The main motif of purgatory was fire. (This was based on 1 Corinthians 3:10–15, where Paul fleetingly mentions that every work will be tested by fire.) There were circles of fire, rivers of fire, lakes of fire, fire-breathing monsters, burning walls and moats, and flaming valleys and mountains. These fires burned away the remaining traces of the sins committed on earth, purifying the soul in preparation for its heavenward journey. The length of the stay depended on the gravity of the sins. Usually, the duration was relatively short—a few days or months—but it could seem an eternity because, as Thomas Aquinas observed, “the least pain of Purgatory surpasses the greatest pain in this life.”
In Dante’s Purgatorio, this realm is a mountain in the southern hemisphere with seven terraces, each corresponding to one of the seven deadly sins. The proud carry heavy weights on their backs, becoming permanently stooped. The envious have their eyelids sewn shut with iron wire. The wrathful are enveloped in black smoke, which blinds them. The slothful are forced to run without rest. The punishments on Mount Purgatory are considerably milder than those in the Inferno, and the atmosphere as a whole is more hopeful, for the penitents there can, through great labor, cleanse themselves in preparation for entering Paradiso.
Most medieval preachers, however, stressed punishment over purgation as they sought to jolt their congregants onto the path of virtue. With great ingenuity they conjured up the torments that souls face in purgatory—the fires more scorching than any that burn on earth; the sleepless nights spent chained to red-hot furnaces; the searing brands applied to the flesh; the sadistic attendants inflicting tortures from head to toe, causing more intense pain than that suffered by St. Lawrence when he was martyred on a gridiron. According to the Church, those in purgatory could be aided by the actions of the living, so the laity in their desperation rushed to take advantage of every available means of relief. The wealthy left large bequests to churches to endow the saying of Masses on their behalf for years after their death, in the belief that those Masses would shorten their stay in purgatory. The common man bought indulgences—certificates that remitted the punishment due for sin and so helped reduce the purgatorial sentence, both for themselves after death and for departed loved ones in current anguish.
With sin held to be inevitable and absolution always incomplete, however, a stay in purgatory was all but ensured; the only question was for how long. A stray lustful thought, an impulsively uttered oath, an imperfectly performed fast—all constituted transgressions that added to the purgatorial sentence. The Church’s parallel insistence on the existence of free will and the individual’s ability to abstain from sin magnified the psychological burden. The medieval system of penance thus turned everyday life into a source of never-ending anxiety. As Pope Gregory I (the Great) observed, it was a characteristic of the pious “to recognize guilt where there is no guilt.”
This system gave the Church extraordinary control over the lives of the laity. The main agent was the priest. Only the priest had the power to grant absolution. It was up to him to determine the thoroughness of the confession and the degree of satisfaction required. Only the priest, with the words “I absolve you,” could free the penitent from serious sin. That phrase became a sort of incantation, which, when uttered, offered relief from any additional burden to be faced in the afterlife. According to Scholastic theology, the expression of contrition did not produce forgiveness apart from the absolution granted by the priest, so without the sacrament of penance, relief was impossible.
The power this gave priests invited abuse. Many charged a fee for hearing confession. The rite provided them with a license to pry into the most intimate corners of a penitent’s life. Many priests lacked the judgment, training, or tact needed to carry out this delicate task. Even more important in the light of future events was the way in which penance turned the personal act of remorse over one’s sins into a formalized act that offered salvation as a reward to all who followed the rules, apart from any genuine internal change. Such a system was bound to stir unhappiness among members of the expanding middle class who craved more intimate forms of fulfillment.
Growing up in Mansfeld, young Martin had shuddered at the judgment of Christ, the horrors of hell, the scheming of the Devil. Now, attending sermons in St. George’s church in Eisenach, he heard dire warnings about the wages of sin and the excruciating punishments awaiting those who transgressed. No matter how hard he tried to avoid sin, it seemed, he was doomed to stray and be severely punished for his trespasses. This prospect pitched him into a slough of desolation and dread. Whatever psychological disorder Luther may have suffered from, the Church’s penitential system contributed strongly to his Anfechtungen.
