Fatal Discord

by Michael Massing

  Arriving in Basel on May 13, 1518, Erasmus was delighted to find himself back in this humanist haven, with its clean streets, quiet libraries, soaring cathedral, and clement weather. To accommodate him, Froben had a room outfitted with a fireplace rather than a stove. While thus able to avoid the usual reek, Erasmus quickly succumbed to the strange pestilence that was sweeping the city, and for more than a month he suffered from headaches, diarrhea, and abdominal pains.

  He could not afford to take time off, however. Erasmus’s first order of business was the annotations. In all, he had notes on more than six hundred passages. Wolfgang Capito, in his earlier warning to Erasmus, had urged him to “put a bridle of self-restraint” on his “abundant eloquence” and refrain from saying anything too controversial about the rules governing food, prayers, and penance. But Erasmus would not listen. In the first edition, he had begun the task of clearing away the thickets of sophistic speculation that had overgrown the text. He now wanted to complete the job—to use his knowledge of Greek and grammar to lay bare the true apostolic spirit within. Whereas in the earlier edition he had stuck mostly to points of grammar, he now ventured more deeply into matters of theology. In the process, he became more forthright. Of the five New Testament editions Erasmus would produce, the second would be the most provocative.

  At Matthew 11:30, for example, where Christ declares, “My yoke is easy, and my burden is light,” Erasmus offered a lengthy catalog of the many unnecessary demands he felt the clergy had imposed on the faithful. On matters of dress and diet, vows and feast days, the Church had encumbered the simple philosophy of Christ with a mass of man-made regulations. The duties of the priesthood had grown so complex that it was easier to learn the complete philosophy of Aristotle than to master them. “Let us drive out the heavenly yoke of men so that we may be truly under the light yoke of Christ,” Erasmus declared. “Evangelical love commands less and achieves more.”

  He was even bolder at Matthew 16:18. Here, Christ says to his chief disciple, “You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church.” Since Peter’s name in Greek (Petros) means “rock,” the Church had long maintained that Christ in this passage was designating Peter the titular head of his church; the popes, as the bishops of Rome, were considered his successors. But Erasmus (following Origen and other Fathers) argued that Christ, in using “rock,” was referring not to Peter but to the confession of faith in Christ himself, and that it was on this that he wanted his church built. “Rocky Peter represented the solid faith of the church,” Erasmus wrote, thus challenging the scriptural foundation of the papacy.

  At Matthew 23, where Jesus rebukes the Pharisees and scribes for creating heavy burdens and laying them on men’s shoulders, Erasmus condemned the proliferating shrines and relics venerated by so many Christians. What, he asked, would Jerome say if he could see the Virgin’s milk exhibited for money, or so many splinters of the True Cross displayed that one could build a large ship with them? “Here we have the hood of St. Francis, there Our Lady’s petticoat or St. Anne’s comb, or St. Thomas of Canterbury’s shoes,” presented not “as innocent aids to religion, but as the substance of religion itself—and all through the avarice of priests and the hypocrisy of monks playing on the credulity of the people.”

  At several points, Erasmus disputed the Church’s rules on sexuality. He called ecclesiastical celibacy too heavy a burden for most to bear, further questioned the sacramental status of marriage, and challenged the Church’s unshakable opposition to divorce. At the time, marriage was considered indissoluble and divorce was not recognized; only by obtaining an annulment—a cumbersome and difficult process—could a marriage be undone. In his note on 1 Corinthians 7:36–39, Erasmus acknowledged that Jesus had unequivocally condemned divorce, but, he asked, why was this one stricture so rigidly enforced while so many others had been eased? Given the high rates of unhappy marriages, a radical cure was needed, and divorce seemed to offer it.

  Erasmus’s refusal to put a bridle on his eloquence was nowhere more apparent than in his note on 1 Timothy 1:6. Using as a springboard Paul’s chastisement of those who engage in “idle talk,” Erasmus let loose a furious barrage at the Scholastics, listing some fifty highly obscure questions of the sort debated by them. Can God teach evil? Can he communicate the power of creating to the creature? Did the number of divine persons pertain to substance or to relation? Can God restore lost virginity? “Entire lives are wasted on these speculations, and men quarrel and curse and come to blows about them,” Erasmus wrote, not considering how the theologians of Louvain and Cologne might react.

