Confession&Witches

Excursus: Confession and Witchhunts
Ever since witchcraft and its persecution became topics of serious historical inquiry, historians have tried to connect the phenomenon to religion. For many Protestant historians, witchcraft persecution was the logical consequence of late medieval Catholicism, specifically the papal sanction given to the persecution witches in 1484. This argument overlooked the inconvenient fact that Protestants hunted witches, too, and that the heyday of persecution arrived after the Reformation. Liberal historians of the nineteenth century condemned both houses, Protestant and Catholic, attributing the witch-hunts to a religious fanaticism that both confessions shared. Then in the 1970s, social historians began collecting evidence on regional and chronological variations in the intensity of witchcraft prosecution. One particularly thorough analysis -- that of H.C. Erik Midelfort -- examined all known trials conducted against witches that took place within the territory of modern Baden-Württemberg, a state in southwestern Germany, between 1560 and 1670. The cumulative results of his study are presented in the following chart:

These data yield a sharp contrast between Protestant and Catholic jurisdictions. In southwestern Germany, Protestants carried out 163 trials and executed 620 persons during the period; Catholic courts conducted far more trials (317) and executed far more people (2333). The overall severity of Catholic persecutions was approximately double that of Protestants, 7.4 to 3.8 executions per trial. These data seemed to confirm the old Protestant explanation for witch-hunts.

But this conclusion is shaky for two reasons:

1) First, it does not consider variations over time. Catholic trials were always more severe, but the difference was not great before 1600 or so. If we examine the trials before and after 1600, we find that sixteenth-century Catholic trials were only 20-30 percent more severe than the Protestant trials conducted there during the same period. After 1600, the number of executions per trial increased in Catholic jurisdictions, but fell in Protestant ones.

2) Second, historians have long argued that there were no significant differences between Catholics and Protestants in their beliefs regarding witchcraft. Instead, we are told, both confessional coalitions were divided internally between advocates of a moderate, "providential" concept of witchcraft that explained it as God's punishment for human wickedness and a more punitive theory animated by the fear of black magic. If there were no confessional differences in demonological theory, how can one explain the fact that German Catholics were more severe prosecutors than their Protestant neighbors?

Confessional differences in the pattern of witch persecution prompts us to reexamine the idea that Protestants and Catholics displayed no marked differences.

To be sure, Protestant and Catholic demonologists shared in a consensus that a pact with the devil made black magic effective. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, trial records continue to emphasize this connection.
The greatest, most careful exponent of a "providential" theory of witchcraft was Johannes Brenz, the Protestant reformer of Schwäbisch Hall and of the Duchy of Württemberg, who argued that the disasters caused by witchcraft were God's way of chastising, warning, and testing His people. The crime of witches was therefore not malefice but ignorance: victims of demonic deceptions, not confederates in a demonic pact, witches were persuaded to believe that their actions had consequences, when in fact there was no causal connection between them at all.

But there were other alternatives available, in addition to demonological and "providential" explanations of witchcraft, and these carried increasingly strong confessional overtones. The adherents of both major faiths managed to find "witchcraft" inherent in the other, but did so in ways that exposed important differences of doctrine and mentality.

Protestant arguments tended to claim that Catholicism was inherently magical, "since many of its rituals relied on securing material effects from non-material causes--blessings, exorcisms, hallowings, and the like" (Clark, 533).

Catholic sacramental doctrines were particularly vulnerable to this kind of attack, above all the doctrine of transubstantion, which many Protestants denounced as 'conjuration' or 'enchantment.'
Thus Catholic priests were no better than magicians, sorcerers, and witches; the Catholic Mass was itself a kind of witchcraft. In 1610, for example, Thomas Pickering asserted that all the miracles associated with saints were "but mere Satanicall wonders." On the continent, the Tübingen theologian Jacob Heerebrand called Catholic rituals "nothing but truly diabolical, ungodly, and magical blasphemies."

Catholic counterarguments adopted a different tone: in essence they asserted that the real source of witchcraft was the Reformation itself.

For them, heresy had always been associated with magic; throughout the history of Christianity, God's true church had been assailed by the devil's false church. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Catholics could recall that for centuries, herectics had been accused of crimes similar to witchcraft.
Thus from their point of view, Protestant 'witches' were only the latest in a long series of demonic threats to the true faith; indeed, the things in Catholic observance that Protestants ridiculed most were precisely the beliefs and practices that witches also aimed to subvert--the Virgin, the saints, the Mass, etc.
Throughout Europe, Catholics linked the flourishing of witchcraft with the prevalence of new heresies.

Sources: H.C. Erik Midelfort, Witch Hunting in Southwestern Germany, 1562-1684: The Social and Intellectual Foundations (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1972); Stuart Clark, Thinking With Demons: The Idea of Witches in Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).