The publication of so sharp a lampoon of so recently departed a pope (Julius had died in 1513) was unheard of, and as it circulated around Europe, it set off an uproar—and intense speculation about its author. Most suspected Erasmus. “How I have enjoyed the Julius!” Guy Morillon, a member of the Burgundian court in Brussels, exulted to him about the dialogue’s enthusiastic reception there. “I paid it the tribute of a continuous chuckle; how delightfully and amusingly, and in a word, Erasmically, he argues with Peter is easier to understand than to explain.”
Erasmus himself, however, angrily disclaimed all responsibility for the work. An “egregious absurdity,” he insisted, noting that he did not have a mind so irreligious as to poke fun at the Holy Father. Yet Erasmus never categorically denied writing the piece. And, while its authorship has never been conclusively demonstrated, the case for his involvement is overwhelming. The most telling piece of evidence is a letter that Thomas More sent him in December 1516, noting that he had in his possession some notebooks that Thomas Lupset, Erasmus’s secretary during his stay in Cambridge, had given to him to be forwarded to Erasmus. Among them was the draft of a dialogue titled Julius Genius that was in Erasmus’s own hand. This seems an unmistakable reference to Julius Exclusus. (“Genius” is a minor character in the dialogue.) Erasmus had probably written it while in Cambridge, soon after the death of Julius.
He had good cause to conceal his involvement, though. At the time, he was continuing to work to persuade the Holy See to grant him dispensations allowing him to hold more than one benefice and absolving him of all penalties associated with putting aside his religious habit. The appearance of such a satire in his name could have derailed that effort. But the manuscript seems to have fallen into the hands of someone who did want it published, and as it spread across the continent, it delivered a major blow to papal prestige.
Erasmus had another reason to hide his connection to Julius Exclusus: his relations with the Louvain theologians. Given their devotion to Rome, any more mockery of the Church could upset the provisional peace between them. Already, Erasmus had embarked on a project with the potential to provoke. While traveling around the Low Countries, he had interested a wealthy friend, Jérôme de Busleyden, the archdeacon of Cambrai, in the idea of backing a new college to teach the three biblical languages. Soon after Erasmus’s arrival in Louvain, Busleyden died, but in his will he left a sum to endow the salaries for three professors and scholarships for eight students. Taking over the project, Erasmus began laying the foundation for the Collegium Trilingue (“College of Three Tongues”), as it came to be called. Through it, he hoped to train a new generation of scholars who, proficient in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, could carry on his program to restore Scripture and revitalize the faith.
From the start, however, the college faced strong resistance. Its very premise—that a knowledge of languages was critical to the study of Scripture—seemed to threaten the authority of the Vulgate and the time-honored methods of interpreting it. Suspicions grew as Erasmus recruited its faculty. The leading candidate to fill the Hebrew chair was Matthaeus Adrianus. Born in Spain in 1475 to a Jewish family, he had converted to Christianity and, after studying medicine in Italy, become a physician. In 1512, in Tübingen, Adrianus had met Johannes Reuchlin, who suggested that he teach Hebrew. Erasmus, introduced to him in Brussels, was impressed with his knowledge of the language, and after much prodding Adrianus agreed to take the position in Louvain. His connection to Reuchlin unsettled the Louvain theologians, but for the time being they remained silent.
Erasmus took advantage of the calm to proceed with his new edition of the New Testament. During his travels around the Low Countries, he had been able to inspect several old manuscripts—a codex of the Gospels from a monastery outside Zwolle in the Netherlands; a Greek manuscript from the Augustinian cloister at Corsendonck in Flanders; a third lent by his friend Cuthbert Tunstall—that would prove of great help in his expanding of the annotations and translating of the New Testament. Instead of the partial revision of the Vulgate he had offered in the first edition, Erasmus now planned a completely new translation—a far riskier enterprise.
