Fatal Discord

by Michael Massing

  Such a stance approached outright pacifism, which rejects even self-defense as unjustified. Realizing that he might be accused of naïveté, Erasmus toward the end of his essay offered a brief qualification, noting that he would not entirely condemn fighting the Turks “if they attack us of their own accord.” More generally, he observed, if there is no way to avoid war—if “you have left nothing untried and no stone unturned in your search for peace, then the best expedient will be to ensure that, being an evil thing, it is the exclusive responsibility of evil people, and is concluded with a minimum of bloodshed.”

  When the new edition of the Adages eventually appeared, Dulce bellum inexpertis would be the longest entry. Few princes would pay it much heed; Erasmus’s opposition to war was too emphatic and categorical. Many men of letters would, however. During Erasmus’s lifetime, the essay would be issued many times as a stand-alone pamphlet. With it and his letter to Antoon van Bergen, Erasmus was introducing a new pacifist strain into Western European thought.

  More generally, Dulce bellum inexpertis reflected the new radical streak that ran through the revised Adages. In A mortuo tributum exigere (“To exact tribute from the dead”), Erasmus denounced both secular and ecclesiastical authorities for exploiting citizens through an endless series of fees, tolls, and other exactions. In Spartam nactus es, hanc orna (“Sparta is your portion; do your best for her”), he urged princes to resist the temptation to seek glory abroad when so much demanded their attention at home. In the sharply antimonarchical Scarabaeus aquilam quaerit (“A dung-beetle hunting an eagle”), he drew parallels between rulers and eagles: both are born to fight and to plunder, to cram themselves with the entrails of innocents, to drink blood, and to seek forever to enlarge their realms.

  Erasmus’s loathing of tyrants would find its fullest expression in the volume’s most unusual entry, Sileni Alcibiadis—“The Sileni of Alcibiades.” Sileni, he explained, were carved wooden figures in ancient Greece that, appearing worthless and crude on the outside, revealed a deity when opened. This is often the case with things of true value: seemingly vulgar and insignificant on the surface, they contain great treasures within. An example was Socrates. With his peasant face and snub nose, he could be taken for a country bumpkin, but, peering within, one finds “a divine being rather than a man, a great and lofty spirit worthy of a true philosopher.” The ultimate Silenus, however, was Christ. His parents were of lowly station, his home was humble, he was poor and had few disciples, but on taking a closer look, “what a treasure you will find, in that cheap setting what a pearl, in that lowliness what grandeur, in that poverty what riches, in that weakness what unimaginable valor, in that disgrace what glory, in all those labors what refreshment, and in that bitter death, in short, a never-failing spring of immortality!”

  Alas, Erasmus observed, in his own day it was more common to find inside-out Sileni, especially in the form of princes who flaunt honorific titles, resplendent belts, and bejeweled rings but who on closer examination turn out to be despots who deride peace, oppress men of goodwill, despoil the Church, live by robbery and sacrilege, and sow seeds of discord. The Silenus would become for Erasmus a symbol of the simple piety that he hoped to reclaim from the pomp and ostentation of the medieval Church.

  By the summer of 1514, Erasmus had made enough progress on the various parts of his reform program to want to see them into print. Only one publisher seemed up to the task—Johann Froben in Basel. Froben was to northern Europe what Aldus was to Italy—the most prestigious and skilled printer of scholarly books. In addition to having an ample supply of Greek type, Froben had for years been preparing a multivolume edition of Jerome’s writings, and Erasmus hoped to join his own work on the great Doctor with that of Froben’s.

  Financially, Erasmus was finally on firmer ground. William Warham had arranged an appointment for him as the rector of a parish in Kent. Erasmus had no intention of filling it, however, and in one of the financial maneuvers common in that era, he was able to convert it into an annual pension. Thus provisioned, he was ready to quit England. The “golden era” that had brought him back from Rome in 1509 had proved cruelly illusory. After sending ahead his heavy luggage to the home of his friend Pieter Gillis in Antwerp, Erasmus went in July 1514 to Dover for the crossing to Calais. For once, the weather was clement and the sea calm. As he boarded his boat, however, the seamen transferred the portmanteau holding his papers to another vessel. All the work that he had completed over the past five years was suddenly out of his hands. And so, despite the clear skies and favorable breezes, Erasmus spent the entire crossing worrying that all his labor had been lost.

