Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 383 - Slowly But Surely - Huldrych Zwingli.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, Slowly but Surely, Höldrecht Zwingli. One of the questions we've been following over the past several episodes has been whether humanism can be credited with, or blamed for, inspiring the Protestant Reformation. The relevance of humanism for early Lutheranism seems undeniable, especially when you look past Luther himself to the work of a man like Melanchthon. But any lingering doubts can be put to rest by following the example of the von Trapp family in The Sound of Music, and going over the Alps into Switzerland. Here, the Reformation had a second emergence with the city of Zurich as its main stage, like Wittenberg in Germany. Playing the central role upon that stage was Höldrecht Zwingli, a preacher and theologian who agreed with Luther about many things, but disagreed with him violently about one thing in particular. We'll get to that in due course. But first we should recognize that a common inspiration for both the Lutherans and Zwingli was that man Erasmus. Zwingli was, like Melanchthon, a committed humanist. Trained in Vienna and Bern, he became proficient in ancient Greek and Hebrew in order to study the Bible. His private book collection included many works by Erasmus and other authors important for the humanist movement, like Pico della Mirandola. If Pico's example inspired Zwingli to go further in the study of Hebrew than Erasmus had done, Zwingli's unrelenting study of the Bible, in its original language, was deeply Erasmian. Like Luther, he made Scripture the sole source of authority in religion. Never mind what the Pope says, never mind the traditions that had evolved over many generations of Christianity, never mind even the doctrines of the late ancient Church Fathers. All that mattered was the clear message taught by Scripture. Zwingli would judge all religious matters by this standard. On this basis, he led his followers out of the trap laid by Catholic theology, saying, So long, farewell, to a few of the papacy's favorite things, including the worship of saints, the use of images in the Church, clerical celibacy, fasting during Lent, and most decisively, the Catholic mass. Actually, it might be more accurate, if somewhat paradoxical, to say that Zwingli did not lead his followers, but followed them. He discouraged fellow reformers from acting too quickly. We achieve our ends, he said, by going slow. Slowly but surely, though, he was drawn into a total breach with the Roman Church. A famous early step was taken, appropriately enough given the central role of the printing press in this period, in the home of the printer, Christopher Froshauer. He hosted a dinner at which sausages were eaten, in violation of the laws for fasting during Lent. Zwingli was in attendance, and rather typically he didn't eat the meat himself, but evidently gave his tacit approval. As always, the rationale was to look to Scripture for guidance. Since it doesn't ban the eating of meat in Lent, there should be no ban. This was only a humanly devised and thus optional custom. As Zwingli commented, If you desire to fast, do it. If you do not want to eat flesh, don't eat it. But in this, leave me, the Christian man, free. He took a similar stance on the question of images. On the one hand, he supported the execution of a man who took a knife to an image of Christ, since the man in question acted alone for the sake of provocation. On the other hand, just a few years later, he oversaw the removal of imagery from the churches of Zürich. He instructed that this be done in a calm and temperate fashion, without mobs smashing pictures and statues, and even invited the sponsors of the artworks to take them home safely. This aspect of the Reformation is apt to remind long-term listeners of the iconoclast movement in 8th century Byzantium, but the Swiss iconoclast's motivation was only partially overlapping with that of the Byzantine iconoclasts. Both groups did worry that the veneration of images constituted idolatry, but in Byzantium there was no principle of Scripture alone, whereas it was at the core of Zwingli's movement. This was to be a stripped-down version of Christianity, purified of everything that was not explicitly mentioned in the Bible. This sounds uncompromising, and in a sense it was. Zwingli was adamant that good Christians should resist the Catholic Church or anyone else who tried to enforce religious authority without a sound basis in Scripture. But, like Luther and Melanchthon, he left ample space for civic authority. So he said that, the Christian man is nothing else than the faithful and good citizen, and worked closely with the Council of Zürich to oversee the pace and measures of reform. A good example of his policies here would be the practice of tithing to the church. When extremist reformers started refusing to pay tithes in 1522 and 1523, Zwingli conceded to them that there is no basis for the practice in Scripture, but told them to pay up anyway because the civic magistrates were empowered to demand this form of taxation. Earthly authorities should be respected. Zwingli said that though merely human righteousness is a poor righteousness, one is as needful of it as eating. In a short treatise laying out the principles of religion as he understood it, he agreed with Luther and Melanchthon that even tyrannical powers should be obeyed patiently while one waits for God to change the situation. Zwingli wavered on this point though. He sometimes suggested that tyrants could be removed by force, though his preference was clearly that injustice should be confronted without violence. As with Luther, Zwingli's respect for secular power and distaste for hastiness and reform were in part a matter of pragmatism. Zwingli was a