While he was thus absorbed, the first attack on his first edition arrived. It came, surprisingly enough, from a fellow humanist, Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples (also known as Jacobus Faber Stapulensis, the Latinized version of his name). Lefèvre’s Quincuplex Psalterium and his commentary on Paul’s epistles had established him as a pioneer in the new critical methods, and Erasmus had become friendly with him in Paris. When Lefèvre read Erasmus’s annotations, however, he was startled by the one on Hebrews 2:7. This verse—one of the most controversial in the New Testament—states that God made Jesus “a little lower than the angels,” so that in suffering death, “he might taste death for everyone.” The idea that Christ could be lower than the angels, even when appearing in human form, seemed to diminish his divinity, and for centuries exegetes had objected. Lefèvre, in his commentary on Paul, had echoed them. Citing Psalm 8, on which this passage was based, he argued that the text should in fact state that Christ was made a little lower than God, not the angels. In this way, Christ’s exalted status would be preserved.
Erasmus strongly disagreed. In his view, Jesus’s humanity was the very point of the passage. Ever since his debate with John Colet in Oxford nearly twenty years earlier, he had held fast to the idea that Christ could feel fear and humiliation like ordinary humans. It was precisely the pain and suffering Christ had endured that made his sacrifice and fortitude so inspiring. Erasmus was so committed to this reading that in his annotation on the passage, he had criticized Lefèvre by name for suggesting that it be changed.
Lefèvre was deeply offended, and in a revision of his commentary on Paul that he was preparing, he struck back. To maintain that Christ, even while on the cross, was inferior to the angels, he said, was to deny the unity of the Trinity—a position that was “impious and most unworthy of Christ and God.”
Now it was Erasmus’s turn to bristle. Convinced that Lefèvre was charging him with blasphemy, Erasmus drafted a detailed defense in which he maintained that to speak of Christ’s humiliation is not to scorn him. We honor his cross with reverence; his mocking is our glory. After cataloging what he saw as Lefèvre’s many errors of scholarship, Erasmus became cruelly personal: “If only you had refrained altogether from this field of translation and making annotations. It was, as I said before, not your métier. You were capable of greater things. This task, however humble it might be, demanded a knowledge of the two tongues. I need not say what capacities you have in this respect: your writings bear public witness to it.”
As soon as his Apologia ad Fabrum came off the press, in August 1517, Erasmus sent copies around to friends. Many were troubled by the severity of his comments about Lefèvre; others rued the intramural nature of the dispute, which they felt could only hearten the conservatives. Lefèvre himself—clearly stung by Erasmus’s criticism—refused to respond. Taking his silence as an admission of defeat, Erasmus for months boasted of his victory—conduct that struck many of his friends as distinctly un-Christlike.
Just as the clash with Lefèvre was subsiding, another broke out with Johann Eck. A professor of theology at the University of Ingolstadt in southern Germany, Eck was celebrated for both his debating skills and his knowledge of Church tradition and canon law. In early 1518 he sent Erasmus a barbed letter outlining many objections to his annotations. One concerned Erasmus’s contention that the authors of the Gospels, in misquoting the Old Testament, had relied on faulty memory. “Listen, dear Erasmus,” he wrote, “do you suppose any Christian will patiently endure to be told that the evangelists in their Gospels made mistakes? If the authority of the Holy Scriptures at this point is shaky, can any passage be free from the suspicion of error?” He similarly admonished Erasmus for asserting that the Greek of the evangelists was less than perfect. It was not from Greek teachers that they had learned the language but from the Holy Spirit.
Most disturbing of all in Eck’s eyes was Erasmus’s preference for Jerome over Augustine. “There is no shortcoming in you which your supporters so much regret as your failure to have read Augustine,” he wrote. “Cease therefore, dear Erasmus, to darken by your criticisms a leading light of the church. . . . Admit rather that Augustine was a great scholar, steep yourself in his works and turn his pages with all diligence, and you will regard as quite shameless the man who dares prefer any of the Fathers to Augustine as a scholar.”
