Fatal Discord

by Michael Massing

  Thus anointed, Charles could now address the two obstacles standing in the way of his long-sought goal of world domination. One was the Turks. In 1529, Suleiman had followed up his occupation of Hungary by laying siege to Vienna. The city resisted, however, and the Ottomans had been forced to retreat. Their westward push nonetheless dramatized the threat they posed to Christian Europe. Backed by a huge army, Suleiman exercised more absolute power than any Western sovereign, and reports were circulating that he had vowed to force all of Europe to practice Islam. Those reports were highly exaggerated, but with Turkish troops having appeared before the ramparts of Vienna, Charles saw subduing Suleiman as his top priority. The great rivalry between the Hapsburgs and the Ottomans that would disrupt Europe until the early twentieth century had begun.

  To prevail, the emperor needed a united Christendom, and that meant reaching a settlement with the Protestants. In a remarkable turn, Charles, who for so long had regarded Luther and his followers as apostates deserving death, was now eager for an accord. With the arrival of spring, the emperor left Bologna for the journey across the Alps. He headed not for Augsburg, however, but for Innsbruck, to visit his brother Ferdinand. From there he proceeded in leisurely stages through southern Germany, finally reaching Augsburg on June 15, 1530. Charles’s entry into the city was an occasion for one of the most sumptuous pageants of the era—a swirling extravaganza of silk and damask, gold and purple, caparisoned horses and phalanxes of foot soldiers, joined by a parade of Germany’s most prominent archbishops, bishops, electors, dukes, and landgraves. Charles stayed with the Fuggers, on whose financial support he continued to rely.

  The following day, Charles and Ferdinand met with some of the leading delegates. Filing into the emperor’s chamber, the delegates were immediately struck by the change in his demeanor. The callow, boyish-looking prince they had seen nine years earlier now looked closer to fifty than thirty. He was already suffering from gout, brought on by his prodigious eating and drinking. Whereas earlier he had been hesitant and in need of constant advice from his counselors, he now projected the stately confidence of an absolute monarch, and his black Spanish garb made him seem grave and unapproachable. As the discussion got under way, Ferdinand demanded an end to all evangelical preaching in the city. This drew sharp protests from several Lutheran princes, one of whom declared that he would rather kneel down and be beheaded on the spot than give in to such a demand; taken aback, Charles eventually withdrew it.

  More generally, the emperor was far more open to hearing out the evangelicals than he had been at Worms. His inner circle included several moderates who had been strongly influenced by the Erasmian surge in Spain, among them the emperor’s Spanish secretary, Alfonso de Valdés, a frequent correspondent of Erasmus’s. Erasmus himself—unable to attend the diet because of a succession of serious ailments—sent a series of letters from Freiburg to Valdés as well as to Melanchthon and Lorenzo Campeggio, the papal nuncio, urging compromise and the granting of concessions to the Lutherans. As hard as it would be to tolerate such sects, Erasmus warned, war would be far worse. How France had been ravaged! How Italy had been stricken! Soon, it seemed, much of the world “will be bathed in blood.” Such appeals went unheeded, however. For all of the emperor’s new reasonableness, his commitment to Rome remained undiminished, and Campeggio, like Jerome Aleander before him, would work hard to prevent any accord with the Lutherans.

  Melanchthon, however, shared Erasmus’s preference for reconciliation over violence. In his twenty-one articles of faith, he sought to refute the charge that the reformers were heretics by downplaying their differences with Rome. In his article on justification through faith, for instance, he omitted the word “alone,” and he took special pains to dispel the impression that the Lutherans rejected good works, even while making clear that these had merit only as a by-product of faith and could not bring about grace or a remission of sins, for which only faith was efficacious. Melanchthon was more expansive in the seven articles describing Rome’s abuses and the steps the Protestants had taken to correct them. Allowing priests to marry, he argued, was necessary because of the infirmity of human nature; private Masses had to be eliminated because they had become instruments of profit. He steered clear of one key issue—papal authority.

