ABSTRACT
The chief architects of the continental Reformation towards whom the English reformers looked with various degrees of approbation were Martin Luther in Saxony and Ulrich Zwingli and Jean Calvin in Switzerland. In some respects the continental reformers were not original, but drew on and developed existing criticisms of the Church of Rome. The fourteenth-century English reformer John Wycliffe and his Bohemian follower John Huss anticipated many of Luther’s teachings. The hostility of many states towards the temporal political power of the papacy had long been expressed. There was widespread condemnation of notorious abuses in the medieval church: the unchastity of the supposedly celibate clergy, the luxury and extravagance of the monasteries whose inmates were vowed to lives of poverty, pluralism (the holding of several benefices) and absenteeism among the clergy, the dubious financial dealings of the papacy, such as the sale of offices (simony) and indulgences (which promised remission of time to be spent in purgatory). Indeed Luther’s attack on the sale of indulgences in 1517 first brought him notoriety. More important than
these specific criticisms, however, were the weapons provided by humanism (see Chapter 9) against the traditional authority of the church. Humanist insistence on the recovery of the past and the return to original texts directed attention away from the work of medieval theologians and back to the Bible and the early Fathers (especially Jerome and Augustine); it also revealed how far removed the medieval church was in its practices from the primitive church of the first centuries and the Christianity of the gospels and epistles. Further, humanist philological methods revealed serious weaknesses in the claims of the church. Thus the Italian humanist Lorenzo Valla demonstrated that the so-called Donation of Constantine giving temporal power to the papacy was a forgery, and Erasmus in his edition of the New Testament of 1516 pointed out errors in Jerome’s Latin translation, the Vulgate, which had been used by the church for centuries. However, though humanism can be seen to have done a good deal to prepare the ground for the Protestant Reformation, there were fundamental differences between the two movements. Erasmus and Luther disagreed violently over the question of the dignity or depravity of human nature (see Chapter 8), and Erasmus remained uncomfortably within the Church of Rome (his writings were, however, to be condemned by Rome after his death). Above all it was Luther’s theology, added to longstanding political, social and moral criticisms of Rome, and armed with humanist literary and historical techniques, that made Protestantism a revolutionary force.
