A world lit only by fire: the medieval mind and the Renaissance

by William Manchester

  COAXED BACK into hiding by his frantic protector, Junker Georg reluctantly grew a beard and wore knightly attire as a disguise. He slept poorly, ate too much, grew fat, and suffered familiar hallucinations—he told his bodyguards that an apparition of the devil had appeared, stinking up the place, but he had replied in kind, routing the demon “mit einem Furz” (“with a fart”). 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. But he remained 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 Ireland; whatever the English were for, the Irish were against. But for a time Catholicism seemed a lost cause in Bohemia, Transylvania, Austria, and even Poland. Converts could be found in the unlikeliest places. Maximilian’s granddaughter Isabella—sister of Charles V, the Holy Roman emperor—was converted to Lutheranism. 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. This was a powerful incentive to break with Rome; overnight a prince’s tax revenues increased enormously, and as he appointed magistrates to fill the void left by ousted papal and episcopal appointees, his prestige among his people rose. They, however, had nothing to say about all this. 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. All converts agreed on certain principles: renunciation of papal rule; replacing Latin with common tongues; the abandonment of celibacy, pilgrimages, adoration of the Virgin and the saints; and, of course, condemnation of the old clergy. However, because the religious revolution also aroused advocates of panaceas, divisions appeared quickly, and ran deep. Presently Protestants were at each other’s throats.

  Perhaps the most popular Protestant dogma—and a striking illustration of how far removed that century was from this—was predestination: the tenet that God, being omniscient and omnipotent, is responsible for every action, virtuous and vile, and man is without choice. Luther, the ultimate determinist, could not grasp the concept of moral freedom. In De servo arbitrio (1525) he wrote: “The human will is like a beast of burden. … God foresees, foreordains, and accomplishes all things by an unchanging, eternal, and efficacious will. By this thunderbolt free will sinks shattered in the dust.”

  But, dissenters replied, if no man’s actions can alter his fate—if his salvation or damnation are foreordained—why resist wicked temptations, or toil to improve the human condition, or even go to church? They argued furiously and endlessly, but never reasonably. Thus Protestantism was divided at its birth. There was the Lutheran Church, and there was the Reformed. As other major figures emerged—Huldrych 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.

  In the spirit of the time, they celebrated their spiritual rebirths violently. Tirades led to recriminations, then to public executions. 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. Afterward the most ardent spectators could be identified by their own singed hair and features; in their eagerness to enjoy the gamy scent of burning flesh, they had crowded too close. Ultimately this fascination with

  The Reformation Monument, Geneva

  death, as ordinary then as it seems extraordinary now, led to massive butchery—to spreading bloodstains of religious wars which crossed national frontiers and carried over into a new age.

  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, Von Sickingen was in the field, fighting an army led by the archbishop of Trier—the prelate turned out to be the better general; the knight fell mortally wounded—and within four years the number of Germans killed or executed approached a quarter-million. 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. They had been awaiting an excuse for a rampage, and Worms would have provided it, whatever the outcome: the knights of Luther’s volunteer escort had sworn to kill him unless he refused to recant.

  Even as word of his successful defiance spread across Germany, the mayhem had begun. Erfurt heard the news in the last days of April; a mob demolished forty houses belonging to the Church, burned rent rolls, razed a library, and, invading the university, killed a humanist scholar. 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. The following day a band of students destroyed the altars of the city’s Franciscan monastery. Shortly thereafter, a leader of the local Augustinian congregation mounted a stump and called upon all who could hear him to follow their example—to roam the countryside, applying the ax to Catholic images, altars, and sacred paintings, and then feeding them to flames. Luther’s colleague, Professor Karlstadt, led students in assaults on local churches, tearing crucifixes and pictures from the walls and stoning priests who tried to intervene. Wearing civilian clothes, Karlstadt said the Mass in German and invited his congregation to celebrate holy communion by drinking from the chalice and taking the bread in their own hands—sacrilege in the eyes of Rome. He 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.

  It was these disorders which had flushed Luther out of his sanctuary in the Thuringian Forest. His attitude toward violence had always been ambivalent. No Protestant, not even Hutten, had published prose as incendiary as Adel deutscher Nation, but now, confronted with the consequences, he drew back. It proved to be only the temporary lapse of a revolutionary. Nevertheless it was impressive. 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? The sun, the moon, the stars, have been worshipped; shall we then pluck them out of the sky?”

  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. The Ratsversammlung, reversing itself, drove Karlstadt out of town. Unchastised, he took a pulpit in nearby Orlamünde to condemn Luther as a “gluttonous ecclesiastic … the new Wittenberg pope.” His congregation was swayed. Frederick the Wise, fearing an uprising—and it was coming—asked Luther to make the burghers of Orlamünde see reason. He tried, but nothing was sacred anymore, not even the man who, more than any other, had inspired them; the Orlamünders, refusing to listen to him, stoned him and pasted him with mud until he withdrew.

  Hearing of the incident, Thomas Müntzer, another former Lutheran turned radical Anabaptist, published a pamphlet calling his former idol “Dr. Liar [Dr. Lügner],” a “shameless monk” who spent his time “whoring and drinking.” Müntzer was openly calling on the serfs to revolt; in a leaflet, Ermahnung zum Frieden (Admonition to Peace), Luther begged them to be patient. They rose anyway, and when their rebellion collapsed—nearly 100,000 peasant deaths later—Karlstadt was threatened with prosecution as an instigator. Ironically, he turned to Luther for refuge. It was quickly granted, and Karlstadt, weary of struggle, hoarse from his polemics, and exhausted by the demands of his teenaged bride, returned to teaching. He died, an obscure professor in Basel, fifteen years later. Müntzer was less fortunate. He led rebellious peasants against seasoned troops in Saxony. The defeat of the rebels was followed by an orgy of medieval brutality; five thousand men were put to the sword. Some three hundred were spared when their women agreed to beat out the brains of two priests suspected of encouraging the uprising. Then Müntzer himself was tortured to the point of death and beheaded.

  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. It was a curious appeal, revealing a total misunderstanding of everything Erasmus represented. Replying on May 30, the scholar suggested that it “might be wiser of you to denounce those who misuse the Pope’s authority than to censure the Pope himself. … Old institutions cannot be uprooted in an instant. Quiet argument may do more than wholesale condemnation. Avoid all appearance of sedition. Keep cool. Do not get angry. Do not hate anybody.”

  Erasmus continued to defend Luther. In the Axiomata Erasmi, a statement addressed to Frederick of Saxony, he declared that men who loved the gospel were those least resentful of the Wittenberg monk; Christians were demanding evangelical truth, he added, and could not be suppressed. To Lorenzo Cardinal Campeggio he sent a long letter which began with the observation that during his travels “I perceived that the better a man was, the less he was Luther’s enemy. … If 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. It was unlike Leo X, and those who were sent to publish it”—Eck and Aleandro—“only made things worse.” He concluded: “You may assure yourself that Erasmus has been, and always will be, a faithful subject of the Roman See. But I think, and many will think with me, that there would be a better chance of settlement if there were less ferocity.”

  But thus far the greater ferocity had come from Rome’s critics. If Luther had badly misjudged Erasmus, Erasmus’s misjudgment of Luther was complete. There is no other way to interpret his May 30, 1519, letter to him. It was an offer of reasonable advice to an unreasonable fundamentalist. As such, it was not only wasted but probably incomprehensible to the monk, whose sensible preaching to the Wittenbergers had been out of character; who, most of the time, spoke the language of invective. The monk in Wittenberg was by nature everything the scholar in Louvain asked him not to be: inflammatory, passionate, seditious, hot, furious, and a born hater. That was his magic, and it was also part of his genius. Erasmus had deplored injustice without result; Luther hated it with great results. One man was thoughtful, the other intuitive.

