Chapter 38: The Victory of the Reformers and the Birth of the Protestant Churches

That which is called the Reformation and saw the emergence of schismatic churches around Martin Luther and John Calvin did not add any fundamental novelty to the program of the reformers who, from the Eleventh Century on, fought against the temporal interests of Rome’s clergy. Commonly accepted among historians, the idea of Catholicism’s control over the people of Europe was contradicted from the moment that one distanced oneself from the power of the laws imposed by the princes and the ecclesiastical authority, with its grid of parishes, confessors, priests, inquisitors and preachers who propagated guilt, horror of sexuality, the Satanism of women, the omnipresent image of death and a Hell directly inspired by the services of penal justice.

The fear, hatred and scorn of the Constantinian Church never ceased to animate the most diverse classes of society. Indifference and irreligion reigned in the disinherited milieu, where the cynicism of false piety served the beggars and soliciters. Only the aspiration to a pre-Constantinian Christianity — ascetic, altruistic, loyal to voluntary poverty, inclined towards martyrdom, anti-clerical and theocratic — brought a religious coloration to the collectivist nostalgias from the Fourth to the Sixteenth Centuries. Each time that Christianity manifested itself, the Catholic Church persecuted it (with the exception of a brief period in the Sixteenth Century).

Attentive to the temporal prerogatives that, through enrichment, conferred upon it a considerable power, the Catholic Church was more and more distanced from the Ekklesia, the spiritual communities of the faithful, which summoned to their vows Vaudois, adepts of voluntary poverty, Wycliffe’s Lollards, Hussites, Taborites and a crowd of agitators whose project to abolish tithes guaranteed success.

In the Church itself, voices were raised to clamor for new accords between the interests of God and the financial interests of a “multinational” that was insisted upon by the Zealot Simon, metamorphosed into Saint Peter.

“Our fat canons believe themselves freed from God if they sing in a clear voice, in the choir, a hallelujah or a response; then they allow themselves to return to their homes to entertain themselves and have supper with their ham actors and their jugglers.”[419] This diatribe was not written by Savonarola, nor by Luther, but by Antoine of Padua (1195–1231), an orthodox spirit but aware of the split between the faith of the poor and the Church of the rich that, through its carelessness, discouraged the resignation of the disinherited, who were completely prohibited from “living according to the Christ.”

Neither Wycliffe, Huss, Savonarola, Luther nor Calvin pursued aims that were revolutionary, schismatic or hostile to Catholicism. Their designs placed them in the political line of Gregoire IX, taking the side of Ramihrdus against the high clergy.

The development of the economic process gave Luther and Calvin a weapon that was finally capable of breaking the spiritual monopoly that the cynicism of the pontifical bureaucracy had discredited by the scandal of the market in indulgences and the priority given to business. The expansion of commerce, the growing independence of the banks and preindustrial artisanal enterprises instaurated a spiritual state that was favorable to the new reforms. The separation from Rome did not simply signify the end of an odious hierarchy, intermixing faith and financial interests; it implied the ideas that belief properly belonged to the individual in his or her relationship with God and that the management of capital constituted a domain separate from religion, governed by the imperatives of Christian morality. The rigorous obedience to God of a Calvinist man of business accorded with the intransigent search for profit, because — banishing the crazy expenditures of hedonism — it underwrote an ascetic morality in conformity with the Christian institution. As Max Weber has shown, Protestantism discovered in the austerity of accumulation and the reproduction of capital a puritanism that inspired the “free” relationship of the sinner with the tutelary God, keeping watch over the rate of profit. Where Rome looted [pille] and squandered [gaspille], the reformers economized and invested.

The concern with moralizing the morals of the clergy intervened too late to dam up the pious ethics of the reformers. The Council of Trente would run aground in its attempt to restore the authority of Catholicism in the northern regions, the cradle of the industrial revolution and the first bourgeois, parliamentary and democratic regimes.

