Downloaded from Brill.Com09/23/2021 10:21:27AM Via Free Access Chapter 4 Pilgrimage

Ruben Suykerbuyk - 9789004433106 Downloaded from Brill.com09/23/2021 10:21:27AM via free access Chapter 4 Pilgrimage The Public Debate on Images, Miracles and Pilgrims The direct causes of the 1566 Beeldenstorm were diverse and cannot possibly be reduced to a single factor, but the acts themselves were a physical and material expression of a body of critiques that had become common ground among Protestants all over Europe. One of the most controversial subjects was the veneration of saints, relics and images, which, in turn, were the driving force behind the pilgrimage phenomenon. Harking back to the ban on the making and adoration (adorare in the Vulgate, latreia in the Septuagint) of images (resp. sculptile or eidolon) in the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20, 1–17; Deuteronomy 5, 4–21), Protestant reformers judged their use and paying honor to them to be idolatrous, distracting the attention of the people from the genuine devotion to God. Luther, Zwingli and Calvin all fulminated against such Catholic practices, although their individual standpoints significantly differed, varying from rather tolerant in Luther’s case to virtually encouraging iconoclasm in the case of Zwingli.1 Protestant Critiques After his initial fierce criticism, Luther developed an increasingly moderate attitude. In the series of sermons he held in Wittenberg in early March 1522 to end the disorderly course of the Unruhen, he presented images as adiaphora, things that in themselves are neither good nor bad. His key distinction was between exterior idolatry, di- rected to images, and the much more dangerous interior cult of idols ‘which every person [has] in his or heart’, such as money.2 Inasmuch as images could help believers to worship God, they were certainly to be allowed in Luther’s view. For Calvin, however, the individual and Figure 72, detail material character of the worshipped images constituted the main Joannes and Lucas van problem, the philosophical ground for his stance being that finite Doetecum after Pieter matter cannot contain the infinite, spiritual God. A set of rhetorical Bruegel, Saint George’s questions in his Institutio christianae religionis (1536) illustrate his kermis, c. 1559, Amsterdam, point (Lib. I, Cap. XI, 10): Rijksmuseum © Ruben Suykerbuyk, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004433106_006 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. Ruben Suykerbuyk - 9789004433106 Downloaded from Brill.com09/23/2021 10:21:27AM via free access 134 Chapter 4 Why are such distinctions made between different images [simulachra] of the same God, that while one is passed by, or receives only common honor, another is worshiped with the highest solemnities? Why do they fatigue themselves with votive pilgrimages [votivis peregrinationibus] to images while they have many similar ones at home?3 However different the views of both giants on either end of the Protestant spectrum might have been, the actual cult of specific images – worship (adoratio (Lat.) or latreia (Gr.)) rather than veneration (veneratio (Lat.) or dulia (Gr.)) – was considered highly problematic by both; it was idolatry.4 Calvin’s rhetorical questions demonstrate how this was inherently related to the practice of pilgrimage. The notion that some places were to be considered holier than others was fundamentally erroneous for him, as God was om- nipresent. Going on pilgrimage was therefore a superfluous practice. Luther, too, had plead for its abolition, calling upon the German princes for practical implementation in An den christlichen Adel (1520), his first publication after having realized that a split with Rome was inevitable. Moral and social principles predominate his argument. While pilgrimages were not founded upon divine sanc- tion, he emphasized how they actually often led to the neglect of the commandment of taking care of one’s wife and children. Traveling to faraway, so-called holy places such as Rome was a total waste of money and it unnecessarily caused families to be left alone in distress.5 The many local shrines such as Wilsnack and Regensburg, on the other hand, were driven by the devil, Luther maintained, pushing pilgrims to visit taverns and brothels. Thus, pilgrimages caused a neglect of the parish, where real Christians find baptism, the sacraments, sermons and neighbors – things that are far more important than the saints in heaven.6 Closely related to these arguments was the general attempt, from the Protestant side, to criticize and discredit all post-biblical and contemporary miracles.7 As the Strasbourg reformer Martin Bucer explained, pilgrimages were the most flagrant excess that sprang from an unbridled faith in miracles, allegedly worked by cult objects venerated at particular shrines. In Bucer’s view, it was precisely such miracles that drove the popularity of devotions to saints, and he tried hard to demonstrate that contrary to common