The conditions were severe. Reaching the Saale River at Halle, the party could not cross because of flooding and floating ice. Three days later, sixty Mansfeld horsemen arrived and succeeded in getting Luther across. He suffered a dizzy spell. The cause was probably a circulatory problem brought on by the cold, but in a letter to Katharina he speculated that the true source of the problem was the Jews living in the nearby village of Rissdorf. Once the matter of the mines was settled, he wrote, “I have to start expelling the Jews. Count Albrecht is hostile to them and has already outlawed them. But no one harms them as yet. If God grants it, I shall aid Count Albrecht from the pulpit, and outlaw them, too.”
The appearance in the distance of the slate-colored rock heaps signaled the approach of Eisleben, and on January 28 Luther and his party arrived. The negotiations proved difficult, involving many lawyers wrangling over the tangled affairs of the princes, and the days turned into weeks. During his stay, Luther gave four sermons at St. Andrew’s church, and at several points in them he lashed out at the Jews. At the time, about fifty of them were living in Eisleben, and Luther denounced them as blasphemers, leeches, and potential murderers. To his next-to-last sermon he appended An Admonition Against the Jews. Should the Jews convert and receive Christ, he declared, “then we will gladly regard them as our brothers,” but if they continued to refuse, “we should not tolerate it.” Every day he prayed to the Son of God; “to Him I must run and flee if the devil, sin, or other misfortune assails me.” For this reason, he could have “neither fellowship nor patience with the stubborn blasphemers and slanderers of this dear Savior.” Forty years after Luther’s entry into the monastery in search of certainty about his fate, he continued to experience doubt—the true wellspring of his hate.
While in Eisleben, he ate and drank with abandon, and his condition worsened. By mid-February, a settlement seemed within reach, with only a few technical points to be resolved. During his last sermon, Luther was so overcome by dizziness that he had to stop. On February 17, 1546, after the evening meal, he retired to his room and later complained of a sharp pain in his chest. Doctors were summoned and hot baths and a massage were administered to improve his circulation. Luther fell asleep but the pains returned, and in the early morning hours of February 18, in the city of his birth, he died.
On February 19, a funeral service was held at St. Andrew’s. The next morning, a message arrived from John Frederick requesting the return of the body to Wittenberg so that it could be buried there, and in the early afternoon a funeral procession left Eisleben. Just as a quarter century earlier townsmen and villagers had lined the road to show their support for Luther on his journey to Worms, so now did crowds of mourners appear to pay him their final respects, and bells tolled as the casket passed. On the morning of February 22, the party reached Wittenberg, passing through the Elster Gate near the university. Faculty members, city officials, and citizens joined the procession as it made its way down the long avenue leading to the Castle Church. Near the town square they were joined by the student body, led by Melanchthon, Jonas, and Bugenhagen, among others. Heading the march was a mounted knight, followed by sixty horsemen, the hearse, and, immediately behind it, a carriage bearing Katharina and her sons.
By the time the procession reached the Castle Church, the crowd had grown to several thousand. In his oration, Melanchthon praised Luther’s vigor of mind; his unshakable courage; the integrity of his character; and his many achievements, including his elucidation of Paul’s doctrine of justification by faith and his waging of “incessant war with the adversaries of evangelical truth.” Some said that Luther had displayed “too much asperity,” and this, Melanchthon said, he could not deny; ardent spirits are sometimes “betrayed into undue impetuosity.” In Luther’s defense, he recalled a remark from Erasmus: “God has sent in this latter age a violent physician on account of the magnitude of the existing disorders.” Surely neither Luther nor Erasmus would have approved.
After the service, Luther’s body was lowered into a grave that had been dug beneath the floor in front of the pulpit of the Castle Church, not far from where nearly thirty years earlier he had posted the defiant propositions that had set off such an explosion, and whose reverberations have continued to resound.
Aftermath: Erasmus
Erasmus and Luther passed from the scene, but their ideas did not. What afterlife did those ideas have? What follows is a proposed trajectory of influence. The account is not meant to be comprehensive; rather, it seeks to suggest a pathway by which the ideas of these two men entered into and shaped the Western tradition, with end points that are entirely unpredictable.
