5. Reformation
FIVE REFORMATION
In the opening months of 1524, Zurich’s suspected parting from the Catholic Church on account of heresy hardened the opposition from fellow Confederates, notably the Five States (Uri, Schwyz, Unterwalden, Zug and Lucerne). The cities of Basel, Bern and Schaffhausen were more circumspect, as they also had active reform movements for which there was sympathy among their magistrates. The Five States sent a delegation to Zurich in late February to protest about the religious changes within the city, but it returned unsatisfied. Implacable hostility led the Swiss Diet, meeting in Lucerne on 20 April 1524, to rebuke the Zurich Council for tolerating and abetting attacks on the Catholic Church. The Diet would stand by the ‘faith of our forefathers’, a contested patrimony claimed equally by Zwingli and his opponents.
The spring of 1524 brought a shift in Zwingli’s attitude towards the Confederation. From his arrival in Zurich in 1519, he had largely espoused an Erasmian pacificism, hostile to mercenary service, pensions and foreign alliances, and reluctant to link religion and war. Hostility, however, was moving beyond words. The opposition of the Five States and the decision of the Diet at Regensburg to enforce the Edict of Worms against heretics, of which Zwingli was one, moved the preacher towards the acceptance of force.1 His dedication of his Commentary on True and False Religion to Francis I in the spring of 1525 was an expression of hope that French support would overcome resistance to the Reformation.
Although as preacher in the Grossmünster he had no official political role, Zwingli increasingly spoke on behalf of the city. As part of Zurich’s tactics of aggressive defence, the reformer prepared his ‘Friendly and Earnest Admonition to the Swiss’,2 which appeared on 2 May 1524, as the Catholics were consolidating their position against him and the city. So reviled was the name Huldrych Zwingli that the ‘Admonition’ appeared anonymously.
Addressing his fellow countrymen, Zwingli returned once more to the theme of lost virtue, contrasting the conduct of contemporary Swiss with the valour of their forefathers.3 While past generations had struggled to defeat the rapacious nobility, tilled the hard soil and liberated themselves from foreign masters, all that could be seen now was the squandering of their inheritance.4 Most execrable were those who received pensions – their hands were stained with blood. The consequences for the fatherland were all too evident: strife, godlessness and the imperilment of the Swiss Confederation.5 The ‘pure’ Word of God, when freely preached, demanded repentance and abandonment of self-interest. The restoration of true Christianity would recover a heroic past. In truth, it would do more, for despite their piety and vitality, the forefathers had lived under the shadow of the falsehoods and idolatry of the Catholic Church. Now that the Word once more shone, the traditional virtues of the Swiss would flourish in the light of Christ. Faith and patriotism were mutually sustaining. Zwingli’s opponents were left unmoved, no doubt fully aware of who had actually written this anonymous tract.
CLEANSING THE TEMPLES
The hesitation of the magistrates to act against the mass and images in the churches fostered an atmosphere of tense uncertainty in Zurich. In January, rural unrest directed against the hated tithe and burdensome obligations reached such a pitch that, alarmed the city might be attacked, the Council ordered the walls reinforced.6 Those who sought the stripping of sacred spaces were frustrated and angered by what they saw as a lack of leadership and determination, but the civic rulers were in no mood to be pushed into rash action. They were primarily concerned about order in the city and rural areas, and in May a seven-point mandate was released prohibiting a range of widespread activities, including dancing – except at weddings – drunkenness, elaborate clothing, and the firing of arms by young men.7 Among the punishable offences was iconoclasm. The fabric of the Church was not to be touched.
Nevertheless, sporadic acts of desecration continued in both the city and rural areas, and preachers such as Wilhelm Reublin connected iconoclasm with aid to the poor. On the Monday after Pentecost, a commission was created, including Zwingli, to consider how to proceed. The magistrates were growing more inclined to move, and by the end of May a report was delivered that offered a bold plan.8 Reformation was to be implemented through the removal of images from churches and the institution of an evangelical Lord’s Supper. By 8 June, the divided Council had agreed that images in churches were contrary to the Bible, but the cleansing was to be carried out in an orderly manner and in charity: ‘with love, without anger or divisiveness, since such images originated among Christians many hundred years ago and not long after the holy apostles and the son of Christ’.9 Those citizens in Zurich who had commissioned devotional items had eight days in which to collect and take them home, where they could remain in private.10 No new images were to be commissioned, and sculptors who took on new orders would be fined.
The magistrates’ concern was to head off random iconoclasm and staunch the flow of violent language from the pulpits and in the streets and taverns. They were determined to demonstrate to their opponents that chaos had not broken out in Zurich: reform would be peaceful. Such caution, however, was revised with the deaths in mid-June of two crucial supporters of Zwingli who had advocated prudence and restraint: Bürgermeister Felix Schmied and Marx Röist. Röist had been Zwingli’s most significant supporter, and with his death opposition to more draconian measures in dealing with images was removed.11 Immediately, indeed on the very day of his death, the Council passed a much more robust edict, determining
to do away with the images or idols in all places where they are worshipped, so that many turn themselves from the idols entirely to the living true God, and each seeks all help and trust in the one God through Our Lord Jesus Christ, to call upon and recognize in worship him alone. And the goods and costs that have been laid upon these images should be turned to the poor needy human beings, who are a true image of God.12
By 2 July, yet another commission had been formed, with 17 members, including a representative of each guild, together with a stonemason, carpenter and three priests. Over the next 10 days, the commission moved from church to church, and behind closed doors began the work of transforming the worship spaces. Statues, wooden panels and altarpieces were smashed and ground up, with the stone used for cobbles and the metals melted down. The stained-glass windows were left untouched, owing to the enormous cost of replacing them.13 When the images were gone, the walls were whitewashed. Everything of value was to be sold for poor relief, including clerical vestments.14 The relics of Felix and Regula were removed from the Grossmünster and quietly buried in an unmarked location. Organs were to be silenced.
Even this more aggressive policy did not satisfy all. Accounts narrate that when churches were reopened, men dashed in and inflicted further damage on what little remained, including furniture and the stone altars, which on account of their weight had not yet been taken down. The Council’s policy extended to the dead: on 18 November, the magistrates permitted those who wished to remove headstones from the graveyards to do so. Unclaimed headstones were taken away to be used by the city for building purposes, and bones from charnel houses were buried in common graves.15
By one contemporary reckoning, the value of the precious items removed or destroyed was eye-watering. The sale of silk paraments raised 1,400 gulden, while the melted silver brought almost 6,000 gulden.16 The numbers rose to almost 9,000 gulden in gold and 10,000 gulden worth of manuscripts and books. To give a sense of proportion: Zwingli, as the most senior cleric in the city, was paid less than a hundred gulden a year. The value of the lost altar paintings and statues cannot be calculated as they perished. Apart from the pillaging of religious houses by Vikings, the Western Church had never witnessed such intentional destruction of the fabric of worship and devotion. The smashed statues and the fires that consumed paintings marked Zurich’s break with a thousand years of European Christianity. The destructive force of Zwingli’s reformation had been unleashed.
