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The Flowering of the Renaissance. Vincent Cronin
Читать онлайн.Название The Flowering of the Renaissance
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isbn 9780008106171
Автор произведения Vincent Cronin
Издательство HarperCollins
‘I was received,’ writes Luther, ‘by the most reverend lord cardinal legate both graciously and with almost too much respect, for he is a man in every way different from those extremely harsh bloodhounds who track down monks among us … I immediately asked to be instructed in what matters I had been wrong, since I was not conscious of any errors.’ Cajetan began by pointing to a statement by Luther that the merits of Christ do not constitute the treasure of merits of indulgence; this, he said, contradicted an Extravagante1 issued by Clement VI (1342–52). He did not expect Luther to know the Extravagante, which was absent from some editions of canon law. But Luther did know it and replied that it did not impress him as being truthful or authoritative, chiefly because ‘it distorts the Holy Scriptures and audaciously twists the words into a meaning which they do not have in their context.’ The Scriptures, he concluded, were in every case to be preferred to the Extravagante, which merely trotted out the teaching of St Thomas Aquinas. Further discussions then took place ‘but in no one point did we even remotely come to any agreement.’
Agreement was precluded by the fact that Luther differed radically from Cajetan on the nature of the Pope’s teaching authority. Luther began to see that there was more than a fortuitous link between Clement VI’s attitude in the Extravagante and the behaviour of Popes in his own lifetime. Both tried to mould God to man’s needs. So Luther’s next move was to criticize the way papal authority was exercised by such Popes as Julius II and Leo X. In a letter to Leo dated 6 April 1520 Concerning Christian Liberty, Luther attacks the Petrine office less as an institution based on canon law than against its ‘excessive’, imperialistic claim to power, and its abandonment of the notion of service to the Church as the community of the faithful. In a passage which shows how sensitive he was to the actual language employed in Rome, Luther writes: ‘Therefore, Leo, my Father, beware of listening to those sirens who make you out to be not simply a man, but partly God—mixtum Deum—so that you can command and require whatever you will. This shall not be, nor will you prevail. You are the servant of servants, and the most wretchedly and dangerously placed man alive.’
Later in the same year Luther rejected the teaching authority of the Pope altogether and, putting himself at the head of the movement which saw in Rome the chief obstacle to reform, appealed to a Council to be summoned by the Emperor Charles V: a new Nicaea presided over by a new Constantine, at which not only clergy but laity too would hammer out a pure religion like that of the early Christians.
In Rome the machinery for dealing with revolt now slipped into action. Luther’s appeal to a Council was rejected on the basis of Pius II and Julius II’s prohibition of any such move. A commission presided over by Cajetan pronounced heretical 41 propositions in Luther’s writings, most of them already condemned by the University of Louvain, a body which Luther himself had named as being impartial. Among the views condemned were Luther’s conception of all-powerful sin (‘In every good work the righteous man sins,’ ‘A good work done very well is a venial sin,’ ‘No one is certain that he is not always sinning mortally, because of the truly hidden vice of pride’), his interpretation of the role of faith, and of the sacraments, and finally his rejection of papal authority. On 2 May Leo examined a draft of the bull Exsurge at his hunting-lodge, and it was then submitted to the sacred college at no less than four consistories; it is noteworthy that the German episcopate was excluded altogether from proceedings against Luther, and this was later to have an adverse effect on Rome. In June 1520 Exsurge was published, condemning the 41 propositions, ordering Luther’s writings destroyed, forbidding him to teach or preach, and threatening him with excommunication if he did not recant within two months. Copies were sent for enforcement to the Emperor and the German princes.
But Rome was already one move behind. In July Luther had published his Letter to the Christian Nobility of Germany in which, drawing on the views of John Huss and the Bohemians, he moved beyond an attack on the papacy to a complete rejection of tradition, in place of which he set up the holy word of Scripture. By taking his stand on Scripture Luther hoped to re-establish the sovereignty of God alone, over against anything the Church had said or might say. In December Luther publicly burned the bull Exsurge. On 3 January 1521 Leo excommunicated Martin Luther: cut him off ‘as a dead branch’.
But Luther was hardly ‘a dead branch’. As a Saxon and a Wittenberg Professor, he belonged to a vigorous community conscious of its independence and protected by the swaggering, moustachioed Frederick, Elector of Saxony, absolute lord in his own domain and the founder of Wittenberg University, whose professors he looked on as his own children. Frederick had no intention of handing Luther over to be burned at the stake, like poor John Huss a century earlier. Intellectually, too, Luther belonged to a flourishing band of scholars, notably Philip Melanchthon, the armourer’s frail son who was the best humanist in Germany, and Ulrich von Hutten, a tough knight errant steeped in Tacitus’s Germania, finding in that book the purity of morals and manliness he ascribed to the German character. And behind Luther stood the men of Germany, disliking and sometimes hating Rome, conscious of their new strength as a people. Roman cardinals might be rich, but they banked with the Fuggers; German mercenaries in Charles VIII’s invasion army had scattered the Italians, thus proving themselves worthy successors of Arminius, the tribal leader who decisively defeated Varus in 9 A.D. The late Emperor, Maximilian, had confided to his sister that one day he intended to add the papal tiara to his iron crown: was it so impossible an ambition?
These were the men who read Luther’s writings, and were stirred by his extremely powerful, scathingly witty style derived from Lucian. As so often happens, their reactions were at variance with the author’s intention, and by sheer weight of numbers they were to drag Luther in directions he did not always want to go. What appealed to the average reader was less the corruption of man than the corruption of Rome: that Babylon where Christian blood was shed with St Paul’s sword, Plato and Aristotle were painted opposite the Blessed Sacrament, and Bembo advised Sadoleto to ‘avoid the Epistles of St Paul, lest his barbarous style should spoil your taste’. In vain did Leo’s representative, Girolamo Aleandro, argue that abuses committed by Rome should not be confused with Catholic truth; as a scholar, he could not see that it is love and hate, not calm reason, that determine most men’s view of truth. In place of the authority of Rome Luther’s followers erected the authority of Scripture interpreted by the individual Christian according to the light of the Holy Spirit. This had a profound appeal at a time when the printed word, so recent an invention, still wore something of a halo. And so the rift widened: Scripture against Church, Grace against Works, Predestination against Free Will, communion service against sacrifice, the priesthood of every Christian against the teaching authority of the Pope.
In the early 1520’s it became evident in Rome that Exsurge had neither silenced Luther nor checked Lutheranism, which was beginning to erect itself into an organized Church, styled Apostolic and declaring the Roman Church heretical. An answer would have to be found, and found quickly: preferably a dogmatic answer to what was primarily a dogmatic challenge. But precisely here Rome found herself ill-prepared. Ever since 1380 when John Wycliffe first challenged traditiones humanae and William of Waterford made the mistake of defending unwritten traditions by arguing from the insufficiency of Scripture, a false antithesis had been set up: Tradition and Scripture, each envisaged separately. This had sufficed to condemn Huss, but not to provide refutation of his arguments. The Vatican had no books defending Tradition, only Raphael’s painted defence of the Real Presence.
In method also Rome found herself at a disadvantage. As Erasmus remarked, Ciceronian Latin was useless for answering heresy, since it did not contain the necessary vocabulary. There was no chair of Scripture in the Sapienza, and in the words of the Augustinian General, ‘Rome, the prince of cities, is the world’s dunce in Biblical studies.’ Sante Pagnine’s translation of the Old Testament into Latin, made in Lucca in 1518, did not find a publisher until 1528, and then only in Lyons. On his return in 1522 even Aleandro, one of Italy’s foremost humanists, sadly and belatedly had to return to school: ‘I have begun to extract from ancient authors passages which