The Catholic Dilemma, Part Two
We have already noted the irony that by entering the public arena to refute Luther's views, Murner and other Catholic publicists ran the risk of promoting and propagating what they opposed. To refute Luther, first Catholic publicists had to explain what Luther was about. In so doing, they conveyed information that might actually attract readers rather than repel them. This has important implications for the historian attempting to understand the progress of the Reformation movement. It is common in historical accounts to start with Luther's treatises and then describe the Catholic replies. But if we ask how
Luther's contemporaries learned of his views, we cannot assume that they always started with Luther's own works. To be sure, publication statistics—the large number of printings and reprintings—suggest that as a matter of probability most readers did start with Luther's own publications. But some Strasbourg readers may have first learned about the substance of these challenging new publications not from Luther but from his anonymous critic.
Historians also need to remember that to live in the middle of great events is to live in confusion. It takes time to separate the significant from the unimportant, the lasting from the ephemeral. Accordingly, we need to be careful not to allow the knowledge of the outcome of these crucial months to get in the way of recapturing the shock and surprise of late 1520, the feeling that things could go in many directions, the uncertainty about how the public controversy would be resolved. The Strasbourg reading public and those with whom they shared their reading were sufficiently taken with several of Luther's treatises that their demand prompted several reprints. But they did not know, as we know now, that three of these treatises—To The Christian Nobility of the German Nation, On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church , and On the Freedom of a Christian —would be among the most important treatises Luther ever published. They did not know, as we know now, that these treatises marked a turning point, perhaps the turning point that led to the Reformation movement and the eventual foundation of Protestantism. They did not know that the anonymous author who replied to Luther was the Franciscan author, satirist, and doctor of theology and both laws, Thomas Murner.[27] They did not know who would prevail in this public confrontation, whose words would last and whose words would soon be forgotten. They did not know which position would be more appealing or convincing until they read or heard about Luther's views and read or heard about the views of his challenger.
Even if Murner's rebuttals were a reader's first detailed introduction to Luther, the reader would have nevertheless learned a great deal about Luther and what he stood for, albeit through a hostile lens. Consider, for example, Murner's first treatise, A Christian and Fraternal Admonition .[28] If readers had gotten no further than the foreword,[29] which was addressed to Martin Luther, they would have still learned several things about Luther. For example, they would know that Luther had recently published some theses. He had repeatedly appealed to the pope, to a better informed pope, and to a council, and
had then criticized even the council's authority. He had issued "one book after another."[30] In these books he attacked abuses in the church, arguing, among other things, that it was better to believe Christ than the pope and better to accept the Bible alone than the decisions of councils or church fathers. Others, under Luther's influence, had also been publishing on these issues.[31] In the body of the treatise, readers would learn that Luther taught that the community could select its preacher and that once the priest gave up his office, he was no longer a priest.[32] Luther attacked abuses in the holy Christian church,[33] and in his book To the Christian Nobility he offered numerous suggestions for reform of the papacy.[34]
Since it was the target of a large section of the treatise, readers would have learned that Luther had written a treatise about the Mass, which he called the "new testament." In this work he apparently suggested that priests had fabricated their view of the Mass simply to gain money, that the Mass was no good work, and that masses read for their benefit were in fact of no value to the living or the dead.[35] The Gospel and its words, Luther argued, should be preferred over honorable custom or tradition.[36] He criticized "human additions" to the Mass and would allow people to participate without the traditional preparation.[37] He favored using German in the Mass.[38] He charged that it was the devil that inspired the silent recitation of the canon of the Mass.[39] He argued that the Sacrament should be used in an assembly of Christians to strengthen and awaken faith, to admonish one another, to promote the "new testament" concerning the forgiveness of sins; in so doing each Christian acted as a priest or priestess.[40] The Mass, according to Luther, was neither a sacrifice nor a good work of use to another.[41] He objected to withholding the cup from the laity.[42] Finally, Luther advocated a "spiritual" church with Christ at its head rather than the rope.[43]
The trick for the reader of A Christian and Fraternal Admonition or any of Murner's other pamphlets was, of course, to separate the relatively neutral information from the heavy freight of his criticism. It was an even greater challenge for the reader to see through the distortions that may have entered into Murner's re-presentation. A few examples on a common theme may illustrate the difficulties as well as the possibilities.
The three major targets of Murner's disapproval—A Sermon on the New Testament, On the Papacy at Rome , and To the Christian Nobility —have one important motif in common: each insisted that
since faith alone saved, every baptized and believing Christian was a true priest and there was no difference between Christians in this regard. Accordingly, Luther denied the validity of the contemporary distinction between the spiritual and secular (lay) estate and argued that it served only to allow the clergy to take advantage of the laity.