Two Agitators At The Dawn Of The Reformation: Hans Boehm And Jerome Savonarola

“He was,” Norman Cohn writes, “a shephard and, in his spare time, a popular entertainer, drumming and piping in hostelries and in the market-place — whence the nickname, by which he is still known, of Drummer (or Piper) of Niklashausen.”[420]

In an ordinary irony of history, Hans [Boehm] heard about the Italian Franciscan John of Capistrano, not as a pitiless inquisitor, author of the massacre of the Fraticelles of Maiolati, but as a brother extolling repentance and the rejection of luxury in Germany 30 years previously. As John of Capistrano had incited the bonfire of the vanities in which the people set aside their beautiful clothes, their games of dice and cards, their objects of pure enjoyment, on a day of Lent, the shepherd would burn his drum in front of the parish-church of Niklashausen and preach.

Mary appreared to him and intimated to him the order to propagate the Good Word [parole], with the result that Niklashausen would raise itself to the glory of the terrestrial Jerusalem. There had been in the church a statue of the Virgin, to which were attributed miraculous powers. The priest of the parish would not give his support to a project that erected Niklashausen as the place elected by divine providence instead of Rome.

The fact was that the little shepherd suddenly revealed himself to be endowed with an extraordinary eloquence. From the fascination that he exerted upon the crowds and diverse classes of society, he soon inferred that God had endowed him with thaumaturgic powers. He preached the simplicity of morals, making himself strong enough to save any soul from hell. The pyres of the vanities would be succeded by violent attacks on the corrupt clergy and the powerful.

He would soon incite the refusal to pay taxes and tithes. And that the priests should abandon their outrageous privileges and content themselves with whatever the people agreed to give them.

The Archbishop of Mayence, who had until then been cantonized in a prudent reserve, plotted to put an end to an agitation that had won over a growing number of regions in Germany.

“In the end Boehm emerged as a social revolutionary,” Norman Cohn recounts, “proclaiming the imminence of the egalitarian Millennium based on the Law of Nature.”

In the coming Kingdom the use of wood, water and pasturage, the right to fish and hunt would be freely enjoyed by all, as they had been in olden times. Tributes of all kinds would be abolished for ever. No rent or services would be owed to any lord, no taxes or duties to any prince. Distinctions of rank and status would cease to exist and nobody would have authority over anybody else. All would live together as brothers, everyone enjoying the same liberties and doing the same amount of work as everyone else. ‘Princes, ecclesiastical and secular alike, and counts and knights should only possess as much as common folk, then everyone will have enough. The time will have to come when princes and lords will work for their daily bread.’ And Boehm extended his attack beyond the local lords and princes to the very summit of society: ‘The Emperor is a scoundrel and the Pope is useless. It is the Emperor who gives the princes and counts and knights the right to levy taxes on the common people. Alas, poor devils that you are!’

No doubt Boehm’s teaching appealed in different ways to different sections of the population. The demand for the overthrow of all rulers, great and small, probably appealed particularly to the urban proletariat; we know that the townsfolk did in fact come to Niklashausen, not only from Wurzburg but from all over southern and central Germany. On the other hand in demanding that wood, water, pastorage, fishing and hunting should be free to all men, Boehm was voicing a very general aspiration of the peasants. The German peasants believed that these rights had in fact been theirs in olden time, until usurped by the nobility; this was one of the wrongs which they were always expecting the future ‘Emperor Frederick’ to undo. But above all it was the prestige of the preacher himself, as a miraculous being sent by God, which drew the tens of thousands into the Tauber valley. The common people, peasants and artisans alike, saw in him a supernatural protector and leader, such as the ‘Emperor Frederick’ was to have been: a savior who could bestow on them individually the fullness of Divine Grace and who would lead them individually into an earthly Paradise.

News of the wonderful happenings at Niklashausen passed rapidly from village to village in the neighborhood and was carried further afield, too, by messengers who went out in all directions. Soon vast hordes of common folk of all ages and both sexes, and including whole families, were streaming towards Niklashausen. Not only the surrounding country but all parts of southern and central Germany were in commotion, from the Alps to the Rhineland and to Thuringia. Artisans deserted their workshops and peasants their fields, shepherds and shepherdesses abandoned their flocks and hastened — often still in the same clothes and carrying their picks and hammers and scythes — to hear and adore him who was now known as ‘the Holy Youth.’ These people greeted one another only as ‘Brother’ or ‘Sister’ and these greetings acquired the significance of a rallying-cry. Among the multitudes of simple, wildly excited folk there circulated fantastic rumors. What the plebs pauperum had believed of Jerusalem these believed of Niklashausen. There Paradise had literally descended upon the earth; and infinite riches were lying ready to be gathered by the faithful, who would share them out among themselves in brotherly love. Meanwhile the hordes — like the Pastoureaux and the Flagellants before them — advanced in long columns, bearing banners and singing songs of their own composition.[421]

