Theo 273 Modern Church History Giacomo Martina SJ

Chapter III: Political, Social and Economic

Factors of the Protestant Reformation

Introduction

In general, we have to remember that, in the life and diffusion of all great
heretical (and/or schismatic movements), the political factor is almost always
never absent. For example:

1. Monophysitism owed its diffusion in Palestine, Syria and Egypt also

to political motives. These motives contextualized the religious aspect
opposition to Byzantium, more or less common in that region.

2. The Greek Schism of 1054 was the effect not so much of theological
controversies but of the by then already antique antagonism between
Rome and Constantinople, an antagonism that became more acute
from the moment that Charlemagne assumed the title of Holy Roman
Emperor.

3. In Bohemia, John Hus was exalted as a national hero in protest

against tendencies that would deprive Bohemia of her national
character, tendencies that sought to reduce her to one more German
province.

I. The Protestant Reformation

It is therefore not surprising that, in the matter of the Protestant

Reformation, we find an analogous situation. At the root of the Protestant
revolt we find a double opposition: 1) against Rome, and 2) against the
Hapsburgs (who were seen to be allied with Rome).

1. Resistance against Rome. According to Erasmus, “the aversion to

the name of Rome had already penetrated the soul of many peoples
through that which is narrated about the customs of that people.”
The anti-Roman sentiment was particularly strong in Germany
following the long struggle between Ludwig of Bavaria and Pope
John XXII. The Avignon Pope was a supporter of an anti-German
political strategy and responsible for the centralization and most of
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all the fiscalism of the Roman curia based at Avignon, provoking

therefore endless lamentations summarized and codified in the
programs of the so-called Gravamina nationis Germanicae
(“complaints of the German nation”). “That Germany may be free,”
“Let us not forget that we are Germans,” Ulrich of Hutten used to
repeat, defining himself as the savior of Germany. Thus, in the
prologue to his complete works, Luther in 1545 united his own
cause to that of German independence, affirming: “The Germans
are tired of supporting the thievery […] The popular aura
propitiously breathes forth everywhere, because those arts and the
ways of proceeding of the Romans, with which they have filled and
fatigued the world, are already and now abhorrent to all.” The
Nuncio Aleander informed Rome in 1521 that, in a nutshell, the
enterprise launched by Luther was in fact something that
transcended Luther himself because the issues precisely had their
roots in a profound anti-Roman affect particularly among the
nobility.

2. Resistance against Hapsburg centralization and absolutism.

The evolution of the feudal state into the absolutist state, already
common in large parts of Europe, implicated a long and hard
struggle between the nobility and the monarchy. In England, Spain
and France, the kings, coming at the end of a long process lasting
many centuries, would strip the nobility of every political power
and erect on the ruins of feudal power a strong national state. In
Germany, this same struggle would have the opposite effect: the
great feudal powers succeeded, in the Peace of Westphalia of 1648,
to wrest full independence, reducing the Holy Roman Empire of the
German Nation to a simple confederation of sovereign states.
Naturally, the emperors of the House of the Hapsburgs would exert
every effort to maintain and reinforce their own authority, and this
would generate an irreducible opposition between nobility and the
emperor. This situation of conflict would influence in definitive
manner the religious attitudes of the nobility. If the emperor, by
tradition, interest and conviction, proclaimed himself the defender
of Catholicism, left to the German princes was exactly the opposite
sentiment. It is in this historical context that one must position the
appeal launched by Luther in 1520, on the occasion of the imperial
election of Charles V (Charles I, King of Spain) who with his power
seriously threatened the autonomic tendencies of the German
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lords (cf. Luther’s address To the Christian Nobility of the German

Nation) and the editorial success of his publication.

