Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind

XIII

REFORMATION

1520: W

ITTENBERG

Sixty days the papacy had given Martin Luther to recant, or else be damned as a heretic. Now, on 10 December, the time was up. That morning, at nine o’clock, Luther walked through one of the three town gates, to where a carrion pit lay. A large crowd had gathered there. One of Luther’s colleagues from the university, a theologian named Johann Agricola, lit a fire. The spot was where the clothes of those who had died in the nearby hospital were burned; but Agricola, rather than rags, used books as fuel. All that morning he and Luther had been ransacking libraries for collections of canon law. Had the two men been able to find a volume of Aquinas, they would have burnt that as well. Their kindling, though, proved sufficient. The fire began to catch. Agricola continued to feed books into the flames. Then Luther stepped out from the crowd. Trembling, he held up the papal decree that had condemned his teachings. ‘Because you have confounded the truth of God,’ he said in a ringing voice, ‘today the Lord confounds you. Into the fire with you.’¹ He dropped the decree into the flames. The parchment blackened, and curled, and turned to smoke. As Luther turned and walked back through the city gate, ashes skittered and swirled on the winter breeze.

He had opposed the burning of heretics well before self-interest might have prompted him to do so. Among the ninety-five theses which he had posted in Wittenberg three years previously was a denunciation of the practice as contrary to the will of the Spirit. It was an ominous sign, then, that the papacy, in its decree, had specifically condemned this proposition. Luther, absconding from Augsburg, had dreaded that Cajetan was planning to have him arrested. Wittenberg, his home, was reassuringly distant from Rome. It also provided him with the protection of a formidable patron. Friedrich of Saxony was one of the seven electors who, on the death of an emperor, were charged with choosing a new one: a responsibility that brought him much influence and respect. But Friedrich wanted more. Painfully aware how backward his lands were compared to those of other electors, he had founded the university in Wittenberg to act as a beacon of sophistication amid the muddy wastes of Saxony. Luther’s growing celebrity had put it spectacularly on the map. Friedrich had no wish to lose his star professor to the stake. The best course, he decided, would be for Luther’s case to be heard by the emperor. That January, a great assembly of the empire’s power-brokers, a ‘diet’, was convened on the banks of the Rhine, in Worms. Presiding over it was Charles of Spain, the grandson of Ferdinand and Isabella who, just a year and a half previously, had become the fifth person of his name to be elected emperor. Friedrich, as one of the men who had chosen him, was well placed to pull strings. Sure enough, on 26 March, a summons arrived in Wittenberg, instructing Luther ‘to answer with regard to your books and teachings’.² He was given three weeks to comply. He also received a personal assurance from Charles V of safe conduct to the diet.

Naturally, travelling to Worms, Luther could not help but feel himself in the shadow of another reformer’s fate. ‘We are all Hussites, and did not realise it. Even Paul and Augustine are in reality Hussites.’³ There could be no serving God’s purpose, Luther had come to understand, without seeing the past in a new and radical light. For centuries, in the garden of Christendom, flowers had been pulled up as weeds, and weeds tended as flowers. Now, and for ever, that had to change. Already, even before his meetings with Cajetan, Luther had come to believe that true reformatio would be impossible without consigning canons, papal decrees and Aquinas’ philosophy to the flames. Then, in the wake of his meeting with the cardinal, he had come to an even more subversive conclusion. It was not enough merely to renovate the fabric of the Church: to fix its abuses, to clean up its scandals. Its very architecture was rotten through. The whole structure needed to be condemned, demolished. That Cajetan, a man of transparent holiness, had placed obedience to the pope above the witness of scripture precisely illustrated the problem. Even at its very best, the Roman Church was a perversion of what Christianity should properly be. Far from bringing the Christian people closer to God, it had seduced them into paganism and idolatry. Luther, contemplating the sheer terrifying scale of its reach, the way in which it had infected every nook and cranny of life with its rot, had no doubt who was to blame. ‘Hell’s brand, the mask of the devil, also called Gregory VII, is the Monster of Monsters, the very first Man of Sin and Son of Perdition.’⁴ His papacy had ushered in the last and fatal age of the world. The world shaped by Hildebrand and his heirs, so Luther warned, the world of a church that for over four centuries had been motivated by nothing except a ravening appetite for power, was a literally hellish abomination: ‘sheer robbery and violence’.⁵

Yet there was, in the very savagery of this abuse, the spectral hint of a compliment. Luther’s condemnation of the road taken by the Church in the age of Gregory VII was an acknowledgement as well of the revolutionary character of its ambitions and achievements. Now, by setting himself openly against the papacy and its works, Luther was aiming at a reformatio no less seismic. His mastery of publicity, his readiness to harness riot to his own purposes, his attempt to bleed from the most awesome office in all of Christendom its authority: here were displays of boldness worthy of Hildebrand. In Wittenberg, on the day that Luther had staged his bonfire, students had built a float, festooned it with parodies of papal decrees, and finally, after driving it around the town to raucous cheers, burnt the lot. A man dressed up as the pope had then tossed his tiara into the fire. Now, travelling to the diet, Luther was greeted with matching displays of exuberance. Welcoming committees toasted him at the gates of city after city; crowds crammed into churches to hear him preach. As he entered Worms, thousands thronged the streets to catch a glimpse of the man of the hour. Late the following afternoon, brought before Charles V and asked whether he would recant, Luther was so disappointed at finding himself denied the chance to argue his case that he asked for twenty-four hours to mull things over. The crowds outside continued to cheer him. As Luther left the bishop’s palace where the meeting had been held, ‘he was admonished by various voices to be brave, to act manfully, and not to fear those who can kill the body but cannot kill the soul’.⁶ One enthusiast even compared him to Jesus.

