A World Lit Only by Fire (24 page)

L
IKE ITS PREDECESSOR
,
Iulius exclusus
was a
succès fou
; an Antwerp humanist wrote the author that it was “for sale everywhere here. Everyone is buying it, everyone is talking of
it.” The Curia, alarmed now, urged Erasmus to lay his pen aside and spend the rest of his life in repentant piety. It was
too late. That same year, 1514, saw the appearance of
Familiarium colloquiorum formulae
in the first of its several editions. Eventually the
Colloquia familiaria
, as it came to be called, became the bulkiest and most loosely organized of his works, and it is the most difficult to characterize.
Essentially it was a miscellaneous collection of random thoughts; the full title,
Forms of Familiar Conversations, by Erasmus of Rotterdam, Useful Not Only for Polishing a Boy’s Speech But for Building His
Character
, suggests his lack of a theme. Written in idiomatic, chatty Latin, these colloquies included a peculiar blessing to be bestowed
on pregnant women—“Heaven grant that the burden you carry may have as easy an exit as it had an entry”—together with encouragement
of circumcision, advice on the proper response when someone sneezed, paeans to piety, discouragement of the burning of heretics,
and an endless, tedious colloquy between “The Young Man and the Harlot,” at the end of which the prostitute, perhaps exhausted,
agrees to abandon her calling. There were off-color jokes, droll observations on the irrationality of human behavior, an endorsement
of the institution of marriage, et cetera, et cetera.

Had that been all, his public, disappointed, would have left the work unread. But Erasmus had not finished savaging the Church
and her clergy. An eighteenth-century Protestant translator later wrote that he knew of “no book fitter to read which does,
in so delightful and instructing a manner, utterly overthrow almost all the Popish Opinions and Superstitions.” Certainly
that seemed the author’s intent. He attacked priestly greed, the abuse of excommunication, miracles, fasting, relic-mongering,
and lechery in the monasteries. Women were urged to keep a safe distance from “brawny, swill-bellied monks. … Chastity is
more endangered in the cloister than out of it.”

Once more, however, he leveled his heaviest artillery on the Vatican. His contempt for Julius’s wars was venomous—“as if
the Church had any enemies as pestilential as impious pontiffs who by their silence allow Christ to be forgotten, enchain
[him] by their mercenary rules … and crucify him afresh by their scandalous life!” Depravity and corruption still outraged
him: “As to these Supreme Pontiffs, who take the place of Christ,” he wrote, “were wisdom to descend upon them, it would inconvenience
them! … It would lose them all that wealth and honor, all those possessions, triumphal progresses, offices, dispensations,
tributes and indulgences,” requiring instead vigils, prayer, meditation, “and a thousand troublesome tasks of that sort.”
In a private letter he wrote, “The monarchy of Rome, as it is now, is a pestilence to Christendom.”

In the first rush after publication, twenty-four thousand copies of the colloquies vanished from bookshops, and between then
and midcentury only the Bible outsold it. There was a continuing demand for all his popular works. In 1520 an Oxford bookseller
noted that a third of all the volumes he sold were written by Erasmus. Forty editions of
Encomium moriae
were published in the author’s lifetime, and as late as 1632 Milton found the book “in everyone’s hand” at Cambridge. It
was this popularity, not the barbs themselves, which outraged those ecclesiastics who saw themselves as enforcers of the holy
faith. Like every writer who has reached a large audience, he was dismissed for pandering to the masses, telling them what
they wanted to hear, motivated solely by the base desire to make money. The impact of his successes on Christendom’s establishment
may be judged by an edict from the Holy Roman emperor. Any teacher found using the
Colloquia
in a classroom, he ordered, was to be executed on the spot. Martin Luther agreed. “On my deathbed I shall forbid my sons
to read Erasmus’ ‘Colloquies.’ ” But Luther was then still professor of biblical exegesis at Wittenberg, an eminent member
of the Catholic establishment. Within three years he would change his mind and, with it, the history of Western civilization.
And Erasmus, though he denied it on his own deathbed, had sounded the claxon of religious revolution.

O
F COURSE
, “the great apostasy,” as it came to be called in the Vatican, was no more the work of humanist scholars than it was an achievement
of those godless descendants of Goths who had amused themselves by forging obscene propositions from the Blessed Virgin. The
forces which fractured the unity of Christendom were enormously complex, and humanism, though a prime mover, was merely one
current in the mighty wave which had just begun to form far out in the deep. One of its contributions was the revelation that
art and learning had flourished before the birth of Jesus, when, it had been thought, such accomplishments were impossible.
But men also wondered why God had allowed the triumph of the Muslims and the fall of Constantinople. And explorers returning
from Asia and the Western Hemisphere reported thriving cultures which had either rejected Christ or never heard of him, thus
discrediting those European Christian leaders who had held that belief in the savior was universal. It was an omen that Marguerite
of Angoulême, the lovely Perle des Valois, sister of the king of France and herself queen of Navarre, became a skeptic. Once
a woman of ardent faith, she now became a lapsed Catholic. In
Le miroir de I’âme pécheresse
, she acknowledged that she despised the religious orders, approved of attacks on the pope, thought God cruel, and doubted
the Scriptures. Marguerite was accused of heresy before the Sorbonne, and a monk told his flock she should be sewn in a sack
and flung into the Seine. As the sister of the French king she was never in peril, however; he adored her, and her championing
of sexual freedom had enhanced her popularity in France.

The Vatican, with its population of bastards, was in no position to censure an advocate of infidelity. Marguerite’s only real
threat to Catholicism was her subsequent role as an accomplice of its enemies; she later provided sanctuary for fugitives
from heresimach posses. One of them was John Calvin. It is instructive to note that Calvin was an ingrate. He rebuked his
protectress for including, as guests of her court, Bonaventure Desperiers and Étienne Dolet, skeptics who mocked Catholics
and Protestants alike. The dismal truth is that the new Christians would turn out to be at least as bigoted as the old.

However, their clergy were to prove neither corrupt nor depraved, and this, in that age, was refreshing. At a time when homicide,
thievery, rape, and assassination reached shocking heights, loyal Catholics were most deeply distressed by the abuses of their
own clergymen. Many of the clergy agreed. Abbot Johannes Trithemius of Sponheim condemned his own monks: “The whole day is
spent in filthy talk; their whole time is given to play and gluttony. … They neither fear nor love God; they have no thought
of the life to come, preferring their fleshly lusts to the needs of the soul. … They scorn the vow of poverty, know not that
of chastity, revile that of obedience. … The smoke of their filth ascends all around.” Another monk noted that “many convents
… differ little from public brothels.” According to Durant, Guy Jouenneaux, a papal emissary sent to inspect the Benedictine
monasteries of France in 1503, described the monks as foulmouthed gamblers and lechers who “live the life of Bacchanals” and
“are more worldly than the mere worldling. … Were I minded to relate all those things that have come under my own eyes, I
should make too long a tale of it.”

In England Archbishop (later Cardinal) John Morton accused Abbot William of St. Albans of “simony, usury, embezzlement and
living publicly and continuously with harlots and mistresses within the precincts of the monastery and without,” and accused
the country’s monks of leading “a life of lasciviousness … nay, of defiling the holy places, even the very churches of God,
by infamous intercourse with nuns,” making a neighborhood priory “a public brothel.” The bishop of Torcello wrote: “The morals
of the clergy are corrupt; they have become an offense to the laity.”

The public perception of the priesthood was in fact appalling. Eustace Chapuys, Charles V’s ambassador in England, wrote the
emperor: “Nearly all the people hate the priests.” A Cambridge professor observed that “Englishmen, if called monk, priest,
or clerk, felt bitterly insulted.” Everywhere, wrote William Durand, bishop of Mende, the Church “is in ill repute, and all
cry and publish it abroad that within her bosom all men, from the greatest even unto the least, have set their hearts upon
covetousness. … That the whole Christian folk take from the clergy pernicious examples of gluttony is clear and notorious,
since the clergy feast more luxuriously … than princes and kings.” In Vienna the priesthood had once been the objective of
ambitious youths. But now, on the eve of the religious revolt, it had attracted no recruits for twenty years.

In his fourteen-volume
History of the Popes
, Ludwig Pastor concludes that it was virtually impossible to exaggerate the “contempt and hatred of the laity for the degenerate
clergy.” Philip Hughes, historian of the Reformation in England, found that in 1514, when the chancellor of the bishop of
London was accused of murdering a heretic, the bishop asked Cardinal Wolsey to prevent a trial by jury because Londoners were
“so maliciously set in favor of heretical pravity that they will … condemn my clerk, though he were as innocent as Abel.”
Even Pope Leo, who, one would have thought, might have felt some responsibility for scandals committed in the name of the
Church, observed in 1516, “The lack of rule in the monasteries of France and the immodest life of the monks have come to such
a pitch that neither kings, princes, nor the faithful have any respect for them.”

Priests by the thousands found it impossible to live in celibacy. Their solutions varied. In London it was not unknown for
women entering the confessional box to be offered absolution in exchange for awkward, cramped intercourse on the spot. In
Norfolk, Ripton, and Lambeth, 23 percent of the men indicted for sex crimes against women were clerics, though they constituted
less than 2 percent of the population. The most common solution for men unable to bear the strain of continence was to take
a mistress. Virtually all German priests kept women. The Roman clergy had a reputation for promiscuity, “but it is a mistake,”
writes Pastor, “to assume that the corruption of the clergy was worse in Rome than elsewhere; there is documentary evidence
of the immorality of the priests in almost every town in the Italian peninsula. … No wonder, as contemporary writers sadly
testify, the influence of the clergy had declined, and in many places hardly any respect was shown for the priesthood.”

There was trouble in the convents, too. The problem seems to have been especially distressing in England. In 1520 eight nunneries
there were closed, one because of “the dissolute disposition and incontinence of the religious women of the house, by reason
of the vicinity of Cambridge University.” After an examination of twenty-one convents in the diocese of Lincoln, fourteen
were blacklisted for “lack of discipline or devotion.” In several, nuns had been found who had been made pregnant by priests.
Two reports told of prioresses living in adultery. A diocesan commission filed a separate account of one abbess who had presented
a local blacksmith with three sons.

The failure of pontiffs to set a good example was heavily blamed. Egidio of Viterbo, general of the Augustinians, summed up
Pope Alexander’s Rome in nine words: “No law, no divinity; Gold, force and Venus rule.” Guicciardini wrote: “Reverence for
the Papacy has been utterly lost in the hearts of men.” In 1513 Machiavelli charged that there could be no greater proof of
papal “decadence than the fact that the nearer people are to the Roman Church, the head of their religion, the less religious
they are. And whoever examines the principles on which that religion is founded, and sees how widely different from those
principles its present practice and application are, will judge that her ruin or chastisement is near at hand.”