As Luther makes clear, he did not take works to refer only to rituals and ceremonies. Paul, he wrote, rejected not only those parts of Scripture that deal with rites but “every teaching that prescribes what constitutes the good life whether it is to be found in the Gospel or in Moses.” This included even the Ten Commandments. Extrapolating from Paul, Luther was rejecting the saving power of not just formal devotions like the veneration of saints and the worship of relics but the entire moral code, and he fumed at those “who have turned the gospel into a law rather than interpret it as grace, and who set Christ before us as a Moses.”
On reaching the eighth chapter of Romans, Luther welcomed Paul’s comments on predestination. While many find this teaching “bitter and hard,” he noted, God has chosen it “to show that he saves us not by our merits but by sheer election and his immutable will” and thus “renders vain the efforts of so many grasping and very fierce adversaries.” For Luther, the doctrine of predestination, by making clear the futility of trying to earn one’s way to salvation, offered great comfort.
Luther was fully aware of the radical nature of these ideas—so much so that he seems to have omitted many of them from his actual lectures. The notebooks of several of those who attended have survived, and in them few of his more controversial statements appear. Not until four centuries later, when his notes finally surfaced, did these passages come to light. When they did, they showed how dramatically Luther was moving away from the reigning axioms of his day.
They also showed the gulf opening up between him and Erasmus. For the Dutch humanist, being a pious Christian meant above all heeding the teachings of Jesus as set forth in the Gospels. The works Erasmus rejected were formal ceremonies—lighting candles, making vows, chanting psalms without understanding them, celebrating the Mass without embracing its spirit. Works of an ethical nature, however, remained at the core of his teaching. While accepting Paul’s teaching about the importance of faith, he felt that faith unaccompanied by works of charity and compassion or by a spirit of brotherhood and forbearance was stillborn.
To Luther, the performance of such acts, if not arising from faith, was not just useless but dangerous—a self-seeking expression that imparted a false sense of security. Erasmus based his spiritual vision on imitating the living Jesus; Luther, on faith in the crucified Christ. The same divide that had opened up between Paul and James in the middle of the first century was suddenly reappearing in the visions of these two Augustinian clerics.
As Luther began preparing his notes on the ninth chapter of Romans, there arrived from Basel a pathbreaking new edition of the New Testament—one that would both enrich his understanding of Paul and make clear his differences with Erasmus.
13
Annus Mirabilis
Erasmus’s crossing of the Channel for once went smoothly, and on the other shore he was reunited with his precious cargo. On July 7, 1514, he arrived in Hammes, near Calais, which was home to an English garrison then under the command of his friend Lord Mountjoy. From there he rode on toward Ghent. On the way, his horse, seeing some bright linen sheets spread on the ground, suddenly lurched, causing Erasmus to wrench his back. He was in such pain that he vowed he would write a commentary on Paul’s Epistle to the Romans if he was able to make it to Ghent. He did make it, and he spent several days there recuperating. He then rode on to Louvain and Liège and, finally, the Rhine. While traveling up the river, Erasmus was astonished at what he found. In the towns along its banks, there had formed vibrant societies of scholars and poets dedicated to the New Learning. Putting in at these towns, Erasmus discovered that, while he had been toiling away in seclusion in England, he had become a celebrity among German humanists. The lively erudition of the Adages, the quiet piety of the Enchiridion, the clever sallies of the Praise of Folly—all had captivated these devotees of classical literature, and they celebrated Erasmus’s appearance almost like a national holiday, as one participant put it.
In Strasbourg, the well-known printer Matthias Schürer had published new editions of several of Erasmus’s works, including De Copia, to which he had appended a prefatory address hailing Erasmus as a hero of German letters. Magistrates, councilmen, vicars, and Jacob Wimpfeling, the town’s leading literary figure, all came out to toast him. In Sélestat—a flourishing humanist center in Alsace—Erasmus was presented with three flagons of fine wine. In these cultured Rhenish centers, there was emerging an Erasmian movement made up of aspiring men of letters seeking a new design for living and looking to the itinerant scholar to provide it.
