Fatal Discord

by Michael Massing

  With Wittenberg full of refugees, runaways, tourists, and spies, Luther was reluctant to meet strangers, and those wanting an audience had to find someone to intercede. Melanchthon agreed to do so for Dantiscus and, after supper, he took him to the Black Cloister, where Luther was gathered with some of the few remaining friars. With their hair grown out, they all looked like peasants, except for Luther, who had the air of a courtier. During almost four hours of conversation over wine and beer, Luther struck Dantiscus as intelligent, learned, and eloquent, but, aside from some biting and disdainful comments about the pope, the emperor, and several princes, “he revealed nothing new.” Like many others, Dantiscus was struck by Luther’s eyes, which, he wrote, “are piercing and twinkle almost uncannily, the way one sometimes sees in a person possessed.” His manner of speaking was passionate and “loaded with banter and taunts.” Overall, Luther seemed to be a “good guy,” though full of pride and arrogance and given to unbridled “scolding, contradicting, and mocking.” Melanchthon seemed far more companionable; of all of Germany’s learned men, the ambassador wrote, “this chap I like best.”

  At the time, Melanchthon was helping Luther with his translation of the Five Books of Moses. In translating the Old Testament, Luther would take even more liberties than he had with the New. Like all Christians, he had been taught to read the Hebrew Scriptures as foreshadowing the coming of Christ, and throughout his translation he gave Hebrew terms Christian shades of meaning. Luther translated “life” as “eternal life,” “Deliverer of Israel” as “the Savior,” and chesed as Gnade, “grace.” A term frequently appearing in the Hebrew Bible, chesed was taken by most Jewish exegetes to mean “loving-kindness,” “steadfast love,” or “faithful love,” which, when applied to God, connoted his covenanted love for the Jewish people. In translating it as “grace,” Luther was evoking the divine favor that God bestows on man through his faith in Christ.

  In his preface to his translation, Luther explained that to understand the Old Testament, the reader must at all times set Christ before him, “for he is the man to whom it all applies, every bit of it.” The Hebrew language had so declined “that even the Jews know little enough about it,” and Jewish scholars did not understand their own Scriptures. As a result, “we Christians are the ones who must do the work, for we have the understanding of Christ without which even the knowledge of the language is nothing.” In his Table Talk, Luther said that his aim was “to make Moses speak so that you would never know he was a Jew.” In fact, he made Moses and virtually everyone else in the Hebrew Bible speak like a Christian. Luther, in short, was Christianizing the Old Testament.

  Because of the length of the Old Testament, Luther decided to publish it in parts to keep it affordable. The printing of the Five Books of Moses, begun in December 1522, would continue until the middle of 1523. In the meantime, Luther began translating the historical books of the Old Testament, beginning with Joshua.

  That same spring, Luther produced his first work expressly about the Jews. It was prompted by a rumor circulating at the diet in Nuremberg that he had claimed that Mary was not a virgin but had conceived Christ with Joseph and then gone on to have more children. This was a serious charge, and to rebut it, Luther wrote That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew. In typical neo-Scholastic fashion, he laced the tract with biblical citations, many interpreted so arbitrarily as to seem completely divorced from the text. What was most striking about the volume, though, was Luther’s temperate attitude toward the Jews. He denounced the popes, bishops, sophists, and other “crude asses’ heads” who had treated them “as if they were dogs rather than human beings.” By forbidding the Jews to labor and do business with Christians, they had forced them into usury. Had he himself been a Jew and seen such “dolts and blockheads” teaching the Christian faith, he would rather “have become a hog than a Christian.” The Jews should be dealt with not according to papal law but according to the law of Christian love. “We must receive them cordially, and permit them to trade and work with us, that they may have occasion and opportunity to associate with us, hear our Christian teachings, and witness our Christian life.”

