The Third Man

"Ah God! If only Adam had eaten a pear!" So wrote the young Swiss Priest Ulrich Zwingli in the margin of a copy of St. Augustine's City of God. It was the half-quizzical, wholly anguished cry of a man bothered by the mystery of evil and man's sinfulness. Like Luther before him and Calvin afterwards, Zwingli discovered his solution in the unadorned Word of God, and not in the papal teachings of the corrupt, corrupting, 16th century Roman Church. Zwingli thus became the architect of the Swiss Reformation. But he remains the least known of the great Protestant fathers. His story has now been told with sympathy and scholarship by Genevan Pastor-Historian Jean Rilliet, in Zwingli: Third Man of the Reformation (Westminster; $6.)

Born in 1484, Zwingli studied at the universities of Basel and Vienna before his ordination. In an age of semiliterate priests, he managed to combine his duties as a country pastor at Glarus with genuine scholarship: he had a library of 350 volumes, studied the Scriptures in Greek and Hebrew, corresponded with the great Renaissance humanist Erasmus.

From the first, Zwingli found celibacy difficult. In 1515, nine years after his ordination, he took a private vow of chastity--which he kept for only a year and a day. But in the casual atmosphere of the Swiss Church, Zwingli's sin was no bar to advancement, and in 1519 the canons of Zurich Minster appointed him preacher of the cathedral; his chief rival for the post was a German priest who admitted to fathering six children.

Revolt of the Sausages. Luther's Reformation began with a protest against the sale of indulgences. The Swiss revolt broke into the open over two sausages: Zwingli attacked the "unscriptural" practice of fasting after some reform-minded friends were denounced to the Zurich magistrates for eating meat during Lent. Later, Zwingli preached against other Roman disciplines--celibacy, the doctrine of purgatory, invocation of saints--on grounds that they are not authorized by the Bible. In 1524 the town council methodically began to put into effect Zwingli's reformation, outlined in his 67 theses. Statues and crucifixes were stripped from the churches, and by 1525 his German service of the Lord's Supper had replaced the Latin Mass.

With the zeal of a Savonarola, Zwingli tried to legislate Zurich into a facsimile of God's kingdom on earth. The town council passed stern laws against adultery and fornication and made attendance at Sunday services compulsory. But Zurich was an ideal community only for those who saw things Zwingli's way. Catholics were fined and were forbidden to run for elective offices, and Zwingli approved exile and execution for Anabaptist heretics who wanted a more radical reformation than he allowed.

Zwingli's followers spread his Reformation doctrines through northern Switzerland and into Germany, where they came into contact and conflict with Lutheranism. With Luther, Zwingli believed in justification by faith, the supremacy of Scripture, and predestination of the elect, but the two quarreled bitterly over the meaning of the Eucharist. Luther believed in the real presence of Christ in the bread and wine of Communion; Zwingli argued that the Lord's Supper was only a memorial to the Saviour's redeeming sacrifice. In 1529, friends brought the two men together for a confrontation at Marburg. It did little good. "Your arguments are weak," thundered Luther. "Abandon them and give glory to God." Answered Zwingli: "We too ask you to give glory to God and abandon your begging of the question." Later, Luther declared that Zwingli was in league with the devil.

Fighting Prophet. As Zurich's spiritual dictator, Zwingli matured into a shrewd, power-conscious diplomat who tried to forge an international alliance against the Catholic Swiss cantons. When their armies attacked the Zurich forces in 1531, he buckled on sword and armor to serve as a fighting chaplain at the battle of Kappel. There, mortally wounded, he was captured and killed by the Catholics. His body was quartered by a hangman, smeared with dung and burned.

More a polemicist than a systematic theologian, Zwingli wrote an earthy, lucid prose that is rarely read today except by scholars. But his influence is nonetheless wide. He helped create the Reformed Church doctrine ultimately perfected by John Calvin, who imitated Zwingli in attempting to set up a theocratic city of God at Geneva. "Zwingli was no stained-glass-window saint," writes Pastor Rilliet, but he made "the unremitted search for God the ruling motive of his life."

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