2. Humanist Priest
TWO HUMANIST PRIEST
Huldrych Zwingli was rarely inclined to write about his early life. Even his voluminous correspondence suggests a pronounced reluctance to reflect on his childhood and his years as a priest. He wrote about God and salvation, the Bible, his studies, history, his land and its people, politics, war and corruption; but his early years are largely absent. He would argue with force, but it fell to others to tell his story and defend his memory. Self-effacement should not be mistaken, however, for a lack of passion: he poured himself into sermons, letters, tracts and, later, his engagement in politics.
When Zwingli went to Glarus as a priest in September 1506, its remoteness must have reminded him of his origins in Toggenburg. The small Confederate had little to offer beyond land and blood: subsistence farming and young men for mercenary recruiters. His tenure would be shaped by conflict and by the pen, for war and suffering were bound up with his intellectual growth. In Glarus we find the first indication of Zwingli the inspiring teacher, the mentor. Undaunted by the isolation, he turned his remote parish into a school for training young men who would later attend universities in Basel and Paris. But the idyllic Glarus valley also provided a brutal induction for Zwingli into the realities of Renaissance politics and warfare. The priest travelled with recruited Glarus soldiers to Italy and experienced their slaughter at first hand. His involvement in the politics of the mercenary service, with his papal sympathies, ultimately led to an acrimonious departure after 10 years.
Glarus (familiar to Zwingli as Glaris) lies on the River Linth beneath the Glärnisch, a massif of the Schwyz Alps with a peak on either side of the Glärnischfirn glacier. In recent years, the glacier has retreated dramatically, and the town of Glarus today also bears little resemblance to the community that Zwingli knew, for its oldest parts burned to the ground in the 1860s. Glarus had joined the Swiss Confederation as a founding member. Habsburg ambitions to annex the territory were reversed in 1388 by the Glarners and their Swiss allies, in a stunning victory in which they had been reputedly outnumbered 16 to 1. Appearing through the snow and mist, a few hundred soldiers cut down a much larger force that had been taken unawares; the enemy retreated in panic, but the bridge across the Linth collapsed under their weight, drowning the army like the hapless forces of Pharaoh.
We know little of how the Glarners received their 22-year-old, remarkably well-educated but inexperienced cleric, whose accent, despite the proximity of his native Toggenburg, would have clearly marked him as an outsider. Zwingli held a master of arts degree from Basel and had begun his theological studies – a level of learning possessed by few parish priests in the region, and certainly not by his predecessor.
Zwingli’s course of studies strongly suggests that he had intended to become a priest, but why he sought the position in Glarus is not known. Perhaps, it has been suggested, he wanted to be near his birthplace.1 While many priests had little education, progress from academic studies to service in the Church was encouraged, and universities provided Rome with lists of theological candidates for consideration for benefices. Unusually, however, Zwingli was offered a benefice in Glarus before completion of his theological studies. The prodigious and ambitious young student may well have been recommended by either his uncle Bartholomäus, cleric in nearby Weesen, or his Basel tutor Gregorius Bünzli, both of whom had connections in remote Glarus. There was competition: Heinrich Göldi, a member of a good Zurich family, had been promised the benefice of Glarus in return for faithful service to the pope. Göldi received the benefice, but made it clear that he intended to be absent, as he had other livings. The Glarners wanted a resident priest, and so Zwingli was elected; but in return, he was required to compensate Göldi financially, a debt that remained until 1519, when he was called to Zurich.2
Zwingli was ordained by Hugo von Hohenlandenberg (1457–1532), bishop of Constance; but so little is known about his early years as a priest that we cannot be sure where or when.3 Zwingli was not from the sprawling diocese of Constance – his native Toggenburg lay in the diocese of Chur – and he had studied in Basel, which had its own bishop, but the medieval Church was not overly concerned with such legal niceties.4 Years later, writing to a friend in 1525, Zwingli commented that Bishop Hugo had come to regard him highly for his preaching against the indulgence peddler Bernhardin Sanson, but the provenance of this favourable view is not known.5
We can at least say that at some point in 1506 Zwingli was ordained. As with all candidates for the priesthood, he had first to pass through the lower orders, which he did with dispatch. The bishop likely laid on his hands in the cathedral in Constance, according to custom, but the solemnity of the service would have belied numerous contemporary concerns. Lively festivities often accompanied such occasions, and we learn from a 1516 reform mandate that Hugo was unhappy with the conduct of priests and candidates about to be ordained, who apparently formed a motley crew dressed in the clothes of peasants or in hats and cloaks favoured by the laity. His rebukes were hardly new: the Council of Vienne in 1311 had railed against clergy and monks in inappropriate clothing doing inappropriate things.6