On what basis, Cajetan had demanded of Luther, did he think to defy the accumulated wisdom of the Church? Now, that night in Worms, the question hung even more urgently in the air. Luther’s mission, no less than Hildebrand’s had been, was to redeem Christendom from darkness, to purify it of corruption, to baptise it anew. He could not, though, as the earlier reformers had done, seize control of the commanding heights of the Roman Church – for that was precisely the strategy that had resulted in everything he aspired to reverse. Standing before the emperor, he did so as a counter-revolutionary: one who mourned that Gregory VII had ever succeeded in bringing Henry IV ‘under his heel – for Satan was with him’.⁷ That Charles V appeared immune to the appeal of this message was, to be sure, a disappointment: for Luther had come to believe that it was the duty of the emperor to check the conceit of the papacy, and demolish all its claims to a universal jurisdiction. Fortunately, the responsibility was not solely that of princes. Luther’s summons was to all the Christian people. For centuries, priests had been deceiving them. The founding claim of the order promoted by Gregory VII, that the clergy were an order of men radically distinct from the laity, was a swindle and a blasphemy. ‘A Christian man is a perfectly free lord of all, and subject to none.’ So Luther had declared a month before his excommunication, in a pamphlet that he had pointedly sent to the pope. ‘A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all.’⁸ The ceremonies of the Church could not redeem men and women from hell, for it was only God who possessed that power. A priest who laid claim to it by virtue of his celibacy was playing a confidence trick on both his congregation and himself. So lost were mortals to sin that nothing they did, no displays of charity, no mortifications of the flesh, no pilgrimages to gawp at relics, could possibly save them. Only divine love could do that. Salvation was not a reward. Salvation was a gift.

As a monk, Luther had lived in dread of judgement, starving himself and praying every night, confessing his sins for long hours at a time, wearying his superiors, all in a despairing attempt to render himself deserving of heaven. Yet the more he had studied the Bible, and reflected on its mysteries, so the more had he come to see this as so much wasted effort. God did not treat sinners according to their just deserts – for, were he to do so, then none would ever be saved. If this was the sombre lesson that had been taught by Augustine, then even more so was it evident in scripture. Paul, a Pharisee upright in every way, had not been redeemed by his zealousness for the law. Only after he had been directly confronted by the risen Christ, dazzled by him, and set on a spectacularly different path, had God marked him out as one of the elect. Luther, reading Paul, had been overwhelmed by a similar consciousness of divine grace. ‘I felt I was altogether born again and had entered paradise itself through open gates.’⁹ Unworthy though he was, helpless and fit to be condemned, yet God still loved him. Luther, afire with the intoxicating and joyous improbability of this, loved God in turn. There was no other source of peace, no other source of comfort, to be had. It was in the certitude of this that Luther, the day after his first appearance before Charles V, returned to the bishop’s palace. Asked again if he would renounce his writings, he said that he would not. As dusk thickened, and torches were lit in the crowded hall, Luther fixed his glittering black eyes on his interrogator and boldly scorned all the pretensions of popes and councils. Instead, so he declared, he was bound only by the understanding of scripture that had been revealed to him by the Spirit. ‘My conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and I will not retract anything, since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience.’¹⁰

Two days after listening to this bravura display of defiance, Charles V wrote a reply. Obedient to the example of his forebears, he vowed, he would always be a defender of the Catholic faith, ‘the sacred rituals, decrees, ordinances and holy customs’.¹¹ He therefore had no hesitation in confirming Luther’s excommunication. Nevertheless, he was a man of his word. The promise of safe passage held. Luther was free to depart. He had three weeks to get back to Wittenberg. After that, he would be liable for ‘liquidation’.¹² Luther, leaving Worms, did so as both a hero and an outlaw. The drama of it all, reported in pamphlets that flooded the empire, only compounded his celebrity. Then, halfway back to Wittenberg, another astonishing twist. Travelling in their wagon through Thuringia, Luther and his party were ambushed in a ravine. A posse of horsemen, pointing their crossbows at the travellers, abducted Luther and two of his companions. The fading hoofbeats left behind them nothing but dust. As to who might have taken Luther, and why, there was no clue. Months passed, and still no one seemed any the wiser. It was as though he had simply vanished into thin air.

