CHAPTER XIX
Luther and Erasmus
1517–36

I. LUTHER

HAVING summarized the economic, political, religious, moral, and intellectual conditions that cradled the Reformation, we must still count it among the wonders of history that in Germany one man should have unwittingly gathered these influences into a rebellion transforming a continent. We need not exaggerate the role of the hero here; the forces of change would have found another embodiment had Luther continued in his obedience. Yet the sight of this rough monk, standing in doubt and terror and immovable resolution against the most entrenched institutions and most hallowed customs of Europe, stirs the blood, and points again the distance that man has come from the slime or the ape.

What was he like, this lusty voice of his time, this peak of German history? In 1526, as pictured at forty-three by Lucas Cranach,¹ he was in transition from slender to stout; very serious, with only a hint of his robust humor; hair curly and still black; nose immense; eyes black and brilliant—his enemies said that demons shone in them. A frank and open countenance made him unfit for diplomacy. A later portrait (1532), also by Cranach, showed Luther cheerfully obese, with a broad, full face; this man enjoyed living. In 1524 he abandoned the monastic garb and dressed like a layman, sometimes in the robes of a teacher, sometimes in ordinary jacket and trousers. He was not above mending these himself; his wife complained that the great man had cut a piece out of his son’s pantaloons to patch his own.

He had slipped into marriage by inadvertence. He agreed with St. Paul that it is better to marry than to burn, and proclaimed sex to be as natural and necessary as eating.² He retained the medieval notion that copulation is sinful even in marriage, but “God covers the sin.”³ He condemned virginity as a violation of the divine precept to increase and multiply. If “a preacher of the Gospel... cannot live chastely unmarried, let him take a wife; God has made that plaster for that sore.” ⁴ He considered the human method of reproduction a bit absurd, at least in retrospect, and suggested that “had God consulted me in the matter, I should have advised Him to continue the generation of the species by fashioning human beings out of clay, as Adam was made.”⁵ He had the traditional and German conception of woman as divinely designed for childbearing, cooking, praying, and not much else. “Take women from their housewifery, and they are good for nothing.” ⁶“If women get tired and die of bearing, there is no harm in that; let them die as long as they bear; they are made for that.”⁷ The wife should give her husband love, honor, and obedience; he is to rule her, though with kindness; she must keep to her sphere, the home; but there she can do more with the children with one finger than the man with two fists.⁸ Between man and wife “there should be no question of mine and thine”; all their possessions should be in common.⁹

Luther had the male’s usual dislike for an educated woman. “I wish,” he said of his wife, “that women would repeat the Lord’s Prayer before opening their mouths.”¹⁰ But he despised writers who composed satires on women. “What defects women have we must check them for in private, gently .... for woman is a frail vessel.”¹¹ Despite his rough candor about sex and marriage he was not insensible to esthetic considerations. “The hair is the finest ornament women have. Of old, virgins used to wear it loose, except when they were in mourning. I like women to let their hair fall down their back; it is a most agreeable sight.”¹² (This should have made him more lenient with Pope Alexander VI, who fell in love with Giulia Farnese’s loosened hair.)

Apparently it was for no physical need that Luther married. In a burst of humor he said that he had married to please his father and spite the Devil and the pope. But he took a long time to make up his mind, and then it was made up for him. When, on his recommendation, some nuns left their convent, he undertook to find them husbands. Finally only one remained unmatched, Catherine von Bora, a woman of good birth and character, but hardly designed to arouse precipitate passion. She had set her sights on a young Wittenberg student of patrician stock; she failed to get him, and entered domestic service to keep alive. Luther suggested a Dr. Glatz as a husband; she replied that Glatz was unacceptable, but that Herr Amsdorf or Dr. Luther would do. Luther was forty-two, Catherine twenty-six; he thought the discrepancy prohibitive, but his father urged him to transmit the family name. On June 27, 1525, the ex-monk and the ex-nun became man and wife.

The Elector gave them the Augustinian monastery as a home, and raised Luther’s salary to 300 guilders ($7,500) a year; later this was increased to 400, then to 500. Luther bought a farm, which Katie managed and loved. She bore him six children, and cared faithfully for them, for all Martin’s domestic needs, for a home brewery, a fish pond, a vegetable garden, chickens, and pigs. He called her “my lord Katie,” and implied that she could put him in his place when he forgot the biological subordination of man to woman; but she had much to bear from his occasional storms and his trustful improvidence; for he cared nothing for money, and was recklessly generous. He took no royalties for his books, though they made a fortune for his publisher. His letters to or about Catherine reveal his growing affection for her, and a generally happy marriage. He repeated in his own way what had been told him in his youth: “The greatest gift of God to man is a pious, kindly, Godfearing, home-loving wife.”¹³

He was a good father, knowing as if by instinct the right mixture of discipline and love. “Punish if you must, but let the sugar-plum go with the rod.”¹⁴ He composed songs for his children, and sang these songs with them while he played the lute. His letters to his children are among the jewels of German literature. His sturdy spirit, which could face an emperor in war, was almost broken by the death of his favorite daughter Magdalena at the age of fourteen. “God,” he said, “has given no bishop so great a gift in a thousand years as He has given me in her.”¹⁵ He prayed night and day for her recovery. “I love her very much, but, dear God, if it is Thy holy will to take her, I would gladly leave her with Thee.”¹⁶ And he said to her: “Lena dear, my little daughter, thou wouldst love to remain here with thy father; art thou willing to go to that other Father?” “Yes, dear father,” Lena answered, “just as God wills.” When she died he wept long and bitterly. As she was laid in the earth he spoke to her as to a living soul: “Du liebes Lenichen, you will rise and shine like the stars and the sun. How strange it is to know that she is at peace and all is well, and yet be so sorrowful! “¹⁷

Not content with six children, he took into his many-chambered monastery-home eleven orphaned nephews and nieces, brought them up, sat with them at table, and discoursed with them tirelessly; Catherine mourned their monopoly of him. Some of them made uncensored notes of his table talk; the resulting mass of 6,596 entries rivals Boswell’s Johnson and Napoleon’s recorded conversations in weight, wit, and wisdom. In judging Luther we should remember that he never edited these Tischreden; few men have been so completely exposed to the eavesdropping of mankind. Here, rather than in the controversies of the theological battlefield, is Luther chez lui, en pantoufles, at home, himself.