Sartorial preferences may have contributed to the rampant anti-clericalism in the southern German and Swiss lands. Or it might have reflected the reality that many, if not most, clerics lived lives not much different from the faithful they served, often with ‘wives’ (officially proscribed as ‘concubines’) and children. Clerics of all stations on the ecclesiastical hierarchy had partners and children, and in the lands of the diocese of Constance priestly families were well established in local communities. Bishop Hugo was himself a father and in an established relationship. Zwingli’s dear friend Leo Jud, whom he had met in Basel in 1505, and Heinrich Bullinger, who would succeed him in Zurich on his death, both had priests as fathers. Many priests farmed the land and engaged in trade and crafts to supplement their meagre livings and support their families. Zwingli, single and possibly celibate, probably dressed for his ordination as a Basel magister of arts, with beret and ring.7
Although Zwingli was personally unknown in Glarus, word of a sermon he had preached in nearby Rapperswil, where his cousin was a priest, may have preceded him and led to his call.8 According to the chronicler Fridolin Bäldi, he was welcomed to his new community with a festive meal:
On St Matthew’s day [21 September] 1506, mayor Kuelchly, and the leader Stucki and the whole church community received Ulrich Zwingli. On the same day there were four full tables of people together with Master Ulrich in the mayor’s house and all was provided as a gift. There were many common worthy people from the valley, among whom were two mayors.9
His first mass then took place, not in Glarus but in his native Wildhaus nearby, on 29 September. Another celebratory meal followed.10 Unlike Luther, who recounted quaking with fear at his first celebration of the Eucharist, Zwingli tells us nothing of his emotions that day.
PRIEST AND WAR
A few glimpses reveal Zwingli to have been a diligent priest and scholar during his years in Glarus. He was responsible for about 1,300 souls, and his care was both spiritual and pedagogical. He founded the first Latin school in his parish, where he educated young boys, some of whom would go on to study at university. During this time Zwingli began to build his library, relying on friends to alert him to recent publications in Basel and engaging a student to bring him books from the Rhine city.11 Zwingli had inherited a few books from his predecessor as priest, Johannes Stucki, including works by Aquinas, Josephus and Aulus Gellius.12 Surviving notes from 1507–1508 tell us that the priest was carefully reading the Jewish historian Josephus.
In 1510, Zwingli penned an allegory in which he revealed his deep pro-papal sympathies. His fable takes place on a bucolic meadow that represented the Swiss Confederation:
There was a garden spot hedged about on one side by high mountains, on another by gurgling streams, and on which roamed, cropping the green blades of grass, a fine fat bullock of ruddy hue, with widespread horns on his rich waving coat.13
His fable was of an ox, representing the Confederates, beset by wily and mendacious foes. When wild animals – the leopard is the French king, the lion is the German emperor – can do nothing to harm the ox, they offer the cats (Swiss political leaders and leading families) all manner of inducements as ‘rich bait’. The herdsman (the pope) reminds the ox of the wisdom of his forefathers: ‘You are aware of how lively were the tried and tested virtues and faithfulness of your father and grandfather. Contemplating that, I come to warn you now not to let me find you inferior to them.’14 The dog (the clergy) barks in joy at the herdsman’s words. The lion and leopard gnash their teeth and declare war on the ox to force him to abandon the ‘protecting staff’ of the herdsman, who is its only hope. Crucially, for Zwingli the pope is the ‘good shepherd’.
In Machiavelli’s idealized view, the Swiss lived in liberty because they were simple, poor mountain people who had not been tainted by the worldliness and material wealth that had corrupted his own people. But renowned for their highly effective military manoeuvres in squares of pikeman, as well as for their slaughtering with halberds and crossbows, the Swiss were sought by popes and kings, who were more than willing to pay.15 Machiavelli also recognized them as an invincible army, as once the Romans had had and unlike the pathetically unreliable troops on whom the Italian states relied.16 Whatever their exceptional prowess on the battlefield, the Swiss soldiers demonstrated the usual proclivities of mercenaries, by plundering and raping their way through Italian lands, much to the horror of Pope Julius II and Cardinal Matthäus Schiner, the pope’s legate to the Swiss Confederation, who had set about recruiting soldiers in the Confederation for war against the French in Italy. Schiner would later be one of Zwingli’s most powerful patrons, precisely as a result of the priest’s papal sympathies. In 1512, over 12,000 Swiss travelled south of the Alps under the leadership of the cardinal. The mercenaries closed ranks alongside imperial, Venetian and Spanish troops to crush the French.
