5. Protestants and Catholics 1. Luther, Calvin and State Absolutism
We have seen that the counter-reformation of the 16th century had to carry on a two-front
intellectual war on behalf of scholasticism and natural law, against Protestants and crypto-Protestants,
and also against secularist apologists for an absolute state.
These latter two seemingly contrasting groups were closer than merely having the same enemy.
In many ways they were twins and not simply fortuitous allies.
Despite their many differences, Martin Luther, 1483-1546, son of a German miner and John
John Calvin, born Jean Covin, of which Calvin is the latinized name, 1509-1564, son of a
French attorney and leading town official, whose new religious sects between them swept
northern Europe, agreed on some crucial fundamentals.
In particular, their social philosophy and theology rested on the basic proposition that
Man is totally depraved, steeped in sin. If this is so, man could scarcely achieve salvation
even partially through his own efforts. Therefore, salvation comes not from man's non-existent
free will, but as an arbitrary and unintelligible gift of unearned grace from God, a gift which
which he for his own reasons hands out only to a predestined elect.
All of the non-elect are damned.
Furthermore, as man is totally depraved and a slave of Satan, his reason, let alone his
sense of enjoyment, can never be trusted.
Neither reason nor the senses can in any way be trusted to form a social ethics.
can only come from the divine will through biblical revelation.
To this day, fundamentalist Calvinists are taught to sum up their creed in the acronym
TULIP, T-U-L-I-P, perhaps also recalling the Dutch vastnesses of Calvinism.
P. Total Damnation. U. Unconditional Election. L. Limited Atonement. I. Irresistible Grace.
P. Perseverance of the Saints.
In short, man is damned totally. His atonement can only be limited and insufficient. The
The only thing that can and does unconditionally save and elect among men is God's irresistible
grace.
If reason cannot be used to frame an ethic, this means that Luther and Calvin had to,
in essence, throw out natural law, and in doing so they jettisoned the basic criteria
developed over the centuries by which to criticize the despotic actions of the state.
Indeed, Luther and Calvin, relying on isolated biblical passages rather than on an integrated
philosophic tradition, opined that the powers that be are ordained of God, and that therefore
the King, no matter how tyrannical, is divinely appointed and must always be obeyed.
This doctrine, of course, played into the hands of the rising absolute monarchs and
their theoreticians.
Whether Catholic or Protestant, these secularists pushed their religion to the background of
life.
Socially and politically they held, as we shall see below, that the state and its ruler
are absolute, that the ruler must seek to preserve and expand his power, and that his
as dictates must be obeyed.
It is therefore the early Jesuits of the Counter-Reformation who saw and analyzed the crucial link between
the Protestant leaders and such amoralist secularists as Niccolo Machiavelli.
As Professor Skinner writes, the early Jesuit theorists clearly recognized the pivotal point
at which the political theories of Luther and Machiavelli may be said to converge.
Both of them were equally concerned, for their own very different reasons, to reject the
idea of the law of nature as an appropriate moral basis for political life.
It is in consequence in the works of the early Jesuits that we first encounter the familiar
and the uncoupling of Luther and Machiavelli as the two founding fathers of the impious
modern state. Moreover, Luther had to rely for the spread of his religion on the German
and other European monarchs. His preaching of all-out obedience to the ruler was reinforced
by this practical concern. In addition, the secular princes themselves had a juicy economic
The Confiscation of the Often Wealthy Monasteries and Other Church Property
Underlying at least part of the motives of the monarchy and nobility of the new Protestant states was the lure of greed and grab.
Thus, when Gustaf Vasa, King of Sweden, became a Lutheran in 1524, he immediately transferred
the church tithes into taxes going to the Crown, and three years later he confiscated
the entire property of the Catholic Church.
Similarly, in Denmark, the newly Lutheran kings seized the monastic lands and confiscated
In Germany, Albert of Hohenzollern accompanied his Lutheran conversion by seizing the lands
of the Catholic Teutonic Knights, while Philip of Hesse grabbed all the monastic lands in
his state, much of the proceeds going into his own personal coffers.
