The Cambridge History of Reformation Era Theology 1107358388, 9781107358386

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the cambridge history of

REFORMATION-ERA THEOLOGY

The Cambridge History of Reformation-Era Theology explores the key developments in both Protestant and Catholic theology ca. 1475–1650. Examining the various settings and schools in which theology was formulated and taught, and the social backgrounds of its exponents – including women and non-university-trained men, as well as writers both in and outside Europe – it establishes how the major denominations took their positions and participated in a broader discourse. The volume examines specific theological themes from different confessional perspectives, demonstrating how theology affected the lives of believers via pastoral theology, canon law, and spirituality, and how theological ideas were linked to politics, warfare, science, and the arts. Written by an international team of leading scholars in the field, this History expands the range of theological discourse by introducing new topics and spokespersons, as well as global and ecumenical perspectives. It will remain the definitive place to begin any further study of theology during this period for years to come. Kenneth G. Appold is the James Hastings Nichols Professor of Reformation History at Princeton Theological Seminary and has written extensively on the history and theology of the Reformation and post-Reformation periods. He was formerly a professor at the Institute for Ecumenical Research in Strasbourg, France, and remains active in Lutheran ecumenical work. Nelson H. Minnich is Ordinary Professor of Church History at the Catholic University of America. He works primarily on early sixteenth-century conciliar and papal history. Between 1993 and 2019 he published four books and edited or co-edited four others. The recipient of numerous fellowships and a former member of the Pontifical Committee of Historical Sciences, he has been the editor of the Catholic Historical Review since 2005.

THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF

REFORMATION-ERA THEOLOGY *

Edited by

KENNETH G. APPOLD Princeton Theological Seminary NELSON H. MINNICH Catholic University of America

Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge cb2 8ea, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, ny 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, vic 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 103 Penang Road, #05–06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 238467 Cambridge University Press is part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment, a department of the University of Cambridge. We share the University’s mission to contribute to society through the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107044043 doi: 10.1017/9781107358386 © Cambridge University Press 2024 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press & Assessment. First published 2024 Printed in the United Kingdom by CPI Group Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data names: Appold, Kenneth G., 1965–author. j Minnich, Nelson H., author. title: The Cambridge history of reformation era theology / edited by Kenneth G. Appold, Princeton Theological Seminary, Nelson Minnich, The Catholic University of America. description: Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY, USA : Cambridge University Press, 2022. j Includes bibliographical references and index. identifiers: lccn 2022022808 (print) j lccn 2022022809 (ebook) j isbn 9781107358386 (epub) j isbn 9781107044043 (hardback) subjects: lcsh: Reformation. j Theology, Doctrinal–History–16th century. j Reformed Church– Doctrines–History–16th century. j BISAC: RELIGION / Theology classification: lcc br305.3 (ebook) j lcc br305.3 .a668 2022 (print) j ddc 270.6 23/eng/20220–dc06 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022022808 isbn 978-1-107-04404-3 Hardback Cambridge University Press & Assessment has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

List of Figures ix Acknowledgments x List of Contributors xi List of Abbreviations xiii

Introduction 1

part one THEOLOGY IN AN AGE O F CULTURAL TRANSFORMATIO N 1  The Printing Press and its Impact on the Production, Proliferation, and Readership of Theological Literature 9 andrew pettegree 2  Humanism and Theology anna morisi

21

3  The Changing Role of the Bible in Theological Discourse robert kolb

35

4  The Regulation of Theology in the Reformation Era 48 nelson h. minnich 5  Political Change and Theological Discourse kenneth g. appold

74

6  Universities, Monastic Studia, Academies, Seminaries, and Catechesis paul f. grendler

v

95

Contents

7  Para-Academic Theology: Theology of the “Uneducated.” 123 geoffrey dipple 8  Gender and Theology in the Reformation Era 134 kenneth g. appold 9  The Theologians and the Clergy: Who Were They? 149 charlotte methuen

part two SCHOOLS AND EMERGING CULTURES OF THEOLOGY: DIVERSITY AND CONFORMITY WITHIN CONFESSIONS 10  The Faculty of Theology of Paris (1474–1682) 175 jean-robert armogathe 11  The School of Salamanca 187 juan belda plans 12  The Schools of Louvain and Douai: The Bible, Augustine, and Thomas 201 wim fran c‚ ois 13  The Jesuit School of Theology stefania tutino

218

14  Theological Currents in Latin America (Sixteenth Century) 233 josep-ignasi saranyana 15  Diversity and Conformity within Early Lutheranism 248 markus matthias 16  Reformed Schools of Theology 288 carl r. trueman 17  Cultures of Theology in the British Isles david s. sytsma 18  Radical and Dissenting Groups 345 john d. roth

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Contents

19  Christian Ecumenical Efforts irene dingel

372

20  Western “Confessions” and Eastern Christianity yury p. avvakumov

385

part three T O P I C S A N D D I S C I P LI N E S O F TH EO L O G Y 21  Method and Ethos of Theological Instruction and Discourse walter sparn

405

22  Biblical Theology 434 euan cameron 23  Systematic Theology risto saarinen

464

24  Controversial Theology 492 jared wicks 25  Sacramental and Liturgical Theology 511 theodor dieter 26  Pastoral Theology and Preaching 532 ronald k. rittgers and megan armstong 27  Reformation Ethics and Moral Theology 557 jennifer a. herdt 28  Ecclesiastical Law in Early Modern Europe 579 kenneth pennington 29  Spirituality in the Reformation Era (1500–1675) 604 bernard mcginn 30  Catholic Christianity and Indigenous Religions in the Americas mariano delgado 31  Jesuit Catechisms in Japan and India 642 haruko nawata ward

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Contents

32  Theology in China ca. 1582–ca. 1688 668 nicolas standaert 33  Theology and Science 680 leen spruit and maurice a. finocchiaro 34  Theology and History stefan bauer

704

35  Theology, Politics, and Warfare 718 robert bireley† and robert kolb 36  The Role of Art in the Theological Discourse of the Reformation marcia b. hall Index 762 The plate section can be found between pp 746 and 747

viii

737

Figures

36.1 36.2 36.3 36.4 36.5 36.6 36.7 36.8 36.9 36.10

Sandro Botticelli, Mystic Crucifixion Sebastiano del Piombo, Christ Carrying the Cross Martino Rota, after Michelangelo, Last Judgment Jacopo Tintoretto, Institution of the Eucharist (Last Supper) Tommaso Laureti, The Triumph of Christianity Lucas Cranach, The Passion of Christ and the Antichrist After Hans Holbein the Younger, True and False Forgiveness of Sin Lucas Cranach the Elder, Law and Gospel Anonymous, Protestants Sweeping Clean After Hans Holbein the Younger, Henry VIII

ix

739 740 741 743 744 748 749 750 756 759

Figure 36.1 Sandro Botticelli, Mystic Crucifixion, Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge

Figure 36.2 Sebastiano del Piombo, Christ Carrying the Cross, Prado, Madrid (Art Res AR9412318)

Figure 36.3 Martino Rota, after Michelangelo, Last Judgment, engraving, Blanton Museum of Art, Austin (PHAS/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

Figure 36.4 Jacopo Tintoretto, Institution of the Eucharist (Last Supper), Basilica di San Giorgio Maggiore, 1594, Venice (Art Res ART54244)

Figure 36.5 Tommaso Laureti, The Triumph of Christianity, fresco, Sala di Costantino, Vatican Museums, 1586 (Art Res ART378090)

Published online by Cambridge University Press

Figure 36.6 Lucas Cranach, The Passion of Christ and the Antichrist, woodcut, 1521 (Art Res ART3808681)

Published online by Cambridge University Press

Figure 36.7 After Hans Holbein the Younger, True and False Forgiveness of Sin, woodcut (Art Res ART524292)

Figure 36.8 Lucas Cranach, Law and Gospel, Schloss Friedenstein Museum, Gotha, 1529 (Art Res ART169052)

Figure 36.9 Anonymous, Protestants Sweeping Clean (Iconoclasm in 1566) woodcut (Rijksmuseum, free download)

Figure 36.10 After Hans Holbein the Younger, Henry VIII, after the mural in Whitehall, 1537, destroyed by fire, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool (Wikipedia Commons)

Acknowledgments

As with any volume of this size, there is a long list of persons without whom the work would have been impossible or more difficult. The editors wish especially to thank the Very Rev. Dr. Iain Torrance for supporting the project since its inception. Sincere thanks are also due the Cambridge University Press editors who have shepherded the process throughout its various phases of development: Kate Brett, Laura Morris, and Beatrice Rehl. Finally, the international composition of the volume called for considerable translating work. The editors are grateful to Dr. Stefan Megyery for translating Mariano Delgado’s chapter, Dr. Margaret Katya Mouris for help editing the Spanish-language essays, Nelson H. Minnich for translating Ana Morisi’s contribution, Nicholas Hopman and Kenneth G. Appold for translating Markus Matthias’s chapter, and Kenneth G. Appold for translating the chapter by Walter Sparn. We thank Jonathan Gaworski for editorial help with footnotes, made possible by the Annabelle Melville Fund; and Briana Grenert for her work in fashioning the sizable index, with support from Princeton Theological Seminary. And we especially thank Mary Starkey for her sensitive and thorough copy-editing of this large work. There are many others in our personal and professional lives whose counsel and inspiration has enriched our work throughout these years, and though they cannot all be named here, we remain mindful of their contributions and grateful for their support.

x

Contributors

K e n n e t h G . A p p o l d ( c o - e d i t o r ) Princeton Theological Seminary N e l s o n H . M i n n i c h ( c o - e d i t o r ) Catholic University of America J e a n - R o b e r t A r m o g a t h e Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, Institut de France, Paris M e g a n A r m s t r o n g McMaster University Y u r i P . A v v a k u m o v University of Notre Dame S t e f a n B a u e r King’s College, London J u a n B e l d a P l a n s University of Navarra (retired) R o b e r t B i r e l e y + Loyola Chicago University (emeritus) E u a n C a m e r o n Union Theological Seminary M a r i a n o D e l g a d o Université de Fribourg T h e o d o r D i e t e r Institute for Ecumenical Research, Strasbourg I r e n e D i n g e l Academy of Sciences, Humanities and Literature, Mainz G e o f f r e y D i p p l e University of Alberta M a u r i c e A . F i n o c c h i a r o University of Nevada, Las Vegas W i m F r a n c¸ o i s Katholieke Universiteit Leuven P a u l F . G r e n d l e r University of Toronto (emeritus) M a r c i a B . H a l l Temple University J e n n i f e r A . H e r d t Yale University R o b e r t K o l b Concordia Seminary, St. Louis B e r n a r d M c G i n n University of Chicago Divinity School (emeritus) M a r k u s M a t t h i a s Protestant Theological University Amsterdam-Groningen C h a r l o t t e M e t h u e n University of Glasgow A n n a M o r i s i Sapienza Università, Rome (retired) K e n n e t h P e n n i n g t o n Catholic University of America (emeritus) A n d r e w P e t t e g r e e , University of St. Andrews R o n a l d K . R i t t g e r s Duke Divinity School J o h n D . R o t h Goshen College R i s t o S a a r i n e n University of Helsinki J o s e p - I g n a s i S a r a n y a n a University of Navarra (emeritus) W a l t e r S p a r n University of Erlangen L e e n S p r u i t Radboud University, Nijmegen, and Sapienza Università, Rome

xi

List of Contributors N i c o l a s S t a n d a e r t Katholieke Universiteit Leuven D a v i d S . S y t s m a Tokyo Christian University C a r l R . T r u e m a n Grove City College S t e f a n i a T u t i n o University of California, Los Angeles H a r u k o N a w a t a W a r d Columbia Theological Seminary J a r e d W i c k s Gregorian University, Rome (emeritus)

xii

Abbreviations

BSELK COGD CR DH LB

LW

TRE WA WA.B WA.DB WA.TR Z

Die Bekenntnisschriften der Evangelisch-Lutherischen Kirche, ed. Irene Dingel. Göttingen, 2014 Conciliorum oecumenicorum generaliumque decreta; Editio critica, ed. Giuseppe Alberigo and Alberto Melloni, 4 vols. Turnhout, 2006–16 Corpus Reformatorum, ed. Karl Gottlieb Bretschneider et al., 101 vols. Halle et al., 1834–1959 Enchiridion symbolorum definitionum et declarationum de rebus fidei et morum, ed. Heinrich Denzinger and Peter Hünermann, 43rd ed. San Francisco, 2012 Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami Opera omnia: Emendata et auctiora ad optimas editiones, praecipue quas ipse Erasmus postremo curavit summa fide exacta, doctorumque virorum notis illustrata, ed. Jean LeClerc, 10 vols. Leiden, 1703 Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, American Edition, vols. I–XXX ed. Jaroslav Pelikan. St. Louis, 1955–1976; vols. XXXI–XLV ed. Helmut Lehmann. Philadelphia and Minneapolis, 1957–1986; vols. XLVI–LXXXII ed. Christopher Boyd Brown and Benjamin T. G. Mayes. St. Louis, 2009– Theologische Realenzyklopädie, ed. Gerhard Müller, Horst Balz, and Gerhard Krause, 36 vols. Berlin, 1976–2004 Martin Luther, Luthers Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe [Schriften], 73 vols. Weimar, 1883–2009 Martin Luther, Luthers Werke: Briefwechsel, 18 vols. Weimar, 1930–1985 Martin Luther, Luthers Werke: Deutsche Bibel, 12 vols. Weimar, 1906–1960 Martin Luther, Luthers Werke: Tischreden, 6 vols. Weimar, 1912–1921 Huldreich Zwinglis Sämtliche Werke, ed. Emil Egli and Georg Finsler, 13 vols. Munich, 1981

xiii

Introduction kenneth g. appold and nelson h. minnich

Most histories of Reformation-era theology have been organized either by theologian or by subject. Both approaches follow a straightforward logic, but they also have limitations, and these have become more evident as the field has expanded and become more complex. Works that treat theology as products of individual minds tend to overlook the role of dialogue and collaboration, mutual influences, and academic exchange in the generation of ideas. That is especially problematic for an era that was shaped by the emergence of new religious communities and confessional identities, powerful currents of polemic and controversy, and strategies for conflict resolution – none of which are given adequate account by viewing individual theologians in isolation. Organizing a history of theology by subject, that is, according to a list of prominent theological topics, solves some of the problems of the first approach but introduces a different set of deficits. Apart from imposing an artificial coherence on widely divergent strains of thought, such models tend to view ideas all too ahistorically, reducing theology to a series of timeless apodictic statements decoupled from their place and function in the conversations of their day, and from their social and political environments. Though not of inherent necessity, most such works have also divided their subjects according to confession, separating Lutherans, Reformed, and Catholics into distinct camps and excluding Anabaptists and Spiritualists altogether, thereby ignoring the degree to which all of these groups were in communication with each other and influenced each other’s thoughts. Scholarship of recent decades has moved on from such approaches in part by appreciating more deeply the complexities involved in the formulation, communication, and publication of ideas. It has taken into greater account the social and institutional location of authors and their relationships to each other and to their readers, as well as their religious and political commitments and agendas. It has also brought a massive expansion of subject matter 1

introduction

that can be associated with the heading “Reformation-era theology.” Far more historical authors have been examined, their works made available in critical editions, and their contributions valued. Writers who worked outside the traditional channels of theological expression, including religious and lay women, as well as laypeople more generally, have had their voices raised to greater prominence. New genres of writing are better appreciated for their theological impact, as are nonverbal media such as the visual arts. As scholars have ventured out of their confessional foxholes, they have begun to recognize the interconnectedness and mutual dependence of theological thinking across the period’s ecclesial lines of loyalty. That, in turn, has encouraged a wider geographic vision, as theology of the Reformation no longer means simply German, Swiss, or English thought, but includes other parts of Europe, and from beyond Europe altogether. It has also forced a broadening of traditional timelines and periodization, not only because of the partial continuities between late medieval and Reformation-era thought, but also because the pluralization of Reformation narratives necessitates different starting points and endpoints. Even scholarship that has remained confessionally oriented has come to recognize a greater diversity of thought within these ecclesial traditions, whether Catholic, Lutheran, Reformed, Anabaptist, or Anglican, especially as it has trained its vision on the later part of the sixteenth century and into the seventeenth. As a result of all these developments, theology of the Reformation era appears far more complex, varied, dynamic – and arguably more interesting – than ever before. Whether one survey work can do justice to all of that complexity remains to be seen. For the present work, the editors have chosen an approach that seeks to address several of the more significant new developments. For one thing, the timeline has been kept deliberately open, ranging from about 1500 to somewhere in the middle of the seventeenth century, depending on the subject at hand. The resulting questions of periodization are handled by the individual contributors according to their own judgment. In a conscious break with the tradition of confessional histories, most chapters were not separated according to confession, except where doing so was an obvious consequence of the subject – such as in the various chapters on the formation of schools of thought. Instead, individual authors were asked to provide an integrated view of their subject, including material from several major Reformation-era confessions, in their chapters. That required forays into less familiar ground for some, but the results are frequently revelatory. The overall structure of the volume, described in greater detail below, has focused on a description of theology as discourse, rather than as a set of fixed 2

Introduction

ideas produced by individual authors. Without making explicit commitments to various theories of discourse currently in circulation, the present project builds on the simple observation that theology emerges in conversation. As a result, the conditions under which it emerges, the factors that seek to regulate or confine it, the questions and needs that propel it forward, and even the personal beliefs, mentalities, and commitments of its authors are not only describable, they are materially relevant to theological expression. Taking such factors into account creates a richer, broader, and more multidimensional account of theology’s history. Such an approach reflects the complexities of contemporary scholarship and seeks to employ them to open new windows onto the thought-worlds of the Reformation era. Several terms require clarification. After considering a variety of alternatives, the editors have chosen to use “Reformation era” to denote the historical period in question. Taken by itself, the term “Reformation,” either singular or plural, retains unavoidable associations with predominantly Protestant narratives; those are in keeping neither with the consciously ecumenical spirit of the work nor with its material content. The term “early modern,” apart from problematic references to an ill-defined European “modernity,” appeared too vague for use in a work that focuses on Christian theology. Because the Reformation in its various expressions was arguably the most conspicuous and formative event that impacted theological discourse after 1500, it makes sense to keep the word in the title, but broaden its range of reference with the addition of “era.” Even though the Reformation continues to influence theological discourse up to the present day, it is also clear that the second half of the seventeenth century saw a number of important shifts in philosophical method, scientific worldview, religious culture, and theological approach which, taken globally, justify the designation of a distinct and new period, and an end to the era under consideration here. Because the Reformation originated within Christianity’s Latin West and exercised its most direct influence on the theology of those cultures, the present volume does not provide an extensive treatment of Eastern Christianity apart from its impact on Western thinking in ecumenical dialogue. “Theology” in this work refers to Christian discourse about God and God’s relations to creation and humankind. It is viewed as a specialized discourse typically grounded in practicing faith communities and generally exercising a normative and public teaching function, though sometimes also extending into devotional modes. That specialization most often locates theology in institutionalized academic settings such as universities, 3

introduction

academies, and seminaries, or in ecclesial teaching offices, and its most conspicuous practitioners tend to be educated and male. Significant exceptions to that model do occur, and this volume treats several, including the theology expressed in visual arts, that produced by untrained laypeople, missionaries in the field, or by literate women working in alternative genres. The dominant currents of Reformation-era theology, however, run through church and academy. The geographic scope of this volume remains focused heavily on Europe, since that is where most of the era’s Christian theology was produced and where the faith communities that occasioned it were anchored. Especially the Catholic world, however, was expanding dramatically during this very period, and that had important impacts on theological discourse. This volume recognizes the significance of that expansion and includes accounts of theology both inspired by and articulated in Latin America and South and East Asia. As those chapters show, studying such developments is immensely rewarding, and the editors hope that the present work will inspire scholarship of Reformation-era theology in Asia, the Americas, and also Africa, whose multi-faceted impact on the period’s theological discourse has recently begun to receive more attention.1 The volume has three parts. The first, Theology in an Age of Cultural Transformation, provides an account of factors external to theological discourse that influenced its shape, scope, and direction. This section includes chapters on the printing press (Andrew Pettegree); on the culture of Renaissance humanism (Ana Morisi); the use of the Bible (Robert Kolb); on ways of regulating theological discourse (Nelson H. Minnich); on the influence of political agendas (Kenneth G. Appold); education at universities, in religious orders, and in primary schools and catechesis (Paul F. Grendler); on the para-academic theology of uneducated authors (Geoffrey Dipple); on gender (Kenneth G. Appold); and on the social background of theological writers (Charlotte Methuen). The second part, Schools and Emerging Cultures of Theology: Diversity and Conformity within Confessions, describes formative factors internal to theological discourse, such as the emergence of theological schools and cultures, that concentrated minds on an emerging consensus of questions, 1 Examples include Alberto Elli, Storia della Chiesa ortodossa Tawǡhedo d’Etiopia: Chiesa ortodossa dell’Unione, 2 vols. (Milan, 2017); Andreu Martinez d’Alòs-Moner, Envoys of a Human God: The Jesuit Mission to Christian Ethiopia, 1557–1632 [Jesuit Studies: Modernity through the Prism of Jesuit History 2] (Leiden, 2015); and Cécile Fromont, The Art of Conversion: Christian Visual Culture in the Kingdom of the Kongo (Chapel Hill, 2014).

4

Introduction

principles, debates, and thematic commitments. It includes chapters on the School of Salamanca (Juan Belda Plans), the Jesuits (Stefania Tutino), the Universities of Paris (Jean-Robert Armogathe) and Louvain (Wim François), and schools in Latin America (Josep-Ignasi Saranyana), as well as chapters on the theological cultures of Lutheranism (Markus Matthias), the Reformed tradition (Carl R. Trueman), the British Isles (David S. Sytsma), and the Radical and Dissenting Protestants (John D. Roth). The final two chapters trace the impact of Christian ecumenical efforts on theology among Western Christians (Irene Dingel) and between Western and Orthodox Christians (Yury P. Avvakumov). The third and final section, Topics and Disciplines of Theology, treats material topics of theology directly and from an ecumenical perspective. This includes chapters on the method and ethos of theology (Walter Sparn), biblical theology (Euan Cameron), systematic theology (Risto Saarinen), controversialist theology (Jared Wicks), ethics and moral theology (Jennifer Herdt), ascetic-mystical theology (Bernard McGinn), pastoral theology and preaching (Ronald K. Rittgers and Megan Armstrong), missiology and relations to non-Christians in China (Nicolas Standaert), Japan and India (Haruko Nawata Ward), and Latin America (Mariano Delgado), sacramental theology (Theodor Dieter), ecclesiastical ordinances and canon law (Kenneth Pennington), theology and science (Maurice Finocchiaro and Leen Spruit), theology and history (Stefan Bauer), the role of art in theological discourse (Marcia B. Hall), and the theology of politics and warfare (Robert Bireley and Robert Kolb). The volume not only summarizes the current state of scholarship on Reformation-era theology with chapters by leading researchers in the field, it also hopes to encourage future studies modeled on its innovative contextual, expansive, and ecumenical approaches.

5

part one *

THEOLOGY IN AN AGE OF CULTURAL TRANSFORMATION

1

The Printing Press and its Impact on the Production, Proliferation, and Readership of Theological Literature andrew pettegree

In 1521 Martin Luther spent a tense and frustrating year in the Wartburg Castle. Five years previously he had been virtually unknown outside the narrow circle of his colleagues in the German Congregation of the Augustinian Hermits order. Now he was one of the most notorious men in Germany, a condemned heretic and a German cause célèbre. His incarceration in the Wartburg came immediately after his appearance at the German Imperial Diet, an interview forced on a reluctant emperor by the German princes. Now he was a fugitive, an outlaw, living under the protection of his own ruler, the elector of Saxony, who had his own reasons not to surrender Luther for punishment for his heresies. This transformation in Luther’s reputation, this tumultuous fame, was something he owed very largely to print: his unexpected facility as a writer and the power of print to spread his word. One can easily document this phenomenon in the torrent of printed works that erupted in Germany from the first months of 1518.1 The Luther controversy transformed the audience for theological questions; how far, and in what way, these writings were understood by their purchasers is a more difficult question. What one can state without equivocation is that the Reformation transformed the German publishing industry, building a new readership and changing the shape of the book, its physical appearance, and the dynamics of the market. This was also a process in which Luther, no detached intellectual, was heavily involved.

1 Most easily in the Universal Short Title Catalogue (www.ustc.ac.uk/). See also Mark U. Edwards, Printing, Propaganda and Martin Luther (Berkeley,1994). For Luther’s works, Josef Benzing and Helmut Claus, eds., Lutherbibliographie: Verzeichnis der gedruckten Schriften Martin Luthers bis zu dessen Tod, 2 vols. (Baden-Baden, 1966–1994), now updated by the USTC.

9

andrew pettegree

The Publishing Industry before the Reformation The birth of print was a more difficult process than is sometimes imagined. Technological fascination could sustain growth for a time: for two decades after Gutenberg’s breakthrough every prince, bishop, or university sought the prestige of a local press. But as print became more familiar, and the novelty wore off, the problems of actually making money from the new printed books became ever more pressing. Printers had been remarkably conservative in their choice of projects, so Europe’s warehouses were glutted with multiple copies of the same familiar texts. Creating a European distribution network to bring editions of more expensive books to distant markets was complex and difficult: local markets were too small to dispose of hundreds of copies of the same text. Raising the necessary investment capital was beyond the capacities of many of those drawn in to the industry. Bankruptcy was the inevitable result.2 So the print industry contracted. Although at some point before the end of the fifteenth century books were published in over two hundred places, twothirds of this production was concentrated in only twelve cities.3 These were not necessarily the major intellectual centers that had been the main focus of manuscript book culture: half did not even have a university. Rather, they were without exception Europe’s major commercial cities, places used to the rhythms of international trade, the transportation and storage of bulk goods, the raising of investment capital, trading on credit. It was only in such places that large books could be contemplated or accomplished: the lag time between investment and recouping costs was too great for small shops in smaller places. If they survived at all, they did so by printing utilitarian work for the local authorities: the church or the state. This was lucrative work, easily completed, the whole batch often paid for directly by a single client. This concentration on cheap print as the bedrock of the industry, as it turned out, offered a significant pointer to how the industry would be transformed with the Reformation.

Luther The extent of the transformation wrought by Luther can be summed up by two milestones of his extraordinary life. In 1515 a description of the hundred 2 Andrew Pettegree, The Book in the Renaissance (New Haven, 2010); Susan Noakes, “The Development of the Book Market in Late Quattrocento Italy: Printers’ Failures and the Role of the Middleman,” Journal of Mediaeval and Renaissance Studies 11 (1981), 23–55. 3 Venice, Rome, Milan, and Florence; Cologne, Augsburg, Nuremberg, Strasbourg, Basel, and Leipzig; Paris and Lyon.

10

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leading professors in three not particularly distinguished German universities (Wittenberg, Leipzig, and Frankfurt an der Oder) did not mention Wittenberg’s professor of Biblical Theology, Martin Luther, at all.4 At this point he had published nothing. His first published work would not appear until 1516. Yet within five years he would be the most published author in the history of print. By 1521 published editions of his works had outstripped those of every living author, and even of the ancients, staples of the school and university curriculum such as Aristotle and Cicero.5 In the process he had transformed the German printing industry. Explaining this extraordinary phenomenon requires attention to several factors both personal and structural. Certainly one must credit Luther’s extraordinary facility as a writer. Between 1518 and 1521 he penned 102 separate works: a remarkable productivity given the tensions and preoccupations of those years.6 Crucially, in terms of their reception, many were very short. Luther established this pattern early with his first response to public criticism of his teaching on indulgences. The Sermon on Indulgence and Grace is a masterpiece of concision: twenty short paragraphs, each addressing a separate aspect of the doctrine of indulgence.7 The whole text is a mere 1,500 words. It fits perfectly into an eight-page pamphlet; it can be read aloud in ten minutes. Crucially, Luther also made the decision to publish it in German, and reach beyond the academic audience addressed in the 95 Theses. The work was an immediate success, published and republished throughout Germany. This set a pattern. Luther’s first hundred writings were distributed in over eight hundred editions; some ran to twenty or more. Here the particular structure of the German print industry greatly assisted Luther’s cause. Unlike other centers of European print, Germany had no predominant center of publication; no equivalent of Venice in Italy or Paris in France.8 The highly decentralized political structure, with multiple states and jurisdictions, made establishing effective control over output extremely difficult. So from Wittenberg Luther’s works were relayed through reprints

4 Bernd Moeller, “Das Berühmtwerden Luthers,” Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung 15 (1988), 65–92, at 67. 5 The figures come from the USTC, searching 1450–1521. 6 Benzing and Claus, eds., Lutherbibliographie. 7 Accessible in a readable translation in Kurt Aland, Martin Luther’s 95 Theses (St. Louis, 1967). 8 Paris was responsible for 65 percent of all books published in France before 1518, and Venice for 37 percent of books published in the Italian states during the same period: USTC.

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in Leipzig, Augsburg, Basel, and Strasbourg, and hence into the bloodstream of German public life. These initial relay stations for Luther’s message were all major centers of publishing before the Reformation: printers in these places did a highly competent job of making Luther’s works available to a wider public. But the impact of Reformation print spread far beyond these major centers. In the years after 1518 print would be established, or reestablished, in towns across Germany that had previously scarcely been able to sustain a printing press.9 Here the example of Wittenberg itself was far more relevant. Wittenberg had had no press at all before 1502; the city, on Germany’s northeastern frontier, was far removed from all the major centers of commerce and intellectual life. That a major public event could be orchestrated from such a place was one of the most extraordinary aspects of the Reformation. Even after a press was established in Wittenberg, the limited needs of the local university community could be met by a single print shop: it survived, barely, by printing small utilitarian works for the local professoriat, and the routine academic works of disputations and dissertation defenses.10 The types of works promoted by the Reformation were ideal to stimulate the growth of such small, undercapitalized ventures. Because Luther’s works were often very short, an edition of 300 or 500 copies could be turned off the press in under a week. Because they proved extremely popular, a printer could rely on an immediate return, creating the investment capital for future growth. This is precisely what happened in Wittenberg. Within a decade Wittenberg had attracted five new printing houses, operating some twenty presses among them, and now capable of taking on far more substantial projects (such as Luther’s German Bible).11 This pattern, in a more modest way, was repeated over and over again in other towns around Germany. This transformation owed a great deal to Martin Luther – his provision of a constant stream of small digestible works, his intuitive understanding of the needs of the new industry. That a friar in his mid-thirties could transform himself into a writer of such power and understanding of the popular voice Christoph Reske, Die Buchdrucker des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts im deutschen Sprachgebiet: Auf der Grundlage des gleichnamigen Werkes von Josef Benzing (Wiesbaden, 2007). 10 Maria Grossmann, Wittenberger Drucke 1502–1517: Ein bibliographischer Beitrag zur Geschichte des Humanismus in Deutschland (Vienna, 1971); Maria Grossmann, Humanism in Wittenberg, 1485–1517 (Nieuwkoop, 1975). 11 For these developments see Andrew Pettegree, Brand Luther: 1517, Printing and the Reformation (New York, 2015); Heimo Reinitzer, Biblia deutsch: Luthers Bibelübersetzung und ihre Tradition (Hamburg, 1983). 9

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was already remarkable. Luther’s understanding of the dynamics of the printing process was equally profound, and just as important. It is not always realized how directly Luther intervened to shape the local press. When it became clear that the one press in Wittenberg, run by the stolid, unimaginative Johann Rhau-Grunenberg, simply could not cope with the demand for Luther’s work, Luther made himself personally responsible for arranging that a more experienced printer should be lured from the more established publishing center of Leipzig to open a shop in Wittenberg.12 This new injection of capital and expertise was one crucial prerequisite for the transformation of the appearance of Luther’s works; the other was the engagement of the printer/entrepreneur Lucas Cranach, whose woodcut title-page designs gave Wittenberg imprints a new poise as well as a clearly distinguishable look.13 Ironically, the full extent of Luther’s day-to-day involvement in the printing industry only becomes clear when he was perforce absent, incarcerated in the Wartburg. Luther filled his days with writing; but he also sent back to Wittenberg a stream of detailed instructions to the printers, often harshly critical of their efforts.14 The printers, meanwhile, sent their proof sheets for his scrutiny and approval. It is a remarkable demonstration of the extent to which successful authors wrote always with the capacities, rhythms, and work flow of the print shop in mind. This was crucial to the early success of the Reformation.

Reception What did people make of this vast torrent of print? This of course is a much more difficult question. The only people who record their reactions to Luther tend to be among the most educated – fellow clerics or humanist intellectuals – rather than the new readers whose purchases were transforming the book market. These highly literate clerical readers were, nevertheless, of the utmost importance to the Reformation. Only a small proportion of the German population would ever meet Luther, even on his journeys across Germany between 1518 and 1521. For the movement to take root 12

The story is told in Pettegree, Brand Luther. See Luther to Spalatin, May 8, 1518, WA.B 1, 381–384. 13 Tilman Falk, “Cranach-Buchgraphik der Reformationszeit,” in Dieter Koepplin and Tilman Falk, Lukas Cranach, 2 vols. (Basel, 1974), I, 307–412; Jutta Strehle, ed., Cranach im Detail: Buchschmuck Lucas Cranachs des Älteren und seiner Werkstatt (Wittenberg, 1994). A selection of the book title-pages are also illustrated in Friedrich W. H. Hollstein, German Engravings: Etchings and Woodcuts, ca. 1400–1700 (Amsterdam, 1954–), VI, 163–175. 14 See, for instance, Luther to Spalatin, 15 August 1521, WA.B 2, 379–381; Letters, I, 292–293.

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required the commitment of fellow pastors in cities such as Strasbourg and Augsburg, men who read Luther and were persuaded. Here Luther’s early Latin explorations of his developing theology were of the utmost importance. Bernd Moeller attributes to their dissemination the remarkable doctrinal coherence of the early Reformation preaching. In time, and with the accession to the movement of less educated or more self-willed acolytes, this would break down, but it clearly played a crucial role in spreading the gospel message beyond Saxony.15 So for many of Germany’s citizens the first they might know of the Reformation might be when a respected local preacher used his own pulpit to proclaim fealty to Luther’s teachings, or echo his criticisms of the corruptions of the church. This was a remarkable event, and would have inspired discussion and controversy. If town councils intervened to inhibit dissident preachers, then congregations had to take sides. It was at this point that they might reach for some of the distinctive new pamphlets turning up on the booksellers’ stalls. What did they understand of what they read there? Here we do have some impressive indirect evidence, not least in the reports of papal loyalists who observed with incredulity this sudden enthusiasm for the printed word. Among the most perceptive was the papal legate Girolamo Aleandro, who immediately grasped the importance both of the sudden shift in public mood and of the willingness of the laity to engage with what had only recently become matters for public debate. He also recognized how important was the role of print in this process. One can see from Aleandro’s reports what people were saying in the hearing of the incredulous legate. They believed that Luther was a holy man (here the circulation of the early portraits by Cranach, of Luther as a simple Augustinian friar, made a powerful impact). In these years the least polemical of Luther’s works, offering simple guidance on living the Christian life, sold particularly well. They believed that Luther should not be condemned unheard. They were inclined to take his side in the quarrel with the pope, an alien, foreign power. Here Luther’s cause blended helpfully with a wellestablished strain of nationalist resentment of Italian domination of the German Church, a context in which the draining of money from the Bernd Moeller, “What was Preached in German Towns in the Early Reformation?,” in C. Scott Dixon, ed., The German Reformation: The Essential Readings (Oxford, 1999), 33–52. For the contrary views see Susan C. Karant-Nunn, “What was Preached in German Cities in the Early Years of the Reformation? Wildwuchs Versus Lutheran Unity,” in Andrew Pettegree, ed., The Reformation: Critical Concepts in Historical Studies, 4 vols. (London, 2004), I, 41–53.

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German economy through the sale of indulgences for St. Peter’s in Rome was very relevant. So when Aleandro heard cries of “death to the Roman Curia” he was witnessing a powerful confluence of different strands of feeling.16 People were also increasingly attracted to a new slogan, Reines Evangelium, “the pure gospel.” This too bore a great deal of rather diverse ideological freight. At one level it encapsulated Luther’s core doctrine of Sola Scriptura; at another it expressed lay frustrations at the expense of works of theology, and the multiple additional charges which hard-pressed clerics insisted on for performing crucial sacramental services (such as baptisms and burials).17 And who could be against the pure gospel? This malleable slogan thus provided the perfect cover for town councils desperate to preserve order in the face of increasing evangelical agitation, without openly defying the emperor. The order that henceforth only the pure gospel should be preached was at one level unexceptional, and at another it signaled a clear partiality for the evangelical party. Finally, Germany’s citizens were impressed by the pamphlets themselves: their accessibility, affordability, and sheer profusion. It was no doubt flattering to be invited to debate as a participant in abstruse theological mysteries previously discussed only by a closed clerical caste. A number of pamphlets dramatized this extraordinary emancipation by placing on their covers a woodcut of an earnest citizen in lively conversation with a priest. At a time when established verities were being challenged in a fundamental way, when the leaders of society were falling into contentious confusion, the sheer profusion of the pamphlets told its own story. They conveyed a sense of unstoppable momentum, the legitimacy of an apparent majority.18 So when the church hierarchy ordered that Luther’s books be burned, citizens often intervened to interrupt the ceremony. Printers became increasingly reluctant to print Luther’s opponents. In early modern societies, opinion forming was often public and communal. The multitude of pamphlets offered a powerful proxy for a plurality of voices. 16 Paul Kalkoff, ed., Die Depeschen des Nuntius Aleander von Wormser Reichstage 1521 (Halle, 1897), 166. There are extended translations in Luther’s Correspondence and other Contemporary Letters, ed. Preserved Smith and Charles M. Jacobs, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1913–1918). 17 Heinrich Richard Schmidt, Reichstädte, Reich und Reformation (Stuttgart, 1986); Thomas A. Brady, “The Reformation of the Common Man, 1521–1524,” in Dixon, ed., German Reformation, 91–132; Robert W. Scribner, “Anticlericalism and the German Reformation,” in Robert W. Scribner, Popular Culture and Popular Movements in Reformation Germany (London, 1987). 18 Andrew Pettegree, Reformation and the Culture of Persuasion (Cambridge, 2005), 156–184.

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In many respects, therefore, the fact of the pamphlets’ existence was as important as their precise contents. Those who bought them had many motives: curiosity, excitement, the wish to be part of a major public event. For many the purchase of a pamphlet (or many pamphlets) would be the first time they had owned a book in their own vernacular tongue. It could be the badge of identity for a decision already made, to follow the local evangelical preacher or adhere to Luther. Here the printers of the Reformation played their part, by giving the Reformation Flugschriften a distinctive look that made them instantly recognizable on the booksellers’ stalls. This brand identity owed a great deal to Lucas Cranach, whose beautifully designed title-pages dressed Luther’s words in an elegant livery that both did justice to the potency of his message and drew all his writings into a coherent whole. This was a major contribution to the success of Reformation literature as a commercial entity, and its influence on the shape of the book market was enduring.

Church Building In Germany the fires of controversy gradually dimmed. The period of intense pamphleteering was quite short, concentrated into the decade between 1518 and 1530, although exceptional events, such as the attempt to impose the Augsburg Interim in 1548, could stimulate a new flurry of publications.19 In the main, however, the Reformation moved into a new phase, one of consolidation and church building. Here, again, printing would play a crucial role. Although the Luther controversies had engaged an unusually large number of Germany’s citizens in public debate, it was still the case that many would find themselves in evangelical territories without any positive action on their own part. This was particularly the case in the German princely states, converted to Protestantism by direction of the ruler. Even in the cities, where parishioners had played an active role in the corporate decision to adhere to evangelical teaching, it was still a considerable extra step to settle on the appropriate form for the new worship service, and ensure that the new theological principles were taught to the population as a whole. This, of course, provided massive work for the printers. Luther and his colleagues swiftly designed a new church order for Electoral Saxony, but 19 Nathan Rein, The Chancery of God: Protestant Print, Polemic and Propaganda against the Empire, Magdeburg 1546–1551 (Aldershot, 2008).

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they were also frequently consulted by other jurisdictions looking to introduce an evangelical order. These orders were printed and circulated. The church orders made provision for an order of worship that placed emphasis on the preaching of the word, but also on scriptural instruction and the provision of schools. Here Luther’s instinct was far from prescriptive. Although Luther’s two catechisms of 1529 were immensely successful and published in repeated editions across Germany, he positively encouraged variety in the writing of catechismal literature.20 This set a pattern for the wider Protestant movement, where the writing (and publishing) of catechisms would be one of the most distinctive features of the new emergent churches. So too was the singing of hymns. Luther, again, led the way. A talented amateur musician, Luther immediately seized the importance of lively congregational involvement in the worship service. His own compositions were some of the most popular and enduring of the hymns of the new Lutheran churches. These, too, provided an enormous quantity of work for the printers.21 Both the catechism and hymnbooks were intended for use. They tended to be heavily thumbed and needed to be replaced on a regular basis. Sometimes whole editions are known only from a single surviving copy, or have disappeared altogether. But the quantity of these essential building blocks of the new congregational life was quite immense. In all of this publication activity, the Bible played a special role. Luther began his work on a new Bible translation during his last months in the Wartburg, and a first draft of a complete translation of the New Testament was accomplished by the time he returned to Wittenberg. Despite this extraordinary burst of solitary creative activity, Luther always envisaged this as a collective enterprise. On his return to Wittenberg he placed his work in the hands of his colleagues for review, and began clearing space on the Wittenberg presses. For print shops that had until recently struggled with the flow of relatively modestly sized theological works, this was a task of a different order. It was necessary to call on all available resources: the technical skill of Melchior Lotter, the organizational flair of Lucas Cranach, along with his workshop (the source of the woodcut illustrations that were

20 Timothy J. Wengert, “Wittenberg’s Earliest Catechism,” Lutheran Quarterly, NS, 7 (1993), 247–260; Benzing and Claus, eds., Lutherbibliographie, 2548–2588 (Large Catechism), 2589–2666 (Small Catechism); Luther’s Small Catechism (St. Louis, 2005). 21 Christopher Boyd Brown, Singing the Gospel: Lutheran Hymns and the Success of the Reformation (Cambridge, MA, 2005); Philipp Wackernagel, Das deutsche Kirchenlied von der ältesten Zeit bis zu Anfang des XVII. Jahrhunderts, 5 vols. (Leipzig, 1864–1867; repr. Hildesheim, 1990).

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such a striking feature of this project), his colleague and partner the financier Christian Döring. The New Testament was ready for sale in September 1522 in a large edition of 3,000 copies. It sold out immediately, as did a second large edition published three months later. These were the first of an astonishing sequence of editions of the scriptural canon, 445 in Luther’s lifetime alone.22 This is all the more remarkable, since it would be another twelve years until the full translation of the Wittenberg Bible was available.23 After his rapid beginning, Luther and his colleagues were frequently side-tracked by other preoccupations; in consequence, the translation of the Old Testament books proceeded fitfully. Frustrating as this was for Luther, it suited the printing industry well. For print shops newly established, or expanding from small beginnings, this type of serial publication worked far better than the requirement to underwrite the publication of so substantial a text in one volume. By the time the whole text was finally ready in 1534, Wittenberg had five well-established print houses, but it was still a major undertaking for the largest of the five, that of Hans Lufft, to take on a task of this magnitude. Lufft worked on several presses simultaneously to produce his magnificent edition, working with a consortium of three wealthy businessmen who provided the investment capital and coordinated the distribution. It was an extraordinary feat of business management, as well as a magnificent work of scholarship.

Diffusion The extraordinary fusion of media and message that allowed the rapid diffusion of Luther’s teaching was to a large extent peculiar to Germany. Nowhere else in Europe exhibited the same combination of commercial energy and diffuse political control that proved such a happy breeding ground for the pamphlet fury of the Reformation’s first years. Elsewhere, and particularly after Luther’s formal condemnation, barriers to the distribution of Luther’s message were swiftly erected, most crucially in France and the Netherlands. From England, meanwhile, came some of the most effective (and widely circulated) condemnations of Luther.24 The promotion of the evangelical teachings in these lands required a different strategy, most 22

Reinitzer, Biblia deutsch, 116–127. Martin Brecht, Martin Luther: Shaping and Defining the Reformation (Minneapolis, 1990); Martin Brecht, The Preservation of the Church (Minneapolis, 1993), 95–113. 24 Richard Rex, “The English Campaign against Luther in the 1520s,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, fifth series, 39 (1989), 85–106. 23

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critically the establishment of evangelical printing in safe places outside their jurisdiction. For France, most famously, this took place in Geneva, where John Calvin was, from 1541, establishing a church that provided a model for a new wave of evangelical expansion in western Europe. In this print would play a powerful role, distributed not openly as in Germany, but in defiance of the state power. This effort, coordinated from Geneva, had a profound impact on France. It also reenergized an industry that had until Calvin’s arrival been largely moribund in the city.25 In this respect the experience of Geneva paralleled that of Wittenberg. Calvin’s example attracted to Geneva several influential members of the Parisian print fraternity, bringing not only expertise but working capital. As with Luther in Wittenberg, the Reformer’s own works provided the cornerstone of the business; though Calvin, as stern a critic of shoddy workmanship as Luther had been, continued to send his Latin commentaries to Strasbourg for publication until he was convinced that the local industry could handle them.26 As the center of Calvin’s new movement, Geneva enjoyed a remarkable economic renaissance, with publishing, along with the education of the many students who flocked to the city to sit at Calvin’s feet, at its core. For the Reformation in the Netherlands, the role of Geneva was echoed in a minor key by Emden, where an entirely new industry was established to smuggle back to Antwerp the instructional texts necessary for the incipient churches.27 Antwerp also played a similar role for England in the years under Henry VIII, when Protestant works could not be published in England. All national printing cultures had their own particular characteristics, but none was more centralized and controlled than England, where the entire print trade was concentrated into a few hundred square meters in London.28 Existing as they did directly under the noses of the state authorities, and largely dependent on official contracts for their work, London printers were very unlikely to risk printing disapproved works. But the appetite was there, as became immediately clear on the death of Henry VIII and the establishment of a regime more friendly to reform. The result was an extraordinary outpouring of Protestant works, and a growth of religious publishing only

25

Jean-François Gilmont, John Calvin and the Printed Book (Kirksville, 2005). Jean-François Gilmont, Bibliotheca Calviniana. Les oeuvres de Jean Calvin publiées au XVIe siècle, volume I: Écrits théologiques, littéraires et juridiques 1532–1554 (Geneva, 1991). 27 Andrew Pettegree, Emden and the Dutch Revolt: Exile and the Development of Reformed Protestantism (Oxford, 1992). 28 Peter W. M. Blayney, The Stationers’ Company and the Printers of London, 1501–1557, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 2013). 26

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partly checked by the restoration of Catholicism under Mary. The long reign of Elizabeth, and the definitive planting of a Protestant church in England, allowed for the creation of a rich and diverse market for a literature of religious devotion and instruction.29 The industry remained, by European standards, small. The whole London book world never grew beyond that of a single large printing city in continental Europe. The range of output was also unusually narrow, largely because English readers continued to depend on books imported from the Continent for works in Latin. But precisely for this reason religious publishing loomed especially large in the business of English printers, who depended to an unusual degree on the sale of catechisms, published sermons, and translated works of the major continental authors. English Protestantism became a religion of the word, but a word mediated to a large degree through print. These were the best-sellers of the day, and English divines became the nation’s most successful authors. It was an extraordinary achievement for a nation that had, until this point, languished very much on the outer margins of the European culture of print. bibliography Blayney, Peter W. M. The Stationers’ Company and the Printers of London, 1501–1557, 2 vols. Cambridge, 2013. Brown, Christopher Boyd. Singing the Gospel: Lutheran Hymns and the Success of the Reformation. Cambridge, MA, 2005. Edwards, Mark U. Printing, Propaganda and Martin Luther. Berkeley, 1994. Gaskell, Philip. A New Introduction to Bibliography. Oxford, 1972. Gilmont, Jean-François. John Calvin and the Printed Book. Kirksville, 2005. Green, Ian. The Christian ABC: Catechisms and Catechizing in England, c. 1530–1740. Oxford, 1996. Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England. Oxford, 2000. Junghans, Helmar. Wittenberg als Lutherstadt. Berlin, 1982. Kapr, Albert. Johann Gutenberg: The Man and his Invention. Aldershot, 1996. Pettegree, Andrew. The Book in the Renaissance. New Haven, 2010. Brand Luther: 1517, Printing and the Reformation. New York, 2015. Rein, Nathan. The Chancery of God: Protestant Print, Polemic and Propaganda against the Empire, Magdeburg 1546–1551. Aldershot, 2008. Reinitzer, Heimo. Biblia deutsch: Luthers Bibelübersetzung und ihre Tradition. Hamburg, 1983.

29 Ian Green, The Christian ABC: Catechisms and Catechizing in England, c. 1530–1740 (Oxford, 1996); Ian Green, Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2000).

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Humanism and Theology anna morisi

Humanism represented a far-reaching endeavor. It attempted to reinterpret reality in a radical manner and to renew all forms of knowledge. It thus caused a profound break with the contemporary intellectual landscape; but it also established a new relationship with the past and brought to completion previously unresolved questions. It highlighted the individual liberty of humans in the face of a worldview that put God at the center; against the misery of the human condition it defended the dignity of humankind and proposed a new relationship between earth and heaven. But all of this came into being over a long and tortuous process, during a period of much unrest and profound religious uneasiness that permeated all of society and often expressed itself in an exasperated prophetism. Francesco Petrarch had already recognized these novel needs and sensibilities: he criticized the intellectualism of the theologians and proposed a new religious language, centered on his devotion to St. Augustine (the Augustine who had written the Confessions, a book that convinced Petrarch of the need for interiorizing ethical and relgious experiences and for introspection and self-knowledge). Humanistic theology had its roots in the fourteenth century, in the conflict between the academic communities that pitted the students of the Humanae litterae against the masters of Scholasticism who, instead of studying the language, used the logical-syllogistic method and privileged the format of the academic quaestio as the way to arrive at precise definitions. At the turn of the century, however, certain theologians recognized the inadequacy of the traditional Scholastic language and method, although they did not question the intimate connection between reason and faith. Lorenzo Valla was the humanist who has left the most profound and lasting impression on the history of theological thought, and who pioneered the tools for its renewal. He was neither a philosopher nor a theologian; he was a philologist, and philology allowed him to focus on the original and historical significance of words, in order to recover with precision the 21

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original meaning of expressions and, consequently, achieve a greater clarity of thought. In his major works, the Elegantiae1 and the Dialectica,2 he also scrutinized closely the theological language of the schools, which he thought was too far removed from the ancient germanus theologandi modus of the Fathers. Thus, he demonstrated how the improper use of some terms could mar the whole argument.3 Valla said that one cannot attribute a transcendent significance to words such as aliquid (something) or essentia (essence), adding ens (a being) is a neutral substantive term that signifies simply a res (a thing), and quiditas nihil est (is nothing).4 By depriving these words of their ontological value and decodifying the language of the schools, Valla demonstrated the falsity of the meanings placed on the words. He also criticized the Aristotelian logico-metaphysical vocabulary, even though he recognized this vocabulary was an attempt to scrutinize the mysteries of God by way of reason, to penetrate beyond real things into a sphere to which the human mind does not have access. In his dialogue on free will, aimed at confronting an authentically theological problem, he observed: “It seems to me that the theologians do not have a good opinion of our religion if they hold that it ought to be defended by philosophy.” And after a long discussion, he claimed that he wished not to be asked to investigate supernal things. It is better to look at more humble things, because thus one can see better the magnificence of the things of God: “There are problems that I do not intend to investigate, lest I be blinded by the light of God’s majesty while trying to look directly into it.”5 Valla did not wish to act as a theologian, but still managed to get to the heart of religious sentiment and language by means of his philological analyses, conducted with scientific lucidity and with that spirit of liberty that is the fundamental characteristic of humanism. With regard to the word persona, he noted that in Latin it signified simply a quality, not a substance, although one could say that in God there is a triple quality: “Such qualities exist in God and I say these are persons”6 (many years later the anti-Trinitarians would take inspiration from these observations).

1 Lorenzo Valla, Elegantiae latinae linguae, in Laurentius Valla, Opera (Basel, 1540; repr. Turin, 1962). 2 Lorenzo Valla, Repastinatio dialectice et philosophie, ed. Gianni Zippel, 2 vols. (Padua, 1982). 3 Salvatore I. Camporeale, “Lorenzo Valla. Adnotationes in Novum Testamentum ed Encomion S. Thomae. Alle origini della ‘teologia umanistica’ nel primo ‘400,” Memorie Domenicane 31 (2000), 71–84. 4 Valla, Repastinatio, II, 3, pp. 370–373: tales qualitates statuo in Deo et has dico esse personas. 5 Lorenzo Valla, De libero arbitrio, in Opera, 999, 1009–1010. 6 Valla, Elegantiae latinae linguae, VI, 34, in Opera, 215–216.

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Moreover, Valla claimed that the word fides (faith) in the Vulgate version of the Bible does not render precisely the significance of the Greek original: fides means document, guarantee, proof, while πίστις signifies rather persuasio (persuasion), if not quite credulitas (credulity).7 Valla leaves the reader the choice, and others would more clearly show the consequences of his discussion, interpreting this word not in the most usual way, as dogmatic certitude, given that, as Valla noted, the demonstration, the proof, does not always persuade. To Pope Nicholas V Valla had offered a combination of stylistic and grammatical annotations on the New Testament;8 in addition, he wrote other observations that Erasmus rediscovered and published in 1505 with the title Annotationes in Novum Testamentum.9 These are observations and corrections of individual words of the Latin text of the Vulgate that Valla did not wish to attribute to Jerome, but rather to an unidentified, uncultured interpreter. They amount to an analysis of the variants present in various codices and a reflection on the problems of translation: thus, this was a work far from the medieval Correctoria Bibliae (Corrections of the Bible) and instead represented a true beginning of biblical philology. Every linguistic variation is an interpretation, and the choice of individual words allows the reader to understand the sensibility, if not the actual doctrine, of the translator. As Erasmus would say after Valla, there is no theology without philology. The premises proposed by Valla for a new language and a new method in theology were brought to fruition in the following century, but other thinkers interpreted the rapport between religious reflection and philosophy differently. Marsilio Ficino, who had received an Aristotelian education and then became an ardent Platonist, did not doubt that only a solid philosophical basis could validate the reality and rationality of the faith. His critique, however, was not aimed at the theologians, but at the commentators on Aristotle (especially the Averroists), who in their discussions on the intellect always ended up denying the immortality of the soul. Ficino was convinced that an impiety proposed by learned men could not be defeated by a pious and simple preaching; he thought that something more authoritative was needed, a kind of religion that could be called philosophical but that was capable of defeating the philosophers.10 The desire to separate the study of philosophy from religion was an error, he affirmed: it would be like

7 8 9 10

Valla, Elegantiae latinae linguae, V, 30, in Opera, 172. Lorenzo Valla, Collatio Novi Testamenti, ed. Alessandro Perosa (Florence, 1970). Valla, Opera, 801–895. Preface to Plotinus in Marsilius Ficinus, Opera (Basel, 1576; repr. Turin, 1983), 1537.

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separating the love of knowledge or the capacity to understand from a rightly regulated will.11 For Ficino the union of philosophy and theology is found in the teaching of the “divine” Plato, who had influenced the great Christian theologians, beginning with Augustine. In fact, as Plato had argued, Ficino claimed that the two disciplines are the wings that sustain the mind in its journey to attain knowledge and the first cause, the intellect, and the will; only thus can the soul discover in itself the image of Him who created it. In a vision that came close to pantheism, the Florentine philosopher asked himself: what else are creatures than the thoughts of God, quasi-words uttered by Him?12 In the ascent toward the highest Good, then, the intellect needs the will, and this will is love.13 In this way Ficino proposed a new apologetic founded on the supreme value of love, in a circle of love in which God is the beginning and end, and he offered a philosophical and theological foundation for the humanistic theme of the dignity of humankind. The Augustinian Egidio Antonini da Viterbo often referred to Ficino’s work, which Egidio interpreted prophetically as a new message containing the signs of an imminent golden age.14 His commentary on the Libri Sententiarum, re-read in a Platonic key, shows the influence of the Florentine philosopher-theologian.15 Like Ficino, Egidio proposed reconciling the Hebrew-Christian tradition with the pagan heritage, and like Giovanni Pico della Mirandola he hoped for concord between Plato and Aristotle, between Christian theology and rabbinic exegesis. A poet and theologian, his work imparts to ancient mythology the same function that it had in Plato. Mythology, for Egidio, is a part of a primitive theology (prisca theologia) that in this polyphony of images has found the opportunity to express richness. Myth is also the poetic theology of God (theologia poetica de Dio) of which Petrarch had spoken.16 As Dionysius had already said, the divine light cannot reach us unless clothed by poetic veils.17 Like Ficino, Egidio affirmed that within the limits of the human capacity one can reach God with the mind and 11

Marsilius Ficinus, Theologia Platonica, Prohemium, in Raymond Marcel, ed., Théologie Platonicienne de l’immortalité des âmes, 3 vols. (Paris, 1964–1970), I, 35. 12 Marsilius Ficinus, De christiana religione, in Opera, 22 (quid enim aliud creaturae sunt, quam cogitationum Dei quasi quaedam voces extra prolatae?). 13 Marsilius Ficinus, Commentarium in Convivium Platonis de amore, volume IV, 6, ed. Raymond Marcel (Paris, 1956), 176. 14 Paul O. Kristeller, Supplementum Ficinianum, 2 vols. (Florence, 1937), II, 315–316. 15 Giles of Viterbo, The Commentary on the Sentences of Petrus Lombardus, ed. Daniel Nodes (Leiden and Boston, 2010). 16 Petrarch, Epistolae familiaris, ed. Vittorio Rossi and Umberto Bosco, 4 vols. [Edizione Nazionale 10–13] (Florence, 1933–1942), X, 2. 17 Pseudo-Dionysius, Coelestis hierarchia, 1, 733b: nisi poeticis velaminibus circumductum.

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the will, and by way of contemplation and love, because only love is able to overcome the limitations of human intellect; one who follows only the intellect does not find happiness, but follows the shadows without the light. Egidio’s suggestions may have inspired the iconographic program that Raphael realized in the Stanza della Segnatura, where the School of Athens and then The Dispute follow the Parnassus.18 The suggestions of Florentine Neoplatonism influenced English and French humanists in the circle of Symphorien Champier. They are also evident in the work of Ulrich Zwingli, and especially in that of Michael Servetus. However, the Neoplatonists’ project to unite theology and philosophy was opposed by an old friend of Ficino, Pico, and Egidio: Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples. Lefèvre d’Étaples, “the first Christian humanist,”19 was educated in France, where Italian humanism had found supporters among the intellectuals who were conversant with both the monastic tradition and Petrarch. It was precisely this cultural milieu that brought these intellectuals to express a religiosity that included sentiments and devotion. Lefèvre was certainly a humanist, given his philological rigor, his intellectual curiosity, and the multiplicity of his philosophical, mathematical, musical, and astronomical interests that then coalesced into his religious reflections. He visited Italy many times: he shared with Ermolao Barbaro an interest for the authentic works of Aristotle, while from Pico he received as a gift the manuscript of the Metaphysica translated by John Bessarion. Since he was an Aristotelian, the encounter with the Neoplatonic and Hermetic culture was a new experience that led him to publish in 1494, and more fully in 1505, Hermetic works translated by Ficino. He recommended reading them, saying that they help contemplation, and contemplation allows us to reach God at full speed.20 Despite all this, his guide remained Aristotle, the philosopher who by divine aid (divino beneficio) had given humankind certain and clear rules for a correct and happy life. This was different from what Aristotle’s modern interpreters did: “understand metaphysics divinely.”21 In 1499, without sharing his opinion on the identity of the author, he gave to the printer Pseudo-Dionysius’s Theologia vivificans: Cibus solidus (Vivifying Theology: Solid Food). It is 18 Heinrich Pfeiffer, Zur Ikonographie von Raphaels Disputa: Egidio da Viterbo und die christlichplatonische Konzeption der Stanza della Segnatura (Rome, 1975). 19 Émile Amann, in Dictionnaire de Théologie catholique, IX (1926), col. 132. 20 Eugene F. Rice, ed., Prefatory Epistles of Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples and Related Texts (New York and London, 1972), 133–134. 21 Jacques Lefèvre, Prologus in Paraphrasin librorum physicorum Aristotelis (Paris, 1492). (See Rice, ed., Prefatory Epistles, 4–7, at 5: intellegunt et metaphysica divine.)

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necessary, he said, to go back to the roots of the Christian experience, to the Gospels, to the works of the apostles and of those like Dionysius who lived soon after them. It is a mistake to consider Dionysius a Neoplatonist – he is something much more sublime; he owed no debt to the philosophers, and Nicholas of Cusa and even Ficino, together with many others, were mistaken. The ancients, despite being wise, still did not possess the language for speaking about divine things.22 In order to understand this language fully, Lefèvre approached the sources with the tools of philology: in 1509 he published the Quincuplex Psalterium, followed in 1512 by the epistles of Paul. In these works he emended the text of the Vulgate, compared it to that of the original Greek, and proposed a new translation that anticipated what Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam would later produce. Like Erasmus, Lefèvre also defended his choices of translation, maintaining that such a revision was not an affront to Jerome, the saint of the humanists, because the biblical citations contained in the works of this Father did not agree with the Vulgate attributed to him by tradition. He was a careful philologist, but philology was for him only a tool for a better understanding of the text of which God Himself was the author. With Scripture, he said, God has made the gift of His word, and whoever understands that it is a divine gift will be able to make progress, not by one’s own merit but by grace, because such progress is the fruit of a work that is beyond human ability. But what kind of reading is necessary in order to make such progress? Not the traditional way of the four senses that binds the reader to a literal interpretation; the true interpretation is both literal and spiritual, the interpretation of Christ. On this point, Lefèvre was in all aspects in harmony with Erasmus, with Martin Luther, and with the theologians who, in a spiritual reading, find the liberty of the spirit, albeit in different perspectives. When Guillaume Briçonnet became bishop of Meaux he wanted Lefèvre with him, and thus began an extraordinary pastoral experience which in 1522 resulted in the Commentarii initiatorii in quatuor Evangelia, and in the following year a French translation of the whole Bible. In these works, the philological approach seems to be a secondary concern, making room for the pastoral spirit. Such pastoral spirit is uniquely evangelical, insofar as it purported to pave the way for understanding the Scripture. To find Christ beyond the words, Lefèvre warned, it is necessary to limit the pressures of the intellect (intelligentia); there must be unconditional faith, repeatedly defined as credulity (credulitas), in following

22

Rice, ed., Prefatory Epistles, 60.

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the significance that the word had acquired in the works of the Fathers. One must approach the gospel with love. Some people wish to understand in order to believe, but Christ has commanded us to believe, not to understand, and whoever believes only what he knows does not believe sufficiently and well.23 Lefèvre never attained academic degrees in theology and never wrote treatises of theology; his thinking can be found in the prefaces of editions and in the notes to his commentaries; his attention to biblical exegesis did not lead him to dispute with the theology of the schools, nor did it allow him to dodge the more anguished questions of his time: If you should think that your works are able to save you, yes, you might carry the cross but you would not follow Christ but yourself, because you think that your salvation consists in those works. Oh wretched man. Salvation does not consist in your works, but in those of Christ; it is not your cross but that of Christ that will save you.24

These words recall those of Luther, but the premises are different and they are not inscribed in a theological system. The humanist Lefèvre did not emphasize original sin and did not deny the capacity of humanity to act justly: “Neither faith nor works justify, but they prepare for justification, given that God alone justifies . . . Works then have the function of preparing and of cleansing the way; faith is the end of the journey, a quasi-access to the divine entrance.”25 Like Erasmus, Lefèvre knew that theological work cannot be sustained without a correct reading of Scripture, but the perspectives of the two scholars were profoundly different, and there was no shortage of contrast and incomprehension between them. The most significant conflict occurred about a passage in the Epistle to the Hebrews (2:7), referring to Jesus, that corresponded to Psalm 8:6: Lefèvre translated it “you have made him little less than God” (minuisti eum paulominus a Deo); Erasmus had favored the more common “you have made him little less than the angels” (minuisti eum paulominus ab angelis).26 Once we realize that the original Hebrew allowed for both versions, we can see that the problem is no longer 23 Ibid., 438: Sed age cum dominuis iubeat, ut dictum est, evangelio credere, non autem intelligere, aspirandumne erit ad ipsum intelligendum? Quidni? Sed ita tamen, ut credulitas priores partes obtineat, intelligentia posteriores, nam qui non credit nisi quod intelligit nondum bene ac sufficienter credit. 24 Lefèvre, Commentarius in Evangelium Matthaei, 11, § 103, in Commentarii Initiatorii in Quatuor Evangelia (Basel, 1523). 25 Lefèvre, Commentarius in Epistolam ad Romanos, 3. 26 Jacques Lefèvre, Apologia ad Iacobum Fabrum Stapulensem, in Opera omnia Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami, ed. Andrea W. Steenbeek (Amsterdam, New York, Oxford, and Tokyo, 1996) (henceforth ASD), IX, 3; Helmut Feld, “Der humanistische Streit um Hebraer 2:7 (Psalm 8:6),” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 61 (1970), 5–33.

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philological, but rather we are seeing two contrasting theologies, two Christologies; and the exchange that followed was rather lively. Lefèvre’s choice of translation was dictated by a scrupulous piety (pietas), a respect for the dignity of the Son of God which kept him from placing Him below other creatures, but not below the Father. The principle of convenience and harmony should always guide one in the reading of the sacred text, he believed. Erasmus, always attentive to the human aspect of Christ and to all aspects that made Him closer and more comprehensible to men, believed that in his version Lefèvre weakened the paradox of faith, attenuated the reality of the incarnation, and thus slipped into a Docetistic position. It was not the first time that Erasmus found himself engaged in Christological discussion; years earlier he had had an exchange with John Colet over the theme of the afflictions and anguish of Jesus in the last hours of His life.27 Colet, following the interpretation of Jerome, held that Christ had lamented the fate of His people, the Hebrews, who were about to send Him to death. Erasmus responded that in that passage there is no mention of the Hebrews, and a correct philological and historical interpretation does not allow the introduction of extraneous elements. The resulting meaning is perfectly clear if one keeps in mind that the human nature of Jesus was that of every person, with all its fragility, and precisely for that reason the Redeemer felt afflicted at the thought of death, just as He suffered from a want of food and sleep. In that moment of anguish His will to sacrifice Himself did not become less, but entered into opposition with the natural inclination; His love for humanity was not diminished, but became even greater. Colet, Lefèvre, and Erasmus were all humanists, but their ways of understanding the Christological problem was different, just as were their anthropological and, in consequence, soteriological positions. In these discussions, conducted above all with references to other passages in Scripture, the traditional procedure of theologians was abandoned: “this is not my arena” (harena mea non est), said Erasmus. He explained what his “arena” was in a work, the Ratio seu methodus perveniendi ad veram theologiam, published in 1518 after significant revisions. This was not a theological summary (summa), but a grammatical, stylistic, and rhetorical guide to the reading of Scripture. Erasmus led the reader, via a long and laborious journey, to confront the difficulties of the text, to appreciate the nuances of the language, to read that which is given figuratively. Erasmus as a humanist 27 Erasmus, Disputatiuncula de tedio pavore tristicia Iesu, ed. André Godin, in ASD, V/7, 2013, 191–278.

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believed in the importance of education, and therefore he also thought that piety (pietas) has an infancy and a maturity; anybody can become a theologian, provided they approach the sacred text without the preconceptions of philosophy and with a purified soul, so as to allow themselves to change, to be taken, to be inspired, and to be transformed by what they learn.28 All of this does not amount to a simple imitation of Christ (imitatio Christi); the Gospels do not offer a mere code of conduct. Rather, the interpretation of Scripture leads to a profound mystical change of the faithful: “Paul calls the reading of arcane scripture not philosophy but prophecy. Prophecy in truth is the gift of that eternal Spirit.”29 Erasmus’s adversaries promptly accused him of wishing to reduce the science of theology to studying the choice of words; they held that concepts have value precisely because they are independent of the language in which they are expressed. Erasmus’s more complete and articulated defense of his position can be found in his response to the writing of Jacques Masson (Latomus),30 in which Erasmus denied any identification of rhetoric and theology, and argued that philology is the indispensable premise for those wishing to dedicate themselves to theological science. If it is true that the orator is the “good man expert in speaking” (vir bonus dicendi peritus), we can paraphrase this by saying that the theologian is “the pious man expert in speaking about divine things” (vir pius, de divinis loquendi peritus) and theology is “piety joined with speaking rationally about divine things” (pietas cum ratione de divinis rebus loquendi coniuncta). As to the method of argumentation, Erasmus concluded: “I prefer the one who discusses with adequate preparation and prudence, or absolutely suspends judgment, to the one who defines with a resolution or without reflection.”31 This was not the first time that Erasmus condemned the obsession for restricting theological thought to rigid formulations that were the source of infinite disputes and hampered meditation. The fervor of the controversies of the period almost forced him to deal with theological issues, and a fruit of this was the De Libero arbitrio,32 a work that disappointed both of the camps who had hoped to include the prince of the humanists in their ranks. Erasmus, always reluctant to constrain the religious experience into stark 28

Ibid., col. 77B: ut muteris, ut rapiaris, ut affleris, ut transformeris in ea quae discis. Erasmus, Ratio seu methodus compendio perveniendi ad veram theologiam, in Ausgewählte Werke, ed. Annemarie and Hajo Holborn (Munich, 1935), 300–301. 30 Erasmus, Apologia Reiiciens quorundam suspiciones ac rumores, natos ex dialogo figurato, qui Jacobo Latomo Sacrae Theologiae Licentiato inscribitur, in LB IX, 79–106. 31 32 Ibid., col. 100F. Erasmus, De libero arbitrio diatribe sive collatio, in LB IX, 1215–1248. 29

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axioms, was on this occasion obliged to reveal his positions clearly. Having to confront Luther, he went straight to the heart of the problem, carrying the question to the level of exegesis, because only by interrogating Scripture is one able to place light on the truth. Analyzing all the passages dealing with the thesis of human free will, then with those that opposed it, he concluded that those that seemed to be contradictory depended on our mistaken reading of the sacred text due to our inability to grasp the unfathomable abyss of the divine will. Caught between Scylla and Charybdis, humankind should live as if their own salvation depended on themselves, but with the understanding that everything hinges on the divine will, starting from that first grace, or natural liberty, that is given to every person, even to pagans, and that induces one to live and carry out the proper choices with responsibility. There are no definitive conclusions in Erasmus’s work; he found himself displeased by asssertive affirmations and drawn to skeptical positions. But his is more than a skeptical position, but rather a suspension of judgment that does not call into doubt the faith he believes in; they are words that recall those of Valla and anticipate the attitude of one who defends liberty of conscience and tolerance. Many tenets of the humanist culture that at first seemed revolutionary were by now largely accepted. The importance of education even in the context of a renewed Christian society had guided the project of Philip Melanchthon and of the reformers of Strasbourg. Moreover, even if not all the theologians were philologists, all agreed that attention should be paid to the accuracy of the texts. Luther had compared humanism to the preaching of John the Baptist, a preparation for the Reformation, and he described Erasmus as a new Moses, destined to arrive only at the boundaries of the Promised Land. Yet, when he translated the Bible into the vernacular, confronting new problems, Luther made good use of the experience of Erasmus before him. Venerated master, but also the object of bitter criticism, Erasmus had influenced the religious thought of his time, but it was now a time of new orthodoxies, of bitter conflicts. The irenic, and perhaps even elitist, vision of the prince of the humanists was bound to collide with the necessity of disciplining the faithful people. Ulrich Zwingli was a fervent Erasmian who had assimilated the lessons of humanism and remained a humanist even when, having become a Reformer, he arrived at conclusions that distanced him from Erasmus’s thought and sensibility.33 In 1525, when introducing the 33

Fulvio Ferrario, La “sacra ancora”: Il principio scritturale nella Riforma zwingliana (Turin, 1993).

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Commentarius de vera et falsa religione, he sought to borrow from Cicero a definition of the word religio; in his sermons he did not hesitate to invoke philological specification in order to gain greater clarity and efficacy; and he derived theological arguments from the exact meaning of words just as one would derive demonstration from precise postulates. He noted that sacramentum, a word proper to military language, signified an oath and therefore a pledge of the faithful, not a bestowal of grace by way of the rite; eucharistia is a thanksgiving, and even in this case the agency of the faithful in the ceremony is highlighted. The constant appeal to the responsibility of humankind in every aspect of life seemed to recall the spirit of the first civic humanism; but the Zwinglian conception is not properly anthropocentric, the will of a person does not determine their salvation, everything depends on the omnipotent sovereignty of God, on his election, because not even faith saves, only grace. Zwingli’s position was neither the same as Luther’s enslaved will (servo arbitrio) nor the same as the ambiguous response of Erasmus, to whom he remained devoted, and whom he always defended. From Erasmus, Zwingli had taken spiritualism and the necessity of going beyond the literal sense of Scripture, drawing his own conclusions from that. For Zwingli, going beyond the letter also meant looking beyond the material reality of deeds and words, as in the rite of the Lord’s Supper where Christ is spiritually present, because bread and wine are only symbols, and to eat signifies to believe, “the body and blood signify the word of faith . . . our souls are nourished and slaked by the blood of Christ.” In the context of biblical studies, a new interest in the language of the Old Testament flourished; among the promoters of these studies was Johannes Reuchlin, author of the De rudimentis ebraicis, the first attempt at introducing the original language of the Old Testament, written for Latinists and sent to the press in 1506. Following Giovanni Pico, Reuchlin was not among those who proposed analyzing the sacred text philologically; he used his knowledge of the biblical language for an exegesis that revealed the hidden wisdom contained in the more profound signification of every word and letter. Such premises led to the exploration of the ontological signification of language and to a cabbalistic meditation on the text. Other Hebraists dedicated themselves to a philological and historical examination of the Old Testament: together with Conrad Pellikan and François Vatable, the Dominican Santi Pagnini occupied a place of prominence, even if the more significant part of his work is lost. A scholar of Greek and Hebrew, he translated the whole Bible into Latin, and prepared a commentary that gave much space to rabbinic comments alongside patristic ones, giving them equal 31

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authority:34 for him, these were diverse voices, diverse contributions to our understanding of the text. Pagnini’s Bible was published by Michael Servetus, whom we should undoubtedly consider as a humanist due to the vastness of his interests as editor, theologian, geographer, and doctor. Servetus was also famous for De trinitatis erroribus (1531) in which he demonstrated how the Trinitarian doctrine was perhaps arbitrarily constructed with nonbiblical language, by means of a precise analysis of the Hebrew and Greek biblical texts. The Christianismi restitutio (1553), a rebuttal to the Calvinist Institutio, contained the summa of his thought. The influence of Neoplatonism, and in particular of Marsilio Ficino, is evident from Servetus’s quotation of entire passages, sometimes even verbatim. Servetus’s Christology is also humanist, centered as it was on the deification of man (deificatio hominis) and bringing to the extreme consequence the theme of the anima mundi: God embraces and contains in Himself everything, He sustains and supports it (Isa 46 and 63), He gives life to everything (1 Tim. 6). In Him we live, we move, and exist (Acts 17). Everything has in Him its firmness . . . He is part of us and of our spirit . . . and we can properly say: The Lord is my part and my portion (Ps. 15 and 72) (Dominus pars mea et portio mea).35

For Servetus the divine spirit is immanent in the world, is present in the human body, in its organs, and, as a doctor and anatomist, he sought confirmation in the structure and in the functions of the organism, he followed the movement of the blood – the seat of the soul – he discovered pulmonary circulation and publicized his discovery in a theological work.36 His was an experimental research, from the interpretation of Scripture to the exploration of nature; perhaps that was also the fruit of a humanist mentality. The execution of Servetus brought Sebastian Castellio to a profound reflection on the nature of religious experience, and to the need for interiorizing it fully. The De arte dubitandi, his spiritual testament, was a fruit of that reflection.37 In a Europe lacerated by religious conflicts and by moral and religious inquietude, Castellio wrote his meditation on the causes of the

34 Anna Morisi, “L’eredità savonaroliana nell’opera di Santi Pagnini,” Memorie Domenicane 40 (2009), 189–202. 35 Miguel Serveta, Christianismi Restitutio (Frankfurt am Main, 1966 [1553]), bk. IV, 129–130. 36 Ibid., bk. V, 168–181. 37 Sebastian Castellio, De arte dubitandi et confitendi ignorandi et sciendi, ed. Elisabeth Feist Hirsch (Leiden, 1981).

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contemporary evils, pointing out the motives of every discord among the various communities and within each confession. Just like Erasmus, Castellio warned that these differences arise from contrasting readings of Scripture in which everyone finds what they seek: “It happens thus that some impose on their disciples their interpretations, often false, as if they were oracles . . . fabricating new articles of faith, they prepare the ground for new persecutions.”38 Everything arises from the fact that in the sacred text there are many obscure passages (as Erasmus held, in contrast to Luther): nothing precise is said, for example, with regard to baptism, to the Lord’s Supper, to predestination, to justification; therefore the faithful can only remain in doubt about these concepts given this lack of precision. Also, he thought that a belief without foundation has even been perpetuated concerning original sin, given that a careful reading of Genesis shows that Adam was not corrupt in either body or soul. Moreover, Castellio believed that the Trinitarian doctrine had been constructed out of simple words about God, His Son, and His Spirit, and formulated in a language that the faithful find obscure, full of subtleties that were introduced after the time of apostolic simplicity. Nonetheless, Scripture offers with clarity all that is necessary to believe for salvation, and the reason that nature has endowed humans with is a secure guide in our reading. Castellio had passionate words about this divine gift: [Reason] is, so to speak, the daughter of God, she is before all the Scripture and rites, absolutely before the creation of the world, and she will remain also after this world of ours will have been changed; not even God can abolish her. Reason, I say, is like a discourse of God, more certain and more ancient than the scriptures and the ceremonies . . . like a discourse and an interior and eternal language of the truth, always alive in us.39

Thus we are back to the problem of faith and reason, the relationship of philosophy and theology, between knowing and believing. These are simply different stages, according to Castellio: in Scripture nothing is contrary to nature or reason, but there are things beyond reason which one believes by an act of the will. Faith is not notitia, as Calvin would have it, it is not certain knowledge, it does not need the assent of the intellect; faith is trust in the promises, and when these are realized in the place of believing there will be knowing, “where science begins, faith ends” (ubi scientia incipit, ibi fides desinit). 38

Ibid., 181.

39

Ibid., 65.

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bibliography Bedouelle, Guy. “Attacks on the Biblical Humanism of Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples.” In Erika Rummel, ed., A Companion to Biblical Humanism and Scholasticism in the Age of Erasmus. Leiden and Boston, 2008, 115–141. Camporeale, Salvatore. “Da Lorenzo Valla a Tommaso Moro: Lo statuto umanistico della teologia.” Memorie Domenicane 4 (1973), 9–97. Chantraine, Georges. Le mysterium paulinien selon les Annotations d’Erasme. [Paris, 1970]. Chiabò, Myriam, Rocco Ronzani, and Angelo Maria Vitale, eds. Egidio da Viterbo cardinale agostiniano tra Roma e l’Europa del Rinascimento, Atti del Convegno, Viterbo 22–23 settembre 2012, Roma 26–28 settembre 2012. Rome, 2014. Chomarat, Jacques. Grammaire et rhétorique chez Erasme. Paris, 1981. D’Amico, John F. “Humanism and Pre-Reformation Theology.” In Rabil, ed., Renaissance Humanism, 349–379. Guggisberg, Hans R. Sebastian Castellio 1515–1563: Humanist und Verteidiger der religiösen Toleranz im konfessionellen Zeitalter. Göttingen, 1997. Hoffmann, Manfred. Rhetoric and Theology: The Hermeneutic of Erasmus. Toronto, Buffalo, and London, 1994. Lauster, Jörg. “Marsilio Ficino as a Christian Thinker: Theological Aspects of his Platonism.” In Michael J. B. Allen, Valery Rees, and Martin Davies, eds., Marsilio Ficino: His Theology, his Philosophy, his Legacy. Leiden, 2002, 45–69. Locher, Gottfried Wilhelm. Zwingli’s Thought: New Perspectives. Leiden, 1981. Rabil, Albert, Jr., ed., Renaissance Humanism, volume III: Foundations, Forms, and Legacy. Philadelphia, 1988. Rice, Eugene F. Prefatory Epistles of Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples and Related Texts. New York and London, 1972. Sánchez-Blanco, Francisco. Michael Servets Kritik an der Trinitatslehre: Philosophische Interpretationen und historische Auswirkungen. Frankfurt, 1997. Sciuto, Francesco Erasmo. Ulrico Zwingli: La vita, il pensiero, il suo tempo. Naples, 1980. Trinkaus, Charles. “Italian Humanism and Scholastic Theology.” In Rabil, ed., Renaissance Humanism, 327–348.

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The Changing Role of the Bible in Theological Discourse robert kolb The Bible permeated the medieval world. Peasants knew its stories from altar depictions; the Biblia pauperum (Bible of the poor); occasional sermons; and simple books that were viewed and sometimes read in the village. Intellectuals placed study of Scripture at the pinnacle of the curriculum of the “queen of the sciences,” theology. Priests could use postils, collections of sermons on the texts appointed for reading on Sundays and festival days, to prepare their own sermons, although they also often preached from the Legenda aurea, a collection of stories rehearsing the miraculous wonders performed by the saints.1 As in all cultures, medieval Europe placed the Bible within its own cultural context. Intellectuals focused chiefly on an Aristotelian rendering of Scripture into a system that made sense according to the Stagirite’s logic and metaphysics. Peasants conceived of the biblical narrative, along with stories of the saints, within the religious framework that they had inherited from pre-Christian traditional religion. Thus, the performance of sacred rituals, above all, the Mass, mediated by a sacred hierarchy, formed the heart of medieval piety. Martin Luther defined being Christian in different terms. Instead of viewing human performance that either obtained God’s grace through good works (above all, sacred works) or built on grace through such works to attain righteousness, a holy identity, in God’s sight, Luther focused first on God’s approach to sinners. His intensely personal understanding of God, as one who seeks conversation and community with sinners, led him to define being Christian as first of all being addressed by God with a re-creative word that forgives sins. This word, he believed, bestows salvation and life, on the basis of the narrative of God’s saving intervention as Jesus Christ, through his

1 John M. Frymire, The Primacy of the Postils: Catholics, Protestants, and the Dissemination of Ideas in Early Modern Germany (Leiden, 2010), 10–25.

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death and resurrection for the justification of sinners. To be Christian meant for Luther to trust in Christ and in God’s saving action through him.2 This focus on God as one who speaks and whose words to human beings are delivered in authoritative form in Scripture caused significant changes at every level of the practice of the Christian faith. The medieval sermon had functioned largely as preparation for the reception of sacramental grace, argues David Steinmetz.3 Now sermons replaced the celebration of the Mass at the center of worship, although Luther also emphasized the importance of the Lord’s Supper as a sacramental form of God’s word of promise.4 Burial of the dead no longer centered on a Mass to reduce the deceased’s time in purgatory but rather on a sermon of comfort and hope.5 Catechetical instruction to cultivate knowledge of the message of Scripture became foundational for parish life.6 Theological instruction shifted its concentration from studying Scripture second hand through the interpretive method governed by Peter Lombard’s Sententiae to philological biblical exegesis.7 Against his will and better judgment, but in obedience to monastic superiors, Luther rose to the pinnacle of medieval learning. In 1512 the University of Wittenberg made him Doctor in Biblia – teacher of Scripture. His intensive study of the biblical text – based on the newest tools for its study produced by the movement labeled biblical humanism – combined with his personality and the presuppositions of an Ockhamist worldview imbibed from his university instructors quickly gained him respect within German academe. His own conscientiousness joined his love of language and his musically attuned ear to catch rhythms in the prophets’ and apostles’ writings that earlier translators and interpreters had missed. His engagement with the heirs of Ockham taught him that God is almighty, bound only by the rules that he has made for himself. The Ockhamist tradition also taught him that 2

See, e.g., in his Smalcald Articles, in BSELK, 727–738; The Book of Concord, ed. Robert Kolb and Timothy J. Wengert (Minneapolis, 2000 [henceforth BC]), 301–306. Cf. Robert Kolb, Martin Luther and the Enduring Word of God: The Wittenberg School and its Scripture-Centered Proclamation (Grand Rapids, 2016), 1–10, 35–42. 3 David Steinmetz, “Luther, the Reformers, and the Bible,” in James E. Bowley, ed., Living Traditions of the Bible (St. Louis, 1999), 164–166. 4 WA 19, 78, 26–27; LW 53, 68. 5 Robert Kolb, “Orders for Burial in the Sixteenth Century Wittenberg Circle,” in Irene Dingel and Armin Kohnle, eds., Gute Ordnung: Ordnungsmodelle und Ordnungsvorstellungen in der Reformationszeit (Leipzig, 2014), 257–279. 6 Albrecht Peters, Kommentar zu Luthers Katechismen, volumes I–V, ed. Gottfried Seebaß (Göttingen, 1990–1994). 7 See Timothy J. Wengert, “Philip Melanchthon and Wittenberg’s Reform of the Theological Curriculum,” in Jordan J. Ballor et al., eds., Church and School in Early Modern Protestantism (Leiden, 2013), 17–33.

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God communicates with his human creatures and takes their earthly existence seriously, and that his message for sinners exceeds the grasp of their reason. He did reject the Ockhamist plan for salvation that he received from students of Gabriel Biel: God gives grace to those who try as hard as they can to please him. Nonetheless, he continued to presuppose other elements of his scholastic instruction. Luther studied at a time when biblical humanism was changing scholars’ use of Scripture. Employing its tools refined and fortified his approach to Scripture. Helps for Hebrew study developed by Johannes Reuchlin (1455–1522); the Christological interpretation of the Old Testament, particularly the Psalms, of Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples (ca. 1450–ca. 1537); and the Parapharases and the edition of the Greek New Testament, the Novum Instrumentum (1516), of Desiderius Erasmus (ca. 1469–1536) facilitated the Wittenberg professor’s engagement with the text and confirmed his own convictions regarding the meaning of Scripture.8 Luther quickly absorbed these new developments in his own study of Scripture. Not only did his own colleague, Philip Melanchthon, employ humanistic principles and tools in his exegesis;9 so did all other Reformers, including those who remained faithful to Rome. For example, Calvin’s humanistic training exhibited itself in his use of rhetorical and logical tools in his interpretation.10 Luther largely – but not completely – abandoned the medieval interpretation of biblical texts through allegory and built on an alternative monastic mode which focused more on the historical and literal meaning of the text.11 His more important hermeneutical breakthrough took place in the later 1510s when he abandoned the “salvation-historical” understanding of the relationship of the law, as God’s Old Testament way of dealing with his people, and the gospel, the way of the New Testament, which essentially consisted of Jesus commanding and enabling human performance of God-pleasing deeds, replacing Moses’ way. Instead, Luther defined “law” and “gospel,” when they are used together, as God’s plan or prescription for human actions (law) and God’s liberation of sinners from their sin through Christ’s death and resurrection (gospel). Christ, prophesied in the Old Testament and narrated in the 8

Robert Rosin, “Humanism, Luther, and the Wittenberg Reformation,” in Robert Kolb, Irene Dingel, and Lubomír Batka, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Martin Luther’s Theology (Oxford, 2014), 91–104. 9 Uwe Schnell, Die homiletische Theorie Philipp Melanchthons (Berlin and Hamburg, 1968). 10 Ward Holder, John Calvin and the Grounding of Interpretation: Calvin’s First Commentaries (Leiden, 2006), 98–109; Thomas Henry Louis Parker, Calvin’s New Testament Commentaries (Grand Rapids, 1971), 49–68. 11 Christopher Ocker, Biblical Poetics before Humanism and Reformation (Cambridge, 2002).

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New Testament, is the center of Scripture. God’s plan stands existentially as the accusation and condemnation of sinners: the gospel forgives them and frees them to live according to the law in their daily lives. Christ’s command to preach repentance and forgiveness of sins (Luke 24:47) shaped the conception of Luther and his followers of the proclamation of the entire biblical message. The law elicits repentance by crushing all sinful pretence of being able to live apart from the Creator; the gospel restores the original relationship of love and trust between Creator and human creature.12 This hermeneutical framework for the narrative of God’s history of relating to human creatures gave Luther what Christopher Ocker maintains both the medieval monastic and the approaches lacked, “a literary method for handling the narrative construction of the Bible as a whole.”13 This distinction between law and gospel permeated the preaching of Luther’s own disciples, but it was also taken over in ways appropriate to their understanding of the way God’s Word functions by other Protestant Reformers. Calvin framed it in terms of “curse” and “promise”;14 his disciple Caspar Olevianus employed the distinction in his Romans commentary.15 Medieval theologians had simply presumed the authority of Scripture, although they drew no sharp line between its authority and that of the Fathers and the Councils. Nonetheless, questions of biblical authority did not command extensive attention from Reformers. Even the Anabaptist Schleitheim Articles (1527), representing a new embodiment of the medieval tradition of religious protest on behalf of reform that embraced a biblicistic – as well as moralistic, anti-clerical, anti-sacramental, millennialistic – platform, does not express its concept of Scripture as the sole foundation for faith and life; it simply practices it with citations to support its positions.16 For Luther biblical authority rested in its being God’s voice. He believed that the Holy Spirit had been present and active in the origin of Scripture. While its human authors wrote its words, its primary author, the Holy Spirit, had guided their pens. He continues to govern its use in the church, Luther claimed, refusing 12

Erik Herrmann, “Luther’s Absorption of Medieval Biblical Interpretation and his Use of the Church Fathers,” in Kolb et al., eds., Oxford Handbook, 71–90; Erik Herrmann, “Luther’s Divine Aeneid: Continuity and Creativity in Reforming the Use of the Bible,” Lutherjahrbuch 85 (2018), 85–109. 13 Ocker, Poetics, 21–22, 211. 14 John Hesselink, “Law and Gospel or Gospel and Law: Calvin’s Understanding of the Relationship,” in Robert Schnucker, ed., Calviniana (Kirksville, 1988), 13–32. 15 Scott Clark, “Law and Gospel in Early Reformed Orthodoxy: Hermeneutical Conservatism in Olevianus’ Commentary on Romans,” in Ballor et al., eds., Church and School, 307–320; Clark reviews competing interpretations. 16 Das Schleitheimer Bekenntnis 1527, ed. Urs B. Leu and Christian Scheidegger (Zug, n.d.).

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to address the theodical problem posed by varying understandings of the text and its meaning.17 Biblical humanism had prepared Ulrich Zwingli (1484–1531) during his university studies to be receptive to calls for reform and to turn to the ancient text of Scripture as the only authority for Christian faith and life, as he rested his case on it in his Ratio Fidei (1530).18 Martin Bucer also based his teaching on Scripture’s authority and certitude. He maintained that the Holy Spirit worked through his human amanuenses by inspiring their words, expressed out of their own personalities, and using the biblical message to draw its hearers to faith in Christ.19 His Confessio Tetrapolitana (1530) took Holy Scripture, given by the Holy Spirit (2 Tim. 3:16), as the basis for both.20 Defining Scripture as God’s authoritative, inspired Word,21 Heinrich Bullinger used the term “Word” to designate God’s creative power, the second person of the Holy Trinity, and his revelation of his will in the message of the prophets and apostles.22 Bullinger did not share Luther’s conviction that the spoken or written – and certainly not the sacramental – word actually could effect God’s will as an instrument of the Holy Spirit, although he held that the Spirit uses Scripture and preaching in his internal working within hearers and readers. While it is inaccurate to say that his position reduced Scripture to a mere source of information, his concern over medieval associations of the created, material order and its physical objects with magical powers prevented him from agreeing with Lutheran teaching on the various forms of God’s Word as effective means of grace.23 In Geneva Calvin reflected key elements in Bucer and Bullinger’s view of Scripture, stressing that in Scripture alone can the faint natural knowledge of God grow to full, true knowledge of him, for once God had placed his revelation in Scripture, it exercised “full authority among believers . . . as if 17

Robert Kolb, “Nowhere More Present and Active than in the Holy Letters: Luther’s Understanding of God’s Presence in Scripture,” Lutheran Theological Journal 49 (2015), 4–17. Reformierte Bekenntnisschriften, ed. Heiner Faulenbach et al., 5 vols. (Neukirchen, 2002 [henceforth RB]), I/1, 445. 19 Peter Stephens, The Holy Spirit in the Theology of Martin Bucer (Cambridge, 1970), 129–155, 196–259. Cf. Johannes Müller, Martin Bucers Hermeneutik (Gütersloh, 1965), 72–80; Alexandre Ganoczy and Stefan Scheld, Die Hermeneutik Calvins (Wiesbaden, 1983), 76–89. 20 RB, I/1, 460–461. 21 See Heinrich Bullinger, De Scripturae sanctae authoritate, certitudine, firmitate et absoluta perfectione (Zurich, 1538). 22 Heinrich Bullinger, The Decades of Henry Bullinger: The First and Second Decades, trans. Thomas Harding (Cambridge, 1849), 37; cf. similar expressions in the First Helvetic Confession authored by Bullinger, Oswald Myconius, and Simon Grynaeus, in RB, I/2, 44, and the Second Helvetic Confession, by Bullinger, in RB, II/2, 273–276. 23 Bullinger, Decades: The Fifth Decade (Cambridge, 1852), 96–98. 18

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there the living words of God were heard.” Biblical authors had written in their own styles, from their own settings, but had written delivering words “from the very mouth of God.” The Holy Spirit gave the words to the writers. Although Calvin did not share Luther’s conviction regarding the power placed in the words themselves, either of preaching or the written text, he believed that the Holy Spirit works in conjunction with the Scriptures he inspired and the message delivered from its pages. Calvin believed that the Scriptures communicate clearly to readers, and rejected the papal claim of its right to interpretation of the Bible. The church does not establish Scripture’s authority. Rather, the witness of the Holy Spirit and the text itself authenticates it as God’s Word.24 Calvin was reacting against the assertion of the Council of Trent that accorded authority alongside the Bible to the traditions handed down orally from Christ through church history. The council taught that Jesus had “proclaimed with his own lips this gospel” and that the “truth and rule” he gave “are contained in written books and in unwritten traditions which were received by the apostles from the mouth of Christ himself or else have come down to us, handed on as it were from the apostles themselves at the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.”25 Biblical interpreters always conduct conversations with past and contemporary exegetes; this traditionally involved polemic against what were perceived as false interpretations. Commentaries and sermons became fields on which opposing theologians used Bible passages to support their own teaching and practice and to prove their opponents wrong. The exchange between Melanchthon and Wittenberg’s Roman Catholic opponents in their Confutation of the Augsburg Confession26 and Melanchthon’s Apology of the Augsburg Confession27 illustrates the role that biblical citation played in such confrontations. The Confutation used only biblical citations in refuting certain elements of the Confession, recognizing that its opponents viewed only Scripture as the ultimate authority, whereas Melanchthon used both 24

Calvin: Institutes of the Christian Religion [Library of Christian Classics 20–21], ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1960), I, vi, 1 (pp. 70–71, 74–76); Corpus Reformatorum, Calvini Opera, in CR, LXXX, 52, 83, LXVI, 48, 20. See Ganoczy and Schild, Hermeneutik, 90–92; Jackson Forstman, Word and Spirit: Calvin’s Doctrine of Biblical Authority (Stanford, 1962), esp. 50–62; Holder, Interpretation, 58–68, 98–108. 25 Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. Norman P. Tanner, S.J., 2 vols. (London and Washington, 1990), 663. 26 Robert Kolb and James A. Nestingen, eds., Sources and Contexts of the Book of Concord (Minneapolis, 2001), 106–139. 27 BSELK, 236–709; BC, 111–294.

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Scripture and patristic arguments in challenging the Confutation. Where each side placed the weight of the biblical argument reveals their primary concerns. The Confutation concentrated its citations in asserting the propriety of medieval ritual practice – clerical celibacy, veneration of the saints, monastic vows, fasting, and also on good works as meritorious. Melanchthon’s biblical citations emphasized justification by faith, the means of grace, repentance, and new obedience in his Apology.28 Luther’s encounter with the Hebrew text of the Old Testament moved him to remove the books not in it – the Apocrypha – from the canon, relegating them in his translation to the end of the Old Testament. He did not, as is often suggested, reduce the number of canonical books in the New Testament, although he argued that some of them focus more on what he regarded as the Scriptures’ center, salvation through Christ’s work. He did operate with the ancient distinction between homologoumena and antilegomena, posing ancient questions as well as his own regarding the status of James, Hebrews, and Revelation. Martin Chemnitz reflects his position in his Examination of the Council of Trent.29 Other Reformers, such as Calvin, rejected the Apocrypha and held to a canon of sixty-six books.30 The Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England typifies most Reformed confessions in listing the canonical books and distinguishing them from the Apocrypha.31 The Council of Trent condemned those who reject the medieval canon of seventy-two books, and made the Vulgate the only acceptable text of Scripture.32 Luther’s career centered in the classroom. In 1513 he began lecturing on the Psalms, turning to Romans (1515–1516), then Galatians, Hebrews, and once again the Psalms (1519–1521). After political events interrupted his teaching, he resumed with lectures on the minor prophets (1524–1526), and dedicated the last twenty years of his life to an array of books, including Ecclesiastes, Isaiah, 1 Timothy, and, above all, Galatians (1531) and Genesis (1535–1545). His lecture style turned from the medieval use of gloss and scholion to a narrative or homiletical style, if his printed commentaries reflect the lecture hall. Both in lectures and preaching – in his case the distinction between 28

Charles P. Arand et al., The Lutheran Confessions: History and Theology of the Book of Concord (Minneapolis, 2012), 127–128. On Calvin’s polemic in his exegesis see Wilhelmus Moehn, “God Calls us to his Service”: The Relation between God and his Audience in Calvin’s Sermons on Acts (Geneva, 2001), 125–175. 29 Martin Chemnitz, Examination of the Council of Trent, Part I, trans. Fred Kramer (St. Louis, 1971), 168–195. 30 31 Holder, Interpretation, 21; cf. Parker, New Testament, 69–78. RB, II/1, 382–383. 32 Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, volume II: Trent to Vatican II, 663–665.

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these two genres is often not obvious – he offered exposition of grammatical, syntactical, philological, and historical details in the text; extensive instruction in the text’s significance for the students or hearers in the congregation (catechesis, consisting, he stated, of either teaching what hearers did not know or admonition to act on what they did); and narratives, often imaginatively retelling the biblical stories, occasionally taking examples from secular or sacred history, contemporary events, or his own experience.33 The shift in theological education to a program based on exegesis not only changed the curriculum, but with the growing availability and affordability of books, the university lecture sometimes became a commentary that pastors could use in their preaching. Commentaries also arose out of and reflected preaching in some instances. Homiletical commentaries usually conveyed the author’s exegesis in application and in the vernacular, in contrast to the more academic lecture-based commentary, which often reflected the style of medieval glosses and scholia. Philip Melanchthon’s contributions to communication theory and other aspects of church life were significant, but his commentaries also shaped preaching for several generations.34 Martin Bucer’s published commentaries, on the Psalms, the Gospels, and the Pauline epistles, exercised a wide influence throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.35 Calvin developed most of his exegetical publications in sermons for the congregation and in lectures, held for the ministers of Geneva or in regular Friday teaching sessions, the congregations, for a wider public. He composed only a few of his commentaries simply in literary form.36 All these works demonstrate his wide, deep command of the exegetical tradition, including 33 The classical study of Luther’s exegesis is Gerhard Ebeling, Evangelische Evangelienauslegung, 3rd ed. (Tübingen, 1991); on his preaching see Ulrich Nembach, Predigt des Evangeliums: Luther als Prediger Pädagoge und Rhetor (Neukirchen, 1972). For recent bibliography see Robert Kolb, “Current Perspectives on Luther’s Biblical Interpretation,” Lutheran Quarterly 36 (2022), 249– 267; Kolb, Luther and the Stories of God: Biblical Narratives as a Foundation for Christian Living (Grand Rapids, 2012); Kolb, Luther and the Enduring Word; and John A. Maxfield, Luther’s Lectures on Genesis and the Formation of Evangelical Identity (Kirksville, 2008). 34 See Timothy J. Wengert, Philip Melanchthon’s Annotationes in Johannem in Relation to its Predecessors and Contemporaries (Geneva, 1987); Timothy J. Wengert, Human Freedom, Christian Righteousness: Philip Melanchthon’s Exegetical Dispute (Oxford and New York, 1998); Timothy J. Wengert, Law and Gospel: Philip Melanchthon’s Debate with John Agricola of Eisleben over Poenitentia (Grand Rapids, 1997); and Timothy J. Wengert, “The Biblical Commentaries of Philip Melanchthon,” in Irene Dingel et al., Philip Melanchthon: Theologian in Classroom, Confession, and Controversy (Göttingen, 2012), 43–76. 35 Bernard Roussel, “Bucer Exegete,” in Christian Krieger and Marc Lienhard, eds., Martin Bucer and Sixteenth Century Europe (Leiden, 1993), 39–54. 36 Thomas Henry Louis Parker, Calvin’s Old Testament Commentaries (Edinburgh, 1986), 9–41; Ganoczy and Scheld, Hermeneutik, 136–154; Olivier Millet, Calvin et la dynamique de la parole. Étude de rhétorique réformée (Paris, 1992).

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Church Fathers, medieval commentators, Jewish interpreters, and contemporaries.37 Richard Muller demonstrates the close association between Calvin’s exegetical work and his translation of his biblical interpretation into catechetical, systematic form in his Institutes. These two activities go together; it is impossible to understand one apart from the other.38 Calvin regarded his Institutes as “guidance and direction” to help readers of the Bible find their way to its message, “a key that unlocks the door to a right understanding of Scripture.”39 He defined the center or scopus of Scripture as Christ and the message of salvation through his justifying work on behalf of the elect.40 All Calvin’s exegesis was intended to aid preaching. He maintained that the preacher delivers the biblical message as God’s spokesman, as the Holy Spirit’s instrument in the conflict against the devil and his temptations.41 The fourfold shape of the ministry that leads and guides the church included, Calvin taught, the office of teacher. Pastors administer discipline and the sacraments and warn and exhort God’s people. Teachers are not called to these activities but, like pastors, they keep doctrine pure among believers by instructing them from his Word.42 Swiss and southern German Reformed circles practiced a high level of biblical scholarship, on the model set by Luther and Calvin. As pastor in Augsburg and professor in Bern, Wolfgang Musculus produced a series of commentaries,43 and in Geneva Theodore Beza (1519–1605) edited the first critical edition of the Greek New Testament alongside his improvements on its Latin translation. This work also influenced English reception of the text.44 37

See David C. Steinmetz, “Calvin and Abraham: The Interpretation of Romans 4 in the Sixteenth Century,” Church History 57 (1988), 443–455; David C. Steinmetz, “Calvin and the Patristic Exegesis of Paul,” in David C. Steinmetz, ed., The Bible in the Sixteenth Century (Durham, NC, 1990), 100–118; Susan E. Schreiner, Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? Calvin’s Exegesis of Job from Medieval and Modern Perspectives (Chicago, 1994), 164–198; Parker, New Testament, 30–48; Thomas F. Torrance, The Hermeneutics of John Calvin (Edinburgh, 1988), 73–95; essays in Donald K. McKim, ed., Calvin and the Bible (Cambridge, 2006); and David C. Steinmetz, Calvin in Context (New York, 1995). 38 Richard A. Muller, The Unaccommodated Calvin (Oxford, 2000), 186; cf. Institutes, I, vi–vii; and Torrance, Hermeneutics, 63–72. 39 40 Institutes, I, vii. Ibid., II, ix, 2; Muller, Calvin, 23; Holder, Interpretation, 50–58, 140–163. 41 Cf. Calvin’s Commentary on Job, in CR, LXIII, 35, 43–44, Holder, Interpretation, 22–23, 168–177; Susan E. Schreiner, “Calvin as Interpreter of Job,” in Donald K. McKim, ed., Calvin and the Bible (Cambridge, 2006), 53–84, at 54; Thomas Henry Louis Parker, Calvin’s Preaching (Louisville, 1992), 1–56; Moehn, God Calls, 80–86. 42 Institutes, IV, iii. 43 Craig S. Farmer, The Gospel of John in the Sixteenth Century: The Johannine Exegesis of Wolfgang Musculus (Oxford, 1997). 44 Jan Krans, Beyond What is Written: Erasmus and Beza as Conjectural Critics of the New Testament (Leiden, 2006); Pierre Fraenkel, De l’Écriture à la dispute. Le Cas de l’Académie de Genève sous

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Impulses from Reformers were not necessary for Roman Catholics to continue publication of commentaries and postils of the late medieval sort.45 In the last seven years of his life Tommaso de Vio, Cardinal Cajetan (1469–1534), turned his attention from his revival of the theology of Thomas Aquinas, using humanist methods and scholarship in his treatments of the Psalms, and then the New Testament books (1527–1529). Beginning in 1530 he published commentaries on the Torah and the historical books, as well as Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the first three chapters of Isaiah.46 A number of Cajetan’s colleagues committed to the Scholastic method of practicing theology also turned to the tools and methods of biblical humanism in commenting on the Bible. Tensions occurred with those who rejected their reliance on Scholastic argument, such as Erasmus, in part over the value of the Hebrew and Greek texts in contrast to their allegiance to the Vulgate alone. These tensions did not prevent these scholars, however, from producing competent biblical studies.47 Luther’s placing of the sermon at the center of Christian weekly experience of God led him to use the genre of the postil to provide a kind of continuing education program for priests who wished to preach in an evangelical manner. His postils and other printed sermons shaped what parishioners across Germany and beyond heard and how they absorbed the biblical message.48 Lutheran and Anglican churches followed the medieval lectionary system of lessons appointed for preaching on Sundays and festivals, though both confessions also provided for preaching on entire books in the manner of the lectio continua of medieval monastic life. Most Reformed churches followed the latter model for the chief Sunday service as well.49

Théodore de Béze (Lausanne, 1977); Irena Backus, The Reformed Roots of the English New Testament: The Influence of Theodore Beza on the English New Testament (Pittsburgh, 1980). 45 See Helmut Feld, Martin Luthers und Wendelin Steinbachs Vorlesungen über den Hebräerbrief (Wiesbaden, 1971). 46 See Paul F. Grendler, “Italian Biblical Humanism and the Papacy, 1515–1535,” in Erika Rummel, ed., Biblical Humanism and Scholasticism in the Age of Erasmus (Leiden, 2008), 227–276, at 251–270. 47 See essays in Rummel, ed., Biblical Humanism, esp. Carlos del Valle Rodríguez, “Antonio Nebrija’s Biblical Scholarship,” 57–72; Paolo Sartori, “Frans Tielmans, the Congregation of Montagu, and Biblical Scholarship,” 215–223; Grendler, “Italian Biblical Humanism and the Papacy, 1515–1535”; and Nelson H. Minnich, “Alberto Pio’s Defense of Scholastic Theology,” 277–295. 48 Benjamin T. G. Mayes, “Introduction to the Luther-Cruciger Church Postil,” LW 70, xiii– xxxi; cf. Ulrich Asendorf, Die Theologie Martin Luthers nach seinen Predigten (Göttingen, 1988). 49 Hughes Oliphant Old, The Reading and Preaching of the Scriptures in the Worship of the Christian Church, volume IV: The Age of the Reformation (Grand Rapids, 2002), 12–16, 38–42, 148–157, 46–48.

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Critics who claim that these preachers became instruments of rising absolutist rulers ignore the coincidence of the behavior defined in the Bible as God’s will for humanity with standards for social order in most societies. Preaching formed the center of congregational life across Reformed and Anglican churches, and the lively homiletical practice fundamentally altered public and family life as the education of the clergy improved during the course of the sixteenth century.50 Heinrich Bullinger’s Decades, published in 1549–1552, exemplify catechetical Reformed preaching, conveying to laity the fundamentals of Christian faith and life.51 Puritans laid particular emphasis on preaching, and insisted on strict biblical standards for teaching and conduct understood within their largely Calvinist theological framework.52 Preaching also played a vital role in Roman Catholic reform, building on medieval traditions of preaching and also redesigning itself to meet the Protestant threat. In 1546 the Council of Trent mandated regular preaching wherever endowed positions for that purpose existed as well as in municipal churches. It also directed that dioceses provide instruction in basic skills for biblical study so that parish priests could learn how to interpret the Bible properly in sermons for their congregations. Bishops were to supervise preachers so that they conveyed God’s Word accurately to the people.53 In 1563 the council stated that preaching is the preeminent duty (munus praecipuum) of a bishop, repeated its concern for the explanation of the Mass and “the divine commandments and precepts of salvation” in the vernacular to the people, and reinforced its mandate for regular parish preaching.54 Despite this, Old concludes that “in the final analysis, preaching was not central to the ministry of Counter-Reformation Catholicism.”55 Reforms introduced at Trent changed its tone and direction somewhat: thematic preaching declined, and patristic or classical models assumed increasing prominence. “Nonetheless, the moralistic and behavioristic emphases in much late-medieval preaching received widespread confirmation . . . Catholic theory on preaching tended to [be] much less prescriptive on doctrinal content than did protestant theory, but it was at least as, if not more, prescriptive about morals.”56 The Jesuits in particular made special efforts to develop good preaching to combat the 50

Ibid., 43–157, 251–368. Walter Hollweg, Heinrich Bullingers Hausbuch (Neukirchen, 1956). 52 John S. Coolidge, The Pauline Renaissance in England (Oxford, 1970). 53 54 Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, II, 667–670. Ibid., II, 763–764. 55 Old, Reading, 250, cf. 158–250. 56 John W. O’Malley, “Form, Content and Influence of Works about Preaching before Trent: The Franciscan Contribution,” in John W. O’Malley, Religious Culture in the Sixteenth Century (Aldershot, 1993), ch. 4, 50. 51

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success of the oral assault on the old church by Protestants. In Germany Peter Canisius’s preaching coincided with the work of Johann Wild, a cathedral preacher in Mainz, and others who produced postils,57 sometimes with the same dependence on Luther’s biblical interpretation as was evident in Roman Catholic translations.58 Luther launched the new wave of biblical translation into vernaculars with his New Testament in German in 1522, followed by the complete Bible in 1534.59 These translations profoundly changed the religious landscape even though illiteracy was still widespread. Public reading of Scripture in the vernacular, in homes and public places, brought the content of the biblical narrative to a wide audience. Roman Catholic translations soon appeared, heavily dependent on Luther’s wording but with their own marginal notes.60 William Tyndale (ca. 1494–1536) began his work on translating the Bible into English in 1522, using Luther’s translation along with the Greek and Hebrew texts. That the establishment took seriously what it perceived as a threat in the vernacular Bible is seen in the fact that Tyndale’s efforts helped earn him martyrdom. Improvements on Tyndale’s translation took place over the entire century. The Coverdale Bible (1535), the Geneva Bible (1557), and the Bishops’ Bible (1568) are among the most important revisions, culminating in the King James Version (1611). Roman Catholic English scholars produced the Rheims-Douay translation (New Testament 1582, entire Bible 1635), with annotations to counter the Protestant versions.61 These translations of the Bible are but one reflection of the sixteenthcentury redefinition of being Christian to a focus on the relationship produced by God’s conversation with his people out of its pages. This shift in focus produced alterations in the understanding of authority in the church and in worship and theological instruction (now shaped by new hermeneutical principles and the humanist emphasis on rhetoric and ancient sources), manifested in the quality and frequency of preaching, in a host of rites, and in

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Frymire, Postils, 98–156, 253–436. Austra Reinis, “‘Such Defiant, Obstinate, Disobedience’: Martin Luther’s Jonah and Michael Helding’s Re-Catholization Effort in Merseburg,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 106 (2015), 156–183; Jonathan Reinert, Passionspredigt im 16. Jahrhundert: Das Leiden und Sterben Jesu Christi in den Postillen Martin Luthers, der Wittenberger Tradition und altgläubiger Prediger (Tübingen, 2022). 59 Heinz Bluhm, Martin Luther, Creative Translator (St. Louis, 1965); Heinz Bluhm, Luther Translator of Paul (New York, 1984). 60 See Bluhm, Paul, 133–153, 507–536 on Hieronymus Emser’s translation. 61 Stanley L. Greenslade, ed., The Cambridge History of the Bible, volume III: The West from the Reformation to the Present Day (Cambridge, 1963), 141–174; Alister E. McGrath, In the Beginning: The Story of the King James Bible (New York, 2001). 58

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catechesis. Despite the many uses of the Bible in the medieval church, the Reformation era can rightly be defined as a revival of God’s Word. bibliography Asendorf, Ulrich. Die Theologie Martin Luthers nach seinen Predigten. Göttingen, 1988. Ebeling, Gerhard. Evangelische Evangelienauslegung, 3rd ed. Tübingen, 1991. Frymire, John M. The Primacy of the Postils: Catholics, Protestants, and the Dissemination of Ideas in Early Modern Germany. Leiden, 2010. Ganoczy, Alexandre and Stefan Scheld. Die Hermeneutik Calvins. Wiesbaden, 1983. Greenslade, Stanley L., ed. The Cambridge History of the Bible, volume III: The West from the Reformation to the Present Day. Cambridge, 1963. Holder, Ward. John Calvin and the Grounding of Interpretation: Calvin’s First Commentaries. Leiden, 2006. Kolb, Robert. Luther and the Stories of God: Biblical Narratives as a Foundation for Christian Living. Grand Rapids, 2012. Maxfield, John A. Luther’s Lectures on Genesis and the Formation of Evangelical Identity. Kirksville, 2008. McKim, Donald K., ed. Calvin and the Bible. Cambridge, 2006. Nembach, Ulrich. Predigt des Evangeliums: Luther als Prediger, Pädagoge und Rhetor. Neukirchen, 1972. Ocker, Christopher. Biblical Poetics before Humanism and Reformation. Cambridge, 2002. Old, Hughes Oliphant. The Reading and Preaching of the Scriptures in the Worship of the Christian Church, volume IV: The Age of the Reformation. Grand Rapids, 2002. Parker, Thomas H. L. Calvin’s New Testament Commentaries. Grand Rapids, 1971. Calvin’s Old Testament Commentaries. Edinburgh, 1986. Calvin’s Preaching. Louisville, 1992. Schreiner, Susan E. Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? Calvin’s Exegesis of Job from Medieval and Modern Perspectives. Chicago, 1994. Torrance, Thomas F. The Hermeneutics of John Calvin. Edinburgh, 1988. Wengert, Timothy J. Philip Melanchthon’s Annotationes in Johannem in Relation to its Predecessors and Contemporaries. Geneva, 1987.

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The Regulation of Theology in the Reformation Era nelson h. minnich The regulation of theology in the Reformation era took many forms. Among the factors that shaped the procedures were the practices of the ancient and medieval church, the particular ecclesiology and polity adopted by various denominations and the authority they gave to their church officials and to new institutions, their credal statements, and the wishes of the Christian rulers in whose territories they functioned. From its earliest days the Christian community was confronted with the problem of distinguishing the true message of Christ from false interpretations of it (2 Pet. 1:20–3:18). In the Pastoral Epistles the task of confronting teachers of error was given to the elders or bishops of the church (1 Tim. 3:2; Titus 1:9–14). Paul in his epistles mentioned the divinely established office of teachers (1 Cor. 12:28–29; Eph. 4:11). While some bishops were teachers, notably some of the doctors of the early church, not all bishops were expert in interpreting Sacred Scripture. They were advised by men skilled in this discipline. Medieval canon law recognized that there are two teaching offices in the church, that of the bishop and that of the doctores, who were theologians, or experts in interpreting Sacred Scripture. The training of these professional theologians was eventually entrusted to the universities or to the studia of the religious orders, and in the later medieval period their teachers and graduates saw themselves as part of the church’s magisterium.1 Medieval and Renaissance theologians developed a sophisticated system of assigning theological notes to various teachings, indicating the level of adherence owed to a particular teaching, such as truths of the faith (dogmas 1 Ian P. Wei, “The Masters of Theology at the University of Paris in the Late Thirteenth Century: An Authority beyond the Schools,” Bulletin of the John Ryland Library of Manchester 75 (1993), 37–63; Ian P. Wei, “The Self-Image of the Masters of Theology at the University of Paris in the Late Thirteenth and Early Fourteenth Centuries,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 46 (1995), 398–431; Nelson H. Minnich, “The Voice of Theologians in General Council from Pisa to Trent,” Theological Studies 59 (1998), 420–441, at 421.

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that must be believed because revealed by God and identified as such by the church); truths that are virtually (not formally) revealed and universally taught by the church; truths that are proximate to the faith and considered Catholic doctrine but not strict conclusions from revealed truths and not expressly proposed as obligatory on the faithful but to which the faithful should give assent out of obedience; theological common and certain truths that theologians commonly hold as certain; and probable truths that rest on a fallible but sufficiently grave basis, such as the considered opinion of authorized teachers. In a similar way the medieval church assigned theological notes to erroneous statements: heresy (something in direct and immediate opposition to or in contradiction to a truth of divine or Catholic faith); false or erroneous (the immediate denial of a Catholic doctrine or theological certain truth of the faith); scandalous (a rash statement contrary to a wellgrounded truth commonly held by theologians – this category includes statements close to or suspected to be heresy); wrong sounding (departs in an incongruous and dangerous way from traditional formulations); and offensive to pious ears (something true but so worded as to shock and give offense: “St. Mary Magdalene the prostitute, pray for us”).

Universities The medieval universities and studia were given charters by the papacy and were subject to the supervision of the local bishop or of the provincial of a religious order, acting ultimately, according to some, as the delegate of the pope. Universities were also self-policing institutions that checked up on the orthodoxy of their teachers and students and censured those who strayed. Because of their expertise, the theologians were often consulted on questions of heresy. Between 1500 and 1537 the theological faculty of the University of Paris was consulted regarding issues of orthodoxy on at least twenty-five occasions by bishops from around Christendom, on eleven of these incidents by French bishops.2 The theological faculty was held in high esteem. Membership in it came from receiving the academic degree of doctor, but mendicant membership was restricted. As many as eighty doctors participated in its collegial decisions. Popes frequently confirmed their judgments. Some felt that only an ecumenical council could overturn their rulings. On January 18, 1543 the whole faculty, teachers and students alike, assembled to approve and swear 2

James K. Farge, Orthodoxy and Reform in Early Reformation France: The Faculty of Theology of Paris, 1500–1543 [Studies in Medieval and Reformation Thought 32] (Leiden, 1983), 231, 236.

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to abide in their speaking and preaching by a set of twenty-six articles of faith. King Francis I (r. 1515–1547) ordered all bishops and local officials to enforce them and the Parlement of Paris registered the royal decree and approved the articles’ publication on July 31, 1543.3 While the faculty struggled to be autonomous, it was under the dual authority of its chancellor, the bishop of Paris (from the beginning), and of the Parlement of Paris (since 1446). In most cases there was good collaboration. On occasion the kings of France intervened: Louis XI in 1474 imposed a philosophic system of realism on the faculty; Francis I in 1527 ordered the faculty to stop proceedings against Jacques Lefèvre, Pierre Caroli, and Gérard Roussel. Others also intervened. In 1612 the papal nuncio to France, Roberto Ubaldini, and the archbishop of Sens, Jacques Davy Du Perron, expelled Edmond Richer from his post as syndic of the faculty.4 If the University of Paris held a special position, other universities were also involved in questions of orthodoxy. Universities played an important role in the Reformation controversies in the Holy Roman Empire. At the very beginning, in December 1517, Archbishop Albrecht von Brandenburg consulted the theologians and canonists at the University of Mainz for a judgment on Martin Luther’s 95 Theses and treatise on indulgences. They noted their novelty and recommended sending them to Rome for a formal judgment. The transcript of the debate between Luther and Johannes Eck at the University of Leipzig (1519) was sent to the universities of Louvain and Cologne for their determination. The Edict of Worms (1521) ordered that no book or other writing that could disturb the Christian faith might be published unless with the knowledge and consent of the local ordinary or of his substitutes and with the permission of the theological (“in der heyligen Geschrifft”) faculty of a nearby university. And in 1543 and in 1544 the universities of Cologne and Louvain respectively issued their articles of faith.5 The Catholic Church wanted universities to be bastions of orthodoxy. The Council of Trent mandated that: 3

Ibid., 33–39; Registre des conclusions de la Faculté de Théologie de l’Université de Paris, volume II: Du 26 novembre 1533 au 1er mars 1550, ed. and annotated by James K. Farge (Paris, 1994), 215–222, no. 255A-I. 4 Augustin Renaudet, Préréforme et humanisme à Paris pendant les premières guerres d’Italie (1494–1517), 2nd rev. ed. (Paris, 1953; repr. Slatkine Reprints, 1981), 40; Farge, Orthodoxy, 238–239, 257; Registre des procès-verbaux de la Faculté de Théologie de l’Université de Paris de janvier 1524 à novembre 1533, ed. and annotated by James K. Farge (Paris, 1990), xx; Jotham Parsons, The Church in the Republic: Gallicanism and Political Ideology in Renaissance France (Washington, 2004), 152. 5 Jared Wicks, “Roman Reactions to Luther: The First Year (1518),” Catholic Historical Review 69 (1983), 521–562, at 522; Farge, Orthodoxy, 247, 249–250; Friedrich Kapp, Geschichte des deutchen

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all concerned with the care, visitation, and reform of universities and places of general studies should carefully ensure that these universities accept in full the canons and decrees of this holy council, and that the masters, doctors and others in the same universities teach and interpret the catholic faith according to the directions of these canons and decrees, and that they bind themselves by oath to this obligation at the beginning of each year . . . The pope will ensure through his delegates that the universities immediately subject to his protection and visitation are visited and reformed to a healthy state in the same manner as above and as his judgment sees most fitting.6

The model of universities determining what is heresy was also practiced outside France and Germany. In Poland the University of Cracow and its chancellor were given the task of censoring books. In Spain the universities of Salamanca and Alcalá were commissioned in 1552 to examine all bibles to detect any errors. Their list of heretical passages was published in 1554 by the Supreme Council of the Spanish Inquisition. In Italy universities were not leaders in formulating Catholic orthodoxy; that role was exercised by the Roman Inquisition.7 That Lutheran universities would become arbiters of orthodoxy and that rulers would be concerned about the teaching of their professors was in keeping with earlier and contemporary practice. The premier Lutheran university was Wittenberg, where Martin Luther and Philip Melanchthon had taught. After Luther’s death, divisions opened up in Lutheranism, notably among the followers of Melanchthon known as Philippists and the disciples of Matthias Vlasić known as Gnesio-Lutherans. The Philippists, who Buchhandels bis in das siebzehnte Jahrhundert [Geschichte des deutschen Buchhandels 1] (Leipzig, 1886), 538: “kayn Bücher noch ander schryfften, in den Etwas begriffen wirdet, das den Christenlichen Glauben wenig oder vil Anrüret. Zum Ersten druck: nit Drucke: on wyssen und willen des Ordinarien desselben Orts: oder seins Substituten, unnd verordenten, mit zulassung der Facultet: in der hayligen Geschrifft eyner der negstgelegen Universitet. Aber ander Bücher. Sy seyen in welicher Facultet unnd gegreyssen was sy wöllen, die sollen mit wyssen unnd willen des Ordinarien, und ausserhalb desselben kains wegs, Gedruckt. Verkaufft: noch zedrucken oder zuverkauffen unnderstanden: Verschaffet noch Gestatet werden, in kayn weyse.” 6 Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. Norman Tanner, 2 vols. (Washington, 1990), II, 785: 29–40 (Trent, sess. 25, ch. 2). By Pius IV’s decree In sacrosancta beati Petri (September 10, 1564) all university professors were required to take the Professio fidei Tridentina. 7 Paul F. Grendler, The Universities of the Italian Renaissance (Baltimore, 2002), 353–392; Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision (New Haven, 1998), 122–128: the University of Salamanca did not regulate its own faculty, but private denunciations of faculty members brought them to the attention of the Spanish Inquisition; and Arthur Gordon Kinder, “Printing and Reformation Ideas in Spain,” in Jean-François Gilmont, Karin Maag, and Jean-Gilles Monfroy, eds., The Reformation and the Book (Aldershot, 1998), 292–318, at 296. On the University of Cracow see Alodia Kawecka-Gryczowa and Janusz Tazbir, “The Book and the Reformation in Poland,” in Gilmont et al., eds., The Reformation and the Book, 410–431, at 422.

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were tinged with Calvinism, dominated the universities in Wittenberg and Leipzig; the Gnesio-Lutherans, who considered themselves defenders of orthodoxy, were installed by Moritz, the elector of Saxony, in the University of Jena. These theologians trained future pastors and government officials in their respective brands of Lutheranism until the Formula of Concord (1577) restored unity. The theology faculty of Tübingen supervised the pulpit and press in the duchy of Württemberg, but even there a professor could be arrested and fined should he become too polemical. At the University of Helmstedt the local duke imposed a form of Lutheran theology known as Calixtinism that exalted the power of the prince and of logic.8 In Denmark, King Christian III (r. 1534–1559) reconstituted the University of Copenhagen in 1537, appointing Lutheran theologians to its faculty.9 Christian III’s Ecclesiastical Ordinance (1537–1539) gave to the University of Copenhagen and to the Lutheran superintendents the power of prepublication censorship of any religious book in Danish, German, or Latin and of allowing the importation of such works.10 In Sweden, the University of Uppsala was moribund until it was re-founded in 1593, with its rector charged with ensuring Lutheran orthodoxy.11 In 1526 King Gustav Vasa closed all presses, confiscated that in Uppsala, and moved it to Stockholm. It became the royal, and only, press in Sweden, and in 1539 he decreed that his personal permission was required for anything to be published by it.12 While Lutheran civil rulers could and did determine the doctrine taught at the universities in their lands, the regulation of doctrine was also conducted by the professors themselves. In Saxony the elector installed in his universities chancellors for life who were theologically trained and whose responsibility was the maintenance of “pure doctrine.” He also appointed commissars (usually four highranking court officials) who were to see that the university obeyed the elector’s directives. Censorship of lectures and publications was also

8

Ronnie Po-Chia Hsia, Social Discipline in the Reformation: Central Europe 1550–1750 [Christianity and Society in the Modern World] (New York, 1989), 117–118. 9 Jens E. Olesen, “Dänemark, Norwegen, und Island,” in Matthais Asche and Anton Schindling, eds., Dänemark, Norwegen und Schweden im Zeitalter der Reformation und Konfessionalisierung: Nordische Königreiche und Konfession 1500 bis 1660 [Katholisches Leben und Kirchenreform im Zeitalter der Glaudensspaltung 62] (Münster, 2003), 27–106, at 61–63. 10 Anne Riising,”The Book and the Reformation in Denmark and Norway, 1523–40,” in Gilmont et al., eds., The Reformation and the Book, 432–448, at 447. 11 Werner Buchholz, “Schweden mit Finnland,” in Asche and Schindling, eds., Dänemark, Norwegen und Schweden, 107–237, at 201–206. 12 Remi Kick, “The Book and the Reformation in the Kingdom of Sweden, 1526–71,” in Gilmont et al., eds., The Reformation and the Book, 449–468, at 450, 458.

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practiced, but the professors themselves helped to maintain orthodoxy by holding academic disputations which refuted error and built a proper consensus.13 In Calvinist lands, academies and universities were subservient to the local magistrates and to the Company of Pastors. In Geneva John Calvin maintained a tight control on orthodoxy. He gathered the local pastors in congrégations, colloquia, and conferences for weekly study of Scripture. On his urgings, in 1559 the city opened the Genevan Academy whose upper section, known as the schola publica, trained men in theology and provided pastors for the Reformed Church. Appointment to a teaching post was contingent not only on being found academically competent, but also on having the proper morals and holding the correct doctrine. This process was supervised by the Company of Pastors. Admission to its ranks was by nomination, testing, and election. Candidates were screened regarding their preaching abilities, but most importantly they were examined on all the headings of Christian doctrine.14 While the city council could refuse to install a candidate as minister to a particular congregation, people who wished to object were restricted in their protests to the candidate’s deficiencies in vita vel doctrina. Once installed, a pastor could be removed by the Company of Pastors, especially for doctrinal reasons. This system allowed the pastors to maintain a strict control over doctrine.15 Calvin had difficulty in maintaining control outside Geneva, where he often lacked the cooperation of local civil authorities. He tried to create a hierarchical system of authorities: local congregations; colloquies that met every few weeks to resolve issues; provincial synods that met twice a year; and a national synod that met annually with representatives of Geneva present. The representatives to these assemblies were ordained pastors accompanied by one or more elder or deacon. But what Calvin really wanted was a system of descending authority with him or his representative at the top. When local rulers became Calvinists, they often turned their universities into seminaries for training Reformed ministers. When Calvinists were driven out of the universities of Heidelberg and Marburg many took 13

Kenneth Appold, “Academic Life and Teaching in Post-Reformation Lutheranism,” in Robert Kolb, ed., Lutheran Ecclesiastical Culture, 1550–1675 (Leiden, 2008), 65–115, at 82–86. 14 Letter of Theodore Beza to Heinrich Bullinger, November 13, 1571, in Robert M. Kingdon, Geneva and the Consolidation of the French Protestant Movement, 1564–1572: A Contribution to the History of Congregationalism, Presbyterianism, and Calvinist Resistance Theory (Madison, 1967), 209: Tandem qui maxime placuit, examine subiicitur omnium doctrinae christianae capitum. 15 Ibid., 39; William Monter, Calvin’s Geneva [New Dimensions in History: Historical Cities] (New York, 1967), 110–114.

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positions in the University of Herborn, where they prepared the ministers and government officials of the Reformed territories of Germany.16 The University of Leiden in the Netherlands and Cambridge University in England became centers of international Calvinist theology. Their influence was clearly felt in the decrees of the Synod of Dort and in the Westminster Confession, which spelled out Reformed orthodoxy. During the Reformation period the clergy of the Radical churches were not trained in theology at universities for their ministerial posts. The early Anabaptists felt that Christ’s words were easily understood and that one did not need a university education, which only filled one with pagan ideas and an attitude of superiority and conceit. New ministers were apparently instructed by older ones and by elders. Menno Simons warned the elders of the church to guard “against all false doctrine” and to “beware of all innovations and doctrines not contained in the Word of Christ and His apostles, nor consistent therewith.”17

Papal Commissions Those with academic degrees in theology were also consulted by the popes before they rendered a judgment. On the eve of the Reformation, for example, Julius II set up a commission of two learned cardinals and twelve leading theologians drawn from the mendicant orders in Rome to advise him on the case of Augustinian canon regular Pietro de Luca, who taught an unusual theory of how Christ was conceived by three drops of Mary’s blood.18 A large commission of twenty-two prelates and theologians was consulted by Leo X when deciding the case of Johannes Reuchlin. Luther’s teachings were examined in Rome by four commissions containing 16

Hsia, Social Discipline, 120–121. At the University of Heidelberg, Zacharias Ursinus held the post of professor of dogmatic theology and of rector (and at times only professor) of the seminary, the Collegium Sapientiae, that trained the Reformed pastors in the Palatinate: see Derk Visser, ed., Controversy and Conciliation: The Reformation and the Palatinate, 1559–1583 [Pittsburgh Theological Monographs, New Series, 18] (Allison Park, 1986), 1. 17 Cornelius Krahn, “Office of Elder in Anabaptist-Mennonite History,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 30 (1956), 120–127, at 123. Seminaries were not established until late in the seventeenth century: see Claus-Peter Clasen, Anabaptism: A Social History, 1525–1618: Switzerland, Austria, Moravia, South and Central Germany (Ithaca, 1972), 79–80; Menno Simons, “The Nurture of Children, c. 1557,” in The Complete Writings of Menno Simons, c. 1496–1561, ed. John Christian Wenger, trans. Leonard Verdun, biography by Harold S. Bender (Scottsdale, 1956), 945–952, at 947. 18 Bullarium ordinis FF. Praedicatorum, ed. Thomas Ripoll and Antoine Brémond, volume IV: (1484–1549) (Rome, 1732), 267–268.

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theologians and discussed in four consistories of cardinals before being condemned. The transcript of the Leipzig Disputation between Martin Luther and Johannes Eck had been sent to the theological faculties of the leading universities of Louvain, Cologne, and Paris for their judgment. The determination of Louvain was very influential in the formulation of the bull Exsurge Domine condemning Luther’s teachings.19 Once Luther had been excommunicated the papacy issued no other condemnations of specific doctrines, but waited for a general council to assemble that would define Catholic teachings. At that council theologians would once again play a major role in clarifying issues of orthodoxy and heresy. When issues arose that could not be resolved by recourse to previous church teachings, as in the case of the debate between the Jesuits and Dominicans over sufficient and efficacious grace, the popes intervened and set up commissions to study the issues, as Clement VIII and Paul V did with their congregationes de auxiliis.

Christian Rulers The role of the Christian ruler in identifying and suppressing heresy changed with time. In the medieval period the Christian ruler was given a secondary role. Church officials had the responsibility of defining church teachings and of identifying and trying those suspected of heresy. Those found guilty and unrepentant were to be turned over to the secular arm for punishment. Heresy was seen as an act of treason against God and the Christian community, and hence punishable by death. As a result of the German Peasants’ Wars (1524–1526) and of the Anabaptist New Jerusalem at Münster (1535), which combined religious ideas with the threat of social upheaval, Christian rulers in the Holy Roman Empire began to take direct charge of persecuting heretics. Between 1527 and 1529 Archduke Ferdinand of Austria secularized the crime of heresy. He required citizens to denounce neighbors who denied basic Christian doctrines and the sacraments to civil officials. He established civil commissioners to conduct visits to his lands to root out heresy, with power to overrule ecclesiastical officials 19 Ludwig Pastor, The History of the Popes from the Close of the Medieval Ages, volume VII, trans. Ralph Francis Kerr (St. Louis, 1923), 323, 387–388, 394–395; Hans Peterse, Jacobus Hoogstraeten gegen Johannes Reuchlin: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Antijudaismus im 16. Jahrhundert [Veröffentlichungen des Instituts für Europäische Geschichte Mainz, Abteilung abendländische Religionsgeschichte 163] (Mainz, 1995), 63.

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and procedures. Anabaptists were captured and executed.20 His brother, Emperor Charles V, starting in 1529, also moved the crime of heresy from ecclesiastical to civil courts and proceeded to persecute Anabaptists in his Low Country possessions.21 In Protestant Germany the elector of Saxony appointed a visitation commission in 1527 that installed superintendents to supervise the doctrine of various officeholders, primarily pastors, preachers, and schoolteachers. To assist them in this task Philip Melanchthon drew up a series of articles and Luther wrote a preface to the Instructions in which he stated that the elector’s role was not to teach or rule spiritually, but to prevent discord.22 In 1528 Luther composed a handbook, A Small Catechism for Ordinary Pastors and Preachers, that addressed doctrinal problems, and then in 1529 published The Large Catechism (Deudsch Catechismus) to instruct pastors and educated laity in proper beliefs.23 The Augsburg Confession (1530), written by a committee of Lutheran theologians and approved by Luther, became the classic statement of Lutheran theology.24 Following Luther’s death, disagreement arose among his followers on how to interpret his teachings. The Religious Peace of Augsburg (1555) entrusted to the local ruler the determination of the religion of his subjects. While Lutheran princes adopted the Augsburg Confession as their common statement of belief, they also picked sides among the disputants. In an effort to restore unity among Lutherans, a Formula of Concord was worked out in 1577 and a Book of Concord (1580) assembled that contained various writings of Luther and other documents that were to be considered normative. The preface included the signatures of three imperial electors, numerous leading civil rulers and city councils, and two Lutheran prince-bishops. The Formula of Concord was subscribed to by six leading Lutheran theologians.25 The Saxon elector August the Pious (r. 1553–1586) was adamantly anti-Calvinist and tried to suppress the Philippists at the universities of Wittenberg and Leipzig, requiring all professors to sign anti-Calvinist confessions (later the Formula of Concord) or be fined or jailed. In Hesse-Kassel and Marburg, Landgrave Moritz imposed the Reformed Confession in 1605, and required the professors at the University of 20

William Monter, Judging the French Reformation: Heresy Trials by Sixteenth-Century Parlements (Cambridge, 1999), 33–35. 21 Ibid., 38–39. 22 Martin Brecht, Martin Luther: Shaping and Defining the Reformation, 1521–1532, 3 vols., trans. James L. Schaaf (Minneapolis, 1986/1990), 260–267. 23 24 Ibid., 275–280. Ibid., 370–371. 25 The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, ed. and trans. Theodore G. Tappert (Philadelphia, 1959), esp. 14–16, 636.

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Marburg to follow him into the Calvinist camp. Those who refused fled to Giessen.26 In the Palatinate, Elector Frederick III (r. 1559–1576) brought Calvinist professors to the University of Heidelberg, but his son Ludwig VI (r. 1576–1583) removed them in 1580 when he required the university professors to sign the Lutheran Formula of Concord.27 King Henry VIII of England (r. 1509–1547), both before the Act of Supremacy (1534) that made him head of the Church of England and after its enactment, prosecuted heretics, especially those with Anabaptist or Lutheran leanings. While executions were carried out under royal authority, Henry involved churchmen in the definition and prosecution of heresy. All major decisions regarding doctrine were worked out in private meetings of prelates and theologians, with the convocations basically rubber-stamping what they had decided. The king would make minor revisions. In the 1536 convocation, after much debate and royal intervention, the Ten Articles, which were Lutheran in doctrine, were issued with the king’s approval.28 In the preface to the Six Articles (1539), reestablishing basically Catholic doctrines, Henry stated that he had ordered the clergy to debate the articles, and with his consent they were formulated in the convocation and approved by Parliament. To deny these articles by preaching, teaching, declaring, or affirming would result in a declaration of heresy punishable by burning and the confiscation of one’s goods by the king.29 Henry had his clergy produce fuller explanations of Christian teachings that he incorporated into the King’s Book (1543), which was issued under his authority. Henry also allowed appeals from an archepiscopal court to a commission named by the king, a high court.30 Under his son Edward VI, the Act of Uniformity (1549) gave civil justices the authority to hear and determine cases involving religion, but allowed local prelates, if they so wished, to join in the proceedings. It also allowed clergy with ecclesiastical jurisdiction to act on their own in matters of heresy.31 To regulate proper belief, Parliament with the king’s approval 26

Appold, “Academic Life and Teaching,” 81–87; Hsia, Social Discipline, 35–36. Charles D. Gunnoe, Jr., “Palatinate,” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation, ed. Hans J. Hillerbrand, 4 vols. (New York, 1996), III, 195–197. 28 Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer: A Life (New Haven, 1996), 165; Christopher Haigh, The English Reformations: Religion, Politics, and Society under the Tudors (Oxford, 1993), 128–129. 29 Documents Illustrative of English Church History, ed. Henry Gee and William John Hardy (London, 1921), 303–304. 30 Felix Makower, The Constitutional History and Constitution of the Church of England [Burt Franklin Research and Source Works Series 9] (New York and London, 1895), 457. 31 Documents Illustrative of English Church History, 363–366. 27

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issued in 1553 the Forty-Two Articles (appended to the Book of Common Prayer) that had been prepared primarily by Thomas Cranmer and revised by an ad hoc committee of bishops and senior clerics during the convocation in March 1553. All students and teachers at the University of Cambridge were to make a formal subscription to them.32 The Articles were revoked by Mary I in 1553, and replaced with Fifteen Articles to which students and teachers were required to subscribe. The Forty-Two Articles returned upon the accession of her sister Elizabeth I, and became the basis for her Thirty-Nine Articles (1559). In her Act of Supremacy (1559) Elizabeth laid out the norms for orthodoxy: “by the authority of the canonical Scriptures, or by the first four general Councils, or any of them, or by any other general Council wherein the same was declared heresy by the express and plain words of the said canonical Scriptures, or by such as hereafter shall be ordered, judged, or determined to be heresy by the High Court of Parliament of this realm, with the assent of the clergy in their Convocation.”33 In her Injunctions (1559) Elizabeth ordered her bishops to visit and examine their clergy on their understanding of Sacred Scripture. No one was to maintain heresies, false doctrines, errors, or superstitions. In addition, no vain and contentious disputations were to be held on religious topics.34 In 1561 Anglican bishops tried to strengthen the norms of orthodoxy by drawing up eleven articles as an answer to the doctrinal decrees of the Council of Trent and by asking that they (not royal visitors) be given the power to grant licenses to preach according to “the unity of doctrine established by public authority.” To avoid Queen Elizabeth’s indignation, Archbishop Matthew Parker in 1565 instructed the bishops of his province to ferret out heresy by consulting with “the most apt and grave men” and then report to him on any varieties of doctrine.35 The Anglican divine John Jewel defended the role of civil authority in determining doctrine with appeals to the divine origins of secular authority and the role emperors had played in the ancient church in establishing doctrine.36 Archbishop John Whitgift used the Court of High Commission to enforce the Elizabethan Settlement.37 32

MacCulloch, Cranmer, 536–537; James Bass Mullinger, The University of Cambridge, volume II: From the Royal Injunctions of 1535 to the Accession of Charles the First (Cambridge, 1884), 145. 33 Mullinger, Cambridge, 154–155; Documents Illustrative of English Church History, 455. 34 Documents Illustrative of English Church History, 425 (XVI, 21), 432 (XXXI, 31), 433 (XXXVII, 37), 436 (L, 50). 35 Victor John Knight Brook, A Life of Archbishop Parker (Oxford, 1962), 105–107, 164. 36 Wyndham Mason Southgate, John Jewel and the Problem of Doctrinal Authority [Harvard Historical Monographs 49] (Cambridge, MA, 1962), 201–203. 37 John R. H. Moorman, A History of the Church in England (New York, 1959), 213.

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Under James I the Consistory Court judged Bartholomew Legate guilty of the heresy of Arianism and had him burnt to death in 1612. A month later Edward Wightman was burnt for Antinomianism.38 In France the definition of orthodoxy and persecution of heresy initially followed traditional patterns. On April 15, 1521 the University of Paris condemned various statements of Martin Luther under nineteen headings, and the bishops of France often sought the advice of the theological faculty when prosecuting a heretic. The provincial council of Sens, held in Paris with the active assistance of the theologians from the University of Paris and whose decrees were published on February 20, 1529, vigorously defended Catholic teaching on the Trinity, the nature and infallibility of the visible church, the authority of the pope and bishops, the seven sacraments, infant baptism, the Mass, satisfaction and purgatory, the veneration of saints, free will, and good works, and it singled out thirty-nine propositions for condemnation.39 While Francis I was initially protective of dissidents, the theological faculty of the University of Paris under the leadership of Noel Beda and the appellate court of the Parlement of Paris under its first president, Pierre Lizet (1529–1550), worked vigorously to suppress heresy, given the ineffectiveness of the local episcopal inquisition. By 1530 commissions composed of parliamentary magistrates with theologian advisors tried cases of heresy by royal mandate without episcopal or papal permission and cooperation. But it was not until the Protestants became aggressive in publicly attacking the Mass and Real Presence in the famous Placard Affair (1534) that Francis I, who was personally devoted to these Catholic beliefs and rituals, decided to involve the civil courts more directly in the prosecution of heresy. Francis I’s Edict of VillersCotterêts (1539) enacted a new legal code that gave the parlements jurisdiction over heresy. The Parlement of Toulouse arrested the Dominican inquisitor Louis de Rochette and his deputy Antoine Ricardi for being too lenient on heresy. They were tried, found guilty of heresy, defrocked, and burnt. The clergy protested over this incursion into their usual jurisdiction. Nonetheless, by his Edict of Fontainebleau (1540) Francis I clearly shifted responsibility to the civil courts, with the clergy acting as counselors to the civil judges.40 His son Henry II in 1547 created a new civil chamber in the parlements to hear heresy cases exclusively. He then modified its practices in 38

Florence Higham, Lancelot Andrewes (London, 1952), 60–61. Charles-Joseph Hefele and Joseph Hergenroether, Histoire des conciles d’après les documents originaux, trans. Henri Leclercq, volume VIII-II (Paris, 1921), 758, 1070–1081. 40 Tyler C. Lange, The First French Reformation: Church Reform and the Origins of the Old Regime (New York, 2014), 180–204; Monter, Judging, 21–24, 55–87. 39

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1549 by assigning the clergy jurisdiction over “simple heresy” with the parlements retaining jurisdiction over “seditious heresy.” This distinction between private and public heresy was blurred in 1551 when the king gave parlements the power to investigate and punish private heresies that could lead to sedition. Finally, the Edict of Romocantin (1560) under the queen regent Catherine dei Medici gave all jurisdiction over simple heresy to church tribunals, while civil courts retained jurisdiction over seditious heresy, a system that lasted for the rest of the century.41 The French monarchs consistently resisted officially implementing the decrees of the Council of Trent, which would have provided clear norms of orthodoxy, as the law of France. While consulting with theologians and bishops, the kings of France imposed norms of orthodoxy to their liking and had their civil courts enforce them. In the system of church governance in Geneva, civil rulers (city council, local noblemen, etc.) could have a voice (a veto) in the choice of pastors. As explained by Theodore Beza, the appointment of a pastor was achieved by nomination by the Company of Pastors, which first screened candidates as to their life, morals, ability to preach, and qui maxime placuit, examini subiicitur omnium doctrinae christianae capitum (he who was most acceptable was subjected to an examination on all the headings of Christian doctrine). The magistrates could reject a candidate and objections could be raised by the prospective congregation. Once ordained and installed, a pastor could be removed by the Company of Pastors if found deficient ut si de doctrina (as on doctrine). This system was used to “maintain a dogmatic line.” The Consistory composed of pastors and twelve elders handled cases of the laity’s moral lapses and any heterodox ideas (male de religione sentire, having bad sentiments on religion). Annually a team composed of a pastor, elder, and neighbor would visit each family to conduct a “dogmatic test.”42 The Anabaptists rejected any role for Christian rulers in setting or defending Christian doctrine. Civil government was restricted to secular matters.43

Visitation The institution of canonical visitation was also used to regulate belief. Among the items investigated by bishops or their deputies when conducting 41

Frederic J. Baumgartner, Change and Continuity in the French Episcopate: The Bishops and the War of Religion, 1547–1610 [Duke Monographs in Medieval and Renaissance Studies 7] (Durham, NC, 1986), 91–94. 42 43 Kingdon, Geneva, 39–40, 209–210. Clasen, Anabaptism, 172–175.

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a visitation was the orthodoxy of the pastor and his flock. Indeed, the Council of Trent stated: “The chief aim of all visitations will be to ensure sound and orthodox teaching and the removal of all heresies.”44 This became especially important with the spread of Protestant beliefs. In France, Kings Henry II in 1551, Charles IX in 1561, and Henry III in 1580 urged the bishops to conduct visitations in order to root out heresy.45 Carlo Borromeo, the cardinalarchbishop of Milan, devoted much time and energy to conducting personal visitations both of his own diocese and of others in his metropolitan province in northern Italy and in Switzerland, checking up on the practice of the faith and providing a model of the Tridentine bishop.46 In Germany questionnaires drawn up in one diocese – for example, in Mainz (1549), Cologne (1550), and Salzburg (1558) – were also used in others. They checked the pastor’s adherence to and understanding of the faith and any tendency to or suspicions of heresy among the faithful. The visitation became an important instrument in safeguarding the orthodoxy of the prince-bishop’s territory. In Bavaria the Catholic lay ruler, Duke Albrecht V (r. 1550–1579) set up in 1570 the Geistlicher Rat, a college of ecclesiastical councilors who were given supreme authority over church affairs, answerable only to the duke. The councilors used annual visitations in the parishes to identify religious deviants. The duke had stated earlier that the purpose of the visitations was “the safeguard and preservation of the holy Christian and Catholic religion.”47 The institution of visitation was adapted by rulers who broke away from the Roman Church. In Electoral Saxony, starting in 1527, the Lutheran ruler John the Constant (r. 1525–1532) set up a visitation commission that installed superintendents who supervised doctrine. He also ordered visitations by his officials of the congregations in his territory to impose an evangelical order on them. To this end, Melanchthon prepared a set of articles that defined orthodox belief and Luther wrote a manual for pastors that addressed doctrinal problems, known as the Large Catechism.48 The visitation became an important instrument of Lutheran church governance. In typical manner, Duke Julius of Brunswick in 1588 issued protocols that required God’s word 44

Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, II, 762: 16–18 (Trent, sess. 24, canon 3). Marc Venard, “Le visite pastorale francesi dal XVI al XVIII secolo,” in Umberto Mazzone and Angelo Turchini, eds., Le visite patorali [Annali dell’Istituto storico italo-germanico 18] (Bologna, 1985), 13–55, at 29. 46 Cesare Orsenigo, Life of St. Charles Borromeo, trans. Rudolph Kraus (London, 1947), 183–202. 47 Peter Thaddäus Lang, “La riforma in trasformazione: I questionari delle visite pastorali cattoliche in Germania nel XVI e XVII secolo,”in Mazzone and Turchini, eds., Le visite patorali, 57–95, at 62 no. I, 28–29, 63 no. III, 10, 69, and 80 no. IV; Hsia, Social Discipline, 43, 289–290. 48 Brecht, Luther, II, 263–264. 45

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to be preached free of error and uncontaminated by false teachings. The local pastor, chaplain, and schoolmaster were to be men of “pure doctrine.”49 In England the rulers used royal visitations to enforce their religious injunctions. In 1535 Henry VIII withheld from bishops the right of visitation, which was thenceforth to be exercised by his vicegerential officers. The royal visitation of 1535–1536 checked up on monasteries and universities. Another royal visitation carried out Edward VI’s Injunctions of 1547 that regulated religious practice at the local level and required the licensing of all preachers. A visitation of 1553 tried to impose his Forty-Two Articles. In 1557 Cardinal Reginald Pole issued fifty-four injunctions to guide visitations in his diocese of Canterbury. Elizabeth I appointed six commissioners to enforce her Injunctions of 1559 that imposed royal supremacy, the Book of Common Prayer, and the Thirty-Nine Articles. Clergy who refused to subscribe were deprived.50 There was no system of official visitations among the Anabaptists whereby an authority superior to the local congregation could correct its beliefs and discipline its members. But leaders did visit other congregations on occasions for discussions and exhortations.51

Preventive Censorship of Books Another practice that regulated theological discourse was the preventive censorship of printed matter. In medieval times universities censored the copying of lecture notes, and the Franciscan and Dominican orders did the same for the publications of their friars. The Jesuits later adopted similar procedures. Soon after the invention of the printing press both civil and ecclesiastical institutions tried to control what was printed in Germany. Eventually the papacy mandated the preventive censorship of religious publications and the Fifth Lateran Council set up procedures for screening and punishments for violators. Beyond papal orders to local ordinaries to enforce the Lateran decree, there is little evidence that printers in Italy did in fact follow the requirement of prepublication censorship soon after the 49

Gerald Strauss, Luther’s House of Learning: Indoctrination of the Young in the German Reformation (Baltimore, 1978), 260, 263. 50 Haigh, English Reformations, 124, 169, 188, 242–243; Tudor Royal Proclamations, ed. Paul L. Hughes and James F. Larkin, 3 vols. (New Haven, 1964–1969), volume I: The Early Tudors (1485–1555), 393–403 (licensing at 396); Archdeacon Harpsfield’s Visitation, 1557, ed. Leonard E. Whatmore [Publications of the Catholic Record Society 45] (London, 1950), 5–6, see esp. nos. 14, 16, 22–24, 37, 46, 51–52. 51 Clasen, Anabaptism, 49–51, 74–75.

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council. Civil authorities did not enforce such measures until later, when the threat of Protestantism became real in the 1540s and various collaborative procedures with church authorities were worked out.52 In Germany some initial efforts were made to enforce the decree. On May 17, 1517, Albrecht von Brandenburg, prince-archbishop of Mainz, issued an edict naming his censors of books and inquisitors of heresy. Without mentioning the Lateran Council by name, but repeating its arguments that books had been published that contained materials contrary to the Catholic faith and good morals and injurious to the reputations of persons in authority, he provided as a remedy the appointment of his vicar general in Erfurt, Paul von Huthenne, titular bishop of Ascalon in Palestine, as his commissioner for examining books and writings that were to be printed. He also constituted him, together with Dr. Jodocus Trutfetter, the canon of Erfurt, as inquisitors of heresy for his diocese. They were to seek out heretics, and examine them – even under torture – to correct and punish them using both secular and religious penalties. Either singly or together, they were to examine materials and allow to be printed those that were found acceptable and reject those that were contrary to the Catholic faith and good morals or presented an imminent danger to either. Those who possessed, bought, or sold these prohibited works were to be punished as malefactors by the civil powers with fines and other legal sanctions. Witnesses who had been corrupted by hatred or favoritism were to be punished with ecclesiastical penalties. That this edict was enforced at least once is evidenced by the action that the Frankfurt censor Peter Meyer took in 1518 against the Tübingen printer Thomas Anshelm. According to Ulrich Eisenhardt, Albrecht’s edict was based on the Lateran decree and was the first time that a papal bull on censorship was made binding in Germany with secular authority. Enforcement of the Lateran decree outside the territory of the princearchbishop of Mainz was spotty. Prince-Bishop Konrad von Thüngen maintained his own system of tight control over the only press in Würzburg by licensing the printer, Johann Lobmeyer, and making him a paid court official. Martin Luther himself initially complied with the Lateran decree by seeking the permission of his ordinary Hieronymus Schultz, bishop of Brandenburg, 52 Nelson H. Minnich, “The Fifth Lateran Council and Preventive Censorship of Printed Books,” Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, Classe di Lettere e Filosofia, series 5, 2 (June 2010), 67–104, at 67–101; on the Jesuits see Lucio Biasiori, “Il controllo interno della produzione libraria nella Compagnia di Gesù e la formazione del Collegio dei Revisori generali (1550–1650),” Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, Classe di Lettere e Filosofia, series 5, 2 (June 2010), 221–249; and on the Scandinavian scene see above notes 10 and 12.

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for the printing of his Resolutiones, which he sent to him on February 13, 1518 and for which he later received a license. But Luther’s contempt for papal and conciliar legislation was soon demonstrated in his consigning the code of papal law to the flames of a bonfire outside Wittenberg’s Elster gate. In an effort to put a stop to the publications of Luther and his followers, Leo X, in the instructions he gave to Girolamo Aleandro, his nuncio to the emperor Charles V on July 16, 1520, complained of the books printed in Germany in defiance of the decree of Lateran V that contained errors condemned by the Holy See. Aleandro was to have these books publicly burnt and to proceed against their authors with the full authority of the Apostolic See. In response to the urgings of Aleandro, Charles V issued an edict at the Diet of Worms on May 8, 1521 that incorporated the central provisions of the Lateran decree without identifying their source. The edict provided that no book or other writing that disturbed the Christian faith might be published without the knowledge and consent of the local ordinary or of his substitutes and with the permission of the theological faculty (“in der heyligen Geschrifft”) of a nearby university. Books on other topics required only the permission of the bishop to be printed and sold. The imperial edict was in general poorly enforced, but efforts were made to impose censorship in ducal Saxony, the Habsburg lands (Breisgau, Austria, etc.), Bavaria, the prince-archbishoprics of Cologne, Mainz, and Salzburg, and the imperial cities of Strasbourg and Augsburg. At the Diet of Nuremberg on April 18, 1524, enforcement of press censorship was entrusted to local civil authorities to enforce as far as possible. In Milan, Duke Francesco II Sforza made reference to his imperial overlord’s Edict of Worms on March 27, 1523, but did not impose the system of prepublication censorship mandated in the edict, requiring instead, under threat of death and the confiscation of goods, that all citizens surrender, within four days, all copies of Luther’s writings to the ducal chancellor so that they could be destroyed. The Lateran decree on book censorship seems not to have been received in France. The old system of book censorship by the king, the local parlements, and the faculty of theology of the University of Paris remained in place. Not until 1521 did the university’s theological faculty or its deputies receive the right to render a judgment on any book on a religious topic, especially on the Bible, before it could be published. On June 13, 1521 the Parlement of Paris, with the concurrence of the procurator general of Francis I, who was away at the time, forbade any printer to publish anything “unless the authority of the University and of the theological faculty is given also by a visitation.” The Parlement of Paris thus granted to the University of Paris the 64

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right of censorship. Parlement and faculty cooperated, the faculty rendering judgments regarding orthodoxy and the Parlement enforcing its decisions. But this ordinance was not strictly followed, even by the university’s own printer, Joost Bade. Problems persisted over the next fifteen or so years. Francis I intervened to protect authors censored by the university and Parlement of Paris. The ordinance of 1521 was not strictly enforced until Francis came to fear civil unrest arising from heresy. The Placard Affair of 1534–1535 led to a crackdown on the printing and sale of heretical books. But it was not until the faculty of theology of the University of Paris produced a list of condemned books in 1543, printed in 1544 and approved by the Parlement of Paris in 1545, that effective measures were taken. Henry II (r. 1547–1559), via edicts of December 11, 1547 and June 26, 1551, banned the importing of any books from Protestant territories. In 1556 a new list of condemned books appeared; thereafter the lists produced by Rome replaced those issued by Paris.53 In Spain during the first half of the sixteenth century neither the Pragmatic Law of Toledo (1502) nor the decree of Lateran V (1515) were effectively implemented. The task of censorship was not carried out directly by the officials named in the Toledo legislation, but by members of the Supreme Council of the Spanish Inquisition and its local inquisitors, as allowed by the Lateran decree. From 1521 the inquisitors general and the Supreme Council of the Inquisition issued edicts banning the writings of Martin Luther and his followers and ordering local inquisitors to get booksellers and individual people to surrender any prohibited books and to rescind any permits to read them. These edicts were issued episodically and not enforced systematically. While the inquisitors granted licenses for some books to be published and banned others, they did not set up adequate procedures to police book production. No significant native authors were prosecuted. Books entered freely from France. Many persons ignored the need for licenses. In 1550 the Crown ordered the inquisitors to stop trying to control books. On September 1, 1551 the Supreme Council of the Inquisition issued its first catalogue of prohibited books, and the inquisitor general, Fernando Valdés, sought the support of the Crown to enforce it. The discovery of a cache of suspect imported books in 1552, and then of a circle of nobles espousing Protestant beliefs in northern Castile and in Seville, alarmed Charles V. A new law in 53

Francis M. Higman, “French-Speaking Regions, 1520–62,” in Gilmont et al., eds., The Reformation and the Book, 104–153, at 149–52; Jean-François Gilmont, John Calvin and the Printed Book, trans Karin Maag [Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies 72] (Kirksville, 2005), 273–274.

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1554 reserved to the president of the royal council the granting of licenses to publish or import books, and this was strictly enforced. With royal backing the Inquisition came down hard on heretics with a series of public burnings. The careful supervision of ports and frontiers by the Inquisition prevented the entry of Protestant literature into Spain.54 In England, church and civil authorities initially ignored the Lateran decree on prepublication censorship and instead issued lists of published books that were to be destroyed. In 1529 King Henry VIII forbade the possession of any books or writings containing erroneous doctrine or opinion. All such works were to be delivered to the bishop of the diocese within fifteen days. He listed fifteen books by authors such as William Tyndale (ca. 1494–1536), Simon Fish (d. 1531), and others to be surrendered. In 1530 he forbade the buying, receiving, or holding of any translations of the Bible and other works of William Tyndale or Simon Fish, whether in English, French, or Dutch.55 In 1538 Henry prohibited the importation and printing of Englishlanguage books and Bibles without a license. In 1553 Queen Mary I (r. 1553–1558) required printers to have a special license in writing. In 1556, at the provincial council of Canterbury, Reginald Pole (1500–1558) promulgated Decretum II, which mandated observance of the Lateran decree in England. Three years later Queen Elizabeth I (r. 1558–1603) incorporated key provisions of this decree.56

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Kinder, “Printing and Reformation Ideas,” 317. Tudor Royal Proclamations, I, 181–186, 193–197. Haigh, English Reformations, 136–137; Documents Illustrative of English Church History, 325, 436 no. 51; Reformatio Angliae ex decretis Reginaldi Poli Cardinalis Sedis Apostolicae Legati anno M.D.LVI. (Rome, 1562), fol. 5v; Heinrich Reusch, Der Index der verbotenen Bücher: Ein Beitrag zur Kirchen- und literaturgeschichte, 2 vols. (Bonn, 1883–1885), I, 88, 90. Prior to Pole’s conciliar legislation, censorship was imposed by the royal injunction of Mary in 1553 stating that no one was to print any “book, matter, ballad, rhyme, interlude, process, or treatise, nor play any interlude except they have her grace’s special license in writing for the same; under pain to incur her highness’ indignation and displeasure”: see Tudor Royal Proclamations, volume II: The Later Tudors (1553–1587), 6–7. Elizabeth I in her Injunctions of 1559 retained the essential contents of this provision: Tudor Royal Proclamations, II, 128, no. 51: “the Queen’s majesty straightly chargeth and commandeth that no manner of person shall print any manner of book or paper of what sort, nature, or in what language soever it be, except the same be first licensed by her majesty by express words in writing, or by six of her Privy Council, or be perused and licensed by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, the Bishop of London, the chancellors of both universities, the bishop being ordinary, and the archdeacon also of the place where any such shall be printed, or by two of them whereof the ordinary of the place to be always one. And that the names of such as shall allow the same to be added in the end of every such work for a testimony of the allowance thereof.” For an overview see David Loades, “Books and the English Reformation Prior to 1558,” in Gilmont et al., eds., The Reformation and the Book, 264–291. 55

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When dealing with the issues raised by the Protestants, the fathers at the Council of Trent referred back to the decree of the Lateran Council and called for its renewal. At its fourth session on April 8, 1546 the fathers of Trent ordered that no one was to have a book printed on a sacred topic or retain one already printed that had not been examined and approved by the local ordinary, on pain of the penalties prescribed in the Lateran decree. The papacy eventually assumed responsibility for determining which books were prohibited. At the beginning of the Reformation civil rulers had issued lists of forbidden books. Starting in 1544 universities published their lists: Paris in 1544 with 278 Latin and 250 French titles, and Louvain in 1546, 1550, and 1558 with 450 titles. In 1549 the combined authorities of the Inquisition, apostolic nuncio, and Tre Savi Sopra Eresia of the Venetian government issued a list of 149 condemnations. In 1554 the governments of Milan, Florence, and Venice published a new list of almost 600 entries that was furnished by the Roman Curia. In 1547 the Portuguese Inquisition compiled a list based on those from the universities of Paris and Louvain and a catalogue produced by the Spanish Inquisition. The Portuguese list printed in 1551 incorporated into its earlier catalogue material from the Louvain condemnation of 1550. In 1551 the Spanish Inquisition published a list that included works it had earlier condemned and those banned by the Louvain catalogue of 1550. And in 1559 the Spanish inquisitor Fernando Valdés issued a list of 698 condemned titles, based in good part on earlier lists from Louvain, Paris, and Portugal. In 1557, under Paul IV (pope 1555–1559), a Roman commission produced a list that was not officially promulgated but was circulated. Once revised, it was printed and promulgated in December 1558. It contained over a thousand titles. Pius IV (pope 1559–1565) revised the Roman index and promulgated it as the Index of the Council of Trent in 1564. In 1571 Pius V (pope 1566–1572) established the Congregation of the Index that became responsible for producing future indices.57 Those who produced these indices were theologians; those who enforced them were local bishops and civil rulers.

Inquisitors The medieval church developed formal procedures for identifying someone who held erroneous beliefs. The person on the local level who was 57 Jesùs Martín De Bujanda, Index des livres interdits, volume X: Thesaurus de la litérature interdite au XVI siècle: Auteurs, ouvrages, éditions, avec addenda et corrigenda (Geneva, 1996), 18–27.

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responsible for maintaining orthodoxy was the bishop. Because many bishops were not skilled in theology, they delegated the identification of a heretic to a qualified official, such as the bishop’s chancellor or vicar general or scholasticus. With the spread of heresy (Catharism, Bogomilism, Waldensianism, Spiritualist Franciscanism, etc.) in Western Christendom the popes became involved and, starting in 1227, provided assistance to local bishops by appointing papal inquisitors who were usually members of either the Dominican or Franciscan orders who were trained in theology. They worked primarily in areas of Germany, Poland, northern and southern France, Aragon, and Italy. Formal procedures were set down and manuals were written to guide the work of the inquisitors – for example, those of Bernard Gui (1324) and of Nicolai Eymrich (1376). The late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries saw the rise of new heresies associated with John Wycliffe (ca. 1330–1384) and Jan Hus (ca. 1373–1415).58 At the Council of Vienne (1311–1312) Clement V (pope 1305–1314) set down rules for inquisitors. To help avoid any indiscretions and evil acts, the pope decreed forty to be the minimum age for an inquisitor. The approval of the local bishop was required to proceed with arrest, imprisonment, and torture. And no one was to profit financially from the exercise of the office.59 The inquisitors were appointed only after a long period of theological study in the mendicants’ studia and in local universities, and frequently after having proved their practical sense by having been elected to office in their orders.60 In the Catholic Church, two institutions arose to deal with the new problems of fictive conversions to Christianity by Jews in Iberia and the challenge of Protestantism. On November 1, 1478, at the request of the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand of Aragon (r. 1479–1516) and Isabella of Castile (r. 1474–1504), Pope Sixtus IV (pope 1471–1484), by the bull Exigit sincerae devotionis affectus, gave these rulers the power to nominate inquisitors for each diocese or city in their lands, and in 1483 he allowed them to set up a centralized bureaucracy (the Supreme Council of the Inquisition) under a general inquisitor nominated by the king and approved by the pope. This central council, composed of university-trained canon lawyers with skill in 58 John H. Arnold, “Inquisizione medieval,” in Dizionario storico dell’inquisizione, ed. Adriano Prosperi, 4 vols. (Pisa, 2010), II, 809–811. 59 Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, I, 382: 36–42. 60 Andrea Del Col, “Inquisitore,” in Dizionario storico dell’inquisizione, II, 800–803, at 801; Michael Tavuzzi, Renaissance Inquisitors: Dominican Inquisitors and Inquisitorial Districts in Northern Italy, 1474–1527 [Studies in the History of Christian Traditions 134] (Leiden, 2007), 38–44.

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civil law who were forty or more (or at least thirty) years old, now appointed the local inquisitors. At the beginning the local inquisitors were often secular priests with university degrees in “canon law and often also in civil law, [but] rarely in theology.” The king preferred secular priests over mendicants as inquisitors because the friars could be too independent.61 On May 23, 1536 Paul III (pope 1534–1549), by the bull Cum ad nihil magis, and by new measures in 1547, set up a similar institution in Portugal. On July 21, 1542, by the bull Licet ab initio, he established the Roman Inquisition to deal primarily with the threat of Protestant ideas entering Italy, but in theory it enjoyed universal jurisdiction (excluding the Spanish and Portuguese lands). A congregation of six cardinals was given extensive powers to suppress heresy. They chose as their agents friars from the Dominican and Franciscan orders who had doctorates in theology, were skilled in canon law, and were at least thirty years old. The local mendicant superiors initially chose the inquisitors, but eventually they were restricted to preparing lists of competent candidates from which the congregation itself chose the inquisitors.62 The surviving records of the various inquisitions do not reveal a significant role in regulating theological discourse. The inquisitors enforced established doctrine. But on occasion a professional theologian was brought before its tribunal for introducing new doctrine. In Spain Philip II ordered the archbishop of Valencia, Juan de Riberra, to conduct a visitation of the University of Salamanca in 1570. When some professors of theology and the rector protested they were sent to prison, but eventually released. Beginning in 1571 some professors of Scripture at the University of Salamanca were denounced to the tribunal of the Inquisition in Valladolid by a colleague, the Greek-language scholar León de Castro, and by the Domincan Bartolomé de Medina. St. Luis de León, Martín Martínez de Cantalapiedra, and Gaspar de Grajal were imprisoned. After more than four years in jail Luis was forced to make a retraction of several propositions and Grajal became ill and died, while Martínez was released after five years but lost his teaching position. Other Scripture scholars were also denounced: Alonso Gudiel of the University of Osuna, who died in prison awaiting trial; Benito Arias Montano, the librarian at Escorial, who escaped the clutches of the 61

Jean-Pierre Dedieu, “Inquisitori di distretto, Spagna,” in Dizionario storico dell’inquisizione, II, 803–804. 62 Del Col, “Inquisitore,” 801; John Tedeschi, The Prosecution of Heresy: Collected Studies on the Inquisition in Early Modern Italy [Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 78] (Binghamton, 1991), 60–64, 127–130.

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Inquisition, thanks to his royal and papal patrons; José de Sigüenza, the Hieronymite historian accused of heterodoxy, who was quickly exonerated; and Francisco Sánchez, a professor of grammar at Salamanca, who was severely reprimanded. According to Henry Kamen, “These were virtually the only intellectuals to be denounced to the Inquisition. Their cases were provoked not by the Inquisition but by rivalry between theologians and grammarians at one university, Salamanca.”63 Most professors were concerned with maintaining orthodoxy. Many of the theologians and canonists who sat on the tribunals of the Inquisition and helped with the compiling of lists of prohibited books came from the professorial ranks of Salamanca and other universities. The strict enforcement of these prohibitions, however, put restraints on theological discourse.64 In Italy the Roman Inquisition did not proceed against any professors at the Universities of Bologna and Padua. Despite a denunciation for heresy in 1514, Pietro Pomponazzi escaped any punishment. But in Bologna some German students were arrested on suspicion of heresy in 1562, and in Padua the papal nuncio and local bishop tried repeatedly and unsuccessfully to impose the Tridentine Profession of Faith on German Lutheran and Greek Orthodox students. In 1587 the Venetian Republic formally granted religious tolerance to the students.65 The 1616 condemnation by the Roman Inquisition of the Copernican theory as false and entirely contrary to Sacred Scripture ended many decades of its teaching at Salamanca and other Catholic universities.66 Among the Anabaptists there was no institution resembling the Inquisition. The guardian of correct belief was the local congregation under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. The congregation came to a consensus as to what it should believe by means of discussion and prayer. Those members who would not conform were subject to the ban or excommunication.67 In Protestant lands there were no permanent institutions on a national or transnational level with a professional staff charged with safeguarding 63

Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition, 123–127; Stefania Pastore, “Arias Montano, Benito,” in Dizionario storico dell’Inquisizione, I, 95–97; Mariano Peset Reig, “Università, Spagna,” in Dizionario storico dell’Inquisizione, III, 1613–1616, at 1614. 64 Peset, “Università, Spagna,” 1614–1615. 65 Guido Dall’Olio, “Bologna,” in Dizionario storico dell’Inquisizione, I, 211–213; Silvia Ferretto, “Università, Italia,” in Dizionario storico dell’Inquisizione, III, 1610–1613. 66 Franceco Beretta, “Galilei, Galileo,” in Dizionario storico dell’Inquisizione, II, 636–640, at 638; Peset, “Università, Spagna,” 1614. 67 Franklin Hamlin Littell, The Origins of Sectarian Protestantism: A Study of the Anabaptist View of the Church (New York, 1964 [1952]), 86–95; Werner O. Packull, Hutterite Beginnings: Communitarian Experiments during the Reformation (Baltimore, 1995), 304–307.

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orthodoxy. Individual cases were investigated and tried by ad hoc committees: Robert Barnes in England; Michael Servetus in Geneva; Anabaptists in Germany. In 1530 Luther and Melanchthon recommended capital punishment for blasphemous Anabaptists who repudiated the church and civil government, and in 1536 Urbanus Rhegius and Ambrosius Blarer joined in this judgment. In Saxony Anabaptists were condemned by aulic courts (Hofgericht).68 If Protestants were reluctant to condemn someone to death for heresy, their hesitancy was put aside when it came to cases of witchcraft. Following the injunction of Exodus 22:18 (“Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live”), Protestant state authorities zealously pursued those who they believed worshiped the devil and engaged in magical practices. While ecclesiastical and civil authorities might cooperate in prosecuting suspected witches, secular courts took increasing charge of the trials and carried out the executions.69

Councils, Synods, Convocations, Consistories Over the centuries major decisions on questions of orthodoxy and heresy were made by assemblies of clerics. In the Catholic tradition, provincial councils have condemned local heretics, but once their ideas spread the task often fell to higher authorities. Thus, while Wycliffe was condemned at the Council of London in 1382, his ideas reached Prague and the archbishop there requested a papal condemnation which Alexander V provided and his successor John XXIII had confirmed by the Council of Rome in 1412 and the Council of Constance in 1415. At councils, theologians were consulted on questions of heresy. During the course of the fifteenth century their voice at councils became increasingly important, even being given a deliberative vote at the Council of Ferrara, Florence, and Rome (1438–1445). In subsequent councils they were only consulted by the prelates, but their role was crucial in clarifying Catholic doctrine at the Council of Trent where their public debates and private consultations educated the bishops on the issues at stake.70 In the Anglican tradition, meetings of the Convocation of Canterbury, if consulted at all, were used by the rulers of England to debate doctrinal 68

Clasen, Anabaptism, 382. Brian P. Levack, “The Great Witch-Hunt,” in Handbook of European History, 1400–1600: Late Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Reformation, volume II: Visions, Programs, and Outcomes, ed. Thomas A. Brady, Jr., Heiko A. Oberman, and James D. Tracy (Grand Rapids, 1995), 607–633, here 614, 624. 70 Minnich, “The Voice of Theologians.” 69

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questions, provide a justification for change, and bring the clergy along on the religious course already determined by the royal head of the church.71 In the Lutheran tradition, conferences of theologians met and hammered out statements of belief: the Swabian Concord (1575), the Swabian-Saxon Concord (1575), the Maulbronn Formula (1576), the Torgau Book (1576), and the Bergan Book (1577) that became the Formula of Concord (1577). Instead of assembling a synod of the Lutheran Church to approve the Formula of Concord, the document was circulated among Lutheran princes, cities, pastors, and theologians, collecting over 8,000 subscribers.72 In the Reformed tradition, synods were an important feature of church governance. Numerous synods were held in France, the Low Countries, Bohemia, Hungary, and Poland that resulted in confessions of faith (e.g. the Gallic, the Belgic, the Consensus Sendomiriensis, etc.). But the two most important assemblies were the Synod of Dort (1618–1619) and the Westminster Convocation (1643–1652). The Dutch national assembly consisted of about 100 official members (ministers, elders, and theologians, and about twenty-five foreign representatives), plus thirteen Remonstrant theologians, who were allowed to speak for two months. After 128 days of debate in 180 sessions, the synod issued five articles or canons against the teaching of the Remonstrants that resulted in the dismissal of 200 ministers. Of the 151 persons appointed by the English Parliament in 1643 to the Westminster assembly, 121 were “learned, godly, and judicious divines.” Although representatives from other Reformed churches were invited to attend, only five Scots came. In the end, they produced the Westminster Confession of Faith and the Shorter and Larger Catechisms which set out standards of belief.73 Theologians played essential roles in formulating the creeds of the various Reformed churches. Among the Anabaptists there were gatherings, sometimes on an annual basis, of the leaders (ministers and elders) who met in various places to define correct doctrine and draw up articles of belief and ordinances. It is unclear to what extent local congregations felt obliged to follow these.74

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Moorman, A History of the Church in England, 167, 177–179, 181, 190, 200–201. Conrad Bergendorf, The Church of the Lutheran Reformation: A Historical Survey of Lutheranism (St. Louis, 1967), 116–118. 73 Glen S. Sunshine, “Synods,” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation, IV, 135–137, at 137; David P. Daniel, “Synods in Eastern Europe,” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation, IV, 137–139; Cornelis Augustijn, “Dordrecht, Synod of,” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation, II, 2–3. 74 Clasen, Anabaptism, 49–51, 74–75. 72

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With the consensus reached at various assemblies and its formulation in creedal statements that enjoyed great authority, theologians were required to conform their teachings to the official positions of their church. Both Catholic and Protestant churches used similar methods for regulating theological discourse and for enforcing their credal statements. Many of these means predated the Reformation controversy. What changed most was the involvement of civil authorities in the process. Neither academic theologians nor nonprofessional clerics and laity were free to interpret the Scriptures according to what they considered the promptings of the Holy Spirit. bibliography Appold, Kenneth. “Academic Life and Teaching in Post-Reformation Lutheranism.” In Robert Kolb, ed., Lutheran Ecclesiastical Culture, 1550–1675. Leiden, 2008, 65–115. Clasen, Claus-Peter. Anabaptism: A Social History, 1525–1618: Switzerland, Austria, Moravia, South and Central Germany. Ithaca, 1972. De Bujanda, Jesùs Martínez. Index des livres interdits, 10 vols. Geneva, 1984–1996. Dizionario storico dell’inquisizione, ed. Adriano Prosperi, 4 vols. Pisa, 2010. Farge, James K. Orthodoxy and Reform in Early Reformation France: The Faculty of Theology of Paris, 1500–1543 [Studies in Medieval and Reformation Thought 32]. Leiden, 1983. Gilmont, Jean-François, Karin Maag, and Jean-Gilles Monfroy, eds. The Reformation and the Book. Aldershot, 1998 [1st French ed. 1990]. Grendler, Paul F. The Universities of the Italian Renaissance. Baltimore, 2002. Haigh, Christopher. The English Reformations: Religion, Politics, and Society under the Tudors. Oxford, 1993. Mazzone, Umberto, and Angelo Turchini, eds. Le visite patorali [Annali dell’Istituto storico italo-germanico 18]. Bologna, 1985. Minnich, Nelson H. “The Fifth Lateran Council and Preventive Censorship of Printed Books.” Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, Classe di Lettere e Filosofia, series 5, 2 (June 2010), 67–104. Monter, William. Calvin’s Geneva [New Dimensions in History: Historical Cities]. New York, 1967. The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation, ed. Hans J. Hillerbrand, 4 vols. New York, 1996. Strauss, Gerald. Luther’s House of Learning: Indoctrination of the Young in the German Reformation. Baltimore, 1978. Tedeschi, John. The Prosecution of Heresy: Collected Studies on the Inquisition in Early Modern Italy [Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 78]. Binghamton, 1991.

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Political Change and Theological Discourse kenneth g. appold Introduction The development of theological discourse during the Reformation period coincided with epochal shifts in Europe’s political culture. Church-state relations were redefined, traditional social hierarchies saw themselves challenged, cities demanded greater autonomy while princes sought greater authority, Europeans encountered entirely new worlds, and Christians tried to reimagine their churches. All of these dynamics impacted theological discourse. They forced theologians to take up new topics, explore new fields, and reexamine traditional doctrines. The opposite is true, as well: theological ideas instigated changes and drove political dynamics, both directly and indirectly, wittingly and unwittingly. Theologians were players in a grand game, their parameters often dictated by factors beyond their control, but their moves affecting the outcome in important and sometimes unexpected ways. In that regard, it is perhaps less helpful to dwell on agency or intent, as older histories of ideas have done, and more appropriate to describe discourse as something shaped by multiple factors, some of which are located in the special “genius” of particular authors, while others are larger than any individual actor and visible only in retrospect. Importantly, the narratives do not begin in the sixteenth century, but have their origins in medieval processes that continue in the various trajectories of the Reformation era. The following chapter traces some of those complicated interactions between theology and politics. It cannot pretend to do so comprehensively, but focuses on a number of neuralgic examples to illustrate those dynamics. It also focuses on factors internal to discourse itself, not on external controlling instruments such as censorship.1 At issue is not the degree to which 1

For an account of such factors see Nelson H. Minnich’s chapter in this volume (Chapter 4).

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temporal rulers influenced theological debates, but rather how the flow of theological discourse reflected challenges raised by changing political landscapes. The term “politics” is used broadly and refers to discussions of “polity” in both the temporal and ecclesial realms. In fact, because the very distinction between “church” and “state” was at issue during this period, any conversation about “politics” necessarily concerns both.

The Fragmenting of Christendom If there was one overarching political agenda of medieval Europe, then it is encapsulated by the term “unity.” The fall of the Western Roman Empire broke apart a political entity that stretched from Britain to Western Asia, and, in the West, scattered its parts into countless small fiefdoms and principalities. Gathering those shards back together and refashioning the whole became the central political project of high ecclesial and temporal rulers from the fifth century onward. That project’s greatest theoretical challenge revolved around who, exactly, should govern this entirety. There were two prime candidates: the pope and the emperor. Neither choice was obvious at the start: the bishop of Rome had not yet achieved the status one associates with the title “pope” in its later medieval glory; and the Holy Roman emperor did not exist at all until Christmas day of the year 800. Their respective ascendancies were accompanied and buttressed by competing ideologies. Papalists based their claims on several sources, including scriptural references to the Petrine commission and the transfer of the power of the keys in Matthew 16:18–19. Conceptually, they drew on the legacy of Augustine’s City of God, applying the distinction between an “earthly” and “heavenly” city to the temporal and sacerdotal spheres, respectively. In that view, the latter was clearly superior, as it dealt with the “eternal” goods necessary for salvation, while the former concerned itself with managing sinful humanity on earth. In an oft-cited letter to the Byzantine emperor Anastasius I in 494, Pope Gelasius I invoked this distinction in a way that would become programmatic for papalist thinking in Western Europe. It had little immediate impact, however, since Anastasius remained unimpressed and the pope’s position too weak. That would change dramatically in the eleventh century. Disgusted by the corruption and ineffectiveness of the papal office, a group of reformers introduced measures that redefined the papacy. A papal election decree in 1059, and a series of engagements with temporal rulers that scaled back royal “investiture” of high clergy, aimed to purify the priestly class from 75

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secular interference.2 These measures worked, and the papacy reached unprecedented heights of influence over affairs in both church and state, culminating in the remarkably effective reign of Pope Innocent III (1198–1216). In addition to their usual title of “successor of Peter,” which referred to their local office in Rome, popes from the age of Innocent onward began to stylize themselves as “vicar of Christ,” signaling the universality of their claim to authority. Importantly, those claims extended not only over the spiritual community of the church, but also, by invoking a vaguely defined but suggestive notion of “fullness of power” (plenitudo potestatis), over the temporal realm as well. Innocent, a trained jurist and superb politician, wielded those tools expertly. At this point, one could credibly claim that the pope acted as an instrument of unity for Western Christendom. That would soon change. Potent political ideologies tend to die a slow death. While one could say that the papalist moment ended definitively in 1378, when one college of cardinals elected two competing popes and brought visions of Christian unity crashing down into a bitter schism that pitted one half of Western Europe against the other, the decline began much earlier and its afterlife fizzled on for another century and a half. That popes should become an instrument of disunity emerged from an example of ideological overreach and diplomatic incompetence perpetrated by Pope Boniface VIII (1294–1303) in the years around 1300. Failing to appreciate the danger of an emerging political rival in the king of France, Boniface issued a crescendo of confrontational missives to Paris, climaxing in the famous bull Unam sanctam of 1302.3 “There is one holy, Catholic and apostolic church,” the bull begins before continuing with the well-known stipulation, “that outside this church there is no salvation . . . .” Of that church there is only one earthly head, the pope himself, called to judge all spiritual and – significantly – all earthly powers. “Therefore we declare, state, define and pronounce that it is altogether necessary to salvation for every human creature to be subject to the Roman Pontiff.”4 That declaration of papal supremacy was not entirely new; it built upon a tradition of thought spanning back to Gelasius. It was, however, unprecedented in its directness and in the boldness of its usage. It failed spectacularly. A new age had dawned, an age in which kings cut from the cynical cloth of France’s Philip IV, “the Fair,” took such bluster in their stride. The king sent soldiers For source texts and a fuller account see Brian Tierney, The Crisis of Church and State 1050–1300 (Toronto, Buffalo, and London, 1988), 33–95. 3 4 See ibid., 172–192. Ibid., 188–189. 2

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to apprehend the pope. The pope died. His successors were French. They even moved the papal court from Rome to Avignon, an ecclesial fortress on the edge of then France. It was a perverse exploitation of the papalists’ own claims to universal jurisdiction: if the pope was truly “vicar of Christ,” then there was no need for him to remain in Rome. The ever-shifting medieval balance between temporal power and spiritual authority had tilted back to favor the former. Thus weakened, the papacy met its greatest crisis in the Schism. Two popes, then three – it was a tragicomic spectacle. The royalist model of church governance predated the papal. In a line reaching from Constantine through Clovis of France and finally to Charlemagne, monarchs viewed themselves as Christ’s most suitable representative at the head of the earthly church. Conceptually, this ideology was predicated on biblical notions of Christ’s kingship, and on Israelite traditions of kings anointed to a sacral office. In that view there was no separation of spiritual and corporal spheres; both belong together just as soul and body form a unity in one earthly person. Therefore, both demand one ruler who cares equally for his people’s corporeal and spiritual needs. Such views found articulation throughout the Middle Ages, and especially during the Investiture Controversies of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Though its proponents lost ground amidst the reforming papacy’s ascent, their views, sometimes expressed anonymously, never fell silent. Now, during the Western Schism and the papalists’ moment of weakness, one could have expected them to seize the opportunity. That they did not owed to a basic problem: no king in Europe could lay claim to universal jurisdiction; kings were regional rulers. The pope’s primary rival for stewardship of the earthly church had long been the Holy Roman emperor. It was pope and emperor who, together, held the complementary swords that kept intact the mystical body of Christendom. The question was who had the upper hand. Apologists for papal supremacy therefore had the emperor in mind as the person most in need of subjugation to the pontiff’s authority. Focused on universality of jurisdiction, they did not fully anticipate the rise of smaller, more nimble national kingdoms such as France and later England. Philip IV exposed that vulnerability, but neither he nor any other European monarch, even leaving aside the issues of universality and unity, had developed the practical or theoretical resources necessary for control of the churches in his land. Philip’s conflict with Boniface arose from a desire to do that. His actions represented a first step, but it was a step into an undefined future with uncertain goals. With both popes and emperors advancing longstanding arguments for universal jurisdiction in temporal and spiritual affairs, it remained unclear how smaller-scale political entities would relate 77

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to those claims or define themselves. As a result, the next two centuries of European church history saw considerable instability and no clear route of return to the project of a unified christianitas. That unity, imperfectly realized even in the best of times, now underwent a process of accelerated fragmentation. Not only did kingdoms, most notably in France and England, then later in Spain and Portugal, emerge to establish centralized power bases that raised the possibility of national churches, but smaller territories within the empire began to stretch the seams of their autonomy as well, calling for imperial reform to facilitate those efforts.5 Some of the most interesting developments came from even more local entities: wealthy and ambitious cities. Those in northern Italy led the way. Trade-based capitalism had given them their wealth and empowered a striving new social class that belonged neither to the nobility nor the peasantry. It was a “middle class,” known as bourgeoisie in French. Its rise helped push the envelope of political thought. Cities in northern Italy were famous for their independence. The medieval chronicler Otto von Freising had already noted this in the twelfth century, observing that the political ambitions of those cities was dragging northern Italy out of the feudal age and into something new, replacing the landed nobility and hereditary rulers with city councils and term-limited elected officials.6 They were turning their backs on the empire and were forming republics. As that process unfolded, its unprecedented character meant that the city-states were moving into a legal terra incognita. In fact, from the standpoint of imperial Roman law, their declarations of autonomy from the emperor’s jurisdiction were illegal. The thirteenth and fourteenth centuries saw multiple emperors striving to reassert dominion over the cities, but to no avail. In turn, the cities developed legal arguments and political theories that sought to legitimize their liberty. One of the most influential legal minds of the fourteenth century, Bartolus of Saxoferrato (1314–1357), conceded that the emperor could be said to have de iure dominion over the cities, but that the facts on the ground had rendered those claims untenable. De facto, the cities were their own rulers – and the law needed to adapt to recognize this new reality. The cities were free and governed themselves; in effect, they were their “own princes” (sibi princeps), their authority within their realms equal to

5 For a fuller account of these developments see Thomas A. Brady, German Histories in the Age of Reformations, 1400–1650 (Cambridge, 2009). 6 Quoted in Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1998), volume I: The Renaissance, 3.

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that of the emperor in his.7 That line of thinking resonated well at the court of Philip IV of France, and gave rise to the “modern legal concept of the State,” setting precedents for other cities and kingdoms in Europe, and further eroding the vision of imperial unity.8 Such notions of popular sovereignty were expanded further by another Italian thinker, Marsilius of Padua (ca. 1275–1342), in his influential work, Defender of the Peace (1324). His arguments form an analogue to those of Bartolus. Marsilius, too, argues for the sovereignty of the cities; his target, though, is the papacy. In building his case, Marsilius launches a comprehensive attack on papal claims to temporal jurisdiction, plenitudo potestatis, and on any form of coercive power. This has ecclesiological implications, for in dismantling those aspects of papal power Marsilius opens the door to a kind of congregationalism that inverts the hierarchical conception of church. Sovereignty rests with the whole people, not just with one individual; it is the people who may designate a “legislator” to work on their behalf, but authority ultimately always rests with them. As Marsilius himself points out, this is an argument for conciliarism.9 In this way, the political ambitions of northern Italian cities impacted theological history. Their advocates developed conceptual resources that came just in time to help the late medieval church solve its greatest crisis: how to end the Schism. If two popes simultaneously could claim to be canonically elected, and neither wished to abdicate in favor of the other, then there needed to be a way to appeal to a higher authority. For obvious reasons, papalist ideology did not make provisions for such a higher authority. Nor was a royalist takeover by temporal rulers feasible. Building on Marsilius’s and others’ recently articulated notions of popular sovereignty, however, theologians such as Jean Gerson (1363–1429) were able to argue that the whole of Christendom, acting collectively and represented at a general council, did constitute the authority needed to overrule and depose a pope. After a false start in Pisa (1409), and some additional nuancing that conceded to the papacy the right to convoke councils, those theories were put to a successful test at the Council of Constance (1414–1418). By now there were three popes; two yielded to the election of one new pope, Martin V, while the third, deposed by the council, retreated to his fortress castle where he died in isolation. Thanks to the council, the Schism was ended. But the conciliarists wanted more. They envisioned an entirely new church polity

7

Ibid., 9–11.

8

Ibid., 11.

9

Ibid., 18–22.

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based on the regular meeting of councils (ideally every decade). To this they pinned their hopes for reforming the church. Those hopes and visions were dashed in the decades that followed. The papalists struck back, declared as an abuse against canon law and deeply threatening the teaching that one could appeal to a council over the decision of a pope (Execrabilis, 1460), and effectively ended the movement. Not even the most sanguine apologists for papal supremacy during the decades between 1460 and 1517 felt entirely secure, however. There were simply too many open questions, both legal and theological, and too many conflicting political agendas for any knowledgeable person to believe that the fissures within the church had healed. The Middle Ages had produced three models for church polity: papal, royal, and conciliar. At the eve of the Reformation, despite the recent practical victory of the papal model, all three were very much alive in the theological discourse of the day. As the process of political fragmentation continued into the sixteenth century, all three would find expression in both thought and practice.

Emerging Ecclesiologies When, on October 31, 1517, Martin Luther (1483–1546) sent Archbishop Albrecht of Mainz a letter containing several documents, including a list of 95 Theses, criticizing the practice and understanding of indulgences, he appears to have hoped for a broader discussion on that topic. Instead, after Albrecht forwarded the materials to Rome, Luther found himself drawn into a debate on papal authority. If Rome’s unexpectedly defensive response stemmed from a continued sense of vulnerability, its approach backfired. The very topic the Curia wished to avoid was now at the center of a rapidly expanding dispute. Had Luther merely been a solitary friar teaching at an unimportant university, he might have been disciplined and ultimately silenced. But he happened to be subject to one of the most powerful rulers in the Holy Roman Empire, Elector Frederick III of Saxony, commonly known as “the Wise.” That meant that any debate between Luther and the Curia, particularly if it included issues related to papal powers of jurisdiction, would be projected onto a much larger political screen. Frederick, along with many other German princes, had a stake in its outcome – an interest that drew on centuries of contested discourse on that precise topic. As for Luther himself, whatever his views on the papacy may have been in October 1517, the events of the next few years destroyed any confidence he may have had in the institutional hierarchy of the church. 80

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In August 1520 Luther published one of his three pivotal Reformation writings of that year, an address “To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation Concerning the Reform of the Christian Estate.”10 It contains his most comprehensive reform program to that point, but the fact that he addresses it to the German nobility, and not to his bishops or the pope, is significant. Having given up on the church hierarchs, he now calls on secular leaders to take up their Christian duty and begin reforming the church. Anticipating an obvious objection, he then explains to them why he feels they are empowered to do so despite not belonging to the clergy, or “spiritual estate.” All baptized Christians, so Luther, are “of the spiritual estate, all are truly priests, bishops, and popes.” More fundamentally, “there is no true, basic difference between laymen and priests, princes and bishops, between religious and secular.”11 The fact that Luther later launches an attack on the pope’s “meddling” in temporal affairs, and calls for curtailments in the pope’s powers of jurisdiction seems almost anticlimactic.12 Those views reiterated longstanding arguments that German (and other European) lay leaders knew well and welcomed. Here, Luther was playing to his audience. But the move to collapse the traditional separation of layperson and clergy, and to include laypeople within the spiritual estate, had revolutionary potential in this environment. Oddly, the consequences of Luther’s move remained relatively muted within the emerging polities of Lutheranism itself. Luther had added an important caveat: While everyone who is baptized “is already a consecrated priest, bishop, and pope . . . it is not seemly that just anybody should exercise such office.” There is no “basic difference between laymen and priests . . . except for the sake of office and work [emphasis added].”13 Clergy did not disappear from Lutheran churches. If anything, the practical and social difference between clergy and laypeople grew more marked. While Lutheran clergy did marry, thanks to the Reformers’ rejection of medieval celibacy requirements, and in that regard lived more like laypeople, they also faced much more extensive educational requirements than pre-Reformation priests. By the seventeenth century Lutheran clergy in most environments belonged to the social and cultural elite of their communities; theological differences between clergy and laypeople may have been leveled, but the social differences had simply shifted.

10 12

11 LW 44, 123–217; WA 6, 404–469. LW 44, 129; WA 6, 408. 13 LW 44, 160 f., 164–168; WA 6, 430 f., 433–435. LW 44, 129; WA 6, 408.

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Nonetheless, Luther’s empowerment of laypeople had wide-reaching ramifications for ecclesial polity throughout Protestantism. It may have begun as an ad hoc appeal spoken into a particular situation, but it coincided with prevailing moods of anticlericalism in Europe, and with the political ambitions of princes and cities eager for greater control over the religious life of their domains. Luther put into stark and straightforward theological terms notions that had been swirling around for a very long time. Those factors magnified and popularized Luther’s thought, even among those who would not have attributed their agendas explicitly to those writings. Beginning in 1522, Ulrich Zwingli (1484–1531) orchestrated the Reformation of Zurich by enlisting the city councils and, after having sidelined the bishop, entrusted these civic bodies with oversight over Zurich’s religious affairs. Other cities soon followed suit.14 Temporal powers were taking on spiritual tasks, thereby collapsing the medieval Augustinian-Gelasian construct of two realms, or “swords,” which had been the backbone of papalist polity. Perhaps the most rigorous rejection of hierarchical polity came from Anabaptist communities. Some of their origins lay in Zurich, where differences with Zwingli caused them to go their own way. Persecuted viciously in Zurich and throughout Europe, many of them found refuge in Moravia. Their most conspicuous doctrine was that of believer’s baptism – rather than the traditionally practiced baptism of infants. Less often appreciated is the ecclesiological context that gave believer’s baptism its sense. These so-called radicals were committed above all to restoring a more authentic and biblical form of community, for which a theological foundation was laid by the first great Anabaptist theologian, Balthasar Hubmaier (1480–1528). The confession of faith that preceded baptism was a public confession, offered before the whole congregation and pledging dedication to the life of the congregation and its discipline. Since those communities separated themselves from the rest of society, refused involvement in civic affairs, accepted strict moral guidelines, invited the fraternal admonition of their peers, oftentimes shared all of their possessions in a spirit of Christian communism, and almost always faced danger from other Christians and temporal powers, that was a momentous commitment. Because few Anabaptist communities practiced formal ordination, and their decision making was collective and congregationally based, they broke more significantly than any other Reformation-era Christians with the hierarchical polity of the past. On the other hand, their 14 See the classic account by Bernd Moeller, Imperial Cities and the Reformation: Three Essays, ed. and trans. Hans C. Erik Midelfort and Mark U. Edwards, Jr. (Philadelphia, 1972).

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ascetic, separated communal life and rejection of wealth placed them in continuity with some of Christianity’s oldest monastic traditions. That was evident in aspects of their theology, such as the cultivation of a spiritual disposition toward Gelassenheit (“yieldedness”), articulated well by the Hutterian Peter Walpot (1521–1578), and in their commitment to pacifism. Not all early Anabaptists shared that rejection of the sword, however, and there was open disagreement between communities in the early years. Hubmaier, for one, advocated for greater involvement in civic affairs. Political circumstances forced the Anabaptists’ hand, however. First the city of Zurich passed an ordinance condemning “rebaptism” under pain of death in 1526; then the Empire followed suit three years later, accusing Anabaptists of sedition. Most of the movement’s first-generation leaders and theologians were executed. Apart from the human tragedy, those dynamics clearly curtailed an important theological conversation. Politically, the Anabaptist movement mapped onto longer-term developments in the rural communities of Western Europe. Much like the princes and cities, rural towns and villages desired more local autonomy. Scholars often refer to this desire for communal self-determination as “communalism.”15 It found clear and persistent expression in local congregations’ calls to reform the tithing system in order to allow them to elect and maintain their own clergy. Once Luther’s thought began to spread through these regions, that desire became more specific: The rural people wanted to hire pastors who would preach the proper Gospel. They began to view this not only as a principle of social justice, but also as a matter of “divine law.” Coupled with the massive oppression suffered by many common people at the hands of their lords during this era, their religious aims soon included demands to end the slave-like condition of serfdom, as well as a restoration of economic rights that the lords had taken from them. The most significant expression of such views, supported by careful theological rationales and biblical references, came in the Twelve Articles, a peasant manifesto published and widely disseminated in 1525. While Martin Luther may have inspired the peasants’ appeal to theology, he did not support their cause. Instead, the Reformer issued a pedantic and superficial response to the Twelve Articles, in which he accused peasants seeking liberation of trying to “steal” from the lords who kept them as

15 Peter Blickle, From the Communal Reformation to the Revolution of the Common Man (Leiden, 1998).

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property.16 It was another theologian who lent the peasants his support: Thomas Müntzer (ca. 1489–1525). Müntzer’s frustrations with the corruption and injustice of his day drove him toward a form of mystical apocalypticism. He envisioned the imminent coming of an end-times conflict in which God would lift his sword and cut down the forces of evil. The latter he saw as concentrated especially among the princes and clergy, whom he warned in fiery sermons to repent and join the cause – or perish. An apocalyptic conflagration did come, but it was more earthly than divine, and it was not the princes who perished. Peasants throughout southern and central Germany revolted against their lords during the spring and summer of 1525. They were decimated. Tens of thousands were mown down mercilessly by armed soldiers, many of them mounted. Müntzer was captured, tortured, and executed. The peasants’ movement was over. The common people’s enthusiasm for the established church, whether Lutheran or Roman Catholic, suffered durably. As theories, communalism and late medieval conciliarism had in common a devolution of authority from individual hierarchs to the whole people. Those commitments were frustrated in the truncated peasants’ movement, and constrained in post-1460 conciliarism, but they found expression in other polities. Perhaps the most successful long-term application of lay empowerment within the church came at the hands of John Calvin (1509–1564). Its model was Geneva. Like those of Zurich and other Swiss cities, Geneva’s Reformation came through its city councils, and at the expense of its bishop. The blueprint was laid by Calvin and his older compatriot, the French Reformer Guillaume Farel (1489–1565). Unlike Zurich, however, where the “state” had effectively taken over the church, Calvin’s Geneva tipped the balance in the other direction. Calvin envisioned a “godly society,” not only a reformation of the church but a moral overhaul of the entire city. To that end, he saw the implementation of strict and largely ascetic behavioral codes, supervised by the church. Unlike the more extreme forms of medieval papalism of which it was vaguely reminiscent, this model was predicated on a much less clerical vision of the church. This was not a church of priests and bishops. Instead, Calvin – drawing on the work of the Strasbourg Reformer Martin Bucer – implemented a fourfold structure of church leadership: pastors, elders, doctors (teachers), and deacons. Tellingly, the Greek term “presbyter,” which had hitherto been translated as “priest,” was now 16 Martin Luther, “Admonition to Peace: A Reply to the Twelve Articles of the Peasants of Swabia,” in LW 46, 3–55; WA 18, 279–334.

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transferred to the elders, who were laypeople. In Geneva many elders also served on the city council, which helped integrate church and state. Bishops, the apex of the medieval hierarchy, were removed entirely. Emphasis on instruction yielded the office of “doctors” – though this office soon fell into lasting neglect. Deacons, having long ago mutated into a kind of “junior priest,” were restored to their New Testament role of serving the bodily (including financial) needs of the community. The pastors preached. They also served, together with select city council members, on a supervisory body called the Consistory. It was here that citizens were able to report moral infractions, and from which suitable discipline, including excommunication, was enforced. Calvin’s Geneva was not a theocracy, as is sometimes claimed. Instead, it represented a synthesis of lay and clerical elements, temporal and spiritual realms into a holistic fusion that retained recognizably distinct roles for each. It was also an innovative application of Luther’s vision of a “priesthood of all believers.” The great variety of practical polities during the Reformation era eventually found its way into more abstract and formal theological discourse. Both Lutheran and Reformed traditions sought to come to terms conceptually with the conviction that much of the institutional church and its leadership had been deficient. If one maintains, as these Protestants did, that the “true” church is that which hears and responds to the Gospel, and one also holds that the visible Roman church fails to preach and even actively obstructs that Gospel, then the true church must be something else. Most Lutheran and Calvinist Reformers were realistic enough to recognize that their own churches, even after having broken with Rome, were still far from perfect. The problem, then, lay with the “visible” church. The solution lay in positing some kind of “invisible” church that encompassed the true believers in a way that only God could see. It was a strategy first launched by the critical theologies of John Wycliffe and Jan Hus in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Lutheran theologians quickly cooled to the notion of an ecclesia invisibilis when they recognized its vulnerabilities. While it allowed them to deemphasize the papal church whose authority they rejected, it exposed them to a spiritualized understanding of church as taught by another set of opponents, the so-called enthusiasts. Luther and, especially, his colleague Philip Melanchthon (1499–1560) were keen to keep the focus on what they deemed to be essential visible characteristics of the church: its task of preaching the Gospel and administering the sacraments. That is the definition that finds its way into the Augsburg Confession (Article 7). While those who respond to 85

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these gifts in true faith may indeed remain “invisible” to human eyes, they will always, according to Lutherans, constitute a subset within the visible church. Except in extraordinary circumstances where God intervenes directly in someone’s life, persons only come to salvation through word and sacraments. Both Zwingli and Calvin, as well as their Reformed followers, taught a different version of this. Their tradition placed a much higher emphasis on predestination than on the mediating function of word and sacraments, typically defining the church as a congregation of the elect (coetus electorum) and retaining a stronger doctrine of the invisible church. The greatest conceptual challenge for both Lutherans and Calvinists lay in formulating an account of the “universal church.” Lutheran ecclesiologies prioritized the local. Already in his new translation of the New Testament, Luther had consistently rendered ἐκκλησία as Gemeinde, or “congregation,” signaling his ecclesiological emphasis. Later Lutheran definitions of the church, by focusing on preaching and sacraments, held up activities done in local congregations. There was very little discussion about what united those congregations with each other. Calvinists, for their part, appealed again to the invisible, spiritual union of all the elect, known to God. Neither approach yielded a tangible means of envisioning a church universal. On the other hand, facts on the ground created little pressure to develop such a doctrine. Their reliance on cooperation with temporal powers meant that both Reformed and Lutheran churches remained largely confined to areas where political settlements allowed them to establish themselves. Neither saw immediate prospects for global expansion.

Discourses on Authority Roman Catholics, on the other hand, had very clear prospects of realizing a global church. Not only did Rome not give up the idea of reclaiming Protestant territories until the end of the Thirty Years War in 1648 but, thanks to Spanish and Portuguese exploration and colonization, Catholics genuinely spread around the globe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. With all the attention to politics, it is easy to forget that medieval Catholicism was above all a religion of charity. Faith left unformed by charity was no faith at all. That was the classic scholastic formula, and it conditioned Catholic ecclesiology. The church could never be “invisible”; as a body of people united by bonds of love and, more importantly, engaged in activities 86

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of love, it was preeminently visible. Countless organizations and religious orders, both lay and clerical, sought to embody that spirit of charity. Robert Bellarmine (1542–1621), the great Jesuit saint, cardinal, and controversialist, and author of the first comprehensive Counter-Reformation treatment of Protestant theology,17 criticized Lutherans and Calvinists for positing “two churches,” one visible and one invisible, and neglecting the former. Like the Protestants, Bellarmine viewed the church as a community united by the profession of faith and communion in the sacraments. Beneath those similarities, though, lay a different conception of divine grace and its impact on believers. For Bellarmine and most other Roman Catholic theologians of the period, grace effectively transformed believers into a mystical body destined for works of charity. Like any body, this one needed a head. Because the church in this respect was an earthly body, it also needed, in addition to Christ in heaven, an earthly head who governed it and directed its actions. Consequently, Bellarmine stipulates that a church can only be “true” if it enjoys the regiment of legitimate pastors, and above all Christ’s vicar on earth, the Roman pontiff.18 Disputes over the need for and identity of an earthly head of the church dominated discourse between Catholics and Protestants for much of the seventeenth century. Even within the Roman Catholic world, however, reality was not as simple as Bellarmine’s formula suggests (and as Bellarmine himself knew very well). The age-old question of who constitutes the church’s proper earthly head remained incompletely resolved. The Council of Trent, despite its otherwise ambitious reform program, avoided the issue entirely. While the papal model had reasserted itself after the Western Schism and the conciliarist scare, several European monarchs pressed for modifications. The most radical step came from the king of England, Henry VIII, whose 1534 Act of Supremacy declared him, and not the pope, Supreme Head of the Church of England. Thanks to the Peace of Augsburg in 1555, German Lutheran princes obtained jurisdiction over religious life in their states and were even given the title of “highest bishop” (summus episcopus). Other monarchs navigated more discreet paths. French kings had long aimed for greater control of their churches, with some voices advocating the formation Robert Bellarmine, Disputationes de controversiis christianae fidei adversus huius tempori haereticos (Ingolstadt, 1586–1593). See Kenneth G. Appold, Orthodoxie als Konsensbildung: Das theologische Disputationswesen an der Universität Wittenberg zwischen 1570 und 1710 (Tübingen, 2004), 176f. For more on Bellarmine’s ecclesiology and its political implications see Stefania Tutino, Empire of Souls: Roberto Bellarmine and the Christian Commonwealth (Oxford, 2010), 9–47.

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of a Gallican church. Those efforts prompted the Concordat of Bologna (1516), by which the papacy ceded to the king of France wide-ranging powers over the clergy in his country. They continued, however, to exercise influence over theological debates. Edmond Richer (1559–1631) advanced a notable defense of Gallicanism with his book on ecclesiastical and political power, published in both Latin and in French (1611 and 1612).19 Following shortly after the assassination of King Henry IV, a former Protestant and proponent of religious tolerance, the book criticized papal power and called for an “aristocratic” form of church governance. The publication was timely but inopportune; it landed Richer in prison. In few places were such tensions more fruitful for intellectual discourse than in Spain. Led by Jesuit and Dominican scholars largely associated with the University of Salamanca,20 and building upon a revival of Thomism, this stream of thinkers found new ways to talk about both monarchy and papacy. They did so by revitalizing the study of law. Relating natural, divine, and civil laws to one another in order to create an “organic” and hierarchically structured whole,21 some of their most important work focused on the lex naturalis. The high esteem they attached to natural law during this period is significant and by no means unique to these Spanish scholars. Though few thinkers said so outright, it may well represent a desire for “universal” values that can find recognition apart from the increasingly parochialized claims to “revealed” truth. The Reformation and its aftermath had demonstrated amply that appeals to Scripture, even among those who held it to be their exclusive norm, did not quell disagreement. Canon law had limitations of its own since it was soundly rejected by non-Catholic Europe. Arguments from natural law and natural reason therefore made an implicit appeal to universal validity. That became even more pressing as the Iberians began to build global empires and came into contact with peoples who had had no exposure whatsoever to European legal traditions and who in fact had carefully cultivated their own. If appeals to natural law contain aspirations of universality, they also represent a desire for a new order. The Reformation had brought an unprecedented degree of disorder to much of Europe, and the fragmenting of Christendom had left a host of political entities looking for both internal and

19

Edmond Richer, Libellus de ecclesiastica et politica potestate (Paris, 1611). See chapter by Juan Belda Plans in this volume (Chapter 11). 21 Bernice Hamilton, Political Thought in Sixteenth-Century Spain: A Study of the Political Ideas of Vitoria, De Soto, Suárez, and Molina (Oxford, 1963), 30. 20

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external reordering. Now more than ever, it made good sense to study law and to anchor its precepts in universal truths that should be apparent to all humans. That step rests on a growing, if not yet unanimous, conviction in these circles that all humans are endowed with sufficient reason to recognize and obey the commands of natural law.22 Clarifying the relationship between monarch and pope was an important priority for Spanish scholars such as the Dominicans Francisco de Vitoria (1483–1546) and Domingo de Soto (1494–1560), and the Jesuits Luis de Molina (1535–1600) and Francisco Suárez (1548–1617). None were interested in returning to the papalism of the pre-Reformation period, nor would that have been viable at this point, given the increased strength of even the Catholic monarchs. Building on medieval theories that understood a monarch’s authority to be grounded in the consent of the people – and not by “divine right,” as some of their contemporaries in Europe were beginning to argue – they took steps to strengthen the ruler’s position. All four of the thinkers mentioned agree that once authority is delegated to the monarch by the people, the monarch becomes “greater” than the whole of the people. That wards off some of the revolutionary potential inherent in models such as that of Marsilius of Padua (see above) and severely limits the circumstances that could warrant resisting a tyrannical monarch.23 It also indicates, as Suárez points out, that human societies are built upon human customs and decisions; they are natural, not supernatural, entities. In fact, Suárez continues, it is not even necessary for a king to be Christian.24 Though Suárez thinks he is contradicting Luther with this view, he in fact echoes a position Luther himself had taken in his 1523 treatise on Temporal Authority: To What Extent it Should be Obeyed.25 Defining the monarch’s authority in purely civic and “natural” terms allows Suárez and his Spanish predecessors to distinguish it more sharply from the papacy. Priestly authority does not come from the people, they argue, but from Christ. Vitoria sees this exemplified in the transfer of the keys, and uses it to reject conciliarism: spiritual power is always given to individuals, not to the people as a whole.26 On the other hand, the spiritual nature of sacerdotal power renders it categorically different from the 22

Skinner, Foundations, volume II: The Age of Reformation, 166–172. 24 Hamilton, Political Thought, 67. Cited by Skinner, Foundations, II, 167. LW 45, 81–129; WA 11, 229–281. 26 Francisco de Vitoria, “On the Power of the Church,” in Francisco de Vitoria: Political Writings, ed. Anthony Pagden and Jeremy Lawrance (Cambridge, 1991), 45–151. Referenced by Hamilton, Political Thought, 71. 23

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temporal power of kings. As a result, popes have no direct authority to intervene in temporal affairs. Along those lines, and marking a stark departure from medieval papalism, Soto denies the pope a plenitudo potestatis in temporal matters.27 Others write similarly, though they do concede that the pope’s power over spiritual matters can in some cases have an impact on temporal affairs, giving rise to the notion of a potestas indirecta.28 At the heart of these reflections lies a reenvisioning of the pastoral vocation that focuses on remission of sins and has obvious, though mutually unacknowledged, parallels to conversations in Protestantism that prioritized the preaching of the gospel. Spanish conquests in the Americas raised particularly thorny interconnections between politics and theology.29 Among other things, they prompted an epochal debate in Spain over the rights and even the humanity of native Americans. The indigenous peoples’ brutal treatment by the conquistadores had prompted outraged protests by a number of missionary priests, including the Dominicans Antonio de Montesinos (ca. 1475–1540) and later Bartolomé de Las Casas (1484–1566). Las Casas’s decades of energetic advocacy on behalf of the indigenous peoples included several written accounts of the history and destruction of the Indies, as well as highly public debates in Valladolid in 1550–1551 with the Spanish humanist Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (1494–1573). Sepúlveda had long endorsed the conquest and enslavement of native Americans on the grounds that their “barbaric” practices, such as cannibalism and human sacrifice, demonstrated that they did not possess human reason. Already in 1539, Vitoria had delivered a forceful rejection of Sepúlveda’s arguments in two lectures at the University of Salamanca.30 Employing the same legal points he used to define the natural origins of royal power, he argued that the ability to organize a political society did not depend on the moral quality or Christian faith of a ruler. Irrespective, therefore, of the occurrence of reprehensible acts within that society, there could be no doubt that the “Indians” had the capacity to form one. Accordingly, Spanish conquest of their dominions was illegitimate. These arguments, coupled with the advocacy of Las Casas and others, including the pope, laid the groundwork for policy changes by the Spanish Crown. Of course, all of the

27

Hamilton, Political Thought, 87–88. Vitoria, “On the Power,” 92–94. See also Stefania Tutino’s chapter in this volume (Chapter 13). 29 See also Mariano Delgado’s chapter in this volume (Chapter 30). 30 Vitoria, “On the American Indians,” in Francisco de Vitoria: Political Writings, 233–292. 28

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Spanish “defenders of the Indians” also called both for freedom of trade with and continued Christian missions to the indigenous peoples. These expeditions were accompanied by Spanish soldiers, ostensibly to protect missionaries and merchants. That left open a number of legal loopholes that, coupled with the lack of serious enforcement, allowed the continuation of many of the crimes to which Vitoria and Las Casas had objected. Appeals to natural law also figured heavily in formative polity debates in Britain. Few theologians took a dimmer view of human society and its governments than the Scotsman John Knox (1505–1572). Consequently, Knox envisioned the preaching office as “prophetic,” lacerating regents with the truth of Scripture: “We in this our miserable age are bound to admonish the world and the tyrants thereof of their sudden destruction, to assure them . . . that ‘the blood of the saints, which by them is shed, continually cries and craves vengeance in the presence of the Lord of hosts’.”31 Knox’s dark mood is answered by the calming tones of the Anglican Richard Hooker (1554–1600), writing on the cusp of the seventeenth century: “We all make complaint of the iniquity of our times: not unjustly, for the days are evil. But compare them with those times wherein there was as yet no manner of public regiment established . . . and we have surely good cause to think that God hath blessed us exceedingly, and hath made us behold most happy days.”32 Hooker found himself in a protracted and public dispute with Presbyterians Walter Travers and Thomas Cartwright, with Hooker advocating for an episcopal polity for the Church of England. Significantly, Hooker sees no hope of resolving the conflict by appeals to Scripture. Instead, he builds his case on natural law, observing that all human societies are capable of organizing themselves well by applying principles evident to their God-given reason. While the church, strictly speaking, is both natural by virtue of its interpersonal social relations and supernatural because of its relating to God and the saints, it is the natural dimension that requires ordering.33 Congruent with those principles of natural reason, Hooker argues, is the Anglicanism of the Prayer Book, shepherded by bishops and headed by a monarch.34

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John Knox, The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, in Oliver O’Donovan and Joan Lockwood O’Donovan, eds., From Irenaeus to Grotius: A Sourcebook in Christian Political Thought 100–1625 (Grand Rapids and Cambridge, 1999), 685–688, at 686. 32 Richard Hooker, Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, bk. I, ch. 10, in O’Donovan and Lockwood O’Donovan, eds., Sourcebook, 743–756, at 748. 33 Ibid., 753. 34 O’Donovan and Lockwood O’Donovan, eds., Sourcebook, editor’s introduction, 745.

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A New Quest for Unity In theory, establishing Scripture as the sole norm and judge in religious matters should have had a unifying effect. That was the intent. In reality, the opposite happened. Among Protestants, Lutherans, at least, were far more cautious than the Reformed or Anabaptists in applying Scripture directly to temporal affairs. Yet even when restricted to theological subjects, Sola Scriptura as a method brought further fragmentation. As Jesuit critics never tired of observing, Protestants had no institutional way of adjudicating between competing interpretations of Scripture. All too often, seemingly irreconcilable differences led to further divisions and the formation of even more polities. To combat that on a theoretical level, Lutherans began speculating about a “self-explicating” feature of Scripture, and attached hopeful attributes such as “clarity” and “perspicacity” to their theological interpretations of Scripture. Reformed theology appealed to a higher power by positing an “inner testimony of the Holy Spirit,” without which readers could not comprehend the Bible. Seventeenth-century sectarian Pietists went further, arguing that only the “reborn” could understand the Word of God. But because the recipients of the Spirit’s special aid were most likely to be recognized in one’s own polity, and all others dismissed as deficient or heretical, such doctrines provided a recipe for confessional exclusivity and intractable parochialism. Despite these challenges, Protestants did sometimes find ways to unite their quarrelsome members. The Lutheran project resulted in a common confession in 1577, called the Formula of Concord, and focused on resolving a range of doctrinal issues in dispute. Although it required significant political pressuring to achieve, it nonetheless represents an example of how theological discourse can be used to build theological consensus. It was a milestone. Analogous examples from the Reformed world include the 1618–1619 Synod of Dort, which culminated in definitive language on issues related to predestination and free will. Roman Catholics came together in the Council of Trent, which met in three phases between 1545 and 1563, and promulgated both practical reforms and significant consensus on theological matters. Colloquies between confessions also populated the agendas of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century rulers and theologians, especially within the empire. Nonetheless, division both within and between churches remained. All Christians of the Reformation era agreed that Christ came into the world to bring reconciliation. The fact that Christians themselves were

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anything but reconciled with each other was therefore troubling. The situation was not entirely the fault of the churches or theologians. As the preceding pages have attempted to show, they had become players in much larger political and social processes of longue durée. This helplessness in the face of disorienting change also had an impact on theological discourse. A fondness for utopianism emerged and found remarkable expression in works by Thomas More, Tommaso Campanella, and Johann Valentin Andreae, among others. It is also no accident that, as Europe sought to reorder itself in the seventeenth century, intellectuals began looking for “therapeutic” approaches to science.35 Following the groundbreaking textbooks of neo-Aristotelian logic emanating from Italy, particularly by Giacomo Zabarella (1533–1589), Protestant theologians learned to view their subject as a “practical science” analogous to medicine and dedicated to “healing” the souls of fallen humanity. To facilitate that task, seventeenthcentury Lutherans, in particular, organized the ever-growing quantity of theological subject matter into practical “systems,” carefully constructed to focus the theological mind on one object: leading people to salvation.36 On paper, at least, the grand systems of that age sought to unify the known world and bring it into order. It was a daunting task, and would soon be met with new forms of skepticism. Many other polity-related factors influenced theological discourse during the Reformation era. Responses to Machiavellianism, to confessionalization, or to the rise of capitalism, for example, could not be treated here. A general picture has emerged, however. Political dynamics followed a long arc driven by aspirations toward a unified Christendom while adjusting to countervailing pressures such as the rise of more autonomous local polities, secular values of governance and economics, and the vast expansion of a global perspective. In the end, Europeans sought to make do not with religiopolitical oneness, but with an unsteady equilibrium among independent entities. Theologians were often players within those processes, developing discourses that both supported and criticized the prevailing trajectories. That is most obvious in their writings on ecclesiology, but evident, as well, in treatments of natural law, theological ethics, scriptural authority, and theological prolegomena, among others. Political concerns also had a less direct effect on theological discourse, such as by pressing theologians toward 35 With respect to the history of philosophy see William J. Bouwsma, The Waning of the Renaissance 1550–1640 (New Haven and London, 2000), 152–156. 36 See chapters by Walter Sparn and Markus Matthias in this volume (Chapters 21 and 15).

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consensus at the Council of Trent, at the various religious colloquies of the age, in the process leading to the Formula of Concord, or in the confessional consolidation in Britain. At best, these factors gave their work a societal “relevance” distinctive in the history of theology. bibliography Appold, Kenneth G. Orthodoxie als Konsensbildung: Das theologische Disputationswesen an der Universität Wittenberg zwischen 1570 und 1710. Tübingen, 2004. Bouwsma, William J. The Waning of the Renaissance 1550–1640. New Haven and London, 2000. Hamilton, Bernice. Political Thought in Sixteenth-Century Spain: A Study of the Political Ideas of Vitoria, De Soto, Suárez, and Molina. Oxford, 1963. Höpfl, Harro. Jesuit Political Thought: The Society of Jesus and the State, c. 1540–1630. Cambridge, 2004. Littlejohn, W. Bradford and Scott N. Kindred-Barnes, eds. Richard Hooker and Reformed Orthodoxy. Göttingen, 2017. O’Donovan, Oliver and Joan Lockwood O’Donovan, eds. From Irenaeus to Grotius: A Sourcebook in Christian Political Thought 100–1625. Grand Rapids and Cambridge, 1999. Roth, John D. and James M. Stayer, eds. A Companion to Anabaptism and Spiritualism, 1521–1700. Leiden and Boston, 2007. Skinner, Quentin. The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. Cambridge, 1998 [1978]. Tierney, Brian. The Crisis of Church and State 1050–1300. Toronto, Buffalo, and London, 1988. Tutino, Stefania. Empire of Souls: Roberto Bellarmine and the Christian Commonwealth. Oxford, 2010.

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Universities, Monastic Studia, Academies, Seminaries, and Catechesis paul f. grendler Men, women, civil rulers, and religious leaders of the Renaissance and Reformation era were passionately concerned about education at all levels. Catholics and Protestants inherited late medieval universities and monastic order studia. Some civil and religious leaders on both sides of the religious divide found them wanting and created new institutions to teach theology. This survey will summarize the position of theology in institutions of higher learning. And it will describe the massive Catholic and Protestant efforts to teach the fundamental beliefs and doctrines of Christianity to the laity through catechesis.

Catholic Universities and Monastic Order Studia In 1500 the University of Paris and its faculty of theology provided the model for theological education and degree requirements across Europe. A doctorate of theology from Paris was highly prized, and the path to it long and difficult. Although the future theologian might begin his studies at any age, he typically came to Paris at the age of about twelve to study Latin grammar for two or more years. He then spent about five years studying arts – meaning logic, natural philosophy, and ethics, based on Aristotelian texts. This culminated in the receipt of bachelor, licentiate, and master of arts degrees successively in his early twenties. Only then did he begin the twelve to fifteen years of study that would culminate in a doctorate of theology. Candidates, who had to be celibate clergymen, were required to hear six years of lectures on Peter Lombard’s Sentences and the Bible, after which they lectured on these texts for three or more years. Then came a series of increasingly elaborate disputations, more lecturing, trial preaching, and the private and public examinations that culminated in conferral of the licentiate (authorization to teach theology anywhere in Christendom) and doctorate. Scholastic theology was taught. 95

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The theologians of Paris and elsewhere rejected the use of humanistic philological skills for biblical exegesis in the early sixteenth century, and often long after. All other university faculties of theology and monastic order studia promulgated statutes for the teaching and conferral of degrees in theology that mimicked those of Paris, although they sometimes condensed the stages and shortened the path by a few years. At Paris and everywhere else in Europe, except in Italy, theology was a superior faculty as important as or more important than law or medicine. Hence, the number of theologians with university appointments was usually superior to, or equal to, the number of professors of law, and normally greater than the number of professors of medicine in the university. The number of teachers of theology varied greatly according to the size of universities, and not all teaching theologians possessed doctorates. In the first third of the sixteenth century it is likely that more than a hundred doctors and advanced students taught theology in any given year at the University of Paris.1 Small universities normally had only two to five teaching theologians. Large universities had many more theology students than small universities but precise figures are difficult to determine, because student matriculation records are often missing or incomplete. The medieval monastic orders had similar curricula and requirements for degrees in theology in their schools, usually called studia. Each monastery had a school which might consist of a single teacher instructing the younger members of the monastery in Latin; larger monasteries added some lectures on the Bible and the Sentences of Peter Lombard. After about two years of study, friars and monks demonstrating academic aptitude were sent to a provincial school open to all members of the province. Large orders, such as the Dominicans, had three levels of provincial studia. The lowest taught logic based on Aristotle. After two or three years there, gifted students spent two more years at another provincial studium where they studied Aristotle’s Physics and De anima. Favored students advanced to a provincial theological school where they studied the Bible and Peter Lombard’s Sentences for another two years. At the apex of the order’s educational pyramid stood

1 It is impossible to give an exact number. The faculty of theology had up to a hundred doctors empowered to teach but it appears that a large majority did not, except for an obligatory single annual lecture. On the other hand, the faculty conferred 474 doctorates of theology between 1500 and 1536. Hence, there were many theology students lecturing on Peter Lombard’s Sentences and the Bible to satisfy degree requirements. See James K. Farge, Orthodoxy and Reform in Early Reformation France: The Faculty of Theology of Paris, 1500–1543 (Leiden, 1985), 33–37, 56, et passim.

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the studia generalia (general schools). Here were found the ablest teachers and students of the order, the future major theologians, preachers, generals, provincial superiors, and bishops. The studia generalia offered the familiar combination of lectures on the Bible and Peter Lombard’s Sentences at an advanced level. Instruction in theology and philosophy followed the Scholastic tradition of the order, as created by its most famous theologians, while smaller orders, or those lacking eminent theologians, adopted the tradition with which they felt most comfortable. Hence, the Dominicans, Servites (Servants of Mary), and Carmelites (Order of Our Lady of Mount Carmel) taught Thomist Scholasticism, while the Friars Minor of St. Francis, Franciscan Conventuals, Augustinian Hermits, and Augustinian Canons Regular taught Scotist Scholasticism influenced by William of Ockham. Monastic order studia seldom welcomed humanist biblical theology based on reading the sacred books in their original languages, because it did not fit into their traditional Scholastic theology. Some universities were tightly bound to religious orders. Medieval religious orders frequently placed their studia generalia in monasteries located in university towns in northern Europe and Spain. Then some of their members became university professors of philosophy and theology and assumed leadership positions, such as dean of the faculty of theology, inside the university. Sometimes the members of a religious order literally lived inside a university, because their monastery was the main university building and residence for its teachers. The humanities, philosophy, and theology were the dominant disciplines in most universities in northern Europe and Spain. These universities had few professors or students in law and medicine; for example, the University of Paris taught canon law but not civil law. With the exception of the universities of Bourges and Orléans, northern European universities rarely conferred doctorates in civil law or medicine. Hence, thousands of northern European students went to Italian universities to study and obtain doctorates in law and medicine. Italian universities were different. They taught little theology, and monastic orders did not become integral parts of them, for two reasons. First, Italian universities were civic enterprises, founded, supported financially, and ruled by the civil authority. Their reason for existence was to educate men so that they might become certified professionals of civil law and medicine in civil society. The certification process consisted of obtaining doctorates followed by admission into the professional associations of law and medicine 97

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of towns where the new doctors would practice. Even popes, cardinals, and bishops normally obtained doctorates of civil and canon law (in utroque iure) instead of doctorates of theology in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The second reason was that theology came late to Italian universities and remained mostly outside the university. When the papacy ended the theological monopoly of Paris and Oxford in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Italian towns with universities added faculties of theology with such names as “the faculty of theology of the University of Bologna.” But that did not mean that a faculty of theology existed inside the University of Bologna. It meant that there was an organization with a dean and council that oversaw the teaching of theology and examination of degree candidates outside the university in the monastic order studia of the town. Beyond the name, the only connection between the faculty of theology and the university was that one or two clergymen from the local monasteries had their theology lectures listed in the university roll. These were often a Dominican who taught Thomist theology and a Franciscan or Augustinian Hermit who taught Scotist theology. They usually lectured in their own monasteries rather than in the university building or the rented quarters used by lecturers in other disciplines. Most theology students came from the monasteries, not the university. Some Italian universities did not even offer this minimum instruction in theology. For example, Bologna had a faculty of theology from 1364, but rarely taught theology. A theology lectureship would appear for four or five years then disappear for many years. Theology only secured a permanent and continuing place in the University of Bologna in the academic year of 1566–1567. And until the last quarter of the sixteenth century, only 1–5 percent of the doctorates conferred by Italian universities were doctorates of theology. All the rest were in medicine, civil law, or in utroque iure, in which civil law was much more important than canon law. The lack of a significant theological presence inside Italian universities is the probable reason for the limited number of distinguished Italian university or monastic order theologians in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This was the position of theology in Catholic universities and monastic studia before the Council of Trent (1545–1563). It decreed limited changes, which were slowly implemented. A few prelates and theologians at the council challenged traditional Scholastic theology in April and May 1546. Citing humanist principles, they wanted to discard Scholastic method in favor of placing primary emphasis on the Bible. Council participants from the regular clergy objected. Unable to agree, the council compromised. It ordered monasteries and some beneficed clergy to teach Scripture but without specifying its 98

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importance and place in the curriculum, or the approach. It also ordered universities to establish professorships of Scripture. This was not a radical change, because monastic studia and some northern European universities already offered Scripture lectures, but in a secondary position and within the context of a Scholastic approach to theology. By the end of the sixteenth century most Catholic universities had two Scholastic theologians, one of whom taught Thomist theology and the other Scotist theology. Many had one or two professors of metaphysics, which was preparation for theology. And while there is no available count, most Catholic universities, including a few in Italy, had Scripture professorships. But that did not necessarily mean that they taught the Bible with the use of humanistic philological techniques and historical perspective. Again, the example of the University of Bologna is instructive. It added a professorship of Scripture in the academic year 1579–1580, because the local reforming bishop, Cardinal Gabriele Paleotti (1522–1597), persuaded the Bolognese Senate to add it. He also wanted the university to create professorships in Hebrew and biblical Greek in order to teach the languages needed for critical biblical studies, but the Bolognese Senate refused. Overall, Catholic universities offered more theological instruction after Trent than before. And Catholic universities conferred many more doctorates of theology in the last quarter of the sixteenth century than earlier, and continued to do so in the following century. Although members of the regular clergy continued to receive the majority of the doctorates, most of the increase came from members of the secular clergy. The campaign of Catholic reformers for a better-educated clergy spurred more of them to obtain doctorates in theology. But other factors also played a role. The Council of Trent decreed in 1562 that those appointed to cathedral churches must have doctorates or licentiates in theology, or in canon law, or have comparable training. And bishops sometimes insisted that secular clergymen obtain degrees as prerequisites for holding benefices. Of course, only those clergymen who could afford years of study, or had a religious order to support them in their studies, could obtain doctorates. Nevertheless, little by little more Catholic clergymen became better educated in theology through university study.

