Europe: A History (99 page)
I am overcome by the Scriptures I have quoted; my conscience is captive to God’s Word. I cannot and will not revoke anything, for to act against conscience is neither safe nor honest …
Hier stehe ich. Ich kann nicht anders
. [Here I stand. I cannot do otherwise.]
After that, he was spirited away by the Saxon Elector’s men and hidden in the Wartburg Castle. The ban pronounced by the Diet against Luther could not be enforced. Religious protest was turning into political revolt.
Germany in 1522–5 was convulsed by two major outbursts of unrest: the feud of the Imperial Knights (1522–3) at Trier and the violent social disturbances of the Peasants’ War (1524–5), which began at Waldshut in Bavaria. Luther’s defiance of the Church may have been a factor in the defiance of political authority; but he had no sympathy for the peasants’ ‘twelve articles’ drawn up in Swabia by Christoph Schappeler and Sebastian Lotzer of Memmingen. When fresh rebel bands appeared in Thuringia, Luther published his appeal
Against the Murderous and Thieving Hordes of Peasants
, trenchantly defending the social order and the princes’ rights. The peasant rebels were crushed in a sea of blood.
The Lutheran revolt took definite shape during three later sessions of the Imperial Diet. The Emperor’s opponents took their chance to consolidate their position whilst he was distracted by the wars against France and the Turks. At Speyer in 1526, in the Recess Declaration of the Diet, they managed to insert a clause for princely liberty in religion anticipating the famous formula:
Cuius regio, eius religio
(whoever rules has the right to determine religion). At the second Diet of Speyer in 1529, they formally lodged the Protest which gave them their name, bemoaning the annulment of the Recess. At Augsburg in 1530, they presented a measured summary of their beliefs. This Confession of Augsburg, composed by Melanchthon, was the Protestant manifesto—after which an adamant Emperor set April 1531 as the deadline for their submission. In response, the Protestant princes formed the armed League of Schmalkalden. From then on, the Catholic and the Protestant camps were clearly defined,
[GESANG]
GESANG
M
ARTIN
Luther’s paraphrase of Psalm 46—‘God is our refuge and strength’—was first set to music in J. Klug’s
Gesangbuch
of 1529. It showed that ‘the nightingale of Wittenberg’ was a poet and composer as well as church reformer and theologian. It turned out to be perhaps the greatest hymn in the Christian repertoire:
| | Ein’ feste Burg ist unser Gott, ein gute Wehr und Waffen. Er hilft uns frei aus aller Not, die uns jetzt hat betroffen. Der alt böse Feind mit Ernst er’s jetzt meint, gross Macht und viel List, sein grausam Rüstung ist auf Erd ist nich seins gleichen. 1 | A safe stronghold our God is still, A trusty shield and weapon; He’ll help us clear from all the ill That hath us now o’ertaken The ancient prince of Hell Hath risen with purpose fell; Strong mail of craft and power He weareth in this hour; On earth is not his fellow. 2 |
Luther, as a monk, was familiar with church music. He had a good tenor voice, and wanted all people to share his enjoyment of singing in church. Musical participation was to be the liturgical counterpart to his theological doctrine of the communion of all believers. He gave high priority to congregational music-making. His
Formula Missae
(1523) reformed the Latin Mass, providing a basis for the later Swedish liturgy. The
Geystliche Gesangk Buchlein
(1524), published by his disciple J. Walter, provided an anthology of polyphonic choral settings. In 1525 he brought the world’s first musical press to Wittenberg. His
Deutsche Messe und Ordnung Gottesdienst
(1526) supplied a form of the vernacular sung Mass. It concluded with a version of the Hussite hymn ‘Jesus Christus, unser Heiland’. Heinrich Lufft’s
Enchiridion
(also 1526) constituted the first ever congregational hymn-book. Within five years of the Diet of Worms, Luther’s followers were musically fully equipped.