The ‘Account by Huldrych Zwingli of the Engagements between the French and Swiss hard by Ravenna and Pavia’ was a humanist writing intended to demonstrate the priest’s skills to his much-admired friend, the scholar Joachim Vadian, with whom Zwingli had studied in Vienna. The text was taken to Vadian in Vienna by Zwingli’s brother Jakob, who was about to enter a monastery in the city. Zwingli relied on information provided by the Glarner soldiers who had fought in Italy and returned home. The victory of Pavia was, for the priest, the great achievement of the Swiss, revealing them as the liberators of the Church, and above all of the papacy. Their war in Italian lands was nothing other than the continuation of their struggle for freedom against the Habsburgs: it was a battle not only for the Confederation, but also for liberty itself.17
Zwingli’s detailed treatment of politics and battles was interspersed with artful dialogue, always flattering to the Swiss, to whom he referred as ‘our forces’. At one point, he related how
some of our men swam across the Po to fix the first supports for a bridge on the farther bank. Their lancers rushed out to stop the undertaking. Meanwhile all the youthful band of brothers-in-arms being practised swimmers, runners and jumpers had thrown off their clothes and, clinging to their spears, were swimming naked across the Po to engage the enemy, who seemed to be given to them by God for constant practice in the art of war.18
He singled out one man from Glarus, whose skill in hunting wild beasts in the mountains enabled him to pick off a Frenchman with a single shot. Zwingli would later admonish his students to engage in both learning and physical exercise. Piety was wed to martial strength, for when Julius II wanted to reward the Swiss for their efforts, they were given ‘Julius banners’, beautiful silk banners that bestowed great honour on the Swiss as ‘defenders of the liberties of the Church’.19
In 1513, at the battle of Novara, 4,000 Swiss soldiers faced a far larger renewed French army; but their strategy proved superior, not only leaving them victorious, but also providing them with considerable French booty. Zwingli experienced the campaign and battle at Novara first hand, as ‘field preacher’ for the forces from Glarus who had headed south to fight for the pope. He was enormously proud of these men as defenders of traditional Swiss liberties and the cause of Rome. We know little of his experience in battle. As the campaign moved toward Milan, he was with the Glarner troops in Monza, where he preached in the marketplace to the soldiers, exhorting them to remain steadfast in their support of the pope.20
Historians have long considered 1513 the peak of Swiss influence in Italy, marking the zenith of ventures that had brought them deep into Italian lands and made them a serious political and military player. But that year the Swiss lost a key ally in Julius II, who died in February 1513. In 1515, the new French king, Francis I (1494–1547), eagerly took up the reins of war and sent his troops back into Italian lands, this time with a mind to turn the Swiss into allies. He knew what it took: with a million crowns, promises of pensions, trade privileges and land, he divided the Swiss by winning over the men of Bern, Fribourg, Solothurn and Biel with an agreement that left the other Swiss feeling utterly betrayed. The kingdom of France would become the most crucial foreign ally of the Swiss, a position it retained until the end of the Old Regime.21
At the battle of Marignano, southeast of Milan, on 13 September 1515, however, those Swiss supporting the pope faced the forces of Francis I full of confidence in their invincibility. At first, that optimism was justified, as the French were pressed back. During the night, however, the French rebuilt their defensive positions, while the opposing side was weakened by hunger and cold, and depleted by desertions. Another assault the following day was repulsed by the French artillery and the Venetian cavalry, inflicting terrible losses. The battle lasted 16 hours and the carnage was great: between 5,000 and 8,000 French died, while the number of fallen Swiss was close to 10,000. In total, nearly half the soldiers at Marignano lost their lives. The Swiss fell back to Milan, soon surrendering the city and leaving Duke Massimiliano Sforza to flee. The defeat at Marignano dispelled the myth of Swiss invincibility on the battlefield.22 A long Swiss tradition has held that Marignano marked the beginning of Swiss neutrality, a claim recently and fiercely contested.23
For all his praise both of Swiss bravery and of the papacy, when he returned to his parish in 1515, Zwingli was just over 30 and was deeply troubled, scarred by the brutality of war and haunted by a vision that divine judgement had fallen at Marignano on the duplicity of those who had profited from the sale of Swiss mercenaries. No longer could he hold the Swiss to be the innocent ox, for their hands were covered in blood – not least of their own countrymen – for the sake of French, German and papal reward. Further, he found that his papal sympathies were increasingly at odds with the growing Swiss sentiments toward the French.
