Christianity on the Eve of Reform

Was the church "corrupt"?

The old Protestant story went like this: by 1500 the church was hopelessly corrupt, the people were kept in ignorance and superstition, and Luther set them free. The old Catholic story was the mirror image: the church was healthy, and Luther was a rebel who destroyed Christian unity. Modern historians, including the authors of the Oxford Illustrated History of the Reformation, reject both caricatures.

Bruce Gordon's opening chapter in that volume stresses the vitality of late medieval Christianity [check]. Eamon Duffy's influential study of English parish religion, The Stripping of the Altars (1992), showed how rich, popular and well-loved traditional Catholicism was on the eve of the Reformation. The Reformation happened not because people had stopped caring about religion, but because they cared intensely. They were anxious about salvation and hungry for more.

Religion in the parish

For most Europeans around 1500, religion was lived in the parish church and through the rhythms of the year:

• The Mass was the center of worship. It was said in Latin by the priest, mostly in a low voice, at an altar often screened from the congregation. Lay people usually received Communion only once a year, at Easter, and only the bread. The high point was the elevation, when the priest raised the consecrated host. People rushed from church to church to see it, believing it brought blessings.
• The saints were friends and protectors in heaven. Each had a specialty: St Apollonia for toothache, St Christopher for travelers. Their relics, bones, cloth and objects, were treasured, and pilgrimages to their shrines were hugely popular.
• Mary was the most beloved saint of all, the merciful mother who could plead with her son. The rosary spread in the 1400s.
• Guilds and confraternities were lay associations that organized feasts, charity and funerals, and paid for Masses for members' souls.
• The church year, with its fasts, feasts, processions and plays, structured community life.

The economy of salvation

A central anxiety was Purgatory. The church taught that most saved souls would not go straight to heaven. Their sins were forgiven, but "temporal punishment" still had to be paid off through suffering in purgatory, which could last thousands of years. The living could help the dead, and themselves, by:

• paying for Masses to be said for the dead. Wealthy people endowed "chantries," where a priest would say Mass for their soul forever;
• prayers, fasting, almsgiving and pilgrimage;
• indulgences.

An Indulgence was a grant by the church, drawing on the "treasury of merits" of Christ and the saints, that reduced or cancelled the punishment due for sins. Originally it was linked to acts like crusading or pilgrimage. In 1476 Pope Sixtus IV declared that indulgences could be applied to souls already in purgatory. Increasingly, indulgences could be obtained by giving money to a good cause, such as building a church. In popular understanding, and in the patter of some preachers, the line between "donation" and "purchase" blurred badly. A rhyme attributed to the indulgence preacher Johann Tetzel ran: "As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs."

The late medieval “economy of salvation”

Real problems

Alongside lively piety, serious problems were widely recognized:

• Clergy: Many parish priests were poorly educated, barely able to understand the Latin they recited. Many lived with partners despite celibacy rules.
• Absenteeism and pluralism: Bishops and senior clergy often held several offices at once for the income, rarely visiting them.
• Money: The papal bureaucracy charged fees for everything: appointments, dispensations, annulments. Germans especially resented money flowing south to Rome.
• The Renaissance papacy: Popes like Alexander VI (Rodrigo Borgia) (Borgia), the warrior Julius II and the art-loving Leo X (Medici), who reportedly said "God has given us the papacy, let us enjoy it," behaved like Italian princes. They were patrons of Michelangelo and Raphael but not spiritual leaders.
• Failed reform: The Fifth Lateran Council (1512–1517) discussed reform but achieved little. It closed just months before Luther's theses.

Some local reform was happening. In Spain, Cardinal Francisco Ximenes de Cisneros de Cisneros reformed the clergy and religious orders, founded a university, and sponsored a great multilingual Bible, the Complutensian Polyglot. But Spain's reform came with the Inquisition and the expulsion of the Jews in 1492.

Humanism: back to the sources

Meanwhile, the intellectual movement of the Renaissance, Humanism, was spreading from Italy across Europe. Humanists were not "secular" in the modern sense. Most were devout Christians. Their slogan was ad fontes, "to the sources." They wanted to recover the original texts of classical antiquity and early Christianity: Cicero and Plato, but also the Greek New Testament and the church fathers. They were often scornful of scholastic theology, which they saw as dry hair-splitting in bad Latin.

Humanist scholarship had explosive consequences. When Lorenzo Valla proved that the Donation of Constantine was a forgery (see Charlemagne), he showed that textual criticism could undermine church claims. Valla also found errors in the Vulgate translation of the Bible.

Erasmus: the prince of humanists

The greatest humanist was Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam (c. 1466–1536). The illegitimate son of a priest, educated by the Brethren of the Common Life, he became the most famous scholar in Europe, corresponding with popes, kings and reformers. He wanted a reformed Christianity of simple, inward devotion to Christ, which he called "the philosophy of Christ." He did not care for elaborate ceremonies, relics or scholastic arguments.

• His satire The Praise of Folly (1509) mocked monks, theologians, popes and superstitious pilgrims.
• His Handbook of the Christian Soldier urged lay people to read Scripture and follow Christ inwardly.
• In 1516 he published the first printed Greek New Testament, with a fresh Latin translation and notes. In its preface he wished that the farmer would sing Scripture at his plow and the weaver hum it at his loom. Luther used it for his German translation. In some places Erasmus showed that the Vulgate had mistranslated. Matthew 4:17, for example, says "repent," not "do penance."

It was said that "Erasmus laid the egg that Luther hatched." Erasmus disliked the saying. He shared many of Luther's criticisms but never left the Catholic Church. He hated division and violence, and in 1524 he broke publicly with Luther over free will (see Martin Luther). Others in his circle included the English humanists John Colet and Thomas More, author of Utopia, and the French scholar Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples d'Étaples.

The printing revolution

Around 1450, in Mainz, Germany, Johannes Gutenberg developed printing with movable metal type. His first major book was a Latin Bible (c. 1455). Printing spread with astonishing speed. By 1500 there were presses in over 250 European towns, and perhaps twenty million books had been printed.

Printing changed everything about how ideas spread. A handwritten book took months to copy. A press could produce hundreds of copies in days. Texts became cheaper, standardized, and available to a growing literate public of merchants, artisans and townspeople. MacCulloch and others note that the Reformation was the first movement to use the new medium on a mass scale [check]. Luther's pamphlets, short, punchy and in German, many with woodcut illustrations, flooded Germany. In the 1520s Luther alone may have accounted for about a fifth of all German printed works. Without printing, Luther might have been another Hus, burned and contained. With it, he started a movement no one could stop.