4. Divergent Visions: 1523–1524
FOUR DIVERGENT VISIONS
1523–1524
Zwingli was the ringleader, the public voice of change, but by no means did he act alone. The sausage incident had demonstrated that he was part of a circle of clergy, guildsmen and politicians. Many were personally close, such as Leo Jud and his printer Christoph Froschauer, bound together by a vision of reform. Jud was a powerful preacher, deeply influenced by Erasmus, but – like Zwingli – was committed to action. Froschauer provided Zwingli with access to a well-equipped printing house that was networked across the German-speaking lands. Yet, Zwingli’s plans would in time diverge from those who were looking for a more purified church.
Magistrates like Röist were drawn to gospel preaching, and the appeal of the preachers’ message lay in their ability to convince listeners that the Bible alone was authoritative. Well-disposed contemporaries, including his students, spoke of Zwingli’s personal charm, warmth and wit; and in the early modern city, charisma was a significant factor in politics. By no means all, however, were persuaded, and opposition remained fierce; but by the end of 1522, supporters were to be found across the Council and guild halls. All were fully aware of the dangers of rash or precipitate deeds, and the magistrates – mindful that events in Zurich were raising alarm across the Confederation – were concerned that religion should not become a source of unrest beyond their control. As Christian rulers had long known, accusations of heresy went beyond the Church to threaten commercial and political stability. Many welcomed Zwingli’s advocacy of greater control over the Church and his attack on the corruption of pensions from foreigners, so long as the preacher presented a new Christian society based on law, order and moral conduct.
The summer and autumn of 1522 had seen the door close on agreement between the reform-minded in Zurich and the bishop’s court in Constance. The conflict was not between advocates of reform and recalcitrant opponents: Erasmus had good reason to believe that Bishop Hugo was committed to addressing problems within the Church in Constance. Bishop Hugo attempted to use his authority to censure priests in the diocese who had followed Zwingli’s lead and spoken against the veneration of saints and images, but his efforts proved fruitless, given his dependence on the cooperation of the rulers of Zurich.1 And Zwingli had gone well beyond the traditional reform language that had swirled through the late-medieval Church, dividing him from Johannes Fabri, the vicar general of Constance, an erstwhile friend who had been active in the Luther case. When, in 1522, Erasmus put down his copy of the ‘Apologeticus archeteles’ with a deep sigh, it was a clear indication that the Zurich priest had also moved away from his mentor, by abandoning the unity of a wounded Church. Two years later, their relationship would be over.
DISPUTATION
The last months of 1522 saw Zurich in a state of turmoil, unsettled by inner conflicts and external threats, yet Zwingli’s position in Zurich was bolstered by the willingness of the Bürgermeister and Council to stage a disputation in the city concerning the reform of religion. The preacher was pushing hard to align his vision of change with political support, the only possible way forward if he did not wish to share the fate of so many John the Baptists before him. A disputation was his most audacious move, a calculated plan to push religious change into the public square. The disputations that emerged in the early Reformation were not intended as open debates, but as a means by which one side might demonstrate its superiority.2
At Zwingli’s request, on 3 January 1523, the Zurich Council invited its bishop to assemble with local clergy and laity to debate religion before the gathered magistrates of the city. There were no precedents for such a meeting, and no one could know what to expect: theology and governance of the Church were being removed from the episcopal courts and the universities and placed in the city hall.3 The idea that the magistrates, clergy and laity should be present for a debate on theological questions, carried out in German no less, was astonishing. There was no script.
In persuading the Zurich Council to stage the debate, Zwingli had effectively cornered his nemesis, the bishop of Constance.4 Without doubt, the very suggestion of a public disputation on church doctrine and discipline was an affront to the noble, mild-mannered bishop, who had been invited as a participant, not to preside. Although Bishop Hugo had no intention of gracing the event with his presence, and thereby lending dignity to a meeting he repudiated, he was canny enough to recognize the folly of leaving matters in the hands of the Zurich authorities. Prudence dictated that a delegation from Constance should be present; but it would attend to observe, for to participate in any manner might bestow an acknowledgement of authority.
Like Albrecht Dürer, with his famous rhinoceros, the magistrates were drawing something they had never seen. The results were equally remarkable. Invitations were spread far and wide across the Confederation, although only a few people responded, and the bishop of Basel demurred, fearing that the sessions might become disorderly. No Catholic authority was willing to recognize what was transpiring in Zurich. The magistrates did insist, however, that all the clergy from the city and its rural lands attend. The terms of the disputation were radical and a break with the medieval Church: no appeal was to be made to church tradition. As Luther had stood before Emperor Charles V at Worms in 1521 to declare that he would recant only if proved in error by scripture, so now in Zurich the Bible was to be the sole standard. With one stroke, Zwingli had hamstrung his opponents.
The extraordinary occasion, now known as the ‘First Zurich Disputation’, took place on 29 January 1523.5 The one-day session was chaired by Bürgermeister Marx Röist, a crucial Zwingli ally, who delivered the opening address. The Large Council, before which the disputants appeared, principally comprised the leaders of the handworkers, small traders and merchants, whose voices were strengthening in the city.6 More than 600 people attended, with some coming from across the Swiss Confederation, although not nearly as many as Zwingli had hoped.
Zwingli was not the only speaker, but he was the writer, director and performer. He had prepared 67 articles that summarized his preaching, drawing them up with considerable speed. In the first 16 articles, he laid out his position on the Bible and faith. Articles 17 to 33 dealt with a long list of abuses and supposedly false teachings in the Catholic Church, including the mass, good works, the saints, the papacy and the marriage of clergy. In articles 34 to 67, the preacher addressed temporal authority, prayer, forgiveness of sins, purgatory and the priesthood.
Now, standing with the Latin Bible, Erasmus’ Greek New Testament and the Hebrew Bible open before him, Zwingli took on all comers, as he moved quickly from text to text to summon passages with impressive recall. The scope of his ambitions was arresting, and the full expanse of his thinking, as it had evolved over the previous year, was laid out in German for a lay audience. Zwingli rejected the authority of the institutional Church, declaring Christ the sole authority. And Christ was revealed through God’s Word, the Bible. The audience heard a wholesale reorientation of order and authority, a new vision of the Church.7 In the eighth and fiftieth articles, Zwingli made it clear that the Church as an institution could not serve as the mediator of the sacred. That role fell not to priests, bishops or councils, but to the Holy Spirit acting through the gospel. The whole disputation was about Church and community under the direct rule of the Spirit. The faithful alone, those elect of God, form the true Church, an invisible body known only to God and dispersed through the ages and the world. The parish community is the visible manifestation of that holy body, but unlike the invisible Church it remains a living, breathing mixture of the faithful and unfaithful, who rub shoulders in this world.
