Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 382 - No Lord but God - the Peasants’ War and Radical Reformation.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, No Lord but God, The Peasants War and Radical Reformation. When you begin to read up on Martin Luther's political ideas, you may come to see it as rather ironic that he was the namesake of Martin Luther King Jr. Whereas King committed his life to resisting oppression and seeking racial and social equality, the original Luther was apoplectic with disapproval when an uprising against oppression and inequality arose in his own time, even though, or more likely, his own teachings had helped to inspire it. In 1525, peasants staged a revolt against church and secular authorities, initially along the Rhine and in Swabia, and spreading from there across southern Germany and parts of modern-day Switzerland and Austria. Luther responded by denouncing the uprising with violent rhetoric. When he was criticized for this, he doubled down, writing, until the sweat drops off their noses. The peasants would not listen, they would not let anyone tell them anything, so their ears must now be unbuttoned with musket balls till their heads jump off their shoulders. We should not be too quick to suggest a posthumous renaming of Martin Luther King Jr., though. Believe it or not, there is actually a distant parallel between Luther's ideas and the pacifist tactics King employed in the civil rights struggle. Before we get to that, we need to learn more about the so-called Peasants' War, its connection to the Reformation, and Luther's political views, which evolved in response to this quite literally revolutionary event. It did not come out of nowhere. After a period of improvement in peasant conditions following on the Black Death, which gave the survivors more bargaining power and more access to land, the 15th century saw an increase in the overall population. This shifted the balance of power back to landowners, who gradually increased rents and kept serfs, especially under tight control. Chafing under this treatment, the peasants, who of course constituted the vast majority of people in Germany, and indeed right across Europe, staged intermittent revolts. They would continue to do so after 1525, too. It's been reckoned that there were 66 such events between the Peasants' War and the French Revolution. Yet 1525 was unparalleled in scope. The revolt involved as many as 300,000 people and led to 100,000 deaths. The horrific violence would have been uppermost in the mind of Luther and others who deplored the revolt, but things began more peacefully as local communes submitted lists of grievances and demands to their local authorities. They wanted changes to the social and economic order, such as an abolition of serfdom, permission to hunt and fish on common lands, and most ambitiously, a say in the appointment of authorities, both secular and clerical. At this stage, the situation was more like a labor strike than a revolution, but things escalated quickly to the point that there were pitched battles between peasant armies and their oppressors. Though the nobility were vastly outnumbered, they were also vastly better armed and better trained, and within just weeks the uprising was put down with huge loss of life. From our modern point of view, it's hard not to think that this was a case where the bad guys won. Reformation era governments had little in common with the states we know today, and from the Peasants' point of view might have seemed more like organized crime syndicates. The lords collected taxes from their subjects in return for protection, meaning protection from themselves, and other nobles like themselves. Nice hovel, be a shame if anything happened to it. As if that weren't bad enough, there was a parallel hierarchical government in the form of the church. They collected taxes too, though these were called tithes. The tithes were material in nature, yet had to be surrendered in return for services that were entirely spiritual, like the performance of the sacraments, and of course regular reminders that the violent thugs who called themselves nobles had been appointed by God. Then came Luther with his reformation. As we know, he restated long-standing grievances about the worldliness, wealth, and hypocrisy of the church, but he went further by undercutting the whole need for a church. If all believers are priests, why should only some priests receive taxes? Oops, sorry, tithes. No wonder that throughout the uprising, monasteries and churches were frequently raided and sacked. And there was a deeper way in which Lutheranism provided a rationale for revolt. The Reformers never tired of issuing a demand of their own, namely that Christian rituals and beliefs should be grounded in nothing but Scripture. If you can't find a biblical passage in favor of something, then it is at best optional, at worst a blasphemous distortion of God's plans for humankind. But where does Scripture say that nobles can treat peasants like slaves, or prevent them from fishing in common ponds? To the contrary, the book of Genesis expressly says that animals are put at the disposal of humans in a way that humans are never put at the disposal of other humans. The peasants' agenda for social and economic reform explicitly echoed this methodological constraint of the religious Reformers. A list of principles issued in Muhlhausen said that, The peasants realized that pursuing this policy would lead to conflict and said, in effect, So be it. We would much rather have God as a friend and people as enemies than have God as an enemy and people as friends. Similarly, the Twelve Articles of the Upper Swabian Peasants