Chastened and troubled, Zwingli turned to his pen to express his anguish, in a work entitled ‘The Labyrinth’. He retold the mythical story of Theseus in the labyrinth with the Minotaur, which he slays before returning to marry Ariadne, who has aided his success. In Zwingli’s morality tale, the labyrinth was the world in which humans wander without the string that saved Theseus; for without God, men and women stagger through the labyrinth unable to see the light of day, deprived of hope. The priest’s tone was dark:
The world is so full of deceit that we have no more the image of Christ than the heathen. Yea, we are worse, for the heathen do all deliberately so that repentance and misery do not come over them. We, on the other hand, in our conceit hurry all matters along thoughtlessly. Therefore, we are all in trouble.24
What, Zwingli asked, do Christians possess of Christ, other than his name? No one shows patience or wisdom:
Most of all the princes have learnt nothing except to pursue their own desires. As soon as a notion enters their heads everything else must cease. When God allows peace to shine upon us, men turn into beasts.
ASPIRING SCHOLAR
Zwingli was very attached to his parishioners in Glarus. In a marginal note to his copy of the medieval doctor Albertus Magnus, he observed that ‘the people of Glarus are cheerful and like to laugh’.25 Years later, in Zurich, he continued to be in contact with men and women from his parish, offering guidance and assistance. As a priest with several assistants, he administered the sacraments, visited the sick and instructed the children. He baptized, married and buried as a priest who took seriously his sacramental and pastoral duties. Although his years in Glarus would end in acrimony, he loved his flock, whom he described in a marginal note to a book by Erasmus as wiser than the people of Attica. He would remember them fondly during his years in Zurich.
While a student in Basel, Zwingli had been encouraged by his mentor Thomas Wyttenbach to see reading the Bible and the church fathers as essential to the study of theology.26 This emphasis did not mean, however, that he gave up on the medieval scholastic authors. Quite the opposite. In Basel and Glarus, he pored over their texts and annotated them, and his library contained his own copies of Duns Scotus, Peter Lombard, Aquinas and Albertus. Later evidence suggests that he was, even from a young age, an outstanding Latinist, and constantly studied the classics and made notes in the margins of books to refine his knowledge. We do not know precisely when he took up Greek, but his first attempts probably came between 1510 and 1513: in 1510, he wrote to the great Swiss humanist Heinrich Löriti (known as Glarean (1488–1563)), requesting a Greek grammar;27 and three years later, he enthused in a letter to his friend Vadian: ‘I am so resolved in my intention to study Greek, no-one but God could dissuade me from this course. I do not care about glory, only about the study of the Holy Scriptures.’28
Zwingli was a lifelong zealous acquirer of books, and from his careful annotations in the margins we know him to have been a meticulous reader. His library in Glarus also included numerous bibles and works by Athanasius, Chrysostom, Augustine, Hilary of Poitiers and John of Damascus.29 His study of the new nine-volume edition of Jerome was so intensive that he could note in a letter that a page was missing.30 In addition, he possessed the complete works of the Florentine Pico della Mirandola and the influential commentary on the Psalms by the renowned French scholar Lefèvre d’Étaples, who offered a crucial path to Augustine.
As a priest in an Alpine valley, Zwingli cultivated a network of friends that gave him access to books and the newest learning. He devoured Greek and Roman authors, the works of the church fathers and the latest humanist writers. Such scholarly engagement, he believed, was a Christian vocation. During his time in Glarus, he grew to recognize, however, that all learning served the understanding of God’s Word. Later, in 1522, he reflected on this experience:
When I was younger, I gave myself overmuch to human teaching, like others of my day, and when about seven or eight years ago I undertook to devote myself entirely to the Scriptures I was always prevented by philosophy and theology. But eventually I came to the point where led by the Word and Spirit of God I saw the need to set aside all these things and to learn the doctrine of God direct from his own Word.31
Pastoral care and study were not Zwingli’s only occupations in Glarus. As he would later freely admit, he came to enjoy the company of women and the pleasures of sex. There is nothing to suggest that his actions caused any particular scandal. Nevertheless, while quasi-clerical marriages were pretty much the norm, Zwingli seems not to have sought a permanent arrangement and to have been more promiscuous, although later he always insisted that he had been discreet. A reputation for unchastity would long outlive the Zurich reformer.
ERASMUS
The most powerful and enduring influence on Zwingli was the Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus, resident in Basel. Erasmus electrified a young generation of scholars with his call for a return to the sources of the Christian faith. In particular, in 1514 he began work on a Greek edition of the New Testament, a labour that took two years.32 Following the scholarship of Lorenzo Valla, whose annotations on the New Testament Erasmus had uncovered in a Dutch monastery, he worked with a series of manuscripts to present the Greek with a facing Latin translation and extensive notes. The Novum Instrumentum appeared in 1,200 copies from the press of Johannes Froben in Basel in early 1516, instantly becoming a wonder of the age.