Jesuit Schools and Universities Some Catholic reformers judged the theological education offered by universities and the medieval monastic studia to be inadequate, and created new 99

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religious orders to do better. The Society of Jesus (founded in 1540), the Barnabites (Clerics Regular of St. Paul, 1530), Somaschans (Clerics Regular of Somascha, 1534), and Piarists (Clerics Regular of the Mother of God of the Pious Schools, 1621) were dynamic new orders determined to fill the lacunae that universities and monastic order studia did not fill. The most important difference between the schools of the new orders and the studia of the medieval monastic orders was that the former had as a primary aim the instruction of lay boys and young men and secular clergymen. By contrast, the medieval orders taught their own members and a few other students. The Jesuits were by far the most important of the new orders, both for the number and size of their schools and universities and for the high quality of their scholarship and teaching. The Society opened its first European school at Messina in 1548. By the mid-1550s they were opening schools and universities, or becoming professors in existing universities, in astonishing numbers, a growth that continued through the seventeenth century. They created new universities in which they filled all the positions in the humanities, philosophy, and theology. With the support of civil rulers they also became professors of theology and philosophy in some established universities, despite the strong opposition of the faculty whom they displaced. The most important universities under the authority of civil rulers in which the Jesuits played major roles were Coimbra, Ingolstadt, Parma, Prague, and Vienna. They also occupied one or more humanities, philosophy, and/or theology positions in other universities. The Ratio studiorum (Plan of Studies) of 1599 codified the Jesuit curriculum. It began with several years of study of Latin grammar, the humanities, and rhetoric based on the ancient Latin and Greek classics. The Jesuit upper school consisted of three year-long courses (in ascending order) of logic, natural philosophy, and metaphysics, all based on Aristotelian texts, followed by four years of theology. The Ratio studiorum directed Jesuit theologians to follow Thomas Aquinas with some deviations. They typically taught dogmatic theology that combined Scholastic analysis with a positive theology approach that emphasized the scriptural and patristic bases of theological doctrines. Although Jesuit theological instruction was Scholastic, Renaissance humanism was not ignored. Jesuit theologians integrated insights derived from humanistic philological and historical study into their theology. And they affirmed humankind’s capabilities and freedom to make informed moral decisions. The Ratio studiorum influenced the curricula of other new religious orders of the Catholic Reformation, but had little or no influence on the curricula of medieval monastic studia. 100

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The Jesuits changed Catholic theological education in several ways. They established many more theological schools, which were free of charge and open to all. By the middle of the seventeenth century there were thirty or more European Jesuit schools with a full complement of theologians. That is, they had four or five professors consisting of some combination of two teaching Scholastic theology, one or two teaching cases of conscience and/ or moral theology (an advanced, more theoretical form of casuistry), one for Scripture, and, occasionally, one for Hebrew. The largest and most important Jesuit school was the Collegium Romanum (Roman College), founded in 1551. It had seven theologians in 1649: three professors of Scholastic theology, two for moral theology, one for Scripture, and one for Hebrew. It also sometimes added temporary positions, such as controversial theology, which was created for and filled by Robert Bellarmine (1542–1621) from 1576 to 1587. Many more European Jesuit schools had incomplete theological schools, which at the minimum consisted of one Scholastic theologian and one casuist. Jesuit schools discarded the University of Paris model of theological education. They shortened the period of theological study to four years of lectures accompanied by intense academic exercises. They eliminated the teaching requirement, integrated the disputations into the courses, and discarded Peter Lombard’s Sentences, as did practically all other Catholic institutions by the end of the sixteenth century. The religious orders and especially the Jesuits made casuistry instruction a major part of their teaching, partly in response to a mandate from the Council of Trent. In 1551 the Council of Trent obligated Catholics to confess their mortal sins to a priest at least once a year. It also insisted that parish priests obtain the theological education needed to understand and administer penance and other sacraments. The Jesuits responded with alacrity. The Collegium Romanum established a professorship of casuistry in 1553, and by the early seventeenth century often had two Jesuits teaching the subject. All Jesuit universities and upper schools followed suit. By the 1570s the larger Jesuit schools across Europe offered courses in cases of conscience consisting of two or three lectures a week. The lectureship was a service course for parish priests and other local confessors; it was separate from the regular curriculum of daily classes in the humanities, philosophy, and theology. Hence, a parish priest could attend lectures in cases of conscience without studying Aristotelian philosophy, which was required preparation for Scholastic theology in the Jesuit curriculum. By the middle of the seventeenth century even small Jesuit schools offered cases of conscience lectures. 101

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Although all the religious orders added casuistry to their theological instruction, and the Dominicans produced some major moral theologians, the Jesuits did the most to reach local confessors. By contrast, Catholic universities with no Jesuits taught little or no moral theology. The theology classes of the Jesuits and other Catholic Reformation religious orders added considerably to the available theological instruction. They made it much easier for secular clergymen to study theology. But the relations of the Jesuits with university faculties of theology and medieval order studia were usually distant, because they were competitors. The medieval order theologians who taught in a non-Jesuit university and dominated its faculty of theology typically did not invite local Jesuit theologians into their company. When the Jesuits had their own universities and schools, or dominated theological instruction in a university, they ignored the medieval order theologians. In mission lands in Asia and the Americas, and eventually in Africa, both the Jesuits and the medieval monastic orders replicated their European educational structures and curricula. They founded schools, universities, and monastic studia that imitated European models and taught the same theology, sometimes with accommodations for local customs and habits. The accommodations sometimes sparked opposition from the papacy.

Seminaries In 1563 the Council of Trent mandated the creation of diocesan seminaries for the training of poor boys for the secular clergy, but not the form that they should take. The council also decreed that future diocesan priests should study Latin, church authors, homilies of the saints, and singing. They were charged with learning how to administer the sacraments, especially penance, and to perform rites and ceremonies. Dioceses made a variety of arrangements to satisfy the decrees of Trent. A common one in Italy, and possibly elsewhere in Europe, was that future priests lived at home and attended classes in the local Jesuit, Barnabite, or Somaschan school alongside lay boys and youths. Hence, the quality of the school largely determined the preparation of the future diocesan priest. In a city such as Milan, which had a large Jesuit day school with several lectures in Scholastic theology and allied disciplines, the future diocesan priest could obtain an excellent theological education. By contrast, eight or ten seminarians attending the local Latin day school in a small town in Lombardy received a limited education. Seminaries probably produced a better-educated diocesan clergy than before. But they 102

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did not produce a learned clergy. Analysis of the libraries of parish priests in France and Italy a hundred years after Trent suggests that the theological knowledge of parish priests was limited. Seminaries in which the students lived in a residence away from home where they were supervised by clergymen produced better results. The bestknown residential seminaries were those that educated Catholic boys and young men from lands that had become Protestant, or where the Catholic Church was under siege. The German and Hungarian College and the English College, both in Rome, and the Swiss College in Milan were examples. Clergymen recommended boys and youths to the appropriate college. They lived in the college free of charge for several years while attending day classes at the Collegium Romanum or the Jesuit school in Milan. After ordination they returned to their homelands as reforming clergymen or missionaries. Many alumni of the German and Hungarian College became bishops and cardinals or otherwise distinguished themselves in their homelands.

Protestant Theological Education Some universities became Protestant, while Protestant rulers and governments founded new universities as well. Calvinists also created new institutions called academies whose major purpose was to teach Reformed theology. Like the Jesuits, Protestant universities and academies greatly modified the Paris model for theological training.

Lutheran Universities The Protestant Reformation began when a young unpublished professor of biblical studies at a new university of little reputation, located far from major scholarly centers, proposed a disputation about indulgences that never took place. From the beginning, the Lutheran Reformation was a university movement, more dependent on universities and professors in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries than the other Protestant churches. Frederick III (the Wise) of Electoral Saxony (1463–1525; r. 1486–1525) founded the University of Wittenberg in 1502. His new university was a typical small northern European arts and theology university modeled on the University of Paris. It had many young students studying for bachelor of arts degrees and a small number of older students pursuing degrees in theology, law, and medicine, most of them bachelor’s degrees. In 1507 the University of Wittenberg had four teaching theologians, one of whom also taught 103

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medicine; none possessed a doctorate. Three men taught canon law, two taught civil law, one taught both, and three men taught medicine. Twentyone regent masters, typically bachelors or masters of arts studying theology, taught humanities, logic, and philosophy.2 The Augustinian Hermits played a key role in the university by providing several teachers and the building in which most lectures were held and some professors lived. Martin Luther (1483–1546) and Philip Melanchthon (1497–1560) brought profound change to the university. Luther obtained a doctorate of theology from the University of Wittenberg in 1512, became professor of biblical exegesis there in the winter semester of the academic year 1513–1514, and held no other post for the rest of his life. Largely through Luther’s influence, the university made curricular changes in 1517 and 1518 that elevated the role of humanist studies. Earlier humanities teachers had taught the ancient secular classical authors for the purpose of giving students the necessary proficiency in Latin to follow lectures in philosophy and Scholastic theology. Then, in 1518, Philip Melanchthon was appointed to fill the newly created professorship of Greek, although he also lectured in theology. Luther and Melanchthon saw humanist studies as providing the philological tools for the exegesis of sacred texts, which they viewed as essential for theological studies. They put humanist studies at the service of theology. The initial five to ten years of the Lutheran Reformation at the University of Wittenberg resembled a young faculty uprising. Led by Luther, professors and students at the University of Wittenberg argued, questioned, and rejected the foundations of Catholicism. That many of them taught and lived in the same building must have given the university the atmosphere of a continuous seminar carried on in the lecture hall, at the dinner table, in disputations, and in the rooms of teachers and students. Luther’s first followers came from among his colleagues in various disciplines, although a few faculty members rejected his views. Luther and Melanchthon attracted large numbers to their lectures. In early December 1520 an official visitor reported that about 400 students heard Luther’s theology lectures and 500–600 attended Melanchthon’s lectures.3 Although these were only estimates, matriculation figures confirm that Wittenberg’s enrollment soared. It is likely that many came to see and hear the man who was setting Germany ablaze religiously in the heady early days Urkundenbuch der Universität Wittenberg, volume I: 1502–1601, ed. Walter Friedensburg (Magdeburg, 1926), 14–17. 3 Ibid., 109. 2

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of the Reformation, but did not stay long enough to obtain degrees. Nevertheless, they spread his message. The enrollment spurt at the University of Wittenberg was an exception. The Reformation, wars and threats of war, and religious, political, and social unrest had a devastating effect on enrollments in other German universities between 1520 and 1540. When Protestant princes and city governments closed monasteries, some monks and friars shed their vows and moved to Protestant universities. Many more ceased formal study. Numerous lay students abandoned universities at this time. The Lutheran revolution soon needed an academic curriculum and structure to educate clergymen in the new theology. So the University of Wittenberg changed the curriculum and procedures inherited from the University of Paris. During the rectorate of Melanchthon in the academic year of 1523–1524, Scholastic philosophical lectures based on Aristotle’s texts were eliminated. However, in theology the university faced an embarrassing situation. At the same time that Luther denounced the papacy as Antichrist, the university conferred theology degrees on the basis of a 1502 papal charter. It is not surprising that the University of Wittenberg stopped awarding theology degrees by 1525, although it continued to confer degrees in other disciplines. In 1533 the university promulgated new theological statutes written by Melanchthon. They established four professorships of theology, all requiring the holder to lecture on the New Testament or the Old Testament. Indeed, Melanchthon’s statutes recommended that the theologians should concentrate on Romans, the Gospel of John, the Psalms, Genesis, and Isaiah. Lectures on Peter Lombard’s Sentences were eliminated and, in time, replaced by lectures on Melanchthon’s Loci communes theologici, a work of dogmatic theology based on Romans. Professors of theology were required to possess doctorates from Wittenberg or elsewhere and to hold the right views, which were tested by public examination before appointment. The new statutes offered the doctorate of theology, but with altered requirements. A candidate no longer had to possess a bachelor or master of arts degree in order to begin doctoral studies, and did not have to be celibate. Candidates were required to attend only six years of lectures on theology for a doctorate. Disputations were less numerous but a final public disputation was retained. Additional statutes of 1545, also written by Melanchthon, refined those of 1533. The primary purpose of theological study at Wittenberg was not to produce doctors of theology but pastors ready to preach the Word of God. 105

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Hence, the length of university study varied considerably: one year, three years, or more, while some men became Lutheran pastors without any university study. In any case, a prospective pastor had to acquire a theological foundation sufficient to satisfy examiners that the candidate knew enough to be admitted as a pastor into a territorial church. The candidate also had to deliver a trial sermon and he had to be morally upright. The statutes and practices of the faculty of theology of the University of Wittenberg greatly influenced other Lutheran and, eventually, Reformed universities. Protestant princes founded new universities that imitated Wittenberg. The University of Marburg (1527) was the first to be founded by a Lutheran prince. Other new Lutheran universities were Königsberg (founded 1544), Jena (1558), and Helmstedt (1575). Others followed in the seventeenth century. Lutheran universities remained small collegiate universities in which theology and arts (now dominated by the humanities rather than philosophy) were more important than medicine and law. The professorships of theology ranged from two to four, occasionally five. Theology positions were listed as teaching the Old and New Testament rather than Scholastic theology. Sometimes a Hebrew professorship was a theology position. Protestant universities entrusted humanities teachers with teaching Greek, and sometimes Hebrew. Canon law disappeared. Ramist logic entered the university, while logic and philosophy based on Aristotle were eliminated or deemphasized. However, philosophical studies, including metaphysics, made a comeback in Lutheran and Reformed universities in the late sixteenth century as part of the movement called Protestant Scholasticism. Unlike universities in Italy, Spain, France, and England, universities in German-speaking states more easily accepted and implemented internal changes, such as professorships in new disciplines, and increases and decreases in the number of teaching positions devoted to each discipline. Obviously, the Protestant Reformation stimulated a willingness to institute and accept change. But two other factors also played roles: many German universities were new and had not yet established strong traditions that inhibited change, and civil rulers exercised greater power over them than did rulers in other parts of Europe.

Reformed Academies The Calvinists had a problem. They did not initially have any universities empowered to confer degrees. According to tradition and the views of jurists, only the pope and the emperor could confer a charter granting a school the 106

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authority to confer degrees recognized throughout Christendom. Universities founded before the Protestant Reformation that became Lutheran or Calvinist continued to enjoy university privileges including the right to award degrees, because charters were not revoked. After political treaties recognizing the existence of Lutheran princes and states were signed, Catholic emperors chartered new Lutheran universities. And if a treaty did not exist, they sometimes chartered them anyway for political reasons. But such treaties did not yet grant legal recognition to the followers of Ulrich Zwingli or John Calvin and their schools. (They did not recognize Radical Reformation groups either, but the latter had little interest in founding institutions of higher learning.) Not until the Treaties of Westphalia of 1648 did the Reformed religion receive legal recognition. Then Calvinist schools might request and receive imperial university charters empowering them to confer degrees. Nevertheless, Calvinist religious and civic leaders were determined to educate followers and future pastors in the new faith. So they invented a new educational institution, the Calvinist (later Reformed) academy. It was a combination secondary school and university-level institution that taught the humanities, a little philosophy, and especially theology, but little or no law and medicine. Academies had an enormous influence in sixteenthand seventeenth-century Europe and in the English-speaking colonies in North America. The Calvinist academy began in Berne and Geneva. In 1536 the Canton of Berne seized the Pays de Vaud and Lausanne, its capital, from Savoy, and imposed the Protestant Reformation. In 1537 the Bernese government founded the Academy of Lausanne for the purpose of educating the sons of the Bernese elite, and anyone else who attended, in humanist studies and the Protestant religion. It also sought to train pastors to spread the Reformed religion throughout the Pays de Vaud and beyond. The Academy had two parts. It had a lower school called the schola privata of seven classes, basically a middle school and secondary school, with a strong emphasis on the studia humanitatis. It also had an upper school called schola publica under four professors: theology, Hebrew, Greek, and arts, the last a mix of rhetoric, logic, natural philosophy, astronomy, and geography in small doses. Religious instruction permeated the Academy; it included chanting psalms in unison, hearing lectures on the New Testament in French, and reading one of Calvin’s catechisms. A galaxy of Protestant scholarly stars, the majority followers of Calvin, including Theodore Beza (1516–1605), taught there in the next twenty-three years. But in February 107

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1559 sharp doctrinal disputes between the Zwinglian government of Berne and Academy teachers and Lausanne pastors led teachers, pastors, and some students to move to Geneva, where the teachers filled several positions in the new Geneva Academy that opened in June 1559. The Geneva Academy was a continuation and development of the Lausanne Academy. It had a lower school of seven classes, also called the schola privata, that taught the studia humanitatis, and a university-level schola publica with five professors, of whom the two theologians were the most important. Both did biblical exegesis. In 1587 one of the two professorships became a position in loci communes, the study of key points, positions, and definitions of Calvinism, in other words, dogmatic theology. The other three professors taught Hebrew, Greek, and rhetoric and natural philosophy based on Aristotle’s Physics. The civic authorities and the Company of Pastors jointly governed the Geneva Academy. Its statutes, probably written by John Calvin (1509–1564), looked forward to the addition of professors of law and medicine. Law became a permanent part of the curriculum only in the 1580s, usually with two professors, but medicine not until the eighteenth century. Upper-level students had to sign a lengthy confession of faith composed by Calvin that included attacks on the Catholic Mass and praying to saints. However, the confession was not imposed on all students in later decades. The initial professors of theology were Calvin and Beza, who also was the first rector and, after Calvin’s death, the leader of the Academy. The most important purpose of the Geneva Academy was to educate Calvinist ministers, in which it was enormously successful. In the first decade or so of its existence approximately two-thirds of the students of the upper school became ministers, and about half did so through 1620. They came from France and French-speaking border regions near France, and later from other Swiss cantons, the Netherlands, German lands, eastern Europe, England, Scotland, and Scandinavia – in short, wherever the Reformed faith had spread. Many returned to their native lands as missionaries. The Geneva Academy remained the major center for teaching Calvinist theology to an international student body for some time. The Lausanne-Geneva Academy model was widely copied, including Harvard College in Massachusetts in 1636. In France academies were founded in Nîmes, Orthez, Montauban, Saumur, Sedan, and elsewhere; most of them endured until Louis XIV (1638–1715; r. 1643–1715) shut them down. The Geneva Academy had considerable influence on Reformed universities, such as the new University of Leiden founded by Dutch rebels in 1575 on the basis of a forged charter of King Philip II of Spain. If a German Lutheran state 108

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became a Reformed state, its university also became Reformed, and looked to the Geneva Academy as a model. Two examples were the University of Heidelberg (founded in 1385), which was Reformed from 1559 to 1576, Lutheran from 1576 to 1583, Reformed again from 1583 to 1622, then Catholic; and the University of Frankfurt an der Oder in 1614. The Geneva Academy did not mandate a specific number of years of theological study. Students came with different levels of preparation and studied for a few months or several years. Since its major purpose was to train Calvinist clergymen, the relevant question was, is the man ready to lead a congregation in true doctrine? Because Reformed academies could not confer degrees, they awarded letters of approval or certificates to those whom the teachers believed to be ready. The letters and certificates testified to the good conduct and academic competence of the recipient. And when the letters came from Calvin, Beza, and prominent scholars, they meant a great deal. But the letters did not guarantee that the former students automatically became pastors. They still had to satisfy Reformed synods and like bodies of their theological competence through examination, before admission into a company of pastors of a city or region. The Reformed academy was a creation of the Reformation that built on the Renaissance. It was a theology and humanities institution that joined a small amount of university-level teaching to a large middle and secondary school. The lower school taught the studia humanitatis created by fifteenth-century Italian pedagogical humanists which, endorsed by Erasmus, swept through northern Europe in the sixteenth century. The upper school of an academy focused on theology, but also included Greek and Hebrew. Together they educated Reformed clergymen.

Theologians and the State Conflict often marked the relationships between theologians and civil rulers. When a university see-sawed between Catholic and Protestant rule, the theologians suffered. For example, Catholics and Calvinists fought to control the small regional University of Caen (in Normandy) during the French Wars of Religion. Whichever side controlled the town tried to remake the faculty of theology with new appointees who adhered to its views. But because few students enrolled during the religious wars, this brought little result. When the university and town returned to Catholicism for good in 1586, the French Crown sought to ensure that the university would remain Catholic by insisting that professors attend Mass and by controlling the appointments of university officials. 109

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Theology and theologians were more important in Lutheran and Reformed universities than they had been before the Reformation, or were in Catholic universities after the Reformation, for two reasons. First, the theologians in Lutheran universities and Reformed academies educated almost all the pastors in their respective confessions. By contrast, universities, monastic order studia, Jesuit schools and universities, and diocesan seminaries shared the responsibility of educating Catholic clergymen, with none of them dominating. Second, Protestant theologians held positions and exercised responsibilities and influence beyond the university or academy in which they taught. They served in consistories and companies of pastors which, under the direction of the prince or city council, supervised the church and education, and sometimes enforced Christian morality, in the state. Lutheran theologians wrote Kirchenordnungen (church ordinances) that ruled the church in the state, and they carried out visitations to ensure that the doctrinal confessions were obeyed. And a university theologian might also serve as the pastor of the most important church in the capital of the state. Protestant rulers continued to impose confessional unity after the death of Luther in 1546, but it became more difficult. Lutheran theologians divided into two groups usually called Gnesio-Lutherans (genuine Lutherans) and Philippists, the more accommodationist followers of Melanchthon, who made a distinction between essentials of the faith and adiaphora (indifferent things). In the early seventeenth century the Arminian Controversy in the Dutch Reformed Church exposed deep divisions within the Reformed community. Instead of permitting the theologians at their universities to differ acrimoniously, almost all Protestant princes and city councils imposed unity. They adopted confessions of faith and formulas of concord drafted by the theologians whom they favored. They then demanded that the theologians in the university of the state, and sometimes professors in other disciplines, accept and adhere to the confession or formula. Those who refused left or were dismissed. Inside the university, deans and faculty councils insisted on uniformity. And rulers imposed prepublication censorship on the theologians of the state. But university and academy theologians were scholars who probed in detail and sophistication the sacred texts and principles of their faith. After accepting the imposed confession of faith or formula of concord, which were usually simplified summaries lacking nuance or subtlety, they continued to explore the complexities of the Bible and doctrines inherited from Luther, Calvin, and other early leaders of the Reformation, and hoped that rulers did 110

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not notice their speculations. After the middle of the sixteenth century the civil power’s authority over universities and academies was a mixed blessing to Lutheran and Reformed theologians. University theologians and the state were very closely linked in England, which often made the relationship perilous for the theologians. Oxford and Cambridge were collegiate universities in which theology, philosophy, and the humanities dominated. Henry VIII (1491–1547; r. 1509–1547) and his successors viewed Oxford and Cambridge as seminaries of virtue and learning whose scholars were expected to teach religious conformity and political obedience. Moreover, the Crown had the right of appointment or could make its wishes known for many university positions. For example, Henry VIII created regius professorships of divinity at Oxford in 1535 and at Cambridge in 1540, for which the Crown named the occupants and provided stipends. Regius professors were expected to adhere to the theology of the monarch, and most theologians concurred that they should be the teachers of the nation. But they seldom agreed on the theology to be taught. The combination of a strong civil role and theological differences produced considerable strife. Crown and parliament inserted themselves into the internal and external affairs of the universities of Oxford and Cambridge more extensively, more brutally, and more frequently than civil rulers did in other parts of Europe. In 1535 Henry VIII tried and executed John Fisher (b. 1469), the chancellor of the University of Cambridge, because he refused to accept Henry’s Act of Supremacy of 1534 which made Henry Supreme Head of the Church of England. The government of Mary Tudor executed Protestants at Oxford, and the government of Elizabeth I executed Catholics, also at Oxford. Although the victims were not necessarily executed for their activities at the university, the place of execution delivered a strong message to members of the university. In the seventeenth century governments used the purge to impose theological uniformity. At the beginning of the rule of each new monarch, the parliamentary ascendancy in the 1640s, Oliver Cromwell’s rule, and the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, the government made clear its theological preference. It then demanded that theologians, administrators, heads of colleges, and college fellows adhere to it. Those who refused had to resign or were expelled. Some conformed outwardly while waiting for the opportunity to speak and write their true views. Theologians at Oxford and Cambridge held and propounded Anglican, Anglo-Catholic, Lutheran, Calvinist, Presbyterian, Puritan, Arminian, and Socinian (anti-Trinitarian) views in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Some drank from multiple theological fountains. After the reign of Mary 111

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Tudor (1553–1558), the only theme on which they agreed was virulent antiCatholicism. Hence, despite the executions, purges, and threats, Oxford and Cambridge manifested a considerable amount of theological diversity within broad Protestant limits. Catholic rulers also believed that religious diversity was civil disobedience that undermined the state, but they did not have to impose theological unity. Rather, they supported the rules and institutions of the papacy that imposed obedience to Catholic doctrine and papal primacy. In 1564 Pope Pius IV promulgated a bull requiring all teachers and all university students about to receive degrees to profess adherence to Catholicism. It was only partly effective. Teachers could not avoid making professions of faith. But Protestant students continued to study in Catholic universities, especially Italian universities, and were able to obtain degrees from counts palatine without making professions of faith. Moreover, at universities such as Padua, Protestant students studied in peace because the Republic of Venice would not allow the local Inquisition to investigate them. Catholic states that adhered to the decrees of the Council of Trent had systems of censorship that included prepublication censorship and Indexes of Prohibited Books that identified and banned heretical books and authors. But there were exceptions. Members of the Society of Jesus received papal permission to read heretical books so that they might be able to refute them, and Italian Catholic scholars in disciplines other than theology sought and obtained permission to read prohibited books in their areas of research. Catholic censorship never completely blocked the entry of heretical books into Catholic states. Theologians had less influence on Catholic civil powers and suffered less. The faculty of theology of the University of Paris believed that it was the preeminent theological body of Catholicism, and tried to influence the French church and state and the larger Catholic Church. But as often as not, the Parlement of Paris and the monarch overruled the Paris faculty, while the papacy ignored it when the Paris theologians differed with Rome. Theologians, such as Jesuit advisors to German and Italian rulers, might advise princes on theological matters and religious policy. But princes tended to listen only when they heard what they wanted to hear. Although the religious and political conflicts roiled universities, they also stimulated a great expansion in the number of institutions of higher learning that taught theology. Europe had sixty-three universities4 and a large but 4 University is defined as an institution of higher learning that offered instruction in arts, law, medicine, and theology, and possessed the authority to confer degrees. This eliminates paper

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undetermined number of monastic studia teaching theology in 1500. The continent added another eighteen universities, plus Reformed academies, and several hundred Jesuit schools that taught at least one course in theology, by 1625. Although Catholic monastic studia disappeared in Protestant lands, they continued to thrive in Catholic countries.

An Explosion of Catechesis The vast majority of people did not learn about Christianity through formal theological study. They learned from little dog-eared, torn, and smudged catechisms. If the effort devoted to catechesis, and the number and importance of the catechisms written, are the criteria for judgment, the sixteenth century was the greatest age of catechesis in the history of the Christian church. Catechesis (or catechetics) is the process of teaching the fundamental beliefs and practices of a Christian church to those ignorant of them. In the sixteenth century the recipients of catechetical instruction were most often children, either in formal schools or in separate catechism classes on Sundays and religious holidays. Adults were catechized, although the number was much smaller. Catechists also received instruction to prepare them to teach others. Both Catholics and Protestants took seriously the responsibility of educating the ignorant in the fundamental tenets of their faiths in order that they might understand, believe, and reach salvation in the next life. Unlike the period before 1500, both magisterial Protestantism and Catholicism made major efforts to catechize girls and women. In Catholic countries a lay man, priest, or sacristan catechized boys in one corner of a church, while a lay woman or priest taught girls in another corner, or in a different church. The sixteenth century inherited late medieval catechesis, which consisted mostly of material to be memorized: the Apostles’ Creed divided into twelve articles of faith, the Ten Commandments, the seven mortal sins, the seven works of mercy, the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit, the seven sacraments of the Catholic Church, and prayers, especially the Pater Noster and the Ave Maria. Late medieval catechesis sometimes manifested Scholastic influences and promoted monastic ideals, such as the opinion that the religious life was more spiritually rewarding than matrimony. universities that conferred degrees but did not teach. Collegiate universities concentrated on teaching the humanities, philosophy, and theology, but taught little law and medicine. They were dominated by colleges in which teachers and students lived, taught, and learned.

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Catechesis was not a priority of Europe’s clergy and educators before 1500. For example, Italian Renaissance pedagogical humanists of the fifteenth century paid very little attention to religious education. They assumed that their pupils would absorb religious beliefs and prayers from the allembracing Christian world that surrounded them. They did teach good morality, but believed that the ancient classics were just as effective as Christian texts for this purpose. The sixteenth century was different. Both Catholic and Protestant reformers wanted to teach the ignorant and unlettered members of the laity the correct form of Christianity. However, with rare exceptions, neither side used catechesis to attack the other. The authors of English Protestant catechisms most often described the benefit of catechesis as teaching the religious knowledge that is essential for salvation. After learning about their faith, the boy, girl, man, or woman would be able to join fully in worship services. They would be stimulated to practice Christian virtue and to avoid vice. Almost as an afterthought, some authors of English catechisms believed that their works would enable the learner to distinguish true doctrine from false. But they seldom attacked Catholic or other Protestant views.5 In like manner, Catholic catechisms almost always ignored Protestantism. The printing press made possible the explosion of catechesis in the sixteenth century. Even if medieval churchmen had wished to catechize multitudes, manuscript catechisms could not be mass produced. Although printing was invented around 1450, the presses did not begin to produce small cheap books in numerous copies until about 1525, just in time for the Protestant and Catholic Reformations. Catechisms were very inexpensive, because the vast majority were only sixteen, thirty-two, or forty-eight pages long and were printed in small formats. The size of average press runs of catechisms is unknown, but probably ranged from a few hundred to a thousand. They were frequently reprinted.

Catechists Confraternities of lay men and lay women played major roles in Italian catechesis. In Italy a modest priest from Milan named Castellino da Castello and his lay associates began the Scuole della Dottrina Christiana (Schools of Christian Doctrine) movement. According to a popular account, on the Feast of St. Andrew (November 30) in 1536, one of the numerous saints’ days on 5 Ian Green, The Christian’s ABC: Catechism and Catechizing in England c. 1530–1740 (Oxford, 1996), 26–43.

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which work was suspended, a lay colleague of Castellino went into the streets of Milan with a large sack of apples. He gave apples to the boys roaming the streets and persuaded them to follow him to a church. There he and Father Castellino promised an apple to the first boy who could learn to make the sign of the cross correctly, and promised more apples if they would return to learn more. Every Sunday and on religious holidays, about eighty-five days a year, Castellino and his lay associates taught boys and girls the catechism and elementary reading and writing for two hours. They organized a confraternity of lay men and women to carry on the work. Thanks to the large number of men and women who joined the confraternities and taught, the Schools of Christian Doctrine were able to offer small group instruction. They tried to make their teaching interesting and diverse: the students spent a quarter hour memorizing a prayer, a quarter hour learning to read, a quarter hour singing hymns, and so on. The Schools of Christian Doctrine spread quickly across Italy. By the end of the century bishops had endorsed them and exercised some supervision. But confraternity members continued to staff and operate Italian catechism schools through the eighteenth century. Some Spanish confraternities also taught the catechism. Parish priests, sacristans, and members of the new religious orders, especially the Jesuits, also became major catechists in Catholic Europe and in overseas missions. The foundation documents of the Society of Jesus made catechesis a major ministry of the Society. In the next two centuries practically every Jesuit establishment in Europe and overseas engaged in catechetical instruction. Jesuits, and sometimes their students, taught personally and oversaw the efforts of lay catechists. This was catechetical instruction for boys and girls who did not attend formal schools. In Protestant states, civil and church authorities shared responsibility for catechizing the laity. The prince or city council promulgated church ordinances, usually drafted by a theological advisor or council of clergymen and lawyers, that organized all religious activities in the state and compelled attendance. The ordinances chose a catechism, then ordered schoolmasters to teach it in their schools, and pastors to teach it to children and ignorant adults in their churches. Pastors and sextons typically held catechism classes on Sunday afternoons. In some areas police officials patrolled the streets and fields to make sure that children attended, while parents who neglected or refused to send their offspring could be fined or jailed. Teachers and pastors were also ordered to examine children to see how well they had learned the fundamentals of the faith. Those who had not learned them well enough were to be denied participation in the Lord’s Supper, although there was a 115

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tendency to admit them anyway, so that they might receive its spiritual benefits. In a few regions further requirements were imposed on adults. Men and women living in Hesse, the Palatinate, and some Swiss churches and Scottish congregations had to demonstrate that they understood the contents of the approved catechism before receiving permission to marry. The Council of Trent ordered parish priests to teach the catechism to children and adults, and bishops followed suit. But they seldom forced children to attend catechism classes or penalized parents who did not send their offspring. There were exceptions. Bishops in sixteenth-century Castile ordered men, women, and children to learn the catechism, and forbade priests from marrying couples until both the man and the woman could recite prayers found in the catechism. In 1555 the Spanish viceroy of Sicily ordered all boys between the ages of six and twelve in the city of Messina to attend catechetical classes, which were taught by the Jesuits. If they did not, their parents would be fined. The fact that both Protestant and Catholic authorities regularly or occasionally used threats to enforce attendance means that catechism classes were not universally popular.

Catechisms Catechisms were indispensable. In the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Europeans authored thousands of printed catechisms, a number that does not include probably another several hundred printed and manuscript catechisms that have disappeared. All Catholic and magisterial Protestant catechisms contained five elements: a very brief opening statement or question defining a Christian, plus material on the Apostles’ Creed, the Ten Commandments, prayer, and sacraments. These might be described as creed, code, cult, and church. Catholic catechisms added hymns and prayers to saints. Catechisms differed in organization and how they handled the five components. Almost all Catholic and Protestant catechisms began with a brief statement about a Christian and God. Many Catholic catechisms began by saying that the sign of the cross was the sign of a Christian, followed by instruction on how to make it. This had the advantage of linking doctrine with an instantly recognizable physical action. Catechisms then proceeded to the other four elements. Protestant catechisms often put the Ten Commandments first, followed by the Apostles’ Creed, and they devoted less attention to prayer and the sacraments. They often included biblical citations, which Catholic catechisms seldom did. Many Catholic and Protestant catechisms appended advice about how to live, mostly 116

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admonitions to behave well and to obey proper authorities. Some historians see state and church, especially in Protestant lands, as using catechisms to persuade members of the lower orders of society to internalize obedience to their betters, especially the state. Others are less certain that this was the intention. And if it was, they doubt its effectiveness. Printed catechisms can be divided into four groups according to their size, format, and use. The smallest and simplest catechisms were duodecimo pamphlets of about sixteen pages that listed basic material to be memorized. These presented the catechetical material in lists without explanations, questions, or answers. These very rudimentary catechisms were intended for young children and adults who were illiterate or had minimal literacy and knowledge. The child or adult was expected to memorize every word, while the catechist explained the meaning. Memorization was a primary pedagogical technique in all catechesis. The most common catechism was the slightly larger question-and-answer catechism of thirty-two to forty-eight pages in a duodecimo or small octavo format. It contained the same material but explained it through questions by the pupil and answers from the teacher. This format and its greater number of pages made it possible to explain the meaning of articles of the Apostles’ Creed, to give examples of the prohibitions of the Ten Commandments, to gloss the prayers, and to explain the purposes of sacraments. Although the questions and answers were still likely to be spoken in unison and memorized, the catechism assumed that the child or adult could read. While the Middle Ages produced a few question-and-answer catechisms, this format came into its own in the sixteenth century and continued to be the most common catechism design into the twenty-first century. All the most influential Protestant and Catholic catechisms of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were question-and-answer catechisms. A larger question-andanswer catechism of about a hundred pages for adolescents and adults came next. The format was the same; the material was more complex. The question-and-answer structure could be adapted to learners of different ages and levels of knowledge. For example, the Jesuit Peter Canisius (1521–1597) published a large Summa doctrinae Christianae (Compendium of Christian Doctrine, published in 1555) consisting of 222 questions and answers for priests and teachers of religion. He then reduced it to a middle-sized Parvus Catechismus (Small or Intermediate Catechism, published in 1559) of 122 questions in about a hundred pages in a duodecimo format for adolescents and secondary-school students. He further reduced it to a Catechismus minimus (Short Catechism, also 1559) for children of fifty-nine questions and 117

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answers occupying about sixteen pages in a duodecimo format. All three were translated into vernacular languages, and were widely used in Germanspeaking areas, but less often in Italy and Spain. The history of the use of catechisms of Canisius and other authors documents a principle that held true across confessional and linguistic boundaries. Authorities preferred a catechism written by countrymen of their own linguistic community, even if the author was obscure, instead of a translation of a catechism written by a prominent churchman from another linguistic community. And if they used a catechism written by a major figure, they might edit or rewrite it as they saw fit. Editing that added or subtracted supplementary material and/or illustrations was common. The well-known Catechismus ex decreto Concilii Tridentini, ad parochos, Pont. Max. iussu editus (A Catechism for Pastors by Decree of the Council of Trent Published by Order of Pius V, Supreme Pontiff ) of 1566, usually called the Roman Catechism or Tridentine Catechism, was not a catechism at all. Although organized along the familiar pattern of Apostles’ Creed, Ten Commandments, prayer, and sacraments, it was a large compendium (600 pages in a duodecimo format) of Catholic doctrine intended for clergymen and others who read Latin and had some theological preparation. Although it was translated into several vernaculars, it was not used to teach the laity. Both Catholics and Protestants frequently combined catechetical instruction with the teaching of reading. That is, they taught doctrine and reading simultaneously by means of a combination primer and elementary catechism. With the invention of printing, it was a simple matter to combine them. A Spanish example was Cartilla y doctrina Christiana (Primer and Christian Doctrine) of 1549 or earlier; typical English Protestant examples were The ABC with the catechisme and The primer and catechisme of the 1540s. Combination primers and elementary catechisms began with the letters of the alphabet, syllables (ba, be, bi, bo, bu, da de di do du, etc.), words, and then the Lord’s Prayer. Children were catechized as they learned to read. In this way children who did not go to school, but attended catechism classes, learned to read a little.

Major Protestant Catechisms A few Protestant catechisms stand out because of their authors and influence. In 1529 Martin Luther published Der kleine Catechismus für die gemeine Pfarherr und Prediger (The Small Catechism for the Simple Pastor and Preacher), usually called Small Catechism and his Deudsch Catechismus (German Catechism) usually called the Large Catechism. He explained in the preface 118

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to the Small Catechism that he had visited the churches of Saxony and had been shocked at the ignorance of the common people about the basic tenets of Christianity. So he wrote the Small Catechism, which he insisted that pastors and teachers must teach word for word to children and ignorant adults, and which heads of households should use to instruct wives, children, and servants. His Small Catechism presented in a vivid conversational style questions and short answers that explained (in the following order) the Ten Commandments, the Apostles’ Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, the sacraments of baptism, confession, and “the altar,” morning and evening prayers, graces before and after meals, and the duties of members of different ranks of society, in about twenty-five pages in a small octavo format. It was free of polemics. The Large Catechism, written for pastors, did not use the questionand-answer format. It offered fuller, but not theologically sophisticated, explanations for the same material in the same order. Calvin’s most influential catechism was his second: Le catechisme de l’Église de Genève: c’est-à-dire le formulaire d’instruire les enfans en la Chrétienté (The Catechism of the Church of Geneva, that is, a Plan for Instructing Children in the Doctrine of Christ) of 1542. Using the question-and-answer format, Calvin began by stating that all must honor and worship God. He then explained the Apostles’ Creed, the Ten Commandments, the Lord’s Prayer, and sacraments from his theological perspective. This catechism dominated in Calvinist and other Reformed churches until 1563. The Heidelberg Catechism appeared in that year. In 1562 Elector Frederick III (1515–1576; r. 1559–1576) commissioned a committee of supervisory ministers and theologians at the University of Heidelberg to prepare a new catechism to guide ministers and teachers. Frederick had moved the Palatinate from Lutheranism to Calvinism, but strong religious and political differences remained. Hence, he wanted a consensus catechism whose views all in his state might accept and teach. The result was the Catechism, oder Christlicher Underricht, wie der in Kirchen und Schulen der churfürstlichen Pfaltz getrieben wirdt (Catechism, or Christian Instruction, as it is Promoted in Churches and Schools of the Electoral Palatinate) of 1563, but universally called the Heidelberg Catechism. Its principal author and interpreter was Zacharias Ursinus (1534–1583), recently appointed professor of dogmatic theology at the University of Heidelberg. A man of wide experience and acquaintance with the major Protestant figures and theological currents after Luther’s death, Ursinus crafted a moderate document that combined Philippist Lutheranism, Zwinglianism, and Calvinism, but rejected GnesioLutheranism. 119

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The Heidelberg Catechism attempted to create a doctrinal synthesis between the Lutheran and Reformed traditions. It began with the statement that “my only comfort in life and death is in Jesus Christ who has paid for my sins with his blood and takes care of me.” It then moved to humankind’s misery, which is relieved by faith (the Apostles’ Creed) and the sacraments. The Ten Commandments and the Lord’s Prayer are explained as reasons for humanity to give thanks. Unlike other early Protestant catechisms, the Heidelberg Catechism offered numerous biblical texts and references in support of its statements. And it included one anti-papal passage, possibly on the insistence of Frederick III, that the Catholic Mass was a “condemnable idolatry,” plus a few implicit anti-Catholic jabs. As much a confession as a catechism, the Heidelberg Catechism was a short and effective catechism for ministers and teachers that taught a moderate Calvinism without predestination. Widely translated and adapted, it became the standard catechism of the Reformed tradition and exercised considerable influence in England and Scotland.

The Impact of Catechesis Did the massive catechetical efforts of Catholics and magisterial Protestants produce men and women who were well informed about the basic tenets of Christianity and who lived Christian lives? In 1978 Gerald Strauss concluded on the basis of study of an abundance of visitation reports by Lutheran clergymen that very large numbers of German men, women, and children were ignorant of the fundamental tenets of Lutheranism and Christianity at the end of the sixteenth century. Many others had a barely adequate knowledge, and few had a good knowledge. If they had learned the catechism as children, they could not remember its contents as adults. Some responded to mandatory catechism classes with apathy and resentment. Most discouraging to the examiners, many lay men and women lived lives that mocked the Ten Commandments. Strauss also discovered that catechetical efforts in Catholic Bavaria produced equally dismal results. Strauss’s research stimulated discussion, and some scholars have presented a rosier picture of Lutheran Germany. Unfortunately, beyond Bavaria, comparable documentation has not been located for Catholic Europe. Very limited local evidence presents a spotty picture. In Castile, for example, a small sample of Catholics knew the contents of the catechism well at the end of the sixteenth century. But Jesuit reports about their missions to remote rural Europe, what they called “our Indies,” revealed people with considerable ignorance about Christian beliefs, but well versed in quasi-paganism and magic. 120

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On the other hand, if the comparison is with the pre-Reformation period, it is possible, although difficult to document, that the laities of Catholic and Protestant Europe had a better knowledge of their faiths in 1600, and even greater knowledge in 1700, than in 1500. Moreover, it is likely that men, women, boys, and girls in cities and towns had greater and more accurate religious knowledge than those who lived in the countryside. The major reason was that rural Europe had fewer schools, and these did not always meet in harvest time or in the depth of winter. Moreover, catechetical instruction in the countryside for those who did not attend formal schools was not widely or regularly available. Both school and church catechesis faced the obstacles of poverty, bad weather, distance, and children who had to work, the last true in both country and town. There is a final question: did catechetical instruction achieve what both Protestant and Catholic reformers most wanted, men and women who lived Christian lives and achieved salvation in the next life? Historians are unable to answer that question. bibliography The most important bibliography consists of the numerous studies of individual universities, academies, monastic studia, Jesuit schools, and other institutions of learning, plus catechisms and educational manuals. What follows are a handful of works, some of which analyze broad trends. Appold, Kenneth G. “Academic Life and Teaching in Post-Reformation Lutheranism.” In Robert Kolb, ed., Lutheran Ecclesiastical Culture, 1550–1675. Leiden, 2008, 65–115. Burnett, Amy Nelson. Teaching the Reformation: Ministers and their Message in Basel, 1529–1629. New York, 200. Carter, Karen E. Creating Catholics: Catechism and Primary Education in Early Modern France. Notre Dame, 2011. Crousaz, Karine. L’Académie de Lausanne entre Humanisme et Réforme (ca. 1537–1560). Leiden, 2011. Farge, James K. Orthodoxy and Reform in Early Reformation France: The Faculty of Theology of Paris, 1500–1543. Leiden, 1985. Green, Ian. The Christian’s ABC: Catechisms and Catechizing in England c. 1530–1740. Oxford, 1996. Grendler, Paul F. Jesuit Schools and Universities in Europe 1548–1773. Leiden, 2019. The Universities of the Italian Renaissance. Baltimore, 2002. A History of the University of Oxford, volume III: The Collegiate University, ed. James McConica; volume IV: Seventeenth-Century Oxford, ed. Nicholas Tyacke. Oxford, 1986 and 1997. Maag, Karin. Seminary or University? The Genevan Academy and Reformed Higher Education, 1560–1620. Aldershot and Brookfield, 1995.

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paul f. grendler The Ratio Studiorum: The Official Plan for Jesuit Education, trans. and annotated by Claude Pavur, SJ. St. Louis, 2005. Strauss, Gerald. Luther’s House of Learning: Indoctrination of the Young in the German Reformation. Baltimore, 1978. Turrini, Miriam. “‘Riformare il mondo a vera vita christiana’: le scuole di catechismo nell’Italia del Cinquecento.” Annali dell’Istituto storico italo-germanico in Trento 8 (1982), 407–489. Urkundenbuch der Universität Wittenberg, volume I: 1502–1601, ed. Walter Friedensburg. Magdeburg, 1926. Wandel, Lee Palmer. Reading Catechisms, Teaching Religion. Leiden, 2016.

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Para-Academic Theology: Theology of the “Uneducated” geoffrey dipple The Reformation began, and arguably ended, as the work of learned theologians. Yet, for a brief period of time, it gave unprecedented opportunity to uneducated lay people to voice their theological opinions publicly, and the echoes of this activity continued through much of the long Reformation.

“Je gelehrter, je verkehrter”: The Image and Reality of the “Uneducated” Theologian in the Early Years of the Reformation Embedded in the Reformers’ early challenges to the authority of the church’s hierarchy were criticisms of learned theologians and the endorsement of the activities of lay, and even uneducated, theologians. While he never denied that the clergy occupied an office distinct from those of the laity, Martin Luther did significantly blur the lines between them, on occasion highlighting the ability of the simple people to interpret Scripture and maintaining the right of a congregation to judge the message of its preacher. Nor was Luther alone in making such statements. Ulrich Zwingli contrasted the authority of Scripture in the hands of a layperson enlightened by the Holy Spirit with the worldly wisdom of the theologians, endorsed the lay authorship of reforming pamphlets, and encouraged the formation of lay Bible-reading groups.1 Their more radical contemporaries such as Thomas Müntzer and Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt denounced the priests and theologians in even sharper terms.2 1 Paul Russell, Lay Theology in the Reformation: Popular Pamphleteers in Southwest Germany 1521–1525 (Cambridge, 1986), 13–14, 56–73; Clifford Arnold Snyder, “Word and Power in Reformation Zurich,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 81 (1990), 263–284, at 268–271. 2 Hans-Jürgen Goertz, “Karlstadt, Müntzer and the Reformation of the Commoners,” in John Roth and James Stayer, eds., A Companion to Anabaptism and Spiritualism, 1521–1700 [Brill’s Companions to the Christian Tradition 6] (Leiden, 2007), 1–44.

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Especially in the German-speaking lands, these tactics were reflected in a flood of popular pamphlets identifying the “common man”3 as the defender of the Gospel. Initially personified as an evangelical peasant – Karsthans and Flegelhans were the favorite characters – the common man later took the form of an artisan as well. Most of these pamphlets were, in fact, written by clerics or highly educated laity. And members of the clergy even stepped forward as popular preachers under assumed lay identities. Probably the best known of these is Diepold Peringer, the Peasant of Wöhrd, likely a Benedictine monk named Schuster, whose apparent knowledge of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew belied his claims to be a simple peasant.4 Building on a well-established tradition of lay preaching in confraternities, lay voices also emerged, initially in the form of popular preachers.5 For example, Hans Maurer, a medical practitioner from Freiburg im Breisgau, adopted the name Karsthans and undertook an itinerant preaching journey that included visits to Zurich, Basel, Strasbourg, and Tübingen before he was eventually imprisoned by the authorities.6 Such activity was supplemented, and quickly surpassed, by the phenomenon of lay pamphlet-writing on religious topics in the early 1520s. Miriam Chrisman divides the authors of these pamphlets into five distinct social groups: nobles, urban elites, learned civil servants and professionals, minor civil servants and technicians, and artisans and burghers. Of these, the final two groups fit most clearly our criteria for “uneducated” theologians. Their members were literate in the vernacular, and some had further education focused on specific skills, sometimes including rudimentary proficiency in Latin and some university education, but usually without a degree. In addition, some of the noble authors, especially women such as Argula von Grumbach, had little or no formal education.7 3 The term “common man,” “gemeiner Mann” in German, had regular currency at the time of the Reformation and was applied to members of both the agrarian and urban lower social orders. Originally associated primarily with negative characteristics, the values identified with it were inverted in the propaganda of the early Reformation. Despite the clearly masculine connotations of the term, it obviously included women as well. 4 Werner Packull, “The Image of the ‘Common Man’ in the Early Pamphlets of the Reformation (1520–1525),” Historical Reflections 12 (1985), 253–277, at 258–260, 264–266, 276; Mark U. Edwards, Printing, Propaganda, and Martin Luther (Berkeley, 1994), 26–27. 5 Nicholas Terpstra, “Ignatius, Confratello: Confraternities as Modes of Spiritual Community in Early Modern Society,” in Kathleen Comerford and Hilmar Pabel, eds., Early Modern Catholicism: Essays in Honour of John W. O’Malley, S.J. (Toronto, 2001), 163–182, at 170–171. 6 Packull, “Image,” 264. 7 Miriam Usher Chrisman, Conflicting Visions of Reform: German Lay Propaganda Pamphlets, 1519–1530 [Studies in German Histories] (Atlantic Highlands, NJ, 1996), 7–8; Peter Matheson, Argula von Grumbach (1492–1554/7): A Woman before her Time (Eugene, OR, 2013), 7.

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Pamphlets by uneducated groups of laity reflected the Reformers’ strategy of juxtaposing the exegetical skill of the Spirit-filled layperson with that of the worldly theologian. They exhibit a new self-confidence arising from a direct encounter with the text of Scripture. Often, they rely almost exclusively on scriptural quotations to make their arguments, revealing in the process great familiarity with the Bible, and the authors see in their knowledge of Scripture a responsibility to speak up in its defense. They identify themselves as simple people of poor understanding, whose lack of formal education qualifies them to speak out. To justify their activity they call on the story of Balaam’s ass, Jesus’s words to his disciples in Luke 10: 21–22, or the prediction of the Spirit being poured out on all the people in Joel 2: 28–31. Female authors also often appeal to examples of biblical heroines such as Judith and Deborah. The stated mission of many of these pamphlets is to support the Gospel newly freed from its centuries-long imprisonment by the priests and monks, and, not surprisingly, a strong current of anticlericalism runs through them. Within this context, Martin Luther appears as a champion bringing the Gospel back to the light of day. However, there is little interest in promoting or disseminating the details of the Wittenberg theology. In fact, among the pamphlets written by the artisans there is a wariness of the discord arising from competition between different theological stances.8 As the appeal to Joel 2 mentioned above suggests, the office of the prophet was an important component in giving voice to lay theologians. Recent research, especially that of Sujin Pak, has highlighted its significance for Reformation claims to authority. Pak identifies two fundamental roles for the prophet within the Christian tradition: a visionary function related to foreseeing future events; and an exegetical function of interpreting Scripture with the gift of the Spirit. Magisterial Reformers, from Luther and Zwingli to Martin Bucer and Matthias Zell, adopted the mantle of the prophet as exegete to justify their own challenges to the church’s authority and placed it on the shoulders of the laity to buttress calls for a priesthood of all believers. Particularly striking in many ways was the use made of the prophetic office by women who supported the magisterial Reformation. The two most prominent such women were Argula von Grumbach and Katharina Schütz Zell. Both were outspoken in their support of the magisterial Reformation, although Schütz Zell in particular was willing also to support more radical individuals and causes.9 8

Chrisman, Conflicting Visions, 9–11, 111–137, 159–204. Sujin Pak, The Reformation of Prophecy: Early Modern Interpretations of the Prophet and Old Testament Prophecy [Oxford Studies in Historical Theology] (Oxford, 2018), 1–63.

9

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Research into the use of the prophetic office by Catholic laity, and especially Catholic women, has been much less extensive than into that of their Protestant counterparts. However, popular visionary prophecy appears to have been alive and well in some Catholic circles at least during the first three decades of the sixteenth century.10 Due in large part to assumptions about the church’s hostility to translations of Scripture into the vernacular in the late Middle Ages and the early years of the Reformation, little work has been done on prophecy as exegesis among the Catholic laity. However, recent research clarifying the nuances of the church’s stance on both vernacular translations of Scripture and theological writing in the vernacular in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries suggests that this may be an area of potentially fruitful research.11

Dousing the Fires Independent lay voices did not last long in the public arena. Already in 1524 the image of the common man as defender of the Gospel was disappearing from pamphlets, as were vernacular pamphlets written by the uneducated laity. Behind these developments were moves by the major Reformers to curtail the theological independence of the laity. Already during his stay at the Wartburg (May 1521 to March 1522), Luther placed increasing stress on the authority of the literal meaning of the Bible and the learned exegete in determining that meaning, and his translation of the New Testament (September 1522) includes extensive glosses and prefaces intended to ensure an “accurate” reading of the text.12 As he broke with his more radical followers, Zwingli, too, began to moderate his statements about the extent and nature of lay interpretation of Scripture. Increasingly he identified humility as the crucial characteristic of the Spirit-filled layperson, whose role it is to judge the veracity of the

10

See, for example, Ottavia Niccoli, Prophecy and People in Renaissance Italy, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Princeton, 1990). 11 For example, Vincent Gillespie, “Vernacular Theology,” in Paul Strohm, ed., Middle English [Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature] (Oxford, 2007), 401–420; Wim François, “Vernacular Bible Reading in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe: The ‘Catholic’ Position Revisited,” Catholic Historical Review 104 (2018), 23–56. 12 James Stayer, “The Radical Reformation,” in Thomas Brady, Jr., Heiko Oberman, and James Tracy, eds., Handbook of European History 1400–1600, volume II: Visions, Programs, and Outcomes (Grand Rapids, 1996), 249–282, at 251–252; Edwards, Printing, 109–130.

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message proclaimed by the prophets, now identified as exegetes trained in the three biblical languages.13 In Wittenberg, Zurich, and Strasbourg, and subsequently in Geneva and Rome, institutions were established to ensure proper training and oversight of the clergy and education of the laity. The result was a significant reclericalization of the Reformation. Initially, though, some space remained for an independent lay voice, even among the Calvinist clergy so often thought of as a cadre of trained professionals issuing forth from Geneva. In fact, well into the 1550s and 1560s, even in Huguenot France, the focal point of Geneva’s missionary activity, many congregations were forced to rely on self-styled ministers with dubious or limited qualifications. The situation was worse in the Low Countries, where lay preachers abounded, many of whom came from the ranks of the artisans and counted as their chief qualifications a knowledge of, and ability to argue from, Scripture. Sometimes, like the early Reformation pamphleteers, they even celebrated their lack of formal training. Similar patterns were replicated elsewhere and in other traditions. And all of the major denominations were forced under certain circumstances to rely on the laity to fulfill traditional pastoral and liturgical roles of the clergy. However, these roles were quickly circumscribed and as much as possible restricted to better-educated elements of the congregation.14

Reformation Radicals and the Continuation of the Theology of the “Uneducated”: Anabaptists Instead, the original lay-focused impulse of the Reformation was carried on by groups of religious radicals, especially in the original German-speaking home of the movement. Early Anabaptism, in particular, continued important traditions of lay leadership and theological independence of the early popular Reformation. However, its theology was not an unalloyed theology of the uneducated. The first baptisms in Zurich in January 1525, the event usually identified as the beginning of the movement, occurred among the members of a lay Bible-reading group, many of whom came from modest Snyder, “Word and Power,” 271–277; Bruce Gordon, “Preaching and the Reform of the Clergy in the Swiss Reformation,” in Andrew Pettegree, ed., The Reformation of the Parishes: The Ministry and the Reformation in Town and Country (Manchester, 1993), 63–84, at 65–67. 14 Phyllis Mack Crew, Calvinist Preaching and Iconoclasm in the Netherlands 1544–1569 (Cambridge, 1978), 1–7, 39–50, 58–73, 84–85, 115–116, 162–167. See also the essays by Penny Roberts and Andrew Spicer in Pettegree, ed., Reformation of the Parishes, 153–174, 195–217; Christopher Black, Italian Confraternities in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge, 1989), 160–162. 13

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backgrounds. However, other, more prominent members of the group, most notably Conrad Grebel, had extensive humanist educations.15 And much of the theological core of Swiss Anabaptism has been attributed to Grebel and the Anabaptist Reformer of the neighboring city of Waldshut, Balthasar Hubmaier, the only trained theologian among the founding fathers of Swiss Anabaptism.16 Similarly, the origins of South German/Austrian Anabaptism are associated with individuals who embody both educated and uneducated traditions of lay theology: Hans Denck was a humanisteducated former rector of the prestigious St. Sebald’s school in Nuremberg, while Hans Hut, the most successful missionary of the movement, was an itinerant book peddler, literate in the vernacular but with no further formal education. Common in the messages of all these individuals was a continued criticism of the learned and an assertion of the competence of the simple layperson to interpret Scripture. This took a particularly interesting form in Hut’s teaching of the Gospel of All Creatures that drew on the everyday experiences of commoners as a path to knowledge of the divine.17 In the spread and eventual amalgamation of these two movements, we see the continued interplay of the ideas and actions of educated and uneducated members. In fact, new recruits to leadership positions came from both sources. For example, among the Swiss Anabaptists, Michael Sattler, the author of the influential Schleitheim Articles, had been prior of the Benedictine Monastery of St. Peter in the Black Forest, while Hans Krüsi, an important missionary in the area around St. Gall, was a teacher’s assistant and weaver’s apprentice. And Hut’s two most important disciples, Leonhart Schiemer and Hans Schlaffer, were former clerics. The primary means in the initial dissemination of the Anabaptist message were direct and in important ways ephemeral: preaching, Bible study, and the celebration of rites, particularly baptism and the Lord’s Supper. All of these, combined with the local circumstances that they encountered, encouraged variations in the Anabaptist message that was delivered and received. A more consistent message, tending to reflect the theology of the better-educated members of 15

Andrea Strübind, Eifriger als Zwingli: Die frühe Täuferbewegung in der Schweiz (Berlin, 2003), 129–147; Clifford Arnold Snyder, “The Birth and Evolution of Swiss Anabaptism 1520–1530,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 80 (2006), 501–645, at 503–505. 16 James Stayer, “Swiss–South German Anabaptism, 1526–1540,” in Roth and Stayer, eds., Companion to Anabaptism and Spiritualism, 83–117, at 83. 17 Werner Packull, Mysticism and the Early South German–Austrian Anabaptist Movement 1525–1531 [Studies in Anabaptist and Mennonite History 19] (Scottdale, PA, 1977), 68–71; Gottfried Seebaβ, Müntzers Erbe: Werk, Leben und Theologie des Hans Hut [Quellen und Forschungen zur Reformationsgeschichte 73] (Gütersloh, 2002), 400–412.

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the group, was disseminated through the written word, either in print or manuscript form: Hubmaier’s writings were published; the Schleitheim Articles were circulated in manuscript, sometimes with an account of Sattler’s martyrdom; and when he was arrested Krüsi was carrying a biblical concordance likely written by Conrad Grebel.18 However, one must not underestimate the legacy of contributions made by the uneducated, as recent studies of the continuing influence of Hut’s hermeneutics on Moravian Anabaptism indicate.19 And in Moravia, the promised land of sixteenthcentury Anabaptists because of the relative religious toleration practiced by the local nobility, leadership of distinct exile communities quickly devolved into the hands of the uneducated: Philip Plener was a weaver from a small town outside Strasbourg, Gabriel Ascherham a furrier from Nuremberg, and Jakob Hutter a hat-maker from the Tyrol. The theological acuity of these men varied greatly. After persecution broke up his community and drove his followers into Silesia, Ascherham wrote a series of detailed works justifying a move to a more Spiritualist position. By way of contrast, Hutter’s genius was likely more charismatic than theological. North German/Dutch Anabaptism initially had more consistent roots among the uneducated. Melchior Hoffman, the founder of the movement, was a furrier from Schwäbisch Hall. In Strasbourg, the base of operations for much of his activity, he fell in with a group of local Anabaptists and visionaries drawn largely from the ranks of the commoners, as were many of his converts in East Frisia, the site of his most successful missionary activity. After Hoffman called for a moratorium on baptisms in response to the executions of some of his followers, a group in the north led by the baker Jan Matthijs took control of the movement and set the stage for one of the most spectacular episodes in Anabaptist history: control of the city of Münster from February 1534 to June 1535. Although not uncontested, spiritual leadership in the city was largely in the hands of Matthijs and after his death Jan van Leyden, who had previously been a tailor, merchant, and innkeeper, although theological justification for Anabaptist rule lay in the hands of the educated propagandist of the regime, the former priest Bernhard Rothmann. After the fall of Münster, leadership of Melchiorite Anabaptism fell briefly to the glass-painter David Joris, but soon passed to the former priest Menno Simons. Simons and his younger companion Dirk Philips, a former Snyder, “Birth and Evolution,” 570–572. Martin Rothkegel, “The Living Word: Uses of the Holy Scriptures among Sixteenth-Century Anabaptists in Moravia,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 89 (2015), 357–404, at 371–378. 18 19

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Franciscan with considerable education, stripped the movement of its earlier excesses and brought it the status of nonconformist respectability.20 Although it was hardly exclusive to this tradition, Melchiorite Anabaptism also experienced some of the most spectacular and famous episodes of visionary prophecy associated with the early Reformation. Among the people Hoffman encountered in Strasbourg were the prophets Lienhard and Ursula Jost and Barbara Rebstock. He attributed to their visions, the interpretation of which he reserved to himself, an authority on a par with that of Scripture. Furthermore, he was responsible for the only published descriptions of their visions. In other words, like many of the prominent female mystics and visionaries in the medieval and early modern Catholic worlds, the Strasbourg prophets required an amanuensis to spread their message. However, in this case Lienhard’s role suggests that this was not so much a gendered relationship as a distinction among laity with a theological message between the illiterate and those literate in the vernacular.21 Over time the leadership structures within surviving Anabaptist traditions were institutionalized. In general, they avoided the reclericalization of other reforming groups, and often their spiritual leaders lacked formal education. Nonetheless, the level of informal education appears to have risen, especially in cases where Anabaptists were afforded some level of toleration and stability. By the 1540s leaders of the Swiss Brethren, as the group originating in and around Zurich were increasingly identified, had very limited formal education. Theirs was primarily a caretaking role, preserving the legacy of their predecessors with the help of hymn collections, biblical concordances, devotional works, and martyr accounts. Insofar as theological positions were clarified or further developed, this occurred, ironically, in the context of public disputations organized by the Reformed clergy and local authorities, which brought representatives of different Swiss Brethren congregations together and encouraged them to reflect on specific theological issues.22 In the Swiss lands Anabaptists suffered the longest and most consistent persecution. At the other end of the spectrum, Dutch Anabaptists enjoyed significant toleration and prosperity in the context of the Dutch Golden Age. There, lay pastors were increasingly well educated for other professions, medicine being a common one, or very well read if not formally educated. Stayer, “Radical Reformation,” 273. Christina Moss, “‘Your Sons and Daughters Shall Prophesy’: Visions, Apocalypticism and Gender in Strasbourg, 1522–1539” (PhD dissertation, University of Waterloo, 2019). 22 John Roth, “Marpeck and the Later Swiss Brethren, 1540–1700,” in Roth and Stayer, eds., Companion to Anabaptism and Spiritualism, 347–388. 20 21

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The history of Dutch Anabaptism in the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is one of frequent schisms punctuated by attempts at reconciliation and reintegration. Through all of this, leaders in the various Anabaptist groups refined their theological positions in sermons, polemical writings, confessions of faith, and especially martyrologies.23 In Moravia local toleration of the Anabaptists alternated with periodic waves of persecution dictated by Habsburg policies. The most successful of the communitarian Anabaptist groups, the Hutterites, vested spiritual authority in the hands of elected “Servants of the Word,” most of whom had previously been craftsmen. Instead of formal training, in preparation for their new role, most were assigned books from the vast stores produced by hand in the Hutterite workshops. These brought together a vast array of writings from a broad spectrum of traditions – Anabaptist, Spiritualist, and broadly Protestant – and preserved them in a variety of formats: propagandistic and apologetic writings, chronicles, and handbooks for pastors focusing on theological and liturgical matters. Yet, within this context novel and comprehensive syntheses of theological traditions could appear, as they did at the hands of Peter Riedemann, an elder and shoemaker often credited with establishing the outlines of a distinct Hutterite theology.24 A similarly eclectic synthesis of theological positions was produced by Pilgram Marpeck, a theologically self-educated mining engineer and representative in the west of another Moravian group, the Austerlitz Brethren or Brethren of the Covenant.25

Reformation Radicals and the Continuation of the Theology of the “Uneducated”: Radical Spiritualists A common appeal to the authority of the Holy Spirit runs through justifications for the theological abilities of commoners from the early statements of the Reformers to the pamphlets of uneducated theologians and the hermeneutics of the various Anabaptist groups. Robert Emmet McLaughlin has identified Spiritualism as a force running through the age of the Reformation and labeled its most forceful proponents “Radical Spiritualists.” Radical Spiritualism often exercised a pull on disaffected Anabaptists. Sometimes it 23 Piet Visser, “Mennonites and Doopsgezinden in the Netherlands, 1535–1700,” in Roth and Stayer, eds., Companion to Anabaptism and Spiritualism, 299–345. 24 Martin Rothkegel, “Anabaptism in Moravia and Silesia,” in Roth and Stayer, eds., Companion to Anabaptism and Spiritualism, 163–215; Rothkegel, “Living Word,” 386–397. 25 Rothkegel, “Living Word,” 379–386.

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appealed to better-educated members of the movement such as Denck, although less educated members like Ascherham and Joris were not immune to its attraction. For the most part, though, Radical Spiritualists tended to be drawn from better-educated ranks of society: Caspar Schwenckfeld was a Silesian noble with some university study and, although a weaver’s son, Sebastian Franck had a solid humanist education. Later challenges to theological orthodoxy from the Spiritualist quarter, even in the case of the mainstream churches, sometimes came from learned, but not necessarily formally trained, individuals such as Jakob Böhme, a Lutheran, and Dirck Vokertszoon Coornhert, a Catholic. As a group they used the early Reformation emphasis on the Spirit’s role in biblical exegesis to focus on the perceived empty literalism of the Reformers and many Anabaptists, and in the process juxtaposed the letter and the Spirit in new and radical ways. Ironically, as their opponents frequently noted, with the possible exception of Schwenckfeld, they relied primarily on the printed word to spread their message.26 The result was the creation of a “virtual church,” whose members, scattered across space and time, tended to be highly literate and theologically sophisticated. In the context of growing confessionalization, this movement appealed especially to elite members of the laity with its theologically and epistemologically radical, but socially conservative, message.27 The Radical Spiritualists targeted not only the independent authority of the written word, but also that of established ritual. In so doing, they took their places in a long line of Reformers recognizing the importance of worship as a means of teaching doctrine, especially to the uneducated. Robert Scribner has described the popular ritual acts of desecration common in the early years of the Reformation as the creation of a counter-liturgy.28 The importance of counter-liturgies was recognized first by those calling for the most significant changes in the church and society as witnessed by Karlstadt’s celebration of the Eucharist in Wittenberg at Christmas 1521 and Müntzer’s creation of the first vernacular Evangelical liturgy in Allstedt during 1523. Nor were more conservative Reformers blind to the importance of worship as a teaching tool. The Council of Trent regularized the Missal as Robert Emmet McLaughlin, “Spiritualism: Schwenckfeld and Franck and their Early Modern Resonances,” in Roth and Stayer, eds., Companion to Anabaptism and Spiritualism, 119–161. 27 Paul Brand, “Print and the Knowledge of God: The Development of a Spiritualist Epistemology in the Early German Reformation” (PhD dissertation, University of York, 2007), 22–24, 257–281. 28 Robert W. Scribner, “Ritual and Reformation,” in Popular Culture and Popular Movements in Reformation Europe (London, 1987), 103–122, at 104. 26

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a clear manifestation of doctrine, including the reassertion of clerical authority. In Protestant liturgies preaching became the focal point of worship in place of the sacrament of the altar, thereby emphasizing the centrality of the Word and faith in Protestant theology. At the same time, they erased some distinctions between the clergy and laity in worship, while maintaining others that highlighted the ordained ministers’ authority in interpreting Scripture. Even in Anabaptist communities originally spontaneous aspects of worship, including preaching, were increasingly regularized over time. It seems that even the theology of the uneducated reached the point at which it had to police itself. bibliography Arnold, Martin. Handwerker als theologische Schriftsteller: Studien zur Flugschriften der frühen Reformation (1523–1525) [Göttinger Theologische Arbeiten 42]. Göttingen, 1990. Chrisman, Miriam Usher. Conflicting Visions of Reform: German Lay Propaganda Pamphlets, 1519–1530 [Studies in German Histories]. Atlantic Highlands, NJ, 1996. Edwards, Mark U. Printing, Propaganda, and Martin Luther. Berkeley, 1994. Matheson, Peter. Argula von Grumbach (1492–1554/7): A Woman before her Time. Eugene, OR, 2013. McKee, Elsie Anne. Katharina Schütz Zell, 2 vols. [Studies in Medieval and Reformation Thought 69]. Leiden, 1999. Packull, Werner. “The Image of the ‘Common Man’ in the Early Pamphlets of the Reformation (1520–1525).” Historical Reflections 12 (1985), 253–277. Pak, Sujin. The Reformation of Prophecy: Early Modern Interpretations of the Prophet and Old Testament Prophecy [Oxford Studies in Historical Theology]. Oxford, 2018. Roth, John and James Stayer, eds. A Companion to Anabaptism and Spiritualism, 1521–1700 [Brill’s Companions to the Christian Tradition 6]. Leiden, 2007. Russell, Paul. Lay Theology in the Reformation: Popular Pamphleteers in Southwest Germany 1521–1525. Cambridge, 1986. Scribner, Robert W. Popular Culture and Popular Movements in Reformation Germany. London, 1987. Snyder, Clifford Arnold. “Word and Power in Reformation Zurich.” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 81 (1990), 263–284. Stayer, James. “The Radical Reformation.” In Thomas Brady, Jr., Heiko Oberman, and James Tracy, eds., Handbook of European History 1400–1600, volume II: Visions, Programs, and Outcomes. Grand Rapids, 1996, 249–282.

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Gender and Theology in the Reformation Era kenneth g. appold One used to read, in older studies of women in the Reformation, that women were “silenced” during this period. That view has some merit. Surveying the many authors of the era’s elite theological discourse, women are hard to find. In fact, only one woman of the Reformation era has been acknowledged by her own tradition as a “doctor of the church,” and thereby identified as an authoritative contributor to doctrinal theology. She is Teresa of Ávila (1515–1582), and it did not happen until 1970. On the other hand, more deliberate research of the last several decades has identified hundreds of women who wrote, and often published, works of theology during this period. The numbers increase especially when scholars look beyond Protestantism and begin to train their focus on the intellectual life of Roman Catholic convents.1 Women’s productivity turns out to have been so high that some scholars even describe the period as a “golden age” for female writing. With this tension between marginalization and prolificacy in mind, it makes sense, when describing women’s participation in early modern theology, to speak not of an outright “silencing,” but more of fluid and imperfect “dynamics of exclusion.” Despite the growing numbers of recognized female theologians during the Reformation era, there would undeniably have been vastly more had their contributions not been reduced formally and informally, systemically and individually. But that process truly was dynamic and, above all, porous. What makes this period particularly interesting is the ability of surprisingly many women to resist institutionalized marginalization and cultural prejudices, and to find a way to be heard anyway. 1 This trend was encouraged notably by Kathryn Norberg, “The Counter Reformation and Women: Religious and Lay,” in John W. O’Malley, ed., Catholicism in Early Modern History 1500–1700: A Guide to Research (St. Louis, 1987), 131–144.

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Dynamics of Exclusion There were no official decrees or injunctions prohibiting women from writing theology in any of the major churches; the barriers were more ad hoc. And central to the character of early modern dynamics of excluding women was the incompleteness of such measures. It was a volatile age, after all, marked by disorder, the questioning of traditional authorities, and competing attempts to reorder. For every effort there seemed to be a counter-effort, an exception, a loophole.

Mentalities The Ursuline sister Marie de l’Incarnation (1599–1672), notable for her missionary work in Quebec and her prolific literary output that included spiritual notebooks later compiled into an autobiography by her son, regular articles for the Jesuit Relations, unpublished manuscripts in Algonquian and Iroquoian, copious correspondence, as well as a catechism, had to contend with considerable resistance, at multiple levels, to her gender.2 Several of her confessors viewed her work with skepticism; her own son Claude Guyart, editor and publisher of many of her writings, felt that some subjects were unseemly for women; and even Marie herself believed that doctrinal theology and biblical exegesis were beyond someone of her gender, “the lowness of my sex having kept me from it.”3 Many other women of the era, including even Teresa of Ávila, assumed – and were reminded – that while devotional writings might be permissible, other, “higher” subjects remained off-limits. Such examples illustrate that restrictions on women’s writing were not only products of masculinist ideologies, but were grounded in deeper-lying, preverbal cultural mentalities. That is underscored by the fact that many of the women themselves affirmed such views and retained them even when they ran counter to their own interests. Notions of what is “proper” or “seemly” for a woman, assumptions about intellectual limitations of women, or the moral qualities of women, whatever their origins, conditioned thinking of both men and women, and remained remarkably consistent across eras and even cultures – some continuing even to the present day. They found

2

Natalie Zemon Davis, Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1995), 63–139. On Marie’s writings see esp. 99–116. 3 Ibid., 105.

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expression and support in a wide variety of literary traditions, including the reception and contextual application of select biblical passages regarding women’s conduct, as well as in copious works of standard Christian theology that amplified women’s inferiorization.4 As in the case of Marie, they also framed concrete relations between men and women, frequently involving female religious writers and their confessors, male family members, and male-dominated church and social hierarchies. Cracks in the wall emerged especially during the European Renaissance, when men and women began to challenge such mentalities and the ideologies that accompanied them. This period saw a marked increase in calls for educating girls and women, literary defenses of women’s intellectual and moral qualities – including the well-known lists of biblical, classical, or historical women whose accomplishments were held up as examples – and actual numbers of pioneering women who made use of new openings to make their voices heard and thereby also set precedents.5 Many of those same women published powerful rebuttals of masculinist assumptions, attacking directly the mentalities that sought to exclude them. That dynamic between traditional exclusionary pressures and the openings afforded by their challengers has an analogue in changing literary treatments of female Christian devotional figures such as the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene, and increased emphasis on biblical women who defied male authority, such as Judith, Deborah, and Esther.6 Motifs of female passivity and humility find themselves replaced by more active qualities. Those shifts in perspective are especially striking when handled by female writers, such as Aemilia Lanyer (1569–1645), Vittoria Colonna (1490/ 92–1547), Chiara Matraini (1515–1604?), and Lucrezia Marinella (1571–1653), or visual artists such as Artemisia Gentileschi (1593–1656?), whose paintings of Judith and Holofernes are an apt image of female agency amidst an insecure patriarchal order. Marie de l’Incarnation, after dutifully signaling her gender-specific inability to do so, went ahead and wrote a theological catechism anyway. It was published by her son.7

4 For an overview see Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks, Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2019), 22–60. 5 Ibid., 32–38. 6 Gary Waller, The Female Baroque in Early Modern English Literary Culture (Amsterdam, 2020), 51–63. 7 Davis, Women on the Margins, 105.

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Education More than 80 percent of early modern Europeans were illiterate. Trends in Renaissance humanism began to change that, and the Protestant Reformers, particularly Martin Luther and his followers, addressed it programmatically with educational reforms and a comprehensive call to increase public schooling. Catholics also intensified educational efforts, building schools and seminaries, and committing several religious orders especially to that endeavor. Girls were very much a part of this picture for both Catholics and Protestants, and were expected to attend the growing number of schools in many regions. How many did, and what they finally learned, likely fell short of the Reformers’ expectations.8 Still, it marked an important change. In order to participate in elite theological discourse, however, men or women needed access to higher education. Village schools did not provide that – although aggressive scholarship programs such as those in late sixteenthcentury Electoral Saxony, among others, did begin to target members of the common people’s classes for university admittance.9 Women were not included. In fact, apart from exceptional cases such as Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia (1646–1684), who earned a doctorate in philosophy at the University of Padua in 1678,10 or Anna Maria van Schuurman (1607–1678) in the Netherlands, almost no women were allowed into European universities before the eighteenth century.11 Even Cornaro Piscopia took her exams without ever having attended a class in person, and Schuurman listened to lectures in Utrecht while hiding behind a screen. Scholarships notwithstanding, the vast majority of men engaged in academic theological discourse came from the higher social classes, typically the nobility and urban bourgeoisie, and later also Protestant pastors’ households.12 Daughters of such upper-class families, especially those with humanist values, often received private tutoring. For Catholic girls, including those 8 Wiesner-Hanks, Women and Gender, 163–164. For Catholic Europe see Paul Grendler, “Schools, Seminaries, and Catechetical Instruction,” in O’Malley, ed., Catholicism in Early Modern History, 321–336. 9 Andreas Gößner, Die Studenten an der Universität Wittenberg: Studien zur Kulturgeschichte des studentischen Alltags und zum Stipendienwesen in der zweiten Hälfte des 16. Jahrhunderts (Leipzig, 2003). 10 Paul Grendler, “Cornaro Piscopia, Elena Lucrezia,” in Encyclopedia of the Renaissance, ed. Paul F. Grendler et al., 6 vols. (New York, 1999), II, 86–87. Also Francesco Ludovico Maschietto, Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia (1646–1684): The First Woman in the World to Earn a University Degree, ed. Catherine Marshall, trans. Jan Vairo and William Crochetiere (Philadelphia, 2007). 11 Wiesner-Hanks, Women and Gender, 178–180. 12 See Charlotte Methuen’s chapter in this volume (Chapter 9).

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from lower social strata, convents and convent schools represented additional opportunities. The results were often impressive. Caritas Pirckheimer (1467–1532), born into a Nuremberg patrician family, received her early education through tutoring in the home and free access to her father’s substantial humanist library. Later abbess of the local Poor Clares’ convent, she was celebrated in her own time as one of the most erudite women of the Northern Renaissance, corresponding with leading male scholars and partly inspiring Erasmus of Rotterdam’s satire “The Abbot and the Learned Lady,” itself a plaidoyer for women’s education. Like many Catholic girls of a similar background, Caritas continued her education in a convent, which she entered at age twelve, and whose importance she later defended forcefully and successfully against Protestant efforts to close it down. When her father died, he left his library not to her accomplished brother Willibald, as might have been expected, but to Caritas.13 While there were many more women of the Reformation era in both Catholic and Protestant settings who enjoyed sufficient education to contribute materially to theological discourse, the fact that they were prohibited from earning university degrees for almost all of this period kept them from acquiring the institutional qualifications necessary to teach theology or to proclaim theological doctrine in the name of their churches.

Institutional Obstacles Closely linked to the issue of women’s education was the question of ordination. Luther’s notion of a “priesthood of all believers,” while drawing on longstanding traditions of church teaching, went further by leveling the spiritual distinction between clergy and laity, and arguing that all baptized Christians had the God-given capacity to preach and administer sacraments – even if only very few were chosen to do so in practice. Because Luther explicitly included women in this priesthood of all believers, it invited the question of why women were not also among the ordained.14 In fact, Luther’s Catholic critics, including those at the Council of Trent, accused him of espousing a priesthood of both sexes.15 Luther denied this and For more on Caritas, including further reading, see Kenneth G. Appold, “Taking a Stand for Reformation: Martin Luther and Caritas Pirckheimer,” Lutheran Quarterly 32 (2018), 40–59. For a fuller account of women’s ordination in early Lutheranism see Kenneth G. Appold, “Frauen im frühneuzeitlichen Luthertum: Kirchliche Ämter und die Frage der Ordination,” Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 103, no. 2 (June 2006), 253–279. 15 Nelson H. Minnich, “The Priesthood of All Believers at the Council of Trent,” The Jurist 67, no. 2 (2007), 341–363. 13

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reaffirmed a male-only ordained priesthood. His reasons were similarly ludicrous to those later advanced at Trent. Luther, not yet married, claimed that women’s voices were not loud enough to be heard in church; the fathers at Trent argued that since it is dishonorable for women to shave their heads, they could never be tonsured. Both traditions also made intermittent if unenthusiastic use of the Pauline injunctions that women be silent in church (1 Cor. 14:34, 1 Tim. 2:12).16 More significant for Luther was Genesis 3:16, which he read to mean that women should remain subordinate to men. In his view that prevented them from preaching in public – though not in private.17 None of the major churches of the Reformation era ordained women, and there appears to have been little pressure for them to do so. That did not take the issue off the table, however. As with other dynamics of exclusion, this one was not absolute. Women did find ways to participate in their churches’ public ministry, occasionally preaching and, in the regularized cases of emergency baptism, administering sacraments. There were calls for them to do more. Women themselves looked to do more, and many men advocated on their behalf. Within seventeenth-century Lutheranism, some scholars argued for building on early church traditions to institute an ordained female diaconate.18 In younger churches outside Europe, particularly those with a scarcity of clergy, women assumed significant leadership roles. That was especially the case in Japan’s “Christian Century,” where women such as Naitō Julia (ca. 1566–1627) and Hosokawa Tama Gracia (1563–1600) were instrumental to Christianity’s early expansion;19 and in Goa, with the astonishingly effective Ethiopian catechist Catharina of Farão.20 The ill-fated Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita (1684–1706), whose visions sparked a Christian peace movement in the Kingdom of the Kongo before she was burned at the stake, also merits mention.21 Despite such efforts, lack of ordination certainly impeded women’s ability to participate in theological discourse. There were many other institutionalized obstacles, too many to enumerate here. They were embedded in the well-known instruments of discipline and suppression associated with the age: inquisitions, including especially the Spanish variant’s well-publicized 17 18 Ibid., 346; Appold, “Frauen,” 263–266. Appold, “Frauen,” 264. Ibid., 274–276. Haruko Nawata Ward, Women Religious Leaders in Japan’s Christian Century, 1549–1650 (Oxford and New York, 2009). 20 See Haruko Nawata Ward’s chapter in this volume (Chapter 31). 21 John K. Thornton, The Kongolese Saint Anthony: Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita and the Antonian Movement, 1684–1706 (Cambridge, 1998). 16 19

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pursuit of Teresa of Ávila, among others; and Calvin’s Consistory, which appears to have had a particularly repressive effect on unconventional or dissenting women.22 They were also enshrined in the structures of power themselves, which inevitably put men in the position of judging and condemning, or granting permission to women. Relations between nuns and their confessors, and the impact these had on shaping the women’s writings, whether by support and inspiration, or manipulation and discouragement, would merit an additional chapter. Finally, such patterns informed the business of publishing, which was almost entirely male and supervised by men. The complicated publishing histories of many works authored by women, some of which were only published posthumously and after heavy editing by men, underscores the problem. A notable exception comes with the Strasbourg publisher Margarethe Prüss-Beck, who drew on her business acumen to publish numerous controversial works, including those of the Anabaptist prophet Ursula Jost.23

Women’s Theological Contributions Despite such far-reaching dynamics of exclusion, women’s contributions to Reformation-era theological discourse were vast. In fact, they are far too numerous to be treated adequately in such short space. Fortunately, recent decades have seen an ongoing explosion of research on the subject, and several points can be highlighted. Because of the aforementioned obstacles to engaging in doctrinal theology and formal biblical exegesis, women’s theological energies tended to flow into other genres. These included correspondence, various kinds of devotional literature, meditations on Scripture or faith (which were often thinly disguised works of dogmatic theology), and, perhaps most famously, spiritual autobiographies and accounts of visionary and prophetic experiences. Less commonly analyzed by theological historians are poetic works – an “accepted” genre for women and often a safe space for theological exploration. The ancient church recognized that some pastoral situations were best handled by women. Consequently, it created an office of deaconess, most immediately so that unclothed female baptizands could be accompanied by Elisabeth Wengler, “Rethinking ‘Calvin’s Geneva’: Women, Agency, and Religious Authority in Reformation Geneva,” Journal of the Western Society for French History 35 (2007), 55–70. 23 Kirsi Stjerna, Women and the Reformation (Oxford, 2009), 17–19. 22

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other women rather than men. Those diaconal ministries quickly became more comprehensive, however, and covered other aspects of life. One sees a revival of such ministry both in the actions of Reformation-era women and also in their correspondence. A noteworthy example comes with the remarkable Katharina Schütz Zell (1497/98–1562), a Protestant Reformer active in Strasbourg both as a wife and partner to a pastor and, after his death in 1548, in her own right.24 Schütz Zell, whose writings are largely available thanks to an excellent critical edition, was exceptional both for her powerful sense of vocation, which caused her to see herself from an early age as a “church mother,” and because she supported her practical ministry with a high degree of theological reflection. Justifying her ministry and public speaking, which included a sermon at her husband’s funeral, Schütz Zell argues that it is every Christian’s duty to speak the truth – and that lay people, including women, are obligated to do so when the ordained ministry fails.25 In this way, she not only concretizes the Protestant Reformation’s notion of a priesthood of all believers, but she also reinterprets the tasks and office of ministry, adding a substantive and clearly envisioned component for laypeople. She advocated fiercely – and against frequent male opposition – for the empowerment of women to participate in that lay ministry. Unlike some of her Roman Catholic counterparts, Schütz Zell had no qualms at all about reading and interpreting the Bible, and certainly did not hesitate to correct her male contemporaries when she disagreed with their readings. Theologically, Schütz Zell remains squarely within the emerging Protestant tradition, skewing toward the Swiss rather than German variant.26 In that sense, one could call her theology materially unremarkable. But that would overlook some important nuances. While she did not systematize her thought, both her reflections on ministry and her well-documented practice contributed to a shifting understanding of the pastoral vocation and office at a time when this was very much in flux. A year after she was married, Schütz Zell wrote a “Letter to the Women of Kentzingen” (1524), near Freiburg im Breisgau.27 After the town voted to implement the Reformation, Catholic authorities retaliated, drove out the pastor, and sent the men of the town into temporary exile, many of them landing in Schütz Zell’s own home in Strasbourg.28 Katharina writes to console the remaining women. Her words of comfort and encouragement, offered by a woman to women, echo the 24

Elsie Anne McKee, Katharina Schütz Zell, volume I: The Life and Thought of a Sixteenth-Century Reformer; volume II: The Writings: A Critical Edition (Leiden, 1999). 25 26 27 28 Ibid., I, 398–418. Ibid., 265–295. Ibid., II, 1–13. Ibid., 2.

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spirit of the early church female diaconate. It is unlikely that a man could have been similarly effective, particularly since Katharina admonishes the women to take on “a manly Abrahamic disposition” in order to stand up to their trials.29 Her words have been described as “pastoral.” But their deeper significance may lie in the way Schütz Zell defines what is “pastoral.” Her exercise of pastoral care reveals an understanding that combines an overtly biblical witness with a care of souls that aims at spiritual strengthening. In that regard, the letter, especially when combined with Schütz Zell’s other writings, contributes significantly to a larger trend within the emerging Protestant tradition: to view the pastoral office in broadly “therapeutic” terms. That shift would later find more systematic expression by Schütz Zell’s Strasbourg colleague Martin Bucer (Von der wahren Seelsorge und dem rechten Hirtendienst, 1538).30 Schütz Zell’s most original contribution to that trend lies in her determined expansion of such pastoral ministry to include laypeople and women. Unlike Katharina Schütz Zell, most English women who wrote and were published belonged to the aristocracy. Aemilia Lanyer (née Bassano) was not one of these. Born in England to a Venetian court musician and his commonlaw wife, she nonetheless appears to have become the first woman in England to have a volume of her own poetry published: Salve Deus Rex Judæorum (1611).31 Often noted for its literary creation of a “community of women” by means of extensive dedicatory epistles to English noblewomen and “all virtuous Ladies in general,” as well as with lists of women in the Bible, its perhaps most striking theological contribution comes in the second section of the poem proper: “Eves Apologie in defence of Women.” Here, Lanyer retells the biblical story of the Fall, subverting dominant Christian accounts that place the blame on Eve: “But surely Adam can not be excusde, /Her fault though great, yet hee was most too blame.”32 Not Eve, whose fault was onely too much love: Which made her give this present to her Deare, That what shee tasted, he likewise might prove, Whereby his knowledge might become more cleare;

29 “. . . nemen an uch ein maennisch Abrahamisch gmuet so jr also in noeten seint”: ibid., 6. Katharina’s comment has been controversial for its own apparently gendered assumptions about the “manliness” of strength (Stjerna, Women and the Reformation, 131). 30 For more on this subject, see Ronald Rittgers’s contribution to this volume (in Chapter 26). 31 The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer: Salve Deus Rex Judæorum, ed. Susanne Woods (Oxford, 1993). On Lanyer’s biography see xv–xxx. On her poetry see Waller, Female Baroque, 123–127. 32 Lines 776–777: Poems of Aemilia Lanyer, 85.

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He never sought her weakenesse to reprove, With those sharpe words, which he of God did heare: Yet men will boast of Knowledge, which he tooke From Eves faire hand, as from a learned Booke.33

The obvious implications are twofold: Lanyer kicks away the cornerstone of masculinist Christian ideology, whereby woman has corrupted man and bears the greater part of human guilt, “earning” her postlapsarian subjugation as a reward; and she mocks masculine claims to superior knowledge, laying its origins in “Eves faire hand.” The poem combines biting social criticism with a provocative move toward reinterpreting Christian doctrines of original sin. Sadly, Lanyer’s work was soon neglected, but such thoughts were not alone. Similar, though less overt, challenges to traditional theological perspectives centered on writings about the Virgin Mary. The English Catholic recusant Mary Ward (1585–1645), for example, used her own view of a militant Mary, along with pivotal visions, to strengthen her commitment to a practical ministry that circumvented prohibitions placed on her by male hierarchs, including three popes.34 Pejoratively called a “Jesuitess” for forming active female communities modeled on the Society of Jesus, she was placed under house arrest by Pope Urban VIII in 1631, having been accused of seeking equality with men. Eventually, Rome relented and tolerated her community in Yorkshire.35 Extensive written treatments of Mary also emerged in Italy, notably by Vittoria Colonna, Chiara Matraini, and Lucrezia Marinella, among others.36 Part of a Counter-Reformation resurgence in Marian devotion, these texts were likely written for female audiences. Those of Matraini and Marinella, in particular, go well beyond more traditional accounts of Mary’s life by drawing liberally from extra-canonical sources. Marinella’s Life of the Virgin Mary, Empress of the Universe (1602) is especially imaginative, as the title suggests. Matraini’s Brief Discourse on the Life and Praises of the Most Blessed Virgin and Mother of the Son of God (ca. 1650) is more explicitly theological, like Lanyer calling into question Eve’s culpability, and according Mary a much more prominent role in salvation history than was customary. While Marian texts written by men more typically emphasized Mary’s purity and humility,

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34 35 Lines 801–808: ibid., 86. Waller, Female Baroque, 94, 102. Ibid., 106–109. Susan Haskins, ed. and trans., Who is Mary? Three Early Modern Women on the Idea of the Virgin Mary (Chicago, 2008).

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and in Protestant readings of the Magnificat, her obedience, Matraini lifts up Mary’s redemptive significance and, invoking the familiar “pillar of faith” trope, her personal fortitude: she alone stays standing by Christ’s cross when everyone else has run away; she alone remains firm in faith, “without ever wavering or doubting Jesus Christ’s divinity, as did the Apostles and other friends.”37 Colonna’s Plaint of the Marchesa di Pescara on the Passion of Christ (1556) focuses more narrowly on Mary’s presence at Christ’s crucifixion. Based on the familiar motif of the Pietà, and possibly prompted by a drawing given her by her friend Michelangelo,38 the Plaint lets the reader view the scene through Mary’s eyes. Exploring Mary’s motherly thoughts and emotions as she looks upon that painful image, the text inverts the more typical pattern of Marian devotion: we gaze with Mary, not at Mary. While Marinella and Matraini (and Lanyer) say things one would not read in a standard theological textbook of this period, Colonna’s contribution to theological discourse comes less through doctrinal innovation than at the level of language. Her poetic imagination allows her to draw the reader into an emotional experience with a strong visual focus. We see the crucifixion as though we were there, feeling Mary’s particular pain: “All this shone forth in Christ’s face more to the Madonna than to others, as she suffered more passionately.”39 We find ourselves taking in the scene sensually and physically: “while she watched, the enormous anxiety of giving Him succor . . . the various sufferings, which made her toss and turn from pang to pang, almost took her outside herself . . . O how lovingly she kissed His most holy wounds, and how in her mind she enclosed herself within his sacred side.”40 Whether that is a distinctively “female” gaze or perspective is perhaps less important than the fact that Colonna, as a woman, makes use of poetic language rather than the dogmatic theology thought to be reserved for men, and in so doing meaningfully expands the range of religious experience. Other women, too, turned to poetry either to circumvent or transcend the prosaic limits of propositional theology and its wooden axioms. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1651–1695), the “Phoenix of Mexico,” comes to mind for her baroque verse, as well as for her fiery defense of women’s writing in “Response of the Poet to the Very Eminent Sor Filotea de la Cruz.”41 The psalms have always called women and men to further meditation, and 37

38 39 40 Ibid., 73, 109–110. Ibid., 49. Ibid., 56. Ibid., 56–57. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Selected Works, trans. Edith Grossman (New York and London, 2014).

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several of the women already mentioned, such as Katharina Schütz Zell, put their reflections into writing. None did so more beautifully and distinctively than Mary Sidney, countess of Pembroke, who composed an English versification of the entire psalter, begun by her late brother Philip, celebrated by John Donne, circulated in manuscript throughout the seventeenth century, and influencing widely the poetry of Donne, George Herbert, and John Milton, among others. Aemilia Lanyer also saw Sidney as an inspiration.42 No one pushed the limits of language as far as mystics, seeking to share their ecstatic and visionary experiences. Of these, the greatest, in the Reformation era, was the Spanish nun Teresa of Ávila. If, to use George Lindbeck’s understanding of the nature of doctrine,43 its purpose lies not in “expressing” inner experience but providing sufficient structure for such experience to remain focused and grounded in community, then Teresa makes the most of the space between. Here is expression, in its purest and rawest form, eluding definitions and as profound for what it does not say as for what it does. And yet Teresa communicates so effectively that she launched an entire tradition of analogously inclined women and men who followed her guidance and adopted her language.44 One of the subtexts that runs throughout Teresa’s work has to do with her acquisition of knowledge and the status of that knowledge. Since she could not read Latin and was forbidden by the Inquisition to read vernacular works,45 she learned much of what she knew through prayer and visions. Not surprisingly, the confessors were unenthusiastic about this information as well. But Teresa did not relent. She does what many people in her position have done: she triangulates by going over her superior’s head. Only Teresa does not appeal to a bishop or even the pope; she involves God: “As often as the Lord commanded something of me in prayer and my confessor told me to do otherwise, the Lord returned and told me to obey my confessor; afterward His Majesty would change the confessor’s mind, and he would agree with the Lord’s command.” She took a similar approach to overcoming obstacles to traditional learning. Lamenting in prayer her lack of permissible books, God gives her a solution: “The Lord said to me: ‘Don’t be sad, for

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The Sidney Psalter: The Psalms of Sir Philip and Mary Sidney, ed. Hannibal Hamlin et al. (Oxford, 2009), xvi–xvii. George A. Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Louisville, 1984). 44 See Bernard McGinn’s chapter on mysticism in this volume (Chapter 29). 45 The Collected Works of Teresa of Avila, 2 vols., trans. Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez (Washington, DC, 2019/2017), I, 226 (Life, 26.5). 43

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I shall give you a living book.’” Her experience of the immediacy of God, soon to be augmented by visions, replaced the traditional knowledge of book-learning: “the Lord showed so much love for me by teaching me in many ways, that I had very little or almost no need for books. His Majesty had become the true book in which I saw the truths.”46 Teresa suggests, and develops further in her writings, a mystical knowledge that, in her hands, has epistemological legitimacy. It allows her, for example, to compose her “Meditations on the Song of Songs” despite barely understanding a word of the text.47 A sustained analysis of Teresa’s “mystical epistemology” would need to contend with the fact that she couples this form of knowledge to devotional use and distinguishes it from scientific knowledge. But that is less important here than the observation that Teresa explicitly links her mystical understanding with being a woman – and recommends her form of knowing to other women. Women should not waste their “thoughts in subtle reasoning” they cannot understand, but rest assured that “when the Lord desires to give understanding, His Majesty does so without our effort.”48 Far from relegating women to an inferior “place” circumscribed by obstacles and restrictions, Teresa exploits the gender distinctions of her day to advance an alternate form of knowing and learning. Her many written works – and the enormous influence they enjoyed on both women and men – testify to the viability of her approach.

“Male” Theology Although most studies of gender in the early modern period focus on women, a small body of recent research has also begun to focus on men and masculinity.49 That opens helpful perspectives on the history of theology. Viewing the overwhelmingly male-written theology of the period as a gendered discourse exposes its glaring one-sidedness. Women, despite what has been said above, are mostly conspicuous by their absence from that discourse. In assessing the influence of gender upon Reformation-era theological discourse, one needs therefore to ask how that female absence impacted men and the theology they wrote. Obvious examples include the 46

All quotes from ibid. Collected Works, II, 210, 219 (Meditations 1.8); also ibid., I, 143 (Life, 15.8). Ibid., II, 216 (Meditations 1.1–2). 49 For example, Scott H. Hendrix and Susan C. Karant-Nunn, eds., Masculinity in the Reformation Era (Kirksville, 2008). For more literature see Wiesner-Hanks, Women and Gender, 335. 47

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entire spectrum of moral theology and ethics, theologies of marriage (and divorce), and other social teachings that employ the binary gender norms of the period and would certainly have looked different if women had been involved in their formulation. Even a brief examination of poetic and mystical texts written by women during this period indicates that such women used language to create alternate spaces within which to explore their religious feelings and thoughts, spaces hidden or exempt from male supervision. Scholars working with critical tools informed by psychoanalytic traditions, such as Julia Kristeva in her powerfully insightful reading of Teresa, show how aspects of female sexual desire can shape religious language even when they are unconscious.50 Vocabulary, imagery, and even the composition of texts are affected. The fact that such expression was relegated to “safe spaces” at the margins of male discourse in turn impoverished the latter in ways that have yet to be understood fully. Types of religious experience and devotion were less available, and much of the intersection of religion and sexuality remained unexamined. Dogmatic theology and the formation of doctrine suffered more directly from the absence of female participation, as well. Two examples illustrate the point. Christian readings of Genesis 3 have, unlike Jewish interpretations of the same text, always been rather narrowly focused on the theological notion of original sin. As the writings of Aemilia Lanyer and Chiara Matraini, among others, indicate, women were well acquainted with the dominant readings of the Fall, and willing to challenge them. They raised questions about Eve’s culpability and, by extension, called for a reassessment of Adam’s role in the story. Those women knew exactly how much hinged on these issues. That is especially true of the prevailing interpretations of Genesis 3:16, which calls for women to be “ruled” by their husbands and was used to support patriarchal social orders and to limit women’s leadership in the church. One can only speculate how differently such teachings would have developed if they had not been written solely by men. Finally, it is tantalizing to note that male theologians of all major confessions spent a good part of the Reformation era discussing issues related to Christian governance. Protestants and Catholics agreed that the nature of temporal ruling differs fundamentally from priestly and pastoral service. Luther explores the difference in his notion of “two kingdoms,” Spanish 50

Julia Kristeva, Teresa My Love: An Imagined Life of the Saint of Avila, trans. Lorna Scott Fox (New York, 2008). See also Waller, Female Baroque.

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jurists developed a sharp distinction between spiritual and civil power in their discussions of natural law, and both traditions used those thoughts to limit the influence of ecclesiastical hierarchs on secular politics. They also applied them to a reenvisioning of the pastoral office, stressing its work in effecting forgiveness and reconciliation. Lutheran systematicians of the seventeenth century spoke for many in stating that Christian leadership is incompatible with the term dominare, and instead involves pascere (to nourish). And yet none of these male thinkers took the logically inevitable next step of applying those insights to their readings of Genesis 3:16. If Christian ministry cannot “dominate,” then women engaged in that ministry cannot be in violation of the apparent injunction that they not “rule” over men. Without engaging in “alternate history,” one can well imagine a much richer discussion of these issues, and of the related domestic and social orders, if women had been at the table. But that remained, as so much else of its day, a bridge too far and a chapter unwritten. bibliography Brown, Sylvia, ed. Women, Gender, and Radical Religion in Early Modern Europe. Leiden, 2007. Conrad, Anne and Caroline Gritschke, eds. “In Christo ist weder man noch weyb”: Frauen in der Zeit der Reformation und der katholischen Reform. Münster, 1999. Davis, Natalie Zemon. Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives. Cambridge, MA, and London, 1995. Haskins, Susan, ed. and trans. Who is Mary? Three Early Modern Women on the Idea of the Virgin Mary. Chicago, 2008. Hendrix, Scott H. and Susan C. Karant-Nunn, eds. Masculinity in the Reformation Era. Kirksville, 2008. McKee, Elsie Anne. Katharina Schütz Zell, volume I: The Life and Thought of a SixteenthCentury Reformer; volume II: The Writings: A Critical Edition. Leiden, 1999. The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer: Salve Deus Rex Judæorum, ed. Susanne Woods. Oxford, 1993. Stjerna, Kirsi. Women and the Reformation. Oxford, 2009. Thornton, John K. The Kongolese Saint Anthony: Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita and the Antonian Movement, 1684–1706. Cambridge, 1998. Thysell, Carol. The Pleasure of Discernment: Marguerite de Navarre as Theologian. Oxford, 2000. Waller, Gary. The Female Baroque in Early Modern English Literary Culture. Amsterdam, 2020. Ward, Haruko Nawata. Women Religious Leaders in Japan’s Christian Century, 1549–1650. Oxford and New York, 2009. Wiesner-Hanks, Merry E. Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge, 2019.

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The Theologians and the Clergy: Who Were They? charlotte methuen Introduction This chapter considers the theologians and clergy of the Reformation period, asking about their social background, and how this changed during the period and between confessions; how and where they were educated; and their social status. It begins by discussing the situation of clergy in the medieval church, and tracing the way that this changed in response to the Council of Trent’s decree introducing seminaries. It then turns to Protestant theologians in the German territories and Switzerland, exploring the ways in which their social backgrounds and education differed from that of Catholic clergy. Finally, it discusses the effect of the Reformation on the theological education of women, and offers a brief consideration of the social milieu of the leaders and preachers in radical and, later, dissenting groups.

Clergy and Theologians in the Late Medieval Church and in Early Modern Catholicism One of the features of the pre-Reformation church in the German territories was that membership of cathedral chapters and thus entry into leading church positions was generally restricted to the high nobility. By the late fifteenth century, for instance, whilst the clerical canons of Cologne’s cathedral chapter were required to hold a doctorate in theology, candidates for the other canonries had to demonstrate sixteen “agnates,” that is, show that they had noble parents, grandmothers, great-grandmothers and great-greatgrandmothers, and were thus descended from at least four generations of nobility.1 The situation was similar in France, and probably also in the Italian 1 Andreea Badea, Kurfürstliche Präeminenz, Landesherrschaft und Reform: Das Scheitern der Kölner Reformation unter Hermann von Wied (Münster, 2009), 32.

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lands. Philip T. Hoffman has investigated the social backgrounds of the clergy in Lyon in the period 1500–1789, and it seems likely that his findings can be extrapolated not only to much of late medieval and early modern France but also to the Holy Roman Empire. Hoffman finds a hierarchy of clerical appointments that reflected and was closely related to the local social hierarchy, with the most powerful posts in the cathedral and parish churches tending to be restricted to the most powerful local families. Overall, Hoffman found that the secular clergy in the diocese tended to be local, the vast majority (ca. 75 percent) having been born within the diocese; whilst mendicants tended to come from elsewhere, with the vast majority (nearly 75 percent) originating from outside the diocese.2 During the sixteenth century the canons of the cathedral, who not only exercised spiritual jurisdiction but also ruled over a substantial territory, styled themselves the Counts of St. Jean; not all were priests, but all had to prove their descent from four generations of nobility. These canons – like the canons in the cathedrals of most German dioceses and archdioceses – were the “preeminent lords of the region” and were required to be scions of “the most illustrious families of the local nobility,” and their stalls often passed down in families, from uncle to nephew.3 Most of them would not have received a theological education. In addition to its chapter, Lyon’s cathedral and its daughter churches had a large staff, including four custodes who served as pastors; a théologal, who preached and instructed younger clergy in doctrine; and twenty curates who said Masses and led/assisted at divine service. Nearly all of these were priests and most were well educated.4 Seven chevaliers looked after the cathedral’s legal affairs, mostly arising from its portfolio of land holdings and property, with its associated tithe rights, annuities, and jurisdictions, but also relating to the cathedral’s patronage of eighty-four parishes. Candidates for all these positions had to contribute 100–200 livres to the cathedral before taking up 2

Philip T. Hoffman, Church and Community in the Diocese of Lyon, 1500–1789 [Yale Historical Publications, Miscellany, 132] (New Haven and London, 1984), 15. 3 Ibid., 11, 13. 4 Ibid., 11; the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges (1438) and Concordat of Bologna (1516) required bishops to have a license in theology or law from a famous university (with a significant exception for nobility), to reserve a cathedral prebend for an experienced theologian who was to lecture and preach, and to reserve one-third of the dignities and benefices for certified graduates, especially in theology or canon law, from universities: see COGD, II/2, 1413: 2787–2789, 1416–1418: 2869–2936. However, according to the statistics in Frederic J. Baumgartner, Change and Continuity in the French Episcopate: The Bishops and the Wars of Religion, 1547–1610 (Durham, NC, 1986), 248–249, only 9 percent of the bishops had a theology degree, while 26 percent had one in law; 14 percent were from religious orders where they studied theology in their studia.

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their posts, which was more than an artisan or journeyman could afford; consequently they tended to come from wealthy or at least well-to-do families, and many were the sons of merchants or officers. The cathedral also supported thirty or more stipendiary (or chantry) priests, who earned their stipends by singing Masses in the chapels. Some of these priests had probably begun their careers as choirboys; many came from artisan families; they would never become custodes or curates.5 Lyon’s collegiate churches also appointed canons, who, like the cathedral’s canons, had to contribute to the endowment on assuming office. These too were drawn from the elite: many of them were the sons of recently ennobled judges, or of magistrates, or of other civic officeholders in the city, and they were likely to be well educated. In contrast, the curates and stipendiary priests associated with these churches came from “less exalted” families, including those of lawyers or lesser merchants. As in the cathedral, in these churches choirboys might be the sons of artisans and rise to become stipendiary priests, gaining a modicum of theological education as they did so.6 The clergy of the city’s seven parish churches tended to be drawn from families of merchants or artisans, but were also well educated.7 Rural clergy, in contrast, tended to have received less extensive education: they could read and write French (as indicated by the fact that they kept registers in French), but most of them “knew no Latin and hence only dimly understood the ritual they conducted.” This also prevented them from engaging in theological study, since Catholic theological discourse continued to be conducted in Latin. Rural clergy were often the natives either of the parish in which they served or of a local town, so that, as Hoffman observes, “no enormous cultural gulf separated [these priests] from their parishioners.” Indeed, many shared a house and even the cultivation of a farm or the care of livestock with family members. In the rural parishes in the environs of Lyon during the early seventeenth century, Hoffman concludes, “as yet, seminaries and education had not driven a wedge between the priests and their people.” However, Tridentine efforts to reform the clergy had not yet had a significant effect: whilst the 1613/14 diocesan visitation found that priestly concubinage had virtually vanished, it also revealed that priests were not catechizing as required by Trent; nor were they dressing or behaving “in ways becoming a priest.”8 Marc Forster’s study of the diocese of Speyer shows a similar picture amongst the rural clergy there. The Catholic Pfarrer were closely integrated

5

Hoffman, Church and Community, 11, 13.

6

Ibid., 11–14.

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7

Ibid., 14.

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Ibid., 48–51.

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into the village community. Thus Sielius, who was the parish priest in Niederlauterbach, not only managed church property and tithes carefully but also ran a vineyard and a farm. He also had a long-term live-in partner with whom he had seven children, to whom he planned to leave his wealth. He was not particularly popular amongst his parishioners, but, finds Forster, “his neighbours . . . saw no conflict between his activities as family man and peasant and his position as a priest.”9 Indeed, at the end of the sixteenth century: Like the clergymen in the neighbouring Protestant territories, Catholic priests were often good fathers and family men. Unlike the homes of Protestant pastors, however, the parsonages in Catholic areas were not “seats of culture” or islands of new morality in a traditional village. As part of the village community, the [Catholic] Pfarrer differed very little from their neighbours and shared their interests.10

Despite the requirement that Catholic clergy be celibate, many seem not to have been, although this began to change as the seventeenth century progressed. Clerical concubinage was (once again) forbidden by Trent in 1563, but in Speyer a diocesan visitation of 1583–1584 found a number of rural priests (either twelve or twenty-two) who were living with women, often “lifelong companions” and the mothers of their children. As Forster observes, whilst the church could relatively easily enforce a ban on clerical marriage, policing celibacy was much more difficult. However, priests seem to have been expected to abide by the social mores of the local community: a priest should be faithful to his “housekeeper” and not abandon her for a younger woman or sleep around; he should keep order in his household, and not drink to excess. In Speyer, however, more than half the priests mentioned in the visitation minutes were “foreigners,” that is, they were not natives of the bishopric of Speyer. A proportion had come to Speyer from the diocese of Constance; others came from Merseburg (Saxony) or Cologne.11 As in Lyon, members of Speyer’s cathedral chapter were drawn from the nobility. Traditionally, the canons of Speyer cathedral, like the Lyon countcanons, expected to participate in the government of the diocesan lands. However, during the latter part of the sixteenth century they began to understand their role also in terms of ecclesiastical reform. By 1600 several members of the cathedral chapter had studied at the Collegium Germanicum in Rome. They 9 Marc R. Forster, The Counter-Reformation in the Villages: Religion and Reform in the Bishopric of Speyer, 1560–1720 (Ithaca, 1992), 26–27. 10 11 Ibid., 27. Ibid., 22–27.

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took a strong interest in the affairs of the diocese, supporting the introduction of the Jesuits into Speyer, calling for a visitation of rural parishes, and establishing a seminary.12 A similar pattern can be observed in Bamberg. When in 1561 Bamberg’s Domherren were told that “their ecclesiastical responsibilities should be ‘principale’ . . . [and] the worldly regiment only an ‘accessorium’,” the majority believed precisely the opposite, understanding themselves to be primarily responsible for the administration of the diocesan territorial lands. Moreover, Günter Dippold finds, “the lives of the majority of the Domherren did not meet even the minimal expectations of the Council of Trent.” This changed over the decades that followed: the first Bamberg canon to have studied at the Collegium Germanicum was Johann Christoph von Neustetter, a supporter of the Tridentine reforms, who was elected Domdekan (cathedral dean) and bishop in 1609, a post which he declined, only to be elected Domprobst (cathedral provost) in 1610. By this time five former students of the Germanicum had been elected to the Bamberg’s Domkapitel (cathedral chapter), and in 1611 the canons agreed to the founding of a Jesuit college in Bamberg.13 In the course of the seventeenth century changes in the education of rural Catholic clergy meant that they became more separate from the communities they served, as Forster observes: The educated, celibate, and “reformed” priests who appeared in the rural parishes after about 1600 were not as easily integrated into the village communities as their predecessors. They were not tightly controlled from Speyer either . . . The rural clergy functioned, not as “agents” of the Tridentine Church but as intermediaries between the rural population and the Church authorities.14

Hoffman and Forster, then, both suggest that sixteenth-century rural priests tended to be integrated into the communities they served, coming either from the local community or from a similar enough background to make it a familiar environment. Priests in cathedral and collegiate church chapters tended to be better born, with cathedral canons often expected to be able to prove their nobility, and drawn from wealthier families, able to pay the required contribution to the endowment. The question of education clearly did not feature prominently in the selection and training of many of these clergy. This was not for lack of 12

Ibid., 60–64. Günter Dippold, Konfessionalisierung am Obermain: Reformation und Gegenreformation in den Pfarrsprengeln von Baunach bis Marktgraitz (Staffelstein, 1996), 53, 54, 57. 14 Forster, The Counter-Reformation in the Villages, 93. 13

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official church pronouncements calling for clerical education. Those calls predate the Council of Trent: both the Third and Fourth Lateran Councils had instructed that provision for the teaching of Latin grammar and the Bible should be made by all cathedrals.15 Simona Negruzzo finds that in rural contexts candidates for ordination were taught basic Latin, some theology, and some ethics by an educated priest of the territory and were then introduced to the bishop to receive sacred orders. Some clergy emerged from the cathedral schools, or from the houses of study of the religious orders, particularly Benedictine, Dominican, Franciscan, and Augustinian. Others – probably a small minority – studied theology at a university.16 However, it is generally accepted that the focus was rather on correct liturgical and ritual practice.17 The records of a 1480 visitation in the diocese of Eichstatt show that the issue of theological training was not pursued. The visitation looked at the practical aspects of the priests’ practice: a priest needed to know “enough grammar to pronounce and intone the words properly and at least to understand the literal sense of what he is reading . . . the necessary material and the necessary form of a sacrament and the right way to administer it . . . the basics of faith . . . the difference between what is sin and what is not and between different sins.”18 However, some priests could not even write their own names: in 1417 two of the eleven members of Brixen’s cathedral chapter could not.19 Universities offered the study of theology, although most university students – and there were not many – only completed the arts curriculum. 15

Klaus Unterburger, “Zwischen Universität und bischöflicher Kontrolle: Das Verhältnis des Herzoglichen Georgianums in München zum Episkopat und zur Rechtsform eines bischöflichen Priesterseminars im Laufe der Geschichte,” Münchener Theologische Zeitschrift 61 (2010), 291–316, at 292. For a discussion of these decrees and their influence on the Council of Trent see James A. O’Donohoe, Tridentine Seminary Legislation: Its Sources and its Formation (Louvain, 1957); summarized in James A. O’Donohoe, “The Seminary Legislation of the Council of Trent,” in Hubert Jedin, ed., Il Concilio di Trento e la riforma tridentina, 2 vols. (Rome and Freiburg, 1965), I, 157–172. 16 Simona Negruzzo, “The Tridentine Proposal for the Formation of the Clergy: The Seminaries,” in Nelson H. Minnich, ed., The Cambridge Companion to the Council of Trent (Cambridge, 2023), 209–224. 17 See, for instance, Unterburger, “Zwischen Universität und bischöflicher Kontrolle,” 292; Klaus Ganzer, “Das Trienter Konzil und die Errichtung von Priesterseminaren,” in Karl Hillenbrand and Rudolf Weigand, eds., Mit der Kirche auf dem Weg: 400 Jahre Priesterseminar Würzburg 1589–1989 (Würzburg, 1989), 11–23; repr. in Klaus Ganzer, Kirche auf dem Weg durch die Zeit: Institutionelles Werden und theologisches Ringen (Münster, 1997), 475–487 (the latter version is cited here); Robert N. Swanson, “Before the Protestant Clergy: The Construction and Deconstruction of Medieval Priesthood,” in C. Scott Dixon and Luise Schorn-Schütte, eds., The Protestant Clergy of Early Modern Europe (Basingstoke, 2003), 39–59. 18 19 Ganzer, “Das Trienter Konzil,” 475–478. Ibid., 487.

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However, this was enough to qualify them for better-paid jobs, often in the church (probably the chevaliers of Lyon cathedral, discussed above, were such posts), but also in other spheres.20 The study of theology did not focus on the practicalities of ministry – canon law was in many ways the more practically based subject – and study of theology at a university was not a prerequisite for ordination.21 However, by the late fifteenth century a good number of vernacular preaching posts had been established in cathedrals and major parish churches in towns in the German and Swiss territories; these were often filled by friars – Franciscans or Dominicans – and were not infrequently appointed and paid by the town council rather than the bishop.22 These posts went some way to fulfilling the need for clergy trained to respond to the demands of the educated laity who were emerging as an important force in the urban context, often with a deep concern for their own salvation and with money to spare to support the church. As Robert Swanson observes, “the educational requirements for a sacramental clergy, concerned with works and rituals, differed from those needed for a preaching and instructing clergy, required to instil a cerebral theology of salvation.”23 The changing nature of urban society required different skills of the clergy (amongst others, more clerks, with new skills, were also needed to administer the growing urban bureaucracy). This also led to the establishing of new educational institutions, often attached to universities and aiming to open university education to those who could not otherwise have afforded it. One of the earliest examples was the Stipendium or Georgianum, established in 1494 at the University of Ingolstadt by Duke George (“the Rich”) of BavariaLandshut, which offered scholarships to poor boys, to be nominated by the councils of the eleven lower Bavarian cities. A scholarship paid for the beneficiaries’ university education, with the expectation that they would show their gratitude to their benefactor by praying for him. The Georgianum was intended to ensure the young men’s morality and improve their knowledge of Scripture, but there was no expectation that the recipients of the scholarships would become priests.24 There was, however, an implicit assumption that they would prove particularly loyal subjects of their benefactor, using the fruits of their education to support his interests. This would become a key aspect when other similar foundations were put in place in 20

21 Unterburger, “Zwischen Universität und bischöflicher Kontrolle,” 293. Ibid. See, for instance, Diarmaid MacCulloch, Reformation: Europe’s House Divided, 1490–1700 (London, 2003), 31–33. 23 Swanson, “Before the Protestant Clergy,” 43. 24 Unterburger, “Zwischen Universität und bischöflicher Kontrolle,” 294–295. 22

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emerging Protestant territories during the sixteenth century, such as Hesse and Württemberg.25 However, although it extended access to university education to a wider spectrum of students, the Georgianum was not a seminary as such. Expectations of clerical education began to change with the Council of Trent’s requirement, expressed in a decree of the twenty-third session, that seminaries be established.26 Negruzzo notes that the decree was based on the measures introduced by Reginald Pole as archbishop of Canterbury in the restored Catholic Church in England under Mary Tudor,27 but the decree was also informed by earlier initiatives such as the diocesan college established by Gian Matteo Giberti, bishop of Verona (who also inspired Pole), and the efforts of Johann Geiler von Kayserberg in Strasbourg to form preachers, ecclesiastical administrators, and confessors.28 The Tridentine article was unanimously ratified,29 although, as Kathleen Comerford observes, the decree provided a training opportunity, not a requirement, and “nowhere in the decree was attendance at seminaries made mandatory.”30 Indeed, Klaus Ganzer argues that seminaries were intended precisely to provide those who could not attend a university with a better theological and spiritual training,31 and notes that the provision of seminaries did not preclude the possibility of studying theology at a university. Trent also required all bishops and archdeacons and at least half of all canons to hold a doctorate or at least a licentiate in theology.32 Bishops were to have been ordained as deacon and priest and to receive episcopal consecration; they were to perform visitations in their dioceses and exercise oversight over their

25 For Hesse see William J. Wright, “Evaluating the Results of Sixteenth Century Educational Policy: Some Hessian Data,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 18 (1987), 411–426; for Württemberg see Charlotte Methuen, “Securing the Reformation through Education: The Duke’s Scholarship System of Sixteenth Century Württemberg,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 25 (1994), 841–851. 26 The decrees of session 23 are helpfully summarized by Kathleen M. Comerford, “Italian Tridentine Diocesan Seminaries: A Historiographical Study,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 29 (1998), 999–1022, at 999–1001. 27 Negruzzo, “The Tridentine Proposal for the Formation of the Clergy.” 28 Michael Mullett, The Catholic Reformation (London, 1999), 64. 29 Negruzzo, “The Tridentine Proposal for the Formation of the Clergy.” 30 Comerford, “Italian Tridentine Diocesan Seminaries,” 1000–1001; cf. also Negruzzo, “The Tridentine Proposal for the Formation of the Clergy.” 31 Ganzer, “Das Trienter Konzil,” 485. 32 Hubert Wolf, “Priesterausbildung zwischen Universität und Seminar: Zur Auslegungsgeschichte des Trienter Seminardekrets,” Römische Quartalschrift für Christliche Altertumskunde und Kirchengeschichte 88 (1993), 218–236, at 230–231, citing Trent sessio 22, cap. 2, sessio 24, cap. 12.

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clergy.33 Seminary education, as Comerford has shown, involved “practical, pastoral, and sacramental theology, with a focus on moral and ethical behaviour” and stood in “a marked contrast to university theology, which was geared more towards theoretical and dogmatic theology.”34 Hubert Wolf concludes that in the Tridentine church three possible routes for training for the priesthood existed: the diocesan seminary, another (higher) school, and the university theology faculties.35 Trent’s aim was to provide sufficient, better-qualified priests, but the principle was that if at least some could attend seminaries, “this would be a decided improvement.”36 However, seminaries proved difficult to establish, and in some areas priests may still have received very little education. Comerford finds that “less than half of the dioceses in the Italian peninsula and islands opened seminaries in the sixteenth century, and many did not even open them in the seventeenth.”37 Josef Stadlhuber has shown how difficult it was to establish a seminary in the diocese of Brixen.38 Speyer transformed its cathedral school into a seminary from 1582, with the help of the Jesuits,39 but Marc Forster finds that the effect of Trent’s decree “was not as dramatic a transformation of the parish clergy as some have argued.”40 By the 1620s the majority of priests in the diocese of Speyer had met the minimum standards set by the Council of Trent: they were celibate and had some education, mostly gained in Speyer, although some had studied in Rome. Most were resident in their parishes and carried out their pastoral duties diligently, although these were often restricted to baptisms, marriages, funerals, and Sunday services, with many congregants showing little interest in confirmation, catechism, or unction as in theory also expected by Trent. However, many of the rural

33 Peter Walter, “Das tridentinische Bischofsideal und seine Wurzeln,” in Peter Walter, Wolfgang Weiss, and Markus Wriedt, eds., Ideal und Praxis: Bischöfe und Bischofsamt im Heiligen Römischen Reich 1570–1620 (Münster, 2020), 1–16, at 2, 16. 34 Comerford, “Italian Tridentine Diocesan Seminaries,” 1009. Cf. also Negruzzo, “The Tridentine Proposal for the Formation of the Clergy.” 35 Wolf, “Priesterausbildung zwischen Universität und Seminar,” 231–232. 36 37 Comerford, “Italian Tridentine Diocesan Seminaries,” 1001. Ibid., 1002. 38 Josef Stadlhuber, “Die Tridentinische Priesterbildung unter dem Brixner Fürstbischof Johannthomas von Spaur (1578–1591),” Zeitschrift für katholische Theologie 81 (1959), 351–368. 39 Hans Ammerich, “Bistum und Hochstift Speyer im Spannungsfeld von Reformation und Katholischer Reform im 16. und frühen 17. Jahrhundert,” in Anette Baumann and Joachim Kemper, eds., Speyer als Hauptstadt des Reiches: Politik und Justiz zwischen Reich und Territorium im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 2016), 139–167, at 153. Cf. also Ludwig Stamer, “Die ersten tridentinischen Seminare des Bistums Speyer im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert,” in Alfons Kloos, ed., St. German in Stadt und Bistum Speyer: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Bischöflichen Priesterseminars Speyer (Speyer, 1957), 103–109. 40 Forster, The Counter-Reformation in the Villages, 59.

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priests were still farmers, and some of them still had very little education indeed.41 Questions of education also did not significantly influence the selection of senior clergy in this period. Comerford’s exploration of Tuscan dioceses shows that “none of the bishops in these areas were appointed for their seminary education, but instead for their political connections.”42 In the German dioceses, the main qualification of prince-bishops continued to be their birth. In contrast, the German suffragan bishops or Weihbischöfe (ordaining bishops) were often theologically well qualified: twenty-five suffragans in Paderborn were friars, at least eleven of whom held a doctorate. In addition, the majority of German suffragan bishops, again unlike the bishops, were members of religious orders: of thirty-two known in Constance, seventeen were friars and twelve monks; of eighteen in Erfurt, all belonged to a religious order; fourteen were friars, most of them Dominicans. Suffragan bishops were expected to lead a disciplined religious and moral life; they ordained and exercised the cure of souls on behalf of the prince-bishop.43 In Germany most of them were university, rather than seminary, educated. However, by the turn of the seventeenth century the Collegium Germanicum in Rome was drawing in students who included members of the nobility. Peter Schmidt calculates that from the 1590s until around 1620 between 40 and 50 percent of the students at the Collegium, the so-called Germaniker, were drawn from the nobility, generally in their early twenties. Students from less exalted backgrounds tended to be a couple of years older.44 The study of theology was increasingly available to students from a wide variety of social backgrounds. As Comerford summarizes her study of Fiesole: by the mid-seventeenth century there was “no clerical elite, no agents of the Counter-Reformation, but instead a small group of men trained only in basic pastoral care.”45 Similarly, in the rural areas around Lyon, Hoffman finds that in the mid41

Ibid., 30–31, 59–60, 89. Kathleen M. Comerford, “Post-Tridentine Tuscan Diocesan Seminaries: Collaboration between City-State and Church?” Paedagogica Historica 43 (2007), 347–364, at 363. 43 Hans-Jürgen Brandt, “Furstbischof und Weihbischof im Spätmittelalter: Zur Darstellung der sacri ministerii summa des reichskirchlichen Episkopats,” in Walter Brandmüller, ed., Ecclesia militans: Studien zur Konzilien- und Reformationsgeschichte; Remigius Bäumer zum 70. Geburtstag gewidmet, vol. II: Zur Reformationsgeschichte (Paderborn, 1988), 1–16, at 12, 14–15. 44 Peter Schmidt, Das Collegium Germanicum in Rom und die Germaniker: Zur Funktion eines römischen Ausländerseminars, 1552–1914 (Tübingen, 1984), 80–81, 93–94. 45 Comerford, “Italian Tridentine Diocesan Seminaries,” 1006. 42

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seventeenth century “as yet, seminaries and education had not driven a wedge between the priests and their people.”46 Forster concludes that in Speyer “the peasant-priest of the mid-sixteenth century only slowly evolved into the educated professional of the eighteenth.”47 This appears to hold for the early modern, Tridentine Catholic Church as a whole. Into the seventeenth century, clergy in the Catholic Church continued to be drawn from a wide spectrum of social backgrounds; theologians, however, were still those who had the wherewithal – whether by virtue of their birth or their membership of a religious order – to finance their university studies, and leading ecclesiastical figures continued to be selected primarily on the basis of their families’ political importance.

Protestant Reformers and Theologians One of the characteristics shared by almost all early Protestant Reformers was their university education. Martin Luther himself was a professor of Bible at the University of Wittenberg as well as an Augustinian friar who shared responsibility for ministering in the town’s churches. Supported by his order, he had studied in Erfurt, taking his MA, Bachelor of Bible, and Bachelor of the Sentences there before moving to the recently founded University of Wittenberg, where he took his doctorate.48 Of his key colleagues in Wittenberg, Nikolaus von Amsdorf had studied in Wittenberg and Leipzig; Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt in Cologne and Wittenberg; and Johannes Bugenhagen in Greifswald (but not theology). The South German Philip Melanchthon had studied in Heidelberg and (like Luther’s mentor Johannes Staupitz) in Tübingen before moving to Wittenberg. This was not untypical: considering the education of eighteen prominent South German Reformers (including Melanchthon), most of whom studied or taught in more than one university, Amy Nelson Burnett finds that seven had studied or taught at Heidelberg;49 probably six had studied or taught at the

46

Hoffman, Church and Community, 52. Forster, The Counter-Reformation in the Villages, 59. 48 See, amongst many others, Martin Brecht, Martin Luther, volume I: Sein Weg zur Reformation 1483–1521 (Stuttgart, 1983), 33–103, 126–129. 49 Conrad Pellikan 1491–1492; Johannes Oecolampadius 1499–1503, 1506–1510, 1513, 1514–1515; Wolfgang Capito 1504–1505; Philip Melanchthon 1509–1512; possibly Johannes Brenz 1513–1522; Martin Bucer 1515–1521; and Simon Grynaeus 1524–1529. For the information that follows, I am grateful to Amy Nelson Burnett for sharing with me the fruits of her trawls through the biographies of the South German reformers. 47

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University of Tübingen;50 six had been at Basel;51 five at Ingolstadt;52 five at Freiburg;53 three at Vienna;54 one studied law in Bologna;55 and one probably matriculated in Mainz.56 Of these, three spent time in Wittenberg.57 Ulrich Zwingli, Reformer in Zurich, studied at the Universities of Vienna and Basel; his successor, Heinrich Bullinger, studied in Cologne, where he encountered humanism as well as Thomist thought. Thomas Müntzer and Caspar Schwenckfeld both studied in Frankfurt an der Oder; Schwenckfeld was also in Cologne; Müntzer probably in Leipzig and certainly in Wittenberg. The studies of Matthias Flacius Illyricus took him to Venice, Basel, and Tübingen, as well as Wittenberg. A university education, which (for all these Reformers except Bugenhagen) included the study of theology, was thus a common factor in the shaping of Reformation thought and would become key to the training of pastors in most territorial Protestant churches. It is, however, important to realize that this educational experience was shared by many of those who opposed the Reformation. Johannes Eck, for instance, opponent of Luther and Karlstadt at the Leipzig Disputation, had studied in Heidelberg (1498), Tübingen (1499), and Freiburg (1502–1510) before moving to Ingolstadt in 1510; there he taught Balthasar Hubmaier and probably Andreas Osiander. In the diocese of Bamberg, of sixteen pastors and ministers in the area of Rattelsdorf, Döringstadt, Altenbanz, Marktzeuln, and Marktgraitz, only six had definitely studied at a university (others may have): four at Jena, three in Wittenberg, one in Leipzig (two had studied at two universities – one Leipzig and Wittenberg; one Jena and Wittenberg).58 The confessional mix of this group is difficult to define: Protestant pastors and Prädikanten (lay preachers) existed alongside Catholic priests in some areas, especially those that

50 Probably Pellikan, as a member of the Franciscan Order of Friars Minor (OFM), 1495–1502; Ambrosius Blarer 1505–1515; probably Martin Cellarius 1512–1520; Melanchthon 1512–1518; Oecolampadius 1513; and Urbanus Rhegius 1519. 51 Pellikan was in Basel as an OFM deacon (1495), then as OFM Lesemeister (1502–1508) and OFM guardian 1519–1526; Leo Jud studied there 1499–1512; Ulrich Zwingli took his BA and his MA there 1502–1506; Oswald Myconius 1510; Casper Hedio 1516–1520 (awarded both BBbl. and BSent. in 1519); Capito 1515–1520 (who arrived in Basel as Lic. Theol.); and Oecolampadius 1515–1516, 1518 (who took all of his theological degrees there). 52 Matthias Zell 1495; Capito 1501–1504 (taking his BA); Rhegius 1510–ca. 1519; Balthasar Hubmaier from 1511 (including taking his doctorate in theology); and Andreas Osiander 1515/ 17–1519/20. 53 Zell 1502–1518; Hubmaier 1503–1511; Capito 1505–1512 (taking his MA); Rhegius 1508–1510; and Hedio 1512–1516 (taking his BA and MA). 54 Zwingli 1498–ca. 1502; Grynaeus 1512; and Joachim Vadian 1502–ca. 1520. 55 56 Oecolampadius: date uncertain (either before 1499 or ca. 1502). Bucer ca. 1516. 57 Melanchthon from 1518; Cellarius from 1521; and Grynaeus in 1523. 58 Dippold, Konfessionalisierung am Obermain, 124.

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bordered on Protestant lands; they were expected to attend clergy chapter, but were otherwise tolerated.59 However, it is striking that the universities named were all Protestant. Moreover, Susan Karant-Nunn has found that of those ordained in Wittenberg between 1542 and 1550, the “previous occupation” of between a quarter and a half was student, the vast majority having studied at the University of Wittenberg.60 Moreover, as Otfried Czaika has shown, it was students from Wittenberg who carried the Reformation to the Swedish empire and established it there.61 University students spread the Reformation, but a university education in theology continued to matter more to Protestant clergy than to Catholic, in part for reasons that have been discussed above. The Protestant pastor or minister was expected to be able to expound and explain his faith in a way that had not been expected of the late medieval clergy, and which continued to be peripheral to the ministry of many early modern Catholic clergy. There were Protestant areas where there were few university-trained ministers – Zurich was one62 – but on the whole, Protestant clergy were expected to be theologically adept, including preaching, catechizing, and teaching,63 and this required a theological education. In contrast, Catholic clergy did not expect – and were not expected – to become theological controversialists. In the early years of the Reformation, however, many “evangelical” pastors had been either priests or monks. Martin Luther, Ulrich Zwingli, Martin Bucer, Matthias Zell, and Johannes Brentz were all notable examples, and Karant-Nunn concludes that visitation records from Albertine Saxony indicate that in the late 1520s “there are abundant reasons for thinking that the proportion of former Catholic clergy was a great deal higher than one 59

Ibid., 121–122. Susan C. Karant-Nunn, Luther’s Pastors: The Reformation in the Ernestine Countryside (Philadelphia, 1979), 9–10 (tables). 61 Otfried Czaika, “Luther, Melanchthon und Chytræus und ihre Bedeutung für die Theologenausbildung im schwedischen Reich,” in Herman J. Selderhuis and Markus Wriedt, eds., Konfession, Migration und Elitenbildung: Studien zur Theologenausbildung des 16. Jahrhunderts (Leiden, 2007), 53–83, at 78. Czaika lists thirty-eight Swedish students who studied in Wittenberg between 1546 and 1560, many of whom also studied at other universities in the German Reich, especially Rostock (twelve students), Königsberg (four students), and Leipzig (one student). At least one student had studied in Uppsala, and one in Bologna. These students went on to become preachers, schoolmasters, diplomats, bishops, and in one case archbishop: see 80–81. 62 See Bruce Gordon, “The Protestant Ministry and the Cultures of Rule: The Reformed Zurich Clergy of the Sixteenth Century,” in Dixon and Schorn-Schütte, eds., The Protestant Clergy of Early Modern Europe, 137–155, at 147. 63 See, for England, Ian Green, “Teaching the Reformation: The Clergy as Preachers, Catechists, Authors and Teachers,” in Dixon and Schorn-Schütte, eds., The Protestant Clergy of Early Modern Europe, 156–175. 60

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third.”64 Similarly, Bruce Gordon notes that “of approximately 170 parish priests in Zürich between 1523 and 1531 we have accounts of only twelve who voiced opposition to the new order and of these only four were removed from office”; in Zurich under Zwingli’s leadership 75 percent of clergy had been ordained as Catholic priests.65 Socially, the majority of the first generation of Reformers came from backgrounds in artisan or guild families: Luther’s father was a miner, Melanchthon’s a swordsmith, and Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt’s a cellarer. Nikolaus von Amsdorf’s father held a high position at the court of Frederick the Wise; his mother was the sister of Johannes Staupitz. Johannes Bugenhagen’s father was a member of the local town council, perhaps at one time mayor; Johannes Oecolampadius came from a similar background. Zwingli’s father was a member of the minor nobility, as was Caspar Schwenckfeldt’s. However, very few Reformers were the scions of noble families – John Laski was an exception – and few came from very poor backgrounds, although Martin Bucer probably did.66 Key Reformers of the next generation included John Calvin, who was the scion of an upwardly mobile family: his grandfather had been a cooper. Bruce Gordon notes that Calvin’s father, Girard Cauvin, under the patronage of the de Hangest family, from whom the bishops of Noyon also came, “achieved bourgeois status in 1497, just over a decade before John’s birth . . . a remarkable ascent up the social ladder.”67 Guillaume Farel came from a noble family from Gap; the father of Theodore Beza was royal governor of Vézelay. Longer term, however, the profile of Reformed pastors was closer to that of Lutherans. As Protestant churches became more established a new generation of clergy was ordained, who had not served in the pre-Reformation church. University training followed by ordination became the norm, although Karant-Nunn finds that between 1538 and 1550 between a quarter and a third of those ordained in Wittenberg had previously been schoolmasters, and until 1545 up to a quarter had been sextons.68 Many clergy continued to come from artisan or craftsmen’s families, although Karant-Nunn cautions that “a relationship between the pastors and craftsmen may or may not have 64

65 Karant-Nunn, Luther’s Pastors, 9. Gordon, “The Reformed Zurich Clergy,” 143–144. Martin Greschat describes Bucer as a “social climber” (sozialer Aufsteiger, without the negative connotation that this often has in English): for Bucer’s background see Martin Greschat, Martin Bucer: Ein Reformator und seine Zeit (1491–1551), 2nd ed. (Münster, 2009), 19–20. 67 Bruce Gordon, Calvin (New Haven, 2009), 4. 68 Karant-Nunn, Luther’s Pastors, 9–10 (tables). 66

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existed.”69 Scott Dixon and Luise Schorn-Schütte, investigating the social origins of Protestant clergy in Hildesheim, Danzig, and Basel, found that that of sixty-six clergy in these areas in the sixteenth century, only two (3 percent) had fathers who were farmers or peasants, whilst eight (12.1 percent) had fathers who were administrators, twenty (30.3 percent) had fathers who were craftsmen, and twenty-five (37.9 percent) had fathers who themselves were (or had been) clergy.70 By the seventeenth century, of a sample of 257 clergy, 24.8 percent came from clerical families; 15.6 percent were the sons of craftsmen; and 11.7 percent were the sons of administrators. Two were the sons of lawyers, and three of university lecturers. None came from the nobility, and only one from a peasant or farming family.71 However, as Schorn-Schütte and Walter Sparn observe, it is impossible to generalize about the situation of Protestant clergy in this period, since local and regional traditions, education provision, and legal structures shaped the patterns of recruitment.72 In Württemberg, for instance, Bruce Tolley found differences between the clergy of different parishes. In and around the duchy’s university town of Tübingen, 101 clergy are known to have served during the period between 1581 and 1621; there is information about the background of fifty-two (51 percent) of these. Of them, forty (77 percent) were the sons of clergy; five (10 percent) were the sons of administrative officials or university lecturers, and seven (13 percent) the sons of town councilors or artisans. Of the thirty-nine clergy who served the more rural area of Tuttlingen over the same period, by contrast, the backgrounds of only nine (23 percent) are known; here all those with known backgrounds were themselves the sons of clergy.73 Again, the elite is underrepresented: none of the pastors appears to have been the son of a noble family, and very few were from the families of “high functionaries or merchants,” although more were drawn from the Ehrbarkeit, made up of district and urban officeholders.74 If any were sons of the peasantry, then this information has not been preserved; however, Tolley argues that the numbers of those 69

Ibid., 11. C. Scott Dixon and Luise Schorn-Schütte, “Introduction,” in Dixon and Schorn-Schütte, eds., The Protestant Clergy of Early Modern Europe, 1–38, at 7–10. 71 Ibid., 7–10. 72 Luise Schorn-Schütte and Walter Sparn, “Einleitung,” in Luise Schorn-Schütte and Walter Sparn, eds., Evangelische Pfarrer: Zur sozialen und politischen Rolle einer bürgerlichen Gruppe in der deutschen Gesellschaft des 18. bis 20. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart, 1997), ix–xxvi, at xiv–xv. 73 Bruce Tolley, Pastors and Parishioners in Württemberg during the Late Reformation, 1581–1621 (Stanford, 1995), 14, 15. 74 Ibid., 12. 70

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coming from less prestigious backgrounds are those more likely to be underestimated. Nonetheless, he concludes that “recruitment from artisan families seems to have decreased among the pastors serving in Tübingen district after 1600.”75 Tolley’s finding regarding patterns of recruitment in Württemberg seem to show the ministry as integrated into Württemberg’s social hierarchy. Similarly, Schorn-Schütte, on the basis of explorations of clergy in Lutheran Braunschweig and Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel and Reformed Hesse-Kassel, argues that the Protestant ministry offered families the chance of social improvement: provided they had the necessary legal training, the sons of ministers had a relatively easy route into administrative or legal posts.76 Unlike the socially hierarchical Catholic structures (such as those described for Lyon), the Protestant ministry was, at least initially, relatively permeable. However, she finds that by the late seventeenth century social hierarchies had become more fixed within the Lutheran hierarchy; this was less the case in the Reformed context of Hessen Kassel.77 By the later seventeenth century German Protestant clergy had become integral to the defining and functioning of the Protestant territories; the Protestant clergy were integrated into the territorial structures in a way that the clergy in Catholic territories were not.78 The existence of married clergy made it possible to establish clerical dynasties, and these certainly existed in Württemberg.79 Württemberg’s pastors tended to come from within the duchy, and as early as 1550 more than 75 percent of the clergy were graduates of Tübingen’s Stift.80 Like Ingolstadt’s Georgianum, the Stift had originally been intended to draw in the sons of poor families to train them up as loyal pastors and schoolteachers,81 but by the seventeenth century it had largely become the preserve of

75

Ibid., 11, 14. Luise Schorn-Schütte, Evangelische Geistlichkeit in der Frühneuzeit: Deren Anteil an der Entfaltung frühmoderner Staatlichkeit und Gesellschaft; dargestellt am Beispiel des Fürstentums Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, der Landgrafschaft Hessen-Kassel und der Stadt Braunschweig (Gütersloh, 1996), 150–151. 77 Ibid., 151. 78 Luise Schorn-Schütte, “Evangelische Geistlichkeit und katholischer Seelsorgeklerus in Deutschland: Soziale, mentale und herrschaftsfunktionale Aspekte der Entfaltung zweier geistlicher Sozialgruppen vom 17. bis zum Beginn des 19. Jahrhunderts,” Paedagogica Historica 30 (1994), 39–81, at 47, 80. 79 Tolley traces several such: Pastors and Parishioners, 122–129. 80 Martin Brecht, “Herkunft und Ausbildung der protestantischen Geistlichen des Herzogtums Württemberg im 16. Jahrhundert,” Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 80 (1969), 163–175, at 170; cf. Tolley, Pastors and Parishioners, 11. 81 Methuen, “Securing the Reformation through Education,” 843–844. 76

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the sons of former scholarship holders, that is, of Württemberg’s clergy.82 This helps to explain the relatively high percentage of Tübingen’s pastors who were the sons of the duchy’s clergy: at 40 percent this far exceeds the 11.8 percent found by Martin Brecht across the duchy or the 10–20 percent found by Bernard Vogler for the Rhineland areas,83 although it is congruent with the findings of Dixon and Schorn-Schütte cited above. For Zurich, in contrast, Gordon provides “the extraordinary calculation that by the 1590s over sixty per cent of the ministers in the parishes were the offspring of native clerical families.”84 Although Schorn-Schütte warns against any assumption that seventeenth-century Protestant pastors were drawn exclusively from clerical families,85 she cites figures from BraunschweigWolfenbüttel which show that in the period 1685–1750, 36.3 percent of pastors were the sons of clergy, and 51.4 percent of their sons went on to become pastors in their turn.86 By no means all Protestant pastors were pastors’ sons, but it is clear, as Tolley remarks, that from an early stage “this process of selfrecruitment was common throughout Germany, and some princes actively encouraged it.”87 The lack of representation of the nobility in these figures is striking, especially compared to the ongoing numbers of young noblemen who were studying at the Collegium Germanicum and entering the ministry of the Catholic Church. Andreas Gößner observes that in the latter part of the sixteenth century German universities with faculties of law tended to see an increase in noble students; however, this was not the case in Wittenberg, where the proportion of noble students remained low at less than 10 percent.88 In Württemberg a similar situation in part reflected the way in which the introduction of the Reformation consolidated the authority of the dukes; Tolley comments that in general “the Reformation accomplished the abolition of the large prebends that had attracted the younger sons of the nobility to the church.”89

82

Tolley, Pastors and Parishioners, 18 (passim). Tolley, Pastors and Parishioners, 19, citing Brecht, “Herkunft und Ausbildung,” 172; Bernard Vogler, Le clergé protestant Rhénan au siècle de la reforme 1555–1619 (Paris, 1976), 18. 84 Gordon, “The Reformed Zurich Clergy,” 145. 85 Schorn-Schütte, “Evangelische Geistlichkeit und katholischer Seelsorgeklerus,” 43. 86 Ibid., 49–51; 25 percent of pastors’ wives were also the daughters of clergy. 87 Tolley, Pastors and Parishioners, 19. 88 Andreas Gößner, Die Studenten an der Universität Wittenberg: Studien zur Kulturgeschichte des studentischen Alltags und zum Stipendienwesen in der zweiten Hälfte des 16. Jahrhunderts (Leipzig, 2003), 32 (also n. 38). 89 Tolley, Pastors and Parishioners, 19. 83

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Protestant parish clergy, like their Catholic counterparts, tended to be quite local. As noted above, the majority of Württemberg’s clergy came from within the duchy: of the 101 clergy who served in the Tübingen district between 1581 and 1621, eighty-four (84 percent) came from within Württemberg; of the thirty-nine clergy of the Tuttlingen district in the same period, thirty-five (89 percent) came from the duchy.90 In Zurich at the time of the Reformation a significant proportion of the clergy were not natives of the city, although most came from the Swiss Confederation; however, from the mid-sixteenth century the vast majority – around 80 percent – came from city families.91 Burnett has found a similar pattern in Basel: whilst the decade after the introduction of the Reformation saw significant numbers of pastors being appointed from outside Basel and its adjoining territories, thereafter this was the exception, and from 1540 to 1629 the vast majority of Basel’s pastors were local: of 191 clergy, just thirty (15.7 percent) came from elsewhere.92 This reflects her findings that between 1542 and 1642 two-thirds of Basel’s theology students came from the area which is now Switzerland,93 and that “a significant percentage of the Swiss students who matriculated in theology in Basel were stipendiates of their home government,” who subsequently entered the service of the church or government that had funded their studies.94 As in Wittenberg, a student in Basel might start his career as a schoolteacher “before being promoted to the ministry.”95 Tolley observes that the increasingly territorial nature of clerical recruitment in Württemberg “ran counter to the recruitment pattern of the territorial university,” which consistently drew between half and two-thirds of its students from outside the duchy.96 A similar pattern may have held for Basel: Dixon and SchornSchütte calculate that during the sixteenth century nineteen (17.6 percent) clergy from Hildesheim, Danzig, and Basel had studied there, compared to thirty-one (28.7 percent) who had studied in Wittenberg, eight (7.4 percent) in Braunsberg, six each (5.6 percent) in Helmstedt and Königsberg, four each (3.7 percent) in Heidelberg, Leipzig, and Tübingen, and three each (2.8 percent) in Erfurt, Frankfurt an der Oder, Rostock, and Rome.97 The high percentage of this sample of clergy who had studied at the University of Basel 90

91 Ibid., 10, 12, 13. Gordon, “The Reformed Zurich Clergy,” 146. Amy Nelson Burnett, Teaching the Reformation: Ministers and their Message in Basel, 1529–1629 (Oxford, 2006), 279. 93 Amy Nelson Burnett, “Local Boys and Peripatetic Scholars: Theology Students in Basel, 1542–1642,” in Selderhuis and Wriedt, eds., Konfession, Migration und Elitenbildung, 109–139, at 125, and see 125–137 for a detailed analysis. 94 95 96 Ibid., 111–112. Ibid., 113. Tolley, Pastors and Parishioners, 11. 97 Dixon and Schorn-Schütte, “Introduction,” 12–21. 92

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must reflect the inclusion of Basel clergy in the study, and the decidedly international student bodies at the University of Wittenberg and the Academy in Geneva almost certainly had little impact in the local pastorate. Basel, however, also trained clergy for other areas of the Swiss Confederation: Gordon finds that of forty-eight Zurich clergy who had attended university, twenty-one had studied at Basel, ten at Heidelberg, and seven at Marburg.98 Many theology students traveled to study, even when a local university was available. Gößner shows that between 1547 and 1602 students attended Wittenberg from across Europe, not only from Protestant lands and territories including Electoral Saxony, Franken, Swabia, Brandenburg-Ansbach/ Bayreuth, the Swabian imperial cities, Electoral Brandenburg, Prussia, Silesia, Niederlausitz, Denmark, Finland, Poland, and Hungary, but also from Catholic areas, such as Upper and Lower Austria, Inner Austria, Bohemia, Moravia, and Bavaria.99 At the Geneva Academy, of the 2,737 students recorded between 1559 and 1620, just 8.4 percent were from Geneva; 34.4 percent were from France (in the period 1559–1572 this percentage is much higher), and 20.4 percent from Germany.100 Almost all the Academy’s students went on to become pastors, although later more began to take up administrative posts. Mark Greengrass observes that in the seventeenth century a majority of Huguenot pastors attended the academies of Saumur and Montauban, but many also studied at universities outside France: “of a sample of 288 pastors serving the [Huguenot] Church in 1660, 128 of them had completed their studies at Geneva, and 11 more had done so at Leiden,” while an unspecified number had attended Sedan, Heidelberg, or Oxford.101 Karin Maag’s statistical analysis also reveals the generally very low numbers of students from the nobility who studied in Geneva, although in 1581 and 1584, and again in 1594 and 1597, noble students made up over 10 percent of the student body.102 She concludes that Geneva’s attraction may have been “its geographic centrality as a well-situated stop between German 98 Gordon, “The Reformed Zurich Clergy,” 147. Gordon does not say where the remaining ten had studied. 99 Gößner, Die Studenten an der Universität Wittenberg, 28–31. 100 These statistics are based on data consolidated from that given by Karin Maag, Seminary or University? The Genevan Academy and Reformed Higher Education, 1560–1620 (Aldershot, 1995), 30, 33, 57, 83, 85. 101 Mark Greengrass, “The French Pastorate: Confessional Identity and Confessionalization in the Huguenot Minority, 1559–1685,” in Dixon and Schorn-Schütte, eds., The Protestant Clergy of Early Modern Europe 176–195, at 184–185. 102 Maag, Seminary or University?, 56, 84.

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centres of learning and French and Italian ones, and its adoption as one of the places to visit during a student’s grand tour,” neither of which had anything to do with confessional identity.103 However, Henri Meylen shows that, although little can be known about the social background of students of Reformed theology, few came from minor nobility and “the number who were sons of artisans or of simple farmers was tiny.”104 The Protestant clergy of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were more consistently educated but less socially diverse than their Catholic counterparts.

“Untrained” Theologians: Housefathers, Women, and Radicals This chapter has so far considered the backgrounds of those who were officially authorized to preach, a group which is relatively easily defined, and many of whose names appear in records such as matriculation and ordination lists. However, and perhaps particularly in the Protestant context with its less closely defined hierarchies of authority, these were not the only people doing theology. This final section will briefly consider the social background of these theologians, most of whom had little or no formal theological education. For Lutherans the household became the new locus of piety, including both spiritual instruction, mostly in the form of catechism, and devotion, often in the form of family prayers. As Robert Christman observes, in theory at least, “over the course of the 16th century, the housefather’s duties came to encompass those of a husband, father, ruler, and bishop, and included studying the catechism and Bible, teaching children and servants the fundamentals of belief and prayer, and imposing strict discipline.”105 It is not clear to what extent households did engage with the faith in this way. Those housefathers who did organize their households in this way were more likely to be the heads of households of the skilled artisan or merchant classes. Housefathers needed at the very least to be able to read if they were to take responsibility for the spiritual formation of the household in this way. The 103

Ibid., 193. Henri Meylen, “Le recruitement et la formation des pasteurs dans les églises réformées du XVIe siècle,” in Derek Baker, ed., Miscellanea Historiae Ecclesiasticae III: Colloque de Cambridge 24–28 Sept. 1968 (Louvain, 1970), 127–150, at 140, 145–146. 105 Robert Christman, “The Pulpit and the Pew: Shaping Popular Piety in the Late Reformation,” in Robert Kolb, ed., Lutheran Ecclesiastical Culture, 1550–1675 (Leiden, 2008), 259–303, at 277. 104

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proliferation of books of prayers, and of postils offering explanations of the traditional lectionary, and of complete Bibles, New Testaments and psalters, all indicate that this aspect of Lutheran home life was taken seriously.106 In many households the teaching and catechizing of children and servants may have been delegated by the paterfamilias to the materfamilias. Although he excluded women from the public preaching ministry, Luther thought that a mother should teach her family, sharing the Word and the Holy Spirit.107 Many women of the merchant classes, however, did not have access to even the basic education that was available to their brothers and husbands. It is striking that of those few women who published under their own names in the Reformation period, three – Ursula von Münsterberg, Argula von Grumbach, and Florentina von Oberweimar – were, as their names indicate, from noble families. Von Münsterberg and von Oberweimar had both been nuns; their works were published by Luther to show their realization of the drawbacks and theological dangers of this way of life. Their theological education, which was more advanced in the case of von Münsterberg than in that of the much younger von Oberweimar, must have been gained in the context of the convent. Similarly, Caritas Pirckheimer, who wrote a theologically sophisticated diary objecting to the imposition of the Reformation on her convent in Nuremberg, received her education in the convent; however, she also came from an important humanist family. Argula von Grumbach and Katharina Schütz Zell, the daughter of a well-to-do family of Strasbourg citizens, must have received their biblical education through their respective families, their attendance at sermons (Schütz Zell was influenced by the preaching of Geiler von Kayserberg), and their own reading. There were clearly greater opportunities for self-education in wealthier families, and von Grumbach and Schütz Zell also had the necessary connections to have their works printed. The spiritual power of the Reformation also gave rise to lay prophets, both male and female. Prophets emerged in many different Lutheran contexts, as Jürgen Beyer has shown, and often encountered resistance from both secular and ecclesiastical authorities.108 Moreover, the Reformation movement gave rise to a whole range of independent, more or less radical, groups, which spawned their own preachers. Some of these were highly educated, such as

106

Ibid., 277–278. Charlotte Methuen, “‘And your Daughters shall Prophesy!’ Luther, Reforming Women and the Construction of Authority,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 104 (2013), 82–109, at 90–91. 108 Jürgen Beyer, Lay Prophets in Lutheran Europe (c. 1550–1700) (Leiden, 2017). 107

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Balthasar Hubmaier, one of the Anabaptist leaders in Zurich, who had studied in Freiburg and Ingolstadt before being ordained priest. Similarly, Thomas Müntzer, Caspar Schwenckfeld, and Michael Gaismair, the Tyrolean leader of the peasants’ or farmers’ uprising, had each received a university education; the former two were also priests who had studied theology. As more radical groups developed, however, often meeting in secret, it is clear that they were often led by self-taught theologians. Thus, the Dutch autodidact Guy de Brès (1522–1567), a glass painter, was famed for being an itinerant preacher. The activities of this group of men and women is often best known from the trials that condemned them. How they were educated and where they learned their theology is unclear. However, it is clear that the leaders of these groups were often drawn from precisely the milieux that were not represented amongst the mainstream Protestant clergy: the lowerranked artisans, simple farmers, and even peasants.

Conclusion Who were the theologians and the clergy? By the mid-seventeenth century the clergy of the Catholic Church were still not all theologians, although they were increasingly expected to have at the least a modicum of theological education. The study of theology tended to be reserved to Catholic clergy higher up the ecclesiastical hierarchy, who were often also drawn from the higher social classes. Protestant clergy, in contrast, were expected to have studied theology at a university, academy, or higher school; they tended, however, to be drawn from a narrower social spectrum. Lay theologians were more important amongst Protestants, due to the emphasis on the household as a place of religious instruction and practice. And some lay men and women, inspired by the Holy Spirit (and perhaps by Luther’s vision of the priesthood of all believers), found themselves preaching the Word of God to local communities and gathered congregations. bibliography Brecht, Martin. “Herkunft und Ausbildung der protestantischen Geistlichen des Herzogtums Württemberg im 16. Jahrhundert.” Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 80 (1969), 163–175. Comerford, Kathleen M. “Italian Tridentine Diocesan Seminaries: A Historiographical Study.” The Sixteenth Century Journal 29 (1998), 999–1022. Dippold, Günter. Konfessionalisierung am Obermain: Reformation und Gegenreformation in den Pfarrsprengeln von Baunach bis Marktgraitz. Staffelstein, 1996.

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The Theologians and the Clergy: Who Were They? Dixon, C. Scott and Luise Schorn-Schütte, eds. The Protestant Clergy of Early Modern Europe. Basingstoke, 2003. Forster, Marc R. The Counter-Reformation in the Villages: Religion and Reform in the Bishopric of Speyer, 1560–1720. Ithaca, 1992. Ganzer, Klaus. “Das Trienter Konzil und die Errichtung von Priesterseminaren.” In Karl Hillenbrand and Rudolf Weigand, eds., Mit der Kirche auf dem Weg: 400 Jahre Priesterseminar Würzburg 1589–1989. Würzburg, 1989, 11–23; repr. in Klaus Ganzer, Kirche auf dem Weg durch die Zeit: Institutionelles Werden und theologisches Ringen. Münster, 1997, 475–487. Gößner, Andreas. Die Studenten an der Universität Wittenberg: Studien zur Kulturgeschichte des studentischen Alltags und zum Stipendienwesen in der zweiten Hälfte des 16. Jahrhunderts. Leipzig, 2003. Hoffman, Philip T. Church and Community in the Diocese of Lyon, 1500–1789 [Yale Historical Publications, Miscellany, 132]. New Haven and London, 1984. Karant-Nunn, Susan C. Luther’s Pastors: The Reformation in the Ernestine Countryside. Philadelphia, 1979. Maag, Karin. Seminary or University? The Genevan Academy and Reformed Higher Education, 1560–1620. Aldershot, 1995. Schorn-Schütte, Luise. Evangelische Geistlichkeit in der Frühneuzeit: Deren Anteil an der Entfaltung frühmoderner Staatlichkeit und Gesellschaft; dargestellt am Beispiel des Fürstentums Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, der Landgrafschaft Hessen-Kassel und der Stadt Braunschweig. Gütersloh, 1996. “Evangelische Geistlichkeit und katholischer Seelsorgeklerus in Deutschland: Soziale, mentale und herrschaftsfunktionale Aspekte der Entfaltung zweier geistlicher Sozialgruppen vom 17. bis zum Beginn des 19. Jahrhunderts.” Paedagogica Historica 30 (1994), 39–81. Schorn-Schütte, Luise and Walter Sparn, eds. Evangelische Pfarrer: Zur sozialen und politischen Rolle einer bürgerlichen Gruppe in der deutschen Gesellschaft des 18. bis 20. Jahrhunderts. Stuttgart, 1997. Selderhuis, Herman J. and Markus Wriedt, eds. Konfession, Migration und Elitenbildung: Studien zur Theologenausbildung des 16. Jahrhunderts. Leiden, 2007. Tolley, Bruce. Pastors and Parishioners in Württemberg during the Late Reformation, 1581–1621. Stanford, 1995. Wolf, Hubert. “Priesterausbildung zwischen Universität und Seminar: Zur Auslegungsgeschichte des Trienter Seminardekrets.” Römische Quartalschrift für Christliche Altertumskunde und Kirchengeschichte 88 (1993), 218–236.

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SCHOOLS AND EMERGING CULTURES OF THEOLOGY: DIVERSITY AND CONFORMITY WITHIN CONFESSIONS

10

The Faculty of Theology of Paris (1474–1682) jean-robert armogathe The history of the faculty of theology of Paris1 cannot be separated from the history of the university as a whole, nor from other factors such as the city of Paris, its bishop, the pope, and the king. Its schools had an episcopal character, that is, they were associations of masters who were obliged to accept a chancellor as commissarius Papae. The pope allowed the schools to become a universitas, that is to say, he granted it the right to confer the licentia ubique docendi, and thus its degrees had universal authority. The history of the University of Paris is that of alliances and conflicts among the four powers: the king, the masters (and the president they elect), the bishop, and the chancellor appointed by the pope. In the fourteenth century the dispute concerned questions of precedence between chancellor and rector, but they faded in the fifteenth century, the two parties uniting against the civil authority of the provost of Paris: in 1482 the rector and the university undertook the defense of the chancellor (Denis Le Harpeur), whom the king wanted to deprive of his office. Increasingly, indeed, royal power tended to view granting the graduation degrees as a ius regale. In this unequal struggle, the king on the one hand and the Parlement of Paris on the other tried to control the university, which produced a large number of arguments, ploys, and tricks to keep a minimum of autonomy. Encouraged by Rome not to support conciliarism, the faculty of theology presented itself as a magisterial organ during the Great Schism rivalry between Rome and Avignon, and thus Paris appeared as “the second capital of Christendom.” Even when Rome increased the activity of the College of Cardinals, Paris continued to stand as arbiter fidei, and persisted in this role 1 The faculty of theology should not be confused with the Collège de Sorbonne, which was one of a number of colleges that composed the faculty. The Sorbonne was famous for its masters and for the protection it later received from Cardinal de Richelieu.

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even when the Council of Trent put universities under close dependency on the pope. The faculty’s authority was preserved and enhanced ad intra and ad extra: ad intra by tightening the solidarity of the body through organizational measures that consistently tended to restrict from governance roles members of religious orders in favor of secular priests who were considered more strongly attached to their Alma Mater; ad extra by identifying its authority with the Gallican Liberties, presented as the true ecclesiastical freedom. The jurist Pierre Le Roy († 1410), abbot of Mont Saint-Michel, one of the most eminent masters of the faculty of law, said in 1406 that “the Pope cannot change customs.”2 The Council of Constance would allow the jurists and theologians of Paris to base their positions on canon law: if the decretals of the popes could do nothing against conciliar constitutions, was it not because the authorities that underpinned both laws belonged to different levels, so that one had to admit that the council was superior to the pope? This doctrine prevailed in France between 1407 and 1415, and led to the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges (1438), approved by the Council of Basel. The Gallican Liberties, of which the faculty of theology claimed to be the most faithful defender, were deemed to be rooted in an immemorial national tradition. They guaranteed, in turn, the independence of the faculty with respect to Roman power, and they led it to rely more and more on royal authority (until Charles VII submitted his “daughter,” the University of Paris, to the jurisdiction of the Parlement in 1445).3 The fifteenth century at first witnessed a sharp decline in the university and its faculties because it had supported the Burgundian party during the Hundred Years War, had accepted the English occupation of Paris, and had participated in the trial of Joan of Arc – all of which explains the long distrust of Charles VII. A reform commission chaired in 1452 by Cardinal Guillaume Estouteville (ca. 1400–1483) failed to restore order. The income of the university had also been considerably reduced by the war and many students had gone to other places for study. The intellectual history of the University of Paris, and specifically of the faculty of theology, deserves special consideration. If at the beginning of the fourteenth century many British theology students came to Paris to study Thomas Aquinas and Henry of Ghent, the movement slowed down in the

2

“Le Pape ne peut immuer les conseaux généraux.” Le Mandement au Parlement de connaître des causes de l’Université de Paris le 2 mai 1546: see François-André Isambert, Nicolas Decrusy, and Athanase-Jean-Léger Jourdan, eds., Recueil général des anciennes lois françaises, 29 vols. (Paris, 1822–1833), IX, 138–144 no. 173.

3

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second half of that century, and theology followed two different and autonomous paths on both sides of the Channel. In this respect, 1474 may be a good terminus a quo for our study: in that year, by his ordinance of March 1, King Louis XI prohibited the public or private teaching of nominalist authors (nominales or terministi), establishing a list of authors banned from university and monastery libraries: William of Ockham, John of Mirecourt, Gregory of Rimini, Jean Buridan, Pierre d’Ailly, Marsilio of Inghen, Adam Woodham, John Dorp, and Albert of Saxony. Twenty theologians approved the royal declaration, which prescribed the teaching of realistic doctors: Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas, Giles of Rome, Alexander of Hales, John Duns Scotus, Bonaventure of Bagnoregio, and aliorum doctorum realium. This teaching, the statement said, more solito legatur, doceatur, dogmatisetur, discatur et imitetur.4 Nominalists followed the via moderna. The distinction between via antiqua and via moderna, however, is complex. Both viae were taught together in Germany, and the statutes of Wittenberg (1508) even admitted three viae: the via Thomae, via Scoti, and via Gregorii (Gregory of Rimini, † 1358). The main feature of the supporters of the via moderna is the distinction in God between potentia absoluta and potentia ordinata. The political implications of the divine omnipotence certainly played a role in the ban, which was lifted in 1482. Nevertheless, the faculty of Paris remained attached to the via antiqua and contributed (with the University of Cologne) to its diffusion: the student residence (die Burse) at the University of Ingolstadt attached to the via antiqua was called the Bursa Parisiensium or Bursa antiqua or Bursa realium. The end of the fifteenth century witnessed a new ordering in some of the forty colleges that made the University of Paris: the Collège de Navarre (under Jean Raulin, 1443–1514) took drastic reform measures beginning in 1480; the Collège d’Autun reformed its statutes in 1490; and, especially, Jan Standonck (1453–1504), a Flemish theologian, restored order in the Collège de Montaigu in 1491. The reform of the colleges strengthened the university, both against the Parlement and against the pope: when Innocent VIII wanted to raise a tithe upon the clergy, he met opposition from the university as a body on September 13, 1491, and the rector Guillaume Capel appealed from the pope

4 For a critical edition of the text see Franz Ehrle, Der Sentenzenkommentar Peters von Candia des Pisaner Papstes Alexanders V. (Münster, 1925), 310–316, at 314; see also César-Egasse du Boulay, Historia Universitatis Parisiensis, ed. F. Noel and P. de Bresche, 6 vols. (Paris, 1665–1673), V, 706–710.

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ill-advised to the pope better informed and to a future general council. Based on this appeal, the faculty of theology ignored any censure or excommunication. In 1498 King Charles VIII sent the faculty a series of questions on the conditions for the convening of a general council, to which the faculty responded positively (the accidental death of the king on April 14, 1498 aborted this project). The theologians stood firm, and they had the opportunity to speak out when the Council of Pisa (1511–1512), joined by King Louis XII, asked them to refute Tommaso de Vio (Cajetan)’s treatise on the authority of the pope (1512). Jacques Almain undertook the task, and his treatise On the Authority of the Church and the Councils (1512) is the first of a long series which founded and developed the Gallican theories. The history of humanistic attacks against a Scholastic and backward faculty, hostile to any innovation, must be carefully reviewed. Buttressed in the defense of orthodoxy, the faculty fought above all against the spread of Reformation ideas. In 1520 the universities of Cologne and Louvain had condemned Luther’s writings. According to the registers of the Paris faculty it would have received from Louvain “a certain book” for review on March 15, 1519. If it was Martin Luther’s 95 Theses, it should be noted that the faculty waited until July 1520 to take action against the Libellus disputationum Leuter and until April 1521 to decide in materia Lutherana, and, two years later, about Philip Melanchthon. In the discussion of August 14, 1520, non fuit conclusio pacifica.5 Debates explain the slow response: in January 1518 the faculty had severely criticized the papal bull on indulgences. It found itself in agreement with the attacks of Luther against the papacy. Finally, we know that Evangelism had found supporters in the highest circles of the country: the sister of King Francis I, Marguerite of Navarre (1492–1549), protected a Reformist cenacle. Parisian theologians managed a tour de force: to condemn Luther in 1521, without mentioning his criticisms of papal authority.6 Noel Beda (or Bédier, ca. 1470–1537) was the first syndic of the faculty (1520). It was in this capacity that he confronted the spread of Reformation doctrines. Faithful to a rigid orthodoxy, he relentlessly attacked all innovations, including those of Marguerite of Navarre and King Francis I himself, which earned him imprisonment at Mont Saint-Michel, where he died. Ill-

5 See Registres des procès-verbaux de la Faculté de théologie de Paris, ed. Jules-Alexandre Clerval (Paris, 1917), 273, and the analysis of this by James K. Farge, Orthodoxy and Reform in Early Reformation France: The Faculty of Theology of Paris, 1500–1543 (Leiden, 1985), 248–250. 6 Philippe Büttgen, Luther et la philosophie. Études d’histoire (Paris, 2011), 163.

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treated by historians, Beda stands as an important witness of the strong resistance given by traditional orthodoxy to ideological landslides. Despite royal indulgence of Erasmus and the Reformers, Beda denounced with pugnacity (and not without talent) whatever he considered as threatening errors, including views held by colleagues in the faculty. Thus Beda opposed the Flemish Josse (Jodocus) Clichtove (1472–1543), a student at Louvain and Paris and a leading figure of the Collège de Navarre and the Sorbonne who received his doctorate in 1506. Parisian humanism was divided among several trends: Petrarch, Gerson, devotio moderna, and the monastic ideal. Both humanist and theologian, Clichtove seems to have been influenced by other factors: the importance of theology in the twelfth century, that is, Bernard of Clairvaux cleared of any suspicion of “scholasticism,” the rediscovery of nominalism – for better and for worse! – and strong personalities such as Abbot Johannes Trithemius. It has been shown that the humanism of Clichtove was less characterized by love of literature (he did not know Greek) than by his preoccupation with an ascetic participation of the individual in his own salvation (a kind of Pelagianism) – hence, his work in favor of the restoration of religious orders to their original features. In April 1520, in an anti-Lutheran sermon at Tournai, Clichtove remained very vague and did not identify the contents of the “new doctrines” he was complaining about. Following the Articles of Faith drawn up by the faculty on the orders of King Francis between January and March 1543, it decided to publish an inventory of books that should be censored: the first catalogue of sixty-five condemned items was compiled in March 1543, followed by others in 1544, 1547, 1551, 1556, and 1562 (when the Roman Index took over). Royal authority repeatedly tried to impose reforms on the faculty: in 1530 the Parlement stressed the need to study the Scriptures – in order not to leave the Reformers alone in the field! But the succession of measures to reform the university proved ineffective, until Henry IV imposed new statutes. It took three-and-a-half years to register them in the Parlement in September 1598, and two more to put them into effect. While the new regulations were very detailed for the faculties of arts and medicine, they were brief for the faculty of theology, calling, once again, for the study of Scriptures, without abandoning Scholastic theology, so necessary for controversies. In a troubled century, the faculty of theology tried to exercise its teaching function with a dual loyalty, to the church and to the monarchy. To maintain the unity of the Catholic kingdom, it censured Henry III in 1587 and Henri de Navarre in 1590: “the divine law forbids the Catholics to recognize a heretic 179

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king or one guilty of heresy and notorious enemy of the Church, and a fortiori a relapsed person excommunicated by the Holy See.” Its concern about the election of bishops led it to oppose the registration of the Concordat of 1516, which made obsolete the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges (1438). In opposing the Jesuits and in many censures of writings hostile to “Gallican liberties,” it was to show a keen patriotism. In 1552 a bull of Julius III gave the Jesuits the right to confer academic degrees: each of their colleges could become a rival to the university. The installation of the Jesuits in France had already met with opposition from the Parlement of Paris. But, strongly protected by the Guise family, the Jesuits had renewed their request, submitting to the ordinances of the kingdom, the Gallican Liberties, the Concordat of Leo X, and all the ecclesiastical rules of France. In 1560–1561 they received a large bequest from Guillaume Prat, bishop of Clermont-Ferrand, which allowed them to buy the Hôtel de Langres, in the heart of the Latin Quarter, to establish a college, which became a challenge for the University of Paris. The faculty of theology was less threatened than other faculties, since to attract the best families in the kingdom the Jesuits intended to confer degrees in arts (or philosophy). They even found some support among the theologians. Decades of trial, when Étienne Pasquier (1565) and Antoine Arnauld (1594) were the lawyers of the university in the Parlement, did not prevent the Jesuits, despite some setbacks, from getting a foothold in the academic world. In a way, this victory of the Jesuits was felt as a drawback for the University of Paris, and a justification for its support of the League. A Navarriste theologian, Claude de Sainctes (1525–1591), became bishop of Évreux (1575); he supported the Leaguers by his writings and actions, which led to his being arrested in 1591 and dying in prison. In the same period the university slowly lost its autonomy. In 1587 the faculty of theology adopted severe measures against the masters, but also against religious orders. Successive reforms of the statutes of the university gave growing influence to royal power (which in 1596 created two chairs of positive theology, similar to those of the College royal). Imposed by the king without any participation by the pope, the statutes of 1600 marked the triumph of royal power. King Henry IV backed the presence of the Jesuits, whose college was a challenge for the university. In an attempt to restore the old ways, the university asked to take part in the Estates General of 1614, but this claim was rejected. The history of the faculty’s involvement in doctrinal matters in the seventeenth century is mainly a history of successive quarrels, marked by censorship around several themes: the rights of religious orders, 180

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the Augustinian doctrine of grace and Jansenism, the defense of Gallicanism, and the rejection of philosophical (Cartesian) and mystical (Quietist) innovations. The faculty distinguished itself in the conflict between Louis XII and Pope Julius II and thus made it possible to construct a Gallican doctrine: the actors were the Navarristes John Major (Mayor, 1469–1540) and Jacques Almain († 1515, who was his student at the Collège Montaigu). Major, of Scottish origin, established the first principles: “bishops and priests have been established by Christ” and “the pope does not possess the power of the sword” (in his commentary of the Fourth Book of Sentences, 1509). Almain, a Frenchman, established the authority of the church (and the council) above the pope, and wrote On the Authority of the Church and the Councils (1512) at the request of King Louis XII to answer Cajetan’s treatise and the pretentions of Pope Julius II on temporal power. A stronghold of Gallicanism, the faculty could not, however, take advantage of the unanimity of its members: most doctors from religious orders were naturally ultramontanes (approving, for example, in 1606, the Institutiones morales of the Jesuit Juan Azor, a firm defender of the indirect power of the pope over civil power), and even some diocesan doctors proclaimed the infallibility of the head of the universal church, as did André Duval (du Val, 1564–1638, professor in 1596), whose commentary on the second part of the Summa theologica (1636) occupies two folio volumes. He defended Roman infallibility, even extending it from matters of faith and morals to canonizations and approval of religious orders. He opposed Edmond Richer. Edmond Richer (1559–1631) studied at the Collège of Cardinal Lemoine; in 1602 he was elected syndic of the faculty of theology. For this reason he became the advocate of the university against the religious orders and the champion of Gallican Liberties. His Latin book On Ecclesiastical and Political Power (1611) had a great impact. Not only did he advocate the traditional theory of the superiority of the council over the pope, but he applied it to the civil power, saying that the Estates General are superior to the king. For him, Christ entrusted the keys to his church principaliter, and only secondly, ministerialiter and instrumentaliter, to the pope and the bishops. Convicted and deposed, Richer had to sign two retractions (1622, 1629) – but in reissuing his text (1622) he added strong demonstrationes which were more argumentative than restrictive. With Duval, two other professors made up a sort of “triumvirate” of theological teaching under Louis XIII. From 1598 Philippe de Gamaches 181

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(1568–1625) occupied one of the two chairs of positive theology created by Henry IV at the Collège de Sorbonne; he taught there until his death. His great commentary on the Summa (posthumous, 1627) relied heavily on medieval authorities. Nicolas Isambert (1565 or 1569–1642) taught dogmatic theology before being called in 1616 to the chair of controversialist theology created by Louis XIII. His commentary on the Summa appeared in six volumes (Paris, 1639–1648). In 1622 the Sorbonniste Michel Mauclerc, in his De monarchia divina ecclesiastica et seculari christiana, openly defended ultramontanism. The university then asked the faculty to condemn the book, but the king did not allow open discussion on this thorny issue. An important part of the work of the faculty was devoted to defending the rights of the bishops and their curates against those of religious orders. Thus, on February 1, 1601, it condemned, at the request of the bishop of Lisieux, some assertions “on Mendicants who arrogate to themselves the right to preach in spite of curates and bishops”;7 similar interventions, often contained by royal authority, occurred throughout the century. The French regulars found allies abroad, and the faculty had to censor Latin works written by English Jesuits or translated from English and supporting the rights of religious orders, especially against the apostolic vicar of Great Britain, Richard Smith. The Abbé de Saint-Cyran, Jean Duvergier de Hauranne, assisted by his nephew Martin de Barcos, defended the right of bishops in his Petrus Aurelius (1631). The Jesuits were the most productive, but the other orders were not to be outdone: the clergy of Poitiers denounced the anonymous book of a Carmelite (Bonaventure de Sainte-Anne) to the faculty on March 12, 1664;8 in 1674 the doctors rejected the thesis of a Franciscan (Michel Gelée). However, in 1670 Clement X had tried to put an end to this dispute by defining the privileges of regulars – establishing that regulars approved by the bishops could preach without the consent of curates. The faculty obtained a guarantee from the Parlement that the constitution Superna magni Patris would not be promulgated in France, “by virtue of an ancient custom.” The Jansenist quarrel revealed fractures in the assembly of the faculty. Originally, the disputed work of Cornelius Jansen (1585–1638) had been approved by several doctors of the Sorbonne. When Rome condemned the work in the bull In Eminenti (1642–1643), the reasons given hindered Parisian 7 8

Collectio judiciorum de novis erroribus ... (Paris, 1724), II, pars 1a, pp. 538–539. Archives Nationales MM353, fol. 52.

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theologians: the bull banned any discussion on matters of grace (a measure already decided by Paul V, recalling Gregory XIII’s bull of 1580). But the faculty claimed the right to intervene on all points of doctrine: it decided to take the lead in condemning on its own seven propositions (later reduced to five) extracted from Jansenius’s book Augustinus (1649). Eleven opponents among the bishops spoke out at the Assembly of the Clergy (1650), while on various sides conflicts revealed the existence of a minority, which made possible an appeal to Rome. But in 1653 there was a new papal condemnation of the five propositions (by Innocent X’s bull Cum occasione). The faculty of Paris registered the bull without difficulty, and was followed by the other faculties of France. The case resumed with vigor in 1655 – the faculty was the scene of intense conflicts between November 1655 and January 1656 which led to the arrival of Chancellor Pierre Séguier, sitting solemnly in the name of the king amidst the assembly. Rejecting the distinction between fact and law cleverly set up by Antoine Arnauld, the assembly took up the case against Arnauld and decided to exclude him from the faculty of theology (and the Sorbonne domus). The decision was far from unanimous (while about 125 doctors approved it, 70 others opposed). The censure of Arnauld occasioned the publication of Pascal’s Letters to a Provincial, soon translated and annotated in Latin by Pierre Nicole. On several occasions the royal power intervened to overcome the impotence of a divided assembly. This fracture of the assembly lasted for decades and was fatal to the authority of the faculty, which was worn out with internal fighting. In vain in 1658 the faculty republished three earlier censures: against Luther (1543); against the Jesuit apology of regicide (1610); and against the Second Letter of Arnauld (1656). These reissues underline its weakness and its desire to do nothing other than pose as the historical defender of Gallican freedoms and Catholic orthodoxy. The king’s men (les gens du Roi) were often more aggressive than the faculty for the defence of Gallican Liberties, and Denis Talon (1626–1698), avocat général of the Parlement of Paris, showed a particular zeal to defend parliamentary Gallicanism, which was not in line with the faculty. When, in 1663, a Breton bachelor, Drouet de Villeneuve, was allowed to argue that “the popes have granted privileges to certain churches such as the Gallican church,” the Parlement condemned the thesis as holding propositions contrary to the authority of the Church, to the doctrine traditionally accepted and cherished in the Kingdom, to the holy Canons, the 183

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decrees of general councils and liberties of the Gallican Church, and tending to raise the power of the pope over that of general councils and beyond the limits that have always been sacredly preserved in the Gallican Church.

Indeed, the doctrine of the Parlement was to assert that the Gallican Liberties were not “privileges” granted by the popes, but immemorial rights, according to the distinction of a great lawyer, the avocat général of the Parlement, Jacques Leschassier (1550–1625). On several occasions during 1660–1680 the Parlement intervened in the affairs of the faculty in order to impose a political Gallicanism that exceeded the canonical Gallicanism. Thus, in 1675, a candidate for the licentiate had argued that “it belonged to the Church to establish impediments of nullity to marriage.” The Parlement requested explanations and warned the syndic of the faculty “to be more accurate in the future when accepting theses and not to suffer slips into proposals contrary to the King’s authority and to the rights of the crown and the liberties of the Gallican Church.”9 The declaration approved by the Assembly of the Clergy on March 19, 1682 (known as the Four Articles) was, by royal decree, recorded in “Parlemonts, baillages, sénéchaussées, faculties of theology and canon law” of the whole country: if the faculty of law offered no resistance, the faculty of theology was angered by the breach of its privileges and the zeal of the chancellor in ordering any bachelor to subscribe to the Four Articles (while it was only asked not to attack them). Although thirty-five doctors favored the pure and simple recording of the declaration, a large minority (twenty-nine) asked that remonstrances be addressed to the king. In June 1682 the first president of the Parlement acting in the name of the king forbade the meetings of the faculty and ordered it to register the declaration. Parlement later lifted the ban, but lettres de cachet sent into exile the eight most recalcitrant doctors.10 The faculty also spoke against innovations in philosophy: in 1624 it condemned theses against Aristotle, and distinguished itself by its opposition to Cartesianism. In August 1671 an order from the king urged the faculty to keep to traditional authors and doctrines and not to step out of the received syllabus. After a lettre de cachet and a judgment prohibiting the teaching of Descartes at the faculty of Angers (1675), a strong offensive was unleashed: 9 Cited by Pierre-Yves Féret, La faculté de théologie de Paris et ses docteurs les plus célèbres: Époque moderne, 7 vols. (Paris, 1900–1910), III, 289. 10 Charles Jourdain, Histoire de l’Université de Paris au XVIIe et au XVIIIe siècle. Pièces justificatives, index chronologique (Paris, 1866), 113–116.

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successively, the faculty of theology of Caen (1677) and the Congregation of the Oratory and of Sainte-Geneviève (1678) were ordered to forsake the teaching of “new opinions.” Nevertheless, the royal prohibition had to be repeated (1685, 1691, 1693, 1699), which shows the irresistible rise of new ideas.

Conclusion The Faculty of Paris felt that it was its duty to resist change by strengthening its natural conservatism with a conviction of its authority – and by wanting to strengthen the exercise of its authority in preserving the status quo. But such resistance could not be achieved without tension, since it was invariably confronted by large minorities. The faculty’s weakened authority was further demonstrated in a paradoxical and contradictory way. It variously relied on the pope and on the king, on the Roman power and on the civil authority of the Parlement. To fight against the regulars, it relied on the Parlement against the pope, but in the Jansenist affairs it received the Roman decisions with alacrity. A stern defender of Gallican Liberties, it also wanted to preserve its autonomy from the interference of the Parlement, which was ever inclined to intervene in matters of doctrine. The increasing frequency of the expression esse doctrinam Facultatis in the documents shows the awareness the faculty had of maintaining a body of identifiable doctrine. bibliography du Boulay, César-Egasse. Historia Universitatis Parisiensis, ed. F. Noel and P. de Bresche, 6 vols. Paris, 1665–1673. Brockliss, L. W. B. French Higher Education in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: A Cultural History. Oxford, 1987. Farge, James K. Orthodoxy and Reform in Early Reformation France: The Faculty of Theology of Paris, 1500–1543. Leiden, 1985. Féret, Pierre-Yves. La faculté de théologie de Paris et ses docteurs les plus célèbres. Époque moderne, 7 vols. Paris, 1900–1910. Fournier, Marcel. Statuts et privilèges des universités françaises depuis leur fondation jusqu’en 1789, 4 vols. Paris, 1890–1894. Grès-Gayer, Jacques M., Le gallicanisme de Sorbonne. Chroniques de la faculté de théologie de Paris: 1657–1688. Paris, 2002. Jansénisme en Sorbonne: 1643–1656. Paris, 1996. Grès-Gayer, Jacques M., ed. En Sorbonne, autour des “Provinciales”. Édition critique des Mémoires de l’abbé de Beaubrun (1655–1656). Paris, 1997. Guenée, Simonne. Bibliographie de l’histoire des universités françaises des origines à la Révolution, 2 vols. Paris, 1978–1981.

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jean-robert armogathe Les universités françaises des origines à la Révolution. Notices historiques sur les universités, studia et académies protestantes. Paris, 1982. Jourdain, Charles. Histoire de l’Université de Paris au XVIIe et au XVIIIe siècle. Paris, 1862. Tuilier, André. Histoire de l’Université de Paris et de la Sorbonne, 2 vols. Paris, 1995. Universités (Les) européennes du XIVè au XVIIIè siècle. Aspects et problèmes. Geneva, 1967. Verger, Jacques. Les universités françaises au Moyen Âge. Leiden, 1995.

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The School of Salamanca juan belda plans

After an unsettled late medieval period, the sixteenth century in Europe presented itself as a new historical cycle, full of vitality and original perspectives. It was a time of significant changes as a consequence of the late medieval crises of plagues, famine, warfare, civil unrest, and the Great Western Schism, and also due to important phenomena such as Renaissance humanism and the budding Protestant Reformation. Looking at the field of theology in the late fifteenth century, we might ask: What was the situation? We find a deteriorated Scholastic theology that was viewed with apprehension by the new cultural currents of the time. Among other defects, it was accused of being a theology susceptible to logicist dialectics in which disputes abounded among opposing schools of Scholasticism. They were frequently occupied in the study of topics of little use and, moreover, distanced from the genuine theological sources (Sacred Scripture and the writings of the Church Fathers). Its formal method of the quaestio and its poor Latinity led to a negative image.1 The University of Paris was the theological center par excellence (based on an old tradition and enjoying great prestige) where weak Scholastic theology dominated the scene. New humanist thinking soon appeared, creating a conflict between the Scholastics and humanists, each wanting to control the university. Meanwhile, what was happening in Spain? The situation was somewhat peculiar; the country had just emerged from a long political, religious, and cultural confrontation with the Islamic world. In 1492 the eight centuries of occupation by Muslim invaders from North Africa ended with a Christian victory in the Reconquista War. The Catholic king and queen unified the

1 Juan Belda Plans, La Escuela de Salamanca y la renovación de la teología en el siglo XVI (Madrid, 2000), 6–22.

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Spanish kingdoms and began the extensive task of promoting arts and letters in a country where there had been no time for study and culture.2

What Was the School of Salamanca? Defining Features It must be affirmed before anything else that the School of Salamanca was a school of theology. The works of the Salamancan masters, however, also provide us with rich content in judicial and economic matters, which have in turn been studied by the specialists of those fields. Here we deal with some authors who were professors of the faculty of theology of Salamanca, although their studies went beyond theology. So, what is understood by the term “School of Salamanca”? It could be defined as a theological movement of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries made up of a group of professors of the faculty of theology of Salamanca University, who were considered disciples of the Dominican Thomist master Francisco de Vitoria. They followed his guidelines and methodology, thus forming a cohesive group of theologians with common characteristics. Vitoria’s main objective was the renovation of Scholastic theology.3 All these professors embodied a homogeneous response, consistent with the considerable challenges of the theology of the time and its renovation. Above all, they contributed to the essential characteristic a “spirit” or “style” of exercising theology, which incorporated traditional elements (the scientific ideal of theology, typical of the great medieval Scholastic) and modern elements (the recourse to the positive sources of theology, according to the typical methods of Renaissance humanism), up till then dissociated and in mutual dispute. We find these elements of theological renovation united here for the first time, systematically developed and, above all, with the fixed rules of a school, forming a true investigational team.4 However, there is now a strong debate among scholars, which tends to redefine the concept of the School of Salamanca from a broader (open) perspective that views the theological school of Francisco de Vitoria as just one part of a broader cultural phenomenon, whose list of leading authors John H. Elliot, La España imperial 1469–1716, 5th ed., trans. Joan-Lluis Marfany (Barcelona, 1986 [London, 1963]), 132–135. Juan Belda Plans, “La Escuela de Salamanca: Hacia una noción crítica,” in La Escuela de Salamanca, 147–162. 4 Melquiades Andrés Martín, La Teología Española en el siglo XVI, 2 vols. (Madrid, 1976–1977), II, 371–372. 2 3

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would expand, and even have a transnational scope, given that many of the masters coming from Salamanca taught in other European universities, in Spanish America, and even in the Philippines. All of them have some connection with the University of Salamanca and its great masters. The School of Salamanca as such would be like the epicenter of a great scientific earthquake that occurred at that time. It would, so to speak, constitute the “hard core” of this scientific phenomenon, the place where the process originates. From there, it expanded throughout the civilized world (as we have said above), in ever wider concentric circles, but perhaps also with less strength and brilliance than in its origin. The results were admirable, not only in the sacred sciences, but in many other fields.5 The School of Salamanca existed during the sixteenth and part of the seventeenth centuries. It is usually divided into two periods. The first period covers the first fifty years of the school, when all its characteristics were formed. The second period comprised the last third of the sixteenth century and beyond. This period presented some variations from the origins, namely, a return to the strict Thomism that conditioned all its theological aspects.6 What are the specific characteristics that distinguish this theological school?7

Investigational Freedom The first characteristic is the free search for truth, without ties to any system that could condition the scientific work of its members. It dealt with “open” theology, not a closed school. The golden rule of Master Vitoria was to set the “search for the truth” before everything. Great freedom would be given for research in theology, avoiding unquestioning adherence to the theological doctrine of a particular school (Thomism, Scotism, or nominalism) or a specific author. St. Thomas Aquinas was particularly appreciated in the School of Salamanca, although authors of diverse tendencies were referenced without being tied to anyone in particular. This enabled great liveliness and 5 For all this current debate, not yet concluded, one can consult the recent studies collected in the chapter bibliography: Thomas Duve, La Escuela de Salamanca: ¿un caso de producción global de conocimiento? [Max-Planck-Institut für Europäische Rechtsgeschichte, Working Paper Series 2018-02] (Frankfurt am Main, 2018); María Martín Gómez, “Francisco de Vitoria y la Escuela Ibérica de la Paz,” Revista Portuguesa de Filosofía 75, no. 2 (2019), 861–890; José Luis Egío and Celia Alejandra Ramírez Santos, Conceptos, autores, instituciones: Revisión critica de la investigación reciente sobre la Escuela de Salamanca (2008–2019) y bibliografía multidisciplinar (2008–2019) (Madrid, 2020), among others. See also the final section in this chapter. 6 Belda Plans, La Escuela de Salamanca, 170–182. 7 Ibid., ch. 2, ep. 7: Carcterísticas y notas específicas, 183–198.

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originality in the professors’ theological work, while at the same time avoiding the reproaches of the humanists who accused the Scholastics of uselessly wasting their energy in a fight between schools.

Scholastic-Humanist Union For the humanist, theology had to consist in the scientific study of the Bible, an exegesis that was based on the original sources (Hebrew and Greek), and was carried out according to historical-philological methods. The Protestants agreed in great part with this approach. In light of these criteria for a somewhat radical reform, the Salamanca masters followed their own way. It was evident that decadent Scholasticism had to change, but according to their criteria it did not need to be suppressed altogether. Rather, it could be renewed and purified of its faults and defects and combined with the beneficial contributions of contemporary humanist culture. Thus, that which characterizes the School of Salamanca is the desired union between Scholasticism and humanism, resulting in a wider, comprehensive vision of theology.8 This was the most important novelty: the creation of a new theological method characterized by a sound equilibrium between positive theology and speculative theology. It was, in effect, positive theology that took into account the calls of the humanists: ad fontes! Hence it demanded the comprehensive management of the sources and erudition that characterized it: Sacred Scripture, the Church Fathers, conciliar and papal decrees, and so forth. At the same time it was also speculative theology, that is, scientific and deductive. Reason was assigned a role in the theological work. It was neither exaggerated (as in the sophistic and verbose decadent Scholastic theologies) nor was it minimized (as the humanists advocated). In the School of Salamanca both positive and speculative aspects found a harmonious and balanced development, giving way to sound and effective theology. New Formal and Literary Style Another accusation made by the humanists against Scholastic theology was its use of non-classical Latin, lack of literary quality, and arid style in accordance with the complex formal structure of the quaestio. The Salamancan masters also addressed that challenge. The most significant external trait is perhaps their formal and elegant literary style. Care was 8 Martin Grabmann, Historia de la Teología Católica, trans. David Gutiérrez (Madrid, 1940 [Freiburg im Breisgau, 1933]), 182–192.

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taken for Latin diction, as opposed to the previous barbaric style.9 Melchor Cano is a good example of its use; his Ciceronian Latin is of extraordinary quality. It is a theology that appreciated the classical Greco-Roman world: it cherished the classical languages and the use of Greco-Latin sources (writers of prose and poetry, lawyers, and philosophers were profusely quoted).10

Main Issues Addressed The creativity of the School of Salamanca was a key part of its significance. The Salamancans discarded the useless and obtuse issues of the previous Scholastic schools. The characteristic of this school is that, without overlooking traditional great issues, it was painstakingly concerned with current problems, political, juridical, and economic. Many of these arose from the recent geographical discoveries, or those derived from the changes in Europe during that period.11 This required the opening of theology to new cultures and to human problems that were springing up at that time. The inviolable dignity of all men, as well as the ethical perspective of international law and of social and economic structures, were included in the theological work and examined in the light of Christian revelation.12 Hence, the great Salamancan masters, owing to their status as theologians, were consulted by monarchs and princes when considering the significant issues of the era. A catalogue of these issues could include the following: the lawfulness of the American conquest, human dignity, political freedom of the American indigenous people, the ethics of peace and war, the origins of political power, the value of money, just prices, usury and loans, and begging and alms-giving. The efforts made by the Salamancan theologians in the study of such disciplines as law, economy, and philosophy contributed to important progress in those fields of knowledge. Francisco de Vitoria is recognized as a founder of international law.13 Domingo de Soto and Martin de Azpilcueta 9 Vicente Beltrán de Heredia, Orientación humanística de la teología vitoriana, in Miscelánea Beltrán de Heredia, 4 vols. [Colección de artículos sobre Historia de la Teología Española] (Salamanca, 1972–1973), II, 38–39. 10 Juan Belda Plans, “Melchor Cano humanista,” in Juan Belda ed., Melchor Cano, De locis theologicis (Madrid, 2006), xciv–cxxxvi. 11 Beltrán de Heredia, Orientación humanística de la teología vitoriana [Miscelánea 2] (Madrid, 1947), 47–50. 12 John Paul II, Discurso a los teólogos españoles, Salamanca, November 1, 1982, in Mensaje de Juan Pablo II a España (Madrid, 1982), 50. 13 Ramón Hernández Martín, Francisco de Vitoria: Vida y pensamiento internacionalista (Madrid, 1995), 211.

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are considered pioneers of economics and mercantile law.14 Metaphysics and psychology experienced important advances in line with discussions on the relationship of grace and freedom. The result was an excellent symbiosis between theology and human sciences. Issues such as the interaction of grace and freedom (the de auxiliis controversy), theological epistemology, the meaning of the biblical words, and the relationship between the Roman pontiff and ecumenical councils, among others, were topics of special interest.

Theologians Most Representative of the School and their Adversaries There were about thirty members of the School of Salamanca, not all of equal ability. Among the pioneers of the first generation, three great teachers should be highlighted: Francisco de Vitoria, Domingo de Soto, and Melchor Cano, all university professors in the faculty of theology, holding the first chair Prima, and members of the Dominican order. In the second generation of the school were the Dominican Domingo Báñez, the Augustinian friars Juan de Gueverra, the Visperas university professor of theology, and Luis de Leon, the Bible professor in the same faculty.15 Of all the members of the school, Francisco de Vitoria (1483–1546) occupied a place of special consideration. The precious fruits of theological renovation that sprouted from the school are due to his genius and to his extensive teachings. His earlier prolonged stay at the famous University of Paris, in the College-Convent of St. Jacques, had a determining influence upon his future formation. There he was exposed to humanism, especially from already famous professors such as the Italian Hellenist Girolamo Aleandro (1480–1542). Francisco experienced a revival of Thomism along with his master Pieter Crockaert (ca. 1470–1514), who in the convent of St. Jacques commented on Aquinas’s Summa theologica.16 Francisco’s Salamancan period began when he was appointed to the Prima chair of theology in 1526. His teaching gained him more and more followers. He commented on St. Thomas’s Summa with an open spirit, and he 14 Abelardo del Vigo Gutiérrez, Cambistas, mercaderes y banqueros en el Siglo de Oro español (Madrid, 1997), 109–115. 15 Juan Belda Plans, “¿Quiénes forman parte de la Escuela de Salamanca?” in La Escuela de Salamanca, ch. 2, ep. 4, 162–169. 16 Ricardo García-Villoslada, La Universidad de París durante los estudios de Francisco de Vitoria (Rome, 1938), 64–71.

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surrounded himself with the best pupils who were to become the initial school. Vitoria was called the Spanish Socrates for his refusal to write. He rather favored oral teaching in the university courses, gathering a large number of disciples, who would be the ones to carry out the necessary changes in the teaching of theology. His classes were prepared with great care; he was a great communicator, and even entertaining. Thanks to his “dictation” system, his pupils were able to obtain excellent notes from his lectures. These notes served as textbooks (books in the first years of the printing press were expensive and scarce).17 Francisco’s legacy became his famous university Relecciones, an annual academic event in which a university professor had to expound upon a given theological topic before the university council and students from all the faculties. This culmination of his theological teaching was achieved from what was a routine event. His speech was thoroughly prepared, making sure the themes were up to date. His lectures rapidly became very famous, creating expectation and excitement around the whole university. His bestknown lectures were the two Relectiones de Indis about issues in the American colonies. The first one was about the legitimate charters of the American conquest; and the next one about just war and its conditions. These burning and controversial themes had great repercussions upon political decisions taken at the time. The first lecture laid out the foundations of international law, replacing the medieval conception of orbis Christianus with the communitas totius orbis.18 Francisco elaborated upon his Relecciones in writing, a polished text; but he did not wish them to be published while he was still alive. The high quality of the work and the interest people took in it meant that there was no lack of copyists who offered to reproduce the texts with great fidelity. The first edition was published in Lyon by Jacob Boyer in 1557. Everyone was taken by surprise; it upset the Dominicans of Salamanca, who prepared a more accurate second edition, published in Salamanca in 1565.19 Vitoria’s theology was neither apologetic nor polemical. It dealt with Luther’s ideas as well as the theological and biblical expositions of Erasmus, although Vitoria distanced himself increasingly from both men. Unlike the controversialist Catholic theologians who explicitly embraced the anti-Protestant apologetic cause in a polemical style, Vitoria did not enter into controversy. His theological assignment was not conditioned to 17 18 19

Vicente Beltrán de Heredia, Francisco de Vitoria (Barcelona, 1939), 43–49. Hernández Martín, Francisco de Vitoria, 113–115. Teόfilo Urdánoz, ed., Obras de Francisco de Vitoria: Relecciones teológicas (Madrid, 1960), 85–96.

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controversial questions; he would rather positively address important topical issues, producing high-quality theology. He seldom referred directly to Luther or Erasmus, always adopting a serene and cool scientific disposition, unencumbered by emotions. Domingo de Soto (1495–1560)20 was Vitoria’s right hand and his perfect complement. Whereas Vitoria did not write, Soto was the great publicist of the school. He wrote several treatises of great scope and influence. He came from a humble family, and studied at the modern University of Alcalá (1512–1516), where he soon stood out for his great intellectual and moral qualities. He moved to Paris where he studied theology for just two years (1517–1519); there he met the young Vitoria, of whom he heard as a new teacher in Convent College of St. Jacques. Soto returned to Alcalá, where he finished his theological studies. He was appointed teacher in the faculty of arts, where he taught philosophical matters, above all Summulas, for four years (1520–1524). After a spiritual crisis, he entered the Dominican order in 1524, when he was twenty-nine years old. He resided in the famous convent of San Esteban of Salamanca, where he broadened his theological formation for six years (1526–1532) under the auspices of Vitoria. After a public examination in 1532, Soto gained the second chair Visperas of theology at the University of Salamanca. He taught for thirteen consecutive years during his first period of theological teaching (until 1545). Although not as brilliant as Vitoria, he was perhaps wiser and more profound. The following stage of Soto’s life is of the utmost importance. He was designated by Charles V as imperial theologian to take part in the Council of Trent (1545–1563). He stood out notably there as doctor salmantinus, especially regarding one of the core issues of controversy with the Protestants: the doctrine of justification. His presentations greatly influenced the documents later approved by the conciliar fathers. On returning from Trent in 1552, Soto was required to take the first Prima chair of theology at Salamanca, where he remained until his death in 1560. It was during this period of maturity that his main works, which he had been compiling over the years, were published. Apart from the Relecciones (eleven in all) that Soto delivered, his works include theological treatises of considerable scope. In 1547 De natura et gratia, about justification, was published in Venice. He dedicated it to the fathers of the Council of Trent. Later, in 1554, another great and influential work 20 Vicente Beltrán (Salamanca, 1960).

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appeared: the ten-book De iustitia et iure, on the virtue of justice and its derivatives. Finally, he published his Commentarium in quartum sententiarum, the first volume in 1558 and the second in 1560, at the end of his life. It was an original and extensive theological treatise about the sacraments. Twenty-six editions were published in the sixteenth century alone. Soto was not a protagonist in particular theological controversies. In De natura et gratia he defended the Catholic doctrine against Protestant ideas. Additionally he brought up in his work on sacraments controversial matters regarding the sacrament of Holy Orders. However, just like Vitoria, Soto exulted in great serenity and scientific moderation, carrying out constructive theological work. Melchor Cano (1509–1560) is the third great master of the foundational period. He was the favorite disciple of Vitoria, who praised him from the beginning for his giftedness. Cano succeeded Vitoria in the Prima chair of the University of Salamanca. In his theological studies Cano was imbued with the whole theological legacy of his master.21 On finishing his period of formation, Cano attained the professorship of St. Thomas in the Cisnerian University of Alcalá (1543). Of the three theological professorships, this was the most significant one. The humanist orientation of Alcalá was well known and its faculty of arts stood out for its prestige and influence. Biblical and philological studies were especially encouraged. Cano inhaled this intense atmosphere of Renaissance humanism, which added to the impulses he had received from Vitoria. Thus, throughout his scientific activity, he stood out as a humanist theologian. Shortly after, Cano attained the Prima chair at Salamanca, where he remained engaged in intense academic activity for five years (1546–1551). Whilst there he was appointed an imperial theologian by Charles V and participated in the second period of the Council of Trent (1551–1552). He became known throughout the European theological world due to his outstanding interventions in the Tridentine sessions, which confirmed him as a great Salamancan theologian. Trent also gave him the opportunity to practice the new Salamancan theological method. The intrinsic value and efficaciousness of his interventions were clear. On returning from Trent, Cano ceased being a university professor at Salamanca. From that time his main objective was to conclude the scientific 21 Fermín Caballero, Conquenses ilustres, Vida del Ilmo: Fray Melchor Cano (Madrid, 1871; facsimile, Tarancón, 1980). See also Juan Belda Plans, “El Maestro Melchor Cano OP,” in La Escuela de Salamanca, ch. 6, 503–618, containing ample presentation of his life and works.

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work of his life: the methodological treatise De locis theologicis, which was already well advanced. Writing was made very difficult for him by the frequent assignments he received from the Spanish court. He lacked the necessary quiet for his theological work. Melchor Cano passed into history as the main author of the new theological method that responded to the renewed expectations of the School of Salamanca. This was a major turning point in the evolution and renovation of the Scholastic theology of his time. Cano’s major work, De locis theologicis libri duodecim, is an authentic methodological treatise, in which the foundations of the rules of theological argumentation were laid out. Due to diverse interruptions, Cano was not able to finish his great work, despite beginning it early in his career. It was published posthumously in Salamanca in 1563.22 It was an immediate success: in the following twenty years six editions were published, five of which were outside of Spain: Louvain (two),Venice, and Cologne (two); after that it was published twenty-five more times until the early twentieth century. The work consisted of a total of fourteen books grouped into three sections. Part I consisted of an introduction, notion, enumeration, and division of the theological themes or “commonplaces” (Book 1). Part II, the longest section, contained the theoretical material, detailed expositions of the nature of each of the ten theological commonplaces and their probative value in theological argumentation (Books 2–11). Part III was the practical part. It described the use of the theological commonplaces in Scholastic debate, in the exposition of the Sacred Scripture, and in the theological controversy with heretics and pagans (Books 12–14). Cano wrote only the first twelve books; it was an incomplete but almost finished work. The ten theological topics or commonplaces were: Sacred Scripture; Traditions of Christ and the Apostles; the Catholic Church; the councils, especially the general ones; the Roman Church; the Church Fathers; the Scholastic theologians (and canonists); natural reason; philosophers and jurists; and human history.23 However, not all commonplaces had the same value or argumentative power. Cano classified the first seven as natural commonplaces and the last three as foreign or alien commonplaces. Within the natural ones, there is a distinction between the first two (Sacred Scripture and divine tradition), which contain revelation and thus have maximum value and argumentative force. The five remaining ones (the Catholic Church, the councils, the Roman Church, the 22 Editio princeps: De locis theologicis libri duodecim (Salamanca, 1563). Spanish translation: Melchor Cano, De locis theologicis, traducción Española, ed. Juan Belda Plans (Madrid, 2006). 23 See De locis theologicis, Bk. I, chs. 1 and 3.

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Church Fathers, and Scholastic theologians) are explanatory commonplaces of revelation that depend on unequal criteria and confer unequal argumentative value.24 What were Cano’s underlying intentions when writing his treatise? The fundamental problem was the absence of understanding in the theological discussions between Catholics and Protestants. This was due, in Cano’s opinion, to the different conceptions of the nature of theology and its very principles. With De locis theologicis he intended to establish a theological epistemology valid for all, which would make possible true dialogue on common ground. True solutions could only be reached this way. De locis responded to this dire need. The confrontation between Cano and the Protestants was not limited to a particular topic, but rather confronted a vital underlying question that affected all the issues. This approach was certainly original in the context of the theological confrontations of his day. It could be said that Cano tried to resolve the controversy by elevation, by establishing a common theological epistemology. This was the great apologetic instrument that he contributed to his era, and the great merit of his work.

Influence on Contemporary and Subsequent Theology The importance of the theological renovation of Vitoria and his school resides not only in its intrinsic quality but above all in its expansive force and in the continuity of its achievements over the years. How did this theological movement influence later history?25 The School of Salamanca influenced a wide range of other universities. Its success was absolute within Salamanca, the Alma Mater. Many disciples of the Salamancan masters were profoundly influenced by the new theological methods. They were people who were later held in great esteem. Outstanding religious such as Alonso de Castro and Andres de Vega OFM, teachers within their own orders and important theologians of the Council of Trent, had been disciples of Vitoria. Many of the leading Spanish bishops who stood out at the Council of Trent, such as Pedro Guerrero (archbishop 24

See the classic study of Albert Lang, Die loci theologici des Melchior Cano und die Methode des dogmatischen Beweises: Zur theologischen Methodologie und ihrer Geschichte (Munich, 1925). 25 There is a detailed study in Juan Belda Plans, “Proyección e influencia de la Escuela de Salamanca,” in La Escuela de Salamanca, ch. 9, 827–926.

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of Granada), Gaspar de Zuñiga (archbishop of Santiago), or Francisco Blanco (bishop of Orense), among others, were also outstanding pupils of Vitoria. In their contributions to the council they highlighted ideas and statements that Vitoria had already defended. Outside Spain, powerful influence could be attributed to Salamanca. The Jesuit Collegium Romanum was of special importance; principal teachers like Francisco de Toledo (later made cardinal) and Francisco Suárez had been disciples of the Salamancan masters. According to some authors the Society of Jesus was the main proponent of the expansion of the Salamancan School. In and around the Sorbonne in Paris the principal exponent was Juan de Maldonado, SJ, a disciple of Domingo de Soto. His inclination toward theological methodology was well known and it was his influence on the Society’s Ratio studiorum that presents interesting similarities with the Salamancan methods. Another famous Jesuit teacher, Gregorio de Valencia, SJ, a brilliant disciple of the Salamancan master Mancio de Corpus Christi, taught in the German universities of Dillingen and Ingolstadt. It was he who directed the beginnings of these two universities within the Catholic Restoration of Bavaria. The influence of Salamanca is similarly appreciated there. On observing the Spanish American university environment (the two pioneer universities, San Marcos of Lima in Peru and the University of Mexico, both founded in 1551), we find distinguished teachers from the Salamancan lecture halls. Alonso de Veracruz, OSA, who formed part of the group of select disciples of Francisco de Vitoria, particularly stands out. Notably careful and well equipped with notes, relecciones, and books of Salamancan origin, he transmitted in Mexico and in the general studium of his order the whole legacy of his teacher. Finally, we cannot forget another channel of long-term influence: the enormous diffusion of the Salamancan teachers’ main works; the Relecciones of Vitoria, the great treatises of Domingo de Soto, and above all, Melchor Cano’s important scientific methodological treatise, De locis theologicis, were abundantly published across Europe until the twentieth century. Cano’s influence as a disseminator of Salamancan methodology was of great importance. A relevant side note: in 1771 the Spanish curriculum established a special professorship called De locis or de Melchor Cano in the universities of Salamanca and Alcalá, in which Cano’s work and methodology was studied; shortly after it was extended to all Spanish universities. What impact did the School of Salamanca have on the humanist environment? The dialogue between the humanist world and the Salamancan 198

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masters was very fruitful, above all for theology. After Vitoria and his followers’ serious contributions, the accusing voices were almost completely silenced. The main claims had been accepted by the theologians, although with a critical evaluation of some demands incompatible with sound theology. It was necessary to defend philosophical or speculative reasoning in theological work, and not only historical or philological examination of texts as urged by the humanists.26 A certain extremism in the importance of the biblical languages (Hebrew and Greek) as well as an excessive literary aestheticism, especially in the Latin translations of the Bible, was also criticized.27 Finally, what can be said of the relationship between the School of Salamanca and the theology of the Reformation? The essential proposal of the school, in establishing a theological method to be a foundation to elucidate the issues in dispute, scarcely had an effect upon the Protestants, whose methodology, based on Sola Scriptura and free examination, hardly changed. The lack of understanding and of constructive dialogue followed previous patterns. Lastly, it should be noted that one of the few direct confrontations on ecclesiological matter was between Melchor Cano and John Calvin.28 bibliography Andrés Martín, Melquides. La Teología Española en el siglo XVI, 2 vols. Madrid, 1976–1977. Barrientos García, José. “Cauces de influencia en Europa.” In Demetrio Ramos Pérez et al., eds., Francisco de Vitoria y la Escuela de Salamanca: La ética en la conquista de América. Madrid, 1984, 457–495. Belda Plans, Juan. La Escuela de Salamanca y la renovación de la teología en el siglo XVI. Madrid, 2000. Beltrán de Heredia, Vicente. Miscelánea Beltrán de Heredia, 4 vols. [Colección de artículos sobre Historia de la Teología Española]. Salamanca, 1972–1973. Cano, Melchor. De locis theologicis, traducción española, ed. Juan Belda Plans. Madrid, 2006. Duve, Thomas. La Escuela de Salamanca: ¿un caso de producción global de conocimiento? [MaxPlanck-Institut für Europäische Rechtsgeschichte, Working Paper Series 2018-02]. Frankfurt am Main, 2018.

Juan Belda Plans, “El humanismo evolucionado de Melchor Cano,” in La Escuela de Salamanca, ch. 3, 261–309. Melchor Cano devotes four chapters of his work to the question: De locis theologicis, Bk. II, chs. 12–15; Spanish translation, 104–145. See ample presentation of the topic in Belda Plans, La Escuela de Salamanca, 266–268, 695–719. 28 See Melchor Cano, De locis theologicis, Bk. IV, ch. 4, second conclusion; Spanish trans., 244–249. 26 27

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juan belda plans Egío, José Luis and Celia Alejandra Ramírez Santos. Conceptos, autores, instituciones: Revisión critica de la investigación reciente sobre la Escuela de Salamanca (2008–2019) y bibliografía multidisciplinar (2008–2019). Madrid, 2020. García-Villoslada, Ricardo. La Universidad de París durante los estudios de Francisco de Vitoria. Rome, 1938. Grabmann, Martin. Historia de la Teología Católica, trans. David Gutiérrez. Madrid, 1940 [Freiburg im Breisgau, 1933]. Grice-Hutchinson, Marjorie. The School of Salamanca: Readings in Spanish Monetary Theory, 1544–1605. Oxford, 1952. Hernández Martín, Ramón. Francisco de Vitoria: Vida y pensamiento internacionalista. Madrid, 1995. Lang, Albert. Die loci theologici des Melchior Cano und die Methode des dogmatischen Beweises: Zur theologischen Methodologie und ihrer Geschichte. Munich, 1925. Martín Gómez, María. “Francisco de Vitoria y la Escuela Ibérica de la Paz.” Revista Portuguesa de Filosofía 75, no. 2 (2019), 861–890. Pereña, Luciano. La Escuela de Salamanca: Proceso a la conquista de América. Salamanca, 1986. Ramos Pérez, Demetrio, et al., eds. Francisco de Vitoria y la Escuela de Salamanca: La Etica en la conquista de América [Corpus Hispanorum de Pace 25]. Madrid, 1984. Rodríguez Cruz, Agueda M. Salmantica docet: La proyección de la Universidad de Salamanca en Hispanoamérica. Salamanca, 1977. Urdánoz, Teόfilo, ed. Obras de Francisco de Vitoria: Relecciones Teológicas. Madrid, 1960.

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The Schools of Louvain and Douai: The Bible, Augustine, and Thomas wim fran c‚ ois Louvain, Erasmus, and Luther The members of the faculty of theology in Louvain, which was founded in 1432, within the university that had been established there seven years prior, fully engaged in the controversies that raged in the first decades of the sixteenth century. The theologians debated the right method of doing theology with Erasmus, who lived in the university town from the summer of 1517. Erasmus and the humanists emphasized that theology should be based upon the Scriptures and the Church Fathers, while they distrusted Scholastic theology. The Louvain theologians, and Jacob Latomus (ca. 1475–1544) especially, retorted that the Scriptures did not contain every revealed truth and certainly not all of the liturgical and disciplinary traditions which had been handed down in the church from the apostolic era. The Church Fathers, as well as the Scholastic theologians, were considered to be important witnesses to that tradition.1 The debate with Erasmus was not limited to methodology, but also dealt with the doctrine of grace, since this humanist, given his belief in the lasting capacities of the human intellect and will after the Fall, was suspected of semi-Pelagianism. The Louvain theologians invoked Augustine, and his anti-Pelagian works specifically, to stress the depravity of human nature after the Fall and humanity’s need of grace in 1 Marcel Gielis, “Leuven Theologians as Opponents of Erasmus and of Humanistic Theology,” in Erika Rummel, ed., Biblical Humanism and Scholasticism in the Age of Erasmus [Brill’s Companions to the Christian Tradition 9] (Leiden and Boston, 2008), 197–214; Marcel Gielis, “L’Augustinisme anti-érasmien des premiers controversistes de Louvain Jacques Latomus et Jean Driedo,” in Mathijs Lamberigts and Leo Kenis, eds., L’Augustinisme à l’ancienne faculté de théologie de Louvain [Bibliotheca Ephemeridum Theologicarum Lovaniensium (hereafter BETL) 111] (Leuven, 1994), 19–61, at 19–32. The first part of this chapter is based for the most part on the author’s excellent Dutch-language doctoral dissertation: Marcel Gielis, Scholastiek en Humanisme: De kritiek van de Leuvense theoloog Jacobus Latomus op de Erasmiaanse theologiehervorming [TFT-Studies 23] (Tilburg, 1994). See also Erika Rummel, Erasmus and his Catholic Critics, 2 vols. [Bibliotheca humanistica et reformatorica 45] (Nieuwkoop, 1989), I, 72–87.

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order to obtain salvation. This was a debate in which John Driedo (1479/ 80–1535), who possessed outspoken Augustinian convictions, was especially engaged. The Louvain theologians also entered into controversy with Martin Luther, whom they officially condemned on November 7, 1519. To combat the reformer’s Sola Scriptura doctrine, Driedo wrote a book entitled On the Scriptures and Dogmas of the Church (De ecclesiasticis scripturis et dogmatibus; first edition 1533). Although he was prepared to accept that all truths necessary for salvation were to be found somehow in the Scriptures, he asserted that in the tradition of the church, all kinds of liturgical and disciplinary customs had been handed down, and even some tenets of the faith which were not explicitly contained within the Scriptures. Moreover, the tradition of the church was assumed to be the locus in which the right interpretation of the Scriptures was to be sought. The Latin Vulgate should be considered to be the “authentic” version of the church, even though it might need emendation on the basis of the original languages, Greek and Hebrew.2 Driedo’s ideas, in this regard, influenced the debates at the Council of Trent considerably, which resulted in the promulgation, on April 8, 1546, of the Vulgate decree.3 The Louvain theologians also formulated a retort to Luther’s Sola Gratia and Sola Fide doctrine, and particularly to his fundamental pessimism concerning postlapsarian humanity’s capacities to do purely good works. Latomus emphasized that the capacities of the human will were not destroyed, but had become corrupted, through original sin. Assisted by gratia inhaerens – the result of baptism and repentance – humankind was able to have faith in the Gospel and to do good works that pleased God and were meritorious for eternal life.4 Driedo, for his part, was more pessimistic on the 2

Wim François, “John Driedo’s De ecclesiasticis scripturis et dogmatibus (1533): A Controversy on the Sources of the Truth,” in Lieven Boeve, Mathijs Lamberigts, and Terrence Merrigan, eds., Orthodoxy, Process and Product: On the Meta-Question [BETL 227] (Leuven, 2009), 85–118; John L. Murphy, The Notion of Tradition in John Driedo [Dissertatio ad Lauream in Facultate Theologica Pontificiae Universitatis Gregorianae] (Milwaukee, 1959). 3 Wim François and Antonio Gerace, “Trent and the Latin Vulgate, a Louvain Project?” in Wim François and Violet Soen, eds., The Council of Trent: Reform and Controversy in Europe and Beyond (1545–1700), volume I: Between Trent, Rome and Wittenberg [Refo500 Academic Studies 35/ 1] (Göttingen, 2018), 131–174. 4 Anna Vind, Latomus and Luther: The Debate: Is Every Good Deed a Sin? [Refo500 Academic Studies 26] (Göttingen, 2019); Hannegreth Grundmann, Gratia Christi: Die theologische Begründung des Ablasses durch Jacobus Latomus in der Kontroverse mit Martin Luther [Arbeiten zur historischen und systematischen Theologie 17] (Münster, 2012); also Jos E. Vercruysse, “Die Stellung Augustins in Jacobus Latomus’ Auseinandersetzung mit Luther,” in Lamberigts and Kenis, eds., L’Augustinisme à l’ancienne faculté, 7–18; Jos E. Vercruysse, “Jacobus Latomus und Martin Luther: Einführendes zu einer Kontroverse,” Gregorianum 64 (1983), 515–538.

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topic of postlapsarian humankind’s possibilities, which brought him closer to Luther’s ideas.5 It is obvious, from the aforementioned, that in the Louvain theologians’ controversy with Erasmus, Luther, and the other Reformers, the correct interpretation of Augustine’s works was also at stake, especially his De doctrina Christiana, where Bible hermeneutics were concerned, in addition to the Church Father’s works on grace – his anti-Pelagian writings in particular – in which the doctrine of original sin, free will, and grace is debated. The mainstream Louvain theologians, however, tried to conceive of Augustine’s doctrine through the Scholastic frame of interpretation (Peter Lombard’s Sentences, but also increasingly Thomas Aquinas), while discussions with humanists and Reformers also required a thorough foundation in the Bible. Louvain’s approach to Scriptures and tradition(s), as well as to original sin, free will, and grace, in addition to the sacraments of the church, culminated in an important synthesis in the so-called Thirty-Two Articles, which were edited by Ruard Tapper (1487–1559) in 1544 at the request of Emperor Charles V.6 The Thirty-Two Articles were a kind of profession of faith which the clergy had to preach and to which the laity were bound. Tapper’s articles were read with great interest by the council fathers in Trent. The Louvain theologians also acted as inquisitors – in this regard it should be emphasized, against established prejudices, that they primarily sought the reconciliation of those suspected and not their destruction – as well as working as book censors, all alongside their work as controversialist theological writers.

The Year 1546 and the Start of the Golden Age of Biblical Scholarship The year 1546 was pivotal in the history of the faculty. Apart from a reform of the inquisitorial apparatus in 1545–1546, the first genuine Louvain Index of Forbidden Books – largely the work of the theologians – 5

Karim Schelkens and Marcel Gielis, “From Driedo to Bellarmine: The Concept of Pure Nature in the 16th Century,” Augustiniana 57 (2007), 425–448, at 426–436; Gielis, “L’Augustinisme anti-érasmien,” 32–61. 6 Martijn Schrama, “Ruard Tapper und die Möglichkeit gute Werken zu verrichten: ‘Non omnia opera hominis mala,’” in Lamberigts and Kenis, eds., L’Augustinisme à l’ancienne faculté, 63–98; Valentine J. Peter, The Doctrine of Ruard Tapper (1487–1559): Regarding Original Sin and Justification [Diss. doct. Pontificia Universitas a S. Thoma Aquinate in Urbe. Facultas Theologiae] (Rome, 1965).

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was published on May 9.7 Another important decision for the future of the faculty was Charles V’s establishment of two new chairs, one for Scholastic theology and one for Sacred Scriptures. It was biblical scholarship especially that would develop in Louvain, even though Scholastic theology would never be neglected totally. Inspired by the Council of Trent’s wish to provide priests and preachers with a solid knowledge of the Scriptures (fifth session, June 1546), and with the help of the biblical languages that were taught at the Louvain College of the Three Tongues, a golden age of biblical scholarship came to flourish in Louvain (and in its daughter university in Douai).8 Some Lovanienses distinguished themselves through textual criticism of the Latin Vulgate and strove for an emended version, as had been requested by the Council of Trent (fourth session, April 1546). This was the case with John Henten (1499–1566) and Francis Lucas “of Bruges” (1548/49–1619), the latter working in the bishop’s curia of Saint-Omer from 1581. Nicholas Tacitus Zegers (ca. 1495–1559), in the study-house of the Franciscans in Louvain, also applied himself to textual critical scholarship of the Latin New Testament.9 The most important Louvain Bible commentator of the sixteenth century was undoubtedly Cornelius Jansenius “of Ghent” (1510–1576; not to be confused with his namesake Cornelius Jansenius “of Ypres” after whom Jansenism is named). He sought to determine the literal sense, the sense of the holy text intended by Jesus and the inspired writers, with the help of the achievements of humanist biblical scholarship (without neglecting, however, the traditional spiritual senses). In this search he also equipped himself with the insights gleaned from the patristic tradition, with Augustine taking pride of place. Jansenius of Ghent was also moved by an authentic pastoral concern, which was not unrelated to his appointment as the first bishop of Ghent (1564/68–1576). In 1571–1572 he published his most important biblical work, his Commentaries on the Gospel harmony, which he had brought

7

Jesús Martínez de Bujanda et al., Index de l’Université de Louvain, 1546, 1550, 1558 [Index des livres interdits 2] (Sherbrooke, 1986). Antonio Gerace, Biblical Scholarship in Louvain in the “Golden” Sixteenth Century [Refo500 Academic Studies 60] (Göttingen, 2019); also Wim François, “Augustine and the Golden Age of Biblical Scholarship in Louvain (1550–1650),” in Bruce Gordon and Matthew McLean, eds., Shaping the Bible in the Reformation: Books, Scholars and their Readers in the Sixteenth Century [Library of the Written Word 20] (Leiden and Boston, 2012), 235–289. 9 Gerace, Biblical Scholarship in Louvain, 41–74; also Henri Quentin, Mémoire sur l’établissement du texte de la Vulgate. Octateuque [Collectanea Biblica Latina 6] (Rome and Paris, 1922), esp. 128–146; and Hildebrand Höpfl, Beiträge zur Geschichte der Sixto-Klementinischen Vulgata [Biblische Studien 18] (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1913), passim. 8

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onto the market a few decades earlier (1549). A collection of his sermons was published posthumously (1577).10 Between 1568 and 1573 Christopher Plantin published the splendid Polyglot Bible or Biblia Regia in Antwerp. The project was supervised by Benito Arias Montano (1527–1598), who could also count upon the expertise of the Louvain theologians.11 In addition, Plantin brought an improved edition of Augustine’s works onto the market in 1576–1577. It was prepared by a group of sixty-four advanced students from the Louvain faculty of theology, under the supervision of ten editors and one final editor, John Molanus (1533–1585). The Louvain edition of Augustine’s works was used by everyone from every point on the confessional spectrum throughout the seventeenth century.12 In the same period Augustinus Hunnaeus (1522–1577), royal professor of scholastic theology since 1567, prepared an edition of Aquinas’s Summa theologica in collaboration with the Portuguese Dominican Antonius Senensis (ca. 1539–1585) and with the assistance of some Lovanienses theologi, including students. The Thomas edition was published for the first time in 1569, once more at the Plantin Press.13 In this way, the faculty’s concentration on the Bible, Augustine, and, to a lesser extent, Aquinas found expression in a series of splendid Plantin editions.

The Doctrine of Grace Contested: Baius and Lessius While the leading professors of the Louvain faculty of theology, headed by Ruard Tapper, were attending the Council of Trent in 1551–1552, the young 10 Gerace, Biblical Scholarship in Louvain, 129–149; Jean-Pierre Delville, “Jansenius de Gand (1510–1576) et l’exégèse des paraboles,” Revue d’Histoire Ecclésiastique 92 (1997), 38–69. This article was republished in Jean-Pierre Delville, L’Europe de l’exégèse au XVIe siècle. Interprétations de la parabole des ouvriers à la vigne (Matthieu 20,1-16) [BETL 174] (Leuven, 2004), 474–487; Jan Roegiers, “Jansénius (Corneille),” in Dictionnaire d’Histoire et de Géographie Ecclésiastiques, XXVI (1997), cols. 942–947. 11 Theodor Dunkelgrün, “The Multiplicity of Scripture: The Confluence of Textual Traditions in the Making of the Antwerp Polyglot Bible (1568–1573)” (PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, 2012); Leon Voet, The Plantin Press (1555–1589): A Bibliography of the Works Printed and Published by Christopher Plantin at Antwerp and Leiden, 6 vols. (Amsterdam, 1980–1983), I, 280–315; also Alastair Hamilton, “In Search of the Most Perfect Text: The Early Modern Printed Polyglot Bibles from Alcalá (1510–1520) to Brian Walton (1654–1658),” in Euan Cameron, ed., The New Cambridge History of the Bible, volume III: From 1450 to 1750 (Cambridge, 2016), 138–156, at 143–147. 12 Arnoud Visser, “How Catholic was Augustine? Confessional Patristics and the Survival of Erasmus in the Counter-Reformation,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 61 (2010), 86–106; Lucien Ceyssens, “Le ‘Saint Augustin’ du XVIIe siècle. L’édition de Louvain (1577),” XVIIe Siècle 34 (1982), 103–120. 13 Voet, The Plantin Press, V, 2195–2214.

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professor Michael Baius (1513–1589), holder of the royal chair of Sacred Scriptures since early 1553, developed his views regarding (1) the state of humankind’s innocent nature as belonging to the natural order of creation, which is a result of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, but not a gratuitous gift of grace; it allows one to obey God’s commandments; (2) the radical sinfulness of humankind’s nature after the Fall, involving the human incapacity to do any good works; and (3) the overwhelming need of God’s grace – bestowed on humanity in virtue of Christ’s death and resurrection – which makes humankind able to observe God’s commandments that are meritorious for the afterlife (while at the same time relativizing the ontological status of inherent grace, preferring to speak of an animi motus). Baius supported his views with ample references to the Bible and Augustine, demonstrating a predilection for the latter’s anti-Pelagian works. Living at the border of Europe’s Protestant regions, he considered this theological method to be the most appropriate for entering into debate with the Calvinist “heretics.” It led, however, to the suspicion among some of Baius’s colleagues that he disregarded the Scholastic tradition; Baius’s critics were led by Josse Ravesteijn, alias Tiletanus (1506–1570), who was Tapper’s disciple and was, thus, a representative of the “old” Louvain school of AugustinoScholasticism.14 Ravesteijn and his like-minded colleagues had Baius’s work examined by the theological faculties of Alcalá and Salamanca, which censured several of his propositions in 1565 and 1567. Subsequently, a papal censure, issued by Pope Pius V (In omnibus afflictionibus, 1567) and repeated by Gregory XIII (Provisionis Nostrae, 1580), targeted several viewpoints of Baius, who attested his submission to the papal pronouncement. As a reaction, the royal professor of Scholastic theology Johannes Lensaeus (Jean de Lens; 1541–1593) drew up, in 1586, a so-called Formula doctrinae, in which he formulated the “official doctrine” of the Louvain faculty of 14

Jarrik Van Der Biest, “Teaching Romans 7 after Trent: Michael Baius and His Lecture Hall on Concupiscence and Original Sin in Early Modern Louvain (1552–1589),” Journal of Early Modern Christianity 8 (2021), 193–221; Alfred Vanneste, “Le ‘De prima hominis justitia’ de M. Baius. Une relecture critique,” in Lamberigts and Kenis, eds., L’Augustinisme à l’ancienne faculté, 123–166; Alfred Vanneste, “Nature et grâce dans la théologie de Baius,” in Edmond J. M. van Eijl, ed., Facultas S. Theologiae Lovaniensis 1432–1797: Bijdragen tot haar geschiendenis/ Contributions to its History/Contributions à son histoire [BET 45] (Leuven, 1977), 327–350; also Schelkens and Gielis, “From Driedo to Bellarmine,” 436–443; Bernard Quilliet, L’acharnement théologique. Histoire de la grâce en Occident (Paris, 2007), 315–334; Quilliet’s book unfortunately lacks a decent apparatus of footnotes, although his account of the causa Baii and his representation of Baius’s theology is generally accurate; a summary and further literature also in Wim François, “Augustinus und die Löwener Kontroversen über Prädestination, Gnade und freien Willen,” in Günter Frank et al., eds., Totus noster? Augustinus zwischen den Konfessionen [Refo500 Academic Studies 93] (Göttingen, 2023), 189–215, at 194–202.

