3. Disruptive: 1519–1522
THREE DISRUPTIVE
1519–1522
The city in which Zwingli arrived at the end of 1518 was not especially remarkable. Nor was it an obvious place for a religious revolution. A member of the Confederation since 1351, Zurich was of middling size, with some 6,000 inhabitants, well placed on the trade routes that led south through the Alps to Italy and north toward the Rhine. Located where the River Limmat meets a large lake, Zurich was a city of trade, pre-eminently in textiles, but it also engaged in the exchange of iron ore from the northeast of the Confederation and of salt, grain and manufactured goods obtained through Basel.1 Once the centre of a flourishing silk industry, by the early sixteenth century the city’s economy was largely local, dependent on cattle and agriculture. In 1518, the situation was not good: the economy was languishing and the rural people were suffering from the collapse of markets. There was considerable social unrest, and the mercenary trade was widely blamed for the economic woes. All this served to prepare an audience for Zwingli’s message.
Zurich was not the seat of a bishop, did not possess a university like Basel or Wittenberg, and had nothing to rival the great banking and merchant houses of Augsburg and Nuremberg. Nevertheless, next to Bern it was the most powerful Swiss Confederate, traditionally exercising considerable influence in the eastern lands. Much of its power came from its large rural territory, which extended along the Lake of Zurich toward the Alps, giving a total population of around 60,000. It was from the land that it drew its soldiers, tithes and agrarian goods. Geography offered clear advantages: the bishop of Constance, its spiritual overlord, was a distant figure with nominal influence; this allowed the magistrates gradually to acquire control over the affairs of their churches, against the bishop’s will. By the time Zwingli arrived in Zurich, the civic rulers already controlled much of the religious life of the city and its rural areas. Furthermore, Zurich lacked rivals in the eastern part of the Swiss Confederation, enabling the city to expand its influence and act on long-held hegemonic aspirations that unsettled its neighbours.
The diocese of Constance sprawled across the lands of southern Germany and the Swiss Confederation, and its bishop was a prince of the Holy Roman Empire. In the late fifteenth century, an agreement had been struck that gave local churches a high degree of autonomy in return for the payment of dues. Within the city of Zurich, there were about 200 clergy, the most prominent of whom had strong links to the leading families. The economic depredations in Zurich, however, had left many priests and monks in poverty. At the same time, the ruling magistrates succeeded in obtaining control over appointments to clerical positions in the city, including to the principal church, the Grossmünster. The magistrates were able to intervene in the affairs of the churches and monasteries, often resolving disputes and choosing candidates for positions. On the whole, they tended to favour candidates from Zurich.
The city was ruled by the Large and Small Councils.2 The former was made up of 212 men elected from the 12 guilds, which included the butchers, tanners, printers, vintners, tailors and merchants. The Small Council was charged with running the daily affairs of the city; its 24 members, all Zurich born and resident, were also members of the Large Council. Presiding were the two Bürgermeisters, who took it in turns to serve for six months and who chaired the two councils. Along with the Bürgermeisters, the Obristmeister (master of the guilds) was especially influential within the city. When key decisions regarding affairs of the state and Church were imminent, the councils appointed members to prepare and present the necessary material. The election of the same families and members of the guilds created considerable continuity in the make-up of these advisers.
Despite the fixed forms of government, the political and social world in Zurich was highly dynamic. The leading families of Röist, Grebel, Göldli, Bonstetten, Landenberg and others – some of which belonged to the nobility – enjoyed enormous prestige and continued to provide many of the civic leaders.3 Experience counted for a lot in political life, and most political players were in their forties or fifties; it was highly unusual for a young person to exercise influence. Substantial power lay with the Constabulary, a body of 18 of the most socially elite and economically powerful men, who largely led the city on foreign affairs. However, by the time Zwingli arrived in Zurich, the Constabulary was in decline, as artisans of the emerging craft guilds were starting to wrest power from the old families. Wealth and status were not the only keys to political power: men rose from the lesser guilds and families, making their way through connections and force of personality. Nevertheless, most of the leading magistrates continued to be members of old families and of the influential guilds, such as those of Meisen and Saffran.
We know that Marx Röist (1454–1524), who served as Bürgermeister from 1505 to 1523 and who had visited Zwingli in Einsiedeln, and his son Diethelm were particular patrons and defenders of Zwingli, using their considerable influence and connections to support his preaching and reformist convictions. The records allow us, however, few glimpses into the relationships that developed between the new preacher and the powerful families and guild members, although they were undoubtedly foundational for later reforms within the city. Zwingli appears to have drawn his supporters mainly from within the Large Council, which included all the guilds, and this exacerbated the conflict between the two councils. For the most part, the Small Council was dominated by noble families opposed to Zwingli, although a significant minority did sympathize with the reforms. It is impossible to know exactly who supported Zwingli and who opposed him. However, since the city was mostly governed by older men, what we can say is that his sympathizers did not necessarily represent the younger generation; rather, they came from the establishment.4
Following the battles of Novara and Marignano, opposition to both French mercenary recruitment and pensions (paid by foreign agents in return for political support and the flow of mercenaries) was growing in Zurich. The rising artisan class deeply resented the flow of such pensions into the pockets of the noble families, providing them not only with income, but also with military careers for their sons. Yet the monies from France, Rome and the Austrians also provided employment for young men from the lower classes, who struggled to make a living in the city and on the land. At the same time, concerns were growing over French influence in the Swiss Confederation, where almost all the states except Zurich were aligned with the French king. For both political and moral reasons, well before Zwingli began to preach, there were already many critics of the system, who regarded the taking of pensions as unpatriotic.
The feuding in Zurich between parties played a significant role in Zwingli’s call to the Grossmünster – and in the opposition that awaited him. Many patrician families benefited from the existing situation, in which they both received pensions and accrued income from the canonry of the Grossmünster, to which they had close family relations. The election of Zwingli, a known opponent of pensions and the mercenary service, was a reversal for them. They were defeated by the anti-French party that had brought the priest to the city, but they remained a powerful opposition.
Outside the walls of the city, further unrest was fostered by residual resentment among rural subjects of their urban overlords. In comparison to their peers in German lands, Swiss peasants had traditionally enjoyed greater autonomy thanks to their traditional rights.5 Nevertheless, these claims clashed with the desires of civic rulers and religious institutions to enhance economic profits. There was a long history of resistance in the countryside, and in 1515 peasant forces attacked the city of Zurich, marauding and looting in protest at corrupt politicians.6 Fortune, however, did not favour the peasants, and the Reformation would only enhance the growing control of the rural areas by the urban rulers through coinage, custom tolls, required labour and taxation administered by officials sent out from the city.7 Zwingli’s initial sympathies for the plight of the peasants, with whom he identified, even though his own family had been prosperous, quickly faded, as he embraced the power of the urban elites as his means to reform.
Zurich society was also military, organized into bands armed with pikes, halberds, crossbows and swords. Service was compulsory for men of the city and its territories, and the Swiss mercenary armies ensured that Zurich could draw on plenty of martial experience. Zurich had no standing army: whenever war loomed, an officer (often a leading citizen) was appointed to raise troops. The men received no salary: the army was to live off the land it occupied and the booty it acquired. The arts of warfare were central to the life of the community, with marksmanship and combat skills regularly rehearsed in festive shooting competitions between the guilds. The young Zwingli had been trained in the use of arms, which served him all his days.
On 11 December 1518, the 34-year-old priest and preacher from Einsiedeln was elected to the post of ‘people’s priest’ (Leutpriester) at the Grossmünster, continuing many of the duties he had performed at the abbey: preaching, celebrating mass and providing pastoral ministrations. The decision was by no means unanimous, with 17 canons voting in favour and 7 against. Zwingli’s hostility to mercenary service and his pro-papal sympathies were well known, making him a controversial candidate in a city where those French pensions lined the pockets of influential families. Nevertheless, hopes ran high for this celebrated preacher, scholar and patriot.
Founded in the eighth century, the Grossmünster was the most prominent ecclesiastical foundation in Zurich. The church was dedicated to the saints Felix and Regula, whose relics resided beneath the high altar, a source of civic pride and identity. The city also had a long association with Charlemagne, whose image appeared on the seal of the Grossmünster. The chapter of the church consisted of 24 canons, who traditionally came from leading families and resided on church property. They were not, however, without worldly interests, deriving income from a plurality of church offices, familial lands and titles.
Zwingli’s office placed in his hands the care of souls, a role for which he was well prepared as a university-trained priest with years of pastoral experience. In Zurich, those who held this office had normally studied at a university.8 Alongside the people’s priest were the deacons and chaplains, who assisted in the sacramental life of the church. As among the guilds, there was considerable internal tension within the church, as the secular and regular clergy quarrelled over rights and privileges – not least over providing pastoral care and entitlement to income for saying masses and burying the dead. Typical of the age, the laity responded with harsh criticism, and anti-clerical sentiment was rife among the faithful. Nevertheless, in December 1518, Zwingli would have encountered in Zurich a world of traditional devotion: a liturgical year full of saints’ days, processions, commemorative masses and the veneration of relics.
‘CALL MY FLOCK’
Zwingli the priest was to preach to those assembled in the Grossmünster. Like all medieval cities, Zurich was awash with preachers declaiming from pulpits and on street corners.9 Most of the leading cities of the German Empire had established preacherships in their principal churches for prominent clergymen.10 Church festivals and the liturgical seasons of Advent and Lent were marked by sermons by well-known clerics, who could dazzle with their rhetorical skills. That Zwingli was called to preach in Zurich was not in itself remarkable: it was what he said that was electrifying. Medieval preaching was full of exempla and familiar accounts of sin and virtue, but Zwingli presented to his listeners the full drama of the gospel story, from the opening genealogies of Matthew to Christ’s Great Commission.
