Fallen Angels: Soldiers of Satan's Realm

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT Protestant Christianity

220 • • • Fallen Angels ments areof noavail. Only the ascetic life of purification willdo. Those whoentered fully upon this course were known as perfecti ; their sympathizers were known as credentes. Such heresy wasbound to evoke thefury of the Church, not only because of itsunorthodox theology, butbecause of its clear challenge to ecclesiastical authority. It became very popular in southern France in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, where its adherents were known asAlbigenses. Soserious did the threat seem to thePopes that an Albigensian Crusade was launched in 1209, and thousands of the heretics (together with manywho were innocent even ofheresy) were ruthlessly massacred.24 Less successful were theefforts toeradicate the Waldenses (or Vaudois), a related sect of northern Italy. Their doctrines were, however, not so extreme as those of the earlier sectaries, and their chief interest was in thereform of the Church. Under the stress of persecution, they withdrew into themountain fastnesses of Piedmont, where they still survive, though with great difficulties . Ultimately they made common cause with Calvin andthe Reformers, andit is as a Protestant group that they exist today. One of themany punitive expeditions against them called forth Milton's magnificent sonnet On the Late Massacre in Piedmont: "Avenge, OLord, thyslaughtered saints, whose bones Lie scatter'd in theAlpine mountains cold/'25 CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT Protestant Christianity UTHER. The Protestant Reformation was not a jmodernist or liberal movement, though it eventually led to such developments. At the start it was a reaction against the corruption of the Catholic Church and a manifestation of thegrowing spirit of nationalism. Martin Luther was less of a liberal than such Catholic humanists as Reuchlin andErasmus . He challenged the authority of the papacy, andhe drastically revised certain doctrines; but he retained many elements Protestant Christianity • • • 221 of traditional Christian theology: among them, the belief in the Devil. There is little or nothing about the Devil in the most important Protestant creeds, such as the Augsburg Confession, the Thirty-Nine Articles and the Westminster Confession. The men who composed these documents were not at all indifferent to the belief in Satan, still less were they sceptical about it. But they devoted their attention chiefly to controversial issues. Since everyone agreed about the existence of the Devil, they felt no need to discuss it. A familiar legend tells that while Luther was confined in the Wartburg, Satan appeared to him; whereupon the doughty monk threw his inkwell at the fiend and drove him off. There seems to be no basis for the tale; yet rarely is a legend so apposite. Luther was not apparently subject to the grosser hallucinations. (He does report that Satan once kept him awake by tossing nuts at the ceiling of his room in the castle; but the episode became much more terrifying in recollection twenty-five years later than when it actually occurred.1 ) Yet few men have been more conscious of a personal Devil. Luther's emotional, impulsive and dramatic nature was well adapted to such a belief. His conversation and his letters were studded with references to Satan. After due allowance for figurative and facetious allusions, the number made in dead earnest is impressively large. In his work on the Unfree Will (in which Luther solemnly set forth a basic element of his doctrine) he declared: "The human will is like a beast of burden. If God mounts it, it wishes and goes as God wills; if Satan mounts it, it wishes and goes as Satan wills. Nor can it choose the rider it would prefer, nor betake itself to him, but it is the riders who contend for its possession."2 During the period of negotiations looking toward a reunion of Catholics and Protestants in Germany, Luther wrote his lieutenant , Philip Melanchthon: "I see they think this is a comedy of men, instead of a tragedy of God and Satan, as it is. Where Satan's power waxes, that of God grows rusty."3 Such citations, from his published works, his letters and his table talk, could be multiplied endlessly. It goes without saying that the Pope and the papacy were closely associated with the Devil and the Antichrist in Luther's mind; and his other opponents, both political and religious, including Protestants with whom he differed, were 222 • • • Fallen Angels the victims, when they were not the allies, of Satan. Particularly interesting is his view that gloom and discouragement, as well as an excessive preoccupation with...