In 1517 Erasmus of Rotterdam complained about recently advanced causes of war. In his Querela pacis he lamented that the names of foreign countries were suddenly being misused to stir up hatred: ‘Thus an Englishman is the enemy of a Frenchman, because he is a Frenchman. A British must hate a Scotsman, for no other reason but that he is Scottish. A German naturally disagrees with a Frenchman, a Spaniard with both.’Footnote 1 To Erasmus it was obvious that the word ‘fatherland/country’ (patriae vocabulum) was an important reason why one nation aimed to destroy another.Footnote 2 Against national enmity, he pointed to the common Christian faith, the church as one great family and the sodalitas Christi, as means of pacifying the warring Europeans. Erasmus was one of the few who remarked with growing concern and discontent on the invention of nationalist ideas around 1500. A few decades later, peace was threatened less by national animosities or patriotism than by fundamental disagreements within the Christian faith.
German national discourse around 1500 has been the subject of several recent studies.Footnote 3 Since the late nineteenth century, scholars have been examining ideas of a German nation and their creation. They have highlighted the humanist recovery of Tacitus's Germania as a blueprint for a new national self-image and the relations between the humanist fabricators of a national myth, their princely patrons, and the Reformation as a political movement. However, surprisingly little scholarship has been dedicated to the patriotic and national vocabulary during the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.Footnote 4 What role did concepts of political unity play under conditions of confessional strife? How was a heterogeneous political entity such as the Holy Roman Empire integrated, even though it lacked the unifying bond of a single religion? What ideas did a humanist-trained elite develop to limit and overcome a potentially dangerous fundamental confrontation?
To answer these questions requires a different approach from the one Erasmus's complaint might suggest. This article will examine the interplay of arguments for religious reconciliation and peace on the one hand and a patriotic vocabulary or programme in the ‘confessional age’ on the other. Instead of using the Christian faith against patriotism, many of the texts that will be analysed below invoked the unifying force of patriotic values to achieve peace and stability for their country, or even for Christendom as a whole.
The argument will proceed in three stages: first, both the problem of irenicism and the idea of amor or caritas patriae will be explored. Secondly, the often problematic relation between this norm and the search for religious peace will be examined. Thirdly, the interrelation between patriotic norms, tolerance, and irenic concepts in German political discourse will be analysed, beginning with a work by the Catholic bishop, Julius Pflug, in 1562 and concluding with a tract by the Protestant scholar, Matthias Bernegger, published at the beginning of the Thirty Years War.
Focusing on different phases of irenic debate in the Empire of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, various types of what will be termed ‘irenic patriotism’ will be identified. The article will demonstrate that irenic patriotism could employ both utilitarian politique and more principled arguments for a religious peace. Finally, a consideration of the comprehensive work of Bernegger's friend, Hugo Grotius, will show how a distinct humanist critique of theological controversies and their politically harmful consequences not only resulted in an emphasis on a minimalist and ethical concept of Christianity, but also became transformed into the idea of a total submission of the church and its doctrines to the authority of the patria.
In recent decades, research on the confessional age in Germany has explored the different stages of dogmatic differentiation between the churches, the process of confessionalization, and the rising political tensions that resulted from it.Footnote 5 From the 1580s, relations between the Imperial estates became increasingly characterized by confrontation instead of co-operation. Though perhaps not inevitably, this process in fact led to a paralysis of the Empire's common institutions such as the Imperial Diet and chamber court at a time when they were most desperately needed to prevent warmongering confessional alliances leading to military conflict.Footnote 6 Despite this, it would be simplistic to view this age solely in terms of confessional confrontation. In fact, for a surprisingly long time the Empire's estates continued to collaborate very effectively across confessional boundaries in solving political problems such as defence against the Ottoman empire.Footnote 7 In addition, as Howard Hotson has pointed out, ‘irenicism is not a dead issue’ between the Peace of Augsburg in 1555 and the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. ‘On the contrary, it is the subject of great debates, enormous efforts, and a substantial body of literature; and the handful of figures celebrated in more general literature are just the tip of an iceberg.’Footnote 8
Hotson has likewise reminded us of the need to put German irenicist literature more consciously into the concrete political contexts of the confessional age instead of rather naively reading them as forerunners of modern tolerance and the Enlightenment. Consequently, one should clearly differentiate between the different phases around and after the Peace of Augsburg as well as with regard to the political and religious goals of each author and his confessional party. Irenic literature was thus often concerned with short-term political objectives and strategies. Irenic tracts dealing with the conciliation and (re)unification of Catholics and the adherents of the Reformation were mainly confined to the years before 1555 and the final session of the Council of Trent. On the other hand, the rise of the Reformed creed in the Empire after Elector Frederic III of the Palatinate's conversion to Calvinism in 1563 marked another turning point. Now appeals by Reformed authors for unity and peace with Lutherans became an overwhelmingly dominant part of irenic literature until the legal position of Reformed Protestantism was finally secured in the Peace of Westphalia in 1648.Footnote 9 Hence, due attention must be paid to the legal and political framework of the Empire's constitution if one is to avoid missing what the authors were doing (as Quentin Skinner might say) in formulating irenic positions.
But what is to be understood by irenicism? If we follow G. H. M. Posthumus Meyjes's minimalist definition of irenicism ‘as the endeavour to allay or to reconcile tensions or divisions between confessions in a peaceful way’Footnote 10 then the texts scrutinized here can often be related straightforwardly to an irenic programme. However, if we confine irenicism more specifically to the learned attempt to overcome theological differences between Christian churches and to a search for religious unity, then it is often rather difficult to put these primarily political tracts into that frame in a strict sense. Irenicism is, after all, usually considered to be a theological position. However, if we take the intertwined character of religion and politics in the confessional age seriously, a broader approach on the question of religious conciliation can be justified. Since the goal of irenic literature in the years after the Peace of Augsburg shifts – as Hotson observes – ‘from full reunion to mere ecclesiastical pacification, from harmonization of liturgy and doctrine to a mere cessation of theological hostilities’Footnote 11 this genre can be extended to include a number of political texts that propagated a similar minimalist objective. In a sense, one could also include the text of the Peace of Augsburg itself in a corpus of irenic literature. Despite the fact that it was first of all a legal and constitutional document, and, as such, merely provided the normative frame for German irenicism after 1555, the Peace nonetheless reflected a number of irenic objectives such as a future reunification between Catholics and the adherents of the Confessio Augustana.Footnote 12 Within this wider discursive context, the manner in which irenic goals were either marshalled against, or aligned with, patriotism and religious tolerance in relation to political stability will be of particular interest.