The stripping of churches during the summer of 1524 shocked the Confederation. The medieval Church had seen heresy come and go, but never had the Catholic faith been so desecrated. The Five States were outraged and resolutely refused to meet Zurich representatives at the federal Diet. Rumours of a military intervention once more circulated, dampened, however, by the reluctance of powerful urban Confederates in Bern and Basel to be drawn into conflict with Zurich. Both cities contained evangelical preachers and the stirrings of popular support for the new faith. They, too, had experienced random iconoclasm. Bern permitted itself distance from the growing hostilities by arguing that there were no grounds for intervention in the religious affairs of another Confederate. In the east, where Zurich had traditionally exerted considerable influence, Appenzell, Thurgau, St Gallen and Schaffhausen gave their consent to the orderly removal of images from the churches. Bishop Hugo von Hohenlandenberg of Constance, together with Zurich’s powerful Catholic neighbour Lucerne, demanded that the decision to strip the churches be reversed. The bishop’s protest was largely symbolic, and Zwingli replied on behalf of the city in August, stressing divine proscription of images in the second commandment.17
The images were gone by the end of the summer. Next on the scaffold were the religious houses, which largely acquiesced in their demise. The houses of the Dominicans and Augustinians were seized by the Council and the monks and friars were retired, left the city or embraced the reform movement. The Dominican house ultimately became a city hospital. All who did not depart gathered in the Franciscan friary. The plan for the monks was relatively simple: they were to find gainful employment, with those who were younger given the option of studying the Bible or taking up a useful trade.18 A number later became evangelical pastors. The older generation was treated gently, allowed to retain their incomes on the condition that no novices were recruited. A large number of monks chose to leave their vocation and marry, often taking positions serving in the hospitals into which many of the religious houses in the city were transformed. These houses occupied a large amount of property within the walls of Zurich, and their dissolution proved a windfall for the Council.
There were four convents in the city: two Dominican, one Cistercian and one Benedictine.19 The desire that the nuns should leave their religious houses brought extreme hardship for many women. The options given were limited: they could remain in the house until their death or else leave and either marry or support themselves through work. Zwingli and the reformers thought they should marry, but many fell into poverty. Those nuns who rejected the new faith often found themselves at odds with their families, who were supporters. The last abbess of the oldest Zurich convent, Katharina von Zimmern, handed over her house with all its rights to the Council at the end of 1524; in return she received a generous living that sustained her over the next 20 years. In the spring of 1525, the Council decided that all the remaining nuns should be moved into one location, the former Dominican house at Oetenbach. The range of experiences for the nuns was considerable, and often challenging. What was clear was that they had no say in Zwingli’s reformation.
Christianity had long associated heresy with moral degeneracy, and Zwingli’s opponents were no exception. He had been a promiscuous priest and a coward who hid behind the walls of Zurich; his musical abilities were also derided, making him a dilettante or even effeminate. Zwingli was simply reaping what he had sown, as he had never held back from mocking opponents. Such was the outrage caused by the stripping of the churches that the Swiss Diet, meeting in Lucerne, demanded that Zurich account for its actions. At the session, Zwingli was vociferously denounced. He responded to the two principal accusations: that his false teaching had come from Jews and that he did not preach Christ as the crucified Son of God.20 He denied both accusations and identified as his slanderers Catholic priests who lived in and near Zurich. In future, he warned, they should preach the Word of God, instead of inciting hatred and gossip. If they failed to do so, he would expose their ignorance for all to see.
The zeal in Zurich among the reformers for Hebrew, and their emphasis on the Old Testament, frequently led to accusations that they were ‘Judaizers’, meaning that they adopted the errors of rabbinical teaching. Late-medieval hostility to Jews intensified during the 1520s in the wake of the infamous Reuchlin affair, which had been an attempt to destroy Jewish learning.21 Zwingli’s hands were not clean, and he shared much of the standard Christian animus toward Jews. Nevertheless, a continuous stream of charges claimed that his reforms arose from rabbinical teachings that stressed the Hebrew scriptures over the New Testament. He addressed a particular story of a Jew named Moses from Winterthur, with whom he had been in contact:
However, it is true that some time ago I talked with him [Moses] in the presence of more than ten other learned and upright men from Zurich and Winterthur about many promises in the Old Testament against their errors. [Jews] sin for not accepting the Lord Jesus as the Christ. [Moses] also came twice to us in Zurich not to teach but to listen to our Hebrew lectures to see if we handle the Hebrew Scriptures rightly. He admitted afterwards that we did and wished he could himself do so in such a way.22
The accusation of consulting with Jews was closely associated with the charge that Zwingli did not preach Christ as the Son of God. The sting was deeply felt: ‘All our work, who preach the Gospel at this time, consists only in preaching how we find the assurance of our salvation in the death of the living Son of God.’23
PILLAGE
Zurich’s precarious position was underscored over a couple of days in mid-June, when once more reform was in danger of spinning out of control. The incident was the dramatic destruction of a religious house. In mid-June, peasants stormed and destroyed the Carthusian monastery at Ittingen in Thurgau, a Mandated Territory jointly governed by the Confederates, but very much under Zurich’s influence.24 The hostility was rooted in a dispute between the monastery and peasants who owed it tithes. The volatile situation was inflamed by evangelical preachers supported by Zurich who were active in the region.25 The crowd that turned on the wealthy abbey had demanded food and drink from the monks. Unsatisfied, they raided the cellars and seized the wine, at which point the violence broke out. By the time the Zurich troops arrived, much of the monastery had already been reduced to ruins. While negotiations were attempted, the remaining part of the building was consumed in a fire.
Catholics, already appalled by the iconoclasm in Zurich, held the city responsible for the destruction of a religious house. The Zurich magistrates, having sought to prevent acts of destruction in their own land, did not want to be associated with riotous actions at Ittingen. They sought to settle the matter by arresting some of the ringleaders, but at their trial the men were found not guilty of any capital offence. Zwingli had acted as an expert witness, expressing sympathy for the peasants and the demands, while reiterating his conviction that the tithe should remain.26 The ensuing Catholic outrage cowed the Council, which did not want to be seen as fomenting rural unrest, as it had to keep a wary eye on its own lands. After threats from the Swiss Diet, backed up by the Austrians, the divided magistrates consented to hand over the men to the Catholic Confederates, who were less benevolent. A number of the men were executed.27 The Ittingen crisis underscored Zurich’s perilous position. The humiliation of having to accede to the wishes of the Catholic Confederates was a harsh reminder for the magistrates of their isolation and limited ability to dictate events outside their lands.
THE WILD GOAT
While in Zurich committed Catholics used status and power to resist change, the most significant theological assaults came from outside the city. Most notable were the attacks by Jerome Emser (1477–1527) and, in particular, Johann Eck (1486–1543), both of whom had been in the vanguard of the struggle against Luther. Turning his attention to the Swiss, Emser took up his pen in April 1524 to write ‘A Defence of the Canon of the Mass against Ulrich Zwingli’, which was little more than a collection of insults. It made, however, a deadly serious point: Emser provided an argument for the antiquity and continuous history of the Roman mass.28 His arrow struck the target, and Zwingli was forced to step back from his position on the novelty of the mass. Emser took aim at Zwingli’s published revision of the mass liturgy and the insertion of his own prayers, and fiercely denounced the Zurich reformer as a fraud and heretic, and, worse, a lesser version of Luther.