  Luther was not urging tolerance of the Jews, however. Rather, he was stating his belief that if they were treated kindly and instructed carefully from Scripture, “many of them will become genuine Christians.” He summarized his position in a letter to Bernard, formerly Rabbi Jacob Gipher, who had converted to Christianity and married Karlstadt’s maid and to whom Luther sent That Jesus Was Born a Jew as a present. The Jews, he wrote, had until then received “not a single spark of light or warmth” from the clergy or the universities, so it was no surprise that they had become alienated. Now that “the golden light of the Gospel is rising and shining, there is hope that many of the Jews will be converted in earnest and be drawn completely to Christ.”

  Luther would cling to his expectation of Jewish conversion until his final years, when—seeing it fail to materialize—he would turn on the Jews with redoubled fury.

  While absorbed in these weighty theological issues, Luther faced a practical challenge that would lead to a radical change in his personal life. Shortly before Easter 1523, he heard that a group of nuns at a convent in Nimbschen, near Grimma, fifty miles from Wittenberg, wanted to leave. Most of them were the daughters of impoverished nobles who had deposited them there after concluding that they were unlikely to find husbands. The convent had a policy of strict seclusion. Relatives who came to visit were allowed to speak only through latticed windows for a few minutes. Silence was the rule, friendships between nuns were forbidden, and even dogs were barred from the premises.

  Yet even here Luther’s ideas had penetrated, and twelve nuns, inspired by his denunciation of monastic vows, decided to leave. But their families, when contacted, refused to provide assistance. Helping a nun leave a convent was a serious offense, punishable by death, and Duke George, in whose territory the convent sat, kept vigilant watch.

  Hearing of their predicament, Luther sent a message to Leonhard Koppe, a member of the town council in nearby Torgau. Koppe had the contract for delivering supplies to the convent, including herring, which he usually transported in barrels in a covered wagon. Thus prodded, Koppe on Easter eve pulled up to the cloister with the wagon and hurriedly bundled the nuns into it. In a state of great anxiety, they headed north across Ducal Saxony, watching out for George’s agents. Only upon reaching Torgau, thirty miles away and safely inside Electoral Saxony, did they begin to calm down. Two days later, all the nuns save three (who were taken in by relatives) were in Wittenberg. “Nine fugitive nuns, a wretched crowd, have been brought me by honest citizens of Torgau,” Luther wrote to Spalatin on April 10. They were in “miserable condition,” having neither shoes nor clothes. Their prospects were equally dismal, for a nun who left a convent was considered disreputable, and, having spent most of their time in prayer, they did not even know how to keep house.

  Luther immediately took responsibility for them. With little to spare from his own meager salary and not wanting to burden the city or his order, he urged Spalatin to find some money from his rich courtiers to help support the women until their kinsmen or others could provide for them. Eventually, Luther managed to find places for all but three: two sisters, Ave and Margaret von Schönfeld, and Katharina von Bora.

  Katharina’s case would prove the most challenging. She had been born into a noble family of declining means in a village near Leipzig. When she was five, her mother died, and she was placed in a Benedictine convent to be educated. Five years later, she was transferred to the cloister at Nimbschen. Now twenty-four, Katharina was unworldly but strong-willed, outspoken, and competent. Later portraits by Cranach show her with a round face and high forehead, eyes set wide apart, and a tight mouth; they do not capture her high spirits. Fearing that she might become a permanent burden, Luther set out to find her a husband. “The monks and nuns who have left their cloisters steal many of my hours,” he complained to Johannes Oecolampadius in June 1523.<
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  Over the previous months, Luther had received several letters from Oecolampadius, but only now was he getting around to answering them. He had heard of the excitement Oecolampadius was causing in Basel and of the success he was having with a series of lectures on Isaiah. Luther had also heard of Erasmus’s displeasure with those lectures, and in his letter he advised Oecolampadius to ignore it. He belittled Erasmus’s judgment on spiritual matters and complained of the “pricks” that the humanist, without openly declaring himself a foe, had given him. Erasmus, Luther wrote, had accomplished what he had been called forth to do: “he has brought us from godless studies to a knowledge of the languages; perhaps he will die with Moses in the plains of Moab, for he does not go forward to the better studies—those that pertain to godliness.” He wished that Erasmus

  would stop commenting on the Holy Scriptures and writing his Paraphrases, for he is not equal to this task; he takes up the time of his readers to no purpose, and delays them in their study of the Scriptures. He has done enough in showing us the evil; to show us the good and to lead us into the promised land, he is, I see, unable.

