Fatal Discord

by Michael Massing

  I have also tried to describe what it was like to live in some of Europe’s leading cities and towns, from London and Paris to Basel and Rome. The Eternal City’s transformation in this period from the shrunken, malodorous wasteland it had become during the Middle Ages into the cultural and historical showcase it is today is one of the subthemes of my book. In my conclusion, I try to trace the modern-day echoes of the rivalry between Erasmus and Luther—between humanism and evangelicalism—and show how that competition continues to shape our world.

  Part I

  Early Struggles

  1

  The New Europe

  For religious tourists wanting to see the cities associated with the rise of the Reformation, the itinerary is well established: Prague, the home of Jan Hus; Zurich and Geneva, the citadels of Huldrych Zwingli and John Calvin; Erfurt, where Luther studied and became a friar; Worms, the site of his stand at the Imperial Diet; and, of course, Wittenberg, the reformer’s longtime center of operations. Yet there is another city that, though absent from such tours, played a key part in incubating the ideas that helped set off the great religious upheaval that transformed Europe: Deventer, in the eastern Netherlands.

  Today, Deventer seems indistinguishable from thousands of other orderly, prosperous towns that dot the map of Western Europe. In its well-preserved center, pedestrians stroll along cobblestoned streets, peering at shop windows that display elegant prints, fine handicrafts, and high-end housewares. The Brink, the town’s long, narrow central plaza, is bordered by cafés and restaurants that in warm months fill with tourists and locals who wash down sandwiches with the local pilsner. Deventer’s public squares are graced with tasteful modern sculptures, and every August it holds an open-air book fair that is one of the largest in Europe. Of the four churches that were operating on the eve of the Reformation, one now serves primarily as an arts center and another as an events space—by-products of the ongoing de-Christianization of Europe. The larger of the remaining churches—the vast Grote of Lebuinuskerk—was once affiliated with the Catholic Church and called St. Lebwin’s. In 1580, however, it was taken over by Calvinists, who stripped the interior of all altars and statues and whitewashed its walls, and it remains a Protestant sanctuary. The church’s lone tower houses a seventeenth-century carillon that serenades the town with everything from Bach to “Havah Nagila.”

  Across from this church stands a trim three-story building. In the late Middle Ages, the site was home to a renowned Latin school, which, run by St. Lebwin’s, attracted students from hundreds of miles around. Among its prominent alumni was Geert Groote, a pious deacon and itinerant preacher who in the late fourteenth century founded the Devotio Moderna (“Modern Devotion”), a lay movement that stressed the inner spirit over formal rituals. Another graduate, Thomas à Kempis, summed up Groote’s ideas in The Imitation of Christ, a manual of piety that urged Christians to withdraw from the world and seek a direct relationship with God. From the moment it appeared, in the early fifteenth century, the Imitation found a huge audience. (It remains popular, ranking as the most widely read devotional work after the Bible.) From its base in Deventer and the IJssel valley, the Devotio Moderna spread throughout the Netherlands and into western Germany, becoming the most important reform movement in northern Europe.

  The spirit of the Devotio Moderna pervaded St. Lebwin’s. And it left a deep mark on the school’s most famous alumnus—Erasmus. Though he would later condemn the school’s instruction as barbarous, it was here that, in addition to learning the rudiments of Latin, he absorbed the earnest piety of the Devotio Moderna. The building that now rises on the school’s site features above its entryway a depiction in colored glass of Erasmus writing on a piece of paper the names of Groote, Kempis, and others associated with the school. Above him are the words Non Scholae Sed Vitae Discimus—“We learn not for school but for life”—a saying of Seneca’s that reflected Erasmus’s own outlook.

  In the public mind, Erasmus is associated not with Deventer but with Rotterdam, the city of his birth. In midlife, he would add its name to his own, becoming Erasmus Roterodamus—Erasmus of Rotterdam. Prior to World War II, there was a small house in Nieuw-Kerk Street in central Rotterdam whose facade had an inscription stating that the famous Erasmus had been born there. (The building, along with much of Rotterdam, was obliterated by German bombs on May 14, 1940.) The house was a short walk from the Nieuwe Maas, one of the branches of the Rhine as that river reaches the North Sea. Erasmus would later note with pride that he was born “between the banks of the Rhine.” In addition to being a vital commercial artery connecting the North Sea with Central Europe, the Rhine was a flourishing cultural corridor, and Erasmus would spend much of his life traveling along it.

