Fatal Discord

by Michael Massing

  As this bit of scurrility shows, Erasmus seemed perfectly willing to put aside his scruples about poisonous pamphlets when such writings served his own purpose. And this instance would prove effective. The charges against Aleander, especially the one about his Jewish origins, would stick to him as he pursued his mission of publicizing the bull and organizing book burnings.

  From Louvain, Aleander went to nearby Liège, where he organized another bonfire, which went off without incident. He then traveled east to Aachen, on Germany’s border with the Low Countries, for the coronation. On October 22, 1520, Charles entered the town astride a spirited horse (which he controlled with a practiced hand) and with a procession of horsemen, counts, lords, and foot soldiers. At the city gates he was met by the electors of the empire, who kissed his hand while he sat bareheaded in the saddle. The next day, in the great cathedral where Charlemagne had been crowned, Charles pledged to defend the Church, preserve the faith, protect the poor, and rule justly. He was anointed with holy oil and, as trumpets blared and drums rolled, the imperial crown was placed on his head. Once the ceremonies were over, Charles and his party traveled forty miles east to Cologne, arriving on October 28. Aleander went along.

  Erasmus was in Cologne, too. Though invited to the coronation, he had apparently decided not to go, in part because the plague had broken out in Aachen. With many German princes staying in Cologne, Erasmus hoped to make one last bid to avert the upheaval he saw looming. In line with his frequent calls for arbitration as an alternative to war, he wanted to see if common ground could be found between the contending parties. Together with a Dominican prior named Johannes Faber, he produced the Consilium, a proposal (published anonymously) to submit the Luther matter to a panel of learned and upright men. This was needed to make sure that the dispute was “neither overwhelmed by the billows nor driven to the shallow shore”—that it avoided Scylla while not being sucked into Charybdis. Erasmus, in short, hoped to rally the moderate middle—those who, whether sympathetic to Luther or not, supported resolving the matter without bloodshed.

  But that middle was fast shrinking. Between the theologians and friars who despised Luther and the new faithful who exalted him, there were a few holdouts who, while loyal to the Church, shrank from seeing its will imposed by force. Among them was the elector Frederick. He, too, was in Cologne, staying at an inn on the Square of the Three Kings. On October 31, in the sacristy of Cologne’s great Gothic cathedral, the stolid Saxon prince met the young, untested emperor. Frederick stated his long-standing belief that no German should be condemned without first receiving a fair hearing. Through an interpreter, Charles said that the matter would be addressed at the first Imperial Diet under his rule, scheduled to start in Worms in January 1521. The language barrier prevented any meaningful exchange, but each showed the exaggerated courtesy demanded by the occasion.

  Aleander, too, wanted to meet Frederick, but the prince would not see him. Persisting, Aleander and the nuncio Caracciolo interrupted Frederick while he was attending Mass at a Franciscan monastery and handed him a papal brief demanding that Luther be extradited to Rome and his books burned. The nuncios pressed for an immediate reply, but Frederick demurred.

  He first wanted to hear Erasmus’s opinion, and the next day he invited him to his quarters. It was no doubt a thrilling moment for Frederick, who greatly admired the Dutchman and had all of his books. Erasmus for his part appreciated the prince’s commitment to liberal studies and support for the University of Wittenberg. Erasmus—probably wearing his usual black fur-lined mantle and black cap, from under which his gray hair curled—faced the aging statesman while warming his hands before a fire. Frederick—large and heavy-jowled, with a long curly beard and the deliberate movements of a gout sufferer—asked him to speak in his native Dutch (which was close to German), but Erasmus said he preferred Latin. The prince understood Latin but, uncomfortable speaking it, posed his questions through Spalatin.

  Frederick asked if Erasmus felt that Luther had erred. This was a question Erasmus had long sought to avoid, and he paused to collect his thoughts. The many years he had spent gathering proverbs had given him a knack for speaking epigrammatically, and after a few minutes of reflection he gave a response worthy of the Adages: “Luther has erred in two points—in attacking the crown of the pope and the bellies of the monks.”

