Heretics and Mystics Before Luther
What was the state of the German Church in Luther's youth? A hint can be found in how ready the high clergy were to accept criticism of the Church, and the critics' readiness to voice it. There were some atheists among them whose names have been forgotten in the passing of time. Erasmus notes that there are men among us who think like Epicurus and believe that the soul also dies with the body. Among the humanists there were skeptics. There were mystics who denied the necessity of the Church or the priest as an intermediary between God and man, and who stressed the inner side of religion against ceremonies and outward acts. Here and there lived small groups of Waldensians, who made no difference between cleric and layman; and in eastern Germany a body of Hussites lived who called the pope Antichrist.
The book next names a scholar called Wolwin(?) of Augsburg, who, with his brother, denounced the sale of indulgences as a swindle (1466). (The passage is garbled in the source and this identification is uncertain.) John of Wesel, a master of Erfurt, declared that man's fate is determined by divine providence; he rejected the sale of indulgences, religious ceremonies, and prayer to the saints; and cried out: I hate the pope, the Church and the council of the Church, and believe only in Christ. He was condemned by the Inquisition, recanted, and died in prison (1481).
Wessel Gansfort, wrongly known as Johann Wessel, raised questions about confession, penance and forgiveness, the sale of indulgences and purgatory, and held the Bible as the only rule and guide of faith and faith as the only way of salvation; and this, in a sentence, was all of Luther's teaching. Luther himself said of Wessel in 1522 that if he had read his works earlier, his enemies would have said Luther took everything from Wessel; so great was the agreement of their spirits and thought.
Popular Piety and the Clergy
Nevertheless in Germany religion was more or less flourishing, and the great majority of the people believed in the Church and, between sinning and drinking, were devout and God-fearing. The German family was almost a church of its own, in which the mother was the catechist and the father the priest. Prayers were repeated again and again, and every house had a book of family devotions. For those who could not read there were "picture books" in which the stories of the life of Christ, Mary and the saints were painted. Images of the Virgin were as plentiful as those of Jesus; reciting prayers and telling the rosary were common practices. Jakob Sprenger, inquisitor, founded a confraternity to teach the saying of the rosary; and a German prayer to the Trinity in the thought of the common people ran thus: glory be to Mary the Virgin, the Father, and the Son.
Some of the clergy were as devout as the people, though in the uproar made by the worldly and dishonest their names were seldom heard; there were no doubt great men of faith and loyalty whose acts and thoughts created and maintained so pervasive a God-fearing piety. The parish priest, willingly or not, kept a concubine or, according to the custom of the place, a wife; but it is thought that the lion-hearted Germans looked on this with indulgence as a remedy for the disorder among priests; had not even the popes in this passionate age themselves rebelled against celibacy? But the sworn clergy, those under the rules of a convent or monastery, were now themselves engaged in a serious reform. The Benedictines made themselves a half-worldly, half-monastic position, and the Teutonic Knights went on with their moral looseness, military excesses and worldly greed; but the Dominican, Franciscan and Augustinian friars returned to the rules of their orders and in practice took up useful and charitable work. In this reform, the most zealous of all orders were the Augustinian ascetics, who kept faith with the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience and were at the same time so learned that they filled many chairs in German universities. When Luther decided to become a monk, he entered this order.
A Church Rich in Land
The complaints against the German clergy were chiefly against the higher clergy, and because of their boundless wealth and worldliness. Some bishops and abbots had to manage the economic affairs of vast territories that had come into the Church's possession. Whether they wore the bishop's miter or were shaven monks, they were feudal lords, often neither easygoing nor kind. These servants of the Church were slaves of the world, not men of God, and it was said that some of them went to provincial or imperial diets with their mistresses in tow. A learned Catholic priest and historian, Johannes Janssen, summed up the charges laid against the German Church on the eve of the Reformation, perhaps with more than usual severity: the contrast between love of God and greed for the world, between godly piety and godless self-seeking and selfishness, was plainly visible in all ranks of the clergy as in other classes. Because of the excess of these qualities among religious servants, religious preaching and care of souls were forgotten. Greed, the besetting and tempting sin of the century, appeared among clergymen of every class, rank and order as a passion to raise rents, income, taxes and church revenues to the limit.
