Fatal Discord

by Michael Massing

  While he was there, however, he became embroiled in a long-simmering feud between the papacy and the Franciscans on the matter of poverty. At the center of it was a group of Franciscan purists, called the Spirituals, who felt that not only their own order but also the Church as a whole had become too attached to worldly goods. Since neither Christ nor the apostles had owned property, they maintained, the Church should follow suit and divest itself of all temporal possessions. Under John XXII, however, the Holy See had become a highly profitable enterprise, and the idea that it should relinquish its holdings horrified him. In the early 1320s, he issued decrees declaring that Christ and the apostles had in fact owned property and so were not practitioners of the type of extreme poverty demanded by the radicals; to maintain otherwise, he held, was heretical.

  This drew loud protests from many Franciscans, including their general, Michael of Cesena, whom John ordered to appear in Avignon to be held to account. After arriving, Cesena asked Ockham to examine the pope’s statements on poverty. With typical impudence, Ockham concluded not only that the Franciscan position was correct but that John’s assertions were themselves heretical. For this, both Ockham and Cesena were thrown into prison. On the night of May 25, 1328, however, they managed to escape, and they took a boat down the Rhone to the southern French coast. There, they boarded a galley that had been sent by Ludwig IV of Bavaria. An implacable foe of the pope, Ludwig had recently been crowned Holy Roman Emperor in Rome. The Franciscans’ conflict with the pope made them Ludwig’s natural allies, and he enlisted the support of Ockham and Cesena. The galley took the two men to Pisa, where Ludwig eventually joined them, and from there the party proceeded to Munich.

  Ockham joined Ludwig’s “Munich academy,” an informal group of scholars and artists, and from it he turned out a stream of books and pamphlets castigating the pope. He challenged the papacy’s right to exercise temporal power and to interfere in the affairs of the empire. The Church, he held, should not be equated with the clergy but rather should encompass the entire community of the faithful. The authority of the Church was inferior to that of Scripture; while popes could err, Scripture could not. Ockham continued to berate the papacy in this vein until his death (perhaps due to the Black Death) around 1348.

  Ockham’s antipapal polemics provided a rich vein of arguments for future challengers of Roman authority. His preference for the authority of Scripture over that of the papacy, in fact, strikingly anticipated Luther’s later views. Whether or not Luther was exposed to these polemics while in Erfurt—given the university’s conservatism, “not” seems more likely—Ockham’s campaign helped provide a precedent for Luther’s future insurgency.

  There was, however, one idea derived from Ockham that Luther would emphatically reject. For all his assertions about divine power, Ockham—like Aquinas and other Scholastics—reserved a place for free will. His followers took this a step further. In the Summa Theologica, Aquinas had maintained that while man cooperates with God in attaining salvation, it is God who initiates the process, bestowing grace as a special gift, apart from any prior action on the part of the individual. On receiving it, the individual could then work with God in attaining salvation. The Ockhamists, however, pointed to several passages in the Bible that suggested that the individual can play a more active part. At Zechariah 1:3, for instance, the Lord says, “Turn to me, and I will turn to you.” On the basis of such injunctions, Ockham’s followers maintained that man can through his own efforts initiate the process. They used the phrase facere quod in se est—“doing that which is within oneself.” By striving to do his best, a person could expect to receive an infusion of divine grace, enabling him to perform works that would make him worthy of eternal life. This would become a central principle of late Scholasticism.

  The Ockhamists, then, while agreeing with other Scholastics that salvation could not be attained without grace, diverged in insisting that grace could be set in motion through moral striving on the part of the individual. This innovation offered man more control over his fate; it also saddled him with more responsibility. It thus had the potential to inflame the general anxiety caused by the sacrament of penance. For a sensitive young man like Luther—already terrified at the prospect of suffering in purgatory—studying Ockham caused the clamp of fear to tighten further.

