Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger
Kneeling in Front of the Emperor – Kneeling in Front of God: On the Discourse of Ritual in the Age of Reformation
This paper deals with the question to what extent the confessional conflict gave rise to intensified mistrust towards rituals. It focusses on a crucial moment in German reformation history: After his victory over the Protestants in the War of Schmalkalden 1547/48, Emperor Charles V forced each of the defeated princes, counts and cities to subject to his authority in a public rite of submission. A spectacular series of ritual genuflexions was performed, according to the medieval tradition of deditio. The Protestants had to submit demonstratively to the Emperor’s universal rule both as political and religious authority. This caused them fundamental problems of conscience: The gesture of obedience to the Emperor was in conflict with their obedience to God; the ritual appeared to be an act of idolatry. This situation raised the fundamental question for the Protestant princes of whether external conformity in religious practice could be reconciled with inner adherence to one’s own true religious convictions, in other words, how far confessional dissimulatio was allowed to go in case of inner reservatio mentalis. This discourse was carried out not least on the basis of Biblical examples – Nicodemus in the New Testament, Esther in the Old, etc. – and reflected in many ways literarily. In essence, it concerned the fundamental questions of the relationship between practice and faith, cult and dogma, visible and invisible church, body and soul. The opposing poles were, on the one hand, the irenic-pre-confessional spiritualistic position taken by Erasmus, who held all physical reality to be negligible and, on the other hand, Calvin’s strict confessionalism demanding conformity in physical and spiritual religious conduct. The way the German princes found to get out of the dilemma seems to be symptomatic of the general tendency in the relationship between politics and religion in the Holy Roman Empire.