No less than Luther, Erasmus was being selective in his citations. While Christ had indeed spoken gently to the multitudes, he had also declared that he came with a sword; Paul, in addition to wanting to be all things to all men, had battered his opponents with coarse epithets. In Luther’s view, the truth had to be proclaimed without qualification, whatever the consequences; in Erasmus’s, it had to be doled out sparingly so as to avoid tumult. At this moment of growing ferment, when the German people seethed with resentment and anger and hungered for change, Erasmus’s temperate pleas for understanding and brotherhood seemed pale compared with the drama and excitement of Luther’s thunderous blasts against the established order.
More than anything else, Erasmus wanted to be left in peace so that he could continue working on his blueprint for a new Europe. In the spring of 1521, he was occupied with revising the Latin translation for the third edition of his New Testament. Among the major questions he faced was what to do about the comma Johanneum—the passage at 1 John 5:7 about the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit that he had omitted from his first two editions. In his dispute with Edward Lee, he had written that if he had found this passage in even a single Greek manuscript, he would have retained it in the text. Not long afterward, a Greek codex was duly discovered in England that did contain it. Erasmus suspected that the manuscript had been corrected against the Vulgate—that a scribe had inserted the clause into the codex so that it would conform to the authorized Latin text. Because he remained under attack for dropping the passage, however, he decided to restore it. He was doing so, he explained, not for reasons of scholarship but to ensure that there was “no cause for making malicious accusations.” He raised questions about the integrity of the Codex Britannicus, as he called it, and described the vast scriptural and patristic evidence against the passage, including its absence from the Greek codices he had examined.
Erasmus’s suspicions have been borne out by modern scholars. Among the thousands of Greek New Testament manuscripts examined since Erasmus’s time, only a handful are known to contain the verse, and it appears in no manuscript of the Vulgate prior to the ninth century. In the huge literature this subject has generated, there has been much debate (ultimately inconclusive) about whether the manuscript was actually produced for the express purpose of refuting Erasmus. (The manuscript in question has been identified as the Codex Montfortianus, named after one of its owners, and is housed in the library of Trinity College in Dublin.) Whichever the case, Erasmus’s scholarly instincts were correct, but because of the explosive environment in which he was working, he felt compelled to make this concession.
In one area at least—the financial—Erasmus now felt secure. In addition to the substantial annuity payments he was getting from England and the stipend he was drawing as a councilor of Charles V, he was receiving a steady flow of gifts from wealthy admirers—gold and silver cups and plates, rings, furs, silks, and wine, plus considerable cash—often in response to works he had strategically dedicated to them. As a result, Erasmus now felt like “a regular grandee,” as he put it, “keeping as I do two horses who are better cared for than their own master and two servants better turned out than he is.”
As always, however, Erasmus’s health remained a concern. With the first hot spell of the year, he came down with a severe fever. His digestion got so bad that his doctors prescribed a series of “pills and enemas, powders, ointments, baths, poultices.” The prospect of spending another summer in Louvain, with its rotting garbage and festering animosities, seemed unbearable, so when Pieter Wichmans, a friend and canon, invited him to visit his house in Anderlecht, an airy village two miles from Brussels, he gratefully accepted. After sending off his new Latin translation to Basel at the end of May 1521, Erasmus headed there.
Set amid farms and meadows, Wichmans’s house was spacious and bright, with wood-beamed ceilings and glazed windows. Within days of his arrival, Erasmus’s fever had lifted, his stomach had settled, and he seemed “to grow young again,” as he exulted. (Today, Anderlecht is a busy suburb of Brussels, and the house—restored to its former splendor—is a museum dedicated to Erasmus.) Here, amid the chatter of songbirds, Erasmus worked on his New Testament annotations.
