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By Root 403 0

Luther. In the Axiomata Erasmi, a statement addressed to Frederick of Saxony, he declared that men who loved the gospel were those least resentful of the Wittenberg monk; Christians were demanding evangelical truth, he added, and could not be suppressed. To Lorenzo Cardinal Campeggio he sent a long letter which began with the observation that during his travels “I perceived that the better a man was, the less he was Luther’s enemy. … If we want truth, every man ought to be free to say what he thinks without fear. If the advocates of one side are to be rewarded with miters, and the advocates of the other side with rope or stake, truth will not be heard.” He now knew that the Exsurge Domine had been genuine, but believed that “nothing could have been more invidious or unwise than the Pope’s bull. It was unlike Leo X, and those who were sent to publish it”—Eck and Aleandro—“only made things worse.” He concluded: “You may assure yourself that Erasmus has been, and always will be, a faithful subject of the Roman See. But I think, and many will think with me, that there would be a better chance of settlement if there were less ferocity.”

But thus far the greater ferocity had come from Rome’s critics. If Luther had badly misjudged Erasmus, Erasmus’s misjudgment of Luther was complete. There is no other way to interpret his May 30, 1519, letter to him. It was an offer of reasonable advice to an unreasonable fundamentalist. As such, it was not only wasted but probably incomprehensible to the monk, whose sensible preaching to the Wittenbergers had been out of character; who, most of the time, spoke the language of invective. The monk in Wittenberg was by nature everything the scholar in Louvain asked him not to be: inflammatory, passionate, seditious, hot, furious, and a born hater. That was his magic, and it was also part of his genius. Erasmus had deplored injustice without result; Luther hated it with great results. One man was thoughtful, the other intuitive.

However, intuition, though it fuels action, is volatile and therefore dangerous. And Luther’s sense of justice was selective. Though he was outraged by the peasant revolt, he remained silent on the one early excess of Protestantism which offended learned Europeans most. The Erfurt mob’s murder of a humanist, an innocent bystander, was an omen to his fellow humanists. Intellectuals everywhere were caught entre deux feux—in peril, as, in times of bloodlust, they have always been. By exposing Roman corruption and eroding blind acceptance of medieval superstition, thoughtful men had opened the way for reform, but the reformers, being emotional men, did not acknowledge the debt. On the contrary; the “Martinians,” as Luther’s followers called themselves, accepted what was coming to be known as the Zwickau Dogma, named after the town in which it originated. The dogmatists held that God spoke directly to simple men in simple language, that they instinctively understood him, and that the true Christian spurned literature, even reading and writing. Karlstadt, though learned, had first destroyed his own books and then declared that true believers should confine themselves to tilling the ground or working with their hands. George Mohr, a colleague and protégé, resigned from the faculty to preach the joys of illiteracy, and a number of Wittenberg undergraduates, seeing no point in further study, left their lecture halls to become craftsmen.

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