The Age of Reformation

E. Harris Harbison

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9780801468537
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

In The Age of Reformation, first published in 1955, E. Harris Harbison shows why sixteenth-century Europe was ripe for a catharsis. New political and social factors were at work—the growth of the middle classes, the monetary inflation resulting from an influx of gold from the New World, the invention of printing, the trend toward centralization of political power. Against these developments, Harbison places the church—nearly bankrupt because of the expense of defending the papal states, supporting an elaborate administrative organization and luxurious court, and financing the crusades. The Reformation, as he shows, was the result of "a long, slow shifting of social conditions and human values to which the church was not responding readily enough. The sheer inertia of an enormous and complex organization, the drag of powerful vested interests, the helplessness of individuals with intelligent schemes of reform—this is what strikes the historian in studying the church of the later Middle Ages."Martin Luther, a devout and forceful monk, sought only to cleanse the church of its abuses and return to the spiritual guidance of the Scriptures. But, as it turned out, western Christendom split into two camps—a division as stirring, as fearful, as portentous to the sixteenth-century world as any in Europe's history. Offering an engaging and accessible introductory history of the Reformation, Harbison focuses on the age's key individuals, institutions, and ideas while at the same time addressing the slower, less obvious tides of social and political change. A classic synthesis of earlier generations of historical scholarship on the Reformation told with clarity and drama, this book concisely traces the outlines, interlocked and interwoven as they were, of the various phases that comprised the "Age of Reformation."

CHAPTER II

The Religious Upheaval

The immediate origins of the Protestant Reformation lay in the religious experience of Martin Luther (1483–1546). We will never know precisely what happened to Luther in the years between his becoming a monk in 1505 and his dramatic attack on indulgences in 1517. But we know from his contemporary lecture notes and from his later writings and conversations with friends that he underwent years of harrowing emotional and intellectual tension which finally resulted in a “conversion” experience sometime during these years. The nature of this experience was to determine the main features of Protestant belief and the direction which the Protestant movement took. It is important, therefore—difficult as it is—to sketch briefly the inner struggles of this obscure Augustinian friar and their outcome.

Salvation by Faith

Outwardly, young Martin Luther was one of the most pious and diligent monks in the friary at Erfurt. “If ever a monk got to heaven by his monkery,” he wrote twenty years later, “I should certainly have got there.” But he was haunted from the beginning by doubts about whether he, a mere man and a sinner, could ever satisfy a righteous God. In spite of fastings, scourgings, and prayer beyond the rule, he could gain no sense of being forgiven. Doubt aroused fear, and fear led to moments of panic and despair. Staupitz, the kindly vicar of the order, could not understand this sensitive and intelligent younger brother who was constantly confessing his minor sins and yet could never quite rid himself of the sense of guilt.

Scholars differ in explaining Luther’s predicament. Perhaps his conception of God as a stern and righteous Judge owed something to the character of his father, a hardworking peasant and miner, devoted to his son’s welfare but strict and demanding. Perhaps it owed something to stern representations of God in either sculpture or story impressed upon him at an early age. He had taken the vow to become a monk in a moment of panic during a thunderstorm, and the fact that he immediately regretted it but went through with it may have contributed to his later tension. Luther was a high-strung person with keen sensibilities and a sensitive conscience, not the kind to persuade himself easily that he was doing the best he could and that the rest might be left to God (as his spiritual advisers urged). The theological school which dominated the teaching at the University of Erfurt where he had studied put strong emphasis on what were called “good works,” a term which included sacramental and ceremonial acts (such as doing penance, fasting, going on a pilgrimage, entering a monastery) as well as acts of charity. The kernel of this teaching was that man through his own effort and will has a large share in determining his ultimate salvation or damnation. In effect, Luther was acting on this teaching, but failing miserably to gain any inner assurance of forgiveness and so of the promise of salvation.