  The ice thus broken, Erasmus described his concerns about the dangers that the Luther affair posed to humane studies. If Luther was quashed, the whole movement to renew Scripture through scholarship would also collapse. The punishment stipulated in the bull against Luther had stirred tremendous indignation, Erasmus said, and, aside from Cologne and Louvain, no university had been willing to censure him. He expressed approval of Luther’s offer to submit to a panel of impartial experts and described some of the steps by which such a policy might be carried out.

  Frederick was pleased to find Erasmus’s position more or less coinciding with his own, and the humanist agreed to accompany Spalatin to the house of a local count to draft a proposal. There, Erasmus set down twenty-two axioms, criticizing the bull as too severe and calling for the issue to be settled “through the sane advice of unbiased and discreet persons.” Given the delicacy of the issue, Erasmus asked Spalatin to return his notes. Spalatin did—but not before making a copy. Not long afterward, in another act of duplicity, Spalatin turned it over to a printer, and in February 1521 Erasmus’s axioms would be published in both Leipzig and Wittenberg. To his fury, his bon mot about the pope’s crown and monks’ bellies flew around Germany.

  The more immediate impact, however, was on Frederick. Erasmus’s positive remarks about Luther reinforced the elector’s own sense that the friar was being treated unfairly. The day after their meeting, Frederick rejected the nuncios’ request. He urged them to abandon their aggressive course and instead arrange for Luther to be examined before reasonable and pious judges with the assurance of a safe-conduct. This was a bitter blow to Aleander and Rome: the Saxon elector was in effect rejecting the terms of the papal bull. From now on, the nuncios would have to direct their pleas to the emperor.

  Erasmus, meanwhile, agreed to meet with Aleander. The atmosphere was tense. Aleander was fully informed of Erasmus’s meeting with Frederick and his advice to him to resist the bull. He had also heard from many sources of Erasmus’s efforts to defame him, including calling him a Jew. Erasmus for his part saw Aleander as the prime mover behind Rome’s destructive course.

  Determined to keep the conversation light so as not to give Erasmus any more fodder against the bull, Aleander recalled the earlier, friendlier times between them. But Erasmus, unable to suppress his anger, complained that he had heard that Aleander had tarnished his name with the princes and was preparing to condemn his and Reuchlin’s books. Aleander replied that he had no such intention and that in any case he did not think Erasmus had written anything contrary to the Church’s interests. “In short,” Aleander later wrote, “I dissembled ably and invented some obliging lies, as in the interest of the faith and of my commission I could not do other.” Aleander did, however, express his sorrow over discovering that Erasmus was the source of the opinion that the bull was a forgery. Seeing Erasmus’s discomfort, he quickly changed the subject, exhorting Erasmus to direct his writings toward the edification of the Church rather than, like Luther, to its destruction. At the end of five or six hours, the two parted with kisses and avowals of friendship that each knew to be insincere.

  Shortly afterward, preparations were made for a burning of Luther’s books in Cologne. They were set ablaze before representatives of the local archbishop. Unlike the burning in Louvain, however, this event was staged without publicity, for even in this orthodox stronghold public opinion was turning decisively against the bull. The humanists of Cologne wrote mocking dialogues about Aleander and posted insulting songs on the doors of the university.

  Eager to escape Germany and its reeking stoves, Erasmus left Cologne on November 15, 1520, to return to Louvain. The
leg to Aachen went smoothly, but west of that town he encountered a maelstrom of wind, rain, and flooding. “Even in the hills we narrowly escaped shipwreck,” he wrote, “for we had to take to the water on horseback.” With great difficulty his horse swam to shore. Despite the waterlogged conditions, Erasmus insisted on continuing on rather than return in humiliated defeat to his host in Aachen—another striking instance of the physical fortitude of this fastidious man of letters.

  While Erasmus returned to Louvain, Charles traveled south to Worms to prepare for the Imperial Diet. Aleander left with him but made a detour to Mainz. As Germany’s most powerful ecclesiastical seat, it seemed an ideal place to make an example of Luther’s books, and a bonfire was scheduled for November 28, 1520. On that day, his books were piled high in the marketplace, and as the hangman standing on the platform prepared to ignite them, he asked whether the man whose volumes stood before him had been legitimately condemned. “No!” the crowd bellowed. The hangman then leaped down, saying he would not execute judgment against anyone who had not been convicted by due process. The burning was rescheduled for the next day, and in the interim Aleander pressed Archbishop Albrecht to make sure the pope’s command was carried out. Throughout the night, however, the archbishop was visited by noblemen who, sympathetic to Luther, advised him against it.

