Fatal Discord

by Michael Massing

  A copy of the judgment was immediately sent to Adrian of Utrecht. This renowned Louvain professor (and future Pope Adrian VI) was now in Spain, serving as the bishop of Tortosa. An endorsement by him would lend weight to the authority of the judgment against Luther, and publication was held off pending its arrival.

  Toward Erasmus, however, the theologians felt no such inhibition. The faculty’s condemnation of Luther served as a sort of tocsin for campus conservatives, summoning them to battle against the enemies of the faith. Erasmus was considered chief among them. “Gangs of conspirators,” he complained, were defaming him everywhere:

  at drinking-parties, in markets, in committees, in druggists’ shops, in carriages, at the barber’s, in the brothels, in public and private classrooms, in university lectures and in sermons, in confidential conversations, in the privacy of the confessional, in bookshops, in the taverns of the poor, in the courts of the rich and in kings’ palaces, among superstitious old men and blockheads rich as Midas, to the ignorant public, and to foolish women.

  There was no place these assailants could not penetrate, no lie they would not tell, to make him “into an object of general hatred.” The ringleaders were the Dominicans and the Carmelites—beggar bullies, he called them—whose ultimate goal was nothing less than the destruction of the humanities.

  In his desperation, Erasmus appealed to Leo X. “The battle grows more barbarous, with monstrous abuse on either side, and poisoned pamphlets are the weapons,” he wrote to the pope. “Curse answers curse, and discord ripens into madness.” Erasmus urged Leo to impose a ban on all contention of this kind so that those lacking proficiency in languages “would cease to cackle like geese at humane studies.” Everyone “should actively pursue his calling without denigrating those of other men.”

  Even had Leo wanted to impose such a ban, however, he lacked the means to enforce it. What’s more, Erasmus himself would have trouble adhering to his own standard, as became clear in his dealings with Edward Lee. Throughout the summer and autumn of 1519, the determined Englishman had continued to compile his notes on Erasmus’s New Testament, to Erasmus’s growing alarm. Since 1514, when he had received the letter from Martin Dorp warning him not to tamper with the Vulgate, Erasmus had faced efforts by conservatives to block his attempts to restore the New Testament, but Lee’s notes posed the most serious threat yet. Though at this point Erasmus did not know exactly what was in them, he suspected that Lee was working closely with the mendicant orders to impugn him. His fear swelling into paranoia, his self-regard feeding a morbid touchiness, he was prepared to use every available means to foil his challenger.

  There were two printers in Antwerp who had Greek type, and Lee, hoping to enlist one of them, went there. Erasmus followed. One of the printers agreed to take on Lee’s project, and he began setting it in type, only suddenly to renege. A servant of Erasmus’s was seen entering the printing house—part of a plot, Lee believed, to sabotage the printing. When Lee asked the printer to unlock the type and distribute it back into the cases, he refused—no doubt (Lee believed) so that he could show the copy to Erasmus. The other printer, when approached, was initially eager to take on the job, but within an hour he, too, reconsidered. When Lee left Antwerp for Louvain, Erasmus followed his coach part of the way to make sure that he did not return to Antwerp without his knowledge.

  Eventually, Lee managed to find a willing printer in Paris, and when Erasmus saw the finished product, he exploded. “The English viper has burst out at last!” he declared to Wolfgang Capito. “Before us stands Edward Lee, an eternal blot on that isle so highly thought of.” The whole world had expected a work of scholarship, but “here before us is a book running over, raving mad I would say, with brawling and fishwives’ abuse. . . . No harlot was ever so brazen, no pimp a more abandoned liar.” This “three-half-penny booby is as pleased with himself as if the world were likely to believe this to be a human being speaking.”

  Using his amateurish knowledge of Greek, Lee (Erasmus believed) had twisted Erasmus’s words, distorted his message, and incited hatred against him. At the start of his volume Lee had placed a tendentious table of contents that listed Erasmus’s alleged offenses, including changing the readings of the Church, adding or omitting things of his own initiative, thinking about marriage in a non-Catholic manner, disparaging Augustine, favoring the Arians, championing the Pelagians, ridiculing the language of the translator, and bringing to life all heresies.