That is especially so in the case of Erasmus, for after his death his ideas all but disappeared. The Catholics worked particularly hard to extinguish them. Shocked by the great gains made by the Protestants, Rome mounted a fierce counteroffensive that came to be known as the Counter-Reformation. (Some historians, finding that term too negative, prefer “Catholic Reformation,” with an emphasis placed on Catholic efforts at renewal.) The contours of this offensive were determined at the Council of Trent. Meeting in twenty-five sessions between 1545 and 1563, this conclave would define the doctrines and style of piety that were to characterize Catholicism for the next four centuries. With its very first substantive decree, adopted on April 8, 1546, the council showed that it would tolerate no Erasmian middle. The Vulgate, it declared, was the only acceptable edition of the Holy Scriptures; no one “under any pretext whatever” was to dare reject it. With this article, the Catholic Church was repudiating the new methods of biblical criticism that Erasmus had helped pioneer. (The Vulgate would remain the official Bible of the Catholic Church until the mid-twentieth century.)
In other sessions, the delegates endorsed the invocation of saints, the veneration of relics, the value of shrines, the sacred use of images, and other forms of popular devotion derided by Erasmus. They also reaffirmed the traditional interpretation of original sin. Anyone who asserted that Adam by his act of disobedience injured only himself and not all of his progeny, and who held that through such defilement he had transmitted only death and not sin to the whole human race, was to be “anathema” (the most solemn ecclesiastical curse). This decree sought to dispel the questions that Erasmus had raised about original sin through his grammatical deconstruction of Romans 5:12. At Trent, this doctrine would be inscribed in Catholic thinking.
The council was especially emphatic in rejecting Erasmus’s calls for the Church to show greater flexibility on matters concerning marriage. It reasserted the “perpetual and indissoluble bond of matrimony,” thus ruling out any possibility of divorce or the easing of the requirements for annulment. The council also condemned all who maintain that “the married state excels the state of virginity or celibacy,” and it strictly forbade concubinage among priests. In a categorical rejection of Protestant leniency, the Catholic clergy would remain resolutely celibate.
The Council of Trent did affirm Erasmus’s teachings on one key point: free will. Anyone who denied that man has free will was to be anathema. The main target of this decree, of course, was Luther and his insistence that man cannot will to do good. The council similarly rejected the doctrine of justification by faith alone. Faith without works, it declared, is dead, and no one should consider himself exempt from observing the commandments. This measure—adopted after six months of fierce debate—put the final seal on the Catholics’ break with Protestantism.
Overall, the delegates at Trent adopted a strict and highly orthodox body of Catholic doctrine. At the same time, they recognized the decline in discipline and morality that had set in among the clergy, and they approved a series of remedial measures. To fight profligacy, they admonished cardinals to live modestly; to reduce absenteeism, they directed bishops to reside in their dioceses. Benefices were to be limited to one per person, parishes were to receive regular visitations to ensure effective pastoral care, and seminaries were to be created to serve as “perpetual nurseries of minister
s for the worship of God.”
The task of implementing these decrees—and of leading the fight against Protestantism—was to fall to the pope. During the Counter-Reformation, the papacy would be reinvigorated and ecclesiastical power newly concentrated in Rome. The tone was set by Paul IV. Elected in 1555 at the age of seventy-nine, he was known for his austerity, fanaticism, temper, and hatred of heresy. In 1542, as a cardinal, he had been instrumental in setting up the Roman Inquisition with the charge to identify, interrogate, imprison, and, when necessary, execute dissenters. As pope, Paul oversaw the creation of the first Index of Prohibited Books. It proposed three classes, the first of which included authors whose whole body of work, even when containing nothing about faith, was to be absolutely forbidden. (The second class consisted of the names of authors of whom only certain books were condemned, while the third listed individual books that contained pernicious doctrines and that had for the most part been written anonymously.) About 550 authors were placed in the first category, Erasmus among them. To punctuate the point, Paul wrote next to Erasmus’s name the works of his that were to be prohibited: “all his commentaries, annotations, scholia, dialogues, letters, opinions, translations, books and writings, even if these include nothing against or about religion.”