Then something happened. In 1511 Staupitz had seen that Luther was appointed Professor of Bible at the new University of Wittenberg, and for a year or more the thirty-year-old professor had been soaking himself in Scripture. The influence of his friends and his reading began to suggest a solution to his soul’s plight. As he remembered it later, it all happened suddenly (some scholars think in the winter of 1512–1513) in the tower room of the Augustinian friary at Wittenberg where he lived, perhaps while he was writing notes for his lectures on the Psalms (which scholars rediscovered only a half-century ago). Here is his own account, written in 1545, of his attempt to probe St. Paul’s meaning in Romans 1:17:

After I had pondered the problem for days and nights, God took pity on me and I saw the inner connection between the two phrases, “The justice of God is revealed in the Gospel” and “The just shall live by faith.” I began to understand that this “justice of God” is the righteousness by which the just man lives through the free gift of God, that is to say “by faith.”…Thereupon I felt as if I had been born again and had entered Paradise through wide-open gates. Immediately the whole of Scripture took on a new meaning for me. I raced through the Scriptures, so far as my memory went, and found analogies in other expressions.1

Luther felt he had rediscovered the meaning of St. Paul’s conviction that a Christian is saved not by moral or ceremonial “works,” but by his faith in the loving and merciful Father who incarnated Himself in Jesus Christ in order to save men. This faith is a “free gift of God.” Salvation cannot be deserved or merited, then; it cannot be bought or bargained for by the doing of good works—by fastings and prayer, penances and pilgrimages, or even by becoming a monk. No man can fulfill God’s requirements and thus become righteous because all men are sinners, but God counts man’s faith (which is His own free gift to man) as the equivalent of righteousness. Luther had tried and failed to merit forgiveness and salvation. At the moment of blackest despair he realized that in the saving of souls literally everything is God’s work and nothing is man’s. Salvation is the free gift of a loving God to undeserving man.

Scripture and Conscience

Luther was not a systematic or logical thinker. Rather, his thinking was existential, that is, it developed out of his own personal experience and the decisions he had to make in living out his own life. If he had been more logically inclined, he might have concluded immediately that if a Christian is saved by his faith alone, then the whole mediaeval church, with its sacraments and ceremonies, its papacy and its priesthood, was really unnecessary. A man alone in his room with God and God’s Word, the Bible, like Luther in his tower room—this would be the true picture of a Christian—not that of a man confessing his sins to a priest, traveling on a pilgrimage, or buying an indulgence to get his dead parents out of Purgatory. This was to be the heart of Protestant belief as it developed later: the Bible and a man’s conscience are the channels through which God speaks to human beings, not the Roman Church and its sacraments. But it took personal contact with the practice of indulgences, and later the attacks of enemies, to make Luther realize the full implications of his own religious experience. And even to the end, he never broke with what he thought was the true Church of Christ and its sacraments.

The Mainz Indulgence of 1515 was a peculiarly lurid example of the connection between spiritual and financial abuses in the church. The pope proclaimed an indulgence ostensibly to raise money for the building of St. Peter’s in Rome. Actually all but a very small percentage of the money raised found its way into the pockets of the Dominican monks who sold the coveted certificates to the people, of bankers who handled the receipts, and of a great ecclesiastical prince, Albert of Hohenzollern, who owed the pope a large bribe for the privilege of holding three bishoprics when the canon law said that no one might hold more than one. Luther, like the ordinary person, knew nothing of Albert’s deal with the pope. He knew only that his students at the University of Wittenberg were flocking across the border of Saxony to buy indulgences in Magdeburg and returning to him convinced that their sins were forgiven. John Tetzel, a particularly unscrupulous Dominican, was preaching to the crowds that “so soon as coin in coffer rings, the soul from Purgatory springs.” In indignation born of his own religious experience, Luther drafted 95 Theses attacking the current doctrine of indulgences. The most radical proposition was that “Any Christian whatever, who is truly repentant, enjoys full remission from penalty and guilt, and this is given him without letters of indulgence.”

