§1
Concerning them, the man who endeavored even by a shameful act to urge concord sings thus:
Not if I had a hundred tongues and a hundred mouths Could I recount the unspeakable sorrows of schism.
Deservedly, therefore, he concludes:
There is no safety in war; we all demand peace.
Indeed, while every anger conceived from inward hatred and from the heart, and every war born and waged from it, is foul and harmful, a dissension concerning religion is accustomed to be the most obstinate and furious of all. We have long perceived that it renders men utterly savage, especially in audacity, crime, and inhumanity; for they assign every crime to religion, and what the gentiles once judged barbarous in wars to the death, heretics consider holy in their disputes. Whoever does not rage is regarded as a deserter; if anyone dares to urge moderation and peace, he is accounted a fugitive. Hence:
Calvinists always practice eternal hatreds, Nor does the fury once begun ever depart from their minds. The fortunate keeps his arms; the unfortunate prepares them. Wars leave nothing: now the field lies foul With vast untilled lands; a lofty ash buries nations, Entombed beneath the torch applied to their roofs.
But let us hear the Syncretist recount the disadvantages of the Evangelical war.
The first disadvantage. Papists are deterred by the deadly dissensions of the Evangelicals from Evangelical doctrine as heretical, satanic, and seditious. This is perhaps a strong and opportune bridle upon heresy ranging through everything, and a great advantage for the Catholic Church. Although it is illumined by the revelation of eternal truth and does not judge the errors of those who perish to be the supports of its faith, nevertheless, in its estimation of the discord of others, it congratulates itself upon its own concord; and, having learned the wars of those who go astray, it embraces its own peace more eagerly, guards it more closely, and exacts it more severely. The goodness of our cause does not rest upon your evils, but is nevertheless made clearer and confirmed by them. We cannot approve the cause of the Evangelicals, which some part of the Evangelicals—often the principal and more numerous part—always execrates.
We acknowledge, O God, great judge and arbiter of furious contests, your benevolence toward us: you founded the Church with such solidity of faith that not only can the powers of hell not prevail against it, but you have permitted those gates to collide mutually against themselves and break their hardness, so that they may strike the walls of the Church with a lesser onset and gentler concussion. So it is, O uncreated, creative Wisdom: you blunt wave with opposing wave, so that, their fury mastered, they strike the sides of Peter’s ship in such a way that they at the same time raise it. Nor is all heresy conspired into one Syncretism to be feared, because a heavenly oracle has promised victory to his Church.
Do you grieve that we regard your doctrine as satanic? Whence, then, such great angers, calumnies, execrations, killings, and massacres, if not from hell? But what will you do with Luther, who says that you are incarnate devils? What with Alberus, who says you are possessed by a demon? What with your doctors, who prosecute one another as guilty of atheism, Turkism, Manichaeism, and Borborism? Return to favor and recover your esteem in our minds. You carried the reproaches out of your own house; what we say abroad you always hear at home.
The Lutherans long ago rendered you suspected of sedition, for they accused your princes, as you yourself bear witness, of openly colluding with the Turk against the Empire. Dedicatory epistle to the Eucharistic Controversy. But it is not mine to treat the disturbed condition of the Empire, especially when you threaten the Lutherans with the sword. I prefer, therefore, to offer Luther—whom you call the defender of the Gospel and servant of God—as a witness against you. You must receive his testimony, since you yourself have praised the witness. Now an old man, namely at the age of sixty-one, he testified thus: “I, who already have one foot in the grave, shall carry this testimony and this boast to the tribunal of my Lord and liberator Jesus Christ: that with my whole heart I condemned and avoided the fanatics and enemies of the Sacrament—Carlstadt, Zwingli, Oecolampadius, Schwenckfeld, and their disciples at Zurich or wherever in the world they may be.”
§2
The second disadvantage. What except the dissension itself placed a stumbling block before the Jews?
Long ago the refuse of various heresies brought a destructive offense to the unhappy Jews and gentiles. Their foulness rendered the entire Christian name hateful to the world from the cradle of religion. The disgraceful acts, paradoxes, sorceries, parricides, and enthusiasms of the Nicolaitans, Menandrians, Carpocratians, Marcionites, Montanists, and Manichaeans were imputed to all; and those who had proved their innocence to God burned among men under hatred for another’s crime. Those stumbling blocks remain and revive among the new sectarians, and one always sins by example as by deed.
