John Tulloch · 5 of 27

Introduction. · Part 3

It is not wonderful that a widespread excitement as to these abuses of the Papacy continued to gather force, notwithstanding all the vigorous checks its successive outbreaks had encountered. These checks had mastered the opposition for the time, but left its roots still uneradicated and strong, ready to spring up after a fresh season of repose. Wherever there was any reality of national life, any feeling of political hope, there could not fail to be found a rising spirit inimical to the pretensions of Rome. More than any other nation, Germany possessed at this time such a national life. The weakness of the Papacy on the one hand, and the distance of the Empire on the other, had given prominence and power to its several states, and promoted a spirit of healthy activity and freedom in its great municipalities. The old conflict of the Emperor with the Pope, although the spirit of opposition had been modified by recent circumstances, such as the Bohemian war, still served as a tradition of hostility. It was the floating banner, the symbol, of an immemorial national cause, which allured men like Sickingen and Hutten, and under which they burned to go forth and fight. Germany, moreover, was virgin soil, or nearly so, as far as the hitherto impeded footsteps of reformation were concerned. She had not been left to languish like England, Bohemia, France, and Italy, under the defeat of a reformatory impulse in which she had prematurely put forth the best and heartiest fibres of her national energies. In air these respects Germany might have been seen to be politically destined as the scene of the next great movement of Reform.

But such political, or, as we may call them, external influences, while they formed the necessary conditions of such a movement, could never by themselves have given a true and enduring life to it. This came, and could alone come, from the Divine influences surviving in the heart of German Christendom, and which, although they had not hitherto, as in other countries, broken forth into any violent flame, had yet lived on in devout seclusion and patient doing of works of mercy, or in the earnest doctrines of some great teacher, whom the Church had not approved, but not violently extruded.

While England had not yet begun to sway with the agitations of the Wicliffite reform, Germany and the Low Countries were nursing in their bosom various elements of a free spiritual life. Cologne, which, by the time of the sixteenth century, had sunk into the main refuge of monkish ignorance, was at this earlier period the centre of a spiritual earnestness which propagated itself by means of various associations, such as we have already mentioned. It was the characteristic of these societies, in contrast to the regular monkish establishments, that they were comparatively free and unorganised. They grew up under an operation of a common inward principle, rather than of an associative external bond; and their aim was to foster the spread of this principle, leaving it to its free action rather than to secure its permanence by legal restraints. Some of them were composed of women, such as the Beguines, others of men, such as the Beghards; some appear to have been more practical, others more contemplative, in their sphere of work. Among the latter must be reckoned the Brethren of the Free Spirit—the nursery of the great names of German mysticism—Eckart, Tauler, Suso, Ruysbroek. The labours of these men, especially the inward spiritualising and free character of their teaching, standing at the very opposite extreme to the prevailing scholastic theology, kept alive a spirit of inquiry and Christian zeal. They were not reformers—this is not the point of view in which they are interesting; but through them the warm current of Christian life, without which the Reformation could never have arisen, continued to pour itself onwards with fertilising vigour.

When these earlier associations had degenerated in virtue of the very licence which, to some extent, they represented, the Brethren of the Common Life sprung up towards the beginning of the fifteenth century. These societies were distinguished from those of the Free Spirit by the comparatively evangelical character of the aim of the Brethren, their devotion to the study of Scripture and the active work of education, as well as almsgiving and visiting the poor and sick. Many of them spent their lives in multiplying and diffusing copies of the Scriptures, and watching over the care of the young. Their simple manner of living, their spirit of soberness and faithful self-denial, their extended beneficence, gave them a powerful influence—to which, more than to any other cause, was owing the latent heat of Christian susceptibility spread throughout Germany, and which responded so rapidly to the touch of Luther’s glowing words. Gerhard Groot may be said to have been the founder of the Brethren of the Common Life, and Thomas à Kempis is their most illustrious name.

Alongside this undercurrent of Christian life, which largely pervaded German society in the fourteenth century, and in fact springing out of it, there is found a succession of distinguished teachers of the Augustinian theology, in opposition to the Pelagian tendencies of the prevailing scholasticism. John Pupper of Goch, chiefly known by a work on Christian Liberty; John of Wesel, professor at Erfurt, and then preacher at Mayence and Worms; and especially John Wessel of Gröningen, are the representatives of this doctrinal tendency. The last and most eminent of them was educated under the guidance of Thomas à Kempis, and, as a theologian, may be said to have anticipated Luther in every direction, and on the doctrine of the Eucharist to have gone beyond him.. Luther himself said of him: “If I had read Wessel before I began, my opponents would have imagined that I had derived everything from him, so entirely do we agree in spirit.” Combining profound devotional feeling with great dialectical and speculative power, Wessel is preeminently the theological forerunner of the Reformation. The Mystics, Ullmann says, “contributed warmth and spiritual life; others, like Huss, were greater in action; but Wessel was supreme in reformatory thinking, research, and doctrine.” He contributed light to the approaching movement.