Despite these trials, he managed to complete his studies at St. George’s. University was next. Of the existing institutions, Heidelberg seemed too far to the west and Leipzig too far to the east. The University of Erfurt, in Thuringia, was only fifty miles from his parents’ home in Mansfeld and so was considered more suitable. In the spring of 1501, at the age of eighteen, Martin set off for that prominent city in central Germany. It would be his springboard into history.
5
Breakthrough
As he covered the 150 miles from Steyn to Cambrai, in 1493, Erasmus was moving from the insular, Dutch-speaking lands of the northern Netherlands to the more refined, French-speaking lands of the south. Cambrai was a major commercial city whose prosperity rested on the production of woolen cloth and cambric, a fine linen named after the town. The diocese of Cambrai was unusually large, with a thousand or so parishes spread across a large expanse of what is now southern Belgium and northern France; the bishop, Hendrik van Bergen, was as powerful as any count or duke. His main goal was to obtain a cardinal’s hat, and in pursuit of it he planned to visit Rome. If he did go, Erasmus as his secretary would probably accompany him.
In the meantime, Erasmus helped Hendrik as he moved from town to town on diocesan business, polishing the Latin of the bishop’s letters and orations. He may have also joined Hendrik on his visits to the Burgundian court in Brussels, the most splendid in all of Europe. After six years of monastic seclusion, Erasmus found himself in the glittering company of squires, counselors, envoys, and abbots.
Unfortunately, Hendrik’s campaign to become a cardinal stalled, and the trip to Italy was postponed. And, after an initial show of warmth toward his young assistant, the bishop cooled. Disappointed, Erasmus consoled himself with books. Catching the manuscript-hunting fever, he began visiting the libraries of nearby monasteries. In an Augustinian priory in the Sonian Forest outside Brussels, he found a bulky codex containing several works by Augustine, and he took it with him into his cell at night. One of the monks recalled how all there were “amazed and amused that a cleric should prefer one of those large codices to other things, and they could not understand what he found in the saint to delight him so.”
Feeling lonely and unappreciated, Erasmus began plotting his escape. Ever since entering the monastery, he had regretted the interruption of his studies. A hundred miles to the south was Paris, home of Europe’s most prestigious university, with its celebrated school of theology. A degree from it would provide an invaluable credential as he sought to make his way in the world of Christian letters. The bishop gave his blessing and a pledge of support, and in 1495 Erasmus set off for Europe’s intellectual capital.
With a population of around 100,000, Paris was one of Europe’s largest cities, but it remained in many ways medieval, as Erasmus—probably entering from the north—would have immediately sensed while he made his way through its grimy neighborhoods. The streets were so narrow that when a pack mule was unloaded, all traffic came to a halt. Unpaved alleyways led off into congested districts of fishmongers and apothecaries, barbers and blacksmiths, money changers and cabinetmakers. The Right Bank was home to much of the city’s commerce, and as Erasmus proceeded south, he would have seen stately trading houses and administrative buildings as well as the sturdy maisons of the upper bourgeoisie
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Crossing Pont Notre-Dame, he would have entered the even more packed Left Bank. The main north-south artery, Rue Saint-Jacques, was full of students milling about its bookshops, open-air stalls, and printing houses. (Paris at the time was northern Europe’s leading book center.) The street led into the Latin Quarter—a grubby maze of monasteries, churches, inns, taverns, brothels, dance halls, and the buildings and boardinghouses of the University of Paris. Four thousand students from around Europe were enrolled there—a rowdy, polyglot mix of nationalities able to communicate in their shared language, Latin (hence the quarter’s name). Most lived and studied in the sixty or so run-down residences known as colleges.