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theology in opposition to the errors of Baius.15 Given the latter’s positions, the document concentrates on original sin and its consequences: (1) Humanity’s original justice should be considered as a supernatural gift of grace; (2) through the Fall, humankind forfeited original justice, but their natural capacities to do good were not entirely annihilated; (3) justification should be seen as an interior renovation of humanity’s soul by inherent grace so that humanity, subsequently, can observe God’s precepts. Lensaeus, in particular, invoked the authority of Paul and Augustine, and the correct interpretation of the Church Father was undoubtedly one of the document’s aims. The Formula doctrinae would be considered to be an important codification of the “official” Louvain doctrine for the years to come, and was applauded by the Roman authorities.16 A year later, in 1587, the Louvain faculty of theology felt obliged to proceed against an adversary on another flank. The Jesuits, who had become established in Louvain in 1542 at the behest of Ruard Tapper, strove, from 1583, to open up their philosophical and theological courses to all students from the university, with the concomitant ambition of granting academic degrees, as was the situation in Douai. Apart from the fact that the university felt its monopoly on education to be threatened, the faculty also took offense at the theological views that some young Jesuit professors propagated in their Louvain College, views which differed from the Formula doctrinae. As a consequence, the faculty issued a censure on September 12, 1587 on thirty-four propositions which had been defended by the Jesuits Leonard Lessius (1554–1623) and John Hamelius (1554–1589). All points of criticism concerned Lessius’s stress on humankind’s cooperation in the economy of salvation, which the theologians considered to be a deviation from Augustine’s genuine theology and highly suspect as “semiPelagianism.” Lessius argued that after the Fall, God had given Adam and his entire posterity sufficient means against sin and aids to pursue eternal life. What the Louvain theologians particularly took offense at was Lessius’s point that grace is only made efficacious when humanity accepts this offer

15

Martinus Steyaert, Opuscula, 6 vols. (Leuven, 1742), I, 193–225. Jan Roegiers, “Le Jansénisme de Louvain à la fin du XVIIe siècle,” in Guido Cooman, Maurice van Stiphout, and Bart Wauters, eds., Zeger-Bernard van Espen at the Crossroads of Canon Law, History, Theology and Church-State Relations [BETL 170] (Leuven, 2003), 1–17, at 5–6; Edmond J. M. van Eijl, “La controverse louvaniste autour de la grâce et du libre arbitre à la fin du XVIe siècle,” in Lamberigts and Kenis, eds., L’Augustinisme à l’ancienne faculté, 207–282, at 215. 16

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through a free decision of will and the performance of good acts, which implies that a person can also refuse God’s offer. This emphasis on human cooperation within the process of salvation led Lessius and his associates to accept divine predestination, on the basis of God’s foreknowledge of humanity’s merits (predestinatio ex meritis previsis).17 The Louvain theologians, although theoretically pondering the Scholastic distinction between sufficient and efficacious grace, were particularly insistent on gratia divina ex se ab intrinseco efficax (God’s grace being efficacious intrinsically and from itself ) only in the elect, so that they came quite close to holding the irresistibility of God’s grace. The implication was that God had predestined the elect from all eternity, on the basis of His absolute sovereign will and without taking into account any foreseen merits on their part (predestinatio ante previsa merita). On February 20, 1588 the Douai faculty of theology issued an even more developed and outspoken censure of Lessius’s positions than that of Louvain, of which William Hessels van Est (Estius; 1542–1613) was the principal author.18 When in the same year, 1588, the Spanish-Portuguese Jesuit Luis de Molina published his De concordia, which led to an ardent controversy with the Spanish Dominicans, the theologians in Louvain and Douai became convinced that there was a definite link between membership in the Jesuit order and reproachable theological standpoints. Rome, for its part, understood that the issues of grace and free will were the most important bones of contention of the post-Tridentine Catholic Church, and had the discussions brought to a halt, reserving the treatment of these issues to the successive Roman Congregationes de auxiliis divinae gratiae (1597–1607).19

17

See, amongst others, Eleonora Rai, “Ex Meritis Praevisis: Predestination, Grace, and Free Will in Intra-Jesuit Controversies (1587–1613),” Journal of Early Modern Christianity 7 (2020), 111–150; also Wim Decock, Le marché du mérite. Penser le droit et l’économie avec Léonard Lessius (Brussels, 2019), 169–196. 18 We used Censvræ facultatum sacræ theologiæ Lovaniensis ac Duacensis super quibusdam articulis de Sacra Scriptura, gratia & praedestinatione (Paris, 1683), 3–51 (censura lovaniensis), 53–141 (censura duacensis). See van Eijl, “La controverse louvaniste,” 216–224; also Jan Roegiers, “Awkward Neighbours: The Leuven Faculty of Theology and the Jesuit College (1542–1773),” in Rob Faesen and Leo Kenis, eds., The Jesuits of the Low Countries: Identity and Impact (1540–1773). Proceedings of the International Congress at the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies, KU Leuven (3–5 December 2009) [BETL 251] (Leuven, 2012), 153–175, at 159–161; Roegiers, “Le Jansénisme de Louvain,” 6. On the “battle of the schools” see Bruno Boute, Academic Interests and Catholic Confessionalisation: The Louvain Privileges of Nomination to Ecclesiastical Benefices [Education and Society in the Middle Ages and Renaissance 35] (Leiden, 2010), 268–311. 19 Roegiers, “The Leuven Faculty of Theology and the Jesuit College,” 164; on the Congregationes and the involvement of the Louvain theologians see Boute, Academic Interests, 316–390, at 375–390; also van Eijl, “La controverse louvaniste,” 255–276.

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Biblical Scholarship and Theology of Grace in Louvain and Douai The option for a theology based upon the Scriptures, Augustine, and Thomas had proved to be conducive to diverging interpretations. This became even more obvious in the work of Thomas Stapleton (1535–1598). He was an Elizabethan exile, who had first studied in Louvain and had, in 1571, become professor at Douai of controversialist theology – a branch of theology which was very concerned with the biblical basis for Catholic theology, given the debates with the Protestants. He revealed himself as a friend of the Jesuits and the theology they promoted. Given his opposition to the censure, which the University of Douai had issued in 1588 against the aforementioned theses of Lessius and Hamelius, he was excluded from all activities in his faculty for a time. It is, therefore, surprising that it was Stapleton who was recalled to Louvain by the administration of King Philip II, in order to become royal professor of Sacred Scriptures, to succeed Michael Baius, who had died in 1589. At the end of his stay in Douai, and during his tenure as professor of Sacred Scriptures in Louvain, Stapleton published a series of so-called Promptuaria (1589–1594), books of sermons that covered the Gospel texts that were read at Mass throughout the liturgical year. The Promptuaria proved to be a welcome pulpit aid for parish priests and preachers, particularly in Germany.20 In addition, Stapleton published scholarly oriented biblical commentaries on the Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, and the main Epistles of Paul, which he called Antidota (1595–1598). Both sets of books were intended to repudiate the “venomous” interpretations of the Bible books commented upon by John Calvin, Theodore Beza, and the other Reformers. Hence, Stapleton’s approach turned out to be very controversial, which makes it thoroughly different to that of Jansenius – the luminary of the golden age of biblical scholarship in Louvain – who actually integrated the results of humanist and even Protestant biblical scholarship. Strangely enough, Stapleton referred copiously to Augustine, while at the same time curiously interpreting the Church Father through an outspoken Thomistic, and even Molinist, understanding. This led him, for example, to emphasize the cooperation between human free will and God’s salvatory initiative, while at the same

20 John M. Frymire, The Primacy of the Postils: Catholics, Protestants, and the Dissemination of Ideas in Early Modern Germany [Studies in Medieval and Reformation Traditions 147] (Leiden and Boston, 2010), 417–422 and 509.

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time sympathizing with the views on predestination on the basis of God’s foreknowledge of humankind’s merits.21 In Douai Stapleton had been a colleague of Estius, who became his primary theological adversary. In 1582 Estius had moved from Louvain to Douai, where he was one of the main authors of the censure against the Jesuits Lessius and Hamelius. As a professor of controversialist theology, he commented extensively upon the Sentences of Peter Lombard – which he explained according to the insights of Thomas Aquinas. His four-volume commentary on the Sentences, published posthumously in 1615–1616, would prove to be very important. The most influential, however, were his Commentaries on the Epistles of Paul and on the Catholic Letters (published 1614 and 1616) – the result of his work as a professor of Sacred Scriptures. Estius collects the achievements made by textual critical biblical scholarship, as well as the results of patristic, medieval, and early modern exegesis, in these commentaries. The commentaries were reprinted several times until the end of the nineteenth century because of their richness. Estius has often been considered to be a splendid exponent of the Augustino-Thomistic school of Louvain and Douai, with its anti-Pelagian bent. It should, however, be added that his theological ideas foreshadowed the heated debates that would dominate the second part of the seventeenth century. Estius defended, amongst others, the thesis that Christ had not died for all humans – thus denying sufficient grace – while emphasizing the efficaciousness of God’s grace only in the elect. God’s efficacious grace not only granted the elect the ability to be saved, but also predetermined and “premoved” them to both willing and enacting the good. More than ever, questions were raised about the degree to which God’s grace is irresistible and how much that detracts from human freedom of will. Estius’s denial of sufficient grace, and his views regarding the irresistibility of God’s efficacious grace, made him a predecessor of what was later to be called Jansenism. After these views had been condemned by the papal bull Cum occasione (1653), Estius’s

21

Marvin Richard O’Connell, Thomas Stapleton and the Counter Reformation [Yale Publications in Religion 9] (New Haven, 1964); Théodore Leuridan, Les théologiens de Douai, volume VI: Thomas Stapleton (Lille, 1898). On Stapleton’s activity as royal professor of Sacred Scriptures see Gerace, Biblical Scholarship in Louvain, 160–175; Wim François, “Augustinus sanior interpres Apostoli: Thomas Stapleton and the Louvain Augustinian School’s Reception of Paul,” in Ward Holder, ed., A Companion to Paul in the Reformation [Brill’s Companions to the Christian Tradition 15] (Leiden and Boston, 2009), 363–386; this article should be supplemented with Wim François, “Thomas Stapleton (1535–1598) sobre la caída de Adán y las consecuencias de ella para su descendencia. ¿Exégesis agustiniana o cripto-jesuítica?” Augustinus 55 (2010), 129–140.

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successors in Douai did not hesitate to point to some propositions requiring rectification in his work.22 Estius found his equal in Cornelius van den Steen, or Cornelius a Lapide (1567–1637), who taught Sacred Scriptures between 1596 and 1616 at the studyhouse of his Jesuit order in Louvain. He was subsequently called to Rome, where he continued his biblical work for another twenty years. Even prior to leaving the southern part of the Netherlands, he edited the Commentaria in omnes divi Pauli epistolas (1614 – the same year as Estius’s commentaries were published, in Douai) and In Pentateuchum (On the Pentateuch, 1616), both in Antwerp. Other commentaries on biblical books were to follow during his sojourn in Rome and even posthumously. All of these were reedited several times, both separately and collectively, until well into the twentieth century, making a Lapide’s Bible commentaries the most successful in their genre. A Lapide emphasized, in a manner consistent with the Jesuit tradition, the cooperation of human free will with God’s grace. However, at the same time, it is true that his commentaries are replete with references to Augustine, which again confronts us with the fact that Augustine was invoked as an authority by every theological faction in post-Tridentine Louvain and Douai.23

A Scholastic Réveil in Louvain: Johannes Wiggers While Estius had elaborated a theology based upon the Scriptures, Augustine, and Thomas in Douai and a Lapide worked on the most successful 22

Xaverio Ferrer, Pecado original y justificacion en la doctrina de Guillermo Estio [Diss. doct. Pontificia Universitas Gregoriana. Facultas Theologiae] (Madrid, 1960); Alfons Fleischmann, Die Gnadenlehre des Wilhelm Estius und ihre Stellung zum Bajanismus: Eine dogmengeschichtliche Untersuchung zu den Gnadenstreitigkeiten des ausgehenden 16. Jahrhunderts [Diss. doct. LudwigMaximilians-Universitat München. Theologische Fakultät] (Kallmunz and Regensburg, 1940); Louis Salembier, “Estius,” in Dictionnaire de Théologie Catholique, V (1913), 871–878; Théodore Leuridan, Les théologiens de Douai, volume V: Guillaume Estius (Amiens, 1895). On Estius’s biblical work see, amongst others Wim François, “Efficacious Grace and Predestination in the Bible Commentaries of Estius, Jansenius and Fromondus,” in Dominik Burkard and Tanja Thanner, eds., Der Jansenismus – eine “katholische Häresie”? Das Ringen um Gnade, Rechtfertigung und die Autorität Augustins in der frühen Neuzeit [Reformationsgeschichtliche Studien und Texte 159] (Münster, 2014), 117–143, at 119–130. 23 Wim François, “Grace, Free Will, and Predestination in the Biblical Commentaries of Cornelius a Lapide,” Annali di Storia dell’Esegesi 34 (2017), 175–197; Jean-Pierre Delville, “La lettre de Jacques aux XVIe–XVIIe siècles chez les exégètes catholiques, en particulier Érasme, Guillaume Estius et Cornelius a Lapide,” in Matthieu Arnold, Gilbert Dahan, and Annie Noblesse-Rocher, eds., L’Épître de Jacques dans sa tradition d’exégèse [Lectio divina 253; Études d’histoire de l’exégèse 4] (Paris, 2012), 119–145; Gerhard Boss, Die Rechtfertigungslehre in den Bibelkommentaren des Kornelius a Lapide [Katholisches Leben und Kämpfen im Zeitalter der Glaubensspaltung 20] (Münster, 1962).

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Bible commentaries of the early modern era in the Jesuit study-house in Louvain and later in Rome, the royal chair of Sacred Scriptures in Louvain was occupied by Jacob Jansonius (1547–1625). Although he shared Estius’s preference for a thorough anti-Pelagian Augustinian theology, he never reached the same level of proficiency but became deeply entangled in the academic politics of his time, defending, amongst others, the privileges of the university against the aspirations of the Jesuits to establish a full public course of philosophy (and eventually theology), as well as the concomitant right to grant degrees.24 As a consequence, scriptural studies became eclipsed by a particularly Thomistic réveil in the first decades of the seventeenth century. Paraphrasing Louvain’s prominent university historian Jan Roegiers, we might notice that in 1596 King Philip II ordered that the teaching of Scholastic theology at the faculty should no longer be based on the Liber sententiarum by Peter Lombard, but on the Summa theologiae by Thomas Aquinas. In so doing, the king confirmed an already existing situation. At the same time Philip II established a second royal chair of Scholastic theology, appointing Johannes Malderus (1563–1633) as its first holder; Malderus had attended Lessius’s lectures at the Jesuit College. Whereas Jansonius looked with sorrow upon this Scholastic réveil, his theological adversaries, the Jesuits, spread the rumor that the faculty had softened its Augustino-Thomism, including its outspoken anti-Pelagian bent, and now taught in the same manner as they did. Eventually, on July 30, 1613, the faculty felt obliged to issue an official declaration “that affirmed that the Faculty as a whole and all its members were sticking to the doctrine expressed in the Corpus [=Formula] doctrinae of 1586 and the Lessius censure of 1587.”25 Scholasticism, that is, Thomism, came to its apogee in Johannes Wiggers (1571–1639); his commentary on Aquinas’s Summa, the work resulting from the courses he gave, was printed posthumously in 1641 and was subsequently used in Louvain for the following century.26

24

Boute, Academic Interests, 463–486, 521–544, and 567–579; Roegiers, “The Leuven Faculty of Theology and the Jesuit College,” 165–166. On Jansonius’s biblical work see Wim François, “Bible Exegesis in Early Seventeenth Century Louvain: The Case of Jacob Janssonius’ Digression on John 12,39–40,” in Wim François and August A. den Hollander, eds., “Wading Lambs and Swimming Elephants”: The Bible for the Laity and Theologians in Late Medieval and Early Modern Era [BETL 257] (Leuven, 2012), 323–345. 25 Roegiers, “The Leuven Faculty of Theology and the Jesuit College,” 164–165; Boute, Academic Interests, 387–388 and 468–469. 26 Elly Marcus-Leus, Johannes Wiggers Diestensis (1571–1639) [Diestsche Cronycke 11] (Diest, 1995).

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Jansenius and the Crisis of Jansenism A new high point in the combination of Augustinian, anti-Pelagian theology and biblical commentary in Louvain was reached in Cornelius Jansenius, bishop of Ypres (1585–1638). He was educated in Louvain and Paris and had spent a period in Camp-de-Prats near Bayonne where he, together with his friend Jean Duvergier de Hauranne, alias the “Abbé de Saint-Cyran,” intensively studied the Bible and the Church Fathers (especially Augustine). From 1618 onwards Jansenius became ordinary professor in the Louvain faculty of theology and was promoted in 1630 to the royal chair of Sacred Scriptures. Becoming the bishop of Ypres from 1635/36, he eventually succumbed to the plague in 1638 and his most important works were published posthumously.27 The most famous is Jansenius’s Augustinus (1640) which he presented as a close study of Augustine’s works and the theology of grace, free will, and predestination that is to be found therein, so his attention was selfevidently drawn to the Church Father’s anti-Pelagian books. In Jansenius’s view, expressed in the last part of the Augustinus, the “new Pelagians” of his own age were to be identified with Lessius, Molina, and the Jesuits.28 As a result of his work as royal professor of Sacred Scriptures, Jansenius’s Tetrateuchus, or Commentary on the Four Gospels, and the Pentateuchus, or Commentary on the Five Books of Moses, were published in 1639 and 1641 respectively. The Tetrateuchus proved to be the more successful of the two, with reprints being issued well into the middle of the nineteenth century (including a French translation in 1863). In his Bible commentaries, especially those on the Gospels, Jansenius especially felt himself to be on home turf on those occasions on which the Bible passage under review gave him the reason to advance a theological, that is, an Augustinian, interpretation of the text. Unlike Estius, Jansenius shows far less susceptibility to Scholastic – that is, Thomistic – influences or vocabulary. It is not difficult to find utterances in Jansenius’s works suggesting that the Son of God, who died

27

On Jansenius and the beginnings of the “Jansenist” controversy see esp. Lucien Ceyssens, “Les débuts du jansénisme et de l’antijansénisme à Louvain,” in van Eijl, ed., Facultas S. Theologiae Lovaniensis 1432–1797, 381–432; Jean Orcibal, Jansénius d’Ypres (1585–1638) [Études augustiniennes. Série Moyen Age et Temps modernes 22] (Paris, 1989); Leszek Kolakowski, God Owes us Nothing: A Brief Remark on Pascal’s Religion and on the Spirit of Jansenism (Chicago and London, 1995), 3–25. A summary in François, “Augustinus und die Löwener Kontroversen,” 202–209; Roegiers, “Le Jansénisme de Louvain,” 9–11. See there for further literature. 28 Diana Stanciu, “The Feelings of the Master as Articles of Faith or Medicine against Heresy? Jansenius’ Polemics against the ‘New Pelagians’,” Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses. Louvain Journal of Theology and Canon Law 87 (2011), 393–418.

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for his flock, only died for the predestined (which means a denial of sufficient grace). Jansenius also emphasized the efficiency of God’s grace in the elect, and the (quasi-)incapacity of their will to resist.29 These propositions were eventually condemned by the bull Cum occasione issued by Pope Innocent X in 1653, but which was the result of actions conducted by Belgian and French Jesuits over many years.30 The faculty submitted to this and subsequent papal bulls against Jansenism, while at the same time maintaining its Augustino-Thomistic doctrine.31 Jansenius’s like-minded friend Libertus Fromondus (1587–1653) was the (co-)editor of his books, as well as his successor to the royal chair of Sacred Scriptures. He produced some interesting Bible commentaries of which his Commentary on the Acts of the Apostles (published posthumously in 1654) was the most successful; the last edition dates back to the beginning of the nineteenth century. Fromondus may have been a Louvain exponent of an evolution that Sylvio Hermann De Franceschi has sketched for France: that, even before 1653, some “Jansenists” had retreated from the most contested points of their doctrine of grace, to accept, at least on a theoretical level, the notion of sufficient grace as it was understood by the Thomists.32 During his lifetime the only work for which Fromondus took the initiative to have published was his commentary on the Canticle of Canticles (1653). He deliberately added the Divisio animae ac spiritus to it, a work by the mystically endowed Capuchin father Johannes Evangelista of ’s Hertogenbosch (ca. 1588–1635), who lived in the Louvain monastery and had a fair amount of contact with Fromondus. It seems that, with Fromondus, Jansenism had turned away from purely doctrinal controversies and become more interested in inner, mystical experiences (as well as their concomitant miracles 29

François, “Efficacious Grace and Predestination,” 130–135. For a close study of the presence of such statements in Jansenius’s Augustinus and in the Church Father’s work, as well as of the righteousness of the condemnation, see Lucien Ceyssens, “L’authenticité des cinq propositions condamnées de Jansénius,” Antonianum 55 (1980), 368–424; Lucien Ceyssens, “La cinquième des propositions condamnées de Jansénius: sa portée théologique,” in Jan van Bavel and Martijn Schrama, eds., Jansénius et le Jansénisme dans les Pays-Bas: Mélanges Lucien Ceyssens [BETL 56] (Leuven, 1982), 39–53. 30 French Jesuits were able to engage the Cardinal de Richelieu for their enterprise, for the latter considered Jansenius as his personal enemy since he had published the Mars gallicus. In this book Jansenius had attacked Richelieu’s alliances with Protestant forces, which were dictated by pure power politics, harmed the Catholic cause in Europe, and as such contravened the spirit of Trent. 31 Roegiers, “Le Jansénisme de Louvain,” 12. See there for further literature. 32 François, “Efficacious Grace and Predestination,” 136–142; Sylvio Hermann De Franceschi, Entre saint Augustin et saint Thomas. Les jansénistes et le refuge thomiste (1653–1663): à propos des 1re, 2e et 18e Provinciales [Univers Port-Royal] (Paris, 2009), 64–82.

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and other supernatural events).33 Fromondus was also the last representative of a golden age of biblical scholarship since, after his death, the Jansenist faction, the proponents par excellence of a “positive” theology, lost their foothold on the royal chair of Sacred Scriptures, which was passed to the “anti-Jansenist” faction. From the same period onward, Louvain theologians with Jansenist leanings supported several “Belgian” bishops in their controversy with the Jesuits and likeminded theologians, who were reproached for their (alleged) laxist moral convictions and practices, as well as their attritionism, which were apparent in their writings and confessional practice. The Louvain theologians, adhering to more rigorist moral views as well as to contritionism, condemned laxism as well as probabilism, which was considered to be the source of moral relaxation. A Louvain delegation sent to Rome (1677–1679) eventually succeeded in having the pope condemn several laxist propositions which were mostly taken from Jesuit publications, among which were those of Lessius and Molina. The Jesuits, in their turn, labeled the theses espoused at the faculty, especially by Gommarus Huygens (1631–1702), as rigorist.34 In short, what had started as an anti-Pelagian, Augustinian view on grace, free will, and predestination had fanned out in several directions: attention to an inner mystical attitude (and even supernatural events, such as healings and miracles); rigorist moral views; and the requirement of true contrition, not to mention a reticence regarding claims of papal “infallibility” and Roman interventions in local church affairs, given the (alleged) blunders that Rome had made in the Jansenist dossier. This is an indication that Jansenism is a multi-layered phenomenon, as Roegiers stated: “Starting from an initial conflict, new quarrels or new terrains of combat added themselves continuously to existing points of disagreement, without having these earlier issues disappear.”35 33

Lucien Ceyssens, “Le janséniste Libert Froidmont (1587–1653),” Bulletin de la Société d’Art et d’Histoire du Diocèse de Liège 43 (1963), 1–46. 34 Roegiers, “Le Jansénisme de Louvain,” 8–9 and 13–14; Roegiers, “The Leuven Faculty of Theology and the Jesuit College,” 172. See there for further literature, esp. two Dutch-language contributions: Lucien Ceyssens, “De Leuvense deputatie te Rome (1677–1679),” in Lucien Ceyssens, Jansenistica: Studiën in verband met de geschiedenis van het Jansenisme, volume I (Mechelen, 1950), 167–253; and Lucien Ceyssens, “Gommarus Huygens in de verwikkelingen van de strijd tussen Kerk en Staat (1678–1687),” in Lucien Ceyssens, Jansenistica: Studiën in verband met de geschiedenis van het Jansenisme, volume II (Mechelen, 1953), 193–229. 35 Roegiers, “Le Jansénisme de Louvain,” 2, with a reference to Peter Hersche, Der Spätjansenismus in Österreich [Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften. Veröffentlichungen der Kommission für Geschichte Österreichs, 7/Schriften des Ddr. Franz Josef Mayer-Gunthof-Fonds 11] (Vienna, 1977), 25–43.

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Conclusion Without losing sight of all kinds of nuances, to be found in the work of individual theologians, the theology espoused in Louvain and Douai should be characterized as a positive theology, rooted in the Scriptures and in works of the Church Fathers – with an emphasis upon Augustine’s anti-Pelagian works and frame of interpretation – not to detract, however, from the systematization brought about by Thomas Aquinas. The Louvain and Douai theologians, who felt themselves to be on the frontline against Protestant heresy in the north of Europe, considered this concentration upon the Scriptures and Augustine to be the most appropriate stratagem. To this end, some of the protagonists of the Louvain faculty of theology – Baius, and Jansenius of Ypres to a certain extent – thought it necessary to draw out the extreme consequences of anti-Pelagian theology, while minimizing Scholastic influence. It brought them onto common theological ground with their Protestant opponents, which revived the lingering suspicion on the part of more “orthodox” colleagues. A position at the other end of the theological spectrum, an overt concentration upon later developments in Scholastic, let alone Jesuit – for example, Molinist – theology, was also considered to be an infringement upon the sacrosanct doctrina lovaniensis. bibliography Boute, Bruno. Academic Interests and Catholic Confessionalisation: The Louvain Privileges of Nomination to Ecclesiastical Benefices [Education and Society in the Middle Ages and Renaissance 35]. Leiden, 2010. Claeys Boúúaert, Ferdinand. L’ancienne Université de Louvain. Études et documents [Bibliothèque de la Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique 28]. Leuven, 1956. De Jongh, Henri. L’ancienne faculté de théologie de Louvain au premier siècle de son histoire (1432–1540). Ses débuts, son organisation, son enseignement, sa lutte contre Érasme et Luther. Leuven, 1911. Étienne, Jacques. Spiritualisme érasmien et théologiens louvanistes. Un changement de problématique au début du XVI siècle [Universitas catholica Lovaniensis. Dissertationes ad gradum magistri in Facultate theologica vel in Facultate juris canonici consequendum conscriptae. Series 3; 3]. Leuven and Gembloux, 1956. François, Wim. “Augustinus und die Löwener Kontroversen über Prädestination, Gnade und freien Willen,” in Günter Frank et al., eds., Totus noster? Augustinus zwischen den Konfessionen [Refo500 Academic Studies 93]. Göttingen, 2023, 189–215. Gerace, Antonio. Biblical Scholarship in Louvain in the “Golden” Sixteenth Century [Refo500 Academic Studies 60]. Göttingen, 2019. Gielis, Gert. “Hemelbestormers: Leuvense theologen en hun streven naar geloofseenheid en kerkvernieuwing (1519–1578).” Doctoral dissertation, KU Leuven, 2014.

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The Schools of Louvain and Douai Guelluy, Robert. “L’évolution des méthodes théologiques à Louvain d’Érasme à Jansénius.” Revue d’Histoire Ecclésiastique 37 (1941), 31–144. Lamberigts, Mathijs and Leo Kenis, eds. L’Augustinisme à l’ancienne faculté de théologie de Louvain [Bibliotheca Ephemeridum Theologicarum Lovaniensium (BETL) 111]. Leuven, 1994. Quaghebeur, Toon. “Pro aris et focis: Theologie en macht aan de Theologische Faculteit te Leuven 1617–1730.” Doctoral dissertation, KU Leuven, 2004. Reusens, Edmond-Henri-Joseph. Documents relatifs à l’histoire de l’Université de Louvain (1425–1797), 5 vols. Leuven, 1881–1903. Roegiers, Jan. “Awkward Neighbours: The Leuven Faculty of Theology and the Jesuit College (1542–1773).” In Rob Faesen and Leo Kenis, eds., The Jesuits of the Low Countries: Identity and Impact (1540–1773). Proceedings of the International Congress at the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies, KU Leuven (3–5 December 2009) [BETL 251]. Leuven, 2012, 153–175. “Le Jansénisme de Louvain à la fin du XVIIe siècle.” In Guido Cooman, Maurice Van Stiphout, and Bart Wauters, eds., Zeger-Bernard van Espen at the Crossroads of Canon Law, History, Theology and Church-State Relations [BETL 170]. Leuven, 2003, 1–17. van Eijl, Edmond J. M., ed. Facultas S. Theologiae Lovaniensis 1432–1797: Bijdragen tot haar geschiedenis/Contributions to its History/Contributions à son histoire [BETL 45] Leuven, 1977.

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Introduction To think about Jesuit theology in terms of a distinctive “school” means to grapple with fundamental issues in the history of early modern theology and in the development of modern Western thought more generally. On the one hand, the world of post-Reformation theologians was assuming an increasingly globalized, plural, and multi-faceted dimension, and the Society of Jesus was theologically, intellectually, and structurally better equipped than other religious orders to engage with the manifold challenges of this rapidly widening context. On the other hand, the Society made a sustained effort to keep this multiplicity solidly tied around a specific theological, and not just institutional or cultural, unity. The fact that the Society was distinctively subject to, and thrived on, this tension between centripetal and centrifugal forces is at the core of the Jesuits’ theological identity, which is itself characterized by a complex and intellectually vibrant tension between unity and multiplicity. Undeniably, there was a set of theological positions that can be seen as intrinsically “Jesuit,” given the heightened sense of theological selfawareness on the part of the Jesuit theologians, and given also the polemical and historical context. Since its inception, the Society was able to present itself as a distinctive development within the larger postReformation Catholic intellectual world. Consequently, both its Catholic and Protestant adversaries were not just theologically but also polemically invested in polarizing the debates by stressing the Jesuit aspects of certain specific controversial doctrines. The Jesuits did not shy away from the polemical challenges, and on several occasions they sought, more or less successfully, to embrace the polemical dynamics in order to defend and reaffirm the very unicity and originality of their theological doctrines against their enemies’ attacks.

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In parallel, however, profound internal divisions, conflicts, and debates animated the theological and intellectual life of the Society. By the end of the sixteenth century the Jesuits had been remarkably successful in permeating the Catholic as well as the non-Catholic world, which also means that the Society manifested within its own ranks the theological, cultural, and political diversity that it was supposed to embrace and adapt to. Evidence of this can be found in several aspects of the history of the Society: for instance, as it created and consolidated Jesuit theological and institutional centers away from Rome, it became clearer and clearer that the interests, needs, and ambitions of the Jesuits living in Coimbra or Alcalá were not exactly the same as those of the Jesuits living in Paris or Louvain or Ingolstadt or at the frontiers of the Catholic world in the Far East or the Americas. The Jesuit hierarchy in Rome had to maintain a delicate equilibrium between the various souls of the Society by negotiating with important organisms of doctrinal control in the Roman Curia such as the Congregations of the Inquisition and Index, in a context in which parts of the administrative and theological structure of the papacy were still in flux. Also, the anti-heretical battle, which was at the center of the theological, and not simply polemical, activities of the Society, helped to catalyze and solidify the doctrinal unity, but at the same time it contributed to exposing the Jesuits’ different theological and intellectual agendas. Thus, the dialectic between unity and multiplicity and the complex relationship between Jesuit theology as a historical object and as a polemical category need to be put at the center of our investigation into the intellectual and historical significance of the Jesuits’ theological school. Three specific doctrines can serve as an ideal lens to magnify these tensions and appreciate their implications: the Jesuits’ soteriological doctrine; their understanding of the relationship between spiritual and political authority; and the doctrine of probabilism.

Grace and Free Will The relationship between grace and free will was crucial in post-Reformation Catholic theology, given that stressing the role that free will played in human salvation alongside God’s grace was an important aspect of the very process of defining the Catholic identity in opposition to the Protestants. While the Council of Trent had clearly established that both God’s grace and the freedom of the human will were necessary for attaining salvation, it had not specified exactly the terms in which the relationship between grace and 219

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free will should be posed. Consequently, Catholic theologians were left with ample margins for debate, so much so that post-Reformation Catholic soteriology looks less like a compact and monolithic doctrinal core than a spectrum of positions. The Jesuits emerged at the more philo-Pelagian side of the Catholic soteriological spectrum. The Jesuits (like all Catholic theologians) were conscious of the fact that Augustine’s soteriology, the main point of reference for the Catholic doctrine on salvation, was not entirely consistent, and lent itself to several different interpretations. Thomas Aquinas’s reading of Augustine confirmed this potential ambiguity, for it reaffirmed Augustine’s emphasis on both grace and free will without specifying explicitly their respective relationship. Therefore, a more philo-Pelagian interpretation of Augustine could be just as consonant with the theological orthodoxy of the church as a more anti-Pelagian one. Furthermore, a more philo-Pelagian soteriology resonated with the spiritual and theological activism that had characterized the Society since its inception. Finally, since the Jesuits had always operated on the front line of the confessional battle, they were more aware than many other orders that the Protestant appropriation of Augustine’s more extreme anti-Pelagianism radicalized the debate over grace and free will. The Jesuits firmly believed in the need for adapting doctrines and practices to the specific historical context, and thus they thought that a more philo-Pelagian soteriology would have been more effective in the fight against the Protestants. Other religious orders (especially the Dominicans) and other Catholic institutions, by contrast, were situated on the other side of the soteriological spectrum, and defended the more explicitly anti-Pelagian aspects of Augustinian theology. The conflict between those two ways of interpreting the complex interplay of grace and free will began to emerge in the 1560s and 1570s, especially in places situated in a delicate and strategic position within the interconfessional battle such as Louvain. It exploded after the publication of Luis de Molina’s Concordia liberi arbitrii cum gratiae donis in 1588. Molina’s text was probably the most thorough, systematic, and to an extent extreme exposition of the Jesuit soteriology. As such, his doctrine provoked the attacks of those Catholic theologians, especially Dominicans, who believed that the Jesuit philo-Pelagian insistence on the role of free will had gone too far. At stake in the conflict between the two orders was not only their different reading of Augustine, but also their different commitment to, and interpretation of, Thomism as the theological backbone of post-Reformation 220

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Catholicism: while the Dominicans generally maintained a relatively conservative approach to Thomism, the Jesuits took up and expanded the effort of modernizing Thomism initiated by the School of Salamanca. The Jesuits manifested a measure of flexibility in following Thomist theology for a number of reasons. First, in their role as educators for a Europe-wide clerical and secular elite, the Jesuits were sensitive to, and ready to absorb and integrate into their educational system, new scholarly and pedagogical methods. Second, because of their distinctive intellectual interests, specific Jesuit theologians such as Robert Bellarmine, Francisco Suárez, and Leonard Lessius thought that a more elastic application of Thomism was better suited to the new theological and intellectual challenges of the early modern world. The Jesuits’ relatively open attitude with respect to Thomism is clearly stated in the rules prescribed by the 1599 Ratio studiorum to the Jesuit professors of theology: while the Ratio explicitly recognized Aquinas’s theology as the main reference point for Jesuit theology, it also explicitly stated that Thomism was not to be followed blindly, and that it was possible to depart from it whenever it was deemed necessary. The debate that followed the publication of Molina’s book, the so-called controversia de auxiliis, tore the Catholic Church apart for at least two decades. Pope Clement VIII appointed a special congregatio in charge of hearing theologians for both camps and deciding which position was to be considered as the orthodox one. Clement died before a decision was made. The debates resumed under Clement’s successors, but a definitive solution never came. In 1607 Paul V decided to end the debates, refrained from choosing one position over the other, and effectively allowed Jesuits and Dominicans to disagree with one another while forbidding both camps to attack each other’s doctrines publicly. The controversia de auxiliis is a perfect example to show both the relevance of the Jesuit school of theology with respect to other Catholic theological positions and the complexities and conflicts within the Jesuits’ own ranks. The controversy was so difficult to solve also because by the end of the sixteenth century the Jesuits had rallied behind a soteriological doctrine that they saw as part of their theological identity. The fact that the popes, for their part, found it difficult to take an executive decision is a testament to the strength and influence that the Society had been able to acquire in less than a century since its inception. Pope Clement VIII, for instance, was well aware of the influence the Jesuits had acquired in post-Reformation Catholicism and personally promoted many Jesuit theologians to high-profile positions in his Curia. At the same time, however, the pope recognized that the Society’s 221

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strong sense of theological identity could have troubling effects on the doctrinal unity of the whole Catholic Church. In 1601, during the extenuating debates between Dominicans and Jesuits in front of the papal congregatio, Clement voiced his frustration at the Jesuits’ defense of Molina, which he thought had become not simply a question of doctrine, but a question of esprit de corps: “Because of the Jesuits’ arrogance and because of the fact that they think nothing of the other orders and theologians, they have fallen in these predicaments thinking that everybody else is ignorant.”1 While Molinism had become part of Jesuit theological identity, however, not all the Jesuits were equally supportive of Molina’s soteriology. During the controversy de auxiliis Robert Bellarmine and Claudio Acquaviva worked actively not to push the pope to endorse officially Molinism, but rather to convince him that it was better to leave both camps free to discuss their respective positions without taking an official stand one way or another. Bellarmine and Acquaviva personally censored, curbed, or silenced other members of their own order who defended Molinism too explicitly, as in the case of Leonard Lessius, whose anti-Baianism and philo-Pelagianism did not sit well with the Jesuit hierarchy in Rome. The conflict within the Society between more extreme and more moderate philo-Pelagianism was certainly motivated by the fact that not all Jesuit theologians interpreted Augustine in the same manner. Robert Bellarmine, for example, who started his career in Louvain in the midst of the polemics over Michael Baius’s doctrine, exhibited a much more pronounced Augustinianism than many of his confrères did. At the same time, however, the internal conflict over soteriology is also an expression of a delicate politico-theological equilibrium between the Roman center and the periphery of the Jesuit world. For those Jesuits who, like Lessius, lived in Louvain or in other confessionally contested lands, the anti-heretical fight was the main concern, and therefore stressing the Pelagian aspects of Catholic soteriology was necessary in order to affirm the Catholic theological identity vis-à-vis the Protestant one. Claudio Acquaviva and the hierarchy of the Society in Rome, from their perspective, were worried that the repercussions of the de auxiliis could compromise the Jesuits’ position in the Curia. From the vantage point of the Roman center, things looked different than from the 1 per la sua superbia li Jesuiti et per estimar en niente le altre Religioni e dotori, sono cascati in questi inconvenienti persuadendosi che tuti sono ignoranti. This quote comes from the report written by Francisco Peña on the debates over the controversia de auxiliis, November 13, 1601, in Archivio della Congregazione per la Dottrina della Fede, St St O 5-i, fol. 147r.

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periphery of the Catholic world, and it was not easy to balance all the different theological, political, and polemical needs.

Spiritual and Political Authorities The traumatic split originated by the Protestant Reformation and the progressive increase and consolidation of power on the part of the early modern sovereigns challenged the hegemony of the Catholic Church over the postReformation world. The overarching aim and veritable raison d’être of the Society was that of adapting and refashioning Catholic theology so as to enable the Catholic Church to meet those novel challenges. After the Council of Trent the papacy emerged as the political, theological, and institutional center of the Catholic Church, and many influential Jesuit theologians engaged the question of how to reframe the supremacy of the pope in the new context. This led them to rethink or refine important theoretical notions such as the nature and binding force of laws, the origin of political and religious authorities, and more generally the nature of the state as a political community and of the church as a spiritual community. The Jesuits’ theoretical efforts did not result in a compact and unified “Jesuit” political position, because, as we saw in the case of soteriology, even concerning political theory different Jesuits expressed different positions on many important issues. For instance, Juan de Mariana and Robert Bellarmine’s notions concerning the state of nature presented significant differences, Francisco Suárez’s reflections on law and property were quite distinctive with respect to other Jesuit theorists, Lessius’s understanding of pacts and contracts set him apart from many thinkers of his own order, and finally Mariana, Bellarmine, and Suárez all had different opinions on the question of tyrannicide. It is also important to remember that the Jesuit political elaborations were not created ex nihilo and that they were not utterly original in the context of Christian political thought, since much of the vocabulary and many of the categories Jesuit theorists used had a long tradition in the history of Western political thought. Furthermore, in many important aspects Jesuit theologians built upon the political theories of the Dominican Francisco de Vitoria and the School of Salamanca. As in the case of soteriology, however, there are specific doctrines which can be rightly identified as distinctively Jesuit, both because the hierarchy of the Society embraced and deployed them as useful tools to assert the Jesuits’ theological identity in many political and theological conflicts and because the controversies they originated radicalized and polarized the debates. One 223

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of these doctrines, which represents perfectly the significance, centrality, and complexity of the Jesuit political elaborations, is the doctrine of the potestas indirecta. This doctrine is usually credited to Robert Bellarmine, but it was widely upheld and defended by the entire Jesuit hierarchy and it was embraced and re-proposed, albeit with many variations, by almost all the other Jesuit theorists. It was founded on two key tenets already expressed by Vitoria and his pupils. First, political government was founded on natural law, and as such its legitimacy was not dependent upon the church. Second, the Christiana respublica was a spiritual and supernatural community, founded on divine law, and as such its government, nature, and structure were ontologically different from the political government, which was a natural and temporal community. After setting up this fundamental difference between the structure and nature of the political and the spiritual authorities, the Jesuit theorists of the potestas indirecta went on to argue that the spiritual and political commonwealths, although each was autonomous, were linked in a fundamental way. Since the men and women who populated both communities were each endowed with both a body and a soul, they owed obedience to the political authority in all things concerning their temporal felicity and to the spiritual authority in all things concerning their eternal life. Whenever political and religious authorities were in conflict, since the soul was more important than the body, everybody should follow the authority in charge of the souls – even against the precepts and rules of the secular sovereign. Furthermore, since the church was founded on divine law, and since by divine law the church was an absolute monarchy governed by the pope, the pope held absolute spiritual supremacy over all Christian men and women, including sovereigns, over whom he could have exercised a form of indirect political authority by virtue of his spiritual supremacy. This doctrine had significant political, doctrinal, and ecclesiological implications. First, it clearly recognized the legitimacy and autonomy of the political government with respect to the Christian church, and therefore it legitimized theologically the centrality of the concept of political obedience. Second, it opened up an important discussion on the nature of political government: given that political authority exists by natural law, it follows that political laws preexist the institution of monarchy, or, more generally, that the nature and legitimacy of secular commonwealths are independent from the different forms of government that they can assume. This notion had important theoretical repercussions on the question of the relationship between laws and sovereigns, which was a fundamental issue in early 224

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modern political thought and to which many Jesuit theologians contributed quite important insights. Finally, the doctrine of the potestas indirecta allowed Catholic theologians to defend the supreme authority of the papacy both against the Protestant attacks on the pope’s spiritual authority and against some Catholic attacks on the pope’s temporal prerogatives and ecclesiological primacy, as for instance in Venice during the crisis of the Interdetto and in France, where the strong tradition of Gallicanism and the equally strong control of the sovereign made it polemically difficult for Catholic theologians to defend papal supremacy. For all these reasons, the doctrine of the potestas indirecta was not only endorsed as the “official” Jesuit position, but it also became the mainstream position that the popes assumed whenever their authority was called into question, such as in the already-mentioned cases of Venice and France, as well as in the controversy over the English Oath of Allegiance. This does not, however, mean that everybody in the Roman Curia or in the Society of Jesus was complicit in defending and upholding the potestas indirecta. Canonists such as Francisco Peña and even popes like Sixtus V disliked this doctrine because they thought that it limited the pope’s plenitudo potestatis. In addition, while most Jesuit theologians embraced the general framework of the potestas indirecta, there were many important variations in the ways in which theorists such as Suárez and Mariana understood its theological and political implications. Finally, there were Jesuits who objected tout court to the potestas indirecta. We can see the clearest example of this line of dissent in France, where the question of papal authority had become dramatically tense after the assassination of Henry IV. By the second half of the seventeenth century an important sector of the French Society, and especially those French Jesuits who were closer to the king and to the court (including, for instance, François Annat and François de la Chaise, who were Louis XIV’s confessors), had begun to stress more and more forcefully the theological, and not just political, importance of the concept of obedience to the secular territorial prince, which in some cases might be in conflict with the external authority of the pope. The most highprofile and controversial representative of this line of thought was probably Louis Maimbourg, who directly opposed the potestas indirecta and vocally defended the rights of the French monarchy by invoking the concept of obedience as a key tenet of Jesuit theology. Even though he was eventually expelled from the Society of Jesus because of his extreme Gallicanism, Maimbourg’s was not an isolated and exceptional case. It was part of a relevant, if minoritarian, line of thought within the Society, which tended 225

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to oppose the very “Jesuit” notion of potestas indirecta by means of another equally “Jesuit” concept, that of obedience. This example attests to the centrality and complexity of the Jesuits’ theo-political vocabulary: early modern Jesuits had at their disposal a number of different theological concepts with significant political implications, which could be deployed to suit a variety of diverse and at times conflicting political and theological positions on crucial issues such as the nature of political government and the relationship between spiritual and political authority.

Probabilism Since at least the time of Pascal, probabilism has occupied a distinctive place in the public and scholarly perception as one of the more intrinsically Jesuit contributions to the realm of moral theology. The “inventor” of probabilism, however, was not a Jesuit, but the Dominican theologian Bartolomé de Medina. Medina, a member of the School of Salamanca and the author of a popular manual for confessors, treated this topic in his commentary on Aquinas’s Ia IIae (q.19, art.6), which was the locus classicus for this kind of discussion in Scholastic and neo-Scholastic treatises. As Medina addressed the question of choosing between a more and a less probable opinion – especially when such choice concerned the administration of sacraments, and confession in particular – he affirmed, against all his predecessors, that it was legitimate, and in some cases even advisable, to follow a less probable opinion. Medina mentioned two main arguments in support of his position. The first concerned the very nature of probability as an epistemological category. Since, according to Aristotle, an opinion was to be considered as probable if it was supported by stringent arguments and defended by learned men, even a less probable opinion, as long as it remained within the realm of probability, would still be reasonable and widely supported, and thus it was perfectly legitimate to follow it in practical and moral matters. The second argument had to do more directly with the pastoral aspect of the question. Allowing people to follow the less probable opinion was legitimate because nobody is obliged to perfection: forcing everybody always to follow the more probable opinion at any cost would thus be unnecessarily excruciating for Catholic consciences.2 2 See Medina’s Expositio in primam secundae, 2 vols. (Venice, 1602), I, 173–179. See also ch. XVII, bk. II, of Medina’s manual for confessors, Breve instrucción de como se ha da administrar el sacramento de la penitencia. The manual was first printed in Salamanca in 1579 and was reprinted

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It is easy to see why the Jesuit theologians immediately picked up on Medina’s opinion concerning the legitimacy of acting on the less probable opinion. The Jesuits’ insistence on the need to examine one’s conscience thoroughly, their awareness of how lacerating this operation could be, and their understanding of confession as a spiritual medicine and of the confessor as the doctor of the conscience made them see the benefits of using probabilism as a pastoral aid to comfort afflicted penitents. The Jesuits also saw other potential benefits of the doctrine of probabilism, and decided to refine it theoretically. Two Jesuit theologians were especially invested in reframing probabilism: Gabriel Vázquez and Francisco Suárez. While Medina defended probabilism mainly as an aid to the consciences of scrupulous penitents, Vázquez provided it with more ample theoretical foundations and framed it as a way to anchor all kinds of doubts or dilemmas to the notion of obedience to authority. Vázquez began his reflections by addressing the root of the controversy over probabilism. He argued that the reason why theologians generally prohibited action on the basis of the less probable opinion was the Pauline precept in Romans 14:23 that going against one’s conscience is always sinful. Given that what I believe in my conscience is also, by definition, what I consider most probable, I am never allowed to abandon my own opinion in order to follow another’s, because that would be tantamount to going against my conscience. There are cases, however, in which my own opinion might run against the command of the sovereign or the opinion of the learned people: should I then remain firm in my own opinion and act according to my conscience against the authority of my king or my teacher? If I want to obey their authority, how could I be allowed to follow their command without going against my conscience? These cases concerned obedience and authority, and as such they did not necessarily involve sacraments or the duty of the confessors to safeguard the delicate equilibrium of the penitents’ consciences. This is why Vázquez thought that Medina’s arguments in support of probabilism were not sufficient to justify its use in these cases, and why he decided to frame probabilism in a completely different way with respect to Medina. Vázquez specified that an opinion could be considered probable either intrinsically or extrinsically. According to Vázquez’s definition, I would hold an intrinsically probable opinion whenever I have examined by myself all the reasons in support of it and have found them inherently convincing. At times, however, I might be and translated numerous times in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (in the Rome 1593 Italian edition of Medina’s manual, chapter XVII can be found at pp. 263r–272v.)

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confronted with an opinion which I myself might not consider the most probable, but which is defended and supported by many learned authorities and/or by my superiors. Such an opinion would be extrinsically, not intrinsically, probable, because its probability would depend on the external authority of its supporters rather than on my own judgment. Whenever I am confronted with an extrinsically probable opinion, Vázquez concluded, I can legitimately convince my conscience that even though I might consider my own opinion as intrinsically more probable, the other opinion meets the standards of legitimate probability because of the authority of its supporters. Therefore I safely can, and at times I absolutely must, act according to the extrinsically probable opinion and obey my prince or do as my teachers say.3 Francisco Suárez provided yet another theoretical foundation for probabilism: he framed it as a method to articulate and manage uncertainty in the context of the laws and rights regulating other forms of human interaction. Like Medina before him, Suárez distinguished between the epistemological question concerning the nature of a probable opinion and the moral question concerning the legitimacy of acting on a probable opinion even when the alternative is more probable and possibly safer. A probable opinion is by definition founded on stringent and solid arguments, defended and supported by learned authorities, and consonant with the dictates of right reason. Consequently, acting on the basis of a probable opinion is safe in conscience and always morally legitimate regardless of the alternative. For Suárez this was the case because human reason and understanding cannot always arrive at certainty and truth, and thus uncertainty is, to a certain extent, an intrinsic component of the human condition, which must be regulated just like any other manifestation of the human condition. Whenever we are not certain of the legitimacy of an action, it means that we have no clear norm at our disposal which we need to conform to. In this situation of uncertainty, however, we have one certain rule to recur to: the legal principle according to which the possessor’s condition is stronger. Given that legal principles such as this one were formulated precisely in order to regulate situations of human uncertainty, we do not have to limit the application of this legal principle only to specific contentions over property, but we can apply it to other practical questions concerning what to do in uncertain situations. Thus, since in the absence of a law prescribing the contrary we are certainly in possession of our own freedom, we have the right to exercise that freedom 3 See esp. the Disputatio LXII of Vázquez’s Commentarii on Aquinas’s Ia IIae, 8 vols. (Ingolstadt, 1604), III, 424–436.

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by choosing whichever probable opinion we want, because a probable opinion is always safe enough, regardless of whether the alternative is more probable. This rule was not, however, a general one, valid for all kinds of dilemmas. The world of moral choices, Suárez noted, was complicated precisely because of the multiple and contradictory variables and sources of authority: sometimes what we think is more probable appears to be less safe; sometimes what we think is safer is also less probable; and finally, different people judge the degrees of probability in different ways. Furthermore, at times our dilemmas only concern our own conscience, while in other cases our dilemmas have consequences for other people and might cause them spiritual or bodily harm, against the laws of charity and justice. Suárez concluded that, given these difficulties, while the principle of the possessor’s condition was a generally useful guide for action, it was nevertheless always necessary to consider the individual cases so as to weigh the many factors involved and to invoke the legal or moral principles that would suit each case best.4 Thus, while Vázquez used probabilism as a way to justify, morally and epistemologically, the duty to obey, in Suárez probabilism becomes a means to articulate the manifold expressions of human uncertainty and to regulate them along the lines of other legal and practical principles used to regulate other aspects of human behavior and social interactions. Even though Suárez and Vázquez’s arguments to defend probabilism were different, and even though they openly criticized each other’s positions on this and many other theological matters, their respective elaborations on probabilism were complementary. From two different angles, in fact, they both solidified probabilism as a coherent intellectual and theological system which they embedded in and integrated with a wider theoretical framework, solidly tied to issues of law, right, obedience, and authority. Once the Jesuits anchored probabilism to this set of legal and theological notions, it became a useful doctrine in a number of specific situations, and not simply in matters of confession. Probabilism was the result of, and in turn contributed to heighten, the proliferation of individual cases of conscience, specific circumstances, and different, competing, and conflicting sources of authority. The historical context, in turn, provided novel occasions for conflicting opinions to emerge: the increasingly stronger and tighter control over the sacrament of confession on the part of the post-Tridentine theological and institutional leadership; the 4 See Suárez’s Tractatus Quinque Theologici on Aquinas’s Ia IIae, Treatise III, Disputatio XII, Sections V and VI (Lyon, 1628), 322–326.

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development of missionary activities which resulted in a number of difficulties in adapting the Catholic doctrine to different languages, practices, legal and political systems; and finally, the often conflicting imperatives to obey the spiritual and political authorities were among the many fundamental factors that contributed to placing moral and epistemological probabilism at the center of the theological debate. The Jesuits were at the forefront of many of these historical developments, and in their pastoral activities they were distinctively attuned to individual cases of conscience: probabilism could therefore become a useful theological and intellectual anchor to address all these different challenges. The fact that probabilism resonated with many of the theological, spiritual, and pastoral concerns of the Society does not mean that the Society was always united in defending probabilism. By the second half of the seventeenth century, and in the wake of the strong polemical reaction following the condemnation of Jansenius, when the papacy and the Inquisition were trying more aggressively to have probabilism condemned, a powerful line of dissent emerged within the ranks of the Jesuits. One of the most outspoken detractors of probabilism was Miguel de Elizalde, a Spanish Jesuit who went on to publish a highly controversial anti-probabilist treatise under the pseudonym Antonio Celladei. Before publishing his treatise Elizalde tried to convince the general of the Society (then Giovanni Paolo Oliva) that probabilism was neither a sound nor an intrinsically “Jesuit” doctrine, given that its first proponent was in fact a Dominican. Since the time of Jansenius, however, the French Catholic rigorists had managed to attribute the invention of probabilism to the Jesuits as a polemical move: the Jesuits fell into the polemical trap and defended probabilism as their own doctrine, while the Dominicans repudiated it and joined the pope in his attacks against it.5 Elizalde’s arguments did not convince Oliva, but they are an important testimony to the crucial role that polemics played in consolidating and complicating the Jesuits’ attachment to probabilism and, more generally, their theological identity. Eventually, the anti-probabilism wave grew to the point that by the end of the tenure of Tirso González de Santalla the 5 “E la ragione è ch’i Jansenisti et altri sono usciti ad impugnarla come nostra. I nostri sono usciti alla difesa, i Dominicani e gl’altri che sono di qualche conto benche compresi nella causa non sono usciti. Anzi cautamente si van facendo della parte contraria. Vedendo che nostro Signore Alessandro VII per il quale hoggi Iddio governa la S.ta Chiesa se ne doleva assai si di molte larghezze in dottrina morale, si di questo universal uso del Probabile”: Elizalde to Giovanni Paolo Oliva (late 1666 or early 1667), in Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu, FG 670, fols. 164r–167r (quoted at fol. 165v).

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Society progressively ceased to defend probabilism as one of its core moral doctrines and embraced as its alternative the much less controversial doctrine of probabiliorism, which allowed the legitimacy of acting only on the basis of the more probable opinion. The battle to eradicate probabilism, at least in its most extreme forms, from the teaching of the Society was neither easy nor quick: between the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century a few, and in some cases relatively important, members of the Society of Jesus openly opposed Tirso González’s probabiliorist position and continued to defend probabilism as a sound moral doctrine. Nevertheless, as the eighteenth century wore on, probabilism also began to fade slowly away from the theological and scholarly debates, and historians have only recently begun to reconsider its important role in early modern theology and epistemology. The crucial, complex, and multi-faceted role of the Jesuits in the development of early modern probabilism is a testament to the vitality and vibrancy of the intellectual and theological debates within the Society. Just as we saw while examining the Jesuits’ soteriology and political theory, even in the realm of moral theology they manifested a heightened awareness of the complexity of the modern world and sought to adapt their theology to it. Paraphrasing what Martin Heidegger wrote about Suárez’s metaphysics,6 precisely because Jesuit theology represented a constant intellectual effort to think through the complex, fractured, and conflicting intellectual needs of the modern world, we can say that the Jesuits ushered theology into modernity by making it the language in which the early modern world could conceptualize and make sense of the novel pressures coming from the proliferation of different centers of power and different sources of authority. bibliography Casalini, Cristiano, ed. Jesuit Philosophy on the Eve of Modernity. Leiden, 2019. Gay, Jean-Pascal. Jesuit Civil Wars: Theology, Politics, and Government under Tirso González (1687–1705). New York, 2016 [2012]. Morales en conflit: Théologie et polémique au Grand Siècle. Paris, 2011. Höplf, Harro. Jesuit Political Thought: The Society of Jesus and the State, c.1540–1630. Cambridge, 2004. Motta, Franco. Bellarmino: Una teologia politica della Controriforma. Brescia, 2005. O’Malley, John W. The First Jesuits. Cambridge, MA, 1995. 6

Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (Bloomington, 1995), 51–55; Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problem of Phenomenology (Bloomington, 1975), 77–99.

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s t e f a ni a t u t i n o O’Malley, John W., ed. The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts 1540–1773, 2 vols. Toronto, 1999–2000. Prosperi, Adriano. Tribunali della coscienza: Inquisitori, confessori, missionary. Turin, 1996. Schüssler, Rudolf. Moral im Zweifel, 2 vols. Paderborn, 2003–2006. Tutino, Stefania. Empire of Souls: Robert Bellarmine and the Christian Commonwealth. Oxford, 2010. Uncertainty in Post-Reformation Catholicism: A History of Probabilism. Oxford, 2018. Županov, Ines G., ed. The Oxford Handbook of the Jesuits. Oxford, 2019.

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Theological Currents in Latin America (Sixteenth Century) josep-ignasi saranyana The Two First Voyages On August 3, 1492 three ships commanded by Admiral Cristóbal Colón (Christopher Columbus) departed from the port of Palos. On October 12, 1492 Columbus touched American soil on a small island of the archipelago of the Bahamas, called Guanahaniand, and renamed it San Salvador. The second voyage departed from Cadiz on September 25, 1493, reaching American soil at the beginning of November, with a fleet of 17 ships and 1,200 men, among whom was the first papal vicar for the Indies, Fray Bernardo Boyl. Another vicar was the Hieronymite hermit Ramón Pané, who was the first missionary to begin evangelizing the indigenous Taíno people. Between the first and second trips the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella obtained the two bulls Inter cetera, issued by Pope Alexander VI, who granted them the possession of the lands discovered and commissioned them to evangelize, on behalf of the pope, their inhabitants.1

The Two Bulls Inter Cetera: Alexander VI (1493) and the Pontifical Donation A papal donation is indicated technically by a formula with the following words: pontifex in perpetuum donat, concedit et assignat (the pontiff donates, 1

The second Inter cetera, dated the next day (though probably was drafted in June and antedated), is almost literally equal to the first, with a minor modification which was a great triumph of Spanish diplomacy, because it was determined that the area of Spanish influence began 100 leagues west of the Azores and Cape Verde (about 500 km). However, in the following year, 1494, the Treaty of Tordesillas was signed between Portugal and Spain, moving the imaginary line (a meridian) that separated the two territories of exploration further westward, at 370 leagues west of Cape Verde (more than 2,500 km). See the two papal bulls in Josef Metzler, America Pontificia primi saeculi evangelizationis: 1493–1592: documenta pontificia ex registris et minutis praesertim in Archivo secreto vaticano existentibus, 2 vols. (Vatican City, 1991), I, no. 1 (the first bull) and no. 3 (the second). The reference to the imaginary line 100 leagues west of Cape Verde can be read in the second Inter cetera on p. 81.

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grants, and assigns in perpetuity).2 The authority by which Alexander VI made the donation was, first, through the Petrine or apostolic succession and, second, because he was the vicar of Christ on earth, with jurisdiction over both Christians and non-Christians. By primatial authority the pope could require obedience, according to the theology of the era, from Christian princes even in temporal matters. Also, by papal authority, that is, as dominus orbis, the pope could confer sovereignty on a Christian prince over a territory of infidels, if the Christian prince committed to evangelization.

The Origins of Patronage The papal donation to the Catholic monarchs, in exchange for their support of evangelization in America, evolved into royal patronage over the church in America, granted by Julius II in 1508, by the bull Universalis Ecclesiae.3 Such privileges accorded to kings, to lead the church in the New World, increased throughout the modern age. What began as a simple pontifical concession was to become, with the passage of time, a right inherent to the Spanish Crown.

The First Evangelization Methods Evangelization began in the Taíno framework, in the area of the Greater Antilles, populated by these indigenous people.4 Here, the Hieronymite friar Ramón Pané soon learned the Taíno language and evangelized for five years in Hispaniola (what is now Santo Domingo and Haiti), at the end of which he wrote a relación on West Indian mythology. The relación has left us some precious details about its catechetical methods and relations with the local chiefs, and the martyrdom of the first baptized (Juan Mateo, his brother 2

omnipotentis Dei auctoritate nobis in beato Petro concessa ac vicariatus Ihesu Christi qua fungimur in terris: Du Cange (Glossarium ad scriptores mediae et infimae Graecitatis) says that vicariatus is masculine and fourth declension. The verb fungimur requires the ablative qua, as female, and agrees with auctoritate. This text is identical in the two Inter cetera. Giménez Fernández translated: “by the authority of God Almighty granted to Saint Peter, and the Vicar of Jesus Christ whom we represent on Earth.” On this complex issue (translation of the text and scope) see Manuel Giménez Fernández, Nuevas consideraciones sobre la historia, sentido y valor de las bulas alejandrinas de 1493 referentes a las Indias (Madrid, 1944), 121–123. 3 Universalis Ecclesiae regimini, of July 28, 1508 in Metzler, America Pontificia, I, no. 13, 105–107. 4 Note on terminology: Because this chapter is translated from Spanish, as are many of the sources quoted therein, the term “Indios” is either left untranslated or substituted with the more widely accepted “indigenous people.”

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Antón, and four other indigenous persons).5 Ramón Pané began his catechesis by explaining the creation of the world, perhaps with the aim of dismantling the pagan cosmology so deeply rooted among Antilleans. He then taught major Christian prayers and encouraged the practice of the moral obligations of the Decalogue; and only after a certain amount of time – sometimes several years – in which the indigenous people had demonstrated that they could comply with the fundamental moral precepts did Pané agree to baptize them. From the theological point of view there are three things of note in the praxis of Ramón Pané. First, he began his preaching with the dogma of creation, perhaps to take advantage of the natural religious inclination of indigenous peoples. Second, he attached great importance to the practice of Christian morality, as a necessary condition to receive baptism. Finally, he gave considerable prominence to the learning and recitation of the main Christian prayers (the Lord’s Prayer, Ave Maria, Salve Regina, Confiteor).

The Dominicans in the Antilles and Bartolomé de Las Casas’s “First Conversion” The Observant Dominican friar Pedro de Córdoba arrived in Hispaniola in 1510, as provincial vicar of the first mission officially established in America. The Dominican friars of that community pledged themselves, from the start, to two objectives: first, to protect the indigenous people from all slavery; and second, to insert Christianity gradually and peacefully. The Dominicans developed a pastoral plan and prepared sermons that they preached to both Spaniards and Indios. A famous sermon, delivered before Spaniards by Friar Antonio de Montesinos, on the fourth Sunday of Advent in 1511, has been preserved, in part, thanks to the impressive memory of Bartolomé de Las Casas, who was present.6 As spokesman of the friars, Montesinos expressed 5

“Relación de fray Ramón Pané acerca de las antigüedades de los indios, las cuales, con diligencia, como hombre que sabe el idioma de éstos, recogió por mandato del almirante,” included in Hernando de Colón, Historia del almirante, ed. Luis Arranz (Madrid, 1984). The relación consists of twenty-six short chapters and was completed in 1498. 6 Bartolomé de Las Casas, Obras completas, volume V: Historia de las Indias, ed. Miguel Ángel Medina, Jesús Ángel Barreda, and Isacio Pérez Fernández (Madrid, 1994), bk. III, ch. 4, 1761–1762. Some historians have questioned whether after more than thirty years Las Casas could have had such a strong recollection of the sermon of Montesinos. They suspect that he might rather have developed a re-creation of the sermon in order to support their actions when they took on the defense of the indigenous people. It is possible, however, that Las Casas had seen the script for the sermon, perhaps retained by the Dominican community of Hispaniola, where he spent his long novitiate.

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his revulsion at the cruel treatment of the indigenous people. He also noted that the bad behavior of the colonists was an obstacle to evangelization. The sermon affirmed the oneness of the human race and condemned the war of conquest, even when cloaked under the guise of evangelization. This sermon made a deep impression on Bartolomé de Las Casas, later as priest, then as an encomendero.7 Years later, in 1512, Las Casas would enter the Order of Preachers and spend his period of religious and theological formation on the island of Hispaniola.

First Steps of Evangelization on the Mainland On November 8, 1519 Hernán Cortés entered Tenochtitlan (now Mexico City), capital of the Aztec empire, in the central valleys of Mexico. An Aztec rebellion forced him to leave the city on June 30, 1520. A year later Cortés returned with a new army. The capital finally surrendered on August 13, 1521, after a very bloody siege. The Spanish court called the conquered territories New Spain. Cortés brought with him to Mexico one secular and three religious (two Franciscans and a Mercedarian) clerics. Later, in 1523 three Franciscans from Flanders came to Mexico, among them the famous Peter of Ghent, a Franciscan lay brother and close relative, it seems, of the Emperor Charles V. In 1524 the first boatload of Franciscans arrived, consisting of twelve friars (the “twelve apostles”), among whom were the prior Martín de Valencia and also Toribio de Benavente, who, years later, wrote an important chronicle of this first stage of evangelization.8 The Franciscans began the work of extensive catechesis, coupled with outstanding educational activity aimed at the children of Aztec chieftains. 7

Although it had antecedence in Spanish history, the encomienda – or distribution in encomienda – took on unique characteristics in America. Repartimiento and encomienda tended to be used as synonyms, although there were small nuances in their meanings. When the land was discovered, there was a repartimiento or distribution of the Indios among the king, the conquistadors, and colonists. Later, the Indios were given to the successors of the first grantees, named encomenderos, that is, the Indians were commended to them with a series of charges to Christianize and civilize them. There were two types of tasks imposed on indigenous people: personal services or work; and the payment of tribute. At first the grants were temporary, but from 1509 onward they became annuities, and even hereditary. Gradually, however, the charges were abolished. The new laws of 1542–1543 ordered that the vacant grants pass to the Crown. But the final phase-out did not take place until the time of King Philip V (decrees of 1718–1721), who determined that the holders of grants could no longer collect their tribute. 8 Fray Toribio de Benavente Motolinia, Historia de los indios de la Nueva España, ed. Georges Baudot (Madrid, 1985). Baudot discusses whether Motolinia wrote the Historia up to 1541, or whether there was another editor who composed it, based on the papers prepared by Motolinia.

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The Apparitions of Tepeyac A Mexican tradition states that on December 9, 1531 the Virgin Mary appeared for the first time to Juan Diego, at Tepeyac, a mound located today within Mexico City. The message of Our Lady to Juan Diego was transmitted by Juan de Zumárraga, bishop-elect of Mexico. From the early days of the conquest of Mexico the Marian cult of Tepeyac, initially competing with other Marian devotions, eventually prevailed, not only in Mexico, but across America, and even in many European countries. A text in Nahuatl (the Aztec language) is attributed to Antonio Valeriano, an illustrious indigenous person, entitled the Relation or history of the apparitions of Our Lady of Santa María de Guadalupe, written between 1552 and 1560. This first Relation was later completed by Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxóchitl, with a Relation of the miracles. Later, in 1649, the text was edited by the Mexican priest Luis Lasso de la Vega, with some additions, a prologue, and an epilogue, all also in Nahuatl. All these pieces constitute the text called Nican mopohua, for its first words: “Here it is narrated.”9 The Franciscan Bernardino de Sahagún feared that this mass cult constituted one of the cases of religious syncretism that began to be detected in the central Mexican valleys around 1560, because this Marian cult of Our Lady of Guadalupe, as it came to be known, had displaced the Aztec cult of the goddess Tonantzin, thus Christianizing a pre-Columbian shrine. Sahagún’s alarm represents irrefutable testimony of the antiquity and the popularity of the Guadalupe cult among the indigenous people.10

The Papal Bull Sublimis Deus (1537) The viceregal authorities and, above all, the encomenderos, often offered resistance to the evangelization of the Indios, maliciously claiming that the natives were not prepared to receive the sacraments. In this way they sought to delay the full inclusion of indigenous peoples in the Hispanic polis, in order 9 See the Testimonios históricos guadalupanos, ed. Ernesto De la Torre Villar and Ramiro Navarro de Anda (Mexico City, 1982), 26–27; pp. 27–35 provide the Castilian version of Primo Feliciano Velázquez, published in 1926 and 1931. Another more modern version has been provided by Mario Rojas Sánchez in 1978. 10 Sahagún is one of the founders of modern ethnography. He arrived in New Spain in 1529. He lived in several convents of the order in Mexico, but spent the critical years at Tlaltelolco, whose College of Santa Cruz provided remarkable pedagogical teaching of Latin. He held various positions within the order and was interpreter in proceedings against sorcerers and idolaters. He mastered the Nahuatl language, and died in 1590.

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to be able to abuse them with greater impunity. Faced with such difficulties and obstructions, the Dominican friars decided to appeal to the Roman pontiff. The response of the Holy See was the papal bull Sublimis Deus, also known as Veritas ipsa, of June 2, 1537.11 It is a relatively short text, but theologically very dense. It states that faith in Jesus Christ is a necessary condition for entering eternal life, and it concluded that “it is necessary to admit that man has such a condition and nature that he can receive the faith of Christ, and that all those who have human nature also have the ability to receive this same faith.” All nations may be instructed in the faith (including the Americans). And the Indios in the New World, although they do not profess the Christian faith, cannot be deprived of freedom or of the right over their things, nor can they be reduced to servitude. With this last statement, Paul III condemned the wars of conquest and their depredations whose legitimization was based on a claim of evangelization.

The Theology of Bartolomé de Las Casas From a theological perspective, De unico vocationis modo is Bartolomé de Las Casas’s most interesting book. Although it has not survived intact, it records the diverse experiences of Las Casas: in the West Indies (where he had been an encomendero before becoming a Dominican); on the Venezuelan coast (where he had attempted to create mixed communities of Spaniards and indigenous people); and in the Central Valley of Mexico. At present only three extensive chapters of the first book are known to have been preserved in the Latin language (chapters 5, 6, and 7, plus a summary of the fourth chapter).12 In the fourth chapter, which is known only by a brief recapitulation that Las Casas offers at the beginning of the fifth chapter, the Dominican presents the thesis that all races and nations are able to understand the gospel message. He then offers the following conclusion: the norm established by Divine Providence to teach men true religion, namely by persuasive understanding with reason and gentle attraction and exhortation of the will, is unique, single, and identical for everyone and for all times. And it must be 11

An edition of the bull can be found in Metzler, America Pontificia, I, no. 84, 364–366. See Bartolomé de Las Casas, Obras completas, volume II: De unico vocationis modo, ed. Paulino Castañeda and Antonio García Moral, bilingual Spanish and Latin edition (Madrid, 1990), which contains a large preliminary study that corrects and improves the edition of Lewis Hanke (Mexico City, 1942; 2nd ed. 1975).

12

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common to all men of the world, without any discrimination of sects, errors, or depraved customs. It seems that a “second conversion” of Las Casas (when his eyes were opened to the indignity of the slave) occurred in 1545, during his short stay in his diocese in Chiapas, and, above all, when traveling through Lisbon in 1547 and seeing the terrible slave market of Portugal. By this experience, and with the information that he collected in Lisbon, he drafted chapters 22–27 of the first book of his Historia de las Indias, which clearly denounces slavery.13

The First American Provincial Councils Inaugurated on February 12, 1546, the first three ecclesiastical provinces in America (with metropolitan sees in Santo Domingo, Mexico City, and Lima) were ready to convene provincial councils.14 There were, during the Council of Trent, and in subsequent years, five provincial councils in Lima (1551–1552, 1567–1568, 1582–1583, 1591, and 1601),15 and three in Mexico (1555, 1565, and 1585).16 The most influential were the third councils of Lima and Mexico.

The Third Provincial Council of Lima The third provincial council of Lima was summoned by Archbishop Toribio de Mogrovejo, in 1581, in agreement with the viceroy, Martín Enríquez de Almansa. The council opened on August 15, 1582 and concluded on October 13, 1583. It was approved by the Holy See in 1588 and its decrees published in 1590. Under the inspiration of the Jesuit José de Acosta and the pastoral guidance of Santo Toribio de Mogrovejo, the catechetical draft mandated by the council was carried out in a short time, and it finally materialized in three relatively short catechisms, prepared for the immediate instruction of the indigenous peoples.17 These were translated into Quechua and Aymara, the two main languages of the Inca empire. The third catechism, which is the 13 Bartolomé de Las Casas, Obras completas, volume III: Historia de las Indias, ed. Miguel Ángel Medina and Isacio Pérez Fernández (Madrid, 1994), bk. I, chs. 22–27, 459–493. 14 The three bulls of Paul III establishing the provinces, each having the same name of Super universas, can be found in Metzler, America pontificia, I, nos. 125, 126, and 127. 15 Willi Henkel and Josep-Ignasi Saranyana, Die Konzilien in Lateinamerika II: Lima 1551–1927 (Paderborn, 2010). 16 Willi Henkel, Die Konzilien in Lateinamerika I: México 1555–1897 (Paderborn, 1984). 17 These catechisms have been edited by Juan Guillermo de Durán in Monumenta Catechetica Hispanoamericana (Buenos Aires, 1990), II, 451–488, 523–596, and 617–741. See also Juan Guillermo de Durán, El Catecismo del III Concilio Provincial de Lima y sus complementos pastorales (1584–1585): Estudio preliminar. Textos. Notas (Buenos Aires, 1982).

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jewel of these instruments, is divided into thirty-one explanatory sermons. This catechetical corpus was published in two volumes, by Antonio Ricardo, a printer based in Lima. The council instructed the priests who ministered to indigenous people, especially to schoolboys, that they should teach them to read and write and to understand and speak the Spanish language. However, the council also established that indigenous people would learn the main prayers in their own language, not in Latin, and only secondarily in Spanish. The council also determined that the Eucharist should be administered to the Indios. It is noteworthy that the reception of communion was related to amending bad habits (“of drunkenness and concubinage and much more of superstitions and rites of idolatry, vices that in these parts are too great”) and, therefore, the need for the sacrament of penance. At the same time it was noted that a bad life and religious ignorance did not constitute an excuse to abandon communion; on the contrary, it was a remedy for human weakness. It was the responsibility of the priest to prepare Indios as soon as they were able to receive Holy Communion at least once a year.

The Third Mexican Provincial Council (1585) The third Mexican provincial council, which took place in 1585, was the work of the third archbishop of Mexico, don Pedro Moya de Contreras. Its provisions focused mainly on the following topics: the formation of the clergy, the preaching of priests, catechesis of the natives, the study of Amerindian languages by missionaries, and the eradication of idolatry. The influence of the Jesuits at the council, after their arrival in the viceroyalty in 1572, was remarkable. In particular, there was decisive preparatory work done by Juan de la Plaza and Pedro de Ortigosa. But the main protagonist of the wording of the decrees was the secular priest Juan de Salcedo, then professor at the University of Mexico. The council was approved by the Holy See in 1589, though its decrees were not published until 1623.18 (The first two Mexican councils did not receive papal approval.) The council ordered that the “Catecismo menor o de primer grado [cartilla]” was to be taught to the Indios from memory. Spaniards, blacks and mulattos, and “Chichimeca” (a term used at the time to refer to northern 18 For an edition of the decrees with notes by Basilio Arrillaga SJ see Concilio III Provincial Mexicano, celebrado en México el año de 1585, primera edición en latín y castellano, ed. Galván Mariano Rivera (Mexico City, 1859). A digtal edition on DVD has been published as Concilios Provinciales Mexicanos: Época colonial: III Concilio y Directorio, ed. Pilar Martínez López-Cano, Elisa Itzel García Berumen, and Marcela Rocío García Hernández (Mexico City, 2004).

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peoples related to the Apaches) should be taught in Spanish; the other indigenous people, on the other hand, should learn in their native language. These provisions show interest in assimilating the northern tribes, with whom the Spanish were at war, and show a greater understanding toward the other Mesoamerican cultures. The teachers had to teach doctrine, along with the rudiments of letters. Adults could not be admitted to baptism if they were ignorant, in their language, of the Our Father, the Creed, and the Ten Commandments. Nor should the Spanish, Indios, or slaves be admitted to marriage if they were ignorant of the main prayers, the Creed, the Ten Commandments, commandments of the church, the sacraments, and the seven deadly sins. Children were to be baptized before they were nine days old. The great pastoral contribution of the third Mexican council was the Directorio para confesores y penitentes (Directory for confessors and penitents), written in Spanish. This work corresponds with the great interest of Archbishop Moya de Contreras in providing the ecclesiastical province with a body of confessors who were well prepared and able to replace the penitential ministry of the religious confessors (Dominicans and Franciscans).19 In addition to its casuistic moral theology content, the Directory contained different sections of great theological, spiritual, social, and legal interest, such as the way of confessing various categories of people, the spiritual direction of devout souls, cases of conscience on how to deal with repartimientos, the way to write a will, and preparing to die well. During the council, theologians lodged an important opinion on the injustice of the repartimientos of the Indios, dated May 18, 1585, which questioned the way in which the system imposed compulsory labor on the indigenous peoples. The war against the “Chichimecas” was also much discussed.

The First American Academic Theology In 1551 King Philip II founded the two universities of Lima and Mexico and, from 1569 onward, fostered the erection of diocesan seminaries for the preparation of the secular clergy, as the canons of the Council of Trent had mandated. In the Hispanic academic centers overseas, similar topics were discussed to those dealt with at Salamanca and Alcalá, but with their own colorations, 19

See Luis Martínez Ferrer, Directorio para confesores y penitentes: La pastoral de la penitencia en el Tercer Concilio Mexicano (Pamplona, 1996 [1585]).

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and, in addition, other issues relevant to the Americans. For example, muchdiscussed questions concerned the indigenous encomienda system; the justification or legitimacy of the Spanish invasion; the legality of the wars of conquest (northward against the “Chichimeca,” for example, and to the south with the Araucanians of Chile); the sacraments of Christian initiation (on the simplified rite of baptism and receiving of the Eucharist); the legitimacy of the marriages of unbaptized natives (for example, the theme of the expression of consent); the morality of the tax systems, considering the extreme poverty of indigenous peoples; ecclesiastical organization, in which two models were put forth (a hypothetical “regular church” and a diocesan church staffed by the secular clergy); the exemption of the religious and the turning over to secular clergy of their doctrinas (places of catechetical instruction of the Indians); the inculturation of theological language (the expression in the autochthonous languages of Scholastic technical concepts); the legality of work in the mines; and slavery.

Mexico Theology was taught at the Universidad Real y Pontificia de Mexico from 1551, with four outstanding Spanish teachers: the Dominicans Pedro de la Peña and Bartolomé de Ledesma; an Augustinian, Alonso de la Vera Cruz; and Pedro de Pravia. Dogmatic courses were taught according to the Summa theologiae of Thomas Aquinas. In his relecciones or courses, Vera Cruz showed great independence and originality. Two series of reflections are preserved in Latin: On the conquest and the rights of indigenous peoples and On tithes.20 In his first relección (in his inaugural academic year) he discussed the fair titles of conquest. The opinion of Vera Cruz on this subject is very nuanced and, perhaps for this reason, it is very diffuse, as befits an academic course. One can see the obvious influence of Francisco de Vitoria. Regarding Las Casas’s proposal, of which we have already spoken, and which demanded restitutio in integrum (the obligation to leave the American lands if the conquerors wanted to be exonerated), Vera Cruz was more conciliatory: “one thing is the beginning of the war in order to gain 20 The Writings of Alonso de la Vera Cruz, ed. Ernest J. Burrus, 5 vols. (Rome, 1968–1976), bilingual (the original Castilian or Latin and English translation). There is a Castilian version of the two relecciones universitarias: “Sobre la conquista y los derechos de los indígenas” and “Sobre los diezmos,” both ed. Roberto Jaramillo Escutia in Cronistas y Escritores Agustinos de América Latina, 1 and 2 (Quito and Mexico City, 1994). There is also a more recent version of the primera relección: “De iusto bello contra indos,” ed. Carlos Baciero (Madrid, 1997).

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possession, and another is the justice that exists in the retention of a kingdom annexed by the war; it could be that at the beginning there was injustice by the one who declared the war and then achieved victory, there is justice in retention.” Briefly, if one discounts the names that are repeated, by having occupied several chairs, there were twenty-four teachers in the faculty of theology of the University of Mexico during the sixteenth century. Of these, twelve were Augustinians, six Dominicans, and six secular priests. The Jesuits were also, in the first generation, prominent theologians, including Pedro Sancho, Pedro de Ortigosa, and Diego de Santisteban, not to mention the great logician Pedro Rubio, who also made forays into theological themes.

Lima In the University of San Marcos de Lima, also founded in 1551, academic activity proceeded more slowly because of a series of lawsuits between the Dominicans and the viceregal authorities. At first the university was run only by the Order of Preachers. San Marcos soon had to compete with the Colegio Máximo of the Jesuits and later with the Colegio de San Martin, of royal patronage. Prominent theologians of this first period were the Peruvian Jesuit Juan Pérez de Menacho, author of a copious work, largely lost, a Thomistic eclectic commentary on the Summa theologiae; the aforementioned Bartolomé de Ledesma; and, above all, the Jesuit José de Acosta. * In summary, it can be said that at the Royal and Pontifical University of Mexico and the University of San Marcos of Lima there was a fruitful pairing of three theological currents. The first originated in Salamanca, with Francisco de Vitoria, based on an intelligent and “located” reading of the second part of the Summa theologiae of Thomas Aquinas, with special emphasis on questions relating to the treatise de iure et iustitia (legitimacy of conquest, origin of sovereignty, proper distinction between the supernatural and the natural, primacy of the fundamental rights of human beings). The second was the reception of the innovations introduced by the Council of Trent, both in the reform of ecclesiastical life and a greater emphasis on the pastoral ministry based on the primacy of the sacraments. And the third was the incorporation of typically American issues, such as the discussion of the legitimacy of indigenous marriages, the legality of encomiendas in farming 243

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and mining, the wars against the indigenous people of the frontier, and required preparation for the sacraments.

José Anchieta in Brazil Blessed José de Anchieta, Jesuit, notable botanist, geographer, and ethnographer, who died in 1597, is known as the Apostle of Brazil. His pastoral work was lengthy as well as fruitful.21 He traveled on foot to many of the territories comprising the north of the Republic of Argentina, Uruguay, and parts of Brazil. He sought to promote culture and the material wellbeing of indigenous peoples, as well as their conversion to Christianity. He wrote an excellent treatise in verse on the Virgin Mary, entitled De Beata Virgine Dei Matre Maria, drafted in 1563, although it was not published until 1663, a century after its composition. This work, written in Latin couplets and consisting of 5,788 verses, constitutes a complete treatise of Marian theology, anticipating the Mariology of second-generation Jesuits such as Francisco Suárez. At the same time, it stands in continuity with the late medieval tradition, especially the devotio moderna, which was popularized in the early lives of Jesus, presenting the Gospel narrative in a systematic way and accompanied by spiritual considerations (recalling, for example, the Vita Christi of Ludolph of Saxony, of the mid-fourteenth century).

Tridentine Missiology Trent took its first steps in American missiology, with three emblematic examples: the Itinerarium catholicum (1574) of the Franciscan Juan Focher; the Rhetorica Christiana (1579) of another Franciscan, Diego de Valadés, both friars settled in the New Spain (Mexico); and, above all, the De procuranda indorum salute of the Jesuit José de Acosta, written in Peru. In 1576 Acosta finished writing his De procuranda indorum salute.22 It is not possible to understand the development of the church in the viceroyalty of Peru, and more specifically in the archdiocese of Lima, apart from this 21

The Monumenta Anchietana, a work edited by the Brazilian Jesuits Armando Cardoso and Hélio A. Viotti, contains works of poetry (nine volumes) and of prose (six volumes), published since 1987. 22 José de Acosta, De procuranda indorum salute: Pacificación y colonización, with a preliminary study by Luciano Pereña and conclusions by Demetrio Ramos, vols. I and II (Madrid, 1984 and 1987), bilingual Latin and Castilian edition. Another important work is his Historia natural y moral de las Indias (Seville, 1591); there is a modern edition by Edmundo O’Gorman (2nd ed., Mexico City, 1962).

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extraordinary missiological manual. In this work Acosta synthesized the quintessence of the Spanish theology of those years: the universalism of salvation; the dispute about the need for explicit faith in Christ to be saved; the discussion about the ability of the Indios to receive the sacraments; and the debate about human freedom before the call of the Gospel – all with great erudition, both patristic and Scholastic. Demonstrating a liberal and conciliatory spirit, Acosta considered it reckless and harmful to rekindle the controversy about the rights of the Spanish Crown in the Indies. However, he did not consider it lawful to wage war against the barbarians because they were infidels, even if this was stubborn; nor for crimes against nature, or to defend innocent indigenous people against their own tyrants. Acosta was not a supporter of Las Casas’s method of “apostolic preaching” (in which the missionaries went out alone, without military protection, into indigenous border territories), because he considered it too dangerous. He proposed a “method of entries” – missionary expeditions protected by soldiers. His missionary plan can be summarized in a few points. First, not to be discouraged, because the seed of the gospel would also produce fruit in the southern lands of the Inca American state; second, to preserve indigenous customs that were not against reason, and to ensure a natural promotion of the Indios, on the basis of a well-matured educational plan that “reduced” them to a civilized way of life;23 third, not to deny the sacraments of the Eucharist and confession to the natives, as long as they were minimally prepared, because it would deny them supernatural nourishment; and fourth, that the priests should be exemplary and selfless, learn local languages to make themselves understood by the natives, and that they should know thoroughly the cultural traditions of the Inca empire. Acosta also urged not to rush baptism, but to wait until the indigenous people had shown, by a change in conduct, that they truly wanted it. The theses sustained by Acosta are important from the speculative point of view; the specification of the need to know Christ in order to be saved was developed solely in the fifth book of the De procuranda.24 In this case, and

23

The verb reducir has a technical sense, when applied to the missionary methods. It consisted of bringing together indigenous people in villages, where they were taught to live “politically” (in a polis) while they were instructed in the main truths of the Christian religion. 24 The titles of the first four chapters of this fifth book: “The end of Christian doctrine is the knowledge and love of Christ” (ch. 1);”The main care should be to proclaim Jesus Christ” (ch. 2); “Against the opinion of those who feel that without the knowledge of Christ no one can be saved” (ch. 3); and “Against a singular error saying that most rude Christians can be saved without explicit faith of Christ” (ch. 4).

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especially in his later treatise, De Christo revelato, the Jesuit argued with the teachers of the first generation of the University of Salamanca. For Vitoria and Soto it was not necessary to require faith in the incarnation for the “first” justification. For Acosta, on the other hand, it was. To better understand the debate, it is important to distinguish carefully between the language of the contending groups, because Salamanca and Acosta did not speak in the same way. In Salamanca the discussion was of salvation, that is, the conditions necessary to be saved, not those for lawfully receiving the sacrament of baptism. Salvation can be reached by many paths, so it is possible to be saved without having heard of Jesus Christ. Acosta, on the other hand, was concerned about the conditions for lawfully receiving baptism, which is the gateway of justification. No adult should in fact be baptized without believing in Christ. The Jesuit had in view the apostolic tradition, attested to by Acts 8:26–40. The Ethiopian man evangelized by the deacon Philip was required to have faith in Christ, which he expressed beautifully with those words: “I believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God.”25 bibliography Azzi, Rolando, Jean-Pierre Bastian, Enrique Dussel, and Maximiliano Salinas. Theologiegeschichte der Dritten Welt: Lateinamerika, introd. Johannes Meier. Gütersloh, 1993. Barreda Laos, Felipe. Vida intelectual del Virreinato del Perú. Buenos Aires, 1937. Belda Plans, Juan. La Escuela de Salamanca y la renovación de la teología en el siglo XVI. Madrid, 2000. Borges, Pedro, ed. Historia de la Iglesia en Hispanoamérica y Filipinas (siglos XV–XIX), 2 vols. Madrid, 1992. De la Hera, Alberto. Iglesia y Corona en la América española. Madrid, 1992. El regalismo borbónico en su proyección indiana. Madrid, 1963. de Egaña, Antonio. La teoría del Regio Vicariato Español en Indias. Rome, 1958. Gallegos Rocafull, José M. El pensamiento mexicano en los siglos XVI y XVII, 2nd ed. Mexico City, 1974.

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“Following its path [the Ethiopian eunuch and Philip] came to where there was water, and the eunuch said: ‘There is water. What prevents that I be baptized?’ Philip said: ‘If you believe with all your heart, you can be.’ And in response, he said: ‘I believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God.’ He commanded the cart to stop and Philip and the eunuch came to the water, and he baptized him” (Acts 8: 36–38). Putting aside a discussion on a possible interpolation of this passage, this text is consistent with the apostolic tradition of the church; and that tradition is older than the New Testament.

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Diversity and Conformity within Early Lutheranism markus matthias Introduction One cannot write a history of theology1 without involving spiritual motives and concepts as constitutive impulses (principia) that have influenced and propelled the progress of history. Therefore, a history of theology does not need to be a classical history of ideas2 and may not exclude from its consideration historical facts, contexts, and human interests. It will instead always attempt to understand the historical rationality, the “meaning,” and relevance of theological concepts and to appreciate them as motives of the historical actors. What follows describes intra-Protestant controversies, strategies of confessional differentiation and exclusion (formation of denominations), or standardization and disciplining (confessionalization), and draws out a “meaning” by attempting to appreciate the effective theological concepts in these events and processes. Protestantism was unprecedented in creating a public theology as a medium of salvation that consistently allowed itself to be challenged by doubts, questions, and objections. It had to answer these with consistent concepts based on underlying foundational ideas or spiritual motives. If, and to what extent, it succeeded may be the subject of a critical history of ideas. One might regret the “rage of the theologians” (rabies theologorum)3 or the “theological madness” (furor theologicus) that emerged from this period, for their own sake or because of their political and ecclesial consequences. However, one should not overlook the fact that this period 1

See, in general, Markus Matthias, “Orthodoxie, lutherische,” in TRE 25, 464–485. Daniel Timothy Goering, “Einleitung: Ideen- und Geistesgeschichte in Deutschland – eine Standortbestimmung,” in Daniel Timothy Goering, ed., Ideengeschichte heute: Traditionen und Perspektiven (Bielefeld, 2017), 7–54; Mark Bevir, The Logic of the History of Ideas (Cambridge, 1999). 3 Philipp Melanchthon, Opera Quae Supersunt Omnia, ed. Karl Gottlieb Bretschneider, 28 vols. (Halle, 1842), in CR 9, col. 1098. 2

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saw the beginning of a broad, vibrant public realm and a competition of ideas, ideals, or truths, which are the precondition of the pluralization and democratization of ritual and culture.

The Principium (Beginning, Principle) of the History of Lutheran Theology (Luther’s New Trajectories) (1) The Lutheran school4 received its complex profile from the tension between the theology of Luther (1483–1546) and that of Melanchthon (1497–1560). That tension lay in the fact that Melanchthon, the greatest humanist north of the Alps after Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466/69–1536), placed himself in the service of the Lutheran Reformation (this was the significance of Melanchthon for the Lutheran Reformation), and that his humanistic program found its consummation in the Lutheran Reformation (this was the significance of the Lutheran Reformation for Melanchthon). Within the Wittenberg school, Melanchthon’s academic and friendly collaboration with Luther bridged the otherwise wide gap between humanism and the Lutheran Reformation. As is well known, the majority of humanists5 of the sixteenth century (even on German soil)6 were not enthusiastic about Luther’s theology. Some, like Erasmus, Sebastian Franck (1499–1543), and Joachim Camerarius (1500–1547), lived as Christian humanists in an almost confessionless state. Others, such as Konrad Peutinger (1464–1547), Johannes Aventius (1477–1534), Willibald Pirckheimer (1470–1528), and Crotus Rubeanus (ca. 1480–1545), remained undecided or positioned themselves as mediators. Still others, like Johannes Cochlaeus (1497–1552), remained emphatically Catholic. Other humanists, such as Oswald Myconius (1488–1552), Johannes Oecolampadius (1482–1531), Joachim Vaidanus (1484–1551), and Johannes Sturm (1507–1589), were more attracted to the approaches of Ulrich Zwingli (1484–1531), Martin Bucer (1491–1551), and John Calvin (1509–1564). (2) The theological relationship between Luther and Melanchthon has been described in different ways. One can emphasize their fundamental

4

Robert Kolb, Luther’s Heirs Define his Legacy: Studies on Lutheran Confessionalization [Variorum Collected Studies Series 539] (Aldershot, 1996); Jörg Baur, Luther und seine klassischen Erben: Theologische Aufsätze und Forschungen (Tübingen, 1993). 5 Helmar Junghans, Der junge Luther und die Humanisten (Göttingen, 1985). 6 For Italian Renaissance humanism see Thomas Leinkauf, Grundriss Philosophie des Humanismus und der Renaissance (1350–1600), 2 vols. (Hamburg, 2017).

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theological agreement7 and attribute their difference to methods of presentation8 and to theological details. Luther never publicly rebuked Melanchthon. It is possible that their perceived differences stem from the fact that Melanchthon systematized Reformation doctrine in a way that was foreign to Luther, seeking to make it more teachable. One can also focus on the material differences, taking note that their own contemporaries saw significant divergences between the two Wittenberg Reformers. In fact, following the controversies surrounding the Augsburg Interim (1548), a perception, or an accusation, has developed, that Melanchthon taught differently than Luther and even distanced himself theologically from or betrayed Luther. The flipside of this assessment is the opinion that a “second Reformation”9 was necessary because Luther’s Reformation had not yet reached its own actual goal, as embodied by Melanchthon or Calvin. Taking that into account, one can explain the external unity between Luther and Melanchthon historically by claiming that Melanchthon played a historically irreplaceable role for Luther as his colleague and that their personal friendship and mutual esteem allowed both Reformers to condone their theological differences. One cannot overlook how significant and successful Melanchthon was when it came to establishing a Lutheran theology for church and commonwealth. He accomplished this internally through a combination of reforming and creating new foundations for churches, schools, universities, science, and education. He also accomplished this externally through diplomatic efforts for the sake of defending the Reformation publicly before the emperor, the empire, and Rome, and for the sake of unifying Protestantism. Melanchthon’s indisputable service to the Reformation meant that even the most rigid Lutherans distanced themselves from him only with caution. (3) This leads to a second point. Luther clearly possessed a type of “genius” or intuition. This means that Luther’s theology radiated out beyond the Reformer’s historical context to a much greater degree than that of other Reformers. Not only does Luther’s theology remain a source of inspiration

7

Oswald Bayer, “‘Die Kirche braucht liberale Erudition’: Das Theologieverständnis Melanchthons,” Kerygma und Dogma 36 (1990), 218–244. 8 Friederike Nüssel, Allein aus Glauben: Zur Entwicklung der Rechtfertigungslehre in der konkordistischen und frühen nachkonkordistischen Theologie [Forschung zur systematischen und ökumenischen Theologie 95] (Göttingen, 2000), 48–61, esp. 60. 9 Heinz Schilling, ed., Die reformierte Konfessionalisierung in Deutschland – Das Problem der “Zweiten Reformation”: Wissenschaftliches Symposium des Vereins für Reformationsgeschichte 1985 [Schriften des Vereins für Reformationsgeschichte 195] (Gütersloh, 1986).

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for modern interpretations and adaptations, but many of his approaches, insights, and concepts were not at all appreciated in his own historical context. They were first worked out by his successors or in modern Luther research as concepts that were significant for Luther in his varied but internally consistent work. That makes it difficult to compare him with Melanchthon. (4) The difference between Luther’s and Melanchthon’s approach and theology can be epitomized by one key statement of each. Luther came to his Reformation theology after having completed studies in nominalist philosophy and classic theology, and then, in the context of a rigorous monastic life among the Augustinian Hermits, having the occasion to test late medieval theology’s assurances of salvation in his own life. That allowed Luther to say, Sola experientia facit theologum (1531: Only experience makes a [good] theologian).10 With the term experientia Luther does not mean some sort of individual spiritual experience or spiritual temptations.11 Experientia is, following Aristotle, a general (anthropological) experiential knowledge of connections, won through individual observations, that can then be practically applied in turn to a concrete case as, for example, medical procedure was at that time. If theology is an experiential science in this respect, then its focus lies on a theological-anthropological diagnosis and therapy. As biblical theology, too, it must focus on uncovering the misery of humans and point the way to their salvation. Only in this context is theological knowledge relevant. As a result, in his theology Luther always involves himself (as an addressee of the biblical message) as the one for whom the theological knowledge holds true. Thus, a theologian does not work with a general, objective doctrine, recorded as “theory” in Scripture and applied “practically” in a second step. Instead, as a theologian he finds himself addressed by the word, whether by the law as a penitent or by the gospel as a believer. For Luther, theology had the task of clarifying for the human being the possibilities and limits of personal freedom (spontaneity) and responsibility before God. The law, according to Luther, unmasks imaginary spontaneous human capacities for self-determination as self-deception and sin before God.

10

WA.TR 1, 16, 7–13 (no. 46). See Albrecht Beutel, “Erfahrung,” in Volker Leppin and Gury Schneider-Ludorff, eds., Das Luther-Lexikon (Regensburg, 2014), 195–197; Markus Matthias, Sola autem experientia facit theologum (Maarten Luther). Alleen door ervaring word je theoloog: Rede uitgesproken bij de aanvaarding van het ambt van hoogleraar Lutherana op 20 mei 2009 (Utrecht, Kampen, and Leiden, 2009). 11

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It is the gospel that creates the special form of Christian freedom (libertas christiana).12 Finally, the spontaneity of the Christian owes itself to the recognition and the faith that God redeemed him or her in Christ from the curse of the freedom to be responsible, which is imposed by the law. That happens when God turns himself toward the human and forgives him or her. If one studies Luther’s early writings, then his question was not, how do I get a gracious God?13 but rather, how can one become the new person promised by the New Testament?14 How does a person become a Christian, and what does the New Testament’s promise of Christian freedom mean? Luther was not interested in justification and easing his conscience, but in forgiveness and renewal (metanoia). Philip Melanchthon went to Wittenberg as a young humanist and became a Reformation theologian, evidently without losing his core humanist values: “I am convinced that I have never engaged in theology for any other reason than to improve life,” he wrote in 1525 to his close friend Joachim Camerarius.15 For Melanchthon, theology serves to improve life ethically and socio-ethically. Its task is to educate (eruditio) the coarse, unformed (rudis) person. For this endeavor, according to Melanchthon, Paul’s theology is a better ethic than all its ancient counterparts.16 In order to reach the pedagogical goal of improving life, reformational theology, based on Paul, is necessary. Even in theological ethics, the concept of freedom and responsibility is central. But the issue is the concrete normative formation of this freedom. The relief of the conscience with respect to high ethical norms (imputative justification) and the complex system of compensation for guilt (forensic justification) can be described as the core of Melanchthon’s theology. Relieving the conscience is necessary in order to face the requirements of daily life and, finally – by the supplementary righteousness acquired once and for all by Christ and now promised to the sinner – to be able to appear before God as righteous. Thus

12 Thorsten Jacobi, “Christen heißen Freie”: Luthers Freiheitsaussagen in den Jahren 1515–1519 (Tübingen, 1997). 13 See Heiko Oberman, Luther: Mensch zwischen Gott und Teufel (Berlin, 1982), 136. 14 Martin Luther, Resolutiones disputationum de indulgentiarum virtute, 1518 (WA 1, 525–628), Dedication to Johannes von Staupitz, esp. 525–527. 15 Letter of January 22, 1525, in Melanchthons Briefwechsel: Kritische und kommentierte Gesamtausgabe, volume II: Texte 255–520 (1523–1526), ed. Richard Wetzel (Stuttgart and Bad Cannstatt, 1995), no. 371, 39–241, esp. 240. 16 Hans-Georg Geyer, Von der Geburt des wahren Menschen: Probleme aus den Anfängen der Theologie Melanchthons (Neukirchen-Vluyn, 1965).

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Melanchthon’s (and finally also the Formula of Concord’s) doctrine of justification converges with the late medieval striving for expanding relief, as exemplified in plenary indulgences.17 (5) The two Reformers’ different approaches led to different emphases in their theologies. In the Bible, Luther sought the living voice of God, Jesus Christ as the word of God, who opened up the Scriptures (Old Testament) by the living word of the gospel (viva vox).18 The appropriate interaction with the Bible was the (always to be revised) translation into the vernacular, the biblical (Old Testament) commentaries (lectures), and sermons. In this, the sense of a passage emerged first of all from its grammar (connexio verborum) and one’s self-awareness as addressee.19 Melanchthon saw spelled out in the Bible the truth revealed by God, which should now – as with all other ancient authors – be worked out exegetically as the doctrina christiana, and, as is the case with jurisprudence, be applied to concrete situations. The appropriate form of interpretation is the systematic-rhetorical ordering of the subject matter under chief theological categories, just as, so Melanchthon believed, Paul’s Epistle to the Romans provides (Loci theologici). Concrete questions about the Christian life can then be subsumed under these chief categories. Melanchthon’s understanding of theology as doctrine (doctrina) about God and humankind led to the need to describe as well as possible the relationship between the two subjects, divine and human; human freedom needed to be placed in the correct relation to God’s freedom. Because Luther understood the Bible as God’s address, he could distinguish between God, insofar as he turns himself toward us and allows us to recognize him, and as he turns away from us and remains hidden to us, even enigmatic and majestically tremendous (Deus revelatus – absconditus). Theology is concerned only (a posteriori) with the God who turns himself to us (in law and gospel),20 while the God who removes himself from human knowledge is only expressible a priori as a concept. These differences in theological approach led to disparate treatments of those themes, such as providence, predestination, grace,

17

Berndt Hamm, Ablass und Reformation: Erstaunliche Kohärenzen (Tübingen, 2016). Joachim Ringleben, Gott im Wort: Luthers Theologie von der Sprache her [Hermeneutische Untersuchungen zur Theologie (hereafter HUTh) 57], 2nd ed. (Tübingen, 2014 [2010]); Albrecht Beutel, In dem Anfang war das Wort: Studien zu Luthers Sprachverständnis [HUTh 27] (Tübingen, 2006 [1991]). 19 Markus Matthias, “Wenn Gott spricht . . . Martin Luther über Bedeutung und Funktion der Grammatik für die Theologie,” Luther. Zeitschrift der Luther-Gesellschaft 3 (2017), 179–194. 20 Martin Luther, Disputatio Heidelbergae habita, 1518, Theol. Thesis 20 (WA 1, 354, 19 f. and 362, 1–5). 18

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repentance, and good works, which describe the relation between the freedom of God and that of the human being. Wittenberg theology’s doctrine of justification was essentially shaped by Melanchthon, especially with respect to its understanding of justification as a forensic pronouncement of righteousness and its objective grounding in the imputation of Christ’s righteousness (imputatio iustitiae Christi).21 Almost all Lutherans followed Melanchthon unquestioningly in this – although Luther never, as is demonstrable,22 spoke of the imputation of Christ’s righteousness – and, after the indulgence controversy, could not have done so, since this had been based on a problematic imputation of alien righteousness. For Melanchthon, the human finds himself in a forensic situation before God. In this situation, God declares him free effectively through the gospel by imputing to him the righteousness of Christ through faith as the medium of perception (per fidem). The “speaking free” or justification is first and foremost possible and valid through this imputation, whereas a person has, for his part, nothing to boast of that could justify him. Compared with the medieval Augustinian doctrine of justification, the righteousness of Christ is attributed to a person not only as the compensation for his guilt, but also as satisfaction for his sin (see CA III: culpa – peccata). Here Melanchthon subscribes to a “reformed” theory of the Augustinian-Anselmian doctrine of justification by grace alone (Sola Gratia), that is, alone due to the merits of Christ. Luther likewise sees humanity (in the conscience) in a forensic situation before God. However, Luther speaks of a justification by or in faith (Sola Fide). The gospel’s goal is not relief, but renewal. This takes place in faith. Faith in God’s word, that at the same time allows a person to recognize that he is lost (law) and frees him unto life (gospel), is the right relation towards God, and is thus his justification, or better, as Martin Brecht put it,23 his righteousness before God. Luther speaks of an “imputative justification” only in the sense that God accepts or “reckons” the beginning of faith for complete faith, because in and of itself such faith is always weak and imperfect. For Luther the meaning of the cross and Christ’s atoning death have to do with the fact that Christ bears humanity’s sins with his own body, thereby

21

Udo Sträter, ed., Zur Rechtfertigungslehre in der Lutherischen Orthodoxie: Beiträge des Sechsten Wittenberger Symposiums zur Lutherischen Orthodoxie [Leucorea-Studien zur Geschichte der Reformation und der Lutherischen Orthodoxie (hereafter LStRLO) 2] (Leipzig, 2002). 22 Markus Matthias, “Zurechnung der Gerechtigkeit Christi? Beobachtungen zum Sprachgebrauch von Imputare bei Luther,” Luther-Bulletin: Tijdschrift voor interconfessioneel Lutheronderzoek 22 (2013 [2014]), 70–100. 23 Martin Brecht, “Rechtfertigung oder Gerechtigkeit? Überraschungen auf den Spuren von Luthers Bibelübersetzung,” Lutherjahrbuch 77 (2010), 81–105.

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denying the law’s claim – rather than strengthening its claim by having satisfied the law vicariously. Melanchthon’s socio-ethical interests also reveal themselves in his binding together of private and political ethics, and in his theological recognition of a tertius usus legis (third use of the law), in addition to the usus politicus (first use) and usus theologicus seu elenchticus (second use) of the law. This third use was the reason, for Melanchthon, why justified and reborn Christians (renati) conduct themselves externally in accordance with a divine order, especially in relation to a higher authority,24 whether as citizens towards political rulers or as children toward parents, teachers, etc.25 Because Melanchthon’s doctrine prevailed in subsequent Lutheran theology and in the Lutheran confessional documents, the intellectual problems resulting from it were also perpetuated. Chief among these was the problem of the relationship between justification and good works, or imputative and effective justification. Authentic Lutheran theology is found more often in devotional literature, which rediscovered Luther during the emergence of the Formula of Concord.26

Early Lutheran Consensus Building The Significance of Confessions or of Consensus Doctrinae for the (Believed) Unity of the Church The Reformation created a new ecclesiological situation by shifting emphasis from the sacrament of penance (see CA VI) to the pure preaching of the gospel and the proper administration of the sacraments as divine means for acquiring justifying faith (see CA V), as well as by dissolving the church-legal and sacramental distinction between laity and clergy. These changes meant that the believed unity and mediating function of the church had to be predicated on something other than legal ceremonies (see CA VII) or the

24 For Luther’s understanding of the relation between church and government or state see James M. Estes, Peace, Order and the Glory of God: Secular Authority and the Church in the Thought of Luther and Melanchthon, 1518–1559 (Leiden, 2005). 25 Markus Matthias, “Reformation als Reformation des Menschen: Mit welchen Gerechtigkeitskonzeptionen beginnt die Reformation?” Luther-Bulletin: Tijdschrift voor interconfessioneel Lutheronderzoek 17 (2008), 76–85. 26 Markus Matthias, “Andreas Musculus and Michael Neander,” in Ronald Rittgers and Vincent Evener, eds., Protestants and Mysticism in Reformation Europe (Leiden, 2019), 200–223; Irene Dingel, “Strukturen der Lutherrezeption am Beispiel einer Lutherzitatensammlung von Joachim Westphal,” in Wolfgang Sommer, ed., Kommunikationsstrukturen im europäischen Luthertum der Frühen Neuzeit (Gütersloh, 2005), 32–50.

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ordained church hierarchy (see CA VIII). Instead, the Reformers sought unity and unanimity in doctrine, both actual27 and to be achieved continually in academic disputation. For a descriptive statement, and then also for standardization, the Reformers occasionally appealed to an instrument of the ancient church, the confession of faith,28 or to an idea likely borrowed from later corporate thinking, the idea of consensus, more specifically the consensus in doctrina.29 Ultimately, this consensus aims at believers as addressees of preaching. Their faith implies agreement in doctrine.30 External, social, liturgical, or legal unity could only come as a consequence of unity in doctrine. The confession of faith played a critical role by implicitly or explicitly excluding certain opinions, with all of the external political consequences (both in relation to the law of the empire and those of territories) for a presumed societas christiana (catholica).

Consensus Building up to the Confessio Augustana: Consensus in Doctrine as an Attribute of the Church (1) The Confessio Augustana (Augsburg Confession) of 1530 marks the Evangelical churches’ first public break from the medieval Catholic Church. Although it has a conciliatory tone and disposition, one cannot overlook the fact that the Augsburg Confession understands the ecclesia catholica (catholic Church) differently than the pope. First and foremost, this concerns the reconciliation of sinful humanity with God by faith (CA I–IV) and continues with the issue of how justifying faith is awakened and (not) acquired (CA V–VIII). This leads into a criticism of sacramental piety (CA IX–XIII), ecclesial hierarchy, and worldly and religious government 27 See the beginning of the article in the Confessio Augustana: Ecclesiae magno consensu apud nos docent. 28 Robert Kolb and Timothy J. Wengert, The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church (Minneapolis, 2000); Charles P. Arand, James A. Nestingen, and Robert Kolb, eds., The Lutheran Confessions: History and Theology of the Book of Concord (Minneapolis, 2012). 29 Adalbert Podlech, “Art. Repräsentation,” in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, 5 vols. (Stuttgart, 1972–1984), V (1984), 509–547, esp. 510–514; Hasso Hofmann, Repräsentation: Studien zur Wortund Begriffsgeschichte von der Antike bis ins 19. Jahrhundert [Schriften zur Verfassungsgeschichte 22] (Berlin, 2003 [1974]). 30 Martin Luther, Dass eine christliche Versammlung oder Gemeinde Recht und Macht habe, alle Lehre zu beurteilen und Lehrer zu berufen, ein- und abzusetzen, Grund und Ursache aus der Schrift, 1523 (WA 11, 408–416); Martin Luther, Von den Konziliis und Kirchen, 1539 (WA 50, 509–653, 690). For later Lutheran orthodoxy see Markus Matthias, “Johann Benedikt Carpzov und Christian Thomasius: Umstrittene Religions- und Gewissensfreiheit,” in Stefan Michel and Andres Straßberger, eds., Eruditio – Confessio – Pietas: Kontinuität und Wandel in der lutherischen Konfessionskultur am Ende des 17. Jahrhunderts. Das Beispiel Johann Benedikt Carpzovs (1639–1699) [LStRLO 12] (Leipzig, 2009), 223–247.

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(CA XIV–XVII). Matters of theological detail (CA XVIII–XXI) close out the consensus on doctrine. The second part (CA XXI–XXVIII) distances itself prima facie only from abuses that had surfaced over the course of time. However, there can be no doubt that such abuses were seen as expressions or consequences of aberrance in doctrine.31 (2) Alongside the formal confessions there were, from the beginning, similar theological instructional documents as well. They functioned internally to teach pastors and schoolteachers, as well as supervisory bodies. Consequently, such texts also held normative authority, even though they were not formal confessions. First in this category were Luther’s catechisms,32 then Melanchthon’s Instructions for Visitors,33 as well as his Loci theologici34 (including a German translation).35 In general, this group of texts was expanded through theological instruction and scholarship, above all those newly drafted textbooks by Melanchthon that were based on Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian, and others (Rhetoric, Dialectics, Ethics, Physics, and Psychology [De anima]).36 Through this process a sophisticated Wittenberg school of theology arose that excluded particular antithetical positions, such as medieval Scholastic theology and the beginnings of a mystical theology of humility coming from Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt (1486–1541) or spiritualistic and prophetic theologies. In view of the foundational role and the public character of theology, church, and school, it seemed legitimate (just as it is today for school and scholarship) to establish norms with regard to content and methods for these fields. In doing so, the Wittenberg school relied on the plausibility of its argumentation. It won, and defended its position within the traditional academic

31

Herbert Immenkötter, ed., Im Schatten der Confessio Augustana: Die Religionsverhandlungen des Augsburger Reichstages 1530 im historischen Kontext [Reformationsgeschichtliche Studien und Texte 136] (Münster, 1997). 32 WA 30 I, 125–238 and 243–425 (also printed in the editions of the Lutheran Confessions). 33 Philipp Melanchthon, Unterricht der Visitatoren an die Pfarhern ym Kurfurstenthum zu Sachssen, 1528: see Robert Stupperich, ed., Melanchthons Werke in Auswahl [Studienausgabe], 7 vols. (Gütersloh, 1951–1975; 2nd ed. 1978–1983), I, 215–271; WA 26, 195–240. 34 For the editions of the Loci praecipui theologici (1521, 1535, 1544, 1559) see Stupperich, ed., Melanchthons Werke, II 1 and 2 (1521 and 1559); Philip Melanchthon, Commonplaces: Loci communes 1521, trans. with introduction and notes Christian Preus (St. Louis, 2014); Philip Melanchthon, The Chief Theological Topics: Loci praecipui theologici 1559, trans. Jacob A. O. Preus, 2nd ed. (St. Louis, 2010). 35 Ralf Jenett and Johannes Schilling, eds., Heubtartikel Christlicher Lere: Melanchthons deutsche Fassung seiner Loci theologici nach dem Autograph und dem Originaldruck von 1553, 3rd ed. (Leipzig, 2012 [2002]). 36 See the chapter by Walter Sparn in this volume (Chapter 21).

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enterprise via polemical and apologetic publications and made it concrete in liturgy and the cultivation of piety. (3) The role that theology played as an academic science in Protestantism was new.37 It had to concern itself with the reasons as well as the consistent explication of doctrine that was the prerequisite for the “credibility” of the sermon and its salutary result. Furthermore, it needed to create forms of expression that were adequate for faith and to link faith to the realities of life and to the experiences of church members (experientia). In this way, academic theology helped shape a new (confessional) religious culture that encompassed the totality of the religious ways of life, as represented and symbolized in confession, doctrine, liturgy, forms of piety, and lifestyle.38 (4) While within the respective territories the university and leading theologians, supported by their princes, standardized the theology of the territorial churches, there were – apart from the separation from the “Enthusiasts” – tensions, at first, among Protestants, as they had constituted themselves after the 1529 Diet of Speyer.39 In order to gain the ability to defend their own confessions (and the territorial [proprietary] rights bound up with them) princes viewed unity in matters of faith as necessary. This led to a string of intra-Protestant religious discussions and an alignment of theological perspectives (such as the Schwabach Articles of 1529;40 the Marburg Colloquy of 1529,41 and later the Wittenberg Concord of 153642). It was hoped that this could provide a religious foundation for a defensive alliance (the Schmalkaldic League43). An early achievement in the quest for that consensus was in fact the threefold division among Wittenberg and the south German

37

For more on theological method see the chapter by Walter Sparn in this volume (Chapter 21). 38 Markus Matthias, Theologie und Konfession: Der Beitrag von Ägidius Hunnius (1550–1603) zur Entstehung einer lutherischen Religionskultur [LStRLO 4] (Leipzig, 2004), 21. 39 See the “protestation” of the “Lutheran” estates, April 19, 1529, printed in Johannes Kühn, ed., Reichstagsakten, Jüngere Reihe VII 1 and 2 (Göttingen, 1935; 2nd ed. Berlin, Munich, and Boston, 1963). 40 WA 30 III, 81–85 and amendment, 13–22. 41 Walter Köhler, Das Marburger Religionsgespräch 1529: Versuch einer Rekonstruktion (Leipzig, 1929). 42 Martin Bucer, Wittenberger Konkordie, 1536, in Martin Bucer, Schriften zur Wittenberger Konkordie (1534–1537), ed. Robert Stupperich [Martini Buceri opera omnia, Ser. 1] (Gütersloh, 1988). 43 Gabriele Haug-Moritz, Der Schmalkaldische Bund (1530–1541/42): Eine Studie zu den genossenschaftlichen Strukturelementen der politischen Ordnung des Heiligen Römischen Reichs Deutscher Nation [Schriften zur südwestdeutschen Landeskunde 44] (Leinfelden-Echterdingen, 2002).

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and Swiss camps, as was made manifest in the presentation of three separate confessional documents at the Diet of Augsburg in 1530 (Confessio Augustana, Wittenberg/Lutheran; Confessio Tetrapolitana, south German;44 Ratio Fidei, Swiss45).

Intra-Protestant Confessional Dissent (1) The foundational dissent within Protestantism, minted by Wittenberg and Zurich, was tied to the understanding of the Lord’s Supper. The controversy’s considerable influence on the course of Protestant history can only be appreciated when one realizes that for Christians (both simple and educated people) brought up in the late medieval church, the sacrament of the altar symbolized the presence of the holy par excellence. The issue of the Lord’s Supper was so important because it dealt, in a completely fundamental way, with the danger of a disastrous profaning of the holy or an idolization of the created. At the same time, the sacrament of the altar was a cultic marker for the understanding of the means of salvation even in the Evangelical churches. Fundamental differences in theological approaches erupted in the formation and understanding of the Lord’s Supper, although they were not necessarily perceived in such a manner. The first controversy on the Supper does not need to be depicted in detail here. On one side stood those theologians who wanted to carry out a radical break (coming out of general, philosophical-theological considerations) with the medieval celebration of the Mass, avoid all idolatry, and reject every “material” means of salvation. They understood the Lord’s Supper symbolically46 (as a symbol for something else), citing, to this end, different exegetical rationales for the words of the Lord’s Supper, and understanding the words of institution improper (as tropus, figurative speech, or alleosis) against the background of a certain Christology (the ontological distinction between natures) and metaphysics (the localization of heaven). On the other side stood Luther and his followers, who initially specified the wording (literal

44

Robert Stupperich, ed., Martin Bucers Deutsche Schriften, volume III: Confessio Tetrapolitana und die Schriften des Jahres 1531 (Gütersloh, 1969), 13–185. Wilhelm H. Neuser, “Zwinglis ‘Fidei ratio’ von 1530,” in Heiner Faulenbach and Eberhard Busch, eds., Reformierte Bekenntnisschriften, I 1 (Neukirchen-Vluyn, 2002), 421–446. 46 See the distinction between “symbolic memoralism” (Zwingli), “symbolic parallelism” (Bullinger), and “symbolic instrumentalism” (Calvin) in Brian Albert Gerrish, Grace and Gratitude: The Eucharistic Theology of John Calvin (Minneapolis, 1992). 45

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sense) of the Evangelical words of institution as the ground of their adherence to the real presence. Nonetheless, in the course of the controversy, they sought their salvation itself in the understanding of the non-localized presence of the divine-human savior. The controversy culminated in the exchange of polemical publications between Luther47 and Zwingli48 in 1526 and 1527. (2) Although Luther himself and his interpreters liked to claim faithfulness to Scripture, this faithfulness cannot have been decisive for Luther’s understanding of the Lord’s Supper, especially since he was also ready, under different circumstances, to make difficult or objectionable biblical passages acceptable through an interpretive gloss. In truth, the following motive led the way: (a) In the controversy on the Lord’s Supper, Luther increasingly argued Christologically and soteriologically. While Zwingli wanted to distinguish clearly between the human and divine natures,49 Luther insisted that Christ is one person.50 This assertion compelled him to claim that the whole Jesus Christ, true God and true man, is present in the Lord’s Supper: Where you want to place God for me, there you must also place the human nature. They do not allow themselves to be separated from one another. It has become one person and does not allow the human nature to be separated from himself as Master Hans takes off his coat and lays it down when he goes to bed.51

Hence, the real presence does not aim at the presence of a human body and blood in the elements of the Lord’s Supper, but instead means the selfgiving presence of the incarnate Lord, as God and man, in the Supper. (b) For Luther it was important to have, externally, the sacrament and the read or preached word, the promise of the holy and, in Christ, salutary presence of God, “actually” and “objectively,” as something independent from him. Faith, consolation, and justification come only

47

Martin Luther, Sermon von dem Sakrament des Leibes und Blutes Christi wider die Schwarmgeister, 1525 (WA 19, 482–523); Vom Anbeten des Sakraments des heiligen Leichnams Christi, 1523 (WA 11, 431–456); Daß diese Worte Christi “Das ist mein Leib” noch feststehen, wider die Schwärmgeister, 1527 (WA 23, 64–283); Vom Abendmahl Christi. Bekenntnis, 1528 (WA 26, 261–509). 48 Huldrych Zwingli, Eine klare Unterrichtung vom Nachtmal Christi, 1526 (Sämmtliche Werke 4 = CR 91, 789–862); Amica exegesis, id est expositio eucharistiae negotii ad Martinum Lutherum, 1527 (Sämmtliche Werke 5 = CR 92, 562–758). 49 Luther: “als werens zwo personen” (WA 54, 39: 8–10). 50 51 Luther: “ein einige person” (WA 26, 332: 12–32, esp. 30). WA 26, 333: 6–10.

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where humanity really – although in a hidden manner – meets God in his enduring reconciliation with humankind, namely in the person of Jesus Christ. (c) The human response to the word of the gospel is also not simply a mere insight, an observation, or a belief, but an existential, real determination in faith, which takes place ritually in the Lord’s Supper. Eating and drinking are the believing consummation of the incorporation in Christ’s person (or the consummation of one’s own self-understanding). (d) Luther’s Christology does not revolve around Christ’s merit, which he acquired through his active and passive obedience and with which he fulfilled divine justice (iustitia activa) once and for all. The gospel is not about the production of justice through compensation, but about forgiveness of guilt (Ps. 32:2). The center of attention is the incarnation, in which God gives his presence to men (iustitia passiva), unmediatedly, not by virtue of a righteous relation. This is no past event, but always present in Christ’s person. Everywhere that the human meets God in Christ, he meets him as the one who engages himself with humanity incarnationally. The Lord’s Supper is the special self-presenting of Jesus in the bodily, empirical consummations of eating and drinking (fundamentally real). (e) The specificity of the Supper (as of baptism) exists concretely in the personal-unmistakable dedication of the word of forgiveness to him who receives the bread and drinks the wine.

The Consensus on Doctrine as Norm (1) Apparently, Luther initially had the naïve notion that his newfound insight, having given him access to paradise,52 would be manifestly clear to everyone else, and its consequences unambiguous. His Invocavit Sermons of March 9–14, 152253 are an eloquent testimony to how much Luther refused to accept legal measures that tried to regain control over faith. This would have contradicted Luther’s stand for the freedom of conscience that has to be the effect of the sermon or the sacrament. This freedom cannot be enforced.54

52

Martin Luther, “Praefatio,” in Martin Luther, Tomus primus omnium operum (Wittenberg, 1545), fols. † 2a–5a, (WA 54, 179–187, esp. 186). WA 10 III, 1–64. 54 Johannes Heckel, Lex charitatis: Eine juristische Untersuchung über das Recht in der Theologie Martin Luthers, 2nd ed. (Cologne, 1973; Darmstadt, 1973), trans. as Lex charitatis: A Juristic Disquisition on Law in the Theology of Martin Luther (Grand Rapids, 2010). 53

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(“We have jus verbi [the right to speak the Word] but not the execution [power to accomplish it]. We should preach the Word, but the results must be left solely to God’s pleasure.”) nor be deputized (“But everyone must himself be prepared for the time of death.”)55 The political freedom of conscience that Luther proclaimed (distinct from a theological freedom of conscience)56 is not identical with religious or general tolerance. Instead, Luther called for freedom of conscience for the simple reason that no worldly or ecclesial authority had power over the conscience of an individual. Consequently, the Lutheran churches grant freedom of belief, but not freedom of teaching. General freedom of religion as freedom of belief, opinion, and teaching, or religious tolerance are political and historical consequences of the claim to freedom of conscience.57 Even now, this freedom is restricted somewhat by civil laws that are valid for all. In that vein, Luther did, to be sure, agree politically with the empire’s legal prosecution of the Anabaptists (the Anabaptist Mandate of 152958) and those who denied the Trinity,59 but he did not actively pursue such actions or try to justify them theologically.60 (2) The church was (and is) also a property owner and public organization. It requires supervising (“episcopal”) institutions and measures in order, also in this context, to reach consensus or achieve order. Alongside the university as advisor to the government (see below), consistories were formed (Wittenberger Konsistorialordung of 1542) to deal with issues, including laws concerning the priests and parishes, that had earlier fallen under the bishop’s spiritual jurisdiction.61 As measures for producing unity in doctrine, keeping

55

WA 10 III, 1 and 15; LW 51, 76 and 51, 70. Eberhard Jüngel, Das Evangelium von der Rechtfertigung des Gottlosen als Zentrum des christlichen Glaubens: Eine theologische Studie in ökumenischer Absicht, 6th ed. (Tübingen, 2011), 192–197. 57 Walter Hamel, “Glaubens-, Bekenntnis- und Gewissensfreiheit II: Rechtsgeschichtlich,” in Evangelisches Staatslexikon, 2nd ed. (Stuttgart and Berlin, 1975), cols. 878–880. 58 Johannes Kühn, ed., Deutsche Reichstagsakten unter Kaiser Karl V., volume VII 2 (Göttingen, 1935; repr. Berlin, 1963), 1325 f. 59 Rejection of the Trinity was regarded as blasphemy and punishable by death according to the Codex Justininanus (Nov. 77.1.1.2) and the Constitutio Criminalis Carolina of 1532 (Art. 106). On the theological controversy see Irene Dingel, ed., Antitrinitarische Streitigkeiten: Die tritheistische Phase (1560–1568) (Göttingen, 2013). 60 Gottfried Seebass, “Luthers Stellung zur Verfolgung der Täufer und ihre Bedeutung für den deutschen Protestantismus,” in Gottfried Seebass, Die Reformation und ihre Außenseiter: Gesammelte Aufsätze und Vorträge (Göttingen, 1997), 267–282. 61 Martin Heckel, Martin Luthers Reformation und das Recht: Die Entwicklung der Theologie Luthers und ihre Auswirkung auf das Recht unter den Rahmenbedingungen der Reichsreform und der Territorialstaatsbildung im Kampf mit Rom und den “Schwärmern” (Tübingen, 2016). 56

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in mind personal freedom of conscience, one has to consider visitations and church ordinances, the temporal heresy law, the (temporally understood) greater ban, the (lesser) ban as exclusion from the sacraments (see Smalcald Articles, On the Ban62), and ordination. (3) Already early on Luther used his doctrine of the common priesthood against a traditional theology of ordination, but not at all against an ordered ministry. The regulation of ordination could not, for Luther, be established on democratic principles, but instead on the basis of public (political), intellectual, and spiritual authority. Correspondingly, the choice of the actual people for the office of public preaching was made by the government and the university (theological faculty) and not entrusted to the common people. However, it must be remembered that the point of reference for this action of the rulers and professors was Luther’s view that the word and the sacrament do not belong to those who administer them, but rather to those who receive them in faith.63 Hence Wittenberg ordination was nothing other than a testimony to the adequate education and suitability of the candidate for the office of pastor, bound together with an appeal for God’s blessing.

The Universities as Places of Theological Foundation of Church Doctrine Overview (1) By the beginning of the sixteenth century the solidifying of territorial rule had come to include the establishment of territorial universities. These were granted privileges by the emperor or (also) by the pope. The purpose of such universities was the professional training of qualified men for public offices, enabling them to manage increasingly complicated administrative tasks and to further the application of laws in the public realm within the limits of proper jurisdiction. The Reformation’s educational campaign added to this the education of pastors and schoolteachers.64 Alongside the education of the professional teachers (status ecclesiasticus), the faculties of theology65 also

62

BSELK, 456: 19–457: 5 = WA 50, 192–254, esp. 247, 5–17. Martin Luther, Von Konzilien und Kirchen, 1539 (WA 50, 509–653, esp. 631). Elizabeth L. Pardoe, “Education, Economics, and Orthodoxy: Lutheran schools in Württemberg, 1556–1617,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 91 (2000), 285–315. 65 Christoph Strohm and Heinrich de Wall, eds., Konfessionalität und Jurisprudenz in der frühen Neuzeit [Historische Forschungen 89] (Berlin, 2009); Irene Dingel et al., eds., Reformation und Recht: Festgabe für Gottfried Seebass zum 65. Geburtstag (Gütersloh, 2002). 63

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functioned as experts in spiritual or spiritual-temporal (consistorial) matters to advise the decision makers.66 Thus, between 1500 and 1700 numerous universities and high schools (Hochschulen) were founded in the Holy Roman Empire north of the Alps. The following were located in what came to be Lutheran territories: Wittenberg (1502), Marburg (1527), Königsberg (1544), Strasbourg (1556/1621), Jena (1548/1557), Helmstedt (1575/76), Giessen (1607), Rinteln (1619), Altdorf (1576/1623), Kiel (1665), and Halle (1693). Several older universities also became Protestant: Heidelberg (1386), Erfurt (1389), Leipzig (1409), Rostock (1419), Greifswald (1456), Tübingen (1477), and Frankfurt an der Oder (1498), along with some outside the empire: Uppsala (1477), Copenhagen (1479), Dorpat (1632), Abø (1640), and Lund (1666/68). (2) Central to an academic generation’s theological profile and to a local tradition was the precise determination of the object of inquiry; the methods, auxiliary sciences, and categories derived from philosophy; and a general reflection on theology as a subject of instruction. After Wittenberg led the way by introducing humanist subjects into the artes curriculum, many other, later, Protestant universities adopted similar reforms (Erfurt, Leipzig, Rostock, Greifswald, Heidelberg, Tübingen, etc.). Following Erasmus,67 the foundation of academic instruction was ancient philosophy, as received selectively by humanism.68 Erasmus rejected the useless, purely speculative questions of Scholastic theology and instead valued a critical engagement with sources of knowledge (authorities). Alongside humanist Aristotelianism, which provided the foundational method and content, other methods of the artes liberales and other ancient streams of philosophy were also adopted. This included some (Neo-) Stoicism via Seneca or Cicero (e.g. by Justus Lipsius, 1547–1606), who had a great impact on Protestant ethics and its way of life.69 Peter Ramus (1515–1572), who became a Protestant at the end of his life, attempted to establish a methodological and systematic alternative to 66

Georg Dedekenn, ed., Thesaurus Consiliorum et Decisionum, 3 vols. (Hamburg, 1623); Consilia Theologica Witebergensia (Frankfurt am Main, 1664); Benjamin T. G. Mayes, Counsel and Conscience: Lutheran Casuistry and Moral Reasoning after the Reformation [Refo500: Academic Studies] (Göttingen, 2011). 67 Manfred Hoffmann, Erkenntnis und Verwirklichung der wahren Theologie nach Erasmus von Rotterdam [Beiträge zur historischen Theologie 44] (Tübingen, 1972). 68 For a reconstruction of Luther’s curricular reform of March 11, 1518 see Leif Grane, Modus loquendi theologicus: Luthers Kampf um die Erneuerung der Theologie (1515–1518) (Leiden, 1975), 138–146. 69 Günter Abel, Stoizismus und frühe Neuzeit: Zur Entstehungsgeschichte modernen Denkens im Felde von Ethik und Politik (Berlin and New York, 1978); Barbara Neymeyr, Stoizismus in der europäischen Philosophie, Literatur, Kunst und Politik: Eine Kulturgeschichte von der Antike bis zur Moderne, 2 vols. (Berlin and New York, 2008).

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academic Aristotelianism. Ramism largely suppressed the Aristotelian teaching of realities.70 Much more, it claimed that truth could be recognized through an analysis of language alone, because it reproduced reality within itself. Obviously, that could only be the case with regard to general empirical experience. While it partially succeeded in schools and Reformed universities and in different combinations with other streams of philosophy, it found little approval in Lutheran universities – due in part to Luther’s Christologically based claim that the Holy Spirit has a “particular grammar of his own”71 – and was pushed aside as superficial and deficient. Humanism would be superseded only at the beginning of the seventeenth century.

The University as a Place of Criticism and Affirmation of Doctrine Early Disputes The nature of disputations at the University of Wittenberg, which were suspended beginning with Luther’s stay at the Wartburg (1521–1522) and only taken up again in 1533 (with the doctoral disputation of Johannes Aepinus [1499–1553] on June 17) served initially to deepen and affirm Evangelical insights, but could also – as with the early Luther – be used for actual deliberation or clarification of a controversial matter.72 This occasionally revealed tension within the fundamental consensus of Wittenberg theology. The first controversy of the post-1533 phase of disputations was between Konrad Cordatus (Hertz) (ca. 1480–1546) and Philip Melanchthon, together with Caspar Cruciger (1504–1548); Luther contributed with the disputation de iustificatione (1536).73 It dealt with the relation between justifying faith and Christian living (bona opera). The second important controversy also focused on properly understanding the Evangelical doctrine of justification. It was occasioned by the position of Johannes Agricola (1494–1566), an Eisleben

70

Mordechai Feingold, ed., The Influence of Petrus Ramus: Studies in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Philosophy and Sciences [Schwabe Philosophica 1] (Basel, 2001). 71 Martin Luther, De divinitate et humanitate Christi, 28, February 1540 (WA 39 II, 93–121, esp. 104). 72 Kenneth G. Appold, Orthodoxie als Konsensbildung: Das theologische Disputationswesen an der Universität Wittenberg zwischen 1570 und 1710 [[Beiträge zur historischen Theologie 127] (Tübingen, 2004). 73 WA 39 I, 82–126.

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teacher,74 whose rejection of the preaching of the law had already led to discussions in the 1520s. When Agricola, with Luther’s support,75 returned to Wittenberg in 1537, he once again encountered – in connection with the Cordatus controversy – opposition from the theologians closer to Melanchthon. Luther sought to resolve the issue with his Antinomian Disputations.76 In these disputations he enshrined the usus elenchticus (pedagogical use) as the second (theological) and necessary use of the law, which serves to call persons to repentance. The gospel (alone) does not effect this contrition. Both discussions raised questions and connections that were not problematic from the perspective of a believer’s experience (Luther), but became so when taken to a more general, and abstract, level. In and of itself, the “Antinomian” opinion, namely, that the preaching of the law cannot lead to faith, was correct. For Luther, however, and based on his own biography, the gospel was always good news for the penitent; consequently, the recognition of one’s own need (sin, guilt) was the enduring prerequisite for appreciating the gospel. This need revealed itself only when persons are accused by their own consciences of not satisfying the norms of righteousness or of the law with which they personally agree. Only at this moment will the person realize their guilt. The methodological tension between Luther and Melanchthon’s approaches led to the creation of two camps77 that emerged more fully after Luther’s death (1546) and were exacerbated by the military defeat of Protestantism in the Schmalkaldic War (1547) and the (Augsburg and Leipzig) Interim (1548). The two sides were now given different names: Philippists or Melanchthonians vs. Gnesio-Lutherans78 (True Lutherans).

Intra-Protestant Controversies Such disagreements became even stronger in the so-called Intra-Protestant Controversies that arose after Luther’s death. Interestingly, in these 74

Timothy J. Wengert, Law and Gospel: Philip Melanchthon’s Debate with John Agricola of Eisleben over Poenitentia (Carlisle, 1997). WA.B 7, 588. 76 Six lists of theses, of which four were used in disputations: Dec. 18, 1537; Jan. 12, 1538; Sept. 6, 1538; Sept. 10, 1540 (WA 39 I, 345–358). 77 Irene Dingel, ed., Memoria – theologische Synthese – Autoritätenkonflikt: Die Rezeption Luthers und Melanchthons in der Schülergeneration [Spätmittelalter, Humanismus, Reformation 90] (Tübingen, 2016). 78 For this term see, e.g., Leonhart Hutter, Loci Theologici (Wittenberg, 1619), Prolegomena, 3, referring not to persons but to doctrine: Sententia verè Orthodoxa ac gnesios Lutherana. 75

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controversies Luther’s followers were not a homogeneous group. The Gnesio-Lutherans (Nikolaus von Amsdorf [1483–1565], Matthias Flacius [Illyricus], et al.) by no means built the nucleus of a confessional Lutheranism. Their positions (some of Amsdorf’s in the so-called Majoristic Controversy, and Flacius’s in the controversy on original sin) were rejected by the majority of later confessional Lutherans (especially in the wake of the Formula of Concord). The Leipzig Interim (Leipzig Landtagsentwurf ) of 1548, which Philip Melanchthon accepted, was for Albertine (Electoral) Saxony in 1548–1549 what could be described as a compromise between the Augsburg Interim as the emperor’s religious law (June 30, 1548) and the Wittenberg Reformation’s doctrine of justification.79 This led to the eruption of renewed antagonism. The controversies came from differences both formal, as in the Adiaphoristic Controversy, and material. They were ignited by the (negative) evaluation of Melanchthon, but were ultimately grounded in the difficulty of converting Luther’s experiential theology into academic conceptuality. Interestingly, most of the controversies revolved around the same problematic, though from different perspectives, namely about the precondition and the consequence of the justifying faith or about the participation of the human subject in the justification taking place merè passive or Sola Gratia. Particularly noteworthy are: (1) The Adiaphoristic Controversy (beginning 1548) concerned the Interim. At issue was whether or not one could accept the Interim by obeying its mandates concerning the external rituals of the church, without necessarily giving up the core of Evangelical faith, and whether, consequently, such practices could be theologically and morally neutral (adiaphoron). This adiaphoristic stance was problematic because practices are always also expressions and proclamations of theological convictions, as the Feast of Corpus Christi is for the doctrine of Transubstantiation. In certain situations, apparently external practices such as wearing clerical robes or using eucharistic wafers instead of ordinary bread could be viewed as a material concession to the confessional opponent. In such circumstances, the opponents of the Adiaphorists maintained: Nihil est adiaphoron in casu confessionis & scandali (Nothing is adiaphora when the confession of faith and public scandal are at stake).80 79

Luise Schorn-Schütte, ed., Das Interim 1548/50: Herrschaftskrise und Glaubenskonflikt (Gütersloh, 2005). 80 Attributed to Matthias Flacius: see Wilhelm Preger, Matthias Flacius Illyricus und seine Zeit, 2 vols. (Erlangen, 1859–1861; repr. 1964, 2000), I, 109.

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(2) The Majoristic Controversy (beginning 1551–1552) pitted the chief protagonist Georg Major (1502–1574),81 along with Justus Menius (1499–1558), on one side against Nikolaus von Amsdorf (1483–1565) on the other. Major was the editor of the Wittenberg edition of Luther’s works of 1552–1559, while Amsdorf’s spiritual roots lay in the medieval church. The core of the argument was the question of whether good works were “necessary” for the salvation of the soul. Luther had already proposed in the second Antinomian Disputation (January 12, 1538) that equivocal terms such as “necessity” (with respect to formal or to material requirements) should not be used in such disputations.82 (3) In a similar way, the Synergistic Controversy (beginning 1551) concerned the cooperation of humans in their conversion versus a strict doctrine of predestination.83 (4) The Second Antinomian Controversy (beginning 1556) followed.84 It centered around Nordhausen (Harz), with the Gnesio-Lutherans Anton Otho (ca. 1505–ca. 1584) and Andreas Fabricius (ca. 1520–1577), and Frankfurt an der Oder, with Melanchthon’s disciple Abdias Praetorius (1524–1573). The question was: are good works the spontaneous fruit of faith (Luther) or the fulfillment of the still valid divine law (Melanchthon) in the sense of the tertius usus legis? (5) Another controversy erupted within the group closer to Luther. The Flacian Controversy (beginning 1560) began in Weimar between Matthias Flacius (see above) and Victorin Strigel (1524–1569), and focused on issues of theological anthropology, and more particularly on the ontological question of to what extent hereditary sin has corrupted the “substance” of humans. Part of the problem lay with the inadequacy of Aristotelian ontology and its substance-accident terminology for dealing with such matters. That, in turn, allowed the issue to be linked with the ongoing synergistic problem (Johann Pfeffinger [1493–1573]) concerning the extent to which people are still

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Irene Dingel, Der Majoristische Streit (1552–1570) (Göttingen and Bristol, CT, 2014); Verzeichnis der im deutschen Sprachbereich erschienenen Drucke des 16. Jahrhunderts, XIII, 216–242 (M 1988–M 2215) offers a complete bibliography on this topic. 82 WA 39 I, 419–485, esp. 446:16 ff.: illas voces [requirere et necessarium] esse aequivocas et loqui tantum de materia, et non de causa efficiente. 83 Lowell C. Green, “The Three Causes of Conversion in Philipp Melanchthon, Martin Chemnitz, David Chytraeus, and the ‘Formula of Concord’,” Lutherjahrbuch 47 (1980), 89–114. 84 Irene Dingel, Der Antinomistische Streit (1556–1571) (Göttingen, 2016); Matthias Richter, Gesetz und Heil: Eine Untersuchung zur Vorgeschichte und zum Verlauf des sogenannten Zweiten Antinomischen Streits (Göttingen, 1996).

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(morally) responsible for their faith and, therefore, salvation. That led to a split within the Gnesio-Lutherans between the “Flacians” – Christoph Irenaeus (1522–1595), Johann Friedrich Coelestin (d. 1586), and Cyriakus Spangenberg (1528–1604) – and the “Anti-Flacians” – Tilemann Heshusius (1527–1588), Johann Wigand (1523–1587), Timotheus Kirchner (1533–1587), Simon Musaeus (1521–1576), and later also Nikolaus Gallus (1560–1570).

The Osiandrian Controversy More theologically meaningful than the previously mentioned discussions about the relation between grace and human participation in the process of justification was the dispute with the theology of Andreas Osiander (1496–1552), the Reformer of Nuremberg. John Calvin’s (1509–1564) sharp rebuke of Osiander’s doctrine, which Calvin made in his Institutio religionis Christianae beginning in 1559,85 on one side, and the opposite understanding of Osiander’s position set forth by the Württemberg theologian Johannes Brenz,86 can be read as an indication that here also a core element of Luther’s theology stands behind the discussion. At stake was an aspect of Luther’s doctrine of justification, which had found a peculiar Christological anchoring in Osiander. Melanchthon had introduced the terms “forensic” and “imputative” justification into the Wittenberg doctrine, thereby addressing a particular aspect of the justification of human beings: in faith God declares the person free – as in a court case (forum). Although the recipient is actually a sinner, the acquittal creates a new reality, which is not based on the nature of the case, namely the man as a sinner and guilty. Furthermore, God does not count the sin against him/her, but “imputes” to the person Jesus’s righteousness as a balance – without any contribution from the human being (Sola Gratia) and without an essential change in that person (Sola Fide). Viewed from a human perspective, justification appears to be an error in God’s judgment or an act of free grace. From a divine perspective, on the other hand, this understanding of justification appears coherent and is largely compatible with Anselm of Canterbury’s theology of reconciliation. However, this kind of justification calls for further clarification with regard to a person who has to be changed. Justification required some kind of supplementary notion that accounted

85

Calvin, Institutes (1559), III, xi, 5–12 (CR 30, 536–545). Gottfried Seebaß, “Johannes Brenz und Andreas Osiander,” Blätter für württembergische Kirchengeschichte 100 (2000), 162–185; Arand et al., eds., The Lutheran Confessions, ch. 11.

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for the justified person’s new orientation toward God (with the help of the moderated law) (tertius usus legis). It was at this point that Andreas Osiander inserted himself into the discussion. A professor of theology in Königsberg since 1549, Osiander challenged the forensic and imputative interpretation of justification on October 24, 1550, in continuity with his earlier statements on this question.87 Moved perhaps by unease with the “as-if” nature of God’s judgment, which neither provides sufficient grounds for certainty of faith nor changes man really, or by virtue of a deeper understanding of Luther, Osiander attempted to understand justification as an effective change that makes a human being righteous. Osiander claimed that justification and vivification belong together. Faith justifies solely by its object, which it grasps – namely Jesus Christ and divine righteousness (theses 1–28). In that light, forgiveness of sin is only a precondition of reconciliation, which itself consists in union with Christ and rebirth (theses 29–30, also theses 73–74). In that union, Jesus’s divine nature, in which the essential righteousness of God (iustitia essentialis) resides, dwells in a person and is thus the “objective” ground of human righteousness (thesis 53). This must be understood not simply as forensic justification, but as real righteousness and a change of the person (theses 31–68). Whoever does not agree with this doctrine of justification, or only speaks of a forensic and imputative justification, is in fact a Zwinglian (theses 69–81). This form of “deification” of humanity ignited a tempest of indignation among all the groups of Wittenberg theology, as well as Calvin’s. Only a few, such as Johannes Brenz, held back and sought to come to terms with Osianderism, albeit after Osiander’s death. Perhaps like Osiander, Brenz recognized rightly that the justification of sinners could not be reduced to the imputation of Christ’s righteousness (whether human or divine-human, active or passive), that Luther was not interested in a release of the conscience, but in freedom from conscience and in a real reversal, and that the incarnation indeed included the “deification” of humans – mediated through the deification of humankind in Jesus Christ (thesis 37). Although Osiander did not comprehend the profundity of Luther’s emphasis on the extra nos and on forgiveness, he was quite close to Luther when he saw the foundation

87 Andreas Osiander, Disputatio de iustificatione, in Andreas Osiander, Gesamtausgabe, 10 vols. (Gütersloh, 1975–1997), IX, 422–447 (no. 425); cf. Stephen Strehle, “Imputatio iustitiae: Its Origin in Melanchthon, its Opposition in Osiander,” Theologische Zeitschrift (Basel) 50 (1994), 201–219.

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of salvation in the presence of the divine-human Jesus Christ and of divine righteousness, and saw faith as the bond with this foundation of salvation.88 It also was no accident that Brenz’s Württemberg theology pushed Lutheran Christology so hard toward a “new doctrine.”89

Distancing from Calvinism The arguments within the Wittenberg schools intensified from 1551–1552, prompted by a reaction against (Crypto-) Calvinism or (Crypto-) Zwinglianism.90 The so-called Second Lord’s Supper Controversy (beginning in 1552) was contested with John Calvin directly. Calvin’s consensus with Zurich (Heinrich Bullinger) on the Lord’s Supper (Consensus Tigurinus, 1549,91 first printed and published in 1551) made Lutherans aware not only that Calvin’s eucharistic doctrine was much closer to the Swiss than the Wittenberg position, but also that Melanchthon’s eucharistic and Christological positions leaned toward Calvin. It was that reaction to Calvinism that first provoked a process of intraProtestant confession formation in Germany.92 It led “Lutherans” to see themselves as such (Joachim Westphal beginning in 1552, Johannes Timann 1555, Erhard Schnepf 1556, Paul von Eitzen 1557, Nikolaus Gallus 1559, Tilemann Heshusius 1559), and to clarify and come to terms with the Melanchthonian influences in Lutheranism. Especially significant to that process was the 1557 Colloquy of Worms, which suddenly made obvious the problematic differences between the Confessio Augustana of 1530 (invariata) and the – following the Wittenberg Concord of 1536 – reworked Confessio Augustana of 1540 (variata).93 That cast further suspicions on Melanchthon and his tradition of teaching.

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Martin Luther, De libertate christiana, 1520 (WA 7, 53, 24–55, 36). Timothy J. Wengert, Defending Faith: Lutheran Responses to Andreas Osiander’s Doctrine of Justification, 1551–1559 [Spätmittelalter, Humanismus, Reformation 65] (Tübingen, 2012). With respect to Ägidius Hunnius’s theology see Matthias, Theologie und Konfession, 282. 90 For the emergence of this term in Marburg in the 1570s see Matthias, Theologie und Konfession, 189, 280f. 91 Emidio Campi and Ruedi Reich, eds., Consensus Tigurinus (1549): Die Einigung zwischen Heinrich Bullinger und Johannes Calvin über das Abendmahl. Werden – Wertung – Bedeutung (Zurich, 2009). 92 Hans-Christoph Rublack, ed., Die lutherische Konfessionalisierung in Deutschland: Wissenschaftliches Symposion des Vereins für Reformationsgeschichte 1988 (Gütersloh, 1992). 93 Richard Ziegert, ed., Confessio Augustana variata: Das protestantische Einheitsbekentnis von 1540, trans. Wilhelm Neuser (Speyer, 1993). For Calvin’s alleged signing of the CA variata see Matthias A. Deuschle, “Calvin und die Confessio Augustana: Ein Nachtrag,” Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 108 (2011), 138–164. 89

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The Inter-Territorial Process of Unity among the Adherents of the Wittenberg Reformation The Problem of Dissent These differences had serious implications for the theological unity of the Reformation and the political unity of Protestantism. Theology was a public discourse and theologians were public participants in a social and political world. A doctrine or a faith community could not be true if its adherents could not agree among themselves. Theological matters were always also overshadowed by non-theological tensions. To this category belonged the political conflict between Ernestine and Albertine Saxony, exacerbated by the Ernestine forfeiture of electoral status to the Albertines in 1547, the varying threat of a “CounterReformation,” and the accompanying needs for political-military union (Hessen/Württemberg), as well as the variety of positions on the relationship between political rule and the church. How much harder it was becoming to bridge differences, not only between the Roman Church and the churches of the Augsburg Confession, but also those within their respective groups, became increasingly evident in the middle of the century. One example came with the Colloquy of Worms (between Protestants and Catholics) in the fall of 1557. Tellingly, the colloquy failed before it even began because of a conflict between two parties within the Wittenberg Reformation movement (Saxony).94 Such intra-Protestant differences called upon the princes to preserve the unity of the Evangelical churches for the sake of their own legitimization and legal protection. The individual stages in that quest of unity, which always failed in the end due to the resistance of one or the other Protestant party, do not need to be examined in detail here (March 1558: Frankfurt Recess; January 1561: Naumberg Convention).95

The Genesis and Significance of the Formula of Concord (1) Jacob Andreae (1528–1590),96 general superintendent of Württemberg, chancellor of the University of Tübingen, and court preacher, tried a new 94 Björn Slenczka, Das Wormser Schisma der Augsburger Konfessionsverwandten von 1557: Protestantische Konfessionspolitik und Theologie im Zusammenhang des zweiten Wormser Religionsgesprächs [Beiträge zur historischen Theologie 155] (Tübingen, 2012). 95 Matthias, Theologie und Konfession, 86–97. 96 Jobst C. Ebel, “Jacob Andreae (1528–1590) als Verfasser der Konkordienformel,” Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 89 (1978), 78–119.

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approach in 1568. After he was called by Duke Julius of BrunswickWolfenbüttel to support the introduction of the Reformation in the duke’s territory, Andreae combined his new reforming effort with theologicaldiplomatic activity for the sake of unity. That unity now encompassed only the narrower circle of the Wittenberg Reformation and excluded Calvinist or “excessively Melanchthonian” elements. The newness of Andreae’s approach was that, unlike earlier attempts, he did not apply the Confessio Augustana of 1530 as a norm for assessing the orthodoxy of later positions. Instead, Andreae gathered the dissenting views into his own text, documented their differences, and then affirmed their respective moments of truth. In a second step, Andreae organized conventions of theologians, which after several attempts (Winter 1568/69: Altenberg; May 1570: Zerbst) achieved his goal. Andreae received significant help from the north German Lutherans Martin Chemnitz (1522–1586) in Brunswick and David Chytraeus (1530–1600)97 in Rostock.98 All three agreed on a consensus text, which came to be called the Swabian-Saxon Concord and acted as a preliminary draft for the larger unifying work. When, in early 1574, the Saxon Elector August separated himself from the strict disciples of Melanchthon in his court and at the universities of Wittenberg and Leipzig, charging a number of them with political crimes and expelling several from his territory, the path was free for theological unity between the two Saxonies. The Electoral Saxon court now became the de facto driving force for unity (May/June 1576: Torgau, with the Torgau Book; the first half of 1577: Kloster Berge near Magdeburg, with the Bergic Book). The drafting of the document of unity represented an enormous theological and organizational achievement, because the various versions always needed to be synthesized between theologians and governments of the various Protestant territories. The Bergic Book was finally submitted to the theologians, pastors, and teachers in the various territories for their signatures. Although the large territories of Anhalt, Hessen, Schleswig-Holstein, Denmark, and Pomerania, as well as a few smaller

97

Inge Mager, “Der Beitrag des David Chytraeus zur Entstehung und Rezeption der Konkordienformel: Die Konkordienformel im jüngeren kirchengeschichtlichen Diskurs,” Berliner theologische Zeitschrift 18 (2001), 207–221. 98 Jobst C. Ebel, “Die Herkunft des Konzeptes der Konkordienformel: Die Funktionen der fünf Verfasser neben Andreae beim Zustandekommen der Formel,” Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 91 (1980), 237–282.

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domains and sixteen cities, did not subscribe, the text called the Formula of Concord99 became the most important unifying document in the empire’s territories that were affiliated with the Wittenberg Reformation. (2) The Formula of Concord, “A Thorough, Pure, Correct, and Final Restatement and Explanation of a Number of Articles of the Augsburg Confession on Which for Some Time There Has Been Disagreement among Some of the Theologians Adhering to this Confession, Resolved and Reconciled under the Guidance of the Word of God and the Comprehensive Summary of our Christian Teaching,” did not understand itself as a new confession, but as a mediating commentary on the Augsburg Confession of 1530. (3) A summary article and twelve further articles discussed the themes of the above-mentioned controversies and those that emerged later. These included theological anthropology (the doctrine of sin, free will), justification and its results (good works, law and gospel, the use of the law), Christology and the Lord’s Supper, the doctrine of Christ’s descent into hell (triggered by Johannes Aepinus [1499–1553] in Hamburg, beginning in 1544), predestination, liturgical practices, and further separate matters of controversy. From a theological perspective, the Formula of Concord was a compromise between Philippists and those theologians who invoked Martin Luther and his nearly forgotten writings. In the meantime it had also become necessary to differentiate themselves clearly from Calvinist and Swiss theologians. In that sense, this work of unity also documented the close of a period of confessional openness. Nonetheless, Lutheran theology remained in development, especially with respect to Christology, and so by the time of its ratification the Formula of Concord was already outdated on some matters.

The Book of Concord (1) Along with the harmonizing of doctrine in the Formula of Concord, it now also seemed advisable to establish certain texts of Luther and Melanchthon, already recognized by the Zerbst Konvent of 1570, as an authoritative theological framework for church doctrine. An example for such efforts had been set by the Leipzig printer Ernst Vögelin, who in 1560 published the three ancient Christian creeds and various texts from 99 Irene Dingel, Concordia controversa: Die öffentlichen Diskussionen um das lutherische Konkordienwerk am Ende des 16. Jahrhunderts [Quellen und Forschungen zur Reformationsgeschichte 63] (Gütersloh, 1996).

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Melanchthon in German and Latin editions. On Elector August’s initiative this collection was introduced in Electoral Saxony as the Corpus doctrinae Misnicum or Corpus Philippicum.100 Between 1560 and 1570 a long line of such collections appeared that usually were, in each case, valid in one territory. In these texts, Melanchthon’s writings were increasingly replaced by Luther’s. Now it was time to create a supra-territorially valid Corpus doctrinae, without calling it such. The Book of Concord was published exactly fifty years after the presentation of the Augsburg Confession on June 25, 1580. The initial edition was printed with 8,000 signatures of territorial lords, city councils, mayors, pastors, and teachers attached. The Book included the Apostles’, Niceno-Constantinopolitan, and so-called Athanasian creeds, the Augsburg Confession of 1530, and its Apology, the Schmalkald Articles of 1537, Melanchthon’s treatise on the power and primacy of the pope from 1537 (without naming Melanchthon as the author), Luther’s two catechisms, and the Formula of Concord, as well as an appendix with a collection of quotes from the ancient Church Fathers and the Middle Ages on the doctrine of the person of Christ. (2) The Book of Concord was effective as a conclusive formulation of Lutheran doctrine, and was hence also often used as a reference text for Lutheranism. It only became a theological criterion in the middle of the seventeenth century, however,101 when people no longer felt contemporaneous with the Reformation, but instead looked back to the confessional writings, as to Luther, from a sense of historical distance. Lutheranism also experienced heavy criticism: from Roman Catholics such as Johannes Nas (1543–1590) and Robert Bellarmine (1542–1621); from Calvinists such as Christoph Hardesheim (Herdesianus, 1523–1585, alias Ambrosius Wolf ), Zacharias Ursinus (1534–1583), Theodore Beza (1519–1605); and from the (more generically) Protestant side, Johannes Sturm (1507–1589), as well as from the Lutheran Matthias Flacius (see above).

100

On the exciting development (especially disagreement with the Corpus Philippicum) see Paul Tschackert, Die Entstehung der lutherischen und der reformierten Kirchenlehre samt ihren innerprotestantischen Gegensätzen (Göttingen, 1910), 544–549; the strict attitude of rejection such as with Hutter, Loci Theologici, 265B: Corpus Doctrinae ipsius [Melanchthon’s], pro norma & forma Doctrinae Evangelicae purioris, haberi nec posse, nec debere. 101 Heinrich Bornkamm, “Die Bedeutung der Bekenntnisschriften im Luthertum,” in Heinrich Bornkamm, Das Jahrhundert der Reformation (Göttingen, 1961; Frankfurt am Main, 1983), 219–225, esp. 286–293; Johannes Wallmann, “Die Rolle der Bekenntnisschriften im älteren Luthertum,” in Johannes Wallmann, Theologie und Frömmigkeit im Zeitalter des Barock: Gesammelte Aufsätze (Tübingen, 1995), I, 46–60.

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All of this led to a series of defenses of the Formula of Concord and disputations on the Confessio Augustana.

The Development of Lutheran Christology and the Doctrine of Predestination as Part of the Formation of Lutheran Confessionalism Introduction The Leuenberg Agreement of 1973 presumes that the chief difference between Reformed and Lutheran churches lies in their teachings on the Lord’s Supper, Christology, and the doctrine of predestination. In the seventeenth century Nikolaus Hunnius had identified these three doctrines as fundamental confessional differences.102 These articles are not accidental points of difference; instead, they are the expression of different understandings of theology and religion – that is what gives them their sense. The theoretical-seeming insistence on the presence of the entire Christ in the celebration of the Supper, the speculative logical rigor with which the doctrine of the person of Christ was explicated, always expanding over the decades, and the conflict with the Reformed doctrine of predestination (up to the expulsion of the Arminians by the Synod of Dort in 1617/18) were all closely connected to the establishment of different forms of religious life in the respective confessions, and to their divergent views of the means of salvation.103 Reformed theology of the sixteenth century presented itself as a science that derives, from the Bible, information about the relationship between God and humankind, and then determines religious consequences and practical applications. It understood the immanent event of salvation, experienceable in faith, as an execution of God’s transcendent salvific act, grounded in God’s omnipotence. In faith, the believer perceives that God’s objectively described salvific act pertains to him or her. Faith is the recognition that Christ’s salvific work is applied to the believer as a result of God’s free decision; it logically includes rebirth as a new person, which then manifests itself in action and

102

Nikolaus Hunnius, Diaskepsis theologica de fundamentali dissensu doctrinae EvangelicaeLutheranae et Calvinianae, seu Reformatae. Cum praemissa consideratione Calvinianae Dordrechtana Synodo proditae (Wittenberg, 1626; 2nd ed. Wittenberg, 1663). 103 Matthias Schneckenburger, Vergleichende Darstellung des lutherischen und reformirten Lehrbegriffs, 2 vols. (Stuttgart, 1855), II, 206.

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thought. Religion is a sapiential doctrine dealing with knowledge of self and God, and, as reflection on one’s own salvific status, moral education. Lutheran theology sees God acting here and now in word and sacrament. God’s word is not something to be applied, but goes forth as promise (Zuspruch) (of the forgiveness of sins), or as challenge (Anspruch), driving a person to repentance. Faith is an effect produced by that promise, in which the promise’s goal, namely reconciliation (absolution from guilt), is realized. In that sense faith effects reconciliation, or is the righteousness that is valid before God. Insofar as the genesis of faith, as a choice for or against salvation, can no longer be attributed to a special will of God or to human free will, according to orthodox Lutheran theology, faith becomes a constitutive religious experience of grace in which salvation first realizes itself. As a result, further reflection on Christology and predestination was needed in order to protect such an understanding of faith from being misunderstood as a predetermined faith.

Christology With the adoption of the Formula of Concord, the development of theological doctrine within Lutheranism was by no means complete. In particular, Article 8, on the person of Christ, had already been surpassed by theological scholarship by the time the Formula was written. The Christological discussion did not simply revolve around safeguarding Luther’s seemingly naïve biblicist and “realistic” view of the Lord’s Supper. Rather, Christology itself became the central doctrine of Lutheranism, although preserved with various levels of stringency. Coming from Luther, it sought to overcome the Anselmian (and Reformed) doctrine of reconciliation through substitutionary satisfaction.104 Instead, it aimed at an entirely new notion of the self-giving righteousness of God, a concentration on the person of Jesus Christ instead of on his work, and on an understanding of religion as the presence of, rather than the perception of, salvation. In this way the Christological controversy between Lutherans and Reformed in the second half of the sixteenth century became the driving force of confession building.

104 Reinhard Schwarz, “Gott ist Mensch: Zur Lehre von der Person Christi bei den Ockhamisten und bei Luther,” Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 63 (1966), 289–351. For sources see Martin Luther, Disputatio de sententia caro factum est Joh 1, 14, 1539 (WA 39 II, 1–33) and Martin Luther, De divinitate et humanitate Christi, 1540 (WA 39 II, 92–121).

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The development of the new Christological dogmas cannot be traced in detail here. Important figures along the way were Johannes Bötker in Hamburg and Johannes Brenz in Württemberg. Subsequent generations of theologians included, first and foremost, theologians from Württemberg, such as Ägidius Hunnius (1550–1603), who was in Marburg (1577–1592); as well as Stephan Gerlach (1546–1612), Matthias Hafenreffer (1561–1619), and Theodor Thumm (1586–1630) in Tübingen. Their work on Christology sought to conceive of Christ’s incarnated presence in the world in such a way that made it secure in theory and believable in proclamation. Central to this new Christology was a shift in understanding the communication of divine and human properties (communicatio idiomatum). While Melanchthon, Martin Chemnitz (Repetitio, 1561), and the Formula of Concord all saw this in primarily rhetorical terms, these later theologians understood it as describing something real (communicatio idiomatum realis). Luther and Lutheranism were concerned with the understanding of God’s incarnation as it is revealed to the human mind. This is about the predication of God with the predicate “is man” (God is man) and the predication of man with the predicate “is God” (man is God). Consequently, it leads to a transfer of human predicates (takes up space, suffers, dies, etc.) to God, and a transfer of divine predicates (omnipresent, immortal) to one concrete brother of humankind. For Luther and the Lutherans this is not simply a human manner of speech that does not actually describe reality, but instead a reality revealed in the grammar of the Holy Spirit, and whose truth emerges from the narrative of the biblical Jesus. These predicates are able to be transferred, or communicated through a communicatio idiomatum, only because of their unique subject, the concrete person of Christ in his two natures. It is Christ about whom these seemingly absurd statements are made (God, i.e. Jesus, is born; a human, i.e. Christ, is omnipotent). These in turn refer back to the mystery of the incarnation (John 1:14). As a result, the communicatio idiomatum realis is imperative to expressing the miracle of the incarnation. If one instead observes in the biblical manner of speaking a rhetorical communicatio idiomatum, then one recognizes that, to be sure, divine and human predicates of the one person of Christ are ascribed to him as the subject. Within this person, however, the ontological antithesis between divinity and humanity continues to exist, so that one must augment the rhetorical communicatio idiomatum correctly with the referencing particle secundum (“according to”) divinam resp. humanam naturam. Where this 278

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referencing particle is denied, there would, according to this school, be an ontologically untenable mixture and confusion of the natures – or, following the Lutherans, a real communion of God with man. The later controversy between the Tübingen and Giessen theologians, which after the Electoral Saxon decision of 1629 (Decisio saxonica) led to a separation of the Tübingen and Württemberg theologians from the theological consensus, also contributed to the consistency of Christology (KrypsisKenosis-Controversy). Here Christology acquired an intellectual richness and completeness that was only rediscovered at the end of the twentieth century.105 Christology also has consequences for the understanding of faith. Faith in Christ is not simply an act of faithful affirmation of a message (such as the forgiveness of sins), but instead faith binds the human believer ontologically with Christ, the God-man, and converts him in this way really.106

The Doctrine of Predestination A second confessionally constitutive doctrine for Lutherans is the doctrine of election, particularly as distinguished from the Reformed-Calvinist notion of an “absolute decree.” The original solution to the question of predestination in Lutheranism came in the doctrine of ex praevisa fide ([election] based on foreseen faith) developed by Ägidius Hunnius. If one assumes that the cause of predestination must be the same as that of justification, then predestination needs to be understood as an electio for Christ’s sake in faith. That yielded the following thesis: A person’s faith (foreseen by God) is the reason for her or his ultimate justification by God, certainly not as a virtue of that person, but because faith breaks the believer out of the self-centeredness of being and lets him or her apprehend Christ. The doctrine of predestination made sure that justification Sola Fide would be understood not as a contingent event, but as an act ordained by God, and that temporal faith also includes the promise of eternal life. The number of the elect is open in principle, because God elects all who believe. At the same time the number is limited and fixed, because

105

Ulrich Wiedenroth, Krypsis und Kenosis: Studien zu Thema und Genese der Tübinger Christologie im 17. Jahrhundert [Beiträge zur historischen Theologie 162] (Tübingen, 2011); Richard Schröder, Johann Gerhards lutherische Christologie und die aristotelische Metaphysik (Tübingen, 1983). 106 See Martin Luther, Von der Freiheit eines Christenmenschen, 1520 (WA 7, 25:26–26:4).

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to God everything is present, and God presciently knows all those who “will” come to faith or not. In the coming to faith, thereby, uncertainties remain, such as the human response to preaching or the freedom to make use of the means of salvation themselves as the place where the human can encounter God.107 Hunnius wanted to present the doctrine of predestination in such a way that it avoided the pitfalls of Calvinism and early Lutheranism, both of which spoke of an electio seu praedestinatio ad fidem (election or predestination to faith),108 which in turn necessitated speaking of two opposed wills or a hidden will in God. Instead, Hunnius postulated only one will. Only in that way is certainty of salvation possible. Admittedly, God’s will can be differentiated conceptually as voluntas antecedens (antecedent will) and voluntas consequens (consequent will). Hunnius borrows this conceptual distinction from John of Damascus (ca. 650–754), who differentiated between God’s determined will and how it manifests itself in actuation. The latter, the voluntas consequens, pertained to individuals, who either – by the Holy Spirit’s effect – hear and believe, or do not. It remains subordinate to the voluntas antecedens, in which God has determined how he wants to justify (see above).109 The voluntas consequens is the antecent will’s actuation in view of contingently occurring, but foreseen, individual cases. The predestined are not simply individual persons, but those who will be justified, that is, believers. There is no discussion of a predestination of persons to faith.110 Hunnius’s solution rejects the Calvinist doctrine that construed the voluntas antecedens as a double and contradictory decree of God. It also excludes the universalist doctrine of Hunnius’s Wittenberg colleague Samuel Huber (1547–1624), who did not want to recognize any determination of God’s consequent will that would factually restrict the number of the elect, not even the election of believers mentioned in Scripture. This was because Huber did not include the category of faith in his account of the election decree (voluntas antecedens). Huber and the Calvinists have in common an 107

Markus Matthias,”Ordo salutis: Zur Geschichte eines dogmatischen Begriffs,” Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 115 (2004 [2005]), 318–346. 108 Formula of Concord, Solida Declaratio XI, 8 (BSELK, 1066: 16–29); Bengt Hägglund, “De providentia: Zur Gotteslehre im frühen Luthertum,” Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 83 (1986), 356–369. 109 Subalternam esse voluntatem Dei consequentem antecedenti: Aegidius Hunnius, Opera Latina I, 755 A. 110 See Rune Söderlund, Ex praevisa fide: Zum Verständnis der Prädestinationslehre in der lutherischen Orthodoxie (Hanover, 1983), 74.

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“absolute” interest in the salvation of humans, rather than inquiring about the salvation of believers. Hunnius and the Lutherans who followed him did not see an individual’s faith as a realization or effect of eternal election. Instead, faith is the infallible and God-intended causa instrumentalis for both justification and election.111 It would be a misunderstanding if one understood faith as the realized decision (voluntas consequens) of an eternal, prior determination. That would be Calvinism in the sense of differentiation or two-sidedness between the voluntas signi (will of indication [of what is pleasing to God]) and the voluntas beneplaciti (will of favor or pleasure) or between call and election, or a similar doctrine such as the doctrine of scientia media (middle knowledge) and through it the particular relation of contingency and determination in Molinism. Of course, the problem is thereby relocated to the question of the genesis of faith. While Hunnius does not describe the genesis of faith synergistically like Melanchthon, but rather reduces the cooperation of humans to the exercise of their general freedom to act, the problem shifts precisely to the philosophical problem of free will – and is in fact no longer a theological problem. Instead, theology’s task focuses not on exploring but awakening faith. In that way, Hunnius’s doctrine of predestination ex praevisa fide recast confessional Lutheran theology as a “practical science of faith.”112

Parallel Lutheran Schools The Helmstedt School The controversy within the University in Helmstedt concerning the correct usage of philosophy in theology was also reflected in theology itself insofar as Helmstedt long cultivated a humanist approach.113 This made Helmstedt theology suitable for compromises with other confessions, a position derided by Lutheran critics as “syncretism,” and with the consequence of a strongly ethical emphasis in Christian soteriology. Abraham Calov in particular, and then also Wittenberg theology, polemicized against the reductionist irenicism of Helmstedt theologians, exemplified after the Thirty Years War 111

Theodor Mahlmann, “Hunnius, Aegidius,” in TRE 15, 703–707, esp. 706. For a fuller treatment of Lutheran orthodoxy’s reception of neo-Aristotelianism and its reconception of theology between 1600 and 1650 see the chapter by Walter Sparn in this volume (Chapter 21). 113 See the chapter by Walter Sparn in this volume (Chapter 21). 112

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by Georg Calixt’s (1586–1656)114 proposal that the confessions should unite through a common commitment to the theological status quo of Christianity’s first 500 years (consensus quinquesaecularis). This proposal, later advocated by Calixt’s son Friedrich Ulrich Calixt (1622–1701), ignited the Syncretist Controversy, in which the Wittenberg theologians, by means of a new confession of faith, the Consensus repetitus fidei vere lutheranae of 1660, wanted to exclude Helmstedt officially from the fellowship of Lutheranism. Not all Lutherans agreed with Wittenberg, and the resistance of Johann Musäus in Jena, in particular, rendered that attempt unsuccessful. The Syncretist Controversy abated with Calov’s death in 1686.

The Arndt “School” Next to the Helmstedt School, the theology of Johann Arndt (1555–1621) can be seen as a separate school within Lutheranism, characterized by its use of natural philosophy. A number of factors, including controversies with Lukas Osiander (1571–1638) in his own day, his domestication as a devotional author, and more recent scholarship make clear that Arndt did not view theology as a humanistic science of letters, but as a spiritualist, natural philosophical science. His proximity to this theological approach is evidenced by his reception of texts from Valentin Weigel (1533–1588), Paracelsus (ca. 1493–1541), Caspar Schwenckfeld (1489–1561), and of mystical texts like those of Angela de Foligno (ca. 1248–1309) and Johannes Tauler (1300–1361), but also through his education and his network.115 The wider circle of this theological approach included others such as Valentin Weigel, Eilhard Lubin (1565–1621), Johann Baptista van Helmond (1580–1644), Johann Amos Comenius (1592–1670), Johannes Marcus Marci (1505–1667), Franziskus Mercurius van Helmont (1614–1699), Christian Knorr von Rosenroth (1631–1689), and Jakob Böhme (1575–1624) and his school.

Lutheran Theology and the Challenge of Pietism Introduction Lutheran Pietism was not only a movement for the renewal of piety, but also a theological reaction to the threat of agnosticism that emerged in the middle 114

Georg Calixt, Werke in Auswahl, 4 vols. (Göttingen, 1970–1982). Hermann Geyer, Verborgene Weisheit: Johann Arndts “Vier Bücher vom Wahren Christentum” als Programm einer spiritualistisch-hermetischen Theologie, 3 parts in 2 vols. (Berlin and New York, 2015 [repr.]); Hans Schneider, Der fremde Arndt: Studien zu Leben, Werk und Wirkung Johann Arndts (1555–1621) [Arbeiten zur Geschichte des Pietismus 8] (Göttingen, 2006).

115

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of the seventeenth century.116 (Protestant) Christianity began to lose its academic and societal relevance. Its demise could not be stopped by historical, natural scientific, or metaphysical attempts at persuasion. The Christian faith could not buttress itself with the historical dignity of Christianity (as in humanism), with miracles, or with a generally accepted metaphysics (Aristotelianism). The self-evident mathematical method of emerging rationalism did not lend itself to theological subjects. Certainty could therefore only be experienced individually and a posteriori in each person’s religious practice. The intensification of personal piety was at first supposed to serve earnest Christians’ ability to confirm the relevance of Christian faith in their own practice. This attempt went hand in hand with a more rigorous Christian ethic that surpassed a merely civic, ultimately pagan, respectability. Theologically, a “living knowledge” was now propagated, and this presupposed conversion and spiritual rebirth. Certainty and, with that, the formal truth of theology were grounded finally in the individual’s spiritual experience. Unlike Luther and Lutheran orthodoxy, Pietists sought to use the selfassurance they gained in the self-examination of their personal faith, namely the conviction that they truly believed, in order to assure themselves and others of the truths of Christian faith. Since only spiritual experience could bestow this double certainty, that “living knowledge” was the only legitimate form of theology. In this sense, Philipp Spener (1635–1705) began to modernize theology. And it is from that basic approach that his reform initiatives and his further development of classic theological doctrines can be understood. This includes his doctrine of justification, his doctrine of renewal and rebirth, and especially the renewal of the idea of a “spiritual” (rather than general) priesthood of all believers. Admittedly, Pietism did not bring forth the kind of modern theology that accounted for the historicity of the Bible and understood personal faith historically (in the sense of the history of ideas or kergymatically). On these matters, Pietism remained too fundamentalistic and wedded to a strong view of the Bible’s verbal inspiration, which explains why it is understood today as a relatively conservative theology. Pietism arose around the middle of the seventeenth century as the innovative energy of Lutheran orthodoxy faded, in relation to both content 116

Markus Matthias, “Pietism and Protestant Orthodoxy,” in Douglas H. Shantz, ed., A Companion to German Pietism, 1660–1800 [Brill’s Companion to the Christian Tradition 55] (Leiden and Boston, 2015), 17–49; Markus Matthias, “Pietismus und Lutherische Orthodoxie,” in Wolfgang Breul and Thomas Hahn-Bruckart, eds., Pietismus-Handbuch (Tübingen, 2021), 81–93.

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and method. The emerging new philosophies, which were certainly not primarily aimed at theology or Christianity, but instead simply wanted to transcend existing philosophical aporias, proved incompatible with the doctrinal articulations of Lutheran orthodoxy. Thus, late orthodoxy (1630–1700) was dying academically. That cannot be said of orthodoxy’s piety, however. A so-called Reform orthodoxy sought to intensify church piety in many parts of Germany during the seventeenth century. Such efforts included church-political attempts to overcome theological and confessional controversies, the numerous church visitations of the seventeenth century, and other measures implemented by governments such as mandatory school attendance, catechetical instruction, moral orders (Sittenordnungen), etc. More important theologically were reflections on appropriate practices for the mediation of faith and piety within and without public worship, which was dominated by preaching and sacraments. The debate was about the cultivation of general piety, or what would more recently be called “spirituality.” Academically, however, Lutheran orthodox theology found its culmination in Abraham Calov’s great dogmatic summa, the erudite Systema locorum theologicorum (1655–1677). With the possible exception of Johann Andreas Quenstadt’s Theologia Didactico-Polemica, Sive Systema Theologicum117 no further orthodox dogmatics worthy of mention appeared after it, only compendia such as David Hollaz’s (1648–1713) Examen theologicum acromaticum of 1707 (8th ed., 1763). The scholarly achievements of academic theologians turned mainly to history. Even the few well-known theologians of this period operated as historical and literary theologians: Ernst Salomon Cyprian (1673–1745), Erdmann Neumeister (1671–1756), and Valentin Ernst Löscher (1674–1749). To be sure, the “orthodox” works were read throughout the entire eighteenth century, reissued or reedited from the archives, but orthodoxy was by then present only as a conservative norm or a (school) tradition sustained by government support. It was substantially a bulwark against the Enlightenment and de-Christianization, and conceptually a rival to Pietism’s type of piety. On the other hand, many of the concepts orthodox theologians had earlier developed as a response to their own changing circumstances now became fruitful in Pietism. This can be seen biographically in the two most important figures of Lutheran Pietism. Philipp Jakob Spener and August Hermann Francke (1663–1727) both had orthodox Lutheran teachers, in particular Johann 117 Andreas Quenstadt, Theologia Didactico-Polemica, Sive Systema Theologicum (Wittenberg, 1685).

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Conrad Dannhauer (1603–1666) of Strasbourg and Johann Musäus (1613–1681) of Jena, who were willing and able to engage with the intellectual currents of their day. Both Dannhauer and Musäus launched innovations within orthodox academic theology that were later continued by Pietism.

Johann Conrad Dannhauer and the New Hermeneutics Johann Conrad Dannhauer specified anew the relation of the Holy Scriptures to their interpreter, by methodologically separating analytical hermeneutics from analytical logic. Dannhauer provided a method to analyze the author’s intended meaning for the text independent of whether or not one was dealing with a true or untrue statement in the author’s intended meaning. On the other hand, logic provides the tools for verifying truth. Turning this distinction of Dannhauer’s Hermeneutica sacra toward the Bible, a hermeneutical interpretation appears only as a statement about the intended message of the Bible, not about its veracity. The latter would be determined by means external to the Bible, or simply taken on faith. With this modified method, Dannhauer distanced himself from the orthodox tradition, which regarded (inner) incomprehension of Scripture as anthropologically grounded. According to early orthodoxy, original sin left humans incapable of comprehending the liberating gospel of Holy Scripture on their own. They required illumination by the Holy Spirit, who re-formed the contents of human cognition. That faith-creating illumination could not be distinguished, much less separated, from its material content. Ecclesial and academic Pietism were committed to this new hermeneutical approach with the need to find a new evidence of truth.

Johann Musäus and the Necessity of Supernatural Conversion August Hermann Francke, founder of Halle Pietism, was also a theologian. Alongside his philological and literary-historical work, he studied the theological system of Johann Musäus and aligned himself with it. Musäus not only engaged in a remarkable way with the modern currents of philosophical theology of his day, he also sought to address questions about certainty anew. Special to Musäus was his theology of conversion. He viewed conversion not simply as a theological topic, but also in anthropological and psychological terms. He analyzed what happens within a person when she or he comes to faith. What happens in the soul when conversion takes place in a person? Musäus analyzed the individual actions of the human soul. These include the mere knowledge of Christ (nuda notitia Christi) and the grace of God revealed in Christ – in the sense of a pure perception of the facts 285

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(apprehensio) as well as the assent of the intellect as a second operation, thus assensus (credere). So much for the acts of the intellect. Finally, firm trust (fiducia) in the recognized salvation is necessary; that is, an act of the will. With respect to certainty, the problem remains that the supernatural subject matter of faith is not evident. Therefore, it needed to be revealed in Scripture. But what makes one sure that what Scripture says is true? There was a traditional answer for this: everything that God reveals is certain because God does not lie and cannot be mistaken. This is evident. Correspondingly, the Bible would be able to give people certainty. There remains, however, a problem: what if Scripture’s divine inspiration is not obvious from its content? In truth, it is not evident. This means that even if one can draw the truths of faith out of the Bible scientifically, one cannot deduce from Scripture itself whether those statements are true and certain. From this it follows that Scripture’s veracity can only be discerned with certainty by means of personal divine revelation. Faith itself can only be certain by relying on a special inner experience, namely, an extraordinary divine revelation. This certainty exists not in the intellect, but in the will. Ultimately, that means the grounds of faith remain irrational. The importance placed on conversion, the formation of the will, and the “miraculous” guidance of believers, as the countless reports of conversion and (auto-)biographies of the period corroborate, should all be understood as coming out of Johann Musäus’s theological approach, with the additional influence of early Helmstedt theology. Even in this premodern form, theology could constitute itself historically and psychologically-empirically. Theology became a science of the experience of piety.

Conclusion Lutheran theology from its beginning understood itself as a discipline that was academically and publicly accountable, that strove to be a servant of the word of God (ministerium verbi divini), by clearing away all obstacles, through its grounding in the Scriptures and with the help of human intellect, that might stand in the way of faith in the divine word. These obstacles were the objection of human reason to the grammar of the Holy Spirit, the anthropological forsakenness of humans, and the objection of “enemies” of the gospel. In doing so, theology constantly needed to respond to new historical and cultural changes. Because it did not simply constitute itself as an edifice of doctrine, but as a type of science of experience (in the sense discussed above), it proved quite successful. 286

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bibliography Bautz, Friedrich Wilhelm. Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon, 39 vols. Hamm, [1975]–2018. Dingel, Irene, ed. Die Bekenntnisschriften der evangelisch-lutherischen Kirche. Göttingen, 2014. ed. Die Bekenntnisschriften der Evangelisch-Lutherischen Kirche: Quellen und Materialien, 2 vols. Göttingen and Bristol, CT, 2014. Ehrenpreis, Stefan and Ute Lotz-Heimann. Reformation und konfessionelles Zeitalter, 3rd ed. Darmstadt, 2011. Frank, Günter. Die theologische Philosophie Philipp Melanchthons (1497–1560). Leipzig, 1995. von Greyerz, Kaspar and Anne Conrad, eds. Handbuch der Religionsgeschichte im deutschsprachigen Raum. Volume IV: 1650–1750. Paderborn, Munich, Vienna, and Zurich, 2012. Headley, John M., Hans J. Hillerbrand, and Anthony J. Papalas, eds. Confessionaliszation in Europe 1555–1700: Essays in Honor and Memory of Bodo Nischan. Aldershot, 2004. Kolb, Robert, ed. Lutheran Ecclesiastical Culture 1550–1675. Leiden, 2008. ed. The Oxford Handbook of Martin Luther’s Theology. Oxford, 2014. Lohse, Bernhard, Gustav A. Benrath, and Carl Andresen. Die Lehrentwicklung im Rahmen der Konfessionalität, 2nd ed. Göttingen, 1998. Louthan, Howard and Graeme Murdock, eds. A Companion to the Reformation in Central Europe. Leiden, 2015. MacGrath, Alister. Iustitia Dei: A History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification, 3rd ed. Cambridge, 2005. Mahlmann, Theodor. “Doctrina im Verständnis nachreformatorischer lutherischer Theologen.” In Philippe Büttgen, ed., Vera doctrina: Zur Begriffsgeschichte der Lehre von Augustinus bis Descartes. Wiesbaden, 2009, 199–264. Das neue Dogma der lutherischen Christologie: Problem und Geschichte seiner Begründung. Gütersloh, 1969. Preus, Robert D. The Theology of Post-Reformation Lutheranism, 2 vols. St. Louis and London, 1970–1972.

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Introduction Unlike Lutheranism, the Reformed faith lacked both a central personality who gave its life and thought a distinctive shape, and a specific localized context from which it could expand. Instead, it emerged in a number of cities in Switzerland. From there it spread across Europe as it was picked up by exiles whose imaginations were captured by what they witnessed in Switzerland and who carried the theology and the ecclesiastical models of their various exile cities back to their homelands. As a result, the Reformed faith was both eclectic and variegated in its manifestations. It was also shaped intimately by the specific political conditions of the nations where it took root.1

The Emergence of Distinctive Voices Zwingli in Zurich The city of Zurich was part of the Swiss Confederation and thus enjoyed considerable independence from the Holy Roman Empire, although this independence was frequently somewhat precarious. As such, the city provided a very different context to that of Wittenberg, a point that is of clear importance in explaining many of the differences between the Lutheran and Reformed Reformations. Most significantly, Zurich’s city council exerted important influence over the city’s religious policies, and thus the

1 The standard history of the Reformed church in Reformation Europe is Philip Benedict, Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed: A Social History of Calvinism (New Haven, 2002). Two good collections of essays covering many aspects of the international Reformed movement are Menna Prestwich, ed., International Calvinism, 1541–1715 (Oxford, 1985); and Andrew Pettegree, Alastair Duke, and Gillian Lewis, eds., Calvinism in Europe, 1540–1620 (Cambridge, 1994).

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Reformation in Zurich was to develop as a close partnership between the civil magistrate and the clergy.2 The Reformation in Zurich was given its fundamental shape by Ulrich Zwingli (1484–1531) who, despite his comparatively brief tenure of just over a decade in the city, stamped his thought upon its theological identity. A trained humanist, he may have been just a few weeks older than Luther but, unlike the latter, Zwingli was, in education and sensibilities, a man of the early modern, not the medieval, age. Prior to becoming a Reformer, his patriotism led him to oppose the Swiss tradition of mercenary service, as in his early poem “The Ox” (1510). His call to the Great Minster in Zurich in 1519 placed him at the center of Zurich religion and politics until his death in 1531 and gave him the opportunity to work closely with the civil magistrate in accomplishing the reform of the whole of society.3 Zwingli had certainly heard of Luther’s performance at the Leipzig Disputation in 1519, and had been very impressed. Nonetheless, reform in Zurich initially proceeded at a very cautious pace. In fact, the traditional date for the start of the Zurich Reformation proper is 1522, when the printer Christoph Froschauer and his workers broke the Lenten fast by eating sausages. Zwingli was present at the meal, though he did not partake of the food. That the Zurich Reformation began this way is suitably symbolic: it involved the breaking of the church calendar (rooted in the rhythm of an agrarian way of life) in the service of a modern urban industry. This radicalism quickly extended to iconoclasm, with the removal of images and stained-glass windows, and the simplification of worship, such that even music was removed from the church service. While Lutheranism was comparatively conservative on such aesthetic matters, Zurich set the tone for the Reformed to be much more thoroughgoing.4 Further, the Froschauer incident points to the deeper social radicalism of the Zurich Reformation: this was to be a reformation that sought to establish a completely new form of society, at the heart of which would be an intimate 2

For the role of cities in the Reformation see Bernd Moeller, Imperial Cities and the Reformation: Three Essays, trans. H. C. Erik Midelfort and Mark U. Edwards (Durham, NC, 1982); Steven E. Ozment, The Reformation in the Cities: The Appeal of Protestantism to Sixteenth-Century Germany and Switzerland (New Haven, 1975). 3 On Zwingli’s life see George R. Potter, Zwingli (Cambridge, 1976); also Gottfried Wilhelm Locher, Zwingli und die schweizerische Reformation (Göttingen, 1982). On the issue of church and state in the reform of Zwingli’s Zurich see Robert C. Walton, Zwingli’s Theocracy (Toronto, 1967). 4 For a general discussion of iconoclasm and worship in the Reformation as it came to shape Reformed life and thought see Carlos Eire, War against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin (Cambridge, 2003).

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relationship between the Reformed church and the civil magistrate. Indeed, in November 1522 Zwingli left the pastorate of the Great Minster and was appointed as preacher at large for the town council. The connection between church and magistrate in the Zurich Reformation was thus formalized. The Reformation in Zurich was subsequently pursued through a series of three public debates that called for the reform of Zurich society along lines laid out in the Bible. The kind of existential personal struggles that marked Luther’s move to Reformation are entirely absent from Zwingli. Instead, we find a concern to apply the word of God to the whole of life, religious and civic, as a means of reform. This attracted more radical figures, such as the humanist Conrad Grebel, into Zwingli’s circles, and even led Zwingli to dally, albeit very briefly, with Anabaptist notions of believer’s baptism. Yet he ultimately reacted very violently against the Radicals, helping to pass legislation in 1525 that made Anabaptism a capital crime. The main reason for this was Zwingli’s overriding concern to make sure that the civic unity of Zurich was not shattered. Zwingli also took charge of the Great Minster schools in 1525, and used this opportunity to establish a practice which would prove influential not only in Zurich but also, when imported back by exiles, in England as well, the socalled Prophezei. This was a meeting that was held five times a week, primarily – though not exclusively – for pastors and aspiring pastors. They would study a biblical text in Greek or Hebrew and Latin together, hear a Latin lecture on the same, and then, finally, a vernacular sermon. The idea reflected both the standard Protestant commitment to the centrality of the Word and of preaching, and the desire to spread knowledge of the Bible as widely as possible.5 Perhaps the key distinctiveness of the Zurich Reformation was the nature of church discipline. When the council decisively repudiated the authority of the local bishop’s courts in 1525, it first established its own marriage court, consisting of two ministers and two magistrates each from the Large and the Small Councils. Over the coming years the power of this institution was extended to cover a wide range of moral issues, and similar courts were established in the various nearby rural parishes. Then, in 1526, the magistrates decided that they, and they alone, should have the power of excommunication, a punishment soon defined as to be applied only to the most egregious heretics and blasphemers who rejected the church’s teachings.

5

Benedict, Christ’s Churches, 30.

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Other miscreants were to receive purely secular penalties and were to be required to continue to take communion on the grounds that this might inspire them to improve. This issue is critical in understanding the distinctive Zurich contribution to the Reformation, as it really did help to reinforce the idea of the church as effectively an arm of the state.6 Finally, no discussion of the Zurich Reformation would be complete without some reference to the eucharistic controversy. The clash between Zwingli and Luther, particularly with regard to Luther, was in part the result of different backgrounds and personalities. But in addition to the fine theological points of dispute it should be noted that Zwingli’s preference for a symbolic understanding of the Eucharist, and his fascination with the etymology of the term sacramentum as a military oath and thus with the horizontal/social implications of sacraments as things that bound Christians together, is of a piece with his vision of reform as something with more immediately thoroughgoing social implications than we find in Luther.7 With the death of Zwingli in 1531, the theological leadership of Zurich passed to Heinrich Bullinger (1504–1575). Bullinger was both a vigorous defender of the vision of the Reformation that Zwingli had espoused and a talented theologian. Indeed, he was arguably as influential as John Calvin, if not more so, among the international Reformed movement of the sixteenth century, particularly through his major cycle of sermons, The Decades, and his authorship of the Second Helvetic Confession, the longest and most elaborate Reformed confession of the Reformation. Most notably, he continued the eucharistic controversy with Luther and the Lutherans, offered less than unequivocal support to Calvin in his debate with Jerome Bolsec over double predestination, and argued at length for the Zwinglian relationship of church and state in the matter of excommunication and church discipline. Indeed, in Bullinger, Zwingli’s theology found a robust expositor and defender.8

6

See Benedict, Christ’s Churches, 30–31; for developments after Zwingli see Bruce Gordon, Clerical Discipline and the Reformation: The Synod in Zurich, 1532–1580 (New York, 1992). 7 For the development of Zwingli’s eucharistic theology see William P. Stephens, The Theology of Huldrych Zwingli (Oxford, 1986), 218–259. For the differences between Lutheranism and Reformed theology see Robert Kolb and Carl R. Trueman, Between Wittenberg and Geneva: Lutheran and Reformed Theology in Conversation (Grand Rapids, 2017). 8 On Bullinger see the following two collections of essays: Bruce Gordon and Emidio Campi, eds., Architect of Reformation: An Introduction to Heinrich Bullinger, 1504–1575 (Grand Rapids, 2004); and Emidio Campi and Peter Opitz, eds., Heinrich Bullinger: Life, Thought, Influence (Zurich, 2007). On his life, Fritz Blanke, Heinrich Bullinger: Vater der reformierten Kirche (Zurich, 1990). On his relationship to the civil authorities, Hans Ulrich Bächtold, Heinrich Bullinger voir dem Rat: Zur Gestaltung und Verwaltung des Zürcher Staatswesen in den Jahren 1531 bis 1575 (Berne, 1982).

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Musculus and Berne At the same time as reforms were being implemented in Zurich, similar reform movements were emerging in other Swiss cities and starting to reshape the religious landscape. Thus, in Basel the key figure was Johannes Oecolampadius, a friend of Erasmus and an outstanding patristics scholar, who, from 1522, was a compelling preacher of Zwinglian-style reform. He was to accompany Zwingli to the Marburg Colloquy in 1529, and then to die in the same year as Zwingli, 1531, a year which thus saw the loss of two key figures in the Swiss Reformed movement. Yet the Zwinglian reform did not progress with uniform ease everywhere, and the city of Berne offers an interesting example of how the Reformation could over time take dramatically different directions even in the same place. Berne began to experience reform under the preaching of Berchtold Haller in the early 1520s. Haller had been initially influenced by reading the works of Luther, but a visit to Zurich brought him into the Zwinglian Reformed camp. By 1523 a Zurich-style program of reform according to the word of God was underway with such traditional practices as carnival now being used to mock the papacy.9 The reforms in Berne continued through the 1530s, but took a sudden change of direction in 1537. In 1536, under the leadership of Martin Bucer, a number of leading Reformed and Lutheran theologians had signed the Wittenberg Concord, a document which seemed to put to rest the disagreement between the two camps on the matter of the Eucharist.10 This document received a positive reception in Berne. It was also the year in which there was an enforced changing of the guard among the Bernese leaders of reform, with the death of Berchtold Haller. In the following year a man called Simon Sulzer became the head of the Bernese clergy. Sulzer was a supporter of the Concord and had also been immensely impressed by his experience of Luther in Wittenberg during the discussions. As a result, Berne was now under the tutelage of a theologian with more Lutheran than Zwinglian sympathies. Sulzer tried to advance Lutheran-style reform in Berne for a decade but met considerable resistance from a clergy and populace somewhat wedded to

9 Benedict, Christ’s Churches, 38. For a more detailed discussion of the cultural impact of the Reformation in Berne see Glenn Ehrstine, Theatre, Culture and Community in Reformation Bern, 1523–1555 (Leiden, 2001). 10 On the Wittenberg Concord and its reception among the Reformed see Amy Nelson Burnett, “Basel and the Wittenberg Concord,” Archive for Reformation History 96 (2005), 33–56.

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the older Zwinglian pattern. Then imperial politics played a decisive role. Charles V moved against the Schmalkaldic League in 1546, crushing it at Mühlberg in 1547. This meant that alliances with the Lutheran princes suddenly became far less attractive, and in 1548 the two councils removed Sulzer and reset the direction of reform. From the perspective of Berne’s theological culture, the most significant result of this move back toward the Reformed camp was to be the appointment of Wolfgang Musculus (1497–1563) as professor of theology there. A veteran of the Strasbourg Reformation who had worked under Martin Bucer, Musculus was an exegete of some distinction and a theologian who made a number of key contributions to the consolidation of the Reformed identity of Berne as a city.11 First, as something of a protégé of Bucer, he advocated a view of the Lord’s Supper which steered clear of hard-core Zwinglian memorialism and instead sought to follow a middle path whereby the words of institution were not regarded as merely symbolic but, at the same time, Christ’s flesh and blood were not truly present in the Eucharist to the unbeliever. The resulting doctrine attempted to maintain the ecumenical spirit of the Wittenberg Concord. On church-state issues, Musculus’s position was very similar to that of Zurich: that the church was, in effect, an arm of the state. The civil magistrate was obliged to maintain the Reformed religion in the territory over which he had jurisdiction. This meant that he was also responsible for ecclesiastical discipline, church appointments, and was to be actively concerned in the promotion of true godliness. Finally, Musculus’s major theological work, his Loci communes, was one of the first attempts to offer a comprehensive account of Reformed doctrine which, like Melanchthon’s famous work of the same name, proceeded through the heads of doctrine by topical arrangement. The work went through multiple editions across Europe and was translated into both French and English.12

11 On Musculus’s life see Reinhard Bodenmann, Wolfgang Musculus (1497–1563). Destin d’un autodidacte lorrain au siècle des Reformes: étude basée sur la bibliographie établie par son fils, la correspondence personelle et de nombreux autres documents d’époque (Geneva, 2000). On him as theologian and exegete, Jordan J. Ballor, Covenant, Causality, and Law: A Study in the Theology of Wolfgang Musculus (Göttingen, 2012); Craig S. Farmer, The Gospel of John in the Sixteenth Century: The Johannine Exegesis of Wolfgang Musculus (New York, 1997). 12 Benedict, Christ’s Churches, 62.

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Calvin and Geneva There were three key components that shaped the Reformed church in Geneva. The first was the need for military protection from the city of Berne. The second was the role of French immigration into the city in the wake of the expulsion of the Catholic Church and the persecution of Protestants in nearby France. And the third was the specific background and personality of Calvin himself, influenced both by his identity as an exile and by specific experiences such as that of pastoring the church of French exiles in Strasbourg and witnessing the ecclesiastical reforms of Martin Bucer first hand.13 All of these factors would have an impact on Genevan theology. Geneva at the start of the sixteenth century was under the protection of the Catholic House of Savoy. In 1535, in the wake of Protestant agitation instigated by the Frenchmen Guillaume Farel and Pierre Viret, the Genevans broke with Savoy and expelled the Catholic Church from the city. Savoy retaliated by placing the city under siege, and it was at this point that the Bernese provided military support to scatter the enemy troops and lift the military pressure on Geneva. In the aftermath the city voted for reform, and a simplified liturgy was put in place, along with the abolition of the liturgical calendar, the seizure of church property, and plans for the restructuring both of education and of hospitals within the city. The intervention of Berne was critical because it established a relationship of dependence for Geneva upon the more militarily powerful city that was to have a significant effect on the shape of reform. The arrival in the city in 1536 of the French exile John Calvin (1509–1564) was important for both the pace and shape of reform.14 Calvin, a talented humanist convert to the Protestant cause, was the author of a new, brief account of the Christian faith, Institutes of the Christian Religion, a work that was to undergo significant expansion and elaboration in coming years until its final edition in 1559. He was also an interesting figure in the early Reformed movement because of his preference for Luther over Zwingli on the issue of the Lord’s Supper. Zwingli’s memorialism was anathema to him. His own view of the Lord’s Supper was not Lutheran but proved to be a significant mediating position between Zurich and Wittenberg. Even so, 13

On the role of immigration and ethnicity in the progress and shape of the Reformation in Geneva see William G. Naphy, Calvin and the Consolidation of the Genevan Reformation (Louisville, 2003). 14 On Calvin see Bruce Gordon, Calvin (New Haven, 2009).

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Calvin was able to come to a broad agreement on the issue with Bullinger in 1549 when they signed the Consensus Tigurinus. Persuaded to stay by Farel, Calvin was to spend two periods in Geneva. The first, 1536–1538, ended with an ominous clash with the civil magistrates relating to church discipline. He spent much of the next three years in Strasbourg, pastoring the church of French exiles, teaching theology, and expanding the Institutes. In 1541 he was recalled to Geneva to continue the work of Reformation and it is in this second period, lasting until his death in 1564, that he emerged both as a Reformer of European stature and as the central figure in shaping the Genevan Reformation. On arrival back in the city in 1541, Calvin almost immediately proposed a set of ecclesiastical ordinances for the government and liturgy of the church. The modification of these proposals, particularly the rejection of his desire for weekly communion in favor of a quarterly celebration, indicated the need to maintain a church order consistent with that of the Bernese upon whom the Genevans depended for protection. The subsequent years of Calvin’s Genevan period were marked both by theological controversies, most notably that involving the notorious antiTrinitarian heretic Michael Servetus who was executed there in 1553, and by conflicts between the pastors and the civil magistrates. At the heart of the latter were both an ecclesiological and a broader demographic issue. Calvin (influenced by the vision of reform set forth, though not fully realized, by Bucer in Strasbourg) desired a church that could govern its own internal affairs (doctrine, liturgy, ordination, discipline, etc.) without interference from the civil magistrate. The second factor was the French immigrants escaping from persecution and attracted to a city so close to France and where one of the dominant figures was a Frenchman. Struggles between Calvin and his supporters and those he chose rather tendentiously to describe as Libertines tended to run along this ethnic division. Two particular institutions established by Calvin under the terms of the Ecclesiastical Ordinances of 1541 were of note in driving the Genevan Reformation. The first, the Company of Pastors, met every Friday morning to discuss ecclesiastical business and for mutual ministerial encouragement. The second, and more important, was the Consistory, which was made up of the city’s pastors and twelve elders, drawn from the city’s three councils. As a result, it was an ecclesiastical body that was still tightly connected to the civil magistrate, effectively a compromise of Calvin’s true vision of a church free of primary state interference. The Consistory met every Thursday to adjudicate on disciplinary matters. As such, it was both a major context for pastoral 295

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care and also, through its judgments, a somewhat controversial body vis-à-vis the tensions between the French immigrants and the old Genevans.15 Despite his reputation as the religious dictator of Geneva, Calvin’s position in the city was relatively precarious until after the Servetus trial of 1553, which consolidated his position on the European stage, and then the final defeat of the Libertines in 1555. Yet in the reforms in Geneva, and through his commentaries and the various editions of the Institutes, he provided a crucial model both of church life and of theological and exegetical precision that were to influence Reformed thinkers all over Europe. Further, the establishment of the Genevan Academy in 1559 served as a means for the training of pastors who could then return to their homelands, particularly to France, in order to export the Genevan style of Reformation. The first rector of the Academy was the renowned humanist Theodore Beza, who ensured that Geneva remained a major center of intellectual interest to the international Reformed movement after the death of Calvin in 1564.16

Tensions and Compatibility in Swiss Models Zurich, Berne, and Geneva offer three models of reform in the Swiss context. In terms of tensions among them, the most obvious one is that of the way in which the civil magistrate and the church were connected. In both Zurich and Berne the civil magistrate was seen to have ultimate power in both the civil and the ecclesiastical realms. In fact, the church was in essence an arm of the state, with the state providing the legislative and judicial power for the implementation of reform. The Geneva situation was different, in significant part because the ethnic power base of Calvin and his supporters was not found among the old Genevan families who held the franchise and the power in the city. Rather, it derived from the presence of increasing numbers of Protestant refugees from France. Because this group provided a significant part of the skilled workforce and was thus economically significant, Calvin was able to press for a very different kind of reform. Influenced by the Strasbourg reforms of 15

On the work of the Genevan Consistory and the Company of Pastors see Scott M. Manetsch, Calvin’s Company of Pastors: Pastoral Care and the Emerging Reformed Church, 1536–1609 (New York, 2013). The records of the Genevan consistory are available in a critical edition: Registres du Consistoire de Genève au temps de Calvin, 14+ vols., ed. Thomas A. Lambert, Isabella Watt, Robert M. Kingdon, and Jeffrey R. Watt (Geneva, 1996–). 16 On the Genevan Academy see Karin A. Maag, Seminary or University? The Genevan Academy and Reformed Higher Education (Aldershot, 1995).

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Bucer, Calvin’s vision was for a church that had decisive control of its own internal affairs, including the power of excommunication. In the long run, it was to be the Genevan model that came to dominate Reformed ecclesiology. After all, such a model was easier to export into hostile, Catholic territory than one that deferred to, and depended upon, the good will of a Catholic magistrate. Yet as the church-state issue separated Geneva from Zurich and Berne, so the Lord’s Supper offered an opportunity for ecumenical agreement. The Consensus Tigurinus of 1549 brought Zurich, Geneva, and also Berne into agreement on the sacrament. To be sure, the agreement was not an exhaustive one representing a common mind on every detail of eucharistic theology, but it provided a sufficiently broad framework within which both Zwinglian and Calvinistic views could be held while excluding Roman and Lutheran approaches.

Reformed Thought Spreads Abroad England The English Reformation was distinctive in that it arguably started much earlier than the continental movements but then developed intellectually at a much slower pace such that its theology was by and large derivative of continental patterns until the work of William Perkins (1558–1602). The work of John Wycliffe (d. 1384), Oxford don, realist philosopher, sponsor of two vernacular Bible translations, and vigorous critic of both the papacy and transubstantiation, was popularized by his followers, the Lollards. The extent to which Lollardy persisted and was a significant factor in preparing the ground for the English Reformation is debated by scholars, but it is incontestable that at minimum Wycliffe and the Lollards provided a precedent in English life for a strand of antisacramental and anticlerical thinking.17 The major impulse for reform in England in the sixteenth century was initially the marriage woes of the monarch, Henry VIII, whose wife, Katherine of Aragon, had failed to produce a male heir. When attempts to obtain permission from the pope to divorce her failed in the late 1520s, Henry 17 On the extent or otherwise of Lollard influence on the English Reformation, the classic case in favor is that made by Arthur Geoffrey Dickens, The English Reformation (London, 1989). For the case contra see Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c. 1400–c. 1580 (New Haven, 1992).

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broke with the papacy. He himself remained a vigorous Catholic in doctrine, merely without the pope, but his quest to find European allies among Europe’s emerging Protestant powers meant that opportunities for Protestants opened up in England during the late 1520s and throughout the 1530s. Key figures in this were William Tyndale (ca. 1494–1536) and John Frith (1503–1533).18 Tyndale had begun his career as an Erasmian humanist with a commitment to the idea of producing a vernacular translation of the Bible. Though he matriculated at Wittenberg in 1524, his theological work soon took on a far more sacramentarian character than Luther would have tolerated and, in addition, he came to set forth the notion of covenant as a key hermeneutical principle for understanding Scripture. John Frith also started his intellectual life as an Erasmian. His theological corpus is not extensive but is remarkable for a treatise critiquing purgatory and for his work on the Lord’s Supper which drew on the medieval thinker Ratramnus of Corbie to argue for a view of the sacrament that is fundamentally Reformed and arguably anticipates that of Thomas Cranmer (1489–1556).19 The major impact of Reformed theology on the English Reformation came through the waves of exile and return that the changing religious policy of the Crown precipitated. Thus, under Henry VIII in the 1520s, 1530s, and 1540s, many Protestants periodically went abroad to study and to avoid persecution at home. Wittenberg was an early choice, but soon Zurich and Geneva became significant centers of English exile. The same was true during the reign of Mary (1553–1558) when many fled abroad to avoid persecution at the hands of a reinvigorated Catholic monarchy. During the earlier reign of Edward VI (1547–1553), distinguished continental exiles came to England and exerted influence among the Protestants. In this context, the figures of the Pole John Laski (1499–1560), Martin Bucer, and Peter Martyr Vermigli (1499–1562) were the most influential. Indeed, Bucer and Vermigli held the chairs of divinity at Oxford and Cambridge respectively.20 18 On Tyndale’s life see David Daniell, William Tyndale: A Biography (New Haven, 1994); for Frith’s life see the introductory essay by Nicholas Thomas Wright in The Work of John Frith (Appleford, 1978). On their theology see Carl R. Trueman, Luther’s Legacy: Salvation and English Reformers, 1525–1556 (Oxford, 1994). 19 For Cranmer see Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer (New Haven, 1996). Ironically, Cranmer was involved in the prosecution of Frith for holding sacramental views which he himself was later to embrace. 20 On exile churches in London see Andrew Pettegree, Foreign Protestant Communities in Sixteenth-Century London (Oxford, 1986). On the Edwardian Reformation in general see Diarmaid MacCulloch, Tudor Church Militant: Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation (London, 1999).

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This traffic between England and the Continent meant that the English Reformation became something of a battleground between different models or aspects of the reformations that the exiles had witnessed abroad and which gripped their imagination. Perhaps one of the distinctive and interesting results of this was the way in which debates about the aesthetics of worship became central to Reformed thinking in England. Thus, in 1550–1551 a major conflict took place between John Hooper (ca. 1495–1555) and Archbishop Thomas Cranmer and his lieutenant, Nicholas Ridley (ca. 1500–1555), bishop of London, over whether Hooper needed to wear clerical vestments for his consecration as bishop of Gloucester. It is significant that Hooper had spent time in exile in the 1540s in Zurich, and had even lodged at the house of Heinrich Bullinger. Now he wished to import back to England the kind of austere aesthetic simplicity that he felt that the word of God demanded of a truly Protestant church. Hooper eventually conceded defeat and was consecrated in the vestments, but the placing of aesthetics and the notion of what did and did not constitute acceptable worship was placed at the center of English ecclesiastical debates.21 This was only intensified by the presence in England in the early 1550s of the Scottish exile John Knox (ca. 1513–1572), whose rigorous definition of idolatry – anything in worship that was either not prescribed in Scripture or to which a false meaning was attached (the Mass being the epitome of both errors) – led to a clash between him and Cranmer and Ridley over the second edition of the Book of Common Prayer (1552) which required communicants to kneel to receive the sacramental elements. To Knox, this was not stipulated in Scripture, and also implied worship of the bread and wine, which in turn implied transubstantiation.22 These issues came to dominate English Reformed thinking in a manner unprecedented on the Continent. In the 1560s controversy over vestments again erupted as Elizabeth I was attempting to shape the English Reformation on the basis of an Erastian episcopalianism and the Book of Common Prayer. At the heart of the debate was both the model of Reformation which gripped the imagination of the various combatants and also, at a more subtle level, differences over the role of the civil magistrate in determining the discipline and practice of the church. The kind of struggles

21 For an account of the struggle between Hooper and Cranmer, along with its connection to the London Strangers’ Church, see MacCulloch, Cranmer, 471–485. 22 For an account of Knox’s attacks on the second Book of Common Prayer see Jane E. A. Dawson, John Knox (New Haven, 2015), 72–75.

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that Calvin precipitated in Geneva with his push for the church to govern itself find their counterpart in England as returning exiles attempted to do much the same for the English Reformation settlement. What is perhaps most striking is the fact that the Thirty-Nine Articles (1563), which embodied a moderately worded Reformed theology, were not a particular point of contention. It was church practice and civil authority rather than theology proper that proved such a source of controversy and which gave the English appropriation of Reformed thought some of its distinctive emphases, such as the Regulative Principle of worship and a vigorous Sabbatarianism.23 One later point of interest relative to the development of Reformed theology that derives from the fact that the English Crown also governed Ireland was the formulation of the Irish Articles (1615). These were the work of Archbishop James Ussher (1581–1656) and connect to the English context in two ways. First, they represent an attempt by the Church of Ireland to distinguish itself from its English counterpart. Second, by their elaboration of Reformed theology beyond that of the Thirty-Nine Articles, they therefore provided an important source and model for the later Westminster Confession of Faith (1647).24

Scotland The Scottish Reformation took a distinctively different political form to that of its neighbor to the south.25 Where the English Reformation was driven by the policies of the Crown, in Scotland it was the nobility who pressed the cause. Mary, Queen of Scots, the daughter of James V and his second wife, Mary of Guise, was only six days old when her father died. Thus, the government of Scotland passed into the hands of James Hamilton (1516–1575), the earl of Arran, who ruled as regent from 1542 to 1554, and her mother, who ruled from 1554 to 1560. While Arran pursued a policy broadly sympathetic to Protestantism with a view to an alliance with

23

On Elizabethan Puritanism from the perspective of the quest for purity of worship see Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (Berkeley, 1967); also his Stenton Lecture, From Iconoclasm to Iconophobia: The Cultural Impact of the Second English Reformation (Reading, 1986). For an approach to Puritanism focused more upon piety as distinctive see Peter Lake, Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church (Cambridge, 2004). On Puritanism in general see David D. Hall, The Puritans: A Transatlantic History (Princeton, 2019). 24 See Alan Ford, James Ussher: Theology, History, and Politics in Early Modern Ireland and England (Oxford, 2007). 25 On the relationship between England and the Scottish Reformation see Clare Kellar, Scotland, England and the Scottish Reformation 1534–1561 (Oxford, 2003).

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England, Mary of Guise, a French Catholic, saw an alliance with her homeland as the best option.26 Against this broad background, the work of a number of Protestant theologians was of early significance.27 The early call for reformation had come from the Lutheran theologian Patrick Hamilton (1504–1528), who was martyred for his faith. Reformed theology came to prominence with the ministry of George Wishart (ca. 1513–1546), who may have spent time in Zurich, and certainly translated the First Helvetic Confession into English in 1536. His influence was spread through his itinerant preaching until his martyrdom in 1546. Perhaps most significant was the fact that among his retinue was John Knox.28 The key year in the Scottish Reformation is 1560. The death of Mary of Guise passed power in Scotland to James Stewart (1531–1570), the earl of Moray, illegitimate half-brother of Mary, Queen of Scots. He was a supporter of the Reformation and remained a key advisor to the Catholic Mary upon her return to Scotland in 1561. The interplay between a relatively weak monarchy and a relatively strong nobility meant that a Presbyterian system, which rejected concentrating church power in bishops and ultimately in the monarch, was the dominant aspirational model. In 1560 the Scots Confession was produced as the basic theological manifesto of the movement to reform the nation. It was signed by six men, but John Knox was the principal hand behind its composition. The document is interesting because of its assertion of three marks of the kirk (Word, sacraments, and discipline – Calvin had only argued for the first two), its Calvinist view of the Lord’s Supper, and its discussion of election as the election of Christ and not in terms of an eternal decree discriminating between elect and reprobate.29 The dominance of John Knox in the Scottish Reformation meant that Scottish Reformed thought was deeply concerned with purity of worship (idolatry epitomized by Roman sacramental theology and ceremonial was a lifelong preoccupation of Knox) and with the relationship between the civil magistrate and the kirk. Knox’s own experience of seeing England revert to 26 On the general narrative of the Scottish Reformation see Jane E. A. Dawson, Scotland ReFormed 1488–1587 (Edinburgh, 2007). 27 For the origins of the Scottish Reformation see Alec Ryrie, Origins of the Scottish Reformation (Manchester, 2006). 28 On Knox’s life see Dawson, John Knox. 29 See W. Ian P. Hazlitt, “The Scots Confession 1560: Context, Complexion and Critique,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 78 (1987), 287–320.

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Catholicism under Mary Tudor convinced him that a failure to pursue thorough Reformation ran the risk of God bringing judgment down upon a nation. In addition, it raised for him in an acute form the nature of the legitimacy not only of a Catholic monarch but also of a female monarch. The diplomatic disaster and political insanity of his First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (1558) should not blind the reader to its serious questions regarding the conditions for legitimate resistance to a civil magistrate.30 These questions arose specifically because of the ebbing and flowing of the Reformation in England and because of the power structure of the Scottish Reformation which required the Protestant nobility to force through Protestant legislation in opposition to the monarch.31 Indeed, another significant theorist of resistance was the Scotsman George Buchanan (1506–1582), who was appointed tutor to both Mary, Queen of Scots and then, after her exile to England, her son, the future James VI/I. Buchanan, a polymath humanist scholar, wrote De jure regni apud Scotos (1579), which crystallized the idea that power flows from the people to their governors, thus legitimizing their resistance to those who prove tyrannical. Again, the distinctive context of the Scottish Reformation, whereby resistance to an unsympathetic monarch was necessary if the Reformation was to be successful, is important. Knox, Buchanan, and others produced the ideological rationale for this. The fear of ceremonials also became a hallmark of Scottish Presbyterian practice and a source of real political tension in the seventeenth century when James I of England (VI of Scotland) attempted to forge a closer liturgical union between his two kingdoms via the Five Articles of Perth (1618), which affirmed the practice of kneeling at communion (famously abominated by Knox), private baptism, private communion, episcopal confirmation, and the legitimacy of celebrating holy days. This effectively proAnglican, anti-Presbyterian approach was continued by his son, Charles I, whose attempt to impose the Book of Common Prayer in 1637 led to the National Covenant in 1638 and the First and Second Bishops’ Wars.

30

On the controversy that followed the publication of The First Blast see Kenneth D. Farrow, “Theological Controversy in the Wake of John Knox’s First Blast of the Trumpet,” in David George Mullan and Crawford Gribben, eds., Literature and the Scottish Reformation (London, 2016), 111–126. 31 On Knox’s theory of resistance see Roger A. Mason, “Knox, Resistance and the Royal Supremacy,” in Roger A. Mason, ed., Knox and the British Reformations (Aldershot, 1998), 154–175; also Mason’s edition of the relevant Knox texts in Roger A. Mason, ed., Knox: On Rebellion (Cambridge, 1994).

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Resistance to what became seen by many kirk leaders as a distinctively English form of oppression fueled the development of radical Presbyterian thinkers in the 1620s and 1630s. A number of these men – Samuel Rutherford, Robert Baillie, and George Gillespie – became key players in the development of Reformed confessionalism as Scottish delegates to the Westminster Assembly in the 1640s. Their writings exhibit both a concern for Presbyterian polity (over against both episcopalianism and congregationalism), a concern for a church-state link that would enforce Presbyterianism, and a deep suspicion of anything that might smack of Anglican ceremonial. With Rutherford, the justification of rebellion against idolatrous monarchs achieved a level of sophistication that was to prove profoundly influential.32

Poland The Reformation in Poland is significant in the development of Reformed theology because of the peculiar radicalism that it nurtured. Vigorous ecclesiastical and royal opposition to Protestant reform meant that it was not until the late 1540s that the Reformed started to make significant inroads into Polish life, and then as a result of nobles sheltering and encouraging Protestant clergy on their own estates. The overall effect was that Poland, like France, fostered a form of ecclesiology built around a synodal model. In addition, the culture of Polish Reformed theology was deeply shaped by exiles – both Poles who spent time abroad and then returned and those foreigners who came to Poland looking for political shelter.33 Two key figures in this movement were the Italian exile Francesco Stancaro (1501–1574) and the Pole John Laski (1499–1560). Stancaro was a converted Catholic priest who drafted the first church order for the Polish Reformed churches. Yet in later life he started to flirt with anti-Trinitarian views which he came both to embrace and propagate in the late 1550s. Joined in this endeavor by another Italian exile, Giorgio Blandrata, Stancaro enjoyed considerable success, helped in part by the death of Laski, a vigorous opponent. Laski was indeed a firm Trinitarian, but he also represented a strongly biblicist form of Reformed church life. He had spent time in Zurich, where

32

For Rutherford and the rise of politically radical Scottish Presbyterianism see John Coffey, Politics, Religion and the British Revolutions: The Mind of Samuel Rutherford (Cambridge, 1997). 33 On the Reformation in Poland see Ambroise Jobert, De Luther à Mohila. La Pologne dans la crise de la Chrétienne 1517–1648 (Paris, 1974).

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he had met Zwingli; had lodged at the house of Erasmus in Basel, where he also attended the lectures of Oecolampadius; became superintendent of the church in Emden; and, during the reign of Edward VI, had organized a Strangers’ Church in England which had been the envy of domestic radicals such as Hooper and Knox because of its austere application of the Bible to worship. Then, in Poland, he had helped to mastermind the growth of the Polish Reformed church through his talent for ecclesiastical organization. His Forma ac ratio (1554) was the church order for the London Strangers’ Church and drew on institutions that had first been developed under Bucer in Strasbourg and Calvin in Geneva. In Poland, Laski was adept at organizing weekly ministerial meetings and periodic synods, and also at coordinating Protestant efforts at expansion.34 While he was, as noted, an opponent of Stancaro’s anti-Trinitarianism, Laski was also a thoroughgoing biblicist and opposed the formulation of a specific ecclesiastical confession. While this was in part driven by the ecumenical desire to keep the Reformed church as broad as possible, it was also to prove no real defense to the growing wave of anti-Trinitarianism in the Polish church. The ferocity of the struggle within the Polish church over the Trinity culminated in a law of 1564 that prescribed the expulsion of anti-Trinitarians from Poland, which had the consequence of driving many clergy who had embraced Stancaro’s teaching to form their own synod in 1565, thus formally dividing the Polish Reformed church. The resulting Minor Reformed Church of Poland became one of the key historical ancestors of the modern Unitarian movement, and ensured that Poland would be fertile ground for the nascent Socinianism. The major Socinian confession/catechism was the Racovian Catechism, authorized by the Minor Reformed Church and published at Cracow in 1605.35 The split in Poland’s Reformed community greatly weakened the Protestant cause there, but also had important ecumenical results. The orthodox tended on the whole to see other Trinitarian traditions, such as the Lutherans, in a more positive light, to adopt a less polemical and more meditative form of piety, and to forge closer links with the Swiss Reformed churches. Thus, the Second Helvetic Confession was accepted as a

34 Benedict, Christ’s Churches, 70. On the Forma ac ratio see Michael S. Springer, Restoring Christ’s Church: John a Lasco and the Forma ac Ratio (Aldershot, 2007). 35 One older but still very useful account of anti-Trinitarianism in the Polish context is George Huntston Williams, The Radical Reformation (Kirksville, 1992).

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confessional standard, and help in the struggle against the anti-Trinitarians was received from luminaries such as Theodore Beza.36

The Netherlands The Reformation in the Netherlands was one of the longest in Europe. It started early: by 1521 Albrecht Dürer was already in possession of a copy of Luther’s 1520 treatise On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church. The territory had been prepared for Reformation by the work of such men as Cornelis Hoen of Delft (who was to be instrumental in Zwingli’s development of his symbolic understanding of the Eucharist). Then, in the 1520s and 1530s, both Lutheranism and Anabaptism made significant inroads into Dutch religious life.37 These two traditions – Lutheranism and Anabaptism – were far more dominant in the first half of the sixteenth century than any Reformed voices might have been. Thus, the anti-heresy moves made against Protestantism at this time were primarily targeted at them. The Netherlands was ruled directly by the Habsburgs and so Charles V was able to exert authority in the suppression of heresy in a way that had proved impossible, for example, in Saxony. Thus, assaults against Protestant heresy began early: the first pronouncement against Lutheranism in the Netherlands was in 1520. Reformed influence was eventually to develop as a result of this suppression via the phenomena of exile churches, especially in England and in Emden. This meant that perhaps the most significant single individual in the early formation of the Dutch Reformed world was the Polish Reformer John Laski, who exerted significant influence among the exile communities in these two places. Further, the London exile church was the point of origin for Reformed churches in both Zeeland and West Flanders. Calvin’s Geneva, by way of contrast, seems to have played a minimal direct role in the establishment of a Dutch Reformed movement.38 By 1555 Reformed congregations were forming in Antwerp. Persecution, of course, creates a need for developing a church structure that minimizes overall risk to a movement, and so the Antwerp church was divided into 36

On the connections between Geneva and the Polish Reformation see Nancy Marilyn Conradt, “John Calvin, Theodore Beza and the Reformation in Poland” (PhD dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1980). 37 On the long Dutch Reformation see Alastair C. Duke, Reformation and Revolt in the Low Countries (London, 1990). 38 On Emden see Andrew Pettegree, Emden and the Dutch Revolt: Exile and the Development of Reformed Protestantism (Oxford, 1992).

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numerous congregations, a structural reality which established basic affinities between Dutch ecclesiology and the kind of Presbyterian or synodal structures that marked the churches in France and Scotland. Indeed, this was further reinforced by the rapid success of the Huguenots in the late 1550s and early 1560s that spread to the French-speaking Walloons in the Low Countries. Theological and confessional expression was given to Dutch Reformed theology by the work of Guillaume DeBray. DeBray had studied at both Geneva and Lausanne and in 1561 published what is now known as the Belgic Confession. Loosely based upon the French Confession of 1559, it is a clear statement of Reformed theology from a Calvinist perspective. Perhaps its distinctiveness lies in the amount of space devoted to refuting both Lutheran and Anabaptist views of the sacraments, a function of the fact that these two groups were prominent among the Protestants in the Netherlands in a way that was not true for, say, Scotland or France. The Belgic Confession was adopted by the churches in Atwerp as the doctrinal standard of church membership in 1563.39 In addition to the slow but steady growth of the Reformed churches in the Netherlands, political opposition to the Habsburgs was also developing, and in 1566 a group of nobles issued a petition calling for freedom of conscience and the abolition of the Inquisition. This led to the granting of freedom of conscience in matters of religion, but the ban on public worship outside the Catholic Church remained in place. This raised significant questions in the Dutch Reformed world. Freedom of conscience for Anabaptists was not something the Reformed wanted; yet the ban on true worship was also equally obnoxious. Thus, questions of the relationship of church to state, and of the legitimacy and extent of resistance to the civil magistrate, became pressing. This was especially so when 1566 also saw the widespread outbreak of iconoclasm, in part the result of the return of many preachers from exile churches. The years after 1566 were marked by further Spanish repression of the Protestant cause in general, but this served merely to alienate more elements of the population and to press the Reformed church to consolidate yet further. Important acts in this latter regard were synods at Wesel in 1568 and Emden in 1571. At these, Genevan and French influence on the Dutch church became explicit, with the adoption of Calvin’s ministerial 39

On DeBray and the origins, theology, and historical significance of the Belgic Confession see Nichola H. Gootjes, The Belgic Confession: Its History and Sources (Grand Rapids, 2007).

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orders and the expressed intention to organize the church along synodal lines, with regular meetings of classes and synods. In addition, local consistories were given the power of exercising discipline with regard to church membership and participation at communion. A key moment in the Dutch Reformed movement came in 1573, when William I (1533–1584), the Prince of Orange, joined the Reformed church. This was in the wake of a remarkable rebellion against Catholic rule that had swept the state of Holland in 1572–1573 and outlawed Catholicism. Yet, while the Reformed now enjoyed some influence and authority, there were external and internal challenges. Externally, as the threat of decisive Spanish intervention receded in the 1570s, so the need for towns to maintain vigorous anti-Catholic policies declined, and with this so did the need for Reformed Christianity as an expression of anti-Spanish sentiment.40 Internally, the Dutch Reformed church was facing all of the typical challenges of a Reformation church: the relationship between church and state, the legitimacy and extent of resistance to the magistrate, and the authority and role of synods. The stage was set, politically and theologically, for a major internal church crisis, and this was provided by the clash between the Remonstrants and the Counter-Remonstrants in the early seventeenth century.

France At the start of the sixteenth century France had numerous characteristics that would have suggested potential fertile soil for Reformation. Protestantism could have become a perfect idiom for the consolidation and continuation of the nation’s strong, centralized monarchy and history of independence from both papacy and empire. In fact, as we now know, the opposite was to be the case, and France was to prove a nation where Catholicism exerted a powerful grip on political power and where the Protestant church underwent significant persecution, a point of importance relative to the kind of Reformed church that was to develop there. The French Reformed church was always to be regarded as a dangerous, seditious entity within France, and thus marginalization and persecution were central to its identity.41 40 On the role of William of Orange see Koenraad Wolter Swart, William of Orange and the Revolt of the Netherlands 1572–84, ed. Raymond Paulus Fagel, Marianne E. H. N. Mout, and Henk F. K. Van Nierop, trans. Joy C. Grayson (Aldershot, 2003). 41 On the French Reformation see Mark Greengrass, The French Reformation (Oxford, 1987); also Denis Crouzet, La genèse de la Réforme française, 1520–1560 (Paris, 1996).

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Luther’s thought made an early impact in Paris where it met with a favorable reception amongst an intellectual elite already schooled in humanism. Indeed, in the 1520s the University of Paris was divided between the followers of the Erasmian champion of the new learning Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples and the strong traditionalist faction led by Noel Beda. Yet it was the latter faction that eventually triumphed, aided in large part by the capture of Francis I by the emperor at the battle of Pavia in 1525. In his absence, his regent mother Louise de Savoie and the Parlement of Paris enacted antiheresy measures. This was fueled in the minds of Beda and company by the close identification of humanist learning with Lutheran heresy.42 The year 1525 was a harbinger of what was to be, with only occasional interruption, the monarchy’s rigorous pro-Catholic, anti-Protestant policy. This was effectively codified in 1543 when professors at the Sorbonne, at the request of Francis I, drew up a series of articles that defined Christian orthodoxy in strongly Catholic terms. Indeed, royal policy served to create a fundamentally hostile environment within France for the Reformed cause. Among the early advocates of the Reformed faith in France was Guillaume Farel (1489–1565). Part of Lefèvre d’Étaples’ circle, a period of exile in Switzerland exposed him to Zwinglianism and he moved in a more radically Reformed direction. His Summary and Brief Declaration of the Faith (1529) was perhaps the most significant statement of the Reformed faith in the French language before the rise of Calvin.43 Calvin and Geneva were, of course, huge influences on the shape of French Protestantism. From the 1530s to the 1550s much of the Reformed activity in France operated at a relatively informal level involving gatherings in houses for prayer and Bible reading. As Calvin emerged as a figure of European stature in the mid-1550s, at the same time as his position in Geneva also became much more secure, so his influence in France grew. In part this was because of his ethnic and linguistic connection, along with the proximity of Geneva to the French border. But it was also in part ecclesiological. Calvin’s ecclesiology was peculiarly suited to establishing churches in hostile territory precisely because it did not require the assistance or support of the civil magistrate, as did the models in Zurich and Berne. Thus, French Reformed churches tended to copy the Genevan model, with frequent

42 On Lefèvre d’Étaples see Guy Bedouelle, Lefèvre d’Étaples et l’intelligence des écritures (Geneva, 1976). 43 See Jason Zuidema, Early French Reform: The Theology and Spirituality of Guillaume Farel (Farnham, 2011).