I
Recalling Erasmus's worries about the competitive nature of humanist debates on geography and history, humanist national discourse can be described – in the words of Caspar Hirschi – as a virtual ‘competition of nations’.Footnote 13 Writing within the rhetorical conventions of the eulogy, humanist authors were eager to claim certain goods for their natio and patria: honour, culture, virtues, and other different qualities ranging from the beauty of one's country to the intellectual abilities of its scholars and poets. The term patria (fatherland, country, home) played a key role in these debates. It denoted more than simply one's hometown, one's nation, or heaven as every Christian's true fatherland. Instead, patria or, more precisely, amor patriae, also carried a clear set of normative implications, i.e. civic duties dating back to their Roman roots in Cicero and others.Footnote 14 Loyalty towards one's country was also termed caritas or even pietas patriae and it was deemed analogous with love of parents. Philip Melanchthon claimed in 1545 that the nomen patriae cannot be confined to the soil or the little hut where we are born through our mother's pains. Instead, it also encompasses religious, legal, and educational institutions. We owe to it education, religious doctrine, and understanding of the virtues.Footnote 15
The concept of the patria was thus at the core of a humanist concern, both Aristotelian and Ciceronian, with the unity of the civil community and the duties it could impose on its members. As a term it was often equated with respublica or civitas, though Aristotelians might have preferred to associate it with the more basic concept of society (civitas) instead of the more restricted order of the state (respublica). In any case, within the loosely integrated composite states of late medieval Europe this idea of a common duty to serve one's country could become vital in the attempts to mobilize vassals and to raise funds against the prince's enemies.Footnote 16 Pointing to ‘our beloved fatherland of the German nation’, Emperor Maximilian I and his humanist supporters tried to entice the German Reichsstände (the princes and Imperial cities) to help finance his expensive wars against France. Strikingly, during the Reformation, such patriotic language then mainly became an instrument in the hands of Protestant partisan propaganda and education in Germany.
It is thus clear that patriotism and irenicism were by no means natural partners within a religiously divided commonwealth such as early modern Germany. Instead, the political patria was often associated with the community of believers whose religious unity should be defended. The Polish humanist and Catholic bishop, Laurentius Grimalius Goslicius (Wawrzyniec Goslicki), launched a strong attack on any attempt to change religion. His widely read civic humanist tract on the perfect counsellor of 1568 invoked Cicero in claiming that the mutatio religionis was high treason for it led to an overthrow of the respublica.Footnote 17 From a humanist perspective, religion could be seen as part of a country's customs, like law, language, or even clothing. Consequently, anyone who changed religion was a traitor to his country. In much the same way, Luther's early critic, Johannes Cochlaeus, had already attacked the reformer as a public enemy, who conspired against the Empire, as Catiline did against the Roman republic.Footnote 18 Other German Catholics shared this view. The lawyer, politician, and theologian, Conrad Braun, compared heresy with the worst political and civil crime of betraying one's country in his De haereticis (On heretics), an intellectual response to the Reformation published in the aftermath of the Schmalkaldic war, 1546–7.Footnote 19 In fact, during this war and the uprising of the princes against Charles V in 1551, various pamphlets vigorously employed patriotic and national arguments against the emperor and his attempt at a Catholic revival.Footnote 20 Taking this into account, one wonders how it was possible to use love of country, even in a loose sense, as an irenic argument and as a means to achieve religious peace or even forms of tolerance.
It comes rather as a surprise that, in fact, patriotism could become one of the central arguments against religious strife and against staunch confessionalists in late sixteenth-century Germany, France, and the Netherlands. In the German Empire two factors were decisive in this transformation: first, the disaster of Charles V's militant religious policy and the acceptance of a bi-confessional constitutional structure in the Peace of Augsburg of 1555;Footnote 21 and secondly, the need to maintain political unity against an aggressive Ottoman expansionism throughout the later sixteenth century. Indeed it was precisely this exclusion of a third other, namely the Turks, as a common enemy that made irenic arguments and pleas for religious toleration attractive to the learned Imperial elite.
II
The Ottoman threat and the Protestant propaganda of the Schmalkaldic League formed the background against which a lengthy tract of 1562 by Julius Pflug, bishop of Naumburg-Zeitz in Saxony, has to be read.Footnote 22 A Saxon nobleman, Pflug was one of the key Catholic politicians during the Reformation. Not only did he counsel the Habsburg rulers and chair bi-confessional disputations at Regensburg in 1541 and Worms in 1557, but he also formulated the final version of Charles V's interim regulations that were designed to reunite German Protestants with the Catholic Church in 1547/8. Not surprisingly, in his De republica Germaniae (On the commonwealth of Germany), he took stock of these rich political experiences. The effort to reunite Protestants and Catholics had been central for Charles V and Ferdinand I; yet this theme dramatically lost its significance after 1555 and the last major colloquy (Religionsgespräch) at Worms in 1557.Footnote 23 Being part of a Catholic minority in his bishopric surrounded by Saxon territory, it comes as no surprise that Pflug pleaded vehemently for a religious and political compromise which would strengthen the emperor against the powerful princes. In sum, from the perspective of the settlement achieved in 1555, this programme already appeared outdated. In many ways it rather resembled the policy of Charles V than the factual situation of the 1560s.
