A World Lit Only by Fire (33 page)

Perhaps the most popular Protestant dogma—and a striking illustration of how far removed that century was from this—was
predestination: the tenet that God, being omniscient and omnipotent, is responsible for every action, virtuous and vile, and
man is without choice. Luther, the ultimate determinist, could not grasp the concept of moral freedom. In
De servo arbitrio
(1525) he wrote: “The human will is like a beast of burden. … God foresees, foreordains, and accomplishes all things by an
unchanging, eternal, and efficacious will. By this thunderbolt free will sinks shattered in the dust.”

But, dissenters replied, if no man’s actions can alter his fate—if his salvation or damnation are foreordained—why resist
wicked temptations, or toil to improve the human condition, or even go to church? They argued furiously and endlessly, but
never reasonably. Thus Protestantism was divided at its birth. There was the Lutheran Church, and there was the Reformed.
As other major figures emerged—Huldrych Zwingli of Switzerland, for example; John Calvin, a native of France; and the Scotsman
John Knox—new sects formed, each with its own views of worship, each as intolerant of the others as it was of Rome, each
as repressive as Catholicism. Anabaptists appeared, and Mennonites, Bohemians, and the forerunners of Baptists, Congregationalists,
Presbyterians, and Unitarians.

In the spirit of the time, they celebrated their spiritual rebirths violently. Tirades led to recriminations, then to public
executions. Autos-da-fé were more popular than ever. Peasants would walk thirty miles to hoot and jeer as a fellow Christian,
enveloped in flames, writhed and screamed his life away. Afterward the most ardent spectators could be identified by their
own singed hair and features; in their eagerness to enjoy the gamy scent of burning flesh, they had crowded too close. Ultimately
this fascination with

The Reformation Monument, Geneva

death, as ordinary then as it seems extraordinary now, led to massive butchery—to spreading bloodstains of religious wars
which crossed national frontiers and carried over into a new age.

N
O ONE HAS
calculated how many sixteenth-century Christians slaughtered other Christians in the name of Christ, but the gore began to
thicken early. Within a year of Worms, Von Sickingen was in the field, fighting an army led by the archbishop of Trier—the
prelate turned out to be the better general; the knight fell mortally wounded—and within four years the number of Germans
killed or executed approached a quarter-million. Their faith cannot be indicted for their deaths. The homicidal lust had long
been latent. Before the revolution, Christendom’s common people, as brutal as their leaders, had enjoyed the sport known to
the Germans as
Bärenhetze
—setting famished dogs loose on a bear chained in a pit and watching them eat him alive. A part of them had wanted to be
down in the pit, too. They had been awaiting an excuse for a rampage, and Worms would have provided it, whatever the outcome:
the knights of Luther’s volunteer escort had sworn to kill him unless he refused to recant.

Even as word of his successful defiance spread across Germany, the mayhem had begun. Erfurt heard the news in the last days
of April; a mob demolished forty houses belonging to the Church, burned rent rolls, razed a library, and, invading the university,
killed a humanist scholar. In Wittenberg another mob, brandishing daggers and rocks, invaded a parish service; women kneeling
before an image of the Madonna were stoned, and the priest driven out. The following day a band of students destroyed the
altars of the city’s Franciscan monastery. Shortly thereafter, a leader of the local Augustinian congregation mounted a stump
and called upon all who could hear him to follow their example—to roam the countryside, applying the ax to Catholic images,
altars, and sacred paintings, and then feeding them to flames. Luther’s colleague, Professor Karlstadt, led students in assaults
on local churches, tearing crucifixes and pictures from the walls and stoning priests who tried to intervene. Wearing civilian
clothes, Karlstadt said the Mass in German and invited his congregation to celebrate holy communion by drinking from the chalice
and taking the bread in their own hands—sacrilege in the eyes of Rome. He persuaded Wittenberg’s Ratsversammlung, the town’s
council, to ban music at all religious services. Both monks and priests, he argued, should be
required
to wed, and he observed his fortieth birthday by setting an example, marrying a fifteen-year-old girl.

It was these disorders which had flushed Luther out of his sanctuary in the Thuringian Forest. His attitude toward violence
had always been ambivalent. No Protestant, not even Hutten, had published prose as incendiary as
Adel deutscher Nation
, but now, confronted with the consequences, he drew back. It proved to be only the temporary lapse of a revolutionary. Nevertheless
it was impressive. He preached: “Do not suppose that abuses are eliminated by destroying the object which is abused. Men can
go wrong with wine and women; shall we then prohibit wine and ban women? The sun, the moon, the stars, have been worshipped;
shall we then pluck them out of the sky?”

Under his direction, both old and new communion rites were made available to Wittenbergers, and worshipers who cherished crucifixes,
religious images, and holy music were left alone; as a composer of hymns, he himself approved of such solace. The Ratsversammlung,
reversing itself, drove Karlstadt out of town. Unchastised, he took a pulpit in nearby Orlamünde to condemn Luther as a “gluttonous
ecclesiastic … the new Wittenberg pope.” His congregation was swayed. Frederick the Wise, fearing an uprising—and it was
coming—asked Luther to make the burghers of Orlamünde see reason. He tried, but nothing was sacred anymore, not even the
man who, more than any other, had inspired them; the Orlamünders, refusing to listen to him, stoned him and pasted him with
mud until he withdrew.

Hearing of the incident, Thomas Müntzer, another former Lutheran turned radical Anabaptist, published a pamphlet calling his
former idol “Dr. Liar [
Dr. Lügner
],” a “shameless monk” who spent his time “whoring and drinking.” Müntzer was openly calling on the serfs to revolt; in a
leaflet,
Ermahnung zum Frieden (Admonition to Peace
), Luther begged them to be patient. They rose anyway, and when their rebellion collapsed—nearly 100,000 peasant deaths
later—Karlstadt was threatened with prosecution as an instigator. Ironically, he turned to Luther for refuge. It was quickly
granted, and Karlstadt, weary of struggle, hoarse from his polemics, and exhausted by the demands of his teenaged bride, returned
to teaching. He died, an obscure professor in Basel, fifteen years later. Müntzer was less fortunate. He led rebellious peasants
against seasoned troops in Saxony. The defeat of the rebels was followed by an orgy of medieval brutality; five thousand men
were put to the sword. Some three hundred were spared when their women agreed to beat out the brains of two priests suspected
of encouraging the uprising. Then Müntzer himself was tortured to the point of death and beheaded.

L
UTHER
had been among the captivated readers of Erasmus’s
Encomium moriae
. The eminent humanist was now busy at the University of Louvain’s Collegium Trilingue, with professorships in Greek, Latin,
and Hebrew, and on March 18, 1519, Luther had written him there, humbly soliciting his support. It was a curious appeal, revealing
a total misunderstanding of everything Erasmus represented. Replying on May 30, the scholar suggested that it “might be wiser
of you to denounce those who misuse the Pope’s authority than to censure the Pope himself. … Old institutions cannot be uprooted
in an instant. Quiet argument may do more than wholesale condemnation. Avoid all appearance of sedition. Keep cool. Do not
get angry. Do not hate anybody.”

Erasmus continued to defend 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.