The German Church was the richest church in Christendom. By one reckoning, about a third of all the immovable property of the country was in the hands of the Church, and the fact that the clergy were always adding to their holdings made most of them more blameworthy. Church buildings and institutions occupied the greater part of the land in many cities.
Among the clergy themselves there were sharp and marked contrasts of income. Lower clergy, whose official pay came from the revenues and tithes of various places, were often forced by poverty, if not by temptation, to take up trades unfit for their station, and were consequently despised by their parishioners. On the other hand the higher clergy enjoyed great and excessive wealth, and many did not hesitate to flaunt it in a striking way and rouse the anger and hatred of the common people, the envy of the upper classes and the reproach of serious minds. In many places voices were raised against material abuses of sacred things, against the repeated sums sent to Rome, against the annual tax the new bishop paid the pope, and against the sale of dispensations. A bitter, hateful feeling against the Italians grew.
Grievances Against Rome
Little by little it took root in people's minds, even in men like Berthold von Henneberg, archbishop, who were true children of the holy Church. On September 9, 1496, he wrote that the Italians ought to reward the Germans for their services and not suck the blood of the clergy by seizing and stealing their money. If Germany could have ignored the claims and extortions of the popes, it might have forgiven the worldliness and love of money of its bishops. A patriotic spirit, growing stronger every day, rejected the popes' claim that no one is lawfully emperor without papal approval and that the power to depose emperors and kings lay with the papacy. The struggle between clerical and civil authorities over the appointment of church officials, the clash of jurisdiction between civil and ecclesiastical courts, and the exemption of clergy from almost all civil duties and laws continued. German nobles looked with greedy resentment on the Church's valuable property, and merchants were vexed that the monasteries and convents, claiming exemption from taxes, competed with them in production and trade. The dispute at this stage was more over material interests and considerations than over principles and religious doctrine.
Another Catholic historian says that in Germany the general opinion was that the Roman administration laid an unbearable burden of taxation on the people. Complaints were repeatedly made, even by those devoted to the Church and the pope, that court fees, the first-year revenues of bishoprics and the payments demanded for the performance of church rites were raised improperly and against law; that countless new indulgences were issued without the consent of the country's bishops; and that successive taxes levied for crusades were spent on other purposes. They often admitted that the complaints and dissatisfaction of the German people against Rome, in financial matters, were mostly correct and well founded.
In 1457 Martin Mair, secretary of the archbishop of Mainz, summed up in anger, while attacking Cardinal Piccolomini, the abuses that angered Germany against the papal court. He wrote in substance that the election of bishops is often postponed without any reason, and that privileges and offices of every kind are reserved for cardinals and the pope's secretaries; that Cardinal Piccolomini himself had been granted three church incomes and offices in three provinces of Germany, in a way no one had ever heard of; that countless promises of appointments are given, annual bishopric revenues and other taxes are demanded harshly, no delay is allowed, and more than the customary legal sum is taken; that bishoprics are given not to the more worthy but to those who pay more bribes; that to heap up money new indulgences are issued and more war taxes imposed every day without asking the opinion or consent of the German bishops; that cases which ought to be tried in the country are hurried off to papal courts; that Germans are treated as savage but wealthy people; and that by a thousand clever tricks the springs of their money are being dried up. For many years Germany has sat in the black dust and mourned its poverty and sorrow, but now its great men seem to have woken as from sleep; now they mean to throw off the yoke of Roman slavery from their necks and win back their old freedom. (The book's passage is abridged.)
Dietrich of Mainz and Pius II
When Cardinal Piccolomini became pope as Pius II (1458), he ignored these protests; he demanded from Dietrich von Isenburg 20,500 gulden for his appointment to the archbishopric of Mainz (1459). Dietrich refused to pay and protested that the sum was far greater than what had been taken from his predecessors. Pius excommunicated him; Dietrich ignored the sentence, and several German princes rose to his support. Dietrich urged a Nuremberg jurist named Gregor Heimburg to rouse popular feeling about the superiority of a general council of the Church over popes. Heimburg went to France to try for an alliance against the papacy. For a time it seemed that the northern nations would throw off the bond of obedience to Rome.
