Chapter 17
In This Chapter
• Martin Luther
• The Protestant Reformation
• Zwingli and Calvin
• The Catholic Counter-Reformation
• The wars of religion
The Protestant Reformation was one of the most divisive events in European history and its impact on world history can’t be overstated. Many of the ideas and institutions of the West—and, as a result, the world—are influenced by the ideas and results of the Reformation.
The Monk Who Changed Europe
Every story has a starting point and the Reformation’s starting point was a German monk named Martin Luther (1483-1546). Luther was born to middle class parents who wanted him to be a lawyer, but legal training was not his style and he decided to become a monk. (There’s a story that Luther, coming home late one night, got caught in a storm and after lightningnearly struck him, he decided to enter a monastery.)
After joining the ranks of the Augustinian Order and becoming a teacher of religion at the University of Wittenberg, he appeared to struggle with his soul’s salvation. Some claimed to have heard him wrestling with the devil late at night in his cell at the monastery. In fact, what Luther was wrestling with turned Europe inside out and struck at one of the sources of the European structure and tradition.
Notable Quotable
"As a monk I led an irreproachable life. Nevertheless, I felt that I was a sinner before God. My conscience was restless ... I actually hated the righteous God who punishes sinners …. Then finally God had mercy on me, and I began to understand that the righteousness of God is that gift of God by which a righteous man lives—namely faith—and that … the merciful God justifies us by faith.”
—Martin Luther
Salvation by Faith
While reading the letters of Paul in the New Testament, Luther was struck by the apostle’s idea of faith. At this time, the Church taught that people entered heaven through their good works. What bothered Luther was that, no matter how many good works he performed, he did not feel sufficient to enter heaven. Paul, in his letters,approached it from an angle the Church seemed to ignore. Paul believed that we enter heaven by faith alone. Simply and truly believing in God was all that we need to enter heaven.
Luther took Paul’s idea and advanced it further by teaching that works of the Church—rituals of the sacraments and other actions—were meaningless and uselessfor one’s salvation. Thus Luther dropped a bombshell at the University of Wittenberg, where he began to teach this new perspective of salvation, putting the Church’s teachings into question. And he wasn’t done yet.
The Ninety-Five Theses
Luther also began to protest what he saw as abuses by the Church. The abuse that most bothered him was the selling of indulgences, certificates awarded by the Church that reduced the punishment for people’s sins. During Luther’s time the Church pushed this practice to raise money to rebuild St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.
By 1517 Luther had had enough of the Church, its teachings, and indulgences. So on October 31, he submitted the Ninety-five Theses or statements to the church in Wittenberg, detailing what he saw as all of the wrongs of the Roman Catholic Church, hoping to generate debate and reform in the Church. The response Luther got was quite unexpected.
What in the World
The official story is that on October 31, 1517 Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-five Theses to the door of the church in Wittenberg, starting the Protestant Reformation. But the image of Luther performing this act, popularized by numerous paintings, is probably false. Historians have no eyewitness accounts of the event, and Luther never mentioned it during his lifetime. It is just a legend that was created after this death.
To say that the Catholic Church was not entirely open to Luther’s criticism would be an understatement. Once the news of the Luther’s Ninety-five Theses reached Pope Leo X in Rome, Luther was excommunicated, and his writings on the subject of justificationby faith and the abuses of the Church were banned. It would appear that all had gone wrong for Luther and that his issues with the Church were not going to be heard. But several German princes were listening.
The German princes were motivated to do the morally responsible thing for the people of their respective small German kingdoms. In addition, the Church had traditionallyappeared to represent Italian, not German, interests. The fact that most of the popes were Italian seemed to prove the point. Finally, the Church was one of the largest landowners in Europe. A break from the Church might mean that Church lands were up for grabs and available for the German princes.
The Teachings of Luther
So with the support of the German princes, particularly Prince Frederick of Saxony, Luther continued teaching and writing despite the actions of the Church. He went on to translate the Latin Bible into German, so all people would have the opportunity to read it. Eventually giving up on reform within the Church, Luther broke completelyfrom the Roman Catholic Church to form the first Protestant (from the word “protest”) faith: Lutheranism. He also developed his ideas and teachings through the years as his new version of the Christian faith grew. The following represent the belief system that Luther advanced:
• Salvation is obtained by faith alone, not works.
• Religious truth and authority can only be found in the Bible.
