The Age of the Reformation Part 4

The humanism of Germany centered in the universities. At the close of the fifteenth century new courses in the Latin cla.s.sics, in Greek and in Hebrew, began to supplement the medieval curriculum of logic and philosophy. At every academy there sprang up a circle of "poets," as they called themselves, often of {54} lax morals and indifferent to religion, but earnest in their championship of culture. Nor were these circles confined entirely to the seats of learning. Many a city had its own literary society, one of the most famous being that of Nuremberg. Conrad Mutia.n.u.s Rufus drew to Gotha, [Sidenote: Mutian, 1471-1526] where he held a canonry, a group of disciples, to whom he imparted the Neo-Platonism he had imbibed in Italy. Disregarding revelation, he taught that all religions were essentially the same. "I esteem the decrees of philosophers more than those of priests," he wrote.

[Sidenote: Reuchlin, 1455-1522]

What Lefevre and Colet had done for the New Testament, John Reuchlin did for the Old. After studying in France and Italy, where he learned to know Pico della Mirandola, he settled at Stuttgart and devoted his life to the study of Hebrew. His _De Rudimentis Hebraicis_, [Sidenote: 1506] a grammar and dictionary of this language, performed a great service for scholarship. In the late Jewish work, the _Cabbala_, he believed he had discovered a source of mystic wisdom. The extravagance of his interpretations of Scriptual pa.s.sages, based on this, not only rendered much of his work nugatory, but got him into a great deal of trouble. The converted Jew, John Pfefferkorn, proposed, in a series of pamphlets, that Jews should be forbidden to practise usury, should be compelled to hear sermons and to deliver up all their Hebrew books to be burnt, except the Old Testament. When Reuchlin's aid in this pious project was requested it was refused in a memorial dated October 6, 1510, pointing out the great value of much Hebrew literature. The Dominicans of Cologne, headed by their inquisitor, James Hochstraten, made this the ground for a charge of heresy. The case was appealed to Rome, and the trial, lasting six years, excited the interest of all Europe. In Germany it was argued with much heat in a host of {55} pamphlets, all the monks and obscurantists taking the side of the inquisitors and all the humanists, save one, Ortuin Gratius of Cologne, taking the part of the scholar. The latter received many warm expressions of admiration and support from the leading writers of the time, and published them in two volumes, the first in 1514, under the t.i.tle _Letters of Eminent Men_. It was this that suggested to the humanist, Crotus Bubea.n.u.s, the t.i.tle of his satire published anonymously, _The Letters of Obscure Men_. In form it is a series of epistles from monks and hedge-priests to Ortuin Gratius. [Sidenote: _Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum_]

Writing in the most barbarous Latin, they express their admiration for his attack on Reuchlin and the cause of learning, gossip about their drinking-bouts and pot-house amours, expose their ignorance and gullibility, and ask absurd questions, as, whether it is a mortal sin to salute a Jew, and whether the worms eaten with beans and cheese should be considered meat or fish, lawful or not in Lent, and at what stage of development a chick in the egg becomes meat and therefore prohibited on Fridays. The satire, coa.r.s.e as it was biting, failed to win the applause of the finer spirits, but raised a shout of laughter from the students, and was no insignificant factor in adding to contempt for the church. The first book of these _Letters_, published in 1515, was followed two years later by a second, even more caustic than the first. This supplement, also published without the writer's name, was from the pen of Ulrich von Hutten.

[Sidenote: Hutten, 1488-1523]

This brilliant and pa.s.sionate writer devoted the greater part of his life to war with Rome. His motive was not religious, but patriotic.

He longed to see his country strong and united, and free from the galling oppression of the ultramontane yoke. He published Valla's _Donation of Constantine_, and wrote epigrams on the popes. His dialogue _Fever the First_ is a {56} vitriolic attack on the priests.

His _Vadiscus or the Roman Trinity_ [Sidenote: 1520] scourges the vices of the curia where three things are sold: Christ, places and women.