  12

  The Gate to Paradise

  After completing his lectures on the Psalms, Luther was busier than ever. In the spring of 1515, he was elected district vicar of the Augustinian order for the states of Meissen and Thuringia. Now, in addition to supervising the activities of his own monastery, he had to oversee those of ten others. He began receiving reports about idleness, gossiping, insubordination, and lavish meals served to unauthorized visitors, and he grappled with how to respond. Being district vicar, he complained, was like being the prior of eleven monasteries.

  When the preacher of the St. Mary’s town church fell ill, Luther was asked to fill in, and he did so well that the town council invited him to preach there on a regular basis. The simple, austere sanctuary was a ten-minute walk from the Augustinian cloister, and soon Luther was making it three or four times a week—a pace he would maintain for the rest of his life. The church provided both a podium for his ideas and a window into the needs and concerns of ordinary Christians. Unlike Erasmus, who shunned pastoral work, Luther would get a firsthand look at lay people’s struggles with sin and temptation and at the frequency with which they lapsed back into old habits despite heartfelt efforts at reform.

  Luther could certainly identify with them. At the Black Cloister, he continued to experience periods of panic and doubt. Struggling to perform meritorious acts that would please God, he felt overwhelmed by his unfitness. Because of his new responsibilities, he frequently neglected his devotional duties, and he would sometimes go two or three weeks without saying the hours. In a frantic effort to catch up, he would sequester himself in his study for one, two, even three days without food or drink while diligently making his way through the Psalter. “This made my head split,” Luther later recalled, “and as a consequence I couldn’t close my eyes for five nights, lay sick unto death, and went out of my senses.” Had he kept at it, he felt sure, the physical and emotional toll would have killed him.

  It was amid such spiritual trials that Luther began to prepare for his next set of lectures, on Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. The lectures were due to start around Easter of 1515, and in anticipation Luther asked Johann Rhau-Grunenberg to print a text based on a Vulgate edition published by Johann Froben in 1509. With the usual wide margins and generous spacing between lines, it came to twenty-eight leaves of text. In his tower study, Luther began to fill the margins with notes as well as to prepare longer scholia on separate sheets of paper.

  He quickly got bogged down. The epistle seemed obscure and severe. Luther was especially troubled by a phrase at 1:17: iustitia enim Dei in eo revelatur (“in it the righteousness of God is revealed”). In a famous autobiographical fragment written in 1545, the year before his death, Luther noted that he despised this passage, for it seemed to say that God in his righteousness punishes the unrighteous sinner. Though he had lived as a monk “without reproach,” he felt that he was a sinner “with an extremely disturbed conscience” and that God was not placated by his acts of satisfaction. “I did not love, yes, I hated the righteous God who punishes sinners.” It was not enough that “miserable sinners, eternally lost through original sin,” were crushed by the law of the Decalogue; God had to add to the pain by “threatening us with his righteousness and his wrath!” With a fierce and troubled conscience, he “beat importunately” upon that phrase, “most ardently desiring to kno
w what St. Paul wanted.”

  After meditating on these words day and night, Luther at last examined the overall passage in which they occurred: “In it [the gospel] the righteousness of God is revealed, as it is written, ‘He who through faith is righteous shall live.’” Suddenly, he began to understand that “the righteousness of God is that by which the righteous lives by a gift of God, namely by faith.” He could now see that “the righteousness of God is revealed by the gospel, namely, the passive righteousness with which merciful God justifies us by faith.” “Here,” Luther recalled, “I felt that I was altogether born again and had entered paradise itself through open gates.” As much as he had previously hated the phrase “righteousness of God,” he now loved it. “That place in Paul was for me truly the gate to paradise. Later I read Augustine’s On the Spirit and the Letter, where contrary to hope I found that he, too, interpreted God’s righteousness in a similar way, as the righteousness with which God clothes us when he justifies us.”