In addition to grabbing the lands and revenues, the monarchs in each of the lands seized control
of the church itself and converted the Lutheran church into a state-run church, to the plaudits
of Martin Luther and his disciples, who championed the idea of a state-dominated church.
In the city of Geneva, John Calvin and his disciples imposed a totalitarian theocracy
for a time, but this church-run state proved to be an aberration in mainstream Calvinism,
which triumphed in Scotland, Holland, and Switzerland, and had considerable influence
in France and England.
An outstanding example of a state-run church as a motive for reformation was the establishment
of the Anglican Church in England.
The defection from Catholicism of Henry VIII was accompanied by the confiscation of the
monasteries and the parceling out of these lands, either by gift or by sale at low cost,
to favored groups of nobles and gentry.
About 2,000 monks and nuns throughout England, as well as about 8,000 laborers in the monasteries,
are thus dispossessed for the benefit of a new class of large landholders beholden to
the crown and not likely to permit any return to a Roman Catholic monarchy in Britain.
2. Luther's Economics
As a man fundamentally opposed to later scholastic refinements or even to the kind of integral
A Confused, Contradictory and Unsystematic Thinker at Best, Luther was unsurprisingly
are the least consistent in an area of secular affairs, economics, in which he had little interest.
Thus, on a crucial question which had vexed scholastics for centuries, whether private property is natural or conventional,
that is, merely the product of positive law, Luther was characteristically anti-intellectual.
He was not interested in such questions, therefore they were trivial.
It is vain to mention these things. They cannot be acquired by thought.
As Dr. Gary North has commented, so much for fifteen hundred years of debate.
All in all, Richard Taney's assessment of Luther on these matters is perhaps not an overstatement.
Confronted with the complexities of foreign trade and financial organization,
Confusion, or with the subtleties of economic analysis. He, Luther, is like a savage introduced
to a dynamo or a steam engine. He is too frightened and angry even to feel curiosity. Attempts
to explain the mechanism merely enrage him. He can only repeat that there is a devil in
it and that good Christians will not meddle with the mystery of iniquity.
The rest is confusion.
Upholding the commandment prohibiting theft meant that Luther had to be, at least in some
sense, an advocate of the rights of private property.
But to Luther, stealing meant not only what everyone defines to be theft, but also taking
advantage of others at market, warehouses, wine and beer sellers, workshops.
In different writings, sometimes even within the same one, Luther was capable of denouncing
a person who makes use of the market in his own willful way, proud and defiant, as though
he had a good right to sell at as high a price as he chose, and none could interfere.
While also writing, anyone may sell what he has for the highest price he can get, so long
On the just price, Luther tends to revert to the minority medieval view that a just price is not the market price, but a cost of production plus expenses, and profit for labor and risk of the merchant.
On usury in particular, Luther tended to revert to the drastic prohibition that the Catholic Church had long left behind.
The census contract he would ban, as he would Lucram Cessens.
Money was sterile, there should be no increase in price for time as against cash payments for goods, etc.
All the old nonsense, which the scholastics had spent centuries burying or transforming,
was back intact.
It is certainly fitting that, as we have seen, one of Luther's great theological opponents
in Germany was his former friend Johann Eck, a Catholic theologian and friend of the great
Fugger banking family, who was even ahead of his time in arguing in thoroughgoing fashion
in favor of usury.
Yet despite his opposition to usury, Luther advised the young ruler of Saxony not to abolish
interest or to relieve debtors of the burden of paying it.
Interest is, after all, a common plague that all have taken upon themselves.
We must put up with it, therefore, and hold debtors to it.
Some of these contradictions can be reconciled in the light of Luther's deeply pessimistic
view of man and, therefore, of human institutions.
In the wicked secular world, he believed, we cannot expect people or institutions to
act in accordance with the Christian gospel.