• The Church should not be a hierarchy of clergy but a community of believers.
• All jobs are important, not just the occupations of priests, monks, or nuns.
• The worship service should be in the language of the people for them to understand.
• There are only two sacraments—baptism and marriage.
Once Luther challenged the Church, others followed in his path. While the teachingsof the Church began to be questioned, a variety of theological teachings sprang up, as religious-minded reformers began to develop new ideas that did not even agree with the teachings of Luther.
Zwingli in Switzerland
In Switzerland, a priest named Ulrich Zwingli (1484-1531) started the call for reform. Eventually the churches in Switzerland broke away from the Roman Catholic Church. Much like Luther, Zwingli stressed that salvation was obtained by faith alone. But unlike Luther, Zwingli was very interested in setting up a theocracy, or church-run state. He thought that the state could best keep the people in line with the backing of church doctrine.
For a time, Zwingli was able to set up his version of a theocracy in the city of Zurich. Then, in 1531, Catholic forces defeated Zwingli and his army in the field of battle. With this Catholic victory and Zwingli’s death in battle, the Protestant reform movementseemed to be over in Switzerland. But another reformer emerged.
Notable Quotable
"Three times Zwingli was thrown to the ground by the advancing forces, but in each case he stood up again. On the fourth occasion a spear reached his chin and he fell to his knees saying, ’They can destroy the body but not the soul.’ And after these words he fell asleep in the Lord.”
—Ulrich Zwingli, Oswald Myconius
Calvinism
John Calvin (1509-1564) was a reform-minded Protestant theologian from France. His teachings drew from Martin Luther and put him in hot water in his homeland, and he was forced to leave the country. By the mid-sixteenth century, Calvin establisheda reformed church in Geneva, Switzerland.
In Geneva, Calvin was able to teach the Christian doctrines he professed in his The Institutes of the Christian Religion. Influenced by the writings of the fourth-century Doctor of the Church Augustine of Hippo, Calvin taught that everyone was already predestined for heaven or hell since God is the Alpha and Omega, in other words the beginning and the end. If a man loves God, he will try to have faith and perform good works, but salvation is in God’s hands alone, for He is the master of man’s destiny.
definition
Predestination is the belief that God determines beforehand whether souls have either salvationor damnation.
Through the strength of his teachings, Calvin took over the government in Geneva and created a strict theocracy to help maintain his reformed church, now known as the Calvinists. Other reformers observed Calvin’s success and used his ideas in their own Protestant reform movements.
Anabaptists and Radicals
As the door for protest against the Church and its teachings opened up, so did the chance for things to go horribly wrong. After all, the very order of society was rooted in Church doctrine. People started to question the authority of established Protestant teachers such as Luther and Calvin.
The Anabaptist movement began in response to the teaching on the sacrament of baptism. Anabaptists believed that baptism should only occur when someone was an adult and fully able to understand the meaningof the sacrament. All well and good, but within the Anabaptist movement, radicals began to deny the very authority of local government to rule their lives, since local officials had no spiritual authority to do so.
definition
Anabaptists were a sixteenth century sect of the Reformation that opposed the taking of oaths, the holding of public office, militaryservice, and most famously the opposition to infant baptisms.
Eventually the radical Anabaptists were a force to be reckoned with. They seized the city of Munster in Germany in a violent uprising. Once sealed off in the city, the radical Anabaptists practiced polygamy, burnt books, and killed members of other religious groups, Protestant and Catholic. Finally the surrounding cities had had enough and an army of Lutherans and Catholics besieged the city and destroyed the radical movement. From that point most Anabaptists, radical or otherwise, knew they were not welcome in Europe and many left for America. With them went two ideas that resonated in the colonies of North America. These were the ideas of religious liberty and the separation of church and state.
In Need of a Divorce
Unlike the Protestant movements prior, the one in England did not have theological doctrine as its focus. Its focus was divorce. King Henry VIII needed a male heir to his throne, as all kings do. The problem was that he just couldn’t produce one, and he went through several wives trying.
What in the World
To gain a male heir to the throne, Henry VIII was married a total of six times. What he produced was a daughter and the first female monarch to assert political power over England. She was Queen Elizabeth I, one of the greatest monarchs of English history, whose rule marked a cultural peak called the Elizabethan Age.