All the while, though, Luther was in the Wartburg. The castle belonged to Friedrich, whose men had brought him there for safe-keeping. Disguised as a knight, with two servant boys to attend him, but no one to argue with, no one to address, he was miserable. The Devil nagged him with temptations. Once, when a strange dog came padding into his room, Luther – who loved dogs dearly – identified it as a demon and threw it out of his tower window. He suffered terribly from constipation. ‘Now I sit in pain like a woman in childbirth, ripped up, bloody.’¹³ He did not, as Saint Elizabeth had done when she lived in the castle, welcome suffering. He had come to understand that he could never be saved by good works. It was in the Wartburg that Luther abandoned for ever the disciplines of his life as a monk. Instead, he wrote. Lonely in his eyrie, he could look down at the town of Eisenach, where Hilten had prophesied the coming of a great reformer, and believe himself – despite his isolation from the mighty convulsions that he himself had set in train – to be the man foretold. At Worms, the emperor had charged him with arrogance, and demanded to know how it was that a single monk could possibly be right in an opinion ‘according to which all of Christianity will be and will always have been in error both in the past thousand years and even more in the present’.¹⁴ It was to answer that question, to share his good news of God’s grace, that Luther kept to his writing desk.

Only in October, though, did he finally settle on a project that proved sufficient to ease his anguish. It was by reading scripture that he had opened his heart to the Spirit, and thereby had revealed to him the startling fact of God’s love. What better could he do, then, than break down the barrier that had for so long existed between the learned and the unlearned, and give to Christians unfamiliar with Latin the chance to experience a similar joy? Already, back in 1466, the Bible had been printed in German; but in a shoddy translation. Luther’s ambition was not merely to translate directly from the original Greek, but also to pay tribute to the beauties of everyday speech. Eleven weeks it took him to finish his rendering of the New Testament. The words flowed from his pen, phrases that might have been heard in a kitchen, or a field, or a market-place, short, simple sentences, language that anyone could understand. Easily, fluently it came. By the time that Luther had finished, even his constipation had eased.

‘If you picture the Bible to be a mighty tree and every word a little branch, I have shaken every one of these branches because I wanted to know what it was and what it meant.’¹⁵ Now, with his translation, Luther had given Germans everywhere the chance to do the same. All the structures and the traditions of the Roman Church, its hierarchies, and its canons, and its philosophy, had served merely to render scripture an entrapped and feeble thing, much as lime might prevent a bird from taking wing. By liberating it, Luther had set Christians everywhere free to experience it as he had experienced it: as the means to hear God’s living voice. Opening their hearts to the Spirit, they would understand the true meaning of Christianity, just as he had come to understand it. There would be no need for discipline, no need for authority. Antichrist would be routed. All the Christian people at long last would be as one.

Here I Stand

They found him hiding in an attic, in a house beside the city gate of Frankenhausen. When he insisted that he was an invalid, and knew nothing about the terrible battle that had just been fought, they emptied out the contents of his bag. A letter left no doubt as to his identity: Thomas Müntzer, the notorious revolutionary who had been preaching the imminent extermination of the mighty, and the reign of the downtrodden, when all – as in the days of the Apostles – would be held in common. Dragged through the streets of the city, where piles of corpses bore witness to the full terrible scale of the slaughter inflicted on his ragtag army, he was led into the presence of his conqueror. Duke George of Saxony, the cousin of Prince Friedrich, was a man who had long dreaded where the elector’s sponsorship of Luther might lead; now, in the charnel house of Frankenhausen, he seemed to have his answer. Interrogating his prisoner, all his darkest suspicions were confirmed. Müntzer insisted on calling him ‘brother’; repeatedly quoted the Old Testament; justified the insurrection of the poor against the rich as the necessary sorting of the wheat from the chaff. The duke had heard enough. Müntzer was put to torture. Some said that he had been brought to recant his views; but nothing in his final message suggested that he had. ‘Do not allow my death to be a stumbling block to you,’ he wrote to his followers. ‘It has come to pass for the benefit of the good and uncomprehending.’¹⁶

Luther, brought the news that Müntzer had been executed, and his head displayed on a pikestaff, was grimly delighted. For three years, ever since he had finally succeeded in slipping the Wartburg and returning to Saxony, he had been wrestling with an unsettling conundrum: the failure of the Spirit to illumine all those inspired by his teachings as he himself had been illumined. When Argula von Grumbach, a Bavarian noblewoman, publicly praised Luther’s translation of the New Testament, she did so in terms that perfectly corresponded to Luther’s own elevated sense of his mission. ‘Ah, but how splendid it is,’ she wrote, ‘when the spirit of God teaches us and, more, helps us understand first this passage then that one, God be praised! revealing to me the real, authentic light shining forth.’¹⁷ Yet the coming of enlightenment, it turned out, revealed different things to different people. Many of Luther’s followers, inspired by the premium that he had put on freedom, complained that he was dragging his feet. That a man who had dared to oppose both pope and emperor should now seem to shrink from campaigning for a universal liberty, one in which the poor might be freed for ever from the exactions of the rich, struck them as a sorry disappointment. Müntzer, a former priest who believed himself appointed by God to bring the oppressed to the lordship of the world, had been particularly vituperative. Making play with the one-time monk’s growing bulk, he mocked Luther as a mound of soft-living flesh, and fantasised about cooking him as a dainty for the Devil.

