This was but one of many takedowns Valla carried out. He used grammar to raise questions about the plausibility of the Trinity. He claimed that some of the presumed facts in Livy’s History of Rome could not possibly be true. He argued that Aristotle’s ten categories of classification should be reduced to three. Most audaciously of all, he insisted that the Apostles’ Creed was produced not by the apostles but by the fourth-century Council of Nicaea. Infuriated by such apostasies, the Church via the Inquisition launched an investigation into Valla’s writings. They were found to be heretical on eight counts. Only the personal intervention of Alfonso I of Aragon, king of Naples, for whom Valla was then working as a royal secretary, kept him from the stake.
Undaunted, Valla—seeing the plum positions being handed out to humanists in Rome—wanted one for himself, and, despite the many headaches he had caused the Church, he managed to secure an appointment as an apostolic secretary to Nicholas V. He was put to work translating Thucydides and Herodotus. On the side, though, Valla prepared what would be his most daring work. Comparing the text of the Latin Vulgate with old Greek and Latin manuscripts of the New Testament, he concluded that the Vulgate was full of solecisms, obscurities, and clumsy translations, and he compiled a series of notes pointing them out and offering alternatives. In short, Valla was using grammar to correct the Bible itself; not even theologians, he maintained, should be exempt from the rules governing tenses and cases. His annotations on the New Testament were so explosive that few copies were put into circulation; most instead sat unexamined in monastic libraries—grenades waiting to go off.
Because of Valla’s irreverence and offensiveness, the Church made sure that most of his works remained inaccessible. One exception was De Elegantiae Linguae Latinae (“Elegances of the Latin Language”). This mammoth folio of some five hundred pages was the most ambitious new Latin grammar to appear since late antiquity. On the surface, it seemed harmless enough, offering technical observations on the use of some two thousand terms. But Valla was not interested simply in helping people write better Latin; he wanted to spark a cultural revolution. As he explained in his introduction, the Roman conquests, however bloody and cruel, had served the cause of civilization by spreading Latin, “a gateway to every form of knowledge.” But, just as ancient Rome had been overrun by the Goths, so had its language been invaded by barbarian usages; he was now seeking to rally a force to drive them out and restore Latin to its original splendor. In the body of the text, Valla, drawing on Cicero, Quintilian, and many others, sought to show how the language had been corrupted and how it could be purified.
The superiority of De Elegantiae to medieval grammar manuals was immediately recognized. Despite its great bulk and steep price, it found a huge market, appearing in fifty-nine editions in sixty-five years and remaining a fixture in grammar schools until the start of the nineteenth century. It is now considered a foundational text of modern linguistics.
At Steyn, Erasmus managed to obtain a copy of this work, and it became his intellectual compass. De Elegantiae opened his eyes to how sloppy language can obscure meanings and conceal abuses and how a knowledge of usage and idiom could be applied to challenge the claims and presumptions of ruling institutions. When Erasmus pressed the book on his reading group, however, he met great resistance; given the Church’s condemnation of Valla, the members were reluctant to read him. Rising to his defense, Erasmus admonished his friend Cornelis Gerard that, in impugning Valla, “you have hurt all educated men.”
Valla’s great influence on Erasmus’s thinking would be apparent in his first major literary undertaking, begun while he was at Steyn. (It would not be published until 1520, after he had become famous.) Titled Antibarbari (“Against the Barbarians”) and framed as a dialogue, it captured Erasmus’s contempt for those philistines who sought to discourage Christians from reading secular literature. Jacob Batt, a real-life town clerk who was a friend of Erasmus’s and who here serves as his mouthpiece, derides the narrow-minded tyrants who, acting as society’s censors, impose their mediocre standards on everyone else. He expresses special contempt for those who oppose reading the pagans on the grounds that they are licentious or obscene. Pagan writers had helped prepare the world for Christ, he declares, and Christianity had borrowed a great deal from them. In the end, the enemies of the humanities were no different from the Goths who had overrun Rome.