emphasized that tithes should be paid strictly in line with scriptural requirements. Though they did not go so far as to reject all social hierarchy, they accepted it only with a major caveat. We should gladly be obedient to our elected and established authorities, if established for us by God. At Schaffenhausen on the Rhine, rebels put the point more boldly still, We have no Lord but God. Another aspect of the ideology driving the peasants' revolt can be connected to humanism. Close study of ancient literature had confronted the late medieval world with the admirable achievements of Republican Rome. Republicanism, modeled on the example of Rome, is going to be a factor in political upheavals going forward, just think of the French Revolution and the American Revolution. But it was already in the air in the early 16th century. The Peasants' War occurred a scant decade after Machiavelli was writing his Discourses based on the Roman historian Livy and expounding on his theories of Republican government. This is not to say that the many thousands of rebellious peasants were paging through Cicero or Livy in their spare time, but we can see the influence of these ideas in justifications of the revolt. The anonymous author of a letter encouraging the peasant uprising goes on at length about the fact that Rome was more prosperous as a republic than when under tyrannical imperial rule. It also links this fact to the religious preoccupations of the Reformation. Hereditary and powerful lordship commonly turns into true idolatry. The peasants of Germany weren't the only ones taking inspiration from Luther in ways he found distasteful. They were also the preachers of Germany. I've mentioned already that in Luther's own city of Wittenberg, the program of reform was pushed forward by Andreas von Karlstadt, pushed too quickly in Luther's opinion. Karlstadt, one of the few men in Europe who thought Luther was far too moderate, was chased from the city. He did not take the defeat lying down, composing a treatise called Whether One Should Proceed Slowly, whose content can be summarized as No, one shouldn't. As far as Karlstadt was concerned, Luther had no grounds to be solicitous towards those who would be alarmed by a program of speedy reform. If one knows that it is wrong to, say, venerate images of saints in churches, one should put a stop to it immediately. If this is unpopular, well then, the fact that the majority of people accept something does not make it any more right. This is so, argues Karlstadt, even if the whole world hesitates and does not want to follow. After all, may one steal until the thieves stop stealing? He makes a nice distinction here that is applicable more widely in moral philosophy. Some commandments are applicable at all times, and can therefore never be violated. For instance, it's never okay to murder or commit adultery. Other obligations are context sensitive. You have no duty to take care of your offspring if you have no children. For Karlstadt, the core policies of Lutheranism were of the first kind and should therefore be instituted right away, rather than waiting for the time and situation to be right. The point was echoed by Conrad Grebel, who was a thorn in the side of the Swiss reformer, Huldrych Zwingli, much as Karlstadt was a problem for Luther. Grebel encouraged the leading reformers to stop sparing the weak by going slow with the pace of change or recognizing the validity of long-standing traditions. For example, church services should not involve singing, and for the usual reason, it is not foreseen in scripture. More momentously, Grebel rejected the practice of infant baptism. This was on the basis of the good Lutheran premise that works are useless without faith, since a baby cannot resolve to embrace God and righteousness, and thus cannot yet have faith, it is pointless to baptize the baby. Or actually worse than pointless. Grebel called infant baptism a senseless, blasphemous abomination contrary to all scripture. He and like-minded reformers came to be called Anabaptists because they wanted to rebaptize adults, though in their eyes this would of course be a first valid baptism. The ritual would only be an outer symbol of the really important purification, the inner baptism that is, in the words of the Anabaptist Hans Hutt, the struggle to kill sin throughout one's whole life. The project of Anabaptists and other so-called radical reformers was comparable to that of the peasants, and not just because of their irreverence and demand for immediate action. The radicals expressed sympathy for the less prosperous, idealizing them as true Christians laboring under the oppression of wicked priests and nobles. They sought to reform not just religious practice, but society as a whole, envisioning villages where all lived in pious simplicity and shared all things. People will eat from one pot, drink from one vessel, as one radical author, possibly Hans Hergott, wrote around the time of the Peasants' War. When the Anabaptists managed briefly to take control of the city of Munster before being defeated after a siege, in 1534 they introduced communist policies. So the radical reformers were part of a trend towards utopian thinking in this period, even if the staunchly Catholic Thomas Moore, author of the famous work Utopia, would certainly not appreciate being lumped in with them. In a short-term expression of their long-term utopian goals, Anabaptists and other radicals embraced a form of separatism, rejecting the norms of even reformed cities like Wittenberg and Sürich. As one author put it, we simply will not have fellowship with evil people nor associate with them nor participate with them in their abominations. This could