The bishop’s party largely sat glumly enduring Zwingli’s heresies. Their hands tied and with no mandate to intervene, they had little to offer by way of counterarguments.8 Johannes Fabri was not, however, entirely silent, and this formidable, experienced and gifted polemicist was well prepared to defend the Catholic Church.9 Thus, for example, he quickly scored against Zwingli by pointing out that Zurich, as one small part of the Catholic community, had no right to set itself at odds with the rest of the Church. He also argued that without the guidance of tradition, the faithful could easily be led into error, for the devil could speak with the words of scripture. Another intervention addressed clerical marriage; he likely knew full well that Zwingli himself was married. No priest had been married in the Church for over a thousand years, Fabri argued, so what right had Zurich to reverse this tradition? Once again, an effective point was made, only to be dismissed by the preacher as mere sophistry.10 Although Zwingli was eager to demonstrate his grasp of scripture, and clearly relished the cut and thrust, in truth he was stabbing at a lame animal. The Catholic party had no chance. The process was rigged. The Catholics would never forget the ritual humiliation, and three years later, in Baden, would exact their revenge.
The event was cut short by hunger. Possibly having heard enough, the presiding magistrates retired to lunch. When they returned, they were ready to deliver their verdict. How they had reached their assessment is not known.11 After a morning of mostly listening to Zwingli, with the occasional response from Fabri, the rulers declared themselves content with the preaching of the gospel, and the priests of the rural areas were ordered to follow Zwingli’s model, with sermons from scripture alone. All accusations of heresy were set aside. Zwingli had the magistrates’ support, or at least enough of them on the Large Council. The Council would preserve its authority over public worship and would decide what constituted Bible-based preaching.12
Zwingli had persuaded the rulers of Zurich to take religion into their own hands and, against the counsel of their bishop, to make an unequivocal statement on the nature of the Christian faith by openly accepting that preaching meant interpreting the Bible alone.13 That pronouncement made the day a turning point in the Reformation: though not yet formally created, Reformed Christianity had essentially been conceived. Furthermore, Zwingli was granted a licence to proceed without challenge, and the clergy of the city and rural areas were to follow his example. The Reformation had not yet occurred: the Council had sanctioned ‘Bible preaching’ without committing itself to either any specific doctrines or any agenda of church reform.14
Nonetheless, the reformer had staged a revolution and laid the foundation for a new church order, in which magistrates and clerics would share authority. Zwingli had argued that the gathering, as the community in Zurich, was a manifestation of the universal Church and could, therefore, make decisions about doctrine and practice.15 There was no need to rely on distant hierarchies: it was in the magistrates’ hands to reform Church and community according to the gospel. This was the point made by Luther in his letter to the German princes in 1520: Zwingli was now enacting it. Indeed, Church and community were one. The rulers themselves had brought about this moment, following Zwingli’s argument that they, not the bishop, were the guardians of true religion. The preacher had delivered the faith into their hands and was handsomely rewarded with the right to preach what he wanted. The bishop’s representatives could only protest and grumble, but they had been irrelevant in this staged performance, playing their part by providing symbolic resistance.
Zwingli’s status among Catholics as arch-heretic was now confirmed. In Lucerne a picture of him was burnt during carnival festivities, to which he responded in a letter to friends that he had never felt calmer in the face of such hateful conduct. Indeed, he wrote,
it brings great joy to me that I have been found worthy to suffer humiliation for the sake of Christ. The matter is hard to believe, but God be thanked that never before have I so patiently borne such loathsomeness. This should encourage you that Christ never abandons his own.16
By his own account, Zwingli laboured day and night after the disputation to prepare a vast commentary on the 67 articles and turn them into a coherent statement of doctrine. In part driven by fierce criticism from Fabri, Zwingli worked from early February to mid-June 1523, writing in German, the language of the disputation.17 He dedicated his Exposition of the Sixty-Seven Articles to the people of Glarus, his former parishioners, stating that he sought to prove to friend and foe alike, and above all to Fabri, that the disputation articles had been wholly grounded in scripture.18 Zwingli did not hesitate to claim that ‘these conclusions contain nearly all of the greatest points of controversy that are being debated in our time’.19 In many respects he was correct, but his labours only fuelled those debates. Johannes Oecolampadius in Basel and Berchtold Haller (1492–1536) in Bern wrote with encouragement, while Bishop Hugo referred to this little book as full of Zwingli’s errors and seductive doctrines.20
The Exposition of the Sixty-Seven Articles, which appeared from Froschauer’s press on 14 July 1523, was essentially a careful expansion of what Zwingli had argued before the magistrates, but set out in greater detail and deepened by a forest of references to the Bible and the church fathers. Zwingli was offering a full statement of his theological convictions, with an emphasis on the providential power of God, salvation through Christ and the role of the magistrates in governing the Church. The Church was not the ecclesiastical hierarchy of Rome, but the gathered faithful in one place, led by the Spirit. Moving through the individual topics (or loci) of the debate as Zwingli had determined them, the text built on the ‘Apologeticus archeteles’ and on ‘On the Clarity and Certainty of the Word of God’, published the previous summer and autumn, and laid the foundation for his greatest work, A Commentary on True and False Religion, which would follow two years later. More apologetic than elegant, the writing in the Exposition is often discursive, almost homiletic, as Zwingli moves back and forth through his primary claims. The arc of all those claims was that the gospel is the foundation of the faith, for ‘according to the words of Paul, in Romans chapter one, the gospel is nothing but the power of God for the salvation of all believers’.21
The enemy was identified as the papists, a pejorative tag Zwingli applied with care. The Zurich preacher judiciously did not explicitly place himself outside the Roman Church, but employed the term ‘papist’ to identify those who embodied false religion through their adherence to tradition and ecclesiastical authority above the Word of God.22 It was a highly effective rhetorical manoeuvre. Nevertheless, the choice of the term ‘papist’ was a turning point in the life of a man who had for so long advocated for the papal cause.