belief miracles were not worked by God, but by the devil or the antichrist in order to pervert true religion.8 Although the point would later come to be Ruben Suykerbuyk - 9789004433106 Downloaded from Brill.com09/23/2021 10:21:27AM via free access Pilgrimage 135 known as the doctrine of the cessation of miracles, neither Luther nor Calvin treated it as a genuine doctrine, and it has been demon- strated how even Calvinists did, in fact, not so easily give up their faith in wonders and the miraculous.9 This was clearly contrary to Calvin’s wishes, however, and he and Luther both considered their statements on miracles as strongly recommended opinions. Luther, for instance, distinguished between miracles of the soul and of the body. While the former continued because they were to be under- stood as transformations of the soul by the force of faith, the latter – including miraculous cures, for instance – had ceased. Begging for miraculous signs (wundertzeychen) was considered as an undesir- able expression of doubt about the Bible, ‘signs of an immense un- belief in the people’.10 Calvin similarly taught that miracles occurred in the Bible only with the purpose of spreading the one true religion by convincing people of the divine nature of Christ, but such acts ceased when the apostolic age came to an end.11 In many respects these critiques were not unique to the Protestant Reformation. They stood in a long tradition of criticism on excessive belief in merely outward devotion, that also had become part and parcel of the Christian humanism that had developed in the early sixteenth century. This movement’s main spokesman was Erasmus of Rotterdam, who treated many of the topics in his writings from the Enchiridion milites christiani (1503) onwards.12 He most notably did so in the satirical Colloquia, a series of short but increasingly critical dialogues on which he worked for the larger part of his life. One of these texts, first printed in 1522 and later entitled De visendo loca sacra, incorporates three clusters of grievances related to pilgrimages that recall both Luther’s and Calvin’s later criticisms: the enormous costs, the waste of time and the fact that family is left un- guarded; the immoral and obscene attitudes that often characterizes pilgrims; and the theology of localization that considers one place holier than another, while God is everywhere.13 He most famously uttered his criticism in the Peregrinatio religionis ergo (1526), which also hints at the first successes of the spreading of Protestant ideas by including references to declining offerings and diminished veneration because of a ‘new-fangled notion that pervades the whole world’.14 In other colloquia his discussion of miracles shows clear links with Protestant writings: not only did Erasmus claim that miracles only occurred in apostolic times, just like Calvin would do later he also emphasized that they were not necessary anymore since the Christian faith has spread.15 Ruben Suykerbuyk - 9789004433106 Downloaded from Brill.com09/23/2021 10:21:27AM via free access 136 Chapter 4 The Low Countries Erasmus’ Colloquies were immensely popular and firmly based on his observations in the Low Countries, but being published in Latin their contents were only available to an educated upper class.16 However, in the Low Countries the debate was also fostered by a number of indigenous treatises that appeared in the vernacular. One of the earliest texts that directly criticized the act of pilgrimage was Een troost ende spiegel der siecken by Willem Claesz. de Volder alias Gnapheus (1493–1568), written in 1525 or 1526, but first printed in 1531 in Antwerp.17 Gnapheus, who held the office of rector of the Latin school in The Hague in the 1520s, was an essential figure for the early Reformation in the Low Countries, and his life can be considered exemplary of the eclectic, protean and dynamic character of the early Reformation there. He was soon persecuted by the inquisition, and so decided to flee to North-Eastern Europe where Lutheranism had been instituted as the official religion. Even there he would eventually enter into conflict with colleagues, resulting in excommunication by the Lutheran church as well, and his return to Emden. In Een troost ende spiegel der siecken, Gnapheus criticizes the adoration of saints, which he refers to as foreign gods, and he unmasks their miracles as untruthful dreams of false prophets or deceit of the devil. As a consequence, he claimed to observe daily that at places where the true word of God was spread the cult of miraculous images (beelden van miraculen) completely collapsed, and he concluded that therefore the ‘fairy-tale miracles and pilgrimages’ (sprokerijen der miraculen ende peregrimatien) were to be eradicated completely.18 Saints, their images and the pilgrims that visited them continued to be a popular target in subsequent Netherlandish writings, which were not infrequently published in exile.

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