Dedication
To my mother
and
To Ann, Larry, and Judith
for their invaluable help
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Introduction
Part I: Early Struggles
1: The New Europe
2: Miner’s Son
3: Candlelight Studies
4: Penance and Dread
5: Breakthrough
6: The Vow in the Storm
Part II: Discoveries
7: Back to the Fathers
8: Angry with God
9: Renaissance Tour
10: Self-Righteous Jews
11: A Blueprint for Europe
12: The Gate to Paradise
13: Annus Mirabilis
14: A Friar’s Cry
Part III: Rumblings
15: For the Want of Greek Type
16: A Drunken German
17: Unbridled
18: Onto the World Stage
19: Uncommitted
20: The Great Debate
21: The Viper Strikes
22: Thunderclaps
23: Bonfires
24: Faith and Fury
25: Will He Come?
26: Judgment at Worms
Part IV: Agitation
27: The Martyr’s Crown
28: Outlaw
29: Was Nowhere Safe?
30: Satan Falls upon the Flock
31: The Pope of Wittenberg
32: The New Gospel Spreads
33: True Christian Warfare
34: A Shower of Stones
Part V: Rupture
35: The Gospel of Discontent
36: Uprising
37: The Murdering Hordes
38: Fatal Dissension
39: Invasion by Scripture
40: Vandals
41: The Crack-Up
42: Madness
43: Enemies of Christ
Aftermath: Erasmus
Aftermath: Luther
Origins and Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Notes
Index
Photos Section
About the Author
Also by Michael Massing
Copyright
About the Publisher
Introduction
Toward the end of the year 1516, Erasmus of Rotterdam, then living in the Low Countries, received a letter from George Spalatin, the secretary to Frederick the Wise of Saxony. After expressing his esteem for the Dutch humanist, Spalatin explained that he was writing on behalf of an Augustinian priest, whom he did not name. The priest had read Erasmus’s recently published annotations on the New Testament—notes on the Latin translation known as the Vulgate—and had two concerns. One related to original sin. Erasmus, the priest believed, had misunderstood Paul’s position on this doctrine and urged him to read Augustine’s commentary on it, which, he felt, would set him right. He also objected to Erasmus’s understanding of “works.” Erasmus seemed to feel that Paul, in rejecting the performance of works, was referring only to rites and ceremonies when in fact he meant works of all kinds, including the keeping of the Ten Commandments. The priest wanted to make sure that Erasmus understood this, since, given his great prestige, he might otherwise lead people astray.
The priest was Martin Luther. Thirty-three years old at the time, he was a little-known friar and Bible professor in the eastern German town of Wittenberg. He had just completed a long series of lectures on Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, delivered in a weather-beaten hall to a small group of clerics and students. Erasmus, who was about fifty, was Europe’s most celebrated scholar. Kings, dukes, and cardinals all vied to bring him to their lands. He was an associate of Pope Leo X, a friend of Henry VIII of England, and a councilor to Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor. He was also Europe’s bestselling author. Thanks to his mastery of the new medium of print, Erasmus was the first person in Europe able to live off the income from his writing, and at the Frankfurt book fair every spring and autumn, his books regularly sold out.
Several times a week, Erasmus received a bundle of letters from around Europe, providing news, offering praise, seeking his opinions. He was unable to respond to them all, and he paid little attention to the complaints of the anonymous priest. The following October, however, Luther would post his Ninety-Five Theses in Wittenberg, challenging the Roman Church’s practice of selling indulgences. These certificates, by remitting the penalties imposed on sinners for their transgressions, reduced the amount of time they had to spend in purgatory before being admitted to heaven. To Luther, they seemed to turn repentance into a form of barter, and he proposed his theses as an invitation to debate. No one accepted it, but within weeks his protest appeared in print, and as copies circulated around Germany, he became a household name.
