A World Lit Only by Fire (34 page)

Intolerance, contempt for learning, the burning of religious art, the rejection of classical culture as pagan, and the adoption
of primitive papal tactics—book burning, excommunication, even death at the stake—alienated humanists who had at first
defended Luther: Johannes Cochlaeus, dean at Frankfurt am Main; Johannes Reuchlin, who had stopped the burning of Luther’s
books and as a result faced trial as a heretic; Willibald Pirkheimer, the Nuremberg merchant, scholar, and friend of Dürer,
whom Erasmus had called “the chief glory of Germany” and who had been excommunicated for his open defense of Luther; Conradus
Mutianus Rufus of Gotha; and Erasmus himself.

The Vatican had shielded scholars and sponsored their successful searches for the lost treasures of classical learning, provided,
of course, they confined themselves to Latin and Greek. The humanists had approved of reforming the Church, but had not bargained
for Protestant ravings about predestination and hell and demons and all the baggage of supernaturalism which, to them, signified
a reactionary return to medievalism. Mutianus had called Luther “the morning star of Wittenberg.” Now, according to Durant,
he decided that he behaved with “the fury of a maniac.” Cochlaeus, another early admirer of Luther, wrote him: “Christ does
not teach such methods as you are carrying out so offensively with ‘Antichrist,’ ‘brothels,’ ‘Devil’s nests,’ ‘cesspools,’
and other unheard-of terms of abuse, not to speak of your threatenings of sword, bloodshed, and murder,” adding: “O Luther,
you were never taught this method of working by Christ!” Pirkheimer wrote: “Things have come to a pass that the popish scoundrels
are made to appear virtuous by the Evangelical ones. … Luther, with his shameless, ungovernable tongue, must have lapsed into
insanity, or been inspired by the Evil Spirit.”

When Erasmus agreed, Luther denounced him as a quixotic dreamer who “thinks that all can be accomplished with civility and
benevolence.” Erasmus was offended. He was, and knew himself to be, the most eminent scholar of his time. But other Martinians
were harder on him than their leader. Some scorned him as a renegade; others, in the words of a later critic, as “a begging
parasite, who had [sense] enough to discover the truth, and not enough to profess it.” Still others denounced him as a Vatican
stooge, on the pope’s payroll. That was terribly unjust. It was true that in Louvain Erasmus was as dependent upon Catholic
wealth as Michelangelo in Rome; true also that he owed his bread, his books, and his very clothing to pensions from an archbishop,
a baron, and the Holy Roman emperor, all loyal to the Holy See. However, he had accepted them only on the condition that he
would retain his intellectual independence. And he continued to exercise it. In Cologne, in Frederick III’s inn rooms—where
he had saved Luther, who never thanked him, and enraged Aleandro, who never forgave him—he had shown that he was no papal
pawn. That was merely an omen; as the interfaith conflict grew, so did his courage.

E
RASMUS
was not without weakness. He was guilty of all the familar academic sins. He overestimated the power of logic, assumed that
intelligent men are rational, and believed that through his friendships with the European elite—the emperor, the pope, King
Francis I, King Henry VIII, Italian princes, German barons, the lord chancellor of England, and virtually every learned man
on the Continent—he could alter events. Although he privately regarded conventional religion as a stew of superstitions,
he could envisage no institution which would replace the Roman faith as an enforcer of social discipline and private morality.
In Christendom’s widening civil war, he foresaw only madness, and he believed the Catholic infrastructure could be set aright
if he brought his wisdom to bear on its flaws. Hans Holbein’s portrait in oils, now in the Louvre, captures the inner Erasmus:
thin-lipped, longnosed, the eyes hooded, the expression forbidding. It may be seen as a study in intellectual arrogance. “I
do not admit,” he wrote, “that my doctrine can be judged by anyone, even by the angels.”

But he
was
wise. No other figure on the European stage saw the religious crisis so clearly; if he was vain to suppose that he could
impose his solution on it, the fact remains that no other solution made sense. And despite the judgment of his contemporaries,
Protestant and Catholic alike, he was no weakling. In rejecting Luther’s overture he had assured his own isolation, for obscurantist
Catholic theologians deeply distrusted him. They not only blamed Erasmus for Luther’s defection; they suspected him of being
his amanuensis. “These men,” he had written to Luther, “cannot by any means be disabused of the suspicion that your works
are written by my aid, and that I am, as they call it, the standard-bearer [
vexillarius
] of your party. … I have testified to them that you are entirely unknown to me, that I have not read your books, and neither
approve nor disapprove of your writings, but that
they
should read them before they speak so loudly. … It was no use; they are as mad as ever. … I am myself the chief object of
animosity.”

That animosity grew, for although he would not abandon Rome—“I endure the Church till the day I shall see another [better]
one,” he wrote—he refused to mute either his suggestions for Catholic reforms or his criticism of those who had dishonored
their vows. The Vatican should encourage tolerance, he wrote; its hostility toward all change was senseless. He offered suggestions.
The Church was too rich; vast tracts of its arable land should be turned over to those who farmed them. The clergy ought to
be allowed to marry. Worshipers might be offered alternate forms of communion. Predestination appalled him, but he thought
it should be studied, discussed, and debated by priests with open minds. And something
must
be done about promiscuous nuns and lecherous, thieving, forging, drunken monks; “in many monasteries the last virtue to be
found is chastity,” and “many convents” had become “public brothels.”