  By June 15, 1530, the document was nearly done. Over the next few days, several Lutheran princes and theologians met to revise it, and Gregory Brück, a Saxon chancellor, contributed a preface expressing hope for a harmonic outcome. Five princes and two cities endorsed the text, and versions were prepared in both German and Latin.

  The Confessio Augustana—the Augsburg Confession—was to be presented to the Kaiser and the estates on the afternoon of June 24. The imperial secretaries had intentionally placed several items of business on the agenda so as to leave little time for the Confession, and by the time Brück was finally recognized, it was too late for the document to be read. The secretaries asked that a copy be submitted. The Protestants, however, were determined to have the statement read aloud, and the Saxon chancellor won the right for a hearing the next afternoon.

  That session was to be held not in the usual gathering place—the town hall—but at the episcopal palace, in the chapter room, which could accommodate no more than two hundred people. By three o’clock, when the proceedings began, the room was packed, and a crowd had excitedly gathered in the courtyard outside to listen through the windows. Brück, bearing a copy of the Confession in Latin, and his colleague Christian Beyer, with a German version, stepped to the center of the room while the Lutheran representatives rose to their feet. The emperor, whose German remained rudimentary and who no doubt wanted to deny the Protestants a full hearing, demanded that the Latin copy be read. But Elector John said that since they were on German soil, the document should be read in German, and Charles reluctantly agreed. Beyer read the Confession loudly and slowly so that those outside could hear it; he took two hours. Both texts were then presented to the imperial secretaries.

  In many ways, the reading of the Augsburg Confession was as significant as its contents. Nine years earlier, at Worms, Luther had been denied the right to explain his position. Now his doctrines had been distilled into a grand statement and publicly proclaimed before the Holy Roman Emperor and the German ruling class. With the reading of the Augsburg Confession, the Lutheran creed for the first time had received an official hearing.

  On the day after the submission of the Confession, Melanchthon sent a copy to Luther. By then, several letters from Augsburg had reached him, showing that his colleagues had in fact been trying to keep him informed. In one of his recurrent displays of petulance, however, he remained convinced that he was being ignored. Luther was further annoyed at Melanchthon’s complaints about being under intense pressure. Curt toward his junior colleague even in normal circumstances, Luther now pitilessly derided him: “Those great cares by which you say you are consumed I vehemently hate; they rule your heart not on account of the greatness of the cause but by reason of the greatness of your unbelief.” The obstacles faced by Jan Hus and others like him were much greater than anything Melanchthon had to endure. Luther had regularly prayed for Melanchthon but now felt that his worrywart ways had canceled out his prayers. Luther’s own scrutiny of Scripture had made him feel more certain than ever that their cause was just.

  Melanchthon’s concerns were not unfounded, however, for his handiwork came under immediate fire. Zwingli, unhappy with the document’s statement on the Lord’s Supper, submitted a fierce confession of his own, making clear his readiness to use force to defend it. Strasbourg and three other south German cities submitted a statement objecting to both the Zwinglians and the Lutherans. Most unhappy of all were the Catholics, who, intent on discrediting Melanchthon’s manifesto, appointed a group of theologians to prepare a rebuttal, with the irrepressible Eck in charge. Working at a prodigious clip, he quickly turned out a 351-page counterattack, which after a round of edits was sent to the emperor. Charles was unhappy with its har
sh tone. The Catholic delegates, too, found it unnecessarily bellicose, and it was sent back to the theologians for revision. By the start of August 1530, they had a more temperate document that acknowledged the existence of many possible points of agreement between the Catholics and the Lutherans and expressed the hope that a common platform could be reached. On August 3, in the same room in which the Augsburg Confession had been presented, the Confutatio Pontificia—the Papal Confutation—was read aloud to the estates.

