Fatal Discord

by Michael Massing

  Adding to Luther’s animus toward the Dutch scholar was the appearance that summer of a German edition of the Assertio Septem Sacramentorum, Henry VIII’s attack on The Babylonian Captivity. Luther knew of Erasmus’s close ties to Henry and was convinced the two were working together against him. Frederick urged Luther to ignore Henry’s work, and, given the king’s stature as Western Europe’s third most powerful sovereign (after Charles and Francis), that would have seemed wise. But Henry’s air of royal entitlement irritated Luther, and after the appearance of a German translation by the goat Emser, he worried that the book might persuade some unsuspecting souls of the legitimacy of the sacraments. He thus decided to prepare a rebuttal, and in it he would repay Henry’s invective with an even stronger dose of his own.

  “Since with malice aforethought this damnable and rotten worm has lied against my king in heaven,” Luther wrote, “it is right for me to bespatter this English monarch with his own filth and trample his blasphemous crown under feet.” For three years these “mad giants” had tilted against him, yet they had still not managed to grasp what the fight was all about. Over and over he had tried to make clear the superiority of Scripture over man-made doctrines, but whenever he declared “Gospel! Gospel! Gospel!” they could only respond, “Fathers! Fathers! Custom! Custom! Decretals! Decretals!”

  Seething, Luther asserted his right as a God-fearing Christian to interpret the Bible for himself: “Here I stand, here I sit, here I glory, here I triumph, here I contemn Papists, Thomists, Henricians, sophists,” and all others “led astray by the saying of holy men or customs.”

  The word of God is above all things. The divine majesty so weighs with me that I care nothing if a thousand Augustines, a thousand Cyprians, a thousand Henrician churches were against me. God cannot err and deceive; Augustine and Cyprian, like all the elect, both could err and have erred.

  In a further jab, Luther speculated that the king’s book had been written not by Henry but by Edward Lee or “one of those sniveling, driveling sophists bred by the Thomist swine.” Whichever “miserable scribbler” did write it had “demonstrated with poisonous words how well he can manage to soil a lot of paper, a truly loyal deed!” Two months after counseling moderation in his Invocavit sermons, Luther was again hurling thunderbolts.

  Appearing in German on August 1, 1522, Against Henry, King of the English set off a furor exceeded only by that of The Babylonian Captivity. In an era of unbounded reverence for monarchs as divinely appointed, people were astounded to see one handled so roughly by a plebeian. Duke George sent a copy to the imperial government in Nuremberg along with a request that Luther be tried for rebellion against royal authority. Luther was unperturbed. Seeking to justify his harsh language, he cited (as was his wont) the examples of Christ, Peter, and Paul, who had called the Jews vipers, murderers, dogs, and children of the Devil. He had written his own books “without any severity, in a friendly and gentle tone,” only to face slanders and lies in return. (One wonders which of his books he considered gentle.) Despite the demands that he restrain his language, Luther stated, “I will not and ought not to stop it. My work is not that of one who can take a middle course, and yield this or give up that, as I have done hitherto, fool that I was.”

  Henry himself was irate over Luther’s attack. Ever since being designated a defender of the faith by the pope, he had proudly flaunted that title, and he was not about to let Luther get away with tarnishing it. When a stern protest to Frederick failed to bring redress, Henry turned to his own court. There, planning began for a campaign to avenge the king’s honor—a project that would draw in Bishop John Fisher, Thomas More, and, eventually, Erasmus.

  As the days of summer dwindled and the Leipzig fair drew near, Luther raced to complete his translation of the New Testament. At Melchior Lotther’s shop, three presses were thrown into the fray. For the book of Revelation, Lucas Cranach’s workshop prepared twenty-one full-page illustrations bristling with apocalyptic fury. In one, the menacing beast mentioned in Revelation 13 was given a crown that unmistakably resembled the papal tiara. To further clarify the meaning of the text, Luther prepared a series of marginal notes offering linguistic explanations, barbs directed at papists, and theological glosses stressing the supreme importance of faith.

