Fatal Discord

by Michael Massing

  During that session and the next several ones, the matter of papal primacy predominated, with attention focused on Matthew 16:18. Eck asserted that it offered clear scriptural sanction for the papacy as the rock of the Church, while Luther invoked the patristic current that interpreted the rock as the confession of faith in Christ. Who, Eck asked, was better able to construe the sense of a biblical passage—the long line of venerated pontiffs and great councils, or Luther himself? Was a simple layman armed with Scripture to be believed above all those venerated authorities? At one point Luther, feeling the audience slipping away, asked to clarify his position in German. Insisting on his innocence of the Hussite heresy, he said that he questioned not the power of the papacy but only its divine origins, and he challenged Eck to prove that a council cannot err.

  “I will tell you, reverend father,” Eck said, “if you say that a council, properly convoked, can err and has erred, you are for me a heathen and a publican.”

  Feeling beset and isolated, Luther nonetheless refused to back down. He would hold fast to his beliefs, he said, even if doing so meant shattering the millennial unity of Christendom. His tenacity made a deep impression on those present, sometimes favorably, sometimes less so. Petrus Mosellanus, the humanist who had given the opening address, would afterward praise Luther for his vigor, clear voice, affability, and knowledge of the Bible, but many, he noted, felt that “in answering he is more imprudent and cutting than is safe for a reformer of the Church, or than is decorous for a theologian.”

  In all, the debate over papal authority lasted five days, with Luther and Eck contending, objecting, and declaiming and the audience gasping, tittering, and cheering as blows were alternately landed and parried. In an interlude of comic relief, Luther and Eck debated whether Duke George’s one-eyed court fool should have a wife. Luther said yes, Eck said no, and the fool, taking offense at the latter, subsequently made grimaces whenever Eck entered. Eck retaliated by mimicking the fool, who let loose a volley of profanity, to the delight of the crowd.

  Finally, on the sixth day of their encounter, the disputants moved on to the subject of indulgences. Remarkably, on this matter, which had sparked the whole controversy, Eck agreed with almost everything Luther had to say. The same was true of penance, purgatory, and the power of priests to grant absolution. Eck treated these matters as little more than footnotes, which in many ways they were. The real issue was not the acceptability of any particular doctrine but rather who had the authority to define it. In his concluding remarks, Eck declared that “the impatient monk is more scurrilous than becomes the gravity of a theologian. He prefers the authority of Scripture to the Fathers and sets himself up as a second Delphic oracle who alone has any understanding of the Scriptures superior to that of any Father.” By this point, Luther had become so disgusted with Eck’s quibbling and guile that he waived his right to a final reply.

  Eck, remarkably, still had enough stamina left to resume his ponderous debate with Karlstadt over free will and grace. After two days, however, Duke George, needing the hall to entertain some dignitaries arriving for a hunting expedition, ordered the meeting adjourned, and so, nearly three weeks after it had begun, and to the relief of all concerned, one of the most consequential debates in European history had come to an end.

  In Leipzig, Eck was immediately proclaimed the victor. For eleven days he remained in the city, feted and toasted at dinners. Duke George invited him to a private dinner, and the town council gave him a coat and a jacket of camel and goat hair. Luther received only a token flagon of wine. On his way back to Wittenberg, he fumed over the insults he had suffered at the hands of the Leipzigers and the ploys Eck had used to outmaneuver him. “I have experienced hatred before, but never more shameless or more impudent,” Luther wrote to Spalatin. Instead of promoting harmony between the peoples of Wittenberg and Leipzig, as he had hoped, the debate had deepened the discord. Luther was especially upset at the hostility shown him by Duke George, who from that time on would be an unshakable adversary.

  Aside from the bitter personal taste left by the disputation, the encounter would bring about a turning point in Luther’s own thinking. Prior to Leipzig, he had continued to consider himself a faithful member of the Roman Church. For all its moral failings and clerical excesses, it remained the institutional embodiment of the Christian community, commanding the love and loyalty of all pious men and women. In arguing that the supreme authority in the Church was not the pope but God’s Word, however, Luther had been labeled a heretic, and the more he saw how that term was used, the less horrifying it seemed. Eck’s unrelenting campaign to marginalize Luther and declare that the Church had no place for someone with his views made it in fact seem the case.

  This idea would take deeper root during the polemical war that erupted in the debate’s aftermath. To serve as judges, the contestants had agreed on the universities of Paris and Erfurt, and transcripts were sent to both, but while their verdicts were awaited, pamphlets began pouring forth from the presses, and the tractate combat that had occurred during the Reuchlin affair resumed with new vigor. Everyone who could write, it seemed, felt an urge to weigh in, with one half denouncing Luther as a renegade and pariah intent on dividing Christendom and the other hailing him as a prophet or apostle seeking to sweep the moneylenders from the temple. Eck was the target of a satire titled The Planed-Down Eck, which mordantly described a series of painful medical procedures performed on him to smooth his rough edges. Word also spread that Erasmus had said that Eck’s name lacked a letter and should be Jeck (Dutch for “fool”).

  As usual, the criticism and contention served as a goad to Luther, and in the six months after Leipzig, in an astonishing burst of productivity, he turned out sixteen works, several of which sought to explain and expand on the positions he had taken there. Not all were cannon shots, however. When the elector Frederick became so ill that his end seemed near, Spalatin urged Luther to prepare some words of solace. The result was a little book about how Christians do not die alone, for Christ embraces death and pain on their behalf and through his resurrection bestows on them everlasting glory. Though the book was intended for Frederick’s personal use, it so impressed Spalatin that he insisted it be published, and it was, under the title Tesseradecas Consolatoria, or “Fourteen Consolations.” (Frederick recovered.) With Rhau-Grunenberg’s shop increasingly overwhelmed, Luther convinced Melchior Lotther in Leipzig to send his son to Wittenberg to set up an operation there, and in the latter part of 1519 he did, offering a trilingual capacity using type from the house of Froben. Before long, Wittenberg would surpass Leipzig as a center of book production.

  Physically, Luther remained very vulnerable. From Rome to Cologne, Louvain to Leipzig, he was inspiring angry opposition, and it would have been easy for an assassin to slip into Wittenberg and kill him. In one chilling episode, he was approached by a stranger who shook his hand, and Luther invited him to the monastery. “Dear Doctor,” the man said, “it surprises me that you so readily shake hands with strangers; are you not afraid of being shot? I am alone with you.” “If you killed me,” Luther replied, “you would die, too.” “In that case,” the man said, “the pope would make me a saint and you a heretic.” At that point, Luther called for the monastery servant, and the man quickly left town.

  The ever-present threat of violence deepened the feelings of despair and worthlessness to which Luther was so prone. His sense of abandonment was apparent in a sorrowful letter he sent to Johann von Staupitz in October 1519. Since the encounter with Cajetan a year earlier, Luther had heard very little from his former mentor, who was far away in Salzburg, and he now felt bereft, “as a weaned child for his mother.” “I hate my wretched life,” he wrote. “I fear death; I am empty of faith and full of qualities which, Christ knows, I should prefer much to do without, were it not to serve him thereby.” The previous night, he continued, “I had a dream about you. I dreamed that you were leaving me while I wept bitterly, but you waved to me and told me to cease weep
ing, for you would come back to me, which indeed has happened this very day. But now farewell, and pray for me in my wretchedness.”

  As for Eck, he would not rest. After the debate, he had sent the Vatican a detailed report, casting Luther as an enemy of papal supremacy and warning the pope not to delay action any longer. When no such action came, Eck decided to deliver a report in person, and in early 1520 he embarked on the long journey to Rome.

  21

  The Viper Strikes

  In the spring and early summer of 1519, Erasmus—still recovering from his labors on the second edition of the New Testament—limited himself to lighter, less taxing projects. While continuing to paraphrase Paul, he prepared new editions of two ancient figures, Cicero and Cyprian. To Erasmus, Cicero’s public-spiritedness and exhortations to do good to all men without expectation of reward seemed a tonic in an age as selfish as Erasmus’s own. “What justice, what purity, what sincerity, what truth in his rules for living!” he exulted in his preface. Cyprian, the bishop of Carthage who died a martyr in 258, seemed to breathe such “apostolic energy” in his letters and pastoral writings as to eclipse even Jerome. In his continuing journey back to the sources, Erasmus was characteristically mining both the pagan and the patristic traditions for timeless wisdom.