  Today, a tall bronze statue of Erasmus stands in a plaza in front of St. Lawrence’s church, not far from the site of the house in Nieuw-Kerk Street. Produced in the early seventeenth century in the midst of the Eighty Years’ War, it has somehow managed to survive centuries of unrest, war, and indifference. (During World War II, it lay buried in the courtyard of a local art museum.) The statue shows the Dutch humanist in a full-length fur-trimmed mantle and a canon’s cap, examining the pages of a thick folio-edition New Testament (no doubt his). A Latin inscription on the pedestal proclaims him “the first man of his age,” the “most outstanding citizen of all citizens,” and “one who rightly attained an immortal name by his eternal writings.” The florid tribute, however, is belied by the bleak surroundings. The plaza is secluded and bordered by unsightly storefronts—a reflection, perhaps, of Rotterdam’s ambivalence toward its famous son, who left it at an early age and rarely returned.

  The statue has an odd feature. On the front, it gives Erasmus’s year of birth as 1469; on the back, it says 1467. At various points, Erasmus himself gave each of those years (as well as 1466) as that of his birth (while never wavering on the day: October 28). The confusion reflects the chaotic circumstances of his parents’ lives (about which little is known). His father, Gerard, the second-youngest of ten children born to a couple living in the town of Gouda, some twelve miles east of Rotterdam, was well educated, having learned both Latin and Greek. His mother, Margaret, was the daughter of a physician in the North Brabant village of Zevenbergen. She and Gerard became intimate, and she gave birth to a boy named Pieter. Nearly three years later, Margaret again conceived. The couple wanted to marry, but Gerard’s parents would not allow it. Gerard—seeking, perhaps, to escape their disapproval—left for Rome, where he supported himself copying manuscripts of classical authors. When Margaret was ready to deliver, she was taken to Rotterdam, where her mother lived. The boy would be named Erasmus, after one of the Fourteen Holy Helpers. He would later add the name Desiderius, “longed for” in Latin.

  Erasmus would never know a normal family life. Not only had he been born out of wedlock; his father at some point became a priest. Europe was full of the children of priests, and the Church considered them nonpersons, barring them from holding certain offices and from receiving various perks except when dispensations were granted. Whether Gerard became a priest before or after Erasmus was born is not clear, but in any case Erasmus would always feel anxiety and shame over his illegitimacy.

  He spent his first few years in Rotterdam in the care of his grandmother. When he was around four, his father arranged for him to attend primary school in Gouda. With a population of around 10,000, Gouda was among the largest cities in Holland. It was laced by canals and dominated by the ornately turreted town hall that still stands on its marketplace. Every Thursday, farmers from surrounding villages came to sell the buttery cheese for which Gouda even then was known. It was even more famous for its high-quality beer, which was shipped to Flanders in exchange for grain.

  Its school was less distinguished. Erasmus, whose writings on education would change the course of Western pedagogy, drew heavily on his own experiences as a student, and from his first days in Gouda, they were overwhelmingly negative. The main subject was Dutch, a
nd the instruction was unrelievedly monotonous and harsh. The headmaster, Pieter Winckel, was a selfish, narrow-minded man who administered the rod for the slightest infractions. Such severities, together with what Erasmus saw as the coarseness and provincialism of the locals, left him with a lifelong distaste for Gouda. “Greasy of mouth and palate” was his tart description of its residents. In 1478, when Erasmus was ten or so, his mother, wanting more for her son, took him sixty-five miles east to Deventer and its famous Latin school.