It did not need the culinary fantasies of Müntzer to inspire in peasants and miners across the various territories of the empire a mood of insurrectionary ferment. The uprising crushed so bloodily at Frankenhausen was only one of a number of such revolts. Again and again, rebellion was justified as obedience to the Bible. In 1525, when thousands of peasants assembled in Baltringen, a village in northern Swabia, they proclaimed it their ambition ‘to hear the gospel and to live accordingly’.¹⁸ It was not they who were responsible for the war, but the lords and abbots, who oppressed them as Pharaoh had oppressed the Israelites. They wanted nothing that was not promised them by scripture. Unsurprisingly, then, the entire course of the peasants’ revolt, once the imperial nobility had rallied against it to brutal effect, slaughtering some hundred thousand rebels and bringing devastation to vast swathes of the empire, was charged by Luther’s critics to his account. ‘There were many peasants slain in the uprising, many fanatics banished, many false prophets hanged, burned, drowned, or beheaded who perhaps would still live as good obedient Christians had he never written.’¹⁹ The accusation was one that preyed on Luther’s conscience. Anxiety that he might have been responsible for sending multitudes to hell tormented him. So desperate was he not to be held responsible for the uprising that, as it reached its bloody climax, he condemned the rebels in terms so hysterical that even his admirers were taken aback. Luther did not care. He understood what was at stake. He knew that to acknowledge the rebels as his own would be to threaten his entire life’s work. Without the backing of supportive princes, there could be no possible future for his great project of reformatio.

‘Frogs need storks.’ Luther had no illusions as to the beneficence of earthly rulers. He knew how blessed he was in his patron. Few princes were as steadfast or wise as Friedrich. The majority, Luther acknowledged, were at best ‘God’s gaolers and hangmen’.²⁰ Yet this was sufficient. In a world that was fallen, there could be no prospect of arriving at a law that adequately reflected the eternal law of God – nor was it the task of the Church to make the attempt. It was one of the more grotesque enterprises of the papacy to have created an entire legal system, and then foisted it on the Christian people. This was why Luther had consigned volumes of canon law to his bonfire in Wittenberg. It was the duty of princes, not of popes, to uphold the frameworks of justice. Yet what were the proper frameworks of justice? Luther, precisely because he scorned to think of himself as a lawyer, took for granted much of what, over the course of long centuries, had been achieved by the very legal scholars whose books he had so publicly burned. Rulers who embraced Luther’s programme of reformatio had little option but to do the same. Anxious to govern their subjects in a correctly Christian manner, they settled on a simple expedient: to appropriate large portions of canon law and make it their own.

The result was not to dissolve the great division between the realms of the profane and the sacred that had characterised Christendom since the age of Gregory VII, but to entrench it. Rulers inspired by Luther, laying claim to an exclusive authority over their subjects, were able to set about designing a model of the state that no longer ceded any sovereignty to Rome. Meanwhile, in the privacy of their souls, true Christians had lost nothing. In place of canon lawyers, they now had God. Subject though they might be to a newly muscular understanding of the secular, liberty was theirs in a parallel dimension: the one dimension that truly mattered. Only those who opened their hearts to the gift of divine grace, to a direct communion with the Almighty, could feel themselves truly free. No longer was it the religiones – the monks, the friars, the nuns – who had religio. All believers had it – even those who, lacking Latin and speaking only German, might call it ‘religion’.

The world consisted of two kingdoms. One was a sheepfold, in which all who had answered the summons of Christ, the Good Shepherd, were fed and governed in peace; the other belonged to those who had been set to watch over the sheep, to keep them from dogs and robbers with clubs. ‘These two kingdoms must be sharply distinguished, and both be permitted to remain; the one to produce piety, the other to bring about external peace and prevent evil deeds; neither is sufficient in the world without the other.’²¹ That ambitious rulers should have been quick to sniff out the potential of such a formulation was hardly surprising. The most startling, the most outrageous move of all was made by a king who, far from ranking as an admirer of Luther, had not merely written a best-selling pamphlet against him, but been commended for it by the pope. Henry VIII – who, as king of England, lived in fuming resentment of the much greater prestige enjoyed by the emperor and the king of France – had been mightily pleased to have negotiated the title of Defender of the Faith for himself from Rome. It had not taken long, though, for relations between him and the papacy to take a spectacular turn for the worse. In 1527, depressed by a lack of sons and obsessed by a young noblewoman named Anne Boleyn, Henry convinced himself that God had cursed his marriage. As wilful as he was autocratic, he demanded an annulment. The pope refused. Not only was Henry’s case one to make any respectable canon lawyer snort, but his wife, Catherine of Aragon, was the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella – which meant in turn that she was the aunt of Charles V. Anxious though the pope might be to keep the English king on side, his prime concern was not to offend Christendom’s most powerful monarch. Henry, under normal circumstances, would have had little option but to admit defeat. The circumstances, though, were hardly normal. Henry had an alternative recourse to hand. He did not have to accept Luther’s views on grace or scripture to relish the reformer’s hostility to the pope. Opportunistic to the point of megalomania, the king seized his chance. In 1534, papal authority was formally repudiated by act of parliament. Henry was declared ‘the only supreme head on Earth of the Church of England’. Anyone who disputed his right to this title was guilty of capital treason.