On Sunday, 1 January 1519, the newly arrived priest entered the pulpit in the Grossmünster to preach on his beloved Gospel of Matthew, having resigned his living in Glarus and having delivered his last sermon in the Benedictine abbey at Einsiedeln. Zwingli had informed the canons of his plan to abandon the set readings of the lectionary and to preach from the beginning of the gospel to its conclusion, as he had done in Einsiedeln.11 Through the cold weeks of January and February, each Sunday Zwingli took up where he had left off in the previous sermon, to continue the journey through the lives of the patriarchs, prophets, Christ, the Apostles and the first Christians.12 The priest who stood before the people was a dedicated follower of Erasmus, passionately committed to putting Christ before the people by bringing them to the gospel. The conviction of the power and accessibility of the Word, set out by his mentor in the preface to the Greek New Testament, had become Zwingli’s agenda.13 Zwingli’s later adoption of Matthew 11:28–30 as his motto – ‘Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light’ – was an expression of his spiritual indebtedness to Erasmus.14
In the years immediately following his appointment in Zurich, Zwingli attended to all his duties as a priest by hearing confession, celebrating mass and participating in festive processions; but it was his preaching that drew most attention. He had made a name for himself with sermons to pilgrims in Einsiedeln, and now he turned to the crowds gathered in the Grossmünster to speak very plainly. ‘I have not,’ he later remarked, ‘used any false nostrums or tricks or exhortations, but in simple words and terms native to the Swiss I have drawn them to the recognition of their troubles, having learned this from Christ himself, who began his own preaching with it.’15 He was convinced that men and women needed to be brought to a visceral awareness of their sins and of the pressing need for repentance. His purpose was clear: ‘to call my flock absolutely away, as far as I can, from hope in any created being to the one true God and Jesus his only begotten Son, our Lord. He that trusts in him shall never die.’16 Renewal in Christ healed both the inner person and the society in which that person lived.
Every word of the gospel was good news – not just the highlights that the lectionary offered. Zwingli preached the direct application of the scriptural message, with the lives of biblical characters immediately applied to the circumstances of his audience, including the injustices of power and the corrupting of the body by the infection of sin. They heard words of correction, and of rebuke, but they also learned of a better Christian world. According to his friends, Zwingli did not possess a particularly strong voice, but he did employ a heightened sense of the dramatic that befitted a poet and lover of classical literature. He preached extemporaneously, without a text, but with the Bible open before him. Plainly and passionately – clearly too plainly for some – he expounded the scriptures, always keeping his eye on the society in which he now lived, not hesitating to name from the pulpit those who neglected or corrupted their spiritual or political offices.
The new priest took aim at medieval practices that he regarded as unscriptural. Both his reading of Erasmus and his conversion in Einsiedeln had led him to doubt the intercessory powers of the saints and of Mary, mother of Christ.17 It was his first major break with medieval devotion. The people were warned against praying to Mary and use of the rosary, as well as against the veneration of saints. He put himself in dangerous territory by attacking a deeply popular expression of faith. In his sermons, apocryphal stories of saints were dismissed – including those of Felix and Regula, the patrons of Zurich. Some canons in the Grossmünster chapter were already alarmed in 1519 by Zwingli’s open support for Martin Luther, whom the Church was seeking to excommunicate and who was being attacked by the theological faculties in Louvain and Cologne. The dual question of when Zwingli began to read the Wittenberg reformer and the extent of the influence of the doctor’s writings on him remains unresolved, but by the end of his first year in Zurich the Swiss priest was defending the German’s attack on the papacy.18 Monks and religious houses were a particular object of Zwingli’s attacks: he railed against their indolence and immorality, telling the people that in his role as confessor at the Benedictine house in Einsiedeln he had heard litanies of their transgressions.
Zwingli had in his sights the selling of indulgences, no less an issue in Swiss lands than in Luther’s Saxony. The Franciscan preacher Bernhardin Sanson, whom Zwingli had first encountered in Einsiedeln, arrived in Zurich in January 1519, selling assurances of relief for the dead that would assuage the anxieties of both rich and poor.19 Following Zwingli’s advice, the Zurich (Large) Council refused to admit Sanson to the city, while the bishop of Constance was clear that he did not sanction the indulgence seller, whom he regarded as depriving him of much-needed revenue. It was less the idea of indulgences that infuriated Zwingli than the Franciscan’s taking coins from people who had no idea what they were doing, a clear echo of Martin Luther’s response to Johann Tetzel. The papacy, allied with the Swiss and a major employer of mercenaries, did not want another fight along the lines of the events in Wittenberg, and Sanson was recalled to Rome. Zwingli’s protest had been well received by the reform-minded bishop of Constance and Pope Leo X, and he remained on close terms with the bishop’s adviser, Johannes Fabri (1478–1541), with whom he continued to correspond until as late as October 1520.20 Their connection is all the more intriguing in light of Fabri’s prominent role in the process against Luther.
Canon Konrad Hofmann (1454–1525) had supported the priest’s appointment, but the unfiltered attacks on abuses in Church and society proved too much to stomach, even for a reform-minded cleric.21 In 1522, he provided a sense of Zwingli’s outrages, and his complaint offers us the best evidence of what the people’s priest was preaching. In sermons on the gospels and epistles, he held the lives of the people, clergy and magistrates up to the standard of the Bible. For Hofmann, however, Zwingli’s intentions were subversive.22 The canon charged the priest with demeaning the fathers of the Church and declaring that ecclesiastical laws had no validity, since Zwingli argued that the laws of the Church should be submitted to the judgement of scripture. He attacked the morals of the clergy, denied purgatory, rejected veneration of the saints as having no biblical warrant, and assured the faithful that unbaptized babies were not damned. Perhaps most controversially, Zwingli declared that the pious Swiss Confederates should refuse to serve any foreign prince, whether the French king, the German emperor or the pope. According to Hofmann, the preacher brought not good news, but spite and polemic, and was dividing the community.23 Hofmann and Zwingli agreed that Church and society should be reformed, but they parted company on the nature of true faith. The senior canon believed that the Church was to be restored and improved, while Zwingli was openly advocating binding reform of the Church with social and political questions.
Zwingli’s sermons had an immediate effect. His attack on the morals of the clergy also brought into the line of fire the patrician families of the city, with whom the senior clerics were closely connected. These families formed the core of the Small Council, where resistance to Zwingli was most pronounced. Hofmann’s objections represented not only the clerical elite, but also families of the noble and merchant class. But matters went further. Zwingli’s attack on religious houses also cut close to the bone: the monasteries of the city and rural areas were occupied, and often led, by members of the leading families, which depended on these offices for a rich seam of income. Zwingli posed a danger to this class beyond the purely religious, for his attack on the mercenary service and pensions also made public the simmering dispute over mercenary service and the receipt of pensions from France and Rome. His incendiary preaching threatened many in the higher echelons of Zurich society, and through Hofmann their displeasure was voiced.24 Bullinger recounted how Zwingli’s preaching against pensions and mercenaries stirred up fierce opposition, and he was branded a heretic by prominent Zurichers. These people, Bullinger added balefully, had not previously been interested in religion, but had been outraged by the threat to their pockets. The matter was not about the faith, Bullinger concluded, but about the purse.25
Zwingli, however, was not an easy target. He had been brought to the city by the anti-French faction in Zurich, including the Röist family, and he held their support. The people’s priest had influential supporters, such as Cardinal Schiner, who saw him as an important player in the papal campaign against the king of France. Schiner, who had good relations with Zurich, was a powerful backer of the priest, though he would die before Zwingli came to espouse his more radical reforms.26 In 1520, Zwingli was still seen as loyal to Rome (from which he continued to receive a pension), and that insulated him against criticism. Inside the city, his preaching led to the formation of a circle of friends who shared his attachment to scripture, his evident patriotism and his attacks on the clergy.27 In the years 1519–1520, Zwingli still separated the corruption of the Church from any attack on Rome (in contrast to Luther, who was excommunicated in January 1521), and also made clear that religious change involved the civic magistrates, who were responsible for the spiritual health of the community. Rome’s need for Zurich provided the crucial space for Zwingli to preach.
Although he preached on highly sensitive subjects, in his first few years in Zurich Zwingli did not much engage in either domestic or foreign politics. He showed little interest in becoming involved in the governing of the city. His focus was elsewhere: promoting his Erasmian pacifism, with its rejection of military conflict. Zurich must be armed, he argued, but only in order to maintain a policy of neutrality. He opposed all martial alliances, a position that must have disappointed even his supporters. Zurich was an ambitious city that looked to extend its influence over the eastern part of the Swiss Confederation, and to do so would require force. When Zwingli preached in 1521 against an alliance with the papacy, he was largely ignored.28
He had his critics, and Zwingli knew it, writing to Myconius that ‘if I should please men, as Paul says, I would not be a servant of Christ’.29 In November 1519, he further remarked to Myconius that he had to defend himself from accusations that he was an agent of Cardinal Schiner, the pope’s representative.30 He acknowledged that his reputation was spreading in Swiss lands, and enjoined Myconius to defend him. Zwingli boasted that his success had been remarkable and that there were many who had been won over to the gospel: ‘For we are not alone: at Zurich more than two thousand children and adults are already sucking spiritual milk, and will soon be ready for solid food, while others starve.’31 By the priest’s perhaps optimistic reckoning, almost a third of the city supported his preaching. Zwingli’s allusion to milk and solid food referred to the fifth chapter of Hebrews and provides us with a glimpse of how he saw his ministry: although his statements could be brusque, his goal was to move the people gently toward God’s Word.
