Fatal Discord

by Michael Massing

  The excitement caused by his work, however, could not be contained, and it was carried on by one of his students, Peter Lombard. An Italian who began teaching in Paris in around 1140 and who would later become the city’s bishop, he was most known for his Four Books of Sentences, in which he proposed hundreds of questions about God, man, salvation, and the sacraments. Going beyond Abelard, he offered not only citations pro and con but also a judgment or conclusion (sententia) on each question. Succinctly written and conveniently organized, the Sentences would become the chief handbook of Scholasticism, generating more than four thousand commentaries. In his most lasting contribution, Lombard declared that seven acts (baptism, penance, the Mass, and so on) deserved sacramental status—a position that was made official in 1215 at the Fourth Lateran Council.

  By the time of Lombard’s death, in 1160, theological life in Paris was experiencing another upheaval, thanks to a sensational scholarly discovery. After centuries of fighting, Christian armies had finally succeeded in taking back most of Spain from the Moors. From local scholars, Christian clerics learned of the great libraries that the Moors had established in Toledo, Córdoba, and other centers of Islamic learning. Eager to assimilate the knowledge of conquered lands, the Muslims had arranged for the translation into Arabic of the works of virtually every important Greek writer, Aristotle included, and copies were deposited in these libraries.

  When Christian clerics learned of this trove, they at once decided to make it available to the Latin-speaking West. Around 1126, Archbishop Raymond of Toledo set up a translation center and invited top scholars to work at it. A Jewish scholar translated the Arabic texts word for word into Castilian; an archdeacon at the cathedral turned the Castilian into Latin. As word of the project spread, scholars eager to participate arrived from England, France, Germany, and northern Italy. Translation centers soon opened in Sicily, Provence, and other places where Christians, Muslims, and Jews freely mixed. Working with little recognition or remuneration, these scholars played a heroic part in reintroducing to the Latin West the great works of Greek learning.

  Gradually, those works began appearing in the libraries of Paris and other centers of Christian study. Those of Aristotle caused the most excitement. Scholars now had access to not only the Organon but also the Metaphysics, his pioneering inquiry into the nature of being; De anima, his famous treatise on the soul; scientific works like the Physics, On the Heavens, and the History of Animals; the Politics; the Nicomachean Ethics, his pathbreaking study of moral conduct; and the other works of logic that Boethius had not translated. The sudden appearance of these treatises would cause a revolution in Western thinking. They offered a rational, self-contained view of how the universe works—one that at many key points challenged and contradicted reigning Christian beliefs.

  The concept of sin, for instance, is absent from Aristotle’s writings. As he saw it, man has natural appetites and impulses that sometimes become excessive but which he can control through an exercise of will. Humans are essentially rational beings able to improve themselves morally through education and practice. Aristotle proposed a mechanistic God who is a simple prime mover and does not intervene actively in the world. He rejected the idea that the world was created from nothing, thus ruling out the possibility of a creation story, and he denied the immortality of the soul, doing away with an afterlife toward which man can strive. Rather than renounce worldly pleasures in the quest for eternal bliss, he taught, man should seek contentment in the present by pursuing a golden mean between extremes.

  On all these points, Aristotle’s views conflicted with the Augustinian notion of fallen man and with the pessimism that had dominated medieval thinking. And, as his writings circulated, they stirred tremendous anxiety. Could Christian theology stand up to the challenge posed by this alternative system of knowledge? In 1210, alarmed Church elders imposed a ban on Aristotle’s works on metaphysics and natural philosophy. This simply stimulated interest in them, however. In addition to studying Aristotle, theologians were reading the philosophers of two competing faiths who had already incorporated his teachings—Avicenna and Averroës of the Muslims and Maimonides of the Jews. In 1255, the faculty of arts at Paris, seeing the futility of trying to suppress Aristotle, reversed course and made him required reading. Rather than silence the Greek intruder, the Church would try to absorb him.