politician as much as a preacher, and saw the cause of reform in Switzerland as being closely linked to the political welfare of these Swiss cities. Early in his career, he served as field chaplain with the Swiss army, and throughout his life he championed Swiss autonomy. Zürich was a formidable military power in his life, which was really the only reason that the reform movement was able to survive there. It wasn't enough to help Zwingli himself survive. He died in a battle against Swiss Catholics in 1531. But while he lived, he was relentless in arguing for policies that would maintain Zürich's strength, in particular by criticizing the practice of hiring out soldiers as mercenaries, perhaps the only point of agreement between Zwingli and his older contemporary Machiavelli, apart from disdain for the papacy. In Switzerland, there seemed to be the possibility of a sort of national unity between the various city-states, which would have been inconceivable in Machiavelli's Italy. Zwingli knew that the long-term viability of his movement would require cooperation between the city-states of Switzerland, something that was secured in part in 1528, when Bern agreed to follow the lead of Zürich by embracing evangelical Christianity. So it's been aptly remarked that for Zwingli, patriotism and true religion had become synonymous. This was itself another example of his humanist leanings. You may recall Erasmus's sense of connection to the Low Countries, and in Germany, humanists like Jacob Wimfeling demonstrated their own patriotism by producing histories of the German people. The Zürich Bible, a version by Zwingli based partially on Luther's translation and printed by the sausage-loving printer, epitomizes the cultural moment. Between two covers, it brought together three central themes, humanist scholarship, the accessibility of scripture to all Christians in a vernacular language, and the national feeling bound up with that language. But the Catholics did not see Zwingli's evangelism as a distinctively Swiss phenomenon. For them, this was just the same heresy as Lutheranism, but in a different dialect of German. And you can see why. When Catholic apologists like Jerome Emse and Johannes Eck tried to meet Zwingli with arguments, they found themselves stymied by the principle that matters of religion should be settled by recourse to nothing but clear statements of scripture, the same rule always imposed by Luther. When a disputation in Zürich in 1522 laid this down as a ground rule for debate, it effectively predetermined victory for the Reformers in advance. A later disputation in Bern in 1528 was just as much a foregone conclusion but in favor of the Catholics. Yet Zwingli stoutly rejected the label of Lutheran. While expressing great respect for his fellow Reformer, he said, I value Luther as highly as anyone alive, he also claimed, I have read little of his teaching, and took pride in following no contemporary teacher, but only Christ. Zwingli was so optimistic about resolving religious matters by consulting the Bible that he wrote a whole treatise on the topic. He certainly admitted that God's revealed message could be misunderstood. Indeed on some topics he thought that the whole Church tradition had been in error for many centuries. But as he said, truth is not necessarily with the majority, and given the abundant clarity of the holy text, misconstrual of its meaning is always the fault of the interpreter. Most often, says Zwingli, this happens because readers bring preconceived notions to their reading. The paradigmatic example would be the Scholastic theologians, who were corrupted by having studied so much philosophy. This training led them to build their interpretations on Aristotelian distinctions and concepts, seeking a perfect marriage of pagan discoveries and revealed truth. This is indeed recognizably the project of figures like Aquinas, and for Zwingli it is completely wrong-headed. If you want to understand God's message, just pray to him for guidance and then read the text with open eyes. Given the long and torturous history of debates over scriptural hermeneutics, this attitude looks naive, even cavalier. It is a bit more nuanced than it sounds though, because Zwingli admits, indeed insists, that many passages need to be read figuratively, for instance when God is described in the Bible as if he had a body. We should appeal to scripture itself for guidance, not to any human authority. One passage may tell us how to understand another. Of course, the more sophisticated the approach to the text, the less plausible it is that its meaning is just obvious. But Zwingli had one more card to play here, namely his skill in Greek and Hebrew. This was a rare enough attainment that he could, as it were, pull scholarly rank in the middle of any dispute by laying down on his own authority what the original version of the text actually said. The Reformers knew that this sort of humanist training was a valuable weapon in religious debate, which is why Zwingli's immediate successor in Zurich, Theodor Bibliander, promoted the study of Hebrew along the lines so enthusiastically proposed in Italy by Pico della Mirandola. But, as Zwingli was to discover, unanimity could not be established just by pointing at the Bible and bragging about your Greek. Upholders of the scripture alone interpretive approach could still disagree with one another. One such disagreement was bred within the ranks of Zwingli's own followers. The troublemakers who rejected tithes and pushed for more radical iconoclasm came to think that Christians should be baptized only once they were old enough to embrace faith in God. As mentioned last time, they were given the pejorative name of Anabaptists, referring to the fact that they baptized adults again on the grounds that infant baptism is not efficacious. Zwingli