  He was also tending to his ever-widening circle of correspondents. They now included Jan Šlechta, an educated nobleman in Bohemia who had sought Erasmus’s acquaintance and through whom Erasmus was trying to spread his ideas in Central Europe. In one letter, Erasmus suggested a principle that would become a pillar of his creed—that “a few truths are enough”; that is, that the central tenets of the faith should be kept to a minimum so as to avoid unnecessary division and strife.

  In Louvain, however, there was nothing but division and strife. As Erasmus’s revised New Testament circulated and the theologians there had a chance to study it, they were outraged. Far from moderating the most offensive passages in his first edition, Erasmus had sharpened them. On ceremonies and rituals, divorce and confession, clerical privilege and papal authority, he had shown even greater disdain for the accepted way of doing things, and the outcry was fierce. In sermons and lectures, Erasmus was charged with showing insufficient respect for Mary, with writing the sacrament of penance out of the Gospels, with altering the Lord’s Prayer and the Magnificat. The similarities between his and Luther’s views seemed unmistakable. The divines “have got it into their heads that I am the champion and mainstay of Luther’s ideas,” Erasmus wrote on July 1, 1519. That summer, the faculty began an investigation into Erasmus’s writings, with several bachelors of theology assigned the task of studying them for errors and uncovering similarities with the works of Luther.

  With the recriminations in Louvain mounting, a meeting was convened between Erasmus and the theologians. On September 13, 1519, an accord was reached in which the theologians agreed to do everything possible to restore Erasmus’s good name and Erasmus promised to urge his friends and acquaintances to stop libeling them. The deal was sealed with one of those rowdy banquets that Erasmus so detested, and an uneasy calm set in.

  Then, in early autumn, Jacob van Hoogstraten arrived. The sight on Louvain’s streets of the glowering inquisitor in his black mantle sent a shudder through all who had experienced even the slightest doubts about Church dogma. Hoogstraten’s remorseless pursuit of Johannes Reuchlin over the past decade had shown his ability to destroy the careers of those he judged insufficiently orthodox. And he was still at it. In April 1519, Hoogstraten had issued Destructio Cabalae, a vitriolic attack on Reuchlin’s latest treatise on the Kabbalah in which Hoogstraten repeatedly denounced the Hebraist as a “purveyor of cabalistic perfidy.”

  In that same publication, Hoogstraten had also criticized Erasmus (without naming him) for his annotation on Matthew 19:8, in which he had urged the Church to adopt a more flexible policy on divorce. In response, Erasmus had sent Hoogstraten a long letter in which he both defended his position and chastised the Dominican for treating Reuchlin so severely over so many years. “How I wish you had spent that effort, that expense, those valuable years in preaching the gospel of Christ!” he admonished Hoogstraten. Heresy “is a hateful word,” and for that reason one should use it as sparingly as possible.

  Hoogstraten had not replied, but before leaving Cologne he had obtained a copy of the letter Erasmus had sent to Luther, and he had brought it with him to Louvain. His main business, though, concerned the Wittenberg friar. On August 30, 1519, the Cologne faculty, examining the Froben collection of Luther’s works, had issued articles of condemnation on eight points, including Luther’s position on good works, his method of interpreting Scripture, his misrepresentation of the sacrament of penance, his denial of the treasury of the Church, and his rejection of papal supremacy. According to the faculty, the book was so full of errors that it deserved to be not only suppressed but also burned together with its supporters, and the author himself should be summoned to a public recantation.

  On October 12, Hoogstraten presented these findings to the Louvain faculty. Since the universities of both Paris and Erfurt had failed to pass judgment on the wayward friar, he said, it was up to Cologne and Louvain to defend the faith. The Louvain doctors—having been the first to discern the dangers posed by the Froben edition—needed little convincing. With the Cologne findings as a guide, they held a series of assemblies aimed at determining the passages that were so erroneous and impious as to deserve official sanction.

  In his meetings with the Louvain theologians, Hoogstraten had also implicated Erasmus, brandishing his letter to Luther as evidence. Its various hedges and reservations, he said, could not hide the humanist’s clear sympathies with the Wittenberg professor. At once, the theologians’ pact with Erasmus broke down, and he was subjected to a new round of abuse.