Initially, the Church ignored the impertinent friar, assuming the matter would blow over, but Luther—tenacious, blunt, fearless—spoke out ever more forcefully against what he saw as Rome’s laxity, venality, and exploitation of ordinary Christians. And many of those Christians—burdened by tithes and fees and the sanctions imposed for not paying them—rallied to his cause. As opposition surged, Rome finally moved to silence Luther, but the harder it tried to suppress him, the more outspoken he became, until finally he was questioning the authority of the pope himself. No ecclesiast, however lofty, he declared, could tell a Christian how to behave or think. By the summer of 1520, the threat posed by Luther had become so great that Pope Leo X signed a bull threatening to excommunicate him if he did not appear in Rome and recant. Luther responded by burning the bull. Demanding an independent hearing, he finally got one in April 1521, when he was summoned before the Imperial Diet of the German nation, meeting in Worms. Standing before the emperor and a phalanx of imperial and ecclesiastical officials, Luther refused to retract what he had written, declaring that he could not act against his conscience.
This moment, when a lone individual appealing to his conscience stood fast before the highest authorities in the land, is considered by many a milestone in Western history—the moment when the medieval gave way to the modern. Luther’s defiance would inspire a broad revolt against Rome—the Protestant Reformation—that would break the thousand-year hold of the Church on the spiritual life of the West.
It would also push Erasmus off the historical stage. In just a few years, the Dutchman would go from being Europe’s most renowned thinker to a largely ignored figure, scorned by both Catholics (for being too critical of the Church) and Protestants (for being too timid). After his death, in 1536, Erasmus was all but forgotten as Europe experienced a century of religious strife. Even today, his works are only sporadically read, and his ideas receive scant attention. They deserve to be revived. For Erasmus was an architect of the Northern Renaissance. While Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael were revolutionizing Western art and culture, Erasmus was helping to transform the continent’s intellectual and religious life. In some ways, he represents the path not taken. At a time of rising nationalism, he was a committed internationalist. In an age of persecution and incessant war, he urged tolerance and promoted peace, and he argued that religion should be more about conduct than doctrine. Erasmus was, in short, the leading exponent of Christian humanism, extolling human dignity, modest piety, and brotherhood in a world gripped by zealotry, rancor, and sectarianism.
In his books and essays, Erasmus laid out a program to reform and revitalize European culture. His Enchiridion Militis Christiani (“The Handbook of the Christian Soldier”) became a manual for Europe’s growing middle class as it sought a form of inner spirituality more fulfilling than the performance of formal acts like going to confession or visiting a shrine.
The Praise of Folly, with its barbed put-downs of pedantic theologians and self-seeking princes, helped puncture the pretensions and excesses of Europe’s ruling elite. The Adages, a thick compendium of aphorisms culled from ancient Greece and Rome and explained in lively essays, did more than any other work to revive interest in classical culture. Erasmus’s treatises on education helped shape Western pedagogy for centuries, and his Colloquies—colorful dialogues and sketches based on everyday life—offered sharp observations on the customs and conventions of sixteenth-century Europe.
Above all, Erasmus revolutionized the study of the Bible. At the time, the Vulgate was the source of all teaching and doctrine in the Western Church, its language consecrated by centuries of tradition and decree. Prepared during the waning days of imperial Rome, it was a Latin translation from the original Greek (in the case of the New Testament) and Hebrew (in the case of the Old). And its accuracy was coming under challenge. Many of its words and phrases seemed to diverge from their original meaning, and misspellings and other errors had been introduced by nodding scribes. Intent on correcting it, Erasmus spent years struggling to learn Greek so that he could read old manuscripts of the New Testament in its original tongue. In 1516, after much toil, he came out with his revised edition, which included a Greek text, an emended Latin translation, and annotations explaining the reasoning behind his changes.