He also took on a new project—an edition of the works of Augustine. Froben had first raised the idea back in 1517 as a natural follow-up to the edition of Jerome, but Erasmus had declined. Given Augustine’s preeminent place among the Church Fathers, he had assumed that his writings had been faithfully preserved, but then he decided to test the idea by comparing some passages from printed editions against old manuscripts, and to his surprise he found that they were full of “monstrous corruptions.” Erasmus thus agreed to serve as the project’s editor. Seeking out early manuscripts of Augustine’s works, he sent letters to his contacts at monastic and cathedral libraries, asking them to check their collections. Because of the scale of the project, Erasmus decided to farm out parts of it to trusted scholars. To edit and annotate the immense City of God, he enlisted his friend Juan Luis Vives, a young convert from Judaism who had fled Spain to escape the Inquisition and who was now living and teaching in the Low Countries. (Vives would go on to become one of the most acclaimed humanists of the sixteenth century.)
While in Anderlecht, Erasmus learned that in England the impression had spread that he was firmly backing Luther. Desperate to dispel it, he hurriedly drafted a letter to his friend Richard Pace, now serving as the dean of St. Paul’s. He complained of the many “poisoned pamphlets” that were being aimed at him and of the continuing efforts to prove that Luther had taken things from his books, “as though he had not taken more out of the Pauline Epistles!” While much of Luther’s teaching was admirable, Erasmus observed, it had been undercut by “intolerable defects.” And even if Luther’s writings had been uniformly beneficial, he admitted,
mine was never the spirit to risk my life for the truth. Not everyone has the strength needed for martyrdom. I fear that, if strife were to break out, I shall behave like Peter. When popes and emperors make the right decisions I follow, which is godly; if they decide wrongly, I tolerate them, which is safe.
For many years—centuries, in fact—Erasmus would be loudly condemned for this passage. At a time when Luther had dramatically shown that he was ready to die for his beliefs, Erasmus was emphatically stating that he was not. Whereas Luther identified with Christ and his willingness to embrace the terrible fate that he knew awaited him, Erasmus saw himself in the frail disciple who, facing arrest as an accomplice of Jesus, thrice denied knowing him. In an era marked by epic demonstrations of faith, Erasmus was frankly acknowledging that he was no hero.
While Erasmus was enjoying the fresh air of Anderlecht, the delegates in fetid Worms were rushing to complete the diet’s business. After months of feuding, debating, gorging, and drinking, all were desperate to leave. As the temperature rose, the smell from the piles of waste and pools of urine became overpowering, and a contagion struck that claimed first dozens and then hundreds of lives. Worms was also hit by a new round of high-pitched pamphlets that predicted the end of the world, celebrated Karsthans, and demanded an end to Roman tyranny. A priest from the imperial court, encountering a man with eighty copies of The Babylonian Captivity, seized and ripped up several of them and would have destroyed the rest had not another bookseller intervened and forced the assailant to seek refuge in the palace. Any day, Ulrich von Hutten and his band were expected to descend on Worms from the Ebernburg castle and carry out a slaughter.
Four days after Luther’s departure, the emperor informed the estates that he planned to proceed against him. Furious at having let the apostate slip away, Charles wanted to deploy the empire’s full resources against him and his books, and he sent instructions to Aleander to draft a decree to that effect. Delighted at the emperor’s resolve, the papal nuncio stayed up all night preparing it.
In its sweep and fury, the Edict of Worms would mark the start of a new era in the Church’s war on dissent. The
errors, heresies, and false doctrines “of a certain Martin Luther,” it declared, had spread such “contagious confusion” that, if not ended, could lead to “the corrupting of all faithful nations and to their falling into abominable schisms.” Luther had sought to destroy all civil and ecclesiastical institutions and thereby incited people to “rebel against their superiors” and “start killing, stealing, and burning.” He, in short, seemed “not a man but a demon in the appearance of a man, clothed in religious habit to be better able to deceive mankind.” He was thus to be considered “an estranged member, rotten and cut off from the body of our Holy Mother Church.” No one was to receive, defend, sustain, or favor him. Rather, he was to be “apprehended and punished as a notorious heretic” and delivered to the authorities. Those who helped him in any manner were to be prosecuted and all their goods and belongings confiscated.
