Huldrych Zwingli (1484-1531)

A son of the Toggenburg mountains

Huldrych Zwingli was born on January 1, 1484 at Wildhaus, a high mountain village of the Toggenburg, in what is now the canton of St. Gallen^[2]. He was thus only seven weeks younger than Luther, born in November 1483: the two men who would divide the West belong to exactly the same generation.

His family belonged to the solid, prosperous peasantry of the Swiss Alps. His father was the Ammann (bailiff, local magistrate) of the village; one of his uncles was an ecclesiastical dean. The third of many sons, young Ulrich was destined early for the Church and entrusted to his uncle Bartholomäus, pastor of Wesen, who noticed his gifts^[3]. From this mountain childhood, Zwingli kept an ardent Swiss patriotism and a growing distrust of a scourge then bleeding the Confederation dry: mercenary service in the pay of foreign powers.

The humanist: Vienna, Basel and the admiration of Erasmus

Zwingli received the formation of a humanist, not a scholastic. After school at Basel and Bern, he studied at the universities of Vienna (from 1498) and Basel, where he obtained the Master of Arts and where the theologian Thomas Wyttenbach directed him toward the direct study of Scripture^[4]. He was received as Master of Theology around 1506.

All his life, Zwingli remained a man of the Renaissance of letters, a reader of the Greek and Latin classics, a lover of music — he played several instruments. His great admiration went to Erasmus of Rotterdam, the prince of humanists, whom he met at Basel in 1516 and whose edition of the Greek New Testament deeply marked him^[5]. This decisive figure of Christian humanism is treated in depth in the article devoted to Erasmus, who for his part remained in the Church. This Erasmian debt explains a constant trait of Zwingli: in him, reform starts first from a return to the text of the Bible and a rejection of popular "superstitions", more than from an anguish over salvation as in Luther.

Pastor of Glarus and chaplain of the mercenaries

In 1506, Zwingli was appointed pastor of Glarus, capital of a canton many of whose men enlisted as soldiers in the pay of kings. Three times he accompanied his parishioners as a military chaplain in the Italian wars, notably at Novara (1513) and at the bloody battle of Marignano (1515), where the Swiss in the service of Milan were crushed by Francis I^[6].

These experiences decided one part of his public vocation. Zwingli became a fierce opponent of the mercenary system: in it he saw a corruption that sold the blood of Swiss youth and bought consciences with foreign pensions. His denunciation of French pensions earned him trouble at Glarus and hastened his departure. This civic and patriotic combat, prior to his doctrinal break, shows that Zwingli's reform was from the outset as much political and moral as theological: he never separated the Gospel from the city.

Einsiedeln: pilgrimage and the return to Scripture

From 1516 to 1518, Zwingli was a secular priest at the great Marian shrine of Einsiedeln, one of the most famous pilgrimage sites of alpine Europe, the destination of crowds come to venerate the Black Madonna^[7]. The contrast is striking: it is at the heart of a high place of Marian piety and indulgences that he deepened his study of the Greek New Testament, copied out the epistles of St. Paul by hand to memorize them, and began to preach against certain popular devotions he judged superstitious.

It was also at Einsiedeln that he crossed paths with the indulgence seller Bernardino Samson, a Milanese Franciscan whose trade scandalized him — as Tetzel's traffic had scandalized Luther in Germany. But Zwingli always claimed to have reached his conclusions independently of Luther, by the sole reading of Scripture and under the influence of Erasmus, even refusing to be called "Lutheran"^[8].

The preacher of the Grossmünster (1519)

On December 11, 1518, Zwingli was elected Leutpriester — "people's priest" — of the Grossmünster, the great collegiate church of Zurich^[9]. He preached his first sermon there on January 1, 1519, his thirty-fifth birthday. There he made an unusual gesture: instead of following the liturgical calendar and its pericopes, he announced that he would comment, verse by verse, on the Gospel according to St. Matthew continuously (lectio continua), then on the other books of the New Testament. The Zurich pulpit became a permanent Bible school.

In autumn 1519, an epidemic of plague struck Zurich and carried off nearly a quarter of the population. Zwingli stayed with the sick, contracted the disease himself and nearly died of it. From this trial was born his Pestlied ("plague song"), a poem of abandonment to God in which his spirituality already shows through: man is nothing, God does with him what He wills^[10]. This experience of death strengthened his conviction of an absolute sovereignty of God over life and salvation — a theme that would become central in his doctrine of providence and predestination.

