Fatal Discord

by Michael Massing

  This was a momentous shift. For centuries, the Scholastics had promoted the idea that man, by making use of his reason and free will, could do works that were pleasing to God. Luther was taking a decisive step away from this position. He was in effect reviving in its pure, concentrated form Augustine’s pessimism about man’s ability to please God through his own powers, before that outlook was watered down by medieval pontiffs and semi-Pelagian theologians.

  In the process, he was also moving away from the humanists, Erasmus included. Erasmus’s philosophy of Christ was based on the idea that man can choose to do good. A true Christian shows his faith by imitating Christ and demonstrating a similar sense of compassion, sacrifice, and mercy. Luther’s own experiences had led him to a very different place. With all his might he had tried to behave in a Christlike fashion, only to fall back into his old ways. Only by acknowledging the futility of such efforts and recognizing man’s inability to do good of his own accord was it possible to take the first tentative steps toward salvation. In Luther’s rambling notes on this ancient Hebrew text, there appeared the seeds of his future conflict with Erasmus.

  Luther delivered his first lecture on the Psalms at six in the morning on August 16, 1513, in the Grosse Hörsaal, or large lecture hall, in the Augustinian cloister. His audience consisted mostly of his superiors and peers from his order, with perhaps a few university faculty members mixed in. One can imagine the twenty-nine-year-old friar seated on a chair before a raised lectern, his face worn from his austerities and crushing workload but lit up by the revelations he was drawing from the well of Scripture. Following the custom of the day, he probably dictated his notes so that the students could take them down verbatim. One student has left a description of Luther as “a man of middle stature” whose voice “combined sharpness and softness: it was soft in tone; sharp in the enunciation of syllables, words, and sentences.” He spoke “at an even pace, without hesitation and very clearly.”

  Luther may have spoken clearly, but following him must have required extraordinary concentration, at least to judge from his notes. For hundreds of pages they went on, offering abstruse digressions, multiple subdivisions, strings of citations, and billowing allegories. “Earrings” were said to pierce ears like the “proof-texts of divine scripture,” while “goats” were the “bodies of the saints in perpetual penitence imposed for sins.” The “frog” mentioned in Psalm 78 conjured up for Luther the “wordiness and long-windedness” of the Jews, while “curdled mountains” suggested the ways in which the Jews had “been curdled into the hardest kinds of cheese and have been made utterly inedible.” Amid such flights, Luther’s theological innovations must have been hard to detect.

  Reaching Psalm 85, Luther hit upon another paradox: it was not because Christ did righteous deeds that he was righteous; rather, it was because he was righteous that he did righteous deeds. The same was true of man. A person cannot be righteous simply because he behaves in an upright fashion. He must first become righteous; virtuous deeds will then follow. Luther was here turning Aristotle on his head. In the Nicomachean Ethics, the Greek philosopher had proposed that man becomes good by doing good deeds; it is through his moral conduct that he shows he is a moral person. For Luther, one must first become a righteous person; righteous deeds will then follow. In these rough notes on the Psalms, one can see the foundations of Western Christianity beginning to shift.

  But how to make one’s heart righteous? On this point, Luther was not yet clear. As he staggered toward the end of his lectures, he seemed to founder. Coming upon the final verse of Psalm 119—“I have gone astray like a sheep that is lost”—he suggested that the faithful are like lambs who in their meekness and vulnerability need a shepherd to watch over them, “for truly we are all thus going astray.” After finally completing his lectures, around Easter of 1515, Luther immediately began work on the next set. In them, he would finally find his way, guided by the figure whom many consider the true founder of the Christian faith.

  11

  A Blueprint for Europe

  Arriving in London in the summer of 1509 after the long, grueling trip back from Rome, Erasmus stayed with Thomas More in his house on Bucklersbury Lane. The place was more chaotic than ever. Thomas and his wife, Jane, now had a son and three daughters, plus a large staff of servants, including tutors to instruct the children and a professional fool with a license to poke fun at everyone. A lover of animals, More kept a menagerie that included a fox, a ferret, a weasel, and a pet monkey, plus birds of every feather. While forbidding card games and ball playing, More liked to lead his children in songs, religious devotions, and educational exercises, including one in which they learned the Greek alphabet by shooting at a target painted with its letters. All in all, the More household breathed happiness, as Erasmus later put it.

  Adding to the cheer was the excitement sweeping England at the accession of Henry VIII. In the final years of the reign of his dour, penny-pinching father, England had become a place of fear and insecurity. The country was blanketed with informers, the wealthy were hit with subpoenas and fines, and even minor offenses were harshly punished. Now the kingdom was to be ruled by a handsome and vigorous prince who, just two months shy of his eighteenth birthday, radiated virtue and optimism. On June 11, 1509, Henry married Catherine of Aragon, the twenty-three-year-old widow of his brother Arthur. Catherine was six years older than Henry, and even though the match was made more out of political expediency than for love, the decision was loudly applauded. On June 23, the day before the coronation, the couple proceeded through streets festooned with gold cloth and lined with priests in rich copes. The coronation itself—one of the most lavish in English history—was followed by days of feasting, jousting, and dancing. England, Thomas More exulted in a royal panegyric, was entering a “golden age.”

  The humanists in particular rejoiced. Henry was widely read in the classics, fluent in Latin and French, and practiced in the flute and recorder. Of a pious bent, he had diligently studied Scripture and could recite long passages by heart. Taken with all things Italian, he introduced to his court Renaissance fashions in furniture, decoration, and dress. He arranged for the purchase of rare manuscripts, brought sculptors and painters from Florence and Naples, and lured woodwind and brass players from Flanders and Germany. Standing about six-foot-three, with broad shoulders and muscular calves, Henry had a pinkish complexion, glowing auburn hair, and a face so fine “that it would become a pretty woman,” as a visiting Venetian put it. He was also a skilled archer and wrestler as well as a practiced horseman who could remain in the saddle for hours at a time. A master of stagecraft, Henry had commoners admitted to the grounds of his palaces to attend tournaments or watch him as he walked to chapel.

  To some, these lavish displays suggested a troubling profligacy, but most accepted them as the harmless indulgences of a youthful enthusiasm. Erasmus was certainly convinced that he had made the right decision in returning to England. After his arrival, he was forced to remain indoors at More’s house because of an attack of the stone. He decided to use the time to set down some of the thoughts about folly he had had while on his return journey from Rome. Amid the shouts of More’s children and the squawks of his birds, he began drafting what would be his most famous work.

  The Praise of Folly (Moriae Encomium in Latin) begins as a Lucianic lark—a rollicking declamation by Folly, a flippant, garrulous woman who crows over how intolerable life would be without her ministrations. Human existence is so dull and burdensome, so full of disappointment and frustration, she declares, that only through the bestowing of her gifts of illusion and self-deception can it be made tolerable. Love, for instance, would be inconceivable without her diligent efforts to conceal the blemishes and bulges of the beloved. “The fellow who kisses the mole on his mistress’ neck, the lover who is delighted with the growth on his dove’s nose, the father who calls his son’s crossed eyes gleaming—what, I ask, can this be but pure folly?” Old men are dirty, stooped, wrinkled, and bald,
yet they so desire to appear young again that one dyes his hoary hair, another cloaks his head in a toupee, a third uses false teeth. Old women, “so like corpses that they seem to have returned from the dead,” painstakingly make up their faces, pluck out hairs from the strangest places, are hardly able to pull themselves away from the mirror. “What divorces or even worse things would come about,” Folly chirps, “if the domestic life of man and wife were not upheld and nourished by flattery, joking, compromise, ignorance, and duplicity—all satellites of mine?”

  Not only the lustful and lovesick but also the learned and lauded benefit from her services, she says. Doctors use flattery to sell their medications. Poets soothe fools’ ears with inane quips and silly stories. Merchants lie, perjure themselves, steal, and cheat, yet they consider themselves important “because they have gold rings on their fingers.” Hunters swear that they experience great joy whenever they hear the sound of the horns and the baying of the hounds, for “what could be more enjoyable than the butchering of animals?” Folly claims as her constituents logicians ready to fight with any man “over a lock of goat’s wool,” scholars prepared to go to war with anyone who makes a conjunction of a word that is properly an adverb, and book authors who add, alter, cross something out, reinsert it, recopy their work, show it to friends, and hold on to it for nine years, yet still are not wholly satisfied with it.