3. The Socio-Economic Situation in Germany. Though this does

not provide an adequate and exclusive explanation of the birth of
Luther’s movement, it must nevertheless be considered in order to
better understand its rapid diffusion in Europe. Most of all in
Germany, two social classes suffered the effects of the economic
crises consequent to the “discovery” of the Americas: the peasant
and the lower nobility. The feudal knights had lost their old power
due to the depreciation of the value of their agricultural lands in
the face of a) the rise of trade and commerce centered in the towns
and cities, b) the transformation of military techniques that now
accentuated infantry over against the cavalry, and c) the
reinforcement of the higher nobility (the dukes and princes).
Obviously, not happy with their lot, the knights were looking for a
way to catapult themselves once again into positions of power, and
the prospect of their acquisition of Church lands offered a
comfortable and easy occasion, more so that it was easy for them
to hide their true motives under the pretext of zeal for the reform
initiated by Luther and others. Among the peasants, revolt had
been fermenting for a long time, with riots violently exploding
periodically in Germany from the last quarter of the 15 th century to
the beginning of the Protestant Reformation (1476, 1478, 1486,
1491, 1492, 1502, and 1513). But more than the unbearable
material condition of their lives, the peasants were impelled to rise
in arms by their inferior juridical condition. Unlike their
counterparts in France, Italy and Spain, the German peasants
continued to languish in the position of serfs, dependent on their
feudatory lords who, if sometimes dealing with them in a
paternalistic way, usually dealt with them harshly in their attempt
to preserve and promote their feudal rights. Certainly, pushed
beyond the limits of their patience and suffering, the peasants
often had no recourse but to explode in violent action.

4. The Personality of Luther. All of this enormous complex of

religious, political, and social factors constituted, in a manner of
speaking, the immense explosive material that had accumulated in
the course of various decades. It was enough for a spark to make it
explode. Now, as in many other cases, it was easy enough to find a
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man to generate that spark, so that we do not have to believe that

without Luther nothing would have happen. On the one hand, the
papal nuncio Aleander had already reported that in Germany 100
other persons were ready to put themselves at the head of a
movement in the place of Luther. On the other hand, it would be
anti-historical, in this and other cases, to ask what would have
happened if Luther did not come into the scene. This is a pseudo-
problem; it is not possible to give a scientific response different
from a simple hypothesis…. Instead, it is the task of history to
establish what state could have been the effective contribution of
Luther in the genesis and development of the Protestant
Revolution. We have to respond immediately and without
hesitation that his influence was very strong: he was the one who
took the present but disparate, dispersed and even latent factors
together, brought them to their maturation, and assured their
maximum efficaciousness. For his gifts, his talents of preaching,
leadership, guidance, his vivacious imagination full of sculpted
images, his conviction of having been sent by God in order to
announce not a theoretical system but an intimate and
overwhelming experience, which in his mind constituted the only
way to peace and to salvation, his vehemence in asserting his
affirmations, his external appearance that magnetized his
listeners, impressed by the gleam in his eyes, Luther was made in
order to inflame and to enthral the popular masses and to
convince and to rouse the intellectuals of his day. In short, Luther
did not determine the cause of the revolt, but he hastened the
moment of its explosion and threw the weight of his strong
personality in support of it, increasing its effectiveness. On the
other hand, it was the same typically German temperament of
Luther that ended with restricting the significance of his action, so
that he brought about the development of a religiosity that was
more national than international in expression.

II. New Historiographical and Methodological Problems

1. In order to know well the spiritual environment in which the

Protestant Reformation reached its mature point, it is necessary to
have a good understanding of Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466-1536).
The bibliography on Erasmus is large. His practical program of
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church renewal is perhaps better revealed, among his works, in

Enchiridion militis christiani, also in his Elogioum Moriae, his
Colloquia, in several of his letters.

Erasmus incarnated, perhaps in a much more vivid and therefore

more efficacious manner than others, the tendencies of Christian
Humanism and Evangelism, of which he was the recognized leader.
With his brilliant writings he contributed to the founding in large
parts of Europe the ideals typical of the movement: tolerance,
purification of the worn out and anachronistic structures that still
weighed down the Church, return to the sources. Erasmus left behind
a spiritual heritage off which we continue largely to live. It is not
excessive to assert that he was, for several decades, the intellectual
father of central Europe.