ERSTWHILE FRIENDS
Like Luther, Zwingli insisted on correct and binding interpretations of scripture. Fidelity to God’s Word required the reform of Church and society. Inaction was not an option.23 At the same time, Zwingli was a student of Erasmus and was fully aware that the Bible contains plenty of passages that elude straightforward or singular interpretation. His goal in preaching was to place the Gospel of Christ before the people, in order that they might be transformed. There was nothing more urgent. But how was a community to live faithfully in matters where the Bible was not explicit? Having rejected the role of the hierarchy as interpreters of scripture, Zwingli had to determine what approach needed to be taken in bringing about change. Was, for example, all that was not proscribed by scripture to be retained? Or was the opposite true – anything not testified to by scripture should be removed? The question was both crucial and divisive. The events of 1522/1523 took place in a city that was still officially Catholic. There was a profound disconnect between the preaching advocated by Zwingli and his supporters and the official sacramental cult in the city’s churches. Most strikingly, Zwingli had declared the mass incompatible with scripture, but the contrast between his words and the daily experiences of the faithful in worship was arrestingly evident in every church, whether in the Grossmünster or in rural parishes. Zwingli had written in the articles about the idolatry of images and the seduction of men and women by sensory experiences – whether statues or incense – that filled houses of worship. Yet his gospel sermons, with their demands for the purification of the cult, were delivered in churches filled with altars and paintings, the material fabric of the medieval Church.
Zwingli’s calls for the cleansing of the temples did not go unheeded. Wilhelm Reublin at Witikon and Andreas Castelberger preached and led private discussions of biblical texts among lay people and were vociferous critics of images, the mass and traditional forms of piety, such as relics, veneration of saints and processions. Reublin had come to Zurich in 1522 from Basel, having being expelled from the city after preaching radical reforms to large crowds. Castelberger had been deeply influenced by Erasmus’ pacifism and was strongly drawn to Zwingli’s attack on the mercenary service. As a colporteur, Castelberger had travelled through the Swiss lands distributing radical religious literature, and provided Zwingli with a number of pro-reform tracts. A friend left an account of Castelberger’s passion:
Andreas said much about war, how the divine teaching was so violently against it and how sinful it was. He expressed the opinion that someone who could live from his own paternal inheritance and go to war, receive money and kill decent people who had never done him any harm and seize their property – such a warrior is a murderer before God and evangelical teaching and no better than he who murders or steals out of poverty.24
Castelberger, a bookseller who brought evangelical pamphlets from Basel and the Empire to Zurich, supplied the growing circle of radicals with literature.25 Lamed by an injury, he was known as ‘limping Andreas’.26 Castelberger’s circle read the Bible as condemning social inequality and economic exploitation, arguing that anyone who benefited from the goods and labour of others was no better ‘than a thief and murderer’.
Reublin, Castelberger and Grebel were just as passionate as Zwingli about reform, but they were not prepared simply to do his bidding. Indeed, they voiced their convictions with greater ardour, pushing for more rapid and radical change, as they were alarmed by the growing distance between words and deeds. They were also in close contact with men and women in the rural areas who were increasingly drawn to the gospel as crucial to their protests against economic oppression. Two paths opened up: on the one hand, there was Zwingli’s careful management of the magistrates and his attempts to nurse the lay people towards change; on the other hand, there were the demands of his colleagues to press the purity of the gospel and to remove all that stood in its way.
RIGHTEOUSNESS
During the summer of 1523, as the Exposition of the Sixty-Seven Articles was printed, rural unrest brought back to the fore the issue of the tithe, a long-standing grievance.27 Communities in the rural areas were raising complaints about the burden owed to urban elites, including churches.28 Reublin, who preached in the Fraumünster and became pastor in Witikon, incited the peasants to refuse to pay the tithe and railed against the immorality and corruption of the magistrates and patricians.29 Resistance to the tithe went hand in hand with withering attacks on the high-living clergy and their excesses. Anti-clericalism was integral to social grievances. While the Council refused to remove the tithe, the attack on the clergy was not thought to be without merit, and in September 1523 reform of the Grossmünster chapter was introduced to improve standards.30 The number of clergy was reduced and finances were reorganized to devote money to education. Zwingli was appointed by the Council to serve as principal of the school, enabling him to begin to implement Erasmian-influenced education.31
In 1520, Zwingli had initially been sympathetic, arguing that the tithe was not sanctioned in the Bible and might be abolished.32 But as resistance to the tithe grew in rural areas during 1522–1523 and was supported by men such as Grebel and Reublin, he shifted ground. He addressed the tithe in a sermon on the feast of St John the Baptist, printed in 64 octavo pages in July 1523 with the title ‘On Divine and Human Righteousness’ (see chapter 3).33 The sermon ranged across various topics, as Zwingli sought to take stock of where reform demands were now headed. The work was dedicated to Niklaus von Wattenwyl, provost in Bern, a sign that Zwingli was reaching out to the most powerful of the Swiss Confederates. He set out in bold prose his conception of the Bible as the foundation for a just, Christian society, while defending his position as a social critic.