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celebrations of the Lord’s Supper, pastors elected by the church, and a consistory to oversee matters of liturgy and discipline.44 This Genevan influence intensified in the late 1550s and early 1560s when the militantly Catholic Henry II died in a jousting accident, to be succeeded first by the fifteen-year-old Francis II, and then, fifteen months later, by the ten-year-old Charles IX. This rapid succession of child-kings left France temporarily without a strong central monarchy and thus opened the way for the growth of the Reformed churches. Many Genevan-trained French pastors returned and took calls in their homeland. A first national synod was held in 1559 at which the parity of all congregations was established, eschewing the Swiss/Genevan notion of the superiority of urban churches over rural ones. This indicates that, although Geneva was a dominant model, it was not simply replicated in the French context. Persecution and suspicion fueled its marginal state, and that in turn pressed toward a more diffuse, congregational polity.45

The Rise of Reformed Orthodoxy As the Reformed churches gained political power in parts of Europe, and as they were required to respond to the Catholic Reformation, especially as embodied in the decrees of the Council of Trent, they began to consolidate their theology. There was an internal dynamic at play here, whereby they became increasingly self-conscious about the conceptual foundations and the elaborate interconnection of various doctrines. But there were also external, material factors in play, specifically the university context in which theology was taught and where future theologians and pastors were trained.

Heidelberg Heidelberg provided a critical context for the development of Reformed orthodoxy as embodied in the Heidelberg Catechism. The university was founded in 1386, but when the Palatinate sided with the Lutherans it became a Protestant institution. By 1560 the faculty consisted of representatives of 44

For the relationship between Geneva and the French Reformation see Robert M. Kingdon, Geneva and the Coming of the Wars of Religion in France, 1555–1563, rev. ed. (Geneva, 2007); for the post-Calvin period see Scott M. Manetsch, Theodore Beza and the Quest for Peace in France, 1572–1598 (Leiden, 2000). For the connection between the Genevan Academy and the training of French pastors see Maag, Seminary or University? 45 For the influence of Geneva on French Reformed ecclesiology see Robert M. Kingdon, Geneva and the Consolidation of the French Protestant Movement, 1564–1572: A Contribution to the History of Congregationalism, Presbyterianism, and Calvinist Resistance Theory (Madison, 1967).

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both Gnesio- and Philippist Lutheran traditions as well as Reformed theologians. A further complicating factor was the elector of the Palatinate, Frederick III, who, raised Roman Catholic, had turned to Lutheranism under the influence of his wife. By the early 1560s he had developed distinctly Reformed sympathies to the point that he was allowed to subscribe the Augsburg Confession variata at the Naumburg Princes’ Conference in 1561. Then, serious debates at the university over the Lord’s Supper led to the expulsion of the leading Gnesio-Lutheran Tilemann Heshusius (1527–1588) in late 1562. This dramatically weakened the position not only of the Gnesios but also of the Philippists, given that the dominant Heidelberg theologian was now the talented Reformed thinker Zacharias Ursinus (1534–1583).46 By early 1562 the elector had become clearly Reformed and, wishing to forge an alliance between the Reformed and the Philippists in Heidelberg, as well as to provide both an educational tool and a doctrinal standard for teaching and preaching in the Palatinate, he commissioned the production of a catechism. The result, the Heidelberg Catechism, represents one of the key confessional documents for subsequent Reformed thinking, especially in the continental Reformed tradition. The principal author appears to have been Zacharias Ursinus, who also wrote the most influential commentary on the Catechism. It is both pastoral in tone, working questions and answers in the second and first persons, and reflective of the theological politics of Heidelberg in the early 1560s. Thus, the doctrine of predestination – a point of contention between the Reformed and the Philippists – is entirely absent from the theological topics treated in the Catechism.47 However, Heidelberg’s religious policy was inevitably determined by the commitments of its prince, and therefore subject to the preferences of each elector. Therefore, upon the succession of Frederick’s strict Lutheran son, Louis (Ludwig) IV to the position of elector palatine in 1576, the university was purged of its Reformed faculty and Lutheranism was reasserted as the official confessional position. Reformed theologians returned to Heidelberg after Ludwig’s death in 1583, and included such luminaries as David Pareus (1548–1622), Bartholomäus Keckermann (1572–1608), and Heinrich Alting (1583–1644). 46

For the history surrounding the composition of the Heidelberg Catechism see the essays in Karla Apperloo-Boersma and Herman J. Selderhuis, eds., The Power of Faith: 450 Years of the Heidelberg Catechism (Göttingen, 2013). 47 On the theology of the Catechism and its ecumenical purpose see Lyle D. Bierma, The Theology of the Heidelberg Catechism: A Reformation Synthesis (Louisville, 2013).

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The Heidelberg Catechism enjoyed a life far beyond its original point of geographical origin and local purpose. It was affirmed at the synods of Wesel (1568), Emden (1571), Dort (1578), and Den Haag (1586), and then adopted as one of the three fundamental confessional documents (along with the Belgic Confession and the Canons of Dort) at the Synod of Dort in 1618–1619.

Herborn The Herborn Academy was founded in 1586. Among its early distinguished faculty were Johannes Althusius (1563–1638), Reformed jurist and legal philosopher, and theologians Caspar Olevianus (1536–1587), who had previously served in Heidelberg under Frederick III, Johann Fischer (Piscator) (1546–1625), who also translated the Bible into German as a Reformed alternative to Luther’s version, and Johann Heinrich Alsted (1588–1638), a Reformed philosopher and theologian.48 Alsted in particular reflected the eclectic intellectual culture of the Academy, with interests not only in theology but also in developments in logic, specifically the work of Peter Ramus. Piscator too had used Ramus, and the Academy thus played an important role in the development of theological method. Ramism did not overthrow the foundational status of the Aristotelian syllogism but offered a simplified logic and also a diagrammatic way of dividing topics and indicating their logical relations. This was to be a useful tool that was widely used by Reformed theologians, although not without controversy. Alsted also connected his Ramism to Lullist theories of memory. The diagrammatic depiction of topics in relation to each other to which Ramism lent itself was an important pedagogical tool and connected to another of Alsted’s concerns: encyclopedism.49 Alsted was one of the most notable early encyclopedists, publishing two editions of his encyclopedia (1610, 1630). This did more than just provide a series of articles on topics. Rather, it attempted to present a comprehensive account of human knowledge which sought to show the interconnectedness of all knowledge and its ultimate foundation in the teaching of the Holy Scriptures. In short, Alsted was trying to articulate a comprehensive view of the world that found its unity in Reformed theology. 48 A good history of the Herborn Academy is Gerhard Menk, Die Hohe Schule Herborn in ihrer Frühzeit (1584–1660): Ein Beitrag zum Hochschulwesen des deutschen Kalvinismus im Zeitalter der Gegenreformation (Wiesbaden, 1981). 49 On Alsted, Ramism, and encyclopedism see Howard Hotson, Johann Heinrich Alsted, 1588–1638: Between Renaissance, Reformation, and Universal Reform (Oxford, 2000).

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This was an important development because it embodied the growing Protestant ambition to offer a scheme of knowledge that was as comprehensive as that found in the medieval university system, which could clearly not be supplanted until something equally comprehensive was found to replace it. Thus, the work of Althusius can also be seen as a significant part of this project: setting legal theory within the context of Reformed theology.

Leiden With the moves toward establishing the Dutch Republic in the early 1570s, one obvious lacuna was the absence of a Protestant institution of higher learning both for the training of ministers and, perhaps more importantly, for the consolidation of a Protestant intellectual culture. Thus in 1575 William of Orange founded the University of Leiden, which was, by the latter part of the seventeenth century, to become the largest Protestant university in Europe.50 Leiden was to provide an important context both for the development of Reformed orthodoxy and for the fostering of tensions at a theological and intellectual level that reflected the wider struggles within the political and social life of the early Dutch Republic. What is clear from the debates and controversies that racked the university at the beginning of the seventeenth century is that Reformed theology in its confessional form, as that which would ultimately triumph over its opponents at the Synod of Dort, was far from universally accepted either in Dutch society in general or in intellectual circles in particular. Indeed, the success of the Reformed faith in the Dutch Republic seems often to have been connected to the perception of the threat from Spain. At times when Spain seemed particularly dangerous, the Reformed faith was strong. When Spain seemed less of a threat, the lack of depth of penetration of the Reformed faith into Dutch society became more obvious. Leiden University was from the outset an institution that attracted powerful intellects. Thus, the early faculty included impeccably orthodox figures such as Francis Junius (1545–1602) along with the former student of Beza, Jacob Arminius (1560–1609). In the seventeenth century both the eminent theologian and jurist Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) and the classicist and theologian Gerard Vossius (1577–1649) served on the faculty. Thus, Leiden University proved critical in the formation of Dutch Protestant culture in

50 On the intellectual culture of Leiden University in the seventeenth century see the essays in Theodoor H. Lunsingh Scheurlee and Guillaume H. M. Posthumus Meyjes, eds., Leiden University in the Seventeenth Century: An Exchange of Learning (Leiden, 1975).

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the first century of the republic. It also exhibited many of the tensions within the emerging political context. Of particular significance in this regard was the controversy surrounding the appointment of Arminius’s successor. Arminius himself had been appointed professor at Leiden in 1603, with the support of Francis Gomarus (1563–1641). Soon thereafter, however, disagreements between the two men had emerged after a university disputation on the matter of predestination. This controversy both expanded beyond the bounds of the university and grew in intensity until Arminius’s death in 1609. The choice of his successor, the German theologian Conrad Vorstius (1569–1622), proved a major point of contention. Vorstius was supported by the Remonstrant party at Leiden and in the wider Dutch Republic but opposed by those Counter-Remonstrants who considered him not simply a devotee of Arminius’s system but also a man of Socinian sympathies. Eventually, Vorstius was dismissed in 1612, having become an international cause célèbre, with even James I of England opining on what he regarded as the man’s heresy.51 Significantly, the controversy also provided the context for discussion of the role of church and state in university appointments, with Grotius defending the right of the secular authorities to act in such appointments without reference to ecclesiastical bodies. Thus, Vorstius and Leiden provided an important test case in the process that would eventually lead to the secular independence of universities. In the mid-seventeenth century Leiden also provided a base for Johannes Cocceius (1603–1669), who was instrumental in the development of theology in terms of God’s successive covenants with his people. This approach was to have great impact across Europe and also to offer a means of structuring theology that was different to the more synthetic and systematic ordering associated with the great summas of the Middle Ages and which had been developed within other realms of Protestant higher education.52

Utrecht The University of Utrecht was founded in 1636, and thus after the major turmoil of the first fifty years of the Dutch Republic. The dominant figure for the first generation of students was that of Gisbertus Voetius (1589–1676), 51 See Frederick Shriver, “Orthodoxy and Diplomacy: James I and the Vorstius Affair,” English Historical Review 85 (1970), 449–474. 52 On Cocceius, his theology, and his significance for the development of Reformed life and thought see Willem J. Van Asselt, The Federal Theology of Johannes Cocceius (1603–1669) (Leiden, 2001).

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who had trained at Leiden and was both a vigorous advocate of Reformed orthodoxy in the line of Dort and committed to a fundamentally Aristotelian metaphysics, a matter which was to be of significance given the inroads of Cartesianism into Utrecht during his tenure as rector.53 In addition, Voetius was a representative of the Scholastic method of theology. Scholasticism was not in itself a metaphysic but rather a traditional means of analyzing and teaching theological topics. Yet Voetius also represented the kind of fusion of rigorous theology and practical piety that one finds in some strands of English Puritanism. Deeply influenced by works of practical divinity, such as Lewis Bayly’s The Practice of Piety, Voetius fostered at Utrecht a combination of Scholastic theology and concern for personal godliness and works of practical Christian charity that helped pave the way for the Dutch Nadere Reformatie, or Second Reformation, which was in many ways the Netherlands’ counterpart to English Puritanism.54

Cambridge The University of Cambridge proved a crucial context for the development of both English Reformed theology and indeed that of the Continent. The university had been the crucible for emerging theological tensions within Anglicanism in the late sixteenth century. The Huguenot minister Peter Baro (1534–1599), fellow of Trinity and Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity, had been an increasingly vehement critic of Reformed views of predestination and perseverance since the 1580s, culminating in an open attack on the Lambeth Articles in 1596. Baro was representative of a growing party within Anglicanism that rejected the dominant Reformed understanding of grace.55 The struggles surrounding Baro were a harbinger of the debates to come within Anglicanism in the early seventeenth century. The Reformed wing of subsequent discussions drew most of their strength from men who had studied at the University of Cambridge, where the impact of a number of key personalities was important. For example, the incredibly long-lived Laurence Chaderton (1536–1640) was a leading figure for several generations. Chaderton came to prominence as a moderate Puritan during the reign of 53 Benedict, Christ’s Churches, 332. On Voetius’s thought see the introduction to De Scholastieke Voetius: Een luisteroefening aan de had van Voetius’ Disputationes Selectae, ed. and introd. Willem J. van Asselt and Eef Dekker (Zoetermeer, 1995). 54 See Joel R. Beeke, Gisbertus Voetius: Toward a Reformed Marriage of Knowledge and Piety (Grand Rapids, 1999). 55 On the Baro affair see Dewey D. Wallace, Puritans and Predestination: Grace in English Protestant Theology, 1525–1695 (Chapel Hill, 1982), 65–73.

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Elizabeth, was one of the four Puritan representatives at the Hampton Court Conference in 1604 that was called by James I, and lived almost long enough to witness the calling of the Westminster Assembly in 1643.56 More than Chaderton, however, the key figure in shaping English Reformed culture was William Perkins (1558–1602) of Christ’s College. Perkins was arguably the first theologian of international stature that Protestant England produced. His thought was representative of the emerging Reformed orthodoxy of the Continent, but also exhibited the distinctive English (and to some extent Dutch) Puritan concern with religious experience. His works used the organizational principles of Ramism to give elaborate expression to the Reformed faith. His publications were wide and varied, covering topics as diverse as assurance, predestination, witchcraft, and preaching. Perkins’s works proved tremendously popular in both England and the Low Countries, being a significant motive force in creating the Anglo-Dutch book trade.57 Perkins’s mantle was taken up, and his international appeal emulated, by William Ames (1576–1633), another Christ’s College man who later taught at Franeker in the Netherlands. Ames’s work again covered a wide spectrum of issues, from pastoral casuistry to systematic theology. Like Perkins, he utilized Ramist structures to articulate his theology. He also debated key continental theologians such as the Jesuit Robert Bellarmine and the Protestants Nicholas Grevinchovius and Simon Episcopius.58 The Puritan theology that emerged from Cambridge was part of the broader Reformed orthodoxy of the Continent, in large part because the questions being addressed and the sources being read were much the same. The debates in which Perkins, Ames, and their followers engaged were of European significance and did not respect national borders. They were part of an international dialogue and discussion concerning theology. In addition, the university curricular context was that of the Middle Ages, modified through the impact of Renaissance concerns. Hence, logic was simplified and rhetoric played a more significant role. But in terms of foundational metaphysical assumptions, little of substance was actually changed.59 56

On Chaderton and his influence see Lake, Moderate Puritans. See Cornelis W. Schoneveld, Intertraffic of the Mind: Studies in Seventeenth-Century Anglo-Dutch Translation with a Checklist of Books Translated from English into Dutch, 1600–1700 (Leiden, 1983); also Keith L. Sprunger, Trumpets from the Tower: English Puritan Printing in the Netherlands, 1600–1640 (Leiden, 1994). 58 See Keith L. Sprunger, The Learned Doctor William Ames: Dutch Backgrounds of English and American Puritanism (Urbana, 1972). 59 See William T. Costello, SJ, The Scholastic Curriculum at Early Seventeenth-Century Cambridge (Cambridge, 1958). 57

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Arminianism and its Challenge: The Synod of Dort The most obvious aspects of the Remonstrant–Counter-Remonstrant conflict in the Netherlands were theological. Shortly after his appointment as professor in Leiden in 1603 Jacob Arminius had raised questions about the strict forms of predestination advocated by his teacher, Theodore Beza, and triggered a controversy which continued beyond his death in 1609 until the Synod of Dort resolved the doctrinal debate in the Counter-Remonstrants’ favor in 1619. Nevertheless, the theological debate was played out against the background of internal political struggles and foreign policy conflicts.60 In 1610 the leading Remonstrant minister Johannes Uytenbogaert (1557–1664) drafted a Remonstrance, signed by forty-four ministers, which challenged Reformed orthodoxy on issues such as predestination, atonement, and perseverance. This precipitated a response in 1611 from the orthodox, led by Francis Gomarus. Johan van Oldebarneveldt (1547–1619), the longstanding Land’s Advocate of Holland, gave support to the Remonstrants and refused to act to suppress them. Although the Remonstrant party represented only a minority of ministers, they enjoyed considerable influence among the regents who, anxious not to foster religious strife, tended to pursue a policy of religious toleration.61 In some minds the Remonstrant cause came to be increasingly identified with a compromised foreign policy. Theologically, Arminianism could look dangerously close to advocating a form of justification by works, and certainly its tendency toward a relaxed attitude to doctrinal precision made it ecumenically more open. Further, the failure of Oldebarneveldt to provide strong leadership against resurgent Spanish aggression did not serve his cause well. His failure in 1614 to stop the Spanish seizing Wesel, a city that was a constant focus of attention in the Eighty Years War, seriously damaged his reputation as a strong leader with Dutch interests at heart. In addition, his earlier failure to act to suspend Vorstius at Leiden also confirmed suspicions that he was sympathetic to heterodoxy. The matter was prosecuted through a brutal pamphlet war from 1613 to 1618. One of the intriguing things about the conflict is that it seems to have polarized Dutch society in a dramatic way that showed no respect for typical ethnic or class divisions. It was a passionate debate that affected all, from the 60 On Arminius’s life see Carl Bangs, Arminius: A Study in the Dutch Reformation (Nashville, 1971); Keith D. Stanglin and Thomas H. McCall, Jacob Arminius: Theologian of Grace (New York, 2012). 61 For a narrative account of the conflict see Jonathan I. Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall, 1477–1806 (Oxford, 1998), 421–449.

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humblest bargeman to the most elite of the political class. As such, it could not continue indefinitely and thus culminated in the purging of proRemonstrant regents in the summer of 1618. In the aftermath, Oldebarneveldt, Grotius, and other leading figures of the Remonstrant movement were arrested and tried. Oldebarneveldt was sentenced to death and executed in 1619. Grotius was more fortunate. Sentenced to life imprisonment, he escaped after two years and fled to Paris, where he was to spend much of his remaining career. The political purge paved the way for the summoning of a synod in Dordrecht (Dort) in November 1618. The Synod of Dort was an international gathering, with delegates from across Reformed Europe, including England and Scotland. It was also a carefully stage-managed affair, with the result assured before the first session was called to order, given its large CounterRemonstrant majority. It was, in effect, the ecclesiastical application of the political triumph that had already been accomplished.62 The Canons of Dort proved an important theological document, becoming one of the confessional standards of the continental Reformed churches. Most notably they enshrined a moderate form of Calvinism, favoring the infralapsarian position (and thus rejecting the supralapsarianism of Gomarus) and also advocating universal salvation for children dying in infancy. Yet the decisive rejection of Arminianism that the canons represented did not fundamentally abolish the division within Dutch society that the debate had constituted. The Reformed remained acutely aware of their weak hold on society at large. This played a significant role in their response to Cartesianism and Spinozism in the middle of the seventeenth century.

Orthodox Responses to Descartes and Spinoza Descartes and, to an extent, Spinoza posed challenges to the Reformed faith because of their basic rejection of the varieties of Aristotelian metaphysics that underlay the Reformed faith as it found expression in the context of the early modern university. Those metaphysical and epistemological challenges inevitably connected to broader issues of church and society.63 62 In the absence of a good history of the synod, the best work in English on the topic is Anthony Milton, The British Delegation and the Synod of Dort (1618–1619) (Woodbridge, 2005), which contains both an introduction and the relevant texts in Latin. 63 On the general intellectual transformation which Descartes, Spinzoa, and company brought in in their wake see Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (Oxford, 2002).

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In the Netherlands the great champion of orthodoxy in its fight with the early Enlightenment was Gisbertus Voetius. Cartesian ideas started to have an impact upon students at the University of Utrecht in the late 1630s via members of the philosophy faculty and then spread to the medical faculty. The resulting faculty strife led to a ban on any discussion of Descartes at all, although this did not stop the dispute also penetrating the University of Leiden.64 Geneva proved a somewhat different case. Certainly Francis Turretin (1623–1687), the champion of Reformed orthodoxy in the city in the seventeenth century, was aware of both Descartes and Spinoza and a vigorous opponent of both, as is evidenced by the polemical engagement with both in his major theological textbook, Institutio Theologiae Elencticae (1679–1685). Yet his son, Jean Alphonse Turretin (1671–1737), was a more mediating figure, adopting a much less clearly defined stance against Enlightenment thought.65 In England the situation was even more complicated. The ecclesiastical fragmentation involved in the English Civil War and the Commonwealth and Protectorate was followed by the vigorous reassertion of the Anglican state church at the Restoration of 1660. This in turn was reinforced in the early 1660s by a series of parliamentary acts that excluded nonconformists from the universities. This effectively cut Reformed theology out of the context in which it had developed, that of the university curriculum, and deprived it of the opportunities and resources for engaging early Enlightenment thinking. Those who did so in any depth, for example Richard Baxter (1615–1691), tended to be rather deviant on key elements of Reformed theology, such as justification and even Trinitarianism.66 The fate of such engagement in these three contexts represents the different status of the Reformed faith in each place. In the Netherlands, once the threat of Spain had subsided and Arminianism had gained a foothold, the Reformed church was constantly aware of its slender grip on political power and the popular imagination. This heightened the fear of anything that might 64

On the Cartesian problem in the Netherlands see Aza Goudriaan, Reformed Orthodoxy and Philosophy, 1625–1750: Gisbertus Voetius, Petrus van Mastricht, and Anthonius Driessen (Leiden, 2006). 65 On the impact of the Enlightenment on Geneva see Martin I. Klauber, Between Reformed Scholasticism and Pan-Protestantism: Jean-Alphonse Turretin (1671–1737) and Enlightened Orthodoxy at the Academy of Geneva (Selinsgrove, 1994); Jennifer Powell McNutt, Calvin Meets Voltaire: The Clergy of Geneva in the Age of Enlightenment, 1685–1798 (London, 2014). 66 For the story of the collapse of orthodoxy in England told with reference to the doctrine of the Trinity see Paul C. H. Lim, Mystery Unveiled: The Crisis of the Trinity in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2012).

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be seen to erode its intellectual foundations. Geneva may well have had a vigorously orthodox intellectual leader in Francis Turretin, but Reformed theology was not so tied into a difficult political situation and thus ultimately more open to change. England, of course, had its own very distinctive history whereby, in one fell swoop, the Reformed were basically deprived of access to the university context and the way opened up for the empiricist impulses of which Locke and Newton were to be the grand masters.

Conclusion As stated at the start, the Reformed faith and the churches that nurtured it were not monochrome across Europe. While Switzerland, especially Zurich and Geneva, provided a number of archetypal patterns of church life, of church-state relations, of worship practices, and of theological emphases, these models were transformed as they spread across Europe. Thus, in England and Scotland the aesthetics of worship became central themes as the Crown sought to impose its will first on England and then on the two kingdoms of England and Scotland. In France persecution and political suspicion served to make the church a marginal element in society, subject to regular periods of persecution that served to shape its appropriation of Genevan polity. Then, in the Netherlands the relatively precarious power of the Reformed church relative first to Spain and then to the Remonstrant cause served as a crucible first for ferocious theological conflict among the orthodox and then for equally bitter engagement with the thinking of Descartes and Spinoza. What is clear is that Reformed theology simply cannot be abstracted from the historical contexts in which it occurred. They gave it shape, they determined its priorities, and finally they ensured its demise. bibliography Benedict, Philip. Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed: A Social History of Calvinism. New Haven, 2002. Dawson, Jane E. A. John Knox. New Haven, 2015. Duke, Alastair C. Reformation and Revolt in the Low Countries. London, 1990. Duffy, Eamon. The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c. 1400–c. 1580. New Haven, 1992. Eire, Carlos. War against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin. Cambridge, 2003. Gordon, Bruce. Calvin. New Haven, 2009. Hall, David D. The Puritans: A Transatlantic History. Princeton, 2019.

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carl r. trueman Kingdon, Robert M. Geneva and the Coming of the Wars of Religion in France, 1555–1563, rev. ed. Geneva, 2007. Lim, Paul C. H. Mystery Unveiled: The Crisis of the Trinity in Early Modern England. Oxford, 2012. Manetsch, Scott M. Calvin’s Company of Pastors: Pastoral Care and the Emerging Reformed Church, 1536–1609. New York, 2013. Naphy, William G. Calvin and the Consolidation of the Genevan Reformation. Louisville, 2003. Wallace, Dewey D. Puritans and Predestination: Grace in English Protestant Theology, 1525–1695. Chapel Hill, 1982.

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Cultures of Theology in the British Isles david s. sytsma

In recent decades the historiographical landscape of the Reformation in the British Isles has witnessed a growing concern for the international context within which confessional identities, whether Protestant or Catholic, were formed.1 This is in no small part due to a generation of scholarship on the English church, which overturned the “myth” of the English Reformation as an exceptional via media between Geneva and Rome. This myth, a descendant of polemically charged histories of the late nineteenth century, contrasted a conservative Anglicanism, only minimally influenced by Protestantism, with Puritanism, a radical and foreign importation of Calvinism onto English soil.2 But recent scholarship now recognizes the importance of a variegated Reformed tradition in the development of distinctive confessional identities in the British Isles. Against this background, the emergence of Laudianism in the early seventeenth century appears not as a simple growth from an undifferentiated “Anglicanism” but rather as a distinctly new synthesis within the Church of England incorporating longstanding anti-Puritan polemic, new anti-Calvinist doctrinal polemic, and a new emphasis on continuity with Catholicism. This chapter discusses the emergence of four “cultures” of theology in the British Isles: Reformed conformity, Puritanism, avant-garde conformity (and Laudianism), and Roman Catholicism. Since developments in England were central to the origins of these theological cultures, our account has required 1 Patrick Collinson, “The Fog in the Channel Clears: The Rediscovery of the Continental Dimension to the British Reformations,” in Polly Ha and Patrick Collinson, eds., The Reception of the Continental Reformation in Britain (Oxford, 2010), xxvii–xxxvii; Alexandra Walsham, Catholic Reformation in Protestant Britain (Farnham, 2014), 2–3, 27; David G. Mullan, Scottish Puritanism, 1590–1638 (Oxford, 2000), 4. 2 Diarmaid MacCulloch, “The Myth of the English Reformation,” Journal of British Studies 30, no. 1 (1991), 1–19; Dewey D. Wallace, Jr., “Via Media? A Paradigm Shift,” Anglican and Episcopal History 72, no. 1 (2003), 2–21; Nicholas Tyacke, Aspects of English Protestantism, c. 1530–1700 (Manchester, 2001), 176–202.

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attention to developments in England, although not exclusively so. Likewise, the focus on the emergence and formation of theological cultures has necessitated a chronologically selective account privileging the Edwardian and Elizabethan periods for Reformed conformity, the Elizabethan period for Puritanism and Catholicism, and the Jacobean period for avant-garde conformity. Although Puritanism reached its zenith of political power in the English Civil War and interregnum, and Laudianism likewise returned to strength at the English Restoration, discussion of these later developments is omitted from the present consideration. Presbyterianism emerged concurrently in England and Scotland in the 1570s, and is discussed in connection with Puritanism.

Reformed Conformity The growth of the Evangelical movement in the British Isles reflected in many respects the course of magisterial reform on the Continent. In both cases university-trained theologians and friars played a leading role in the early stages of reform,3 and this reform was implemented when a minority was able to win the support of powerful magistrates – whether through the English Crown or Scottish nobles.4 In both England and Scotland an initially strong reception of Luther’s theology transitioned to an alignment with Swiss Reformed theology. Yet unlike the Reformation of the cities on the Continent, Reformers gradually took control of the old diocesan establishment in both England and Scotland, although in Scotland the growth of Presbyterianism in the 1570s forced episcopacy out of the church until the reign of King James VI and I. In the development of Reformed conformity administered by bishops and magistrates, the reign of Edward VI (1547–1553) played a pivotal role. For during this time future Elizabethan and Scottish Reformers participated in the alignment with continental Reformed theology orchestrated by Archbishop Thomas Cranmer. Leadership for the Evangelical movement in the reign of Henry VIII emerged from Cambridge, where the reception of Protestant ideas was 3

Alec Ryrie, The Gospel and Henry VIII: Evangelicals in the Early English Reformation (Cambridge, 2003), 157–193; Richard Rex, “The Friars in the English Reformation,” in Peter Marshall and Alec Ryrie, eds., The Beginnings of English Protestantism (Cambridge, 2002), 38–59; Peter Lorimer, Precursors of Knox (Edinburgh, 1857), 164–193. 4 See Bruce Gordon, The Swiss Reformation (Manchester, 2002), 86: “The evangelical party was always a minority movement; in every case its success was dependent on winning over the magistrates, who would then impose the new religion.”

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strongest, and evangelicals at court helped to secure preferment and protection for these Cambridge men, so that by the end of Henry’s reign in 1547 evangelicals were appointed to a number of bishoprics and as tutors for young Edward and Elizabeth.5 Although evangelicals under Henry included a fair number of partisans for Luther’s eucharistic theology, “it is clear that sympathy for Reformed ideas had come to a certain dominance within the broader English evangelical movement by the time of Henry VIII’s death.”6 It is hard to overstate the significance that this shift, which became entirely apparent in the reign of Edward VI, would have on the future of all Protestant parties in the British Isles. After an eclectic reception of predominantly Lutheran, but also Swiss, reformist writings in the 1520s and 1530s in both England and Scotland,7 evangelicals in the British Isles turned increasingly toward the theology emanating from the Swiss Reformation, particularly Zurich.8 As a result, the confessional and liturgical reform carried out in the reign of Edward VI set reform in the British Isles on a parallel doctrinal course with the continental Reformed tradition. A number of intellectual and social factors contributed to this alignment with Reformed theology. On two of the early fault-lines separating the Lutheran and Reformed traditions in the sixteenth century, images and the Eucharist, the Church of England turned gradually toward the Reformed. First, the attack on material piety and use of images in worship in England went much further than Luther, who taught that the prohibition against making images was part of the temporal ceremonial law, not of immutable 5 Ryrie, The Gospel and Henry VIII, 171; Maria Dowling, “The Gospel and the Court: Reformation under Henry VIII,” in Peter Lake and Maria Dowling, eds., Protestantism and the National Church in Sixteenth Century England (London, 1987), 36–77. 6 Alec Ryrie, “The Strange Death of Lutheran England,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 53, no. 1 (2002), 64–92, at 68. 7 Richard Rex, “The Early Impact of Reformation Theology at Cambridge University, 1521–1547,” Reformation & Renaissance Review 1, no. 2 (1999), 38–71, at 39–40, 63; Ryrie, “The Strange Death of Lutheran England”; William Stanford Reid, “Lutheranism in the Scottish Reformation,” Westminster Theological Journal 7, no. 2 (1945), 91–111; Carl R. Trueman, Luther’s Legacy: Salvation and English Reformers, 1525–1556 (Oxford, 1994), 77, 198–199; Franz Heinrich Reusch, Die Indices librorum prohibitorum des sechzehnten Jahrhunderts (Tübingen, 1886), 6–10; John Foxe, The Acts and Monuments of John Foxe, new ed., ed. George Townsend, 8 vols. (London, 1843–1849), V, appendix VI. 8 Carrie Euler, Couriers of the Gospel: England and Zurich, 1531–1558 (Zurich, 2006); Diarmaid MacCulloch, “Sixteenth-Century English Protestantism and the Continent,” in Dorothea Wendebourg, ed., Sister Reformations: The Reformation in Germany and in England (Tübingen, 2010), 1–14; Diarmaid MacCulloch, “Heinrich Bullinger and the English Speaking World,” in Emidio Campi and Peter Opitz, eds., Heinrich Bullinger: Life–Thought–Influence, Zurich, Aug. 25–29, 2004, International Congress Heinrich Bullinger (1504–1575) (Zurich, 2007), 891–934.

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moral law, and thus adiaphora.9 Despite being otherwise heavily Lutheran, The Institution of a Christian Man (1537; the Bishops’ Book), which explained the Ten Articles of 1536, followed Zurich theologians’ distinctly non-Lutheran enumeration of the Ten Commandments which made the prohibition against making graven images a distinctly separate (second) commandment.10 At the coronation of Edward VI on February 20, 1547, Archbishop Cranmer preached a sermon in which he called for Edward to have “idolatry destroyed; the tyranny of the Bishops of Rome banished from your subjects, and images destroyed.” Three days later Nicholas Ridley, bishop of London, preached before the king against the idolatry of images.11 This was followed by a campaign, carried out by royal injunction beginning in the summer of 1547, for the removal of images from churches across the kingdom.12 In his catechism the following year Cranmer reinforced the identification of images with idolatry by setting forth what has been described as “a distinctly Zwinglian condemnation of images.”13 Second, on the matter of the mode of presence in the Eucharist, the Church of England under the leadership of Archbishop Cranmer moved toward a Reformed understanding of Christ’s spiritual presence. Around 1546 or 1547 Cranmer had broken with his earlier Lutheran view of Real Presence, and over the next several years came to embrace a position close to that of his new colleague Peter Martyr Vermigli. Cranmer’s views were fully expressed shortly thereafter in his A defence of the true and catholike doctrine of the sacrament of the body and bloud of our saviour Christ (1550), which cited Zwingli’s favorite passage, John 6:63, on the title page,14 and relied extensively on Vermigli’s Tractatio de sacramento eucharistiae (1549).15 Like the Consensus Tigurinus (1549) between Zurich and Geneva, the Forty-Two Articles of England (1553) defined the sacraments as “tokens of Christien 9 David C. Steinmetz, Calvin in Context, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 2010), 54–57; Margaret Aston, England’s Iconoclasts, volume I: Laws against Images (Oxford, 1988), 476–477; Carl C. Christensen, Art and the Reformation in Germany (Athens, OH, 1979), 42–54. 10 The institution of a Christen man [London, 1537], fol. 67r; Euler, Couriers, 165; Aston, England’s Iconoclasts, 379–382; Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer: A Life (New Haven, 1996), 192. 11 12 Aston, England’s Iconoclasts, 249, 251. Ibid., 254–277. 13 Ibid., 232. Cf. MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer, 387–388. For evidence of the enduring nature of a Reformed interpretation of images in the Church of England see Aston, England’s Iconoclasts, 434–435. 14 The bottom of the title page reads, “Yt ys the spirite that giveth lyfe, the fleshe profitech nothinge. Ioannis. 6.” See Thomas Cranmer, A defence of the true and catholike doctrine of the sacrament of the body and bloud of our saviour Christ (London, 1550). 15 MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer, 354–355, 382–383, 391–392, 467, 490–491; Diarmaid MacCulloch, “Peter Martyr Vermigli and Thomas Cranmer,” in Emidio Campi, ed., Peter Martyr Vermigli: Humanism, Republicanism, Reformation (Geneva, 2002), 173–201.

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Mennes professione” and “effectuall signes” of invisible grace, while excluding the Lutheran argument of the ubiquity of Christ’s body.16 When Heinrich Bullinger received the Forty-Two Articles he advocated successfully for a German translation in Zurich with the words, “the crown of England has entirely the teaching and faith that we also have.”17 In the reign of Edward VI these intellectual shifts converged with an influx of evangelicals sympathetic to the Swiss Reformation. Among the notable preachers to join the Edwardian church were John Knox (1549) and John Laski (April 1550).18 Cranmer, whose own views on predestination and justification had been developing in a Reformed direction,19 sought to strengthen the Evangelical presence at the English universities by sending invitations to professors on the Continent. After Emperor Charles V’s victory over the Schmalkaldic League in April 1547, Bernardino Ochino and Peter Martyr Vermigli decided to flee Strasbourg and accept the invitation of Cranmer to come to England in December 1547.20 At Cranmer’s invitation they were joined in England by their former Strasbourg colleagues Immanuel Tremellius (1548), Paul Fagius, and Martin Bucer (April 1549). Vermigli was appointed regius professor of divinity at Oxford (1548–1553), where he attracted a strong following of Zurich students, who saw in him a bond with Bullinger.21 At Cambridge Bucer was appointed regius professor of divinity (1549–1551), while Fagius became regius professor of Hebrew (1549), and upon his death was quickly succeeded by Tremellius (1549–1553). Prior to Bucer’s arrival Cranmer and Ochino had tried to persuade Wolfgang Musculus to take up the Cambridge professorship, although without success.22 Again, after Bucer’s death Cranmer attempted to persuade first 16

Articles agreed on by the Bishoppes, and other learned menne in the Synode at London (London, 1553), fol. B4, C1v. See Joseph C. McLelland, The Visible Words of God: An Exposition of the Sacramental Theology of Peter Martyr Vermigli (Grand Rapids, 1957), 40–42; and Euler, Couriers, 191–192. 17 Cited in Euler, Couriers, 190. 18 See Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, www.oxforddnb.com, henceforth ODNB. 19 Ashley Null, Thomas Cranmer’s Doctrine of Repentance: Renewing the Power to Love (Oxford, 2000), 16–17, 129, 155–156, 210–211, 262–268. 20 MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer, 380–381. 21 Christopher Mattinson Dent, Protestant Reformers in Elizabethan Oxford (Oxford, 1983), 7–8; Claire Cross, “Continental Students and the Protestant Reformation in England in the Sixteenth Century,” in Derek Baker, ed., Reform and Reformation: England and the Continent c.1500–c.1750 (Oxford, 1979), 35–57, at 35–46; John ab Ulmis to Heinrich Bullinger, May 28, 1550: “Peter Martyr, one who is very much attached to you” (Original Letters relative to the English Reformation, written during the reigns of King Henry VIII., King Edward VI., and Queen Mary: chiefly from the archives of Zurich, ed. Hastings Robinson, 2 vols. [Cambridge, 1846–1847], 408, henceforth OL). 22 OL, 334–337, 352.

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Musculus and then Melanchthon to succeed Bucer, but again to no avail.23 In 1551 one contemporary complained that England was sucking away all the talent from Germany despite the fact that it already had the better theologians.24 During the reimposition of Catholicism under Queen Mary (r. 1553–1558) many evangelicals from England took refuge on the Continent. Vermigli and Bullinger were already well respected among these exiles, but the reputation of Zurich increased as a number of them followed Vermigli to Strasbourg and then to Zurich.25 When the Marian exiles returned to England and Scotland following the accession of Queen Elizabeth in 1558 they brought with them the Protestant theology they had experienced first hand. They also played a leading part in the confessional formation of the kingdoms of England and Scotland. Fourteen of the twenty-three bishops appointed to the English episcopal bench and two of the six authors of the Scots Confession (John Willock and John Knox) were Marian exiles. Of the newly appointed English bishops six had lived in Zurich with Vermigli and Bullinger, and at least ten were “all zealously committed to advancing Reformed thought and practice at the local as well as the national level.”26 Continental connections thus played an important role in the confessional formation of England and Scotland. Scholars now speak of a “Zurich connection” with the Elizabethan Settlement and the “example of Geneva” in Scotland.27 Bishops John Jewel and Robert Horne reported back to Vermigli and Bullinger that doctrinally the Elizabethan Settlement conformed closely to Zurich.28 The Thirty-Nine Articles do reflect the distinctive 23

George Cornelius Gorham, ed., Gleanings of a Few Scattered Ears during the Period of the Reformation in England and of the Times Immediately Succeeding; A.D. 1533 to A.D. 1588 (London, 1857), 245–246, 265–266; OL, 680, 725; Thomas Cranmer, Miscellaneous Writings and Letters (Cambridge, 1846), 421–423; John Schofield, Philip Melanchthon and the English Reformation (Aldershot, 2006), 170–172. 24 OL, 725. 25 See Patrick Collinson, Archbishop Grindal, 1519–1583: The Struggle for a Reformed Church (Berkeley, 1979), 72: “Martyr’s presence made Zürich a source of almost final authority on matters of doctrine, conscience and church order.” 26 Scott Wenig, Straightening the Altars: The Ecclesiastical Vision and Pastoral Achievements of the Progressive Bishops under Elizabeth I, 1559–1579 (New York, 2000), 22–23. Wenig’s list of nine “progressives” is based on dated biographies and needs amendment to include Nicholas Bullingham, who was no moderate on ceremonies (see ODNB). 27 Torrance Kirby, The Zurich Connection and Tudor Political Theology (Leiden, 2007); Jane E. A. Dawson, “John Knox, Christopher Goodwin and the ‘Example of Geneva’,” in Ha and Collinson, eds., The Reception of the Continental Reformation in Britain, 107–135. 28 Jewel to Vermigli, February 7, 1562: “as to matters of doctrine, we have pared everything away to the very quick, and do not differ from your doctrine by a nail’s breadth” (The Zurich Letters, comprising the Correspondence of several English Bishops and Others, with some of the

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views of Vermigli and Bullinger on predestination and royal supremacy.29 Likewise, discipline in the Church of Scotland was modeled on the pattern of Geneva.30 Yet such points of distinctiveness should not obscure the sense of shared confessional identity that existed. From the 1560s until the early decades of the seventeenth century most Protestants in the British Isles saw themselves as part of an international Reformed tradition.31 As Stephen Hampton argues, despite ambiguity in the Book of Common Prayer, “the sections of the Thirty-Nine Articles which address the Lord’s Supper offer no leeway for a Lutheran understanding of the sacrament” of the Lord’s Supper, and Article 29 “specifically denies the [Lutheran teaching] of manducatio impiorum [chewing of the unfaithful].”32 In the face of Lutheran pressure on Reformed churches in Germany to endorse the Formula of Concord, Queen Elizabeth I took the side of the Reformed churches, writing in an official memorandum to the Elector Palatine: “Nothing prejudicial can be done to the churches in Germany who embrace the same confession as we, without affecting us.”33 During this time Lutherans were often regarded as incompletely Reformed with respect to Real Presence and the use of images in worship, and the soundness of Luther’s doctrine of predestination was contrasted with later Lutherans.34 Rome was regarded as a church inasmuch as the word and sacraments continued to be used, but these were corrupted by the addition of false doctrines and traditions.35 Yet anti-papal polemics were often qualified by recognition of differences in the religious orders; Dominicans such as Domingo Báñez, in contrast to the Jesuits, were consistently viewed as more sound since they better preserved Augustine’s views

Helvetian Reformers, during the early part of the Reign of Queen Elizabeth, ed. Hastings Robinson, 2 vols. [Cambridge, 1842–1845], I, 100, henceforth ZL); Horne to Bullinger, December 13, 1563: “We have throughout England the same ecclesiastical doctrine as yourselves”: ZL, I, 135. 29 Kirby, Zurich Connection, passim; David Neelands, “Predestination and the Thirty-Nine Articles,” in Torrance Kirby, Emidio Campi, and Frank A. James III, eds., A Companion to Peter Martyr Vermigli (Leiden, 2009), 355–374. 30 James K. Cameron, ed., The First Book of Discipline (Edinburgh, 1972), 32–33, 165–173. 31 Anthony Milton, Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1600–1640 (Cambridge, 1995), 377–384, 395–407; Dent, Protestant Reformers, 74–102; Anthony Milton, “The Church of England and the Palatinate,” in Ha and Collinson, eds., The Reception of the Continental Reformation in Britain, 137–165; Patrick Collinson, “England and International Calvinism, 1558–1640,” in Menna Prestwich, ed., International Calvinism, 1541–1715 (Oxford, 1985), 197–223; Mullan, Scottish Puritanism, 215–216; James Eglinton, “Scottish-Dutch Reformed Theological Links in the Seventeenth Century,” Dutch Crossing 37, no. 2 (2013), 131–148; Alan Ford, The Protestant Reformation in Ireland, 1590–1641 (Dublin, 1997). 32 Stephen Hampton, “Confessional Identity,” in Anthony Milton, ed., The Oxford History of Anglicanism, volume I: Reformation and Identity, c.1520–1662 (New York, 2017), 210–227, at 216. 33 34 35 Ibid., 210. Milton, Catholic and Reformed, 384–395. Ibid., 128–141.

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on grace.36 Bishop John Davenant drew heavily and explicitly on Thomas Aquinas and contemporary Dominicans in his formulation of predestination and free choice, while simultaneously attacking “the arguments of the Jesuits and Arminians . . . [which] plainly depend on the same foundations.”37 Until the rise of Laudianism, the greatest intra-confessional polemics concerned matters of external government and ceremony. Episcopacy existed not only in England but also in the Church of Scotland, where the model of superintendency prevailed until 1581, to which the older bishoprics were briefly assimilated from 1572. Episcopacy was again revived on the English model of diocesan bishops by King James VI and I and imposed on the Church of Scotland until 1638.38 Reformed arguments for episcopal conformity initially found support in the Zurich theologians’ “Erastian” model of religious and political authority unified in the godly magistrate, who had the right to determine matters of indifference.39 According to this view espoused by Archbishop John Whitgift, episcopacy was an indifferent matter left undetermined by Scripture, but to be settled by the godly magistrate.40 Yet in the 1590s the stronger argument from divine right (iure divino) gained currency among English Reformed theologians, thereby causing tensions with proponents of the older argument from indifference, although episcopacy was still viewed as a different degree of the ministry rather than a separate order.41

Puritanism It is now generally recognized that Puritanism was “a distinctive and particularly intense variety of early modern Reformed Protestantism which originated within the Church of England, and was a product of that unique

36

Jordan Ballor, Matthew Gaetano, and David Sytsma, eds., Beyond Dordt and De Auxiliis: The Dynamics of Protestant and Catholic Soteriology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Leiden, 2019). 37 David S. Sytsma, “Aquinas in Service of Dordt: John Davenant on Predestination, Grace, and Free Choice,” in ibid., 169–199, at 193. 38 Cameron, ed., First Book of Discipline, 49–54, 115–128; David G. Mullan, Episcopacy in Scotland: The History of an Idea, 1560–1638 (Edinburgh, 1986), 17–53, 95–194. 39 Kirby, Zurich Connection, passim; Gary W. Jenkins, John Jewel and the English National Church: The Dilemmas of an Erastian Reformer (Aldershot, 2006), 170–174; Mullan, Episcopacy in Scotland, 61, 89–91. 40 Peter Lake, Anglicans and Puritans? Presbyterianism and English Conformist Thought from Whitgift to Hooker (London, 1988), 88–89. 41 Ibid., 90–97; Milton, Catholic and Reformed, 448–461, 466.

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environment and its tensions.”42 At the outset, Puritanism arose as an internecine dispute over the pace of reform and indifferent things of ceremony (adiaphora). As Puritan discontent with the ecclesiastical institution grew, it merged with the more radical Presbyterian movement. Presbyterianism was thus a more radical subset of a larger movement which included moderate Puritans who endorsed or tolerated episcopacy. As a movement that emerged out of a polemical context, Puritanism must be understood through the series of events leading from the Vestiarian Controversy (1565–1567) to the Admonition Controversy (1572–1575). The Vestiarian Controversy arose as a conflict over the use of traditional garments. The “ornaments proviso” in the Act of Uniformity (1559) had required a return to the use of ornaments and clerical attire in the second year of King Edward. This would have meant the restoration of altars, crosses, and lights, and for attire the use of the alb, surplice, and either the chasuble or cope. However, Queen Elizabeth’s Injunctions (1559) ordered the destruction of images, altars, and candlesticks, and simplified apparel to “habits, garments, and such square caps” as were in use at the end of King Edward’s reign, which implied the use of the surplice only. The Interpretations of the Bishops (1560) reinforced the Injunctions by reducing dress to the cope for communion and the surplice for other occasions.43 The controversy, then, focused on the remaining use of the surplice and cap. Most of the returning Marian exiles disliked these traditional ceremonies, with many of the bishops tolerating nonconformity, and over the next five years there were peaceful attempts to rectify a potentially explosive situation. A measure for liturgical reform in the Convocation of 1563 called for the removal of the offensive garments, but this was only supported by a third of the Lower House.44 In early 1565 Archbishop Matthew Parker took measures to enforce conformity in ceremonies with the Advertisements, which required clergy to wear the surplice and cap. Over the course of the next year Parker began enforcing conformity in isolated cases, but in March 1566 thirty-seven ministers in London were temporarily suspended from their livings, although only a handful were later deprived. The situation polarized John Coffey and Paul C. H. Lim, “Introduction,” in John Coffey and Paul C. H. Lim, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism (Cambridge, 2008), 1–15, at 3. 43 Wenig, Straightening the Altars, 35–36, 78–79. For the Injunctions see Documents Illustrative of the History of the English Church, ed. Henry Gee and William John Hardy (London, 1910), 419 (no. 2), 428 (no. 23), 432 (no. 30), 339–340. 44 William P. Haugaard, Elizabeth and the English Reformation: The Struggle for a Stable Settlement of Religion (Cambridge, 1968), 64, 208–210. Twenty of the twenty-seven Marian exiles in the Lower House voted in favor of abolishing the garments. 42

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opinion for and against conformity, and a literary pamphlet war, led by the London ministers, ensued for the remainder of 1566.45 This controversy hinged on differing approaches to adiaphora, and specifically on the relative importance of political order versus edification of the godly. The determinative argument on the side of conformity was that adiaphora were a matter of good order falling under the authority of the magistrate.46 The 1559 Injunctions understood ceremonies as falling under the general principle in 1 Corinthians 14:40 that “all things be done decently and in order.”47 For the Puritans, things indifferent in substance were not indifferent with respect to circumstance and use, which meant that in practice they were either edifying or not.48 They argued that the vestments were not edifying since they represented Catholic idolatry and caused offense to the conscience of the weak.49 Puritan clergy refused to conform for the sake of the weak in faith, who might interpret the vestments as an indication of support for Catholicism. This view did not lead in all cases to long-term nonconformity; some ministers chose only to exercise nonconformity until they were certain not to give offense, at which time they conformed.50 The literary war of 1566 not only hardened party lines, it also sowed seeds that would align the Puritans more closely with Geneva than Zurich, and make them receptive to the Presbyterianism of the Genevan divine Theodore Beza. Both Calvin and Vermigli died in 1564, leaving Bullinger as the greatest living authority for the Marian exiles at the time of greatest controversy. In February of 1566 the two foremost intellectual leaders of the Puritans, Laurence Humphrey and Thomas Sampson, sent separate letters to their former mentor Bullinger with precise questions regarding conformity to vestments. They probably assumed that Bullinger would side with them, and with good reason, for Bullinger had long expressed disapproval of the linen surplice, “as these relics, copied from Judaism, savour of popery, and are introduced and

45 John H. Primus, The Vestments Controversy (Kampen, 1960), 84–106; Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (Berkeley, 1967), 71–78; Brett Usher, “The Deanery of Bocking and the Demise of the Vestiarian Controversy,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 52, no. 3 (2001), 434–455; ODNB, “Participants in the Vestiarian Controversy.” 46 John Strype, Annals of the Reformation, volume I, part 1 (Oxford, 1824), 520; John S. Coolidge, The Pauline Renaissance in England: Puritanism and the Bible (Oxford, 1970), 43; Primus, Vestments Controversy, 90–92, 118–120. 47 48 Documents Illustrative, 432. Primus, Vestments Controversy, 89, 109–110, 122. 49 Coolidge, Pauline Renaissance, 5, 26–27, 41–42; Primus, Vestments Controversy, 121–122. 50 Karl Gunther, Reformation Unbound: Protestant Visions of Reform in England, 1525–1590 (Cambridge, 2014), 205–207.

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established with injury to Christian liberty.”51 However, Bullinger, appealing to the shared judgment of Vermigli and writing on behalf of himself and Rudolph Gualter, responded point by point, firmly siding with the queen and bishops.52 Moreover, Bullinger turned his response to Humphrey and Sampson into a circular letter by sending a copy to Bishops Horne, Grindal, Parkhurst, Jewel, Sandys, and Pilkington.53 The bishops in turn published Bullinger’s letter in the heat of the controversy in both Latin and English.54 Around this same time two nonconformist tracts included attacks on the office of bishop itself. As John Primus observed, “Already in 1566 the nonconformists were primed for Cartwright’s leadership into presbyterianism.”55 The nonconformists, disappointed with Zurich, turned to Geneva in the summer of 1566.56 The Genevans were much more sympathetic to the Puritans, but advised them not to leave the church over vestments.57 At the same time, Beza wrote a letter to Bishop Grindal placing the blame on the side of the bishops, followed by a letter to Bullinger placing the blame more generally on the royal supremacy and hierarchy of bishops. Beza’s letter to Grindal found its way into the hands of Puritans and was published in the Presbyterian An Admonition to Parliament (1572), which inaugurated the Admonition Controversy.58 The publication of the Admonition by Puritans John Field and Thomas Wilcox, and the subsequent literary war between Thomas Cartwright and John Whitgift, marked the emergence of the more radical calls for reform, “in which,” as Archbishop Grindal complained, “almost the whole external polity of our church was attacked.”59 While English Presbyterianism grew out of Puritanism under the leadership of Cartwright and Walter Travers, Scottish ZL, II, 357; cf. Walter Phillips, “Heinrich Bullinger and the Elizabethan Vestiarian Controversy: An Analysis of Influence,” Journal of Religious History 11, no. 3 (1981) 363–384, at 371–375. 52 Bullinger to Humphrey and Sampson, May 1, 1566 (ZL, I, 345–355). Cf. Bullinger and Gualter to Grindal and Horne, September 6, 1566: “The sum of our judgment was this, that churches redeemed by the blood of Christ ought on no account to be deserted for the sake of caps and gowns, which are to be regarded as mere matters of indifference, since they are enjoined to be used, not with a view to any religious observance, but merely as a matter of civil concern, for the maintenance of proper decency” (ibid., 358). 53 Bullinger to Horne, Grindal, and Parkhurst, May 3, 1566 (ibid., 356–357). 54 Reprinted with introduction in Kirby, Zurich Connection, 202–233. 55 Primus, Vestments Controversy, 132–133, 137–138, 148, citation on 133. 56 Coverdale, Humphrey, and Sampson to Farell, Viret, Beza, and others, July 1566 (ZL, II, 121–124). 57 “The Answer of the Ministers of Geneva to certain Brethren of the Church of England; concerning some controversy in the Ecclesiastical Policy [October 24, 1567],” in [William Whittingham], A Brief Discourse of the Troubles at Frankfort: 1554–1558. A.D. (London, 1908), 239–250. 58 59 Primus, Vestments Controversy, 155–157. Grindal to Bullinger, July 31, 1573 (ZL, I, 292). 51

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Presbyterianism advanced through the leadership of Andrew Melville. For a brief period in 1571 all three future Presbyterian leaders were in Geneva with Beza,60 thereby establishing bonds that would help tie the Presbyterian movements in the British Isles together for decades to come. Melville returned to Scotland in 1574, and by 1578 had convinced the Church of Scotland to abolish episcopacy from the Second Book of Discipline. Thereafter the interests of the Scottish Presbyterians and the Puritans converged, with leaders of both groups assisting and sympathizing openly with each other.61 Cartwright and Travers turned down invitations around 1580 to professorships at St. Mary’s College in St. Andrews,62 while Melville and other Scottish ministers during their exile to England in 1584 conferred with English Puritans on the political situation in England.63 From the 1590s there is abundant evidence of mutual interest in theological literature between Puritans and Scottish divines,64 and Scottish divines recycled English arguments on indifference in their own debate over ceremonies after the Five Articles of Perth (1618).65 Although the English Reformed bishops were sympathetic to the first Puritans, the bishops and their Zurich colleagues became increasingly alarmed by and hostile to the growth of separatist and Presbyterian tendencies in the movement.66 As Grindal remarked, “Humphrey, and Sampson, and some others, who heretofore moved the question about ceremonies, are entirely opposed to this [Presbyterian] party.”67 Thus, the Puritan movement encompassed a range of perspectives. There were moderates with more conformable sensibilities who operated within the mainstream of the established church, many of whom, such as William Whitaker, William Perkins, and Andrew Willet, viewed episcopacy as an acceptable polity.68 There were others, whether Presbyterian or separatist, who worked to implement discipline through a complete change in ecclesiastical structure, only a minority of whom preferred being deprived rather than conform.69 ODNB, “Andrew Melville.” Scott Pearson, Thomas Cartwright and Elizabethan Puritanism, 1535–1603 (Cambridge, 1925), 262–263, 338–340, 343, 409. 62 63 Ibid., 194–195. Ibid., 250. 64 65 Mullan, Scottish Puritanism, 5–7, 30, 53, 59, 138, 186, et passim. Ibid., 261–262. 66 ZL, I, 248–249, 277, 280–281, 284–285, 287–288, 291–292, 295–300, 306–309, 311–317, 319–320, 332; ZL, II, 227–235, 237–254, 258–259; John Whitgift, Works, ed. John Ayre, 3 vols. (Cambridge, 1851–1853), III, 496–497. 67 Grindal to Bullinger, July 31, 1573 (ZL, I, 292). 68 Peter Lake, Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church (Cambridge, 1982); Milton, Catholic and Reformed, 13–19. 69 Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, 333–402; David R. Como, “Radical Puritanism, c. 1558–1660,” in Coffey and Lim, eds., Cambridge Companion to Puritanism, 241–258. 60 61

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In the aftermath of the vestments controversy, continental Reformed theologians had advised Puritans to tolerate problems over external order and discipline as of secondary importance and to remain within the church where they could do the most good.70 Most Puritans followed this moderate non-separatist line of thought, even though they retained scruples over ceremonies and concern for church discipline. Puritan separatists, who were fueled in part by the larger Puritan prioritization of piety over ecclesiology, were successfully repressed by the larger movement and remained a numerically insignificant minority, until the political circumstances of the 1640s allowed for their rapid growth and shifted Puritan opinion toward greater toleration of Baptists.71 Despite the successful suppression of the Presbyterian movement by authorities in England (1589–1593), Puritans were nonetheless partially able to promote their goal of edification through the practice of personal devotion and rigorous moral purity, and this distinctive practical divinity tradition was exported to the Netherlands, Germany, and Hungary.72 Although this Puritan practical divinity tradition became evident through printed works in the 1590s, it was not simply the by-product of the suppression of the Presbyterian movement, but rather a more overt manifestation of nascent practices traceable to the 1570s both among English Puritans and continental Reformed theologians.73 Puritanism flourished in part due to ecclesiastical and lay patronage. Sympathetic Reformed bishops, earls, gentry, and others protected and promoted Puritans as pastors and lecturers in the church, and teachers in the universities.74 Moreover, in practice clerical conformity was unevenly 70 “Answer of the Ministers of Geneva,” in Brief Discourse of the Troubles at Frankfort, 244–245, 248–249; Bullinger to Humphrey and Sampson, May 1, 1566 (ZL, I, 349, 351, 353–355); Bullinger to Miles Coverdale, September 20, 1566 (ZL, II, 136–137). 71 John Coffey, “From Marginal to Mainstream: How Anabaptists Became Baptists,” in Clarence Douglas Weaver, ed., Mirrors and Microscopes: Historical Perceptions of Baptists (Bletchley and Milton Keynes, 2015), 1–24. 72 Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, 120–121, 385–437, 448–467; Anthony Milton, “Puritanism and the Continental Reformed Churches,” in Coffey and Lim, eds., Cambridge Companion to Puritanism, 109–126, at 117–119; Edgar C. McKenzie, “British Devotional Literature and the Rise of German Pietism” (PhD dissertation, University of St. Andrews, 1984). 73 Peter Lake, “‘Puritans’ and ‘Anglicans’ in the History of the Post-Restoration English Church,” in Anthony Milton, ed., The Oxford History of Anglicanism, volume I: Reformation and Identity, c.1520–1662 (New York, 2017), 352–379, at 364–365; Patrick J. O’Banion, “Jerome Zanchi, the Application of Theology, and the Rise of the English Practical Divinity Tradition,” Renaissance and Reformation 29, no. 2–3 (2005), 97–120. 74 Paul Seaver, “Puritan Preachers and their Patrons,” in Kenneth Fincham and Peter Lake, eds., Religious Politics in Post-Reformation England: Essays in Honour of Nicholas Tyacke (Woodbridge, 2006), 128–142; Usher, “The Deanery of Bocking”; Collinson, Elizabethan

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enforced, allowing for widespread partial conformity until the 1620s.75 Moderate Puritans found their way into positions of power as heads of university colleges where they turned schools into nurseries of godly pastors. At Cambridge, Puritanism took root at St. John’s, Trinity, and Christ’s from the 1570s, and flourished especially under moderate Puritan masters Laurence Chaderton (Emmanuel, 1584–1622) and William Whitaker (St. John’s, 1585–1595), but also under Robert Some (Peterhouse, 1589–1609) and William Fulke (Pembroke, 1578–1589).76 At Oxford, Puritanism flourished under the headships of Laurence Humphrey (Magdalen, 1561–1589), John Rainolds (Corpus Christi, 1598–1607), James Montague (Sidney Sussex, 1596–1608), John Wilkinson (Magdalen Hall, 1605–1648), and others.77 In Ireland, Trinity College, Dublin attracted many Puritans under the leadership of Archbishops Adam Loftus and James Ussher.78 By 1640 a number of colleges at Cambridge (Christ’s, Emmanuel, Sidney Sussex, and St. Catherine’s Hall) and Oxford (Magdalen Hall, New Inn Hall, Brasenose, Exeter, and Lincoln) had Puritan reputations. Two of these colleges – Emmanuel and Sidney Sussex – were founded by patrons with Puritan sympathies and became known as Puritan seminaries.79

Avant-Garde Conformity and Laudianism While clergy in England and Scotland squabbled heatedly over matters of ceremony and church government, a new party emerged ca. 1590–1625 and gained power in the 1630s under the leadership of archbishops William Laud and Richard Neile. Although they matched former archbishops Whitgift and Puritan Movement, 51–55, 62–63, 164–167, et passim; Patrick Collinson, The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society 1559–1625 (Oxford, 1982), 81–91; Wenig, Straightening the Altars, 231–232. 75 Kenneth Fincham, “Clerical Conformity from Whitgift to Laud,” in Peter Lake and Michael Questier, eds., Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church, c.1560–1660 [Studies in Modern British Religious History] (Woodbridge, 2000), 125–158; Kenneth Fincham, Prelate as Pastor: The Episcopate of James I (Oxford, 1990), 212–231; Peter Lake, “Moving Goal Posts? Modified Subscription and the Construction of Conformity in the Early Stuart Church,” in Lake and Questier, eds., Conformity and Orthodoxy, 179–205. 76 Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, 125–128; Lake, Moderate Puritans, 35–46, 169–200; David Hoyle, Reformation and Religious Identity in Cambridge, 1590–1644 (Woodbridge, 2007), 50–53. 77 Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, 129; Dent, Protestant Reformers, 23–68, 73, 167–180; Sidney Graves Hamilton, Hertford College (London, 1903), 108; and entries in ODNB. 78 Crawford Gribben, “Puritanism in Ireland and Wales,” in Coffey and Lim, eds., Cambridge Companion to Puritanism, 159–173, at 160–161. 79 John Morgan, Godly Learning: Puritan Attitudes towards Reason, Learning, and Education, 1560– 1640 (Cambridge, 1986), 232–233, 247–258.

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Bancroft in severity toward nonconformity, the basis of this opposition was different.80 This group attacked not only Genevan-style discipline, but also the broader Reformed doctrinal consensus uniting conformists and Puritans on points of soteriology, and elevated the importance of prayer and external worship over preaching. Accordingly, they were hostile to the word-centered piety of even moderate Puritans often tolerated by Reformed bishops who prioritized preaching.81 There is no agreed-upon nomenclature for this group, variously labeled Arminians, anti-Calvinists, Laudians, and, recently, avant-garde conformists. The labels Arminian, anti-Calvinist, and Laudian do not do justice to a movement with broader concerns than soteriology and with an earlier pedigree. Avant-garde conformity seems better to reflect a type of conformity at odds with both earlier Reformed conformity and Puritanism.82 The tendencies of this movement are often traced back to the anti-Puritan ceremonialism of Lancelot Andrewes and Richard Hooker in the 1590s,83 even though the soteriological perspective of these two early figures still retained Augustinian aspects in line with the conformist consensus,84 and should therefore be distinguished from later reception of Arminianism into the movement. Royal favor, combined with a good deal of discretion, played an important role in the advance of avant-garde conformity. Whereas Elizabeth had chosen advisors from the laity, with the accession of King James in 1603 bishops and clergy regained their place at court as royal advisors. Among James’s most trusted bishops were Andrewes and Neile.85 Neile became royal chaplain and clerk of the closet in 1603, a post he held until 1632. Through his position as clerk of the closet, Neile exercised a great influence over the king’s selection of court preachers, and in 1609 he drew the king’s attention to William Laud, who was appointed royal chaplain

80

Milton, Catholic and Reformed, 425–426, 452–453; Nicholas Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism c.1590–1640 (Oxford, 1990), 3, 17; Tyacke, Aspects, 164. 81 Fincham, Prelate as Pastor, 212–240. 82 Milton, Catholic and Reformed, 8–9; Peter Lake, “Lancelot Andrewes, John Bruckeridge, and Avant-Garde Conformity at the Court of James I,” in Linda Peck, ed., The Mental World of the Jacobean Court (Cambridge, 1991), 113–133. 83 Peter McCullough, “‘Avant-Garde Conformity’ in the 1590s,” in Milton, ed., The Oxford History of Anglicanism, 380–394. 84 Jay T. Collier, Debating Perseverance: The Augustinian Heritage in Post-Reformation England (New York, 2018), 34–42, 153–155; Michael L. Lynch, “Richard Hooker and the Development of English Hypothetical Universalism,” in William Bradford Littlejohn and Scott N. KindredBarnes, eds., Richard Hooker and Reformed Orthodoxy (Göttingen, 2017), 273–293. 85 Fincham, Prelate as Pastor, 38.

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in 1611.86 In the same year Neile helped to secure the closely fought election of Laud as college president of St. John’s, Oxford.87 Neile also helped to advance the careers of like-minded anti-Puritans such as John Overall (regius professor of divinity at Cambridge), John Buckeridge (former tutor of Laud at St. John’s, Oxford), and John Howson.88 As Neile, Andrewes, and their friends moved up the ecclesiastical hierarchy, their former bishoprics were often filled by like-minded clergy.89 The anti-Puritan reputations of these men were an important factor in their advancement.90 In the last years of James’s reign (1619–1625) the avant-garde faction claimed a solid minority of the bishops’ bench, and with the accession of Charles I Laud became “effectively Charles I’s ecclesiastical patronage-broker,” whereby he secured royal patronage for benefices, deaneries, and bishoprics.91 The balance of power turned rapidly in favor of avant-garde conformists as they took control of the archbishoprics of York (in 1628) and Canterbury (in 1633), six Cambridge heads (by 1635), the Oxford chancellorship for Laud (in 1630), and also a number of bishoprics in Scotland and Ireland.92 Besides the court, two communities served as especially important seedbeds for the growth and identity formation of avant-garde conformity.93 The first is St. John’s, Oxford. John Buckeridge had entered St. John’s in 1578 and served as president of the college (1606–1611), followed by Laud (1611–1621) and William Juxon (1621–1633). St. John’s was one of the more conservative colleges and a home to crypto-Catholics as late as 1573.94 During Buckeridge’s presidency the college was still conservative and militantly anti-Puritan, as

Andrew Foster, “Archbishop Richard Neile Revisited,” in Lake and Questier, eds., Conformity and Orthodoxy, 159–178. 87 88 Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists, 68–69. Fincham, Prelate as Pastor, 46–47. 89 Andrewes and Samuel Harsnett (Chichester, 1605–1619); Neile, Buckeridge and Walter Curle (Rochester, 1608–1647); Neile and Overall (Lichfield and Coventry, 1610–1618); Neile and George Montaigne (Lincoln, 1614–1621); Neile, Montaigne, and Howson (Durham, 1617–1632); Andrewes, Neile, and Curle (Winchester, 1618–1647); Montaigne, Laud, and William Juxon (London, 1621–1649); Buckeridge, Francis White, and Matthew Wren (Ely, 1628–1667); Montaigne, Harsnett, and Neile (archbishopric of York, 1628–1640). 90 Fincham, Prelate as Pastor, 29–30, 49; ODNB, “John Buckeridge.” 91 Kenneth Fincham, “William Laud and the Exercise of Caroline Ecclesiastical Patronage,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 51, no. 1 (2000), 69–93, at 83. 92 Fincham, Prelate as Pastor, 48; Hoyle, Reformation and Religious Identity, 151, 164; Tyacke, AntiCalvinists, 79. For Scotland see ODNB, “Thomas Sydserf,” “James Wedderburn,” and “John Maxwell (d. 1647).” For Ireland see ODNB, “William Chappell” and “John Bramhall.” 93 For broader context see Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists, 29–86; and Kenneth Fincham and Nicholas Tyacke, Altars Restored: The Changing Face of English Worship, 1547–c.1700 (Oxford, 2007), 74–125. 94 On the strength of Catholicism at Oxford see James McConica, “The Catholic Experience in Tudor Oxford,” in Thomas McCoog, ed., The Reckoned Expense: Edmund Campion and the Early English Jesuits, 2nd ed. (Rome, 2007), 43–73. 86

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evidenced by an expensive play mocking Puritans in 1607 which was sponsored by a number of future leaders of avant-garde conformity, including Buckeridge and two future archbishops of Canterbury, Laud and Juxon. Both Tyacke and Dent surmise that this conservative ethos shaped the character of Laud.95 The second and more important seedbed for avant-garde conformity is the so-called Durham House group (ca. 1617–1630) gathered under the patronage of Neile at his London residence when he became bishop of Durham in 1617. This was a kind of “open house” for leading theologians of avant-garde conformity. Among the residents of the Durham House were Laud, Buckeridge, John Cosin, Richard Montague, Francis White, and Thomas Jackson. They took Andrewes and Overall as their intellectual mentors.96 Indeed, although Neile acted as patron, many of the main ideas that came to characterize avant-garde conformity are traceable to these two men.97 Although many avant-garde conformists were anti-Calvinists hostile to the doctrine of unconditional predestination, this reaction was part of a larger theological vision which subordinated the importance of preaching and doctrinal speculation to the sacraments and visible worship. Generally speaking, avant-garde conformists and Laudians gave priority to the orderly and visible aspects of worship.98 Two verses were especially popular: Psalm 96:9, “O worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness,” and 1 Corinthians 14:40, “Let all things be done decently and in order.” The former words of the Psalmist were cited so frequently that Fincham and Tyacke remark that it “became something of a campaign slogan during the 1630s.”99 In this view, the physical space and order of worship should reflect the awe and reverence due to God. The Eucharist is the holiest part of worship, with preaching a means to prayer, and prayer a means to the Eucharist. Accordingly, communion tables placed east–west in the midst of the congregation were replaced with altars placed altarwise, with ends north–south at the east end of the Jill Phillips Ingram, “Avant-Garde Conformists and Student Revels at Oxford, 1607–08,” Anglican and Episcopal History 80, no. 4 (2011), 349–372; Tyacke, Aspects, 206; Dent, Protestant Reformers, 232. 96 ODNB, “Durham House group”; Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists, 106–124. 97 Nicholas Tyacke, “Lancelot Andrewes and the Myth of Anglicanism,” in Lake and Questier, eds., Conformity and Orthodoxy, 5–33; Anthony Milton, “‘Anglicanism’ by Stealth: The Career and Influence of John Overall,” in Fincham and Lake, eds., Religious Politics in Post-Reformation England, 159–176. 98 Peter Lake, “The Laudian Style: Order, Uniformity and the Pursuit of the Beauty of Holiness in the 1630s,” in Kenneth Fincham, ed., The Early Stuart Church 1603–1642 (Stanford, 1993), 161–185. 99 Fincham and Tyacke, Altars Restored, 166. 95

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chancel, and railed off, thereby visibly delineating the holiest from less holy or profane space.100 The beautification of the worship space included the religious use of images which, along with bowing toward restored altars, caused considerable controversy in light of the iconoclastic precedent of the Edwardian reform and homily against idolatrous use of images in the Second Book of Homilies.101 Calvin’s preferred image for the church was the “school of God”; for Laudians the archetype was a medieval cathedral.102 Avant-garde conformists distinguished themselves polemically by downplaying disagreement with Rome while simultaneously vigorously attacking Puritans and distancing themselves from Reformed Protestantism. This new via media was an approach pioneered by Overall but later typified Laudianism.103 Andrewes and Overall, followed by Neile, Harsnett, and others, revived the practice of auricular confession associated with Roman Catholicism.104 After the Laudians gained power in the 1630s they actively suppressed anti-papal polemic, notably in the process of licensing books, where they removed passages attacking Roman errors. In their own writings they refrained from traditional attacks relating to Roman doctrine and ceremony. Laudian college heads at Cambridge tolerated not only decorated altars, hangings, and crucifixes, but also sermons and commencement theses which taught distinctly Roman Catholic doctrines such as the necessity of auricular confession for absolution, the cooperation of works with faith, and the necessity of good works for salvation. The motivation for downplaying differences stemmed ostensibly from a desire to avoid offending recusants in the hope of their conversion.105 The ideal, as one contemporary expressed it, was “near popery, and yet no popery.”106 This favor showed to Roman Catholics contrasted sharply with Protestant coreligionists. Whereas most Elizabethan conformists had defended episcopacy and ceremonies as things indifferent to be determined by legal authority, avant-garde conformists joined the Jacobean trend of arguments for iure Lake, “The Laudian Style,” 164–171; Fincham and Tyacke, Altars Restored, 176–273. Fincham and Tyacke, Altars Restored, 128–129, 137–138, 141–142, 151. 102 Raymond A. Blacketer, The School of God: Pedagogy and Rhetoric in Calvin’s Interpretation of Deuteronomy (Dordrecht, 2007), 23–59; Ian Atherton, “Cathedrals, Laudianism, and the British Churches,” Historical Journal 53, no. 4 (2010), 895–918. 103 Milton, “‘Anglicanism’ by Stealth.” 104 ODNB, “Lancelot Andrewes”; Milton, “‘Anglicanism’ by Stealth,” 161; Fincham, Prelate as Pastor, 238; Milton, Catholic and Reformed, 472. 105 Milton, Catholic and Reformed, 63–92; Hoyle, Reformation and Religious Identity, 209–215; David Hoyle, “A Commons Investigation of Arminianism and Popery in Cambridge on the Eve of the Civil War,” Historical Journal 29, no. 2 (1986), 419–425. 106 Hoyle, Reformation and Religious Identity, 161. 100 101

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divino episcopacy, and furthermore viewed bishops as a separate sacerdotal order. Under the older adiaphora model it was possible for English conformists to view foreign Reformed churches as sister churches, but avant-garde conformity made it increasingly difficult to affirm the validity of the ministry of foreign Presbyterian churches.107 Moreover, in the 1630s, as Milton quips, “the open abuse of established Reformed divines became a popular sport.”108 These avant-garde and Laudian polemics stemmed not only from theological sympathies with Dutch Arminians, whose works were gaining an audience in the 1620s, but more importantly from a desire to remove an established orthodoxy which supported Puritanism and fostered opposition to their own more sacramental and ceremonial piety. For Laudians disputes over predestination were secondary to the “beauty of holiness.”109 It is not until after the Restoration that “there was a much more explicit alliance between English and continental European Arminianism than there had been in the days of Lancelot Andrewes and William Laud.”110

Roman Catholicism The fate of Roman Catholicism in the British Isles varied greatly from kingdom to kingdom. While Scotland had been among the swiftest to implement Tridentine reforms under Archbishop Hamilton (1549–1559), after the triumph of the Reformation in 1560 and the overthrow of Mary, Queen of Scots, the popular appeal of Protestantism combined with successful repression of the priesthood and monasticism resulted in widespread collapse of Catholicism by the end of the sixteenth century. In Ireland, by contrast, coerced conformity on the part of the English Crown combined with a lack of qualified indigenous Irish Protestant clergy only reinforced the antiProtestant sentiment of an entrenched Catholic majority, which maintained unofficial Catholic bishops. By 1623 only thirteen Catholic priests remained in Scotland, whereas by 1600 in Ireland reportedly no more than ten Protestant bishops were supported by only twenty-four preachers (although that number increased sharply thereafter).111 In England the dissolution of monasteries under Henry VIII meant that Catholicism survived initially as a minority religion through Marian priests (ordained in the reigns of Henry 107

108 109 Milton, Catholic and Reformed, 466–502. Ibid., 432. Ibid., 435–439. Stephen Hampton, Anti-Arminians: The Anglican Reformed Tradition from Charles II to George I (Oxford, 2008), 271. 111 Michael A. Mullet, Catholics in Britain and Ireland, 1558–1829 (New York, 1998), 33–69; Henry A. Jefferies, The Irish Church and the Tudor Reformations (Dublin, 2010), 246. 110

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VIII, the beginning of Edward VI, and Mary), later supplemented by continental missionary priests and Jesuits from the mid-1570s.112 The Elizabethan Act of Uniformity (1559) required conformity to the Book of Common Prayer under penalty of eventual deprivation and imprisonment for clergy, and a fine of 12 pence for every case of non-attendance for laity. This forced Catholics to choose the path of flight to the Continent (exiles), outward conformity (church papists), refusal to participate (recusants), or some combination of the latter two options. Until 1571, when clergy were required to subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles, many Catholic clergy held onto their livings until they were forced out.113 Others resigned their livings and practiced Mass in secret. As the Catholic leadership was pushed out of the church, the practice of outward conformity among laity (church papists) became a pressing question. Conformity was widespread in England until the 1570s and in Ireland until the 1580s, when Catholics turned increasingly to recusancy.114 Although recusancy was already underway in the 1560s,115 the advent of missionary priests in 1574 and Jesuits in 1580 spurred on recusancy. While at the so-called Synod of Southwark (1580) secular clergy and the Jesuits Robert Persons and Edmund Campion had condemned conformity, debate surfaced in the 1580s until Henry Garnet published the Tridentine decision against conformity in 1593. The proponents of occasional conformity argued for the permissibility of attending Protestant services out of political obedience if they did not participate in prayer or communion. They often appealed to the biblical example of Naaman the Syrian (2 Kgs. 5). Proponents of recusancy countered that attendance was not a neutral political act, it was impossible to separate one’s soul from external worship, and association with heretics was strictly forbidden. Interestingly, although English missionary priests and Jesuits argued strongly for recusancy on the basis that conformity is schismatic, Scottish Jesuits, when considering the loss of property and exile that accompanied excommunication in the Church of Scotland, argued in favor of occasional conformity as a tolerable non-schismatic sin.116 Despite official condemnation of conformity, occasional conformity continued to be widely Patrick McGrath and Joy Rowe, “The Marian Priests under Elizabeth I,” Recusant History 17, no. 2 (1984), 103–120. 113 Ibid., 103–104, 116. 114 Alexandra Walsham, Church Papists: Catholicism, Conformity and Confessional Polemic in Early Modern England (Woodbridge, 1993), 20–21; Christopher Haigh, English Reformations: Religion, Politics, and Society under the Tudors (Oxford, 1993), 254–261; Jefferies, Irish Church, 202–203, 234–236. 115 Haigh, English Reformations, 259. 112

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practiced into the seventeenth century, often with a conforming husband and recusant wife.117 In order to survive in officially Protestant kingdoms, Catholics in the British Isles needed new priests. The training of priests was accomplished through the establishment of colleges abroad for exiles. In the first decade of Elizabeth’s reign over a hundred Catholic scholars left Oxford, and many of them migrated to Louvain, and then Douai, where William Allen started an English College in 1568 (relocated to Reims 1578–1593). A strong Catholic presence at Oxford in the first decades of Elizabeth’s reign provided the English College with a steady stream of recruits for the priesthood.118 Following the founding of the English College at Douai, Irish colleges were formed at Salamanca and Douai, and Scottish colleges at Douai and Rome. For the Irish, however, “Paris was without doubt the most important university town.”119 In 1574 Douai began sending priests back to England, and in 1580 they were joined by the Jesuit mission. Just as Puritans found patronage with the aristocracy, so too Catholic priests were protected by Catholic nobility and gentry. In England there were at least seven strongly Catholic nobles between 1558 and 1641, mainly located in the north. Yorkshire and London were the greatest centers for harboring priests, although strong networks of powerful families existed elsewhere, such as in the county of Oxford, which bolstered the Catholic presence at the university.120 Although priests certainly took up residence with gentry, many were peripatetic. For priests on the move who visited Catholic households for hours or days, women played an important role in planning and maintaining secrecy.121 Priests alone did not sustain the Catholic community. The Oxford exiles at Louvain and Douai put their talents to use by flooding the British Isles with

116

See introduction and sources in Ginevra Crosignani, Thomas M. McCoog, and Michael Questier, eds., Recusancy and Conformity in Early Modern England (Toronto, 2010), xviii–xxxi; and Walsham, Catholic Reformation, 53–124. 117 118 Walsham, Church Papists, 77–81. McConica, “Catholic Experience,” 58–59. 119 Hilde de Ridder-Symoens, “The Place of the University of Douai in the Peregrinatio Academica Britannica,” in John M. Fletcher and Hilde de Ridder-Symoens, eds., Lines of Contact: Proceedings of the Second Conference of Belgian, British, Irish and Dutch Historians of Universities Held at St Anne’s College, Oxford, 15–17 September 1989 (Ghent, 1994), 21–34, at 33. 120 Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of Aristocracy, 1558–1641 (Oxford, 1965), 727–729; Patrick McGrath and Joy Rowe, “The Elizabethan Priests: Their Harbourers and Helpers,” Recusant History 19, no. 3 (1989), 209–233, at 217; McConica, “Catholic Experience,” 60–62. 121 Marie B. Rowlands, “Recusant Women 1560–1640,” in Mary Prior, ed., Women in English Society 1500–1800 (London, 1985), 149–180.

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English Catholic books. Between 1559 and 1582 105 English books were published abroad, and, according to Nicholas Sanders’s contemporary account, before 1580 “not less than 20,000 of these books were imported into England and secretly sold.”122 These were moved across the sea and distributed through a complex network of priests, women, booksellers, and other middlemen.123 The books not only provided ammunition to counter Protestant arguments; they also connected ordinary Catholics with the larger European Counter-Reformation. Among the books were English translations of Latin works by important continental Catholics such as Peter Canisius, Stanislaus Hosius, and Robert Bellarmine.124 The publication of the vernacular Rheims-Douai New Testament in 1582 only further testified to the trend underway – the increasing transformation of English Catholicism into a religion of the word. Through their polemical publications the exiles at Louvain and Douai provided the intellectual resources for English-speaking Catholics to distinguish themselves from English Protestants. The first wave of polemics was set off by the “challenge” sermon of John Jewel, delivered on November 26, 1559, which challenged Catholic adversaries to bring forth “any one sufficient sentence, oute of any olde catholique doctour, or father,” general council, or Scripture from the first 600 years of church history to prove twenty-seven controversial doctrines. Over the next twenty years a wave of over eighty letters and treatises poured forth from the pens of both sides. The points of debate – images, Eucharist, papacy, and royal supremacy – demonstrate that in this early period the controversy focused on worship, sacraments, and ecclesiology.125 With the rise of Arminian theology and Laudianism, a noticeable shift is observable in Catholic attitudes toward the Church of England. There is evidence that Catholic laity and clergy welcomed the Laudians’ conciliatory approach to Rome and their anti-Puritanism.126 In this regard, the presence of the Jesuit mission is significant. The Jesuits were often associated with Luis de Molina’s views on grace and free will, and were attacked by Dominicans. English Reformed and Arminian Protestants

Alfred Collingwood Southern, Elizabethan Recusant Prose, 1559–1582 (London, 1950), 31, 36. Walsham, Catholic Reformation, 244–252. Christopher Highley, Catholics Writing the Nation in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford, 2008), 42–47; Walsham, Catholic Reformation, 263. 125 Southern, Elizabethan Recusant Prose, 59–135; Jenkins, John Jewel, 115–154. 126 Michael Questier, “Arminianism, Catholicism, and Puritanism in England during the 1630s,” Historical Journal 49, no. 1 (2006), 53–78. 122 123

124

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were divided along similar lines, with the Reformed citing Dominicans favorably against Arminius’s appropriation of Molina’s doctrine of middle knowledge.127 In this context, it is notable that Jesuits showed sympathy for English Arminianism.128 A year after Laud’s accession to Canterbury in 1633, an anonymous Jesuit work titled Apology of English Arminianisme appeared with a dedication to archbishops Laud and Neile.129 In the following year, upon the publication of the Laudian Robert Shelford’s Five Pious and Learned Discourses (1635), the Reformed archbishop James Ussher complained from Ireland that “the Jesuits of England sent over the book hither to confirm our papists in their obstinacy, and to assure them that we are now coming home unto them as fast as we can.”130 By the reign of Charles I the clear us-versusthem polemics of the early Elizabethan era had morphed into a complex polemical situation involving a web of inter- and intra-confessional differences. Of the four “cultures” of theology surveyed here, no single group laid claim to lasting dominance in the seventeenth century. The fortunes of Puritanism and Laudianism were especially volatile. While the Puritans came to dominate the theological landscape of the Interregnum (1649–1660), they soon found themselves forced into nonconformity following the Great Ejection of 1662. The Laudians, while retaking control of the archbishopric of Canterbury from 1660 until 1690 through the successive appointments of William Juxon (1660–1663), Gilbert Sheldon (1663–1677), and William Sancroft (1677–1690), nonetheless shared control of the Church of England with a sizable minority of Reformed Anglican conformists, who held onto a number of influential bishoprics, deaneries, and academic positions at Oxford into the early eighteenth century.131 The Laudians’ fortunes, in turn, radically reversed in favor of Latitudinarians with the transition from the reign of James II to William III and the appointment of John Tillotson as archbishop of Canterbury (1691–1694).132

127

Ballor et al., Beyond Dordt, 5–9, 11–12; Hampton, Anti-Arminians, 210. Questier, “Arminianism,” 65. O.N., An Apology of English Arminianisme or A Dialogue, betweene Iacobus Arminius, Professour in the University of Leyden in Holland; and Enthusiastus and English Doctour of Divinity and a great Precisian. Wherein are defended the Doctrines of Arminius touching Freewill, Predestination, and Reprobation: The said doctrines being mantained & taught by many of the most Learned Protestants of England, at this present time (St Omer, 1634), cited in Questier, “Arminianism,” 70. 130 James Ussher, The Whole Works, 17 vols. (Dublin, 1847–1864), XVI, 9. 131 Hampton, Anti-Arminians, 1–38. 132 Nicholas Tyacke, “From Laudians to Latitudinarians: A Shifting Balance of Theological Forces,” in Grant Tapsell, ed., The Later Stuart Church, 1660–1714 (Manchester, 2012), 46–67. 128 129

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bibliography Coffey, John, and Paul C. H. Lim, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism. Cambridge, 2008. Crosignani, Ginevra, Thomas M. McCoog, and Michael Questier, eds. Recusancy and Conformity in Early Modern England. Toronto, 2010. Fincham, Kenneth. Prelate as Pastor: The Episcopate of James I. Oxford, 1990. Fincham, Kenneth and Nicholas Tyacke. Altars Restored: The Changing Face of English Worship, 1547–c.1700. Oxford, 2007. Gunther, Karl. Reformation Unbound: Protestant Visions of Reform in England, 1525–1590. Cambridge, 2014. Hoyle, David. Reformation and Religious Identity in Cambridge, 1590–1644. Woodbridge, 2007. Kirby, Torrance. The Zurich Connection and Tudor Political Theology. Leiden, 2007. Lake, Peter. “Lancelot Andrewes, John Bruckeridge, and Avant-Garde Conformity at the Court of James I.” In Linda Peck, ed., The Mental World of the Jacobean Court. Cambridge, 1991, 113–133. McGrath, Patrick and Joy Rowe. “The Marian Priests under Elizabeth I.” Recusant History 17, no. 2 (1984), 103–120. Milton, Anthony. Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1600–1640. Cambridge, 1995. Milton, Anthony, ed. The Oxford History of Anglicanism, volume I: Reformation and Identity, c.1520–1662. New York, 2017. Tyacke, Nicholas. Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism c.1590–1640. Oxford, 1990. Wallace, Dewey D., Jr. “Via Media? A Paradigm Shift.” Anglican and Episcopal History 72, no. 1 (2003), 2–21. Walsham, Alexandra. Catholic Reformation in Protestant Britain. Farnham, 2014. Wenig, Scott. Straightening the Altars: The Ecclesiastical Vision and Pastoral Achievements of the Progressive Bishops under Elizabeth I, 1559–1579. New York, 2000.

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Radical and Dissenting Groups john d. roth

Introduction Faced with the challenge of defending the orthodoxy of the Evangelical Reformation against attacks from the Catholic Church, the early Reformers tended to regard all other competing groups as an undifferentiated threat, generally under the heading of Schwärmerei (fanatics). In their eyes these movements were dangerously subjective and seditious – a threat to both the Reformation cause and to good public order. Thus, in his 1528 tract Von der Widertauffe Martin Luther described his opponents as “wild-eyed fanatics,” bent on destroying godly order in church and society. Two years later Luther’s colleague Philip Melanchthon depicted them as “angels of the devil” whose only interest was to sow seeds of confusion and division.1 In 1531 Heinrich Bullinger, Zwingli’s successor as the leading Reformer and city pastor of the Grossmünster church in Zurich, denounced the Anabaptists as “wanton rebels.” “[They] are divided into countless sects,” he wrote, “and each bans and denounces the other as if they were the devil.”2 And in 1561 John Calvin defended the execution of the anti-Trinitarian Michael Servetus by arguing that the church dare not fail “to rid the country of those scoundrels, who stir up the people to revolt against us. Such monsters should be exterminated.”3 These judgments set the dominant tone of subsequent historiography through the early twentieth century – radicals and dissenters were, in the words of a standard church history text, the “deformation of the Reformation.”4

1

See John S. Oyer, Lutheran Reformers against the Anabaptists (The Hague, 1964), 122, 155. Heinrich Bullinger, Von dem unverschampten fräfel (Zurich, 1531), I, viii. The Letters of John Calvin, ed. Jules Bonnet, 4 vols. (Edinburgh, 1855), IV, 440. 4 Johann Kurtz, Lehrbuch der Kirchengeschichte für Studierende, 9th ed. (Leipzig, 1885), 148. For similar assessments see Karl Holl, “Luther und die Schwärmer” (1922), in Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Kirchengeschichte, 3 vols. (Tübingen, 1948), I, 420–467. 2 3

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Such descriptions were not entirely a figment of the polemicist’s imagination. After all, the religious reforms of the sixteenth century gave rise to a constellation of diverse groups, whose teachings challenged ecclesial traditions and threatened political authority. Since these groups remained outside the legal framework established by the religious settlements at Augsburg (1555) and Westphalia (1648), their members were, by definition, seditious, and therefore subject to fines, imprisonment, torture, expulsion, or even death. Contemporary scholarship has been somewhat kinder to these groups, repositioning them as forerunners of modern religious liberty and the separation of church and state. In his encyclopedic volume The Radical Reformation (1962), the Harvard church historian George Williams insisted that groups outside the Catholic, Lutheran, and Reformed traditions were indeed an integral part of the Reformation.5 In his scheme, the primary distinction between the “radical reformation” and what he identified as the “magisterial reformation” focused on the medieval union of church and state often associated with the Emperor Constantine in the fourth century. Whereas the magisterial reformers reaffirmed the tradition of infant baptism and accepted a prominent role for political authorities in religious matters, the radical reformers generally embraced some form of voluntary Christianity and argued for a separation of the church from the territorial state. Moreover, Williams proposed a basic taxonomy for the Radical Reformation that distinguished among the Anabaptists, the Spiritualists, and the anti-Trinitarians, each with its own further subdivisions. Even though scholars today generally affirm the inclusion of such groups in Reformation historiography, and have largely adopted the categories proposed by Williams, the terms “radical” and “dissenting” remain contentious. In the first place, to speak of “radical and dissenting groups” presupposes the orthodoxy of a larger theological tradition, without which terms such as “radical” or “dissenting” have no meaning – theological reformers become “radical” only in comparison to some normative standard from which they are perceived to deviate. Yet most of the groups included under this label regarded themselves as thoroughly orthodox Christians. Their goal was not to be “radical” but rather to recover qualities of the apostolic church that the dominant traditions had lost or forgotten.

5

George H. Williams, The Radical Reformation, 3rd ed. (Kirksville, 1992 [1962]).

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In this sense, all of the groups that emerged out of the religious ferment of the sixteenth century were “radical,” none more so than Martin Luther himself. By the mid-1520s Luther’s heroic defiance of the pope, his open rejection of the authority of tradition, and his defense of the principle of Sola Scriptura and the freedom of religious conscience had inspired the emergence of numerous other groups who regarded their beliefs and practices to be consistent with Luther’s own example. If “radical” is understood in its original meaning of “going to the roots” (radix), then all of the reformers understood themselves to be part of a larger movement to restore the purity of the church according to the teachings of Christ and the apostles.6 In a slightly different vein, emphasizing the “radical” character of movements such as the Anabaptists or Spiritualists can easily obscure the deep continuities between these groups and other similar reform initiatives that had long been part of the medieval Catholic Church. To be sure, the church had denounced some of these reforms – those led by Peter Waldo and Jan Hus, for example – as heresies. But others – the critique of Francis of Assisi in the thirteenth century; the mysticism of Johannes Tauler in the fourteenth century; or the movement of lay piety associated with the devotio moderna and Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ in the fifteenth century – were successfully absorbed. To different degrees, the groups emerging in the sixteenth century identified here as “radical and dissenting” actually shared significant continuities with these currents within late medieval Catholicism. Identifying them as “radicals” can easily pry them loose from their historical context, thereby minimizing the connections they shared with late medieval theology and the broader social, economic, and political currents of the time. Finally, a survey of the theology of “radical and dissenting groups” presents yet another set of challenges. In contrast to the consolidation of Lutheran orthodoxy around the Augsburg Confession (1530) or the crystallization of Reformed theology in the grand architecture of Calvin’s Institutes (1536/1560), the groups included in this chapter represent a widely diverse range of theological emphases and methods. Part of this was the inevitable consequence of living at the margins of European society. Regarded as religious heretics and political threats, Anabaptists, Spiritualists, and antiTrinitarians were forced to meet in secret. With rare exceptions, their theology was formulated not in the quiet preserve of a university study, Adolf Laube, “Radicalism as a Research Problem in the History of the Early Reformation,” in Hans Hillerbrand, ed., Radical Tendencies in the Reformation: Divergent Perspectives (Kirksville, 1988), 9–23.

6

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but in the context of persecution; and it found expression less frequently in systematic treatises than in broadsides and pamphlets, catechisms and hymns, interrogation protocols, disputations, and prison letters. But this theological diversity was a consequence of conviction as well as circumstance. Many of the groups considered here, for example, were suspicious of formal theology and the endless wrangling of university-trained experts (Schriftgelehrten). They rejected the hierarchical structures of church organization and refused to defend their theological positions with the coercive power of the magistrate. In general, they emphasized an earnest and upright ethical life modeled after Christ – an existential theology of orthopraxis – more than intellectual argumentation. Thus, their theology defies easy classification, especially during the early years of the Reformation when group identity had not yet coalesced and individuals often passed through several phases of theological conviction. The positions of these groups are therefore best understood not as precise coordinates on a theological map but as unfolding conversations, always susceptible to transformation in the light of new contexts and challenges. For the purposes of this chapter, “Anabaptist” denotes those groups emerging in the early Reformation that practiced baptism upon confession of faith (thereby rejecting pedobaptism), held to a sacramentarian view of the Lord’s Supper, regarded sanctification as an inevitable corollary of the divine gift of grace, and practiced some form of church discipline consistent with their commitment to a visible church. This means that people like Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt and Thomas Müntzer, often associated with the Anabaptist movement, do not technically belong since they did not actually practice adult baptism. On the other hand, the so-called Anabaptist Kingdom of Münster is necessarily part of the story, since the leaders there continued to practice adult baptism, albeit under circumstances of coercion and violence that the larger Anabaptist tradition rejected. “Spiritualists,” by contrast, describes those groups and individuals who rejected external forms of the sacraments, elevated the Inner Word over the written word of Scripture, and were generally skeptical about visible forms of the church. A third group of dissenters has often been described by their opponents as “anti-Trinitarian” since this was the most contentious aspect of their teachings. Yet these groups actually held a range of understandings regarding the relationship of the Son to the Father, and their theological concerns extended to aspects of Christian faith and life that went far beyond their opposition to the doctrine of the Trinity. In the context of the early Reformation the distinctions among all of these emerging traditions – like 348

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the lines separating supporters of Luther from the followers of Zwingli or Calvin – were often blurred. Geographically, our focus will be primarily on the German-speaking territories of the Holy Roman Empire and the Swiss Confederation, though Moravia, at the edge of the Habsburg Empire, was home to a flourishing diversity of Anabaptist groups, and anti-Trinitarian groups were concentrated in places such as Italy, Poland, and Transylvania, at the geographic fringes of the Reformation.

Spiritualists The Reformation as a Spiritualizing Movement Central to the theology and practice of the medieval Catholic Church was the conviction that believers were united with God through material forms. In particular, the sacraments were understood to be efficacious mediators of God’s grace that enabled human beings to participate in the divine essence. Since the efficacy of the sacraments required the presence of an ordained member of the clergy, the church served as a crucial link between the individual and the divine. To the extent that the Reformation raised doubts about the salvific efficacy of external works and challenged the authority of the clergy as mediators between God and the believer, all the Reformers were “spiritualists.” Indeed, the origins of the Spiritualist movement can be traced to Luther’s early years in Wittenberg. Influenced by the mystical piety of the German Theology, Luther openly challenged Catholic penitential theology and practices. In The Freedom of the Christian, which appeared in 1520, Luther dissolved the connection between the external demands of the law and the internal transformation of the Christian effected by the gift of God’s prevenient grace and appropriated subjectively through faith. The human sinner, Luther insisted, is justified by grace alone. At the Diet of Worms in 1521 he defended the principle of Sola Scriptura and the liberty of the individual conscience against the weight of Catholic tradition and the institutional church. However, when Luther’s contemporaries in Wittenberg began to explore the ecclesial and social consequences of these arguments, especially during his exile at the Wartburg between May 1521 and March 1522, a struggle ensued over the future direction and character of the Reformation. In the winter of 1521–1522 Luther’s mentor, Andreas Karlstadt, assumed leadership of the Wittenberg movement and initiated a series of reforms that challenged outward forms. Because God cannot be contained in human-made objects, Karlstadt argued, he must be worshiped in Spirit. As a consequence, Karlstadt 349

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rejected the traditional symbols of clerical authority, raised doubts about the Mass and other outward ceremonies, and supported a wave of iconoclastic violence that led to the destruction of altars, statues, images, and relics. In March 1522, at the urging of Frederick the Wise, Luther returned to Wittenberg to preach a series of sermons denouncing the radical turn the reforms had taken. But many of his early followers were not persuaded by the increasingly moderate direction of his theology. As Luther went on to develop a clearer theology of the office of the minister and the role of the state in preserving social order, a host of his early followers – including people like Thomas Müntzer, Hans Denck, Hans Hut, and Melchior Hoffman – continued to pursue the Spiritualist trajectory of the early Reformation. They argued, for example, that ordinary lay people, inspired by the Holy Spirit, could interpret Scripture just as well as university-trained professors and clergy. In contrast to Luther, they promoted a symbolic – or “sacramentarian” – understanding of the Lord’s Supper. They were increasingly critical of infant baptism, a ceremony they associated with the fall of the church sometime between the second and the fourth centuries. And some of them embraced apocalyptic visions of a coming transformation in which the Holy Spirit would purge and restore creation according to the principles of divine justice. Although Luther denounced these impulses as anarchic and fanatical, the reformers who represented these themes were convinced that they were not a radical fringe of the Reformation, but its most faithful representatives. Because these reformers were generally skeptical about visible forms of authority, they were inherently diverse. Indeed, the term “Spiritualist” did not enter into the vocabulary of Reformation historiography as a distinct category until the early twentieth century, and it has proved to be a slippery label ever since. The historian Emmet McLaughlin has helpfully identified three distinct trajectories among Spiritualist reformers, “based on the source and conception of the Spirit (Bible vs. Plato) and the way in which those spirits manifested themselves in theology and experience.”7 The summary that follows draws heavily on McLaughlin’s insights.

Biblical/Charismatic Spiritualism A contemporary of Luther, Thomas Müntzer (1489–1525), exemplifies what McLaughlin calls the biblical/charismatic strain of Spiritualism. In 1518 7 Emmet McLaughlin, “Spiritualism: Schwenckfeld and Franck and their Early Modern Resonances,” in John D. Roth and James M. Stayer, eds., A Companion to Anabaptism and Spiritualism, 1521–1700 (Leiden, 2007), 119–161, at 122.

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Müntzer spent time in Wittenberg, where he encountered Luther and Karlstadt and became acquainted with the writings of the late medieval mystics. From there Müntzer began a meteoric career as a fiery preacher who fused mysticism and apocalypticism into a vision of revolutionary social transformation. His activities culminated in May 1525 when he served as a chaplain to the peasant armies at the battle of Frankenhausen, followed shortly thereafter by his torture and execution. Müntzer’s theology began with the premise – shared by all Spiritualists – that the chasm between res (thing/essence) and signum (sign) can be bridged only by the Spirit of God, which must penetrate the abyss of the human soul. But in contrast to the Platonic Spiritualists, he rejected a dualism between spirit and matter. In his view the Spirit was not primarily the object of intellectual desire, but rather an active, almost physical, force – a breath or wind (ruah/pneumos) – an instrument through which God is made visible in the world. This Biblical Spirit, which could not be contained by material forms and would blow where it willed (John 3:8), drove humans to carry out the will of God. It often targeted injustice or oppression, using violence if necessary to restore divine justice in the world. Müntzer was especially critical of the clergy, whom he denounced as rapacious and greedy Schriftgelehrten, who focused only on the written Word and empty ceremonies. But even though he condemned the preoccupation with external forms that he saw in both the Catholic Church and the emerging Protestant movement, Müntzer never rejected the material world as a potential instrument of God’s revelation. He did not, for example, abolish the Lord’s Supper or baptism. And he actively promoted a visible church consisting of the elect, who had been chosen by God to destroy godlessness and to bear witness to the imminent reign of God. The materiality of his vision was evident in his direct appeal to action. The Spirit did not drive the believer to contemplate a divine ideal, but to establish God’s righteous kingdom, ushered in with sacrifice and suffering, in the spirit of the “bitter Christ.” Müntzer is best remembered for his “Sermon to the Princes” that he delivered to Duke John at the Allstedt castle in 1524 and as a leader of the failed Peasants’ War the following year. Luther and Melanchthon associated him with the Anabaptists; and, indeed, early Anabaptist leaders in Zurich attempted to correspond with him. But his particular blend of Spiritualism – concrete, dynamic, socially transformative – came to an end in the spring of 1525 with the peasant defeat at the battle of Frankenhausen. In contrast to Müntzer, the Spiritualist tradition in the sixteenth century more typically revealed deep debts to Neoplatonic dualism. In simple terms, 351

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this view posited a fundamental divide between the material, mortal, sinful world and the far superior realm of the mind. In contrast to the physical world, which was subject to change, the world of Spirit (or Forms or Ideas) was timeless, occupying no space, and perceptible only by the mind (nous), which shared the same qualities of immateriality as the divine Spirit itself. True human happiness or virtue consisted in the melding of the mind with the qualities of the Spirit. McLaughlin has traced two distinct understandings of this union within the Platonic stream of Spiritualism.

Sacramental Platonic Spiritualism Caspar Schwenckfeld (1489–1561), a university-trained courtier and member of a well-established Silesian noble family, offers the best example of a “sacramental” solution to the body–spirit divide. Like Müntzer, Schwenckfeld was an early follower of Luther and played a key role in introducing the Reformation into Silesia. But he was troubled by the fact that Luther’s emphasis on imputed righteousness, combined with his emerging defense of the Eucharist, was not leading to a transformed moral life among believers. This problem led Schwenckfeld to a lifelong preoccupation with sacramental theology and what it meant to participate in, with, and through the living Christ. In April 1526 Schwenckfeld formally broke with the Wittenberg Reformation by suspending the practice of the Lord’s Supper. The true Eucharist, he concluded, was internal and spiritual; one could participate fully in Christ’s body and blood without the external form of bread and wine. Indeed, this inner eucharistic participation in Christ became the ontological underpinning for salvation. For Schwenckfeld, “Christ’s righteousness was not imputed to the believer, but was infused into the soul as Christ’s body and blood, making possible a more Christian life, a more moral behavior, and a true love of God and neighbor.”8 In 1529 political pressures in Silesia drove Schwenckfeld into exile to Strasbourg, where he encountered the nascent Anabaptist movement. The debate that ensued with Pilgram Marpeck and other Anabaptists further radicalized Schwenckfeld. In subsequent writings he rejected the visible church, arguing that the church of Christ had ceased to exist on earth and that the apostolic church would be reestablished only by divine intervention. His theology became even more intensely Christocentric, focused increasingly on the ascended “glorified Christ,” rather than the earthly body of the incarnated 8

Ibid., 126.

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Christ. Eventually Schwenckfeld argued that Christ’s humanity must have come directly from God rather than from his earthly mother, Mary. What emerged from all this was a form of spirituality that can be described as “Platonic sacramentalism.” For Schwenckfeld, union with the divine did not come about by a deeper contemplation on the Word, but through the experience of participating in the body and blood of Christ, sharing in the mystery of a spiritualized flesh. The goal of the believer was not to know about Christ, but to know Christ – to experience a union with the glorified Christ and his heavenly flesh, and to bear witness to the living Christ through the fruits of a regenerated life. Schwenckfeld regarded the cessation of the Eucharist and external ceremonies as temporary, awaiting the day when Christ would reestablish the true church and the true sacraments. Until then, believers should meet in small gatherings, but only for the purpose of individual edification. Forced to flee Strasbourg in 1533, Schwenckfeld found safe haven among noble families in and around Ulm, where he died in 1561. His writings, further developed by Valentin Crautwald, Valentin Weigel, and others, enjoyed a long legacy, especially among women, the nobility, and urban patriciates.

Noetic Platonic Spiritualism A third expression of Reformation Spiritualism – what McLaughlin identifies as Noetic Platonic – was more resolutely dualist in its understanding of spirit and matter, and characterized by an almost strident individualism and a thoroughgoing rejection of external sacraments, the visible church, and the written Word. Though it found expression in a wide variety of forms, Sebastian Franck (1499–1542) serves as a useful exemplar. Like Müntzer and Schwenckfeld, Franck followed the events in Wittenberg closely and, after his ordination as a priest in 1524, became a Lutheran preacher. But he, too, was quickly disillusioned by the lack of moral regeneration among Reformation enthusiasts and especially by the contentious confusion unleashed by Luther’s appeal to the principle of Sola Scriptura. After a brief encounter with Schwenckfeld in Strasbourg in 1529, Franck embarked on his own theological journey, centered on the “spark of divine love” and expressed in a profound skepticism of all rituals, doctrines, and ecclesial structures. In his Chronica, Zeitbuch und Geschichtsbibel (1531), a massive history of the world, Franck described a litany of human greed, coercion, oppression, and injustice as pervasive in the church as it was among secular rulers. The visible church in the apostolic era, he argued, was a 353

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concession to human weakness that quickly became corrupted by coercive forms of power. The true church persisted, but only in a spiritual form that encompassed all those who were open to the inner moving of the Spirit – including pre-Christians and non-Christians. Along the way Franck also cast doubt on all Christian doctrine, including the divinity of Christ, as human speculation that would inevitably lead to interminable debates and the coercive imposition of doctrinal boundaries. In Franck’s Spiritualist theology Christ became an exemplary human, useful as a moral example but not relevant to salvation in any orthodox sense of the term. A resolute skeptic about all theological claims, including his own tentative description of the Inner Word of the Logos, Franck concluded in a kind of via negativa. Not surprisingly, he had no disciples and created no school. Yet his writings continued to be popular in Anabaptist and Spiritualist circles, particularly among the Dutch Collegiants and other groups in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who pursued nondogmatic, nonsectarian, and noninstitutional forms of religion.

Anabaptism: Between Spiritualism and the Visible Church The boundaries separating the Anabaptist movement from the Spiritualists were never sharply defined. Both owed significant debts to the early Reformers as well as to elements of Renaissance humanism and medieval mysticism. The most visible marker of the Anabaptists, of course, was their practice of adult – or believer’s – baptism. True Christian baptism, they argued, required a conscious recognition of one’s sin and need for repentance, followed by a voluntary decision to accept God’s gracious gift of forgiveness – something they believed no infant could do. Originally, the term “Anabaptist” (Wiedertäufer = rebaptizer) was defamatory. Members of the movement generally referred to themselves as Brüder (brethren) – or later by more descriptive terms such as Täufer (baptizers) or Taufgesinnten/Doopsgezinde (baptism-minded). In their minds, they were not “rebaptizing,” but rather baptizing correctly for the first time. Still, the name Anabaptist persisted, not least because their opponents recognized that Roman law regarded “rebaptism” as a criminal offense, punishable by death. Its use in English today is nonpejorative, serving as an umbrella reference for both the range of sixteenth-century groups that practiced adult baptism and the more general theological tradition that gave rise to its primary descendent groups: the Mennonites, Amish, and Hutterites. 354

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Historians have generally identified the beginnings of the Anabaptist movement by focusing on four distinct clusters: the Swiss Brethren, Hutterites, Melchiorites/Münsterites, and Mennonites. What follows is a highly compressed summary of these groups and a survey of their shared theological convictions.

Swiss Brethren The story of Anabaptist beginnings in Zurich bears clear resemblances to the tensions in Wittenberg, with Ulrich Zwingli playing the role of Luther. Like Luther, Zwingli began his critique of the Catholic Church by appealing to the principle of Sola Scriptura. Based on a close reading of Scripture, he and his students began to raise basic questions about clerical celibacy, fasting, the place of religious relics and images, and especially the sacramental character of the Eucharist. In 1523 Zwingli submitted his resignation as a Catholic priest; but the city council of Zurich immediately rehired him as an Evangelical preacher, effectively marking the city’s shift into the Reformation camp. Exactly what that meant, however, had not yet been determined. When the council expressed reluctance to ban the Mass immediately or approve his spiritual-commemorative view of the Lord’s Supper, some of Zwingli’s more radical followers expressed frustration at both the pace of the reform and the role of political authorities in interpreting biblical principles. Tensions heightened when several rural communities around Zurich, claiming the principle of Sola Scriptura, launched a critique of ecclesial tithes, infant baptism, and external control over the appointment of local pastors. The heart of the debate focused especially on baptism. In various public disputations Zwingli defended pedobaptism as a continuation of circumcision; but many of his followers were unconvinced. When some refused to baptize their newborn babies – citing Christ’s teaching that belief should precede baptism (Matt. 28:19; Mark 16:16) – the council responded fiercely. On January 21, 1525 it issued an ultimatum, demanding that the radicals baptize their infants or risk expulsion from the city.9 That same evening, in clear violation of the city council’s order, a small group of reform-minded radicals, led by Conrad Grebel, Felix Mantz, and George Blaurock, baptized each other. This set in motion a series of similar events, especially in the countryside around Zurich. By the next day reports had begun to trickle into 9

Leland Harder, ed., The Sources of Swiss Anabaptism: The Grebel Letters and Related Documents (Scottdale, 1985), 337.

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the city of additional baptisms in Wytikon and other villages surrounding Zurich; and within a few weeks Anabaptist missionaries were baptizing new converts in Schaffhausen, Hallau, St. Gall, and the Tyrol. Initially the precise meaning of these baptisms was not entirely clear. Some early Swiss Anabaptists, such as the humanist-trained theologian Balthasar Hubmaier in Waldshut, attempted to establish a magisterial form of Anabaptism. Others regarded the incipient movement as being in close harmony with the Twelve Articles, a biblically anchored manifesto for social reform that was a rallying point of the Peasants’ War. Not until the spring of 1527, following the decimation of the peasant army and the first wave of persecution, did a small group of Anabaptists compose a Congregational Order and a formal statement of shared convictions – the Schleitheim Confession – that provided the foundation for a more cohesive movement known as the Swiss Brethren.

Hutterites As the Anabaptist movement spread into the Grisons, the Tyrol, and the territories of south Germany, the authorities responded harshly, forcing many new believers to migrate eastward to Moravia. There, a variety of baptizing groups found refuge in cities and estates controlled by local Moravian nobility. Among them were the followers of Hans Hut, an Anabaptist reformer whose theology reflected a distinctively mystical and apocalyptic tone. Hut shared the Swiss Brethren’s emphasis on following Jesus in the suffering of the cross as well as in the glory of his resurrection; but the language he used to describe this – with numerous references to “yieldedness” (Gelassenheit) and purification – drew more explicitly on late medieval mysticism. Like the Swiss Brethren, Hut rejected violence – but only as a temporary measure until Christ returned to lead his followers in a final decisive battle against the forces of evil. Similarly, Hut, like the Swiss Brethren, baptized adults; but he did so by marking converts on their foreheads with the “sign of the Thau,” a spiritual symbol that would distinguish the 144,000 elect mentioned in Revelation from the ungodly on the day of judgment, which he predicted would occur on Pentecost in 1528. Hut died in jail in December 1527. Several months later magistrates in the Moravian city of Nikolsburg expelled many of his followers. Following the example of the apostolic church in Acts 2 and 4, the group pooled their possessions and eventually found refuge in Austerlitz, where they continued to practice community of goods. In 1533 Jakob Hutter, a missionary/preacher from the Tyrol, assumed leadership of a portion of the Austerlitz group, now 356

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relocated in the nearby town of Auspitz. Although Hutter would be executed only two years later, he brought a new sense of administrative order to the community and ultimately lent his name to the “Hutterite” tradition that emerged.10 Shortly after Hutter’s execution Peter Riedemann, another gifted leader, produced a lengthy statement of Hutterite beliefs that provided a theological foundation for the group, particularly their distinctive practice of community of goods. The Hutterites eventually became the largest Anabaptist group in sixteenth-century Europe, thanks to an aggressive missionary strategy and the appeal of their thriving communities.

Melchiorites/Münsterites As the Hutterites were developing a form of Anabaptism characterized by tightly structured, peaceful communities in which members shared all their possessions, Anabaptism in north Germany and the Netherlands took a dramatically different direction. Anabaptist ideas were introduced to northern Europe by Melchior Hoffman, a zealous evangelist and self-styled prophet, who started his preaching career as a Lutheran reformer.11 Hoffman’s fiery message of iconoclasm, anticlericalism, and the promise of a new, purified Christian order soon infuriated Luther; but it found broad resonance among the poor. In Strasbourg, a haven for religious dissidents, he was won over to Anabaptism, and began to practice adult baptism. At the same time, Hoffman’s biblical studies – drawing especially on the books of Daniel and Revelation – increasingly focused on the end times. He also began teaching a Spiritualist variation on the incarnation, claiming that Jesus had a “heavenly flesh” untainted by human physical qualities. Though born of Mary, Jesus passed through her “like water through a tube,” thereby retaining his divine character. Hoffman enjoyed great success as an Anabaptist missionary in the Low Countries. But when Dutch authorities, under pressure from the Habsburg emperor, began to execute his followers, he announced a temporary cessation on baptism and incorporated the experience of suffering into an apocalyptic vision of the imminent return of Christ. As Hoffman’s followers gathered in Strasbourg to await the event, the city council, its patience exhausted, threw Hoffman into prison, where he later died. 10 See Werner O. Packull, Hutterite Beginnings: Communitarian Experiments during the Reformation (Baltimore, 1995). 11 See Klaus Deppermann, Melchior Hoffman: Social Unrest and Apocalyptic Visions in the Age of Reformation, trans. Malcolm Wren (Edinburgh, 1987).

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Although Hoffman was gone from the scene, his teachings lived on among his converts, especially in East Frisia, Westphalia, and the Netherlands. One disciple, Jan Matthijs, a baker from Haarlem, argued that Hoffman had been wrong only about the place and the date of Christ’s return.12 Rallying Hoffman’s disciples and other new converts, Matthijs called for a holy army of the elect to gather in the north German city of Münster to await the imminent reign of Christ. The events that followed were tragic, forever associating the Anabaptist movement with the stain of extremism and violence. In short order, Matthijs introduced Anabaptism to the city of Münster and persuaded its leading citizens to join in the cause, transforming the city into an Anabaptist stronghold. But as allied armies of Catholic and Evangelical princes besieged the city, the vision of a New Jerusalem collapsed. When Christ failed to return as predicted at Easter 1534, Matthijs led a small squad of armed men on a suicidal charge against the besieging army. His death led to even more radical measures. Leadership of the city now fell into the hands of Jan of Leiden, a twenty-four-year-old actor who styled himself as the reincarnation of King David. Appealing to Old Testament precedents, Jan replaced the elected council with twelve elders, introduced polygamy, mandated adult baptism, enforced community of goods, and proclaimed the Anabaptist Kingdom of Münster. In September 1534 he declared himself to be “King of the New Israel and of the whole world” and responded to dissent with public executions. By the spring of 1535 the inhabitants of Münster were hungry and exhausted. On June 25, 1535 imperial soldiers stormed the city. The bloody massacre that ensued brought a decisive end to the Kingdom of Münster. Leaders who survived the battle were interrogated, tortured with red-hot tongs, and then executed – their bodies exposed to the public in three iron cages hoisted to the top of the bell tower of the Lamberti church. In the eyes of many, the tragic events at Münster revealed the true character of the Anabaptist movement – religious fanatics who preached heresy and spread sedition and chaos wherever they were to be found.13 As a result, a new wave of anti-Anabaptist persecution rolled across Europe. 12 For a summary of the complex events that unfolded in Münster see Ralf Klötzer, “The Melchiorites and Münster,” in Roth and Stayer, eds., A Companion to Anabaptism and Spiritualism, 217–254. 13 For a detailed survey of the lingering perceptions of Anabaptism created by the Münster debacle see Stadtmuseum Münster, Das Königreich der Täufer: Reformation und Herrschaft der Täufer in Münster, 2 vols. (Münster, 2000).

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Mennonites The collapse of the Anabaptist Kingdom of Münster left hundreds of people dead and thousands more deeply disillusioned. Yet out of the tragedy of Münster a new Anabaptist group emerged. Led by Menno Simons (1496–1561), a Roman Catholic priest turned radical reformer, Anabaptism in northern Europe regained its theological moorings. In the years that followed his conversion to the Anabaptist movement in 1536 Menno set out to rebuild the scattered and dispirited fellowship. His first surviving tract was a polemic against Jan of Leiden, in which he denounced the visions and violence of the Münsterites and advocated a method for interpreting Scripture based firmly on the teachings of Christ. During the following three decades Menno traveled almost constantly – preaching, baptizing, and instructing new believers in the faith. Although some elements of the Spiritualist impulse persisted among the followers of the enigmatic prophet David Joris, the group that gathered around Menno’s energetic leadership was dedicated to a Christocentric biblicism shorn of apocalyptic visions, along with an ethic of nonresistant Christian discipleship, and a disciplined church that posed no threat to civil order. Menno’s teachings eventually had considerable influence beyond his own circle. Over the following centuries the group that gathered around these teachings – initially called “Mennists,” and then, more commonly, Doopsgezinde (“baptism-minded”) – became an enduring and visible presence in the emerging Dutch state.

Anabaptist Theology As this summary suggests, the first generation of Anabaptists, like all grassroots movements, was not a unified body. Some early converts were disillusioned veterans of the Peasants’ War still hoping to transform social and political realities according to a biblical template. Others reflected the apocalyptic mood of the times, drawing from the prophetic writings of Daniel and Revelation a message of God’s imminent judgment. Still others were gripped by the teachings of Jesus and assumed, naively perhaps, that the Sermon on the Mount and the story of the early church offered a blueprint for a renewed and purified church, separated from a fallen world. Contributing to the fluid boundaries of the movement was the ongoing threat of persecution, which soon deprived them of their most gifted theologians and made communication among various Anabaptist groups difficult.

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A congregationalist ecclesiology further complicated efforts to unify the movement; and Anabaptists in the first generations were suspicious of formal theology, focusing more on practices – believer’s baptism, oath refusal, nonresistance, community of goods, church discipline – than a uniform set of doctrines. Nonetheless, Anabaptist leaders insisted on the fundamental orthodoxy of their theology. In interrogations and disputations they consistently appealed to the teachings of Jesus and the example of the early church. Though they did not always express their convictions with the precision sought by their university-trained interlocutors, virtually all Anabaptists were Trinitarian; and they frequently cited the Apostles’ Creed and the Didache in defending themselves against charges of heresy. Perhaps the most useful framework to summarize Anabaptist theology is the doctrine of the incarnation – the mystery of the Word made Flesh (John 1:14). Whereas Catholic and Protestant theologians often began their doctrinal statements with detailed arguments about creation, the nature and character of God, and an account of original sin, Anabaptists generally oriented their theological arguments around the Gospels, arguing that God’s will for humanity was most fully revealed in the person of Jesus Christ. Leonhart Schiemer, an early Anabaptist martyr, offered a typical Anabaptist perspective: In Christ dwells the fullness of the deity. He alone is Lord of all lords and the King of all kings, a Healer and Savior of the human race. To him is given all authority in heaven, on earth and under the earth. Therefore we are properly subject to him, give him our obedience, and honor, fear, and love him above all creatures.14

Though they did not always agree on its implications, the doctrine of the incarnation infused Anabaptist biblical hermeneutics, soteriology, ecclesiology, and ethics; and it played a central role in their theology of suffering and martyrdom.

Hermeneutics: A Christocentric Reading of Scripture Like all the mainstream Reformers, Anabaptists affirmed the principle of Sola Scriptura. And, like the Reformers, they quickly adopted several distinctive hermeneutical principles for clarifying the true meaning of the biblical text. Leonard Schiemer, “Letter to the Church of God at Rattenberg” (1527), in Sources of South German/Austrian Anabaptism, ed. Arnold C. Snyder (Kitchener, Ont., 2001), 67–80, at 72.

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The earliest Anabaptist church orders, for example, asserted that biblical interpretation was the task of the entire congregation, not the specialized prerogative of an elite clergy. The sources are less clear just how this socalled hermeneutical community actually functioned – especially as early charismatic forms of church life gave way to more institutionalized leadership. But a bias toward the priesthood of all believers in biblical interpretation was clear. The most significant principle of Anabaptist hermeneutics, however, was the central authority of Christ as the revealer of Scripture. This Christocentric principle found expression whenever a passage in the Bible seemed unclear or when they were confronted with texts that seemed to contradict each other. In these instances Anabaptists oriented their biblical focus to the Synoptic Gospels and insisted on the example and teachings of Jesus as the final arbiter. Thus, for example, Christ’s command in the Sermon on the Mount to love enemies and to repay evil with goodness had a higher authority for them than texts in the Old Testament where God seemed to command the use of violence. In Christ, they argued, the promises of the Old Testament found their fulfillment – the light of Christ’s teaching illuminated what had previously been understood only as a shadow, thereby revealing fully God’s will for humanity.

Soteriology: Participation in Christ through the Holy Spirit The emphasis on the incarnation also had profound implications for how most Anabaptist groups understood salvation. Though often accused of Pelagianism, the Anabaptists affirmed the inherent human tendency toward evil. But they did not share Luther’s sense of the overwhelming crushing nature of sin. Although the natural order had been profoundly injured by the Fall, humans were designed by a loving and gracious God to live in harmony with God, with each other, and with creation. Thus, as the “second Adam,” Christ not only imputed righteousness to sinful humans through his atoning death; he also, through the resurrection, mitigated the effects of original sin and enabled the believer to participate in a “new creation” (2 Cor. 5:17) expressed as a genuine transformation of life. The world is full of Christians, Pilgram Marpeck wrote, “who confess only the mortal and physical Christ, but very few believe and confess the risen Christ with their lives.”15 Anabaptists frequently described this relationship by quoting from Christ’s 15

Quoted in Stephen Boyd, Pilgram Marpeck: His Life and Social Theology (Mainz, 1992), 90.

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words in John 15: “I am the vine, [Jesus says to his followers], you are the branches. He who abides in Me, and I in him, bears much fruit; for without Me you can do nothing . . . By this My Father is glorified, that you bear much fruit; so you will be my disciples” (John 15:5, 8).

Ecclesiology: “Thy Kingdom Come . . . on Earth as it is in Heaven” The doctrine of the incarnation was also central to the Anabaptist understanding of the church. As with other Christian traditions, Anabaptists frequently appealed to the image of the apostle Paul who described the church as “the body of Christ” (1 Cor. 12). But the image for them was less a metaphor than a description of the living presence of Christ incarnated in the gathered community. Pilgram Marpeck described the church as the “prolongation of the incarnation.” Christ, of course, was no longer physically present on earth; but he remained alive in a tangible, visible form in the gathered community of faith, where the Spirit was “embodied” by disciples who heeded his teachings, participated in the fellowship of his suffering, and bore witness in their lives to the hope of his resurrection. Ambrosius Spitelmaier, an Anabaptist from Linz who was executed for his faith in 1528, described this in vivid language: [The Body of Christ] concerns all those who belong to Christ . . . who are his members, that is hand, feet or eyes. Such members must be joined to Christ spiritually and not physically. Christ, the true man in the flesh, is the head of such members through which the members are ruled. With such a head and members it becomes like a visible body.16

The active presence of the Holy Spirit, essential to the life of the church, was made visible through the practice of biblical “ceremonies” or “ordinances” that had been commanded by Christ and practiced by the apostles. These ordinances were not sacraments in the sense that they actually effected that which they signified; but neither were they understood to be “merely” external rituals. The most important, and contentious, of these practices in the sixteenth century was the Anabaptist understanding of voluntary, or believer’s, baptism – the ritual that marked a believer’s entrance into the church. Although their Lutheran and Reformed opponents often identified the voluntary 16 Ambrosius Spitelmaier, “Questions and Answers,” in Sources of South German/Austrian Anabaptism, 54–63, at 55.

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nature of baptism as proof of the charge of “works righteousness,” the Anabaptists insisted that the practice was rooted in Scripture and that it preserved the initiative of God’s grace. In language typical of many others, the Anabaptist leader Hans Hut explained that “First Christ said, go forth into the whole world, preach the Gospel to every creature [Matt. 28:19]. Second, he said, whosoever believes, and third, is baptized – the same shall be saved [Mark 16:16]. This order must be maintained if we want to achieve a true Christian life.”17 Though faith was truly a gift, they argued, the believer needed to receive it actively as such – God’s grace was never coercive. In elaborating their baptismal theology, Anabaptists frequently cited 1 John 5, where the writer testified that “the Spirit, the water and the blood” all bear witness to the divinity of Christ (1 John 5:8).18 These three themes became the foundation for the Anabaptist understanding of baptism. At its most basic level the baptism was an external sign of the inward transforming work of the Holy Spirit. The baptism of water – whether by immersion, pouring, or sprinkling – anchored the spiritual reality within the material world so that, in the words of the Anabaptist leader Pilgrim Marpeck, each becomes “a cowitness” of the other.19 Finally, the baptism of blood was a reminder that following Christ in life meant being prepared to follow him in death as well. In January 1527, two years after the first baptisms, the Zurich city council approved the execution by drowning of Felix Mantz. His martyrdom would soon be followed by the deaths of hundreds of other Anabaptists, and the arrest, interrogation, imprisonment, and torture of thousands more. Indeed, during the course of the sixteenth century some 2,000–3,000 Anabaptists were executed for their convictions.20 If the Anabaptist church was formed by the ritual of baptism, its inner life was sustained by a series of other ordinances. The Lord’s Supper, generally practiced several times a year, was understood to be a memorial meal that recalled the death and resurrection of Christ while also celebrating his continued presence in the life of the gathered church. Anabaptists generally 17 Hans Hut, “On the Mystery of Baptism,” in Early Anabaptist Spirituality: Selected Writings, ed. Daniel Leichty (New York, 1994), 64–81, at 67. 18 See, for example, Hans Schlaffer, “A Brief Instruction for the Beginning of a Truly Christian Life,” in Sources of South German/Austrian Anabaptism, 84–94, at 92–94. 19 For a development of Marpeck’s sacramental theology see Neal Blough, Christ in our Midst: Incarnation, Church and Discipleship in the Theology of Pilgram Marpeck (Kitchener, Ont., 2007), esp. 101–132. 20 For an insightful comparative analysis of martyrdom in the Reformation see Brad S. Gregory, Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA, 1999).

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linked participation in the Lord’s Supper with the practice of church discipline, citing Matthew 16:19 and 18:15–17. Though deeply controversial at times, the practice of mutual admonition and the ban maintained the integrity of the believer’s baptismal vows and the visible character of the gathered church. Footwashing was yet another ordinance, a practice instituted by Christ that joined the Spirit of Christ – expressed as meekness, humility, and yieldedness (Gelassenheit) – with an outward form. The ritual, also associated with the Lord’s Supper, symbolically reenacted Christ’s example of humble servanthood.

Discipleship: Witness of a Transformed Life Perhaps the most significant expression of the incarnation among the Anabaptists was a commitment of the believer to follow Christ in daily life. Anabaptist groups differed on the exact details of Christian discipleship; the Hutterites, for example, insisted that it included the renunciation of all claims to private property while the Swiss Brethren taught that mutual aid could not be mandated. But all were agreed that baptism would be followed by a life conformed to the teachings and example of Christ. It will not “help a fig,” wrote Menno Simons, to “boast of the Lord’s blood, death, merits, grace and gospel so long as we are not truly converted from this wicked, immoral and shameful life.”21 “True evangelical faith,” he wrote elsewhere, “cannot lie dormant . . . It clothes the naked; it feeds the hungry; it comforts the sorrowful; it shelters the destitute; it returns good for evil; it serves those that harm it . . . it binds up that which is wounded, it has become all things to all people.”22 In accordance with Jesus’s instructions in the Sermon on the Mount, most Anabaptists abstained from the swearing of oaths, rejected lawsuits, expressed doubts about participating in civil governance, and refused to defend themselves with lethal violence. This emphasis on a life of earnest moral transformation was an effective form of Anabaptist mission, especially to those who were dissatisfied with Roman Catholic sacramentalism and a Lutheran theology of grace that did not seem to them to bear fruit in a regenerated life. Any summary of “Anabaptist theology” inevitably oversimplifies a complex movement. Nevertheless, the Swiss Brethren, Hutterites, Melchiorites, and Mennonites emerged out of the same soil. They all drew deeply on 21 22

The Complete Writings of Menno Simons, ed. John C. Wenger (Scottdale, 1955), 110–111. Ibid., 307.

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forms of piety inherited from late medieval spirituality and they all were indebted to the Protestant Reformers for a new awareness of the power of Scripture as the Word of God. With few exceptions, Anabaptist groups were committed to the principle of voluntary baptism, a life of practical discipleship in the spirit of The Imitation of Christ, and a utopian vision of the church as a holy community. Yet their teachings – especially within the context of the Peasants’ War of 1525 and the debacle at Münster a decade later – were deeply unsettling to contemporary authorities and seemed to challenge the very foundations of sixteenth-century European society.

Anti-Trinitarianism If Anabaptist groups were largely defined by their distinctive practices, a final cluster of dissenting groups were identified almost exclusively by a single point of doctrine: their views on the Trinity. Debates over the precise relationship of God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit had emerged repeatedly during the first three centuries of the early church. Building on formulations established by the Council of Nicaea (325) and the Council of Constantinople (381), the church settled on its formal doctrine of the Trinity at the Council of Chalcedon in 451. That council described God as three distinct persons (hypostases) – Father, Son (Jesus Christ), and Holy Spirit – who were nonetheless understood to be “one God,” co-eternal, coequal, and indivisibly united. The three persons of the Trinity were distinct, yet “one in substance, essence or nature (homoousios).” By the late fifth century the Athanasian Creed further solidified the doctrine of the Trinity as a central component of Catholic orthodoxy by explicitly condemning as heretical any teaching that disagreed with this formulation. But even though the matter was seemingly settled within the dominant Christian tradition, undercurrents of dissent – defined now as heresy – never disappeared. During the course of the Reformation these voices emerged in a variety of settings and expressed in a range of non-Trinitarian perspectives. Some anti-Trinitarian arguments in the sixteenth century sought to defend the monotheism of the Christian faith against charges of tritheism. More typically, anti-Trinitarianism was rooted in a biblical literalism, buoyed by the principle of Sola Scriptura, that relativized all historical doctrines or human creeds that had no explicit biblical warrant. The biblical writers, the argument went, expressed the relationship of God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit in many different ways; but they never did so with the linguistic precision of the credal formulations of the fourth and fifth centuries. At its worst, the 365

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doctrine of the Trinity was a nonbiblical invention of the historical church that had become a clerical weapon to wield against dissenters. The first open doubts about the doctrine of the Trinity in the sixteenth century are often associated with Martin Cellarius (1499–1564), a friend of Melanchthon who expressed his reservations in a treatise, De operibus Dei (1527).23 However, the most celebrated challenge to Trinitarian orthodoxy in the early Reformation movement came from the Spanish humanist and polymath Michael Servetus (1511?–1153). Servetus had joined the Reformation cause through contact with Johannes Oecolampadius in Basel in 1530. Already in 1531 he published a theological treatise, De Trinitatis erroribus (On the Errors of the Trinity), which rejected the Nicene formula, which he described as a “three-headed Cerberus.” Following a career as a doctor, at times forced to live under an assumed name, Servetus returned to the controversial topic of the Trinity in a longer work, Christianismi restitutio (The Restitution of Christianity), in 1553. There he did not so much reject the doctrine of the Trinity as attempt to correct what he perceived to be the errors of Nicene formulations. Among other arguments, Servetus raised biblical doubts about the individuality of three divine persons in one God, he repudiated philosophical speculation regarding the preexistence of Christ as the eternal Logos, and he described the Holy Spirit as a power emanating from God rather than a Person of the Godhead. The ensuing debate with Calvin eventually led to his celebrated trial in Geneva and, ultimately, to his execution by burning in October 1553. Servetus, however, was not alone in his doubts about the doctrine of the Trinity. Indeed, during the second half of the sixteenth century many other anti-Trinitarian voices also found expression, particularly in Italy, Poland, and Transylvania.

Evangelical Rationalists in Italy The Italian peninsula was home to a variety of underground religious movements in the early sixteenth century, particularly the Waldensians and several small groups of Anabaptists. The most notorious group of dissenters, however, reflected a stream of religious reform deeply indebted to Renaissance humanism whom George Williams has identified as “evangelical rationalists.” Most of the key leaders in this movement – people like Girolamo Busale, Giovanni Gentile, Giorgio Biandrata, Paolo Ricci, and 23

The Anabaptist/Spiritualist Hans Denck is also often associated with early non-Trinitarian thought, though his arguments were more muted.

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Matteo Gribaldi – were gifted philologists, some of them skilled in Hebrew as well as Latin and Greek. Their emerging theology was characterized less by a preoccupation with sin and grace than by a strong emphasis on the freedom of the will and the ethical teachings of Christ. They were opposed to war, capital punishment, and coercion in matters of conscience, and they rejected the doctrine of the Trinity, which they associated with the Constantinian fusion of religious and political authority seen now in its revised form in Calvin’s Geneva. In general, they promoted a sort of tritheism, in which Christ and the Holy Spirit have an eternal nature but proceeded from God the Father and did not exist co-eternally with God. In 1550 a gathering of some sixty leaders of the so-called Anabaptist Council of Venice marked the formal beginning of the underground antiTrinitarian movement in Italy. Here, Laelio Sozzini (1525–1562), an Italian lay theologian, emerged as a leading voice. Sozzini promoted an Adoptionist Christology, arguing that Christ had not existed as God for all eternity – rather, he was a man elevated to the status of God’s son by virtue of his merits and his role as a teacher of divine truths. Although Sozzini published only one book (Concerning the Sacraments, 1555), he traveled widely throughout Switzerland, France, England, and Poland, quarreling with reformers such as Melanchthon, Bullinger, and Calvin, and disseminating his antiTrinitarian thought in the form of letters, disputations, and unpublished manuscripts.

The Emergence of the Polish Brethren and the Transylvania Unitarians The anti-Trinitarian movement found a more congenial home in Poland, where several fiercely independent towns and nobles offered refuge to a variety of religious minorities. In 1562 the Italian physician Giorgio Biandrata played a key role in promoting anti-Trinitarian thought at the Calvinist synod of Pinczów, which prompted a division among the Calvinists and ultimately the creation in 1565 of the Minor Church (Ecclesia Minor, also known as the Polish Brethren). Despite fierce opposition from the Calvinist majority and ongoing internal debates over the preexistence of Christ, the Minor Church survived in Poland, thanks in part to the systematizing work of Fausto Sozzini (1539–1604), nephew of Laelio Sozzini. Fausto distilled the antiTrinitarian themes from Laelio’s manuscripts into a more systematic theology and published them in Basel in 1574 in a book called Concerning Jesus Christ, the Savior. Fausto denounced a theological method based on “formulas of speaking that are utterly unknown to the sacred writers.” If such dogmas 367

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were correct, he argued, “Holy Writ would certainly have taught them somewhere in a manner that is clear, obvious and free of verbal complications and ambiguities.”24 Contrary to Anselm’s understanding of the atonement, Fausto did not regard Christ’s death as “the price for our sins,” or as needed to “placate” the wrath of God; rather, Christ “showed and taught the way of salvation” – he declared the love of God and confirmed it by his miracles. In the wake of the furor aroused by the book, the young theologian moved to Poland in 1579 where, despite significant differences with other leaders in the emerging Minor Church, he found a warm reception for his ideas. Fausto Sozzini’s writings became the basis for the Racovian Catechism (1605), a widely published and translated summary of anti-Trinitarian theology. The catechism, along with many other books published by the Polish Brethren in Racov, affirmed the virgin birth; but it clearly rejected traditional orthodox doctrines such as hell, original sin, the preexistence of Christ, and an Anselmian view of atonement. The catechism, highly rational in its scriptural hermeneutic and expressing a clear preference for ethics over metaphysics, did much to seal the legacy of Fausto Sozzini and the “Socinian” tradition, a term that became common in Holland and England in the early seventeenth century. During the second half of the sixteenth century anti-Trinitarian thought also took root in Transylvania, which, like Poland, provided refuge for a variety of religious radicals. For a time Unitarianism, as the movement became known in Transylvania, was legally recognized in the country, alongside Catholicism, Lutheranism, and Calvinism. In Transylvania, as elsewhere, anti-Trinitarian groups continued to engage in vigorous internal debates, especially over the preexistence of Christ, Christ’s claim to divine worship, adult baptism, and conscientious objection to war.

Anabaptists, Spiritualists, and Anti-Trinitarians in 1675 By the end of the seventeenth century the picture of “radical and dissenting groups” is much clearer than it was during the early years of the Reformation. Although the incandescent revolutionary fervor of Thomas Müntzer had disappeared from the scene with the defeat of the peasants in 24 Quoted in Jaroslav Pellikan, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, 5 vols. (Chicago, 1977–1984), IV, 327.

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1525, Schwenckfelder conventicles continued to meet well into the seventeenth century, where they defied the wishes of their leader and identified their circles by his name. The violence of the Thirty Years War drove most of them out of south Germany, so that by 1675 Schwenckfelders were concentrated almost exclusively in Lower Silesia, where they enjoyed ongoing contact with pockets of Anabaptists in the region. The most radical of the Spiritualists, Sebastian Franck, left no institutional legacy. But his writings continued to find an eager readership among some Dutch Anabaptists – particularly Abrahamsz Galenus, the well-known seventeenth-century leader of the Lamist congregation in Amsterdam – and among early Enlightenment skeptics. By 1675 the Spiritualist impulse had mostly disappeared among the Anabaptists, as an emerging confessional structure absorbed the charismatic impulses of earlier leaders, particularly the Swiss Brethren and the Hutterites. Although congregationalist in orientation, the Swiss Brethren had consolidated a cohesive theological identity by the end of the sixteenth century, forged around a shared hymnody and a series of ministers’ meetings that resulted in several collective disciplines (Ordnungen) intended to regularize church practices. The ongoing reality of persecution in regions around Zurich and Berne led to a gradual migration of Swiss Brethren into Alsace, Lorraine, and the Palatinate, especially after the Thirty Years War. Meanwhile, the Hutterites flourished in southern Moravia and Slovakia during the latter half of the sixteenth century – boasting as many as 100 communities and a population of around 30,000. By the early seventeenth century, however, the group faced increased resistance from the CounterReformation, and then, beginning in 1605, were devastated by the Turkish Wars and the ensuing Thirty Years War. Surviving Hutterite remnants retreated to Slovakia, and then to Transylvania where they experienced a revival in the mid-seventeenth century under the leadership of Andreas Ehrenpreis. From Transylvania, Hutterites sought to establish contact with the Schwenckfelders in Silesia, the Socinians in Danzig, and Mennonites in the Netherlands. By the late sixteenth century Anabaptist groups in the northern provinces of the Netherlands experienced relative toleration under Calvinist rule. But the group continued to fissure, thanks in part to Spiritualist impulses that sparked a division between followers of Menno Simons – who continued to practice strict shunning – and the more lenient Waterlanders in 1557, which was soon followed by a complex series of further divisions. Although they did not enjoy full legal status until the early nineteenth century, the Dutch 369

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Anabaptists (Doopsgezinde) found a home within the relative tolerance of Dutch urban society, entering vigorously into Dutch commercial life and the flowering of arts and literature known as the Dutch “Golden Age.”25 Meanwhile, the anti-Trinitarian currents persisted as well, though in muted form. The Polish Brethren survived until in 1658 the Polish Sejm outlawed the Ecclesia Minor as part of the Counter-Reformation. Members of the group found asylum in Prussia, Transylvania, and especially in the Netherlands, where they were welcomed by the Remonstrants. There they published the Bibliotheca fratrum polonorum (1665–1669), which became a crucial foundation for later Socinian and Unitarian theology. The theological legacy of radical and dissenting groups of the Reformation can be seen most clearly today in the principles of religious voluntarism, the separation of church and state, and a critique of any form of coercion in religious life. Though minor characters in the Reformation itself, their influence on modern culture is still relevant today. bibliography Deppermann, Klaus. Melchior Hoffman: Social Unrest and Apocalyptic Visions in the Age of Reformation, trans. Malcolm Wren. Edinburgh, 1987. Goertz, Hans-Jürgen and James M. Stayer, eds. Radikalität und Dissent im 16. Jahrhundert/ Radicalism and Dissent in the Sixteenth Century. Berlin, 2002. Gregory, Brad S. Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge, MA, 1999. Harder, Leland, ed. The Sources of Swiss Anabaptism: The Grebel Letters and Related Documents. Scottdale, 1985. Hutterian Brethren, eds. The Chronicle of the Hutterian Brethren, volume I. Rifton, NY, 1987. Klaassen, Walter and William Klassen. Marpeck: A Life of Dissent and Conformity. Scottdale, 2008. McLaughlin, Robert Emmet. “Reformation Spiritualism: Typology, Sources and Significance.” In Hans-Jürgen Goertz and James M. Stayer, eds., Radikalität und Dissent im 16. Jahrhundert. Berlin, 2002, 127–140. Packull, Werner O. Hutterite Beginnings: Communitarian Experiments during the Reformation. Baltimore, 1995. Mysticism and the Early South German-Austrian Anabaptist Movement 1525–1531. Scottdale, 1977. Rempel, John. The Lord’s Supper in Anabaptism. Scottdale, 1993.

For a fuller account of this fascinating and complex story see Piet Visser, “Mennonites and Doopsgezinden in the Netherlands, 1535–1700,” in Roth and Stayer, eds., A Companion to Anabaptism and Spiritualism, 299–343; and Samme Zijlstra, Om de ware Gemeente en de oude Gronden: Geschiedenis van de dopersen in de Nederlanden, 1531–1675 (Leeuwarden, 2000). 25

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Radical and Dissenting Groups Roth, John D. and James M. Stayer, eds. A Companion to Anabaptism and Spiritualism, 1521–1700. Leiden, 2007. Seebaß, Gottfried. Müntzers Erbe: Werk, Leben und Theologie des Hans Hut. Gütersloh, 2002. Snyder, C. Arnold. Anabaptist History and Theology: An Introduction. Kitchener, Ont., 1995. Stayer, James M. The German Peasants’ War and Anabaptist Community of Goods. Montreal and Kingston, Ont., 1991. Williams, George H. The Radical Reformation, 3rd ed. Kirksville, 1992 [1962].

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The Religious Colloquy as a Medium for Seeking Consensus: Structures and Methods The search for the truth and establishment of consensus through the exchange of viewpoints was a common means of reaching understanding in the early modern period.1 The roots of this process lay in the way in which academic disputations were conducted in the medieval university. It followed firmly established rules, rhetorical models, and techniques. These standard forms of communication were carried over onto a nonacademic, public plane in early modern decision making and formation of public opinion. There the forms of the medieval academic disputation and judicial structures for negotiations blended with each other. The religious divisions that proceeded from the Reformation and the medieval church’s inability to reform provided the impetus for this development. The struggle for correct doctrine, which employed the form of the disputation with theses and antitheses, moved ever more out of the academic realm. That certainly did not end the culture of disputation at the university, within learned circles, however. Instead, a form of exchange, discussion, and dialogue in the vernacular took its place alongside it in the forum of the nonacademic public.2 Public disputations or colloquies could address the question of the introduction of the Reformation as well as that of how the divisions into 1

See Thomas Fuchs, Konfession und Gespräch: Typologie und Funktion der Religionsgespräche in der Reformationszeit [Norm und Struktur 4] (Cologne, Weimar, and Vienna, 1995). See also Irene Dingel, “Zwischen Disputation und Polemik: ‘Streitkultur’ in den nachinterimistischen Kontroversen,” in Henning P. Jürgens and Thomas Weller, eds., Streitkultur und Öffentlichkeit im konfessionellen Zeitalter [Veröffentlichungen des Instituts für Europäische Geschichte Mainz 95] (Göttingen, 2013), 17–29, at 20–24; Irene Dingel, “Pruning the Vines, Plowing up the Vineyard: The Sixteenth-Century Culture of Controversy between Disputation and Polemic,” in Anna Marie Johnson and John A. Maxfield, eds., The Reformation as Christianization: Essays on Scott Hendrix’s Christianization Thesis (Tübingen, 2012), 397–408. 2 Irene Dingel, “Von der Disputation zum Gespräch,” Lutherjahrbuch 85 (2018), 61–84.

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differing streams of public teaching, already established, could be set aside and the two sides possibly be reunited. In this context researchers differentiate the colloquies on inaugurating reform in the early years of the Reformation (which were to prepare for the secular government’s decision to introduce new teaching and ecclesiastical practice or to legitimize such a decision) from the later religious dialogues that ideally aimed at a convergence of two religious parties.3 Contemporaries hardly noticed this difference. The same kind of event could be labeled a Religionsgespräch,4 a disputatio, a colloquium, or a religious dialogue, without regard for its goal. Despite all the parallels with the medieval process of disputation, sixteenth-century religious colloquies differed from the academic model at essential points. One fundamental difference was the alteration of the governing methodological structure. The representatives of the Reformation decisively rejected the syllogism of Scholasticism as a relevant structure for argumentation for determining theological truth and untruth. A hermeneutic based upon and drawn from Holy Scripture was to govern the establishing of the truth, not arguments based on major and minor premises. God’s Word alone served the Reformers as the highest norm and source of the doctrine, and they insisted on making Holy Scripture the criterion for decisions. This paradigm shift emerged in the course of the Leipzig Disputation between Luther and Eck in 1519, a dispute between academicians which cannot be designated a “religious colloquy” in the later, native sense of the term.5 The first disputation in Zurich, on January 29, 1523, a “colloquy aimed at Reformation,” which took place within the municipal realm and sought to introduce the Reformation, can be cited as an early example of this paradigm shift. It was a public disputation which was to test or prove the viability of reformational doctrine. The manner in which the first Zurich disputation was held foreshadows what became characteristic for the later great religious 3 See Irene Dingel, “Religionsgespräche IV. Altgläubig – protestantisch und innerprotestantisch,” in TRE 28, 654–681, at 657–658; and Irene Dingel, Volker Leppin, and Kathrin Paasch, eds., Zwischen theologischem Dissens und politischer Duldung, Religionsgespräche der Frühen Neuzeit [Veröffentlichungen des Instituts für Europäische Geschichte Mainz 121] (Göttingen, 2018). 4 Sven Gütermann has recently demonstrated that, contrary to what had been previously argued, the term Religionsgespräch was occasionally used in the sixteenth century. See Sven Gütermann, Reformation und Konfessionsbildung in Speyer: Von konfessioneller Unentschiedenheit zum nonkonkordistischen Luthertum im Spannungsfeld von Reichspolitik und bürgerlichem Handeln [Refo500 Academic Studies 77] (Göttingen, 2021), 57–59. 5 See Irene Dingel, “Die Leipziger Disputation 1519 in ihrem historischen Kontext: Verfahren – Realisierung – Wirkung,” in Markus Hein and Armin Kohnle, eds., Die Leipziger Disputation von 1519: Ein theologisches Streitgespräch und seine Bedeutung für die frühe Reformation [Herbergen der Christenheit 25] (Leipzig, 2019), 9–24.

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colloquies in the Holy Roman Empire: secular governments took the initiative and thereby established the conditions and criteria for the conversation, which were to make a decision on the validity of the doctrinal expression under consideration. In Zurich, according to contemporary sources, the authority was to be the “true divine Scripture.” The judges of the disputation were the members of municipal government, who presided over the discussions. As practical as this process might be in theory, it was difficult to establish a principle under dispute by the parties, the Holy Scripture, as the criterion for the decision. Its authority was not regarded in the same way by the two opposing groups, nor was its text interpreted in a similar way. That formed one of the decisive reasons why the great religious colloquies all failed, even though they essentially had as their goal nothing other than ensuring the establishment of the truth through an exchange of ideas on the basis of agreedupon rules. This is true also of the colloquies among Protestants, within Lutheranism, between Lutherans and Calvinists, or with the Anabaptists.6 A change set in only in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. At that time colloquies dedicated to promoting the Counter-Reformation returned to syllogistic argumentation. The failure of the religious colloquies also rested, however, on the fact that this form of dialogue had very little concern for what is understood today by the search for ecumenical consensus. Humanists such as Erasmus of Rotterdam did strive to surmount religious division and to restore religious peace. But the historical constellations stood in the way of such ideas in the long term. Erasmus’s Liber de sarcienda ecclesiae concordia (1533) spoke of a doctrine of justification that mediated between the parties with the concept of duplex iustitia. Georg Witzel7 and the Strasbourg Reformer Martin Bucer attempted to follow this path proposed by Erasmus in a disputation in Leipzig in 1539. The draft of the document, which rests largely on Bucer’s work, prepared for negotiations regarding the doctrine of justification at the religious colloquies in Worms and Regensburg in 1540/1541. But these mediating propositions could not neutralize the continuing concern to 6 Only recently has work on the religious colloquies with anti-Trinitarians begun. See Kęstutis Daugirdas, “Religionsgespräche und Disputationen mit Beteiligung der Antitrinitarier in PolenLitauen,” in Dingel et al., eds., Zwischen theologischem Dissens und politischer Duldung, 201–215; Ulrich A. Wien, “Abschied von der Trinitätstheologie? Zur Komplexität von Disputationen und Religionsgesprächen in Siebenbürgen,” in ibid., 77–110. 7 Witzel had converted twice. After his marriage he lost his office as a priest in 1524 and was considered part of the Reformation movement. But in autumn 1531 he abandoned the Reformation. In his treatise Methodus concordiae ecclesiasticae (composed in 1532, printed in 1537) he presented his program for overcoming religious division. On Witzel see Barbara Henze, Aus Liebe zur Kirche Reform: Die Bemühungen Georg Witzels (1501–1573) um die Kircheneinheit [Reformationsgeschichtliche Studien und Texte 133] (Münster, 1995).

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disprove the other side in the dialogue and to convince it of one’s own position. Both sides were confident that this could succeed by means of good argumentation. Thus, the differing standpoints often took on sharp contours in the course of the colloquies and tended to set boundaries and back up their own confession of the faith in the process. Despite all the potential of early modern religious colloquies for ecumenical consensus, it cannot be overlooked that each party invited or required to take part always sought to prove its own theological truth and claim superiority for its interpretation.

The Great Religious Colloquies The most significant attempts to overcome religious division between the old church and those desiring reformation were those colloquies that the emperor called at the level of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation.8 They took place in a twenty-year period beginning in 1540. Thereafter this type of imperial colloquy faded because the Religious Peace of Augsburg (1555) guaranteed adherents of the Augsburg Confession legal protection within the boundaries of their own territories. This essentially rendered further Catholic-Evangelical colloquies superfluous. Events unfolded in other ways in European lands with strong Reformation movements, in which comparable juridical paths were pursued later or not at all. The negotiations around the Augsburg Confession in August 1530, which ran parallel to the Diet of Augsburg, can be seen as structural predecessors of the great imperial colloquies.9 They arose out of an initiative by King Ferdinand, Charles V’s brother. Nonetheless, a new era began with the colloquy held ten years later in Hagenau, Worms (1540), and Regensburg (1541). This colloquy, which took place in three significant phases, shared with all earlier colloquies only the goal of confessional reconciliation; they differed in the subject of discussion, aiming at convergence in doctrine. In Augsburg, and also in the Leipzig draft of 1539, the possibility of unity on the basis of common ceremonies and a common ecclesiastical order derived from tradition was discussed. Later on this no longer played a role, being replaced by the central doctrines of the faith as the chief concern. The colloquy thereby assumed a task that should really have been undertaken On what follows see Dingel, “Religionsgespräche,” 658–665. See Gerhard Müller, “Zwischen Konflikt und Verständigung: Bemerkungen zu den Sonderverhandlungen während des Augsburger Reichstages 1530,” in Gerhard Müller, ed., Die Religionsgespräche der Reformationszeit [Schriften des Vereins für Reformationsgeschichte 191] (Gütersloh, 1980), 21–33. 8 9

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by a council, which had not been convened because of the tensions between imperial and papal interests. Emperor Charles V needed the powerful princes favoring Reformation on his side in view of the continuing threat of the Ottoman Turks and the tense relationship with France. He therefore took the initiative and issued an invitation to a religious colloquy on April 18, 1540. It did not take place as originally planned on June 6 in Speyer but was moved to Hagenau because of the epidemic in Speyer. Charles’s brother Ferdinand represented him. In Hagenau only questions of process were initially discussed, but they were important as they set the basis for negotiations and the norms for decision making. The evangelicals insisted on the Augsburg Confession as the basis for discussion, as Melanchthon had revised it for the colloquy (it was presented in Worms on November 30, 1540); they further insisted that only the Holy Scripture be cited as the authority for discussing doctrine, while the adherents of Rome wanted to regard the Church Fathers and councils as valid authorities alongside Holy Scripture. Both sides had thus raised their own fundamental principles to official standards of judgment, which remained formative for the later differentiated confessional churches: the establishment of Holy Scripture as the primary norm and the Augsburg Confession as the secondary norm in the Lutheran church, the establishment of Scripture and tradition in Catholicism. The negotiations in Hagenau ended with an agreement on July 28, 1540. For the conduct of the colloquy it became important that the Augsburg Confession and its Apology indeed were accepted as the basis for negotiations and the participants were pledged to the Holy Scripture as the basis for discussion. At the same time, against the objections of the evangelicals, it was established that the results required recognition by the emperor and the pope. The continuation of the colloquy was fixed for October 28 in Worms. But the late arrival of the emperor’s official representative, Nicolas Perrenot de Granvelle, delayed the beginning of the second phase of the colloquy for about one month. Philip Melanchthon and Martin Bucer headed the Evangelical delegation, Johannes Gropper and Johannes Eck the Roman representatives.10 Also on this occasion, countless formal negotiations took precedence over the issues of content. But Gropper and Bucer actually made work on a draft of an agreement possible, with their “Worms Book.”11 It signaled that the two 10

See the lists in Corpus Reformatorum: CR 3, 1160–1162, 1217–1219, 4, 86 f.; and Dr. Martin Luthers Sämtliche Schriften, ed. Johann Georg Walch, 23 vols. (St. Louis, 1881–1910), XVII, 424–429. 11 It was ready on December 31, 1540. A critical edition is found in Martin Bucers Deutsche Schriften, volume XI, 1: Religionsgespräche (1539–1541), ed. Cornelis Augustijn, with Marijn de Kroon (Gütersloh, 1995), 323–483.

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sides could come closer together in their understanding of original sin and justification as well as in questions of Scripture and tradition. The doctrine of the Lord’s Supper, especially the understanding of the Mass, however, remained unclarified, for the article composed by Gropper and Bucer, which sought to combine the medieval and reformational understandings of this sacrament, offered no real solution. On January 18, 1541 the colloquy in Worms was ended and adjourned to the imperial diet that had been called for Regensburg. That meant a revision of the agreement. In Regensburg the Worms Book was revised as the so-called Regensburg Book. Cardinal Gasparo Contarini and the papal nuncio Giovanni Morone had the negotiators make revisions, especially in the article on the Lord’s Supper. They emphasized the doctrine of transubstantiation, which the evangelicals resolutely rejected.12 The article of justification also came under discussion again along with the question of the interpretative authority of the church. The agreement sought in Worms through a doctrine of justification in the sense of a duplex iustificatio was altered slightly. It had permitted an evangelical reading defining the justification of the sinner sola gratia with the fruits of faith proceeding from it but also permitted the medieval understanding of a iustitia inhaerens given by the Holy Spirit to people, which enabled them to grow in righteousness and good works. The Regensburg Book avoided the terminology and concept of duplex iustificatio, which made consensus again more difficult.13 When the emperor demanded the results of the consultation on May 22, 1541, it was clear that agreement had been reached in only a few articles. The colloquy which had begun with much promise had indeed worked out bases for understanding but at the same time had established boundaries. Differences continued, especially in the understanding of the Lord’s Supper, the concept of the church, and the understanding of repentance.14 In the end both Luther and the Curia rejected the Regensburg Book. Nevertheless, the two sides came close to theological agreement for a time. None of the later imperial religious colloquies succeeded in revitalizing the elements of consensus fashioned in Worms and Regensburg. 12 Controversia et Confessio: Theologische Kontroversen 1548–1577/80. Kritische Auswahledition, ed. Irene Dingel, 9 vols. (Göttingen, 2008–2023), I. 13 See Athina Lexutt, Rechtfertigung im Gespräch: Das Rechtfertigungsverständnis in den Religionsgesprächen von Hagenau, Worms und Regensburg 1540/41 [Forschungen zur Kirchenund Dogmengeschichte 64] (Göttingen, 1996); Anthony N. S. Lane, The Regensburg Article 5 on Justification: Inconsistent Patchwork or Substance of True Doctrine? (Oxford, 2020). 14 See Saskia Schultheis, Die Verhandlungen über das Abendmahl und die übrigen Sakramente auf dem Religionsgespräch in Regensburg 1541 [Forschungen zur Kirchen- und Dogmengeschichte 102] (Göttingen, 2013).

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When Emperor Charles held out the prospect of a new colloquy at the Diet of Worms in 1545, the situation had changed fundamentally. First, the preparation and organization of this Regensburg colloquy of 154615 took place during the first period of the Council of Trent, which the evangelicals rejected. The imperial estates loyal to the old faith had no interest in a religious colloquy that would run parallel to the council and in their eyes served only the interests of the emperor. Second, imperial policy already aimed at a military solution to the question of religion. Therefore, the Regensburg colloquy took place in the shadows of the Schmalkaldic War, which broke out a bit later, and thus the colloquy functioned only as a delaying tactic. Third, the choice of participants in the colloquy obstructed rather than cleared the way for a consensus. The results of this Regensburg colloquy of 1546 confirmed the remaining, fundamental differences between the two sides rather than contributing to mutual understanding. That was clear especially in the question of the doctrine of justification, which was central to the discussions. The other articles planned for discussion – faith, law, good works, the sacraments, ceremonies, and ecclesiology – were not addressed, partially because of the early departure of the Evangelical delegation, which left Regensburg in protest. The imperial court chaplain, Petrus de Malvenda, had presented “propositions” on the doctrine of justification, which were a step back from the position reached in Worms and Regensburg. They connected iustificatio not only to the forgiveness of sins through Christ but simultaneously to the meritorious works enabled by gratia infusa. This rescinded the possibility of the more open interpretation in the Worms Book, still present in the Regensburg Book, and provided a model for the article on justification of the Augsburg Interim of 1548,16 which the evangelicals resolutely saw as a return to medieval theology and resolutely rejected. The Regensburg colloquy of 1546 had significantly contributed to the demarcation of the doctrinal systems from each other. The last significant imperial religious colloquy, held in 1557 in Worms, took roughly the same course.17 Here again the historical conditions made See Lothar Vogel, Das zweite Regensburger Religionsgespräch von 1546: Politik und Theologie zwischen Konsensdruck und Selbstbehauptung [Quellen und Forschungen zur Reformationsgeschichte 82] (Gütersloh, 2009). 16 See Articles 3–8 of the Augsburg Interim, in Das Augsburger Interim von 1548, dt. und lat., ed. Joachim Mehlhausen, 2nd ed. [Texte zur Geschichte der evangelischen Theologie 3] (Neukirchen-Vluyn, 1996), 40–59. 17 See Björn Slenczka, Das Schisma der Augsburger Konfessionsverwandten von 1557: Protestantische Konfessionspolitik und Theologie im Zusammenhang des zweiten Wormser Religionsgesprächs [Beiträge zur historischen Theologie 155] (Tübingen, 2010); Benno von Bundschuh, Das 15

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the attainment of consensus unlikely from the beginning. The Religious Peace of Augsburg, concluded shortly before the colloquy, really made a search for consensus initiated by political forces superfluous. In addition, the Evangelical side had suffered several theological divisions after Luther’s death in 1546 and the Interim of 1548.18 The opposition between the socalled Gnesio-Lutherans, who adhered strictly to Luther’s theology, and those who followed Melanchthon emerged with vehemence in the colloquy arranged for Worms in September 1557. The representatives of Roman theology, especially Peter Canisius, purposely exploited these divisions to intensify anti-Protestant feelings. Canisius focused on these intra-Protestant disputes, demanding a clear position from the Evangelical camp, supported by clear repudiations of false teachings. Precisely that, the decision for or against personal and/or doctrinal anathemas, was one of the points that had previously divided the evangelicals. This “strategy” of Canisius, which aimed at unmasking the disunity among the partners in the negotiations, made further efforts to seek consensus impossible. This resulted in the conclusion of the colloquy without any results after the Gnesio-Lutheran delegation from Ernestine Saxony submitted a protest to the assessors of the colloquy from the Roman side and abandoned the colloquy. The colloquy in Worms had made the theological variations dominating the Evangelical side painfully clear. The Roman Catholic negotiators had also made it clear that it was necessary to attain confessional clarity among the Evangelical theologians. The ability to outline their own theology and differentiate it from false teaching in their own camp as a presupposition for interconfessional negotiations seeking consensus was openly discussed for the first time. The colloquy of Worms in 1557 was the last great imperial-level colloquy. From that point on the doctrinal differences within the confessional camps became more prominent, and solutions were also sought through colloquies, mostly within German principalities.

Religious Colloquies outside the Empire Important religious colloquies were also held beyond the borders of the Holy Roman Empire, extending beyond regional dialogues. The Colloquy of Poissy in France and the “Colloquium Charitativum” of Thorn in Poland are among the most well known, but there were more. Even today there is Wormser Religionsgespräch von 1557: Unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der kaiserlichen Religionspolitik [Reformationsgeschichtliche Studien und Texte 124] (Münster, 1988). 18 These controversies are documented in the nine volumes of Controversia et Confessio.

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no overview of the entire European phenomenon of the religious colloquy. As with earlier colloquies, the Colloquy of Poissy19 was inspired by humanistic efforts to overcome religious division. The French chancellor, Michel de l’Hôpital, expressed this in his opening address, in which he defined the colloquy as a national council. At the same time, various political problems triggered the calling of the colloquy; Catherine de Medici, the mother of King Charles IX, still a minor, hoped to solve these problems by holding the colloquy. Protestantism had won powerful adherents in the high nobility, who were using it to promote the restoration of the might of territorial powers, who came together in an assembly of the Estates General after a decades-long hiatus, in 1560/1561. In this murky situation the colloquy began at Catherine’s initiative on September 9, 1561. Theological authorities from outside France, including Theodor Beza from Geneva and Peter Martyr Vermigli from Zurich, were invited. German theologians only arrived ten days after the end of the colloquy. On the Roman side were among others Charles de Guise, cardinal of Lorraine, and Odet de Châtillon, archbishop of Beauvais, who already leaned toward the side of the Reformation. The proceedings followed the pattern that had become common for such colloquies. The Reformed side insisted that the king and not some representative of the Roman side preside, that the Word of God alone should be the basis for decisions, and that each party should appoint a notary, whose minutes would be compared each day. The chief spokesmen were the cardinal of Lorraine and Theodore Beza; the chief subject of the disputation was the doctrine of the Lord’s Supper. The cardinal asked whether the Calvinist French Protestants would be prepared to accept the Augsburg Confession; that question revealed the division within European Protestantism since Beza set forth a doctrine of the Lord’s Supper teaching the spiritual presence of Christ and a Christology which he differentiated from that of the Augsburg Confession. The colloquy came to naught because of this, along with the lack of willingness of the clergy to reform; the general of the Jesuit order, Diego Laínez, rejected the competence of temporal authorities to make decisions in spiritual matters and instead insisted on the presence of the French at the Council of Trent. Religious unity disappeared over the horizon. To deescalate the struggle between the parties, both of which marshaled considerable military power, to avoid a civil war, and to secure peace in the country, the 19 See Alain Dufour, “Das Religionsgespräch von Poissy: Hoffnungen der Reformierten und der ‘Moyenneurs’,” in Müller, ed., Religionsgespräche der Reformationszeit, 117–126; Donald Nugent, Ecumenism in the Age of the Reformation: The Colloquy of Poissy (Cambridge, 1974).

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court issued an Edict of Tolerance in January 1562. This, however, could not prevent the outbreak of successive wars of religion.20 The colloquy of Thorn (1645), the so-called Colloqium Charitativum,21 also had a comparable dimension that reached beyond a single region in Poland and created dialogue among three confessional parties. Called by King Wladislaw IV of Poland, it brought Roman Catholic representatives together with Lutheran and Calvinist theologians. The Wittenberg professor Johann Hülsemann and Abraham Calov, rector of the secondary school in Danzig, reinforced the Lutherans. Johann Amos Comenius represented the Bohemian Brethren. Elector Frederick William of Brandenburg, also duke of Prussia, in whose domain Thorn lay, sent several delegates to support the Reformed side. He also commissioned the irenically inclined Helmstedt professor Georg Calixt to join the Königsberg Lutherans, who were his subjects. Hülsemann and Calov rejected Calixt, who then did not take part in the official proceedings but served as an advisor for the Reformed. George of Teschen, Ossolinski (duke of Ossolin), the high chancellor of the king, opened the colloquy in the town hall of Thorn on August 28, 1645. After thirty-six sessions, in which the differences could not at all be overcome, the colloquy ended in November 1645. Calixt had tried to bring the confessional groups closer together with an appeal to the consensus antiquitatis, without result.

Irenicism and the Enlightenment Despite all the honest efforts at overcoming the religious divisions in Europe, the religious colloquies sharpened the consciousness of the respective doctrinal positions that could not be surrendered and were marks of confessional identity. They had thus, although without intending to do so, promoted confessional consolidation.22 Not only did this shape and strengthen the 20

See Hans-Joachim Müller, Irenik als Kommunikationsreform: Das Colloquium Charitativum von Thorn 1645 (Göttingen, 2004). 21 See Inge Mager, “Brüderlichkeit und Einheit: Georg Calixt und das Thorner Religionsgespräch 1645,” in Bernhart Jähnig, ed., Thorn: Königin der Weichsel, 1231–1981 [Beiträge zur Geschichte Westpreußens 7] (Göttingen, 1981), 209–238; Martina Thomsen, “Auf der Suchen nach Konsens: Zur politischen Dimension des Thorner Religionsgesprächs von 1645,” in Dingel et al., eds., Zwischen theologischem Dissens und politischer Duldung, 71–76. 22 See Irene Dingel, “Von der Wittenberger Reformation zum Luthertum: Konfessionelle Transformationen,” in Wolfgang Thönissen und Josef Freitag, eds., Luther: Wurzeln – Wege – Wirkungen (Leipzig and Paderborn, 2016), 239–260; Irene Dingel, “Confessional Transformations from the Wittenberg Reformation to Lutheranism,” Lutheran Quarterly 33 (2019), 1–25. See also Marcel Nieden, “Warum Religionsgespräche scheitern: Anmerkungen

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contrast between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, but differences within Protestantism also became clear. The irenic of the seventeenth century reacted to the continuing confessional turmoil, particularly because its problematic nature became clear in the political realm through the Thirty Years War. Irenical efforts sought the reunification of Lutheranism and Calvinism, and if possible even the entirety of Christianity. The irenicists were convinced that this goal could be reached through the categorization of essential and unessential doctrines, in order to achieve unity on the basis of the essential “fundamental articles.” This spirit produced colloquies aimed at uniting Lutherans and Reformed, such as the Leipzig colloquy of 1631 between the staunch Lutheran theologians of electoral Saxony and Reformed theologians from electoral Brandenburg, Hesse-Kassel, and the University of Marburg. Even though the fundamental differences (in Christology, the doctrine of the Lord’s Supper, and since the 1580s the doctrine of predestination) between the confessional churches were not resolved, this “colloquy toward union” had a new quality when compared with early religious colloquies. Here the attempt was made for a union with conscious toleration of doctrinal differences. Also in this category was the Kassel colloquy organized in 1661 by Landgrave Wilhelm VI of Hesse-Kassel between Lutheran theologians from Rinteln and Reformed theologians from Marburg as well as the related colloquy initiated by the Great Elector, Frederick William, in Berlin (1662). But no significant results ensued. The driving force behind confessional rapprochement had been Georg Calixt23 (d. 1656) and his followers along with the Heidelberg Reformed theological professor David Pareus.24 From 1697/1698 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz increasingly dedicated himself to efforts at union among the confessional groups.25 Religious persecution

zum innerchristlichen Diskurs des 16. Jahrhunderts,” in Stefan Brakensiek and Claudia Claridge, eds., Fiasko – Scheitern in der Frühen Neuzeit: Beiträge zur Kulturgeschichte des Misserfolgs (Bielefeld, 2015), 135–168, at 160. 23 Evangelisch-Lutherische Landeskirche in Braunschweig, Theologie im Dialog: Georg Calixt (1586–1656) als Wegbereiter der Ökumene: Beiträge eines Studientags zum 350. Todestag am 30. Oktober 2006 im Predigerseminar Braunschweig [Quellen und Beiträge zur Geschichte der Evangelisch-Lutherischen Landeskirche in Braunschweig 17] (Wolfenbüttel, 2007). 24 See Wilhelm Holtmann, “Die pfälzische Irenik im Zeitalter der Gegenreformation” (theol. dissertation, Göttingen, 1960). 25 See Irene Dingel, “Toleranz und Ökumene: Zum Erscheinen von Band 7 der Politischen Schriften von Leibniz,” in Wenchao Li, ed., Drehscheibe des Wissens – und Zierde für jede Bibliothek [Hefte der Leibniz-Stiftungsprofessur 15] (Hanover, 2012), 27–42, with further literature; Johannes Hund, “‘Mutua tolerantia’ oder ‘conciliatio’? Die Unionsgespräche zwischen dem reformierten Brandenburger Hofprediger Daniel Ernst Jablonski und dem lutherischen

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and confessional migration, along with the conversion of princes from Protestantism to Catholicism, set the framework for this development. Leibniz tirelessly devoted his efforts to reuniting divided Christendom – indeed, to a religious integration of Europe, which had to begin with the overcoming of the divisions in Latin Christendom, that is, between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, between Lutheranism and Calvinism, so that it could finally extend to Eastern Orthodoxy. Leibniz’s “Declaration de Loccum,” the French translation of a declaration jointly authored with Gerhard Wolter Molanus, the Evangelical abbot at Loccum (September 22, 1698), makes clear how deeply concerned Leibniz was to overcome the confessional differences without wanting to surrender the Protestant legacy of the Lutheran Reformation. His Roman Catholic partner in a dialogue at the Loccum cloister at the beginning of September 1698 was Franz Anton von Buchhaim, the successor of Christoph de Roja y Spinola as bishop of Wiener Neustadt. Leibniz signaled in the Declaration the readiness of the Evangelical side to declare extensive convergence under the condition that the traditional reformational concerns in theology and ecclesiastical law were recognized. Pointing to new directions for Leibniz’s strategy of union was his presentation of ratio as the standard and fundamental condition for reunion. He was firmly convinced that reason could serve as the guarantee for the true faith and thereby as the criterion for consensus and mutual recognition. The principle that a true conciliatio should be oriented around reason determined Leibniz’s efforts for a union within Protestantism, though with the rejection of anti-Trinitarian tendencies. A prominent example of this is his “Unvorgreiffliches Bedencken,” which he sent to the electoral Brandenburg court preacher Daniel Ernst Jablonski in February 1699. Leibniz strove to interpret doctrines that had caused confessional differences and raised serious theological questions with an appeal to the God-given light of reason and with the help of precise definitions of the concepts under discussion, so that irrational truths of revelation would be explained and confessional polemics would be seen as misunderstandings. At the same time he formulated his arguments critically on the basis of the attempts at religious dialogue and negotiations for union undertaken since the sixteenth century, which had not adequately used God’s gift of the light of nature. Nonetheless, Leibniz conceded – for example, in order to prevent the harshness of the Calvinist doctrine of predestination from standing in the way of unity – that some Hofrat Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in Hannover,” in Dingel et al., eds., Zwischen theologischem Dissens und politischer Duldung, 255–274.

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theological positions had to remain outside the light of reason and that one should flee – with Luther – to the concept of the Deus absconditus, who had made everything the best in the best of all possible worlds. It was the light of reason that paved the way to consensus and union, in which the Enlightenment as it was practiced in proximity to the church could assume the defense of the faith. bibliography Dingel, Irene. “Pruning the Vines, Plowing up the Vineyard: The Sixteenth-Century Culture of Controversy between Disputation and Polemic.” In Anna Marie Johnson and John A. Maxfield, eds., The Reformation as Christianization: Essays on Scott Hendrix’s Christianization Thesis. Tübingen, 2012, 397–408. “Religionsgespräche IV. Altgläubig – protestantisch und innerprotestantisch.” In TRE 28, 654–681. “Von der Disputation zum Gespräch.” Lutherjahrbuch 85 (2018), 61–84. Dingel, Irene, Volker Leppin, and Kathrin Paasch, eds. Zwischen theologischem Dissens und politischer Duldung: Religionsgespräche der Frühen Neuzeit [Veröffentlichungen des Instituts für Europäische Geschichte Mainz 121]. Göttingen, 2018. Lexutt, Athina. Rechtfertigung im Gespräch: Das Rechtfertigungsverständnis in den Religionsgesprächen von Hagenau, Worms und Regensburg 1540/41 [Forschungen zur Kirchen- und Dogmengeschichte 64]. Göttingen, 1996. Mager, Inge. “Brüderlichkeit und Einheit: Georg Calixt und das Thorner Religionsgespräch 1645.” In Bernhart Jähnig, ed., Thorn: Königin der Weichsel. 1231–1981 [Beiträge zur Geschichte Westpreußens 7]. Göttingen, 1981, 209–238. Müller, Gerhard, ed. Die Religionsgespräche der Reformationszeit [Schriften des Vereins für Reformationsgeschichte 191]. Gütersloh, 1980. Müller, Hans-Joachim. Irenik als Kommunikationsreform: Das Colloquium Charitativum von Thorn 1645. Göttingen, 2004. Nugent, Donald. Ecumenism in the Age of the Reformation: The Colloquy of Poissy. Cambridge, 1974. Slenczka, Björn. Das Schisma der Augsburger Konfessionsverwandten von 1557: Protestantische Konfessionspolitik und Theologie im Zusammenhang des zweiten Wormser Religionsgesprächs [Beiträge zur historischen Theologie 155]. Tübingen, 2010.

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Western “Confessions” and Eastern Christianity yury p. avvakumov “Confessionalization” in the East? The notion of “Eastern Christianity” covers an extensive variety of ecclesiastical traditions – Chalcedonian (“Byzantine”/“Melkite”), pre-Chalcedonian (“Miaphysite”/“Jacobite”), and pre-Ephesian (“Nestorian”/“Chaldean”) – that originated in Late Antiquity in the Eastern Roman Empire and neighboring lands. This vast area, including the region surrounding the Mediterranean from the Balkan peninsula through Asia Minor, south Caucasus, upper Mesopotamia, Syria, Palestine, and Egypt, gave birth to a diversity of Christian cultures using Greek, Aramaic, Syriac, Armenian, and Coptic as the languages of their theological and liturgical traditions. Islamic conquests that began in the seventh century brought about an increasing Arabization of Eastern Christian cultures in the territories under Muslim control, but the identity of Eastern Christianity remained clearly bound to its Late Antique origins. Already in the first Christian millennium, the missionary activity of Eastern churches drew additional regions into the sphere of their influence and ethnicities, including Bulgaria, Serbia, and the Kyivan Rus Christianized by the Byzantines, parts of China and India Christianized by the Syrians, as well as Nubia and Ethiopia. In the early modern period the churches belonging to the Byzantine-Slavic cultural legacy (in particular, those in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Muscovy, and the Romanian principalities Moldavia and Wallachia) came to prominence due to their full or relative independence from Muslim control, an advantage relative to their Constantinopolitan mother church. To begin, one must note that there existed a salient asymmetry between the system of denominational identities established in the process of “confessionalization”1 in the West and the fluid and at times elusive world of 1 The concepts Konfessionsbildung and Konfessionalisierung were coined by German historians in the 1960s and 1970s; a foundational work is Ernst Walter Zeeden, Die Entstehung der Konfessionen (Munich, 1965). Recent anglophone studies relevant for the topic include Thomas Max Safley,

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Eastern Christianity. It would be misleading to subsume all Eastern Christians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries under the notion of the “Orthodox Church,” or “Orthodoxy” (with a capital O), as one finds in the scholarship and especially in popular accounts. Applying the triad “Roman Catholic–Protestant–Eastern Orthodox” to the early modern period posits a distinct “Orthodox” denomination along lines more or less similar to those of the Western “confessions.” Such a paradigm anachronistically projects the clear-cut denominational map of present-day Christianity onto the early modern era. The realities of the Reformation period show, however, that the relations between Western and Eastern Christianity displayed a complex dialectical process that involved both tension and conflict as well as interaction, cooperation, and even synthesis. Moreover, disagreements, divisions, and clashes were often more pronounced within Eastern Christianity, among its different cultural versions and theological projects, than between Eastern Christianity as a whole and the Western denominations. The process of confessionalization in the East, catalyzed by interaction with Western “confessions,” began later and lasted longer than in the West. It makes sense to speak of “confessionalization lag” or “protracted confessionalization” with respect to the Eastern Christianity of the early modern era. As a common denominator for Eastern Christian diversity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the concept of “rite,” traditionally used in classical Roman Catholic scholarship, can be helpful. “Rite” denotes the cultural specificity of a particular Christian community by focusing on liturgy as “the most perfect and ‘official’ expression of the soul that animates each tradition.”2 While this term could seem to reduce the rich theological content of a tradition to its ritual form, if employed not as a descriptive but as a classificatory tool, the apparent narrowness of the concept proves an advantage. This is true especially in respect of Eastern Christianity in the Reformation era since there have been, and still are, considerable disagreements among Eastern theologians themselves on the essence of authentic “Orthodox” theology, spirituality, etc., in the early modern period. Can, for instance, the basically Calvinist confession of faith published by patriarch Cyril Lucaris of Constantinople be seen as a part of “Orthodox” history at all, ed., A Companion to Multiconfessionalism in the Early Modern Era (Leiden, 2011), esp. 369–443 (“Central Europe”); Alfons Brüning, “Confessionalization in the Slavia Orthodoxa (Belorussia, Ukraine, Russia)? – Potential and Limits of a Western Historiographical Concept,” in Thomas Bremer, ed., Religion and the Conceptual Boundary in Central and Eastern Europe: Encounters of Faith (Basingstoke, 2008), 66–97. 2 Robert F. Taft, Eastern-Rite Catholicism: Its Heritage and Vocation (Glen Rock, 1963), 5.

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if considered theologically?3 Liturgy, on the contrary, presents a very clear identification mark, since it deals with ritual systems established centuries earlier that retained a distinctive character and relative stability throughout the early modern period. Understanding Eastern Christianity as “Eastern-rite Christianity” is consonant both with the post-Durkheimian emphasis on ritual in the sociological/anthropological study of religion and with the focus on liturgy in contemporary theology after Alexander Schmemann. It makes it possible to distinguish between “Eastern Christianity” and “Christianity in the East”: communities of Western-rite Christians established in the East by Western missionaries (e.g. by the Portuguese in India in the mid-sixteenth century) did not belong to the world of Eastern Christianity proper. On the other hand, “Eastern-rite Christianity” includes many that would not be deemed “Orthodox” according to denominational nomenclature, including such dissimilar communities as the Maronites in the Middle East and the Bezpopovtsy Old Believers in Muscovy. The former, united with Rome, were moving toward ever-closer integration and even assimilation into the Roman Catholic Church; the latter ended up splitting into numerous sectarian groups that broke with the official Muscovite Orthodoxy completely and developed a radically apocalyptic theology and an essentially Protestant ecclesiology. Both, however, can be seen as belonging to Eastern Christianity as long as they founded their ecclesiastical life on a ritual system of the Eastern type: the Maronites by following the Syrian rite – even with progressive Latinization that reached its peak in the eighteenth century; the Bezpopovtsy by adhering to the Old Muscovite form of the Byzantine rite – even with signs of disintegration because of the absence of the consecrated hierarchy, leading to the loss of the sacraments of Eucharist and Holy Orders. With the concept of “rite” the researcher can thus identify an Eastern cultural substratum even in such complicated borderline cases that would by no means be classified as “Orthodox” in a denominational sense.

Political-Ecclesiastical Background Two basic factors shaped relations between Eastern-rite Christians and the West in the early modern era: first, Islamic domination over the entire Eastern Mediterranean and parts of Eastern Europe; and second, rivalry 3

Similar questions were raised, for example, in a classical study of Orthodox historical theology: Georges Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology, part 1 [The Collected Works 5] (Belmont, 1979), esp. 33–113.

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among Western confessions for alliance with and influence over Eastern Christians. Muslims – exclusively Ottoman Turks since Sultan Selim I (r. 1512–1520) – held the main centers of Eastern Christianity throughout our period, including four out of the five pentarchy sees: Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem. The latter three, historical centers for both nonChalcedonians and Melkites, had already experienced life under Muslim governance, with interludes, since the seventh century; for Constantinople the watershed came with its conquest by the Turks in 1453. From that date Byzantine Christianity was deprived of its imperial protector and forced into a completely new political situation in the Ottoman Empire.4 The Greek Church and other Eastern Christian communities were classified as “nations” (millet), heavily underprivileged and each headed by its spiritual leader or patriarch. Not all Byzantine-rite Christians immediately shared the destiny of Constantinople: a number of local communities, especially those on the Greek islands, remained for a time untouched by Turkish conquests while under primarily Frankish and Venetian governance (thus, Cyprus until 1570 and Crete until 1669); other territories, like Moldavia and Wallachia, although vassals of the Ottoman Empire, enjoyed relative autonomy; still others were only sporadically and unsuccessfully attacked by the Turks or their Muslim vassals and remained outside Islamic control, like the Ionian island of Kerkyra (Corfu) and the principality of Muscovy. The fall of Constantinople, however, affected not only Greeks and Byzantine-rite Christians but had universal significance for the entire Chalcedonian and non-Chalcedonian Christian world since it meant the collapse of the Christian Empire of the New Rome both as political-ecclesiastical reality and as a theological idea. New centers of Eastern Christianity gradually arose in the regions and nations outside direct Muslim control, in particular in Romanian principalities and among the Slavs; at times they promoted their own imperial projects claiming succession to Constantinople, as in early sixteenth-century Muscovy with the idea of “Moscow the Third Rome.”5 Ottoman conquests increased Greek emigration to the West. The Greek diaspora contributed to the rise of humanistic learning and the study of 4

Steven Runciman, The Great Church in Captivity: A Study of the Patriarchate of Constantinople from the Eve of the Turkish Conquest to the Greek War of Independence (Cambridge, 1968); Tom Papademetriou, Render unto the Sultan: Power, Authority, and the Greek Orthodox Church in the Early Ottoman Centuries (Oxford, 2015). 5 Nicolas Zernov, Moscow the Third Rome (London and New York, 1937); Colin Wells, Sailing from Byzantium: How a Lost Empire Shaped the World (New York, 2006), 252–282.

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Greek in Western Europe; while Greek education declined under Ottoman rule, in the West Greek educational institutions were founded and Greek books began to be printed.6 The Ottoman domination over Eastern Christians lasted for almost four centuries and started to crumble in the 1820s with the outbreak of the Greek struggle for independence. For our period, the year of the Turkish defeat at Vienna in 1683 is a milestone for the beginning of the reversal of the Ottoman advancement into Christian territories. The second factor that determined East-West relations was the rivalry between Roman Catholics and Protestants for making Eastern Christians – first and foremost those belonging to the Greek Church and other Byzantinerite churches – their respective allies and, possibly, adherents. These efforts have often been described in modern accounts as “expansionist” and their main purpose as “conversion,” but the reality is much more nuanced. Western attitudes toward Eastern Christians ranged widely – from dismissive scorn to respectful recognition, and the strategy and tactics of dealing with them also varied. Eastern Christians, especially non-Chalcedonians, were indeed sometimes approached by Westerners with a missionary zeal resembling the politics of conversion practiced toward religions of the New World, but we also encounter fascinating examples that can qualify as harbingers of modern ecumenism.

Protestants and Eastern Christianity The topic of Eastern Christianity was drawn publicly into Western controversies of the Reformation era in 1519, when both Martin Luther and Johannes Eck cited the example of the Greek-rite Church in their debate in Leipzig: Eck blamed the Greeks for schism and heresy because of their disobedience to Rome; Luther, on the contrary, appealed to the Greek Church, with its long and venerable tradition, that never understood itself as being subordinated to the Roman pope.7 Later in his life Luther was much 6 The first Greek book was printed in Venice in 1471; the first Greek printing house was founded there in 1499. 7 Disputatio inter Ioannem Eckium et Martinum Lutherum: 1519, in D. Martin Luthers Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, volume LIX (Weimar, 1983), 427–605, esp. 439–483. A summary in Ernst Benz, Die Ostkirche im Lichte der protestantischen Geschichtsschreibung von der Reformation bis zur Gegenwart (Freiburg and Munich, 1952), 9–14; see also Yury P. Avvakumov, “Ecclesia Orientalis – Heretical or Saintly? The Leipzig Debate (1519) and Western Approaches to Eastern Christianity in High and Later Medieval Period,” in Nelson H. Minnich and Michael Root, eds., Martin Luther and the Shaping of the Catholic Tradition (Washington, 2021), 255–268.

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more critical toward the Greeks, accusing them of contending with Rome for primacy.8 Luther never had any special interest in Eastern Christianity and knew little about its contemporary situation, but his views already contain, in embryo, Protestant ambivalence toward Greek Christianity throughout the Reformation period: on the one hand, the Greek Church was recognized as a potential ally against Rome and as one of the old and venerable traditions confirming the consensus quinquesaecularis of the first five Christian centuries, a tradition that gave birth to the outstanding Greek theologians and men of letters of Late Antiquity (the latter aspect is very pronounced in humanistically minded Reformers such as Philip Melanchthon). On the other hand, the Reformers were suspicious of the Eastern churches for their doctrinal proximity to the “papalist church” and for the ritual side of their religion that, for Protestants, seemed to border on idolatry and superstition. Overall, Protestant interest in Eastern Christianity was considerable; Lutheran, Reformed, and Anglican scholars, travelers, and diplomats contributed to the study of Eastern churches by publishing a number of reports on their history and current status (e.g. Martin Crusius,9 David Chytraeus,10 and Paul Rycaut11). One of the most interesting episodes of theological dialogue between Western Protestant and Eastern Greek Christianity is the exchange between Lutheran scholars of the university in Tübingen and the patriarch Jeremiah II Tranos of Constantinople (1572–1579; 1580–1584; 1587–1595) and his theological advisors12 that lasted from 1573 to 1581.13 The correspondence began at the initiative of Martin Crusius (1526–1607), who taught Greek and Latin in Tübingen, and Jacob Andreae (1528–1590), a renowned theologian and On Luther’s remarks about the Greek Church before 1519 see Gunnar Hering, “Orthodoxie und Protestantismus,” Jahrbuch der Österreichischen Byzantinistik 31 (1981), 823–874, at 826–827. 8 9 Benz, Die Ostkirche, 14–16. Martin Crusius, Turcograecia (Basel, 1584). 10 David Chytraeus, Oratio de statu ecclesiarum hoc tempore in Graecia, Asia, Africa, Ungaria, Boemia etc. (Wittenberg, 1581). On Chytraeus see Daniel Benga, David Chytraeus (1530–1600) als Erforscher und Wiederentdecker der Ostkirchen: Seine Beziehungen zu orthodoxen Theologen, seine Erforschungen der Ostkirchen und seine ostkirchlichen Kenntnisse (Wettenberg, 2012). 11 Paul Rycaut, The Present State of the Greek and Armenian Churches, Anno Christi 1678 (London, 1679). 12 Jeremiah’s circle of advisors included the theologians Johannes and Theodosios Zygomalas; a learned physician, Leonardos Mentones; and the members of the permanent synod: see Gerhard Podskalsky, Griechische Theologie in der Zeit der Türkenherrschaft (1453–1821): Die Orthodoxie im Spannungsfeld der nachreformatorischen Konfessionen des Westens (Munich, 1988), 107. 13 On the correspondence see Dorothea Wendebourg, Reformation und Orthodoxie: Der ökumenische Briefwechsel zwischen der Leitung der Württembergischen Kirche und Patriarch Jeremias II. von Konstantinopel in den Jahren 1573–1581 (Göttingen, 1986) trans. and comm. George Mastrantonis, Augsburg and Constantinople (Brookline, 1982).

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secretary of the chancellor. The Tübingen scholars sent the patriarch a Greek translation of the Augsburg Confession, expecting it to be able to serve as a foundation for a theological consensus between the two sides, which, moreover, they believed already existed implicitly. Their hopes for rapprochement and, possibly, a union proved to be unfounded, however. Jeremiah II displayed reservation toward Lutheran teachings including the principles of Sola Scriptura and the Sola Fide, the rejection of the sacramental septenarium, monasticism, and the veneration of the saints. At the same time, the patriarch charged his Protestant addressees with the “flaws” they shared with the Roman Church, namely, the doctrine of the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father and the Son (Filioque) and the use of unleavened bread in the Eucharist: because of these errors the Lutherans appeared indistinguishable from the “Latins” – the traditional target of Greek medieval polemic against Rome.14 The Greeks seem not to have been aware of the depth and seriousness of the challenge that had been posed by the Reformation to Christian theology; their argumentation basically remains within the limits of traditional medieval discourse. The patriarch repeatedly warned the Reformers against “introducing innovations” (neoterizein)15 and invited them to join the only true catholic church, which existed “with us,” that is, with the Greeks.16 The Tübingen scholars, on their part, replied with warnings against superstitions: the Greek Church, in their view, clung to those “abuses” that corrupted the pristine evangelical life and teaching. The correspondence, however, maintained a tone of mutual respect and concluded by expressing the intention to continue “friendship,” even if theological consensus was not attainable. Jeremiah II’s polite but unambiguous disapproval of Protestant “innovations” was counterbalanced by the Confessio fidei17 of patriarch Cyril Lucaris of Constantinople (1620–1635, with three interruptions; 1637–1638),18 which

14

Acta et scripta theologorum Wirtembergensium et Patriarchae Constantinopolitani D. Hieremiae (Wittenberg, 1584), 86. 15 16 Crusius, Turcograecia, 420–422. Acta et scripta, 143. 17 Confessio fidei reverendissimi Domini Cyrilli Patriarchae Constantinopolitani (Constantinople, 1629). On further editions and translations see Klaus-Peter Todt, “Kyrillos Lukaris,” in Carmelo Giuseppe Conticello and Vassa Conticello, eds., Le théologie byzantine et sa tradition, volume II: (XIIIe–XIXes) (Turnhout, 2002), 617–651, at 634–635; Podskalsky, Griechische Theologie, 169 n. 696, 170 n. 701, 175–176 n. 724. 18 On Lucaris see Todt, “Kyrillos Lukaris”; Podskalsky, Griechische Theologie, 162–180; Runciman, The Great Church, 259–288; Gunnar Hering, Ökumenisches Patriarchat und europäische Politik 1620–1638 (Wiesbaden, 1968); George A. Hadjiantoniou, Protestant Patriarch (London, 1961); Georg Hofmann, Griechische Patriarchen und Römische Päpste: Untersuchungen

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followed Calvinist doctrine on almost every point.19 The Confessio, first printed in 1629 and appearing in Europe in several editions and languages within a year, emerged at the very heart of the tumultuous ProtestantCatholic conflict during the Thirty Years War (1618–1648). The patriarch’s turn to Calvinist teachings in the period from 1613 to 1618 occurred under the influence of his Protestant friends, especially two Dutchmen: the ambassador of the Netherlands in Constantinople, Cornelis Haga (1578–1654), and the theologian Johannes Wtenbogaert (1557–1644). Cyril’s personal authorship of the Confessio, however, is beyond doubt, confirmed by his own repeated references in his epistolary. Scholars agree that the patriarch and his followers indeed had plans for a union with the Reformed church and of a gradual “Calvinization” of Greek Christianity.20 The turbulent and tragic fate of Cyril Lucaris, under vehement attack from his adversaries both among the Greek clergy and the Roman Catholic diplomatic corps in Constantinople, repeatedly deprived of and restored to the patriarchal throne, and finally murdered by Janissaries on the sultan’s order, illustrates the intensity with which Western interdenominational conflict affected the destinies of Eastern Christians in the Ottoman Empire. Lucaris’s Confessio stands out in the development of the Greek Church and its relations with Western confessions: it served as a catalyst for confessionalization. The Confessio was officially condemned at a number of councils of the Greek Church (for the first time only several months after Lucaris’s death), and spurred the appearance of further “confessions” that aimed at a clear delineation of the Orthodox faith against Roman Catholic and Protestant teachings. The “Confessions” of Petro Mohyla of 1640 and of Dositheos of Jerusalem of 1672 responded, in large part, to the Confessio of Lucaris. A few words should be said about various forms of Protestantism in the Ruthenian (Ukrainian and Belarusian) territories of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The Polish Crown, due to its relative religious tolerance, saw the rapid spread of Protestant, mostly Calvinist, communities in the 1550s and 1560s. The adherents of Protestantism included representatives of the Ruthenian nobility from families traditionally belonging to Greek-rite

und Texte, volume II/1: Patriarch Kyrillos Lukaris und die Römische Kirche [Orientalia Christiana XV–1] (Rome, 1929). 19 On the sources of the Confessio see Todt, “Kyrillos Lukaris,” 635. 20 Vasileios Tsakiris, “The ‘Ecclesiarum Belgicarum Confessio’ and the Attempted ‘Calvinization’ of the Orthodox Church under Cyril Loukaris,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 63 (2012), 475–487. Tsakiris, however, stresses that it was not the Confessio of Lucari but the Confessio Belgica that had to be the basis of the “Calvinization.”

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Christianity. The period of expansion of the Protestant denominations in Poland proved to be brief, however; the Roman Church regained its status in the course of the Counter-Reformation after the Council of Trent due in particular to the missionary work of the Jesuits, especially Benedykt Herbest (ca. 1531–1598) and Peter Skarga (1536–1618); for the Ruthenian (Ukrainian) Church of the Greek rite this turnabout reached its high point with the Union of Brest in 1596.21

Roman Catholics and Eastern Christianity The attitude of the Roman Church toward Eastern Christians in the period was determined, first, by the history of East-West relations in the Middle Ages. In the later medieval period the list of five controversial issues (pente diaphorai) between Latins and Greeks emerged: the questions on the procession of the Holy Spirit, the eucharistic bread, purgatory, the beatitude of saints, and papal primacy. This list applied also to non-Chalcedonian churches, albeit with important reservations (the issue of eucharistic bread was irrelevant for relations with Armenians, for instance); moreover, doctrinal disagreements with non-Chalcedonians included, of course, the Christological issues discussed by the ecumenical councils in Ephesus in 431 and in Chalcedon in 451. Already in the Middle Ages theological and ecclesiastical-political controversies between Latins and Greeks had led to charges of schism and of heresy, although those accusations did not have a systematic and universal character and were not established canonically. The medieval legacy, however, was not confined to conflicts but also included attempts at dialogue and union between Western and Eastern Christians. The Council of Ferrara, Florence, and Rome (1438–1445), at which a series of church unions was achieved, in particular with the Greeks, the Armenians, the Copts, the Syrians of Mesopotamia, the Maronites, and the Chaldeans of Cyprus, had special prominence in subsequent relations. In light of the Florentine legacy, the distinction between adherents and adversaries of union – between “united” or “Uniate” (Lat., uniti; Gr., henoumenoi; Slav., unity and uniaty) and “disunited” (Lat., disuniti; Slav., dysunity) Eastern Christians – played an important role throughout the early modern period. 21 Ambroise Jobert, De Luther à Mohila. La Pologne dans le crise de la Chrétienté 1517–1648 (Paris, 1974); George Huntston Williams, “Peter Skarga 1536–1618,” in Jill Rait, ed., Shapers of Religious traditions in Germany, Switzerland, and Poland, 1560–1600 (New Haven and London, 1981), 175–194.

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Another factor was that renewal of Roman/Latin Christianity, prompted by the Council of Trent (1545–1563), which shaped the Roman Catholic “confession” and its specific confessional culture (Konfessionskultur),22 and in later historiography was designated the “Counter-Reformation,” or “Catholic Reform.” Decrees from Trent contributed to what has recently been called by scholars “confessional disciplining,” which meant, among other things, a clearer identification of heresy and schism and a hardening of canonical norms preventing communion with heretics and schismatics. These norms were directed first and foremost against Protestant “heresies,” but they also applied to those Eastern Christians who rejected the jurisdictional primacy of the pope. The attitude of the post-Tridentine Roman Church toward Protestants, however, differed substantially from its attitude toward Eastern Christians, as the outstanding theological and historical significance of Eastern Christianity was always recognized by Rome. Thus, the participants at Trent, even if they focused almost exclusively on Western problems, did recognize the specificity of Eastern canonical and liturgical tradition, as one can see in the council’s discussions of matrimony and divorce, in which Latins and Greeks followed different canonical regulations.23 The model of unity found in Florence in 1439 viewed the church of Christ as a multicultural community and approved of a peaceful coexistence between churches of different rites, cultures, and canons under one universal pastor: the pope. From the Roman standpoint the Florentine unions were still valid theologically and canonically; they had only to be retrieved and enacted. In order to achieve this it was necessary, first and foremost, to enlighten Eastern Christians, to educate them theologically, to introduce them to the achievements of humanist learning, to teach the truth about the theological consensus of the East and West. There were also voices maintaining that the rift, in fact, never occurred canonically and that the two churches – the Roman and the Greek – had always been in a state of inherent harmony; this harmony had only to be revealed.24 The ambivalent theological foundations of the mission to Eastern Christians – the post-Florentine “multicultural” unionism, on the one hand, 22 Franz Xaver Bischof et al., Einführung in die Geschichte des Christentums (Freiburg, 2014), 271–272. 23 Theobald Freudenberger, “Das Konzil von Trient und das Ehescheidungsrecht der Ostkirche: Zur Entstehungsgeschichte des Canons 7 de matrimonio,” in Ernst-Christoph Suttner and Coelestin Patock, eds., Wegzeichen: Festgabe Hermenegild Biedermann (Würzburg, 1971), 149–187. 24 Leo Allatius, De ecclesiae occidentalis atque orientalis perpetua consensione (Cologne, 1648).

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and the post-Tridentine canonical “disciplining,” on the other – gave rise to opposing poles of the mission in practice. On the one pole, rigorous and juridical, the ultimate aim of placing the East under the power of the pope led to the tendency to annihilate the allegedly “hazardous” elements of the East: the cultural specificity of Eastern churches was considered tolerable as long as it did not contradict the dogmas of the Roman Church; the final decision on the acceptance or rejection of a particular cultural feature belonged to the Holy See. On the opposite pole, “idealistic” and “visionary-ecumenical,” the unreserved recognition of the validity of Eastern cultural traditions prevailed over juridical questions of subordination; hence the priority of enlightening and educational work for the East. The real life of the missions fluctuated between the two poles. The official mechanisms of the Roman Curia seem to have been closer to the former pole, while the practice of Catholics on mission tended to the latter, although there were many exceptions to this general tendency, both among the functionaries at Rome and among missionaries. An important milestone in this regard was the foundation of the Greek College in Rome by Pope Gregory XIII in 1577, which trained a long series of prominent figures from among both Uniate and non-Uniate Greek Christians (a total of 690 from the school’s founding until 1700).25 Decisive impulse was given to missionary work by Pope Gregory XV’s foundation of the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith (de propaganda fide) in 1622.26 Mission understood as enlightenment brought about remarkable results. Scholars have long noted that despite occasional episodes of hostility between Roman Catholics and Eastern Christians, examples of sacramental communion (communicatio in sacris) were very common.27 Detailed information has been gathered regarding Greek Christianity,28 but there are plenty of indications that other Eastern traditions followed similar practices.29 25 Vittorio Peri, “Inizi e finalità ecumeniche del Collegio Greco in Roma,” Aevum 44 (1970), 1–37; Zacharias N. Tsirpanlis, To Ellēniko Kollegio tēs Rōmēs kai oi mathētes toy (1576–1700) (Thessalonica, 1980). 26 Josef Metzler, ed., Sacrae Congregationis de propaganda fide memoria rerum 1622–1972, volume I/ 1–2: 1622–1700 (Rome, 1971–1972). 27 Wilhelm de Vries, “Das Problem der communicatio in sacris cum dissidentibus im Nahen Osten zur Zeit der Union, 17. und 18. Jahrhundert,” Ostkirchliche Studien 6 (1957), 81–106; Timothy Ware, Eustratios Argenti (Oxford, 1964), 16–42; Timothy Ware, “Orthodox and Catholics in the Seventeenth Century: Schism or Intercommunion?” in Derek Baker, ed., Schism, Heresy and Religious Protest (Cambridge, 1972), 259–276. 28 Paulos Grēgoriou, Skheseis Katholikōn kai Orthodoxōn (Athens, 1958). 29 For the Kyivan Church see Ihor Skočilias, Halyc’ka (L’vivs’ka) jeparkhija XII–XVIII st. (Lvov, 2010), 295–300.

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Roman Catholic religious in Eastern territories heard the confessions of Byzantine-rite Christians; preached in Greek churches with the permission of local Greek bishops; participated in liturgical processions with Greeks; and allowed Greek Christians to take communion in Latin churches. Greek Uniate priests were ordained by non-Uniate Greek bishops. Eastern clergy crossed the boundary between Uniate and non-Uniate status in both directions, and attempted to maintain friendship and communion both with Roman institutions and with Eastern patriarchs at the same time. An example was the life of Pantaleon (Paisios) Ligarides (ca. 1609–1678), a Greek from a Uniate family in Chios who studied at St. Athanasius College in Rome, was ordained metropolitan of Gaza by Patriarch Paisios of Jerusalem, and later was active in Muscovy at the council of 1666 that banned Patriarch Nikon and condemned the leaders of the Russian Old Believers.30 Jesuits seem to have exercised particularly liberal policies in their missionary work,31 but examples appear among the Capuchins, Carmelites, and (less frequently) Franciscans. The Jesuits’ pastoral and educational strategies bore fruit also in their work with non-Chalcedonian churches, as in the missions of Pedro Paez to Ethiopians,32 Francis Roz to Nestorians in India,33 and Giovanni Battista Eliano to Copts in Egypt and Maronites in Lebanon.34 Communicatio in sacris between Roman Catholics and Eastern Christians was particularly common in the seventeenth century, referred to by scholars as “a century of indeterminacy” (un siècle d’indétermination).35 Toward the end of the century, however, the distinctions on both sides hardened and mutual aversion intensified. To a considerable degree this was the result of stricter instructions from the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, which viewed missionary “liberalism” with suspicion and repeatedly warned against indiscriminate attitudes.36 30

For a summary see Podskalsky, Griechische Theologie, 251–257. For examples see Vitalien Laurent, “La mission des Jésuites à Naxos de 1617 à 1643,” Échos d’Orient 33 (1934), 218–226, 354–375; 35 (1935), 97–105, 179–204, 350–367, 473–481. 32 Leonardo Cohen, The Missionary Strategies of the Jesuits in Ethiopia (1555–1632) (Wiesbaden, 2009), passim; Philip Caraman, The Lost Empire (Notre Dame, 1985), passim. 33 Francisco Roz, De erroribus Nestorianorum qui in hac India orientali versantur. [Orientalia Christiana XI–1, no. 40] (Rome, 1928); Stephen Neill, A History of Christianity in India (Cambridge, 1984), index. 34 Matti Moosa, The Maronites in History (Syracuse, 1986), 245–255; Alastair Hamilton, The Copts and the West, 1439–1822 (Oxford, 2006), 70–73. 35 Bernard Heyberger, Les Chrétiens du Proche-Orient au temps de la Réforme Catholique (Syrie, Liban, Palestine, XVIIe–XVIIIe siècles) (Rome, 1994), 390. 36 See, e.g., de Vries, “Das Problem,” 91–101. 31

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The Era of Unions The entire period from 1439 until well into the early eighteenth century can be called “the era of church unions” for East-West relations. Unions of Eastern Christianity with Rome were concluded frequently and in different ecclesiastical and cultural contexts, on both the national/local and the personal levels; they were repeatedly renounced and forgotten, and repeatedly retrieved and renewed. The long series includes the union of Rome with Nestorians (Chaldeans) in 1552; Jacobites in Syria in 1576; Syro-Malabar Christians in India in 1599; Serbs and Ruthenians in Croatia in 1611; Ethiopians in 1622; Armenians in Poland in 1635; Romanians in Uzhgorod in 1646; and Romanians in Transylvania in 1697–1701.37 On the personal level, one finds a number of prominent united theologians and church leaders, mostly from churches of the Byzantine and Byzantine-Slavic tradition, many of whom had received a thorough humanist and theological education. Their writings and activities often went beyond the narrow confines of confessionalism; they understood themselves as bridgebuilders, and as such can be seen as harbingers of modern ecumenism; among them are the Greeks Leon Allatios (1587–1668),38 Petros Arcudios (1562/63–1633),39 and Neophytos Rhodinos (1576/77–1659),40 and the Ruthenian Josef Velamin Rutskyj (1574–1637).41 In this period the union of the Kyivan (Ruthenian) church, confirmed by the council in Brest in 1596, had the most far-reaching consequences. A number of recent studies have substantially revised the account of the Union of Brest, which was once considered religiously and ecumenically flawed and was regarded almost exclusively as an opportunistic political act. In particular, the studies by Gudziak,42 Plokhy,43 Gil and Skoczylas,44 and others45 have 37

For a brief but useful overview of these attempts at union see Wilhelm de Vries, Der christliche Osten in Geschichte und Gegenwart (Würzburg, 1951), 102–118. See also Wilhelm de Vries, Rom und die Patriarchate des Ostens (Munich and Freiburg, 1963). For a collection of the most important documents of the unions of the period see Ernst Christoph Suttner, Quellen zur Geschichte der Kirchenunionen des 16. bis 18. Jahrhunderts (Freiburg, 2010). 38 39 40 Podskalsky, Griechische Theologie, 213–219. Ibid., 156–160. Ibid., 201–205. 41 Theodosius Halušèinskyj and Athanasius Welykyj, eds., Epistolae Josephi Velamin Rutskyj (Rome, 1956). 42 Borys A. Gudziak, Crisis and Reform: The Kyivan Metropolitanate, the Patriarchate of Constantinople, and the Genesis of the Union of Brest (Cambridge, MA, 2001). 43 Serhii Plokhy, The Cossacks and Religion in Early Modern Ukraine (Oxford, 2001). 44 Andrzej Gil and Ihor Skoczylas, Kościoły wschodnie w państwie polsko-litewskim w procesie przemian i adaptacji: Metropolia Kijowska w latach 1458–1795 (Lublin and Lvov, 2014). 45 See the papers collected in Johann Marte, ed., Internationales Forschungsgespräch der Stiftung PRO ORIENTE zur Brester Union: Erstes Treffen (Würzburg, 2004); Johann Marte, ed.,

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shown that the union had an authentic religious motive and that its conclusion was conceived by the bishops of the Kyivan Metropolitanate (Mykhaylo Rahoza, metropolitan of Kyiv in 1588–1599, and especially Ipatiy Potiy, bishop of Brest at the time of the union and later, in 1600–1613, metropolitan of Kyiv) as an instrument of a sweeping reform in their church, its parish life, and its theological education. The document that most clearly elucidates the intentions of the promoters of the union, the Articuli ad unionem cum ecclesia Romana pertinentes, emphasizes the need for reform and demands the preservation of the Byzantine-Ruthenian theological and liturgical traditions, at the same time expressing (Articles 13 and 31) the hope that the union of the Kyivan church could show a way for other Eastern churches (especially Constantinople) to unity.46 Ruthenian unionists aimed ultimately at the establishment of union with Rome without severing communion with Constantinople; the later letters of Metropolitan Rutskyj clearly express such intentions, as well as the idea of bringing the defenders and the adversaries of the union to a common council.47 The Roman Curia, however, wanted to see the union implemented along the lines of “confessional disciplining”; Rome persistently suppressed any Ruthenian attempts to convoke a joint council of Uniates and non-Uniates and tended to silence the Ruthenian demands expressed in the Articles.48 On the pole of extreme alienation from Western confessions, both Catholic and Protestant, was the church in Muscovy. Western visitors, such as Antonio Possevino in 1582,49 remained unsuccessful in attempts to strengthen the opposition to Protestant teaching in the responses of Tsar Ivan IV “the Terrible” to Johan Rokyta, a Bohemian Protestant who came to Moscow as part of a Polish-Lithuanian delegation in 1570: for Ivan, Rokyta was without doubt a heretic and a servant of the Antichrist.50 With respect to Roman Catholics, the Council of Moscow in 1622 imposed rebaptism on Latins who wanted to join the Muscovite Church – a practice that differed conspicuously from the Greek approach of the time. A fascinating episode is the activity of a Croatian Roman Catholic priest and missionary, Juraj Internationales Forschungsgespräch der Stiftung PRO ORIENTE zur Brester Union: Zweites Treffen (Würzburg, 2005); Johann Marte and Oleh Turij, eds., Die Union von Brest (1596) in Geschichte und Geschichtsschreibung: Versuch einer Zwischenbilanz (Lvov, 2008). 46 Documenta Unionis Berestensis eiusque auctorum (1590–1600), ed. Athanasius G. Welykyj [Analecta OSBM, series II, section III] (Rome, 1970), 61–75 (no. 41 in Polish, no. 42 in Latin); for analysis see Gudziak, Crisis and Reform, 225–230. 47 Plokhy, The Cossacks and Religion, 125–126. 48 An example of the reaction of the Curia see Monumenta Ucrainae Historica, ed. Andrei Sheptyts’kyi et al., 14 vols. (Rome, 1964–1977), I, 111–116 (no. 197); cf. 116–128 (no. 198). 49 Antonio Possevino, Moscovia (Vilnius, 1586). 50 Valerie A. Tumins, Tsar Ivan IV’s Reply to Jan Rokyta (The Hague and Paris, 1971).

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Križanić (1618–1683), an alumnus of St. Athanasius College who came to Moscow in 1659 with an enthusiastic hope of bringing Muscovites to union with the Roman Church; after two years of service to the tsar as an interpreter he was exiled to Tobolsk in Siberia. Križanić spent fifteen years there (1661–1676), and wrote works on a variety of topics in theology, history, politics, economy, and the liberal arts. His intention was to bring the wide range of theological and secular knowledge of the West to Muscovy so that enlightened Muscovites would willingly unite with the Roman Church. Called “a turbid and extravagant brain” (cervello torbido e stravagante) by Cardinal Dyonisius Massari of the Propaganda congregation, one of his contemporary officials in the Curia, Križanić has been celebrated in modern research as an “ecumenic visionary.”51

Toward the Birth of Eastern Orthodoxy To conclude, a few words should be said about factors that contributed to the confessionalization of Eastern Christianity and the emergence of denominational Orthodoxy. Among such factors was the establishment of a parallel non-Uniate hierarchy in Ruthenia by Patriarch Theophanes of Jerusalem in 1620 that split the Ruthenians between the two rival Byzantine-rite churches, the Uniate and the non-Uniate. This cemented the previously existing conflict between adherents and adversaries of the Union of Brest of 1596 and unleashed a real war on the Ukrainian and Belarusian territories that can with good reason be called “confessional.” Around this time, the words “pious” (Slav., blagočestivyj, from the Greek eysebēs) and “orthodox” (Sl., pravoslavnyj, pravověrnyj, from the Greek orthodoxos) became the preferred designations of Greek-rite Christians opposed to union with Rome in the Polish-Lithuanian and Muscovite contexts.52 A high point on the way to denominational Orthodoxy was the activity of Metropolitan Petro Mohyla of Kyiv (1633–1646/47), an outstanding figure of Eastern Slavic history, the author of the Confessio Orthodoxa (1640–1642) that was recognized as an authoritative text throughout the non-Uniate Byzantine-rite area including the Greek Church.53 Under Mohyla’s guidance, the Kyivan non-Uniate 51 Thomas Eekman and Ante Kadić, eds., Juraj Križanić (1618–1683): Russophile and Ecumenic Visionary: A Symposium (The Hague and Paris, 1976). 52 For examples see Lev Valentinovič Zaborovskij, Katoliki, pravoslavnye, uniaty, part 1: Istočniki vremeni getmanstva B. M. Khmel’nickogo (Moscow, 1998), passim. 53 On Mohyla see Podskalsky, Griechische Theologie, 229–236; more recent literature in Enciklopedija istorii Ukrainy, VII (Kiev, 2010), 12–14.

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church established its own theological education and became a prominent center of ecclesiastical Baroque culture in Ruthenian lands. In the Greek Church, Orthodox confessionalization gained impetus from Patriarch Dositheos of Jerusalem (1641–1707), who worked to consolidate antiWestern opposition among the Byzantine-rite Christians.54 He authored his own confession of faith (1672) and convoked a council in Jerusalem in 1672 that issued a number of decisions emphasizing demarcation from Western confessions. Dositheos founded several printing houses in Moldavia and published a series of large polemic anti-Western compendia that treated both Roman Catholic and Protestant denominations as parts of a single whole opposed to the Orthodox East.55 The figure of Dositheos bridges the Reformation era with the later Enlightenment period when the frontier between the East and the Western confessions became much less fluid and the denominational boundaries much more clear-cut than they had been in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. bibliography Freudenberger, Theobald. “Das Konzil von Trient und das Ehescheidungsrecht der Ostkirche: Zur Entstehungsgeschichte des Canons 7 de matrimonio.” In ErnstChristoph Suttner and Coelestin Patock, eds., Wegzeichen: Festgabe Hermenegild Biedermann. Würzburg, 1971, 149–187. Gil, Andrzej and Ihor Skoczylas. Koœcio³y wschodnie w pañstwie polsko-litewskim w procesie przemian i adaptacji: Metropolia Kijowska w latach 1458-1795. Lublin and Lvov, 201. Gudziak, Borys A. Crisis and Reform: The Kyivan Metropolitanate, the Patriarchate of Constantinople, and the Genesis of the Union of Brest. Cambridge, MA, 2001. Hering, Gunnar. Ökumenisches Patriarchat und europäische Politik 1620–1638. Wiesbaden, 1968. “Orthodoxie und Protestantismus.” Jahrbuch der Österreichischen Byzantinistik 31 (1981), 823–874. Heyberger, Bernard. Les Chrétiens du Proche-Orient au temps de la Réforme Catholique (Syrie, Liban, Palestine, XVIIe–XVIIIe siècles. Rome, 1994. Hofmann, Georg. Griechische Patriarchen und Römische Päpste: Untersuchungen und Texte. Volume II/1: Patriarch Kyrillos Lukaris und die Römische Kirche [Orientalia Christiana XV–1]. Rome, 1929. Marte, Johann and Oleh Turij, eds. Die Union von Brest (1596) in Geschichte und Geschichtsschreibung: Versuch einer Zwischenbilanz. Lvov, 2008.

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On Dositheos see Podskalsky, Griechische Theologie, 282–294; Klaus-Peter Todt, “Dositheos II. von Jerusalem,” in Conticello and Conticello, Le théologie byzantine, 659–720. 55 Tomos katallagēs (Jassy, 1694); Tomos agapēs (Jassy, 1698); Tomos kharas (RâmnicuVâlcea, 1705).

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Western “Confessions” and Eastern Christianity Mastrantonis, George. Augsburg and Constantinople: The Correspondence between the Tubingen Theologians and the Patriarch Jeremiah II of Constantinople on the Augsburg Confession. Brookline, 1982. Papademetriou, Tom. Render unto the Sultan: Power, Authority, and the Greek Orthodox Church in the Early Ottoman Centuries. Oxford, 2015. Podskalsky, Gerhard. Griechische Theologie in der Zeit der Türkenherrschaft (1453–1821): Die Orthodoxie im Spannungsfeld der nachreformatorischen Konfessionen des Westens. Munich, 1988. Runciman, Steven. The Great Church in Captivity: A Study of the Patriarchate of Constantinople from the Eve of the Turkish Conquest to the Greek War of Independence. Cambridge, 1968. Suttner, Ernst Christoph. Quellen zur Geschichte der Kirchenunionen des 16. bis 18. Jahrhunderts. Freiburg, 2010. Todt, Klaus-Peter. “Dositheos II. von Jerusalem.” In Carmelo Giuseppe Conticello and Vassa Conticello, eds., Le théologie byzantine et sa tradition., volume II: (XIIIe–XIXes). Turnhout, 2002, 659–720. “Kyrillos Lukaris.” In Carmelo Giuseppe Conticello and Vassa Conticello, eds., Le théologie byzantine et sa tradition, volume II: (XIIIe–XIXes). Turnhout, 2002, 617–651. Wendebourg, Dorothea. Reformation und Orthodoxie: Der ökumenische Briefwechsel zwischen der Leitung der Württembergischen Kirche und Patriarch Jeremias II. von Konstantinopel in den Jahren 1573–1581. Göttingen, 1986.

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TOPICS AND DISCIPLINES OF THEOLOGY

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Method and Ethos of Theological Instruction and Discourse walter sparn The quest for an appropriate method of acquiring and presenting true and sound knowledge was one of the most important factors driving the development of early modern science. That general philosophical motive had a religious counterpart, the quest for truth and certainty in matters of Christian faith. Because answering that question largely determined the course of early modern religious history, the search for proper method was a key priority for all confessions and branches of theology. Theology, however, was not simply an intellectual and methodologically disciplined activity. Rather, it was also constituted by theologians’ personal ethos. While prior to the Reformation that ethos may have been shaped mainly by celibate clerical lifestyles, whether in monastic and mendicant studia or in university settings, it was now determined, personally and institutionally, by a variety of methodological and sociological factors. Importantly, theological education always explicitly linked method and ethos. The approaches varied somewhat within and between the confessions, but they were univocal against heterodox theologies and philosophies of religion. The relationship of method and ethos in theological education drew, as did theological discourse more generally, on a correlation between theology and propaedeutic philosophy, a relationship which changed amidst ongoing developments in the histories of church and science. Broadly speaking, one may distinguish three phases in the evolution of method and ethos: (1) a formative phase of the new constellation until about 1560/1570; (2) its pluralization in the context of confessionalization, until ca. 1610/1620; and (3) its respective “orthodox” stabilization in the era of the baroque.

Ethos and Method in the Era of Reformations Theology’s first phase of concentration on the pairing of ethos and method was determined by three actors: humanism; the Reformations emanating 405

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from Wittenberg, Zurich, and Geneva; and the papal Church, whose reforms came after a slight delay. They had in common a commitment to grounding debates and learning in a new way on texts, above all that of the Bible, but also (and hermeneutically scarcely less important) those of ancient philosophy and literature.

Humanism Humanism, emerging in the fourteenth century, was not a university-based school but rather an epistolographic network of scholars, writers, and artists. It represented the innovative combination of an often passionate mental and moral ethos with a new philologically and historically grounded method of approaching ancient texts. Its advocacy of studia humanitatis and bonae litterae distinguished it from the Scholastic cultivation of traditional knowledge and speculative explication, favoring instead philological precision and historical exploration. This reoriented learning toward a new paradigm of moral and aesthetic education. Humanism in France and Germany merged an interest in Christian Platonism with a devotional interest in the Bible. Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples (Faber Stapulensis) edited not only the works of Nicholas of Cusa and (Neoplatonically interpreted) Aristotle, but also the Psalter (1509) and Pauline epistles (1512); his philology and Christocentric hermeneutics informed Martin Luther’s Dictata super Psalterium (1513–1515). Subsequent important innovations in method, that came to the artes faculties first, included the adoption of grammar, rhetoric, and history (in order to interpret optimally the constitutive sources), as well as the replacement of an excessively subtle Scholastic logic with Aristotelian dialectic, and disputations with topical discourses and declamations. The goal was making topics a method for thinking and communication, and that demanded a corresponding ethos of its participants. Erasmus was one of the first to apply that method to theology when he supplemented his edition of the Greek New Testament with a work on Ratio seu methodus compendio perveniendi ad veram theologiam (1519). Taking Augustine’s De doctrina Christiana as his point of departure, Erasmus calls for a rejection of what he viewed as the linguistically barbaric, logically hypertrophic, doctrinally excessive, but practically useless theology of the Scholastics. Instead, he sought to replace it with a philosophia Christi, biblically grounded, with more emphasis on prayer than argument, and aiming toward practical piety. Inspired by the devotio moderna, Erasmus believed that this consists in studying Holy Scripture and avoiding intellectual hairsplitting while aiming at the affects of those who study. His own biblical 406

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commentaries and treatises, such as Enchiridion militis Christiani (Handbook of a Christian Knight, 1503) or the ironic Moriae encomium (In Praise of Folly, 1511), corresponded to this “folly of the cross.” Erasmus goes even further when dignifying the uneducated layperson: no Christian may be excluded from theology; the biblical dogmata Christi are comprehensible to everyone. Educated discourse is only an aid, designed to grasp those teachings and to articulate them as professio theologica. In the context of that “pious philosophizing,” readers of the Bible have great latitude in using even the fourfold sense of Scripture, the Church Fathers, and the praiseworthy pagan authors of the “circle and world of Christ.”1 In his inaugural lecture, “De corrigendis adolescentium studiis” (1518), Philip Melanchthon introduced a humanistic reform of the curriculum to Wittenberg. He recognized, as did Luther, a significant benefit for the study of theology. It would now be possible to see in the authentic text of the Bible clear theological contents, and these would make it possible to “taste Christ.” He closed his exposition of the relationship between pietas and eruditio with the exhortation Sapere audete! (Dare to understand!).2 Corresponding reforms of the philosophical (artes) faculty and, with that, of theological propaedeutics, ensued in Erfurt and Leipzig (1518), Rostock (1520), Greifswald (1521), Heidelberg (1522), and Tübingen (1525). Those reforms expanded the canon of curricular subjects by adding biblical languages, grammar, rhetoric, and poetics, and by reducing philosophy to dialectic and physics, while removing Scholastic-Aristotelian ethics and metaphysics because of their alleged distortion of both biblical and philosophical perspectives. After 1522 disputations were replaced by declamations. The realization of this new curriculum was aided by assigning to every student a professor as advisor, as the Wittenberg Studienordnung of 1523 prescribed. The subsequent shape of Protestant universities and academic gymnasiums emerged through further reforms. These included the restitution not of metaphysics but of natural philosophy and ethics, with the addition of politics, and based on sound sources and contemporary authors. For the curriculum Melanchthon wrote commentaries and textbooks, revising them continually; they soon spread throughout Europe. Prominent among these 1 Erasmus of Rotterdam, Ratio seu Methodus compendio perveniendi ad veram theologiam, in Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus, Ausgewählte Werke, ed. Hajo and Annemarie Holborn (Munich, 1933/1964), 150–162, at 157: 9–10, Christi circulum et orbem. 2 Philip Melanchthon, “De corrigendis adolescentiae studiis,” in Melanchthons Werke (Studienausgabe), ed. Robert Stupperich, volume III (Gütersloh, 1961), 30–42, at 42. Also in CR 11, 15–25.

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was De anima (1540, 1553), in fact an anthropology (although that term was not introduced until ca. 1600), discussing the latest anatomical, physiological, and psychological insights into human nature, and evaluating these both cosmologically and theologically. In 1533 the Wittenberg faculty of theology, where Melanchthon taught as biblical baccalaureus, reintroduced disputations for graduation. Luther himself participated, formulating the doctoral oath and contributing theses on important theological issues. Melanchthon, having written a brief Discendi theologiae ratio around 1530, reiterated the importance of academic degrees in an address at the first doctoral celebration in 1533: De gradibus in theologia.

Luther For theology, Luther clarified the constitutive connection between ethos and method early on. It is grounded in the observation that both ethos and method emerge from the correlation of religious experience and understanding the Bible. With respect to method, Luther declared in 1520 that “God’s words are the first principles of Christians.” The term Schriftprinzip (Scripture principle), likely coined by Melanchthon, indicates that the canonical Bible, read and heard as gospel, and unencumbered by the remaining tradition of interpretation, is the source of faith in Christ and therefore the foundational text of theology. Thus, the canon and its original-language sources are determined and fixed, in the case of the Old Testament now according to the Masoretic sources (Karlstadt: De canonicis scripturis libellus, 1520). The Bible, in terms of its religious sufficiency, is the normative and, in cases of disputed interpretations, the ultimate authority for theology (Sola Scriptura), superseding any external “hierarchy of authorities.” Tied to this Scripture principle was the hermeneutical rule that Scripture may and must be interpreted out of itself: Sacra scriptura sui ipsius interpres.3 For theology, that takes specific form in biblical commentaries. For religious practice, its constitutive form comes in the communication of the gospel through vernacular sermons; in catechisms, which receive new emphasis as condensed forms of Holy Scripture; and, innovatively, in personal confessions of faith. Almost immediately, controversies arose over whether the inner, illuminative experience of the Holy Spirit depended on mediation by the “external word” and remained tied to the “letter” of Scripture. Most of the Reformers 3

Martin Luther, Assertio omnium articulorum . . . (1520), WA 7, 94–151, at 97. Cf. Stefan Alkier, ed., Sola Scriptura 1517–2017: Rekonstruktionen – Kritiken – Transformationen – Performanzen (Tübingen, 2019), 29–102.

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in Wittenberg, Zurich, and Geneva replied affirmatively, and condemned the negative answer of the fanatici, today known as the Spiritualist or left wing of the Reformation. For this latter group the media of God’s word were secondary and, as “dead letters,” even detrimental; instead, theology bears witness to personal baptism in the Holy Spirit. Although the emerging state churches of the Reformation treated Anabaptists with animosity, controversy over the status of religious experience did not cease. In Wittenberg it resurfaced in disputes over antinomian piety in 1527 and 1537–1540, which were subdued only superficially. The Reformation made religious experience essential to theology, most prominently by Luther himself. He saw the specific ethos of theologians grounded in the dual character of theology both as biblical interpretation and experiential knowledge, as sapientia experimentalis. Even though faith, inasmuch as it depends on receiving the proclaimed gospel, believes “contrary to experience,” it is still an experience of lived life: Sola . . . experientia facit theologum.4 That means, on the one hand, that all Christians are theologians, because their baptism makes them part of the spiritual estate and empowers them to interpret the Bible properly and points to Christ. On the other hand, it also means that one is always in the process of becoming a theologian, as Luther points out in the introduction to the 1539 German edition of his works: one does this by ceaseless prayer (oratio); a deeper understanding of Holy Scripture (meditatio); and the spiritual struggles, or Anfechtungen, that sustain faith in life (tentatio). With respect to the object of theology, this involves a substantive change: previously defined as “knowledge of God,” it has now changed to “knowledge of God and humankind.” In this vein, too, Ulrich Zwingli in his Fidei ratio (1530) and John Calvin in his Institutio Christianae religionis (1536–1559) introduce their positive explication of Reformation doctrine. Luther pointedly refers to this in his interpretation of the Penitential Psalm 51 (1532): the proper subject matter of theology and divine wisdom is “justifying God and sinful humanity.”5

Reformation Theology From a methodological perspective, all of Reformation theology committed itself to a teaching (doctrina) that went beyond biblical commentary to focus on a discussion of soteriologically relevant terms (topoi, loci) and to organize these in service of proclamation; that in turn was to inform the study of 4

Martin Luther, Tischrede 1531, WA.TR 1, 16.

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WA 50, 657–661; WA 40/2, 327–328.

