Luther’s dismay grew as a result of an important discovery he made while reading Erasmus’s annotations. He learned that the word poenitentia, used in the Vulgate (in the form poenitentiam agite) at Matthew 3:2 (by John the Baptist) and at 4:17 (by Christ himself), was actually based on the Greek metanoia. The New Testament was urging people not to do penance but to recognize their misdeeds and undergo a change of disposition. This seemed to echo what Johann von Staupitz had told him years earlier—that penance is genuine only if it begins with a love for God and if the performing of the sacrament is seen as the starting point rather than the end point of the process of coming to terms with one’s transgressions. Luther was overcome by this revelation. After all the years he had spent struggling to attain absolution for his sins through contrition, confession, and satisfaction, he now saw that the Church’s whole system of penance lacked any basis in Scripture. The philological adjustment that Lorenzo Valla had proposed in his notes on the New Testament and that Erasmus had found in the monastic library outside Louvain and later incorporated into his own annotations had thus helped open the eyes of this tormented friar in remote Wittenberg as to how far Church theologians were leading the faithful astray.
This awakening bore directly on the issue of indulgences. The relief granted by these dispensations did not require any genuine change of attitude; they were said to be effective without regard to any feeling of regret or contrition. What’s more, they were given in exchange for money, turning the critical act of penitence into a financial transaction—one being used, moreover, to build an opulent structure in Rome.
With the approach of All Saints’ Day (November 1), Wittenberg again began to fill with pilgrims come to see the relics at the Castle Church and obtain an indulgence. After his performance on the previous All Hallows’ Eve, Luther was not asked to preach on this one. But, in the face of so grave an abuse, he felt he could not remain silent. He decided to convey his objections in the time-honored form of a set of theses for disputation, with other scholars invited to debate them.
Sitting down to draft what would become his most famous document, Luther began with the recent discovery he had made about penance in his reading of Erasmus’s annotations:
When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, “Poenitentiam agite, &c,” he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.
This word cannot be understood as referring to the sacrament of penance, that is, confession and satisfaction, as administered by the clergy.
At this point, Luther was not yet ready to jettison all external expressions of penitence, so in his third thesis he offered a clarification: penitence does not mean “solely inner repentance,” which “is worthless unless it produces various outward mortifications of the flesh.”
From that point on, though, Luther offered few qualifications. Instead, he mounted a fierce attack on the whole theological infrastructure of indulgences. The pope, he stated, does not have the power to remit any penalties beyond those imposed at his own discretion or by canon law. Moreover, this power could be applied only to the living and not to the dead, for papal decrees cease to apply at death. Nor was there divine authority for preaching that the soul flies out of purgatory immediately upon the depositing of the coins in the indulgence chest. “When money clinks in the money chest,” he wrote, “greed and avarice increase.”
Furthermore, Luther observed, it was not consistent with Christian doctrine to preach that those who buy such letters have no need to repent of their sins. Any Christian who is truly repentant enjoys full remission from both the penalty and the guilt attached to sin without obtaining such letters. Christians should be taught that one who passes a person in need in order to give money for an indulgence gains no benefit but only incurs God’s wrath. They should also be taught that if the pope knew of the exactions of the indulgence preachers, “he would rather that the basilica of St. Peter were burned to ashes than be built up with the skin, flesh, and bones of his sheep.” If the need arose, the pope should be willing to sell St. Peter’s and give the proceeds along with his own money to those from whom the pardon merchants extract money.
With each succeeding thesis, Luther grew increasingly cheeky. Whereas in the past the Gospels were used to fish for men of wealth, now indulgences were used to fish for the wealth of men. If the pope could indeed free souls from purgatory, why did he not liberate everyone for the sake of love? Since the pope’s income was greater than that of the wealthiest of men, why did he not build St. Peter’s with his own money, rather than with that of indigent believers? These questions were serious matters of conscience, and to suppress them by force rather than refute them with reason was “to expose the church and the pope to the ridicule of their enemies, and to make Christian people unhappy.”
