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History of the Reformation. Thomas M. Lindsay
Читать онлайн.Название History of the Reformation
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isbn 4064066379995
Автор произведения Thomas M. Lindsay
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A pilgrimage to the Holy Land was too costly and dangerous to be indulged in by many. The richer Germans made pilgrimages to Rome, and the great pilgrimage place for the middle-class or poorer Germans was Compostella in Spain. Einsiedeln, in Switzerland, also attracted yearly swarms of pilgrims.
Guide-books were written for the benefit of these pious travellers, and two of them, the most popular, have recently been reprinted. They are the Mirabilia Romæ for Roman pilgrims, and the Walfart und Strasse zu Sant Jacob for travellers to Compostella. These little books had a wonderful popularity. The Mirabilia Romæ went through nineteen Latin and at least twelve German editions before the year 1500; it was also translated into Italian and Dutch. It describes the various shrines at Rome where pilgrims may win special gifts of grace by visiting and worshipping at them. Who goes to the Lateran Church and worships there has “forgiveness of all sins, both guilt and penalty.” There is “a lovely little chapel” (probably what is now called the Lateran Baptistry) near the Lateran, where the same privileges may be won. The pilgrim who goes with good intention to the High Altar of St. Peter's Church, “even if he has murdered his father or his mother,” is freed from all sin, “guilt as well as penalty,” provided he repents. The virtues of St. Croce seem to have been rated even higher. If a man leaves his house with the intention of going to the shrine, even if he die by the way, all his sins are forgiven him; and if he visits the church he wins a thousand years' relief from Purgatory.82
Compostella in Spain was the people's pilgrimage place. Before the invention of printing we find traces of manuscript guides to travellers, which were no doubt circulated among intending pilgrims, and afterwards the services of the printing-press were early called in to assist. In the Spanish archives at Simancas there are two single sheets, one of which states the numerous Indulgences for the benefit of visitors at the shrine of St. James, while the other enumerates the relics which are to be seen and visited there. It mentions thirty-nine great relics—from the bones of St. James, which lay under the great altar of the cathedral, to those of St. Susanna, which were interred in a church outside the walls of the town.83 These leaflets were sold to the pilgrims, and were carried back by them to Germany, where they stimulated the zeal and devotion of those who intended to make the pilgrimage. Our pilgrim's guide-book, the Walfart und Strasse zu Sant Jacob,84 deals almost exclusively with the road. The author was a certain Hermann Künig of Vach, who calls himself a Mergen-knecht, or servant of the Virgin Mary. The well-known pilgrim song, “Of Saint James” (Von Sant Jacob), told how those who reached the end of their journey got, through the intercession of St. James, forgiveness from the guilt and penalty (von Pein und Schuldt) of all their sins; it tells the pilgrims to provide themselves with two pairs of shoes, a water-bottle and spoon, a satchel and staff, a broad-brimmed hat and a cloak, both trimmed with leather in the places likeliest to be frayed, and both needed as a protection against wind and rain and snow.85 It charges them to take permits from their parish priests to dispense with confession, for they were going to foreign lands where they would not find priests who spoke German. It warns them that they might die far from home and find a grave on the pilgrimage route. Our guide-book omits all these things. It is written by a man who has made the pilgrimage on foot; who had observed minutely all the turns of the road, and could warn fellow-pilgrims of the difficulties of the way. He gives the itinerary from town to town; where to turn to the right and where to the left; what conspicuous buildings mark the proper path; where the traveller will find people who are generous to poor pilgrims, and where the inhabitants are uncharitable and food and drink must be paid for; where hostels abound, and those parts of the road on which there are few, and where the pilgrims must buy their provisions beforehand and carry them in their satchels; where sick pilgrims can find hospitals on the way, and what treatment they may expect there;86 at what hostels they must change their money into French and Spanish coin. In brief, the booklet is a mediæval “Baedeker,” compiled with German accuracy for the benefit of German pilgrims to the renowned shrine of St. James of Compostella. This little book went through several editions between 1495 and 1521, and is of itself a proof of the popularity of this pilgrimage place. In the last decades of the fifteenth century there arose a body of men and women who might be called professional pilgrims, and who were continually on the road between Germany and Spain. A pilgrimage was one of the earliest so-called “satisfactions” which might be done vicariously, and the Brethren of St. James (Jacobs-Brueder) made the pilgrimage regularly, either on behalf of themselves or of others.
