From reading those Scholastics, Luther had concluded that, by zealously fulfilling the rule of the Augustinian order, he could attain divine grace. Yet his base impulses and impure thoughts kept intruding, feeding his anxiety about salvation. Now, in reading Augustine himself, Luther found nothing about free will, good works, or doing one’s best. Instead, he found stern pronouncements about human wickedness, divine majesty, and undeserved grace. If Augustine was correct, the selfish urges and prideful thoughts that were continually welling up in him represented not simply his own personal failings but ingrained features of human nature. As forbidding as Augustine’s theology might seem to others, Luther took great comfort in the idea that his fate was not in his own hands.
In the bishop of Hippo, Luther found not only the rudiments of an alternative theology but also a method for arriving at it. In the Confessions, Augustine describes how he found God through reading Scripture. His memoir is laced with biblical citations that serve as signposts on his spiritual journey; his dramatic transformation came via a fortuitous encounter with the Epistle to the Romans. Inspired by Augustine, Luther longed to get at the kernel of the grain, the marrow of the bone. And the opportunity to do so would soon arise.
9
Renaissance Tour
It was on Erasmus’s second visit to England (where he arrived at the end of 1505) that his famous literary friendship with Thomas More would bloom. Now twenty-six, More had recently married Jane Colt, the seventeen-year-old daughter of a country squire, and the couple had moved into a large stone house on Bucklersbury, a busy lane lined with grocers and apothecaries in the heart of the City of London. More was just beginning to attract notice as a lawyer and scholar, and to his house came a steady stream of barristers, merchants, clerics, and scholars to gossip, banter, and debate. Erasmus, who on his earlier visit to England had been impressed by More’s geniality, was now fully smitten. “I believe (unless I am deluded by the intensity of the love I bear him) that nature never created a livelier mind, or one quicker, more discerning, or clearer—in short, more perfectly endowed with all the talents—than his; and his intelligence is matched by his power of expression,” he wrote to a friend.
In many ways, though, they were an odd couple, with contrasting temperaments and outlooks that, under the pressure of events, would result in a painful separation. Erasmus was the neat one. He liked clean sheets, savory meals, and airy rooms. England would prove a major test in this regard, for the English were widely considered Europe’s most slovenly people. The floors of their houses, Erasmus would later write in disgust, “are generally spread with clay and then with rushes from some marsh,” which remain in place for as many as twenty years and “under which fester spittle, vomit, dogs’ urine and men’s, too, dregs of beer and cast-off bits of fish, and other unspeakable kinds of filth,” all of which exhale “a sort of miasma.” Erasmus cited the fetid state of English houses as a factor in the island’s susceptibility to the sweating sickness—a highly contagious and often fatal disease that periodically and pitilessly struck the country beginning in 1485 and which later spread to the Continent. He recommended doing away with the rushes and making sure that rooms were properly ventilated—ideas that showed how advanced he was in matters of hygiene.
More, by contrast, was indifferent to his surroundings. He wore simple clothes, disdained jewelry, shunned drink, and preferred “beef, salt fish, and coarse bread with much yeast to the dishes of which most people are fond,” as Erasmus put it. Whereas Erasmus generally avoided the scatology and ribaldry that pervaded the literature of the period, More enthusiastically embraced it. At this time, he was working on his epigrams—short, ironic slivers of Latin verse—whose subjects included vomiting, breaking wind, and wiping snot from the nose. In “Remedies for Ending the Foul Breath Which Results from Certain Foods,” he wrote of a man’s breath so offensive that tantum tollere merda potest—“nothing but shit will remove it.” Fascinated by excrement, More had an extensive lexicon for it, including merda, stercus, lutum, and coenum.
It was in religious sensibility, though, that the gulf between the two men was greatest. Earlier, while pursuing his legal studies, More had lived in the Charterhouse, a cloister of the Carthusian order, whose regimen was far stricter than the Augustinian rule followed by either Erasmus or Luther. More slept on a wooden plank, used a log as a pillow, and wore a hair shirt—an undergarment made of animal hair that was intended to cause pain as a spur to contrition and repentance. He found monastic life so congenial that he seriously considered taking vows. He ultimately decided against it because he wanted to marry, but he would always wonder if he had made the right decision, and he continued to wear a hair shirt. More believed in life after death, said his prayers at fixed hours, and always found time to attend Mass despite his busy schedule. In his correspondence, Erasmus rarely mentions saying prayers and only sporadically refers to attending Mass.
Amid such contrasts, the two were bound together by their shared love of classical literature. One writer in particular fascinated them: Lucian. Erasmus and More got hold of several of his works and jointly set out to translate them. Born in the second century in Samosata, in what is now southeastern Turkey, Lucian wrote in Greek, and after the fall of Rome, as knowledge of that language disappeared from the West, familiarity with his works faded as well. In the early fifteenth century, however, some of his manuscripts had resurfaced, and with translations into Latin quickly following, Lucian became the most popular author of the Renaissance, helping to reintroduce irony into the Latin West after a millennium of mirthlessness.
An irreverent misanthrope, Lucian was trained as a rhetorician but grew bored at home and so took to the road, traveling through Greece, Italy, and Gaul and performing improvised monologues along the way. He eventually worked them up into a series of declamations, panegyrics, essays, and dialogues—mordant entertainments featuring a wayward cast of misers and toadies, spongers and swindlers. Lucian parodied Homer, ridiculed the gullibility of the common man, and wrote about battles between the planets and voyages to the sun and the moon. (Some consider him the father of science fiction.) In his Dialogues of the Gods, Zeus, Hera, Apollo, and other members of the Greek pantheon chortle over the absurd acts and ludicrous powers ascribed to them by credulous humans.
Lucian, Erasmus wrote, “satirizes everything with inexpressible skill and grace, ridicules everything, and submits everything to the chastisement of his superb wit,” and “quite rightly, too, for what is more detestable or intolerable than rascality which publicly masquerades as virtue?” Like Erasmus, Lucian was a moralist—most of his dialogues had lessons to teach—but he showed that those lessons could be most effectively conveyed when presented in comic garb. A Lucianic mix of scorn and social criticism would show up in many of Erasmus’s works, such as the Praise of Folly and the Colloquies. His project of translating Lucian, undertaken jointly with More, would help open a new era of humanist letters in England.
Erasmus dedicated his translations to various prelates and burghers in the hope that they would express their appreciation monetarily. This would become a common practice for him. Since publishers in those days rarely paid advances or royalties, he hoped through his dedications to reel in patrons. One day in January 1506, his friend William Grocyn took him in a boat across the Thames to meet William Warham, the archbishop of Canterbury, at his palace at Lambeth on London’s south bank. Erasmus brought with him a copy of the translation of Euripides’s Hecuba that he had begun in Louvain, and he presented it to Warham. Warham offered in return a bag of coins. Opening it on the way back, Erasmus was disappointed to see how meager the sum was.
A man of great learning, Warham would later become one of Erasmus’s chief backers, but as the spring of 1506 arrived, Erasmus’s financial situation was growing bleak. Just when things seemed darkest, however, there came a thunderbolt. Giovanni Battista Boerio, a wealthy Italian who was serving as a physician to King Henry VII, wanted to send his two sons, Giovanni and Berna
rdo, to Italy to receive a proper humanist education, and he asked if Erasmus would accompany them and supervise their studies. Erasmus jumped at the opportunity. Ever since his school days at Deventer, he had dreamed of joining the tide of scholars heading south across the Alps to see the Renaissance up close. Now he was going to get the chance.
In June 1506, Erasmus, along with the two Boerio boys and their tutor, Clyfton (who would handle the actual instruction), set off. Their destination was Bologna, home to Italy’s most prestigious university. The city was more than seven hundred miles away, and just getting there would require an epic display of stamina. The crossing from Dover to Calais alone took four nights “at the mercy of wind and wave,” as Erasmus put it, during which he caught a bad cold that left his head throbbing. The group stopped in Paris so that Erasmus could arrange the publication of his translations of Lucian and Euripides, then headed south toward the French Alps. As they rode through the seven-thousand-foot pass at Mont Cenis, Erasmus composed a highly stylized elegy, “On the Troubles of Old Age” (he was then turning forty), in which he wistfully bade farewell to “spurious pleasures” and “delightful Muses” and resolved to devote his remaining years to Christ. Descending to Turin, the group remained for two weeks so that Erasmus could obtain a doctorate in theology. (The university—an early version of a diploma mill—granted degrees through a sitting for orals.)
Heading east toward Milan, the party had to proceed cautiously, for the region was aflame with war. Battalions were camped on roadsides, bands of pikemen were marching through valleys, horses were pulling wagons piled high with armaments. The fighting had wound on since 1494, when France sent a 27,000-man army across the Alps in a bid to control northern Italy. The conflict had drawn in Italy’s five main powers—the republics of Florence and Venice, the duchy of Milan, the kingdom of Naples, and the Papal States—as well as contingents from Spain, Switzerland, and the Holy Roman Empire, turning northern Italy into the cockpit of European politics. The Italian wars (which would continue until the mid-1550s) featured a new, more lethal generation of firearms, and though Erasmus had lived through the civil war in the northern Netherlands, he was unprepared for the butchery and devastation he saw in Italy. It was a shocking introduction to the cradle of Western civilization.
On finally reaching Bologna, the travelers found to their dismay that the city was preparing for an attack—by the pope. Two months earlier, Julius II had left Rome at the head of an army of two thousand infantry and four hundred cavalry. His goal was to reclaim the Papal States—a thick girdle of territory across Italy’s midsection. Awarded to the papacy in the mid-eighth century by Pepin the Short, these states had gradually slipped from its control. Bologna, the richest city in them, was ruled by Giovanni II Bentivoglio, a petty despot who had rejected the pope’s demands for a show of fealty. Julius had responded with a bull excommunicating him and offering a plenary indulgence to anyone who killed him. When that proved unavailing, the pope decided on military action. After taking Perugia, he drove his army north along rugged mountain roads through rainstorms and mudslides.
Amid this discord, the university had closed, so Erasmus and his charges again mounted their horses and headed southwest across the mountains to Florence. There, Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael were all at work, but Erasmus, preferring good letters to fine arts, spent his time translating Lucian. Eventually, word arrived that Bentivoglio had fled Bologna. With the prospect of war receding, Erasmus and his pupils headed back to the city, and they were present on the unseasonably warm day in November 1506 when Julius and his forces triumphantly entered it. Crowds lining the streets cheered as phalanxes of infantry and horsemen marched in, followed by four papal standard-bearers, ten white papal steeds with golden bridles, officials of the court, clergymen with lighted candles, the papal choir accompanying the sacred host, rows of cardinals, and, finally, the pope himself, borne on his portable throne.
It was a formative moment for Erasmus. For the first time, he was laying eyes on a pope, and he was at the head of an occupying army. Erasmus let out a “mighty groan,” as he would later write. Julius was “waging war, conquering, leading triumphal processions; in fact, playing Julius to the life.” The comparison of Julius II to Julius Caesar was one that Erasmus (and many others) would frequently make: the vicar of Christ as the warrior-pope. As he traveled around the countryside, Erasmus could see the effects that maintaining a papal army had on the people. Peasants whose entire fortune consisted of a yoke of oxen and who could barely support their families had to pay a ducat per ox in tithes and taxes. (The ducat was an international coin containing three and a half grams of gold; the annual salary of a teacher was twenty-five or thirty ducats, while a skilled craftsman made about fifty.)