Erasmus’s residence, the Collège de Montaigu, sat on Montagne Sainte-Geneviève, the great hill on the Left Bank. (Today, the site is occupied by the austerely classical Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, part of the University of Paris library system; across the street is the Panthéon.) The master of the college, Jan Standonck, had established a special dormitory for poor students, and it was here that Erasmus lived. To his dismay, the conditions were even more severe than they had been at Steyn. Fasts were frequent, and meals often consisted of no more than a single (usually rotten) egg and a third of a pint of cheap wine mixed with water. Because firewood was expensive, there was no heat, and in winter the cold was debilitating. The cubicles on the ground floor had moldy walls and reeked from a nearby latrine. Those unable to keep up with the study schedule were savagely whipped, often to the point of injury. Of the many students in Standonck’s charge, Erasmus would later write, he had within a year “caused the deaths of very many capable, gifted, promising youths” and brought others “to blindness, emotional breakdown, or leprosy.” The privations Erasmus experienced there would reinforce his aversion to monkish asceticism.
The curriculum was no less punishing. The University of Paris had four faculties—arts, law, medicine, and theology. The doctorate in theology took a minimum of eight years and an average of fifteen to complete. The theology school was also known as the Sorbonne, after Robert de Sorbon, a wealthy theologian who in 1257 had provided the funds for some communal housing for poor students. Even more than Rome, the University of Paris was considered authoritative in matters of doctrine; the pope often looked to its faculty to settle differences and arbitrate disputes. Paris owed its reputation in part to the eminent figures who over the centuries had taught there, including Peter Abelard, the master of the dialectical method; Peter Lombard, the author of the main handbook of medieval theology; and Thomas Aquinas, whose Summa Theologica was considered the supreme intellectual achievement of the medieval Church.
These men were central figures in the movement known as Scholasticism. It dominated the faculty at Paris, as at other theology schools. By applying logic to theological questions, the Scholastics sought to demonstrate religious propositions with the same precision and rigor as scientific ones. Students were trained in constructing syllogisms, analyzing theses and the arguments against them, and stating refutations and conclusions. (A sample syllogism: Socrates is a man; all men are mortal; therefore, Socrates is mortal.) A key element of instruction was the disputation. A question posed by the master was defended by a senior student against objections posed by other students; at the end, the master summarized the course of the debate and presented his own solution, answering major objections. At the Sorbonne, these sessions were often uproarious affairs, with egos unchained and passions unleashed. Sometimes the discussions spilled into the street, where, fueled by alcohol, they exploded into brawls and even riots.
To Erasmus, the whole enterprise seemed pointless. The lectures were filled with jargon, stuffed with arcane metaphysics, and given over to intricate classifying and subdividing. Instructors piled up citations from the Bible and the Church Fathers, philosophers and theologians, without any regard to authorship, context, or history. Shivering in the Sorbonne’s poorly lit classrooms, fighting off the hunger pangs caused by the meager meals, Erasmus had to endure discussions of matter and form, substance and accident, potentiality and actuality, the three types of distinctions, the four causes, and the nine types of faith.
The questions posed, meanwhile, seemed obscure to the point of parody. How long had Christ been in the Virgin’s womb? Does God the Father hate the Son? Could God have taken upon himself the likeness of a woman, a devil, an ass, a gourd, a piece of flint? Will we be forbidden to eat and drink after the resurrection? What, Erasmus wondered, did any of this have to do with faith and devotion, repentance and redemption?
Erasmus’s encounter with Scholasticism would be of critical historical significance. In the years to come, he would emerge as the movement’s fiercest critic, seeking to discredit it by deploying his most lethal weapon, mockery. The theologians at Paris would fight back, mounting a vigorous campaign to harass and marginalize him. They would similarly help lead the opposition to Luther after his rise to prominence. The Sorbonne, in short, was the chief bulwark of Catholic orthodoxy, and its doctors stood in the way of any program aimed at reforming the Church.