  Luther also wrote prefaces for several books of the New Testament, plus one introducing the volume as a whole, in which he grandly described its purpose: “To free the ordinary man from his false though familiar notions, to lead him into the straight road, and to give him some instruction.” There was but one gospel, Luther declared—that of the eternal kingdom of Christ, who by his own death and resurrection conquered sin, death, and hell on behalf of all who have faith in him. He warned against making “Christ into a Moses” and the gospel “into a book of law or doctrine.” The gospel demands of us no works to make us holy. On the contrary, it condemns works and demands only faith in Christ. If a Christian has faith, though, all his efforts “are directed towards the benefit of his neighbor.” If good works and love “do not blossom forth, it is not genuine faith.”

  To reinforce this point, Luther ranked the books of the New Testament by their importance. The “best and noblest” were those describing not the works and miracles of Christ but faith in Christ, who conquers death and gives life. Of the four Gospels, Luther dismissed Matthew, Mark, and Luke as being primarily about the former; John, being mainly about the latter, was “far superior to the other three, and much to be preferred.” Luther similarly endorsed the first Epistle of John, the Epistles of Paul (especially Romans, Galatians, and Ephesians), and the first Epistle of Peter, which together teach “everything you need to know for your salvation.” By contrast, the Epistle of James, with its statement that faith without works is dead, “contains nothing evangelical” and so is “an epistle full of straw.”

  These were audacious statements. In assembling the scriptural canon, the early Fathers had sought to weave together the two main strands of the Christian tradition: Jesus the teacher of virtue and Christ the agent of redemption; the Sermon on the Mount and the cross on Calvary; the value of works and the importance of faith. But Luther in his introduction was insisting that only one of those strands truly mattered—that of the crucified Christ, who, rising from the dead, offered the promise of everlasting peace to all who have faith in him. The real-life Jesus was secondary. In so arguing, Luther was in effect trying to redefine the New Testament canon.

  Erasmus, of course, had his own scriptural preferences, esteeming in particular those books that featured Jesus the wise teacher and moral exemplar. In his annotations, he sought to highlight the presence of the human Jesus over the divine Christ. Nowhere, however, did he offer a ranking of books or dismiss those he disagreed with, as Luther did.

  As the final pages of the New Testament were being printed, Luther prepared a preface to the Epistle to the Romans. Given the central place this book occupied in his theology, it was fitting that he would leave this task for last. Romans is “the most important document in the New Testament, the gospel in its purest expression,” he wrote. A Christian should seek not only to learn it by heart “but also to meditate on it day by day. It is the soul’s daily bread and can never be read too often, or studied too much.” More than anything else he wrote, Luther’s preface to Romans could be considered the Gospel according to Martin, and for centuries it would be an effective recruiting tool.

  Around September 25, 1522, after five months of editing, revising, polishing, and printing, the translation was done. Its cover bore the simple inscription Das Newe Testament Deutzsch. The sensitivity of the project is indicated by the fact that Luther’s name nowhere appeared. Nor did the year. Only the place of publication, Wittenberg, was given. A folio of 222 leaves, the book was very bulky. It was also expensive, selling for about one guilder—the equivalent of two months’ salary for a schoolmaster or the price of a calf. The price would have been considerably higher had Luther demanded a fee, but, as usual, he requested no
compensation of any kind.

  Anticipating strong sales, Lotther printed some three thousand copies. Many were carried by wagon to Frankfurt; others were transported to surrounding communities. Within weeks, all copies of the September Testament (as it was called, after its month of publication) were gone and a new edition was planned. Pleased with the opportunity to correct the errors in the first edition, Luther plunted into the revision. Even while thus engaged, he began translating the Old Testament, and by early November 1522 he was already up to Leviticus.

