Fatal Discord

by Michael Massing

  While spreading to the east, Erasmianism was also traveling westward. Erasmus had long had a loyal following among the educated elite of Spain. At the University of Alcalá, where the Complutensian Bible had been produced, he was widely admired for his contribution to scriptural studies, and the court of Charles V included many Burgundians who considered themselves Erasmians, among them Mercurino Gattinara, the powerful chancellor, and Guy Morillon, the imperial secretary. Even Alonso Manrique de Lara, the archbishop of Seville who in September 1523 was named Spain’s inquisitor-general, was an admirer.

  Then, in 1526, the Enchiridion was translated into Spanish, and all of Spain was smitten. Juan Maldonado, a priest in Burgos, reported to Erasmus that not only were Latin-speakers “falling in love with your brilliant books” but also “the ordinary masses” were “clamoring to hear about you and want to become acquainted with your ideas.” Even “weak and ignorant women burn with desire to find out about the teachings of this Erasmus whose fame is blazoned abroad throughout the learned world.” To satisfy them, “a bevy of scholars are busy translating your works into our language.” Of the Enchiridion, he added, “the printers cannot meet the demand, although they have run off thousands of copies.” Overall, the excitement stirred by the translation of this primer of piety (as well as of some of the Colloquies) would help make Spain Europe’s most vibrant center of Erasmian humanism—at least for the time being.

  In Basel, meanwhile, the furor set off by Karlstadt’s tracts on the Eucharist was spreading. In September 1525, Oecolampadius issued a commentary on “This is my body” in which he emphatically denied that any physical change takes place in the communal bread and wine. In Zurich, Zwingli published two tracts that similarly rejected the doctrine of transubstantiation, emphasizing instead the spiritual aspects of Communion. Bucer, Bugenhagen, Pirckheimer, and half a dozen others all weighed in as well. The sacramentarian “heresy,” Erasmus observed, had “caught on everywhere with the speed of fire running towards naphtha.”

  The matter held a special risk for him. Both Zwingli and Oecolampadius, in proposing a spiritual interpretation of the Eucharist, claimed to have drawn on Erasmus’s own writings and his embrace of the spirit over the flesh. Erasmus himself admitted that Oecolampadius’s book was “so carefully written and so buttressed with argument and supporting evidence that even the elect could be led astray.” But transubstantiation was a core Catholic belief, and Erasmus emphatically rejected any questioning of it. When he heard that Conradus Pellicanus, a well-known Basel Hebraist and longtime admirer who was now close to Oecolampadius, was spreading rumors that Erasmus had privately expressed skepticism about the doctrine, Erasmus angrily admonished him: “You can imagine what an uproar there would be if I were rash enough to declare there is nothing in the Eucharist except bread and wine.” Erasmus made it unequivocally clear where his allegiance lay: “When I find a better church than the one I belong to, I shall stop calling this one ‘Catholic.’ But I have not found such a church.” Amid the growing sectarian fury, Erasmus was increasingly ready to defer to Rome’s authority.

  In early February 1526, he finally saw a copy of The Bondage of the Will. He was shocked by its virulence. “Who can believe that the spirit of Christ dwells in a heart from which flow words of such arrogance, bitterness, savagery, malice, and abuse?” he complained to Duke John of Saxony. Erasmus was especially unsettled by Luther’s dismissal of him as a pig from Epicurus’s sty. Rather than treat him as a fellow Christian who sincerely disagreed with him on several theological points, Luther had essentially called him an atheist—a charge even graver than that of heretic.

  At the time, Erasmus was working on a book about matrimony at the request of Catherine of Aragon, but he immediately put it aside so that he could respond to Luther. He wanted to have his reply ready for the spring fair in Frankfurt, and this left him no more than ten or twelve days in which to complete it. He decided to leave the discussion of scriptural passages for a follow-up volume and instead concentrate on Luther’s discussion of his methods and beliefs. He called his work Hyperaspistes—an obscure term from the Septuagint for a warrior’s shield against an enemy’s attack. No longer feeling the need to exercise restraint, Erasmus decided at last to say what he really thought about the man who had so upended his life.