Such was the state of affairs in 1527, when Henry VIII asked the pope to grant a divorce from his currentwife, Catherine of Aragon, so he could marry his mistress, Anne Boleyn. The pope, who had granted several divorces at this point, refused Henry VIII’s request. In response, Henry VIII broke from the Roman Catholic Church to form the Church of England, with the monarch—him—as the head of the church. As head of the Church of England, Henry VIII then granted himself a divorce. Case closed, problem solved! But Henry’s move ushered in a period of religious strife in England that plagued the country and the monarchy for two centuries before it was finally resolved.
You Know … You Might Be Right
With the Protestant Reform movement in Europe, the Church conceded that the Protestants might be right. In 1536, Pope Paul III officially called for reform in the Catholic Church. The Counter-Reformation, as it is sometimes referred, can be divided into two phases.
The Society of Jesus
The first phase started with the establishment of the Jesuits, or Society of Jesus, led by Ignatius Loyola. This society was organized militarily, requiring members to obey blindly and with absolute faith. The Jesuits served as the militant arm of the Counter-Reformation and tried to counter Protestantism in a number of ways:
• They engaged in missionary activities around the world.
• They established schools in Catholic nations to help perpetuate the Catholic faith.
• They rooted out heresy through the Inquisition.
• They served as advisors in the courts of Catholic kings.
• They helped to create and maintain the Index of Forbidden Books.
definition
The Inquisition was a general tribunal used to discover and root out heresy in the Roman Catholic Church.
What in the World
The Index of Forbidden Books got its start in the early fifth century but it wasn’t until the sixteenth century under Pope Paul IV that it took the form in which it remained for over 400 years. During those years, the texts of many great thinkers and philosophers were put on the list including Erasmus, Thomas Hobbes, and Voltaire. The list also had some very strange and interesting uses. The Bodleian library, founded in the 1600s at the University of Oxford, purchased its first books from the list found in the Index. They figured if the Catholic Church didn’t like it, it must be worth having!
The Jesuits performed all of these actions very zealously, and in all likelihood they did prevent the spread of Protestantism in the majority of Europe. But another Church action probably also helped to prevent that spread, and that was the Council of Trent.
Notable Quotable
"Let him who would fight for God under the banner of the cross and serve the Lord alone and his vicar on earth in our Society, which we desire to be distinguished by the name of Jesus ... for the task of advancing souls in Christian life and doctrine and of propagating the faith by the ministry of the word.”
—Ignatius Loyola
The Council of Trent
The Council of Trent was a meeting of the top bishops and theologians of Catholic Europe held in Trent, Italy, from 1545 to 1563 (they must have needed a lot of espresso!). The purpose of this meeting was to define a new Catholic doctrine in response to the complaints of the Protestants. In the end the Church decided upon the following things:
• First and foremost, the sale of indulgences was forbidden.
• Salvation is achieved by a combination of good works and faith.
• The seven sacraments are true and valid in the life of the Church.
• Religious authority is found in the Bible, the traditions of the Church, and the writings of the Church leaders.
• The Latin Vulgate Bible is to be used.
• People cannot interpret the message of the Bible without the guidance of the Church.
definition
The seven sacraments of the medieval Church were ceremonies in which only a priest possessed the right to perform through the authority of the Church. They included baptism,confirmation into the Church, the consecration of the Eucharist, the administration of penance, the ordination of the clergy, and the marriage ceremony.
The Results of the Catholic Counter-Reformation
The actions of the Jesuits and the mandates of the Council of Trent had several results. First the Counter-Reformation helped to correct some of the abuses of the Roman Catholic Church. It also increased religious devotion, which led to a new art and musical style called Baroque that emerged in Catholic Europe. And finally, the Protestant movement was prevented from spreading across the entirety of Europe, making it essentially a northern European movement.
Of course, all of the efforts of the Council of Trent to address the complaints of the Protestants beg the question: Why did the Protestant reformers and churches remain separated from the Catholic Church after the Counter-Reformation? The Catholic Church was reformed and better, wasn’t it? In reality, regardless of the changes, things had gone too far.
The Protestants were very sincere in their religious beliefs and convictions. In addition,there were political reasons to remain separate from the Church. Monarchs and rulers wanted church lands and the ability to use religion to benefit their own state. Northern European nations were only too happy to defy the Italian-controlled Roman Catholic Church. They wanted autonomous, local control over their lands and people, so separation seemed to be the better political course. Merchants and townspeople also liked the new Protestant Christianity. Protestant doctrine on the value of all vocations or work seemed to support business practices and the accumulationof wealth.