  The following month, the December Testament (as the revised edition was called) was in the bookstores, and it, too, quickly sold out. More editions were planned, and pirated versions soon began appearing. Since the invention of the printing press seven decades earlier, no other German text had sold in such numbers. In its eloquence and majesty, Luther’s translation won favor with scholars and theologians; in its earthiness and euphony, it appealed to millers and blacksmiths. Even the unlettered would feel its pull as they heard it read in churches, taverns, and town squares. Exercising such broad appeal, Luther’s translation helped forge a common basis of communication and identity across regional and class lines. That the text was the Holy Scriptures gave Luther’s words the appearance of divine sanction, further searing them into the German mind.

  Luther “created the German language,” Heine would later observe. Goethe called his Bible a mirror of the world and said that through it the Germans first became a people. According to Herder, it was Luther’s Bible, along with his hymns, that “awoke and liberated the German language, a sleeping giant.” Nietzsche, in Beyond Good and Evil, called it the “best German book.” Among Germans, Luther alone “knew what a syllable weighs, or a word, and how a sentence strikes, leaps, plunges, runs, runs out; he alone had a conscience in his ears.” Compared with this “masterpiece of German prose,” Nietzsche added, almost everything else was “mere ‘literature.’” Just as the King James Version would help create a national culture for the English people, so would Luther’s Bible help do for the Germans.

  Even Johannes Cochlaeus, an ardent Catholic polemicist and a zealous critic of Luther, had to acknowledge the popularity of his New Testament. It spread so widely, he wrote, “that even tailors and shoemakers, yea, even women and ignorant persons who had accepted this new Lutheran gospel, and could read a little German, studied it with the greatest avidity as the fountain of all truth. Some committed it to memory and carried it about in their bosom.” Within months, such people “deemed themselves so learned that they were not ashamed to dispute about faith and the gospel,” not only with Catholic laymen “but even with priests and monks and doctors of divinity.”

  With his notion that all believers are priests, Luther had asserted the right of every Christian to read the Bible for himself. Now those priests could hear Christ and the apostles speak in their own tongue, and the conditions in ancient Palestine seemed to bear remarkable similarities to those in their own lives. Arriving in market towns and hamlets, read by farmers at their plows and weavers at their shuttles, the Luther Bible fed the discontent and unrest that were rising in the land.

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  The New Gospel Spreads

  Basel was among the cities in which Luther’s Bible was first reprinted. Not by Froben, however. Following Erasmus’s demands, he continued to steer clear of the reformer. Other houses, though, were eager to publish him. Leading the way was Adam Petri. Soon after the September Testament appeared in Wittenberg, Petri obtained a copy, and by the end of 1522 he had brought out an elegant edition. Within four months, he would print two more, putting nine thousand copies in circulation—a measure of the extraordinary demand for this work. Over the course of the next decade, Petri would print nearly a hundred works by Luther—part of a great flood of evangelical literature that would help make Basel (along with Strasbourg) a top distributor of Reformation books outside Wittenberg.

  Erasmus could feel the change. After the appearance of Luther’s New Testament, he would later complain, the whole book trade came to be dominated by him. The publishing history of the Enchiridion illustrates the shift. Some eight editions appeared in 1522 and another eleven in 1523; in 1524, however, only two came out, followed by three in 1525 and just one in 1526. The Erasmian appeal to reason, willpower, and moral improvement could not compete with Lutheran texts extolling faith in Christ and salvation by divine grace.

  Erasmus refused to adapt. A true son of the Renaissance, he continued to devote himself to the recovery of lost knowledge. In addition to preparing a sixth edition of the Adages and a fourth edition of his own New Testament, he was absorbed in editing Augustine. From Louvain, Juan Luis Vives sent the remaining chapters of his annotated City of God. Because of the great significance of this work, Erasmus and Froben decided to bring it out as a stand-alone volume. Unfortunately, Vives’s notes were almost as long as the mammoth text itself, and getting them ready for the printers required meticulous attention. Seeking a break from such labors, Erasmus in the afternoon would repair to Froben’s garden to read Chrysostom, Seneca, and other sources of ancient wisdom.

