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Varieties of the Protestant Way: Erasmus, Luther, Calvin
As they succeeded, the three thriving institutions—the Church, the monasteries, and the universities—that emerged from the European Middle Ages became not only communities of Seekers but targets for Christians seeking control of their own lives and thought. The Church, no longer a mere agent of the state, became a competitor for worldly power and for the treasure of believers. Monasteries, while claiming the moral superiority of withdrawal from the world and from the burdens of wealth, prospered, acquired the odium of riches, and flouted their vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. And universities, elaborating the ways of disputation, developed a pedantic arrogance that overshadowed the simple messages of faith and Scriptures.
It is not surprising that the passions of Christian Seekers could not remain confined and channeled in these institutions. Their ardor would be expressed in countless independent ways. Three enduring spokesmen give us clues to their range and variety: Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1466-1536), the Dutch apostle of moderation, spokesman of Christian humanism; Martin Luther (1483-1546), outspoken German advocate of “justification by faith” alone, founder of the Protestant Reformation; and John Calvin (1509-1564), French creator of a Reformed Church. They followed divergent paths of classical scholarship, biblical exegesis, dogmatic theology, and reforming zeal toward conflicting views of the higher truths and how to reach them. Fueled by the passions and resentments of others less eloquent and more violent, their dissension would make Western Europe a battleground and cemetery of contesting Christians. How they disagreed over the meaning and contours of Christianity and ways of seeking salvation is not impossible to recount. What remains puzzling is why so many acolytes of a reputed God of Love should have been willing to kill—or be killed—over a theological nuance. Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries became a chaos of faith and persecution.
A Protestant Humanism: Erasmus
Moderation, praised by moralists, has seldom had its due from history. But if the spirit of Erasmus had prevailed, the history of Europe in the early modern era would have been quite different. “Prince of humanists” and godfather of the Protestant reformation, he remains a subject for scholars, historians, and novelists. His contemporaries, Luther and Calvin, would be founders of thriving sects and become household names in the Christian West.
The birth of Erasmus in Rotterdam about 1466 was clouded by mystery and the stigma of illegitimacy. Erasmus himself reported that his father, Gerard, had had a secret affair with his mother, Margaret, “in the expectation of marriage.” When Gerard’s parents opposed the marriage, he fled, leaving Margaret to bear his child. Later in Rome, where Gerard was employed as a copyist, he received word from his family that Margaret was dead. Out of grief he became a priest. When Gerard returned home he discovered the deception, but he still did not marry her, and stayed by his priestly vows. This saga became the basis of Charles Reade’s popular historical romance, The Cloister and the Hearth (1861). The cloud of illegitimacy haunted Erasmus all his life.
His mother sent him as a boy with his brother to a school in Deventer in eastern Netherlands dominated by a “Modern Piety” movement of the Brethren of the Common Life. The most famous of these brethren, Thomas à Kempis (1380-1471), had expressed their spirit in his Imitation of Christ when he urged, “Trinity is better pleased by adoration than by speculation.” The sect’s founder, Gerard Groote, had urged study of the ancient classics, such as Seneca and Cicero, as pagan preparations for the Gospel, but his movement emphasized inwardness. The lack of printed texts still encouraged memorizing as the avenue to literature, and Erasmus learned Horace and Terence by heart. “An occult force of nature drove me to the humanities,” he wrote. At sixteen, apparently attracted by their library, Erasmus joined the Augustinian Canons at Steyn, and at the end of his novitiate year, he took the vows of the strict order.
There Erasmus wrote On Contempt of the World, a rhetorical exercise on the virtues of monastery life. Then, before he was twenty, he wrote his Antibarbari (Against the Barbarians) defending the value of pagan learning. Just as the Church had not rejected the Old Testament despite its plea for obedience to laws that Christians had discarded, so, Erasmus said, the Church should not abandon the classics because they celebrated pagan gods. “You tell me that we should not read Virgil because he is in hell. Do you think that many Christians are not in hell whose works we read? It is not for us to discuss whether the pagans before Christ were damned. . . . either they are saved or no one is saved. If you want to give up everything pagan you will have to give up the alphabet and the Latin language, and all the arts and crafts.” So he began his lifelong championing of the ancient classics. He was ordained a priest in 1492.
