A reply came in June 1523 in the form of a letter from his friend Cuthbert Tunstall, now the bishop of London. The king, Tunstall reported, was happy to hear Erasmus confirm his loyalty. It was not enough, however. Duty demanded that he challenge Luther directly and openly. Never before had a man who was as well equipped in theology as Erasmus and who had witnessed the rise of a pernicious heresy during his lifetime failed to attack it. Here, in confronting heresy, Tunstall wrote, was “true Christian warfare.”
I adjure you, by all the toils that Christ endured in his mortal body, by the blood which he shed in death to redeem the world, and by the glory which you look for in the heavens when your course in this life is run: I beg and beseech you, dear Erasmus, or rather it is the church that begs and beseeches you, to grapple after all this time with the hydra-headed monster. Courage is all, and the world is confident that you will win.
Given Tunstall’s position, this entreaty could be seen as coming directly from Henry. Erasmus nonetheless continued to resist. As much as he admired Tunstall’s devotion to the Church, he replied, he felt that he had to proceed with caution, for he had seen many who in their zeal to pull up the tares had uprooted the wheat as well and who in their pursuit of heretics actually threatened piety and concord. As late as August 29, 1523, Erasmus was informing Willibald Pirckheimer in Nuremberg that “the princes all urge me to attack Luther. But I shall write nothing.”
What finally pushed Erasmus over the edge was a calamitous encounter—or rather non-encounter—with his old acquaintance Ulrich von Hutten. In late November 1522, the volatile knight-laureate had arrived in Basel—homeless, penniless, and terminally ill with syphilis. His frantic and unsuccessful efforts to provoke a war against the Romanists had alienated much of Germany. Forced to leave it, he had headed to Basel, home to some of his few remaining friends. He quickly fell in with the circle of reformers around Oecolampadius, who did their best to bolster his spirits.
It was Erasmus, though, whom he most wanted to see. Though the two had drifted apart over the years, Erasmus remained for him the great lodestar of learning, and in his extremity he hoped to rekindle some of their old affection. His feelings were not reciprocated. Erasmus had never forgiven Hutten for leaking his letter to Albrecht of Mainz back in 1519, and he was tired of Hutten’s reckless efforts to push him into declaring his support for Luther. More important, Erasmus feared that meeting such a notorious champion of the Lutheran cause would be seized upon by his orthodox opponents as evidence of his own sympathies for it. Also, the very prospect of the unkempt, pox-ridden Hutten invading his premises repelled the fastidious Erasmus. As a pretext for not receiving him, Erasmus sent word that, given the chilliness of his stoveless rooms, it would be unwise for Hutten in his feverish state to visit them. It was a transparent excuse but one that he hoped Hutten would understand.
He wouldn’t. Physically ravaged by his disease, pursued by the agents of the pope, banished from his homeland, and intently seeking the support of an old mentor, Hutten felt spurned as if a vagrant. Furious, he began denouncing Erasmus to all who would listen as an unprincipled egotist who reflexively backed winners over losers. He also mocked Erasmus’s friends and wrote a fierce satire of a Basel doctor who had proposed some preposterous cures for Hutten’s condition. Exasperated, the magistracy of Basel asked him to leave. In mid-January 1523, he did, moving to the nearby village of Mühlhausen and taking up residence in the local Augustinian monastery.
While there, Hutten saw a copy of a long letter that Erasmus had sent to his friend Marcus Laurinus in Bruges and which had been published by Froben. The letter was one of the occasional set pieces Erasmus produced to keep his fellow humanists informed of his thoughts and activities. In it he criticized the Lutherans with unusual acerbity, condemning “their arrogant air and their excessive virulence.” He denounced Luther’s book against Henry as needlessly abusive and praised the king as “a prince compared with whom there is hardly another alive today more richly endowed with every kingly virtue or further removed from tyranny or more popular with his own people.” Boasting of his own stature, Erasmus referred to all the complimentary letters he had received from eminent men and the esteem in which he was held by Europe’s three leading monarchs (Charles, Francis, and Henry). As to Hutten’s request to visit him, Erasmus said that, had Hutten appeared, he would not have refused to receive him “as an old friend” whose “wonderfully fertile and lively mind” he found attractive “even now,” but that Hutten had reconsidered because of the lack of a stove in his rooms.
