Fatal Discord

by Michael Massing

  For more than a week, Luther felt a sickness unto death. After the worst had passed, he wrote to Melanchthon that he had “almost lost Christ in the waves and blasts of despair and blasphemy against God,” but God had taken pity on him and rescued his soul “from the lowest hell.”

  Adding to his misery was his growing conflict with the sacramentarians. In April 1527, Luther came out with a blistering attack on the Swiss. Titled That These Words of Christ, “This Is My Body, etc.,” Still Stand Fast Against the Ranting Spirits, the tract insisted that those words be taken literally. Zwingli quickly countered with That These Words of Jesus Christ, “This Is My Body Which Is Given for You,” Will Forever Retain Their Ancient, Single Meaning, and Martin Luther with His Latest Book Has by No Means Proved or Established His Own and the Pope’s Views, in which he made the case for regarding the communal bread and wine as spiritual symbols of Christ’s sacrifice. Reading the work, Luther erupted, denouncing Zwingli as “worthy of holy hatred, so insolently and unworthily does he deal with the holy Word of God.” In contending with Zwingli, Oecolampadius, and the other sacramentarians, Luther wrote to Nicholas Gerbel, he felt as if he were amid “wild beasts, vipers, lionesses, and leopards, in almost greater peril than Daniel himself in the den of lions.”

  Because the sacramentarians often appealed to Erasmus’s writings, Luther lumped them all together as “Judases” who he felt had abandoned him. “Would that Erasmus and the sacramentarians might feel the anguish of my heart for a quarter of an hour,” he wrote, “I can safely say that they would be converted and saved thereby, but now my enemies are strong and live and add grief to my grief, and whom the Lord hath smitten they persecute.”

  On top of it all, Wittenberg in August 1527 was hit by the plague. Striking first in the fishermen’s quarter outside town, it quickly reached the center. By the middle of the month, the contagion had carried off eighteen people, including the young son of Justus Jonas; the daughter of the printer Johann Rhau-Grunenberg; and the burgomaster’s wife, who died almost in Luther’s arms. Many fled. The entire university moved to Jena, where it would remain until the following spring. (Luther lectured to the few students who stayed behind.) Many of the stricken showed up at the Black Cloister, which became an impromptu infirmary. Luther’s son, Hans, became so ill that Luther feared for his life. When Luther himself grew weak. Elector John urged him to leave, but he considered it his duty to remain to minister to the people.

  Hans ultimately pulled through, but Luther’s exposure to so much suffering deepened his despair. Terrified of being alone, he asked Bugenhagen to come live with him. For his insomnia, Luther found another remedy: alcohol. He began drinking heavily in this period—a problem that would intensify with time.

  Luther’s spirits were further dampened by what he saw as a rapid decline of morality in Wittenberg. Sexual license, lewdness, cursing, cheating, and intoxication were all rampant. One day Luther passed someone who was defecating in public and reproached him; in a sermon, he mentioned the incident as an example of the shamelessness and lack of respect that were spreading in the town. Christian worship was also suffering. Attendance at Sunday services was down. Many of the women who did come were dressed as if for a dance. A German Mass had been introduced at Christmas 1525, but the congregants, unhappy with the changes, sat through it like blocks.

  Luther was especially troubled by the stinginess of his congregation. “This week we are asking for an offering,” he said in a sermon. “I hear that people will not give the collectors anything and turn them away. . . . I am amazed, and I do not know if I will preach any more, you uncouth rascals.”

  The decline in morality was in part a by-product of Luther’s own theology. His doctrine of justification by faith alone was breeding contempt for the law. Since attending church, going to confession, and providing charity were no longer seen as meritorious acts leading to salvation, many simply gave them up. In the countryside, meanwhile, all was chaos. With the disappearance of the Church, there was a profusion of doctrines, customs, and worship practices; with the abolition of tithes, villagers were refusing to support pastors. Many actually considered pastors superfluous since they could now read the Gospels on their own. With no endowed Masses for the dead, churches were going into debt.