Simultaneously, in the German city of Münster, another king was pushing the implications of Luther’s teachings to an opposite, but no less radical, extreme. Jan Bockelson – ‘John of Leiden’ – had no palaces, no parliaments. Instead, he was a tailor. For a year, as the forces of the expelled bishop laid siege to the town, attempting to starve it into submission, he governed Münster as a second David, the self-anointed king of the world. Confident that the thousand-year reign of the saints prophesied in Revelation was imminent, preachers in the city summoned the faithful to the slaughter of the unrighteous. ‘God will be with his people; he will give them iron horns and bronze claws against their enemies.’²² A familiar rallying-cry. Müntzer had raised it only a decade earlier at Frankenhausen. Escaping the slaughter of that terrible battle, a handful of men had lived to inspire a new generation. One, a former bookseller named Hans Hut, had taken refuge in Augsburg, where he had preached an uncompromising rejection of traditions lacking the sanction of scripture. A particular object of his ire had been the baptism of infants. Though the custom reached back to the earliest days of the Church, it lacked any mention in the Bible – and so Hut had duly denounced it as ‘a cunning trick on all Christendom’.²³ In 1526, on Pentecost, the feast-day that commemorated the descent of the Spirit onto the first apostles, he had received a second baptism: an anabaptismos. Hut’s death in prison the following year had not prevented thousands of Christians from following his example. Bockelson’s reign in Münster was an Anabaptist coup. A host of policies for which scriptural licence could readily be cited, but which the Church had long set its face against, were instituted: the smashing of images; communism; polygamy. Riot alternated with repression. John of Leiden personally beheaded a suspected spy. The scandal and the horror of it reverberated across Christendom. By June 1535, when Münster finally fell, Lutheran princes had joined forces with the bishop, and Anabaptist become a byword for violence and depravity.

‘Here I stand. I can do no other.’ So Luther, appearing before the emperor at Worms, was said to have declared. John of Leiden, equally convinced of his obedience to God’s Word, had suffered for it more terribly. His flesh was tortured with red-hot pincers; his tongue pulled out with pliers; his corpse left to moulder in an iron cage. Other Anabaptists, wherever the news from Münster was reported, from England to Austria, were hunted down. They too died in the certainty of their obedience to God’s Word. They too could do no other. Yet the men who condemned them, Lutheran as well as Catholic, when they imagined themselves preventing a second Münster, might often have their victims badly wrong. Many Anabaptists, when they pondered the writings that had inspired John of Leiden and his followers to exact God’s vengeance on the unrighteous, understood them to mean the precise opposite: never to wield a sword. The verses of scripture were many, and the ways of interpreting them as numerous as those who read them. If some Anabaptists found in the Bible a summons to trample God’s enemies in the winepress of his wrath, then so did many others, pondering the life and the death of their Saviour, absorb a very different lesson. Hut himself, escaping the slaughter at Frankenhausen, had repented his time as a soldier. Other Anabaptists too, committing themselves to an absolute pacifism, had sought, not to overthrow the order of the world, but to withdraw from it. Whether in the loneliness of isolated valleys or in the anonymity of crowded cities, they turned their backs on earthly power. It seemed to them the only proper, the only Christian thing to do.

‘Where the Spirit of the Lord is,’ Paul had written to the Corinthians, ‘there is freedom.’²⁴ Between this assertion and the insistence that there existed only the one way to God, only the one truth, only the one life, there had always been a tension. The genius of Gregory VII and his fellow radicals had been to attempt its resolution with a programme of reform so far-reaching that the whole of Christendom had been set by it upon a new and decisive course. Yet the claim of the papacy to embody both the ideal of liberty and the principle of authority had never been universally accepted. For centuries, various groups of Christians had been defying its jurisdiction by making appeal to the Spirit. Luther had lit the match – but others before him had laid the trail of gunpowder. This was why, in the wake of his defiant appearance at Worms, he found himself impotent to control the explosions that he had done so much to set in train. Nor was he alone. Every claim by a reformer to an authority over his fellow Christians might be met by appeals to the Spirit; every appeal to the Spirit by a claim to authority. The consequence, detonating across entire reaches of Christendom, was a veritable chain-reaction of protest.

Flailingly, five Lutheran princes had sought to put this process on an official footing. In 1529, summoned to an imperial diet, they had dared to object to measures passed there by the Catholic majority by issuing a formal ‘Protestation’. By 1546, when Luther died, commending his spirit into the hands of the God of Truth, other princes too had come to be seen as ‘Protestant’ – and not only in the empire. Denmark had been Lutheran since 1537; Sweden was well on its way to becoming so. Yet elsewhere, the spectrum of what it might mean to be Protestant yawned as unbridgeably as it had ever done. Luther, a man whose genius for vituperation had helped to make the whole of Christendom shake, had never been content merely to insult the pope. Those who, like him, had dared to repudiate the Roman Church but had then been guilty of what Luther condemned as a failure properly to understand the Spirit, had also been the objects of his ire. Theologians in Swiss or German cities who presumed to dispute his views on the eucharist; Anabaptists, with their wild contempt for infant baptism and secular authority; Henry VIII, who seemed to think he was God. Luther, fretting where it all might lead, had not shrunk from contemplating a nightmarish prospect: a world in which the very concept of truth might end up dissolving, and everything appear relative. ‘For whoever has gone astray in the faith may thereafter believe whatever he wants.’²⁵

