The Swiss School of Church Reformers, and Its Propagation
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Chapter II – The Swiss School of Church Reformers, and Its Propagation. Switzerland. As Luther stands unrivalled in the group of worthies who conducted what is termed the Saxon Reformation, Zwingli’s figure is originally foremost in the kindred struggles of the Swiss. He was born* on New Year’s day, 1484, and was thus Luther’s junior only by seven weeks. His father was the leading man of Wildhaus, a parish in the Toggenburg, where, high above the level of the lake of Zürich, he retained the simple dignity and truthfulness that characterized the Swiss of olden times, before they were so commonly attracted from their native pastures to decide the battles of adjacent states.** Huldreich Zwingli, being destined for the priesthood, sought his elementary education at Basel and Bern, and after studying philosophy for two years at the university of Vienna, commenced his theological course at Basel under the care of Thomas Wyttenbach, a teacher justly held in very high repute.*** At the early age of twenty-two, Zwingli was appointed priest of Glarus (1506). He carried with him into his seclusion a passionate love of letters, and especially of that untrodden field of literature which was exciting the profoundest admiration of the age, – the classical remains of Greece and Rome. To these he long devoted his chief interest; for although he was not unacquainted with the writings of the Middle Ages, scholasticism had never any charm for him, and exercised but little influence on his mental training. Thus while Luther undervalued the wisdom of the heathen poets and philosophers, Zwingli venerated them as gifted with an almost supernatural inspiration.*4 *[On the boyhood and early training of Zwingli, see Schuler’s Huldreich Zwingli, Zürich, 1819. The best contemporary Life of him is by Oswald Myconius, the reforming preacher, who died at Basel in 1552. It is reprinted in Stäudlin’s Archiv für Kirchengesch. Vol. I.] **[Their services were especially solicited by the pope on one side, and the French on the other. Hence arose the custom of pensions by which a French party had acquired general ascendancy in Switzerland at the beginning of the sixteenth century: Ranke, Ref. III. 65, 66.] ***[He belonged to the same school as Erasmus, and besides inspiring his pupils with a love of classical literature, excited them against the more extravagant of the Mediaeval notions. Zwingli says (Opp. III. 544, ed. Schuler) that he learned from Wyttenbach “solam Christi mortem pretium esse remissionis peccatorum.”] *4[Ranke, III. 63. Walter (Gualther), his son-in-law, whose Apology for him was prefixed to the edition of his works which appeared in 1545, has to answer the following charge among others: “Quosdam ex Ethnicorum numero, homines impios, crudeles, horrendos, idololatras et Epicuri de grege porcos, Sanctorum coetui adnumeravit”: sign. δ.] At the same time other traits no less distinctive in his character were strongly brought to light. Zwingli was from first to last a genuine republican, not only by the accident of birth in the Helvetic confederacy, but as it seemed by an original instinct of his nature. Hence we find the pastor of Glarus busily engaged in politics, composing patriotic allegories [These were entitled Der Labyrinth, and Fabelgedicht vom Ochsen und etlichen Thieren, written in 1510.] in denunciation of “the foreigners,” taking the field with his courageous flock, and even present at the battle of Marignano, where his countrymen at last succumbed beneath the chivalry of France (1515). But in the meanwhile an important change was passing over the complexion of his private studies. In 1513 he applied himself with characteristic ardour to the cultivation of the Greek language,* and accepting the principles of exegesis then advocated by Erasmus, resolved that the Bible, and especially the New Testament in the original, should be in future his great touchstone for determining the nature and the limits of religious truth. In all this process, notwithstanding some analogies, the course of Zwingli had diverged considerably from that of the Wittenberg reformer. Luther, as we saw, was forced into collision with the Church authorities by an internal pressure of the conscience, a profound and overwhelming impulse of his moral sensibilities. Though disciplined to habits of submission, and by nature indisposed to break away from the traditions of the past, he was nevertheless unable to repress the storm of holy indignation that arose within him on beholding the practical substitution of man’s righteousness for Christ’s, [Cf. above.] of justification by the law for justification by faith. But if this error had been once corrected, Luther’s quarrel with the dominant school of theologians would in all probability have ceased. Zwingli, on the contrary, [Ranke, Ref. III. 96.] had no such reverence for the Church, and no such bond of union with antiquity. His thoughts were for the most part circumscribed within his native mountains, and concentrated on the parish where his lot was cast. That joyous heart, of which