When he first heard of Luther's cause he called it a quarrel of monks, and only hoped they would all destroy one another. But by 1519 he saw in the Reformer the most powerful of allies against the common foe, and he accordingly embraced his cause with habitual zeal. His letters at this time breathe out fire and slaughter against the Romanists if anything should happen to Luther. In 1523, he supported his friend Francis von Sickingen, in the attempt to a.s.sert by force of arms the rights of the patriotic and evangelic order of knights. When this was defeated, Hutten, suffering from a terrible disease, wandered to Switzerland, where he died, a lonely and broken exile. His epitaph shall be his own lofty poem:

I have fought my fight with courage, Nor have I aught to rue, For, though I lost the battle, The world knows, I was true!

[Sidenote: Erasmus, 1466-1536]

The most cosmopolitan, as well as the greatest, of all the Christian humanists, was Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam. Though an illegitimate child, he was well educated and thoroughly grounded in the cla.s.sics at the famous school of Deventer. At the age of twenty he was persuaded, somewhat against his will, to enter the order of Augustinian Canons at Steyn. Under the patronage of the Bishop of Cambrai he was enabled to continue his studies at Paris. [Sidenote: 1499-1509] For the next ten years he wandered to England, to various places in Northern France and Flanders, and Italy, learning to know many of the intellectual leaders of the time. From 1509-14 he was in England, part of the time lecturing at Cambridge. He then spent some {57} years at Louvain, seven years at Basle and six years at Freiburg in the Breisgau, returning to Basle for the last year of his life.

Until he was over thirty Erasmus's dominant interest was cla.s.sical literature. Under the influence of Colet and of a French Franciscan, John Vitrier, he turned his attention to liberalizing religion. His first devotional work, _The Handbook of the Christian Knight_, perfectly sets forth his program of spiritual, as opposed to formal, Christianity. [Sidenote: _Enchiridion Militis Christiani_, 1503] It all turns upon the distinction between the inner and the outer man, the moral and the sensual. True service of Christ is purity of heart and love, not the invocation of saints, fasting and indulgences.

In _The Praise of Folly_ Erasmus mildly rebukes the foibles of men.

[Sidenote: 1511] There never was kindlier satire, free from the savage scorn of Crotus and Hutten, and from the didactic scolding of Sebastian Brant, whose _Ship of Fools_ [Sidenote: 1494] was one of the author's models. Folly is made quite amiable, the source not only of some things that are amiss but also of much harmless enjoyment. The besetting silliness of every cla.s.s is exposed: of the man of pleasure, of the man of business, of women and of husbands, of the writer and of the pedant. Though not unduly emphasized, the folly of current superst.i.tions is held up to ridicule. Some there are who have turned the saints into pagan G.o.ds; some who have measured purgatory into years and days and cheat themselves with indulgences against it; some theologians who spend all their time discussing such absurdities as whether G.o.d could have redeemed men in the form of a woman, a devil, an a.s.s, a squash or a stone, others who explain the mystery of the Trinity.

In following up his plan for the restoration of a simpler Christianity, Erasmus rightly thought that a return from the barren subtleties of the schoolmen to {58} the primitive sources was essential. He wished to reduce Christianity to a moral, humanitarian, undogmatic philosophy of life. His att.i.tude towards dogma was to admit it and to ignore it.

Scientific enlightenment he welcomed more than did either the Catholics or the Reformers, sure that if the Sermon on the Mount survived, Christianity had nothing to fear. In like manner, while he did not attack the cult and ritual of the church, he never laid any stress on it. "If some dogmas are incomprehensible and some rites superst.i.tious," he seemed to say, "what does it matter? Let us emphasize the ethical and spiritual content of Christ's message, for if we seek his kingdom, all else needful shall be added unto us." His favorite name for his religion was the "philosophy of Christ,"

[Sidenote: Philosophy of Christ] and it is thus that he persuasively expounds it in a note, in his Greek Testament, to Matthew xi, 30:

Truly the yoke of Christ would be sweet and his burden light, if petty human inst.i.tutions added nothing to what he himself imposed. He commanded us nothing save love one for another, and there is nothing so bitter that charity does not soften and sweeten it. Everything according to nature is easily borne, and nothing accords better with the nature of man than the philosophy of Christ, of which almost the sole end is to give back to fallen nature its innocence and integrity. . . . How pure, how simple is the faith that Christ delivered to us! How close to it is the creed transmitted to us by the apostles, or apostolic men. The church, divided and tormented by discussions and by heresy, added to it many things, of which some can be omitted without prejudice to the faith. . . . There are many opinions from which impiety may be begotten, as for example, all those philosophic doctrines on the reason of the nature and the distinction of the persons of the G.o.dhead. . . . The sacraments themselves were inst.i.tuted for the salvation of men, but we abuse them for lucre, for vain glory or for the oppression of the humble. . . . What rules, what superst.i.tions we have about vestments! How many are judged as to {59} their Christianity by such trifles, which are indifferent in themselves, which change with the fashion and of which Christ never spoke! . . . How many fasts are inst.i.tuted!

And we are not merely invited to fast, but obliged to, on pain of d.a.m.nation. . . . What shall we say about vows . . . about the authority of the pope, the abuse of absolutions, dispensations, remissions of penalty, law-suits, in which there is much that a truly good man cannot see without a groan? The priests themselves prefer to study Aristotle than to ply their ministry. The gospel is hardly mentioned from the pulpit. Sermons are monopolized by the commissioners of indulgences; often the doctrine of Christ is put aside and suppressed for their profit. . . . Would that men were content to let Christ rule by the laws of the gospel and that they would no longer seek to strengthen their obscurant tyranny by human decrees!

[Sidenote: Colloquies]

In the _Familiar Colloquies_, first published in 1518 and often enlarged in subsequent editions, Erasmus brought out his religious ideas most sharply. Enormous as were the sales and influence of his other chief writings, they were probably less than those of this work, intended primarily as a text-book of Latin style. The first conversations are, indeed, nothing more than school-boy exercises, but the later ones are short stories penned with consummate art. Erasmus is almost the only man who, since the fall of Rome, has succeeded in writing a really exquisite Latin. But his supreme gift was his dry wit, the subtle faculty of exposing an object, apparently by a simple matter-of-fact narrative, to the keenest ridicule. Thus, in the _Colloquies_, he describes his pilgrimage to St. Thomas's shrine at Canterbury, the b.l.o.o.d.y bones and the handkerchief covered with the saint's rheum offered to be kissed--all without a disapproving word and yet in such a way that when the reader has finished it he wonders how anything so silly could ever have existed. Thus again he strips the worship of Mary, and all the {60} stupid and wrong projects she is asked to abet. In the conversation called _The Shipwreck_, the people pray to the Star of the Sea exactly as they did in pagan times, only it is Mary, not Venus that is meant. They offer mountains of wax candles to the saints to preserve them, although one man confides to his neighbor in a whisper that if he ever gets to land he will not pay one penny taper on his vow. Again, in the _Colloquy on the New Testament_, a young man is asked what he has done for Christ. He replies:

A certain Franciscan keeps reviling the New Testament of Erasmus in his sermons. Well, one day I called on him in private, seized him by the hair with my left hand and punished him with my right. I gave him so sound a drubbing that I reduced his whole face to a mere jelly. What do you say to that? Isn't that maintaining the gospel? And then, by way of absolution for his sins I took this book [Erasmus's New Testament, a folio bound with bra.s.s] and gave him three resounding whacks on the head in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.

"That," replies his friend, "was truly evangelic; defending the gospel by the gospel. But really it is time you were turning from a brute beast into a man."

So it was that the man who was at once the gentlest Christian, the leading scholar, and the keenest wit of his age insinuated his opinions without seeming to attack anything. Where Luther battered down, he undermined. [Sidenote: Methods of argument] Even when he argued against an opinion he called his polemic a "Conversation"--for that is the true meaning of the word Diatribe. With choice of soft vocabulary, of attenuated forms, of double negatives, he tempered exquisitely his Latin. Did he doubt anything? Hardly, "he had a shade of doubt"

(_subdubito_). Did he think he wrote well? Not at all, but he confessed that he produced "something more like Latin than the average"

(_paulo latinius_). Did he {61} like anything? If so, he only admitted--except when he was addressing his patrons--"that he was not altogether averse to it." But all at once from these feather-light touches, like those of a Henry James, comes the sudden thrust that made his stylus a dagger. Some of his epigrams on the Reformation have been quoted in practically every history of the subject since, and will be quoted as often again.

