The Impact of the European Reformation

Princes, Clergy and People

Ole Peter Grell, Bridget Heal, Bridget Heal

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351887861
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mondiale

Recent decades have witnessed the fragmentation of Reformation studies, with high-level research confined within specific geographical, confessional or chronological boundaries. By bringing together scholars working on a wide variety of topics, this volume counteracts this centrifugal trend and provides a broad perspective on the impact of the European reformation. The essays present new research from historians of politics, of the church and of belief. Their geographical scope ranges from Scotland and England via France and Germany to Transylvania and their chronological span from the 1520s to the 1690s Considering the impact of the Reformation on political culture and examining the relationship between rulers and ruled; the book also examines the church and its personnel, another sphere of life that was entirely transformed by the Reformation. Important aspects of knowledge and belief are discussed in terms of scientific knowledge and technological progress, juxtaposed with analyses of elite and popular belief, which demonstrates the limitations of Weber's notion of the disenchantment of the world. Together they indicate the diverse directions in which Reformation scholarship is now moving, while reminding us of the need to understand particular developments within a broader European context; demonstrating that movements for religious reform left no sphere of European life untouched.

PART I

Princes

CHAPTER 1

Hubmaier, Schappeler and Hergot on Social Revolution

Tom Scott

The issue of social revolution in the Reformation cannot be separated from resistance theory; indeed, the leading reformers – Luther, Zwingli, Calvin – made a significant contribution to elaborating doctrines of resistance, usually ex negativo, it has to be admitted: that is, by setting strict limits to the legitimacy and appropriateness of opposition to secular authority. Luther’s views are well known, from the time of Eine treue Vermahnung (1522) onwards, which ruled out any possibility of legitimate revolt by the common man.¹ And these views were of course reiterated and potentiated during the Peasants’ War. But by the 1530s, doubtless alarmed at the threat to the Gospel posed by the hardening confessional antagonisms throughout Germany, Luther subtly changed his views. In his Exposition of Psalm 101 (1534–35), he acknowledged the existence of those he termed the ‘Wunderleute Gottes’, those possessed of such supervening spiritual authority that they, as individuals, might depose an unjust ruler, provided that they derived no personal advantage therefrom. Because they possessed a direct line to God, they had no need of human advice on the configuration of righteous government. Such men, argued Luther, were extremely rare, and were certainly never to be found among the ranks of the peasantry.² Calvin, too, although resolutely opposed to revolutionary resistance, acknowledged the possibility of a human angel of retribution, an avenger of faith sent by God, but such persons were not only exceedingly rare: they could never be sure of their appointed role. Calvin looked rather to the Estates as guardians of right rule, who by their office had the right to resist tyranny (on the model of the ephors of Sparta or the Roman tribunes).³

With Zwingli the accents were set somewhat differently. In common with the other reformers, Zwingli regarded evil rulers as sent by God as a punishment for the sins of mankind, but he did concede a carefully circumscribed right of resistance. In his Exposition of the Sixty-Seven Axioms of 1523, he identified unjust rule first and foremost with the suppression of the Gospel; what, he pondered, in those circumstances should faithful Christians do? His answer was clear – and I cite it in view of what I propose to discuss later: ‘If Nero, Domitian, Maximinian, and others were unable to stop the teaching of Christ with their murdering, how much less can the angry, insane princes who rage in our time drive it out, as long as you stand firmly and without retreating?’⁴ Of course, tyrannical rulers also oppressed the common people by their self-indulgence and wantonness, robbing the poor through duties, taxes, and by tolerating the holders of monopolies.⁵ For Zwingli, therefore, the crux was not whether tyrants should be deposed, but how. If they had been elected by the common people, then they should be deposed following a collective decision of the people. If, on the other hand, the tyrant had been chosen by a few princes, then they should unseat him.⁶ The difficulties were obvious enough: ‘Here,’ Zwingli conceded, ‘the problem begins. For a despot will slaughter those who oppose him … It is more comforting to be killed from doing right … than to be destroyed later by the hand of God.’ And, he concluded despairingly, if a despot rules by heredity, ‘I do not know how such a kingdom is to have any foundation at all’.⁷ I cite Zwingli verbatim, not only because there are clear echoes of the communal-collective and republican sentiments that we find in the manifestoes of the Peasants’ War, but more especially to underscore the fundamental point that the views of the leading Reformers and the so-called radicals over questions of resistance or social revolution are located within a continuum. There was no caesura, merely a gradient, between Luther, Calvin or Zwingli, on one hand, and the proponents of an applied or politicized theology on the other. After all, Luke chapter 1 was normative for all the reformers: the words of the Magnificat sounded the knell of self-serving and vainglorious temporal rulers, in whose place the humble and meek should be exalted. What was at issue was agency (or, to put it more properly and in contemporary parlance, providence): who, and in what circumstances, was to initiate and carry through the transformation of the world?⁸

