Heretics and Heroes

by Thomas Cahill

  The burden of Erasmus’s argument in the Enchiridion is that Christianity comes in two versions: formalistic Christianity, concerned only with physical rituals and outward show, and a Christianity of the spirit that takes seriously the words and spirit of Jesus but is unconcerned with what Erasmus calls “silly little ceremonies.” “What is the use of being sprinkled with a few drops of holy water as long as you do not wipe clean the inner defilement of the soul? You venerate the saints, and you take pleasure in touching their relics.… Would you like to win the favor of Peter and Paul? Imitate the faith of the one and the charity of the other, and you will accomplish more than if you were to dash off to Rome ten times.” Unfortunately, claims Erasmus, “most Christians are superstitious rather than faithful, and except for the name of Christ differ hardly at all from superstitious pagans.” The sole escape route from this pagan impasse of holy water, relics, and pilgrimages is what Erasmus calls philosophia Christi (the philosophy of Christ), anchored in “the Gospel teaching.”

  The argument, as presented by Erasmus, is dotted with learned Platonic references, all pointing out that the only purpose of visible things is to lead us to the Invisible; and it is full as well of Thomas à Kempis’s constant emphasis on a life uncluttered, poor, and centered on the example of Jesus. Erasmus’s unique combination of humanism and Christ-centeredness has a stoic, even a grimly serious northern European flavor. It is hard to imagine any Italian, except perhaps Michelangelo, making a similar argument and bringing together such seemingly disparate elements as an unyielding Platonism and an equally unyielding evangelical piety.

  No one knows if Erasmus won over his friend the knight, though I doubt it. Pleasant companions steeped in fornication are seldom amenable to such reasoning, posed, it must be said, in so monkish a manner. I imagine the knight continued as he was, attracted to religion as outward show and pursuing his pleasures with knightly vigor. But the book was so original in its literate and clever criticism of religious formalism that it fairly tore through the Europe of its day. Written in 1501 and published a few years later, it would by century’s end boast more than seventy Latin editions and countless translations into every major European language.

  With his newfound celebrity, Erasmus discovered that he was increasingly able to live apart from the monastic community to which he was formally vowed. In his first years as a monk, he had fallen passionately in love with another young monk. Once that relationship had come to nothing, Erasmus kept himself free of erotic entanglements for the rest of his life.3 But he also came to loathe the shut-up atmosphere of convents, and gradually he found himself in contact with humanistic churchmen throughout Europe who were so entertained by his books that they were happy to dispense him from monastic obligations, especially stabilitas—the obligation to remain in one place and not flit about. Erasmus would be a traveler and guest for the rest of his life, never residing for long in one place, seldom serving even a short term at a university (though offered many such positions), but often the recipient of the genial private hospitality of his fellow humanists in various parts of Europe.

  One of his favorite jaunts was to cross the Channel to visit his dear English friends, especially the lawyer Sir Thomas More, who would soon become the young King Henry VIII’s confidant and high official. Sir Thomas was personally more austere than Erasmus. He had in his youth considered a monastic vocation and continued to practice monastic-style mortifications (much fasting, a hair-shirt worn in secret beneath his handsome street clothes) throughout his life. But More was never dreary: we have abundant attestation to the merriness of his populous household, to his own playfulness and wit, and to his personal generosity. However hard he may have been on himself, he was the ideal host.

  Erasmus was most appreciative. So much so that he wrote an original book-length composition in tribute to More. It was entitled Moriae Encomium (In Praise of Folly) and, like his earlier publications, it was wildly successful. The text is a soliloquy by Folly herself, explaining her thoughts on various subjects. The reasoning is cockeyed but convincing. Like a puffed-up politician or public personality of our own day (say, Glenn Beck, Charlie Sheen, Donald Trump), Folly takes herself quite seriously. She introduces her attendants: Drunkenness, Ignorance, Self-Love, Flattery, Wantonness, et al. She insists that all great endeavors—war, civil society, the church and its theology—depend upon her, and that all important people—lawyers, professors, scientists, kings, popes—are her followers. At the end of her discourse, she finds herself incapable of making the customary rhetorical summary of her remarks because she has already forgotten what she was saying. The format enabled Erasmus to satirize everything and everyone in the world of his time while escaping the condemnations that would have been hurled at him had he tackled his subjects straight on. Even the newly crowned pontiff, Pope Leo X, was amused.

  Moriae, the genitive form of the Latin word for “folly,” is also a tongue-in-cheek nod to More himself, since the book’s title could be translated In Praise of More. For a reader today, the title pretty much sets the tone of the tome: it is full of donnish jokes, learned if mildly humorous asides meant to be caught and appreciated only by insiders, other humanists. But by this point the fashion for humanism was sweeping Europe, giving Erasmus an audience so sizable as to be the envy of all.