[Sidenote: His wit]

But it was not a few perfect phrases that made him the power that he was, but an habitual wit that never failed to strip any situation of its vulgar pretense. When a canon of Stra.s.sburg Cathedral was showing him over the chapter house and was boasting of the rule that no one should be admitted to a prebend who had not sixteen quarterings on his coat of arms, the humanist dropped his eyes and remarked demurely, with but the flicker of a smile, that he was indeed honored to be in a religious company so n.o.ble that even Jesus could not have come up to its requirements. The man was dumfounded, he almost suspected something personal; but he never forgot the salutary lesson so delicately conveyed.

Erasmus was a man of peace; he feared "the tumult" which, if we trust a letter dated September 9, 1517--though he sometimes retouched his letters on publishing them--he foresaw. "In this part of the world,"

he wrote, "I am afraid that a great revolution is impending." It was already knocking at the door!

{62}

CHAPTER II

GERMANY

SECTION 1. THE LEADER

It is superfluous in these days to point out that no great historical movement is caused by the personality, however potent, of a single individual. The men who take the helm at crises are those who but express in themselves what the ma.s.ses of their followers feel. The need of leadership is so urgent that if there is no really great man at hand, the people will invent one, endowing the best of the small men with the prestige of power, and embodying in his person the cause for which they strive. But a really strong personality to some extent guides the course of events by which he is carried along. Such a man was Luther. [Sidenote: Luther, 1483-1546] Few have ever alike represented and dominated an age as did he. His heart was the most pa.s.sionately earnest, his will the strongest, his brain one of the most capacious of his time; above all he had the gift of popular speech to stamp his ideas into the fibre of his countrymen. If we may borrow a figure from chemistry, he found public opinion a solution supersaturated with revolt; all that was needed to precipitate it was a pebble thrown in, but instead of a pebble he added the most powerful reagent possible.

On that October day when Columbus discovered the new world, Martin, a boy of very nearly nine, was sitting at his desk in the school at Mansfeld. Though both diligent and quick, he found the crabbed Latin primer, itself written in abstract Latin, very difficult, and was flogged fourteen times in one morning by {63} brutal masters for faltering in a declension. When he returned home he found his mother bending under a load of wood she had gathered in the forest. Both she and his father were severe with the children, whipping them for slight faults until the blood came. Nevertheless, as the son himself recognized, they meant heartily well by it. But for the self-sacrifice and determination shown by the father, a worker in the newly opened mines, who by his own industry rose to modest comfort, the career of the son would have been impossible.

Fully as much as by bodily hardship the boy's life was rendered unhappy by spiritual terrors. Demons lurked in the storms, and witches plagued his good mother and threatened to make her children cry themselves to death. G.o.d and Christ were conceived as stern and angry judges ready to thrust sinners into h.e.l.l. "They painted Christ," says Luther--and such pictures can still be seen in old churches--"sitting on a rainbow with his Mother and John the Baptist on either side as intercessors against his frightful wrath."

At thirteen he was sent away to Magdeburg to a charitable school, and the next year to Eisenach, where he spent three years in study. He contributed to his support by the then recognized means of begging, and was sheltered by the pious matron Ursula Cotta. In 1501 he matriculated at the old and famous university of Erfurt. [Sidenote: Erfurt] The curriculum here consisted of logic, dialectic, grammar, and rhetoric, followed by arithmetic, ethics, and metaphysics. There was some natural science, studied not by the experimental method, but wholly from the books of Aristotle and his medieval commentators, and there were also a few courses in literature, both in the Latin cla.s.sics and in their later imitators. Ranking among the better {64} scholars Luther took the degrees of bachelor in 1502 and of master of arts in 1505, and immediately began the study of jurisprudence. While his diligence and good conduct won golden words from his preceptors he mingled with his comrades as a man with men. He was generous, even prodigal, a musician and a "philosopher"; in disputations he was made "an honorary umpire" by his fellows and teachers. "Fair fortune and good health are mine," he wrote a friend on September 5, 1501, "I am settled at college as pleasantly as possible."