The Antibarbari featured some of the humanists’ worst flaws—verbosity, arrogance, a love of polemics, and unqualified deference toward the ancients. Batt’s inability or unwillingness to imagine content that might genuinely offend pious Christians or be unsuitable for young minds reflected Erasmus’s refusal to seriously engage with the issue. But engagement was not his purpose. The humanists were trying to raise a revolt against the monks and metaphysicians who, feeling threatened by the cultural revival under way, wanted to quash it. The Antibarbari was meant as a rallying cry in the campaign to discredit them and acclaim the New Learning.
In April 1492—six years after entering the cloister—Erasmus was ordained a priest. He was now a full-fledged cleric, authorized to perform the Mass, hear confession, and perform baptisms. But, as the scornful tone of his dialogue suggests, he had grown impatient with his surroundings. The dreaded bell summoning the monks to matins; the procession of fast days that unsettled his stomach; the monotonous rounds of prayer and chanting; the insularity of his fellow inmates—all were becoming unbearable. Erasmus heard that the bishop of Cambrai to the south was seeking a Latin secretary, and he put himself forward as a candidate. His superiors—convinced that he was no Thomas à Kempis—approved his application. So did the bishop.
Erasmus’s departure, in 1493, was kept secret, for monks were not normally allowed to leave the cloister. He did, however, inform Willem Hermans, a fellow monk and good friend, of his plans. Eager to bid him farewell, Hermans positioned himself at a point on the road outside Gouda where Erasmus was due to pass. When the appointed hour came, however, there was no sign of Erasmus. Determined to hide his movements, he had intentionally misled his friend, and the poor fellow was left to wait haplessly on the side of the road.
Seemingly inconsequential at the time, Erasmus’s flight from the monastery would in fact prove profoundly significant—a herald of the great monastic exodus to come. In his baggage he had a rough draft of the Antibarbari, which he planned to use as a calling card in humanist circles. Now in his midtwenties, Erasmus headed south into the world, eager to make his mark on it.
4
Penance and Dread
Throughout his life, Martin Luther experienced crushing bouts of despair. In his letters and his Table Talk, he described the acute anguish he felt during these spells—the sweating and shaking, the panic and fear, the sense of worthlessness and abandonment. These episodes have led to speculation that Luther suffered from depression. That may well have been so, but as Luther described them, these squalls had a strong spiritual dimension. Anfechtungen, he called them, meaning a type of existential trial sent by God to test the soul. When they struck, Luther felt gripped by a sort of cosmic angst, in which the Father, the Son, and Mother Church all seemed to conspire against him. Luther’s decision to enter the monastery was driven in part by a desire to overcome these attacks, and the inability of the cloister to provide relief helped set off his revolt against the Church. It was in his youth that these dark phases first struck, and so it is there that one must seek their source.
At first glance, Luther’s schoolboy days seem to have been unremarkable. The Latin school he attended in Mansfeld had none of the renown of St. Lebwin’s in Deventer, but its curriculum was similar. Latin grammar was the main subject, and, as with Erasmus, Martin had its fundamentals pounded into him. In each class a student was assigned the role of lupus, or wolf, who was charged with keeping a list of demerits for violations of the school’s code; these infractions included cursing and speaking German. (The vernacular was not considered important enough to teach.) Those with the most infract
ions at the end of each week were whipped, and the students who performed worst in class were forced to wear an asinus, a wooden donkey’s head.
Luther was once beaten fifteen times for failing to conjugate something he had yet to be taught. Schools in those days, he later wrote, were “a hell and purgatory” in which students “were tormented with cases and tenses” yet “learned less than nothing despite all the flogging, trembling, anguish, and misery.” Luther did, however, get to read Aesop’s fables, which would become lifelong favorites, as well as selections from such Latin writers as Plautus and Terence, which he enjoyed. And, despite his bitter memories, his lessons in Mansfeld would prove of incalculable benefit. Luther was one of the sixteenth century’s greatest writers; from the moment he burst onto the scene with his Ninety-Five Theses, he showed an astounding ability to move, mobilize, and unsettle with his pen. And it was at the little Latin school in Mansfeld that he first began to learn the rudiments of rhetoric.