  That effort would be led by the greatest Scholastic of them all, Thomas Aquinas. In contrast to most medieval theologians, who were loud, impatient, and contentious, Thomas was humble, soft-spoken, and legendarily absentminded. Obese, he became known as “the dumb ox”—dumb in the sense of silent. When it came to intellectual capacity, he was without peer. In a writing career that lasted nearly a quarter century, he would show otherworldly stamina, filling ten thousand double-column folio pages. Over time, his understanding of doctrine would become that of the Roman Church itself. In 1323 he was canonized, and in 1567 he was given the title “Angelic Doctor”; in 1879 Pope Leo XIII issued an encyclical letter (“On the Restoration of Christian Philosophy”) that established Thomas’s teaching as the foundation for all Catholic study and that urged universities to use it “for the refutation of prevailing errors.” Apart from Augustine, no one would do more to shape the Catholic mind.

  Born around 1225 into the ruling family of Aquino, a town midway between Rome and Naples, Thomas while in his midteens informed his parents that he wanted to join the Dominican order. Appalled at the idea of their son becoming a penniless friar, they urged him to reconsider. When he refused, his mother sent his two brothers to abduct him, and he was held captive in a family castle. He would not budge, however, and after a year his mother finally relented. Aided by the Dominicans, Thomas immediately set off on the long journey to Paris.

  Arriving in 1245, he became both a friar and a master of theology. In fifteen years he produced thirty thick tomes, the greatest of which was the Summa Theologica. Thomas was the first Christian theologian to have full access to the new translations of Aristotle’s works, and in his own monumental treatise he sought to demonstrate and explain Christian doctrines through the application of Aristotelian logic. The Summa examines more than six hundred questions, ranging from the most cosmic, such as whether the existence of God is self-evident, to the most mundane, such as whether the pleasures of touch are greater than those of other senses. Using the dialectical method, Thomas seeks to prove that God is perfect, infinite, immutable, ubiquitous, eternal, and good. He offers precise descriptions of the six days of Creation, the repercussions of the Fall, the nature of original sin, the relation between grace and merit, the place of the soul during the resurrection, and—most eye-catching of all—the properties of angels. In his discussion of angels (which extends over more than sixty pages in most modern-day editions), Thomas seeks to answer such questions as whether an angel can be in several places at once (no), whether one angel can know another (yes), whether angels can know the future (no—only God can), and whether angels are numerous (yes, very). Thomas nowhere addresses the famous question attributed to medieval theology—How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?—but his discussion clearly seems to have inspired it.

  Of more lasting consequence were Thomas’s comments about man. Like all medieval thinkers, he placed God—all-powerful and all-knowing—at the center of his system. But, influenced by Aristotle’s embrace of human capability, he preserved a critical space for man as well. While man is subject to habits and passions that incline him toward sin, Thomas wrote, these can be reined in through the exercise of reason. Though God predestines all, man has free will. “Otherwise, counsels, exhortations, commands, prohibitions, rewards and punishments would be in vain.” As Thomas saw it, a person who freely does good works in a state of grace cooperates in achieving his salvation—the type of balanced proposition that typifies his theology. Thanks in part to the Summa, the idea that man has a degree of free will would become inscribed in Catholic theology. Centuries later, it would become a flash point
between Erasmus and Luther.

  In Thomas’s own day, his embrace of human capability angered many orthodox churchmen. So did his faith in reason. He was denounced for putting Aristotle ahead of the Gospels, logic before revelation, metaphysics over exegesis. Toward the end of his life, Thomas himself seems to have developed doubts about the merits of his enterprise. Returning to Naples, in 1272, he continued to work on the Summa, but on December 6, 1273, while he was celebrating Mass in the presence of a friend, something happened to him, and he could not return to work. When pressed by his friend to do so, Thomas said, “I cannot, because all I have written seems like straw to me.”

  It is not clear what happened. Thomas may have had a mystical revelation that made his logical exercises seem pointless. Or he may have had a stroke. Three months later, he was dead, his masterwork unfinished. Eager to suppress it, the bishop of Paris in 1277 issued a decree branding as heretical 219 Aristotelian propositions, among them several charged to Thomas. The opposition to him was especially fierce among the Dominicans’ chief rivals, the Franciscans. From among them rose the star of the next generation: John Duns Scotus.