In his final four theses, Luther—growing emotional after his long spiritual odyssey—offered a ringing peroration:
Away then with all those prophets who say to the people of Christ, “Peace, peace,” and there is no peace.
Blessed be all those prophets who say to the people of Christ, “Cross, cross,” and there is no cross.
Christians should be diligent in following Christ, their head, through penalties, deaths, and hell,
And thus be confident of entering heaven through many tribulations rather than through the false security of peace.
By the end, Luther had ninety-five theses. As much as he had tried to keep to a conventional academic format, his long-simmering rage, together with his naturally combative style, had produced a polemic that was witty, biting, and defiant.
Shortly before All Saints’ Day, he gave a draft of his theses to Johann Rhau-Grunenberg to be printed as a folio sheet. Titled Disputation on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences, the page declared at the top that “out of love and zeal for the truth and the desire to bring it to light, the following theses will be publicly discussed at Wittenberg under the chairmanship of the reverend father Martin Luther.” Around noon on October 31, 1517, Luther set out with an assistant from the Augustinian cloister for the Castle Church, document in hand. As he walked along the rutted, muck-filled main street, he was no doubt greeted by students and parishioners; on reaching the marketplace, he would have encountered visitors come to Wittenberg to view Frederick’s relics and obtain indulgences. Reaching the Castle Church, he passed through the covered gateway and crossed the wooden walkway that led to the north door of the church. On it, he posted the Ninety-Five Theses. (In recent years, scholars have raised questions about whether Luther actually affixed the theses to the door of the church or simply distributed—“posted”—them.)
That same day, Luther sent a copy of the theses to Archbishop Albrecht of Mainz, along with a letter explaining his actions. He decried the “gross misunderstanding” that the indulgence preachers had spread among common people: that through these letters they were assured of their salvation and that souls “escape from purgatory as soon as they have placed a contribution into the chest.” For all those souls, the archbishop bore the heaviest responsibility. “What a horror, what a danger for a bishop to permit the loud noise of indulgences among his people, while the gospel is silenced, and to be more concerned with the sale of indulgences than with the gospel!” The archbishop should immediately withdraw his booklet of instructions and command the preachers to change their message. “If this is not done,” he warned, “someone may rise and, by means of publications, silence those preachers and refute the little book. This would be the greatest danger for Your Most Illustrious Highness. I certainly shudder at this possibility, yet I am afraid it will happen if things are not quickly remedied.”
In mid-November 1517, Luther’s letter reached Albrecht at his residence in Aschaffenburg, east of Mainz. The archbishop—who had his own relics collection, featuring 8,933 items offering a total of 39,245,120 years and 220 days of relief from purgatory—was furious at Luther’s insolence, and he sent the theses to the theological faculty of the University of Mainz for assessment. (It
would take no action.) In December, Albrecht forwarded the document to Rome, thus setting in motion the Vatican’s actions against Luther. Johann Tetzel, meanwhile, threatened to have Luther burned and his ashes scattered on the waters.
That is what had happened a century earlier to Jan Hus after he had lodged a similar protest. Luther, however, was living in a new age—the age of print. On November 11, 1517, he began sending around copies of the theses, and over the following weeks they were printed as single-sheet broadsides in Leipzig and Nuremberg. In December, they appeared in Basel in booklet form, and soon they were translated into German. By the start of 1518, the Ninety-Five Theses had appeared in towns and villages throughout Germany, “as if the angels themselves had been their messengers,” as one contemporary put it. “It is a mystery to me,” Luther himself would observe a few months later, “how my theses, more so than my other writings,” were “spread to so many places. They were meant exclusively for our academic circle here.” Had he anticipated how popular they would become, he added, “I would certainly have done my share to make them more understandable.”
But they were in fact understood. For years, the German people had been waiting for someone to put into sharp, concise language the anger and resentment they had been feeling toward Rome. Now an obscure friar in remote Saxony had done so. The friar was obscure no longer, however, and everyone wondered what would happen next.