Hans Boehm’s preaching began around 1474. Towards the end of March 1476, the pilgrimages led to retaliatory measures on the part of the large towns. The municipal council of Nuremburg prohibited the inhabitants from going to Niklashausen. Wurzburg closed its doors and armed its militias. On 12 July, the Prince-Bishop sent an infantry section of horesmen to the holy city. Arrested, Hans was incarcerated in Wurzburg, while a peasant, invested in his turn with a prophetic role, incited the people to march upon the episcopal city, where the walls would fall like those of Jericho. Forty millenarian liberators were killed. Judged hastily, Hans Boehm would have to mount the pyre where he died, one says, singing hymns. The offerings deposited by the pilgrims in the church of Niklashausen were confiscated. The Archbishop of Mayence, the Bishop of Wurzburg and the Count upon whom the New Jerusalem depended did not disdain from sharing them equitably among themselves. The cinders of the prophet, dispersed so that no cult could render homage to him, were not allowed to put into the air of the time the germs of a millenarianist and reforming renewal that would break the reins of all-powerful Rome.

Jerome Savonarola

For Savonarola, Joachimite prophetism, voluntary poverty, the asceticism of the Spirituals and the political calculations of the communalist tribunes composed a conjunction of diverse ambitions that would elevate him to power and plot his downfall.

Born in Ferrara in 1452, he distinguished himself in the order of the Dominicans by his eloquence and his culture. The Prior of the Monastery of Saint-Marc in Florence, he soon exercised on the brilliant court of Larent de Medici a fascination that exacerbated the attraction of purity, so frequent in the wavering of guilty pleasures.

Jean Pic de la Mirandole, whose philosophical theses were condemned by the Church, discerned an ally in the monk-prophet who, through his diatribes against the luxuria and aviditas of the Pope and the clergy, gave his voice to the popular anger, accumulated over the centuries, about the despotism of Rome.

Savonarola’s millenarianism was seductive in the times in which dreams of fortune and ordinary poverty suggested an imminent apocalypse. He shared with Dolcino the mistake of giving a too precise turn to his prophecies. He announced terrible misfortunes for Italy. One didn’t fail to believe him, because misfortunes occurred every day. Even death unburdened itself in the lines of the poems in which Laurent celebrated youth and beauty.

Against the vises and tyranny of the papacy, Charles VIII, the King of France, brandished the “scourge of God, the vengeful sword,” the new Charlemagne, the new Frederick, the new king of a Third Age. Marcil Ficin, well versed in Kabbalah, friend of literature and pleasure, scented around the monk [Savonarola] the acrid odor of a rigor as pernicious as the Sadian hedonism of the prelates and aristocrats.

After the death of Laurent de Medici, who, enjoying a dissipated life, had invested Fra Girolamo with a secret hope of redemption, Pierre de Medici would show greater reserve, nay, frank hostility to the one who was ambitious enough to rule the lives of the Florentines.

Savonarola’s appeals to voluntary poverty, which revived memories of the Fraticelles and the Spirituals, rallied to him the suffrage of the disinherited classes. He would soon thereafter tip over into the puritanical mysticism of all the extremisms.

The flight of Pierre, the proclamation of the Florentine Republic in 1494 and the triumphal entry of King Charles VIII into the city all bestowed upon Savonarola the power of a spiritual and temporal leader.

Florence, promoted as the New Jerusalem, finally marked the beginning of the Third Age, the prelude to the return of the Christ to earth and the massive conversion of the Turks and the Jews.

The hysteria inherent in the compulsion for virtue would kindle in the town, renamed for the refinement of its arts, purifying flames that one called “pyres of the vanities.” One threw on them pell-mell jewels, ornaments, books, paintings, and luxurious frocks.