If the German Reformation has its symbolic starting point in the 95 Theses of 1517, the Swiss Reformation has its own in a more prosaic episode, in Zurich in the spring of 1522.

The Affair of the Sausages (1522)

During Lent 1522, a few men gathered at the printer Christoph Froschauer's house and ate sausages there, in open violation of the abstinence prescribed by the Church. Zwingli was present but did not eat; he nevertheless publicly took the defense of the offenders. Soon after, he published his first reforming writing, Von Erkiesen und Freiheit der Speisen ("On the Choice and Freedom of Foods"), in which he maintained that the fasting laws are only human commandments, with no foundation in Scripture, and that no Christian is bound in conscience to observe them^[11].

This "affair of the sausages" (Wurstessen) is traditionally regarded as the birth certificate of the Swiss Reformation. Behind the anecdote lies the very principle of Protestantism: only Scripture binds, and whatever is not explicitly commanded in it may be rejected. It is the same principle as sola scriptura, critically examined in the article Why don't Catholics follow sola Scriptura?.

The Zurich disputations and the 67 Articles (1523)

Zwingli had an advantage Luther never had: the magistrate of his city would embrace his cause. On January 29, 1523, the council of the city of Zurich organized a public disputation between Zwingli and the representatives of the bishop of Constance. Zwingli appeared armed with 67 Articles (the Schlussreden) summarizing his doctrine, with the rule that he be refuted only from Scripture alone^[12]. His opponents, refusing that ground, remained silent; the council declared Zwingli the victor and authorized him to continue his preaching.

"All those who say that the Gospel is nothing without the confirmation of the Church err and dishonor God." — Zwingli, Article 1 of the 67 Articles, 1523^[13]

A second disputation, in October 1523, concerned images in churches and the Mass. From then on, this was no longer a private quarrel: it was the city of Zurich, by decision of its council, that swung into the Reformation. The decisive character of this alliance between the reformer and the civil power is Zwingli's most original trait: his Reformation was from the outset a state Reformation, carried by the urban magistracy.

The marriage of priests and the end of the Mass

The break soon translated into irreversible acts. In 1524, Zwingli publicly married Anna Reinhart, widow of a Zurich patrician, whom he had already married in secret — a gesture by which he solemnly rejected priestly celibacy^[14]. The same year, the convents were dissolved, their goods confiscated and assigned to poor relief and teaching.

The gravest act came at Easter 1525: the council of Zurich abolished the Mass and replaced it with a simple commemorative supper, celebrated four times a year, around a wooden table, with ordinary bread on wooden plates, without altar, vestments or chant^[15]. Where the Catholic Mass is the unbloody renewal of the sacrifice of Calvary, the Zwinglian supper is no more than a meal of remembrance among brethren. It is the direct consequence of his eucharistic doctrine, which we shall now examine.

Iconoclasm: the stripping of the churches

In 1524, by order of the council and at Zwingli's urging, the churches of Zurich were methodically emptied: statues, paintings, crucifixes, relics, figured stained glass, altars and even the organs were removed or destroyed, the walls whitewashed^[16]. The contrast with Luther is sharp: the Saxon reformer had on the contrary restrained the iconoclasm of a Karlstadt, judging images useful to the piety of simple folk. Zwingli, for his part, applied without reserve the Old Testament prohibition of graven images (Exodus 20:4) and saw in them an idolatry to be rooted out.

For Catholicism, this radical stripping is not a purification but a loss: the tradition of the Church, since the Second Council of Nicaea (787), honors images not for themselves but for what they represent, the honor paid to the image passing to its model^[17], and sacred art is a catechesis for the eyes. On the honor paid to images and saints — often wrongly confused with adoration — see the article Do Catholics worship Mary?.

To judge a doctrine, one must first expound it honestly. Zwingli's theology is neither poor nor incoherent: it is a system, marked by the implacable logic of a humanist, which carries two intuitions to their end — the absolute sovereignty of God and the radical insufficiency of material signs to contain the divine.

A rational, stripped-down sola scriptura

Like all the reformers, Zwingli holds Scripture alone as the sole authority. But he adds a tint of his own, more rationalist: what Scripture does not explicitly command, he tends to abolish, where Luther contented himself with tolerating what Scripture does not forbid. From this difference of method flow all the others: the abolition of images, of the Mass, of liturgical chant, of feast days, of fasting. Zwingli is the reformer of retrenchment: he keeps only what he believes he finds in black and white in the sacred text.

