Introduction
Those who prophesy speak to other people for their upbuilding and encouragement and consolation.
1 Corinthians 14:3
When Huldrych Zwingli died in 1531, he vanished. His body was ritually humiliated and reduced to ashes mixed with pig’s blood. No funeral was held in Zurich, where disbelief took the place of commemoration. In the 12 years since Zwingli had arrived in his adopted home, Christianity had been reimagined; but at what price? A vibrant faith had been eradicated, churches stripped, opponents banished or drowned. A new reality had been created, but not the dreamed-of conversion of all of the Swiss lands to the gospel. Unyielding borders between faiths had been erected instead. Most shockingly, Zwingli had died in a war he had advocated in his preaching and military battleplans, dressed in armour, with his final words reputed to be ‘They can kill the body, but not the soul.’
Huldrych Zwingli understood that violence belonged to Western Christendom and early modern society. It gave him great sorrow, but he saw its place. He railed against cruelty and injustice, but as a priest he accompanied troops to war, and as a reformer he consented to the execution of Anabaptists. He hated the sale of the young men of the impoverished Swiss lands into the mercenary service of foreign powers, which he equated with prostitution; but he saw in his valorous forefathers a folk prepared to take up arms to defend ancient liberties against predatory bishops and abbots. The problem was not the swords, but whom they served. Unlike the Florentine Dominican preacher Girolamo Savonarola, Machiavelli’s ‘unarmed prophet’, Zwingli never made the mistake of separating the vision of godly reform from political and military power.
Zwingli was God’s armed prophet, but not simply because he fell at Kappel, cut down by Catholic soldiers. The weapons with which this visionary was armed were many. He used the pulpit to bring about radical social, political and religious change, with his words leading to the reform of care for the poor and education of young people. Faith and rule were distinct, but must never be uncoupled, as ancient Israel exemplified. Freedom existed within structures divinely given. The almighty, providential God ordains the order and hierarchy by which the people should live. Zwingli stood out among his generation of reformers for his readiness to harness Christianity’s marriage to earthly authority in order to create an astonishingly bold reimagining of what the relationship between Church and society might be. He saw a new world, for which he was prepared to kill and, ultimately, die. He was not a warmonger, but he was prepared to sacrifice himself and others. Even his closest allies were deeply troubled by Zwingli’s confidence: friends had warned him against military conflict, and his best friend, Leo Jud, regretted on his deathbed the war that almost ended the Reformation. The martial legacy endured. The monument to Zwingli erected in Zurich in the nineteenth century has him facing south, towards Catholic Switzerland, with Bible open and sword in hand.
Huldrych Zwingli possessed the qualities of those remarkable religious figures who, in their persons, draw together unresolved contradictions that prove to be their making; in his case, they proved also to be his downfall. To say that Zwingli was a complex person would be banal. This book explores the ways in which competing impulses and contradictory tensions became remarkably generative, fecund and destructive. Zwingli’s debt to Martin Luther, who gave voice to the Protestant creed of scripture, faith and grace alone, was deep, as he acknowledged in his more generous moments. But when the two churchmen looked to the Bible, they found different truths. Zwingli’s vision was not Luther’s.
To reach Zwingli in a distant age, we must begin with his God. The common thread that ran through his life as priest and reformer was his perception of God as creator – providential and, ultimately, good. Indeed, God was goodness itself. The reformer was convinced that although God was inscrutable and his decisions unfathomable, his unconditional love for humanity had never been in question. Zwingli had influential teachers on this point: his beloved Plato spoke of the source of all things in the Good, and his mentor Desiderius Erasmus (1456–1536) taught the optimism of creation. For Zwingli, the Christian life was not a dull, self-flagellating trudge through the world. Yes, God sent hardships to test and discipline the faithful, but Zwingli delighted in describing him as joyful. Lives were constantly being transformed and were transforming, making the world more just. The focal point of such transformation was the Eucharist. It was Zwingli’s oft-derided and misunderstood conviction that the Eucharist – a commemoration of the Lord’s Supper – was primarily intended as an expression of glory and unity: as light poured through clear glass and reflected off whitewashed walls, the community at the table encountered a vision of eternity, of unity beyond time with the gathered faithful of the past, present and future. Zwingli was not a mystic, but the experience was of the presence of the Spirit.