  Aleander urged the archbishop to proceed, and in the end a few books were put to the torch by a grave digger who was pressed into service. Only a gaggle of women bringing their geese to market witnessed the event. Reviled as a Jew and a traitor, Aleander was pelted with stones and managed to escape only through the intervention of a sympathetic abbot. Mainz was flooded with defamatory posters, and Ulrich von Hutten commemorated the event in a “Lament over the Lutheran Conflagration in Mainz”:

  O God, Luther’s books they burn.

  Thy godly truth is slain in turn.

  Pardon in advance is sold,

  And heaven marketed for gold.

  The German people is bled white

  And is not asked to be contrite.

  To Martin Luther wrong is done—

  O God, be thou our champion.

  My good for him I will not spare,

  My life, my blood for him will I dare.

  The pro-Rome party, meanwhile, was mounting its own furious propaganda campaign, as Erasmus discovered on his return to Louvain. A Dominican lecturing at the university spent several weeks inveighing against the Praise of Folly, and two other friars sent Erasmus a pamphlet angrily censuring his use of sermo in place of verbum. Such agitation, Erasmus believed, had one end—to provoke him into publicly denouncing Luther. “The theologians think that nothing but my pen can polish off Luther and are silently bringing pressure on me to attack him in print,” he wrote. “Heaven forbid that I should be so mad!”

  Thus buffeted, Erasmus sought refuge with the one institution that seemed able to provide him sanctuary. For all its flaws and shortcomings, the Roman Church remained the institutional embodiment of Christ’s spirit and mission, and, unlike Luther, Erasmus could not imagine leaving it. Worried that he had come under suspicion in Rome, he prepared a long, emotional defense of his actions for Cardinal Lorenzo Campeggio. The most esteemed papal diplomat of his generation, Campeggio was Erasmus’s highest-ranking friend in the Church, and during the coming upheaval Erasmus would often use him as a conduit to the pope and the Curia.

  The letter, dated December 6, 1520, offered Erasmus’s most complete statement yet of his position on the most explosive issue of the day. Given the scrutiny he was under, his comments were surprisingly favorable. Though he had not read more than a dozen pages through of Luther’s works, he wrote, he had detected in what he had read “rare natural gifts and a nature finely adapted to expound the mysteries of Scripture.” The world “thirsts for the pure living water drawn from the conduits of evangelists and apostles,” and Luther seemed to have “both the natural endowments and the necessary zeal.” But he had also stumbled on things in Luther that were “rude and harsh” and which “did not properly reflect the gentle spirit of the Gospel,” and he had written to warn him to follow Christ’s example and not attack the pope or condemn the universities or monastic orders out of hand.

  But then a terrifying bull had been published under the pope’s authority, and Luther’s books were burned—actions that “could hardly be done in a more spiteful way.” The sole result of the clamor had been to make Luther’s books more famous and to drive more people to read them. Whatever Luther’s sins, it would “be more civilized to cure him than to snuff him out.” In the days of Augustine, heretics were listened to “even with respect,” and the penalty for a convicted heretic who persisted in his error was no more than expulsion from the community of the faithful. “Nowadays no proscription is more brutal than an accusation of heresy,” yet no word comes more easily to the lips of those seeking to enforce orthodoxy. Everyone knows that the pope has the means to either destroy or terrify whomever he pleases, but he should move slowly in exercising his authority on such an issue. “If we wish to be told the truth, everyone must be free to utter his opinion, and even the man who gives bad advice must be forgiven, provided he was doing his best.”