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Scripture. What in the seventeenth century came to be called “positive,” “dogmatic,” and then “systematic” theology began as a treatment of Topics.6 The model for this was Melanchthon’s Loci communes rerum theologicorum (1521), which he developed in three phases, culminating in an expansive final version, Loci praecipui theologici (1543/1559, 35th ed. 1595). The discrete topoi were arranged coherently, for which Melanchthon already used the term systema, borrowed from music theory. They were oriented along individual and human, in this case biblical, salvation history as a series historica (later erroneously called “local method”). Melanchthon’s students followed this model, as did Calvin in his Institutio (1536, 1559). Many authors used the title, up to and including Leonhart Hutter (Compendium locorum theologicorum, 1610, which found widespread use in schools of all Lutheran lands well into the eighteenth century), and finally Johann Gerhard (Loci theologici, 1610, 1625), who capitalized on the potential of topics to produce a work of baroque expansiveness. The Reformation’s understanding of a theological “doctrine” based on the Scripture principle resulted in two methodological tasks. The first was a new scriptural hermeneutics which distanced itself from the Erasmian assumption that Holy Scripture was at times “obscure” and that its exegesis must therefore be regulated finally by the church’s teaching authority. Luther addresses this in De servo arbitrio (1525): The Bible contains everything necessary for salvation – not just allegorically, but literally (according to the sensus historicus); it may well remain unclear in some details, but everywhere refers to Jesus Christ; in that regard it is comprehensible to every reader (claritas externa); its intended efficacy comes by the Holy Spirit (claritas interna). In this, Luther favored the heuristic distinction between law and gospel, the two performative aspects of the word of God. The pastoraloccasional, or dialectic, sense of Luther’s original distinction largely disappeared later, however, behind a reductive alternative in Article 5 of the Formula of Concord (1577). Calvin for his part subsumed the law and gospel distinction into the history of God’s covenant with humanity, relativizing it with his pedagogy of salvation. A principled covenant-theological hermeneutics was formulated by the Reformed theologian Caspar Olevianus (De substantia foederis gratuiti inter Deum et electos, 1585); in the seventeenth century it took up the challenge of historic-philological criticism.

6 Günter Frank, Topik als Methode der Dogmatik: Antike – Mittelalter – Frühe Neuzeit [Theologische Bibliothek Töpelmann 139] (Berlin and Boston, 2017), 172–203.

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Reformation theology’s second methodological task focused on disentangling knowledge provided by “supernatural” revelation from that derived from “natural” experience and reason. It was made necessary by the assumption, held in common by the Reformers, that reason was weakened by original sin and deviated from its creaturely orientation toward the true and good; in fact, it could be turned toward the opposite. Different solutions emerged, none of which is easily identifiable with Luther or Melanchthon. For neither they nor Calvin extrapolated from the relationship of theology and philosophy in soteriological matters to the disciplines as a whole. Following Romans 1:19 f. and 2:14 f., no one questioned that revelationbased theology presupposed a natural-rational theology, nor that the latter’s insufficiency for faith in Jesus Christ needed to be explained plausibly. While Luther, for whom all the world was “full of Bible,” saw the particular contrast between Christology and philosophy as a contradiction, Melanchthon and Calvin argued that the natural capacity to know about God not only draws from the “Book of Nature,” but it is inherent to reason itself. Melanchthon, invoking Plato and Cicero, called this a priori knowledge of the principles of thought and action ideae innatae. He grounded it in a psychology that departed from Luther and even from Aristotle, with whose conceptuality he otherwise had much in common.7 He was concerned to reject as irreligious both the Epicurean principle of chance and the Stoic notion of fate, and to maintain that only a belief in divine providence is rational. His “innatism” became controversial once the relationship between ethos and method was reoriented.8

Methodology and Confessional Authority In a second phase, concentration on the coupling of ethos and method was fueled by interest in the issue of certainty, thus shifting the focal point away from the ethos of theologians and toward theological method. Ethical commitments were subsumed into the ongoing and politically driven processes of confessionalization, that produced three distinct forms of lived Christian piety. In that environment, theological method became an essential factor in identifying and stabilizing confessional authority. It sought to verify 7 Sascha Salatowsky, De Anima: Die Rezeption der aristotelischen Psychologie im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert (Amsterdam and Philadelphia, 2006), 35–131. 8 Günter Frank analyzes the religious-philosophical significance of this complex in the early modern period in Die Vernunft des Gottesgedankens (Stuttgart-Bad Canstatt, 2003); on Melanchthon and Calvin see 72–78.

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religious certainty in the face of external challenges and to secure confessional bonds among the faithful through pastoral practice. This gave rise to an ambivalent difference between the ethos of Roman Catholic and that of Protestant theologians.

Catholic Reform Theologically, Catholic reform was by no means only a reaction to the Protestant Reformation. Its prehistory includes aspects in common with the Protestants, such as late medieval mysticism and devotional theology, which were essential to the Reformers. That is illustrated by the example of Johannes von Staupitz, Luther’s confessor, a superior in the order and predecessor in the Wittenberg professorship. Staupitz’s piety trained its eyes on the pious life and the vivid image of God’s love displayed on the cross. Apart from focusing on the study of Scripture, however, it did not have methodological consequences. That is true of the Catholic reform theologians of the 1530s as well. Only the humanistic biblicism of figures such as Johannes Eck, or the urging of Leuven theologians Albert Pighius and John Driedo to clarify the Catholic principle of tradition, took things a step further.9 More momentous was the approval of the Jesuits in 1540. Their appeal lay largely in the ethos embodied by Ignatius of Loyola and his friends – an emotionally intensified devotion to Christ that is every bit the equal of Luther’s experiential theology (except that it included an unconditional submission to papal authority). Ignatius’s Exercitia spiritualia (1548) concentrated on moral and emotional self-discovery before God, aiming to describe and prescribe the experiential path of purification, illumination, and union with God in the discipleship of Christ. The Jesuit Constitutions (finalized in 1558/59) are also a compendium of spiritual wisdom, describing a process of spiritual growth. A comparable focus on the ethos of mystical piety came with Teresa of Ávila (Camino de perfeccion, 1556; Las moradas, 1577), and her follower and subsequent confessor Juan de la Cruz (Cántico spiritual, 1584). Teresa’s theologically coded experience of inner freedom in prayer, and union with the friend and bridegroom Jesus, which also involved a dialectic of active struggle and passive rest in God, soon animated Lutheran devotional writers as well.

9 For a comparison of humanist, reformational, and pre-Tridentine Catholic theological reforms see Ulrich G. Leinsle, Einführung in die scholastische Theologie (Paderborn, 1995), 229–261.

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Catholic reform of theological method received a decisive impetus from the Council of Trent (1545–1563). This corresponded in some ways to the Reformers’ faith ethos. It happened ecclesiologically and hermeneutically by maintaining the equal status of written (biblical) and oral (ecclesial) traditions of faith and morals, as well as by fixing the scope of the biblical canon (including the Apocrypha), the validity of the Vulgate translation, and the interpretative authority of the Mother Church (sessio 4, 1546).10 It prompted the formulation of a Confessio fidei Tridentinae (1564), the reform of religious communication in preaching and education, and the formation of new institutions of theological learning. The decree De reformatione (sessio 6, 1546) provides for the establishment of professorships of Holy Scripture (realized in Dillingen as early as 1549), and continuous reading of Scripture in dioceses and convents. The decree on ordination (sessio 23, 1563), contains guidelines for the method and content of theological education for diocesan clergy, augmented by the Roman Breviary (1568) and the Roman Missal (1570). Very important was the catechesis of pastors, which took shape in a spirit of biblical humanism, for example with Michael Helding’s Catechesis (Mainz, 1549), and the Catechismus [Romanus] ex decreto Concilii Tridentini ad parochos (1566, with more than 600 editions by the eighteenth century). The latter provided an innovative schooling for catechetical preaching that emphasized the creed, sacraments, Decalogue, and prayer (avoiding topics of canon law and controversial theology). The Jesuit Peter Canisius had already produced catechisms, among which the Catechismus minor (1558) saw hundreds of editions in multiple languages.11 The Jesuits were the most significant driving force in early modern higher education in Catholic lands, founding more than 500 new colleges by 1650, and reorienting the humanities and artes toward theology.12 This had an impact on academic methodology as well, especially after they founded the Collegium Romanum in 1551 and gained a foothold in other institutions around Europe. In doing so, the Jesuits built on the Spanish late Scholasticism of Salamanca, and the Thomistic renaissance of Paris.13 The latter had sought to move beyond the Scholastic via controversy with 10 Tridentina synodus [. . .] omnes libros tam Veteris quam Novi Testamenti, cum utriusque unus Deus sit auctor, nec non traditiones ipsas, tum ad fidem, tum ad mores pertinentes, tamquam vel oretenus, vel a Spiritu Sancto dictatas et continua successione in Ecclesia catholica conservatas, pari pietatis affectu ac reverentia suscipit et veneratur: Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. Norman Tanner, 2 vols. (London and Washington, 1990), II, 663–665; COGD, III, 15–17; DH 1501–1507 (1546). 11 On the topic of catechisms see the chapter by Paul Grendler in this volume (Chapter 6). 12 On the Jesuits see the chapter by Stefania Tutino in this volume (Chapter 13). 13 See the chapters on Salamanca and Paris by Juan Belda Plans and Robert Armogathe, respectively, in this volume (Chapters 11 and 10).

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humanistic-philological commentaries on Thomas’s Summa theologiae and the Corpus Aristotelicum. An important figure in that development was the Dominican Tommaso de Vio Cajetan, legate in Augsburg in 1518, and author of extensive Thomas commentaries (1508–1523), based on a new edition of Aquinas’s works. Cajetan’s thought was marked by a critical departure from Scotist metaphysics in favor of Thomism, as well as by the underlying conviction, shared with many Reformers, that while mysteries of faith are not philosophically explicable, one could make a philosophical case for the immortality of the soul, as the anti-Averroist Melanchthon school had also done. Melchor Cano, another Dominican, head of the school at Salamanca, and participant at Trent, charted new ways with his De locis theologicis libri duodecim (posthum. 1560). Unlike both Johannes Eck’s Enchiridion locorum communium adversus Lutherum (1525/1543) and Melanchthon’s topical analysis predicated upon an assumption of scriptural clarity, Cano coupled the inventorying task of the loci with a criteriological function that identified which elements within the hierarchy of authorities could and should intervene plausibly when Scripture is obscure. Cano’s historical contextualization and rational reconstruction of the authoritative guarantees for truths of faith was new. Also new was a special tractate on theology, its object, goal, and principles. The safeguarding of true scriptural interpretation through church authorities was also the subject of Thomas Stapleton’s Principiorum fidei doctrinalium demonstratio methodica (1578); Stapleton, who had been exiled to Leuven, applied this to the doctrine of justification. Such an approach was applied to all controversial doctrines by the Jesuit Robert Bellarmine in his seminal Disputationes de controversiis Christianae fidei adversus huius temporis haereticos (1586–1593). From the start, the Jesuits’ interest in theological method was linked to the task of organizing the theological curriculum and its propaedeutics, and that process culminated in the Ratio et institutio studiorum (1599). The curriculum began with a three-year study of Aristotle and his commentators, of which the Jesuits were particularly productive interpreters; that was followed by four years of studies on Holy Scripture, “Scholastic” theology (i.e. Thomas commentaries), augmented by a large course and small seminar on moral teaching using cases of conscience. The interdependence of propaedeutics and theology was anchored in the teachers themselves, since they dealt with theological topics in philosophy courses, and vice versa, such as introducing Aristotle’s Metaphysics XII in theology. Unlike the Scotist Franciscans and the Thomist Dominicans, the Jesuits built their theology on a liberal connection to Aquinas, oriented by degrees of probability, and open, as well, to Scotist and even nominalist 414

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options. That resulted in a relatively large plurality of positions and discussions, so that after 1600 the order’s general had to make frequent appeals to unify teaching. Notwithstanding such differences, around 1600 the order voted almost unanimously against the Dominicans in the de auxiliis controversy, which debated the relationship between God’s primary potent action and human freedom to (dis)believe, a tension central to all confessions at the time. Of course, the Jesuit notion of a scientia media, which posited a special form of divine foreknowledge that foresaw the future in its contingency as a consequence of human freedom, was not accepted by all (not even by all Lutherans); many Dominicans (and all the Reformed) rejected it.

Protestant Confessionalization Protestant confessionalization, which developed in Europe after the middle of the sixteenth century as a result of religious policy decisions, created three distinct religious cultures: Lutheran, Reformed (Calvinist), and Anglican. Both with respect to the ethos of theologians and to theological method, all three show commonalities and characteristic differences. Among the commonalities in ethos are a shared negative: an increasingly emphatic differentiation from the Roman Catholic regular and secular clergy, which constituted its own form of life both religiously (by its powers of consecration) and socially (by mandatory celibacy). This opposition, however, was ambivalent. On the one hand, Protestant theologians found themselves integrated into the priesthood of all believers, and most belonged to that estate, that is, they were married. On the other hand, their education and social status distinguished them collectively as a politically independent and respected “ecclesial estate” (status ecclesiasticus), developing on its own terms and precipitating conflicts over competence issues and marriage politics. Education and lifestyle of pastors and their families developed in relation to and dependence on political and ecclesial authorities on one side, and on the other to the congregation and its members, whose schooling and moral edification were part of a pastor’s official duties. As a result, a pastor’s piety rarely remained free of external scrutiny. But pastoral interpretations and practices of church order varied regionally, moving within a spectrum between the needs of church governance and church discipline; because of that variety, generalizations are problematic.14 14

Andreas Holzem, Christentum in Deutschland 1550–1850 (Paderborn, 2013), ch. 4 f.; C. Scott Dixon and Luise Schorn-Schütte, eds., The Protestant Clergy in Early Modern Europe (Basingstoke,

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In terms of method, common features were based on joint Reformation principles, above all the Scripture principle and its attendant hermeneutical and ecclesiological commitments. The latter, which brought method and ethos close together, led to attempts to safeguard the unity of the church and to prevent the Reformation movement from breaking apart over internal disputes. The resulting religious colloquies were an especially condensed form of theological communication. Of the many such endeavors after Marburg (1529), none, with the exception of Wittenberg (1536) and an inner-Lutheran colloquy in Zerbst (1570), were successful. The Consensus Sendomirensis (1570) was a partial success in that it achieved at least civil toleration among Lutherans, Reformed, and Bohemian Brethren in Poland. Just as the religious colloquies of the 1520s prepared the political introduction of the Reformation, so too those after 1600, this time organized by the Jesuits, aimed to persuade Lutheran princes to convert. A second ecclesiological commitment, the personal and collective confession of faith, lost its innovative potential and became a conservative element. The formulation of new confessions aspiring to have normative influence on religious policy came to a close in Poland in 1570, and Bohemia in 1575. Where Luther’s catechisms were given a confessional function, these confessions found a catechetical purpose, as for example in the Reformed Heidelberg Catechism (1563), or the Socinian Racovian Catechism (1608). While the Reformed recognized that their confessions, such as those written by Melanchthon, were occasioned by particular topical circumstances and therefore open to augmentation by future confessions (the Genevan Harmonia confessionum of 1581 remaining unsuccessful), Gnesio-Lutherans assumed that the Reformation’s confession writing had concluded, and that this simply needed to be acknowledged. Even those Lutherans who did not sign the Formula concordiae (1577), or, as in Denmark, were prohibited from doing so, did not venture beyond their corpus doctrinae. Formally, the Lutheran Book of Concord (1580) and the Reformed consensus codified by the Synod of Dort (1618/1619) consisted of theological propositions, that is, statements pro and contra derived demonstratively from the Bible. Their purpose lay in making a sharp distinction between “us” and all the heterodox “them” – “genuine Lutherans” from Philippists and the Reformed, or “true Reformed” from Arminians and Lutherans.

2003); Wolfgang E. J. Weber, Luthers bleiche Erben: Kulturgeschichte der evangelischen Geistlichkeit des 17. Jahrhunderts (Berlin and Boston, 2017).

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A more productive project revolved around a hermeneutical commitment to the Scripture principle. It committed theology to a transparent biblical exegesis rooted in understanding (intelligere) and explaining (explicare), and thus to the education of prospective pastors as independent interpreters looking for salvific applications. As a result of this commitment, theologians took responsibility not only for the articulation and passing on of theological knowledge, but also for its philosophical propaedeutics and for education more generally. Methodologically, this meant that both Reformed and Lutherans focused their work on hermeneutics and homiletics, as well as on philosophical propaedeutics, especially history. That was now thematized15 by the “Hessian Melanchthon,” Andreas Hyperius, in De formandis concionibus sacris seu de interpretatione Scriptuarum (1553), and De recte formando theologiae studio (1556); by David Chytraeus’s Oratio de studio theologiae recte inchoandi (1557, rev. 1572); and, more closely aligned with Geneva, by Hieronymus Zanchi’s De conservando puro puto Dei verbo (1561). For critical historical method, the academies and later universities of Strasbourg (1567) and Altdorf near Nuremberg (1571/1578), newly founded in a late humanist urban spirit, proved especially productive. Historically informed hermeneutics guaranteed that a religiously necessary and sufficient interpretation of Scripture on its own terms was actually possible, and that its authority did not depend upon extra-canonical tradition or ecclesial teaching authority. That was the task set forth by Melanchthon’s student Martin Chemnitz in the first two loci of his Examen Concilii Tridentini (1565), and in the prolegomenon on Holy Scripture in his posthumously published Loci theologici (1591), which circulated widely in the seventeenth century. Chemnitz also took up the rules that Matthias Flacius Illyricus had previously formulated in his Clavis Scripturae sacrae (1567). That work, printed well into the eighteenth century, appealed to the principle that the unity of Scripture becomes manifest in Christ, and drew on the hermeneutical guidelines in the biblical prefaces of Erasmus and Luther. More important than his dictionary was Flacius’s reorientation of grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric away from the goal of improving one’s own speech, and toward 15 See Marcel Nieden, “Rationes studii theologici,” in Herman J. Selderhuis and Markus Wriedt, eds., Bildung und Konfession: Theologenausbildung im Zeitalter der Konfessionalisierung (Tübingen, 2006), 211–230; Johannes Wischmeyer, “Leitbilder des theologischen Studiums: Programmatische Diskussion und institutioneller Wandel vom 16. bis ins 20. Jahrhundert,” in Reformationsgeschichtliche Sozietät der Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, ed., Spurenlese: Wirkungen der Reformation auf Wissenschaft und Bildung, Universität und Schule (Leipzig, 2014), 39–68.

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understanding the speech or texts of others. In this respect, Flacius expanded Melanchthon’s analytical view of understanding, motivated by a commitment to the Scripture principle, by adding the demand that hermeneutical rules must not be hermetically or cabbalistically coded, but must remain general: in all texts, one needs to be able to determine the skopus, explain obscure passages contextually, decline the argument, translate tropes according to the literal sense, take into account the style and historical location of the author, etc. The next step toward a general hermeneutics came in the early seventeenth century with the Altdorf scholar Michael Piccart and his thoughtful synthesis of contemporary rules of interpretation, Oratio de optima ratione interpretandi (1605). Flacius also applied Melanchthon’s legacy to historiography. Where the latter’s work had culminated in a history of the world, Chronicon Carionis latine expositum et auctum (1556–1566), Flacius confined himself to church history. He structured it by contrasting the paradigmatic example of the early church with the decline of the papal church, and applying that perspective to a presentation of recent history. The resulting thirteen volumes of the Centuriae Magdeburgenses (1559–1574) were innovative both in terms of their historical critique and their use of many new sources. Only that last point can be applied to the Roman Catholic counterpart, the twelve-volume Annales ecclesiastici (1588–1607) of Cardinal Cesare Baronio; this work conspicuously avoided presenting the church’s teaching as changeable.

The Influence of Philosophy The institutional context for such hermeneutical and historical work was provided not only by theological faculties, but also by their cooperation with philosophical faculties, where professors of grammar, rhetoric, and logic were responsible for scientific standards and their methodological and didactic advancement. Countless new academic gymnasiums benefited. At both renewed and recently founded universities, philosophical faculties participated in a methodological discussion made necessary by the innovations of Renaissance humanism in the fields of natural science and religion, as well as by the theological innovations of the Reformation. Despite confessional differences, almost all of Latin Europe took part in these developments. That discussion enabled Protestant theologies to define more precisely the relationship between their religious commitments and scientific reflection, and to differentiate them both methodologically and practically. The most significant clarification concerned the science of knowledge represented by anti-Aristotelian Ramism, the scientific neo-Aristotelianism of the School of 418

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Padua, and the wisdom discourse of Neoplatonic Hermetism. Lutheran and Reformed philosophers and theologians opted differently, and not always according to confession. Institutions of higher learning in Germany and Scandinavia, shaped by Melanchthon’s legacy and cultivating a theology that emphasized exegetical depth and homiletic efficacy over doctrinal performance, began to embrace Ramist dialectics in the 1570s as an alternative to Aristotelian logic and metaphysics. This science of knowledge understood itself as a First Philosophy, that is, as an image of that logic according to which God thinks and speaks the ideas of all being; in that respect it was based on a Neoplatonic-humanistic philosophy of spirit. Its method of identifying, defining, and organizing concepts hierarchically allowed it to recognize the logical-mathematical structures of the world. That seemingly “natural” and clear comprehensiveness made it attractive, even when it appeared in Melanchthonian guise as Philippo-Ramism. Applications to theology were suggested by Peter Ramus (Pierre de la Ramée) himself (Commentarii de religione Christiana, posthum. 1576), and by the Reformed theologian Amandus Polanus von Polansdorf, whose Syntagma theologiae Christianae (1609, 4th ed. 1655) achieved a methodical symmetry of doctrine (doctrina) and ethos (disciplina). Another way of connecting method and ethos emerged in the Genevan Academy (1559), shaped by Calvin’s theology and Beza’s interpretation of it. The Academy’s propaedeutics set aside Melanchthonian and Ramist dialectics in favor of a scientifically more rigorous demonstrative logic, as espoused by Hieronymus Zanchi and his brand of Paduan neo-Aristotelianism. That in turn influenced the approach to a Christian ethos, as for example with Lambert Daneau’s Ethices Christianae libri tres (1577). Above all, though, it was tied to the strict doctrine of predestination governed by a notion of God’s supralapsarian decretum absolutum (Zanchi, Quaestiones et responsiones Christianorum, 1570; Guillaume du Buc, Institutiones theologicae, 1602). That model prevailed in other places as well, including Hungary (Alba Julia, 1567), in Huguenot academies (Sedan, 1579; Saumur, 1593), in John Knox’s Scotland (e.g. Edinburgh, 1685), in Cambridge’s Puritan Emmanuel College (1584), and in the Netherlands (Leiden, 1575; Franeker, 1585; Groningen, 1614). Absolute predestination was also combined with Ramist method and covenant-theological exegesis to yield a symmetry between life and doctrine, as exemplified in the Puritan branch of Reformed confessionalization. This piety, which took good works and holy affects to be signs of election, made theology into a “science of living blessedly forever,” as William Perkins 419

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called it in Armilla aurea (1590). It also furthered the Soules Preparation for Christ, as the emigré to North America Thomas Hooker wrote in 1638. All of this contrasted sharply with the kind of Anglicanism developed by Richard Hooker. Here, religious authority was coupled methodologically with notions of law, and yielded an ecclesiological focus. For Richard Hooker, natural law (lex naturae) was also a presupposition of church governance, and he reached back to the Scholastic balance of Scripture, tradition, and reason to build his case (The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, 1593–1597). On the other hand, Puritan ways of relating method and ethos influenced Dutch predestinationism; William Ames defined theology as doctrina Deo vivendi in his Medulla theologiae (1623), and that became normative for Dort orthodoxy. Around 1600 Ramism receded in Reformed academies and was prohibited in Lutheran schools (though it survived in currents of reform pedagogy). The shift was precipitated by the arrival of a Paduan conception of science, represented by the work of Giacomo Zabarella. Zabarella saw the potential of Aristotle’s Organon less in dialectical Topics, and more in the demonstrative proofs of the Posterior Analytics. Interesting for theology (and natural philosophy) was Zabarella’s conceptual distinction between experientially based objects and rationally based orders. It prevented “secondary” concepts from being treated as “primary” ones, and being ascribed an extra-rational reality. That allowed a distinction between theology’s external cause and its own activity, and enabled scripturally based arguments to be made demonstratively rather than topically. The motto was accuratior theologia, and pointed to a scientification of theology that took root with special vigor after 1600 in Wittenberg, Germany’s largest university at that time, and in the similarly popular Helmstedt (founded in 1576).16 Overcoming proto-Pietistic resistance, such schools pushed through a ban on Ramism as well as the introduction of metaphysics in the philosophical curriculum and for its use in theology. Lutheran and Reformed faculties added chairs in logic to accommodate metaphysics, based, in this case, on philological analysis of Aristotelian texts and their commentaries, and geared toward engagement with Roman Catholic, particularly Jesuit, metaphysicians. Neither Catholics nor Protestants were interested in producing further Aristotle commentaries; instead, they strove toward a systematic metaphysics, now called ontologia or 16

For background on the history of science see Martin Mulsow, ed., Spätrenaissance-Philosophie in Deutschland 1580–1650: Entwürfe zwischen Humanismus und Konfessionalisierung, okkulten Traditionen und Schulmetaphysik (Berlin and Boston, 2009); Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann and Friedrich Vollhardt, eds., Ideengeschichte um 1600: Konstellationen zwischen Schulmetaphysik, Konfessionalisierung und hermetischer Spekulation (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, 2017).

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theoria transcendentalis. Confessional differences did emerge in their explication, however.

Method and Ethos in Baroque Theologies The third phase of early modern correlation between theological method and theologians’ ethos was marked on the one hand by a strong will to orthodoxy, that is, a continual self-reassuring within a doctrinally set and socially homogeneous space, and on the other by an urgent need for that space to engage with the two analogous confessional spaces and with theologically and philosophically heterodox movements that could no longer be marginalized. Externally, the beginnings of this third phase can be dated by the outbreak of European-wide war in 1618; that ended the political peace between the confessions for thirty years. Where the destruction was not total, the dominant cultural form of this phase was the baroque. It was moved by extreme affects and attitudes, which it staged with both naïveté and finesse. In all three confessions that orthodox constellation was challenged, if not yet institutionally then at least intellectually, and with differing degrees of impact.

Post-Tridentine Baroque Scholasticism Post-Tridentine baroque Scholasticism took up the educational task in philosophy launched by the council.17 In confessionally divided France and Germany conditions were not always ideal, but they provided opportunities; controversial topics were ubiquitous. That was true for Spain, Portugal, and Italy as well. Naturally, Catholic Scholasticism influenced Protestant universities too, thanks to the spirit of a Respublica litteraria Europaea, academic travel, and, despite the Roman Index librorum prohibitorum implemented in 1559, an open book market. Another external influence came with the centralizing policies of the papacy, which consolidated and disciplined academic work. In addition to the Jesuits, whose annual reports were an ideal source of information for the pope, other orders established offices in Rome. Directly accountable to the pope was the central Inquisition (1542) and the new colleges: Romanum (later “Gregoriana,” 1551), Germanicum et Hungaricum (1552/1580), and the mission college, Urbanum (1627). The Congregatio de Propaganda Fide (1622) managed Roman Catholicism’s 17

For an interconfessional overview see Leinsle, Einführung, 262–306.

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global expansion. This gave baroque-Scholastic theology a much wider religious and cultural horizon than that of the non-seafaring Protestants, whose moral-philosophical and -theological discourse remained Eurocentric, especially with respect to natural and international law (ius gentium). Although the correlation of method and ethos for both philosophers and theologians was safeguarded by clerical and monastic education, the Jesuit ethos posed a challenge to the traditional balance with its recourse to moral probabilism. Dominicans criticized this “positive” theology, oriented by individual cases of conscience, for its tendency toward laxism in opportunistic casuistry and political counsel. Though the major Scholastic works managed to ward off this danger of prudential ethics until well into the eighteenth century, the connection of Scholastic and positive theology remained unstable. For example, the Jesuit Hermann Busenbaum’s Medulla theologiae moralis, printed more than 200 times between 1645 and 1776, fueled the suspicion that here the end justified the means. In the wake of the probabilism controversy, both laxism and Jansenist rigorism were condemned by the church’s teaching authority in 1679;18 intermediate positions such as tutiorism and probabiliorism remained viable into the eighteenth century. The Chinese Rites Controversy, begun in 1631 between the Jesuits and Dominicans over missionaries’ “accommodation” of traditional Chinese practices, and ended in 1704 by a papal prohibition, gives further proof not only of rivalries between the orders but also of the deep differences that separated many Jesuits from the ethos of Dominicans and Franciscans. Next to the “free” school of the Jesuits, the Dominicans and Franciscans maintained a Thomist and Scotist presence, respectively, in institutions of higher learning both north and south of the Alps. They had in common two methodological characteristics. First, they used textbooks for both philosophy and theology that were often written by a single author, such as John of St. Thomas in Alcalá (Cursus philosophicus thomisticus, 1630; Cursus theologicus, 1631–1664), or jointly by more than one author (most importantly, Cursus theologicus Salamanticensis, 1631–1712). The Scotists in Rome, Paris, and Prague also produced such textbooks through the end of the seventeenth century: for example, in Prague Bernhard Sannig’s Scholae philosophicae (1684/85) and Cursus theologiae completus ad mentem D. J. Scoti (1675–1681). A second characteristic saw theological reflection grounded in Aquinas commentaries.

18

DH 2101–2165.

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Thomist approaches came from the Dominicans Domingo Báñez (Scholastica commentaria, Salamanca, 1584), and the exceptional John of St. Thomas, whose Cursus theologicus (Alcalá, 1637–1656; Rome, 1667) set long-lasting standards. This commentary contained a detailed epistemology and science of knowledge, as well as one of the classics of Dominican spirituality, the treatise “On the Gifts of the Holy Spirit.” In contrast to the Protestant Reformers’ Scripture principle, John makes the validity of his knowledge about all ten theological loci, including that of Holy Scripture itself, subject to approval by the church. Aquinas commentaries by Jesuits included Scotist and nominalist perspectives as well, and tended to be multi-volume syntheses of philosophy and theology; many were also read by Protestants. Among the most frequently published were the commentaries of Luis de Molina (1592), Gregory of Valencia (1592–1597), Francisco Suárez (1590–1621), and Gabriel Vázquez, known as the “Spanish Augustine” (1598–1615). Rodrigo Arriga, who taught in Prague, used the common title Disputationes theologicae (Antwerp, 1643–1655; Cursus philosophicus, 1632). The Jesuits’ philosophical productivity focused above all on metaphysics. Interconfessionally significant were Benedict Pereira (De communibus omnium rerum naturalium principiis et affectionibus, 1576); the “Portuguese Aristotle,” Pedro da Fonseca, with his Logic (1574) and Metaphysics (1577/1579); and above all Francisco Suárez, whose methodologically innovative Disputationes metaphysicae (Salamanca, 1597; Mainz, 1600) remained influential for Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Christian Wolff.19 These early decades of the seventeenth century also saw hints of developments that would soon become serious theological challenges, and which the methodologies, and perhaps even the ethos, of baroque Scholasticism were not equipped to meet. One such irritant took the form of a radical (“Pyrrhonic”) epistemological skepticism, circulating since Michel de Montaigne’s Essais (1588/1590), and an emerging “atheistic” Libertinism in France that undermined the correlation between reason and revelation. Such challenges could not be addressed by simply appealing to revelation and church authority, since the presence of non-Christian religions as well as intra-Christian disagreements over epistemology made that implausible. The only option was to confine oneself to “natural” religion and religious tolerance, as did Jean Bodin (Heptaplomeres, ca. 1590). The Minim friar Marin 19 Robert S. Maryks and Juan Antonio Senent de Frutos, eds., Francisco Suárez (1548–1617): Jesuits and the Complexities of Modernity (Leiden and Boston, 2019).

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Mersenne (La vérité des sciences, 1625) offered a new model in his Christian philosophy, correlating a mathematical approach to natural philosophy with theology, and motivated solely by search for truth. René Descartes hoped to replace the Aristotelian theological propaedeutics of baroque Scholasticism with a new method, inspired by Augustine and turning radical doubt into absolute certainty (Meditationes de prima philosophia, in qua Dei existentia et animae immortalis demonstrantur, 1641). Descartes’ a priori rationalism and radical anti-Scholasticism were viewed as delusional by many. Pierre Gassendi countered with a sensualist and atomist approach in Disquisitio metaphysica (1644). More radical was Blaise Pascal’s thesis that skepticism could only be resolved religiously, by a subjective experience of revelation (Pensées sur la religion, ca. 1660), a position that Scholastics could only view as a fideistic heresy beyond discussion. Baroque Scholasticism was overwhelmed spectacularly by the case of Galileo Galilei, with its shift to a Copernican cosmology and mathematicalexperimental physics. A method of hierarchical truth claims could allow many things to seem possible or even likely, but the authority of the church, which was based on Holy Scripture (understood also to provide knowledge of nature), excluded the truth claims of Galileo’s theory. The impasse remained until the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher, a polymath who was not methodologically committed to correlating philosophy and theology, confirmed the possibility of different cosmologies (Iter exstaticum, 1660). Kircher, using Lullist and Cusan methods, conceived of a universal knowledge based on semiotic systems that upheld that correlation without contradiction (Ars magna sciendi, 1669). In addition, Kircher assumed, as did many Jesuits, that God created the world in a calculatory manner – which soon inspired Leibniz.

Protestant Orthodoxies Protestant orthodoxies were established in the first two decades of the seventeenth century. While they and their subsidiary school philosophies did not represent their confessions exclusively, they were entrenched in the state church and theologically dominant in the academy. In method and ethos, and in the relationship between the two, they were not always homogeneous, and tensions arose between the needs of devotional communication and of methodical scholarship. Wherever neo-Aristotelian method and its scientific impetus were adopted, however, it led to a methodologically and didactically sophisticated structuring of the theological curriculum, even when Ramist or Melanchthonian influences were present. Such method was 424

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worked out in introductions to theology, often stand-alone publications and well informed interconfessionally. A prominent example among the Reformed is Johann Heinrich Alsted’s Methodus sacrosanctae theologiae (1614). Lutheran counterparts include Balthasar Meisner’s Praecognita theologica (1625) and Abraham Calov’s Isagoge in SS. Theologiam (1652, 4th ed. 1685), which contained the treatise De natura theologiae and a Paidia theologica de methodo studii theologici. Also influential on method were Johann Gerhard’s Methodus studii theologici (1617, 3rd ed. 1654) and Johannes Hülsemann’s Methodus studii theologici (1638, 5th ed. 1667). That structuring contained two wide-ranging innovations that were, however, handled differently by Lutherans and Reformed. The first innovation came with the development of a new concept of theology. The philosophers’ science of knowledge contributed to this in both confessions, typically with titles such as systema theologiae methodicum, and often presented prior to the doctrine of Scripture in sections de natura theologiae. Protestants saw a need to legitimize their theology and its Scripture principle over and against the Tridentine authority principle. Lutherans additionally sought to demonstrate that the Reformed invoked the Scripture principle unjustly; such conceptual work was particularly intensive in Wittenberg (Balthasar Meisner) and Helmstedt (Georg Calixt). The Aristotelian term “theology,” previously of marginal importance, now became the guiding concept, replacing the Melanchthonian doctrina. Its most important elements include the notion that theology is “habituated” as a learnable intellectual competence. It is distinguished from other such abilities by its dependence on a spiritual gift of God (habitus theosdotos). It is a practical ability, in which knowledge is not an end in itself, but a means actively to realize a goal. That orientation to praxis elevated related disciplines, including those occupied with applied biblical hermeneutics, yielding works such as Conrad Dietrich’s Institutiones catecheticae (1613, reedited into the eighteenth century), or Valentin Fromme’s Theologia catechetica (1654) and Friedrich Balduin’s Idea dispositionum Biblicarum (1622) and Institutio ministrorum verbi (1621), the latter combining exegesis, homiletics, and casuistry.20 Those developments were shared by Lutherans and Reformed, with the Reformed efforts typically more encyclopedic, as in Johann Heinrich Alsted’s Methodus (1614). Common to both was also a special interest in

20 Daniel Bohnert, Wittenberger Universitätstheologie im frühen 17. Jahrhundert: Eine Fallstudie zu Friedrich Balduin (1575–1627) (Tübingen, 2017), esp. 186–279.

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pastoral care (Friedrich Balduin, Tractatus de casibus conscientiae, 1628; William Ames, De conscientia et ejus jure vel casibus, 1630). Confessional differences did emerge in the specification of theology’s goal. Reformed theologians saw this primarily in terms of the pious lifestyle of the theologian himself. Lutherans applied it to the object of theological activity, that is, to its practical goal of leading people to salvation; its closest neighboring discipline was not ethics but medicine, emblematically present in the figure of Christus medicus. In written form, Lutheran theology was organized analytically (and called ordo, not “method”). It began with its practical goal, moved on to the object (subjectum tractationis) and mediating instrument (subjectum inhaesionis), before ending with the means for attaining that goal. The first “practical” dogmatics of this kind was Georg Calixt’s Epitome theologiae (1619); apart from Johann Gerhard’s Loci theologici (1625), most positive Lutheran theologians followed this model. From this emerged a second confessional difference. The Reformed defined theology’s goal in a way that directly integrated the theologian’s ethos. Lutherans did so only indirectly, which resulted in different ways of balancing that ethos with the discipline’s methodological demands. One ideal type sought to connect the two intimately, a move furthered by the kinds of devotional theology that took a critical stance toward scientific theology but had a strong following in the churches. It drew momentum from Johann Arndt’s Vier Bücher vom wahren Christentum (1606/1610), and produced a wide array of popular devotional literature that absorbed currents of Puritan and Roman Catholic spirituality. Opposed to that integrative option was a newer conception that made a sharper methodological distinction between personal piety and academic theology. This model was represented by Calixt and his philosophical and theological followers (who later became dominant in the Enlightenment). Most Lutheran theologians found themselves somewhere between these two poles and saw theology and science united in the person of the pious theologian who followed Luther’s three faith practices (oratio, meditatio, tentatio) while simultaneously embracing the methodological rigor of theologia accurata. That leads to the second innovation, the development of a general hermeneutics. It was motivated by commitments to the Scripture principle and by controversialist demands for demonstrative proofs based on the literal sense of various scriptural passages. That did not deny the implication that Holy Scripture must be adequately comprehensible to simple laypeople; this commitment is underscored amply by increasing printings of vernacular Bibles, as well as by a new annotated translation and commentary by the 426

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Reformed Johann Piscator (1602–1610), the gospel harmony by Johann Gerhard (1626–1627), and the Bible edition of Duke Ernest the Pious completed in the midst of war in 1641. To begin with, the hermeneutics of the Altdorf Aristotelians was developed further, for example, by the Reformed in logic textbooks of Bartholomäus Keckermann (1611), or as doctrina hermeneutiké by Clemens Timpler (1612). Lutherans at first confined their approaches to Holy Scripture, exemplified by Johann Gerhard (Tractatus de legitima Scripturae Sacrae interpretatione, 1610), Wolfgang Franz (Tractatus novus et perspicuus de interpretatione Scripturae Sacrae maxime legitima, 1619, 6th ed. 1708), and Salomo Glassius (Philologia Sacra, 1623, 1725). They did not address the exact role played by the hermeneut when interpreting the Bible’s letter in its spiritual sense. This opened the door to spiritualist positions, which accentuated Johann Arndt’s distinction between spiritual and material, and argued that the material letter is merely a guide for the spiritual readings to which only the spiritually gifted have access. A consensus position emerged in 1630 through a controversy with Heinrich Rahtmann, emphasizing that the connection of letter and spirit in Scripture is one of three possible forms the word of God can take. Johann Conrad Dannhauer of Strasbourg recognized astutely that one could not secure the Scripture principle methodologically with a hermeneutics that was restricted to privileged persons (popes, clergy, spiritualists). Dannhauer addressed this problem by publishing the first general hermeneutics: Idea boni interpretis et malitiosi calumniatoris (1630, 5th ed. 1652). Its positive aspect lay in integrating various hermeneutical operations (grammar, rhetoric, philology, history) into a logic which ensured that a passage of Scripture could have only one sense (Dannhauer based this approach in part on medieval logic). Its critical aspect came in excluding readings that are possible but not intended by the author – above all, the three allegorical senses and the catechetical, homiletic, or mystical applications of the literal sense. That allowed applied hermeneutics to be freed of the demands of scriptural proof, and strengthened the already dominant production of edifying literature. This in turn encouraged Bible interpretations that aimed at the pious affects of a cathartic culture, shaping sermon postils, catechisms, religious poetry, synesthetic religious emblematics, and religious music.21 Dannhauer also did not let his emphasis on the informing “grammatical” 21 Walter Sparn, “Subtilitas intelligendi, explicandi, applicandi: Protestantische Bibelhermeneutik zwischen 1618 und 1717,” in Alkier, ed., Sola Scriptura 1517–2017, 163–189, esp. 171–176.

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hermeneutics lead to a rejection of the “oratorical,” with its metaphorical and allegorical language tools, nor of the “mystical” and “prophetic” (typological and apocalyptic), which are only available to persons with special spiritual gifts. Dannhauer’s project of equipping the hermeneut to give order to Scripture’s “various ways of speaking” (Heb. 1:1) came at a price, and this weakened its ability to meet heterodox and early rationalist challenges such as those of the Socinians. First of all, Dannhauer’s hermeneut needed to change non-predicative (e.g. metaphorical) forms of speech into predicative statements; non-grammatical speech, such as visions or riddles, could not be considered at all. Second, he had to view the Bible’s theopneustia as verbal inspiration, and that denied the biblical authors any interpretative role. Here the Lutherans adopted Reformed biblical philology, as represented by Johannes Buxtorf the Younger (1648), who claimed verbal inspiration for the Old Testament’s Masoretic text (according to an early dating) and its vocalization. Finally, Dannhauer committed the very error he had sought to avoid with his general hermeneutics; this had presupposed intellectual and emotional aptitude for proper understanding, but had expressly excluded a religious prequalification. And yet the biblical hermeneutics offered here makes religious affiliation decisive: Catholics and Calvinists, even when methodologically correct, are deemed incapable interpreters. In Dannhauer’s model, the theologian’s ability to understand and interpret the Bible, defined as habitus theosdotos, resembled the charisma of prophecy. He even quotes Calvin on this. With these moves, Dannhauer opens the door indirectly to Christ-mystical baroque allegories of the Song of Songs, and to the emerging trends toward chiliastic readings of biblical apocalypticism. Next to his work on hermeneutics, Dannhauer also played a leading role in developing the art of disputation. This was the most significant place in the academy where established truths could be inculcated and new ideas tested (Idea boni disputatoris, 1629).22 A new wave of religious colloquies, such as those in Leipzig (1631) and Thorn (1645), exposed the limitations of that method, however. Even the intra-Lutheran negotiations between Abraham Calov and Georg Calixt in the post-1648 Syncretist Controversy could not find resolution; Calov’s proposed Consensus repetitus fidei vere Lutheranae (1655) failed. 22

Kenneth G. Appold, Orthodoxie als Konsensbildung: Das theologische Disputationswesen an der Universität Wittenberg zwischen 1570 und 1710 (Tübingen, 2004).

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Tridentine theology affirmed the Vulgate as a canonical text and at most regarded its sources in the Septuagint as inspired. Here, historicalphilological criticism was actually encouraged, inasmuch as it furthered the church’s hermeneutical authority. Orthodox Lutherans, on the other hand, struggled to meet the challenges posed by heterodox hermeneutics such as those of the Arminian-Reformed scholar Hugo Grotius in his Annotationes in Vetus Testamentum (1644) and in Novum Testamentum (1641–1650). They may have equaled such efforts in terms of exegetical detail (as exemplified in Calov’s Biblia Veteris et Novi Testamenti illustrate, 1672–1676), but had no answer to the guiding interpretative principle of canonicity, other than seeing it as the negation of a true, Christologically defined principle. Their exegesis was even less capable of countering the biblical interpretations of Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan, 1651) and Baruch Spinoza (Tractatus theologico-politicus, 1670). Criticism of a prejudicial Christian biblical hermeneutics found slightly less traction with the Reformed, even though the Formula Consensus Helvetica (1675) again codified the verbal inspiration of the vocalized Old Testament. The Reformed, however, had long grounded their notions of the Bible’s canonicity, including that of the Old Testament, not only in Christology, but also in covenant theology. That perspective was now strengthened, particularly by Johannes Cocceius (Summa doctrinae de foedere et testamento Dei, 1654). In this way, Reformed covenant theology was able to engage the new methodology of Descartes, especially in its occasionalist form. Spinoza’s religious-philosophical use of the Bible, however, posed a more fundamental challenge to the correlation of theology and philosophy, and therefore to the plausibility of orthodox Protestant hermeneutics. Correlating theological method and ethos exposed Protestant theology to challenges that went beyond the individualistic religiosity of Pietism and the filtering out of heterodox positions. Additional fronts opened up with new developments in philosophy. That was especially true of innovations that came not just from the widely accepted propaedeutic branches of philosophy, but from what came to be known as “natural” or “rational” theology. The field of battle was metaphysics, along with its epistemological and anthropological implications. It was waged, frequently with passion, in both Lutheran and Reformed universities, with sometimes similar, sometimes confessionally different expansions and explications of metaphysics. The guiding question for both method and ethos revolved around the capacity of the human spirit, which is a creature of God but impacted by sin, to partake of God’s spirit; and whether human reason can have accurate knowledge of God and put it to practical use. Metaphysics, which in every 429

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(non-materialistic) tradition included the existence of God and God’s essential attributes in its discussion of the being of beings, affirmed such a possibility. That conviction grounded the cultivation of metaphysics as First Philosophy that both confessions had in common. It included an analysis of (analogous) being, the essence and existence of real things, the simple and polar natures of beings, the ways of being, substance and accidents, as well as finite and infinite being. Human partaking of God’s spirit could also be understood more broadly, that is, as “Platonic,” inasmuch as human reason was believed to have innate theoretical and practical principles, including an idea of “God” (following Acts 17:28); or, in a more limited fashion, as “Aristotelian,” insofar as knowledge of God only discerns ontological difference. This dissimilarity, though rarely pure, may lie at the root of divergences in how natural theology was integrated by the two revelationbased theologies. Lutheran Scholastic metaphysics was almost entirely ontological in orientation. Sixteenth-century Melanchthonian “innatism,” together with its “hypermetaphysical” explication, gave way, along with RenaissancePlatonic Ramism, to the systematically ordered ontological categories of general metaphysics and the distinction between finite and infinite being in special metaphysics. A comparable situation arose in philosophical anthropology with the traducian theory about the generation of individual souls; it was countered by Roman Catholic and Reformed creationism, which taught that God later added an individual soul to every newly created body.23 The existence of ideae innatae was typically rejected by the Averroist-Aristotelian epistemologies, but accepted again in a Ciceronian-practical sense, based on Romans 2:14 f. The notion that the human mind is a tabula rasa and acquires knowledge only through rational experience led to the creation of a new material discipline called noology. It posits the human capacity for deriving first principles of knowing from the subtilitas of things, that is, their proportionality to one another, to their creator, and to the human intellect; in this way it complemented metaphysics. Similarly, a newly conceived epistemological discipline of gnostology became necessary; it described how such a habitus arises from an intellect initially equipped only with a potentia critica innata. That creation-theological framing of Aristotelian empiricism was completed by about 1630. It set in motion, however, a removal from special 23

Salatowsky, De Anima, 133–372.

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metaphysics of the doctrine concerning “spiritual substances” (God, angels, rational souls), recommended earlier by Benedict Pereira and rejected by Suárez, now taken up by Johann Scharff (Pneumatica seu Pneumatologia, hoc est Scientia spiritum naturalis, 1629).24 Also significant was the fact that scientific method impacted Scholastic physics, which had since the 1620s mostly left behind its Neoplatonic-Hermetic model of science, including astrology and alchemy. On its way toward experimental physics, it also moved away from its accustomed place among the propaedeutics of theology. In Lutheranism of this period there were two methodologically divergent formations that manifest a different understanding of natural theology. The one belonged to the spiritualist-leaning devotional theology embodied by Johann Arndt and associated with the para-church Rosicrucianism that operated in his orbit. Such authors applied Neoplatonic-Hermetic or Paracelsian methods to their natural philosophy and used cabbalistic allegorical interpretations to support a positive correspondence between the anthropological “microcosm” and the cosmological “macrocosm,” and thus to connect methodically the “light of nature” with the “light of grace.” That strand remained present in the rest of the seventeenth century alongside the other deviation: a sapiential interpretation of Aristotelian metaphysics, whose explication in Altdorf and Königsberg was not supplanted by a scientifically adapted ontology. Although it shared with that ontology the notion of a tabula rasa and empiricist method, it had the goal of taking Aristotle’s definition of metaphysics as “theology” and expanding it to create a natural theology that, by means of active comprehension, participated in God’s spirit and partook of God’s blessedness; it retained astrology. But it rejected special metaphysics, and especially pneumatics, noology, and gnostology, as useless. Cartesian methodology was dismissed as “self-referential.” Here, too, the structural dilemma of ontological and theological metaphysics reasserts itself, reconstructed historically after 1650 and combined with the criticism that Scholastic metaphysics failed to make good on its claim to reality because its conceptual abstraction, directed toward theological purposes, reduced it to a mere lexicon. That already applied partly to Balthasar Meisner’s Philosophia sobria (1611–1623), which, under controversialist pressure, sought to make the terms of Lutheran Christology and sacramentology metaphysically plausible but confined innovative thinking strictly to the mysteries of faith and prevented it

24 Walter Sparn, “Vorwort,” in Johann Scharff, Pneumatica seu Pneumatologia, hoc est Scientia spirituum naturalis (Hildesheim, 2014), 5–27.

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from becoming accepted more generally.25 Such criticism was also leveled at Calov, and he gave it further fuel in his Scripta philosophica (1651). Calov’s presentation of metaphysics, flanked by its epistemological and encyclopedic “counsels,” abstracted from knowledge of both nature and revelation; tellingly, he called it not natural theology but metaphysica divina. By contrast, the new “eclectic” method emanating from Halle and Altdorf simply relegated metaphysics to instrumental philosophy. Reformed academies did view metaphysics primarily as natural theology; Melanchthon and Calvin’s innatism were foundational. Ontology was of course also taught, but its concepts not only described reality, they were understood as being real themselves, that is, as intelligible. Not surprisingly, attempts were made to expand the object of metaphysics, with reference to creation, in order to include nothingness – that which is not an ens rationis (Clemens Timpler, Metaphysicae systema methodicum, 1604). Lutheran and Jesuit metaphysicians only reflected on this in order to reject it as impertinent. Timpler’s initiative failed, but Reformed Scholastic metaphysicians remained much more open to Hermetic, Neoplatonic, and pansophical models of knowledge than did Lutherans. Among these were the intercultural philosophia perennis and, successful throughout Europe, the encyclopedic concept of philosophy. Drawing on Lullist and Ramist motifs, Johann Heinrich Alsted’s seven-volume Encyclopedia (1630) presented a universal unity of all knowledge, including that of natural and supernatural theology, whose truths affirm each other. Contemporaneously with English authors, Alsted rehabilitated chiliasm (millenarianism), which was condemned by all Reformation confessions, by ascribing to encyclopedic knowledge the power to effect a general cultural reformation that had remained out of reach of the Reformation itself. This Alsted passed on to his student Johann Amos Comenius and to the messianism of the English Puritans. His encyclopedic model inspired Comenius’s pansophical Consultatio catholica and Leibniz’s conception of universal characteristics. Alsted’s Neoplatonic-Hermetic physics saw no success against Cartesian mechanism and dualism, however. The Reformed were able to read Descartes’ methodology through an Augustinian lens and to see compatibility with their covenant-theological interpretations of Scripture. The new physics was either viewed as religiously neutral or lent itself to physicotheological applications.

25 Joar Haga, Was there a Lutheran Metaphysics? The Interpretation of Communicatio Idiomatum in Early Modern Lutheranism (Göttingen, 2012).

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Both Protestant confessions had by 1650 crossed a peripeteia in the history of Reformational theology. Not just their theologies, but also, and somewhat sooner, their philosophical propaedeutics were gripped by profound changes in both method and ethos that swept them into the pious-enlightened phase of modern theology. bibliography Alkier, Stefan, ed. Sola Scriptura 1517–2917: Rekonstruktionen – Kritiken – Transformationen – Performanzen. Tübingen, 2019. Avis, Paul. In Search of Authority: Anglican Theological Method from the Reformation to the Enlightenment. London, 2014. Beutel, Albrecht, ed. Luther Handbuch, 2nd ed. Tübingen, 2010. Bultmann, Christoph and Lutz Danneberg, eds. Hebraistik – Hermeneutik – Homiletik: Die “Philologia Sacra” im frühneuzeitlichen Bibelstudium. Berlin and Boston, 2011. Büttgen, Philippe et al., eds. Vera Doctrina: Zur Begriffsgeschichte der Lehre von Augustinus bis Descartes. Wiesbaden, 2009. Frank, Günter, ed. Philipp Melanchthon: Ein Handbuch. Berlin and Boston, 2017. Frank, Günter and Stefan Meier-Oeser, eds. Hermeneutik, Methodenlehre, Exegese: Zur Theorie der Interpretation in der Frühen Neuzeit. Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, 2011. Kolb, Robert. Bound Choice, Election, and Wittenberg Theological Method. Grand Rapids, 2005. Leinsle, Ulrich G. Einführung in die scholastische Theologie. Paderborn, 1995. Maryks, Robert S. and Juan Antonio Senent de Frutos, eds. Francisco Suárez (1548–1617): Jesuits and the Complexities of Modernity. Leiden and Boston, 2019. Reventlow, Henning Graf. History of Biblical Interpretation, volume III. Atlanta, 2010. Schulz, Heiko et al., eds. Handbuch Religionsphilosophie: Geschichte – Konzepte – Kontroversen. Stuttgart and Weimar, 2021. Selderhuis, Herman J., ed. Calvin Handbuch. Tübingen, 2008. ed. A Companion to Reformed Orthodoxy. Leiden and Boston, 2013. Selderhuis, Herman J. and Markus Wriedt, eds. Bildung und Konfession: Theologenausbildung im Zeitalter der Konfessionalisierung. Tübingen, 2006.

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Most theologians of the Reformation era would have found the idea of distinguishing some aspect of theology as “biblical” very surprising. It was axiomatic in the medieval church that Scripture was the authoritative source from which all Christian doctrine and ethics were derived.1 At the beginning of this period magisterial lectures in theology often took the form of extended expositions of whole books of Scripture.2 While theologians of the Reformed era did write theological works of a confessional or thematic nature, probably the largest single category of theological writing, by the number of words expended or pages printed, consisted of works of scriptural exposition and commentary. Only gradually over the course of the early modern centuries would a divide open up between practitioners of “sacred philology,” the science of the language and literature of the Bible, on one hand, and the systematic exploration of theological doctrines, on the other. All parties to this gradual process of diversification and intellectual specialization began by believing that the two enterprises would achieve consistent results. Nevertheless, it does make sense to speak of “biblical theology” in this era. In some branches of the Western church “scripture” attained the status of a locus communis, a theological topic in itself. Questions circled around the authorship – and therefore the authority – of Scripture. How did one reconcile divine inspiration and human authorship? What, or who, determined the accuracy of the text and the authenticity of its transmission? In what sense were the various books of Scripture normative for faith, worship, and ethics? Who was qualified or authorized to interpret and comment upon the message of Scripture? As a part of that question, how did the text of 1 See for example Heiko Augustinus Oberman, Forerunners of the Reformation: The Shape of Late Medieval Thought (Philadelphia, 1981), 53–120. 2 See for instance Martin Luther’s lectures as a biblical theologian from 1513 onward.

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Scripture, the heritage of ancient and more recent exegetes, serve or support the ongoing teaching ministry of the church and its hierarchy? Perhaps the largest theological question was also the most obvious. What was Scripture ultimately about? What was its scopus or fundamental principle?

Contexts for Encountering the Bible Theologians, and their readers, encountered Scripture in a wide range of contexts and settings, both liturgical and scholarly. Scripture could be read in private: the very great numbers of Bibles sold, in Latin and in so many other languages, in the sixteenth century testify to a widespread desire to own, and (at least in some cases) to read privately in a small-format copy.3 Scripture was also encountered through liturgical reading. At the start of this period the pericopes or extracts were determined by the often complex liturgical rules current in each province. As Archbishop Thomas Cranmer remarked, paraphrasing Cardinal Francisco de Quiñones’s proposals for the reform of the breviary, “the number and hardness of the Rules called the Pie, and the manifold changings of the Service, was the cause, that to turn the Book only was so hard and intricate a matter, that many times there was more business to find out what should be read, than to read it when it was found out.”4 Consequently, in the Reformation era all the Reformed and some within the Roman Catholic tradition began to embrace a simpler and more consecutive way of reading Scripture in the liturgy. In some cases this meant lectio continua: the reading and then the exposition of consecutive passages of a biblical book over a period of days and weeks within common worship. Lectio continua appealed especially in those settings where the primary purpose of liturgical reading was to serve as a prelude to preaching.5 As 3 For example, a complete Vulgate Bible appeared in octavo in Venice in 1492: Biblia (Venice, 1492); octavo editions of Luther’s New Testament were published in 1535, 1537, and 1539: WA.DB 2, 562–563, 596–597, 610–611. Bibles intended for clandestine use, such as Tyndale’s, were naturally small format. 4 For Cranmer’s preface see www.churchofengland.org/prayer-and-worship/worship-textsand-resources/book-common-prayer/concerning-service-church; on Quiñones see Francisco de Quiñones, The Second Recension of the Quignon Breviary, following an edition printed at Antwerp in 1537 . . ., ed. Wickham Legg, 2 vols. (London, 1908–1912), I, xxv; Anscar J. Chupungco, ed., Handbook for Liturgical Studies, 5 vols. (Collegeville, 1997–2000), volume V: Liturgical Time and Space, 71–74; Simon Ditchfield, Liturgy, Sanctity, and History in Tridentine Italy: Pietro Maria Campi and the Preservation of the Particular (Cambridge and New York, 1995), 24–25. 5 See e.g. Hughes Oliphant Old, The Reading and Preaching of the Scriptures in the Worship of the Christian Church, volume IV: The Age of the Reformation (Grand Rapids, 2002).

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one would expect, one of the primary areas where theological writers worked with and expounded Scripture was in the pulpit – and in the printed forms to which sermons were often turned. Scripturally based sermons might be issued as sets of postils, intended to assist preachers who might need additional inspiration for a season of the church’s year; or as individually named sets of sermons on a given theme.6 A sometimes slender line divided the theological exposition of Scripture, in a series of sermons from the pulpit, from the continuous exposition of Scripture in the lecture-hall of a place of higher education. The Prophezei at Zurich sponsored lectures on Scripture as part of the continuing education of the city-state’s clergy.7 Some of the most prolific biblical exegetes of the sixteenth century issued commentaries in the form of homilies or daily extempore presentations of a few verses of Scripture at a time. Heinrich Bullinger’s Homilies on Daniel and Calvin’s commentaries on Daniel followed this pattern.8 The use of amanuenses allowed the leaders of the Reformation to produce what, even given their amazing diligence, would otherwise have been an unbelievable amount of expository text over a relatively short time. In another far less pastoral setting theologians of the Reformation era used Scripture in controversial theology. The use of Scripture in theological controversy went far, far beyond mere proof texting, and may amount to some of the most intentional forms of exegesis in this very troubled epoch of the church’s life. To take only the most obvious example, the most controversial passages in Scripture in the debates over the Eucharist, 1 Corinthians 11:24 and John 6:63, were exhaustively interpreted and counter-interpreted through the 1520s, 1530s, and 1540s.9 6

See for instance Luther’s postils for Advent, Christmas, and Lent in WA 1, part 1 and 17, part 2; for extended expository sermons published as a series see Heinrich Bullinger, Sermonum decades quinque, de potissimis Christianae religionis capitibus (Zurich, 1567), fols. 248r–265v; trans. as Fiftie Godlie and Learned Sermons: Divided into Five Decades (London, 1577), 731–754. 7 Bruce Gordon, “The Bible in Reformed Thought, 1520–1750,” in Euan Cameron, ed., The New Cambridge History of the Bible, volume III: From 1450 to 1750 (Cambridge and New York, 2016), 462–488, at 467–468. 8 For two examples of commentaries in the form of homilies or daily addresses see Heinrich Bullinger, Daniel . . . expositus homiliis LXVI . . . : Accessit . . . epitome temporum et rerum ab orbe condito ad excidium . . . ultimum urbis Hierosolymorum sub Imperatore Vespasiano . . . (Zurich, 1565); John Calvin, Praelectiones in librum prophetiarum Danielis (Geneva, 1561), standard edition in Calvini Opera, in CR 50, 529–722, CR 51, 1–304. 9 For examples of controversial works that rely on detailed scriptural analysis and debate see for instance Martin Luther’s Against the Heavenly Prophets in the Matter of Images and Sacraments in WA 18, 62–125, 134–214, and translated in LW 40, 77–222; That These Words of Christ, “This is my Body,” etc., Still Stand Firm Against the Fanatics, in WA 23, 64–283, and translated in LW 37, 13–150.

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Scripture in the Confessions of the Churches As a preliminary way into this subject, one might look for guidance from the documents that encapsulated the teachings of the contemporary churches. Confessions of faith might be expected to include passages describing what Scripture was, what should be believed about it, how it should be read, and so forth. In practice the picture is surprisingly uneven. The Lutheran confessions from the Augsburg Confession onward made copious use of Scripture; but they felt little need to define it as an article of the faith in itself. The closest approach to such a confessional statement came in the opening section of the Formula of Concord of 1577/1580, where the primacy of Scripture over all other sources of revelation was asserted, in the context of a defense of the Lutheran credal documents.10 Elsewhere, the inspired authority of Scripture was taken for granted in every way that Lutheran theology was written. Philip Melanchthon, in a work published in 1539, made the particular argument that the church depended on Scripture for its authority, and not vice versa.11 In the Profession of Faith produced for Catholic Europe in 1564 after the Council of Trent, the order of the statements was interesting. The speaker affirmed the contents of the Nicene Creed, then the “apostolic and ecclesiastical traditions” and then “also . . . admit[ted] the holy Scriptures, according to that sense which our holy mother Church has held and does hold, to which it belongs to judge of the true sense and interpretation of the Scriptures.”12 On the other hand, the Reformed churches, those of Switzerland, of Geneva, and beyond, came to regard it as a foundational point to make a bold statement about Scripture in their creeds. This tradition emerged with the First Helvetic Confession of 1536, drafted by Bullinger, Simon Grynaeus, Oswald Myconius, and others at a meeting in Basel. The first clause of this confession affirmed that “Canonical Scripture, the Word of God, handed down by the Holy Spirit” contained all that was needed for the Christian life in philosophy, piety, and ethics. The second clause insisted that Scripture was self-interpreting. In the third clause it was stated that the Holy

10

See The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, ed. Robert Kolb and Timothy J. Wengert, trans. Charles Arand et al. (Minneapolis, 2000), 486–487 (Epitome) and 526–532 (Solid Declaration). 11 In De Ecclesia et de Autoritate Verbi Dei, in Philippi Melanchthonis Opera Quae Supersunt Omnia, ed. C. G. Bretschneider et al., 28 vols. (Halle, 1834–1860), XXIII, cols. 585–642. 12 For the Tridentine Profession of Faith see Documents of the Christian Church, 4th ed., ed. Henry Bettenson and Chris Maunder (Oxford, 2011), 270–271.

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Fathers, insofar as they interpreted Scripture according to the Spirit, could be understood as God’s instruments.13 The epigraphic statements of the 1536 Confession were elaborated into a fuller discussion in the Second Helvetic Confession of 1566, which was primarily Bullinger’s work. The first article of the Second Helvetic insisted, like the first but in fuller language, that Scripture was the self-sufficient Word of God. From it alone were wisdom, piety, church reform, and the approval of doctrine to be derived. The voice of the Word was to be heard through “lawfully called preachers” in the church, and no extraordinary divine voices were to be expected. Internal illumination did not make external preaching redundant. Heretics who denied the value of Scripture were condemned; the apocryphal books were lowered in stature compared to the others.14 In the second article Bullinger developed a more explicit theology of the interpretation of Scripture. While interpretations that served the needs of the Roman Church were rejected, true interpretation was the work of those who knew the language and history of the text and could interpret it in accordance with the rule of charity. Accordingly, the interpretations of the Fathers, and the decisions of the councils, might be helpful but were not in all cases normative. Human traditions, even if they were claimed to come down from the apostles, were to be rejected if they conflicted with Scripture.15 As a general rule the confessions that flowed from Geneva and from Calvin’s influence tended to be shorter and simpler than the Second Helvetic; however, a gradual tendency toward fuller and more prolix clauses about Scripture manifested itself over time. Although the confessions of the churches inspired by Geneva’s example all emerged from a family relationship, so to speak, they followed quite different orders from each other and discussed Scripture in slightly different terms. The 1536 Genevan Confession began with a single article affirming “the Word of God” as the sole rule of faith and authority for the church’s governance.16 The Gallican Confession of 13

The Creeds of Christendom: With a History and Critical Notes, ed. Philip Schaff and David Schaff, 3 vols. (New York and London, 1905) III, 211–231, articles quoted on 211–212, online edition at www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/creeds3.iv.iv.html. 14 [Heinrich Bullinger], Confessio Helvetica posterior: olim ab Henrico Bullinger conscripta nunc denuo ad fidem editionis principis anni domini 1566 ubi trecentianni sunt elapsi ad memoriam helveticae Confessionis pie recolendam edidit . . . Eduardus Böhl (Vienna, 1866), 9–11; Creeds of Christendom, III, 233–306, online edition at www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/creeds3.iv.v.html. 15 Confessio Helvetica posterior, 11–13. 16 Ernst F. Karl Müller, ed., Die Bekenntnisschriften der reformierten Kirche: In authentischen Texten mit geschichtlicher Einleitung und Register, 2 vols. (Waltrop, 1999; repr. [Leipzig, 1903]), I, 111; translation in John Kelman Sutherland Reid, ed., Calvin: Theological Treatises [Library of Christian Classics 22] (London and Philadelphia, 1954), 26–33.

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1559 expanded somewhat on the theme in Articles 3–5: the knowledge of God was to be based on the books of canonical Scripture (Article 3): other “ecclesiastical books” could not serve as a basis for faith (Article 4). Scripture gained its authority from God alone; no heritage of the church in terms of councils or traditions might stand against it (Article 5).17 The Belgic Confession of 1561 followed a similar pattern: though Guy de Brès added as a further proof of the inspired quality of Scripture the claim that “even the blind themselves are able to see that the things predicted in them do happen.”18 The Scots Confession of 1560, while inspired by a similar theology, approached the authority of Scripture from a different angle. It derived the authority of the Bible from the presence of the Spirit within the churches, and so in a sense (but only in a sense) subordinated Scripture to ecclesiology. The Reformed churches, including those in Scotland, were authentic members of the universal church because they taught the doctrine contained in canonical Scripture, the interpretation of which belonged to the Holy Spirit (Article 18). The Scriptures, however, had authority from God, and any who claimed that they derived their authority from human agency or institutions blasphemed against them (Article 19).19 The Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England, drafted in 1563 on the basis of Cranmer’s earlier Forty-Two Articles and confirmed in 1571, affirmed the sufficiency and listed the agreed content of Scripture in Article 6, further explaining the relationship of the two testaments in Article 7.20 By the time that the Westminster Confession was drafted in 1646 the locus of Scripture was expanded to ten articles, the whole of the first chapter of the confession. Scripture was necessary for the making known of God’s will, now that extraordinary oracles and theophanies had ceased (Article 1). The 17

Creeds of Christendom, III, 356–382, Articles 3–5 at 360–362, online edition at www.ccel.org/ ccel/schaff/creeds3.iv.vii.html; also Müller, ed., Bekenntnisschriften, I, 222; compare the very similar Waldensian confession of 1655 in ibid., II, 500–505; see also on these documents Reformierte Bekenntnisschriften, herausgegeben im Auftrag der Evangelischen Kirche in Deutschland, ed. Heiner Faulenbach and Eberhard Busch, with Emidio Campi et al. (Neukirchen-Vluyn, 2002–); Campi’s edition of the Confessio Gallicana and the related Waldensian confession of 1560 is found in volume II/1: Reformierte Bekenntnisschriften 1559–1563, ed. Andreas Mühling and Peter Opitz (Neukirchen-Vluyn, 2009), 1–56. 18 Creeds of Christendom, III, 383–436, Articles 3–7 at 384–389, online edition at www.ccel.org/ ccel/schaff/creeds3.iv.viii.html. 19 Creeds of Christendom, III, 437–479, Articles 18–19 at 460–464, online edition at www.ccel.org/ ccel/schaff/creeds3.iv.ix.html. Ian Hazlett’s edition of the Scots Confession is found in Reformierte Bekenntnisschriften, II/1, 209–300. 20 www.churchofengland.org/prayer-and-worship/worship-texts-and-resources/bookcommon-prayer/articles-religion.

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canonical books were to be received as Scripture; the apocryphal books, in contrast, were “not . . . of divine inspiration . . . [and] of no authority in the Church of God, nor to be any otherwise approved, or made use of, than other human writings” (Articles 2–3). Scripture was to be received as the word of God: however Scripture might commend itself to us by its contents, it was received through the work of the Holy Spirit within us (Articles 4–5). Though Scripture was all-sufficient for life, the Spirit was needed to receive it; and some “light of nature and Christian prudence” might be necessary for ordering things in worship and polity (Article 6). The essence of Scripture was knowable by all; but the text was to be studied where possible in the original languages, and was to be interpreted according to the Spirit (Articles 7–10).21 The fullest discussion of Scripture in a confessional document appeared in what might seem a surprising context. The Racovian Catechism of 1605/1608, the credal document of the Polish Socinians, incorporated a highly detailed consideration of Scripture in its first section, nineteen pages of the 1818 edition.22 The catechism derived from the structure of the arguments in Faustus Socinus’s On the Authority of Holy Scripture, originally composed in Italian but circulated in Latin editions of 1588 and, later, 1611.23 Unlike mainstream Protestant confessional documents, the Socinian writings assumed, at least rhetorically, a degree of skepticism in the reader. They aimed to justify the special status of Scripture by reasoned defenses, rather than doctrinaire statements. The first chapter of the catechism addressed the question of whether the Scriptures were authentic. Emphasizing the New Testament, though not quite to the exclusion of the Old, the catechism pointed out that the reputed authors of the New Testament books were known and free from suspicion, since they knew the events they described so closely. Given their moral repute, they could not reasonably be suspected of 21

Creeds of Christendom, III, 598–673; ch. 1 at 600–606, online edition at www.ccel.org/ccel/ schaff/creeds3.iv.xvii.ii.html. 22 The Racovian Catechism: with notes and illustrations, translated from the Latin; to which is prefixed a sketch of the history of Unitarianism in Poland and the adjacent countries, ed. and trans. Thomas Rees (London, 1818); see also Martin Schmeisser, Sozinianische Bekenntnisschriften: Der Rakówer Katechismus des Valentin Schmalz (1608) und der sogenannte Soner-Katechismus (Berlin, 2012). 23 Faustus Socinus, De Sacrae Scripturae auctoritate: opusculum temporibus his nostris utilissimum: quemadmodum intelligi potest ex praecipuis capitibus rerum, quae in ipso continentur: ea autem notata sequenti inuenies pagellâ (Seville, 1588; later ed. Steinfurt, 1611); trans. as Faustus Socinus, An argument for the authority of Holy Scripture from the Latin of Socinus, After the Steinfurt Copy (London, 1731). A further edition appeared in 1732. Socinus’s headings bore a resemblance to the heads of Scripture in Reformed orthodox theology, where the authority, divinity, necessity, perspicuity, and authenticity of the Scriptures were explored in turn.

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falsehood. It could not plausibly be argued that the texts were seriously corrupted across time. Moreover, the Christian religion could be supposed to be divine from the miraculous powers of Jesus and from his resurrection; from the sublime quality of its teachings; and from its historically rapid spread despite persecution.24 In the second chapter, “of the Sufficiency of the Holy Scriptures,” the authors of the catechism argued that Scripture was sufficient because it inculcated saving faith and love. It was also sufficient because it was unimaginable that God would have allowed something crucial to be omitted. Reason was appropriate in the study of Scripture: human traditions such as those of the Roman Church were not.25 In a chapter on “the perspicuity of Scripture” it was argued that Scripture was clear in its essentials, but might become obscure when read and expounded from the wrong motives. Obscurer passages should be interpreted with the aid of clearer and simpler ones. Some sections of prophecy, however, required inspired interpreters. The teaching of Scripture served to transmit, instill, and gather together its message.26 Even raising the rationalistic objections that he did – though the answers given were, at this point, hardly threatening to orthodoxy – conveyed a slightly different stance toward the faith, even allowing for the difference in genre between a declaratory confession and a question-andanswer catechism.

Establishing and Defining the Text: Sacred Philology and the Theology of Scripture All the confessions (even including the Socinians) agreed that Scripture was the foundation of their theology – though that basic principle concealed many diverse approaches to its use and interpretation. However, even before one could begin to do theology with Scripture, the question arose of how to establish its text with credibility and accuracy. In the manuscript age the quest for an accurate text did not impose itself with anything like the urgency that was felt in the sixteenth century, simply because most scholars would have worked with a fairly closely related family of Scholastic Latin texts, where the differences did not seem critical.27 In the course of the fifteenth 24

25 26 Racovian Catechism, 1–13. Ibid., 13–17. Ibid., 17–19. For the Scholastic Vulgate see Frans van Liere, “The Bible in Latin, c. 900 to the Council of Trent, 1546,” in Richard Marsden and E. Ann Matter, eds., The New Cambridge History of the Bible, volume II: From 600–1450 (Cambridge, 2012), 92–109. 27

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century two developments changed the rules of engagement. First, Christian scholars gradually acquired a competence in Hebrew and Greek, as well as other ancient languages in which the Scriptures had been conserved.28 Second, and a little later, the availability of print ensured that divergences of opinion, or divergent texts, could become notorious across the scholarly community within a period of weeks or months. Both of those developments antedated the Reformation, though the bitterest controversies over them arose once the Reformation debates had broken out. A new discipline, of “sacred philology,” presented questions and raised challenges to biblical theology. The basic aspiration of sacred philology need not, in principle, have been too daunting to the theologians. Scholars like Lorenzo Valla, Gianozzo Manetti, Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples, and even Erasmus accepted the authority, traditions, and structure of the Western Latin Church. One thing they did question was the condition in which the sacred text had been transmitted. If there were major inconsistencies between, say, the received Latin Vulgate and the Hebrew and Greek texts, or even the quotations from Scripture in the authentic writings of the Fathers, then one might conclude that the sacred text was corrupt and needed to be restored, not that Scripture per se had lost authority. In fact, even as scholarship on the Bible burgeoned in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the prevailing theological assumption held that the authentic, correct text (however that was to be recovered, and in whatever language it was taken to reside) possessed absolute authority for the faith. Nevertheless, there remained the question of who was competent to judge what a “correct” reading of the text might be. The first practitioners of sacred philology were, naturally enough, philologists: experts in the grammar, syntax, style, and vocabulary of ancient authors. In the first generation or so the recovery of Scripture did not normally involve the unearthing and collation of ancient manuscripts. The discoveries of secondand third-century papyri were several centuries away; even the earliest parchment codices that might in principle have been used (such as Codex Vaticanus or the Codex Bezae) were known but little used at this stage. Textual correction, especially in the New Testament, involved the gathering of variant readings from the available, mostly late medieval Byzantine manuscripts and applying the humanistic method of comparing text with text. 28 See Alastair Hamilton, “The Study of Tongues: The Semitic Languages and the Bible in the Renaissance,” and Jill Kraye, “The Revival of Greek Studies in the West,” in Cameron, ed., New Cambridge History of the Bible, III, 17–36 and 37–60.

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Deciding what was a better reading, in some cases, became an issue of learned conjecture, of literary connoisseurship.29 Farther into the early modern period, more sophisticated principles for evaluating variant readings came into vogue; though even there, critical sophistication did not bring agreement.30 At these early stages scholars of literature, the arbiters of taste and style, were at an advantage compared to theologians. The latter were trained only in Latin, and more used to metaphysical abstractions or logic than to literary flourishes. In the early decades of the humanist movement literary and theological scholars seem to have operated side by side in their respective spheres. Early exercises in biblical philology such as Valla’s Collatio or Lefèvre’s fivefold Psalter aroused little comment, and certainly little criticism, from professional theologians. Most of the drama came from other Renaissance humanist scholars, and some of that amounted to little more than the characteristic Renaissance posture of always seeing the barbarian detractors at the gates. It has even been suggested that the set-piece debate between Maarten Dorp of Louvain and Erasmus over humanism and theology, which concluded with a debate over editing the Vulgate, may have been something approaching a publicity stunt between two scholars who quite liked each other.31 Where the debate over Renaissance scriptural criticism became acrimonious, ironically enough, was on the margins of Scripture and tradition. Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples stirred up a nest of theological hornets when he suggested that the traditional figure of Mary Magdalen was in fact a conflation of three distinct individuals mentioned in the Gospels; and to make things worse, he then cast doubt on the venerable if apocryphal tradition according to which St. Anne, the mother of Mary, had given birth to three daughters called Mary by three successive husbands.32 These exegetical essays deployed Scripture as a sole authority – perhaps independent of, perhaps actually against – the traditional devotional stories treasured by the church. 29

On conjectures in textual editing see Eldon J. Epp, “Critical Editions of the New Testament, and the Development of Text-Critical Methods: From Erasmus to Griesbach (1516–1807),” in Cameron, ed., New Cambridge History of the Bible, III, 110–137, at 114, 125. Epp notes the efforts made by scholars such as Beatus Rhenanus to move away from conjectural emendations. 30 For developed criteria for preferring readings see ibid., 127–132. 31 Lisa Jardine, Erasmus, Man of Letters (Princeton, 1993), 111–118, and as discussed in Richard Rex, “Humanist Bible Controversies,” in Cameron, ed., New Cambridge History of the Bible, III, 61–81, at 68–69. 32 For the controversies over Lefèvre see Richard Rex, The Theology of John Fisher (Cambridge, 1991), 65–77 and Rex, “Humanist Bible Controversies,” 71–73. St. Anne’s family tree is sometimes described as the “Holy Kindred,” articulated in medieval tradition. See https://udayton .edu/imri/mary/h/holy-kindred.php.

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Unlike their reforming successors, the first generation of textual humanists did not have a comprehensive theological program. Erasmus, the most widely read and influential of the early biblical scholars, denounced with equal asperity both over-sophisticated dogmas that did not make people into better and more sociable Christians and the quirks of popular piety that promised salvation in return for repeated ritual actions that had no ethical or spiritual content. More positively, Erasmus was an anthropological optimist. He believed that a well-educated and refined Christian would actually become a better person through such education.33 Many others shared his skepticism about popular devotions and, to varying degrees, his doubts about academic theology: though humanism and Scholasticism would coexist in a far closer association than propaganda and cliché sometimes gave one to believe. The Reformation transformed the debates over sacred philology, though the polarization of views represented by the rival propaganda of the confessions can give a misleading impression. In the Protestant churches it remains broadly true that (as some of the more elaborate confessions would indeed state) the authoritative texts of Scripture were the Hebrew Old Testament and the Greek New Testament. Considerable energy was expended in improving these texts as far as possible and in educating a new generation of theologians and pastors to read the Bible in their original forms. On the other side, Scripture was translated into the vernacular, often with the programmatic intent to expose lay readers to the controversial interpretations that the Reformers had founded upon particular books of the Bible. The Roman Catholic Church, in contrast, enshrined in the decrees of Trent, and in many subsequent pronouncements, that the Vulgate Bible in Latin was the authentic Scripture, and that it must be read and interpreted in a way consistent with the traditional teachings of the church.34 Much of the philological expertise of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Catholicism was devoted to improving and purifying the text of the Vulgate.35 In some 33

See Erasmus, Enchiridion, in Desiderius Erasmus, Collected Works of Erasmus, English translation (Toronto and Buffalo, 1974–), LXVI (1988), 8–127 and esp. 65–84; Praise of Folly, in Collected Works, XXVII (1986) 126–135, 142–153. 34 For Trent’s decree on Scripture see Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. Norman Tanner, 2 vols. paginated continuously (London and Washington, 1990), 663–665. For how it came to be see Hubert Jedin, A History of the Council of Trent, trans. Ernest Graf, 2 vols. (London and New York, 1961), II, 52–98. 35 For efforts to revise the Vulgate see Bruce Gordon and Euan Cameron, “Latin Bibles in the Early Modern Period,” in Cameron, ed., New Cambridge History of the Bible, III, 187–216, at 188–194.

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parts of Catholic Europe translations of Scripture into the vernacular were actively discouraged; in more contested areas, especially in northern Europe, Catholic translations were made in the hope of dissuading believers from reading Protestant ones.36 Officially, such translations were made from the Vulgate. However, the picture as regards sacred philology was considerably more complex than this broad-brush simplification suggests. On one hand, Reformed theologians continued to conduct their scholarly work overwhelmingly in Latin. Their familiarity and comfort with that language translated into continued use of the Bible in Latin, alongside the Scriptures in Hebrew and Greek. In fact, the two forms of philology complemented each other, as new Latin Bibles were written to embody the correct sense of the original texts for those whose command of the biblical languages was less than perfect.37 The Vulgate was absolutely denied the kind of ascendancy in Protestantism that it acquired in the Catholic reform; but it did not fall completely out of use, and occasional revisions continued to be published. On the other hand, the enforced ascendancy of the Vulgate in the Roman Catholic world did not bring textual scholarship to an end. The same impurities and corruptions that had exasperated the first generation of sacred philologists gave the textual editors of Louvain, Rome, and elsewhere the necessary provocation to improve the text. The Roman Vulgate of 1590–1592, while initially compromised by the interference of Pope Sixtus V, represented a genuine effort by an erudite team of scholars (who had a few years earlier produced a scholarly edition of the Septuagint) to recover the text of Jerome’s translation in as accurate a form as possible.38 Even after the supposedly definitive 1592 edition had appeared, Catholic scholars reflected in erudite fashion on the relationship between the various Louvain and Roman editions.39 Moreover, the Catholic world certainly did not lack interest in the languages of antiquity. Three of the four great polyglot Bibles (those of Alcalá, Antwerp, and Paris) were edited by

36

See for instance the German Catholic Bibles of Emser, Eck, Dietenberger, and Ulenberg as discussed in Euan Cameron, “The Luther Bible,” in Cameron, ed., New Cambridge History of the Bible, III, 217–238, at 235. 37 38 See Gordon and Cameron, “Latin Bibles,” 200–211. Ibid., 211–215. 39 E.g. Henricus de Bukentop, Lux de luce: libri tres, in quorum primo ambiguæ locutiones, in secundo variæ ac dubiæ lectiones quæ in vulgata latina S. Scripturæ editione occurrunt, ex originalium linguarum textibus illustrantur, & ita ad determinatum clarumque sensum; certamque aut verosimiliorum [sic] lectionem reducuntur. In tertio agitur de editione Sixti V. factâ anno 1590, multaque alia tractantur . . . (Brussels, 1710).

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Catholic scholars and printed on Catholic presses.40 Members of the editorial teams mastered the Syriac and Arabic texts as well as the Hebrew; from 1616 onward Catholic – and in due course Protestant – Europe had access to the Samaritan Pentateuch, which cast an interesting sidelight on the transmission history of the Hebrew Pentateuch.41 A curious byproduct of this scholarship in obscure languages was the proliferation of alternative Latin translations based on the Targums and on the biblical texts in the obscurer ancient languages. So long as the Vulgate’s ascendancy as the language of liturgy and doctrine was acknowledged, other translations could be issued for the subsidiary purpose of helping scholars.42 It may fairly be asked how great an impact the latter generations of sacred philologists had on the theological world of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. How far, if at all, did highly refined philological points matter for doctrine or controversy? One of the ironies of this period is that biblical scholars read and used each other’s works across the confessional divides, even as the dogmatic theologians read their adversaries’ works only to refute them.43 Some of the early philological and translation debates had been of real theological significance, whether the “Word” of John 1 should be rendered verbum or sermo, whether the Greek word for “repent” in Matthew 4(:17) should be rendered poenitentiam agite, poeniteas, or resipiscite. By 1600 the doctrinal positions had hardened into competing orthodoxies, such that new textual erudition was far less likely to challenge or reform them.

Theology Interacts with Scripture in the Major Traditions As the Roman Catholic, Lutheran, and Reformed traditions took increasingly settled form from the middle of the sixteenth century onward, different questions began to be asked about the relationship between Bible and 40

See Alastair Hamilton, “In Search of the Most Perfect Text: The Early Modern Printed Polyglot Bibles from Alcalá (1510–20) to Brian Walton (1654–8),” in Cameron, ed., New Cambridge History of the Bible, III, 138–156, at 138–151. 41 Hamilton, “The Study of Tongues,” 34–35. 42 Collected editions of these Latin versions were published on their own, without the original texts: see Biblia sacra variarum translationum, ed. Laurentius Beyerlinck, 3 vols. (Antwerp, 1616). For discussion see Jacques Le Long (1665–1721), Bibliotheca Sacra in binos syllabos distincta: quorum prior qui jam tertio auctior prodit, omnes sive textus sacri sive versionum ejusdem quavis lingua expressarum editiones: nec non praestantiores MSS. codices, cum notis historicis & criticis exhibet, 2 vols. (Paris, 1723), I, 270. A subsequent edition of Beyerlinck’s Bible was published at Venice in 1747. 43 See, e.g., Gordon, “The Bible in Reformed Thought,” 487–488.

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theology in each of these confessional blocs. It becomes difficult to follow the relationship thematically or in terms of loci, because the assumptions made and the questions asked in the various traditions were different, and they resist a formal or thematic comparative structure. Accordingly, the following sections will trace biblical theology respectively in the Roman Catholic, Lutheran, and Reformed traditions separately, before bringing the picture together for a discussion of the state of affairs by the seventeenth century.

Biblical Theology in Roman Catholicism As already noted, in the Tridentine Confession Scripture subsisted as an authority within the tradition of the church. This coinherence of Scripture and tradition dated back to the Middle Ages.44 However, in the Council of Trent what had previously been a flexible and variously interpreted assumption became a carefully worked and debated-over principle, the product of weeks of debate.45 The decree read that “[the Synod] following the examples of the orthodox Fathers, receives and venerates with an equal affection of piety (pari pietatis affectu) and reverence, all the books both of the Old and of the New Testament – seeing that one God is the author of both – as also the said traditions . . .”46 This view became much more than an abstract principle. It became the guiding rule by which Catholic theology interpreted and expounded the Bible. Moreover, it testified to the belief that not just the doctrines but the political structures and the liturgical practices of the Roman Church in the West had the full authority of Scripture-and-tradition. The Bible authenticated current practice. Even before the Council of Trent, Catholic theology had regarded the interpretation of Scripture as a cumulative, progressive activity. Academic theologians such as Francisco de Vitoria (1485–1546) and Tommaso de Vio OP, known as Cajetan (1468–1534), compiled vast commentaries (Cajetan’s were ultimately published as a great five-volume set) which derived their points by commenting on what previous theologians had written in their expository and speculative works. One side-effect of Cajetan’s exegesis was that (perhaps paradoxically) while preparing his commentaries he 44

See Oberman, Forerunners; see also Jean Gerson as quoted in Mark S. Burrows, Jean Gerson and De consolatione theologiae (1418): The Consolation of a Biblical and Reforming Theology for a Disordered Age (Tübingen, 1991), 229–234 and discussed by Deeana Copeland Klepper, “Theories of Interpretation: The Quadriga and its Successors,” in Cameron, ed., New Cambridge History of the Bible, III, 418–438, at 433–434. 45 In addition to the exhaustive account in Jedin, Council of Trent, II, 52–98, see also John W. O’Malley, Trent: What Happened at the Council (Cambridge, 2013), 90–98. 46 See note 34 above.

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re-translated most of the Bible into a fresh Latin version for the purpose.47 Not only that; Catholic commentators did not isolate Scripture from the tradition when selecting texts to expound and discuss. The same theologian who wrote commentaries on Scripture might also write commentaries on the Fathers or the medieval Scholastics, and regard these exercises as fundamentally similar. One particular aspect of the Catholic hermeneutic of Scripture calls for comment. The biblical past and the sacramental present became continuously entangled in Catholic exegesis. To take two examples, and from among the most scholarly: when the historian Cesare Baronio discussed the Last Supper, he jumped from the narrative of Christ’s last meal with his disciples to discussion of transubstantiation, eucharistic sacrifice, and the times for celebrating Mass. He interspersed quotations from much later authorities with the Gospel narrative.48 Another spectacularly erudite CounterReformation Catholic scholar, the Hebraist Gilbert Génébrard, manifested the same desire to prove that study of the religious past would vindicate the religious present. Throughout the early sections of his Chronographiae Génébrard claimed to demonstrate that, from the beginnings of history, biblical testimony tended to confirm not just Christianity, but Catholic Christianity. He saw in the earliest testimonies to Hebrew religion the beginnings of sacrifices, sacraments, religious vessels and vestments, prayers for the dead, belief in purgatory, religious vows, even the use of a language other than the vernacular for worship . . . in short, all the beliefs, practices, and traditions that the Protestant historians had discarded as recent innovations.49 Baronio and Génébrard were both outstanding scholars. Their

47

Tommaso de Vio Cajetan, Commentarii illustres planeque insignes in Quinque Mosaicos libros (Paris, 1539); Tommaso de Vio Cajetan, In omnes authenticos Veteris Testamenti historiales libros, commentarii: in Jehosuam, Judices, Ruth, Reges, Paralipomena, Hezram, Nehemiam et Ester (Paris, 1546); Tommaso de Vio Cajetan, Evangelia cum commentariis: in quatuor Eua[n]gelia & Acta Apostolorum ad Gr[a]ecorum codicum veritatem castigata, ad sensum quem vocant literalem commentarii (Paris, M.D.XXXII [1532]); Tommaso de Vio Cajetan, Epistolae Pauli et aliorum Apostolorum ad Graecam veritatem castigate et per Reverendissimum Dominu[m] Dominum Thomam de Vio, . . . iuxta sensum literalem enarratae. Recens in lucem edite (Paris, 1532). These commentaries, often reprinted, were ultimately edited as Tommaso de Vio Cajetan, Opera omnia quotquot in Sacrae Scripturae expositionem reperiuntur (Leiden, 1639); see Le Long, Bibliotheca Sacra, I, 297–298. See discussion in Ellie Gebarowski-Shafer, “The Bible in Roman Catholic Theology, 1450–1750,” in Cameron, ed., New Cambridge History of the Bible, III, 489–517, at 492–493. 48 Caesar Baronius, Annales Ecclesiastici auctore C. B. Sorano, ex congregat[ione] oratorii . . . Tomi duodecim, Editio novissima, 12 vols. (Cologne, 1624), I, cols. 179 ff. 49 Gilbert Génébrard, Chronographiae Libri Quatuor: Priores duo sunt de rebus veteris populi, et praecipuis quatuor millium annorum gestis (Lyon, 1599), 21–22, 38, 68–70, 113–115, 160–161, 165–171, 376–377, 388–389, 406, 433–434.

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erudition contributed to a long process whereby the Roman Catholic tradition purged its heritage of apocryphal and discredited elements. In some areas, Catholic use of historical materials proved more selective and discriminating than its Protestant counterparts, especially when Catholic scholars demonstrated that the forms of dissent from the Catholic tradition had changed constantly across history, rather than representing a single antitradition.50 However, so strong was the dogmatic conviction that the true church was fundamentally always the same that it led the most learned interpreters to read Scripture in a fundamentally ahistorical way.51 Catholic conviction of the continuity of tradition with Scripture led to some acrimonious disputes over biblical translation in the early modern period. Protestant translators (notably William Tyndale) had challenged the impression of continuity that the Vulgate Bible offered by ostentatiously translating the key words for the church and its ministries into nonecclesiastical terms that, in the translator’s view, evoked the sense of the Greek much better than the traditional terms. Tyndale had, for instance, consistently translated ecclesia (ἐκκλησία) as “congregation” rather than “church,” and presbuteros (πρεσβύτερος) as “senior” rather than “elder,” let alone “priest.” Sixteenth-century Roman Catholic Bibles sought to roll back this lexical tide. So, where Tyndale had translated Acts 14(:22–23) “And when they had ordened them seniours by eleccion in every congregacion,” the Rheims Roman Catholic English New Testament (1582) read “And when they had ordained to them priests in every church.” (The King James Bible would compromise with “And when they had ordained them elders in every church.”)52 The conservative English bishop Stephen Gardiner pointed out a whole series of such sensitive words in a work of 1542.53 The sensitivity over such issues of translation (perhaps particularly acute in the English language) prompted the issuing of Catholic translations of the Bible where there was otherwise a risk that minority Catholics under a Reformed regime would use 50

See the debates in Catholic polemical histories over the records of medieval heresy discussed in Euan Cameron, Waldenses: Rejections of Holy Church in Medieval Europe (Oxford, 2000), 288–291. 51 The Catholic perspective addressed the challenge of historical change in the church with the appearance of John Henry Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (London, 1845), first published around the time of its author’s conversion from the Church of England to Roman Catholicism. 52 For Tyndale’s New Testament see The New Testament translated by William Tyndale: The Text of the Worms edition of 1526 in original spelling, ed. William R. Cooper (London, 2000); for the Rheims New Testament see www.drbo.org/. 53 Gebarowski-Shafer, “The Bible in Roman Catholic Theology,” 500–501, with reference to Glyn Redworth, In Defence of the Church Catholic: The Life of Stephen Gardiner (Oxford, 1990), 164.

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Protestant Bibles.54 Hieronymus Emser’s first attempt at a Catholic German New Testament (1527) drew heavily on Luther’s New Testament, but deliberately altered the translation in areas that were theologically sensitive.55 The hierarchy of the Church of England handed Catholic propagandists an unexpected tool when, in the instructions for the translating of the King James Bible of 1611, it was insisted that the traditional ecclesiastical words should be used.56 The Catholic propagandist John Heigham, in his The Gagge of the New Gospel (1623), argued that Catholics could deduce traditional doctrines from the words of the current English Bible, and so “confound them [the Protestants] by their owne Bible.”57 On into the seventeenth and even the eighteenth century, Catholic and Protestant polemics would accuse each other of mistranslating Scripture in order to support their doctrinal and liturgical claims.58

Biblical Theology in Lutheranism The relationship between Scripture and theology in the emerging Lutheran movement followed a quite different course. It is well known that Martin Luther (1483–1546) described his defining moment of theological insight, his liberation from incurable spiritual despair, as a moment of discovery while struggling with the text of Scripture. In later life he told how he had resolved his doubts through some very bold and creative exegesis of Paul. He decided that the “righteousness of God revealed in the Gospel” (Romans 1[:16–17]) could not mean what conventional exegesis said that it meant, the “justice” of the just God who punished sinners: or else no one could be saved.59 Rather, he concluded that “righteousness of God” meant what he called the “passive righteousness,” the acquittal, the “state of being judged to be guiltless” which belonged properly only to Christ, but which God offered to human beings as a gift for Christ’s sake. “Righteousness of God” was, he claimed, a phrase like others in Scripture, where “the work of God . . . is, 54

Gebarowski-Shafer, “The Bible in Roman Catholic Theology,” 504–505. Cameron, “The Luther Bible,” 235. 56 For the translators’ rules see David Norton, The King James Bible: A Short History from Tyndale to Today (Cambridge and New York, 2011), 86–90. 57 John Heigham, The Gagge of the New Gospel: contayning a briefe abridgement of the errors of the Protestants of our time. With their refutation, by expresse texts of their owne English bible (St. Omer, 1623), 4–5. The title changed in the fourth edition to The touch-stone of the reformed ghospell (St. Omer, 1634); discussion in Gebarowski-Shafer, “The Bible in Roman Catholic Theology,” 511–512. 58 Gebarowski-Shafer, “The Bible in Roman Catholic Theology,” 513–517 and references. 59 The Latin and Greek terms justus/justitia and δίκαιος/δικαιοσύνη convey the sense of both “justice” and “righteousness” and are used interchangeably for both concepts. 55

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what God does in us, the power of God, with which he makes us strong, the wisdom of God, with which he makes us wise, the strength of God, the salvation of God, the glory of God.”60 The “righteousness of God” was the righteousness with which God treats as righteous those who are not essentially righteous at all. That was what the prophet Habbakuk had meant when he had written “the righteous person shall live by his faith.”61 Luther’s thought developed considerably over the ten years or so from when he began to lecture on the Psalms at the University of Wittenberg in 1513 to the appearance of his New Testament in September 1522. By the time that he wrote his prefaces to the New Testament Luther had begun to organize his thought around a series of antitheses or contrasts. These antitheses in turn shaped his exegesis of Scripture. First, Luther reasoned that some parts of Scripture consisted of laws, while other parts constituted the promises of the gospel. The laws (to be found predominantly in Hebrew Scripture but also in parts of the New Testament) told people how they should act, and denounced wrongdoing; however, they did not provide the means to escape from the inevitable consequences of human failure to keep the divine law. By itself, the law could only offer condemnation. However, both Testaments of Scripture also offered the promise of redemption, the gospel of Christ. Wherever the Old Testament spoke prophetically of Christ (and Luther held that it did so often) it conveyed the promise of the gospel. As Luther argued, there was really only one gospel, not limited to the traditional four Gospel narratives: any part of Scripture that spoke of Christ contained the gospel.62 The second key antithesis in Luther’s theology distinguished between the “grace” of God and the “gifts” of God. This distinction was absolutely critical to the distinctive novelty of his thought, and its potential to corrode the old pieties. Luther made the distinction with especial clarity in the early 1520s, notably in his preface to the Letter to the Romans.63 “Grace” referred to the absolute and unconditional favor of God toward undeserving sinners, which God gave for Christ’s sake and with which God clothed the sinner, protecting the soul from the rigors of divine judgment for sin. The “gifts” were 60 Luther offered these reflections in the preface to the 1545 edition of his collected works, the so-called autobiographical fragment: see LW 34, 323–338, based on WA 54, 179–187. 61 Habakkuk 2:4: the Vulgate reads iustus autem in fide sua vivet. 62 WA.DB 6, 3–6; LW 35, 357–361. 63 WA.DB 7, 2–27; LW 35, 365–380. See also the annotated edition of this preface in Euan Cameron, ed., The Annotated Luther, Volume 6: The Interpretation of Scripture (Minneapolis, 2017), 457–479.

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produced when the Holy Spirit dwelt within the person, enabling that person to grow gradually, imperfectly, haltingly in holiness. Grace was absolute and unconditional; the gifts were always partial in this life. “For his grace is not divided or parceled out, as are the gifts, but takes us completely into favor for the sake of Christ our Intercessor and Mediator. And because of this, the gifts are begun in us.”64 These themes of Lutheran theology were deeply rooted in careful exegesis of Scripture, and constantly referred back to it. At the same time, they matured to become in turn guiding principles by which the whole of the Bible could be read. Somewhat notoriously, Luther identified particular books as being “the true and noblest books of the New Testament”: John’s Gospel, Paul’s main Epistles (Romans, Galatians, Ephesians), and the First Letter of Peter. Although he later deleted that part of his New Testament preface, bibles that contained it long remained in circulation.65 The consequence of this was that Lutheran biblical theology consisted of what one might term a feedback loop. Scripture showed Luther the key principles of his theology; once identified, these principles became the criteria for deciding what was “essential” Scripture in the first place. There is every reason to believe that Luther was completely sincere in this theological construct. He believed that the core of Scripture had been revealed through earnest prayerful study, and that (as it were in humanist fashion) the rest of Scripture must be explained by the heart of Scripture, “the Word” as he saw it. Consequently, Lutheran biblical theology tended to orient itself on a different axis from previous theological systems. It became overwhelmingly focused on guiding the believer through the challenges of life: from the existential challenges of the Law and sin, through to the discovery of saving faith and the expression of that faith in practical (not ritual) good works. This was the structure followed by Melanchthon’s Loci communes66 and would also be the pattern for the Lutheran catechisms. Theology was step-by-step 64

Translation at LW 35, 369–370; Cameron, ed., Annotated Luther 6, 468. WA.DB 6, 10–11; LW 35, 361–362. This passage was removed from the preface to the 1534 complete Bible, and it was also excised from editions of the New Testament issued after 1537. There may be no significance to the retention of the controversial passages in the 1534–1537 editions of the New Testament on its own: these were not overseen by Luther and probably simply repeated what had been found in earlier small-format editions. 66 For a modern edition see Philipp Melanchthon, Loci communes 1521: Lateinisch–Deutsch, ed. and trans. Horst Georg Pöhlmann (Gütersloh, 1993). The point is made by Kenneth G. Appold, “The Importance of the Bible for Early Lutheran Theology,” in Cameron, ed., New Cambridge History of the Bible, III, 439–461, at 446–449. 65

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instruction for what medieval theologians had called the Viator: the human being on the journey of life toward God. That approach need not have excluded speculative metaphysics: it did not exclude abstract speculation in, for instance, the case of William of Ockham.67 However, Lutheran theologians tended on the whole not to become speculative metaphysicians, even though theological textbooks gradually broadened out to address a wider range of topics. The classic place where the principles outlined above found expression was in Luther’s own prefaces to books of the Bible. As elsewhere, Luther took a genre of writing which dated back to St. Jerome (or even to the first verses of Luke and Acts) and adapted it into a new form for his own purposes. Luther’s longer prefaces, especially those to the Gospels and Romans, presented encapsulations of the core elements of his thought. Some of the shorter prefaces just presented simple summaries of the text. As Luther revised his New Testament prefaces in 1530, some (such as those to 1 Corinthians and Revelation) were expanded to include pointed references to contemporary events and the challenges faced by the church.68 When writing about the Psalms Luther praised the way that they gave psychological–spiritual insights into the minds of the saints, rather than the outward details of their lives.69 Consistently with his theology, Luther read Hebrew Scripture as partly made up of laws (which proved how impossible they were to fulfill) and prophetic foreshadowing of Christ. Rather exceptionally, his preface to Daniel incorporated a considerable amount of Late Antique political history, necessary to explain the prophecies.70 Luther was prepared to speculate, more boldly than some subsequent Protestant theological commentators, about the circumstances in which biblical books were compiled. Some of the Solomonic books, he suggested, showed evidence of later editing and redaction. Isaiah appeared to handle its themes in a disorganized way, perhaps because of later compilation by others.71 With the apocryphal books, Luther felt emancipated from any least 67

See for instance Jenny E. Pelletier, William Ockham on Metaphysics: The Science of Being and God (Leiden and Boston, 2013). The rewritten prefaces are at WA.DB 7, 82–87; LW 35, 380–383; WA.DB 7, 406–421; and LW 35, 399–411. 69 WA.DB 10/1, 98–105; LW 35, 253–2527. 70 WA.DB 11/2, 2–131 contains comparative editions of the three versions of this long preface. LW 35, 294–316 translates the 1530 preface. See also the annotated edition of this preface in Cameron, ed., Annotated Luther 6, 375–411. 71 For Luther’s doubts about Ecclesiastes see WA.DB 10/2, 104; LW 35, 263. For the Isaiah preface see WA.DB 11/1, 20–23; LW 35, 277. Cf. Luther’s remarks about the compilation of 68

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temptation to make an idol of the text. Judith and Tobit appeared to be fictions, one a tragedy and the other a comedy. Sirach was an ill-assembled compilation, as was 2 Maccabees. The later books of Esdras were omitted altogether from the Bible.72 Notwithstanding the lower rank accorded to the apocryphal books, some of them, especially the wisdom literature, could be regarded as sources of useful moral advice. Whatever Luther thought of Sirach, it enjoyed a prolonged period of popularity among later Lutheran and Reformed writers as a work of guidance for family life and ethics.73 More striking was Luther’s readiness to relegate some canonical books of the New Testament to a secondary status on theological as well as textcritical grounds. Whereas traditional versions placed Hebrews and James between Philemon and 1 Peter, Luther relegated Hebrews and James to near the end, after 3 John and just before Jude and Revelation. Moreover, he left these last four books (sometimes called “Luther’s antilegomena”) unnumbered, unlike the rest of the New Testament. He explained the reason as fundamentally a matter of textual criticism. He could not see from the internal evidence of any of these four writings that they were “apostolic”: they came from anonymous writers who were at least at one remove from the apostles of Jesus.74 This was the final outcome of Luther’s biblical “feedback loop”: if some scriptural books gave a weak and poor witness to what the most essential Scriptures showed to be the true heart of the gospel, then those weaker books had a shaky place in the canon. Scripture figured prominently in two other genres of writing where Lutheran theologians were especially prolific: works of controversial controversy written against Roman Catholics, and, with perhaps even greater fury, against Zwinglian and “Calvinist” Schwärmer; and biblical commentaries. Controversial works involving scriptural texts (such as the numerous Lutheran tracts on the Lord’s Supper) belong under the heading of controversial or sacramental theology and are discussed elsewhere.75 Biblical commentaries in Lutheranism, like those in the other great traditions, often Jeremiah in LW 35, 280. John Calvin made similar observations on Jeremiah 35:1–7: CR 39, 99–100. 72 The prefaces to the apocryphal books are ed. at WA.DB 12, 4–7, 108–11, 144–149, 290–291, 314–317, 416–419; LW 35, 337–353. 73 Susan C. Karant-Nunn, “The Problem of ‘Spiritual Discipline’: Apocryphal Books among Sixteenth-Century Leaders of the Lutheran Churches,” in Cameron, ed., New Cambridge History of the Bible, III, 603–619. 74 For the subsequent history of the “antilegomena” in Lutheranism see Cameron, “Luther Bible,” 227–228 and n. 54. 75 See the chapters by Jared Wicks and Theodor Dieter in this volume (Chapters 24 and 25, respectively).

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began as expository lectures in academic settings. One of the most imposing products of this kind was Luther’s massive commentary on Genesis. Delivered as a series of lectures from 1535 onward, this commentary spreads over three large volumes of the Weimar edition and occupies eight volumes in the standard translation.76 One striking aspect of the commentary is that Luther worked almost entirely with the text itself. He did not bring a great deal of external material to bear in these commentaries: the exegete’s core task was to expound the text in the light of itself, and of the human predicament before God’s judgment. For example, in expounding Genesis 3 Luther analyzed Eve’s language quite precisely: But she begins to waver when she comes to the mention of the punishment. She does not mention the punishment as God had stated it. He had simply stated (Gen. 2[:17]): “On whatever day you will eat from it, you will surely die.” Out of this absolute statement she herself makes one that is not absolute when she adds: “Lest perchance we shall die.”77

Interestingly, Luther’s exegesis here depended on the word forte, “perchance,” found in the Vulgate, but not in his own German translation, and not nearly so clearly in the Septuagint.78 This same tendency to reflect upon the internal evidence of the text, and to read it in the light of the believer’s journey to salvation, would persist in later Lutheran commentaries.79

Biblical Theology in Reformed Protestantism The Lutheran and “Reformed” traditions (those that developed the Reformation message in southwestern Germany, in Switzerland, France, the Low Countries, England and Scotland, parts of East-Central Europe, and in the “second reformation” in Germany) differed from each other, sometimes acrimoniously, over certain issues in theology and even more in liturgical practice. Nevertheless, the range of biblical questions on which these movements shared key principles was also broad. Often the differences belong in the area of emphasis, of nuance, more than of core matters of 76

WA 42–45; and LW 1–8. At one time this commentary was suspected of being contaminated with Philip Melanchthon’s thought through the editing of the transcriber, Veit Dietrich. Modern scholars now tend to believe that the lectures overwhelmingly express Luther’s own thought. 77 The English is from the King James Version. The Vulgate has Ne forte moriamur. See WA 42, 116–117; LW 1,115. 78 Luther’s German Bible has “Da sprach das Weib zu der Schlangen / Wir essen von den früchten der bewme im Garten. Aber von den früchten des Bawms mitten im Garten hat Gott gesagt / Esset nicht da von / rürets auch nicht an / Das jr nicht sterbet.” 79 See Appold, “Importance of the Bible,” 449–450.

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doctrine. The structure of this chapter presupposes that one will focus on those matters of difference, of contrasting emphasis, more than on the shared Reformation heritage. Nevertheless, the latter must be assumed as a starting point. Both Lutheran and Reformed Protestantism held that Scripture was the authoritative Word of God. Moreover, both held that Scripture could and must be invoked as testimony against aspects of the medieval Christian church – especially the sacrificial Mass and the whole apparatus of acquiring merit toward salvation – that the Reformers had broken from. As such, both Lutheran and Reformed turned decisively against the principle of the coinherence between Scripture and the tradition of the visible, hierarchical church that formed the cornerstone of Catholic theology and practice. Long after the arguments on Scripture versus church had petrified into orthodoxy, Reformed theologians of all kinds continued to rehearse these arguments in some detail against their Catholic adversaries. A number of other principles followed, none of which was entirely unique to the Reformed tradition, but all of which were expressed in particular accents. First, the south German and Swiss Reformers laid great stress on the role of the Holy Spirit in transmitting and mediating the Word of God to the believer. As Ulrich Zwingli insisted, Scripture could only be received and understood with the indwelling presence of the Spirit. The Spirit authenticated Scripture to the believer and opened the words of Scripture to the understanding. Zwingli could write quite lyrically about this process: When the Word of God shines on the human understanding, it enlightens it in such a way that it understands and confesses the Word and knows the certainty of it . . . Before I say anything or listen to the teaching of man, I will first consult the mind of the Spirit of God . . . then you should reverently ask God for his grace, that he may give you his mind and Spirit, so that you will not lay hold of your own opinion but of his . . . and then go to the written word of the Gospel.80

That insistence on the role of the Spirit in relation to Scripture within Reformed theology functionally replaced the role formerly assigned to tradition or church. It would be hard to apply effectively in controversy, and in some contexts may have provoked Luther’s coarser complaints against “fanatic spirits.” However, as an observation on how the Scriptures needed

80 Ulrich Zwingli, Huldreich Zwinglis sämtliche Werke, ed. Emil Egli et al., CR 88 f. (Berlin, Leipzig, and Zurich, 1905–), I, 361–377; William P. Stephens, The Theology of Huldrych Zwingli (Oxford, 1986), 55 ff., 59 ff.

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to be read it was almost irresistibly appealing, and was taken up by others.81 It would be embodied in this sense in David Pareus’s Lectures on the Heidelberg Catechism, which became the standard text in theological instruction in many parts of the Reformed world by the early seventeenth century.82 The Holy Spirit might be the mediator of Scripture to the faithful reader, but in what sense was it also to be regarded as the author of Scripture? Here there appears to have been some slippage of views over the course of the later Reformation decades. From early in the Reformed tradition there developed the concept that Scripture was authoritative of itself, that it authenticated itself, that it was autopistos, credible and trustworthy because of its inherent qualities.83 Over time that concept developed into something rather closer to the idea of verbal inspiration than the early Reformers had intended or assumed. Calvin always held in careful balance two contrasting points: on one hand, Holy Scripture was divinely inspired and could be taken as the voice of God speaking for us; on the other, individual authors of books of Scripture had their own distinctive styles, temperaments, and personalities, and these could be seen in the form that their writings had come down to us.84 By the time of the Reformed German theologian Johann Piscator (1546–1625) it was possible to shift the emphasis slightly, to argue that the Holy Spirit was the real author of Scripture, and that the human authors took a subordinate role.85 By the early seventeenth century the English Reformed theologian William Perkins (and others) could write habitually that “the Holy Ghost saith” when quoting Scripture.86 By later in the seventeenth

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See Martin Bucer, Praelectiones doctiss. in Epistolam d. P. ad Ephesios (Basel, 1562), 46–47; William P. Stephens, The Holy Spirit in the Theology of Martin Bucer (Cambridge, 1970), 134; Calvin, Institutes I, VII, 4–5; cf. even Luther, in WA 18, 606–609; LW 33, 25–28. 82 Zacharias Ursinus and David Pareus, The Summe of Christian Religion, delivered by Zacharias Ursinus first, by way of catechism, and then afterwards more enlarged by a sound and judicious exposition, and application of the same: wherein also are debated and resolved the questions of whatsoever points of moment have been, or are controversed in divinitie, trans. Henry Parry (London . . ., 1645), 22–24. This translation was first published at Oxford in 1587, based on Pareus’s revision of Ursinus’s lectures on the Heidelberg Catechism. 83 See Henk van den Belt, The Authority of Scripture in Reformed Theology: Truth and Trust (Leiden, 2008). 84 Gordon, “The Bible in Reformed Thought,” 472–473 and references. 85 Ibid., 479–480 and references. 86 See for instance William Perkins, A cloud of faithfull witnesses, leading to the heauenly Canaan, or, A commentarie vpon the 11 chapter to the Hebrewes preached in Cambridge by that godly, and iudicious divine, M. William Perkins . . . (London, 1607), 121, 133, 436, 479, 493, 558–559, 564, 582–583; William Perkins, A Golden Chaine: or The Description of Theologie containing the Order of the Causes of Salvation and Damnation, according to Gods word (Cambridge, 1600), 283, 344, 368,

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century the needs of polemic had driven this approach further still. The conservative Reformed Dutch theologian Gisbertus Voetius (1589–1676) argued, to counter the epistemology of Descartes, for something much closer to verbal inspiration and inerrancy than his predecessors had done.87 A high orthodox version of this doctrine later came to be enshrined in the Formula Consensus Helvetica (1675) following the lead of Johann Heinrich Heidegger (1633–1698) against the reservations of earlier and also more moderate thinkers such as Moïse Amyraut.88 Scripture might be inerrant, but it still needed interpretation. Here the Reformed argued on multiple fronts: against Catholics who argued for the interpretative role of the church, and Spiritualists who might deem the text mere dead words. They also balanced the belief that the most important messages of the Bible were clear to all unprejudiced readers with the felt need for the work of the scholarly interpreter and editor of Scripture. Heinrich Bullinger approached this issue in his Decades. He argued on one hand that Scripture was not at all so obscure that it need be kept from the people. On the other hand, the proper means for Scripture to reach the people was through the interpretation and exposition of skilled and properly appointed ministers.89 A series of principles of biblical interpretation evolved, according to which difficult or apparently peripheral passages must be interpreted according to the most essential and clearest parts of the gospel, following the analogy of faith.90 The rules for faithful and Spirit-led interpretation of Scripture were therefore more balanced and less dynamic in the Reformed than in the Lutheran tradition. The “feedback loop” linked to the theology of justification was less evident (though by no means entirely absent). Law and gospel remained the fundamental keys to reading passages of Scripture. However, a slight shift of emphasis, a slight realignment away from the Lutheran position, has been noted by some in regard to Law. Lutherans and Reformed alike perceived three uses of the Law: as a restraining force for civil good order; as a means to demonstrate to believers their incapacity to fulfill the law and their dependence on grace; and finally, as a pattern for the life of 409, 514, 756, 758, 779, 901, 908, 973, 1011. See also www.nesherchristianresources.org/perkins/ PerkinsWorks/WP-Heb11%20web%20pages/Perkins%20-%20Heb%2012-1.htm. 87 88 Gordon, “The Bible in Reformed Thought,” 482–483. Ibid., 483–484 and references. 89 Heinrich Bullinger, The Decades of Henry Bullinger, trans. “H.I.” and ed. Thomas Harding, 4 vols. [Parker Society] (Cambridge, 1849–1852), I, 70–75; discussion in Gordon, “The Bible in Reformed Thought,” 469–470. 90 Ursinus and Pareus, The Summe of Christian Religion, 21–22.

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sanctified believers as they attempt to live a life patterned on the gospel.91 However, this “third use of the law,” which in Lutheranism had been intended primarily to respond to the antinomian controversy and to ensure that “good works” were not entirely written out of theology, in the hands of Calvin and his successors became a more absolute and primary way to understand the legal parts of Scripture.92

Biblical Criticism and Theology in the Late Reformation So far, the editors and critical scholars who examined Scripture largely, though not always, also worked as theologians. Toward the end of the Reformation, into the confessional era, signs appear of a gradual divergence between works of textual, philological scholarship in the Bible and the teaching of doctrines according to loci communes or what would later be called systematics. In some sense this distinction had already existed in the Middle Ages: glosses, commentaries, or postils on Scripture formed a different literary genre from theological summae or commentaries on the Book of Sentences. However, the Reformation controversies had changed the context for doing theology, as they had changed so much else. In the confessional era the rival systems of Roman Catholicism, Lutheranism, and Reformed Protestantism had assumed relatively set forms, embedded in confessions of faith and catechisms as well as in much larger works of doctrinal instruction. It was passionately believed that each of these systems was grounded on the correct reading of Scripture. For Lutheran and Reformed theologians, with their insistence on the self-authenticating and inspired character of Scripture, it was of key importance to establish the correct text in the original languages and, once established, to defend its accuracy as well as its divine character. Unfortunately, the quest for absolute accuracy by the highest critical standards proved self-defeating in a quite unexpected way. While none of the biblical scholars of the early seventeenth century could possibly have envisaged, let alone desired, such an outcome, the more that critical studies in the text of Scripture developed, the more elusive the idea of the perfectly retrieved, immutable biblical text ultimately became. This tendency manifested itself in various areas of biblical criticism. Examples of the 91 See the Lutheran Formula of Concord, section VI: “The Third Function of the Law” in The Book of Concord, ed. Kolb and Wengert, 502–503 (Epitome) and 587–591 (Solid Declaration). 92 See for instance Calvin, Institutes II, VII, 6–13.

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phenomenon include the gathering of variant readings in the New Testament, and the debates over the Masoretic vowel pointing of the Hebrew Bible. In its earliest form “sacred philology” consisted of the search for a single text, as close to perfect as possible. Erasmus’s New Testament was very far from perfect, but it offered a base-line edition (or rather several) from which the critical process could begin. Early editions of the Scriptures did not contain any significant apparatus to show what alternative readings might be found in different sources. Robert Estienne’s 1550 New Testament was one of the first to include significant marginal notes indicating alternative readings found in various manuscripts.93 However, the later editions of the Estienne text by Beza and the Dutch Elzevier publishing house, instead of opening up possibilities, petrified the text as the textus receptus. Eighteenthand nineteenth-century scholars would struggle to emancipate themselves from this standard.94 In the course of the seventeenth century opinion gradually shifted in favor of indicating variant readings. John Mill’s 1707 edition of the New Testament included an extremely complex apparatus (the ancestor of those in modern critical editions) indicating some 30,000 variants.95 Mill also popularized the view that the harder and more implausible a reading was, the more likely it was to be authentic: the process of copying and transmission was more likely to smooth out a problematic text than to roughen it. At the time of its appearance some critics objected that this made the sacred text appear unstable, even though Mill had not substantially altered the text at the heart of his edition. As the eighteenth century progressed small steps would be taken toward the abandoning of the textus receptus altogether, leading to its displacement by the textual discoveries of the nineteenth.96 Much more acrimonious was the seventeenth-century debate over the vowel points in Hebrew Scripture. This debate reflects the intense pressure put on Scripture as an autonomous source of authority in early modern Christianity. In the Middle Ages the rabbinic commentators had believed that the vowel points in the Masoretic text of the Hebrew Bible were ancient, part of the revealed sacred text. Christian exegetes had generally been skeptical about the points: some argued that the rabbis had added these to the text to 93

Epp, “Critical Editions,” 116. On the textus receptus see Henk Jan de Jonge, Daniel Heinsius and the Textus Receptus of the New Testament: A Study of his Contributions to the Editions of the Greek Testament Printed by the Elzivers at Leiden in 1624 and 1633 (Leiden, 1971). 95 96 Epp, “Critical Editions,” 118–120. Ibid., 123–137. 94

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distort the meaning of the Bible in favor of their own interpretations and against Christological readings. In the early Reformation the medieval view prevailed among some theologians. Martin Luther shared the view of medieval exegetes: on a number of occasions he made scathing comments about the “made-up grammar” of the rabbis.97 Zwingli and (with slightly greater caution) Calvin shared this view.98 The debate was blown open, within Judaism, by the appearance in 1538 of Elijah Levita’s work Masoret haMasoret, which demonstrated on philological grounds that the vowel points must be much later than the rest of the text. Initially Protestants were unperturbed: Levita’s work became quite widely read in Christian circles, though deeply controversial among other Jewish scholars. Protestants were at this stage unworried by the points, since they generally believed that the text was clear enough without them.99 In the late sixteenth century, however, some Catholic polemics seized on the late date of the vowel points as a stick with which to beat Protestant doctrines of Scripture. Polemical theologians such as Génébrard, William Damasus Lindanus, and especially Robert Bellarmine argued that, since it now appeared that the vowel points might be even later than the Latin Vulgate, the idea of relying on Scripture against the tradition of the church was absurd.100 Decades later the Oratorian Richard Simon developed this argument to a radical extreme. He claimed that the internal incoherence of the scriptural text made Sola Scriptura untenable, and that one must believe that the later (Catholic) tradition of conservation and interpretation was also Spirit-led.101 In response, some Reformed orthodox theologians such as the Protestant Hebraist Amandus Polanus began to argue that the vowel points were after all very ancient and authentic. The formidable Hebraist scholar Johannes Buxtorf the Elder (1564–1629) argued that the points went back to the time of Ezra.102 However, a few years later a fellow Reformed scholar, Louis Cappel, argued that the points were only an oral tradition until the time of the 97

Especially in his defence of his 1531 translation of the Psalms: WA 38, 11, 16; LW 35, 213, 221. On Luther and the Masoretic pointing see also Eric W. Gritsch, “Luther as Bible Translator,” in Donald K. McKim, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Martin Luther (Cambridge, 2003), 62–72, at 72 n. 3; Heinrich Bornkamm, Luther and the Old Testament, ed. Victor I. Gruhn, trans. Eric W. and Ruth C. Gritsch (Philadelphia, 1969). 98 Richard A. Muller, “The Debate over the Vowel Points and the Crisis in Orthodox Hermeneutics,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 10 (1980), 53–72, at 53–54. 99 100 Ibid., 54–55. Ibid., 55–56 and references. 101 Richard Simon, Histoire Critique du Vieux Testament (Amsterdam, 1680; new ed. Rotterdam, 1685). 102 Johannes Buxtorf, Tiberias Sive Commentarius Masorethicus (Basel, 1620); Muller, “Debate over the Vowel Points,” 58–59.

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Masoretes. His critique implied a more fluid approach to the text, one that would be vindicated by later scholarship. However, in the short term Cappel’s intervention provoked a reverse argument among some dogmatic theologians that the sacred text must be perfect and inerrant, to a degree that the early Reformers would never have insisted upon. Sympathetic scholars of orthodoxy, above all Richard Muller, point out that the later seventeenth-century orthodox theologians such as Francis Turretin and Johann Heinrich Heidegger distinguished between the inerrant “original” text and potentially defective actual copies.103 Nevertheless, as a matter of historical accident the debate over Hebrew Scripture paved the way for more rigid doctrines of biblical inerrancy, even as biblical scholarship demonstrated that retrieving the perfect original text of the Bible might forever prove elusive. During the seventeenth century a few biblical scholars sought to distance sacred philology from dogma, or even to challenge the foundations on which Judeo-Christian thought was based. The Dutch Remonstrant Hugo Grotius (1583–1645), best known as a legal theorist, also wrote Annotations to the Old and New Testaments late in his career.104 Grotius showed relatively little interest in polemics, and treated the review of Scripture as an exercise in philology. Grotius provoked a temperate but highly critical response from the Lutheran theologian Abraham Calov.105 Matthew Poole’s (1624–1679) five-volume Synopsis criticorum aliorumque Sacrae Scripturae presented critical philological work on Scripture with a strikingly ecumenical slant. Himself Reformed, Poole made use of Catholic, Arminian, and Lutheran scholarship as well as confirming the Reformed penchant for seeking out the most useful elements of Jewish exegesis.106 Much more extreme was the provocation – and the response – resulting from the publication by Baruch Spinoza of the Tractatus theologico-politicus in 1670. This work argued, with a combination of linguistic scholarship and highly readable polemic, that the Pentateuch must be of a much later date, possibly compiled after the exile in its current form; that the cross-quotations between prophetic and historical books made it impossible accurately to retrieve ancient Israelite history; and that prophets could have had no supernatural insight into future events.107 Spinoza’s work 103

Muller, “Debate over the Vowel Points,” 66–70. Hugo Grotius, Annotata ad Vetus Testamentum (Paris, 1644); Hugo Grotius, Annotationes in Novum Testamentum, 3 vols. (published as separate parts) (Amsterdam and Paris, 1641–1650); discussion in Appold, “Importance of the Bible,” 457–458. 105 Abraham Calov, Biblia Testamenti Veteris illustrata (Frankfurt am Main, 1672). 106 Gordon, “The Bible in Reformed Thought,” 487 and references. 107 Benedictus de Spinoza, Tractatus theologico-politicus (Hamburg, 1670); see also Travis L. Frampton, Spinoza and the Rise of Historical Criticism of the Bible (New York, 2006). 104

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provoked a furious reaction from Jewish and Christian scholars of all kinds. Unacceptable to its own time, the work adumbrated in a bold and startling way some of the arguments of German Protestant higher critics in the later nineteenth century. The Reformation leaned very hard on the Bible, as its leading figures believed it should. However, Scripture was not an easy or uniform text to deploy: it raised critical questions of authorship, ownership, interpretation, and the accuracy of the text as it had come down to their time. Many of these questions were not new, but the dogmatic struggles of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries gave them new urgency. Out of their wrestling and wrangling with the text would, eventually, emerge a modern critical awareness of the problems and the possibilities of the Bible. That awareness continues to inform a constantly growing body of scholarship and study of these ancient, enigmatic, and often provocative texts. bibliography Cameron, Euan, ed. The Annotated Luther, Volume 6: The Interpretation of Scripture. Minneapolis, 2017. The New Cambridge History of the Bible, volume III: From 1450 to 1750. Cambridge and New York, 2016. The Creeds of Christendom: With a History and Critical Notes, ed. Philip Schaff and David Schaff, 3 vols. New York and London, 1905. Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. Norman Tanner, 2 vols. paginated continuously. London and Washington, 1990. Le Long, Jacques. Bibliotheca Sacra in binos syllabos distincta: quorum prior qui jam tertio auctior prodit, omnes sive textus sacri sive versionum ejusdem quavis lingua expressarum editiones: nec non praestantiores MSS. codices, cum notis historicis & criticis exhibet, 2 vols. Paris, 1723. Melanchthon, Philipp. Loci communes 1521: Lateinisch – Deutsch, ed. and trans. Horst Georg Pöhlmann. Gütersloh, 1993. Müller, Ernst F. Karl, ed. Die Bekenntnisschriften der reformierten Kirche: In authentischen Texten mit geschichtlicher Einleitung und Register, 2 vols. Waltrop, 1999; repr. [Leipzig, 1903]. Old, Hughes Oliphant. The Reading and Preaching of the Scriptures in the Worship of the Christian Church, volume IV: The Age of the Reformation. Grand Rapids, 2002. Reformierte Bekenntnisschriften, herausgegeben im Auftrag der Evangelischen Kirche in Deutschland, ed. Heiner Faulenbach and Eberhard Busch, with Emidio Campi et al. Neukirchen-Vluyn, 2002–; esp. volume II/1: Reformierte Bekenntnisschriften 1559–1563, ed. Andreas Mühling and Peter Opitz. Neukirchen-Vluyn, 2009. van den Belt, Henk. The Authority of Scripture in Reformed Theology: Truth and Trust. Leiden, 2008.

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Systematic Theology risto saarinen

The terms “systematic theology” and “dogmatics” emerged in the seventeenth century. They were closely connected with the German cultural area and spread only later to other vernacular languages.1 In the following, systematic theology is understood as the normative elaboration of the doctrine of the church. The issues of method and biblical interpretation are intimately connected with systematic theology. As these issues are treated in other chapters of this book, they are here only briefly mentioned when necessary. After a concise look at (a) terminology, this chapter proceeds to (b) the common doctrines of the churches between 1500 and 1675. Then, (c) some distinctive doctrines of the different churches are described. As the controversialist dimension of such doctrines is discussed separately in this book, it is not emphasized here. Another section is devoted to (d) the most important non-confessional doctrinal developments of the early modern period. As systematic theology interprets the doctrine in close connection with philosophical and other intellectual trends, (e) a final comparison between theology and philosophy is needed to understand the nature of early modern ecclesiastical doctrine.

Terminology During the sixteenth century the Greek word systema was employed only occasionally and was translated into Latin by ordo. Due to the influence of the German logician Bartholomäus Keckermann, the term “system” was adopted

1 Gerhard Sauter, “Dogmatik I,” Theologische Realenzyklopädie, 36 vols. (Berlin and New York 1976–2004), IX, 41–77, at 41–42; Fritz-Peter Hager and Christian Strub, “System,” Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, 12 vols. (Basel, 1971–2007), X, 824–856, at 827–828.

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for different academic disciplines during the first decades of the seventeenth century. It soon became very fashionable.2 Generally speaking, a system means an organized whole of some discipline. The method of this is the principle according to which the material is organized so that a system emerges. For instance, Thomas Hobbes defines political systems as those subordinate systems that are “made by authority from the Soveraign power of the Common-Wealth.”3 In his influential theological compendium of 1664 Johann Friedrich König divides theology into introductory matters and “the system itself.” As theology belongs to practical sciences, its organizing principle is practical and concerns its end or purpose (finis). Objectively, this end is God. Humans seek the “enjoyment of God” as their formal end. Accordingly, König’s system starts with a description of God and continues with the description of the order of salvation leading to that enjoyment.4 The system is practical because it is organized according to teleological criteria. Georg Calixt is normally considered to be the inventor of the term “dogmatics.” In his moral theology of 1634 Calixt understands theologia dogmatica to be the art of investigating doctrinal sentences, distinguishing it from theological ethics. Like König, Calixt employs such a distinction to build an entire system of theology.5 In a similar manner, the Reformed theologian Petrus van Mastricht divides theology into doctrines of faith and doctrines of obedience, considering that both the beliefs of the church and the life of the Christian belong to theology.6 Given that such new terminology was due to the methodological innovations of Peter Ramus, Giacomo Zabarella, and other post-Reformation thinkers, we need to ask whether the theological vocabulary of the European Reformations can be read in terms of “systematic theology” or “dogmatics.” Older Protestant research tended to distinguish the Reformation thinkers rather sharply from both late medieval Scholasticism and the Protestant orthodoxy of the seventeenth century. In such a research

2

Hager and Strub, “System,” 827–828. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Cambridge, 1991), 155. 4 Johann Friedrich König, Theologia positiva acroamatica (Rostock 1664) (Tübingen, 2006), 16, 46, 104. 5 Sauter, “Dogmatik I,” 41, quoting Georg Calixt, Epitome theologiae moralis (Helmstedt, 1662 [1634]), 70. 6 Richard A. Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics: The Rise and Development of Reformed Orthodoxy, 4 vols. (Grand Rapids, 1987–2006), I, 219, referring to Petrus van Mastricht, Theologiae didactico-elenctico-practicae Prodromus (Amsterdam, 1666). 3

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paradigm the Reformation was easily seen as an “unsystematic” seedbed of fresh thinking and proclamation.7 Current research is more inclined to see continuities between medieval, Reformation, and early modern terminologies. The late medieval spiritual tradition displayed considerable similarities with the early phases of the Lutheran Reformation. Aristotelian Scholasticism deeply influenced Reformed dogmatics. In Roman Catholic universities Thomas Aquinas continued to be the most important theologian. The humanist influence permeated all confessions. For these reasons we cannot speak of a movement “from unsystematic Reformation to systematized orthodoxy.” Rather, the movement went “from Reform to theological and confessional codification.”8 In church history the phenomenon of “confessionalization” can be regarded as the social and cultural counterpart of this intellectual movement. Given this, we may ask which concepts depict the phenomenon of systematic theology in the sixteenth century. The simple answer is that the term “theology” is frequently used in this sense. The Summa theologica of Aquinas is understood as the most prominent representative of doctrinal theology. In the humanist movement the Ratio verae theologiae of Erasmus of Rotterdam introduces the loci method as the humanist way of doing “true theology.” Philip Melanchthon’s Loci praecipui theologici consolidates this way of doing doctrinal theology in Protestantism.9 In all these titles “theology” refers to doctrinal issues in general. Another obvious concept is that of “Christian religion,” a phrase that covers doctrinal theology in Calvin’s Institutio religionis christianae (1559). The phrase played a prominent role in Marsilio Ficino’s De christiana religione (1476), a programmatic humanist interpretation of Christian doctrine. The different Reformation programs, including the radical Reformation and the Catholic reform, can be terminologically united under the umbrella of “Christianization.” The different agendas of the Reformation did not just aim to be distinctive, they strove for a recultivation of Christianity entirely.10

7

So Muller, Dogmatics, I, 46. For Ramus and Zabarella, ibid., 181–186. So Muller, Dogmatics, I, 46, 49–52. 9 See Erasmus of Rotterdam, Ratio verae theologiae, in his Ausgewählte Schriften, volume III (Darmstadt, 1990); Philip Melanchthon, Loci praecipui theologici (1559), Werke, Studienausgabe, volume II (Gütersloh, 1953). 10 John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 2 vols. [Library of Christian Classics 21] (Louisville, 2006); Marsilio Ficino, De Christiana religione, in his Opera omnia (Basel, 1576); Scott H. Hendrix, Recultivating the Vineyard: The Reformation Agendas of Christianization (Louisville, 2004). 8

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The frequent use of the words “Christian” and “religion” in the Reformation thus captures the overall doctrine of the church. This usage continued in Protestant orthodoxy. Johann Friedrich König defined it as follows: “The Christian religion is the way of worshiping the true God according to the Scriptures, in faith in Christ, loving God and the neighbor, so that the human person separated from God may return to God.”11 The “Christian religion” of the early modern period was both doctrinal and practical: the true faith entails worship and love, aiming at salvation. While the seventeenth century may have conceptually distinguished the “systematic” and “dogmatic” dimensions of Christian religion from practical and moral theology, the real and concrete unity of theology was preserved. The term doctrina also signifies issues of systematic theology in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This term had a comprehensive and many-sided meaning in the early modern period. For Calvin it could mean preaching, confessional writing, education, the content of faith, and proclaiming this content. Doctrina was also closely connected with teaching and pastoral care. It would be misleading to create narrow distinctions, for instance by saying that, for some, doctrine meant normative propositional truths, and for others the event of preaching.12 The early Lutheran concept of doctrina covers the English words teaching, discipline, and doctrine. These meanings cannot simply be reduced to any one dimension. For instance, the expression doctrina evangelii in the Lutheran Augsburg Confession (§ 7) contains not only preaching but also the doctrinal content and the argumentative grounding of such doctrine.13 This semantic richness of doctrina had an influential practical consequence for Lutherans and other Protestants: as the concept of doctrine covered both the proclamation and the rational reflection of the content, academic theology played an important role as a normative instance of defining the content of doctrine. Philip Melanchthon was essential in ascribing this role to academic teaching. While Melanchthon did not yet employ “theology” as a synonym for doctrine, this usage is typical of Lutheran theology after Martin Chemnitz. Martin Luther had depicted both theory and practice in speaking of “doctrine and life” as an intimate theological relationship.14 In this manner, the early 11

König, Theologia, 26. For the intellectual history of this term see Philippe Büttgen et al., eds., Vera doctrina: Zur Begriffsgeschichte der Lehre von Augustinus bis Descartes (Wiesbaden, 2009). 13 Ibid., 201–205. 14 Ibid.; Gerhard Ebeling, “Lehre und Leben in Luthers Theologie,” in his Lutherstudien III (Tübingen, 1985), 3–43. 12

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modern theologians could competently use a broad and comprehensive concept of doctrina, a term that depicts both theoretical and practical issues.

Common Doctrines While the European Reformations created new ecclesiastical structures and theological identities, they also continued the common Christian heritage in many ways. Some confessional writings of the sixteenth century focus on differences, but others emphasize similarities. For instance, the Belgic Confession intended to demonstrate to King Philip II that the Protestants remained loyal to the Christian faith and state. The confession starts (§§ 2–7) with an exposition of the authority of the Bible and then continues with a detailed description of the Trinity (§§ 8–9) and the two natures of Christ (§§ 10, 19–21).15 Thereafter follow the articles regarding creation, original sin, incarnation, and the forgiveness of sins (§§ 12–23). The Protestant emphasis on salvation through faith without the merit of good works (§ 24) is embedded in this traditional scheme. The articles on the church (§§ 27–29) were designed to create a distance from “sects.” Infant baptism is affirmed and rebaptism condemned (§ 34). Distinctively Protestant views are expressed in the context; for instance, the articles on ministry (§§ 30–31) do not mention bishops and the article on the Lord’s Supper (§ 35) speaks of the spiritual nature of the body and blood of Christ. While the Belgic Confession did not convince Catholics, it was added to the documents of the Synod of Dort, becoming one of the so-called Forms of Unity in the Reformed tradition. The idea of writing comprehensive and balanced confessions of faith was not limited to situations in which the Protestants needed to prove their Christianity to Roman Catholics. The Westminster Confession, for instance, offers a similar treatment of the basic articles of faith.16 This confession first expounds the authority of the Bible, the doctrine of God and the Trinity as well as creation (chs. 1–4). An extensive chapter 8 deals with the person and work of Christ in a traditional manner. Chapters 25–26 on the church and the communion of saints speak of the church as “catholic” and as “bride of Christ,” stressing that the visible church is also 15 “Confessio Belgica von 1561,” in Die Bekenntnisschriften der reformierten Kirche, ed. Ernst Friedrich Karl Müller (Waltrop, 1999), 233–249. 16 “Die Westminster-Confession von 1647,” in ibid., 542–611.

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catholic and is not limited to any particular nation. There is “no ordinary possibility of salvation” outside the church. The Westminster Confession highlights particularly Protestant doctrines, such as “the effectual calling” (ch. 10) or the pope as “Antichrist” (ch. 25), much more strongly than the Belgic Confession, but also in such cases the text employs concepts and ideas that can be thought of as belonging to the long biblical tradition of the true church. German Lutherans employed the Augsburg Confession in their dialogue with other Reformation movements as well as with Roman Catholicism. After drafting the original text Philip Melanchthon composed a slightly modified version, the Confessio Augustana variata, which was later signed by Martin Bucer, Johannes Brenz, and John Calvin. In 1540–1541 Melanchthon and his supporters negotiated with a Catholic group led by Johannes Eck in Worms, coming to a considerable convergence regarding the content of the Augsburg Confession. This convergence was further elaborated in Regensburg in 1541 with a text that attempts to combine the forensic and effective dimensions of justification.17 The eventual success of such modified texts has remained controversial in later reception. The Augsburg Confession employs a balanced overall doctrinal structure, proceeding from the generally approved doctrines regarding God and Jesus Christ (§§ 1, 3) toward the controversial issue of justification (§ 4). This structure enabled later dialogical attempts toward further convergences. Between 1530 and 1675 the primary problems of inter-church encounter were often political rather than theological. Due to the political constellations, attempts at coming to theological agreement were often unsuccessful. While the theological differences should not be underestimated, a considerable traditional basis of common doctrine was shared by the quarreling parties. Both Catholics and Protestants continued to employ a comprehensive idea of normative doctrine in which only some issues remained divisive. The doctrinal agreement of the majority of churches from 1500 to 1675 consisted at least of the following articles of faith: God and the Trinity, Jesus Christ, creation, and infant baptism. Some minority groups deviated from the practice of infant baptism. Anti-Trinitarians also emerged, but they remained 17

For different conversations see Otto Scheib, Die innerchristlichen Religionsgespräche im Abendland, 3 vols. (Wiesbaden, 2009–2010), I, 155–204; and Controversia et confessio, ed. Irene Dingel (Göttingen, 2008–). For Augsburg Confession I use The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, ed. Robert Kolb and Timothy Wengert (Minneapolis, 2000), here at 27–106.

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insignificant to the dominant confessional landscape. Within such overall doctrinal agreement, new theological currents presented themselves. A widespread agreement in Trinitarian theology, for instance, allowed different intellectual elaborations around the common rule of faith. In this manner, both Catholics and Protestants could formulate different orthodox Trinitarian reflections and approaches.18 New explorations in Christology did not contain a rejection of the traditional consensus. When Calvin held that the presence of Christ in the Eucharist does not entail containment (so-called extracalvinisticum), he did not intend to deviate from the Christology of Chalcedon.19 Luther’s emphasis on the so-called theology of the cross did not formulate a new view of Christ “from below,” but continued the Christological tendencies of mercy and humility that had long been available in the Latin spiritual tradition.20 As the new minorities did not question the ancient doctrines regarding Jesus Christ, we may conclude that Christology was the most significant doctrine held in common by nearly all churches and significant theologians of the early modern period. Enlightenment developments in the historical-critical interpretation of the Bible and modernity’s claim that Christ was a human moral teacher weakened this agreement, but these trends only emerged fully in the eighteenth century. The authority of the Bible belonged to the doctrinal matters that were both common and divisive. Both Catholics and Protestants emphasized this authority; the humanist movement with its new philological and hermeneutical skills permeated all Western churches in similar fashion. Protestants wanted to establish the authority of the Bible in a way that was more exclusive (Sola Scriptura) than the Catholic practice of formulating theology with the help of the normative teaching tradition of the church. While the increased use of vernacular languages distinguished Protestants from Catholics, all churches continued to employ Latin as the language of higher studies. Both Protestants and Catholics invested considerably in a deeper theological knowledge of Scripture. The Ratio studiorum of the Jesuit order (1599), for instance, admonishes the teacher of biblical studies as follows:

18

See Ulrich Lehner, “The Trinity in the Early Modern Era (c.1550–1750),” in Gilles Emery and Matthew Levering, eds., The Oxford Handbook of the Trinity (Oxford, 2011), 240–253. 19 For this see e.g. George Hunsinger, The Eucharist and Ecumenism (Cambridge, 2008), 34–46. 20 See David J. Luy, Dominus Mortis: Martin Luther on the Incorruptibility of God in Christ (Minneapolis, 2014).

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In order to ascertain the genuine sense of Holy Writ, he must note the idiomatic expressions and figures of speech peculiar to Scripture. He must skillfully compare the passage he is reading not only with that which precedes and follows but also with other passages where the same phrase will have sometimes the same, sometimes a different meaning.21

The Ratio also tells the biblical scholar “not to use the scholastic method in questions peculiar to Holy Writ.”22 In the light of such exegetical advice, Catholics and Protestants interpreted the Bible in similar ways. The chapter on biblical interpretation in the present book develops these views in more detail.

Distinctive Doctrines Among a variety of confessionally dividing doctrines, three are highlighted in the following: (1) justification by faith; (2) the Eucharist; and (3) the ordained ministry.

Justification by Faith The doctrine of justification received a distinctive formulation in Protestantism, especially Lutheran systematic theology. According to this doctrine, human beings are saved by grace alone and by faith alone, without one’s own merits. Because of its symbolic significance the doctrine of justification has been endlessly debated in later Protestantism.23 The following description does not take a stance on these debates, but attempts to lay out the basic normative texts and the concepts employed in them. In doing this, I do not understand justification in its broad sense as the means by which the relationship between humans and God is established. Such a doctrine of justification would cover the entire understanding of salvation and the work of Christ. Instead, I focus on the concept of justification in its narrow sense, depicting the Pauline concept of God’s righteousness. Martin Luther’s tireless preaching against the use of human powers for achieving salvation created the background of this doctrine in the sixteenth century. At the same time, justification is a classical theme of Pauline and Augustinian theology. Luther radicalized this theme, but he also continued 21 I use the English translation of Allan Farrell available at www.bc.edu/sites/libraries/ratio/ ratio1599.pdf (here at 30). 22 Ibid., 31. 23 For an overview see Alister McGrath, Iustitia Dei: A History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification (Cambridge, 2020). Controversia, ed. Dingel, contains much new research.

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the classical anti-Pelagian stance of Latin theology. The Latin text of the Augsburg Confession § 4 formulates the Lutheran position as follows: Likewise, they teach that human beings cannot be justified before God by their own powers, merits, or works. But they are justified as a gift (gratis) on account of Christ through faith when they believe that they are received into grace and that their sins are forgiven on account of Christ, who by his death made satisfaction for our sins. God reckons (imputat) this faith as righteousness (Rom. 3: 21–4:5).24

Paul’s Letter to the Romans assumes a Jewish image of God who judges humans in a heavenly court of law. God’s righteousness in this forensic situation works in a peculiar manner, as God can “justify” guilty persons through acknowledging some aspect that speaks for them. In this manner, Abraham’s faithfulness to God is “reckoned” as righteousness (Gen. 15:6, Rom. 4:3–5). This act is a “justification of the impious” (Rom. 4:5), because the guilty person does not produce works, merits, or an improved human condition as compensation or rationale for the divine act; only his faith counts. The divine act of “reckoning” (Gr. logizomai) can be translated as “counting” or “considering as.” It serves as a rationale of the divine act of approving faith as the basis of justification. The Latin verb of the Vulgate, imputare (or sometimes reputare), contains the same idea. However, the Latin verb adds new connotations: while “imputed” righteousness can mean a forensic pronouncement or declaration, it can also mean a gift transfer in which God’s or Christ’s righteousness is transferred or even infused to the human person. The Augustinian tradition of Western Catholicism often emphasized both such a donative and sanative understanding of justification. The Augsburg Confession understands imputation in a moderated forensic manner: while faith is reckoned as righteousness, the sanative dimension is not explicitly mentioned. Later Protestantism tended to distinguish between three semantic fields of theological imputation: (1) the non-imputation of sins; (2) the imputation of faith as righteousness; and (3) the imputation of Christ’s righteousness. In Lutheranism these three meanings date from at least Matthias Flacius Illyricus; at the same time, it is noteworthy that the Augsburg Confession only employs the first and second meanings. Given this, it is possible, within the parameters of early Lutheran theology, to employ the concept of justification in purely forensic terms. God justifies 24

Book of Concord, 39–41.

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the sinner so that God’s act of reckoning can be understood as a deliberate change of status: the wrongdoer is released. Healing and the gifts of grace may belong to the whole event of salvation, but they are not conceptually necessary in the act of justification, narrowly understood. While the Latin phrase iustum facere contains an aspect of “making” someone righteous, a purely forensic reckoning need not contain this aspect. In some sense, the purely forensic act is closer to the vocabulary of justification available in the Greek New Testament. Many Roman Catholic theologians considered that the sanative dimension of justification is not adequately expressed in Lutheran theology. While Catholics did not want to advocate righteousness by works, the views that prevailed at the Council of Trent claimed that the Lutheran doctrine lacks a sufficient personal commitment of the Christian. The Decree on Justification, approved by the council, elucidates this basic position from different directions. Generally speaking, the council teaches that justification “consists not only in the forgiveness of sins but also in the sanctification and renewal of the inward being.”25 An exclusive understanding of imputed righteousness is condemned: If anyone says that people are justified either solely by the attribution of Christ’s justice, or by the forgiveness of sins alone, to the exclusion of grace and charity which is poured forth in their hearts by the Holy Spirit and abides in them; or even that the grace by which we are justified is only by the good-will of God: let him be anathema.26

This passage shows how a distinctively Protestant understanding of forensic justification created problems for Catholics. The passage condemns such externalism in which God acts in terms of mere amnesty, acquitting sins without any improvement on the part of the wrongdoers. The Catholic Church demands that a dimension of “making” righteous should be involved. Such a dimension also entails personal commitment, as can be seen in the decree’s chapter dealing with the formal cause of justification: Finally, the one formal cause is the justness [iustitia, righteousness] of God: not that by which he himself is just, but that by which he makes us just and endowed with which we are renewed in the spirit of our mind, and are not merely considered (reputamur) to be just but we are truly named and are 25 The Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. Norman Tanner (London and Washington, 1990), 673 (ch. 7). Cf. Karl Lehmann and Wolfhart Pannenberg, eds., The Condemnations of the Reformation Era: Do they Still Divide? (Minneapolis, 1990). 26 Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, 679 (can. 10).

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just, each one of us receiving individually his own justness according to the measure which the holy Spirit apportions to each one as he wills, and in view of each one’s dispositions and co-operation.27

On the one hand, this passage says clearly that God’s righteousness is the formal cause of justification; thus, an anti-Pelagian stance is secured and no righteousness of works is taught. At the same time, God’s righteousness is not simply reckoned (the verb reputare), but a personal and individual appropriation and renewal accompanies the act of justification. Even in an anti-Pelagian doctrine of salvation the individual commitment must be assumed; otherwise justification becomes a mere externalist “consideration” that does not involve its object. It is remarkable that the Council of Trent condemned an externalist view of justification. From a post-Enlightenment theological perspective a Catholic could be more inclined to claim that the Protestants exaggerate subjectivism and individualism when they claim that justification is “by faith alone” (sola fide). The Council of Trent was critical of sola fide and of faith as merely personal trust, but one needs to see in what sense this criticism is meant. The council approved the Pauline view that a person is justified by faith and as a gift. For the council, “faith is the first stage of human salvation, the foundation and root of all justification.”28 This means, among other things, that subsequent renewal also belongs to justification. However, “it must not be said that anyone’s sins are or have been forgiven simply because he has a proud assurance (fiducia) and certainty that they have been forgiven, and relies solely on that.”29 At first glance this remark is somewhat confusing, because now the Lutherans seem to be accused of too strong a personal involvement. The canons concerning justification conclude, however, that such fiducial trust is rather another sign of non-involvement: If anyone says that people are justified by faith alone, meaning thereby that no other co-operation is required for him to obtain the grace of justification, and that in no sense is it necessary for him to make preparation and be disposed by a movement of his own will; let him be anathema. If anyone says that the faith which justifies is nothing else but trust in the divine mercy, which pardons sins because of Christ; or that it is this trust alone (fiduciam solam) by which we are justified; let him be anathema.30

27

Ibid., 673 (ch. 7). Ibid., 674 (ch. 8). The charge of exaggerated subjectivism is presented, e.g., by Paul Hacker, The Ego in Faith: Martin Luther and the Origin of Anthropocentric Religion (Chicago, 1970). 29 30 Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, 674 (ch. 9). Ibid., 679 (can. 9, 12). 28

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Remarkably, these canons do not consider that “faith alone” expresses subjectivism, but rather that it is another indication of externalist noninvolvement. With the Council of Trent, the Roman Catholic view of justification distinguished itself through the principle of human involvement. At the same time, this involvement was conceived in terms of an anti-Pelagian gift of grace: through such a gift, humans become involved persons. Protestants were not labeled as individuals or as subjectivists; on the contrary, they were condemned because they were said to rely on a forensic concept of reckoning that does not allow for personal involvement. Clearly, this was not what Luther and his followers intended. In fact, Luther’s concept of imputatio assumes an inner participation of the human heart and it thus emphasizes the interpersonal dimension more strongly than in the Augustinian tradition.31 At the same time, the church-dividing issue concerned the precise understanding of justification. Both sides could say that a Christological and pneumatological gift of grace can accompany justification, either as its effective dimension or as conceptually distinct sanctification. The disagreement – and the identity-constituting power of this doctrine – concerns the theological significance of forensic reckoning. For Protestants this divine act provided the sound alternative to the false righteousness of human works. For Catholics, however, it rather meant a problematic general amnesty that downplays personal involvement. Both views could be either moderated or exaggerated depending on different confessional situations. To understand the Catholic teaching of justification properly, one must see its connection with the inner spiritual renewal as well as the concrete life of the Christian. Robert Bellarmine’s writings are exemplary in showing how Christian renewal involves the mind, body, and actions. Bellarmine’s treatment of baptism illustrates how the ritual acts of the church accompany the bestowal of grace upon an individual person: He who is to be baptised ought to make a profession of his belief in the Catholic faith, either by himself or by another. Secondly, he is called upon to renounce the devil, and all his works and pomps. Thirdly, he is baptised in Christ, and thus translated from the bondage of the devil to the dignity of a son of God; and all his sins being washed away, he receives the gift of divine grace, by which he becomes the adopted son of God, an heir of God, and coheir with Christ. Fourthly, a white garment is placed on him, and he is exhorted to keep it pure and undefiled till death. Fifthly, a lighted candle is

31

Sibylle Rolf, Zum Herzen sprechen (Leipzig, 2008), 38–40.

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put into his hand, which signifies good works, and which he ought to add for innocence of life as long as he lives.32

The Catholic reform after the Council of Trent was highly successful in its appeal to inner spiritual renewal and the concrete observance of ecclesiastical rites. While Martin Luther could point out some highly problematic practices of the church, Protestants tended to underestimate the ritualistic and experience-related dimensions of genuine piety. Jesuit authors such as Ignatius and Bellarmine renewed the connection between saving grace and its concrete ritual expression. The “good works” of the believer received a new positive meaning in such a theological context. While the various controversies of the Reformation concerning the forensic and effective aspects of justification (and sanctification) cannot be entered into here, we can briefly describe how two influential Protestants steered their course with a view to these normative doctrines and condemnations. In his Institutio, John Calvin first carefully defines the concept of justification in the narrow sense described above. For Calvin, justified by faith is he who, excluded from the righteousness of works, grasps the righteousness of Christ through faith, and clothed in it, appears in God’s sight not as a sinner but as a righteous man. Therefore, we explain justification simply as the acceptance with which God receives us into his favor as righteous men. And we say that it consists in the remission of sins and the imputation of Christ’s righteousness.33

In this passage, the concept of justification is defined in forensic terms. As Calvin strongly employs the third variant of imputation, speaking even of “clothing” oneself in Christ, broader ideas of imputation and gift are not simply ruled out. In his extensive treatment of justification Calvin emphasizes how righteousness is a thing of the heart and how the person comes before works. Calvin was no externalist but taught a strong personal involvement. In refuting the accusations of his Catholic critics, Calvin emphatically denied that the doctrine of justification would stifle the zeal for good works. The Protestants are not motivated by reward, but they strive to do good so that God may be glorified in them.34 While Calvin stresses justification by faith, he does not consider faith to be an end in itself. Rather, faith is “only the instrument for receiving righteousness.” In this manner, faith receives 32 33

Robert Bellarmine, The Art of Dying Well, trans. John Dalton (Dublin, 1847), 27. 34 Calvin, Institutes, 726–727 (III, 11, 2–3). Ibid., 800 (III, 16, 3).

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Christ.35 Calvin thus keeps the different elements of theocentric salvation in mutual balance. A similar comprehensive balance can be observed in later Lutheran dogmatics. Johann Friedrich König’s systematic theology offers a concise summary of the great works of Martin Chemnitz, Johann Gerhard, and Abraham Calov.36 König presents an elaborate order of salvation that starts with vocation. Justification and mystical union are the two steps that precede the final renovation. For König justification is a forensic event; however, the mystical union with Christ is simultaneous with justification, although logically posterior to it. The distinctively Lutheran feature of justification is that it takes place by faith.37 König explains this feature through an elaborate analysis of different causalities involved in justification. König holds that faith exercises a peculiar causality in justification, namely, organic causality. This resembles instrumental causality, but König does not regard faith as a tool or as similar to a musical or mechanical instrument. Rather, faith is a receptive, living organ that “apprehends” its object.38 Like Luther, he assumes an interpersonal concept of imputation. At the same time, the justifying power of faith is only apprehended from the justifying object, that is, God or the merit of Christ. The imputation that takes place is a fusion of the second and third meanings described above: “Neither faith alone nor the merit of Christ alone is imputed, but the faith that apprehends the merit of Christ, or, synonymously, the merit of Christ apprehended by faith. These two can be distinguished, but as they are constantly related to one another, they cannot be separated in this event.”39 For König the event of apprehension enables the personal commitment of the believer who does not do any human works. Likely having the decrees of the Council of Trent in mind, König states that the justifying faith is fiducia, trust, which can be described as the “appropriative reception or apprehension that concerns me and you individually.”40 In his final definition of justifying faith König strikes a careful balance between the universal salvific intention of God on the one hand and the “inner movement of the heart” on the other. Through this inner movement the faithful can “apply and appropriate” the promise of grace to themselves individually.41 While faith can only receive in terms of

35

Ibid., 733–734 (III, 11, 7). For König’s sources see Andreas Stegmann, Johann Friedrich König, Seine Theologia positiva acroamatica (1664) im Rahmen des frühneuzeitlichen Theologiestudiums (Tübingen, 2006). 37 38 39 40 König, Theologia, 280–322. Ibid., 308, 388. Ibid., 310. Ibid., 386. 41 Ibid., 388. 36

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organic causality, it can bring about such individual appropriation and commitment. In sum, we can detect a twofold systematic movement in the doctrine of justification. On the one hand, this doctrine shapes the distinctive identity of emerging Protestantism, becoming the argumentative vehicle against Roman theologians. On the other hand, the careful elaboration of this doctrine shows that Protestants do not simply move frontally against the condemnation of Trent but want to show how personal commitment is possible within Protestantism. Given this, the doctrine of justification is also relevant for the early modern development of broader systematic issues, such as the nature of individual subjectivity or the relationship between gift transfer and economic property. We return to these issues below.

Eucharist The theology of the Eucharist, or the Lord’s Supper, is another major doctrinal area that clearly provided arguments for the construction of distinct confessional identities. The differentiation among churches is extremely complex at this point.42 Luther criticized the late medieval abuses but wanted to keep the doctrine of Real Presence. At the same time he was critical of Zwinglian notions of eucharistic memoria for reasons that often seem church political as much as biblical or theological. Calvin emphasized the spiritual presence in ways that were not always fully compatible with other eucharistic theologies of the emerging Reformed churches. The Radical Reformers were sometimes ready to liberate themselves from traditional sacramental views altogether. At the Council of Trent, the Roman Catholic Church defended its sacramental practices with arguments from the early church, saying, for instance, that “the custom of reserving the eucharist in a sacred place is so ancient that even the age of the council of Nicaea recognized it.”43 Eucharistic piety became quite popular in early modern Catholicism, showing that laypeople often ardently supported practices that Protestants condemned as merely clerical abuses. While Melanchthon and the Lutheran Confessions considered Eastern Orthodox theology of the Eucharist to be compatible with Protestant views, the ecumenical patriarch Jeremiah II in his responses to Lutherans

42 Some of this complexity is connected with Christology: see Richard Cross, Communicatio Idiomatum: Reformation Christological Debates (Oxford, 2019). 43 Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, 696 (De eucharistia, ch. 6).

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(1576–1581) rejected the doctrine of the Augsburg Confession, insisting that the Eucharist is also a sacrifice.44 This complex confessional situation does not mean, however, that individual normative texts would necessarily be one-sided or defective. A systematic attempt at balance can often be observed. The Westminster Confession condemns the Roman doctrines of transubstantiation and sacrifice. At the same time, its description of the presence of Christ in the Lord’s Supper is very balanced: Worthy Receivers outwardly partaking of the visible Elements in this Sacrament, do then also inwardly by Faith, really and indeed, yet not carnally and corporally, but spiritually receive and feed upon Christ crucified, and all Benefits of his Death: The Body and Blood of Christ being then, not corporally, in, with, or under the Bread and Wine; yet as really, but spiritually, present to the Faith of Believers in that Ordinance, as the Elements themselves are to their outward Senses. (ch. 29, 7)

The phrase “in, with or under” comes from Lutheranism in which these modes of presence underline strong sacramentality.45 The Westminster Confession understands those modes “spiritually,” thus joining the Calvinist tradition. At the same time, “really” is mentioned twice – thus the Confession also emphasizes a strong sacramentality. The last sentence gives a remarkable quasi-empirical comparison: just as the elements are really present to the senses, so too are the spiritual body and blood really present to the faith. The confession thus gives a distinctive and original interpretation of the Calvinist doctrine; at the same time, it is balanced with the broader Christian tradition.

Ordained Ministry A third area of distinctive doctrinal views concerns the theology of ordained ministry. The marriage of priests and the downgrading of ordained ministry as a nonsacramental reality are in many ways more strongly distinctive marks of Protestantism than the abstract views regarding justification and the Lord’s Supper. In order to be truly distinctive, the Reformation doctrines needed to be accompanied by new practices. In the Lord’s Supper this meant the distribution of both wine and bread to the laity; in the ordained ministry 44

See Dorothea Wendebourg, Reformation und Orthodoxie: Der theologische Briefwechsel zwischen der Leitung der württembergischen Kirche und dem Ökumenischen Patriarchen Jeremias II. in den Jahren 1574–1581 (Göttingen, 1986). 45 Book of Concord, 599 (Solida declaration, VII, 35).

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the marriage of the pastor and his new lifestyle probably witnessed more strongly the Reformation ideas than did the doctrines in themselves. In Roman Catholicism the Council of Trent formulated a rudimentary doctrine of threefold ministry, according to which “there exists in the catholic church a hierarchy consisting of bishops, priests and ministers.” Bishops were “of higher rank than priests.” The view according to which “apart from priesthood there do not exist other orders in the catholic church” was explicitly condemned.46 These canons are significant for many reasons. The medieval and early modern bishops were often worldly rulers with predominantly secular tasks. The Reformation theologians frequently considered either that bishops were not needed at all or that they were simply another name for pastors. Due to the decisions of the Council of Trent, the threefold ministry became prominent in Christianity, a trend that was shared by Eastern Orthodoxy as well as by Anglicanism. The papacy was connected to the Catholic view of bishops: the Council of Trent considered only “bishops who are elevated by the authority of the pope” to be legitimate bishops.47 In this manner, the sixteenth-century normative decisions regarding the nature of ordained ministry became distinctive for the hierarchical structure of Roman Catholicism. As these decisions were accompanied by strong practices of church life and administration, they had a formative influence on the entire modern history of Christianity.

New Doctrinal Developments The years from 1500 to 1675 in Europe marked the transition from the medieval world toward modernity. This means that a variety of new ideas emerged and were theologically developed during that period. Such “new doctrinal developments” were not limited to one confession, nor could they be easily defined in terms of orthodoxy and heresy. In the following, three different clusters of ideas are briefly described, namely (1) freedom and bondage; (2) otherness and colonialism; and (3) gift and love. While I claim that these themes represent new ideas in early modern systematic theology and are symptomatic of this transition period, I do not maintain that any of them would provide a general explanation of the essence of emerging modernity. 46

Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, 743–744 (Canones de sacramento ordinis).

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Ibid., 744.

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Freedom and Bondage The theologians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were often obsessed with the problems of human freedom and bondage. In the Reformation the debate between Luther and Erasmus is representative of these problems. Later the debate between Calvinists and Arminians divided Protestant theology considerably. In Roman Catholicism Molinists and Jansenists treated the issue of freedom in different and controversial ways. While Catholics often related more positively to the freedom of the will than did Protestants, the fundamental issues were philosophical and anthropological rather than confessional. Protestants affirmed the freedom of conscience more strongly than the Catholics. Martin Luther and his followers tended to think that an affirmation of human free will easily leads to works righteousness and Pelagian heresy. Luther adopted Augustine’s anti-Pelagian formulation regarding “the bondage of the will” (servum arbitrium).48 Luther’s conviction was not formulated in a philosophical manner, but it remained an aspect of his overall theology of justification by faith. Erasmus of Rotterdam aimed to show that free will is compatible with many insights of the Reformation and that its complete denial is an exaggeration. While Lutherans did not agree with Erasmus on this, Lutheran doctrine was not practiced in terms of determinism and predestination. Students of Luther and Melanchthon agreed that humans have responsibility for their works and that falling into sin does not deprive human creatures of all freedom of choice.49 For this reason, the debate between Luther and Erasmus was intellectually unsatisfactory, especially since the influence of Erasmus is evident in the broad spectrum of Reformation theology. On the other hand, the important thing in this debate is not its philosophical consistency but the ethos of justification by faith: to highlight this core doctrine, Lutheran theologians use a rhetoric that is not meant for nuanced philosophical scrutiny. When Luther simultaneously emphasizes “the freedom of a Christian,” “the freedom of conscience,” and “the bondage of the will,” he does not promote conceptual consistency, but elucidates the idea of justification by faith from different angles.

48

Augustine, Contra Iulianum 2, 8, 23. Martin Luther, De servo arbitrio, in WA 18. Erasmus, De libero arbitrio, in his Ausgewählte Schriften, volume IV (Darmstadt, 1969). 49 See Robert Kolb, Bound Choice, Election, and Wittenberg Theological Method (Grand Rapids, 2005), 285. Cf. Risto Saarinen, Weakness of Will in Renaissance and Reformation Thought (Oxford, 2011).

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A reader who looks for systematic consistency in the issues of freedom and bondage finds it in John Calvin’s thinking. Calvin teaches that “God once established by his eternal and unchangeable plan those whom he long before determined once for all to receive into salvation, and those whom, on the other hand, he would devote to destruction.”50 He developed the idea of effectual calling, according to which “the call is coupled with election” so that God, by calling, receives the chosen people into his family. This manner of the call shows how the calling depends on grace alone, not on the will and actions of humans.51 Calvin thus interprets the Reformation principles “faith alone” and “grace alone” as entailing a strong doctrine of predestination. The doctrine of effectual calling is elaborated in great detail in the Westminster Confession. To understand the complex dynamics of human will in seventeenth-century discussions, one needs to see that, in effectual calling, God renews humans’ wills, “effectually drawing them to Jesus Christ; yet so as they come most freely, being made willing by his Grace” (ch. 10). The doctrine of predestination is formulated normatively in the Canons of Dort.52 These canons emphasize that the eternal election of God is in no way based on the merits of the elected; for this reason, divine election is the only ground of salvation (§1). As the election entails effectual calling, those elected people will persevere in faith (§5). Many other Protestant denominations did not embrace a strict doctrine of election and predestination. In some sense predestination remained a divisive issue between Calvinists and many other Protestants. On a deeper level, however, Luther, Calvin, and most of their followers shared common convictions in this area. In addition to the basic teachings of the Reformation (justification by faith, grace alone), the free-will debates were concerned with the lasting power and influence of sin in Christians. Both Luther and Calvin considered that the struggle between carnal, sinful humanity on the one hand and the renewed spiritual humanity on the other continues in the Christian until death. Even in the most pious saints the flesh remains repugnant, struggling against spiritual renewal. Luther labeled this state of affairs as the Christian being “righteous and sinner at the same time.”53 Calvin likewise taught that in all children of God “there still remains in them a continuing occasion for struggle whereby they may be exercised; 50 52 53

51 Calvin, Institutes, 931 (III, XXI, 7). Ibid., 966–967 (III, XXIV, 1–2). Müller, Bekenntnisschriften, 843–861. First time in his Lecture on Romans, in WA 56, 269, 21–30.

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and not only be exercised, but also better learn from their own weakness.”54 Predestination and perseverance are thus counterbalanced through the lasting inner struggle of all Christians. The theme of inner struggle was particularly prominent in the theology of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. While this theme is intimately connected with the Reformation view of the Christian’s being “righteous and sinner at the same time,” it is a systematic anthropological principle that is not limited to confessional theology. In the field of morality the emerging new discipline of “Christian ethics” replaced the traditional Aristotelian discussion on virtue with the concept of “wrestling virtue” that emerges in inner spiritual struggle.55 The concept of moral wrestling was already significant in Melanchthon, but it was systematically developed in the influential Ethices Christianae of Lambert Daneau. Because of the continuing sinfulness of all humans, Daneau denies the existence of pure virtue: “it has never been found in any mortal human being (excepting in some sense Christ); it is not found now nor will be in the future as long as this condition of the world and its things last.”56 Instead of pure virtue, a textbook of ethics should therefore focus on the wrestling virtue; even in this case, ethics is a theological discipline, as “not the human mind as such, but the human mind already renewed can be capable of this virtue which we call continence and the wrestling virtue. Only this kind of virtue can exist in our worthless person.”57 The inner struggle is not only a Protestant topic, but was also a theme in classical Greek and Latin thought. It became prominent again in sixteenthcentury texts. For instance, Francesco Piccolomini’s influential Catholic textbook of moral philosophy lays out extensively the so-called half-virtues that struggle with the perturbations of the soul.58 William Shakespeare’s sonnets contain particularly sophisticated descriptions of inner struggle, combining philosophical, theological, and literary elements. In Sonnet 146 Shakespeare sketches the Calvinist landscape of sin: Poor soule the center of my sinfull earth, My sinfull earth these rebell powres that thee array, Why dost thou pine within and suffer dearth Painting thy outward walls so costlie gay?

54

55 Calvin, Institutes, 602 (III, III, 10). See Saarinen, Weakness, 132–200. 57 Lambert Daneau, Ethices Christianae libri tres (Geneva, 1583), 101. Ibid., 107. 58 Francesco Piccolomini, Universa philosophia de moribus (Frankfurt, 1595). See in more detail Saarinen, Weakness, 95–96. 56

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The well-known stanzas of Sonnets 144 and 35 depict an inner wrestling: “Two loves I have of comfort and dispaire/ Which like two spirits do sugiest me still” and “Such civill war is in my love and hate.” For the poet the inner struggle does not only appear in gloomy Puritan terms; the painful conversion from one self to another also allows for playful observations in Sonnet 133: Me from my selfe thy cruell eye hath taken, And my next selfe thou harder hast ingrossed, Of him, my selfe, and thee I am forsaken, A torment thrice three-fold thus to be crossed.

The debates between the adherents and opponents of human free will are not isolated theological matters, but are symptomatic of the general interest in and sometimes even obsession with introspection in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Protestant teachings regarding “faith alone” and “grace alone” contributed to this introspection, but the intellectual current dealing with inner struggle was much broader, and not only conditioned by the Reformation insights. At the same time, Shakespeare’s sonnets and other literary expressions of this current exemplify a human quest that is also prominent in theological texts. This current coincides with the emergence of subjectivity and Cartesianism in early modern thought.59 As we saw above, the Council of Trent was already interested in the discussion regarding the personal involvement of the Christian. All confessional parties agreed that such a personal involvement is necessary. As shown above, the Calvinist adherents of strict predestination nevertheless taught that the faithful need to exercise and to learn from their weakness. Such considerations led to an even broader systematic question: in addition to the inner struggle, is there a new doctrinal development toward a deeper appropriation of one’s own faith or a new kind of introspective construction of Christian identity? As this question needs many qualifications to be precise, it cannot be answered in detail. The question is nevertheless relevant in light of Protestant Pietism and the European Enlightenment, two later currents characterized by introspection and personal appropriation. When we look at some prominent earlier sources, for instance the above-quoted passages from König’s textbook, some grounds for an affirmative answer can be

59

See Udo Thiel, The Early Modern Subject: Self-Consciousness and Personal Identity from Descartes to Hume (Oxford, 2011); Risto Saarinen, Recognition and Religion: A Historical and Systematic Study (Oxford, 2016).

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provided. The Protestant insistence on faith alone, the Catholic demand for personal involvement, and the prominence of inner struggle are all signposts that led toward König’s conclusion: a personal, individual appropriation of faith is crucial in Christian life. Given this, we can see how new doctrinal developments led toward Pietism and the Enlightenment.

Otherness and Colonialism From the beginning of the sixteenth century the New World became known in Europe. Book printing, improved maps, and the new achievements of science prompted a first wave of globalization. While the Reformation contributed to the introspective dimension of worldview, the era of geographical discoveries allowed a new understanding of differences and human otherness. Initially this reflection concerned Catholics more than Protestants. Renaissance texts such as Marsilio Ficino’s De Christiana religione (1476) can give a glimpse of the “otherness” that was already present in Christian thinking before the discovery of the Americas. The title itself displays an awareness that religion is a broader category than Christianity. Ficino devotes much of this work to discussing the views of Jews, Muslims, and ancient pagan religions in relation to Christianity. Ficino confidently believed that a Platonic interpretation of the Christian faith can show the ways in which other religions are imperfect reflections of the Christian truth. At the same time he did not believe in rational demonstrations, but considered that religious truths are revealed; we can only approach God through faith. Other religions are not evaluated rationally but in the light of such revealed Christian truth.60 While Ficino abandoned medieval Aristotelianism and in some sense adopted an autonomous category of religion, Christianity remained the measure of everything. In his study In Defense of the Indians Bartolomé de Las Casas gives one of the first European defenses of non-European cultures and religions that is based on first-hand experience. He wrote it against Juan de Sepúlveda, who argued that the colonialist measures against native Americans were justified. While Las Casas is (unfortunately!) not representative of the early modern attitudes toward other cultures and religions, his work is theologically groundbreaking. Las Casas distinguishes among several different kinds of “barbarians,” coming to the conclusion that Aristotle’s aggressive views were no longer 60

Ficino, De Christiana religione, at 77 (ch. 37).

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valid in Christianity. Barbarians “must not be compelled harshly . . . but are to be gently persuaded and lovingly drawn to accept the best way of life.” Barbarians are created in God’s image and are our brothers. Furthermore, “we must consider it possible that some of them are predestined to become renowned and glorious in Christ’s kingdom.”61 The study defends the rights of native Americans as human persons. He discusses extensively the Augustinian advice that non-Christians should be “forced to come in,” arguing that this advice refers to heretics only, not to nonbelievers in general. For Las Casas, “pagans are not subject to the Church.”62 The discussion on human sacrifice practiced by pagans shows in a particularly lucid manner how Las Casas could understand different cultures in a manner that shows an emphatic consideration of otherness. In Defense of the Indians discusses different cases in which the Spanish found that the indigenous Americans sacrificed human victims, or ate them.63 The work argues that the practice of human sacrifice may appear good to those who practice it for many reasons, especially when it seems to please God. Las Casas compares the pagan practices to God’s command to Abraham to offer his only son Isaac and the decision of God the Father to offer his only son Jesus as a sacrifice. While Las Casas did not want to excuse pagans on such grounds, he claims that pagans commit sacrifices in a state of invincible ignorance, aiming at religious obedience, and should therefore be judged leniently.64 These brief samples show that the discovery of the New World at least in some cases led to new theological judgments concerning other cultures and religions. More generally, an understanding of cultural differences and the ability to adopt the viewpoint of a foreign culture was trained and developed. In this sense the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries did not only lead to an increased theological introspection but also toward an increased ability to grasp other convictions through heuristically adopting their position. At the same time the oppressive features of European colonialism show that this ability was an exception rather than a rule.

Gift and Love In sixteenth-century Europe both Catholics and Protestants practiced gift economy along with a monetary economy. Poor people seldom had money; they often exchanged gift-like services with one another to survive. Rich 61 62

Bartolomé de Las Casas, In Defense of the Indians, trans. Stafford Poole (DeKalb, 1992), 39. 63 64 Ibid., 309–311. Ibid., 217. Ibid., 239–242.

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people exchanged gifts with one another because such exchanges were considered more honorable than buying and selling. The emerging middle class of the cities was more accustomed than other classes within society to the monetary economy.65 The Reformation criticism of human works and merits and the proclamation of salvation as the gift of God employs terminology that was familiar to listeners because they had a clear awareness of the differences between gift exchange and the monetary economy. Human merits and works were easily connected with monetary exchange; Luther’s criticism of indulgences proceeded from the assumption that humans cannot relate to God in terms of a monetary economy. The sacrament of penance was also easily connected with monetary tariffs and other economic procedures. Both the monetary economy and gift exchange are reciprocal and serve the well-being of society. Seneca’s much-used textbook on gift-giving, De beneficiis, instructs that gift exchange is not measured in the same manner as buying and selling: I give you today, you may give me tomorrow, but we are not supposed to count the value of this gift exchange. The problem of measuring and the relationship of justice and mercy fascinated early modern Europeans. The dialogue of Angelo and Isabella in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure act 2, scene 2 exemplifies this feature: while Angelo argues that justice needs to be measured, Isabella claims that mercy is the proper attitude in approaching human faults and wants to “bribe” the judge, Angelo, with the gift of true prayers. Another major difference between gifts and sales concerns the personal ties involved in gift exchange: giving and receiving gifts creates personal ties of thankfulness and mutual commitment, whereas the personal ties at stake in buying and selling are different or sometimes even lacking. According to such a paradigm, receiving forgiveness from a person as a gift creates more gratitude than obtaining it through satisfactory works. Social historians and theologians continue to discuss the precise content of observed analogies between religious life and economic realities.66 The cultural differences between gifts and payments elucidate these analogies in new and important ways. It is evident that Protestants criticized Catholicism for connecting religious practices too tightly with buying and selling. 65

For this see Natalie Zemon Davis, The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France (Oxford, 2000). Max Weber’s old views have experienced an innovative update in Marcel Hénaff, The Price of Truth: Gift, Money, and Philosophy (Palo Alto, 2010). For Reformation studies see Berndt Hamm, “Martin Luther’s Revolutionary Theology of Pure Gift without Reciprocation,” Lutheran Quarterly 29 (2015), 125–161; and Risto Saarinen, Luther and the Gift (Tübingen, 2017). 66

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Protestants wanted to highlight an idea of a pure gift economy in religious life. As one consequence of this complex dynamics, the monetary economy became more secular than before, especially in Protestant surroundings. The precise content of such doctrinal developments needs more study. More generally, the theology of love is relevant in considering the meaning of these developments. According to older scholarship Protestant theologians tended to separate an idealized agapistic love from earthly human activities. Catholics, on the other hand, were considered to have advocated a stronger unity of love, arguing that an interplay of gift and merit is visible in the complex unity of loving behavior. Historically, such views are complex and problematic, as we easily find evidence to the contrary. Toward the end of the seventeenth century Protestants became very active in charity and practical piety (Philipp Jakob Spener, August Hermann Francke), whereas a quietist renunciation of human works gained ground in some parts of Catholicism (Miguel de Molinos, Jeanne Guyon, François Fénelon).67 It may be safer to say that the early modern doctrinal developments in the theology of gift and love were not confessional in the first place. Rather, the nature of religious activities started to be understood in new ways in all churches when the monetary economy and capitalism became dominant modes of social life. As a result, religion was increasingly considered a counter-culture, which provided an alternative to buying and selling.68 Increased charity, quietist piety, and the ideal of receiving something from “grace alone” or “as free gift” are theological indicators of this cultural change. The influential spiritual writings of Francis de Sales outline the new middle ground in the theology of love that could be shared by different confessions. In his correspondence with Jane de Chantal Francis defends a spirituality in which all Christians are called to find God. This radical call need not take place in a monastery, but could occur in the world and in the middle of ordinary family life.69 The Salesian style of devotion recognizes that true Christian life can be realized anywhere. In this manner early modern Catholic piety also participated in that affirmation of ordinary life

67 Carter Lindberg, Love: A Brief History through Western Christianity (Oxford, 2008), 133–145; Peter Gorday, François Fénelon, a Biography: The Apostle of Pure Love (Brewster, 2012). 68 See Saarinen, Luther and the Gift; and Veronika Hoffmann, Skizzen zur Theologie der Gabe (Freiburg, 2013). 69 See Francis de Sales and Jane de Chantal, Letters of Spiritual Direction [Classics of Western Spirituality] (Mahwah, 1988), 44–45.

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that is characteristic of modernity and is often regarded to be a predominantly Protestant feature.70

Theology and Philosophy The first decades of the sixteenth century witnessed a transition from Scholasticism to humanism in the universities and in church life. Aristotle and Scholastic theology were often criticized; here the German Reformers joined the Italian humanists. In the long run, however, the criticism of Aristotle was more rhetorical than real. Many Italian humanists continued their philosophical work as Aristotelian. Philip Melanchthon and his students renewed the commentaries on the works of Aristotle. Aristotle’s concepts were again extensively employed in Protestant orthodoxy. Humanism nevertheless meant a fundamental change in doctrinal theology. After the publication of the Greek New Testament edited by Erasmus, knowledge of Greek became practically obligatory. Many theologians learned Hebrew as well. The humanist program of Erasmus was remarkably different from Scholasticism; knowledge of original sources, careful textual work, and the loci method of exposing theological doctrine had lasting influence in theology. Often the humanists insisted that a clear difference between theological and philosophical vocabularies should be made; this requirement had a concrete impact on the style of doing theology. In spite of these transitions, a modern reader who studies the doctrinal theology of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is inclined to see philosophy everywhere. The Aristotelian causes and categories, the virtues available in the Nicomachean Ethics, and the syllogistic method of argumentation are omnipresent in both Catholic and Protestant sources. To evaluate such features properly, a reader must remember that Aristotelian philosophy provided for most of the general education received in the universities. Even when an author wanted to liberate himself from philosophy, his terminology remained bound to this educational background. In the latter part of the sixteenth century new methods, such as Ramism or the analytical method of Zabarella, attempted to liberate thinkers from traditional Aristotelianism. The basic problem of such new methods was that they did not offer a new philosophical vocabulary, merely new ways to organize the traditional material. They were methods of presentation rather 70

For this feature see Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge, 1989), 211–302.

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than of investigation. For this reason, an Aristotelianism with humanist ingredients remained the philosophical background of doctrinal theology at least until the emergence of Cartesianism. The pioneers of modern philosophy and science, René Descartes, Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei, and Isaac Newton, emphasized the laws of mathematics and the paradigm of objective scientific knowledge. According to this new science, God practices an eternal geometry and the book of nature is written in mathematical language.71 Rather than attempting a mathematical or geometrical way of doing theology, the religious contemporaries of Descartes often emphasized the separation of philosophy and theology as the lesson to be learned in this new situation. Blaise Pascal, for instance, does not attempt to do Cartesian philosophical theology in his Pensées (1670), but rather rejects philosophy as an instrument of Christian apology.72 Clearly, Cartesianism and the new science changed the intellectual surroundings of university theology. To grasp the impact of this change in doctrinal theology we would need to go significantly beyond 1675. Through the late seventeenth century the Cartesian influence is best visible in the theological writings of the leading philosophers. For instance, Thomas Hobbes and John Locke emphasized the knowledge of causes in their characterization of God. While Descartes believed that we have an innate idea of God, John Locke thought that the idea of God is made by us from the simpler ideas of sensation and reflection.73 In this manner, the modern concepts of perception and causality began to be employed as conditions of the possibility of formulating theological positions. bibliography Büttgen, Philippe et al., eds. Vera doctrina: Zur Begriffsgeschichte der Lehre von Augustinus bis Descartes. Wiesbaden, 2009. Cross, Richard. Communicatio Idiomatum: Reformation Christological Debates. Oxford, 2019. Dingel, Irene, ed. Controversia et confessio. Göttingen, 2008–. Garber, Daniel and Michael Ayers, eds. The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy. Cambridge, 1998. 71 See, e.g., Jean-Luc Marion, “The Idea of God,” in Daniel Garber and Michael Ayers, eds., The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (Cambridge, 1998), 265–304, at 268–269. 72 Nicholas Jolley, “The Relation between Theology and Philosophy,” in Garber and Ayers, eds., Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy, 363–392, at 366–370; Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. Alban J. Krailsheimer (London, 1995). 73 Marion, “Idea,” 284–285, quoting Hobbes, Leviathan, chs. 3, 11–12, and 31, as well as John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Oxford, 1975), II, 23, 33–36.

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Systematic Theology Kolb, Robert. Bound Choice, Election, and Wittenberg Theological Method. Grand Rapids, 2005. Lehmann, Karl and Wolfhart Pannenberg, eds. The Condemnations of the Reformation Era: Do they Still Divide? Minneapolis, 1990. Lehner, Ulrich L., Richard A. Muller, and Anthony Gregg Roeber, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Theology. Oxford, 2016. McGrath, Alister. Iustitia Dei: A History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification. Cambridge, 2020. Muller, Richard A. Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics: The Rise and Development of Reformed Orthodoxy, 4 vols. Grand Rapids, 1987–2006. Nelson, Derek R. and Paul R. Hinlicky, eds. The Oxford Encyclopedia of Martin Luther, 3 vols. Oxford, 2017. Saarinen, Risto. Luther and the Gift. Tübingen, 2017. Weakness of Will in Renaissance and Reformation Thought. Oxford, 2011. Scheib, Otto. Die innerchristlichen Religionsgespräche im Abendland, 3 vols. Wiesbaden, 2009– 2010. Selderhuis, Herman J., ed. The Calvin Handbook. Grand Rapids, 2008. Thiel, Udo. The Early Modern Subject: Self-Consciousness and Personal Identity from Descartes to Hume. Oxford, 2011.

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The early modern specialization of “attack theology” aimed at publicizing and refuting doctrinal deviations in works by adversaries, who often responded with defense and counter-argument. Many Reformation-era works of this genre are distasteful today because they attribute base motives to the adversaries in question. While some giant figures wrote controversial works, a broad view of the field reveals only flashes of theological brilliance. Mediocre theology predominates, but the works had the effect of hardening both Protestant-Catholic opposition and intra-Protestant differences, which today’s ecumenical commissions are laboring to reduce in their intensity and even show, in some cases, to be reconcilable differences. This account treats only a few of the hundreds of polemical theologians of the early modern era, surveying first some early Catholic defenders against Protestant doctrine and reforms. Second, from the major Reformers, the chapter considers John Calvin’s controversial works not treated elsewhere in this work. Third, a review of Protestant attacks on the Council of Trent will lead to an account of two monuments of controversy, Martin Chemnitz’s Examination of the Council of Trent’s doctrines from a Lutheran standpoint and Robert Bellarmine’s comprehensive formulation of Catholic responses in his De controversiis Christianae fidei. The selections treated here show the separating and opposed Christian confessions at work to secure and defend their ecclesial identities amid heated theological exchanges.

Preludes to the Confessional Controversies Controversy erupted early in the Reformation century, in 1511–1512, over whether the highest church authority was situated in a general council or the pope. Another early controversy raged between the Christian Hebraist Johannes Reuchlin and his adversaries. Both disputes affected subsequent Reformation-era controversies. 492

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In 1511 the French-backed conciliabulum of Pisa, opposing Pope Julius II, unleashed controversy. The Dominican Master General, Tommaso de Vio Cajetan (1469–1534), saw Pisa reviving conciliarist ecclesiology and responded with arguments for papal superiority in On the Comparison of the Authority of Pope and Council, claiming divine institution of the papacy by Christ in Matthew 16 and John 21. While the pope has the plenitude of power for governing the church, bishops have authority by a participation granted to them from the papal fullness. Further, the pope is the church’s supreme teacher, protected by God from teaching errors in faith. When canonists spoke of the church’s power to remove a heretical pope from office, Cajetan argued against this being an exercise of higher authority over the pope, but instead the dissolving of the connection, established by the cardinals’ election, between the individual and the papal office.1 The Parisian scholar Jacques Almain (ca. 1480–1515) answered Cajetan with arguments for conciliar superiority in A Book concerning the Authority of the Church.2 Almain held papal fallibility and conciliar infallibility, and defended as legitimate the assembling of a reform council against a pope. Cajetan responded in late 1512 with an Apology, rebutting Almain’s positions one by one. The Cajetan-Almain dispute raised issues underlying several Reformation controversies. The source of bishops’ authority remained so unsettled that the Council of Trent refrained from treating ecclesiology to avoid clashes over Spanish Catholic episcopalist views, akin to those of Almain. The jurist Johannes Reuchlin (1455–1522) had become the leading Christian Hebraist of the day. From study of the Jewish cabbala, Reuchlin claimed to

1 De comparatione auctoritatis Papae et Concilii cum apologia eiusdem tractatus (Rome, 1511), ed. Vincentius M. Jacobus Pollet (Rome, 1936), trans. in James H. Burns and Thomas M. Izbicki, eds., Conciliarism and Papalism (Cambridge, 1997), 1–133. On Cajetan’s ecclesiology see Olivier de la Brosse, Le pape et le concile. La comparison de leurs pouvoirs à la veille de la Réforme (Paris, 1965); Anton Bodem, Das Wesen der Kirche nach Kardinal Cajetan (Trier, 1971); and Ulrich Horst, “Der papa infallibilis und der papa hereticus nach Cajetan,” in Zwischen Konziliarismus und Reformation: Studien zur Ekklesiologie im Dominikanerorden (Rome, 1985), 27–54. On Cajetan’s career see Barbara Hallensleben, “Thomas de Vio Cajetanus: Erneuerer der Theologie für eine erneuerte Kirche,” in Martin H. Jung and Peter Walter, eds., Theologen des 16. Jahrhunderts: Humanismus – Reformation – Katholische Erneuerung (Darmstadt, 2002), 65–82; and Michael O’Connor, Cajetan’s Biblical Commentaries: Motive and Method (Leiden, 2007). 2 Jacques Almain, Libellus de auctoritate ecclesiae seu sacrorum conciliorum eam representantium contra Thomam de Vio (Paris, 1512), trans. in Burns and Izbicki, eds., Conciliarism and Papalism, 134–200. On the context in Paris see James K. Farge, Orthodoxy and Reform in Early Reformation France: The Faculty of Theology of Paris, 1500–1543 (Leiden, 1985), 220–225.

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have unlocked hidden mysteries of Scripture and the universe.3 Controversy ignited in 1510 when Reuchlin contested the confiscation of Jewish books, begun in the Rhineland by the Jewish convert Johann Pfefferkorn (1469–1523), who charged the books with insulting Christian beliefs; Reuchlin argued that they were protected by imperial law and served Christian study of Scripture. His report came out in a larger work, Augenspiegel (Eye glasses, 1511), which broadened his legal case for the rights of Jews in the empire.4 Against Reuchlin, the inquisitor Jacob Hochstraten, OP (ca. 1450–1527) obtained university condemnations of Augenspiegel in Cologne, Louvain, and Paris, followed by a papal censure in 1520.5 Attacks on the Jews and their Talmud characterized anti-Reuchlin works by Pfefferkorn and the Cologne theologian Arnold von Tungern, OP (ca. 1470–1540). Reuchlin’s Defense against his Calumniators, Accusers from Cologne (1513) called his opponents deceivers for railing against works they had not read. The humanists Crotus Rubeanus (1480–1539) and Ulrich von Hutten (1488–1523) collaborated on the widely read Letters of Obscure Men laced with ridicule of Reuchlin’s Dominican opponents, which spread anticlerical and anti-Scholastic attitudes which in time drew younger humanists to side with the Reformation against the Catholic establishment.6

Early Catholic Responses to Reformation Doctrines Catholic theologians responded to early Protestant programs of doctrinal recentering, ecclesial restructuring, and pastoral revival with books and popular pamphlets defending the tradition and calling for official censure 3

De verbo mirifico (1494) and De arte cabalista (1515), of which Latin and German texts are in Johannes Reuchlin, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Widu-Wolfgang Ehlers et al. (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, 1996–), I and II/1. A Latin/English edition of the latter is On the Art of the Kabbalah, trans. Martin and Sarah Goodman (New York, 1983; repr. Lincoln, 1993). 4 Augenspiegel, in Reuchlin, Sämtliche Werke, IV/1 (1999), 15–168. A translation of the report of 1510 is in Johannes Reuchlin, Recommendation Whether to Confiscate, Destroy and Burn All Jewish Books, trans. Peter Wortsman (New York and Mahwah, NJ, 2000). Daniel O’Callaghan gives an annotated version in The Preservation of Jewish Religious Books in Sixteenth-Century Germany: Johannes Reuchlin’s Augenspiegel (Leiden, 2013), 120–198. 5 On Reuchlin’s case in Rome see David H. Price, Johannes Reuchlin and the Campaign to Destroy Jewish Books (New York, 2011), 163–173, 193–195, and 201–203. 6 Ulrich von Hutten et al., Letters of Obscure Men, trans. Francis G. Stokes, intro. Hajo Holborn (Philadelphia, 1964 [2 vols., 1515–1517]). A revisionist interpretation of the Reuchlin controversy is James H. Overfield, Humanism and Scholasticism in Late Medieval Germany (Princeton, 1984). Differing from Overfield are Hans Peterse, Jacobus Hoogstraeten gegen Johannes Reuchilin (Mainz, 1995); Erika Rummel, The Case against Johann Reuchlin (Toronto, 2002); and Price, Johannes Reuchlin and the Campaign to Destroy Jewish Books.

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for heresy.7 We review here examples of this Counter-Reformation theology, especially works now accessible through recent editions and studies.8 Two Dominicans wrote early against Luther. Sylvester Mazzolini Prierias (1456–1527) was Master of the Sacred Palace, the pope’s in-house theologian, from 1515 to his death in 1527.9 Cajetan completed his decade as Dominican Master General in 1518, was made a cardinal in 1517, and continued composing the last part of his commentary on the Summa theologiae of Thomas Aquinas. Prierias affirmed papal superiority over councils in his theological dictionary, the Summa Silvestrina (1514–1515), while branding heretical an appeal from the pope to a council. Against Luther’s 95 Theses, Prierias’s Dialogus (1518) charged Luther with heresy for diverging from the teaching and practice of the Roman Church. Prierias gave no Scripture warrants, but appealed in some cases to positions of Aquinas as normative. Luther claimed that Prierias misjudged his disputation theses by taking them for asserted positions, but Prierias’s method moved Luther toward espousing Scripture as the overriding norm of teaching and practice. Prierias’s works against Luther had few 7 Recent publications include an edition of ninety-nine German Catholic polemical pamphlets printed from 1518 to 1530, Flugschriften gegen die Reformation, ed. Adolf Laube and Ulman Weiβ, 2 vols. in 3 parts (Berlin, 1997 and 2000); the text collection Luther as Heretic: Ten Catholic Responses to Martin Luther, 1518 to 1541, ed. Matt Patrick Graham and David Bagchi (Eugene, 2019), giving translations of shorter works by Tetzel, Eck, Emser, Alveld, Coclaeus, Wimpina, and Paul Bachmann; an extensive review and analysis, Karl-Heinz Braun, Wilbirgis Klaiber, and Christoph Moos, eds., Glaube(n) im Disput: Neuere Forschungen zu den altgläubigen Kontroversisten des Reformations-Zeitalter (Münster, 2020); and Volker Leppin’s reflection on the century-long promotion of editions and studies by the Corpus Catholicorum society, Von der Kontroverse zur Historisierung (Münster, 2018). Yves Congar’s observation that the acrimony and atomizing tendencies of these works, while understandable in their heated context, make them of little value for constructing ordered theological proposals in our later day, is worth recalling: “The Encounter between Christian Confessions – Yesterday and Today,” in Dialogue between Christians: Catholic Contributions to Ecumenism, trans. Philip Loretz (Westminster, MD, 1966 [1958]). 135–159, at 135–139. 8 Many Protestant controversialists are treated elsewhere in this work, while concise introductions to the Catholic controversialists are given in the Dictionary of the Reformation, ed. Klaus Ganzer and Bruno Steimer (New York, 2004); entries updated from Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche, 3rd ed., ed. Walter Kasper, 11 vols. (Freiburg, 1992–2001). Also, Katholischen Theologen der Reformationszeit, ed. Erwin Iserloh, 5 vols. (Münster, 1984–1989), enlarged by volume VI, ed. Heribert Smolinsky and Peter Walter (2004). 9 Prierias’s four works against Luther are in Dokumente zur Causa Lutheri (1517–1521), ed. Peter Fabisch and Erwin Iserloh, 2 vols. (Münster, 1988–1991), I, 33–189. Studies include Carl Lindberg, “Prierias and his Significance for Luther’s Development,” Sixteenth Century Journal 3 (1972), 45–64; Jared Wicks, “Roman Reactions to Luther: The First Year, 1518,” Catholic Historical Review 69 (1983), 521–562, repr. in Luther’s Reform: Studies on Conversion and the Church (Mainz, 1992; repr. Eugene, 2019), 151–187; Horst, Zwischen Konziliarismus und Reformation, 127–162; and Michael Tavuzzi, Prierias: The Life and Works of Silvestro Mazzolini da Prierio (Durham, NC, 1997).

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readers, but Erasmus noted that their arguments, though inept, drove Luther to divisive positions.10 Cajetan studied Luther’s Explanations of the Ninety-Five Theses and other published texts on confession and excommunication before he met the Reformer in 1518 when he was papal legate to the Imperial Diet of Augsburg. After Emperor Maximillian denounced Luther to Rome for obstinately holding doctrines censured by Prierias, Cajetan was delegated to expedite the case against Luther, either by gaining a retraction or having him held for punishment. Cajetan critically assessed Luther’s positions in ten short treatises before he met Luther three times, and he added five more treatises during and after the meetings.11 But Cajetan raised only two topics on which Luther should recant his erroneous – not heretical – views: first, his denial of Pope Clement VI’s teaching in the text Unigenitus (1343) on indulgences remitting temporal punishment for sin based on the merits of Christ and the saints; and second, Luther’s proposal of a fully assured “faith in the sacrament,” especially in the confessor’s absolution in confession.12 Luther countered Cajetan’s demands both in Proceedings at Augsburg and momentously in his appeal to the pope (October 16, 1518) against improper treatment at the hands of Prierias and Cajetan. Expecting a papal condemnation, Luther went a step further with an appeal to a future general council (November 29, 1518).13 When Luther contested the divine origin of papal primacy at the Leipzig Disputation in mid-1519, Cajetan responded in 1521 with intricate counterarguments in The Divine Institution of the Pontifical Office over the Whole Church in the Person of the Apostle Peter.14 This plodding work gives Luther’s views 10

Correspondence of Erasmus, ed. Roger A. B. Mynors et al. (Toronto, 1974–), VI, 137–138, 298–299, VII, 112–113, 120, and XIII, 319–320. The treatises took the form of scholastic “disputed questions” beginning with citations of Luther’s arguments. See Charles Morerod, Cajetan et Luther en 1518. Édition, traduction, et commentaire des opuscules d’Augsburg de Cajetan, 2 vols. (Fribourg, 1994); and Jared Wicks, Cajetan Responds: A Reader in Reformation Controversy (Washington, 1978; repr. Eugene, 2013), translating seven treatises and synopsizing eight others. Studies include Jared Wicks, Cajetan und die Anfänge der Reformation (Münster, 1983), 80–112; Wicks, “Roman Reactions to Luther,” 161–181; and Bernard Alfred R. Felmberg, Die Ablasslehre Kardinal Cajetans (Leiden, 1998). 12 See Jared Wicks, “Fides sacramenti – fides specialis: Luther’s Development in 1518,” Gregorianum 65 (1984), 53–87; repr. in Luther’s Reform, 117–147. 13 A revisionist account of the Augsburg encounter of 1518 is Henry Ansgar Kelly, “Luther at Augsburg, 1518: New Light on Papal Strategies,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 70 (2019), 805–822. 14 Latin edition: Thomas de Vio Cajetanus: De divina institutione pontificatus Romani Pontificis, ed. Friedrich Lauchert [Corpus Catholicorum 10] (Münster, 1925); in English in Wicks, Cajetan Responds, 105–143, giving translations and synopses. Luther had stated his position in Thesis 13 for the Leipzig Disputation (WA 2, 432; LW 31, 318). Cajetan was countering Luther’s biblical 11

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sentence by sentence followed by refutations, as Cajetan strove to show the cogency of Christ’s instituting words to Peter in Matthew 16 and John 21. After opposing Luther in 1518–1521, Prierias and Cajetan turned to other matters.15 But several German Catholic defenders began contesting the positions of Luther and other Reformers. In Albertine Saxony Duke George sponsored a program of anti-Lutheran publications before he died in 1539, with substantial works from Augustin von Alveld, OFM (ca. 1480–ca. 1535) and Hieronymus Emser (1478–1527).16 From the German diocesan clergy, Johann Eck (1486–1543) and Johannes Cochlaeus (1479–1552) were productive controversialists. German Dominicans in this effort were Jacob Hochstraten, a drafter of the Cologne and Louvain University censures of Luther’s positions, and Johann Dietenberger (1475–1537), who contested the Protestant Sola Scriptura.17 Franciscans in early controversies included Thomas Murner (1475–1537), who enlivened disputes over papacy, priesthood, and the saints with vernacular satirical poetry, and Kaspar Schatzgeyer (1463–1527), a Catholic interpreter of Christian freedom and defender of eucharistic sacrifice.18 The Dutch churchman Albert Pigge (ca. 1490–1542) countered Reformation ecclesiology with a massive formulation of papal primacy and infallibility, continuing the views of Prierias and Cajetan, and attacked Calvin’s 1539 Institutes of the Christian Religion on free choice and predestination.19 Outside Germany, Catholic theological responses to Luther’s errors originated in Louvain and Paris.20

arguments given in Resolutio Lutheriana super propositione XIII de potestate papae (1519: WA 2, 183–240, esp. 188–197). 15 On Prierias’s anti-witchcraft activity see Michael Tavuzzi, Renaissance Inquisitors: Dominican Inquisitors and Inquisitorial Districts in Northern Italy, 1477–1527 (Leiden, 2007), 149–208. Wicks, Cajetan Responds, also gives Cajetan’s texts on behalf of eucharistic sacrifice (1531) and the meritorious value in Christ of graced good works (1532). 16 A controversial work by Emser and two by Alveld are in Luther as Heretic, ed. Graham and Bagchi. On this Saxon controversial theology see Heribert Smolinsky, Augustin von Alveld and Hieronymus Emser: Eine Untersuchung zur Kontroverstheologie der frühen Reformationszeit im Herzogtum Sachsen (Münster, 1983). On the ecclesial context see Christoph Volkmar, Catholic Reform in the Age of Luther: Duke George of Saxony and the Church, 1488–1525 (Leiden, 2018). 17 Critical edition of Dietenberger: Phimostomus scripturariorum (1532), ed. Erwin Iserloh and Peter Fabisch [Corpus Catholicorum 38] (Münster, 1985). 18 Recent editions of Schatzgeyer are Von der waren Christilichen und Evangelischen freyheit (1524), together with De vera libertate evangelica (1525), ed. Philip Schäfer [Corpus Catholicorum 40] (Münster, 1987), and Schriften zur Verteidigung der Messe, ed. Erwin Iserloh and Peter Fabisch [Corpus Catholicorum 37] (Münster, 1984). 19 Albert Pigge (or Pighius in Latin), Hierarchiae ecclesiasticae assertio (Cologne 1538; repr. 1544, 1551, 1558, and 1572). The next section will treat Pigge’s dispute with Calvin. 20 See the passages on Paris theologians Beda and Clichtove in Chapter 10 in this volume, and on Driedo and Latomus of Louvain in Chapter 12.

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At the Leipzig Disputation in 1519 Eck and Luther debated papal primacy.21 Eck brought out De primatu Petri in 1521, arguing – unlike Cajetan – from amassed patristic comments on the New Testament passages on Peter to demonstrate that the reception history showed an early and continuous conviction that Christ founded the papacy. The aim was to show Luther’s departure from a longstanding consensus on the biblical texts grounding the authority of Peter’s successors. The method shaped Eck’s other works against Luther on confession, penitential satisfaction for sin, and contrition, along with a defense of images against Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt (1486–1541).22 Eck’s major contribution was Enchiridion of Commonplaces against Luther and Other Enemies of the Church (1525, with 121 reprints and translations).23 The work grew to treat thirty-eight topics, giving on each biblical and traditional proofs, the Reformers’ objections, and Catholic rebuttals. Eck took over arguments advanced by others, such as King Henry VIII (b. 1491; r. 1509–1547), John Fisher (1469–1535), and Johann Cochlaeus. Eck formed the central stream of modern Catholic ecclesiology by placing church authority first, followed by the sacraments, and then normative practices in worship and church life. In 1530 Eck was, without intending it, formative of Lutheran positions when he brought to the Augsburg Diet his 404 Articles, a list of doctrinal errors allegedly spawned by Luther. This forced Philip

21 Texts: WA 59; also “Johannes Eck: Polemische Schriften aus dem Umfeld der Leipzig Disputation mit Karlstadt und Luther,” in Dokumente zur Causa Lutheri, ed. Fabisch and Iserloh, II, 241–315. A recent study is Michael Root, “The Catholic Reception of the Leipzig Disputation,” in Mickey Mattox, Richard J. Serina, Jr., and Jonathan Mumme, eds., Luther at Leipzig: Martin Luther, the Leipzig Debate, and the Sixteenth-Century Reformations (Leiden, 2019), 288–319. 22 Eck’s De primatu and works on sacramental penance have not been critically edited or translated. But on images there is A Reformation Debate: Karlstadt, Emser, and Eck on Sacred Images. Three Treatises in Translation, trans. Bryan D. Mangrum and Giuseppe Scavizzi (Toronto, 1998), 97–125. Luther as Heretic, ed. Graham and Bagchi, gives texts of Eck’s 1519 intervention on behalf of Emser and his 1541 address at the Diet of Regensburg. Recent works on Eck include Erwin Iserloh, Johannes Eck (1486–1543): Scholastiker, Humanist, Kontroverstheologe (Münster, 1986); the symposium Erwin Iserloh, ed., Johannes Eck (1486–1543) im Streit der Jahrhunderte (Münster, 1986); Franz Xavier Bischof and Harry Oelke, eds., Luther und Eck: Opponenten der Reformationsgeschichte im Vergleich (Munich, 2017); and, from a Lutheran perspective, Manfred Schulze, “Johannes Eck im Kampf gegen Martin Luther,” Lutherjahrbuch 63 (1996), 39–68. 23 Critical edition, Johannes Eck: Enchiridion locorum communium adversus Lutherum et alios hostes ecclesiae (1525–1543), ed. Pierre Fraenkel [Corpus Catholicorum 34] (Münster, 1979) and in English, Johannes Eck, Enchiridion of Commonplaces against Luther and Other Enemies of the Church, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Grand Rapids, 1979). Corpus Catholicorum added, as vol. 36, a critical edition of Eck’s De sacrificio missae (1526), ed. Erwin Iserloh, Vinzenz Pfnür, and Peter Fabisch (Münster, 1982).

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Melanchthon to formulate the articles of the normative Lutheran text, the Augsburg Confession, as a positive profession of traditional belief.24 Johannes Cochlaeus is better known today through editions of his works and a major interpretive study.25 His notorious but long influential Deeds and Writings of Martin Luther (1549) has appeared in English.26 Cochlaeus’s industry in publications against Luther and other Reformers was not matched by theological acumen, as his arguments seldom go beyond excerpting from his opponents texts which readers would find shocking.27 Luther’s positions of the early 1520s loom large in Cochlaeus’s post-1530 works, so much so as to erase the memory of the Augsburg Colloquy of August 15–31, 1530, in which Eck and Melanchthon reached agreement on justification by faith and grace.28 Notable English opponents of the early Reformation were Bishop John Fisher (1469–1535) and Thomas More (1477/78–1535) – both executed for their refusal, which had become treasonous, to swear to Henry VIII’s supremacy over the church in England. Recent studies treat in depth Fisher’s opposition

John Eck, “Four Hundred Four Articles for the Imperial Diet of Augsburg,” trans. Robert Rosin, in Sources and Contexts of the Book of Concord, ed. Robert Kolb and James A. Nestigen (Minneapolis, 2001), 31–82. 25 Works: Responsio ad Johannem Bugenhagium Pomeranum (1526), ed. Ralph Keen (Nieuwkoop, 1988); “The Seven-Headed Luther” (1529), trans. Ralph Keen, in Luther as Heretic, ed. Graham and Bagchi, 141–168; Philippicae I–VII (1534, 1540, 1544, 1549, against works by Melanchthon), ed. Ralph Keen, 2 vols. (Nieuwkoop, 1995–1996). David Bagchi treats how the nationalism of Luther’s appeal to the nobility was countered by Cochlaeus, who argued that Germany’s greatness lay in being in the Holy Roman Empire, which linked it with Roman Christianity: “‘Teutschland uber alle Welt’: Nationalism and Catholicism in Early Reformation Germany,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 82 (1991), 39–58. An interpretation, attending to Cochlaeus’s early humanistic work and his theological anthropology, is Monique Samuel Scheyder, Johannes Cochlaeus: Humaniste et adversaire de Luther (Nancy, 1993). 26 “The Deeds and Writings of Dr. Martin Luther,” in Luther’s Lives: Two Contemporary Accounts of Martin Luther, ed. Ralph Keen, trans. Elizabeth Vandiver (Manchester and New York, 2002), 53–351. 27 For the Council of Trent, Cochlaeus delivered excerpts showing Protestant errors on which the council would set forth Catholic doctrine. See Vinzenz Pfnür, “Verwirft das Konzil von Trient in der Lehre von den Sakramenten die reformatorische Bekenntnisposition? Zur Frage der Kenntnis der reformatorischen Theologie auf dem Konzil von Trient,” in Lehrverurteilungen – kirchentrennend?, 4 vols. (Freiburg, 1986–1994), volume III: Materialien zur Lehre von den Sakramenten und vom kirchlichen Amt, ed. Wolfhart Pannenberg (Freiburg, 1990), 159–186. 28 See Vinzenz Pfnür, Einig in der Rechtfertigungslehre? (Wiesbaden, 1970), 284–312. On the colloquy see Jared Wicks, “The Lutheran forma ecclesiae in the Colloquy at Augsburg, August 1530,” in Gillian R. Evans, ed., Christian Authority: Essays in Honour of Henry Chadwick (Oxford, 1988), 160–203, at 171–177; repr. in Wicks, Luther’s Reform, 279–316. A survey of the theological colloquies is Vinzenz Pfnür, “Colloquies,” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation, ed. Hans J. Hillerbrand, 4 vols. (New York, 1996), I, 375–383. 24

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to the Reformation from 1521 to 1527.29 His polemical works aimed to secure Catholic doctrinal and devotional foundations against attacks and so confirm the faith of the wavering. As early as 1521 he singled out Luther’s three basic errors not highlighted in Leo X’s Exsurge Domine, namely denial of papal primacy, justification by faith alone, and attributing doctrinal authority only to Scripture. Fisher’s 1523 Confutation of Luther, frequently reprinted, treats Luther’s teaching as a coherent body rising from the three foundations. In the preface Fisher explains in ten concise truths how doctrine does not arise from Scripture alone, but needs a conciliar and/or papal judge of controversies to settle disputed issues.30 The nine anti-reformation defenses written by Thomas More between 1523 and 1533 exist in exemplary editions in More’s Complete Works.31 They extend from the Responsio ad Lutherum (1523), a rebuttal of Luther’s attack on Henry VIII, through a lengthy duel with Karlstadt (1486–December 24, 1541), to works written after More’s 1532 resignation as lord chancellor. Before his arrest in April 1534 he contended (1) against William Tyndale (ca. 1496–1536) in Books IV–VIII of The Confutation of Tyndale’s Answer, (2) against Christopher St. Germain (1460–1540) on clerical immunities and the existence of the church’s legislative powers, canon law, and independent courts, and (3) against recent works importing Zwingli’s alternative to Christ’s real eucharistic presence into England.32 For study of Reformation controversy carried out with style and verve, editions of the main works of the More-Tyndale clash give a rare opportunity, namely, More’s Dialogue Concerning Heresies (1529), Tyndale’s Answer unto Sir Thomas More’s Dialogue (1531), and More’s massive Confutation of Tyndale’s Answer (1532–1533).33 29 Brendan Bradshaw and Eamon Duffy, eds., Humanism, Reform and the Reformation: The Career of Bishop John Fisher (Cambridge, 1989); Richard Rex, The Theology of John Fisher (Cambridge, 1991). In 1527 Fisher turned from Reformation issues to the controversy over Henry VIII’s first marriage. From his Reformation phase: Assertionis Lutheranae Confutatio (1523; twenty printings; countering Luther’s 1520 Assertio of the articles censured in Exsurge Domine) and De veritate Corporis et Sanguinis Christi in Eucharistia (1527; six printings; against Oecolampadius). 30 “Prooemium” of Assertionis Lutheranae Confutatio, in Ioannis Fisheri opera omnia (Würzburg, 1597; repr. Farnborough, 1967), cols. 279–296. See also Brian Gogan, “Fisher’s View of the Church,” in Bradshaw and Duffy, eds., Humanism, Reform and the Reformation, 131–154. 31 Thomas More, Complete Works, ed. Richard Silvester et al., 10 vols. in 15 parts (New Haven, 1963–1998), V–XI. 32 See Louis A. Schuster, “Thomas More’s Polemical Career, 1523–1533,” in The Confutation of Tyndale’s Answer, in More, Complete Works, VIII, part 3 (1973), 1135–1268. John Guy informs well on the St. Germain–More debate, as main author of the introduction to Debellation of Salem and Bizance, in Complete Works, X (1987), xvii–xciv. 33 More’s Dialogue, in Complete Works, VI (1981); Tyndale’s Answer, ed. Anne M. O’Donnell and Jared Wicks (Washington, DC, 2000); and More’s Confutation, in Complete Works, VIII, parts I– III (1973). The last work, often criticized, received a sympathetic interpretation by Eamon Duffy

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Theologically, More developed notions of the church and of tradition to undergird his ripostes to Tyndale and his rejection of Henry VIII’s claims over the church.34 Tyndale viewed the church as the little flock of spiritually guided believers persecuted by the carnal multitude both in biblical history and the previous 800 years. For More the church was visible and commonly known, as the whole catholic people, both clergy and lay folk. The oral word of Jesus and his apostles assembled this church, which existed prior to the New Testament Scriptures. The Holy Spirit led the early church to its canonical consensus on the biblical books. The tradition of church life and teaching gave rise to authentic interpretations that ascertained binding biblical doctrine and practice or excluded deviations from God’s revelation. This tradition, oral and lived as well as written, came from God’s ongoing revelation written by the Holy Spirit in believing hearts. Councils and synods, assisted by the Holy Spirit, articulated the consensus when they condemned heresies and issued norms of practice. The latter bound more authoritatively than enactments of any ruler or parliament.35 More at first ascribed little to the pope, but under pressure of Henry VIII’s claims and with insights from the Fathers and Fisher he came to hold that the pope had a necessary role in preventing schisms. Fisher and More laid bases later developed by seventeenth-century English Catholic recusants on Scripture and its canon, tradition, and the gospel announced orally and planted in believing hearts.36

The Controversial Works of John Calvin (1509–1564) This treatment of early Protestant controversial theology is selective, as other parts of this volume present argumentative exchanges at key moments in the Reformers’ development, such as Luther’s heated debates with Erasmus, Zwingli, Karlstadt, and the Spiritual enthusiasts (Schwämer). Protestant in “Thomas More’s Confutation: A Literary Failure?” in Peter Clarke and Charlotte Methuen, eds., The Church and Literature (Woodbridge, 2012), 134–155. 34 Studies include Brian Gogan, The Common Corps of Christendom: Ecclesiological Themes in the Writings of Sir Thomas More (Leiden, 1982); John Guy, “Morus, Thomas,” in TRE 23: 325–330; and Eamon Duffy, “The ‘comen knowen multitude of crysten men’: A Dialogue Concerning Heresies and the Defense of Christendom,” in George M. Logan, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Thomas More (Cambridge, 2011), 191–213. 35 See Tyndale, Answer, xxxiv, 28, 47, 105–109, and More, Dialogue, in Complete Works, VI, 205, but also on the “comen faith and byleve of crystys chyrche,” 37, 62, 161, and 169. 36 See George H. Tavard, The Seventeenth Century Tradition: A Study in Recusant Thought (Leiden, 1978).

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confessional developments treated elsewhere include the intra-Lutheran conflicts leading to the Formula of Concord, Anglican-Puritan polemical exchanges, and the challenge of Arminianism to Reformed orthodoxy. An early high point of Reformed controversial writing came in 1539 in John Calvin’s Reply to Sadoleto, to the cardinal who appealed to the Genevans to return to Catholic unity resting on the age-old tradition.37 Calvin responded on elements of Reformed ecclesiology, especially the Word of God and discipline. Justification begins existentially in one’s awareness of helplessness before the tribunal of God, who however offers gratuitous mercy through Christ and new zeal for God’s glory, supported by the sacraments engrafting believers into Christ. An evangelical minister gives testimony before the divine judge to the light by which he saw the church in ruins and came to learn and then dispense God’s reforming word. Several of Calvin’s controversial works are out in new editions in the Opera Omnia denuo recognita, begun in 1992.38 Calvin appears in fresh ways as a controversialist, beginning with his dispute with Pighius over free choice in conversion and salvation. Pighius attacked the 1539 edition of Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion both for denying human effort in preparing for grace and free choice in salvation and for its doctrine of double predestination. Calvin responded, first, in The Bondage and Liberation of the Will in 1543, against Pighius’s Books I–VI.39 Calvin clarifies the issue as less about corrupt 37

The texts: John Calvin, Opera selecta, ed. Petrus Barth, Wilhelm Niesel, and Dora Scheuner, 5 vols. (Munich, 1926–1952), I, 441–456 (Sadoleto) and 457–489 (Calvin); in English: “Reply to Sadolet,” in Calvin: Theological Treatises, trans. John Kelman Sutherland Reid (Philadelphia, 1954), 221–256; and John Calvin and Jacopo Sadoleto, A Reformation Debate, ed. John C. Olin (New York, 1966; 2nd ed. New York, 2000). Studies: Richard M. Douglas, Jacopo Sadoleto: Humanist and Reformer (Cambridge, MA, 1959); Alexandre Ganoczy, The Young Calvin (Philadelphia, 1987), 126, 254–259, and 279–281; and Bruce Gordon, Calvin (New Haven, 2009), 94–98. 38 Published in Geneva by Droz. Series IV, Scripta didactica et polemica, to mid-2020 include Contre la secte phantastique et furieuse des Libertins qui se nomment spirituelz (1545) and Response a un certain Holandois (1562), ed. Mirjam van Veen (2005); Brieve instruction pour armer tous bons fideles contre les erreurs de la secte commune des anabaptistes (1544), ed. Mirjam van Veen (2007); Defensio sanae et orthodoxae doctrinae de servitute et liberatione humani arbitrii, ed. Anthony N. S. Lane (2008); Epistolae duae (1537) and Deux Discours (1536), ed. Erik A. de Boer and Franz P. van Stam (2009); Defensio orthodoxae fidei de sacra trinitate contra prodigiosos errores Michaelis Serueti Hispani (1554), ed. Joy Kleinstuber (2009); and Pro G. Farello et collegis eius, adversus Petri Caroli . . . calumnias. Petri Caroli Refutatio blasphemiae Farellistarum in Sacrosanctam Trinitatem (1545), ed. Olivier Labarthe and Reinhard Bodenmann (2016). Series III, Scripta ecclesiastica, began with De aeterna Dei praedestinatione/De la prédestination eternelle (1552), ed. Wilhelm H. Neuser (1998). Wulfert de Greef describes all of Calvin’s controversial works in The Writings of John Calvin, Expanded Edition: An Introductory Guide (Louisville, 2008), 134–181. 39 Lane’s edition of Calvin’s Defensio on human choice enslaved and freed gives in facsimile reprint on pp. 333–450 Books I–VI of Pighius’s De libero hominis arbitrio. The Defensio in English translation is in John Calvin, The Bondage and Liberation of the Will: A Defence of the Orthodox

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behavior in the papal church, which Pighius admits, than about teaching that obscures Christ: “For his power is hidden in deep darkness, his office is consigned to oblivion, grace is almost brought to nothing.”40 Calvin fends off commonsense arguments for free choice being implied both by exhortations to do good and avoid vice and by the “if, then” structure of teaching on reward or punishment.41 Calvin lays a solid basis in Augustine on human corruption by the fall and on the unmerited grace of perseverance. He cites the Council of Orange (529) on God alone beginning conversion, to which he adds a biblical case on God’s efficacious “drawing” of the will to Christ.42 A further rebuttal of Pighius came in Calvin’s 1552 Concerning the Eternal Predestination of God, pointedly formulating positions of the Institutes on God’s actions “by which he elects some for salvation, leaving others to their condemnation, while by providence he governs human affairs.”43 To assure the purity of Geneva’s reform and show it to all, Calvin’s polemical works confronted Anabaptists, “Libertines,” and the protoUnitarian Michael Servetus (ca. 1511–1553). In the first skirmish (1544) Calvin refuted the Schleitheim Articles of Michael Sattler (1490–1527), adding a defense of the true humanity of Christ against Melchior Hoffmann (1495–1543) and refuting the alleged Anabaptist doctrine of “soul sleep” in the interval between death and final resurrection.44 In refutations of Anabaptism Calvin developed both the “covenantal” inclusion of one’s offspring in parental baptism and the Christian character of early modern states. Doctrine of Human Choice against Pigius, ed. Anthony N. S. Lane, trans. Graham I. Davies (Carlisle and Grand Rapids, 1996). 40 John Calvin, Defensio sanae et orthodoxae doctrinae de servitute et liberatione humani arbitrii adversus calumnias Alberti Pighii Campensis, ed. Anthony N. S. Lane (Geneva, 2008), 85–86; Bondage and Liberation of the Will, 18–19. 41 Defensio, ed. Lane (2008), 98–102, 105–106; Bondage and Liberation of the Will, 31–34, 37–38. 42 Defensio, ed. Lane (2008), 200–209; Bondage and Liberation of the Will, 128–136. Calvin cited Orange from Peter Crabbe’s Concilia Omnia (1538), in the Defensio, 151–152, 268–269 = Bondage and Liberation of the Will, 81–82, 188–189. 43 The work refutes Pighius’s Books VII–X, while answering later attacks by Jerome Bolsec and Georgio Siculo on Calvin’s doctrine. In Neuser’s 1998 edition, Oliver Fatio edited Calvin’s French version. In English: Concerning the Eternal Predestination of God, trans. John Kelman Sutherland Reid (London, 1961). 44 Veen’s 2007 edition refers to other Reformed anti-Anabaptist tracts, esp. Zwingli’s 1527 Elenchus. See Richard Stauffer, “Zwingli et Calvin, critiques de la confession de Schleitheim,” in Marc Leinhard, ed., The Origins and Characteristics of Anabaptism (The Hague, 1977), 126–147. The basic account is Willem Balke, Calvin and the Anabaptist Radicals, trans. William J. Heynen (Grand Rapids, 1981). For Calvin’s text in English see Treatises against the Anabaptists and Against the Libertines, trans. Benjamn Wirt Farley (Grand Rapids, 1982), 11–158. For parallel and differing anti-Anabaptist arguments see John Stanley Oyer, Lutheran Reformers against Anabaptists (The Hague, 1964).

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Historically the origins of the Libertines of Geneva are obscure, but Calvin saw the devil active in them.45 They were for him a serious threat both to godly doctrine and to the social order. The polemical treatise of 1545 links their teachings to early Gnostic and Manichean heresies and goes on to disqualify their biblical interpretation. Then follow rebuttals of Libertine notions of an omnipresent world spirit, of determinism, of an antinomian discrediting of moral norms, and of their denial of future resurrection. Also in 1545, Pierre Caroli (1480–1550), after a time adhering to the Reformation, was reconciled with the Sorbonne, and charged Calvin and Guillaume Farel (1489–1565) with heterodox Trinitarian doctrine, to which Calvin responded promptly, albeit under the pseudonym of Nicolas de Gallars.46 The burning in Geneva for heresy of Michael Servetus in 1553 weighs heavily on the later reputation of Calvin’s reform.47 But Catholic Vienne had already condemned Servetus and burned him in effigy, while Basel, Berne, and Zurich assented to Geneva’s condemnation. Calvin published his Defensio of orthodox Trinitarian doctrine against Servetus’s “prodigious errors” in time for the Frankfurt book fair of March 1554. The Defensio argues for a difference between forbidden coercion of belief and permissible measures by a Christian society to defend the faith it professes.48 The Defensio condemns thirty-eight heretical propositions excerpted from Servetus’s Christianismi restitutio. Servetus’s defense follows with Calvin’s rebuttal.49 The Defensio adds Calvin’s own patristic case for the Trinity and refutes other errors of Servetus on astrology, baptism, the Lord’s Supper, and the soul’s immortality.50 A thread in the Defensio is how Trinitarian and Christological orthodoxy support redemptive promises of profound consolation.51 45 Veen’s introduction to the 2005 edition surveys accounts of the Libertines’ origins, but leaves much uncertain. The edition also gives Calvin’s 1547 letter against a Franciscan adherent of Libertine ideas as well as Calvin’s anti-Libertine tract of 1562. Farley’s English translation gives the work of 1545 on 187–326. 46 On Caroli and the dispute see de Greef, The Writings, 158–160. 47 On Servetus see Roland Bainton, The Hunted Heretic, revised with updated bibliography by Peter Hughes (Providence, 2005); and Jerome Friedman, Michael Servetus: A Case Study in Total Heresy (Geneva, 1978). Servetus’s principal work is Christianismi Restitutio (1553; repr. Frankfurt, 1966), in English in parts under different titles, trans. Christopher A. Hoffman and Marian Hillar (Lewiston, NY, 2007–2015). An early hostile reaction to Calvin’s Defensio by Sebastian Castellion has appeared in a critical edition: Contra libellum Calvini, ed. Uwe Plath (Geneva, 2019). A basic account, treating attacks on Calvin in the aftermath, is Gordon, Calvin, 217–232. 48 49 Calvin, Defensio, ed. Kleinstuber (2009), 9–27. Ibid., 52–111. 50 Ibid., 112–116 (Zurich letter), 118–128 (on Christ as “Son of God”), 128–149 (patristic evidence), 149–190 (astrology, sacraments, immortality, etc.). The concluding pages (209–212) offer compendiously Servetus’s accounts of God, Christ, the Spirit, human beings, sin’s corruption, faith, righteousness, and the difference between the Old and New Testaments. 51 Ibid., 7, 22 (suavissima consolatio from the two-nature doctrine), 44, 110, 211.

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These selections show Calvin’s vigor and high level of controversial work, which extended further into inter-Protestant disputes, especially with Lutherans over Christ’s presence in the Lord’s Supper.52

Protestant Arguments against the Council of Trent In this era’s controversial theology, Protestant responses to the Council of Trent are a notable chapter, which moved from objections as it started to methodical refutations of its promulgated teachings.53 After his election Pope Paul III (b. 1468, pope 1534–1549) moved toward holding a general council, for which he issued a first call in mid-1536 to begin a council in Mantua at Pentecost 1537. But would the Reformation leaders agree to attend? The prince-elector of Saxony was contrary, since Paul III said the council would aim to root out heresy, clearly targeting the Lutherans.54 After delays, Trent opened in late 1545, and news spread of its first actions. Philip Melanchthon (1497–1560) formulated the case for the Lutheran Estates to hold to the Augsburg Confession and not attend the council.55 He held that pure doctrine, from Scripture and the Creeds, was now taught in the Lutheran territories, in contrast with Rome’s errors and abuses, about which the bishops at Trent showed no concern. Paul III’s council was not a free Christian council but a tribunal of judges bitterly opposed to Lutheran doctrine. The pope was not a proper judge, but should be the accused; his predecessor Leo X (b. 1475; pope 1513–1521) had caused divisions by his indulgences and bull of 1520 against Luther, filled with errors contrary to Christian truth. Paul III called this council to confirm his tyranny, and they

52

See Gordon, Calvin, 233–249, on Calvin and Luther’s heirs, esp. on Joachim Westphal’s polemic in 1552 against Calvin’s denial of Christ’s presence in the elements of Holy Communion. 53 See Gottfried Maron’s survey, “Il Concilio di Trento dal punto di vista evangelico,” in Giuseppe Alberigo and Iginio Rogger, eds., Il Concilio di Trento nella prospettiva del terzo millennio (Brescia, 1997), 131–154. 54 Luther challenged the council in his hardline Smalcald Articles (1537), but the German Lutheran Estates held instead to the Augsburg Confession and its Apology. Cochlaeus responded to Luther’s Articles in Ein nötig und christich bedencken (1538), published in Drei Schriften gegen Luthers Schmalkaldische Artikel von Cochläus, Witzel und Hoffmeister, ed. Phil Hans Volz [Corpus Catholicorum 18] (Münster, 1932). 55 Philip Melanchthon, Ursach, Warumb die Stende, so der Augspurgischen confession anhangen, Christliche Leer erstlich angenommen und endtlich auch darbey zuverharren gedenken. Auch, warumb das vermeinte Trientische Concilium weder zubesuchen noch darein zu willigen sey, in Melanchthons Werke in Auswahl, ed. Robert Stupperich, 7 vols. in 9 parts (Gütersloh, 1951–1975), I, 411–448.

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would condemn justification by faith and the all-sufficiency of Christ’s sacrifice by teaching on the mass.56 When Trent suspended work in March 1547, Calvin brought out the documents of the council’s first seven sessions, with accompanying “antidotes.”57 Calvin’s preface references his Necessity of Reforming the Church, which justifies the Reformation.58 Trent, for Calvin, showed no promise of reform in response to widespread complaints, while its doctrines called forth attacks on Scripture and traditions as normative witnesses to the gospel, on the biblical canon including the Old Testament apocryphal or deuterocanonical books, on the official standing of the Latin Vulgate translation, and on prescribing a biblical interpretation agreeing with perennial church teaching and the consensus positions of the Church Fathers.59 He saw adoption of the Vulgate as a retreat into barbarism, after the critical work of Lorenzo Valla (ca. 1406–1457) and Erasmus. Trent’s Decree on Justification has a role for human assent brought to meet God’s grace on the way to justification, while Calvin counters that Scripture has the Lord “creating a new heart,” leaving no place for cooperation. Where Trent divides the causality of justification between God’s imputation and an inhering quality, Calvin posits the inclusive “gratuitous acceptance of God . . . outside us, because we are righteous in Christ alone.” Trent excludes certainty about being justified, on which Calvin instead states that believers know they are God’s children, for conscience, “resting in the testimony of the Holy Spirit, boldly glories in the presence of God, in the hope of eternal life.” Concluding, Calvin says that “a pious council” is highly desirable for settling present dissensions, but Trent gives no hope of this. So one’s recourse must be to the Lord.60 56

Melanchthon, Ursach, Warumb die Stende, 413–414 (Lutheran pure doctrine), 416–418 (errors not corrected by bishops), 438–443 (papal judges at Trent as suspect; Leo X’s errors and the present aims of the council). 57 CR 35, 365–506, in Tracts Relating to the Reformation, trans. Henry Beveridge, 3 vols. (Edinburgh, 1844–1851; repr. Eugene, 2002), III, 17–188. See Theodore W. Casteel, “Calvin and Trent: Calvin’s Reaction to the Council of Trent in the Context of his Conciliar Thought,” Harvard Theological Review 63 (1970), 91–117. A recent account is Michael Horton, “John Calvin’s Commentary on the Council of Trent,” in Jennifer Powell McNutt and David Laubert, eds., The People’s Book: The Reformation and the Bible (Downers Grove, 2017), 155–170. 58 CR 34, 453–534, trans. Reid in Calvin: Theological Treatises, 183–216. 59 On these matters see Jared Wicks, “The Decrees of the Council of Trent on the Old Testament Canon, the Vulgate and Biblical Interpretation,” in Magne Saebø, ed., Hebrew Bible/Old Testament: The History of its Interpretation, 5 vols. (Göttingen, 1996–2014), II, 624–636. 60 Recent studies of Trent on justification are Vinzenz Pfnür, “Zur Verurteilung der reformatorischen Rechtfertigungslehre auf dem Konzil von Trient,” Annuarium Historiae Conciliorum 8 (1976), 407–428; and Otto H. Pesch, “Die Canones des Trienter Rechtfertigungsdekretes: Wen

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When Pope Julius III (b. 1487; pope 1550–1555) called for Trent to resume work in 1551, Protestant rulers were again invited to take part.61 A response is Philip Melanchthon’s Confessio Saxonica, further elaborating the Augsburg Confession.62 The new text refutes calumnies spreading about doctrines taught in Electoral Saxony and its allied territories, while restating Lutheran tenets for posterity. The 1551 text resembles Melanchthon’s Apology of the Augsburg Confession (1531), but exudes new confidence over the Reformed teaching and church life being established in Lutheran territories. Hope of convergence and union had faded. It claims that Tridentine teaching lacks a sense of anguish over sin, of the consoling certainty of forgiving grace, and of the imperfect nature of good works, while Lutheran teaching holds firmly to the church’s visibility, to the Real Presence of Christ “substantially” in Holy Communion, and to the rightful role of civil authority. Trent’s completed documents must be revised, so as to correct abuses and not oppose the Lutheran standpoints.