involve refusal to pay tithes and other taxes, perform military service, accept government offices, and even to take oaths. Conrad Grebel argued in favor of this sort of exceptionalism. Better to be one of the few who worship and believe correctly than the many who still follow a form of religion adulterated with falsehood. Now, it may seem strange to connect the massive violent uprising of the Peasants' War to the formation of small groups of pacifist religious purists, but we might think of the radical reformers as reacting to the disappointment of 1525 by lowering their sights. When the swords of the nobility and the pen of Luther were turned against them, and they saw that European society would not be made over to follow what they considered to be God's will, they settled for reforming their own lives. No figure unites the radical reformation and the peasant uprising better than Thomas Munster. He began by trying to persuade the secular powers to use the sword of civil authority to impose true religion from above. When this did not happen, at least not to his satisfaction, he cheered on the peasant revolt. He complained that, it is the greatest monstrosity on earth that no one wants to defend the plight of the needy, and warned rulers of the violence that would rise up against them if they did not reduce their rents and extortions. Luther considered Munster to be a prophet of murder, and Munster returned the favor. He excoriated the more famous reformer as Dr. Liar, which is a pun. Lugner, German for liar, sounds a bit like the name Luther. Munster blamed him for throwing in his lot with the oppressive upper classes and for welcoming the execution of the peasants. In the end, Munster was disappointed in the uprising, which focused on economic concerns rather than religious ones. As he put it, everyone sought his own prophet rather than the justification of Christendom. He died in the fighting at Frankenhausen, among the victims of the decisive defeat of the peasants, in May of 1525. Munster's diatribes against Luther return us to the question of why Luther was not prepared to support the peasants revolt, despite the fact that he supported at least some of their goals, for instance permission to elect their own pastors. One answer, which is rather cynical but surely at least partially true, would be that it was a matter of tactics. Luther did not want his movement associated with violent interaction and chaos. He clung to the same hope initially expressed by Munster, that secular authorities would be strong allies against the papacy. This was not going to happen if the Reformation involved dismantling the whole structure of society. And Luther's strategy proved successful. After his condemnation and excommunication, he received protection in Saxony from Frederick the Wise, and Frederick's successor, John, officially embraced Lutheranism. The reward for moderation was the spread of what is sometimes called a magisterial reformation, imposed from above by princely lances, not from below at the end of an angry farmer's pitchfork. Another way to look at this is that non-radical reform prevailed over radical reform because the secular authorities could live with it. Indeed, they could profit from it, and handsomely. Until the 16th century, the nobility were forced to compete with that parallel government that was the church. Popes and bishops could have vast estates and command armies, so they were the natural rivals of kings and secular lords. The toppling of the religious quasi-state left this secular state as the sole unchallenged authority and repository of riches. As friend of the podcast, Quentin Skinner, has remarked, noble sponsors of the Reformation from Frederick and John in Saxony to Henry VIII in England to Gustav Vasa in Sweden were largely unconcerned with the doctrines of the Reformation, except for their obvious value as ideological weapons in their struggles to control the wealth and power of the church. By contrast, these figures were never going to embrace a version of the Reformation in which part of what was to be reformed was the social order that gave them their exalted positions. But Luther did also have a more principled reason for leaving that social order in place. A treatise of his from 1523 deals with the question of how far one should obey secular power. Even posing that question sounds daring, if not actually subversive, but this is no manifesto for insurrection. Luther makes a central distinction between worldly affairs and affairs of faith, calling these two separate kingdoms. Secular authorities have no authority whatsoever in what we might call matters of conscience. They cannot enforce adherence to any particular set of religious beliefs, if only because this is simply not possible. As Luther puts it, every man runs his own risk in believing as he does, and he must see to it himself that he believes rightly, because faith is a free act to which no one can be forced. When it comes to the external world, though, good Christians ought to be obedient subjects of their rulers pretty much no matter what those rulers do or say. Ideally, the rulers oversee peace and worldly justice in their realms. This actually has little effect on the true Christian, who as we know, naturally performs good works as an automatic result of faith. Requiring these Christians to act morally would, says Luther, be like legislating that apple trees produce apples. But most people are not good Christians, and it is good for the wicked to be restrained by the rulers, so the Christians should not interfere with this by being insubordinate. What about cases where the ruler is not good, something Luther in fact expects to be pretty