Chapter 39: The Dissidents from Lutheranism and Calvinism

In 1523, Luther published the treatise Jesus-Christ was born Jewish, which accused the papacy of having distanced the Jews from the truth faith. The Church had confined them to usury; it had calumnied them, accused them of “using the blood of Christians to remove their bad ordor,” and “I do not know what [other] nonsense.” “If we would like to help them,” the Reformer wrote, “it is the law of Christian love that we must apply to them, not the law of the Popes.”[424]

What became of such beautiful provisions, after the “Constantinian” turn of the religion called reformed, and the appeal to a holy war against the peasants? In 1543, two pamphelts were published back to back by the master of Wittenberg: Against the Jews and their Lies and Shem, Hamephoras.

Jean Delumeau judged it useful to yield some extracts from writings that Hitler would print in millions of copies:

The Christ, the Reformer [Martin Luther] writes, did not have “enemies more venomous, more determined, more bitter than the Jews.” He “who lets himself steal, sin and curse for them has only to (...) grovel on his knees, to adore this sanctuary (...) then to glory himself for having been merciful (...): Christ will compensate him on the day of the Last Judgment with the eternal fire of Hell.” When Judas was hanged, “the Jews sent their servants with platters of money and pitchers of gold to collect his piss along with the other treasures, and then they ate and drank this shit, and had thus acquired eyes so penetrating that they perceived in the Scriptures glosses that were not found by either Matthew or Isaiah” ... “When God and the angels hear a Jew fart, there are such bursts of laughter and gamboling!”

“Observe all that the Jews have suffered for fifteen hundred years and there will be much worse in Hell (...). They must tell us why (...) they are a people who are rejected by God, are without a king, without prophets, without a temple; they can’t give any other reason than their sins...” “Never has the anger of God manifested itself with more brilliance than on these people.”

“To make this blaphemous doctrine disappear, it will be necessary to set fire to all their synagogues and, if something remains after the fire, to cover it with sand and mud so that one can no longer see the smallest tile or rock from their temple... One must prohibit Jews from being among us and on our soil, and from praising God, praying, teaching or singing, upon pain of death.”[425]

In that same year, 1523, when Luther extolled a certain tolerance for the Jews, he also propagated the notion of the heresy of prudent reservation, which no doubt intimated to him his own destiny:

“If you want to extirpate the heresy,” Luther wrote in 1523, “above all you must know how to remove it from the heart and to provide men with a way to divert themselves through a profound movement of the will. By force you will not exhaust it, but you will instead reinforce it... Because if by force one burns all the Jews and the heretics, one will not convince nor convert a single one through these means.”[426]

But (Jean Delumeau notes) after the violence of Th. Munzter and the war of the peasants, and while the princes and towns adhered in great numbers to the Reformation, here Luther changed his tone, by virtue of another logic, contrary to the first one: Protestantism is the return to Scripture, the removal of the “novelties” — the Roman “superstitions” as well as the “sacramentalism” of Zwingli. Inversely, “the wickedness of the world” manifests itself as both “idolatry and heresy.” The State can not tolerate these Satanic aberrations. The Reformer thus judged necessary the intervention of civil authority so as to bring an end to “abominations” such as Mass. Under threats, the Chapter of the Collegiate Church of Wittenberg ceased celebrating Mass on Christmas 1524. Two years later, Luther wrote to John, the new Elector of Saxony: “There must only be a single kind of preaching in each place.” In 1527, he demanded that the Elector organize “ecclesiastical visits” to his territory. Thenceforth, in the Lutherian countries, the State would control the organization of the Church, would break religious deviances, and had to look after the preaching of the Gospels. The “German mystical spiritualists,” disappointed with Luther, had good sport reproaching him, as well as the other reformers of the people, with having substituted “a new papacy,” a “papacy of paper” (the Bible) for the Roman papacy. For Schwenckfeld, Luther “led us out from Egypt and through the desert, across the Red Sea, but he left us there, wandering aimlessly, everything striving to persuade us that we were already in the Promised Land.” A little later, Weigel would reproach the “Pope of Wittenberg” with having organized a new slavery and persecuting the inspired.[427]

Like the Popes that he vilified, Luther indeed did not disdain from adopting the ordinary hypocrisy that, to serve powerful interests, one must choke off with the left hand the morality caressed with the right. When Philippe of Hess demanded the authorization to marry a second spouse in a just wedding, the spiritual master, after having equivocated, accepted on the condition that the affair remain secret. The recognized Landgrave sent a cask of Rhineland wine as the price for the indulgence. At least Pope Jules II paid Michel-Ange with money extorted from the Catholics.