There was a serpent in the garden. Zwingli sought to bring together temporal and spiritual authority, so that they seamlessly formed the body of Christ in the world. To do so, he tethered power and violence to magistrates and Church. Individuals and communities were constantly in a state of becoming – of striving to be – more Christ-like. But the Word, sacraments and prayer were not enough. The rod of governance was not only to correct: when necessary, the governing powers were to demonize, exclude and destroy. A man of his age, Zwingli did not accept that individuals were free to believe what they wanted. The religion of the state was the religion of its people. Zwingli quickly encountered the dispiriting reality that most people would not readily convert to the gospel. The forces of opposition to his reformation in Zurich, and to his plans for the evangelizing of the Swiss Confederation, took the form of reluctant peasants, the institutional Church and confident political authorities.
Zwingli does not allow the Reformation to rest comfortably in the modern mind, joining Luther, with his execrable views of Jews, and Calvin, with his role in the execution of Michael Servetus. In Evelyn Waugh’s short novel Helena, the mother of Emperor Constantine asks the Christian Lactantius about the new faith in the empire and whether it will take its place alongside the old gods. Lactantius replies: ‘Christianity is not that sort of religion, ma’am. It cannot share anything with anybody. Whenever it is free, it will conquer.’ Zwingli inherited from medieval Christianity a powerful sense of orthodoxy and utter intolerance of heresy, but there were degrees. Ultimately these convictions led him away from his beloved Erasmus. Jews were benighted deniers of Christ, yet he found his model of Christian ministry in the rabbinic tradition of a priesthood of the educated in the service of the Word. Zwingli had an expansive view of salvation and he expected to find the virtuous figures of classical antiquity in heaven. Yet in his own time, those who rejected infant baptism deserved to be drowned in the river that flowed through Zurich.
The gospel, Zwingli believed, was not to be thwarted, and every power – spiritual and temporal – was to be conscripted into its service. The prophet of the renewed body of Christ was also the military tactician who planned the conquest of Zurich’s Catholic neighbours. He joined other religious leaders of his age in understanding reformation as God’s entering into human history to rescue a lost people through the renewal of his Word. His optimism was enormous, and perhaps to our eyes naïve. One does not come close to understanding Zwingli without seeing how he was utterly convinced that when exposed to the Word of God, the people would cast off idolatry and embrace the truth. He was given to overreaching confidence in himself, others and the inevitable truth of his cause.
In the pages of this book we find, however, a man who never created his own reality. Zwingli was a powerful, charismatic and flawed character who unleashed a revolution which he then struggled to lead. His was not the only narrative unfolding in Zurich: Catholics and Anabaptists also dreamed of reform and of a purified Church, and their convictions were equally unyielding. The Reformation could have taken a number of paths; and it might not have materialized at all. Further, Zwingli’s friends and colleagues were never his acolytes, for their shared beliefs did not gloss over divided conceptions, perspectives and convictions. For all its compelling drama, Zwingli’s life took place within a broader story and was largely reactive, responding to events over which he had no control. He did not pick many of his battles, and nor did he anticipate their outcomes.
Zwingli’s Zurich was an admixture of innovation and conservation. The Reformation in Zurich, as across Europe, was built on the medieval foundations of church order, retaining the ideal that each community was focused on the parochial church and served by a cleric. It was not a liberation from a dark past. The Zurich that Zwingli entered in December 1518 was filled with processions, relics, interceding saints and the body of Christ in the hands of priests. His reformation eviscerated the Catholic doctrines and practices, and priests became pastors; but the laity still made their way to the local church to be baptized, confirmed, married and then, eventually, buried. The Reformed emphasis on the link between moral rectitude and true belief had deep roots in the medieval world, as did the violent proscription of deviant behaviour – all that polluted the communal body had to be excised.