In re-presenting this argument, Murner confused Luther's distinction between the two realms—that is, the two ways in which, Luther said, God ruled the spiritual and secular world—with the traditional distinction between the two estates, laity and clergy. It cannot be determined whether this confusion was willful or inadvertent, a polemical distortion or a "natural" misreading due to Murner's particular mindset. It was a confusion, however, that allowed Murner to conclude that Luther was attempting to do away with the clergy and over-throw all distinctions of rank and hierarchy.
On the matter of the priesthood, consider what Luther said in A Sermon on the New Testament, That Is, the Holy Mass . Here he explained to his readers that in the Mass God offered a divine promise of forgiveness. For their part, human beings simply had to accept this gift and faithfully believe this divine promise.[44] Therefore Luther insisted that the Mass was a sacrament, not a sacrifice offered by the priest. To be sure, Christians offered through Christ a sacrifice of prayer, praise, and thanksgiving and their very selves.[45] "Thus it becomes clear," he concluded, "that not only the priest offers the sacrifice of the Mass but each one [offers] his own faith." This was the true priestly office, through which Christ was offered before God as a sacrifice. Therefore, everyone was equally a spiritual priest before God.[46]
In his restatement Murner understood Luther to say that the sacrament of the Mass should be celebrated "in an assembly of Christians to strengthen and awaken their faith in the promise of Christ, to admonish each other in this regard, and to promote the testament regarding the forgiveness of sins." The reader of Murner would get this part of Luther straight, but that was about all. It did not follow from this, Murner continued, that everyone was a priest or priestess. Only consecration made a priest. "Therefore you have misused in an incomprehensible way the words priest and priestess with the result that the laity has become highly angry about the matter and already thinks that priests are no longer necessary for the practice of the Sacrament."[47] Consecration was of course, from Murner's perspective, the way a person moved from the laity, the secular estate, to the ordained clergy within the spiritual estate. A person was in either one estate or the
other. So it seemed nonsensical to him to assert that lay people were priests, even "spiritual" priests. Murner and Luther were using the distinction spiritual and secular differently, but Murner did not acknowledge this. Perhaps he was not even aware of the equivocation. If readers were first introduced to Luther's priesthood of all baptized Christians through Murner's re-presentation, they would have learned that Luther taught that all Christians were priests, but they would likely have been at a loss for Luther's rationale.
Murner was even more upset by the way in which Luther drew the consequences from his conviction that faith alone made the true priest. In A Sermon on the New Testament , Luther asserted, for example, that "all Christian men are priests, all women priestesses, be they young or old, master or servant, mistress or maid, learned or lay. Here there is no difference, unless faith be unequal."[48] In To the Christian Nobility , Luther declared even more pointedly that all Christians were of the spiritual estate and there was no difference among them except one of office, because all Christians had the same baptism, the same gospel, and the same faith, which alone made a spiritual and Christian people.[49] "Thus it follows from this that there is basically no other difference than one of office or task, and not of estate, between laity, priests, princes, bishops, and, as they say, spiritual and worldly [estates], for they are all of the spiritual estate and true priests, bishops, and popes but not with the same tasks."[50] From passages like these Murner concluded that Luther sought to erase all social distinctions. As he explained to the emperor in his To the Most Mighty and Enlightened Nobility of the German Nation , Luther was a rebel who stirred up civil uprisings and promoted the downfall of the fatherland, setting "father against his child, brother against brother, subjects against their authorities" and so mixing things up "that neither pope, emperor, king, bishop, bath attendant, or pig-herder will any longer be distinguishable" one from another.[51] Murner urged the emperor and German nobility to forestall the incipient rebellion and to protect "our faith" against Luther, "who has robbed you all of your noble estate and turned you into priests."[52] Whether a willful distortion or a misreading that is explicable given Murner's clerical point of view, this re-presentation bears little resemblance to Luther's position.
