Fatal Discord: Erasmus, Luther, and the Fight for the Western Mind
Michael Massing
Philosophy, religion, history
As with Crucible of Faith, I read this book, not because religion is among my core interests, but because I'm largely ignorant of the subject matter. In this, if for somewhat different reasons, I'm a match for the author. "I had never read the New Testament," he says in an afterword, "could not distinguish Peter from Paul, knew little about the birth of Christianity."
The result is a pretty good matchup, and a pretty good book. Massing's explicit mission is to rescue Erasmus from Martin Luther's vast penumbra. Erasmus of Rotterdam is a name that invokes vague familiarity in the well-read (I certainly couldn't have told you any details about him); Lutheran jokes, by contrast, were a staple of A Prairie Home Companion. Yet the battle between their worldviews is as lively as ever.
Luther is the one who got famous as the champion of individual judgment. "I cannot and will not recant anything, since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience," he's recorded as saying--in the face of a very real possibility that he would be burned at the stake for saying it. Courageous, yes; and yet, in truth, Luther ended up by furiously denying that other people might use their consciences. He feuded savagely with everyone, other reformers most especially included. It wasn't really "scripture and only scripture" that he stood for: it was "scripture according to the understanding of Martin Luther, and nobody else."
By contrast, Erasmus--though not always a model of sweetness and light in his writing--was closer to the "can't we all get along" camp. For this, he was roundly vilified by everyone, Luther included. He seems to have been prickly and egocentric, and sometimes vituperative--it was a vituperative age, literarily speaking--but, unlike Luther, he didn't set himself up as the sole arbiter of a singular truth, and he generally called for his foes to be convinced rather than disemboweled. (Massing quotes a letter in which Erasmus frankly admits that he's a coward who has no wish to be a martyr, no stomach for fighting to the death; it made me like him rather more than otherwise!)
In his last chapters, Massing follows the Luther/Erasmus split into the modern world. Luther's insistence on a single truth and a single interpretation of it is obviously relevant to modern American politics, for example; so his his insistence on the right of the individual, not the authorities, to seek it.. The Erasmian tradition shows up among those who argue for compromise and arbitration as an alternative to war, as well as for those who emphasize inner rather than outer piety.
This is a pretty interesting thread. All the same, it would be more accurate to describe Luther and Erasmus as torchbearers for these ideas, rather than originators. The dueling perspectives themselves are, I think, universal. To take one modern analogy that Massing doesn't make, his account of the schisms and savageries within the post-Luther reform movement remind me of nothing so much as the current upheaval in the Islamic world. Violent peasant armies spring up, seemingly overnight, and sweep over large swathes of territory. Sects which are in theory united against a common enemy spent more and more of their time quarreling bitterly with each other. Firebrand preachers give rise to to even more firebrand-ish preachers, many of whom split from their progenitors. Trivial points of doctrine start wars. Ultra-puritans rail against music, against images, against modernism. The voices of moderation go unheard, even persecuted. 16th-century Germany, or the 21st-century Arab world? It could be either.
Thought-provoking, no? So, as I said, Fatal Discord is pretty good--intellectually stimulating, readable enough, and thorough. It even gets mildly exciting in spots. As it goes on, the book does lose steam somewhat. Luther dominates--he's just more colorful--and at times Fatal Discord forgets its intellectual core and descends into a straightforward biography/history. At 800 pages, it's probably too long and too detailed, and certainly not for the faint of heart. If it doesn't entirely succeed in its primary goal of rehabilitating Erasmus, it at least gives us an insight into why he was so important at the time.
For a much more modern and very readable philosophers' smackdown tale, try the excellent Wittgenstein's Poker.
One thing I've always liked about Erasmus is that although In Praise of Folly was written in Latin, he titled it in Greek -- Moriae Encomium -- so he could make a pun at the expense of his friend Thomas More, since Moriae Encomium could also mean "In Praise of More".
ReplyDeleteMassing notes the pun. I think it's safe to say that Martin Luther wouldn't have been so linguistically playful. He tended rather towards the explosively vulgar. Apparently many English editions of his Table Talk have been heavily bowdlerized.
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