Luther probably had no intention of doing more than start an academic debate on his theses at the University of Wittenberg. But it became evident almost overnight that he had touched on the most sensitive nerve of the whole ecclesiastical organization of his day. The theses were published and devoured by Germans everywhere. The pent-up resentment against papal exactions and ecclesiastical abuses became polarized by his attack. The sale of indulgences fell off sharply, and the Dominicans demanded that Luther be curbed. Step by step, opponents who saw the doctrinal and financial dangers in Luther’s criticisms forced him to work out the implications of his position. First he appealed to the pope, but the Medici Leo X was inclined to treat the whole matter as an unimportant quarrel between monks. When Leo’s attitude became harder, he appealed from the pope to a general council. Finally a particularly skillful debater, Dr. John Eck, manoeuvred him into declaring that even a general council was fallible—which left him with Scripture and conscience as his only ultimate authorities. This became perfectly clear when he faced the emperor Charles V and the assembled Diet of the empire at Worms in 1521 and replied to the demand that he recant his views with words which were to become famous throughout Europe:

Unless I am convinced by the evidence of Scripture or by plain reason—for I do not accept the authority of the Pope or the councils alone, since it is established that they have often erred and contradicted themselves—I am bound by the Scriptures I have cited and my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and will not recant anything, for it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience. God help me. Amen.

Protestant Beliefs

Between 1520, when Luther wrote the tracts and pamphlets which are still the best expression of his religious ideas, and 1530, when the beliefs of the church he founded were summarized in the Augsburg Confession, the main lines of Protestant belief and practice were worked out by Luther himself and his lieutenants in Wittenberg, with some contributions from independent leaders of revolt against Rome such as Ulrich Zwingli in Zurich and Martin Bucer in Strasbourg.

The best general description of Protestantism2 is still probably that of Ernst Troeltsch: “A modification of Catholicism, in which the Catholic formulation of problems was retained, while a different answer was given to them.” In particular, Luther offered relatively new answers to four questions which go far back in Christian history. To the question how is a man to be saved, Luther answered: not by works but by faith. To the question where does religious authority lie, he answered: not in the visible institution known as the Roman Church, but in the “Word of God” contained in the Bible. To the question what is the church, he answered: the whole community of Christian believers, since all are really priests and since every man must be “a Christ to his neighbor.” To the question what is the essence of Christian living, he replied: serving God in one’s calling, whether secular or ecclesiastical, since all useful callings are equally sacred in the eyes of God. These were the four central Protestant beliefs, each closely related to the others: salvation by faith rather than by works, the authority of the Bible interpreted by the consecrated conscience, the priesthood of all believers, and the service of God in secular as well as clerical callings. All could be taken to follow from Luther’s original experience of God’s saving grace in the gift of faith.

To sixteenth-century followers of Luther, Protestantism was essentially a restoration. During the Middle Ages—so the theory ran—Christianity had become encrusted and overloaded with doctrines and practices which had nothing to do with its essence and which came close to obliterating the Gospel revealed to the early church. It was imperative to go back to Paul and the Gospels, back to the practices and insights of the Apostolic Age, in order to recapture Christian truth. The canon law and scholastic theology of recent centuries were satanic corruptions of the primitive Gospel. The bishop of Rome, far from representing Christ on earth, was the Anti-Christ prophesied in the Book of Revelation.

To sixteenth-century Catholics, Protestantism was essentially a revolution. To deny that Christ had founded his church on Peter and that the popes were Peter’s successors, to question the divine institution of the seven sacraments, to say that all believers are equally priests, that all men are saved or damned by the arbitrary will of God with no respect to good works or merit—all this was either heresy or blasphemy to loyal sons of the mediaeval church. Luther, not Leo, was the Anti-Christ—the “wild boar” which was ravaging God’s vineyards, in the words of the papal bull which excommunicated the heretic friar in 1520.

Today most historians refer to Protestantism as a reformation. In the ordinary sense of moral reform, Protestantism probably accomplished little. Nor did Luther think of his movement as aimed primarily at the improvement of clerical and lay morality. Protestantism is properly described, however, as a reforming or reformulating of the Christian tradition. In attempting to restore first-century Christianity, the early Protestants were inevitably revolutionists. In going back, they moved forward. And the result was that they gave a new shape to the Christian tradition in almost half of Europe.

