Fatal Discord: Erasmus, Luther and the Fight for the Western Mind

Michael Massing, “Fatal Discord: Erasmus, Luther and the Fight for the Western Mind,” Harper Collins, 2018, 821 pp.

This is an 800 plus page dual biography of the early 16th-century conflict over religion between the contemporaries Erasmus and Luther.

In many parts of the book I reflected, ‘You can’t make this stuff up.’  As I was in and out of Catholic institutions, including two colleges, I kind of missed out in real-time much of the conflict this book presents.  Good that it is never too late.

Pg. 675:  The deities described in Erasmus’s and Luther’s dueling tracts could hardly be more dissimilar.  Erasmus’s God is an even-tempered rationalist who sagely judges men and women by how they behave in the world.  Luther’s God is an inscrutable being who acts according to his own unfathomable logic, apart from human understanding and expectation.  Erasmus’s God requires the existence of free will to ensure that his rule is just; Luther’s God has to reject free will to make sure his power is unbounded.  Whereas Erasmus wanted to protect the freedom of man to choose, Luther wanted to safeguard the freedom of God to act.

I find it baffling that the allegedly most intelligent and educated persons in the early 1500’s spent most of their lives studying the bible.  Maybe because both Erasmus and Luther were Catholic priests and the recent invention of printing did not offer that much else to study.   In any event, Erasmus’s philosophy of Christ was based on the idea that man can choose to do good.  A true Christian shows his faith by imitating Christ (so good works matter).  Luther, on the other hand, held that a man must know that by himself he is nothing without divine grace (no matter what good works he may do).

Massing has written a dual biography—I presume, unauthorized--of Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536) and Martin Luther (1483–1546).  He argues that the pluralistic humanism presented by Erasmus and the evangelical religion presented by Luther still shape Western religious and political thought and controversy of today.  Erasmus, as did Luther, became a critic of contemporary Catholicism, Erasmus served as an early inspiration for Luther although they later became enemies.  Their contemporaries were Henry VIII, Thomas More, Cardinal Wolsey, Michelangelo, Raphael, Julius II and Pope Leo X.

The Reformation succeeded sufficiently to divide Christendom but not to reunite it in a new image. As Protestantism spread, it fractured. The result was a dark age of religious persecution and war: of believers tortured and burned, churches ransacked and desecrated, Jews viciously persecuted, and new sects born ready-armed for battle.

My Notes:

Pg. ix:  Erasmus was the first person in Europe able to live off the income from his writing, his books regularly sold out in the beginning of the 16^th century.

Pg. xv:  Examining the life of Luther helps shed light on the origins of modern-day evangelicalism (mostly prevalent in the US).  And studying Erasmus’s life can help unlock the origins of modern-day humanism (mostly prevalent in Europe).  Also, this book concentrates on the rivalry between the two affords an opportunity to explore the complex relationship between two great historical movements, the Renaissance and the Reformation.

Pg. 58:  The University of Paris that Erasmus attended had four faculties—arts, law, medicine, and theology.  The doctorate in theology took a minimum of eight years and an average of fifteen to complete.  The theology school was also known as the Sorbonne, after Robert de Sorbon, a wealthy theologian who in 1257 had provided the funds.  This school owed its reputation in part to the eminent figures who over the centuries had taught there, including Peter Abelard, the master of the dialectical method; Peter Lombard, the author of the main handbook of medieval theology; and Thomas Aquinas, whose Summa Theologica (1245) was considered the supreme intellectual achievement of the medieval Church (apart from Augustine, no one would do more to shape the Catholic mind.)  These men were central figures in the movement known as Scholasticism which dominated all theology schools at the time.  By applying logic to theological questions, the Scholastics sought to demonstrate religious propositions with the same precision and rigor as scientific ones.  Students were trained in constructing syllogisms, analyzing theses and the arguments against them, and stating refutations and conclusions. 

Pg. 62:  Peter Abelard’s Sentences became the chief handbook of Scholasticism.  In it he declared the seven acts (baptism, penance, the Mass, and so on) deserved sacramental status—a position that was made official in 1215 at the Fourth Lateran Council.  (Abelard died in 1160; he and Heloise are buried in Paris, a grave I visited.)

Pg. 66:  Duns Scotus (b1266) most famous proclamation, logically deduced, concerned the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, he held that Mary was born without original sin.   The idea that anyone, other than Christ, could have come into the world untainted by Adam’s transgression caused an uproar.  This debate was still raging for centuries and not fully resolved until 1854 when the Immaculate Conception doctrine was declared a dogma by Pope Pius IX.

