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They had begun as pure scholars dedicated to the rediscovery of Latin, and then Greek, classics. But their emphasis on wisdom not derived from religious sources had led them to turn away from the supernatural.
that mankind’s highest ethical objective is not the salvation of his soul but the earthly good of all humanity.
By then the divines were ready to fight, and the first quarrel they opened—over higher education—was one the humanists, it seemed, could hardly ignore.
Although the issue was profound, discussion of it remained a monologue. The humanists were hardly inarticulate; they were merely reserving their concern for immediate issues, such as the gross abuse of authority in the ecclesiastical hierarchy.
Reflective men make uncomfortable prosecutors. By nature and by training, they tend to see the other side and give it equal weight. Clerical misconduct aroused the anger of some humanists, but others, bred to be devout, found the matter disturbing. They searched for compromises, envying painters and sculptors who could overlook the goings-on in Rome. Not all artists did, however. The shrewdest of them, aware that the papacy was spending fortunes on Vatican art even as famine stalked Europe, suspected the Vatican of exploiting them, tightening its grip on the masses by overawing them with
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To them this was tragic. The doctrine that the Church was perfect, that the very idea of change was heretical, deeply disturbed learned Catholics, leaving them torn between faith and reason.
Within a century Galileo Galilei of Florence would confirm the Copernican system. Summoned to Rome, he, too, was found guilty of heresy. When he persisted in publishing his findings, he was called before the Inquisition, where, in 1633, under threat of torture, he disavowed his belief in a revolving earth. As he left the tribunal, however, he was heard to mutter, “E pur si muove” (“And yet it does move”). His recantation therefore was judged inadequate. He died blind and in disgrace.
But there had been little science and no modern civilization in the Dark Ages, when acceptance of papal supremacy by all Christendom had rescued a continent from chaos. Faith had literally held Europe together then, giving hope to men who had been without it.
His, in short, was the peculiar naïveté of the isolated intellectual. As an ecclesiastic, he had an encyclopedic knowledge of clerical scandals, including the corruption in Rome. Other humanists had withdrawn from this squalor and found solace in the Scriptures. Not Erasmus; by force of reason, he believed, he could resolve the abuses of Catholicism and keep Christendom intact.
He miscalculated. Because the press as we know it had not even reached an embryonic stage, his knowledge of the world around him, like that of his contemporaries, was confined to what he saw, heard, was told, or read in letters or conversation.
moria for “folly.”
He opened his argument by declaring that the human race owed its very existence to folly, for without it no man would submit to lifelong monogamy and no woman to the trials of motherhood. Bravery was foolish; so were men who pursued learning; and so, he added slyly, were theologians, whom he mocked for defending the absurdity of original sin, for spreading the myth that “our Saviour was conceived in the Virgin’s womb,” for presuming, during holy communion, to “demonstrate, in the consecrated wafer… how one body can be in several places at the same time, and how Christ’s body in heaven differs
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As for the pontiffs, they had lost any resemblance to the Apostles in “their riches, honors, jurisdictions, offices, dispensations, licenses… ceremonies and tithes, excommunications and interdicts.” Erasmus, the intellectual, could find only one explanation for their success: the stupidity, ignorance, and gullibility of the faithful.
Once more, however, he leveled his heaviest artillery on the Vatican. His contempt for Julius’s wars was venomous—“as if the Church had any enemies as pestilential as impious pontiffs who by their silence allow Christ to be forgotten, enchain [him] by their mercenary rules… and crucify him afresh by their scandalous life!” Depravity
In the first rush after publication, twenty-four thousand copies of the colloquies vanished from bookshops, and between then and midcentury only the Bible outsold it. There was a continuing demand for all his popular works.
Until now all exchanges had been in Latin. This time, however, Luther replied in German. He rejected the authority of popes and councils, which had contradicted one another so often. He recanted nothing.
was, Thomas Carlyle would write, “the greatest moment in the modern history of man.” Certainly it was the most astonishing moment in young Charles’s life. To rebuke a Holy Roman emperor!