We perceive, first of all, that he was a man, not an inkwell; he lived as well as wrote. No healthy person will resent Luther’s relish for good food and beer, or his fruitful enjoyment of all the comforts that Catherine Bora could give him. He might have been more prudently reticent on these points, but reticence came with the Puritans, and was unknown to Renaissance Italians as well as to Reformation Germans; even the delicate Erasmus shocks us with his candid physiological speech. Luther ate too much, but he could punish himself with long fasts. He drank too much, and deplored drinking as a national vice; but beer was the water of life to the Germans, as wine to the Italians and the French; water could literally be poison in those careless days. Yet we never hear of his overstepping exuberance into intoxication. “If God can forgive me for having crucified Him with Masses twenty years running, he can also bear with me for occasionally taking a good drink to honor Him.”¹⁸

His faults leaped to the eye and the ear. Proud amid his constant expressions of humility, dogmatic against dogma, intemperate in zeal, giving no quarter of courtesy to his opponents, clinging to superstitions while laughing at superstition, denouncing intolerance and practicing it—here was no paragon of consistency or Grandison of virtue, but a man as contrary as life and scorched with the powder of war. “I have not been slow to bite my adversaries,” he confessed, “but what is the good of salt if it does not bite?” ¹⁹ He spoke of papal decrees as Dreck, dung;²⁰ of the pope as “the Devil’s sow” or lieutenant, and as Antichrist; of bishops as “larvae,” unbelieving hypocrites, “ignorant apes”; of sacerdotal ordination as marking a man with “the sign of the beast in the Apocalypse”; of monks as worse than hangmen or murderers, or, at best, “fleas on God Almighty’s fur coat”;²¹ we may surmise how his audiences enjoyed this hilarity. “The only portion of the human anatomy which the pope has had to leave uncontrolled is the hind end.”²² Of the Catholic clergy he wrote: “The Rhine is scarcely big enough to drown the whole accursed gang of Roman extortioners... cardinals, archbishops, bishops, and abbots”;²³ or, water failing, “may it please God to send down upon them the rain of fire and sulphur that consumed Sodom and Gomorrha.” ²⁴ One is reminded of the Emperor Julian’s comment: “There is no wild beast like an angry theologian.” ²⁵ But Luther, like Clive, marveled at his own moderation.

Such rhetorical passion was in the temper of the times. “Some of the preachers and pamphlet writers on the orthodox side,” confesses the learned Cardinal Gasquet, “were Luther’s match in this respect.”²⁹ Vituperation was expected of intellectual gladiators, and was relished by their audiences; politeness was suspected of cowardice. When Luther’s wife reproached him—“Dear husband, you are too rude”—he answered, “A twig can be cut with a bread knife, but an oak calls for an axe”;³⁰ a soft answer could turn away wrath, but could not overturn the papacy. A man mollified to refined speech would have shrunk from so mortal a combat. It took a thick skin—thicker than Erasmus’—to slough off papal excommunications and Imperial bans.

And it took a strong will. This was Luther’s bedrock; hence his self-confidence, dogmatism, courage, and intolerance. But he had some gentle virtues too. In his middle years he was the height of sociability and cheerfulness, and a pillar of strength to all who needed consolation or aid. He put on no airs, assumed no elegances, never forgot that he was a peasant’s son. He deprecated the publication of his collected works, begging his readers to study the Bible instead. He protested against applying the name Lutheran to the churches that followed his lead. When he preached he turned his speech to the vocabulary and understanding of his hearers. His humor was ruralrough, rollicking, Rabelaisian. “My enemies examine all that I do,” he complained; “if I break wind in Wittenberg they smell it in Rome.” ³¹ “Women wear veils because of the angels; I wear trousers because of the girls.”³² Many of us have committed such quips, but have not had such merciless reporters. The same man who uttered them loved music this side of idolatry, composed tender or thundering hymns, and set them—theological prejudice for a moment stilled—to polyphonic strains already used in the Roman Church. “I would not give up my humble musical gift for anything, however great.... . I am quite of the opinion that.. . next to theology, there is no art which can be compared to music; for it alone, after theology, gives us .... rest and joy of heart.”³³