Sensitive to the question of pensions, Zwingli relinquished his pension from the papacy at some point during 1520. The move may have had something to do with the Luther case in Germany, where the Wittenberg reformer was being excommunicated by Rome. In Zurich and the Swiss Confederation, Zwingli’s preaching was being termed ‘Lutheran’, and he was seen as sympathetic to the German, an association that made the Zurich Council nervous. Accusations of heresy imperilled commercial activity and stirred up social unrest, and pressure was brought to bear on the Swiss Diet to enforce the condemnation of Luther. It was crucial to demonstrate that Zwingli was not a supporter of Luther, and a civic mandate was issued to offer that fig leaf – whatever the truth.32
Yet the combination of influential supporters and the papacy’s unwillingness to alienate Zurich led to further advances. Zwingli had been careful never to cast his preaching as a threat to the magistrates, but rather to present an open invitation for them to lead reform. Furthermore, the growing number of his supporters gave him influence among the political leaders. Dividends came in the autumn of 1520, when the Council supported his preaching from the Bible, clearly asserting its right to decide on the matter of religion. The magistrates waded deeper into the waters of reform. Singing of the Ave Maria ceased in the Grossmünster – an evident sign of Zwingli’s influence – and the monetary resources for the devotion were redirected to the city’s hospitals.33
‘DEATH IS AT THE DOOR’
In 1519, the chronicler Johannes Stumpf recorded the onslaught of plague: ‘At this time a swift and horrible pestilence reigned in all German countries and also affected a remarkable number of people within the states of the Confederation in a short time.’34 In Schaffhausen, out of a population of approximately 4,000 souls, the city lost 3,000. Zurich lost about a third of its inhabitants. As the shadow of death was cast over the urban and rural areas, Zwingli was at the baths in Pfäfers in the mountains, near Bad Ragaz – today the site of a famous psychiatric clinic. On hearing the news, he hurried to Zurich, believing it his duty as a priest to be with the people in their suffering and final hours. Plague was no respecter of sacred office, and in September Zwingli was struck down. Friends and family had a strong presentiment of the priest’s impending death. We know from a letter that by 6 November the Zurich preacher was recovering, but he still needed to convalesce through the winter and into 1520.35 In response to his near-death experience, he composed his ‘Plague Song’, an astonishingly moving account of despair, resignation and recovery, and a hymn to the Christian’s dependence on the goodness of God.
Composed for solo voice and sung during Zwingli’s life in household worship, the text reveals a Christ-centred spirituality rooted in scripture, with few traces of traditional religion and no reference to either Church or sacraments:
Help, Lord God, help
In this trouble.
I think Death is at the door.
Stand before me, Christ;
for You have overcome him.
To You I cry.36
The opening petition was neither to Mary nor to the saints, but to ‘Lord God’ and his son, Christ, who alone protects as mediator. Alluding to Romans 9:21 – where Paul asks: ‘Does not the potter have the right to make out of the same lump of clay some pottery for special purposes and some for common use?’ – Zwingli declared: ‘Your vessel am I; To make or break altogether. For, if You take away my spirit from this earth, You do it that nothing shall be worse for me.’ God’s chosen are wholly dependent on him as the creator of the vessel. The disease laid waste to the body, creating unbearable pain and putting to flight all trust in human effort:
Console me, Lord God, console me.
Pain and fear seize
my soul and body.
Come to me then,
with Your grace, O my only
consolation.
It will surely save
everyone, who
his heart’s desire
and hope sets
On You . . .
In the midst of agony, the tongue cannot speak and resistance to the ravages of the devil is no longer possible. Only God’s abiding presence could bring relief. His divine love alone brings healing: ‘Sound, Lord God, sound! I think I am already coming back.’ Restored by Christ the physician, and consoled by the God who does not abandon, the sufferer finds the afflictions of body and soul overcome. For this there can be only one response – thanksgiving:
Yes, if it please You,
that no spark of sin
rule me longer on earth.
Then my lips must
Your praise and teaching
proclaim more
than ever before,
However it may go,
in simplicity and with no danger.
The ‘Plague Song’ has long remained something of a mystery, as it cannot be dated with any certainty: scholarly speculation has placed its origins between late 1519 and 1525, the year of the Reformation in Zurich.37 Whatever its dating, the song reflected the state of Zwingli’s soul in 1520, once he had emerged from imminent death. The stirring, affective language was wholly in line with his 1516 conversion to the gospel, for it was in biblical words that he found expression for his song of mercy and redemption. The unanticipated recovery was God’s purpose, and Zwingli was his agent; his lips were to ‘praise and teach’. The mortal body must die, yet the promise of eternal life brings strength, notwithstanding the ‘spite and boasting’ of the world. Without God’s grace in Christ ‘nothing can be perfect’. Zwingli drew no connection between bodily health and spiritual blessings, for he was firmly persuaded that he would die and enter bliss; but his recovery convinced him that he had survived for God’s service, his prophetic office in Zurich.
WHEAT AND THE TARES
By the summer of 1520, the intensity of Zwingli’s focus on Christ alone, together with his growing concern about the failure of anticipated church reform, had found darker expression. The ‘Plague Song’ was Zwingli’s plaintive call for divine intervention from an abyss of extreme anxiety and spiritual despair. He had survived, and for a purpose; but he awoke to an unrepentant world. In March 1520, Zwingli wrote to Myconius a lengthy letter about God’s angels, to whom he attributed divine healing from the plague. After speaking of how Origen, Jerome and Augustine accounted for the good and fallen angels, Zwingli observed that it pleased God to demonstrate his love and care to the faithful through the appearance of his messengers. Myconius replied that he was much pained by the constant attacks on Zwingli, observing that perhaps it was on account of the wine he was drinking in Zurich that his friend’s voice, once so weak, now thundered through the Confederation.38
In 1520, Zwingli wrote of the powers of the world arrayed against renewal and learning, forming the ‘constant enemy of the truth that itself cannot be conquered’. Were Zwingli’s words a spiritual groan or a battle cry? His language was unambiguous:
I say all this in order to hasten the battle that is already under way and hurries towards its end, to win for Christ as many soldiers as possible who will then fight boldly for him. Admonish them long and hard, so that the more cruelly they are persecuted, the less shamefully they will respond. For this I will tell you plainly: just as the Church was born through blood, only through blood can she be renewed.39
It would take many personifications of Hercules to cleanse the Augean stables, and for their labours they would be persecuted. Zwingli referenced Luther as a prime example of those who would be handled unjustly, and declared his own readiness to die for the faith. Persecution is the fire spoken of by Jesus: it tests the faithful and proves their perseverance. Zwingli’s pessimism reflected a significant theological shift away from sanguine hopes invested in the revival of learning as the key to the renewal of piety and toward a more radical trust in the will of God acting through Christ.40 It was also the beginning of his martial language.
Drawing on the parable of the wheat and tares found in Matthew 13, he had begun to understand the world in terms of supporters and opponents of Christ. His interpretation of the parable, drawn from Augustine, saw the Church as a mixed body of believers and unbelievers – the wheat and tares – who would be separated only by God’s judgement at the end of time. Indeed, the role of Augustine, whose works Zwingli read carefully in Einsiedeln and Zurich, was crucial. Zwingli possessed the 1506 complete edition, produced in Basel, and his marginal notes are an invaluable source on his developing thought. Through his reading of the North African father’s City of God, Zwingli came to think of history as the ongoing struggle between good and evil, a reality played out in the lives of the faithful. Augustine also instructed him in the role of law in the life of the justified Christian. Zwingli rarely named his intellectual mentors, but later, in 1527, he recalled the transforming influence of Augustine’s commentary on John.41
While we have no evidence that Martin Luther influenced Zwingli directly, the latter certainly regarded Luther as a supporter of the humanist vision of church reform, and saw the fierce attacks on the German as a threat to the renewal of Christ, the gospel and true learning. In other words, he had seen Luther through the lens of Erasmus. That would begin to change in the summer of 1520, when the papal bull Exsurge domine appeared, threatening Luther with excommunication. Zwingli was now persuaded that Rome was the enemy of reform. And if Rome persecuted Luther, might he be next?42
No bolts from the blue, but rather a confluence of forces brought a turning point in the second half of 1520. The dangers posed to hoped-for reforms by the Luther case, a growing pessimism about the willingness of the Church to effect change, and his reading of Augustine all moved Zwingli toward a more radical assessment of the world around him. The battle for the gospel pitted the forces of Christ against darkness; God alone was the author of change; and little was to be expected of human efforts. The great Dutchman remained the towering influence, but Zwingli’s perspective had shifted. His focus was now on an all-powerful God leading the renewal of the Church in this world, which would remain mired in conflict with darkness until the end of time. For the rest of his life, Zwingli would view the gospel in terms of a seismic Pauline struggle between light and darkness. The opponents would vary – from Rome to the Habsburgs and Luther; but the conviction never ebbed.
From his days in Glarus, Zwingli was well aware that mercenary service often left survivors unable to work and in penury, and villages and towns full of widows and fatherless children. Additionally, begging was everywhere in the fetid conditions of the cities. In drawing attention in his sermons to the most vulnerable in society, Zwingli was directly entering into another already disputed matter: who should tend to the poor? Traditionally, the religious houses, guilds and hospitals had cared for those suffering most; but in a mandate of September 1520, the Zurich magistrates took matters into their own hands by establishing their own system of poor relief, a position that Zwingli supported, but by no means initiated.43 He justified from the pulpit the intentions of the rulers. The mandate enhanced the control of the ruling Council over the ecclesiastical affairs of the city, but the policy also changed. The decree distinguished between two types of poor: those who genuinely suffered ‘through fire, war, crop failure, drought or a variety of illnesses’ and those who simply were lazy and indolent.44 In other words, the magistrates separated the deserving and undeserving poor. Begging was permitted, but the community was to provide for the destitute through common collections, taken at the door of the city’s churches by ‘worthy, pious women’.45 Central to the question of destitution and poverty was the burden of the tithe, to which we shall return. The poor loomed large in the reforming impulses of Zwingli and his earliest supporters. The wealth represented by the Grossmünster and other civic churches, along with the religious houses, was an affront to the teaching of gospel. Care for the destitute, fired by sermons decrying injustice, would lead to iconoclastic attacks on the symbols of Catholic worship. Poor relief was a mark of a renewed society.
FRANCE AND ROME
An early sign that Zwingli was winning influential supporters within the city came on 29 April 1521, when he was elected to a canonry in the Grossmünster, on the death of an elderly incumbent. He now belonged to the leading clerical body in Zurich. Additionally, the position bestowed citizenship of the city. Zwingli’s election confirmed the esteem in which he was held by influential clerics in the city, and from the Grossmünster a circle of humanist-minded friends had begun to form, including Erasmus Schmid, Heinrich Engelhart (people’s priest in the Fraumünster) and Heinrich Utinger, with whom Zwingli had corresponded and who became godfather to Zwingli’s first child.