  Many of Lee’s notes dealt with Erasmus’s scholarship, challenging his changes in the tenses, cases, articles, conjunctions, and word order of the Vulgate. Some notes, though, were darkly accusatory. At Luke 1:28, for instance, he lambasted Erasmus for giving a lascivious cast to the angel Gabriel’s greeting to Mary (“Hail, beloved one”), making him sound like a suitor. “It seems to me that one ought to speak more reverently and chastely about so sacred a matter and so sublime a message.” Lee also expressed dismay at Erasmus’s preference for Jerome over Augustine and his criticism of the latter for his imperfect knowledge of Greek. He reproved Erasmus for maintaining that the New Testament does not support the sacramental status of marriage, for asserting that private auricular confession was not practiced in ancient times, and for implying (in his comments on Romans 5) that the idea of original sin has no scriptural foundation but rather “is an invention of the theologians.” Erasmus was thus depriving the Church “of a weapon to slay the heretics,” i.e., the Pelagians, with their insistence on man’s moral perfectibility.

  Erasmus’s greatest offense in Lee’s eyes, however, was his decision to omit 1 John 5:7, the comma Johanneum, with its reference to the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit. Had Erasmus more thoroughly checked old manuscripts, Lee maintained, he would not have made such an egregious error. “Such great negligence comes close to impiety in such sacred and venerable teachings and in a passage so necessary to the faith.” With the exclusion of this passage, “we will fall once again on Arian times and an endlessly lamentable discord in the holy church.” If Arianism again reared its head, he asked, “will not every kind of upheaval, every kind of faction, quarrel, and tempest arise?” More generally, Lee warned of the long-term damage that Erasmus’s Novum Testamentum could inflict on the faith: “Let the church be mindful and take measures at the outset, lest what began as smoke turn into fire.” In Erasmus’s biblical notes, then, Lee saw a threat to the very survival of the Church.

  In Lee’s work, in turn, Erasmus saw nothing but insult, abuse, and poison, and he began orchestrating a campaign to discredit him. “My friends,” he instructed one of them, Justus Jonas,

  are to write letters highly critical of Lee, but taking care to praise English scholars and the great men in England who support them, and bearing down on Lee and no one else; and him they are to laugh at as a foolish, boastful, deceitful little man, rather than attack him seriously. I should like to see many letters of this kind put together, so that he may be overwhelmed all the deeper. I should like them to be collected from the learned writers and sent me by safe hand, and I will revise them myself and see to their publication. Great variety is desirable.

  The letters soon began arriving. “I pray he may enjoy the long and lingering death which he deserves,” the eminent humanist Willibald Pirckheimer wrote from Nuremberg. From Basel, Bonifacius Amerbach declared that “out of his native darkness crawls this worm, to gnaw at the splendid harvest which is ours without having won respect himself in any field of study. . . . Numbskulls of this type dare write books in this learned age of ours, and dare to write them against Erasmus!” Another letter, addressed to Lee himself, bluntly concluded, “Go hang yourself!” More than two dozen such letters along with some insulting verses were brought out as a collection by Froben in the summer of 1520. Two schoolmasters assigned their students the task of vilifying Lee, and a copy of Lee’s book at a Franciscan library was smeared with excrement. When a vituperative attack on Lee arrived from Ghent, a friend of Erasmus had it printed and posted in mor
e than ten places, including the doors of churches. One libelous poster was affixed to the door of Lee’s own dwelling, making him fear for his life.

  “If a clandestine attack is made on me, Erasmus is undoubtedly the person responsible,” he wrote to the Dutchman, putting him on notice. He called attention to the glaring gap between Erasmus’s ugly tactics and his lofty appeals to Christian brotherhood. “Where now is that Christian bosom of yours that breathes nothing but endless charity and reticence and all that is friendly and straightforward?” While acknowledging his own occasional intemperance in the dispute, Lee sarcastically alluded to the famous “modesty” Erasmus had shown in his letters to his friends, in which he had called Lee “in one place a venomous little serpent, in another a monster rather than a man, in another a past master of innuendo!” He added: “Slanders, slanders, slanders—it is your favorite word.” With the threats against him turning ever more violent, Lee decided to flee Louvain for England.

