A world lit only by fire_ the medieval m - William Manchester [90]
Perhaps the most popular Protestant dogma—and a striking illustration of how far removed that century was from this—was predestination: the tenet that God, being omniscient and omnipotent, is responsible for every action, virtuous and vile, and man is without choice. Luther, the ultimate determinist, could not grasp the concept of moral freedom. In De servo arbitrio (1525) he wrote: “The human will is like a beast of burden. … God foresees, foreordains, and accomplishes all things by an unchanging, eternal, and efficacious will. By this thunderbolt free will sinks shattered in the dust.”
But, dissenters replied, if no man’s actions can alter his fate—if his salvation or damnation are foreordained—why resist wicked temptations, or toil to improve the human condition, or even go to church? They argued furiously and endlessly, but never reasonably. Thus Protestantism was divided at its birth. There was the Lutheran Church, and there was the Reformed. As other major figures emerged—Huldrych Zwingli of Switzerland, for example; John Calvin, a native of France; and the Scotsman John Knox—new sects formed, each with its own views of worship, each as intolerant of the others as it was of Rome, each as repressive as Catholicism. Anabaptists appeared, and Mennonites, Bohemians, and the forerunners of Baptists, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and Unitarians.
In the spirit of the time, they celebrated their spiritual rebirths violently. Tirades led to recriminations, then to public executions. Autos-da-fé were more popular than ever. Peasants would walk thirty miles to hoot and jeer as a fellow Christian, enveloped in flames, writhed and screamed his life away. Afterward the most ardent spectators could be identified by their own singed hair and features; in their eagerness to enjoy the gamy scent of burning flesh, they had crowded too close. Ultimately this fascination with
The Reformation Monument, Geneva
death, as ordinary then as it seems extraordinary now, led to massive butchery—to spreading bloodstains of religious wars which crossed national frontiers and carried over into a new age.
NO ONE HAS calculated how many sixteenth-century Christians slaughtered other Christians in the name of Christ, but the gore began to thicken early. Within a year of Worms, Von Sickingen was in the field, fighting an army led by the archbishop of Trier—the prelate turned out to be the better general; the knight fell mortally wounded—and within four years the number of Germans killed or executed approached a quarter-million. Their faith cannot be indicted for their deaths. The homicidal lust had long been latent. Before the revolution, Christendom’s common people, as brutal as their leaders, had enjoyed the sport known to the Germans as Bärenhetze—setting famished dogs loose on a bear chained in a pit and watching them eat him alive. A part of them had wanted to be down in the pit, too. They had been awaiting an excuse for a rampage, and Worms would have provided it, whatever the outcome: the knights of Luther’s volunteer escort had sworn to kill him unless he refused to recant.
Even as word of his successful defiance spread across Germany, the mayhem had begun. Erfurt heard the news in the last days of April; a mob demolished forty houses belonging to the Church, burned rent rolls, razed a library, and, invading the university, killed a humanist scholar. In Wittenberg another mob, brandishing daggers and rocks, invaded a parish service; women kneeling before an image of the Madonna were stoned, and the priest driven out. The following day a band of students destroyed the altars of the city’s Franciscan monastery. Shortly thereafter, a leader of the local Augustinian congregation mounted a stump and called upon all who could hear him to follow their example—to roam the countryside, applying the ax to Catholic images, altars, and sacred paintings,