Jesuitism, Calvinism, Lutheranism

The victory of the princes in the great Peasant War, whose main origin was rooted in the fact that the conflict of the economic interests in the various parts of Germany had prevented the rise of a great modern nation, was further strengthened by the incipient impoverishment of the towns. The main reason for this was that world trade had begun to move from the Mediterranean beaches to the shores of the Atlantic Ocean.

The capture of Constantinople by the Turks blocked the trade routes to the Orient, so that the ever-developing commodity production was forced to seek new markets and new trade routes. With the age of great geographical discoveries came modern colonial policies, from which Germany was excluded by her geographical position. Her economic growth was more and more thwarted and with it disappeared the possibility of her political centralization. Germany’s gradual but irresistibly advancing impoverishment provided fresh support for the rule of the princes. Of course it also made their rule all the more unbearable for the German people, in that the intensity of the plunder grew in proportion to its difficulty.

Of the three great party groups that had formed at the outbreak of the German Reformation, the plebeian revolutionary party had been stifled in the blood-letting of the Peasant War and the bourgeois reformist party had received a shock in the war from which it needed a long time to recover. Nor was the Catholic conservative party unmarked by the stormy passage of time. From now on three new parties were built which, it must be said, won European significance far beyond the frontiers of Germany.

They were Jesuitism, Calvinism and Lutheranism. They all still bore a religious colouration but were, beneath their ecclesiastical forms, politico-economic organizations. All three, despite their dogmatic religious differences, sprang from a common ground: they were as different from the feudal medieval Church as the feudal mode of production is from the capitalist. Jesuitism was Catholicism reformed on a capitalist basis. If the Papacy had become a means and instrument of rule of the great modern monarchies that had developed out of the needs of the capitalist mode of production, then it had to be placed upon a capitalist footing if it was going to be an effective means and instrument of that rule. This is precisely what the Society of Jesus ensured in making the Catholic Church fit the new economic and political conditions. It reorganized the whole educational system through the study of the classics, the highest form of learning that then existed, and thus far adopted the heritage of Humanism. It had its trading posts throughout the then known world and provided the princes, in the form of father confessors, with the most experienced and cunning ministers.

Modern absolutism however only temporarily suited the interests of the growing towns – not permanently, and only so far as the creation of great unified economic and trading areas was concerned. For them it was not an end in itself but only a means to an end. As soon as it felt inclined to be an end in itself, they reminded it emphatically that it only lived by their grace. Calvinism was the banner under which first the towns of the Netherlands rose against Spanish, then the French towns against French absolutism. Calvin had introduced this doctrine in the rich trading city of Geneva, and with its democratic church constitution it suited the interests of the most advanced city burghers. It is true that part of the nobility in Holland and France professed Calvinism, but only because they had more or less common interests with the rebellious towns. Wherever Calvinism became an exciting fanatical power bourgeois interests were to the fore. Alongside the absolutist-capitalist society of Jesus this can be called bourgeois-capitalist religion.

Lutheranism, finally, was the religion of the economically backward countries that had been most heavily exploited by Rome, but had the least prospects of either annihilating or dominating Rome. Thus they had to break with Rome completely but were unable to intervene decisively in the great competition to take over its inheritance: Lutheranism held sway in North and East Germany, in Denmark and in Sweden. These were countries where the towns were comparatively under-developed and the nobility strongly predominant. In West Germany, where the towns were stronger and more numerous, Calvinism took the lead. Where Lutheranism ruled, capitalist development took a long time to work its way out of the feudal chaos. It created no revolutionary bourgeoisie. On the contrary it made the landlord into an owner of property, the knight into a commodity producer. This happened particularly in the arable lands east of the Elbe. Here the Church paid for the ‘pure doctrine of God’ with their goods, the peasants with ever-increased exploitation.

In conformity with these backward conditions Lutheranism was a backward religion. Ever since his betrayal of the peasants Luther had become a crawling servant of the princes. Out of his translation of the Bible, which, with its presentation of simple primitive Christianity, had contributed not a little to the excitation of the masses, he henceforward made a sort of princely catechism that no bootlicker of monarchy would have found objectionable. The princes, Bishops and Junkers were the patrons of the Lutheran Church. It was much more sharply divided in this respect from the democratic church constitution of Calvinism than in all the hair-splitting about the Last Supper. The Dutch Calvinists accused the spiritual life of the Lutheran Church of being a ‘worse than bestial stupidity.’