The acclaim continued in Basel. Arriving in August 1514, Erasmus at once felt at home in this tidy town, with its winding streets, stately homes, airy gardens, and mild climate. Located at the point where the Rhine bends majestically northward on its journey to the North Sea, Basel (with a population of about 6,000) was a commercial crossroads between Italy, Germany, and France and a gateway for river traffic all the way to the Low Countries. It was dominated by its cathedral, known as the Münster, a towering hulk of red sandstone that stood on a bluff overlooking the river. As a member of the Swiss Confederation, Basel was subject to no king or pope and so had an air of openness and tolerance. It had the oldest university in Switzerland, monastic libraries full of rare manuscripts, and paper mills powered by the streams that coursed through the town.
Thanks to such assets, Basel had become one of Europe’s top printing centers. It had more than fifty printing houses, the most prominent of which was the house of Froben. It had been founded around 1475 by Johannes Amerbach with the aim of producing scholarly editions of the four Doctors of the Church; when he died, in 1513, Johann Froben assumed control along with Amerbach’s three sons. Erasmus’s arrival in Basel would mark the start of a partnership between Europe’s greatest scholar and its most prestigious printer north of the Alps, with historic results.
A few days into his stay, Erasmus was welcomed at a banquet attended by leading figures at the university. “I seem to myself to be living in some delightful precinct of the Muses,” he wrote, “to say nothing of so many good scholars, and scholars of no ordinary kind. They all know Latin, they all know Greek, most of them know Hebrew too; one is an expert historian, another an experienced theologian; one is skilled in mathematics, one a keen antiquary, another a jurist.” There was only one irritant: the reeking stoves that warmed the houses—to suffocating excess, in Erasmus’s view. Such “hothouses,” as he called them, were common throughout Germany, and whenever he encountered one, his mood turned as foul as the air. Basel would nonetheless become the closest thing Erasmus had to a permanent home.
Like Aldus in Venice, Froben installed Erasmus right there in his shop. Along with the university, it was the main intellectual center in Basel, and at all hours scholars, poets, and linguists could be found mixing with pressmen, correctors, and colporteurs. In the weeks leading up to the spring and autumn book fairs in Frankfurt, carts would pull up to collect printed volumes and take them to the Rhine for transport to that city on the Main River, two hundred miles away.
Amid this commotion, Erasmus began the monumental task of preparing for the printers the great bundle of works that together offered his blueprint for a new Europe. First up was the new edition of the Adages. It would contain more than 3,400 entries, including the long essays denouncing despots and condemning war. Also being readied were revised editions of the Praise of Folly, De Copia, and the Enchiridion; a book on the use of similes; the critical edition of Seneca; translations of Plutarch and Lucian; and the Jerome.
Froben’s edition of Jerome—the first collected edition of the works of the scholar-saint—was to fill nine volumes. Erasmus took charge of the first four, consisting of his letters, several polemical and apologetic tracts, and some works falsely ascribed to him. These volumes represented the culmination of the great project Erasmus had embarked on in 1500 to restore the reputation of the Church Father. “I believe that the writing of his books cost Jerome less than I spent in the restoring of them
, and their birth meant fewer nightly vigils for him than their rebirth for me,” Erasmus wrote in his dedicatory letter. He was referring to the hundreds of blunders he had removed, the Greek and Hebrew words he had corrected, and the spurious interpolations he had identified and excised, along with the extensive notes he had prepared explaining his editorial decisions.
To further enhance the hallowed scholar’s stature, Erasmus prepared a “Life of Jerome”—a rare foray for him into the fields of history and biography. In it, he sought to shear away the many miracles and fables that had become attached to Jerome over the centuries and instead call attention to the true marvels of his life—his mastery of languages and literature and his outstanding work as a translator and interpreter of the Bible. “Who ever drew Sacred Scripture from the sources themselves as he did?” Erasmus asked. Who drank more deeply? Who had a more thorough knowledge of the philosophy of Christ, or expressed it more forcefully in his writings or his life? As such passages suggest, Erasmus’s sketch was in its own way hagiographic, seeking to replace the cult of the desert hermit with the model of the pious scholar. He thus hoped to use Jerome as both a justification and a shield as he proceeded with his own project to use scholarship to restore the true spirit of the Holy Scriptures.