Calvin knew nothing of such weaknesses. He hated detested with a visceral hatred and his faith never tolerated the least lapse. Several months after having assassinated Michael Servetus, while Sebastian Castellion (*) set himself against such barbarity, Calvin published a Declaration to Maintain the True Faith, in which he declared:

Our merciful [one], who takes great pleasure in letting the heresies go unpunished (...) would like — out of fear that the Church of God is not defamed by too much rigor — that one makes a fashion of all the errors... Therefore God does not want that we spare either the towns or the people, indeed, to the point of razing the walls and exterminating the memory of the inhabitants and intimidating everyone as a sign of a much greater hatred, for fear that the infection might spread further.[428]

(*) In the Treatise of the Heretics, Castellion wrote: “We see that there is hardly any sect — today there are so many of them — that does not see the others as heretical: with the result that, if in one city or region you are esteemed to be truly loyal, in the next one you are esteemed to be heretical.”[429]

And Theodore of Beze raised the stakes:

Tyranny is a lesser evil than having license such that each one makes his own fantasy and it is better to have a tyrant, nay, even a cruel one than not having a prince, or having one under whom it is permitted for each person to do what he wants to do... Those who do not want the magistrate to mix himself up in religious affairs, and principally to punish heretics, scorn what the Word [Parole] of God expresses ... and bring ruin and extreme destruction to the Church.[430]

The Prince “must erect and maintain good edicts against those who by simple stubborness want to resist the establishment of the true religion, as we see our time in being practiced with respect to the papacy, the Anabaptists and other heretics in England, Denmark, Sweden, Scotland, a good part of Germany and Switzerland.”[431]

Johannes Denck

While the shadow of Lutheranism and Calvinism threatened to spread over the world an obscurantism that had the fallacious advantages over Rome of reason and freedom, Johannes Denck was — along with Sebastian Castellion — one of the rare, lucid and sincere men for whom human feeling had the upper hand over beliefs and ideologies that were so quick to suffocate under their sublime abstractions.

Denck was a member of no party other than his own; he did not aspire to govern others. To emancipate himself from all constraints appeared to him a sufficient task. Lutherian freedom did not accommodate itself to such license — indeed, it was hardly reconciable with any church, it is true.

Born in 1500 in Habach, in Upper Bavaria, Denck entered the University of Ingolstadt at the age of 17. While pursuing his studies at Basle, he worked as a proofreader at a print shop and perfected his Latin, Greek and Hebrew. He read Erasmus and was passionate about medieval mysticism and adhered to the ideas of Thomas Muntzer. On the insistance of the Lutherian Oecolampade, he was named Rector of the Saint-Sebald school at Nuremberg when he was 23 years old. He got married and frequented the milieu that, without anarchronism, can be called libertarian.

Like other great preindustrial towns, Nuremberg oscillated in the undertow of the Reformation between Lutherian tyranny, disappointment with imperfect freedoms and the old Catholic current in which the restless and disenchanted ebbed. Indifference to the [whole] religious thing, which had dominated the absolute reign of Catholicism according to the imperative ritual observances, changed into cold and willful skepticism.

A number of strong spirits, including the clergy, no doubt shared the atheism of Thomas Scoto or Hermann of Rijswijck but were not emboldened enough to claim it, that is, beyond the people who possessed the means of their insolence — such as Frederick II or the condottiere Montefeltro, whose cask carried the inscription that promised a beautiful future: “Neither God nor master.” The contestation of the existence of God now resulted in the multiplication of dogmatic truths and parties of the “true faith.”

The affair of the “three Godless painters”[432] offered to the municipality the occasion to rage against the party of the skeptics. The banter that was opposed to the religions too often found complacent ears among the people. It sharpened the language of the intellectuals and the artists. The three painters put into question (the brothers Behaim) enjoyed the friendship of Johannes Denck, whose independence of spirit had more than once irritated the Lutherian notables, Osiander in particular.

The council would summon him to appear and demanded a confession of faith from him that would wash away all suspicion. Denck complied and expounded upon his doubts with a provocative sincerity in two successive texts.