Furthermore, no one was “to dare buy, sell, keep, read, write, or have somebody write, print or have printed, or affirm or defend the books, writings, or opinions of the said Martin Luther.” All of his books were to be “universally prohibited and forbidden” and burned. Books written by his disciples or imitators of his false doctrines were likewise to be incinerated. But it was not just Lutheran books that were the problem. Every day, new books “full of evil doctrine and bad examples” were being written and published, as were pictures and illustrations that through various tricks sought to capture Christian souls and cause them to doubt their faith. In order “to kill this mortal pestilence,” no one was to compose, write, print, sell, buy, or have printed “such pernicious articles” against the Catholic Church. Anything written against the pope, the prelates of the Church, the secular princes, and the leading schools and their faculties was to be similarly condemned. To further ensure that the art of printing was put to good ends, no book dealer or printer or anybody else was to mention the Holy Scriptures or their interpretation without having first received the consent of the local city clerk and the theology faculty of the university.
The Edict of Worms was in effect a declaration of war on the printing press and the forces it had unleashed. The edict committed the full powers of church and state to enforce orthodoxy, extinguish heresy, and restrict free expression. The edict would lead to the creation of an apparatus of intellectual control and censorship, crowned by the establishment in 1559 of the Index of Prohibited Books, which banned not only individual titles but also the entire works of some 550 writers—Erasmus included. Not until 1966 would the index be discontinued. The Edict of Worms, then, inaugurated a period of four hundred years during which the Church resolutely sought to seal off the Christian mind from all material it considered immoral, erroneous, or seditious.
Aleander felt such rapture at the edict’s adoption that in his report to Rome he quoted from Ovid’s Art of Love. And he quickly moved to enforce the decree. On May 29, 1521, three days after its signing, a great pyre of Lutheran books was erected in front of the bishop’s palace in Worms, then set ablaze. Bonfires were also organized in Ghent and Antwerp.
While the Vatican and its allies rejoiced over the edict, others had a sense of foreboding. “Here you have, as some imagine, the end of this tragedy, but I am persuaded it is not the end, but the beginning,” wrote Alfonso de Valdés, the emperor’s secretary and a friend of Erasmus’s. The minds of the German people “are greatly exasperated against the Roman See” and so did not attach great importance to the emperor’s edicts. Already, he noted, Luther’s books were being sold with impunity at every street corner. “From this you will easily guess what will happen when the emperor leaves.”
In his eagerness to depart from Worms, Charles would leave a key matter unaddressed. One of the diet’s main aims had been to strengthen the Reichsregiment, the council that was to govern the empire in the Kaiser’s absence, but it was denied any real executive power, and Germany was left as splintered and disorganized as ever. Charles would not step foot in Germany for another nine years—a gift to the reformers.
The emperor was already preoccupied with Francis I. The great confrontation long expected between Western Europe’s two most powerful men had finally erupted, in northern Italy. In late January 1521, the French lost Alessandria—a strategic fortress midway between Milan and Genoa—and in the early summer imperial troops entered Milan, forcing the French to withdraw. Determined to strike back, Francis opened fronts on his southern and northern borders with lands ruled by Charles, sending a surrogate force across the Pyrenees to attack the Spanish kingdom of Navarre and a detachment across the Meuse (Maas) River to plunder Flanders. Counterattacking, an imperial force under the command of Henry of Nassau burned and looted its way through a broad swath of northeastern France before laying siege to the great cathedral city of Tournai; the nearby towns of Ardres and Mouzon were razed. (In Spain, meanwhile, the Comunero insurgents were being butchered and their rebellion was put down.)
In this geopolitical skirmishing, England remained the great prize. Seeking to build on the Field of Cloth of Gold summit of the previous summer, Thomas Wolsey had organized another meeting between the English and the French, to take place in Calais on August 2, 1521. Francis desperately wanted Henry VIII’s support in his conflict with Charles, but the long-standing animosity between England and France persisted, and England retained ties to Charles through Catherine, his aunt. Charles, meanwhile, felt that because his lands had been attacked by France, he was entitled to England’s help under the Treaty of London signed three years earlier. Even while the talks between England and France were taking place in Calais, Charles invited Wolsey to see him in Bruges. Wolsey—telling the French that he wanted to persuade Charles to enter into peace talks with France—suspended the negotiations in Calais and traveled the seventy miles to Bruges. In that picturesque, canal-crossed Flemish port, the shape of world politics would be determined.