Two essential questions come immediately to mind in thinking of

Erasmus. First, what was the source of the great influence exercised
by a man who was not really a profound thinker and whose moral
temperament was nothing to crow about? Second, was this influence
positive or negative?

It is easy enough to respond to the first question. Erasmus better

than many others knew how to express the aspirations that were
widely diffused in many strata of public opinion. He was in some way
the interpreter of his time. But then, as usually happens, history
started to move more decisively and more rapidly than what the writer
had foreseen, Erasmus, arm chair intellectual that he was and not a
man of action, less original and less creative than what is first
apparent, wanted to remain neutral and thus was surpassed and left
behind.

More difficult is the response to the second question. According to

the schemas typical of Marxist historiography, Erasmus was the
classic bourgeois individual, who wanted reform but refused
revolution, and because of his fears ended with arresting the march of
authentic renewal. Catholic scholars considered the Dutch
intellectual weak, both physically and morally, who first with his
sarcasm and then with his indecision, ended with favouring the
Protestant Reformation. Erasmus posuit ova, Lutherus exclusit pullos.
Erasmus laid the egg, Luther hatched the chick. In other words,

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Erasmus planted, Luther harvested. More recent historians, from

Imbart de la Tour to Garcia Villoslada, despite admitting the limited
intellectual and moral character of Erasmus, show themselves more
benevolent toward him, substantially considering him a precursor of
genuine Catholic Reform of the first half of the 1500s. One could then
revise the old saying, affirming instead: Erasmus posuit ova, Loyola
exclusit pullos. Erasmus laid the egg, but Loyola hatched the chick.

2. Hubert Jedin, in his fundamental work Catholic Reform or Counter-

Reformation, affirms: “No other work of Luther is so lacking in
originality in its concrete content as much as his writing addressed to
the (German) nobility” dated 1520. This affirmation could be
documented more usefully, recalling here the many plans and
projects of reform before 1520. Again, Erasmus would be useful to
remember here, particularly his work Colloquia, reworked many times
by the author from 1518 to his death. Expressed in humoristic form,
with biting insinuations and scenes presented in shaded colors, the
humanist criticized the abuses of the times: pilgrimages reduced to
tourism, the excessive cult of relics, the pharisaism of certain exterior
religious observances, vows lightly meant and pronounced, the
excessive reliance on indulgences, the prevalence of devotion to the
saints rather than Jesus, etc. But Erasmus was in substance more
fortunate, at least due to the wide diffusion of his works, than other
writers who also invoked the need for reforms in the Church but with
a different tone.

3. Still to be explored are the themes of anxiety, guilt and sin and their
various aspects and up to what point they weighed on the mentality of
the 1400s and the 1500s. E.Castelli, in his work Il demoniaco
nell’arte (Rome, 1952), has demonstrated with what frequency the
theme of death and the devil runs through the art works of the
Quatrocento and the Cinquecento. J.Delumeau, in his Le peche et la
peur: la culpabilisation en Occident (XIII-XVIII siècles) (Paris,
1983), has analysed the pessimism and the sense of the macabre in
the Renaissance, examining the almanacs, homilies, and other
Catholic and Protestant pastoral works. One may also read with profit
this other work from the same author: La peur en Occident: une cite
assiegee (Paris, 1978).

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4. One may query whether the numerous descriptions of religious life in

Europe and especially in Italy in the beginning of the Cinquecento
were always contrasting aspects, positive and negative. Helpful in this
regard would be H.Bohmer’s book Ignatius von Loyola (Stuttgart,
1941). Also useful, particularly life in the Rome of the Cinquecento,
would be P. Tacchi Venturi, La vita religiosa in Italia durante la
prima eta della Compagnia di Gesu (Roma, 1950).

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