  “How much there is in your book that is completely off target, how much that is superfluous, how many commonplaces dwelled on at length, how many insults, how much that is manifestly inane, how many ruses, how many sly digs, how much that is shamelessly twisted and distorted, and how many tragical conclusions drawn from the distortions, and how much undeserved vociferation inspired by the conclusions!”—all, he wrote, in response to his own moderate discussion. Many monarchs and princes of the Church had begged him to use all his eloquence “to thunder and fulminate” against Luther, but he had long resisted, worried that if he had complied, he would have unwittingly injured a cause that had at first enjoyed near-universal support. In his own work on free will, he had deliberately used a temperate style so as to deny Luther any pretext for offering outrageous insults. Yet Luther in his response had directed at him more “enmity and bitterness” than he had at anyone else.

  Erasmus fastened on Luther’s claim that Scripture is nowhere obscure. If that were so, why was there so much disagreement among his own evangelical brothers? Karlstadt had raged against Luther and Luther against Karlstadt, while Zwingli and Oecolampadius had opposed Luther’s opinion in multiple volumes. Even in that “tiny little town” of Wittenberg, he wrote, not everyone seemed to agree. Every day new dogmas appeared among the reformers, and every day new quarrels arose over them, yet Luther bristled if anyone dared disagree with him. As for the supposedly simple story of the Gospels, talented people had for centuries sweated to harmonize the many inconsistencies among them. Erasmus expressed special exasperation with Luther’s passing off his own interpretation of the Bible as God’s Word: “And so, away with this ‘word of God, word of God.’ I am not waging war against the word of God but against your assertion.”

  While Luther derided the Scholastics, Erasmus observed, he proposed arguments and distinctions no less sophistical and outlandish than theirs. Erasmus offered example after example of the inconsistencies, contradictions, and absurdities that he felt riddled Luther’s texts and which for years had so maddened him. At the end, he issued an anguished cry at the destruction that he felt the “seditious wantonness” of Luther’s pen had wrought:

  The people are stirred up against bishops and princes; magistrates are hard pressed to put down mobs eager to revolt; cities which once were joined by very close ties now quarrel among themselves with fierce hatred; now you can hardly find any man you can safely trust; all freedom has been taken away.

  The slavery that Luther had set out to overthrow “has been redoubled; the yoke is heavier; the chains are not shaken off but tightened”—a reference to the Peasants’ War. “Liberal studies, together with languages and good writing, are everywhere disregarded because you have loaded them down with ill will.” The outstanding monuments of the ancients “are rejected, and in their place the world is filled with quarrelsome and defamatory books which infect the reader with poison and disease.”

  Luther had drawn countless people away from their bishops, “and now they wander around like scattered sheep, having no shepherd, especially when they see that your church is shaken by so many quarrels and thrown into tumult by internal warfare.” Reaffirming his own enduring faith in Christ, Erasmus expressed his wish that the Lord would “renew a good spirit” in Luther so as to help restore harmony to the Christian world and so that the two of them might “pray with one voice to him whose teachings we now assert with discordant voices.”

  After nearly two weeks of feverish writing, Erasmus had eighty thousand words. To get them ready for the spring fair, Froben devoted five or six presses to them. When completed, the volumes were at once sent off to Frankfurt, 240 miles away. At the fair, customers who bought
The Bondage of the Will could now also pick up the Hyperaspistes and read two of Europe’s top thinkers squaring off on the most pressing issues of the day.

  In the early spring of 1525, Erasmus received a letter from Luther. It has not survived, but it is clear from Erasmus’s response that Luther was even more condescending than he had been in the Bondage, taking pity on Erasmus as an unbelieving soul who should be grateful that he had not written against him even more harshly.

  “So you restrained your pen!” Erasmus fumed. What, he asked, “is the point of all those scurrilous insults and the false charges that I am an atheist, an Epicurean, a skeptic in matters belonging to the Christian faith, a blasphemer, and whatever else comes into your head—to say nothing of the many other accusations you claim to pass over in silence?” Had he made his case with the usual intensity but without the raging insults, he would have stirred fewer people against him. “What distresses me, as it distresses all decent people, is the fact that because of your arrogant, insolent, and turbulent personality you cause a fatal dissension that unsettles the whole world, you expose good men and lovers of the humanities to the fury of the Pharisees, and you arm wicked and rebellious men for revolution.” The calamity and universal confusion afflicting the world “we owe to no one but you with your headstrong nature.”

  This would be the last letter between the two men. The hatred between them now flared too brightly to allow for any further exchanges.

  39

  Invasion by Scripture

  Erasmus’s broadside landed in Wittenberg with the intended impact. “Have you ever read anything more bitterly written than Erasmus’ Hyperaspistes?” Melanchthon wrote to Joachim Camerarius on April 11, 1526. “He is certainly a viper.” (Melanchthon used the term aspis, a play on Erasmus’s title.) Though he had expected a stern reply to Luther’s attack on The Freedom of the Will, he observed, he was surprised at its vulgarity. And he was sure Luther would respond in kind. While he had hoped that Luther over time “would grow used to these things and be somewhat milder” when confronted with them, he was instead “becoming more and more vehement.”

  Luther was in fact furious. “That enraged viper, Erasmus of Rotterdam, is again writing against me,” he reported to Spalatin. “How much eloquence this vainglorious beast uses up this time in trying to knock Luther down!” In another letter, he called Erasmus “an instrument of Satan” who did not properly appreciate the moderation of his own book against him.

  The dismay that Luther and Melanchthon felt over the Hyperaspistes suggests the air of unreality that had settled over Wittenberg. They were somehow unable to grasp how abusive Luther’s tract had been. Such obliviousness, in turn, reflected their own growing sense of beleaguerment. In July 1525, several princes, led by Duke George, met in the town of Dessau to discuss forming a league to wipe out the “cursed Lutheran sect.” In response, several pro-Lutheran princes met to discuss organizing a defensive alliance, and soon afterward work began on new fortifications in Wittenberg “so that it may be impregnable,” as Luther put it.

  Luther’s growing isolation helps explain an episode that would prove among the most embarrassing of his career. In the spring of 1525, King Christian II of Denmark informed the Saxon court that Henry VIII was becoming more favorably inclined toward the evangelical cause, and he suggested that Luther send the king a conciliatory note. Spalatin reported this to Luther and urged him to follow through. Luther, though skeptical, agreed. In his letter to the king, dated September 1, 1525, he apologized for his earlier harsh response to the booklet on the seven sacraments and said that he had learned that the work had actually been written not by Henry but by “crafty men” who had abused his name, foremost among them that “pest of your kingdom,” the cardinal of York (Wolsey).

  He went on: “I cast myself with the utmost possible humility at your Majesty’s feet, and pray and beseech you, by the love and cross and glory of Christ, to deign leave off your anger and forgive me for what I have done to injure your Majesty, as Christ commands us in His prayer to forgive each other.” If the king wished him to recant publicly, he had only to say so and he would immediately oblige. In the meantime, he should not let his royal ears be filled “with the pestilent songs of those sirens who do nothing but call Luther a heretic,” for what harm could there be in his teaching that salvation comes through faith in Christ alone? With so many princes and wise men in Germany embracing the new gospel, Luther expressed his hope that Henry would soon join them.

  The abject tone of Luther’s letter reflected his craving for support in the aftermath of the revolt by the peasants, the war over the Eucharist, and his break with Erasmus. Unfortunately, the information about Henry turned out to be false: the king despised him as much as ever. And Luther’s assertion that Henry had not actually written his book further inflamed him. In the summer of 1526, the king—still relishing his status as a defender of the faith—prepared a mocking response in Latin in which he detailed Luther’s many offenses, including undermining the Mass, denying free will, inciting the peasants, and marrying a nun.

  Henry sent a copy to Duke George, who quickly arranged for a German translation. Its title—Luther’s Offer to Recant in a Letter to the King of England—angered Luther even more than the document itself, and he informed Spalatin that he would answer the king, who, he wrote, was “merely a mask for Erasmus.” In Against the Title of the English King’s Slanderous Writing, Luther wrote that he had tried to keep the peace with both Henry and Erasmus, “but I am a sheep and must remain a sheep to think that I can pacify such men.”

  At the same time that Henry and Luther were trading blows, however, the way was being prepared for one of history’s most astonishing about-faces: Henry’s break with the Catholic Church. In just a few years, this faithful follower of Rome would become one of its fiercest detractors. The cause (as every student of history knows) was Henry’s infatuation with Anne Boleyn, which bloomed in the early months of 1526. Unlike her sister Mary, with whom Henry had had an affair, Anne refused to become his mistress. This, however, only fanned his desire, and Henry began thinking of ending his marriage to Catherine and making Anne his queen.

  For the moment, he kept his intentions secret. Not until the spring of 1527 would Henry ask Wolsey to begin secret proceedings to annul his marriage, and not until June of that year would he inform Catherine of his plans. Her refusal to go along and his insistence on proceeding would precipitate a profound political and religious crisis, leading to a showdown with the pope, the disestablishment of the Catholic Church in England, and the start of the English Reformation.

  That reformation would take a course very different from the one unfolding on the Continent. It would follow a more flexible, less dogmatic (though very violent) “third way” between the two great warring faiths. It would, to a degree, reflect the ideas of Erasmus. The Christian humanist ideals that Erasmus had been disseminating since his first visit to England in 1499 would help shape many aspects of Tudor religious and political policies.

  Erasmus’s influence in England had spread through a variety of channels: the curriculum he had developed for John Colet and St. Paul’s School; his personal ties and correspondence with leading clergymen and scholars in England, through which he had tirelessly pressed his reform ideas; and, of course, his writings. The log of an Oxford bookseller for the first ten months of 1520 shows that, of the 2,114 books he sold, 175 were by Erasmus, including 15 copies of the Enchiridion, 17 of De Copia, and 48 of the Colloquies. The English elite adorned their letters with Erasmus’s adages; wrote Latin according to his style manuals; read the New Testament with his annotations at their side; heeded the admonitions in the Enchiridion to nurture the inner spirit; took note of his denunciations of war and despotism; studied his explanations of Jesus’s parables in the paraphrases; laughed at his gibes against monasticism; and shared in his disdain for pious superstition. The 1526 edition of the Colloquies included “A Pilgrimage for Religion’s Sake,” which drew on visits that Er
asmus had made years earlier to two of England’s most famous shrines—Our Lady of Walsingham (which featured a vial of the Virgin’s milk) and the crypt of Thomas à Becket at Canterbury (a collection of bones, jewels, and gilt artifacts). In Erasmus’s account, the shrines were aimed more at gulling pilgrims than promoting faith. In the 1530s, both would be destroyed as part of Henry’s headlong assault on monasteries, shrines, and relics.

  In mounting that assault, of course, Henry did not need Erasmus’s encouragement, and he carried out his policies with a brutality that was decidedly un-Erasmian. But Erasmus’s writings played a key part in discrediting the old order in England and fostering a preference for doctrinal flexibility over dogmatic assertion. Erasmus’s influence would be most evident during the reign of Henry’s daughter Elizabeth I (1558 to 1603). At a time of bloody competition between Catholics and Protestants, Elizabeth would pursue a flexible course that came to be known as the via media (“middle way”), seeking to avoid both the excessive ceremonialism of Catholicism and the creedal certitudes of Protestantism. On such key matters as original sin, the Trinity, and the Eucharist, Elizabeth would support a deliberate ambiguity similar to that advocated by Erasmus, and her policies showed a pragmatic centrism that seemed to draw on his spirit (though, again, they were carried out with a ruthlessness that would no doubt have appalled him). Overall, England would become the sole European showcase of Erasmus’s reform ideas.

  Remarkably, at the very moment that Henry was beginning to consider dissolving his marriage to Catherine, Erasmus was completing the treatise on matrimony that she had requested. The Institutio Christiani Matrimonii (“Institution of Christian Matrimony”) would add to the large and influential body of Erasmus’s work on this subject. As always, he worked on two fronts, promoting the superiority of marriage over celibacy while also arguing for a way out of failing unions. “Death,” he wrote, “may be a lighter affliction than an unhappy marriage, where the living suffer the torments of hell and utter the wails of the damned on earth.” For this state of affairs, he largely blamed the Church. The many impediments to marriage stipulated in canon law allowed clergymen to meddle endlessly in conjugal matters, leading to great heartache. “If one looks at social life today, if one considers the many thousands throughout Christendom who are enmeshed in the toils of marriage,” then one could only wish that “an indulgent Mother Church, always attentive to the edification and not the destruction of her children,” would allow some relaxation, much as a learned physician varies his prescription to suit the age and condition of his patient.