A World Lit Only by Fire (21 page)

Erasmus, whose close friend he was, asked: “What did Nature ever create milder, sweeter, and happier than the genius of Thomas
More?” But that says more about Erasmus’s generosity than More’s character. Unquestionably the Englishman was benevolent for
his time, but it was not an age when men of mild and sweet disposition rose to power; a savage streak was almost a prerequisite
for achievement. So it was with Sir Thomas More. He had first attracted royal notice—from Henry VII—for his skills as
a Star Chamber prosecutor. In argument he was bitter, vituperative, given to streams of invective. And although as a writer
he celebrated religious tolerance in his
Utopia
, in practice he was a rigid Catholic, capable of having a servant in his own home flogged for blasphemy. He believed that
heretics, atheists, and disbelievers in a hereafter should be executed, and as chancellor he approved such

Sir Thomas More (1478–1535) as lord chancellor of England

sentences. At the same time, he was a loyal subject to Henry VIII. Presiding over the House of Commons, he cannot have imagined
a time when he would be forced to choose between his king in Hampton Court and the pope in Rome. But that time was coming.

I
N
1502,
WHEN
King Henry VII’s reign had seven years to run, his mother, Margaret Beaufort, had used her largess to found professorships
of divinity at Oxford and Cambridge. Autocratic, wealthy, cultivated, and still vigorous in her late fifties, Margaret lay
at the epicenter of England’s noble hierarchy. As viscountess of Richmond and Derby and a great-granddaughter of John of Gaunt,
she was the paradigm of what a sovereign’s mother should be. Despite her conservatism, she welcomed change, particularly in
the arts. Her country home had become a rendezvous for scholars, statesmen, poets, prelates, philosophers, and artists, and
her endowment of the chairs in divinity had been inspired by her respect for the new learning as epitomized in Europe’s rising
universities.

At the same time, she remained deeply respectful of tradition. Like More, she was a staunch Catholic; it was said that she
had never missed a Mass. Therefore she would have been mortified if she had known that within a generation the theologians
holding her professorships would be blessed, not by the Holy See, but by her younger grandson, who as sovereign would establish
an Anglican church independent of the Vatican and consecrate himself as head of it, thus becoming Christ’s vicar on the island
his grandmother and forty generations of ancestors had cherished as a bastion of the only true faith.

Virtually all humanists in the opening years of the new century shared Margaret’s reflexive loyalty to Rome. There had been
a few striking exceptions, but they all had been in Germany. In that age the bewildering quilt of tiny principalities east
of the Rhine was as remote to Englishmen as the Germania of Tacitus had been in Caesar’s time. Learned though Margaret Beaufort
was, it is doubtful that she had even heard of Conradus Celtis, the Arch-humanist, of whom it was written that “wherever he
went, he gathered students about him, and inspired them with his passion for poetry, classical literature, and antiquities.”
Yet at about the time the viscountess established her chairs of divinity, this academic giant abandoned his soul by denying
its existence and embraced atheism. His new lectures bore such titles as “Will the soul live after death?” and “Is there a
God?” His answer to both was No.

Skepticism, and then sacrilege, became stylish among his colleagues. In 1514 Eoban Hesse, a protégé of Celtis, published
Heroides Christianae
, a volume written in flawless Latin. Actually, as Durant points out, the work was a clever parody of Ovid. Only accomplished
Latinists could recognize the style, however. Others, taking it at face value, were appalled. Hesse had forged blasphemous
documents profaning the sacred origins of Christianity. Among his apocrypha, which the credulous accepted as genuine, were
passionate love letters from Mary Magdalene to Jesus and, even more shocking, from the Virgin Mary (whose virginity was exposed
as myth) to God the Father,
Domine Deus
. Subtly exploiting the plural definition of
dominus
, which may mean “lover” as well as “father,” Hesse implied that the missives had been sent to a rake who had been cuckolding
Joseph of Nazareth, and by whom she had conceived Jesus.

