A world lit only by fire_ the medieval m - William Manchester [56]
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