Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy Podcast brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyofphilosophy.net.

Today's episode, slowly but surely, Huldrich Zwingli.

One of the questions we've been following over the past several episodes has been whether humanism can be credited with, or blamed for, inspiring the Protestant Reformation.

The relevance of humanism for early Lutheranism seems undeniable, especially when you look past Luther himself to the work of a man like Malanthon.

But any lingering doubts can be put to rest by following the example of the Fontop family in the sound of music and going over the Alps into Switzerland.

Here, the Reformation had a second emergence with the city of Zurich as its main stage, like Wittenberg in Germany.

Playing the central role upon that stage was Huldrich Zwingli, a preacher and theologian who agreed with Luther about many things, but disagreed with him violently about one thing in particular.

We'll get to that in due course, but first we should recognize that a common inspiration for both the Lutherans and Zwingli was that man Erasmus.

Zwingli was, like Malanthon, a committed humanist, trained at Vienna and Bern, he became proficient in ancient Greek and Hebrew in order to study the Bible.

His private book collection included many works by Erasmus and other authors important for the humanist movement, like Pico della Mirandola.

If Pico's example inspired Zwingli to go further in the study of Hebrew than Erasmus had done, Zwingli's unrelenting study of the Bible in its original language was deeply Erasmian.

Like Luther, he made Scripture the sole source of authority and religion.

Never mind what the Pope says, never mind the traditions that had evolved over many generations of Christianity, never mind even the doctrines of the late ancient church fathers.

All that mattered was the clear message taught by Scripture.

Zwingli would judge all religious matters by this standard. On this basis, he led his followers out of the trap, laid by Catholic theology, saying, so long farewell to a few of the papacy's favorite things, including the worship of saints, the use of images in the church, clerical celibacy, fasting during lent, and most decisively the Catholic mass.

Actually, it might be more accurate, if somewhat paradoxical, to say that Zwingli did not lead his followers but followed them.

He discouraged fellow reformers inserted from acting too quickly. We achieve our ends, he said, by going slow. Slowly but surely though, he was drawn into a total breach with the Roman church.

A famous early step was taken, appropriately enough, given the central role of the printing press in his period, in the home of the printer, Christopher Froshawa.

He hosted a dinner at which sausages were eaten in violation of the laws for fasting during lent. Zwingli was in attendance, and rather typically he didn't eat the meat himself, but evidently gave his tacit approval.

As always, the rationale was to look to Scripture for guidance. Since it doesn't ban the eating of meat in lent, there should be no ban. This was only a humanly devised and thus optional custom.

As Zwingli commented, if you desire to fast do it, if you do not want to eat flesh, don't eat it, but in this leave me the Christian man free.

He took a similar stance on the question of images. On the one hand, he supported the execution of a man who took a knife to an image of Christ, since the man in question acted alone for the sake of provocation.

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