The choice of which radical reformers to interrogate on their views of social revolution was pragmatic: Balthasar Hubmaier, Christoph Schappeler and Hans Hergot were all involved in the Peasants’ War of 1524–26, in different theatres of rebellion, and with differing theological assumptions and practical agendas. Hubmaier, whose chequered career from mariolater and instigator of an anti-Semitic pogrom in Regensburg in 1519 to Anabaptist exile in Moravia in 1526 is surely one of the most remarkable in the early history of the Reformation, offers himself as Zwinglian radical whose inchoate Anabaptist sympathies did not lead him to reject secular government or the sword; Schappeler, the Reformer of the Swabian imperial city of Memmingen, who glossed the Twelve Articles of the Upper Swabian peasantry, is here discussed as the author of the anonymous tract To The Assembly of The Common Peasantry; and lastly, the author of the utopia On The New Transformation of A Christian Life is considered, now presumed to have been the Nuremberg printer and colporteur Hans Hergot, who knew both Hans Denck and Hans Hut, and from whose press Müntzer’s tract A Highly Provoked Vindication and a Refutation of the Unspiritual Soft-living Flesh in Wittenberg was issued in 1524. Though neither a cleric nor a lay preacher, Hergot’s familiarity and identification with radical Reforming doctrines of Müntzerite provenance make him a suitable figure to set alongside Hubmaier and Schappeler. It may be asked: where are Müntzer and Gaismair? My decision to disregard them was, again, pragmatic. Their views – or at least their supposed views – have been well rehearsed in the existing literature, yet both men offer fragmentary and contradictory (or, at least, inconsistent) views both on the means of transforming the world, and of what a new Christian society should look like.⁹ At various points in my remarks, however, I shall draw explicit comparisons with the thought of both these men as well that of other radicals.

Hubmaier

Hubmaier’s involvement in the Peasants’ War stemmed from his position as the Reforming preacher of the small Austrian town of Waldshut on the Rhine above Basel. From early 1523 onwards he was drawn into the controversy over true faith in Zürich, manifested in the two colloquies of January and October that year (the second of which he attended) which resulted in the defeat of the Catholic party and the Zürich magistracy’s decision to throw its weight behind the Reforming cause. Hubmaier’s debt to Zwingli, however, paled before the influence of more radical figures in the Zwinglian camp, notably Sebastian Hofmeister, the Reformer of Schaffhausen, but above all of a number of radicals in the Zürich countryside who advocated the application of Reforming theology to social issues, especially tithing. As the stirrings of peasant unrest gathered pace in the southern Black Forest in the summer of 1524, Hubmaier in Waldshut was pitched willy-nilly into the conflict.¹⁰