Likewise, the Reformation took place within the magical universe of the late-medieval world, filled with malign and benign forces or spirits. Neither Zwingli nor any of his supporters denied the order or composition of the natural Ptolemaic world or humanity’s place within it. The body consisted of humours determined by the movement of the stars and the elements. The forests were full of demons who could easily take the shape of a wolf or a dead grandmother. The natural world evoked awe and fear: beyond the city walls lay a dangerous world in which travel was perilous. The Reformation had no answer to plague, which continued to ravage communities, with no respect for status or wealth. Zwingli nearly died of the pest in 1519, as his future wife, Anna Reinhart, nursed him. Yet, for Zwingli, the Alpine mountains and valleys of his youth were the mirror of heaven, a land that nurtured a valorous, brave and godly people.
Nevertheless, the disruption was immense. Nothing in Luther’s reforms matched the zeal with which the worship of God was spiritually and physically reconceived in Zurich. When the Reformed Lord’s Supper was first celebrated in Zurich, on Maundy Thursday 1525, there was nothing to which it could be compared. Christ was no longer physically present, and the bond between the living and the dead had been severed. Symbolically, Zwingli now preached from the very spot where the high altar, the site of intercession, had once stood. The removal of altars, images, stained glass and organs was by order of the magistrates, for Zwingli envisaged a relatively seamless unity of the temporal and sacred to form a corpus Christianum. To his critics, this vision was a compromise with earthly power and a betrayal of the gospel. For Zwingli, the Church was the whole community, believers and unbelievers alike. Although they would be separated at the Last Judgement, in this world they formed one visible community, subject to magistrates and prophets. To be an obedient servant of the state was to be a member of the Church, and vice versa.
In 1516, while still a priest, Zwingli had had a revelation that led him to the sufficiency of scripture alone. That encounter preceded Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses, but the Swiss preacher was by no means the first Protestant. Many more miles remained to be travelled. Nevertheless, the moment was personally formative and determined a career of preaching through the books of the Bible, line by line, from start to finish. Scripture was the fullness of God’s revelation to humanity, and it was also clear and perspicuous. Zwingli joined Luther in holding that the Bible interprets itself, with clearer passages throwing light on those that are thorny. As a disciple of Erasmus, he believed that knowledge of languages was key to understanding scripture, but only if the reader was guided by the Holy Spirit. Zwingli shared the enthusiasm of his day for the belief that scripture could be understood by all the faithful; but his initial impulses soon gave way to a priesthood of the learned and a didactic role for pastors. The consensus of wise prophets should hold sway. The most dramatic symbol of the new Reformed order was the creation of the Prophezei at the principal church in Zurich. The leading clergy gathered daily in the choir to interpret the Old Testament in Greek, Hebrew and Latin, before translating their reading into German for the faithful. There could be no more dramatic expression that the Bible was to be interpreted not by the people, but by the elite within the space of the church.
Zwingli envisaged a new form of Church, a new understanding of the sacraments and a new way of being the sacral community. That vision would ultimately become the ‘Reformed tradition’, often more misleadingly known as ‘Calvinism’, and its theology and forms of Church would find a multitude of expressions. Their origins lay in the aspirations of a peasant’s son from Toggenburg. Zwingli has long been cast as a lesser man than Martin Luther and as the warm-up act for John Calvin. Neither view stands up to scrutiny. Zwingli freely admitted that Luther was the towering figure of the early Reformation, but he was no dependant. He came to his convictions about God, scripture and the Church independently of the Wittenberg doctor. He had initially believed he was in agreement with Luther, whom he read with profit, but their gazes differed. Whereas the German looked to law and gospel as the essential dynamic of the Christian life, Zwingli saw the community as the body of Christ – fallen and deeply flawed, but capable of regeneration. If we are to speak of abiding influences, we must turn to the great Dutch humanist Erasmus. Ultimately, Zwingli would depart from his mentor in embracing radical reform, but to his last days he still acknowledged his debt.