The bishop of Cambrai sent Erasmus to Paris to study theology at the Collegia Pauperum of the Collège de Montaigu. This was the Paris of “Stygian darkness” that Rabelais ridiculed, and Erasmus too was troubled by the scholastic dogmas, quibbles, and intolerance. The masters of theology were fiercely quarreling. “You say you do not want to be called a Platonist or a Ciceronian,” he had argued, “but you do not mind being called an Albertist or a Thomist.” To support himself as a scholar, Erasmus sought pensions, gifts, and pay for the flattering dedications in his books. Despite his love of classical moderation in philosophy and theology, he was an extravagant sycophant where it brought him the money he needed. To draw on the wisdom of the ancients, he made a collection of proverbs from the Bible and Greek and Latin authors. His first edition of Adagia in 1500 offered some eight hundred proverbs, but later editions exceeded five thousand. These included many expressions that would become familiar in the West—“Leave no stone unturned,” “Where there is smoke there is fire,” “A necessary evil,” “The mountain labors and brings forth a mouse.” His Colloquies used the ancient dialogue form for models of Latin conversational style, spiced with Erasmus’s own wit.
First Speaker: From what coop or cave did you come?
Second: From the Collège de Montaigu.
First: Then I suppose you are full of learning.
Second: No, lice.
Invited to England in 1499 by the young and charming Lord Mountjoy, Erasmus formed friendships with aristocrats and leading philosophers and clerics of the age, especially John Colet and Thomas More. To his own surprise he was captivated by the English delights of hunting, and “that most admirable custom of kissing at every turn.” He had some knowledge of Greek before going to England, but English scholars persuaded him to master the language. While the philosophers were enthusiastic Neoplatonists, Erasmus was wary of obscurantism. He never claimed a religious ecstasy, and remained the steadfast advocate of classical humanism.
On leaving England to return to France, Erasmus was stripped of his meager funds by Henry VII’s agents at Dover enforcing the ban on exporting currency. He fled from the plague in Paris and at Orléans, then in the Netherlands he immersed himself in studying Greek until 1505. He had started on an edition of Saint Jerome for which he needed Greek. And he was also editing Cicero. When Erasmus discovered a manuscript of Lorenzo Valla that annotated the New Testament as if it were by some classical author, it reminded him that Holy Scriptures, like other ancient books, could be given textual scrutiny. This suggested, of course, that Saint Jerome’s translation of the New Testament into Latin might require revision.
Appealing to Pope Clement V’s earlier directive to study the ancient languages, Erasmus opened the path of modern biblical scholarship. He had found the perfect convergence of his classical and his Christian interests. Then with his Enchiridion Militis Christiani (Handbook of the Christian Soldier) he became a spokesman for Catholic reform. Cautioning against the mere externals of religion, he praised the spirit of Saint Paul and “a warm love for the scriptures.” And by discounting the outward forms of religion, Erasmus invited the suspicion of both Catholics and Reformers.
In his Enchiridion he exhorted:
Cre
ep not upon the earth, my brother, like an animal. Put on those wings which Plato says are caused to grow on the soul by the ardour of love. Rise above the body to the spirit, from the visible to the invisible, from the letter to the mystical meaning, from the sensible to the intelligible, from the involved to the simple. Rise as by rungs until you scale the ladder of Jacob.
The next years, seeking support and repose for his scholarship, he traversed Europe. In England he secured the patronage of William Wareham, archbishop of Canterbury (to whom he dedicated his translations of Euripides). And he developed an intimacy with Thomas More, then a prominent young London barrister. Their shared enthusiasm for the satirical dialogues of Lucian (c. 115- c. 200) would soon bear fruit in More’s Utopia and Erasmus’ Praise of Folly (1508). Touring Italy as tutor to young English aristocrats, he visited Rome, where he was horrified by the corruption of the Church. In the countryside he saw poor peasants mulcted by papal tax collectors.
Pioneers of the new technology of printing became Erasmus’ intimates. In Venice he was welcomed into the household of Aldus Manutius (1450-1515), whose Aldine press had published elegant editions of Greek and Latin classics, and who published a much-enlarged edition of Erasmus’ Adages (1508). In Basel he became the friend and collaborator of Johann Froben (1460?-1527), settled in Froben’s household and became his general editor and literary adviser. Froben published Erasmus’ edited version of the Greek New Testament and his Colloquies. Done in haste, Erasmus’ New Testament, Erasmus himself said, was “precipitated rather than edited” and failed to use some of the best surviving sources. But it was still the first published version of the printed text. Erasmus’ reputation, and the book’s low price and convenience, made it the stimulus to New Testament scholarship. It became a dominant influence on Luther’s translation into German (1522) and William Tyndale’s translation into English (1525-26). And it gave Erasmus his claim to be the father of New Testament scholarship. From all sides came attacks on his text, on his translation, his orthodoxy, and his omissions.
But, Erasmus asked, why be satisfied with the vulgar text of Saint Jerome? “You cry out that it is a crime to correct the gospels. This is a speech worthier of a coachman than of a theologian.” An English critic, accusing him of the Arian heresy for having omitted the words supporting the Trinity, predicted that “the world would again be racked by heresy, schism, faction, tumults, brawls, and tempests.” Erasmus retorted, “My New Testament has been out now for three years. Where are the heresies, schisms, tempests, tumults, brawls, hurricanes, devastation, shipwrecks, floods, general disasters, and anything worse you can think of?” The printing press had now become the collaborator and vehicle of the Protestant spirit. And so it opened the path to a popular scriptural theology—and the Reformation. Or, as it was later said, Erasmus laid the egg that Luther hatched.
The Champion of Simple Faith: Luther
It would be hard to imagine two more different responses to the challenge of Catholic Christianity at the end of the Middle Ages than Erasmus and Martin Luther. In the battle between Faith and Learning, Erasmus remained the champion of wit and learning, while Luther became the inspired champion of simple faith. While Erasmus had been raised as an orphan, Luther was the son of a domineering father. He was sent to a cathedral school in Magdeburg, then had some contact with the Brethren of the Common Life and entered the University of Erfurt to study the seven liberal arts. While Erasmus had entered the Collegia Pauperum in Paris for want of funds, Luther was denied financial aid because of his father’s prosperity. Then, pursuing his father’s wishes, he began the study of law, which came to an abrupt end in 1505. After only two months, and without asking his parents, Luther entered the Augustinian order of Hermits in Erfurt. “Not freely or desirously did I become a monk,” he later wrote in Monastic Vows (1521), “but walled around with the terror and agony of sudden death, I vowed a constrained and necessary vow.” The story in his Table Talk was that, fearing for his life when suddenly overtaken by a horrifying thunderstorm, Luther exclaimed, “Help, St. Anne, and I’ll become a monk.” On entering the monastery, he had kept only his Plautus and his Virgil, and sold all the rest of his books. He was ordained as a priest in 1507.
Erasmus never reported such a mystic experience, but found his own Christian faith confirmed by the sober wisdom of antiquity. He had wandered Europe seeking support for his retreat into scholarship. Erasmus’ Greek New Testament was a search for sources. In contrast, Luther’s translation of the Bible into German reached out to the wide audience and helped establish German as a national literary language. Erasmus wrote with humor, wit, and irony. His favorite literary form was the colloquy or dialogue of venerable classical lineage. But with no patience for dialogue, Luther asserted his Theses. How Luther came to his reformist enthusiasm is not clear. On his trip to Rome he, like Erasmus, was dismayed at the corrupt and worldly Church. Luther himself recalled his mystic experience of evangelical discovery of the “righteousness of God.”