Zwingli only learned of Emser’s pamphlet, which was printed in Dresden, when a traveller brought him a copy. He replied in August 1524, claiming to be responding ‘lovingly and benignly’. In truth, he mocked Emser as a ‘wild goat’ – a joke first used by Luther on account of a goat on the Emser coat of arms. As a man of the mountains, Zwingli knew his opponent: ‘Wild goat that you are, you brandish your horns against one who has seen so many of those animals that he does not fear their look at all.’29
The purpose was not mere verbal jousting. Zwingli used Emser’s attack on his revision of the liturgy to offer a full account of the nature of the Church. The body of Christ is both visible and invisible, and is not formed like the hierarchical institution of Rome, with orders, laws and offices. The visible body in this world consists of all people, believers and non-believers, and is constantly in need of correction. The invisible Church is the gathering of the faithful past, present and future. It alone was the spotless body:
As many, then, as trust in Christ are built upon a rock, which no blasts of wind can shake, no inundating floods wash away. As many as are built upon this are the Church of Christ, for he himself said ‘my’.30
Soon Zwingli was also forced to defend himself against Johann Eck, a more formidable opponent. A brilliant theologian and humanist at the University of Ingolstadt, Eck was a figure well known from his confrontation with Luther at Leipzig in 1519, and he continued in his role as a scourge of the reformers. During the years 1524–1526, Eck emerged as Zwingli’s most capable enemy.31 The theologian took considerable interest in the developing religious controversies in the Swiss Confederation, and in the summer of 1524 addressed the Swiss Diet in Baden, where he attacked Zwingli’s Exposition of the Sixty-Seven Articles.32 He proposed to the Diet that he and Zwingli should hold a public debate, and that a body of delegates should determine who was the true heretic. Zwingli’s response was fierce. He contended that Eck was nothing more than a showman and self-promoter, adding that the Catholic professor was deeply disappointed not to have been made a bishop.33 One performer was attacking another.
Zwingli was drawn to the possibility of a debate, but insisted that the confrontation should take place in Zurich before an open Bible, which alone should be the standard of judgement, not church hierarchy or tradition. Despite his bravado, Zwingli knew full well that he could not risk travelling to Baden, where the Diet was sitting. Reports recounted that his books, as well as an effigy of him, had been burned in public, and he had every reason to believe that if apprehended, he would suffer the same fate. Eck was the most dangerous opponent Zwingli had faced and the reformer’s instinct was to attack.34
Eck was more than a match for Zwingli’s acid tones. He knew exactly how to exasperate the reformer. In his first epistle, of 18 September 1524, he claimed that the true source of Swiss errors was Luther, and he continued to call Zwingli a ‘Lutheran’. Both heretics had destroyed the unity of the Church with their specious claims for scripture alone. His own response came from Paul’s words to Titus: ‘After a first and second admonition, have nothing more to do with anyone who causes divisions, since you know that such a person is perverted and sinful, being self-condemned’ (Titus 3:10–11). Eck was withering: Zwingli could not be serious about a debate or he would have accepted the terms.35 The heretic would not dare debate unless he was also judge. He was a coward who believed that he alone possessed the Holy Spirit.
Although expectations rose during the late summer and autumn of 1524 of an encounter between Eck and Zwingli, for which there was support in both the Swiss Diet and the Zurich Council, each of the two combatants refused to accept the other’s terms. Eck refused to enter the walls of heretical Zurich and Zwingli refused to leave. Both knew what awaited them if they ventured into hostile territory, and by 1524 there was no neutral ground.
BAPTIZED IN THE SPIRIT
In the summer of 1524, parishioners in Witikon and Zollikon, which were under Zurich control, refused to bring their children for baptism, claiming that they had been told not to do so by their preachers. Once again, Wilhelm Reublin was in the fray, insisting that he would not baptize anyone who had not made a profession of faith. Infant baptism, he declared, was nowhere to be found in the New Testament. The response from the magistrates was uncompromising. Beyond theology, they connected this resistance with the rural unrest currently widespread in Zurich lands. All newborns, the Council thundered, must be brought to the parish church for baptism and their names duly recorded, making them subjects. The decision on baptism was the first explicit theological decision made by the magistrates without any form of disputation. By refusing to administer the sacrament to their infants, men and women were setting their faith in conflict with their civic duties, raising the question of their allegiance.
In a collective letter to Thomas Müntzer in early September 1524, the group, led by Konrad Grebel and Felix Manz, sought to outline its theological convictions and establish connections beyond the Confederation of like-minded reformers. The letter is not a dogmatic statement, but ranges across the nature of the Church, baptism, discipline and pacifism. The Church was to be reformed in conformity with scripture, and Zwingli’s compromises with temporal authority were rejected. It was to be separated from the rulers as an autonomous community of believers.36 The letter harshly indicted Zwingli and his supporters who, Grebel and his colleagues insisted, ‘follow their own notions, yes, even those of Antichrist, above God and contrary to God, as is not right for ambassadors of God so to act and so to preach’.37
In the autumn of 1524, the debate over baptism continued to escalate. In the face of the demands of the Council, the opponents of infant baptism began to look further afield for support. In October, they made contact with Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt and then with Thomas Müntzer. Karlstadt’s writings on baptism had been highly influential on the radicals, and his works were disseminated throughout the Swiss lands. He was a fierce opponent of infant baptism.38
Between October and December, the radical circle in Zurich cultivated their views on baptism, which were in conflict with Zwingli’s, in a series of private debates. Felix Manz’s ‘Protestation to the Council’ set out the case against infant baptism, and demonstrated that Zwingli was wrong. His statement formulated what would become the heart of the Anabaptist argument: scripture makes it clear that faith follows from preaching and that baptism follows from faith.39 Manz argued that baptism should be administered ‘upon one who having been converted through God’s Word and having changed his heart now henceforth desires to live in newness of life’.40 Such a person could only be an adult, for ‘to apply such things as have just been related to children is without any foundation and against all Scriptures’. Particular emphasis was placed on the desire of the believer to be baptized and their conduct after the rite.
By early 1525, the debate over infant baptism was no longer confined to private discussions, but was a public controversy that unnerved the magistrates. They called for a disputation in January, which resulted in a hardening of their position: infant baptism was mandatory; private reading groups banned. Those who had not had their children baptized had eight days in which to do so. The principal antagonists, including Grebel, Manz and Castelberger were either to remain silent or be banished. Zwingli and the Council were determined to extirpate the threat to the reform movement, and as Andrea Strübind has remarked, ‘the magistrates had resolved to protect their protégé by decree’.41 The opponents of infant baptism had been made criminals.
Starting on 21 January 1525, the first adult baptisms took place in Zurich and the rural areas. In the home of Felix Manz, Konrad Grebel baptized Georg Blaurock, who then baptized the others present. Theirs was an act of enormous courage, as those gathered knew full well that their convictions would bring persecution and exile. The baptisms took place in an atmosphere created by prayer and scripture reading, within a gathering of the faithful, not a new church. To be baptized, one had to make a public profession of faith. Soon afterwards, baptisms followed in nearby Zollikon, where a celebration of baptism and the Lord’s Supper took place in a private home. The communal worship was named a ‘meal of unity’. Participation was open to all who demonstrated ‘brotherly love’, with those who received the sacraments expected to live according to the New Testament. The participants had taken the sacraments into their own hands, away from the clergy and magistrates.42
One of the most gifted figures in this movement was Balthasar Hubmaier (1480–1528), an educated humanist, theologian and former pupil of Johann Eck. He knew Zwingli, Oecolampadius and Vadian well, initially agreeing with them in broad outline on evangelical teaching, and had participated at the second disputation in Zurich, in 1523. In the spring of 1524, he drew up a plan for the reform of Waldshut, a town on the Swiss–German border under Austrian rule. During the autumn of 1524, when Waldshut was caught up in peasant unrest and military conflict loomed, Zurich sent a small number of soldiers to aid.
Hubmaier’s rejection of infant baptism seriously strained his relations with Zwingli and Oecolampadius, and by January 1525 he was in contact with Konrad Grebel, Felix Manz and Georg Blaurock in Zurich. Their connections were enhanced with the arrival of several Anabaptists in Waldshut during that winter, after their expulsion from Zurich. Adult baptisms followed in the town, and Hubmaier himself was baptized at Easter 1525. Unlike Grebel, Manz and others, Hubmaier attempted to retain good relations with Zwingli and Oecolampadius, despite the rift. Indeed, on several occasions Hubmaier insisted that Zwingli and Oecolampadius had shared his doubts about infant baptism.