Sandro Botticelli, the most sensual of the painters, would succumb to this destructive madness, to this rage in which life took revenge on the scorn that overwhelmed it by annihilating with a sinister joy all that made life pleasant. Into this rage was mixed the legitimate resentment of the exploited, on whose back lived luxury, from which the exploited were excluded. Savonarola’s sermons, which both flattered the demands that he could not satisfy and the hatred to which he gave evangelical virtue (thereby alienating him little by little from the aristocracy and the intellectuals), contained promises of a new order that, politically, would remain a dead letter.

The party of Rome regrouped its partisans. Pope Alexander VI, who was intelligent, brutal and corrupt, excommunicated the monk and prohibited him from preaching. Savonarola would ignore him. Arrested in his convent at Saint-Marc, then tortured, charged with heresy, which his doctrine basically did not merit, he was — despite the effervescence of his partisans, the Piagnomi, from Piagnonia, which was the name of the bell at the convent of Saint-Marc — hanged and burned with two of his disciples, Domenico of Pescia and Sylvestri Maruff, on 23 May 1498.

The program for the renewal of the Church, which Savonarola had folded within the risky politics of the city, would be expounded by Luther as the protest of all Christianity against the ignominy of Catholicism, the religion soiled by the unworthiness of its priests. Savonarola had the prudence to remain in Germany, where the old tradition of the emperors and princes hostile to Rome would make the old principle cuius regio, eius religio[422] work in favor of Lutherism.

From Heresy To The Religion Of The State: Luther And Calvin

The Reformation of the Church trimphed with Luther and Calvin, but it triumphed outside of the Church and against it. What victories could those who dreamed of a renewal of faith and the freedom of belief hope to see from the new state religion?

Born in 1483, a student, then the holder of a Master’s Degree from the University of Erfurt in 1505, [Martin] Luther was ordained a priest in 1507. He attained the position of professor and preacher at the University of Wittenberg due to the sympathies that he aroused in the Prince-Elector of Saxony.

A visit to Rome in 1511 revealed to him the state of cupidity and license that reigned among the prelates and the pontifical court. Assuredly, he was not the only one, nor the first one to be jealous of the feasts and luxury of the Church, to be indignant with a vehemence.

The promotional sale of indulgences, begun by Pope Leon X to finance the works of the Church of Saint-Peter, offered Luther an occasion to excite the discontent of the northern towns and the regions heated by the agitation of Boehm and the Taborites, but also the German princes, who were traditionally hostile to Rome and soon thereafter (around 1520) put off by the authoritarianism of the Catholic Emperor Charles V.

To collect funds from the sale of indulgences, the archbishop of Mayence, having deputized the Dominican Tetzel, a talented preacher who would absolve all sins if the price was paid, said “one could fornicate with the Virgin Mary herself.”

From his arrival in Wittenberg, a violent polemic opposed Tetzel to Luther, who had the double advantage of being there with him and being able to express with the crudeness of popular language opinions that were widely held. With the glibness of a traveling businessman, Tetzel proposed to settle the debate with an ordeal of fire and water: “I mock your brayings,” Luther would retort. “In place of water, I advise the juice of the grape arbor and, in place of fire, the aroma of a roasted goose.” The rough treatment that the people gave to Tetzel’s emulators alarmed those in Rome responsible for the marketing[423] operation founded on the redemption of sin, while the monk of Wittenberg — emboldened by his popularity — summarized in 95 articles his theses against the Roman clique. On 31 October 1517, he attached them to the walls of the Church of All Saints. In vain did Cardinal Cajetan, the apostolic nuncio and the ecclesiastical hierarchy try to get him to sign a retraction.

In 1520, the Papal Bull Exsurge condemned 41 of Luther’s propositions and ordered that the lampoons be burned. Accompanied by his disciples, Luther brought himself to the door of Wittenberg, where a pyre had been lighted, and with great solemnity both the Papal Bull as well as the writings of Luther’s adversaries were thrown into it.