  Throughout, Erasmus offered many opinionated asides. He censured the quarreling spirit of the monastic orders, the sloth of mendicant friars, theologians puffed up with learning, clerics enamored of war, crusaders seeking converts at the point of a sword, and church services filled with blaring trumpets and yelping choirs. He embraced humility, brotherhood, charity, wise princes, and pacifist priests. At every point, he sought to stress the human qualities of Christ and the value of inner spirituality over external show.

  As Erasmus was completing his annotations, Froben was preparing a new edition of the Enchiridion. When this manual of piety first appeared fifteen years earlier, it had quickly sunk from view, but the times had caught up with it, and booksellers were having trouble keeping it in stock. To help freshen the edition, Erasmus agreed to add a preface. Framed as a letter to his friend Paul Volz, a Benedictine abbot in Alsace, it would offer the clearest distillation of the Erasmian creed.

  The theologians, Erasmus wrote, had issued a flood of tracts addressing every conceivable question in the smallest detail, but who had the time to read them all? There were almost as many commentaries on the Sentences as there were theologians. Christian nations were preparing to fight the Turks, but even if they triumphed, how many of the vanquished would be won over if presented with the tomes of Ockham, Scotus, or Biel, with their discussions of instances, formalities, quiddities, and relativities? None of these volumes addressed what is truly essential—how to lead a good life modeled on the example of Christ. Because the Gospels and Epistles are difficult to understand, a group of saintly and learned men should be assigned the task of producing a brief but scholarly summary of “the whole philosophy of Christ,” with simple words that could make people understand that Christ’s yoke is easy and not harsh. Could anyone deny that the current generation was the most corrupt ever? When before had so much importance been attached to ceremonies? When had iniquity so abounded, or charity waxed so cold? While he had no wish to scold the Franciscans or Benedictines for being devoted to their rules, he did object “that some of them think their rule more important than the Gospel.”

  In the original edition of the Enchiridion, Erasmus had declared, Monachatus non est pietas—“Monasticism is not piety”—and this was continuing to rankle monks and mendicants, but he now pressed the point even more forcefully. In the Church’s early days, he noted, members of monastic communities had no aim other than to join with friends for a life based on the Gospels. They shunned riches and avoided honors, worked with their hands, and ruled not through violent language and whippings but by inspiration and example. Then, with the passage of time, wealth grew, ceremonies multiplied, and genuine piety cooled. Whereas monastic life was once “a refuge from the world,” many monks now devoted themselves to worldly business and exercised “a kind of despotism in human affairs,” yet because of their dress or the name they bore, they claimed so much sanctity for themselves that they considered others hardly Christian. Whether monk or layman, all must strive toward one goal—Christ and his teaching in all its purity. All should aid one another in achieving that goal, without envying those who have hurried ahead or disdaining those who have lagged behind. And when each has done what he can, he should behave not like the Pharisee of the Gospels, who boasts before God of his fasting and other good works, but like the servant who does what he knows he should do and speaks of it to no one.

  Erasmus�
�s description of early monasticism was highly romanticized. Some of the early hermits nearly killed themselves with spectacular feats of fasting and flagellation. But the idealization served his goal of censuring current monastic excesses and trying to restore a simplified version of the faith, shorn of ornate ritual and abstruse doctrine. The new edition of the Enchiridion would thus heighten Erasmus’s unpopularity in the abbeys of Europe, but outside them it would achieve extraordinary acclaim as a manifesto of Christian humanism, promoting the idea that to be a pious Christian, one must not only have faith in Christ but also imitate his charity, modesty, and compassion.