In May 1521, Zurich refused to join the alliance with France that had been concluded by the rest of the Confederation. The Swiss had signed an agreement by which they would provide between 6,000 and 16,000 mercenaries, in return for payment of 25,000 crowns.46 Zwingli was not the principal force behind the rejection, but he gave it his full support. The refusal to join France stemmed from stiff political resistance within the city, where Zwingli was a significant but not singular voice. His views were not so much against France, but against all forms of mercenary service and foreign wars.
Not only did the magistrates reject the French alliance, but they forbade Zurichers from service in any foreign army. This was also bad news for Rome, with which they had had an agreement since 1515. The city was politically isolated by the decision, and the opprobrium of the fellow Confederates was fierce. Although anti-mercenary sentiments were to be found throughout the Confederation, the opportunity was a lifeline for many of the members, especially the poorer central ones. This reality was never accepted by Zwingli. The intertwining of calls to end the profitable trade in soldiers with calls for gospel religion was creating a new dynamic. Those who had most to gain from mercenary service were hardened against the evangelical reforms led by Zwingli, while in Zurich, the rejection of the French alliance was the first sign that religious reforms in the city were beginning to determine external affairs. Yet the connection with Rome had served the evangelical cause well in the city: the papacy was unwilling to move directly against Zwingli and his allies while it still needed Zurich’s force. The effect of the new policy was powerful: in January 1522, the Council forbade the receipt of pensions and participation in mercenary recruitment on pain of fines and banishment.47 Those who persisted could lose their citizenship. With Zwingli’s continued support from the pulpit and in print, the magistrates maintained the pressure on supporters of the financial and military arrangements until, by the late 1520s, they were largely suppressed.48
One of the most remarkable transitions that Zwingli made in his first years was from partisan of Rome to opponent of the papacy. No doubt the Luther case had influenced his sentiments, but he was also appalled by Rome’s cynical politics. At first, he had tried to separate his attacks on the Catholic faith and clergy from his attitude to Rome itself. But by 1522, that effort had come to an end. And Zurich was done with the pope, whose refusal to pay for the city’s soldiers he received stirred anti-papal sentiments in the city that greatly aided Zwingli and his followers. Zurich recalled its troops in January and issued a mandate forbidding any further service. It would be the last time Zurich sent its soldiers to serve a foreign master. Rome was no longer a significant player in events in Zurich, and Zwingli’s reforms now depended on the good will of the magistrates.
Rome needed Zurich’s military support, but it also wanted to be rid of Zwingli, whose preaching was increasingly becoming an irritant. Efforts were made to discredit him with accusations that he had been more a papal agent than a loyal Swiss. Those hostile to him within Zurich were in close contact with Catholic leaders in Lucerne, Basel and Bern, and numerous plans were hatched to force his expulsion from the city by traducing his name. More draconian methods were also envisaged. In January 1522, the Council heard the case of Kärli Köchli, a dishwasher at the Dominican house, who boasted in a tavern while drunk that he had come to Zurich to kill Zwingli. The Council took the threat (not the first) seriously, and Zwingli was provided with an armed guard.49
STAGED PROVOCATION
As soon as Zwingli arrived in Zurich, he sought out the company of others. He became part of a circle of friends committed to reading Greek works, such as Homer and the tragedies, as well as the New Testament. A network of friends and supporters took shape, encouraged by the preaching, as well as by the flow of new ideas into the city from the printing world of Basel. His advocacy of the Bible spurred groups of laymen and women to meet in homes to read scripture, pray and sing.50 For the most part, these gatherings were independent of the clergy, led by educated laymen known as ‘readers’.51 The lay members were moved by Zwingli’s preaching, but they also formulated their own ideas. From these early groups would emerge figures such as Konrad Grebel and Felix Manz, who became friends, but were later bitter opponents of Zwingli. Many of these men belonged to a younger generation. Christoph Froschauer (1490–1564), originally from Bavaria, had arrived in Zurich in 1515/1516, becoming a citizen in 1519; and at an early stage he was already printing both the works of Luther and the German translations of Erasmus’ biblical paraphrases.52 His home became one such meeting place.
A group of some 12 friends, including Zwingli, met on 9 March 1522 in Froschauer’s house. That they gathered was not remarkable; but what they ate changed the reform cause – they sat down to a meal of sausages in Lent. The event was not the first flagrant breach of the Church’s rules on abstinence from meat during the penitential season, for earlier the same day a small group had assembled at the house of Hans Kloter to eat soup with wine, bread and eggs. That gathering, which included members of the city’s Large Council, had then moved to Froschauer’s home, where the printer’s wife, Elsie Flammer, had prepared sausages. At this point, Zwingli and others joined the company.53 The presence of a canon of the Grossmünster offered a degree of unofficial sanction of the flouting of the church laws.
Although Zwingli sat with the others, he did not eat the meat. Why he did not is not entirely clear, but his abstinence cannot be attributed to either timidity or fear of controversy. He was fully aware of the implications and that his presence would ensure scandal. The sausage-eating incident was no private matter. It was a well-staged provocation, intended to turn Zwingli’s preaching into action by flaunting unbiblical practices. It did not matter whether Zwingli ate the sausages or not: he was fully complicit, encouraging the breaking of the Lenten fast.
The desired effect was immediate. Senior church officials were appalled and called for the offenders to be punished, while sympathizers were emboldened to hold their own meals. The choice of breaking Lenten strictures by eating was not coincidental; food was closely connected to the associated matter of poor relief. The magistrates, some of whom had been present, were not much inclined to act. A half-hearted investigation led to no further action. As host of the meal, the printer Froschauer appeared before the magistrates to claim that
I believe the Holy Scriptures, which say that a Christian life is not dependent upon food or drink. Indeed, it is not dependent on external works, but only on true faith, trust, and love so that we may all live simply, friendlily, justly and truly with one another.54
The printer’s words were those of Zwingli, certainly heard from the pulpit and likely at the table during the meal. A couple of weeks later, the priest preached on the freedom of Christians to eat what they wished. His sermon was a public justification of fast-breaking. He defended the actions of the fast-breakers, portraying them as honest Christian men.55 Referring to Paul’s arguments as to whether the ancient Christians should have eaten food consecrated to pagan idols, Zwingli came to the crux of the matter: in terms of the faith,
food is neither good nor bad in itself . . . but it is necessary and therefore truly good. And it can never become bad, except as it is used immoderately; for a certain time does not make it bad, but rather the abuse of men when they use it without moderation and belief.56
A printed version of Zwingli’s sermon appeared in April 1522, offering his first major statement on the freedom of the Christian conscience and echoing the teaching of Martin Luther.57 It also marked a further step away from Erasmus, who had also criticized fasting: unlike his mentor, who suggested that reform should be in the hands of church leaders, Zwingli advocated that the magistrates should ban fasting, and that no Christian was bound to the unscriptural practice. Zwingli had deftly woven together social reform and Christian freedom, while attacking the Church for encroaching on the liberty promised by the gospel.
By pouring oil on the fire, Zwingli sought to draw the reluctant magistrates into the quarrel. He must have been satisfied. His opponents responded quickly: some spoke of Zwingli as a heretic who should be driven from the city, while others claimed that he brought only ‘hate’ and ‘jealousy’.58 The Council appointed a commission, which consisted of Zwingli, together with Felix Fry, dean of the Grossmünster chapter, and two other priests. That he was appointed to investigate himself was a sign of his secure position. The outcome was a partial victory: while the fast was deemed not biblical, it was to be continued in the interests of preserving peace in the city.59 The instigators of the provocation were not to be punished, but were instead admonished to go to their confessors. Having dismissed the saints as intercessors, Zwingli had now opened another crack in the wall of medieval piety. The sausage incident was the first clear evidence of growing support for reform among the laity, as well as among some clergy and politicians.
The Council’s appointment of Zwingli to the commission and its unwillingness to punish the fast-breakers were all the more remarkable as the church hierarchy had not been idle. Even before Zwingli’s sermon was printed, the bishop of Constance had sent an investigative delegation to Zurich, where it remained from 7 to 9 April 1522, holding meetings with various ecclesiastical and civic leaders. Zwingli prepared a written account of the discussions.60 The delegation understood the delicacy of the matter and wished to express the bishop’s displeasure, while not offending the Zurich magistrates. Those magistrates, however, were not united. Many, particularly those on the Small Council, wanted Zwingli to have no role in the discussions and for him to be punished for insolence.61 For his part, the priest lobbied hard to meet the delegation and explain his views; in the end, his supporters on the Large Council made this possible.
For the first time, as Zwingli described it to a friend, he had been on an equal footing with the bishop’s authorities. The magistrates had given him a new status, as well as a stage for his convictions. He offered a rather wry account:
His [the bishop’s representative’s] whole speech was violent and full of rage and arrogance, though he took pains to hide the fact that he had any quarrel with me. For he avoided mentioning my name as scrupulously as if it were sacred, though meanwhile there was nothing that he didn’t say against me. When the tragedian had finished shrieking out his part, I stepped forward, feeling that it was unbecoming and disgraceful to allow a speech which might do so much damage to go unrebutted, especially as I saw from their sighs and their pale and silent faces that some of the feebler priests who had recently been won for Christ had been troubled by the tirade.62
In contrast to the histrionics of the bishop’s man, Zwingli portrayed himself as a humble priest:
‘My Lord suffragan’ (and in this I made an indiscreet and ignorant enough blunder; for they tell me I should have said ‘most merciful Lord’, but being unskilled in polished ways I take hold like a clodhopper) ‘and fellow-ecclesiastics,’ I said, ‘wait, I pray, until I make explanation in my own behalf.’
The conscious self-deprecation could not hide a confidence that enabled him to speak to the officials of the true ancient faith as a prophet calling for reform. He declaimed with conviction and attacked his enemies, an assault leavened with humour: his opponents, he observed, were able to ‘see how clearly I handled the sacred writings’. He concluded the letter with a marvellous self-assessment: ‘These are the wounds I received and inflicted in the assembly of the ecclesiastics and councillors; these the means with which I ran to the aid of the feeble.’