was in a difficult position here because, like Luther, he admitted that outer works could be efficacious only when they stem from inner faith. Anabaptism was premised on principles he himself endorsed. But for precisely this reason, he was unsparing in his opposition to this group. Essie frankly commented, There are still some who ascribe their heresies to us. For that reason we are their most bitter enemies. On Zwingli's analysis, the Anabaptists were in fact giving too much power to outer works. Being baptized cannot cleanse us from sin, but is only a sign that a person is pledged to the Christian faith. This, he insisted, is the meaning of the word sacrament, a sign or symbol, and nothing more. The same idea lies at the core of a more famous disagreement, namely the dispute between Zwingli and Luther over the sacrament of the Eucharist. This crucial ceremony of Christian practice, in which bread and wine are designated as Christ's body and blood, had long been an occasion for applying philosophical ideas to theology, and their own protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, this is true of the Zwingli-Luther debate too. They agreed in rejecting the Catholic account of the Eucharist, which had been upheld by Aquinas. The bread and wine are literally changed in their substance to become flesh and blood, hence the term transubstantiation. The communion wafer still looks and tastes like bread, but that's because the accidental properties of the bread have remained while the substance is transformed. By now, you should already be able to guess on what grounds Luther disagreed with this analysis, there was no basis for it in Scripture. Instead, he taught the doctrine called consubstantiation, meaning that there is both the substance of bread and the substance of Christ's body in the Eucharistic host. For Zwingli, this too was a ridiculous, and worse, unscriptural explanation. He took a radically different position, according to which there is no substantial or real change in the bread at all. Rather, when Christ said to his disciples at the Last Supper, take this bread and eat it, for it is my body, he just meant that the bread symbolized his body. It was a simple metaphor, the kind of thing we see all the time in Scripture, including in similar statements of Christ himself, as when he said that he was a vine, meaning that Christian religion branches off from him. Here then, we have a dramatic illustration of the problem with the Reformers appeal to the clear meaning of Scripture. Luther and Zwingli look at the same simple phrase, namely, this is my body, and they cannot agree what it means. As Bill Clinton so rightly remarked, it depends what the meaning of the word is is. In fact, quite a lot depended on this. Luther said, I cannot regard Zwingli and all his teaching as Christian at all. He is seven times more dangerous than when he was a pabist. So, as Zwingli's biographer G.R. Potter also so rightly remarked, the word of the Bible was indeed authoritative, but authoritative only when properly understood. Why exactly did the two disagree so strongly about the proper understanding of the Eucharist? As Zwingli might have warned, it had a lot to do with their philosophical presuppositions. Remember, Luther was trained by nominalist scholastics who were committed to voluntarism and taught that God can do anything that is not actually contradictory. So, for him, when Christ says, this bread is my body, this should be taken literally, unless it is shown that this is impossible. But there is no reason God can't make Christ's body co-present with bread. Indeed, he can make the body co-present with many bits of bread simultaneously and in different locations just as the soul is simultaneously present in all the parts of the body or as speech can simultaneously persuade many hearers. Luther complains that the Zwinglians adopt the wrong standard of proof. They want to be given a rational explanation of why something so miraculous should be believed. But that is not how religion works, says Luther. Rather, we should believe whatever we are told unless it is impossible. In his inimitable fashion, he puts it like this. This is what they say, what need is there for me to believe in a baked God? Wait and see. He will bake them when the time comes so that their hides will sizzle. Zwingli, by contrast, was trained at Vienna by realists and was thus comfortable with the idea that verbal expressions are mere signs that refer to some reality out in the world. For him, this is just how language works and must work. Otherwise, as he puts it, I could give someone a monkey just by writing the word monkey on a piece of paper and handing it to them. Like baptism, the Eucharistic host is a mere sign that denominates some other reality, in this case, Christ's body. To make this plausible, Zwingli shows off the historical sense he's acquired through his humanist training. As Jews, Christ's disciples would have been familiar with the rituals of circumcision and the sacrificial lamb, both of which involve actual physical blood. They understood immediately that Christ was transforming these rituals into something purely symbolic, which is why they didn't express bewilderment at the Last Supper, as you would do if you thought someone had just literally turned some bread into his own body. As this line of argument shows, there was a further, even more fundamental philosophical issue lurking behind the disagreement over the Eucharist, namely the role of the body. Like Erasmus, Zwingli was a thoroughgoing spiritualist who thought that religion is about the internal state of the soul. Since the soul cannot be affected by anything physical, the Eucharist cannot be about the nature of the body that is being eaten. Rather, the physical act of eating must represent something at the spiritual level, namely faith. Hence the Zwingliian motto, to eat is to believe, which sounds better in Latin, Edere est Credere. Luther saw things differently. With the incarnation of God as a human at the center of his religious imagination, he embraced the idea that the same thing could be both spiritual and physical. Hence the tone of his dismissal of Zwingli's position in this passage, and in his saints on earth. As I say, Zwingli would not appreciate the idea that his teaching on the Eucharist, or any other theological matter, was informed by philosophical ideas. In one treatise on the question, he even starts by promising not to do any philosophizing, unless absolutely necessary. But philosophy did play a role in the Zwingliian movement, and the reverse was also true. The Reformers had a huge impact on the history of philosophy. In fact, this might be a good moment to step back and consider the longer-term relevance of the early Reformation for our subject. I'm guessing that some of you have been thinking in this and other recent episodes that we are having to discuss an awful lot of theology. Worries about grace, predestination, and now even baptism and the Eucharist have been on the menu, along with the sausages. In some cases, these discussions have related immediately to standard philosophical issues, like the problem of free will. In other cases, the philosophical significance is less easy to spot, but no less profound. Let's just think about the way that, under Zwingli's leadership, Zürich effectively seceded from Christendom as it had been for many centuries. In retrospect, we know that much of Europe eventually became Protestant. But at the time, this was a breathtaking assertion of the right of a single community to determine its own religious affairs. The emergence of Anabaptism shows that Zwingli himself could not accept what he had unleashed. He excoriated the Anabaptists for separating themselves and refusing to accept others as true Christians. In a sense, this was a principled complaint. Zwingli believed that a Christian community would be a mix of the faithful and the faithless, and saw no prospect of making religious purity a criterion for membership, as he accused the Anabaptists of doing. After all, only God knows who the righteous are. But in another sense, Zwingli was echoing the charge made by Catholics against the Zwinglians. Here was a lawless, antisocial rebellion in the guise of piety. Having set itself up as a kind of mini-Rome, the city of Zürich had to decide whether to persecute its own heretics. Zwingli wrestled with this problem, as he was, for instance, by turns strict and lenient, when it came to enforcing unity of liturgy among all parishes. On the not-so-distant horizon was religious fragmentation, and with it, political fragmentation. Once the authority of the papacy was removed, and the priesthood of all believers declared, it became possible, even plausible, that every community would choose its own religious convictions. This was clear from the very beginning of the Reformation, and founders like Luther, Melanchthon, and Zwingli already fought against it. But using hindsight again, we can see that the proliferation of confessions within Protestantism was likely, if not inevitable. Closely related to this was the burgeoning idea of faith as a private individual matter. This is really just an extreme version of religious fragmentation, with the fragments now being the size of just one person at a time. We saw Luther saying that rulers cannot coerce people in matters of faith, and Zwingli allowing private citizens to retrieve religious art from churches before the art was destroyed. That looks like toleration for veneration of images at home, so long as iconoclasm could prevail in public. Such pragmatic compromises are going to open the door for an unprecedented divide between private and public spheres. We take this divide for granted now, but it has a history which traces back to the early 16th century. Alongside these tendencies within the Reformation as a whole, we have a contribution that is more distinctively Zwinglian. He insisted that priests are not conduits for everyday miracles like the transformation of bread into Christ's body. What happens in churches is significant, but only because of what it signifies, namely spiritual ideas and beliefs. This was a step towards what is sometimes called demystification, or secularization, a trend we can also see in the reformers' abolition of the saints, their miracles, and their relics. Increasingly, the world is going to be seen as the creation of an infinitely transcendent, and thus infinitely distant, God, who remains aloof from what He has made. Zwingli's way of thinking unwittingly makes space for an autonomous, secular approach to a world drained of miracles and comprehensible through reason. But at the same time, the foundations of Aristotelian science were being removed. We've already seen another early reformer, Bolangton, exploring the possibilities of a non-Aristotelian natural philosophy. In this generation of reformers, then, we can see suggestions of a future in which the world is approached in a way that is neither overtly religious nor based on the ideas of classical antiquity. Of course, we're still not seeing anything quite like the science that will emerge a few generations further down the line, but as they almost said in The Sound of Music, we are in the 16th century, going on 17th. Next time, though, we'll be moving on by only a few years, and staying in what is modern-day Switzerland. We still have one major founding father of the Reformation to introduce. He hailed from France, but was above all associated with Geneva. So don't be guilty of a Swiss miss. Make sure to catch the next episode on John Calvin, here on The History of Philosophy, without any caps.