By his fourteenth year, he had exhausted the school’s offerings, and his father, seeing his intelligence and envisioning for him a legal career that could be of use in protecting his own economic interests, arranged for him to attend a secondary school in Magdeburg, located forty miles to the north on the Elbe River. In the spring of 1496 or 1497, Luther, accompanied by an older boy whose father was a business associate of Hans’s, left sleepy Mansfeld on his first real foray into the world. On the road he joined a continent restlessly on the move—merchants transporting goods, envoys carrying communiqués, scholars taking up university posts, seasonal workers seeking employment, preachers in search of pulpits, penitents en route to shrines, and students like himself traveling from out-of-the-way towns and hamlets to big-city secondary schools.
With a population of more than 20,000 and a thriving trade in grain, wool, and textiles, Magdeburg was the dominant city between Germany’s central mountains and the Baltic Sea. In addition to being the seat of an archbishopric and the site of a great cathedral famous for its many relics, the city was known for its schools. Though details about Luther’s time there are scant, the school he attended is believed to have been associated with the Brethren of the Common Life—the same movement of pious laymen that Erasmus had encountered in Deventer. In all, Luther would spend a year there, and from the Brethren he got an early glimpse of a type of inner faith very different from the elaborate ritualism of the Church.
In 1498, Luther transferred from Magdeburg to a school in Eisenach, about a hundred miles to the southwest. Here, he was just ten or so miles from Möhra, the home of his father’s family. His mother had relatives there, and Martin stayed with them. Her family members were well-off urban professionals, most of whom had graduated from a university, and they no doubt instilled in Luther the value of education. Eisenach had no more than 3,000 or 4,000 residents, and Luther seemed to prefer its small-town tranquility to Magdeburg’s metropolitan bustle. “My beloved city,” he would later call it. It was located on the fringes of the Thuringian Forest, a rolling expanse blanketed with pines and firs. Just outside town, on a great bluff, sat the famous Wartburg Castle, an imposing medieval fortress that, though largely abandoned, would play a critical part in Luther’s later life.
The house in which Luther lived is today a whitewashed four-story dwelling that includes a museum (the Lutherhaus) offering exhibits of scenes from Luther’s life. Just a five-minute walk away, remarkably, is the Bachhaus, a museum dedicated to Johann Sebastian Bach, who was born in Eisenach in 1685 and who spent his first ten years there. Bach was baptized at St. George’s, the parish church, a dilapidated structure in the center of town, where several members of his family were organists. The church also ran the Latin school that Luther attended. At both the school and the church, Bach would absorb the language and cadences of Luther’s Bible, and he would later put into music Luther’s theological vision. This one modest church in this one provincial town, then, helped shape the early lives of two of Germany’s most towering figures.
At the school, Luther continued his study of grammar and rhetoric, with some instruction in logic and moral philosophy as well. It was outside the classroom, though, that he got some of his most lasting lessons. Even by late-medieval standards, Eisenach was awash in piety. An estimated one-tenth of its residents were clergymen, and while the town as a whole struggled economically, its churches and cloisters thrived. Later, Luther would call Eisenach a “nest of priests,” but at the time he was fully immersed in its reverent ways. The family he stayed with, the Schalbes, were prominent burghers who, while professionally ambitious, were also deeply devout. Heinrich Schalbe, the family head, was a generous backer of the Franciscans, who had a cloister at the foot of the Wartburg. Luther frequently visited the friars and became close to Johannes Braun, a priest who was the vicar of a local religious foundation. Luther served as a choirboy at St. George’s and was a fixture at the vespers service on Sunday.
He was also present for many sermons. Now in his impressionable teen years, Martin would absorb from them the core tenets of the medieval Church, including the complex rituals and doctrines surrounding penance, the centerpiece of the medieval system of piety. This sacrament was the point at which the Church most frequently and intimately touched the lives of the laity—Luther’s included. His exposure to it played a key part in setting off his dark moods and, much later, spurring his revolt.