Certainly, in the years that followed Luther’s death, the task of steering the great project of reformatio between rocks and shoals appeared an ever more desperate one. Lutheran princes were crushed in battle by Charles V, and cities that had long echoed to the impassioned debates of rival reformers brought to submit. Many exiles, in their desperation to find sanctuary, headed for England, where – following the death of Henry VIII in 1547 – his young son, Edward VI, had come to be hailed by Protestants as a new Josiah. This was no idle flattery. Edward might be a boy, but he was committed to the cause. Indeed, the only aspect of it he in any way seemed to dislike was the style of beard sported by German Protestants. Heir as he was to the title of head of the English Church, the young king provided the radicals on his council with a formidable instrument of reform. It was one they exploited to the full. ‘The greater change was never wrought in so short a space in any country since the world was.’²⁶ Yet the thread on which all this hung was a delicate one. What a monarchy charged with the governance of the Church could give, it might also take away. In 1553, Edward died, to be succeeded by his elder sister Mary, the daughter of Catherine of Aragon. Devoutly Catholic, it did not take her long to reconcile England with Rome. Many leading reformers were burned; others fled abroad. The lesson to Protestants on the perils of placing their trust in a secular authority was a harsh one. Yet there was peril too in being a stateless exile. To refugees in flight from Mary’s England, it seemed an impossible circle to square. The liberty to worship in a manner pleasing to God was nothing without the discipline required to preserve it – but how were they to be combined? Was it possible, amid the storms and tempests of the age, for a seaworthy ark to be built at all?

The most formidable, the most influential attempt to answer these questions was undertaken by a reformer who was himself an exile. Jean Calvin was a Frenchman, a scholar whose intellectual brilliance was rivalled only by his genius for the detail and grind of administration. Schooled as he was in law, he might under normal circumstances have enjoyed a profitable career at court; but instead, embracing what the French authorities condemned as a sinister and foreign heresy, he had been obliged in 1534, at the age of twenty-five, to abandon his homeland. Fortunately for the young fugitive, there had lain, just across the border, a number of cities renowned as hotbeds of reform. Calvin, restless and anxious to play his part, had made a tour of them: Zurich, Strasbourg, Bern. When he did finally put down roots, though, it was in a city that had barely registered in the consciousness of most Protestants: Geneva. Calvin had first visited it in 1536; but then, after two years of attempting to create a godly community, had ended up being run out of town. Invited back in 1541 to have a second go, he had demanded official assurance of their backing from the city magistrates. This they had provided. Geneva was a city racked by political and social tensions, and Calvin – a man of evidently formidable talents – seemed to its leaders the man likeliest to heal them. And so it proved. Calvin, recognising a rare opportunity when he saw it, had moved with what proved to be decisive speed. It took him only a couple of months to set the Genevan church on new foundations, to recalibrate its relationship with the civic authorities, and to commit the entire city to an unsparing programme of moral regeneration. ‘If you desire to have me as your pastor,’ he had warned the council, ‘then you will have to correct the disorder of your lives.’²⁷ He was nothing if not true to his word.

Naturally, there was opposition. Calvin brusquely, even brutally, overrode it. The means he used, though, were always within the law, never violent. He lived unarmed, unguarded. He turned the other cheek when he was spat at by his enemies in the street. His only weapon was the pulpit. Lacking any civic office, or even – until 1559 – citizenship, he relied solely on his authority as a minister of the Word to bend the Genevans to his purposes. This, to the growing numbers of his admirers beyond the city, only confirmed that his achievements enjoyed divine sanction. In 1555, when a group of exiles from England arrived in Geneva, they found themselves in what appeared to their stupefied gaze the very model of a Christian commonwealth: a society in which freedom and discipline were so perfectly in balance that none of them would ever forget the experience.

To a degree exceptional among reformers, Calvin had always wrestled with the practicalities of defining a godly order. That the ‘privilege of liberty’²⁸ was one to which all Christians were entitled he took for granted. Accordingly, in his vision of what the Church should properly be, he set a premium on every Christian’s freedom both to join it and to leave. The dictates of conscience, so Calvin believed, had always, ‘even when the whole world was enveloped in the thickest darkness of ignorance, held like a small ray of light which remained unextinguished’;²⁹ but he knew, nevertheless, that it was not given to everyone to be saved. Only an elect few, reaching out to God with their faith, would be met by God with his grace. All the descendants of Adam were predestined either to heaven or to eternal death. That this decree was ‘a dreadful one’,³⁰ Calvin freely admitted; and yet he did not shrink before it. It was precisely because he knew that many would spurn the gifts of the Spirit that he laboured so hard, not just to gather together a community of the elect, but to bring it into harmony with God’s plans. Four offices existed to uphold it. There were ministers to preach the word of God; teachers to instruct the young; deacons to meet the needs of the unfortunate. Then, watchdogs elected to stand guard over the morals of the laity, there were the ‘elders’: the presbyters. Meeting every Thursday, it was they and the city’s ministers who provided the church with its court: the ‘Consistory’. Fail to attend a service on Sunday, or transgress the Ten Commandments, or break the laws devised by Calvin to define the doctrines of the Church, and a summons was bound to come – no matter the rank of the offender. Every year, almost one in fifteen Genevans would end up making an appearance before it.³¹ For those in the city who hated Calvin, who rejected his theology, who resented the endless lectures and harangues from the pulpit, it was this that constituted the worst intrusion: the dread that the eyes of the Consistory were always on them, watching, marking, judging. Conversely, for Protestants fleeing persecution, uprooted from their homes and desperate to believe that the disorder of the fallen world might yet be brought into harmony with God’s plan, it was precisely Calvin’s concern to rectify sinners that made Geneva seem such a model. He had created in it, as one admirer put it, ‘the most perfect school of Christ that ever was in earth since the days of the apostles’.³²

