A world lit only by fire: the medieval mind and the Renaissance : portrait of an age

by William Manchester

  The Church was the last career such parents would have chosen for their eldest son. He knew it, and that decided him. “The severe and harsh life I led with them,” he wrote, “was the reason I afterward took refuge in the cloister and became a monk. ” Despite its inspirational beginning, his visit to the Vatican left a poor impression on him, but at the time he kept that to himself. His colleagues, dazzled by his treatises and his performances in his lecture hall, would have been astounded to learn that he had never shed the pagan superstitions infused in him even before he had reached the age of awareness—that a part of him was still haunted by pagan nightmares of werewolves and griffins crouched beneath writhing treetops under a full moon, of trolls and warlocks feasting on serpents’ hearts, of men transforming themselves into slimy

  Martin Luther (1483–1546)

  incubi and coupling with their own sisters while in a cave Brunhilde dreamed of the dank smell of bloodstained axes.

  Luther was peculiar in other ways. His fellow monks spoke of the devil, warned of the devil, feared the devil. Luther saw the devil—ran into apparitions of him all the time. He was also the most anal of theologians. In part, this derived from the national character of the Reich. A later mot had it that the Englishman’s sense of humor is in the drawing room, the Frenchman’s sense of humor is in the bedroom, and the German’s sense of humor is in the bathroom. For Luther the bathroom was also a place of worship. His holiest moments often came when he was seated on the privy (Abort) in a Wittenberg monastery tower. It was there, while moving his bowels, that he conceived the revolutionary Protestant doctrine of justification by faith. Afterward he wrote: “These words ‘just’ and ‘justice of God’ were a thunderbolt to my conscience. … I soon had the thought [that] God’s justice ought to be the salvation of every believer. … Therefore it is God’s justice which justifies us and saves us. And these words became a sweeter message for me. This knowledge the Holy Spirit gave me on the privy in the tower.”

  Well, God is everywhere, as the Vatican conceded four centuries later, backing away from a Jesuit scholar who had gleefully translated explicit excretory passages in Luther’s Sammtiche Schriften. The Jesuit had provoked angry protests from Lutherans who accused him of “vulgar Catholic polemics.” Yet the real vulgarity lies in Luther’s own words, which his followers have shelved. They enjoy telling the story of how the devil threw ink at Luther and Luther threw it back. But in the original version it wasn’t ink; it was Scheiss (shit). That feces was the ammunition Satan and his Wittenberg adversary employed against each other is clear from the rest of Luther’s story, as set down by his Wittenberg faculty colleague Philipp Melanchthon: “Having been worsted … the Demon departed indignant and murmuring to himself after having emitted a crepitation of no small size, which left a foul stench in the chamber for several days afterwards.”

  Again and again, in recalling Satan’s attacks on him, Luther uses the crude verb bescheissen, which describes what happens when someone soils you with his Scheiss. In another demonic stratagem, an apparition of the prince of darkness would humiliate the monk by “showing his arse” (Steiss). Fighting back, Luther adopted satanic tactics. He invited the devil to “kiss” or “lick” his Steiss, threatened to “throw him into my anus, where he belongs,” to defecate “in his face” or, better yet, “in his pants” and then “hang them around his neck.”

  A man who had battled the foulest of fiends in der Abort and die Latrine was unlikely to be intimidated by the vaudevillian Tetzel. Yet Luther’s reply to the jubilee agent was not as dramatic as legend has made it. He did not “nail” a denunciation of the pope on the door of Frederick’s Castle Church. In Wittenberg, as in many university towns of the time, the church door was customarily used as a bulletin board; an academician with a new religious theory would post it there, thus signifying his readiness to defend it against all challengers.

  Luther’s timing was canny, however. He took advantage of another tradition, the elector’s annual display of his relics on All Saints’ Day, November 1. This always brought a crowd. Therefore at noon on October 31, 1517, he affixed his (Disputatio pro declaratione virtutis indulgentiarum (Disputation for the Clarification of the Power of Indulgences) alongside the postulates of other theologians. He did something else. He prepared a German translation to be circulated among the worshipers who would gather in the morning. And he sent a copy to Archbishop Albrecht, sponsor and secret beneficiary of Tetzel’s carnival act.