Medieval sermons were very long, typically lasting an hour or more. They seemed even longer, for seating in most churches was limited, and many congregants had to stand. By one estimate, an urban dweller heard as many as eight hundred sermons in a lifetime. Most of them were based on the daily Bible passages fixed by the Church, and preachers often explained a passage word for word, with little context and even less inspiration. Others offered extravagant allegories—a pelican symbolizing Christ’s atonement, goats standing in for the bodies of the saints, shoes representing the Gospel incarnate. To hold the congregation’s attention, preachers often resorted to irreverent anecdotes, sensational stories, off-color jokes, fables from the animal kingdom, and miraculous episodes from the lives of the saints. As Erasmus would observe in the Praise of Folly, whenever a preacher expounds a serious argument, “everybody is asleep or yawning or feeling queasy,” but if he embarks on “some old wives’ tale,” as so often happened, “his audience sits up and takes notice open-mouthed.”
The most reliable means of riveting an audience, however, was to summon up the prospect of death and the gruesome agonies awaiting those expiring in a state of unexpiated sin. This was a staple theme of the preaching manuals and sermon collections that flowed from the printing presses in the late fifteenth century. They stressed the need to impress the laity with behaving righteously so as to minimize the suffering they would have to endure in the afterlife. Because of Adam’s original sin, it was held, man is by nature depraved and so bound to transgress. Fortunately, the Church in its abounding mercy offered a means for absolving sin: penance.
This sacrament had three parts. First, the penitent had to show contrition—to feel genuine remorse over his transgression. Next, he had to confess—to offer a full accounting of his mortal sins and acknowledge his sorrow for them. If the priest felt that a heartfelt confession had been made, he as Christ’s representative pronounced absolution, taking away the individual’s sin and making him guiltless before God. Finally, there was satisfaction—the acts the sinner had to perform to compensate for the injury he had done to God. Prescribed by the priest and based on the gravity of the sin, these ranged from the mildly inconvenient or uncomfortable—reciting a number of Hail Marys, giving alms to the poor, fasting—to the seriously afflicting, such as flagellation, nightly vigils, pilgrimages, and the wearing of hair shirts.
The obligation of Christians to confess their sins to a priest is not mentioned in the Bible, but medieval writers, drawing on several ambiguous passages, maintained that such an act was mandated by divine law. In 1215, this requirement was made binding by the papal decree
Omnis utriusque sexus. At least once a year—preferably at Easter—all adult Christians were expected to confess. To help priests carry out this task, numerous confessor manuals were produced. These listed the different types of sins, weighed their seriousness, and suggested questions to ask. The sins covered the full range of human behavior, from oversleeping and stinginess to intoxication and blasphemy. Sexual activity received special attention. One manual listed sixteen levels of sexual transgression, from chaste kisses at one end to bestiality at the other; masturbation was ranked the twelfth most serious offense—higher even than incest and rape (since ejaculation occurred without the possibility of procreation). The late-medieval French theologian Jean de Gerson prepared an entire volume to guide confessors on masturbation. Not only deeds but also thoughts—especially those involving sins of desire—were considered transgressions, and the penitent had to take note of every wayward impulse, ache, and craving. He also had to relate the “aggravating circumstances” in which each sin occurred so that the priest could determine the state of his heart and the degree of his guilt.
Even when penitents performed the required acts of satisfaction, there remained a residue of sin that had to be expiated before they could be admitted to heaven. This expiation took place in purgatory, a sort of halfway house between heaven and hell. Like private confession, purgatory is not mentioned in the Bible. During Christianity’s first millennium, the dead were divided into two groups—the saved and the damned—and were consigned to heaven or hell. But the stark nature of this divide, and the fear of being trapped for all eternity on the wrong side of it, led in the late twelfth century to the conceiving of a physical realm between the two. Unlike hell, to which those guilty of mortal sins such as murder and adultery were condemned and from which there was no escape, purgatory received those who were guilty of lesser sins such as sloth and envy and who had to work off their debt to God before gaining access to paradise.
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