Mountjoy’s family had close ties to the court of King Henry VII, and after all the hardships and setbacks he had faced in Paris, Erasmus suddenly found himself moving amid the upper reaches of English society. The Mountjoys had estates in both Greenwich, just east of London, and Hertfordshire, thirty miles north of the capital, and Erasmus divided his time between them. Haggard and gaunt after the years of scraping by in the Latin Quarter, he basked in the regal homes, the fine meals, the clean linen, and even the climate, which seemed positively balmy when compared with waterlogged Paris. He was especially taken with the women—“nymphs of divine appearance,” he called them. “When you arrive, you are received with kisses on all sides, and when you take your leave they speed you on your way with kisses.” Wherever one turns, “the world is full of kisses.” Although Erasmus spoke no English, his wit, polished Latin, breadth of knowledge, and practiced horsemanship won him entrée to the English court, and he became “mannerly” in salutation and “conciliatory” in address.
Erasmus was enjoying the fruits of early Tudor rule. Fourteen years earlier, Henry VII had come to power after the defeat and death of Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth Field—an event that had helped end the thirty-year Wars of the Roses. Henry had (with ruthless efficiency) reestablished order, replenished the royal treasury, and promoted the wool trade, helping initiate a period of unprecedented economic growth that allowed not only the landed gentry and merchants to flourish but also a circle of influential humanists to take root. These men had all attended Oxford; all had visited Italy and brought back the flame of the New Learning to their remote, fogged-in isle. On this visit, Erasmus met several who were to become lifelong friends—Thomas More chief among them.
At twenty-two, More was nearly ten years younger than Erasmus, but the two formed an instant bond based on their shared love of literature and language. More was as adept in Latin as Erasmus was, and the two began bantering and challenging each other in it. Erasmus was from the start struck by More’s “sweetness,” as he later put it—a reference to his good humor, charming disposition, and ability to get along with just about everyone. He was also impressed by More’s looks. (Erasmus, with his aquiline face, prominent nose, and sallow complexion, always fretted about his appearance, and he was reluctant to have his portrait painted.)
Just a few miles from Greenwich was Eltham, the site of a royal residence, and one day in the autumn of 1499 Mountjoy invited Erasmus and More to walk there with him. Beneath the burnished hammerbeam roof of this stately complex, several members of the royal household had gathered. Among them was the eight-year-old Prince Henry, for whom the king had deemed Mountjoy a suitable companion. Henry was not the heir to the throne—his older brother Arthur was—but he was nonetheless being groomed for a life in the public eye, and his tutor, the well-known scholar John Skelton, was exposing him to the best classical writers. More, who had learned from Mountjoy that they were going to meet the prince, had prepared a brief tribute in Latin, which he presented to him. Erasmus, who had been told nothing, was embarrassed at arriving empty-handed, and during dinner Henry sent him a note asking him to compose something for him. Back in Greenwich, Erasmus spent three days sweating over a 150-line poem in Latin, in which he paid tribute to the Apollo-like Henry VII and his royal offspring. In a dedicatory letter, Erasmus—echoing Cicero—observed that, while kings may deserve immortal fame for their glorious deeds, poets alone can confer it with their praise. It was a carefree start to a relationship with a boy who, as England’s next sovereign, would so profoundly affect the fortunes of both Erasmus and More, and of the English nation as a whole.
After a summer of dinner parties and country outings, Erasmus was ready to return to Paris, but the royal government, seeking the capture of a fugitive duke wanted for treason, had forbidden anyone to leave the kingdom. Desiring a break from the trammels of courtly life, Erasmus decided to visit Oxford, whose theology faculty was second only to that of Paris in prestige. Mountjoy had initially offered to take him but was detained by other business, and so in October 1499 Erasmus rode alone across the rolling countryside. He had with him a letter of introduction to a religious scholar named John Colet. Colet was causing much excitement at the university with his lectures on the epistles of Paul. On meeting him, Erasmus felt at once that Colet stood apart from all the other scholars he had met in England—indeed, from the whole world of humanist letters in which he had been moving.
Colet, the son of a wealthy merchant who had served as lord mayor of London, had as a young man joined the flow of aspiring classicists to Italy. While there, he had been drawn to not only the idealism of Plato (who was undergoing a revival) but also the pious teachings of the apostles and the Church Fathers. Like so many others, Colet had learned to read the Bible in Scholastic fashion, as an assemblage of proof-texts for use in theological dispute, but as he studied Scripture in the heartland of Christianity, he became absorbed in the story of Christ’s life and death and of Paul’s tireless efforts to spread awareness of the sacrifice that the Redeemer had made on behalf of mankind.
Excited at this new way of reading Scripture, Colet on his return to England arranged to lecture at Oxford on Paul’s Epistles to the Romans and the Corinthians. In place of the jargon-filled exercises of the Scholastics, his lectures treated Paul as a real human being wrestling with urgent moral, social, and spiritual problems. Colet described the fractious, turbulent world of the eastern Mediterranean in which Paul moved and the fledgling communities of Christian believers that he was attempting to establish. Above all, Colet tried to show how the crises and challenges that Paul faced mirrored those confronting present-day Christians. The Corinthians were prey to lust, envy, wantonness, and gluttony, but, by becoming reborn in Christ, Paul taught, they could embark on a new path.
In his lectures, Colet repeatedly lashed out at the clergy of his own day. Like dogs returning to vomit and sows to their filthy wallowing (images from the Bible), they had abandoned the simplicity and humility commended by Christ to acquire worldly goods and pursue earthly pleasures. Unaccountably, they had lost sight of the exemplary lives of the apostles and other early Christians who had given up so much for their faith.
Colet’s lectures were a landmark in the history of Christian scholarship. As if for the first time, those attending awoke to the richness of Scripture and the relevance of Paul’s missionary work. Erasmus, too, was impressed. While it is not clear if he actually attended the lectures, he found Colet’s approach to the Bible refreshing. On a personal level, Colet had an air of modesty and sobriety that appealed to Erasmus’s own earnestness, and the two began taking long walks in the Oxford gardens. Erasmus also became a regular at Colet’s table. The fare served there was less plentiful than at the Mountjoys’, but the conversation was far more nourishing, with lively discussions of sacred texts.
Colet could be very severe. He always wore black, habitually abstained from dinner, and was censorious about sex, maintaining that it should be engaged in as seldom as possible. Most off-putting to Erasmus was Colet’s disdain for pagan literature. The best way to understand Scripture, Colet insisted, was through meditation and prayer, without any resort to the “demonic” wisdom of the pagans. All truth “is contained in the splendid, the plentiful table of Holy Scripture.” For all the freshness of his lectures on Paul, Colet remained in many ways a medieval figure.
At one point, he and Erasmus got into an argument over the nature of Christ’s agony in the garden of Gethsemane while he awaited arrest. The discussion centered on Christ’s words at Mark 14:36: “Father, let this cup pass from me; yet not as I will, but as thou wilt.” Colet, drawing on Jerome, maintained that Christ was referring not to his impending death on the cross but to the agony he felt in witnessing the guilt of the Jews in sending him to it. To Erasmus, this seemed obscure and far-fetched. Surely at that moment, he wrote to Colet in explaining his position, Christ was deeply saddened at the prospect of death and viewed it with terror: “at that moment he s
poke as a man, for men, to men, and in the words of men, expressing man’s fears.” Christ wanted his death to be of the most humiliating kind and through it “to set us an example of patience and gentleness which he bade us learn from him.”
Erasmus here gave an early sense of the Christ he would come to embrace—a very human savior seeking to inspire others through his gentleness and forbearance. Colet was unpersuaded. While praising Erasmus’s argument for its vigor and clarity, he dismissed it as unperceptive. Erasmus in turn chided Colet for refusing to accept what the text plainly seemed to say—that “here is a man, who stands in fear of death.” He could not see in Christ’s comments anything that had to do with the Jews.
Despite such differences, Colet was sufficiently impressed with Erasmus’s learning to urge him to stay on in Oxford, suggesting that he lecture on either the Five Books of Moses or Isaiah. Though flattered, Erasmus felt he was not up to it. “How could I ever be so brazen as to teach what I myself have not learned?” he wrote. “How can I fire the hearts of others when I myself am trembling and shivering all over?”
Erasmus most keenly felt his lack of Greek. This was the language in which the New Testament had originally been written; if he wanted to understand the true essence of Christ’s teachings, he felt, he needed to read them in that tongue. Colet did not know Greek, and it showed. Lecturing from the Latin Vulgate, he at one point said that Paul had reproached the Corinthians for priding themselves on “their skill with languages”; a glance at the Greek showed that Paul was actually referring to speaking in tongues.
From Lorenzo Valla, Erasmus had learned how fundamentally the nuances of language can affect the meaning of a text. If this was true for Cicero and Livy, how much more so must it be for Scripture—the foundation of the Christian faith? If classical texts had become corrupted in the course of being transmitted over the centuries, the same was no doubt true of sacred texts. Could not the same critical methods developed by the humanists to repair secular works be applied to Christianity’s holy books as well?
The two or three months Erasmus spent in Oxford would prove a turning point in his life. His letters from this period have a depth and sense of resolve absent from his earlier correspondence. Erasmus’s conversations with Colet had helped awaken the strain of Christian piety that he had absorbed from the Brethren of the Common Life but which had remained dormant. He now longed to apply to sacred studies the same energy he had previously devoted to classical ones.
As he prepared to leave England, Erasmus exulted over the six months he had spent there. “I have never found a place I like so much,” he wrote on December 5, 1499, to his former pupil Robert Fisher, who was now studying law in Italy. England had “such a quantity of intellectual refinement and scholarship, not of the usual pedantic and trivial kind either, but profound and learned and truly classical, in both Latin and Greek, that I have little longing left for Italy, except for the sake of visiting it. When I listen to Colet, it seems to me that I am listening to Plato himself.” Eager to get to work on Greek, Erasmus prepared to forsake the spacious manors and kissing damsels of England for the cold, hunger, and crowding of Paris. His real lifework was about to begin.
6
The Vow in the Storm
On the surface, the four years that Luther spent at the University of Erfurt (1501 to 1505) would pass quietly. Unlike Erasmus, he would prove a diligent student; he would register no complaints, pass no sardonic notes. Inside, though, an explosion was building.
Known as “Little Rome” for its many religious institutions, Erfurt had twenty-one parish churches, eleven monastery churches, and four endowed churches, plus a large presence of Augustinians, Benedictines, Carthusians, Dominicans, and Franciscans. The Church’s presence was symbolized by two fortresslike sanctuaries that stood side by side on a bluff overlooking the town: St. Mary’s, the cathedral, which had Europe’s largest free-swinging bell, and St. Severus, whose facade featured three austere towers. Majestic and forbidding, this enclave formed a sort of mini–Holy See.
With a population of 20,000, Erfurt was one of Germany’s three or four largest cities. It was also one of the most prosperous, owing to its dominance of the trade in woad, a plant of the mustard family used to make a popular blue dye. Even more than in most towns, however, the wealth was concentrated among a small sliver of merchants and patricians who lived in great comfort while the mass of laborers and seasonal workers struggled in the shabby suburbs. Social unrest ran deep, and in 1509 it would erupt in a “year of madness,” which became so violent that part of the university was leveled—an outburst that no doubt contributed to Luther’s later antipathy to popular protest. (Erfurt is now ten times as large as it was then, but, thanks to having been largely spared by World War II and neglected by the East German government, it retains strong—and charming—traces of its medieval past.)
The university was located in a warren of streets just off the fish market. The students lived in ten or so bursae, or hostels. In each, the day was as regimented as in a monastery. Students had to rise every morning at four and retire every evening at eight. They had to speak Latin at all times and wear monk-like garb. At night they could leave only with special permission, and because of the lack of streetlights and the presence of many hazardous streams, they had to check out lanterns at the rector’s office—a procedure that allowed for the close monitoring of their movements. During lectures, no one was allowed to loiter in the streets. New students had to take an oath to obey the college head, to listen patiently to his instructions, and “to refrain from plots and cabals against him.” Fights and disruptions were nonetheless frequent, and Luther would later say the city was no better than “a whorehouse and a beer house.”
On the Erfurt faculty, humanists were gaining an ever-greater foothold, but the Scholastics remained in charge, and Luther’s courses were dominated by them. While the bachelor’s program in which he was enrolled did feature readings in Ovid, Terence, Virgil, Plautus, and other classical writers, Luther mostly studied grammar and logic, rhetoric and natural philosophy. He completed the program in the minimum amount of time—three semesters—and on the exam finished thirtieth out of fifty-seven, suggesting that he was a middling student.
The master’s program, to which he immediately advanced, offered instruction in the four arts of the quadrivium—music, astronomy, arithmetic, and geometry. More than anything else, though, students were drilled in dialectic. Luther learned to define terms, identify premises, marshal citations, construct syllogisms, offer corollaries, and uncover fallacies in the arguments of adversaries. In all, he participated in fifteen disputations, gaining experience in the cut-and-thrust, attack-and-parry tactics of these high-pressure exercises—skills that would serve him well in later years, when he was frequently called upon to participate in contests of a similar nature but with far higher stakes.
No less than Erasmus, Luther would reject the Scholastics, but for fundamentally different reasons. Whereas Erasmus derided the Scholastic method, with its arid dialectics and speculative flights, Luther would thoroughly absorb it. The work that first brought him to public attention, his protest on indulgences, was, tellingly, framed as theses for debate. For the rest of his life, Luther would seek to prove religious truths by assembling long strings of passages from the Bible, with limited regard to context or setting. As a result, he and his followers would be labeled “the new Scholastics.”
When it came to the substance of Scholasticism, however, Luther, after a period of dutiful acceptance, would turn violently against it. In order to construct his own system, he first had to overthrow the old one. His time as a master’s student in Erfurt would thus prove a critical way station on his path to a new theology.
While Erasmus in Paris had to contend with the Scotists, Luther in Erfurt had to deal with the Ockhamists. Years later, he would call William of Ockham “the most ingenious” of all the Scholastic doctors and identify himself as a member of his party. Eventually, though, he would rejec
t him along with all the rest. Ockham, who was born around 1285 in a village in Surrey, England, and schooled in a Franciscan convent, was another of the perpetually disgruntled and pugnacious controversialists who periodically threw the medieval Church into turmoil. (He was the model for the learned inspector in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose.)
Today, Ockham is best known for his “razor”—the principle that the simplest explanation is likely to be the best. Ockham never put it quite so simply; his closest version was, “Whatever can be done with fewer assumptions is done in vain with more.” He proposed it in opposition to the Scholastics’ fondness for building complex metaphysical systems. Ockham rejected the very idea that universals exist outside the mind. Universal ideas do not exist in reality—only discrete, concrete objects do. There is no such thing as a universal “chairness”—there are only individual chairs, from which we mentally construct the symbolic idea of a chair. This school of thought is known as nominalism, and Ockham is considered one of its founding fathers. In his uncompromising attachment to the real world, he would anticipate the radical empiricism of Hume and Wittgenstein.
Theologically, Ockham was a follower of Scotus and shared his preference for revelation over reason, but he pushed it even further, holding that such basic tenets as the infinity of God and the immortality of the soul cannot be demonstrated by rational means. He thus advanced the separation of logic and metaphysics that Scotus had begun, and he further loosened the grip of Aristotle on Christian theology.
On a more practical level, Ockham’s zeal for simplicity brought him into bitter conflict with the pope, in ways that would later bear on Luther’s own relations with Rome. While lecturing at Oxford, Ockham wrote a commentary on Peter Lombard’s Sentences. The former chancellor of Oxford, John Lutterell, was so disturbed by the errors he found in it that he traveled all the way to Avignon to lay them before Pope John XXII. The pope summoned Ockham to defend himself, and in 1324 he made the long journey across France. A panel of theologians determined that some of Ockham’s articles were in fact erroneous, but he somehow managed to escape condemnation.
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