In his letter to Leo, Luther affirmed his deep respect for Rome but reiterated his refusal to recant; to do otherwise, he maintained, would further defile the Church. His refusal meant in effect that Miltitz’s mission had failed. In a stunning act of duplicity, the envoy withheld Luther’s letter and instead sent the pope his own report. A complete misrepresentation, it stated that Luther had repented of his views but had been unwilling to do so before Cajetan for fear of being severely reprimanded. On receiving the report, Leo was filled with joy, and he drafted a warm letter to Luther. “With paternal love,” he wrote, he happily accepted his explanations. His gratitude was so great that he wished to hear the recantation in person, so Luther, on receiving his letter, should immediately prepare to travel to Rome.
When Leo’s letter arrived at the electoral court, Frederick wisely decided not to deliver it, for he knew that Luther would reject the pope’s demand out of hand and thus further incense Rome. The whole Miltitz affair, with its bumbling and bluster, captured Rome’s ineptness as it sought to stifle the dissident Augustinian.
It was not just inside Germany that Luther’s fame was growing. In February 1519, Johann Froben sent him a report on the sales of Ad Leonem X, the collection of his works published the previous autumn: “We have sent six hundred copies to France and Spain; they are sold at Paris, and are even read and approved by the doctors of the Sorbonne.” A bookseller from Pavia had taken a parcel of his books to Italy “to distribute them among all the cities. Nor does he do it so much for gain as to aid piety.” Ad Leonem X had also been exported to Brabant and England. “We have sold out all your books except ten copies, and never remember to have sold any more quickly.” (Within ten days, Froben added, he expected to bring out a new edition of Erasmus’s New Testament, “much enlarged.”)
Froben’s letter hints at the excitement that Ad Leonem X was causing as it circulated throughout Western Europe. For the first time, burghers and magistrates were able to read in a single volume the friar’s views on indulgences, penance, excommunication, and clerical abuses, and the effect was electrifying. “Switzerland and the Rhine country as far as the ocean are solid for Luther, and his friends in these regions are both powerful and learned,” Wolfgang Capito informed him in February 1519. A lawyer in Basel, writing to a friend in Metz who had asked him to buy some volumes by Luther for him, noted that he had scoured the whole city without finding any, “as they were all sold long ago.” Huldrych Zwingli, a reformist priest who was then rising to prominence in Zurich, ordered several hundred copies for colporteurs to distribute on horseback among the laity. In England, agents of Thomas Wolsey, Henry VIII’s top adviser, found copies concealed in bales of cotton.
In Wittenberg, couriers arrived with letters from sympathetic clerics in Constance, Ulm, Augsburg, Strasbourg, Breslau, and Paris. At the Black Cloister, dignitaries and students stopped by with letters of introduction, hoping for a meeting with Luther. Applications to the university surged. “Our town can hardly hold them, due to the lack of lodging facilities,” Luther observed. Melanchthon’s lectures, despite beginning at six in the morning, regularly drew four hundred people, and Luther’s classes were nearly as packed.
Luther took advantage of the university’s growing prestige to press his program to overhaul its curriculum. Courses on Aristotelian physics and logic were dropped in favor of such humanist favorites as Pliny, Quintilian, and Ovid’s Metamorphoses. “In this way,” Luther wrote to Spalatin, “the subtle hair-splitting finally may perish altogether and genuine philosophy, theology, and all the arts may be drawn from their true sources.” “The best studies,” Spalatin observed in turn, “are so successfully taught at Wittenberg that you would call it another Athens.”
Luther himself was sounding increasingly Athenian. Captivated by Greek, he bought a volume of Homer, and in his letters Greek terms appeared with growing frequency. With Melanchthon’s help, he was preparing for publication his notes for the lectures he had given on Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians in the winter of 1516 and 1517, and from start to finish he relied heavily on grammar and Greek; he cited Jerome nearly twice as often as he did Augustine and quoted Erasmus almost as much. In his very first sentence, Luther paid tribute to the Dutch scholar: “Now that the whole Christian world knows Greek, and the Annotations of that most eminent theologian Erasmus are in everyone’s hands and are diligently used, there is no need to point out what the word ‘apostle’ means—except to those for whom I am writing, not Erasmus.” In a letter to two colleagues, Luther expressed regret at not having yet received the paraphrase of Galatians that he had heard was being prepared by Erasmus, “that theologian too great even to envy.”