Zwingli responded to the Anabaptist challenge in May 1525 with the first of two major works on the sacrament that would appear that year. In Baptism, Rebaptism and Infant Baptism, he took direct aim at his opponents, accusing them of having completely distorted the sacrament. Turning their argument on its head, he claimed that, as infant baptism was not forbidden in scripture, it could not be an offence.43 But his argument was not based on silence. He was eager to state what baptism actually is: a covenantal sign that does not in itself or as an act impart or even strengthen faith. Zwingli rejected what he saw as the pernicious Anabaptist argument that baptism was a pledge to live a sinless life, a position he claimed was a new form of legalism to bind the conscience. It would make God a liar, as such lives were not possible. For Zwingli, baptism marked the beginning of a journey of following Christ: ‘baptism in water is an initiatory sign, with which we pledge ourselves to a new life’.44 He denied that children do not possess the Spirit, arguing that God can act through whomsoever he wills.
Zwingli accused the Anabaptists of reading scripture too literally: the command to baptize made no distinction between adults and children.45 Furthermore, the fact that infants are not mentioned was not an argument against their reception of the sacrament, for if one took that position, then women would not be permitted to receive communion, as there were no women at the Last Supper. Baptism is the rite of initiation into the covenant of Christ, as circumcision was for the Israelites. Circumcision did not bring faith: it was a covenantal sign that those who trust in God will raise their children to know and love God. Instruction follows initiation, so children are baptized and then are taught the faith. Baptism cannot save, but it is a sign or pledge of the covenant God has made with humanity. It was instituted by Christ for all.
‘THIEF, HERETIC AND ADULTERER’
Although much of Zwingli’s life was determined by the urgency of events over which he had little control and by the constant need to respond to opponents in the city and abroad, he drew strength from order and discipline. He sought to preserve a balance of life involving family, study, worship and public events. His biographer Myconius offers a window on the reformer’s daily world:
He carried on his studies standing up, setting apart certain hours for them, and nothing but dire necessity compelled him to omit them. From early morning to 10 o’clock he gave himself to reading, exegesis, theology and writing, as time and occasion required. After lunch [10 a.m.] he attended to those who wished to talk to him or hear his advice, and then strolled with friends until two o’clock. Then he returned to his study. After supper he again walked a little, then generally wrote his letters, an occupation that sometimes kept him up till midnight. Moreover, as often as business compelled, he was at the command of the Council.46
Those letters often speak of physical and mental exhaustion and the failure to meet the myriad demands. Strikingly, however, Myconius had almost nothing to say about Zwingli’s beloved Anna, their children or domestic life. He did not pass over, however, the assaults, verbal and physical, on Zwingli’s person, and he was well informed on what was being said about the man in the taverns and civic chambers. He tells one story of an attack on the reformer’s sleeping household, probably in 1525. From the street two men, filled with wine, shouted insults and smashed windows with stones:
[They] behaved so cruelly, basely and inhumanly with their shouts and curses and blows that none of the neighbours dared to protest even through the windows. So they kept on till they used up their stones, their words, and their strength. The tumult was reported to the Bürgermeister in the morning and the gates were shut and armed men searched for the offenders in vain in every nook and cranny of the city until certain prostitutes who knew about their hiding places, not being adept in concealing, unintentionally betrayed one of them. The other had already escaped.47
The captured offender was found hiding in a wine barrel that belonged to a priest, and was taken to prison by an ‘enraged crowd’. He was condemned to indefinite imprisonment and languished in the Wellenberg, the prison tower in the middle of the River Limmat, until released at the request of the city of Bern.
Zwingli was clearly rattled. On 22 September 1525 he wrote to Vadian describing the ‘extremely tragic event’ that had befallen him.48 He added that Christian Fribolt, the merchant from St Gallen who carried the letter, would recount the story in greater detail. Zwingli described the situation as ‘horrible’, although God (‘the holy Jupiter’), he was certain, would somehow use this incident to his honour. He told Vadian that the assault reflected a disease in the community and that the Council had been properly stern, acting to heal the poisoned body. The well-meaning people of the city had responded well, and Vadian was not to be unduly worried. Zwingli assured his friend that he was unfazed and back at work.
The broken windows were not the only occasion when Zwingli was personally threatened. Myconius recalled an incident of a man, reportedly from Zug, who was apprehended in Zurich carrying a large sword under his cloak with the intention, so he claimed, of running Zwingli through when the right moment presented itself. After being arrested, the would-be assassin managed to vanish from the city.49 Such incidents, Myconius tells us, were not isolated. Zwingli was frequently called a ‘thief’, ‘heretic’ and an ‘adulterer’. His being mocked in the streets of Zurich was an almost daily occurrence:
They calumniated him, made him of no account, publicly and privately jeered at him to such a degree that the Zurichers began to consider how they might avert this evil. It would require a volume if anyone would know this affair fully or write exhaustively about it.50
Zwingli’s volatile relations with the people and Council in Zurich were well known abroad. Thus, for example, in January 1526 Zwingli recorded that a traveller had arrived in Zurich reporting rumours circulating in Strasbourg that Zwingli had been killed, banished or gone into hiding.51
The controversial preacher and reformer required a security detail:
Zwingli sometimes dined away from home with friends or entertainers. Therefore, returning he was almost always escorted without being aware of it by good citizens, lest evil should befall him on the way. And the Council in this time placed watchers around his house at night. See, I beseech you, what unjust accusations were brought against the man that he should have to be protected in this way!52
Perhaps most dramatic was an abortive kidnapping. Myconius alluded to numerous ‘secret plots’ against Zwingli, but also recounted how a figure appeared at Zwingli’s door after midnight, beseeching the preacher to tend to a dying man. Zwingli’s servant replied that he would do whatever was necessary, as the reformer was not to be disturbed during the night, on account of his busy days. The man at the door objected so vehemently that the quick-witted servant became suspicious:
The servant, therefore, going as if he was to rouse his master and tell him about it, frustrated the marauder by closing the door and leaving him outside. In the morning the facts were discovered that he [Zwingli] was to have been gagged and carried away secretly in a boat. Shortly thereafter a horse was got ready to be used for the same purpose.53
We read of graffiti on the city walls and bridges denouncing Zwingli as excrement and a fornicator.
THE BODY OF CHRIST
While the debate over baptism was a defining moment for the Reformation, on the Lord’s Supper, the other sacrament, Zwingli and his radical opponents were largely in agreement. Nevertheless, the question of what took place during the celebration of the meal was soon to open another fissure. In his Exposition of the Sixty-Seven Articles of 1523, Zwingli had attacked transubstantiation and argued that he and Luther were saying much the same thing, albeit with different words. A year later, it was evident that they held very different positions on the sacrament, and Zwingli distanced himself from Wittenberg, denying that he was a ‘Lutheran’, as opponents such as Eck had asserted. But his own position was by no means clear. He had repeatedly rejected the sacrificial character of the mass, and continued to claim that the Roman Church taught that Christ’s once-offered sacrifice was repeated by priests at the altar. He preferred to speak of the Lord’s Supper as a ‘remembrance’ or ‘memorial’, but what exactly he meant awaited further explanation.
Zwingli articulated more fully an understanding of the Lord’s Supper in November 1524 in his ‘Letter to Matthew Alber’, addressed to a pastor in Reutlingen in Germany.54 In the missive, Zwingli responded to a variety of criticisms, not just those of his Catholic opponents. It marked his intense engagement with the sixth chapter of the Gospel of John as central to his sacramental thought: Jesus speaks of himself as the ‘bread of life’, telling his disciples:
very truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day.