common? Here, he concedes that no one should perform an evil act if they are commanded to do so, but he forbids active resistance, even against tyrannical princes. Such wicked authorities are sent by God as a punishment for sins, so their outrages are not to be resisted but endured. This is what I had in mind when I said that there is, after all, some comparison between Martin Luther King Jr. and his namesake. The original Luther might have admired the strategy of non-violent resistance, precisely because of its non-violence. He thought that the most a Christian may do to defy a secular ruler is to refuse to cooperate. Obviously this rules out things like, say, violent peasant uprisings. On the other hand, Luther might not have admired King's approach, because non-violent political resistance is indeed resistance and is political. In this same treatise, Luther does express dismay at lords who exploit peasants, but ultimately he thinks that energy spent in remedying earthly injustice is a waste of time, given that one could be looking to the far more important matter of heavenly salvation. Thus, in his first reflection on the tensions between the nobles and the peasants, he is even-handed. He once again laments lordly oppression, then encourages the peasants to bear that oppression with patience. While he is sympathetic to the poor, he really thinks that both the nobles and the malcontent peasants are far too interested in material goods, like land ownership and fishing rights, and not interested enough in spiritual goods. Once the peasants actually tried to do something about the way they were mistreated, Luther was accordingly unsparing in his condemnation of their actions. From his point of view, all of political and social life is, relatively speaking, an irrelevant sideshow. The objective of human governance is simply to keep things peaceful and stable enough that the vast majority of people who are not faithful Christians, but are enthralled to sin, don't go around expressing their worst urges. But how, given this attitude, could Luther ever have encouraged sympathetic rulers to support his reformation? He ought to say, you would think, that such matters of faith are none of their affair. Here, though, he makes another more subtle distinction. You can tell he was trained by scholastics, even if he didn't like them. Secular authorities are, by virtue of their office, involved in the worldly kingdom, and have to deal with such trivialities as civic laws, the economic welfare of the people, and warfare. But if these same rulers are also Christians, then they belong to the other kingdom too, and with this in mind, they will seek to promote true religion. As Luther wrote some years later, a prince can indeed be a Christian, but it is not as a Christian that he must rule. The office has nothing to do with his Christianity. Thus, for example, a king might call a church council, not by virtue of his royal status, but as a Christian who just happens to be so powerful that if he makes this announcement, everyone will take it seriously. Furthermore, many things that we would nowadays take to be a matter of private religious conviction were, for Luther, matters of public concern, and thus subject to governmental oversight. Thus, the Christian ruler may punish heresy or blasphemy as soon as it reaches the ears of other people. The ruler cannot force people like the radical reformers to give up their false beliefs, but they can and should stop the radicals from expressing or promoting those beliefs. Luther even attacked Munsee and the Anabaptists for teaching in people's homes. As soon as you open your mouth, you may affect the beliefs of your fellow citizens, so you are subject to repression by the Lutheran state. If there are no thought police, this is only because thought itself cannot be policed. Clearly then, Luther was very far from defending anything like a separation of church and state or religious pluralism. Yet, just as clearly, his writings lay the seeds for those developments, by distinguishing the worldly kingdom from the kingdom of faith and admitting that faith is up to the believer. Contemporary thinkers were beginning to embrace the more radical implications, as when the Anabaptists opted out of their political and social duties on religious grounds, or when the Nuremberg humanist Georg Fröhlich argued that it should be possible for groups of different religious convictions to live together in a harmonious political union. So, as with the Peasants' War, when it came to freedom of thought, speech, and religion, Luther had to work hard to block the implications of his own ideas. This pattern will be repeated as we turn to other leading reformers over the next few episodes. They asserted the freedom of a Christian, to quote the title of one of Luther's treatises, and sought autonomy from the established church and any ruler who supported it. But once individuals and groups started asserting autonomy, things threatened to spin out of control, which the leading reformers could not accept for both pragmatic and ideological reasons. Thus, we'll see John Calvin offering teachings that plenty of his contemporaries found heretical, while giving his blessing to the burning of a heretic. The subject of our next episode, Höldrich Zwingli, will agree with Luther that faith cannot be compelled by violence. Yet he was far from willing to just let other Christians, including other reformers, believe whatever they wanted. Both Anabaptists and Luther himself would find themselves the target of his refutations, adding to our sense that we are not covering the Reformation here, but numerous Reformations, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.