Even as he was editing Jerome, in fact, Erasmus was preparing his material on the New Testament—the cornerstone of his program to renew Christianity. He had with him hundreds of notes that he had written on scraps of paper during his years of studying Greek and Latin manuscripts and comparing them with the Vulgate. He may also have had the outlines of a revised translation of the Vulgate. Yet, on his arrival in Basel, Erasmus was not yet clear on what shape his new New Testament was to take; only over a period of months would the details fall into place as he consulted and negotiated with the house of Froben.
To that point, no edition of the Greek New Testament had been published. The first house to bring one out would earn a place in history, not to mention a hefty profit. In the university town of Alcalá near Madrid, a group of scholars had for years been preparing a six-volume edition of the Bible, called the Complutensian Polyglot (after Complutum, Alcalá’s Latin name). Its first four volumes offered the Old Testament in parallel Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and Latin versions; the fifth offered the New Testament in parallel Greek and Latin (Vulgate) texts. (The sixth volume contained instructional aids.) The printing of the Greek New Testament was completed in January 1514, but the project’s director, Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros, a cardinal who headed the Spanish Inquisition, wanted the pope’s approval before placing it on the market, and that approval had not yet come. (It would in fact not arrive until 1520, and the edition would not be officially published until 1522.)
Eager to be the first on the market, Froben urged Erasmus to prepare a Greek text for inclusion in his edition. The pioneering nature of the project appealed to Erasmus, as did the opportunity it would give readers to check his notes on the Vulgate against the Greek, and so he agreed. To produce such an edition, however, he needed manuscripts on which to base it. The library of the Dominican chapter in Basel, he learned, had a half-dozen codices containing various parts of the Greek New Testament. Cardinal Ivan Stojkovic´ of Ragusa in Dalmatia had brought them to the city while attending the Council of Basel in 1431. On his death twelve years later, he left the manuscripts to the Dominicans. Examining them for accuracy, Erasmus hoped to find one that, with a quick edit, could serve as a base text for the printers. Unfortunately, none of the manuscripts contained Revelation, the final book of the New Testament. A codex that did have it had been borrowed by Johannes Reuchlin. Erasmus wrote to him to ask to borrow it, and Reuchlin promptly sent it off.
Over the summer of 1514, Erasmus seems to have worked on both his annotations and his new translation of the Vulgate. On September 21, in a letter to Jacob Wimpfeling in Strasbourg, he for the first time described in full the shape of his New Testament: “My Adagia has now begun to be printed. There remains the New Testament translated by me, with the Greek facing, and notes on it by me.” Erasmus’s decision to publish a new Latin translation would be an even bolder step than printing the Greek New Testament, for it would suggest changes in a text long regarded as sacred and immutable. In 1512, however, the French humanist Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples had come out with a new Latin translation of the Pauline Epistles, setting a precedent. Erasmus now prepared to offer a new translation of the entire New Testament—not a complete top-to-bottom translation but rather a revision of the Vulgate to make it clearer and more graceful. Froben was eager to publish it, but Erasmus—perhaps holding out for the best possible deal—was not yet ready to commit.
At this key moment in his publishing career, Erasmus in March 1515 decided to make a sudden trip to England. The reason is not clear; most likely, he wanted to inspect some manuscripts for his work on Jerome and the New Testament as well as to renew contacts with friends and potential patrons. He sent ahead to England a box containing materials on Jerome that he was working on. To keep the Froben presses busy while he was gone, he left behind a number of manuscripts to be printed, including his edition of Seneca, his translations of Plutarch and Lucian, and the first volumes of the Jerome edition.
While en route, Erasmus received a letter from Beatus Rhenanus, an assistant to Froben, with an urgent plea: “Froben is asking if he may have your New Testament and says he will give you as much for it as you could get anywhere else,” it stated. Rhenanus further noted that only 600 of the 1,800 copies of the new edition of the Praise of Folly printed by Froben remained, so a second printing was being readied. Rhenanus also observed that the Seneca was making progress but warned that the manuscript was full of errors.