Pflug made no effort to hide the patriotic agenda of his hundred-page tract, which he subtitled ‘oratio ad Germanos’.Footnote 24 The term patria can be found on most pages, without counting similar expressions as Germania nostra and respublica nostra. Pflug's work was partly an anti-Protestant pamphlet and partly an eloquent attempt to win over the Protestant estates for his vision of a pro-Imperial policy and a religious reunification. On the one hand, he established a clearly monarchical interpretation of German history centred on the achievements of its various emperors while defaming the common aristocratic version of Germany's ancient libertarian constitution popular among Protestant humanists. Pflug furthermore presented a bleak picture of the Reformation as a national catastrophe characterized by a lack of love of fatherland.Footnote 25 According to him, the religious differences had diminished the amor patriae and thus turned the German respublica upside down, while leading to the revolt of the peasants in 1524–5 and other armed conflicts. Overall, he believed that Germany's level of civilization had been decisively endangered by these recent events.
On the other hand, Pflug remained remarkably cautious with regard to the Protestant party. Well versed in mediation, he avoided open polemics against the reformers or Protestant doctrines in general. He did not even use the term heresy. In an effort to overcome schism, Pflug reached out to all Protestants willing to purge the church of its current shortcomings in order to restore its pristine forma pulchra.Footnote 26 In fact, Pflug not only maintained friendly relations with moderates such as Witzel, Melanchthon, and Camerarius. His own theology was also in several respects – for example his Christology – very close to Reformed doctrines.Footnote 27 He quoted Paul's plea for Christian love in his First letter to the Corinthians and he also appealed to the caritas patriae of all Germans to settle religious disputes and overcome memories of recent mutual harm. Pflug praised the Athenian Thrasybulos for removing discord among the citizens after the Peloponnesian War in 403 bc by imposing an amnesty:
How much more praiseworthy would it be if we – I say we Germans – would remove our religious controversies ourselves and sacrifice the injuries, which we believe to have received from others, to the church, sacrifice them to the fatherland? And would we then not live in concord among each other as if there had never been any controversies?Footnote 28
Pflug's vision of national religious reconciliation was intimately related to the idea of divine reward and punishment. According to Pflug, God's benevolence towards any commonwealth depended on the caritas patriae of the citizens. For God loves the patriae amantes and the virtuous, just as he punishes the factious (viri factiosi).Footnote 29 In Pflug's eyes, the unity of the church was closely intertwined with the unity of the fatherland and thus its wellbeing. Strikingly, he applied Ciceronian and civic humanist notions of the virtuous civitas to the Empire as a whole, claiming that discord was threatening the citizen's virtue and thus infecting the respublica with corruption. It was in the same vein and the same year that Georg Cassander, a Flemish-born theologian from Cologne, who, like Pflug, was closely associated with the religious policy of Ferdinand I, employed this Ciceronian and civic humanist vocabulary to analyse the schism in (western) Christianity. He compared the church to a respublica shaken by civil discord which was about to escalate into civil war. Despite that, there was hope. Viri boni and communis reipublicae amantes in both camps would strive for peace, concord, and a restitution of the old laws.Footnote 30
While Pflug drew a pessimistic picture of his country to inspire German princes and estates to united action and reform, his contemporary, the humanist Heinrich Pantaleon of Basel, pursued the opposite strategy to unite and educate his countrymen.Footnote 31 His massive three-volume Teutscher Nation Heldenbuch (Book of heroes of the German nation) of 1565–6 was an attempt to improve Germany's national prestige and morals by praise.Footnote 32 Equally inspired by humanists like Paolo Giovio and the catalogues of martyrs compiled by his friends, John Foxe and John Bale, Pantaleon produced a biographical encyclopaedia of illustrious Germans, including some who were simply mythical figures. A good humanist himself, he believed that virtuous action was best taught through good examples. In the preface addressed to the reader, he claimed that he had not included every famous prince, but only those Germans who had achieved remarkable things for their country, militarily, in the field of piety or in the arts and sciences.Footnote 33 Thus amor patriae became the only criterion by which virtue might be judged. Not surprisingly, Pantaleon's list of heroes includes emperors and kings such as Charles the Great, Otto I, as well as tribal leaders such as Arminius, the liberator of the Germans from Roman yoke, Berchtoldt Schwartz, the alleged inventor of gunpowder, and Johannes Gutenberg, the inventor of printing. Modern readers, however, might be rather astonished to find Adam and Noah also included among the illustrious Germans – and, even more amazingly, Jesus Christ, sandwiched between the entries on the warrior Flavius and Strumico, king of the Vandals.
Like the works of many nationalist humanists and Melanchthon, the Heldenbuch characterized the middle ages as the struggle between the emperors and the envious popes. But this undoubtedly Protestant interpretation is only one side of the coin. In contrast to the Wittenberg reformers, Pantaleon wanted to integrate Catholics in his effort to win national attention and aggrandize the honor patriae. Consequently, he included a substantial number of abbots, bishops, and even popes in his catalogue, provided of course that they belonged to the German nation. In particular, the third, contemporary, part of the Heldenbuch presented the biographies of such antithetical figures as Pope Adrian IV, Martin Luther, Flacius Illyricus, Luther's first theological opponent Johannes Eck, and the first German Jesuit Petrus Canisius. It is indicative of Pantaleon's desire to mediate that he devoted relatively little space to Luther and instead wrote a lengthy entry on Erasmus. With respect to sectarian criticism of his first Latin version, Pantaleon explicitly abstained from any confessional partiality in his dedicatory epistle to Emperor Maximilian II in the German translation.Footnote 34 He also made it plain that he had consciously avoided sectarian and defamatory names such as ‘papists’ and ‘heretics’. Instead, he had used the neutral terminology of ‘Catholics’ and ‘Evangelicals’.Footnote 35 Equally, he dedicated each separate part of his work to two patrons, in each case both a Catholic and a Protestant ruler. The Heldenbuch belonged to a context in which neither Tridentine Catholicism nor Lutheran doctrines were finally established. Pantaleon's work fitted very well into Emperor Maximilian II's policy of national reconciliationFootnote 36 and it was not surprising that he bestowed the title of a poeta laureatus on the Basel humanist during the Imperial Diet of Augsburg in 1566.