  Luther’s Reformation discovery, as this moment is known, is one of the great moments in Protestant history. It was his own “road to Damascus” experience, when, breaking the fetters of medieval theology, he found his way toward a new creed.

  Yet the episode is cloaked in confusion and controversy. Luther’s concept of the “passive righteousness with which merciful God justifies us by faith” is opaque, and scholars for centuries have struggled to make sense of it. They have wrestled with his chronology as well. Luther says that his breakthrough occurred while he was preparing his second set of lectures on the Psalms. He delivered these in 1519—four years after he began lecturing on Romans and two years after he posted the Ninety-Five Theses. If accurate, this account would mean that Luther did not have his intellectual breakthrough until well after he issued his great protest against indulgences. Luther’s reference to On the Spirit and the Letter adds to the difficulties, for he had read and absorbed that work by 1515, as he was preparing his lectures on Romans.

  These discrepancies have led Reformation scholars to search for a holy grail: the exact point in Luther’s writings where his great epiphany occurred. Some have placed the event as early as 1509, when he was writing his glosses on the Sentences. Others have located it in 1513 and 1514, during his first lectures on the Psalms, or in 1515 and 1516, when he was lecturing on Romans. Still others have pointed to 1518 and 1519 as the key period, and one prominent scholar argues that the breakthrough did not occur until Luther was preparing On the Babylonian Captivity, in 1520.

  In the end, Luther’s account, written so many years after the fact, has proved too unreliable to provide much guidance. If it is set aside and only contemporary documents are considered, the mystery can be readily cleared up, thanks to a remarkable scholarly find made at the start of the twentieth century.

  Until then, it had been assumed that Luther’s notes for his 1515 lectures on Romans had been lost for good. In the 1890s, however, the Vatican Library was opened to scholars, and in 1899 Johannes Ficker, a professor of church history at the University of Strasbourg, asked a former student then in Rome to see if the library had some exegetical works by Luther’s associate Philipp Melanchthon. The student found catalogs listing manuscripts by not only Melanchthon but also Luther. Among the latter was a copy of Luther’s notes for his lectures on Romans that had been transcribed by an assistant. Intrigued, Ficker began a search for the original. It soon turned up, in the Royal Library of Berlin (now the Berlin State Library). As it happened, the manuscript of Luther’s handwritten notes (along with some other texts) had been sold by his grandsons in the late sixteenth century to the margrave of Brandenburg. It eventually ended up in the library in Berlin. Nobody, however, had paid it much attention. In 1846, as part of a special exhibition on the three-hundredth anniversary of Luther’s death, the document was placed on prominent display, but, again, no one showed much interest. After the exhibition ended, the manuscript was put in a showcase in the large entrance hall leading to the reading room, and there it sat, unnoticed. As word of Ficker’s interest spread, its existence was called to his attention. After protracted negotiations with a German professor of church history who claimed the right to publish the document, Ficker finally gained access to it, and in 1908 he issued a preliminary edition. (A fully edited and annotated edition did not appear until 1938.)

  The discovery of Luther’s handwritten notes on Romans had an electrifying effect on Reformation research, helping to spark a renaissance in Luther studies, especially of his early theological development. It did not, however, resolve the controversy over when Luther’s breakthrough occurred, for when scholars examined his notes at 1:17, they found that these were brief and perfunctory and devoid of any sense of discovery. And so the debate continued.

  Yet a close reading of Luther’s notes shows that he did have a breakthrough while preparing his lectures on Romans. It did not occur at 1:17, however. Rather, the key moment came at a later point in the epistle, where Luther suddenly grasped the idea that would offer him a pathway out of his struggles. That idea would become the core of Luther’s new gospel—and the foundation for Reformation theology as a whole. From that point on, Paul would become the central figure in Luther’s intellectual life, displacing Augustine. Luther’s encounter with Romans in 1515 would thus alter the course of Christian history.