  So irresistible are her wiles, Folly says, that whole nations succumb to them: the British take pride in their good looks, the Scots boast of their gentility, the French brag of their courtesy, the Italians preen over their eloquence, the Germans proclaim over their great size. “Why should I go on?” Folly cackles. “I think you see how much pleasure is brought to all men, individually and collectively, by self-love.”

  To this point, the Praise of Folly is all lightness and charm, a deft send-up of human foibles and pretensions. Midway through, though, the tone suddenly changes as the subject of religion rounds into view. The bantering Folly quickly fades, and it is the angry voice of the author we now hear. All the fury and scorn that had been building in Erasmus at the shallowness and materialism of the Church come rushing out in a scathing tirade. First up are the theologians. Thomists, Nominalists, Realists, Albertists, Ockhamists, and Scotists all refer to one another with illustrious titles like Renowned Doctor, Subtle Doctor, Very Subtle Doctor, Seraphic Doctor, Invincible Doctor. Reeking of self-regard, they seek to dazzle their uneducated listeners through the use of syllogisms, conclusions, corollaries, concessions, quiddities, and implicit and explicit propositions. Among the urgent questions they ponder: Did divine generation take place at a particular time? Are there several sonships in Christ? Through what channels has original sin come down to us through the generations? How do accidents subsist in the Eucharist without their substance?

  Next it is the monks’ turn. These “magnificent creatures,” who regard illiteracy as a “high state of sanctity,” set “an apostolic example for us by their filthiness, their ignorance, their bawdiness, and their insolence.” They insist “that everything be done in fastidious detail, as if employing the orderliness of mathematics, a small mistake in which would be a great crime.” They declare that just so many knots must be on each shoe; that just so much lace is allowed on each habit; that the girdle must be of just the right material and width; that the hood must be of a certain shape and capacity. One professes a knowledge of more than a hundred hymns, another takes glory in the fact that he has lived parasitically in the same spot for more than fifty-five years, yet another thinks he can use grammar and the relations between letters to prove the existence of the Trinity.

  Erasmus reproaches bishops for being too busy feeding themselves to think about caring for their sheep, cardinals for failing to understand that they are the stewards rather than the lords of spiritual affairs, and, finally and most fiercely, the popes. If the supreme pontiffs were to recall that they are Christ’s representatives on earth, they would give up their wealth, honors, powers won by victories, dispensations and indulgences, and horses, mules, and carts, and offer instead vigils, fasts, prayers, and sermons. If they did, “a great many copyists, notaries, lobbyists, promoters, secretaries, muleteers, grooms, bankers, and pimps” would be out of jobs. “In other words, that large group of men that burdens—I beg your pardon, I mean to say adorns—the Holy Roman See would be done away with and would have to, as a result, resort to begging as a means of making a living.”

  Erasmus offers a caustic inventory of the pious dullards of his day—buffoons who calculate the amount of time to be spent in purgatory “down to the year, month, day, and hour, as if it were a container that could be measured accurately with a mathematical formula”; who draw exact pictures of every part of hell, as if they had spent many years in that region; who, in planning their funerals, prescribe the precise number of candles, mourners, singers, and hired pallbearers, as if they were organizing a public show or banquet; and who, stretching Scripture as if it were a sheepskin, deem it a lesser crime to cut the throats of a thousand men than to sew a stitch on a poor man’s shoe on the Sabbath.