The Heldenbuch consciously harmonized confessional tensions of a religiously divided fatherland. However, as these tensions deepened from the 1580s they could no longer be ignored by political discourse. The pamphlet literature on the Ottoman threat in particular repeatedly identified confessional strife as the main obstacle to the organization of a successful national defence of the German patria. Those who appealed for national unity in this context even included the usual suspects of confessional polemics such as Lutheran or Catholic preachers. While defending religious zeal they pleaded for a limited suspension of religious disputes while the foreign menace continued. Aegidius Albertinus, a poet and writer at the Bavarian court, reminded the German addressees of his pamphlet Der Kriegßleut Weckuhr (The soldiers' alarm clock) in 1601 of the example of the Athenian statesmen, Themistocles and Aristeides. Though they were bitter rivals, Aristeides offered to lay aside their quarrels ‘for the sake of the fatherland’ for the duration of a diplomatic mission they were assigned to by the Athenian people.Footnote 37 In the same vein the Danish orator and historian at Rudolf II's court in Prague, Jacob Typotius, pleaded for an accord between Christian love and the defence of the fatherland: ‘Nos et Christum colimus et patriam defendimus.’Footnote 38 In his printed speeches he aimed at gathering pan-European support, Protestant and Catholic alike, for Emperor Rudolf II in his war against the Ottomans. Following Erasmian tradition, Typotius appealed to the Europeans to lay aside their civil wars and to defend Christianity as a whole. Thus he lauded the amor patriae because it could calm private hatred.Footnote 39
Strikingly, a limited, yet surprisingly widespread, number of pamphlets, whose authors were critical of the established churches, launched a harsh attack on religious strife. In many cases, their main concern was not so much religious truth as the welfare of the fatherland and the preservation of civil society. According to the pamphlet Dolium Diogenis (Diogenes's barrel) of 1594, violence and expansionism were now chiefly justified with religious arguments. ‘For every religion claims that it performs a pious duty by exterminating other cults.’Footnote 40 Its author, Christian Francken (c. 1552–1603),Footnote 41 knew what he was writing about. A native of Lutheran Magdeburg and a teacher of philosophy who converted to Catholicism, he became a Jesuit, (re)converted to Protestantism, and then later embraced Socinianism and published sharp attacks on the Trinitarian dogma. When he drafted Dolium Diogenis, he had finally converted back to Catholicism in 1591, not least due to persecution by the Polish king, finally dying as a prisoner of the Milanese Inquisition.
Francken's pamphlet, whose original Latin version was dedicated to high-ranking Catholic counsellors at the Rudolfine court in Prague, reflected on the current war against the Turks and developed practical advice for stemming the Ottoman aggression against the Empire and Christianity as a whole.Footnote 42 Referring to the Ancient philosopher Carneades, he gave a sceptical account of imperial aggrandizement and a just order of nature. In contrast to the common Ciceronian assumption of a natural law, Francken thus doubted the possibility of justice and equity. Instead, he viewed man as characterized by a striving for dominance over others, as with animals, a conclusion which – as indicated above – he also applied to religions.Footnote 43 Francken thus played a part in that revival of Academic sceptic and Stoic philosophy in the late sixteenth century whose impact on moral philosophy and political theory has been highlighted most prominently by Richard Tuck.Footnote 44 This new humanism reacted against competing claims of dogmatic certainty in Christianity and focused on the preservation of the self and political order.
Essentially sceptical with respect to the possibility of a concerted action of Christian Europe, Francken placed all his hopes in the military efforts of the Germans to defend their fatherland. Their religious division, however, formed a real obstacle to any united military efforts. It was thus vital to overcome embittered religious disputes in order to save the Empire. A commentator of works by the Stoic philosopher, Epictetus, Francken's advice on confessional strife was of a moral, rather than a legal-political, nature. As an alternative to far-reaching irenical ideas, he made opinion and self-management the Archimedean point of his instructions. Both Catholics and Protestants, convinced of their superior position, should treat the adherents of the other Christian faith gently and patiently, as if they were sick.Footnote 45 If they were insulted, they should rely on the Christian virtue of humility. He furthermore stressed the common features of both major confessions. Christ had died for all of them and they were bound to him and to one another through a common baptism. Equally, Christians should not weaken their religion with their quarrels and thus betray it to Jews and Turks but abide in Christian love. Francken, who regardless of his return to the Catholic Church had kept some of his basic heterodox convictions, also quoted the pagan Roman senator, Aurelius Symmachus, from the fourth century in a way that could be interpreted as a statement in favour of general religious toleration.Footnote 46 In his Analysis rixae Christianae, quae Imperium turbat et diminuit Romanum of 1585 he addressed the causes of religious diversity in human nature and in the interpretation of scripture more systematically and stressed the common features of the notion of God between Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.Footnote 47 While he tried to minimize dogmatic differences from a sceptical perspective, he supported the idea of solving them in accordance with legal and political disputes through a ‘living judge’.Footnote 48 His position could thus be interpreted as giving priority to civil laws and order over theological truth claims.