Part III
Rumblings
15
For the Want of Greek Type
After months of restlessly moving around the Low Countries, Erasmus in the summer of 1517 decided to settle in Louvain. Located just twenty miles east of Brussels, the city offered easy access to the Burgundian court, where Erasmus continued to have business. From earlier visits, he fondly recalled its mild climate, its printers and libraries, its scholarly bustle. Louvain’s university—the only one in the Netherlands—was a stronghold of Scholastic theology. (The University of Louvain remains the largest university in Belgium, though in the late 1960s, after protests and riots, it split into two campuses, with one speaking Flemish and the other French; both remain affiliated with the Catholic Church.) Louvain was also home to the Golden Torch, the print shop of Dirk Martens, who played an important part in disseminating humanist texts (including those of Erasmus) in the Low Countries. Louvain’s marketplace was dominated by St. Peter’s church, an immense medieval pile featuring seven radiating chapels, waterspouts shaped like gargoyles, elongated arched windows, and a steeply slanted slate roof. Opposite it stood the three-story town hall—a florid mass of stone filigrees, octagonal turrets, and canopied niches that radiated bourgeois pride and was considered the finest civic building in Brabant.
Aside from its university, Louvain was most known for its beer, and the presence of so many taverns along with three thousand students made for a rowdy drinking culture. In his letters, Erasmus frequently complained about the many boisterous parties he had to attend. (Stella Artois got its start in Louvain, and today the town is the headquarters of Anheuser-Busch InBev, the world’s largest beer company.)
Of far greater concern to Erasmus were the many conservatives on the Louvain theology faculty. Along with their brethren in Cologne, they had ardently sided with the prosecutors of Johannes Reuchlin. Among the faculty members was Martin Dorp, who had earlier chastised Erasmus for both the astringency of the Praise of Folly and his irreverence in seeking to correct the New Testament. Many of the Louvain theologians were still smarting from Erasmus’s jeers at the subtle doctors. Dorp had eventually come around, however, and Erasmus’s growing celebrity had helped quell the more general carping against him.
He was allotted a spacious room in an upper story of the College of the Lily, one of the university’s four colleges. He had a large table on which to place his papers, a couch on which to rest, and a garden in which to receive friends and visitors. And there were many of them, for few scholars could pass through Louvain without seeking an audience with the prince of learning. Nearly every day, a courier brought tributes from dukes, bishops, and professors in Germany, France, Italy, and Spain. Paschasius Berselius, a Benedictine from Liège, wrote to Erasmus about the excitement he felt upon opening a letter from him: “It ravished my heart, my bowels turned to water, my mind failed. Never have I felt so sweetly the bewitching magic of affection.” All the while, Erasmus was pestered for copy. “We are daily expecting a great parcel of work from you,” Beatus Rhenanus wrote from Basel, “and as soon as it arrives, everything else shall be put on one side, and the house of Froben will print nothing that is not Erasmus.”
Erasmus at this moment of peak celebrity is captured in a portrait by Quentin Massys (or Metsys). In the thriving towns of Flanders, a new form of intimate portraiture was emerging as prosperous burghers sought to commemorate their success and individuality, and Massys was one of its masters. He showed Erasmus at his desk, applying his reed pen to a folio-size notebook. Lying on the shelf behind him are his revised New Testament, the Praise of Folly, and his editions of Lucian and Jerome. Erasmus’s fur-lined black robe and matching black biretta—set against the nut-brown wood of the wall and shelves behind him—exude medieval sobriety. His face, taut and unlined, has the sallow hue of a man who spends too much time indoors. The one bright surface is the luminous page on which he is writing—the text as beacon, lighting the world with its wisdom and insight.
