The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World (17 page)

In his
Enchiridion
he exhorted:

Creep not upon the earth, my brother, like an animal. Put on those wings which Plato says are caused to grow on the soul by the ardour of love. Rise above the body to the spirit, from the visible to the invisible, from the letter to the mystical meaning, from the sensible to the intelligible, from the involved to the simple. Rise as by rungs until you scale the ladder of Jacob.

The next years, seeking support and repose for his scholarship, he traversed Europe. In England he secured the patronage of William Wareham, archbishop of Canterbury (to whom he dedicated his translations of Euripides). And he developed an intimacy with Thomas More, then a prominent young London barrister. Their shared enthusiasm for the satirical dialogues of Lucian (c. 115- c. 200) would soon bear fruit in More’s
Utopia
and Erasmus’
Praise of Folly
(1508). Touring Italy as tutor to young English aristocrats, he visited Rome, where he was horrified by the corruption of the Church. In the countryside he saw poor peasants mulcted by papal tax collectors.

Pioneers of the new technology of printing became Erasmus’ intimates. In Venice he was welcomed into the household of Aldus Manutius (1450-1515), whose Aldine press had published elegant editions of Greek and Latin classics, and who published a much-enlarged edition of Erasmus’
Adages
(1508). In Basel he became the friend and collaborator of Johann Froben (1460?-1527), settled in Froben’s household and became his general editor and literary adviser. Froben published Erasmus’ edited version of the Greek New Testament and his
Colloquies.
Done in haste, Erasmus’ New Testament, Erasmus himself said, was “precipitated rather than edited” and failed to use some of the best surviving sources. But it was still the first published version of the printed text. Erasmus’ reputation, and the book’s low price and convenience, made it the stimulus to New Testament scholarship. It became a dominant influence on Luther’s translation into German (1522) and William Tyndale’s translation into English (1525-26). And it gave Erasmus his claim to be the father of New Testament scholarship. From all sides came attacks on his text, on his translation, his orthodoxy, and his omissions.

But, Erasmus asked, why be satisfied with the vulgar text of Saint Jerome? “You cry out that it is a crime to correct the gospels. This is a speech worthier of a coachman than of a theologian.” An English critic, accusing him of the Arian heresy for having omitted the words supporting the Trinity, predicted that “the world would again be racked by heresy, schism, faction, tumults, brawls, and tempests.” Erasmus retorted, “My New Testament has been out now for three years. Where are the heresies, schisms, tempests, tumults, brawls, hurricanes, devastation, shipwrecks, floods, general disasters, and anything worse you can think of?” The printing press had now become the collaborator and vehicle of the Protestant spirit. And so it opened the path to a popular scriptural theology—and the Reformation. Or, as it was later said, Erasmus laid the egg that Luther hatched.

The Champion of Simple Faith: Luther

It would be hard to imagine two more different responses to the challenge of Catholic Christianity at the end of the Middle Ages than Erasmus and Martin Luther. In the battle between Faith and Learning, Erasmus remained the champion of wit and learning, while Luther became the inspired champion of simple faith. While Erasmus had been raised as an orphan, Luther was the son of a domineering father. He was sent to a cathedral school in Magdeburg, then had some contact with the Brethren of the Common Life and entered the University of Erfurt to study the seven liberal arts. While Erasmus had entered the Collegia Pauperum in Paris for want of funds, Luther was denied financial aid because of his father’s prosperity. Then, pursuing his father’s wishes, he began the study of law, which came to an abrupt end in 1505. After only two months, and without asking his parents, Luther entered the Augustinian order of Hermits in Erfurt. “Not freely or desirously did I become a monk,” he later wrote in
Monastic Vows
(1521), “but walled around with the terror and agony of sudden death, I vowed a constrained and necessary vow.” The story in his
Table Talk
was that, fearing for his life when suddenly overtaken by a horrifying thunderstorm, Luther exclaimed, “Help, St. Anne, and I’ll become a monk.” On entering the monastery, he had kept only his Plautus and his Virgil, and sold all the rest of his books. He was ordained as a priest in 1507.