  Desperate to suppress it, Erasmus decided to appeal to Germany’s highest-ranking prelate. Despite his opposition to Luther and the Ninety-Five Theses, Archbishop Albrecht of Mainz remained a devotee of good letters. Matthias Grünewald was a painter at his court, Albrecht Dürer was a regular correspondent, and Lucas Cranach had painted him as Jerome. Erasmus hoped to persuade Archbishop Albrecht to use his authority to halt the conservative onslaught. Though he had done little more than dip into Luther’s writings, Erasmus observed, the friar seemed a man of high character. If he was innocent of the charges directed at him, it would be tragic to see him overwhelmed by some villainous faction. If he was wrong, it would be far better to set him right than to destroy him. Unfortunately, certain divines had sought neither to correct nor to instruct him but rather to “traduce him with their crazy clamor,” condemning as heretical things in his books that, when found in the writings of Bernard and Augustine, were considered orthodox and even pious. Luther’s real offense was that he took the profits out of indulgences; that he did not think much of the mendicant orders; that he did not give man-made subtleties the same respect he showed the Gospels. All of these positions were of course “insufferable heresies,” he sardonically observed.

  Most insidious of all, Erasmus went on, was the determined effort under way to use Luther to undermine the great strides being made in literature and languages. “What can liberal studies have in common with a question of religious faith?” Whatever the outcome of the Luther affair, the New Learning had to be preserved. And whatever actions the universities might take against Luther, they should carry no risk for him, Erasmus, since he had always been careful not to write anything that conflicted with the teachings of Christ. “I shall never knowingly be either a teacher of error or a promoter of strife, for I will suffer anything rather than rouse sedition.”

  In this letter, Erasmus laid out the position he would cleave to over the next several years—signaling his support for Luther without actually endorsing him. In this way, he hoped to remain above the fray and preserve his independence. In the current climate, however, even such temperate remarks could prove damaging if made public, and so he needed a dependab
le courier.

  As it happened, Ulrich von Hutten, who had recently joined Albrecht’s court, was passing through Louvain. The impetuous knight-poet had met Erasmus in 1514 and become a fervent admirer, calling him the “German Socrates.” But Hutten was in the forefront of a younger generation of German humanists with more militant leanings. After studying at several German universities, he had traveled to Italy to study law, but, repelled by the arrogance and avarice he found there, he had returned to Germany determined to rouse his fellow countrymen. Like many of his peers, Hutten had rallied to the defense of Johannes Reuchlin in his battle with the Scholastics, and he was responsible for many of the more abusive entries in the expanded edition of the Letters of Obscure Men that had appeared in 1517. Not long afterward, Hutten had published a German edition of Lorenzo Valla’s treatise exposing the Donation of Constantine as a forgery, hoping in this way to undermine the papacy’s claims to temporal power. Whereas Erasmus, in revisiting the past, sought inspiration for a united Christendom, younger humanists like Hutten sought the foundations for a German national identity, and after the Leipzig disputation he had thrown his support behind Luther as the leading exponent of the German cause.

  To Erasmus, however, Hutten seemed a loyal acolyte, and so he decided to entrust his letter to him. It would prove a serious misstep. Once he was out of Erasmus’s sight, Hutten broke the seal of the letter and read it. Immediately seeing its propaganda value, he took it to a printer. When the original reached Albrecht, it was torn and soiled with printers’ ink, and the archbishop was furious. Before long, unauthorized editions were appearing throughout Germany. Incensed, Erasmus suspected Hutten of treachery, and their relationship would take a dark and ultimately tragic turn.

  On the morning of November 7, 1519, the Louvain theology faculty met in the chapter house of the cathedral. With great solemnity, they adopted fifteen articles of condemnation against Luther. They dealt with indulgences, confession, purgatory, good works, original sin, the Eucharist, and the merits of the saints. Luther, the articles stated, had made many other stupid and false assertions, all harmful to the congregation of believers and the teachings of salvation; the volume containing his works should be committed to the flames and its author summoned to recant his errors. Not a single dissenting vote was cast.