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

by William Manchester

  That animosity grew, for although he would not abandon Rome—“I endure the Church till the day I shall see another [better] one,” he wrote—he refused to mute either his suggestions for Catholic reforms or his criticism of those who had dishonored their vows. The Vatican should encourage tolerance, he wrote; its hostility toward all change was senseless. He offered suggestions. The Church was too rich; vast tracts of its arable land should be turned over to those who farmed them. The clergy ought to be allowed to marry. Worshipers might be offered alternate forms of communion. Predestination appalled him, but he thought it should be studied, discussed, and debated by priests with open minds. And something must be done about promiscuous nuns and lecherous, thieving, forging, drunken monks; “in many monasteries the last virtue to be found is chastity,” and “many convents” had become “public brothels.”

  HE CONTINUED to correspond with Pope Leo X and, later, his successors, Adrian VI and Clement VII. All instructed the Curia to extend him every courtesy, but they were ignored. The fog of religious strife was, if anything, thicker than those of secular wars; obscurant theologians in Rome and hard-liners in the dioceses abroad saw the widening apostasy as an opportunity to stifle dissent. In Catholic Louvain they were particularly active, even among Erasmus’s colleagues, and their suspicion of him rose on October 8, 1520, when Aleandro arrived there to promulgate Luther’s excommunication. He spread word that the great scholar was the secret mastermind behind Protestant revolts. The faculty, reasoning that the nuncio ought to know, was preparing to expel its most learned colleague when, anticipating his critics, he abruptly left.

  Erasmus moved to Cologne, then still loyal to the pontiff. Rumors that he was a closet Lutheran followed him, however; strangers accosted him with the charge that he had laid the egg Luther hatched. “Yes,” he would wryly reply, “but the egg I laid was a hen, whereas Luther has hatched a gamecock.” By late 1521 he was fed up with them; in mid-November he renounced his pensions, moved up the Rhine to Basel, Switzerland, and settled among a nucleus of humanists. Here he enjoyed a respite; elsewhere priests were using his name as a synonym for treachery, but the Swiss, committed to Protestantism in various forms, left him alone.

  They did not, however, leave Catholicism alone. Inflamed by evangelist preachers, a Basel mob rioted, broke into every Catholic church in the vicinity, and destroyed all religious images. As it happened, Erasmus himself had recently impeached the veneration of images, writing that “people should be taught that these are no more than signs; it would be better if there were none at all, and prayer were addressed only to Christ.” He had, however, added: “But in all things let there be moderation.” The immoderate, rioting vandals had ruptured the thin membrane of civility which he cherished. Disgusted, he showed Switzerland his heels, moving this time to Freiburg im Breisgau, in Catholic Austria. By now Christendom was so confused that no one thought his source of support odd. Actually his bills were being paid by the Fuggers, staunch Catholics who were, at the same time, quietly supporting Protestants in Catholic Venice.

  Nevertheless he found no peace there, either. Austrian opinion about him was divided. Freiburg’s Stadtrat (town council), welcoming Europe’s most illustrious intellectual, moved him into Maximilian’s imperial palace, but the local Augustinians were aware of, and resented, his presence among them. During his Swiss idyll, hereticators had been smearing him all over the Continent. Using techniques which would reemerge in later ages, they identified him as the leader of apostate conspiracies, muttering, in Europe’s many tongues, one of mankind’s oldest and most insidious apothegms: Es gibt keinen Rauch ohne Feuer—Where there’s smoke, there must be fire.

  Erasmus was now approaching seventy. Racked with pain from several afflictions—gallstones, ulcers, gout, dysentery, respiratory disease, arthritis, and pancreatitis—he also felt suffocated by suspicion. In his final flight he returned to Basel. There, after years of wandering, pursued by lies, he passed away in the home of Jerome Froben, son of the scholar-publisher Johann, who had first published his Latin translation of the Greek New Testament.

  Erasmus died a martyr to everything he had despised in life: fear, malice, excess, ignorance, barbarism. And his martyrdom did not end at the grave. He had known that his life was ebbing, yet asked for neither priest nor confessor. Word that he had refused last rites found its way to Spain, where the rekindled Inquisition, having completed a systematic study of his books, began formal proceedings against the doyen of humanism, thereby setting in motion wheels which, eight years later, would grind out a formal denunciation of Erasmus. He was excommunicated and branded a heretic. Under the violent reactionary Pope Paul IV, who as a cardinal had reorganized the Inquisition, everything Erasmus had ever published was consigned to the Index Expurgatorius, which meant that any Catholic who read the prose which had once delighted a pontiff would be placing his soul in jeopardy. *

  ERASMUS WAS the most eminent intellectual victimized by the revolution, but he was far from alone. Indeed, once the lines of battle had been drawn, humanists everywhere were hostages to one side or the other, and sometimes to both. Reason itself had become suspect: tolerance was seen as treachery. Luther, once he had survived Worms, was shielded by Frederick the Wise and the gathering armies of Protestantism. Catholics could find refuge in monasteries, with sympathetic sovereigns or princes, in the papal states, or among the thousandfold sanctuaries of the Holy Roman emperor. The intellectuals were usually without champions, unarmed in a Europe bristling with weapons, and at times it seemed that every man’s hand was against them. Very few were to be untouched during the disorders. Some, like Erasmus, fled from one asylum to another; some were executed; others survived torture but were horribly maimed, their noses torn away, foreheads branded, hands cut off at the wrist, or nipples plucked out by pincers.