In On the Papacy at Rome , Luther treated at length "what 'Christendom' and 'head of Christendom' mean" and, in the process, concluded that Christendom was an "assembly of all believers in Christ throughout the earth."[53] This was a spiritual rather than a physical
assembly; the "natural, real, right, essential Christianity exists in the Spirit and in no external things, whatever it may be called," Luther insisted.[54] The visible church including pope, bishops, priests, monks, nuns, and other members of the "so-called spiritual estate" and the external worship they produced was not Christendom, although this community and these estates would always contain people who were true Christians, keeping the visible church spiritually "alive" just as a soul animated the body.[55] It was faith that made true priests and Christians in the soul, not membership in the "so-called spiritual estates" or the institutional church.[56] Murner once again either did not understand or would not accept Luther's redefinition of the spiritual-secular distinction. "In the same manner in which you [deal with] the spiritual church," Murner wrote, "you also deal with the spiritual Mass [claiming] that it was an assembly of Christians [gathered] to observe the passion of our lord in a strong faith, to promote the new and eternal testament concerning the forgiveness of sin." And this led to a false dichotomy. "You sever the spiritual Mass from all bodily and external things, as if we had no need of bodily ordained priests but rather baptism has made us all priests and priestesses."[57] Murner of course identified the true church with the institutional church with the pope as its head. To speak of "spiritual Christendom" was to mislead people into believing that they could ignore the authority of the actual, institutional church and its leaders. Murner's reworking would, once again, leave his reader with the bare substance of Luther's position but rather in the dark about Luther's theological reasoning.
So it would appear that readers who were first introduced to Luther through Murner's writings would likely come away with a severely skewed view of some central tenets such as the priesthood of all baptized Christians. They would learn that Luther claimed that all Christians were priests through their faith, but they would have at best a distorted grasp of Luther's rationale. On other, perhaps less theological matters, the readers of Murner's treatises might neither need nor particularly care about the underlying justification—the position itself would be sufficient. Consider two examples: Luther's violent opposition to the papacy and his appeal to the laity to take matters into its own hands.
Luther's three treatises gave Murner considerable reason to conclude that Luther had rejected papal authority. While all three treatises named various abuses within the church and proposed reforms that
drastically challenged current church practice, On the Papacy at Rome and To the Christian Nobility went on to attribute many of these abuses to the papacy. In On the Papacy at Rome , Luther stated openly that "all evil examples of spiritual and worldly knavery flow out of Rome and into all the world as if from a sea of all wickedness."[58] The papal claims to be of divine order were made for the sake of money, from confirming bishops and priests to issuing indulgences.[59] "Because money is involved, whatever they think must be of divine order."[60] Luther attacked, among other thing, the papal demand for clerical celibacy, papal laws regarding fasting, papal claims of superiority over temporal authority, and papal misuse of the keys.[61] Christ's command to "tend my sheep" meant "in Romanish,"
to oppress Christendom with many human, destructive laws; to sell the bishop's cape for as much as possible; to rip annates from every benefice; to take to themselves all foundations; to turn all bishops into [their] servants through horrible oaths; to sell indulgences; to tax the whole world with letters, bulls, lead [and] wax [seals]; to forbid the preaching of the Gospel, to occupy the whole world with knaves from Rome, to gather all quarrels to themselves [for adjudication], [and thereby] to increase disputes and quarrels. In short [they] do not allow anyone to come to the truth or have peace.[62]
In To the Christian Nobility , Luther escalated his attack against the "Romanists." He accused them of cleverly constructing three defenses against reform, thus greatly damaging Christendom. He rejected as "a fine fabrication and hypocrisy" [ein feyn Coment[*]vnd gleyssen ] the Romanists's first defense, their claim to be the "spiritual estate" distinct from the laity and with special privileges.[63] The Romanists' second defense—their claim that only the pope could interpret Scripture and in so doing, could not err—he labeled a "wanton, made-up fable" contrary to Scripture.[64] To the third defense—that only a pope could convene a council—he replied that when the pope acted contrary to Scripture, he was to be reproved and corrected by authority of a council.[65] "It is the power of the devil and the Antichrist that resists that which serves to improve Christendom," Luther stated. "Therefore it is not at all to be followed but rather resisted with body, goods, and all that we are capable of."[66]
Luther's conclusion was stark. "With this I hope that the false, lying terror with which the Romans have long intimidated us and confused our consciences should lie defeated," he said, adding that he hoped that they would be made subject to the temporal sword "just like the
rest of us," stripped of the power to interpret Scripture "on the basis of mere force without skill" and unable "to fend off a council or to bind or obligate it according to their whims and take away its freedom." Until these changes were made, the Romans were "truly of the fellowship of the Antichrist and the devil" and had "nothing of Christ except the name."[67]