When it came to theological truths, however, Luther remained clear-eyed about their differences. In his notes on Galatians, Luther returned over and over to his key themes of human futility and divine grace, the inutility of works and the saving power of faith. As he starkly put it, “Free will collapses, good works collapse, the righteousness of the Law collapses. . . . Only faith and the invoking of God’s completely pure mercy remain.” This ran directly counter to Erasmus’s belief in human agency and the ability of men and women to use their reason and willpower to show modesty, forbearance, and other Christlike traits.
Nonetheless, Luther was heartened by Erasmus’s evident support for some of his key ideas. Wolfgang Capito had written to him about Erasmus’s admiration for the Ninety-Five Theses, and Luther himself had seen Erasmus’s jab (in his new preface to the Enchiridion) at those who profit from indulgences. Given the intense pressure he was under, a few words of support from the great Latin laureate could provide a critical lifeline, and so in late March 1519 Luther decided to write to him directly. Eager to impress, he traded his usual bluntness for the copious style of the humanists.
Given all that he and Erasmus had in common, Luther wrote, it was strange that they had not yet become acquainted. In a sense, though, he felt that he already did know Erasmus, for “where is there someone whose heart Erasmus does not occupy, whom Erasmus does not teach, over whom Erasmus does not hold sway?” Of course, Luther went on, it was presumptuous for him to approach so great a man with “unwashed hands” (a phrase from the Adages) and without a proper introduction. But, having been encouraged by Wolfgang Capito and by Erasmus’s preface to the Enchiridion, he felt compelled to acknowledge Erasmus’s outstanding spirit, which had so enriched his own. The hearts of all his readers glowed with gratitude and love for him, and Luther counted himself among them. Since his own name was now becoming known, he continued, some might misinterpret the silence from the Dutchman. “As a result, my Erasmus, amiable man, if it seems acceptable to you, acknowledge also this little brother in Christ. He is certainly most devoted to you and has the greatest affection for you.”
The clumsiness of Luther’s language shows how hard it was for him to show such deference—and how strongly he craved Erasmus’s support. Justus Jonas, a young Erfurt humanist then visiting Wittenberg, was about to leave for Louvain in the hope of seeing Erasmus, and he agreed to take the letter to him.
Louvain itself, however, was in an uproar, and Luther was the cause. With the arrival of the Froben collection, the theologians there were finally able to read the friar’s views in concentrated form, and they were aghast. Luther’s rejection of indulgences, his disparagement of penance, his opposition to the ban, his challenge to papal authority—all seemed not only erroneous but heretical. Given the clear danger the book posed to impressionable minds, the religious authorities immediately sought (with limited success) to ban it. In addition, several professors were selected to read through the volume and extract passages that seemed offensive. An assembly was convened, and over several sessions agreement was reached on those articles that seemed to deserve censure.
On a matter of such gravity, however, the Louvain theologians were reluctant to act on their own, and for a second opinion they turned to their colleagues at the university in Cologne. The Dominicans on its faculty had
special authority in matters of doctrine. Jacob van Hoogstraten, the inquisitor who had so relentlessly pursued Johannes Reuchlin, had studied at Louvain and had close ties to many of its professors. On February 22, 1519, a bachelor of theology left Louvain for Cologne with a list of suspect passages from the Froben edition.
It was at the very institution to which Erasmus was attached, then, that the formal proceedings against Luther began. The impact on Erasmus’s own situation was immediate and dramatic. The Louvain doctors at that moment were especially sensitive because the controversy over Reuchlin had taken a decisive turn against them. In 1517, there had appeared an expanded edition of the Letters of Obscure Men, a scathing satire of the Scholastic doctors. The first edition, which had appeared two years earlier, depicted Hoogstraten, Johannes Pfefferkorn, and the Cologne theologians as vulgar pedants who mangled Latin, chased women, drank prodigiously, and engaged in endless quarrels over absurd theological propositions. (One friar mulls whether Jews who convert to Christianity grow back their foreskins.) The new edition was even more caustic, and it frequently alluded to Erasmus as a supporter of the humanist cause. (Erasmus strongly disapproved.) In 1519, support for Reuchlin in Europe was soaring while the Cologne faculty had become a laughingstock. All of which had embittered the conservatives toward Erasmus. Now, in Luther’s writings, they saw the fruit of Erasmus’s own teachings; some were convinced that Erasmus had helped him.
