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The Vatican had shielded scholars and sponsored their successful searches for the lost treasures of classical learning, provided, of course, they confined themselves to Latin and Greek. The humanists had approved of reforming the Church, but had not bargained for Protestant ravings about predestination and hell and demons and all the baggage of supernaturalism which, to them, signified a reactionary return to medievalism. Mutianus had called Luther “the morning star of Wittenberg.” Now, according to Durant, he decided that he behaved with “the fury of a maniac.” Cochlaeus, another early admirer of Luther, wrote him: “Christ does not teach such methods as you are carrying out so offensively with ‘Antichrist,’ ‘brothels,’ ‘Devil’s nests,’ ‘cesspools,’ and other unheard-of terms of abuse, not to speak of your threatenings of sword, bloodshed, and murder,” adding: “O Luther, you were never taught this method of working by Christ!” Pirkheimer wrote: “Things have come to a pass that the popish scoundrels are made to appear virtuous by the Evangelical ones. … Luther, with his shameless, ungovernable tongue, must have lapsed into insanity, or been inspired by the Evil Spirit.”

When Erasmus agreed, Luther denounced him as a quixotic dreamer who “thinks that all can be accomplished with civility and benevolence.” Erasmus was offended. He was, and knew himself to be, the most eminent scholar of his time. But other Martinians were harder on him than their leader. Some scorned him as a renegade; others, in the words of a later critic, as “a begging parasite, who had [sense] enough to discover the truth, and not enough to profess it.” Still others denounced him as a Vatican stooge, on the pope’s payroll. That was terribly unjust. It was true that in Louvain Erasmus was as dependent upon Catholic wealth as Michelangelo in Rome; true also that he owed his bread, his books, and his very clothing to pensions from an archbishop, a baron, and the Holy Roman emperor, all loyal to the Holy See. However, he had accepted them only on the condition that he would retain his intellectual independence. And he continued to exercise it. In Cologne, in Frederick III’s inn rooms—where he had saved Luther, who never thanked him, and enraged Aleandro, who never forgave him—he had shown that he was no papal pawn. That was merely an omen; as the interfaith conflict grew, so did his courage.

ERASMUS was not without weakness. He was guilty of all the familar academic sins. He overestimated the power of logic, assumed that intelligent men are rational, and believed that through his friendships with the European elite—the emperor, the pope, King Francis I, King Henry VIII, Italian princes, German barons, the lord chancellor of England, and virtually every learned man on the Continent—he could alter events. Although he privately regarded conventional religion as a stew of superstitions, he could envisage no institution which would replace the Roman faith as an enforcer of social discipline and private morality. In Christendom’s widening civil war, he foresaw only madness, and he believed the Catholic infrastructure could be set aright if he brought his wisdom to bear on its flaws. Hans Holbein’s portrait in oils, now in the Louvre, captures the inner Erasmus: thin-lipped, longnosed, the eyes hooded, the expression forbidding. It may be seen as a study in intellectual arrogance. “I do not admit,” he wrote, “that my doctrine can be judged by anyone, even by the angels.”

But he was wise. No other figure on the European stage saw the religious crisis so clearly; if he was vain to suppose that he could impose his solution on it, the fact remains that no other solution made sense. And despite the judgment of his contemporaries, Protestant and Catholic alike, he was no weakling. In rejecting Luther’s overture he had assured his own isolation, for obscurantist Catholic theologians deeply distrusted him. They not only blamed Erasmus for Luther’s defection; they suspected him of being his amanuensis. “These men,” he had written to Luther, “cannot by any means