Around 1514/1515 the priest in Glarus had begun to collect and devour works by this international champion of learning and Christian renewal. Notably, Zwingli took up Erasmus’ admonition in his Enchiridion, or Handbook of the Christian Knight, to begin the study of the New Testament by reading the letters of Paul, and he filled his copy of Erasmus’ work with notes and underlined key passages on the imitation of Christ and the struggle between flesh and spirit.33 His marginal notes drew heavily on Erasmus’ Annotations to the Greek New Testament, and he dedicated himself to writing out the Pauline epistles from that translation and committing them to memory.34 Zwingli later recounted the profound effect of reading Erasmus’ poem ‘Expostulatio Jesu cum homine’, published in 1514 and later translated into German by Leo Jud and printed in Zurich in 1522. The work, he said, encouraged him to doubt the intercessory role of the saints and to focus on Christ alone as ‘the sole treasure of our benighted soul’.35 In the margins of his edition of Erasmus’ Lucubrations, Zwingli provided witness to his growing evangelical beliefs in words that may have been written as early as 1515, recording that ‘today the mass of Christians worship God through certain corporeal ceremonies, whereas the piety of the mind is the most pleasing worship. For the Father seeks such worshippers as will worship Him in Spirit, since He is Spirit.’36 It was the Greek New Testament that turned Zwingli into an Erasmian, opening him to a new understanding of Christ.37
In early 1516, Zwingli visited Erasmus in Basel, an encounter made possible by Heinrich Glarean (1488–1563), a Swiss humanist poet and scholar of music, who was an early patron and friend. We glean from a rather unctuous letter of gratitude, sent by Zwingli to Erasmus several months after their conversation, that he felt that he had entered the holy of holies of Christian learning. When he read Erasmus’ work, he enthused to the scholar, ‘I feel that I can hear your voice and I see you in your small but elegant body moving most elegantly. For you are, without flattery, my beloved – if I have not communed with you, I cannot sleep.’38 Just as in earlier times the Spanish and Gauls had made pilgrimages to Rome, Zwingli wrote, he had now come to the centre of learning. Erasmus was, for Zwingli, the pre-eminent interpreter of Holy Scripture. In comparison to Erasmus, he insisted, he felt unimportant and unlearned.39 Their encounter led Zwingli to commit himself with greater zeal to studying, for Erasmus had drawn him into a new world of learning and Christianity, grounded in the study of the Bible and the philosophy of Christ.40 He read as many of Erasmus’ writings as he could lay his hands on, and threw himself into accessing the Bible in the original tongues, even undertaking a self-study of Hebrew, a language the Dutchman did not possess.
The overworked Erasmus responded with brevity and restraint, but that he replied at all is significant. His words to Zwingli were warm, but not excessively so – evidently the priest had made a good impression, but little more. Erasmus cautioned Zwingli that he should not expect much of a correspondence from Basel, for he was tied down with innumerable obligations.41 Perhaps he also dampened Zwingli’s hopes by noting that, while he looked to the revival of piety and learning in the Swiss Confederation, he expected its leadership to come from Glarean.42 Erasmus advised Zwingli to continue to work on his style, for although Minerva, the goddess of wisdom, was evidently well disposed to him, constant practice would eventually lead to a mastery of prose.43
Although there would not be another personal encounter, Zwingli constantly mentioned Erasmus in his correspondence. His principal contact with the Dutchman was through Beatus Rhenanus, a humanist and close friend of Erasmus in Basel.44 By 1518, Rhenanus could describe Zwingli as an ardent follower of Erasmus’ philosophy of Christ. The correspondence between Zwingli and Erasmus continued for another eight years, until it was acrimoniously ended by the Dutchman in the autumn of 1524. Zwingli never ceased to regard Erasmus as his spiritual and intellectual mentor, the inspiration for much of his theology and vision of reform.
MENTOR AND FRIEND
Zwingli lived in communities of parishioners, pupils and scholars, surrounding himself with a broad company of people who shared his passions. Intellectually, Erasmus emerged as the model. Next to the Dutchman, the most distinguished figure was Heinrich Glarean, an esteemed friend of the Basel humanist.45 Zwingli’s first contact with Glarean was an exchange of letters while he was a priest in Glarus, with Zwingli referring to his fellow countryman as a most trusted friend.46 Theirs was a generous friendship. While in Cologne, Glarean received a request from Zwingli for copies of the Isagoge (or Introduction) to Aristotle’s ‘Categories’, Ptolemy’s geography and a work by Pico della Mirandola; and later in Basel – so their correspondence attests – Glarean sourced many books for his friend, assuring him, for example, that if he did not have a Greek grammar, he would send him one.47 He also advised Zwingli to be particularly warm toward the printer Froben in Basel, who could supply him with books.48 Glarean often footed the bill for all these books himself, although their transactions indicate that Zwingli was also sending money.49 Glarean also used his relationship with Erasmus on Zwingli’s behalf – he facilitated that personal meeting with Erasmus, and we know that he encouraged the Dutchman to write to Zwingli. Where Glarean evidently understood himself as Zwingli’s mentor, Zwingli joined Erasmus in investing his hopes in Glarean for a renewal of learning among the Swiss, and for their cultivation as a chosen people.