  For alert readers, there was one passage in this manifesto that stood out. Modern-day Philistines, it stated, had gained strength by preaching not divine but rather human things, which “tend not to Christ’s glory but to the profit of those who traffic in indulgences, in compositions, in dispensations, and suchlike merchandise.” This traffic was all the more perilous because those engaging in it “give their greed a facade of great names, eminent princes, the supreme pontiff, even Christ himself.” This was an unmistakable reference to Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses.

  While Erasmus was in Basel, everyone was talking about the German friar. At the 1518 fall fair in Frankfurt, Froben had obtained several of his works in Latin, and back in Basel his staff could see how explosive they were. With Luther’s views only vaguely known outside Germany, a lucrative market beckoned. Working in secret, Wolfgang Capito (who was helping Erasmus with his New Testament), together with Johannes Oecolampadius, Beatus Rhenanus, and several other scholars, began preparing a collected edition of his works. (In the absence of copyright laws, they did not need Luther’s permission.) In a brief preface, Capito captured the excitement Luther was stirring among humanists: “Here you have the theological works of the Reverend Father Martin Luther, whom many consider a Daniel” sent by Christ “to correct abuses and restore the evangelic and Pauline divinity to theologians who have forgotten the ancient commentaries and occupy themselves with the merest logical and verbal trifles.” The “conscience of the laity is now awakened,” and it should “resist the tutelage of professional theologians.” The fact that Capito did not give his name, and that the volume bore no colophon or place of publication, reflected the risks involved in publishing Luther.

  A thick quarto of 488 pages, the anthology appeared in October 1518 with the title Ad Leonem X (“To Leo X”). In addition to the Ninety-Five Theses and Luther’s long explanation of them, it included his sermons on penance, indulgences, and the ban, plus his replies to Prierias and Eck. (On the title page, the typesetters mischievously changed Prierias’s identification from magister palatii, “master of the palace,” to magirus palatii, “cook of the palace.”) Copies were carted to the Rhine for transport to the towns along its banks, and colporteurs set off with them for France, Switzerland, and Italy. For the first time, Luther’s defiant statements about the Church and its practices were made available to Latin-speaking Christians across Europe.

  At the same time that Froben was preparing the Luther collection and Erasmus’s New Testament, he was also readying a new edition of More’s Utopia—testimony to his house’s dominant position in European publishing. But Erasmus would not be around to witness this historic moment. Eager to return to Louvain, he arranged for his famulus (secretary) to remain behind to help oversee the proofreading of the annotations. He also sent letters to several high-ranking friends in Rome requesting their help in gaining the pope’s blessing for the new edition.

  Erasmus left Basel in early September 1518. It would take him eighteen days to reach Louvain, and his detailed account of his journey—written after his arrival in the form of a letter to Beatus Rhenanus—was meant to be read by his friends and the interested public. Offering a colorful look at the rigors of travel in that age, the letter was an early example of the tell-all travelogue, in which no mishap is too small or intimate to relate. Erasmus described the stench of the horses, the belching stoves, the noise of packed parlors in grimy inns, and the terrible meal he had in the town of Breisach (“dirty pease porridge, lumps of meat, sausage réchauffé more than once—it was simply revolting”). He recounted how, in the town of Boppard, he was recognized and pointed out to the customs officer, Christoph Eschenfelder. Excited, the man insisted on escorting Erasmus to his house. There, on his desk, lay a number of Erasmian volumes. Erasmus expressed delight at finding “a customs officer devoted to the Muses.” A ship’s crew, however, became angry at the delay, and so the officer sent over to them several flagons of red wine. Thus lubricated, the shipman’s wife nearly killed the cook-maid with her large basting spoon.

  Leaving the town of Bedburg, Erasmus got caught in a powerful rainstorm, which caused his carriage to shake so badly on the rocky pavement that by the time he reached Aachen he was weak with exhaustion. There, he ate some stockfish, some of it still raw. Retiring to the inn, he became so ill that he had to put his finger down his throat.