Zwingli drew the conclusion that it was Christ slain on the cross, not eaten in the sacramental meal, that feeds the faithful. Eating the flesh of Christ is not, therefore, a physical act, but a spiritual one. To eat the body is to believe; it means believing that Christ died to save humanity.
A significant influence on Zwingli’s evolving convictions about the Lord’s Supper, as found in the ‘Letter to Matthew Alber’, came from a somewhat unusual source. In or around 1521, the Dutch humanist and jurist Cornelius Hoen had written a letter in which he argued that Christ’s words ‘this is my body’ actually meant ‘this signifies my body’.55 In proposing that the bread and wine do not really become the body and blood of Christ, but represent them, he articulated a rejection of both Catholic transubstantiation and Luther’s teaching. Zwingli came in contact with the letter in manuscript at some point in 1524. Hoen had provided him with a crucial piece of his argument, leading the reformer to claim:
The flesh of Christ is the food and hope of the human heart, simply in that he was slain for us. For what is produced of flesh is flesh. The flesh of Christ, therefore, when it is eaten cannot produce anything but flesh. Yet, the flesh of Christ in dying for us makes that person spiritual, that is, truly a child of God who rests upon his death. I conclude, therefore, that this bread of which Christ speaks is simply this: that Christ was delivered up to death for our life.56
Zwingli rejected the notion that the bread was in any way the physical body of Christ, or that Christ’s body was present in any ‘real’ sense. Although Zwingli did not name Luther in the letter to Alber, here he departed from what the German doctor was saying about the physical presence of Christ in the Supper. For Zwingli, the promises of Christ are for those who believe, those who have faith, and simply for those who consume the bread and wine:
Christ gives life to the world not because he is flesh, but because he is God and the Son of God. Again, it appears that he is life insofar as he is believed to be the Son of God and to have died according to the flesh he had taken on from the virgin, and that he gives life to those who have believed in this way, not those who have eaten physically.57
Although it would be six more months before the mass was officially abolished in Zurich, by November 1524 Zwingli evidently possessed a coherent view of the sacrament. Having stripped away any sacrificial role at the altar for the priest, he envisaged the community gathered around a table with bread and wine to recall Christ’s last meal with his disciples. Christ would be present not physically, but in the Spirit, who fed those who partook in faith.
REVOLT
The tumult over religion between 1523 and 1525 took place against the background of growing unrest among the peasants in the rural territories.58 In comparison to most of the lands of northern Europe, the plight of the peasants in the Confederation was less dire – a result of the strong Swiss communal tradition, particularly in the inner Confederates.59 Nevertheless, suffering was considerable, particularly as Zurich continued into economic decline during the 1520s, through a heady mixture of bad weather, a failure of markets and the city’s isolation. A disproportionate amount of the hardship fell on the rural communities. As we have seen, the feudal bonds of tithing remained a serious grievance. Peasants also faced payments for virtually every aspect of their lives: the marriage of a daughter, grinding corn and inheriting, to name but a few.60 The Church played a key role in this catalogue of customary payments, exacting money to baptize children and bury the dead, as well as receiving tithes from crops and animals. Despite his readiness to identify himself with the peasantry of his native Toggenburg, Zwingli had known privilege and advantages that set him apart. His family situation had enabled him to attend university and become a priest. Few peasants experienced that level of social or economic advancement.
The evangelical preaching in Zurich in the autumn of 1523 had begun to exacerbate the situation, with protests about the tithe hurled by the peasants against the Grossmünster and the religious houses at Rüti and Bubikon. Riots and looting took place. Inspired by what they heard from Zwingli, pastors called for profound changes at the parish level. The grievances were both well established and radical: calls for the end of episcopal authority and for communities to both elect their own priests and control the possessions of the parish that paid for the clergy went hand in hand with demands for the end of serfdom and of feudal dues.
The Swiss Diet – alarmed by the situation to the north, in the German lands of Swabia, where unrest was becoming increasingly militant – met in April and May 1524 to draw up plans for defence against the peasant armies assembling in Germany.61 They foresaw the Rhine as the front for the Confederation, but disturbances were soon also happening on Swiss territory, in Bernese and Basel lands, as well as in Appenzell, St Gallen, Schaffhausen and other territories in the eastern part of the Confederation. Moderate responses from the ruling magistrates were initially sufficient to avoid loss of life.
In the spring of 1525, some 4,000 peasants gathered in Töss, not far from Zurich, but they eventually disbanded after assurances from the Zurich Bürgermeister that their cause would be investigated. Zwingli took a direct hand in events, and advised the Zurich Council on how to respond to the combination of religious, economic and political demands.62 In his written intervention, he argued that the government should consider the grievances, as was the tradition in Swiss lands, but his conclusions offered no radical alternative, for he held that established contractual demands must be honoured, leaving the peasants to pay tithes, rents and interest. The Bible was clear: both the Old and the New Testament told of serfs of whom obedience to their overlords was demanded.63 Zwingli was deeply concerned with the justice of the tithes and commerce, and proposed capping interest at 5 per cent for loans in business transactions.64 A statement from the magistrates in late June 1525 made it clear that they did not accept the Bible as the basis for economic arrangements. Some concessions were made, but the tithe was to stay.65
Zwingli was forced onto the defensive. Pamphlets were circulating that invoked his language of fraternal love as the basis for social reform. Additionally, the magistrates believed that the clergy were behind the unrest, no doubt thinking of the radicals in the rural parishes. Zwingli counselled compassion towards the peasants without overturning the system: rents and interest were to be charged at reasonable rates.
Zwingli’s position was straightforward, if rather naïve. There was to be no economic or social reform to liberate the peasantry, but in turn it fell to the rulers to act in a godly and benevolent manner consonant with their role as God’s appointed. Magistrates were to keep order, protect true religion and cultivate virtue, while subjects were to submit to the established structures of authority. Zwingli never adopted Luther’s attitude, found in his direly titled Against the Murderous, Thieving Hordes of Peasants of May 1525. In Wittenberg, Luther recorded, ‘The peasants have taken upon themselves the burden of three terrible sins against God and man; by this they have abundantly merited death in body and soul.’66 In Zurich, the appeal was to the good will of the rulers in responding to the rural grievances. The Swiss lands suffered little, compared to the hostility and slaughter of the peasant revolts in German lands. For the most part, negotiations, rather than conflict, marked those events in the Confederation that related to the peasants; but in the end, little changed. The Reformation would do nothing for the plight of the rural populace, whose subjugation suited both magistrates and their reformers.
FINAL BREAK
Zurich had truly broken with the Catholic Church when it purged its churches; the abolition of the mass was a delayed consequence. Zwingli’s calculation was that this step would not be taken unless the magistrates were persuaded that disorder would not ensue.67 Yet significant Catholic opposition remained in the city, and victory was not guaranteed. Anabaptism was spreading and the rural areas were restive. The growing threat from the inner Confederates and their links to Habsburg Austria suggested that military action was imminent. Bern and Basel had demonstrated that they had no appetite for war, but they were still officially Catholic.
In the early months of 1525, however, the reform party in Zurich was well placed, for – led by Bürgermeister Diethelm Röist (1482–1544) (son of Marx) and Heinrich Walder (1460s–1542) – the Large Council was fully behind change. On 11 April, Zwingli appeared before the Council, alongside two other priests from the Grossmünster and his friends Kaspar Megander and Oswald Myconius, to call for the abolition of the mass. It should be replaced, they proposed, by a celebration of the Lord’s Supper that followed the biblical model provided by the Apostle Paul.