The Lutheran musical tradition had far-reaching consequences. It required every parish to keep its cantor, its organist, its choir school, and its body of trained singers and instrumentalists. As a result, it played a
prominent role in turning Germany into the most musically educated nation in Europe—the richest resource for Europe’s secular music-making. The genius of J. S. Bach could have found no more fertile soil than in Lutheranism.
A hypothesis exists which maintains that it was the German language and its rhythms which lay at the root of Germany’s musical pre-eminence. This may or may not be true. But one can find Luther saying in 1525 that ‘both text and notes, accent, melody and performance ought to grow from the true mother tongue and its reflections’. Luther’s emphasis on the use of the vernacular deeply affected German education. There is a direct link between the hymns and masses of Luther, Walter. Rhaw, and Heinrich Schutz (1585–1672), and the later glories of Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, and Brahms.
3
To celebrate the Lutheran tradition in isolation no doubt does a disservice to Catholic music, and to the fruitful interactions of various Christian traditions. But one only has to compare the sterile music of Calvinism, whose ban on ‘Popish polyphony’ reduced the Geneva Psalter (1562) to a collection of metrical unisons, to see the felicity of Luther’s music-making.
In many ways the Church of England shares Luther’s musicality, developing a wonderful tradition launched by Tallis, Gibbons, and Byrd. In its stunning simplicity, Tallis’s
Canon
, composed by a monk of Waltham Abbey who became a gentleman of the Chapel Royal, is the Anglican equivalent of
Ein’ feste Burg
, and an eight-part round to boot:
Glory to thee, my God, this night
For all the blessings of the light.
Keep me, oh keep me, King of Kings
Beneath thine own almighty wings.
4
Nor should one neglect the magnificent musical tradition of the Orthodox Church, which adopted polyphony as readily as Luther did. In this case the ban on musical instruments inspired a very special expertise in choral part-singing. The Catholic Church always permitted instrumental accompaniment. The earliest surviving church organ, dating from 1320, is still operational at Sion in the Valais. But in Russia and Ukraine the polyphony had to be generated by human voices alone, thereby fostering a culture which is as ready to make music as to appreciate it. In this context, Tchaikovsky was no more of an accident than Bach was.
Meanwhile, the Lutheran protest movement was swelled by a series of parallel events, each of which widened the nature of Protestantism. In 1522 in Switzerland, Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531), hellenist, correspondent of Erasmus, and ‘people’s priest’ at Zurich, challenged the Roman Church both on ecclesiastical organization and on doctrine. Like Luther, he started by denouncing indulgences; and he shared Luther’s concept of justification by faith. But he also rejected the authority of bishops; and he taught that the Eucharist was no more than a simple, symbolic ceremony. He was killed at Kappel in 1531, carrying the Protestant banner in a war against the five Catholic forest cantons that had split the Swiss Confederation. He launched an important Protestant trend, in which local congregations or communities claimed the right to control their affairs,
[HOLISM]
In the 1520s radical preachers and sects proliferated in Germany. Andreas Karlstadt (1480–1541), who quarrelled with Luther, went off to Basel. The ‘Prophets of Zwickau’—Storch, Stuebner and Thomae—were old-fashioned mil-lenarians. The mystic Thomas Muentzer (1490–1525), possessed both communist and anarchist traits, modelling his group on the Czech Taborites. After many wanderings, he was caught at the head of a band of expropriators during the Peasants’ War in Thuringia, and executed at Muhlhausen. The Anabaptists or ‘Rebaptisers’ emerged among some disgruntled Swiss Zwinglians. Rejecting all established authority, they declared all previous baptisms invalid. They also sought to found an ideal Christian republic on evangelical principles, renouncing oaths, property, and (in theory) all violence. In 1534–5 at Munster in Westphalia under two Dutchmen—Jan Matthijs of Haarlem and Jan Beukelz of Leiden—they briefly created a ‘Kingdom of the Elect’ that was crushed with great cruelty. The cages which once held the remains of their leaders, still hang from the spire of St. Lambert’s Church. The Anabaptists were Christendom’s first fundamentalists, persecuted by Protestants and Catholics alike. They recovered as ‘Mennonites’ under the Frieslander, Menno Simons (1496–1561), sowing a spiritual legacy for later Baptists, Unitarians and Quakers. Christian Spiritualism, in contrast, drew support from Bavarian Denckians, Swabian Franckians and Silesian Schwenkfeldians.
