18 April Luther Defies Charles V at the Diet of Worms. The Spread of Protestantism

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1 18 April 1521 Luther Defies Charles V at the Diet of Worms The Spread of Protestantism I despise the fury and favour of Rome Let them condemn and burn my books I will condemn and publicly burn the whole papal law, that slough of heresies. Martin Luther (10 July 1520) On the afternoon of 18 April 1521, in a hall in the city of Worms, the German theologian Martin Luther confronted Charles V, the young Habsburg prince recently elected Holy Roman Emperor. Early-sixteenth-century Germany was a dynamic Christian culture. More churches and religious charities were being established on German soil than ever before and one in every nine Germans was a priest. But just because it was so Catholic and religious, Germany was ready to be scandalized by the luxury and worldly ambitions of the Renaissance Papacy. Luther s anti-papal tirades were having an incendiary effect. Now he had been summoned to explain himself. The Imperial Diet was the central representative institution of the Holy Roman Empire, bringing together on a regular, and peripatetic, basis the rulers of the patchwork of territories which comprised that loose federation. In 1521 the Diet was meeting in the city of Worms and, as emperor, Charles was presiding over it. In January of that year the Pope had excommunicated Luther, a monk of the Augustinian order who was also teaching at the University of Wittenberg. For the past four years Luther had been drawing out the implications of his central doctrine of justification by faith: humanity stood alone before God and needed no priests or saints to intervene on its behalf. Only God, not the Church, could save sinners and it was the quality of inner faith which justified human beings in God s sight. In June 1520 the Pope had issued his formal Bull Exsurge Domine (Lord, Cast him out) which condemned Luther on forty-one articles of his teaching. His writings were then publicly burned in Rome. The students at Wittenberg retaliated by making a bonfire of some works of Catholic theology while Luther himself consigned a copy of the Papal Bull to the flames. He had raised the most fundamental of all questions: what is the basis of authority and of the laws which enforce obedience?

2 Luther s rebellion started as a question of theology and church government but it had inevitable political consequences. In his polemic against the Papacy Luther was supported by his local prince, Frederick the Wise, elector of Saxony. Frederick, like many other German princes, thought the issues raised were so important that the reformer should explain his case to the Diet. This enraged the Papacy, which thought the Diet should be automatically supportive of its case. But by now the reform movement had become a popular movement stirring powerful, sometimes anti-italian, nationalism. Having escaped the confines of the university, the court, the church and the monastery, it had now taken to the streets. Which is why, when Luther entered Worms, a troop of German knights accompanied him and the town was filled with his supporters. He appeared before Charles V at the session of the Diet which met on 17 April. When asked to recant he asked for a day to consider. The following afternoon he had a bigger audience before him since the Diet was meeting in a larger hall. Luther now delivered his reply in a prepared speech: he would only recant if he became convinced of his own error either by reason or by scripture. He was guided, he said, by his conscience and every human being s conscience was bound by the word of God. The Diet dissolved in confusion with the Catholic theologian Johann Eck and Luther shouting at each other. Luther probably did not say Here I stand, I can do no other. But the phrase became famous because it really did sum up his position. He is the hero therefore not only of the Protestant Reformation but of the voice of the stubborn individual conscience. With his princely supporters absenting themselves, a rump Diet passed the Edict of Worms, which declared Luther an outlaw and proscribed his writings. This limited his movements for the rest of his life. After a pretended abduction, he was smuggled to the castle of Wartburg near Eisenach, where he stayed until Here he started work on his translation of the New Testament, one of the great classics of German prose and a major element in the consequent spread of German literacy and education. German anti-papalism was not new. Its strength in the fifteenth century had resulted in the Roman curia allowing individual princes an increased control over Church appointments and land. But the Papacy s monetary demands from all Catholic princes was increasing in the early sixteenth century partly to pay for its own magnificence but also to finance its military role in the internecine wars between the Italian states. France, England and Spain, countries with a newly revived tradition of vigorous, central royal administration, were able to resist this pressure. But the German territories, where authority was dispersed among so many little states, were more vulnerable to Papal demands and