Following these names, that of Staupitz, the friend and long the patron of Luther, deserves special mention. He was allied by his contemplative thoughtfulness, simple and gentle character, and fervent piety to the Mystics, of whose writings he was an ardent student and admirer. It was at his instance that Luther edited in 1516 the ‘Theologia Germanica,’ the text-book of German mysticism, whose perusal profoundly moved him; and we shall see more particularly in the sequel how decided an influence Staupitz exercised upon the great reformer at the most critical period of his life.

The influences which we have now marked were among the most direct and powerful in preparing the way for the Reformation of the sixteenth century. They were those which it took up most directly into its bosom, and which most immediately helped, by their energy, to stimulate and strengthen it. Something more, however, was needed to secure to the movement that wide diffusion and intellectual and historical importance which it so soon obtained. The unripeness of the times had especially proved fatal to the preceding movements. The superiority of intellect and the highest knowledge that prevailed had, upon the whole, remained with the Church. Scholasticism was still in the ascendant, its vigour still unspent. But now at length a great revival of intellectual life spread beyond the Church; and, in many of its aspects and most distinguished representatives, came closely into collision with its decaying forms. This revival had already begun in Italy, when the conquest of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453, and the dispersion of its scholars throughout the south of Europe, gave a greatly increased impetus to it. Classical studies everywhere gained ground, and this irrespectively of any application to theological or ecclesiastical purposes. They were pursued for their own sakes, and as the basis of a new and general human culture, the idea of which survives in the name that came to be universally applied to them.

Taking its start in Italy, this literary renaissance soon extended into Germany and the Low Countries. Rudolf Agricola, a friend and companion of Wessel, is one of the first names that attract our attention. He may be reckoned the father of German Humanism. His scholarship was everywhere applauded his literary knowledge esteemed marvellous. The two great names, however, that represent this new intellectual movement, are those of Reuchlin and Erasmus. The early contests of the latter with the monks, the piquancy and success of his famous satires, brought him into immediate connection with the reformatory tendencies of his time. There was no name that, for a while, was more a symbol of reviving Christian as well as literary interest. His New Testament studies widely stimulated inquiry, and called forth principles at variance with the traditionary theology. He was the great leader of the Humanists; the prominent representative of a spirit of culture directly inimical to the long-venerated Scholasticism, and before the spread of which it was destined to perish. We shall afterwards have occasion. to estimate the special position which he took up towards Luther, and the diversities of aim and modes of thinking and action by which they were characterised.

Reuchlin again became the centre of a conflict singularly significant of the insurrectionary spirit abroad, and the rottenness of the defences opposed to it. A baptised Jew of the name of Pfefferkorn, at Cologne; raised a cry against all Jewish writings as full of blasphemies against Christ, and called upon the Emperor to commit them to the flames. The Dominicans joined with him, and urged that the Jews should be proceeded against as heretics. The Imperial Council consulted Reuchlin in the circumstances. The son of a poor messenger, he had risen by his great accomplishments and happy manners to a post of influence at the court of Würtemberg, and was especially distinguished by his Oriental learning, and the attention he had given to the Rabbinical writings. As may be imagined, Reuchlin protested strongly against the proposal of the Dominicans. They were enraged at his interference, and attacked him with all the bitterness of ignorant and offended pride. He retorted with stinging sarcasm; and Hochstraten, the Cologne inquisitor, summoned him before his tribunal. Reuchlin appealed to Leo X. The contest widened and raged, not only throughout Germany but in Paris. Hutten and his coadjutors in the ‘Epistolæ Obscurorum virorum’ joined in it. In coarse and broad, but vigorous and vivid satire, the stupidity and obscenity of the monks were made to tell their own story in a continually running allusion to their quarrel with Reuchlin. The effect was so felicitous that (as in the no less famous case of Pascal’s Provincials) some of the monks themselves thought the letters genuine.

This occurred in 1516, on the very eve of the Reformation. A revelation of such mingled pride, ignorance, and wickedness, was in itself a revelation of weakness which could not fail to make a deep impression everywhere. Even the Pope felt ashamed of the Cologne ecclesiastics, and gave sentence in the dispute against them. A house thus divided against itself could not long stand. The monks, and especially the Dominicans, had become, in their deepened corruption, a constant and dangerous source of affliction to the Papacy; and Tetzel, with his indulgences and money bag, was soon to prove this with a conspicuous fatality.