HOLISM
I
N
February 1528 the wonderful ‘Dr Paracelsus’ lost his brief appointment as Basle’s city physician. He had been barred from the university, had offended the guild of apothecaries, and had sued a prelate for refusing to pay him a full professional fee. When he publicly accused the magistrates of bias, he risked arrest and fled. His ideas were no more acceptable to the scholastic medicine of his day than to the supposedly scientific medicine of a later age.
Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim (1493–1541), known as Paracelsus, was born at Einsiedeln in the canton of Schwyz. He was the contemporary of Luther, Erasmus, and Michelangelo. He graduated from the medical faculty at Ferrara in 1524. But he dropped higher study and spent seven years travelling, learning the lore of herbalists, gypsies, and magicians, and earning his keep at the artisan grade of barber-surgeon. He visited Spain and Portugal, Russia and Poland, Scandinavia and Constantinople, Crimea and possibly Egypt. Formerly a Catholic, he often associated with the radical sects such as the Anabaptists and the Brethren of the Free Spirit. Arrested in Salzburg in 1525 for supporting rebellious peasants, he narrowly escaped execution. Apart from Basle, his longer sojourns were at Strasbourg, Nuremberg, St Gallen, Meran in Tyrol, St Moritz, Bad Pfeifers, Augsburg, Kromau in Moravia, Bratislava, Vienna and Villach. He was a prolific author on everything from theology to magic—the centrepiece being
Opus Paramirium
(1531), his ‘Work Beyond Wonders’.
Paracelsus rejected the reigning notion that medical knowledge was to be garnered from ancient texts. At Basle, he had joined some students who were burning the works of Avicenna. Instead, he proposed to learn on the one hand from practical observations and on the other from ‘the four pillars’—natural philosophy, astrology, alchemy, and ‘Virtue’ (by which he meant the innate powers of people, plants, and minerals). His empirical bent led to a series of brilliant treatments and techniques in amputations, antisepsis, homeopathy, and balneology. His other lines led him to an alternative system of biochemistry based on sulphur, salt, and mercury, and gave him a lasting reputation for wizardry. Not for 400 years was even part of Europe’s medical profession prepared to consider his holistic precept—that the good doctor seeks the harmony of all factors affecting the patient’s well-being, including the environmental, the psychosomatic and the supernatural.
Paracelsus lived at a time when no one understood the workings of the digestive, circulatory, neural, or reproductive systems, let alone genes or chromosomes. Yet many of his insights resonate across the centuries:
Both the man and the woman each have half a seed, and the two together make a whole seed … There is in the matrix [womb] an attractive force (like
amber or a magnet)… Once the will has been determined, the matrix draws unto itself the seed of the woman and the man from the humours of the heart, the liver, the spleen, the bone, the blood … and all that is in the body. For every part of the body has its own particular seed. But when all these seeds come together, they are only one seed.
1
In 1529 King Henry VIII of England initiated the policy which was to separate the English Church from Rome. The initial cause lay in Henry’s obsessive desire for a male heir and in the Pope’s refusal to grant him a divorce. Henry, who had earlier earned the title of
Fidei Defensor
for denouncing Luther, had little religious motivation; but he gained great support in Parliament, and immense material advantage, by attacking the Church’s privileges and property. The Act of Annates (1532) cut financial payments to Rome. The Act of Appeals (1533) curtailed Rome’s ecclesiastical jurisdiction. The Act of Supremacy (1534) abolished papal authority completely, raising the King to be Supreme Head of the Church of England. Subjects such as Thomas More or Cardinal John Fisher, who declined to accede, were executed for treason. The Ten Articles (1536) and Six Articles (1539) asserted the inviolability of the Roman Mass and of traditional doctrine. The direct association of Church and State—later called Erastianism—brought Anglicanism closer to Orthodox than to Catholic practice,
[UTOPIA]