  In many respects, Deventer remained a medieval town. Its narrow streets echoed with the clang of hammers and shriek of saws, the shouts of vendors and barks of town criers. Opening onto the streets were the workshops of carpenters, tailors, locksmiths, apothecaries, shoemakers, and bakers, each trade with its own quarter. Houses rose helter-skelter along the street, their upper stories protruding over the lower and blocking out the sun. Most were ramshackle wooden structures, the windows covered by oiled paper or pigskin and the roofs made of thatch. Here and there stood the more stately residences of merchants and patricians—multistory timber houses with panes of glass and roofs of tile. Like most medieval towns, Deventer (which had a population of 8,000) was encircled by thick walls mounted by towers, made necessary by the ever-present threat from criminals, marauders, and enemy armies. On a daily basis, however, the main danger to public order came from within. With taverns on every corner and drinking the main pastime, drunkenness was rampant, contributing to the high rates of crime and violence that were endemic features of medieval life.

  Walking around Deventer, the young Erasmus would have had to watch his step. Like most medieval towns, it lacked even the most rudimentary sanitation, and streets served as sewers. Butchers slit open cows and pigs in front of their shops, letting the blood run into the gutter; fishmongers dumped fish heads and rotting stock into alleyways; tanners emptied vats of the acrid solutions of urine and dung they used to turn animal hides into leather. Chickens, goats, and pigs all roamed freely, depositing their waste in the street; when it rained, the excrement mixed with offal, carcasses, moldy cheese, and rotting vegetables to form a muddy, putrid mess. Chamber pots were routinely emptied from second-story windows, creating a hazard for passersby. The thatch on roofs was an ideal breeding ground for rats, and lice and fleas were so abundant that not even dukes or bishops could escape them. Despite the presence of bathhouses, people often went weeks without bathing, and underwear was changed perhaps once a fortnight.

  Through this foul loam, however, the buds of a new civilization were poking. Deventer was one of many thriving towns in the northern Netherlands. (The Netherlands then comprised not only the modern-day country of that name but also Belgium, parts of northern France, and Luxembourg—an area also known as the Low Countries.) Along with northern Italy, the northern Netherlands was the most highly urbanized region in Europe, with some twenty walled cities of between 5,000 and 15,000 inhabitants. As Erasmus later observed, “No other region can be found containing so many towns in such a small area. Admittedly, they are of modest size, but they have an incredibly attractive appearance.” As the French historian Fernand Braudel has observed, towns “are like electric transformers. They increase tension, accelerate the rhythm of exchange and constantly recharge human life.” The northern Netherlands was thick with such transformers.

  It’s remarkable that these catalysts would emerge in such a backwater—a term literally applicable in this case. Most of the northern Netherlands was at or below sea level. From the north and west, the North Sea surged relentlessly in, flooding plains and feeding lakes. The many rivers crisscrossing the region regularly overflowed, inundating farms and pastures. Beginning in the thirteenth century, though, Dutch farmers, seeking to contain the waters, banded together to construct an elaborate system of dams, dikes, floodgates, and drainage canals, with windmills used to pump water from the land. The large tracts thus reclaimed, called polders, were divided up among those who had contributed labor. Unlike the rest of northern Europe, where feudal relations prevailed, this region had a rough social equality, with many independent farmers living in humble homes and working small plots of land. The increase in agricultural productivity freed people to move off the land and into towns, which became marketing centers for farm and dairy products, especially cheese.

  These towns, in turn, established commercial ties abroad. And here the water proved a boon, facilitating links to the outside world. In the first half of the fifteenth century, the Dutch developed a fleet of seagoing vessels that enabled them to dominate the bulk-carrying trade as well as the herring grounds of the North Sea. The building of ships, their equipping and manning, the provision of sails and rope—all became thriving industries. The resulting prosperity made funds available for schools, teachers, and books, which in turn facilitated the rise of a dynamic new class of educated urbanites. These burghers—magistrates, merchants, notaries, accountants, teachers, lawyers—were proud, curious, public spirited, and eager for a new design for living. Erasmus would spend much of his life trying to provide it. He would, in effect, become the most articulate spokesman for this new urban class.

  In Deventer, the signs of the new Europe were everywhere visible. In 1477, Deventer got its first printing press, and the town quickly became a top publishing center. Its location on the IJssel River gave it ready access to both the Rhine and (via the Zuider Zee) the North Sea, and ships were constantly putting in with wood from Germany, grain from Poland, dried fish from Norway, and wine from the Rhineland. Along with these goods, the ships and their crews brought new ideas and perspectives, adding to the intellectual ferment.

