A world lit only by fire_ the medieval m - William Manchester [95]
Erasmus was now approaching seventy. Racked with pain from several afflictions—gallstones, ulcers, gout, dysentery, respiratory disease, arthritis, and pancreatitis—he also felt suffocated by suspicion. In his final flight he returned to Basel. There, after years of wandering, pursued by lies, he passed away in the home of Jerome Froben, son of the scholar-publisher Johann, who had first published his Latin translation of the Greek New Testament.
Erasmus died a martyr to everything he had despised in life: fear, malice, excess, ignorance, barbarism. And his martyrdom did not end at the grave. He had known that his life was ebbing, yet asked for neither priest nor confessor. Word that he had refused last rites found its way to Spain, where the rekindled Inquisition, having completed a systematic study of his books, began formal proceedings against the doyen of humanism, thereby setting in motion wheels which, eight years later, would grind out a formal denunciation of Erasmus. He was excommunicated and branded a heretic. Under the violent reactionary Pope Paul IV, who as a cardinal had reorganized the Inquisition, everything Erasmus had ever published was consigned to the Index Expurgatorius, which meant that any Catholic who read the prose which had once delighted a pontiff would be placing his soul in jeopardy. *
ERASMUS WAS the most eminent intellectual victimized by the revolution, but he was far from alone. Indeed, once the lines of battle had been drawn, humanists everywhere were hostages to one side or the other, and sometimes to both. Reason itself had become suspect: tolerance was seen as treachery. Luther, once he had survived Worms, was shielded by Frederick the Wise and the gathering armies of Protestantism. Catholics could find refuge in monasteries, with sympathetic sovereigns or princes, in the papal states, or among the thousandfold sanctuaries of the Holy Roman emperor. The intellectuals were usually without champions, unarmed in a Europe bristling with weapons, and at times it seemed that every man’s hand was against them. Very few were to be untouched during the disorders. Some, like Erasmus, fled from one asylum to another; some were executed; others survived torture but were horribly maimed, their noses torn away, foreheads branded, hands cut off at the wrist, or nipples plucked out by pincers.
At the outbreak of the revolution most of the humanists had been ordained priests, and several, because of their eminence, were picked by their superiors to serve as blacklisters, leading the Church’s counterrevolution. Suspecting Protestant sympathies among his clergy, the bishop of Meaux appointed Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples his vicar general with instructions to weed them out. Lefèvre, then approaching seventy, was professor of philosophy at the University of Paris, the author of works on physics, mathematics, and Aristotelian ethics, and a Latin translation of Saint Paul’s Epistles. His former pupils—the bishop was one of them—revered him without exception.
But although he wore vestments and celebrated Mass, Lefèvre was above all a humanist. To expose medieval myths, he proposed a clearer version of the original New Testament. He was working on a French translation of the Bible, and—like Luther — he believed that the Gospels, not papal decrees, should be the ultimate court of theological appeal. Lefèvre was incautious enough to observe also that he thought it “shameful” that bishops should devote their days to hunting and their nights to drinking, gambling, and mounting putains—a criticism which was ill received in Meaux. Suddenly the hunter of heretics was himself condemned as one, and by the Sorbonne at that. Fleeing Paris, he found sanctuary in Strasbourg, in Blois, and, finally, in