  Luther was referring to Deuteronomy 32, where Moses, standing atop Mount Nebo on the plains of Moab, looks out over the land that God had promised Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and which he would not be allowed to enter. After Moses’s death, Joshua takes his place and leads the Israelites into Canaan—a role in which Luther clearly saw himself.

  Oecolampadius’s lectures on Isaiah had indeed caused a stir in Basel. Delivered around Easter 1523 to the theological faculty at the university, they drew up to four hundred people, including not just students and professors but also burghers, craftsmen, and laborers. Like all Christian interpreters of the Old Testament in this era, Oecolampadius read Isaiah as being wholly about Christ, but he used his knowledge of Hebrew and of the Septuagint to bring alive the prophet and his time and to describe the moral guidance Isaiah could offer to believing Christians; he also mixed in German with his Latin, making his presentations more accessible. His Sunday sermons at St. Martin’s church were attracting large crowds as well. Oecolampadius’s moral fervor seemed all the more inspiring for being delivered in a soft-spoken, nontheatrical manner. Soon other preachers were echoing him, and Basel became increasingly divided between a growing faction demanding far-reaching change and the town elders, who, consisting mostly of merchants and the senior clergy, wanted to keep the peace and maintain the status quo.

  Erasmus was startled by Oecolampadius’s growing ardor and popularity. What, he wondered, had happened to the retiring corrector and fact-checker he had known just a few years back? In Zurich, too, the reformers were becoming more insistent. In late 1522, Zwingli issued a bitter tirade against Rome, dismissing not only Pope Adrian’s proposals to the diet in Nuremberg but also all claims of papal authority. Although he did not attach his name to the work, Erasmus, on seeing it, could tell at once from whose pen it had sprung. “Another piece of nonsense, utter rubbish, has appeared about the pope,” he wrote to Zwingli. If “all of Luther’s party are like this, I wash my hands of the whole lot of them. I never saw anything more mad than this foolish stuff.”

  The Church’s own zeal in cracking down on its critics, meanwhile, was apparent in the brutal treatment of Sigismund Steinschneider, the surgeon at whose home in Basel the luncheon of roasted pig had taken place the previous Lent. In addition to this offense, Steinschneider had made some remarks about the sacraments and the Virgin Mary that were considered blasphemous. He had then made the mistake of traveling into territory near Freiburg that was under the control of Archduke Ferdinand (the brother of Emperor Charles V), a remorseless pursuer of heretics. Steinschneider was arrested and condemned to death. Before being dispatched, he was forced to undergo horrific tortures. First, his flesh was torn from his back by red-hot tongs. Then his four limbs together with his hips and shoulders were slowly and excruciatingly amputated. His throat was cut and his tongue pulled out through the incision. Finally, the central part of his body except for the heart was burned. By inflicting such harsh punishment on one man, Erasmus lamented, “it was thought large numbers could be cured.”

  In the face of such cruelty, he decided to issue a stern protest. In early 1523, he and Froben were preparing a new edition of the works of St. Hilary. This fourth-century bishop of Poitiers had helped lead the fight against the Arian heresy and its questioning of Christ’s divinity. Reading of the internal battles that tore the Church apart back then, Erasmus was struck by the parallels to his own day, and in his preface he sought to highlight the malignant effects of theological disputation. The essay would be an important text in the history of religious toleration.

  “Once,” he wrote, “faith was more a matter of a way of life than of a profession of articles.” Then came the wicked teachings of the heretics, and in response theologians had formulated more and more definitions, until finally faith came to reside more “in the written word than in the soul.” In fighting the Arians, orthodox churchmen devised all kinds of abstract propositions about the nature of God, the creation of the Son, and the relation of both to the Holy Spirit. What did it serve the Church to pronounce on such abstract and ultimately unknowable matters? As doctrines multiplied, sincerity faded; as controversy boiled over, charity grew cold. Hilary viciously attacked the Arians, yet among them there were probably many pious Christians.