The Catholics were not yet done. Joachim am Grüt, deputy town clerk, addressed the Council, denouncing Zwingli and his appeal to scripture, and warning the magistrates not to be fooled by the reformer’s sophistry.68 Although he was unsuccessful, he remained a fierce defender of the Catholic faith. He was unable to prevail, and in a narrow vote the members of the Large Council mandated that the mass be abolished and replaced by a biblically based celebration of the Lord’s Supper.69 Several days before the vote, Zwingli had had printed a liturgy for the service, with the sacrifice of the mass replaced by a service of remembrance and thanksgiving.70 The first celebration of the Lord’s Supper in the Grossmünster took place the following day, on Maundy Thursday 1525.71 The bread and wine, contained within wooden vessels, were placed on a simple table located between the choir and the nave. Some leading citizens who did not wish to be coerced into the new faith sought to have the mass permitted in other churches, but their request was denied, and it was sternly advised that they go to places outside Zurich, where the mass was still available.72
The houses of worship had been stripped and whitewashed, their altars eventually replaced by simple wooden tables, and music had ceased. The body of Christ was no longer physically present in the hands of the priests, and Mary and the saints had been demoted to being models of the faith. Virtually all religious symbols, including crucifixes, had been removed from public spaces, and time was reordered by the abolition of liturgical seasons, saints’ days and traditional feast days, apart from Christmas and Easter. The Lutheran churches had largely preserved the medieval fabric of worship, but in Zurich there was little to remind people of the vanished faith.
Bishops, priests, monks or nuns were replaced by men in black who preached through the week and urged obedience to the state. Although beards would become one of the distinguishing features of Reformed ministers of the Reformation – notably Oecolampadius, Calvin and Bullinger – the first generation of Zurich reformers remained clean shaven. Zwingli, Jud and Konrad Pellikan retained their priestly visages.
Although the churches had been purged the previous year, the heavy stone altars proved a formidable remnant of Catholic culture. The last stage in the ritual break with Rome was their removal from the churches, which took another year to complete. Military banners that hung in the Wasserkirche on the River Limmat, which had survived cleansing, were also removed, as were organs from the city churches. Those who held to the ‘old faith’ were left with nothing. Zwingli’s triumph was complete – at least in terms of the worship of the community.
The break with Rome in terms of religion had been made, but the relationship was not over. In the months up to the autumn of 1525, Zurich made various attempts to reach a deal with the pope for repayment of the funds owed. Finally, Joachim am Grüt was sent to Rome on behalf of Zurich, in the hope that he might gain even a portion of the money owed. One of the conditions set by Rome was a colloquy, to be held in Geneva or Lausanne, to resolve the religious dispute.73 The Zurich Council tasked Zwingli with writing a reply, which he undertook with venomous delight.74 His answer was full of sarcasm and faux deference. The Council tactfully set Zwingli’s reply aside.
Zurich stood alone outside the Catholic Church with its hierarchy, priests and sacraments. This revolution from within had been brought about by Zwingli and his clerical and lay colleagues, who had succeeded in gathering enough support among the magistrates and guilds to upend the Latin Church. Although preaching had been crucial, and the appeal of the Bible alone was powerful, there had been no social revolution. The Reformation was a movement not of the people, but of educated men working within the system. Those who objected to Zwingli’s approach were driven out and marginalized, soon to be persecuted. Dissent was not tolerated and freedom of conscience was extended only to those who accepted the new order. The Church that emerged in the spring of 1525 had no room for either Catholicism or Anabaptism.
The liturgy for the Lord’s Supper, introduced on Maundy Thursday 1525, was the fullest expression of Zwingli’s vision of the Christian community.75 True religion was performed through true worship. Although he cast the liturgical reform of 1525 as a recovery of the Lord’s Supper, Zwingli created a form of worship previously unknown.76 No longer, as with his initial liturgical reforms proposed in 1523, was worship principally framed around the canon of the mass, although certain aspects were retained in the form of prayers. In 1525, Zwingli dispensed with any pretence of continuity with the Catholic sacrament, in order to place his emphasis on the sacral relationship of the Zurich Church with the ancient Israelites. A remarkable dream, he would recount, had pointed him to Exodus and the link of the Eucharist with the Passover, providing him with a usable past for his changes.77
The introductory letter that accompanied the liturgy for the Lord’s Supper, published in 1525, drew on the biblical narrative in 2 Chronicles 34, where the young King Josiah purged the worship of the land, removing idols and cutting down the altars of Baal. Similarly, Hezekiah, in 2 Kings, ‘did what was right in the eyes of the Lord’ and destroyed images and altars, including the bronze serpent of Moses.78 Zwingli linked the ancient stories of cleansing religion with the Church’s sacred meal of the Easter Lamb. He would soon directly associate the Lord’s Supper with the Passover meal. Zwingli’s reading of the Old Testament in light of Christ formed the backbone to the practice of Reformed theological thought and the creation of liturgical drama.79 For Zwingli in Zurich, for Oecolampadius in Basel, for Martin Bucer (1491–1551) in Strasbourg and their evangelical contemporaries, Christ was found everywhere in the Old Testament.80
Zwingli entitled his new liturgy ‘Aktion oder Brauch’, drawing a distinction between ‘practice or use’ and ‘ceremony’. ‘Practice or use’ referred to the historical fact that the sacrament had been inaugurated by Christ at the Last Supper.81 The term had the force of both divine command and historical continuity, for the Supper was a Passover meal, linking the sacrament to the salvation story of Israel. Ceremony, in contrast, possessed no divine warrant and, therefore, could be adapted to human circumstance; this ceremony was to be celebrated four times a year. Zwingli spoke of ceremony as a concession to ‘human weakness’, intended to ensure that the essential sacramental act was not performed ‘without life and shape’.82 The introductory letter gave expression to Zwingli’s vision of the liturgy:
we have authorized such ceremonies for the action – as appointed here – which we have deemed beneficial and appropriate to enhance in some degree the spiritual memorial of the death of Christ, the increase of faith and brotherly love, the reformation of life, and the prevention of the vices of the human heart.83
In the preface that followed the letter, Zwingli provided a model of the liturgy and for its performance. He did retain certain aspects of the mass – for example, the scripture readings, confession of sin, the Creed, the Gloria, the words of institution and the post-communion prayer.84 But he opened with a bold theological statement about the nature of reform: the liturgy was distinguished by virtue of having been purged of ‘everything that does not conform to the divine Word’.85 The liturgy was also an act of recovery, for Christ’s Supper had been ‘seriously abused’ for ‘a long time’. Reform redeemed that time, cleansing the polluted history of the Church. Crucially, at no point in the text did he refer to the Supper as a sacrament. Rather he described what was to take place as ‘this memorial’, as ‘a thanksgiving and a rejoicing before Almighty God for the benefit which He has manifested to us through His Son’.86
The 1525 liturgy was marked by its relative simplicity. The bread and wine were placed on a table among the people, with the pastor facing the congregation. After opening prayers and a reading of the words of institution from 1 Corinthians 11 – ‘For I received from the Lord what I also passed on to you: The Lord Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, “This is my body, which is for you; do this in remembrance of me”’ – the people, following Paul’s stern words, were warned against the unworthy reception of the bread and wine. The congregants then recited the Gloria antiphonally, coming together with the Amen. At the conclusion of the Gloria, the faithful heard passages from John 6, principally verses 47 (‘In truth, he who believes has everlasting life’) and 63 (‘The Spirit gives life; the flesh counts for nothing. The words I have spoken to you are spirit, and they are life’). The pastor then kissed the Bible and proclaimed: ‘Praise and thanks be to God. He will forgive all our sins according to his holy Word.’