  In the end, though, Luther’s main complaint was not with Ockham but with the thinker who stood behind him. Aristotle was an inescapable presence at the University of Erfurt. Students spent eight months on the Nicomachean Ethics, six on the Metaphysics, six on the Politics, and one on the Economics, while also delving into the Physics and De anima. “Without Aristotle, no one becomes a doctor of theology,” is how a suffragan bishop in Erfurt put it. Of the two professors to whom Luther became closest, one, Jodokus Trutfetter, wrote a series of books on logic that drew heavily on Aristotle; the other, Bartholomäus Arnoldi von Usingen, was the author of a compendium of natural philosophy that was based almost entirely on Aristotle as adapted by Aquinas and others.

  Later, while developing his own philosophy, Luther would turn furiously against Aristotle, holding him responsible for much that had gone wrong with Christian theology. The “whole Aristotle is to theology as darkness is to light,” he declared in his “Disputation Against Scholastic Theology,” issued in 1517 on the eve of the Ninety-Five Theses. Three years later, in his famous address To the Christian Nobility, Luther lamented how “this damned, conceited, rascally heathen has deluded and made fools of so many of the best Christians with his misleading writings.”

  Luther did not want to jettison all of Aristotle. His Logic, Rhetoric, and Poetics all seemed worth retaining. But he wanted to suppress Aristotle’s writings on physics, metaphysics, the soul, and ethics, on the grounds that “nothing can be learned from them either about nature or the Spirit.” Most of all, he reviled the Nicomachean Ethics, calling it “the worst of all books” and charging that it “flatly opposes divine grace and all Christian virtues.” Luther’s great revolt would spring in part from his fierce reaction to this work.

  Named after Aristotle’s son Nicomachus, the Nicomachean Ethics seeks to describe the nature of virtue and how man can achieve it. For Aristotle, virtue is not a natural attribute, like sight or height; people are not born good or evil. They are, however, born with the capacity for virtue, which should be developed through education and practice, beginning at an early age and continuing over a lifetime. Just as men become builders through the act of building and become musicians by playing instruments, so they become virtuous by doing virtuous deeds. For Aristotle, choice is central. We have it within our power to perform or avoid moral acts. Though he does not actually use the phrase “moral responsibility,” that is what he is describing.

  Aristotle has little to say about the intense struggles many face in trying to do the right thing in the face of temptation and weakness. Supreme rationalist that he was, he barely mentions longing and lust, craving and compulsion. Unlike the Scholastics, who held that man ultimately has to rely on divine grace in attaining salvation, Aristotle placed the full burden on the individual.

  While at Erfurt, Luther dutifully absorbed these teachings. And they added to his disquiet. From the many sermons he had attended, he knew that, owing to original sin, human nature is warped, making transgression inevitable. Was he to be held responsible for his every lapse, as Aristotle seemed to insist? If he could not refrain from losing his temper or using the Lord’s name in vain, would God find him unrighteous and hence undeserving of salvation? (Erasmus’s works, by contrast, would be permeated by the spirit of the Nicomachean Ethics.)

  During Luther’s time in Erfurt, his Anfechtungen intensified. He felt that he was an irredeemable sinner whom the wrathful Christ would surely condemn. During these spells, he felt utterly forlorn, forsaken, without hope. The question pressed in on him: what would happen to him if he died?

  All around him, he heard the rattle of death. A close friend was killed in a fight. At one point Er
furt was hit by the plague, and the casualties included a baccalaureate at the university and one of the participants in his master’s examination. Luther himself had a bad scare when, while traveling to see his parents, he accidentally cut an artery in his thigh with the student dagger he carried. Lying alone in a field while a friend ran for help, he prayed to Mary to intercede. A doctor who arrived managed to stop the bleeding, but during the night the wound reopened, causing Luther in his panic to again entreat the Virgin. While recovering, he learned to play the lute. He found the resonant tones soothing, but death continued to loom.