His theology led him to a lenient ethic, for it told him that good works could not win salvation without faith in redemption by Christ, nor could sin forfeit salvation if such faith survived. A little sin now and then, he thought, might cheer us up on the straight and narrow path. Tired of seeing Melanchthon wear himself thin with gloomy scruples about minor lapses from sanctity, he told him, with full-blooded humor, Pecca fortiter—” Sin powerfully; God can forgive only a hearty sinner,” but scorns the anemic casuist;³⁴ yet it would be absurd to rear an indictment of Luther on this incidental raillery. One thing is clear: Luther was no puritan. “Our loving God wills that we eat, drink, and be merry.” ³⁵ “I seek and accept joy wherever I can find it. We now know, thank God, that we can be happy with a good conscience.”³⁶ He advised his followers to feast and dance on Sunday. He approved of amusements, played a good game of chess, called card-playing a harmless diversion for immature minds,³⁷ and said a wise word for dancing: “Dances are instituted that courtesy may be learned in company, and that friendship and acquaintance may be contracted between young men and girls; here their intercourse may be watched, and occasion of honorable meeting given. I myself would attend them sometimes, but the youth would whirl less giddily if I did.” ³⁸ Some Protestant preachers wished to prohibit plays, but Luther was more tolerant: “Christians must not altogether shun plays because there are sometimes coarseness and adulteries therein; for such reasons they would have to give up the Bible too.” ³⁹ All in all, Luther’s conception of life was remarkably healthy and cheerful for one who thought that “all natural inclinations are either without God or against Him,”⁴⁰ and that nine of every ten souls were divinely predestined to everlasting hell.⁴¹ The man was immeasurably better than his theology.

His intellect was powerful, but it was too clouded with the miasmas of his youth, too incarnadined with war, to work out a rational philosophy. Like his contemporaries, he believed in goblins, witches, demons, the curative value of live toads,⁴² and the impish incubi who sought out maidens in their baths or beds and startled them into motherhood.⁴³ He ridiculed astrology but sometimes talked in its terms. He praised mathematics as “relying upon demonstrations and sure proofs”;⁴⁴ he admired the bold reach of astronomy into the stars, but, like nearly all his contemporaries, he rejected the Copernican system as contradicting Scripture. He insisted that reason should stay within the limits laid down by religious faith.

Doubtless he was right in his judgment that feeling, rather than thought, is the lever of history. The men who mold religions move the world; the philosophers clothe in new phrases, generation after generation, the sublime ignorance of the part pontificating about the whole. So Luther prayed while Erasmus reasoned; and while Erasmus courted princes Luther spoke to God—now imperiously, as one who had fought strenuously in the battles of the Lord and had a right to be heard, now humbly as a child lost in infinite space. Confident that God was on his side, he faced insuperable obstacles, and won. “I bear upon me the malice of the whole world, the hatred of the Emperor, of the Pope, and of all their retinue. Well, onward, in God’s name! “⁴⁵ He had the courage to defy his enemies because he did not have the intellect to doubt his truth. He was what he had to be to do what he had to do.

II. THE INTOLERANT HERETICS

It is instructive to observe how Luther moved from tolerance to dogma as his power and certainty grew. Among the “errors” that Leo X, in the bull Exsurge Domine, denounced in Luther was that “to burn heretics is against the will of the Holy Spirit.” In the Open Letter to the Christian Nobility (1520) Luther ordained “every man a priest,” with the right to interpret the Bible according to his private judgment and individual light;⁴⁶ and added, “We should vanquish heretics with books, not with burning.”⁴⁷ In the essay On Secular Authority (1522) he wrote:

n a letter to Elector Frederick (April 21, 1524) Luther asked toleration for Münzer and other of his own enemies. “You should not prevent them from speaking. There must be sects, and the Word of God must face battle.... Let us leave in His hands the combat and free encounter of minds.” In 1528, when others were advocating the death penalty for Anabaptists, he advised that unless they were guilty of sedition they should be merely banished.⁴⁹ Likewise, in 1530, he recommended that the death penalty for blasphemy should be softened to exile. It is true that even in these liberal years he talked as if he wished his followers or God to drown or otherwise eliminate all “papists”; but this was “campaign oratory,” not seriously meant. In January 1521, he wrote: “I would not have the Gospel defended by violence or murder”; and in June of that year he reproved the Erfurt students for attacking priests; however, he did not object to “frightening them” a bit to improve their theology.⁵⁰ In May 1529, he condemned plans for the forcible conversion of Catholic parishes to Protestantism. As late as 1531 he taught that “we neither can nor should force anyone into the faith.”⁵¹

But it was difficult for a man of Luther’s forceful and positive character to advocate tolerance after his position had been made relatively secure. A man who was sure that he had God’s Word could not tolerate its contradiction. The transition to intolerance was easiest concerning the Jews. Till 1537 Luther argued that they were to be forgiven for keeping their own creed, “since our fools, the popes, bishops, sophists, and monks, those coarse assheads, dealt with the Jews in such a manner that any Christian would have preferred to be a Jew. Indeed, had I been a Jew, and had seen such idiots and dunderheads expound Christianity, I should rather have become a hog than a Christian.... I would advise and beg everybody to deal kindly with the Jews, and to instruct them in the Scripture; in such case we could expect them to come over to us.”⁵² Luther may have realized that Protestantism was in some aspects a return to Judaism, in its rejection of monasticism and clerical celibacy, its emphasis on the Old Testament, the Prophets, and the Psalms, and its adoption (Luther himself excepted) of a sterner sexual ethic than that of Catholicism. He was disappointed when the Jews made no corresponding move toward Protestantism; and his hostility to the charging of interest helped to turn him against Jewish moneylenders, then against Jews in general. When Elector John expelled the Jews from Saxony (1537) Luther rejected a Jewish appeal for his intercession. In his Table Talk he united “Jews and papists” as “ungodly wretches .... two stockings made of one piece of cloth.”⁵³ In his declining years he fell into a fury of anti-Semitism, denounced the Jews as “a stiff-necked, unbelieving, proud, wicked, abominable nation,” and demanded that their schools and synagogues should be razed with fire.

Luther should never have grown old. Already in 1522 he was outpapaling the popes. “I do not admit,” he wrote, “that my doctrine can be judged by anyone, even by the angels. He who does not receive my doctrine cannot be saved.”⁵⁵ By 1529 he was drawing some delicate distinctions:

Luther now agreed with the Catholic Church that “Christians require certainty, definite dogmas, and sure Word of God which they can trust to live and die by.”⁵⁷ As the Church in the early centuries of Christianity, divided and weakened by a growing multiplicity of ferocious sects, had felt compelled to define her creed and expel all dissidents, so now Luther, dismayed by the variety of quarrelsome sects that had sprouted from the seed of private judgment, passed step by step from toleration to dogmatism. “All men now presume to criticize the Gospel,” he complained; “almost every old doting fool or prating sophist must, forsooth, be a doctor of divinity.” ⁵⁸ Stung by Catholic taunts that he had let loose a dissolvent anarchy of creeds and morals, he concluded, with the Church, that social order required some cloture to debate, some recognized authority to serve as “an anchor of faith.” What should that authority be? The Church answered, the Church, for only a living organism could adjust itself and its Scriptures to inescapable change. No, said Luther; the sole and final authority should be the Bible itself, since all acknowledge it to be the Word of God.

In the thirteenth chapter of Deuteronomy, in this infallible book, he found an explicit command, allegedly from the mouth of God, to put heretics to death: “Neither shalt thine eye pity him, neither shalt thou conceal him,” even though it be “thy brother, or thy son, or the wife of thy bosom... but thou shalt surely kill him, thy hand shall be the first upon him to put him to death.” On that awful warrant the Church had acted in annihilating the Albigensians in the thirteenth century; that divine imprecation had been made a certificate of authority for the burnings of the Inquisition. Despite the violence of Luther’s speech he never rivaled the severity of the Church in dealing with dissent; but he proceeded, within the area and limits of his power, to silence it as peaceably as he could. In 1525 he invoked the aid of existing censorship regulations in Saxony and Brandenburg to stamp out the “pernicious doctrines” of the Anabaptists and the Zwinglians.⁵⁹ In 1530, in his commentary on the Eighty-second Psalm, he advised governments to put to death all heretics who preached sedition or against private property, and “those who teach against a manifest article of the faith .... like the articles children learn in the creed, as, for example, if anyone should teach that Christ was not God but a mere man.”⁶⁰ Sebastian Franck thought there was more freedom of speech and belief among the Turks than in the Lutheran states, and Leo Jud, the Zwinglian, joined Carlstadt in calling Luther another pope. We should note, however, that toward the end of his life Luther returned to his early feeling for toleration. In his last sermon he advised abandonment of all attempts to destroy heresy by force; Catholics and Anabaptists must be borne with patiently till the Last Judgment, when Christ will take care of them.⁶¹

Other reformers rivaled or surpassed Luther in hounding heresy. Bucer of Strasbourg urged the civil authorities in Protestant states to extirpate all who professed a “false” religion; such men, he said, are worse than murderers; even their wives and children and cattle should be destroyed.⁶² The comparatively gentle Melanchthon accepted the chairmanship of the secular inquisition that suppressed the Anabaptists of Germany with imprisonment or death. “Why should we pity such men more than God does?” he asked, for he was convinced that God had destined all Anabaptists to hell.⁶³ He recommended that the rejection of infant baptism, or of original sin, or of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, should be punished as capital crimes.⁶⁴ He insisted on the death penalty for a sectarian who thought that heathens might be saved, or for another who doubted that belief in Christ as the Redeemer could change a naturally sinful into a righteous man.⁶⁵ He applauded, as we shall see, the execution of Servetus. He asked the state to compel all the people to attend Protestant religious services regularly.⁶⁶ He demanded the suppression of all books that opposed or hindered Lutheran teaching; so the writings of Zwingli and his followers were formally placed on the index of prohibited books in Wittenberg.⁶⁷ Whereas Luther was content with the expulsion of Catholics from regions governed by Lutheran princes, Melanchthon favored corporal penalties. Both agreed that the civil power was in duty bound to promulgate and uphold “the law of God”—i.e., Lutheranism.⁶⁸ Luther, however, counseled that where two sects existed in a state the minority should yield to the majority: in a predominantly Catholic principality the Protestants should yield and emigrate; in a prevailingly Protestant province the Catholics should give way and depart; if they resisted, they should be effectively chastised.⁶⁹

The Protestant authorities, following Catholic precedents, accepted the obligation of maintaining religious conformity. At Augsburg (January 18, 1537) the town council issued a decree forbidding the Catholic worship, and banishing, after eight days, all who would not accept the new faith. At the expiration of the period of grace the council sent soldiers to take possession of all churches and monasteries; altars and statues were removed, and priests, monks, and nuns were banished.⁷⁰ Frankfurt-am-Main promulgated a similar ordinance; and the seizure of Catholic church properties, and the suppression of Catholic services, spread through the states controlled by Protestants.⁷¹ Censorship of the press, already established in Catholic areas, was adopted by the Protestants; so Elector John of Saxony, at the request of Luther and Melanchthon, promulgated (1528) an edict that prohibited the publication, sale, or reading of Zwinglian or Anabaptist literature, or the preaching or teaching of their doctrines; “and anyone who is aware of such being done by anybody, whether a stranger or an acquaintance, must give information to the... magistrates of the place, in order that the offender may be taken up in due time and punished.... Those who are aware of such breeches of the orders... and do not give information, shall be punished by loss of life or property.”⁷²

Excommunication, like censorship, was adopted by the Protestants from the Catholics. The Augsburg Confession of 1530 proclaimed the right of the Lutheran Church to excommunicate any member who should reject a fundamental Lutheran doctrine.⁷³ Luther explained that “although excommunication in popedom has been and is shamefully abused, and made a mere torment, yet we must not suffer it to fall, but make right use of it, as Christ commanded.”⁷⁴