Following the confession of sin, those present sang the Apostles’ Creed antiphonally, after which the invitation and admonition to the Supper were pronounced, during which all were warned against ‘anyone [who might] pretend to be a believer who is not, and so be guilty of the Lord’s death’. The people knelt for the Lord’s Prayer and a prayer said by the pastor beseeching God that the faithful might live ‘purely as becomes the body’.
The words of institution were read at the table over unleavened bread and wine. The pastors served themselves first, before the servers took the elements to the people, who knelt to receive them. The bread and wine were passed among the people in silence, which Zwingli deemed the appropriate response to the gift of God. The drama of the liturgy was built around the interplay of words and silence, emphasizing the approach to the table as contemplation of God. Following the eating and drinking, Psalm 113 was recited, once more antiphonally. The reading of Psalm 113 linked the Supper with the Passover, where the Psalm was part of the Hallel, recited on joyous occasions in praise and thanksgiving. To conclude, the benediction was pronounced and the people departed.
The 1525 liturgy, and its slightly revised 1529 form, gave expression to Zwingli’s conviction of the inseparability of thanksgiving and Christian living.87 It was his fullest expression of his understanding of Christianity. The community was the body of Christ, not because of any liturgical action, but through the divine promises. The rituals of worship were nothing in themselves: they directed the people to higher realities. Yet Zwingli believed that liturgy was essential to memory, gratitude and contemplation. Liturgy shaped the emotions and senses; it formed the gathered community as one before God, yet still visible in its social, political and gender distinctions. Zwingli’s purpose was a moving, poignant moment in which the lightness of the walls and the illumination through the windows united with the bread and wine to elevate the community into the body of Christ, the unity of the visible and invisible Church through Word and Spirit.
Worship was about being ‘innocent’ and ‘pure’, which was not to suggest any form of human perfection, but rather the realization of God’s gracious gift in Christ. Through the imitation of the Son of God, the faithful were able to fulfil God’s principal command, as expressed in Leviticus 20:7: ‘Consecrate yourselves therefore, and be holy; for I am the Lord your God.’ Zwingli rephrased the biblical text as: ‘I am righteous, pure, godly, therefore if you wish to be of me you must be like me.’88 God demands in worship, as in life, that each person be ‘untainted’ and ‘clean’. Christ says in Matthew that ‘you must be perfect as your heavenly father is perfect’ (5:48), to which Zwingli responded:
it is impossible, as long as we live, to be that pure. Therefore, we must at all times come to God through the one, righteous, innocent Jesus Christ, for he alone is the advocate and recompense for our sin unto eternity.89
The liturgy was the heart of a changed reckoning of time in Zurich. The abolition of days for celebrating saints and church feasts established a new rhythm to life and worship. In 1526, Zwingli proposed that the Lord’s Supper was to be celebrated only four times a year: at Christmas, Easter, the Annunciation and Michaelmas.90 The Council found the reformer’s proposal too severe, and permitted other religious holidays, such as Pentecost and certain days to mark biblical figures. The Reformation’s reduction in the number of religious holidays was accompanied by an increased emphasis on Sundays, when all work was to cease, games were forbidden and taverns closed in order that the whole community might gather to hear the Word preached.
CHURCH MUSIC
Singing was not to be part of worship in Zurich, unlike in the churches in Wittenberg, Strasbourg and Basel.91 In 1523, in article 46 of his Exposition of the Sixty-Seven Articles Zwingli had quoted the prophet Amos, who declared: ‘Take away from me the noise of your songs; to the melody of your harps I will not listen’ (Amos 5:23). ‘What would the rustic Amos say in our day,’ asked Zwingli, ‘if he saw and heard the horrors that were being performed and the mass priests mumbling at the altar . . . Indeed, he would cry out so that the whole world could not bear his words.’92
Yet Zwingli had a deep conviction that music had a power over the soul like no other force. Zwingli, the talented musician, believed passionately in the ability of the harmonious to transform.93 In his commentary on the prophet Isaiah, he addressed the prophet’s words that seemed to contrast musical ability with reverence for the Lord: ‘They have harps and lyres at their banquets, pipes and timbrels and wine, but they have no regard for the deeds of the Lord, no respect for the work of his hands.’ Such is the power of music that beauty and danger await:
The ratio of no other discipline is so profoundly rooted and innate in the souls of all men as that of music. For no men are so stupid that they are not captivated by it, even though they are entirely ignorant of its technique. There are none, on the other hand, who are not offended by the confusion and discord of voices, even those who cannot explain what is dissonant and what is unsuitable. So powerful is the native talent of everyone to judge what is harmonious; on the other hand, in judging ratio and technique, such native talent is the property of the very few.94
Zwingli’s views on music were so complex and ambiguous that simple judgements are ill advised. Although it was not part of his liturgical reforms, the singing of psalms was clearly attractive to Zwingli, who in December 1524 had expressed delight that the practice had been introduced in the Strasbourg Church.95
After his death, an apocryphal story circulated that one day Zwingli had appeared in Basel to demand that the Council abolish singing in church. Curiously, he had made his petition by singing to the magistrates, who thought he was mad. In response, he explained that their reaction confirmed his point that singing had no place before the rulers of the city. In the same way, he explained, it was ridiculous for the people to sing before God.96 Basel did not follow Zurich, and the reformer Johannes Oecolampadius supported singing in worship, above all during the Lord’s Supper, provoking a contemporary to remark: ‘Husschin [Oecolampadius] upholds the singing of psalms, but Zwingli . . . cannot tolerate psalms.’97
Zwingli’s objections to church music were grounded in polemic against what he had known as a boy and a priest, but also in a theological and devotional anxiety about the relationship between the outward forms of worship (prayer and music) and the inner contemplation of the heart, where the faithful meet God. His own music was composed for house gatherings. The style in which he set the Psalms to music was not designed for congregational praise, but spoke to trials of the individual and the refuge found in God. That tension between music for worship and for contemplation was ultimately left unresolved at his death. He wrote little on the subject, although he may have said more. The question of music reminds us of the reality of Zwingli’s life, most of which was spent fighting battles determined by his opponents. Sudden death left much unresolved. Ironically, in the end his ambiguity on music created a silence that enabled his friends and successors to interpret him differently.
PROPHETS OF THE WORD
The work of God’s prophet was, for Zwingli, a collective labour. The varied gifts of the learned were to be shared and tested. Zwingli’s vision was of a circle of humanists dedicated not only to education in the service of the Church, but also to providing interpretations of the Bible for the preaching of the pastors. In 1520, he had already gathered a sodality of learned men, whose principal interest lay in interpreting scripture in Greek; this group had been an engaged audience for his interpretation of the Psalms in 1521, for example.98 Its members included several men who would later emerge as his fierce opponents: Konrad Grebel, Felix Manz and Simon Stumpf. Although the future Anabaptist Andreas Castelberger founded his own circle of readers two years later, for the most part it retained friendly relations with Zwingli’s sodality.99
In the summer of 1525, Zwingli’s nascent vision came to full fruition with the establishment of a regular meeting of a group of scholars who would undertake public interpretation of the Old Testament, working from the Hebrew, Greek and Latin. In On the Preaching Office of 1525, Zwingli declared the two roles of the prophet to be to resist evil and plant good, and to engage in the public exposition of scripture.100 The Prophezei, as it was later named, was the visible, communal expression of Zwingli’s ideal of Church and pastor – scholarship at prayer.101 The sessions began on 19 June 1525 in the Grossmünster, with a clear order that they were to undertake a combination of study and worship. The symbolism was powerful. Gathering in the choir of Zurich’s principal church, the scholars appropriated the authority of the medieval Church, replacing hierarchy with learning and prayer. The event was thoroughly ecclesiastical, in that the interpretation of the Bible belonged in the sacred space of the church, but was performed by the new priesthood.