The Jews are hardened not more by your dissension than by the absurdity of your dogmas. They somehow acknowledge that God is one and continually repeat to that God, “Because he is good, because his mercy endures forever.” But when they hear from you that he is the decreer, procurer, mover, impeller, and compeller toward crimes, they immediately believe the Lutherans who say that this God is the bloodthirsty Moloch, the Devil himself. Again, when they hear that amid every crime you are just, holy, and dear to God, they suspect that you are beasts. They believe Arminius, Bertius, and the rest of your doctors, who say that rigid Calvinism is infamous among all nations because of its paradoxes.
The stumbling blocks therefore come from you—not so much from dissension in error as from the error itself. For they are not offended because you do not agree in so disgraceful an opinion; rather, they are altogether indignant that a man can be found either so mad as to believe those things or so audacious as not to fear uttering them. You ought not to have erred at the beginning; complaint is late amid ruin:
τὸ πραχθὲν ἔργον ἀνυπεύθυνον.
What has been done cannot be corrected. They recognize that, having followed such diverse sects, you cannot wander together into one error. You run about groping in the darkness; how can you strike against one rock? You therefore place a stumbling block before the Jews not only by the diversity of sin, but by the very absurdity, gravity, and savagery of the crimes.
§3
The third disadvantage. What sharpened the scimitars of the Turks and Tartars against the Christian world and drew them as far as the thresholds of Germany and Italy, except, on the one side, the horrible idol-mania of the Papists and, on the other, the sins of the Evangelicals and the fatal quarrels and conflicts allied to them? By these, fraternal charity was trampled, domestic peace disturbed, the raging Fury attracted, the minds of all estates divided and exasperated, salutary counsels dispersed, and at last the most afflicted Church betrayed to its enemies at home and abroad.
He adduces a twofold cause for Turkish strength and the victories obtained against the Empire: the “idol-mania,” as he calls it, of the Papists, and the crimes and furies of the Evangelicals. We deny the first: we are conscious of no idol-mania. We not only detest idols, but with great dangers and continual labor endeavor to exterminate them from both Indies, Africa, China, and Japan. Since you yourselves confess the other, it is not ours to deny it; for why should I make a speech for defendants who have confessed and have been convicted by their own judgment? They have an internal witness continually lashing them within their fortification: conscience. It is neither part of my purpose to speak against it, nor can they suppress it or impose silence upon it. And if that domestic torturer sometimes ceases, nevertheless the Lutherans do not allow them to rest.
Among the Lutherans—as Pareus himself complains in the preface to the Eucharistic Controversy—a certain courtly Stentor recently did not blush to advise in a public writing that at the diets they should join themselves with the Papists rather than with the orthodox Calvinists. He adduced two reasons. One was theological: that the Lutherans agree with the Papists in more things than with the Calvinists, whom he calls Turks. The other was civil: that the pope contributes forces for protecting the Roman Empire, while Calvinist princes openly collude with the Turk against the Empire. The latter reason deserves to be refuted in a manner very different from my pen.
What reasons the Lutherans adduce to prove so grave and dangerous a matter need not concern me. I nevertheless remember reading the answer of the German princes to the embassy of Ségur: “The audacity of your men has now become known not only to Christians but even to the emperor of the Turks. Although he desires them to rage against the Spaniard for the destruction of all Christians, nevertheless, with the truth of the matter crying aloud, he cannot approve them.” Answer of the Protestants to the Embassy of Ségur.
And a little later the same princes say: “And have you ever seen one of the Calvinists who drew the sword for the Christian state, either in that naval fleet which the Roman pontiff, the Spaniard, and the Venetians prepared against the Turk, or when Malta was attacked by Dragut? Indeed, rather, they hastened to stir up the Moors so that they might cross into Spain, and to impel the Turks lest the Christian state find rest, and finally to slaughter kings by various arts.” And a little later: “Whence shall we obtain protection against the Turk if the pontifical party, which has always assisted us in this matter, is absent?” And so forth. But what is to be expected from the Calvinists both N. has said and all readily understand: either that they provoke the Turks against the Christians, and so forth.
It is not mine to inquire upon what foundation these judgments of the princes rest; I know that conspicuous places must be avoided.
A savage thunderbolt comes from a conspicuous citadel.
Meanwhile, it ought also to be permissible for me to bring into the midst, without deceit and harm, what the Calvinist ministers think. Frederick Braunbomus, in the prolegomena to the Flores Flaminiorum, after saying on page 15, “Even the sultan’s arms are now about to depart from the Church,” immediately adds: “Let us prepare ourselves for war—not so much the Turkish war; the sultan will never possess Hungary, because it was never among the Roman provinces under the dominion of Constantinople, Babylon, or Arabia—as for the approaching Roman war and the most bitter expedition of all.”