Therefore, in contrast to the Catholic attempt through the art of casuistry to apply moral
John Calvin's social and economic views closely paralleled Luther's, and their
There is no point in repeating them here.
There are only two main areas of difference, their views on usury and on the concept of
the calling, although the latter difference is more marked for the later Calvinist Puritans
of the seventeenth century.
Calvin's main contribution to the usury question was in having the courage to dump the prohibition
altogether.
The son of an important town official had only contempt for the Aristotelian argument
that money is sterile.
A child, he pointed out, knows that money is only sterile when locked away somewhere,
but who in their right mind borrows to keep money idle.
Merchants borrow in order to make profits on their purchases, and hence money is then
fruitful.
As for the Bible, Luke's famous injunction only orders generosity towards the poor, while
Hebraic law in the Old Testament is not binding in modern society.
To Calvin, then, usury is perfectly licit, provided that it is not charged in loans to
the poor who would be hurt by such payment.
Also, any legal maximum, of course, must be obeyed.
And finally, Calvin maintained that no one should function as a professional moneylender.
The odd result was that hedging his explicit pro-usery doctrine with qualification, Calvin
in practice converged on the views of such scholastics as Beale, Zumanhart, Kajetan and
Eck.
Calvin began with a sweeping theoretical defense of interest-taking and then hedged it about
with Qualifications.
The liberal scholastics began with a prohibition of usury and then qualified it away.
But while in practice the two groups converged and the scholastics in discovering and elaborating
upon exceptions to the usury ban were theoretically more sophisticated and fruitful, Calvin's
Calvin's bold break with the formal man was a liberating breakthrough in Western thought
and practice.
It also threw the responsibility for applying teachings on usury from the church or state
to the individual's conscience.
As Taney puts it, the significant feature in his, Calvin's, discussion of the subject
is that he assumes credit to be a normal and inevitable incident in the life of a society.
A more subtle difference, but in the long run perhaps having more influence on the development
of economic thought, was the Calvinist concept of the calling.
This new concept was embryonic in Calvin and was developed further by later Calvinists
and especially Puritans in the late 17th century.
Older economic historians such as Max Weber have made far too much of the Calvinist as
against Lutheran and Catholic conceptions of the calling.
All these religious groups emphasize the merit of being productive in one's labor or occupation,
one's calling in life.
But there is, especially in the later Puritans, the idea of success in one's calling as a
visible sign of being a member of the elect.
The success is striven for, of course, not to prove that one is a member of the elect
destined to be saved, but assuming that one is in the elect by virtue of one's Calvinist
A Calvinist emphasis on postponement of earthly gratification led to a particular stress on
saving.
Labor or industry and thrift, almost for their own sake, or rather for God's sake, were emphasized
in Calvinism much more than in the other segments of Christianity.
The focus, then, both in Catholic countries and in scholastic thought, became very different
from that of Calvinism.
The scholastic focus was on consumption, the consumer, as the goal of labor and production.
Labor was not so much a good in itself as a means toward consumption on the market.
The Aristotelian balance, or golden mean, was considered a requisite of the good life,
a life leading to happiness in keeping with the nature of man.
And that balanced life emphasized the joys of consumption as well as of leisure, in addition
to the importance of productive effort.
In contrast, a rather grim emphasis on work and on saving began to be stressed in Calvinist
Culture.
This de-emphasis on leisure, of course, fitted with the iconoclasm that reached its height
in Calvinism, the condemnation of the enjoyment of the senses as a means of expressing religious
devotion.
One of the expressions of this conflict came over religious holidays, which Catholic countries
enjoyed in abundance.
To the Puritans, this was idolatry. Even Christmas was not supposed to be an occasion for sensate enjoyment.
There has been considerable dispute over the Weber thesis, propounded by the early 20th century German economic historian and sociologist Max Weber,
which attributed the rise of capitalism and the Industrial Revolution to the late Calvinist concept of the calling
Banking, and the resulting capitalist spirit.
For all its fruitful insights, the Weber thesis must be rejected on many levels.