From the pope's ostentatious style of life to the various ways that the papacy gained control of and taxed benefices and sold dispensations of all sorts from its own canon law, the theme running through the remainder of his treatise was that the papacy was fleecing the Germans and that reforms should be instituted to reduce Rome's centralized authority and to stop the flow of gold from Germany to Rome.[68] Luther had frequent occasion to characterize the papacy as a band of robbers doing the devil's and perhaps even the Antichrist's work. "Since, then, such devilish rule is not only public robbery, deceit, and the tyranny of the portals of hell, but destructive to the body and soul of Christendom," he summed up, "it is our responsibility to spare no effort to fend off such affliction and destruction of Christendom." He even posed the rhetorical yet still threatening question, "If we properly hang thieves and behead robbers, why should we allow Roman greed to go free, since it is the greatest thief and robber that has or could come to earth, and [it does] all [of its robbery] in the sacred name of Christ and St. Peter?"[69]
Murner's description of these attacks is reasonably faithful to bare charges while putting a quite different interpretation on the motives underlying the attacks. According to Murner, Luther's attack on abuses within the institutional church and the papacy was a pretext to stir up the common people. Luther, Murner remarked, "under the cover and appearance of doing away with the many abuses in the Christian churches wishes to lead the poor simple [people] into an erroneous faith and errors in Christian truth."[70] Murner could no longer stand by and watch. Instead, he had "to spring to the rescue and protection of the pious simple Christian man."[71] Luther and his supporters claimed that they only sought to lighten the monetary burdens imposed by the papacy on the German nation, but in fact they made accusations against the papacy about burdens and exactions in order to protect and maintain among the commoners error and falsehood concerning the Christian faith and to promote disobedience against authority.[72]
Murner's recurring refrain was that Luther sought to promote rebellion by abusing the clerical estate in writings aimed at the common people. "There are many who think that you thirst for the blood of the clergy since you have thrown such great and, as they say, undeserved ill-will, suspicion, and hatred on them." Luther did not publish anything that did not "slander and abuse the pope, all the cardinals, archbishops, and bishops along with the whole clerical estate."[73] If, as Luther recommended, the cloisters were closed, churches destroyed, and endowed masses ended, and people deprived thereby of their property, "we would throw things into such confusion that a child would slay or strangle its parents, one brother, the other, a friend, his friend."[74] The Hussites and their bloodshed served as an admonitory example, and the author repeatedly suggested the parallels between Luther and his followers and Hus and the Hussites.[75]
Murner certainly did not misread Luther's desire to incite the laity, or at least the lay rulers, to action against the institutional church, although Murner placed it in a most unfavorable light. In On the Papacy at Rome , Luther announced that he would "tolerate" letting kings, princes, and the rest of the nobility keep the "knaves of Rome" from their streets and prohibit papal fees for new bishops or benefices.[76] In his To the Christian Nobility he announced in its very title that lay temporal authorities had to reform the Christian estate. As he explained in his prefatory letter to the Nicholas von Amsdorf, he was bringing together various suggestions for Christian reform and laying them before the Christian nobility of the German nation in the hope that God might help his church through the laity since the clergy, to whom the task more properly belonged, was faithless and negligent.[77] The priesthood of all the baptized gave them the right to act since the clergy would not. The temporal authorities were "fellow Christians, fellow priests, fellow members of the spiritual estate [mitgeystlich ], and fellow lords [mitmechtig ] in all things" and were therefore in the best position to call a free council.[78]
All this was rather heady stuff. No wonder Murner concluded that Luther was attempting to incite the laity to action against the church. He was. But for Murner this was the wrong way to go about reforming abuses. It not only bypassed legitimate authority, it directly subverted that authority. It violated the distinctions of rank and responsibility that Murner believed society depended upon and advocated that the laity leave its proper sphere and interfere in the spiritual estate. As
Murner put it, Luther "has also misused his noble skill and understanding and the Holy Scripture for a rebellious, unpeaceful also unchristian purpose," namely, to use the German nobility "to seduce the other poor sheep of Christ into unbelief."[79] Worst of all from Murner's perspective, it invited the "rebellious and ignorant common people" to become involved in a debate that was properly the private business of their "betters."
In the early years of the Reformation movement, even many literate people would have had only a vague notion of why Luther opposed the papacy. If Murner was one of their original sources, especially on Luther's opposition to the papacy and to many traditional beliefs and practices of the Western church, they would have learned quite a bit about his positions, albeit in a hostile and frequently distorting light. Still, even a distorted picture could intrigue readers and lead to further exploration in Luther's own writings. And some of the very issues that distressed Murner—Luther's attacks on the papacy and the clergy, and his appeal to the laity—may well have actually recommended Luther to those members of the laity who were themselves hostile towards the papacy or clergy or both. The hook could be set by anti-Roman, anti-papal, and anticlerical appeals, and the theological rationale could follow afterwards as the reader explored what was behind the attacks.