The baldness of this falsehood infuriated Hutten. So did Erasmus’s fawning toward the powerful and hostility toward Luther. In Hutten’s mind, Erasmus’s dismissal of him personally merged with his rejection of the Reformation as a whole, and he decided to strike back. Redirecting the disdain he had previously aimed at Rome, he composed 272 numbered paragraphs furiously attacking the character, conduct, and opinions of Erasmus.
“Would you have us believe that, after frequently standing in the Main Square for three hours at a time conversing with friends, I was really unable to leave my unheated quarters during the more than 50 days I spent in Basel—whether for reasons of health or whatever other trifling matters—and thus could not have come to pay a visit or two?” Hutten fumed. “I am not at all certain which angers me more, your craftiness or the fact that you have dealt with me so discourteously.” Not long before, Erasmus had castigated Rome with his vengeful pen “as a cesspool of depravity and crime.” Now this same Erasmus had entered into an unholy alliance with the Roman Church, holding it up as the universal Church itself. Was this due to his lust for fame? His weakness of character? His envy of Luther and his much greater popularity? No, Hutten wrote, the real source of Erasmus’s sycophancy, he now realized, was “a certain cowardice inherent in your character,” a “timidity which causes you at the slightest provocation to fear the worst and thus to despair.” When Reuchlin was in desperate need of his support in his battle with the doctors of Cologne, Erasmus refused to provide it. When the German princes banded together against the Lutherans, Erasmus in his anxiety sought in every possible way to curry favor with the princes. While he thus might succeed in preserving his life, he risked losing something far more precious—his reputation.
Hutten excoriated Erasmus for his assertion that one need not always tell the truth: “This sacrilegious utterance of yours ought to be shoved down your throat,” for “what can be more godless and contrary to the teaching of Christ than to assert that the truth does not always have to be told, for the sake of which He wanted us to die?” Did Christ not predict “that because of Him and His word there would be hatred and dissensions, war and slaughter?” Erasmus faced two choices—either to stand firm on the side of Luther or to change sides and state his reasons for joining the enemy. If he refused to commit, he would find himself stranded in no-man’s-land and regarded as a traitor by both parties. In a violent crescendo, Hutten declared that “we must fight this out to the very end and engage in hand-to-hand combat so that all can see what a perverse thing you have done and with what a violated, nay utterly prostituted conscience you have undertaken it.”
As Hutten was drafting his attack, Erasmus heard of it and at once wrote to him to demand that he desist. By May 1523, however, Hutten’s manuscript was in circulation and had been seen by many in Basel, Erasmus included. Hutten, meanwhile, was causing such commotion in Mühlhausen that some of its residents were threatening to storm the monastery where he was staying and seize him. Fleeing in the middle of the night, Hutten went to Zurich, where Zwingli offered him asylum and arranged for him to stay on the island of Ufenau in Lake Zurich in the care of a local pastor. Erasmus wrote to the Zurich town council to demand that it restrain his pen.
By then, however, Hutten’s Expostulatio cum Erasmo Roterodamo was in print, and Erasmus immediately put aside the biblical paraphrase on which he was working to respond. It took him six full days to read Hutten’s “false accusations” and wip
e off “the muck he threw on me,” he stated in his rebuttal, explaining its title: Spongia Adversus Aspergines Hutteni (“The Sponge Against the Aspersions of Hutten”). Defending his decision not to receive Hutten, Erasmus said that he had in fact been informed by an acquaintance that Hutten could not spend time in a room without a stove, but he also acknowledged his worry that word of a meeting with Hutten would quickly reach the pope in Rome and the emperor in Spain. He rejected Hutten’s claim that he had an insatiable thirst for glory and fame. The kings of both France and England had written to him in their own hand, yet he had refrained from boasting about this. Nor had he mentioned the personal letters he had received from Emperor Charles and Archduke Ferdinand. “Had Hutten received such letters, imagine how puffed up his cheeks would be! He indeed writes to emperors, cardinals, and papal nuncios, but who among them has answered him?”