First, modern capitalism, in any meaningful sense, begins not with the Industrial Revolution
of 18th and 19th centuries, but, as we have seen, in the Middle Ages, and particularly
in the Italian city-states.
Such examples of capitalist rationality as double-entry bookkeeping and various financial
techniques begin in these Italian city-states as well.
All were Catholic.
Indeed, it is in a Florentine account book of 1253 that there is first found the classic
pro-capitalist formula, In the Name of God and of Prophet.
No city was more of a financial and commercial center than Antwerp in the 16th century, a
Catholic center.
No man shone as much as financier and banker as Jakob Fugger, a good Catholic from southern
Germany.
Not only that, Fugger worked all his life, refused to retire, and announced that he would
make money as long as he could.
A prime example of the Weberian Protestant ethic from a solid Catholic.
And we have seen how the scholastic theologians moved to understand and accommodate the market
and market forces.
On the other hand, while it is true that Calvinist areas in England, France, Holland and the
North American colonies prospered, the solidly Calvinist Scotland remained a backward and
Undeveloped Area, even to this day.
But even if the focus on calling and labor did not bring about the Industrial Revolution,
it might well have led to another outstanding difference between Calvinist and Catholic
countries, a crucial difference in the development of economic thought.
Professor Amel Couter's brilliant speculation to this effect will inform the remainder of
this work.
Scouter
Calvin and his disciples placed work at the center of their social theology.
All work in this society is invested with divine approval.
Any social philosopher or economist exposed to Calvinism will be tempted to give labor
an exalted position in his social or economic treatise.
And no better way of extolling labor can be found than by combining work with value theory,
traditionally the very basis of an economic system.
Thus value becomes labor value, which is not merely a scientific device for measuring exchange
rates, but also the spiritual tie combining divine will with economic everyday life.
In their extolling of work, the Calvinists concentrated on systematic, continuing industriousness,
on a settled course of labor.
Thus the English Puritan Divine, Samuel Huron, opined that, he that hath no honest business
about which ordinarily to be employed, no settled course to which he may betake himself,
cannot please God.
A very influential was the early 17th century Cambridge University academic, the Reverend
William Perkins, who did much to translate Calvinist theology into English practice.
Perkins denounced four groups of men who had no particular calling to walk in, beggars
and vagabonds, monks and friars, gentlemen who spend their days in eating and drinking,
and servants, who allegedly spent their time waiting.
All these were dangerous, because unsettled and undisciplined.
Particularly dangerous were wanderers, who avoided the authority of all.
Furthermore believed Perkins, the lazy multitude was always inclined to popish opinions, always
more ready to play than to work.
In contrast to the Calvinist glorification of labor, the Aristotelian Thomist tradition was quite different.
Instead of work, moderate pleasure-seeking and happiness formed the center of economic actions, according to Aristotelian and Thomistic philosophy.
A certain balanced hedonism is an integrated part of the Aristotelian theory of the good life.
If pleasure in a moderate form is the purpose of economics, then following the Aristotelian concept of the final cause, all principles of economics, including valuation, must be derived from this goal.
In this pattern of Aristotelian and Thomistic thinking, valuation has the function of showing how much pleasure can be derived from economic goods.
Hence Great Britain, heavily influenced by Calvinist thought and culture and its glorification of the mere exertion of labor, came to develop a labor theory of value,
While France and Italy, still influenced by Aristotelian and Thomist concepts, continued the scholastic emphasis on the consumer and his subjective valuation as the source of economic value.
While there is no way to prove this hypothesis conclusively, the counter insight has great value in explaining the comparative development of economic thought in Britain
in and in the Catholic countries of Europe after the 16th century 4. Calvinists on Usury
Perhaps because he was considered the greatest French jurist of the mid-16th century, the
merit of the contribution of Charles du Moulin, Latinized name Corollus Molinaeus, 1500-1566,
has been highly inflated, in his and in later times.