This focus on the modes of communication between the confessions was also central to Nicolaus Vigelius's 1588 analysis of the present state of the Empire.Footnote 49 Viewing the current Turkish threat, the professor of civil law at the University of Marburg in Hesse particularly blamed the clergy and scholastic eloquence for the terminal decline of the Roman empire since late antiquity. While striving for dogmatic truth, the Germans would instead simply cause discord, strife, and a fatal decline of ‘legal faith’, the fundamental sense of justice.Footnote 50 Despite strong dogmatic differences, the Catholic, Lutheran, and Calvinist theologians were all equally quarrelsome, ambitious, selfish, and rebellious. From the viewpoint of Roman law and Stoic philosophy, Vigelius particularly criticized the theologians' denunciation of the light of nature and reason. They relied, he said, on a method of disputation which had proven its ineffectiveness in many bi-confessional colloquia.Footnote 51 Addressing the German nobility, Vigelius projected his own ideals of a greater separation between the church and the state to the Ottoman empire. The Turks had namely left everyone to choose and exercise his faith freely as long as he refrained from interfering with others or rebelling:
As a consequence, Saracens and Turks have set themselves apart from the clergy. They have steadfastly upheld the laws and jurisprudence of Mohammed and have thrown rhetoric, that is, the art of chatting, out of their schools. Instead, they have implanted Stoic philosophy and jurisprudence and not allowed law to be treated dialectically as in Academic schools. They have furthermore left everyone to choose his religion at his own risk but under the restriction that he does not despise or abuse other faiths or incites mutinies because of religion. Even more, the clergy's quarrels cannot set the Turkish nobility against each other or cause civil war but they keep their secular regime.Footnote 52
Reacting against an ever more sophisticated theology and the predilection of his contemporaries for increasingly subtle dogmatic distinctions, Vigelius proposed a reformed method of jurisprudence and a renewed emphasis on a basically Ciceronian concept of justice to uphold society and save Germany from dissolution as a result of internal strife and external aggression. Taking up the terminology of his theological opponents, he christened this programme ‘legal faith’ or ‘faith of the jurists’. According to Vigelius, ‘faith of the jurists’ was central to the stability of every commonwealth and political community. This was an unmistakable attempt to give clear preference to (Stoic) ethics, civil laws, and righteous conduct over theological subtleties. Of course, he also accepted religion's central position within society, but because of that he wanted to limit its destructive potential: ‘Religion has to be cultivated but not by means that prudence and civil justice between men perish.’Footnote 53 He consequently challenged the claims of the confessions to enforce their faith and restricted the power of religion to ‘persuasion’.
Vigelius's attack on theological disputes reflected the general situation of the Empire in the 1580s. To understand its full background one must, however, also take the narrower territorial context of Hesse into account.Footnote 54 During the Reformation and its aftermath, the Hessian landgrave Philip the Good had managed to follow a via media between staunch Lutheranism and Reformed positions, particularly on the question of the Eucharist. After the partition of the principality among his four heirs in 1567 confessionalization drove a bitter wedge between the traditionally Melanchthonian Kassel branch of the dynasty on the one hand and the strictly Lutheran Marburg and Darmstadt lines on the other. It was chiefly Ludwig IV of Hesse-Marburg who initiated this process by introducing strict Lutheranism in his part of the principality and by appointing the Lutheran Ägidius Hunnius to a chair in theology at Marburg in 1575, the university governed by all three branches. This led to angry debates within the university and at the general Hessian synods over the dogmatic orientation and religious policy. Vigelius's tracts must thus be viewed as a direct response to the renewed Lutheranism of his theological colleagues and as a plea for the traditional Melanchthonian way.Footnote 55 Describing his own work a ‘book of concord’ (Concordienbuch),Footnote 56 he mocked the attempts of the Marburg theologians to introduce the Lutheran Formula of Concord of 1577 and the Book of Concord of 1580 as a new dogmatic basis in Hesse and to rule out other forms of Protestantism.
Notwithstanding his academic background, Vigelius's arguments were very much in line with the pragmatic plea for a limited tolerance made by Lazarus von Schwendi, the famous Imperial counsellor and general.Footnote 57 Schwendi has long been regarded as the sole political defender of religious toleration in late sixteenth-century Germany. However, Johannes Burkhardt has recently sharply criticized the Imperial counsellor's stance. He compares Schwendi to a potentially dangerous driver proceeding in the wrong direction down the general road of sixteenth-century German history by attempting to subvert the Empire's progression into a stable system of clearly identified confessional entities.Footnote 58 In the wider context of the views analysed above, however, it is clear that Schwendi's proposals to the Emperor Maximilian II to allow general tolerance of Catholics and Protestants in all German territories are far from being utterances of an isolated individual. Instead, they are part of a much broader debate.
In his considerations for the emperor, Schwendi argued that the civil wars in France and the Netherlands were the upshot of religious suppression.Footnote 59 Schwendi was convinced that the results of ecclesiastical schism and the Reformation could not be overcome by force or compromise within the near future. Accordingly, he did not rely on principled irenic arguments. For him, religious toleration was a Nothweg or emergency route to rescue the fatherland from the chasm of civil strife, not something systematically or theologically justified.Footnote 60 Tolerance was first and foremost necessary to preserve concord, as well as the stability, honour, and greatness of the Empire. This was a fairly typical politique argument, and in fact Schwendi's explicitly patriotic concept of toleration was very close to positions of French politiques such as Chancellor Michel de l'Hôpital and Estienne Pasquier.Footnote 61 Schwendi's aim was undoubtedly the glory and the freedom of the fatherland from foreign, particularly Spanish, interference. He couched this Imperial humanist programme in an almost Machiavellian account of the rise and corruption of empires and human order in general which was generated by the dialectic of fortuna and virtus.Footnote 62
Strictly speaking, it is thus rather misleading to describe Schwendi's ideas, as Howard Louthan does, as the ‘high point of Austrian irenicism’.Footnote 63 For this seems to assume that Schwendi's ideas were rooted in an irenic Catholicism. Yet unlike Catholic irenicists such as Pflug, Schwendi was not at all concerned with the problem of a reunification of the church, whose prospects he viewed as rather gloomy. On the other hand, his position was not simply politique and pragmatic. In contrast to many Catholic politiques, his arguments for toleration had more than purely pragmatic and political motives; they were also the product of a growing sympathy for the new faith, something that he shared with Emperor Maximilian II. In his 1574 Bedencken An Kaiser Maximilian den Andern (Considerations for Emperor Maximilian II) Schwendi demonstrated a strong humanist dislike of Tridentine Catholicism and the papacy, which he blamed for the corruption and decline of the Empire during the middle ages. He accused the pope of preventing real reform of the church, and complained of his reluctance to allow common Christians to read the Bible in their own language. Schwendi praised the unspoiled simple Church of the Apostles and the first councils which he contrasted with the alleged corruption, idolatry, and superstition of the Roman Catholic Church.Footnote 64 In all, this was not far from being a genuine Protestant criticism of Catholicism.