  Following quickly on the Encomium came the anonymous distribution of a brief dialogue entitled Julius Exclusus e Coelis (Julius Excluded from Heaven) in commemoration, as it were, of the death of Pope Julius II, Michelangelo’s great patron and Leo X’s immediate predecessor. Julius arrives at the Pearly Gates in full armor and is stopped by good, honest Saint Peter, who has no intention of letting this smug monster into Heaven. Julius fulminates in the excessive manner that always got him what he wanted on earth. He even declares Peter excommunicate, but to no avail. In life, says Peter, Julius failed to perform his one real duty—“to preach Christ to others.” He can go to Hell.

  This dialogue traveled up and down Europe at warp speed, causing repeated outbreaks of laughter everywhere at the expense of the Holy See. Erasmus never admitted to being its author, though he never actually denied authorship, either. He had become the Jon Stewart of his day.

  Erasmus was now in a position to offer his most consequential—and least humorous—work. About the middle of the second decade of the sixteenth century, there appeared an Erasmian text that would become the essential catalyst of the Reformation. It was initially entitled Novum Instrumentum Omne (The Whole of the New Instrument), an attempt no doubt to camouflage its contents; in later editions it would receive the plainer, more revealing title of Novum Testamentum Omne (The Whole of the New Testament). In its most complete editions it offered three texts in parallel columns: the New Testament in the traditional Latin Vulgate of Jerome; the New Testament in a better Latin version as translated by Erasmus; and the original Greek text of the New Testament, supplied so that those who knew enough Greek could check that Erasmus’s Latin was indeed an improvement on Jerome’s. “It is only fair,” boasted Erasmus, proud of his gracefully classical Latin style, “that Paul should address the Romans in somewhat better Latin.” The Greek text became the textus receptus, the standard scholarly text for generations to come.4

  It is astonishing to realize that till this publication saw the light almost no one in Western Europe had read through the original Greek of the New Testament for close to twelve centuries. The Greek East, of course, had always depended on its Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. (Erasmus created his Greek text by pasting together different portions of the best manuscripts he could find, “collating,” as he called it blandly, “a large number of ancient manuscripts.”) But this publication marked the first time the Greek text had been set in type anywhere in the world.

  It also marked the first time anyone had seen fit to issue a completely revised Latin translation. It made possible all the vernacular translations that would soon flood Europe, eventually putting this more accurately Latinized New Testament w
ithin the grasp not only of those who could read Latin but of anyone who could read the printed words of his own language. And as the cheap and novel products issuing from more and more printing presses encouraged more and more people to learn to read, the potential audience for Erasmus’s great work was growing phenomenally. Though, as yet, probably few more than 10 percent of Western Europeans could read fluently in any language, many, listening to the new texts read to them, must have made a silent resolution to master the alphabet. “Literacy now!” could almost have been the slogan of the age.

  How different the passionless, calculating, urbane, friend-making Erasmus from his younger contemporary and fellow Augustinian, the impassioned, impulsive loner and small-town professor, Martin Luther. Though their names would be forever linked by their northern European origins, by their common devotion to the New Testament, by their desire to put its text into as many hands as possible, and by the controversies each would engender as a result of his prayerful meditations on this text, their temperaments could hardly have driven them further apart.

  Luther first came to public notice as an innovative lecturer on the Bible at a tiny new university in the little Saxon town of Wittenberg. Like the vast majority of university teachers throughout Europe, he was in orders, in his case as an Augustinian monk of an especially severe convent, called the Black Cloister. Unlike Erasmus, who had sought the cloister only to avoid hunger and homelessness, Luther’s motivation was highly subjective, even neurotic. On his way to becoming a lawyer in accordance with the wishes of his upwardly mobile father, a prosperous businessman engaged in copper mining and smelting, young Martin found himself on horseback in a darkening countryside near his university5 as a thunderstorm was unleashed. A bolt of lightning, striking beside him, terrified the rider (and, I should imagine, his horse), convincing Luther that the next strike was meant for him, and he cried out to the patroness of miners, “Hilf du, Heilige Anna!” (“Help thou, Saint Anne!”), promising “Ich will ein Mönch werden!” (“I will become a monk!”) The scene, recalled by Luther many years later, evokes the fast-receding piety of the Middle Ages, in which external events were often read simply as signs from God (or, more darkly, from Satan), and even seems to belong more properly as a fictional episode in a timeless collection of German fairy tales.

  Such a scene cannot be imagined of our placid Dutch humanist, who would surely have calculated the probability of his escape from electrocution with more dispassion and perhaps comforted himself with an adage from Horace or from one of the Greek dramatists. And yet, the parallels between Erasmus and Luther remain striking: like the Dutchman, the German was schooled by the Brethren of the Common Life (later offering no bouquets to their educational practices, which he compared to going to Hell) and came under the influence of Thomas à Kempis’s revered Imitation of Christ. Like Erasmus, Luther was unhappy in the cloister—but unlike Erasmus, it is a bit difficult to imagine what mode of life would have made Luther happy.

  As it was, the young Augustinian devoted himself to much fasting, self-flagellation, long and stressful hours spent on his knees in prayer, anxious pilgrimage, and frequent, interminable confession of his supposed sins, imposing on his confessor for up to six hours at a single session. “If anyone,” he would recall later, “could have gained Heaven as a monk, then I would indeed have done so.” But, looking back, he was to remember this period as a desert of despair: “I lost touch with Christ the Savior and Comforter, and made him the jailer and hangman of my poor soul.”