  Erasmus, meanwhile, began preparing a detailed—and scornful—rebuttal of Lee’s notes. He mocked Lee’s scholarship, questioned his motives, dismissed him as a pedant, and accused him of hallucinating. “Good God!” he wrote about his comments on Gabriel’s greeting. “Does Lee now teach the art of courtship? . . . He shudders at the word ‘suitor,’ he recoils from the word ‘loving,’ from the word ‘groomsman,’ crying out that I used these words in a frivolous manner, as if I had had in mind something unchaste.” Erasmus was especially emphatic in defending his omission of the comma Johanneum. Having examined more than seven Greek manuscripts and finding the passage in none of them, “I did the only thing possible and indicated what was lacking in the Greek texts.” If he had come across one manuscript that had the reading found in the Vulgate, he would have added it. “Let Lee produce a Greek manuscript that has what is lacking in my edition and let him prove that I had access to this manuscript . . . then he may accuse me of negligence in sacred doctrines.” From Oxford to Rome, word of Erasmus’s challenge quickly spread, and the search for such a manuscript was on.

  Erasmus was equally dismissive of Lee’s prediction that his New Testament would set off tempests and conflagrations: “I beseech you, what is it that will bring us such a flood of evils, so many schisms, so many heresies, so many upheavals, so many tempests, so many shipwrecks? . . . It is now more than three years since the New Testament as edited by me has been in people’s hands. Has any upheaval arisen from it?” On the contrary, “Many say that they made considerable progress on account of my labor.”

  In terms of scholarship, Lee’s notes were pedantic and pedestrian, but when it came to the threat posed by Erasmus’s work, he would prove clear-eyed. Erasmus’s decision to omit the comma Johanneum from his New Testament would help inspire the rise of an anti-Trinitarian movement that, spreading during the Reformation, would eventually lead to the founding of Unitarianism, centered in the belief that God exists in one person only. As for Lee’s broader fears about a great conflagration, the spread of Luther’s ideas seemed to be providing the spark.

  Lee’s voice was soon joined by others. Henry Standish, a Franciscan graduate of Oxford who was a popular preacher at the court of Henry VIII and a mentor of Lee’s, was so enraged by Erasmus’s decision to use sermo rather than verbum at the start of the Gospel of John that he made it the subject of a fiery sermon delivered at St. Paul’s churchyard in London. For more than a thousand years, he declared, the whole Church had read “In principio erat verbum,” but now “a little Greek somebody will teach us that we ought to read ‘In principio erat sermo.’” Unless all new translations were immediately suppressed, he warned, the Christian faith would face utter destruction, and he appealed to the magistrates and citizens who were present to rally around the Church in its hour of trial.

  In a hastily written defense, Erasmus sarcastically noted that John in his Gospel had written not verbum but logos, and he wondered why Jerome had chosen to translate it that way, since sermo seemed to far better capture the idea of a speech or continuous narration, which was clearly John’s meaning. Despite Erasmus’s strenuous efforts to justify his choice, sermo would become a rallying cry for his opponents.

  In early 1520, the statement on Luther that the Louvain faculty had sought from Adrian of Utrecht finally arrived from Spain. It was unsparing. “I am greatly surprised that one who errs so manifestly and obstinately and who scatters his opinions broadcast is allowed to err with impunity and with impunity to draw others into his pernicious errors,” he wrote. Those errors were “such crude and palpable heresies on their face that not even a pupil of theology of the first grade ought to have been caught by them.” The Louvain faculty deserved praise for resisting the “pestiferous dogmas” of this insolent man.

  With Adrian’s imprimatur, the Louvain theologians were now ready to proceed. They sent the articles condemned by the two faculties to Dirk Martens, the Louvain printer, to be typeset. Appearing on February 20, 1520, the Condemnation of Luther by Cologne and Louvain marked the first formal censure of the German reformer. Together with Lee’s attack on Erasmus, this document moved Louvain into the forefront of the opposition to the reform movement. “The university here has developed incurable insanity,” Erasmus observed to Justus Jonas on April 20.