  Christendom was now being similarly racked by sophistical conflict over obscure questions. “What arrogance, what contentions, what tumult, what discord in the world do we see gush forth from this kind of absurd learning!” Erasmus declared. Meanwhile, the really important things were neglected. “Unless I pardon my brother’s sins against me, God will not pardon my transgressions against him. Unless I have a pure heart, I shall not see God.” With all his energy, man must strive to purge his soul of malice, envy, avarice, and lust and replace them with charity, patience, kindness, and other fruits of the Spirit. The “sum and substance of our religion,” Erasmus offered, “is peace and concord.”

  As unobjectionable as that last sentiment might seem, it caused a tremendous furor. In 1526, the Sorbonne would censure it along with many other passages from the essay. The Lutherans were no less condemnatory. In that zealous era, the assertion that Christianity was at its core about peace and that godliness of conduct should count for more than purity of doctrine inflamed militants on both sides.

  With the chasm between those sides widening, Erasmus was coming under renewed pressure to declare himself. The main source was England. Henry VIII remained intent on striking back at Luther. More than personal honor was at stake. In increasing numbers, Luther’s books were invading the island and spreading his subversive doctrines. The hellish wolf had to be silenced. To carry out that task, the king turned to the one man in his kingdom who seemed endowed with the necessary eloquence, knowledge, and conviction: Thomas More.

  Now a close adviser to Henry, More was undergoing a dramatic change in outlook as a result of the growing turmoil on the Continent. In Utopia, he had made religious tolerance a key principle, with everyone on the island “free to practice what religion he liked, and to try and convert other people to his own faith”—provided that he did it “quietly and politely, by rational argument”; the penalty for “being too aggressive in religious controversy” was either exile or slavery. To More, the Lutherans seemed too aggressive. With Luther calling every Christian a priest and with weavers and miners interpreting the Bible for themselves, the social fabric seemed in danger of unraveling. Seeking an anchor, More found it in the Church. The free-spirited humanist who had translated Lucian with Erasmus and bantered about human folly was turning into a tenacious defender of the established order as embodied in the hierarchy, traditions, and customs of the eternal Church of Rome.

  Accepting Henry’s request to respond to Luther, More took aim at his doctrine of sola scriptura. Luther extolled the authority of the Bible, but without the Church to interpret it, More declared, it was a lifeles
s book full of contradictions and obscurities. All heretics from the time of Arius on were able to cite Scripture to justify their pernicious doctrines, and Luther was no exception. The Church was the embodiment of divine wisdom, the guardian of true doctrine, the hallowed arbiter of Holy Scripture. The Bible was the servant of the Church, not its master.

  Along with such solemn invocations of ecclesiastical sanctity, More served up large helpings of vulgarity and invective. Luther was a “mad friarlet and privy-minded rascal with his ragings and ravings, with his filth and dung, shitting and beshitted.” He was an ape, an arse, a drunkard, a liar, a cacodemon (“shit-devil”) who farted anathema and celebrated Mass super foricam (“on the toilet”). This “worthless heretical buffoon” should “swallow down his filth and lick up the dung with which he has so fondly defiled his tongue and pen.”

  Even in a century given to scatology, More’s Responsio ad Lutherum stood out for its foulness. More himself seems to have been embarrassed by it, for he brought it out under a pseudonym (William Ross). Even so, it clearly came from someone close to the king and so lost much of its bite. A shaft from Erasmus would penetrate much deeper. From his friends in England, Erasmus had heard that Henry had somehow gotten the idea that he had helped Luther prepare his attack on the king. This was doubly exasperating, since others suspected that Erasmus had helped Henry prepare his Assertio against Luther. At great expense, Erasmus sent a servant to England to deliver to the king, Thomas Wolsey, and other notables letters that emphatically denied any such involvement and reaffirmed his unbounded devotion.