Bishop Hugo von Hohenlandenberg, friend of Erasmus and himself an advocate of reform, was deeply troubled by what was transpiring in Zurich, and he remained resolved not to allow the heresy that was engulfing German lands to spread to his diocese. He wrote to the Grossmünster chapter, citing reports that
all through Germany people of Christ cry out day and night that they have been wrongfully oppressed until now by the heads of the Church with hard and burdensome regulations, observances, and ceremonials, and as a result such persons are attempting with all their might to cast off and do away with such ceremonials.63
He cautioned Zwingli to ‘abide in the unity of Holy Mother Church and in obedience to those set over you, and not to cast away hastily the ceremonies of the Church introduced by our forefathers’.64 On 9 May, he wrote to his whole diocese that the faithful were to stand by the teachings and practices of the Church. The statement reached Zurich on 24 May and proved a catalyst for Zwingli’s increasingly bold statements – not only about fasting, but now also about clerical celibacy. And with the arrival in Zurich of his close friend Leo Jud, who had become people’s priest in the city church of Saint Peter, Zwingli now had a powerful ally.
TESTED PATIENCE
Zwingli was playing a complex game in which he attempted to balance provocation with tact. Although driven by his theological views and profound convictions, he knew that rash action could be disastrous. In many respects he was struggling with his own impulses, which were to attack. His opponents were not simply corrupt and venal. The tensions instead surrounded a clash of views of reform: was change to come from within the institution or be pressed from without? Zwingli wrote to Jud in May 1522 that one must do less than one wants in order to achieve a greater result.65 Zwingli was by no means the only advocate of reforming the Church. Many of his colleagues were passionate about change, while at the same time disturbed and even angered by his assault on traditional piety and authority. Zwingli’s radical teaching inspired many of his followers; but as he fully understood, their zeal posed a considerable risk. Even though the Council had backed him several times, moving towards his position on the authority of scripture and the role of the magistrates in making decisions concerning the religious life of the city, the situation was precarious – and he knew it.
The Lenten protest and its largely favourable resolution emboldened Zwingli and his followers. In May, a group of Zwingli’s colleagues, many of whom had eaten the sausages, met at the home of patrician Konrad Grebel to plan an event to honour the reformer, who was returning from the baths at Baden, where he had undertaken a cure.66 Some 300–500 people were to be invited to an event intended less as a social gathering than as an expression of support for Zwingli, putting pressure on the magistrates to resist efforts by the bishop to quash the reforms. The size of the proposed assembly made the Council nervous, and the occasion was forbidden. The magistrates were concerned that the gathering would only encourage Zurich’s enemies to claim that the reforms were politically subversive. It is not clear whether Zwingli had any role in the plans, or even knew of them, but undoubtedly he was to be the centre of attention. The organizers’ purpose was to put pressure on the rulers to act with great speed in bringing about reform. Their impatience bordered on hostility, as Grebel articulated:
The Devil not only sits in the chambers, but he also sits among my lords. For one sits among my lords who has said, ‘the gospel should be preached in a cow’s ass’. And insofar as the lords do not allow the gospel to progress further, they will be destroyed.67
Grebel’s remarks suggest that, by the summer of 1522, some of Zwingli’s supporters were growing suspicious of his close alliance with the guilds and magistrates.
By June 1522, the priest’s increasingly vociferous critique of the veneration of saints was leading supporters to dare to interrupt the sermons of other priests and monks with catcalls. Grebel took the lead, but Zwingli himself shouted down a Franciscan preacher from Avignon, François Lambert, when the latter spoke in the Fraumünster: in the middle of Lambert’s sermon on Mary and the saints, Zwingli called out ‘Brother, you are in error!’ The overt offensiveness was a conscious strategy to force a public debate and keep up the pressure on the magistrates, and it succeeded.
A disputation was held in the city among the leading ecclesiastical figures to consider the preaching of the mendicants. The result was gratifying for Zwingli and his supporters. The Large Council issued a mandate declaring that the friars were to preach from scripture along the lines set down by the priest, abandoning the scholastic teachers.68 This time a delegation of magistrates had not only intervened directly in church matters, but had also ventured a judgement on a theological question. Their decree was limited to the mendicants, and was not a full endorsement of Zwingli’s preaching as normative for the Zurich Church, but the direction of events was evident. Zwingli had set the agenda for scriptural preaching, and his name was unmistakably identified with the evangelical cause. The Council, although divided on the question of Zwingli, had no desire to fall in step with the bishop, whose authority it had for years only nominally acknowledged. Zwingli’s first victory was in persuading Zurich’s rulers that questions of religion were in their hands and could be resolved locally. In an ensuing debate with Lambert over images in the Church, which took place before the Bürgermeister Marx Röist and senior officials, Zwingli made an astonishing statement: ‘In this city of Zurich I am bishop and priest.’69
MARRIAGE
By early July 1522, priestly celibacy had become the next point of conflict. For Zwingli, who openly admitted that he had not abstained from sex while in Glarus and Einsiedeln, the matter was deeply personal. More importantly, at some point in early 1522 he had secretly married Anna Reinhart, a young widow who had tended him when he nearly died of plague.70 To what extent they were able to keep their marriage hidden in crowded Zurich is not known, but Zwingli told only a few close friends. Anna was the daughter of an innkeeper in Zurich and had married Hans Meyer von Knonau against the wishes of the bridegroom’s father, who had cut him off from his inheritance. Knonau had died in 1517, leaving Anna with three children, one of whom, Gerold, was very close to Zwingli (and would die with his stepfather at the battle of Kappel in 1531). For a priest to cohabit with a woman was hardly unusual, but Zwingli and Anna claimed to be married, and that was another matter. They would not officially celebrate their marriage until April 1524, three months before the birth of their first child. Zwingli was the first of the Reformation leaders to marry – three years before Luther.
What took the edge off the demand for clerical marriage was the reality that throughout the German-speaking lands, and perhaps particularly in the diocese of Constance, the cohabitation of priests with women was almost universally accepted, even if the derogatory term ‘priest whore’ was widely used.71 Formally, church law had long proscribed what was in fact the reality. It has been reckoned that by the early 1520s there were about 1,300 children of priests in the diocese, and for each one the bishop collected money, known as a cradle tax, in order that they might be baptized and made legitimate.72
Together with 10 other priests, on 2 July 1522 Zwingli signed a petition requesting the abolition of celibacy, on the grounds that there was no basis in scripture for this manifestly unsustainable burden on the clergy.73 The petition presented was carefully timed for maximum impact, appearing in Latin and German to reach a wide audience beyond Zurich.74 Ever the tactician, Zwingli was learning the possibilities of printed media, as had Luther, and was mastering the benefits of striking first, to put his opponents on the defensive. The German edition came off the press only two weeks after the Latin original, signalling Zwingli’s intention to carry out this fight in public.75 The German version, with the title ‘Friendly Request and Admonition Addressed to the Confederates’, was addressed to the Swiss Confederates, not the bishop, and sought to remove the celibacy debate from the ecclesiastical hierarchy and place it in the hands of sympathetic temporal rulers. Zwingli framed the argument along lines similar to Luther’s ‘Letter to the German Nobility’ of 1520, by encouraging the magistrates to embrace church reform and free priests from burdened consciences.
The ‘Friendly Request’ broadened the vision of reform. Christian freedom was released from human rules and regulations that deadened the spirit of the Word. It was God’s will that men and women should marry and not allow their sexual appetites free rein, an inevitable consequence of forcing clergy to abstain from licit, divinely sanctioned sexual relations.76 Celibacy could not be the marker of priestly identity as members of a higher spiritual order, superior to the laity. Marriage was the natural order: ‘If we run through the whole of the New Testament, we find nowhere anything that favours free concubinage, but everything in approval of marriage.’77 Bishop Hugo von Hohenlandenberg was not to be moved, and in early August 1522 he issued a mandate requiring the Zurich Council to proceed against the agitators. His request fell on deaf ears, but it was clear that Zwingli was reaching beyond the city to a wider audience in the Confederation.
‘IT WILL KILL US’
Although the benches of the Large Council held considerable support for Zwingli, external affairs and prudence dictated caution. Zwingli had lent his voice in Zurich to those opposed to an alliance with France, but the city was isolated as the Swiss Confederates joined the French king. The result was disaster for the Confederates. In the spring of 1522, as Zwingli was engaging in his first open debates, the French army with its Swiss mercenaries was decisively defeated at the battle of Bicocca by imperial and papal forces. Having nearly revolted because they had not been paid by their French employers, the Swiss had launched into battle only to be slaughtered by cannon fire as they sank into a quagmire. The traditional formations of pikemen proved ineffective against heavy artillery and Spanish arquebuses. The surviving Swiss soldiers turned tail and fled home, far from their glory days on Renaissance battlefields.78
Deep resentment at the supposed mendacity of their French masters led to renewed debate about the willingness of the Swiss to serve the king. Two days before the issue was discussed at a local assembly in Schwyz on 18 May, Zwingli had written to the Confederates. He spoke with a prophetic, patriotic voice warning of divine judgement. Moral decay and devastation of the land were the consequences of the people’s departure from the virtues of their forefathers, he insisted.79 The piety of the traditional Swiss, who had stood with God the creator and his son, Jesus Christ, contrasted starkly with the rapacious immorality manifested in mercenary service and pensions. The perils of foreign alliances for the Swiss were incalculable. Above all, war brought God’s opprobrium upon the people of the Confederation and endangered the Swiss alliance itself. ‘Protect yourselves from the money of foreign leaders!’, warned Zwingli. ‘It will kill us.’80 He gave no quarter to the crucial economic role that mercenary service played in the mountainous Confederates.81
Zwingli interwove divine promise with the innate virtues of his kinsmen, a glorious past written in the annals of history. Quoting Paul (Romans 8:31) – ‘If God is for us, who can be against us?’ – he linked the natural defences of his land with God’s protection: ‘The Rhine is now our border security . . . Think on the earlier Swiss Confederation, think of how God helped our honest forefathers in the same way that he had the Israelites.’82 Zwingli’s warning to the Schwyzer was no pacifist tract. War in defence of the fatherland was wholly justified, as it had been in the Old Testament. The banishment of mercenary service and pensions was essential to the renewal of the whole of society.