Naturally, Schwendi's plea for religious toleration had a much greater appeal to German Protestants after 1555 than elaborate plans for religious unification. Since it did not rely on contested theological concepts of conscience and liberty, it could easily be addressed to Catholics as well. Schwendi's ideas were, however, also much more vulnerable to becoming instrumentalized in the hands of the Reformed party than a theologically elaborated irenicism. They could also easily be used to undermine Catholic positions. It is perhaps hardly surprising that they soon resurfaced in the context of the political demands of the Reformed party. In an address to the Imperial Diet of Regensburg in 1576, councillors from the Calvinist Palatinate blamed the lack of trust among the German estates on the harassment and expulsion of Protestant subjects by Catholic magistrates.Footnote 65 Now foreign barbaric nations were taking advantage of this weakening of the Empire. The conclusion they drew from this proposition was simple. If the welfare of the fatherland was dear to them, the Imperial estates should prevent such things and support at least the general free private exercise of religion. Printed pamphlets varied this link between religious concessions, tolerance, and the defence of the fatherland. A Discurs, Oder Bedencken vom jetzigen Ungerischen Kriegswesen (Discourse on the current war in Hungary) of 1597 argued that only through tolerance and equal participation in the Empire's institutions could the estates stand united ‘pro patriae defensione, pro libertate’.Footnote 66
It was this linkage that provoked a remarkable reply from Catholic confessionalists. In his polemic pamphlet, De autonomia, the Imperial counsellor, Andreas Erstenberger, categorized and refuted different types of arguments, both Protestant and Catholic, in favour of leaving religious questions free to individual decision. Erstenberger termed those who promoted religious toleration in the name of an imminent danger for the fatherland, ‘political courtiers’ (‘Politische Hofleut’).Footnote 67De autonomia attacked their doctrine as the un-Christian opinion of ‘pagan, worldly and fleshly counsellors’ (‘Haydnische/Weltliche und Fleischliche Räth’). Erstenberger's main targets were arguments that threatened to relinquish hard-line Catholic positions for political reasons: ‘Away with this un-Christian opinion and worldly prudence that says that one should set aside God's honour, his command and practice of the Catholic religion, his church and its unity and make concessions to sects and heretics for the sake of temporal peace or country and government!’Footnote 68 He further condemned the sacrifice of an eternal fatherland in the name of a worldly and temporal political community and its goods. De autonomia illustrated this with an anecdote concerning the fourth-century bc Athenian orator Democrates. Democrates had counselled the citizens of Athens to calm the triumphant Alexander the Great by venerating him as god with the argument that they should not risk losing the earth over their care for heaven.Footnote 69 Strikingly, two years later Vigelius affirmed Democrates's words to demonstrate that by quarrelling over heaven the Christian theologians were forgetting about man's worldly existence and the political community.Footnote 70
III
These two alternatives seemed to leave little choice. Characteristically, as the tensions between the various confessions rose in central Europe, patriotic arguments in favour of political peace and stability of the civil order were revived in the years before the Thirty Years War. Their advocates' aim was to circumvent futile theological irenicism both between Catholics and Protestants and, perhaps more importantly, between Lutherans and Calvinists. German Calvinists in particular appealed to their Lutheran countrymen on various levels to form a united Protestant front against the imminent threat of Counter Reformation. Paul Tossanus even tried to blur confessional boundaries between Protestants by employing national categories in an otherwise strictly theological discourse. With respect to the mostly negatively employed term ‘Calvinist’, the Heidelberg theologian asked ‘what have our churches in Germany to do with Calvin who has been a Frenchman and spent most of lifetime in Geneva not in Germany … should a foreigner's name prevent peace between the Evangelical churches in Germany?’Footnote 71 However, such linguistic and rhetorical manoeuvres enjoyed little success. The Lutheran theologians flatly rejected – as Hotson notes – Calvinist irenicism in the Empire, insisting on sharp theological differences. They were suspicious of the Reformed irenicist attempts that sprang up immediately after every Calvinist takeover of a Lutheran court, as in Hesse-Cassel, Brandenburg, and other principalities. For many Lutherans, the rise of Calvinism posed a greater threat than Roman Catholicism; some indeed thought it as pernicious as the religion of Turks and other Muslims.Footnote 72
On the political front, however, Calvinist activists were more successful. Drawing on patriotic arguments for saving the Empire against a combined threat by Spanish interference, Jesuit machinations, and an increasingly absolutist emperor, they managed to form a political alliance with a significant number of Lutheran princes and cities in the Protestant Union founded in 1608.Footnote 73 While this alliance carried some clear anti-Catholic undertones, pamphleteers sympathetic to the Union also addressed appeals to the common fatherland to their Catholic countrymen between 1608 and 1621.Footnote 74 What their exact intentions were must remain a subject of speculation. Did they, as a minority within the Empire, seek co-operation and sympathy across sectarian boundaries with their cause of saving the Empire's current constitution and peace, or did they simply try to undermine confessional solidarity within the Catholic camp? It was in this context that the Protestant scholar Matthias Bernegger, a famous Tacitean, professor at Strasbourg, and friend of Hugo Grotius, launched an extensive and wide-ranging plea for peace in the first phase of the Thirty Years War. Bernegger's Tuba pacis (Trumpet of peace) was a direct response to a militant tract by Caspar Schoppe (Scioppius),Footnote 75 a Catholic convert from Franconia, untiring pamphleteer, and Spanish councillor.Footnote 76 Schoppe suggested to the Spanish king and other Catholic princes that they should launch a direct attack on Protestant Europe. German Calvinists published excerpts of this text in order to show the unscrupulous militant intentions of their adversaries.