Selim would wish this, and the Ottomans would purchase it at a great price. O safety of Germany, how you stand upon a slippery place, by what grave hatred you are assailed! What monsters do you embrace in your bosom? What vipers do you bring up? The Turk holds Greece, has enervated Transylvania, oppressed a great part of Hungary, strikes Austria and Styria, and threatens the Margraviate of Brandenburg; and the prophet of Phaehoff forbids us to arm against an enemy so savage, so restless, so cunning in disposition, so desirous of another’s property, so hostile to the Christian name, so intent upon every opportunity to harm, playing with treaties as with knucklebones, and regarding nothing as disgraceful which is profitable. Against this enemy, I say, he forbids us to arm, while he incites subjects against the pontiff, bishops, Catholic princes and kings, and the emperor himself. Who does not know
What he constructs by these beginnings?
If fortune follows him, the Germans will expend their strength, arms, and blood mutually upon themselves, so that, when they are worn down, scattered, discordant, and half-wounded, the victor, exulting, may impose the Turkish yoke and carry away their wealth, wives, children, and even the faith which remains, without battle and labor. I grieve that these things had to be said; yet they could not be left unspoken, so that it might become manifest to the orthodox what the Lutherans think about the Calvinists.
§4
The fourth disadvantage. Offenses to the weak. But I also add the gravest falls and horrible deaths of the strongest, whom either Zwinglian cruelty dragged into the battle line to die or Lutheran license broke down into pleasures. Hence stumbling blocks and depraved morals, luxury, avarice, fornication, contention, drunkenness, and vices of that kind range everywhere with the greatest disgrace to the Christian name, as the adversary himself complains in the preface to First Corinthians. Hence, as the same man acknowledges in the same place, come the ambition of teachers, the levity of hearers, a most profane life, security, contempt of God, contempt of every order, and Epicurean profanity.
§5
The fifth disadvantage. The condemnations, exiles, prisons, persecutions, and killings of so many provinces and faithful doctors and confessors, and finally the devastation of graves.
Nemesis at last pursues and apprehends the proud. Heresy is assailed by its own examples. The Lutherans were cruel against us, the Calvinists more savage; for the former tempered their savagery with drinking cups, while the latter sharpened their angers with drunkenness and lust. But now they rush mutually against themselves and say and do to one another things which shame and Christian charity forbid us to say and do. At the beginning and thereafter, every most faithful man deserted Luther: Carlstadt, Oecolampadius, Cruciger, Melanchthon, and others. Zwingli fell in the civil war which he had urged. A host of diseases produced by an intemperate life overwhelmed Calvin in despair.
Thereafter, as discord increased, the Lutherans were oppressed. They were expelled from the Palatinate, Zweibrücken, Hesse, Ascania, Switzerland, Rhaetia, Holland, Zeeland, Friesland, and many counties of Germany. Now even the Brandenburgers have bitten the bridle and will gradually understand that they have no preacher except one of the Calvinist stamp. Nor are the Calvinists content with a Lutheran enemy. So long as they lived they waged civil wars most hostilely and perfidiously. Do we not still behold the battle lines of that nation fighting?
Hear those who even now serve in those camps, the nine orphaned children of Arminius, who was commander of one party, in their preface to the curators of the Academy of Leiden: “Good God,” they say, “to what lengths do we not break forth? We who within the same Christian religion follow opinions different from one another decide among ourselves more harmfully with pens than with iron. Nor are our disputes confined within dissensions, hatreds, and eternal enmities. Some of us exclude others from the practice of our religion; some adjudge salvation away from others; indeed, we advance our hatreds as far as ropes and from time to time even the most exquisite punishments, while magistrates of evil zeal assent to us. The memory of this matter is still far too recent for there to be any need to reopen it. To wit, in zeal for CHRIST, how often have we shed the blood of those who wholly devoted themselves to Christ himself, applied themselves to piety and salvation, always lived most innocently, and harmed no one—although Christ poured out his own blood for them so that the blood of others would not be shed.”
These are the contests of the Calvinists among themselves. All Britain swells with the same, and they would undertake some greater abomination unless they were restrained by royal power. In Holland they are carried on with so great an onset that they can scarcely be restrained by the edicts of the most illustrious Lords the Estates, as Peter Bertius, leader of the principal faction, bears witness in the Hyperaspistes. This man stands for Arminius, that man for Gomarus; to this man Calvin is holy, to that one a Borborite and Manichaean. All labor for their own opinion, no one for the whole truth; for even those who defend true things mingle in many false things, lest this be for them an unmixed good. These things the Calvinists do among themselves; what will happen to the Lutherans?