Paul’s index stirred much protest, especially among booksellers concerned about their sales, and after his death a scaled-down version was issued. Now only a handful of works by Erasmus were banned, including the Praise of Folly, the Colloquies, the Institution of Christian Matrimony, and the Italian translation of the paraphrase of Matthew. All of his other works on religion were to be proscribed until purged of offensive passages by the faculties of Paris or Louvain—a stipulation that effectively kept them off-limits to Catholic readers. The index also sought to keep vernacular Bibles out of the hands of the laity; anyone who wanted to read such a Bible had to get permission from the local bishop. From 1567 to 1773, no Italian-language edition of the Bible would be printed in Italy. By the end of the sixteenth century, the Italian peninsula would be virtually free of all traces of Erasmianism (not to mention Protestantism).
While thus enforcing conformity to its doctrines, the Church sought to make the faith more appealing by encouraging new, more emotional forms of piety. The confessional was introduced as a piece of furniture, reflecting the renewed stress on the sacrament of penance. Bones from the Roman catacombs were sent to churches around Europe to augment their collections of relics. A new emphasis was placed on miracles; worship of the Virgin Mary was encouraged; a special body was set up to handle the canonization of saints; and a highly theatrical artistic and architectural style—the baroque—was introduced. There was also a proliferation of new monastic orders and religious associations, including the Capuchins, Theatines, and Lazarists (for men) and the Ursulines, Visitandines, and Angelic Sisters of St. Paul (for women)—part of a monastic revival that stood as a rebuke to Erasmus’s declaration that “monasticism is not piety” and to the more general Protestant revolt against the cloister.
The most famous of the new orders was the Society of Jesus—the Jesuits—founded by Ignatius Loyola. A Basque adventurer with dreams of military glory, Loyola in 1521 was wounded in battle at Pamplona; while convalescing, he underwent a spiritual transformation and decided to become a priest. Making his way to Paris, he, like Erasmus, studied at the Collège de Montaigu. When he read Erasmus, however, he was repelled; the Enchiridion, he said, chilled his spirit and made his ardor grow cold. His favorite book was Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ, with its call to suppress the self and surrender to God. To help ordinary Christians achieve such a state, Loyola prepared his Spiritual Exercises, a spiritual handbook that taught austerity, self-discipline, an absolute commitment to Christ, and unconditional obedience to the pope. The one aspect of Erasmus’s work that Loyola did admire was his humanist curriculum, and he made it the basis for the Jesuit schools that would soon begin appearing across Europe. In addition to teaching, the Jesuits served as preachers, polemicists, confessors to the powerful, and missionaries to the heathens in lands stretching from the New World to the Far East. For all this, the Jesuits became known as the shock troops of the Counter-Reformation. Erasmus was a perennial target. He was denounced for promoting Pelagianism, undermining the Trinity, weakening the authority of the Church, and planting his “filthy feet” in the Vulgate and other sacred books, as one Jesuit controversialist put it.
The Protestants were no less condemnatory. After Luther’s death, Melanchthon—still drawn to Erasmus’s teachings—tried to retain a place for free will and good works in Lutheran theology, but orthodox Lutherans (called Gnesio-Lutherans, after the Greek word for “authentic”), angrily denouncing him, demanded unwavering adherence to the enslaved will and justification by faith alone. The rancor became so great that, as Melanchthon’s final days approached, he expressed a willingness to die so as to escape “the rage of the theologians.” After his passing, on April 19, 1560, he was buried in the Castle Church next to Luther—a recognition of all that he had done for the Reformation—but the Gnesio-Lutherans now had the edge in their campaign to snuff out all flickers of Erasmian laxity. Among Protestants in general, Erasmus was reviled as a man who had seen the light of the new gospel but refused to embrace it out of a mixture of fear, fecklessness, and opportunism.