The first volley against Erasmus came from Jan Briart, the vice-chancellor of the university. Speaking at a graduation ceremony in February 1519, he declared that it was impious to praise marriage at the expense of celibacy. Though he mentioned no one by name, it was clear to whom he was referring. A short time earlier, a Louvain printer—hungry for material by Erasmus—had published his Encomium Matrimonii, a paean to marriage that Erasmus had written more than twenty years earlier. In praising marriage, Erasmus had not exactly advocated carnal bliss; his ideal Christian marriage was chaste almost to the point of celibacy. But he had called the single state “a barren way of life hardly becoming to a man” and held up wedlock as superior—an insupportable position to conservatives like Briart. When Erasmus pointed out to him that he had actually written the tract two decades earlier, the vice-chancellor withdrew his comments.
It was too late, however. As if on cue, all the anger and resentment that had been building up at Erasmus and his mockery of monks, criticism of the Vulgate, and broadsides against Julius suddenly exploded. From the pulpit and lectern, friars and theologians inveighed against Erasmus, the New Learning, and the whole idea of reform.
Erasmus’s standing was further weakened by the progress being made by the College of Three Tongues. In the spring of 1519, a large building was purchased in the city’s fish market to house the institute. Given Erasmus’s aversion to fish, the location was hardly ideal, but the prospect of a permanent home for his prized college outweighed any potential blow to his gastrointestinal system. The Louvain theologians, on the other hand, were unhappy with this outpost of Greek and grammar, seeing it as a Trojan horse aimed at undermining their own authority. Jacobus Latomus, an outspoken defender of orthodoxy who since 1517 had loudly criticized Erasmus, published two dialogues deriding pseudo-theologians who sought to make a knowledge of rhetoric, literature, and languages necessary for divine studies; though he, too, avoided mentioning Erasmus by name, his target was no less obvious.
Edward Lee, meanwhile, was continuing to comb Erasmus’s New Testament for errors. On his return from Basel, Erasmus had learned that the Englishman now had more than two hundred notes. Lee refused to let him see them, and with rumors spreading of their tartness, Erasmus in a fit of pique challenged Lee to go public with them. Lee had initially had no such intention, but with Erasmus’s goading he prepared to do just that.
The attacks against Erasmus seemed so broad and coordinated that he suspected an actual conspiracy at work, directed at not just him but the whole movement to promote good literature. The university of Louvain, he lamented to a colleague, “the peaceful home of literary studies, has been racked by extraordinary turmoil, the like of which I have never seen in all my life.” The clerical clans “have made a division of labor among themselves, some of them talking nonsense at the dinner-table or in the council-chamber, others ranting to the ignorant mob which is so easily imposed upon; some arguing in the lecture-room, some dropping their poison in the ears of princes.”
Amid all this contention, Erasmus heard from Basel that Froben wanted to publish more Luther. The prospect alarmed him. From the passages in Ad Leonem X that he had read, he could see that, while it contained clear echoes of his own work, the language was much stronger, the tone far sharper. Any further airing of Luther’s views could provoke a crackdown that might well undermine his own more gradual efforts at reform. And so Erasmus implored his publisher to refrain from printing any more of Luther.