But the pope's agents detached Dietrich's supporters and allies one by one, and Pius appointed Adolf of Nassau bishop in Dietrich's place. The troops of the two archbishops fought a bloody battle; Dietrich was defeated; he sent a warning message to the leaders and rulers of Germany that if they did not unite, their movement for liberty would be defeated again and again; and this proclamation was one of the first documents printed by Gutenberg.
The fire of German discontent was not put out by this victory of the popes. After a huge amount of German money flowed to Rome in the Jubilee year of 1500, the Diet of Augsburg demanded that some of it be returned to Germany. The emperor Maximilian raised his voice to complain that the revenue the pope drew out of Germany was hundreds of times his own income from the country. In 1510, when he was at war with Pope Julius II, he ordered the humanist Wimpfeling to draw up a list of the grievances of the German nation against the popes; for a time the idea of separating the German Church from Rome crossed his mind, but Wimpfeling, on the ground that the German princes would not support him, dissuaded him. Nevertheless all the economic advances of the century opened the way for Luther's revolt. In the end, the basic conflict of material interests turned the German Reformation, which wanted to stop the flow of German money to Italy, against the Italian Renaissance, which satisfied the financial needs of its poetry and art with German gold.
Anticlericalism and the Gathering Storm
Among the people, anti-religious ideas kept step with piety. The honest historian Pastor writes that the revolutionary spirit of hatred of the Church and the clergy surged among the different classes across Europe, and that the cry "Death to the priests!", once spoken secretly and under the breath, had now become everyone's slogan. So great was the force of this general hostility and anger that the Inquisition, then at the height of its power in Spain, hardly dared in Germany to condemn anyone. Fierce pamphlets rained attacks on the German Church, though their violence never matched the attacks on Rome. Some monks and priests joined the attack and stirred their orders and societies against the luxury and extravagance of the higher clergy. Pilgrims who returned from the Jubilee of 1500 brought home terrible, often exaggerated stories of the debauchery and poisonings of the popes, of the boasts and extortions of the cardinals, and of the general idolatry and love of money. Many Germans swore that as their ancestors had broken the power of Rome in 1476, they or their children would again rub the nose of that oppressive power in the dust. Others recalled the humiliation Pope Gregory VII inflicted on the emperor Henry IV at Canossa and thought that the time for revenge had come. In 1521 Aleander, the papal nuncio, informed Leo X of the approaching revolution against the Church, saying that five years before he had heard from many Germans that they were waiting for a "fool" to open his mouth against Rome.
Thousands of spiritual, intellectual, emotional, economic, political and moral causes, after centuries of obstruction and suppression, were gathering and stirring up a powerful whirlwind that would draw Europe into the greatest change and upheaval since the conquest of Rome by the barbarian tribes: the weakness of papal government after the removal of the papacy to Avignon and the Great Schism; the breakdown of monastic discipline and clerical celibacy; the luxury of the early clergy; the corruption of the papal court; the worldly activities of the popes; the conduct and morals of Alexander VI, the wars of Julius II, the careless pleasures of Leo X; the buying and selling of relics and the trade in indulgences; the victory of Islam over Christianity in the Crusades and the Ottoman wars; scattered acquaintance with non-Christian religions; the influence of Islamic philosophy and science; the decay of scholastic philosophy in the irrational philosophy of Scotus and the skepticism of William of Ockham; the failure of the conciliar movement to reform religion and the Church; the discovery of ancient pagan cultures and the discovery of America; the invention of printing; the spread of literacy and education; the translation and reading of the Bible; the perception of the contrast between the poverty and simplicity of the apostles and the lavish, ceremonious wealth of the Church (a new recognition); the accumulation of wealth and economic independence in Germany and England; the rise of a third class that hated the restrictions and demands of the clergy; protest against the flow of German money to Rome; the passing of law and government into the hands of civil authorities; the growth of nationalism and absolute governments; the nationalist influence of vernacular languages and literature; the revolutionary legacies of the Waldensians, Wyclif and Hus; and the mystical demand for a religion less ritual and external and more personal and inward.
All these causes and motives were now joining as a flood of power to break the crust of medieval custom, to snap all bonds and rules, to turn Europe into diverse nations and sects, to remove more and more of the foundations and comforts of the old beliefs, and perhaps to announce the beginning of the end of Christianity's rule over the intellectual life of European man.
With this the book closes its first volume of the section and opens Book Two, "The Religious Revolution, 1517–1564," whose first chapter is on Luther.