Erasmus remained in Bologna for about a year, supervising the studies of Giovanni and Bernardo. They were turning out to be considerably less clever and well behaved than he had at first thought, and he resented the time they were taking from his own projects—studying Greek, revising his translations of Euripides, and gathering more adages. The tedium of tutoring, together with the punishing summer heat, helped make Erasmus’s year in Bologna his most unhappy yet. In October 1507, as his supervisory duties were coming to an end, he sent a letter to Aldus Manutius, the head of a famous printing house in Venice, asking if he would be interested in reprinting his Euripides translations. (The edition published in Paris had been badly botched.) Aldus was indeed interested, and the new edition appeared in December 1507. Pleased with the result, Erasmus wrote to him again to propose a far more ambitious undertaking—a new edition of the Adages. Aldus again expressed interest. Given the scale of the project, Erasmus wanted to oversee it in person, and so, after wrapping up his affairs with his lackluster pupils, he headed to Venice.
Arriving in early January 1508, Erasmus found himself in Europe’s richest, grandest, most cosmopolitan city. Along the Grand Canal, gondolas glided past sumptuous palazzi with red-tiled roofs and colonnaded facades of marble and porphyry. Venice’s lagoons were filled with boats bringing spices, oils, and foodstuffs from the Black Sea, the Levant, India, and beyond. Traders congregated on the Rialto, the decrepit wooden bridge over the Grand Canal that was the commercial heart of the city. Leading from it to the Piazza San Marco was the Merceria, a narrow, twisting lane lined with stalls offering fine fabrics, jewelry, leather goods, glassware, and books. There were dozens of bookstalls there, tempting passersby with the latest textbooks, treatises, manuals, and romances.
Venice at the start of the sixteenth century was Europe’s leading book center. The city’s dozens of printing houses turned out about one-sixth of all the volumes produced on the Continent. Of them, the Aldine Press was king. Scholars from England to Hungary avidly sought out its compact editions of Latin and Greek classics. Every day, visitors arrived at Aldus’s office to get copies of recent editions, give opinions on textual questions, and offer manuscripts for publication. Aldus became so fed up with the interruptions that he posted a sign above his doorway: “Whoever you are, Aldus asks again and again to say whatever it is you want of him in a few words and then be on your way, unless like Hercules you have come to take the world on your shoulders and give weary Atlas a rest. There will always be something for you to do.”
Aldus did not consider Erasmus’s visit an interruption. Informed that the Dutch writer was waiting to see him, he eagerly came out to greet him. Erasmus’s arrival at the offices of Europe’s leading printer would prove a key moment in the intellectual history of the West. He was in effect stepping into the heart of the printing revolution that was just beginning to transform European society; during his months in Venice, Erasmus would help transform print.
The print shop in those days served as a sort of international house, offering itinerant men of letters a social club, message center, and cultural hub. The Aldine house was renowned for the quality of its scholarship; its trademark—a dolphin wrapped around an anchor—served as a symbol of good learning. (Today,
it is the insignia of Doubleday publishers.) Aldus was most known for his books in Greek, set in a font designed by a craftsman he had commissioned, which gave him an important edge over the competition. Over the years, he had amassed a library of valuable Greek manuscripts. Like all such volumes, they were full of slips and blunders that needed to be weeded and pruned. At the time, Venice had the largest Western community of Greek-speakers (many of them driven there by the Turkish capture of Constantinople), and Aldus hired the cream. In addition to housing and feeding them, he invited them to join the informal academy he had established to preserve and promote Greek literature. With the help of his typefaces and his academy, Aldus brought out the first print editions of such Greek giants as Thucydides, Sophocles, Aristophanes, Xenophon, Plato, and Aristotle. Thanks in part to his labors, many Greek treatises, plays, and chronicles that had for centuries been buried in private collections and monastic libraries now began to circulate widely in the West.
They were part of a much larger cascade of material tumbling from the printing presses. During the first half century of printing, their products were mainly religious books: the Bible (by far the most popular item), breviaries, missals, Psalters, catechisms, lives of the saints, and various manuals for parish priests. Gradually there appeared more secular texts: dictionaries, grammars, and encyclopedias; textbooks on arithmetic, anatomy, and astrology; and how-to guides on everything from breeding plants to playing an instrument. Latin authors who had been dead for more than a millennium suddenly became bestsellers. Works by Virgil, Horace, Terence, and Seneca went through dozens of printings. Most popular of all was Cicero, with 316 editions of his works appearing before the start of the sixteenth century.
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