his cheerful countenance [“Ingenio amoenus et ore jucundus supra quam dici possit erat,” is the description of him by Oswald Myconius. He had also a fine musical taste.] was the unfailing index, had been well-nigh unacquainted with the spiritual tempests in which Luther learned to fathom the abyss of human depravity, and tested the victorious power of faith: and therefore what the Saxon friar undertook as the result of holy impulses and spiritual intuitions, the Swiss clergyman was rather aiming to achieve by the employment of his critical and reasoning faculties. He rose at length to controvert established usages and dogmas of the Church, because he had not found them in his careful study of the Greek Testament. *[“Coepi praedicare Evangelium,” he writes in 1523, “antequam Lutheri nomen unquam audivissem. Atque in eum usum ante decem annos operam dedi Graecanicis literis, ut ex fontibus doctrinam Christi haurire possem”: Opp. (ed. Gualther, 1545), I. fol. 38 a. He did not indeed condemn the reading of the Fathers, himself studying Origen, Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine and Chrysostom, and, like Erasmus, feeling a strong preference for Jerome’s commentaries. Still he spoke of brighter days not far distant when Christians would value nothing but the Word of God (“ut neque Hieronymus neque caeteri, sed sola Scriptura Divina apud Christianos in pretio sit future”): Ibid. I. fol. 37 b.] The Swiss reformer had thus many points in common with Erasmus, and accordingly as soon as the literary chieftain came to Basel in 1514, frequent communications [See, for instance, Erasmi Epist. Lib. XXXI. ep. 52.] passed between them. “There is nothing,” wrote Zwingli, “of which I am prouder than to have seen Erasmus.” But in 1516 he began to manifest far greater boldness than his learned correspondent.* Having been transferred to Einsiedeln** in the autumn of that year, he laboured to divert his people*** from the grosser forms of image worship and other like corruptions, and even wrote to his diocesan, the bishop of Constance, urging the necessity of minor reformations. Two years later he was appointed to a preachership in the collegiate church of Zürich (Jan. 1, 1519) where he found a more appropriate arena for his eloquence, and where his force of character at once exalted him to the position he retained during the rest of his life. His efforts had at this period a threefold tendency, – to vindicate the absolute supremacy of Holy Scripture, and establish what he deemed a juster method of interpretation;*4 to purify the morals*5 of the citizens; and to recall the Swiss confederation to those principles of independence on which it had been founded. In the spring of 1519 some correspondence took place between the Zurichers and Leo X respecting a Franciscan friar*6 who had ventured to reopen the disgraceful traffic that drew forth the animadversions of Luther in 1517. The obnoxious agent was immediately withdrawn, and so amicably that the Swiss reformer, who directed the resistance of his fellow townsmen, still continued to enjoy a pension given him by the pope.*7 In the following year, however, his harangues at Zürich had induced the cantonal authorities to publish a decree enjoining that pastors should henceforth have perfect liberty to preach all doctrines that could claim the warrant of the Holy Scriptures, and thus threatening to precipitate a crisis very near at hand. [Ranke, Ref. III. 73.] The fermentation spread from day to day in all the orders of society. Accordingly, in 1522, a formal charge was made against the innovators*8 by the bishop of Constance, and substantiated before the chief authorities of the canton, but without eliciting a favourable answer. *[Erasmus was, however, the chief agent in determining his course: Opp. I. fol. 55 b, ed. Gualther. He had learned from a poem of his friend that Christ was the true “Patron” of the sinner and the helpless. “Hunc enim vidi unicum esse thesaurum pii pectoris, quin coepi scriptis Bibliorum Sacrorum veterumque patrum diligentius intendere, certius quiddam ex his de divorum intercessione venaturus. In Bibliis Sacris plane nihil reperi. Apud quosdam veterum de ea re inveni, apud alios nihil.”] **[His removal to this lonelier district (“Eremitorium”) was chiefly caused by the hatred of the French party in Glarus: cf. p. 100, n. 2: but it must have conduced to the development of Zwingli’s principles by securing him more leisure for reading and reflection. According to a letter of Capito (quoted in Middle Age, p. 412, n. 5), he was then meditating on a plan “de pontifice dejiciendo.”] ***[Waddington, II. 271, 272. In a passage cited by Gieseler (III. i. p. 139, n. 29, ed. Bonn.; V. 304, ed. Edinb.) he declares that as early as this period (1517) he plainly told the cardinal of Sitten (Sion) “dass das ganze Papsitthum einen schlechten Grund habe, and das allweg mit gwaltiger heiliger Schrift.”] *4[Instead of preaching exclusively from the select passages of Holy Scripture contained in the “Lectionarium,” he expounded whole books, beginning with St Matthew (“idque absque humanis commentationibus ex solis fontibus Scripturae Sacrae”): Opp.