For the sudden change that came over his life at the age of twenty-one no adequate explanation has been offered. Pious and serious as he was, his thoughts do not seem to have turned towards the monastic life as a boy, nor are the old legends of the sudden death of a friend well substantiated. As he was returning to Erfurt from a visit home, he was overtaken by a terrific thunderstorm, in which his excited imagination saw a devine warning to forsake the "world." In a fright he vowed to St. Ann to become a monk and, though he at once regretted the rash promise, on July 17, 1505, he discharged it by entering the Augustinian friary at Erfurt. After a year's novitiate he took the irrevocable vows of poverty, chast.i.ty, and obedience. In 1507 he was ordained priest. In the winter of 1510-1 he was sent to Rome on business of the order, and there saw much of the splendor and also of the corruption of the capital of Christendom. Having started, in 1508, to teach Aristotle at the recently founded University of Wittenberg, a year later he returned to Erfurt, but was again called to Wittenberg to lecture on the Bible, a position he held all his life. [Sidenote: 1511]

During his first ten years in the cloister he underwent a profound experience. He started with the horrible and torturing idea that he was doomed to h.e.l.l. {65} "What can I do," he kept asking, "to win a gracious G.o.d?" The answer given him by his teachers was that a man must work out his own salvation, not entirely, but largely, by his own efforts. The sacraments of the church dispensed grace and life to the recipient, and beyond this he could merit forgiveness by the asceticism and privation of the monastic life. Luther took this all in and strove frantically by fasting, prayer, and scourging to fit himself for redemption. But though he won the reputation of a saint, he could not free himself from the desires of the flesh. He was helpless; he could do nothing. Then he read in Augustine that virtue without grace is but a specious vice; that G.o.d d.a.m.ns and saves utterly without regard to man's work. He read in Tauler and the other mystics that the only true salvation is union with G.o.d, and that if a man were willing to be d.a.m.ned for G.o.d's glory he would find heaven even in h.e.l.l. He read in Lefevre d'etaples that a man is not saved by doing good, but by faith, like the thief on the cross.

In May, 1515, he began to lecture on Paul's Epistles to the Romans, and pondered the verse (i, 17) "The just shall live by his faith."

[Sidenote: Justification by faith only] All at once, so forcibly that he believed it a revelation of the Holy Ghost, the thought dawned upon him that whereas man was impotent to do or be good, G.o.d was able freely to make him so. Pure pa.s.sivity in G.o.d's hands, simple abandonment to his will was the only way of salvation; not by works but by faith in the Redeemer was man sanctified. The thought, though by no means new in Christianity, was, in the application he gave it, the germ of the religious revolution. In it was contained the total repudiation of the medieval ecclesiastical system of salvation by sacrament and by the good works of the cloister. To us nowadays the thought seems remote; the question which called it forth outworn. But to the {66} sixteenth century it was as intensely practical as social reform is now; the church was everywhere with her claim to rule over men's daily lives and over their souls. All progress was conditioned on breaking her claims, and probably nothing could have done it so thoroughly as this idea of justification by faith only.

The thought made Luther a reformer at once. He started to purge his order of Pharisaism, and the university of the dross of Aristotle.

Soon he was called upon to protest against one of the most obtrusive of the "good works" recommended by the church, the purchase of indulgences. Albert of Hohenzollern was elected, through political influence and at an early age, to the archiepiscopal sees of Magdeburg and Mayence, this last carrying with it an electorate and the primacy of Germany. For confirmation from the pope in the uncanonical occupation of these offices, Albert paid a huge sum, the equivalent of several hundred thousand dollars today. Mayence was already in debt and the young archbishop knew not where to turn for money. To help him, and to raise money for Rome, Leo X declared an indulgence. In order to get a large a profit as possible Albert employed as his chief agent an unscrupulous Dominican named John Tetzel. [Sidenote: Tetzel]

This man went around the country proclaiming that as soon as the money clinked in the chest the soul of some dead relative flew from purgatory, and that by buying a papal pardon the purchaser secured plenary remission of sins and the grace of G.o.d.