The Supper, a mere memorial: the heart of the break

The most characteristic — and gravest — point of Zwingli's doctrine is his conception of the Supper. For him, the Eucharist is neither a sacrifice nor the place of a real presence of Christ. It is a memorial: a meal in which the community remembers the death of the Lord and proclaims its faith. The bread remains bread; the wine remains wine. Christ, ascended into heaven, is corporally absent; He is present only in the faith of the believer who remembers.

"To believe is to eat." — Formula attributed to Zwingli at the Marburg Colloquy, summing up his doctrine of the Supper^[18]

Zwingli's underlying argument is twofold. First a philosophical principle: finitum non est capax infiniti — the finite cannot contain the infinite; a piece of bread, a finite and material thing, therefore cannot "contain" the body of Christ. Then a scriptural principle: he quotes John 6:63, "It is the spirit that gives life, the flesh profits nothing", to maintain that eating the body of Christ carnally would be absurd and profitless^[19]. Between the sign (the bread) and the reality (the glorified body in heaven), there is, he says, "the whole distance that separates heaven from earth".

"Is" means "signifies": the argument of Cornelius Hoen

How, then, does Zwingli read the word of Christ, "This is my body"? He must reinterpret it. The key came to him from a letter of the Dutch jurist Cornelius Hoen (Honius), received around 1524, which proposed understanding the verb "is" (est) in the sense of "signifies" (significat)^[20]. "This is my body" would thus mean "this represents my body", as when one says of a portrait: "that is my father". The bread is no more than a commemorative symbol.

It is this little word — is or signifies — that would crystallize the whole fracture of Protestantism. For Luther, on this precise point, absolutely refuses to yield: "This IS my body" must be taken literally. The Catholic position, for its part, goes beyond both: Christ is really, substantially present, not by the ubiquity of a body (Luther) nor by a mere remembrance (Zwingli), but by transubstantiation — the bread truly becomes the Body, under the appearances of bread. The Council of Trent would define it solemnly (see below).

Original sin, providence, predestination

Zwingli also departs from tradition on other points. He tends to minimize original sin, which he describes less as a personally imputed fault than as a sickness, a "natural defect" (Brest, defectus naturalis) transmitted but not guilty in itself — a position he develops in his treatise De peccato originali of 1526^[21].

On the other hand, he carries the doctrine of providence and predestination to an extreme degree. In his De providentia Dei (1530), Zwingli affirms that God is the cause of all things, that election is wholly free and sovereign, prior to all faith, and dependent on no merit^[22]. On this ground, he announces Calvin and Calvinism, expounded in the article John Calvin. This insistence on divine omnipotence is consistent with his whole theology: what God does alone, man can neither merit nor contain in a material sign.

The salvation of virtuous pagans: Socrates and Seneca in heaven

One last trait, more surprising, reveals the humanist beneath the reformer. In his Christianae fidei expositio ("Exposition of the Christian Faith", 1531), addressed to the King of France, Zwingli declares his hope of finding in heaven not only the saints of the Old Testament, but also the great sages of paganism: Socrates, Plato, Seneca, Aristides, the Catos, the Scipios — and even mythical heroes such as Hercules and Theseus^[23].

This idea of a possible salvation of virtuous pagans, not absurd in itself and treated with nuance by Catholic theology (God can save, outside the visible paths, those who seek Him with an upright heart), takes in Zwingli a turn that scandalized Luther, who saw in it proof that the Swiss no longer really believed in the necessity of Christ and explicit faith^[24]. It illustrates a tension proper to Zwingli: a Christian rationalist for whom the sovereignty of grace can overflow all the visible frontiers of the Church — at the risk of dissolving the very necessity of Redemption.

Of all the episodes of Zwingli's life, the weightiest in consequences is his direct confrontation with Luther. It seals, at the very dawn of the Reformation, its irremediable division.

Why Philip of Hesse wanted union

The Landgrave Philip of Hesse, a Protestant prince, had a vital political interest in uniting the two branches of the Reformation — the German and the Swiss — to form a common front against the Catholic Emperor Charles V. He therefore summoned the principal theologians of both camps to his castle at Marburg, from October 1 to 4, 1529^[25]. On one side Luther and Melanchthon; on the other Zwingli and Oecolampadius.