Zwingli’s brutal and coruscating ‘Apologeticus archeteles’ appeared in August 1522, as his ‘first and last word’. Heinrich Bullinger would later record that the work summarized what Zwingli had been preaching since his arrival in 1519.83 The text was polemical and artful, coloured at moments with humour, and remains one of Zwingli’s most compelling cases for evangelical reform. Penned in haste, it assumed the tone of offended honour and righteous indignation following the episcopal investigation of the reform movement in Zurich.
Are you mightier than God, Zwingli mocked his Catholic opponents, wiser than God,
or just so stupid, that you think you are going to persuade consciences free in Christ not to regard as lawful what they know is lawful by the divine law, even though you shout about it till you are hoarse?
Switching metaphors, he threatened:
I shall certainly not spare your names but shall challenge you by name to single combat as Menelaos challenged Paris, and if you scorn me so far as to refuse to come forth, I will proclaim your reluctance to the whole world.84
Once more the prophet saw the need to enter into battle.
Zwingli, in his own estimation, stood for the pure preaching of the gospel, at one moment a Peter, then a Paul, enabled by the Spirit to separate biblical truth from the inventions and pretensions of human fantasy. He pleaded in the dock as a man wronged by his opponents, traduced by those unable to see the truth of the gospel. The Zurich priest did not recoil from advising the bishop on how to do his job:
You should therefore be wary and wise, and pray to the Lord to guide your path, and, to make an end finally, you should take it in good part if something be taken from you to be added to Christ. For thus you will make the House of Hohenlandenberg most illustrious and your own soul most acceptable to Christ.85
Against the sophistication of the episcopal court with its misconceived nostrums, Zwingli enjoyed fashioning a humble, rural background, as a rusticus or country bumpkin who was ‘preaching the gospel with such energy and risk of harm’.86 Having earlier spoken with the words of the exilic prophet Ezekiel, Zwingli shifted his self-portrayal to the prophets Amos and John the Baptist, outsiders and men of the people. Erasmus had predicted how the simple of faith would confound the doctors and bishops. Zwingli was extremely proud of his Toggenburg heritage and frequently referred to the virtues of the mountain peoples. It should be no surprise that God would raise up a prophet from among them to strip away the hierarchical pretensions of his accusers, who for all their privileges raged against the wind ‘urging the unity of the Church, when your words breathe nothing but rebellion, uproar, war, destruction and whatever belongs to it’. Zwingli rightly sensed that ‘it is absolutely clear that you [Bishop Hugo] are aiming at me alone’.87 And in response to the bishop’s accusations, he asserted his prophetic calling: ‘God spoke by my mouth when I was setting forth His Word.’88
Both parties – Zwingli and Bishop Hugo – claimed the other was of a different and deceitful spirit, employing God’s words to their own ends. Zwingli’s accusatory words of wilful distortion of scripture could have been hurled back at him by his opponents: ‘Therefore if I have anywhere handled the scriptures improperly, you ought to have pointed that out. That you have never done.’ Zwingli repeatedly asserted that he had ‘handled the scriptures according to Christ’s intentions’ and that the bishop’s men should yield to his views. Otherwise, their perdition was certain. And with further mockery, he promised them the fate that had befallen Julius Caesar:
when he saw that he could not escape death, he took care to gather the edge of his garment about him that he might fall in a suitable manner. So should you, now that you see ceremonials tottering and almost ready to fall, strive to cause them to fall as fitly as possible – that is, not let them hold on so obstinately.89
The ‘Apologeticus archeteles’ bore no message of rapprochement. A boundary had been crossed and Zwingli recognized that return would require full recantation. By 1522, he had separated himself from the church hierarchy and the papacy – and increasingly also from his beloved Erasmus, whose conciliatory language he had set aside. He stood charged with heresy and was unrepentant. In the eyes of his opponents, the rulers of Zurich were complicit in Zwingli’s errors, and thereby placed the Confederation in great danger. The demands for reform went beyond anything Bishop Hugo of Constance could possibly accept; there was no path to reconciliation.
Zwingli sent the text to Erasmus in the hopeful expectation of approval, but the Dutchman was in a difficult place. He had sought to improve his relations with Bishop Hugo, who was not averse to church reform. Erasmus stayed up all night to respond and had a warning:
I beseech you by the glory of the gospel – which I know you have at heart above all else, as all of us are bound to do who are enlisted under Christ’s name – if you publish anything in the future, it is a serious task, and you must take it seriously. Do not forget modesty and the prudence demanded by the gospel. Consult scholarly friends before you issue anything to the public. I fear that defence of yours may land you in great peril, and even do harm to the Church. In the little I have read there was much on which I wanted to see you put right. I do not doubt that with your second sense you will take this in good part; for I write with the warmest affection for you, and late at night. Farewell.90
Zwingli the provocateur was the recipient of considerable abuse, and it was taking its toll. In August he reflected to Oswald Myconius: ‘If I did not rightly see that the Lord watches over the city, I would have long ago abandoned the rudder.’91
The following spring, Zwingli shared a similar reflection with two other friends. To Johannes Oecolampadius in Basel he defended himself:
I have no fear, as I know full well what sort of irreproachable life I have led . . . Zwingli has done nothing for which he must render account and from which he would not be set free by an honourable judge.92
To Berchtold Haller in Bern he pleaded his case: ‘I do not gainsay that weak men here and there insult me when they unworthily pounce, when I believe that I have done the best I could and deserved the best.’93
FRIENDSHIPS
From his early days in Basel, when he sat on a bench alongside Leo Jud listening to Thomas Wyttenbach, the teacher he claimed had introduced him to the power of the gospel, Zwingli had loved his friends and was deeply loyal to them.94 They reciprocated his affection and trust. His concept of friendship was rooted in a theology of divine human reconciliation, manifested in God’s will. Friendship formed part of the order of creation. There had been friendship among humanity’s first parents in the garden, and it was a casualty of the fall. Christ offers humanity true friendship: ‘being human, he promises friendship and intimacy, which is the common bond of relationship. What then can he refuse who is a brother and sharer of our weakness?’95
A poignant expression of Zwingli’s ideal of friendship is located in his 1523 dedication of ‘On Divine and Human Righteousness’ to Niklaus von Wattenwyl, dean of the Bern Münster. ‘That I, dear brother,’ Zwingli wrote,
am so bold as to address you in an open letter, although I have no particular friendship with you before this, comes simply from one Christ who makes us brothers and members of one body. For as the heathen have it in a proverb, ‘The good join with the good unsolicited’, so also a Christian has every right to seek the friendship of other Christians since they are of one God, one baptism, and one faith; one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all. (Ephesians 4:5)96
In reality, friendship was difficult to maintain in light of the pressing daily demands. In December 1525, Zwingli wrote to the anxious Ambrosius Blarer (1492–1564) in Constance, offering a striking (if somewhat harsh) view of his understanding of their friendship. He acknowledged Blarer’s complaint that he had written two letters to the Zurich reformer without a response. Zwingli believed that he had written back, but it was possible that he had ‘deceived himself’ and had formulated in his head what he would say without actually putting pen to paper. Many letters had to be written in great haste, and so Blarer should not take it amiss if a mistake had been made, particularly as Zwingli was constantly overwhelmed by work and unrest. Friendship entailed commitment to the gospel modelled by the disciples of Christ.
For I am not in the habit to seek friends casually. I note whether they have the same faith as I proclaim it. I do not seek to become their personal friends. I know that I am dear to them when I without deceit declare the truth. More than sufficient for me is the reward of the Spirit. As soon as I see that one is in possession of the Spirit that is friendship enough for me. So I need you only out of faith in Christ to judge your work and then I am certain that I am your friend and you are mine.97
The most difficult friendships to assess existed between those who lived in the same place and had no reason to commit their sentiments to paper. Without doubt, Leo Jud was Zwingli’s dearest friend, supporter and colleague, but because they lived side by side and did not correspond, we have relatively little information about their interactions.98 Unlike Zwingli, Jud was not Swiss. The son of a priest, he was born as Leo Keller in Guémar in Alsace and was a pupil at the famous Latin school in Sélestat, a centre of humanist learning. He was two years older than his friend, whom he had met in 1505 during their student days in Basel. In addition to the study of the arts for his baccalaureate, Jud also trained as an apothecary.
When Zwingli was called to Zurich at the very end of 1518, Jud was summoned to Einsiedeln as his replacement. A gifted linguist and committed humanist, he used his time in the monastery to begin translating the works of Erasmus into German.99 In time, he would become known as one of the leading voices of the Dutch scholar in the vernacular.100 In 1521, he published his translation of Erasmus’ Education of a Christian Prince.
Jud’s growing attachment to Zwingli’s circle deepened with his close working relationship with Froschauer and the esteem in which his translations were held. He soon expressed the wish to go to Zurich permanently. In May 1522, not long after the sausage incident, Zwingli invited Jud to preach in the church of St Peter in Zurich.101 His purpose was clear. St Peter’s was one of the most prominent pulpits in the city, and Zwingli would naturally have been delighted to have a friend, supporter and talented preacher hold the position. Jud gave a sermon on that Sunday and then stayed in the city for a week, during which he preached several times. On Zwingli’s recommendation he was formally elected to the post in June. Zwingli wrote to Myconius that ‘soon will also the Leo, the lion with the mighty voice and righteous heart arrive: small in stature but great in valour’.102 Jud took up his position in Zurich at St Peter’s in February 1523, and continued his translation work with more editions of Erasmus, Luther and Zwingli.103 Jud possessed neither an original nor a powerful theological mind: his long years in Zurich were committed to preaching and preparing educational and devotional works for the laity in their language.