  To try to restore some order, Luther proposed to Elector John that teams of wise men be sent into the countryside to assess the situation on the ground. John agreed. The electorate was divided into five regions, each of which was to receive a delegation from Wittenberg. The visitors were to inspect schools and churches, assess the quality and conduct of pastors, mediate disputes, and recommend improvements.

  In early July 1527, a six-member team led by Melanchthon left for Weida, south of Leipzig. The six spent the next month visiting communities in and around the Saale valley. They were shocked by what they found. The pastors included many misfits and oddballs with only a rudimentary knowledge of evangelical doctrines. Some could barely recite the Apostles’ Creed or the Lord’s Prayer. Of the two hundred clergymen in the region, all but a handful were openly fornicating; many frequented taverns and gambling dens.

  “Everything is in confusion, partly through ignorance, and partly through the immorality of the teachers,” Melanchthon wrote, adding: “My heart bleeds when I regard this misery. Often when we have completed the visitation of a place, I go to one side and pour forth my distress in tears.” Interestingly, this was the same region where three years earlier Karlstadt had preached and Luther been challenged by plowmen quoting Scripture. That so few now knew or cared about matters of faith suggested the pall of apathy and cynicism that had settled over the countryside following the peasants’ defeat.

  After completing the tour, Melanchthon drew up a set of articles to guide future visitations. After weeks of discussion, including comments from Luther, these appeared in March 1528 as a handbook, Instructions for the Visitors of Parish Pastors in Electoral Saxony. Predictably, it called on pastors to preach the importance of faith. Surprisingly, it also urged them to stress the need to do good works, including upholding the Ten Commandments. They were also to teach that man has free will. The emphasis placed on good works and free will seemed a clear departure from Lutheran orthodoxy, and Catholic commentators gleefully pounced on it, but it was considered necessary to combat the breakdown of morality in the countryside. Strong stress was also placed on obedience to, and respect for, the government, and schools were to instruct students in the essentials of both Christian living and grammar. (Remarkably, the curriculum was to include Erasmus’s Colloquies.) To ensure compliance, each region was to be overseen by a superintendent, who was to make sure that pastors were fit for office, that they led pious lives, and that they properly preached the Word of God.

  The Instructions did not address what was perhaps the most critical question of all: who rules? Without a pope or bishop, who was to have the ultimate say over church matters? The answer soon became clear: the sovereign. The final arbiter of religious matters in Saxony was to be not the congregation, or the theologians, or a body of elders, but the elector. During the seven years of his rule, John, who supported the Reformation far more vigorously than had his brother Frederick, would meet frequently with Luther to discuss everything from the selection of pastors and the order of services to the financing of churches and the establishment of schools. This development reflected the need for a strong hand to keep the peace. It also mirrored the ongoing change in Luther’s own thinking, away from his early populism and belief in congregational control toward an emphasis on order and authority. The visitation instructions of 1528 thus marked an important step in the creation of the so-called territorial church, in which the prince, acting as the bishop, oversaw all ministerial activities. Over time, the supervisory tasks of the visitations would be assumed by consistories—ecclesiastical bodies formed to address marriage matters, uphold moral discipline among the peasants, and monitor the performance of pastors. In addition, a superintendent would be appointed to c
arry out the duties previously assigned to bishops. The final say, though, remained with the ruler. This model, in which the church became an arm of the state, would be adopted by other territories as they embraced Luther’s gospel.

  And there would be many such territories, for the Reformation was about to enter a period of rapid growth, due in part to a critical measure adopted at the 1526 Diet of Speyer. Because the Edict of Worms had proved unenforceable, the delegates decided to suspend it. In its place, each prince was urged to conduct himself in a way answerable to both God and the emperor. In effect, this gave princes the right to determine the religious practices in their territories.