Over the next century, Erasmianism went underground as men of faith zealously sought to enforce worship of their own particular God. In France, Francis I’s early success in squashing dissent after the affair of the placards proved fleeting amid the Calvinist invasion from Geneva. Beginning with a handful of clandestine groups, the Huguenots (as French Calvinists were called) had nearly two million adherents by the early 1560s. As their numbers grew, so did their militancy. Religious meetings became occasions for mass demonstrations; bands of worshippers invaded churches and smashed icons. Catholics, viewing the Huguenots as interlopers tainting the purity of French society, started organizing into local leagues. This began a cycle of retaliation and revenge that resulted in eight religious wars, which, extending over a quarter century, would constitute one of the most savage periods in French history.
The worst outbreak occurred on August 24, 1572—St. Bartholomew’s Day. During a wedding ceremony to which the royal government, in a gesture of reconciliation, had invited both Protestants and Catholics, royal troops assassinated several members of the Protestant party. Taking this as a signal, Catholic mobs fell on Paris’s Huguenots, leaving hundreds or even thousands dead. Several times that number died as the violence spread to provincial cities. The French state nearly disintegrated in the bloodletting that followed. It ended only in 1598, when Henry IV signed the Edict of Nantes, granting Protestants a degree of freedom of conscience and private worship.
By then, the Low Countries were well into their own Eighty Years’ War, driven by a revolt against the rule of Philip II of Spain. Even more than his father, Charles V, Philip saw himself as God’s appointed champion of the Catholic cause; under him, Spain would surpass even Italy as the driving force behind the Counter-Reformation. Despite residing in distant Madrid, Philip insisted on exercising total control over the Low Countries, and to suppress the rampant heresy there he greatly expanded the inquisitorial apparatus set up by his father. Thousands were dragged from their homes to face horrific torture and gruesome execution. As in France, however, the Calvinist surge proved unstoppable, and in 1566 Protestant preachers provoked an Iconoclast Fury, during which hundreds of churches were looted and wrecked. Enraged, Philip in 1567 sent a nine-thousand-man force to occupy the country. It was commanded by the duke of Alva, a fanatical Catholic, who, in addition to levying punitive taxes, set up a Council of Troubles that sent so many people to the stake that among local residents it became known as the Council of Blood.
Leading the resistance to these abuses was William the Silent, Prince of Orange. Despite his name, William made clear his support for political autonomy and religious liberty, and he raised
an army that, spearheaded by Calvinists, mounted a series of attacks on Spanish garrisons. In January 1579, the seven northern provinces of the Netherlands, through the Union of Utrecht, effectively declared their independence. In 1584, William was assassinated by a Burgundian Catholic, but the fighting wound on. It would eventually result in the division of the Low Countries into a Protestant north (the Dutch Republic) and a Catholic south (which would much later become Belgium). In 1609, a twelve-year truce was signed, but when it expired the fighting resumed, and the region was sucked into the great continental conflagration that had broken out in 1618.
The Thirty Years’ War—the most destructive conflict in Europe prior to World War I—was an Armageddon-like contest for control of the Continent between the forces of the Reformation and those of the Counter-Reformation. Raging from the Baltic to the Alps, the Rhine to the Oder, it drew in all the great Western powers as they sought to feed on the bloated body of the Holy Roman Empire. Set off by a series of local provocations, including the “Second Defenestration of Prague” (in which two Hapsburg officials and a secretary were hurled from a window), the conflict had many causes: geopolitical aspirations, military ambitions, a fight between German princes and the emperor for control of the empire, and the prevailing belief that only a uniform society was acceptable and that all who refused to conform deserved silence, expulsion, or death. The war featured prolonged sieges, torched villages, mass rapes, the widespread use of waterboarding and other tortures, and frenzied witch hunts. The armies consisted mostly of mercenaries, who, expected to live off the land, plundered and stripped it. Famine and contagions spread, winnowing the population. In the course of the war, the German population was reduced by as much as a third, and the roads of Central Europe were filled with columns of wretched refugees. The great territorial gains that Protestantism had made over the previous century were reversed and its southern borders eventually pushed back by hundreds of miles.
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