  In mid-August, after much discussion, a committee was formed, with equal numbers of Catholics and Lutherans, to see if a compromise could be achieved. The negotiations dragged on without resolution, so a smaller group was appointed, including Eck and Melanchthon. The soft-spoken classicist—outnumbered, worn down, and craving an accord—agreed to a number of concessions, including the recognition of auricular confession, fasts, episcopal jurisdiction, and even (with some qualifications) papal authority. To him, these were secondary matters; for many Protestants, though, they were vital, and Melanchthon was denounced as a greater enemy of the faith than any Romanist. Appeals were made over his head to Luther, who characteristically opposed all compromise. “If we yield a single one of their conditions,” he wrote to Melanchthon on September 20, “be it that on the Canon or on private masses, we deny our whole doctrine and confirm theirs.” Saying that he “would not yield an inch to those proud men, seeing how they play upon our weakness,” Luther instructed him to “break off all transactions at once and return hither.”

  Melanchthon remained in Augsburg, however, and he set to work preparing a refutation of the Papal Confutation. With the negotiations deadlocked, however, and the delegates desperate to leave Augsburg after five months of being confined there, Charles on September 22, 1530, declared a recess. The recess document gave the Lutherans until April 15 of the following year to accept the articles that remained unsettled. Until then, all religious innovations were to cease. The implicit threat to the Lutherans was clear: either accept these terms or face war. The next day, after the document was read, the Lutherans immediately withdrew to consult; they then returned and protested. Brück offered to present the refutation that Melanchthon had drafted, but the emperor refused to receive it. Concluding that nothing more could be accomplished, Elector John left Augsburg on September 23.

  With that, the crack that had opened in the Church at Worms became permanent. In 1054, the Eastern Church had formally split from the Western; now the Western Church itself had irrevocably split. The Augsburg Confession—reworked by Melanchthon after his return to Wittenberg and published the following spring—would become the central creed of the Lutheran church (which it remains to this day). It would also influence the writing of many other Protestant confessions, including the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England and John Wesley’s Methodist Articles of Reform.

  On October 4, 1530, after nearly 170 days of confinement, Luther finally left Coburg. On his arrival back in Wittenberg, the town council showed its appreciation by giving him a small barrel of Rhine wine and a keg of Einbeck beer. Whatever relief he felt, though, was tempered by the escalating threats from the Catholics. In November, the rump of the diet, in its final statement, condemned all forms of Protestantism, demanded enforcement of the Edict of Worms, and called for the initiation of legal actions against all who had expropriated Church property.

  Seeking to rally the Protestants, Philip of Hesse invited a number of princes and representatives of cities to meet in the small town of Schmalkalden, on the southwestern slope of the Thuringian Forest. There, they formed the Schmalkaldic League, which would soon become the most powerful Protestant force in Europe. Dominated by princes, it would further solidify the hold of sovereigns over the reform movement.

  The Diet of Augsburg had been called to bridge the chasm in Christendom. Instead, it had widened it. Western Europe now had two great confessional blocs, each convinced that it embodied the will of God, and each prepared to use force to impose that will on the other.

  42

  Madness

  Freiburg turned out to be far more pleasant than Erasmus had expected. Scenically set on the Dreisem River at the edge of the Black Forest, it had a temperate climate, and his health quickly improved. His house, the White Lily, was the most handsome in town. Though Erasmus had several friends in Freiburg, it was well off the literary circuit, and there were far fewer visitors than in Basel. Dinner parties were more infrequent as well, and while Erasmus missed the sparkle of wine-flecked conversation, the quiet was conducive to his work. “I like this well-mannered city,” he wrote to Bonifacius Amerbach. “I hear no one speaking ill of one another.”

  Now in his early sixties, Erasmus kept up the work pace of a man half his age. Incapable as always of ignoring criticism, he drafted a series of polemical attacks, including a “Letter Against False Evangelicals” that assailed the pastors of Strasbourg for promoting discord and destroying everything good in the Church. Erasmus also continued his campaign to recover lost knowledge. Among his quarries was a Greek codex of Josephus’s Jewish History of the Sack (of Jerusalem). Hearing that it was in the possession of the bishop of Rieux in Brittany, Erasmus sent him a request to borrow it. Through a roundabout route, the manuscript had ended up in the hands of a proofreader working for a publisher in Lyon, who was instructed to forward it to Erasmus when a messenger became available. The proofreader was François Rabelais. Then completely unknown, the Franciscan friar turned scholar revered Erasmus, and, when a courier did materialize, he sent along with the codex a note full of humanist adulation. Just as pregnant women nourish and protect offspring they have never seen, so had Erasmus nourished him “with the most chaste breasts” of his divine learning. If he did not ascribe to Erasmus his “whole worth and being,” he would be “the most ungrateful of all men.” Erasmus’s influence would be apparent in Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel, with its jests at sophists, sayings lifted from the Adages, and send-ups of the abundant style.