That night placards bearing the image of a peasant’s shoe—the German symbol of revolution—appeared all over Worms, including the door of the Rathaus (town hall).
The diatribe charged, among other things, that Luther had “sullied marriage, disparaged confession, and denied the body and blood of Our Lord.” It continued: “He is a pagan in his denial of free will. The devil in the habit of a monk has brought together ancient errors into one stinking puddle and invented new ones.… His teaching makes for rebellion, division, war, murder, robbery, arson, and the collapse of Christendom. He lives the life of a beast.”
Within a few months he left his lair to deliver a series of eight sermons in Wittenberg. Yet the emperor was already gone. Preoccupied by his conflict with the French, he absented himself from central Europe for ten years. By the time he returned, it was too late. Europe had changed. Somewhere in the continent a kind of universal joint—one of those suspicious devices whose design could be found among Leonardo’s papers—had shifted. German princes, the king of France—even the pope—were loath to give Charles the powers he needed to suppress Luther. Moreover,
To Spalatin he sent a treatise on monastic vows, repudiating celibacy as a trap of Lucifer’s and declaring sexual desire to be irrepressible. (Spalatin, embarrassed, hid the tract.) Finally Luther settled down on a stump, surrounded himself with foolscap, and began compounding his crimes by translating the New Testament into German.
restless. “I had rather burn on live coals,” he wrote, “than rot here.… I want to be in the fray.” Actually no one was thicker in it. Luther’s movement was sweeping northern Europe:
first the free cities, led by Nuremberg; then Saxony, Brandenburg, Prussia, Württemberg, Hesse, Brunswick, and Anhalt; then half Switzerland; then Scandinavia. Italy and Spain never threatened to defect. Nor, after England turned, did ...
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And the king of France tolerated Lutheran propaganda, decided purgatory did not exist, and turned against the pope, though he never became a closet Protestant.*
Early Protestant strength sprang from tradesmen; from anticlericals; from the educated middle classes, whose humanistic studies had convinced them that Catholicism was rooted in superstition; and, in Germany, from the nobility, whose first acts, upon renouncing allegiance to Rome, were to appropriate all Church wealth within their domains, including land and monasteries.
The decision was completely his. His subjects adopted whatever faith he chose; the various diets and councils which met throughout the century to discuss tolerance—and eventually granted it, accepting the historic schism—were discussing the rights of rulers, not the ruled. Religious freedom for the individual lay centuries away. It did not even exist as an abstraction.
Had men been offered choices, the result would have been chaotic. Protestantism was already confusing enough as it was.
Perhaps the most popular Protestant dogma—and a striking illustration of how far removed that century was from this—was predestination: the
but never reasonably. Thus Protestantism was divided at its birth.
Zwingli of Switzerland, for example; John Calvin, a native of France; and the Scotsman John Knox—new sects formed, each with its own views of worship, each as intolerant of the others as it was of Rome, each as repressive as Catholicism. Anabaptists appeared, and Mennonites, Bohemians, and the forerunners of Baptists, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and Unitarians.
Autos-da-fé were more popular than ever. Peasants would walk thirty miles to hoot and jeer as a fellow Christian, enveloped in flames, writhed and screamed his life away.
NO ONE HAS calculated how many sixteenth-century Christians slaughtered other Christians in the name of Christ, but the gore began to thicken early. Within a year of Worms,
Their faith cannot be indicted for their deaths. The homicidal lust had long been latent. Before the revolution, Christendom’s common people, as brutal as their leaders, had enjoyed the sport known to the Germans as Bärenhetze—setting famished dogs loose on a bear chained in a pit and watching them eat him alive. A part of them had wanted to be down in the pit, too.
In Wittenberg another mob, brandishing daggers and rocks, invaded a parish service; women kneeling before an image of the Madonna were stoned, and the priest driven out.
persuaded Wittenberg’s Ratsversammlung, the town’s council, to ban music at all religious services. Both monks and priests, he argued, should be required to wed, and he observed his fortieth birthday by setting an example, marrying a fifteen-year-old girl.
