The Assertio was rich in such vituperation. Luther, Henry wrote, was a venomous serpent, a “detestable trumpeter of pride, calumnies and schisms,” a “hellish wolf” belching out “foul inveighings.” He urged his readers not to listen to the insults spewed against the vicar of Christ by “this one little monk.” Though weak in strength, Luther was in temper “more harmful than all Turks, all Saracens, all infidels anywhere,” and it was up to Christian sovereigns to defend and guard the Holy Roman Church by not only force of arms but also their wits.
Henry dedicated his book to Leo X, and as soon as it was printed he arranged for twenty-eight copies to be sent to Rome, including one bound in gold cloth for the pope. (Today the pope’s copy is in the Vatican Library, as are Henry’s love letters to Anne Boleyn.) After reading the first few pages, Leo expressed his deep satisfaction, and soon afterward he issued a bull declaring Henry Fidei Defensor—“Defender of the Faith”—a title the king would proudly flourish. The Assertio, which offered the remarkable spectacle of a sitting sovereign assailing a private individual in print, would become a bestseller, appearing in around twenty editions and translations in the sixteenth century.
In Bruges, there was no copy to spare for Erasmus, but Wolsey promised to send one from England. “I greatly long to read it,” Erasmus wrote to Richard Pace with sugary overstatement, “for I have no doubt that it is worthy of that very gifted mind, which shows such extraordinary powers, whatever the topic on which it is exercised.”
Erasmus hoped that such praise would placate his English friends. It wouldn’t. Now that Henry had entered the arena against Luther, they expected Erasmus to do the same. He was similarly pressed by Jean Glapion, an ardent Franciscan who had recently been named Charles’s confessor and who informed Erasmus that it was his duty as a councilor of Charles’s to publicly denounce this traducer of true piety.
From Rome, too, the pressure was building. After returning from Bruges to Anderlecht, Erasmus received a letter from Paolo Bombace, an old friend now at the papal court. While reassuring him of Leo’s continued support, Bombace said that if Erasmus truly wanted to show his loyalty to the Holy See, he had to write against Luther: “All the other labors which you have undertaken hitherto with your nightly vigils and all your writing have been absolutely barren when compared with what this piece of work would be.”
Erasmus, then, was being pushed by the pope, the emperor, and the English king to declare himself against Luther. At the same time, however, Luther’s followers were growing increasingly vicious. From Wolfgang Capito, Erasmus received a chilling report on the mood in Wittenberg following Worms. Now working for Albrecht of Mainz, Capito had gone there in the hope of arranging an accommodation between Luther and the archbishop on the subject of relics and indulgences. “Luther’s party are crazier and more insolent and more self-assertive in everything,” he wrote; “they fix their teeth in anyone, no matter whom, and abuse everyone to his face with barbarous impertinence, such is their public contempt for all brains except their own.” Erasmus was one of their principal targets: “There is no declaration in which they do not criticize you when they are by themselves, and in public they set you up as the leader of their party in the most preposterous fashion. I freely confess, they have made me very angry, passionately devoted as I am to your reputation.”
Amid such ill will, Erasmus increasingly feared for his physical safety. Writing to Pierre Barbier, an assistant to Cardinal Adrian of Utrecht, he said that unless the pope could guarantee protection, any declaration of opposition to Luther he might make could prove fatal. He would rather be exposed to the lances of the Swiss than “cut to pieces” by the “sharp-pointed pens” of the Lutheran pamphleteers. He complained that Luther’s supporters were dinning into his ears the words of Matthew 10:34: “I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.” While some changes in the Christian religion seemed warranted, Erasmus noted, “I can approve no reforms pursued with this sort of uproar.” In his effort to stay on good terms with both sides, Erasmus was incurring the wrath of each.