III. THE HUMANISTS AND THE REFORMATION

The intolerant dogmatism of the Reformers, their violence of speech, their sectarian fragmentation and animosities, their destruction of religious art, their predestinarian theology, their indifference to secular learning, their renewed emphasis on demons and hell, their concentration on personal salvation in a life beyond the grave—all these shared in alienating the humanists from the Reformation. Humanism was a pagan reversion to classical culture; Protestantism was a pious return to gloomy Augustine, to early Christianity, even to Old Testament Judaism; the long contest between Hellenism and Hebraism was renewed. The humanists had made remarkable headway within the Catholic fold; in Nicholas V and Leo X they had captured the papacy; popes had not only tolerated but protected them, and had helped them to recover lost treasures of classic literature and art—all on the tacit understanding that their writings would be addressed, presumably in Latin, to the educated classes, and would not upset the orthodoxy of the people. Disturbed now in this cozy entente, the humanists found that Teutonic Europe cared less for them and their aristocratic culture than for the soul-warming talk of the new vernacular preachers about God and hell and individual salvation. They laughed at the passionate debates of Luther and Eck, Luther and Carlstadt, Luther and Zwingli, as battles over issues that they had thought long dead or courteously forgotten. They had no taste for theology; heaven and hell had become myths to them, less real than the mythology of Greece and Rome. Protestantism, as they saw it, was treason to the Renaissance, was restoring all the supernaturalism, irrationalism, and diabolism that had darkened the medieval mind; this, they felt, was not progress but reaction; it was the resubjection of the emancipated mind to the primitive myths of the populace. They resented Luther’s vituperation of reason, his exaltation of a faith that was now to be dogmatically defined by Protestant popelets or potentates. And what remained of that human dignity which Pico della Mirandola had so nobly described, if everything that happened on the earth—every heroism, every sacrifice, every advance in human decency and worth—was merely the mechanical fulfillment, by helpless and meaningless men, of God’s foreknowledge and inescapable decrees?

Humanists who had criticized, but never left, the Church—Wimpheling, Beatus Rhenanus, Thomas Murner, Sebastian Brant—now hastened to confirm their loyalty. Many humanists who had applauded Luther’s initial rebellion as the wholesome correction of a shameful abuse drew away from him as Protestant theology and polemics took form. Willibald Pirkheimer, Hellenist and statesman, who had so openly supported Luther that he had been excommunicated in the first draft of the bull Exsurge Domine, was shocked by Luther’s violence of speech, and dissociated himself from the revolt. In 1529, while still critical of the Church, he wrote:

Mutianus agreed. He had hailed Luther as the “morning star of Wittenberg”; soon he was complaining that Luther “had all the fury of a maniac.”⁷⁶ Crotus Rubianus, who had opened a path for Luther by the Letters of Obscure Men, fled back to the Church in 1521. Reuchlin sent Luther a courteous letter, and prevented Eck from burning Luther’s books in Ingolstadt; but he scolded his nephew Melanchthon for adopting the Lutheran theology, and he died in the arms of the Church. Johannes Dobenek Cochlaeus, at first for Luther, turned against him in 1522, and addressed to him a letter of reproach:

The humanists of Germany had perhaps forgotten the scurrility of their Italian predecessors—Filelfo, Poggio, and many more—which had set a pace for Luther’s contumelious pen. But the style of Luther’s warfare was only the surface of their indictment. They noted—as Luther noted—a deterioration of morals and manners in Germany, and ascribed it to the disruption of ecclesiastical authority, and the Lutheran discounting of “good works” as a merit for salvation. They were hurt by the Protestant derogation of learning, Carlstadt’s equating of pundit and peasant, Luther’s slighting of scholarship and erudition. Erasmus voiced the general view of the humanists—and here Melanchthon sadly concurred⁷⁸—that wherever Lutheranism triumphed, letters (i.e., education and literature) declined.⁷⁹ The Protestants retorted that this was merely because learning, to the humanist, meant chiefly the study of pagan classics and history. For a generation the books and pamphlets of religious polemics so absorbed the mind and presses of Germany and Switzerland that nearly every other form of literature (except the satire) lost its audience. Publishing firms like Froben’s in Basel and the Atlansee in Vienna found so few purchasers for the learned works that they had issued at great cost that they verged on bankruptcy.⁸⁰ Rival fanaticisms stifled the young German Renaissance, and the trend of Renaissance Christianity toward reconciliation with paganism came to an end.

Some humanists, like Eoban Hess and Ulrich von Hutten, remained faithful to the Reformation. Hess wandered from post to post, returned to Erfurt to find the university deserted (1533), and died professing poetry at Marburg (1540). Hutten, after the fall of Sickingen, fled to Switzerland, robbing for his food on the way.⁸¹ Destitute and diseased, he sought out Erasmus at Basel (1522), though he had publicly branded the humanist as a coward for not joining the Reformers.⁸² Erasmus refused to see him, alleging the inadequacy of his stove to warm Hutten’s bones. The poet now composed An Expostulation denouncing Erasmus as a chicken-hearted renegade; he offered to withhold it from publication if Erasmus would pay him; Erasmus balked, and urged upon Hutten the wisdom of settling their differences peaceably. But Hutten had allowed the manuscript of his lampoon to circulate privately; it came to Erasmus’ knowledge, and moved him to join the clergy of Basel in urging the city council to banish the irascible satirist. Hutten sent the Expostulation to the press, and moved to Mulhouse. There a mob gathered to attack his refuge; he fled again, and was taken in by Zwingli at Zurich (June 1533). “Behold,” said the Reformer, here more humane than the humanist, “behold this destroyer, the terrible Hutten, whom we see so fond of the people and of children! This mouth, which blew storms upon the pope, breathes nothing but gentleness and goodness.”⁸³ Meanwhile Erasmus replied to the Expostulation in a hastily written Spongia Erasmi adversus aspergines Hutteni (Erasmus’ Sponge on Hutten’s Aspersions); and he wrote to the town council of Zurich protesting against the “lies” Hutten had told of him, and recommending the poet’s banishment.⁸⁴ But Hutten was now dying; the war of ideas and the ravages of syphilis had exhausted him. He breathed his last (August 29, 1523) on an island in the Lake of Zurich, being thirty-five years old, and possessing nothing but his clothes and a pen.