  Princes sympathetic to Luther moved at once to capitalize. In 1526, the landgrave Philip of Hesse formally declared for the Reformation and quickly began seizing the Catholic monasteries in his territory. (Expropriating Church property was a common motive for joining the Reformation.) Ambitious, restless, and strategically savvy, Philip would become the political leader of the Lutheran cause, directing negotiations, forming alliances, and rallying his more phlegmatic colleagues. In 1527, in Marburg, the landgrave founded a university, which in the coming years would inspire the creation of scores of similar institutions throughout the Protestant world.

  In cities, it was town councils that took the lead. When in 1528 the north-central city of Brunswick decided to become Lutheran, its council asked Wittenberg to send a theologian to help oversee the transition. Luther reluctantly agreed to part with Bugenhagen. For more than a year, Bugenhagen lived in Brunswick, helping to implant Lutheran institutions. Soon afterward, he would travel north to Hamburg to do the same. In the coming years, Bugenhagen’s work would be instrumental in establishing the Reformation in the Hanseatic cities of Magdeburg, Bremen, Lübeck, Rostock, Danzig, and Riga. In northeastern Germany, Albert of Brandenburg-Ansbach, who had converted to the evangelical cause in 1525, continued the process of converting his duchy, Prussia, into a Lutheran state.

  In the south, the new faith prevailed in several important cities, including Nuremberg, Augsburg, Strasbourg, and Ulm. Here, images were removed from churches, meat was eaten on fast days, preaching was based exclusively on Scripture, and private Masses were abolished. The money formerly spent on such Masses was redirected to schools, hospitals, and poor relief. In 1526, Nuremberg, responding to Luther’s call for towns to establish schools, opened a Latin school in a former convent. Melanchthon spent much of the month of May there, shaping its curriculum and giving its inaugural address. (The school, known as the Melanchthon-Gymnasium, is still in operation.) In the years to come, three thousand such schools would be established in territories aligned with the Reformation. The stress on schooling, literacy, libraries, and printing would become a hallmark of Protestantism, which looked to the Book rather than the pope for direction.

  Large parts of southern Germany, however, continued to look to the pope. Bavaria, along with the powerful archbishoprics of Mainz, Trier, and Cologne, remained loyal to Rome. In these years, the religious map of modern Germany was beginning to take shape, with a largely Lutheran north and east and a generally Catholic south. Ten years after the posting of Luther’s lonely protest against indulgences, his ideas had become the reigning creed in nearly half the land.

  The growing division of Christendom left Erasmus deeply demoralized. His reform program was based on the idea of a united Europe rooted in a common Christian culture, but with that community now splintering, the space for Erasmus’s vision was shrinking. It suffered a major blow on December 16, 1527, when the Paris faculty of theology voted formally to condemn his writings. The faculty cited 112 propositions from his paraphrases and his rebuttals of Béda, plus twenty-two instances in which he was said to have misread or disagreed with the Vulgate. In Louvain, there arose a dogged new critic, the Franciscan Frans Titelmans. A tenacious defender of the Vulgate, Titelmans in public lectures denounced Erasmus for rashly modifying that text and thereby diminishing its authority. Echoing Dorp, he claimed that the Vulgate had been prepared under divine guidance and that it was thus insolent to offer a new translation, as Erasmus had done.

  The strongest strike against Erasmus, however, came in Spain. The Spanish translation of the Enchiridion, which had set off such a frenzy of interest in Erasmus, had also produced a furious backlash among the monks. That work’s statement that monasticism is not piety, along with other perceived insults to that institution, had inflamed the Dominicans and Franciscans, who now set out to blacken Erasmus’s image and isolate his admirers. “Men speak ill of me everywhere simply because I am a supporter of Erasmus,” Alonso Ruiz de Virués, a Benedictine monk in Burgos, complained to a fellow Spaniard. Such vilification was not confined to private conversations or to out-of-the-way places, he noted: “In courts, theaters, and crowded gatherings I am reviled, snubbed, and hissed at.” The charge “is heresy, and it is made in sermons and delivered from the pulpit.” The monks were secretly stationing agents in bookstores, where, pretending to be occupied with something else, they tried to warn off those interested in buying Erasmus’s works by citing their offensive content.