By the end of the summer of 1521, it had become clear to Erasmus that the golden age of peace he had once so hopefully heralded was dead. At Bruges, Charles and Wolsey signed a secret treaty under which Henry was to invade France in May 1523. Leo X—hoping to expel the French from northern Italy and regain lost papal lands—signed his own pact with Charles. Under it, Charles promised to protect the pope against his enemies and ensure the rule of the Medici in Tuscany; Leo, binding himself in perpetuity to the emperor, promised to formally invest him with the crown of Naples. On top of it all, the Ottomans, under their new sultan, Suleiman I the Magnificent, were laying siege to Belgrade. Guarded by a garrison of only seven hundred men, the city fell in late August 1521. The victory—the first of Suleiman’s famous military career—opened the way for the Turks to march north along the Danube toward Hungary.
“The whole Christian world, as though it were cut into two halves, is committed to a disastrous war,” Erasmus wrote. Charles and Francis, “devotedly intent on mutual destruction,” were threatening to “drag the world down to destruction with them.” With imperial troops ravaging France and Christian armies warring in Italy, Erasmus wanted to make a show of solidarity with his fellow humanists across national lines. He chose as his vehicle a letter to Guillaume Budé. One of France’s leading intellectuals, Budé had made a name for himself with De Asse, a dense five-book treatise that sought to estimate the value of every coin and weight of ancient Rome. He was equally well known, however, for his correspondence with Erasmus. For the last five years, the two men had exchanged long, stylized epistles in which they had tried to outdo each other in metaphors, witticisms, epigrams, wordplay, classical allusions, and citations in Greek. They bickered over the aptness of a phrase, argued over perceived slights, and drove each other into fits of neurotic irritation. Throughout it all, though, they remained bound by their shared commitment to humanist ideals and their conviction that good literature can produce good character.
While Erasmus was in Bruges with his English friends, Budé was in Calais with the French party, and in writing to him, Erasmus declared, he was trying to make sure that “these upheavals between monarchs do not disrupt the bonds drawn by the Muses.” To further thicken those ties, he offered a tribute to another humanist, Thomas More. During their talks at Bruges, More had told Erasmus of the great strides that his three daughters were making in their literary studies, and Erasmus now praised him for it. At an earlier time, Erasmus acknowledged, he had believed that education had little to offer women and girls, but More’s description of his daughters’ progress had made him reconsider. They were proving adept at the exercises their father prepared for them, including writing letters in Latin and explaining the sermons they heard in church. They enjoyed reading Livy and could understand authors of that caliber without help from anyone. While he did not object to those who taught their daughters only the domestic arts, Erasmus wrote, “nothing so occupies a girl’s whole heart as the love of reading.” What’s more, a woman must have intelligence if she is to keep her household, mold her children’s character, “and meet her husband’s needs in every way.”
In this letter, Erasmus was for the first time moving beyond the suffocating paternalism of the humanist world; having long shared in the era’s boundless condescension toward women, he was with More’s help arriving at a new understanding. He praised his friend as a “model literary man” who combined “real wisdom with such charm of character” while also rendering great services to his country. He was truly omnium horarum homo—a man for all hours (a phrase plucked from the Adages). By praising the Englishman More to the Frenchman Budé, the Dutchman Erasmus was trying to keep alive the international sodality of scholars amid rising nationalist and religious tensions.
In mid-October 1521, as the slate skies of autumn gathered, Erasmus returned from serene Anderlecht to boisterous Louvain. With his annotations now ready to be set, he wanted as always to see th
em through the presses in person. So, despite his advancing years, growing frailty, and loathing of German stoves, he decided to undertake another long journey to Basel. As the day of his departure approached, a Dominican friar at the cathedral preached against him for a full hour. “He seemed to be not so much speaking from a sacred pulpit as thumping a tub,” Erasmus wearily observed. From time to time the man dropped in Luther’s name to make it seem that Luther and Erasmus were in cahoots. What most riled the friar, however, was Erasmus’s intention to edit the works of Augustine, of whom, he charged, he “understood nothing.”
