Peter Martyr Vermigli

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Peter Martyr Vermigli — Pietro Martire Vermigli in his native Italian — was christened Piero Mariano in Florence in 1499, the son of a prosperous shoemaker; his mother taught him his first Latin. He took the name Peter Martyr when he entered religion, naming himself for Peter of Verona, the thirteenth-century Dominican inquisitor cut down on a Lombard road and venerated as a martyr of the faith — an irony the later Reformer carried without comment, since the Peter Martyr the Reformation knew would spend his second life fleeing inquisitions rather than conducting them. He joined the Lateran Congregation of the Augustinian Canons Regular, studied at Padua — learning Greek there to read Aristotle in the original, and later Hebrew to read Scripture — and rose to the front rank of his order: preacher, vicar, abbot. By middle age he had concluded that the church he served was wrong about the things that mattered most, and he left it.

Copper-engraving portrait of Peter Martyr Vermigli (1499–1562). — Unknown engraver, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain, PD-Art)

From the cloister to the Alps

The turn came in the 1530s, in the years he spent as abbot of the city monastery of St Peter ad Aram at Naples. There he fell in with the circle gathered around the Spanish émigré Juan de Valdés — an evangelical reform movement inside Italian Catholicism that prized justification by faith and the inward reading of Scripture — and there, in private, he read the Reformers: Bucer’s commentaries, Zwingli on true and false religion. His own biblical lecturing began to change with what he read. In 1541 he became prior of San Frediano at Lucca, where he did not keep the new doctrine private: he gathered a teaching staff of like-minded humanists and turned both monastery and congregation toward Reformed worship.

This could not last. In 1542 the Roman Inquisition was reconstituted, and Vermigli was summoned to answer before a chapter of his order. Rather than appear, he fled — to Pisa, to Florence and the company of his fellow ex-friar Bernardino Ochino, and then over the Alps: through Zurich and Basel to Strasbourg, which he reached in November 1542 on an invitation from Martin Bucer. He never returned to Italy. The exile that began as flight from a tribunal turned him into something his Neapolitan years could not have predicted: an international scholar of the Reformed cause, carried from city to city by the political weather of the Reformation, and read wherever the cause had taken hold.

The geography of a movement

At Strasbourg he lectured on the Old Testament at the College of Saint Thomas under Bucer’s protection, married a former nun, Catherine Dammartin of Metz, and settled into the life of a Protestant professor. In 1547, after the Lutheran defeat in the Schmalkaldic War made Strasbourg unsafe for Reformed teaching, he accepted Thomas Cranmer’s invitation to England and took up the Regius chair of divinity at Oxford through the brief Protestant spring of Edward VI’s reign. He lectured on the Pauline epistles — it was his teaching on 1 Corinthians that lit the Eucharistic fuse — and lent his learning to the revision of the English liturgy, working close enough to Cranmer that he is reckoned among the foreign divines who shaped the second Edwardian Prayer Book of 1552. When Mary Tudor restored Catholicism and Cranmer went to the fire, Vermigli was permitted to withdraw. He returned to Strasbourg, and then in 1556, when his Eucharistic and predestinarian views again collided with the Lutherans there, he accepted the chair of Hebrew at Zurich, succeeding Konrad Pellikan and teaching alongside Heinrich Bullinger until his death.

Thomas Cranmer (1545), who invited Vermigli to Oxford; he is shown reading the epistles of St Paul with a work of Augustine on the table. — Gerlach Flicke, National Portrait Gallery, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

His last public act was diplomatic. In 1561 he attended the Colloquy of Poissy, the French crown’s attempt to reconcile Catholics and Huguenots before the wars of religion broke open; he stood with Theodore Beza and addressed Catherine de’ Medici in their shared Italian. He died at Zurich on 12 November 1562, Bullinger and Josiah Simler at his side. His career traces, almost exactly, the geography of the Reformed movement at mid-century: Naples and Lucca to Strasbourg to Oxford and back, and finally Zurich — the itinerary of a man who belonged to no single Protestant nation and carried his authority across all of them.

The Colloquy of Poissy of 1561, Vermigli’s last public act, depicted in a later painting. — Joseph-Nicolas Robert-Fleury, 1840, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Zurich in a 1576 woodcut plan, the city where Vermigli held the chair of Hebrew and died in 1562. — Jos Murer, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

What is received in the bread

What gave Vermigli his lasting weight was the Eucharist. The question of what happens in the bread and wine had split the Reformation against itself more bitterly than any other, and it was here that he argued most carefully and at greatest length. He rejected the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation — the conversion of the whole substance of bread and wine into the body and blood — and he rejected with equal firmness the Lutheran insistence on a true bodily presence in, with, and under the elements, received by the mouth of believer and unbeliever alike. He held instead that Christ is truly received in the sacrament, but spiritually, by the faith of the receiver; the body itself, glorified and circumscribed, remains in heaven at the right hand of the Father, and the believer is lifted by the Spirit to feed upon it. The bread and wine are signs and instruments, genuinely conveying what they signify to faith, not empty tokens and not the thing itself. This is the spiritual-receptionist position — close to that of Calvin and Bullinger, the shared confession of the Reformed church against both Rome and Wittenberg — and against it stands the Lutheran bodily presence defended in the same generation by the systematizers of the other camp — the dogmaticians for whom Martin Chemnitz wrote, the heirs of the Wittenberg theology that Martin Luther and Philipp Melanchthon had founded. On the sacrament itself the two confessions could not be reconciled, and Vermigli’s contribution was to give the Reformed side one of its most rigorous and most learned statements.