Pg. 105f:  According to legend, the Septuagint, a Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible produced in the third century B.C., was carried out by seventy-two translators brought to Egypt from Israel by King Ptolemy, who wanted a copy of the Hebrew Scriptures for the library at Alexandria.  The translators were set to work in isolation from one another.  Miraculously it is reported they produced identical Greek texts.  (Septuagint means ‘seventy’ in Greek.)  So, from its earliest days, the Roman Church had considered the Septuagint divinely inspired and hence the only authorized text of the Old Testament.  But not for long, when St. Jerome (347 – 420 AD) discussed the Septuagint with Jews, they laughed at the many places where it diverged from the Hebrew.  He began to agree with the criticism and decided to jettison the Septuagint and work on a new Latin translation directly from the original Hebrew on his work on the Old Testament (he used the Greek version for the New Testament; there is, of course, no Hebrew version of the New Testament).  This was a radical step for a Christian and took him fourteen years to complete.  Jerome scornfully dismissed the legend of the Seventy.  His work became the Vulgate, and (as revised in 1592) adopted as the official text for the Roman Catholic Church.)  Yet, again many errors occurred.  The most famous being Jerome’s apparent intentional use of the word virgin for Mary rather than the clearly used Hebrew word meaning woman.

Pg. 123:  In 1507 Luther was ordained a priest at the age of twenty-three. 

Pg. 137:  St. Augustine’s (354-430) vision of original sin, human depravity, predestination, and the condemnation of the mass of mankind apart from any individual merit was in many ways terrifying.  Yet, he succeeded in getting it adopted by the Church.   Yet, in practice, Augustine’s denial of human agency proved too chilling to serve the needs of the Church.  Missionaries found it less than conducive to their work proclaiming a God who had decided in advance to sentence most of humankind to perdition through no fault of their own.  So Pope Gregory I developed a new formula whereby a person by performing the sacraments of the Church, could set in motion a process to attain grace.  This became institutionalized in the sacrament of penance, which, a thousand years later, by the time of Luther, became a great source of income for the Church through sales of indulgences.

Pg. 170:  Luther was a bit OCD regarding his confessions, they steadily lengthened, reaching two, three, even six hours.  Sometimes, after leaving, he would rush back to disclose some sin he had momentarily forgotten.  (Much unlike myself when the priest asked my name when I told him I had stolen a case of pop—I replied: “John Smith” and left, probably ran—not bad for a second grader, Luther could have learned a lot from me).

Pg. 176:  Today Luther is known as one of history’s most violent haters of Jews.  His hatred was present from a very early point in his career.  It was, in fact, central to his theological development.  Luther placed himself squarely in the medieval tradition of reading the Old Testament as fundamentally about Christ.  For the Jews to deny that it was a sin to have crucified Christ was worse than doing the actual crucifying.  (Erasmus shared Luther’s hatred of Jews.)

Pg. 203:  By the end of the sixteenth century, the entire framework of English schooling would be built on Erasmian principles.  In fact, the humanist curriculum he prescribed would form the foundation for all education in Europe until the latter part of the nineteenth century. 

Pg. 221:  Had it not been for St. Paul, Christianity would probably never have emerged as a separate religion but would have been absorbed back into Judaism. 

Pg. 229:  In Paul’s epistle to the Corinthians he condemned divorce and deemed it shameful for women to speak in church.  If there is anything they desire to know, let them ask their husbands at home.  (These statements would later be used to justify a subordinate status for women in the Roman Church.)

Pg. 229: Galatians has been called the Magna Carta of Christian liberty.  Paul proclaimed that the Five Books of Moses had been superseded by faith in Christ.  This would drive a wedge between Jews and Christians.

Pg. 230:  Paul’s epistle to the Romans is not only one of the most important religious documents ever written but also one of the most obscure.  At bottom, the document reflected Paul’s ongoing struggle to balance the competing claims of law and faith, deeds and beliefs. 

Pg. 269:  In early 1517 word spread that a new indulgence was being offered.  It was being preached by a Dominican friar named Johann Tetzel on behalf of the pope.  It, a plenary indulgence, offered the remission of all temporal punishment due to one’s sins over a lifetime and thus eliminating the need for any additional expiation in purgatory.  However, it was unavailable in Wittenberg itself for Frederick, the ruler of the area—wanting no competition for his own offerings--had barred Tetzel from his territory.  The money Tetzel collected had a specific designated purpose: the building of St. Peter’s in Rome.

Pg. 275:  The pope’s authority to issue indulgences derived from an inventive doctrine developed by Scholastic theologians.  Christ, the Virgin Mary, and the saints, they maintained, had performed so many meritorious acts beyond the satisfactions required of them that there had accumulated in heaven a treasury of surplus merits, which could be used to make up for the debts contracted by others.  Under the authority of the 1343 Extravagante Unigenitus, the pope could draw on this treasury and allocate its merits to individual sinners to remit the temporal penalties that had incurred for their sins.  In 1476, Sixtus IV, in a highly controversial move, declared that indulgences could remit the sins of the deceased in purgatory as well as the living.  The clamor for indulgences grew accordingly.