The Prophezei began work at eight o’clock that first morning, turning to the opening of Genesis in Hebrew, Greek, Latin and German. The sessions then took place every day of the week except Fridays and Sundays, with the canons, city clergy and students of the Latin School required to attend. The plan was simple: to work through all the books of the Old Testament – and when finished, to start again.102 This focus reversed the lack of regard for the Old Testament demonstrated by many radicals. Its line-by-line approach echoed the lectio continua style of Zwingli’s preaching through the Bible. Zwingli opened each day with a prayer in Latin:103
O merciful God, heavenly Father! Because your Word is a candle to our feet and a light that should illuminate our way, we pray that through Christ, who is the true light of the whole world, you will open and enlighten our hearts that we should clearly and purely understand your Word and form our entire lives accordingly, that we do not displease your exulted majesty, through our Lord Jesus Christ.104
In On the Preaching Office, Zwingli argued that knowledge of Greek alone was insufficient: familiarity with Hebrew was needed to fulfil Paul’s understanding of prophecy in 1 Corinthians 14:5:
Paul desires here that Christians should be knowledgeable in all tongues for the purpose of prophesying. He knows well, of course, that not everyone is well versed in tongues; but he shows how useful a thing it is for Christians to know the languages in which God’s word is written, when he desires such knowledge for everyone.105
This rationale determined the shape of each gathering. Following the invocation, a student or Kaspar Megander, one of Zwingli’s closest companions, read the appointed text in Latin, from the Vulgate.106 The exegetical work then began with Jakob Ceporin (1499–1525) rising to read the Hebrew from the Masoretic text printed by the Christian Daniel Bomberg in Venice. A native of Zurich’s rural lands, Ceporin had learned Hebrew at the feet of the great Johannes Reuchlin in Cologne.107 Zwingli had supported Ceporin as a student, and had previously promoted his career by recommending him to the humanist circle in Basel, on account of his remarkable fluency in Latin, Greek and Hebrew; since 1522, he had himself been instructed by Ceporin in Hebrew. At the Prophezei, Ceporin first translated the Hebrew into Latin, before undertaking a meticulous philological interpretation. Zwingli would then do the same with the Septuagint, the divinely inspired Greek translation of the Old Testament begun in Alexandria in the third century bce. Once the Latin, Hebrew and Greek texts had been fully examined, Zwingli would draw together and summarize the theological fruits. Clearly the principal theological voice of the Zurich Church, Zwingli turned the finely tuned philological work into doctrinal explanation. When he had finished, it fell to Leo Jud to prepare a sermon based on Zwingli’s words, to be delivered in German for the faithful who had come to the Grossmünster for the final part of the session.
By November 1525, the members of the Prophezei had reached the end of Genesis. Eighteen months later, Zwingli’s annotations on the first book of the Bible appeared from Froschauer’s press. The achievement was cut short by tragedy: Jakob Ceporin fell ill and died, depriving the Zurich Church of its rising star. Perhaps with a sense of guilt, Zwingli lamented that Ceporin had been sent to an early grave, aged just 26, by the great burden of work placed on him by his colleagues. They had shared a humanist vision, having worked together on the poet Pindar, with Zwingli writing in the preface that no other Greek author understood scripture so well.108 Looking for a prominent replacement for Ceporin, he turned to an older, more established scholar, Konrad Pellikan in Basel.109 Pellikan, a former Franciscan, had produced the first printed Hebrew lexicon and belonged to the first generation of Hebrew scholars.110 He had worked closely with Erasmus on his edition of the church fathers. Like others of his generation, he parted company with the Dutch humanist by embracing the Reformation, but unlike Zwingli the break was not acrimonious.
Across the River Limmat from the Grossmünster, an equivalent of the Prophezei for the New Testament was established at the Fraumünster, under the aegis of Oswald Myconius, schoolmaster and close friend of Zwingli. Myconius’ lectures, in which he addressed the students and laity in German, took place in the afternoons. Once a week, Zwingli gave an oration in Latin on the New Testament text that Myconius was expounding.111 In the summer of 1526, he began with interpretation of the First Epistle of John, before turning to 1 and 2 Thessalonians, Colossians, Philemon, Hebrews and 1 and 2 Corinthians, in that order.112 Notes taken by colleagues at these sessions were published after Zwingli’s death.
With the creation of the Prophezei, Zwingli had placed prophecy at the heart of the new Church.113 For years, he had associated the prophetic office with the work of the Spirit in enlightening the hearts of believers who communally possessed the wisdom to discern the Word. By 1525, partially in response to his radical opponents, the reformer refined his understanding of the prophet and of his own role.114 Prophecy became more closely associated with interpretation of the Bible in the original languages. He rejected the Anabaptist itinerant ministers, and in his On the Preaching Office of late June 1525 he declared that the people would be taught by educated pastors properly called and ordained by the Church. Preaching was the lifeblood of the godly community, and each person who truly proclaimed the Word was a prophet. In this prophetic role, the minister was responsible for society and was a defender of divine righteousness, standing together with the magistrate, who oversaw the laws of the state. This was the role of the ancient prophets of Israel, as restored in Zurich.
The Prophezei became the foundation for theological education in Zurich and for the preparation of a new generation of pastors for the Church. It was the fulfilment of Zwingli’s reform of education in the service of the godly community. It was to create a new generation of prophetic ministers capable of instructing the faithful through their knowledge of the ancient languages. This would become one of Zwingli’s enduring legacies, and a model copied by other communities across Europe. The Prophezei was also integral to the work of translating the Bible into the language of the people. The work on the Old and New Testaments during the 1520s led to the greatest creation of the Zurich Reformation: the Froschauer Bible of 1531.
The introduction of the Reformed liturgy at Easter 1525, together with the struggles over the sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, led Zwingli to a vision of the community in light of the Bible.115 By summer of that year, he had found a new vocabulary that enhanced his sense of continuity between ancient Israel and the Church. Zwingli came to think of God’s relationship with humanity in terms of an eternal covenant, emerging from God’s promises to the patriarchs. He had already drawn the analogy between circumcision and baptism, but here he went further. God’s promise to Abraham was nothing less than Christ’s sacrifice for humanity: the covenant with Abraham anticipated the new testament of the Son of God. What was promised long ago has been fulfilled. Christ is the absolute centre, who alone reconciled God and the world.
The new Christian Church and society that had taken shape was a covenanted community – a term with deep resonance in Swiss history. The summer of 1525 saw Zwingli deeply engaged with the first book of the Bible, Genesis. He preached on it and the study group he assembled in the Grossmünster went through it line by line. The sacraments that came to occupy his mind were increasingly seen as signs of the covenant, but they were not the covenant itself. They were signs of what God had done in the past and would remain for eternity. Zwingli stressed the continuity of the people of Israel with the Church of Christ. Those whom God has elected receive the law not as a source of terror – as condemning them for their sins – but as a transformative work of the Spirit that guides them to Christ.
Zwingli’s Christian society was deeply rooted in memories. Gathered at the tables in the churches, the people re-enacted the Passover: they were God’s chosen people delivered from the Egyptians. The bread and wine consumed by Christians had been shared by Christ with his disciples. Memory was the way to truth. Zwingli reminded his former friend Balthasar Hubmaier that
as soon as we recognize by way of the covenant that God has made with Christian people that they are no less blessed or children of God than in the Old Testament, it follows that we should give them the sign of the covenant no less than in the Old Testament [circumcision was granted to the children of Israel].116
In the summer of 1525, the conviction that the Church is the covenanted body, so central to generations of Reformed Christians, found its first expression.