But that is where our difficulties begin. For there are no authentic Hubmaier testimonies from this period, except for the Eighteen Axioms of mid-1524, his explicit rejection of Catholic doctrine, liturgy and hierarchy.¹¹ The ‘articles’ supposedly composed by Hubmaier and sent by the bishop of Konstanz to the Outer Austrian government in Ensisheim were in reality a list of charges against him.¹² Instead, we are required to reconstruct his thought from the numerous writings he set down in exile in Nikolsburg from 1526 onwards, after the peasants’ defeat, in circumstances where Hubmaier was not only keen to exculpate himself from charges of having fomented social unrest, but was also concerned to defend his Anabaptist doctrines against the rival interpretations of other Anabaptists, not least Hans Hut, whose brief appearance there in 1527 led to the Nikolsburg Disputation.¹³ Above all, Hubmaier’s Apologia from Prison, the account of his interrogation at Kreuzenstein Castle near Vienna in 1527 by Johann Fabri, the erstwhile vicar-general of the diocese of Konstanz and soon to be the bishop of Vienna, must be treated with caution.¹⁴ Hubmaier was at pains to defend his views against the explicitly pacifist doctrines of Anabaptists such as Hans Hut. In his subsequent confession, extracted under torture, Hubmaier even retracted his rejection of infant baptism, and admitted to involvement in the Peasants’ War. Nevertheless, he stood by the views put forward in On the Sword (his last tract) and The Christian Ban, even though they sealed his fate at the stake.¹⁵ We can therefore regard these tracts at least as authentic testimonies of Hubmaier’s beliefs.

The ‘articles’ forwarded to Ensisheim in February 1524 are nevertheless of particular interest. They accuse Hubmaier of having preached against tithes, interest charges and rents, and of having rejected feudal lordship – even before the onset of peasant rebellion. And these charges were to dog Hubmaier throughout his career: can they be believed? After his flight to Moravia, Hubmaier composed a refutation, A Brief Apologia,¹⁶ in which he affirmed that Christians should pay dues over and above what they owed rather than sow discord:

I have never taught that subjects should not fulfil the duty and obedience due to their government. Since it is of God, who hung the sword at its side, one should without contradiction render to it tolls, duties, tribute, honour, and respect….¹⁷ A Christian does not quarrel or fight, rather he gives a fifth or a third, not to mention a tenth of his goods.¹⁸

Out of genuine brotherly love, interest should be given and taken, and the same applied to tithes. But his argument throughout was highly contingent, and in his defence of the sword – the most consistent theme in Hubmaier’s Anabaptism tout court – he comes close to Müntzer’s language:

On the other hand I have also told the authorities to wield the sword according to the order of God for the protection of the righteous and punishment of the evil, or God will take away their mandate and mete out to them in like measure …. On the other hand I have also never taught that it is proper for the government, bishops, abbots, monks, nuns, and priests to overload their poor people, more than is godly and just, with unprecedented unchristian impositions, and to tear them away by force from the Word of God.¹⁹

When Hubmaier returned to the issue at the end of his career, he recounted in detail why he believed the sword was necessary:

There are two kinds of sword in Scripture. There is a spiritual one which is used against the perfidious attacks of the devil …. In addition … there is also an external sword which one uses for the protection of the righteous and for the terror of the evil persons here on earth. That is given to the government in order to maintain a common territorial peace …. It is also called a spiritual sword when one uses it according to the will of God. These two swords are not in opposition to each other.²⁰

In effect, Hubmaier believed that while only Christians were likely to exercise just government, the sword remained an imperfect instrument of rule in an imperfect world, and that it was the duty of the God-fearing to rid themselves of tyrants if that could be achieved without a serious breakdown of public order:

However, if a government is childish or foolish, yea, if perchance it is not competent at all to reign, then you may escape from it legitimately and accept another, if it is good …. If the seeking of another cannot be done lawfully and peacefully, and also not without great damage and rebellion, then one must endure it, as the one which God has given us in his wrath, and as if he desires to chastise us on account of our sins.²¹

That is exactly what Zwingli had said, and indeed Hubmaier’s verdict is couched in part word-for-word in the language of Zwingli’s Exposition.²²

Hubmaier was the only theologian of the early Reformation to place the Christian doctrine of the spiritual ban at the centre of his teaching, even though...