Jud wrote letters for Zwingli and often read and summarized books when the reformer was pressed for time. When Zwingli left for Marburg in 1529, Jud preached for him in the Grossmünster. He was also Zwingli’s editor and translator. As often as he could be, he was present when Zwingli preached, and he worked to edit the biblical commentaries – both those published during Zwingli’s lifetime and those that came out posthumously. Although Zwingli wrote in the vernacular when the situation demanded, it was Jud who translated his major Latin works into German. The two men appear to have worked together on these translations in Jud’s house.104 Scholars have noted that Jud’s translations were more than faithful renderings of the original and often brought greater clarity to Zwingli’s ideas.105
Jud would share Zwingli’s call to arms and the necessity for military action against the Catholic Confederates. On his deathbed, however, he regretted that enthusiasm. Four days before his death in 1542, Jud gave a remarkable confession, seeking God’s forgiveness:
Protect yourselves from war. Do not be driven by lust for war. Work for the maintenance of peace. It is fitting for Christians and above all the shepherds [pastors] to show humility, not thirst for revenge. Regrettably, I rode to war in time, a great evil. Therefore, I cry out to God that he might have mercy on me and forgive me. Remember forever the unfortunate consequences of this war.106
Where Leo Jud might serve as Zwingli’s loyal lieutenant, Johannes Oecolampadius (1482–1531), the reformer of Basel, emerged in many respects as Zwingli’s theological better.107 He certainly could command greater respect from Luther and Melanchthon. Two years older than Zwingli, Oecolampadius served as a preacher in his native Weinsberg, in southern Germany, before making extended stays in Tübingen, Heidelberg and Basel to deepen his knowledge of Hebrew, Greek and theology. While in Basel in 1516, he worked for the printer Froben on Erasmus’ 1516 Greek New Testament, the Novum Instrumentum. A gifted linguist, he undertook the translation of a number of the Greek church fathers into Latin. In 1518, he became a doctor of theology in Basel; thus, compared to Zwingli, Oecolampadius possessed better theological credentials.
The extensive correspondence between the two men, whose friendship began in 1522, tells the story of the Swiss Reformation in the 1520s. They had different temperaments:108 Zwingli could be impulsive and thrived on controversy, while the soft-spoken Oecolampadius proved a canny politician, who struggled in the polemical heat of the period. However unjustly, Oecolampadius is nowadays barely remembered, and virtually none of his extensive works in Latin have been translated into modern languages; yet in his day, he was much admired by scholars across the confessional divide, including Philipp Melanchthon (1497–1560), whom he met in Marburg and with whom he corresponded. John Calvin, who rarely had a kind word for Zwingli, deeply admired Oecolampadius’ biblical commentaries.109
The relationship between Zwingli and Oecolampadius is fascinating because, as they themselves understood well, they each possessed qualities lacking in the other.110 Zwingli greatly admired and relied on Oecolampadius’ theological abilities, as well as his high reputation. The reformer of Basel, in turn, acknowledged Zwingli as the leader of the Swiss Reformation, frequently consulted him on a wide range of questions, and relied on his strength and fortitude. Many letters survive from an active correspondence that often saw the two men writing to one another several times a month. They discussed all the major events of their period, devised strategies, read each other’s works, and commended students, clerics and lay persons to one another. When their correspondence was printed posthumously, in 1536 in Zurich, it caused outrage in Lutheran circles, because it revealed the attitudes of these two leading figures on Luther, doctrine and politics. No subject of the Reformation in their time was not discussed in detail.
Oecolampadius opened their exchange, sending a letter in December 1522:
Do not wonder, good Zwingli, when I have the personal honour of making your acquaintance through a friendly letter. You may take this offer to the glory of your virtue and personal wellbeing, to the glory of Christ, this gift as precious balm to flow over you. Those who seek good things feel themselves compelled not only to love the man but also to seek his friendship.111
Quoting from Pliny’s Natural History, Oecolampadius told Zwingli that he and his circle should heed for themselves what the Romans said about panthers – with their scent they draw others to them. He admitted that he had no particular purpose in writing to Zwingli, other than to wish him well, which he did most heartily, and to celebrate a man so beloved by others. Who could not love one who ‘undertook Christ’s work with such zeal’ and erected a wall for the protection of the house of Israel? Zwingli was a ‘devotee of true religion’. Oecolampadius poured forth his admiration:
I beseech God that he ever more grant you great treasures of strength and zeal, and make you ever more fruitful, that I will with joy always hear through good reports of you and your efforts to the glory of the Gospel of Christ.
Zwingli’s reply, written in early January 1523, expressed his surprise at such flattery and offered the modest response that it was not he, but Christ who was the hero. Nevertheless, he was clearly thrilled by this new contact with a scholar of whom he knew. Oecolampadius, he wrote, was equally praised as a humanist and as a Christian, two virtuous roles that flowed together and were inseparable. He welcomed the possibility of a friendship grounded in learning and commitment to the gospel. ‘Let us now and ever discuss the matters demanded to serve the heavenly doctrine.’112 Zwingli concluded by saying that the courier of the letter would report more fully on events in Zurich concerning an upcoming disputation: there was a rumour, he reported, that Johannes Fabri, the vicar general of Constance, might be coming to Zurich. Zwingli hoped this news was true, as it would deprive the pope and bishop of their claims to victory.
Zwingli was never a singular figure. He lived in a family and community, and among a web of friends spread across Europe. In Zurich, he moved in circles of friends who met in homes, reading scripture and discussing reform. Although decisive and confident in his own judgement, his work as a reformer was rarely solitary. His personality and charisma dominated those around him and were key to many of his successes. Like Luther and Melanchthon, he recognized talents in others that he lacked. He was also thoroughly Swiss in his communal view of friendship, Church and society. Despite their evident affection, Zwingli could easily confound and confuse even those closest to him. He could make them laugh and cause them to shake their heads. His confidence in his calling made him a challenging friend.
THE WORD
Zwingli’s deep and abiding attachment to Erasmus found expression in 1521 in a pamphlet entitled the ‘Description of the Godly Mill’ that he helped to prepare with Martin Seger from Graubünden.113 According to Zwingli, he received the image from the layman and was deeply impressed, asking one Martin Füssli to compose verses to accompany it. ‘My only contribution,’ Zwingli observed to Myconius,
was to point out to him most of the references in Holy Scripture, which he diligently examined and then proceeded to show me the poem. It pleased me exceptionally with its simple, easily understood language: and because it was to sound authentically Swiss, it was printed quickly and without rewriting or improvements. I designed the look of the pamphlet with him: the first verse and the title are mine, nothing else.114
Füssli, Zwingli added, often stood beside him when he preached. Christ is represented as the miller, pouring his Word between the millstones. Erasmus is his humble aide, who puts the flour into sacks (his Greek New Testament) and passes it to Luther, who is the baker preparing the bread (Bibles). The other assistant, who distributes the bread to the people (God’s Word), may well be Zwingli himself. The pamphlet became one of the most famous images of the Zurich Reformation, expressing the evangelical hopes of its early years.
Zwingli’s publishing frenzy during the summer of 1522 continued with ‘On the Clarity and Certainty of the Word of God’, which Froschauer produced on 6 September. This text, too, was a reworked and expanded sermon, which in this instance had been preached in the Dominican convent at Oetenbach. It was a sign of Zwingli’s growing influence that the Council appointed him to preach at the religious house, a duty formerly reserved for Dominicans. The sermon addressed the question on which Zwingli and the bishop’s examiners could find no common ground – how was the Bible to be interpreted? The published work was Zwingli’s fullest exploration to date of that issue, and his overarching argument was arrestingly bold: scripture, the source of all wisdom, could only be grasped by those led by the Holy Spirit. Without that Spirit, nothing availed – neither tradition nor the teachings of the ancient fathers – and the Bible was mere words. But God calls men and women to something more: ‘We are made in the image of God and that image is implanted within us in order that it may enjoy the closest possible relationship with its maker and creator.’115 To love God is akin to drinking ‘strong wine’. To the healthy, Zwingli wrote,
it tastes excellent. It makes him merry and strengthens him and warms his blood. But if there is someone who is sick of a disease or fever, he cannot even taste it, let alone drink it, and he marvels that the healthy are able to do so. This is due not to any defect in the wine, but to the sickness.116
The Word of God is absolutely clear, because it is God speaking to humanity.117 In truth, it is nothing other than God himself. The faithful receive the Word through the Spirit, an interior illumination that leads to Christ.118 Even the difficult or ‘dark’ passages, which might seem contradictory or unclear, feed the faithful, inspiring men and women to hear more, to delve deeper. Zwingli saw the reception of the Word as a deeply communal activity: the Church knows when it is being fed. Certainty lies in the Bible itself, the work of Spirit, and requires no external verification.
Zwingli’s interest was not in damnation, but in salvation, and he was remarkably sanguine about how those in the Spirit might be certain of God’s will. He was totally confident that it was the divine purpose to save:
If you ask further, how can I be taught of him so that I know with certainty that this or that doctrine is according to his will? There is just one answer: ask of him and he will give you all that is needed, for he knows what is needed far better than you do yourself.119
The tract has a rare autobiographical quality, offering us insights into his conversion:
Again, I know for certain that God teaches me because I have experienced the fact of it, and to prevent misunderstanding this is what I mean when I say that I know for certain that God teaches me. 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.120
‘On the Clarity and Certainty of the Word of God’ did not please Erasmus, to whom Zwingli had sent the text. While both held to scripture as the foundation of the Christian life, their approaches differed in significant ways. For the Dutchman, Zwingli’s emphasis on the perspicuity of the Bible was troubling, if not arrogant. Both men recognized that scripture was difficult, obscure and even contradictory in places; but whereas Zwingli looked to the text interpreting itself, Erasmus advocated humility.
The Zurich preacher was deeply concerned by the growing row between Erasmus and Luther. For Zwingli, they were titans. He described them as Odysseus and warlike Ajax, struggling for the arms of Achilles. He declared his love for both and was desperate that they should be reconciled.121 Although Zwingli had moved away from the Dutchman, he was loath to voice criticism.