Zwingli’s early letters also give us access to his developing relationship with Joachim Vadian (1484–1551), his exact contemporary and fellow student in Vienna. The son of a wealthy St Gallen patrician family, Vadian stayed on in Vienna, where at the age of 32 he became rector of the university. Like Glarean, Vadian was a poet: both men had the title of poet laureate conferred on them by Emperor Maximilian. We get a flavour of Zwingli and Vadian’s friendship from an exchange from the early months of 1513. Zwingli opened with a complaint about the amount of time that had elapsed without a reply from Vadian; he then sought his friend’s guidance on how to read the Isagoge to Aristotle’s ‘Categories’ in his endeavour to learn Greek, adding that he trusted Vadian’s advice in all matters of education.50 Vadian replied with fulsome praise for Zwingli’s learning, encouraging him to persevere with his writing and not, as many others had done, let his studies fall dormant. He was delighted with Zwingli’s progress in Greek, he noted, as it would deepen his understanding of Latin; no one could be called learned who did not possess both languages.51
Zwingli’s exchanges were not confined to rarefied learning. He used his friendships to find teachers for his students; the students then reciprocated by writing letters in which they reported on their progress in their studies, and frequently by expressing their gratitude to their master. The letters stand out not for references to their mentor’s piety or service to the Church, but for his commitment to them, marked by expectation and enthusiasm. Little is known about many of these pupils and mentees beyond occasional references in Zwingli’s correspondence; but one instance produced a distinguished Reformation career. Valentin Tschudi was born in Glarus in 1499, the son of a knight. We know that he studied Latin, and possibly Greek, with Zwingli before travelling to Vienna, and to Vadian, in 1512/1513. His studies led him also to Pavia and then to Glarean in Basel, whom he followed to Paris, staying there from 1517 to 1521. He ultimately returned to his native Glarus, where he served first as a priest and then as a pastor for over 30 years, until his death in 1555.
In a letter from July 1514, Tschudi apologized and explained that his failure to write was a sign not of indolence, but rather of the lack of messengers to carry his letters to Glarus.52 He recounted his recent difficulties and thanked Zwingli for his generosity during his recent bout of quartan fever.53 A sign of this kindness was a book the priest had brought his former pupil in Basel, leaving it behind with encouragement to study and not fall behind. The young Tschudi was full of praise for his former teacher, describing him as ‘shrewd in reading ancient authors’, surpassing all but Apollo himself.54 He described how Glarean had gathered all his students together in his house, where they shared their resources, lived together as a community and studied Livy, Aulus Gellius and Greek; yet Tschudi remained short of means and asked Zwingli to intervene on his behalf with friends, that they might relieve his financial woes.55
Valentin was not the only Tschudi whom Zwingli taught and mentored. The priest also exchanged letters with Valentin’s brother Peter, who had advanced sufficiently in his studies at Basel to be able to correspond in Greek with his former teacher. Peter asked Zwingli to intervene on his behalf with his father, who for some unmentioned reason was opposed to his studies.56 A third brother, Aegidius Tschudi, would become a distinguished humanist author, Catholic nobleman and defender of the Roman Church. He wrote to Zwingli just before Easter 1517 to report that his teacher Glarean was about to leave for France, depriving him of his mentor. Worried that, without this great man, he would have to return home and would forget everything he had learned, he asked if he might study with Zwingli, with whom he did not seem to be as familiar as were his brothers Valentin and Peter.57
Valentin Tschudi also gives us a sense of Zwingli’s manner and approach as an instructor. In a letter sent from Paris in 1517, he thanked Zwingli for his assiduity in always correcting mistakes, pushing for perfection and punishing laziness. His elegant and eloquent portrait of Zwingli suggests a learned, stern and exacting teacher, who was also caring, encouraging and humorous.58 At times, Valentin admitted, he had grown so exasperated with the demands for practice that he had wanted to throw his writing implement at his teacher.