The shelter that the city could offer refugees was like streams of water to a panting deer. Charity lay at the heart of Calvin’s vision. Even a Jew, if he needed assistance, might be given it. ‘Remember this: Whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and whoever sows generously will also reap generously.’³³ The readiness of Geneva to offer succour to refugees was, for Calvin, a critical measure of his success. He never doubted that many Genevans profoundly resented the influx of impecunious foreigners into their city. But nor did he ever question his responsibility to educate them anew. The achievement of Geneva in hosting vast numbers of refugees was to prove a momentous one. The example of charity that it provided; the reassurance that a godly society was indeed possible; the comfort offered to persecuted exiles that there was a purpose to their suffering, and that everything in life was shaped by divine intention: all were topics discussed whenever refugees made it home. ‘Calvinists’ they were called by their enemies, a term of abuse that was also a tribute. Loyal to God’s purposes as they understood them, those inspired by Calvin would prove themselves ready to follow his teachings even at the utmost cost: to abandon their past; to leave behind their homes; to travel, if they had to, the ends of the earth.

The Clearing Mist

One night in 1581, a group of men carried the corpse of an executed robber through the dark streets of Shrewsbury. Ahead of them, on a hill overlooking the river Severn, rose one of the tallest spires in England. Founded back in the age of Athelstan, the church of St Mary’s was where, during the turbulent centuries that preceded the English conquest of Wales, some ten miles to the west, a succession of papal legates had based themselves. But those days were history. What Protestants had come to call ‘popery’ was banished from England. The Catholic Queen Mary had died in 1558, and her half-sister, Elizabeth, the daughter of Anne Boleyn, now sat on the English throne. Over one of the church doors her coat of arms had been carved, and a verse from the Bible: ‘Many daughters have done virtuously, but thou excellest them all.’³⁴ Not every taint of popery, though, had yet been erased. In the churchyard there stood a giant cross. That it was much cherished in Shrewsbury only made the task of destroying it all the more urgent. Working under cover of darkness, the party of body-snatchers set to pulling it down. Then, once the cross had been demolished, they dug a grave where it had formerly stood, and slung in the corpse. Better an executed criminal than a monument to popery.

‘A perpetual forge of idols.’³⁵ So Calvin had described the human mind. This conviction, that fallen mortals were forever susceptible to turning their backs on God, to polluting the pure radiance of his commands, to erecting in his very sanctuary a golden calf, was the dread that had constantly shadowed all his reforms. Now, a decade and more after his death, his warnings against superstition had won a readership far beyond the limits of Geneva. In London, where more editions of his works were published than anywhere else, printers struggled to keep pace with demand. One enterprising editor had even commissioned a compilation of his greatest hits. Nor was it only in England that Calvin had become, almost overnight, a best-seller. The reverberations of his influence had reached as far afield as Scotland – a land freely acknowledged by its own nobility to lie ‘almost beyond the limits of the human race’.³⁶ In 1559, the preaching of John Knox, an exile returned from Geneva, had inspired an eruption of godly vandalism across the kingdom. One congregation, after listening to Knox inveigh against idolatry, had promptly set to dismantling the local cathedral. Other bands of enthusiasts had incinerated abbeys, chopped down the orchards of friaries, and pulled up flowers in monastery gardens. A year later – after a short but vicious civil war, and a vote by the Scottish parliament for a reformation of the country’s Church that was unmistakably Calvinist in flavour – the ambition to rout idolatry had been set on an official footing. There was now no relic of papist superstition in Britain so remote that it might not be liable for legal destruction. Whether to islands lashed by Atlantic gales, where Irish monks, back in the age of Columbanus, had raised crosses amid the heather and the rock, or to the wildest reaches of Wales, where moss-covered chapels stood guard over gushing springs, workmen armed with sledge-hammers made their way, and did their work. The reach of magistrates inspired by Calvin had become a long one indeed.

Why, then, in the churchyard of St Mary’s, had there been any need for the clandestine destruction of its cross? It had been done by men who feared that time was running out. Across the Channel, the forces of darkness, hell-bound and predacious, were drowning famous Christian cities in the blood of the elect. In 1572, on the feast-day of Saint Bartholomew, thousands of Protestants had been butchered on the streets of Paris. In other cities too, throughout Calvin’s native France, there had been a general slaughter of his followers. New martyrs had been made in Lyon. Meanwhile, in the Low Countries, an even more murderous conflict was being fought. Its cities, brilliant and rich, had long been incubators of every shade of Protestant. As early as 1523, Charles V had hanged two monks in Antwerp on a charge of heresy, and levelled their monastery. The king of Münster, John of Leiden, had been Dutch. Over the course of the succeeding decades, more Protestants had been put to death in the Low Countries than anywhere else. Yet still the ranks of the godly there had continued to grow. Insurgents against a monarchy with all the wealth of the New World at its back, many had found in Calvin’s teachings a life-altering reassurance: that to be outnumbered did not mean being wrong. To take up arms against tyranny was no sin, but rather a duty. God would look after his own. If the toppling of a cross in an English market town could hardly compare as a feat with the successful defiance of the most formidable military machine in Christendom, then it was no less godly for that. The loyalty shown by the Dutch rebels to the will of the divine; their readiness to risk their fortunes and their lives; the courage and the intelligence that they brought to their fight against idolatry: here were inspirations to anyone with eyes to see.