By 1517 Luther’s ire was roused by the abuse of the Catholic practice of granting indulgences. These documents issued by authority of the pope claimed to be part of the sacrament of penance. As certificates commuting part of the temporal penalty of the sinner, they were sold through papal agents. Though theoretically they were not supposed to be effective unless the sinner was penitent, this requirement did not destroy their market. Indulgences, a welcome source of funds for the costly activities of the papacy, were managed by the Fuggers of Augsburg, one of the leading financial agents of the time. Pope Sixtus IV in 1476 had included the souls in purgatory in the saving effect of the indulgences. Luther’s patron, the elector Frederick, had banned from his territory the sale of the Jubilee Indulgences, which were said to be sold to help the pope rebuild St. Peter’s in Rome. What especially troubled Luther was the extravagant sales tactics of the German Dominican monk Johann Tetzel (1465?-1519), who had been authorized by the ambitious Archbishop Albert of Mainz.
Luther was so provoked by Tetzel’s vulgar salesmanship that he put together his Ninety-five Theses arraigning the abuses of the Catholic Church on October 31, 1517. The appealing tradition of the outraged Luther “nailing his theses to the door of the Wittenberg castle church” gives a legendary vividness to his outrage and his anger. Whether or not he actually “nailed” his theses to a church door, Luther surely affixed his concerns deep into the hearts of believing Christians. And his declaration of defiance, even in that age of slow communication, soon made him notorious.
The legend of the “nailing” has not taken account of the ambiguities surrounding indulgences in Luther’s time. The precise theological meaning had not yet been dogmatically defined by the Church. What actually was remitted by an indulgence? How serviceable was an indulgence to relieve a sinful soul from suffering in purgatory? These ambiguities had opened the opportunity for the extravagant salesmanship by Tetzel and his like, and for the extravagant indictments by Luther and others. The uses of the indulgences were so ill defined in the theology of the time that some Church historians have considered Luther’s Theses to be little more than “probing inquiries.” Luther himself said he issued them “for the purpose of eliciting truth.” He did not deny the pope’s power to grant indulgences, but he did attack the abuse of the power. And he insisted on the inwardness of the Christian religion.
Repentance, according to Luther, could not be attained by ecclesiastical fiat, but required a transformation within the believer. The true power and glory of the Church were not in the papacy but in the Gospel. Luther, lecturing at the new University of Wittenberg, had abandoned the Aristotelian scholastic theology for the study of the Bible in the original Hebrew and Greek. But his efforts to carry his message to other universities did not succeed. He now believed that salvation came not through works but through the divine gift of grace from God and through Christ. He would express this dogma in his German translation of the Bible, where he added the word “alone” in the crucial passage “For we hold that a man
is justified by faith alone, apart from the works of man.”
* * *
So Luther short-circuited the power of the Church, the priesthood, and the sacraments. His combative theses, broadcast by the new art of printing, against the abuses of indulgence have attracted historians more than his more fundamental affirmations of religious faith, autonomy, and the priesthood of all believers. Without the printing press, Luther’s challenge might have made only a local flurry in Wittenberg. Luther himself sent copies of his theses to the ambitious archbishop of Mainz and to his own bishop. The printing press made it possible to circulate them more widely and more speedily than ever before.
Luther would make the printing press the vehicle also for his reforming ideas. His address “To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation concerning the reformation of the Christian Commonwealth,” published in Wittenberg, offered his argument that the spiritual power of Christianity came from the whole body of true believers, all of whom had the power to read and interpret the Scriptures for themselves. He attacked the supremacy of the pope over the state, the theories of two estates (temporal and spiritual) and of two swords (pope and emperor). He called for a national German Church, abolition of the celibacy of the clergy, and reforms of schools and universities. This was his answer to the papal bull excommunicating Luther, published in Rome in June 1520, and did more than Luther ever imagined or intended. He ignited the national spirit (not only in Germany) and sparked an overwhelming movement for reform of the Church. Published in mid-August 1520, by the eighteenth of the month his address had sold four thousand copies. In the sixteenth century it reappeared in seventeen further editions.
The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World Page 13