  Finally, there was St. Lebwin’s. The school had eight grades and two hundred or more students in each, for a total student body of around two thousand. It had one great mission: teaching how to write and speak good Latin—the passport to a better life. Latin was the medium in which commercial contracts were signed, government communiqués issued, university lectures delivered, international affairs transacted, ecclesiastical business carried out. Those proficient in Latin could also participate in the animated intellectual life that was beginning to take root across borders, regions, and nations.

  At St. Lebwin’s, the curriculum in the lower grades was dominated by the traditional medieval trivium: grammar, rhetoric, and logic. Of these, grammar predominated. Unfortunately, instruction in it remained mired in the old ways, with textbooks that were hopelessly dull and arcane. They included the Pater Meus, an exercise book for declensions; the Tempora, a similar guide to conjugations; and the Catholicon, an etymological dictionary that was so obscure and convoluted that Erasmus would call it “the most barbarous book in the world.”

  Because printing was still in its infancy, only the instructor had books, and students sat on the floor around him as he dictated a text slowly enough so that each could take down every word; he then translated and commented on that text. Students were forced to memorize the inflections of nouns and verbs reflecting the various cases and moods, and when it came time to recite this information, the school rang “with horrific shrieks of pain,” as Erasmus put it. Some of the teachers had such uncouth manners that even their wives could not possibly feel affection for them, and “no useless, disreputable scoundrel” was “disqualified by general opinion from running a school.”

  The torments inflicted on the students were not limited to parsing and conjugating. Teachers as well as parents beat children savagely for the smallest violations, to the point of blinding, crippling, or even killing them. Schools, Erasmus observed, were like “torture chambers,” in which one heard nothing “but the thudding of the stick, the swishing of the rod, howling and moaning, and shouts of brutal abuse.” Was it any wonder, then, “that children come to hate learning?” Anyone caught speaking Dutch—even in the school yard—was subject to a fine, and boys were encouraged to inform on one another. The students themselves engaged in ugly hazing rituals in which young men of good families were forced to undergo outrages “fit for exe
cutioners, torturers, pimps, thieving Carians, or galley-slaves.” Erasmus would later become a strong opponent of corporal punishment in schools, condemning it as not only inhumane but also ineffective.

  In this cruel and unforgiving world, Erasmus had to make his own way. And, while trudging through the endless dictations and dreary exercises, he made a key discovery. Like other Latin schools, St. Lebwin’s offered readings of classical writers, such as Cicero, Virgil, Horace, and Terence. Meant to serve as technical models, these readings were usually provided in the form of excerpts and abridgments, without much attention to content or style. As he read them, however, Erasmus was struck by how much their Latin differed from that taught in the school’s primers. In the centuries since Rome’s fall, the language had constantly evolved to meet the practical needs of daily life. While helping to make Latin a living language, these changes had robbed it of much of its elegance and concision. When Erasmus read the poets and playwrights of ancient Rome, he felt transported from his sordid surroundings into a world of harmony and light. As he later wrote, a “kind of secret natural force swept me into liberal studies. My teachers might forbid it; even so, I furtively drank in what I could from such books as I had managed to acquire.” He was so taken with Terence that he learned many of his plays by heart. His greatest love, however, was poetry, and he strove to compose odes after Horace and elegies echoing Virgil. A polished aesthete seemed in the making.

  At St. Lebwin’s, though, Erasmus was exposed to another cultural current that would leave a permanent residue of moral earnestness. Deventer was permeated by the spirit of the Devotio Moderna, the movement of Geert Groote and Thomas à Kempis. The town was home to several houses run by the Brethren and Sisters of the Common Life, as the movement’s followers were called. They were easy to spot: they wore plain clothes, kept their eyes on the ground, uncomplainingly helped their neighbors, and occasionally uttered short prayers, called ejaculations. The Brethren had close ties to St. Lebwin’s, and from them the students picked up the precepts of the Devotio Moderna. In the IJssel valley as a whole, communities of bakers and cooks, teachers and tailors inspired by its teachings were trying to lead lives of apostolic simplicity. The movement’s rapid spread attested to the growing hunger for more personal forms of piety than those offered by the medieval Church.