The growing discontent of the poor people, whether in country
or town, is clearly traceable in Germany during the 1 5th century,
and revolutionary agitation was chronic in southern
Germany at least during the first two decades of the
16th. The clergy were satirized and denounced inHostility of the masses to the clergy in Germany.
popular pamphlets and songs. The tithe was an
oppressive form of taxation, as were the various fees
demanded for the performance of the sacraments. The
so-called “Reformation of Sigismund,” drawn up in 1438, had
demanded that the celibacy of the clergy should be abandoned
and their excessive wealth reduced. “ It is a shame which
cries to heaven, this oppression by tithes, dues, penalties,
excommunication, and tolls of the peasant, on whose labour
all men depend for their existence.” In 1476 a poor young
shepherd drew thousands to Nicklashausen to hear him denounce
the emperor as a rascal and the pope as a worthless fellow, and
urge the division of the Church’s property among the members
of the community. The “parsons ” must be killed, and the
lords reduced to earn their bread by daily labour. An apocalyptic
pamphlet of 1508 shows on its cover the Church upside
down, with the peasant performing the services, while the
priest guides the plough outside and a monk drives the horses.
Doubtless the free peasants of Switzerland contributed to
stimulate disorder and discontent, especially in southern
Germany. The conspiracies were repeatedly betrayed and the
guilty parties terribly punished. That discovered in 1517 made
a deep impression on the authorities by reason of its vast
extent, and doubtless led the diet of Augsburg to allude to
the danger which lay in the refusal of the common man to
pay the ecclesiastical taxes. “ It was into this mass of seething
discontent that the spark of religious protest fell-the one
thing needed to ire the train and kindle the social conflagration.
This was the society to which Luther spoke, and its discontent
was the sounding board which made his words reverberate.”[1]
On turning from the attitude of the peasants and poorer townspeople to that of the scholars, we find in their writings a good deal of harsh criticism of the scholastic theology, satirical allusions to the friars, and, in Germany, sharp denunciations of the practices of the Curia. But thereAttitude of the humanists. are many reasons for believing that the older estimate of the influence of the so-called Renaissance, , or “new learning,” in promoting the Protestant revolt was an exaggerated one. The class of humanists which had grown up in Italy during the 15th century, and whose influence had been spreading into Germany, France and England during the generation immediately preceding the opening of the Protestant revolt, represented every phase of religious feeling from mystic piety to cynical indifference, but there were very few anti-clerical among them. The revival of Greek from the time of Chrysoloras onward, instead of begetting a Hellenistic spirit, transported the more serious-minded to the nebulous shores of Neo-Platonism, while the less devout became absorbed in scholarly or literary ambitions, translations, elegantly phrased letters, clever epigrams or indiscriminate invective. It is true that Lorenzo Valla (d. 1457) showed the Donation of Constantine to be a forgery, denied that Dionysius the Areopagite wrote the works ascribed to him, and refuted the commonly accepted notion that each of the apostles had contributed a sentence to the Apostles' Creed. But such attacks were rare and isolated and were not intended to effect a breach in the solid ramparts of the medieval Church, but rather to exhibit the ingenuity of the critic. In the libraries collected under humanistic influences the patriotic writers, both Latin and Greek, and the scholastic doctors are conspicuous. Then most of the humanists were clerics, and in Italy they enjoyed the patronage of the popes. They not unnaturally showed a tolerant spirit on the whole toward existing institutions, including the ecclesiastical abuses, and, in general, cared little how long the vulgar herd was left in the superstitious darkness which befitted their estate, so long as the superior man was permitted to hold discreetly any views he pleased. Of this attitude Mutian (1411–1526), the German humanist who perhaps approached most nearly the Italian type, furnishes a good illustration. He believed that Christianity had existed from all eternity, and that the Greeks and Romans, sharing in God’s truth, would share also in the celestial joys. Forms and ceremonies should only be judged as they promoted the great object of life, a clean heart and a right spirit, love to God and one’s neighbour. He defined faith as commonly understood to mean “not the conformity of what we say with fact, but an opinion upon divine things founded upon credulity which seeks after profit.” “With the cross,” he declares, “we put our foes to flight, we extort money, we consecrate God, we shake hell, we work miracles.”
These reflections were, however, for his intimate friends, and like him, his much greater contemporary, Erasmus, abhorred anything suggesting open revolt or revolution. The extraordinary popularity of Erasmus is a sufficient indication that his attitude of mind was viewed withErasmus (1464–1536). sympathy by the learned, whether in France, England, Germany, Spain or Italy. He was a firm believer in the efficacy of culture. He maintained that old prejudices would disappear with the progress of knowledge, and that superstition and mechanical devices of salvation would be insensibly abandoned. The laity should read their New Testament, and would in this way come to feel the true significance of Christ’s life and teachings, which, rather than the Church, formed the centre of Erasmus’s religion. The dissidence of dissent, however, filled him with uneasiness, and he abhorred Luther’s denial of free will and his exaggerated notion of man’s utter depravity; in short, he did nothing whatever to promote the Protestant revolt, except so far as his frank denunciation and his witty arraignment of clerical and monastic weaknesses and soulless ceremonial, especially in his Praise of Folly and Colloquies, contributed to bring the faults of the Church into strong relief, and in so far as his edition of the New Testament furnished a simple escape from innumerable theological complications.
A peculiar literary feud in Germany served, about 1515, to throw into sharp contrast the humanistic party, which had been gradually developing during the previous fifty years, and the conservative, monkish, scholastic group, who found their leader among the Dominicans of the university of Cologne. Johann Reuchlin, a well-known scholar, who had been charged by the Dominicans with heresy, not only received the support of the newer type of scholars, who wrote him encouraging letters which he published under the title Epistolae clarorum virorum, but this collection suggested to Crotus Rubianus and Ulrich von Hutten one of the most successful satires of the ages, the Epistolae obscurorum virorum. As Creighton well said, the chief importance of the “Letters of Obscure Men” lay in its success in popularizing the conception of a stupid party which was opposed to the party of progress. At the same time that the Neo-Platonists, like Ficino and Pico de la Mirandola, and the pantheists, whose God was little more than a reverential conception of the universe at large, and the purely worldly humanists, like Celtes and Bebel, were widely diverging each by his own particular path from the ecclesiastical Weltanschauung of the middle ages, Ulrich von Hutten was busy attacking the Curia in his witty Dialogues, in the name of German patriotism. He, at least, among the well-known scholars eagerly espoused Luther's cause, as he understood it. A few of the humanists became Protestants-Melanchthon, Bucer, Oecolampadius and others-but the great majority of them, even if attracted for the moment by Luther's denunciation of scholasticism, speedily repudiated the movement. In Socinianism (see below) we have perhaps the only instance of humanistic antecedents leading to the formation of a religious sect.
A new type of theology made its appearance at the opening of the 16th century, in sharp contrast with the Aristotelian scholasticism of the Thomists and Scotists. This was due to the renewed enthusiasm for, and appreciation of, ghealugy St Paul with which Erasmus sympathized, and which andThe new theology and Martin Luther. found an able exponent in England in John Colet and in France in Lefevre of Etaples (Faber Stapulensis). Luther was reaching somewhat similar views at the same time,
- ↑ Lindsay.