Examining the belief in which he had been educated, he apparently adopted the position that it was a matter of a purely fictive faith, “because it had not triumphed over my spiritual poverty, my inclination to sin, my weakness and my sick situation (...). I will not undertake to pretend that I now possess the faith that translates itself into life, although I see clearly that my disbelief can no longer continue before God.” And he added: “All believers are, at one moment or another, unbelievers. To become believers, they must let their passions and the terrestrial man die, in such a fashion that it is no longer they who live, such as they might in their nonbelief, but God who lives in them through the mediation of the Christ.”[433]

God’s presence acting in man freed him from all constraints and all sin: such would be the doctrine of those Calvin would call the “Spiritual Libertines.”

On 25 January 1525, Denck was condemned to banishment. Forced to leave his family and stripped of his university position, he took refuge in June 1525 among the Anabaptists of Saint-Gall, who were themselves victims of the hatred of the Lutherians; he would soon shock them with his conceptions of individual freedom. Wandering led him to Augsburg, where he stayed up to October 1526, drafting Wer die Wahre warlich lieb hat,[434] a balance sheet of paradoxes, contradictions and absurdities in the Bible, which brought him to this conclusion: the quarrels about interpretation had no shared meaning, only the presence of God (when the Spirit deigned to reveal it), which signified and served as a guide to existence through the spontaneity of the impulses that it engendered.

Hostility from the Lutherians forced Denck into exile again. The same fate awaited him in Strasbourg, where Bucer and Capito denounced him for subversive activities.

He was already worn out by his solitary combat when he arrived in Basle in September 1527. Oecolampade was disposed to accord him asylum on the condition that he adjured. Denck wrote a kind of confession, mixing a few concessions (dictated by weakness) with opinions close to those of Schwenckfeld and his notion of the inward man. Oecolampade would enter into the tradition of the inquisitorial lie by publishing it under the title (deceptive at the very least) The Abjuration of Hans Denck.

When Denck died from plague in Basle at the age of 27, he was about to publish Von der Wahren Liebe.[435] In it he insisted on the following theme: he who loves God and has God in his heart need not bother with institutions, which only blind him.

In 1528, two of his texts, which appeared as the preface and the appendix to the Deutsche Theologie, made it clear “that the creature is necessary to God and that the man deified by illumination enjoys the union with Him as well as with the Christ,” which was an idea that the philosopher Jacob Boehme — another victim of the New [Protestant] Churches — would develop in the Seventeenth Century.

The Nineteenth Century would see in Denck one of the pioneers of free thought. No doubt he influenced the lucid and tormented conscience of Kierkegaard. Nevertheless, it seems that the combined hatred of the Protestants and the Catholics was caused by the impregnation of the Free-Spirit, which was discernible in this thesis: “Where there is faith, there is no sin; where there is no sin, there resides divine virtue.”[436]

Sebastian Franck

A philosopher and historian, Sebastian Franck belonged to the very small number of humanists who allied an unfailing passion for tolerance and respect for life with intelligence.

Born in Donauworth, in Souable, in 1499, he enrolled at the University of Heidelberg, where he associated with Martin Bucer, the future master of Strasbourg. Despite his contacts with Luther after 1519, he began his ecclesiastical career in the Catholic Church, which he left around 1525. An evangelistic preacher in the region of Nuremburg, he married Ottilie Behaim, sister of the painters Barthold and Sebald, disciples of Durer and [various] free spirits to whom all forms of religion were repugnant.

Nevertheless, he also took a position against the justification through faith defended by Johannes Denck, friend of the Behaims, and adopted a position that was in conformity with Christian principles. But in 1529 he resigned his ecclesiastical functions, moved to Strasbourg, associated with Michael Servetus and Caspar Schwenckfeld, and increasingly adopted Denck’s attitude, in which convictions only had meaning in the coherence between ideas and a life stripped of artifice and hypocrisy. Such was the spirit that animated his masterpiece, Chronica, Zeytbuch and Geschictbibel (Chronicles, Annals and History of the Bible), published in 1531. Erasmus took offense at a citation and denounced him to the Council of Strasbourg; with the support of Bucer, he got Franck expelled. Exposed to the hatred of Erasmus and the Lutherians, and condemned by Melanchton, he ended up as a printer in Ulm, the Council of which rejected several demands for his expulsion, including one attempted by Philippe of Hess, Luther’s protector. Franck took the time to publish several personal works and a treatise by Cornelius Agrippa, before being banished in 1530. Taking refuge in Basle, where he entered into a second marriage with the heiress from a family of great publishers, he did not cease publishing — his collection of proverbs enjoyed a great popularity — and fighting for tolerance and the suppression of the death penalty. (“If the choice was given to me, I would much rather be in the condition of many whom the world has condemned as heretical than in that of those whom it has canonized.”[437]) He died in 1542, scarcely 43 years old.

