Reformation

C

Zürich

In Zürich, the reform movement was led by Huldreich Zwingli. He had already gained notoriety for his denunciation of indulgences in 1518. The following year he was elected leutpriester (German, “stipendiary priest”) of the Great Minster in Zürich and, partly encouraged by reading numerous treatises by Luther, Zwingli’s own evangelical notions began to crystallize. From March 1522 onward, Zwingli began expressing his views more openly in sermons and public disputations before the city council. He attacked fasting as an ecclesiastically imposed obligation, the vow of celibacy required of priests, the reverence to images in churches, and the notion of the Mass as a sacrifice. Although he did not always win the Zürich authorities over to his point of view, Zwingli persuaded them to burn the city’s religious relics in June 1524. They had already agreed to abolish ceremonial processions and the adoration of saints, and to release the city’s monks and clergy from their vows of celibacy. At Eastertide 1525, the Mass was replaced with an evangelical communion service that Zwingli claimed was closer to the model of Christ’s Last Supper. Reformation occurred in Zürich progressively, relatively peacefully, and under civic authority.

Zwingli’s changes to the Mass were indicative of the issues that would divide him from Luther. Although it does not readily appear so from our modern perspective, they went to the heart of the Reformation. To medieval theologians, the elements of bread and wine in the Mass were miraculously changed into the very body and blood of Christ (the “real presence”) at the moment when the priest uttered the words of consecration. They explained the process in the scholastic term transubstantio (Latin, “transubstantiation”). By this, they meant that the substance (the reality within) the bread and the wine was transformed into the substance of the body and blood of Christ leaving only the accidents (or superficial properties—what you could see, touch, or taste) unchanged. In common with some later medieval philosophers and theologians, Luther was prepared to accept the notion of a “real presence” but rejected transubstantiation as a means to explain it. For Luther, the fact of the “real presence” had undisputed Biblical attestation. It was analogous to the fact that Christ incarnate (both God and Man) had been on Earth. Christ’s body and blood were not to be equated with the bread and the wine but they lay “in, with, and under” it in ways that God had not intended us fully to understand.

Zwingli, however, went much further than Luther. He refused to accept that the body and blood of Christ could in any way be connected with the material objects of the bread and the wine. Any such suggestion was superstitious and idolatrous. If the bread and wine were a eucharistic sacrament, it was because, in our hearts and minds, we could envisage them as representing the body and blood of Christ. The rejection of the “real presence” led to supporters of Zwingli being often described by contemporaries as “sacramentarian”. These internal debates reached their climax in the famous colloquy of Marburg in October 1529. There, Luther and Zwingli met face to face. They agreed about much, but they failed to come to any meeting of minds over the key theological question of the Eucharist. Zwingli returned to Zürich and produced in due course his fidei ratio (Latin, “confession of faith”) in 1531, the Zwinglian response to the Augsburg Confession of the Lutherans. Thenceforth there would be two divergent and often hostile traditions at the heart of the Protestant Reformation, a division that was exploited by their Catholic critics.

Why did the Eucharist issue prove impossible to resolve? It lay at the heart of the Reformation because it deconstructed a vital part of the Protestant Reformation’s conceptual framework as constructed by Luther. On the basis of Biblical authority alone, Zwingli proposed a radical shift in how holy power was conceived. He further “de-sacralized” the material world and invested holy power within the consciences of individual people and the authority of collective worship. That had profound implications for how other forms of power were to be regarded. Although such conceptions did not unduly discomfort the magistrates of Zürich, who were already adapted to the notion of authority being invested within individuals and, through them, in a corporate body, it alarmed the more conservative princely and royal courts of Europe. This division in Protestantism came thus to reflect fundamental tensions about how far the Reformation would reshape Europe’s politics and society.

Within Switzerland, however, the tensions created by Zürich’s reformation threatened the Swiss confederation. The Protestant cantons formed the Christliche Burgrecht (German, “Christian Civic Union”) in 1529 and the inner Catholic cantons responded with a confederation of their own, backed by Duke Ferdinand of Austria. They briefly raised forces and came to blows and, in the second Kappel War (1531) Zwingli was slaughtered in the skirmish at Kappel (October 31, 1531) that led to the defeat of the Zürich canton and a negotiated conclusion to their differences. Thenceforth, the Swiss confederation would enjoy a modus vivendi in which the inner Swiss cantons (Lucerne and the forest cantons of Schwyz, Uri, and Unterwalden) rejected the Reformation while allowing the outer cantons to pursue their Protestantism without causing the collapse of the confederation.