EINSIEDELN AND CONVERSION
Zwingli’s publicly expressed hostility toward the mercenary trade and his papal sympathies went down badly in a poor land desperately in need of the money French agents were offering. In 1515, the Swiss Confederates had concluded a pact with King Francis I, and Zwingli was on the wrong side. Although loved as a priest and teacher, his political views had caused animosity among local officials, and Zwingli knew the time had come to leave.59 On 14 April 1516, he reluctantly agreed to depart from Glarus for the ninth-century Benedictine abbey at Einsiedeln, 15 miles across the mountains in Schwyz, a Confederate with which Zwingli had no connection, just as he had no links to the Benedictine order. He informed Vadian that his situation had changed not because he sought more pleasure or money, but because he had been driven out by the partisans of the French.60 He did not resign his post in Glarus, taking a leave of absence instead. His position at the abbey was as a ‘people’s priest’ (Leutpriester), which came with the responsibility to administer the sacraments, preach and provide pastoral care. He was to minister to local farmers and preach to the pilgrims who came to venerate the Black Madonna.61 We know that he was well compensated for his efforts: in addition to the papal pension he was still being paid, he continued to receive money from Glarus and was remunerated by the abbey. He was also entitled to the ‘confessional shilling’, the fee for reading masses.62 Much of his money, as in Glarus, went on the purchase of books. At the abbey, he was under the direct authority of the abbot. He threw himself into his new position, and in 1517 even led a group of pilgrims to distant Aachen, where they could worship at the shrine of Charlemagne.
Although he had been diligent in collecting books while in Glarus, Einsiedeln opened up new vistas for the humanist priest. He had responsibility for about 1,500 souls, but there was virtually no monastic life at the abbey, and so Zwingli could spend a great deal of time in study, working in a library that possessed thousands of texts. He continued to teach students, some of whom would fondly remember how he introduced them to Greek literature. The extant copy of his personal edition of Aristotle reflects careful and repeated reading.63 He could now fully embrace the Erasmian vision of devoting himself to the study of scripture and of the most ancient witnesses of the faith. The works of Augustine and Jerome, both of whose writings had been produced in Basel by Erasmus, would be particularly well thumbed. The results were dramatic, as Zwingli later recorded:
I call God to witness that I learned the essential purport of the Gospel from reading the treatises of John and Augustine and from the diligent study of Paul’s epistles in the Greek, which I copied with my own hand . . . This essential summary I committed to writing in such manner that many congratulated me.64
His efforts as a priest, scholar and mentor – first in Glarus and now in Einsiedeln – led Zwingli to a remarkable break with medieval practice. He provides few details, but he clearly had a form of conversion experience that led him to a realization that scripture was the only true authority for the Christian life. His later account of his Einsiedeln years was certainly part of a curated attempt to distance himself from Luther (an evident consequence of their hostile relations), but the early date of his conversion to the gospel offers us every reason to believe that Zwingli, through Erasmus and others, had come to his own position on the authority of the Bible.
His first move was radical: he abandoned the lectionary, the daily readings from scripture.
Before anyone among us had heard the name of Luther, I had begun in 1516 to preach the Gospel of Christ. When I entered the pulpit, I did not preach the words from the Gospel lesson appointed for the mass that morning, but rather from the biblical text alone.65
He was thus aspiring to be the priest of whom Erasmus wrote. According to the learned Beatus Rhenanus, the German humanist and classical scholar, Zwingli’s preaching was marked by the ‘purest philosophy of Christ’, carried out like the fathers of the ancient Church.66
We also have an account of Zwingli’s preaching in Einsiedeln from the young Kaspar Hedio (1494–1522), who studied at the famous school in Pforzheim and then took a degree in theology at Basel in 1519. Hearing that Zwingli was very ill with the plague in Zurich, he recounted his early experience of having heard the Swiss preacher during a visit to Einsiedeln. Zwingli had preached a ‘beautiful, learned, weighty, rich, vivid and evangelical sermon in a manner that renewed the power of the old theologians’ and, Hedio continued, ‘this sermon so inflamed me that I was filled with the greatest inward love for Zwingli, and looked up to him in wonder.’67
In 1523, Zwingli wrote of an undated experience in which he found relief for his conscience in the Lord’s Prayer. The evidence suggests Einsiedeln as the setting. In the petition ‘forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us’, Zwingli described himself as reaching a mountain so great that he stepped back. What does it mean for God to forgive us as we forgive others? In great anxiety and self-doubt, he surrendered his troubled conscience to God, crying out: ‘Lord I must not presume that you should forgive me according to my own forgiveness. Lord I am an imprisoned person. Forgive me, Lord, forgive.’68 He continued to babble, he wrote, until ‘I stood so utterly exposed in the very prayer that God had commanded me.’ He meditated on a psalm, but it brought greater accusation, for his conscience told him that he was self-satisfied that he had taken hold of the Spirit. If he was to find relief, it would be in learning what it meant to be forgiven and then to forgive others. That was the heart of the matter.69
SINS OF THE FLESH
The celebrated priest and preacher was pursued by gossip. In both Glarus and Einsiedeln, Zwingli was sexually active – even highly active. Though in itself that was hardly remarkable. Bullinger was to write many years later that there had been plenty of stories about the priest’s relationships; and Zwingli later admitted to Bishop Hugo that he had not been celibate.70 His sexual encounters only became an issue, however, in 1518, when he was being considered for an appointment as a priest in Zurich.