Erasmus never reported such a mystic experience, but found his own Christian faith confirmed by the sober wisdom of antiquity. He had wandered Europe seeking support for his retreat into scholarship. Erasmus’ Greek New Testament was a search for sources. In contrast, Luther’s translation of the Bible into German reached out to the wide audience and helped establish German as a national literary language. Erasmus wrote with humor, wit, and irony. His favorite literary form was the colloquy or dialogue of venerable classical lineage. But with no patience for dialogue, Luther asserted his Theses. How Luther came to his reformist enthusiasm is not clear. On his trip to Rome he, like Erasmus, was dismayed at the corrupt and worldly Church. Luther himself recalled his mystic experience of evangelical discovery of the “righteousness of God.”

By 1517 Luther’s ire was roused by the abuse of the Catholic practice of granting indulgences. These documents issued by authority of the pope claimed to be part of the sacrament of penance. As certificates commuting part of the temporal penalty of the sinner, they were sold through papal agents. Though theoretically they were not supposed to be effective unless the sinner was penitent, this requirement did not destroy their market. Indulgences, a welcome source of funds for the costly activities of the papacy, were managed by the Fuggers of Augsburg, one of the leading financial agents of the time. Pope Sixtus IV in 1476 had included the souls in purgatory in the saving effect of the indulgences. Luther’s patron, the elector Frederick, had banned from his territory the sale of the Jubilee Indulgences, which were said to be sold to help the pope rebuild St. Peter’s in Rome. What especially troubled Luther was the extravagant sales tactics of the German Dominican monk Johann Tetzel (1465?-1519), who had been authorized by the ambitious Archbishop Albert of Mainz.

Luther was so provoked by Tetzel’s vulgar salesmanship that he put together his Ninety-five Theses arraigning the abuses of the Catholic Church on October 31, 1517. The appealing tradition of the outraged Luther “nailing his theses to the door of the Wittenberg castle church” gives a legendary vividness to his outrage and his anger. Whether or not he actually “nailed” his theses to a church door, Luther surely affixed his concerns deep into the hearts of believing Christians. And his declaration of defiance, even in that age of slow communication, soon made him notorious.

The legend of the “nailing” has not taken account of the ambiguities surrounding indulgences in Luther’s time. The precise theological meaning had not yet been dogmatically defined by the Church. What actually was remitted by an indulgence? How serviceable was an indulgence to relieve a sinful soul from suffering in purgatory? These ambiguities had opened the opportunity for the extravagant salesmanship by Tetzel and his like, and for the extravagant indictments by Luther and others. The uses of the indulgences were so ill defined in the theology of the time that some Church historians have considered Luther’s Theses to be little more than “probing inquiries.” Luther himself said he issued them “for the purpose of eliciting truth.” He did not deny the pope’s power to grant indulgences, but he did attack the abuse of the power. And he insisted on the inwardness of the Christian religion.

Repentance, according to Luther, could not be attained by ecclesiastical fiat, but required a transformation within the believer. The true power and glory of the Church were not in the papacy but in the Gospel. Luther, lecturing at the new University of Wittenberg, had abandoned the Aristotelian scholastic theology for the study of the Bible in the original Hebrew and Greek. But his efforts to carry his message to other universities did not succeed. He now believed that salvation came not through works but through the divine gift of grace from God and through Christ. He would express this dogma in his German translation of the Bible, where he added the word “alone” in the crucial passage “For we hold that a man is justified by faith alone, apart from the works of man.”

* * *

So Luther short-circuited the power of the Church, the priesthood, and the sacraments. His combative theses, broadcast by the new art of printing, against the abuses of indulgence have attracted historians more than his more fundamental affirmations of religious faith, autonomy, and the priesthood of all believers. Without the printing press, Luther’s challenge might have made only a local flurry in Wittenberg. Luther himself sent copies of his theses to the ambitious archbishop of Mainz and to his own bishop. The printing press made it possible to circulate them more widely and more speedily than ever before.

Luther would make the printing press the vehicle also for his reforming ideas. His address “To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation concerning the reformation of the Christian Commonwealth,” published in Wittenberg, offered his argument that the spiritual power of Christianity came from the whole body of true believers, all of whom had the power to read and interpret the Scriptures for themselves. He attacked the supremacy of the pope over the state, the theories of two estates (temporal and spiritual) and of two swords (pope and emperor). He called for a national German Church, abolition of the celibacy of the clergy, and reforms of schools and universities. This was his answer to the papal bull excommunicating Luther, published in Rome in June 1520, and did more than Luther ever imagined or intended. He ignited the national spirit (not only in Germany) and sparked an overwhelming movement for reform of the Church. Published in mid-August 1520, by the eighteenth of the month his address had sold four thousand copies. In the sixteenth century it reappeared in seventeen further editions.