Erasmus would make no such admission. In a caustic reply, he maintained that the authority of Scripture is not imperiled if an evangelist by a slip of memory had mistakenly substituted one name for another. Nowhere is it said that the apostles spoke Greek by some miracle. Origen and other Greek commentators found many difficulties in Paul’s uncouth style. As for Augustine, Erasmus noted, he was the first author he had read, and he had continued to reread Augustine as the need arose, but when he began reading Jerome, he was quickly persuaded of his superiority. Jerome was born in a town very close to Italy and educated in Rome under the best scholars of the day; Augustine was born in Africa, “a barbarous region where literary studies were at an amazingly low ebb.” Jerome imbibed the philosophy of Christ with his mother’s milk; Augustine was nearly thirty when he finally got around to reading Paul and was immediately distracted by his duties as a bishop. By his own admission, Augustine knew little or no Greek, whereas there was no book in the whole library of Greek literature that Jerome had not mastered. The only reason Augustine was ranked above Jerome and Ambrose in the academic fraternity was that he was more frequently quoted by those authors who ruled it.
At the time, Erasmus was preparing a new collection of his letters for publication, and he planned to include his exchange with Eck in it. In this way, he hoped to further his program to restore both the Bible and Jerome’s reputation.
In the end, the greatest challenge to Erasmus’s New Testament would come from a most unlikely source. Edward Lee was a cleric of Kentish origins in his midthirties who, after attending Oxford and Cambridge, had come to Louvain to improve his Greek. There he had met Erasmus, who spoke of his plan to revise his first edition of the New Testament and who encouraged Lee to suggest changes. Lee was flattered by the attention, and a friendship developed. As Erasmus progressed with his revision, he showed parts of it to Lee. At one point, Lee disclosed that he had made some notes on Erasmus’s annotations, and he shared some of them with him. Lee’s comments were not always as supportive as Erasmus would have liked, and Erasmus was occasionally sharp in his replies. Lee began hearing that at social gatherings Erasmus’s friends were insulting him, telling jokes at his expense, and mocking him for daring to challenge the great Achilles of scholarship. Hurt, Lee stopped sharing his notes. He continued to compile them, however, and Erasmus, fearing the industry and ambition of the young scholar, became openly hostile toward him.
Erasmus had good cause for concern. After beginning with modest comments on technical points of grammar, Lee had begun to develop more serious objections. He was deeply troubled, for instance, by Erasmus’s decision to omit the comma Johanneum at 1 John 5:7, with its reference to the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit. In doing so, Lee believed, Erasmus was removing the main scriptural foundation for the Trinity, thus threatening to revive the Arian heresy that had thrown the Church into such turmoil more than a millennium earlier. Similarly, Lee (like Luther) feared that Erasmus’s questioning of Romans 5:12 as a scriptural foundation for the doctrine of original sin would encourage a revival of Pelagianism, with its heretical insistence on human perfectibility.
More generally, Lee had begun to develop doubts about the central premises of Erasmus’s enterprise—that the Vulgate had serious flaws and that they could be repaired through a knowledge of syntax and semantics. Far from restoring the Scriptures to their original purity, Erasmus seemed to be defacing a sacred text. The Latin translator of the Bible had been guided by the Holy Spirit, and whatever faults there might appear to be in the Vulgate, they actually served a divine purpose. Were Erasmus’s judgments to replace the sanctioned readings of the Fathers, popes, and councils? In Lee’s rough notes on Erasmus’s New Testament, one can detect the first signs of the great counterrevolution just beginning to take shape against the application of the new humanist methods to the Bible.
When his schedule allowed, Erasmus planned to make a preemptive strike against Lee. For the moment, however, he remained absorbed in his annotations. As the spring of 1518 approached, he felt that he had made enough progress to seek out a printer. He hoped to find one close to Louvain so that he would not have to travel far, but none, it turned out, had Greek type. Froben, of course, did, but Erasmus shrank from the prospect of making another trip to Basel. The thought of the dirty German inns with their reeking stoves made him queasy. In addition, Basel had recently been hit by the plague, and several prominent scholars had succumbed. On top of it all, a group of discharged soldiers known as the Black Band was plundering towns in the Rhineland, and there were many tales of travelers being murdered. Nonetheless, Erasmus felt he had no choice. “How I wish, my dear Bade, you had a good supply of Greek type!” he wrote to the printer Josse Bade in Paris. “As it is, I am obliged to go to Basel, at the risk of my life, for the New Testament cannot be published unless I am there in person.”