  Despite it all, Luther in January 1505 completed his master’s program, placing second among seventeen students. Years later, he would recall the thrill he felt: “What majesty and splendor there was when one received his master’s degree! They brought torches to him and presented them. I think that no earthly joy could be compared with it.” He prepared for the next stage of his education: the law. This was in accord with the wishes of his father. In addition to paying Martin’s tuition, Hans provided him with the funds to buy a complete edition of the Corpus Juris Civilis of Justinian, a mammoth sixth-century code that served as the basis for civil law in Europe. A remunerative career seemed ensured. But Luther’s heart was not in it. The law seemed a technical and bloodless field, especially when compared with the great existential matters taken up in theology and philosophy.

  On July 2, 1505, Luther was returning to Erfurt on foot from a visit to Mansfeld. In a field outside the village of Stotternheim, about four miles from Erfurt, he was caught in a thunderstorm. As bolts of lightning crashed down around him, he fell to the ground and in his terror cried out, “Saint Anne, help me! I will become a monk!” In this moment of extremity, Luther appealed to the patron saint of miners. Such vows were commonplace in that day, and just as commonly forgotten. But not by Luther. Given the tempest in his soul, the cloister beckoned. In medieval Europe, the monastery was considered the “gate of Paradise”—a place that, sealed off from temptation and distraction, offered its inmates a clear path to salvation. Luther was determined to take it. When he told his friends of his plan, they were aghast. How could this bright and affable young man embarking on such a promising career exchange it for a life of silence and seclusion? Few were aware of the depths of his inner torment.

  Of the many orders in Erfurt, Luther chose the Augustinians. In addition to being less austere than most of the others, they were known for their educational opportunities. Luther arranged to sell his books, including the Corpus Juris Civilis, keeping only his volumes of Virgil and Plautus. Two weeks after making his vow, he held a farewell dinner to which he invited several scholars and (according to one account) some “modest and virtuous girls and women”—the last time he would be able to mix in such company. Growing animated, he entertained the group on his lute. On the following day, July 17, Luther, accompanied by several friends, walked to the Augustinian cloister, located on the edge of town. “Today you see me, but never again!” he declared to his tearful companions, then disappeared through the arched gate in the cloister’s stone wall.

  Erasmus had left an Augustinian monastery to see the world; Luther was now forsaking the world to enter an Augustinian monastery.

  Luther first told the story of the vow in the storm many years later, and questions have been raised about whether it occurred just as he said. The episode bears strong parallels to Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus. Could Luther have embellished his account to heighten the similarities? Whatever the reality, his decision to enter a monastery would prove no less momentous for the future of Christianity than Paul’s own transformation. The spot where Luther is believed to have made his vow is now marked by a seven-foot-high pillar of reddish stone set in a quiet grove of linden trees. Erected in 1917, on the four-hundredth anniversary of the posting of the Ninety-Five Theses, the pillar bears the inscription:

  GEWEIHTE ERDE—WENDEPUNKT DER REFORMATION

  [HALLOWED GROUND—STARTING POINT OF THE REFORMATION].

  Part II

  Discoveries

  7

  Back to the Fathers

  The troubles that Erasmus encountered on his return journey from England to France, in January 1500, began in Dover. He had on him money worth about twenty pounds—enough to sustain him for many months. But the British Crown, hungry for revenue, had issued a decree forbidding the export of all gold and silver from the country. Erasmus had been assured by Colet and More that, because he had no English coins and had brought most of the money into the country with him, he would be exempt. They were wrong, and the customs officials confiscated all but a tiny sum. In one swift blow, Erasmus was reduced to penury.

  Things got no better on the other side of the Channel. The horse Erasmus rented in Amiens turned out to be lazy and slow. Stopping at an inn, he became so convinced that he was going to be assaulted that he could barely sleep. The next morning, when he went to pay his bill, he spent several hours haggling with the innkeeper over exchange rates. After settling, he decided to abandon his horse and, despite the cold and damp, to make the rest of the journey on foot. On February 2, 1500—six days after leaving Dover—he staggered into Paris, “very tired from traveling and with an empty purse,” as he wrote in a long, agitated letter to his friend Jacob Batt.