The Appeal of Protestantism

One of the most difficult tasks of the historian is to discover how and why a complex set of ideas like those of Luther captures men’s minds and so becomes a historical “movement.” The simplest explanation is to say that Luther was a “typical” German of his day, with an uncanny feeling for the religious problems of ordinary people, and that his teachings went straight to the hearts of those who were tired as he was of trying to win salvation by good works. There is truth in this, but as an explanation it obviously applies only to a tiny minority of persons who had a religious sensibility and sophistication comparable to Luther’s. What of the many others all over Europe—peasants, artisans, merchants, lawyers, priests, monks, and princes—who we know became “Lutherans”?

Among the lowest classes there were many who misinterpreted Luther to mean that God meant men to be free of all bonds, social and economic as well as ecclesiastical. They were soon disillusioned when Luther made it clear that what he meant by “the liberty of a Christian” was freedom from the galling restrictions of the Roman Church, not freedom from serfdom or from obedience to secular rulers. But they were awakened and thrilled, nevertheless, by Luther’s heroic defiance of authority.

Much has been written about the appeal of Protestantism to the middle classes. The tendency of recent scholarship is to be cautious about generalization on the subject. But Lutheran and particularly Calvinist teachings certainly had special appeal to the merchants and professional people of Europe, particularly in the North. These were the classes which had obvious reasons to dislike papal taxation, to envy the church’s wealth, and to despise the luxury and corruption of the nonproductive bishops and monks. Salvation by faith alone, the priesthood of all believers, and serving God in one’s calling were attractive slogans to such people—sometimes, but not always, for the purely religious reasons Luther himself would have wished. Not that the ordinary bourgeois was irreligious. More often he was a person deeply immersed in secular pursuits—building up a business, amassing wealth, carrying on a law practice, or serving a monarch—troubled in conscience by the gulf between his worldly interests and the other-worldly ideal imbued in him by the Roman Church. For this reason he might be much attracted by the idea that a man is saved by faith, not by sacramental magic and the buying of indulgences, and that one can serve God just as well as a merchant or magistrate as one can by being ordained priest or monk. Who can estimate the subtle balance of religious and secular motives in the souls of such persons, to whom Lutheranism meant an answer to the question how they might gain salvation and still remain fully in the active world of business competition and human pleasure?

To the German governing classes, the prospects of curbing the independent power of the supranational church in their particular dominions, of establishing control over the local clerical hierarchy, of possibly confiscating the lands of monasteries and even bishoprics, had particular appeal. In 1520 Luther appealed to “the ruling class of the German people” to reform the church, since the church would not reform itself. Such an appeal to the secular rulers was nothing new, as we have seen, but it had decisive results for the Lutheran movement. Luther was a peasant and a monk, naturally inclined to think in terms of authority and obedience to lawfully constituted powers. He turned to the princes and magistrates for support, and he was not disappointed. Before his death in 1546 he saw duchy after duchy and city after city in north and central Germany break with Rome, subordinate the local church to the state, dissolve the monasteries, and simplify the church services, all under the leadership and usually at the instigation of the ruling prince or the town council. Luther himself had no intention to preach the “divine right of kings,” but the circumstances in which he found himself, together with his own instincts, led him to rely on the powers that be to defend the Gospel. Most of the German rulers who took up his challenge to reform the church profited considerably in terms of political power and wealth.

One element in the appeal of Protestantism to all classes of European society, particularly in Germany, was national sentiment. The drain of ecclesiastical taxation was particularly severe in Germany because there was no strong national ruler to stand up against it and the unimpeded abuse was correspondingly resented. This resentment played no part in Luther’s own early development, but soon after his attack on indulgences he sensed the support he was receiving from German national sentiment and learned to play upon it. The papacy was wealthy, corrupt—and Italian. It was intolerable, he wrote in 1520, that the pope and cardinals should mulct his countrymen and then refer contemptuously to them as “silly drunken Germans.” “If the kingdom of France has resisted it, why do we Germans let the Romanists make fools and monkeys of us in this way?” The appeal of Protestantism to national patriotism was perhaps strongest in Germany, but national sentiment was also a major factor in the appeal of Protestantism to Scandinavians, Englishmen, Netherlanders, and some Frenchmen.

Nation...

Table of contents

• Foreword
• Introduction
• I The European World about 1500
• II The Religious Upheaval
• III The Struggle for Power
• Chronological Summary
• Suggestions for Further Reading