There were two forms of righteousness:
Measured by divine righteousness, we are all fools or knaves. Since our iniquity is known to God alone, that one God judges us through his grace if we believe that he died and made payment for us out of his compassion. Measured by human righteousness, we are often found to be righteous, though we are truly knaves in God’s sight. But one who is found by human righteousness to be not only a knave in God’s sight but a known sinner is turned over to the one who judges transgressors, namely the magistrate or judge.34
Human righteousness kept people obedient to the laws of the land, yet it had absolutely no effect on a person’s standing before God. Such order and submission to authority preserved the conditions under which true religion might flourish through the preaching of the Word. Ministers of the Word must preach freely – that was their duty – and the magistrates were not to interfere. Quoting the words of Ovid, Zwingli made clear that magistrates had no claim over faith: ‘Caesar has not been able to control my heart or take away from me the gifts of the heart.’35 Human righteousness, which Zwingli called a ‘poor and feeble righteousness’, had no call upon the divine. In contrast:
divine righteousness ought to be revealed and preached unceasingly to all people and one should rather risk life and limb than allow anyone to frighten us off such preaching and proclamation, as Christ often commanded . . . We hear that everyone is bid to seek divine righteousness, which means unceasingly, in keeping with his will, to strive after innocence until we reach the measure of Christ, and that we should never be satisfied with being considered good according to human righteousness.36
Zwingli’s position on tithes was sympathetic and subtle. He had not simply reversed his earlier objection to the burden as unbiblical. He concurred with the peasants that it was oppressive and frequently unjust. It ran counter to divine righteousness, as did ownership of property. Quite simply, there was nothing in scripture to justify either. But should the tithe be abolished? On this question, Zwingli offered both a remedy and an argument for the status quo. The large and small tithes belonged to human righteousness, the necessary structures of society for commerce and community.37 Because they were necessary, they should remain, but justly. The tithe was not a licence for excess or exploitation. Human righteousness must be made to conform to divine righteousness as far as possible, an ongoing demand laid on rulers:
whoever then should not willingly render the tithe, in opposition to this common agreement of the authorities would therefore go beyond what was granted him in an upright, straight-forward purchase which the authorities considered to be right and legal. Such a person would then resist the authorities, and whoever resists the authorities opposes God, as we have shown earlier.38
Zwingli’s sermon on divine and human righteousness tied reform to established political order, further splintering a movement in which there was no consensus on how Christian the magistrates were. Reublin saw the defence of the tithe as a betrayal, and Konrad Grebel wrote to his brother-in-law Vadian that ‘the people of our world of Zurich are doing everything tyrannically and like the Turk in this matter of the tithe’.39
EDUCATION
Having been made head of the Grossmünster school, Zwingli threw himself into reforming education. His commitment was personal. In the summer of 1523, having returned from taking a cure at the baths, he dedicated to his beloved 14-year-old stepson Gerold a small book entitled Of the Education of the Youth. Zwingli had been committed to the teaching of boys from his first days as a priest in Glarus. The text was less a concrete plan for educating pupils than a vigorous expression of Zwingli’s belief in the transformative power of learning. The beginning point of true education was piety, knowledge of God’s providence, humanity’s fall and the gift of reconciliation in Christ. For the Zurich preacher, the propagation of the gospel depended on a new generation both steeped in the Word of God and equipped with a classical education.
Zwingli aligned education with faith. True enlightenment is a gift of the Spirit, and ancient languages are the foundation:
There is no better way to preserve the order of the soul than to pore over the Word of God day and night [Psalm 1:2]. This labour cannot be performed until one has mastered the languages of Hebrew and Greek, for without the first the Old Testament and the second the New cannot be properly understood.40
Learning is not measured merely in terms of the acquisition of knowledge, but is to be experienced as the transformation of body and soul. Pupils should take regular and rigorous physical exercise and cultivate friendships, as well as the mind, through play:
I recommend the playing of games with one’s contemporaries, but only those that contribute to education and building of one’s body: educational games and playing with numbers, such as those for learning arithmetic, or physical games of attack and defence, or of attack and ambush as in chess. Such games teach one not to overlook anything. All such things, however, should be done in moderation. There are those who abandon their duties to devote themselves to play. I say that games should be played in spare time and alongside one’s studies. Playing with dice and cards I reject.41
Zwingli’s fondness for making music and engaging in conversation with friends inflected his belief that education was linked to friendship, a sacred bond in which all are equal through mutual sharing.
Zwingli closed with an admonition to Gerold: ‘Use your youth! The years fly by with swift feet and later years are rarely as wonderful as the earlier.’ His beloved stepson was to have little time beyond his youth, for at the age of 22 he died alongside his stepfather at the battle of Kappel.42
THE MASS
By the end of 1522, when he resigned his office as priest to become a city preacher, Zwingli had already stopped celebrating mass, which he regarded as idolatrous. Most offensive in his eyes was the belief that on the altar of a church the priest repeated the sacrifice of Christ on the cross. For Zwingli, that belief contradicted the biblical message that Christ died for the sins of the faithful, was resurrected and ascended to heaven. His sacrifice, once offered, was full and perfect and need not be repeated in a human form of worship. Precisely because Christ is in heaven, the bread and wine could not truly be his flesh and blood. Zwingli denied the central teaching of the medieval Church, the doctrine of transubstantiation, in which at the moment of consecration Christ was physically present in the church.
Zwingli understood that he could not rush to demand that the Council abolish the mass. The city was divided and his support among the magistrates remained partial. Nevertheless, reform of worship was advanced, and during the summer of 1523 Leo Jud, pastor in St Peter’s church, published in a small pamphlet a vernacular baptismal rite for children.43 The liturgy followed Luther’s German Baptismal Book of the same year.44 Children were to be baptized in a service conducted in the vernacular, and certain traditional elements were to be omitted, such as the exorcism of the demonic forces. Nevertheless, Jud had preserved a number of traditional practices, including the double signing with the cross and the placing of salt in the child’s mouth.45 On 10 August 1523, the first child was baptized according to Jud’s new liturgy.
The cautious changes in the new baptismal service were mirrored in Zwingli’s first attempt to provide a new order of worship for the mass, known as ‘On the Canon of the Mass’, which was followed in October by a more detailed apology.46 The liturgy was written in haste over four days, as Zwingli raced to meet the deadline set by Froschauer in order for the printed text to reach the Frankfurt book fair. Despite the rush, Zwingli wrote in his preface that he had been thinking about liturgical reform since his days as a priest in Glarus, when he had begun to study with care the missals, the liturgical books containing all instructions and texts necessary for the celebration of mass throughout the year.
His studies had led to the conviction that the Catholic mass was not an ancient rite; it was, he held, of more recent provenance, having been improvised over the centuries. In other words, the missals indicated that the liturgy had evolved and did not come from one ancient source.47 In the twentieth article of his Exposition, Zwingli had derided the antiquity of the mass and its liturgy, rejecting claims that it could be justified on the grounds of history:
It is likely that this canon which we have now is of too recent origin for any of the earlier prelates, such as Ambrose, to have made additions to it, and it is manifestly nothing but a collection of various prayers which men who were pious enough but not overly learned had put up publicly or privately.48
It was not, consequently, an inviolable sacred inheritance.
‘I am not going to bring forward,’ Zwingli proposed, ‘anything that is not adapted to the norm of the divine word, and this I want to understand as applying to the Canon I am going to offer.’49 His proposed changes managed to be both modest and radical. For the most part, he kept the order and structure of the mass, while at the same time eviscerating it: gone was the consecration of the bread and wine into the body and blood. In its place was a simple order in the middle of the service for the elements to be received by the faithful. He also moved the Lord’s Prayer from its traditional location between the canon and communion to the opening of the service, claiming that the dominical prayer was ‘the best expression that God is received in the sacrifice of praise and appeal’.50 Zwingli’s intention was to replace the mass with a liturgy in which the Word would be preached and the Lord’s Supper celebrated. The reform of liturgy was a significant step in Zwingli’s rejection of tradition as authority in the Church. He was beginning to relish having a free hand to create something new: an order of worship that expressed what he saw as the biblical message of repentance and thanksgiving in the Spirit.