Thus the German Reformation, after the revolutionary fire had been extinguished with the blood of the peasants, became a campaign of robbery and plunder by the German princes and their ever-growing emancipation from Imperial authority. The Princes’ ‘Reformation’ consisted of naming themselves heads of their national churches, having Lutheranism developed by their court chaplains as a religion of narrow-minded subordination, and particularly of pocketing the rich property of the Church themselves. These princely ‘Reformations’ were all aimed at the same goal, for all the colourfully chequered variety of their external manifestations. The history of the Hohenzollerns provides a particularly classical example of this. Only the Junkers got a share of the booty, and perhaps the urban patricians who, because of the decay of the towns, had to be satisfied with what they got. The masses, the peasants and the town plebeians gained not the slightest benefit from the robbery of Church property.

Thus the power of the princes grew continually. The attempt of the imperial authority to reimpose itself, that is, ideologically expressed, to recreate the Catholic religious unity of Germany, failed completely and only proved that the particularist rule of the princes was too deeply rooted in Germany’s economic conditions to be removed. The Emperor Charles V, it is true, defeated several Protestant princes at the battle of Mühlberg in 1545, but this was only because other Protestant princes supported him for the sake of selfish advantages that he had promised them. It was precisely these princes who rose against him immediately he actually tried to reimpose the imperial authority after that victory. They bought an alliance with the French King with the basest betrayal of the empire, by the cession of the bishoprics of Toul, Metz and Verdun to France, and thus managed to defeat the Emperor. In the Treaty of Passau and later in the religious peace of Augsburg, religious freedom for the imperial estates, that is to say for the authorities of each state, was enacted in 1555. Each imperial estate, each state authority, received the right to make whatever religious arrangements it thought fit within its own area. The religious peace of Augsburg rested on the principle cuius regio, eius religio (‘whoever rules, his religion’). That means, whoever possesses the land also possesses the right to determine the religion of its inhabitants. Religious freedom only permitted the inhabitants the right to emigrate should they feel a conscientious objection to their ruler’s efforts for their ‘salvation’. This ‘salvation’, that is to say the forcible conversion of the population to the religion of their rulers, was carried out by the Protestant princes no less than by the Catholics.

Thus the religious peace of Augsburg left the schism of the Church and princely sovereignty untouched. But this peace left two decisive questions unsolved. It placed its seal, it is true, upon the German princes’ previous plundering of the Church, but it did not decide what was to happen to the ecclesiastical territories, of which there was still a great number in Germany. The Protestants demanded that the principle of cuius regio, eius religio should not apply in these areas. Their Protestant inhabitants were to continue unhindered in their faith. The Catholics on the other hand demanded that the ecclesiastical princes should have the same right of ‘salvation’ as the Protestant princes. The other difference of opinion, however, arose over the so-called ‘Ecclesiastical Reservation’ that was demanded from the Catholic side. According to this, any imperial ecclesiastical estate, high prelate, archbishop, bishop or abbot who became a Protestant was to lose his Church offices and dignities. The Protestant princes would have nothing to do with this because it cut them off from the easiest way of pocketing ecclesiastical property.

No agreement was reached on these differences. The real questions of power involved were too important for the two sides to convince each other by ideological and religious arguments. On the one hand, in the sixty years following the religious peace of Augsburg, the Protestant princes were able to gain control of more than a hundred ecclesiastical archbishoprics, bishoprics, foundations and abbeys, despite the Ecclesiastical Reservation. On the other hand the ecclesiastical princes who remained true to their religion made full use of the principle of cuius regio, eius religio and began a Counter-Reformation which was skilfully led by the Jesuits and once more opened up a sphere of influence for the Catholic religion, particularly in South and West Germany. A big catch for the Jesuits were the Dukes of Bavaria, whom whey were able to tie to the interests of the Catholic Church, more it is true by the offer of material advantages than by spiritual eloquence. When in 1607 Duke Max of Bavaria used some religious quarrel as an excuse to attack the free city of Donauworth and incorporate it into his own possessions, this impudent act of violence was the signal for a general muster of the armies. A part of the Protestant princes formed a Union under the leadership of the Elector Palatinate, whereupon the Catholic princes formed a League under the leadership of Bavaria. The Protestant Union was still-born, particularly since the leading and greatest Protestant prince, the Elector of Saxony, stayed aloof from it out of jealousy of the Palatinate and out of a greed for land which he hoped to see satisfied by the Catholic side. The Catholic League on the other hand became a real force. In Duke Max of Bavaria it had a determined and capable leader, and a great number of ecclesiastical imperial estates, particularly the three ecclesiastical electorates, provided it with a firm framework.