And Luther provided more than doctrine. He provided the treasure-house of Christian faith in a new form, which came to be called the Reformation Bible. Simply by translating the Bible into German he had committed an act of reform that translated doctrine into deed. He democratized the sources of Christian faith by putting them into the language of the marketplace. By 1522, after some two years of work, using the second edition of Erasmus’ Greek text, he had translated the whole New Testament, now illustrated by Lucas Cranach (1472-1553), whose vivid full-page woodcuts depicted dragons and the Woman of Babylon wearing papal triple crowns. From there Luther went on to the Old Testament, and the whole was published by 1534. So he made the Bible a popular cathedral. By this time some eighty editions of his New Testament had appeared and became the basis of translations into Dutch, Swedish, Danish, and Icelandic. William Tyndale (c. 1494-1536) used it along with Erasmus’ Greek New Testament for his translation, the first New Testament to be printed in English. So Luther had opened wide the gate to Scripture for all Christian Seekers, and helped destroy priestly monopoly on the sources of faith. Incidentally, he helped create a national language, for it was the eloquence of Luther’s High German that overcame the many other dialects to become eventually the language of Heine and Goethe. The democratizing of the Bible was not the only consequence of Luther’s work that far exceeded his intentions and expectations.

Calvin’s Bridge to a Democratic World

Of the great trinity of the Protestant Reformation in Europe—Erasmus, Luther, and Calvin—it was Calvin who provided a way of organizing churches that opened paths to the modern Western world of democracy, federalism, and representative government. For the Christian Seeker, Erasmus had focused the humanist tradition; Luther had transformed theology into a doctrine of personal faith, with the independence and priesthood of all believers. Calvin, with a remarkable talent both for dogma and for organization—for the theory and the practice of Protestantism—made the newly Reformed Church in his Geneva into a model for Protestant Christianity across Europe and into the New World.

Born into a bourgeois family in Noyon in Picardy, France, in 1509, John Calvin (originally Jean Chauvin or Caulvin) seemed a most unlikely candidate to become intellectual leader of the Protestant Reformation. His father was secretary to the bishop and attorney for the cathedral. Calvin was raised and educated in an aristocratic family of the de Hangists who were relatives of the bishop. Intended for the Church, Calvin was sent to Paris with the de Hangist boys to study at the rigorous Collège de Montaigu. That was where Erasmus and Rabelais, too, had studied theology. After a falling-out with the bishop, Calvin’s father directed him to give up theology for the law. And just as Luther’s father had required Luther to turn to the law, the young Calvin dutifully obliged by going to the University of Orléans. When his father died excommunicate in 1531, Calvin’s struggle to obtain a Christian burial for his father embittered his relation to the Church. At twenty-two he returned to Paris and to humanist studies. The fruit of these studies was his first book, a commentary on Seneca’s
De clementia.
When Calvin helped his friend Nicholas Cop, rector of the University of Paris, compose an address that included ideas of the Lutheran Reformation, he and Cop were forced to flee for their lives. It was probably soon after this crisis that Calvin experienced the “sudden conversion” to Protestantism that he would later describe. He became, and remained, an exile from his native France.

And Calvin would spend his life expounding the theory and developing the practice of the Protestant Reformation. Few figures in history have shown such a talent to combine theory and practice in building institutions. Few have been so adept at combining opposites. Calvin’s concept of the Church was both the most dogmatic, and the most practical; the most local, and the most universal. He preached the dogma of predestination, yet insisted that the participation of all believers was what God expected of his Church. Before he was thirty he had written
Christianae religionis Institutio
(translated as
Institutes of the Christian Religion
), the most important and comprehensive systematic statement of the Protestant cause (1536; definitive Latin edition 1559). It was in 1536, too, that he happened on his travels to pass through Geneva, where he encountered the fire-eating Guillaume Farel (1489-1565), whom he had known in Paris. Farel was now arousing the Geneva populace into an anti-Catholic fervor that resulted in image-breaking riots. And it was there, Calvin later said, that God “thrust him into the fray.” Under Farel’s influence, Geneva had revolted against its bishop, forbade the Catholic sacraments, and expelled all priests and members of religious orders who were not willing to conform to the Protestant faith. Since the Protestant rituals and system of education had not yet been established, Farel challenged Calvin to stay and help organize Geneva as a city in the biblical model. He threatened Calvin with the wrath of God if he refused.