IDOLS
God is Spirit, Zwingli preached, and should be worshipped in Spirit. The altars and images that filled the churches were manifestations of the idolatry of human attempts to capture the divine, to render the transcendent in material form. Instead of hearing the Word of God, the people were taught to worship statues and relics, just as they had turned for aid to the saints, and not to Christ. Zwingli’s message was of a direct encounter of the faithful with God, wholly unmediated by the material. The preacher’s rejection of transubstantiation was a denial that God in Christ could be physically present in the world. The second commandment of Moses forbade any graven images of what is in heaven above. There could be no possibility of true worship without a cleansing of the temples. Zwingli was adamant on this point and his supporters were moved to action, fired by both zeal for the gospel and hatred for the clergy. Their goal was not in question, but the timing was crucial. Reform for Zwingli had to follow the lead of the magistrates, who would not tolerate wanton destruction of the churches. Iconoclasm remained a capital offence in Zurich.
Leo Jud emerged as a key figure in the discussions, and preached in his church of St Peter’s on 1 September 1523 in favour of the removal of images; but there was little consensus among reformers and politicians on how to proceed.51 It was one thing to object to images on spiritual grounds, but quite another to engage in unbridled and illegal desecration. The magistrates were not prepared to tolerate vandalism, and damage to churches and religious symbols was severely punished. Forced to bide his time, Zwingli was in a bind. Sermons from the pulpits of Zurich denouncing idolatry incited lay people to act against the material fabric of the medieval churches in which they prayed, but the magistrates had not approved the radical removals he was advocating.
Events forced Zwingli’s hand. During the autumn of 1523, the first spontaneous acts of iconoclasm took place in Zurich and the rural areas. An assistant at the church of St Peter’s was hauled before the Council and charged with destroying an altar. His defence, which echoed Zwingli and Jud, was that the money should be redirected to the poor. Likewise, an altar in the Fraumünster was attacked, and the perpetrators thrown in prison. Another three men broke into the Fraumünster, sprinkled each other with holy water, and destroyed lamps in the chapel in the name of rejecting idolatry. Two weeks later, and more spectacularly, Klaus Hottinger pulled down the large crucifix that stood at the crossroads outside the city at Stadelhofen.52 At his trial, he claimed that he wanted to sell the wood to provide for the poor. For his efforts, he was banned from the city; he was beheaded in Catholic Lucerne four months later for his radical sentiments. The destruction of images was not only a subject for sermons: trial records show that it was hotly debated in guild halls, taverns and homes.53 The Council would not tolerate wanton violence and cracked down on the perpetrators with fines and imprisonment. The question of religious images presented Zwingli and his comrades with the first great challenge of how to realize change. How could reform be implemented without unleashing chaos?
Jud’s sermon certainly played a role, but so did a tract by Ludwig Hätzer (1500–1529) with the title ‘How One Should Conduct Oneself with Idols and Images’.54 Hätzer was chaplain in the nearby village of Wädenswil and belonged to the circle around Zwingli.55 His views were uncompromising: ‘Let all Christians strive diligently to do away with idols without hesitation before God visits them with that punishment which he is accustomed to send to all those who do not follow his word.’ Hätzer would soon part ways with his erstwhile friend and become a founder of the Anabaptist movement, a conviction for which he was beheaded in 1529.
The religious objects in the churches were seen by many as images of economic oppression. Several of Zwingli’s supporters argued that devotional items donated to the churches should not be used for the decoration or ornamentation of the places of worship; rather, they belonged to the poor, who are the true image of God. The false images should be redeemed by being turned into resources for poor relief.56 In the century before the Reformation, the Zurich rural areas had doubled in population, from about 25,000 to 60,000, with the result that by the early 1520s hunger afflicted many of the peasants beyond the walls of the city. Deprivation had heightened the resentment of the tithe. The plight of those suffering could not be separated from an assault on the privileges and wealth of the Church. Frequently, the attacks on the images were closely connected to demands for relief from feudal dues.57
The Zurich magistrates were in a seemingly impossible situation. Preaching and iconoclasm were disrupting the peace and stability of the city, which was their overriding concern. They had sanctioned the preaching, but were punishing the vandals. In rural areas, traditional grievances were being cast in terms of religious freedom. Beyond the city walls, the Catholic Confederates were growing so hostile that rumours spread of an attack on Zurich. Such was the concern of the magistrates that when the Grossmünster was reformed, some of the resources had been invested in strengthening the city’s defences. To deal with the unrest in the city, the magistrates appointed a committee of politicians, laymen and clerics to make recommendations about how to proceed with images in the churches.58 Its recommendation was for a second disputation ‘to discuss and help find a decision of Holy Scripture of the Old and New Testaments concerning images and the mass’.59
The magistrates consented and ordered a disputation that would address images and the mass, to take place from 26 to 28 October 1523.60 Invitations were sent to the bishop of Constance, as well as to other leading Catholic ecclesiastics, the university of Basel and prominent scholars. This time, neither Constance nor any other leading Catholic churchmen attended. The event was mostly made up of politicians, guild members and clerics from Zurich. Over 900 people attended, a third of whom were clergy. Leo Jud was to lead on the first day, which would address images, while Zwingli presided over the next two days, with discussion of the mass.61
The second disputation was not as well orchestrated as the first, but it did not need to be, for there was hardly any opposition from the church hierarchy. Jud and Zwingli argued vigorously that ‘images should not be endured, for with all that God had forbidden there could be no compromise’.62 The results, however, were mixed. There was division with the reform party about how quickly the images should be removed, and such disagreement displeased the magistrates, who declared that no one should remove anything from the churches without their permission. The second disputation, like the first, faced the question of legitimacy, as the Catholic Konrad Hofmann protested. Nevertheless, the principle of independence established at the first was upheld – that the local church could preside in matters of faith.63 When Konrad Grebel rose to ask what should be done about the mass, Zwingli replied that the Council would decide. Simon Stumpf, a local priest, shouted out provocatively: ‘Master Huldrych . . . you have no authority to place the decision in the hands of my lords, for the decision has already been made by the Spirit of God!’64
Martin Steinlin of Schaffhausen was the lone voice in support of traditional Catholic understanding of the sacrament, for which he was censured.65 Among the wider body of clerics, the thrust of the argument, following Zwingli’s lead, was repudiation of any idea that the salvific death of Christ could in any way be repeated on the altar. Further, prayers for the dead were denounced as having no scriptural warrant. The reformers argued that the laity were to receive both the bread and the wine, rejecting the medieval practice by which men and women received only the Eucharistic wafer. The Lord’s Supper was to be celebrated in the language of the people, and priests were not to adorn themselves with vestments. How exactly the people were to receive the elements was deemed a matter for local churches to decide.