  Even in sleepy Freiburg, Erasmus was able through his network of correspondents to stay abreast of the news around Europe. It was not good. As the great schism opened up in Christendom, a sort of religious lunacy had set in, with apostles and zealots of every stripe declaring theirs to be the only true creed and ready to slash and flay anybody who followed a different one. “There is peace nowhere, no road is safe,” Erasmus lamented; “people are suffering everywhere from the high cost of living, and from poverty, hunger, and plague; the whole world is torn apart by sects.” Soon, he predicted, “the long war of words and pamphlets” would be waged “with halberds and cannons.”

  After arriving in Freiburg, Erasmus learned the fate of Louis de Berquin, his French translator. In 1526, Berquin, after having been imprisoned a second time for his heretical activities, had been freed as a result of an appeal from Erasmus to Francis I. But Berquin had continued to issue provocative statements, and in 1528 he was subjected to another trial. In early April 1529, the verdict came down: Berquin’s books were to be burned, he was to abjure certain articles, his tongue was to be pierced with iron, and he was to remain in prison for the rest of his life. Shocked at the severity of the sentence, Berquin appealed to the king and pope for clemency. Indignant, the judges—intent on preventing any more such appeals—sentenced him to death. On April 17, Berquin was transported by cart to the Place de Grève (now the Place de l’Hôtel de Ville), the traditional site for executions in Paris. To prevent disturbances, hundreds of armed guards were stationed in the square. Berquin gave no sign of agitation as he was escorted to the stake and tied to it. In an act of mercy, he was first strangled, then burned.

  Erasmus was deeply shaken. Berquin, he wrote, was a pious and modest man, “completely free from any kind of pretense” and with “little sympathy for the teachings of Luther”; he had simply been led astray by the arguments of others. “It sets a strange precedent to send a man to the stake for a mistake in judgment.” To “condemn, quarter, crucify, burn, behead, these are
the actions of good judges as well as of pirates and tyrants.”

  No group could more attest to that than the Anabaptists. This radical sect was spreading with a rapidity that surprised and unsettled many. “I feel sorry for the Anabaptists,” Erasmus observed; “they could be helped if baptism were the only issue, but they introduce confusion into everything. They are possessed of a kind of madness; yet I am told that some members of this sect are not at all evil people.”

  The Anabaptists represented a sort of third way emerging in Europe in the aftermath of the Peasants’ War. With that effort at social transformation having so spectacularly failed, the Anabaptists sought to withdraw from society. Most were ordinary workingpeople—farmers, tailors, bakers, shoemakers—seeking to live in strict conformity with the Bible. Their pacifism, simple piety, and moral striving echoed Erasmus’s philosophy of Christ. Some historians, in fact, consider Erasmus their spiritual father. But their literal interpretation of the Bible, and their rigidity in seeking to apply it, were utterly foreign to Erasmus.

  Their true forebear was Karlstadt. In the same way that he had sought to create in Orlamünde a community living in strict adherence to the Word of God, so did the Anabaptists try to live biblically wherever they alighted. Because Jesus in the New Testament said not to swear, they refused to take oaths. Because he said not to kill, they rejected military service. Embracing the apostolic idea of sharing all things in common, they cut the locks to their homes and cellars; shunning costly fabrics, they wore coarse clothes and broad felt hats. Above all, they rejected infant baptism. This was mentioned nowhere in the Bible and so seemed to lack scriptural sanction. Moreover, since newborns could not declare their faith, it seemed wrong to initiate them into the Church through this rite. Baptism should be reserved for adults who were able to recognize and admit their sins and willingly repent. Hence the name Anabaptist (ana meaning “again” in Greek).