Erasmus was fully apprised of these developments, for during his stay in Anderlecht he frequently rode into Brussels to see people at the imperial court. Wolsey, he learned, would be accompanied to Bruges by several of his English friends, including Lord Mountjoy, Cuthbert Tunstall, and Thomas More, and Erasmus decided to go in order to catch “many hares in one field,” as he put it (quoting from the Adages). He stayed with his friend Marcus Laurinus, the dean of St. Donation’s cathedral, whose house on Golden-Hand Street served as a sort of hostel for humanists, thanks to both his hospitality and his well-stocked wine cellar. The St. Donation’s library itself was well provisioned with manuscripts, and Laurinus arranged for Erasmus to examine four old Latin codices of the New Testament, which would prove of great help in the revising of his annotations.
Erasmus was present when, on August 15, 1521, Charles rode out to see Wolsey. This time the cardinal was able to meet with him. Erasmus also saw a good deal of More. Recently promoted to undertreasurer of the exchequer, More described the tiresome negotiations he was conducting with Hanse merchants. Among the English, though, one topic eclipsed all others: Luther. In England, the friar’s views were spreading with unsettling speed, and Wolsey had ordered a crackdown on his writings. On May 12, 1521, a bonfire had been scheduled to take place in the churchyard of St. Paul’s cathedral. After Wolsey and Bishop John Fisher delivered fierce tirades against Luther, books by him and other dissidents were fed to the flames, to the cheers of thousands. Two days later, Wolsey issued a mandate banning the importation of Luther’s books into England and ordering a search for materials written or edited by him.
As Erasmus heard in Bruges, however, the main blow against Luther had been delivered by Henry VIII himself. Months earlier, Wolsey had sent the king a copy of The Babylonian Captivity and suggested that he write against it. Taking up the challenge, Henry had produced the Assertio Septem Sacramentorum (“Defense of the Seven Sacraments”). The tract was thick, sober, and studded with citations, and, given Henry’s well-known distaste for desk work, rumors had spread that he was not its real author; More, Fisher, and Edward Lee were all said to have had a hand i
n it. To his dismay, Erasmus was also suspected of having contributed. Examining a copy in Calais, however, he was convinced the book was a product of (again citing the Adages) the king’s “own bow and spear.”
Years later, as Henry’s relations with Rome (and Catherine) deteriorated, he would in fact come to wish that he had not written the book, for in the course of accusing Luther, he offered a full-throated defense of the Roman Church. Though plodding, the Assertio set out a line of argument against Luther that in the future would be frequently used against him. Over the centuries, Henry maintained, the Church had sifted out the truth of the Christian faith in ways that no mere reading of Scripture could achieve. He mocked Luther’s claim to have suddenly discovered the truth about the sacraments after a millennium of darkness. Noting Luther’s assertion that the Mass is not a sacrifice, the king wondered how it was that so many Holy Fathers had studied the matter for so many centuries, yet none had been able to perceive what Luther “brags so clearly to see himself!” Citing the Epistle of James, Henry also condemned Luther’s all-consuming devotion to faith, on the grounds that it would discourage people from doing good works.
Most offensive of all to Henry was Luther’s attack on the sacramental status of marriage. In a section of his book he would later come deeply to regret, the king argued that matrimony was the “first of all Sacraments,” instituted by God, given by Christ, and handed down by the apostles “to be honored to the end of the world.” As the New Testament made clear, marriage was “an indissolvable bond”; those whom God has joined together in wedlock can never be sundered, except in cases of fornication. For many pages Henry went on in this vein, rhapsodizing about the sacred nature of marriage and railing against the “impertinent calumnies” of Luther, who, based on abstruse Greek parsings, claimed that it was not a sacrament but simply a mystery.
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