The disputation cast in sharp relief the growing divisions within the reform party. Zwingli was largely in sympathy with Konrad Grebel and Simon Stumpf on the mass and images, but he had an entirely different approach to how scripture should be read and its commands implemented. All should be done in due order, not according to the immediate, individual biblical interpretation. Two distinct visions were at odds: that of the magistrates, working together with the clergy to introduce reform in time; and that of local congregations as the source of authority. Who was the legitimate bearer of reform?66
In late 1523, Zwingli and Jud met Konrad Grebel (1498–1526), Simon Stumpf and Felix Manz (1498–1527) at a gathering, of which we have no record beyond a report in Zwingli’s own hand, written some four years later. This account defended his support for the Council’s determination to stop acts of iconoclasm.67 In Zwingli’s telling, Stumpf, Manz and Grebel had wanted to establish a separate church of believers that had nothing to do with the civil government. Their church would contain only ‘upright, Christian people’ who lived lives of moral rectitude without need of ‘interest or other usury’. Stumpf, Zwingli claimed, had once told him that priests should be ‘struck dead’, and that the people should not have to pay interest and tithes. Further, Grebel and Stumpf had claimed more than once that ‘all things must be held in common’. Felix Manz had demanded that no one should be admitted into the Church unless they knew themselves to be ‘without sin’.68
Zwingli’s account was hostile and unsympathetic, as he sought to present the radicals as seditious and a threat to the true Christian state. He summarized their argument for a separate Church of the holy:
They begged us to make a declaration to this effect: Those who want to follow Christ should stand on our side. They promised also that our forces would be far superior to the army of unbelievers. Next the Church of the devoted itself was to appoint its own council from the devoutly prayerful.69
His hostility was reciprocated. After the meeting, Konrad Grebel responded: ‘Whoever thinks, believes or declares that Zwingli acts according to the duty of a shepherd thinks, believes and declares wickedly.’70 Zwingli, he added for good measure, was one of the ‘tonsured monsters’.
The lack of consensus among the reformers demonstrated at the second disputation was reflected in the words of one chronicler, who recorded that ‘the pastors in the Zurich countryside were not of one mind in doctrine, and some did not gladly receive the restoration of evangelical truth and apostolic teaching’.71 The Council looked to Zwingli to provide a concise statement of the new faith, and his response, ‘A Short Christian Instruction’, was published as an official mandate on 17 November 1523. The mandate demonstrated the high level of support on the Council for Zwingli’s teaching, instructing the people of Zurich to ‘let the evangelical scriptures declared therein be thoroughly and diligently reflected on in their original form’. It was the first confessional statement of the Zurich Reformation.
The purpose of the ‘Short Christian Instruction’ was didactic, to serve as a resource for pastors with little idea of what they were doing and what was going on around them. Having rehearsed the key topics of the faith, and having provided the pastors with the relevant passages in scripture for consultation, Zwingli ended with guidance on how reform should be introduced. He argued once more against the mass, before turning to what he named as ‘good ways to abolish the abuses’. Charity was the rule, and pastors should look kindly upon the mass priests who had not accepted the evangelical faith. They were not responsible for the errors they committed, and therefore were not to be punished. As Zwingli wrote:
Let all the people be admonished to let them depart in peace as they came. For the majority of them are so old that they cannot any longer be set to work. And no Christian should destroy the work of God on account of the Supper, as Romans 14:20 says. Where some behave so indecently, that is with an opposition that lacks foundation in the Word of God, then nobody should act against them. Rather, leave them for the government, which will handle them as is fitting.72
Despite Zwingli’s efforts to bring clarity, much remained uncertain. The magistrates adjured the clergy and people to follow the Bible and the evangelical teaching, but were not prepared to abolish the mass or have images removed from the churches. The church clerics were divided. Numerous priests in the Grossmünster, following Zwingli’s example, refused to celebrate the mass. One who did, a Johannes Widmer, was denounced as a ‘butcher of God’. The members of the Grossmünster chapter swore before the Council that liturgical books were being damaged, stolen and even thrown into the river.73 At the same time, the reform movement had split over the pace and extent of change, and did not speak with one voice. Another mandate was issued on Sunday, 13 December, to be read from the pulpits of the three major churches in the city, threatening to punish those who took it upon themselves to damage church property.74 The mandate declared that the magistrates themselves would determine how to proceed in the matter of the mass and images. A commission that included Zwingli and Jud advised the Council that the mass should be abolished and replaced by an evangelical service, but out of respect for weaker brethren this change should be made slowly.75
The city remained in no-man’s-land, caught between traditional and evangelical forms of worship. The Large Council, where Zwingli’s supporters predominated, was clear that scripture alone could be the only yardstick for determining matters of religion. Those who dissented from the new order were to appear before the magistrates to argue their case, but on the basis of the Bible alone. The Council agreed that images should be dealt with as recommended, but was in a quandary on the mass. Mindful of Zurich’s precarious position within the Confederation, the Council decided that Zwingli’s ‘Short Christian Instruction’ should be sent to the bishop of Constance and the other Swiss Confederates as an official statement of the city of Zurich.76 Konrad Hofmann, Zwingli’s leading Catholic opponent, took the opportunity to appear before the Council, presenting several articles against the evangelical party, but he made no headway.77 Two weeks later, the magistrates declared that he and other Catholics could believe what they wanted, but should they speak or act against the Council’s mandates, they would be stripped of their benefices.78 Catholic resistance in the city was by no means vanquished, but it was being worn down. By early 1524, evident signs of change had appeared in the city: mass was celebrated less frequently, and Candlemas was not marked that January with its usual festive processions of lights. Later, in Lent the faithful did not observe Palm Sunday with the traditional palms and relics, and there was no creeping to the cross on Good Friday. The altar triptychs were kept closed.79 In Holy Week, Zwingli suggested that the people gather outside the churches to hear sermons on the Penitential Psalms, with money collected for the care of the poor.