3 therefore fertile soil for Lutheran protest. There were other forces at work undermining the Church. Renaissance learning ( humanism ) was recovering the key texts of Greek and Latin antiquity and getting rid of the accumulated errors of the centuries during which monks and other clergy had copied and transmitted those works in manuscript form. This scholarly revival was not of itself anti-catholic but it did make for a more questioning attitude towards authority. Scholasticism, the philosophical method built up by the mediaeval church, emphasized transmitted authority but the freshness and elegance of the new literary humanism made that tradition look stale and derivative. This was why, in February 1517, Luther wrote a series of theses against the Scholastic theologians. But it was the ninety-five theses that he wrote in October of the same year which galvanized first Germany and then Europe. His objection was to the sale of indulgences, Papal dispensations from serving time in purgatory. They might require contrition in order to be effective but they were still pieces of paper bought by money which went to the Papacy. This was big business in 1517 since the Papacy needed the money to build its new basilica of St Peter s in Rome and the German sale of indulgences was coordinated by the great Augsburg banking family of the Fuggers. Half of the money raised went to Albert, the young archbishop of Mainz, who was heavily in debt having paid his way into a series of high ecclesiastical jobs. Indulgences summed up all of Luther s deepest feelings against the edifice of a corrupt Catholic sacramentalism bent on manipulating God s will. Once his questioning started, much else was rejected as well: Papal primacy, the infallibility of the councils of the Church, transubstantiation of the blood and wine into the body and blood of Christ, and clerical celibacy were all dumped unceremoniously. Luther s idea of the priesthood of all believers consciously displaced the spiritual perks of clerical professionals. The seven sacraments were reduced to just three: baptism, the Lord s Supper and penance. This spiritual and inward understanding of Christianity spoke to many Germans and they could also read about it. Printing still a new trade in 1517 transformed the prospects for Luther s rebellion and he was a prodigious pamphleteer. Luther was lucky that, with an election to the throne of the empire imminent in , the Papacy needed the support of the elector Frederick and therefore did not stamp on him immediately. Charles V, in deciding what to do about Luther and the German rulers who supported him, also had to consider his own quarrels with the Papacy and with the French crown. And he needed as many allies as possible to build up a coalition against the Turks. This was why the Diet

4 of Speyer (1526) suspended the Edict of Worms and decided that each prince should behave within his own territories according to his own judgement answerable to God. It was the withdrawal of this concession at the second Diet of Speyer which caused the reforming princes to draw up the Protest which gave Protestantism its name. Luther relied on these princes in order to carry out his reforms and believed that secular power should correct spiritual abuses, yet it was a major Reformation paradox that this call for an inward religion resulted in the increased power of state-organized churches. It was a further irony that the man who started this Reformation was soon horrified by popular Protestantism. The Anabaptist movement and associated enthusiasts rejected any secular or church authority and threatened a popular insurrection on iconoclastic lines, attacking religious paintings and sculpture. But Luther went deeper and thought the real power of idolatry lay in men s minds. Once that mental corruption had been corrected by individual repentance then the outward idols would just fall into disuse. This was too subtle a belief for extremists. Some of Luther s greatest fears were realized during the Peasants War an insurrection in the Black Forest in the summer of 1524 which defended the peasants ancient rights as defined in game and forest laws. The rebellion could also be presented as a further implication of Luther s successful defiance of authority. When the Thuringian peasants rose in the spring of 1525 Luther responded with one of his most violent tracts: Against the Murdering and Thieving Hordes of Peasants. The Reformation inaugurated a century and a half of European religious wars between equally dogmatic Protestant and Catholic states. It also separated Erasmus, Christendom s most famous scholar, from Luther. In Concerning Free Will, he rejected Luther s teaching that the human will was totally enslaved. This was a divide between the optimism of the earlier humanists and the harsh new world of dogmatic disputes. In 1531 the Protestant Imperial states of Germany established their own organization with its joint army, the Schmalkaldic League. The Peace of Augsburg (1555) drew the first phase of the Reformation to a close with its decision that the subjects of German rulers had to follow their ruler s faith. This decision was wrested from a reluctant Charles V, who looked back to the mediaeval ideal of Christendom an ideal which was now dead. The Catholic Church recovered and enjoyed its own reforming revival after it summoned the Council of Trent. In the second half of the century Protestant dynamism moved on from Luther and his legacy to Calvin and his austere theology of an Elect who had been predestined for salvation by God.

5 This represented a further hardening of the dogmatic arteries. But the cultural, social and political consequences of Protestantism were profound and longlasting. Protestant societies renewed their national institutions, reformed their schools and universities, and responded to the new commercial opportunities of the Atlantic economy. By the end of the seventeenth century, it was a striking fact that most of northern Europe was Protestant and richer than southern, Catholic, Europe.