Nowhere was the faith of humanists so fragile as in Celtis’s homeland. Elsewhere, his adversaries, the German defenders of
Christianity, would not have been considered Christian at all. One of them, Conradus Mutianus Rufus, gave lip service to the
Church, arguing that ceremonies and creeds should be judged on their moral effects, not their literal claims; if they encouraged
private virtue and a disciplined society, he said solemnly, they should be accepted unquestioningly. Mutianus wrote: “I shall
turn my studies to piety, and will learn nothing from poets, philosophers, or historians, save what can promote a Christian
life.” According to Durant, he was attempting to marry “skepticism with religion.” If so, his efforts ended in the divorce
courts, and the blame lay with him. His public professions of piety appear to have been mere pap, intended to mollify orthodox
congregations resentful of Celtis. He was singing a different song with undergraduates, and it bore no resemblance to a hymn.
In Gotha, J. M. Robertson writes, Mutianus taught his students that Masses for the dead were worthless, fasts ineffectual,
and confessions both pointless and embarrassing. The Bible, he said, was a book of fables; only a
Dummkopf
could listen to the trials of Job and Jonah without laughing. The crucifixion was absurd. So was baptism, and if paradise
really existed, the Romans and Greeks who had lived decent lives were already there. According to Mandell Creighton, a scholar
of the Reformation, Mutianus urged undergraduates to “esteem the decrees of philosophers above those of priests,” but he advised
them to hide their agnosticism from the masses. “By faith,” he explained, “we mean not the conformity with fact of what we
say, but an opinion about divinity based on credulity and persuasiveness, which leads to profit.” Over his door he hung the
motto
Beata Tranquillitas
, honoring tranquillity. It should have read
Beata Simulatio
, praising hypocrisy.

B
UT
G
ERMANY
was unique, Christendom’s greatest headache, presenting difficulties so vexing that there must have been times when pontiffs
wished it had been left unconverted. Elsewhere European
eruditum
—with a few striking exceptions, which would emerge later—was made up of devout men who, like the artists responsible
for St. Peter’s new majesty, reflected glory on the Church. The Vatican had been hospitable to the emerging Renaissance from
the outset, and saw no reason for regret.

It would. Humanism, the Holy See would bitterly learn, led to the greatest threat the Church had ever faced. Actually it posed
two threats. Martin Luther identified the first when he wrote: “Reason is the greatest enemy that faith has; it struggles
against the divine word, treating with contempt all that emanates from God. The Virgin birth was unreasonable; so was the
Resurrection; so were the Gospels, the sacraments, the pontifical prerogatives, and the promise of life everlasting.” If you
were a believer, you never subjected piety to the test of logic. Intellectuals, however, found logic an irresistible attraction,
and therein lay their menace.

The second threat was inherent in the medieval Church’s preoccupation with the afterlife. As early as
A.D
. 166 Lucian had defined Christians as “men who are persuaded that they will survive death and live forever; in consequence,
they despise death and are willing to sacrifice their lives to that faith.” Belief in a life everlasting lay at the very center
of Christianity. To true Christians, life on earth was almost irrelevant. During it they obeyed the precepts of Catholicism
to safeguard their future in paradise, disciplined by the fear that if they didn’t, they might lose it. The thought of living
for the sheer sake of living, celebrating mortal existence before God took them unto his own, was subversive of the entire
structure. Yet that was precisely the prospect humanism offered. The new scholars took their worldly scripture from the first
surviving fragment of Plato’s Protagoran dialogue: “Man is the measure of all things.”

Abandoning the past’s preoccupation with eternity, humanists preached enrichment of life in the here and now. Their message,
reversing ten centuries of solemnity, was hearty—an expression of confidence that men would learn to understand, and then
master, natural forces, that they could grasp the nature of the universe, even shape their individual destinies. Those steeped
in the habitude of the Middle Ages should have recognized this as a dangerous heresy, eclipsing the pitiful defiance of a
Savonarola, but they didn’t. The prestige of the scholars, and the eminence of their supporters, obscured the enormity of
the challenge. So did confusion over the relationship between the artists of the Renaissance, who were above controversy,
and the militant humanists. Those who translate revolutionary concepts into action are never as acceptable, or even as respectable,
as those who express themselves indirectly. Humanism, by its very character, implied a revolt against all religious authority.
It still does; the evangelists who denounce “secular humanism” five centuries later recognize the true adversary of fundamentalism.

As the apostasy grew, its character would slowly become clear to those who remained blindly loyal to the old Catholicism —
to men like England’s Sir John Fortescue, His Majesty’s chief justice, who, after paying fulsome tribute to his country’s
laws, an Englishman’s right to trial by jury, and the principle that civilized sovereigns should be law-abiding servants of
those over whom they reigned, ended with a baffling non sequitur. All governments, he wrote, must be subject to the pope,
“
usque ad pedum oscula
,”—“even to kissing his feet.”

Men whose dedication to the papacy extended that far would ultimately come to realize that the humanists were moving in a
very different direction. They had begun as pure scholars dedicated to the rediscovery of Latin, and then Greek, classics.
But their emphasis on wisdom not derived from religious sources had led them to turn away from the supernatural. They did
not reject it—not yet, at any rate not outside Germany. Their movement was still transitional; the change was one of emphasis,
toward a new faith which held that man’s happiness and welfare in this lifetime should come first, taking precedence over
what might or might not follow it, that mankind’s highest ethical objective is not the salvation of his soul but the earthly
good of all humanity.