H
E CONTINUED
to correspond with Pope Leo X and, later, his successors, Adrian VI and Clement VII. All instructed the Curia to extend him
every courtesy, but they were ignored. The fog of religious strife was, if anything, thicker than those of secular wars; obscurant
theologians in Rome and hard-liners in the dioceses abroad saw the widening apostasy as an opportunity to stifle dissent.
In Catholic Louvain they were particularly active, even among Erasmus’s colleagues, and their suspicion of him rose on October
8, 1520, when Aleandro arrived there to promulgate Luther’s excommunication. He spread word that the great scholar was the
secret mastermind behind Protestant revolts. The faculty, reasoning that the nuncio ought to know, was preparing to expel
its most learned colleague when, anticipating his critics, he abruptly left.

Erasmus moved to Cologne, then still loyal to the pontiff. Rumors that he was a closet Lutheran followed him, however; strangers
accosted him with the charge that he had laid the egg Luther hatched. “Yes,” he would wryly reply, “but the egg I laid was
a hen, whereas Luther has hatched a gamecock.” By late 1521 he was fed up with them; in mid-November he renounced his pensions,
moved up the Rhine to Basel, Switzerland, and settled among a nucleus of humanists. Here he enjoyed a respite; elsewhere priests
were using his name as a synonym for treachery, but the Swiss, committed to Protestantism in various forms, left him alone.

They did not, however, leave Catholicism alone. Inflamed by evangelist preachers, a Basel mob rioted, broke into every Catholic
church in the vicinity, and destroyed all religious images. As it happened, Erasmus himself had recently impeached the veneration
of images, writing that “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.” He had, however, added: “But in all things let there be moderation.” The
immoderate, rioting vandals had ruptured the thin membrane of civility which he cherished. Disgusted, he showed Switzerland
his heels, moving this time to Freiburg im Breisgau, in Catholic Austria. By now Christendom was so confused that no one thought
his source of support odd. Actually his bills were being paid by the Fuggers, staunch Catholics who were, at the same time,
quietly supporting Protestants in Catholic Venice.

Nevertheless he found no peace there, either. Austrian opinion about him was divided. Freiburg’s Stadtrat (town council),
welcoming Europe’s most illustrious intellectual, moved him into Maximilian’s imperial palace, but the local Augustinians
were aware of, and resented, his presence among them. During his Swiss idyll, hereticators had been smearing him all over
the Continent. Using techniques which would reemerge in later ages, they identified him as the leader of apostate conspiracies,
muttering, in Europe’s many tongues, one of mankind’s oldest and most insidious apothegms:
Es gibt keinen Rauch ohne Feuer
—Where there’s smoke, there must be fire.

Erasmus was now approaching seventy. Racked with pain from several afflictions—gallstones, ulcers, gout, dysentery, respiratory
disease, arthritis, and pancreatitis—he also felt suffocated by suspicion. In his final flight he returned to Basel. There,
after years of wandering, pursued by lies, he passed away in the home of Jerome Froben, son of the scholar-publisher Johann,
who had first published his Latin translation of the Greek New Testament.

Erasmus died a martyr to everything he had despised in life: fear, malice, excess, ignorance, barbarism. And his martyrdom
did not end at the grave. He had known that his life was ebbing, yet asked for neither priest nor confessor. Word that he
had refused last rites found its way to Spain, where the rekindled Inquisition, having completed a systematic study of his
books, began formal proceedings against the doyen of humanism, thereby setting in motion wheels which, eight years later,
would grind out a formal denunciation of Erasmus. He was excommunicated and branded a heretic. Under the violent reactionary
Pope Paul IV, who as a cardinal had reorganized the Inquisition, everything Erasmus had ever published was consigned to the
Index Expurgatorius
, which meant that any Catholic who read the prose which had once delighted a pontiff would be placing his soul in jeopardy.
^*

E
RASMUS WAS
the most eminent intellectual victimized by the revolution, but he was far from alone. Indeed, once the lines of battle had
been drawn, humanists everywhere were hostages to one side or the other, and sometimes to both. Reason itself had become suspect:
tolerance was seen as treachery. Luther, once he had survived Worms, was shielded by Frederick the Wise and the gathering
armies of Protestantism. Catholics could find refuge in monasteries, with sympathetic sovereigns or princes, in the papal
states, or among the thousandfold sanctuaries of the Holy Roman emperor. The intellectuals were usually without champions,
unarmed in a Europe bristling with weapons, and at times it seemed that every man’s hand was against them. Very few were to be untouched during the disorders. Some, like Erasmus, fled from
one asylum to another; some were executed; others survived torture but were horribly maimed, their noses torn away, foreheads
branded, hands cut off at the wrist, or nipples plucked out by pincers.