In ‘On the Clarity’, Zwingli offered another glimpse into his experience of coming to the gospel during his years in Glarus and Einsiedeln:
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 directly from his own Word. Then I began to ask God for light and the Scriptures became far clearer to me – even though I read nothing else – than if I had studied many commentators and expositors. Note that that is always a sure sign of God’s leading, for I could never have reached that point by my own feeble understanding.122
Just over a week after the publication of ‘On the Clarity and Certainty of the Word of God’, Zwingli printed another sermon, this time on the perpetual virginity of Mary.123 Dedicated to close friends and relatives, the work was both martial and autobiographical. He opened with his continued praise of the virtue of the hardworking, pious peasantry, who are the true Swiss. Those who hold to that patrimony are God’s chosen; those who prostitute themselves for war are the damned:
As long as I hear that you live from the work of your hands, as is your custom, I am pleased and confident that you preserve your lineage from which you are born, that is from Adam. As long as I hear that some of you take up war for money and thereby kill your body, and let the Devil lead your soul into eternal prison, so do I mourn that you depart from the community of the pious inheritance of the peasants and workers and are led into robbery and murder. How is it any different to serve a foreign lord in war for money than to commit robbery and murder?124
For Zwingli, the peasants represented the best of both Christianity and the Swiss. Their hard, honest labours stood in contrast to the mendacity of the wealthy urban families that lined their pockets with money from foreign pensions. Mindful of his own background, he associated himself with those true faithful who lived close to the land and embodied the virtues of their Swiss forefathers. ‘Those, however, who go to war, I am certain of their sorrow and the damnation of their souls. May God grant them a right disposition that they never more do this kind of thing as they had promised.’
By this point, Zwingli had an impressive list of rejected Catholic practices: he had denied the obligation to fast, denounced celibacy, questioned the intercession of the saints and snubbed the church hierarchy. Now he took aim at the cult of the Mother of God, essential to medieval popular piety. Zwingli had a strong personal attachment to Mary, but he believed that her role for Christians was gravely distorted. She was not a mediator, but a model for the faithful.125 Any attribution to her of intercession necessarily diminished the crucifixion and resurrection of her son. She was present at the crucifixion, an enduring testimony to her unfailing faithfulness. God himself had placed her above the saints and angels; her prayer from the innermost part of the heart was an example to all of how to speak to God. She alone had responded: ‘Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your Word.’ It was right to offer praise in the ‘Hail Mary’, but without expectation that it would bring merit or reward.
Zwingli’s seeming demotion of the Mother of God was, for his opponents, unequivocal evidence of his heresy, and he was forced onto the defensive:
This passage in the Gospel of Matthew I have, therefore, interpreted with such zeal that all those who everywhere put words in my mouth and speak falsely and dishonourably about me claim that I have preached the following: that Mary was a silly and stupid woman. Further, that I have dirtied her purity and profaned it, which is badly thought of me. I can swear that such nonsense about the holy Mother of God was never my intention.126
In the middle of the sermon, he made an extraordinary confession to his friends and relatives. Not only had he been accused of preaching against Mary and traducing her name, but he had endured numerous charges of having fathered illegitimate children, wandered the streets at night and received money from foreign rulers. Zwingli was not imagining these rumours. They had been widely circulated through Swiss lands, repeated, for example, in Chur by a wealthy Zurich statesman.127 Past promiscuity continued to haunt him. The priest was so deeply troubled by the accusations that in the sermon he robustly defended himself:
I decided not to give an answer to this provocation or false news about how many children I have fathered in this year or the money I have received from princes and lords. Although I have not answered these rumours, I could not permit these shameful insults about me to be believed. Each can say what he wants about my moral integrity, may God forgive him, but I will no more tolerate blasphemy.128
The connection was clear. Zwingli linked the accusations that he had made Mary a whore with the charges made against his own sexual licence. Neither was true, and by implication both he and Mary were models of faith.
PRIEST TO PREACHER
Zwingli’s sermons and writings spoke to specific moments and occasions, often responding to charges of heresy or misconduct. Additionally, however, he kept a weather eye on the wider European stage, on those events beyond the Swiss border that were determining the fate of Christ’s Church and potentially threatening the Confederation. He followed with care how popes and rulers struggled to find unity against the spread of heresy. Luther’s nemesis, Leo X, died suddenly in December 1521, unleashing a fierce struggle for control of the papal throne between French and imperial parties. The new pope, Hadrian VI (1459–1523), once Erasmus’ teacher, proved no puppet of Emperor Charles V (1500–1558), and committed himself to restoring peace among the Christian rulers, in order to launch a crusade against the Turks, reform the Church and extirpate heresy. Unlike his predecessor, Hadrian was more willing to accept that the Church had at times erred. A penitent Martin Luther would be accepted back into the fold. However, as Eamon Duffy has astutely stated: ‘Nothing in Hadrian’s response suggests any grasp of the real power of Luther’s message, the evangelical fervour and the sense of the radical and blessed simplification of religious life which it offered.’129
Charles V had convened the Diet of Nuremberg to face the Turkish and Lutheran threats, mindful of the fact that he needed the support of the German princes against the enemy in the east. The Swiss had no representatives or any voice at the sessions, but Zwingli was moved in November 1522 to write a submission to the delegates, who probably never saw it.130 He offered his most fulsome praise of Martin Luther as a man of the greatest integrity and learning, who was to be protected at all costs.131 The Reformation would be lost without him. Taking up a theme to which he would return in later years, Zwingli rejected the idea that those who preached the gospel should be known as ‘Lutherans’. The renewal of God’s Word was through following Christ, not any man. Nevertheless, the movement for reform was greatly threatened by any alliance between Charles V and Francis I, who were committed not to a crusade against the Turks, but to the suppression of the gospel. The only real victor would be the pope, whose claims to reform the Church could and should be dismissed as false.
Although Zwingli’s reputation as a heretic was rapidly spreading across the Swiss lands and abroad, the city of Zurich remained in the Catholic Church and the traditional services continued to be celebrated. The mass, processions and holy days still marked the rhythm of the faith. Zwingli, however, knew that he could no longer in good conscience perform his duties within a Church whose central tenets he no longer believed. In November 1522, he resigned his living as a secular priest and ceased his duties, although he continued to preach. His official status in the Grossmünster was not clear. It was evident that his change of position had the support of the magistrates, who had given their permission. Zwingli was now the preacher in the city. His sermons were reaching audiences beyond the city, winning followers who echoed his views in urban and rural churches. At sessions of the Swiss Diet held in Baden in late November and early December, resolutions were passed calling for the prohibition of the ‘new learning’.132
The magistrates of Zurich were fully aware of the accusations that the city was a nest of ‘Lutheran’ heresy. At the same time, many leading figures were proud of the distinguished humanist, whose knowledge of scripture and the classics in Greek, Latin and Hebrew could not be rivalled in Swiss lands, except by the great Erasmus in Basel (who, however, was unable to read the Old Testament in its original language). There was no doubt that Zwingli was a committed patriot and defender of his homeland, whose call for the renewal of the faith went hand in hand with outrage at the injustices inflicted on his people. The priest had also proved himself a canny adviser on politics, and well aware of events in the Confederation and Empire.
Zwingli’s repudiation of the authority of the bishop of Constance was joined by an appeal to the people of Schwyz to follow Zurich and abolish the receipt of pensions as an abomination in the sight of God. A particular flashpoint was the Mandated Territories, jointly administered by the Confederates, where the evangelical preaching was making inroads. The Zurich Council demonstrated a willingness to defend those preachers charged with heresy against any trial in the episcopal courts, preventing the accused from facing ecclesiastical punishment. This move led to complaints to the Swiss Diet, which in the summer of 1522 issued an unequivocal condemnation of the innovations in Zurich. The rebuke was renewed in December, when the Confederates were warned not to foster the ‘new teachings’, and Basel and Zurich were counselled to watch over what was printed in their cities.133
By the end of 1522, and no longer a mass priest, Zwingli occupied no particular position of authority within the Church or city, beyond being the preacher in the Grossmünster; his power in Zurich derived not from high office, but from the pulpit, his pen and his personal contacts. Above all, he continued to exhibit a tireless charisma, a force of character that showed no want of boldness or willingness to take on his superiors. To put it baldly, he was equally admired and reviled. The sausage meal had demonstrated his willingness to stage a controversy and force public debate, in which he sought to dictate the terms. As we shall see, however, his supporters did not speak with one voice. He was married and had turned his face against episcopal authority and the legal claims of the Church. Such was his sense of biblical and moral authority that he felt empowered to advise his fellow Confederates on religion and politics. Combative and aggressive, his language, both personal and public, tended to the martial and confrontational. He did not doubt that he led the forces of traditional Swiss peasant virtue against foreign corruption, that God had appointed him to restore both the Church and his homeland – two responsibilities between which he drew little distinction.
The events of 1522 had clearly demonstrated that the reforming instincts of Zwingli were not those of Bishop Hugo or Erasmus. The preacher expected nothing from Rome. The church hierarchy had no desire to sanction gospel preaching, lift restrictions on eating, or abolish clerical celibacy. Nothing that Zwingli and his supporters had advocated had found any purchase with the higher ecclesiastical powers: their arguments had been met only with denunciations and condemnation. They were ‘Lutherans’, to be suppressed as quickly as possible.
Nevertheless, Zwingli knew that he had influential supporters among both the clergy and laity in the city. If there was to be a breakthrough for the reforms, however, he had to win the backing of his political masters. But he was being pulled in different directions. He had continually invoked the rural peasants and the dwellers of the valleys as the authentic embodiment of patriotic Swiss Christianity, but he knew that his path relied on the support of the urban rulers whose interests did not always align with his own convictions. The seeds of accommodation were laid. If reform was to be raised beyond a series of oppositional claims against the Catholic Church, Zwingli knew that his principles for a new order urgently needed to be set out with clarity and force, offering politicians and the faithful a vision of how a reformed Church might look. As his engagement with the bishop’s commissioners had demonstrated, he relished stating his case publicly in debate. The wary magistrates had made it clear that they were prepared to make decisions on religious matters, but just how far they were prepared to go remained uncertain. Their willingness had to be channelled, empowering the rulers to determine the course of church affairs in the city, but guided by the former priest. Zwingli was fully aware that he was supported by a slender majority, mostly guildsmen in the Large Council. His tactic was to draw his opponents into open debate on terms that would ensure the victory of the gospel. He pushed for a public disputation on the nature of the Christian faith – a debate that could be resolved in Zurich, not Constance or Rome. The door to a new order was opening. It was to be Zwingli’s moment.