Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (100 page)

I gave you an apple, as a mother does when she gives an apple to her son when he cries in order to comfort him; but then when he continues to cry further and she cannot soothe him, she takes the apple away and gives it to another son . . . If you do not want to repent and be converted to God, He will take the apple from you and give it to another . . . do these four things that I have told you, and I promise you that you will be richer than ever, more glorious than ever, more powerful than ever.
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This was the first republic in human history where those in charge narrowly defined the concept of 'republic' as necessarily involving rule by the whole people - Savonarola's Florence has not often been awarded the credit for this innovation. That legacy of a particular and rather frightening Christian vision of reform has become one of the most important political ideas of the modern world.
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Savonarola was self-consciously traditional in religion, but for the moment he was able to defy Pope Alexander VI's order to cease preaching, and he scorned the excommunication from what he called in 1495 and at other times the 'Babylon of Rome'. Alas for him, the continuing political and economic miseries of the city did not suggest any imminent intervention by an approving God, and his enemies were able to overwhelm the political faction supporting him. In 1498 the friar's power collapsed: he was tortured and burned at the stake with his chief lieutenants. He left many admirers. Throughout Europe, pious humanists valued the deep spirituality of his writings and overlooked the grim chaos into which his republic had descended. Far away in the kingdom of that aspiring Medici Henry VIII, Savonarola's meditations composed in prison after his torture continued to be much read, and two were incorporated in an officially approved English primer in 1534. Archbishop Thomas Cranmer quoted the friar unacknowledged in his final dramatic sermon before himself being burned at the stake in 1556, and half a century later, by ecumenical contrast, the English Catholic composer William Byrd created a choral setting of a Savonarolan prison meditation; many other composers across Europe had previously done the same.
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In Savonarola's own land his legacy remained alarming to those in power. A group known as the Piagnoni sprang up in Florence to preserve his memory; their organization might be seen as a particularly potent example of an Italian devotional gild or confraternity, emphasizing mystical meditation and missionary work, and promoting such
Devotio Moderna
classics as the
Imitation of Christ
. Although the Dominican Order throughout Italy was very wary of stepping out of line after the Savonarola debacle, friars continued to be prominent among the Piagnoni, and in later years the sizeable group of considerable scholars who were adherents were firm against Luther, while still continuing to advocate reform in the Church. The Piagnoni nursed the same combination of political and theological republicanism which had shaped the Savonarolan years, but after they succeeded in overthrowing the Medici afresh in 1527-30, their rule became a sadistic tyranny which did much finally to kill off Florentine republicanism and ensure the future of the Medici in power.
⁶⁴
Even after that, as the Society of Jesus, a new Catholic renewal movement, developed in the 1540s, its founder Ignatius Loyola still felt constrained to ban members of the Society from reading Savonarola's writings, despite seeing a lot of good in them, simply because the friar's fate still stimulated unseemly disagreement between supporters and detractors. As late as 1585, the Medici Grand Duke had to forbid Florentine monks, friars and nuns even to utter his name.
⁶⁵

The Piagnoni movement was only one symptom of the chronic neurosis and apocalyptic expectations which disturbed the Italian peninsula for decades after Savonarola was ashes. As in Spain, the mood affected high and low, powerful and destitute; female 'living saints' got a respectful hearing when they turned up to proclaim their message of imminent judgement in Italian princely courts. Through the sixteenth century and beyond, prophecies, accounts of monstrous births and wondrous signs became sure-fire money-spinners for the printing presses, as so often since in troubled times (see Plate 12). One text caused a sensation even though it remained in manuscript: the
Apocalypsis Nova
('New Account of the Last Days'). Announced in 1502, it claimed to have been written some time before by a Portuguese Franciscan, Amadeus Menezes da Silva, and certainly it built on earlier monastic or Franciscan literature in the style of Joachim of Fiore (see pp. 410-11). This 'Amadeist' manuscript, which still has its devotees, especially in the wilder corners of the Internet, predicted the coming of an Angelic Pastor or Pope, righting the world's ill and heralded by Spiritual Men. A crucial task was correctly to identify these important characters. Plenty of candidates were lined up or fearlessly stepped forward: Popes Julius II, Leo X and Clement VII had their advocates, while Cardinal Mercurino di Gattinara saw his young master, Charles V, as one of the heralds, the Last World Emperor - an insight which had not hindered him winning high office as Imperial Chancellor, under a youth who needed some means of understanding his staggering accumulation of thrones and territories.
⁶⁶

There were plenty who in due course transferred the identification on to Martin Luther and the early Protestant Reformers. For over three decades from the 1490s, much of Europe was in high excitement about the future, ranging in expression from decorous humanist editing of hermetic and cabbalistic texts to prophecies from wild-eyed women in Spanish or Italian villages and angry sermons of respected clergy. When a would-be reforming council was convened by the Pope (with initial great hopes and widespread goodwill) to the Lateran Palace in 1512-17, one of its many ineffective provisions was to forbid preaching on apocalyptic subjects. A literary fashion emerged for imagining ideal societies and how they might work. The English humanist Thomas More invented a word to describe them all in the title of his enigmatic and straight-faced description of such a place:
Utopia
- in cod-Greek, that means 'nowhere'.

ERASMUS: NEW BEGINNINGS?

One man seemed to offer the possibility of a reasonable, moderate outcome to Europe's excitements and fears in the early 1500s: Desiderius Erasmus. His life and achievements combine so many themes of European renewal. The supreme humanist scholar came from the Netherlands, home of the
Devotio Moderna
. He became a friend not merely to princes and bishops, but to any clever, wealthy or attractive well-educated European who shared his passion for ideas. All Europe wanted Erasmus as its property: Cardinal Ximenes made vain overtures to get him to Spain, and the cultivated humanist Bishop of Cracow Pietr Tomicki had just as little success with his invitation to Poland - in a curious superstition, Erasmus would never travel very far east of the Rhine, although he was frequently prepared to risk the English Channel. Instead, people came to Erasmus as devotees. He constructed a salon of the imagination, embracing the entire continent in a constant flow of letters to hundreds of correspondents, some of whom he never met face to face. Erasmus should be declared the patron saint of networkers, as well as of freelance writers.

It is interesting that we habitually refer to Erasmus as 'of Rotterdam': in reality, he was indifferent to where he lived, as long as he had a good fire, a good dinner, a pile of amusing correspondence and a handsome research grant. Erasmus himself created this misleading use of the place name, and he also added the 'Desiderius' as a supposed Greek synonym for 'Erasmus'. His crafting of his name is only one aspect of the great humanist's careful construction of his own image: he perfectly exemplified the humanist theme of building new possibilities, for he invented himself out of his own imaginative resources. He needed to do this because when he was born as Herasmus Gerritszoon in a small Dutch town (either Rotterdam or Gouda), he was that ultimate non-person in medieval Catholic Europe, the son of a priest. His family put him on the customary road to self-construction by preparing him for office in the Church. After a
Devotio Moderna
-inspired education, the young man was persuaded to enter a local Augustinian monastery at Steyn, but he did so with great reluctance. He hated monastic life and became additionally miserable when he fell in love with Servatius Rogerus, a fellow monk - but then he identified an escape route: his passion and talent for humanist scholarship.
⁶⁷

The Bishop of Cambrai, conveniently far to the south of Steyn, needed a secretary to give his correspondence the fashionable humanist polish appropriate to an important Church dignitary, and Erasmus persuaded his superiors to let him take the post, which he held just long enough to make sure that Steyn was well behind him and that there would be no serious recriminations when he moved on. Erasmus never returned to monastic life (the authorities in Rome eventually regularized this unilateral declaration of independence in 1517, after he had become a celebrity). Although he had been ordained priest in 1492, he never took conventional opportunities for high office in Church or university, which someone of his talent could have had for the asking. Instead, he virtually created a new category of career: the roving international man of letters who lived off the proceeds of his writings and money provided by admirers. He wrote the first best-seller in the history of printing after a stroke of bad luck: desperate for cash after English customs officials confiscated the sterling money in his luggage, he compiled a collection of proverbs with detailed commentary about their use in the classics and in scripture. This work, the
Adagia
or
Adages
(1500), offered the browsing reader the perfect short cut to being a well-educated humanist; Erasmus greatly expanded his money-spinner in successive editions.

At much the same time, Erasmus changed direction in his scholarly enthusiasms, with momentous consequences for the history of European religion: he moved from a preoccupation with secular literature to apply his humanist learning to Christian texts. On one of his visits to England, his admiration for his friend John Colet's biblical learning nerved him to the painful task of acquiring the specialist skill of Greek; Greek would open up to him the writings of then little-known early Fathers of the Church, together with the ultimate source of Christian wisdom, the New Testament. He produced new critical editions of a range of key early Christian texts, the centrepiece of which was his 1516 edition of the Greek New Testament, accompanied by an expanding range of commentaries on the biblical text. The effect of his superbly presented editions was much enhanced by his collaboration from 1516 with one of the most brilliant and artistically sensitive publishers of his day, Johann Froben of Basel.

Erasmus's New Testament was an inspiration to many future Reformers, because he provided not only the Greek original but also an easy way of puzzling out what this difficult text might mean with the aid of a parallel new Latin translation, tacitly designed to supersede the Vulgate and the commentary which Jerome had created around it. Erasmus hugely admired Jerome's industry and energy, but his work of retranslation and commentary amounted to a thoroughgoing onslaught on what Jerome had achieved a millennium before. To attack Jerome was to attack the structure of understanding the Bible which the Western Church took for granted. Most notorious was Erasmus's retranslation of Gospel passages (especially Matthew 3.2) where John the Baptist is presented in the Greek as crying out to his listeners in the wilderness, '
metanoeite
'. Jerome had translated this as
poenitentiam agite
, 'do penance', and the medieval Church had pointed to the Baptist's cry as biblical support for its theology of the sacrament of penance. Erasmus said that John had told his listeners to come to their senses, or repent, and he translated the command into Latin as
resipiscite
. Indeed, throughout the Bible, it was very difficult to find any direct reference to Purgatory, as Orthodox theologians had been pointing out to Westerners since the thirteenth century.

Much thus turned on one word. In Erasmus's view, bad theology stemmed from faulty grammar, or faulty reading of the Bible. The characteristic medieval way of making sense of the frequently puzzling or apparently irrelevant contents of the Bible was to allegorize them in the manner pioneered by Origen (see pp. 151-2). Commentators found justification for their allegorizing by quoting a biblical text, John 6.63: 'The Spirit gives life, but the flesh is of no use' - allegory was the spiritual meaning, the literal meaning the fleshly. This text became a favourite of Erasmus too, but he was irritated that it should be used as a support for allegory. Readers of the Bible were right to note allegory in its text, but they should do so with caution and common sense. This principle was particularly significant in the cult of Mary, the Mother of God; it had been a natural impulse for commentators to try to expand the rather slim biblical database about her through the use of allegory. Erasmus came to deplore the redirection on to Mary of Old Testament texts. Protestant Bible commentaries rammed home this message later, and drew gratefully on Erasmus's other redefinitions of biblical terms in order to cut down to size Mary, her cult and her ability along with the lesser saints to intercede with her Son to the Father.
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More generally, they followed Erasmus in his cautious attitude to the use of allegorical interpretation of the Bible, which they came to consider prone to Catholic misuse.

Erasmus faced up more honestly than most theologians to one problem which later proved as troublesome to Protestants as to Catholics, and whose solution was unavoidably dependent on the exploitation of allegorical reading of the Bible, whether humanists and Protestants liked it or not. This was the universally held belief in Mary's perpetual virginity - that she had remained a virgin all her life. Much of the traditional case for this belief, which has no direct justification in scripture, was based on allegorical use of Ezekiel 44.2, which talks about the shutting of a gate which only the Lord could enter. This was then bolstered by the forced Greek and Latin reading of Isaiah's original Hebrew prophecy that a young woman would conceive a son, Immanuel (Isaiah 7.14; see p. 81). Erasmus could not read these texts as Jerome had done. In response to shocked complaints about his comments, he set out a precise position: 'We believe in the perpetual virginity of Mary, although it is not expounded in the sacred books.'