Monuments of Reformation Controversy Constructed by Chemnitz and Bellarmine A Lutheran work of long-term influence is the Examination of the Council of Trent by Martin Chemnitz (1522–1586) that treats Trent’s doctrinal decrees and canons in four volumes (1566–1573).63 Earlier Chemnitz defended Johann Monheim (ca. 1509–1564) of Düsseldorf against attacks on his catechism by trafen sie? Wen treffen sie heute?” in Lehrverurteilungen – Kirchentrennend? volume II: Materialien zu den Lehrverurteilungen und zur Theologie der Rechtfertigung, ed. Karl Lehmann (Freiburg, 1989), 243–282. 61 On this issue and the eventual Protestant presence see Hubert Jedin, Geschichte des Konzils von Trient, 4 vols. in 5 parts (Freiburg, 1949–1975), III, 304–314 and 359–378. Also Peter Meinhold, “Die Protestanten am Konzil zu Trient,” in Il Concilio di Trento e la riforma tridentina, 2 vols. (Rome, 1965), I, 277–315; and Robert Kolb, “The German Lutheran Reaction to the Third Period of the Council of Trent,” Lutherjahrbuch 51 (1984), 63–95. 62 Text in Melanchthons Werke in Auswahl, ed. Stupperich, VI, 80–167. Georg Maior published Lutheran arguments against Trent: De origine et autoritate verbi Dei (1550) and Refutatio horrendae prophanationis coenae Domini (1551), both offered digitally by the Bavarian State Library. 63 Martin Chemnitz, Examen decretorum Concilii Tridentini, 4 vols. (Frankfurt am Main, 1566–1573, followed by twenty-six editions 1574–1707 and a critical edition by Eduard Preuss, Berlin, 1861, repr. Darmstadt, 1972); English translation in Martin Chemnitz, Examination of the Council of Trent, trans. Fred Kramer, 4 vols. (St. Louis, 1971–1984). On Chemnitz see Theodor Mahlmann, “Chemnitz, Martin (1522–1586),” in TRE 7, 714–721; Robert Kolb, “Martin Chemnitz,” in Carl Lindberg, ed., The Reformation Theologians (Oxford and Malden, MA, 2002), 140–153; and, recently, Hendrik Klinge, Verheissene Gegenwart: Die Christologie des Martin Chemnetz (Göttingen, 2015). On the Examen see Arthur C. Piepkorn, “The Genesis and the Genius of the Examen Concilii Tridentini,” Concordia Theological Monthly 37 (1966), 5–37.

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Jesuits of Cologne.64 When a Portuguese council theologian, Diego Andrada de Payva (1528–1575), attacked Chemnitz with references to Trent’s decrees, the latter took up the council’s doctrines for evaluation and extensive refutation. Chemnitz, who had heard Luther and was a disciple of Melanchthon, countered Trent in volume 1, on Scripture and traditions, original sin and concupiscence, free choice, and justification and good works. Volume 2 refutes Trent’s doctrine on the sacraments, while volume 3 states the Lutheran denials of clerical celibacy, purgatory, and the veneration and invocation of saints. In volume 4 the critical reading passes on to relics, images, indulgences, the practice of fasting, and observing feast days. The treatments are lucidly organized into sections and articles, with biblical and patristic arguments bringing out Lutheran doctrine amid the debate. After citing Trent’s Decree on Justification, Chemnitz expresses Lutheran priorities. Justification is the chief topic of doctrine: Under temptation faith looks about anxiously for this one consolation, for what it can and must rely on, lest it be condemned by the righteous judgment of God on account of sins . . . Where this one topic is rightly explained and understood . . . it affords the necessary and most abundant consolation to pious consciences and illuminates and amplifies the glory of the Son of God, our Redeemer and Mediator.65

The focus falls upon faith: Most necessary is a true and genuine explanation of what justifying faith is and in what sense it is understood when Scripture says that one is justified by faith. For faith is the means . . . through which we seek, apprehend, receive, and apply to ourselves from the word of the Gospel the mercy of God, who remits sins and accepts us to eternal life for the sake of his Son the Mediator.66

In 1576, three years after Chemnitz completed the Examen, Robert Bellarmine (1542–1621) began lecturing as professor of controversial theology at the Jesuit Roman College. The lectures led to Bellarmine’s Controversies of the Christian Faith against Heretics in three volumes (1586–1593).67 They gather

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Chemnitz responded to several arguments from Trent’s teaching in his Theologiae Jesuitarum praecipua capita (Leipzig, 1562), treated by Piepkorn, “Genesis and Genius of the Examen,” 11–14. Chemnitz, Examination, I, 461, after citing Trent’s Decree on Justification, chs. II–VII, with canons 9–12. 66 Chemnitz, Examination, I, 565, after citing Trent’s Decree, ch. IX, with canons 12–14. 67 First published in Ingolstadt, followed by thirteen editions while Bellarmine lived and twenty-one by 1700, in Lyon, Paris, Cologne, and Mainz. Studies include Gustavo Galeota, 65

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into an ordered whole all the issues of Protestant-Catholic doctrinal dispute and, after citing the opponents amply, present an orderly case for each Catholic doctrine.68 The Controversies begin on the word of God, Scripture’s canon, and Scripture and traditions, before they treat Christ, the church’s head and mediator. Ecclesiology follows in five controversies, namely, the pope, councils, the earthly church, the church under purgation, and the heavenly church. Five parts expound the sacraments, leading to the final three parts on sin, grace and free choice, and justification. Thus, Bellarmine ends with issues central for Lutherans, but earlier passages had set forth the Catholic sources and the instances of judgment in the church for settling controversies over Scripture’s meaning. Because of intra-Catholic differences, Trent did not issue an ecclesiology decree, but Bellarmine filled this gap for generations. He defined the church by its societal components, as “the group of persons professing the same Christian faith, connected by communion in the same sacraments, and governed by legitimate pastors, especially the Roman Pontiff who is the Vicar of Christ on earth.” The bonds are external, making the church “as visible as the Kingdom of France or the Republic of Venice.”69 This comes after the account of Christ as Head and Mediator, while a following passage cites Augustine on the living church’s body animated by spiritual gifts, but the definition had its own life outside these contexts. Later, the imperative of catechetical concision led many to name only the external components of creed, sacraments, and governance, which Vatican II’s Lumen gentium (1964) has enriched biblically in several directions. After Chemnitz and Bellarmine, Catholics treating Trent’s doctrines contended with potent Lutheran and Calvinist-Reformed opponents, with

“Genesi, svillupo e fortuna delle ‘Controversiae’ di R. Bellarmino,” in Romeo de Maio et al., eds., Bellarmino e la Contrariforma (Sora, 1990), 3–48; Thomas Dietrich, Die Theologie der Kirche bei Robert Bellarmin (Paderborn, 1999); Franco Motta, Bellarmino: Una teologia politica della Controriforma (Brescia, 2005); and Stefania Tutino, Empire of Souls: Robert Bellarmine and the Christian Commonwealth (Oxford, 2010). 68 Bellarmine cited Calvin 1,642 times, especially on the church, original sin, and grace and free choice in justification. Chemnitz appeared in 1,258 citations, especially on Scripture/tradition, sacraments, and good works. See Robert W. Richgels, “The Pattern of Controversy in a Counter-Reformation Classic: The Controversies of Robert Bellarmine,” Sixteenth Century Journal 11 (1980), 3–15. 69 Bellarmine, Controversies, Controversy IV, bk. 3, ch. 2. This definition of the church had a long life in Catholic theology and it appears in Vatican II, but with an insertion on “having the Spirit of Christ,” designating those “fully incorporated into the society of the church” (Dogmatic Constitution on the Church [1964], no. 14).

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Protestant controversialists developing an entire sub-field of anti-Bellarmine refutations.70

A Glance Ahead, with a Question The bibliography of Calvinist-Catholic controversial publications in seventeenth-century France evidences concentration and constant repetition on a set of standard issues, namely, the “judge of controversies,” predestination, grace and free choice, Christ’s presence in Holy Communion, and saints’ relics and other superstitions.71 The strong impression of controversial theology being stalemated raises the question, recently advanced, whether the lack of progress toward agreement did not discredit Christianity and so prepare for the outbreak of later Enlightenment skepticism.72 bibliography Andresen, Carl and Adolf Martin Ritter, eds. Handbuch der Dogmen- und Theologiegeschichte, volume II: Die Lehrentwicklung im Rahmen der Konfessionalität, ed. Bernard Lohse, Wilhelm Neuser, et al. 2nd ed. Göttingen, 1998. Angelini, Giuseppe, Giuseppe Colombo, and Marco Vergottini, eds. Storia della teologia, volume IV: Età moderna. Casale Monferrato, 2001. Bagchi, David V. N. Luther’s Earliest Opponents: Catholic Controversialists, 1518–1525. Minneapolis, 1991. Betz, Hans Dieter, Don Browning, et al., eds. Religion Past and Present: Encyclopedia of Religion and Theology, 13 vols. and index. Leiden and Boston, 2004–2013. Desgraves, Louis. Répertoire des ouvrages de controverse entre catholiques et protestants en France, 1598–1695, 2 vols. Geneva, 1984–1985. Ganzer, Klaus and Bruno Steimer, eds. Dictionary of the Reformation. New York, 2004. Iserloh, Erwin, ed. Katholische Theologen der Reformationszeit, 5 vols. Münster, 1984–1988. Klaiber, Wilibrigis. Katholische Kontroverstheologen und Reformer des 16. Jahrhunderts: Ein Werkverzeichnis. Münster, 1978. Krause, Gerhard and Gerhard Müller, eds. Theologische Realenzyklopädie, 36 vols. Berlin and New York, 1977–2004. Pacomio, Luciano and Giuseppe Occipinti, eds. Lexikon: Dizionario dei Teologi. Casale Monferrato, 1998.

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An older list of Protestant works against the Controversies is Carlos Sommervogel, Bibliothèque de la Compagnie de Jesus, 10 vols. (Brussels, 1890–1909), I, 1165–1180. Instructive on this agonistic theology is Christopher Ocker, Luther, Conflict, and Christendom: Reformation Europe and Christianity in the West (Cambridge, 2018), 281–291. 71 Louis Desgraves, Répertoire des ouvrages de controverse entre catholiques et protestants en France, 1598–1695, 2 vols. (Geneva, 1984–1985), listing, with full titles, 7,171 controversial works. 72 This is argued by Brad S. Gregory in The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Cambridge, MA, 2012), 40–47.

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“. . . that our dear Lord himself may speak to us through his holy Word and we respond to him through prayer and praise.”1 These famous words from Martin Luther’s sermon at the Dedication of the Castle Church in Torgau (1544) describe worship as a “word event” between God and human beings. For Luther the sacraments functioned as bodily words and analogously the proclamation of the word functioned in a sacramental way.2 Worship is the Sitz im Leben of theology or its point of reference; therefore, changes in theology manifest themselves in liturgy. Debates over the sacraments, their understanding, practice, and number were at the center of the debates among the Reformation movements and with the Roman church. There was a considerable variety of theologies and practices of sacraments and worship in the Reformation, though common structures can also be identified. In what follows, the central role of preaching in Reformation worship as a common feature will be highlighted first. Second, commonalities and differences in the understanding and practice of the sacraments in Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, the Anglicans, and the Anabaptists will be described. Luther’s positions will be described in more detail than those of the other Reformers, since he was in several respects foundational for the others, even if they developed their theologies in their own ways and partly in explicit contradiction to Luther. In dealing with the topic of worship, the reader should be aware: “The Reformation brought about the greatest change in the area of worship to happen in the history of Christendom since the Constantinian shift.”3

1

2 LW 51, 333. See, e.g., LW 36, 340. Peter Cornehl, “VIII. Evangelischer Gottesdienst von der Reformation bis zur Gegenwart,” in TRE 14, 54.

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The Central Role of Preaching in Reformation Worship In the Middle Ages preaching was practiced in multiform ways, occasions, and places, as sermon collections show.4 Preaching was one of the main tasks of the mendicant orders, and in late medieval times preachers or predicants played an increasing role, especially in urban church life. Nevertheless, at that time “sermons were more likely to be given and heard during the penitential season of Lent than at any other time of the year,” and “preaching was by and large not embedded in the fabric of routine worship. Even in towns where many sermons were preached, the sermon remained largely separate from the Mass.”5 In his “Concerning the Order of Public Worship” (1523) Luther offered his first guidance for liturgical reforms. He criticized the fact that in worship services God’s Word was silenced, even though it was read and sung. For him, this Word only spoke when it was preached, for preaching the Word implies understanding it, applying it to the situation of the congregants in a lively communicative relation, comforting, admonishing, teaching them. “Know first of all that a Christian congregation should never gather together without the preaching of God’s Word and prayer, no matter how briefly. . . . Therefore, when God’s Word is not preached, one had better neither sing nor read, or even come together.”6 In the Marburg Colloquy of 1529 Luther, Zwingli, and other Reformers declared their agreement “that the Holy Spirit, ordinarily, gives such faith or his gift to no one without preaching or the oral word or the gospel of Christ preceding, but that through and by means of such oral word he effects and creates faith where and in whom it pleases him (Romans 10[:14 ff.]).”7 Preachers were convinced that God used them as his mouth in order to proclaim his Word. Thus preaching became a “means of grace” (though not all Reformers would have used this precise phrase). A special feature of these sermons was their focus on biblical texts instead of treating certain themes (such as penitence) or legends, or on whole biblical 4 See Anne T. Thayer, Penitence, Preaching and the Coming of the Reformation (Aldershot and Burlington, VT, 2002), 13–45. 5 Andrew Pettegree, Reformation and the Culture of Persuasion (Cambridge, 2005), 13–15. For a detailed description of Lutheran and Reformed sermons and the situation of preaching in Germany, Switzerland, England, Scandinavia, and the Low Countries see the different contributions in Larissa Taylor, ed., Preachers and People in the Reformations and Early Modern Period (Boston and Leiden, 2003). See also Mary Jane Haemig and Robert Kolb, “Preaching in Lutheran Pulpits in the Age of Confessionalization,” in Robert Kolb, ed., Lutheran Ecclesiastical Culture 1550–1675 (Leiden and Boston, 2008), 117–157. 6 7 LW 53, 11. LW 38, 87.

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books instead of selected pericopes, even though Luther continued to use the pericopes of the liturgical calendar. “Zwingli and Calvin preached extemporaneously with the original Greek and Hebrew texts of the Bible lying open on the pulpit or in hand.”8 The Reformers preached a huge number of sermons, most of which we know only through transcripts by hearers. Collections of the Reformers’ sermons were published not so much to be read as to be an aid for pastors, assisting them in the preparation of their own sermons. The exception to this rule was in England, where preachers often were obliged to read sermons composed by church authorities. In his Torgau sermon Luther also emphasized the response to God’s speaking in worship: the congregants’ prayer and praise. Communal singing represented, “along with regular preaching . . . the most distinctive innovation of the new evangelical worship service.”9 Another scholar has observed: “The introduction of vernacular hymns into the Lutheran service beginning about 1524 struck contemporary observers as a mark of religious change as notable as the marriage of clergy or the distribution of the cup to the laity.”10 Luther called for the writing of vernacular hymns, and he himself created the genre of psalm hymns (for example, “Aus tiefer Not schrei ich zu dir” from Psalm 130). But hymns were not understood only as responses to preaching, but also as a type of preaching itself, and, in the case of catechetical hymns, also as teaching. Luther accordingly composed hymns to accompany all parts of the Catechism. His intention was “that God’s Word and Christian teaching might be instilled and implanted in many ways,” that “the holy gospel . . . may be noised and spread abroad,” especially among young people, “combining the good with the pleasing.”11 Hymns were sung in the streets and at home. Even though in 1523 Luther had expressed his wish “that we had as many songs as possible in the vernacular which the people could sing during mass,”12 German hymns were only gradually used to replace certain parts of the medieval liturgy. The hymnbooks were mainly meant to assist private piety and devotion. The lasting influence of these hymns may have been stronger than that of sermons. The German Jesuit Adam Contzen remarked in 1620 that “Luther had destroyed more souls with his hymns than with all his writing and preaching.”13 James Thomas Ford, “Preaching in the Reformed Tradition,” in Taylor, ed., Preachers, 65–88, at 77. Pettegree, Reformation, 40. 10 Christopher Boyd Brown, Singing the Gospel: Lutheran Hymns and the Success of the Reformation (Cambridge, MA, and London, 2005), 9. 11 12 13 LW 53, 316. LW 53, 36. Brown, Singing the Gospel, 1. 8 9

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Hymns and hymnals came into being in many different places. When John Calvin was in Strasbourg (1538–1541) he became familiar with the congregation’s singing of metrical versions of biblical texts, and so he started using metrical psalms for his small congregation there. Clément Marot and Theodore Beza set all the psalms into rhymed stanzas. The complete Psalter, Pseaumes de David, mis en rime françoise, was published in 1562. It contained 125 different tunes; this Psalter became very popular, and, translated in many different languages, contributed much to the attraction of Reformed worship. By bringing the biblical prayers into a metrical form, Calvin wanted to allow people to pray to God and praise him with God’s own words. Thus, unlike in the Lutheran tradition, he rejected the use of anything other than the Psalms and a few biblical sentences in church hymns. Zwingli was the exception to the Reformation rule in forbidding any music in liturgy. “It is new in the Reformation that the singing of hymns by the congregation becomes a constitutive part of the worship. The gathered congregation becomes a co-bearer of the worship, which means it becomes the bearer of a liturgical office.”14

Sacramental Theology Martin Luther In his Prelude on the Babylonian Captivity of the Church (1520) Luther expressed the basic structure of his theology, and in particular that of his sacramental theology: “God does not deal, nor has ever dealt, with man otherwise than through a word of promise . . . We in turn cannot deal with God otherwise than through faith in the Word of his promise.”15 Luther arrived at this understanding in a process of reflecting for years about penance and finally about the words of absolution in the sacrament of penance. In accordance with a widespread understanding in medieval times, he interpreted these words in a declarative way: The priest, having identified signs of true contrition in the penitents, declares that God has already forgiven them due to their contrition. In late medieval theology this was understood in line with the rule: To those who do what is in their power God does not deny his grace. In 1518 Luther realized that this understanding does not 14 Walter Blankenburg, “Der gottesdienstliche Liedgesang der Gemeinde,” in Walter Blankenburg and Karl Ferdinand Müller, eds., Leiturgia, volume IV: Die Musik des evangelischen Gottesdienstes (Kassel, 1961), 559–660, at 562. 15 LW 36, 42.

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correspond to the structure of Matthew 16:19 and 18:18; instead, Luther recognized that the priest speaking on behalf of Christ promises forgiveness, and in fact forgives.16 Significantly, he did not understand this effect in terms of the four Aristotelian causes, but in relational terms, as the work of Christ’s promise that calls for faith and trusting in it, or, more correctly, trusting in Christ giving this promise. Since Christ is faithful, the penitents should undoubtedly trust in this promise, that is, that they have received forgiveness. Doubting whether one has received forgiveness would make Christ an untrustworthy person and thus be sin. Christ’s promise effects what it says, and as a promise it calls for faith in it. Both belong together. Faith is externally based in Christ’s promise, while the promise does not reach its goal if there is no faith in it. Luther consequently applied this gift structure to the sacraments and reduced them to two or three: baptism, the office of the keys, and the Lord’s Supper. This reduction can also be found in the other Reformers. Luther agreed with Augustine that the word comes to the element and makes the sacrament. The word in baptism is Christ’s promise to receive a person into the communion with his death and resurrection; this promise is given as a leibliches Wort (bodily word). Thus Jerome’s and Tertullian’s old image of baptism as a ship that is destroyed through sin while only planks of it are left over (the sacrament of penance) has to be modified. Because baptism is Christ’s promise, and Christ never withdraws or invalidates his promise, one should say: Even though Christians commit sins, the ship of their baptism is not destroyed but the occupants have fallen into the sea. They are called to come back into the ship – in repentance believing again in the promise of baptism. Thus the sacraments of baptism and repentance are so closely connected that Luther and the Lutheran tradition have often taken them to be one sacrament. There was another reason for this close connection. Luther understood the fulfillment of God’s law differently from the Scholastics. Both agreed that the divine commandments must be fulfilled in love for God, but Luther followed Jesus’ explanation of how God wishes to be loved: God should be loved “with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength” (Mark 12:30). For Luther, this requires the dedication of the whole person to God, and not only an act of the will, as the Scholastics assumed. Where this love is not offered to God, there is sin. Sin means not to 16 See WA 1, 630–633; Oswald Bayer, Promissio: Die Geschichte der reformatorischen Wende in Luthers Theologie, 2nd ed. (Darmstadt, 1990), 164–202.

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seek God but one’s own benefit, thus being incurved in oneself. Luther realized that this self-seeking structure is not totally overcome by baptism, even among the faithful who live in grace. Thus he could not say that original sin is completely overcome by baptism, as if only the remnants of it (reliquiae peccati as the inclination to sin) had remained. Rather, for Luther, these “remnants” were sin because their reality and activity contradict the will of God. Thus baptism, in spite of being an event once and for the whole life, nevertheless calls for a daily dying of the old Adam and the rising of the new – this is penance as a lifelong process of returning to baptism. Both belong together: being fully justified through baptism as divine promise and believing in it, and being transformed through daily renewal. In line with this, private confession was long held in high esteem in Lutheranism. Luther declared in The Large Catechism: “When I exhort you to go to confession, I am doing nothing but exhorting you to be a Christian.”17 But nobody should be forced to confess, and no one was required to confess all their sins, which seemed to the Lutherans to be impossible.18 The pastor had to inquire not so much after signs of contrition in the penitent as the faith of the penitent in absolution. Luther understood the Lord’s Supper in the same relation of promise and faith. He focused on the words of institution (“This is the new testament in my blood,” Luke 22:20 according to the Latin testamentum). “In that word, and in that word alone, reside the power, the nature, and the whole substance of the mass.”19 “Testament” denotes a promise of a person who is about to die; the inheritance is “the forgiveness of sins” and life everlasting. This means: “to have God as father, to be his son and heir of all his goods.”20 The relation of an heir to a testament is to receive it as a gift; in this case, to trust in the promise (faith). The words of institution do not only remember something that happened in the past but confer a present gift. Thus they should not be said silently but aloud so that they can encourage the faith of the congregants. Just as little as baptism can be taken as a good work on the part of the baptized, so little can the Lord’s Supper be regarded as a good work of either priest or communicant whose effects could then be communicated to others. Since in the Last Supper Jesus offered his body and blood to his disciples and they received it, the Holy Supper cannot be seen as a sacrifice offered to the Father. Rather, the communing is itself constitutive, 17 18 20

Robert Kolb and Timothy Wengert, eds., The Book of Concord (Minneapolis, 2000), 479. 19 See, e.g., Augsburg Confession XXV (Book of Concord, 73–75). LW 36, 36. LW 36, 45.

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that is, offering and receiving the Supper as a gift. The gifts brought to the sacrament and the prayers said there can be understood as good works and sacrifices of praise to God, but not the sacrament itself. Changing the gift of God to the faithful into a sacrifice offered to God is Luther’s strongest accusation against the traditional understanding of the Eucharist. The criticism of the Mass as sacrifice was shared by the other Reformers, even though they supported their position with different arguments, but it was nevertheless the foundation for their liturgical reforms. Beside this “captivity” of the sacrament, as Luther called it in Babylonian Captivity, he addressed two others. The first was withdrawing the cup from the laity. This was seen by Luther as arrogating a competence to the church that it did not have, especially since Jesus, according to Matthew (26:27), said: “Drink of it, all of you.” Again, the cup for the laity became a common feature of Reformation worship. The other “captivity” for Luther was that the Real Presence of Christ’s body and blood in the Lord’s Supper was required to be believed through the concepts of the transubstantiation theory. He criticized the Roman Church for making a philosophical explication an article of faith. Luther’s criticism had far-reaching consequences. Since the Lord’s Supper was seen primarily as a gift of Christ to the faithful, their reception of this gift (eating) and reaction (the sacrifice of thanks and praise) of the congregation were also required for this sacrament; consequently private Masses and silent Masses had to be abandoned. The Lord’s Supper needed a congregation to which the gift of the sacrament could be given. Communion became an essential part of the Lord’s Supper. This is a very different situation compared with the Middle Ages. While in that time Masses were nearly omnipresent, communion of the lay people was rare, and sometimes happened only in special services.21 According to the Fourth Lateran Council, lay people had to take communion at least once a year, at Easter.22 But now, with the reforms, each celebration of the Lord’s Supper necessarily included communion. While prior to the Reformation several Masses might be celebrated at the same time in one church building

21 See Josef Andreas Jungmann, Missarum Sollemnia, volume II, 5th ed. (Vienna, Freiburg, and Basel, 1962), 446–455; Hans Bernhard Meyer, Eucharistie: Geschichte, Theologie, Pastoral (Regensburg, 1989), 236: “Only very pious lay people received communion more often than at Easter” (with respect to the Middle Ages). 22 DH 812. Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. Norman Tanner, 2 vols. (London and Washington, 1990), I, 245.

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at its various side-altars, now, for Lutherans, there could only be one service at a time. Luther codified his new insights liturgically first in his Formula missae et communionis of 1523,23 a revision of the Latin Mass for use, retaining the Latin. He emphasized: “It is not now nor ever has been our intention to abolish the liturgical service of God completely, but rather to purify the one that is now in use from the wretched accretions which corrupt it and to point out an evangelical use.”24 As far as he could, Luther followed the Roman tradition of the Mass, but he removed all the offertory prayers. After the preparation of bread and wine came the preface, while the words of institution were connected by a relative clause, thus remaining part of the eucharistic prayer. Luther wanted the words of institution to be recited in the same tone as the Lord’s Prayer. After the blessing, the choir was to sing the Sanctus and the Benedictus, then the bread and the cup were to “be elevated according to the customary rite for the benefit of the weak in faith who might be offended”25 by a sudden change. Luther was confident that through sermons the right understanding of the elevation as visible proclamation of Christ and his promise (for you) would become clear to the congregants. Congregants had to ask in person before the service to receive communion. There they would be asked whether they held the right understanding of the Lord’s Supper and whether they knew the words of institution by heart. Private confession before communion was regarded as useful but not strictly required. In 1525/6 Luther published a vernacular order of the Mass, the Deutsche Messe und Ordnung Gottesdiensts,26 since some other Reformers had drafted their own German Masses, among them Thomas Müntzer in Allstedt and Martin Bucer in Strasbourg. The Latin service was to be retained for schools and universities where young people were trained in Latin; the German service was “for the sake of the unlearned lay folk”;27 while a third type of worship “should be a truly evangelical order and should not be held in a public place for all sorts of people” but for those “who want to be Christians in earnest.” But, as Luther admitted, “I have not yet the people or persons for it, nor do I see many who want it.”28 Luther chose the model of the people’s church and not, like the Anabaptists, the model of a community of committed and confessing Christians. In Luther’s German Mass the words of institution were sung in the same tone as the Gospel, the administration of the bread took place after the words 23 28

LW 53, 19–40. LW 53, 63.

24

LW 53, 20.

25

LW 53, 28.

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LW 53, 51–90.

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LW 53, 63.

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over the bread (with the German Sanctus), the administration of the cup after the words over the cup (with the German Agnus Dei or other Lord’s Supper hymns). The words of institution were understood at the same time as words of benediction and gift-words, and they were connected as closely as possible to communion in order to show that there is something to receive, not something to sacrifice. Luther understood his liturgical orders as examples, not binding. He emphasized freedom in developing liturgical forms. The orders were different from town to town, principality to principality,29 but they showed certain commonalities depending on whether they had been developed as corrections of the Latin Mass or from the services of predicants, as was mainly the case in southern Germany. The changes in the sacramental order required serious attempts at catechization, of which the Small and Large Catechisms are exemplars, and especially “The Baptismal Booklet” and “A Brief Exhortation to Confession.”30 Marriage as an ecclesial practice was addressed in the “Marriage Booklet,”31 while ordination was treated in the Ordination Formula.

Ulrich Zwingli For Ulrich Zwingli, understanding the Lord’s Supper as remembrance (Wiedergedächtnis) is fundamental, first for rejecting the understanding of it as a sacrifice and also, after 1524, as criticizing the belief in the Real Presence of Christ in the Supper. In this respect he had been inspired by Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt and Cornelis Hoen.32 For Zwingli the dichotomy of creator and creature became that of spirit and flesh. In communicating grace the Spirit cannot bind himself to the sacraments, since they belong to the realm of the flesh. The Spirit has to begin to teach human beings internally about Christ and what he did pro nobis. Then the baptismal water indicates that the Holy Spirit has cleansed the soul of sin, but baptism does not effect that cleansing itself. Sacraments are not means of grace; rather, they are signs of public witness for the grace that has been received 29 See Irmgard Pahl, ed., Coena Domini, volume I: Die Abendmahlsliturgie der Reformationskirchen im 16./17. Jahrhundert (Fribourg, 1983), 25–180; and Frank C. Senn, Christian Liturgy: Catholic and Evangelical (Minneapolis, 1997), 265–479. 30 31 Book of Concord, 371–375, 476–480. Ibid., 367–371. 32 See Amy Nelson Burnett, Karlstadt and the Origins of the Eucharistic Controversy: A Study in the Circulation of Ideas (Oxford, 2011); and Dorothea Wendebourg, Essen zum Gedächtnis: Der Gedächtnisbefehl in den Abendmahlstheologien der Reformation (Tübingen, 2009), 61–100.

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beforehand and of the baptized person’s commitment to Christ. Through the sacraments the faithful are able to recognize each other in such a way that the church becomes visible. In the Lord’s Supper the remembrance of the death of Christ takes place in the human mind through the divine Spirit-eating. Remembering is believing in Christ and what he has done for us on the cross, but it is not grounded in the external promissio that communicates grace here and now, as in Luther. Thus Zwingli’s position is quite similar to Luther’s understanding of absolution before the latter had discovered the performative character of the promissio. Faith, for Zwingli, is directed to the once of Christ’s work, while faith for Luther is directed to the here of the sacraments that promise grace. For Zwingli the words of institution are narrative words, not performative ones. “This is my body” means: This bread is a sign of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross that took place in the past for all humankind and of his human body that now is located “at the right hand of the Father.” The Lord’s Supper as commemorative act is an act of the congregation, not of God; it has to do with the ecclesial body of Christ. Commemoration and thanksgiving to God are connected. Zwingli’s position has been called “symbolic memorialism”; he understood the elements of the Eucharist, their details, and the action performed as signs through which a distant past is commemorated.33 Zwingli liturgically enacted his theology of the Lord’s Supper in his Action oder Bruch des Nachtmals, Gedechtnus oder Dancksagung Christi (1525) with this order of service: the collect; a reading of 1 Corinthians 11; the Gloria (spoken alternately by men and women); the Gospel reading from John 6:47–63; the Creed (spoken alternately by men and women); the admonition to practice the Supper as commemoration, praise, and thanksgiving for Christ’s death; the Lord’s Prayer; the Communion Prayer (“O Lord . . . who through your Spirit made us your body in unity of faith . . . with the commandment to praise you”); the words of institution; the distribution (everybody takes a bit

33 Brian Gerrish proposed the following helpful and often-quoted distinction: “There seem to be, then, three doctrines of the Eucharist in the Reformed confessions, which we may label ‘symbolic memorialism,’ ‘symbolic parallelism,’ and ‘symbolic instrumentalism’” (Brian A. Gerrish, “Sign and Reality: The Lord’s Supper in the Reformed Confessions,” in Brian A. Gerrish, The Old Protestantism and the New: Essays on the Reformation Heritage [Edinburgh, 1982], 128). The third phrase refers to Calvin, the second to Bullinger: “For Bullinger, as for Calvin, Christ is the one who gives, not only gave; and we are to receive, not only to remember that he once gave. But . . . by some mysterious divine arrangement, grace is given at the same time as the sacrament is administered (concomitatur!). On the strictly Calvinistic . . . view, God really works by means of symbols (significando causant!)” (ibid., 129).

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of bread and wine, they are not given); the thanksgiving, beginning with Psalm 113; and the Peace.34 The differences between Luther and Zwingli’s understanding of the Lord’s Supper led to a fierce controversy, and eventually to the split of the Reformation movement.35 Four main areas of the conflict will be addressed: First: Which interpretation of the sentence “This is my body” is required in order for it to make sense at all? Zwingli insisted that “is” must mean “signifies” (according to the rhetorical figure of alloiosis), while Luther emphasized that this sentence constitutes a union that is differentiated in itself (as the rhetorical figure of synecdoche). In this “sacramental union,” as Luther called it, there takes place an exchange of attributes of bread and body of Christ, in a certain analogy to the two natures in Jesus Christ. Second: Zwingli concluded from John 6:63 (“The flesh is of no avail”) that Christ’s body is not really present in the Lord’s Supper, while Luther denied that “flesh” in this passage meant Christ’s body. The third area of conflict was the question of whether the sacraments conferred grace or only expressed grace that had been already received. Luther insisted on the performative character of certain speech acts, such as “I baptize you” or “This is my body,” because they include an imperative of Jesus (“Baptize all nations”; “Do this in remembrance of me”). If this is the case, these promises effect what they say. That insight into the gift character of the sacraments was one of Luther’s basic liberating insights. Fourth: There was a debate about the relation between the divine and human natures in Christ. In Zwingli’s eyes Luther’s understanding of the communicatio idiomatum violated the Chalcedonian definition that the two natures of Jesus Christ are not to be confused or changed. Zwingli argued that, by definition, a human nature is locally circumscribed and thus cannot be ubiquitous. Luther, on the contrary, insisted that according to the Chalcedonian definition the two natures are indivisible and inseparable, so that where Jesus Christ is in his divinity, there he must also be in his humanity. For Luther it is important for salvation not only that Jesus Christ’s human nature suffered, which is the case with every saint, but also that his divine nature was involved in the suffering. 34

Pahl, ed., Coena Domini, 189–198. See from Luther’s side: “That These Words of Christ, ‘This is My Body,’ etc., Still Stand Firm Against the Fanatics” (1527: LW 37, 3–150) and “Confession Concerning Christ’s Supper” (1528: LW 37, 151–372); from Zwingli’s side: Amica Exegesis, id est: expositio eucharistiae negocii ad Martinum Lutherum (1527: CR 92, 562–758), and “Dass diese Worte: ‘Das ist mein Leib’ etc. ewiglich den alten Sinn haben werden etc.” (1527: CR 92, 805–977). 35

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The Marburg Colloquy of 1529, called by Prince Philip of Hesse in order to bring the two sides together, failed to resolve the conflict between Luther and Zwingli. Luther was only able to give Zwingli the “hand of love,” but not the “hand of the brother,” and when in 1536 the Wittenberg Concord reached a certain agreement, the Swiss Reformation had already developed too far along its own trajectory. The Concord could not heal the split.

John Calvin John Calvin wished to take a middle position between what he saw as the extremes represented by Luther and Zwingli. For him the sacraments have the same purpose as the Word of God, but they realize this purpose in different ways: “Let it be a fixed point that the office of the sacraments differs not from the word of God; and this is to hold forth and offer Christ to us, and, in him, the treasures of heavenly grace” (Institutes IV, XIV, 17).36 Thus they are only useful if they are received in faith. In the sacraments there is an analogy between what they show and what they signify. As visible signs for the promises of God they are seals of these promises, and are thus meant to strengthen and increase the believers’ faith. They have no power to bestow grace in and through themselves, for it is God who “truly performs whatever he promises and figures by signs” (Institutes IV, XIV, 17). In line with Augustine, Calvin held that the sacraments effect what they signify, but it is the Holy Spirit who is effective in the hearts and opens them to the sacraments so that they are able to serve as his instruments. As the eyes can only see through the light of the sun if they have eyesight, so it is the inner work of the Holy Spirit in the hearts creating faith that allows for the sacraments to strengthen this faith (Institutes IV, XIV, 10). The Lord’s Supper is about partaking of the body of Christ. For Calvin “eating this body” meant more than believing in Christ and his work: “By virtue of true communication with [or partaking of] him, his life passes into us and becomes ours, just as bread when taken for food gives vigor to the body” (Institutes IV, XVII, 5). Even though Jesus Christ is far away from the believers at the right hand of the Father, it is through the Holy Spirit’s “incomprehensible agency that we communicate in the body and blood of Christ” (Institutes IV, XVII, 33). Calvin criticizes those who speak only of partaking of Christ’s Spirit and disregard Christ’s flesh and blood (Institutes IV, XVII, 7). The ascended and glorified Christ still retains his human nature. 36

John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Peabody, MA, 2008). References to the Institutes, in this translation, will be given in parentheses in the text.

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It is “the flesh-and-blood Jesus Christ who is present and active in the sacrament . . . Calvin, when discussing the Eucharist, almost always speaks of partaking of the flesh and blood of Christ.”37 Of course, for human reason “nothing [is] more incredible than that things separated by the whole space between heaven and earth should, notwithstanding the long distance, not only be connected, but united, so that souls receive aliment from the flesh of Christ” (Institutes IV, XVII, 24). Calvin mentions two conditions that must be observed when speaking appropriately about the presence of Christ in the Supper. First, Christ’s heavenly glory must not be minimized, which happens when he is bound to any temporal creature; and second, nothing should be attributed to his body that is not in line with what the human nature requires. This latter would be the case if Christ’s body were regarded as unlimited or ubiquitous (Institutes IV, XVII, 19). But even though Christ’s body is not to be bound to creatures such as bread and wine, nevertheless it is possible that the Supper is meant to lead to a union of human beings – creatures, too – with Christ – “being one with him in soul, body, and spirit” (Institutes IV, XVII, 12). Thus for Calvin the Lord’s Supper has not only a cognitive dimension and does not only assure believers of what they believe in, but it also has a performative dimension. The sign of this sacrament is not only bread and wine, but the actions of offering and receiving. Calvin states that “the chief, and almost the whole[,] energy of the sacrament consists in these words, It is broken for you: it is shed for you” (Institutes IV, XVII, 3). “For Calvin, the central signifying phenomena are these actions – not the bread and the wine as such, but the presider’s actions of offering the bread and wine and the recipients’ actions of eating the bread and drinking the wine.”38 Calvin affirms that the following statement would not create much debate: If the bread is offered in the sacrament, the offering of the body of Christ is immediately connected with it, because the sign and the truth it signifies cannot be separated. But it should be excluded that Christ’s body is present locally or ubiquitous (Institutes IV, XVII, 16). Thus one can say: When the presider after declaring “This is Christ’s body given for you” “does actually offer the bread and the wine to the communicants, that counts as the fleshand-blood Jesus Christ offering himself. By the presider doing that, Jesus Christ does that.”39 Partaking of Christ in the sacrament bears fruits: 37 Nicholas Wolterstorff, “John Calvin,” in Lee Palmer Wandel, ed., A Companion to the Eucharist in the Reformation (Leiden and Boston, 2014), 97–113, at 102. 38 39 Ibid., 98. Ibid., 109.

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strengthening faith, assuring the believer, calling for thanksgiving for and praise of Christ’s benevolence, and it brings about and calls for the unity of those who partake in the body of Christ: “Moreover, since he has only one body of which he makes us all to be partakers, we must necessarily, by this participation, all become one body” (Institutes IV, XVII, 38). Calvin transformed his theology into liturgy in “La Forme des Prières et Chantz ecclésiastiques 1542 de Jean Calvin,”40 taking up impulses that he had received in Strasbourg. The Lord’s Supper began with a reading from 1 Corinthians 11 as the narrative of the institution of the Supper, separated from the distribution of the elements; then an excommunication of “those who do not belong to the company of His faithful people,”41 excluding immoral and irreligious persons, together with an exhortation to the communicants, calling them to examine their consciences and instructing them about the right understanding of and attitude toward the Supper. Above all, therefore, let us believe those promises which Jesus Christ, who is the unfailing truth, has spoken with His own lips: He is truly willing to make us partakers of His body and blood, in order that we may possess Him wholly and in such wise that He may live in us and we in Him. And though we see but bread and wine, we must not doubt that he accomplishes spiritually in our souls all that He shows us outwardly by these visible signs, namely, that He is the bread of heaven to feed and nourish us unto eternal life. So let us never be unmindful of the infinite goodness of our Saviour who spreads out all His riches and blessings on this Table, to impart them to us.42

In Geneva and other Reformed churches the altar was removed and replaced by a table before or beside the pulpit. Paintings, statues, and other pieces of art regarded as “idols” were destroyed or removed. Organs were frequently removed or destroyed. Nevertheless, a new ritual system was established, based on the complementarity of preaching the Word and the communion service.

Anabaptists Anabaptists such as Balthasar Hubmaier (1485–1528), Hans Hut (1490–1527), Melchior Hoffman (1495–1543), and Pilgram Marpeck (1495–1556) received inspiration from Reformers such as Martin Luther, Andreas Bodenstein von 40 Pahl, ed., Coena Domini, 355–367. See Bard Thompson, Liturgies of the Western Church (Minneapolis, 1961), 203–210. 41 42 Thompson, Liturgies, 205. Ibid., 207.

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Karlstadt, Ulrich Zwingli, and Thomas Müntzer, but developed such thoughts in their own ways. In a meeting of Swiss and South German Anabaptists in Schleitheim in 1527, Michael Sattler (1490–1527) prepared a confession of faith, known as the Schleitheim Articles. It states: Baptism shall be given to all those who have been taught repentance and the amendment of life and [who] believe truly that their sins are taken away through Christ, and to all those who desire to walk in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and be buried with Him in death, so that they might rise with Him; to all those who with such an understanding themselves desire and request it [baptism] of us; hereby is excluded all infant baptism, the greatest and first abomination of the Pope. For this you have the reason and the testimony of the writings of the apostles. We wish simply yet resolutely and with assurance to hold to the same.43

According to Anabaptists, Christian life starts with “the baptism of the Spirit,” “the birth of the Spirit” that “was the gift of salvation itself, for it cleansed the person of sin and gave him the power to live the Christian life.”44 This inner experience of regeneration, to which the Holy Spirit witnesses, needs to become external in the confession of faith before the church that has carefully examined the candidates. Upon their confession of faith the congregation offers baptism with water to the baptizands. In doing so, the church recognizes the gifts of the Spirit in the baptizands. Thus baptism is an external confirmation of the Spirit’s gift of regeneration in them. The baptizands give a testimony, but also receive a testimony of their faith. The inner witness of the Holy Spirit in the hearts of the baptizands is joined by the outer witness of the fellowship of believers. In “the service of baptism, the Spirit is called upon to act simultaneously with the church and the believer in the moment of baptism.”45 Baptism as the way of the baptizands into the church includes a pledge not only to God and to a Christian way of living, but also a commitment to the discipline of the church. This pledge allows for the covenantal structure of a free church “as a brotherhood of regenerate believers covenanted together in mutual responsibility for living the life of the Spirit,” “a society separate from the unregenerate world.”46 According to 1 John 5:6–8, the baptism of blood was added to 43

The Legacy of Michael Sattler, ed. and trans. John Howard Yoder (Scottdale, 1973), 36. Rollin Stely Armour, Anabaptist Baptism: A Representative Study (Scottdale, 1966), 140. Johann D. Rempel, “Sacraments in the Radical Reformation,” in Hans Boersma and Matthew Levering, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Sacramental Theology (Oxford, 2015), 298–312, at 310. 46 Armour, Anabaptist Baptism, 139. 44 45

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the two other types of baptism as a special aspect of the one baptism. The sufferings of this baptism could mean inner suffering of guilt and despair, but also persecution and martyrdom as disciples of the crucified Jesus Christ. Persecution would work as the testimony of the ungodly “to assure the believer that he was indeed a member of the body of Christ.”47 One can “say that the Christian life for the Anabaptists was a lifelong baptism.”48 Anabaptists learned from Karlstadt the merely significative character of the sacraments. Accordingly, the Eucharist was a sign instituted by Christ in order to signify Christ’s suffering, to commemorate and proclaim his death. Thus Christ’s body and blood cannot be really present, and the Eucharist cannot be understood as a sacrifice. It is a commemoration of Christ’s suffering and death connected with a willingness to suffer for Christ’s sake, if necessary. A “spiritual transformation” of the individual believers should “[take] place before partaking in the physical components of the Eucharist.”49 Gospel readings and the sermon should kindle their commitment to lead a Christian life. The Eucharist would only become meaningful to them if they were transformed by that message. Anabaptists saw a parallelism of the inward acting of the Spirit and the outward acting of the church or the believer both in baptism and the Eucharist. The “object of baptism becomes the candidate’s oath rather than the water, and the object of communion becomes the community’s covenant rather than the elements of bread and wine. For Hubmaier, the breaking of the bread focused on being rather than receiving the body of Christ.”50 The bread signified the church more than the sacramental body of Christ. In Hubmaier’s Form of the Supper of Christ a “Pledge of Love” belonged to the Eucharist. Communicants were called to self-examination and asked whether they were committed to do good, love their neighbors, and even shed their blood for them. This was the worthiness required for taking part in the Eucharist, the commemoration of Christ’s suffering and Last Supper.51 Even though there was a considerable diversity in liturgical practices, the features of Hubmaier’s Form of the Supper of Christ were widespread among Anabaptists. In Anabaptist theologies “the sacramental dimension, that is, the meeting point of spirit and matter, is displaced

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48 Ibid., 141. Ibid. Michele Zelinsky Hanson, “Anabaptist Liturgical Practices,” in Wandel, ed., A Companion, 251–272, at 254. 50 Johann D. Rempel, “Anabaptist Theologies of the Eucharist,” in Wandel, ed., A Companion, 115–137, at 123. 51 See Hanson, “Anabaptist Liturgical Practices,” 254; Rempel, “Anabaptist Theologies of the Eucharist,” 124. 49

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in varying degrees from the water to the faith of the candidate and from the bread and wine to the love of the congregation.”52

Anglicanism Sacramental theology in sixteenth-century England reflected the debates on the continent in special ways. Thomas Cranmer (1489–1556) developed his sacramental theology in several steps, beginning with a “Lutheran phase” and moving to a clear rejection of the idea of corporeal presence of Christ in the Lord’s Supper. Major liturgical changes in England took place only after the death of King Henry VIII (1547). The first Book of Common Prayer (1549) presented all of the liturgies in the vernacular.53 The eucharistic rite in this edition had transitional character; it followed to a high degree the order of the Roman Rite (“Sarum Use”). It excluded the understanding of the Mass as sacrifice while being ambiguous regarding the corporeal presence. “Heare us (o merciful father) we beseech thee; and with thy holy spirite and worde, vouchsafe to blesse and sanctifie these thy gyftes, and creatures of bread and wyne, that they maie be unto us the bodye and bloude of thy moste derely beloued sonne Jesus Christe.”54 This wording was open to different interpretations; it very quickly provoked a theological debate on the question of Real Presence. In his understanding, Cranmer used the as-so structure: as the bread is eaten with the mouth, so Christ, the celestial bread, is eaten – in faith. Those who receive the sacrament without faith will only have bread in their mouths. This understanding is close to Heinrich Bullinger’s “symbolic parallelism.”55 In order to express the rejection of the understanding of the Eucharist as sacrifice, altars were removed and tables introduced, but in different places from those of the altars. The second Book of Common Prayer (1552) more clearly represented Cranmer’s sacramental theology, even though he was not the only author. He gave up the structure of the eucharistic prayer. The former epiclesis was transformed into these words: “Heare us O mercyefull father wee beseeche thee; and graunt that wee, receyuing these thy creatures of bread and wyne, according to thy sonne our Sauioure Jesus Christ’s holy institucion, in remembraunce of his death and passion, maye be partakers of his most blessed body and bloud.”56 The distribution followed immediately after the Rempel, “Sacraments,” 309. Pahl, ed., Coena Domini, 395–406. See James F. Turrell, “Anglican Liturgical Practices,” in Wandel, ed., A Companion, 273–291. 54 55 56 Pahl, ed., Coena Domini, 400. See note 33 above. Pahl, ed., Coena Domini, 407. 52 53

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words of institution, as in the German Masses of Luther and Bucer. The sacrifice of thanksgiving and praise and the self-oblation of the faithful were located after the communion. Nobody present could have the idea that in the sacrament anything was offered to God or anything happened with the elements. A rubric said: “And yf any of the bread or wine remayne, the Curate shal haue it to hys owne use.”57 The 1559 Book of Common Prayer reinforced the order of 1552 after the time of (Catholic) Queen Mary. It changed the words of distribution only slightly: “The bodie of our lord Jesus Christ which was given for thee, preserve thy body and soul into everlasting life, and take and eat this, in remembrance that Christ died for thee, and feed on him in thy heart by faith, with thanksgiving.”58 Emphasis was put on catechizing the communicants; they had to be confirmed. The degree of participation was high. Serious conflicts arose between Puritans, who thought that the liturgical reforms had not gone far enough, and ceremonialists, who had the opposite understanding and wished to embellish the liturgy again. Debates over ceremonies, gestures, the location of the table, and rails around the table troubled church life and finally contributed to the civil wars (1642–1646 and 1648–1649). After the execution of King Charles I in 1649 the Book of Common Prayer was banned and the reforms undertaken by the ceremonialists were withdrawn. Nevertheless, the prayer book survived, and it was reestablished in 1662 after church and monarchy had been restored in 1660. The form of 1552 was preserved with some changes, most significantly through the requirement to treat the leftovers of the Supper with reverence by consuming them immediately after the conclusion of the service. The basic structure that Thomas Cranmer had introduced remained while many surrounding ceremonies set different accents. The Anglican Eucharist was clearly not the medieval Mass even though certain ceremonies had survived.

Roman Catholicism The Council of Trent (1545–1563) reacted to the changes in sacramental theology inaugurated by the Reformation movements by reemphasizing the seven sacraments (baptism, confirmation, Eucharist, penance, last anointing, orders, matrimony) as having been instituted by Christ. It explained comprehensively and in detail the content of the Catholic faith in 57 58

Ibid., 408. John E. Booty, ed., The Book of Common Prayer (Charlotteville, VA, 1976), 264.

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the sacraments, both constructively in the chapters of the respective decrees and in the canons by rejecting what were seen as errors and heresies.59 It insisted in the objective efficacy of the sacraments from God’s perspective, reaffirming that the sacraments confer grace to those “who place no obstacle in the way.”60 Special emphasis was put on the sacrament of penance, the Sitz im Leben of justification in the life of the Christian after baptism. The elements of the matter of this sacrament (contrition, confession, and satisfaction), strongly challenged by the Reformers, were described and confirmed meticulously: the need for contrition through self-examination, recapitulation, and formal renunciation of sins; the request for confession of all mortal sins known to the penitent; satisfaction “by the sufferings imposed by God and patiently borne; or by the penances enjoined by a priest,”61 or by voluntary acts of fasting, praying, and almsgiving. The absolution by a priest (and only by a priest) was defined as a judicial act. The significance of the sacrament of last anointing was to be “the final complement not only of penance but also of the whole Christian life, which ought to be an ever continuing penance [!].”62 The council addressed the sacrament of the Eucharist by focusing on three different aspects at different times – sacrament, communion, and sacrifice – in this way answering the criticisms of the Reformers. The “Decree of the most holy sacrament of the Eucharist” of October 11, 155163 emphasized that the body and blood of the whole Christ are “truly, really, and substantially” contained in this sacrament.64 This requires a “unique change of the whole substance of the bread into the body, and of the whole substance of the wine into the blood” of Christ, “a change which the Catholic Church most aptly calls transubstantiation,” as the council cautiously formulated.65 In its “Teaching on communion under both kinds and of children” of July 16, 1562 the council emphasized that there is no command of God for all Christ’s faithful to receive both forms of the Holy Supper, and that Christ is “received whole and entire under the one form of bread.”66 The question of whether

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DH 1600–1630, 1635–1661, 1667–1719, 1725–1734, 1738–1760, 1763–1778, 1797–1816. Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, II, 684–686, 693–698, 703–713, 726–727, 732–736, 741, 742–744, 753–759. 60 DH 1606 (Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, II, 684). 61 DH 1713 (Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, II, 713). 62 DH 1694 (Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, II, 710). 63 DH 1635–1661 (Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, II, 693–698). 64 DH 1651 (Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, II, 697). 65 DH 1652 (Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, II, 697). 66 DH 1733 (Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, II, 727).

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the chalice could be allowed “to an individual or nation or kingdom” was referred to the pope.67 The “Decree on the most holy sacrifice of the Mass” of September 17, 1562 affirmed that in the Mass “a true and proper sacrifice”68 is offered to God and not only a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving. It is understood as “a truly propitiatory sacrifice”: “For it is one and the same victim here offering himself by the ministry of his priests, who then offered himself on the cross,” but in a different manner (bloody–bloodless). The benefits of the sacrifice on the cross “are received in the fullest measure through the bloodless offering,”69 and this offering is done not only for the sins and penalties of the living but also for those who died in Christ. Nevertheless, Catholic theologians doubt whether the council succeeded in theologically explaining the unity of the sacrifice on the cross and in the Mass, of which all council fathers were convinced. The “Decree on the sacrament of orders” of July 15, 1563 states that sacrifice and priesthood belong together. The visible sacrifice of the Eucharist corresponds to “a new, visible and external priesthood”70 with the “power to consecrate and offer the true body and blood of the Lord, and to forgive or retain sins.”71 And, there “exists in the Catholic Church a hierarchy consisting of bishops, priests and ministers, instituted by divine appointment.”72 The Council of Trent managed to clarify, develop, maintain, and defend the Catholic doctrine of the sacraments. Nevertheless, with respect to some issues and aspects, one needs to speak of “dissensus hidden – consensus reached.”73 For centuries the council’s decrees were received in the Roman Catholic Church as rejecting bluntly the doctrines of the Reformation churches. Since the last century fresh research on these decrees has shown how much the council positively and creatively received from the Reformation movements, and how some Roman Catholic traditions were used to interpret those decrees in a one-sided manner. The ecumenical potential of this council has begun to be discovered. 67

DH 1760 (Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, II, 741). DH 1751 (Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, II, 735). 69 DH 1743 (Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, II, 733). 70 DH 1764 (Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, II, 742). 71 DH 1771 (Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, II, 743). 72 DH 1776 (Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, II, 744). 73 See the subtitle of Josef Freitag, Sacramentum ordinis auf dem Konzil von Trient: Ausgeblendeter Dissens und erreichter Konsens [“excluded dissent and achieved consensus”] (Innsbruck and Vienna, 1991). 68

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Conclusion Concerning the intra-Protestant controversies, Brian Gerrish has pointed out that depending on the test question (for example: the corporeal presence of Christ? Or: the gift character of the sacraments?) the different theologies are grouped differently. “Why did the Calvinists . . . refuse to follow Zwingli’s lead into symbolic memorialism? The answer to this question attests to a fundamental bond between Roman Catholics, Lutherans, and Reformed . . . a sacrament is a sign, not of past grace only, but of present grace.”74 Such an insight, together with continued research and fresh perspectives and contexts, allows for a new evaluation of the relations between the different Reformation theologies, as was done, for example, in the Leuenberg Agreement (1973) that led to church fellowship between formerly separated Protestant churches in Europe. bibliography Boersma, Hans and Matthew Levering, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Sacramental Theology. Oxford, 2015. Harper, John. The Forms and Orders of Western Liturgy from the Tenth to the Eighteenth Century: A Historical Introduction and Guide for Students and Musicians. Oxford, 1991; repr. 2001. McCord Adams, Marilyn. “Eucharistic Real Presence: Some Scholastic Background to Luther’s Debate with Zwingli,” in Christine Helmer, ed., The Medieval Luther. Tübingen, 2020, 65–88. Pahl, Irmgard, ed. Coena Domini, volume I: Die Abendmahlsliturgie der Reformationskirchen im 16./17. Jahrhundert. Fribourg, 1983. Pettegree, Andrew. Reformation and the Culture of Persuasion. Cambridge, 2005. Senn, Frank C. Christian Liturgy: Catholic and Evangelical. Minneapolis, 1997. Simon, Wolfgang. Die Messopfertheologie Martin Luthers: Voraussetzungen, Genese, Gestalt und Rezeption. Tübingen, 2003. Taylor, Larissa, ed. Preachers and People in the Reformations and Early Modern Period. Boston and Leiden, 2003. Thompson, Bard. Liturgies of the Western Church. Minneapolis, 1961. Wandel, Lee Palmer. The Eucharist in the Reformation: Incarnation and Liturgy. Cambridge, 2006. Wandel, Lee Palmer, ed. A Companion to the Eucharist in the Reformation. Leiden and Boston, 2014. Wendebourg, Dorothea, Essen zum Gedächtnis: Der Gedächtnisbefehl in den Abendmahlstheologien der Reformation. Tübingen, 2009.

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Gerrish, “Sign and Reality,” 128.

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Introduction This chapter deals with Catholic and Protestant theologies of preaching and the Christian ministry in the Reformation period. A word of clarification is necessary at the outset. The focus of this chapter is not on early modern preaching or pastoral care per se but on theological reflection on preaching and the pastoral office as such. In other words, this chapter is an exercise in the history of Pastoraltheologie, a term that encompasses more than the English “pastoral theology,” which in some contexts refers to a branch of practical theology that deals especially with pastoral care and counsel.1 The definition of pastoral theology adopted here is considerably broader; it includes all that relates to the pastoral office and ministry of the Christian church. Early modern Catholic and Protestant pastoral theologies will be examined briefly in turn.

Early Modern Protestant Pastoral Theology and Preaching ronald k. rittgers Beginning with Luther, early modern Protestants rejected much of the traditional Catholic understanding of the pastoral office, arguing that it was largely unbiblical. Protestants questioned the validity of most offices in the clerical hierarchy along with many of the privileges and functions of the traditional priesthood. Most important, they abolished the sacrament of ordination.2 Luther posited a simplified pastoral theology in the place of its traditional counterpart that was based on the priesthood of all believers 1

The German Pastoraltheologie is equally broad for both Catholicism and Protestantism, although it does not mean the same thing for both. See the definitions in TRE 26, 70, 76. 2 See WA 6, 560, 20–21, 564, 1–5; LW 36, 106, 112. In time, a Protestant rite of ordination did emerge in some contexts.

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and the ministry of the Word, especially the preached Word. Luther argued in numerous places that by virtue of baptism all Christians were priests and therefore all Christians were authorized to intercede with Christ for one another and to serve one another by preaching the Word and administering the sacraments.3 But Luther also believed that order should be preserved in the church (1 Cor. 14:14) and that God had therefore called certain (male) members of the baptized to serve their brothers and sisters in Christ through the ministry of the Word and sacraments.4 The chief purpose of this ministry, as stipulated in the Augsburg Confession, was to convey grace to the baptized and thus to nurture their faith.5 The Augsburg Confession also required evangelical pastors to be properly called to their office.6 Luther never produced a full statement of his pastoral theology. However, several key features of this theology may be discerned in his writings. Preaching was absolutely central.7 Luther’s understanding of preaching was based on his theology of the Word, which encompassed the Word incarnate (Christ), the Word written (Scripture), and the Word proclaimed (preaching).8 Evangelical preaching was to focus on Christ, Scripture’s very center; it was also to proclaim the “plain sense” of the text and observe the crucial law– gospel distinction that Luther found throughout the Bible. Such preaching was a means of grace for Luther, a kind of sacrament that brought Christ Himself to the Christian via the Holy Spirit.9 The evangelical preacher

3 See WA 6, 547, 20, 564, 6–13, 566, 26–29; LW 36, 88, 112–113, 116. Cf. WA 6, 407, 9–408.7; LW 44, 127–128. On the priesthood of all believers see Paul Althaus, The Theology of Martin Luther, trans. Robert C. Schultz (Philadelphia, 1966), 313–318; and Paul D. L. Avis, The Church in the Theology of the Reformers (Atlanta, 1981), 95–108. Avis argues for the centrality of the doctrine in Luther’s pastoral theology. For an alternative perspective see Christopher Voigt-Guy, Potestates und ministerium publicum: Eine Studie zur Amtstheologie im Mittelalter und bei Martin Luther (Tübingen, 2014). For the Catholic view of the doctrine see Nelson H. Minnich, “The Priesthood of All Believers at the Council of Trent,” The Jurist 67, no. 2 (2007), 341–363. 4 5 See Althaus, The Theology of Martin Luther, 323–332. Confessio Augustana V. 6 Confessio Augustana XIV. 7 Luther frequently conflated preaching with the pastoral office. See Timothy J. Wengert, ed., The Pastoral Luther (Grand Rapids and Cambridge, 2009), 17. 8 See Beth Kreitzer, “The Lutheran Sermon,” in Larissa Taylor, ed., Preachers and People in the Reformations and Early Modern Period (Boston and Leiden, 2003), 35–63, at 41. 9 Old refers to a doctrine of “kerygmatic real presence” in Luther’s view of preaching. See Hughes Oliphant Old, The Reading and Preaching of the Scriptures in the Worship of the Christian Church, volume IV: The Age of the Reformation (Grand Rapids and Cambridge, 2002), 40–41. See also Fred W. Meuser, “Luther as Preacher of the Word of God,” in Donald K. McKim, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Martin Luther (Cambridge, 2003), 135–148, at 137; and Kreitzer, “The Lutheran Sermon,” 41. On the relationship of the Holy Spirit and the Word in Luther’s theology see Jeffrey G. Silcock, “Luther on the Holy Spirit and his Use of God’s Word,” in Robert Kolb, Irene Dingel, and Lubomír Batka, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Martin Luther’s Theology (Oxford, 2014), 294–309.

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functioned as a mouthpiece for God, a prophet through whom the Lord proclaimed the Word.10 Luther once asserted that after a preacher finished his sermon he should say, “Haec dixit dominus, ‘God himself has said this’ [1 Cor. 1:10]. And again, ‘In this sermon I have been an apostle and prophet of Jesus Christ’ [1 Thess. 4:15].”11 Preaching was not the only ministry in which God used evangelical pastors as His instruments. The same was true of all of their ministerial functions. Luther asserted: “A preacher is God’s servant and instrument, used by God to accomplish his work. When I preach, baptize, absolve, offer the sacrament, God uses my mouth and hand outwardly in the work that he performs inwardly.”12 Luther’s mention of absolution is especially important, as he strongly supported an evangelical version of private confession that in time became a defining mark of the Lutheran ministry. Luther and his followers believed that private absolution was the single best way of applying the consoling promises of the Word to the troubled conscience, especially in the midst of suffering, and thus to strengthen faith. The power of the keys, understood along evangelical lines, was a crucial part of Luther’s pastoral theology.13 Conrad Porta would later gather Luther’s reflections on private absolution and a whole host of other issues related to the pastoral ministry in his Pastorale Lutheri (1582), which provided excerpts from Luther’s writings to help define and guide the evangelical care of souls.14 There were a number of Lutheran Reformers who provided further theological reflections on different aspects on the pastoral office. Melanchthon wrote important works on preaching and greatly influenced the shape of Lutheran (and Catholic) preaching through his works on

See Ronald K. Rittgers, “The Word-Prophet Martin Luther,” The Sixteenth-Century Journal: The Journal of Early Modern Studies 48, no. 4 (2017 [2018]), 951–976. 11 WA 51, 517b, 26–28; LW 41, 216. Quoted in part in Otis Carl Edwards, Jr., The History of Preaching (Nashville, 2004), 288. 12 WA 45, 310. Cited in Avis, The Church in the Theology of the Reformers, 91. 13 On Lutheran private confession see Ronald K. Rittgers, The Reformation of the Keys: Confession, Conscience, and Authority in Sixteenth Century Germany (Cambridge, 2004). On the evangelical ministry to the sick and suffering see Ronald K. Rittgers, The Reformation of Suffering: Pastoral Theology and Lay Piety in Late Medieval and Early Modern Germany (Oxford and New York, 2012). 14 On this work see Peter A. Dykema, “Handbooks for Pastors: Late Medieval Manuals for Parish Priests and Conrad Porta’s Pastorale Lutheri (1582),” in Robert J. Bast and Andrew C. Gow, eds., Continuity and Change: The Harvest of Late Medieval and Reformation History: Essays Presented to Heiko A. Oberman on his 70th Birthday (Leiden, 2000), 143–162; and Robert Kolb, “Luther the Master Pastor: Conrad Porta’s Pastorale Lutheri, Handbook for Generations,” Concordia Journal 9, no. 5 (September 1983), 179–187. 10

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rhetoric.15 Urbanus Rhegius produced an important homiletical handbook that explained to the new evangelical clergy how to preach the evangelical faith. Rhegius argued that only those entrusted with the public ministry of preaching possessed the gift of prophecy, an attempt to combat more radical interpretations of the priesthood of all believers.16 Johannes Bugenhagen greatly helped to clarify the nature of the evangelical ministry and developed specific offices within it, including superintendents.17 But it was Martin Bucer who provided the first real Lutheran pastoral theology, in Von der wahren Seelsorge und dem rechten Hirtendienst (Concerning the True Cure of Souls and Genuine Pastoral Ministry, 1538).18 In this work, which was intended to refute attacks made by “enthusiasts” against Lutheranism, the Strasbourg preacher describes how the church as the Regiment of Christ is governed by Christ, its shepherd, through duly called pastors, who exercise ministries of preaching/teaching and discipline. The recovery of ancient Christian penitential discipline figures prominently in this work, as Bucer thought it was essential to the proper functioning of a truly evangelical church. Thus, the key theme of the work is God’s desire to seek and save the sheep that have strayed from the true flock (Ezek. 34:16).19 While Bucer emphasized the importance of pastoral offices in this work, elsewhere he voiced his support for the priesthood of all believers. Later he was less enthusiastic about the doctrine, something that was also true of Melanchthon and the Augsburg Confession.20 The other great treatment of Lutheran pastoral theology in the early modern period appeared in Johann Gerhard’s multivolume Loci theologici (1610–1622). Gerhard used Aristotelian categories to explain the Christian ministry from an evangelical point of view.21

See Edwards, The History of Preaching, 299; and Kreitzer, “The Lutheran Sermon,” 49–50. See Scott Hendrix, ed. and trans., Preaching the Reformation: The Homiletical Handbook of Urbanus Rhegius (Milwaukee, 2003), introd., at 73. 17 See David Cornick, “The Reformation Crisis in Pastoral Care,” in Gillian R. Evans, ed., A History of Pastoral Care (London and New York, 2000), 223–251, at 232. 18 A critical edition may be found in Robert Stupperich, ed., Martin Bucers Deutsche Schriften, volume VII: Schriften der Jahre 1538–1539 (Gütersloh and Paris, 1964), 67–245. For an English translation see Martin Bucer, Concerning the True Cure of Souls and Genuine Pastoral Ministry, trans. Peter Beale (Edinburgh and Carlisle, 2009). On the importance of this work see Cornick, “The Reformation Crisis in Pastoral Care,” 237. 19 For a brief summary of this work see Cornick, “The Reformation Crisis in Pastoral Care,” 237–239. 20 Von der wahren Seelsorge, in Stupperich, ed., Martin Bucers Deutsche Schriften, 77. On the declining importance of the priesthood of all believers in Lutheran pastoral theology see Avis, The Church in the Theology of the Reformers, 102–103. 21 See Johann Gerhard, Theological Commonplaces: On the Ecclesiastical Ministry, 2 vols., ed. Benjamin T. G. Mayes (and Heath R. Curtis – vol. II), trans. Richard J. Dinda (St. Louis, 15

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Much of what has been said thus far about Lutheran pastoral theology also applies to Reformed Protestantism.22 The ministry of the Word was central to Ulrich Zwingli’s understanding of the pastoral office, and while he believed in the priesthood of all believers, he, like Luther, insisted that order was important in the church; therefore, only those duly called by God and the community should exercise this ministry publicly. The Zurich reformer made this point especially in Vom Predigtamt (The Preaching Office, 1525), in which he refuted Anabaptist claims to the contrary. Zwingli also had an expansive understanding of the ministry of the Word that included care of the poor, the sick, and the needy. Evangelical ministers were to administer the Word in both individual and communal contexts. (Unlike Lutherans, Zwingli and Reformed Protestants in general did not include private absolution in their prescriptions for ministry to the sick and suffering; instead, they emphasized instruction in biblical doctrine.)23 Zwingli and Reformed Protestants adopted the practice of preaching through whole books of the Bible (lectio continua) rather than following the traditional lectionary, as was the case with most Lutherans. Zwingli began his career as an evangelical minister by preaching through the Gospel of Matthew. Regrettably, very few of his sermons survive. For Zwingli the evangelical minister was first and foremost a prophet. In fact, the German term Prophet became the typical designation for pastors in Zwingli’s Zurich, and the regular gatherings at which pastors studied Scripture together in the original languages and prepared sermons and commentaries was called the Prophezei (Prophecy). The emphasis in these gatherings was not on ecstatic utterance but on Spirit-inspired engagement with the Hebrew and Greek text as a means of avoiding the errors of both Catholics and Anabaptists. Zwingli interpreted the biblical gift of tongues (1 Cor. 14) as knowledge of the biblical languages, a reflection of his deep indebtedness to the biblical humanism of Erasmus. As with Old Testament prophets, Zwingli thought that evangelical ministers should attack all that opposes God and promote all that conforms to the divine will. The Zurich Reformer asserts in The Preaching Office, “it is the primary task of the prophet 2011). The treatment of the ecclesiastical ministry first appeared in 1619 in volume VI of Gerhard’s massive work. 22 The following paragraphs on Zwingli’s pastoral theology draw on William P. Stephens, The Theology of Huldrych Zwingli (Oxford, 1986), 274–281; and William P. Stephens, Zwingli: An Introduction to his Thought (Oxford, 1992), 111–122. 23 See Amy Nelson Burnett, Teaching the Reformation: Ministers and their Message in Basel, 1529–1629 (Oxford and New York, 2006), 51, 238, 245. Basel was an exception; its church orders allowed private absolution.

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that he pluck up, tear down and destroy whatever is set up against God and that he build and plant, on the other hand, what God desires.”24 In keeping with Zwingli’s desire to establish a Christian commonwealth in Zurich, evangelical prophetic preaching was to address every aspect of human life, including politics, economics, and social matters, in addition to the condition of human souls and inner piety. In what was arguably his most important work on the evangelical ministry, Der Hirt (The Shepherd, 1524), Zwingli assumes the mantle of the prophet and seeks to guide evangelical pastors in the proper exercise of their office. Zwingli distinguishes true evangelical shepherds of God’s flock from false ones, holding up Christ as the proper model for Christian ministry. False shepherds live immoral lives, are motivated by greed, fail to confront sin, and rely on human teaching and tradition, invariably directing the sheep to mere created things rather than to the Creator. True shepherds reflect God’s glory in their lives, look to the needs of the flock, preach against both individual and corporate sin, and rely entirely on Scripture to discern the divine will, which they boldly proclaim to their contemporaries. As Zwingli asserted elsewhere, such proclamation brought salvation and grace to the human soul.25 Calvin placed an equally strong emphasis on preaching as a means of grace; preaching was the ordinary means through which God effected the salvation of the elect.26 For Calvin, as for the majority of Protestants, the central task of the evangelical pastor was to preach the Word of God purely and to administer the sacraments according to Christ’s institution.27 (Calvin affirmed the priesthood of all believers but took it to mean that there are no human mediators between God and humankind, not that all were authorized to preach and administer sacraments; pastors had to be duly called to their office.)28 For Calvin there was an important parallel between Christ’s

24

Z 4, 394, 8–11; The Preaching Office, in Huldrych Zwingli: Writings, trans. Wayne Pipkin, volume II (Allison Park, 1984), 158. 25 Zwingli made this assertion in Of the Clarity and Certainty of the Word of God. Cited in Anne T. Thayer, “Preaching and Worship,” in David M. Whitford, ed., T&T Clark Companion to Reformation Theology (London and New York, 2012), 157–77, at 161. 26 See Dawn DeVries, “Calvin’s Preaching,” in Donald K. McKim, ed., The Cambridge Companion to John Calvin (Cambridge, 2004), 106–124, at 110. 27 Calvin, Institutes IV, I, 9. See Raymond A. Mentzer, “Church Discipline and Order,” in Whitford, ed., T&T Clark Companion to Reformation Theology, 213–232, at 214. 28 Avis, The Church in the Theology of the Reformers, 154. For Calvin’s defense of his pastoral calling see “Calvin’s Reply to Sadoleto,” in A Reformation Debate: John Calvin and Jacopo Sadoleto, ed. John C. Olin (Grand Rapids, 1966), 50–51.

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presence in preaching and in the Lord’s Supper.29 In both cases the Holy Spirit mediated the presence of Christ to the elect. God alone ruled the church via the Word, and God made use of human beings as His instruments through which to exercise this rule. Calvin could speak of the preacher as a mouthpiece for God or as a tool used by the divine workman,30 but he insisted that the Holy Spirit was the animating force behind the sacramental quality of evangelical preaching. The preacher could not assume that God was speaking through him simply because he was endeavoring to preach the Word. God the Father had to add the Holy Spirit to such preaching in order for it become revelatory and salvific.31 One of Calvin’s most important contributions to Protestant pastoral theology was his scheme of organizing church offices, which he learned from Martin Bucer. In the Institutes Calvin discusses four offices, which he found in Ephesians 4:11–12, among other places, in the New Testament: pastors, doctors, elders, and deacons.32 Pastors were to preach the Word, administer the sacraments, and admonish and console the laity (both privately and publicly);33 doctors were to teach sound doctrine; elders were to assist in maintaining discipline; and deacons were to care for those in physical need.34 Pastors constituted the most critical office, but according to Calvin, all offices were to work together as “different tones in music combine to make sweet melody.”35 Discipline was an important theme in Calvin’s pastoral theology. As we have seen, he taught that two offices in the church were specifically tasked with this ministry: pastors and elders. (He also maintained that all Christians have a duty to exercise “fraternal correction.”) In some places Calvin could say that the exercise of discipline, especially with respect to unworthy participation in the Lord’s Supper, was an essential mark of the Christian church along with Word and sacraments.36 Calvin helped to create the DeVries, “Calvin’s Preaching,” 109. The same parallel existed for Luther, although the two Reformers conceived of Christ’s eucharistic presence differently. 30 31 Calvin, Institutes IV, CXI, 1. See Edwards, The History of Preaching, 313–314. 32 Calvin, Institutes IV, III, 4. 33 On the importance of private exhortation and consolation in the ministry of a pastor see the excerpt from Calvin’s La forme des prières in John Calvin: Writings on Pastoral Piety, ed. and trans. Elsie Anne McKee (New York and Mahwah, NJ, 2001), 292. See also Scott M. Manetsch, Calvin’s Company of Pastors: Pastoral Care and the Emerging Reformed Church, 1536–1609 (Oxford and New York, 2013), 280–298. 34 See Calvin, Institutes IV, III, 4. 35 CR 79, 196, cited in Herman J. Selderhuis, ed., The Calvin Handbook (Grand Rapids and Cambridge, 2008), 330. 36 See Mentzer, “Church Discipline and Order,” 214. 29

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Genevan Consistory, a quasi-judicial body made up of elders and pastors that met on a weekly basis to admonish and punish sinners, but also to educate, console, and reconcile them to the church.37 (The elders were members of the city council, which gave Geneva a distinctive blend of lay and clerical leadership in religious matters.) The Consistory became a defining feature of Reformed Protestant communities in the early modern period and leading Reformed Protestant theologians, such as Theodore Beza and John Knox, continued to view discipline as an essential mark of the church; the same is true of the Belgic Confession.38 Reformed Protestants had sharp disagreements about another church office: bishops.39 Especially in England, Calvinists clashed over the validity of the episcopate, with many “hotter Protestants” (i.e., Puritans) expressing their disdain for the allegedly “papist” office, while other Calvinists, such as John Jewel, were willing to support it. Preaching remained the most important pastoral duty of the Reformed Protestant pastor, and a number of theologians provided important homiletical guides: Heinrich Bullinger’s Decades (Decades quinque, 1552) and William Perkins’s The Arte of Prophesying (1607) were the most significant.40 Because preaching was so central to Reformed Protestantism, even as it was for Lutheranism, theologians consistently emphasized that, as with the sacraments, the character of the preacher did not affect the efficacy of the sermon as a means of grace – God could use an unworthy and even sinful vessel to communicate the Word.41 Finally, along with the ministry of preaching and discipline, Reformed Protestantism also increasingly stressed the importance of the individual care of souls. The ideal Reformed pastor was not only a preacher but also “a clinician of the soul, a surgeon of the conscience.”42 As we have seen, Magisterial Protestant pastoral theology was intended in part to refute and suppress the Radical Reformation. Although Magisterial and Radical Reformers agreed on such essentials as Sola Scriptura and the priesthood of all believers, they had sharp disagreements on the nature and function of the pastoral office in a truly evangelical church. Radical Reformers believed that God had called them to resurrect the apostolic 37

38 Ibid., 216–217. Ibid., 214. See Avis, The Church in the Theology of the Reformers, ch. 8, “The Reformed Episcopate.” 40 James Thomas Ford, “Preaching in the Reformed Tradition,” in Taylor, ed., Preachers and People, 65–88, at 75–76. 41 Avis, The Church in the Theology of the Reformers, 92–94. 42 David Cornick, “Pastoral Care in England: Perkins, Baxter and Burnet,” in Evans, ed., History of Pastoral Care, 313–327, at 315. See also Joseph William Black, Reformation Pastors: Richard Baxter and the Ideal of the Reformed Pastor (Carlisle and Waynesboro, 2004), 91. 39

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Christianity of the pre-Constantinian era, before the church had lapsed into reliance on the state for protection and support, and before infant baptism had become widespread. The hope that Luther and Zwingli initially provided for a return to primitive Christianity soon disappointed certain of their followers, who believed that both Reformers had committed the sin of Constantinian compromise. Radical Reformers interrupted sermons in Protestant churches and also took to the streets, the fields, and private homes to preach their version of evangelical Christianity. Both lay and ordained Radicals participated in this preaching, which they justified by invoking the priesthood of all believers. (On occasion, women preached in the open air as well.)43 This doctrine played a defining role in the emerging Radical pastoral theology. Radicals used it to justify not only lay preaching but also two other key marks of their movement: fraternal correction and mission/evangelism. Both were seen as the responsibility of all members of the gathered community of true Christians (Gemeinde).44 But early on the Radical Reformation also developed a nascent theology of pastoral leadership that many, but not all, Radical communities adopted. (The Spiritualist wing of the Radical Reformation showed little interest in such pastoral theology, as Spiritualists embraced the life of the lonely prophet, as in the case of Sebastian Franck, or the intimacy of a small circle of like-minded friends, as in the case of Caspar Schwenckfeld.)45 This early pastoral theology found expression in Michael Sattler’s Schleitheim Articles (1527), which called for “shepherds” to be men of good repute whose office it was “to read [Scripture], to admonish, to teach, to warn, and to punish or ban in the community; to lead all sisters and brothers in prayer and in breaking bread; and to make sure that in all matters that concern the body of Christ, the community is built up and improved.” The community was to provide for the shepherd’s basic needs, although there is no mention of the tithe. The community was also empowered to replace the See Lee Palmer Wandel, “Switzerland,” in Taylor, ed., Preachers and People, 221–247, at 238; and Hans Jürgen Goertz, The Anabaptists, trans. Trevor Johnson (London and New York, 1996), 115. For an example of the efforts of women to preach and practice pastoral care in Magisterial Protestantism see Church Mother: The Writings of a Protestant Reformer in SixteenthCentury Germany, ed. and trans. Elsie Anne McKee (Chicago and London, 2006). Here the Reformer is Katharina Schütz Zell. 44 See Avis, The Church in the Theology of the Reformers, 97; Cornelius J. Dyck, “The Role of Preaching in Anabaptist Tradition,” Mennonite Life 17, no. 1 (1962), 21–25, at 22; and Franklin H. Littell, The Origins of Sectarian Protestantism: A Study of the Anabaptist View of the Church (New York and London, 1964), 112. 45 Robert Friedmann, The Theology of Anabaptism (Scottdale and Kitchner, 1973), 117. 43

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shepherd with another of its number if the shepherd fell into grievous sin or “through the cross [i.e., execution] [was] brought to the Lord.”46 Menno Simons later stipulated that shepherds could be called to their office either directly by God or through the means of the faithful.47 It is clear that shepherds were to preach, and there are even accounts of some Anabaptist worship services having sermons by two preachers with much congregational interaction.48 Unfortunately, very few Radical sermons survive. The extant sources we have suggest that such sermons were based on Scripture and that they exhorted the faithful to take up their crosses and follow Christ (Nachfolge Christi), that is, they were largely spontaneous and hortatory in nature. They also assumed that their listeners were true believers who understood the true faith and who therefore simply needed to be exhorted to follow it.49 A popular title for preachers in Anabaptist communities was Vermaner (exhorter).50 There is little evidence of training in the biblical languages among preachers, as secondgeneration Radical preachers typically had little if any formal theological education and instead relied on the Holy Spirit and the plain meaning of Scripture. In Hutterite communities especially, the servants of the Word (Diener des Worts) or teachers (Lehrer) preached “sharp” rather than “soft” sermons that demanded obedience to Christ’s call to radical discipleship.51 However, the sermon was not seen as identical with the Word of God, as was the case among Magisterial reformers; rather, sermons bore testimony to what God had done and how true believers should respond.52 Shepherds or pastors were also to be directly involved in exercising the ban (Matt. 18:15–20), as they sought to maintain the purity of Christ’s spotless Bride. They were assisted in this task by the faithful, who by virtue of their

Michael Sattler, “The Schleitheim Articles,” in Michael G. Baylor, ed. and trans., The Radical Reformation (Cambridge, 1991), 172–180, at 176. Menno Simons, “Foundations of Christian Doctrine,” in The Complete Writings of Menno Simons, c. 1496–1561, ed. John Christian Wenger, trans. Leonard Verduin (Scottdale and Waterloo, 1984), 103–226, at 159 and 160. 48 Thayer, “Preaching and Worship,” 163. 49 On the nature of Anabaptist preaching and its assumed audience see Harold S. Bender, “Sermons,” in Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online, http://gameo.org/index.php? title=Sermons&oldid=111206. For an example of an extant Radical sermon see Paul S. Gross and Elizabeth Bender, trans., “A Hutterite Sermon of the Seventeenth Century,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 44, no. 1 (January 1970), 59–71. 50 Dyck, “The Role of Preaching in Anabaptist Tradition,” 23. 51 Robert Friedmann, “Hutterite Worship and Preaching,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 40, no. 1 (January 1966), 5–26. 52 Dyck, “The Role of Preaching in Anabaptist Tradition,” 23. 46

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common priesthood were both qualified and obliged to carry out this important function.53

Early Modern Catholic Pastoral Theology and Preaching megan armstrong Like their Protestant counterparts, Roman Catholic theologians devoted considerable energy to pastoral theology. A particularly good example is preaching, a topic which generated intense discussion throughout the late medieval and early modern periods. That it did so is not surprising because preaching was considered a cornerstone of Catholic pastoral engagement. It mediated the teachings of the church to lay believers, and it was also enormously popular. Indeed, even as printing presses began to appear in cities across Europe after 1460, the pulpit remained arguably the most powerful medium of communication in Europe. On Sundays, feast days, and special occasions, local preachers climbed into parish pulpits to give their sermons. Celebrated preachers wandered the roads of Europe, attracting large crowds.54 By the sixteenth century the Catholic Church was in the throes of profound change that made the pastoral ministry of the church a pressing concern for ecclesiastical authorities. The following discussion explores preaching in the context of an evolving early modern Catholic pastoral theology, one that came to shape the influential program of reform formulated at the Council of Trent (1545–1563). Discussions at Trent reveal the shaping influence of over two centuries of thinking on the pastoral role of the church, illuminating the particular influence of conciliarism, Observant reform, Christian humanism, and Protestant reform. In diverse ways these reform traditions contributed to a significant rethinking of preaching and the office of preacher between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. For these reasons early modern preaching serves as a critical window into the changing character of the pastoral ministry of the church during a formative period of its history. It is a central assertion here, however, that in the divided context of Reformation Europe, Catholic pastoral theology privileged a special role for the preacher and other members of the clergy as “reconcilers of souls.”55 53 On the ban see Menno Simons, “A Kind Admonition on Church Discipline, 1541,” in The Complete Writings of Menno Simons, 407–418. 54 See, e.g., Larissa Taylor, Soldiers of Christ: Preaching in Late Medieval and Reformation France (Oxford, 1992). 55 On the engagement of preachers in religious controversy during the Reformation see, among others, John Frymire, The Primacy of Postils: Catholics, Protestants and the Dissemination

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Despite its important place in the ministry of the Catholic Church, one is hard-pressed to find a systematic theological treatment of preaching from the early modern period.56 Instead, one must look broadly across the institution of the church, turning not only to theological treatises and ecclesiastical legislation, but also to the vast and diverse body of preaching aids that were circulating from European presses in growing numbers from the middle of the fifteenth century. The artes praedicandi included handbooks on preaching, sermon and homily collections, and postils (postilla).57 With this array of texts in mind, the following discussion will explore the place of preaching in the pastoral theology of early modern theorists, looking in turn at some of the more important representatives of the different reforming currents leading up to the promulgation of the reform program at the Council of Trent. Broadly speaking, three issues preoccupied Catholic theorists by the early modern period: the relationship between preaching and Christian doctrine; the intercessory authority of the church; and the formation of the preacher. A prominent theologian at the University of Paris, Jean Gerson (d. 1429), wrote upon all three issues. He was also a well-known and influential conciliarist thinker. Since his work also stood at the intersection of older and newer currents of thought on preaching, it serves as a good place to begin this exploration of early modern pastoral theology and preaching. Gerson is perhaps best known as a vocal advocate and theorist of conciliar reform, one of the many reform movements that swept through the fifteenth-century church.58 Conciliarists such as Gerson were deeply concerned about the state of the late medieval church, critical of its administration but also of its role in ensuring Catholic orthodoxy among its laity. It was because of his concern about orthodoxy that Gerson wrote extensively on the pastoral role of the clergy, in particular the offices of bishop, parish priest, and preacher. In line with Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274) and other Scholastic thinkers who preceded him at the University of Paris, Gerson regarded preaching as an apostolic office charged with illuminating the Word of God. The Word was manifest not only in the Bible, but also in the of Ideas in Early Modern Germany (Leiden, 2010); and Megan C. Armstrong, The Politics of Piety: Franciscan Preachers during the French Wars of Religion (Rochester, 2004). 56 This is an observation made by John O’Malley in The First Jesuits (Cambridge, MA, 1995), 32. 57 Frymire argues that the late fifteenth century witnessed a preaching renaissance, aided by the printing press. Over 50,000 copies of the postils of Johannes Herolt (d. 1478) alone were printed before 1500, along with over 100 separate editions of various sermons. See Frymire, Primacy of Postils, 13–14. 58 For a broad survey of conciliarism see Francis Oakley, The Conciliarist Tradition (Oxford, 2008).

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teachings of the church handed down over time. Gerson shared with his Scholastic predecessors a distrust of the capacity of ordinary believers to understand the Bible, let alone other Christian sources, without the intercession of the church. True understanding of Christ’s message required a sophisticated grounding in the Christian sciences, one only found among the clergy who had studied theology at a university.59 Gerson’s privileging of rigorous theological training reflected a profound concern about doctrinal error. He resisted the publication of the Scriptures in the vernacular and criticized lay preaching on the same grounds, that ignorance of sound doctrine could lead to misunderstanding. But Gerson also worried about well-intentioned preachers who were too “subtle” in their explication of a scriptural passage. A good preacher, he once said, understood when the people required “milk” rather than “solid food.”60 In this, Gerson was by no means alone. Scholastic language of any sort was widely discouraged for use in sermons, while preaching aids advocated the use of simple and even homely language that was easily understood by listeners.61 Avoiding complexity and reasserting essential doctrine were hallmarks of good preaching. Gerson’s conciliarist leanings were perhaps most visible in his discussion of who should preach. Bonaventure (d. 1274) ranked mendicant preachers above the secular clergy in the hierarchical structure of the church because of their special gift for illuminating the Word of God.62 As a Franciscan, Bonaventure’s privileging of the office of preaching is understandable. Along with the other mendicant orders (Dominican, Carmelite, Augustinian, and Servite), the Franciscans emerged in the thirteenth century as having an itinerant preaching ministry. The founder of the order, Francis of Assisi (d. 1226), embraced a charismatic understanding of the role of the preacher as a vessel of Christ and interpreter of his message. By the fifteenth century much of the routine preaching in the church was in the hands of the friars who were trained in their own theology colleges (studia) as well as at the university. Many of the most celebrated preachers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were drawn from these orders, notably the Franciscans Bernardino of Siena, Michel Menot, Francesco Panigarola, and Cornelio

59

Dorothy Catherine Brown, Pastor and Laity in the Theology of Jean Gerson (Cambridge, 1987), 42–44. Such skepticism was widely shared in the late medieval church. Geiler von Kayserberg urged preachers to avoid using Latin theological terms and mentioning academic debates to avoid confusion. See Essie Jane Dempsey Douglass, Justification in Late Medieval Preaching: A Study of Geiler von Kaysersberg (Leiden, 1966). 60 Brown, Pastor and Laity, 37–38. 61 62 Taylor, Soldiers of Christ; Frymire, Primacy of Postils, 11–12. Brown, Pastor and Laity, 38.

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Musso, and the Dominicans Vincent Ferrier and Girolamo Savonarola.63 In marked contrast to Bonaventure, Gerson argued that preaching should be the responsibility of the secular clergy because of their role in directing the spiritual life of the laity. Like many conciliarists he was harshly critical of episcopal absenteeism in particular, insistent that a bishop was responsible for ensuring good doctrine in his diocese. To his mind one of the most important duties of the bishop was to preach, a role he should fulfill regularly in person in addition to overseeing the parish clergy in the performance of the cura animarum. Gerson situated preaching at the center of an ambitious plan for spiritual renewal in the church, a plan that pivoted upon the dissemination of correct belief through the mediation of a well-trained and diligent secular clergy. Conciliarist concerns about a well-trained secular clergy continued to percolate in church circles after this time, inspiring diocesan reform in many regions long before its cause was taken up at the Council of Trent.64 At much the same time, however, the pastoral ministry of the church had become a matter of intense discussion among adherents of Observant reform, a reforming movement that swept through many of the late medieval monastic traditions including the most influential preaching orders, the mendicant. A central preoccupation of Observant reform was moral reform, a concern that came to late medieval discussions of preaching. Larissa Taylor has described fifteenth-century sermons as vehicles of a practical theology for this reason, since training Christians to recognize sin and resist its temptations was the principal objective of late medieval preaching.65 However, this orientation was by no means new to Observant reform. Moral reform was a particular preoccupation of mendicant preaching from the origins of these traditions in the thirteenth century. The Rule of St. Francis, for example, asked friars to speak simply but vividly on “vices, virtues, punishments, and glory.”66 Francis of Assisi, a layman himself, advised followers against exploring the intricacies of doctrine at the expense of exposing the presence of sin. On the fifteenth-century preachers see esp. Taylor, Soldiers of Christ. On Cornelio Musso and Panigarola see Corrie Norman, Humanist Taste and Franciscan Values: Cornelio Musso and Catholic Preaching in Sixteenth Century Italy (New York, 1998). 64 Nicole Lemaitre, “L’idéal pastoral de réforme et le Concile de Trente (XIVe–XVIe siècle),” in Wim François and Violet Soen, eds., The Council of Trent: Reform and Controversity in Europe and Beyond (1545–1700), volume II: Between Bishops and Princes (Göttingen, 2018), 13–17. 65 Taylor, Soldiers of Christ, 84–86. 66 Rule of St. Francis (1221). Corrie Norman also discusses its influence upon Cornelio Musso in “The Franciscan Preaching Tradition and its Sixteenth-Century Legacy: The Case of Cornelio Musso,” Catholic Historical Review 85 (1999), 208–232, at 208–209. 63

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The task of the preacher was to illuminate the path to God, one that had already been modeled by Christ incarnate. The seven deadly sins and the seven virtues provided medieval and early modern preachers with a popular and easily digested framework for expounding on the nature of temptation, the effects of sin, and the rewards that awaited the good Christian in the afterlife.67 The spread of Observant reform in the mendicant traditions focused renewed attention upon the reformative function of preaching. It varied in nature from tradition to tradition but generally speaking reflected a shared concern that members were no longer “observing” faithfully the ideals established by their respective spiritual founders. Reformers called for a return to a simpler, less worldly, and heartfelt model of religious life, thus reinforcing a traditional mendicant understanding of spiritual reform that placed the body in the service of the soul. The Franciscan Bernardino of Siena (d. 1446) was particularly influential in popularizing an Observant understanding of preaching. Though Bernardino never wrote a treatise on preaching, he discussed the role of the preacher in many of his sermons. These circulated widely during his lifetime and were still recommended as models for preaching in the sixteenth century. For Bernardino, preaching was essential to the salvation of souls because it could “transform” the will.68 Catholic theology made the will important in the reception of God’s grace. But recognizing one’s sinning state and seeking repentance were the first stage in redemption. Bernardino believed that preaching, because of its orality, was uniquely suited to moving the sinner to repent. In medieval thought, hearing was considered the most important of the human senses for conveying and absorbing Christian truths because it harnessed the emotions and the senses.69 Bernardino argued that to understand truly Christ’s message one must feel it. In a sermon given in Siena in 1427, for example, he stated: “This is the faith, the word that is preached; by hearing the word it immediately enters through the ear and passes to the heart, and Jesus reposes 67 On sin in the medieval Catholic tradition see, e.g., Jean Delumeau, La peur en Occident (Paris, 1978). On Franciscan preaching in the context of the Reformation see Megan C. Armstrong, “A Franciscan Kind of Hell,” in Isabel Moreira and Margaret Toscano, eds., Hell and its Afterlife: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (Aldershot, 2012), 173–187. 68 Caroline Muessig, “Bernardino da Siena and Observant Preaching as a Vehicle for Religious Transformation,” in James Mixson and Bert Roest, eds., A Companion to Observant Reform in the Late Middle Ages and Beyond [Brill’s Companions to the Christian Tradition 59] (Leiden, 2015), 185–203, at 195. 69 Meussig, “Bernardino da Siena,” 196–197. On the role of “hearing” in medieval thought see, e.g., Bruce W. Holsinger, Music, Body and Desire in Medieval Culture: Hildegard of Bingen to Chaucer (Stanford, 2001).

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in your heart through the faith that you hold to believe.”70 The friar advised his listeners to pay close attention to his words for this reason, but he also asked preachers to use language that aroused feelings of pleasure and love as well as pain and sorrow.71 Fostering hatred of one’s sinning behavior, fear of damnation, and love of Christ opened the Christian’s soul to true contrition and readied it for redemption. By the end of the fifteenth century the reformative function of preaching had also become part of a vigorous debate over the relationship between preaching and the sacraments. Johann Geiler von Kayersburg (d. 1510), for example, argued that the office of the preacher was as important as the priest at the altar because it helped to ready the soul of the sinner for the reception of grace through the sacraments.72 The celebrated preacher considered it particularly important for the efficacy of the sacrament of penance. Michel Menot (d. 1518), a celebrated Franciscan preacher and contemporary of Geiler, expressed a similar view of preaching when he suggested that many of the souls that were then in Heaven would have been damned had they not attended good sermons.73 For Menot and Geiler the sermon and the sacraments were both essential to the salvation of the sinner. As Ann Thayer has shown, however, a range of opinion existed on this issue by the turn of the sixteenth century.74 “Rigorists” held that the efficaciousness of confession, penance, and the Eucharist resided significantly upon the spiritual readiness of the sinner to receive God’s grace. From this standpoint, preaching was critical to the redemptive journey of the individual, because it engendered contrition. “Absolutionists,” in contrast, privileged the redemptive authority of the sacraments, a view most closely associated with the Scholastic theologian John Duns Scotus (d. 1308).75 Duns Scotus famously argued that the words of the priest performing the sacraments were sufficient. This vigorous discussion on the reformative purpose of preaching continued throughout the sixteenth century, and shaped discussions at the Council of Trent in significant ways. It accounts in particular for the council’s Meussig, “Bernardino da Siena,” 197. On Bernardino of Siena see also Franco Mormondo, The Preacher’s Demons: Bernardino of Siena and the Social Underworld of Early Renaissance Italy (Chicago, 1999). 72 David Steinmetz, Reformers in the Wings: From Geiler von Kaysersberg to Theodore Beza (Oxford, 2001), 12–14. 73 Dempsey Douglass, Justification, 85. Douglass provides the original Latin passage: O quot sunt hodie in paradiso qui damnati essent fuissent boni sermones quos frequentaverunt! See also Michel Menot, Sermons choisis de Michel Menot (1508–1518), ed. Joseph Nève (Paris, 1924), 421. 74 Ann Thayer, Penitence, Preaching, and the Coming of the Reformation (Aldershot, 2002), 94–96. 75 Ibid., 96. 70 71

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affirmation of an essentially mendicant model of preaching that privileged the emotions in processes of internal reform.76 By the time the council convened in the middle of the sixteenth century, however, its formulation of preaching was also being shaped in response to two other reform movements: Christian humanism and Protestant reform. For different reasons, both of these reform movements would lead church authorities to privilege learning as a critical foundation of preaching. Similar to the Observants, Christian humanists were first and foremost moral reformers. They were also products of Renaissance culture, however, whose understanding of human nature was significantly informed by Greek and Roman philosophical and other writings on the human condition. They drew upon both classical and Christian learning to construct a unique program of spiritual reform, one that embraced learning as the path to the virtuous life and decried ignorance as the source of sin. Christian humanists rejected the more pessimistic Augustinian view of human nature, in particular its emphasis upon the weakness of human will in processes of reform. They were more optimistic, insistent that the mind and body worked in tandem to train the devout believer to recognize sin and choose the virtuous life. It was because Christian humanists believed that ignorance was the root of sin that they emphasized the pedagogical and reformative role of the clergy, a role that made effective preaching a special concern. Christian humanists expected a good preacher to have a solid grasp of theology, but they also had to be effective in the art of persuasion. Content and form worked in tandem in pursuit of spiritual reform. Christian humanist attention to rhetoric in the art of preaching, and in particular to the popularization of classical modes of rhetoric, was its most significant contribution to early modern discussions of preaching, an approach disseminated in preaching manuals as well as model sermons. One of the earliest humanist preaching manuals came from the celebrated Hebraist Johannes Reuchlin (d. 1522). Published in Germany in 1508 though first written two decades earlier, De arte praedicandi mingled a traditional Scholastic understanding of the nature and purpose of preaching with an interest in classical rhetorical strategies. For Reuchlin, a good preacher was a 76

Preaching was discussed during the early sessions of the council, in particular session V, June 1546 (decree II, chapter 2). See Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. Norman P. Tanner, 2 vols. (London and Washington, 1990), volume II: From Trent to Vatican II, 669. Bireley points out that the text on preaching on vice and virtue was lifted directly from the Rule of Francis of Assisi: Robert Bireley, “Preaching from Trent to the Enlightenment,” in Edward Foley, ed., Handbook on Catholic Preaching (Collegeville, 2016), 74–83.

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master at public speaking and approved by ecclesiastical authorities. Arguing that the ultimate goal of preaching was to make the listener “better,” Reuchlin discussed the utility of rhetoric in traditionally humanist terms: as the art of moral suasion. For Reuchlin, speaking well was useful for promoting virtue. Speech was the expression of the entire self. One’s stance, gestures, and tone of voice as well as selection of words must all be harnessed to move the listener to feel “pleasure or humility, or fear or longing.”77 The humanist inclination of Reuchlin was also reflected in his preference for the Scriptures as the basis of the sermon. Similar to Protestant Reformers, humanists considered early Christian sources more authentic representations of true Christian piety.78 Reuchlin insisted that the biblical text chosen for the sermon should be read so that it was easily understood. Avoiding “absurdities” and unnecessary embellishments that could lead to misinterpretation was essential. For this reason he touted brevity, clarity, and giving each word its full weight as essential to effective preaching.79 The single most influential humanist contribution to early modern discussions of sacred oratory was the Ecclesiastes sive de ratione concionandi, written by the Dutch reformer Desiderius Erasmus and published in 1535. In the Ecclesiastes Erasmus argued that a good preacher required natural ability, a solid knowledge of the Scriptures, and training in classical rhetoric. Preaching was among the highest and most dignified church offices because of its role in illuminating the Word, and it demanded an oratory that was worthy of the perfection of its spiritual message. Erasmus held up Cicero and Augustine of Hippo for special praise as rhetoricians, considering Augustine the perfect exponent of Christian oratory through his marriage of classical form and Christian wisdom. In using Augustine as a model of the good preacher, Erasmus signaled the importance of character. Drawing upon classical rhetorical theory, Erasmus argued that the moral state of the preacher was integral to speaking well. Whether the moral state of the preacher inflected the efficacy of his message was an old discussion in the church, one renewed by Christian humanists including Erasmus. That preachers should lead a good Christian life was expected. Even so, it was the traditional argument of the church by the thirteenth century that the ordination of a priest made him Gillian R. Evans, “The Ars Praedicandi of Johannes Reuchlin,” Rhetorica 3 (1985), 99–104, at 103. See, e.g., Jerry H. Bentley, Humanists and the Holy Writ: New Testament Scholarship in the Renaissance (Princeton, 1983). On Erasmus in particular see Erika Rummel, Erasmus Annotations on the New Testament: From Philologist to Theologian (Toronto, 1986). 79 Evans, “The Ars Praedicandi,” 101. 77

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a vessel of Christ’s authority. As the celebrated French preacher Jean Le Picart (d. 1556) explained to his listeners in one of his sermons, “even if I am a bad priest and lead an evil life, I am still a priest, because my dignity and authority come not from my goodness and charity but from the Word of God.”80 Erasmus stopped short of denying the efficacy of a sermon given by an immoral preacher. He insisted, even so, that to preach well one had to model Christian values because the inner state informed the integrity of the message. Erasmus described the good preacher as moral, temperate in his speech, possessing good judgment, and dignified in the performance of his office. Above all, he must be “of a heart pure and uncorrupt that from this fountain may flow nothing which is not holy, and wise, and good.”81 But most importantly of all, he argued, preaching must be useful. Eloquence must edify, otherwise it had no real purpose and could even be dangerous. By the middle of the sixteenth century the appeal of classical rhetoric spurred the production of more specialized treatises on sacred oratory, including Agostino Valerios’s De Rhetorica ecclesaiastica (1574), Luis de Granada’s Ecclesiasticae rhetoricae (1578), and Francesco Panigarola’s Il Predicatore (1609). A number of scholars including John O’Malley and Frederick McGinness have argued that the growing appeal of classical rhetoric reflected its perceived usefulness for reaching diverse audiences. McGinness, for example, suggests that the post-Reformation papacy favored a Ciceronian-style public oratory as especially suitable for expressing the grandeur and authority of the head of the Catholic Church.82 Classical oratorical modes were considered just as useful for reaching more humble audiences as well. Panigarola’s Predicatore, for example, identified twelve possible sermon types useful for preaching in the vernacular; these were dependent upon the proposed subject matter and selection of rhetorical mode. Of the three most important ones discussed by the Latin orator Cicero (deliberative, demonstrative, judicial), Panigarola recommended the judicial for treating doctrine. However, he also found the traditional medieval thematic sermon useful for teaching the Gospels, a fact which suggests that many preachers continued to find them valuable. The classical sermon, 80

Translation is taken from Taylor, Soldiers of Christ, 123. The passage comes from François Le Picart, Les sermons et instructions chrestiennes, pour tous les iours de Caresme (Paris, 1566), fol. 96. 81 For the English translation see Desiderius Erasmus, Ecclesiastes; or the Preacher (London, 1797), 17. 82 Frederick J. McGinness, Right Thinking and Sacred Oratory in Counter-Reformation Rome (Princeton, 1995), 17, 106. See also John O’Malley, Praise and Blame in Renaissance Rome: Rhetoric, Doctrine, and Reform in the Sacred Orators of the Papal Court, c. 1450–1521 (Durham, NC, 1979).

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in other words, did not replace the thematic sermon, but existed alongside it, revealing a certain degree of flexibility, eclecticism, that was likely characteristic of early modern preaching. The end goal of preaching, after all, was to effect change.83 Of the proponents of classical oratory, one also has to take note of the important contributions of the Jesuits. The Society of Jesus was formed in 1540, and quickly earned a reputation as an effective and influential preaching tradition. While there is no question that the order helped to popularize the classical sermon, Jesuit sources from the sixteenth century suggest that their classicism served a rather traditional, even mendicant, understanding of the office of preacher. Drafted by Ignatius of Loyola in the 1540s and using language similar to that in the Franciscan Rule, the Constitutions reminded members that they, like the apostles, were “sent” by Christ.84 “Sent” invoked the charismatic call of preaching – to be moved to speak through the working of Christ’s Word upon the preacher.85 Francisco Borja expressed a similar charismatic understanding in his preaching manual. Written during his time as Superior General, though not published until the 1590s, Borja’s manual insisted that preaching was a religious act; it was only effective when God operated through the preacher.86 He encouraged Jesuits to serve God by writing in a simple and direct manner, and by listening to God. Through its central insistence upon learning and rhetoric as essential for the formation of an effective preacher, Christian humanist writings on preaching helped to popularize a classically influenced conception of Christian virtue and human nature. In doing so these humanists were advocating not only for a new program of education for the preacher but also for an ambitious rethinking of the pastoral ministry of the church more generally. As Desiderius Erasmus argued repeatedly, the Catholic Church had become far too concerned about the outward forms of its authority and rituals, neglecting its role in nurturing the spiritual progress of the devout believer through promoting simple, heartfelt devotion and love for Christ. See, e.g., Emily Michelson, “Preaching Scripture under Pressure in Tridentine Italy: The Case of Gabriele Fiamma,” Nederlands Archief voor Kerkgeschiedenis/Dutch Review of Church History 85 (2005), 257–268. 84 Thomas Worcester, “The Catholic Sermon,” in Larissa Taylor, ed., Preachers and People in the Reformations and the Early Modern Period (Boston and Leiden, 2003), 3–34. 85 O’Malley, The First Jesuits, 102–104. The Constitutions explain this more fully, stating that Christ “is the Word inside us; he grants that we hear the Word of his teaching and know that it proceeds from him.” 86 O’Malley, The First Jesuits, 99. The full title is Francisco Borja, Tratado breve del modo de predicar el santo Evangelio. It was published posthumously in 1592. 83

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For Christian humanists, the cure of souls was the first and foremost responsibility of the preacher. This was a message that resonated at the Council of Trent, an assembly which was called to deal with an institution that was in a serious state of disarray by the middle of the sixteenth century. One can point to several serious issues plaguing the administration of the church, including internal dissension, the westward expansion in Europe of the powerful Ottoman Empire, and the growing demands placed upon its pastoral ministry in an increasingly global Catholic landscape. For the leaders of the church gathered at Trent, however, the most pressing, and unquestionably devastating, threat to the church was the divisive impact of Protestant reform. Indeed, one could argue that the Protestant Reformation brought to a head the many debates over the pastoral ministry that had been percolating in church circles since the fourteenth century, thrusting into relief persistent concerns about the training of priests and moral corruption, among other issues. Conciliarist as well as Christian humanist influence, for example, was visible in the importance given at the council to diocesan reform under the leadership of an active, resident bishop. The training of priests in seminaries, development of diocesan regulations governing clerical behavior and duties, and the requirement of regular parochial visitations were among the many new reform initiatives to emerge from Trent.87 These measures reveal an institution well aware that it had to work hard to regain “souls” lost to the new Protestant faiths as well as to convert the growing number of people brought within its sphere of influence through the expanding reach of Catholic empires. If the Protestant Reformation inaugurated a particular change to pastoral thinking about preaching, it lay in the refashioning of the clergy as “reconcilers” of souls. Reconciliation was a central thread of Catholic discussions on pastoral ministry in the wake of the division of the Western Church, reflecting a traditional understanding of the church as a Christian body united through its shared adherence to the one “true” Catholic faith. Medieval and early modern theorists considered heresy a source of political and social as well as spiritual division because spiritual health and societal stability lay in the unity and purity of a broadly defined Christian body. Reconciling souls lost to error was thus a restorative process, because the objective was to bring the erring member back into the fold of the church and the true faith. 87

Episcopal residence and diocesan reform, for example, preoccupied discussions during the first sessions of Trent. See, e.g., Hubert Jedin, A History of the Council of Trent, trans. Ernest Graf, volume II (New York, 1961), 121–142.

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Early modern theorists considered reconciliation an act of spiritual peace making as well, since a spiritually pure body was one that was naturally at peace with itself. One of the reasons why heresy became a capital crime in many states by the sixteenth century was a widely shared perception that it was a threat to political order. For similar reasons, early modern sermons and other Catholic writings produced during the Reformation often described the reconciliation of souls in terms of spiritual healing. Heresy was a “cancer” in the Christian body, gangrenous. It divided, tormented, and ultimately corrupted the body from within. In the context of the Reformation, reconceptualizing the pastoral ministry in terms of reconciliation offered direction for a clerical hierarchy that was no longer in charge of a unified Catholic community. In many parts of Europe the Reformation ruptured families, parishes, and states along religious lines. The Catholic clergy in religiously divided regions, whether a parish priest, bishop, or preacher, found themselves operating on the frontiers of the Catholic tradition and were expected to recalibrate their mandate accordingly. Given the serious nature of the disagreements between the Catholic and Protestant traditions, which centered upon doctrinal issues as well as concerns about church corruption among others, Catholic authorities were eager to produce preachers who were not only of good moral character but also intellectually prepared to discuss contested doctrines. Reclaiming souls lost to “erring” faiths became a priority, and this required the ability to teach Catholic doctrine effectively, and just as effectively point out the errors in the Protestant faiths. As the scholarship on the early modern church makes clear, the Reformation did not see a fundamental change in Catholic doctrine. From the perspective of church authorities, the new Protestant theologies were heresies that emerged from misinterpreting the Scriptures among other Christian sources. The Council of Trent reaffirmed core Catholic teachings and religious practices. Given the nature of the religious debates of the sixteenth century, however, concern about doctrine in particular moved to the center of ecclesiastical discussions on the pastoral role of the clergy, including preaching. For example, sixteenth-century postils (postilla) – renderings of the literal and spiritual sense of biblical passages – show that ordinary preachers were directed to address some of the most contested doctrines considered relevant to parochial worship, in particular transubstantiation, free will, the intercessory authority of the church, and the cult of the saints.88 But striking a balance 88 Bert Roest, Franciscan Learning, Preaching and Mission, c. 1220–1650 (Leiden, 2015), 208; Frymire, Primacy of Postils, 257.

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between challenging Protestant “errors” and explicating biblical passages was important. In Il Predicatore Panigarola voiced a common worry about the dangers posed to the laity by engaging in complex theological discussions. Rather than delving deeply into a debate on a disputed belief or practice, such as the fast or the doctrine of justification, he advised preachers instead to devote most of their sermons to reaffirming the truth of Catholic teachings on that topic. This approach, he argued, refuted Protestant teachings without risking the laity’s exposure to its unsound doctrine.89 The role of the preacher remained what it had always been, to inculcate correct Christian belief by focusing upon simple, essential points of doctrine. Similar concerns about doctrinal error also underlay church efforts to regulate more closely the office of preaching. It was not lost on early modern authorities that Catholic pulpits were used to disseminate Protestant doctrine during the early years of the Reformation. Zwingli, Luther, and Melanchthon were Catholic preachers before leaving the church. Concerned about potential abuse of the office, church authorities placed the theological formation of the preacher and the administration of pulpits under greater scrutiny. Papal authorities, for example, implemented legislation that restricted the reading of Protestant writings to theologians and preachers who had received a licentiate in theology at university. Faculties of theology at European universities also rigorously scrutinized the publications of preachers.90 These measures reflected a view that only the most highly trained preachers were considered capable of engaging in theological debates without risking the spread of further errors.91 However, even as church authorities narrowed access to theological controversy to elite preachers and theologians, they expanded the preaching responsibilities of the diocesan clergy, beginning with the bishop. Following the Council of Trent, it fell to each bishop to ensure good preaching in his diocese, both through assuming the office of preacher himself and through his supervision of the parish clergy. Stricter supervision went hand in hand with proper formation to ensure the orthodoxy of Catholic preaching.92 These Tridentine initiatives had a far-reaching impact. By the end of the

89 This passage was translated from the French edition: Francesco Panigarola, L’art de prescher, trans. Gabriel Chappuis (Paris, 1604), 8–9: “nous disions que . . . ce sermon ne sera contre l’heretique, mais de matiere: La ou si, pour ma principale intention, je preschois [que les raisons de Calvin amenees contre le jeusne sont fausse, ce sermon seroit proprement contre l’heretique, pour ce que je ‘aurois pour ma fin, aucune confirmation, mais bien la refutation.” 90 91 Armstrong, The Politics of Piety, ch. 5. Discussed in ibid., 73. 92 Worcester, “The Catholic Sermon.”

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sixteenth century, bishops across Europe were preaching in their own dioceses and closely monitoring pulpit oratory.93 Reforming ecclesiastics produced guidebooks and other preaching aids for the training of the parish clergy, notable among these Carlo Borromeo’s Instructions on Preaching.94 But as Thomas Worcester has argued, the Council of Trent was more concerned about establishing who could preach than closely dictating the nature of preaching itself. The decree formulated in June 1546 during the fifth session of the council recognized an essentially medieval formulation of the office of preacher. The decree required preachers to focus upon teaching virtue and vice, and to speak clearly and simply: to teach “[the laity] those things that are necessary for all to know in order to be saved and by impressing upon them with briefness and plainness of speech the vices that they must avoid and the virtues that they must cultivate, in order that they may escape eternal punishment and obtain the glory of heaven.”95 Such advice was quite traditional, but early modern preachers understood full well that their sermons were being given in a vastly changed religious context. Whether a parish priest, bishop, or university-trained preacher, they were working on the frontlines of the Catholic Church to strengthen the faith of the devout while reclaiming the souls of neighbors lost to other faiths. bibliography Armstrong, Megan C. The Politics of Piety: Franciscan Preachers during the French Wars of Religion. Rochester, 2004. Black, Joseph William. Reformation Pastors: Richard Baxter and the Ideal of the Reformed Pastor. Carlisle and Waynesboro, 2004. Burnett, Amy Nelson. Teaching the Reformation: Ministers and their Message in Basel, 1529–1629. Oxford and New York, 2006. Cornick, David. “Pastoral Care in England: Perkins, Baxter and Burnet.” In Gillian R. Evans, ed., A History of Pastoral Care. London and New York, 2000, 313–327. “The Reformation Crisis in Pastoral Care.” In Gillian R. Evans, ed., A History of Pastoral Care. London and New York, 2000, 223–251. 93

Prominent examples of preaching bishops in France include Camus and François de Sales. See Worcester, “The Catholic Sermon,” 19; and Thomas Worcester, Seventeenth-Century Cultural Discourse: France and the Preaching of Bishop Camus (Berlin and New York, 1997). On diocesan reform see also Joseph Bergin, Cardinal de la Rochefoucauld: Leadership and Reform in the French Church (New Haven, 1987). 94 McGinness lists the production of diocesan “instructions” in the sixteenth century including Borromeo’s: McGinness, Right Thinking, 33–49. 95 Worcester, “The Catholic Sermon,” 18–19. The Fifth Lateran Council made similar provisions in its bull Supernae majestatis praesidio (1516): see Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, I, 635; and Trent, Session V, decree on reform, ch. 2, in ibid., II, 669.

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ronald k. rittgers and megan armstrong DeVries, Dawn. “Calvin’s Preaching.” In Donald K. McKim, ed., The Cambridge Companion to John Calvin. Cambridge, 2004, 106–124. Dyck, Cornelius J. “The Role of Preaching in Anabaptist Tradition.” Mennonite Life 17, no. 1 (1962), 21–25. Ford, James Thomas. “Preaching in the Reformed Tradition.” In Larissa Taylor, ed., Preachers and People in the Reformations and Early Modern Period. Boston and Leiden, 2003, 65–88. Frymire, John. The Primacy of Postils: Catholics, Protestants and the Dissemination of Ideas in Early Modern Germany. Leiden, 2010. Kreitzer, Beth. “The Lutheran Sermon.” In Larissa Taylor, ed., Preachers and People in the Reformations and Early Modern Period. Boston and Leiden, 2003, 35–63. Manetsch, Scott M. Calvin’s Company of Pastors: Pastoral Care and the Emerging Reformed Church, 1536–1609. Oxford and New York, 2013. Old, Hughes Oliphant. The Reading and Preaching of the Scriptures in the Worship of the Christian Church, volume IV: The Age of the Reformation. Grand Rapids and Cambridge, 2002. Rittgers, Ronald K. The Reformation of the Keys: Confession, Conscience, and Authority in Sixteenth Century Germany. Cambridge, 2004. The Reformation of Suffering: Pastoral Theology and Lay Piety in Late Medieval and Early Modern Germany. Oxford and New York, 2012. Taylor, Larissa. Soldiers of Christ: Preaching in Late Medieval and Reformation France. Oxford, 1992. Voigt-Guy, Christopher. Potestates und ministerium publicum: Eine Studie zur Amtstheologie im Mittelalter und bei Martin Luther. Tübingen, 2014. Wengert, Timothy J., ed. The Pastoral Luther. Grand Rapids and Cambridge, 2009. Worcester, Thomas. “The Catholic Sermon.” In Larissa Taylor, ed., Preachers and People in the Reformations and Early Modern Period. Boston and Leiden, 2003, 3–34.

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Two overarching and interrelated features of the Reformation period help to bring the variegated landscape of Reformation ethics and moral theology into focus. The first is a common emphasis on a fuller Christianization of the entire population, not simply of clerics and monastics, and hence on the importance of lay religious instruction and formation. Initially pursued in the hope of reform and renewal of the Church Universal, as Reformation divisions hardened the focus turned to competitive confessionalization. The second is a sense of cultural crisis; the drive for reform emerged not primarily out of a sense of optimism and capacity, but rather out of a sense of crisis, as a response to a perceived falling away from the divinely ordained social order. Reformers of various camps parted ways over whether the Christianization of society required doctrinal and institutional reforms or simply better education and formation, and over whether new religious movements represented heightened disorder or a move toward restored order. Some were convinced that the fuller Christianization of the people required accommodation of human frailty and limitation; others that it required more effective forms of education and social discipline. They were united in their commitment to the Christianization of society, a properly ordered society in accord with God’s will and intention.1

I would like to express my thanks to James Dunn, Andrew Forsyth, Layne Hancock, and Nelson H. Minnich for their helpful feedback and suggestions on how to improve this chapter. 1 See, e.g., Jean Delumeau, “Prescription and Reality,” in Edmund Leites, ed., Conscience and Casuistry in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1988), 134–158; Jean Delumeau, Catholicism between Luther and Voltaire, trans. Jeremy Moiser (London, 1977); Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, 2007), 61–64; Ronnie Po-chia Hsia, Social Discipline in the Reformation: Central Europe 1550–1750 (London, 1991); Wolfgang Reinhard, “Konfession und Konfessionalisierung in Europa,” in Wolfgang Reinhard, ed., Bekenntnis und Geschichte: Die Confessio Augustana im historischen Zusammenhang, Ringvorlesung der Universität Augsburg im Jubiläumsjahr 1980 (Munich, 1981), 165–189; Wolfgang Reinhard, “Zwang zur Konfessionalisierung? Prolegomena zu einer Theorie des konfessionellen Zeitalters,” Zeitschrift für historische Forschung 10, no. 3

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While ethics as a university discipline continued for the most part across Western Europe to be framed in terms provided by Aristotelian Scholasticism, a stronger accent on law and obligation, on God’s order, is evidenced both in the centrality of the Decalogue in moral instruction and in the expansion of natural-law discourse. The emphasis on a broader cultural Christianization brought with it a stress on the importance of confession, and this, in its train, the explosion of casuistry and practical theology, including “moral theology” as a distinct discipline. The magisterial Reformers’ emphasis on the Law–Gospel dynamic and on the doctrine of the two kingdoms justified a separation between moral philosophy, governing external action and the civil order, and Christian ethics, governing the hearts of Christians. This fostered in Lutheran and Reformed territories the emergence of increasingly autonomous secular moral philosophies of various humanist-inspired, non-Scholastic varieties, alongside heavily Scripture-based Christian moral theologies. In Catholic territories, meanwhile, moral theology shaped by Augustinian revivals criticized pastoral approaches that were overly accommodationist and emphasized transformation of the heart, not simply external conformity to moral norms. Lacking a foothold in the university or other strong institutional base, and being subject to persecution from all sides, the Swiss Brethren and other Anabaptist groups did not develop a formal ethics or moral theology. Ethical concerns were nevertheless central to them. These movements are clearly another expression of the impulse of Christianization and another force contributing to the emergence of a scriptural, anti-philosophical Christian ethics, albeit one that embedded more counter-cultural norms than those of magisterial Reformers. The 1527 Schleitheim Articles set the tone for a biblically based rejection of oaths, embrace of pacifism, refusal to take civic office, and more generally a commitment to forming a visible church of the redeemed. These are best examined alongside the political and social tenets and practices of other Reformation groups (such as Luther’s innovations in social welfare), important terrain that nevertheless lies beyond the scope of this chapter.2

(1983), 257–277; Christoph Strohm, “Ethics in Early Calvinism,” in Jill Kraye and Risto Saarinen, eds., Moral Philosophy on the Threshold of Modernity (Dordrecht, 2005), 255–281, at 257. 2 James M. Stayer, “The Dream of a Just Society,” in Reformation Christianity (Minneapolis, 2007), 191–211; James Turner Johnson, “Two Kinds of Pacifism,” Journal of Religious Ethics 12, no. 1(1984), 39–60; Carter Lindberg, “Reformation Initiatives for Social Welfare: Luther’s Influence at Leisnig,” Annual of the Society of Christian Ethics 7(1987), 79–99.

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The Place of the Decalogue In a social atmosphere framed as a crisis of disorder, law held out the possibility of a restoration of order, a conformity of the mutable human realm to the stable goodness of the divine. This made itself felt at the level of popular religious instruction in terms of an increased emphasis on the Decalogue. The catechetical enterprise had been gaining momentum starting in the twelfth century, which witnessed not simply ever more frequently reiterated calls for popular religious instruction, but also a shift in the centerpiece of the program for ethical education. The place held since the time of Gregory the Great by various catalogues of sevens, including the seven virtues, seven deadly vices, and the seven works of mercy, came to be occupied by the Ten Commandments. Patristic thinkers had typically contrasted Old and New Covenants and thus emphasized the moral teachings of the Gospels, notably the twofold love commandment, rather than the Decalogue. Augustine was an exceptional figure in his insistence that the Decalogue was fully binding on Christians. In the twelfth century the septenary system of instruction was deeply entrenched, with the seven deadly sins of pride, envy, wrath, avarice, gluttony, sloth, and lechery treated as a negative of the ideal Christian life of love of God and neighbor. But shifts were already underway that would lead to the embedding of reflection on the virtues within a framework provided by the Decalogue.3 An emphasis on the Decalogue as the primary summary statement of Christian ethics did not require that divine revelation be viewed as the only source of moral truth. In the early twelfth century theologians such as Hugh of St. Victor and Peter Lombard began to harmonize the Decalogue with the moral teachings of the Gospels.4 Thomas Aquinas differentiated the ceremonial and judicial laws of the Old Testament from the moral law of the Decalogue; the latter remained binding on Christians, and could be understood as an elaboration of the twofold love commandment; the first table of the Decalogue articulated how God was to be loved; and the second table the love of neighbor.5 They were to be understood as a re-publication of the natural law, knowable in principle without the assistance of revelation, and

3 See John Bossy, “Moral Arithmetic: Seven Sins into Ten Commandments,” in Leites, ed., Conscience and Casuistry, 214–234; Robert James Bast, Honor your Fathers: Catechisms and the Emergence of a Patriarchal Ideology in Germany 1400–1600 (Leiden, 1997). 4 See the discussion in Bast, Honor your Fathers, 9–35. 5 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, vols. 4–12 in Opera Omnia iussa edita Leonis XIII P.M. (Rome, 1888–1906), I.II Q. 98. A. 5, Q. 100 A. 11.

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written on the hearts of humankind, however dimmed by sin. Aquinas placed much more emphasis on the virtues as the internal principles that render human acts good than on conformity to law. However, with the rise of late medieval voluntarism, with its preoccupation with the freedom of divine commands, the Decalogue came to be prized not as a mere restatement of the natural law but precisely as the revelation of God’s will. Over the course of the fourteenth century, despite the ways in which the seven deadly sins continued to capture the imaginations of visual and literary artists, the aspiration to cultivate the virtues increasingly came to be seen as nested within the central Christian task of obedience. The Grosse Seelentrost (ca. 1350–1360) collected exempla and fables illustrating the violation and honoring of the Ten Commandments.6 And Jean Gerson, an influential advocate of intensified efforts at lay catechesis, placed heavy emphasis on the Decalogue and insisted that knowledge of the commandments of God is necessary for salvation.7 By the sixteenth century, with reformers of all stripes taking up the catechetical enterprise with enthusiasm, the Decalogue held pride of place. This shared emphasis coexisted with varying theological interpretations of their significance. Luther certainly could not agree with those who insisted that obedience to the Ten Commandments was necessary to salvation. However, this did not dampen his enthusiasm for the Decalogue itself, which he was just as eager as they to integrate into his own catechetical program. For Luther the knowledge of the law was a necessary preliminary to that of grace, for it is confrontation with God’s law that reveals one’s sin and desperate need for grace.8 Luther was insistent that the Decalogue was binding on Christians not as revealed divine law, since Christians even as sinners are no longer bound by the Mosaic law. Rather, the Decalogue’s authority is specifically as natural law.9 There were other differences of interpretation. Catholics and Lutherans included the ban on graven images as part of the first commandment, while 6 Der Grosse Seelentrost, ed. Margarete Schmitt (Cologne and Graz, 1959), discussed in Bast, Honor your Fathers, 9. 7 Joannis Gersoni, Opera Omnia, ed. Louis Ellies Du Pin, 5 vols. (Antwerp, 1706; repr. Hildesheim, 1987), I, 426, cols. 1, 2–12; see Bast, Honor your Fathers, 16. 8 Bossy, “Moral Arithmetic,” 227. 9 WA 18, 80–81; LW 40, 97–98, English trans. in Against the Heavenly Prophets in Luther’s Works, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan and Helmut Lehmann (Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Concordia, 1955 ff.), XL, 97–98; William Lazareth, “Love and Law in Christian Life,” in Carter Lindberg, ed., Piety, Politics and Ethics: Reformation Studies in Honor of George Wolfgang Forell (Kirksville, 1984), 103–118, at 106–109.

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distinguishing the coveting of wives from that of goods. Calvinists and Anglicans, in contrast, considered the ban on graven images its own distinct commandment, distinct from a more general failure to honor God’s authority. This was to leave a permanent stamp on Reformed church architecture. In all its forms, though, the turn to the Decalogue reflected an emphasis both on divine authority and on human authority, and on the latter as the effective sign of the former. Since the Decalogue contained no commandment concerning obedience to the church, Catholics had since the fifth century routinely added on the Commandments of the Church (a supplement that was, unsurprisingly, a point of contention with Protestant reformers).10 Alternatively, the fourth commandment was broadly interpreted as enjoining obedience not just to parents, but also to all earthly authorities; as the head of the second table of the law, both Luther and the Roman Catechism of Pius V singled it out as particularly important, linking it with the first commandment. The social instabilities amplified by the reformation movements reinforced the insistence on the need for obedience to authority; Luther’s struggle to rein in the evangelical principle of freedom in the face of the peasant revolts is a case in point. Thus the increased emphasis on the Decalogue reflected a broader shift in the center of gravity of Christian ethics, from the aspiration to develop virtues fit for friendship with God to the determination to obey the commands of divine and earthly authority – and this, even among Reformers who insisted that salvation is by grace alone.11 At the same time, it is not the case that reflection on the virtues ebbed; given the strong and ongoing influence of Aristotle’s ethics, the virtues continued to be treated as a core element of moral philosophy.

Confession and Casuistry Even more significant for the development of moral theology than the new centrality of the Decalogue was the rise of casuistry. Here, too, we have to do with a centuries-long development reaching back into the twelfth century, even if one that reached a dramatic new phase in the sixteenth century, when the term theologia moralis first came into established use. While theology Bossy, “Moral Arithmetic,” 224, 233; Bast, Honor your Fathers, 44. For a critical analysis of these developments see John Mahoney, “The Language of Law,” in The Making of Moral Theology: A Study of the Roman Catholic Tradition (Oxford, 1987), 224–258, esp. 252–253; and Servais Pinckaers, The Sources of Christian Ethics (Washington, 1995), 256–257. 10 11

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certainly included reflection on the human act, on intention, on conscience, on the various forms of law ordering the cosmos, from eternal law to natural law to divine law to human law, and on the virtues, the emergence of “moral theology” as a technical term and as a specific branch of theology is a sixteenth-century phenomenon, itself an outgrowth of the drive to deeper Christian acculturation on the part of the masses, with its emphasis on confession and catechesis. The Fourth Lateran Council’s requirement of annual confession on the part of every layperson meant a significantly expanded responsibility for priests; confessors had to be properly equipped to identify sins and their gravity and to assign appropriate penances. In response to this need, a new genre of casuistry was created, drawing together elements of canonical case law, older penitential books, and Scholastic theology into an ordered taxonomy of cases of conscience, analyzed with attention to the application of principle under varied circumstances. The mendicant orders had placed the ministry of the confessional at the heart of their self-understanding, giving a further impetus to the writing of confessional manuals informed by Scholastic theology, for instance, Raymond de Pennafort’s Summa de casibus poenitentia (ca. 1234), John of Fribourg’s Summa confessorum (ca. 1280), the so-called Summa angelica of Angelo Carletti (ca. 1480), and the Summa summarum of Sylvester Mazzolini (1516).12 These sums of cases incorporated distinctions that had been developed by Scholastic theologians, such as that between venial and moral sin, the object and intention of the act, and between precept and counsel. Their focus, however, as their name implied, was not on lengthy argument, but on bringing together a host of topics and treating them authoritatively and briefly, often simply by repeating the opinions of others. The Council of Trent underscored the need for such casebooks; in 1551 it reaffirmed the Fourth Lateran Council’s canons on confession and required further that sins be confessed according to species, number, and circumstances. Confessors thus needed training that would enable them to assist the faithful in diagnosing their sins with considerable specificity and precision. The council further called for the creation of seminaries for the education of priests in practical, not merely speculative, theology. The Jesuits in particular, with their emphasis on frequent confession, stepped up to the plate, starting to appoint professors of cases of conscience starting in 1556 and producing around

12 See Albert R. Jonsen and Stephen Toulmin, The Abuse of Casuistry: A History of Moral Reasoning (Berkeley, 1988), 139–140.

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600 volumes of casuistry by 1669.13 Moral theology as a distinct discipline was the direct fruit of this effort to provide clergy with adequate preparation for hearing confessions. Francisco de Toledo’s Summa casuum conscientiae sive de instructione sacerdotum, libri septem (1598) is a revealing example of the sixteenth-century Jesuit casebook because of its structure. Whereas many such books were simply organized alphabetically by topic, de Toledo began with priesthood, progressed to the administration of the sacraments and the practice of confession, then to the first table of the Decalogue, followed by the second, treating each commandment in turn, and concluding with the six precepts of the church. Hence de Toledo, whose Summa originated as lectures for priestly formation at the Roman College, first addressed himself to cases arising in the practice of priesthood, then to the cases a priest could expect to encounter in the confessional. The Decalogue was taken as a natural principle of organization for the study of such cases. And, while the fourth commandment could be taken to include obedience to the church as implicit in obedience to parents, de Toledo continued the established practice of adding a consideration of the precepts of the church following the Decalogue. He did insert a treatment of the theological virtues between his general discussion of confession and his consideration of the Decalogue, but his focus was less on developing the virtues themselves than on sins against faith, hope, and charity. Hence it is clear that the primary emphasis is not on the formation of good character but on conformity to law.14

Lutheran Casuistry The attitude toward confession on the part of the various reform movements of the sixteenth century varied.15 The rejection of confession as a sacrament did not mean a rejection of confession as such. Zwingli, followed by the 13 Jonsen and Toulmin, Abuse of Casuistry, 141–143; John W. O’Malley, The First Jesuits (Cambridge, 1993), 137, 146–147; Johann Theiner, Die Entwicklung der Moraltheologie zur eigenständige Disziplin (Regensburg, 1970), 119–122; Louis Vereecke, De Guillaume d’Ockham à Saint Alphonse de Liguori. Études d’histoire de la théologie morale moderne, 1300–1787 (Rome, 1986), 495–508. 14 Francisco de Toledo, Summa casuum conscientiae sive de instructione sacerdotum, libri septem (Constance, 1600); James Keenan, “The Casuistry of Francisco de Toledo, (1532–1596),” in Thomas McCoog, ed., The Mercurian Project (St. Louis, 2004), 461–483, at 467–473; O’Malley, The First Jesuits, 147; James F. Keenan, “Was William Perkins’ Whole Treatise of Cases of Consciences Casuistry? Hermeneutics and British Practical Divinity,” in Harald E. Braun and Edward Vallance, eds., Contexts of Conscience in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1700 (New York, 2004), 17–31, at 21. 15 Vereecke, De Ockham à Liguori, 472–474.

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Anabaptists, argued that only the direct forgiveness of God is of any significance.16 This was an exceptional view, however. Lutherans, for instance, required those intending to partake of the Lord’s Supper to submit to examination of life and morals by a pastor. Often Reformers argued that confession had nothing to do with divine forgiveness but was nonetheless useful for Christian instruction, as did Johannes Oecolampadius (Hussgen) and Beatus Rhenanus (Bild). An emphasis on instruction and counsel meant an increased emphasis on the character and skill of the pre-communion confessor, over against reliance on manuals that detailed sins and penalties; this is clear from Bucer’s understanding and defense of pre-communion examination of life.17 The emphasis on Christian formation, shared by the Lutheran and Reformed movements, was to have lasting influence on the various forms taken by moral theology. Still, the differences should not be exaggerated; in 1618 a group of delegates to the Synod of Dort called for the establishment of a chair of practical theology to provide instruction in cases of conscience.18 While the motion was defeated, practical theology did emerge in the course of the seventeenth century as distinct from doctrinal theology. The assumption that the Christian life required expert, detailed guidance on how to handle difficult cases was a general feature of the era. In 1520 Luther burned the papal bull that excommunicated him; his followers added the canon law and the Summa angelica to the flames. His attack on casuistry was rooted in one of his core theological themes: the freedom of a Christian from law. Whereas sinners are constrained by laws and forced to confront their sinfulness and inability to obey, Christians, having accepted the free gift of forgiveness in Christ, are freed to love and serve the neighbor spontaneously. Luther complained that the church, having proclaimed obedience to laws as necessary for salvation, multiplies these to infinity.19 Casebooks for confessors were clear evidence of this tendency. Nevertheless, Luther soon recognized that evangelical Christians stood in no less need of ethical instruction and guidance than their Roman brethren. He set himself energetically about the task of writing appropriate catechisms, with heavy emphasis on the Decalogue, and his various writings

16

Schlussreden, in CR 2, 393–405. On attitudes to confession in Zwingli, Oecolampadius, Rhenanus, and Bucer see Amy Nelson Burnett, “Church Discipline and Moral Reformation in the Thought of Martin Bucer,” Sixteenth Century Journal 22, no. 3 (1991), 438–456, at 442–443. 18 Donald Sinnema, “The Discipline of Ethics in Early Reformed Orthodoxy,” Calvin Theological Journal 28 (1993), 10–44, at 43. 19 Martin Luther, Lectures on Galatians (1535), in WA 40/1, 616; LW 26, 405–406. 17

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included advice to Christians on what to do in cases of conflict and ethical indeterminacy. In the sixteenth century authors were quick to draw together brief selections from Luther’s works, particularly his Table Talk, in topically organized ways that mirrored the casuistical summa being produced by their Jesuit contemporaries, that is, Nikolaus Ericeus’s Sylvvla sententiarum (1566), Conrad Porta’s Pastorale Lutheri (1582), and Theodosius Fabricius’s Loci communes D. Martini Lutheri (1594). Melanchthon’s writings were also given similar treatment. Hence, Lutherans quickly generated their own casebooks, even while maintaining that following the advice contained within these books had nothing to do with winning God’s favor or earning salvation. By the sixteenth century Lutherans were publishing fullblown casuistical texts, beginning with Georg Dedekenn’s four-volume Treasury of Counsels and Decisions (1623), a compilation of opinions on difficult cases drawn from official opinions given by Lutheran theological faculties, consistories, and respected individuals. A more systematic casuistical text was soon to follow, Friedrich Balduin’s De casibus conscientiae (1628). Both considered cases that could be encountered by anyone, but addressed themselves to pastors; they were essentially pastoral aids. The reliance on Lutheran sources, and the fact that these sources sought moral guidance from Scripture rather than from Scholastic theology, distinguished Lutheran casuistry from its Jesuit counterpart.20

Reformed Casuistry, French Augustinianism, and Probabilism In England the seventeenth century similarly witnessed the birth of casuistry among Anglicans of various stripes as well as nonconforming Puritans. Jesuit casuistical works were widely used by both English Catholics and nonCatholics in the sixteenth century; both the Puritan dissenter William Ames (1576–1633) and the Anglican bishop Jeremy Taylor (1613–1667) complained that the children of Israel were going down to the forges of the Philistines.21 Each contributed his own casuistical treatise, Ames in 1630, De conscientia et ejus jure vel casibus, and Taylor in 1660, Ductor dubitantium, or the Rule of Conscience. But the progenitor of British reformed casuistry was William Perkins (1558–1602), with his Whole Treatise of Cases of Conscience 20 Benjamin T. G. Mayes, Counsel and Conscience: Lutheran Casuistry and Moral Reasoning after the Reformation (Göttingen, 2011), 30–37. 21 William Ames, De Conscientia, eius Jure et Casibus (Amsterdam, 1630), ii; Jeremy Taylor, Ductor Dubitantium, or the Rule of Conscience (London, 1660), i–ii; Thomas Wood, English Casuistical Divinity during the Seventeenth Century (London, 1952).

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(1606). James Keenan has identified several distinctive features of this literature. First, it is focused on the discernment of God’s will in Scripture. Recourse to human authorities is not seen as necessary or significant; faith, together with right reason, is sufficient. Thus, even as these works became moral authorities, they did not present themselves as such; they were not compilations of authoritative opinions. Further, they were often written for laypeople rather than as guides for pastors or confessional manuals for priests. They thus represent what one could term a significant democratization of casuistry. It has been argued, further, that they merge casuistical with spiritual or ascetical genres. In both cases these were modeled after Jesuit originals, but among the Jesuits the two genres were quite distinct from one another, with spiritual directories directed toward a lay audience and casuistical manuals toward priestly confessors. By the final decades of the sixteenth century there was a significant body of Puritan devotional literature. Perkins’s innovation was to introduce a case-style treatment into a work concerned with such matters as what a man must do in order to be saved and whether doubt means that one lacks faith, joined with consideration of the sort of question of conscience one would expect to find in a Jesuit casebook, such as whether forced oaths are binding.22 One of the fiercest theological controversies within post-Tridentine Catholicism had to do with how to reconcile new understandings of free will with traditional doctrines of predestination and efficacious grace. The Jesuits understood free will as liberty of indifference, the freedom to perform or not perform any particular act, rather than merely as spontaneity, the freedom to act as one wills. Dominicans accused Jesuits of Pelagianism; Jesuits accused the Dominicans, in turn, of crypto-Calvinism. In his 1588 treatise on free will, grace, and predestination Luis de Molina argued that God possesses scientia media (middle knowledge), that is, knowledge of future contingents, such as of how free creatures will choose to act, including how they will respond to various graces, and so bestows graces in order to secure divinely intended outcomes. Ongoing debates eventuated in a series of papal interventions, including the creation of the Congregatio de Auxiliis, fruitlessly charged with settling the matter, and culminating in Paul V’s 1611 prohibition on further discussion of the issue of efficacious grace. Yet the issues resurfaced in the form of the Jansenist controversy, starting with the 1640 James Keenan, “William Perkins (1558–1602) and the Birth of British Casuistry,” in James Keenan and Thomas Shannon, eds., The Context of Casuistry (Washington, 1995), 105–130, at 110, 119–121; Keenan, “Was William Perkins’ Whole Treatise of Cases of Consciences Casuistry?” 22

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publication, posthumously, of Cornelius Jansenius’s Augustinus, with its pointed critiques of the Pelagianism of the Jesuits. Five Jansenist propositions were condemned by the papacy as heretical in 1643. Pascal’s Provincial Letters (1657), with its stinging attack on Jesuit casuistry, was a rhetorically effective means of Jansenist retaliation. Despite official condemnations of Jansenism, retrievals of Augustine’s moral thought were an important contribution to Catholic spirituality in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, contributing a distinctive emphasis on human sinfulness and the need for grace, together with an insistence on self-examination, sincere repentance, and transformation of the heart.23 French Augustinianism, Puritanism, and Anabaptism, despite their differences, shared a rigorist form of the Christianizing impulse of reform; Christianizing the population, they insisted, could not succeed if the demanding character of the grace-transformed Christian life was not squarely recognized. Any form of casuistry in which doubtful questions had been addressed by a host of authorities, sometimes agreeing and sometimes disagreeing with one another, had to grapple with the question of how to adjudicate such disagreements and offer peace for a doubting conscience. The issue of whether an erroneous conscience binds had been a standard topos of Scholastic theology, and the matter of how to respond to an overly scrupulous conscience had already arisen within late medieval theology; Jean Gerson (1363–1429) took up the matter and argued that “moral certainty” needed to be recognized as compatible with some degree of doubt concerning the ultimate state of one’s soul and yet as sufficient for purposes of action.24 In determining how to proceed in a situation of doubt as to the permissibility of an act, the traditional view was that one ought to follow the more probable opinion.25 An opinion was probable if defended by an acknowledged authority, where acknowledged authorities were taken to be those informed by right reason; probability was thus a matter both of good argument and of authority. It was the Dominican Bartolomé de Medina who was responsible for the fateful introduction of probabilism in 1577, with his

23

Delumeau, Catholicism between Luther and Voltaire, 99–128; William Doyle, Jansenism: Catholic Resistance to Authority from the Reformation to the French Revolution [Studies in European History] (New York, 1999); Michael Moriarty, Disguised Virtues: Theories of Virtue in Early Modern French Thought (Oxford, 2011), 151–168, 211–225. 24 Jean Gerson, “De praeparatione ad missam,” in Oeuvres Complètes, 10 vols. (Paris, 1973), IX, 35–50; Rudolf Schüssler, “Jean Gerson, Moral Certainty, and the Renaissance of Ancient Scepticism,” Renaissance Studies 23, no. 4 (2009), 445–462, at 451. 25 Schüssler, “Jean Gerson,” 450.

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suggestion that the most probable opinion need not always be followed.26 His core thought was that an opinion could not properly be said to be probable unless it was permissible to follow it; hence, any probable opinion could safely be followed. To follow the most probable opinion (probabiliorism) might be better, but could not be obligatory, since it is not obligatory to do that which is most perfect.27 To be sure, one might end up performing an act that is materially evil, but it would not be morally evil; the agent’s innocence would be secured by having followed a probable opinion. Further distinctions were to follow, notably that of the Jesuit Gabriel Vásquez (1551–1604), who differentiated between extrinsic probability, founded on the authority of the wise, and intrinsic probability, founded on good arguments.28 One of the tasks of casebooks was to weigh the probability, intrinsic and extrinsic, of various resolutions to a case; with the advent of probabilism the temptation to invent arguments to render outlandish opinions “probable” proved irresistible. It was not long before charges of laxism were leveled, and several books placed on Rome’s Index of Forbidden Books. Still, Arnauld’s The Moral Theology of the Jesuits faithfully extracted from their Books (1643) was so savage a critique that it was itself placed on the Index, even as Rome’s Holy Office condemned various moral propositions as laxist in 1665, 1666, and 1679. The Jesuits themselves were divided on the question of probabilism; widespread as it had become among them, by 1645 there were efforts to rein in laxism within the order.29

Ethics in the University Curriculum Scholastic theology continued in the context of the universities in substantial continuity with fifteenth-century reflection, both in Protestant and Catholic territories. Ethics was part of the standard medieval arts curriculum, together with the other philosophical disciplines: logic, natural philosophy, and metaphysics. Advanced students went on to study theology. “Ethics,” then, was understood as moral philosophy.

26

Bartolomé de Medina, Expositiones in primam secundae divi thomae (Venice, 1580 [1st ed. Salamanca, 1577]), q. 19, a.6. Schüssler, “Jean Gerson,” 452. 28 Gabriel Vasquez, Commentaria in IIam-IIae Summa Theologia Sancti Thomae Aquinatis (Salamanca, 1592), 10. 29 Mahoney, Making of Moral Theology, 138–140. 27

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The understanding of ethics within medieval Scholastic theology was conditioned by the structure of the university curriculum. “Ethics” was philosophical ethics, heavily reliant on pagan philosophy, Aristotle in particular. Theology, then, had the task of showing how Aristotelian philosophy was taken up, corrected, and transformed by Christian faith. Aquinas, for instance, did this in his Summa theologica by embedding a treatment of standard Aristotelian topics – the highest good and final end, structure of the human act, habits, and virtues – within a theological framework of God, creation, and return to God.30 Aristotle, as “the Philosopher,” was an authority in whom truth was to be found and taken up into a higher and fuller truth. Given this structure and set of assumptions, it is not surprising that Romans 2:14 was an important scriptural touchstone, for it was seen as offering a basic affirmation of this approach. Pagan wisdom was the law written on the heart, grasped by conscience (or synderesis). And theologians had the task of relating this natural law to the divine law of Scripture. In a broad sense, this was what theologians were doing all the time in unpacking the relation between pagan philosophy and Christian theology. But from the thirteenth century onward, in response to the flowering of both canon and civil law, they began to devote increasing attention to law – eternal, natural, divine, and human – as a conceptual tool for orchestrating different sources of moral truth.31 In so doing, they did not regard the natural law as an independent source of action-guiding moral principles, but rather as an element in an ordering framework that also included the eternal law of God’s creative and providential wisdom, the divine law of God’s revelation, and human-made law. The natural law was accessible in theory without the assistance of divine revelation, but Scholastics took for granted that sin impeded its grasp and that Scripture, the Decalogue in particular, expressed it more clearly.32 So understood, the concept of the natural law fit smoothly into the enterprise of correcting and amplifying pagan ethical wisdom. The rise of nominalism and voluntarism in the fourteenth century introduced a sense of a greater discontinuity between nature and Scripture, natural and divine law; and an emphasis on the transcendent creativity of divine law: God was not an arbitrary tyrant, but God’s reasons were not transparent to finite, fallen humankind. In voluntarist circles, law was understood as the command of a superior, rather than as a rational ordering principle. Confidence in the 30 31 32

Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II-II, Prol. Michael Crowe, The Changing Profile of the Natural Law (The Hague, 1977), 114–115. Jean Porter, Natural and Divine Law (Grand Rapids, 1999), 40–52.

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enterprise of showing the continuities between pagan and Christian ethics, even if only from the shore of faith, began to erode.

The Rise of Natural Law Despite repeated criticisms of Aristotle and of Scholasticism on the part of humanists and Reformers, and despite the ways in which humanists reached around the Scholastic tradition to retrieve a broader swath of ancient and patristic schools and authors, notably Platonism, Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Augustine, European universities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries remained for the most part bastions of Aristotelian Scholasticism.33 Commentaries on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics continued to make up the core of the university ethics curriculum: Melanchthon lectured on the Nicomachean Ethics a total of eight times, and published several commentaries. Meanwhile, Reformed commentators on the Nicomachean Ethics include lectures delivered at the Marburg Academy by Andreas Hyperius (1511–1564), lectures and a commentary by Peter Martyr Vermigli (1499–1562) based at the Strasbourg Academy, and a commentary of 1598 by Rudolphus Goclenius (1547–1628).34 This naturally meant that robust attention to the virtues also continued within both Lutheran and Reformed Scholasticism, contrary to common mid- to late twentieth-century claims concerning the decline of the virtues and Protestant hostility to the virtues.35 The ongoing enterprise of Aristotelian Scholasticism was increasingly informed, however, by humanist emphases on Stoic philosophy and on Roman jurisprudence, which fed increasingly elaborate and ambitious systems of natural law. The heightened emphasis on the Decalogue in catechetical instruction has already been discussed. Virtually all sixteenthand seventeenth-century thinkers continued to understand both the Decalogue and civil law with reference to the natural moral law. In continuity with their Scholastic predecessors both in the via antiqua and the via moderna, they identified the natural law with the law of God written on the human heart as spoken of by Paul (Rom. 2:14–15). Further, they regarded the natural law as the standard for civil law, and saw the Decalogue as a revealed 33

See, e.g., Luther’s Disputation Against Scholastic Theology, in WA 5, 320–326; LW 31, 9–16; Calvin, Institutes II, III, 13, III, XI, 15. Sinnema, “Discipline of Ethics,” 14–15. 35 See, e.g., Eilert Herms, “Virtue: A Neglected Concept in Protestant Ethics,” in Offenbarung und Glaube: Zur Bildung des Christlichen Lebens (Tübingen, 1992), 124–137. For a recent corrective see Pieter Vos, Longing for the Good Life: Virtue Ethics after Protestantism (London, 2020). 34

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restatement of the natural law. There were differences of interpretation that depended on whether understandings of the natural law were drawn primarily from Scholastic theologians and canonists or from the civilians who had preserved the traditions of Roman law. The theologians tended to assume that international consensus, as sedimented in the law of nations, served as a reliable form of access to the natural law, alongside its inscription in the human heart and reinscription in the Decalogue and twofold love commandment. The civilians, in contrast, regarded the law of nations as a form of positive law, a free creation of human reason, and paid little attention to the natural law, regarding it, following Ulpian, simply as that which nature has taught to all animals: common instincts, such as self-preservation and care for young.36 There were also differences that depended on whether accounts of the natural law received a voluntarist inflection, emphasizing the contingency of divine will in the creation of natural law, or an intellectualist inflection, emphasizing the necessity of the divine nature and natural law as a participation in the eternal law. Either way, natural law was a lingua franca for ethical and political reflection.

Natural Law in the School of Salamanca Within Catholicism, natural-law thought flowered in the School of Salamanca, starting with the Dominicans Francisco de Vitoria (1483–1546) and Domingo de Soto (1494–1560) and continuing with Jesuit thinkers, including most notably Francisco Suárez (1548–1617) and Luis de Molina (1535–1600).37 Here, as elsewhere in Europe (including at Lutheran universities), it was expected that civil authorities would consult with theologians when great cases of conscience arose.38 Subtle features distinguish this revival of Thomism from Thomas’s own theology. These “Second Scholastic” thinkers were responding to the specific ethical and political concerns of their day, notably those posed by the changing political landscape in Europe and by unfolding events in the New World. In such a context the natural law was pressed into more and more active service, and Vitoria and those who followed in his footsteps drew increasingly on the law of nations to give a fuller and more determinate account of natural law. Instead of serving, as in Thomas, primarily as a way to justify the theological absorption of Aristotle’s teaching on the virtues, natural law was seen as the natural framework for 36 38

37 Crowe, Changing Profile, 110. Vereecke, De Ockham à Liguori, 498. Mayes, Counsel and Conscience, 35.

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considering questions such as whether the Spanish had a just title over the indigenous Americans and whether a heretical monarch forfeited his throne. Whereas Thomas had stressed that only the most basic principles of practical reason, on the order of “do good and avoid evil,” were known by all, and that practical wisdom was required in order to arrive at a more detailed understanding of the natural law, these thinkers were confident that detailed provisions of the natural law were universally accessible. In Vitoria the natural law provided a basis according to which war and conquest could at least theoretically have been justified. According to the law of nations, which Vitoria regularly treats as a reliable mode of access to the natural law, the Spaniards have the right to travel, dwell, and trade in the New World. If the natives deny them this, the Spaniards ought to draw on reasoning and persuasion to demonstrate these rights, which since they are a matter of natural law ought to be recognized by the natives. But if reasoning fails to persuade, and the natives resist with force, the Spaniards at that point would have grounds for the use of force in response, for a just war to avenge the offense, and for confiscation of native lands and sovereignty.39 Vitoria is inclined to the view that the “barbarians’” understandable fear of the Spaniards excuses them from their failure to understand the arguments offered to them; he is clearly skeptical of the justice of the Spanish conquest as actually executed. But his confidence in a universally accessible determinate natural law is nevertheless striking.

Natural Law and the Two Kingdoms While natural law in the Catholic world remained an integral part of the theological enterprise, developments within Lutheran and Reformed thought encouraged a separation of natural law as proper to the realm of external action and civic affairs from theology as proper to the realm of inward intention, grace, and heavenly affairs. Lutheran and Reformed thinkers emphasized the effects of the Fall on the human capacity to know and obey the natural law. Even more decisively, they tended to understand the natural law through the lens of the distinction between the two governments or kingdoms, the heavenly, spiritual kingdom and the civil, earthly kingdom.40 Francisco de Vitoria, De Indis, Q.3 A.1, trans. as “On the American Indians” in Vitoria: Political Writings, ed. Anthony Pagden and Jeremy Lawrance (Cambridge, 1991), 282. 40 Luther, Von weltlicher Obrigkeit, in WA 11, 245–281; LW 45. On Luther and the natural law see, e.g., Lazareth, “Love and Law,” 106. On the Reformed tradition see David Van Drunen, 39

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It was nothing new to note that the Fall had obscured the natural law engraved on human hearts, nor to point to the Decalogue as a necessary restatement of the natural law given the facts of sin. It was, though, a departure from medieval Scholasticism to insist, as Calvin does, that “the purpose of natural law . . . is to render men inexcusable.”41 Yet while this seemed to imply that the knowledge of the natural law available under conditions of sin is sufficient for no other purpose, in fact Calvin, like Luther, assumed that the natural law, at least as known by the regenerate, could serve as a criterion for the government of external actions and civil affairs. The heavenly kingdom, which governs the life of the soul, is the realm of grace and Christian liberty, but Christians continue to be governed in their external conduct by the earthly kingdom – and this is the realm of natural and civil law. Melanchthon defined ethics itself as natural law, the part of divine law concerned with external actions, as distinct from the Gospel.42 This was fleshed out in terms of the second table of the Decalogue and the civic virtues. In this respect Lutheran and Reformed thinkers, like their Catholic counterparts in the School of Salamanca, were actually more optimistic concerning the possibility of arriving at a detailed and determinate content of the natural law than were their medieval Scholastic predecessors. Aquinas had insisted that only the most general precepts could be said to be per se nota; as the precepts of the natural law became more determinate, they also became more difficult to know. Even among the precepts of the Decalogue there were some self-evident only to the wise.43 Late medieval nominalists, meanwhile, emphasized the indeterminacy of nature; for Scotus, for instance, the divine commands that constitute the moral law are fitting to human nature, but other commands could have been equally fitting.44 Calvin, in contrast, influenced by Stoicism and the Roman legal tradition, believed that nature itself taught a host of specific things, from breastfeeding to primogeniture. This pattern continued throughout Lutheran and Reformed Scholasticism: Natural Law and the Two Kingdoms: A Study in the Development of Reformed Social Thought (Grand Rapids, 2010), 70–73. 41 Calvin, Institutes II, II, 22, trans. in Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill (Louisville, 1960), 282. 42 Philipp Melanchthon, Philosophiae Moralis Epitome, in Opera quae supersunt Omnia, ed. Carolus Gottlieb Bretschneider and Henricus Ernestus Bindseil, 28 vols. (Halle, 1834–1860), CR 16, 21–24; Jill Kraye, “Melanchthons ethische Kommentare und Lehrbücher,” in Jürgen Leonhardt, ed., Melanchthon und das Lehrbuch des 16. Jahrhunderts (Rostock, 1997), 195–214. 43 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica I-II.94.2, 99.2 ad 2. 44 John E. Hare, God’s Call: Moral Realism, God’s Commands, and Human Autonomy (Grand Rapids, 2001), 67–68.

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the denial of any salvific capacity of the natural law, and the insistence that the natural law could be fully known only by the regenerate, went hand in hand with appeals to the natural law as the proper basis for ethics and civil order. The Italian Calvinist Hieronymus Zanchi (1516–1590) is an interesting case in point. Zanchi held the distinctive view that God had rewritten the natural law on the hearts of fallen humankind. He thereby underscored that this law flows from divine will and not human nature as such, while also ensuring its accessibility to all. On the other hand, he emphasized that this reinscription offered only a general knowledge of good and evil; conclusions about the good vary widely and are often distorted by inordinate desires. It is sufficient to “preserve the common good and convict people of sin.”45 The English divine Richard Hooker (1554–1600) was even more optimistic concerning the possibility of determinate knowledge of the natural law (which he preferred to term the law of reason in order to differentiate it clearly from the laws of nature obeyed infallibly by non-rational creatures). While Hooker notes that wicked customs have obscured knowledge of the law of reason amongst whole nations, he also insists that the law of reason is such as should be knowable with effort by any normal human being. Scripture republishes much of the natural law, but is strictly necessary only to show the way to eternal felicity, not moral and civil flourishing.46 These developments went hand in hand with a changed understanding of conscience. Medieval Scholastics had wrestled with how to parse the work of synderesis over against conscience, settling into a division of labor according to which synderesis grasps the most general ethical principles, while conscience descends to particular judgments. This distinction allowed Aquinas to insist that at the level of synderesis one could properly speak of the universal and ineradicable knowledge of the natural law, while also recognizing the difficulty of arriving at wise judgments at the level of particulars.47 Luther and Calvin, in contrast, both regarded conscience as an immediate awareness of the natural law, an inward witness to the divine judgment.48 Melanchthon 45 D. Hieronymus Zanchi, De Lege, in Operum theologicorum, book four (Geneva, 1613), thesis 8, pp. 189–190; English trans. Jeffrey J. Veenstra, Journal of Markets & Morality 6, no. 1 (2003), 317–398, at 326–329; Davey Henreckson, “Protestant Natural Law: For What Purpose?” unpublished MS. 46 Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (London, 1988 [1594]), I.3.2, I.8.9, I.11.3. 47 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica I.79.12–13. 48 Randall C. Zachman, The Assurance of Faith: Conscience in the Theology of Martin Luther and John Calvin (Minneapolis, 1993), 99–101; Van Drunen, Natural Law and the Two Kingdoms, 100–101.

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followed suit, and this tendency to think of conscience as bearing immediate witness to the natural law, suggesting a potential derivation of the legislative from the judicial conscience, became a mainstay of Reformed Scholasticism.49

Natural Law and the Autonomy of Moral Philosophy While in a theological context Reformed and Lutheran thinkers continued throughout the seventeenth century to emphasize the effects of the Fall and thus the radically limited accessibility of the natural law, non-theologians began to bracket the Fall and construct increasingly elaborate systems of natural law with little reference to Scripture or Scholastic theology.50 For these thinkers, not only was it the case that natural law governed the realm of external actions, of civil society, of justice; the natural law was something that could be constructed by reflecting on salient features of human nature, with geometry as the model. This basic trend is evident in the German-born Reformed jurist Johannes Althusius (1557–1638), as well as in the major figures of so-called modern natural law, from the Arminian Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) onward through its most radical representative, Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), the Lutheran Samuel Pufendorf (1632–1688), and the Socinian John Locke (1632–1704).51 Despite very significant differences amongst themselves, these thinkers shared the conviction that natural law, like the law of nations, is the proper province of jurists, not of theologians, and that it governs external actions and civil affairs, leaving to theology the task of perfecting hearts and saving souls. They also shared the methodological strategy of bracketing the Fall and of starting simply with the salient features of human nature as we now observe it in order to demonstrate a systematic natural law in a manner akin to geometry. Natural-law discourse was thereby transformed in ways clearly indebted to the doctrine of the two kingdoms, but only possible by setting aside the doctrine of the Fall. So transfigured, natural law served as the dominant discourse of moral philosophy up through Kant’s critical turn. 49

See Mayes, Counsel and Conscience, 17, 45–46; Richard Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics, 4 vols. (Grand Rapids, 1987–2003), III, 171–187; e.g., Peter Martyr Vermigli, Loci communes (London, 1583), I.ii.5. 50 See, e.g., Samuel von Pufendorf, De officio hominis et civis (Lund, 1673), I.3.11, trans. as On the Duty of Man and Citizen, ed. James Tully, trans. Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge, 1991), 36. 51 Knud Haakonssen, Natural Law and Moral Philosophy: From Grotius to the Scottish Enlightenment (New York, 1996), 15–62; John Witte, The Reformation of Rights: Law, Religion, and Human Rights in Early Modern Calvinism (Cambridge, 2007), 150–164.

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Even as natural-law discourse developed in directions increasingly distant from its roots in Scholastic Aristotelianism, humanism brought with it the fuller recovery of other schools of ancient philosophy that also took ethical reflection in various new directions. These developed largely outside of a university context still dominated by Scholasticism, although with some noteworthy exceptions, such as the university-based Cambridge Platonists, starting with Benjamin Whichcote (1609–1683) and extending through John Smith (1618–1652), Henry More (1614–1684), and Ralph Cudworth (1671–1684). The Cambridge Platonists, responding critically to the voluntarism both of Hobbes and of Calvinism, argued that moral truths were eternal and immutable and could be known through human reason’s participation in divine truth. A similar emphasis on contemplation of eternal moral verities is found in the Augustinian rationalist Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1715). Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655) represented a Christianized Epicureanism: human beings, he argued, are naturally pleasure seeking, and need only grasp that obedience to God will bring maximal pleasure in order to act well and be made happy. Neo-Stoicism was promoted by Justus Lipsius, with his influential De Constantia (1584), followed by Guillaume du Vair (1556–1621) and, in the English context, Herbert of Cherbury (1581/2–1648). The seventeenth century was thus a remarkably fecund and inventive period for moral philosophy.

The Emergence of Christian Ethics If the dominant tendency within Lutheran and Reformed Scholasticism was to situate ethics, together with natural law, within moral philosophy, a discipline charged with the task of developing a basis for external action and civil life, over the course of the seventeenth century there were also voices calling for an explicitly Christian ethics. The rise of practical theology within the context of the flowering of casuistry has been discussed above; both “moral theology” and “Christian Ethics” emerged under this umbrella. To Lambert Daneau, successor of Beza as professor of theology at the Genevan Academy, may go the distinction of coining the term, in his Ethices Christianae libri tres (1577).52 While some of his framing concepts were taken from Aristotle, Stoicism, and the Roman-law tradition, Daneau insisted 52 Strohm, “Ethics in Early Calvinism,” 261; Christoph Strohm, Ethik im frühen Calvinismus: Humanistische Einflüsse, philosophische, juristische und theologische Argumentationen sowie mentalitätsgeschichtliche Aspekte am Beispiel des Calvin-Schülers Lambertus Danaeus (Berlin and New York, 1996) offers an exhaustive study of Daneau’s formation and thought.

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that Christian ethics be based solely on divine law as revealed in Scripture. This law governs the heart, not solely external actions; philosophical distinctions among virtues and vices are to be set aside in favor of the basic distinction between being guided by the Spirit of God versus serving the passions of the flesh, with the virtues and vices reinterpreted through this scriptural lens.53 In 1627 William Ames critiqued the Systema ethicae (1607) of Danzig-based Reformed theologian Bartholomäus Keckermann for its separation of moral good from spiritual good. In his Medulla theologiae Ames sought to develop an explicitly scriptural ethics to offer practical guidance for the Christian life as part of a process of the spiritual reform of believing Christians.54 Meanwhile, in the Lutheran world, Georg Calixt was the first, in 1619, to write a work of moral theology that conceived its task as clearly distinct from both dogmatics and moral philosophy; his focus was on guidance for regenerate Christians seeking to obey divinely revealed law.55 Therefore, even as the Law–Gospel dialectic and the doctrine of the two kingdoms plowed the ground for the emergence of secular moral philosophy, it also fed in Lutheran, Reformed, and Anglican circles the emergence of an emphatically scriptural Christian ethics, undertaken within the context of dogmatic theology, not philosophy.

Conclusion The common impulse to reform, to a fuller Christianization of the whole of society, lay as well as religious, yielded highly diverse fruits in the arenas of ethics and moral theology. It was expressed in a commitment both to transforming society in accordance with God’s will and to cultivating an inner piety on the part of ordinary lay individuals, both in the aspiration to align civil law and the external social order with the natural moral law and in the drive to allow God’s spirit – and God’s Word – to govern the inmost recesses of the heart. It gave rise both to Jesuit laxism and to Jansenist and Calvinist rigorism, all in their varied ways preoccupied with transforming and ordering human intention and action. It yielded an array of increasingly autonomous secular moral philosophies as well as forms of ethical reflection that were Lambert Daneau, Ethices Christianae libri III, I.1, in Opuscula omnia theologica . . . in tres classes divisa (Geneva, 1583; micro-reproduction Zug, 1980), 24; see Sinnema’s extensive discussion in “Discipline of Ethics,” 21–31. 54 Luca Baschera, “Ethics in Reformed Orthodoxy,” in Herman J. Selderhuis, ed., A Companion to Reformed Orthodoxy (Leiden, 2013), 519–552, at 527. 55 Georg Calixt, Epitome theologiae (Goslar, 1619); see Mayes, Counsel and Conscience, 14. 53

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determinedly scriptural. The former secured independence by bracketing the question of how grace transforms human agency, while the latter declared its own independence from moral philosophy by focusing on how Scripture wholly reigns in the hearts and lives of those reborn in the Spirit. The stage was thereby set for the emergence of modern moral philosophies forgetful of their theological roots, a moral theology formed in a legalistic mode and preoccupied with the casuistical enterprise, and a biblicist Christian ethics often conceiving of its task as the abdication of human agency in favor of the Spirit.56 It is a legacy with which we are still coming to terms. bibliography Baschera, Luca. “Ethics in Reformed Orthodoxy.” In Herman J. Selderhuis, ed., A Companion to Reformed Orthodoxy. Leiden, 2013, 519–552. Bast, Robert James. Honor your Fathers: Catechisms and the Emergence of a Patriarchal Ideology in Germany 1400–1600. Leiden, 1997. Haakonssen, Knud. Natural Law and Moral Philosophy: From Grotius to the Scottish Enlightenment. New York, 1996. Jonsen, Albert R. and Stephen Toulmin. The Abuse of Casuistry: A History of Moral Reasoning. Berkeley, 1988. Keenan, James F. “Was William Perkins’ Whole Treatise of Cases of Consciences Casuistry? Hermeneutics and British Practical Divinity.” In Harald E. Braun and Edward Vallance, eds., Contexts of Conscience in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1700. New York, 2004, 17–31. Kraye, Jill. “Melanchthons ethische Kommentare und Lehrbücher.” In Jürgen Leonhardt, ed., Melanchthon und das Lehrbuch des 16. Jahrhunderts. Rostock, 1997, 195–214. Leites, Edmund, ed. Conscience and Casuistry in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge, 1988. Mayes, Benjamin T. G. Counsel and Conscience: Lutheran Casuistry and Moral Reasoning after the Reformation. Göttingen, 2011. Pinckaers, Servais. The Sources of Christian Ethics. Washington, 1995. Porter, Jean. Natural and Divine Law. Grand Rapids, 1999. Sinnema, Donald. “The Discipline of Ethics in Early Reformed Orthodoxy.” Calvin Theological Journal 28 (1993), 10–44. Strohm, Cristoph. “Ethics in Early Calvinism.” In Jill Kraye and Risto Saarinen, eds., Moral Philosophy on the Threshold of Modernity. Dordrecht, 2005, 255–281. Ethik im frühen Calvinismus: Humanistische Einflüsse, philosophische, juristische und theologische Argumentationen sowie mentalitätsgeschichtliche Aspekte am Beispiel des CalvinSchülers Lambertus Danaeus. Berlin and New York, 1996. Van Drunen, David. Natural Law and the Two Kingdoms: A Study in the Development of Reformed Social Thought. Grand Rapids, 2010. Witte, John. The Reformation of Rights: Law, Religion, and Human Rights in Early Modern Calvinism. Cambridge, 2007.

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Ecclesiastical Law in Early Modern Europe kenneth pennington The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw significant changes in Roman canon law. The libri legales that were taught in the law schools and used in the courts had been compiled in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. After the first half of the fourteenth century popes no longer attempted to shape papal law. After the middle of the fourteenth century the bishops of Rome did not promulgate any more collections of papal court decisions (decretals). They left the development of canonical jurisprudence to the jurists. Together with the Justinian codification of Roman law these libri legales formed the “required books” for every European lawschool class.1 Why did the papacy no longer promulgate collections of its court decisions after the first half of the fourteenth century? One answer to that question is that canonists primarily taught case law. With the exception of Gratian’s Decretum, all the collections of canon law contained the appellate decisions of the Roman Curia and conciliar legislation. Case law, then and today, has significant advantage over codified norms: it is much more flexible. A typical case can open a Pandora’s box of issues far beyond the facts and principles that led the court to render its decision. From the middle of the fourteenth century two other genres emerged that supported case-law jurisprudence: consilia (legal briefs) and the appellate decisions of the Roman Rota.2 Both these genres, but 1 On the libri legale, the ius commune and its constituent parts, medieval Roman, canon, and feudal law, see Michael H. Hoeflich and Jasonne M. Grabher, “The Establishment of Normative Legal Texts: The Beginnings of the Ius Commune,” in Wilfried Hartmann and Kenneth Pennington, eds., The History of Canon Law in the Classical Period, 1140–1234: From Gratian to the Decretals of Pope Gregory IX [History of Medieval Canon Law] (Washington, 2008), 1–21. 2 For bibliography on the medieval Rota see Thomas Woelki, Lodovico Pontano (ca. 1409–1439): Eine Juristenkarriere an Universität, Fürstenhof, Kurie und Konzil [Education and Society 38] (Leiden and Boston, 2011), 100–103. The Roman Rota is discussed in depth by Brigide Schwarz, “The Roman Curia (until about 1300),” in Wilfried Hartmann and Kenneth

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especially consilia, remained a part of canonical teaching and jurisprudence until the seventeenth century.3 The number of large commentaries and summae on the various collections of decretals that were characteristic of the period from Gratian to around 1450 diminished substantially. The great commentaries of Nicholas de Tudeschis (Panormitanus) on the decretal collections taught in the law schools were the last of the massive commentaries until the genre was revived in the seventeenth century.4 Beginning in the middle of the fifteenth to the start of the sixteenth centuries, the jurists of the ius commune turned their attention to monographic treatises treating many subjects, but especially criminal procedure. The papacy had taken control of its legal system between 1226 and 1317. It promulgated collections of its law officially, following the model established long before by the emperor Justinian. Although the decretal collections did not contain comprehensive statements of law like Justinian’s codification of Roman law, they did provide the law schools with fundamental tools for teaching canon law. During the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries one might have concluded that the popes perceived their legal role and authority within the church much as modern governments do when they exercise control of their legal systems within their territorial states. Like modern governments the popes promulgated, shaped, authenticated, and exercised jurisdiction over their legal systems and the sources of their law. This “modern” model ends after 1317. There were no more papal collections of canon law until Pope Gregory XIII promulgated a unified and carefully edited Corpus iuris canonici in 1582. The Avignon Papacy and the Great Schism were distractions but cannot be an explanation for this hiatus. During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries popes participated less and less in the daily work of the papal court. Whereas early papal decretals contained decisions in which the pope sometimes, if not always, heard the cases, by the fourteenth century papal letters were no longer the primary vehicles for reporting the judicial activity of the papal Curia. Papal auditors (auditores) commonly heard the cases that were appealed to Rome. When Pope John XXII (1314–1334) promulgated the decretal Ratio iuris (1332) in

Pennington, eds., The History of Courts and Procedure in Medieval Canon Law [History of Medieval Canon Law] (Washington, 2016), 160–228. 3 For an introduction to the consilia see Consilia im späten Mittelalter: Zum historischen Aussagewert einer Quellengattung, ed. Ingrid Baumgärtner [Schriftenreihe des Deutschen Studienzentrums in Venedig 13] (Sigmaringen, 1995). 4 Niccolò Tedeschi (Abbas Panormitanus) e i suoi Commentaria in Decretales, ed. Orazio Condorelli (Rome, 2000).

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which he granted auditors ordinary power to hear cases, the pope confirmed a practice that had been in place for more than a century. During the fourteenth century the Decisiones or Conclusiones of the Rota were gathered together and manuscripts of them circulated widely. These decisions of the Rota became another source of great authority within canon law. By the fifteenth century the Sanctae Romanae rotae decisiones were published each year. This practice has continued until the present day. A consequence of this institutional development was that collections of papal decretals became far less relevant for canon law. The decretal collections of the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, however, remained the cornerstones of canonical jurisprudence because they were used universally in the classrooms and the courtrooms of Europe. In the second half of the sixteenth century the papacy decided to revise these standard texts of canon law. Under pressure by both humanistic scholarship and Protestant criticism of the canonical libri legales, the papacy decided that all the books of canon law needed a thorough and careful textual examination. In 1566 Pope Pius V convened a commission of experts to examine the complicated textual basis of the canonical libri legales, especially the texts in Gratian’s Decretum. These scholars were called the Correctores Romani. The commission was guided in part by one of the most brilliant scholars of the age, the Spaniard Antonio Agustín. Pope Gregory XIII promulgated a new Corpus iuris canonici based on the careful scholarship of the Correctores Romani in 1580.5 It was printed for the first time in Rome during 1582. Pope Gregory XIII’s revised and authenticated version of the standard texts of canon law remained in force until the Codex iuris canonici was promulgated in 1917. There were other unsuccessful and semi-successful attempts to compile collections of decretals that would have supplemented and updated the standard collections. The concept of adding a “Liber septimus” to the libri legales took different forms and experienced the vicissitudes of papal interest and support. With the encouragement of Pope Paul IV (1555–1559) Giovanni Paolo Lancelotti († 1590) had already conceived of a collection of decretals to augment the libri legales canonici. Pope Paul V (1605–1621) did permit Lancelotti’s work to be published as an appendix to some editions of the Corpus iuris canonici.6 A manuscript in Toledo contains a “Codex Gregorianus” compiled by Celso Pasi. It contained decretals and texts that reached as far 5

Mary E. Sommar, The Correctores Romani: Gratian’s Decretum and the Counter-Reformation Humanists [Pluralisierung & Autorität 19] (Vienna and Berlin, 2009). 6 Editions of Lyon: 1606, 1616, 1661 (Venice, 1630).

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back to the Church Fathers and to the decretals of Boniface VIII, but mainly contained the decrees of the Council of Trent and the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century popes. The Liber septimus that came closest to finding an official place in canon law was begun during the pontificate of Pope Gregory XIII and continued under his successors.7 A French canonist, Pierre Mattieu, put together a Liber septimus decretalium with decretals from the pontificates between Sixtus IV (1471–1484) and Sixtus V (1585–1590). Although no pope gave it official approval, it was printed as part of the Corpus iuris canonici at Lyon in 1661.8 Mattieu’s most significant innovation was to add new titles to the collection, such as De cardinalibus, De insulis novi orbis, De cambiis, De conciliis, and De taurorum et aliorum animalium agitatione et pugna that attempted not only to update decretal collections after Trent but to broach new issues in Christian society. It was, however, placed on the Index librorum prohibitorum in 1623 for reasons that are not known.9 Sixteenth-century canonical literature in the ius commune was primarily monographic. Perhaps the most important genre was devoted to the rules that governed the courts. Procedural treatises had been dominated by canonists until the sixteenth century. Guillelmus Durantis († 1296) produced a massive treatise on procedure between 1271 and 1291 that remained the standard work for centuries.10 At the end of the fifteenth century the Romanlaw and canonical jurists turned their attention to criminal procedure. The most important was the detailed analysis of criminal procedure by Prospero Farinacci († 1618), who summed up the jurisprudence of his successors.11 He was probably educated in Perugia and quickly gained experience on both sides of the bench. In 1567 he became the general commissioner in the service

7 On these sixteenth-century collections see Lorenzo Sinisi, Oltre il Corpus iuris canonici: Iniziative manualistiche a progetti di nuove compilazioni in età post-tridentina [Collana della Facoltà di Giurisprudenza dell’Università degli Studi Magna Graecia di Catanzaro] (Soveria Mannelli, 2009); Elisabeth Dickerhof-Borello, Ein Liber Septimus für das Corpus iuris canonici: Der Versuch einer Nachtridentinischen Kompilation [Forschungen zur kirchlichen Rechtsgeschichte und zum Kirchenrecht 27] (Cologne, Weimar, and Vienna, 2002); Lorenzo Sinisi, “The Commentaries on the Tridentine Decrees in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: The First Remarks on a Category of ‘Prohibited’ Works,” Bulletin of Medieval Canon Law 33 (2016), 209–228. 8 Corpus iuris canonici (Lyon, 1661). 9 Septimus decretalium constitutionum apostolicarum post sextum, Clementinas et extravagantes usque in hodiernum diem editarum, Continuatio universi corporis canonici . . . Opus novum et necessarium, ed. Petrus Marrhaeus (Frankfurt am Main, 1590). Mattieu added many more titles than those listed in the text. 10 Guillelmus Durantis, Speculum iudiciale, 4 vols. (Strasbourg, n.d.), and reprinted many times. 11 Aldo Mazzacane, “Farinacci, Prospero,” in Dizionario biografico dei giuristi italiani (XII–XX secolo), ed. Italo Birocchi et al. (Bologna, 2013), I, 822–825.

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of the Orsini of Bracciano; the next year he took up residence in Rome as a member of the papal camera. However, in 1570 he was imprisoned for an unknown crime. Legal problems hounded him for the rest of his life. He lost an eye in a fight, was stripped of his positions, and was even accused of sodomy. In spite of his difficulties, Pope Clement VIII reinstated him to the papal court in 1596. He began his most important work, Praxis et theorica criminalis, in 1581 and put the finishing touches on it by 1601. Farinacci wrote extensively about torture and the rules governing its application, summing up the three centuries of jurisprudence governing the use of torture by judges in the courtroom. He repeated the standard norm that the evidence establishing the judge’s right to torture a person must be legitimate, probable, grave, and sufficient. The judge must be almost certain of the person’s guilt before he could order torture. He repeated the condemnation of many earlier jurists that judges were too ready to torture. “Princes,” he proclaimed, “should not tolerate those evil judges.” The proofs necessary to torture should be grave, urgent, certain, clear, but even clearer than the light at midday. The judge should be almost certain (quasi certus) of the defendant’s guilt, so that nothing was lacking except a confession. His treatise was very influential on Protestant jurists such as Benedict Carpzov, who wrote tracts on criminal procedure. Rather than writing massive commentaries on the libri legales canonici, the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century canonists wrote focused treatises on individual decretals, and specialized topics such as marriage, elections, benefices, dispensations, privileges, simony, judicial proofs, heresy, and papal authority.12 They also wrote extensively on the rules of law (regulae iuris). Diego de Covarrubias y Leyva († 1577) was born in Toledo, studied in Salamanca, and taught canon law at Oviedo. One of his most important works was a detailed commentary on a rule of law, Peccatum, that had been placed in Boniface VIII’s Liber sextus, which stipulated that a sin is not forgiven unless what has been taken is restored.13 Covarrubias used the maxim as a platform to discuss the rights of the poor, the duty to assist others, the right of a prince to declare war, the rights of non-Christians, the origins of slavery, laws governing just war, and, finally, the rights of those who find treasure.14 Covarrubias’s work is an excellent example of the way in 12 For an extensive list of these canonists and their publications see Johann Friedrich von Schulte, Die Geschichte der Quellen und Literatur des canonischen Rechts, volume III.1: Von der Mitte des 16. Jahrhunderts bis zur Gegenwart (Stuttgart, 1880; repr. Graz, 1956), 123–783. 13 Liber sextus 5.[13].4: Peccatum non dimittitur, nisi restituatur ablatum. 14 Diego de Covarrubias y Leyva, Regulae peccatum, De regulis iuris Liber VI: Relectio (Lyon, 1560), 6, 64, 69, 110, 216, 250, 270–275, 285–319; see Richard H. Helmholz, “Diego de Covarrubias

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which the jurists of the ius commune creatively explored the many-sided and complex issues that were embedded in what may seem a straightforward, simple statement. A few canonists began to write extensive commentaries on the decretals again in the seventeenth century. The two most important were a Spaniard, Emanuel González Téllez († 1649) and an Italian, Prospero Fagnani († 1678).15 Téllez approached the most important of the canonical libri legales under the influence of the textual criticism of the work done by the Correctores Romani. Fagnani took a more traditional approach.16 Both broke with traditional commentaries by including the text of the decretal at the beginning of their analysis, and both drew upon the jurisprudence of earlier canonists, stretching back to the thirteenth century. Both also incorporated the conciliar decisions of the Fifth Lateran Council and Trent into their commentaries.17 Téllez broke new ground. At the beginning of each decretal he explored the textual tradition of the text extending to its inclusion in the earliest collections of canon law that predated Pope Gregory IX’s Decretales.18 Téllez not only examined the textual history of the text but also put it into its historical and legal context, which the editing of Raymond de Pennafort omitted. His approach to the text was very much in the footsteps of the Correctores Romani. Téllez and Fagnani marked, however, the end of an era. They had no successors. The canonists who came after Téllez and Fagnani could be called encyclopedists. They turned their attention to writing large, multi-volume treatises that covered all canonical jurisprudence. Their inspiration on a much smaller scale might be seen as Justinian’s Institutes. Anaklet Reiffenstuel († 1703) was perhaps the most learned of these jurists.19 His compendium of canonical jurisprudence touched all aspects of legal thought. On each subject he y Leyva,” in Rafael Domingo and Javier Martínez-Torrón, eds., Great Christian Jurists in Spanish History [Law and Christianity] (Cambridge, 2018), 174–189. 15 Alejandro González Téllez, “González Téllez, Manuel,” in Diccionario general del derecho canónico, ed. Javier Otaduy, Antonio Viana, and Joaquín Sedano, 7 vols. (Pamplona, 2012), IV, 232–234; Diego Quaglioni, “Fagnani, Prospero,” in Dizionario biografico dei giuristi italiani, I, 814–816. 16 Prospero Fagnani, Commentaria in V libros Decretales cum Repertorio, 4 vols. (Cologne, 1704). 17 On the prohibitions to glossing the Lateran and Trent canons see Kenneth Pennington, “Ecclesiastical Liberty on the Eve of the Reformation,” Bulletin of Medieval Canon Law 33 (2016), 185–207. 18 On these early collections of decretals see Kenneth Pennington, “The Decretalists 1190–1234,” in Wilfried Hartmann and Kenneth Pennington, eds., The History of Canon Law in the Classical Period, 1140–1234: From Gratian to the Decretals of Pope Gregory IX [History of Medieval Canon Law] (Washington, 2008), 211–245. 19 Stepahn Dusil, “Anaklet Reiffenstuel,” in Diccionario general del derecho canónico, VI, 848–850.

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outlined the main positions of earlier jurists and noted their differences. His range of sources extended back to the thirteenth century and forward to the seventeenth. His work was published continuously until the late nineteenth century.20 It is not by chance that the most illustrious Protestant jurist of the early modern age, Justus Henning Böhmer († 1749), patterned his comprehensive work on ecclesiastical law after Reiffenstuel’s and the organization of the Roman canonical libri legales.21 In contrast to Roman canon law, the Protestant jurists had to create a set of norms and a jurisprudence that reflected their theological beliefs. They also had to cull papal law out of their vocabulary. Protestants almost never called their ecclesiastical norms “canons.”22 When Protestant jurists or theologians wrote “canon law” (ius canonicum) in their works, it was clear to their readers that they meant Roman canon law. They called their norms ordinances and their courts consistories. Surprisingly, Protestant jurists often cited Roman canon law and its jurisprudence long after Martin Luther burned books of Roman canon law at the Elster gate in Wittenberg. These jurists also continued to teach courses at the universities that treated the ius canonicum. Consequently, an important question for understanding early modern religious law is: how much Roman canon law remain embedded in the Reformers’ legislation and jurisprudence and how much was rejected? Until relatively recently scholars answered that question largely according to their confessional affiliations. Every Protestant movement has its own history, which depends on the circumstances of its origins. That history almost invariably includes a story of how the early Reformers rejected papal authority, the structures of the Roman Church, but especially the legal system that provided the juridical and constitutional foundations (status ecclesiae) of papal power.23 To quote the English historian William Holdsworth, who declared in his massive History of English Law that “in England the change in the position of the

20 Anaklet Reiffenstuel, Ius canonicum universum, clara method iuxta titulos quinque librorum decretalium, 4 vols. (Munich, 1726). 21 Justus Henning Böhmer, Ius ecclesiasticum protestantium usum hodiernum iuris canonici, 3rd ed., 5 vols. (Halle, 1730–1763). 22 An exception is England: see The Anglican Canons 1529–1947, ed. Gerald Bray [Church of England Record Society 6] (Woodbridge, 1998). 23 For an excellent discussion of these issues see John Witte, Jr., Law and Protestantism: The Legal Teachings of the Lutheran Reformation (Cambridge, 2002), 53–64. For a more detailed discussion of Protestant jurisprudence see Kenneth Pennington, “Protestant Ecclesiastical Law and the Ius commune,” Rivista internazionale di diritto commune 26 (2015), 9–36.

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canon law was more sudden and more drastic than in any other country.”24 In recent scholarship Holdsworth’s broad generalization has been modified, for England and for other Protestant lands as well.25 All the Reformers incorporated the medieval ius commune, shaped by canonical, Roman, and feudal jurisprudence, into their legislation and legal thought in varying degrees. The Protestant jurists incorporated Roman marriage and family law but also other areas of law such as court procedure, contracts, principles of law, social welfare, and education. The Reformers unanimously rejected medieval canonical jurisprudence that supported the Roman Church’s hierarchical authority, especially the jurisdictional and dogmatic power and prerogatives of the bishop of Rome. Some of the Reformers rejected the jurisprudence of the ius commune completely – at least rhetorically.26 Nevertheless, Protestant jurists were keenly aware of the debt owed to Roman canon law. Conrad Lagus († 1546) had warned his Protestant colleagues that the canonists’ jurisprudence on procedure, what was called the ordo iudiciarius, was essential for the functioning of the law courts: “At the same time I warn you not to reject the ius canonicum and its judicial norms. They preserve the customs of common usage. Since these rights are now observed everywhere in the courts, they expedite cases when conducting trials.”27 The Protestant jurists who taught the ius canonicum at the Reformed universities limited their teaching and publishing to certain books and subjects, especially marriage and procedure. It is well known that Martin Luther had studied canon law at the University of Erfurt and quickly learned that canonical jurisprudence

24

Quoted by Richard H. Helmholz, “Canon Law in Post-Reformation England,” in Richard H. Helmholz, ed., Canon Law in Protestant Lands (Berlin, 1992), 203–221, at 203. 25 Witte, Law and Protestantism, 23–29, 53–64; and Harold Berman, Law and Revolution, volume II: The Impact of the Protestant Reformations on the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge, 2003), 71–72. Witte and Berman both note that Ernst Troeltsch (1865–1923) first put forward the argument that Protestant jurists were not averse to using Roman canon law. See, e.g., Mathias Schmoeckel, Das Recht der Reformation: Die epistemologische Revolution der Wissenschaft und die Spaltung des Rechtsordnung in der Frühen Neuzeit (Tübingen, 2014). 26 Witte, Law and Protestantism, 64. 27 Conrad Lagus, Iuris utriusque tradition methodica (Frankfurt, 1543), 193: Atque simul quoque moneo non esse contemnenda iura canonica in observationibus iudicialibus quia usus sic tulit, ut nunc fere ista iura praecipue observentur in processu iudiciorum, propterea quod magis expeditus eius ordo in exercendis iudiciis esse videatur. On Lagus see Schmoeckel, Das Recht der Reformation, 88–89, 98. Cf. Berman, Law and Revolution, 118–124; also the examples cited by Udo Wolter, “Die Fortgeltung des kanonischen Rechts und die Haltung der protestanischen Juristen zum Kanonischen Recht in Deutschland bis in die Mitte des 18. Jahrhunderts,” in Richard H. Helmholz, ed., Canon Law in Protestant Lands (Berlin, 1992), 13–47, at 19.

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supported the prerogatives of the bishop of Rome and provided a juridical foundation for the other institutions in the church. Luther learned the flawed jurisprudence that governed and regulated marriage.28 He flamboyantly demonstrated his contempt for Roman canon law on December 10, 1520 when he burned the papal bull Exsurge Domine and other books of canon law in Wittenberg. As John Witte has written, Luther announced “a loud call for freedom . . . from the tyranny of the pope . . . from the hegemony of the clergy . . . from the strictures of canon law.”29 Luther and his fellow Reformers could not anticipate the chaos that quickly followed. Medieval canon law had regulated many social relationships. It defined social bonds, of which the most important was marriage. It disciplined both secular and religious lives. The turmoil was a result of the divisions in the Reform movement into different sects with different ideas about how a church could be governed without the guidance of a centralized authority. From the beginning of the Reformation, therefore, many of the Reformers followed the advice of Conrad Lagus and permitted Roman Catholic canon law to provide a solid foundation for their norms and jurisprudence from the beginning of their revolt against Rome.30 The jurisprudence of canon law had been intricately entwined with secular law and norms for centuries. While the Reformers could easily disentangle Catholic theological thought and traditions in their quest to return to a more pristine set of beliefs, they could not just as easily reject Catholic jurisprudence and norms embedded in the teachings of canon law. There was not a set of purified legal norms to which they could give pride of place in their courts. Luther had studied law. He and other law students had absorbed the doctrines, norms, and institutions of the ius commune that had developed over the previous four centuries. Every law school in Europe had a curriculum in which students studied canon law, Roman law in its medieval guise, and feudal law. The libri legales that were taught in the schools were not balkanized into different disciplines but were integrated into a set of common texts.31 By the fifteenth century the teachers in Europe’s law schools taught 28 Johannes Heckel, “Recht und Gesetz, Kirche und Obrigkeit in Luthers Lehre vor dem Thesenanschlag von 1517: Eine juristische Untersuchung,” Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte, Kanonistische Abteilung, 26 (1938), 285–375. 29 Witte, Law and Protestantism, 1; Schmoeckel, Das Recht der Reformation, 1–4. 30 Rudolf Schäfer, “Die Geltung des kanonischen Rechts in der evangelischen Kirche Deutschlands von Luther bis zur Gegenwart,” Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte, Kanonistische Abteilung, 36 (1915), 165–413 remains a fundamental introductory text. 31 Hoeflich and Grabher, “The Establishment of Normative Legal Texts,” 1–21.

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and wrote commentaries on all three components of the ius commune. The great jurist of the fourteenth century Baldus de Ubaldis († 1400) was not unusual – although his genius is. He taught Roman, canon, and feudal law and wrote significant works on all three.32 The main point is that while Luther could burn books of canon law, he could never stamp out the canonical jurisprudence that had been created from the papal texts in those books. It had become too deeply ingrained in European jurisprudence. The irony is that some of the most fundamental concepts and norms that were embedded in the intellectual baggage of every European jurist were based on papal court decisions and conciliar canons that had been clothed and fashioned by jurists who did not distinguish between Roman and canonical jurisprudence. The ius commune was the product of both. It is particularly important to emphasize that the ius commune was not a set of statutes. Rather, it was a set of principles, norms, doctrines, rules, and concepts that could be applied to many different legal problems and areas of law. It was, in other words, jurisprudence, not positive law.33 The Reformers’ early assaults on medieval papal canon law and its support of papal authority has obscured the importance that it had in their later jurisprudence. Luther attacked papal canon law in his letter to the German nobility in 1520. In 1518 he warned that without destroying medieval canon law reform was not possible.34 He had three main issues with the Roman ecclesial polity that he called the three walls (Drei Mauern): (1) secular power had no authority or jurisdiction over ecclesiastical power; (2) only the pope 32

Kenneth Pennington, “Baldus de Ubaldis,” Rivista internazionale di diritto comune 8 (1997), 35–61. 33 Schmoeckel, Das Recht der Reformation, has a particularly sophisticated understanding of the ius commune. For different and flawed interpretations of its role in medieval and early modern law see Heikki Pihlagamäki and Risto Saarinen, “Lutheran Reformation and the Law in Recent Scholarship,” in Virpi Mäkinen, ed., Lutheran Reformation and the Law [Studies in Medieval and Reformation Traditions 112] (Leiden and Boston, 2006), 1–17, at 12: “The study of Roman law was separate from that of canon law . . . until the reception of Roman law, the learned ius commune, began in Germany”; and Berman, Law and Revolution, 126. This chapter will be an extended critique of these assertions, which have also been made by many other scholars. See Kenneth Pennington, “Learned Law, Droit Savant, Gelehrtes Recht: The Tyranny of a Concept,” Rivista internazionale di diritto commune 5 (1994), 197–209 on the concept of “learned law.” For the development, importance, and constituent parts of the ius commune from the twelfth century on, see Kenneth Pennington, “Sovereignty and Rights in Medieval and Early Modern Jurisprudence: Law and Norms without a State,” in Heinz-Gerhard Justenhoven and James Turner, eds., Rethinking the State in the Age of Globalisation: Catholic Thought and Contemporary Political Theory [Politik 10] (Münster, 2003), 117–141. 34 See Walther E. Köhler, Die Quellen zu Luthers Schrift “An den christlichen Adel deutscher Nation”: Ein Beitrag zum Verständnis dieser Schrift Luthers [Inaugural-Dissertation Heidelberg] (Halle, 1895), 220.

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might interpret Scripture and dogma; and (3) only the pope might call a papal council.35 Luther cited Pope Boniface VIII’s decretal Unam sanctam and Innocent IV’s deposition of Emperor Frederick II as key texts that supported the first wall.36 Texts in Gratian’s Decretum and the Decretales supported papal claims for the second and third walls. Texts attributed to Popes Nicholas I and Agatho supported the second wall.37 Papal authority to summon general councils could be found in Gratian.38 Luther particularly detested a decretal of Pope Pascal II, Significasti, in which the pope declared that no archbishop could receive his pallium without swearing an oath of obedience to the pope. Every council, the pope went on, established its authority on papal prerogatives.39 How much canon law did Luther learn in his short time studying law? The texts cited in the previous paragraph might lead one to conclude he knew the texts of the Corpus iuris canonici quite well. But such a conclusion would presume that he cited these canons from his own knowledge. Scholars have noted more than once that Luther might have taken canonical references from the texts of other Reformers.40 If one examines Luther’s early polemical writings he cited very few texts. Understandably, most of those he did cite dealt with papal authority.41 There is only one text with which we might test Luther’s knowledge of canon law and, more broadly, his range in the ius commune. A consilium that dealt with the issue of sanctuary for those who sought refuge in ecclesiastical institutions has been attributed to him.42 There had been a disputed case of sanctuary in Wittenberg in 1512 that was not resolved until 1515. An anonymous consilium dealing with sanctuary was printed in 1516 at Oppenheim (by Jacob Köbel?) on the Rhine and again in 1517 by Johannes Weissenburger in Landshut. In 1520 the tract was printed for a third time. The Oppenheim printing was without attribution of authorship, but Weissenburger inserted Martin Luther’s name into the titular rubric. 35 Luther’s three principles have been widely discussed: see, e.g., Karl-Heinz zur Mühlen, Reformation und Gegenreformation [Zugänge zur Kirchengeschichte 6.2] (Göttingen, 1999), 70. 36 Extravagantes communes 1.8.1 and Liber sextus 2.14.2, in Corpus iuris canonici, ed. Emil Friedberg, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1879; repr. Graz, 1955), II, cols. 1245 and 1008 (henceforth Friedberg). 37 Gratian, Decretum D.19 c.1 and 2, ed. in Friedberg, I, cols. 58–60. 38 Gratian, Decretum D.17 c.1 and 5; C.3 q.6 c.9, ed. in Friedberg, I, 50 and 521. 39 Decretals of Gregory IX 1.6.4, in Friedberg, II, cols. 49–50; see Köhler, Quellen zu Luthers Schrift, 223–224. 40 Köhler, Quellen zu Luthers Schrift, 232–233. 41 Wilhelm Maurer, “Reste des Kanonischen Rechtes im Frühprotestantismus,” Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte, Kanonistische Abteilung, 51 (1965), 190–253, at 192–195. 42 Witte, Law and Protestantism, 54–55 n.8.

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Subsequently, although there have been dissenters, the work has been attributed to Luther by most recent scholars and librarians.43 Consilia became a major literary genre of the ius commune during the thirteenth century and evolved into the most important genre of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The first part of Luther’s consilium resonates with his approach to problems. It cites examples taken from the Old Testament, Roman law, and canon law to establish which categories of persons had a right to sanctuary.44 He relied on texts from Gratian’s Decretum, and Decretales of Gregory IX, cited the legal commentaries of the great figures of medieval canon law: Hostiensis († 1271), Zabarella († 1417), and Panormitanus († 1445). If Luther wrote the consilium it would provide evidence of his legal learning at the beginning of the Reformation. It would also be incontrovertible proof that he accepted and used the jurisprudence of the ius commune, and especially canon law, when dealing with matters outside dogma. However, this consilium must be treated cautiously. Although the text might have been approved by Luther for the 1520 printing, his approval would not eliminate the possibility that the text was cobbled together from at least one other work.45 From the Reformation’s early days the Reformers realized that medieval canon law was not a monolithic fortress defending papal authority. The books that were used in the schools and the courts became uniformly papal only in 1582 when Pope Gregory XIII promulgated a Corpus iuris canonici. Until then, two texts included in that Corpus, Gratian’s Decretum and the Extravagantes communes, had not even been given a papal imprimatur. Nonetheless, if they had all been officially promulgated by the papacy earlier than 1582, that approbation would not have damaged their prestige as witnesses and sources to the Christian tradition. That is especially true of Gratian’s Decretum. Every educated person knew and used it. It is almost impossible to find a fifteenth-century theologian or jurist or polemicist who did not cite Gratian. The “Father of canon law” had a great advantage from the Reformers’ perspective. He could be seen as non-partisan because his 43 Martin Luther, Traktat über das kirchliche Asylrecht: Latein/Deutsch, ed. Barbara and Dietrich Emme (Regensburg, 1985). 44 Richard H. Helmholz, “The Law of Sanctuary,” in The Ius Commune in England: Four Studies (Oxford, 2001), 16–81; William Chester Jordan, “A Fresh Look at Medieval Sanctuary,” in Ruth Mazo Karras, Joel Kaye, and Ann Matter, eds., Law and the Illicit in Medieval Europe (Philadelphia, 2008), 17–32; Karl B. Shoemaker, Sanctuary and Crime in the Middle Ages: 400–1500 [Just Ideas: Transformative Ideals of Justice in Ethical and Political Thought] (New York, 2011). 45 I have not, however, found a consilium from which the latter part of the text might have been taken. I suspect that the first page, dealing with Old Testament law, might very well have been from Luther’s pen.

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texts supporting papal authority were submerged in other topics. Gratian must have appeared irenic and open-minded to the Reformers.46 Even more importantly, Gratian was a quarry from which hundreds of texts dating to the early Christian traditions could be taken. The Decretum was a rich source for anyone interested in returning to the practices of the early church.47 One could cite the Reformers’ works to justify those generalizations. When Melanchthon published a tract in which he examined the writings of various theologians’ interpretations of the Last Supper in 1530 he turned to a text of Augustine from the third part of Gratian’s Decretum, De consecratione.48 He took the text from Gratian because, as he wrote, many people had been misled by the way that Gratian had “stitched together” Augustine’s words from different works. What Melanchthon did not know was that Gratian had merely copied the text from earlier canonical collections. Nonetheless, it was Gratian’s version of Augustine that had become authoritative, and it was the one with which Melanchthon had to wrestle.49 The jurisprudence of marriage was particularly dependent on Roman canon law. An important tenet of Protestant canon law was to move the institution of marriage from its sacramental status in Roman jurisprudence to a civil status. “Marriage and all its institutions was a political matter. Nothing concerning marriage pertained to the Church, except problems of conscience.”50 In the period between the 1530s and 1560s Lutheran jurists worked on the foundations 46

It is certain that Luther burned Gratian’s Decretum; he mentioned the Decretum explicitly in a letter to Spalatin, December 10, 1520: omnes libri papae, Decretum, Decretales, Sext. Clement. Extravagant. See Sieghard Mülmann, “Luther und das Corpus iuris canonici bis zum Jahre 1530: Ein forschungsgeschichtlicher Überblick,” Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte, Kanonistische Abteilung, 58 (1972), 235–305, at 286. By Luther’s time no other book would have been referred to as simply “Decretum.” 47 Alberto Pincherle, “Graziano e Lutero,” in ****Studia Gratiana, III (Bologna, 1955), 451–481, who lists Luther’s citations of Gratian and the Decretals of Gregory IX and the Liber sextus in Quare papae ac discipulorum eius libri a Doctore Martino Luthero combussi sint (Wittenberg, 1520) at 467. Most recently, Eltjo Schrage, “Luther und das Kirchenrecht,” in Paola Maffei and Gian Maria Varanini, eds., Honos alit artes: Studi per il settantesimo compleanno di Mario Ascheri: La formazione del diritto comune: Giuristi e diritto in Europa (secoli XII–XVIII) [Reti Medievali, E-Book 19.1] (Florence, 2014), 407–416, at 410 lists the number of times Luther cited canon law; see also 414–415. 48 Phillip Melanchthon, “Sententiae veterum aliquot scriptorium de Coena Domini,” in Opera quae supersunt omnia, ed. Karl G. Bretscheider and Heinrich E. Bindseil [Corpus Reformatorum] (Braunschweig, 1855), CR 23, 733–752, at 744–747; De consecratione D.2 c.44. Gratian may not have been the compiler of De consecratione, but his authorship has not been definitively disproven. 49 Witte, Law and Protestantism, 3–5. 50 Anton Lauterbach, Tagebuch auf das Jahr 1538, die Hauptquelle der Tischreden Luther’s, ed. Johann Karl Seudemann (Dresden, 1872), 152: coniugium est res politica, cum omnibus suis circumstantiis nihil pertinent ad ecclesiam, nisi quantum est conscientiae casus. See also Witte, Law and Protestantism, 17–18.

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of a new ecclesiastical legal system, and marriage occupied a privileged position. Joachim von Beust was one of the most prominent Protestant jurists. He was born just after the Reformation began and belonged to a Saxon military family. In 1539 he began to study law in Leipzig and learned of Luther’s teachings. He sat in the classroom of Modestinus Pistoris, and followed in his teacher’s footsteps to the law schools of Italy – first Bologna and then Siena. Returning to Germany he was chosen by Duke Elector of Saxony Maurice to teach Roman law at the University of Wittenberg in 1552. Beust died in 1597. Beust has been called the founder of Saxon Protestant marriage law.51 His most important work, Tractatus de iure connubiorum et dotium, was printed several times in the sixteenth century.52 At the beginning of the Tractatus the printer listed the jurists and persons whom Beust cited in his work. The list of canonists ranged from Gratian to Diego de Covarrubias y Leyva, with many other canonists in between. He also cited Martin Luther and Philip Melanchthon and other Reformers. Beust’s purpose was to bring marriage jurisprudence of the past into congruence with the Reformers’ theology. At the beginning of his tract he cited Luther on clandestine marriages; he had defined such a marriage as being “outside the knowledge and consent of those who have power over the couple.” Even a thousand witnesses to the marriage could not bring it out of those shadows. Luther maintained that this bond could not be considered a marriage, and Beust agreed. He listed a number of canonists who supported this opinion, including Pope Innocent IV (†1250), Hostiensis († 1271), and Panormitanus († 1445).53 Public marriages were always preferred to private and clandestine ceremonies.54 However, if sexual intercourse happened after a clandestine marriage, then the clandestine marriage was given precedence, “contrary to canon law . . . which is not observed today in these lands.”55 51

For a good summary of Luther’s views on marriage see Witte, Law and Protestantism, 214–241. For a summary of what the Reformers accepted and rejected from Catholic canonical jurisprudence, ibid., 243–255. See also John Witte, Jr., “The Reformation of Marriage Law in Martin Luther’s Germany,” Journal of Law and Religion 4 (1986), 293–351; John Witte, Jr., From Sacrament to Contract (Louisville, 1997), 42–73; and Scott Hendrix, “Luther on Marriage,” Lutheran Quarterly 14 (2000), 335–350; Johan Buitendag, “Marriage in the Theology of Martin Luther – Worldly yet Sacred: An Option between Secularism and Clericalism,” Hervormde Teologiese Studies/Theological Studies 63 (2007), 445–461. 52 E.g., 1591, 1592, and 1597. 53 Joachim von Beust, Tractatus de iure connubiorum et dotium (Frankfurt am Main, 1591), fols. 10v–11r. 54 Ibid. fol. 11r–11v. 55 Ibid., fol. 11v: contra dispositionem iuris canonici, quod publica sponsalia praefert clandestinis, etiamsi in clandestinis copula intervenisset . . . hodie in his terris non observatur. See Witte, Law and Protestantism, 236–237, for a summary of the rather complicated development of Protestant jurisprudential thought on clandestine marriages.

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Konrad Mauser (†1548), a Protestant jurist who studied law in Wittenberg, distinguished between two types of clandestine marriage. The first was completely secret and without witnesses, and the second was secret, with witnesses, but without the consent of the parents.56 In the event of a dispute over the validity of a clandestine marriage, Protestant courts (consistorii) could judge cases in accordance with the ius commune, Mauser asserted, because neither Roman law nor canon law is contrary to the true faith.57 A judge should not render decisions with imagined equity or with his own presumptions because not only would that be dangerous but such decisions would be full of temerity and frivolity.58 Quoting Paulus de Castro († 1441), Mauser pleaded that equity should not trump the law. If the courts’ decisions were distorted by equity it would mean that all law could be abolished.59 Although Mauser found justification for his position in the jurisprudence of the ius commune, Paulus de Castro’s opinion on equity was more nuanced than Mauser understood or acknowledged.60 It was an important goal of Protestant marital jurisprudence to restore the authority of the parents to sanction the marriages of their children.61 Beust posed the question whether this authority extended to guardians (tutors) and trustees (curators). He cited Bartolomeo da Saliceto († 1411), who distinguished between tutors and curators. Tutors could prohibit their charges from marrying, but a person subject to a curator could freely marry without the curator’s consent. A tutor has authority over persons, but a curator has

56

Konrad Mauser, Explicatio erudita et utilis x. tituli instit. De nuptiis, dictate olim publice a clarissimo et doctissimo iurisconsulto L. Cunrado Mausero Noribergensi (Wittenberg, 1569), 12. 57 Ibid., 11: Nos recitabimus iura usitata, tam civilia quam canonica, quae neutiquam pugnant cum nostra vera religione, unde secundum ea in consistoriis debet pronunciari. On the Protestant consistories see Ralf Frassek, “Konsistorium,” in Handwörterbuch zur deutschen Rechtsgeschichte, 2nd ed. (Berlin, 2013), III, 121–126; and Schmoeckel, Das Recht der Reformation, 161–163. On Johann Oldendorp’s theory of equity see Witte, Law and Protestantism, 164–168. 58 Mauser, De nuptiis, 11: Nam ex ficta aequitate et capite suo velle pronunciari, non solum esset periculosum, sed etiam temerarium et levitatis plenissimum. 59 Ibid., 11–12: Nec debemus capite nostro, propter aequitatem, quam esse putamus, a iure scripto recedere. Quia sic omnes leges possunt aboleri, propter praesumtuosos et temerarios, asserentes contrarium, et non tenentes iura scripta, propter aequitatem capitis sui, dicentes non curamus de vestris legibus et subtilitatibus. See Paulus de Castro, Lecture super Codice (Venice, 1487) to Cod. 3.1.8, fol. 123vb. 60 E.g., Paulus de Castro, Commentaria ad Digestum vetus in secundum partem (Venice, 1596), fol. 59ra: Aequitas non est consideranda mere secundum ius gentium, sed mixtim, habito respectu ad praecepta civilia et praetoria. On equity in canon law see Peter Landau, “Aequitas in the Corpus iuris canonici,” Syracuse Journal of International Law and Commerce 20 (1994), 95–104, at 103–104. Witte, Law and Protestantism, 165 n.213, cites further literature. 61 Protestant jurists generally did not distinguish between betrothal and marriage as clearly as did the Catholic canonical tradition: see Witte, Law and Protestantism, 237.

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power only over property.62 Beust delved into this issue even more deeply. What if a young woman married without her tutor’s consent, but when she was on the brink of puberty? Citing Accursius and Baldus de Ubaldis († 1400), Beust argued that if the paterfamilias could not prevent his daughter from marrying under those circumstances, neither could the tutor. Consequently, continued Beust, if a city promulgated a statute that an adolescent boy or girl could not marry without the consent of a tutor, the statute was without doubt invalid because it violated the freedom of marriage. Beust confirmed his opinion by citing Panormitanus and Felinus Maria Sandeus († 1503), two of the most prominent fifteenth-century canonists. He ended his discussion by noting that those jurists who cited Luther to defend the idea that a tutor’s consent was required misunderstood Luther. He had written of parents not of tutors in his treatise on marriage.63 Beust posed a final question: could a tutor marry his charge? He observed that the Roman-law jurists forbade this kind of union but that the canonists permitted it. Sandeus and Bartolomeo da Saliceto accepted the canonistic tradition. Konrad Mauser followed the canonists. He declared that since neither Roman law nor Catholic canon law differed from Protestant law, Protestant courts (consistorii) should follow the ius commune.64 Beust tacitly followed the joined Catholic and Protestant tradition.65 Mauser pointed out that Saxon law recognized the husband as the tutor of his wife.66 The jurisprudence of the ius commune did not grant the husband tutorial authority, but in this case Protestant legislation trumped it. Beust explored the legal status of a spouse who abandoned the marriage bed. The plaintiff had two options: to pursue a separation; or to petition for cohabitation in court.67 If the parties lived in the same community and one party petitioned for reconciliation and cohabitation, the recalcitrant party could be imprisoned, forced, and compelled by a “new” Saxon ecclesiastical ordinance of 1580.68 Beust also observed that the spouse who deserted and

62

63 Beust, Tractatus de iure connubiorum et dotium, fol. 14v. Ibid., fol. 15r. Mauser, De nuptiis, 11: Nos recitabimus iura usitata, tam civilia quam canonica, quae neutiquam pugnant cum nostra vera religion, unde secundum ea in Consistoriis debet pronunciari. 65 Beust, Tractatus de iure connubiorum et dotium, fol. 15r. 66 Melchior Klingen von Steinheim an der Strassen, Das gantze Sechsisch Landrecht mitt ex und Gloss (Leipzig, 1577), fol. 94r–94v. 67 Beust, Tractatus de iure connubiorum et dotium, fol. 39r–39v. See Paul Hinschius, “Beiträge zur Geschichte des Desertionsprocesses nach evangelischem Kirchenrecht,” Deutsche Zeitschrift für Kirchenrecht 2 (1862), 1–38. 68 For the statute see Die evangelischen Kirchenordnungen des sechszehnten Jahrhunderts: Urkunden und Regesten, ed. Emil Ludwig Richter, 2 vols. (Weimar, 1846), II, 480. 64

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remained in the community showed greater contempt for the magistrate than one who sought refuge in distant lands. Willful and malicious desertion (malitiosa desertio) provided grounds for divorce. Adultery was also grounds for divorce. Other reasons were debatable, and Beust listed them in his commentary. If a husband severely beat his wife and could not be restrained, some jurists thought that his brutal behavior could be grounds for divorce. In the end Beust noted that the judgment should be left to the “political magistrate” because rarely or never are desertions without fornication.69 In his analysis of desertion he noted that Panormitanus and Luther agreed that an absent deserter and a deserter who remained in the community had the same legal status.70 Catholic and Protestant jurisprudence were in congruence when the jurists treated adultery on the part of a wife. Beust argued that a husband could bring a civil suit against his adulterous wife, but a wife could not bring a criminal suit against her husband because the adultery of a wife is a greater danger to her husband than a husband’s adultery is to his wife. She could bear him children who were not his own. To support his conclusions he cited Panormitanus, Johannes Andreae († 1348), Cinus de Pistoia († 1336), Henricus Bohicus († ca. 1350), and Marianus Socinus Senior († 1467). Beust did mention that a statute of Emperor Charles V now permitted a wife to accuse her husband criminally.71 On the question of whether an adulterous party could accuse the other spouse of adultery either criminally or civilly, Beust relied entirely on Catholic jurisprudence.72 If the husband prostituted his wife, he could not accuse her of a crime, as had been established by a decretal of Pope Innocent III.73 If, having learned from good evidence, the wife believed her husband to be dead and had the permission of the church to remarry, she could not be pursued in court. To substantiate his opinion Beust cited Gratian’s Decretum and a decretal of Pope Lucius III.74 In his discussion of adultery, Beust created a scenario taken from the pages of Boccaccio in which a woman goes to bed in the dark with a man whom she believes to be her husband.75 The hypothetical case was not far-fetched, Beust wrote, because this had happened recently to a woman named Friberga. He also referred to an early medieval conciliar text in Gratian’s

69 71 74 75

70 Beust, Tractatus de iure connubiorum et dotium, fol. 68v. Ibid., fol. 39v. 72 73 Ibid., fol. 61r. Ibid., 61r–61v. Decretals of Gregory IX 4.13.6. Gratian, Decretum C.34 q.1–2 c.1 and Decretals of Gregory IX 4.21.2. Giovanni Boccaccio, Decameron, Day 3, Story 6 and Day 9, Story 6.

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Decretum in which a man slept with his wife’s sister and was judged guiltless.76 More generally, Beust noted that the canonists thought that according to common law (ius vulgare) if a wife committed adultery and the husband knew about it, but he continued to live with her, the canonists considered the continuation of the relationship to be valid and legitimate. A knottier question was whether a husband could leave his wife who had been caught in flagrant and public adultery without a trial and on his own authority. Beust referred his readers to a French jurist, François Marc, who was a participant in and a scrupulous recorder of many cases heard in the Parlement of Dauphiné in Grenoble between around 1486 and 1515.77 In a long discussion Marc decided that a husband cannot leave without a trial, but must have a judicial decision. Beust thought his argument posed and resolved “many beautiful questions.” Beust concluded his discussion with the comment: “Otherwise, whether and when a husband may kill his adulterous wife with impunity or her partner caught [in] adultery, see the comments of Diego Covarrubias (in his Epitome on the marriage book of the papal decretals).” Covarrubias offered a stiff defense of a husband’s right to kill an adulterous wife and her lover if he caught them in flagrante delicto.78 Beust thought Covarrubias came to the correct conclusion. As this brief survey has shown, medieval papal canon law and jurisprudence not only lived on in Protestant canon law, it flourished.79 Protestant jurists such as Beust found much that they could use and admire in Catholic law books. There were many legal issues and problems that were universal and did not impinge on theological differences. Consequently, they found Catholic jurisprudence congenial in spite of confessional differences. The Reformers’ ideas and conceptions about law, jurisprudence, and legal systems were not balkanized as they are in the mindsets of modern jurists whose visions of law are constricted by legal positivism. The Reformed jurists thought that good law could be found in many places and in many legal systems. Every jurist believed that reason was the foundation of law, 76

Beust, Tractatus de iure connubiorum et dotium, fol. 61v; Gratian, Decretum C.34 q.1–2 c.6, Council of Tribur (895), c. 43. François Marc, Decisionum aurearum in sacro delphinatus senatu iampridem discussarum ac promulgatarum Pars prima (Lyon, 1562), fols. 185r–189v. The case concerned Claudia Pachodi, who left Phillipus Albi after he had slept with a servant, beaten Claudia, and wasted her dowry (fol. 189vb). 78 Didacus de Covarrubias y Leyva, Quartum decretalium librum Epitome (Lyon, 1558), Pars secunda, cap. 7, § 7–17, fols. 141a–145vb. 79 As Johannes Heckel observed in an essay over fifty years ago: see “Das Decretum Gratiani und das deutsche evangelischem Kirchenrecht,” in Studia Gratiana, III (Bologna, 1955), 482–537, passim. 77

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and when the Reformers found reason in the canon law of the past (Gratian) or the present (Covarrubias) they embraced it.80 This, however, did not mean that Catholic jurists reciprocated. Covarrubias was a conservative who, for example, was not kind to Martin Luther when he discussed his theory of excommunication.81 The confessional divide did affect the teaching of law in the universities. After Luther’s dramatic confrontation with the books of Roman canon law in Wittenberg, there was a significant decline in the canon law taught at Wittenberg University. Even later, it seems, Luther harbored anger and resentment against jurists. The Elector of Saxony, Johann Friedrich I, promulgated a rescript in 1544 addressed to Melanchthon, Johannes Bugenhagen († 1558), and Gregor Brück († 1557) in which he commanded the three men to dissuade Luther from composing a polemical tract against jurists.82 We do not have much information about the reasons for Luther’s animus. It is puzzling since parts of Roman canon law had been taught at German universities since the Reformation began, even if its role was not as central to the curriculum as it had been before. Although lectures in canon law were established with the restoration of the University of Wittenberg by a statute in 1536, Melchior Kling (1504–1571) had already been teaching the subject.83 In 1534 he had taught procedural titles of Boniface VIII’s Liber sextus at Wittenberg, and by 1536 he was elevated to ordinary professor. He received a stipend of 50 guilders for his efforts.84 He also wrote on the procedural titles of the Decretales of Gregory IX.85 It is clear that by focusing on procedure, which had little theological content, Kling could avoid the problems that might arise from teaching papal law. The rules and norms of procedure as they had evolved in the ius commune had become pervasive in European ecclesiastical and secular courts and were accepted without question by Catholic and Protestant jurists.86 80

I would differ from Heckel’s conclusion that the Reformers’ adherence to Roman canonical jurisprudence was due only to the “unveränderte Zugehörigkeit der evangelischen Gemeinden zur ecclesia universalis”: “Decretum Gratiani,” 536–537. I would rather see their use of Catholic jurisprudence as an adherence to the principles of ius bonum. 81 Covarrubias y Leyva, Quartum decretalium, fol. 406v and fol. 432r. 82 Ibid., fol. 547; see Joel F. Harrington, Reordering Marriage and Society in Reformation Germany (Cambridge, 1995), 149–151, including a misunderstanding of the ius commune that is common among Reformation scholars. 83 Schmoeckel, Das Recht der Reformation, 71–72, 87–88. 84 Melchioris Kling, Super secundum Sexti decretalium . . . lectura (Frankfurt, 1562). 85 Melchioris Kling, In praecipuos secundi libri decretalium titulos (Lyon, 1551). 86 Hans Liermann, “Das kanonische Recht als Gegenstand des gelehrten Unterrichts an den protestantischen Universitäten Deutschlands in den ersten Jahrhunderten nach der

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Kling taught a wide range of subjects at Wittenberg. Like most late medieval and early modern jurists who taught the ius commune, he had to have more than one arrow in his quiver. He taught and wrote tracts on Roman and feudal law.87 He extended his interests to Germanic law. After moving to Halle, he used Christoph Zobel’s (1499–1560) work on the Sachenspiegel to produce a volume on Saxon law.88 In his tract on marriage, Kling focused on the same Reform issues that Beust would deal with later: consent of parents, adultery, and desertion. He noted that Roman law demanded the consent of the parents, but canon law did not. In canon law, parental consent was not a matter of necessity but of honesty. In his own times, Kling lamented, a great argument erupted between the theologians and the canonists. Theologians favored Roman law; the canonists ius canonicum. The two camps did agree that children behave badly if they marry without parental consent. They differed on their legal status if the marriage had been consummated.89 Kling devoted many pages of his treatise to distinguishing between the Roman law and the Roman canon law of adultery.90 He also ultimately, after much dialectical argumentation, conceded that a second marriage was valid even if a former spouse still lived.91 Malicious desertion was a problem that created many problems in marital jurisprudence, but even the canonists accepted it as grounds for a second marriage.92 Other German universities followed in the curricular footsteps of Wittenberg, though some did not provide for the teaching of canon law. When Marburg was established in 1529 and Königsberg in 1544, the founders did not establish a chair in canon law. In other universities the professor of canon law occupied a prominent position. At the University of Leipzig the professor of canon law was given a prebend in the evangelical churches of Nauburg and Merseburg. One of the most famous canonists at Leipzig was the renowned Benedict Carpzov the Younger (1595–1666), whose works on

Reformation,” in Studia Gratiana, III (Bologna, 1955), 541–566, at 551; and Hans Liermann, “Das kanonische Recht als Grundlage europäischen Rechtsdenkens,” Zeitschrift für evangelisches Kirchenrecht 6 (1957), 37–51. 87 Melchior Kling, In feudorum usus seu consuetudines brevis et erudite commentatio (Frankfurt, 1563); Melchior Kling, Institutionum iuris principis Iustiniani libros enarrationes (Lyon, 1546). 88 Melchior Kling, Das gantze Sechsisch Landrecht mit Text und Gloss in eine richtige Ordnung gebracht durch Doctor Melchior Klingen (Frankfurt, 1600). 89 Melchior Kling, Matrimonialium causarum tractatus (Frankfurt, 1553), fols. 33v–34v. 90 91 Ibid., fol. 39r–39v and passim. Ibid., fols. 43v–44r. 92 Ibid., fol. 43r. For an overview of the Protestant reform of marriage law see Witte, Law and Protestantism, 232–255.

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procedure circulated throughout Protestant and Catholic lands.93 As we have seen, the jurisprudence of procedure was a special focus of all the jurists teaching in Protestant universities. Tübingen and Heidelberg established chairs that were centered on the teaching of procedure. Procedure was also central at the universities in Greifswald and Rostock. In Rostock, however, the statutes of 1564 stipulated that there would be five professors of Roman law, one for feudal law, and one to teach the Regulae iuris. No provisions were made for a professor of canon law.94 In the next two centuries the teaching of canon law almost, with a few exceptions, disappeared from the Protestant universities.95 In European lands that did not yet have universities, or where Protestant enclaves were embedded in Catholic kingdoms, the relationship between the old jurisprudence and the new is difficult to untangle. Cities, synods, and individuals established norms or ordinances to guide Reformed communities mainly through ordinances and the decisions of the courts (consistories).96 Without respected jurists to unite legislation and court decisions with a jurisprudence that replicated the literature of the ius commune, disparate legislative decrees and court decisions remained without a uniform jurisprudence.97 In 1541 Geneva promulgated ordinances for the Reformed congregations. “Intolerable” crimes were listed in them: heresy, schism, rebellion against ecclesiastical order, simony, forgery, perjury, usury, and dancing. The ordinance added a number of lesser crimes such as interpreting the Scriptures bizarrely, negligence in performing the duties of office, and using language that injured others.98 Except for dancing these crimes had also been staples

93

Liermann, “Das kanonische Recht als Gegenstand,” 548–550; Günter Jerouschek, ed., Benedict Carpzov: Neue Perspektiven zu eninem umstrittenen sächischen Juristen [Rothenburger Gespräche zur Strafrechtsgeschichte 2], (Tübingen, 2000). 94 Liermann, “Das kanonische Recht als Gegenstand,” 550–553. 95 Ibid., 556–566. For the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries see the important essay by Udo Wolter, “Die Fortgeltung des kanonischen Rechts.” 96 The best source for these texts remains Richter’s Die evangelischen Kirchenordnungen, and more recently Schmoeckel, Das Recht der Reformation, 163–165, 217–218, 232–237. For an interesting statistical analysis of the legal problems the consistories handled see Philip Benedict, Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed: A Social History of Calvinism (New Haven and London, 2002), 460–489. 97 John Witte, Jr. and Robert M. Kingdon, Sex, Marriage, and Family in John Calvin’s Geneva, volume I: Courtship, Engagement and Marriage [Religion, Marriage, and Family] (Grand Rapids and Cambridge, 2005), 419–431 and passim. It is important to remember that the collections of decretals were primarily reports of appellate decisions rendered at the Roman Curia. 98 “Les Ordonnances ecclesiastiques de l’Église de Geneve,” in ibid., 344. On Calvin, his legal education, and his works see Benedict, Christ’s Churches, 77–114; and William J. Bouwsma, John Calvin: A Sixteenth-Century Portrait (Oxford, 1987), 10–24.

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of the medieval ius commune. However, with statutes it is difficult to trace the inspiration of any text. Nonetheless, some ecclesiastical structures and institutions can be easily identified as borrowings from the medieval church. For example, the Geneva ordinances provided an outline for how a visitation to a congregation should be conducted that imitated medieval visitations.99 In 1546 John Calvin (1509–1564) finally pushed through an ordinance that outlined the norms for marriage for Geneva.100 The consistories in Geneva applied the norms of the ordinance relatively uniformly.101 At times Calvin’s opinions and the decisions of the consistories led to perplexing and contradictory decisions that differed from the established norms of the ius commune. An interesting case in point is the marriage of elderly men and young women. Roman canon law had no difficulty sanctioning May–December marriages, but Calvin harbored an unexplained antipathy toward them. The courts had difficulty rendering uniform decisions in those cases.102 It will not be a surprise that the norms for court procedure in the consistories closely followed the norms of the ius commune. If a plaintiff brought a case to the consistory, the ordinance dictated the wording of an oath that must be sworn. It is modeled on the oath of calumny that was necessary to begin proceedings in ecclesiastical and secular courts.103 The Geneva ordinances also dealt with discipline of clergy, sacraments, burials, liturgy, and, especially, the regulations for marriage.104 The same marital issues that occupied the Reformed jurists appeared in the ordinance: permission of the parents, authority of tutors and curators, implications of adultery, and desertion by a spouse.105 The English Church was the most Roman. The geographical map of the church remained virtually the same, even though five new dioceses were established: Bristol, Oxford, Chester, Peterborough, and Gloucester. Their juridical structure, however, was very much the same as the pre-Reformation dioceses.106 The most significant change in the structure of the church was in the way in which 99

Witte and Kingdon, Sex, Marriage, and Family, 344–345. 101 Ibid., 40–48; translation of ordinance, 51–61. Ibid., 131–139, 174–182, 228–238, 272–282. 102 Ibid., 278–280, 284. 103 Ibid., 345. On the oaths taken during the legal process see Antonia Fiori, Il giuramento di innocenza nel processo canonico medievale: Storia e disciplina della “purgatio canonica” [Studien zur europäische Rechtsgeschichte 277] (Frankurt am Main, 2013); and Tiziana Ferreri, Ricerche sul crimen calumniae nella dottrina dei glossatori: Da Irnerio ad Azzone e da Graziano a Uguccione da Pisa [Archivio per la storia del diritto medioevale e moderno 15] (Noceto, 2010). 104 On marriage see Witte and Klingdon, Sex, Marriage, and Family, 347–350. 105 E.g., Witte, Law and Protestantism, 238, 248, 250–251. 106 Helmholz, “Canon Law,” 204–206. I am dependent on Helmholz’s works for much of what follows. 100

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appeals were handled. King Henry VIII had forbidden appeals to Rome. During his reign a new appellate court was created, the Court of Delegates, to hear all appeals from ecclesiastical courts. A new and different set of jurists was delegated to hear each case that was appealed from diocesan tribunals. These judges were chosen from common law lawyers and civil law jurists, that is, those jurists who had been educated at the university law schools in Roman law. A statute of Queen Elizabeth I in 1559 created a second court, the Court of High Commission. This court was governed by the rules and norms of the ius commune’s ordo iudiciarius. Its primary function was to deal with the crime of dissent within the church. In the early years of the English Reformation a commission was formed to draft a code of ecclesiastical norms.107 A similar attempt had been made in Germany under the leadership of Johannes Bugenhagen in 1522.108 Both attempts at codification failed and were never accepted as official. The English project was published under the title Reformatio legum ecclesiasticarum later in the sixteenth century.109 Although it was a failed attempt at codification, its organization can reveal the mindset of the English Reformers. The commissioners created a text that has many similarities to a modern code. They eschewed quoting texts from the ius commune, except for the last title, De regulis iuris. These rules of law were taken primarily from Roman law with a scattering of canonistic texts. Rules 1 and 4 were two of the most famous of the maxims created by the medieval canonists: Quod non est licitum in lege, necessitas facit licitum (Necessitas legem non habet) and Quod omnes tangit debet ab omnibus approbari.110 Although the beginning and end of the Reformatio imitated Roman and canon law collections,111 the topics in between departed completely from the organization of the libri legales of the ius commune.112 The last third of the Reformatio dealt with procedure. It is here that we find unambiguous evidence of the commissioners’ debt to the ius commune. Trials were divided into ordinary and extraordinary proceedings. Decisions were rendered in ordinary trials by “proofs that were more 107

Ibid., 206–207. Schmoeckel, Das Recht der Reformation, 6; see Annaliese Sprengler-Ruppenthal, Gesammelte Aufsätze: Zu den Kirchenordnungen des 16. Jahrhunderts [Jus ecclesiasticum 74] (Tübingen, 2004) for several essays on the subject. 109 Reformatio legum ecclesiasticarum ex authoritate primum regis Henrici 8. inchoata, deinde per regem Edouardum 6 provecta (London, 1571; London, 1640). I will cite the 1640 edition. 110 Decretals of Gregory IX 5.41.4; Liber Sextus 5.[13].29. 111 The Reformatio began with the title “De summa trinitate” which is also the first title of Justinian’s Codex, Pope Gregory IX’s Decretales, and Pope Boniface VIII’s Liber sextus. The Reformatio’s last title, “De regulis iuris,” was also the last title of Justinian’s Digest and the Decretales as well as the Liber sextus. 112 Hoeflich and Grabher, “The Establishment of Normative Legal Texts,” 9–20. 108

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clear than day.”113 In proceedings using extraordinary procedure – that is, summary procedure – the court could render a judgment de plano, et sine strepitu et sine forma, et figura iudiciis. The wording was taken directly out of Pope Clement V’s decretal Saepe contingit, which was included in the papal decretal collection the Clementines, when it was promulgated in 1317.114 The commissioners also accepted the argument of the jurists of the ius commune that court proceedings were established by natural law. Therefore, the key elements of court procedure could not be omitted.115 In the remaining chapters, which laid down the norms of procedure, the principles and language were taken directly out of the procedural texts of the ius commune. The fate of canon law in the English universities was quite different from what occurred on the Continent. From the beginning, the teaching of Roman canon law was completely suppressed. This led to an expansion of Roman law’s importance in the curriculum. By the end of the seventeenth century a significant cadre of jurists’ teaching on Roman law had been entrenched at Oxford and Cambridge.116 Richard Helmholz has raised the question of how, since Roman canonical jurisprudence was used and cited in England for the next two centuries, did jurists learn what they needed to know? He thought that he could not provide a definitive answer to his question. However, he made the point that the jurisprudence of the ius commune was so entangled that “Knowledge of Roman law in the sixteenth century led, almost inevitably, to knowledge of canon law. . . . The two laws were so interdependent by 1600 that they could scarcely be pulled apart.” Helmholz’s last sentence was a translation taken from the canonist Petrus Rebuffus (Pierre Rebuffi, 1487–1557), who had the same insight.117 There is no question that Helmholz’s tentative answer is the major factor for the extensive use of Roman canon law in English and continental Reformation sources. As Helmholz has illustrated in detail, the procedure of ecclesiastical courts in England 113 Reformatio, 180: probationes fuerint ipsa luce clariores, which was borrowed from the standard language of the jurists: see, e.g., Giuseppe Mascardi, Conclusiones probationum, 4 vols. (Frankfurt am Main, 1661), I, 26: nisi per probationes meridiana luce clariores probarent. 114 Clem. 5.11.2 in Clementis papae V constitutiones, Decretales Gregorii noni, ed. in Friedberg, II, col. 1200. 115 Reformatio, 181: Processus absque forma et figura iudiciis tunc sit quando ea tantum quae sunt iuris naturalis in processor conservantur, et citatio legitimarum personarum, qua mandatum exhibeant . . . petitio, defensio, et alia huiusmodi. See Kenneth Pennington, “Innocent Until Proven Guilty: The Origins of a Legal Maxim,” The Jurist 63 (2003), 106–124. 116 Helmholz, “Canon Law,” 207–208; Brian P. Levack, The Civil Lawyers in England 1603–1641: A Political Study (Oxford, 1973). 117 Richard H. Helmholz, Roman Canon Law in Reformation England [Cambridge Studies in English Legal History] (Cambridge, 1990), 149–154, at 151 n.103.