IV. ERASMUS APPENDIX: 1517–36

The reaction of Erasmus to the Reformation provides a living debate among historians and philosoohers. Which method was the better for mankind—Luther’s direct attack upon the Church, or Erasmus’ policy of peaceful compromise and piecemeal reform? The answers almost define two types of personality: “tough-minded” warriors of action and will, “tenderminded” compromisers given to feeling and thought. Luther was basically a man of action; his thoughts were decisions, his books were deeds. His thinking was early medieval in content, early modern in result; his courage and decisiveness, rather than his theology, co-operated with nationalism to establish the modern age. Luther spoke in masculinely vigorous German to the German people, and aroused a nation to overthrow an international power; Erasmus wrote in femininely graceful Latin for an international audience, a cosmopolitan elite of university graduates. He was too sensitive to be a man of action; he praised and longed for peace while Luther waged and relished war. He was a master of moderation, deprecating intemperance and extravagance. He fled from action into thought, from rash certainties into cautious doubt. He knew too much to see truth or error all on one side; he saw both sides, tried to bring them together, and was crushed in between.

He applauded Luther’s Theses. In March 1518, he sent copies of them to Colet and More, and wrote to Colet: “The Roman Curia has cast aside all shame. What is more impudent than these indulgences?”⁸⁵ In October he wrote to another friend:

For the most part Erasmus lived now in Louvain. He shared in founding at the university the Collegium Trilingue, with professorships in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. In 1519 Charles V gave him a pension. Erasmus made it a condition of acceptance that he was to keep his independence of body and mind; but if he was human this pension, added to those that he was receiving from Archbishop Warham and Lord Mountjoy, must have played some part in molding his attitude toward the Reformation.

As Luther’s revolt passed from criticism of indulgences to rejection of papacy and councils, Erasmus hesitated. He had hoped that Church reform could be advanced by appealing to the good will of the humanist pope. He still revered the Church as (it seemed to him) an irreplaceable foundation of social order and individual morality; and though he believed that the orthodox theology was shot through with nonsense, he had no trust in the wisdom of private or popular judgment to develop a more beneficent ritual or creed; the progress of reason could come only through the percolation of enlightenment from the instructed few to the emulous many. He acknowledged his share in opening a path for Luther; his own Praise of Folly was at that moment circulating by the thousands throughout Europe, pointing scorn at monks and theologians, and giving sharp point to Luther’s blunt tirades. When the monks and theologians charged him with laying the egg that Luther hatched, he answered, wryly: “Yes, but the egg I laid was a hen, whereas Luther has hatched a gamecock.”⁸⁷ Luther himself had read the Praise of Folly, and nearly everything else published by Erasmus, and he told his friends that he was merely giving more direct form to what the famous humanist had said or hinted for many years past. On March 18, 1519, he wrote to Erasmus humbly and reverently, soliciting his friendship and, by implication, his support.

Erasmus had now to make one of the pivotal decisions of his life, and either horn of the dilemma seemed fatal. If he renounced Luther he would be called a coward. If he associated himself with Luther in rejecting the Roman Church he would not merely forfeit three pensions and the protection that Leo X had given him against obscurantist theologians; he would have to abandon his own plan and strategy of Church reform through the improvement of minds and morals in influential men. Already he had (he thought) made real progress on this line with the Pope, Archbishop Warham, Bishop Fisher, Dean Colet, Thomas More, Francis I, Charles V. These men, of course, would never consent to renounce the Church; they would shrink from disrupting an institution which in their view was inextricably allied with princely government in maintaining social stability; but they could be enlisted in a campaign to reduce the superstitions and horrors in the prevailing cult, to cleanse and educate the clergy, to control and subordinate the monks, and to protect intellectual freedom for the progress of the mind. To exchange that program for a violent division of Christendom into warring halves, and for a theology of predestination and the unimportance of good works, would seem to these men, and seemed to Erasmus, the way to madness.

He hoped that peace might still be restored if all parties would lower their voices. In February 1519, he advised Froben to publish no more of Luther’s works, as being too inflammatory.⁸⁸ In April he wrote to Elector Frederick encouraging him to protect Luther as more sinned against than sinning.⁸⁹ Finally (May 30) he answered Luther:

Despite this cautious ambivalence the theologians of Louvain continued to attack Erasmus as the fountainhead of the Lutheran flood. On October 8, 1520, Aleander arrived, posted the papal bull excommunicating Luther, and scored Erasmus as a secret fomenter of the revolt. The pundits accepted Aleander’s lead, and expelled Erasmus from the Louvain faculty (October 9,1520). He moved to Cologne, and there, as we have seen, defended Luther in conference with Frederick of Saxony (November 5). On December 5 he sent to the Elector a statement known as the Axiomata Erasmi, to the effect that Luther’s request to be tried by impartial judges was reasonable; that good men and lovers of the Gospel were those who had taken least offense at Luther; that the world was thirsting for evangelical truth (i.e., truth based solely on the Gospel); and that such a mood, so widely spread, could not be suppressed.⁹¹ With the Dominican Johann Faber he composed a memorial to Charles V, recommending that Charles, Henry VIII, and Louis II of Hungary should appoint an impartial tribunal to try Luther’s case. In a letter to Cardinal Campeggio (December 6) he urged justice for Luther:

Luther made it more and more difficult for Erasmus to intercede for him, since with each month the violence of his speech increased, until in July 1520, he invited his readers to wash their hands in the blood of bishops and cardinals. When news came that Luther had publicly burned Leo’s bull of excommunication, Erasmus confessed himself shocked. On January 15,1521, the Pope sent him a letter expressing pleasure in his loyalty; at the same time Leo sent instructions to Aleander to treat the humanist with every courtesy. As the Diet of Worms approached, a German prince asked Erasmus to come to Luther’s help, but he replied that it was too late. He regretted Luther’s refusal to submit; such submission, he thought, would have furthered the movement for reform; now he feared civil war. In February 1521, he wrote to a friend:

Luther now abandoned hope of Erasmus’ support, and put him aside as a cowardly pacifist who “thinks that all can be accomplished with civility and benevolence.”⁹⁴ At the same time, and despite Leo’s instructions, Aleander and the Louvain theologians continued to attack Erasmus as a secret Lutheran. Disgusted, he moved to Basel (November 15, 1521), where he hoped to forget the young Reformation in the old Renaissance. Basel was the citadel of Swiss humanism. Here labored Beatus Rhenanus, who edited Tacitus and Pliny the Younger, discovered Velleius Paterculus, and superintended the printing of Erasmus’ New Testament. Here were printers and publishers who were also scholars, like Hans Amerbach and that saint among publishers, Johann Froben(ius), who wore himself out over his presses and texts, and (said Erasmus) “left his family more honor than fortune.” ⁹⁵ Here Dürer lived for years; here Holbein made breath-taking portraits of Froben and Bonifacius Amerbach—who gathered the art collection now in the Basel Museum. Seven years before, on an earlier visit, Erasmus had described the circle with fond exaggeration:

Living with Froben, Erasmus acted as literary adviser, wrote prefaces, edited the Fathers. Holbein made famous portraits of him at Basel (1523—24). One is still there; another was sent to Archbishop Warham, and is now in the Earl of Radnor’s collection; the third, in the Louvre, is Holbein’s masterpiece. Standing at a table writing, wrapped in a heavy fur-trimmed coat, hooded with a beret covering half of each ear, the greatest of the humanists betrays in his premature age (he was now fifty-seven) the toll taken by ill health, a peripatetic life of controversy, and the spiritual loneliness and grief brought on by his attempt to be fair to both sides in the dogmatic conflicts of his time. Disheveled strays of white hair emerge from the beret. Grim, thin lips; features refined but strong; a sharp, ferreting nose; heavy eyelids almost closed on tired eyes; here, in one of the greatest of all portraits, is the Renaissance slain by the Reformation.

On December 1, 1522, the new pope, Adrian VI, wrote to Erasmus in terms suggestive of the extraordinary influence with which both sides credited him:

After a preliminary exchange of letters pledging each other to secrecy, Erasmus opened his heart to the Pope:

Poor Adrian, whose good intentions outran his powers, died brokenhearted in 1523. His successor, Clement VII. continued to urge Erasmus to enter the lists against Luther. When finally the scholar yielded, it was with no personal attack on Luther, no general indictment of the Reformation, but by an objective and mannerly discussion of free will (De libero arbitrio, 1524). He admitted that he could not fathom the mystery of moral freedom, nor reconcile it with divine omniscience and omnipotence. But no humanist could accept the doctrines of predestination and determinism without sacrificing the dignity and value of man or of human life: here was another basic cleavage between the Reformation and the Renaissance. To Erasmus it seemed obvious that a God who punished sins that His creatures as made by Him could not help committing, was an immoral monster unworthy of worship or praise; and to ascribe such conduct to Christ’s “Father in heaven” would be the direst blasphemy. On Luther’s assumptions the worst criminal would be an innocent martyr, fated to sin by an act of God, and then condemned by divine vengeance to eternal suffering. How could a believer in predestination make any creative effort, or labor to improve the condition of mankind? Erasmus confessed that a man’s moral choice is fettered by a thousand circumstances over which he has had no control; yet man’s consciousness persists in affirming some measure of freedom, without which he would be a meaningless automaton. In any case, Erasmus concluded, let us admit our ignorance, our incapacity to reconcile moral freedom with divine prescience or omnipresent causality; let us postpone the solution to the Last Judgment; but meanwhile let us shun any hypothesis that makes man a puppet, and God a tyrant crueler than any in history.

Clement VII sent Erasmus 200 florins ($5,000?) on receiving the treatise. Most Catholics were disappointed by the conciliatory and philosophical tone of the book; they had hoped for an exhilarating declaration of war. Melanchthon, who had expressed predestinarian views in his Loci communes, was favorably impressed by Erasmus’ argument, and omitted the doctrine in later editions; ⁹⁹ he, too, still hoped for peace. But Luther, in a delayed response entitled De servo arbitrio (1525), defended predestination uncompromisingly:

It is significant of the sixteenth-century mood that Luther rejected free will not, as some eighteenth-century thinkers would do, because it ran counter to a universal reign of law and causality, nor, as many in the nineteenth century would do, because heredity, environment, and circumstance seemed to determine, like another trinity, the desires that seem to determine the will. He rejected free will on the ground that God’s omnipotence makes Him the real cause of all events and all actions, and that consequently it is He, and not our virtue or our sins, Who decides our salvation or damnation. Luther faces the bitterness of his logic manfully:

Typical again of the age was the wide sale that this treatise On the Slave Will had in the seven Latin and two vernacular editions that were called for within a year. In the sequel this proved the great source book of Protestant theology; here Calvin found the doctrine of predestination, election, and reprobation which he transmitted to France, Holland, Scotland, England, and America. Erasmus answered Luther in two minor tracts, Hyperaspistes (The Defender) I and II (1526–27), but contemporary opinion gave the Reformer the better of the argument.