  Born around 1266 in the Scottish town of Duns, Scotus would outstrip all other Schoolmen (as the Scholastics were also known) in his love of nuanced distinctions, hence his nickname: the “Subtle Doctor.” Teaching at both Oxford and Paris, he wrote a series of highly technical tracts in which he sought to place limits on the range of religious truths that could be demonstrated through logical analysis. Matters like divine power, original sin, and the immortality of the soul, he insisted, could not be proved through theses and countertheses. God is absolutely omnipotent and free to act without limits imposed by human understanding. Scotus wanted to restore the place of revelation in the spiritual life of the believer—to free God from the bounds of human reason and to recognize his unlimited freedom to will whatever does not contradict the essence of his being, which is love.

  For all his hostility toward Thomas, however, Scotus shared his affinity for arcane exposition. In terms of opacity, in fact, his equal would not be seen for centuries. His lexicon included terms like haecceity (an object’s “thisness”), quiddity (an object’s essence), and univocity (a word’s having the same meaning when applied to different things). “The quiddity or definition of one extreme is the middle term in demonstration,” went a sample passage. Scotus’s most famous cause was the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, which held that Mary was born without original sin. The idea that anyone other than Christ—even his mother—could have come into the world untainted by Adam’s transgression caused an uproar, especially among Dominicans. In Paris, the Thomists and Scotists warred over the matter, assailing each other with citations, libels, insults, and slurs. As the categories and theorems multiplied, the rancor and resentment grew. This, in the end, was one of the main consequences of Scholasticism: a proliferation of doctrines, and of violent clashes over them.

  The debate over the Immaculate Conception was still raging two centuries later, at the end of the fifteenth century, when Erasmus was at Paris. (The matter would not be fully resolved until 1854, when the doctrine was declared a dogma of the Catholic Church by Pope Pius IX.) The Scotists dominated the theological faculty, and, thanks to their appetite for obscure speculation and fine distinctions, “Dunsman” would became a synonym for a hairsplitting sophist. (In English, it would come to mean a blockhead incapable of learning, i.e., a dunce.)

  Forced to endure lectures about propositions, definitions, conclusions, demonstrations, and other “super-subtle subtleties,” Erasmus grew exasperated. “If only you could see your Erasmus sitting agape among those glorified Scotists,” he wrote to a fellow student, these “quasi-theologians” whose “brains are the most addled, tongues the most uncultured, wits the dullest, teachings the thorniest, characters the least attractive, lives the most hypocritical, talk the most slanderous, and hearts the blackest on earth.”

  Lost in all the syllogisms, corollaries, and refutations, Erasmus believed, was the Bible itself. It was no longer read as an account of actual events or the teachings of real men. As he would later write, the apostles “baptized wherever they went, yet nowhere did they teach the formal, material, efficient, and final causes of baptism, nor did they ever mention the delible and indelible marks of the sacraments.”

  Erasmus managed to suppress his contempt long enough to receive a bachelor’s degree in theology (probably in April 1498), but he decided not to continue. Striking out on his own, he moved into a boardinghouse and began spending time with the small but lively circle of Parisian humanists, who congregated at Josse Bade’s famous printing house and bookstore on Rue Saint-Jacques. Erasmus also sought to cultivate Paris’s leading humanist, Robert Gaguin, an elderly monk, a diplomat, and a prolific author. Soon after arriving in Paris, Erasmus had sent him a letter full of exaggerated praise, with references to the integrity of Scipio and the eloquence of Nestor. Writing back, Gaguin noted his dislike of flatterers and urged Erasmus to leave aside all such pretense in the future.

  Erasmus heeded his advice, and the two developed a genuine bond. When Gaguin learned from the printers that an edition of a history of France that he had written had a blank page at the end, he asked Erasmus to fill it. Erasmus happily obliged, but in so doing he relapsed, noting that Gaguin’s histories displayed “the elegance of a Sallust” and “the good taste of a Livy.” Clearly, Erasmus could not easily shake the habit of humanist hyperbole, and his addendum to Gaguin’s history would attract little notice.