In his growing self-absorption, Erasmus could not see how incriminating this was. In the end, though, it was his comments about Luther that would cause the most offense. He charged the German reformer with heaping abuse on Erasmus’s books, souring nearly all of his friendships, and causing irreparable harm to the cause of good letters. Erasmus had been unable to persuade himself “that the Spirit of Christ” dwells “in a heart from which such bitterness gushes forth.”
Erasmus intended the Spongia to be provocative, but its offensiveness would be compounded by a misfortune of timing. On August 29, 1523, as Froben was racing to complete the printing, Hutten died. When the work appeared a few days later, Erasmus seemed to be beating a dead man, and Hutten’s friends and supporters, rallying to his posthumous defense, pelted Erasmus with insults.
The first indication that Erasmus had decided to move off his cherished middle ground came in a letter he sent to Henry VIII in early September 1523 along with a copy of his newly completed paraphrase of Luke. Erasmus expressed his hope that the king would look favorably on the book and recognize Erasmus as one who had prayed for his prosperity and happiness. He added: “I have something on the stocks against the new doctrines but would not dare publish it unless I have left Germany first, for fear I prove a casualty before I enter the arena.”
Exactly what he had on the stocks, Erasmus did not say. But word that he planned to write against the new gospel quickly spread, and on hearing it the Lutherans flew into “a perfect fury,” as Erasmus reported to an official in Rome. If he were to proceed, he went on, he worried that his very life would be in danger.
Then Erasmus heard of Luther’s own reaction to the rumor that he planned to write against him. Luther gave it in a letter to Conradus Pellicanus, a professor of theology and Hebrew at the University of Basel, who immediately shared it with Erasmus. Luther expressed his wish that Hutten “had not expostulated” and “still more that Erasmus had not wiped his expostulation out. If that is wiping out with a sponge, what, pray, is malediction and abuse?” Luther noted with dismay the “incredible boasts” Erasmus had made about his reputation and the way he raved against the vices of his friends. If Erasmus were to raise his pen against him, Luther observed, it would cause him no injury, for he had the Lord on his side. Erasmus was so far from a knowledge of things “that I will easily endure whatever names he chooses to call me so long as he lets my cause alone.” When he was praised, Luther said, he grieved; when he was maligned, he felt joy. “If Erasmus wonders at this, I am not at all surprised. Let him learn Christ and say farewell to human wisdom. May the Lord illuminate him and make Erasmus a different man.” In closing, Luther noted that he had no hard feelings for Erasmus, only pity, and he asked Pellicanus to greet Erasmus for him. If Erasmus would not allow it, he would quite willingly give up any wish for continued friendly relations with him.
For Erasmus, Luther’s letter was the deciding blow. “Luther passionately abuses the Spongia,” he wrote on November 21, 1523, to Johannes Fabri, a senior cleric in Constance. “He also said in a letter to Oecolampadius that I am like Moses and must be buried in the wilderness and that too much weight should not be given to Erasmus in spiritual matters. This sort of thing means war.” Listing his various projects, Erasmus mentioned a paraphrase of Mark, a commentary on the Lord’s Prayer, and a preface to a commentary on Ovid’s Nux. And, if his strength held out, “I shall add a book on free will.”
Free will: this was the subject on which Erasmus had decided to take on Luther. On the surface, it seemed an odd choice. Given all the other pressing matters at hand—the power of the pope, the authority of Scripture, the support for faith over works, the rejection of the sacraments, the abrogation of the Mass—free will seemed abstract and philosophical. But that was part of its appeal. Erasmus agreed with many of Luther’s practical ideas for reform, objecting mainly to the vehemence with which he stated them. The subject of free will, though, went to the heart of Erasmus’s differences with him. Luther had raised it back in 1516, when he wrote to Spalatin to urge Erasmus to read Augustine’s writings against the Pelagians so that he could better understand the doctrine of original sin and man’s inability to choose to do good. The initial charge that Erasmus was a Pelagian who attributed too much freedom to man had since grown into a mighty chorus.