  Luther’s theses—he had posted ninety-five of them—were preceded by a conciliatory preamble: “Out of love for the faith and the desire to bring it to light, the following propositions will be discussed at Wittenberg under the chairmanship of the Reverend Father Martin Luther, Master of Arts and Sacred Theology.” It did not occur to him that his position was heretical. Nor was it—then. The pontiff, he agreed, retained the right to absolve penitents, “the power of the keys.” He simply argued that peddling pardons like Colosseum souvenirs trivialized sin by debasing the contrition.

  However, he then lodged an objection, one Rome could not ignore. The papal keys, he pointed out, could not reach beyond the grave, freeing an unremorseful soul from purgatory or even decreasing its term of penance there. And while he absolved the Holy See from huckstering indulgences, he added a sharp, significant observation, which, in retrospect, may be seen as the first warning flash of the fury he had bottled up within since his hideous childhood. It was, in fact, a direct criticism of the Apostolic See—breathtaking because it could only be interpreted as the premeditated act of a heresiarch, and thus, a capital offense. He wrote: “This unbridled preaching of pardons makes it no easy matter, even for learned men, to rescue the reverence due the pope from … the shrewd questionings of the laity, to wit: ‘Why does not the pope empty purgatory for the sake of holy love and of the dire need of the souls that are there, if he redeems a … number of souls for the sake of miserable money with which to build a church?’ ”

  THE SALE of indulgences plunged. Fewer and fewer quarter-florin coins rang in the pontiff’s bowl. The jubilee had virtually collapsed; Tetzel’s spell had been broken. Luther was the new spellbinder—divine or satanic, for opinion was deeply divided—and accounts of his audacity spread across the continent with what was, in the early 1500s, historic speed.

  As long as a year would pass before the tidings of great events reached the far corners of Europe. Except for the flatbed presses, which moved at a lentitudinous pace, communications as we know them did not exist. Information was usually carried by travelers, and trips were measured by the calendar. The best surviving timetables start from Venice, then the center of commerce. A passenger departing there could hope to enter Naples nine days later. Lyons was two weeks away; Augsburg, Nuremberg, and Cologne, two or three weeks; Lisbon seven weeks. With luck, a man could reach London in a month, provided the weather over the Channel was cooperative. If a storm broke in midpassage, however, you were trapped. The king of England, leaving Bordeaux under fair skies, did not appear in London until twelve days later.

  Yet if news was electrifying, it could pass from village to village and even across the Channel, borne word-of-mouth. That is what happened after Luther affixed his theses to the church door. Before the first week in November had ended, spontaneous demonstrations supporting or condemning him had erupted throughout Germany. Luther had done the unthinkable—he had flouted the ruler of the universe.

  Penetrating the essence of the peasants’ faith is difficult. Essentially it was belief in the supernatural. The lower orders of parochial clergy were regarded with contempt but also with affection. Bishops and archbishops, on the other hand, were less popular. In a study of Luther’s homeland on the eve of his rise, Johannes Janssen, himself an eminent Catholic, found the prelates there obsessed with “worldly greed,” while “preaching and the care of souls were altogether neglected.” And, unlike priests faithful to their Konkubinen, they were notoriously promiscuous, sometimes traveling to federal or imperial diets with
several mistresses in tow. The peasants’ view of the pope is harder to define. They revered him, but not as the Vicar of Christ. He was more like a great magician. Now his powers had been impeached by a lowly Augustinian theologian. They expected a vengeful response. Its potency would sway their allegiance. If the pontiff’s magic failed, they would begin to turn away from him.

  In defying the organized Church, Luther had done something else. He had broken the dam of medieval discipline. By his reasoning, every man could be his own priest, a conclusion he himself would reach in 1520–1521. Moreover, as fragmentary accounts of the Gospels began to circulate, the peasantry learned that the sympathies of Christ and his apostles had lain with the oppressed, not with the princes who had presumed to speak in his name. Because church and state were so entwined in central Europe, Luther’s challenge to ecclesiastical prestige encouraged a proletariat eager to demand a larger share in an increasingly prosperous Germany. Soon a pamphlet titled Karsthans (Pitchfork John) appeared in rural villages, pledging Luther the protection of the peasants. The assumption that he had become their champion was implicit.

  The views of the upper classes were very different. Before the succession of disastrous popes their commitment to the Catholic hierarchy and the order of temporal life had been unwavering. Their lives were still guided by the dogmas of the Church, but the corruption in Rome and the flagrant misconduct of the clergy had angered them. It was also their “general opinion,” in the words of Ludwig Pastor, “that in the matter of taxation the Roman Curia put on the pressure to an unbearable degree. … Even men devoted to the Church and the Holy See … often declared that the German grievances against Rome were, from a financial point of view, for the most part only too well founded.” Now they listened attentively to the sermons of Luther’s disciples touring Austria, Bohemia, Saxony, and the Swiss Confederation. The patricians, too, awaited a strong response from Rome.

  ON APRIL 24, 1518, the German Augustinians, meeting in Heidelberg, relieved Luther of his duties as district vicar. It was a show of confidence, not a reprimand, and he used his new freedom well, delivering a closely reasoned denunciation of Scholastic doctrine as a pretentious “theory of glory.” Printed copies were circulated across the Continent and discussed in widening circles, including the humanist community. Since the turn of the century humanist leaders had awaited a distinguished theologian with the courage to label Scholasticism as anti-intellectualism parading mindless shibboleths as philosophy. German scholars now published a sheaf of leaflets proclaiming themselves Lutherans.

  In England John Colet, who had seen the revolt coming—yet whose loyalty to the papacy would remain unshaken throughout the coming tumult—saw the Curia engrossed not with good works and repentance, but with the size of the fees it could exact. Luther was discovering that he had become the voice of millions who suffered doubly from the Renaissance popes; impoverished by highwaymen like Tetzel, they also grieved for their beloved faith, desecrated by rogues in vestments. From this point forward, his wrath and theirs would join, gathering in volume and strength as together they confronted the most powerful symbol of authority Europe had ever known. Both sides would invoke the name of Christ, but in Germany, where first blood was being drawn, the spectacle invited parallels, not with the New Testament, but with Das Lied vom huren Seyfrid, the pagan fable first heard by Luther as a child, which reaches its climax when Siegfried buries his gory ax in the dragon Fafnir.

  The gauntlet had been flung, but Pope Leo merely toyed with it. Archbishop Albrecht, alarmed, sent the theses from Mainz to Rome accompanied by a forceful request that Luther be formally disciplined. Leo misinterpreted the challenge. Dismissing it as another dispute between Augustinians and Dominicans, he turned the matter over to Gabriel della Volta, the vicar general ofLuther’s order, instructing him to deal with it through channels, in this case Johann von Staupitz, the Augustinian responsible for Wittenberg. Della Volta’s order may have wound up in some curial pigeonhole or file. Certainly it never reached Staupitz. In effect, the papacy had ignored the defiance in Wittenberg.

  Elsewhere, however, the Catholic reaction was vehement. The universities of Louvain, Cologne, and Leipzig, strongholds of theological tradition, condemned the theses in their entirety. And Tetzel, feeling himself libeled, had decided to reply. Because he was an illiterate and ignorant of virtually every principle at stake, the Dominicans had appointed a theologian, Konrad Wimpina, as his collaborator, and in December 1517 One Hundred and Six Anti-Theses had appeared in Frankfurt under Tetzel’s name. Unapologetic, unyielding, the friar defended his distributions of cut-rate salvation in an argument later described in the Catholic Encyclopedia as giving “an uncompromising, even dogmatic, sanction to mere theological opinions that were hardly consonant with the most accurate scholarship.” The following March a hawker offered eight hundred copies of the leaflet in Wittenberg. University students mobbed him, bought the lot, and burned them in the market square.

  Luther counterattacked in a tract, Indulgence and Grace. Now the rebelliousness in his tone was unmistakable: “If I am called a heretic by those whose purses will suffer from my truths, I care not much for their brawling; for only those say this whose dark understanding has never known the Bible.” In the Curia wise men, realizing that Tetzel had become an embarrassment, told Leo that he had to go. The pope, agreeing, received Karl von Miltitz, a young Saxon priest of noble lineage now serving in Rome. Once the dust had settled, he told Von Miltitz, he wanted him to travel north and unfrock the discredited friar.

  BUT ABANDONING TETZEL now—with orthodox German theologians fiercely defending him—was out of the question. Archbishop Albrecht had privately reprimanded the salesman for his excesses. In public, however, the leadership of the Catholic establishment there closed its ranks and its minds, refusing to discuss compromise. In Rome, a German archbishop called for heresy proceedings against Luther, and the Dominicans demanded his immediate impeachment. Dr. Johann Eck, vice chancellor of Ingolstadt University and perhaps the most eminent theologian in central Europe, attacked the theses in a leaflet, Obelisks, accusing their author of subverting the faith by spreading “poison.” The Curia’s censor of literature, concurring, issued a Dialogue reaffirming “the absolute supremacy of the pope,” and Jakob van Hoogsträten of Cologne demanded Luther be burned at the stake.

  Instead he kept scratching away with his pen. In April 1518, the month after Eck’s blast, he published Resolutiones, a curious brochure whose ostensible purpose was to assure the Church of his orthodoxy and submission. In a copy sent to the pontiff he offered “myself prostrate at the feet of your Holiness, with all I am and have. Quicken, slay, call, recall, approve, reprove, as may seem to you good. I will acknowledge your voice as the voice of Christ, residing and speaking in you.” Yet this inscription was wholly inconsistent with the text that followed. Resolutiones implicitly denied the pontiff’s supremacy, suggesting he was answerable to an ecumenical council. The pamphlet went on to slight relics, pilgrimages, extravagant claims for the powers of saints, and the holy city (“Rome … now laughs at good men; in what part of the Christian world do men more freely make a mock of the best bishops than in Rome, the true Babylon?”). He declared the very foundation of the Curia’s indulgences policy—stretching back over three centuries—null and void. The monk of Wittenberg was growing ever more confident, and as his confidence grew, so did his feelings of independence.

  Leo was stunned. Abandon indulgences? Just as his pontificate was approaching bankruptcy? He was rebuilding a cathedral, waging wars, funding elaborate dinner parties while trying to keep Raphael, Lotto, Vecchio, Perugino, Titian, Parmigianino, and Michelangelo in wine. The Curia, juggling budgets, was swamped with bills. And now a German monk—a mere friar—had the audacity to condemn a prime source of Vatican revenue. The Holy Father summoned Martin Luther to Rome.

  The invitation was declined. Acceptance might mean the stake—there were plenty of precedents for that. At the very least Luther might be assign
ed to an obscure Italian monastery, where, within a year, he and his cause would be forgotten. Instead he appealed to Frederick the Wise, submitting that German princes should shield their people from extradition. The elector agreed. He liked his controversial Augustinian. (One reason was that Luther’s Wittenberg duties included keeping the university’s books; unlike Leo, he had never resorted to red ink.) And

  Pope Leo X (1475–1521)

  Maximilian’s advice, which Frederick sought, was decisive. The Habsburg emperor had only five months to live, but he had lost none of the political shrewdness which had forged an intricate dynastic structure, making his family dominant in central Europe. He was keeping a close watch on the interplay of German politics and religion. “Take good care of that monk,” Maximilian wrote the elector. Handing Luther over to the pontiff, he explained, could be a political blunder. In his judgment, anticlerical sentiment was increasing throughout Germany.

  Almost immediately an imperial diet, or Reichstag, confirmed him. The emperor, in summoning his German princes to Augsburg, was responding to a request from Rome. Leo had told him he was planning a new crusade against the Turks and wanted a surtax to support it. The diet rejected his appeal. The action was highly unusual, but not unprecedented; Frederick, after collecting a papal levy from his people, had decided to keep it and build the University of Wittenberg. His peers had been heartened. All the Vatican wanted from the princes, it seemed, was money, money, and more money. In their view the confirmation fees, annates, and costs of canonical litigation were already millstones around the empire’s neck. Besides, they had sent the Curia revenues for other crusades, only to learn that the ventures had been canceled, while the funds, unreturned, had been spent on Italian projects. All previous crusades had failed anyway. And the princes weren’t worried about Turks. The real enemy of Christendom, they decided, was what one of them called “the hell-hound in Rome.” In a conciliatory letter to the Vatican, Maximilian assured the pope that he would move sternly against heresy. At the same time, he ventured to suggest that Luther be treated carefully.