Many of these pilgrims were men and women of indifferent character,87 who had been sent on a pilgrimage as an ecclesiastical punishment for their sins. The Chronicles of the Zimmer Family88 gives several cases of criminals, who had committed murder or theft or other serious crimes between 1490 and 1520, who were sent to Santiago as a punishment. Even in the last decades of the fifteenth century, when the greater part of the pilgrims were devout in their way, it was known only too well that pilgrimages were not helpful to a moral life. Stern preachers of righteousness like Geiler of Keysersberg and Berchtold of Regensburg denounced pilgrimages, and said that they created more sins than they yielded pardons.89 Parish priests continually forbade their women penitents, especially if they were unmarried, from going on a pilgrimage. But these warnings and rebukes were in vain. The prevailing terror had possessed the people, and they journeyed from shrine to shrine seeking some relief for their stricken consciences.
A marked characteristic of this revival which found such striking outcome in these pilgrimages was the thought that Jesus was to be looked upon as the Judge who was to come to punish the wicked. His saving and intercessory work was thrust into the background. Men forgot that He was the Saviour and the Intercessor; and as the human heart craves for someone to intercede for it, another intercessor had to be found. This gracious personality was discovered in the Virgin Mother, who was to be entreated to intercede with her Son on behalf of poor sinning human creatures. The last half of the fifteenth century saw a deep-seated and widely-spread craving to cling to the protection of the Virgin Mother with a strength and intensity hitherto unknown in mediæval religion. It witnessed the furthest advance that had yet been made towards what must be called Mariolatry. This devotion expressed itself, as religious emotion continually does, in hymns; a very large proportion of the mediæval hymns in praise of the Virgin were written in the second half of the fifteenth century—the period of this strange revival based upon fear. Dread of the Son as Judge gave rise to the devotion to the Mother as the intercessor. Little books for private and family devotion were printed, bearing such titles as the Pearl of the Passion and the Little Gospel, containing, with long comments, the words of our Lord on the cross to John and to Mary. She became the ideal woman, the ideal mother, the “Mother of God,” the mater dolorosa, with her heart pierced by the sword, the sharer in the redemptive sufferings of her Son, retaining her sensitive woman's heart, ready to listen to the appeals of a suffering, sorrowful humanity. We can see this devotion to the Virgin Mother impregnating the social revolts from Hans Böhm to Joss Fritz. The theology of the schools followed in the wake of the popular sentiment, and the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception was more strictly defined and found its most strenuous supporters during the later decades of this fifteenth century.
The thought of motherly intercession went further; the Virgin herself had to be interceded with to induce her to plead with her Son for men sunk in sin, and her mother (St. Anna) became the object of a cult which may almost be said to be quite new. Hymns were written in her praise.90 Confraternities, modelled on the confraternities dedicated to the Blessed Virgin, were formed in order to bring the power of the prayers of numbers to bear upon her. These confraternities spread all over Germany and beyond it.91 It is almost possible to trace the widening area of the cult from the chronicles of the period. The special cult of the Virgin seems to have begun, at least in its extravagant popular form, in North France, and to have spread from France through Germany and Spain; but so far as it can be traced, this cult of St. Anna, “the Grandmother,” had a German origin, and the devotion manifested itself most deeply on German soil. Even the Humanist poets sang her praises with enthusiasm, and such collectors of relics as Frederick of Saxony and the Cardinal Archbishop of Mainz rejoiced when they were able to add a thumb of St. Anna to their store. Luther