Erasmus’s new New Testament, offering scholars and exegetes a comprehensive apparatus for reading the Bible anew and arriving at their own interpretations, set off an explosion across Europe. It was to the study of Scripture what Copernicus’s On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres (first printed in 1543) was to the study of astronomy. Just as the Polish astronomer shattered the idea that the earth was the center of the heavens, so did the Dutch humanist seek to bring Scripture down from heaven to earth. From that point on, the Bible would be seen by many as a document that, though divinely inspired, had been fashioned by human hands and which could be deconstructed and edited in the same manner as a text by Livy or Seneca.
It was this work that prompted Luther to approach Erasmus. At that point, Luther was a great admirer of the Dutchman and eagerly followed his writings. And he shared Erasmus’s diagnosis of what ailed the Catholic Church. Later, in fact, Erasmus’s conservative critics would accuse him of having “laid the egg that Luther hatched.” At an early point, however, Luther went his own way. Where Erasmus was skeptical, temperate, and undogmatic, Luther was ardent, volatile, and uncompromising. At the age of twenty-one, he had entered a monastery in the hope of overcoming a deep spiritual crisis. Convinced of his utter worthlessness before God, he intently searched the Bible for a new way to him. He found it in Paul’s epistles. Luther’s famous “discovery” of the doctrine of justification by faith alone while reading the Epistle to the Romans would become the foundation of his challenge to Rome and the core of the new Protestant faith.
Erasmus, who had similarly entered a monastery at a young age but left it to see the world, was interested less in faith than in works; a Christian, he held, should in all things seek to imitate Christ. While Erasmus stressed the capabilities of man, Luther exalted the power of God. Where Erasmus sought to reform the Church from within, Luther proposed a more thoroughgoing transformation. Eventually, the widening differences between the two men flared into a bitter competition, with each seeking through tracts and pamphlets to win over Europe to his side. Their rivalry represented the clash of not just two intellectuals but also of two worldviews—the humanist, embracing the common bonds of humanity and the diversity of cultures and viewpoints within it, and the evangelical, stressing God’s majesty and Christ’s divinity and insisting that all recognize those truths as supreme and incontestable.
These two schools remain with us today. The conflict between Erasmus and Luther marks a key passage in Western thinking—the point at which these two fundamental and often colliding traditions took hold. The struggle between them continues to shape Western society. On one side are Erasmus-like humanists: seekers of concord, promoters of pluralism, believers in the Bible as a fallible document open to multiple interpretations, and advocates of the view that man is a fully autonomous moral agent. On the other are Lutheran-style evangelicals who seek a direct relationship with God, embrace faith in Christ as the only path to salvation, accept the Bible as the Word of God, and consider the Almighty the prime mover of events.
The continuing influence of these two outlooks can be seen in the divergent paths taken by Europe and America. Since World War II, Europe has embraced a creed founded on many of the same principles as Erasmian humanism. The European Union embodies many of Erasmus’s core ideals. Luther’s ideas, meanwhile, have found their most fertile ground in America. The one-fourth or so of American adults who are evangelical in orientation seem in many ways Luther’s offspring.
Traditionally, John Calvin has been considered the Reformation figure who has most shaped American life. His teachings about predestination, grace, salvation, and the elect are widely seen as having strongly influenced early American society, leaving a permanent imprint on the country’s spiritual, cultural, and political life. This perspective owes much to Max Weber. In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, he argued that the Calvinist preoccupation with salvation led early Americans—anxious for signs that they had been saved—to embrace such godly virtues as industriousness, asceticism, and thrift. Becoming engrained in the American way of life, such traits helped nurture the capitalist spirit.
Weber’s thesis has given rise to a massive literature both pro and con. Whatever its merits, The Protestant Ethic has had the effect of highlighting Calvin’s influence in American life. Yet Calvin got many of his ideas from Luther. It was Luther who developed the doctrine of predestination that was so central to Calvinism. It was Luther who developed the revolutionary idea that Christian authority rests not with popes, councils, or tradition but with the Bible. And it was Luther who insisted that all Christians should have the right to read that document on their own. Luther further held that once a Christian has determined the Word of God, he must tirelessly proclaim and promote it, even in the face of scorn, mockery, and persecution.