D

Bern and Geneva

Following a public disputation on January 6, 1528, in Bern, which Zwingli attended, the magistrates of this cautious oligarchy determined upon a Reformation along Zürich’s lines. It had not been an easy decision to make since it challenged the canton’s traditional allies in the region, especially the most important of them, the French. But it gave the canton the possibilities of extending its influence on its western margin around Lake Geneva, and especially in Geneva itself. The city of Geneva was not a member of the Swiss confederation but, in a dramatic fashion, it had overthrown its traditional overlords, the Duke of Savoy and his immediate representative in the city, the Bishop of Geneva, in 1526. The Protestant Reformation in Geneva became intermingled with the factional disputes in the city between the supporters of its new Protestant ally and protector, Bern, and those of its old, traditional overlord, Savoy.

It was to this bitterly divided and newly independent republic of Geneva that the French Protestant theologian John Calvin came in 1536. He was in flight from the religious repression in France and he had just published the first edition of his famous Christianae Religionis Institutio (Latin, “Institutes of the Christian Religion”). He settled in Geneva and eventually became the dominant figure in the second generation of the Protestant Reformation after Luther and Zwingli. Through his extraordinary and punishing single-mindedness, Calvin stamped his authority on Geneva and upon the wider Protestant movement as well.

How did Calvin conceive of the task of reformation? He felt himself to be living on the edge of an “abyss” and in a “labyrinth” of uncontrolled and unbridled human passions. The Genevan catechism that he drafted began: “The whole life of man is a ruinous labyrinth of wanderings until he has been converted to Christ.” In his French sermons on the book of Job he uses another bold metaphor: “(We are) like rats running helter-skelter in straw.” This sinfulness was particularly evident in the corrupt Church, about which Calvin wrote witheringly and to great effect. But it was also overwhelming civil society. Only a complete reformation—one that embraced both society and Church—would eliminate the “pollution” that was corroding the pillars of the Christian religion.

Geneva was the city-state where Calvin attempted to put his thorough reformation into practice. In this quarrelsome and divided city, the task proved far from easy. Calvin was expelled by the factions opposing him within two years of his arrival there in 1536. It was only with great reluctance that he accepted the invitation to return in 1541, and he made one of the implied conditions of his return the institution of the authority of the Church in the city independent of (but coterminous with) the magistrates. The famous Ecclesiastical Ordinances of November 1541 laid out unambiguously the significance of a public discipline to which all authority, both ecclesiastical and lay, was committed. At its heart lay the consistoire (French, “consistory”), modelled on the ehegerichten (German, “marriage tribunals”) that had been established in various reformed cities in southern Germany to handle the jurisdiction once carried out by ecclesiastical courts administering the now-abandoned canon law. The functions of the consistory court at Geneva, however, were more broadly conceived. It had the duty to investigate, to admonish and, if necessary, to exclude temporarily from communion or to excommunicate. All unbecoming conduct lay within its remit, including sexual offences, gambling, blasphemy, swearing, and superstitious practices or popish customs. At the same time, the Ordinances established the four orders of the Genevan Church (pastors, elders, deacons, and doctors) and laid down the arrangements for their appointment. The Genevan pattern of Church government provided the model for a Presbyterian structure that would be adopted with numerous variations elsewhere in Calvinist Europe in due course, especially in Scotland, the Low Countries, and in the French Huguenot Churches.

It took Calvin more than a decade to overcome the opposition to his Reformation in Geneva. He recalled his struggles in his last words to his fellow-pastors at his death-bed in April 1564: “They set dogs at my heels crying ‘at him, at him’ and these snapped at my gown and legs…. You are in a perverse and unhappy nation (Geneva), and though there are good men in it, the nation is perverse and wicked.” Calvin gradually surrounded himself with like-thinking pastors and shaped the consistory around elders who shared his uncompromising views. Factions in and around the city council (christened Libertines by Calvin) opposed to Calvin’s reformation coalesced in 1545-1547 and came close to unseating him, but he was able to discredit their leaders. Opposition reappeared in 1551 and was able to exploit the Servetus Affair in 1553. Michael Servetus was a Basque by origin, a physician by training, and a Protestant by inclination. But his Protestant inclinations led him to question fundamental aspects of Christian belief, especially the notion of the Trinity (that is, that God exists in three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but in one substance) in a book that was published in 1553. Imprisoned for his beliefs in France, he escaped to Geneva, probably on his way to Basel. Calvin, already incensed at his blasphemy, had him arrested. There had to be a trial and Calvin inevitably played a leading part in the prosecution. Servetus’ resulting conviction and death at the stake proved controversial and Calvin’s opponents lost no opportunity to exploit that fact.

Opposition to Calvin finally came to a head in Geneva on the night of May 18, 1555, when the remnants of the hostile Libertine faction instigated a municipal insurrection against him and the increasing numbers of foreign refugees seeking residence in the city in order to escape religious persecution. The Libertines failed and their leaders were either exiled or put to death. The magistrates admitted a sudden influx of exiles into the privileged ranks of the bourgeoisie of the city, whose political complexion finally and definitively was transformed in Calvin’s favour. Thereafter he was secure to pursue the Reformation in Geneva that transformed the city into the “most perfect school of Christ” that the Scottish reformer, John Knox, affected to find there in the later 1550s. Calvin maintained a workable relationship with Zwingli’s successor in Zürich, Heinrich Bullinger, and united the non-Lutheran Protestant movement. The Geneva Bible and Psalter became powerful symbols of the Calvinist creed elsewhere in Europe.