In terms of their characters and thought, Zwingli and Calvin are not simply alternatives. The Frenchman’s debt to Zwingli was enormous, even if he refused to acknowledge it. He belonged to the next generation: his conversion to evangelical Christianity came after Zwingli was dead. Calvin inherited the Reformed tradition forged in Zurich, Basel and Strasbourg, and his great contribution was to draw it together compendiously and to deepen its furrows. Zwingli, however, was the creative spirit. He imagined and created a new form of Christianity grounded in the covenantal relationship between God and humanity and founded on the positive understanding of divine law. The shape and cadence of Reformed Christianity came from Zurich. Zwingli, who cherished the ancient Greek lyricist Pindar and repeatedly read Plato, was the poetic spirit of the Reformation. He loved music, created liturgy for worship and crafted an aesthetic of the Spirit. He was the artist, while his successor Heinrich Bullinger and Calvin in Geneva were the craftsmen. They also inherited Zwingli’s hatreds: Anabaptists, idolatry and dissent.
The onus on a biographer is to avoid over-valorizing a single individual, casting everyone else as spear-carriers in an opera. Without apology, this book argues that Zwingli made the Reformation in Zurich possible, and that the networks he cultivated spread his ideas to other Swiss lands and abroad. It fully recognizes, however, that he did not act alone and that his thought was not entirely his own. Zwingli was undoubtedly an original thinker: he whipped up a distinctive mixture of new and borrowed ideas to forge a vision unlike the imaginings of his contemporaries, although he shared many of their deepest convictions. Innovation accompanied a remarkable ability for clarity, synthesis and polemic. Unlike Erasmus, Zwingli did not write in the comfort and tranquillity of the study; his extraordinary volume of writings was crafted in the fires of controversy and attack. His time was brief: Luther lived into his sixties, and Calvin was in Geneva for almost 25 years. Zwingli was in Zurich for only 12 years and died at the age of 47. Yet, he created a Church, and his writings and letters fill a dozen large volumes in their critical edition.
Zwingli did not make it easy for us to engage with his texts. As for many figures of his age, his logic is now somewhat foreign in its assumptions. His theological works seem at times to operate by assertion, tautology and somewhat random proof texting. He felt absolutely no obligation to prove many of his arguments, such as God’s existence, God as Trinity or the fall of humanity. The practice of infant baptism, assumed from the tradition of Western Christianity, required no explanation until challenged by the radicals. Zwingli frequently spoke of reason, but his meaning does not align with our post-Enlightenment instincts. Reason for Zwingli was embedded in creation and consonant with the will of God as revealed to humanity. This biography seeks to find him on his own ground. It is crucial for us to remember that, for all his radical theology, our subject had been a student of the medieval scholastics and believed himself an inheritor of the legacy of the church fathers.
Nineteenth-century liberal Protestants found in Zwingli the most congenial of Reformation theologians. Their case hardly bears close scrutiny, for Zwingli was no proto-liberal. True religion, the subject of his most polished theological work, was a narrow path. But he did create narratives of the freedom of a Christian, the liberated conscience and the redeemed life. Zwingli did not reject the world or human bodies. The inner working of the Spirit was expressed in outward acts. In fact, Zwingli was attacked by Catholics and Lutherans alike for not having a sufficiently robust doctrine of sin, which he famously called an ‘illness’. Despite his reputation for iconoclasm and banishing church music, he possessed a heightened aesthetic that saw beauty in creation and humanity, both of which he praised in lyrical terms.