This put Froben in a difficult spot. Erasmus was his premier writer and the main source of his reputation as Europe’s leading publisher. But the Luther collection had sold faster than anything of Erasmus’s, and the market for this fresh new voice seemed huge. Capito, who had been the main force behind the volume, was especially eager to follow it with more, and when he learned of Erasmus’s cease-and-desist order to Froben, he urged Erasmus to reconsider: “Do not, I beg you, exaggerate this business of Martin into a public issue. You know how much your vote matters. I really mean this.” While there was much in Luther’s work that he himself did not like, Capito noted, it was important that his reputation not suffer. “This will encourage the rest of the younger generation to risk something in the cause of liberty in Christ.” In Germany, there were many distinguished people who wished Erasmus and Luther equally well, while Luther and his party were devoted to Erasmus. Luther’s enemies desired nothing more than to see Erasmus break with him. And so, Capito pleaded, “Do not let Louvain prove an obstacle.”
But Erasmus had seen the inquisitors destroy Reuchlin’s reputation and knew they could do the same to him. And so he held firm: if Froben did not give up Luther, he would give up Froben.
The threat worked. Apart from a few minor texts, Froben would publish no more Luther. It would prove a fateful decision—for Froben, not Luther. With so many presses now in operation, Froben’s withdrawal simply left the field open to others, and new editions of Ad Leonem X soon appeared in Strasbourg, Antwerp, Vienna, and beyond. More generally, the printing industry as a whole was about to undergo a dramatic transformation, leaving Froben—and Erasmus—behind.
To that point, that industry had been dominated by large folios of interest mainly to theologians, clerics, schools, and scholars. Froben’s reputation rested on his skill in producing serious books of the highest quality, both in appearance and in content, of which Erasmus’s New Testament was the supreme example. Erasmus no doubt had Froben in mind when, in a preamble he prepared in early 1519 for a new edition of Livy’s History, he paid tribute to printing as an “almost superhuman art” that had made formerly rare works available at very reasonable prices. If Ptolemy Philadelphus had earned such lasting renown from the library he had founded at Alexandria, “what recompense do we not owe to those who daily offer us whole libraries, a whole world so to say of books, in every language and every branch of literature?” But, Erasmus went on, he wished that printers would confine themselves to producing books on subjects that truly deserved it—to restoring the great works of antiquity rather than “adding modern works to the pile.”
Erasmus, in short, remained wedded to the great scholarly mission of printing’s early decades—the recovery and dissemination of classical and patristic texts. By the end of the second decade of the sixteenth century, however, the hunger for such works was waning and an appetite was growing for texts that were shorter, cheaper, and more topical. This new generation of texts was aimed at a broader, less rarefied audience. And here Luther would lead the way. Around this time he began to write at the furious clip (twenty to thirty titles
a year) that he would maintain for many years to come. In 1519 alone he would produce thirteen homiletic pieces (apart from other, more polemical works), most of them written in German and appearing in pamphlet form. They were often intensely practical, with titles like A Brief Instruction on How Confession Should Be Made and A Short Way to Understand and Say the Lord’s Prayer for Young Children. The ten-page Meditation on Christ’s Passion, which described the mental state with which Christians should approach Easter, appeared in more than a dozen editions in its first year alone. Through such shorter works, Luther was able to reach the weavers and plowmen whom Erasmus had cited in the Paraclesis.
The flow of texts from Luther’s pen was so great that rumors spread that he was not working alone, but alone he did work, in his small room over the passageway between the cloister and the brewery, writing late into the night in his neat, compact hand. Messengers from the print shop would wait at his door for copy, then rush it off to be set and printed, then return the next day for more. The writing came effortlessly. “I have a swift hand and a quick memory,” Luther observed. “When I write, it just flows out; I do not have to press and squeeze.” (He also rarely rewrote, which helps explain the disorganized nature of many of his works.) Somehow, this farmer’s grandson who had grown up among belching smelters and had spent so much of his adult life in classrooms and monastic cells had managed to develop a forceful, penetrating style that could simultaneously rouse and console, incite and entertain.
Luther’s literary power derived not just from his wide vocabulary and rich imagery but also from the sound and cadence of his sentences. He enjoyed onomatopoeia, wordplay, and puns on opponents’ names, and he could pass quickly from soaring invocations of divine majesty to vulgar phrases rooted in the Saxon soil. “Here is the beast in its stable, said the devil as he shoved a fly up his mother’s backside” was a typical jeer. When it came to coarseness and invective, Luther had few equals.
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