Remarkably, the dominant figure in Scholasticism was not a theologian or even a Christian but a pagan philosopher who lived three centuries before Christ: Aristotle. Scholasticism arose out of the response of medieval theologians to the rediscovery of Aristotle’s lost works. Those works covered the whole range of human knowledge, from logic, ethics, politics, and law to astronomy, biology, physics, and metaphysics. After the collapse of the Roman Empire, most of these works, written in Greek, became inaccessible to the Latin-speaking West. In the early sixth century, the Roman philosopher and statesman Boethius—fearing they would be permanently lost—set out to translate them into Latin, beginning with the treatises on logic. He managed to complete only six of them, however, before he was arrested in 524 on charges of treason. He was convicted and beaten to death, and with his passing, Aristotle’s remaining works faded from Western consciousness.
Even the six treatises Boethius had translated, known collectively as the Organon, were neglected as the interest in classical culture waned. Not until the early twelfth century would they again receive close scrutiny. Western Europe at that time was undergoing a mini-renaissance, with a creative outpouring in art, literature, and philosophy, and the Organon came to the attention of Christian theologians. They were deeply impressed. Aristotle’s system of knowledge, his rules for observing empirical reality, his principles of syllogistic reasoning, and his guide to constructing arguments offered an entirely new approach to understanding the world. In the past, theologians seeking to explain religious truths had had to rely on revelation, but now, with Aristotle to guide them, they could use reason as well.
Leading the way was Peter Abelard. A prickly contrarian and canny showman from Brittany, Abelard would become the greatest of the era’s itinerant scholars, moving from town to town, challenging instructors, giving his own sparkling lectures. From the moment he arrived in Paris, in 1100, to study at the famous school run by the cathedral of Notre Dame, he caused a stir with his dynamic classroom manner and questioning of long-accepted axioms. His fame was cemented by his book Sic et non (“Yes and No”), which featured 158 theological propositions along with citations pro and con culled from the Bible, the Church Fathers, papal edicts, and conciliar decrees. Abelard hoped to show that even the most basic doctrines remained open to discussion and that vigorous debate and rigorous analysis were the best ways to arrive at the truth.
The most useful tool in that pursuit, he believed, was Aristotelian logic—especially the dialectical method. This entailed stating a proposition, presenting the main objections, rebutting them, and offering a resolution. Applying this formula, Abelard sought to clarify everything from the creation to the resurrection, and he did so with such ingenuity that a cult began to form around him.
The same brilliance that so dazzled his students, however, got him into trouble with one of them. Heloise was the niece of a prominent canon at Notre Dame, who, impressed by Abelard, en
trusted her education to him. They quickly fell in love and began exchanging blissful letters. When Heloise became pregnant, Abelard sent her to stay with his sister-in-law in Brittany, where she had a son. Heloise’s uncle—both enraged at Abelard for seducing his niece and worried that he was going to abandon her—sent a team of ruffians to Abelard’s quarters. While he slept, they bribed their way in and, as Abelard described it, “took cruel vengeance on me of such an appalling barbarity as to shock the whole world; they cut off the parts of my body whereby I had committed the wrong of which they complained.” Abelard, in short, was castrated (meaning no doubt the removal of his testicles rather than a more drastic emasculation).
Abelard recounted this episode in his memoir, The History of My Calamities—the most lively autobiography since Augustine’s Confessions seven centuries earlier. True to his craving for attention, it offered titillating details about his affair with Heloise. Ultimately, though, it was Abelard’s theological audacity that brought about his downfall. Around 1120, he published a short essay about the Trinity. This core doctrine, which defined the relations between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, was a treacherous zone that for centuries had caused recrimination, division, and strife. With characteristic panache and the assistance of Aristotelian logic, however, Abelard set out to clarify the relations among the three. Such impertinence infuriated his enemies, especially Bernard of Clairvaux, a pious militant of the Church, and in 1140 Abelard was brought before a French council on charges of heresy. In a proceeding that foreshadowed Luther’s appearance at Worms, he was duly condemned, and he spent his remaining two years as a Cluniac monk.
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