Hostile to all forms of ecclesiastical organization, he rejected the authority of the priests as well as that of the Scriptures. The Gospels, he said, had replaced pontifical authority with a papieren Papst (a paper Pope). This was the cause of all evil; he denounced it in a society dominated by the strength and power of the Prince. No war was just because all wars derived from the principle of appropriation. On the other hand, his pessimism hardly accorded any credit to revolt. Closer to the Tao than to La Boetie, he contented himself with identifying God with a feeling of interior plenitude, in which he dreamed that brutality and the misery of a changeless world were annihilated.

In the insurmountable and vain confrontation in which truths fought each other bitterly, tolerance represented the only human virtue. (“Thus take from each sect what is good and leave the rest to the Devil.”[438]). This sufficed to bring down upon him the animosity of the majority of the humanists, ideologues and sectarians of his time, from the Catholics to the Anabaptists. On the other hand, Sebastian Castellion did everything he could to distribute his works, to which Valentin Weigel, Jacob Boehme, Dirk Coornherdt and the historian Gottfried Arnold paid homage.

Carlstadt And Schwenckfeld

The rivalry of power that quickly opposed Luther to Andreas Rudolf Bodenstein, also known as Carlstadt, determined a rivalry of opinion that was even more subject to uncertainty than the dogma of the reforms that were incomfortably cemented to the controversies. The Constantinian Catholic Church had hardly preceded otherwise, but its absolutism treated doubts with the sword. The similar operation attempted by Luther, Calvin and Henry VIII of England no longer inscribed itself in the same historical conditions. Underneath the predominance of the agrarian mode of production, the mole of merchantile expansion was at work. The progress of values open to modernity no longer guaranteed the stability of the divine order and the unchanging power of its ministers.

The defeat of the Roman Church, the power of which was only imperfectly restored by the counter-offensive of the Council of Trente, thus prohibited the despotic pretensions of the popes of the Reformation to go beyond local tyrannies that poorly resisted contestation.

Unlike Denck, Munzter, Storch, Hoffmann and Schwenckfeld, Carlstadt did not have a doctrine properly speaking. He contented himself with scorning Luther, knocking around that conceited wimp whose shadow extended over Europe.

Born around 1480, Carlstadt studied philosophy and theology in Erfurt (1499), then in Cologne (1500). There he was, professor of theology, exegete of the Bible and honest doctor at the University of Sienna. Interested in Luther’s demands, he soon clashed with the man’s intransigence, for which the dogmatic interpretation of sacred texts had the upper hand over the generosity of the heart’s impulses. Was it not precisely the most sensitive part, nay, the most sensual part of man, that most ardently fought against the Roman clergy?

Carlstadt’s meeting with Thomas Muntzer, whose revolutionary millenarianism both fascinated and frightened him, hastened the break with Luther, who chased him from Wittenberg. Taking refuge in Orlamuende, where he came out against the necessity of baptism and communion, he was expelled on the insistence of his old friend, who pursued him in hatred, especially where he had the support of the princes. Carlstadt would only find peace in the company of Zwingli, who founded a rival Church in Zurich and did not follow Luther. Carlstadt would defend his positions, which were close to those of Denck, who estimated that the sincerity of faith dispensed with all spiritual authority. He was teaching at the University of Zurich when he died from plague in 1541.

Freedom was the cause of the break between Luther and Caspar Schwenckfeld (1490–1561), whose sect experienced equal persecution under the Catholics and the Lutherians. In the line of Denck, he rejected the sacraments and religious rites in favor of faith, in which humanity founded its feeling of conformity with the designs of God. He put the accent on the inward man, whose mystical experiences participated in illumination. Certain Pietists would later claim his teachings.

Michael Servetus

A physician and humanist, born around 1509 in Villaneuva, Spain, Michael Servetus owed his dramatic end less to an audacity of thought — more well-known than it would appear, if not less imprudent — than to a settling of accounts to which the morbid authority of John Calvin humbled itself. His medical studies at the University of Toulouse and the University of Paris induced in him, as in Rabelais, a certain skepticism in theological matters. The man who discovered the mechanisms of the circulation of blood in the lungs would experience some difficulty in finding clarity in the Trinity that was a part of the Constantinian arsenal and had presided over the instauration of Catholicism as the religion of the State.