  Romans is one of thirteen Pauline epistles in the New Testament. (Of them, seven are considered indisputably his and the rest the work of his followers.) Written twenty to thirty years after the death of Christ, in the mid-50s, they are the earliest surviving Christian documents and are considered the most reliable sources of information about the birth of the Church. (Another important source, the Acts of the Apostles, was written about forty years after Paul’s letters and is thought to be considerably less dependable.) Paul’s epistles were usually dictated in haste to a stenographer and carried by messenger over the great Roman road system. They contain some of the most memorable lines in Western literature: “I put away childish things.” “The love of money is the root of all evil.” “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.” “Where, O death, is thy sting?” “I have become all things to all men, that I might save some of them.” “For now we see through a glass, darkly.” The ideas and doctrines outlined in these letters provided the theological foundation for the new Christian faith. Had it not been for Paul, in fact, Christianity would probably never have emerged as a separate religion but would have been absorbed back into Judaism. His efforts were so critical to the birth of the faith that, though not one of the original twelve apostles, he came to be known as the Apostle.

  Of all Paul’s epistles, none has had more impact than Romans. “The most profound work in existence,” Samuel Taylor Coleridge called it. Augustine’s famous conversion in the garden was triggered by his chance encounter with Romans 13:13. John Calvin, in founding the Reformed church in the mid-sixteenth century; John Wesley, in establishing Methodism in the mid-eighteenth century; and Karl Barth, the Swiss theologian who founded a neo-orthodox school of Protestantism in the twentieth century, were all profoundly influenced by Romans.

  Luther’s theology would be heavily indebted to this epistle as well. In it, he found Paul wrestling with many of the same problems he himself faced—foremost among them the place of the law. To what extent was it binding on those following Christ? In Paul’s case, the law in question was the Jewish law, i.e., the Torah—the intricate set of commands and prohibitions governing everything from the worship of God and the care of the poor to the washing of hands and the butchering of animals. Most of Christ’s early followers were Jews who, while accepting Jesus as the Messiah sent by God to lead the people of Israel, considered adherence to the Mosaic code essential. These followers were concentrated in Jerusalem and included the twelve apostles, led by Peter, Jesus’s top disciple. Also prominent was the brother of Jesus, James, known as the Just. The members of this Jerusalem church (as it came to be called) kept the dietary laws, refrained from workin
g on the Sabbath, made the prescribed animal sacrifices, and followed the intricate devotional rituals of the Holy Temple.

  Paul, though, had a very different background and would follow a very different course. On the one hand, he was like them a Jew. Born around the same time as Jesus, he went by the Hebrew name Saul. Raised in a strict Jewish family, he became a member of the Pharisees, who were distinguished by their scrupulous adherence to the Torah; he was, as he put it in one of his letters, “zealous” for the faith.

  But Paul was raised not in Palestine but in the Diaspora. Of the several million Jews in the Roman Empire, more lived outside Palestine than in it. Paul was born in Tarsus, the capital of the Roman province of Cilicia, in what is now southeastern Turkey. It was famous as a port, a trading emporium, and a center of Hellenistic culture to which professors in Rome liked to retire. Most people in Tarsus spoke Koine, the everyday Greek of the marketplace, and Paul’s knowledge of it gave him entrée to the vast region that had been conquered by Alexander the Great. He was also a Roman citizen—a status that bestowed important legal protections. To support himself, he worked as a tent maker—a profitable enterprise in a world where people were constantly on the move.

  As a young man, Paul opposed the Jewish followers of Christ with such vehemence that he participated in violent persecution of them. Around the year 33, he traveled to Damascus on a mission to suppress the Jewish Christians living there. While on the road to that city, however, he saw a brilliant flash of light in the sky and, falling to the ground, heard a voice cry out, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” “Tell me, Lord, who you are,” he asked. “I am Jesus,” came the reply, “whom you are persecuting.” The voice instructed him to get up and continue on to Damascus, where he would be told what to do. Unable to see, Saul was led by his traveling companions into the city.