History of the Reformation - Thomas M. Lindsay

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indoors, he watched from his windows the country people in the fields, or the sportsman and the fisher at their occupations. He was fond of entertaining visitors from the neighbourhood. Sometimes he gathered round him his upper servants or his tenants, with their wives and families. The evening was usually devoted to the study of history and archæology, in both of which he was greatly interested. He was in the habit of sitting up late at night, and when the sky was clear he followed the motions of the planets with a telescope; for, like many others in that age, he had faith in astrology, and believed that he could read future events and the destinies of nations in the courses of the wandering stars.

      In all those civic circles, poets and artists were found as members—Hans Holbein at Augsburg; Albert Dürer, with Hans Sebaldus Beham, at Nürnberg. The contemporary Italian painters, when they ceased to select their subjects from Scripture or from the Lives of the Saints, turned instinctively to depict scenes from the ancient pagan mythology. The German artists strayed elsewhere. They turned for subjects to the common life of the people. But the change was gradual. The Virgin ceased to be the Queen of Heaven and became the purest type of homely human motherhood, and the attendant angels, sportive children plucking flowers, fondling animals, playing with fruit. In Lucas Cranach's “Rest on the Flight to Egypt” two cherubs have climbed a tree to rob a bird's nest, and the parent birds are screaming at them from the branches. In one of Albert Dürer's representations of the Holy Family, the Virgin and Child are seated in the middle of a farmyard, surrounded by all kinds of rural accessories. Then German art plunged boldly into the delineation of the ordinary commonplace life—knights and tournaments, merchant trains, street scenes, pictures of peasant life, and especially of peasant dances, university and school scenes, pictures of the camp and of troops on the march. The coming revolution in religion was already proclaiming that all human life, even the most commonplace, could be sacred; and contemporary art discovered the picturesque in the ordinary life of the people—in the castles of the nobles, in the markets of the cities, and in the villages of the peasants.

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      The New Learning made its way gradually into the Universities. Classical scholars were invited to lecture or settle as private teachers in university towns, and the students read Cicero and Virgil, Horace and Propertius, Livy and Sallust, Plautus and Terence. One of the earliest signs of the growing Humanist feeling appeared in changes in one of the favourite diversions of German students. In all the mediæval Universities at carnival time the students got up and performed plays. The subjects were almost invariably taken from the Scriptures or from the Apocrypha. Chaucer says of an Oxford student, that

      “Sometimes to shew his lightnesse and his mastereye

      He played Herod on a gallows high.”

      At the end of the fifteenth century the subjects changed, and students' plays were either reproductions from Plautus or Terence, or original compositions representing the common life of the time.

      The legal recognition of Humanism within a University commonly showed itself in the institution of a lectureship of Poetry or Oratory—for the German Humanists were commonly known as the “Poets.” Freiburg established a chair of Poetry in 1471, and Basel in 1474; in Tübingen the stipend for an Orator was legally sanctioned in 1481, and Conrad Celtis was appointed to a chair of Poetry and Eloquence in 1492.

      Erfurt, however, was generally regarded as the special nursery of German university Humanism ever since Peter Luders had taught there in 1460. From that date the University never lacked Humanist teachers, and a Humanist circle had gradually grown up among the successive generations of students. The permanent chief of this circle was a German scholar, whose name was Conrad Mut (Mudt, Mutta, and Mutti are variations), who Latinised his name into Mutianus, and added Rufus because he was red-haired. This Mutianus Rufus was in many respects a typical German Humanist. He was born in 1472 at Homburg in Hesse, had studied at Deventer under Alexander Hegius, had attended the University of Erfurt, and had then gone to Italy to study law and the New Learning. He became a Doctor of Laws of Bologna, made friends among many of the distinguished Italian Humanists, and had gained many patrons among the cardinals in Rome. He finally settled in Gotha, where he had received a canonry in the Church. He did not win any distinction as an author, but has left behind him an interesting collection of letters. His great delight was to gather round him promising young students belonging to the University of Erfurt, to superintend their reading, and to advise them in all literary matters. While in Italy he had become acquainted with Pico della Mirandola, and had adopted the conception of combining Platonism and Christianity in an eclectic mysticism, which was to be the esoteric Christianity for thinkers and educated men, while the popular Christianity, with its superstitions, was needed for the common herd. Christianity, he taught, had its beginnings long before the historical advent of our Lord. “The true Christ,” he said, “was not a man, but the Wisdom of God; He was the Son of God, and is equally imparted to the Jews, the Greeks, and the Germans.”32 “The true Christ is not a man, but spirit and soul, which do not manifest themselves in outward appearance, and are not to be touched or seized by the hands.”33 “The law of God,” he said in another place, “which enlightens the soul, has two heads: to love God, and to love one's neighbour as one's self. This law makes us partakers of Heaven. It is a natural law; not hewn in stone, as was the law of Moses; not carved in bronze, as was that of the Romans; not written on parchment or paper, but implanted in our hearts by the highest Teacher.” “Whoever has eaten in pious manner this memorable and saving Eucharist, has done something divine. For the true Body of Christ is peace and concord, and there is no holier Host than neighbourly love.”34 He refused to believe in the miraculous, and held that the Scriptures were full of fables, meant, like those of Æsop, to teach moral truths. He asserted that he had devoted himself to “God, the saints, and the study of all antiquity”; and the result was expressed in the following quotation from a letter to Urban (1505), one of his friends and pupils at Erfurt: “There is but one god and one goddess; but there are many forms and many names—Jupiter, Sol, Apollo, Moses, Christ, Luna, Ceres, Proserpina, Tellus, Mary. But do not spread it abroad; we must keep silence on these Eleusinian mysteries. In religious matters we must employ fables and enigmas as a veil. Thou who hast the grace of Jupiter, the best and greatest God, shouldst in secret despise the little gods. When I say Jupiter, I mean Christ and the true God. But enough of these things, which are too high for us.”35 Such a man looked with contempt on the Church of his age, and lashed it with his scorn. “I do not revere the coat or the beard of Christ; I revere the true and living God, who has neither beard nor coat.”36 In private he denounced the fasts of the Church, confession, and masses for the dead, and called the begging friars “cowled monsters.” He says sarcastically of the Christianity of his times: “We mean by faith not the conformity of what we say with fact, but an opinion about divine things founded on credulity and a persuasion which seeks after profit. Such is its power that it is commonly believed that to us were given the keys of the kingdom of heaven. Whoever, therefore, despises our keys, shall feel our nails and our clubs (quisquis claves contemserit clavum et clavam sentiet). We have taken from the breast of Serapis a magical stamp to which Jesus of Galilee has given authority. With that figure we put our foes to flight, we cozen money, we consecrate God, we shake hell, and we work miracles; whether we be heavenly minded or earthly minded makes no matter, provided we sit happily at the banquet of Jupiter.”37 But he did not wish to revolt from the external authority of the Church of the day. “He is impious who wishes to know more than the Church. We bear on our forehead,” he says, “the seal of the Cross, the standard of our King. Let us not be deserters; let nothing base be found in our camp.”38 The authority which the Humanists revolted against was merely intellectual, as was the freedom they fought for. It did not belong to their mission to proclaim a spiritual freedom or to free the common man from his slavish fear of the mediæval priesthood; and this made an impassable gulf between their aspirations and those of Luther and the real leaders of the Reformation movement.39

      The Erfurt circle of Humanists had for members Heinrich Urban, to whom many of the letters of Mutianus were addressed, Petreius Alperbach, who won the title of “mocker of gods and men” (derisor deorum et hominum),

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