The indulgence-sellers were forbidden to enter Saxony, but they came very near it, and many of the people of Wittenberg went out to buy heaven at a bargain. Luther was sickened by seeing what he believed to be the deception of the poor people in being taught to rely on these wretched papers instead of on real, lively faith. He accordingly called their value in question, {67} in Ninety-five Theses, or heads for a scholastic debate, which he nailed to the door of the Castle Church on October 31, 1517. [Sidenote: The Ninety-five Theses, 1517]

He pointed out that the doctrine of the church was very uncertain, especially in regard to the freeing of souls from purgatory; that contrition was the only gate to G.o.d's pardon; that works of charity were better than buying of indulgences, and that the practices of the indulgence-sellers were extremely scandalous and likely to foment heresy among the simple. In all this he did not directly deny the whole value of indulgences, but he pared it down to a minimum.

The Theses were printed by Luther and sent around to friends in other cities. They were at once put into German, and applauded to the echo by the whole nation. Everybody had been resentful of the extortion of greedy ecclesiastics and disgusted with their hypocrisy. All welcomed the attack on the "holy trade," as its supporters called it. Tetzel was mobbed and had to withdraw in haste. The pardons no longer had any sale. The authorities took alarm at once. Leo X directed the general of the Augustinians to make his presumptuous brother recant.

[Sidenote: February 3, 1518] The matter was accordingly brought up at the general chapter of the Order held at Heidelberg in May. Luther was present, was asked to retract, and refused. On the contrary he published a Sermon on Indulgence and Grace and a defence of the theses stating his points more strongly than before.

The whole of Germany was now in commotion. The Diet which met at Augsburg in the summer of 1518 was extremely hostile to the pope and to his legate, Cardinal Cajetan. At the instance of this theologian, who had written a reply to the Theses, and of the Dominicans, wounded in the person of Tetzel, Luther was summoned to Rome to be tried. On August 5 the {68} Emperor Maximilian promised his aid to the pope, and in order to expedite matters, the latter changed the summons to Rome to a citation before Cajetan at Augsburg, at the same time instructing the legate to seize the heretic if he did not recant. At this juncture Luther was not left in the lurch by his own sovereign, Frederic the Wise, Elector of Saxony, through whom an imperial safe-conduct was procured. Armed with this, the Wittenberg professor appeared before Cajetan at Augsburg, was asked to recant two of his statements on indulgences, and refused. [Sidenote: October 12-14, 1518] A few days later Luther drew up an appeal "from the pope badly informed to the pope to be better informed," and in the following month appealed again from the pope to a future oec.u.menical council. In the meantime Leo X, in the bull _c.u.m postquam_, authoritatively defined the doctrine of indulgences in a sense contrary to the position of Luther.

The next move of the Vicar of Christ was to send to Germany a special agent, the Saxon Charles von Milt.i.tz, with instructions either to cajole the heretic into retraction or the Elector into surrendering him. In neither of these attempts was he successful. [Sidenote: January 1519] At an interview with Luther the utmost he could do was to secure a general statement that the accused man would abide by the decision of the Holy See, and a promise to keep quiet as long as his opponents did the same.

Such a compromise was sure to be fruitless, for the champions of the church could not let the heretic rest for a moment. The whole affair was given a wider publicity than it had hitherto attained, and at the same time Luther was pushed to a more advanced position than he had yet reached, by the attack of a theologian of Ingolstadt, John Eck. When he a.s.sailed the Theses on the ground that they seriously impaired the authority of the Roman see, Luther retorted:

{69} The a.s.sertion that the Roman Church is superior to all other churches is proved only by weak and vain papal decrees of the last four hundred years, and is repugnant to the accredited history of the previous eleven hundred years, to the Bible, and to the decree of the holiest of all councils, the Nicene.