He preached: “Do not suppose that abuses are eliminated by destroying the object which is abused. Men can go wrong with wine and women; shall we then prohibit wine and ban women?
Under his direction, both old and new communion rites were made available to Wittenbergers, and worshipers who cherished crucifixes, religious images, and holy music were left alone; as a composer of hymns, he himself approved of such solace.
LUTHER had been among the captivated readers of Erasmus’s Encomium moriae. The eminent humanist was now busy at the University of Louvain’s Collegium Trilingue, with professorships in Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, and on March 18, 1519, Luther had written him there, humbly soliciting his support.
we want truth, every man ought to be free to say what he thinks without fear. If the advocates of one side are to be rewarded with miters, and the advocates of the other side with rope or stake, truth will not be heard.” He now knew that the Exsurge Domine had been genuine, but believed that “nothing could have been more invidious or unwise than the Pope’s bull.
But thus far the greater ferocity had come from Rome’s critics.
However, intuition, though it fuels action, is volatile and therefore dangerous. And Luther’s sense of justice was selective. Though he was outraged by the peasant revolt, he remained silent on the one early excess of Protestantism which offended learned Europeans most. The Erfurt mob’s murder of a humanist, an innocent bystander, was an omen to his fellow humanists. Intellectuals everywhere were caught entre deux feux—in peril, as, in times of bloodlust, they have always been. By exposing Roman corruption and eroding blind acceptance of medieval superstition, thoughtful men had opened the way
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Zwickau Dogma, named after the town in which it originated. The dogmatists held that God spoke directly to simple men in simple language, that they instinctively understood him, and that the true Christian spurned literature, even reading and writing.
Intolerance, contempt for learning, the burning of religious art, the rejection of classical culture as pagan, and the adoption of primitive papal tactics—book burning, excommunication, even death at the stake—alienated humanists who had at first defended Luther:
The humanists had approved of reforming the Church, but had not bargained for Protestant ravings about predestination and hell and demons and all the baggage of supernaturalism which, to them, signified a reactionary return to medievalism.
ERASMUS was not without weakness. He was guilty of all the familar academic sins. He overestimated the power of logic, assumed that intelligent men are rational, and believed that through his friendships with the European elite—the emperor, the pope, King Francis I, King Henry VIII, Italian princes, German barons, the lord chancellor of England, and virtually every learned man on the Continent—he could alter events. Although he privately regarded conventional religion as a stew of superstitions, he could envisage no institution which would replace the Roman faith as an enforcer of social
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Calvinists worked hard because there wasn’t much else they were permitted to do. “Feasting” was proscribed; so were dancing, singing, pictures, statues, relics, church bells, organs, altar candles; “indecent or irreligious” songs, staging or attending theatrical plays; wearing rouge, jewelry, lace, or “immodest” dress; speaking disrespectfully of your betters; extravagant entertainment; swearing, gambling, playing cards, hunting, drunkenness; naming children after anyone but figures in the Old Testament; reading “immoral or irreligious” books; and sexual intercourse, except between partners of
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To show that Calvinists were merciful, first offenders were let off with reprimands and two-time losers with fines. After that, those who flouted the law were in real trouble.
because any single woman discovered with child was drowned. (So, if he could be identified, was her impregnator.) Violating the seventh commandment was also a capital offense. Calvin’s stepson was found in bed with another woman; his daughter-in-law, behind a haystack with another man. All four miscreants were executed.
On other issues they were adamant, however. The ultimate crime, of course, was heresy. It was even blacker than witchcraft, though sorcerers could not be expected to appreciate the distinction; after a devastating outbreak of plague, fourteen Geneva women, found guilty of persuading Satan to afflict the community, were burned alive.
It was a consummate irony of the Reformation that the movement against Rome, which had begun with an affirmation of individual judgment, now repudiated it entirely.