From Germany to England, in France and the Netherlands, the pyre of Wittenberg — which had symbolically consumed the power of Rome — would set public opinion aflame. For the princes and kings, Catholicism was merely an instrument of political domination. None of them had any scruples about dumping it if it encumbered more than it served. In 1527, the very loyal servant of faith named Emperor Charles V subjected Rome to the most pitiless sacking and massacres that it had known since the days of the Visigoths. Francois I, King of France, no less a good Catholic, burned the Protestants but helped the German reformers in their struggle against Charles V; he hated the Emperor so much that he did not hesitate to ally himself with Islam.

While the economy had condemned Dolcino, the Spirituals and Savonarola, it saved Luther and his movement; the economy carried them to power by virtue of the force that, underneath the outward appearance of religion and ideology, began to appear in broad daylight as the veritable mode of government of mankind: the economy.

Luther and Calvin ratified the obscure decrees on free enterprise, even in the crushing of peasant communalism and the condemnation of the Free-Spirit so resolutely irreconciable with the economic control exercised over the lives of men and women.

In 1521, Charles V summoned Luther to appear before the diet of the princes meeting in Worms, in the Rhineland. Strong from the sympathy that his act of rebellion aroused among the lords who were not anxious to grovel under the boot of the Emperor, Luther presented his profession of faith like a challenge, then, foreseeing arrest, took refuge in Saxony, where the Elector — under the pretext of imprisoning him — protected him at his chateau in Wartburg. There he translated the Bible into German and laid the bases for a new dogma.

In 1521, Thomas Muntzer, taking the freedoms claimed by Luther literally, joined the peasants in revolt and revived the hopes for a Joachimite Third Age. In 1525, Luther, in his lampoon entitled Against the Bands of Looting Peasants and Assassins, appealed for the most pitiless repression, thereby removing the last reticences of the German princes concerning his doctrine and thus counter-signing the birth of Lutherism as the religion of the State. In five years, the heresiarch (in his own way) repeated the Constantinian operation of the Roman Church. He set himself up as the pontifex maximus by according to the national and religious independence of the principalities and kingdoms of the north the support of a bourgeoisie of free enterprise that saw in enrichment the compensation for sacrifice and obedience to a reasonable God.

John Calvin

The heresiarchal career of John Calvin ended with a coup d’Etat, the success of which he himself assured. He was born in 1509 in Noyon, in Picardy, where his father, who was the attorney of the chapter, reserved him for a career in the church. After studying at the College of Montaigu in Paris, Orleans and Bourges, he published a commentary on Seneca’s De clementia.

Around 1533, he adopted the ideas of the Reformation. Suspected of having drafted a harangue against his friend, the Rector of the University of Paris, Nicolas Cop (who was deeply impregnated by the Lutherian doctrine), he fled to Angouleme, then took refuge in Nerac with the help of Marguerite of Navarre, sister of Francois I and protector of the reforms.

In 1534, Calvin was in Basle, where he drafted the first version of The Christian Institution. In 1536, William Farel, who attempted to implant the Reformation in Geneva, invited him to use his authority to convince the citizens, who were not in a hurry to exchange a new religious truth for an old one about which they only cared a little. Banishment sanctioned them both in 1538 and Calvin went to Strasbourg, where Martin Bucer had consolidated one of the bastions of Lutherism. Returning to Geneva in 1541, Calvin thenceforth worked to instaurate his power. An opposition among the inhabitants of the city rose against him, founded just as much on the awareness of belonging to a free state as on the repugnance that Calvinist austerity aroused among the people who were naturally inclined to the joys of existence. Calvin would work patiently at breaking the party of political freedom — stigmatized under the name “libertines” — that was led by Jacob Gruet and the Pocques, Perceval and Quintin Thierry faction, vituperated under the name “spiritual libertines.”

In 1547, after an unjust trial, Jacob Gruet was decapitated for having defended the free choice of atheism and being an insurgent against the dictatorship of a Puritanism that forged in the north of Europe the Anglo-Saxon mindset that illustrated English Victorianism and Americanism in the most deplorable senses of the words.

To confirm the truth that God had imposed, all one would need to do would be to drag to the pyre the physician Michel Servet, who took refuge in Geneva in 1553 to escape from Inquisitorial barbarity.