  As for himself, Erasmus went on, “I am not impious enough to dissent from the Catholic Church, I am not ungrateful enough to dissent from Leo, of whose support and exceptional kindness to me I have personal experience.” He added: “I have never knowingly been nor will I be a leader in error; I have no intention to be a captain or coadjutor in civil strife. Let others court martyrdom; it is an honor of which I find myself unworthy.” He “always was and always will be a zealous supporter above all else of the see of Rome, to which I know myself indebted on so many grounds, and shall count any of its enemies my personal enemy.”

  Erasmus’s rejection of martyrdom would be cited repeatedly as evidence of his pusillanimity and would do serious damage to his reputation. But it reflected his resolute opposition to fanaticism. In an age when people were preparing to kill and be killed in the name of God, he refused to participate. And his resistance to the growing demands that he denounce Luther took some backbone. At the same time, Erasmus was unequivocally embracing an institution of which he had been bitterly critical. And, for the rest of his life, he would remain loyal to the Roman Church. No doubt he felt a genuine attachment to that institution. At its best, it embodied the values on which European civilization was built, and Erasmus’s reform program was aimed at correcting the abuses that were undermining its authority. Yet the passions unleashed by Luther were becoming so dark and menacing as to make Erasmus fear for his life, and declaring his unstinting loyalty to Rome seemed the one path available to ensure his own survival.

  24

  Faith and Fury

  In Wittenberg, as in university towns across Europe, the students were a rowdy and volatile lot. Living far from home in overcrowded conditions; dealing with cold, hunger, and unforgiving workloads; and finding their sole release in alcohol, they posed a perennial threat to public order. In the early months of 1520, the students in Wittenberg began protesting the fact that the apprentices at Lucas Cranach’s workshop were allowed to carry weapons while they were not, and in July their unhappiness boiled over into a riot. After clashing with the city militia, they assembled in the churchyard of the Franciscan monastery with the intention of forcing their way into Frederick’s castle. The citizens blocked them, however, and the electoral army was called in to keep order.

  Luther was furious, for he felt that the students’ actions would tarnish the university’s image. To his further dismay, the rector and a number of faculty members sided with the students against the town council; when the university senate voted to allow the students to carry weapons, Luther walked out. From the pulpit of the parish church, he denounced the rioters with such vehemence that he was physically threatened; if he preached like that again, one student shouted, someone would hit him on the head with a stone. “Good heavens! How much hatred I won for mysel
f,” Luther reported to Spalatin. His reaction gave an early sign of his inclination when faced with civil unrest to side with the forces of order and authority—an attitude that would fatefully resurface when the peasants rose up a few years later.

  Adding to Luther’s unease were the reports he was receiving of Johann Eck’s northward progress. “I almost wish that that notorious raging bull against my teaching would come from Rome,” he wrote. That the Church had chosen such a bitter foe of his to deliver the document, he believed, showed its determination to crush him. Frederick, too, was coming under intense pressure to act. In July 1520, he received a letter from Cardinal Riario in Rome imploring him to force Luther to recant. “You can if you will,” he wrote. “With just one little pebble the puny David killed the mighty Goliath.” Frederick had the letter forwarded to Luther, who read it with “great and silent grief.”

  “The world presses me down and gnaws me piecemeal,” he wrote, complaining of the “many ravenous wolves” who surrounded him. From friends came pleas to temper his language. Johann Lang (who a few months earlier had replaced Staupitz as vicar-general of the Augustinian Observants) was so disturbed by the ferocity of To the Christian Nobility that he implored Luther to recall it. “Almost all condemn my stinging tone,” Luther wrote to a friend, adding that he had no intention of moderating it, “for I realize that those things which in our age are treated quietly will soon be forgotten, and nobody will care about them.” Who could not see that the prophets attacked the sins of the people “with the greatest violence”?

  Already, the prophet of Wittenberg was preparing another blast. At the end of To the Christian Nobility, he had noted that he was composing “another little song about Rome,” to be pitched “in the highest key.” This would be the second of his great Reformatory tracts. Whereas To the Christian Nobility had been written in German for the lay public, the new work would be written in Latin for the educated elite. That it was not to be an abstruse treatise, however, was apparent from its title: The Babylonian Captivity of the Church. Just as the Jews had been carried off from Jerusalem into exile, Luther suggested, so had Europe’s Christians been led astray from Scripture and subjected to Roman tyranny.