A Catholic who later converted to Calvinism and was then forced to leave for Germany,
Dumoulin had nothing but contempt for scholasticism, which he attacked vehemently in his highly
publicized work, The Treatise on Contracts and Usury, Paris, 1546.
Whereas Molinaeus officially denounced the prohibition of usury, in actuality his views
were little different from those of the contemporary scholastics, or indeed of Calvin.
While clearly denouncing the view that money is sterile and demonstrating that it is as
productive as the goods bought with it, he hedges his defense of usury sufficiently so
that his views are little different from many others.
He does maintain that the charge of interest on a loan per se is unjust, but ingeniously
points out that a lender charges for the utility of the money rather than for the money itself.
But Molinaeus attacks the cruel usuries permitted by Lucrum Cessans, and maintains with Calvin
that interest may not be charged for loans to the poor.
One wonders that if such a rule were enforced, who in the world would ever lend to the poor?
And would the poor then be better off by being deprived of all credit?
Indeed it seems that Molinaeus' main contribution was to blacken unjustly the name of poor Conrad
Zumenhardt, a cruel injustice that would last for four centuries.
In an act obviously motivated by malice towards scholasticism, Molinaeus took the great Zumanhart's
arguments against the usury ban and twisted them to make the German theologian a particularly
doltish advocate of the prohibition.
He took Zumanhart's initial arguments for the prohibition, which he had stated in order
to Knock Down, claimed that they were Zumanhart's own, and then plagiarized Zumanhart's critique
of these arguments without acknowledgement.
As a result of this shabby mendacity, as Professor Noonan points out, since Dumoulin's writings
have alone become famous, Conrad Zumanhart has appeared to posterity only as Dumoulin
caricatures him, that is, as a particularly obstinate and strangely stupid defender of
the usury prohibition.
The honor of putting the final boot to the usury prohibition belongs to the 17th century
classicist and Dutch Calvinist Claude Zoméz, Latinized name Claudius Salmatius, 1588-1653.
In several works published in Leiden beginning with De Usuris Liber in 1630 and continuing
to 1645, Salmaceus finished off this embarrassing remnant of the mountainous errors of the past.
His fort was not so much in coining new theoretical arguments as in finally willing to be consistent.
In short, Salmaceous trenchantly pointed out that money lending was a business like any
other and like other businesses was entitled to charge a market price.
He did make the important theoretical point, however, that, as in any other part of the
market, if the number of userers multiplies, the price of money or interest will be driven
Salmatius also had the courage to point out that there were no valid arguments against usury, either by divine or natural law.
The Jews only prohibited usury against other Jews, and this was a political and tribal act, rather than an expression of a moral theory about an economic transaction.
As for Jesus, he taught nothing at all about civil polity or economic transactions.
This leaves the only ecclesiastical law against usury that of the Pope, and why should a Calvinist obey the Pope?
Salmaceous also took some deserved whacks at the evasions permeating the various scholastic justifications, or extrinsic titles, justifying interest.
Let's face it, Salmaceous in effect asserted what the canonists and scholastics took away with one hand, they restored with the other.
The census is really usury, foreign exchange is really usury, lucrum cessans is really usury, usury all, and let them all be licit.
Furthermore, usury is always charged as compensation for something, in essence, the lack of use of money and the risk of loss in a loan.
Salmatius also had the courage to take the hardest case, professional money lending to the poor, and to justify that.
Selling the use of money is a business, like any other. If it is licit to make money with things bought with money, why not from money itself?
As Noonan paraphrases Salmaceus, the seller of bread is not required to ask if he sells it to a poor man or a rich man, why should the money lender have to make a distinction?
And, there is no fraud or theft in charging the highest market price for other goods, why is it wrong for the usurer to charge the heaviest usuries he can collect?
Empirically, Salmaceus also analyzed the case of public userers in Amsterdam, the great
commercial and financial center of the seventeenth century, replacing Antwerp of the previous
century, showing that the usual 16 percent charge on small loans to the poor is accounted
for by the costs of the userers borrowing their own money, of holding some money idle,
of renting a large house, of absorbing some losses on loans, of paying license fees, hiring
employees and paying an auctioneer.
Deducting all these expenses, the average net interest rate of the moneylenders is only
8%, barely enough to keep them in business.
In concluding that usury is a business like any other, Salmaceus, in his typical witty
and Sparkling Style, declared, I would rather be called a usurer than be a tailor.
Our examples of his style already demonstrate the aptness of the great Austrian economist
Boehm-Bawerk's conclusion about Salmaceus, that his works are extremely effective pieces
of writing, veritable gems of sparkling polemic.
The materials for them, it must be confessed, had in great part been provided by his predecessors.
But the happy manner in which Salmaceous employs these materials, and the many pithy sallies
with which he enriches them, places his polemic far above anything that had gone before.
As a result, Salmaceous' essays had wide influence throughout the Netherlands and the rest of
Europe.
As Boehm-Bawerk declared, Salmaceous views on usury were the high water mark of interest
theory to remain so for over 100 years.
5.
Communist Zealots, The Anabaptists
Sometimes Martin Luther must have felt that he had loosed the whirlwind, even opened the
gates of hell.
Shortly after Luther launched the Reformation, various Anabaptist sects appeared and spread
throughout Germany.
The Anabaptists believed in predestination of the elect, but they also believed, in contrast
to Luther, that they knew infallibly who the elect were, that is, themselves.
The sign of that election was in an emotional mystical conversion process, that of being
Born Again, Baptized in the Holy Spirit Such baptism must be adult and not among infants.
More to the point, it meant that only the elect are to be sect members who obey the
multifarious rules and creeds of the Church.
The idea of the sect, in contrast to Catholicism, Lutheranism or Calvinism, was not comprehensive
Church Membership in the Society, The Sect was to be distinctly separate for the elect
only.
Given that creed, there were two ways that Anabaptism could and did go.
Most Anabaptists, like the Mennonites or Amish, became virtual anarchists.
They tried to separate themselves as much as possible from a necessarily sinful state
and Society, and engaged in non-violent resistance to the state's decrees.
The other route, taken by another wing of Anabaptists, was to try to seize power in
the state and to shape up the majority by extreme coercion, in short, ultra-theocracy.
As Monsignor Knox incisively points out, even when Calvin established a theocracy in Geneva,
It had to pale beside one which might be established by a prophet enjoying continuous, new, mystical
revelation.
As Knox points out in his usual scintillating style, in Calvin's Geneva and in the Puritan
colonies of America, the left wing of the Reformation signalized its ascendancy by enforcing
I have called this rigorous attitude a pale shadow of the theocratic principle, because
A full-blooded theocracy demands the presence of a divinely inspired leader or leaders,
to whom government belongs by right of mystical illumination.
The great reformers were not, it must be insisted, men of this caliber.
They were pundits, men of the new learning.
And so, one of the crucial differences between the Anabaptists and the more conservative
of Reformers was that the former claimed continuing mystical revelation to themselves, forcing
men such as Luther and Calvin to fall back on the Bible alone as the first as well as
the last revelation.
The first leader of the ultra-theocrat wing of the Anabaptists was Thomas Mintzer, circa
1489-1525 Born into Comfort in Stolberg in Thuringia,
Munzer studied at the universities of Leipzig and Frankfurt, and became highly learned in
the scriptures, the classics, theology, and in the writings of the German mystics.
Becoming a follower almost as soon as Luther launched the Reformation in 1520, Munzer was
is recommended by Luther for the pastorate in the city of Zwickau. Zwickau was near
the Bohemian border, and there the restless mincer was converted by the weaver and adept
Niklas Storch, who had been in Bohemia, to the old Taborite doctrine that had flourished
in Bohemia a century earlier. This doctrine consisted essentially of a continuing mystical
and the necessity for the elect to seize power and impose a society of theocratic Communism by brutal force of arms.
Furthermore, marriage was to be prohibited and each man was to be able to have any woman at his will.