Erasmus could, however, take comfort in his cordial relations with the Louvain faculty. “They thank me openly for my Jerome, there are no complaints for my New Testament,” he wrote to a friend in the Burgundian court; “in fact the leaders of the faculty heartily approve. Not a dog barks, except a few friars of some sort at Cologne, I hear, and Bruges, but in the distance and behind my back.” On all sides he was being congratulated on his conquest of Lefèvre, and his paraphrase of Romans was winning broad praise. Soon, he felt sure, everyone would be speaking in two or three tongues rather than one and drawing Scripture from the clearest springs.
There remained the practical matter of getting to Basel. Erasmus needed both money and a horse, and to solicit them he sent a courier with letters to his friends in England. Since 1495, the export of horses from that country had been restricted by law, but he felt sure that one of his correspondents could find a way around it.
One of those letters went to Thomas More. Erasmus informed his friend that the Froben press was preparing to bring out a new, corrected edition of Utopia. He also noted that he was sending along three works: a treatise in praise of liberal education (by the British envoy Richard Pace); a proposal from the pope for a crusade against the Turks; and “the Conclusions on Papal pardons.” This last was undoubtedly Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses. That Erasmus did not mention Luther’s name suggests that he was not yet familiar with it. That would soon change.
16
A Drunken German
Winters in Wittenberg were always bleak. Raw winds swept in off the Central European plains, piercing mantles and penetrating walls. The variety of available foods shrank, making meals even more monotonous than usual. With the sun setting around four in the afternoon, families were trapped in their homes for long periods with little to distract them, and the itinerant preachers and peddlers who visited in warmer months appeared only rarely, deepening the town’s sense of isolation.
For Luther, the winter of 1517–1518 was especially difficult. Several times a week, he trudged through the sleet and slush to the town church to mount its pulpit and exhort his huddled congregants. In early 1518, he began a second course of lectures on the Psalms, and, standing before the rows of note-taking students, he again bore into these opaque verses in search of Christ’s redemptive presence. Despite his growing frustration with the devotional offices of his order, Luther continued to perform them, rising early in his frigid cell to say matins and holding vigils late into the icy night. To show his resoluteness, Luther went long periods without food or sleep, and the physical toll was mounting. “My poor worn body is exhausted by constant hardships—fasting, abstinence
, austerity in labor and clothing,” he wearily observed to Johann von Staupitz. The new cowl that Frederick had promised him a year earlier had not yet arrived, and Luther had to write to the elector to remind him of his pledge.
Most trying of all was the response to the Ninety-Five Theses. There wasn’t any. After the initial flurry of excitement, the authorities had taken no action, and no one had come forward to accept his invitation to debate. Luther was beset by doubts about what he had written. Some of the theses should perhaps have been omitted, while others seemed in need of more explanation. At night in his study, he began to provide it, taking up the theses one by one and seeking support for them not in Aquinas or Scotus or any other human source but in Scripture. As his watchword, he took Paul’s admonition at 1 Thessalonians 5:21: “Test everything; hold fast to what is good.”
In his loneliness, books became his lifeline. With great interest Luther was following the tracts and translations that were flowing from the humanist presses. Wolfgang Capito, the Basel scholar who had helped Erasmus with his New Testament and who now began corresponding with Luther, sent reports on the latest productions of the house of Froben. On the basis of these reports, Luther recommended to his friend Johann Lang a list of titles to buy at the upcoming Frankfurt fair: the newest edition of Erasmus’s Adages, his Querela Pacis, the dialogues of Lucian, More’s Utopia, and Capito’s own Institutiones Hebraicae (a guide to Hebrew grammar). Luther was especially eager to get a copy of Erasmus’s Apologia against Lefèvre. Having closely followed their exchange, he expressed regret “that such a conflict should have broken out between these great princes of learning.” Erasmus, he observed, “is certainly by far the superior of the two” but “also more violent, though he makes a great effort to preserve friendship.”
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