  At the outbreak of the revolution most of the humanists had been ordained priests, and several, because of their eminence, were picked by their superiors to serve as blacklisters, leading the Church’s counterrevolution. Suspecting Protestant sympathies among his clergy, the bishop of Meaux appointed Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples his vicar general with instructions to weed them out. Lefèvre, then approaching seventy, was professor of philosophy at the University of Paris, the author of works on physics, mathematics, and Aristotelian ethics, and a Latin translation of Saint Paul’s Epistles. His former pupils—the bishop was one of them—revered him without exception.

  But although he wore vestments and celebrated Mass, Lefèvre was above all a humanist. To expose medieval myths, he proposed a clearer version of the original New Testament. He was working on a French translation of the Bible, and—like Luther — he believed that the Gospels, not papal decrees, should be the ultimate court of theological appeal. Lefèvre was incautious enough to observe also that he thought it “shameful” that bishops should devote their days to hunting and their nights to drinking, gambling, and mounting putains—a criticism which was ill received in Meaux. Suddenly the hunter of heretics was himself condemned as one, and by the Sorbonne at that. Fleeing Paris, he found sanctuary in Strasbourg, in Blois, and, finally, in Nérac, with Marguerite of Angoulême, queen of Navarre and protectress of the revolution’s humanist refugees. There he resumed his scholarship and died quietly, of natural causes, five years later.

  Lefèvre was one of Marguerite’s successes. She also had her failures, notably Bonaventure Desperiers and Étienne Dolet. Both were given her best efforts; nevertheless both died violently in Lyons. Desperiers had been guilty only of bad timing; had he published his Cymbalum mundi before Luther challenged Rome, the Curia would have ignored it. Written in Latin and addressed to fellow humanists, it noted the flagrant contradictions in the Bible, deplored the persecution of heretics, and mocked miracles. There was nothing new here. The satires of Erasmus and the German heretics, making the same points, had been more caustic. But in the new age of intolerance, Cymbalum was denounced by both sides—the Catholic witchhunters in the Sorbonne and the Protest
ant Calvin. Then it was publicly burned by the official hangman of Paris. Desperiers became too hot even for Marguerite; she was forced to banish him from Nérac. She sent him money, but the pressure was too much for him. On the run, threatened and hounded, he died, reportedly by his own hand. Dolet, on the other hand, courted death. A printer as well as a Ciceronian scholar, he clandestinely published books on the Index Expurgatorius until he was summoned before the Inquisition, found guilty, and, despite Marguerite’s attempts to intervene, burned alive.

  Some humanists were victims; some became leaders of the revolt. All, when captured, met hideous deaths. Those who had led became martyrs, but the deaths of leaders and led seem equally senseless. In his Christianismi restitutio (The Restitution of Christianity) the Spanish-born theologian and physician Michael Servetus dismissed predestination as blasphemy; God, he wrote, condemns only those who condemn themselves. Servetus was naive enough to send a copy to a preacher who believed in predestination as the revealed word and who, knowing which church Servetus would attend and when, had him ambushed at prayer. A Protestant council sentenced him to death by slow fire. Now terrified, aware of his blunder, the condemned author begged for mercy—not for his life; he knew better than that; he merely wanted to be beheaded. He was denied it. Instead he was burned alive. It took him half an hour to die.

  The Catholics who quartered the body of the Swiss Huldrych Zwingli and burned it on a pyre of dried exrement were equally merciless; so was Martin Luther, who had regarded Zwingli as a rival and called his ghastly death “a triumph for us.” In the darkness enveloping Christendom no one recalled that as a young priest the slain Swiss had taught himself Greek to read the New Testament in the original and possessed a profound knowledge of Tacitus, Pliny, Homer, Plutarch, Livy, Cicero, and Caesar. All they remembered was that he had said he would prefer “the eternal lot of a Socrates or a Seneca than of a pope.”

  Perhaps the most poignant figure in the strife—and certainly one of the most tragic—was Ulrich von Hutten. Once he had distinguished himself as a humanist, a Franconian knight, a brilliant satirist, and one of the first scholars in central Europe to cherish the vision of a unified Germany. Like Luther, he had abandoned Latin to help shape the German language as it is spoken today; his Gesprächbüchlein, published the year after Worms, was a greater contribution to linguistics than to theology. But Hutten was one of the committed humanists, and like most Reformation zealots he displayed more enthusiasm than judgment. Unwisely, he had cast his lot with Von Sickingen, whose defeat transformed him into a penniless fugitive robbing farms for food as he fled toward Switzerland. Reaching it, he headed straight for Basel, and Erasmus. He expected his fellow humanist to support him, but that was asking too much. Not only had his vehement rhetoric offended the man who preached moderation and tolerance; Hutten had denounced Erasmus as craven for not supporting Luther. Now, in Basel, the victim of his abuse refused to receive him, wryly explaining that his stove provided too little heat to warm the German’s bones.