  Erasmus was about to enter his period of greatest hardship. After the genteel comforts of England, he was now sharing a friend’s run-down quarters on the Left Bank. A fever he had picked up on the way back from England would linger for months, sapping both his energy and his spirits. Even more distressing was his continued anonymity. Seven years after fleeing the monastery, Erasmus remained a minor figure in the world of letters, and the mortification of it daily ate at him.

  He was buoyed, however, by his new enthusiasm for sacred studies. After years of suffering through the sterile exercises of the Scholastics, he longed to read the Gospels and Epistles as the story of Christ’s ministry and the efforts by his apostles to spread his message. As he had realized in Oxford, however, the New Testament would give up its secrets only if read in its original language, and so he set out to learn Greek.

  It was a daunting enterprise. More than a century had passed since Petrarch and Boccaccio had sought to revive the study of Greek in the Latin West, yet arranging instruction in it remained difficult. Few books had been printed in Greek, and tutors were even scarcer. With the fall of Constantinople to the Turks, in 1453, some Greek-speaking scholars had fled to the West and were offering their services, but most lived in Italy; the few north of the Alps were well beyond Erasmus’s means. While at Deventer, he had learned the Greek alphabet and a smattering of vocabulary, and during his brief time at the University of Paris he had picked up a few rudiments more, and with that shaky foundation he set out to teach himself.

  The drudgery tormented him. Working late into the night in his chilly quarters, he grappled with the tenses, cases, voices, moods, genders, accents, breathings, and enclitics of ancient Greek. “My readings in Greek all but crush my spirit,” he wrote to Batt. As soon as he got some money, the first thing he would do would be “to buy some Greek authors; after that, I shall buy clothes.” When another acquaintance asked him to return a volume of Homer that he had borrowed, Erasmus protested that his friend was robbing him of his “only consolation” in his “dreary situation.”

  During Lent of 1500, the postponement of meals caused Erasmus to grow weak—part of a yearly pattern since he had begun living in France. Urged by a doctor to reduce his workload, he decided to pass the time rereading some of his favorite classical works. Desperate to earn some money, he got the idea of gathering adages from them and collecting them into a book. Erasmus shared the humanist fascination with ancient proverbs. They were used to enliven texts, add levity, fortify an argument, and—not least—display one’s learning. Erasmus could hardly write a letter without slipping in a reference to putting one’s scythe to the harvest, taking an ox to wrestling school, or playing the sow who tea
ches Minerva (i.e., trying to instruct someone who is far wiser).

  After two months of strolling through the “gardens of the classics” and plucking “flowerets of every hue,” as he put it, he had 818 proverbs, about a fifth of them in Greek and the rest in Latin. He found a printer in Paris, and in June 1500 the Adagiorum Collectanea (“Collected Adages”) appeared. A slender volume of 152 pages, it was Erasmus’s first full book in print. There were sayings from Plato, Virgil, Plautus, Terence, Catullus, Horace, Pliny the Elder, and Cicero, each illumined with a few lines of commentary. Some of the entries are appealingly eccentric. Crambe bis posita mors—“Twice-cooked cabbage is death”—referred to the practice of serving cabbage at banquets in ancient Greece; when recooked, it induced nausea. The saying came to signify aversion, as with a speech that, sounding fresh the first time around, becomes deadly on successive servings. Other unfamiliar adages include “as quick as asparagus is cooked,” “to a pig even marjoram seems sweet,” and “adopting the outlook of a polyp” (i.e., changing with the circumstances).

  Other sayings are more familiar: “to be afraid of your shadow,” “to break the ice,” “to teach an old dog new tricks,” “to leave no stone unturned,” “a dog in the manger,” “the tip of the tongue,” “the hedgehog and the fox.” Are these sayings known to us because of Erasmus’s book or because they were already fixed in Western usage? A bit of both, perhaps. One expression fully credited to Erasmus is, “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.” Two other sayings can be traced back to mistakes he made. “Pandora’s box” resulted from Erasmus’s mistranslation of the Greek word pithos, which means a “large jar,” as pyxis, or “box”; the original saying was “Pandora’s jar.” And “to call a spade a spade” stems from his belief that the Latin scapha signified a tool for digging rather than a dugout boat or washtub.