  

Pg. 276:  As was the custom, Leo on becoming pope announced the revocation of all the indulgences that had been proclaimed by his predecessor, with one exception—the St. Peter’s indulgence.  This he would expand as stated in the bull (dated March 13, 1515), the indulgence was to be sold for eight years in the church provinces of Mainz and Magdeburg and the state of Brandenburg (as well as in parts of France and the Low Countries).  Dispensations were available for almost all types of offenses, including adultery. 

Pg. 300:  The response to the Ninety-Five Theses was troubling to Luther: initially, there was no official response.  After the initial flurry of local excitement, the authorities had taken no action, and no one had come forward to accept his invitation to debate.  However printing had recently been invented.  An estimated six million to seven million pamphlets would be printed in the first decade, most supporting Luther (P. 352).  (In Luther’s time, as much as 30 percent of the population could read in large cities, compared with 5 to 10 percent outside them. P. 569)

Pg. 308:  Like indulgences, the Church’s use of excommunication had produced growing resentment.  Once a solemn punishment reserved for heretics and reprobates, it was now being routinely used to enforce the collection of payments and dues even from ordinary Christians falling behind in their tithes.

Pg. 366f:  In 1414 Jan Hus (b. 1369) was summoned to Rome to appear before the Council of Constance to defend ideas he was promulgating.  He was granted a safe-conduct by the emperor-elect Sigismund.  Hus is considered by many to be the first Protestant.  Hus had drawn liberally from John Wycliff (b. 1330) and condemned the entire ecclesiastical framework, including the papacy, which he insisted had no foundation in Scripture.  The Church was not ruled by the Pope but by Christ who (through correct interpretation of “thou out Peter…”) was himself the rock.  In any event, his safe-conduct was judged to not be respected because he was judged a heretic.

Pg. 388:  Luther often invoked Matthew 10:34, where Jesus declares, “Do not think I have come to bring peace to the earth.  I have not come to bring peace but a sword, for I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law, and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household.”  In the New Testament, there appear two very different Christs—one the prince of peace, the other the bearer of the sword.  Whereas Erasmus embraced the former, Luther began identifying with the latter.

Pg. 420f:  Luther began to attack the Catholic Church stance on the Sacraments.  They were of recent vintage and had not been fully defined until the mid-thirteenth century and their number had not been officially set at seven until 1439 (at the Council of Florence).  Luther tested the sacraments against the text of the New Testament—and found most of them wanting.  He ended up, in his publication of the Babylonian Captivity, with two-plus—the Lords’ Supper, baptism, and a greatly reduced version of penance.

Pg. 480:  The Edict of Worms was in effect a declaration of war on the printing press and the forces it had unleashed.  The edict leads to the creation of an apparatus of intellectual control and censorship, crowned by the establishment in 1559 of the Index of Prohibited Books, that was not discontinued until 1966 (1966 is not a typo).

Pg. 485:  Belgrade, guarded by only seven hundred men, fell in 1521 to Suleiman I the Magnificent.  The Turks could now march north along the Danube toward Hungary.  Suleiman followed up his occupation of Hungary by laying siege to Vienna.  Vienna resisted and the Ottomans had retreated.  Their westward push nonetheless dramatized the threat they posed to Christian Europe. (Pg. 730).

Pg. 494:  In 1215 the Fourth Lateran Council established annual confession as mandatory for all Christians.  Luther rejected this as a human invention.  Luther did endorse voluntary confession since from his own experience he knew the consolation it could provide.

Pg. 528:  Luther wanted a New Testament that fully conveyed his belief in the supreme place of faith in Christ.  In the key section of Romans 3:19-30 he sharpened his translation in almost every passage.  He was especially bold at 3:28.  In the Vulgate, this read, “Man is justified by faith, without the works of the law.”  When Luther translated this into German it seemed to lack the emphasis Paul had intended.  To provide it, he added the word ‘alone” so that the passage reads, “Man is justified by faith alone, without the works of the law.”  (He also made Moses and virtually everyone else in the Hebrew Bible speak like a Christian.  Luther, in short, was Christianizing the Old Testament. P. 577)

Pg. 621:  The Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, held that the bread and the wine are transformed into the body and the blood of Christ.  Their outward appearance (called ‘accidents’) remains the same but their substance is fundamentally transformed, hence the doctrine’s name: transubstantiation. 