The text in this case (identifiable from the lines written on the page) is Erasmus’s paraphrase of the Epistle to the Romans, which he had prepared in Antwerp before moving to Louvain. Erasmus’s aim was to put the epistle into a colloquial Latin that educated readers could comprehend. Though Paul was the “one infallible oracle of Christ,” he explained, many had been discouraged from reading him by the strangeness of his language. His Greek had such an admixture of Hebrew idiom in it that even Greek speakers had trouble understanding him; Erasmus wanted to strip away the Hebraisms and give Paul a “Roman dress.” Appearing in the autumn of 1517, the paraphrase would prove so successful that Erasmus decided to move on to Paul’s other epistles. He would ultimately produce paraphrases on nearly the entire New Testament—another part of his project to make Scripture more accessible to laypeople (or at least those who could read Latin).
While in Louvain, Erasmus was preoccupied with another key part of his reform program: peace. Not long after settling there, he completed what would be his longest statement on the subject. Querela Pacis (“A Complaint of Peace”) features the character of Peace, who issues an ardent appeal for international concord. Erasmus—building on the arguments he had made in Dulce bellum inexpertis and The Education of a Christian Prince—denounces with even greater indignation the frenzy with which Christians attack and slaughter one another. “What land has not been soaked in Christian blood, what river or sea not stained with human gore?” Peace asks. Neither theologians nor monks, bishops nor cardinals, are ashamed to be the instigators and leaders of the very thing that Christ found so abhorrent. “What has a miter to do with a helmet, a crozier with a sword, the Gospel with a shield?”
Toward the end of the essay, Erasmus decries the nationalist animosities that had set Christian against Christian:
The English are hostile to the French, for no other reason than that they are French. The Scots are disliked by the British, solely for being Scots. Germans don’t agree with French, Spaniards don’t agree with either. What perversity—for the mere name of a place to divide people when there is so much which could bring them together! . . . How can something so trivial weigh more with people than so many natural ties, and so many bonds in Christ?
He dismissed geographic barriers as similarly artificial. The Rhine separates the French from the Germans, but it should not divide Christian from Christian. The Pyrenees form a physical barrier between the Spanish and the French, but they should not destroy the communion of the Church.
In the ninth century, Charlemagne had advanced the idea of a Christian Europe under the rule of a sin
gle sovereign. In the thirteenth, Dante had articulated the ideal of a common humanity governed by a universal monarch, with peace as a precondition. Now, in Querela Pacis, Erasmus was making the case for a pan-European identity rooted in the concept of a common Christian brotherhood. First published in December 1517, the essay would appear in more than twenty editions over the next twenty years as well as in numerous translations, helping to confirm Erasmus’s position as the leading proponent of European union.
The book that would earn him the most notice, however, did not even bear his name. Julius Exclusus e Coelis (“Julius Excluded from Heaven”), published anonymously at the start of 1517, was a piercing satire featuring Pope Julius II appearing before the doors of heaven, only to find them locked. Pounding away, he demands that they be opened. St. Peter appears and, speaking through a window, asks who is making such a racket. Julius indicates his magnificent tiara and bejeweled robe, which is stamped with the letters “P.M.” (for “Pontifex Maximus”). “I suppose they stand for ‘Pestis Maxima’ [‘Supreme Plague’],” Peter says. Seeing Julius’s fierce eyes and the bloody weapons clattering under his garment, he refuses to open the doors.
There follows a long and heated exchange between Julius, who insists on being admitted, and Peter, who resolutely refuses. Julius boasts of the many measures he had taken as pope to enlarge the papal treasury, including adding to the papal lands through the use of arms and inventing a system in which bishoprics could be bought without prompting charges of simony. Peter, unimpressed, notes that he had been instructed by Christ to open the doors not to those carrying “bulls heavy with lead” but to “those who have clothed the naked, fed the hungry, given drink to the thirsty, visited the prisoner, and taken in the stranger.” Back and forth they go, with Julius crowing about all the wealth and prestige he had brought to the Holy See and Peter castigating him for becoming a captive of money and power. “You won’t open up, then?” Julius asks. “The last person I’d let in is a pestilent fellow like you,” says Peter.
Fatal Discord Page 35