  The pressure on him to come out against Luther, meanwhile, continued to build. In the summer of 1522, he received a letter from Duke George of Saxony that expressed his delight in the drubbing that Henry VIII had given to Luther and that noted the widespread belief that Erasmus had had a hand in it. Whatever the actual extent of his involvement, the duke went on, Erasmus’s duty was now clear: “It would do much good in this regard if you, who brilliantly surpass all other men as a scholar and a fluent speaker and writer, were to descend into the arena.” “Arise, most learned Erasmus,” George added, “and for the love of Christ Jesus turn all the force of your great natural gifts to meet this challenge” and “silence this man” who had raged with such “profane presumption” against holy things.

  Erasmus in his reply politely declined the duke’s request, citing his poor health and the many pamphlets that had already been aimed, with little effect, at the heterodox friar. In addition, Erasmus remained wary of what Luther’s supporters would do to him if he did deploy his pen as the duke urged. In Basel itself, the evangelicals were growing in both number and assertiveness. Already maligned for the go-slow approach he had advocated in his tract on eating meat, Erasmus was under heightened suspicion for his growing differences with Zwingli. In the summer of 1522, Zwingli had sent Erasmus a warm letter inviting him to move to Zurich and become a citizen. Erasmus sent back a friendly demurral that would become famous as a catchphrase of internationalism: “I am most grateful to you and your city for your kindly thought. My own wish is to be a citizen of the world, to be a fellow-citizen to all men.” Erasmus closed on a note of cautious encouragement: “Fight on, dear Zwingli, not only with courage but with prudence, too.”

  Zwingli would fight on, but with more courage than prudence (at least from Erasmus’s standpoint). After the sausage-eating episode, he and his fellow reformers in Zurich grew increasingly impatient. In church, agitators regularly interrupted sermons, demanding that priests preach the true Word of God—a tactic Zwingli himself engaged in.

  Over the summer in Zurich, the issue of fasting gradually gave way to that of clerical celibacy. This vow was so routinely violated in Switzerland that the country had, more or less, a married clergy; priests, in fact, were allowed to keep concubines if they paid the bishop of Constance an annual fee. At the start of the year, Zwingli himself had gotten married, to a widow of about his own age, but had kept the marriage secret. Tiring of such hypocrisy, he and ten other priests sent the bishop a petition urging him (as the title put it) To Allow Priests to Marry, or at Least Wink at Their Marriages. Because clerical celibacy had no foundation in Scripture, they argued, it should be abolished. The staunchly conservative bishop refused.

  Charges of heresy flew. In his defense, Zwingli wrote Apologeticus Archeteles, his first full statement of belief. Ironic and indignant, it attacked Church traditions and doctrines as human inventions t
hat were by their nature fallible. Scripture, by contrast, was divine and inerrant. While the bishop was on the side of human law, the reformers were on the side of Christ.

  Zwingli immediately sent a copy of the tract to Erasmus, who was taken aback by its militant tone. In the little of the pamphlet that he had read, he wrote back, “there was much on which I wanted to see you put right.” If Zwingli published anything more in the future, Erasmus warned, “it is a serious task, and you must take it seriously. Do not forget the modesty and the prudence demanded by the gospel. Consult scholarly friends before you issue anything to the public. I fear that defense of yours may land you in great peril, and even do harm to the church.”

  As news of the widening rift between the two men spread, Basel’s evangelicals all sided with Zwingli. In its strife and dissension, the city was beginning to feel uncomfortably like Louvain, with scriptural absolutists replacing subtle doctors as the main source of discord.

  The climate would grow chillier still with the arrival of Johannes Oecolampadius. Seven years earlier, when Erasmus was preparing his first edition of the New Testament, Oecolampadius had worked closely with him, helping to check Greek and Hebrew quotations, and though he had made many mistakes, Erasmus had graciously overlooked them. At the time, Oecolampadius was a dedicated humanist, with an impressive command of the biblical tongues, a lively interest in Jerome, and a commitment to a program of moderate reform. His very name suggested his humanist leanings: Oecolampadius means “shining light” in Greek—a classicized version of his German surname, Husschin or Hussgen.