After a Channel crossing that was difficult but rapid, Erasmus met with some of his English friends, including Archbishop William Warham, who provided some support, and Cardinal Wolsey—by now the real power in Henry’s government. A month or so into his stay, however, Erasmus grew nervous about the handling of his manuscripts by the printers and so decided to return to Basel. Passing through Bruges and then continuing on to Antwerp, he found waiting for him an ominous letter from Martin Dorp, a twenty-nine-year-old lecturer in philosophy at the University of Louvain, whom Erasmus knew from his visits there. The letter offered the first sign of the backlash that was building over Erasmus’s work. After offering the obligatory expressions of respect, Dorp noted that Erasmus’s books had turned many people against him, including some of his most enthusiastic supporters. The main source of complaint was the Praise of Folly. In the old days, Dorp observed, “everyone admired you, they all read you eagerly, and now, lo and behold, this wretched Folly . . . had upset everything. Your style, your fancy, and your wit they like; your mockery they do not like at all, not even those of them who are bred in the humanities.”
Dorp had also heard about Erasmus’s plan to revise the Scriptures. What sort of business was this, he asked, “to correct the Latin copies by means of the Greek”? The Vulgate “contains no admixture of falsehood or mistake.” It was not reasonable that the whole Church, in using this edition, “should for all these centuries have been wrong.” Nor was it probable that all the Holy Fathers and all the saintly men who had relied on it “should have been deceived.” That the Vulgate’s Latin could have been more elegant was widely acknowledged, but if anyone were to show him that a sentence in the Latin varied from that in a Greek manuscript, “at that point I bid the Greeks goodbye and cleave to the Latins, for I cannot persuade myself that the Greek manuscripts are less corrupted than the Latin ones.” Even if Erasmus simply pointed out places where the Greek manuscripts differed from the Latin, many people would develop doubts about the text. In light of all this, he beseeched Erasmus to limit his project and emend “only those passages in the New Testament where you can retain the sense and substitute something that gives the meaning more fully.”
Reading Dorp’s letter, Erasmus felt sure that it was written at the behest of powerful members of the Louvain f
aculty. Those men could make his life very difficult, and so, though still queasy from the Channel crossing, he prepared a strongly worded (and long-winded) reply. He could hardly believe the “peevish pedantry” of those who took offense at a “single humorous piece” like the Folly. His aim was no different from the one he had pursued in the Enchiridion—to offer “guidance and not satire; to help, not to hurt; to show men how to become better and not to stand in their way.” Rather than try to mollify the aggrieved theologians, Erasmus heaped even more scorn on them. Such men, he observed, “poke fun at Greek and Hebrew and even Latin, and, though as stupid as pigs and not equipped with the common feelings of humankind, they suppose themselves to hold the citadel of all wisdom.” Erasmus seemed unmindful of the anger such taunts might cause.
He was no less unyielding on the subject of Scripture. Noting the many points at which old Greek and Latin manuscripts diverged from the Vulgate, Erasmus wondered how Dorp could cling so tightly to the latter. He was even more mystified by Dorp’s suggestion that Greek manuscripts could not be trusted. The same people who considered Greek exegetes renegades had turned the pagan Aristotle into an unassailable authority. What the theologians really feared in the use of Greek codices was the challenge these posed to their authority. Whenever they misquoted Scripture, they would now have the truer version drawn from the Greek and Hebrew thrown in their teeth. Surely there was no danger that someone would suddenly “abandon Christ” if he happened to hear that in the sacred books a drowsy scribe had corrupted something or that some unknown translator had made a poor rendering. When his revision finally appeared, Erasmus predicted, Dorp would offer his congratulations on the great advance in scholarship it represented.
In this exchange, Dorp and Erasmus were reenacting the great debate over Scripture that Augustine and Jerome had had more than a millennium earlier. Did any individual, however learned, have the right to alter a biblical text that had for centuries been used and authorized by the Church? Were the words of Scripture sacrosanct, even in translation? Which should take precedence in interpreting the Bible, the weight of tradition or the expertise of scholars? In their ardor and urgency, the letters between Dorp and Erasmus echoed the epochal controversies of the past—and anticipated the deep rumblings ahead.
Fatal Discord Page 30