  Angry, desperate, and ill—his affliction was venereal—Hutten abandoned both dignity and decency by turning to extortion. He wrote a scurrilous pamphlet about Erasmus (Expostulation) and offered to suppress it in exchange for money. Erasmus indignantly refused. Then Hutten began circulating it privately. The local clergy asked Basel’s city fathers to expel the polemicist, and it was done. Hutten moved to Mulhouse and sent his manuscript to the press. A mob drove him out. In the summer of 1523 he stumbled into Zurich, only to find that there, too, the city council was preparing a motion of expulsion. Homeless, broke, banished from society, he retreated to an island in the Lake of Zurich, and there, aged thirty-five, he succumbed to syphilis. His sole possession was his pen. Valuable only a year earlier, it was now worthless.

  ALL PROTESTANT regimes were stiffly doctrinal to a degree unknown—until now—in Rome. John Calvin’s Geneva, however, represented the ultimate in repression. The city-state of Genève, which became known as the Protestant Rome, was also, in effect, a police state, ruled by a Consistory of five pastors and twelve lay elders, with the bloodless figure of the dictator looming over all. In physique, temperament, and conviction, Calvin (1509–1564) was the inverted image of the freewheeling, permissive, high-living popes whose excesses had led to Lutheran apostasy. Frail, thin, short, and lightly bearded, with ruthless, penetrating eyes, he was humorless and short-tempered. The slightest criticism enraged him. Those who questioned his theology he called “pigs,” “asses,” “riffraff,” “dogs,” “idiots,” and “stinking beasts.” One morning he found a poster on his pulpit accusing him of “Gross Hypocrisy.” A suspect was arrested. No evidence was produced, but he was tortured day and night for a month till he confessed. Screaming with pain, he was lashed to a wooden stake. Penultimately, his feet were nailed to the wood; ultimately he was decapitated.

  Calvin’s justification for this excessive rebuke reveals the mindset of all Reformation inquisitors, Protestant and Catholic alike: “When the papists are so harsh and violent in defense of their superstitions,” he asked, “are not Christ’s magistrates shamed to show themselves less ardent in defense of the sure truth?” Clearly, he would have condemned the Jesus of Matthew (5:39, 44) as a heretic. * In Calvin’s Orwellian theocracy, established in 1542, acts of God—earthquakes, lightning, flooding—were acts of Satan. (Luther, of course, agreed.) Copernicus was branded a fraud, attendance at church and sermons was compulsory, and Calvin himself preached at great length three or four times a week. Refusal to take the Eucharist was a crime. The Consistory, which made no distinction between religion and morality, could summon anyone for questioning, investigate any charge of backsliding, and entered homes periodically to be sure no one was cheating Calvin’s God. Legislation specified the number of dishes to be served at each meal and the color of garments worn. What one was permitted to wear depended upon who one was, for never was a society more class-ridden. Believing that every child of God had been foreordained, Calvin was determined that each know his place; statutes specified the quality of dress and the activities allowed in each class.

  But even the elite—the clergy, of course—were allowed few diversions. 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 different genders who were married to one another.

  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. The Consistory made no allowances for probation, suspended sentences, or rehabilitation programs, and Calvin assumed that everyone enjoyed community service without being sentenced to it. Excommunication and banishment from the community were considered dire, though those living in a more permissive age might find them less appalling. In any event, there were plenty of other penalties, some of them as odd as the offenses they punished. A father who stubbornly insisted upon calling his newborn son Claude spent four days in the canton jail; so did a woman convicted of wearing her hair at an “immoral” height. A child who struck his parents was summarily beheaded. Abortion was not a political issue 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.

  Of course, it proved impossible to legislate virtue. Some of Calvin’s devoted followers insisted that it was possible, that the Consistory’
s moral straitjacket worked; Bernardino Ochino, an ex-Catholic who had found asylum in the city-state, wrote that “Unchastity, adultery, and impure living, such as prevail in many places where I have lived, are here unknown.” In fact they were widely known there; the proof lies in the council’s records. A remarkable number of unmarried young woman who worshiped with Ochino managed to carry their pregnancies to term unde-

  John Calvin (1509–1564)

  tected. Some abandoned their issue on church steps or alongside forest trails; some named their male co-conspirator, who then married them at sword’s point; some lived as single parents, for not even Calvinists could orphan an innocent infant.

  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. But because the soul was more precious than the flesh, the life expectancy of the apostate was even shorter. Anyone whose church attendance became infrequent was destined for the stake. Holding religious beliefs at odds with those of the majority was no excuse in Geneva or, for that matter, in other Protestant theocracies. 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. Apostasy was regarded as an offense to God and treason to the state. As such it was punished with swift, agonizing death. One historian wrote, “Catholicism, which had preached this view of heresy, became heresy in its turn.”