  With Erasmus facing such opprobrium, Alonso Manrique de Lara, the Spanish inquisitor-general, directed his critics to submit their objections in writing, to be taken up at an ecclesiastical assembly scheduled for the summer of 1527 in Valladolid. The charges included defaming Jerome, undermining the Trinity, placing too much faith in ancient manuscripts, and impugning the authority of the Vulgate. Because of an outbreak of the plague, the conference was adjourned before a final judgment could be reached. Erasmus’s Spanish friends advised him to let the matter rest. Refusing, he produced a searing Defense Against Some Spanish Monks. This inflamed the monks further, and after Charles left Spain in 1529, taking the Erasmian-inflected court with him, Erasmus’s enemies declared war on his supporters. They were investigated, fined, forced to issue public recantations, and in some cases imprisoned. By the mid-1530s, reading Erasmus had become a virtual crime in Spain.

  Amid all these clashes, Erasmus managed to find the time to make good on his promise to Thomas More to complete the second part of the Hyperaspistes. Twice the length of the first, it was one of Erasmus’s longest—and most vitriolic—works. He scorned Luther’s “supersophistical trash,” his “prolix and pretentious palaver,” his smoke screens and hairsplitting. “It is worthwhile to hear how he shakes and sifts this passage,” he wrote of one Lutheran gloss, “for he does so not like a person examining something carefully but like a wild horse shaking its rider off the saddle and into the mud.” Whether discussing the pharaoh’s heart, Judas’s betrayal, or the potter’s clay, Luther had done nothing but “cockadoodled”—a term Erasmus repeatedly flung like a school-yard taunt.

  Here and there, he took a break from the name-calling to offer a heartfelt summary of the main differences between him and Luther and, in effect, between the Renaissance and the Reformation. Within man, he wrote, there is a faculty of reason that enables him to distinguish good from evil and turn from the one to the other. The tears that grown men shed at the sight of extraordinary acts of virtue show that the seeds of such behavior lie deep within us. Even the most dissolute individuals retain some faculty of moral awareness. But Luther had so exaggerated man’s depravity and his need for grace as to make him seem almost a Satan. Even when performing the noblest deeds, Luther claimed, man does nothing but sin. But even if one grants that virtuous acts alone are not sufficient to achieve justification, people do not do wicked deeds when they honor their parents, love their children and wives, support the poor and sick. Many perform such acts for no other reason than that they think them worthy of a good person and would want the same done to them if they found themselves in similar circumstances.

  At the end of his tract, Erasmus offered a simple statement that, perhaps more than any other in his vast oeuvre, summed up his philosophy of Christ: Rather than make finespun distinctions over how God’s grace works in us, we should devote our efforts to obtaining that
grace. Scripture does not say that all human endeavor is in vain—that God will save or damn you as he pleases. Rather, it says: Turn to me and I will turn to you. Struggle to enter by the narrow gate. Transgressors, return to your senses. Forgive and you will be forgiven. Help the poor and show favor to the orphan. “Let brother say to brother, ‘Let us love one another’; let us change for the better if we have sinned through ignorance; let us strive for God’s grace by pious works.”

  Thus far, Basel had managed to escape the strife and recrimination engulfing Europe, remaining a haven of openness and pluralism, and in the afternoon Erasmus liked to retreat to Froben’s garden to read and edit the ancients. In 1527 and 1528, he brought out new editions of Chrysostom, Athanasius, Irenaeus, Origen, Ambrose, Seneca, and—towering over them all—Augustine. The collected edition of the great Doctor that he had been working on since 1521 was so massive (ten thick volumes) that it would take two full years to print.