In response to the accusations of frequent fornication, Zwingli wrote a letter dated 3 December 1518 to Heinrich Utinger in Zurich, an early supporter of church reform.71 Zwingli rejected the suggestion that he had violated the daughter of a leading citizen in Einsiedeln, but he acknowledged that his relationship with another woman, the daughter of a barber, had not been chaste and he was concerned that he had made her pregnant. Apparently thinking it vindication, he claimed that she had not been a virgin before he slept with her, and her reputation was such that no one blamed him for having sex with her. When she discovered herself to be pregnant, she had left Einsiedeln for Zurich, but Zwingli offered no more information about her whereabouts or condition. It is tempting to wonder whether the newly arrived priest ever encountered the woman or her (their) child in the city. Zwingli’s response was a mixture of victimhood and tortuous logic: he insisted that he had never slept with a married woman, a virgin or a nun; he did not mention prostitutes, on whom the rumours focused. He had always been discreet in both Glarus and Einsiedeln. The admission was part confession and part excuse, salted with a self-deprecating biblical line: ‘A dog returns to its vomit’ and ‘A sow that is washed returns to her wallowing in the mud’ (2 Peter 2:22).72
Years later, in Zurich, Zwingli would publicly acknowledge his conduct in print on two more occasions. In a sermon from 1522 on the Virgin Mary that was addressed to his brothers, he confessed that, as a priest, he had been beset by ‘pride’, ‘gluttony’, ‘impurity’ and other fleshly sins. Therefore, he wrote,
most beloved brothers, if you are told something about me which you feel ashamed of, think from what motive or intention this comes. If you are told that I do sin with pride, gluttony or unchastity, believe it with ease, as I am sadly subdued to these and other vices. However, if you are told that I give wrong teaching for the sake of money, whatever the sum they swear it is, do not believe it. For I am not bound to any lord on earth for a single penny.73
A direct reference, without details, is also found in his 1522 petition to Bishop Hugo von Hohenlandenberg for priests to be released from the vow of chastity. Zwingli makes the well-founded observation that few priests had kept to that vow, and he hardly concealed his own experience:
We, then, having tried with little enough success, alas, to obey the law . . . have discovered that the gift has been denied unto us. We have meditated long within ourselves how we might remedy our ill-starred attempts at chastity.74
Although he would be the first reformer to marry, nothing Zwingli wrote or said suggests a particularly high view of women. His wife, Anna Reinhart (1484–1538), remained largely invisible, the model wife and mother; and when the religious houses were ultimately closed, Zwingli was clear that nuns were to make themselves useful and marry. We find nothing akin to Luther’s passion for his beloved Katharina.
ZURICH
At the Benedictine abbey, the priest had enjoyed the support and admiration of the administrator Diebold von Geroldseck, whom he described as not learned, but an advocate of study. As a preacher in Einsiedeln, however, Zwingli also attracted attention further afield. The Zurich Bürgermeister Marx Röist met the priest while on pilgrimage to the Black Madonna. In October 1517, Zwingli declined an invitation from the town of Winterthur to be city preacher and head of the school, stating that he still had unfinished business in Glarus.75 The priest’s reputation was spreading: in 1518, the papal legate Antonio Pucci wrote to Zwingli that there was no one who would not ‘praise your learning to the heavens’.76 That year a more attractive possibility arose with the prospect of moving to Zurich, a city with which he had growing connections, fostered by its ties with Einsiedeln. On visiting the city, he made it very clear that he was open to an invitation.77
In October, his friend Oswald Myconius wrote, encouraging him to apply for a position in the chapter at the Grossmünster, the leading church in the city.78 Zwingli was by no means passive in the matter: he bombarded Myconius, who taught at the church, with questions and requests, finding out who the other candidates were and beseeching him to speak on his behalf. His pride was at stake: Zwingli insisted that he would be mortified if he, a learned Swiss, was beaten to the post by some ‘flatulent and windy Swabian’.79 Myconius played the roles of adviser and confidant, calming Zwingli about his prospects for the position, but warning him of the major impediment arising from the rumours of his sexual misconduct. The outcome was his confessional missive to Utinger. Zwingli received several supportive letters, including one from the secretary to Cardinal Schiner, who was still active for the papal cause.80 In Zurich, the influential humanist canon Konrad Hofmann declared himself satisfied. Zwingli’s election to the position of people’s priest followed on 11 December.