  Just as Erasmus’s indignation seems ready to boil over, his tone shifts once again, and in his final pages he returns to the theme of folly, only this time with admiration and awe, for the folly he now wishes to consider is that of Christ, the exemplar of meekness and modesty. Jesus could have mounted a lion without danger but instead chose a donkey; the Holy Spirit could have descended from heaven as an eagle or a hawk but instead took the form of a dove. In his kindness and tolerance, Christ delighted the most in children, women, and fishermen. The apostles he chose were weak and stupid. He called their attention to lilies, mustard seeds, and sparrows—things foolish, lacking in sense, without art. Who could act more foolishly than those “whom the ardor of religion has totally consumed?” They throw away their wealth, neglect injuries, permit themselves to be deceived, fail to discriminate between friend and foe, and give themselves over to hunger, vigils, tears, and labors. Those who in this way gain a foretaste of the invisible world “suffer from something akin to madness.” They speak in a manner “that is not quite coherent,” their facial expressions “change from joy to sorrow,” they “weep and laugh and, in short, are outside themselves.”

  Embracing the invisible, of course, was a familiar theme with Erasmus. Here, though, he elevates his spiritual vision to another, more transcendent level, striking a note of mysticism that is rare in this most rationalist of writers. This sudden leap into the realm of the ecstatic, coming so unexpectedly after the barbed thrusts at the Church, which itself follows so abruptly on the frolicsome opening, makes the book seem strangely disjointed. Of Erasmus’s many works, the Praise of Folly is one of the few that have remained continuously in print, yet, for modern readers, its oddly shifting voices, flood of classical references, and frequent allusions to controversies long past give it a dated feel.

  In Erasmus’s own day, however, the work would strike with explosive force, owing mainly to its pitiless attack on the Church. The substance of Erasmus’s indictment was hardly unprecedented. John Wyclif, William of Ockham, and Jan Hus had all produced tracts challenging the authority of popes and the avarice of bishops, but they had used a dense, didactic idiom with limited reach. The Praise of Folly was something new—a slashing polemic meant to provoke and rouse. Its lighthearted tone helped conceal just how subversive its message really was. The Church, which had survived schism and rebellion and withstood armies and invaders, would now face a new, more insidious foe: Erasmian ridicule.

  What’s more, Erasmus, in disseminating his message, would have the help of a powerful new agent—the printing press. The Praise of Folly would be Erasmus’s first bestselling work, with more than twenty thousand copies in print by 1522 and more than thirty Latin editions appearing during his lifetime. Over time, it would be translated into French, German, Italian, English, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, and Russian. With its leveling assault on the traditions and prerogatives of the old or
der, Erasmus was helping clear a path for the Reformation.

  That would not happen all at once, however. Although Erasmus would later boast (in typical humanist fashion) that he had spent a mere seven days on the Praise of Folly, it no doubt took months of work. Where he spent them, however, is not clear, for over the next two years he disappears from the historical record. No letters from this period survive, nor are there any traces of his whereabouts. It seems likely that he remained in London, though probably not at More’s house, since the constant commotion there was not conducive to writing.

  As to what Erasmus was doing during these “two lost years,” as they have been called, it is not hard to surmise. Erasmus was about to enter a critical period of his career. In a few short years, he would issue a small library of essays, commentaries, reference works, and exegetical texts that together would constitute his reform program for Europe. The Praise of Folly was a work of demolition, seeking to clear away the medieval debris of hierarchy, superstition, and convention. Now came the task of construction—of preparing a blueprint for a new order—and during these months when he was out of view, Erasmus was no doubt doing the necessary research, analysis, and drafting.

  In drawing up his program, Erasmus would be strongly influenced by his surroundings. While in London, he spent most of his time in the City, a square mile into which were crammed some 50,000 people. As much as anywhere else in Europe, this crowded patch was feeling the impact of the new economic system that was beginning to transform society: capitalism. It was most visible in the buzz of activity on the wharves of the Thames. There, wagonloads of cloth were being bundled into containers for shipment across the Channel and North Sea to Antwerp, Bruges, and other ports. Through most of the fifteenth century, England had been content to send its wool—the finest in Europe—to the Continent to supply the looms of Flanders and Tuscany, but English entrepreneurs, seeking a greater share of the profits, began manufacturing cloth at home and exporting it. Of the more than sixty guilds and fraternities in the City, none was more powerful than the Mercers, who controlled the cloth trade and whose expansionist energies were helping establish England as Europe’s top producer.