The stakes were immense: if the Protestants agreed, they were a bloc; if they divided, they weakened themselves. And they would stumble over a single word.

"Hoc est corpus meum": Luther refuses to yield

According to the accounts, Luther is said to have traced from the outset, in chalk on the table beneath the velvet cloth, the Latin words of institution: "HOC EST CORPUS MEUM" ("This is my body"), returning to them ceaselessly and refusing all compromise^[26]. Zwingli objected that "is" must be read as "signifies", and quoted John 6:63: "the flesh profits nothing". Luther replied that the word of Christ takes precedence over all human reason.

"It is not reason, nor my eyes, but the Word of God that binds me: 'This is my body.'" — Position of Martin Luther at Marburg, as reported by the witnesses^[27]

The two men agreed on fourteen of the fifteen Marburg Articles — the Trinity, Christ, sin, justification by faith, baptism, the rejection of purgatory and indulgences. But the fifteenth, on the real presence in the Supper, remained open: the text ends by acknowledging that they "are not agreed as to whether the true body and blood of Christ are corporally present in the bread and wine"^[28].

"You have a different spirit": the Protestant fracture

The final gesture has remained famous. Zwingli, moved to tears, held out his hand to Luther, begging him to recognize him as a brother. Luther refused the outstretched hand, answering that they were not of the same spirit:

"You have a different spirit than ours." — Martin Luther to Zwingli, Marburg Colloquy, October 1529^[29]

This refusal is one of the founding moments of Protestantism: barely born, it tears itself apart. Lutherans and Reformed (Zwinglians, then Calvinists) would never again form more than a facade of unity. To the Catholic eye, Marburg is a striking demonstration: as soon as one abandons the living authority of the Church for Scripture interpreted by each man, Scripture itself no longer suffices to make unity — for two men of good faith, reading the same sentence, find in it two contrary dogmas, and no instance can decide between them. It is the classic Catholic objection to the Protestant principle.

Division came not only from his right (Luther), but also from his left. The most radical of his own disciples reproached Zwingli with not going far enough.

From disciples to enemies

A group of young Zurich humanists — Conrad Grebel, Felix Manz, Georg Blaurock — had first been Zwingli's most fervent supporters. But they drew from the principle of Scripture alone a conclusion Zwingli refused: since the New Testament shows only believing adults receiving baptism, the baptism of little children would be without foundation. They demanded a Church of the pure, separated from the State, formed of rebaptized believers — hence their name of Anabaptists ("re-baptizers"). On January 21, 1525, they proceeded to the first adult baptisms.

Zwingli, whose whole Reformation rested on the alliance with the magistrate and on a Church coextensive with the city, saw in this a mortal danger to the social order as much as to doctrine. The Anabaptist movement — from which the Mennonite current would later emerge, see Erasmus and the figures of the Radical Reformation — was repressed.

The drowning of Felix Manz (1527)

The council of Zurich, with Zwingli's assent, decreed that rebaptism would be punished by death. On January 5, 1527, Felix Manz was drowned in the Limmat, the river of Zurich — a torment chosen in mockery, as a parody of the baptism by immersion he defended^[30]. He is regarded as the first Anabaptist martyr, and one of the first Protestants put to death by other Protestants.

This episode weighs heavily in Zwingli's record. The same man who invoked freedom of conscience against Rome had his former disciples executed over a disagreement on baptism. It is the paradox of all state Reformations: having broken one authority, they at once re-establish another, and in turn persecute dissenters. The blood of Manz recalls that "tolerance" was the project of no reformer — no more Zwinglian than Catholic in that age.

Zwingli's Reformation was inseparable from politics; it is by politics and by arms that it ended.

The war of the cantons

The Swiss Confederation had been cut in two: on one side Zurich, Bern, Basel and the towns won over to the Reformation; on the other the five "primitive" cantons of central Switzerland (Uri, Schwyz, Unterwalden, Lucerne, Zug), firmly Catholic. Zwingli, who wanted to extend the Reformation to the whole Confederation, pushed Zurich into a food blockade against the Catholic cantons to make them bend^[31]. The provocation degenerated into open war.

The quartered and burned body

On October 11, 1531, the Catholic cantons attacked by surprise the ill-prepared Zurich army near Kappel am Albis. Zwingli, who accompanied his fellow citizens as chaplain and combatant, was wounded then killed on the battlefield, at 47^[32].