IV

Reformation and Reaction Elsewhere in Europe

The Protestant Reformation was an earthquake in Europe’s political history that created seismic shocks throughout the continent along its fault-lines. These occurred at different moments across the 16th century and often led to unpredicted results. Not the least of the reactions was that of the Gegenreformation (German, “Counter-Reformation”), a term first used in the early 19th century to describe the parallel reforming movement in the Catholic Church. This term has never, however, gained universal acceptance, not least because it is apparent that the movements for renewal within the traditional Church had extensive roots before the Reformation and were not merely a reaction to the advent of Protestantism. Historians are now more aware of the complementary nature of the movements for ecclesiastical change in both Catholic and Protestant Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries. Beyond the confessional divergences lay the common challenge of a Europe that, especially in its rural hinterlands, was very unwilling to forego what both Protestant and Catholic reformers now regarded as superstitious. For historians of the Protestant Reformation, it is easier to document the political changes in favour of Protestantism than it is to measure the acceptance of Protestantism at a local level in the hearts and minds of ordinary people. It is probable that, in many Protestant regions, this acceptance did not occur before the 17th century.

A

Baltic Lands

In Scandinavia, the Reformation was largely a princely Reformation that was relatively peaceful and doctrinally unadventurous. The monarchs of Denmark and Sweden themselves sponsored the reform movement. In 1536 a national assembly in Copenhagen abolished the authority of the Roman Catholic bishops throughout Denmark and the then subject lands of Norway and Iceland. Christian III invited the Lutheran reformer, Johann Bugenhagen, to organize the national Lutheran Church in Denmark on the basis of the Augsburg Confession. In Sweden the brothers Olaus Petri and Laurentius Petri became the leading figures in the movement for the adoption of Lutheranism as the state religion in the newly formed Swedish state. The reformation finally occurred in 1529 with the support of Gustav I Vasa, king of Sweden, in a decision of the Swedish Diet. By some measures, the tiny Swedish population was the most educated and most Protestantized population in Northern Europe.

B

France

France was a huge kingdom with a large Church and a theoretically absolute monarchy that was committed to the catholic religion. The adoption of the Protestant Reformation there was never likely to be accomplished without considerable opposition and, as it turned out, bloodshed.

Support for Reformation, though not necessarily along precisely Lutheran lines, came from various quarters early on among France’s intelligentsia. Among them were a group of mystics and humanists who gathered in the bishopric of Meaux near Paris under the prudent protection of its bishop, Guillaume Briçonnet. They were particularly inspired by Lefèvre d’Etaples, whose friendship with Erasmus had led him to study the Pauline Epistles and to translate the New Testament into French. It did not take long for this, and other coteries of evangelical opinion in France, to be branded as heretical and persecuted. Many Protestants like John Calvin fled France and settled either in Switzerland or in the tolerant cities of the Rhineland where they established refugee communities and “stranger” churches which naturally looked to Geneva and Calvin for their inspiration and model. Their correspondence with covert communities of Protestant adherents back in France in the 1550s sustained the minority Protestant faith. This was particularly important because it took time to train pastors and only a limited number—about 118 in the years from 1555 to 1562)—were dispatched from Geneva to francophone Europe. In 1559, despite legal repression, delegates from over 60 congregations gathered at the first national synod in Paris to draw up a confession of faith and discipline based on those already in use at Geneva.

The main growth in Protestantism in France was to occur in the three years following that synod. In the circumstances of national defeat, bankruptcy and recrimination following the Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis the absolute monarchy was also in crisis. Following the death of Henry II his sons were either adolescents in tutelage (Francis II) or minors subject to a regency (Charles IX). The Protestants, known disparagingly to their critics as Huguenots, seemed likely to convert the kingdom. This prospect alarmed France’s considerable and vocal Catholic population and the combination of fears and alarms led to a generation of civil wars (1562-1598), which were punctuated by civilian massacres and atrocities by both sides. For the Protestants, these culminated in the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. The wholesale massacre of Protestants in Paris was followed by copycat massacres in various provincial towns. French Protestantism, already by this stage a minority religion in the kingdom, never recovered its dynamism. Although with the accession of the first Bourbon king, Henry IV, to the French throne in 1589, there was briefly a Protestant in a position of authority, he announced his intention to convert in 1593 in order to win over the Catholic majority and eventually pacified the kingdom by negotiating extensive privileges for his former co-religionists in the Edict of Nantes. The edict was revoked in 1685.