An expert showman and a brilliant tactician, Zwingli also mastered the art of communication, using the pulpit and the printing press to extraordinary effect, as he moved effortlessly between Latin and his native German. A rusticus brought up in the countryside, he could make the words of the gospel resonate in the narrow streets of the city and in the yards of the villages. Zwingli loved to play with language. He even played with his name, turning his baptismal ‘Ulrich’ into ‘Huldrych’, which meant in his dialect ‘rich in grace’. He practised self-fashioning from the pulpit, in council chamber and on the page. In the vernacular, he evoked home and family, valleys and mountains, and the agrarian life. His language was paternalistic and most of his metaphors highly masculine, but he loved to remind the people that they stood above the angels in God’s estimation. The world of antiquity was his playground: he adored Homer and the poetry of Pindar, and drew upon the comedies of Aristophanes and Terence for elegant parallels or to stick his opponents with sarcasm and mockery. He had been shaped by Erasmus’ belief that the classical world could be baptized into the Christian.
Zwingli’s evident charisma cut both ways. On his arrival in Zurich in 1519, he had immediately been able to weave a narrative that the corruption wrought by mercenary pensions and the abuses of the clerical class belonged to God’s judgement on the world. He used the pulpit to inspire, cajole and vilify. The people had never heard anything like it, and he quickly became the principal voice within the Zurich Church, his name associated with scripture as a sole authority and with fierce social and political criticism. His preaching won him supporters, whom he convinced not only that the traditional faith was error-laden and dishonest, but also that the Bible held the promise of a better world. Admired and hated in equal measure, he was also able to cultivate contacts within the Zurich establishment, in particular with leading families who became patrons. Although his approach quickly disappointed those who sought more rapid reform or who were less persuaded that the magistrates were Christians, he would not be moved. The tactician in him understood that his evolving vision of a new Church and society would remain an illusion unless the magistrates were on board. Without their support, even from a minority of the elite within the city, the scurrilous preacher most likely would have been shown the gate of the city, or worse. The late-medieval world provided plenty of examples of the fate of unwanted preachers.
The strategist did not function at the expense of the preacher or theologian. At the heart of this book is the argument that although Zwingli’s thought and actions may at times seem to be at odds, in fact they belong together – and must be addressed together. Zwingli the politician was still very much Zwingli the preacher. The Bible was always the lens through which he viewed the world. That prospect at times blinded him to political realities. His goal was to bring the people and society back to God’s Word. From an early stage, he adopted the identity of a prophet, bringing scripture to the people, advising political leaders and imagining a new land governed by God’s justice. Zwingli was in no doubt that he had a special calling. Yet when news of the military defeat in which he died reached Zurich on the morning of 12 October 1531, his name was spat out as that of a traitor. His successor used his first public address to defend the memory of the fallen reformer, declaring that he had been a true prophet. Many were unconvinced.
Zwingli’s story has never been easy to tell. His end had all the qualities of a bad death. He had not been martyred at the hands of unrighteous persecutors, nor had he died in his bed (as would Luther and Calvin), surrounded by weeping friends. Colleagues within the Reformation movement mourned the loss of a leader of the faith, but were guarded about the circumstances. Luther was certain that his nemesis had gone to hell, having lived and died by the sword. Reviled by Catholics and Lutherans, Zwingli had become synonymous with heresy. He could not embody national or heroic sentiments within the Swiss Confederation, where he was associated with Zurich’s age-old hegemonic desires. A prospective biographer was warned off the project by a close friend of Zwingli’s – his subject was too controversial. John Calvin would pretend to know little about Zwingli.
By the nineteenth century, we find a reformer much transformed. The patriotic and national interests of the age reconfigured Zwingli as a founder of liberal Protestantism. He was a hero and martyr, a screen onto which Swiss identity could be projected. In the face of growing secularism, he was a reformer who could serve the confessional interests of a new age. By the end of the century, a string of commemorations had been held, a statue erected, numerous biographies and plays written or performed, and a critical edition of his works launched. Zwingli became a significant part of the resurgence of the Reformation in the English-speaking world. And in our own time, in thoroughly secular Zurich, where Catholics today outnumber Protestants (and where people of no confession outnumber both), considerable effort was made in 2019 to mark the 500th anniversary of Zwingli’s arrival in the city. The reformer became the central figure in a heated debate about identity and modernity. In a post-Christian society that he could never have imagined, Zwingli still stirs the ambivalent feelings that met him at the gates of the city in 1518.