In contrast to the allegedly notorious traitor Schoppe, Bernegger clearly stated in his preface that Tuba pacis was ‘in Germania paci destinatus’ and that his work was written in ‘professione pietatis in patriam’. Drafted in December 1620, it was finished at a point when the power of the Calvinist party in Germany and its leader Frederick V, elector of the Palatinate and king of Bohemia, was about to collapse completely after its crushing defeat at the hands of joint Catholic forces in the battle of White Mountain a few weeks before. Hence Tuba pacis was not simply a general plea to reconcile the confessional parties in the Empire. More precisely, it was both an attempt to stop and argue against an ongoing religious civil war and a call for Protestant unity and solidarity. Drawing on the latest theories of just war, its foremost, and avowedly Protestant, aim was to deconstruct any notion of legitimacy for a religious war – a bellum or classicum sacrum – of Catholics against Protestants both in terms of utile and honestum.Footnote 77
Understandably after the horrors of the Second World War, German scholars in the 1950s interpreted Tuba pacis too idealistically as a humanist outcry for peace based on a deeply felt Sittlichkeit (ethical life).Footnote 78 In fact, a more complex picture emerges. Berngegger's Tuba pacis was in many ways a typical piece of propaganda in favour of the Calvinist cause. It is striking how Bernegger employed common arguments of Protestant polemic by making Spain's striving for universal monarchy, the ambition and greed of the pope and the Jesuits responsible for the actual conflict. While this attack was targeted solely at foreign forces and was thus designed to exclude patriotic German Catholics, one might doubt whether this strategy really appealed to them. In the light of the recent events in Bohemia, the Catholic elites felt justified in their claim that Calvinists wanted to overthrow the Empire and Catholicism alike.
What might have been more attractive to them was Bernegger's more principled attack on war and violence in the name of religion. As is well known, most Catholic theorists of just war were arguing against an aggressive war to propagate religion.Footnote 79 In contrast, of course, they took a different position with regard to the (violent) punishment of heretics.Footnote 80 Bernegger, however, did not directly engage with Catholic neo-scholasticism but followed a humanist path of argument. On the one hand he claimed, with a view to honestas, that violence was incompatible with the practice and teachings of Christ, the Apostles, and the ecclesia prisca, with that force only pertaining to corporal not spiritual affairs. He furthermore stated that
since the right of religion does not fall between men but pertains to the relation between God and man it does not, consequently, violate human law. We thus believe that neither war may be inflicted in its name nor such punishments imposed, which cause the destruction of public peace of human society.Footnote 81
On the other hand, with a view to utilitas, Bernegger revived the politique argument by criticizing religious wars and persecution as practically counter-productive. They would generate nothing but atheism, hypocrisy, rebellion, and destruction within the respublica and between peoples, which also conflicted with honestas and pietas.Footnote 82 On the other hand, he emphasized that magistrates should take measures against fanatics and against those who attempted to overthrow public order such as the Jesuits.Footnote 83
Bernegger's attack on religious persecution formed the basis on which he formulated his irenical programme in the last passages of his tract. Characteristically, he started with a call for Protestant unity and then treated issues of communication between the Reformed and the Lutherans. He particularly focused on the problem of calumnies and theological polemics. Like Vigelius, Bernegger appealed to the princes not to allow the respublica to perish because of an ambitious libido disputandi.Footnote 84 Thus again he gave clear priority to the stability of the political unity over religious truth claims. This rested on two contentions, which took up the humanist tradition of Erasmus and Castellio, but were now placed within the frame of Tacitism.Footnote 85 First, he pointed to the general, one might dub it the sceptical, problem of cognition and theological certainty. Invoking the church fathers such as Augustine and Gregory of Nazianz, Bernegger highlighted how difficult it was for us to penetrate God's secrets and concluded that one should thus stick to faith and simple, less contentious truths. Secondly, he emphasized with Erasmus, Lipsius, and others that the Christian faith was above all about life and that also theology's finis had to be vita. Hence he showed himself convinced that if ‘we profess the simple Christian faith, if we give up unknowable subtleties for Christ, the apostles and antiquity; if we learn for life and not for school, consensus and concord can be easily achieved’.Footnote 86 Bernegger lays out three principles for a basic consensus, namely that everyone submits to the authority of Holy Scripture, refrains from calumny on issues which are not decided by an independent council, and treats the other side benevolently and with Christian charity.Footnote 87 Strikingly, he claims that, despite the obvious obstacles, this programme should be extended from a concord between Protestants to one that included Catholics as well. Bernegger, in fact, continued to pursue this path during the Thirty Years War. In 1628 he published and wrote the preface to the Syllabus, a reading list of irenical literature compiled by the French Protestant Jean Hotman de Villiers, and planned to produce a collection of aphorismi irenici from this canon of Catholic and Protestant authors.Footnote 88
IV
Bernegger was never able fully to integrate this irenicist programme into a coherent political theory, perhaps because he did not really work as a theologian. It is thus instructive to turn from the German scholar to the more systematic approach of his Dutch friend, Hugo Grotius.Footnote 89 Though Grotius produced a genuine and comprehensive theological œuvre, he never lost sight of the political aim of bringing irenicism into ‘patriotic’ service.Footnote 90 He sought to save the political community from disintegration as a result of religious wars, ecclesiastical independence, and intolerance. Grotius's approach was twofold from the outset. On the one hand, he perpetrated a theological irenicism based on a minimalist concept of Christianity allegedly rooted in reason, the church of the fathers, and the early councils. On the other hand, he wanted to organize the church in a way that would not allow dogmatic differences to escalate into political crisis. Against the Calvinist Counter-Remonstrants he supported the idea of a subordination of the church to the state and a tight public control of ecclesiastical institutions.