The Catholic victors, recognizing him, inflicted on him the fate of a heretic and a traitor: his body was quartered, then burned, and his ashes mingled with those of swine so that no relic could be drawn from them^[33]. This treatment, brutal and revealing of the violence of the wars of religion, made Zwingli, in Reformed eyes, a martyr. The news of his death in combat, weapon in hand, embarrassed even some Protestants: Luther saw in it a judgment of God upon one who had mingled the Gospel and the sword.

Bullinger and the Reformed heritage

The Zurich Reformation did not die with its founder. As early as December 1531, Heinrich Bullinger succeeded Zwingli at the head of the Church of Zurich, which he led for more than forty years, consolidating and softening his work^[34]. It was Bullinger who, with Calvin, would sign in 1549 the Consensus Tigurinus, an agreement on the Supper which merged the Zwinglian current into nascent Calvinism^[35].

Thus, paradoxically, Zwingli's name faded in part behind Calvin's: the "Reformed" tradition which today dominates non-Lutheran Protestantism is more Calvinist than Zwinglian. But it is indeed Zwingli who first gave the Reformation its barest, most symbolic and most civic form.

An Ignispedia article cannot content itself with narrating: it must judge, in the light of the faith of the Church. What should be retained from Zwingli?

What the Council of Trent condemned

Twenty years after Zwingli's death, the Council of Trent, in its XIIIth session (October 11, 1551 — the anniversary of his death), answered his eucharistic doctrine precisely. The first canon directly targets memorialism:

"If anyone denies that in the sacrament of the most holy Eucharist are contained truly, really and substantially the body and blood, together with the soul and divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ, and therefore the whole Christ, but says that He is present therein only as in a sign, or in a figure, or by His power: let him be anathema." — Council of Trent, session XIII, canon 1, 1551^[36]

The formula "as in a sign or a figure" (ut in signo vel figura) is the very definition of Zwingli's position. The Church sees in it not a respectable opinion among others, but a denial of what Christ instituted and what faith has always held: "This is my body" — not "this represents it". On the scriptural and patristic foundation of the real presence, see the article Is confession biblical? and, more broadly, the dossier on the sacraments.

The loss: the Eucharist, images, saints

Zwingli's drama, for a Catholic, stands in one word: subtraction. Where the Church received and kept a treasure — the real presence, the sacrifice of the Mass, the communion of saints, the honor of images, the veneration of the Virgin — Zwingli methodically cut away. His whitewashed church, without altar, image, tabernacle, with a bare table four times a year, is the visible symbol of this reduction.

The Catholic objection is not that Zwingli loved Scripture — one must love it. It is that, by isolating it from the Tradition and the living Church which wrote and transmitted it, he delivered it to his own reason; and his reason, logical to the end, finished by finding "superstitious" almost everything fifteen centuries of Christians had held holy. Memorialism is not a progress of faith: it is an impoverishment of the gift of God.

What a Catholic can acknowledge

Honesty nevertheless obliges us to acknowledge real qualities in Zwingli. His pastoral courage during the plague, his sincere combat against the corruption of mercenary service, his horror of trafficking in holy things, his love of the biblical text, his intelligence — all that is not nothing. As with Luther, the tragedy is that an authentic zeal, ill directed, produced a tearing apart.

The Church did, in her own way, hear some of the legitimate demands running through the Reformation: the Council of Trent reformed abuses, restored the formation of the clergy, purified preaching and catechesis. But she did so without retrenching anything from the deposit of faith — that is the whole difference between a reform within the Church and a revolution against her. Zwingli wanted the second; he left a Christianity purer in appearance, but amputated of its sacramental substance.

Zwingli can only be understood within the constellation of the great reformers and the debates they reopened. He is illuminated by bringing him together with neighboring figures and related doctrinal dossiers.

• On the German reformer of whom he was both ally and adversary: Martin Luther and the Reformation.
• On the reformer who gathered and systematized his heritage: John Calvin and Calvinism.
• On the humanist who inspired him but remained Catholic: Erasmus.
• On the distant ancestor of every denial touching Christ and the sacraments: Arius and the 4th-century crisis.
• On the principle commanding his whole doctrine: Why don't Catholics follow sola Scriptura?.
• On the devotions he rejected and which the Church defends: Do Catholics worship Mary? and Is confession biblical?.