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remained virtually unchanged by the Reformation. English jurists such as Francis Clerke adopted the rules of the ordo iudiciarius of the ius commune in an influential treatise on procedure that he wrote around 1590.118 Readers of this chapter may conclude at this point that there was much continuity between the law of pre-Reformation and the post-Reformation churches in Protestant lands. If one focuses solely on the institutions of law, the courts, and jurisprudence, one can make a good argument for continuity. However, continuity is only one part of the story. As the titles of Berman’s and Schmoeckel’s books remind us, revolution and schism are major elements of a story in which conflict and rejection of past norms play a major role. bibliography Berman, Harold. Law and Revolution, volume II: The Impact of the Protestant Reformations on the Western Legal Tradition. Cambridge, 2003. Dickerhof-Borello, Elisabeth. Ein Liber Septimus für das Corpus iuris canonici: Der Versuch einer Nachtridentinischen Kompilation [Forschungen zur kirchlichen Rechtsgeschichte und zum Kirchenrecht 27] Cologne, Weimar, and Vienna, 2002. Harrington, Joel F. Reordering Marriage and Society in Reformation Germany. Cambridge, 1995. Hartmann, Wilfried and Kenneth Pennington, eds. The History of Courts and Procedure in Medieval Canon Law [History of Medieval Canon Law] Washington, 2016. Helmholz, Richard H. “Canon Law in Post-Reformation England.” In Richard H. Helmholz, ed., Canon Law in Protestant Lands. Berlin, 1992, 203–221. Roman Canon Law in Reformation England [Cambridge Studies in English Legal History] Cambridge, 1990. Levack, Brian P. The Civil Lawyers in England 1603–1641: A Political Study. Oxford, 1973. Schmoeckel, Mathias. Das Recht der Reformation: Die epistemologische Revolution der Wissenschaft und die Spaltung des Rechtsordnung in der Frühen Neuzeit. Tübingen, 2014. Witte, John, Jr. Law and Protestantism: The Legal Teachings of the Lutheran Reformation. Cambridge, 2002 Witte, John, Jr. and Robert M. Kingdon, Sex, Marriage, and Family in John Calvin’s Geneva, volume I: Courtship, Engagement and Marriage [Religion, Marriage, and Family]. Grand Rapids and Cambridge, 2005.

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Ibid., 121–144; and Helmholz, “Canon Law,” 211–212. Helmholz has noted that a manuscript copy of Clerke’s treatise at the Catholic University of America, Washington, MS 180, was annotated with many citations of the ius commune in the margins: see Richard Helmholz, “The Privilege and the Ius Commune: The Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century,” in The Privilege against Self-Incrimination: Its Origins and Development (Chicago, 1997), 17–46, at 39 n. 118. Cf. Helmholz, “Canon Law,” 255–256.

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Spirituality in the Reformation Era (1500–1675) bernard mcginn Introduction: Terminology I have chosen “spirituality” to characterize this chapter, because in recent decades the word has become the designation for the investigation of the lived experience of Christian faith. Spirituality is rooted in the New Testament texts that speak about living in “the Spirit of Jesus.” The noun occurs in roughly the modern sense as early as around 400 CE,1 and was widely used in the Middle Ages.2 Spiritualitas was employed by Catholic authors in the Reformation era. Protestants knew the term, but shied away from it, preferring to speak of piety and active faith. “Spirituality” covers both the active life devoted to the love of one’s neighbor and the contemplative life dedicated to love of God and the forms of prayer leading to union with him, what was sometimes called the life of perfection. Interacting with these categories were two Greek terms taken over by Christians in the early centuries CE: askêsis (literally, “training”), comprising the practices of selfdiscipline, or asceticism, designed to purify the soul; and theôria (speculatio/ contemplatio) aimed at seeing God (Matt. 5:3). The contemplative life more or less corresponds to what we call mysticism today. Although the adjective mystikos (“hidden”) occurs often in patristic and medieval Christianity to describe the deep meaning of the Bible, of Christian rituals, and even of theology (theologia mystica), mysticism is a modern word, first found in seventeenth-century France (la mystique). Spirituality, or spiritual theology

1 On spirituality see Elizabeth A. Dreyer and Mark S. Burrows, eds., Minding the Spirit: The Study of Christian Spirituality (Baltimore and London, 2005). 2 Thomas Aquinas uses spiritualitas over seventy times, both in the original sense of a life lived under the direction of the Holy Spirit and in the new philosophical sense of what pertains to soul as contrasted to the body. The confusion of these two meanings led to problems in later centuries when Christian spirituality came to be seen as having nothing to do with the external aspects of believers’ lives.

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(another modern term), covers what Catholics used to call ascetical and mystical theology.

Spirituality in General The late Middle Ages and the sixteenth century have been called the “Age of Reform”;3 but reform – that is, the effort to bring about a return to a way of life closer to the witness of Christ and the Apostles – has always been a feature of Christianity. There were a number of reform movements of the late Middle Ages that remained influential in the sixteenth century: personal reform; reform of religious orders; and general reform of the church “in both head and members.” The foremost example of a movement aiming at personal moral reform was the devotio moderna, a multi-faceted attempt beginning in the late fourteenth century to return to the simple life of the early church, one that appealed to women and men, clergy and laity. Lay and clerical communities of the devotio moderna flourished in northern Europe through the fifteenth century, but died out in the first half of the sixteenth. Reform of the religious orders, the mainstay of much medieval spirituality, was more long-lasting. After experiencing decay during the fourteenth century, the fifteenth saw a proliferation of “Observantine reforms” that sought to return religious orders to a more strict observance of their initial rules. The Franciscans, Dominicans, Carmelites, and Benedictines all experienced such reform initiatives, movements that brought new life to the orders. The most significant reform was the desire for “the reform of the church in head and members.” This concern was widespread in the early sixteenth century, both among those who stayed with the pope and those who broke away. It is important to note that Luther and his followers did not think of themselves as “Protestants” (a term first used for the rulers who defended Luther in 1529), nor did they even usually call themselves “Reformers.”4 Luther and the others who broke with Rome identified themselves as “Evangelicals,” true followers of the Gospel that had been neglected, even forgotten, by the adherents of the papacy. Luther did not set out to found a Steven E. Ozment, The Age of Reform 1250–1550: An Intellectual and Religious History of Late Medieval and Reformation Europe (New Haven, 1980). 4 Sixteenth-century Catholic polemicists were the first to use widely the term “Protestants.” Evangelical churches did not employ it, or even the term “Reformation,” much before the eighteenth century: see Gerald Strauss, “Ideas of Reformatio and Renovatio from the Middle Ages to the Reformation,” in Thomas A. Brady et al., eds., Handbook of European History, 1400–1600: Late Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Reformation. Visions, Programs, and Outcomes, 2 vols. (Grand Rapids, 1996), II, 1–30. 3

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new kind of Christianity. It was only after he became convinced that the papacy and its supporters were radically opposed to evangelical faith that he decided it was necessary to break with Rome – not to try to reform it. Many of Luther’s Catholic opponents were also convinced that reform in head and members was needed for the good of the church, but they disagreed with him about how much reform was needed and how the reforms were to be achieved. After considerable resistance on the part of the papacy, Paul III finally summoned a general council to meet at Trent in northern Italy. The council pursued its contentious course over three widely spaced periods from 1545 to 1563. It did not really try to negotiate with the Protestants, but clarified Catholic doctrine against Protestant teaching, as well as issuing a number of reform decrees on church governance and Christian living. For the most part Trent defended the spiritual practices that the Reformers attacked. Reform of the head was left up to the head, and, although some progress was made, many of the financial and moral abuses of the papacy that the Protestants had decried continued. Despite the divisions that sundered the Christian world in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Catholics and Protestants continued to practice many similar religious exercises: striving to overcome sin, succoring their neighbors in active love, and cultivating the love of God.5 The Reformers emphasized that only divine grace, not good works, is responsible for salvation; but none of the masters of the Reformation abandoned the goal of the sanctification of the believer. Luther’s teaching on justification by faith had the salutary effect of reminding Christians that not only their justification but also their sanctification is God’s work, not the product of their own efforts. Thus, the “piety” preached by the Reformers and the “devout life” of Catholics were different, but often overlapping, ways of characterizing the actions of Christians who observed the commandments, practiced forms of asceticism (e.g., fasting and alms giving), prayed, listened to sermons, attended services of worship, and received the sacraments (though Catholics and Protestants had differing views of their number and constitution). Both Catholic and Protestant leaders sought a deeper evangelization of their flocks. There were, of course, notable differences between Catholic and Protestant spiritualities. Protestants abandoned many aspects of medieval 5 On spirituality of the Reformers see Frank C. Senn, ed., Protestant Spiritual Traditions (New York, 1986). For a collection of texts see Scott Hendrix, Early Protestant Spirituality (New York, 2009).

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piety that remained vital for Catholics, such as the cult of the saints, pilgrimages, and the importance of religious images. The Reformers also jettisoned the concept of special forms of religious life living according to recognized rules – the world of monastic, mendicant, and other forms of religio that were so important in medieval Christianity and whose impact grew, if anything, greater in early modern Catholicism. Protestants gave more weight to some practices than was typical for most Catholics, especially universal access to, and reading of, the Bible. Although Luther kept the practice of confessing one’s sins, it was demoted from sacramental status, and was thus different from Catholicism where reception of the sacrament of penance became more and more central to how the Catholic clergy formed the spirituality of their flock. An essential new development for both Catholic and Protestant spirituality was the invention of the printing press. Religious literature was omnipresent in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The success of the Protestant reform had much to do with the efforts of the Reformers to spread their message in print, from Luther’s German translation of the Bible and catechisms to numerous works of theology and polemics. Catholics also made use of the new medium, publishing catechisms, works of devotion, and spiritual writings. Printing gave wide dissemination to spiritual classics. Some, such as The Imitation of Christ (ca. 1425), were used by both Catholics and Protestants; others were more confessional in their readership, such as Lorenzo Scupoli’s Spiritual Combat (1589) and Francis de Sales’s Introduction to the Devout Life (1609) among Catholics; and Johann Arndt’s True Christianity (1606–1610) and John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) among Protestants. In the realm of practices of piety and devotion, new forms and developments emerged in both Catholicism and Protestantism. In Catholicism the creation of systematic forms of meditation and the practice of examination of conscience were designed to lead to a decisive election in favor of Christ, as best expressed in the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola. Meditation and spiritual election became techniques capable of being studied, mastered, and replicated.6 The pastoral initiatives of the Council of Trent were also important.7 Trent reaffirmed indulgences, relics, and the existence of purgatory; it gave new emphasis to the sacrament of penance and reformed the clerical 6

Surveys of early modern Catholicism that provide summaries of the spirituality of the era include Henry Outram Evennett, The Spirit of the Counter-Reformation (Cambridge, 1968); Jean Delumeau, Catholicism between Luther and Voltaire, trans. Jeremy Moiser (Philadelphia, 1977); and Robert Bireley, The Refashioning of Catholicism, 1450–1700 (Washington, 1999). 7 John W. O’Malley, Trent: What Happened at the Council (Cambridge, MA, 2013).

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life, especially by decreeing the establishment of seminaries for training priests. Trent also stressed the importance of preaching, strengthened the authority of bishops, and insisted that they should be resident in their sees. The council issued a number of regulations about the religious life, including the strict claustration of vowed religious women. Tridentine Catholicism was a confessionalization process begun at the council and implemented by the popes of the late sixteenth century, one that produced a new sense of Catholic identity that took the offensive against Protestantism: the CounterReformation. Among the most important developments in Reformed Christianity was the effort to involve all believers in the life of the community. Luther’s teaching on the priesthood of all believers and the translation of the Bible and the liturgy into the vernacular opened up a myriad of new forms of spirituality in Protestant communities that were not possible in Catholicism, with its strong division between the clergy and the laity. Nevertheless, lay people were not left as mere passive spectators in early modern Catholicism. The establishment of lay confraternities and sodalities, groups of men and women dedicated to particular spiritual practices, although begun in the late Middle Ages, picked up steam in the sixteenth century and led to a revitalization, a new lay spirituality. In recent decades the spirituality of Luther, the Early Reformation, and John Calvin, as well as that of the Radical Reformers, has begun to be studied in greater depth.8 It would not be possible in a short chapter to summarize what this research has revealed about the general spirituality of the Evangelical churches in such areas as reading the Scriptures, praying, worshiping, receiving the sacraments, preaching and hearing the Word, admonishing and consoling, singing, and observing the major stages of the Christian life from birth and baptism through death. Luther, Calvin, and some of the Radical Reformers such as the Anabaptists had different views about these spiritual practices, but they all agreed that the benchmark for spirituality was to be found in the Gospel, not in the traditions and practices of medieval Christianity. Roman Catholics, on the other hand, after a relatively brief period when more and less radical programs for “reformation in head and members” were actively debated, came out in favor of a reaction against the protests of the Reformers and a general reaffirmation of the traditions of medieval 8 The willingness of contemporary Protestants to talk about the spirituality of Reformation figures is evident in volumes in the Classics of Western Spirituality series such as those on the early Anabaptists (1994); Calvin (2001); and Luther (2007).

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spirituality. New times, however, also demanded new initiatives, not only in reforming the old religious orders, but also in creating new types of specialized religious life.9 The most important new order was the Jesuits (recognized in 1540), but other orders also made an impact, such as the Theatines (1524), the Capuchins (a Franciscan reform of 1536; the founding document Religionis Zelus dates from 1528), and the Oratorians (1575), as well as orders for women, such as the Ursulines (1535), and the Visitation Sisters (1610). Anyone who walks the length of the nave of St. Peter’s Basilica, the ultimate artistic monument of Counter-Reformation Catholicism, will pass beneath giant statues of the founders of religious orders, many of whom were active in this period.

Mystical Spirituality Christian teaching stretching back to Clement of Alexandria taught that the goal of spiritual practice was to attain unifying vision, or loving union with God. The journey toward union received an institutional location in monasticism and a theological elaboration at the end of the fourth century. Though subject to many variations and much later development, the notion that spiritual practices were meant to prepare for a deeper sense of God’s presence, variously conceived of as seeing God, uniting with God, and even being annihilated in God, was integral to Christian spirituality. This is the realm of mysticism.10 Thinkers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were heirs to a variety of mystical traditions. Four were of special importance. The first was the patristic mysticism of Augustine and Gregory the Great, valued by both Catholics and Protestants. Monastic mysticism, best represented by Bernard of Clairvaux, and including Cistercians, Victorines, and Franciscans, was vital for Catholic mystics, and some of these authors were also used by Protestants. The third tradition was the late medieval mysticism of northern Europe, Germanic and Dutch, which in Latin translation was also read in southern Catholic lands.11 A fourth form was the mystical theology of 9

For an overview see Richard De Molen, Religious Orders of the Catholic Reformation (New York, 1994). 10 For mysticism in the sixteenth century see Bernard McGinn, “Mysticism,” in Hans J. Hillerbrand, ed., The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1996), III, 119–124. 11 During the first half of the sixteenth century the Carthusian house of St. Barbara in Cologne became a center for spiritual renewal by publishing many spiritual and mystical texts, both in German and Dutch, as well as in Latin translation. Works of Henry Suso, Johannes Tauler, and

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Pseudo-Dionysius, which affected some monastic mystics and most of the northern mystics. It had an impact on a number of early modern Catholic mystics, but less among Protestants. The spread of print made this material more widely available than ever before. Another factor in the dissemination of mysticism was the production of mystical handbooks, a practice begun in the late thirteenth century and strong in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Some of these manuals, such as those of the Dutch Franciscan Hendrik Herp (1400–1477) and the French Benedictine Louis de Blois (1506–1566), were of real moment in the history of mysticism. Finally, forms of late medieval mysticism, especially the “Northern mysticism” of Eckhart, Suso, Tauler, and Ruusbroec, lasted well into the sixteenth century, as we can see in the case of the anonymous Great Evangelical Pearl, a Dutch text written by a nun in the eastern Netherlands in the 1530s, and the Institutiones spirituales, often ascribed to Tauler.12 The “New Mysticism” that began around 1200 featured a number of tendencies that continued to shape sixteenth- and seventeenth-century mysticism.13 The new currents in late medieval mysticism were democratic in the sense that they addressed all believers, not only a monastic elite; they were secular because they did not require retreat from the world, but could be realized in society. They were mostly expressed in the vernacular, and therefore allowed access to women to a degree unprecedented in earlier Christianity. Some of these mystics, such as Eckhart, used language that suggested that contemplatives could attain a deep union in which all distinction between the soul and God disappears; others spoke of excessive love, erotic fulfillment, and extraordinary visions and raptures. Mystics such as the French Beguine Marguerite Porete (d. 1310) were condemned as proponents of the heresy of the “Free Spirit” for so emphasizing interior states that the mediatorial role of the church and its sacraments became unnecessary. Underlying many of these developments was the changing relation between the liber scripturae, the Bible as the norm of belief and practice, and the liber experientiae, the inner book of the mystic’s consciousness of God. Some Jan van Ruusbroec were translated by Laurentius Surius (1523–1578), a member of the community. 12 The Evangelical Pearl was published by the Cologne Carthusians in both short (1535) and long (1537–1539, 1542) versions. Translated into Latin (1545), French (1602), and German (1676), it was widely read. On this last chapter in Northern mysticism see Bernard McGinn, The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism, volume V: The Varieties of Vernacular Mysticism 1350–1550 (New York, 2012), ch. 5. 13 On the “New Mysticism” see Bernard McGinn, The Presence of God, volume III: The Flowering of Mysticism: Men and Women in the New Mysticism – 1200–1350 (New York, 1998).

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mystics were accused of letting experience trump church teaching. Thus, the period from the late thirteenth century on saw a growing suspicion of the dangers of mysticism.

Protestant Mystics Adolf von Harnack’s quip that a mystic who is not a Catholic is only a dilettante says more about Harnack’s theology than it does about mysticism. Over the past century Protestant theologians have come to recognize that the mystical element in Christianity had many witnesses in the Reformed communions, though mysticism has a different weight and tone in Protestantism.14 Martin Luther (1483–1546) had a complicated relationship to mysticism. Luther’s mature evangelical theology contains a number of elements marked by aspects of mystical traditions. Although some Luther scholars have used this fact to describe the Reformer as a mystic,15 Luther never wrote a mystical work and is not a mystic in any usual sense of the term, however much he transmutes mystical themes in his theology. Luther read the mystics selectively for the purpose of finding support for his own thinking. Luther rejected the mysticism of Dionysius, but he maintained respect for Augustine, Bernard, and some other monastic mystics. The most significant impact of mysticism on his theology, however, came from his reading of Tauler, whom he praised lavishly, as well as his discovery of the late medieval mystical treatise known as the Theologia Deutsch, which he twice edited and published. Luther’s support for these two authors gave them a long afterlife among Lutheran Protestants. There are a number of links between Luther and the mystics he favored, such as the stress on the need for inner experience of God as the foundation for true faith, and an emphasis on humility and passivity while waiting for God’s justifying grace (see the Commentary on the Magnificat). Like Tauler, Luther highlighted finding God through distress and dereliction (Anfechtungen), because God remains hidden sub contrario, especially the scandal of Christ on the cross. Luther also had a 14 Markus Wriedt, “Mystik und Protestantismus: Ein Widerspruch?” in Mystik. Religion der Zukunft: Zukunft der Religion? (Leipzig, 2003), 67–87. See also Bernard McGinn, The Presence of God, volume VI, part 1: Mysticism in the Reformation (New York, 2016). 15 For Luther as a mystic see Bernd Hamm, The Early Luther: Stages in a Reformation Reorientation (Grand Rapids, 2014). For a more guarded view of Luther’s relation to mysticism see Heiko A. Oberman, “Simul Gemitus et Raptus: Luther and Mysticism,” in Steven E. Ozment, ed., The Reformation in Medieval Perspective (Chicago, 1971), 219–251.

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sense of union with God, a union that could even be expressed in marital terms. Founded in the “happy exchange” of the incarnation, this union is given to believers in the sacrament of baptism and is meant to be the source for the grace of sanctification shown by faith in God and active love of neighbor (see The Freedom of the Christian). Some of these notions can also be found in mystics such as Bernard, though Luther’s notion of union stresses faith, while Bernard’s emphasizes love. Finally, Luther spoke of divinization, though how important a feature of his thought this mystical theme was remains under discussion. John Calvin (1509–1564) took a more negative view of mysticism, although he respected Augustine and Bernard. Recent work has shown that there are some affinities between Calvin’s Reformed theology and aspects of mystical spirituality,16 but it would be an exaggeration to speak of him as a mystic. Nonetheless, Calvin had a strong teaching on the union between Christ and believers, which he was even willing to call a “mystical union” (unio mystica: Institutes I, XI, 10). Given Calvin’s greater distance from mysticism than Luther’s, it is no surprise that later Protestant mysticism was more powerful in the Lutheran than in the Reformed churches. If one were pressed to name a Protestant mystic, probably the name of the Lutheran pastor Johann Arndt (1555–1621) would be most often put forward. In reaction to the Scholastic rigidity of much contemporary Lutheran theology, Arndt returned to Luther’s emphasis on the experience of faith and his use of mystical texts to insist that Evangelical faith had to include the path to spiritual perfection. Arndt’s True Christianity, originally published in four books (1606–1610), had an immense success for centuries.17 True Christianity is a summary of the whole Christian life, one that argues that the justifying faith central to the Reformation is nothing without the process of sanctification that aims at loving union with God. In setting forth this teaching Arndt often turned to medieval mystics, not only Bernard and the masters of Northern mysticism, but also figures such as Angela of Foligno. Arndt emphasized mystical themes far more than Luther, especially the birth of God in the soul, the necessity for “releasement” (Gelassenheit), deification, and a marital union with God that could be described in the erotic language of the Song of Songs (True Christianity, especially books III and V). Arndt was

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Julie Canliss, Calvin’s Ladder. A Spiritual Theology of Ascent and Ascension (Grand Rapids, 2010). After Arndt’s death the original four books of True Christianity were often combined with two of his later treatises to form a six-book compendium. On Arndt see Hermann Geyer, Verborgene Weisheit: Johann Arndts “Vier Bücher vom Wahren Christentum”, 3 vols. (Berlin, 2001). 17

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a controversial figure, attacked by some Orthodox Lutheran theologians, but widely read and influential on the birth of German Pietism towards the end of the seventeenth century. The Radical Reformation is a convenient term to identify the individuals and groups who became convinced that Luther, Calvin, and their followers had not gone far enough in their rejection of the medieval church and in the establishment of pure religion based on the inner action of the Holy Spirit. Many of the Radicals were biblical literalists, like the Anabaptists. Others, however, can be described as Spiritualists, thinkers who so stressed the experience of the Spirit within that the external aspects of religion (Bible, visible church, sacraments, etc.) became secondary, even dispensable. In their emphasis on interiorization the Radicals often appealed to the Northern mystics, such as Tauler, the Theologia Deutsch, and even Eckhart, but there is a real difference between the interiorization of these medieval figures who never rejected the externals of religion and the Radicals who did, though in differing ways.18 A look at three of the Radicals will provide a sense of the mysticism of the Radical Reformation: Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt (1486–1541), Sebastian Franck (1499–1542), and Valentin Weigel (1533–1588). Karlstadt was a colleague of Luther, who broke with him between 1520 and 1525 over many issues, not least the authority of the Holy Spirit in determining belief and practice. Like Luther, he was influenced by Tauler and the Theologia Deutsch, but he went further than Luther in the two treatises he wrote on Gelassenheit (1520, 1523), the letting go of self and all things taught by the Northern mystics. Karlstadt’s view of releasement implies a mystical anthropology based on the soul’s ground in God (something far from Luther), as well as a deeper sense of union than Luther would have countenanced. Similar emphasis on mystical releasement and a high anthropology is also found in a number of the later Spiritualists. Thinkers such as Sebastian Franck cared little about external religious practices, even the sacraments, in their pursuit of returning to our preestablished unity in God. The learned Franck used a wide variety of mystical sources to present his view of the paradoxes of true spiritual religion in his summary Paradoxa (1534). The most important of the Spiritualist mystics was Valentin Weigel, who concealed his true views while serving as a Lutheran pastor for many years. In the midst of religious doubts occasioned by the intra-Lutheran disputes of his youth, Weigel was rescued by a revelation from God that 18

On the relation of the Radicals to Northern mysticism see Steven E. Ozment, Mysticism and Dissent: Religious Ideology and Social Protest in the Sixteenth Century (New Haven, 1973).

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gave him an inner book as the source of his mystical teaching. His early works (1570–1571) are based on Eckhart, Tauler, and the Theologia Deutsch. Weigel’s reading of the Lutheran doctrine of justification through a mystical lens stressing Gelassenheit, divine birth, and union and deification was expanded upon in his mature pansophical writings, especially The Place of the World (1576) and The Golden Grasp (1578). In the history of Western mysticism, the Görlitz cobbler and auto-didact Jakob Böhme (1575–1624) has always been a controversial figure.19 In a brief period of time Böhme produced a succession of dense and original works setting forth a theosophy, or hidden wisdom, about God, the Divine Virgin Sophia, creation and its many stages, Christ, and redemption. Although he lived as a Lutheran lay man, Böhme was attacked as a heretic and really stands closer to the Radicals than he does to a Lutheran mystic such as Arndt. Böhme has attracted disciples who see him as the origin of modern thought, as well as skeptics, who, in the words of John Wesley in 1742, dismiss his writings as “the most sublime nonsense; inimitable bombast; fustian not to be paralleled.”20 His longest work is a massive commentary on Genesis, and at the end of his life he wrote a series of tracts of a more Christological character published as The Way to Christ. In Böhme the esoteric tendencies among the Spiritualist Reformers that had begun to challenge traditional doctrine found their ultimate evolution. It is difficult to judge whether or not Böhme should be considered a Christian mystic, but he was certainly a theosophical mystic. One chapter in the story of Protestant mysticism that does not easily fit within the continental perspective is that of the mystical aspects of the English Reformation. A number of Anglican poets from the seventeenth century have been described as mystical in their orientation, notably George Herbert (1593–1633), Henry Vaughan (1622–1695), and Thomas Traherne (ca. 1637–1666). The major group of mystical writings from England is the product of the more radical side of the English Reformation. The Puritans, who rejected the Elizabethan compromise between Catholic and Protestant elements in the English Church, had an interest in medieval mysticism and produced a number of treatises on mystical union with Christ. The Quakers were more reminiscent 19 Andrew Weeks, Boehme: An Intellectual Biography of the Seventeenth-Century Philosopher and Mystic (Albany, 1991). On his mysticism see David Walsh, The Mysticism of Innerworldly Fulfillment: A Study of Jacob Boehme (Gainesville, 1983); and Cyril O’Regan, Gnostic Apocalypse: Jacob Boehme’s Haunted Narrative (Albany, 2002). 20 John Wesley, The Works of John Wesley, volume XIX: Journals and Papers II (1738–43), ed. W. R. Ward and R. P. Heitzenrater (Nashville: Abingdon, 1990), 272.

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of the Radical Spiritualists. Under the leadership of George Fox (1624–1691), who began to receive revelations in 1646, they preached a message of reliance on the inner light of the Holy Spirit and abandonment of the exterior practices of the church. The Journal that Fox dictated in 1673–1675 while in prison is a striking account of visionary illumination.

Catholic Mystics Common Issues The description of inner states of consciousness of God, reading the “book of experience,” had been growing since the twelfth century, but reached a new level in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as can be seen in figures such as Teresa of Ávila and John of the Cross. 21 This introspection is evident in the many analyses of the stages of prayer, and the concern for careful discrimination between the stages of prayer that can be attained by one’s own efforts in cooperation with God (what came to be called “acquired contemplation”) and those that must be passively “infused” by God. Also important were the precise descriptions of different levels of uniting with God, and the attention given to the need for discernment for the detection of diabolical deception in the spiritual path.22 It would be an exaggeration, however, to see this interiorization as indicative of the triumph of a kind of phenomenology of mysticism, because the Catholic mystics were also deeply concerned with showing the consistency of their experience with the witness of the Bible and the church’s teaching. Still, tensions between mystical teaching and institutional stress on orthodoxy grew during this period, partly as a result of the challenge offered by the Reformation and partly for reasons internal to CounterReformation Catholicism. The Inquisitions, both Spanish (established 1478) and Roman (established 1542), as well as the publication of indices of forbidden books, set up a situation of contestation in which mystics continued to strive, successfully and sometimes unsuccessfully, to avoid accusations of heresy and to vindicate their message about the necessity of contemplative prayer and union with God. 21 Among the general accounts of early modern Catholic mysticism see Louis Cognet, La spiritualité modern, volume I: L’essor: 1500–1650 (Paris, 1966); Bernard McGinn, The Presence of God, volume VI, part 2: Mysticism in the Golden Age of Spain (1500–1650) (New York, 2017); and Bernard McGinn, The Presence of God, volume VI, part 3: The Persistence of Mysticism in Catholic Europe (1500–1675) (New York, 2020). 22 Moshe Shulovsky, Believe Not Every Spirit: Possession, Mysticism, and Discernment in Early Modern Catholicism (Chicago, 2007).

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The Golden Age of Spain The sixteenth century saw the flowering of Spanish mysticism. 23 Spain had contributed little to medieval mysticism, but the unification of the country under Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492, Spain’s ascent to world power, and Spanish self-identity under the Habsburgs as the Catholic power and militant bulwark of the faith against the Reformation provided the backdrop for a burst of mystical writing that lasted about a century. The reformist tendencies in early sixteenth-century Spain, both within the religious orders and in the wider culture, led to the earliest case of the suppression of mystical heresy in the period, the 1525 condemnation of the Alumbrados, or (“Illuminated”), who were accused of much the same errors as the medieval “Free Spirits” because of their teaching on dejamiento, inner mystical abandonment to God.24 Almost all the major Spanish mystics were under investigation by the Inquisition at one time or another. In the first generation of Spanish mysticism the Observantine Reform of the Franciscans produced mystical authors such as Francisco de Osuna (1492–1541), whose Third Spiritual Alphabet sought to open the mystical prayer of recollection (recogimiento) to all fervent believers. Another Franciscan, Bernardino de Laredo (1482–ca. 1540), produced a popular handbook that dealt with contemplation, The Ascent of Mount Sion. The most significant mystic of this period was the founder of the Jesuits, Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556). It was Ignatius’s successor, Jerónimo Nadal, who spoke of him as being “active at the same time that he was contemplative.” Ignatius’s active life is evident in his creating the Spiritual Exercises, as well as founding and leading the apostolic reform of the Jesuit order. His hidden contemplative life is found in the Autobiography he dictated to his followers between 1553 and 1555, which tells the story of his life between 1521 and 1538 and shows him to be a mystical visionary. Equally important is the fragment of his Spiritual Diary for 1544–1545, one of the best examples of a day-by-day narrative of mystical experiences.25 The middle generation of Spanish mysticism (ca. 1550–1590) centers on the figures of two leaders of the reform of the Carmelite order, Teresa de Jesús (Teresa of Ávila: 1515–1582) and Juan de Yepres (John of the Cross: 23 “Espagne. III. L’age d’or,” in Dictionnaire de spiritualité ascétique et mystique doctrine et histoire, 16 vols. (Paris, 1937–1994). IV, 1127–1178; also Edgar Allison Peers, Studies of the Spanish Mystics, 3 vols. (London, 1960); McGinn, Mysticism in the Golden Age of Spain. 24 Alastair Hamilton, Heresy and Mysticism in Sixteenth-Century Spain: The Alumbrados (Toronto, 1992). 25 Harvey D. Egan, Ignatius Loyola the Mystic (Collegeville, 1991).

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1542–1591).26 Teresa, the descendant of Jewish converts, was a fairly mediocre nun for almost twenty years under the relaxed Carmelite rule in the Convent of the Incarnation in Ávila. Her conversion to a deep contemplative life (ca. 1555) induced her and like-minded sisters to found the new reformed house of St. Joseph’s in 1562, where they could observe the earlier and stricter Carmelite rule. In reaction to the Index of 1559 that suppressed the rich mystical literature circulating in Spanish, Christ appeared to Teresa and told her he would give her a “living book” about interior prayer and union with God that she could write down to instruct her nuns and others seeking the deeper life. The result was The Life of Mother Teresa of Jesus (Teresa called it simply My Book), written between 1562 and 1565, but not published until 1588 after a long investigation by the Inquisition.27 It remains among the classics of mystical literature. Despite her exhausting efforts to spread the Carmelite reform throughout Spain, Teresa managed to produce two more major mystical works, The Way of Spiritual Perfection (1566), and her masterpiece, The Interior Castle (1577). John of the Cross was a young Carmelite whom Teresa recruited to help spread her reform to the male Carmelites. The well-educated friar was a skilled spiritual director, and far more the pure contemplative than Teresa herself. During the course of a cruel imprisonment by the unreformed Carmelites, John began writing his striking lyrics about the love between God and the soul, poems that recreate the mystical eroticism of the biblical Song of Songs. After his escape, John was asked by some of the nuns he directed to explain the poems, and so between 1579 and 1585 he composed four prose commentaries that constitute a kind of summa of the ascetical and mystical life: The Ascent of Mount Carmel and The Dark Night of the Soul (really two parts of one work); The Spiritual Canticle; and The Living Flame of Love. The mystical teachings of Teresa and John agree in many themes, especially in their emphasis on the soul’s passivity before God, in the careful ways they delineate mystical states, and in their doctrine of a loving union with God that is both Christological and Trinitarian. Nevertheless, there are also significant differences. John, for example, was more apophatic, or negative, than Teresa in his stress on nada, the “nothingness” of

26 There is a large literature about these two Carmelite mystics. For a comparison see Edward Howells, John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila: Mystical Knowing and Selfhood (New York, 2002). 27 On Teresa’s problems with the Inquisition see Gillian T. W. Ahlgren, Teresa of Avila and the Politics of Sanctity (Ithaca, 1996); on the techniques Teresa used to present her message see Alison Weber, Teresa of Avila and the Rhetoric of Femininity (Princeton, 1990).

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God, the soul, and the path of faith. He was also more suspicious of visions and ecstatic states.28 The person responsible for the publication of Teresa’s writings was the Augustinian friar Luis de Léon (ca. 1527–1591). A poet, theologian, and biblical scholar, he had run afoul of the Inquisition and was even imprisoned for several years. Luis’s major mystical work is The Names of Christ (1583), an investigation of the biblical titles of the Savior infused with Dionysian apophatic theology and colored by late medieval and Renaissance views of the supremacy of love in seeking and finding God. Although the deaths of John and Luis in 1591 marked the end of the great generation of Spain, the production of mystical texts continued on into the seventeenth century, both among the Carmelites (e.g., Thomas de Jésus: 1564–1615) and Franciscans (e.g., Juan de los Angeles: 1536–1609).

Italy and Germany The attention paid to Spain and France as centers for early modern Catholic mysticism has sometimes obscured the ongoing role of Italy, Germany, and the Low Countries, areas that were central to late medieval mysticism. In Italy mysticism was the domain of women. The most important figure was Catherine of Genoa (1447–1510), a laywoman who lived a life of apostolic service to the sick and of deep mysticism. Catherine was connected with Catholic Reformist circles, specifically the Oratory of Love in which groups of laity and clergy shared dedicated spiritual lives. Catherine herself wrote nothing. The popular works that enshrine her teaching about inner purgation to attain the pure love that unites the soul with God (Purgation and Purgatory, The Spiritual Dialogue, and The Life) were put together by her followers and not published until 1551. In Catherine’s wake came a group of female ecstatics of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, such as the Carmelite Maria Maddalena dei Pazzi (1566–1607), the Franciscan Giovanna Maria della Croce (1603–1673), and the laywoman Isabella Bellinzaga (1551–1624). Germany and the Low Countries also produced mystics, if not in the same numbers as in the late Middle Ages. The most important figure of the mysticism of Baroque Catholic Germany was the convert and mystical poet Angelus Silesius (Johann Scheffler: 1624–1677), the rhyming couplets of whose Cherubinic Wanderer reprised the themes of the Northern mystics of the Middle Ages. His contemporary, the Dutch Maria Petyt (1623–1677), was a Carmelite 28 For an analysis of John’s mysticism see Steven Payne, John of the Cross and the Cognitive Value of Mysticism (Dordrecht, 1990).

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tertiary who wrote a mystical autobiography that, like that of Teresa of Ávila, is rich in analyses of inner experiences and visions.

French Mysticism The center of Catholic mysticism shifted to France at the end of the sixteenth century, just as the political power of Habsburg Spain was yielding to that of Bourbon France.29 The era of French preponderance in Catholic spirituality and mysticism, fully if at times controversially portrayed by Henri Bremond in his multi-volume A History of Religious Thought in France from the Wars of Religion Down to our Own Times, continues to attract students of mysticism. Like Spain, medieval France had not been a major center of mystical writing, so the reasons for the burst of mystical literature in French remain opaque. What we do know is that at the end of the devastating Wars of Religion between Catholics and Calvinists (1562–1598), the victory of the now-Catholic monarch Henry IV (r. 1589–1610) saw the beginnings of a Gallican Catholic monarchy that grew strong under his successors Louis XIII and Louis XIV. It was also France’s “Golden Age” of mystics. In the 1590s the noblewoman Barbe Acarie (1566–1618) gathered a kind of mystical salon around her in Paris and encouraged the spread of Teresa of Ávila’s Carmelite reform to France. Among those in her circle were the Capuchin Benet Canfield (1562–1610), an exiled Englishman, who wrote his Rule of Perfection about 1590, and the Carthusian Richard Beaucousin (1561–1610), who fostered translations of mystical literature. Two major tendencies in seventeenth-century French mysticism emerged in the first quarter of the century in figures who were involved with the Acarie circle. Francis de Sales (1567–1622) was a young Savoyard noble slated for a career in law. After undergoing a temptation to religious despair in 1586, he was ordained a priest and spent time in Paris. Named bishop of Geneva in 1602 (a see lost to the Reformers), he struggled for two decades trying to convert Protestants, encouraging reform, and giving spiritual advice to many through his preaching and letters and writings. Francis was the ideal representative of Devout Humanism, an optimistic view of Christianity stressing God’s universal love for all, free will even after sin, and the call to a life of devotion culminating in mystical union with God. Francis emphasized a For introductions see Jacques Le Brun, “France VI. Le grand siècle de la spiritualité française et ses lendemains,” in Dictionnaire de spiritualité, V, 917–953; and Wendy M. Wright, “Seventeenth-Century French Mysticism,” in Julia A. Lamm, ed., The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Christian Mysticism (Oxford, 2013), 437–451.

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heart-to-heart relation to God open to all through the divine-human heart of Jesus, a pure love that allows believers to achieve “holy indifference.” His Introduction to the Devout Life (1609) set out a spirituality open to all walks of life, characterized by a gracious and gentle love influencing the whole of life. His Treatise on the Love of God (1616) analyzed the higher mystical dimensions of loving union. Francis was perhaps not an original thinker, but the Treatise is one of the best summaries of Catholic mysticism. Christian humanism did not die with Francis de Sales. The Salesian tradition includes Francis’s close friend and collaborator, the widow Jane de Chantal (1572–1641), who founded the Order of the Visitation of Mary for women who did not fit into the cloistered religious orders, but who wished to pursue a deeper spiritual life. The second major tradition in seventeenth-century France is often called the “French School” (although not all the mystics considered here were French). The originator was Cardinal Pierre de Bérulle (1575–1629), a member of the Acarie circle, reformer of the clergy, and founder of the French Oratorians (rather different from the more loosely organized Italian version). Bérulle’s influential mystical writings include his Discourse on the States and Grandeurs of Jesus (1623). He combined a teaching on interior abnegation and annihilation influenced by Dionysius and the traditions of Northern mysticism with a Christological emphasis in which the believer attains divinization through taking on the different “states” of the life of Jesus. His notion of special vows of servitude to Jesus and Mary, however, proved controversial. Bérulle had a number of followers inside and outside the French Oratory. Charles de Condren (1588–1641) was the second head of the Oratory, while Jean Eudes (1601–1680) spent many years with the Oratorians before founding his own reform order. Jean-Jacques Olier (1608–1657) was trained by Condren and later founded the Sulpician order for the training of diocesan priests. Olier’s Christocentric mysticism pushed the Berullian theme of mystical annihilation to an extreme, as is evident in a series of mystical treatises such as The Crystal Soul: The Divine Attributes in us that are only now being made available. Characterizing French mysticism according to Salesian Devout Humanism and the Berullian French School, however, scarcely provides the whole story. Among the Jesuits, Ignatius’s mysticism had come under attack from later Jesuit leaders who criticized contemplative prayer as inimical to the active vocation of the order. This did not prevent some French Jesuits, such as Louis Lallement (1587–1635), and especially Jean-Joseph Surin (1600–1675), from leaving mystical teachings. The French Carmelites Jean de SaintSamson (1571–1636), both a poet and a prose writer, and Lawrence of the 620

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Resurrection (1614–1691), a soldier who became a lay brother, were important mystics, although today Lawrence is read and Jean is largely forgotten. The Ursuline nun Marie de l’Incarnation (1599–1672), who spent much of her life as a missionary in Canada, compares with Teresa of Ávila and Maria Petyt as a profound explorer of inner states, both those sent by God and those inspired by the devil. Seventeenth-century France was rich in mystics who summarized many of the developments in early modern Catholic mysticism.

Conclusion A general survey cannot include detailed analyses of the classics of the vast trove of spiritual and mystical literature produced between 1500 and 1675. What I have tried to do is sketch a perspective that may be helpful for those who wish to explore this vital period in the history of living “according to the Spirit.” Modern historians are often eager to identify turning points, decisive shifts in the events that brought us to where we are today. The Reformation era is such a shift, though its significance remains under debate. In the history of spirituality, the period may be described as a time of transition. Despite the connections, both for Protestants and Catholics, with fifteen centuries of Christian spirituality, the old traditions and practices were presented with new challenges and given new forms in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Nevertheless, at least in most cases, the adaptations did not involve a shift to another world of discourse (save perhaps with someone like Jakob Böhme). What we detect instead are forms of teaching about preparation for attaining union with Christ and living in his Spirit that constitute a series of new variations on modes of Christian living and thinking that had been known for many centuries. In 1675 the real challenges to the traditional discourse of Christian spirituality represented internally by the Quietist controversy and externally by the Enlightenment were becoming more evident. But that is another story. bibliography Bremond, Henri. Histoire littéraire du sentiment religieux en France depuis la fin des guerres de religion jusqu’à nos jours, 11 vols. Paris, 1915–1933. de Certeau, Michel. The Mystic Fable, volume I: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Chicago, 1992; volume II: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Chicago, 2015. Cognet, Louis. La spiritualité moderne, volume I: L’essor: 1500–1650. Paris, 1966.

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Catholic Christianity and Indigenous Religions in the Americas mariano delgado Christianity is part of the history of religion and as such participates in its ambivalent and contingent relationship with light and shadow.1 Missiology and religious theology serve as particular examples of this historicity, as they are generally understood differently today than during the Age of Discovery and the Reformation. Biblical statements, as well as the magisterium of the Catholic Church and theological tradition, allow both exclusive and inclusive attitudes to nonChristian religions. While prior to the expeditions of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries an exclusive interpretation was highlighted due to the dogmatization of the teaching extra ecclesiam nulla salus by the Council of Florence’s decree Cantate Domino (1442); the Second Vatican Council – especially through Lumen gentium 16 and Gaudium et spes 22 – emphasized the inclusive approach. To understand the missionaries’ attitudes to nonChristian religions in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, one must consider that they had in mind the exclusive model of the Council of Florence, reinforced by the teaching of the Council of Trent about the necessity of baptism for salvation (1547). Part of their thinking was the characterization of all non-Christian religiosity as “inexcusable, satanic idolatry,” which was common in all Christian denominations during the Renaissance. Martin Luther talked about this as well when he translated 1 Chronicles 16:26: “For all gods of the nations are idols.” Today it is translated as “For the gods of the nations all do nothing,” meaning that the gods of the pagans are powerless compared to the one true God. Luther announced a Christ-centric, reformatory equivalent to the See Mariano Delgado, “Das Christentum in der Religionsgeschichte: Unterwegs zu einem aufgeklärten Inklusivismus,” in Mariano Delgado, Gregor Maria Hoff, and Günter Riße, eds., Das Christentum in der Religionsgeschichte: Perspektiven für das 21. Jahrhundert. Festschrift für Hans Waldenfels [Studien zur christlichen Religions- und Kulturgeschichte 16] (Fribourg and Stuttgart, 2011), 15–31. 1

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church’s necessity for salvation: Extra Christum omnes religiones sunt idola.2 This soon became the theological and missionary mainstream in the Age of Discovery; whereas those who followed an inclusive attitude in accordance with the teaching of fides implicita, or who strove to have a more positive, dedemonized understanding of non-Christian religions, were clearly the exception.

The Renaissance Concept of Religion and Blindness toward Alien Religiosity Contemporary authors such as Wilfred Cantwell Smith,3 Michel Despland,4 and Ernst Feil5 wrestled intensively with the Renaissance concept of religiosity. Their writings illustrate that during the Renaissance, religion, which was based on Christian humanism and understood as worship of God, increasingly became an anthropologically structured constant. Only Christian faith was recognized as true religion, and apologetics were developed toward all other religions. Given this background, two things could be expected to happen when Europeans of the Renaissance encountered non-European cultures: First, they would try to discover traces of religion in the sense of a worship of God; and second, they would react to other religions according to a Christian apologetic shaped by Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) and Girolamo Savonarola (1452–1498): “1. God, His existence and His providence; 2. Religion as a bond between the human being and God; 3. The excellence of the Christian religion; 4. Errors of the other religions.”6 Indeed, in the Americas, the first encounters between Christian missionaries and indigenous religions followed this pattern. Equipped with Cicero’s works, missionaries believed that no indigenous tribe would be so wild “that it does not know that it should have a god, although it may be ignorant of

2

Ernst Feil, Religio: Die Geschichte eines neuzeitlichen Grundbegriffs vom Frühchristentum bis zur Reformation [Forschungen zur Kirchen- und Dogmengeschichte 36] (Göttingen, 1986), 241 (see also for quotes from Luther’s works). 3 Wilfred Cantwell Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion (New York, 1962; repr. Minneapolis, 1991). 4 Michel Despland, La religion en occident. Évolution des idées et du vécu (Montreal, 1979). 5 Feil, Religio; Ernst Feil, ed., Streitfall “Religion”: Diskussion zur Bestimmung und Abgrenzung des Religionsbegriffs [Studien zur systematischen Theologie und Ethik 21] (Münster, 2000); Ernst Feil, “Religion,” in Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, 4th ed. (Tübingen, 2004), VII, 264–274. 6 Despland, Religion, 165.

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what sort it ought to have.”7 A people without any form of religion was simply unthinkable for Europeans of the time. But because the missionaries defined religion as public worship of God, with clearly identifiable priests and places of worship or temples, they could not comprehend the religiosity of the indigenous peoples due to the lack of these features: Their own concept of religion prevented them from understanding other forms of religion. That is why Catholics and Protestants thought that the Tupi, living as seminomads in Brazil without stable places of worship or other signs of a public religion, had no God and lacked any form of religion. The Europeans were completely blind to any understanding of a shaman-based religiosity, in which intoxicating herbs, magic, and dance play a central role. In 1549 Manoel da Nóbrega (1517–1570), a Portuguese missionary and superior of the first Jesuit community in Brazil, described the indigenous peoples as follows: “These pagans do not worship anything, nor do they know God, only the thunder which they call Tupana, meaning something divine. So we have no better word to bring them the knowledge of God than to call him Father Tupana.”8 In the middle of the sixteenth century French Huguenots also came to Brazil, during short-lived attempts by France to establish a colony called France Atlantique in the bay of Rio de Janeiro (1555–1558). Calvin sent fourteen of his religious followers, among them Jean de Léry (1534–1613), who stayed there in 1557 and recorded the history of the early mission: Cicero says that no peoples would be so wild, no nation so barbaric and wild, that you would not have the feeling there was a God. Everybody makes this statement his own and considers it to be undeniable. But if I think about our Tuupinambaúlts in America, I do not want to apply this principle to them. First of all, they have absolutely no knowledge of the one true God. Furthermore, they do not acknowledge any god – divine or material. This stands in contrast to all the old pagans, who had a variety of gods. It also stands in contrast to idolaters today, and even the Indigenous of Peru, whose country borders theirs, albeit five hundred miles far away, who offer sacrifices to the sun and the moon. Hence, the Tuupinambaúlts have neither an order of worship nor any place where they gather to say their prayers. They do not know any form of religious prayers, neither public nor private.9

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Cicero, Über die Rechtlichkeit (De legibus), trans. Karl Büchner (Stuttgart, 1989), 16 (1, 24). See also Cicero, Vom Wesen der Götter (De natura deorum), Latin and German ed., trans. and annotated by Wolfgang Gerlach and Karl Bayer (Munich, 1978), 159 (2, 12 f.). 8 Klaus Koschorke, Ludwig Frieder, and Mariano Delgado, eds., A History of Christianity in Asia, Africa, and Latin-America, 1450–1990: A Documentary Sourcebook (Grand Rapids and Cambridge, 2007), 300. 9 Jean de Léry, Brasilianisches Tagebuch 1557 (Tübingen, 1967), 276.

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The Indigenous Religions as Inexcusable Idolatry according to the Letter to the Romans (1:18–21) There was a widespread understanding among European missionaries that the people of the New World were determined and stubborn idolaters. For example, the religiosity of the Mayans or the peoples of the Aztec or Inca empires, whose idols, temples, priests, and rites could be observed, was generally interpreted by Europeans as inexcusable according to the Letter to the Romans 1:18–21: The wrath of God is indeed being revealed from heaven against every impiety and wickedness of those who suppress the truth by their wickedness. For what can be known about God is evident to them, because God made it evident to them. Ever since the creation of the world, His invisible attributes of eternal power and divinity have been understood and perceived in what He has made. As a result, they have no excuse [anapologétous]; for although they knew God they did not accord Him glory as God or give Him thanks. Instead, they became vain in their reasoning, and their senseless minds were darkened.

This biblical passage deeply influenced the encounter of Christianity with other religions. Based on the postulation of a natural knowledge of God, it claims that there is compelling evidence of the sole true God. The early Christian apologists and Church Fathers went to great lengths to reconcile this anapologétous with God’s universal saving will (1 Tim. 2:4) and the Petrine advice to justify oneself about the Logos of Christian hope to everyone (1 Peter 3:15).10 This proved to be fruitful for the theological–philosophical dispute, as long as Christians did not presuppose the “wrath of God” against the inexcusable heathens already in this world. According to the Augustinian theory of the two epochs of the church, the church could not take coercive action before the Constantinian era. Afterward it was able to do so because it could fall back on the massive support of a Christian state against enemies of faith. When reading Augustine, one can see how the balance had shifted in favor of compelling “evidence of the sole true God”; therefore the burden of proof unilaterally lay with the “others” because, for Augustine, the existence of the Christian God is “immediately obvious.” When the pagans ask for miracles See Max Lackmann, Vom Geheimnis der Schöpfung: Die Geschichte der Exegese von Römer 1, 18–23; 2, 14–16 und Acta 14, 15–17; 17, 22–29 vom 2. Jahrhundert bis zu Beginn der Orthodoxie (Stuttgart, 1952), 285–363; Karl Hermann Schelkle, Paulus – Lehrer der Väter: Die altkirchliche Auslegung von Römer 1–11 (Düsseldorf, 1959), 53–69.

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or signs of the superiority of the Christian God, Augustine accuses them of denying this evidence and of inexcusably rejecting the call to salvation: “And whoever now-a-days demands to see prodigies that he may believe is himself a great prodigy, because he does not believe, though the whole world does.”11 Here, the sociological fact of the Christian victory is seen as the best argument in favor of the true religion, and whoever is not part of it or does not want part in it can be persecuted by the Christian state on earth. From Augustine’s point of view this argument is applicable primarily to aggressive heretics (“Donatists”), but ultimately to all pagans living under Christian rule, because they could be a nuisance for the Christians. Augustine’s conviction of the “immediately obvious” existence of God is shared by most subsequent theologians, such as Anselm of Canterbury.12 Thomas Aquinas’s writings open up the discourse to a different direction because his Summa contra gentiles, written to justify the foolish verdict against the pagan philosophers (Averroists), emphasizes the “possibility” of a natural knowledge of God according to Romans 1:20, and the rationality of Christianity according to 1 Peter 3:15. Using reason, Aquinas tries to prove that all creation is oriented toward God;13 “to understand God” is therefore the ultimate goal of all rational beings.14 At the same time, he emphasizes that human reason is able to recognize “that God is,”15 through observing creation and through a metaphysical inference, but human reason is unable to grasp “what [or who] He [God] is.”16 This is due to God’s gracious selfrevelation, which can only be understood on the basis of argumentative discourse, external miracles, or a good and exemplary Christian life. But only those that God has helped in this threefold manner are obligated to believe: primo, quidem, per interiorem vocationem; secundo, per doctrinam et praedicationem exteriorem; tertio per exterior miracula.17 For Aquinas the pagans are also guilty if they do not want to believe in the true Christian God even if they have been touched by divine grace, Christian homily, and external miracles. Aquinas, like nearly all Scholastics, legitimizes

11

Magnum est ipse prodigium, qui mundo credente non credit: Augustine, De Civitate Dei, 22, 8 [Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina, 48] (Turnhout, 1955), 815. See Hansjürgen Verweyen, Gottes letztes Wort: Grundriss der Fundamentaltheologie (Düsseldorf, 1991), 322–323. 13 Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra gentiles, 3 vols. (Turin and Rome, 1967), III, 17. 14 15 Ibid., III, 25. Ibid., I, 10–13. 16 Ibid., I, 12. See also Thomas Aquinas, “Super epistolam ad Romanos,” in Super epistolas S. Pauli I (Turin and Rome, 1953), 114; Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, 4 vols. (Turin and Rome, 1952), I, q.12. 17 Thomas Aquinas, Quaestiones quodlibetales I. (Turin and Rome, n.d.), II, a.6. 12

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armed support for missionaries, based on the (European concept of the) right to preach. But he implicitly concludes that conflict with the pagans is not a crusade or the presumptuous anticipation of the wrath of God, but rather a communicative encounter; therefore one should “Equip them . . . with sound doctrine, education, knowledge of errors . . . [rather] than with weapons.”18 Aquinas heavily influenced the Spanish Dominican missionary Bartolomé de Las Casas. In general, proponents of the “inexcusability” of the sixteenthcentury indigenous American peoples and their religions follow Augustine’s argumentation regarding the “immediately obvious evidence” of the Christian God and Paul’s Letter to the Romans with his “inexcusable sinful reason.”

The Inexcusability of the Indigenous Peoples The Franciscans of the Mexico Mission Upon arriving in Mexico, the first twelve Spanish missionaries, who were Franciscans, undertook a religious conversation lasting several days with the Aztec nobility and priests.19 The contents and process of this conversation are proof that this type of mission, taking place after the colonial conquest by a Christian state, could not remain reconciliatory, but resembled a spiritual Requerimiento, a kind of religious demand to submit.20 Here one can see the foundational difference to the true irenic behavior of Paul at the Areopagus, of Francis of Assisi during his encounter with the Muslim sultan during the fifth crusade in Damietta 1219, or of the Jesuits meeting with the Japanese nobility at Yamaguchi 1551. In Mexico, the conversations got off to a good start when the Franciscans tried to explain to the Aztecs that they were not “white gods coming out of 18

Marie-Dominique Chenu, Das Werk des hl. Thomas von Aquin, 2nd expanded German ed. (Heidelberg and Graz, 1960), 334. Bernardino de Sahagún (1499/1500–1590), who came to Mexico in 1529, reconstructed from surviving notes and Aztec sources a religious conversation, which took place in 1524 between the first Franciscans and Aztec nobility. He reproduced a “literary paradigm” of the many religious conversations, which took place in the first years of the Franciscan Mexico mission. See Bernardino de Sahagún, Coloquios y doctrina cristiana, ed. Miguel León Portilla (Mexico City, 1986). The German edition is Sterbende Götter und christliche Heilsbotschaft: Wechselreden indianischer Vornehmer und spanischer Glaubensapostel in Mexiko 1524. “Coloquios y doctrina cristiana” des Fray Bernardino de Sahagún aus dem Jahre 1564 (Spanish and Mexican texts with German translation by Walter Lehmann based on the remaining documents), ed. Gerdt Kutscher [Quellenwerke zur alten Geschichte Amerikas aufgezeichnet in den Sprachen der Eingeborenen 3] (Stuttgart, 1949). 20 For the historical context of the Requerimiento during the Spanish conquest of the New World see Koschorke, Frieder, and Delgado, eds., A History of Christianity, 287–289. 19

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the water,” but only “human beings like you”: “Do not get confused! Do not consider us to be higher beings! Because we are just like you, subjects, we are also human beings like you, in no way gods, we also live on earth, we also drink water, we also eat, we also suffer from cold and heat, we are also mortal, perishable.”21 This explanation appears analogous to the episode with Paul and Barnabas in Lystra as described in Acts 14:11–18. But the apostolic way soon disappeared when the Franciscans introduced themselves as envoys of the pope, tasked with teaching the Aztecs about the sole, true God, while at the same time denying them any preexisting knowledge about this God: And now, my dear friends, we are here, here you see us, get to know us, we, who are emissaries, who are sent, who are commissioned, we are twelve, who are sent to earth by the Lord [the pope], who resides in the heart of the great city, the place called Rome. He gave us his holy authority, and the Word of God, in which lies, in which is kept the holy breeze, the holy Word of the sole, true God, the Lord of the Heavens, the Lord of the Earth, of everything living, whom you never got to know.22

Paul and Barnabas told the Lystrans, who considered them to be “gods in human bodies,” “Men, why are you doing this? We are of the same nature as you, human beings. We proclaim to you good news that you should turn from these idols to the living God, ‘who made heaven and earth and sea and all that is in them’” (Acts 14:15). But at the same time the apostles, using a theology of creation, came to a positive evaluation of pre-Christian religious history by adding: “In past generations He [the true God of the Gospel] allowed all Gentiles to go their own way; yet, in bestowing His goodness, He did not leave Himself without witness, for He gave you rains from heaven and fruitful seasons, and filled you with nourishment and gladness for your hearts” (Acts 14:16–17). It would be tempting to make a connection between the episode described in Acts and the encounter between Franciscan missionaries and Aztec priests in 1524, because the Aztec priests complained bitterly about the Christian contempt for their traditions: You told us that we did not know the God, the Lord of heaven and earth. You told us that our gods were not true gods. It is a new, outrageous word which you said, and we are upset, we take offense at it, because our ancestors . . . did not speak so. They gave us their customs (their law), they 21

Sahagún, Sterbende Götter, 74.

22

Ibid., 76–77.

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believed in the gods, they served them, and paid them homage. They taught us all what we have to do and have to honor. . . . They said: These are the gods, through whom everything is living, they showed mercy. . . . They said: These are the gods, who sustain us: who give us dinner, breakfast, meat and drink, food, corn, beans, orach or spanish spinach, sage. They are the gods, to whom we beg for water and rain, through which everything flourishes on earth.

But the Franciscans answered as Augustine once did in De Civitate Dei by pointing to the factual argument of the strong Christian God: “Hear, if they are really true gods: would we not also ask them for our human alimony? And would not they already be invoked and be worshiped everywhere on the world?”23 Afterwards, the Franciscans strongly emphasized that the Aztecs would not have any knowledge of the true God and therefore would neither adore nor fear Him; rather, their uncountable rites of sacrifices would have hurt Him, so that they remained in disgrace and subject to His wrath. Consequently, the Spaniards appeared as the subjects of the true God who came according to His wish to humble the Aztecs: “So you were punished because of the many (not few) insults, which you have committed, against Him (God).”24 It seemed fitting to them that all of the Aztecs’ gods were considered to be “negro,” “dirty,” “disgusting” devils, which should be “detested,” “despised,” “cursed,” and “spat upon.”25 The theological discourse of the Franciscans culminated first in a determination of the indigenous idolatry ab initio through their gods’ descent from the fallen angels and second in the theological claim to be able to prove this thesis according to the Bible: Therefore be assured in your hearts, that altogether none of those, whom you worship as gods, is the (true) God, none He through whom you live, because all of them are devils. You have heard how they were created and how they are constituted. But what we will say to you can be found in God’s book, the whole word of God, through whom we live, of the Lord about whom we have come to teach you.26

Certainly, the Franciscans never forgot to emphasize that in their view the indigenous peoples could not be compared with Muslims or heretics. They were rather some new kind of “ignorant” pagans: Because the Bible, the word of God, had never reached them before, they were like blind people,

23

Ibid., 80.

24

Ibid.

25

Ibid., 87, 88, 90, 122, 129, 131, 134, 93.

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like deaf people, who had lived in the night, in the darkness. For lack of better knowledge their sin was perceived as being comparatively small, as long as they accepted Christianity once presented with the religion. To those rejecting Christianity and persisting in their idolatry, however, the Franciscans showed no understanding. They did not hesitate to threaten the indigenous peoples with the strong, conquering God of Christianity: “And God, who has begun with your annihilation, will accomplish that you totally perish.”27

José de Acosta SJ The Spanish missionary and Jesuit José de Acosta (1540–1600) initially expressed his joy that the inhabitants of Peru and Mexico acknowledged and confessed the existence of a highest Lord and Creator of all things, whom the Peruvians called Viracocha, adding a very excellent name such as Pachacámac or Pachayachaic, which means the creator of the heaven and the earth, and Usapu, which means admirable, and other similar names. They worshiped him, and he was the chief god that they venerated gazing heavenward. And the same beliefs exist, after their fashion, in the Mexicans and the Chinese today and in other heathen peoples.28

Acosta observes an analogy to St. Paul’s “unknown God” (Acts 17:23) and to the beginnings of the Christian mission during the times of the apostles. He also follows the theology of Logoi spermatikoi in various ways: He explicitly says, for example, that from the beginning of the world the true God “did not leave himself without witness” (Acts 14:16–17).29 Unlike the Franciscans, Acosta concedes that the native peoples do have a natural knowledge of God, even if this appears “deficient and meager” according to his view, so that the Quechua people even when addressing God “depend on our vocabulary.”30 But this natural theology was also framed by a providential theology of history which put the sacramental-like rites of the indigenous peoples, with the help of the interpretive scheme of “diabolic mockery,” into the service of the Praeparatio evangelica: “I cannot find any better explanation for these pagan customs than that the devil is still furiously looking to imitate God in all things, and that he, the same way as he wants to 27

Ibid., 109. José de Acosta, Historia natural y moral de las Indias, ed. José Alcina Franch [Crónicas de América 34, Historia 16] (Madrid, 1987), 314–315. 29 José de Acosta, De Procuranda indorum salute [Corpus hispanorum de pace 23 and 24] (Madrid, 1984–1987), I, 122–125 (lib. I, cap. 5). 30 Acosta, Historia, 315. 28

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be worshiped and venerated as God by the blinded mortals, is seeking to adopt the sacraments and religious ceremonies of the true God due to false imitation.”31 Acosta considered indigenous religions to be merely “Idolatry, plague, lies and genetic disorder,” evoked by the deception of the devil.32 Because they followed these deceptions and fell into idolatry, Acosta considered the indigenous peoples to be “inexcusable” according to Romans 1: 20, 24–32.33 But at the same time, referring to Romans 2: 12, Acosta emphasizes that only God will be the judge of this matter and not the conquering Christians.34 He explicitly renounces any simple theology, which might justify a war of conquest against the Quechua people by pointing to their idolatry, making the Spaniards appear to be the “executors of the wrath of God.”35

Apology for Indigenous Religiosity or the Excusability of the Indigenous Peoples Bartolomé de Las Casas, OP The theological achievements of Spanish Dominican missionary Bartolomé de Las Casas (1484–1566) include developing a hermeneutical approach from the ambiguous history of theology. Using both its exclusive and inclusive aspects, he does justice to the dignity and the logic of indigenous religiosity, since Socrates’ apologetic was understood as a defense of one’s own position against subjective accusations. In this sense, ancient Christian apologists defended Christianity against pagan philosophers. Las Casas wrote his apologetical works in order to defend the truth of others. He considered indigenous idolatry and human sacrifices to be despicable, but “excusable” natural phenomena, and misguided expressions of a natural desire to find the one true God that are the result of lacking the light of faith. Following this reasoning, indigenous peoples would act out of “excusable, invincible ignorance,” because, unlike Europeans, they had not been taught about the sole true God by philosophers or apostles. In his Letter to the Romans, Las Casas continues, Paul refers to the pagan philosophers of the ancient world, who 31

Acosta, De Procuranda, II, 424–429 (lib. VI, cap. 12). See Michael Sievernich, “Missionstheologien nach Las Casas,” in Bartolomé de Las Casas, Werkauswahl, volume I: Missionstheologische Schriften, ed. Mariano Delgado (Paderborn, 1994), 59–85, at 71. 33 See Acosta, De Procuranda, II, 254–255 (lib. V, cap. 9). 34 See ibid., I, 124–125 (lib. I, cap. 5) and I, 272–273 (lib. II, cap. 4). 35 See ibid., I, 272–283 (lib. II, cap. 4). 32

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recognized the existence of a highest God, but who did not worship him accordingly.36 Las Casas responds with common sense to those who scornfully claimed that worshiping “stones” instead of the true God offends natural reason. According to Las Casas, the true intention (communis et finalis intentio) of those idolaters is not to worship stones, but to acknowledge and to appreciate the Creator and mover of the world through those stones and certain “appearances,” according to the piecemeal knowledge that they have of Him. To Las Casas, the true intention of these idolaters is to worship the sole true God, of whom they only know, based on natural reason, “that” He exists without really being able to describe “what” He is.37 Therefore, instead of declaring indigenous worship forms idolatrous, Las Casas perceived them to be authentic religiosity and not diabolic phenomena. Las Casas even concedes the right of the indigenous peoples to reject the Christian apostles and Christianity as a whole due to the relative novelty of its teachings, as the Jews did when they asked: “What kind of new religion is this, which confounds the old and time-proven order? How is it possible, that God is both one and triune at the same time, and that God himself was crucified?”38 Only in one case would the native peoples be obliged to believe the new religion to be true: If they, as Las Casas clarifies citing Thomas Aquinas, aside from the divine grace of the interior light of faith, are convinced through the discourse of the apostles and through external miraculous signs. By miraculous signs, Las Casas does not so much mean miraculous healings surpassing natural laws, but rather the impeccable way of life of these apostles and the other Christians. Las Casas’s expectations of the indigenous peoples as living a gentle, humble, kind, and virtuous life full of charity and other virtues form part of the classical repertoire of the pious. On this long wish list, Las Casas puts a special demand first: that the evangelization of the indigenous must be clearly free of any kind of imperiousness and greed, and that it must not be misused to gain control over the newly baptized or to get rich at their expense. Las Casas’s assertions about idolatry and human sacrifices hinge on the assumed lack of wise philosophers in indigenous cultures, who would have taught other forms of religion. Las Casas was aware of the fact that in the 36 See Bartolomé de Las Casas, Apologia, in Obras completas, ed. Paulino Castañeda Delgado, volume IX (Madrid, 1988), 255–266. 37 38 See ibid., 266–271. Ibid., 266.

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high valleys of Mexico a cultural hero existed, named Quetzalcóatl, who “did not want to know anything about wars, human sacrifices, and other things detrimental to the community.”39 Even if Las Casas would not be dissuaded from his apology for indigenous religiosity, he nevertheless always emphasized what was at stake here: He does not question that the indigenous peoples, like the Spaniards, might be “inexcusable in front of God,” who at the Last Judgment will judge them alike. However, he challenges the belief that the indigenous peoples are “inexcusable in front of the Spaniards,” because they “did not do anything” to them, as Las Casas puts it. As a result, his apology is a rebuttal of the Christian presumption of being qualified to anticipate God’s wrath against indigenous peoples on earth. It is no surprise that Las Casas refers in his writings to the parable of the weeds and the wheat (Matt. 13:24–30), which was a central focus in the tolerance discourse of the Renaissance. He was convinced that the persuasion of the mind by arguments and the gentle enticement and exhortation of the will, through the example of a virtuous way of life, were the only true ways of carrying out the Christian mission according to the Gospel.40 Of course, according to Las Casas, Christianity was the “true religion.” But through his discovery of “authentic religiosity” behind idolatry and his rebuttal of a mundane claim to exclusivity toward the indigenous peoples, whom he saw as “excusable” pagans, he presents an innovation in the understanding of religiosity in the Renaissance and perhaps, if not a more humanist, at least a more humane understanding of religion. Las Casas’s apology for indigenous religion culminates in his statement that Christians could learn from the indigenous form of worship. He writes about the religion of the Aztecs: And all actions and deeds, performed in their cult of the gods, were honorable, decent, clear, and pure of any infamy, vileness, and obscenity; and if you ignore the horrible and bloody sacrifices they offer, forbidden by our religion and the gentle and easy law of Jesus Christ; and those ceremonies and deeds, obviously devoted to idols, all else would deserve

39

Bartolomé de Las Casas, Apologética historia sumaria, II, in Obras completas, ed. Paulino Castañeda Delgado, volume VII (Madrid, 1992), 898. For the reference to Matthew 13: 24–30 see Las Casas, Apologia, 398–407. See Mariano Delgado, “Religion in der Renaissance und die Innovation des Bartolomé de Las Casas,” in Hans Waldenfels et al., eds., Evangelium und Kultur: Begegnungen und Brüche. Festschrift für Michael Sievernich [Studien zur christlichen Religions- und Kulturgeschichte 12] (Fribourg and Stuttgart, 2010), 397–410.

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it, that it would be performed in our universal church and that we would learn from them.41

Las Casas therefore anticipated in the Renaissance what would be written later in Nostra aetate 2 (1965): “The Catholic Church rejects nothing that is true and holy in these religions.” Besides relying on Thomas Aquinas, Las Casas also builds on the Scholastic philosopher William of Auvergne,42 who, based on the natural desire for the one true God, developed a natural interpretation of idolatry, which tends toward its “de-demonization.” Only the religious history of German idealism is renowned for developing a non-demonizing evaluation of non-Christian religions.43

Antonio de la Calancha, OSA The legend of the original evangelization of ancient America by the apostle Thomas was first spread by Jesuits as a pious explanation of some phenomena in indigenous religions which seemed “Christian.” In the sixteenth century the evangelization theory was understood as an argument for the indefensibility of the indigenous peoples, who must have apostatized from original Christianity. They would therefore not be treated as ignorant pagans but as heretics. For this reason, Las Casas rejected the Thomas legend, and also disputed that the indigenous peoples were descended from the Jews, as some people claimed, which would also mean that they had indefensibly apostatized from the original biblical monotheism. Around 1600 some baptized indigenous, mestizos, and American-born friars reinterpreted the Thomas legend as an argument for the indefensibility of the native peoples. This tendency became most obvious with the Bolivianborn Augustinian Antonio de la Calancha (1584–1654). For him, the apostle Thomas was motivated to preach in the New World for reasons of divine mercy and providence: Why should the proclamation of the Gospel or the universal salvation of Christianity be limited to the Old World? Calancha accused those who claimed this of needing an excuse to promote the demonization of indigenous religions and cultures with a clear conscience. His counter-thesis was that indigenous peoples were as much Christians of 41

Bartolomé de Las Casas, Apologética historia sumaria, III, in Obras completas, ed. Paulino Castañeda Delgado, volume VIII (Madrid, 1992), 1255. Guilielmi Alverni, Opera Omnia, 2 vols. (Paris, 1674; repr. 1963), I, fols. 66–67. 43 See Ernst Benz, Ideen zu einer Theologie der Religionsgeschichte [Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur: Abhandlungen der geistes- und sozialwissenschaftlichen Klasse 5/1960] (Wiesbaden, 1961), 452–453. 42

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the first hour as were the Spaniards but that over the course of time the light of faith had become clouded due to the lack of priests and teachers, which facilitated the work of the devil. According to Calancha, if we look more closely, many indigenous rites do not constitute a diabolic “mockery of the true religion,” but rather Christian sacraments and feasts overlaid with paganism. These would reappear if one carefully removed the pagan patina, for which the indigenous peoples could not be blamed because they had been surrendered to the power of the devil by the church for so many centuries.44

The Discussion about the Sufficiency of Implicit Faith for Salvation Thomas Aquinas addresses this question most clearly in De veritate. In his answer, Aquinas dstinguishes between a time before the existence of law (ante legem), a time of the law and the prophets (sub lege), and finally a time of mercy (sub gratia). In the pre-law time, implicit faith in divine providence sufficed for salvation, “as long as they believed that God will not withhold from those who love Him that which they need.” Therefore “male leaders (maiores) had to have explicit faith in the Redeemer, while the ordinary people (minores) had only implicit faith. This was held either in their belief in the faith of the patriarchs and prophets or in their belief in divine providence.” According to Aquinas, the pagans of the Old World can be compared to the ordinary people (minores) of the time of the law and the prophets. Therefore, an implicit faith in the Redeemer was sufficient for them also. But in the Christian time of grace a shift occurred, and now “everybody, the leaders and the ordinary people, have to have explicit faith in the Trinity and in the Redeemer.” This subsequently follows the famous story of the human being in the forest: Granted that everyone is bound to believe something explicitly, no untenable conclusion follows even if someone is brought up in the forest or among wild beasts (si in silvis vel inter bruta animalia nutriatur). For it pertains to divine providence to furnish everyone with what is necessary for salvation, provided that on his part there is no hindrance. Thus, if someone so brought up followed the direction of natural reason in seeking good and avoiding evil, we must most certainly hold that God would either reveal to him through internal inspiration what had to be believed, or would send 44

See Antonio de la Calancha, Crónica moralizada del Orden de San Agustín en el Perú, 6 vols. (Lima, 1974–1981), III, 710–771.

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some preacher of the faith to him as he sent Peter to Cornelius (Acts 10:20). Although it is not within our power to know matters of faith by ourselves alone, still, if we do what we can, that is, follow the guidance of natural reason, God will not withhold from us that which we need. 45

Facienti quod in se est, Deus non denegat gratiam is the classical Scholastic formula. Sixteenth-century theologians from Salamanca referred to this passage from Thomas Aquinas to explain the Celeberrima quaestio (Domingo de Soto) as a necessity of faith for salvation, because of the discovery of so many indigenous peoples in the Americas, who, due to their seclusion in the time of grace (sub gratia), had been excluded from Christian preaching. First, Soto held the opinion that explicit faith in Christ could not be necessary for salvation, because for many it would be impossible. Through an excusable insurmountable ignorance many would be exempt from the law of faith. On the basis of Melchor Cano’s critique, Soto revised his position so that explicit faith is indeed necessary, but understood as that “implicit faith” which follows the guidance of natural reason.46 Near the end of the sixteenth century, Acosta polemicized against the sufficiency of fides implicita. He saw it as a danger of missionary defeatism: After this tremendous New World had been discovered, our theologians started to teach and to write such nonsense. . . . I would like to share the apology, which these authors write in favor of these native peoples, because I feel strongly connected to the cause of the Indigenous. But I am prevented from doing so by the fact that nobody comes to the Father except through Christ (John 14: 6) and that there is no other way and no other door to gain eternal life (John 6: 37–40, 44–46). Besides, there would be these true circumstances: If you could gain salvation and justification without having known Christ, then it would not be worth preaching Christ and sending apostles into the world, nor to spread: “Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved” (Mark 16:16).47

Consequences of the Substitution of Indigenous Religions by Catholic Christianity The typologies for the interpretation of indigenous religions, which have been introduced here, also had consequences for their substitution by Thomas Aquinas, “Quaestiones disputatae de veritate,” in Thomas Aquinas, Quaestiones disputatae (Turin and Rome, 1965), I, q. 14, a. 11, ad 1um and ad 2um. See the discussion in Teófilo Urdánoz, “La necesidad de la fe explícita para salvarse según los teólogos de la Escuela de Salamanca,” Ciencia Tomista 59 (1940), 398–414, 529–553, 60 (1941), 109–134, 61 (1941), 83–107. 47 Acosta, De Procuranda, II, 190–197 (lib. V, cap. 3). 45

46

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Catholic Christianity. The advocates of inexcusable idolatry by the indigenous peoples supported a policy of tabula rasa, meaning a radical eradication of indigenous idolatry in accordance with examples in the Old Testament (Deut. 7:5, 12:2–3; Exod. 34:13). They worked for the thorough destruction of particular religions or cults. Here, Acosta refers to the teaching of Augustine. A longer quotation may be appropriate, because its content is important for an understanding of mainstream missionary thinking of the early modern age: The first concern of a priest shall be to remove the idols from the hearts of his audience; the best way to achieve this is to instruct and exhort. But it must be tried by any means to remove the idols from their eyes and ways of life. Here Holy Scripture gives us eloquent instructions and examples: “Tear down their altars and smash their sacred pillars” [Deut. 7:5, 12:2; Exod. 34:13] says the Lord. . . . Priests and governors are to eradicate any kind or any suspicion of superstition under any circumstances. There are two approaches to achieving this goal; according to Christian law both are justified and adequate. The first is used for those who are already Christians and who have received baptism: evidence of pagan superstition cannot be tolerated among them. Any kind of idolatry which is discovered among them must be strictly persecuted; it must be prevented in advance by destroying all images. . . . Consequently, not only idols and the obvious evidence of idolatry must be eradicated, but also any remnant of inherited superstition. If necessary, one may also draw on their political power and authority. All of this refers to the political subordinates and children of the church. What must be done with the unbelieving? Here we must carefully distinguish between two cases. If they practice their rites and ceremonies without provoking the believers, and allow everyone to live according to his laws, then we shall leave them in their ignorance until they are enlightened by God. The words of the apostle are aiming for that: “God will judge those outside” [1 Cor. 5:13]. But if they are subjects of Christian rulers and provoke the already converted, no tolerance can be shown to them. Here St. Augustine is praising the laws of Constantine the Great, in which he had ordered the closing of pagan temples and the destruction of images. Similarly, St. Ambrose argued against Symmachus, the city prefect, that the sacrificial altar of the goddess of fortune had to be removed from the Roman Senate. The Council of Elvira [Ilíberis, Spain, ca. 300] also mandated that masters must destroy the carved images of their slaves.48

Acosta’s plan was to destroy the indigenous idols and temples, and at the same time, with the help of Catholic liturgy and popular devotion, 48

Ibid., II, 270–277 (lib. V, cap. 11).

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replace the “damnable rites” of the indigenous peoples with Christian ceremonies: Priest must convince the newly converted that holy water, images of saints, rosaries, blessed grains, candles, and other things which Holy Mother Church endorses and uses are a very beneficial means for them. All these practices they must praise explicitly in their homilies to the people, so that the people instead of the old superstition take in these new Christian signs. By practicing better and proper rites they will drop the traditional superstition of her cult from their hands and hearts.49

Las Casas knew that the idols would inevitably be taken from the indigenous peoples against their will. From a psychological perspective he emphasized that nobody would simply and voluntarily abandon “what he has considered to be his God for many years, what he cut his teeth on, and what has been borne witness to by his ancestors, without having understood beforehand, that he trades his idol for the one true God.”50 Like Acosta, Las Casas also refers to Augustine’s insistence51 that idols must first be eradicated from one’s heart. But this must be done only by peaceful, discursive means: “To remove the idea and appreciation that idolaters show their idols, through tireless, eager, and consistent teaching so as to reveal to them the idea of the true God. Afterwards, they themselves should level and demolish their idols with their own hands due to the awareness of their deception and error.”52 The substitution should therefore be made by the indigenous peoples themselves, and with conviction. Calancha interpreted indigenous religiosity as a pagan remnant of an urevangelization by the apostle Thomas, which the church had not continued. This makes possible a Christian purification and absorption of indigenous religiosity with the necessary pastoral prudence. Calancha demonstrates this new mentality with an episode from the life of Toribio Alfonso de Mogrovejo (1538–1606), the archbishop of Lima around 1600. When in an Andean village of the Chachapoyas province in the east of Cajamarca, a stone was found which the indigenous venerated, “where tracks of two rivers are preserved together with fourteen dots and as well as two concaves of two knees and a long lacuna of a pilgrim’s staff,” the bishop did not react according to the “tabula rasa method” of the advocates of the indefensibility 49

50 Ibid., II, 274–277 (lib. V, cap. 11). Ibid. See Augustine, De Verbis Domini, Sermo 62, Kap. 7 [Patrologia Latina 38] (Paris, 1865), 420. 52 Bartolomé de Las Casas, Historia de las Indias, in Obras completas, ed. Paulino Castañeda Delgado, volume V (Madrid, 1994), 2264 (lib. III, cap. 117). 51

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of the indigenous peoples, but instead went on a pilgrimage with his clergy to this site, kissed the stone, and established a chapel, “in which the stone was placed.”53 In this way a new Catholic place of pilgrimage came into existence on the site of the old indigenous cult. This pastoral prudence (together with the exceptional work of the missionaries studying the indigenous languages and cults, and with the Indigenous Peoples Protection Acts of the Crown) was the decisive factor for Catholic Christianity in reaching the hearts of the indigenous peoples with an indigenous popular piety. None other than Octavio Paz has acknowledged this: After the ties to their actual culture were ripped off, after their gods were dead, and their cities destroyed, these orphaned native peoples found a new place in the world through the Catholic Faith. (This possibility, of belonging to a living system, and even if it was only at lowest rank of society, was denied the indigenous people of the New England States!). We should not forget that affiliation to the Catholic Faith involves a place in the cosmos. The flight of the gods and the fall of the leaders pushed the natives into a vast loneliness, unimaginable for the modern human being. Only Catholicism enabled them to reconnect with the world and the afterlife, it provided them with a sense of life which nurtured their hope and justified their life and death.54

Final Remarks In the examination of indigenous religions in the Americas, all approaches that may be found in the history of theology were used. The prevalence of the exclusivity approaches and the anapologétous, according to Romans 1:18–21, was not least a consequence of the narrow understanding of the tradition marked by the Council of Florence (1442) and the concept of religion at the beginning of the Renaissance. Christians such as Las Casas, who supported a de-demonizing of non-Christian religiosity and perceived the true and holy contained in it, were ahead of their time. They already represented the inclusivity approach of the church toward other religions which was later promulgated during the Second Vatican Council (1965) (see Lumen gentium 16; Nostra aetate 2).

53

Calancha, Crónica, III, 744. Octavio Paz, Das Labyrinth der Einsamkeit (Frankfurt am Main, 1979), 104. See Mariano Delgado, “Western Catholicism and the Indian Religions, or Syncretism: Balance and Perspectives,” Studies in Interreligious Dialogue 6, no. 1 (1996), 5–28.

54

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bibliography de Acosta, José. Historia natural y moral de las Indias, ed. José Alcina Franch [Crónicas de América 34, Historia 16]. Madrid, 1987. De Procuranda indorum salute [Corpus hispanorum de pace 23 and 24]. Madrid, 1984– 1987. Benz, Ernst. Ideen zu einer Theologie der Religionsgeschichte [Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur: Abhandlungen der geistes- und sozialwissenschaftlichen Klasse 5/ 1960]. Wiesbaden, 1961. de la Calancha, Antonio. Crónica moralizada del Orden de San Agustín en el Perú, 6 vols. Lima, 1974–1981. Delgado, Mariano. “Das Christentum in der Religionsgeschichte: Unterwegs zu einem aufgeklärten Inklusivismus,” in Mariano Delgado, Gregor Maria Hoff, and Günter Riβe, eds., Das Christentum in der Religionsgeschichte: Perspektiven für das 21. Jahrhundert. Festschrift für Hans Waldenfels [Studien zur christlichen Religions- und Kulturgeschichte 16]. (Fribourg and Stuttgart, 2011), 15–31. “Religion in der Renaissance und die Innovation des Bartolomé de Las Casas,” in Hans Waldenfels et al., eds., Evangelium und Kultur: Begegnungen und Brüche. Festschrift für Michael Sievernich [Studien zur christlichen Religions- und Kulturgeschichte 12] (Fribourg and Stuttgart, 2010), 397–410. “Western Catholicism and the Indian Religions, or Syncretism,” Studies in Interreligious Dialogue 6, no. 1 (1996), 5–28. Despland, Michel. La religion en occident. Évolution des idées et du vécu. (Montreal, 1979). Koschorke, Klaus, Ludwig Frieder, and Mariano Delgado, eds. A History of Christianity in Asia, Africa, and Latin-America, 1450–1990: A Documentary Sourcebook. Grand Rapids and Cambridge, 2007. de Las Casas, Bartolomé. Apologia. In Obras completas, volume IX, ed. Paulino Castañeda Delgado. Madrid, 1988. Paz, Octavio. Das Labyrinth der Einsamkeit. Frankfurt am Main, 1979. de Sahagún, Bernardino. Coloquios y doctrina cristiana, ed. Miguel León Portilla. Mexico City, 1986; German ed. Sterbende Götter und christliche Heilsbotschaft: Wechselreden indianischer Vornehmer und spanischer Glaubensapostel in Mexiko 1524. “Coloquios y doctrina cristiana” des Fray Bernardino de Sahagún aus dem Jahre 1564 (Spanish and Mexican text with a German translation by Walter Lehmannni, from the remaining documents), ed. Gerdt Kutscher [Quellenwerke zur alten Geschichte Amerikas aufgezeichnet in den Sprachen der Eingeborenen 3]. Stuttgart, 1949. Sievernich, Michael. “Missionstheologien nach Las Casas,” in Bartolomé de Las Casas, Werkauswahl, volume I: Missionstheologische Schriften, ed. Mariano Delgado. Paderborn, 1994, 59–85. Smith, Wilfred Cantwell. The Meaning and End of Religion. New York, 1962; repr. Minneapolis, 1991. Urdánoz, Teófilo. “La necesidad de la fe explícita para salvarse según los teólogos de la Escuela de Salamanca.” Ciencia Tomista 59 (1940), 398–414, 529–553, 60 (1941), 109–134, 61 (1941), 83–107.

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From the sixteenth to early mid-seventeenth centuries the Society of Jesus in the Portuguese East Indies pioneered the missionary concept and practice of omnia omnibus. The theological views of Ignatius of Loyola, who founded the Society in 1540, formed Jesuit global missionary principles. The meditations in Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises depict an image of a missionary God in the divine act of self-sending and becoming incarnate.1 This God calls on the Jesuits to go and “help souls” of diverse persons in the whole “circuit of the world” by becoming like them.2 The fourth vow in the Society’s Constitutions requires members to go wherever the pope and the General of the Society send them.3 Teaching of Christian doctrine (catechism) was central to their ministry wherever they went.4 Their missionaries in India and Japan lived like Asians, learned their complex languages, cultures, religions, and social norms, and reformed their European catechesis to make them relevant for Asians. Their success also depended on the degree to which Asians could also accommodate the Jesuit worldview. Moreover, Iberian colonialism always overshadowed these mutual accommodations. Nonetheless, joint efforts between missionaries and native catechists resulted in the production of new catechisms, in which hybrid theologies were manifest. This chapter examines several mission catechisms from the Jesuit missions in Japan and India, and poses several questions. What did the Jesuit 1 See Ignatius of Loyola, Ignatius of Loyola: The Spiritual Exercises and Selected Works, ed. George E. Ganss (New York, 1991), 148. 2 On “help souls” see John W. O’Malley, The First Jesuits (Cambridge, 1993), 18–19. 3 See Ignatius of Loyola, The Constitutions of the Society of Jesus, ed. George E. Ganss (St. Louis, 1970), 238. 4 See O’Malley, The First Jesuits, 87–88, 115–126. For the theories of Tridentine Catholicism, globalization, and transculturality in comparative Jesuit missionary catechesis see also Antje Flüchter, “Translating Catechisms, Translating Cultures: An Introduction,” in Antje Flüchter and Rouven Wirbser, eds., Translating Catechisms, Translating Cultures: The Expansion of Catholicism in the Early Modern World [Religious Cultures in the Early Modern World] (Leiden and Boston, 2017), 3–49 (hereafter TCTC).

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missionaries regard as standard Christian doctrine? What changes did they make to convey their message in religious language that could speak to persons in India and Japan? What challenging questions arose? What concepts and expressions remained untranslatable? How much did native catechists contribute to the translating and transforming of missionary idioms? How do the apologetic catechisms reflect actual Christian dialogue with other religions? These inquiries further lead to questions of the limitations of translation, accommodation, assimilation, acculturation, enculturation, indigenization, syncretism, and the rejection of Christianity in multi-religious contexts.

Historical Context Although Jesuit catechesis occurred simultaneously in India and Japan, one must pay attention to their respective contexts. These nations each had a long history of exchanging goods, persons, ideas, and religions, but the geopolitical-colonial-ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the Portuguese padroado (patronage), set by the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), connected them in a new way. The arrival of Francis Xavier (1506–1552), the first Jesuit in padroado India, occurred in 1542. The Portuguese “discovered” Japan in 1542 and Xavier went there in 1549. Subsequent Jesuit missionaries to Japan all traveled via India. Political conditions differed greatly between the two countries. The Portuguese colonized Goa in 1500 and regarded it as the capital of the Portuguese East Indies. The authorities imposed Catholicism in Goa and other colonial ports along the coastline. Many powerful Hindu and Muslim empires and kingdoms occupied India’s vast interior. These rulers all engaged in battles for territorial expansion. Japan was never a colonial possession of the Portuguese. It had been going through a period of civil wars among sixty-six feudal warlords since 1467. Three strongmen gradually arose and reunified the nation, culminating in the establishment of the Tokugawa shogunate in 1603. Religious diversity existed in both locales. In India, Thomas Christians had a longstanding presence. The majority of the population practiced Indian traditional religions with numerous local variants. Muslims also held their own diverse traditions. The Buddhist population was smaller. When Christianity arrived in Japan for the first time in 1549, Japanese Buddhism had developed into twelve different schools, and traditional Shinto had become fused with Buddhism. Taoism influenced folk practices. 643

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Confucianism, which only the aristocrats studied during the medieval period, would become Tokugawa ideology. India had a greater diversity of race, ethnicity, and languages. Japan’s lingua franca was universally Japanese, and the ethnic-minority population remained small, including captives from the invasion of Korea (1592–1598). The initial patterns of evangelization and the development of the respective Jesuit missions also varied. Secular priests and other Catholic orders arrived in India earlier than the Jesuits. While the Jesuits tried to reform the loose morals of Portuguese Christians, they sometimes compromised with the colonial church by allowing conversion by force and incentive. Nonetheless, they pioneered in indigenizing Christianity and interreligious dialogue in Malabar, Madurai, and North India, while they worked to join the Roman Church with the Thomas Christians in Kerala and the Orthodox Christians in Ethiopia. Their impact in India has lasted until the present. In contrast, with the papal bull allowing their missionary monopoly in Japan until 1608, the Jesuits cultivated their accommodation model, and Christianity spread steadily under the patronage of local lords until 1612, despite occasional persecutions. The authorities’ suspicion of European colonial encroachment, competition between the Jesuits and the laterarriving mendicants from the Spanish Philippines, and the coming of the English and the Dutch trading companies hastened the Tokugawa ban on Christianity, the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1614, and the execution of tens of thousands of Christians. By 1641 Japan had closed its doors to the West, except for Dutch traders, with a strict prohibition of proselytization. The church went totally underground before resurfacing in the 1860s.

Catechisms in Japan Catechesis in the Japan mission developed in two stages. The first saw rather crude attempts by Xavier and Alessandro Valignano to translate Christian doctrine into Japanese, with polemical criticisms against Japanese religions. Yet even during this phase the mission developed more sophisticated and suitable translations of catechisms. Collaboration between missionaries and native catechists resulted in Kirishitanban. In the second phase the Jesuit press, founded in 1590, published these Kirishitanban catechisms.

Early Missionary Catechisms An encounter with a few Japanese in Malacca around 1547 convinced Xavier to proselytize in Japan. One of the first converts was Anjiró (or Yajirō), who 644

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then studied at the Jesuit College in Goa. Based on knowledge gained from Anjiró and Nicolao Lancilotto (ca. 1515–1558), Xavier composed a catechism in Japanese in Goa. In 1549 Xavier arrived in Kagoshima with Anjiró, Father Cosme de Torres (1510–1570), and Juan Fernández (ca. 1526–1567), and immediately engaged in disputation with the Buddhists. Many errors, especially the use of Dainich (Tathagata) as the name of God, caused much confusion. Despite this, about 700 Japanese became Christian before Xavier left for China in 1551. After Xavier’s departure the mission quickly abandoned his catechism. After that, Japanese Brother Lourenço (1526–1592) helped Father Balthasar Gago (1515–1583) write Twenty-Five Articles in Japanese using a dialogical format. This was used until 1570. Meanwhile, in 1570 the Superior of the Mission Francisco Cabral (1533–1609) endorsed the Roman Catechism in Latin, perhaps as a seminary textbook. No copies of these earlier catechisms survive. After his first visit to Japan (1579–1582), Visitor Alessandro Valignano (1539–1606) published Catechismus Christianae fidei in Lisbon in 1586. Although often mentioned as the definitive Japanese catechism in the spirit of Matteo Ricci and Roberto de Nobili’s accommodation theory, it is rather condescending in tone. In his Scholastic arguments on Deus as the Prime Mover, human reason, natural revelation, revelation through the Trinity, incarnation, and salvation, Valignano lumps Japanese religions together into a single heresy and dismisses their teachings as stupid lies and senseless delusions.5 Since Valignano never learned Japanese, he based his Catechismus on lectures which he delivered with much help from Japanese translators at the novitiate in Usuki in 1581.6 These lecture notes, most likely composed by Japanese catechists, present numerous carefully chosen Buddhist key terms and concepts. Valignano included only a dozen of these in his publication.

Kirishitanban Doctrina Christam Valignano’s greatest contribution was his foundation of the Jesuit press in Japan in 1590. Among sixty plus Kirishitanban titles which the press published 5 Despite his confused presentations of Japanese Buddhism, Valignano makes two interesting points, which later catechisms do not include. The first is the doctrine of henjō nanshi, which teaches that, because of their essential impediment, women only achieve salvation by turning into men. The second is that because of this doctrine bonzos avoid women and have sexual relationships with young men against the natural law. See Alessandro Valignano, Catechismus Christianae fidei, in quo veritas nostræ religionis ostenditur, & sectæ Iaponenses confutantur (Lisbon, 1586), in facsimile, Tenri Central Library (Tokyo, 1972), 4 and 46. 6 On the modern rediscovery of these lecture notes, provisionally entitled Nihon no katekizumo (Japanese catechism), and its critical edition with the editor’s commentary, see Arimichi Ebisawa et al., Kirishitan kyōrisho (Tokyo, 1993), 221–255, 504–506 (hereafter Kyōrisho).

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were two standard catechisms. The very first Kirishitanban publication in 1591 was どちりいな きりしたん (Doctrina Christam) in a dialogical form between a student and teacher.7 This is printed in Kokuji (Japanese characters). It is not a translation of Marcos Jorge’s Christian Doctrine for children in Portuguese, as is often assumed.8 While it contains many transliterations of Portuguese and Latin, it utilizes numerous Buddhist terms. The preface of Doctrina Christam states that while it stands in the long history of catechisms, it is a “small sutra (chiisaqi qiō),” which the superior of the Society prepared specially for those who want to be “certain about the true way of salvation in the afterlife (goxō vo tasucaru michi).”9 It claims that its expressions are easily understood by everyone, noble or plebian, while maintaining sound doctrine. It also explains that the use of a dialogue between teacher and student (xi-dexi no mondō) presents ideas in a logical and understandable way. While in traditional catechisms the teacher is an examiner and the student repeats correct answers by rote memorization, the student in Doctrina Christam raises difficult and controversial questions, reflecting those that Japanese converts actually posed to the missionaries, as Higashibaba rightly notes.10 In chapter 1 the student initiates the dialogue by expressing his desire to learn more about Christian teachings beyond what he knows from sermons. In response, the teacher dialogically helps him understand what Christians are. Chapter 2 teaches the significance of the cross for Christians. As shown in its chapter headings, Doctrina contains traditional elements of catechism: the Pater Noster, Ave Maria, Salve Regina, prayers to saints, Credo (the Apostles’ Creed), and Decalogue (including Jesus’ command to love God and one’s neighbor).11 In chapters 8 and 9, “On the Regulations of the Holy Church,” the teacher explains the basic requirements in regards to the Mass, confession, the Eucharist, fasting, and tithing. The topics continue traditional ethical teaching, such as the seven deadly sins and seven virtues; the seven sacraments of the church; seven corporal works of mercy; seven spiritual 7 Doctrina Christam, ed. Hubert Cieslik, Tadao Doi, and Mitsunobu Ōtsuka, in Arimichi Ebisawa et al., eds., Kirishitansho haiyasho (Tokyo, 1970), 13–81. 8 See Ikuo Higashibaba, Christianity in Early Modern Japan: Kirishitan Belief and Practice [Brill’s Japanese Studies Library 16] (Leiden and Boston, 2001), 56–57 on the Doctrina Christam of Marcos Jorge (1524–1608). 9 Ebisawa et al., eds., Kirishitansho haiyasho, 14–15. 10 See Higashibaba, Christianity in Early Modern Japan, 61–63. 11 Printed leaflets of the Credo, almost identical to the one in this Doctrina, had been in circulation prior to the publication of the Doctrina in 1591. A copy is preserved in Sophia University Laures Collection with the provisional title Oratio danquan.

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works of mercy; three theological virtues; seven spiritual gifts; eight beatitudes; prayer of confession; and prayer before and after the meal. Even within this framework, uniquely Japanese questions are highlighted. For example, the student complains that the sacrament of marriage is too strict and hard to practice, indicating that Christian marriage was a thorny issue, as Japanese law allowed polygamy. In 1592 the Japan Province adopted Doctrina as the standard catechism. In the same year the press published the same Doctrina rendered in Rōmaji (the Roman alphabet).12 There were very few differences between these versions. In place of the table of contents placed at the end of the Kokuji version, the Rōmaji version adds a summary catechism in ten articles and a simple glossary.13 In 1600 the press published revisions of Doctrina first in Rōmaji and then in Kokuji, both typeset by Gotō Thome Sōin, SJ, with minimal discrepancies.14 These 1600 revisions of Doctrina keep the same structure as the 1591–1592 Doctrinas with an almost identical preface but without an appendix. A comparison between the 1591–1592 and 1600 Doctrinas reveals the continued efforts to make theology understandable and usable for ordinary Christians. The 1600 versions replace most Buddhist and European terms in the 1591–1592 editions with simpler Japanese expressions. For example, the Buddhist term for the “certain way of salvation (anjin qetgijō no itdō)” is changed to the “teaching to enlighten wise eyes (chiye no manaco vo aqiramuru voxiye).”15 The term guedat (liberation from karma) is replaced with jiyū (freedom), and saido riyacu (profit of help) to sucuuare (salvation). The translation of the Pater Noster (chapter 3) is very refined and close to the one in use today. Such expressions as tenjō, gloria, and vondade (heaven, glory, and will) become the more apt ten no paraiso, von fomare, and vovoximexi.16 In the commentary on the Ave Maria, a clarification is made that Christians do not offer yecō (Buddhist prayers for the dead) to the altar image of the 12

Doctrina Christam (1592), ed. Arimichi Ebisawa and Hisashi Kishino, in Kyōrisho, 95–173. The Ten Articles or “Moromoro Christam no xirubeqi jōjō no coto” (Several matters which every Christian must know) is found in Kyōrisho, 161–164. These contain articles on God as creator of all, Trinity, incarnation, immortality of the soul, Decalogue, sacraments and the church, passion, resurrection, judgment, and confession. These articles in pamphlet forms were later incorporated in such publications as Oratio no fonyaqu (Nagasaki, 1600). Ebisawa notes that the underground Christians in Ikitsuki still recited a similar eleven articles in the twentieth century: see Arimichi Ebisawa, Kirishitan Namban bungaku nyūmon (Tokyo, 1991), 101. 14 For the modern edition of the 1600 Rōmaji version see Doctrina Christam, ed. Arimichi Ebisawa and Hisashi Kishino, in Kyōrisho, 13–93; for the 1600 Kokuji version see Doctrina Christam, ed. Arimichi Ebisawa, in Nagasakiban Dochirina Kirishitan (Tokyo, 1950; rev. 1991). 15 16 Kyōrisho, 15–16, 98. Ibid., 25–30, 107–112. 13

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Virgin Mary, but they pray these Marian prayers to God, who alone can provide salvation after death (goxō no tasucari).17 The description of St. Mary as the Queen Consort (cōqiū) is expanded to the Queen of Heaven, Precious Female Saint, or Pious Woman (ten no qisaqi and tattoqi jennhonin), the latter making her closer to Japanese women. Furthermore, the 1600 versions insert a section on the Rosary Prayer. This indicates the context of the increased Jesuit competition against the Dominican Confraternity of the Rosary. Other elaborations in the 1600 versions reflect the climate of increasing persecution. The commentary on article eleven in the Credo (chapter 6) assures the resurrection of the Christian body, even after being burnt to ashes.18 In chapter 7 on the Decalogue, the fifth commandment not to kill, the student poses a new question, how a nation could govern well without executing its criminals. The teacher explains that this general rule applies only to those who are not serving in official positions. This answer allows the Christian lords to participate in battle against other lords. The teacher gives further elaboration to one of the student’s questions originally posed in the 1591–1592 versions, asking if the lord may punish his errant vassal. The teacher in 1600 advises that only those masters with “highest privilege” may execute a criminal vassal, and only after a thorough examination, because taking human life is “the deepest concern.”19 The student challenges the teacher, asking what he means by “the deepest concern” and the “highest privilege.” The teacher answers that to execute someone who has committed no offense is tyranny, and only the lords who receive permission from the head of the state should carry out executions. The 1600 Doctrinas include more instructions for penitential acts. In chapter 8 a new regulation on the Sabbath is added, and more details of the required fasts are given.20 In contrast, earlier regulations on tithes and offerings have been totally deleted. Questions on the sacraments continue to be expanded. Importantly, the teacher in 1600 names two additional possibilities for baptism without water.21 First, the baptism of hope (nozomi no Bautismo) is given to those who die in the sure conviction of salvation without the chance of receiving water baptism (mizu no Bautismo). Second is the baptism of blood (chi no Bautismo) given to the martyrs executed for their faith (Fides). Written shortly after the first state execution, that of the Nagasaki Twenty-Six in 1597, this change reflects the heightened expectation of martyrdom. In the sacrament of the Eucharist, various new terms make their meaning clearer. The 17 21

Ibid., 30–35, 112–115. Ibid., 74–76, 146–148.

18

Ibid., 49.

19

Ibid., 54, 132.

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Ibid., 58–69, 135–140.

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1600 versions replace the transliteration Mysterio in 1591–1592 with translations such as “the logic (kotouari) which cannot be explained by words,” “wondrous teaching (fucaxigi no gi),” and “the story concerning the Passion (go Passiom).”22 The term go nhūmet, which means Buddha’s death, is replaced with go xiqio (precious death) of Jesus.23 The teacher in 1600 states clearly that in receiving the Eucharist, one must think about the nature and person of Jesus Christ, using the Chalcedonian definition as truly divine and truly human (macoto no D, macoto no fito).24 The sacrament of penance receives the largest expansion.25 The discussion on contrition is detailed, and a new teaching of attrition and satisfaction is added. The sacrament of marriage continues to be controversial. The 1600 versions retain the student’s complaints about the difficulty of practicing monogamy, and its prohibition against receiving this sacrament repeatedly for polygamous unions.26 Yet the 1600 versions omit the duty of husband and wife in the task of procreation and childrearing as partners from 1591–1592. In addition to these four complete standard versions of Doctrina Christam of the Jesuit mission, there is a Franciscan variant, provisionally entitled Kirishitan kokoroesho (Basics for Christians), with an emphasis on the Four Last Things.27 Although not meant as a catechism for ordinary people, the Jesuits also prepared Compendium catholicae veritatis, a textbook for the Scholastic brothers at the Jesuit college, founded on Valignano’s initiative in 1580. The Latin version, based on the lectures of Father Pedro Gómez (1535–1600), was completed in 1593. The Japanese translation mainly by Father Pedro Ramón (1549–1611) was finished in 1595.28 It consists of three parts: De sphaera;

22

23 24 Ibid., 77–80, 148–151. Ibid., 78, 80, 150, 151. Ibid., 80. Ibid., 80–83, 152–153. 26 Ibid., 88, 157. See also Takao Abé, “Christian Catechisms and Practice in Japan in the Era of the Jesuit Mission: An Intercultural Approach,” in TCTC, 285–307, on the complexity of “Japanese religions,” and Japanese Christians’ contributions to Jesuit literary productions. On the European arguments and Japanese discourses on marriage and divorce in the Jesuit catechisms see Rouven Wirbser, “A Law Too Strict? The Cultural Translation of Catholic Marriage in the Jesuit Mission to Japan,” in TCTC, 252–284. 27 For a critical edition with editor’s comments see Kyōrisho, 175–219, 501–503. It does not use a dialogue and mentions papal indulgences, the belt of the Franciscan Confraternity of the Cord, and architectural designs of European churches. 28 For a critical edition of Gomez’s Latin work see Satoru Obara, ed., Iezusukai Nihon Korejiyo no kōgiyōkō, 3 vols. [Kirishitan Bungaku Sōsho] (Tokyo, 1997–1999). For the foundation and relocations of the Jesuit college (seminary), Kirishitan doctrinal literature and the Compendium, and a good comparison between Gomez’s free adaptation of the post-Tridentine Roman Catechism and Ramón’s further free translation, see M. Antoni J. Üçerler, “Jesuit Humanist Education in Sixteenth Century Japan,” in Compendium catholicae veritatis, ed. Jōchi daigaku 25

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De anima; and De theologia. Part 3, also entitled Compendium catholicae veritatis or Teachings on the Truth (Xinjit no oxie), contains selective portions of the Roman Catechism and makes minimal references to European Reformation controversies, while addressing some specific issues which preachers might encounter in Japanese congregations.29 Such cultural adjustments include lenient guidelines for Kirishitans’ participation in common Japanese festivals. For example, at Urabon the ceremonial food offerings to welcome the spirits of one’s ancestors’ return is discouraged, but allowed if so ordered by one’s master. Concerning why it took so long for the gospel to arrive in Japan, it explains that God mercifully waited until there were those who were ready to accept it. As Üçerler notes, Valignano, Gómez, and Ramón and other authors such as Japanese brothers Yōfō Paulo (1508–1595) and Vicente Fōin (1540–1609), can be regarded as “pioneers in the creation of a Christian philosophy and theology ‘in context’.”30 Between 1597 and 1621 this textbook formed the basis of scholastic instruction and by 1601 two graduates, Luis Niabara and Sebastião Kimura, had received ordination as the first “native” priests. The final Jesuit catechism is Myōtei mondō, composed by Brother Fabian Fucan (1565–1621) around 1605 before his apostasy in 1607. This is an apologetic catechism along the lines of Valignano’s, but with more accuracy and sophistication in discussing Japanese religions. The manuscript was not discovered until 1972 because scholars had paid singular attention to Fabian’s anti-Christian pamphlet Ha Daiusu (1620). Myōtei mondō consists of three parts: Buddhism; Confucianism and Shinto; and Christianity. Unlike the earlier male dialogue partners, this dialogue takes place between two nuns with personal names. As Fabian states in his postscript that he had women readers in mind, he most likely preserved actual exchanges of the women catechists of Miyaco no bicuni, exhibiting their solid knowledge of Japanese religions and Christianity. Kirishitan bunko, 3 vols. (Tokyo, 1997), III, 11–60. See also Satoru Obara, “Iezusukai Nihon colegio no ‘Compendium Kōgi yōkō’,” in Obara, ed., Kōgiyōkō, III, 288–340. 29 See Obara, ed., Kōgiyōkō, II, 74. The Roman Catechism in Latin was also printed in 1595, but no copy survives. In the preface Ramón states that the Roman Catechism is a massive compilation of theological scholarship which would require many years for the Japanese brothers to study and master, but because of the urgent needs to preach logically to the errant non-Christians, the translators selected the most important matters from the Roman Catechism and added more relevant teachings to the Japanese situation. It also states that there would be five volumes, although in actuality it has only four. The fourth volume on “Being a Kirishitan,” on such virtues as fortitude, perhaps more relevant for Kirishitans under persecution, is torn from the manuscript. 30 Üçerler, “Jesuit Humanist Education,” 32.

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Part I of Myōtei mondō presents detailed teachings of Japanese Buddhism citing from various places in Buddhist literature. The early chapters explain the common Buddhist understanding of the origin of the cosmos (sangai, or three worlds of desire, material and non-material) and the origin of religion in the person of Shaka.31 Myōtei mondō refutes aspects of these ideas as unscientific by using contemporary astrological, navigational, and geographical knowledge. Then it argues that all twelve schools regard the phenomena of this world as essentially nothing and do not provide the way of salvation in life after death.32 It analyzes particular teachings of the representative schools of Hossōshū, Sanronshū, Kegonshū, Tendai and Nichirenshū, Shingonshū, Zenshū, Jōdo, and Ikkōshū in separate sections. Each section gives fair and nuanced explanations on concepts such as the essential unchanging absolute reality in the “seemingly ever shifting life world” (xōjō fenge), its cycle (rinne), human illusions and suffering (bon’nō), recognition of truth (xin’nho) through senses or conscience (qensō), acquisition of wisdom (fannha) through many degrees of discipline and progress, sudden enlightenment (satori) that all is nothing (qū), and the state of enlightenment (nefan) of Buddha, etc. Part II of Myōtei mondō explains important principles such as taikyoku and ying-yang in Japanese Confucianism, and states that Confucianism contains some useful truths.33 However, it dismisses Shinto teaching of the origin of Japan as myth, a mere fiction without religious depth.34 At the beginning of part III of Myōtei mondō the teacher Yūtei affirms her vocation as a woman catechist despite the danger in facing hatred, criticism, and physical violence from those who are provoked by Christianity and outspoken women, indicating that there were ongoing attacks against these women catechists.35 She goes on to defend Christianity by referring back to Buddhism.36 First, she explains the supremacy of the One Deus as the invisible eternal creator of all things, who alone can give peace in this life and salvation in the next. To her interlocutor Myōshū, who considers that all created things are one and equal as they issued from one essence, Yūtei provides a new teaching of the rational and immortal soul, which Deus creates uniquely in humanity. Myōshū’s major questions are about the Buddhist gocuracu (heaven), Jōdo (Pureland), tenjō (heaven above), and jigocu (hell).37 Yūtei explains again that these Buddhist places are nonexistent, but the Christian pariso and inferno are real. To Myōshū’s questions about who goes to these Christian places, Yūtei 31 35

32 33 Kyōrisho, 289–302. Ibid., 302–354. Ibid., 355–368. 36 37 Ibid., 384. Ibid., 385–402. Ibid., 403–409.

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Ibid., 368–383.

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briefly explains the Fall, Christ’s incarnation, passion and resurrection, and the way of salvation handed down through the church first headed by St. Peter and now Pope Clement. She exhorts Myōshū to receive baptism, and then gives a summary of the Decalogue. Myōshū is by now converted, but still wants to clarify controversial issues about Christianity: Why do Christians not sign their names on the legal formula of vows to Butjin (Buddha and the gods)?38 Why do some Christians behave badly? Would not the peace, law, and nation of Japan, the land under the protection of Butjin, be disturbed if everyone becomes Christian? Is the rumor true that missionaries spread Christianity with the intention of conquering Japan? Why did the Good News not come to Japan until now? Does Deus display favoritism? Yūtei gives convincing answers to these questions, and Myōshū expresses her desire to become her companion of faith forever.

Dōjucu, Cambō, Women Catechists, and Catechesis These Kirishitanban catechisms shaped doctrinal beliefs of the Christians, and served as guidebooks for the catechists as the above example in Myōtei mondō suggests. In fact, from Xavier’s first mission, the Jesuits in Japan relied heavily on the mission work of native catechists. They adopted the Zen acolyte system and created their own coadjutor classes of dōjucu and cambō. Among the many tasks of the itinerant dōjucu was to preach and teach Christian doctrine in Japanese. As congregational pastors in the absence of priests and brothers, cambō also regularly preached and taught Christian doctrine. Many dōjucu excelled in literary skills, and contributed much to the creation of Kirishitanban literature. They engaged in public interreligious disputations, often staged by the officials. Many of these native catechists, including women, were leaders in Japanese religions before their conversion to Christianity, and utilized their knowledge of these religions in their work for the Christian mission. The mission provided these male catechists with salaries and expenses for ministries. Women catechists, such as Naitō Julia (ca. 1566–1627), achieved great success in their ministry paralleling dōjucus, but were without official status and financial support. The Kirishitanban Doctrina Christam and Myōtei mondō show a high degree of Japanized Christianity. In the end, the Jesuit catechesis was effective in forming a small but strong Christian community, with the majority of its members’ commitment to Christianity costing them execution, expulsion, or 38

Ibid., 409–417.

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survival underground without a Jesuit presence except for the native catechists during 250 years of oppression by the Japanese government.

Catechisms in India In India, Jesuit omnia omnibus through catechesis developed differently in five regional missions: Goa, Fishery and Malabar Coasts, Madurai, Kerala, and North India, each posing important theological questions.

Goa Among the four major orders that catechized Goa, the Franciscans and the Jesuits pursued rigorous missionary activity in native languages. During his short stay in Goa in 1542, Xavier famously gathered 300 children and slaves via the ringing of a little bell, led them in procession to the Church of Nossa Senhora do Rosario, and taught them a ninety-minute catechism every evening.39 His Doutrina Christiana in Portuguese, posthumously published in 1557, closely follows the catechism of João de Barros (1496–1570), published in Lisbon in 1539 in twenty-nine articles with two original additions. First, it includes St. Thomas in the prayer to the saints (no. 14) to honor this apostle to India. Second, it includes a statement on renunciation of idols (no. 26): “O gentiles [non-Christians], how great is your blindness to sin that you make God out of beasts and the devil, since you pray to him under their forms!”40 In practice, Xavier interwove local expressions and African patois in teaching his Doutrina, but did not compose one in Konkani, which was the dominant language of the region. Prior to Xavier, Franciscans had been serving the colonial churches using Konkani. According to Gomes’ research, Fray Gaspar de São Miguel (ca. 1595–1647), prolific writer of the most comprehensive Konkani grammar, translated catechetical works by Luis de Granada (1504–1588) and Robert Bellarmine (1542–1621) into Konkani.41 Other Franciscans such as Manoel de Bonha, Manoel do Lado, and Manoel Baptista produced catechisms in

See Georg Schurhammer, Francis Xavier: His Life, His Times, volume II: India 1541–1545, trans. Martin Joseph Costelloe (Rome, 1977), 218–224. St. Francis Xavier, The Letters and Instructions of Francis Xavier, trans. Martin Joseph Costelloe (St. Louis, 1992), 41–45 (citation 44). Doutrina Christiana consists of the Credo, Pater Noster, Ave Maria, Salve Regina, Decalogue, regulations, sins, virtues, and works, but does not include the sacraments except for prayers to Christ in the Eucharist. 41 Olivinho J. F. Gomes, The Religious Orders in Goa (XVIth–XVIIth Centuries) (Goa, 2003), 94–96. 39

40

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Konkani for popular use. Native catechists, associated with the Franciscan Tertiary order, were active in parishes and confraternities. Following the Franciscans, the Jesuits produced many catechisms in Konkani. In 1556 the newly founded Jesuit press in Goa published a Konkani Doutrina Christam by Andre Vaz of Carambolim, a seminarian who taught Konkani to the missionaries.42 Reprinted in 1560, this was widely circulated among the convents and parishes. Thomas Stephens (ca. 1549–1619), a grammarian of Konkani and Marathi, revised many early catechism booklets, and published Doutrina Christam em ligoa bramana canarim in 1622.43 This remained the standard Konkani catechism in Goa until the twentieth century. Simão Gomes is reported to have written a catechism in Marathi, but no copy exists. Diogo Ribeiro’s Declaracam da Doutrina Christam, a Konkani translation of Bellarmine’s, published in 1634, “has all the flavor of local Goan culture that was at that time steeped in the ancestral Hindu ethos” and adapted such words as vinkunth for paradise and bhoktanco ektar for communion of saints.44 The Jesuit compounds in Goa operated two Houses of Catechumens for male and female converts, where catechists prepared them for baptism. Jesuit letters note the special contribution of Catharina of Farão (n.d.), an Ethiopian native catechist, who helped convert numerous Indian villagers between 1557 and 1565. She was also instrumental in rescuing 100 Ethiopian women from an Arab slave-trader in 1562. The Jesuits housed Catharina’s converts and the liberated Ethiopians in the Women’s House of Catechumens, where unnamed Ethiopian women catechists cared for between 70 and 100 women annually.45 It is not clear which versions of catechisms Catharina and the women catechists used in these houses. Despite the fact that all inhabitants of the greater Goan region became at least nominally Catholic by 1570 and learned Christian doctrine in Konkani, the Portuguese colonial authorities issued decrees banning Konkani and other mother tongues of the people, and required them to use only Portuguese in the 1680s.46 Only the elites complied. 42

Ibid., 142. Doutrina Christam of Thomas Stephens, 2nd ed., ed. Mariano Saldanha (Lisbon, 1945) contains a facsimile. 44 Gomes, The Religious Orders, 143–144. 45 See Luís Fróis, “To the Fathers and Brothers of the Colleges in Lisbon, Coimbra and Evora, Goa, 13 November 1560,” in Documenta Indica, volume IV, ed. Josef Wicki (Rome, 1956), 655; and Documentação para a história das missões do padroado português do Oriente, ed. António da Silva Rêgo, 12 vols. (Lisbon, 1947–1958), X, 97. 46 See Joseph Thekkedath, History of Christianity in India, volume II: From the Middle of the Sixteenth to the End of the Seventeenth Century (1542–1700) (Bangalore, 1982), 412–413. 43

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Fishery Coast to Malabar Coast After four months of evangelizing in Goa, Xavier traveled widely along the Fishery Coast between 1543 and 1545. He received permission to evangelize and baptize the fishers of the Macuan caste from the king of Quilon, who reached out to the Portuguese for military assistance in his fights with the kings of Travancore and Tuiticorin. Writing from Cochin in 1545, Xavier indicated that he had translated the Confiteor, Pater Noster, Ave Maria, and Salve Regina prayers into Tamil in 1543, and also taught the Credo and Decalogue in Tamil. This letter describes how he evangelized the fishers from village to village, catechizing, baptizing, and ordering them “to destroy the huts in which they keep their idols.”47 In 1545 he was in Malacca (Malaysia), and sent his Latin Instruction for Catechists of the Society of Jesuits in the Indies to Goa. In it he lays out the “program” for the catechists to teach the “unlearned” using a simple dialogue, the Pater Noster, Ave Maria, three other prayers he had created, and an explanation of the Creed focused on Jesus Christ before giving “catechetical lessons” in more detail.48 Xavier then went to Moluccas (Spice Islands), and in Ternate he composed An Explanation of the Creed in Portuguese in 1546, specifically for native women “married to” the Portuguese, their children, and slaves. It begins with a teaching against polygamy and concubinage in retelling the creation story of Adam and Eve, whom God “joined” in “wedlock,” and since “God gave Adam only one woman, it is clearly against God for the Moors and pagans and bad Christians to have many wives.”49 It also warns against diviners and idolatries. Then it gives a long explanation of the Credo, using narrative stories, reminiscent of the Spiritual Exercises, of the creation, Fall, incarnation, life and ministries of Christ, the passion, the harrowing of hell, the ascension, and judgment, ending with a brief teaching on the filioque. Xavier used this Explanation himself and recommended its use in Moluccas and then back in Malacca. He persuaded a native secular priest to translate it into Tamil to use on the Fishery Coast. The Jesuit press revised and published it with his Doutrina Christiana in 1557. Xavier thus left his examples, content, and instructions of catechesis in Tamil for the people of lower caste, with some iconoclastic and

47 49

Xavier, The Letters and Instructions, 117–118. See ibid., 150–160 (citation 151).

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Ibid., 131–133.

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monogamous polemics against the local customs. The degree of his omnia omnibus remained at the level of colonial cultural “creolization.”50 Henrique Henriques (1520–1600), who succeeded Xavier, learned the language and culture from the Parava Christian sábios (learned ones) and made Christian doctrine truly Tamil. He left two Tamil catechisms, as well as a Tamil grammar and Tamil adaptation of Flos Sanctorum (1586). His first catechism is Doctrina Christam, or tampirān vanakkam, published by the Jesuit _ _ it with a native priest, Manoel press in Quilon in 1578. Henriques co-authored de Saõ Pedro (n.d.). This is a short booklet in prose (sixteen pages), and probably a revision of Xavier’s 1542 Doctrina Christiana. The second is entitled Doctrina Christam or kiricittiyāni vanakkam, published in Cochin in 1579. This _Jorge’s Doutrina Cristã (published in Braga _ is Henriques’ translation of Marcos in 1566), and is more extensive (120 pages), in a dialogue format between the teacher and the student. Both catechisms begin with a Tamil instruction about the “diamond-headed sign to indicate words in the text for Portuguese”51 transliteration. Županov notes the predominance of Tamil over only a remnant of these transliterated words. Indeed Henriques’ catechisms are the fruit of the enduring cooperation between the Jesuits and the Parava Christians in testing, negotiating, and appropriating the “eloquence of the Parava Christian community,” and “crafting Tamil Christian language, liturgy, sociability, and affects” in the text.52 Županov sees this translation process as the creation of “intervening spaces . . . in which newly planted words ripen and assume meanings of their own.”53 The missionary and Parava efforts resulted in the opening up of such spaces, in which “Parava Christian culture and imagery would . . . develop within its own semantic field, guided by its own imperatives.”54 Županov See Ines G. Županov, Missionary Tropics: The Catholic Frontier in India, 16th–17th Centuries [History, Languages, and Cultures of the Spanish and Portuguese Worlds] (Ann Arbor, 2005), 244–245. 51 Henrique Henriques, Doctrina Christam: kiricittiyāni vanakkam (Cochin, 1579), ed. Svarimuthu _ Henriques, _ Rajamanickam (Tuttukudi [Tuticorin], 1963); Henrique Doctrina Christam en Lingua Malauar Tamul: tampirān vanakkam (Quilon, 1578), facsimile ed. Tamiḻnādaṉ, tamiḻ moḻinyin _ _ 1995). For a detailed description of the single surviving copy of mudal accup puttakam (Selam, the Quilon catechism see Georg Schurhammer and George William Cottrell, “The First Printing in Indic Characters,” Harvard Library Bulletin 6 (1952), 148–160, repr. in Georg Schurhammer and László Szilas, eds., Orientalia (Rome and Lisbon, 1963), 317–327, at 321. 52 Županov, Missionary Tropics, 253–254. 53 Ibid., 257–258. The case studies in India and Japan in TCTC similarly discuss the common Jesuit strategies of cultural translation in the use of transliteration, loanwords from existing religions, and neologisms, and interweaving in the catechisms discussion of conflictual issues such as idolatry, marriage, and concepts of rebirth. 54 Ibid., 258. 50

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gives only a couple of examples of such transformation. The term vanakkam, _ which the catechisms used for doctrine, literally means salutation. Henriques explains that doctrine forms catechetical words in Christians’ “lotus hearts,” and they climb it like a ladder in their good behavior to appear in the presence of God (tampirān).55 Christian stories and images were interwoven _ with local stories. For example, the three magi in Matthew 2 become Tamil kings, establishing for Paravas their own “royal lineage” in the Christian story.56 Through Henriques’ Tamil catechisms, by the end of the sixteenth century the Parava Christians “became the oldest Catholic convert community in Asia,” which still thrived in the twentieth century.57 In order for this full indigenization to happen, Županov asserts, Henriques and his fellow Jesuits “discovered early enough that the source language has to be renounced in order for the receptor language to produce freely its own significance, imagery, cognitive patterning, esthetic and religious identity.” In other words, the Jesuits left home and became Tamil to the point that their catechesis lost almost all traces of its Portuguese origins, thus thwarting linguistic imperialism and colonization of Tamil by imposing Portuguese Christianity on the converts. After two decades of labor following Xavier’s accommodation, Tamil Christianity was securely owned by the grassroots Parava Christians. Under the fourth and fifth Jesuit Superior Generals Everard Mercurian (in office 1573–1580) and Claudio Acquaviva (1581–1615), Valignano served as Visitor in Japan and India (1573–1583), as the Provincial of India (1583–1587), and then again as Visitor of India until 1606. Valignano took up a “veritable linguistic offensive” in adopting local languages, as Županov puts it.

Madurai Mission The Malabar Rites Controversy, which divided the Madurai mission over the adaptation model of Roberto de Nobili (1577–1656), is well known. Examining both archival sources and de Nobili’s major writings, Županov demonstrates well that this controversy arose in diverse and shifting contexts. Changes within the Society, weakening of Portuguese padroado, revisionist movements within Hinduism, and other political and personal rivalries and alliances in Europe and India all contributed to it. In addition, as Anand Amaladass and Francis X. Clooney point out, de Nobili, as well as Gonçalo 55

Ibid., 255.

56

Ibid., 257.

57

Ibid., 258.

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Fernandes (1541–1619), his great opponent, and many other missionaries were working in the rising Indologist movement of the Western study of Brahmanical texts.58 Arriving in Goa in 1605, de Nobili went to Madurai in 1607, where Fernandes had been working among the small Parava Christian community. Between 1607 and 1612 de Nobili dissociated himself from what the inhabitants called the Parangui (Portuguese) pollution, and, fashioning himself as a sannyāsi (ascetic holy man), exclusively targeted the conversion of the highest caste, the Brahmin, hoping for the trickle-down conversion of the whole society. He pursued his omnia omnibus at two levels. On the one hand, he separated the adiaphora aspects of Brahmin social customs such as punul (sacred thread), kucumi (tuft of hair), sandal paste, and ritual baths from religion, and defended their use among the converts and himself.59 On the other hand, he liberally borrowed theological and philosophical vocabulary in Sanskrit, Tamil, and Teguru, but, without “empathy,” imposed Scholastic synthesis on Hinduism.60 Amaladass and Clooney state that while de Nobili believed in the basic goodness of human culture, his “openness to the new culture and religions . . . is selective, already confined within the boundaries of Thomist concepts, words, and methods.”61 Around 1610 de Nobili authored two pre-catechetical treatises in Tamil, Dialogue on Eternal Life and Inquiry into the Meaning of God, intended for the Śaivite theologians.62 Dialogue possibly idealizes “actual conversations,” in which the disciple (shishiya) poses questions to the teacher (guru).63 These questions concern human reason, truths, knowledge, revelation, one true Veda (sacred revelation and scriptures), atheism, idolatry, a compassionate God, and moral life. It briefly introduces the concept of the Trinity and the incarnation of the Lord as the Teacher.64 Inquiry, formatted as an ascetic’s search for God, is a direct refutation of Hindu gods, who do not measure up to the Christian God in six attributes. For example, in section 113 he makes fun of the sexual promiscuity of Shiva, Para Shakti, Brahma, Sarasvati, and Krishna.65 The book concludes with the introduction of the Decalogue.

58 See Anand Amaladass and Francis X. Clooney, eds. and trans., Preaching Wisdom to the Wise: Three Treatises by Roberto de Nobili, S.J., Missionary and Scholar in 17th Century India (St. Louis, 2000), 23–33. 59 See Ines G. Županov, Disputed Mission: Jesuit Experiments and Brahmanical Knowledge in Seventeenth-Century India (New Delhi and New York, 1999), 97–100. 60 61 Amaladass and Clooney, eds., Preaching Wisdom, 6. Ibid., 18. See also 34–48. 62 63 64 65 Ibid., 23. Ibid., 11. Ibid., 249, 259–260. Ibid., 316.

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The decade between 1612 and 1622 was the period of the controversy. Archbishop Francisco Ros of Cranganore (in office 1599–1621), Provincial Albert Laerzio (1557–1630), and other Jesuits such as Stephen Britto supported de Nobili, while Fernandes, Diogo da Cunha, the new Provincial Pero Francisco (since 1611), and Goan theologians such as António Fernandes (1567–1642) criticized his Sanscritization of Christianity. De Nobili enlisted over a hundred “Tamil doctors” to endorse his points.66 All appealed to Cardinal Bellarmine and General Acquaviva in Rome in 1613, and all interpreted these authorities’ responses to support their own views. The center of the question was whether the Brahmin customs were religious or civic. The issue of vernacular catechism also became important. Provincial Francisco and his party wanted to retain the transliteration of Portuguese in Henriques’ catechisms.67 De Nobili pushed for the total replacement of such words with Sanskrit or Tamil. In his defense, de Nobili composed three treatises in Latin: Apology, Narration, and Report on Certain Customs of the Indian Nation (co-authored with Antonio Vico). In the Report (1613), citing extensively from the Laws of Manu, he distinguishes Indian civic customs from religion. He argues that having witnessed Jesuit respect for Indian culture, wise and reasonable sannyāsis would seek out Christianity as the Truth, and says, “Almost all of those to whom we propound the catechetical teaching of Christ immediately go to consult the Brahmins or bring them along to our house. . . . They do this so that they may learn what their wise men have to say in rebuttal.”68 He also expresses his omnia omnibus ideas based on incarnational missiology clearly: The herald of the Gospel must himself, as far as possible, conform his way of acting to the social customs of these people. . . . [As the Law of Manu suggests, i]mmigrants in foreign lands are not to abide by the usages of their country of origin unless these correspond with those of the inhabitants of that place. . . . It is one’s first duty of charity, in view of the salvation of souls, to set aside that tenor of life into which one was born . . . and to assume a different one, if this new way of acting is purely of a social character and entirely free from any moral blame. . . . To make oneself all to all has from earliest times been the policy of the apostles of the Christian faith. Christ himself, the guide and master of the apostles, did not deem it below his august dignity to move freely with those he came to save.69 66 68 69

67 Županov, Disputed Mission, 84–89. Ibid., 64, 79. See also 98–100. Amaladass and Clooney, eds., Preaching Wisdom, 107. Roberto de Nobili, The Report on Certain Customs of the Indian Nations, in ibid., 221, 222, 223.

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In 1623 Pope Gregory XV sanctioned de Nobili’s method. De Nobili continued to labor until 1656. Importantly, he completed his largest work in Tamil, entitled Kāndam (or Gnāṉōpadēsam: The Teaching of Religious __ Knowledge), an extensive catechism, or rather Scholastic treatise, in five parts. Earlier de Nobili had also written a shorter catechism, Gnāṉōpadēsa Kuṟippidam, and twenty-six sermons on Gnāṉōpadēsam. After he and other _ tested these, he incorporated them into Kāndam. Rajamanickam catechists __ part I deals gives its synopsis in English.70 Following the Thomist framework, with the Nature of God; part II the creation and the Fall; part III is on Christ; part IV builds on the standard catechism of the Pater Noster; Creed, and Decalogue; and the now-lost part V is a list of the marks of the true religion. Kāndam is also apologetic. Part I appeals to human intellect and claims the __ superiority of Christianity to the “false” Indian religions. Part II criticizes the immoral Indian sexual practices of polyandry and polygamy as a consequence of original sin, and advocates for the celibacy or sanctity of marriage. The incarnation is central to his discussion in Part III. It mostly follows Loyola’s Mysteries of the Life of Christ our Lord in the Spiritual Exercises, in a series of references to the life of Christ to help the readers imagine these biblical scenes. The middle parts of Christ’s ministries and miracles are relegated to part V. Discussions on the sacraments appear in part III under the topics of the resurrection. Parallel to Christ’s life is Mary’s, closely tied to the questions of her sinless conception, marriage and virginity, her death, and devotion to Christ. Examining the works of de Nobili under his Tamil name, Tattuva Pōtakar (Teacher of Truth), and especially Kāndam, Arokiasamy synthesizes de _ _ the Hindu concept of Vishnu Nobili’s incarnational theology. Utilizing Avatāra, de Nobili explains the mystery of the incarnation as the Avatāra God-Human, i.e. Jesus Christ, who as the Divine Teacher (kuru), like a Śaivite guru, as in a dance, teaches the way of the virtuous deeds in gracelove (cinēkam) and loving response to God in faith (bhakti), leading humanity to salvation. These virtuous practices (dharma) of complete renunciation (sannyāsa) or purity in marriage, shown in the Decalogue, guide the 70

Savarimuthu Rajamanickam, The First Oriental Scholar (Tirunelveli, 1972), 119–121. I am following Rajamanickam’s transliteration for Gnāṉōpadēsa and Kāndam. Anand Amaladass, _ South India: Henrique “The Writing Catechism and Translation Strategies of Three Jesuits _in Henriques, Roberto de Nobili and Joseph Beschi,” in TCTC, 170–194, uses Ñānōpadecak kāntam; _ _ in while Julia Nardini, “Roberto Nobili’s Viyāha dharma: A Case of Cultural Translation,” TCTC, 223–251; and Soosai Arokiasamy, Dharma, Hindu and Christian according to Roberto de Nobili: Analysis of its Meaning and its Use in Hinduism and Christianity [Documenta Missionalia 19] (Rome, 1986) have Ñāna Upatēcam, Kāntam. No complete English translation is available. __

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followers to heaven (moquixam).71 While he chose moquixam (liberation) for heaven over corkam (heaven or a place of pleasure) in Henriques’ catechism, his idea for liberation did not mean from caste and gender oppression, nor did the-becoming-of-God-as-a-poor-person in the incarnation apply to the liberation of the poor, as postcolonial theologians rightly criticize.72 However, non-Brahmin converts gradually began to join the Madurai mission, especially after the incorporation of pantāracāmi (native catechists), _ _ lower castes beginning in such as Balthasar da Costa, to work among the 1640.73 While de Nobili’s initial “global, hierarchical Christianization . . . failed to materialize,” as Županov concludes, the fully catechized Madurai Parava Christian community flourished and survived the expulsion of the Jesuits in the eighteenth century.74

Thomas Christians in Kerala The Jesuit mission to the Thomas Christians in Kerala was far removed from their ideal of omnia omnibus, and their catechisms became a tool of proselytization for the Roman Church. The Thomas Christians traced their roots to the apostle Thomas and maintained traditional ties with the Nestorian (Assyrian) patriarchate in Mesopotamia. Their liturgical language was Syriac. The Malabar Thomas Christians experienced their own reformation under Mar Jacob, bishop of Malabar (ca. 1503–1551). On the one hand, Mar Jacob revitalized clerical theological education in Syriac and defended Thomas Christians legally against the Portuguese. On the other hand, he established cordial relationships with the Franciscans. Meanwhile, under the rigorous Latinization from Rome, the Chaldean patriarchate in Mesopotamia was divided into two factions in 1553. One faction followed the old Nestorian line and the other became the Uniates. In the ensuing years, Thomas Christians in Malabar were greatly affected by these divisions as all the

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See Arokiasamy, Dharma, Hindu and Christian, 227–287. For example, see A. Alangaram, “Incarnation and Avatara: A Comparative Reflection on de Nobili’s Religion,” in Chockalingam Joe Arun, ed., Interculturation of Religion: Critical Perspectives on Robert de Nobili’s Mission in India (Bangalore, 2007), 76–79. 73 Županov, Disputed Mission, 189. See also Stephen Neill, A History of Christianity in India: The Beginnings to AD 1707 (Cambridge and New York, 1984), 295, 301, and 308. 74 Ines G. Županov, “Compromise: India,” in Ronnie Po-chia Hsia, ed., A Companion to the Reformation World (Oxford, 2007), 353–374, at 365. Amaladass, “Translation Strategies,” 192, traces how de Nobili and successive Jesuit authors securely founded the Tamil language Christian catechesis for South Indian Christians. Nardini, “Roberto Nobili’s Viyāha dharma,” 234, agrees with Amaladass and analyzes de Nobili’s diverse literary sources in Tamil and Sanskrit in creating his new genre of the catechetical Purāna (teachings on Catholic marriage). 72

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orders in India joined the aggressive Uniate movement. The Jesuits followed suit. Mar Abraham of the Nestorian faction had been exiled and forced to receive papal endorsement in Rome, but returned to Kerala in 1569. In 1577 he sought Portuguese aid in his rivalry against Mar Simon of the Uniates. Under Valignano’s directive, the Jesuits set up their residence and the seminary in Vaipicotta to educate Thomas Christians in Latin, Portuguese, and Syriac. They imposed Mass in Latin and taught catechisms in Malayalam and Portuguese throughout Kerala. In 1583 Valignano “induced Mar Abraham to convoke a reformatory synod at Angamali,” where Mar Abraham was forced to make a confession of Roman Catholic faith.75 Seeing the Portuguese intentions, Mar Abraham then rigorously protected the Thomas Christian tradition until his death in 1597. The synod entrusted Archbishop Francisco Ros, SJ, to purge the Syriac liturgy and manuscripts of Nestorian errors while the Catholics repeatedly accused Mar Abraham of Nestorian heresy. After Abraham’s death in 1597, against Abraham’s successor Alexis de Menezes, archbishop of Goa, steadily worked to Latinize Malabar. He called the notorious Synod of Diamper in 1599, which issued 200 articles, written by four Jesuits. The first article mandated teachings of Western catechisms, use of the Vulgate over Syriac scriptures, St. Mary as Mother of God, and meditation on the passion of Christ.76 All feasts honoring Nestorius, Theodore of Mopsuestia, Diodorus of Tarsus, Narsai, and other Nestorian theologians were declared heretical. This blatant declaration of the authority of St. Peter over St. Thomas provoked anger among the Thomas Christians, who again were split into three factions after a 1653 rebellion.

North India The Jesuit mission to the Mughal Empire in India was in three phases (1580–1583, 1591–1595, and 1595 to the papal suppression of the Jesuits in 1773) and did not yield as many converts as was initially hoped. Yet it sustained an “active and healthy dialogue” with the imperial court and produced catechisms in Persian based on these interfaith debates, especially on the symbolic meaning of holy images.77 Beginning in 1580, Emperor 75

76 Thekkedath, History of Christianity, 52. Ibid., 70–72. Gauvin Alexander Bailey, “The Truth-Showing Mirror: Jesuit Catechism and the Arts in Mughal India,” in John W. O’Malley et al., eds., The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 1540–1773 (Toronto, 1999), 380–401, at 397.

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Akbar (r. 1556–1605) invited the Jesuits to join the weekly debates among the Shi‘a, Sunni, Sufi, Brahmin and Jain, Zoroastrian, and Armenian Christian theologians in his ‘ibādatkhāna (debating hall) at Fatehpur Sikri near Agra. Nominally Muslim, Akbar was constructing his imperial ideology of Dīn-i Ilāhī, a religious brotherhood, which he founded in 1583. It combined “Hindu and Muslim practice with a philosophy based on Illuminist Sufism and Mongol ancestor worship . . . as a way of uniting men of various religions and nationalities together in the service of their leader,” the emperor.78 The emperor occupied the “central position . . . in celestial and temporal worlds, and set up his saintly and angelic servants as role models for personal obedience of the Emperor’s devotees.” Paralleling this brotherhood was the sisterhood of the court ladies led by Akbar’s mother Maryam Makani, succeeded by Nur Jahan, consort of the next emperor, Jahangir (r. 1605–1627). Inspired by the Jesuits, four generations of Mughal emperors, without any intention of conversion, amassed Christian texts and images, and incorporated Christian iconography rigorously into court life. Their court painters (including some women) and architects produced numerous syncretistic artworks based on European imports, often utilizing religious symbols common to Christian, Muslim, and Indo-Islamic faiths. Jerónimo Xavier (1549–1617) wrote catechisms and theological treatises in Portuguese and, with the help of the Mughal court historian ‘Abdul Sattar ibn Qasim Lahori (ca. 1590–1619), translated them into Persian. Xavier dedicated his Āyine-ye Haqq Numā (The Truth-Showing Mirror) to Jahangir in 1609. This catechism takes the format of a debate among a priest (Xavier), a philosopher (Akbar), and a mullah, utilizing materials from the actual ‘ibādatkhāna debates in Lahore in 1607. According to Bailey, it covers such topics as divine law, doctrine of God, the divinity of Christ, Decalogue, Quranic commandments, Christian and Muslim miracles, comparison of the lives of Christ and Muhammad, chastity, prayer, and pilgrimage, and finally argues for the superiority of Christianity because it “provides more aids to weak human nature than Islam or other religions.”79 The central chapter focuses on the question of the use of images. Not too remote from the Reformed-Catholic debates in Europe, the Jesuit in this chapter promotes the traditional and Tridentine affirmation of the holy images of Jesus, Mary, the apostles, and the saints. It argues that images lift up both external sensual 78 Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Art on the Jesuit Missions in Asia and Latin America, 1542–1773 (Toronto, 1999), 139–140. 79 Bailey, “The Truth-Showing Mirror,” 386.

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perceptions and interior senses to God. Xavier appeals to this anagogical understanding of symbols, the metaphors, and inner senses in the Aristotelian and Neoplatonist traditions shared by Islam and Christianity. In addition to this highly intellectual apologetic catechism, the Jesuits also produced illustrated Christian doctrine for the princes.80 They also prepared Arabic and Sanskrit catechisms for church communities in Lahore, Delhi, Agra, Cambay, and other places, and perhaps an Armenian version for the community in Agra as the Armenian Christians “became the Jesuits’ most important patrons in Northern India.”81

Conclusion These and other diverse catechisms in Indian languages achieved different degrees of indigenization and saw different outcomes. Francis Xavier’s many accommodated catechisms still imposed more Portuguese views on Indian converts, just as in the Japan mission. Valignano’s direction toward conformity with Roman Catholic theology and practice among the Thomas Christians went the opposite way of omnia omnibus. De Nobili’s analogy between Hindu and Christian philosophy and tolerance of Hindu customs were controversial but remained Thomist. Jerónimo Xavier’s Persian catechism reflected a high level of interreligious exchanges comparable to Myōtei mondō. Convert communities in India enjoyed ownership of Thomas Stephens’ Konkani and Henriques’ Tamil and Malayalam catechisms, and other catechisms in the vernacular for ordinary Christians, as they did Kirishitanban catechisms in Japan, due to the dominance of their own voices in these texts. In addition to their linguistic-literal, sociocultural cooperation with the missionaries in the production of catechisms in these local languages, native catechists implemented these in all missions. In his mission in the Fishery Coast, Francis Xavier instituted the office of kanakkappillais. Under occasional missionary supervision, these lay ministers served as sacristans, liturgists, preachers, and pastoral overseers in congregations without resident clergy.82 They regularly taught Christian doctrine for children and adults. They had the authority to baptize in case of emergency and provide proper burial. Another group of kanakkappillais were 80 81 82

Bailey, Art on the Jesuit Missions, 117. Ibid., 131. See Thekkedath, History of Christianity, 437 on other kinds of catechetical literature. Thekkedath, History of Christianity, 126–128, 159.

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itinerant evangelical preachers, often accompanying the missionary, or conducting their own evangelical missions for recruitment of catechumens. They held refutations with the non-Christians. All received some compensation for these tasks. These coadjutors resemble Japanese dōjucu, cambō, and women catechists. As noted earlier, women catechists such as Catharina of Farão also were active in Goa. Henriques depended on the local sábios and poets in creating Tamil literature.83 He instituted ten semi-clerical supervisors of kanakkappillais, who became ubiquitous in Malabar by 1563.84 They all seem to have been male. Thekkedath lists the exemplary pantāracāmi of great character, zeal, sexual purity, devotion, and performative_ _ talents in Madurai who worked closely with de Nobili and says that these many “veteran catechists . . . were very much respected, not merely by the people, but also by the priests, and hence their advice, even regarding matters of policy, was listened to with respect.”85 Although women catechists do not seem to have been visible in Madurai, there may have been female ascetics.86 No matter how much the Jesuits owed to the contribution of these native catechists, Thekkedath also remarks, “the final decisions [regarding policy matters] were made by the priests.”87 Thus both Indian and Japanese catechists, who were likely former religious leaders among their people, played an important role in teaching, enforcing, and creating mission catechesis. In reality, both missions provided catechesis in performative ways beyond the written texts so that the Christians learned Christian doctrine through their bodies. These theatrics included participatory sermons, songs, recitation, storytelling, processions, dramas, music, fireworks, spiritual exercises, and vocal prayers based on the Christian doctrine. Converts’ daily conversations with non-Christian family members and neighbors provided opportunities to practice what they learned from Christian doctrine, and, conversely, these interreligious conversations made their way back into the revisions of Christian doctrine. This interactive catechesis was most effective in the missions where the Jesuits gave up not only their native tongues but also their nostalgia for their

84 Županov, Missionary Tropics, 253. See Thekkedath, History of Christianity, 167, 187–188. Ibid., 260. See also the summary descriptions of Yesu Adiyan, Muthudaiyan, Savariyaran, Dhairiam, Yesupaten, Mariadas, Arulanandam, and Gnanamuthu as representatives of the “great catechists” of the Madurai mission in the second half of the seventeenth century (260–262). 86 87 See Županov, Disputed Mission, 191. Thekkedath, History of Christianity, 260. 83

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homelands, and mingled with Japanese and Indian Christians, who also, upon their conversions, lost their old identities and speech. This cursory comparative study of the Jesuit catechisms in early modern India and Japan shows that in order to consider a history of Reformation-era theology on a global scale, it is necessary to include the interconnectedness of the reformations (Catholic, Protestant, and other) in Europe with the early modern missionary movement, the early modern history of other religions, and the making of what would become the various faces of world Christianity, rather than treating these as isolated phenomena. It also suggests that problems of translating Christianity which arose as a result of the encounters between foreign and native worldviews need scholarly attention beyond missionary minds. Finally, gender and ethnic consciousness in examining native contributions to the new Catholic literature, not only by the named authors but unnamed readers/co-authors/catechists/performers, may open up other ways of thinking about theology.88 bibliography Arokiasamy, Soosai. Dharma, Hindu and Christian according to Roberto de Nobili: Analysis of its Meaning and its Use in Hinduism and Christianity [Documenta Missionalia 19]. Rome, 1986. Bailey, Gauvin Alexander. Art on the Jesuit Missions in Asia and Latin America, 1542–1773. Toronto, 1999. “The Truth-Showing Mirror: Jesuit Catechism and the Arts in Mughal India.” In John W. O’Malley et al., eds., The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 1540–1773. Toronto, 1999, 380–401. Ebisawa, Arimichi. Kirishitan Nanban bungaku nyūmon. Tokyo, 1991. Flüchter, Antje and Rouven Wirbser., eds. Translating Catechisms, Translating Cultures: The Expansion of Catholicism in the Early Modern World. Leiden, 2017. Gomes, Olivinho J. F. The Religious Orders in Goa (XVIth–XVIIth Centuries). Goa, 2003. Higashibaba, Ikuo. Christianity in Early Modern Japan: Kirishitan Belief and Practice. [Brill’s Japanese Studies Library 16]. Leiden and Boston, 2001. Obara, Satoru. “Iezusukai Nihon colegio no ‘Compendium Kōgi yōkō’.” In Satoru Obara, ed., Iezusukai Nihon Korejiyo no kōgiyōkō, 3 vols. [Kirishitan Bungaku Sōsho] Tokyo, 1997–1999, III, 288–340. O’Malley, John W. The First Jesuits. Cambridge, 1993.

88 On gender issues and women’s contributions in the Kirishitan literature see Haruko Nawata Ward, “Women, Households, and the Transformation of Christianity into the Kirishitan Religion,” in Nadine Amsler et al., eds., Catholic Missionaries in Early Modern Asia: Patterns of Localization [Religious Cultures in the Early Modern World] (London and New York, 2020), 174–189.

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Jesuit Catechisms in Japan and India Rajamanickam, Savarimuthu. The First Oriental Scholar. Tirunelveli, 1972. Schurhammer, Georg. Francis Xavier: His Life, his Times, volume II: India 1541–1545, trans. Martin Joseph Costelloe. Rome, 1977. Thekkedath, Joseph. History of Christianity in India, volume II: From the Middle of the Sixteenth to the End of the Seventeenth Century (1542–1700). Bangalore, 1982. Üçerler, Murat Antoni John. “Jesuit Humanist Education in Sixteenth Century Japan.” In Compendium catholicae veritatis, ed. Jōchi daigaku Kirishitan bunko, 3 vols. Tokyo, 1997, III, 11–60. Ward, Haruko Nawata. “Women, Households, and the Transformation of Christianity into the Kirishitan religion.” In Nadine Amsler et al., eds., Catholic Missionaries in Early Modern Asia: Patterns of Localization [Religious Cultures in the Early Modern World]. London and New York, 2020, 174–189. Županov, Ines G. Disputed Mission: Jesuit Experiments and Brahmanical Knowledge in Seventeenth-Century India. New Delhi and New York, 1999. Missionary Tropics: The Catholic Frontier in India, 16th–17th Centuries [History, Languages, and Cultures of the Spanish and Portuguese Worlds]. Ann Arbor, 2005.

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Theology in China ca. 1582–ca. 1688 nicolas standaert

The mission in China in the seventeenth century still draws the attention of many theologians and missiologists today. This mission, which in the first hundred years was predominantly led by the Jesuits, was remarkable in several regards: the Jesuit missionaries adopted a policy of accommodation to Chinese culture; they evangelized “from the top down”; they propagated indirectly by using European science and technology; and they adopted an attitude of toleration toward Confucian values and rites. Moreover, the mission is well known for the Chinese Rites Controversy, which fueled theological debates in Europe at the end of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. However, the development of a local theology in China is one of its lesserknown aspects, though nothing comparable can be found in other missions of the same time. This development originated from the European background of the missionaries, but more significantly hinged on the cultural, social, and political context of China. This overview will first discuss this context, and next the theological issues that had impacted theologies of mission.

Theology in Context Four characteristics outline the development of theology in the early China mission.

The Background of the Missionaries The Jesuit presence in China, starting in 1582, was very European from the outset. Though the China mission fell under the Portuguese padroado, Portuguese Jesuits on average represented merely one-third of the total of foreign Jesuits, the others coming from Italy, France, and other European countries. Some of these missionaries were trained at the Collegium Romanum in Rome, others at Coimbra in Portugal, and still others at various European training centers, or even in Goa. As a consequence of this variety 668

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in background, practical theology in China was influenced by diverse European local ritual traditions (veneration of saints, common Christian names, exorcisms, etc.) mirroring the diversity of European practices. Adding to this variety was the arrival of Spanish Dominican and Franciscan friars (under the Spanish patronato) in the 1630s, some of whom had been active for several years in the Philippines. Notably, missionaries were still very limited in number. After the arrival of these friars and before the arrival of the French Jesuits in 1688, about forty to forty-five missionaries were stationed in China, a slight majority of them Jesuits. Moreover, few Chinese converted to Christianity. Spread out throughout the country with a diversity in local ritual cultures, Chinese Christians reached only around 110,000 in 1665, of a total population of 150 to 200 million inhabitants.

Equality in Terms of Means of Cultural Reproduction A second characteristic influencing theology is that both cultures were relatively equal in cultural, economic, institutional, intellectual, and material complexity. In many other places of the world, contact between cultures involved unequal levels of complexity. The equality between Europe and China showed itself especially in two important means of cultural reproduction: printing and education. In China the printing system was widely available before the arrival of the Europeans, disseminating many books, at a cheap price. Moreover, unlike Europe, neither the state nor any religious group enforced preprinting censorship. Thus missionaries could freely publish (theological) works and practice the “apostolate through books” from the beginning. The other field was the educational system. China had an advanced educational system, training youngsters in classical Chinese texts, leading them through a highly effective and nationwide examination system. This culminated in the palace examination, the threshold to the highest bureaucratic positions. Europe had nothing comparable to this system. Thus in China there was a highly educated society eager for philosophical or scientific exchanges expressed in book learning. A number of converts originating from this literati class fully participated in the publishing culture. Among their publications, some treatises can be labeled as theological, written by Chinese Christian scholars with a strong intellectual education, yet without specific theological formation.

The Chinese Occupation of the Dominant Position A third characteristic is the virtual absence of colonial or external power. Though the missionaries themselves remained exponents of European 669

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culture, which they considered superior, the Ming and Qing administrations ultimately decided on their entrance and duration of stay; in other words, the Chinese occupied the dominant position. The clearest example is the predominance of the Chinese language in the exchange of cultures. Unlike the interaction in Japan, where Japanese learned Portuguese or Latin, in the seventeenth century foreigners had to learn Chinese, since no Chinese interacted through a foreign language, except for a very small number of Chinese educated for the priesthood (mainly after 1688). This aspect is important because prior to evoking responses (theological) ideas had to be communicated, and were filtered through Chinese language and thought patterns, which resulted in a considerable literature of primary sources in Chinese. For the seventeenth century, apart from 120 texts dealing with the West and its sciences, some 470 texts were identified, which mainly treat theological, religious, and moral issues.

Cultural Imperative The fourth characteristic is in line with the previous one: foreigners had to submit to the Chinese “cultural imperative,” obliging them to accommodate the native culture. No marginal religion penetrating from the outside could expect to take root in China (at least at a high social level) without conforming itself to this imperative. What we call “Confucianism” today represented what was zheng 正 (orthodox/orthoprax) in a religious, ritual, social, and political sense. In order not to be branded as xie 邪 (heterodox/heteroprax) or treated as a subversive sect, a marginal religion had to prove its alliance with the orthodox main current, zheng. Thus, Christianity had no viable alternative other than to comply with the Confucian cultural imperative. Therefore, theology in seventeenth-century China exhibits typical characteristics of the response to the cultural imperative: emphasis on congruity and compatibility between the minority religion and Confucianism; the notion of complementarity: the foreign creed serves to enrich and fulfill the Confucian doctrine; the tendency to ground the existence of the foreign doctrine upon historical precedent, sometimes reaching back to the very beginning of Chinese civilization; and the adoption of Chinese mores and rituals. Thus Christianity was confronted with an “other” that raised fundamental questions regarding the Christian tradition. For instance, the discovery of a Chinese history with records of events predating the Flood put the biblical and European chronology into question. This confrontation with the “other” spawned a large number of European publications that provoked mental displacements in European theology. 670

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Theological Issues Although, in general, texts (some 330 of ca. 470) by European missionaries say little about how doctrinal, liturgical, or moral teachings were implemented, they do reveal the theological priorities set by the authors. Moreover, several of these texts are accompanied by prefaces and postscripts by Chinese converts and sympathizers, thus confirming close interaction between European missionaries and Chinese literati.

The Transmission of European Theology in Chinese The transmission of European theology in Chinese followed the development of the mission itself. Initially, catechetical texts were most needed before delving into specialized texts. Gradually, individual missionaries engaged in larger, more specific translation projects. Regarding catechetical literature, two major types can be distinguished: the Dottrina Christiana (based on revelation) and the Catechismus (based on natural theology; not to be confused with the modern “catechism”). From an early stage the Dottrina Christiana contained the Chinese version of the most important prayers, the Ten Commandments, the Creed, a list of the seven sacraments, the fourteen works of mercy, the eight beatitudes, the seven capital sins, and the seven opposing virtues, etc. Tianzhu jiaoyao 天主教要 (The Essentials of the Teachings of the Lord of Heaven, 1605), revised by Matteo Ricci (1552–1610), and its extensive commentary by Alfonso Vagnone (1568/9–1640) became the basis for catechetical literature during the seventeenth century and beyond. More than twenty similar works were published by Jesuits, Franciscans, and Dominicans. Some catechisms were also adapted to Chinese types of writing, such as Giulio Aleni’s (1582–1649) Tianzhu shengjiao sizi jingwen 天主聖教四字經文 (1642), which imitated the Sizi jing 四字經 (Four Character Classic) used in children’s education. Francesco Brancati’s (1607–1671) Tianshen huike 天神會課 (Rules for the Association of Angels, 1661), originally written for an association of Christian children, became a very popular text with many reprints. Remarkably, the wording of these works changed little over time, it was settled relatively early, and contained various options for rendering Christian key concepts: translation, transliteration, or the creation of new words. Unlike the Dottrina, the seventeenth-century Catechismus was based on natural theology and aimed at people poorly acquainted with Christian teachings. It discussed fundamental Christian truths, such as God’s existence, creation, the human soul, the consequences of good and evil, heaven and 671

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hell. Matteo Ricci’s Tianzhu shiyi 天主實義 (The Solid Meaning of the Lord of Heaven, 1603) became the prototype. It was reprinted multiple times, and translated into several languages until modern times. Formally and contentwise, it resembles Alessandro Valignano’s (1539–1606) catechetical method for Japan as reflected in his Catechismus Christianae Fidei (1586). Geared toward the Confucian elite, Tianzhu shiyi was conceived of as a dialogue between a Western and a Chinese scholar, wherein the Western participant uses rational (Thomistic) arguments to prove the above-mentioned Christian truths. Moreover, it is also apologetic, especially in the refuting of Buddhism (e.g., reincarnation, concepts of fasting and sin) and discussing the original goodness of human nature according to Confucian tradition. Only the last chapter treats the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ and his ascension, without speaking of his passion and crucifixion. The most original aspect of Tianzhu shiyi, with far-reaching consequences, is that Ricci quotes the Chinese Classics, demonstrating that in ancient times the Chinese had a natural knowledge of God. He conflates the terms shangdi (high lord) and tian (heaven) in these texts with the Christian God (Tianzhu: Lord of Heaven), signaling a significant concession to the Confucian cultural imperative. The solidity of Tianzhu shiyi is noteworthy. Although theological language evolved, and Ricci’s approach was criticized, the apologetic arguments by Ricci were repeated rather than developed further. The only comparable works are Aleni’s Wanwu zhenyuan 萬物真原 (The True Origin of All Things, ca. 1628) and Sanshan lunxue ji 三山論學紀 (Record of the Learned Discussions at Sanshan, ca. 1629). Additionally, though some later Jesuits (e.g., the compilers of Confucius Sinarum philosophus, Paris, 1687) studied the Chinese Classics in greater detail than the first Jesuits in China had done, this did not lead to a more profound dialogue with Chinese philosophy and religion in their catechetical writings. During the rest of the seventeenth century many specialized works appeared covering more meticulously some of the aspects included in the Dottrina (the Ten Commandments, the sacraments [especially the Eucharist and confession], the seven deadly sins, etc.) and the Catechismus (the creation of human beings and things, the soul, angels, original sin, reward and punishment of good and evil, the impossibility of reincarnation). These texts were primarily based on the works of Thomistic theology as the missionaries had been taught during their formation. Many of these texts were destined for the “in-group” of Chinese Christians, and most converts were not drawn from the literati class but from people whose vocabulary was limited in philosophical or Confucian notions. Works intended for this latter group, 672

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often written in colloquial language, explain the fundamental Christian teachings without appealing to reason or to references to the Chinese Classics. Moreover, Chinese religions are simply treated as false, and Buddhist and Taoist deities were described as demons usurping the position of the Lord of Heaven. Specialized texts sometimes inspired individual translation projects. A prolific translator of theology was Lodovico Buglio (1606–1682). In 1645 he started to translate parts of Thomas Aquinas’s Summa theologiae (mainly pars prima), published in 30 juan during 1654–1678 (Chaoxing xueyao 超性學要). Buglio also translated substantial parts of liturgical manuals, with a view to the formation of a Chinese clergy and gaining papal permission for the administration of the sacraments in Chinese: the Missale Romanum (Misa jingdian 彌撒經典, 1670), Breviarium Romanum (Siduo kedian 司鐸課典, 1674), and Manuale ad sacramenta ecclesiae ministranda (Shengshi lidian 聖事 禮典, 1675). The translation of the Bible was not a major focus in missionary activity before the nineteenth century, which appears to have been a missed opportunity, since the letter Romanae sedis antistes of Pope Paul V (1615) granted permission to translate it. However, it was only during the eighteenth century that two attempts were made at a systematic translation of the Bible. These texts remained in manuscript. The absence of complete Bible translations does not mean that translations of selections were nonexistent. Giulio Aleni’s Tianzhu jiangsheng yanxing jilüe 天主降生言行紀略 (Short Record of the Words and Deeds during God’s Incarnation, 1635) was a Chinese adaptation of the gospel harmony Vita Jesu Christi by Ludolphus de Saxonia (ca. 1300–1378). Its counterpart, Aleni’s Tianzhu jiangsheng chuxiang jingjie 天主降生出像經解 (Annotated Images of God’s Incarnation, 1637) was based on Jerónimo Nadal’s (1507–1580) Evangelicae Historiae Imagines (Antwerp, 1593). Shengjing zhijie 聖經直解 (A Direct Explanation of the Holy Scripture, ca. 1636–1642) by Manuel Dias, Jr. (1574–1659) is a translation and commentary on the Gospel readings of each Sunday that was used by missionaries and converts well into the eighteenth century. Moreover, references to Gospel narratives can be found in many catechetical works. In the field of devotional literature, the translation of prayer books, Shengjiao rike 聖教日課 (Daily Exercises of the Holy Religion, 1665) represents a unique case in the history of prayer books since it would be in use for more than three hundred years. These translations, originally by Niccolò (Nicolas) Longobardo (1565–1655) in 1628, were taken partly from the Memorial de la Vida Christiana of the Spanish Dominican mystic Luís de Granada 673

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(1504–1588). Three well-known spiritual works were also translated: the spiritual admonitions of Teresa of Ávila (Shengji baiyan 聖記百言, 1632, by Giacomo Rho [1592–1638]); Thomas à Kempis’s Imitatio Christi (Qingshi jinshu 輕世金書, before 1659, by Manuel Dias, Jr., published posthumously by Chinese converts (ca. 1680); and Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises (Sheng Yi-na-jue shenxing gongfu 聖依納爵神行工夫, ca. 1668), by Prospero Intorcetta (1625–1696).

Chinese Theologians Chinese Christian scholars epitomize the Confucian-Christian synthesis, fully responding to the cultural imperative. The synthesis was a kind of “Confucian monotheism” centered upon belief in the Lord of Heaven, the one omnipotent creator and stern judge. The use of the Classical Chinese terms tian 天, “heaven,” and shangdi 上帝, “high lord,” to denote the Christian God was controversial even within the Jesuit order, but it was fully accepted by Chinese converts. The crux of this Christian-Confucian effort at synthesis was the transformation of the abstract, impersonal “heaven,” the highest cosmic force or principle, into a personal Lord of Heaven. To Chinese Christians the worship of that Tianzhu 天主 was the very essence of their creed; in every exposition of the doctrine it forms the first and most fundamental theme. The incarnation-passion-resurrection subject played a secondary role. Another focus of interest was the ethical message: the excellence of Christian morals and their congruence with Confucian norms of social conduct. A strong conviction emerged among Chinese Christians that Christian morals could play a positive role in society because of their concrete applicability, their “solidity” (shi 實). Some prominent converted scholars were active in promoting charity and social harmony along Christian lines. These two themes of monotheism and ethics were expressed in apologetic and moral texts. The conviction that Christianity is a “complement” to the original teachings of Confucianism led to a Christian reinterpretation of ancient cultic terms and key passages from the Confucian canonical scriptures. As a corollary, Buddhism and other “superstitions” were sternly rejected – an iconoclastic attitude rarely seen in Chinese religious life. The apologetic nature was characteristic of most Chinese Christian religious writings. They were indeed subjected to more (overt) criticism than missionaries for having joined a foreign tradition. One of the earliest texts in this 674

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regard is Xu Guangqi’s 徐光啓 (1562–1633) widely circulated memorial Bianxue zhangshu 辨學章疏 (Memorial Defending Christianity, 1616), wherein he expressed the opinion that the “Learning of Serving Heaven” could supplement the Confucian tradition and correct the Buddhist tradition. The writings of another well-known Christian scholar, Yang Tingyun 楊廷 筠 (1557–1627), typify this apologetic tendency. By becoming a Christian, Yang Tingyun had turned his back on Buddhism. He first expressed this break in his Tian Shi mingbian 天釋明辯 (Clear Discussions on Heaven [Christianity] and Buddhism, before 1621), in which he exposed apparent similarities and essential differences between Christianity and Buddhism in thirty chapters. Later, under Confucian criticism, Yang Tingyun defended Christianity, explaining its doctrine and organization in several texts, including Daiyi pian 代疑篇 (Treatise on Replacing Doubt, 1621). His final work, Daiyi xupian 代疑續篇 (Sequel to the Treatise on Replacing Doubt, 1635, published posthumously), treats the question of orthodox transmission: it is not only a justification of Christianity, but also an indirect apology of the Confucian tradition with reference to Christianity. Several other Chinese converts followed in the footsteps of Yang Tingyun, such as Zhu Zongyuan 朱宗元 (d. 1660), the author of Da ke wen 答客問 (Answering the Questions of a Guest) and Zhengshi lüeshuo 拯世略說 (Short Explanation of the Salvation of the World, after 1650). Both works give a broad introduction to the main elements of the Christian faith, Scholastic theology, and Catholic liturgy. Zhu stressed the associations with the Confucian tradition on different levels, claiming that China was falling short of its ideals due to the influence of Buddhism and Taoism, while Europe, where the teaching of the Lord of Heaven dominated, was the ideal and true “Middle Kingdom.” The second major type of writing concerns ethical issues, and is well represented by Confucian-Christian morality books (shanshu 善書), a Chinese literary genre advocating moral education. Members of two important networks produced these works in the 1630s and 1640s: the Christian community in the Fujian province was concentrated around the Li 李 and Zhang 張 families and the missionary Giulio Aleni; the community in the Shanxi province around the Han 韓 and Duan 段 families and the missionary Alfonso Vagnone. The most important source about the Fujian community is Kouduo richao 口鐸日抄 (Diary of Daily Admonitions), an extensive selection over a period of ten years of missionaries’ sermons from Fujian. More than twenty-five Christians participated in the recording and editing of this work. Besides theological questions, it contains quite a number of homilies addressing moral questions. Also important is Lixiu yijian 勵修一鑑 (Mirror 675

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Encouraging Cultivation, 1639/1645), a Christian “morality book.” Divided into moral categories, it illustrates principal virtues by way of pious stories in order to encourage people to do good and avoid evil. This book contains a unique mixture of classical or historical stories and biblical or holy stories culled from the texts of the missionaries and books by converts who related events in the Chinese Christian community. Similar texts exist for the Shanxi community. Dadao jiyan 達道記言 (Recorded Sayings to Reach the Way) arranges sayings of philosophers and famous worthies under five headings corresponding to the Confucian five relations, a moral categorization that no doubt appealed to the Chinese public, reinforcing its character as a Western morality book. Duoshu 鐸書 (Book of the Warning Bell) arranged Christian and Confucian moral examples and sayings around the six moral instructions of the Sacred Edict (Shengyu 聖諭) of the founder of the Ming dynasty.

The Chinese Rites Controversy Generally, the controversy about the Chinese rites turned on the name of God and the rituals in honor of Confucius and the ancestors. The major question was whether terms such as tian (heaven) and shangdi (high lord) taken from the Chinese Classics could convey the meaning of the Christian concept of God. Or did these words have either no or so little theistic significance that other terms must be sought or new ones coined? This aspect of the controversy, which stands separate from but also is closely related to the rites questions, is often labeled the “term question.” The second point of dispute concerned the ceremonies in honor of Confucius, performed by the literati class in temples and halls dedicated to him, and the cult of ancestors, which was embedded in the social structures on all levels, and manifested by such forms of piety as prostrations (the kowtow), incense burning, the serving of food, etc., in front of a corpse, grave, or commemorative tablet. The issue was whether Christians should be forbidden to participate in these “superstitious” acts, or whether they should be regarded as “civil,” or at least not contrary to Christian belief, and therefore be tolerated. Or could the missionaries take a middle stance, condemning some features while permitting converts to perform the rites with modifications and expect that Christian conscience would eventually make them redundant or modify them still further? One can distinguish various phases in the controversy. The first phase (corresponding to the first fifty years of the mission) primarily concerned the “term question,” which was debated within the Society of Jesus. Basically, 676

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two opposite visions coexisted: Ricci’s view interpreted the ancient Classics in such a way that tian and shangdi were identified with the Christian God, thus rejecting the later Neo-Confucian interpretations. Longobardo’s view argued that one should not interpret these ancient texts without the later (“materialistic”) commentaries, thus rejecting the terms tian, shangdi, and others in favor of Christian concepts. In fact, there was also a paradox in their approaches to intercultural hermeneutics. Ricci took the European interpretation as the norm and rejected the dominant Neo-Confucian interpretation, which made possible the rapprochement with (original) Confucianism and the conviction of a compatibility between Confucianism and Catholicism. Longobardo took the Chinese interpretation as the norm and argued that the Neo-Confucian interpretation should be respected. It was precisely this position that complicated the rapprochement with Confucianism because it suggested that Confucianism and Catholicism were incompatible. The controversy was temporarily settled around 1633 in favor of the first view. The second phase coincided with the arrival of the Friars in 1633, in the person of Juan Bautista de Morales OP (1597–1664). The Friars were astonished by certain practices allowed or tolerated in the Christian communities established by the Jesuits. After having left China and returned to Rome in 1643, Morales presented “Seventeen Questions” that basically attacked the Jesuit approach to the Chinese rites. A first decree approved by Pope Innocent X (September 12, 1645) prohibited the practices described by Morales. In reaction, the Jesuits dispatched Martino Martini (1614–1661) to Rome in 1651 to show that Morales had not described their missionary practices accurately. A favorable decree followed on March 23, 1656, giving sanction to the practices as described in a statement by Martini. After the “Canton Conference” that was held among representatives of the Jesuits, Dominicans, and Franciscans around January 1668, and aimed at arriving at a uniform missionary method, Juan de Polanco OP (d. 1671) inquired whether the decision of 1656 had annulled the decision of 1645. The Holy Office responded on November 20, 1669 that both were still in effect and to be observed “according to the questions, circumstances, and everything set down in them.” In the decades that followed, Chinese Christians became more and more involved, and some Christian literati wrote important essays explaining the issues from a Chinese perspective. For instance, Yan Mo 嚴謨 (baptised as Paul; b. 1640) wrote several treatises collecting and discussing quotations about the terms tian, shangdi, or ji 祭 (sacrifice) as found in the Chinese Classics, which would be used in the formulation of arguments by missionaries. 677

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The conflict between the visions intensified at the end of the century (later than the period covered by this chapter and this book), when Charles Maigrot MEP (1652–1730), Vicar Apostolic of Fujian, launched an indictment of the rites in his Mandate of March 26, 1693. From that time the Holy See became involved in a juridical process of extraordinary complexity, while Jesuits’ books about China became the subject of stormy debates and condemnations at the Sorbonne in Paris. From their side, Chinese Christians wrote individual and collective letters to let their voices be heard in Rome. The deliberations of a commission of cardinals in Rome resulted in the decree Cum Deus optimus of November 20, 1704 forbidding the use of tian and shangdi, while approving Tianzhu; banning church tablets bearing the characters jing tian 敬天; prohibiting Christians from taking part in sacrifices to Confucius or to ancestors; proscribing ancestral tablets inscribed with characters calling them the “throne” or “seat of the spirit” of the deceased, but permitting tablets bearing merely the names of the dead. The Rites Controversy could be considered from the different ways in which various groups dealt with the ambiguity inherent in the terms or ritual practices. However, the effect of the controversy on the development of the church in China (especially after the proscription of Christianity in 1724) has probably been overestimated. Certainly, the papal decision made the church not very accommodating toward Chinese conditions and beliefs, and the irritation aroused by the papal legations without doubt influenced the emperor’s attitude to the missionaries, but there were many other factors: the attitude of the subsequent emperors to all religions; local anti-Christian movements; the isolated life of Christian communities in China; and changes in the Catholic Church in Europe. Many of the theological treatises by both missionaries and Chinese converts dating from the early seventeenth century survived these difficulties and were reprinted, sometimes in adapted forms, and spread well into the nineteenth century. bibliography For a more extensive description see Ad Dudink and Nicolas Standaert, “Apostolate through Books,” Erik Zürcher, “Key Theological Issues,” and Nicolas Standaert, “Rites Controversy,” in Nicolas Standaert, ed., Handbook of Christianity in China, volume I: 635–1800 (Leiden, 2001), 600–631, 632–652, and 680–688. For a very extensive bibliography to (Chinese) primary and secondary sources see Ad Dudink and Nicolas Standaert, Chinese Christian Texts Database (CCT-Database): www .arts.kuleuven.be/sinologie/english/cct.

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Theology in China ca. 1582–ca. 1688 Dudink, Ad. “The Holy Mass in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century China: Introduction to and Annotated Translation of Yu Misa Gongcheng (1721), Manual for Attending Mass.” In Sara Lievens and Noël Golvers, eds., A Lifelong Dedication to the China Mission: Essays Presented in Honor of Father Jeroom Heyndrickx, CICM, on the Occasion of his 75th Birthday and the 25th Anniversary of the F. Verbiest Institute K.U. Leuven (Leuven, 2007), 207–326. Malek, Roman, ed. The Chinese Face of Jesus Christ, volume II. Nettetal, 2003. Ricci, Matteo. The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven, ed. Thierry Meynard, trans. Douglas Lancashire and Peter Hu Kuo-chen. Boston, 2016. Standaert, Nicolas. Chinese Voices in the Rites Controversy: Travelling Books, Community Networks, Intercultural Arguments. Rome, 2012. “Coping with Ambiguity: Seventeenth-Century Intercultural Interpretations of ‘As If’ Rituals in the Liji.” In Anne Cheng, Stéphane Feuillas, and Joseph Ciaudo, eds., Autour du Traité des rites: De la canonisation du rituel à la ritualisation de la société / All about the Rites: From Canonised Ritual to Ritualised Society. Paris, 2021, 77–105. The Fascinating God: A Challenge to Modern Chinese Theology Presented by a Text on the Name of God Written by a 17th Century Chinese Student of Theology. Rome, 1995. An Illustrated Life of Christ Presented to the Chinese Emperor: The History of Jincheng shuxiang (1640), Sankt Augustin and Nettetal, 2007. The Interweaving of Rituals: Funerals in the Cultural Exchange between China and Europe. Seattle, 2008. “Xin 信 in the Early Seventeenth-Century Chinese Christian Community.” In Christian Meyer and Philip Clart, eds., From Trustworthiness to Secular Beliefs; Changing Concepts of xin from Traditional to Modern Chinese. Leiden, 2023, 246–286. Yang Tingyun, Confucian and Christian in Late Ming China: His Life and Thought. Leiden, 1988. Standaert, Nicolas and Ad Dudink, eds. Forgive us our Sins: Confession in Late Ming and Early Qing China. Sankt Augustin, 2006. Starr, Chloë. Chinese Theology: Text and Context. New Haven, 2016. A Reader in Chinese Theology. Waco, 2022.

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Protestant Theology and Science leen spruit Status Quaestionis The influence of Protestantism on natural science is nebulous and difficult to determine. First of all, one should bear in mind that Protestantism did not exist as a unified set of beliefs in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Lutherans, the Reformed, and the Anabaptists were all technically Protestant, yet their differences with each other were as great as the differences of each with the Church of Rome. The situation in England was even more complex. Henry VIII’s reformation in the 1530s had not been “Protestant” but dynastic, anticlerical, and national in character. In the past it has frequently been suggested that Protestantism provided an atmosphere more favorable to scientific investigations as such than did Catholicism. Protestantism, in particular in its Puritan variant, was seen as more conducive to the acceptance of the peculiar mechanical conception of nature that accompanied early modern science, and to its reconciliation with religious beliefs. In a celebrated thesis, Robert Merton argued that the Puritan movement in seventeenth-century England made a distinctive contribution to the expansion of the practical sciences. He argued that the social utility of both science and technology was increasingly recognized where Puritan values held sway.1 Merton’s thesis has been much criticized, because it is very hard to determine who counts as a Puritan. Merton’s argument that the experimental method

1 Robert K. Merton, Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth-Century England (New York, 1970; first published in Osiris, 4, no. 2 [1938], 360–632).

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was the scientific expression of the practical bent of the Protestant ethos was also vague and unpersuasive.2 Probably the strongest case for the links between Puritanism and science has been made by Charles Webster, who drew attention to the millenarianism of the period and showed that this aspect of Puritan theology played a crucial role in the promotion of scientific and technological innovation.3 However, Webster’s protagonists were concerned with a range of pragmatic concerns, including agriculture and animal husbandry, that do not always coincide with our notion of science.4 There have been attempts to refine Merton’s thesis by focusing on other religious groups in England, including orthodox Anglicans who turned to science as a pastime during the Civil War, and the so-called Latitudinarians whose doctrinal minimalism coupled with a liberal skepticism has been seen as inspiring cautious empiricism.5 However, the concern of these alternatives, like Stimson’s, Merton’s, and Webster’s, is only with the situation in England, and the respective analysis is restricted to a fairly short period (ca. 1640–1660). In 1968 Reijer Hooykaas emphasized some central tenets in Protestant theology that probably played a role in the rise of modern science: the duty of glorifying God for all His works (read the book of nature); the doctrine of predestination (determinism); and the general priesthood of believers (opposition to authority and tradition). He further argued that the Bible itself allowed a reconstruction of nature in which the residues of pantheism were swept away.6 There is also a much more general theory explaining why Protestants were more pioneering in science than Catholics. In the 1990s Peter Harrison claimed that the sixteenth-century changes in reading the Bible, made 2

Later discussions by Christopher Hill, Hugh F. Kerney, Stephen F. Mason, Lotte Mulligan, Theodore K. Rabb, and Barbara J. Shapiro appear in Charles Webster, ed., The Intellectual Revolution in the Seventeenth Century (London, 1974). 3 Charles Webster, The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine and Reform, 1626–1660 (London, 1975); Charles Webster, “Puritanism, Separatism, and Science (1986),” in Irwin Bernard Cohen et al., eds., Puritanism and the Rise of Modern Science: The Merton Thesis (New Brunswick, NJ, 1990), 273–275. 4 See John Henry, “Religion and the Scientific Revolution,” in Peter Harrison, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Science and Religion (Cambridge, 2010), 39–58, at 45. 5 Lotte Mulligan, “Civil War Politics, Religion and the Royal Society” and Barbara J. Shapiro, “Latitudinarianism and Science in Seventeenth-Century England,” both in Webster, ed., The Intellectual Revolution, 317–339, and 286–316 respectively; the latter repr. from Barbara J. Shapiro, “Latitudinarianism and Science in Seventeenth-Century England,” Past and Present 40 (1968), 16–41. 6 Reijer Hooykaas, Religion and the Rise of Modern Science (Edinburgh, 1972).

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available in print and in vernacular, carried over in significant ways into the reading of God’s other book: nature. The more literalist reading by the Protestants led readers of the book of nature to develop a more naturalist reading.7 This thesis has also been taken up by Stephen Gaukroger.8 Other theories have focused on particular theological positions. The most extensively discussed is the one concerned with voluntarist theology, proposed in 1935 by Michael Foster.9 Later Francis Oakley, Margaret Osler, and John Henry argued that a theology that emphasizes the freedom of the divine will to make one world rather than another is a theology that makes it inappropriate to reason a priori about how the world must be. Empirical methods are necessary to discover which of the many possible worlds the deity might have made has in fact been made. Accordingly, voluntarist theology has been seen as going hand in hand with empiricist approaches to an understanding of the world.10 Recently, Peter Harrison has recognized another theological justification for empiricism, namely the belief in the corrupt and deficient state of humankind after the Fall. He argued that a pessimistic, essentially Augustinian view of humanity’s rational abilities – embraced by Luther, Calvin, and the Jansenists – favored an empiricist approach in science.11 Harrison’s thesis is backed by evidence from writers of the period, as well as by the work of Richard Popkin on skepticism as a motor in the process of dethroning Aristotle and other ancient authorities in the early modern period. Harrison also suggested that postlapsarian pessimism was at the basis of voluntarist theology, and thus that it is impossible to distinguish between them. John Henry has argued, however, that abandoning voluntarism as a separate category would result in a diminishing of our understanding of the rise of modern science.12 7

Peter Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism and the Rise of Natural Science (Cambridge, 1998). Stephen Gaukroger, The Emergence of Scientific Culture: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1210–1685 (Oxford, 2006). 9 Michael Foster, “Christian Theology and Modern Science of Nature,” Mind 44 (1935), 439–466; cf. Hooykaas, Religion and the Rise of Modern Science; Eugene M. Klaaren, Religious Origins of Modern Science (Grand Rapids, 1977). 10 Francis Oakley, “Christian Theology and Newtonian Science: The Rise of the Concept of Laws of Nature,” Church History 30 (1961), 433–457; Margaret J. Osler, Divine Will and the Mechanical Philosophy: Gassendi and Descartes on Contingency and Necessity in the Created World (Cambridge, 1994); and John Henry, “Voluntarist Theology at the Origins of Modern Science: A Response to Peter Harrison,” History of Science 47 (2009), 79–113. For discussion see also John Brooke and Geoffrey Cantor, Reconstructing Nature: The Engagement of Science and Religion (Oxford, 2000 [Edinburgh, 1998]), 20; Henry, “Religion and the Scientific Revolution,” 47–50. 11 Peter Harrison, The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Modern Science (Cambridge, 2007). 12 Henry, “Religion and the Scientific Revolution,” 51–52. 8

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In sum, to say that theological doctrine could function as a presupposition of science need not entail the strong claim that, without a prior theology, modern science would never have taken off. But it does mean that the particular conceptions of science held by its pioneers were often informed by theological and metaphysical beliefs. In addition, a critical attitude to religious authority, typical of Protestantism, created a climate of opinion that predisposed some to be equally critical of dogma in science.13

Science and Theology: Luther, Calvin, and the Interpretation of the Bible Martin Luther argued that reason, when illuminated by faith, could observe the book of nature as the visible locus of God’s creation and providence. Luther also had some reservations about science. He was afraid that science might extend its interest in the natural processes of nature to the point where it no longer understood these forces as being under the control of the everactive sovereign will of God.14 Calvin defended the autonomy of secular learning,15 but he had reservations about science similar to those of Luther. He feared that a disinterested scientific approach would weaken one’s awareness of the lively control and directing activity of God in the natural order. Science could make a genuine contribution to humanity’s understanding of God, while still falling short of the revealed knowledge necessary to eternal life. Later Reformers, including Lambert Daneau, Theodore Beza, and Heinrich Bullinger, argued that in the earthly pilgrimage there are three avenues to knowledge: sense, reason, and revelation. By sense and reason one comes to know the structure and present workings of the universe, which includes the physical human body; but one must learn the origins, purposes, and destiny of this universe through the revelation granted by God.16 When Luther defined the Bible as “the cradle in which Christ is laid,” he suggested that the authority of the Bible was not primarily the information it supplied. Its meaning could only be apprehended in a vital Christologically 13

Paul H. Kocher, Science and Religion in Elizabethan England (San Marino, 1953), 19, suggested that Puritan iconoclasm could be transferred from the religious field to the destruction of scientific orthodoxies. 14 John Dillenberger, Protestant Thought and Natural Science: A Historical Study (London and Glasgow, 1961), 34. 15 Calvin, Institutes, I, II, 13–17, esp, 15; for discussion see Quirinus Breen, “Humanism and the Reformation,” in Jerald Carl Brauer, ed., The Impact of the Church Upon its Culture: Reappraisals of the History of Christianity (Chicago and London, 1968), 145–171, at 161. 16 Kocher, Science and Religion, 10 and 44.

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centered faith. Hence, only as the Spirit and the text were so conjoined as to create and nourish faith did the Bible become the Word of God in the full sense.17 Calvin’s basic conception of exegesis was no different. However, he did not so readily accept levels within Scripture, and hence occasionally strained certain texts in order to give them evangelical meaning. Both Luther and Calvin stressed the living Word. Only through the work of the Spirit were both the content and the authority of the Bible attested to us.18 Calvin thought that the authority of the Bible did not demand acceptance of unreasonable tenets regarding nature. He attributed a degree of poetic licence to the bibical text, by which divine truths were presented in nontechnical language for the lay reader. In his Genesis commentary, for example, he pointed out that the story of creation does not compete with the great art of astronomy, but accommodates and speaks in terms of the unlettered idiota.19 Thus, while recognizing the discrepancy between the scientific world system of his day and the biblical text, he did not repudiate the results of scientific research on that account. Calvin’s accommodation theory had considerable influence on Copernican astronomers in Protestant countries.20 From the 1560s a shift occurred, away from the exegetical principles of the Reformers themselves and toward a more legalistic attitude. First, a postReformation Scholasticism developed, the philosophical assumptions of which were antagonistic to the philosophy of the new science. Second, a defense of the Bible on the basis of its literal accuracy developed, including the claim to inerrancy with respect to science as well as theology. Through the systematization of Reformed doctrine and through the polemics with Rome, the Bible became a set of proof texts. Subsequently, both the religious and philosophical assumptions of many of the scientists appeared contrary to Christian theology.21 In seventeenth-century Reformed orthodoxy the text of the Bible, a theological interpretation, and an item of scientific knowledge were alike

17

18 Dillenberger, Protestant Thought and Natural Science, 30. Calvin, Institutes, I, VII. Heiko O. Oberman, “Reformation and Revolution: Copernicus’ Discovery in an Era of Change,” in Owen Gingerich, ed., The Nature of Scientific Discovery (Washington, 1973), 134–169; Gary B. Deason, “Reformation Theology and the Mechanistic Conception of Nature,” in David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers, eds., God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter between Christianity and Science (Los Angeles, 1986), 167–191, at 171. 20 Hooykaas, Religion and the Rise of Modern Science, 122–124; Rienk Vermij, The Calvinist Copernicans: The Reception of the New Astronomy in the Dutch Republic, 1575–1750 (Amsterdam, 2002). 21 Dillenberger, Protestant Thought and Natural Science, 50. 19

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construed as metaphysical knowledge. The Protestant orthodox defended the Bible as a recorded document of the very words of God Himself. Physics or geography, chronology, and other sciences belonged to the words of God as well as all aspects of faith. Formally, the Bible had become a book of knowledge.22

From Melanchthon to Later Lutheranism In the early 1520s Luther attacked the Aristotelian natural philosophy taught in the universities as vain. Initially this conviction was shared by Philip Melanchthon, but after 1527, when the Zwickau prophets presented a radical alternative to Luther’s Protestantism, a shift occurred in his thought on the value of philosophy and science: Science cannot discern theological truths, but is useful for the knowledge of God’s creation. Melanchthon then began a life-long project of writing and rewriting philosophy textbooks as well as numerous prefaces for mathematical and astronomical works.23 In Luther’s view, God Himself and His intentions with His world reveal themselves only to those who believe in the words of the Gospel. And it is only in the light of this belief, which is accorded to humanity sola gratia, that human beings are able to observe the vestigia Dei (footprints of God) in nature. Melanchthon, by contrast, thought that natural philosophy verifies and confirms the biblical truth and is therefore useful for the rationalitas of revelation, and in the refutation of Stoics and Epicureans.24 The exact impact of Lutheranism on science, however, is difficult to evaluate. From the 1570s contemporary interpretations of Aristotelianism began to have a marked effect on Lutheran theology. During the early orthodox era (roughly 1565–1640) theologians expressed doubts about the new cosmology and philosophy, as a rule remaining content with the late Renaissance revisions of Peripatetic philosophy at the hands of Italian philosophers and Spanish schoolmen, including Giacomo Zabarella and Francisco Suárez. Theological controversies within Lutheranism and between Lutheranism and other confessions made precise definitions of terms such as “substance” and “accident,” “nature” and “person” imperative.

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Ibid., 97. Sachiko Kusukawa, The Transformation of Natural Philosophy: The Case of Philip Melanchthon (Cambridge, 1995), 45, 69, 141–142. 24 Jürgen Helm, “Religion and Medicine: Anatomical Education at Wittenberg and Ingolstadt,” in Jürgen Helm and Annette Winkelmann, eds., Religious Confessions and the Sciences in the Sixteenth Century (Leiden, 2001), 51–68, at 56–57. 23

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Thus, metaphysics became a powerful tool to fend off attacks by Calvinists and Catholics.25

The Bible as a Source of Scientific Knowledge: Lambert Daneau to Gisbertus Voetius Lambert Daneau and Hieronymus Zanchi were the first Protestant scholars to define the Calvinist standpoint as regards natural philosophy. Daneau wrote Christian Physics (1576), a natural philosophy based on descriptions of the workings of nature as found in the Scriptures. In On the Works of God Created within Six Days (1591), Zanchi, an ex-canon regular of the Lateran and then a Protestant theologian, argued that natural philosophy is useful in three ways: in order to know God through creation; to help understand metaphors in Scripture taken from nature; and to lead students to piety.26 There were significant differences between Daneau and Zanchi. Daneau argued that one cannot rely upon the study of nature without knowing Scripture. A fortiori, in his view, the Pentateuch provided all necessary knowledge about the creation. Thus, physics is the true knowledge of the causes by which creation and its differentiation in the world are brought about, and of the effects that follow; it serves the glory of God’s work. Daneau preferred Moses to Aristotle, while Zanchi had total confidence in Aristotle’s explanation of the works of nature, did not criticize Aristotle’s phrasing, as did Daneau, and argued that Moses and Aristotle essentially agreed. Both, however, held that philosophy should approximate the biblical truth; both evaluated theories of natural philosophy according to their success in presenting the world as governed by divine administration.27 Reformed theologians from the seventeenth century onward continued the attempt to integrate biblical data and physics. They defended “Mosaic origins” against the new philosophies of their day, and philosophized about creation and nature in accordance with the authority of Scripture. In their view natural philosophy was “an inherently theological discipline.”28 25 Walther Sparn, Wiederkehr der Metaphysik: Die ontologische Frage in der lutherischen Theologie des frühen 17. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart, 1976); Richard Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics: The Rise and Development of Reformed Orthodoxy (Grand Rapids, 2003), 71–73. 26 Further Protestant developments are found in Otto Casmann, Cosmopoeia et ouranographia christiana (Frankfurt, 1598); Conrad Aslacus (Kort Aslakssøn), Physica et ethica mosaica (Hanover, 1613); Amos Comenius, Physicae ad lumen divinum reformatae synopsis (Leipzig, 1633). 27 Johannes A. van Ruler, The Crisis of Causality: Voetius and Descartes on God, Nature and Change (Leiden, 1995), 71–82. 28 Cees Leijenhorst, “Place, Space and Matter in Calvinist Physics,” Monist 84 (2001), 20–41, at 20.

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Daneau and Zanchi’s ideas heavily influenced the exponents of the Second Reformation. And this holds in particular for Gisbertus Voetius (1589–1676), who argued that the Bible is the book of all sciences, and that natural science (as well as philosophy and medicine) was based on and should be at the service of a literal interpretation of Scripture. According to Voetius, the content of the Bible is not descriptive but normative. For him, this implied that the authority of the Bible in natural science is absolute and that there is no space for moving in between the “two books.”29 Voetius was convinced that Sacred Scripture not only teaches what is necessary for salvation, but also lays down the principles of all good sciences and arts, including mathematics, astronomy, physics, and logic.30 Consequently, he was also vigorously opposed to Copernicanism. Voetius’s main argument against heliocentrism is that this cosmology puts the reliability of Scripture in jeopardy.31 He strongly opposed a distinction between religious and nonreligious matters in the Bible, as it weakens biblical authority and strengthens the opponents of Christianity.32 This implied opposition to the notion of accommodation, because it endangers the divine inspiration of the Bible. Voetius’s rejection of accommodation entails a defense of the supremacy of theology. Even though the Bible is written in terms that are intelligible to everyone, there is nonetheless no reason for Scripture to contain falsehoods. Voetius did not see his interventions as a transgression of disciplinary bounds. By contrast, he held that astronomers have no right to meddle in Scripture. One should reject novelties and idle curiosity, and embrace God’s revelation.33 Voetius opposed the new Cartesian philosophy, and defended a pragmatic use of Aristotelianism. In his treatises on creation and on substantial forms, Voetius admitted that forms are not a substantial part of Christian faith, but he argued that the denial of forms generates a number of difficulties, including the collapse of the distinction between substance and accident

29

Van Ruler, The Crisis of Causality, 74–75. Gijsbert Voetius, Sermoen van de nutticheydt der academien en de scholen, mitsgaders der wetenschappen ende consten die in de selve gheleert werden (Utrecht, 1636), 35–36. 31 A. Goudriaan, Reformed Orthodoxy and Philosophy, 1625–1750: Gisbertus Voetius, Petrus van Mastricht, and Anthonius Driessen (Leiden and Boston 2006), 125–130. 32 Ibid., 133–136; Vermij, The Calvinist Copernicans, 245–250. 33 Van Ruler, The Crisis of Causality, 15–19. For Voetius’s defense of Ptolemaic astronomy see Gisbertus Voetius, Selectarum disputationum theologicarum. Pars prima [-quinta], 5 vols. (Utrecht, 1648–1669), I, 869–870. 30

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and, in particular, the denial of secondary causality.34 In effect, Voetius held that mechanistic ideas might exclude God’s concurrence. Indeed, the theory of divine concurrence is dependent on a theory of causality in which there is something for the prime cause to co-operate with. At the heart of Voetius’s criticism of the new philosophy lies the conviction that the mechanical viewpoint cannot account for the causal relations between God and creation.35

From the Elizabethan Age to the Foundation of the Royal Society In the past the growth of the scientific movement in early modern England has been ascribed to the religious drive of the Puritans toward the performance of “good works” such as the useful application of science. However, it is difficult to establish the precise role of Puritanism in the rise of modern science in England. First, there is a loose set of not always consistent assumptions, and thus it is difficult to make out who is a Puritan and who is not. Second, there is no tendency within Puritan theological works to stress specific scientific doctrines or philosophies. Finally, nobody can ignore the links between Reformed religion and scientific advance from the midseventeenth century, but the evidence for the connection between science and Protestantism before 1640 is meager at the very least. As to the value of Scripture and the ancient traditions, the English situation reveals significant parallels with ideas flourishing on the Continent. Many English authors, including Francis Bacon, Thomas Browne, Robert Fludd, and Robert Boyle, lamented the loss of ancient scriptural science. Nicholas Hill and Walter Charleton traced the origin of genuine scientific ideas in the Hebrew tradition. Ralph Cudworth held that Moses invented atomism, and Henry More argued that the Bible contained the first articulation of Copernicus, of Descartes’s ideas, and in general of corpuscular philosophy. Thus, the discoveries of modern science were essentially seen as rediscoveries of scriptural truth. There was general support within English Protestantism for the investigation of nature on the grounds that it would glorify God and contribute to the comprehension of His attributes. The experimental sciences in general attained an enhanced status owing to their development in works devoted to natural religion.36 For the period under scrutiny, roughly between 1550 and 34 35 36

Goudriaan, Reformed Orthodoxy and Philosophy, 115–116. Van Ruler, The Crisis of Causality, 284–305. Webster, “Puritanism, Separatism, and Science,” 201.

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1650, many innovative scientists apparently belonged to the “middle band” of the religious spectrum, that is, to a group that cannot be split into Anglican and Puritan camps. An important unifying factor was provided by a general adherence to certain ideas of Francis Bacon, whose anti-Scholasticism and experimental philosophy attracted widespread enthusiasm. The traditional concept of the common authorship and deep interconnectedness of the two books – the book of nature and the Bible – is also a foundational tenet of the versions of natural theology developed by British philosophers and scientists. However, they progressively severed their ties with the older tradition, and in particular with natural philosophy and the natural history underpinning it. Central to their definitions was the argument from (divine) design, which remained a relatively stable rhetorical strategy during the period from Francis Bacon to Isaac Newton, although its outlook shifted over time. In the Meditationes sacrae (1597) Bacon drew a distinction between the will of God (more revealed in Scripture), and the power of God (exhibited more through His creatures). This is not a veiled distinction between faith and science, however. Bacon underlines that God governs a chain of causes, not every single cause, as Calvin thought.37 In Bacon’s view, the human mind was designed to comprehend nature or the universe, not the inner workings and plans of the transcendent God. Thus, natural knowledge is a support for faith – as a reconstruction of the chain of causes that depend upon providence. For Bacon, the design of the organism or creature offered the best possibility of understanding the role of God in propounding the laws of nature and creating nature in accordance with those laws.38 John Wilkins, like Walter Charleton and Seth Ward, used natural religion to defend the harmony of reason and religion against real or imaginary attacks. He moved from proofs of God’s existence based on common consent and natural notions to the conventional arguments from creation. Wilkins argued that nature operated according to certain mechanisms and natural laws, but that these laws themselves were due to God’s will and were part of His purpose.39 From the end of the seventeenth century in Great Britain, a form of natural theology called physico-theology developed, which aimed at proofs

37 For Calvin all beings are directed by God’s ever-present hand: Institutes, I, XVI, sec. 2. See Steven Matthews, Theology and Science in the Thought of Francis Bacon (Aldershot, 2008), 32–39. 38 Matthews, Theology and Science, 53–74. 39 Shapiro, “Latitudinarianism and Science in Seventeenth-Century England.”

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for the existence of God and at knowledge of (some of ) His properties deduced from manifest patterns, since aspects of order and purpose are found in natural phenomena. This trend, which goes beyond the chronological borders of this chapter, is markedly different from what was called “natural theology” in the Catholic tradition, as it was a study of the ontology of natural facts as a stairway to God.

Catholic Critiques of the Biblical Objection to Copernicanism maurice a. finocchiaro The Copernican Revolution may be defined as the transition from a geostatic and geocentric worldview to a geokinetic and heliocentric one. It was a slow and gradual process, beginning with Nicolaus Copernicus’s On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres (1543) and ending with Isaac Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (1687). The main reason for such a lengthy development was that the geostatic view, although false, was reasonable, and for thousands of years was based on available evidence and good arguments; moreover, the alternative geokinetic view was subject to apparently irrefutable objections and counter-arguments. These anti-Copernican arguments were of many types: observational, theoretical, philosophical, astronomical, mechanical, and theological.40 Among the theological objections there was the scriptural argument, which may be stated as follows. It is asserted or implied in many passages of the Bible that the earth stands still at the center of the universe. For example, the Joshua miracle is described as follows: “Then spake Joshua to the Lord in the day when the Lord delivered up the Amorites before the children of Israel, and he said in the sight of Israel, ‘Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon; and thou, Moon, in the valley of Ajalon.’ And the sun stood still, and the moon staid, until the people had avenged themselves upon their enemies” (Josh. 10:12–13). Therefore, the argument continued, the earth’s motion is contrary to Scripture. Now, since Scripture cannot err, it follows that Copernicus’s heliocentric and geokinetic theory is wrong, false, and/or heretical. Thus, the Copernican Revolution required not only the discovery of new evidence and the formulation of new arguments in favor of the earth’s motion,

40 Maurice A. Finocchiaro, ed. and trans., The Galileo Affair: A Documentary History (Berkeley, 1989), 15–25; Maurice A. Finocchiaro, On Trial for Reason: Science, Religion, and Culture in the Galileo Affair (Oxford, 2019), 54–67.

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but also the criticism of the old arguments against it and in favor of the earth standing still. The greatest contribution to this accomplishment was made by Galileo Galilei (1564–1642). He did so partly through his telescopic discoveries in astronomy (the moon’s mountains, Jupiter’s satellites, Venus’s phases, and sunspots) and partly through his creation of a new physics, a new science of motion that included such principles as the law of inertia, the relativity of motion, and the composition of motion into distinct components. With regard to the theological objections, however, the situation was different. Galileo perceived (correctly) the potentially explosive character of those issues. Thus, at first he did not get involved, even though his initial telescopic discoveries of 1609–1610 were immediately attacked on theological grounds. Eventually, however, he felt compelled to intervene. Nevertheless, he did so prudently, in the form of private letters thoughtfully criticizing the biblical argument against Copernicanism.41 In December 1613 he wrote a sixpage critique to his former student Benedetto Castelli; and in 1615 he expanded this into a thirty-two-page essay addressed to the grand duchess Christina, mother of the grand duke of Tuscany, who employed Galileo as his philosopher and chief mathematician. Although these letters were not published at the time, they underwent some circulation, enough to start Inquisition proceedings against Galileo. These proceedings occurred in two phases.42 The first phase was concluded in 1616, with two main results. On March 5 the Congregation of the Index issued a decree declaring the Copernican idea of the earth’s motion scientifically false and theologically contrary to Scripture. It also banned Copernicus’s Revolutions subject to some corrections; these were published in a 1620 decree, which stipulated revisions intended to remove the book’s suggestions that terrestrial motion was compatible with Scripture and was a real physical phenomenon (above and beyond a mere instrument for mathematical calculations and astronomical predictions). Galileo himself was not mentioned at all in these decrees, but in 1616 he was given a private and friendly warning by Cardinal Robert Bellarmine in the name of the Inquisition: Galileo was not supposed to defend the earth’s motion as physically real or compatible with Scripture, but he could treat it as a mere hypothetical instrument to make calculations and predictions.

41

Galileo Galilei, Le Opere di Galileo Galilei, ed. Antonio Favaro et al., 20 vols. (Florence, 1890–1909; repr. 1929–39 and 1968), V, 281–288, 309–348; Finocchiaro, ed., The Galileo Affair, 49–54, 87–118. 42 See Finocchiaro, On Trial for Reason, 109–122, 155–170.

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The second phase of the proceedings occurred in 1632–1633, after Galileo published his Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems, Ptolemaic and Copernican. He was accused of having violated various injunctions stemming from the 1616 proceedings, and was eventually convicted of having violated Bellarmine’s warning. Thus, Galileo’s criticism of the biblical argument against Copernicanism had an important role in the Copernican Revolution and a crucial role in his Inquisition trial. Actually, that criticism also had a role in the subsequent cultural history of the science-theology relationship.43 The reason is that eventually the Catholic Church agreed with Galileo’s view. This happened implicitly in 1893, when Pope Leo XIII in his encyclical Providentissimus Deus advanced an account of the relationship between science and theology very similar to Galileo’s; the similarity was implicit in the sense that this encyclical did not even mention him, and yet its theses and its arguments left no doubt. Eventually the recognition became explicit, during the rehabilitation of Galileo by Pope St. John Paul II in 1979–1992: the pope was clear and explicit that Galileo had been theologically right as against his ecclesiastical opponents. Finally, it is historically important that Galileo was not the only Catholic who insightfully elaborated a criticism of the scriptural argument against Copernicanism. Indeed, there are two other Catholic clergymen who at the time advanced and published similar unorthodox views on the subject and got into similar difficulties. One was the Italian Carmelite friar Paolo Antonio Foscarini (1580–1616), who in 1615 published a book containing a theological defense of Copernicanism. Foscarini was the provincial head of the Carmelites in Calabria and had an ambitious agenda of works in philosophy and theology that tended to be encyclopedic in scope. The book was written in the form of a letter to the general of the Carmelite order and was entitled Letter on the Opinion, Held by Pythagoreans and by Copernicus, of the Earth’s Motion and Sun’s Stability and of the New Pythagorean World System.44 This book was explicitly condemned and totally and permanently banned by the Index Decree of March 5, 1616. 43

See Finocchiaro, On Trial for Reason, 175–181. See Paolo A. Foscarini, Lettera sopra l’opinione de’ pittagorici e del Copernico (Naples, 1615), repr. in Massimo Bucciantini and Michele Camerota, eds., Scienza e religione: Scritti copernicani (Rome, 2009), 113–154; and Paolo A. Foscarini, “A Letter . . . Concerning the Opinion of the Pythagoreans and Copernicus about the Mobility of the Earth . . .,” trans. Richard J. Blackwell in Richard J. Blackwell, Galileo, Bellarmine, and the Bible (Notre Dame, 1991), 217–251. 44

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The other clergyman was Dominican friar Tommaso Campanella (1568–1639). His most relevant work is a book whose title may be translated as A Defense of Galileo, the Mathematician from Florence, where One Discusses whether the Manner of Philosophizing Advocated by Galileo Conforms or Conflicts with Sacred Scripture.45 It was first published in Frankfurt in 1622, but promptly banned by the Index in Rome. Most likely, Campanella wrote it just before the anti-Copernican decree of March 5, 1616, while he was in Naples serving time in prison for his unorthodox religious ideas and for his political activities advocating a kind of communist state. My remarks so far are meant to contextualize the arguments by Foscarini, Galileo, and Campanella attempting to refute the scriptural objection to Copernicanism. It is now time to analyze them in detail. Foscarini is explicit that his aim is to give a theological defense of the earth’s motion, that is, a defense of the geokinetic proposition from the objection that it is contrary to Scripture. He is equally clear that he is in no position to mount the following direct defense: that since Copernicanism is physically true, and since two truths cannot contradict each other, Copernicanism is not contrary to Scripture. This defense is not feasible because the earth’s motion has not been proved with certainty. However, Foscarini is also at pains to repeat frequently the assertion that Copernicanism is probable or likely true, indeed more probable than the Ptolemaic system, and that this probability is largely the result of Galileo’s telescopic discoveries. Foscarini puts forward several arguments to show that Copernicanism is not contrary to Scripture. One of the most important is based on the principle of accommodation, which he takes to be uncontroversial and universally accepted: “whenever Sacred Scripture attributes to God or to some creature anything which is otherwise known to be problematic or improper, then it is interpreted and explicated in one of the following four ways”;46 these amount to saying that Scripture is speaking metaphorically or analogically, or is accommodating itself to the common or popular manner of speaking, thinking, perceiving, describing, or believing. Foscarini illustrates this principle with scriptural statements that attribute to God physical attributes such as walking and hands, and emotional states like anger and regret; also with statements that attribute to the earth ends and foundations; 45 Tommaso Campanella, Apologia pro Galilaeo (Frankfurt, 1622), trans. Richard J. Blackwell as A Defense of Galileo (Notre Dame, 1994). 46 Foscarini, Lettera sopra l’opinione, 19 (my trans.).

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and with those that speak of light and night and day having been created before anything else, of the six “days” of creation, and of the sun and moon as the two great luminaries. Moreover, Foscarini is careful to formulate the conclusion of this particular argument by saying that “if the Pythagorean opinion were otherwise true, then it could easily be reconciled with the passages of Sacred Scripture that appear contrary to it . . . by saying that there Scripture speaks in accordance with our manner of understanding, with the appearances, and with our point of view.”47 Indeed, such a conditional and relatively weak conclusion is all that follows from the principle of accommodation as stated by Foscarini, which is contingent on a scriptural attribution that is otherwise known to be literally incorrect. Thus, by means of the principle of accommodation, Foscarini does not show, and does not pretend to show, that Copernicanism is indeed compatible with Scripture, but only that if we knew that Copernicanism were true then we could unproblematically reinterpret geostatic statements in Scripture. Another key argument is based on the principle of limited scriptural authority. Paraphrasing various scriptural passages, Foscarini claims: Sacred Scripture . . . does not instruct men in the truth of the secrets of nature . . . because [God] has already allowed and decided that the world be occupied with disputations, quarrels, and controversies and be subject to uncertainty in everything (as stated in Ecclesiastes), and that the answer will only come at the end. . . . Thus, its intention is now only to teach us the true road to eternal life.48

Here, the conclusion he reaches is that “so consequently we see how and why from the passages already mentioned we cannot derive any certain resolutions in such subjects, and how with this principle we can easily avoid the hits from the first and second group of passages and from any other allegation derived from Sacred Scripture against the Pythagorean and Copernican opinion.”49 This argument seems a more direct line of reasoning in support of his claim that Copernicanism does not contradict Scripture. For Foscarini is saying that, since Scripture is not an authority on the secrets of nature, scriptural allegations about the earth’s rest and sun’s motion do not entitle us to infer that the earth is motionless and the sun moves; thus, we are in no position to assert the earth’s lack of motion on scriptural grounds, and hence 47

Ibid., 29–30.

48

Ibid., 30–31.

49

Ibid., 34.

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the conflict with the Copernican opinion evaporates. In other words, the earth’s motion is not contrary to Scripture because Scripture is not a philosophical (or scientific) authority, and so scriptural assertions that the earth is motionless do not mean that the earth really is motionless. A third argument involves what Foscarini calls the principle of “extrinsic denomination” and the Joshua passage. The principle states that “many times one says commonly and most properly that a motionless agent moves not because it really moves but by extrinsic denomination, namely because with the motion of the subject that receives its influence and action, what also moves is some property which the agent causes in the subject.”50 Applied to the Joshua miracle, we get the following analysis: If the earth moves and the sun stands still, sunlight would still move over the earth’s surface, and so it would be proper to say, by extrinsic denomination, that the cause of this moving sunlight itself moves. The earth’s motion can thus be reconciled with the Joshua passage. Most of the rest of Foscarini’s Letter consists of arguments attempting to show that various specific scriptural passages that have been alleged to be contrary to Copernicanism can be reconciled with it for various reasons and in various ways. Galileo’s Letter to Christina consists of a brief introductory part explaining its origin and purpose; a long central part that takes up in turn a number of distinct questions about the relationship between scriptural interpretation and scientific investigation; and a brief final part in which Galileo engages in some scriptural exegesis meant to show that the earth’s motion is not contrary to Scripture. In the introductory part we are told that the letter originated from some unprovoked attacks against Galileo accusing him of heresy because he believed in the earth’s motion, and that in it he plans to defend himself from this accusation. It is important to stress the apologetic and defensive character of the letter. The apologia takes the form of the criticism of the scriptural argument against Copernicanism, and he concludes this part of the letter with a clear and incisive statement of the objection. Galileo begins the central argument of the letter by elaborating several uncontroversial points. The first (echoing Foscarini) is that the literal interpretation of Scripture is not always correct since, for example, some scriptural statements about God state or imply that He has eyes, ears, and so on,

50

Ibid., 35.

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and we know that this is not literally true. The second point is that the literal interpretation of Scripture is incorrect when it conflicts with physical truths that have been conclusively proved. The third is an explanation for this priority of proved scientific truths over literal scriptural meaning, and that it was also universally accepted; the explanation is that, whereas Scripture is the Word of God, which was meant “to teach us how one goes to heaven and not how heaven goes,”51 the physical universe and the human senses and mind are the Work of God, and hence one cannot doubt the truth of physical conclusions grounded on sense-experience and conclusive arguments. From these three points, Galileo argues that it plausibly follows that the literal interpretation of Scripture is not binding when we are dealing with physical propositions that are capable of being conclusively proved (even if not proved yet); this consequence follows because doing so would be the more prudent policy, and because what we know is minute compared to what we do not know. Galileo next undertakes an explicit criticism of theological authority. He argues that theology is not the queen of the sciences because its principles do not provide the logical foundations of the knowledge formulated in other sciences, the way that, for example, geometry does for surveying. Moreover, theologians cannot dictate physical conclusions from the above (i.e., without themselves actually getting involved in physical investigations), any more than a king who is not a physician can prescribe cures for the sick. Nor can theologians tell scientists to undo their own observations and proofs because this is an inherently impossible or self-defeating task. Rather, theologians can and should follow two courses. The first corresponds to already established practice: apropos of conclusively established physical truths, they should strive to show that they are not contrary to Scripture by an appropriate interpretation of the latter. The second would be a rule of interdisciplinary communication. Theologians should presume scientific ideas that are not conclusively proved but contrary to Scripture to be false, and accordingly should try to give a scientific disproof of them; this is desirable because the inadequacies of an idea can be discovered more easily by those who reject it. This ingenious but plausible rule is this section’s main methodological conclusion. Next, Galileo questions the traditional principle that used scriptural consensus combined with the unanimity of the Church Fathers to require

51

Finocchiaro, ed., The Galileo Affair, 96.

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acceptance of the literal meaning of physical statements. In other words, he criticizes what may be called the anti-Copernican objection from the consensus of Church Fathers. Once again, he makes his fundamental distinction between physical propositions that are and those that are not capable of conclusive proof. For the latter the principle makes sense, but for the former the previous considerations suggest that it is not sound. Two new points emerge in this discussion. First, scriptural consensus is not a sign that physical statements are meant to be taken as literally and descriptively true, but rather it is the result of Scripture’s desire for consistency, its appeal to common people, and the need to reflect the opinions of the time. Second, the unanimity of Church Fathers is not binding unless it is explicit, unless it is the result of reasoned discussion, and unless it refers to matters of faith and morals. Finally, the authority of the church itself comes under discussion. Galileo admits that it does have the power to condemn an idea as heretical, but he notes that “it is not always useful to do all that one can do.”52 Moreover, to make ideas heretical is not the same as making them false; indeed, “no creature has the power of making them be true or false, contrary to what they happen to be by nature and de facto.”53 At any rate, the church should not be hasty in its condemnation; he hopes that it is not “about to make rash decisions.”54 Before condemning a physical idea, it should examine all the evidence and listen to all the arguments on both sides of the issue, and should rigorously prove that its interpretation of the relevant scriptural passages is correct. For example, such a rigorous proof should use all the cautious advice elaborated by St. Augustine. To avoid potential embarrassment, it might be best to wait until the physical idea is conclusively refuted before declaring it heretical. One of the most striking features of this central part of the Letter is the negative tone of its component conclusions: that the literal interpretation of Scripture is not binding in scientific investigation; that theology is not the queen of the sciences; that scriptural consensus is not a sufficient condition for a literal interpretation; that the unanimity of Church Fathers is not necessarily decisive in physical questions; and that the authority of the church should not be hastily applied. This negativity corresponds to the apologetic and critical purpose of the letter, and the general suggestion is, as mentioned earlier, a denial of the scientific (or philosophical) authority of Scripture. But

52

Ibid., 110.

53

Ibid., 114.

54

Ibid.

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there is an underlying positive idea: the principle of autonomy, according to which scientific investigation can and should proceed independently of Scripture. And from the point of view of the enterprise of understanding Scripture, we get another constructive idea underlying these negative conclusions: that scriptural interpretation often depends on the results of scientific investigation. A second striking theme is that of prudence and caution, which Galileo adopts from St. Augustine and elaborates further. Galileo’s explicit admonitions are, of course, against haste in condemning Copernicanism. But it would also extend to the question of accepting the theory or judging the conclusiveness of its supporting arguments. Equally striking is the theme involving the distinction between physical propositions that are and those that are not capable or susceptible of conclusive proof. This is obviously the main epistemological distinction, rather than that between propositions that have and those that have not been conclusively proved already. The central issue concerns the former distinction, and Galileo tries to resolve it by arguing that no physical proposition capable of conclusive proof should ever be condemned. The priority of established scientific knowledge that has already been conclusively proved over scriptural statements is a non-issue. From the viewpoint of this uncontroversial principle, there would have been no reason for him to write an essay on the methodology of scriptural interpretation and scientific investigation; rather, the only thing to do would have been to produce or search for the conclusive demonstration. The very fact that he has written this methodological essay indicates that he wants to advocate a (relatively) novel principle. In other words, in this central part of the letter Galileo interprets the scriptural argument against Copernicanism as essentially an argument from authority to the effect that it is erroneous to believe in the earth’s motion because Scripture says so. He objects that Scripture is not a scientific authority, and therefore even if Scripture does endorse the geostatic thesis, it does not follow that it is true and the geokinetic thesis is false; that is, the reason given for the conclusion is inadequate, even if it were true. The brief final part of the Letter may be interpreted as a criticism of the truth of the minor premise of the scriptural argument. Galileo tries to show that it is questionable whether Scripture says that the earth stands still and the sun moves. He does this by an analysis of several passages that were typically given to support the contrariety thesis. The Joshua miracle is discussed at great length. Galileo argues that the Joshua passage contradicts the geostatic system, whereas it could be given a literal interpretation from the Copernican 698

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viewpoint. The passage says that, in response to Joshua’s prayer to prolong daylight, God ordered the sun to stop, and the sun stood still for a whole day. Galileo points out that in any system, to lengthen the day the diurnal motion must be stopped. Unfortunately, in the geostatic system the diurnal motion belongs not to the sun, but to the outermost sphere in the universe, either the celestial sphere or the so-called primum mobile. The proper motion that belongs to the sun is the annual motion, which, being opposite in direction to the diurnal motion, would shorten the day if stopped, making the sun set that much sooner. It follows that if we take the Scripture literally, the miracle is physically impossible in the geostatic system, whereas if God did the miracle, he should have ordered the primum mobile to stop. By contrast, Galileo argues that in the geokinetic system the miracle could have happened as follows. First, he refers to his own discovery that the sun is not completely motionless but rotates on its axis with a period of about a month; thus it makes sense, to begin with, to stop the sun from moving. To this Galileo adds the speculation that solar rotation probably causes the planetary revolutions, one of which is the earth’s own annual orbital motion; and further that this terrestrial orbital motion is probably connected with the earth’s axial rotation. All of this makes some sense because all these motions are in the same direction in the heliocentric system. Thus, by stopping the sun’s rotation, God could have stopped the earth’s diurnal motion and lengthened Joshua’s day. One final remark is worth adding. The Letter is full of references to and quotations from the patristic and theological tradition, such as St. Jerome, St. Thomas Aquinas, and especially St. Augustine. This aspect of the letter could be reconstructed as the endorsement of an argument from authority, designed to show that, according to theological tradition, Scripture is not a scientific authority. This is important because Galileo was aware that regardless of how cogent his methodological argument was, his main conclusion (denying scriptural authority for demonstrable physical claims) could be taken to be so radical that its novelty needed to be toned down by trying to root it in tradition. Moving on to Campanella’s Defense, recall that its title speaks of Galileo’s “manner of philosophizing.” Campanella is talking about Galileo’s philosophical approach or manner of reasoning. This contrasts with the usual translations55 that render the corresponding Latin phrase as philosophical view, philosophical doctrine, scientific theory, or (just) theory.

55

Campanella, A Defense of Galileo.

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This point is extremely important56 because Galileo’s theory, doctrine, or view (whether philosophical or scientific) suggests Copernicanism or the earth’s motion. This would imply that Campanella was more committed to the Copernican doctrine than he really was. And it would further imply that he was trying to do the same thing Foscarini had done. On the other hand, “manner of philosophizing” suggests some principle of reasoning or procedure, and so Campanella is trying to do something more general or methodological. Campanella’s broader aim is also evident from other passages and documents. For example, in a letter to Galileo, dated November 3, 1616, Campanella states that he has sent him a manuscript copy of his Defense, which he describes as “a discussion where it is proved theologically that the manner of philosophizing you use is more in conformity with Divine Scripture than the contrary one is.”57 This also gives a clue that Campanella’s own argument is specifically or primarily a theological one. But what Galilean manner of philosophizing is Campanella referring to? I believe this is an aspect of the manner of reasoning which Galileo uses in his discussions of astronomical topics, such as one finds in The Sidereal Messenger (1610) and the History and Demonstrations Concerning Sunspots (1613), and in which he tries to justify in his own critique of the scriptural objection, such as we find in the Letter to Christina. The most pertinent and general description of this manner of reasoning is to say that he advocates disregarding scriptural assertions in astronomical investigation. Stated as a methodological principle, it is the claim that scriptural statements about the earth’s rest and sun’s motion do not entail that the earth stands still and the sun moves. In other words, Scripture is not an authority in natural philosophy; it is the principle of limited scriptural authority. Campanella comes close to explicitly giving such a description of the Galilean approach when he says that “Galileo does not treat any of these subjects from a theological point of view, but rather by means of his marvelous instruments he renders previously hidden stars visible.”58 In short, Campanella wants to provide a theological argument that theological considerations ought to be disregarded in scientific investigation! In fact, such an argument constitutes a major line of reasoning in Campanella’s Defense.

56

See Tommaso Campanella, Apologia pro Galileo, ed. and trans. Michel-Pierre Lerner as Apologie de Galilée (Paris, 2001), xcv–c. 57 Galilei, Opere, XII, 287. 58 Campanella, Apologia pro Galilaeo, 50 (my trans.); cf. Campanella, A Defense of Galileo, 110.

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In a central part of his book, which he calls “the third assertion of the second hypothesis,” Campanella stresses the fact that “in the Gospel Christ is never found to discuss physics and astronomy but only morality and the promise of eternal life.”59 Correspondingly, Campanella emphasizes two crucial scriptural passages: Ecclesiastes 3:11, “God handed the world over to the disputes of men”; and Romans 1:20, “The invisible things of God come to be understood through the things which he has made.”60 And he elaborates the point with the argument: “For us to be able to do this, he gave us a rational mind, and for avenues of investigation he provided the five senses as windows to the mind. . . . Therefore it would have been superfluous for him, who came to redeem us from sin, to teach us what we are able and obliged to learn on our own.”61 Here Campanella is giving a justification of the principle of limited scriptural authority as being implicit in Jesus’ example in Scripture, explicit in the assertions of the Old and New Testaments, and in accordance with plausible theological speculation. But Campanella goes further. He argues not only that it is proper to learn about the world by using our minds and senses rather than by reading Scripture, but also that it is un-Christian to prevent such learning. In what he calls “the fourth assertion of the second hypothesis,” Campanella holds that “anyone who forbids Christians to study philosophy and the sciences also forbids them to be Christians.”62 One reason is that “since one truth does not contradict another, as was stated by the Lateran Council under Leo X and elsewhere, and since the book of wisdom by God the creator does not contradict the book of wisdom by God the revealer, anyone who fears contradiction by the facts of nature is full of bad faith.”63 Another is that “from the beginning the world has been called . . . a ‘Book’ in which we can read about all things. Hence, in his Sermon 7 on the fast days of the tenth month, St. Leo says, ‘We understand the meaning of God’s will from these very elements of the world, as from the pages of an open book’.”64 It follows that “therefore wisdom is to be read in the immense book of God, which is the world, and there is always more to be discovered.”65 Using the metaphor of the book of nature, and the theological claim that this book was authored by God and so is at least as important as the book of Scripture, Campanella is arguing that it is wrong (theologically) to prevent someone from reading and studying the book of nature.

59 63

60 Campanella, A Defense of Galileo, 65. Ibid., 54. 64 65 Ibid., 69. Ibid., 57. Ibid., 71.

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61

Ibid., 65–66.

62

Ibid., 54.

l ee n s p r u i t a n d m a u r i c e a . f i n o c c h i a r o

Similarly, in what he calls “the first assertion of the second hypothesis,” Campanella argues that it is not only irrational and harmful but impious “if there is anyone who chooses on his own to prescribe rules and limits for philosophers as though they were decreed in the Scriptures and who teaches that one should not think differently than he does, and who subjects and confines the Scriptures to one unique meaning either of his own or of some other philosopher.”66 Campanella’s reason is that such an impious person “exposes the Sacred Scriptures to the mockery of the philosophers and to the ridicule of pagans and heretics and thereby prevents them from listening to the faith.”67 And then he gives a long quotation from St. Thomas that includes a quotation from St. Augustine’s On the Literal Interpretation of Genesis. Thus, Campanella is able to claim that “so says St. Thomas in agreement with St. Augustine,”68 and hence to provide formidable theological credentials for his own argument. With regard to the Joshua passage, Campanella denies that the miracle “would be nullified if the sun is at rest in the center of the world.”69 For “the appearances are exactly the same if either the observer or the object seen is moved,”70 and the Copernicans say that the miracle happened by stopping the earth rather than the sun; but “whoever says that this happened by arresting the motion of the earth does not deny the miracle but explains it, just as the physicist does not deny that God causes the rainbow but explains how he does it and what natural and reasonable means he uses.”71 Campanella does not seem worried about the nonliteral interpretation that is needed, but about retaining the spiritual message or meaning. To summarize, Foscarini advanced a theological criticism of the minor premise of the scriptural objection – that Copernicanism is contrary to Scripture. Campanella put forth a theological criticism of its major premise – that Scripture is a scientific authority. Galileo proposed a methodological criticism of this major premise, and a scientific and textual criticism of the minor premise. Together, Foscarini, Campanella, and Galileo provide us with both theological and philosophical arguments justifying the claim that Copernicanism is not contrary to Scripture, and that Scripture is not a scientific authority. In my judgment, these arguments by Foscarini, Galileo, and Campanella are cogent and essentially valid. They are thus of perennial relevance and have some applicability to subsequent and present-day issues regarding the relationship between science and religion. 66

Ibid., 74.

67

Ibid.

68

Ibid., 76.

69

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Ibid., 97.

70

Ibid., 98.

71

Ibid., 99.

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bibliography Barbour, Ian. Religion and Science: Historical and Contemporary Issues. San Francisco, 1997. Blackwell, Richard J. Galileo, Bellarmine, and the Bible. Notre Dame, 1991. Brooke, John Hedley and Geoffrey Cantor. Reconstructing Nature: The Engagement of Science and Religion. Oxford, 2000 [Edinburgh, 1998]. Brooke, John Hedley and Ian Maclean, eds. Heterodoxy in Early Modern Science and Religion. Oxford, 2005. Bucciantini, Massimo, and Michele Camerota, eds. Scienza e religione: Scritti copernicani. Rome, 2009. Campanella, Tommaso. Apologia pro Galileo, ed. and trans. Michel-Pierre Lerner as Apologie de Galilée. Paris, 2001. Finocchiaro, Maurice A. On Trial for Reason: Science, Religion, and Culture in the Galileo Affair. Oxford, 2019. Finocchiaro, Maurice A., ed. and trans. The Galileo Affair: A Documentary History. Berkeley, 1989. Galilei, Galileo. Le Opere di Galileo Galilei, ed. Antonio Favaro et al., 20 vols. Florence, 1890–1909; repr. 1929–1939, 1968. Goudriaan, Aza. Reformed Orthodoxy and Philosophy, 1625–1750: Gisbertus Voetius, Petrus van Mastricht, and Anthonius Driessen. Leiden and Boston, 2006. Harrison, Peter. The Bible, Protestantism and the Rise of Natural Science. Cambridge, 1998. The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Modern Science. Cambridge, 2007. Harrison, Peter, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Science and Religion. Cambridge, 2010. Hooykaas, Reijer. Religion and the Rise of Modern Science. Edinburgh, 1972. Merton, Robert K. Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth-Century England. New York, 1970; first published in Osiris 4, no. 2 (1938), 360–632. Muller, Richard. Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics: The Rise and Development of Reformed Orthodoxy. Grand Rapids, 2003. Re Manning, Russell, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Natural Theology. Oxford, 2013. Van Ruler, Johannes A. The Crisis of Causality: Voetius and Descartes on God, Nature and Change. Leiden, 1995.

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With the coming of Christ, a divine revelation became manifest in concrete, historical time. Christianity is therefore an intrinsically historical religion. In Christian theology there are several fields related to history, of which church history and the history of doctrine occupy a central place. Church history deals with subjects such as the social, cultural, political, and institutional factors that had an influence on shaping the church and vice versa. The history of doctrine, on the other hand, focuses on the development of thought. It is important to bear in mind that many events that had tremendous significance for church history had no immediate bearing on doctrine. A well-known example of this is the Edict of Milan of 313, which granted religious toleration to Christians in the Roman Empire. It changed the course of church history, but did not contribute directly to the development of doctrine.1 Another problem is often posed by the nature of sources: the events surrounding the life of Christ, for example, are hard to understand on a purely historical level and are documented in sources which have a predominantly theological focus.2 While the distinctions in the examples above may be relatively clear-cut, church history and history of doctrine are usually, as we shall see, more intricately intertwined. What is more, from 1517 onward their treatment was also shaped by the polemical necessities of confessional struggle.

Protestant Challenges From the time of the Reformation, church history presented a challenge to each confession in its own right. Protestants were compelled to devise 1 Alister E. McGrath, Historical Theology: An Introduction to the History of Christian Thought, 2nd ed. (Chichester, 2013), 8. 2 Peter Walter, “Il ‘peso’ della storia per la teologia,” Il Regno: attualità 53 (2008), 717–722, at 717, also published in Rivista di teologia dell’evangelizzazione 13, no. 26 (2009) (supplemento), 31–47, at 33.