Catholics were put on the back foot by the growing support for the reform party among the Zurich magistrates; but beyond the city, the sky was darkening. The Confederate states of Schwyz, Unterwalden, Lucerne, Uri and Zug began to prepare to take action against Zurich, meeting regularly to draw up plans. It was at this point that the Five States, as they became known, formed a bloc within the Confederation, united against Zurich and its precipitate and provocative shedding of traditional religion. The ‘Short Christian Instruction’ of late 1523 had been Zurich’s confirmation that it had abandoned Catholic doctrine; and although the official break with Rome was yet to come, heresy had prevailed, stirring other Confederates to action.
‘THE SHEPHERD’
On the morning of the last day of the second disputation, Zwingli delivered a sermon in which he wholly reimagined the Christian pastorate, in contrast to the Catholic priesthood. From his denial of the mass, it could only follow that he would strip the clergy of their sacrificial role. Zwingli provided a rich and evocative picture of both how the faithful were to encounter the Word of God and how the Christian community should look. Although he had been encouraged to have the sermon printed immediately, the reformer was not able to revise and publish the text until late March 1524. By that point, the combined opposition of the bishop of Constance, the Catholic Confederates and the Imperial Diet was consolidating against Zurich. As a result of the enormous pressure from hostile parties, and on account of the difficult social and economic conditions, above all among the rural populace, Zwingli reworked his text by drawing on a wide range of examples from daily life to illustrate his case for gospel-based church offices. He entitled the work ‘The Shepherd’.80
Zwingli dedicated the work to the pastor Jakob Schurtanner in Appenzell, citing him as a ‘true shepherd of God’. The 72-page quarto book was printed by Froschauer and included an engraving of an image by Hans Holbein depicting Christ with his disciples and accompanied by the scriptural text from Matthew – ‘Come to me all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens and I will give you rest.’ The Holbein image would be found in most of Zwingli’s subsequent works printed by Froschauer. He had written ‘The Shepherd’ in German with an intended readership of non-latinate clergy and literate laity; only later was it translated into Latin. The book was an immediate success, quickly spreading across the Swiss and German lands. As early as July 1524, the great French scholar Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples was in possession of a copy. In 1513, Lefèvre d’Étaples had edited The Shepherd of Hermas the popular early Christian text from the first or second century, from which Zwingli had taken his title. An English translation with the title The ymage of both pastoures, set forthe by that mooste famous clerck, Huldrych Zwinglius, published in London in 1550, proved highly popular in Elizabethan England.81 The printer described the work as a ‘most fruitefull and necessary boke’.
In his letter of dedication to Schurtanner, Zwingli remained convinced of the special calling of the Swiss to the gospel. Rejoicing in the news that the people of Appenzell had received the Word of God through the labours of his friend, Zwingli portrayed the inhabitants as the best of the Swiss: people of the land, faithful and free from the corruption of the city. For the particular qualities of the Swiss, Zwingli once more invoked the patriotic story of Bruder Klaus:
Rather their [the Appenzellers’] unspoiled behaviour still shows us something of the qualities of the Confederation. When the Word of God comes to them, it will create a wonderfully pious and God-fearing people, and will do away with the selfishness which Bruder Klaus of Unterwalden prophesied would be so detrimental. Where the selfishness is not done away with, no government can continue. Although some are of a different opinion, nothing other than the Word of God has done away with the mercenary service with foreign lords in Zurich city and territory.82
The heart of the life and teaching of the evangelical pastor was the proclamation of the Word of God. The transforming of the gospel message raised the common person (der gemeine Mann) as well as the community to recognize the powers of spiritual oppression and to find divine emancipation. The Word of God was causing reformation and was unstoppable. Christ was the model of the good pastor in his harmony of life and learning, of prophecy and pastoral love. To imitate Christ, each pastor had to break with Catholic superstition, proclaim the gospel, deny himself and bear the cross. To preach the gospel was to teach people of the misery of the human condition, reconciliation through mercy and the Christian life. One must be fearless in trusting God and never shrink from battling the enemies of faith. Love must replace law.
Christ presented us with a true model. For when he saw the hypocrisy and avarice of the priests among the Jewish people as a cause for all the people straying from God and that they were held captive in the priests’ avarice, statutes and wilfulness, he attacked nothing more vigorously than the hypocrisy and avarice. He had great sympathy with the misled people in that they were robbed of the Word of God and had no fatherly shepherds.83
Zwingli claimed that his model for the pastor was Christ, but his argument was more complex. His vision of the pastoral office drew upon the traditional role of the medieval priest that he had himself performed as people’s priest: preaching, administering the sacraments and caring for the people. Although the sacral nature of the priesthood was denied, the faithful still required pastors and were dependent on them to provide the right interpretation of scripture and to minister to their pastoral needs. But Zwingli had another model – one that he would never have publicly claimed: the Jewish rabbi as learned teacher. Zwingli’s enthusiasm for Hebrew and the Old Testament, and his engagement with Jewish teachers offered him a way of thinking about the pastor as engaged in study and with knowledge of both languages and profane and sacred literature. Zwingli’s pastor was to be learned, married and an advocate of God’s Word, in imitation of the Old Testament prophets and of Christ the shepherd.