  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 for reform, but the reformers, being emotional men, did not acknowledge the debt. On the contrary; the “Martinians,” as Luther’s followers called themselves, accepted what was coming to be known as the 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. Karlstadt, though learned, had first destroyed his own books and then declared that true believers should confine themselves to tilling the ground or working with their hands. George Mohr, a colleague and protégé, resigned from the faculty to preach the joys of illiteracy, and a number of Wittenberg undergraduates, seeing no point in further study, left their lecture halls to become craftsmen.

  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: Johannes Cochlaeus, dean at Frankfurt am Main; Johannes Reuchlin, who had stopped the burning of Luther’s books and as a result faced trial as a heretic; Willibald Pirkheimer, the Nuremberg merchant, scholar, and friend of Dürer, whom Erasmus had called “the chief glory of Germany” and who had been excommunicated for his open defense of Luther; Conradus Mutianus Rufus of Gotha; and Erasmus himself.

  The Vatican had shielded scholars and sponsored their successful searches for the lost treasures of classical learning, provided, of course, they confined themselves to Latin and Greek. 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. Mutianus had called Luther “the morning star of Wittenberg.” Now, according to Durant, he decided that he behaved with “the fury of a maniac.” Cochlaeus, another early admirer of Luther, wrote him: “Christ does not teach such methods as you are carrying out so offensively with ‘Antichrist,’ ‘brothels,’ ‘Devil’s nests,’ ‘cesspools,’ and other unheard-of terms of abuse, not to speak of your threatenings of sword, bloodshed, and murder,” adding: “O Luther, you were never taught this method of working by Christ!” Pirkheimer wrote: “Things have come to a pass that the popish scoundrels are made to appear virtuous by the Evangelical ones. … Luther, with his shameless, ungovernable tongue, must have lapsed into insanity, or been inspired by the Evil Spirit.”

  When Erasmus agreed, Luther denounced him as a quixotic dreamer who “thinks that all can be accomplished with civility and benevolence.” Erasmus was offended. He was, and knew himself to be, the most eminent scholar of his time. But other Martinians were harder on him than their leader. Some scorned him as a renegade; others, in the words of a later critic, as “a begging parasite, who had [sense] enough to discover the truth, and not enough to profess it.” Still others denounced him as a Vatican stooge, on the pope’s payroll. That was terribly unjust. It was true that in Louvain Erasmus was as dependent upon Catholic wealth as Michelangelo in Rome; true also that he owed his bread, his books, and his very clothing to pensions from an archbishop, a baron, and the Holy Roman emperor, all loyal to the Holy See. However, he had accepted them only on the condition that he wo
uld retain his intellectual independence. And he continued to exercise it. In Cologne, in Frederick III’s inn rooms—where he had saved Luther, who never thanked him, and enraged Aleandro, who never forgave him—he had shown that he was no papal pawn. That was merely an omen; as the interfaith conflict grew, so did his courage.

  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 discipline and private morality. In Christendom’s widening civil war, he foresaw only madness, and he believed the Catholic infrastructure could be set aright if he brought his wisdom to bear on its flaws. Hans Holbein’s portrait in oils, now in the Louvre, captures the inner Erasmus: thin-lipped, longnosed, the eyes hooded, the expression forbidding. It may be seen as a study in intellectual arrogance. “I do not admit,” he wrote, “that my doctrine can be judged by anyone, even by the angels.”

  But he was wise. No other figure on the European stage saw the religious crisis so clearly; if he was vain to suppose that he could impose his solution on it, the fact remains that no other solution made sense. And despite the judgment of his contemporaries, Protestant and Catholic alike, he was no weakling. In rejecting Luther’s overture he had assured his own isolation, for obscurantist Catholic theologians deeply distrusted him. They not only blamed Erasmus for Luther’s defection; they suspected him of being his amanuensis. “These men,” he had written to Luther, “cannot by any means be disabused of the suspicion that your works are written by my aid, and that I am, as they call it, the standard-bearer [vexillarius] of your party. … I have testified to them that you are entirely unknown to me, that I have not read your books, and neither approve nor disapprove of your writings, but that they should read them before they speak so loudly. … It was no use; they are as mad as ever. … I am myself the chief object of animosity.”