In England no less than in the embattled Dutch Republic, the yearning was for purity. One year after the demolition of the cross in St Mary’s, when a new minister arrived to lead the church, he lauded his monarch as God’s faithful servant, ‘who hath worthily triumphed over spiritual tyranny’.³⁷ But in his own congregation, and across the length and breadth of the kingdom, there were plenty who disagreed. England was not the Dutch Republic, where the exertions of Calvinists in the cause of independence had helped to secure for their church – the ‘Reformed Church’, as they proudly termed it – a pre-eminent and public status. Elizabeth’s Protestantism was of a distinctively wilful kind. Her taste for the trappings of popery – bishops, choirs, crucifixes – appalled the godly. The more that she dismissed their calls for further reform, the more they fretted whether the Church of England over which she presided as its first Supreme Governor could be reckoned truly Protestant at all. The name first given them by a Catholic exile in 1565 – ‘Puritans’* – seemed less an insult than a fair description. Knowing as they did that only a small number were destined to be saved, they saw in the obduracy of the queen and her ministers all the confirmation they needed of their own status as an inner core of the elect. It was not just their right to shoulder the responsibility for reform, but their duty. What were all the titles of bishops if not mere vanities ‘drawn out of the Pope’s shop’?³⁸ What the affectations of monarchy if not tyranny? True authority lay instead with the fellowship of the godly, led by its elected pastors and presbyters. Their charge it was to continue the great labour of cleansing the world of delusion, and of scraping away from the ark of Christianity all the accumulated barnacles and seaweed of human invention. Before the urgency of such a mission, all the raging of the traditional guardians of church and state, of archbishops and kings, were as nothing. The task was nothing less than to right the disorder of the cosmos. To join God with man.

Yet for all the revolutionary character of the Puritans’ programme – its dismissal of custom, its contempt for superstition – it was not nearly as radical a break with the past as either their supporters or their enemies liked to insist. Godly examples of idol-toppling were hardly confined to the Bible. In 1554, while Mary was still on the throne, the papal legate sent to welcome England back into the fold had addressed members of parliament, and reminded them of how it was from the papacy that they had first received the gift of Christ, which had redeemed their country from the worship of stock and stone. Meanwhile, in the Low Countries, Catholic leaders desperate to steel their flock urged veneration of Saint Boniface, who had brought the light of the gospel to their forebears, and constructed churches out of Thunor’s oak. This was a line of attack with the power to make Protestants feel uneasy. Various defences were employed against it. Some insisted that the first Christian mission to England had in fact arrived, not in the papacy of Gregory the Great but long before, back in the age of the apostles, and therefore owed nothing to the Antichrist of Rome; others that the saints celebrated by Bede had never existed, but instead been fabricated to fill the gap left by the banished gods. The thesis did not catch on. To many Protestants, the record of the Anglo-Saxon Church was a model and an inspiration. Clearly, its corruption, and that of Christendom as a whole, had been the fault of Gregory VII. Puritans, then, even as they rejected the old and familiar, could not entirely deny a lurking paradox: that their rejection of tradition was itself a Christian tradition.

Back in the earliest days of English Christianity, when the first king of Northumbria to hear the gospel had consented to be baptised, and was heading down to the river with his followers, a crow had appeared, croaking in a manner that every pagan knew to be a warning. But the missionary who had been preaching to them, a Roman sent by Gregory the Great, had ordered the bird shot dead. ‘If that heedless bird could not avoid death,’ he had declared, ‘then still less was it able to reveal the future to men who have been reborn and rebaptised into the image of God.’³⁹ No Puritan would have thought to disagree. Mockery of the tall stories told by papists, of the folly of their claims that the footprints of the Devil were to be found imprinted on rocks, or that the bones of saints might in any way be reckoned holy, or that Christ, during the eucharist, became physically present among the congregation, did not imply any doubt that the divine was manifest in every aspect of the universe. Calvin had believed this quite as devoutly as Abelard. If reason had no role to play in fathoming the mysteries of faith, then in its proper sphere, where the stars moved on their inexorable course, and the birds sang their songs of love to their creator, and ‘grass and flowers laugh out to him’,⁴⁰ it existed to reveal to mortals the traces and purposes of God.

A century on from Luther, Protestants could cast themselves as the heirs of a revolution that had transformed Christendom utterly. No longer merely a staging post in a lengthy process of reformatio, it was commemorated instead as an episode as unique as it had been convulsive: as the Reformation. It had been, in the opinion of its admirers, a liberation of humanity from ignorance as well as error. Once, when the world had been lost to darkness, there had been no limit to the stories of marvels and wonders that Christians had greedily swallowed; but then, ‘when the mist began to clear up, they grew to be esteemed but as old wives’ fables, impostures of the clergy, illusions of spirits, and badges of Antichrist’.⁴¹ If God was to be found in the interior experience of individual believers, then so also could he be apprehended in the immensity and complexity of the cosmos.

The truest miracles needed no popery to be rendered miraculous.