  Arriving in Louvain, Erasmus felt sure that his rooms would be too cold to inhabit, so he stayed with his friend, the printer Dirk Martens. Over the next four weeks, while convalescing there, he hurriedly finished his translation of the New Testament. His goal was to produce a Latin text that would speak to the educated Christians of his day while remaining true to the original. As he explained, the “countrified and simple style” in which the New Testament was originally written was appropriate for those early days, but now it was necessary to “have it in neater dress, provided it be simple still.” Erasmus was thus embracing the principle—radical at the time—that translations of the Bible should be tailored to the needs of each age.

  Given the Vulgate’s sacred status, however, every change was fraught with risk. Erasmus was nonetheless determined to follow the call of his muse, grammar. A good example came at Matthew 6:12—a passage from the Lord’s Prayer. Dimitte nobis debita nostra, stated the Vulgate—“forgive us our debts.” From his examination of Greek manuscripts, Erasmus had concluded that it would be more accurate to say Remitte nobis debita nostra—“remit our debts.” And so it would read in his translation. Though relatively minor, the change would open him to the charge that he was altering the Lord’s Prayer. At Matthew 3:2, he decided to translate poenitentiam agite not as poeniteat vos, as he did in the first edition, but as resipiscite, meaning “come to your senses,” which he felt more accurately reflected the sense of the underlying Greek term, metanoia.

  Even more daring was the one-word alteration he made at the start of the Gospel of John. In the Vulgate, this read In principio erat verbum—“In the beginning was the Word.” For centuries, this phrase had rung out from pulpits, been invoked in sermons, become etched in the minds of churchgoers. But Erasmus felt that verbum did not accurately reflect the underlying Greek word, logos. Sermo seemed more apt. Whereas verbum connotes a single word, sermo means an ongoing discourse, conversation, or speech, which is what John seemed to have in mind. In the first edition, Erasmus had declined to make such a change for fear of the protests it would raise, but he now decided to act on his philological principles and translate the passage as In principio erat sermo. Scholars, he felt sure, would understand.

  Beyond such specific changes, Erasmus prepared a fifty-page introductory essay, titled Ratio Verae Theologiae (“True Theological Method”), which he hoped would nudge students of the Bible onto a new course. Rather than look to Scripture as a source of doctrine and divine messages, he argued, exegetes should regard it as literature—as a text to be deconstructed, emended, repaired, and expounded. Pointing to Origen and Jerome as models, Erasmus maintained that the Bible scholar must first of all learn the three biblical tongues. He should familiarize himself with the distinctive features of the language of Scripture—its tropes and allegories, idioms and enigmas. He should be conversant with history, customs, law, philosophy, dialectic, myth, astronomy, geography, music, architecture, animals, and plants. Above all, he should take the text on its own terms, as an account of
real people living at a particular time, so that he might not only read and follow the story but see it, “for it is wonderful how much light—how much life, so to speak—is thrown by this method” onto what by traditional methods seems a “dry and lifeless” text. Approached in this way, the Bible could once again become a living document, and Jesus could emerge as a truly exemplary teacher with qualities found in neither Moses nor Socrates nor any other man.

  The Ratio Verae Theologiae was at bottom an assault on Scholastic exegetes, seeking to replace them with a new cadre of scholars armed not with syllogisms and corollaries but with grammar and vocabulary. It was in many ways an elitist program, demanding so many qualities in a Bible scholar as to disqualify all but a handful of specialists. Nonetheless, the essay would stir so much interest that it would be printed separately and appear in more than a dozen freestanding editions. With it, Erasmus was laying the foundation for a new approach to the Bible that would lead to the higher criticism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

  Anticipating the protests that he felt sure would come, Erasmus drafted another preface with the impish title “Summary Arguments Against Certain Contentious and Boorish People.” To those who would maintain that he was not a qualified theologian, he wrote, “I have played the role of grammarian. If they despise the grammarian, let them take note that the emperor does not despise the services of his barber or secretary.” Throughout, he had never willingly departed “even a finger’s breadth from the judgment of the church. . . . I have written annotations, not laws, and I have proposed some things for discussion, not to be immediately construed as findings.”