Pg. 637:  Peasants Revolt 1525:  during the first part of April alone, more than one hundred castles were seized or burned.  For all their wantonness, the peasants’ violence was directed mostly at property; the taking of life was rare.  Luther began to prepare a new tract in which he would urge the princes of Germany to strike at the peasants, and strike them hard.  (And they did.  The peasant death toll was estimated at between 100,000 and 130,000.  Pg. 659).  (The current Catholic character of both Austria and Bavaria can be traced not only to the vigorous policies of the Counter-Reformation but also to the fierce suppression the new gospel in the aftermath of the Peasants’ War. P. 664) Again, Luther referenced Romans 13: “Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established.”  The peasants had no right to question God-given authority.  (Romans 13 is where the ‘divine right of kings’ is justified.)

Pg. 688f:  In 1604 King James I of England convened fifty scholars to produce a new translation of the Bible.  This translation relied heavily on Tyndale’s Old and New Testaments.  An estimated 90 percent of the King James Version—the cornerstone of the Church of England—came from Tyndale, who in turn got his initial inspiration from Erasmus.

Pg. 709:  Expropriating Church property was a common motive for joining the Reformation along with having the church as an arm of the state.  (Much like China and the Catholic Church today, nez pas?)

Pg. 710:  The stress on schooling, literacy, libraries, and printing would become a hallmark of Protestantism, which looked to the Book rather than the pope for direction.

Pg. 734:  With the crack that had opened in the Church at Worms, the 1530 Augsburg Confession—reworked by Melanchthon—irrevocably completed the split in the Catholic Church and would become the central creed of the Lutheran church (which it remains to this day). (In 1054, the Eastern Church had formally split from the Western, now the Western Church split).

Pg. 747:  Luther proposed that King Henry VIII solve his marital problem by taking two wives.  Henry declined and wanted only one wife (at a time).  In 1533 Anne Boleyn married Henry and gave birth to Elizabeth.  Henry also had his previous daughter, Mary, declared illegitimate, thus making Elizabeth heir to the throne.  (Luther again proposed that Landgrave Philip of Hesse again advised the ruler to follow the example of the Old Testament patriarchs and take a second wife.  Philip did just that.

Pg. 783:  The Council of Trent, meeting in twenty-five sessions between 1545 and 1563, defined the doctrines and style of piety that were to characterize Catholicism for the next four centuries. This Council rejected any Erasmusian middle path and declared the Vulgate as the only acceptable edition of the Holy Scriptures; no one ‘under any pretext whatever’ was to dare reject it.  With this article, the Catholic Church was repudiating the new methods of biblical criticism that Erasmus had helped pioneer.  (Saint Jerome’s Latin Vulgate would remain the official Bible of the Catholic Church until the mid-twentieth century.)

In other sessions, the delegates endorsed the invocation of saints, the veneration of relics, the value of shrines, the sacred use of images, and other forms of popular devotion derided by Erasmus.  They also reaffirmed the traditional interpretation of original sin.  Anyone who asserted that Adam by his act of disobedience injured only himself and not all of his progeny, and who held that through such defilement he had transmitted only death and not sin to the whole human race, was to be ‘anathema’ (the most solemn ecclesiastical curse).  (Erasmus had raised questions about original sin through his grammatical deconstruction of Romans 5:12.)

The Council of Trent did endorse Erasmus’s position on free will. 

Pg. 789:  The 1648 Peace of Westphalia ended more than a century of religion-stoked violence, dating back to the first executions of Luther’s followers in the Netherlands in the early 1520s.  The fanaticism and savagery set off by the Reformation had led to the dispossession, maiming, execution, and slaughter of millions of people.  Finally, a tenuous pluralism took hold.  The Peace of Westphalia marked the emergence of the modern nation-state.  Sovereigns exercised strict control over the churches in their lands. 

Pg. 797:  Erasmus’s influence would again appear with the underlying principles of the European Union.  His call for a pan-European identity transcending borders and nationalities, his appeals for tolerance and mutual understanding, his admonitions to Christian princes to avoid wars and foreign adventures, his stress on keeping doctrinal differences to a minimum and emphasizing all that binds humankind together, all are ideals on which the EU is built.

Addenda:

The Reformation succeeded sufficiently to divide Christendom but not to reunite it in a new image. As Protestantism spread, it fractured. The result was a dark age of religious persecution and war: of believers tortured and burned, churches ransacked and desecrated, Jews viciously persecuted, and new sects born ready-armed for battle.

Paul’s Epistle to the Romans: We need not worry about failing, since nothing we do makes any difference. Our fate is predestined by God, and our salvation will come through faith in that conviction. Luther’s famous principle of “justification by faith,” making (some of) us passive recipients of God’s unearned love, would become central in the movement that would eventually be known as Protestantism.