The passive wing of Anabaptists were voluntary anarcho-Communists who wished to live peacefully by themselves.
But Menzer adopted the Storch vision of blood and coercion.
Defecting very rapidly from Lutheranism, Menzer felt himself to be the coming prophet and his teachings now began to emphasize a war of blood and extermination to be waged by the elect against the sinners.
Munzer claimed that the living Christ had permanently entered his own soul, endowed thereby with perfect insight into the divine will,
Munzer asserted himself to be uniquely qualified to fulfill the divine mission.
He even spoke of himself as becoming God.
Abandoning the world of learning, Munzer was now ready for action.
In 1521, only a year after his arrival, the town council of Zwickau took fright at these increasingly popular ravings and ordered Mincer's expulsion from the city.
In protest, a large number of the populace, in particular the weavers led by Nicholas Storch, rose in revolt, but the rising was put down.
At that point, Munzer hied himself to Prague, searching for Taborite remnants in the capital
of Bohemia.
Speaking in peasant metaphors, he declared that harvest time is here, so God himself
has hired me for his harvest.
I have sharpened my scythe, for my thoughts are most strongly fixed on the truth, and
My Lips, Hands, Skin, Hair, Soul, Body, Life, Curse the Unbelievers
Munzer, however, found no Taborite remnants. It did not help the prophet's popularity that
he knew no Czech and had to preach with the aid of an interpreter, and so he was duly
expelled from Prague.
After wandering around central Germany in poverty for several years, signing himself
and Christ's Messenger, Munzer in 1523 gained a ministerial position in the small Thuringian
town of Alstadt.
There he established a wide reputation as a preacher employing the vernacular and began
to attract a large following of uneducated miners, whom he formed into a revolutionary
organization called the League of the Elect.
A turning point in Munzer's stormy career came a year later when Duke John, a prince
of Saxony and a Lutheran, hearing alarming rumors about him, came to little Alstadt and
asked Munzer to preach him a sermon.
This was Munzer's opportunity, and he seized it.
He laid it on the line.
He called upon the Saxon princes to make their choices and take their stand, either as servants
of God or of the devil.
If the Saxon princes are to take their stand with God, then they must lay on with the sword.
Don't let them live any longer, counseled our prophet, the evildoers who turn us away
from God, for a godless man has no right to live if he hinders the godly.
Mincer's definition of the godless, of course, was all-inclusive.
The sword is necessary to exterminate priests, monks, and godless rulers.
But, Mincer warned, if the princes of Saxony fail in this task, if they falter, the sword
shall be taken from them.
If they resist, let them be slaughtered without mercy.
Mincer then returned to his favorite harvest-time analogy.
At the harvest-time, one must pluck the weeds out of God's vineyard.
For the ungodly have no right to live save what the elect chooses to allow them.
In this way the millennium, the thousand-year kingdom of God on earth would be ushered in.
But one key requisite is necessary for the princes to perform that task successfully.
They must have at their elbow a priest, prophet, guess who, to inspire and guide their efforts.
Sadly enough, for an era when no First Amendment restrained rulers from dealing sternly with
heresy, Duke John seemed not to care about Münzer's frenetic ultimatum. Even after
Münzer proceeded to preach a sermon proclaiming the imminent overthrow of all tyrants and
the beginning of the Messianic kingdom, the duke did nothing. Finally, under the insistent
The prodding of Luther that Munzer was becoming dangerous, Duke John told the prophet to refrain
from any provocative preaching until his case was decided by his brother, the Elector.
This mild reaction by the Saxon princes, however, was enough to set Thomas Munzer on his final
revolutionary road.
The princes had proved themselves untrustworthy.
The mass of the poor were now to make the revolution.
The poor were the elect, and would establish a rule of compulsory egalitarian communism,
a world where all things would be owned in common by all, where everyone would be equal
in everything, and each person would receive according to his need.
But not yet.
For even the poor must first be broken of worldly desires and frivolous enjoyments,
and must recognize the leadership of a new servant of God who must stand forth in the
spirit of Elijah and set things in motion.