  In fact, the events in these months in Louvain were the first steps on the road to the Council of Trent, the historic conclave of the mid-sixteenth century that would help set in motion the great Catholic pushback against Protestantism and which would set the course of the Roman Church for the next four hundred years.

  22

  Thunderclaps

  From across Europe, theologically curious and spiritually hungry Christians were steadily making their way to a new pilgrimage site—not a chapel featuring a vial of the Virgin’s milk or a shrine boasting a sliver of the True Cross, but Wittenberg. Alsatians and Walloons, Tiroleans and Czechs, Steiermarkians from central Austria, and even Scotsmen, having read Luther in the Froben collection and other editions, were heading to this small outpost on the Elbe to hear the newly restored gospel. Not only younger aspirants seeking theology degrees but also older men dissatisfied with the tired ritualism that had tinctured the faith crowded the lecture halls to hear Luther, Melanchthon, and other heralds of renewal, helping to vault Wittenberg into the top ranks of German universities.

  “I left Italy a few days ago, for two reasons,” John Hess, a young theologian from Nuremberg, wrote to a colleague in late 1519: “first, on account of my health, and secondly, to hear Martin.” In Italy, he explained, he had met many lovers of Luther who, after reading an account of the Leipzig debate, had, like him, been smitten. The Nuremberg humanist Willibald Pirckheimer declared that “all ages will remember that the Wittenbergers were the first to see the truth, the first to open their eyes after so many centuries, and to begin to separate the degenerate from the Christian philosophy.”

  “If God help me,” Albrecht Dürer wrote to George Spalatin, “I will go to Dr. Martin Luther and make his likeness in copper for a lasting memorial of the Christian man who has helped me out of great anguish. I beg your Honor if Dr. Luther writes anything more in German, please to send it to me at my expense.” The Nuremberg master never would get a chance to meet Luther, but, as his comment to Spalatin suggested, he had recently undergone a deep emotional crisis, and his study of Lutheran doctrines had helped him overcome it. Luther’s teaching that man is justified by faith would work such a powerful effect on Dürer that he would abandon secular subjects for religious ones and give up his former exuberant style for an intensely austere one.

  The influx of visitors and students threatened to overwhelm the town. “Everything is very expensive, the supplies brought in are insufficient, nor is anything administered properly in this most confused and careless city,” Luther complained to Spalatin in the spring of 1520. Owing to the shortage of housing, the university was having trouble finding quarters for the prospective new professor of Hebrew: Matthaeus Adrianus. This was the same Adrianus
who had been teaching Hebrew in Louvain. He had fallen out with the conservatives in Louvain over a speech he had given praising the three biblical tongues. He had also gone deeply into debt and was being pursued by several creditors, and over the summer he had fled the city. Not long afterward, he had shown up in Wittenberg and applied for a similar position. Luther was eager to have him, but it was unclear if the university could meet his demands on salary or housing. Eventually, both the money and a dwelling were found, and Adrianus in the spring of 1520 began offering instruction in Hebrew.

  Meanwhile, Philipp Melanchthon’s early-morning lectures on Matthew were packed, leading Luther to observe that “this little Greek beats me even in theology.” Still worried that Philipp might be lured away by another university, Luther pressed Spalatin to persuade Frederick to raise his salary. He also became concerned for Melanchthon’s health. The frail young man was working himself so hard that he seemed headed for a physical breakdown, and Luther, intent on seeing him better cared for, urged him to find a wife. (Melanchthon said he was not interested.)

  As Luther’s reputation as a critic of clerical excesses grew, laypeople with grievances against the Church began seeking him out. When a Wittenberg widow who had willed her house to the clerics at the Castle Church decided she wanted to keep it for her family, Luther agreed to serve as a mediator. (The case became so convoluted and time-consuming that he would end up ruing his involvement.) When the city council of Kemberg drafted a petition to Frederick complaining of oppressive taxes, Luther took up their case, writing to Spalatin that “the people there are absolutely sucked dry by this extreme usury.” The situation was daily growing worse because of the priests and religious fraternities that were “supported by these sacrilegious taxes and ungodly plunderings.” Spalatin would “serve God” if he could make some headway with Frederick.