A world lit only by fire_ the medieval m - William Manchester [94]
That animosity grew, for although he would not abandon Rome—“I endure the Church till the day I shall see another [better] one,” he wrote—he refused to mute either his suggestions for Catholic reforms or his criticism of those who had dishonored their vows. The Vatican should encourage tolerance, he wrote; its hostility toward all change was senseless. He offered suggestions. The Church was too rich; vast tracts of its arable land should be turned over to those who farmed them. The clergy ought to be allowed to marry. Worshipers might be offered alternate forms of communion. Predestination appalled him, but he thought it should be studied, discussed, and debated by priests with open minds. And something must be done about promiscuous nuns and lecherous, thieving, forging, drunken monks; “in many monasteries the last virtue to be found is chastity,” and “many convents” had become “public brothels.”
HE CONTINUED to correspond with Pope Leo X and, later, his successors, Adrian VI and Clement VII. All instructed the Curia to extend him every courtesy, but they were ignored. The fog of religious strife was, if anything, thicker than those of secular wars; obscurant theologians in Rome and hard-liners in the dioceses abroad saw the widening apostasy as an opportunity to stifle dissent. In Catholic Louvain they were particularly active, even among Erasmus’s colleagues, and their suspicion of him rose on October 8, 1520, when Aleandro arrived there to promulgate Luther’s excommunication. He spread word that the great scholar was the secret mastermind behind Protestant revolts. The faculty, reasoning that the nuncio ought to know, was preparing to expel its most learned colleague when, anticipating his critics, he abruptly left.
Erasmus moved to Cologne, then still loyal to the pontiff. Rumors that he was a closet Lutheran followed him, however; strangers accosted him with the charge that he had laid the egg Luther hatched. “Yes,” he would wryly reply, “but the egg I laid was a hen, whereas Luther has hatched a gamecock.” By late 1521 he was fed up with them; in mid-November he renounced his pensions, moved up the Rhine to Basel, Switzerland, and settled among a nucleus of humanists. Here he enjoyed a respite; elsewhere priests were using his name as a synonym for treachery, but the Swiss, committed to Protestantism in various forms, left him alone.
They did not, however, leave Catholicism alone. Inflamed by evangelist preachers, a Basel mob rioted, broke into every Catholic church in the vicinity, and destroyed all religious images. As it happened, Erasmus himself had recently impeached the veneration of images, writing that “people should be taught that these are no more than signs; it would be better if there were none at all, and prayer were addressed only to Christ.” He had, however, added: “But in all things let there be moderation.” The immoderate, rioting vandals had ruptured the thin membrane of civility which he cherished. Disgusted, he showed Switzerland his heels, moving this time to Freiburg im Breisgau, in Catholic Austria. By now Christendom was so confused that no one thought his source of support odd. Actually his bills were being paid by the Fuggers, staunch Catholics who were, at the same time, quietly supporting Protestants in Catholic Venice.
Nevertheless he found no peace there, either. Austrian opinion about him was divided. Freiburg’s Stadtrat (town council), welcoming Europe’s most illustrious intellectual, moved him into Maximilian’s imperial palace, but the local Augustinians were aware of, and resented, his presence among them. During his Swiss idyll, hereticators