That statement was forged in public. His Oxford lectures on 1 Corinthians provoked controversy bordering on riot among students and conservative dons, and Cranmer arranged a formal academic disputation to settle the matter in argument. Over three days in 1549, Vermigli defended three propositions against the leading Oxford traditionalists: that the bread and wine are not transubstantiated into the body and blood of Christ; that the body and blood are not carnally or corporeally present in the elements; and that the body and blood are united to the bread and wine sacramentally — by signification and to faith, not by substance. The record of the debate, with the treatise that preceded it, became one of the founding Reformed documents of the English church. His later Defensio, the long reply to Stephen Gardiner’s defense of the Roman doctrine, ran to some eight hundred folio pages and stands among the most exhaustive Eucharistic works the century produced.

The argument turned on the Fathers. Vermigli’s distinctive strength was a command of patristic literature deep enough to contest the ground his opponents thought theirs: he read Augustine above all — Augustine’s account of the sign that is not the thing it signifies, of a presence to faith rather than to teeth — as teaching what the Reformed now confessed, and he marshaled Chrysostom, Theodoret, and the ninth-century Ratramnus to the same end. The claim was not that the early church was Reformed in the sixteenth-century sense; it was that the doctrine of a corporeal, substantial presence was a later overgrowth, and that the older and better authorities spoke of a spiritual eating. To frame the Reformation as a recovery of the ancient church rather than a rupture from it was the common patristic strategy of the era’s first-rank theologians, on both sides of the Eucharistic divide; Vermigli wielded it for the Reformed with a philologist’s exactness.

Aristotle inside the new church

If the Eucharist made him an authority, his method made him a teacher of teachers. Vermigli had been formed at Padua in the most rigorous Aristotelian schooling Italy offered, and he never set the training aside. His one non-biblical commentary was on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, lectured at Strasbourg and left unfinished — a Protestant reading of the pagan philosopher that took the natural virtues seriously while insisting they reach their completion only in the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love, and only under the criterion of Scripture. Behind his theology stood the apparatus of the schools: the careful distinction of terms, the disputed question, the syllogism marshaled against an opponent, the scholastic method by which a doctrine is defined, defended, and ringed with qualifications. Historians of the period — John Patrick Donnelly foremost — have set Vermigli, with Beza and Girolamo Zanchi, among the founders of a distinctively Reformed scholasticism, in which the structures of medieval theology, Thomas Aquinas not least, were turned to the service of a church that had broken with the Thomist’s Rome. The Reformation Vermigli joined kept, in him, much of the intellectual machinery of the church he fled; he had carried the Summa out of the cloister and put it to work in the lecture hall at Zurich.

This is the standpoint from which his afterlife is best read. For the traditions that received him, Vermigli was less a builder of systems than an authority to be cited and a locus to be consulted: a name that settled a question. His topical discussions, scattered through his biblical commentaries, were gathered after his death by Robert Masson and published at London in 1576 as the Loci Communes — the Common Places — a compendium arranged by theological head that served generations of Reformed students as a working reference and went through some fourteen further editions across Protestant Europe. It was the Loci, more than any single treatise, that carried his name into the seminaries and kept it there. He is remembered now mainly by specialists, and his predestinarian and sacramental teaching was long folded anonymously into the broader Reformed consensus he helped to fix. The contrast he could not have foreseen would come from the opposite direction entirely: three centuries later John Henry Newman, running the road in reverse, would leave the Church of England that Vermigli’s Oxford helped to make and convert to the Rome that Vermigli had fled, carrying a doctrine of how an unchanging church may visibly change — the mirror image of a man who left Rome convinced that the change had already happened and that the Fathers were on his side.

The recovered scholar

For most of three centuries Vermigli was a footnote — read, when read at all, through the Loci and a confessional consensus that no longer needed his name. The twentieth century recovered the man. John Patrick Donnelly’s Calvinism and Scholasticism in Vermigli’s Doctrine of Man and Grace (Brill, 1976) argued that the Reformed tradition had reabsorbed the scholastic method it claimed to have left behind, with Vermigli among its chief carriers — a thesis that reframed him from minor authority to a hinge between medieval and Protestant thought. The critical foundation for that recovery is the Peter Martyr Library, the modern English edition begun under Joseph C. McLelland, which has brought the Oxford treatise and disputation, the Defensio, the biblical commentaries, and the Nicomachean Ethics commentary into print with apparatus. The state of the field is gathered in A Companion to Peter Martyr Vermigli, edited by Torrance Kirby, Emidio Campi, and Frank A. James III (Brill, 2009), whose two dozen essays trace the international career, the hermeneutics, the major loci, and the later influence, and whose reception by reviewers marked the arrival of a serious Vermigli scholarship. His predestinarian teaching, the other pole of his system, has its own literature; the debate over how far it stands in the double-decree tradition runs through the Scottish Journal of Theology and the specialist monographs of Marvin Anderson and Frank James. The portrait that emerges from this work is consistent: a philologist of the Fathers, a schoolman of the new church, and a Eucharistic theologian whose precision came from having argued the doctrine, in public, against men who held the older view with conviction.

He built no church of his own and founded no school under his name. What he left was a way of arguing: a Eucharist defined against two errors at once and anchored in Augustine, a predestination reasoned in the old scholastic forms, and a confidence that the theology of the divided present could be won back on the ground of the ancient sources. The Reformed church that consulted him as a locus was consulting, in effect, the cloister he had walked out of — its Aristotle, its Aquinas, its disputed questions — bent now to a doctrine the cloister would have condemned. He had answered the summons of 1542 by crossing the Alps; the schoolroom answer he took with him was that a man could keep the whole apparatus of the old church and still pronounce its central rite mistaken, and keep it precisely in order to say so. That was the wager of his second life, and the seminaries that went on citing him for three hundred years were, whether they knew it or not, repeating it.

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