Such ravings reinforced Erasmus’s desire to leave. He gathered together his manuscripts and personal effects and saddled his horse for the grueling 450-mile journey. Departing on October 28, 1521 (his birthday), Erasmus planned to stay in Basel as long as it took to print his annotations, then travel back to Louvain. In fact, he never would return.
28
Outlaw
At the Wartburg, it took Luther some time to adjust to his new surroundings. Geographically, the fortress was not all that remote—Eisenach was only a mile away—but it sat atop a steep ridge that rose out of the Thuringian Forest and was not easily breached. Its centerpiece was a twelfth-century palace that featured a great banquet hall, a chapel decorated with murals, and two hundred columns topped by intricately carved capitals. For generations, the Wartburg was home to the powerful landgraves of Thuringia. The wife of one of them, Elizabeth of Hungary, won renown for her humility and care for the poor; she was canonized just four years after her death (she had died in 1231, at the age of twenty-four). The fortress was also the site of the legendary thirteenth-century contest of the minstrels that Wagner used as the setting for his opera Tannhäuser.
At the time of Luther’s arrival, the place was largely abandoned. For most of his stay, the only other residents were the warden, an armed guard, and two pages of noble stock who brought him food and drink twice a day. He was assigned a spartan wood-paneled room that had once served as a bailiff’s lodge. It had a stove, a bed, a wood desk, a stump that served as a stool, and a small window that offered a view over hills and hollows. At night the narrow stairway to his room was raised on its chain and locked so as to prevent possible intruders. Luther was given lay clothes in place of his habit and ordered to let his hair and beard grow so that he would look like a knight. He had been declared vogelfrei—outlawed—meaning that anyone was free to kill or capture him on sight, and so he had to remain indoors for a week while he turned into “Junker Jörg,” his new identity. A portrait by Lucas Cranach painted months later shows him with long curly hair, a drooping mustache, and an unruly beard.
After more than three years of nonstop lecturing, preaching, writing, and contending, during which he was almost always the center of attention, Luther now found himself alone and “a strange prisoner,” as he wrote. The chilly nights and whipping winds added to his sense of isolation. Bats whirred about the place, and ravens and screech owls produced a constant racket. The pages often brought him walnuts, and one night Luther heard what sounded like the nuts being thrown up at the ceiling from a bag on the table—an act he attributed to the Devil. Later, he would write of the “many evil and astute demons” who amused him during his stay, “but in a disturbing way.” Much later, a legend arose that Luther at one point threw his inkpot at the Devil, and for many years a dark blotch was carefully maintained on a wall of the Lutherstube (Luther’s room), but it attracted so much unwelcome attention that it was eventually removed. In any case, the poltergeists he heard were no doubt the creaks and rattles of an aging building straining under the elements.
Luther’s one regular link to the outside world was the bundle of letters brought once or twice a week by special couriers supplied by Frederick and overseen by Spalatin. In his replies, Luther had to be careful so that his location would not leak out, and for many weeks it was known only to a small circle in Wittenberg and at the electoral court. Once Luther was no longer recognizable, the chains of his captivity were relaxed somewhat, and he was allowed to roam the woods and pick strawberries. Occasionally he went out on horseback, riding with a groom at his side. He was instructed on how to behave like a nobleman, including constantly gesturing and stroking one’s beard and keeping a hand on one’s sword, but he could not resist picking up and thumbing through every book he saw. This drew a rebuke from the groom, who said that that was not the way an aristocrat behaved.
The first letter arrived on May 12, 1521. Posted by Spalatin from Worms, it described the harsh imperial edict being drafted. Chilled, Luther at once sent a note to Melanchthon, ruing that his enemies would “now search the whole world for my little books.” Luther, though, had a more immediate source of distress. “The Lord has struck me in the rear end with terrible pain,” he complained to Melanchthon; “my excrement is so hard that I have to strain with such force to expel it that I sweat, and the longer I wait, the harder it gets. Yesterday on the fourth day I was able to go once, and then I couldn’t sleep all night, and still I have no relief.” To his friend Nikolaus von Amsdorf, Luther in his agony groaned in German, “Mein arss ist vos worden”—“My ass is sore.” Brought on by his unvarying diet and lack of exercise, this constipation would torment him for months. (The translation of these passages in the collected English edition of Luther’s works is almost comically bowdlerized, with Luther’s frank descriptions replaced by references to “elimination” and “painful constipation.”)
