Zwingli

Zwingli, HULDREICH (Latinised Ulricus Zwinglinus), the Swiss Reformer, was born at Wildhaus, at the head of the Toggenburg valley, canton of St Gall, January 1, 1484. He made his studies in philosophy and humanity at Bern and Vienna, in theology at Basel under Thomas Wytenbach, and was appointed pastor at Glarus in 1506. Here he devoted himself to study and taught himself Greek, learning by heart the epistles of St Paul. At that time the Swiss hired out their soldiers to foreign states, and Zwingli twice (1512 and 1515) accompanied the men of Glarus as field-chaplain. In 1516 he was transferred to Einsiedeln, then as now a great resort of pilgrims to the shrine of the Black Virgin. Zwingli made no secret of his contempt for the superstition of such pilgrimages, and all the papal promises of promotion failed to purchase his silence. In December 1518 he was elected to be preacher in the minister at Zurich, and one of his first duties was to rouse the council not to admit within the city gates Bernhardin Samson, who had been selling indulgences throughout the Forest Cantons. He now began to preach plain gospel truth with greater boldness than ever, and his influence grew rapidly. In 1521 he succeeded in keeping Zurich from joining the other cantons in their alliance with France—'it is no sin to eat flesh on a fast-day,' said the fearless patriot-preacher, 'but it is a great sin to sell human flesh for the slaughter.' The Bishop of Constance now sent his vicar-general to Zurich, but he was quickly silenced in debate by the Reformer (January 29, 1523), in presence of the council and six hundred men. His utter discomfiture was followed by the formal adoption by the city of the Reformed doctrines as set forth in Zwingli's sixty-seven theses. A second disputation followed in presence of nine hundred (October 26-29, 1523), with the result that images and the mass were swept away. Zwingli married Anna Meyer (née Reinhard), a widow of forty-three, in 1524; on Easter 1525 he dispensed the sacrament in both kinds to his congregation. Meantime the movement spread widely over Switzerland. Bern followed in 1528 after the triumphant disputation in January, then Basel, St Gall, Schaffhausen. The Anabaptists troubled the Swiss reformation (1523-26), while the great controversy with Luther, which was to rend the Protestant church, began and grew to its height. Zwingli first made public his views on the Lord's Supper (q.v.) in his famous letter to Matthans Alber (November 16, 1524), and the first stage of the controversy closed with the fruitless conference at Marburg, brought about by Philip the Magnanimous, in October 1529. On the one side were Luther, Jonas, Melanchthon, Osiander, Stephanus Agricola, and Brenz; on the other, Zwingli, Ecclampadins, Bucer, and Hedio. Luther insisted upon identity in doctrine being necessary amongst brethren, and his refusal to give the right hand of fellowship to Zwingli made the latter burst into tears. Of the fifteen articles prepared by Luther, there was absolute agreement on the first fourteen, and even two-thirds of the fifteenth. In his view of this last question Zwingli rejects every form of local or corporeal presence, whether by transubstantiation, impanation, or consubstantiation. He assails every form, however subtle, of the old Capernicie (John, vi. 51-53, 59) conception of a carnal presence and carnal appropriation. He took his stand upon John, vi. 63, 'The flesh profiteth nothing;' but Luther wrote with chalk on the table before him, 'This is my body,' as the truth of God which nothing could explain away.

Meantime the progress of the Reformation had only aroused bitter hatred in the Forest Cantons, which foresaw the end of the traditional political importance they enjoyed in the diet. Zwingli divined that the political and religious questions could not be separated, but failed to bring the Protestant cantons to see the real nature of the crisis. Five Roman Catholic cantons formed in November 1528 a separate alliance, to which the Archduke Ferdinand of Austria was admitted a few months later. Zurich declared war in 1529 on account of the burning alive of a Protestant pastor seized on neutral territory, but bloodshed was averted for a time by the first treaty of Cappel, June 25, 1529. The Zurichers' fears were lulled into a faucied security, and Bern's jealousy of Zurich hindered co-operation, while the Forest Cantons and Zug stealthily made their preparations. At length they made a sudden dash on Zurich with a force of 8000 men, and were met at Cappel by an ill-prepared and ill-provided force of but 2000 men. The men of Zurich made a desperate resistance, but were completely defeated, and among the dead lay the great Reformer, Oct. 11, 1531. 'They may kill the body but not the soul' were his last words.

Zwingli's religious convictions came to him independently of Luther, for he was preaching substantially the Reformed doctrines as early as 1516, the year before the appearance of Luther's theses. He never had the inward struggle of Luther and Calvin, for he started from a different point from them, finding his way by degrees from Humanism to positive truth as the meaning of Scripture deepened in his mind. The inward sphere of the self-consciousness as renewed by God, in which man knows himself to be a child of God, was the region in which Luther's religious speculation lingered; Zwingli, on the other hand, emphasised the necessity laid upon man to carry out God's glory on earth by fulfilment of His will. Hence his patriotism, which sprang naturally from this religious root, and his un-Luther-like zeal for reform in the formal worship and constitution of the church, and his repudiation of everything not expressly enjoined in Scripture. Original sin he regarded as a moral disease (morbus), or natural defect, rather than as punishable sin (peccatum) or guilt. The latter term was limited to actual personal violation of God's law, but was not applicable to the natural depravity of man, itself the source of such violation. He was the first to maintain the salvation of unbaptised infants, and he believed, moreover, in the salvation of such virtuous heathens as Socrates, Plato, Pindar, Numa, Scipio, and Seneca. With regard to the universal fore-ordination and efficacious providence of God, and in regard to repro- bation and election, Zwingli was as Calvinistic as Calvin or Augustine himself. As a man he was calm, intrepid, incorruptible, without the fire and genius of Luther, but with a sounder understanding and better balance of faculties. The most open-minded and liberal amongst the Reformers, he grasped the conception of a broad Christian union, beyond unessential differences in doctrine and ritual, to which it can hardly be said the Christian church has yet attained. He had no faculty for metaphysical speculation, and his four dogmatic works are terse and clear beyond most writings of their class: the Sixty-seven Articles of Zurich (1523), the Ten Theses of Bern (1528), the Confession of Faith to the German Emperor Charles V. (1530), and the Exposition of the Christian Faith to King Francis I. of France (1531)—his 'swan-song,' as Bullinger calls it, written but three months before his death.

Zwingli's Opera fill four folio volumes, ed. by Gualther, his son-in-law (1545). Later editions are by M. Schuler and J. Schulthess (8 vols. 1828-42; supp. 1861). A good selection in German is that by Christoffel in 11 small volumes (1843-46). The chief is the Commentarius de vera et falsa religione (1525); the rest are mainly occupied with the exposition of Scripture and the controversies with the Papists, the 'Catabaptists,' and on the Eucharist. There are Lives by Oswald Myconius (1532; reprinted by Neander in Vitæ quatuor Reform. 1841), Heinrich Bullinger (ed. by Hottinger and Vögeli, 3 vols. 1838), J. M. Schuler (1819), Sal. Hess (1819), J. J. Hottinger (1841; Eng. trans. 1856), R. Christoffel (1857; Eng. trans. 1858), J. C. Mörkoffer (1867-69), G. A. Hoff (1882), and Usteri (1883). For his theology, see the books by Zeller (1853), Sigwart (1855), H. Spörri (1866), Marthaler (1873), A. Baur (1885-89); Dörner's Hist. of Prot. Theology (Eng. trans. 2 vols. 1871), Principal Cunningham's Reformers and the Theology of the Reformation (1862); and for the great Eucharist controversy, A. Ebrard, Das Dogma vom heil. Abendmahl und seine Geschichte (1846).