  Now around thirty, Erasmus bemoaned his thin résumé. His health, which had been seriously impaired during his time at Montaigu, remained poor in crowded, insalubrious Paris. At one point it rained without stop for nearly three months, causing the Seine to overflow and flood the city center. On top of it all, his funds were dwindling. On arriving in Paris, he had resolved not to waste his time tutoring the wealthy, but he was running out of options, and in the spring of 1497 he took on two brothers from Lübeck who, studying at the University of Paris, wanted to improve their Latin.

  They were soon joined by two Englishmen, Thomas Grey and Robert Fisher, who shared a house with Erasmus under the watchful eye of their guardian. Erasmus quickly grew attached to Grey, and the guardian, becoming suspicious, asked him to leave. Erasmus did, but in his anguish he sent a series of notes to the young man filled with lamentations, self-pity, and expressions of love for his “sweetest Thomas.” “See how my very real grief makes me burst into floods of tears, though I hoped the injury had healed!” he moaned. He denounced the guardian as an “ungrateful scoundrel” and “abominable monster” with sagging jowls and nostrils “choked with thickets of bristly hair.” Erasmus’s messages to Grey have the same impassioned quality as those he had earlier sent to Servatius—he even refers to them as “lovers’ letters”—and they add to the questions about his sexual leanings.

  Tutoring would prove every bit as burdensome as Erasmus had expected, but he found a way to turn it to his advantage. Having endured so much punitive pedagogy over the years, he now had an opportunity to test some alternatives. To teach his students colloquial Latin, he drafted a series of exchanges showing how to greet friends, inquire after their health, and decline an invitation. These would become the basis for his Colloquies, the collection of wry dialogues and sketches that would be his most popular work. To show his students how to compose letters, Erasmus prepared a series of examples; he would later expand them into a guide to the epistolary art. He also began work on a manual on how to write well, plus a program for curricular reform—the seeds for Erasmus’s later education texts, through which he would help shape the course of European schooling for centuries.

  For the moment, though, he continued to founder. In the spring of 1498, he came down with a low-grade but stubborn fever that made him feel he was wasting away. Seeking a break, he traveled to Holland to see friends, but he drank heavily, placing an added strain on his health. On the way back to Paris, Erasmus s
topped in Brussels to speak with the bishop of Cambrai and request his continued support, but the bishop was noncommittal. Word began spreading about Erasmus and his intemperate behavior in Holland, prompting his friend Willem Hermans to send him a reproachful letter. Erasmus bristled. “I greatly fear you may suppose that I am wasting my time here in frivolity, feasting, and love affairs,” he wrote to Hermans toward the end of 1498. While acknowledging that his concern for his health had caused him “to relax somewhat the rigor” of his former style of life, he chided his friend for his offensive statements. He would however admit that, overwhelmed by troubles, he felt “utterly wretched.”

  These comments offer tantalizing hints of a man who, entering middle age, was relieving his frustration and despondency with bouts of dissolution. Unfortunately, details remain scant. What does come through is Erasmus’s lack of direction and of purpose at this point in his life. That was about to change, however. In the summer of 1499, one of his students, William Blount (also known as Lord Mountjoy), invited Erasmus to join him on a visit to England to see his family. Erasmus quickly accepted. While there, he would have his great intellectual breakthrough.

  For those who today cross the English Channel on high-speed trains or fleet ferries, it takes an imaginative leap to grasp how perilous the trip was in Erasmus’s day. It took anywhere from three days to three weeks, with as many as seventy-five people packed onto sixty-foot-long skiffs. They had to endure foul food, seasickness, fickle winds, treacherous currents, and sudden storms that could prove fatal. Erasmus’s first trip would leave him with a deep dread of the crossing, which was unfortunate, because from the moment he stepped foot in England, he was captivated.