In that letter to Melanchthon, Luther gave his location as “in the land of the birds.” Other letters were signed “from the wilderness,” “from the mountain,” “where I am,” “Patmos” (the parched isle where according to tradition the apostle John wrote the book of Revelation), and “in the land of the birds that sing sweetly in the branches and praise God with all their power night and day”—a lyrical description of his sense of exile. An added hardship was his lack of books. “I am sitting here all day, drunk with leisure,” he wrote to Spalatin on May 14. “I am reading the Bible in Greek and Hebrew.” He urged Spalatin to send him the manuscripts he had been working on before leaving for Worms, including his commentary on the Psalter, his Postils (a book of homilies), and his exposition of the Magnificat. He planned to write a sermon on confession as well.
Eager for news about Wittenberg, Luther peppered Melanchthon with questions about what was going on there. He also sought to reassure his fretful disciple, who had written of his anxiety over Luther’s absence: “I cannot believe what you write, that you are going astray without a shepherd. This would be the saddest and bitterest of news.” Even if he were to perish, the gospel would not suffer, for Melanchthon was already surpassing him, as the prophet Elisha had replaced Elijah (as recorded in 2 Kings). News of the outside world was hard to come by, “since I am a hermit, an anchorite, and truly a monk, though neither shaved nor cowled. You would see a knight and hardly recognize me.” His life in seclusion meant nothing, but he admitted that he “would rather burn among glowing coals than rot here alone half alive.” As far as he was concerned, “all is well, except that the troubles of my soul have not yet ceased, and the former weakness of the spirit and faith persists.”
As that last remark suggests, Luther’s Anfechtungen had returned. Sequestered in this wind-battered, bat-ridden redoubt; hunted by emperor and pope; and cut off from his lively circle of friends in Wittenberg, he was once again experiencing the bouts of doubt and worthlessness that had so often beset him during his long years of torment in the monastery. Forced inward, Luther brooded obsessively on the defiant course he had taken and the disorder it had caused. How was it that he, one lone man, had dared come forward to declare the pope the Antichrist, the bishops apostates, and the universities brothels? Was he alone wise? What if he was mistaken and had led so many into such error that they would be eternally damned?
As he so often did in times of crisis, Luther sought solace in the Psalms. With their cries of anguish and desolation, these ancient hymns offered rea
ssurance that he was not alone. To help pass the time, he began writing expositions on some of those with special resonance, among them Psalm 36 (37 in modern editions). “For evildoers,” it stated, “shall be cut off: but they that wait upon the Lord, they shall inherit the land” and “delight in abundance of peace.” Dedicating his commentary to “the poor little flock of Christ in Wittenberg,” Luther wrote that the psalm “almost precisely fits our needs,” for in “an especially loving and motherly way it quiets the rising anger against the slanderers and the arrogant.”
Writing helped Luther ward off his loneliness, and during his stay he would produce a large trove of tracts, homilies, polemics, and expositions. His letters from the Wartburg offer an intimate look at both his intellectual development and the physical and emotional trials he faced during his roughly three hundred days there. (Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a great admirer of Luther’s letters, singled out the Wartburg letters for praise.)
Luther’s Wartburg sojourn would in fact prove a blessing of sorts, offering a break from the crushing demands and nagging distractions of Wittenberg. For long uninterrupted stretches he could explore the truths he had drawn from Scripture and think through their implications for Christian doctrine and devotion. With his decisive break from the Church at Worms, rebellion now had to give way to reform—to redefining the sacraments and the liturgy, the cloister and the priesthood, schools and parishes. In his writings at the Wartburg, Luther would begin the process of creating a new church.
Fatal Discord Page 58