So what were the long-term results of the Protestant Reformation on Europe? In the end, the Protestant churches became well established in northern Europe, while the Roman Catholic Church remained entrenched in the southern regions of Europe. The Reformation also helped the monarchs of Europe to centralize power and completely end the feudal system. But the Reformation also had violent long-term consequences, which culminated in the seventeenth century’s Wars of Religion.
The Wars of Religion
Three different wars were caused in part by the religious differences created by the Protestant Reformation and Counter-Reformation. These were the French Wars of Religion (1562-1598), the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648), and, to some degree, the English Civil War (1642-1649).
The French First
The French Wars of Religion, although they ended in the sixteenth century, gave Europeans an idea of the strife that was to emerge from behind the Protestant Reformation. The series of wars between 1562 and 1598 focused on the fight between French Protestants, or Huguenots, and French Catholics for the throne of the Valois dynasty after the death of King Henry II.
Tracing the wars and their various conflicts is a complex task better left to European histories; what matters is that, in the end, Henry of Navarre rose to the top of the political heap by adopting Catholicism and became king of France in 1593 as Henry IV. Later he established official tolerance of Protestantism in France with the Edict on Nantes in 1598. Henry IV spent the rest of his rule trying to repair the damage to the power and prestige of the French monarchy, which had been upturned by the religious dissention in France.
What in the World
By the early seventeenth century, firearms dominated the battlefield. The flintlock musket was a front-loaded gun. A flint striking metal at the closed end of the musket ignited the gunpowder. This flintlock mechanism made it easier and more reliable than previous muskets. Trained armies of musketeers were able to fire up to two shots per minute. This technological development changed the face of war. The nations of Europe started to fund standing armies, and from then on wars were fought by professional soldiers.
The Thirty Years’ War
The next series of wars over religion in Europe was even more chaotic and disruptive than the French wars. In general, there were not only religious reasons for the war but also political reasons. The princes of the independent German kingdoms wanted autonomy from the Holy Roman Empire. France wanted to limit the power of the Hapsburg family, which ruled the Holy Roman Empire. The Spanish, also ruled by the Hapsburgs, wanted to help extend the Hapsburg power in Germany over the German princes. And finally, the nations of both Sweden and Denmark wanted to strengthen their sphere of influence in the Baltic Sea region.
Regardless of the political reasons for the war, the overarching conflict was between Catholics and Protestants over religious doctrine. For this doctrine, the people of Europe descended into the first continent-wide war involving all the major nations in their history.
Again, the track of the war is the subject of a European history not a world history. The result of the war was that, at its conclusion, the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 reinstated the earlier Peace of Augsburg of 1555, which allowed the German princes to choose their subjects’ form of Christian religion—limited, of course, to Catholicism, Lutheranism, and now Calvinism. The idea of Cuius region, eius religio or “whose the region, his the religion,” was the maxim for the German states. In addition, the German princes were made sovereign, independent rulers of their kingdoms. This curtailed the political power of the Holy Roman Emperor and the Hapsburgs, beginning their slow decline.
The Results of the Wars of Religion
There were also several long-term results of the war. Germany had been ravaged and devastated. One-third of its population had been wiped out, and it took the region two centuries to regain its composure culturally and politically. Later, the English Civil War acquainted England with the problems that religious differences cause. This war from 1642 to 1649 beheaded a king, King Charles, and gave them a tyrant, Oliver Cromwell, before things returned to a state of normalcy.
By the seventeenth century, the European nations had learned their lesson about wars of religion. From now on, they’d only go to war for political reasons! The people of Europe associated religious absolutism and zealotry with death and destruction, and began to look elsewhere for the answers religion used to provide. The stage was set for the age of science and reason.
The Least You Need to Know
• Martin Luther’s Ninety-five Theses led to the emergence of the Protestant Reformation.
• During the Catholic Counter-Reformation, the Catholic Church enacted a series of reforms that helped to strengthen the Church.
• The French Wars of Religion fought between French Huguenots and French Catholics started a period of religious warfare in seventeenth century Europe.
• The Thirty Years’ War devastated the region of Germany economically, socially, and culturally.
• After the Reformation and the Wars of Religion, people started to examine other worldviews in place of the religious.