Grotius thereby made a striking claim about the nature of the church in his De imperio summarum potestatem circa sacra, published posthumously in 1647. It took up the topical assertion made by many confessional writers that religion was the bond of society, but then gave the argument a distinctive new twist.Footnote 91De imperio declared the church's external affairs such as the nomination of its ministers were fully subject to the state, similar to the public administration of medicine or agriculture. With this, Grotius was very much in line with a number of theorists within the Protestant and Gallican camp who, like Henning Arnisaeus, Bartholomäus Keckermann, and Bernegger, insisted that the prince had the power of inspectio and cura rerum sacrarum and was thus qualified to judge in matters of religious affairs.Footnote 92 Grotius, however, went much further. These theorists tended never to question the autonomy of the (true) church in its internal affairs, particularly in matters of doctrine. In contrast, Grotius hoped not only to calm claims surrounding religious truth for the sake of the civil community: he also wanted to abolish all teachings dangerous to peace within the state and between nations. While the corporal nature of God had no relevance for human conduct, the notion of a free will (liberum arbitrium) and good works could not be fully abolished without grave damage to the commonwealth.Footnote 93 Thus he defended Arminianism as an ethical guideline much more appropriate to political stability than the strict anti-freewill doctrines of its Counter-Remonstrant opponents. Furthermore, a notorious passage of his polemic against the Leiden theologian Andreas Rivetus Grotius stated: ‘Those who seek to further peace among Christians are obliged to destroy those dogmas which disturb political peace. It is more important to be a good citizen than a good Christian.’Footnote 94 Whereas in this particular context Grotius was attacking the Monarchomachs' assertion of a duty to take up arms against the magistrate in defence of religion, his claim could, as shown above, also be extended to genuine religious positions. The implication of this was, as Richard Tuck argues in relation to Grotius's early unpublished essay Meletius, that the ‘state ought to foster religious doctrines which fit its fundamental interests’ and, one might add, uphold citizens' duties and virtues.Footnote 95
But how, one might ask, does this fit into Grotius's positions on natural law and civil society and, finally, what does this have to do with patriotic irenicism? Like Bernegger, Grotius asserts from the outset that too much significance had become attached to dogmas and specific religious precepts. Christianity was essentially about natural cognition and common ethical precepts, which were little contested between the different confessions.Footnote 96 Grotius's ethical concept of Christianity emphasized the conformity of Christian morals and natural law. Since theological truth claims and specific religious customs, like the liturgy, were not essential preconditions for being a proper Christian, the church was reduced to an outward organization within a certain commonwealth. It is an integral part of the respublica and has thus the character of a merely private, subordinate association.Footnote 97 This position was later forcefully restated by Pufendorf.Footnote 98
As such it could not overrule the interests of the civil community, as Catholics like Erstenberger claimed. In the ‘Prolegomena’ of his unpublished De jure praedae Grotius (re)legitimized the priority of common good and country over private interests in terms of natural law:
The more general concept should take precedence on the ground that it includes the good of individuals as well. In other words the cargo cannot be saved unless the ship is preserved. For whatever is beneficial for one's country (πατριδι) [as a whole] is likewise of common [advantage] to the various parts thereof.Footnote 99
In De imperio he emphasized that it was another aspect of religion that it ‘creates peaceful and observant human beings, patriots (patriae amantes), who keep right and equity.’Footnote 100 Hence the classical language of the salus and amor patriae employed by Pflug and Schwendi re-surfaced, though in the quite different context of self-love and utility. In this sense, a minimal Christian theology and a public control of the church and its dogmas were in the interest of every individual entering political community. This claim can be further sustained by what G. H. M. Posthumus Meyjes described as a central aspect of Grotius's irenicism: that ‘the task of the church and religion is to allow salutary influx from above to flow into the commonwealth. But … what is salutary has already been decided in advance, in sovereign independence of the church. Salutary is what serves the community.’Footnote 101 One might describe this as a patriot or civil concept of religion and church with respect to civil community.Footnote 102
Strikingly, it was in the same vein that Spinoza later argued for a combination of close political control over religious affairs with toleration and the peaceful coexistence of different religious opinions in his Tractatus theologico-politicus. Taking the commonwealth of the Hebrews in the Old Testament as a model, Spinoza claimed in chapter xix that an independent religious authority could not be tolerated for this would establish a state within the state. Since religious law can truly only be implemented through political authorities, who thus rule in God's name, the devotional love (pietas) towards one's country must overrule particular religious customs and commandments such as the love to one's neighbour or one's parents.Footnote 103 The irenic aim of securing peace between different confessions is here fully transformed into the problem of securing public peace.
V
What conclusions can be finally drawn from this examination of a variety of different texts and debates? First of all, ideas of a peaceful religious coexistence between the confessions and notions of a common Christian identity in German political discourse were ambivalent. On the one hand, they promoted concord and sought to diminish the effects of confessional enmity. On the other hand, the arguments advanced for them hinged on the aggressive reference to an external threat, be it the Ottoman empire, the pope, or the Spanish empire. In some cases this reference to an external threat also accounts for their success in political fact. The same exclusion of a third other was, in some respects, even echoed in Grotius's irenicism, which drew heavily on the apologetic tradition of Christian superiority over other religions.
While the appeal to the endangered fatherland could be, of course, an instrument in partisan propaganda, it often shaped the political language in a way that transcended confessional polemics. In fact, to evoke the welfare of the patria meant to put aside confessional and theological truth claims. Patriotism thereby helped to bridge the gap between Catholics and Protestants or, perhaps even more important, between Lutherans and Calvinists in Germany. In this sense, the political arguments for toleration advanced by exponents of irenic patriotism had a greater practical impact than irenic visions of a reunited Christian church. This is also evident in the relationship between Calvinists and Lutherans in the Empire on the eve of the Thirty Years War. United by an anti-Spanish patriotism, Calvinist and Lutheran estates were able to form an alliance in 1608. In sharp contrast, the Lutheran clergy vehemently rejected irenic proposals made by David Pareus and other Reformed theologians that aimed to complement the political coalition with a religious union.
While it is important to distinguish between politique or pragmatic arguments for religious peace and even toleration and more principled arguments, in reality many authors combined these two types of argument. In particular, political theorists like Bernegger and Grotius, who were, above all, interested in the unity of the commonwealth, combined a plea for a return to the principles of early Christianity, and a simple Christian life against confessional subtleties, with arguments for a stronger political control of the church and the theologians. Like Vigelius, both of them focused on the ethical aspects and value of Christianity in contrast to theology. They thereby took up widespread criticism among later humanists of the dangerous consequences of theological disputes for the fatherland. In fact, one might argue that Grotius drew the most radical consequences from this position when he developed an idea of the relation between church and commonwealth which was very much in line with patriot restriction of religion and the late humanist concern with raison d'état.
Finally, was Erasmus right to condemn patriotism? He was certainly justified in criticizing a narrow patriotism. However it was precisely the implementation of irenicism within a specific patria and the patriotic restriction of religious controversies that appeared to be perhaps the most promising answer to the confessional confrontation.
