Franz Lambert of Avignon

Franz Lambert von Avignon (also Franziskus Lambertus , * 1487 in Avignon ; † April 18, 1530 in Frankenberg (Eder) ) was a Protestant theologian and played a decisive role in the Reformation of the Landgraviate of Hesse .

Life

Lambert, whose father came from Orgelet ( Franche-Comté ) and probably worked as a lawyer, entered the Order of the Minorites at the age of 15 . Since he took the rules of the order too seriously, he decided to change to the Carthusian order, which he ultimately did not do. Instead, he began to roam the country as an itinerant preacher. In this activity he was very successful, so that in 1517 he was awarded the title of Praedicator Apostolicus . On one of these trips in Lyon - probably in 1520 - he published the treatise la corone de nostre Saulveur Jesus Christ , a first attempt to place Jesus - instead of Mary - at the center of Christian piety.

In June 1522 he left Avignon to visit his idol Martin Luther in Wittenberg . On the way there he met popular reformers such as Zwingli and Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim , with whom he is said to have lived. For reasons unknown, he left the Order during his journey. Presumably he could no longer identify with the old values . Lambert arrived in Eisenach in November and sought contact with Luther. In the following month he sent him a manuscript with 139 theses to acquaint Luther with his thoughts. This showed little interest in Lambert's work, but let him come to Wittenberg.

Here Lambert found a job as a university teacher at the theological faculty of the University of Wittenberg and had taught the minores prophetae. He was literarily productive: apologetic to defend his conversion from religious life to the Reformation, and biblical-exegetical. He had worked under the synonym Johannes Seranus, among other things. One year before Luther, he married the daughter of a baker from Herzberg, who was in the service of Augustin Schurff, on July 30, 1523, and left Wittenberg on February 14, 1524.

Then he went to Nikolaus Gerbel in Strasbourg. Initially received positively by the city council, Lambert later banned it from publication. In Strasbourg with no prospects, he accepted the offer of the Hessian Landgrave Philipp to participate in a disputation on a new church order . This disputation took place from October 21 to 23, 1526 in Homberg / Efze and became known as the Homberg Synod . Lambert's theses, the so-called paradoxes , formed its basis. Both the spokesman of the Catholics, the Franciscan Nikolaus Ferber , Guardian of the Marburg Franciscan Monastery , and Luther were distant from Lambert's theses; one because he denied the right of this synod to reform, the other because he saw “eyn hauffen laws” in the new church order. The regulations were not published in the 16th century, but many of their provisions were put into practice, such as the establishment of a Protestant university. From 1527 Lambert taught at the newly founded University of Marburg .

In addition to lectures on works of the Holy Scriptures , he also held a disputation on the theses of the Scot Patrick Hamilton , who was burned as a heretic in St Andrews in 1528 . 1529 was published in honor of Charles V his major work chretienne Somme . Lambert didn't seem to feel at home in Marburg either, which is why he wrote a letter to the reformer Martin Bucer to find him a job in French-speaking Switzerland . This did not happen because Lambert in Frankenberg, where the university had been relocated because of a plague epidemic, was carried away by the epidemic together with his family.

Goals and meaning

Lambert tried to enforce the leitmotifs of the Reformation throughout his life. As a basis he saw the examination of the scriptures of the Bible and their interpretation in sermons. In addition to his spiritual closeness to Luther, his works Paradoxa and Farrago in particular show his very own ideas about the reorganization of the church. There were always four focal points:

• The sermon and the confrontation with it
• The bishop as preacher and administrator of the sacraments
• The state power, which should give the appropriate legal form
• The independence of the communities

Obviously Lambert's thoughts were too radical to have become reality, which is why Luther's moderate variant at least established itself in the German Reich. Although Lambert's ideas were no longer relevant for the further course and expansion of the Reformation, they show the struggle in the early years for an organizational form of the Reformation, which is particularly important for today's research.

literature

• Gerhard Müller: Franz Lambert of Avignon and the Reformation in Hesse [= publications of the historical commission for Hesse and Waldeck. Sources and representations on the history of Landgrave Philip the Good-natured 24.4]. Marburg 1958 (Contains the complete French text of the Somme chrestienne .)
• Rainer Haas: Franz Lambert and Patrick Hamilton in their importance for the evangelical movement in the British Isles , dissertation, University of Marburg 1973.
• Rainer Haas: La Corone de nostre saulveur . In: Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 84th Volume 1973, pp. 287–301.
• Reinhard Bodenmann: Bibliotheca Lambertiana . In: Pour rétrouver Francois Lambert , Baden-Baden and Buxwiller 1987, pp. 9-213.
• Rainer Haas: Franz Lambert and the state of Hesse's confession in the 16th century in: Yearbook of the Hessian Church History Association, Volume 57/2006, pp. 177–210.
• Edmund Kurten: Franz Lambert von Avignon and Nikolaus Herborn in their position on the concept of the order and on Franciscanism in particular , Aschendorff, 1950 (studies and texts on the history of the Reformation; vol. 72).
• Gerhard Müller: The beginnings of the Marburg Theological Faculty . In: Hessisches Jahrbuch für Landesgeschichte VI (1956), pp. 164–181.
• Louis Ruffet: François Lambert d'Avignon, le réformateur de la Hesse , Bonheur, Paris 1873.
• Roy Lutz Winters: Franz Lambert of Avignon 1487–1530. A Study in Reformation Origins , United Lutheran Publication House, Philadelphia PA 1938.
• Johann Wilhelm Baum : Franz Lambert of Avignon, Strasbourg 1840.
• Gerhard Müller:  Lambert, Franz. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 13, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1982, ISBN 3-428-00194-X , pp. 435-437 ( digitized version ).
• Felix Stieve:  Franz Lambert . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 17, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1883, pp. 548-551.
• Lambertus, Franciscus. In: Johann Heinrich Zedler : Large complete universal lexicon of all sciences and arts . Volume 16, Leipzig 1737, column 304 f.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Gustav Bauch: The introduction of the Melanchthonian Declamations and other simultaneous reforms at the University of Wittenberg , Commission publishing by M. & H. Marcus, Breslau 1900.
2. ↑ Das Gottfried Wentz: The Franciscan Monastery in Wittenberg. In Germanica Sacra- The dioceses of the Church Province of Magdeburg. de Gruyter, Berlin 1941, 2nd T., p. 396

Web links

• Works by and about Franz Lambert von Avignon  in the German Digital Library
• Reinhard Bodenmann: Franz Lambert. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland .