Fatal Discord

by Michael Massing

  The funding for that would have to come from the German princes, but they in return wanted their own concerns addressed. Fed up with the chaos, violence, and inefficiency of the German political system, they longed for a functioning state that could enforce order, adjudicate disputes, and regulate commerce. They also wanted protection from Rome and a resolution of the lists of grievances that had been regularly submitted—and ignored—at previous diets.

  Gaining the cooperation of the Germans would also require addressing the matter of Luther. The delegates were divided between those moved by Luther’s call on the ruling class to defend the interests of the German people and those troubled by the unrest he was causing, and as preparations for the diet proceeded, it was unclear where the balance of sentiment lay.

  Luther’s greatest asset was Frederick. Earlier, at his meeting with Charles in Cologne, the elector had impressed on the emperor the importance of the idea that no German should be banned without cause or hearing. To achieve his own goals, Charles needed Frederick’s support, and so on November 28, 1520, he had sent him the letter asking him to bring Luther to Worms.

  Aleander, however, felt that Luther’s presence, in addition to showing disrespect for the pope, could lead to many unforeseen consequences, and so from the moment of his arrival in Worms, he worked to keep Luther from appearing there. He had received a boost from the appearance of The Babylonian Captivity. Its fierce assault on the Mass, its radical redefinition of penance, and its insistence that all Christians are priests had made clear that Luther was a “heretic a thousand times worse than Arius,” the fourth-century sower of doubts about the Trinity.

  In mid-December, Aleander got in to see the emperor. Assuring the nuncio that he would act as a truly Christian prince, Charles invited him to address the Imperial Council, the empire’s executive arm. In his speech, Aleander sought to expose “the grossest errors of this rascal,” as he reported to Rome. He called The Babylonian Captivity blasphemous for denying all distinctions among Christians and for disdaining obedience to the spiritual authorities. The nuncio produced documents showing that, as far back as the reign of Charlemagne, the Germans had referred to the pope as Papa Romanae et Universalis Ecclesiae Pontifex (“the Roman Pope and Pontiff of the Universal Church”). Impressed, Charles on December 17 sent Frederick a letter withdrawing his earlier request to bring Luther to the diet and imploring him instead to press the friar to recant and submit to Rome’s judgment. Frederick, he wrote, should bring Luther not to Worms but to Frankfurt or some other nearby place and await further instruction.

  On January 5, 1521, Frederick and his advisers arrived in Worms, taking rooms at the Swan tavern. The town was so crowded that the elector had trouble finding quarters for his brother, the co-regent of Saxony. The streets swarmed with princes and bishops with their entourages; Landsknechts with their swords; and Spanish, Italian, and Dutch merchants come to sell their wares. Every day Spanish grandees galloped through the marketplace, causing the crowd to scatter. Knights and grooms relieved themselves at every corner, creating breeding pools of contagion. There were fights over food and lodgings and wild scenes in the taverns, with knives frequently drawn. Even at church, nobles contended over seating, with some leaving in a huff rather than accept a place they considered beneath their rank.

  Owing to all the jockeying, the diet’s opening session was delayed until January 27, 1521. When it finally did convene, the question of Luther—the one thing for which the diet would be remembered—was not even on the agenda. The major items were establishing an efficient administration, reorganizing the judicial system, strengthening law enforcement, reforming the tax code, and addressing the latest list of German grievances, which now numbered more than one hundred. Charles’s proposed journey to Italy also needed to be addressed. With the emperor planning to leave Germany at the diet’s close, establishing a structure to govern in his absence was considered essential.

  The Reichstag consisted of three estates—electors, princes, and representatives of cities—with each making decisions by majority vote and plenary sessions held to ratify actions. The princes’ chamber, with forty-five ecclesiastical lords and twenty-seven lay eminences, carried the most weight. Most sessions took place in the town hall, a stately civic monument located a short walk from the cathedral. To accommodate the emperor, a glittering throne was erected in the main meeting hall.

  Inside the hall, Luther’s name was rarely mentioned; outside, it dominated all conversation. The secretary of the Venetian ambassador noted the rousing effect that Luther’s burning of the canon law was having on the German population. He had learned that Luther “has twenty thousand comrades of like mind.” A woodcut by Hans Holbein the Younger showed Luther as the German Hercules, holding in his mouth a cord at the end of which dangles a strangled pope. In his left hand Luther clutches Hoogstraten, whom he is about to bludgeon with a spiked club; lying bloodied on the ground are Aristotle, Aquinas, Lyra, Ockham, Lombard, and Scotus, in a tableau crackling with the violence that seemed about to erupt on the street.

  At every point, Aleander found his position undermined. The contents of his dispatches to Rome were promptly leaked, then recirculated with rumor and innuendo. And he felt he knew who was responsible: Erasmus. The Dutchman, he believed, had spies in Rome who kept him informed of Aleander’s every move. The nuncio found this particularly disturbing in light of how close the two men had once been. “I shared lodging and bed with him at Venice once for six months, and he considered it not beneath his dignity to hear my daily lectures on Plutarch’s Ethics according to the Greek text,” he complained to Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici; Aleander urged him to make sure the pope did not place more trust in Erasmus than in him.

  Earlier, Aleander had surmised that Erasmus was the real author of Luther’s books, but he had since concluded otherwise. Even so, he considered Erasmus “the greatest corner-stone of this heresy,” who had helped prepare the way for Luther through his promotion of Greek, his revision of the New Testament, his rejection of ceremonies, and his disdain for the dialecticians. In fact, Aleander believed, Erasmus’s ironic style and moderate tone had done more than Luther’s fulminations to undermine ecclesiastical authority. Intent on fighting back, Aleander circulated an epigram that was just then gaining currency: “Erasmus laid the egg that Luther hatched.”

  Erasmus had originally planned to attend the diet, in part so that he could refute such allegations. In Louvain, he heard many variations on them. “Luther is pestilential, but Erasmus more so, for Luther sucked all his poison from Erasmus’ teats,” went one. A widely circulated broadsheet, titled Die göttliche Mühle (“The Godly Mill”), featured a drawing of Christ pouring the wheat of the Gospels into a mill, Erasmus bagging the flour, and Luther kneading the dough into books, which are being rejected by a pope, a cardinal, and a bishop. Above, a bird crying “ban” prepares to attack Luther but is repelled by a faithful peasant wielding a flail.

  Being yoked to Luther became especially dangerous after the appearance of The Babylonian Captivity. Until then, Erasmus had approved of much of the substance of Luther’s writings, objecting mainly to their vehement tone, but Luther’s willingness to tamper with the sacraments shocked him. “His De captivitate Babylonica alienates many people,” he observed, “and he is proposing something more frightful every day. I do not see what he is hoping for in setting this on foot, unless perhaps he is relying on the Bohemians.” Paying Luther back for comparing him to a he-goat whose horns are caught in a thornbush, Erasmus wrote that Luther was like “the he-goat who has got himself into a pit without stopping to think how he is to get out.”

  While the diet would have given Erasmus an opportunity to defend himself, he would also have come under intense pressure to speak out against Luther. He was especially wary of Aleander—“a maniac, a wicked stupid man,” he called him. (Erasmus was also worried about a reported outbreak of the plague in Worms.) To add to the pressure, the pope himself was now demanding action. The previous
September, Erasmus had written to Leo X to affirm his allegiance to the Church; in passing, he noted that he had not read enough of Luther to judge him. In his reply, the pope dismissed that claim as unpersuasive. “Never was the time more opportune or the cause more just for setting your erudition and your powers of mind against the impious,” the pontiff wrote, “nor is anyone better suited than yourself—such is our high opinion of your learning—for this praiseworthy task,” i.e., writing against Luther. While he admired Erasmus’s expression of goodwill toward the Holy See, the pope observed, it required a demonstration.

  If he complied with Leo’s request, Erasmus would enjoy all the favors Rome could provide. He would also gain a respite from the attacks of the sophists and potbellies. But if he denounced Luther, the enemies of the Muses would be emboldened. The Vulgate would go unchallenged, Greek and Hebrew would be neglected, Scotus and Aquinas would again reign in the universities. And, no doubt, Luther’s own supporters would begin to assail him.

  What Erasmus wanted above all else was to be left alone. “I would rather be a spectator of the play than one of the actors,” he wrote to Johannes Reuchlin (who had come out vehemently against Luther). Feeling the years slipping away, Erasmus wanted to devote his remaining time to promoting the philosophy of Christ. By this point, he was absorbed in preparing the third edition of his New Testament. And so, pleading ill health, Erasmus decided to skip the diet. He instead wrote a series of letters to several key counselors and prelates in Worms, describing the middle course he hoped to steer at this decisive moment in European affairs. The pope’s supporters “have no ideas except to eat Luther alive, and it is not my business whether they prefer him boiled or roast,” he callously observed in one of them. But, he added, as dangerous as Luther’s teachings might seem, the Church also had to resist the ignorant clamor of his enemies. While determined to stay clear of Luther, Erasmus could not approve of men such as these. To the Church alone he would remain true: “Christ I recognize. Luther I know not.”

  With the approach of Lent in mid-February 1521, Erasmus—dreading the prospect of another forty-day period of postponed meals and servings of smelly fish—left for Antwerp and the house of his friend Pieter Gillis. Just entering its golden age, this metropolis on the Scheldt was as open and cosmopolitan as any in Europe. Every day, dozens of ships bearing Indian spices, German copper, and English cloth put in there, fortifying its place as the center of the world economy. The arts thrived, the luxury-goods trade boomed, printing houses proliferated, and humanists came to breathe freely. Many of them met regularly at the Gillis dinner table. Among the guests during Erasmus’s stay was Albrecht Dürer, who was using Antwerp as a base for his travels around the Netherlands (and who greatly admired Erasmus).

  Even here, though, Erasmus could not escape the commotion over Luther. Antwerp’s printers were doing a brisk trade in Luther’s books. Local Marranos (Spaniards and Portuguese of Jewish extraction) had his works translated and printed in Spanish, and German merchants were eagerly promoting his ideas. Prominent citizens like Cornelius Grapheus, the town clerk, and Jacob Probst, the prior of the Augustinian friars, were moving into Luther’s camp. Here as elsewhere, Luther’s teachings about the personal transformation that faith can work in the heart, and about the radical change needed in society as a whole, were kindling the people. By comparison, Erasmus’s appeals to reason, free will, and moral virtue seemed chilly, piecemeal, and uninspiring.

  In Wittenberg, meanwhile, Luther was desperately trying to find out what was going on in Worms. Despite its emergence as Europe’s most dynamic theological center, the town remained geographically remote, with couriers needing a week or more to cover the distance from the Rhineland. Spalatin was Luther’s main source of information about the diet, and the friar’s spirits rose and fell according to the reports he received. Luther was disappointed to learn that the emperor’s close advisers all seemed opposed to him, but he was heartened by the news that Charles might summon him to Worms. When Spalatin asked how he would respond to such a directive, Luther assured him that he would go, even if it seemed likely that force would be used against him. “No one’s danger, no one’s safety can be considered here,” he wrote. He would prefer to perish at the hands of the Romanists alone than to have Charles’s administration stained early by bloodshed, as Sigismund’s had been with Hus’s.

  Luther’s fearlessness was inspiring others. “Rumor constantly tells us how little you are frightened by the threat of tyrants, how bravely you despise death, how much you wish to endure a thousand dangers for Christ’s sake,” the Erfurt humanist Crotus Rubianus wrote to him. Crotus reported hearing a canon speculate that it would not be hard for someone to kidnap Luther and deliver him to the pope. He warned Luther to be watchful, like Argus.

  In the first weeks of 1521, cartloads of Luther’s books were burned in the Saxon towns of Merseburg and Meissen. Confessors in several locales were demanding that penitents hand over any volumes by Luther in their possession and denying them absolution if they refused. To help guide them, Luther quickly drafted a pamphlet offering an actual script they could follow when questioned. “Let nothing on earth,” he wrote, “even if it were an angel from heaven, be so great as to drive you against your conscience and away from the teaching you recognize and regard as God’s.”

  Johann von Staupitz, Luther’s old mentor, was coming under intense pressure to renounce Luther’s teachings. In 1520, he had resigned his office as vicar-general of the Augustinian Observants and accepted an invitation from Cardinal Lang in Salzburg to serve as court preacher. There, Staupitz hoped to live out his remaining days in peace, but Lang, pressed hard by Rome, ordered him to appear before witnesses to testify that Luther’s opinions were heretical. Staupitz in fact differed with Luther on many points but had resisted saying so publicly. As the threats against him mounted, however, he agreed to sign an equivocal statement against Luther and submit it to the pope. “Martin has begun a hard task and acts with great courage, divinely inspired,” Staupitz wrote dolefully to Wenceslas Link on January 4, 1521. “I stammer and am a child needing milk.”

  When he heard of Staupitz’s action, Luther was furious. “If Christ loves you, he will make you revoke that declaration,” he wrote. Staupitz “should have stood up for Christ and contradicted the pope’s impiety.” This was “not the time to tremble but to cry aloud, while our Lord Jesus is being condemned, burned, and blasphemed.” As much as Staupitz exhorted him to humility, Luther urged Staupitz to pride: “You are too yielding, I am too stiff-necked.” Staupitz’s submission, he wrote, showed that he was a different man from the one who had taught him about grace and the cross. Toward weaker colleagues unwilling to follow him into martyrdom, Luther was unforgiving.

  Despite the threats pressing in on him, Luther maintained his extraordinary work pace, and—producing letter after letter, sermon after sermon, book after book—he kept four presses busy, as a Wittenberg student marveled. In addition to his two earlier denunciations of the bull against him, Luther composed two more: one in Latin and one in German. The latter (which as usual was more truculent than the former) showed his growing messianism: “God did not choose many eminent and great bishops for his work. St. Augustine was bishop in one little unimportant city, but did he not accomplish more than all the Roman popes with all their fellow-bishops?” Even if he were not a prophet, “I am sure that the Word of God is with me and not with them, for I have the Scriptures on my side and they have only their doctrine. This gives me courage, so that the more they despise and persecute me, the less I fear them.”

  Luther’s zest for combat was most apparent in his polemical skirmishes with Hieronymus Emser, a Dresden-based humanist and secretary for Duke George who, after the Leipzig debate, raised questions about Luther’s orthodoxy. The two men began exchanging tracts filled with wild abuse, with Emser playing off Luther’s reputation as a “raging bull” and Luther calling Emser a goat. (The coat of arms of Emser’s family featured a shield and a helmet
adorned with a goat.) Answer to the Hyperchristian, Hyperspiritual, and Hyperlearned Book by Goat Emser in Leipzig went the title of one of Luther’s attacks. Far from regretting such rancor, Luther felt it confirmed the righteousness of his mission. The preaching of the gospel, he wrote, “must and should cause quarreling, disunity, dissension, and disturbance. Such was the condition of Christianity at the time of the apostles and martyrs, and that was its best time. The discord, dissension, and disturbance produced by God’s word are blessed events. With them begins a true faith and struggles against false faith.”

  Around this time, Luther began referring to his teachings as evangelische, or “evangelical,” an adjective he adapted from evangelium, Latin for “gospel.” Luther was thus asserting a connection between his own spiritual message and the good tidings spread by Christ and the apostles, in contrast to the tired doctrines proffered by Rome. (To this day, the Lutheran church in Germany is known as the Evangelische Kirche im Deutschland.)

  At the end of January 1521, Joachim I, the elector of Brandenburg, stopped in Wittenberg on his way from Berlin to Worms so that he could meet Luther. On February 3, Luther dined with Duke Bogislav of Pomerania, who was also on his way to the diet. From Worms itself, however, no word about his fate came.

  With the approach of Lent and the prayer and fasting it demanded, Luther’s sense of frustration and inadequacy grew. To add to it, the lectures he was giving on the Psalms were not going well. Though far more conversant in Hebrew than he had been during his earlier lectures on the Psalms, he was getting even more bogged down in them. His notes were so long that the printers were bringing them out ten psalms at a time. Examining the page proofs for the second volume, Luther felt disgust at their “verbosity, lack of order, and chaotic arrangement.” At that moment, he was working on Psalm 22, and its opening line—“My father, why hast thou abandoned me?”—seemed a chilling premonition of what might befall him at Worms.