a bounden duty to obey the magistrate if things even more than
indifferent were required: ‘I, on the contrary, would magnify, in political
matters, the authority of the magistrate, which indeed is of no little
weight; and there are many things which are made lawful by reason of
such authority, the lawfulness of which might otherwise be doubted.’^37
Adiaphora begin with the conscience, but not in abeyance of the rights
and prerogatives of princes. Melanchthon lived by this advice. In April
1547 Charles V, finally able to react militarily to the question of
Lutheranism, crushed the Schmalkaldic League and both turned his
attention to the reform of the Catholic Church by situating himself in
Innsbruck, opposite Trent, and by imposing his will on the Lutherans of
the Empire with the Augsburg Interim. For Melanchthon, though faced
with the fait accompli of Charles V’s victory, his definition of
justification survived, but the other stipulations of the Interim wiped
away everything Luther’s Reformation had effected. To Melanchthon,
the concession on justification by faith alone meant the continuance of
the evangelical cause. But the ministers of the unvanquished city of
Magdeburg, however, saw in Melanchthon’s appeal to adiaphora a tacit
justification of the Mass and a surrender of the Gospel. Most vocal and
vitriolic of the Magdeburg clergy was Matthias Flacius Illyricus, whose
arguments fall into two categories. First, the vestments and rites of Rome
were materially those of the old covenant cult of Israel, and as such were
done away in Christ. Second, and relevant to the English situation,
Flacius Illyricus contended that the idolatry of Antichrist had defiled the
Latin vestments and rites, and as such they were no longer fit for use,
that is, abusus tollit usum.^38
John Hooper had been in Zurich when the verbal conflict between
Flaccius and Melanchthon began, the arguments he used in his debate
with Ridley and Cranmer bearing close affinity to those of Flaccius^39
166 JOHN JEWEL AND THE ENGLISH NATIONAL CHURCH
1965), p. 308.
(^37) Melanchthon to Bucer, 8 November 1531, in Original Letters, p. 556. The particular
matter Melanchthon here references is the state of Henry VIII’s marriage to Catherine of
Aragon. Even though the marriage itself is odious to the law of God, it does not warrant
a divorce, and the will of the magistrate is ample to overrule any conflict of affinity.
(^38) Flacius’s treatise, in an expurgated form was reprinted in the Puritan tract The
Fortress of Fathers, and is reproduced in Leonard Trinterud’s Elizabethan Puritanism
(Oxford, 1971), pp. 101–6. Cf. p. 102, where is made particular allusion to the
resurrecting of popish rites and usages.
(^39) Whether Hooper read Flacius Illyricus, or whether similar circumstances produced
similar results, is debated. That the later English radical political tracts took their
inspiration from the Magdeburg Bekentnnisseems clear. Cf. Esther Hildebrandt, ‘The
Magdeburg Bekenntnis as a Possible Link Between German and English Resistance
Theories in the Sixteenth Century’, Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, Vol. 71 (1980), pp.
227–53.
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