Even at this stage Erasmus continued his efforts for peace. To his correspondents he recommended tolerance and courtesy. He thought that the Church should permit clerical marriage and communion in both kinds; that she should yield some of her vast properties to lay authorities and uses; and that such divisive questions as predestination, free will, and the Real Presence should be left undefined, open to diverse interpretations.¹⁰² He advised Duke George of Saxony to treat the Anabaptists humanely; “it is not just to punish with fire any error whatever, unless there be joined to it sedition or some other crime such as the laws punish with death.” ¹⁰³ This was in 1524; in 1533, however, moved by friendship or senility, he defended the imprisonment of heretics by Thomas More.¹⁰⁴ In Spain, where some humanists had become Erasmians, the monks of the Inquisition began a systematic scrutiny of Erasmus’ works, with a view to having him condemned as a heretic (1527). Nevertheless he continued his criticism of monastic immorality and theological dogmatism as main provocatives of the Reformation. In 1528 he repeated the charge that “many convents, both of men and women, are public brothels,” and “in many monasteries the last virtue to be found is chastity.” ¹⁰⁵ In 1532 he condemned the monks as importunate beggars, seducers of women, hounders of heretics, hunters of legacies, forgers of testimonials.¹⁰⁶ He was all for reforming the Church while deprecating the Reformation. He could not bring himself to leave the Church, or to see her torn in half. “I endure the Church till the day I shall see a better one.” ¹⁰⁷

He was dismayed when he heard of the sack of Rome by Protestant and Catholic troops in the service of the Emperor (1527); he had hoped that Charles would encourage Clement to compromise with Luther; now Pope and Emperor were at each other’s throats. A closer shock came when, in a pious riot, the reformers at Basel destroyed the images in the churches (1529). Only a year before, he himself had denounced the worship of images: “the people should be taught that these are no more than signs; it would be better if there were none at all, and prayer were addressed only to Christ. But in all things let there be moderation”¹⁰⁸: this was precisely, on this point, the position of Luther. But the incensed and senseless denudation of churches seemed to him an illiberal and barbarous reaction. He left Basel and moved to Freiburg-im-Breisgau, in Catholic Austrian territory. The city authorities received him with honors, and gave him the unfinished palace of Maximilian I for a residence. When the Imperial pension came too irregularly the Fuggers sent him whatever funds he needed. But the monks and theologians of Freiburg attacked him as a secret skeptic, and as the real cause of the turmoil in Germany. In 1535 he returned to Basel. A delegation of university professors went out to welcome him, and Jerome Froben, son of Johann, gave him rooms in his home.

He was now sixty-nine, thin, with features drawn taut with age. He suffered from ulcers, diarrhea, pancreatitis, gout, stone, and frequent colds; note the swollen hands in Dürer’s drawing. In his final year he was confined to his rooms, often to his bed. Harassed with pain, and hearing almost daily of fresh attacks made upon him by Protestants and Catholics, he lost the habitual good cheer that had endeared him to his friends, and became morose. Yet, almost daily, letters of homage came to him from kings, prelates, statesmen, scholars, or financiers, and his dwelling was a goal of literary pilgrimage. On June 6, 1536, he was stricken with acute dysentery. He knew himself to be dying, but he did not ask for a priest or confessor, and passed away (June 12) without the sacraments of the Church, repeatedly invoking the names of Mary and Christ. Basel gave him a princely funeral and a tomb in the cathedral. The humanists, the printers, and the bishop of the city joined in erecting over his remains a stone slab, still in place, commemorating his “incomparable erudition in every branch of learning” His will left no legacy for religious purposes, but assigned sums for the care of the sick or the old, for providing dowries for poor girls, and for the education of promising youths.

His standing with posterity fluctuated with the prestige of the Renaissance. Almost all parties, in the fever of religious revolution, called him a trimmer and a coward. The Reformers charged him with having led them to the brink, inspired them to jump, and then taken to his heels. At the Council of Trent he was branded as an impious heretic, and his works were forbidden to Catholic readers. As late as 1758 Horace Walpole termed him “a begging parasite, who had parts enough to discover the truth, and not courage enough to profess it.”¹⁰⁹ Late in the nineteenth century, as the smoke of battle cleared, a learned and judicious Protestant historian mourned that the Erasmian conception of reform, “a scholar’s conception .... was soon interrupted and set aside by ruder and more drastic methods. Yet it may be questioned whether, after all, the slow way is not in the long run the surest, and whether any other agent of human progress can permanently be substituted for culture. The Reformation of the sixteenth century was Luther’s work; but if any fresh Reformation is .... coming, it can only be based on the principles of Erasmus.”¹¹⁰ And a Catholic historian adds an almost rationalistic appreciation: “Erasmus belonged, intellectually, to a later and more scientific and rational age. The work which he had initiated, and which was interrupted by the Reformation troubles, was resumed at a more acceptable time by the scholarship of the seventeenth century.”¹¹¹ Luther had to be; but when his work was done, and passion cooled, men would try again to catch the spirit of Erasmus and the Renaissance, and renew in patience and mutual tolerance the long, slow labor of enlightenment.