Again, guess who?
Seeing Saxony as inhospitable, Mincer climbed over the town wall of Alstadt and moved in
1524 to the Thuringian city of Mühlhausen. An expert in fishing in troubled waters,
Munzer found a friendly home in Mühlhausen, which had been in a state of political turmoil
for over a year. Preaching the impending extermination of the ungodly, Munzer paraded
around the town at the head of an armed band, carrying in front of him a red crucifix and
and a naked sword.
Expelled from Mülhausen after a revolt by his allies was suppressed, Mincer went to
Nuremberg, which in turn expelled him after he published some revolutionary pamphlets.
After wandering through southwestern Germany, Mincer was invited back to Mülhausen in February
1525, where a revolutionary group had taken over.
Thomas Münzer and his allies proceeded to impose a communist regime on the city of Mülhausen.
The monasteries were seized, and all property was decreed to be in common, and the consequence,
as a contemporary observer noted, was that he so affected the folk that no one wanted
to work.
The result was that the theory of communism and love quickly became in practice an alibi
for Systemic Theft.
When anyone needed food or clothing, he went to a rich man and demanded it of him in Christ's
name, for Christ had commanded that all should share with the needy.
And what was not given freely was taken by force.
Many acted thus.
Thomas Munzer instituted this brigandage and multiplied it every day.
At that point, the Great Peasants' War erupted throughout Germany, a rebellion launched by
the peasantry in favor of their local autonomy and in opposition to the new centralizing,
high-tax, absolutist rule of the German princes.
Throughout Germany, the princes crushed the feebly armed peasantry with great brutality,
massacring about 100,000 peasants in the process.
In Thuringia, the army of the princes confronted the peasants on 15 May with a great deal of
artillery and 2,000 cavalry, luxuries denied to the peasantry.
The land-grave of Hesse, commander of the prince's army, offered amnesty to the peasants
if they would hand over Mincer and his immediate followers.
The peasants were strongly tempted, but Mincer, holding aloft his naked sword, gave his last
Flaming Speech, declaring that God had personally promised him victory, that he would catch
all the enemy cannonballs in the sleeves of his cloak, that God would protect them all.
Just at the strategic moment of Mincer's speech, a rainbow appeared in the heavens, and Mincer
had previously adopted the rainbow as the symbol of his movement.
To the credulous and confused peasantry, this seemed a veritable sign from heaven.
Unfortunately, the sign didn't work, and the prince's army crushed the peasants, killing
five thousand while losing only half a dozen men.
Mincer himself fled and hid, but was captured a few days later, tortured into confession,
and then executed.
Thomas Mintzer and his signs may have been defeated, and his body may have molded in
the grave, but his soul kept marching on.
Not only was his spirit kept alive by followers in his own day, but also by Marxist historians
from angles to the present day, who saw in this deluded mystic an epitome of social revolution
and the Class Struggle, and a forerunner of the chiliastic prophecies of the Communist
stage of the supposedly inevitable Marxian future.
The Mincerian cause was soon picked up by a former disciple, the bookbinder Hans Hut.
Hut claimed to be a prophet sent by God to announce that at Witzentide 1528 Christ would
would return to earth and give the power to enforce justice to Hoot and his following
of re-baptized saints.
The saints would then take up double-edged swords and wreak God's vengeance on priests,
pastors, kings and nobles.
Hoot and his followers would then establish the rule of Hans Hoot on earth, with Mülhausen
as the favored capital.
Hoot was then to establish a millennium marked by communism and free love. Hoot was captured
in 1527, before Jesus had had a chance to return, imprisoned at Augsburg and killed
trying to escape. For a year or two, Hootian followers kept emerging at Augsburg, Nuremberg
and Esslingen in southern Germany, threatening to set up their communist kingdom of God by
by Force of Arms, but by 1530 they were smashed and suppressed by the alarmed authorities.
Zarian-type anabaptism was now to move to northwestern Germany.