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particularly creative answers because, as Euan Cameron notes, “the core message of the Reformation called for a shift in perceptions of the Christian past.”3 This is because Protestants, who aimed to revert to the pristine early state of the church, were confronted with the key issue of explaining why error had come into the church after apostolic times. The prevailing models for church history did not suit their view of the degeneration of the medieval church, so Protestant historians had to reinvent the discipline. Reformers were imbued with humanism to varying degrees; according again to Cameron, there was a development from humanist-inspired to “doctrinalapocalyptic” Protestant church history in the sixteenth century. Early Swiss Reformers such as Johannes Oecolampadius, Joachim Vadian, Ulrich Zwingli, and Heinrich Bullinger showed a strong interest in humanist historical method.4 They emphasized human fallibility and the deterioration of what had been, initially, good intentions in religious life. The doctrinalapocalyptic variants, on the other hand, employed a stricter view: the Magdeburg Centuries (published 1559–1574), for example, maintained that wrong teachings and the dilution of the ideas of the Gospel had led to inevitable degradation. Similarly, Johann Sleidan in his Four Empires (1556) viewed history as an unfolding of constant decline, leading to an apocalyptic end.5 It is the second line of thought, the apocalyptic streak, that prevailed in the most influential Protestant views of history, as will be outlined below. To trace the plot of this development, it is useful to begin with Martin Luther. Although efforts have been made to argue that Luther was a church historian, he cannot really be considered as such, because the principal thrust of his interests was theological.6 The first Reformers were so concerned with doctrinal problems that relatively little attention was given to questions of church history. Luther distanced himself from church history in his preface to

3 For what follows see Euan Cameron, “Primitivism, Patristics, and Polemic in Protestant Visions of Early Christianity,” in Katherine Van Liere, Simon Ditchfield, and Howard Louthan, eds., Sacred History: Uses of the Christian Past in the Renaissance World (Oxford, 2012), 27–51 (quotation at 29). 4 On Bullinger see Christian Moser, Die Dignität des Ereignisses: Studien zu Heinrich Bullingers Reformationsgeschichtsschreibung, 2 vols. (Leiden, 2012). 5 Alexandra Kess, Johann Sleidan and the Protestant Vision of History (Aldershot, 2008), 84. For providential views of history see Euan Cameron, “The Bible and the Early Modern Sense of History,” in Euan Cameron, ed., The New Cambridge History of the Bible, volume III: From 1450 to 1750 (Cambridge, 2016), 657–685. 6 Mark Thompson, “Luther on God and History,” in Robert Kolb, Irene Dingel, and Lubomír Batka, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Martin Luther’s Theology (Oxford, 2014), 127–142; Marie Barral-Baron, “A Church without History? Luther and Historical Argument in the Context of Humanist Polemics,” Renaissance Studies 35 (2021), 43–60.

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the Vitae pontificum (Lives of the Popes, 1536) by Robert Barnes, where he expressed his hope that others would do in the field of history what he had done by means of the Bible: Indeed, in the beginning, not having much expertise in history, I attacked the papacy a priori (as is said), that is, from the holy Scriptures. Now I wonderfully rejoice that others are doing this a posteriori, that is, from history. And I clearly seem to triumph, since, with the light becoming clear, I perceive that the histories agree with the Scriptures.7

In general, therefore, the first Reformers dealt with church history only incidentally, when the necessities of polemics forced them to do so. An example is Luther’s Leipzig Disputation with Johannes Eck of 1519, where they argued about papal primacy. In preparing for this disputation, Eck maintained that Peter was the successor of Christ – a fact that made the Roman Church superior to the other churches. Luther argued that this was false, and that the pretense of superiority of the Roman Church derived from the “very frigid” decrees of the popes of the previous 400 years.8 He examined not only Scripture and the Church Fathers, but also conciliar decrees and canon law. For Luther, it was a crucial insight gained from the study of historical evidence that papal primacy was not established by divine right, but created by mere human actions. At no other time in his life did Luther occupy himself so actively with church historical questions as on this occasion. His short-lived but intense research on papal primacy was instrumental in paving the way for his later rejection of the papacy as an institution.9 Philip Melanchthon, whose education was shaped by humanism, was more inclined than Luther to delve into the pursuit of historical references. In his Loci communes (Theological Commonplaces, 1521), the first systematic treatment of Luther’s theology, Melanchthon aimed to show that Lutheran ideas were consonant with the doctrines of the first centuries of

7

Martin Luther, “Pio lectori salutem,” in Robert Barnes, Vitae Romanorum pontificum (Wittenberg, 1536), sig. A4r–v; the translation is adapted from Korey D. Maas, The Reformation and Robert Barnes: History, Theology and Polemic in Early Modern England (Woodbridge, 2010), 175. 8 Martin Luther, Disputatio et excusatio adversus criminationes D. Iohannis Eccii, in WA 2, 158–161, at 161: Romanam ecclesiam esse omnibus aliis superiorem, probatur ex frigidissimis Romanorum Pontificum decretis intra cccc annos natis. 9 See Bernhard Lohse, Martin Luther’s Theology, trans. Roy A. Harrisville (Edinburgh, 1999), 118–126; Susan E. Schreiner, Are you Alone Wise? The Search for Certainty in the Early Modern Era (Oxford, 2011), 148–165.

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Christianity.10 He had a keen interest in universal history, as is expressed in his editions of the Chronicle of Johannes Carion (1499–1537), which he published first in German (1532) and then, in a substantially revised version, in Latin (1558–1560). Although profane and ecclesiastical history, according to Melanchthon, had to be carefully distinguished, both were useful for learning how to avoid repeating errors from the past. Ecclesiastical history, in his view, displayed the past struggles of the true church, showed the historical dimension of theological controversies, and permitted the recognition and extirpation of heresies; it also offered consolation in times of persecution. As a university teacher, he helped to introduce history into the curricula of German universities.11 Melanchthon developed the influential idea that there had been a long historical continuity in the proclamation of the truth of the Gospels. This continuity was expressed by small groups of believers who throughout history had stuck to the true faith despite the widespread and worsening corruption in the church.12 Matthias Flacius Illyricus’s Catalogus testium veritatis (Catalogue of Witnesses to the Truth, 1556) is the most striking example of this line of argumentation. Just as the Catholics maintained that there had been an uninterrupted succession of bishops of Rome, Flacius argued that there had never been a time in which there was no protest against the domination of the church by the popes. He corroborated his theological argument by making use of numerous medieval manuscripts, in this way preserving parts of many sources which are now lost.13 It was particularly the persecutions of the sixteenth century that gave rise to the new genre of Protestant hagiography. The accounts of the fate of the victims were aimed at strengthening the faith and shaping confessional identities.14 Jean Crespin’s Livre des martyrs (1554; enlarged edition by Simon Goulart, 1582) concentrated on Calvinist victims and became staple reading 10 See Harald Bollbuck, “Testimony of True Faith and the Ruler’s Mission: The Middle Ages in the Magdeburg Centuries and the Melanchthon School,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte/ Archive for Reformation History 101 (2010), 238–262. 11 Emil Clemens Scherer, Geschichte und Kirchengeschichte an den deutschen Universitäten (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1927), 26–51 and ad indicem; Mark A. Lotito, The Reformation of Historical Thought (Leiden, 2019). 12 For what follows see Heinz Scheible, “Der Catalogus testium veritatis: Flacius als Schüler Melanchthons,” in Heinz Scheible, Aufsätze zu Melanchthon (Tübingen, 2010), 415–430; Harald Bollbuck, Wahrheitszeugnis, Gottes Auftrag und Zeitkritik: Die Kirchengeschichte der Magdeburger Zenturien und ihre Arbeitstechniken (Wiesbaden, 2014), 80–103. 13 For details see Martina Hartmann, Humanismus und Kirchenkritik: Matthias Flacius Illyricus als Erforscher des Mittelalters (Stuttgart, 2001), 141–197. 14 For what follows see Brad S. Gregory, Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1999).

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matter in Huguenot households. John Foxe’s book of martyrs was strongly influenced by the persecutions during the reign of the Catholic Queen Mary I (1553–1558). Foxe first published a forerunner in Latin (Commentarii rerum in ecclesia gestarum, 1554), but the most comprehensive versions of his book of martyrs were the four different English editions published during his lifetime (Acts and Monuments, 1563, 1570, 1576, and 1583). He kept adapting his work to the changing circumstances of the moment by incorporating new evidence, rearranging the text, and answering critics. Foxe aimed to sustain the cause of the English national church by demonstrating, through examples from history, why the Roman Church should justly be hated. Not only did he make use of extensive evidence from oral testimonies and eyewitness accounts, he also drew heavily on archival sources such as the archiepiscopal registers at Lambeth Palace and the London diocesan records. His inclusion of vividly realistic illustrations depicting martyrdom further enhanced the book’s effectiveness as a weapon of propaganda.15 Thieleman Jansz van Braght’s Martelaersspiegel (Martyrs’ Mirror, 1660), a century later, was the principal work that concentrated on Anabaptist and Mennonite martyrs.16 By around 1560 the battle lines of interconfessional polemics had become more clearly drawn, as reflected, on the Protestant side, by the Ecclesiastica historia (better known as Magdeburg Centuries), which was composed by Flacius, Johannes Wigand, and their collaborators. In the Centuries, doctrine was given center stage. The Centuriators argued in their preface that they had employed a new method: while their predecessors as historians of the church (from Eusebius onward) had concentrated on persons and events, they dealt instead with religious ideas. They saw doctrine as an action of God’s church.17 Each century in this work was divided into sixteen chapters, of which the one on doctrine was the most important. Those on liturgy, church government, and synods were also concerned with doctrine; and all shared a markedly polemical character, no doubt supplying proof texts for sermons and controversialist tracts.

15 See Elizabeth Evenden and Thomas S. Freeman, Religion and the Book in Early Modern England: The Making of Foxe’s “Book of Martyrs” (Cambridge, 2011). For a critical edition see The Unabridged Acts and Monuments Online (Sheffield, 2011), available at www.dhi.ac.uk/foxe. 16 For an English translation see Thieleman Jansz van Braght, The Bloody Theatre or Martyrs’ Mirror, trans. Joseph F. Sohm (Elkhart, 1886). 17 Matthias Flacius et al., Ecclesiastica historia, 13 vols. (Basel, 1559–1574), Centuria I, sigs. α4v, α6r. See also Harald Bollbuck, “Searching for the True Religion: The Church History of the Magdeburg Centuries between Critical Methods and Confessional Polemics,” Renaissance Studies 35 (2021), 100–117.

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Many of the historical questions covered by the Centuriators were chosen for controversial reasons. They decided, for instance, to uphold the authenticity of the legend of Pope Joan, according to which a female pope occupied the chair of St. Peter in the ninth century, pretending to be a man and then dying in childbirth during a procession. They argued against the Augustinian Onofrio Panvinio’s refutation of the legend, dating from 1562. He had put forward compelling arguments why it had to be false, drawing on historical, philological, and theological reasoning. Most convincing was his proof of the silence of contemporary sources, including the Liber pontificalis (Book of Pontiffs).18 The Centuriators were interested in upholding the authenticity of the story not only because it served to ridicule the papacy, but also because Pope Joan interrupted the continuity of apostolic succession. They therefore compiled a list of references to sources which, though they were not contemporary, mentioned the story. Its authenticity, according to the Centuriators, was proved by its relatively long circulation inside the Catholic Church. They countered Panvinio’s key argument of the silence of contemporaries by throwing overboard a fundamental rule of source criticism: that the highest value should generally be assigned to contemporary sources. Instead the Centuriators claimed, plainly, that the authors of the ninth-century sections in the Liber pontificalis had “deliberately omitted her [Joan’s] name and dates because of the disgrace and because she was a woman.”19 Here emerges a fundamental aspect of the role of history in early modern polemical writing: source criticism was welcome, but overarching theological and political needs often had a higher priority. In another case, the Centuriators took a stance that was diametrically opposed to the one they put forward regarding Pope Joan. This was the Donation of Constantine, the forged imperial decree that purported to record the emperor Constantine’s transferral of temporal dominion over the entire West to Pope Sylvester I in the fourth century. This most famous of all medieval forgeries was still held by the Roman Curia to be authentic up to the end of the sixteenth century. According to the Centuriators, it could not be claimed to be genuine, precisely because no contemporary or nearcontemporary source had been found to validate it (“there is no explicit

18

Alain Boureau, The Myth of Pope Joan, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago, 2001), 245–247. Flacius et al., Ecclesiastica historia, Centuria IX (1565), cols. 332–333, 500–502, at col. 502: nomen autem et tempus eius pontificios scriptores consulto omisisse propter foeditatem rei et sexum foemineum. See also Boureau, Myth, 247–248, and for what follows Bollbuck, Wahrheitszeugnis, 341–349.

19

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mention of this by well-reputed authors for several centuries”).20 With the force of their own arguments, and also by accepting the earlier critique of Lorenzo Valla (d. 1457), which had shown that the Donation was a forgery, the Centuriators were able to mount a strong attack on one of the principal foundations of papal primacy. A related question that was central to papal claims to authority was whether, and if so for how long, St. Peter had been in Rome. There was much uncertainty about this question in both the Catholic and Protestant camps. Eusebius had stated that both Peter and Paul had been executed in Rome under Nero. The Centuriators cited him as a source, but they pointed out that the dates of their stays and deaths were far from clear – and indeed that, despite Eusebius’s affirmation, it could not be proved with certainty that Peter had ever been in Rome.21 They relied on some of the arguments advanced by the Bohemian scholar Ulrichus Velenus, who had radically denied the Petrine tradition in 1520, and also on the considerations of Luther, who had been more reserved and had recognized that the questions about the chronological details could not be easily settled. This lingering uncertainty alone was, of course, enough to unsettle the Roman side; for if Peter’s stay in Rome was in doubt, then so too was the claim to primacy of the bishop of Rome. The Magdeburg Centuries provided an enormous quantity of systematic documentation, acting as a historical encyclopedia, which was of particular use to polemicists. Yet facts were often simply lined up, while explanations of causality and evolution were frequently in short supply. John Calvin produced structural criticism of the Centuries even before their first publication. The plan to divide the subject matter into a century per volume was not practical, he wrote in 1557, because sometimes a mere decade provided more historical material than a whole century. The strict arrangement by categories within each century would lead to repetition. The topical arrangement, in sum, was only helpful for a first orientation, but not for the writing of true history.22 Calvin himself, of course, never engaged in history writing, nor did he, despite his perceptive criticism, have the mind-set of a historian. The 20

Flacius et al., Ecclesiastica historia, Centuria IV (1560), col. 567: nam de ea nulla apud probatos autores expresse fit mentio per aliquot secula. Ibid., Centuria I, bk. ii, cols. 28, 562. For this argument, and for what follows, see Antonie J. Lamping, Ulrichus Velenus (Oldřich Velenský) and his Treatise against the Papacy (Leiden, 1976), 139–142, 180–184. 22 See John Calvin’s letter to Caspar von Nidbruck, February 13, 1557, in CR 48, cols. 448–450; Bollbuck, Wahrheitszeugnis, 130–131, 302–303. 21

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passages in his Institutio religionis Christianae (Institutes of the Christian Religion, 1536–1559) where he deals with church history are rare. He did, however, develop a distinctive style of historicizing interpretation of Scripture, to which his own humanist education had certainly contributed.23 After the Centuriators, historical criticism in the Lutheran camp remained subdued in the shadow of their great achievement. While Lutherans in Germany tended to focus on the study of Scripture, Calvinist polemics in France concentrated more on patristics and church traditions.24 Calvinists continued the humanist-inspired approach of Oecolampadius and Bullinger. They produced, for example, editions of Church Fathers, a continuation of Flacius’s Catalogus (edited by Simon Goulart, 1597–1608),25 and discussions of the Eucharist.26 In the first half of the seventeenth century great Calvinist controversialists such as Philippe Duplessis-Mornay (d. 1623) dominated the international debates on the Protestant side, setting themselves apart from Lutherans because of their enmity toward the Lutherans and frequently also because of their strong humanist education.

Catholic Responses A similar pattern can be observed among Catholics: while at the beginning of our period there were numerous works on doctrine and particular questions of church history, in the second half of the sixteenth century large works of synthesis appeared. In general, the viewpoints of Catholic authors were less personal and more homogeneous than those of Protestant authors. Catholic authors recognized very quickly the explosive potential of the Protestant principle of Sola Scriptura, which went against the established authority in the church. They argued that the Bible itself was not sufficient. Scripture needed a trustworthy interpretation and, what is more, there were truths concerning faith which could not be found in it. As Johannes Eck stated: “Scripture is not

23 Euan Cameron, “Calvin the Historian: Biblical Antiquity and Scriptural Exegesis in the Quest for a Meaningful Past,” in Karen E. Spierling, ed., Calvin and the Book (Göttingen, 2015), 77–94; Barbara Pitkin, Calvin, the Bible and History (Oxford, 2020). 24 Pontianus Polman, L’Élément historique dans la controverse religieuse du XVIe siècle (Gembloux, 1932), 248–277. 25 Irena Backus, “Quels témoins de quelle vérité? Le Catalogus testium veritatis de Matthias Flacius Illyricus revu par Goulart,” in Olivier Pot, ed., Simon Goulart (Geneva, 2013), 125–139. 26 See, e.g., Mack P. Holt, “Divisions within French Calvinism: Philippe Duplessis-Mornay and the Eucharist,” in Mack P. Holt, ed., Adaptations of Calvinism in Reformation Europe (Aldershot, 2007), 165–177.

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authentic without the authority of the Church.”27 Eck, Luther’s most famous opponent, published his Enchiridion locorum communium (Manual of Commonplaces) for the first time in 1525; there, he laid out Catholic doctrine, explained the primacy of the papacy, and defended the institutional church, councils, tradition, good works, the sacraments and the cult of images, making his book the blueprint for polemical handbooks of the sixteenth century.28 Eck’s book – the counterpart to Melanchthon’s Loci communes – was frequently revised and reprinted, and became the most widely diffused of all Catholic responses to the Reformation. Patristic authorities were given special weight in the arguments of the Catholic side, and editions of Church Fathers were often made with their polemical use in mind. Peter Canisius’s edition of Jerome’s letters (1562) replaced Erasmus’s edition, which in its marginal remarks had criticized and ridiculed church institutions.29 Augustine stimulated the most scholarly activity, because both Catholics and Protestants respected his authority and regarded him as crucial.30 The polemical use of Church Fathers reached its Counter-Reformation fulfilment in Peter Canisius’s catechism (Summa doctrinae Christianae, 1555) and Marguerin de La Bigne’s edition of the Fathers in nine volumes (Sacra bibliotheca sanctorum patrum, 1575–1579). Presentations of doctrine such as Canisius’s catechism, however, were not yet organic works: they often only set out isolated texts and did not permit the understanding of the development of the ideas of patristic thought over the course of the centuries. Historical arguments were prominently deployed by Catholics to demonstrate the development of papal power, as a means of bolstering the primacy of the pope against the challenge mounted by Protestants. As has been seen, a key issue was St. Peter’s stay in Rome, the details of which had been put into doubt by Ulrichus Velenus, Luther, and the Centuriators. Numerous Catholics defended the Petrine tradition, and all of them insisted that Peter had been in Rome. In 1522 John Fisher put forward elaborate arguments to show that, although the dates were not entirely certain, Peter’s ministry and 27 Johann Eck, Enchiridion locorum communium adversus Lutherum et alios hostes ecclesiae, ed. Pierre Fraenkel (Münster, 1979), 27. 28 See Nelson H. Minnich, “On the Origins of Eck’s Enchiridion,” in Erwin Iserloh, ed., Johannes Eck (1486–1543) im Streit der Jahrhunderte (Münster, 1988), 37–73. 29 Hilmar M. Pabel, “Peter Canisius as a Catholic Editor of a Catholic St. Jerome,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte/Archive for Reformation History 96 (2005), 171–197. 30 Irena Backus, “The ‘Confessionalization’ of Augustine in the Reformation and CounterReformation,” in Karla Pollmann et al., eds., The Oxford Guide to the Historical Reception of Augustine, 3 vols. (Oxford, 2013), I, 74–82.

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martyrdom in Rome themselves were facts which no ancient writer had called into question.31 If Peter was bishop of Rome, then it followed that his successors inherited his authority. Furthermore, it was proved by means of papal lists and papal histories that this succession had been uninterrupted until the present day.32 Like the Protestants, the Catholics published relatively few works on church history in this period. This was because its teaching was neglected in the universities. The influential Ratio studiorum (plan of studies) of the Jesuits (1599) compounded this negative tendency because it did not include church history. While the moral uses of classical history remained fundamental to the Jesuit teaching of rhetoric and preaching, a chair of ecclesiastical history was only introduced at the Jesuit Collegium Romanum (Roman College) in 1742.33 As Hubert Jedin noted, church history in Rome was studied in private circles.34 Pontianus Polman succinctly summarized this tendency when he observed that Catholics were “neither prepared for nor especially attracted to the study of history.”35 Melchor Cano (De locis theologicis, 1563) was an exception among Catholics in this period, in that he expressed more detailed opinions about the role of human history in ecclesiastical studies and advocated critical studies within the limits of authorization by the church. Excursions into church history, consequently, remained personal and isolated initiatives. Examples include the editions of ancient church historians (1523) by Erasmus’s friend Beatus Rhenanus, as well as the editions of conciliar decrees by Jacques Merlin (1524) and Petrus Crabbe (1538). Lives of saints were collected by Luigi Lippomano and Laurentius Surius. An example of a book of martyrs is Richard Verstegan’s account of the executions of Catholics in England, France, and the Low Countries. His Theatrum crudelitatum haereticorum nostri temporis (Theater of the Cruelties of 31 For the last point see John Fisher, Convulsio calumniarum Ulrichi Veleni (Antwerp, 1522), sig. B1r. See also Lamping, Velenus, 152–157; Richard Rex, The Theology of John Fisher (Cambridge, 1991), 103. 32 For a papal list see Johann Eck, De primatu Petri adversus Ludderum (Paris, 1521), bk. ii, fols. 33r–39r. On papal biographies see Stefan Bauer, The Censorship and Fortuna of Platina’s Lives of the Popes in the Sixteenth Century (Turnhout, 2006); Stefan Bauer, The Invention of Papal History: Onofrio Panvinio between Renaissance and Catholic Reform (Oxford, 2020). 33 See Paul Nelles, “Historia magistra antiquitatis: Cicero and Jesuit History Teaching,” Renaissance Studies 13 (1999), 130–172; Florian Neumann, Geschichtsschreibung als Kunst: Famiano Strada S.I. (1572–1649) und die ars historica in Italien (Berlin, 2013), 80–100. 34 Hubert Jedin, “General Introduction to Church History,” in Hubert Jedin and John Dolan, eds., History of the Church, 10 vols. (London, 1980–1981), I, 1–56, at 31. On this point see also Paolo Prodi, “La storia umana come luogo teologico,” in Paolo Prodi, Profezia vs utopia (Bologna, 2013), 217–242, at 228–229. 35 Polman, L’Élément historique, 500.

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the Heretics of our Time, 1587) was accompanied by engravings which served to illustrate the alleged bloodthirstiness of the Protestants. Verstegan sought to mobilize European Catholic opinion and encourage a crusade against England.36 After such individual efforts, large-scale projects of synthesis were required to try and refute the Magdeburg Centuries. In the field of doctrine, one such project was Robert Bellarmine’s Controversies (1586–1593). This work grew out of his lectures on controversial theology at the Collegium Romanum and was divided into thematic parts. The first dealt with Scripture, Christ, the pope, councils, clergy, saints, images, and relics; another part was devoted to the sacraments; lastly, in a section on the forgiveness of sins, issues such as grace, predestination, and justification were discussed. Bellarmine systematically upheld the role of tradition and of the teaching authority (magisterium) of the Roman Church. For his arguments he used a wide range of historical sources, and he accepted, alongside Scripture, the body of tradition constituted by the Church Fathers. Bellarmine thus provided a doctrinal handbook for polemicists, which became the manual par excellence of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As a consultant to the Congregation of the Index of Prohibited Books (from 1587), Bellarmine took on the task of judging historical works. In contrast to other high-ranking censors, he was not afraid to permit discussion of the darker moments of the church’s past, since he followed the traditional notion that, although individual members of the church were fallible, the church itself was not.37 Bellarmine therefore allowed, for example, the vices of past pontiffs to be described in Bartolomeo Platina’s Vitae pontificum (Lives of the Popes, Italian edition, 1592). The church, after all, stood not by the prudence or strength of humanity, but because it was protected by God. Elegant though it was, this argument was not, however, historical but doctrinal.38 The Annales ecclesiastici (Ecclesiastical Annals, 1588–1607) of Cesare Baronio provided the official Catholic answer to the Magdeburg Centuries on the historical side. In this comprehensive history of the church, which went down to 1198, Baronio aimed to show that church institutions and doctrine from apostolic times had always been the same. He adopted a strictly 36

See Anne Dillon, The Construction of Martyrdom in the English Catholic Community, 1535–1603 (Aldershot, 2002), 243–276. McGrath, Historical Theology, 33. 38 See Roberto Bellarmino, Disputationes de controversiis Christianae fidei adversus huius temporibus haereticos, 3 vols. (Ingolstadt, 1586–1593), I, 594; Bauer, Censorship, 142. On the censoring by Catholic theologians of historical works see also Bauer, Invention. 37

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chronological framework and tried to establish precise dates for all events. This led him to correct Eusebius and many other writers on numerous details. The Annales were not a systematic treatise of theological doctrine; but since they postulated that the doctrine of the church had never changed, they offered an image of what the church should be. Baronio recognized the authority of the Roman Church and presented its doctrinal traditions, which, he argued, had been fixed in the first centuries. He strove to demonstrate, in particular, the origins of the primacy of the bishop of Rome. He also gave much attention to heresies, in order to show through historical narration how these were always defeated by the true church. Baronio was able to build on previous catalogues of heretics published by Catholics, such as those of Bernard of Luxembourg (1522) and Gabriel du Préau (1568), who had compared ancient heresies with the Protestant movement.39 Because there was a “symbiotic relationship between Catholic history and Catholic orthodoxy,” it is difficult to establish what Baronio’s personal positions were.40 One such position, nevertheless, was his denial of the authenticity of the Donation of Constantine; but this did not mean, for Baronio, that the legitimacy of the church was damaged, since its privileges had been transferred to it directly from Christ and it did not require a secular ruler such as Constantine to confer power on it.41 Ecclesiastical erudition in the seventeenth century was carried forward by the two large-scale projects of the Bollandists and Maurists.42 Seeking to publish the sources for the lives of the saints, the Jesuits Jean Bolland (1596–1665), Godefroid Henskens (1601–1681), and Daniel Papebroch (1628–1714) in Antwerp set out to find the oldest versions of each hagiographical text and publish them in their original form. Publication of the Acta sanctorum (Acts of the Saints) began in 1643 with two volumes for the saints who had their feast-days in January. Next to Baronio’s Annales, the Acta were 39

See Irena Backus, Historical Method and Confessional Identity in the Era of the Reformation (1378–1615) (Leiden, 2003), 382–390. 40 Giuseppe Antonio Guazzelli, “Cesare Baronio and the Roman Catholic Vision of the Early Church,” in Van Liere, Ditchfield, and Louthan, eds., Sacred History, 52–71, at 61. 41 Cesare Baronio, Annales ecclesiastici, 12 vols. (Rome, 1588–1607), XII, 845. See also Stefano Zen, “Cesare Baronio sulla Donazione di Costantino tra critica storica e autocensura,” Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, Classe di lettere e filosofia, series 5, 2, no. 1 (2010), 179–219. 42 For what follows see Jean-Louis Quantin, “Document, histoire, critique dans l’érudition ecclésiastique des temps modernes,” Recherches de science religieuse 92 (2004), 597–635; Simon Ditchfield, “What Was Sacred History? (Mostly Roman) Catholic Uses of the Christian Past after Trent,” in Van Liere, Ditchfield, and Louthan, eds., Sacred History, 72–97; Maciej Dorna, “Von der Hagiographie zur Diplomatik: Daniel Papebrochs Lehre zur Erkennung von frühmittelalterlichen Urkundenfälschungen,” Archiv für Diplomatik 60 (2014), 165–189.

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the second great pillar of Catholic historia sacra in the early modern period. By compiling the lives of saints, the editors demonstrated the presence of God in the church through the centuries. Their daunting chore of sorting through countless texts to find the most authentic versions led to an ever more conscious employment of philological techniques. The work of the Bollandists was also a stimulus for researchers in the Benedictine order, the history of which reached back into the early Middle Ages. A member of the Benedictine Congregation of Saint-Maur, Jean Mabillon (1632–1707), elevated the auxiliary sciences of history to a new level. In his De re diplomatica (On Diplomatics, 1681) Mabillon established the principles for determining the authenticity of medieval manuscripts. The Maurists published a vast array of historical material, ranging from histories of their own order, editions of Latin and Greek Church Fathers, and studies on liturgy to regional and civic histories. In conclusion, it can be said that both Catholics and Protestants had many reasons to appeal to and invoke history. In the beginning, Catholic attacks involving history concentrated on Luther. After his death, several orthodoxies and systems emerged, so that a battle of individuals turned into a battle of systems. In working methods, there was a continuation of previous humanist studies on both sides, since, as Polman observed, “polemical passion stimulated research.”43 Polemicists generally preferred the solutions that lay closest to their own interests. Depending on these, they accepted or rejected the results of the humanists. But research was not always subordinated to interconfessional polemical goals; it could also serve as an intraconfessional weapon. On the Catholic side, for example, local churches carried out historical research to justify their own devotional practices. Opposing the universal regularization implied by the Tridentine reforms, they sought to preserve, with arguments from history, the particular forms of their liturgy.44 bibliography Backus, Irena. Historical Method and Confessional Identity in the Era of the Reformation (1378–1615). Leiden, 2003. Bauer, Stefan. The Censorship and Fortuna of Platina’s Lives of the Popes in the Sixteenth Century. Turnhout, 2006.

43

Polman, L’Élément historique, 542: “la passion polémique a stimulé les recherches.” See Simon Ditchfield, Liturgy, Sanctity and History in Tridentine Italy: Pietro Maria Campi and the Preservation of the Particular (Cambridge, 1995). 44

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Theology and History The Invention of Papal History: Onofrio Panvinio between Renaissance and Catholic Reform. Oxford, 2020. Bauer, Stefan, ed. The Uses of History in Religious Controversies from Erasmus to Baronio, special issue of Renaissance Studies 35 (2021), 9–23. Benz, Stefan. Zwischen Tradition und Kritik: Katholische Geschichtsschreibung im barocken Heiligen Römischen Reich. Husum, 2003. Bollbuck, Harald. Wahrheitszeugnis, Gottes Auftrag und Zeitkritik: Die Kirchengeschichte der Magdeburger Zenturien und ihre Arbeitstechniken. Wiesbaden, 2014. Cameron, Euan. Interpreting Christian History: The Challenge of the Churches’ Past. Malden and Oxford, 2005. Clarke, Peter D. and Charlotte Methuen, eds. The Church on its Past. Woodbridge, 2013. Guazzelli, Giuseppe Antonio, Raimondo Michetti, and Francesco Scorza Barcellona, eds. Cesare Baronio tra santità e scrittura storica. Rome, 2012. Orella y Unzué, José Luis. Respuestas católicas a las Centurias de Magdeburgo (1559–1588). Madrid, 1976. Polman, Pontianus. L’Élément historique dans la controverse religieuse du XVIe siècle. Gembloux, 1932. Quantin, Jean-Louis. The Church of England and Christian Antiquity: The Construction of a Confessional Identity in the Seventeenth Century. Oxford, 2009. Sawilla, Jan Marco. Antiquarianismus, Hagiographie und Historie im 17. Jahrhundert: Zum Werk der Bollandisten. Tübingen, 2009. Van Liere, Katherine, Simon Ditchfield, and Howard Louthan, eds. Sacred History: Uses of the Christian Past in the Renaissance World. Oxford, 2012.

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Theology, Politics, and Warfare robert bireley† and robert kolb

Theology, Politics, and Warfare: The Catholic Perspective robert bireley† The Catholic Church of the early modern period struggled to accommodate to the changing world of the sixteenth century. Three developments in particular challenged Catholic theologians, philosophers, and political writers: the European discovery of lands across the sea, especially in the Americas; the rise of the state; and the Reformation. Their responses were various. Three leading Scholastic philosopher-theologians stand out: the Spanish Dominican Francisco de Vitoria (ca. 1483–1546), whose most significant contributions came while he was teaching at the University of Salamanca;1 the Jesuit Francisco Suárez (1548–1617), who taught in Rome and then principally at the University of Coimbra in Portugal;2 and the Italian Jesuit Robert Bellarmine (1542–1621), who taught in Louvain and Rome and then served in the Roman Curia, having been made a cardinal in 1599.3 All three of them accepted the new sovereign state, but with limitations aimed at maintaining a degree of unity among the states of Europe – and indeed, in 1 On Vitoria see Francisco Vitoria, Political Writings, ed. Anthony Pagden and Jeremy Lawrance [Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought] (Cambridge, 1991); and James Brown Scott, The Spanish Origins of International Law: Francisco de Vitoria and his Law of Nations (Oxford, 1934); see Scott for an outstanding analysis of Vitoria’s “De Indis” and “De Jure Belli.” 2 On Suárez see Francisco Suarez, Selections from Three Works: De Deo ac Deo Legislatore (1612), Defensio Fidei Catholicae, et Apostolicae Adversus Anglicanae Sectae Errores (1613), De Triplici Virtute Theologica, Fide, Spe, et Charitate (1621), volume II: The Translation, introd. James Brown Scott [Classics of International Law] (Oxford, 1944); and Heinrich Rommen, Die Staatslehre des Franz Suarez [European Political Thought: Traditions and Endurance] (New York, 1979 [1926]). 3 On Bellarmine see Robert Bellarmine, On Temporal and Spiritual Authority: On Laymen or Secular People, On the Temporal Power of the Pope against William Barclay, On the Primary Duty of the Supreme Pontiff, ed. Stefania Tutino (Indianapolis, 2012); Stefania Tutino, Empire of Souls: Robert Bellarmine and the Christian Commonwealth (Oxford, 2011); and Franz X. Arnold, Die Staatslehre des Kardinals Bellarmin: Ein Beitrag zur rechts- und staatsphilosophie des konfessionellen Zeitalters (Munich, 1934).

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the case of Vitoria and Suárez, of the world. This was to be achieved in part through the indirect power of the pope in temporal affairs. According to it, the pope might, by virtue of divine law, excommunicate, depose, and if necessary call upon a secular power to implement his decision should a temporal prince obstruct in a significant way the church’s mission of leading subjects to their highest goal, eternal life.4 In fact, the last papal excommunication of a ruling prince was that of Queen Elizabeth of England by Pius V in 1571.5 All three of these writers drew their arguments from the Scriptures, the Christian tradition, and especially from the natural law and the law of nations (ius gentium).which overlapped to a degree.6 They recognized the legitimacy – indeed, the necessity – of war between states, and showed little sympathy for the alleged pacifism of Erasmus and others.7 They shared the position stated by Vitoria in his treatise “On the Law of War.” There could be no question about a defensive war; even private individuals could defend themselves by force. The peace and security of the commonwealth required war since fear of war deterred enemy attacks, wrote Vitoria, sounding like Machiavelli.8 Distinctive of these authors was their concern for the international common good. According to Vitoria, the world could not be “happy – indeed, it would be the worst of all possible worlds – if tyrants and thieves and robbers were able to injure and oppress the innocent without punishment, whereas the innocent were not allowed to teach the guilty a lesson in return.”9 But war had to be just, and for this Vitoria listed three requirements. First, offensive war could only be undertaken by a commonwealth or sovereign state. Second, Vitoria took up the issue of the just cause. Here he noted in the first place that “difference of religion cannot be a cause of just

See Vitoria, “On the Power of the Church,” Question 5, Articles 6–9, in Political Writings, 90–101; Bellarmine, “On the Temporal Power of the Pope,” chapter 18 in On Temporal and Spiritual Authority, at 279. Stefania Tutino explains the indirect temporal power of the pope in her contribution to this volume (Chapter 13). 5 On the excommunication of Elizabeth see Arnold Oskar Meyer, England and the Catholic Church under Queen Elizabeth, trans. John Reginald McKee, introd. John Bossy (New York, 1967), 25–58, 76–86, 138–141, 323–335. 6 Scott, Spanish Origins of International Law, 138 and citing Vitoria, the ius gentium was based on “a consensus of the greater part of the whole world, especially on behalf of the common good of all”: “De Indis,” Appendix A, xxxviii. 7 Erasmus was not a complete pacifist; he did admit the possibility of a just war. See Erasmus, The Education of a Christian Prince, ed. Lisa Jardine [Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought] (Cambridge, 1997), 102–110; on his pacifism see Pierre Mesnard, L’Essor de la philosophie politique au XVIe siècle, 3rd ed. (Paris, 1969), 102–118. 8 9 Vitoria, “On the Law of War,” Question 1, Article 1, in Political Writings, 298. Ibid. 4

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war.”10 He referred to his treatise “On the American Indians,” and in his discussion of the just war it was the Spanish conquests in the Americas that he principally envisioned. The Spaniards could not wage war to force the indigenous people to convert. However, he did list the enforcement of “the right to preach and announce the Gospel in the lands of the barbarians” as one of the titles justifying the conquests of the Spaniards in the New World as well as the duty to protect Christian converts.11 “The sole and only just cause for waging war is when harm has been inflicted,” he continued in “On the Law of War.” “Offensive war is for the avenging of injuries and the admonishment of enemies.”12 But there must be a proportion between the injury received and the response to it. One cannot declare war for trivial offenses.13 Third, a war must be beneficial to the commonwealth, that is, it must be likely to succeed.14 Vitoria’s sense of the international community emerged in further remarks. The pope might by virtue of his indirect power in the case of conflict among sovereign princes compel the princes to submit to his arbitration. “And although the Pope does not do this, or does not do it often, it is not because he cannot . . . but because, for fear of scandal, he wishes to prevent the princes from thinking his motive is ambition or because he is afraid of a revolt from the Apostolic See on the part of the princes.”15 In lieu of any effective international authority, a ruler had the right to punish states that attacked his own state, in which case he acted as an instrument of justice for the international community, that is, as a judge. The universal common good required the existence of such a right to uphold justice among nations.16 A prince might also intervene in another country in order to defend its subjects’ human rights. In this case he had the practice of cannibalism and human sacrifice in the Indies in mind.17 In his “On Civil Power” Vitoria contended that in the case where one nation had just cause to attack another in order to avenge an injury, such an action would not be just if it harmed the common good of

10

Ibid., Question 1, Article 3, 302. Vitoria, “On the American Indians,” Question 3, Articles 2–3, in Political Writings, 284–287. 13 Vitoria, “On the Law of War,” in Political Writings, 303. Ibid., 304. 14 Vitoria, “On the Civil Power,” Question 1, Article 10, in Political Writings, 21; Scott, Spanish Origins of International Law, 229. 15 Vitoria, “De Indis,” in Scott, Spanish Origins of International Law, appendix A, xxiii. This translation would seem to be preferred over that in Political Writings. 16 Vitoria, “On the Law of War,” in Political Writings, 305–306. 17 Vitoria, “On Dietary Laws, or Self-Restraint,” Question 1, article 5, in Political Writings, 221–226. Vitoria meant by the defense of human rights only protection against cannibalism and human sacrifice, and Suárez later only against human sacrifice. 11

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Christendom. So, he explained, should Spain have good reason to initiate war on France and so undermine the capability of Christendom to defend itself against the Turks, it would not be a just war.18 Suárez in the final disputation “On War” in his treatise on charity followed closely on Vitoria with a more elaborate, philosophical treatment of most topics. Defensive war was not only permitted but might be commanded, and aggressive, even preventive war to ward off looming acts of injustice was allowed by natural law, and even by the Gospel.19 Two conditions had to be met for a war to be just. First, it had to be waged by a legitimate, sovereign ruler, a concept which Suárez developed much more completely than did Vitoria. Suárez then introduced the indirect power of the pope, with the hope, it would seem, of maintaining some form of international authority. The pope could insist that the disputing sovereigns submit the case to him for arbitration and that they accept his judgment “unless his decision be manifestly unjust.” But the pope might well choose not to exercise this function “lest perchance greater evils result.”20 Second, natural reason dictated that “a just and sufficient cause for war is the infliction of a grave injustice which cannot be avenged or repaired in any other way,” according to Suárez. He listed three main types of injustice: the seizure of property and refusal to return it; denial of the normal rights of nations such as the use of highways and trading in common; and a serious prejudice to a ruler’s or a country’s reputation or honor.21 A ruler might also resort to war to punish the perpetrator of an injustice against him or against an ally. To a degree, Suárez admitted, this made the same instance plaintiff and judge. But such punitive justice was essential to mankind, “and no more fitting method for its performance could, in the order of nature, and humanly speaking, be found.”22 In his treatise on faith Suárez allowed for intervention

Vitoria, “On Civil Power,” Question 1, Article, 10, in Political Writings, 21–22; see Scott, Spanish Origins of International Law, 230. Vitoria, Suárez, and Bellarmine all wrote extensively on the ius in bello, that is, on the morality in fighting a war, but there is not space to discuss these questions in this chapter. 19 Francisco Suárez, “On War,” “On Charity, Disputation XIII,” in Francisco Suárez, Selections from Three Works: De Deo et de Deo Legislatore, 1612, Defensio Fidei Catholicae et Apostolicae adversus Anglicanae Sectae Errores, 1613, De Triplici Virtute Theologica Fide, Spe et Caritate, 1621, introd. James Brown Scott, trans. Gwladys L. Williams, Ammi Brown, and John Waldron, 2 vols. [Classics of International Law 20] (Oxford, 1944), II, 802–804. 20 Ibid., 805–810, citations on 808 and 809. Suárez also discussed the indirect power of the pope in “On the Excellence and Power of the Supreme Pontiff,” Defensio Fidei Catholicae et Apostolicae, in Selections from Three Works, 409–429. 21 22 Ibid., 816–817. Ibid., 817–819. At this point Suárez is arguing from natural law. 18

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to protect subjects’ human rights in another state; this he applied to the human sacrifice that was found in the New World.23 Robert Bellarmine took up the question of the just war in his treatise in his classic Controversies, first published at Ingolstadt in 1586. Bellarmine’s position on the just war differed in some respects from that of Vitoria and Suárez. He devoted considerably more space to the argument that war was permitted to Christians, while rejecting what he considered to be the pacifism of Erasmus.24 Bellarmine did not allot to a ruler a wider responsibility for international order, as did Vitoria and Suárez, and he thought more in terms of the Respublica Christiana, that is, Catholic Europe, than he did of the world. A prince could serve as a judge for his own subjects, and he was entitled to take action when an injustice was committed against them. But “he cannot punish all the crimes that are committed by others.”25 Bellarmine gave considerable weight to good intention if a war was to be acceptable. This good intention aimed at peace. War was a “very serious and dangerous” means to peace, and for this reason efforts had to be made toward a negotiated settlement before proceeding to war.26 Bellarmine also from his position in Rome devoted a short chapter to justify war against the Turks, a major concern to Pope Clement VIII during the Long Turkish War (1593–1606) and an issue which the two Spaniards did not take up.27 A type of war not discussed by Vitoria, Suárez, or Bellarmine was what can be called a “holy war.” It was associated with providentialism and designated a war fought in some sense at the behest of God and with a promise of divine assistance.28 It is found in El Principe Cristiano (The Christian Prince) of the Spanish Jesuit Pedro de Ribadeneira, which appeared in 1595. Ribadeneira belonged to the Anti-Machiavellian school of writers, that is, writers of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries who aimed to refute Machiavelli not on philosophical or theological grounds but on pragmatic ones, arguing that his recipe for political success simply would not work. The Anti-Machiavellians intended to propose a program for a Suárez, “On Means for the Conversion of Unbelievers,” “On Faith, Disputation XVIII,” in Selections from Three Works, 770. Robert Bellarmine, “On Laymen,” in On Temporal and Spiritual Authority, 53–67. 25 26 Ibid., 69. Ibid., 70–71. 27 Ibid., 75–80. Bellarmine here refutes Luther, who at one point briefly condemned war against the Turks. 28 Vitoria alluded to war at divine behest, citing Deuteronomy 20:16, in “De Bello,” ibid., xiv (Appendix): see Selections from Three Works. On holy war see Robert Bireley, The CounterReformation Prince: Anti-Machiavellianism or Catholic Statecraft in Early Modern Europe (Chapel Hill, 1990), 131. 23

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prince that was both effective and moral.29 Ribadeneira enjoyed connections at the court of Philip II, and he had opposed the king’s war to secure for himself the succession in Portugal in 1580. But he enthusiastically supported the Armada against England in 1588. As he wrote in his “Exhortation for the Soldiers and Captains who are Going on the Expedition against England, in the Name of their Captain,” the Spanish army was sent as “help from heaven for the Catholic king, Philip.” “Let us proceed to an enterprise that is not difficult, since God Our Lord, whose cause and most holy religion we defend, goes before us,” he wrote.30 In his Treatise on Tribulation, published the year after the Armada, Ribadeneira wrestled with the defeat of the Armada and explained it ultimately as a mystery of God’s providence, to be accepted as punishment for the sins of the Spaniards.31 Later, in El Principe Cristiano, published in 1595, he insisted that the ruler had to have a just cause to undertake a conflict, but he left it up to the experts to determine what constituted a just cause. In a passage intended primarily to demonstrate the legitimacy of war for a prince, he then described the holy war. “By the wars which God has ordered his holy captains to wage,” he wrote, “by the victories he has given them, and by the laws he published for his people, teaching them to wage war, one sees that war can be waged in a holy fashion (santamente).”32 God demonstrated his providence through the victories that he had bestowed on his servants, the kingdoms and empires he had entrusted to them. Ribadeneira illustrated this providence with examples from the Old Testament and from Christian history of the “miraculous” victories of Gideon, Constantine, Joan of Arc, and others.33 But as we have just seen, Ribadeneira never claimed that those fighting on God’s side always won. If they did not, it was due to their sins or to the mystery of God’s providence. Another Jesuit writer, the German Adam Contzen, also allowed for a holy war, and he was to have considerable influence at the court in Munich of Duke and then Elector Maximilian of Bavaria. He was appointed to the Jesuit academy at Mainz in 1609, and a stream of publications came from his pen in 29

Bireley, Counter-Reformation Prince. Monumenta Historica Societatis Jesu: Ribadeneira 2 (Madrid, 1920), 256, 268. 31 Pedro de Ribadeneira, Tratado de la tribulación, in Pedro de Ribadeneira, Obras escogidas del Padre Pedro de Ribadeneira, ed. Dom Vicente de la Fuente (Madrid, 1868; repr. Madrid, 1952) II, 418–423, esp. 426, 432, 444–446. 32 Pedro de Ribadeneira, Tratado de l religion y virtudes que debe tener el principe cristiano para convervar y gobernar sus estados, contra lo que Nicolas Maquiavello y los políticos deste tiempo enseñan, ed. Dom Vicente de la Fuente (Madrid, 1868; repr. Frankfurt, 1952), II, 579. 33 Ibid., 580–581. 30

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the following years, topped by his magnum opus, the Libri decem de politicis (Ten Books on Politics), published in 1621, a massive, diffuse tome of 837 folio pages. It was to exercise considerable influence in Catholic Central Europe.34 Contzen’s treatment of the just war followed traditional lines but with some significant particularities. He departed from Vitoria, Suárez, and Bellarmine in that he emphasized more the sovereignty of the state and prohibited the interference of one state in the affairs of another, even to protect a religious minority, since this infringed upon its sovereignty. Contzen did not note that this interference would violate the Peace of Augsburg, but he may have had it in mind. A sovereign state served as judge in its own case since there was no higher authority. There was no mention of any indirect authority of the papacy in temporal affairs, nor of papal mediation of disputes.35 The sense of an international community seems to have been lost. But then in a clause of far-reaching importance, Contzen added a major qualification to his prohibition of interference in the affairs of another state, and raised the possibility of a holy war. Normally war was not a valid means to advance the cause of religion. But it could be declared “at the express command and order of God.”36 So he allowed for a holy war. As a biblical scholar Contzen may have elaborated this view in order to accommodate in his position on war the many instances in the Old Testament when the Hebrews took up arms at the behest of God. Elector Maximilian of Bavaria summoned Contzen to Munich in 1623 to serve as his confessor. He was to exercise considerable influence on Maximilian, often in the face of the prince’s other councilors, and so to influence the course of the Thirty Years War.37 Contzen and William Lamormaini, who as a professor in Graz had come to know the archduke and then emperor Ferdinand II, both began to serve as confessors to Elector Maximilian and Emperor Ferdinand respectively at the turn of 1623/1624. Both exercised considerable influence at the courts of Munich and Vienna until the Peace of Prague in 1635. They led the militant party at the two courts who called for a holy war to retake from the 34 Ernst-Albert Seils, Die Staatslehre des Jesuiten Adam Contzen, Beichtvater Kurfürst Maximilians von Bayern [Historische Studien 405] (Lübeck and Hamburg, 1968), 22, 175–176, 180–187, 194, 200–224, 228. 35 Adam Contzen, Politicorum libri decem (Mainz, 1621), bk. 10, ch. 4, nos.1–7 (pp. 745–746), 10, 5, no.2 (p. 749), 10, 4, nos. 6 (pp. 750–751), 10 (pp. 756–757). 36 Ibid., 10, 6, no. 5 (p. 750). 37 Robert Bireley, Maximilian von Bayern, Adam Contzen, S.J. und die Gegenreformation in Deutschland 1624–1635 [Schriftenreihe der Historischen Kommission bei der bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften 13] (Göttingen, 1975).

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Protestants all the ecclesiastical lands that had been seized from the Catholics since the Peace of Augsburg in 1555, illegally in Catholic eyes. At the time the fortunes of the German Catholic forces in the Thirty Years War were looking up, and they continued to do so until they peaked in the winter of 1627–1628 when the imperial general Wallenstein’s army reached the shores of the Baltic Sea. By then two parties had emerged at the courts of Munich and Vienna, the militants and the moderates, where the two confessors led the militant party. In the empire the principal issue dividing the two parties was the Edict of Restitution of 1629, which required the return of all the ecclesiastical lands that the Protestants had seized. Two features characterized the militants’ position leading up to the Edict and then to their subsequent defense of it until the Peace of Prague, when it was substantially modified. One was providentialist, and implied some form of divine revelation, as the moderates pointed out to them. The victories of the Catholics up to this point, and in Ferdinand’s case his “miraculous” successes in the Austrian lands and Bohemia, made evident God’s summons to restore Catholicism in the empire to the status of 1555. Contzen encouraged the Catholics with an example from Scripture: “In a cause as holy as that of the Maccabees it is better to hope in a favorable outcome of the conflict than to yield to the heretics and endanger the bodies and souls of future [generations].”38 Both Contzen and Lamormaini also looked to France eventually to come to the aid of the German Catholics, not an unrealistic expectation at the time. The side of the moderates contained many of the Bavarian and imperial councilors who feared a Catholic overreach and urged a settlement with the Protestants, which would still have greatly benefited the Catholics at the time. In 1631 Gustavus Adolphus and the Swedes won a major victory at Breitenfeld that reversed the whole course of the war. But in Munich and Vienna the two parties continued to vie for the upper hand until the moderates finally won out at the Peace of Prague in 1635, when they secured a substantial modification of the Edict. Before his acceptance of the Peace, Ferdinand summoned a conference of sixteen theologians to determine whether he could reconcile it with his conscience. At this conference a major topic was whether the emperor could base his policy on an alleged divine revelation or whether he had to rely on a rational analysis of the political situation. The majority of the theologians plus the two cardinals among Ferdinand’s councilors sided with the moderates. So Ferdinand and

38

Cited in Bireley, Maximilian von Bayern, 131.

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Maximilian agreed to the Peace of Prague, thus ending the period of “holy war” during the Thirty Years War. Two new Jesuit confessors came to the fore following the Peace of Prague. Johannes Vervaux replaced Contzen, who died the following year, and Johannes Gans was named confessor of Ferdinand III after the death of Ferdinand II in early 1637. Both were moderates. Gans, when asked for his opinion during the Diet of Regensburg in 1641, asserted that the Edict, which was the source of all the trouble in the empire, had been advocated by a few zealous but politically inept advisors.39 The whole episode reveals the differences among Catholics during the Thirty Years War. To conclude, a word about the papacy. Starting with Pope Clement VIII (1592–1605) and continuing with Popes Paul V (1605–1621), Urban VIII (1623–1644), and Innocent X, the popes did not actively support military action against the Protestants. The exception here was the brief but militant papacy of Gregory XV (1621–1623), who promoted the fight against the Protestants in Germany and in France as a holy war.40 Increasingly the popes referred to themselves as the padre commune who stood above the fray in an effort to mediate between the contending parties, and Urban VIII from the beginning of his pontificate attempted to resolve the issues between the Habsburgs and Bourbons. Indeed, the abortive conference that he summoned for Cologne in 1637 did initiate the process that ended with the Peace of Westphalia.41 But the reach of the padre commune did not extend, at least not directly, to the Protestants. The popes refused to engage in direct negotiations with heretics and, understandable as this might be, it hurt the papacy politically. Fabio Chigi, the papal legate at the Congress of Westphalia and the future Pope Alexander VII, had protested the terms of the Peace of Westphalia at Münster. But the formal papal protest in the brief Zelo domus Dei, though backdated to November 26, 1648, was not issued until August, 20, 1650, so after the Nuremberg Agreement on Demobilization. The papacy did not want to provide any excuse for prolonging the war. It too desperately longed for peace, and it certainly did not want to bear the odium 39 Bernhard Duhr, Geschichte der Jesuiten in den Ländern deutscher Zunge, 4 vols. (Freiburg, 1913), II/I, 473–474. 40 Alexander Koller, Imperator und Pontifex: Forschungen zum Verhältnis von Kaiserhof und römischer Kurie im Zeitalter der Konfessionalisierung (1555–1645) (Münster, 2012), 139–151; Robert Bireley, The Jesuits and the Thirty Years War: Kings, Courts, and Confessors (Cambridge, 2003), 50, 62. 41 Konrad Repgen, “Negotiating the Peace of Westphalia: A Survey with an Examination of the Major Problems,” in Klaus Bussmann and Heinz Schilling, eds., 1648: War and Peace in Europe, 2 vols. (Münster, 1999), I, 355–372.

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for a resumption of the conflict. The protest was meant to preserve the juridical claims of the church, which might possibly be revived in an uncertain future.42 But the choice of the juridical over the political greatly compromised the ability of the papacy subsequently to act as a mediator in the political affairs of Europe.

Protestant Theologies in the Context of War and Violence robert kolb Protestant views of war offer a microcosm of the political views of the various confessional groups that formed in the sixteenth century and constitute today what is labeled Protestantism. Their attitudes toward violence in the service of societal order and in the service of the establishment or maintenance of proper religious teaching and practice reveal much about their conceptions of God’s lordship over and direction of the body politic. Several areas of research in this area offer ongoing opportunities for new investigations. Brad Gregory’s monumental study of martyrologies invites indepth follow-up studies on a host of individual martyrs, and there is certainly more work to do on the much-studied works of John Foxe, Jean Crespin, and Adriaen van Haemstede and the little-studied pioneering martyr-story collection of Ludwig Rabus.43 Exile and the phenomenon of life as a refugee played an important part in the religious life of every religious communion in early modern Europe; foundations for such research have been laid,44 but in particular those refugees produced by decree rather than violence, such as a significant number of Lutherans, invite investigation, as do individual instances of persecution that drove people out of their homelands. The conclusion of religious peace agreements, such as the Religious Peace of Augsburg of 1555 and the Edict of Nantes of 1598, has won scholarly attention, and the gathering of source documents into a standard collection has begun. This project will generate new analyses by allowing the comparison of a large number of agreements that brought about measures of religious peace 42 Konrad Repgen, “Die Proteste Chigis und der päpstliche Protest gegen den westfälischen Frieden (1648/1650),” in Dieter Giesen, Joseph Listl, Dieter Schwab, and Hans-Wolfgang Stratz, eds., Staat, Kirche, Wissenschaft in einer pluralisatischen Gesellschaft: Festschrift zum 65. Geburtstag von Paul Mikat (Berlin, 1989), 623–647; Michael F. Feldkamp, “Das Breve ‘Zelo Domus Dei’ vom 26. November 1648, Edition,” Archivum Historiae Pontificiae 31 (1993), 293–305. 43 Brad S. Gregory, Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1999). 44 Nicholas Terpstra, Religious Refugees in the Early Modern World: An Alternative History of the Reformation (Cambridge, 2015).

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and tolerance.45 Benjamin Kaplan’s approach to questions related to the use of violence for religious purposes and the advance of concepts of toleration points the way for further inquiries into this process.46

The Anabaptists on the Use of Force for Religious Purposes A prominent medieval type of reform movement that arose and disappeared in many local forms in the centuries immediately preceding the sixteenth proposed a biblicistic alternative to the traditions of the established church, with a moralistic view of the Christian life that replaced sacred or religious good works with ethical imitation of Christ. These movements rejected the authority of the clergy and the sacramental system that undergirded that authority. In addition, many of these groups were millenarian, and some tried to introduce God’s kingdom on earth through their own use of force. The “spiritualist” and “Anabaptist” heirs of this tradition in the sixteenth century (to use George Williams’s parlance47) were not always distinguishable at the time of the German Reformation, and within their continuation of the tradition two opposite positions on the use of force developed. One tradition, represented by the Schleitheim Articles (1527) of some South German Anabaptists and later by Menno Simons, espoused the renunciation of all violence, along with participation in civil government, and espoused the practice of pacifism.48 The other, exhibited in the leadership of rebellious peasant forces by Thomas Müntzer in 1525, and the establishment of the Anabaptist apocalyptic kingdom in Münster in 1535, advocated and embraced violence as a tool for eradicating the ungodly and initiating Christ’s rule on earth.49 Only the pacifistic wing endured into the seventeenth century and beyond.

The Lutheran View of the Use of Force for Religious Purposes Martin Luther conceived of human history as the battleground between Christ’s kingdom (Reich) and Satan’s, and he distinguished two realms (confusingly often also designated Reich, but in addition Regiment) or 45

See https://eured.de/. Benjamin J. Kaplan, Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2007). 47 George Huntson Williams, The Radical Reformation, 3rd ed. (Kirksville, 1992). 48 Urs B. Leu and Christian Scheidegger, eds., Das Schleitheimer Bekenntnis 1527 (Zug, 2004), 42–43, 69–70. 49 James M. Stayer, Anabaptists and the Sword (Lawrence, 1972); Christoph Bornhäuser, Leben und Lehre Menno Simons (Neukirchen, 1973), 140–146. 46

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dimensions of human life, the vertical sphere of relationship between God and his human creatures and the horizontal realm of interhuman relationships. God had established civil government, Luther argued, to keep order and promote the good in sinful society, and in pursuit of these goals it could employ physical and even fatal force. However, he saw absolutely no role for force or coercion in the vertical realm, and also none for it in the conduct of the institution of the church in the horizontal realm.50 That led him to insist that only the Holy Spirit’s sword, the Word of God, should be used against false teachers, and never the sword of civil government (although he did not oppose the execution of Anabaptists for treasonous criticism of and resistance to certain demands of civil authorities). In varying degrees his followers supported his position, with Johannes Brenz, a Reformer in southwestern Germany, among the most insistent on the rejection of such coercive measures.51 Luther also rejected the concept of the crusade against the “Turkish infidels” as a religious war, although he supported the exercise of imperial military measures against the invading enemy as a just war.52 When asked by a nobleman in military service, Assa von Kram, “whether soldiers, too, could be saved,” Luther defended the godliness of serving princes in their armies if the war being waged was just. Being a soldier was a calling that in a sinful world was necessary for the defense of the innocent and the maintenance of peace and order.53 In the Augsburg Confession Philip Melanchthon affirmed the right to wage “a just war,”54 but circumstances did not require extensive Lutheran comment on the concept in the early modern period, although treatments of the topic in the standard dogmatic texts of seventeenth-century Lutheran theologians continued major threads of the medieval argument.55

50 Eike Wolgast, “Luther’s Treatment of Political and Societal Life,” in Robert Kolb, Irene Dingel and Lubomír Batka, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Martin Luther’s Theology (Oxford, 2014), 397–413. 51 William David James Cargill Thompson, The Political Thought of Martin Luther (Brighton, 1984), 155–162; James M. Estes, ed., Whether Secular Government has the Right to Wield the Sword in Matters of Faith (Toronto, 1994). 52 Gregory Miller, The Turks and Islam in Reformation Germany (London, 2017). 53 WA 19, 623–662, in LW, 93–137. Cf. the study and comparison of Luther’s and Melanchthon’s political views in James M. Estes, Peace, Order and the Glory of God: Secular Authority and the Church in the Thought of Luther and Melanchthon, 1518–1559 (Leiden, 2005). 54 Die Bekenntnisschriften der Evangelische-Lutherischen Kirche, ed. Irene Dingel (Göttingen, 2014), 110/111; The Book of Concord, ed. Robert Kolb and Timothy J. Wengert (Minneapolis, 2000), 48, 49. 55 Johann Gerhard, Loci theologici, ed. Eduard Preus (Berlin, 1868), VI, 478–521.

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Perhaps the most critical question raised during Luther’s lifetime regarding the use of force with regard to the faith revolved around the validity of the resistance of German princes and towns to imperial use of force against the Evangelical faith. In 1523 Elector Frederick the Wise of Saxony requested the opinion of four faculty members in Wittenberg on this question. Luther maintained at this point that no resistance in defense of the gospel was possible; his colleagues Philip Melanchthon and Johannes Bugenhagen allowed for some measure of armed defense of the faith, and the nobleman Nikolaus von Amsdorf defended the right of princes to maintain justice in open resistance to imperial abuse of power.56 Melanchthon’s arguments for the right to resist grew stronger as the military threat from Emperor Charles V increased, initially based largely on the natural right of self-defense, added to constitutional arguments concerning the nature of the German imperial structure, which bound the emperor to conditions made at his election. By the end of the 1530s Luther was also arguing on the basis of his understanding of God’s calling (vocation) of each human being to specific tasks in the home, economy, society, and church that if the emperor violated his calling to rule justly and began to function as a “toady of the pope,” resistance by lesser magistrates would be justified.57 Lutheran resistance theory came to a head in the Schmalkaldic War of 1546–1547 and the aftermath of the defeat by Charles V in 1547 of the forces of the Evangelical Schmalkaldic League, the “Protestants” who adhered to the Augsburg Confession. Melanchthon and other Wittenberg colleagues mounted a pamphlet campaign in defense of resistance to the tyrannous imposition of the Old Faith.58 This war began because of imperial attempts to suppress reform led by Wittenberg and other centers, but it also figured in the plans of Charles V to tame his German empire as he had two decades earlier united the nobles of the Iberian peninsula by force of arms. The city of Magdeburg continued its defiance of the emperor after the defeat, and its ministerium published the Magdeburg Confession of 1550, which asserted the right of lesser

56

WA.B 12, 35–45. Mark U. Edwards, Jr., Luther’s Last Battles: Politics and Polemics, 1531–46 (Ithaca, 1983), 20–37; Cargill Thompson, Political Thought, 91–111. 58 Most recently, see the edition of one of these treatises in Politische Widerstand als protestantische Option: Philipp Melanchthon und Justus Menius: Von der Notwehr (1547): Lateinisch–Deutsch, ed. Hans-Otto Schneider (Leipzig, 2014). On the war see Thomas A. Brady, Jr. The Politics of the Reformation in Germany: Jacob Sturm (1489–1553) of Strasbourg (Atlantic Highlands, 1997), 201–231. 57

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magistrates to take up arms against an emperor who had broken his oath and failed to fulfill his princely vocation properly.59 Subsequently some Lutheran preachers practiced the criticism of injustice and tyranny that Luther had insisted was among the duties of pastors.60 Indeed, Robert von Friedeburg argues that it was this cultivation of a critique of princely injustice and flouting of the law that led to the creation of modern concepts of the state which replace the responsibility of the prince for the welfare of the people with that of organs of the state. These ideas developed during the Thirty Years War when preachers such as Johann Wilhelm Neumair von Ramslas voiced criticism of princely abuses of power in pulpit and print. This habit of mind exhibited itself after the war in the arguments advanced by figures like Karl Ludwig von Seckendorf and Samuel Pufendorf.61 The Thirty Years War, like the other wars of religion, exhibited a mixture of religious concerns and pretexts with jockeying for power within the German empire. The conclusion of the so-called Religious Peace of Augsburg (1555) and the Peace of Westphalia (1648) ended the use of military action for ecclesiastical purposes. Churches thereafter generally supported the military decisions of civil governments. Research into the nature of the various settlements labeled “religious” peace agreements is yielding new insights into a series of related questions. It is clear that these settlements often had less to do with religious issues than with related political causes of discord.62

59

Robert von Friedeburg, Widerstandsrecht und Konfessionskonflikt: Notwehr und Gemeiner Mann im deutsch-britischen Vergleich 1530–1669 (Berlin, 1999); David Mark Whitford, Tyranny and Resistance: The Magdeburg Confession and the Lutheran Tradition (St. Louis, 2001); Nathan Rein, The Chancery of God: Protestant Print, Polemic and Propaganda against the Empire, Magdeburg 1546–1551 (Aldershot, 2008). More work is needed on the development of Lutheran resistance theory. 60 WA 31, 1, 196, 19–198, 18, eps. 197, 3–198, 2 and 198, 12–13; LW 13, 49–51. 61 Robert von Friedeburg, Luther’s Legacy: The Thirty Years War and the Modern Notion of “State” in the Empire, 1530s to 1790s (Cambridge, 2016); cf. Robert von Friedeburg, “Der Gewissenlose Fürst in der lutherischen Kritik des Dreißigjährigen Krieges,” in Michael Germann and Wim Decock, eds., Das Gewissen in den Rechtslehren der Protestantischen und Katholischen Reformationen (Leipzig, 2017), 287–296, Robert von Friedeburg, “Die lutherische Orthodoxie und die Debatte um das Widerstandsrecht,” in Matthias Meinhardt, Ulrike Gleixner, Martin H. Jung, and Siegrid Westphal, eds., Religion, Macht, Politik: Hofgeistlichkeit im Europa der Frühen Neuzeit (1500–1800) (Wiesbaden, 2014), 307–322, and Robert von Friedeburg, “Church and State in Lutheran Lands, 1550–1675,” in Robert Kolb, ed., Lutheran Ecclesiastical Culture, 1550–1675 (Leiden, 2008), 361–410, esp. 378–410. 62 Irene Dingel, “Religion in the Religious Peace Agreements of the Early Modern Period: Comparative Case Studies,” in Konrad Eisenbichler, ed., Collaboration, Conflict, and Continuity in the Reformation: Essays in Honour of James M. Estes on his Eightieth Birthday (Toronto, 2014), 389–409.

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The Reformed Tradition on Tolerance and War Established governments that embraced Reformed confessions of faith exhibited the same attitudes toward religious pluralism and dissent that all other late medieval and early modern European governments held. National political unity was closely tied to officially recognized religion (and, in the case of the German empire after the Religious Peace of Augsburg, religions). The Genevan government was doing no more than carrying out Roman law when it executed Michael Servetus for the heresy of denying the Trinity. It could not risk being condemned as a tolerator of false teaching. Calvin’s own attitude toward societal tolerance of religious error became clear in his dispute with Sebastian Castellio, who within the Genevan circle proposed the most wide-ranging measure of tolerance espoused by a theologian in the early modern period.63 But apart from execution based on Roman law, as in the Servetus case, Reformed cities and principalities, like Lutheran governments, generally used exile rather than execution to purify the body politic. Heinrich Bullinger represents an understanding of the use of war in the service of religion that goes beyond Ulrich Zwingli’s support for the defense of the faith by forces allied with Zurich, which took him to the battlefield of Kappel in 1531, where he died at the hands of the city’s foes from the cantons loyal to the Old Faith.64 In Bullinger’s widely influential catechetical sermons, The Decades, he taught that magistrates are “compelled to send aid and raise the siege of his enemy” in defense of their own lands since they cannot break their oath to protect their subjects. They are compelled to wage war against those who “are incurable,” whom the very judgment of the Lord condemns and bids to be killed “without pity or mercy.” This includes “wars that are taken in hand for the defense of true religion against idolaters and enemies of the true and catholic faith. They err, that are of the opinion that no wars may be made in defense of religion.” Peter was not to strike with the sword; that is not the duty of the church. But civil government is charged with preserving “liberty, wealth, chastity, and his subjects’ bodies; why should he not defend and revenge the things of greater account, and those which are of greatest weight?”65

Hans R. Guggisberg, Sebastian Castellio, 1515–1563: Humanist and Defender of Religious Toleration in a Confessional Age, trans. Bruce Gordon (Aldershot, 2003). 64 Ulrich Gäbler, Huldrych Zwingli, trans. Ruth C. L. Gritsch (Philadelphia, 1986), 148–152. 65 Heinrich Bullinger, The Decades of Henry Bullinger . . . The First and Second Decades, trans. Thomas Harding., ed. Parker Society (Cambridge, 1849), 376–377. 63

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In his Institutes John Calvin also expressed approval of the civil magistrates’ use of “arms to execute such public vengeance.” Wars are lawful if used to preserve the tranquility of their dominion, to restrain the seditious stirrings of restless men, to help those forcibly oppressed, to punish evil deeds . . . both natural equity and the nature of the office dictate that princes must be armed not only to restrain the misdeeds of private individuals by judicial punishment but also to defend by war the dominions entrusted to their safekeeping if at any time they are under enemy attack.

Civil authorities are to guard against “giving vent to their passions even in the slightest degree.”66 The prospect of war became concrete for Calvin and his followers when open warfare broke out between French nobles sympathetic to Calvinist thought and the royal court in the wake of the conspiracy of Amboise in 1559. France alternated between periods of uneasy peace and brutal conflict until the Calvinist cousin of King Henry III, Henry IV, assumed the throne, said that Paris was worth a Mass, and through his conversion to Roman Catholicism and the Edict of Nantes in 1598 restored order to his French domains.67 Religious concerns again coincided with the desire to assert power by king and by nobility in these conflicts. The justification of the right of the Calvinist nobility to resist the monarchy during these religious wars went through three stages. At first, the use of military force in defense of Calvinist congregations was aimed only at the king’s advisors, not at the central government itself. The second stage employed arguments from the Magdeburg Confession regarding the rights of lower magistrates to resist tyranny practiced by the monarch.68 The third stage appealed to reason as the basis for the proper functioning of the commonwealth. One key figure in the development of this theory, François Hotman,69 had served as Calvin’s personal secretary and taught at the Reformed academy in Lausanne and at Johannes Sturm’s academy in Strasbourg, where he may have become 66 John Calvin, Calvin: Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill and Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia, 1960), II, 1409–1501. 67 The classic text covering the earlier half of this period is James Westfall Thompson, The Wars of Religion in France 1559–1576: The Huguenots, Catherine de Medici and Philip II (Chicago, 1909). See also Robert M. Kingdon, Geneva and the Coming of the Wars of Religion in France 1555–1563 (Geneva, 1956); Robert M. Kingdon, Geneva and the Consolidation of the French Protestant Movement 1564–1572 (Madison, 1967); and Mack P. Holt, The French Wars of Religion, 1562–1629 (Cambridge, 1995). 68 Robert M. Kingdon, Myths about the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacres 1572–1576 (Cambridge, 1988), 150–160. 69 Donald R. Kelley, François Hotman: A Revolutionary’s Ordeal (Princeton, 1973).

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familiar with the argumentation of the Magdeburg Confession, which Calvin’s successor, Theodore Beza, also used in formulating his justification of resistance to tyrannous government. The anonymous Vindiciae contra tyrannos of 1579, perhaps drafted by the Huguenot diplomat Hubert Languet and edited for publication by Philippe Duplessis-Mornay, a leader of the noble party, used biblical argumentation, such as Romans 13 and Old Testament examples, but key to the treatise’s argument was the validity of war in defense of just causes, including that of the gospel. Since the king had sought to corrupt God’s law and was hindering its reestablishment, God, who sets governments in place through his people, was at work in the nobility’s resistance to royal tyranny.70 Allan A. Tulchin has proposed explanations for the duration of the French civil wars: following Robert J. Knecht, he suggests that the weakness of the central monarchy, the unsatisfying nature of each successive religious peace, and the bitterness that evolved from the savagery of the fighting sustained hostilities, but peace finally came when each side recognized the strength of the other, and when Henry IV emerged as “victor with a particular conciliatory style.”71 Thus, in the end non-religious factors played the major role in ending the violence and the need to justify it.

The English Civil War The focal point of armed religious conflict had moved from Germany to France in the sixteenth century. In the seventeenth it moved to England. Extensive research on aspects of the clash between royal “Anglican” forces and those of the “Puritan” rebels and on the movement from Puritan rule toward the “Glorious” and unbloody “Revolution” of 1688, with the introduction of widespread though not complete religious toleration under Queen Mary and her consort William of Orange, have not precluded further study of individual aspects of this vital area of Anglo-Saxon religious and political development. English religious conflicts also reveal how political maneuvering for power within the kingdom coincided with and sometimes overpowered religious concerns. Students of the period may gain access to

70 Robert M. Kingdon, “Calvinism and Resistance Theory, 1550–1580,” in James H. Burns, ed., The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450–1700 (Cambridge, 1991), 193–218, esp. 212–214. 71 Allan A. Tulchin, “Ending the French Wars of Religion,” American Historical Review 120 (2015), 1696–1708. Cf. Jérémie Foa, “Pacifying the Kingdom of France at the Beginning of the Wars of Religion: Historiography, Sources, and Examples,” in Raymond A. Mentzer and Bertrand Van Ruymbeke, eds., A Companion to the Huguenots (Leiden, 2016), 90–117.

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this political jockeying from works such as that of Christopher Hill.72 The intertwining of ecclesiology with differing perceptions of how God had constituted his church and arguments over the political constitution of the English monarchy provided a fertile bed for a variety of wheat and tares to grow.73 Research into the place of this discussion in the larger flow of English history is but one of the many angles for viewing early modern Great Britain that command interest.74 A number of studies of the relationship between Puritan justification of revolt against the Anglican monarchy appeared a generation ago,75 and fresh studies of the complex of questions connected with Puritan theories and their critics invite comment from new perspectives.

Conclusion Those we classify as Protestants embraced a spectrum of opinions on the use of violence and war in defending their faith – although, for the most part, with the rare exceptions of figures such as Thomas Müntzer and the leaders of the Anabaptist kingdom in Münster, they avoided the use of the sword in propagating their confession. Justification for resistance to higher levels of government varied, from Luther’s use of the concept of princely vocation to the secular arguments employed by Melanchthon and others from natural law and the right of defense, and arguments based on the traditional constitutions of the German empire, the French monarchy, and that of England. The religious wars, from the Schmalkaldic War to the English Civil War, arose from a mixture of factors, with religious rights of practice figuring in each, but political maneuvering by a variety of forces within society also playing major roles. bibliography Arnold, Franz X. Die Staatslehre des Kardinals Bellarmin: Ein Beitrag zur Rechts- und Staatsphilosophie des konfessionellen Zeitalters. Munich, 1934. Bireley, Robert. The Counter-Reformation Prince: Anti-Machiavellianism or Catholic Statecraft in Early Modern Europe. Chapel Hill, 1990. The Jesuits and the Thirty Years War: Kings, Courts, and Confessors. Cambridge, 2003. Christopher Hill, The Century of Revolution 1603–1714 (Walton-on-Thames, 1980 [1961]). Among recent works are Charles W. A. Prior, A Confusion of Tongues: Britain’s Wars of Reformation, 1525–1642 (Oxford, 2012). 74 Michael G. Finlayson, Historians, Puritanism, and the English Revolution: The Religious Factor in English Politics before and after the Interregnum (Toronto, 1983). 75 For example, Michael Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics (New York, 1969). 72 73

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robert bireley † and robert kolb Maximilian von Bayern, Adam Contzen, S.J. und die Gegenreformation in Deutschland 1624–1635 [Schriftenreihe der Historischen Kommission bei der bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften 13]. Göttingen, 1975. Cargill Thompson, William David James. The Political Thought of Martin Luther. Brighton, 1984. Estes, James M., ed. Whether Secular Government has the Right to Wield the Sword in Matters of Faith. Toronto, 1994. Kaplan, Benjamin J. Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge, 2007. Koller, Alexander. Imperator und Pontifex: Forschungen zum Verhältnis von Kaiserhof und römischer Kurie im Zeitalter der Konfessionalisierung (1555–1645). Münster, 2012. Mesnard, Pierre. L’Essor de la philosophie politique au XVIe siècle, 3rd ed. Paris, 1969. Meyer, Arnold Oskar. England and the Catholic Church under Queen Elizabeth, trans. John Reginald McKee, introd. John Bossy. New York, 1967. Repgen, Konrad. “Die Proteste Chigis und der päpstliche Protest gegen den westfälischen Frieden (1648/1650).” In Dieter Giesen, Joseph Listl, Dieter Schwab, and HansWolfgang Stratz, eds., Staat, Kirche, Wissenschaft in einer pluralisatischen Gesellschaft: Festschrift zum 65. Geburtstag von Paul Mikat. Berlin, 1989, 623–647. Scott, James Brown. The Spanish Origins of International Law: Francisco de Vitoria and his Law of Nations. Oxford, 1934. Seils, Ernst-Albert. Die Staatslehre des Jesuiten Adam Contzen, Beichtvater Kurfürst Maximilians von Bayern [Historische Studien 405] Lübeck and Hamburg, 1968. Stayer, James M. Anabaptists and the Sword. Lawrence, 1972. Tutino, Stefania. Empire of Souls: Robert Bellarmine and the Christian Commonwealth. Oxford, 2011. von Friedeburg, Robert. Widerstandsrecht und Konfessionskonflikt: Notwehr und Gemeiner Mann im deutsch-britischen Vergleich 1530–1669. Berlin, 1999.

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The Role of Art in the Theological Discourse of the Reformation marcia b. hall Roman Catholicism Theological themes that received attention from Renaissance painters centered on the role of images in a devotional setting. Some other contentious issues between Catholics and Protestants appear, such as faith versus works, transubstantiation, the sacraments, the role of the saints, and Mary. Before the challenge raised by the Reformers, the Catholic Church could assume a broad base of common belief and common knowledge, so the art was free of polemics. The exception is the brief period of the hegemony of Savonarola in Florence in the 1490s. Fra Girolamo Savonarola, a fiery Dominican, stepped into the vacuum created when the Medici were expelled and became the leader of the populist, theocratic republic he fashioned with Christ as its head. In response to his attacks on the worldliness of the papacy, he was excommunicated by Pope Alexander VI. In his sermons he addressed himself to the working people, and preached an apocalyptic doctrine of repentance, calling on them to repudiate worldly luxuries and dedicate themselves to a life in the light of the Holy Spirit. For his infamous Lenten Bonfires of the Vanities he enjoined the people to sacrifice solicited emblems of the luxurious life Florentines had enjoyed in the recent economic prosperity. Targeting women in particular, he demanded from them such ornaments as their false hair, cosmetics, and jewelry. He advocated that his congregation read the Bible first, then, if there was time left over, they could give their attention to those ancient pagan authors who were so much in vogue with the humanists. He urged them to cast into the flames such pagan books and incentives to lascivious thoughts as paintings of Venus.1 I would like to thank Larry Silver, Ashley West, and Paige Howarth for their kind advice and assistance. 1 On Savonarola see Donald Weinstein, Savonarola: The Rise and Fall of a Renaissance Prophet (New Haven, 2012).

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The art commissioned by followers of Savonarola carried his message promoting an ascetic life that would not distract from seeking redemption through penitence and the sacraments. Stylistically the art of his regime took a turn back toward the medieval. Portraits disappeared, and were replaced by austere meditations upon the Eucharist. In one Crucifixion, the central panel of a dispersed triptych (formerly Berlin, destroyed in World War II), only Mary and St. Francis appear in fervent prayer on a barren hill, strewn with oversized skulls as a memento mori. Angels catch the redemptive blood of Christ in chalices; all this is set astonishingly against a gold background, a regression to a kind of iconic sacred image of a hundred years prior. The wings of this triptych, itself a disused format, represent the penitent saints John the Baptist and Mary Magdalen (Filippino Lippi, Accademia, Florence). The Magdalen, who was normally depicted in her earlier role as the beautiful prostitute with flowing strawberry-blonde hair, appears here as a gaunt and emaciated desert-dweller. Sandro Botticelli represented Savonarola’s vision of the imminent destruction of the world, from which Florence, if it reformed, might be exempted (Figure 36.1). We see on the right the wrath of God descending in a black cloud raining fiery torches, contrasted with a sun-drenched Florence on the left, behind Christ on the cross adored by Mary Magdalen, who is confronted by an avenging angel.2 Savonarola anticipated the concerns of Catholic reformers at mid-century who were responding to Protestant attacks on the profligate lifestyle of the papal court and its godless culture. His call for a pious art that moved the worshipers to contemplate the mysteries of their faith would be echoed in the Decree on Sacred Images promulgated at the Council of Trent in 1563. The calls for reform within the Roman Catholic Church preceded Protestant allegations of corruption, but reform proved difficult to instigate. By the 1530s some pious Catholics sought to reform themselves by putting more focus on faith than good works and by expunging superfluous ornaments from their lives. The most prominent group, known as the Spirituali, counted among its adherents such eminent persons as Cardinal Reginald Pole, Vittoria Colonna and her friend Michelangelo, and the painter Sebastiano del Piombo. The paintings of Sebastiano can be interpreted as reflecting the beliefs of the Spirituali. Purging his style of all but the essential, his preferred subject was the suffering Christ, often shown carrying his cross 2 On the art commissioned by Savonarola’s followers see Marcia B. Hall, “Savonarola’s Preaching and the Patronage of Art,” in Timothy Verdon and John Henderson, eds., Christianity and the Renaissance: Image and Religious Imagination in the Quattrocento (New York, 1990), 493–522.

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Figure 36.1 Sandro Botticelli, Mystic Crucifixion, Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge. A black and white version of this figure will appear in some formats. For the color version, refer to the plate section.

(Figure 36.2). Unlike his contemporaries, such as Francesco Salviati, Giorgio Vasari, or Agnolo Bronzino, whose sacred images were richly ornamented, Sebastiano places Christ against a stark black background and moves him close to his viewers, inviting them to participate in Christ’s suffering. His message of the primacy of faith in a realm stripped of mundane distractions appealed particularly to Spanish clients, for whom many of his devotional images were made.3 3

On Sebastiano see Michael Hirst, Sebastiano del Piombo (Oxford, 1981); Matthias Wivel, Michelangelo & Sebastiano (London, 2017). On Sebastiano and his Spanish patrons see Michael Hirst’s exhibition review, “Madrid: Sebastiano del Piombo and Spain,” Burlington Magazine 137, no. 1108 (1995), 481–482.

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Figure 36.2 Sebastiano del Piombo, Christ Carrying the Cross, Prado, Madrid (Art Res AR9412318). A black and white version of this figure will appear in some formats. For the color version, refer to the plate section.

Michelangelo too appears to have moved toward an art of purer piety in the 1550s, perhaps in part as a response to the vitriolic criticism that his fresco of the Last Judgment in the papal Sistine Chapel had evoked among some conservative and reform-minded clerics.4 Their willful misunderstanding had turned the artist’s celebration of the fulfillment of history on the Final Day into a perverse display of artistic virtuosity at the expense of religion. The fresco became a lightning rod for the attacks of those within the Catholic Church who had been sensitized by Luther’s critiques. Michelangelo’s nudes, modeled on classical antique statuary to represent the doctrine of the resurrection of the body, became the emblem of a Christianity reverted to paganism. When the fresco 4 See Giovanni Andrea Gilio, Dialogue on the Errors and Abuses of Painters, ed. Michael Bury, Lucinda Byatt, and Carol M. Richardson, trans. Michael Bury and Lucinda Byatt (Los Angeles, 2018); Melinda Schlitt, “Painting, Criticism, and Michelangelo’s ‘Last Judgment’ in the Age of the CounterReformation,” in Marcia B. Hall, ed., Michelangelo’s Last Judgment (New York, 2005), 113–149; Bernadine Barnes, Michelangelo’s Last Judgment: The Renaissance Response (Los Angeles, 1998).

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Figure 36.3 Martino Rota, after Michelangelo, Last Judgment, engraving, Blanton Museum of Art, Austin (PHAS/Universal Images Group via Getty Images). A black and white version of this figure will appear in some formats. For the color version, refer to the plate section.

was copied in cheap engravings and made available to the public, who could not be expected to bring the same sophisticated knowledge of theology and art as the members of the papal court for whom it was created, misunderstanding escalated (Figure 36.3). The untutored were titillated by Michelangelo’s idealized bodies, and tittered instead of being moved to contemplate life after death. What Michelangelo intended as the depiction of St. Paul’s “glorified body” (1 Cor. 15: 44–54) became the occasion for rude jokes. The decree of the Council of Trent on the veneration of sacred images, approved in the final session in 1563, supported the veneration of images, while at the same time addressing certain abuses in very generalized language. The function of images was defined as twofold, didactic and affective: 741

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images should teach correct doctrine and should move the emotions of the worshiper. Bishops were made responsible for oversight and enforcement.5 Artists were not provided with guidelines until treatises such as that of Cardinal Gabriele Paleotti appeared (1582) in subsequent decades.6 Some painters, such as Scipione Pulzone, gained favor with some patrons by returning to the kind of simple pious images that had prevailed in the early fifteenth century and before, but many patrons demanded more up-to-date art.7 Inventive painters such as Titian (in his late years) and Jacopo Tintoretto in Venice, El Greco in Spain, Federico Barocci, and Caravaggio, serving the Roman establishment, responded with creative innovations that conformed to the requirements and spirit of Trent while vigorously heightening the emotional appeal of their sacred images.8 Tintoretto specifically addressed some contested doctrines. In several of his Last Suppers he shows apostles sharing their bread with beggars (Venice, San Polo, ca. 1570; Santo Stefano, ca. 1570), a demonstration of good works. In his magnificent final version he filled the room with translucent angelic beings, making visible the miracle of transubstantiation that is taking place (Figure 36.4). El Greco with his transcendental light could make miracles present and plausible for the worshiper: the Word of God at Christ’s baptism; the Resurrection; or the Descent of the Holy Spirit on Mary and the Apostles in the upper room at Pentecost (all in the Prado, Madrid). Federico Barocci invented a coloring system and a charming soft style that suborned the emotions and made the supernatural believable and accessible. Saints see visions and undergo out-of-body experiences before the eyes of the beholder with an immediacy never before achieved with the same power to convince (Stigmatization of St. Francis, Galleria Nazionale delle Marche, Urbino, 1594–1599; St Francis at Prayer, Metropolitan Museum, New York, ca. 1604–1606; Beata Michelina, Pinacoteca, Vatican, 1606).9 Caravaggio made 5 Text of the decree “On the Invocation, Veneration, and Relics of Saints, and on Sacred Images,” in Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent, original Latin text and trans. Henry J. Schroeder (St. Louis, 1941), 215–216. 6 Gabriele Paleotti, Discourse on Sacred and Profane Images, introd. Paolo Prodi, trans. William McCuaig (Los Angeles, 2012). 7 Federico Zeri made a case for Scipione as the quintessential painter of the Roman CounterReformation: see his Pittura e Controriforma: L’arte senza tempo di Scipione da Gaeta (Turin, 1957). 8 On these five painters as the most innovative artists of the post-Tridentine era see Marcia B. Hall, The Sacred Image in the Age of Art: Titian, Tintoretto, Barocci, El Greco, Caravaggio (New Haven, 2011). 9 On Barocci see Stuart Lingo, Federico Barocci: Allure and Devotion in Late Renaissance Painting (New Haven, 2009); and Judith Mann, Babette Bohn, and Carol Plazzotta, Federico Barocci: Renaissance Master of Color and Line (New Haven, 2012), esp. 238–251, 283–287.

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Figure 36.4 Jacopo Tintoretto, Institution of the Eucharist (Last Supper), Basilica di San Giorgio Maggiore, 1594, Venice (Art Res ART54244). A black and white version of this figure will appear in some formats. For the color version, refer to the plate section.

theological statements less in terms of doctrine than with the actors he chose and the audience he addressed. In drawing his models from the simple people, he violated Renaissance convention and linked his images with the humanity and humility of Christ. Although his barefoot and illiterate St. Matthew was rejected for the altarpiece of a Roman church, his imagery was adapted, for example in Naples and in the north, by both Catholic and Calvinist painters, whose audiences were the bourgeois middle class.10 What may be the earliest response in paint to Protestant allegations of image worship appears in Rome in the private chapel of the chancellor of the church in the 1540s. On the vault soldiers are depicted shattering pagan statues and shoveling the broken pieces into the flames of a furnace.11 This concern with the proper use of images is echoed some four decades later in the public, prominent center of the vault of the Sala di Costantino in the 10 The rejected painting, formerly in Berlin, destroyed in World War II, was replaced by the second version Caravaggio painted, still in place in S Luigi dei Francesi in Rome. See in particular the Utrecht Caravaggisti: Wayne Franits, Dutch Seventeenth-Century Genre Painting: Its Stylistic and Thematic Evolution (New Haven, 2008). 11 The chapel in the Palazzo della Cancelleria, Rome, was painted by Francesco Salviati: see Patricia Rubin, “The Private Chapel of Cardinal Alessandro Farnese in the Cancelleria, Rome,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 50 (1987), 82–112.

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Figure 36.5 Tommaso Laureti, The Triumph of Christianity, fresco, Sala di Costantino, Vatican Museums, 1586 (Art Res ART378090). A black and white version of this figure will appear in some formats. For the color version, refer to the plate section.

Vatican. Here a statue of Mercury, god of magic and superstition, lies shattered, replaced on its base by a crucifix. The message of both iconographies is clear: We Catholics have been dealing with false images since earliest times and we know the difference between idolatry and the proper veneration of images (Figure 36.5). The centrality of the Real Presence is alluded to in many altarpieces, if sometimes obliquely. Tabernacles to house the host on the altar were prescribed and commonly adopted after the Council of Trent. Carlo Borromeo gives detailed instructions on their construction in his treatise on architecture.12 These tabernacles were frequently so tall that they interfered with the painted altarpieces behind them. On one documented occasion the painter El Greco, commissioned to execute both, designed his painting to limit the intrusion of the tabernacle by piercing its upper story and arranging his figures around it.13 12 Evelyn Carole Voelker, Charles Borromeo’s “Instructiones fabricae et supellectilis ecclesiasticae,” 1577: A Translation with Commentary and Analysis (Ann Arbor, 1993). 13 Andrew R. Casper, Art and the Religious Image in El Greco’s Italy (University Park, PA, 2014), 164–170.

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Catholics steered clear of polemics. Only a few fresco cycles in Vatican buildings eventually addressed contentious issues. In the Lateran Palace, rebuilt and decorated under Pope Sixtus V (1585–1590), a pair of rooms celebrate Old Testament stories of Baal vanquished by Daniel and Elijah.14 Daniel’s shrewd proof to King Nebuchadnezzar that the food put out nightly for Baal was in fact consumed by the well-fed priests converted the king to the worship of Daniel’s God (Dan. 14). Elijah likewise convinced King Ahab that Baal was a powerless idol when in the contest to light the fire for the sacrifice of a bull only Yahweh answered prayer (1 Kgs. 18). These lighthanded confirmations of the church’s long tradition of handling idols contain none of the satirical venom of Lutheran propaganda. In a new wing of the Vatican Palace complex, the Tower of the Winds, new subjects were introduced and new iconographies were invented to represent scenes derived from sources discredited by the Protestants, for instance, the stories of Tobias and Judith, which were excluded from the Protestant canon of the Bible (early 1580s). The source the papal iconographers chose for the narrative histories of the apostles in the same location was primarily the medieval collection of stories of the saints, the Golden Legend, rejected as unreliable by Protestants.15 The chapel commissioned by Pope Paul V in the Roman basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore (1606–1613) was built to house the Byzantine icon Salus Popoli Romano, which had come to represent the antiquity and the continuity of the Catholic Church. Similar icons elsewhere were given honored positions in the Counter-Reformation, as on the high altar of the Roman church of Santa Maria in Aracoeli, where the icon was installed, displacing Raphael’s Madonna di Foligno. The frescoes in the Pauline Chapel at Santa Maria Maggiore, unusually polemical, were dedicated to the unprecedented subject of the triumph over Byzantine iconoclasts. The defeat of the heretical emperors who destroyed images and reviled the Virgin Mary, Julian the Apostate, Constantine V Copronymus, and Leo V the Armenian, expressed the wish that this triumph of the past would prefigure the hoped-for victory over Protestant iconoclasts of the present.16

14

The frescoes were designed and executed by the team headed by Cesare Nebbia and Giovanni Guerra: see Hall, Sacred Image, 137. Nicola Courtright, The Papacy and the Art of Reform in Sixteenth-Century Rome: Gregory XIII’s Tower of the Winds in the Vatican (New York, 2003), 133. 16 Steven F. Ostrow, Art and Spirituality in Counter-Reformation Rome: The Sistine and Pauline Chapels in S. Maria Maggiore (New York, 1996), 234. 15

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The sacred art of the seventeenth century celebrated the triumph of the Catholic Church with new iconographies of doctrines rejected by Protestants: the Real Presence, the cult of the saints, the cult of relics, the cult of martyrs, visions and saints in ecstasy, and above all, Mariology. Mary appears with even more frequency than before, often in glory and without her son.17 The Immaculate Conception, a doctrine supported by the Franciscans, though it did not become dogma until the nineteenth century, was frequently represented by showing the Virgin standing on a crescent moon. Ludovico Cigoli’s version shows her standing on a moon pitted with the craters Galileo had discovered with his telescope – before his findings had been declared heretical (Pauline Chapel, Santa Maria Maggiore, Rome, fresco, 1610–1612).18 In the decoration of the crossing of St. Peter’s both the cult of relics and the cult of the saints were reaffirmed. The four most precious early Christian relics were embedded in the piers next to the tomb of St. Peter and at the very heart of the Vatican, and sculptors were commissioned to create overlife-sized marbles of saints associated with them: St. Veronica with the relic of her veil (Francesco Mochi); St. Longinus with the tip of his lance (Bernini); St. Helena with pieces of the true cross (Andrea Bolgi), which she brought back from Jerusalem, and St. Andrew with his head (François Duquesnoy).19 These relics could be visited by pilgrims to St. Peter’s adjacent tomb beneath the nearby Baldacchino. The Veil of Veronica had been displayed at the Jubilee of 1575 and appears subsequently in paintings, notably those of El Greco, who was resident in Rome then (e.g., Saint Veronica with the Sudarium, Museo de Santa Cruz, Toledo, 1580).20 The depiction of these saints in ecstasy is typical of the way Baroque art sought to engage the worshiper’s emotions. In Catholic Flanders, the traditional subjects continued to be commissioned to decorate churches, and the exuberant style of the Italian Baroque was practiced by the leading painter, Peter Paul Rubens, who had learned it in Italy. He displayed celebrations of the doctrines that had come under attack by the Protestants – Mary, the saints, martyrdom – and he glorified them. With his vibrant brushstrokes, his gloriously sensuous flesh, and 17

The classic and still definitive source on Counter-Reformation iconography is Emile Mâle. Steven F. Ostrow, “Cigoli’s Immacolata and Galileo’s Moon: Astronomy and the Virgin in Early Seicento Rome,” Art Bulletin 78 (1996), 218–235. 19 On the crossing of St. Peter’s see Irving Lavin, Bernini and the Crossing of Saint Peter’s (New York, 1968). 20 See Andrew R. Casper, “Display and Devotion: Exhibiting Icons and their Copies in Counter-Reformation Italy,” in Wietse De Boer and Christine Göttler, eds., Religion and the Senses in Early Modern Europe (Leiden, 2013), 43–62. 18

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sumptuous draperies, he made images that were irresistibly appealing not only to the eye but to the emotions as well.21 The new order of the Jesuits was important in disseminating the postTridentine image, particularly in the format of prints. In need of images for instruction in their worldwide missions, where the written word was not accessible to illiterate natives, they embraced the new iconographies of the Eucharist, Mary, the saints, and martyrs, which were lucid and legible and at the same time capable of arousing emotional participation. The Jesuits’ own churches, in particular the mother church in Rome, Il Gesú, modeled the exuberant glorification of Catholic beliefs, as in the ceiling fresco of the Triumph of the Name of Jesus by Giovanni Battista Gaulli (1661–1679).22

Lutheranism The indulgence for rebuilding St. Peter’s that triggered Luther’s 95 Theses became the subject of polemical woodcuts beginning in the early 1520s. Luther made use of prints, and particularly the woodcut, to spread his message to a largely illiterate or semi-literate folk. Cheap to produce and easy to read, these satiric images contained little or no text. In 1521 Lucas Cranach the Elder produced the booklet Passional Christi und Antichristi, modeled on the Passional, a Catholic book for meditation containing scenes from the life of Christ and the saints. Cranach juxtaposed thirteen images from the life of Christ on the left-hand page with images of the pope as the Antichrist on the right. The text was limited to a few lines of Scripture, from which the Christ image derived, and a few lines composed by Melanchthon describing the acts of the pope.23 A recurrent theme is the contrast between Christ’s humility and the pomposity of the papal court. In number 6 Christ is shown falling under the weight of his cross, surrounded by mocking soldiers, while opposite, the pope, unmistakably Leo X, is carried in his ornate sedia gestatoria on the shoulders of his footmen (Figure 36.6). The pope is dressed in full regalia, and raises his hand in blessing with punctilious grandiosity. Christ wears a crown of thorns, while the pope is crowned with his triple 21 On Rubens see esp. Willibald Sauerländer, The Catholic Rubens: Saints and Martyrs (Los Angeles, 2014). 22 On the art of the Jesuits see the books of Gauvin Alexander Bailey; and also John W. O’Malley and Gauvin Alexander Bailey, eds., The Jesuits and the Arts: 1540–1773 (Philadelphia, 2006). 23 The series is illustrated at http://pitts.emory.edu/dia/1521LuthWWBook/PC1.cfm.

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Figure 36.6 Lucas Cranach, The Passion of Christ and the Antichrist, woodcut, 1521 (Art Res ART3808681). A black and white version of this figure will appear in some formats. For the color version, refer to the plate section.

tiara. In number 2 Christ is mocked and wearing the crown of thorns, and the pope, surrounded by kneeling prelates, is being crowned with his tiara. In the background are machines of war, implying another inappropriate worldly pursuit of the papacy. This theme of the worldly pursuits of the pope is repeated in number 8, where Christ’s nativity in a humble stable is juxtaposed to the papal army engaged with a king. The profligate and secularized lifestyle of the papal court is a leitmotif running through the booklet. In number 5, while Jesus prays in the garden of Gethsemane, the pope and his court are being entertained by a mock joust performed for them in the Belvedere court at the Vatican Palace. Number 3 depicts Christ washing the feet of the apostles opposite the pope presenting his foot to be kissed, and number 12 shows Christ cleansing the Temple juxtaposed with the pope selling indulgences, a subject that recurs in prints issued over the period of the next several years. The motif of confession and penance was taken up in a woodcut by Hans Holbein called True and False Forgiveness of Sin (Figure 36.7). Here the contrast is between the Old Testament, where forgiveness is freely given, 748

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Figure 36.7 After Hans Holbein the Younger, True and False Forgiveness of Sin, woodcut (Art Res ART524292). A black and white version of this figure will appear in some formats. For the color version, refer to the plate section.

and a parody of the indulgence system. On the left, King David, Manasseh, and a contemporary sinner are seeking forgiveness directly from God, who appears in the heavens with opened arms. On the right, occupying more than half the field, is the sumptuous papal court, richly decorated with Medici papal arms. The Medici pope, seated on a raised throne, is dispensing the infamous document that instituted the indulgence for St. Peter’s. In the foreground is a table where friars are selling indulgences to a crowd of eager customers, including a hapless cripple pleading indigence, who is ignored. On the right two priests hear confession. One places his hand on the penitent’s head while pointing with a rod to the chest in front of them, indicating that the price of forgiveness is a cash offering, such as the one that a woman, a previously absolved sinner, is dutifully making. This image, like Cranach’s prints, is a burlesque of the corruption of the clergy and papal practices. In another woodcut by Holbein, Christ as the Light of the World, Luther’s opposition to Scholasticism is on display, pitting the erudite against the simple folk. On the left, Christ leads a company of pious working people to salvation, signified by the large candle streaming light at the center. On the other side clerics and scholars, led by Plato and Aristotle and followed closely by the pope, are dropping into a barren ditch. In such prints the papacy was literally demonized and the ecclesiastical hierarchy and ritual practices were lampooned. In the final series of prints made by Cranach shortly before Luther’s death to accompany the text, Against the Papacy in Rome, Instituted by the Devil, the imagery, based on Luther’s designs, descended into scatological vulgarity. Luther’s position on images in churches evolved from early avowed indifference to the recognition that altarpieces in particular could serve a useful didactic function, so long as they appealed only to the mind and not to 749

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Figure 36.8 Lucas Cranach, Law and Gospel, Schloss Friedenstein Museum, Gotha, 1529 (Art Res ART169052). A black and white version of this figure will appear in some formats. For the color version, refer to the plate section.

the senses.24 Any kind of aesthetic or emotional appeal was scrupulously avoided, but representations of the sacraments and of the fundamental Lutheran doctrine of faith not works were devised and implemented. The principal visualization of Luther’s position on justification by faith alone was represented by Cranach in the painting known as the Law and Gospel. Its earliest form is the panel of 1529 now in Gotha, but it rapidly spread and was widely imitated with variations in prints and in paint (Figure 36.8). Designed to spell out the theology, it is in two parts divided by a tree, which is leafless on the side of Law; on the right, the side of the Gospel, it is verdant. The left side contains scenes that Luther identified as evidence of our alienation from God, or man condemned under the law. Behind we see Adam and Eve 24 John Dillenberger, Images and Relics: Theological Perceptions and Visual Images in SixteenthCentury Europe (New York, 1999), 93 (traces Luther’s statements about images and how they changed over the years).

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sharing the apple, and the Worship of the Brazen Serpent. In the foreground a naked and terrified man is being chased by a devil and a skeleton into hell, observed by four prophets, including Moses, who holds the Tablets of the Law. On the Gospel side, John the Baptist directs a pious naked man to Christ on the cross, and the resurrected Christ rising from the tomb, who points to the light of heaven. It is tempting to read the two halves as alternatives, either judgment, as indicted by the Christ as Judge in the sky at the left, or mercy. What is intended, rather, is that both are necessary to a full theology: God is both judging and merciful, as Luther proclaimed. Under the law, all humankind is condemned, but the key to salvation is faith, as indicated by the prayerfully folded hands of the man on the right, who is saved. Later versions make the correct reading more evident. Because the first version was subject to misinterpretation, the iconography was refined for the version today in Schneeberg, where the Brazen Serpent was moved to the Gospel side as an instance of God’s mercy. This placement makes clear the Lutheran distinction between the proper and improper uses of images. The bronze serpent that the Lord ordered Moses to set up in the desert was not an image created by human imagination but one given by God, and therefore appropriate to venerate, as even Karlstadt had argued.25 The Schneeberg Altar was a massive triptych with folding wings, providing space for multiple scenes front and back, with wings opened and closed.26 Below on the predella, just above the communion table and visible from the front at all times, was the Last Supper, where communion in both kinds is underlined by the attention given to filling wine glasses. The Law and Gospel theme was presented above on the front when the first set of wings was open. On the back was the Last Judgment and in the predella the Resurrection of the Dead. When the wings were open it would be flanked by scenes of the sinfulness of man and the resultant punishment: Lot and his Daughters and The Flood. The sacraments are the subject of the Wittenberg Altar, which includes portraits of the leaders of the church.27 The Last Supper is the central image where Luther is represented among the apostles accepting a cup of wine from a servant, again affirming the doctrine of communion in both kinds. On 25 Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt, On the Abolition of Images. . . (Von Abtuhung der Bilder . . . (Wittenberg, 1522), cited by Carl C. Christensen, Art and the Reformation in Germany (Athens, OH, 1979), 29–30 and n. 136. 26 On the Schneeberg Altar see Oskar Thulin, Cranach-Altäre der Reformation (Berlin, 1955), 33–53. 27 For an extensive examination of the Wittenberg Altarpiece see Joseph Leo Koerner, The Reformation of the Image (Chicago, 2010).

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the left is the sacrament of Baptism, with Philip Melanchthon holding an infant and pouring the water over him. On the right is Confession, being heard by Johannes Bugenhagen, pastor of the church, but it is not a sacrament: Bugenhagen does not possess the power to absolve, as does the Catholic priest, despite holding the keys associated with Peter and the papacy. The sinner looks inward, not at Bugenhagen, for absolution. Luther approved of private confession, “for when we have laid bare our conscience to our brother and privately made known the evil that lurked within, we receive from our brother’s lips the word of comfort spoken by God himself.”28 It did not require a priest and was therefore excised from the sacraments. In the predella Luther preaches with his hand on the Bible gesturing to the crucifix: opposite the congregation listens and regards the Crucified Christ. The message of the importance of preaching the Word based on the sole authority of Scripture is unmistakable. Another subject showing the tension between the Law and the Gospel that was frequently represented for Lutherans is Christ and the Adulteress. Cranach painted it at least fourteen times, based upon a sermon Luther preached in autumn 1531 in which he declared that Christ’s words, “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her” were addressed to everyone.29 A similarly popular motif in Lutheran painting was Christ Blessing the Children, painted by Cranach thirteen times and popular also among Dutch Protestants. In Cranach’s version, women holding their infants crowd around Jesus, who holds one of them tenderly. The apostles, whom Jesus rebukes, look on disapprovingly. Because the children are all infants, it is likely that the popularity of the theme was related to the endorsement by Lutherans of infant baptism, in response to the challenge of the Anabaptists. Luther took the position that infant baptism was God’s promised grace.30 Luther supported illustration of his translation of the Bible from the very start, and invited Lucas Cranach, his favorite artist, to execute it. His 1522 translation of the New Testament contained only twenty-one woodcuts. As originally published in September, in one of the illustrations of Revelation the Whore of Babylon is wearing the papal tiara. In the December printing and thereafter, at the behest of Duke George of Saxony, two tiers of the tiara

28

LW 36, 11–57; WA 6, 497–573. LW 23, 9–11, 310–319, cited and discussed by Christensen, Art and the Reformation, 130–134. 30 Christensen, Art and the Reformation, 134–136; Christine O. Kibish, “Lucas Cranach’s ‘Christ Blessing the Children’: A Problem of Lutheran Iconography,” Art Bulletin 37 (1955), 196–203. 29

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were removed, transforming it into an ordinary royal crown, expunging the inflammatory reference to the pope.31 Luther produced partial editions of his translation of the Old Testament in the following years, but by 1534 he was ready to present his complete Bible, which was richly illustrated. Luther himself chose some of the subjects he wanted depicted.32 The woodcuts showed multiple episodes in a single frame, with the same figure repeated as needed. In the Jonah story, for instance, seven episodes are depicted (No. 76, fol. XXXVr). The narrative was vivid, with no distractions, so they were easily legible even for the semi-literate. The stories are told in a straightforward fashion with almost no editorializing. Several of the prophet stories contain references to New Testament parallels, for example, Hosea preaching (No. 72, fol. XIXv) shows the Resurrection in the background. Joel preaching (No. 73, fol. XXVv) is linked to the scene of Pentecost, Acts 2:16–21. Micah (No. 77, fol. XXXVIIv) is paralleled to the Annunciation to the Shepherds and the Nativity. Zechariah (No. 82, fol. LIr) shows Christ entering Jerusalem on an ass. Malachi who preached of “the messenger who will prepare the way” (No. 83, fol. LVIIv) shows John baptizing and pointing to Christ. Though many of the Old Testament characters resemble German peasants and artisans, there is only one instance where the illustration substitutes contemporary figures for the biblical actors. In Habakkuk bearing witness before the king and the people (No. 79, fol. XLIIIIr), Luther stands in with the prophet. This scene is intended to recall his testimony at the Diet of Worms in 1521, which Luther had linked in 1526 to Habakkuk 2:19, where the prophet decries worship of wood or stone idols.33 In the illustrations of Revelation the beast that ascends from the bottomless pit appears with the papal crown (No. 117, fol. CXCIr, Rev. 11:1–8), and the Whore of Babylon has also reassumed the papal tiara, as in the earliest 1522 edition (No. 123, fol. CXCVv, Rev. 17:1–18). In compensation for the loss of images of the saints and of the pope, the Reformers themselves were frequently portrayed, as in the Wittenberg Altar. Cranach made numerous portraits of Luther both in painting and engraving, which were replicated in his workshop. In an early woodcut by Hans Baldung Grien, Luther is shown with the dove above his head and a radiance

31 Martin Luther, Biblia: the Luther Bible of 1534: Complete Facsimile Edition from the Workshop of Lucas Cranach, ed. Stephan Füssel, 2 vols. (Cologne, [2002]), 25. 32 Christensen, Art and the Reformation, 110, 123. The references here are to the numbers and folios in the facsimile edition cited in note 32. 33 Ibid., 133.

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around it that is strikingly close to the effect of a halo, making him resemble a Catholic saint.34 Albrecht Dürer appears to have been a confirmed Lutheran, though he was not in close personal contact with Luther as was Lucas Cranach. Attempts to associate his works with Protestant belief conclude that none is unambiguously Protestant, with the exception of his Four Apostles, or Four Holy Men, which he inscribed to the Nuremburg city council.35 It looks like a traditional Catholic triptych, but with the omission of the central panel that would present the iconic image, which would have been offensive to Luther. On the wings John and Matthew, Peter and Paul, the disciples whose writings were more revered by Luther, appear without haloes and looking very much like ordinary men. Books, or the Word, figure prominently on both wings. A strong case has also been made for the dependence of Dürer’s Last Supper woodcut (1523) on Luther’s preface to his translation of the New Testament of 1522. Luther’s insistence on the centrality of John 13:34: “love one another . . . ” is reflected in Dürer’s unprecedented choice to depict the moment after the departure of Judas – the crisis of the event – in which he speaks the injunction to love recorded by John.36 Dürer’s other works were theologically neutral enough to allow him to work for both Protestants and Catholics. Lutheran images differ from their Catholic counterparts in insisting on their pedagogical function, with the exclusion of any appeal to the emotions or the senses. They are deliberately anti-aesthetic, avoiding any association with the dangerous allure of art. In the illustrations of the Bible, they are used to reinforce the written word, without being visually seductive. For Luther, Christ’s kingdom is a hearing kingdom not a seeing kingdom, as he put it in a sermon.37

Calvinism Calvin rejected all images in churches, adopting the extreme position of Karlstadt and Zwingli, because he, like Luther, wanted people to read the 34

Craig Harbison, “Introduction to the Exhibition,” in Craig Harbison, Symbols in Transformation: Iconographic Themes at the Time of the Reformation (Princeton, 1969), 21. 35 Munich, Alte Pinakothek, 1526. See Donald McColl, “Through a Glass Darkly: Dürer and the Reform of Art,” Reformation & Renaissance Review 5 (2003), 54–91. 36 David Price, “Albrecht Dürer’s ‘Last Supper’ (1523) and the ‘Septembertestament’,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 59 (1996), 578–584. 37 Martin Luther, Werke, Kritische Gesammtausgabe (Weimar, 1883–), LI, 11, cited by Koerner, The Reformation of the Image, 41.

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Bible for themselves and to depend upon the Word, as written and preached, for their instruction, thereby avoiding superstition and abuse. The aesthetic of Calvin was more sophisticated and more highly developed than that of the pragmatic Luther. He believed that artistic skill was a God-given gift and that art was provided for our enjoyment. He had a deep and rich appreciation for art in the secular world. Art had two purposes: not only to instruct, as admitted by Luther, but also to give pleasure. The prohibition of the second commandment applied only to sacred images because it was impossible to represent the transcendent. The visible world, then, was the proper subject of art, and it should celebrate God’s good creation. Calvin makes his definitive statement on images in this passage in the Institutes: And yet I am not gripped by the superstition of thinking absolutely no images permissible. But because sculpture and painting are gifts of God, I seek a pure and legitimate use of each, lest those things which the Lord has conferred upon us for his glory and our good be not only polluted by perverse misuse but also turned to our destruction. We believe it wrong that God should be represented by a visible appearance, because he himself has forbidden it . . . and it cannot be done without some defacing of his glory . . . Therefore it remains that only those things are to be sculpted or painted which the eyes are capable of seeing: let not God’s majesty, which is far above the perception of the eyes, be debased through unseemly representations. Within this class some are histories and events, some are images and forms of bodies without any depicting of past events. The former have some use in teaching or admonition; as for the latter, I do not see what they can afford other than pleasure.38

Calvin’s support of secular images enabled the explosion of Dutch painting in the seventeenth century. Prosperous burghers who wanted pictures to adorn their houses bought landscapes and seascapes that pictured the land they had wrested from the sea. Portraits were very popular, along with genre paintings, both of clean and orderly interiors, such as those of Pieter de Hooch and Johannes Vermeer, or lowlife scenes of taverns, or scenes of peasant life, such as those by Pieter Brueghel. Some of these carried a moralizing message. Brueghel also painted biblical narratives, sometimes with hidden political messages (Census at Bethlehem, Royal Museums of 38 John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1969), bk. 1, ch. II, para. 12.

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Figure 36.9 Anonymous, Protestants Sweeping Clean (Iconoclasm in 1566) woodcut (Rijksmuseum, free download). A black and white version of this figure will appear in some formats. For the color version, refer to the plate section.

Fine Arts of Belgium; Massacre of the Innocents, Royal Collection, London). Rembrandt van Rijn painted Old Testament stories in particular, such as David Playing his Harp for Saul (Mauritshuis, The Hague), which would also have served as reminders of Christian virtues, or the New Testament parable The Return of the Prodigal Son (Hermitage, St. Petersburg). Calvin would have deplored the violence of the iconoclasm in the Netherlands in 1566, two years after his death. As much a revolt against the oppressive rule of Philip II as it was religiously motivated, mobs stormed the churches, shrines, and monasteries, tore down altarpieces and statues, shattered stained glass, even dug up tombs in the floor of churches. Liturgical vessels, relics, and all the paraphernalia of popery were looted, as shown in the woodcut alongside scoffing references to the papal church (Figure 36.9).39 39

See David Freedberg, “Art and Iconoclasm, 1525–1580: The Case of the Northern Netherlands,” in Jan Piet Filedt Kok, Willy Halsema-Kubes, and Wouter Theodoor Kloek,

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After order had been restored, it was the delicate task of painters to replace the destroyed altarpieces with images that would represent Catholic belief without offering provocation to further violence. In the Low Countries the situation was very different from Italy because there were many shades of gray in the beliefs people held, and religion was intertwined with politics. King Philip II had imposed the Roman Catholic Church and the veneration of images with harsh measures, and the rule of the duke of Alba incited hatred and resentment. It could be difficult to be pro-image and anti-Spain at the same time. Painters created some images that sought a compromise, appealing to both reform-minded Catholics and moderate Calvinists. Saints were depicted, as per Catholic belief, but they were shown as participating in the sinful nature shared by all humanity, although they led exemplary lives, as Desiderius Erasmus and others had asserted.40 By portraying a saint as a normal sinful human, rather than idealizing him as a demigod, it was possible to obviate the accusation of idolatry.41 Instead of giving them the immaculate bodies of the Italian Renaissance or classical antiquity, their fallibility was shown in such imperfections as wrinkles, tanned skin, body hair, or, most ingenious, dirty fingernails and toenails, and dirty feet. The “desacralization of sainthood” made space to accommodate a wider range of beliefs.42 These imperfections were also used by Catholic painters to distinguish between martyrs and their torturers, as in the altarpiece commissioned by the Shoemakers’ and Tanners’ Guilds to replace the one destroyed in the iconoclasm of 1566 for the church of St. Carolus Borromeus in Antwerp. In the Martyrdom of Saints Crispin and Chrispinian, the pure white hands and nails of the saint are contrasted with the filthy nails of the torturer.43 Conversely, Reformers impugned the authority of the Vulgate Bible by representing its translator, St. Jerome, with dirty fingernails, tanned skin, chest hair, and a bare torso, indicating that he was fallible and capable of errors in his translation.44 eds., Kunst voor de beeldenstorm: Noordnederlandse kunst 1525–1580 (The Hague, 1986), 69–84. For the classic study of iconoclasm in general see David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago, 2007). 40 See Koenraad Jonckheere, Antwerp Art after Iconoclasm: Experiments in Decorum, 1566–1585 (Brussels, 2012), esp. ch. 3, pp. 85–127. 41 Ibid., 114. 42 Ibid., 85, notes that Caravaggio in Rome appears to have imitated the device of dirty feet and rimmed nails in the next generation. 43 The triptych by Ambrosius Francken is illustrated and discussed in ibid., 96, fig. 84. 44 Saint Jerome in his Study by Adriaen Thomasz Key, in the Louvre, Paris, is discussed and illustrated in ibid., 101, figs. 68, 71–72.

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The Anglican Church The history of the Church of England, and particularly of the role in it of sacred images, was in a constant state of flux from 1534 when Henry VIII broke with the pope and had himself named the Supreme Head of the Church of England. It is a story more of alternating destruction and preservation of existing images than of creating new ones, with few exceptions. Henry, as the replacement for the pope, required official images of himself. Hans Holbein, one of the great portraitists of the century, had returned to England from Basel in 1532. By 1535 he was the King’s Painter and in 1537 he painted the iconic likeness of Henry, standing fullface, legs spread and arms akimbo, looking the viewer in the eye (Figure 36.10). This deified image enunciated King Henry’s holy authority. Replicas and copies were distributed to ambassadors and friends. The Ten Articles of July 1536 endorsed Luther’s position on justification (article 5): “That sinners attain this justification by contrition and faith joined with charity.”45 Just before the promulgation of the Ten Articles Holbein had painted a version of Cranach’s Law and Grace, called Allegory of the Old and New Testaments, ca. 1533–1535 (National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh). Holbein’s version clarifies the message of Cranach’s. On the mountain at the left, instead of Judging Christ in the heavens, we see Moses receiving the law from God. At the base of the tree, the seated naked man is identified with an inscription from Romans 7:24 as he cries, “What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death?” Two prophets approach with the answer: John the Baptist, who points to the Lamb of God, and Isaiah, who predicted the coming of the Messiah (Isa. 7:14b). Although Isaiah is standing on the side of Law he too points to Grace on the side of the New Law. Foremost on this side is Christ stepping out of the tomb and onto a skeleton, which matches the one opposite marked Death. Inscribed “Our Victory,” he is the answer to the question of the naked man of Romans 7:24.46 Holbein’s title page of the Coverdale Bible, published in 1535, denies the ultimate authority of Peter and the pope. It shows, opposite Moses Receiving the Tablets of the Law (Exod. 21), Christ Giving the Law to the Apostles (Mark 16), where each of the apostles, not just Peter, holds a large key.47 45 John McClintock and James Strong, eds., Cyclopædia of Biblical, Theological, and Ecclesiastical Literature (New York, 1867–1887), X, 271–272, www.luminarium.org/encyclopedia/tenarticles .htm. On the Ten Articles see Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c.1400–c.1580 (New Haven, 2006), 392–394. 46 47 Susan Foister, Holbein and England (London, 2007), 154–156, fig. 159. Ibid., fig. 165.

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Figure 36.10 After Hans Holbein the Younger, Henry VIII, after the mural in Whitehall, 1537, destroyed by fire, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool (Wikipedia Commons). A black and white version of this figure will appear in some formats. For the color version, refer to the plate section.

The promulgation of the Ten Articles bore witness to the struggle between radicals and traditionalists. The Articles stated a position on images close to Luther’s, though more lenient with regard to images of Mary and the saints. It stipulated that images in churches were permitted, provided they were not abused. Idolatrous worship was forbidden, but the instructional and 759

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affective functions were acknowledged: “[Images] be representers of virtue and good example. And that they also be by occasion the kindlers and stirrers of men’s minds, and make men oft to remember and lament their sins and offenses, especially the images of Christ and our Lady” (Art. VI). The widespread iconoclasm that took place between 1536 and 1540 was not initiated by official intolerance of images. Rather, it was perpetrated by Thomas Cromwell and his zealous agents, who were eager to dismantle Catholic opposition to reform. Henry’s dissolution of the monasteries was aimed at acquiring their assets for the Crown, so monks were evicted and the properties seized, but in the process churches, cloisters, and shrines were destroyed and statues were defaced and left in the rubble as a reminder and an enduring symbol. Under Henry’s son and successor Edward VI (r. 1547–1553), who was strongly inclined to Protestantism and iconoclasm, it was ordered that all images be removed, even those in stained glass, previously exempt.48 During Mary’s brief reign (1553–1558) it was not possible to accomplish extensive restoration of images previously destroyed, but an attempt was made to supply churches at least with crucifixes.49 Under Queen Elizabeth (r. 1558–1603) it was deemed imperative to exterminate the remnants of her predecessor’s reinstated Catholic worship. All images in churches were banned. Homes were searched to prevent the hiding of images, which were not simply removed but destroyed to make it clear that they were to be eradicated permanently from the realm.50 Elizabeth herself was more conservative and insisted on retaining the crucifix and some other ornaments in the royal chapel, despite the opposition of some of her bishops, who were influenced by Calvinism. The attitude toward secular images, even those that showed Christ in his human form – so long as they were not kept in places of worship – was tolerance, like Calvin’s.51 Thus images continued to be contested throughout Elizabeth’s reign, and there was no place for the creation of new ones. James I (r. 1603–1625) took an anti-iconoclastic stance, so during his reign fears of idolatry relaxed, and the style of worship moved toward favoring ceremony. The Puritans resisted this drift and saw all images as idols. The trend toward more decorous worship, tolerance of images, and beautification of the sanctuary was abhorrent to them. James’s son Charles I (r. 1625–1649) married a Catholic princess and, by permitting the continuing drift toward Catholic practices, aroused the opposition of the Puritans. The new form of 48 50 51

49 Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, 451. Ibid., 563. Julie Spraggon, Puritan Iconoclasm during the English Civil War (Woodbridge, 2003), 6. Ibid., 16.

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iconoclasm, which peaked in the early 1640s, would be against Protestantism as it was evolving under the guidance of the bishops.

Radical Reformers The Puritans, Anabaptists, and other Radical Reformers took positions opposing images in places of worship, and usually in the private sector as well. The Eastern Orthodox Church subscribed to the Roman Catholic position approving images but not idolatry. bibliography Bailey, Gauvin Alexander. Art on the Jesuit Missions in Asia and Latin America, 1542–1773. Toronto, 1999. Between Renaissance and Baroque: Jesuit Art in Rome, 1565–1610. Toronto, 2003. Christensen, Carl C. Art and the Reformation in Germany. Athens, OH, 1979. Foister, Susan. Holbein and England. London, 2007. Freedberg, David. The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response. Chicago, 2007. Hall, Marcia B. The Sacred Image in the Age of Art: Titian, Tintoretto, Barocci, El Greco, Caravaggio. New Haven, 2011. Jonckheere, Koenraad. Antwerp Art after Iconoclasm: Experiments in Decorum, 1566–1585. Brussels, 2012. Koerner, Joseph Leo. The Reformation of the Image. Chicago, 2010. Mâle, Emile. L’art religieux de la fin du XVIe siècle: du XVIIe siècle et du XVIIIe siècle. Étude sur l’iconographie après le Consile de Trente, Italie-France-Espagne-Flanders. Paris, 1972. Thulin, Oskar. Cranach-Altäre der Reformation. Berlin, 1955.

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Index

ethics and moral theology, 558, 563–564, 728 grace/justification, 361–362 Holy Communion (Lord’s Supper), 363–364, 526–527 Scriptural hermeneutics, 360–361 Hutterite group, 129, 131, 356–357, 364, 369, 541 laypersons’ role in, 127–131, 361 Melchiorite/Münsterite group, 129–130, 357–359 Mennonite group, 129–130, 359, 369–370 ministers, 54, 83, 540–542 persecution of Anabaptists, 55–56, 57, 71, 130, 358–359, 708 in Low Countries, 56, 305, 306 in Zurich, 81–82, 83, 290, 363 Protestant Reformers on, 71, 262, 345, 503, 729 publications, 130, 131 Schleitheim Articles. See Schleitheim Articles Swiss Brethren group, 130, 355–356, 364, 369 theological education, 54 theological regulation, 60, 62, 70, 72–73 Anastasius I, Byzantine emperor, 75 de Anchieta, José, 244 Andreae, Jacob, 272–273, 390–391 Andreae, Johann Valentin, 93 Andrewes, Lancelot, 335, 337, 338 Angela of Foligno, 282, 612 Angelus Silesius (Johann Scheffler), 618 Anglicanism. See English Reformation and Anglican Church Anjiró (Yajirō), 644–645 Annales ecclesiastici (Baronio), 418, 448, 714–715 Anselm of Canterbury, 269, 368

Abraham of Angamaly (Mar Abraham), 662 Acarie, Barbe, 619 de Acosta, José, 239, 243, 244–246, 631–632, 637, 638–639 Acquaviva, Claudio, 222, 657, 659 Adiaphoristic Controversy, 267–268 Admonition Controversy, 331 adultery, Protestant jurisprudence, 595–596, 598 Aepinus, Johannes, 265, 274 Agricola, Johannes, 265–266 Agustín, Antonio, 581 Akbar the Great, 662–663 Albrecht IV, duke of Bavaria, 61 Albrecht von Brandenburg, princearchbishop of Mainz, 50, 63, 80 Alcalá University, 51, 194, 195, 206 Aleandro, Girolamo, 14, 64, 192 Aleni, Giulio, 671, 672, 673, 675 Alexander V, 71 Alexander VI, 233–234, 737 Allen, William, 341 Allstedt liturgy (Müntzer), 132, 518 Almain, Jacques, 178, 181, 493 Alsted, Johann Heinrich, 311, 425, 432 Althusius, Johannes, 311, 312, 575 de Alva Ixtlilxóchitl, Fernando, 237 Amaladass, Anand, 657–658 Ames, William, 315, 420, 425–426, 565, 577 von Amsdorf, Nikolaus, 159, 162, 267, 268, 730 Anabaptism, 348, 354–355 and Spiritualism, 131–132, 348, 351, 354, 357, 368–369 doctrines, 359–360, 364–365, 761 adult baptism, 82, 354, 362–363, 524–526 discipleship, 364 ecclesiology, 82–83, 362

762

Index Anshelm, Thomas, 63 Antinomian Controversy, Second, 268 Antinomian Disputations (Luther), 266 anti-Trinitarianism, 348, 365–366, 370 in Italian states, 366–367 in Poland, 303, 304–305, 367–368, 370 Racovian Catechism, 304, 368, 416, 440–441 of Servetus, 32, 366 in Transylvania, 368 of Vorstius, 313 Antwerp, 19, 305–306 Apocrypha, 41, 438, 453–454 Apology of the Augsburg Confession (Melanchthon), 40–41 Aquinas, Thomas. See Thomism Arias Montano, Benito, 69–70, 205 Aristotle. See also Scholasticism humanist followers of, 23, 24, 25, 264–265, 406, 489 and probabilism, 226 and theological education, 35, 96, 489, 570 ethics and moral theology, 558, 569 Jesuit studies, 414 Lutheran studies, 105, 106, 257, 570 Arminianism, 110, 316–317, 335, 339, 342–343 Arminius, Jacob, 312, 316, 342–343 Arnauld, Antoine, 180, 183, 568 Arndt, Johann, 426, 607 mysticism of, 282, 427, 431, 612–613 art and theology Catholic reforms Council of Trent decree on sacred images, 738–739, 741–742 Savonarola and followers, 737–739 Spirituali movement, 738–741 tabernacle design, 744–745 controversialist theology in art, 745, 747–749 hagiographical art works, 746, 757 Jesuit-commissioned works, 747 Lutheran doctrines, 749–753, 754 portraits of Luther, 14, 751–754 woodcut illustrations in texts, 747–749, 752–753 Reformed Church iconoclasm. See iconoclasm of Reformed Church artists Barocci, 742 Botticelli, 738 Brueghel, 755–756 Caravaggio, 742–743 Cranach, 747–748, 749, 750–751, 752, 753, 758 Dürer, 754

El Greco, 742, 744–745, 746 Gentileschi, 136 Holbein, 748–749, 758–759 Laureti, 743–744 Michelangelo, 144, 738, 740–741 Raphael, 25 Rembrandt, 756 Rubens, 746–747 Sebastiano del Piombo, 738–740 Tintoretto, 742 Ascherham, Gabriel, 129, 132 Aston, Margaret, 324 Augsburg Colloquy (1530), 375, 498–499 Augsburg Confession, 56, 259, 437, 469, 498–499 Catholic Confutation and Melanchthon’s Apology of, 40–41, 507 doctrines, 85, 257–271, 467, 472, 533, 729 Jeremiah II Tranos of Constantinople on, 390–391, 478–479 variata (Melanchthon, 1540), 271–272, 376, 469 Augsburg Interim, 16, 250, 266, 267, 378 Augsburg, Religious Peace of, 56, 87, 375, 379, 724, 727–728, 731 August, Elector of Saxony, 56, 273, 275 Augustine of Hippo doctrines, 75, 220, 559, 626–627 influence on theologians, 21, 24, 222, 549, 638, 639, 712 school of Louvain, 201–202, 203, 205, 206, 207, 209–210, 211 Augustinian Hermits, 9, 97, 104, 251 Austerlitz Brethren, 131 avant-garde conformists, 334–339, 342–343 Aventius, Johannes, 249 Azor, Juan, 181 de Azpilcueta, Martin, 191–192 On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church (Luther), 305, 514 Bacon, Francis, 688, 689 Bade, Joost, 65 Bailey, Gauvin Alexander, 663 Baillie, Robert, 303 Baius, Michael, 205–207, 209, 216, 222 Balduin, Friedrich, 425–426, 565 Baldung Grien, Hans, 753–754 Bamberg, clergy in, 153, 160–161 Báñez, Domingo, 192, 327–328, 422–423 baptism Anabaptist doctrine, 82, 354, 362–363, 524–526

763

Index pre-Reformation era, 35 private ownership of, 435 Bible translations, 46–47, 444 Chinese, 673 English, 46, 297, 447–449 Bishops’ Bible, 46, 324 Coverdale Bible, 46, 758–759 King James Bible, 46, 449 Reims-Douai New Testament, 342, 449 Tyndale, 46, 66, 449 French (Lefèvre), 26 German Emser’s New Testament, 450 Luther’s New Testament, 17–18, 41, 46, 86, 126, 752–753 Piscator, 311, 426–427 Wittenberg Bible, 18, 41, 46, 455, 752–753 Latin, 445, 446 Pagnini, 31–32 Vulgate. See Vulgate polyglot, 205, 445–446 biblical studies and theology, 434–437 Anabaptist hermeneutics, 360–361 biblical humanism, 31–32, 97, 441–444 of Catholic theologians, 44, 95–96, 204, 413, 444–446 of Protestant Reformers, 37, 39, 444, 445 Calvinist/Reformed studies, 417–418, 426–428, 455–459 at Catholic universities, 98–99, 203–205, 209–211 confessional texts, Scripture in, 437–441 disputations based on, 373–374, 376, 428–429 in late Reformation era, 459–463 lectures and commentaries, 40–41, 436 Catholic theologians, 44, 45–46, 204–205, 209–211, 213–214, 447–449 Protestant Reformers, 41–45, 436, 453–454 Lutheran studies, 408–409, 416–418, 426–428, 450–455 at monastic studia, 96–99 pre-Reformation era, 37, 38 regulation of. See theological regulation School of Salamanca. See under Salamanca University science and the Bible, 683–688, 689 Copernican cosmology controversy. See Copernican cosmology scriptural authority, theologians on Bucer, 39, 125 Bullinger, 39

baptism (cont.) Bellarmine on, 475–476 Latin American missionaries on, 235, 241, 245, 246 Latomus on, 202 Luther on, 515–516, 521, 612, 752 Spiritualist doctrine, 350 Zwingli on, 519–520 de Barbanson, Constantine, 619 Barbaro, Ermolao, 25 Barnes, Robert, 71 Baro, Peter, 314 Barocci, Federico, 742 Baronio, Cesare, 418, 448, 714–715 Bartolus of Saxoferrato, 78–79 Basel clergy in, 166–167 University of, 160 Baxter, Richard, 318 Bayly, Lewis, 314 Beda (Bédier), Noel, 59, 178–179, 308 Belgic Confession, 306, 439, 468, 539 Belgium. See Low Countries Bellarmine, Robert, 223, 275, 315, 342, 461, 659 on baptism, 475–476 censorship by, 714 controversialist theology, 101, 414, 508–510, 714, 722 Gallileo, warning to, 691–692 on grace/justification, 87, 222, 475–476 on invisible church idea, 87 just war theory, 718–719, 722 potestas indirecta doctrine credited to, 224 on Thomism, 221 Bergic Book. See Formula of Concord Berlin Colloquy (1662), 382 Bernadino of Siena, 544, 546–547 Bernard of Clairvaux, 612 Berne, 107–108, 292–293, 294 Swiss reform models compared, 296–297 de Bérulle, Pierre, 620 von Beust, Joachim, 592–596 Beyer, Jürgen, 169 Beza, Theodore, 60, 162, 275, 305, 316, 330, 539 Admonition Controversy, 331 at Geneva Academy, 107, 296 at Poissy Colloquy (1561), 380 on science, 683 publications, 43–44, 460, 730–734 Biandrata [Blandrata], Giorgio, 366–367 Bible. See also New Testament; Old Testament Apocrypha, 41, 438, 453–454 liturgical readings of, 435–436

764

Index Calvin, 39–40, 41, 42–43, 53, 457, 461, 684 Cano, 414 Council of Trent theologians. See under Council of Trent Dannhauer, 427–428 Luther, 36–39, 253, 408–409, 410, 451–454, 461, 683–684 Melanchthon, 253, 414, 437 Zwingli, 39, 456, 461 Sola Scriptura. See Sola Scriptura (by Scripture alone) translations. See Bible translations women’s exclusion from, 146–148 Biblical/Charismatic Spiritualists, 350–351 Biel, Gabriel, 37 Bishops’ Bible, 46, 324 Blanco, Francisco, 197–198 Blarer, Ambrosius, 71 Blaurock, George, 355 Bodenstein, Andreas. See Karlstadt (Andreas Bodenstein) Böhme, Jakob, 132, 282, 614, 621 Böhmer, Justus Henning, 585 Bolland, Jean (and Bollandists), 715–716 Bologna University, 98, 99, 160 Bonaventure of Bagnoregio, 544 Boniface VIII, 76, 77, 581–582, 589 Book of Common Prayer, 58, 91–92, 299, 327, 340, 527 fourth edition (1662), 528 second edition (1552), 299, 527–528 third edition (1559), 528 Book of Concord, 274–275, 416 Borja, Francisco, 551 Borromeo, Carlo, 61, 555, 744 Bötker, Johannes, 278 Botticelli, Sandro, 738 van Braght, Thieleman Jansz, 708 Brancati, Francesco, 671 Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, 164, 165 Brazil, 244 Brecht, Martin, 165, 254 Bremond, Henri, 619 Brenz, Johannes, 161, 269, 270–271, 278, 469, 729 de Brès, Guy, 170, 439 Brethren of the Covenant, 131 Briçonnet, Guillaume, 26 Brown, Christopher Boyd, 513 Brueghel, Pieter, 755–756 Bucer, Martin, 161, 249, 292, 374, 469, 564 Calvin influenced by, 84, 294, 295, 296–297, 538 in England, 298–299, 325

on pastoral duties, 535 publications, 42, 518, 535 on Scriptural authority, 39, 125 at Worms Colloquy (1540), 376–377 Buchanan, George, 302 von Buchhaim, Franz Anton, 383 Buckeridge, John, 336–337 Bugenhagen, Johannes, 159, 160, 162, 730 on pastoral duties, 535, 601, 752 Buglio, Lodovico, 673 Bullinger, Heinrich, 160, 325, 683, 711 on Anabaptism, 345 on clerical vestments, 330–331 doctrines, 39, 291–292, 732–733 England, influence in, 299, 325, 326–327 publications, 436 Consensus Tigurinus (with Calvin), 271–272, 294–295, 297, 324 The Decades, 45, 291, 458, 539, 732–733 Helvetic Confessions, contributions to, 291, 304–305, 437, 438 Burnett, Amy Nelson, 159–160, 166 Busale, Girolamo, 366–367 Busenbaum, Hermann, 422 Buxtorf, Johannes (the Elder), 461 Buxtorf, Johannes (the Younger), 428 Cabral, Francisco, 645 Caen University, 109–110 Cajetan (de Vio), Tomasso, 44, 414, 447–448, 495 Luther, condemnation of, 496–497 on papal authority (dispute with Almain), 178, 181, 493 de la Calancha, Antonio, 635–636, 639–640 Calixt, Georg, 382, 425, 426, 465, 577 Syncretist Controversy, 281–282, 381, 428–429 Calixtinism, 52 Calov, Abraham, 284, 425, 429, 432, 477 Syncretist Controversy, 281–282, 381, 428–429 Calvin, John, 162, 199, 249, 469 on Anabaptism, 503 Bucer’s influence on, 84, 294, 295, 296–297, 538 on church history, 710–711 Council of Trent, response to, 506–507 doctrines. See Calvinist/Reformed doctrines in Geneva, 42–43, 294–296 humanism, influence on, 37 just war theory, 733 on lay church leadership, 84–85, 86

765

Index Calvin, John (cont.) on marriage, 600 on mysticism, 612 natural law discourse, 411, 573, 574 on pastoral duties, 537–539 preaching by, 513 publications, 19, 119, 436 Consensus Tigurinus (with Bullinger), 271, 294–295, 297, 324 controversialist theology in, 502–505 Institutes of the Christian Religion, 43, 269, 294, 296, 409, 466, 538, 733 on sacraments, 522 on sacred and secular images, 754–755, 760 on science, 683, 684 on scriptural authority, 39–40, 41, 42–43, 53, 457, 461, 684 and Servetus, 296, 345, 366, 504–505 worship, reforms to, 295, 514, 524 Calvinist Church. See Reformed Church Calvinist/Reformed doctrines, 33, 276–277, 319, 467. See also Zwinglian doctrines Belgic Confession, 306, 439, 468, 539 Canons of Dort, 92, 311, 317, 416, 468, 482 catechisms, 119–120 education on. See theological education, Calvinist/Reformed studies Enlightenment philosophies challenging, 317–318, 429–433 France, influence in, 308–309 Genevan Confession, 438 goal of, 426 grace/justification, 476–477, 502, 506–507 Helvetic Confessions, 291, 301, 304–305, 437–438 Helvetic Consensus, 429, 458 Holy Communion (Lord’s Supper), 293, 294–295, 297, 470, 478, 522–524, 537–538 Consensus Tigurinus (Calvin with Bullinger), 271, 294–295, 297, 324 Zwinglian doctrine, 259–260, 291, 305, 324, 519–522 inner-Protestant disputes. See under Holy Communion; Protestantism inner struggle idea, 482–483, 484 just war theory, 732–734 law and gospel distinction, 38, 410, 458–459 Lucaris on, 391–392 predestination, 43, 86, 279, 280, 281, 291, 419–420, 482–483 and Puritanism, 330, 331, 419–420, 539

regulation of. See Reformed Church, theological regulation and science. See science and theology scriptural basis, 416–418, 426–428, 455–459 Sola Scriptura (by Scripture alone), 39–40, 92 Cambridge University, 58, 111–112, 602 Calvinist/Reformed theology at, 54, 314–316, 322–323, 334 Cambridge Platonists, 576 Protestant exiles at, 298–299, 325–326 Camerarius, Joachim, 249, 252 Cameron, Euan, 705 Campanella, Tommaso, 93, 692–693, 699–702 Canfield, Benet, 619 Canisius, Peter, 45–46, 342, 379, 712 catechisms, 117–118, 413, 712 Cano, Melchor, 191, 192, 195, 199, 637 De locis theologicis libri duodecim, 196–197, 198, 414, 713 canon law. See under ecclesiastical law Canons of Dort, 92, 311, 317, 416, 468, 482 Cantwell Smith, William, 624 Capel, Guillaume, 177–178 Cappel, Louis, 461–462 Caravaggio, 742–743 Carmelite order, 97 Caroli, Pierre, 50, 504 Carpzov, Benedict, 583, 598–599 Cartesianism, 314, 424, 490 responses of theologians, 184–185, 317–319, 429, 431, 432–433, 688 Cartwright, Thomas, 91, 331 Castellio, Sebastian, 32–33, 732 da Castello, Castellino, 114–115 de Castro, Alonso, 197 de Castro, León, 69 de Castro, Paulus, 593 casuistry. See under ethics and moral theology catechesis, 36, 113–114, 120–121 catechisms, 114, 116–118, 408 by Calvin, 119 by Canisius, 117–118, 413, 712 Heidelberg Catechism, 119–120, 309–311, 416 by Luther, 17, 56, 61, 118–119, 257, 564–565 Racovian Catechism, 304, 368, 416, 440–441 Tridentine Catechism, 70, 118, 437 catechists, 114–116, 413 in China, 671–673

766

Index lists of prohibited texts, 67, 112, 179, 203–204, 421, 714 pre-Reformation era, 62, 177 Chaderton, Laurence, 314–315, 334 Champier, Symphorien, 25 de Chantal, Jane, 488, 620 Charismatic/Biblical Spiritualists, 350–351 charity, doctrines of, 86–87, 486–489 Charles I of England, Scotland and Ireland, 302–303, 336, 343, 760–761 Charles IX of France, 61 Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor and Louvain University, 204 colloquies convened by. See Regensburg, Colloquies; Worms, Colloquies Council of Trent, theologian appointments, 194, 195 Schmalkaldic League defeated by, 293, 325, 730 theological regulation, 56, 64, 65–66, 203, 305 Charles VII of France, 176 Charles VIII of France, 178 Charleton, Walter, 688, 689 de Châtillon, Odet, 380 Chemnitz, Martin, 41, 273, 278, 417, 467, 477, 507–508 China, mission in, 668 Chinese elite tolerance of, 669–670 Chinese Rites Controversy, 422, 676–678 and Confucian cultural imperative, 670–671 Chinese theologians, 674–676 translated theological texts, 671–674 factors facilitating, 669 missionaries, 668–669 Chrisman, Miriam, 124 Christian ethics. See under ethics and moral theology Christian III of Denmark, 52 Christman, Robert, 168 Christology, 470. See also Holy Communion anti-Trinitarianism. See antiTrinitarianism of humanists, 27–28, 32 of Lutherans, 277–279, 470 of Spiritualists, 352–353, 354, 357 church history narratives. See history and theology Church of England. See English Reformation and Anglican Church Chytraeus, David, 273, 390, 417

Council of Trent reforms, 116, 413 Jesuit catechesis, 115 in India. See India, Jesuit catechisms in in Japan. See Japan, Jesuit catechisms in in Latin America, 234–237, 239–241 Catharina of Farão, 139, 654, 665 Catherine of Genoa, 618 Catholic Church canon law. See under ecclesiastical law Catholic and Protestant spiritualities compared, 606–609 clergy, 170, 349, 480 celibacy requirement, 41, 152 education. See theological education in England, 339–341 in German dioceses, 151–153, 157–158, 159 in Lyon, 149–151, 152, 155, 158–159 preaching by. See under pastoral theology and preaching social backgrounds, 149–150, 151, 153, 158–159, 165 colloquies with Protestants, 372–375, 381 particular colloquies. See under town or city name doctrinal reforms Council of Trent reforms. See Council of Trent in early Reformation era, 412 in seventeenth century, 421–424 Eastern Christianity, relations with, 393–397 history of. See history and theology in Latin America. See under Latin America laypersons in, 608 papal authority, discourse on. See under politics and theology pre-Reformation era. See pre-Reformation era sacramental theology. See under sacramental theology Cauvin, Girard, 162 Cellarius, Martin, 366 censorship by Protestant rulers, 52, 110 Edict of Worms, 50, 64 Jewish texts (Reuchlin affair), 493–494 Lateran V decree (against Protestant texts), 62–63 Council of Trent renewal of, 67 in England, 66 in France, 64–65 in German states, 63–64 in Italian states, 62–63, 64 in Spain, 65–66

767

Index Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 30–31, 257, 264, 411, 549, 550, 624–625 Cigoli, Ludovico, 746 clandestine marriage, Protestant jurisprudence, 592–593, 598 Clement V, 68, 602 Clement VI, 496 Clement VIII, 55, 221, 583, 722, 726 Clement X, 182 clergy Anabaptist ministers, 54, 83, 540–542 of Catholic Church. See Catholic Church, clergy education of. See theological education Huguenot pastors, 167 of Lutheran Church. See Lutheran Church, clergy pastoral duties and preaching. See pastoral theology and preaching pre-Reformation era, 149–150 of Reformed Church. See Reformed Church, clergy vestments, disputes on, 299, 329–331 women, ordination barred, 138–140 Clichtove, Josse (Jodocus), 179 Clooney, Francis X., 657–658 Cocceius, Johannes, 313, 429 Cochlaeus, Johann, 249, 497, 498, 499 Coffey, John, 328–329 Colet, John, 28 Collegium Romanum, 101, 103, 413, 668, 713, 714 colloquies, 372–375, 381, 416 particular colloquies. See under town or city name Cologne University, 50, 55, 159, 160, 177, 178 Colonna, Vittoria, 136, 144, 738 Columbus, Christopher, 233 Comenius, Johann Amos, 282, 381, 432 Comerford, Kathleen, 156, 157, 158 communalism (peasants’ movements), 83–84, 170, 351, 356 communion. See Holy Communion Company of Pastors, 53, 60, 108, 109, 295 Compendium catholicae veritatis (Jesuit catechism), 649–650 de Condren, Charles, 620 Confessio Augustana. See Augsburg Confession Confessio Saxonica (Melanchthon), 507 Confessio Tetrapolitana (Tetrapolitan Confession), 39, 259 confession. See under ethics and moral theology

Confutation of the Augsburg Confession, 40–41 Congregation of the Index of Prohibited Books, 67, 691–692, 714 Consensus Tigurinus (Calvin with Bullinger), 271, 294–295, 297, 324 Consistory (Reformed Church), 60, 85, 140, 295–296, 538–539 Contarini, Gasparo, 377 controversialist theology, 209, 454, 492, 510 Anabaptism, condemnations of, 71, 262, 345, 503 in art, 745, 747–749 of Bellarmine, 414, 508–510, 714, 722 of Calvin, 502–505 church history narratives. See history and theology Council of Trent, Protestant responses, 505–508 ecumenical efforts. See ecumenical efforts inner-Protestant disputes. See under Holy Communion; Protestantism Luther, condemnations of. See under Luther, Martin papal authority Catholic discourse on. See under politics and theology Protestant discourse on, 80–82, 85, 89, 588–589, 709–710, 758–759 Controversies (Bellarmine), 508–509, 714, 722 Contzen, Adam, 513–514, 723–725 Convocation of Canterbury, 71–72 Copenhagen University, 52 Copernican cosmology, 424, 687, 690–693, 702–703 Campanella’s defense, 699–702 Foscarini’s defense, 693–695 Gallileo’s defense, 695–699 Cordatus, Konrad, 265 de Córdoba, Pedro, 235 Cornaro Piscopia, Elena Lucrezia, 137 Cortés, Hernán, 236 Council of Constance, 79–80, 176 Council of Ferrara, Florence and Rome, 71 Council of Trent, 92, 378, 606. See also Catholic Church on confession, 101 on ecclesial authority, 480 French resistance to decrees, 60 on grace/justification, 219–220, 473–476, 506–507 and papal authority, 87, 175–176, 223, 480

768

Index Decalogue (Ten Commandments), 116, 120, 241 ethics and moral theology, significance for, 559–561, 563, 569, 570–571, 573 graven images prohibition, 324, 560–561 Dedekenn, Georg, 565 Denck, Hans, 128, 131–132, 350 Dent, Christopher Mattinson, 337 Descartes, René. See Cartesianism Despland, Michel, 624 Dias, Manuel, 673 Dietenberger, Johann, 497 Dionysius [Pseudo-Dionysius], 24, 25–26, 611, 620 Dippold, Günter, 153 disputations, 372–375, 381, 416 on Scripture, 373–374, 376, 428–429 particular colloquies. See under town or city name dissenting and radical groups, 345–349, 370, 539–542, 613–614, 728 Anabaptists. See Anabaptism anti-Trinitarians. See anti-Trinitarianism Spiritualists. See Spiritualism divorce, Protestant jurisprudence, 595–596, 598 Dixon, Scott, 163, 165, 166–167 Doctrina Christam (Jesuit catechism), 645–649 dogmatics. See systematic theology Dominican order, 62, 68, 155, 327–328 Jesuits, disputes with, 230 Chinese Rites Controversy, 422, 676–678 de auxiliis controversy, 55, 208–209, 220–223, 342–343, 415, 566 in Latin America, 235–238, 242 theological education by, 96–97, 422–423 Donation of Constantine, 709–710, 715 Döring, Christian, 17–18 Dorp, Maarten, 443 Dort, Synod of, 276, 312, 316, 564 Canons of Dort, 92, 311, 317, 416, 468, 482 Dositheos of Jerusalem, 392, 400 Douai University, 204, 207. See also Louvain University British Catholic exiles at, 341–342 Estius at, 208, 210–211 theological regulation, 208, 209 Driedo, John, 202–203, 412 du Perron, Jacques Davy, 50 Duplessis-Mornay, Philippe, 711, 734 Durantis, Guillelmus, 582 Dürer, Albrecht, 305, 754

on pastoral duties, 45–46, 243, 542, 547–548, 552–555, 607–608 Protestant responses, 505–508 on sacraments, 528–531 Holy Communion, 478, 529–530 on scriptural authority, 40, 204, 447 Vulgate endorsement, 41, 202, 429, 444, 506 on theological education biblical studies, 98–99, 413 catechesis, 116, 413 clerical qualifications, 99, 101, 102, 156–157, 204, 413, 562 papal authority over universities, 175–176 theologians at, 71, 194, 195, 197–198 on theological regulation, 50–51, 61, 66–67, 394 Tridentine Catechism, 70, 118, 437 on women’s ordination, 138–139 on worship, 132–133 sacred images, 738–739, 741–742 de Covarrubias y Leyva, Diego, 583–584, 596, 597 Coverdale Bible, 46, 758–759 Cracow University, 51, 304 Cranach, Lucas as illustrator, 747–748, 749, 750–751, 752, 753, 758 as publisher, 13, 14, 16, 17–18 Cranmer, Thomas, 58, 299, 322, 435 on Holy Communion, 298, 324–325, 527–528 invitations to Protestant exiles, 325–326 on worship, 299, 324 Crespin, Jean, 707–708, 727 Crusius, Martin, 390–391 de la Cruz, Sor Juana Inés, 144 Cudworth, Ralph, 576, 688 Cyprian, Ernst Salomon, 284 Czaika, Otfried, 161 Daneau, Lambert, 419, 483, 576–577, 683, 686–687 Dannhauer, Johann Conrad, 284–285, 427–428 Davenant, John, 328 de auxiliis controversy, 55, 208–209, 220–223, 342–343, 415, 566 De locis theologicis libri duodecim (Cano), 196–197, 198, 414, 713 DeBray, Guillaume, 306 The Decades (Bullinger), 45, 291, 458, 539, 563, 732–733

769

Index Edward VI of England, 57–58, 62, 298, 322, 324, 760 Egidio Antonini da Viterbo (Giles of Viterbo), 24–25 Ehrenpreis, Andreas, 369 Eisenhardt, Ulrich, 63 El Greco, 742, 744–745, 746 election. See predestination Electoral Saxony Albertine and Ernestine conflict, 272 Decisio Saxonica, 279 Leipzig University. See Leipzig University Luther in, 9, 16 theological regulation, 52–53, 56, 61, 273 Wittenberg. See Wittenberg Elizabeth I of England, 20, 299, 323, 327, 335, 719 theological regulation, 58–59, 62, 66, 111, 601, 760 de Elizalde, Miguel, 230 Emden, 19, 304, 305 Synod of, 306, 311 Emser, Hieronymus, 450, 497 encyclopedism, 311, 432, 584 England, pre-Reformation era Luther condemned, 18, 499–501 publishing industry, 19 theological education, 111, 176–177 theological regulation, 57, 66 English Civil War, 734–735 English Reformation and Anglican Church, 297–300, 321–322, 680 avant-garde conformity and Laudianism, 334–339, 342–343 Book of Common Prayer. See Book of Common Prayer casuistry, 565–566 and Catholicism, 339–343, 760 Convocation of Canterbury, 71–72 ecclesiastical law, 600–603 episcopacy, disputes on, 91, 328, 332–333, 539 Forty-Two Articles (1553), 57–58, 62, 324–325 Holy Communion, disputes on, 299, 302, 324–325, 327, 337–338, 527–528 Lutheranism, view of, 327 mysticism, 614–615 and Oxford and Cambridge Universities, 54, 111–112, 314–316, 322–323, 334, 602 Protestant exiles influencing, 298–299, 304, 305, 314, 325 publishing industry, 19–20, 341–342

Durham House group, 337 Dutch Reformation, 305–307, 312, 318–319 Duval, André, 181 Duvergier de Hauranne, Jean, 182, 213 Eastern Christianity, 385–387, 761 Eastern Orthodoxy, emergence, 399–400 Western Christianity, relations with Catholic relations, 393–397 church unions, 397–399 political-ecclesiastical factors shaping, 387–389 Protestant relations, 389–393 war against Turks, 369, 389, 722, 729 ecclesial polity, attacks on. See under politics and theology ecclesiastical history. See history and theology ecclesiastical law. See also theological regulation canon law canonists, 582–585 Protestant jurists, influence on, 585–591, 596–597 reforms to, 579–582 in England, 600–603 Lutheran studies on, 597–599 marriage and divorce, Protestant jurisprudence, 591–596, 598, 600 Reformed Church ordinances, 599–600 on warfare. See just war theory Eck, Johannes, 160, 376, 412, 469 Leipzig Disputation (with Luther), 50, 55, 289, 373, 389, 496, 706 publications, 414, 497, 498–499, 711–712 Eckhart (mystic), 610 ecumenical efforts, 372 colloquies, 372–375, 381, 416 particular colloquies. See under town or city name East-West relations. See under Eastern Christianity irenicism, 281–282, 381–384 Leuenberg Agreement, 274–275, 531 Lutheran doctrines. See Lutheran doctrines, consensus-building on Syncretist Controversy, 281–282, 381, 428–429 Edict of Fontainebleau, 59 Edict of Nantes, 727–728, 733 Edict of Romocantin, 60 Edict of Worms, 50, 64 education, theological. See theological education

770

Index Eusebius of Caesarea, 708, 710, 715 Eymrich, Nicolai, 68

Puritanism. See Puritanism and science, 680–681, 688–690 Spanish Armada, 723 Ten Articles (1536), 57, 324, 758, 759–760 theological regulation, 57–59, 62, 111, 600–603 Thirty-Nine Articles (1559), 58, 62, 300, 326–327, 340, 439 Tyndale’s Bible, 46, 66, 449 Westminster Confession, 54, 72, 300, 439–440, 468–469, 479, 482 worship, 304, 337–338, 528 clerical vestments disputes, 299, 329–331 iconoclasm, 323–324, 329, 338, 561, 759–761 sermons, 513 Enlightenment philosophies, 284–285, 318, 429–433, 470, 484–485 Cartesianism. See Cartesianism Enthusiasts, 85, 258, 535 episcopacy, English disputes on, 91, 328, 332–333, 539 Erasmus, Desiderius, 23, 26, 249, 442, 444, 757 on preaching, 549–552 pacifism (alleged), 719, 722 publications, 23–24, 26, 37, 138, 406–407, 460, 489, 712 theological approach, 28–30, 33, 201, 264, 406–407, 466, 489 theological debates, 27–28, 44, 201–202, 374, 443, 481 van Est (Estius), William Hessels, 208, 210–212 Estienne, Robert, 460 ethics and moral theology, 557–559, 577–578 Anabaptism, 558, 563–564, 728 charity, doctrines of, 86–87, 486–489 Christian ethics, emergence of, 576–577 confession and casuistry, 561–563, 607 in England, 565–566 Lutheran doctrines, 514–516, 534, 563–565, 752 probabilism, 226–231, 422, 567–568 Decalogue (Ten Commandments), significance for, 559–561, 563, 569, 570–571, 573 education on, 568–570 inner struggle idea, 482–485 just war theory. See just war theory natural law discourse. See natural law discourse Eucharist. See Holy Communion Eudes, Jean, 620

Fabricius, Andreas, 268 faculty of theology of Paris. See Paris University faculty of theology Fagius, Paul, 325 Fagnani, Prospero, 584 faith alone. See Sola Fide (by faith alone) Fall (original sin) doctrines. See grace/justification Genesis, commentaries on, 33, 142–143, 147, 454–455, 655, 684 Farel, Guillaume, 84, 162, 294, 295, 308, 504 Farinacci, Prospero, 582–583 Feil, Ernst, 624 female theologians. See women Ferdinand I, archduke of Austria, 55–56, 375, 376 Ferdinand II, Holy Roman Emperor, 724, 725 Ferdinand of Aragon, 68, 233 Fernandes, Gonçalo, 657–658 Ficino, Marsilio, 23–24, 25, 26, 32, 466, 485, 624 fides implicita (implicit faith), 636–637 Field, John, 331 Fincham, Kenneth, 337 First Helvetic Confession, 301, 437–438 Fischer (Piscator), Johann, 311, 426–427, 457 Fish, Simon, 66 Fisher, John, 111, 498, 499–500, 712–713 Flacius Illyricus, Matthias, 160, 267, 275, 417–418, 472 on church history, 418, 707, 708 Flacian Controversy, 268–269 Focher, Juan, 244 da Fonseca, Pedro, 423 Ford, James Thomas, 513 Formula of Concord, 52, 56–57, 92, 255, 277 background, 272–274 circulation, 72 doctrines, 253, 278, 410, 437 Formula Consensus Helvetica, 429, 458 Forster, Marc, 151–153, 157–158, 159 Forty-Two Articles (England, 1553), 57–58, 62, 324–325 Foscarini, Paolo Antonio, 692, 693–695 Foster, Michael, 682 Fox, George, 614–615 Foxe, John, 708, 727 France Gallicanism, 87–88, 176, 178, 181, 183–184, 225, 438–439

771

Index Gardiner, Stephen, 449 Garnet, Henry, 340 Gassendi, Pierre, 424, 576 Gaukroger, Stephen, 682 Geiler von Kayserberg, Johann, 156, 169, 547 Gelasius I, 75, 76 Génébrard, Gilbert, 448, 461 Genesis, commentaries on, 33, 142–143, 147, 454–455, 655, 684 original sin doctrines. See grace/ justification Geneva, 294 Academy, 53, 107–109, 167–168, 296, 318, 319 Calvin in, 42–43, 294–296 English exiles in, 298 French Protestant refugees in, 167, 294, 295, 296 publishing industry, 19 Swiss reform models compared, 296–297 theological regulation, 60, 84–85, 296–297 Geneva Bible, 46 Genevan Confession, 438 Gentile, Giovanni, 366–367 Gentileschi, Artemisia, 136 George, duke of Saxony, 497 Gerhard, Johann, 410, 425, 426, 427, 477, 535–536 German states Anabaptists in, 129–130, 357–359 Catholic clergy in, 151–153, 157–158, 159 Lutheran doctrines, reception in, 13–16 university debates, 50 mysticism in, 618–619 particular states. See under state names Protestant clergy in, 163–167 publishing industry, 9–13, 15–16, 62 church building, contribution to, 16–18 theological education, 56–57, 105, 106, 167, 264, 407, 598–599 Geneva Academy, influence on, 108–109 theologians’ Alma Maters, 159–161 at Wittenberg University. See Wittenberg University theological regulation, 56–57, 61–64 Thirty Years War. See Thirty Years War Gerrish, Brian, 531 Gerson, Jean, 79, 543–545, 560, 567 Giberti, Gian Matteo, 156 gift and love doctrines, 86–87, 486–489 Giles of Viterbo (Egidio Antonini da Viterbo), 24–25

France (cont.) Lyon, clergy in, 149–151, 152, 155, 158–159 mysticism in, 619–621 Poissy Colloquy (1561), 379–381 Protestantism in, 307–309 publishing industry, 19 religious wars, 733, 734 theological regulation, 59–60, 61, 109–113 by Paris faculty of theology. See Paris University faculty of theology Francesco II Sforza, duke of Milan, 64 Francis I of France, 59, 178, 308 theological regulation, 49–50, 59, 65, 179, 308 Francis of Assisi, 544, 545–546, 628 Franciscan order, 68, 155 in India, 653–654 in Latin America, 236–237, 628–631 pastoral duties and preaching, 544–546 theological education, 97, 414, 422 theological regulation, 62 Franck, Sebastian, 132, 249, 353–354, 369, 540, 613 Francke, August Hermann, 284–285, 488 Frankfurt an der Oder University, 109, 160 Frederick III, Elector of Saxony, 80, 103, 350, 505, 730 Frederick III, Elector Palatine, 57, 119, 120, 310 Frederick William, Elector of Brandenburg, 381, 382 free will vs. predestination. See predestination freedom of conscience, 261–262, 306, 481–482 The Freedom of the Christian (Luther), 349 Freiburg University, 160 von Freising, Otto, 78 von Friedeburg, Robert, 731 Frith, John, 298 Fromondus, Libertus, 214–215 Froschauer, Christoph, 289 Fucan, Fabian, 650–652 Fulke, William, 334 Gaismair, Michael, 170 Galenus, Abrahamsz, 369 Galilei, Galileo, 424, 490, 691–692, 695–699, 700, 746 Gallicanism, 87–88, 176, 178, 181, 183–184, 225, 438–439 de Gamaches, Philippe, 181–182 Gans, Johannes, 726 Ganzer, Klaus, 156

772

Index Gui, Bernard, 68 de Guise, Charles, 380 Gustav Vasa of Sweden, 52 Guyart, Claude, 135, 136–137

Gillespie, George, 303 Gnesio-Lutherans, disputes with Philippists, 51–52, 110, 266–269, 271–272, 310, 379, 416 Gomarus, Francis, 313, 316, 317 Gómez, Pedro, 649, 650 González Téllez, Emanuel, 584 Gordon, Bruce, 162, 165 gospel and law distinction, 37–38, 266, 410, 451, 458–459, 750–751, 752 Gößner, Andreas, 165, 167 grace/justification Anabaptist doctrine, 361–362 Calvinist/Reformed doctrine, 476–477, 502, 506–507 colloquy debates on, 377, 378 Council of Trent on, 219–220, 473–476, 506–507 Erasmus on, 30, 201 fides implicita (implicit faith), 636–637 Jansenism, 182–183, 210, 213–216, 225–230, 566–567 Jesuit doctrines, 207–208, 219–220, 476 de auxiliis controversy, 55, 208–209, 220–223, 342–343, 415, 566 Molinism, 220–222, 281, 342–343, 566 Lefèvre on, 26 Louvain theologians on, 201–202, 203, 205–211, 212 Lutheran doctrines. See Lutheran doctrines, grace/justification School of Salamanca on, 246 Zwingli on, 31 de Grajal, Gaspar, 69 Gratian’s Decretum, 579, 581, 589, 590–591, 595 Great Schism, 76–77, 79, 87, 175, 580 Grebel, Conrad, 128, 129, 290, 355 Greek Church. See Eastern Christianity Greengrass, Mark, 167 Gregory, Brad, 727 Gregory XIII, 206, 395, 580, 581, 582, 590 Gregory XV, 395, 660, 726 Gregory of Rimini, 177 Gribaldi, Matteo, 366–367 Grindal, Edmund, 331, 332 Gropper, Johannes, 376–377 Grotius, Hugo, 312, 313, 317, 429, 462, 575 von Grumbach, Argula, 124–125, 169 Grynaeus, Simon, 437 Guadalupe, 237 Gudiel, Alonso, 69 Guerrero, Pedro, 197–198 de Gueverra, Juan, 192

Haga, Cornelius, 392 hagiography art works, 745–746, 757 texts, 707–708, 713–716, 727 Haller, Berchtold, 292 Hamelius, John, 207, 209, 210 Hamilton, James, earl of Arran, 300–301 Hamilton, Patrick, 301 Hampton, Stephen, 327, 339 von Harnack, Adolf, 611 Harrison, Peter, 681–683 Hebrew Scripture, vowel points controversies, 460–462 Heidegger, Johann Heinrich, 458, 462 Heidegger, Martin, 231 Heidelberg Catechism, 119–120, 309–311, 416 Heidelberg University, 159, 160, 407, 599 changing confessional status, 53–54, 57, 108–109, 309–311 Heigham, John, 450 Helmholz, Richard, 602–603 Helmstedt University, 52, 106, 281–282, 420, 425 Helvetic Confessions, 291, 301, 304–305, 437–438 Helvetic Consensus, 429, 458 Henriques, Henrique, 656–657, 664, 665 Henry, John, 682–683 Henry II of France, 59–60, 61, 65, 309 Henry III of France, 61, 179 Henry IV of France, 179, 180, 619, 734 assassination, 88, 225 Edict of Nantes, 727–728, 733 Henry VIII of England, 498 Act of Supremacy, 87, 111, 297–298, 501 dissolution of monasteries, 339, 760 evangelical movement under, 322–323 Holbein’s portrait of, 758–759 theological regulation by, 19, 57, 62, 66, 111, 601 Henten, John, 204 Herborn Academy, 53–54, 311 heresy, regulation of. See theological regulation Hesse-Kassel, 56–57, 155–156, 164 Hill, Christopher, 734–735 Hill, Nicholas, 688

773

Index theological regulation, 55–56 Thirty Years War. See Thirty Years War holy war, 722–727. See also just war theory Hooker, Richard, 91–92, 335, 420, 574 Hooker, Thomas, 420 Hooper, John, 299, 304 Hooykaas, Reijer, 681 de l’Hôpital, Michel, 380 Hosokawa Tama Gracia, 139 Hotman, François, 733–734 housefathers, 168–169 Huber, Samuel, 280–281 Hubmaier, Balthasar, 82, 129, 524–525 on Holy Communion, 526–527 theological education, 128, 160, 169–170, 356 Huguenots, 167, 306, 314, 625, 707–708 in Geneva, 167, 294, 295, 296 Hülsemann, Johann, 381, 425 humanism, 21, 406–408, 489, 548 biblical humanism. See under biblical studies and theology Egidio’s poetical theology, 24–25 Erasmus’s new theology, 28–30, 33, 201, 264, 406–407, 466, 489 Ficino’s philosophical theology, 23–24 humanists on preaching, 548–552 influences of on Calvin, 37 on Castellio, 32–33 on Jesuit education, 100 on Luther, 30, 37, 104, 249, 406 on Melanchthon, 37, 407–408 on School of Salamanca, 190, 192, 195, 198–199 on Servetus, 27–32 on Zwingli, 25–32, 39, 289, 536 Lefèvre’s philology, 25–28, 406, 443 Scholasticism challenged by, 44, 105, 187, 373, 406, 407 coexistence, 189–191, 444, 489 Valla’s philology, 21–23, 443 Humphrey, Laurence, 330–331, 332, 334 Hunnaeus, Augustinus, 205 Hunnius, Ägidius, 278, 279–280, 281 Hunnius, Nikolaus, 276 Hus, Jan, 68, 85, 347 Hut, Hans, 128, 129, 350, 356, 363, 524–525 von Huthenne, Paul, 63 von Hutten, Ulrich, 494 Hutter, Jakob, 129, 356–357 Hutter, Leonhart, 410 Hutterite Anabaptists, 129, 131, 356–357, 364, 369, 541

Hispaniola, Catholic evangelization of, 234–238 history and theology, 704, 716. See also politics and theology Catholics on church history, 711–714 Annales ecclesiastici (Baronio), 418, 448, 714–715 Controversies (Bellarmine), 508–509, 714, 722 De locis theologicis libri duodecim (Cano), 196–197, 198, 414, 713 hagiographical texts, 713–716 Protestants on church history Calvinists, 711 hagiographical texts, 707–708, 727 Magdeburg Centuries, 418, 705, 708–711 Protestant Reformers, 704–707, 710–711 Hobbes, Thomas, 429, 465, 490, 575 Hochstraten, Jacob, 494, 497 Hoen, Cornelius, 305, 519 Hoffman, Melchior, 129, 130, 350, 357–358, 503, 524–525 Hoffman, Philip T., 149–151, 153, 158–159 Holbein, Hans, 748–749, 758–759 Holdsworth, William, 585–586 Holland. See Low Countries Holy Communion (Eucharist, Lord’s Supper). See also Christology Anabaptist doctrine, 363–364, 526–527 Calvinist/Reformed doctrine. See under Calvinist/Reformed doctrine Catholic doctrine, 448, 478, 529–530 for children, 115–116 colloquy debates on, 377, 380 inner-Protestant disputes on, 531 Adiaphoristic Controversy, 267–268 English Reformation disputes, 299, 302, 324–325, 327, 337–338, 527–528 Luther and Zwingli, 259–261, 291, 305, 324, 478, 519–522 in Latin America, 240, 245 Lutheran doctrine, 259–261, 478, 516–519, 521–522, 751 Spiritualist doctrine, 350, 352–353 Westminster Confession on, 479 Holy Roman Empire colloquies convened by Charles V. See Regensburg, Colloquies; Worms, Colloquies pre-Reformation era, 75, 77–80 Religious Peace of Augsburg, 56, 87, 375, 379, 724, 727–728, 731

774

Index censorship of Protestant texts, 67 mysticism in, 618 pre-Reformation era, 78–80 Roman Inquisition, 51, 69, 70 theological education, 97–98, 99, 102–103, 112 Collegium Romanum, 101, 103, 413, 668, 713, 714 Ivan the Terrible, 398

hymns and hymnals Calvin on, 514 by Luther, 17, 513–514 psalters, 144–145, 514 Zwingli on, 514 Hyperius, Andreas, 417, 570 iconoclasm of Reformed Church, 289, 560–561 Anglican Church, 323–324, 329, 338, 561, 759–761 Calvin on sacred and secular images, 754–755, 760 Ignatius of Loyola, 412, 476, 551, 607, 616, 620, 642 implicit faith (fides implicita), 636–637 India Jesuit catechisms in, 653, 664–666 Fishery and Malabar Coasts, 655–657, 665 Goa, 653–655 Kerala, 661–662 Madurai, 657–661, 665 North India, 662–664 Jesuit missions in, 642–643 historical context, 643–644 indulgences, sale of German resentment, 14–15 Luther on, 11, 50, 487, 496 woodcuts illustrating, 747, 748 Ingolstadt University, 155, 160, 164, 177, 198 inner struggle idea, 482–485 Innocent III, 76, 595 Innocent IV, 589, 592 Innocent VIII, 177–178 Innocent X, 214, 677, 726 inquisitions, 67–70, 203, 615–616. See also Portuguese Inquisition; Roman Inquisition; Spanish Inquisition Institutes of the Christian Religion (Calvin), 43, 269, 294, 296, 409, 466, 538, 733 Inter cetera (papal bulls, 1493), 233 invisible church idea Bellarmine on, 87 Lutheran Church on, 85–86, 87 Reformed Church on, 85, 87 Spiritualists on, 352, 353 Ireland, 300, 334, 339, 340 irenicism, 281–282, 381–384 Isabella of Castile, 68, 233 Isambert, Nicolas, 182 Italian states anti-Trinitarianism in, 366–367

Jacob, bishop of Malabar (Mar Jacob), 661 James I of England (VI of Scotland), 302, 313, 322, 328, 335, 760 Jan of Leiden, 358, 359 Jansenius, Cornelius (of Ghent), 204–205, 209 Jansen(ius), Cornelius (of Ypres) (and Jansenism), 182–183, 210, 213–216, 225–230, 566–567 Jansonius, Jacob, 211–212 Japan Jesuit catechisms in, 644, 652–653, 665–666 Compendium catholicae veritatis, 649–650 Doctrina Christam, 645–649 early catechisms, 644–645 Myōtei mondō, 650–652, 664 native catechists, 139, 652 Jesuit missions in, 628, 642–643 historical context, 643–644 Jedin, Hubert, 713 Jena University, 51–52, 106, 160 Jeremiah II Tranos of Constantinople, 390–391, 478–479 Jerome, St., 23, 26, 28, 515, 712, 757–758 Jesuits, 218–219, 412, 423 art works commissioned by, 747 casuistical literature, 565, 566 and censorship, 62, 112 in China. See China, mission in and church history, 713 Eastern missions, 396 in England and Scotland, 340, 341, 342–343 on grace/justification, 207–208, 219–220, 476 de auxiliis controversy, 55, 208–209, 220–223, 342–343, 415, 566 Molinism, 220–222, 281, 342–343, 566 in India. See under India in Japan. See under Japan in Latin America, 240, 243, 244–246 on preaching, 45–46, 551 probabilism doctrine, 226–231, 422, 567–568 and School of Salamanca, 198, 223, 224, 226, 245–246

775

Index à Kempis, Thomas, 347 Kepler, Johannes, 490 Kimpa Vita, Dona Beatriz, 139 King James Bible, 46, 449 Kircher, Athanasius, 424 Kling, Melchior, 597–598 Knox, John, 325, 326, 539 on resistance to monarchs, 91, 302 on worship, 299–300, 301, 302, 304 König, Johann Friedrich, 465, 467, 477–478, 484–485 Königsberg University, 106 Krebs, Nikolas, 26 Kristeva, Julia, 147 Križanić, Juraj, 398–399 Krüsi, Hans, 128, 129 Krypsis-Kenosis Controversy, 279 Kurtz, Johann, 345–346 Kyivan (Ruthenian) Church, 392–393, 397–400

Jesuits (cont.) on Sola Scriptura doctrine, 92 on spiritual and political authority, 223–226 theological education by catechesis. See under catechesis schools and universities, 99–102, 180, 207, 413–415, 421–422, 470–471, 562–563 Jewel, John, 58, 326, 331, 342, 539 Joan (alleged pope), 709 Johannes Evangelista van ‘s Hertogenbosch, 214 John XXII, 580–581 John XXIII, 71 John of the Cross, 616–618 John of Damascus, 280 John Paul II, 692 John of St. Thomas, 423 Joris, David, 129, 132, 359 Jost, Lienhard, 130 Jost, Ursula, 130, 140 Juan Diego, 237 Julius II, 54, 181, 234, 493 Julius III, 180, 507 Julius, duke of Brunswick, 61–62 just war theory of Bellarmine, 718–719, 722 of Covarrubias, 583–584 holy war, 722–727 on Latin America conquests, 90–91, 193, 572 Protestant doctrines, 727–728, 735 Anabaptist, 728 Calvinist/Reformed, 732–734 Lutheran, 728–732 Puritan, 734–735 of Suárez, 718–719, 721–722 of Vitoria, 191, 193, 571–572, 718–721 justification. See grace/justification Juxon, William, 336–337, 343

Lagus, Conrad, 586 Laínez, Diego, 380 laity. See laypersons Lallement, Louis, 620 Lamormaini, William, 724–725 Lancelotti, Giovanni Paolo, 581 Languet, Hubert, 734 Lanyer, Aemilia, 136, 142–143, 145, 147 a Lapide (van den Steen), Cornelius, 211 de Laredo, Bernardino, 616 Large Catechism (Luther), 56, 61, 118–119 de Las Casas, Bartolomé, 235–236, 238–239, 628, 639 on indigenous religious belief, 90, 485–486, 632–635, 640–641 Laski, John, 162, 298, 303–304, 305, 325 Lasso de la Vega, Luis 237 Lateran V decree. See under censorship Latin America Catholic evangelization of, 233–234, 623–624 fides implicita (implicit faith), 636–637 Hispaniola, 234–238 indigenous religions, attitudes to, 90, 485–486, 624–626, 632–641 Mexico, 236–237, 628–631 theological justifications, 237–239, 244–246, 626–628, 631–632, 640 provincial councils, 239 Third Council of Lima, 239–240 Third Council of Mexico, 240–241 Salamancan theologians in, 198

Kamen, Henry, 70 Kaplan, Benjamin, 728 Karant-Nunn, Susan, 161–163 von Karlstadt (Andreas Bodenstein), 123–124, 159, 162, 257, 519 and Anabaptism, 348, 526 mysticism of, 613 on worship, 132, 349–350, 498, 751 Karsthans (Hans Maurer), 124 Kassel Colloquy (1661), 382 Keckermann, Bartholomäus, 310, 427, 464–465, 577 Keenan, James, 565–566

776

Index Spanish discourse on conquests, 90–91, 193, 572, 720 just war theory. See just war theory theological education in, 241–244 Latitudinarians, 343, 681 Latomus, Jacob (Jacques Masson), 29, 201, 202 Laud, William (and Laudianism), 334–339, 342–343 Laureti, Tommaso, 743–744 Lausanne Academy, 107–108 law and gospel distinction, 37–38, 266, 410, 451, 458–459, 750–751, 752 Lawrence of the Resurrection, 620–621 laypersons, 170. See also women Anabaptism, role in, 127–131, 360–361 in Catholic Church, 608 communalism (peasants’ movements), 83–84, 170, 351, 356 pamphlets by, 124–125, 126 pamphlets praising, 124, 126 preaching by, 124, 127, 133, 139, 169–170, 540 prophets and mystics. See under mysticism spiritual authority, 479–480 Calvin on lay church leadership, 84–85, 86 in Lutheran Church. See under Lutheran Church Spiritualists. See Spiritualism theological education, 127 by catechesis. See catechesis by parents, 168–169 women, 138–139, 141, 148, 169 of women and girls, 113, 136, 137–138, 169 Zwingli on, 123, 125, 126–127 Le Picart, Jean, 550 Le Roy, Pierre, 176 de Ledesma, Bartolomé, 242, 243 Lefèvre d’Étaples, Jacques, 37, 50, 308, 442 philology, 25–28, 406, 443 Legate, Bartholomew, 58–59 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 382–384, 423, 424, 432 Leiden University, 54, 108, 312–313, 318, 407, 598–599 Leipzig Colloquy (1631), 382, 428 Leipzig Disputation (Luther and Eck), 50, 55, 289, 373, 389, 496, 706 Leipzig Interim, 266, 267 Leipzig University, 10–11, 51–52, 56, 159, 160 Lensaeus, Johannes (Jean de Lens), 206–207 Leo X, 54, 64, 505, 747–748

Leo XIII, 692 de León, Luis, 69, 192, 618 de Léry, Jean, 625–626 Leschassier, Jacques, 184 Lessius, Leonard, 221, 223 doctrines censured, 207–208, 209, 210, 215, 222 on grace/justification, 207–208, 213, 222 “Letter to the Women of Kentzingen” (Schütz Zell), 141–142 Leuenberg Agreement, 274–275, 531 Levita, Elijah, 461 van Leyden, Jan, 129 Libertines, 295, 296, 503–504 Ligarides, Pantaleon (Paisios), 396 Lim, Paul C.H., 328–329 Lindbeck, George, 145 Lipsius, Justus, 576 literacy, teaching of, 118 liturgy. See worship Lizet, Pierre, 59 Lobmeyer, Johann, 63 Loci communes (Melanchthon), 105, 410, 452, 706–707 Loci communes (Musculus), 293–294 Loci praecipui theologici (Melanchthon), 410, 466 Locke, John, 490, 575 Loftus, Adam, 334 Lollards, 297 Lombard, Peter on Ten Commandments, 559 Sententiae (biblical exegesis method), 36, 95, 96, 105, 203, 210, 212 London publishing industry, 19–20 Longobardo, Niccolò (Nicola), 673–674, 677 Lord’s Supper. See Holy Communion Löscher, Valentin Ernst, 284 Lotter, Melchior, 17 Louis XI of France, 50, 177 Louis XII of France, 178, 181 Louvain University, 216. See also Douai University Augustinian influence, 201–202, 203, 205, 206, 207, 209–210, 211 biblical studies, 203–205, 209–211 English Catholic exiles at, 341–342 Erasmus, debates with, 201–202 grace/justification doctrines, 201–202, 203, 205–211, 212 Jansenism at Louvain, 210, 213–216 theological regulation Articles of Faith publication, 50, 203

777

Index on papal authority, 80–82, 85, 89, 588–589, 710, 712 and peasants’ movements, 83–84 portraits of, 14, 751–754 publications Antinomian Disputations, 266 in Book of Concord, 274–275 catechisms, 17, 56, 61, 118–119, 257, 564–565 censorship of. See censorship consilium on sanctuary (attributed to Luther), 589–590 The Freedom of the Christian, 349 German language liturgy, 518–519 hymns, 17, 513–514 New Testament translation, 17–18, 41, 46, 86, 126, 752–753 On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church, 305, 514 pamphlets, 9–13, 15–16, 81 postils (collections of sermons), 44, 261–262 Resolutiones disputationum de indulgentiarum virtute, 63–64 Wittenberg Bible, 18, 41, 46, 455, 752–753 on radical and dissenting groups, 71, 262, 345, 350, 611–612, 729 on sacraments, 514–515 on sacred images, 749–750 on science, 683, 685 on scriptural authority, 36–39, 253, 408–409, 410, 451–454, 461, 683–684 on Ten Commandments, 560 Wartburg Castle incarceration, 9, 13, 17, 126, 265 at Wittenberg University, 36–37, 41–42, 103, 104–105, 159, 451 worship, reforms to, 16–17, 36, 86, 512–513, 518–519 Lutheran Church. See also Protestantism; Reformed Church clergy, 81–82, 160–161, 415–416 celibacy not required, 81, 105, 479 dynasties of, 164–165 education. See theological education, Lutheran studies former Catholic priests or monks, 161–162, 554 Luther on ordination, 123, 138–140, 263, 532–533 ministry local to place of study, 166–167 pastoral duties and preaching, 36, 44, 512–513, 532–536

Louvain University (cont.) censorship, 50, 67, 203–204 as inquisitors, 203 Luther, condemnation of, 178, 202–203 Thomist influence, 203, 205, 209–210, 212–214 love and gift doctrines, 86–87, 486–489 Low Countries Anabaptists in, 56, 130–131, 305, 306, 357–359, 369–370 art works in, 755–756 Dutch Reformation, 305–307, 312, 318–319 lay preachers, 127 Leiden University, 54, 108, 312–313, 318 Louvain University. See Louvain University mysticism in, 618–619 publishing industry, 19 Utrecht University, 313–314, 318 de Luca, Pietro, 54 Lucaris, Cyril (of Constantinople), 386–387, 391–392 Lucas, Francis, 204 Ludwig VI, Elector Palatine, 57, 310 Lufft, Hans, 18 Luís de Granada, 550 Luther, Martin, 161, 347 and canon law, 586–590, 597 on church history, 705–706 on clandestine marriage, 592, 594 condemnations of, 18, 54–55, 59, 178, 202–203, 497 by Cajetan, 496–497 by Cochlaeus, 499 by Eck, 497–499 Edict of Worms, 50, 64 by English Catholics, 18, 499–501 by Prierias, 495–496 doctrines. See Lutheran doctrines on Eastern Christianity, 389–390 on freedom of conscience, 261–262, 481–482 just war theory, 728–729, 730 on laypersons’ spiritual authority, 81–82, 123, 125, 126, 138–139, 147, 169, 608 lectures, 41–42 Leipzig Disputation (with Eck), 50, 55, 289, 373, 389, 496, 706 Melanchthon, theological relationship with, 249–255 natural law discourse, 560, 573, 574 and non-Christian religions, 623–624 on ordination, 123, 138–140, 263, 532–533

778

Index social backgrounds, 162–164, 165 doctrines. See Lutheran doctrines ecclesiastical law. See ecclesiastical law and invisible church idea, 85–86, 87 laypersons’ spiritual authority communion cup for laypersons, 517 housefathers, 168–169 Luther on, 81–82, 123, 125, 126, 138–139, 147, 169, 608 women, 138–139, 141, 148, 169 and universal church idea, 86 worship, 16–17, 36, 86, 512–513, 518–519 Lutheran doctrines, 286–287, 467–468, 605–606 Arndt “School,” 282, 427, 431, 612–613 artistic representations. See under art and theology baptism, 515–516, 521, 612, 752 Christology, 277–279, 470 consensus building on, 72, 255–259, 272, 416 Augsburg Confession. See Augsburg Confession Book of Concord, 274–275, 416 Formula of Concord. See Formula of Concord Wittenberg Concord, 258, 271–272, 292, 293, 522 disputes on, 265–266, 272 inner-Protestant. See under Holy Communion; Protestantism Osiandrian Controversy, 269–271 Philippists and Gnesio-Lutherans, 51–52, 110, 266–269, 271–272, 310, 379, 416 Syncretist Controversy, 281–282, 381, 428–429 education on. See theological education, Lutheran studies English view of, 327 Enlightenment philosophies challenging, 284–285, 429–433 German states, reception in, 13–16 university debates, 50 goal of, 426 grace/justification, 252, 277, 450–452, 471–473, 475 Chemnitz on, 508 König on, 477–478 Melanchthon on, 252–253, 254, 269–270 Osiandrian Controversy, 269–271 Sola Fide. See Sola Fide (by faith alone) Sola Gratia (by grace alone), 35–36, 202–203, 254, 269, 349, 472

Sola Scriptura. See Sola Scriptura (by Scripture alone) Helmstedt School, 281–282 Holy Communion (Lord’s Supper), 259–261, 478, 516–519, 521–522, 751 and humanism, 26, 27, 30, 37, 104, 249, 308, 407–408 inner struggle idea, 482–483 just war theory, 728–732 law and gospel distinction, 37–38, 266, 410, 451, 458–459, 750–751, 752 Luther and Melanchthon, theological relationship, 249–255 penance and absolution, 514–516, 534, 563–565, 752 Pietism, 92, 282–286, 429, 484–485 predestination, 279–281, 481–482 regulation of, 52–53, 56, 71, 72, 110, 262–263 and science. See science and theology scriptural basis, 408–409, 416–418, 426–428, 450–455 Spiritualism, Lutheran origins, 349–350 Ten Articles (England, 1536), 57, 324, 758, 759–760 Lyon, clergy in, 149–151, 152, 155, 158–159 Maag, Karin, 167–168 Mabillon, Jean, 716 Magdeburg Centuries, 418, 705, 708–711 Magdeburg Confession, 730–731, 733–734 Maigrot, Charles, 678 Maimbourg, Louis, 225 Mainz University, 50, 160 Major (Mayor), John, 181 Major, Georg (and Majoristic Controversy), 268 Malabar Rites Controversy, 657–661 de Maldonado, Juan, 198 Manetti, Gianozzo, 442 Mantz, Felix, 355, 363 Mar Abraham (Abraham of Angamaly), 662 Mar Jacob, bishop of Malabar, 661 Marburg Colloquy (1529), 258, 292, 512, 522 Marburg University, 53–54, 56–57, 106, 570 Marc, François, 596 Marguerite of Navarre, 178 Marian art works, 746 Marian cult in Guadalupe, 237 Marian texts by women, 143–144 de Mariana, Juan, 223, 225 Marie de l’Incarnation, 135, 136–137, 621 Marinella, Lucrezia, 136, 143

779

Index Marpeck, Pilgram, 131, 352, 361, 362, 363, 524–525 marriage, Protestant jurisprudence, 591–595, 598, 600 Marsilius of Padua, 79, 89 Martínez de Cantalapiedra, Martín, 69 Martini, Martino, 677 martyrology. See hagiography Mary, Queen of Scots, 300, 301, 302 Mary I of England, 19–20, 111–112, 301–302, 760 persecution of Protestants, 111, 298, 326, 708 theological regulation, 58, 66 Mary of Guise, 300, 301 Mass. See Holy Communion Masson, Jacques (Jacob Latomus), 29, 201, 202 van Mastricht, Petrus, 465 Matraini, Chiara, 136, 143–144, 147 Matthijs, Jan, 129, 358 Mattieu, Pierre, 582 Mauclerc, Michel, 182 Maurer, Hans (Karsthans), 124 Mauser, Konrad, 593, 594 Maximilian I, Elector of Bavaria, 723, 724, 725–726 Mazzolini (Prierias), Sylvester, 495–496, 562 McGinness, Frederick, 550 McLaughlin, Emmet, 131, 350, 352 dei Medici, Catherine, 60 medieval period. See pre-Reformation era de Medina, Bartolomé, 69, 226–227, 228, 567–568 Meisner, Balthasar, 425, 431–432 Melanchthon, Philip, 30, 85, 159, 162, 278, 281, 326 on church history, 706–707 Cordatus, dispute with, 265 Council of Trent, responses to, 505–506, 507 followers (Philippists), 56 Gnesio-Lutherans, disputes with, 51–52, 110, 266–269, 271–272, 310, 379, 416 on grace/justification, 252–253, 254, 269–270 humanism, influence on, 37, 407–408 just war theory, 729 Luther, theological relationship with, 249–255 natural law discourse, 411, 573, 574–575 on pastoral duties, 534–535 publications, 42, 56, 61, 257, 565, 591 Apology of the Augsburg Confession, 40–41, 507

Augsburg Confession variata (1540), 271–272, 376, 469 Confessio Saxonica, 507 in Book of Concord, 274–275 Loci communes, 105, 410, 452, 706–707 Loci praecipui theologici, 410, 466 on radical and dissenting groups, 71, 345 on science, 685 on scriptural authority, 253, 414, 437 at Wittenberg University, 104, 159, 252 teaching method, 104–106, 407–408, 410, 419, 467, 570 at Worms Colloquy (1540), 376 Melchiorite/Münsterite Anabaptists, 129–130, 357–359 Melville, Andrew, 331–332 Mennonite Anabaptists, 129–130, 359, 369–370 Menot, Michel, 544, 547 Mersenne, Marin, 423–424 Merton, Robert, 680–681 Mexico Catholic evangelization of, 236–237, 628–631 Mexico City provincial councils, 239, 240–241 Salamancan theologians in, 198 theological education in, 242–244 Meyer, Peter, 63 Meylen, Henri, 168 Michelangelo, 144, 738, 740–741 Middle Ages. See pre-Reformation era de São Miguel, Gaspar, 653 Mill, John, 460 Milton, Anthony, 339 ministers. See clergy Moeller, Bernd, 14 de Mogrovejo, Toribio Alfonso, 239, 639–640 Mohyla, Petro, 392, 399–400 Molanus, Gerhard Wolter, 383 de Molina, Luis, 89, 208–209, 213, 215, 423 Molinism, 220–222, 281, 342–343, 566 monastic studia, 96–99, 100 de Montesinos, Antonio, 90, 235–236 moral theology. See ethics and moral theology de Morales, Juan Bautista, 677 Moravia, Anabaptists in, 82, 129, 131, 356 More, Henry, 576, 688 More, Thomas, 93, 500–501 Morone, Giovanni, 377 Moya de Contreras, Pedro, 241 Muller, Richard, 43, 462 Münster rebellion, 129, 358–359

780

Index Erasmus’s translation, 460, 489 Estienne edition, 460 law and gospel distinction (Protestant doctrine), 37–38, 266, 410, 451, 458–459, 750–751, 752 Luther’s commentaries on, 37, 452, 453–454 Luther’s translation, 17–18, 41, 46, 86, 126, 752–753 Mill edition, 460 Reims-Douai New Testament, 342, 449 Valla’s philological analysis, 23 Newton, Isaac, 490, 690 Nicholas V, 23–24 de Nobili, Roberto, 645, 657–661, 664 da Nóbrega, Manoel, 625 Noetic Platonic Spiritualists, 353–354 nominalism, 177

von Münsterberg, Ursula, 169 Münsterite/Melchiorite Anabaptists, 129–130, 357–359 Müntzer, Thomas, 123–124, 160, 170, 350–351, 368–369 Allstedt liturgy, 132, 518 and Anabaptism, 348, 351 doctrines, 84, 351 Peasants’ War led by, 84, 351, 728 Murner, Thomas, 497 Musäus, Johann, 282, 285–286 Muscovy Church, 398–399 Musculus, Wolfgang, 43, 293, 325–326 Myconius, Oswald, 249, 437 Myōtei mondō (Jesuit catechism), 650–652, 664 mysticism, 609–611, 621 Catholic mystics, 615–616 in France, 619–621 in Italy, Germany and the Low Countries, 618–619 in Spain, 616–618 in China, 673–674 in England, 614–615 prophets and mystics, 125–126, 130, 169, 613–614 Arndt “School,” 282, 427, 431, 612–613 Tauler, 282, 347, 610, 611, 613 Teresa of Ávila, 134, 135, 139–140, 145–146, 147, 412, 616–618 Protestant Reformers on, 350, 611–612 of radical and dissenting groups, 613–614 Spiritualists. See Spiritualism

O’Malley, John W., 45 Oakley, Francis, 682 von Oberweimar, Florentina, 169 Observant reform movement, 545–547, 605, 616 Ochino, Bernardino, 325 Ocker, Christopher, 38 Ockhamism, 36–37, 97, 177, 453 Oecolampadius, Johannes, 162, 249, 292, 304, 366, 564, 711 Old Testament Decalogue (Ten Commandments), 116, 120, 241 ethics and moral theology, significance for, 559–561, 563, 569, 570–571, 573 graven images prohibition, 324, 560–561 Genesis, commentaries on, 33, 142–143, 147, 454–455, 655, 684 original sin doctrines. See grace/ justification humanist philological analyses, 31–32, 37 law and gospel distinction (Protestant doctrine), 37–38, 266, 410, 451, 458–459, 750–751, 752 Luther’s translation, 18, 41, 753 Old, Hughes Oliphant, 45 van Oldebarneveldt, Johan, 316 Olevianus, Caspar, 38, 311, 410 Olier, Jean-Jacques, 620 ordination, Luther on, 123, 138–140, 263, 532–533 original sin (Fall) doctrines. See grace/justification Genesis, commentaries on, 33, 142–143, 147, 454–455, 655, 684

Nadal, Jerónimo, 616, 673 Naitō Julia, 139, 652 natural law discourse, 88–89, 570–571 of Hooker, 91–92, 420, 574 pre-Reformation era, 569, 573 of Protestant Reformers, 411, 560, 572–575 of School of Salamanca, 88, 147–148, 224, 571–572 of seventeenth century, 430–432, 575–576 Thomism. See Thomism of Zanchi, 574 Negruzzo, Simona, 154, 156 Neile, Richard, 334, 335–336, 337, 338, 343 Netherlands. See Low Countries Neumeister, Erdmann, 284 von Neustetter, Johann Christoph, 153 New Testament Beza’s critical edition, 43–44 Emser’s translation, 450

781

Index pastoral theology and preaching, 532 biblical interpretations in sermons, 41–43 Catholic clergy, 542–543 Council of Trent reforms, 45–46, 243, 542, 547–548, 552–555, 607–608 Gerson on preaching, 543–545 Observant reform movement, 545–547, 605, 616 oratory in sermons, guidance on, 550–551 sacramental theology of preaching, 547 English preachers, 513 humanists on, 548–552 Jesuits on, 45–46, 551 Knox on, 91 lay preachers, 124, 127, 133, 139, 169–170, 540 Lutheran clergy, 36, 44, 512–513, 532–536 postils. See postils (collections of sermons) pre-Reformation era, 35, 36, 512, 545–547 radical and dissenting groups, 539–542 Reformed Church clergy, 44–45, 512–513, 536–539 women, pastoral ministry by, 140–142, 540, 652, 654 Paul (Apostle), 48, 207, 227, 252, 253, 362, 570 on God’s righteousness, 450–451, 472 on God’s wrath against unrighteousness, 626, 632–633, 640 in Lystra (Acts 14:11–18), 626, 629, 631 Paul III, 69, 237–238, 505–506, 606 Paul IV, 67, 581 Paul V, 55, 221–222, 566, 581, 673, 726, 745 Paz, Octavio, 640 Peace of Augsburg, 56, 87, 375, 379, 724, 727–728, 731 Peace of Westphalia, 107, 346, 726–727, 731 peasants’ movements (communalism), 83–84, 170, 351, 356 Pelagian doctrines. See grace/justification Pellikan, Conrad, 31 Peña, Francisco, 225 de la Peña, Pedro, 242 penance. See under ethics and moral theology Pereira, Benedict, 423, 431 Pérez de Menacho, Juan, 243 Peringer, Diepold, 124 Perkins, William, 297, 332, 457 publications, 315, 419–420, 539, 565–566 Peru, 244–245 Lima provincial councils, 239–240 Salamancan theologians in, 198 theological education, 243–244 Peter (apostle), 710, 712–713, 732, 758–759

Orthodox Church. See Eastern Christianity orthodoxy, regulation of. See theological regulation de Ortigosa, Pedro, 240, 243 Osiander, Andreas (and Osiandrian Controversy), 160, 269–271 Osler, Margaret, 682 de Osuna, Francisco, 616 Otho, Anton, 268 Ottoman Empire, 388–389 war against, 369, 389, 722, 729 Overall, John, 336, 337, 338 Oxford University, 111–112, 298–299, 334, 336–337, 341, 602 Pagnini, Santi, 31–32 Pak, Sujin, 125 Paleotti, Gabriele, 99, 742 pamphlets catechisms. See under catechesis by laypersons, 124–125, 126 laypersons praised in, 124, 126 of Luther, 9–13, 15–16, 81 Pané, Ramón, 233, 234–235 Panigarola, Francesco, 550–551, 554 Panormitanus (Nicholas de Tudeschis), 580, 590, 592, 594, 595 papacy authority, 233–234 and canon law reforms, 579–582 Catholic discourse on. See under politics and theology Protestant discourse on, 80–82, 85, 89, 588–589, 708–710, 758–759 and holy war, 726–727 particular popes. See under papal names pre-Reformation era, 75–80 papal commissions, 54–55 Pareus, David, 310, 382, 457 Paris University faculty of theology Irish Catholic exiles at, 341 pre-Reformation era, 175–178, 187 theological education, 95–96, 97, 413–414 theological and political controversies, 179–185, 493 theological regulation, 49–50, 59, 112, 178–179, 308 censorship, 64–65, 67, 177, 179, 182 Jansenism, response to, 182–183 Parker, Matthew, 58, 329 Pascal II, 589 Pascal, Blaise, 424, 490, 567 Pasi, Celso, 581–582

782

Index Peter of Ghent, 236 Petrarch, Francesco, 21, 24, 25 Petyt, Maria, 618–619 Peutinger, Konrad, 249 Philip II of Spain, 69, 209, 212, 241, 468, 723, 756 Philip IV of France, 76–77, 79 Philip the Evangelist, 246 Philippists (followers of Melanchthon), 56 Gnesio-Lutherans, disputes with, 51–52, 110, 266–269, 271–272, 310, 379, 416 Philips, Dirk, 129–130 philology of humanists, 21–23, 25–28, 30–31, 406 biblical humanism. See under biblical studies and theology physico-theology, 689–690 Piccart, Michael, 418 Piccolomini, Francesco, 483 Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni, 24, 25, 31 Pietism, 92, 282–286, 429, 484–485 Pighius (Pigge), Albert, 412, 497, 502–503 Pirckheimer, Caritas, 138, 169 Pirckheimer, Willibald, 249 Piscator (Fischer), Johann, 311, 426–427, 457 Pius IV, 67, 112 Pius V, 67, 206, 581, 719 Placard Affair, 59, 65 Plantin, Christopher, 205 Plato, 24, 411 Platonic Spiritualists, 352–354 de la Plaza, Juan, 240 Plener, Philip, 129 Poissy Colloquy (1561), 379–381 de Polanco, Juan, 677 Poland anti-Trinitarianism in, 303, 304–305, 367–368, 370 Racovian Catechism, 304, 368, 416, 440–441 Cracow University, 51, 304 Reformation, 303–305, 392–393 Thorn Colloquy (1645), 381, 428 Polanus von Polansdorf, Amandus, 419, 461 Pole, Reginald, 62, 66, 156, 738 politics and theology, 74–75, 93–94, See also history and theology Catholic discourse on papal authority, 86–88, 493, 501, 712–713 Council of Trent, 87, 175–176, 223, 480 Gallicanism, 87–88, 176, 178, 181, 183–184, 225 Jesuits, 223–226, 509 Paris faculty of theology, 179–185

School of Salamanca, 89–90 church history narratives. See history and theology ecclesial polity, attacks on, 85 Anabaptists, 82–83, 362 Calvin, 84–85, 86 invisible church idea. See invisible church idea Luther and Melanchthon, 80–82, 85–86, 89, 588–589 natural law discourse in Britain, 91–92 peasants’ movements (communalism), 83–84, 170, 351, 356 Zwingli, 82, 86 pre-Reformation era, 75–80, 175–178, 187–188 unifying initiatives, 92–93 universities, conflicts with civil rulers, 109–113 warfare. See just war theory Polman, Pontianus, 713, 716 Pomponazzi, Pietro, 70 Poole, Matthew, 462 popes. See papacy Porete, Marguerite, 610 Porta, Conrad, 534, 565 portraits of Luther, 14, 751–754 Portuguese Inquisition, 67, 69 postils (collections of sermons), 436, 513, 543, 553 Bullinger’s The Decades, 45, 291, 458, 539, 732–733 of Luther, 44, 261–262 of Stapleton, 209 potestas indirecta doctrine, 223–226 Praetorius, Abdias, 268 Pragmatic Law of Toledo, 65 de Pravia, Pedro, 242 preaching. See pastoral theology and preaching du Préau, Gabriel, 715 predestination Arminian Controversy, 110, 316–317 Calvinist/Reformed doctrine, 43, 86, 279, 280, 281, 291, 419–420, 482–483 Catholic disputes on, 566 Jansenism, 182–183, 210, 213–216, 225–230, 566–567 Louvain theologians, 208, 209–210 Lutheran doctrine, 279–281, 481–482 Scottish Reformed Church on, 301 pre-Reformation era biblical studies and theology, 35, 37, 38

783

Index Trinitarian controversies. See antiTrinitarianism Eastern Christianity, relations with, 389–393 ecclesiastical law. See ecclesiastical law Lutheranism. See Lutheran doctrines radical and dissenting groups, 345–349, 370, 539–542, 613–614, 728 Anabaptists. See Anabaptism anti-Trinitarians. See anti-Trinitarianism Spiritualists. See Spiritualism and science. See science and theology Zwinglianism. See Zwinglian doctrines Prüss-Beck, Margarethe, 140 psalters, 144–145, 514 Pseudo-Dionysius. See Dionysius publishing industry Calvin’s impact on, 19 catechisms. See under catechesis censorship. See censorship in China, 669 in England, 19–20, 341–342 Luther’s impact on, 9–13, 15–16 pre-Reformation era, 10, 11 Protestant Reformation, contribution to, 16–20, 607 Bible translations. See Bible, translations woodcut illustrations in texts, 747–749, 752–753 spiritual texts, 607 women’s publications. See women, publications Pufendorf, Samuel, 575, 731 Pulzone, Scipione, 742 pure Gospel (Reines Evangelium) slogan, 15 purgatory, 36 Puritanism, 45, 328–334, 343, 528, 614, 760–761 and Calvinist/Reformed doctrines, 330, 331, 419–420, 539 casuistical doctrines, 565–566 English Civil War, 734–735 and Presbyterianism, 329, 331–332, 333 and science, 680–681, 688

pre-Reformation era (cont.) canon law, 580 catechesis, 113–114 clergy, 149–150 disputations, 372 England. See England, pre-Reformation era natural law discourse, 569, 573 papacy, 75–80 politics and theology, 75–80, 175–178, 187–188 publishing industry, 10, 11 spirituality, 605 theological regulation, 48–49, 55, 62, 67–69, 71, 177 worship and sermons, 35, 36, 512, 517–518, 545–547 Presbyterianism, 306, 330, 339 and Puritanism, 329, 331–332, 333 in Scotland, 301, 302–303, 322, 331–332 Prierias (Mazzolini), Sylvester, 495–496, 562 priests. See Catholic Church, clergy printing. See publishing industry probabiliorism, 231, 422, 568 probabilism, 226–231, 422, 567–568 prophets and mystics. See under mysticism Protestantism, 248–249, 288, 415. See also Lutheran Church; Reformed Church Calvinism. See Calvinist/Reformed doctrines Catholic and Protestant spiritualities compared, 606–609 colloquies with Catholic Church, 372–375, 381 particular colloquies. See under town or city name Council of Trent, Protestant responses, 505–508 disputes within, 258–259, 275–276 Arminian Controversy, 110, 316–317 colloquies to resolve, 416 English disputes on worship. See under English Reformation and Anglican Church on Holy Communion. See under Holy Communion irenicism to resolve, 281–282, 381–384 in Lutheranism. See Lutheran doctrines, disputes on Sola Scriptura (by Scripture alone) doctrine, 92, 408–409 Swiss reform models, tensions between, 296–297

Quakerism, 614–615 Quenstadt, Johann Andreas, 284 Quintilian, 257 Rabus, Ludwig, 727 Racovian Catechism, 304, 368, 416, 440–441 radical and dissenting groups, 345–349, 370, 539–542, 613–614, 728

784

Index Anabaptists. See Anabaptism anti-Trinitarians. See anti-Trinitarianism Spiritualists. See Spiritualism Rainolds, John, 334 Ramism, 264–265, 311, 315, 419–420, 465 Ramón, Pedro, 649, 650 Raphael, 25 Ratio studiorum (Jesuit curriculum), 100–101 Ravesteijn, Josse (Tiletanus), 206 reading, teaching of, 118 Reformed Church, 288, 319. See also Lutheran Church; Protestantism clergy education. See theological education, Calvinist/Reformed studies lay church leadership, Calvin on, 84–85, 86 pastoral duties and preaching, 44–45, 512–513, 536–539 social backgrounds, 162, 167–168 doctrines Calvinist. See Calvinist/Reformed doctrines Heidelberg Catechism, 119–120, 309–311, 416 Zwinglian. See Zwinglian doctrines ecclesiastical law. See ecclesiastical law in England. See English Reformation and Anglican Church in France, 307–309 and invisible church idea, 85, 87 in Netherlands, 305–307, 312, 318–319 in Poland, 303–305, 392–393 in Scotland. See Scottish Reformation Swiss models, 296–297. See also Berne; Geneva; Zurich theological regulation, 53–54, 295, 732 civil authorities’ role, 60, 289–291, 293, 295, 296–297, 539, 733 Company of Pastors, 53, 60, 108, 109, 295 Consistory, 60, 85, 140, 295–296, 538–539 ordinances, 599–600 synods, 72, 92, 306–307 Zwingli’s reforms, 290–291 and universal church idea, 86 worship Calvin’s reforms, 295, 514, 524 iconoclasm. See iconoclasm of Reformed Church sermons, 44–45, 512–513, 536–539 Zwingli’s reforms, 324, 514, 520–521

Regensburg, Colloquies of 1541 (and Worms Colloquy [1540]), 374, 375–378, 469 of 1546, 378 regulation of theology. See theological regulation Reiffenstuel, Anaklet, 584–585 Reims-Douay Bible, 46 Reines Evangelium (pure Gospel) slogan, 15 Religious Peace of Augsburg, 56, 87, 375, 379, 724, 727–728, 731 religious war, 722–727. See also just war theory Rembrandt, 756 Remonstrants, 72, 307, 313, 316–317, 370 Resolutiones disputationum de indulgentiarum virtute (Luther), 63–64 Reuchlin, Johannes, 31, 37, 54, 493–494, 548–549 Rhau-Grunenberg, Johann, 13 Rhegius, Urbanus, 71, 535 Rhenanus, Beatus, 564, 713 de Ribadeneira, Pedro, 722–723 Ribeiro, Diogo, 654 de Riberra, Juan, 69 Ricardi, Antoine, 59 Ricci, Matteo, 645, 671, 672, 677 Ricci, Paolo, 366–367 Richer, Edmond, 50, 88, 181 de Ridder-Symoens, Hilde, 341 Ridley, Nicholas, 299, 324 Riedemann, Peter, 131, 357 de Rochette, Louis, 59 Roegiers, Jan, 212, 215–216 Rokyta, Johan, 398 Roman canon law. See under ecclesiastical law Roman Catechism, 118 Roman College (Collegium Romanum), 101, 103, 413, 668, 713, 714 Roman Inquisition, 51, 69, 70 Rosicrucianism, 431 Rostock University, 407, 599 Rothmann, Bernhard, 129 Roussel, Gérard, 50 Rubeanus, Crotus, 249, 494 Rubens, Peter Paul, 746–747 Rubio, Pedro, 243 Ruthenian (Kyivan) Church, 392–393, 397–400 Rutherford, Samuel, 303 Ryrie, Alec, 323

785

Index Sacramental Platonic Spiritualists, 352–353 sacramental theology, 511–512. See also baptism; Holy Communion; worship Calvin on sacraments, 522 Catholic Church Council of Trent on sacraments, 528–531 Holy Communion, 448, 478, 529–530 sacramental theology of preaching, 547 tabernacle design, 744–745 confession. See under ethics and moral theology Luther on sacraments, 514–515 sacred art. See art and theology de Sahagún, Bernardino, 237 de Sainctes, Claude, 180 de Saint-Samson, Jean, 620–621 Salamanca University, 51, 70, 206 Riberra visitation, 69–70 School of Salamanca, 88, 188–189 characteristics, 189–191 influence of, 197–199, 223, 224, 226, 243, 245–246 main issues addressed, 191–192, 246 natural law discourse, 88, 147–148, 224, 571–572 principal theologians, 192–197. See also Cano; Soto; Vitoria and Thomism, 88, 189, 192–193, 571–572, 637 de Salcedo, Juan, 240 sale of indulgences. See indulgences, sale of de Sales, Francis, 488–489, 607, 619–620 da Saliceto, Bartolomeo, 593–594 salvation. See grace/justification Salve Deus rex Judæorum (Lanyer), 142–143 Sampson, Thomas, 330–331, 332 Sánchez, Francisco, 70 Sancroft, William, 343 Sanders, Nicholas, 342 Sandeus, Felinus Maria, 594 San Marcos de Lima University, 243–244 Sattler, Michael, 128, 129, 503, 525, 540 Schleitheim Articles. See Schleitheim Articles Savonarola, Girolamo, 545, 624, 737–739 Saxony, Electoral. See Electoral Saxony Scharff, Johan, 431 Schatzgeyer, Kaspar, 497 Scheffler, Johann (Angelus Silesius), 618 Schiemer, Leonhart, 128 Schism, Western/Great, 76–77, 79, 87, 175, 580

Schlaffer, Hans, 128 Schleitheim Articles, 129, 356, 503, 558 doctrines, 38, 525, 540–541, 728 Schmalkaldic League, 258–259, 293, 325, 730 Schmidt, Peter, 158 Scholasticism, 21, 314, 557–558, 570 Aristotelian. See Aristotle, and theological education baroque Scholasticism of seventeenth century, 421–424, 684 Catholic studies, 95–96, 97, 98–99, 100, 178–179 Louvain University, 204, 206–207, 211–212 School of Salamanca’s innovations, 189–191, 196–197 humanist challenge to, 44, 105, 187, 373, 406, 407 coexistence, 189–191, 444, 489 Protestant Scholasticism, 106, 570, 574–575, 576 Scotism, 97, 98, 99, 177, 422, 547 Thomist. See Thomism Schorn-Schütte, Luise, 163, 164, 165, 166–167 Schultz, Hieronymus, 63–64 Schütz Zell, Katharina, 125–126, 140–142, 144–145, 169 van Schuurman, Anna Maria, 137 Schwenckfeld, Caspar, 132, 282, 353, 540 Neotic Platonist doctrines, 352–353 social background and education, 132, 160, 162, 170, 352 science and theology Cartesianism. See Cartesianism Copernican cosmology. See Copernican cosmology Protestant theologians, 93, 680–683 Bible and science, 683–688, 689 in England, 680–681, 688–690 later Lutherans, 685–686 Scottish Reformation, 300–303, 322, 327, 328, 331–332 and Catholicism, 339, 340 Scots Confession, 439 Scotus, John Duns (and Scotism), 97, 98, 99, 177, 422, 547, 573 Scribner, Robert, 132 scriptural studies. See biblical studies and theology Scripture alone. See Sola Scriptura (by Scripture alone) Sebastiano del Piombo, 738–740 Second Antinomian Controversy, 268

786

Index Second Helvetic Confession, 291, 304–305, 438 Séguier, Pierre, 183 seminaries, 102–103, 156–158 Seneca, 264, 487 de Sepúlveda, Juan Ginés, 90, 485 Sermon on Indulgence and Grace (Luther), 11 sermons. See pastoral theology and preaching Servetus, Michael, 27–32, 71, 295, 732 and Calvin, 296, 345, 366, 504–505 anti-Trinitarian doctrine, 32, 366 Shakespeare, William, 483–484, 487 Sheldon, Gilbert, 343 Shelford, Robert, 343 Sidney, Mary, countess of Pembroke, 144–145 Sielius (parish priest at Niederlauterbach), 152 de Sigüenza, Jose, 70 Simon, Richard, 461 Simons, Menno, 54, 129–130, 359, 364, 369–370, 541, 728 Six Articles (England, 1539), 57 Sixtus IV, 68 Sixtus V, 225, 445, 745 Sleidan, Johann, 705 Small Catechism (Luther), 56, 118–119 Society of Jesus. See Jesuits Socinian controversies. See antiTrinitarianism Sola Fide (by faith alone), 254–255, 269, 279, 481, 606 artistic representation, 750–751 Catholic responses, 202–203, 474–475 Lefèvre’s version of doctrine, 27 Sola Gratia (by grace alone), 35–36, 202–203, 254, 269, 349, 472 Sola Scriptura (by Scripture alone), 35–36, 39, 349, 353, 365, 408, 470 Anabaptist view, 360 artistic representation, 752 Calvinist view, 39–40, 92 Catholic responses, 202, 711–712 inner-Protestant disputes on, 92, 408–409 and Reines Evangelium (pure Gospel) slogan, 15 Zwingli on, 355 Some, Robert, 334 soteriology. See grace/justification de Soto, Domingo, 191–192, 194–195, 198, 246 on implicit faith (fides implicita), 637 on papal authority, 89, 90

South America. See Latin America Sozzini, Fausto, 367–368 Sozzini, Laelio, 367 Spain, 187–188 Latin American colonies. See Latin America mysticism in, 616–618 papal authority, discourse on, 88–91 Salamanca University. See Salamanca University Spanish Armada, 723 Spanish Inquisition, 51, 65–66, 67, 68–70, 139–140 Sparn, Walter, 163 Spener, Philipp Jakob, 283, 284–285, 488 Speyer, clergy in, 151–153, 157–158, 159 Spinoza, Baruch, 317–319, 429, 462–463 Spiritualism, 131–133, 348, 458, 540, 613–614. See also mysticism and Anabaptism, 131–132, 348, 351, 354, 357, 368–369 Lutheran origins, 349–350 Spiritualist groups, 350, 351–352 Biblical/Charismatic, 350–351 Noetic Platonic, 353–354 Sacramental Platonic, 352–353 spirituality, 604–605 Catholic and Protestant spiritualities compared, 606–609 mysticism. See mysticism pre-Reformation era, 605 and reform, 605–606 Spittelmaier, Ambrosius, 362 Stadlhuber, Josef, 157 Stancaro, Francesco, 303, 304 Standonck, Jan, 177 Stapleton, Thomas, 209–210, 414 von Staupitz, Johannes, 159, 162, 412 van den Steen (a Lapide), Cornelius, 211 Steinmetz, David, 36 Stephens, Thomas, 654, 664 Stewart, James, earl of Moray, 301 Strauss, Gerald, 120 Strigel, Victorin, 268 Sturm, Johannes, 249, 275 Suárez, Francisco, 198, 221, 223, 244, 431 just war theory, 718–719, 721–722 metaphysics of, 231, 423, 685 on probabilism, 228–229 on royal and papal authority, 89, 225 Sublimis Deus (papal bull, 1537), 237–238 Sulzer, Simon, 292–293 Surin, Jean-Joseph, 620 Swabian-Saxon Concord, 72, 273

787

Index theological education, 95 Anabaptist studies, 54 Calvinist/Reformed studies, 42–43, 53–54, 127, 419–421 Geneva Academy, 53, 107–109, 167–168, 296, 318, 319 Herborn Academy, 53–54, 311 Lausanne Academy, 107–108 Leiden University, 54, 108, 312–313, 318 Oxford and Cambridge Universities, 54, 314–316, 322–323, 334 Ramism, 264–265, 311, 315, 419–420, 465 scriptural basis, 416–418, 426–428, 455–459 Utrecht University, 313–314, 318 Zwingli’s reforms, 290 catechesis. See catechesis at Catholic universities, 95–96, 97, 98–99, 102, 154–156, 160 Italian universities, 97–98, 99, 112 Paris faculty of theology, 95–96, 97, 413–414 School of Salamanca. See under Salamanca University Council of Trent decrees on. See under Council of Trent by Dominicans and Franciscans, 96–97, 422–423 in England, 111–112, 176–177, 298 on ethics and moral theology, 568–570. See also ethics and moral theology at Jesuit schools and universities, 99–102, 180, 207, 413–415, 421–422, 470–471, 562–563 in Latin America, 241–244 of laypersons, 127 by catechesis. See catechesis by parents, 168–169 women and girls, 113, 136, 137–138, 169 Lutheran studies, 81, 110, 162, 170, 585 on ecclesiastical law, 597–599 humanist influence on, 104, 407–408 in German states. See German states, theological education; Wittenberg University scientific method, 258, 264–265, 409–411, 418–419, 424–426 scriptural basis, 408–409, 416–418, 426–428, 450–455 method and ethos, 405, 411–412 biblical studies. See biblical studies and theology

Swanson, Robert, 155 Swedish publishing industry, 52 Swiss Brethren Anabaptists, 130, 355–356, 364, 369 Swiss reform models, 296–297. See also Berne; Geneva; Zurich Syncretist Controversy, 281–282, 381, 428–429 Synergistic Controversy, 268 synods, 71–72, 92, 306–307 particular synods. See under town or city name systematic theology, 464–468 common doctrines, 468–471 controversialist dimension. See controversialist theology distinctive doctrines ecclesial authority, 479–480. See also clergy; laypersons; politics and theology grace/justification. See grace/ justification Holy Communion. See Holy Communion new doctrines, 480–481 gift and love, 86–87, 486–489 inner struggle, 482–485 predestination. See predestination tabernacle design, 744–745 Taft, Robert F., 386 Talon, Denis, 183 Tapper, Ruard, 203, 205, 207 Tauler, Johannes, 282, 347, 610, 611, 613 Taylor, Jeremy, 565 Taylor, Larissa, 545 Temporal Authority: To What Extent it Should be Obeyed (Luther), 89 Ten Articles (England, 1536), 57, 324, 758, 759–760 Ten Commandments (Decalogue), 116, 120, 241 ethics and moral theology, significance for, 559–561, 563, 569, 570–571, 573 graven images prohibition, 324, 560–561 Tepeyac, apparitions of, 237 Teresa of Ávila, 134, 135, 139–140, 145–146, 147, 412, 616–618 Tetrapolitan Confession (Confessio Tetrapolitana), 39, 259 Thayer, Ann, 547 Thekkedath, Joseph, 665 Theologia Deutsch, 611, 613

788

Index as “holy war,” 368, 731 Peace of Westphalia, 107, 346, 726–727, 731 Thirty-Nine Articles (England, 1559), 58, 62, 300, 326–327, 340, 439 Thomas (apostle), 635, 639, 653 Thomas Christians in Kerala, 661–662 Thomism, 97, 98, 99, 177, 226, 466. See also Scholasticism and Dominicans, 327–328, 422–423 and Jesuits, 100, 220–221, 413–415, 423 and School of Louvain, 203, 205, 209–210, 212–214 and School of Salamanca, 88, 189, 192–193, 571–572, 637 Aquinas’s doctrines, 543, 559–560, 569, 573, 574, 627–628, 636–637 in Latin America, 242, 243 Thorn Colloquy (1645), 381, 428 von Thüngen, Konrad, prince-bishop of Würzburg, 63 Tiletanus (Josse Ravesteijn), 206 Timpler, Clemens, 427, 432 Tintoretto, Jacopo, 742 To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation (Luther), 81 de Toledo, Francisco, 198, 563 Tolley, Bruce, 163–164, 165, 166 Torgau Book, 72, 273 Toribio de Benavente (Motolinia), 236 translations of the Bible. See Bible translations Transylvania, 368, 369 Travers, Walter, 91, 331–332 Tremellius, Immanuel, 325 Tridentine Catechism, 70, 118, 437 Tridentine Council. See Council of Trent Trinitarian controversies. See antiTrinitarianism Trinity College, Dublin, 334 Trutfetter, Jodocus, 63 Tübingen University, 159, 160, 164–165, 166, 407, 599 Eastern Christianity, engagement with, 390–391 theological regulation, 52 de Tudeschis, Nicholas (Panormitanus), 580, 590, 592, 594, 595 Tulchin, Allan A., 734 Turkish wars, 369, 389, 722, 729 Turretin, Francis, 318, 319, 462 Turretin, Jean Alphonse, 318

Enlightenment philosophies. See Enlightenment philosophies humanism. See humanism Scholasticism. See Scholasticism scientific method, 258, 264–265, 409–411, 418–419, 424–426 at monastic studia, 96–99, 100 of rural Catholic clergy, 153–154 at seminaries, 102–103, 156–158 universities conflicts with civil rulers, 109–113, 313 particular universities. See under town or city name theological regulation. See also ecclesiastical law Anabaptist doctrine, 60, 62, 70, 72 of Calvinist/Reformed doctrines. See Reformed Church, theological regulation censorship. See censorship Copernican cosmology controversy. See Copernican cosmology by councils, synods, convocations, and consistories, 71–72, 92, 306–307 by inquisitions, 67–70, 203, 615–616. See also Portuguese Inquisition; Roman Inquisition; Spanish Inquisition of Lutheran doctrines, 52–53, 56, 71, 72, 110, 262–263 by monarchs and civil rulers, 55 in Denmark and Sweden, 52–53 in England. See under Elizabeth I; Henry VIII; Mary I in France, 59–60, 61, 109–110 in Geneva, 60 in German states, 56–57, 63–64 in Holy Roman Empire, 55–56 in Low Countries, 56, 305 of mysticism, 615–616 by papal commissions, 54–55 pre-Reformation era, 48–49, 55, 62, 67–69, 71 by universities, 48–49 Catholic universities, 50–51, 70. See also Louvain University; Paris University faculty of theology Lutheran doctrines debated at, 50 Lutheran universities, 51–53 by visiting bishops or deputies, 60–62 witch-hunts, 71 Thirty Years War, 382, 392, 421 consequences, 86, 369

789

Index Viret, Pierre, 294 visible church idea. See invisible church idea visitations for theological regulation, 60–62 de Vitoria, Francisco, 188, 189, 192–194, 195, 246 influence of, 191–198, 223, 224, 242, 243 just war theory, 191, 193, 571–572, 718–721 publications, 193, 447 on royal and papal authority, 89–90 Voetius, Gisbertus, 313–314, 318, 458, 687–688 Vögelin, Ernst, 274–275 Vogler, Bernard, 165 Vokertszoon Coornhert, Dirck, 132 Vorstius, Conrad, 313, 316 Vossius, Gerard, 312 vowel points in Hebrew Scripture controversies, 460–462 Vulgate Bible translations from, 444–445 Council of Trent decree endorsing, 41, 202, 429, 444, 506 Erasmus’s translation, 26, 460, 489 Lefèvre’s philological analysis, 26 revised editions, 445 Valla’s philological analysis, 22–23

Twelve Articles (peasants’ manifesto), 83–84, 356 Tyacke, Nicholas, 337 Tyndale, William, 46, 66, 298, 449, 500–501 Ubaldini, Roberto, 50 de Ubaldis, Baldus, 588, 594 Üçeler, Antoni J., 650 uneducated theologians. See laypersons Unitarianism. See anti-Trinitarianism universal church idea, 86 universities conflicts with civil rulers, 109–113, 313 particular universities. See under town or city name theological education at. See theological education theological regulation by. See under theological regulation Uppsala University, 52 Urban VIII, 143, 726 Ursinus, Zacharias, 119–120, 275, 310 Ussher, James, 300, 334, 343 utopianism, 93 Utrecht University, 313–314, 318 Uytenbogaert, Johannes, 316, 392

Walpot, Peter, 83 Ward, Mary, 143 warfare, law of. See just war theory Wartburg Castle, Luther at, 9, 13, 17, 126, 265 Webster, Charles, 681 Weigel, Valentin, 282, 353, 613–614 Wesel, Synod of, 306, 311 Western Schism, 76–77, 79, 87, 175, 580 Westminster Confession, 54, 72, 300, 439–440, 468–469, 479, 482 Westphalia, Peace of, 107, 346, 726–727, 731 Whitaker, William, 332, 334 Whitgift, John, 58, 328, 331, 334–335 Wigand, Johannes, 269, 708 Wiggers, Johannes, 212–213 Wightman, Edward, 59 Wilcox, Thomas, 331 Wild, Johann, 45–46 Wilkins, John, 689 Wilkinson, John, 334 Willet, Andrew, 332 William I, Prince of Orange, 307, 312 William of Auvergne, 635 William of Ockham (and Ockhamism), 36–37, 97, 177, 453

Vadian (Vaidanus), Joachim, 249 Vagnone, Alfonso, 671, 675 de Valadés, Diego, 244 Valdés, Fernando, 65, 67 de Valencia, Gregorio, 198 Valeriano, Antonio, 237 Valignano, Alessandro, 644, 645, 650, 657, 662, 664, 672 Valla, Lorenzo, 21–23, 30, 442, 443, 710 Vatable, François, 31 Vaz, Andre, 654 Vázquez, Gabriel, 227–228, 229, 423, 568 de Vega, Andres, 197 Velenus, Ulrichus, 710, 712 de la Vera Cruz, Alonso, 242–243 Veritas ipsa (papal bull, 1537), 237–238 Vermigli, Peter Martyr, 298–299, 324, 325, 326, 331, 380, 570 Verstegan, Richard, 713–714 Vervaux, Johannes, 726 vestments, disputes on, 299, 329–331 Vienna University, 160 de Villeneuve, Drouet, 183–184 de Vio, Tomasso. See Cajetan (de Vio), Tomasso

790

Index Williams, George, 346, 366, 728 Wishart, George, 301 witch-hunts, 71 Witte, John, 587 Wittenberg Altar, 751–752 Wittenberg Bible, 18, 41, 46, 455, 752–753 Wittenberg Concord, 258, 271–272, 292, 293, 522 Wittenberg publishing industry, 11–13, 17–18 Wittenberg University, 10–11, 103–104, 160, 161, 165, 264, 265 canon law studies, 597–598 English exiles at, 298 Luther at, 36–37, 41–42, 103, 104–105, 159, 408–409, 451 Melanchthon at, 104, 159, 252 teaching method, 104–106, 407–408, 410, 419, 467, 570 Philippists at, 51–52, 56 school of theology, 104–105, 257–258, 281–282, 420, 425 Witzel, Georg, 374 Wolf, Hubert, 157 women, 134–135. See also laypersons ordination barred to, 138–140 pastoral ministry by, 140–142, 540, 652, 654 prophets and mystics. See under mysticism publications, 135, 136–137, 140, 147, 169 “Letter to the Women of Kentzingen” (Schütz Zell), 141–142 Marian texts, 143–144 pamphlets, 124–125 psalters, 144–145 Salve Deus rex Judæorum (Lanyer), 142–143 by Teresa of Ávila, 145–146, 147, 412, 616–617 theological discourse, exclusion from effects, 146–148 mentalities supporting, 135–137 theological education, 113, 136, 137–138, 169 witch-hunts, 71 woodcut illustrations in Lutheran texts, 747–749, 752–753 Worcester, Thomas, 555 Worms, Colloquies of 1521, 349 Edict of Worms, 50, 64 of 1540 (and Regensburg Colloquy [1541]), 374, 375–378, 469 of 1557, 271–272, 378–379

worship Anglican Church. See under English Reformation and Anglican Church Council of Trent on, 132–133 Holy Communion. See Holy Communion hymns. See hymns and hymnals Knox on, 299–300, 301, 302, 304 liturgical Bible readings, 435–436 Lutheran reforms, 16–17, 36, 86, 512–513, 518–519 pre-Reformation era, 517–518 by radical lay groups, 132–133 Reformed Church. See under Reformed Church sermons. See pastoral theology and preaching Württemberg, 52, 155–156, 272 clergy in, 163–166 Tübingen University. See Tübingen University Wycliffe, John, 68, 71, 85, 297 Xavier, Francis, 643, 644, 653, 655–656, 664 Xavier, Jerónimo, 663–664 Xu Guangqi, 674–675 Yajirō (Anjiró), 644–645 Yan Mo, 677–678 Yang Tingyun, 675 Zabarella, Giacomo, 93, 420, 465, 489, 590, 685 Zanchi, Hieronymus, 417, 419, 574, 686–687 Zegers, Nicholas Tacitus, 204 Zell, Matthias, 125, 161 Zhu Zongyuan, 675 de Zuñiga, Gaspar, 197–198 Županov, Ines G., 656–657, 661 Zurich, 288–289 Anabaptism in, 81–82, 83, 127–128, 290, 355–356, 363 clergy in, 161, 162, 165, 166 Colloquy (1523), 373–374 English exiles in, 298, 299, 326 Reformation, 82, 84, 289–292, 355 Swiss reform models compared, 296–297 Zwingli, Ulrich, 160, 161, 732. See also Reformed Church doctrines. See Zwinglian doctrines humanism, influence on, 25–32, 39, 289, 536 on laypersons’ spiritual authority, 123, 125, 126–127

791

Index baptism, 519–520 grace/justification, 31 Holy Communion (Lord’s Supper), 259–260, 291, 305, 324, 519–522 penance and absolution, 563–564 predestination, 86 worship, 324, 514, 520–521

Zwingli, Ulrich (cont.) on pastoral duties, 536–537 preaching by, 513, 536 on scriptural authority, 39, 456, 461 and Zurich Reformation, 82, 289–291, 355 Zwinglian doctrines, 409. See also Calvinist/ Reformed doctrines

792