§6
The sixth disadvantage. The bloodthirsty theologians—the Lutherans—in tragic pamphlets written not with ink but with blood represented those who were killed by Catholics in France as martyrs of the Devil, to be refuted not by the pen of theologians but by the sword of butchers, and thus inflamed the Catholics against them. That disadvantage is of such a kind that, to one who weighs the matter, it brings many advantages with it.
For first, the Catholics possess the Lutherans as approvers of their opinion. When the magistrate commanded proceedings according to law against the Huguenots, who were guilty of many killings and sacrileges, incendiaries and cruel torturers of the orthodox, men hardened in crimes and shameful acts immediately adorned with the praise of martyrs those whose crimes were capital, lest fear of punishments deter the rest from evildoing, whose audacity appeared likely to be of use to their desires. And when they attempted to stir and entice Lutheran arms into France as if to defend the cause of martyrs and confessors, the Lutherans in public writings and sermons did not indeed merely deny that they were martyrs, but declared that they were martyrs of the Devil. By this judgment they absolved the Catholics and condemned the Calvinists.
For this reason, when certain Lutherans through flattery called the Calvinists pious and holy martyrs of Christ, they were rejected by them with abuse. In an epistle to the Gallican Churches Danaeus complains about Osiander in this way, page 12: “For those whom this man, in his zeal to flatter you, calls pious and holy and martyrs of Christ, both he himself and certain of his associates most insultingly call martyrs of the Devil from the public pulpit.” And a little later: “Indeed, brothers, this is now the cruel charity of those men toward us and their compassion for your punishments: when recently they had most savagely anathematized all of us and our churches in a certain new formula of new discord, and were therefore warned by several most illustrious princes of Germany and by very many good German men”—that is, Calvinizing men—“to abolish it, because by this means they sharpened the swords of the pontifical party against our churches, they themselves answered and joked ridiculously, indeed cruelly, that they were only accidentally the causes of our punishments.” Finally he adds that this is Osiander’s disposition, charity, and sincere love: that he does not fear to stir up against you the fires of most savage persecutions and flames. This, therefore, is the opinion of the Lutherans concerning the French martyrs.
Furthermore, because the cause, not the punishment, makes a martyr, it is worthwhile to inquire into the causes of the punishments, so that the name may be established. For if I state the cause for which each was killed, I shall submit the judgment concerning the designation to the reader so that he himself may determine whether they must be judged martyrs of the Devil or of Christ.
When the Swiss inflicted cruel war upon their blood relatives, they fell in battle with Zwingli their very gladiator, not as martyrs but as invaders of another’s right. In the year 1562 they undertook by common counsel the crimes which they had already conceived and published at Geneva and elsewhere: to despoil the churches throughout the whole kingdom and everywhere perpetrate those deeds of which they left examples in several places. The beginning of their savagery was in Aquitaine; the fury wandered widely. At Paris, wicked men flew about with swords, rashly injuring everyone they met. Priests were slaughtered everywhere at the very altars; churches flowed with blood. Statues of the saints were shattered not from hatred of idolatry, which did not exist, but from avarice, which was immense. The bones of Francis II, king of France, were burned, so that no one could doubt with what disposition they would have treated him alive when they so raged against him dead.
But what would those men not dare, whom Poitiers saw burn the bones of Saint Hilary after they had been dug from their ancient tomb, and from whom neither the relics of Irenaeus nor those of the most celebrated bishop Martin escaped? The people of Lyon and Tours beheld with immense grief impious flames consuming sacred pledges. Why should I relate what cruelty Orléans endured from them? Neither age nor sex was spared, and this throughout the entire kingdom upon which they bore down like a storm: old men killed amid mockery and tortures; tender youth burned with the towers in which they sought protection; men driven by torture to disclose the bones of martyrs; bells changed into cannon; baptisteries turned into sewers; wells filled with Catholics; bellies and genitals cut out. While they did these things, and attempted many more things worthy of a theater of Calvinist cruelty, they themselves were repressed and killed, and mark the Calvinist martyrologies and exceedingly inauspicious calendars. These are Calvinist martyrdoms.
But the Calvinists have no cause to be angry with the Lutherans over the designation of their martyrs; Bertius the Calvinist himself does not acknowledge those martyrs. His words in the Hyperaspistes, pages 172–173, are: “Nor indeed did that confession”—the Augsburg Confession—“cost your Germany less than this one, which, although it is said to have been confirmed by much Belgian blood, has nevertheless thus far been introduced into neither the state nor the churches by any authority of our nobles.” First, he says it is said to have been confirmed, not that it has been confirmed, and opposes to it the Augsburg Confession. But on the following pages he relates the articles of the Belgic Confession to the Manichaeans, who formerly experienced that severity.