Later in life, Luther backed away from some of these principles. Enraged by the peasants’ uprising of 1525 and their invoking of his writings, he increasingly looked to the princes to ensure both the survival of the Reformation and his own physical safety, and he jettisoned some of the more populist elements of his program. More generally, Luther rejected actions aimed at effecting broad social or political change based on one’s religious beliefs. By contrast, Calvin in Geneva sought to remake society in line with his theology—to build a heavenly city on earth. His followers in subsequent generations similarly sought to transform the world according to biblical principles. This was true both in Europe and in America, where the New England Puritans sought to create a biblically based community. Luther eschewed all such activism.
In the Calvinist stress on the community, however, the place of the individual got lost. And it is here that Luther’s influence in America seems so fundamental. His insistence on the right of lay Christians to read Scripture on their own; on the critical importance of the individual’s faith in Christ; on the need to stand alone and accountable before God; on remaining true to one’s spiritual convictions in the face of formidable obstacles—all seem aspects of an evangelical perspective. In their commitment to a highly individualized faith based in Christ and Scripture, America’s evangelicals seem—however unconsciously—to be following the path blazed by Luther five centuries ago. Examining his life can help shed light on the origins of modern-day evangelicalism. And studying Erasmus’s life can help unlock the origins of modern-day humanism.
The Protestant Reformation is one of history’s most well-chronicled events and Luther one of its most written-about figures. Most biographies of Luther, however, focus narrowly on his life and character, his circle of associates, and events in Wittenberg. The broader Eur
opean setting of Luther’s revolt, and how his ideas roused a continent, are often neglected. Most biographies of Erasmus, meanwhile, while offering much useful information and analysis, are aimed at specialized audiences. The most readable of them, by Stefan Zweig, appeared more than eighty years ago. Furthermore, while books about Luther and Erasmus invariably touch on their famous rivalry, few place it at their center. Concentrating on that rivalry offers an opportunity to explore the complex relationship between two great historical movements, the Renaissance and the Reformation.
In what follows, I describe the parallel lives of Erasmus and Luther, their gradual entanglement, and their eventual estrangement. A journalist by trade, I have approached the subject much as I would a newspaper or magazine assignment. Rather than visit a far-off land, I have traveled to a distant century. As with many assignments, the cultural setting often seemed foreign, but I felt I was able to bring a fresh eye to well-trodden terrain (mindful all along of my debt to the many historians who have gone before). Journalism, it is said, is the first draft of history; in writing about the Reformation, I am preparing perhaps the five-hundredth. Throughout, though, I have often felt the same surge of excitement I have had while reporting a good story.
I have tried to convey that excitement. One of the most striking things about the sixteenth century is the passion with which people debated ideas, and this book is as much about the ideas as the people. In researching the lives of Erasmus and Luther, I have undertaken my own journey back to the sources, and I offer sketches of some of the remarkable figures I encountered along the way, including the Apostle Paul, the inspirer of Luther; Augustine, the most influential Catholic thinker; Jerome, the temperamental translator of the Bible; Thomas Aquinas, the indefatigable Scholastic systematizer; Petrarch, the first great humanist; Lorenzo Valla, the disruptive Renaissance iconoclast; Johannes Reuchlin, the embattled champion of Hebraic studies; Erasmus’s close friend Thomas More; Luther’s collaborator Philipp Melanchthon; the runaway nun Katharina von Bora, whom Luther married; the publishers Aldus Manutius and Johann Froben; the radical reformers Andreas von Karlstadt and Thomas Müntzer; Jan Hus, Luther’s Czech forerunner; Huldrych Zwingli, the father of the Swiss Reformation; William Tyndale, the translator of the Bible into English; and John Calvin.
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