MUSIC
Among the leading reformers of the sixteenth century, Zwingli appears to have been a particularly talented musician. All his contemporary biographers, from Oswald Myconius to Heinrich Bullinger, refer to his gifts in playing the lute, among other instruments, and in singing. As befitted an avid reader of Plato, Zwingli loved the harmony of music, which he saw as embedded in the order of nature. Indeed, his preaching voice was much admired for the way in which he could modulate his tones and project pastoral images drawn from nature. His musical achievements, his friends recorded, were recognized when he was a boy in Toggenburg and cultivated by his uncle Bartholomäus. Later, Zwingli received vocal and instrumental instruction in Bern from Arnold Geering and the Münster cantor Bartholomäus Gottfried Frank. The education continued in Vienna, where Zwingli studied the arts with the great German humanist Conrad Celtis, who had set the Odes of Horace to music. Bullinger tells us that when the young student went to Basel, his knowledge of the quadrivium, which included music, was deepened by his young teacher Gregorius Bünzli.84 During his stay in Basel, Zwingli mastered several instruments. In Bullinger’s eyes, his ability to make music was very much part of a character that relished humour and wit, and one that loved to perform. While he was in Glarus, he became good friends with the distinguished music theorist Heinrich Glarean. The chronicler Bernard Wyss was admiring:
I never heard of anyone who was so learned in the art of music – that is singing and every instrument like the lute, the harp, the violin, the Abögli [a small stringed instrument], the pipe, the whistle like a good Confederate, the trumpet marine, the dulcimer, the cornett and the horn anything other you can think of – any [instrument] as soon as he took it in the hand and was so talented, as written before.85
To his supporters, Zwingli’s love of music reflected the very best of his engaging and charismatic personality. It also spoke to his poetic nature. Bullinger observed that ‘he practised music with joy, including flute, which he did with modesty’.86 His opponents, in contrast, portrayed him as a buffoon or fool. The Catholic chronicler Hans Salat (1498–1561) spoke of him as ‘engaging in all manner of frivolity, including playing drums, flute, lute and harp’ and called him an ‘entertainer’. Thomas Murner despised Zwingli as ‘a fiddler of the holy Gospels and a lute player of the Old and New Testaments’.87
At the first disputation in Zurich, the leader of the bishop’s party, Johannes Fabri, had accused Zwingli of replacing the organ with fiddles and flutes, to which the preacher sarcastically replied:
You reproach me also, dear Fabri, [for playing] court lute, violin and pipe. I say, however, that I cannot [play] anything on the court lute. You know without doubt better about it; I do not know what kind of music it is. However, I learned once to play lute, violin and other instruments. I will keep silent with regard to children, for you are no doubt too holy for such amusement and other things. Therefore, you should know that David was a very good harp player, who calmed his own . . . Your greed for honour and glory, indeed for money and blood, would vanish if you would dwell in the sound of the celestial court.88
Zwingli arranged for the creation of a music school in the former Franciscan monastery, and as teacher he recruited the young Hans Vogler from St Gallen. Vogler lived in Zwingli’s home, adding to the circle of musicians, including Leo Jud, who performed and sang together. In 1528, Zwingli ordered two violins from Bern, although he does not seem to have received them. They may have been intended to be played at the musical performances that were staged in Zurich during Zwingli’s time and in which he took a leading role. In 1529, the play The Rich Man and Poor Lazarus was performed with musical and voice accompaniment, while in January 1531 Aristophanes’ Ploutos was staged, with music composed by Zwingli.89
The evidence suggests that Zwingli was an active composer, although many of his creations have been lost. We know that his friend Wolfgang Capito (1478–1541) wrote from Strasbourg, asking that the reformer send him more of his songs – by which he meant not only the tunes, but also the texts.90 Capito already had some of Zwingli’s music in his possession, most likely pieces for multiple voices. Influences and possible attributions can also be detected. Zwingli’s use of folk melodies for his setting of Psalm 69 was replicated by Jud, and striking similarities exist between psalms traditionally credited to Leo Jud and Zwingli’s three surviving songs.91 These three extant works by Zwingli the composer, singer and accompanist are his ‘Plague Song’ of 1519, his setting of Psalm 69 of 1525 and the ‘Kappel Song’ of 1529. The genesis of the last of these is explained by Heinrich Bullinger: ‘Zwingli endured great danger in this war . . . therefore in sorrow and fear he composed the following song’:
Lord, hold the carriage yourself,
or soon the ride will go astray.
That would bring joy to the adversary,
who despises you beyond measure.
God lift up the glory of your name,
fight and punish the fierceness of the wicked,
awaken the sheep by your voice,
[the ones] who love you most deeply.
Help that all bitterness might depart, O Lord,
and that the old faithfulness might be restored and renewed,
so that we can eternally praise you.92
Zwingli had taken the old Swiss tradition of battle songs (such as those sung by soldiers before Novara in 1513) and spiritualized it for the battle of faith. He was a craftsman of words, and wrote tracts and expositions feverishly; but his most intimate expressions of faith and hope came in poetry and music. In the pulpit, before the Council, in making music with friends and staging plays Zwingli was a performer, and Zurich was his stage.
END OF THE ROAD: ERASMUS
Despite their differences over reform of the Church and the Zurich reformer’s vilification by Catholic opponents, Zwingli and Erasmus had continued their correspondence. Their relationship was severely strained by the German knight Ulrich von Hutten (1488–1523), an avowed supporter of Luther and an outspoken German patriot.93 Erasmus, formerly Hutten’s patron, turned against him when it became clear that Hutten’s violent claims for reform brought the threat of revolt. Erasmus acrimoniously broke with Hutten and would not receive him when the imperial knight, stricken with syphilis, came to Basel in 1523. Hutten published a pamphlet in which he bitterly insulted Erasmus as immorally faint-hearted for abandoning church reform. Near death, he was offered refuge by Zwingli, who enabled him to live on the island of Ufenau in Lake Zurich from May 1523 until his death in August that same year.
Zwingli’s harbouring of Erasmus’ enemy was long thought to have been the final straw that broke their relationship; but such was not the case. Erasmus certainly rebuked the Zurich reformer, but undaunted, Zwingli kept sending him letters. In the month in which Hutten died, Erasmus wrote defending himself against criticism from Zurich. In correspondence now lost, Zwingli had apparently referred to the Dutchman as a ‘vacillator’. Erasmus conceded that he had sought compromise, but never at the expense of the gospel.
The problem was Zwingli’s support for Luther. When the German reformer warned Oecolampadius in Basel that Erasmus was not to be trusted in matters of the Spirit, the Dutchman turned to Zwingli to ask what spirit Luther had in mind.94 He was evidently disappointed by the reply. Their exchange is lost, but clearly over the course of 1524, as Erasmus’ conflict with Luther boiled over, his relationship with Zwingli came to an end. Erasmus complained to Philipp Melanchthon in September 1524 that Zwingli had responded to his admonitions with contempt.95 The relationship so desperately sought by the priest in Glarus in 1516 was slipping away. Four years later, Zwingli reflected on how presciently Erasmus had warned him against Luther. ‘Now I realize how prudent Erasmus’ admonitions were,’ he wrote.
My eyes have been opened – but too late. For, by being too outspoken in my defence of one man, I offended the other more than I supposed. How stupid I was! Therefore, I imprudently turned the one [Erasmus] into my prudent enemy for the sake of a man [Luther] who is less conciliatory and less likely to be a friend than the one against whom I defended him.96
Zwingli never relinquished his reverence for Erasmus, but they had diverged over how the revival of the classical world might serve the faith. The two men were of strikingly different temperaments. Zwingli’s apparent desire to employ humanist learning to tear down the Church and create a new order horrified the Dutchman. Once Zwingli embarked on transforming Christianity, their relationship was doomed.