Anti-trinitarianism, popularized by Socin and his friends, responded less to a theological preoccupation than to the questioning of the Church through the derision of a principle that had never succeeded in getting itself out of trouble and the mystical character of which in fact dissimulated the political necessity of holding firm between God (the Father) and humankind (the Son) the balance of the Spirit that governed the temporal in the name of a celestial mandate.

Published in 1531, Servetus’ De trinitatis erroribus justified Arius and the old Gnosticism by denying the existence of the Spirit — and thus the Church — as distinct beings. According to Servetus, everything took place between the Logos, which was eternal, and the Son, who was not.

In 1553, the anonymous publication of Servetus’ Christianismi restitutio drew down upon him threats from the Inquisition. Arrested in Lyon and imprisoned, he had the good fortune to escape and the misfortune of going to Geneva, that is, near-by Calvin, with whom he had exchanged letters more than once. The Restitutio was an ironic take on Calvin’s Institutio and it put Calvin on his guard inasmuch as Servetus adopted positions that were close to those of Anabaptism. But his freedom of morals and language especially worked upon Calvin like an insult to his majesty as a prophet. An unjust trial, to which no one gave credit (because the complaints offered no common measure with the accusations that had been made against Jacob Gruet), succeeded where the Inquisition had failed and would benefit Rome. Servetus was burned alive on 27 October 1553.[439]

Sebastian Castellion

By the force of things, the Reformation inscribed itself in a movement of desacralization inherent in the merchantile expansion that, up to the Twentieth Century, reduced the religions of the indistrialized nations to supermarket junk. With its multiple sects, Protestantism marked the transition from clerical theology — supported by a huge apparatus of popes and monarchs of divine right — to the ideologies founded on a restrictive ethics that oscillated between totalitarianisms of the nationalist or collectivist type and the demand for freedom that in fact authorized the becoming of the economy.

The importance of morality in the Reformed religion prolonged the will of the reformers who, starting in the Eleventh Century and especially in the whirlpool of urban freedoms, intended to moralize the Church. Even if ethical despotism was most often succeded by the tyranny of dogmatic prescriptions, the absence of a sacred orthodoxy — of a rectilinear perspective in which God was the point of flight and arrival — no longer authorized one to speak of heresies from the moment that Protestantism occupied the predominant position in a given country or region.

If Calvin treated Servetus as a heretic, this was because he estimated himself to be — as much as the Pope did — the elect of God, fixing in Geneva the New Jerusalem that did not stop fluctuating geographically. On the other hand, his role as puritan dictator took the upper hand during the polemic between him and Sebastian Castellion. The controversy was no longer theological: it was ideological. It put into question the inhumanity of the repressive discourse attributed to God.

The official history makes a lot of Erasmus, the humanist and anti-Semite, intellectual and misogynist, defender of freedom and partisan of the death penalty for heretics, whom he occasionally denounced. He knew nothing of Guillaume Postel, who discerned in the emancipation of women the foundation of a human society, nor Castellion, who fought for tolerance.

Born in 1515 in Saint-Martin-du-Fresne in the Bugey, where the influence of the Vaudois continued to exist, Sebastian Castellion studied in Lyon and associated with the humanists who were seduced by the new ideas. The spectacle of the persecutions and his reading of Calvin’s The Christian Institution won him over to the Reformation. He left for Strasbourg, then Geneva, where Calvin offered him a professor’s position in 1542. His Sacred Dialogues reflected his first hesitancies concerning Calvin’s growing authoritarianism. In it he celebrated tolerance and remarked that “There is no one who more obstinately resists the truth than the great ones of this world.” He soon left Geneva, having attracted the animosity of the man whom he had the naivete to admonish for his sectarianism.

Reader of Greek at the University of Basle, he provided his first manifestation of a free conscience in the preface to his translation of the Bible into Latin. Indignant over the execution of Servetus in 1553, which inspired him to write De haereticis an sit persequendi? (Basle, 1654), he developed a doctrine that was opposed to predestination, which Calvin used to justify his own crimes.

Published in 1562, Castellion’s Advice to Distressed France called for universal tolerance and refused to “force consciences.” It opposed the fanaticisms and horrors of the wars undertaken for the greatest glory of God. Rarely has a book been welcomed by such unanimous reprobation. Lutherians, Calvinists, Catholics and humanists all judged the project to abolish the death penalty for the crime of heresy to be criminal. His nephew and brother-in-law, guilty of having introduced the book into Geneva, had to take flight. Until his death on 29 September 1563, Castellion did not cease diffusing throughout all of Europe letters that extolled freedom of thought and were sent to all those whom he estimated capable of sharing his ideas and spreading the effects.[440]