In writing in support of free will, Erasmus hoped to salvage a place for the principles of human dignity and autonomy amid the great evangelical tide that was sweeping Europe. Those principles were at the core of the humanist movement as it had developed from Petrarch’s time on, and Erasmus, in defending himself, was hoping to keep the flame of the Renaissance alive.
Examining Luther’s writings, Erasmus found the clearest description of his position in the thirty-sixth article of the pamphlet he had written in 1520 against the bull threatening to excommunicate him. Among the bull’s articles was one condemning Luther’s denial of free will. In his defense, Luther provided a blizzard of biblical citations supporting his claim that our lives are “never for a single moment under our control.” Instead, he maintained, “all things occur by absolute necessity.” No subject needed to be handled more carefully than free will, Luther observed, yet the notion had become so fixed in men’s hearts that “I do not see anyone who is fit to understand it or even to dispute with me about it.”
Erasmus considered himself so fit. Through the end of autumn and into the winter of 1523, he prepared himself for combat. He reread Origen’s On First Principles, Jerome’s Hebrew Questions on Genesis, and Augustine’s anti-Pelagian tracts. He studied Thomas Aquinas on first and second causes and Scotus on prevenient, sanctifying, and persevering grace. He read a treatise on free will by Lorenzo Valla and a refutation of Luther’s theology by John Fisher, the bishop of Rochester. Most of all, he studied the Bible. As much as he disliked the practice of mustering citations in support of this or that proposition, he knew that if he failed to engage in it, the evangelists would dismiss him. If he presented his argument in a temperate and evenhanded manner, Erasmus felt sure, even the most committed Lutherans would not object.
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A Shower of Stones
While Erasmus was struggling with free will, Luther was wrestling with Job. After finishing his translation of the second group of Old Testament books, he had moved on to the third, consisting of the prophetic and poetic books. These included the Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Solomon, but it was Job that gave him the most trouble, “on account of the grandeur of his sublime style,” as he wrote to Spalatin in early 1524. Sometimes Luther got so bogged down in the text that, even with the help of Melanchthon and others, he could translate no more than three lines in four days.
The runaway nuns posed a challenge of a different sort. The sisters Ave and Margaret von Schönfeld and Katharina von Bora remained under his care and in need of husbands. To Luther’s relief, Katharina became attached to Jerome Baumgärtner, the scion of a prominent patrician family in Nuremberg who was studying in Wittenberg. He returned her feelings, and the two decided to marry. First, though, Baumgärtner wanted the blessing of his parents, and he left for Nuremberg
to get it. Very soon, Luther hoped, Katharina would be off his hands. In the meantime, her presence in Wittenberg was feeding rumors about wild goings-on between priests and harlots.
At the town church, meanwhile, Luther began introducing changes in the service. In addition to requiring Communion in both kinds, he downgraded the importance of the Mass and instead made the sermon the centerpiece of the service. Both on Sundays (after the Eucharist) and on weekdays, the Word of God was to be preached. Luther compared the pulpit to a milking stool: the preacher daily had to pull hard and keep the milk flowing to the people so that they could be patiently and persistently instructed. Thanks to Luther, the sermon would become a fixture of Protestant worship, and churches would be built to make it easier to hear (for instance, by adding galleries). Even today, in urban America, anyone wandering into a Protestant church can hear a sermon at most weekday services.
No less enduring a change was the introduction of hymns. Seeking to encourage lay participation in the worship service, Luther wrote to Spalatin of his intention to “compose for the common people German psalms, that is spiritual songs,” so that the Word of God could be spread in musical form. At the start of 1524, the first Reformation hymnal, containing four hymns by Luther, was produced by a Nuremberg printer, and a larger collection appeared in Wittenberg later in the year. From the start, Luther’s hymns were very popular. While the Swiss reformers, led first by Zwingli and then Calvin, would shun musical instruments and most song, congregational singing would become a fixture of Lutheran churches. Luther’s most famous hymn, “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” a paraphrase of Psalm 48 that he wrote around 1528, would become the battle hymn of the Reformation. With these first halting steps began the great tradition of Protestant church music, leading two centuries later to the cantatas, chorales, and oratorios of Bach.
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