  Luther’s much-put-upon confessor and monastic superior, Johann von Staupitz, tried to jolly him out of his obsessions, telling the young man that he seemed to turn every fart into a sin, then, in a continuing attempt to free him from his ever deeper slough of introspection, ordering him to take up theological studies in preparation for a career as a university lecturer, hoping that such an occupation would return the young monk to a healthier frame of mind. Luther was hardly unique, except perhaps in the abysmal depth and unrelieved constancy of his melancholy. Manuals for masters of novices and for other superiors charged with the care of new monks have always been full of warnings on the dangers to young inmates of scrupulosity of conscience and obsession with personal sin, so easy to cultivate in the hothouse atmosphere of a religious house. Those who indulge themselves in unrelenting breast-beating are recognized as drags on communal spirit and on their own mental health and are even labeled informally as “scrupes” or awarded some similarly unflattering cognomen in an attempt to zap them out of their lethargic self-presentation. In ordering his charge to concentrate on something other than himself and his supposed sinfulness, Staupitz was just going by the book.

  Luther’s plunge into biblical studies—he never did anything by half measures—became the all-pervading occupation of his life. The worried monk’s central psychological problem was that he could never make himself believe that he was forgiven by God. No matter what he did or tried to do, no matter how much he abased himself, he could always detect the perverse pride of the unregenerate sinner beneath all his attempts at self-justification. The answer was to give up on self-justification, and he found the answer to his paralyzing dilemma in Paul’s most elaborate and considered piece of prose, the Letter to the Romans—written to the community of Roman Christians, whom Paul had never met. Whereas all of Paul’s other surviving letters are addressed to Gentile communities (or individuals) that he had personally converted, this one, the longest of Paul’s letters, is addressed to a community founded by others, which Paul would meet only in his last days, while awaiting his own execution.

  Paul’s other letters have as their subjects problems current in the lives of those addressed. “Romans,” as it is called in church circles, is more general, more theoretical, more essay-like, as befits a letter to strangers. It is also the author’s last general statement of his central theological preoccupations, full of memorable, emotion-filled passages: “If God be for us, who can be against us?…For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:31, 38–39).6

  Though Luther found ultimate relief for the dilemma of his conscience in Romans, Paul is addressing there a quite different dilemma, one that had occupied the writer in one way or another throughout his ministry: the claim that the ethical norms of pharisaical (later, rabbinical) Judaism justify those who keep them. Jesus himself had made light of such justification in the course of his own ministry and had often dismissed it outright,7 as in this passage from Luke:

  And [Jesus] spake this parable unto certain which trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and despised others: Two men went up into the [Jerusalem] temple to pray; the one a Pharisee, and the other a publican [tax collector for Rome, a profession despised by Jews]. The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself: “God, I thank thee, that I am not as other men are, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even this publican. I fast twice in the week, I give tithes of all that I possess.” And the publican, standing afar off, would not lift up so much as his eyes unto heaven, but smote upon his breast, saying, “God be merciful to me a sinner.” I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other: for every one that exalteth himself shall be abased; and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted (Luke 18:10–14).

  Here, as in many other passages in the gospels, Jesus condemns self-righteousness as a form of self-delusion and praises honesty and humility, which lead to true justification before God. Indeed, Jesus throughout his ministry shows himself extraordinarily sympathetic to the trials and sorrows of ordinary people, condemnatory only of the smugly religious and the uncaring rich of his time and place. Because his time and place were first-century Jewish Palestine under Roman occupation, there is no way of knowing for sure whether Jesus would be similarly condemning of smugly religious pagans (or of smug Ch
ristians, devotees of a religion that did not yet exist). It is difficult even to know if such a category could be made to refer to the religions that encircled the territory known to Jesus, or if he was dealing only with what he saw as a specifically Jewish syndrome. (There can be no doubt that he would have found the uncaring rich of any time and culture appropriate objects for condemnation.)

  In Romans, Paul certainly seems to be building to some extent on Jesus’s bias against pharisaical Judaism, but he also moves that sentiment in the direction of a more detailed analysis, one that involves not just dramatis personae like the Pharisee and the publican but that places Jesus himself at the center of the argument. “All” of us, whether Pharisee or publican, says Paul, “have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; yet all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that comes in Christ Jesus. Through his blood God has presented him as a means of expiating sin for all who have faith.… For we maintain that a human being is justified by faith apart from deeds prescribed by the law” (Romans 3:23–25, 28).

  Jesus in the course of his earthly life could hardly have been expected to speak of universal expiation through the shedding of his own blood. But he does refer to something quite like that on “the night before he died for us” (in the words of the Eucharistic rite): “And he took the cup, and gave thanks, and gave it to them, saying, ‘Drink ye all of it; for this is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many for the remission [forgiveness] of sins’ ” (Matthew 26:27–28).

  Paul pushes these propositions still further, coming so close to Luther’s obsessions that the young monk could have felt that Romans was written especially for him: