He had promised Cathay. If he produced an unknown continent instead, a continent many thousands of miles long, prohibiting approach to Cathay, he would undo his own work; the peasants who had exposed his fallacies would triumph in his failure, and the competing Portuguese would appropriate all that he had undertaken to add to the crown of Castile. Without civilisation and gold his discoveries would be valueless; and there was so little gold at first that he at once proposed to make up for it in slaves. His constant endeavour was not to be mistaken for the man who discovered the new world. Somewhere in the near background he still beheld the city with the hundred bridges, the crowded bazaar, the long train of caparisoned elephants, the palace with the pavement of solid gold. Naked savages skulking in the forest, marked down by voracious cannibals along the causeway of the Lesser Antilles, were no distraction from the quest of the Grand Khan. The facts before him were uninteresting and provisional, and were overshadowed by the phantoms that crowded his mind. The contrast between the gorgeous and entrancing vision and the dismal and desperate reality made the position a false one. He went on seeking gold when it was needful to govern, and proved an incapable administrator. Long before his final voyage he had fallen into discredit, and he died in obscurity.
Many miserable years passed after his death before America began, through Cortez, to weigh perceptibly in the scales of Europe. Landing at Lisbon from his first expedition, Columbus, in all his glory, had an audience of the king. It was six years since Diaz proved that the sea route to India was perfectly open, but no European had since set eyes on the place where Table Mountain looks down on the tormented Cape. Portugal apparently had renounced the fruits of his discovery. It was now reported that a Spanish crew had found in the West what the Portuguese had been seeking in the East, and that the Papal privilege had been infringed. The king informed Columbus that the regions he had visited belonged to Portugal. It was evident that some limit must be drawn separating the respective spheres. Rome had forbidden Spain from interfering with the expeditions of Portugal, and the Spaniards accordingly demanded a like protection. On the surface, there was no real difficulty. Three Bulls were issued in 1493, two in May and one in September, admonishing Portuguese mariners to keep to the east of a line drawn about 35 degrees west of Greenwich. That line of demarcation was suggested by Columbus, as corresponding with a point he had reached on 13th September, 100 leagues beyond the Azores. On that day the needle, which had pointed east of the Pole, shifted suddenly to the west. There, he reckoned, was the line of No Variation. At that moment, the climate changed. There was a smooth sea and a balmy air; there was a new heaven and a new earth. The fantastic argument did not prevail, and in the following year Spain and Portugal agreed, by the treaty of Tordesillas, to move the dividing meridian farther west, about midway between the most westerly island of the Old World and the most easterly island of the New. By this agreement, superseding the Papal award, Portugal obtained Brazil. When the lines of demarcation were drawn in 1493 and 1494, nobody knew where they would cut the equator on the other side of the globe. There also was matter for later negotiation.
After the fall of Malacca, Albuquerque sent a squadron to examine the region of islands farther east. One of his officers, Serrano, remained out there, and after as many adventures as Robinson Crusoe, he found his way to the very heart of the Moluccas, to Ternate, the home of the clove. In describing his travels to a friend, he made the most of the distance traversed in his eastward course. Magellan, to whom the letter was addressed, was out of favour with his commander Albuquerque, and on his return home found that he was out of favour with King Emmanuel. For the country which had repelled Columbus repelled the only navigator who was superior to Columbus. Magellan remembered Serrano's letter, and saw what could be made of it. He told the Spaniards that the spice islands were so far east that they were in the Spanish hemisphere, and he undertook to occupy them for Spain. He would sail, not east, but west, in the direction which was legally Spanish. For he knew a course that no man knew, and America, hitherto the limit of Spanish enterprise, would be no obstacle to him.
It seemed an apparition of Columbus, more definite and rational, without enthusiasm or idealism, or quotations from Roger Bacon, and Seneca, and the greater prophets. Cardinal Adrian, the Regent, refused to listen, but Fonseca, the President of the Board of Control, became his protector. Magellan wanted a good deal of protection; for his adventure was injurious to his countrymen, and was regarded by them as the intrigue of a traitor. Vasconcellos, Bishop of Lamego, afterwards Archbishop of Lisbon, advised that he should be murdered; and at night he was guarded in the streets of Valladolid by Fonseca's men. Magellan was not the first to believe that America comes to an end somewhere. Vespucci had guessed it; the extremity is marked on a globe of 1515; and a mercantile house that advanced funds is supposed to have been on the track.
Without a chart Magellan made his way through the perilous straits that perpetuate his name in twelve days' sailing. Drake, who came next, in 1577, took seventeen days, and Wallis, one hundred and sixteen. And then, at Cape Deseado, the unbroken highway to the fabled East, which had been closed against Columbus, opened before him. The Spaniards discovered Cape Horn five years later, but it was doubled for the first time in 1616 by the Dutchman who gave his name to it. From the coast of Chili, Magellan sailed north-west for three months, missing all the Pacific Islands until he came to the Ladrones. He was killed while annexing the Philippines to the Crown of Spain, and his lieutenant Delcano, the first circumnavigator, brought the remnant of his crew home by the Cape. On 9th September, 1522, thirteen wasted pilgrims passed barefoot in procession through the streets of Seville, not so much in thanksgiving for that which had not been given to man since the Creation, as in penance for having mysteriously lost a day, and kept their feasts and fasts all wrong. Magellan's acquisition of the Philippines lasted to the present year (1899), but his design on the Moluccas was given up. Nobody knew, until the voyage of Dampier, to whom, by the accepted boundary, they belonged; and in 1529 Spain abandoned its claim for 350,000 ducats. The Portuguese paid that price for what was by right their own; for Magellan was entirely wrong both as to the meridian and as to the South American route, which was much the longest, and was not followed by sailors.
For more than twenty years Spain struggled vainly with the West Indian problem. Four large islands and forty small ones, peopled by barbarians, were beyond the range of Spanish experience in the art of government. Grants of land were made, with the condition that the holder should exercise a paternal rule over the thriftless inhabitants. It was thought to pay better to keep them underground, digging for gold, than to employ them on the surface. The mortality was overwhelming; but the victims awakened little sympathy. Some belonged to that Arcadian race that was the first revealed by the landfall of Columbus, and they were considered incurably indolent and vicious. The remainder came from the mainland and the region of the Orinoco, and had made their way by the Windward Islands as far as San Domingo, devouring the people they found there. Neither the stronger nor the weaker race withstood the exhausting labour to which they were put by taskmasters eager for gold. Entire villages committed suicide together; and the Spaniards favoured a mode of correction which consisted in burning Indians alive by a slow fire. Las Casas, who makes these statements, and who may be trusted for facts and not for figures, affirms that fifty millions perished in his time, and fifteen millions were put to death.
Without a fresh labour supply, the colony would be ruined. It was the office of the clergy to prove that this treatment of the natives was short-sighted and criminal, and their cause was taken up by the Dominican missionaries. In 1510 the preacher Montesino, taking for his text the words, "I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness," denounced the practice. Their mouthpiece with the Home Government, their immortal mouthpiece with posterity, is Las Casas, whose narrative is our authority. The government was anxious to preserve conquests that began to yield some profit. They appointed Commissions to advise, and followed sometimes one report, sometimes the other, taking generally the line of least resistance. The most important Commission of all, in which Las Casas asserted the duties of Christians and the rights of savages, against Sepulveda, who denied them, never came to a decision.
Failing the native supply, the Spaniards substituted negroes. The slaves forwarded by Columbus had been sent back with tokens of the queen's displeasure, and Ximenes would not permit the importation of Africans. But the traffic went on, and the Indies were saved. Under Charles V 1000 slaves were allotted to each of the four islands. It did not seem an intolerable wrong to rescue men from the devil-worshippers who mangled their victims on the Niger or the Congo. Las Casas himself was one of those who advised that the negro should be brought to the relief of the Carib, and he would have allotted twelve slaves to each settler. He survived half a century, lived to lament his error, and declared his repentance to the world. He repented from motives of humanity rather than from principle; his feelings were more sensitive than his conscience, and he resembled the imperious Parliaments of George III which upheld the slave trade until imaginations were steeped in the horrors of the middle passage.
The supreme moment in the conquest of America is the landing of Cortez at Vera Cruz in 1521. He was an insubordinate officer acting in defiance of orders, and the governor of Cuba, in just indignation, despatched a force under Narvaez to bring him back. Cortez came down from the interior to the coast, deprived Narvaez of his command, and took possession of his men. With this unexpected reinforcement he was able to conquer Mexico, the capital of an illimitable empire. There was plenty of hard fighting, for the dominant race about the king was warlike. They were invaders, who reigned by force, and as they worshipped beings of the nether world who were propitiated with human sacrifice, they took their victims from the subject people, and their tyranny was the most hateful upon earth. The Spaniards, coming as deliverers, easily found auxiliaries against the government that practised unholy rites in the royal city. When Mexico fell Cortez sent a report to Charles V, with the first-fruits of his victory. Then, that no protesting narrative might follow and weaken his own, that his men might have no hope except in his success, he took the most daring resolution of his life, and scuttled his ships. Fonseca had signed the order for his arrest, when the most marvellous tale in that sequence of marvels reached his hands, and the disgraced mutineer was found to have added to the Emperor's dominions a region many times vaster and wealthier than all he possessed in Europe. In 1522 the accumulated treasure which had been extracted from Mexican mines since the beginning of ages came pouring into the imperial exchequer, and the desire of so many explorers during thirty unprofitable years was fulfilled at last.
Cortez was not only the most heroic of the Conquistadors, for there was no lack of good soldiers, but he was an educated man, careful to import the plants and quadrupeds needed for civilisation, and a statesman capable of ruling mixed races without help from home. From the moment of his appearance the New World ceased to be a perplexing burden to Spain, and began to foreshadow danger and temptation to other nations. And a man immeasurably inferior to him, a man who could not write his name, whose career, in its glory and its shame, was a servile imitation, almost a parody, of his own, succeeded thereby in establishing a South American empire equal to that of Cortez in the North. One of the ships sailing from the islands to the isthmus carried a stowaway hidden in a cask, whose name was Balboa, and who discovered the Pacific.
The third name is Francisco Pizarro. He stood by and listened while a native described a mighty potentate, many days to the south, who reigned over the mountains and the sea, who was rich in gold, and who possessed a four-footed beast of burden, the only one yet encountered, which was taken at first for a camel. He waited many years for his opportunity. Then, with 168 armed men, and with aid from an associate who risked his money in the business, he started for the Andes and the civilised and prosperous monarchy in the clouds, which he had heard of when he was the lieutenant of Balboa. The example of Cortez, the fundamental fact of American history, had shown what could be done by getting hold of the king, and by taking advantage of internal dissension. How much could be accomplished by treachery and unflinching vigour Pizarro knew without a teacher. Whilst he established his power in the highlands under the equator, Almagro occupied the coast in the temperate zone, 1000 miles farther. Together they had conquered the Pacific. Then, as no man had the ascendency of Cortez, the time that succeeded the occupation was disturbed by internal conflict, in which both the conquerors perished. They had done even more for the Spanish empire than their greater rival. There were 4,600,000 ducats in the treasury of the Inca, and he filled his prison with gold as high as he could reach for the ransom which did not save his life. The mines were soon in working order; and, as the expanse of fertile soil was 3000 miles long, it was clear that Peru, added to Mexico, constituted an important factor in European finance.
As time carried away the tumult of conquest, and the evil generation that achieved it, Spanish America became the seat of such abundance and profusion as was not found in any European capital; and the natives, instructed and regulated by the missionaries, were the object of an elaborate protective legislation, which gave reason for attachment to the mother country. The prodigality of nature was too much for tropical society, and it accomplished nothing of its own for the mind of man. It influenced the position of classes in Europe by making property obtained from afar, in portable shape, predominate over property at home. Released from the retarding pressure of accumulated years, it developed towards revolution; and all the colonies founded by the Conquistadors on the continent of America became Republics. These events shifted the centre of political gravity from land to sea. The resources of the ocean world extended the physical basis of modern History; and increase of wealth, involving increase of power, depended thenceforward on the control of distant regions. Vasco da Gama created a broad channel for the pursuit of Empire, and Columbus remodelled the future of the world. For History is often made by energetic men, steadfastly following ideas, mostly wrong, that determine events.
NEXT TO the discovery of the New World, the recovery of the ancient world is the second landmark that divides us from the Middle Ages and marks the transition to modern life. The Renaissance signifies the renewed study of Greek, and the consequences that ensued from it, during the century and a half between Petrarca and Erasmus. It had survived, as a living language, among Venetian colonists and Calabrian monks, but exercised no influence on literature.
The movement was preceded by a Roman revival, which originated with Rienzi. Rome had been abandoned by the Papacy, which had moved from the Tiber to the Rhone, where it was governed by Frenchmen from Cahors, and had fallen, like any servile country, into feudal hands. Rienzi restored the Republic, revived the self-government of the city, the memories attached to the Capitol, the inscriptions, the monuments of the men who had ruled the world. The people, no longer great through the Church, fell back on the greatness which they inherited from ancient times. The spell by which the Tribune directed their palm was archaeology. In front of the Capitoline temple, near the Tapeian rock and the She Wolf's cave, he proclaimed their rights over the empire and the nations; and he invited the people of Italy to a national parliament for the restoration of Italian unity and of the ancient glory and power of Rome. Patriotism, national independence, popular liberty, all were founded on antiquarian studies and the rhetorical interpretation of the fragments of the Lex Regia.
Thee political scheme of Rienzi failed, but it started a movement in the world of thought deeper and more enduring than State transactions. For his ideas were adopted by the greatest writer then living, and were expounded by him in the most eloquent and gracious prose that had been heard for a thousand years. Petrarca called the appearance of the patriotic tribune and rhetorician the dawn of a new world and a golden age. Like him, he desired to purge the soil of Italy from the barbaric taint. It became the constant theme of the Humanists to protest against the foreign intruder, that is, against the feudal noble the essential type of the medieval policy. It is the link between Rienzi, the dreamer of dreams, and the followers of Petrarca. Bocaccio had already spoken of the acceptable blood of tyrants.
But the political influence of antiquity, visible at first, made way for a purely literary influence. The desire for good Latin became injurious to Italian, and Petrarca censured Dante for his error in composing the Divine Comedy in the vulgar tongue. He even regretted that the Decamerone was not written in Latin, and refused to read what his friend had written for the level of uneducated men. The classics became, in the first place, the model and the measure of style; and the root of the Renaissance was the persuasion that a man who could write like Cicero had an important advantage over a man who wrote like Bartolus or William of Ockham; and that ideas radiant with beauty must conquer ideas clouded over with dialectics. In this, there was an immediate success. Petrarca and his imitators learnt to write excellent Latin. Few of them had merit as original thinkers, and what they did for erudition was done all over again, and incomparably better, by the scholars who appeared after the tempest of the Reformation had gone down. But they were excellent letter writers. In hundreds of volumes, from Petrarca to Sadolet and Pole, we can trace every idea and mark every throb. It was the first time that the characters of men were exposed with analytic distinctness; the first time indeed that character could be examined with accuracy and certitude.
A new type of men began with Petrarca, men accustomed to introspection, who selected their own ideals, and moulded their minds to them. The medieval system could prepare him for death; but, seeing the vicissitudes of fortune and the difficulties of life, he depended on the intellectual treasures of the ancient world, on the whole mass of accessible wisdom, to develop him all round. To men ignorant of Greek, like the first generation of the Renaissance, the fourteenth-century men, much in ancient philosophy was obscure. But one system, that of the Stoics, they studied deeply, and understood, for they had the works of Seneca. For men craving for self-help and the complete training of the faculties, eager to escape from the fixed types of medieval manhood, minted by authority, and taught to distrust conscience, when it was their own, and to trust it only in others, Seneca was an oracle. For he is the classic of mental discipline, vigilant self-study, and the examination of conscience. It is under these influences that the modern type of individual man took shape. The action of religion, by reason of the divided Church, and the hierarchy in partibus, was at a low point; and no age has been so corrupt, so barbarous in the midst of culture. The finished individual of the Renaissance, ready for emergencies equal to either fortune, relying on nothing inherited, but on his own energy and resource, began badly, little recking rights of others, little caring for the sanctity of life.
Very early in the first or Latin phase of the revival, people suspected that familiarity with the classics would lead to admiration for paganism. Coluccio Salutato, who had been Florentine Secretary from the time of Petrarca, and is a classical writer of Latin letters, had to defend the new learning against the rising reproach of irreligion; and the statue of Virgil was ignominiously removed from the market-place of the town which his birth has made illustrious, as a scandal to good men. Petrarca never became a Greek scholar. He felt the defect. To write beautiful Latin was nothing, unless there was more to say than men already knew. But the Latin classics were no new discovery. The material increase of knowledge was quite insufficient to complete the type of an accomplished man. The great reservoir of ideas, of forgotten sciences, of neglected truth, remained behind. Without that, men would continue to work at a disadvantage, to fight in the dark, and could never fulfil the possibilities of existence. What was impatiently felt as the medieval eclipse came not from the loss of elegant Latin, but from the loss of Greek. All that was implied in the intended resurrection of antiquity depended on the revival of Greek studies. Because Petrarca possessed the culture of his time beyond all men, he was before them all in feeling what it needed most. Knowledge of truth, not casual and partial, but as complete and certain as the remaining civilisation admitted, would have to be abandoned, if Latin was still to be the instrument and the limit. Then the new learning would not be strong enough to break down the reliance on approved authors, the tyranny of great names, the exclusiveness of schools. Neither rhetoric nor poetry could deprive Aristotle and Peter Lombard, St. Augustine and St. Thomas, of their supremacy, give them their position in the incessant stream of thought, or reduce them beneath the law of progress in the realm of knowledge.
The movement which Petrarca initiated implied the revival of a buried world, the enrichment of society by the mass of things which the western nations had allowed to drop, and of which medieval civilisation was deprived. It meant the preference for Grecian models, the supremacy of the schools of Athens, the inclusion of science in literature, the elevation of Hippocrates and Archimedes to a level with Terence and Quintilian, the reproduction of that Hellenic culture which fought the giant fight of the fourth and fifth century with the Councils and Fathers of the Church. That is why the Latin restoration, which was the direct result of Petrarca's example, was overwhelmed by the mightier change that followed, when a more perfect instrument reached the hands of men passionately curious and yearning for new things.
At first there was no way of acquiring the unknown tongue. But the second generation of Humanists sat at the feet of Byzantine masters. The first was Chrysoloras, who was sent to Italy on a political mission and settled in 1397 as a teacher of his own language at Florence. When he died, at the council of Constance, there were Italian scholars who could read Greek MSS. As teachers were scarce, adventurous men, such as Scarparia, Guarino, Aurispa, pursued their studies at Constantinople. Filelfo remained there for seven years, working in great libraries not yet profaned by the Turk. Before the middle of the fifteenth century Italy was peopled with migratory scholars, generally poor, and without fixed appointments, but able to rouse enthusiasm when they offered Plato for Henry of Ghent, and Thucydides for Vincent of Beauvais. By that time the superiority of the new learning, even in its very fragmentary condition, was irresistible.
Just then three events occurred which determined the triumph of the Renaissance. The Emperor came over to the Council of Florence with a number of bishops and divines. In the discussions that followed, Greek scholars were in demand; and one Eastern prelate, Bessarion, remained in Italy, became a cardinal, and did much for the study of Plato and the termination of the long Aristotelian reign. His fine collection of manuscripts was at the service of scholars, and is still at their service, in St. Mark's library at Venice. The fall of Constantinople drove several fugitives to seek a refuge in Italy, and some brought their books with them, which were more scarce and more needful than men. For by that time Greek studies were well established, and suffered only from the extreme scarcity of manuscripts. The third important event was the election of Parentucelli, who became Pope Nicholas V. On that day the new learning took possession of the Holy See, and Rome began to be considered the capital of the Renaissance.
It was not in the nature of things that this should be. For the new men, with their new instrument of intellectual power, invaded territory which was occupied by the clergy. In the Middle Ages the Church, that is to say, first the cloister, then the universities founded under the protectorate of the Church, had the civilising of society, and, apart from law, the monopoly of literature. That came to an end when the clergy lost the superiority of knowledge, and had to share their influence with profane laymen, trained in the classics, and more familiar with pagan than with Christian writers. There was a common presumption in favour of the new point of view, the larger horizon, of opinions that were founded on classical as well as on Christian material. The Humanists had an independent judgment and could contemplate the world they lived in from outside, without quitting it, standing apart from the customary ways. As Pater said: "The human mind wins for itself a new kingdom of feeling and sensation and thought, not opposed to, but only beyond and independent of the spiritual system then actually realised."
This is one of many causes operating at the time to weaken the notion of ecclesiastical control. It was the triumphant return of an exile, with an uproarious popularity and a claim to compensation for arrears. The enthusiasm of those who were the first to read Homer, and Sophocles, and Plato grew into complaint against those by whose neglect such treasures had been lost. Centuries of ignorance and barbarism had been the consequence. There was not only a world of new ideas, but of ideas that were not Christian, which the Christianity of the West had discarded. They began to recover the lost power, and the ages in which they had been unknown became the ages of darkness. As they were also ages in which the Church had exerted supreme authority, antagonism was not to be averted. The endeavour was not only to make the range of men's thought more comprehensive, but to enrich it with the rejected wisdom of paganism. Religion occupied a narrower space in the new views of life than in those of Dante and the preceding time. The sense of sinfulness was weaker among the Humanists, the standard of virtue was lower; and this was common to the most brilliant of the Italian prelates, such as Aeneas Sylvius, with the king of the Renaissance, Erasmus himself.
Lorenzo Valla, the strongest of the Italian Humanists, is also the one who best exhibits the magnitude of the change that was going on in the minds of men. He had learnt to be a critic, and, what was more rare, a historical critic. He wrote against the belief in the writings of Dionysius the Areopagite, which was one of the fixed positions of theology, then and long after. When the Greeks at the Council of Florence declared themselves unacquainted with the Apostles' Creed, Valla warned the Latins not to speak of it as an apostolic composition. During a war between Rome and Naples, Valla, in the Neapolitan service, attacked the Donation of Constantine as the basis of the temporal power, and exhorted Pope Eugenius to abandon what was a usurpation, and a usurpation founded on fraud. Formidable in all the armour of the new learning, he did more than any other man to spread the conviction that the favourite arguments of the clergy were destined to go down before the better opinion of profane scholars. Valla is also the link between Italy and Germany. His critical essay on the New Testament in the Vulgate influenced Erasmus, who published it in 1505. His tract against the Donation, as the title-deed of the temporal sovereignty, was printed by Ulrich von Hutten, and spread that belief that the Pope was an antichrist, which was afterwards an important article of the Huguenot Church. He was also a forerunner of the Reformation by his tract on the Freedom of the Will. This man, who displayed so conspicuously the resentful and iconoclastic spirit, the religious scepticism, the moral indifference, the aversion for the papal sovereignty, the contempt for the laws and politics of feudalism, the hope and expectation of a mighty change, was an official in the Pope's household.
After the discussion with the Greeks at Florence it was clear to all men that there was a deeper issue than the revival of classical learning, that there was a Christian as well as a pagan antiquity, and that the knowledge of the early Church depended on Greek writings, and was as essential a part of the Renaissance as the study of Homer or of Pindar. The inference was drawn by Nicholas V, the first Renaissance pontiff. He recognised the fact that a divine in full possession of Hellenic literature would be a more competent defender of tradition, a better writer, a stronger disputant, than the long line of scholastic teachers. He saw that it would be the means of renovating theology and disclosing the authentic and necessary evidences of historical religion. The most enlightened ecclesiastics of that age understood but vaguely that there was not only benefit and enrichment in a policy that favoured the new learning, but the only possible escape from a serious danger.
Religious knowledge in those days suffered not only from ignorance and the defect of testimony, but from an excess of fiction and falsification. Whenever a school was lacking in proofs for its opinions, it straightway forged them, and was sure not to be found out. A vast mass of literature arose, which no man, with medieval implements, could detect, and effectually baffled and deceived the student of tradition. At every point he was confronted by imaginary canons and constitutions of the apostles, acts of Councils, decretals of early Popes, writings of the Fathers from St. Clement to St. Cyril, all of them composed for the purpose of deceiving.
The example of Lorenzo Valla made it certain that all this was about to be exposed. The process that began with him lasted for two centuries, to the patriarchs of authentic erudition, Ussher and Pearson, Blondel and Launoy, the Bollandists of Antwerp and the Benedictines of Saint-Maur. It became apparent that the divines of many ages had been remarkable for their incapacity to find out falsehood, and for their dexterity in propagating it, and it made no little difference whether this tremendous exposure should be made by enemies, and should constitute one series of disasters for religion. This was prevented by the resolve of Pope Nicholas, that the Holy See should sanction and encourage the movement with its influence, its immense patronage, and all its opportunities. Therefore Valla, who had narrowly escaped alive from the Inquisition, became a functionary at the Vatican, and received 500 ducats from the Pope to translate Thucydides. Scholars were attracted by the papal collection of 5000 manuscripts, which were the foundation of the Vatican library, the first in the world after the fall of Constantinople.
The alliance between renovated Hellenism and the Papacy was ratified a few years later, when the most intelligent of the Italian Humanists, Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini of Siena, was raised to the throne under the name of Pius II, and became the most modern of medieval Popes. He was one of those Churchmen in whom the classical spirit of the time predominated over the ecclesiastical. Twice there was a breach, and a momentary reaction; but on the whole the contract was observed, and the ancient pagans made their way under the shadow of St. Peter's better than the early Christians. Humanists of the type of Valla were domesticated by the prizes held out to them, from the pen of the secretary to the tiara of the pontiff. The apprehended explosion never came; the good and evil that was in the new scholars penetrated the court and modified its tone. Bibbiena's comedies were applauded at the Belvedere; The Prince was published by the Pope's printer, with the Pope's permission; a cardinal shrank from reading St. Paul, for fear of spoiling his style; and the scandals in the family of Borgia did not prevent bishops from calling him a god. Calixtus III said that he feared nothing from any hostile Powers, for he had 3000 men of letters to rely on. His successor, Aeneas Sylvius, considered that the decline of the empire was due to the fact that scholarship had gone over to the Papacy. The main fact in the Italian Renaissance is that an open conflict was averted at the cost of admitting into the hierarchy something of the profane spirit of the new men, who were innovators but not reformers. Ficino declares that there was no place where liberty prevailed as it did at Rome. Poggio, the mocking adversary of the clergy, was for half a century in the service of the Popes. Filelfo was handsomely rewarded by Nicholas for satires which would now be considered scarcely fit for publication. Aeneas Sylvius laughed at the Donation of Constantine, and wrote an account of his own Conclave in the tone of a fin de siecle journalist. He is indeed the founder of freedom of speech in History. When his History of his own time was published, a great number of passages injurious to his countrymen and to his ecclesiastical brethren had to be suppressed. They have been printed lately, and contain, in fifty pages, the concentrated essence of the wickedness of Italy. Platina wrote an angry and vindictive History of the Popes, and presented it to Sixtus IV, who made him librarian of the Vatican. Erasmus, who had a sort of clerical bias, warmly extols the light and liberty which he found at Rome in 1515, at the very eve of the Reformation.
There were branches of classical philology in which the Renaissance was backward. The general purpose was to set up Plato in the place of Aristotle, discredited as as accomplice of the obscurest schoolmen. Under the Medici, a Platonic academy flourished at Florence, with Ficino and Politian at its head. But there was a tendency to merge Plato in Neoplatonism, and to bridge over what separated him from Christianity. Neither the knowledge of Plato, nor the knowledge of the Gospel, profited by the endeavour. The only branch of literature in which the Renaissance gave birth to real classics, equal to the ancients, was politics. The medieval theory of politics restrained the State in the interest of the moral law of the Church, and of the individual. Laws are made for the public good, and, for the public good, they may be suspended. The public good is not to be considered, if it is purchased at the expense of an individual. Authorities are legitimate if they govern well. Whether they do govern well those whom they govern must decide. The unwritten laws reigns supreme over the municipal law. Modern sentiments such as these could not be sustained in the presence of indifference to religion, uncertainty as to another world, impatience of the past, and familiarity with Hellenistic thought. As the Church declined the ancient State appeared, a State which knew no Church, and was the greatest force on earth, bound by no code, a law to itself. As there is no such thing as right, politics are an affair of might, a mere struggle for power. Such was the doctrine which Venice practised, in the interest of a glorious and beneficent government, and which two illustrious writers, Machiavelli and Guicciardini, made the law of modern societies.
The one thing common to the whole Italian Renaissance was the worship of beauty. It was the aesthetic against the ascetic. In this exclusive study, that is, in art, the Italians speedily attained the highest perfection that has been reached by man. And it was reached almost simultaneously in many parts of Italy, Rome, Florence, Milan, and Venice. First, it was the triumph of classical over medieval models, and the suppression of Gothic. Then it was the outbreak of modern painting, beyond all models, medieval or ancient, in a generation of men remarkable for originality. Rome, which had adopted the new learning under the impulse of Nicholas V, went over also to the new art and became its metropolis. It was the ripest and most brilliant work of the time, and it was employed to give expression to religious ideas, and to decorate and exalt the dignity of the Papacy, with its headquarters at the Vatican. The man who conceived how much might be done by renascent art to give splendour to the Church at the moment when its terrestrial limits were immeasurably extended, and its political power newly established, was Julius II. In 1505 Emmanuel of Portugal, inspired by the prodigies of that epoch of discovery, and by the language of recent canonists, addressed him in these terms "Receive, at last, the entire globe, thou who art our god."
Julius, who, by the energy of his will and his passion for posthumous fame, was the true son of the Renaissance, asked Michael Angelo to construct a monument worthy of a pontiff who should surpass all his predecessors in glory. When the design proved too gigantic for any existing Church, he commanded Bramante to pull down the Basilica of Constantine, which for a thousand years had witnessed the dramatic scenes of ecclesiastical history, the coronation of Charlemagne, the enthronement of the dead Formosus, the arrest of Paschal, and to erect in its place a new and glorified St. Peter's, far exceeding all the churches of the universe in its dimensions, in beauty, in power over the imagination of men. The ruthless destruction indicates the tone of the new era. Old St. Peter's was not only a monument of history, but a sepulchre of saints.
Julius was not inspired by the Middle Ages. Under him the Papacy was preparing for a new career, less spiritual than what once had been, more politic and secular and splendid, under new stars. He had Bramante, Michael Angelo, Rafael, San Gallo, Peruzzi, a concentration of artistic genius such as had never been, not produced by Rome itself, but attracted from every quarter by the master of Rome. What had been, one hundred years before, a neglected provincial town, became the centre of European civilisation by the action of the Popes, and principally of one ambitious Pope. The Vatican paintings were largely political, commemorating the sovereign more than the priest, until St. Peter's was designed to exhibit the sublime grandeur and unity of the universal Church, and the authority of its head upon earth. It was the crowning triumph of the Renaissance. When he was dying, Julius said that the masses are impressed not by what they know, but by what they see. He transmitted to his successors the conception of a Church to be the radiant centre of religion and of art for mankind; and we shall see that this was, after all, a disastrous legacy.
The Renaissance, which was at its height in Italy after the middle of the fifteenth century, was checked by the wars of Charles V, the siege of Rome, and the Spanish domination. Toward 1540 Paolo Giovio says that scholarship had migrated from the Italians to the Germans; and the most learned Italian of the next generation, Baronius, knew no Greek. Before its decline in Italy it had found new homes beyond the Alps, especially in Germany. The Germans adopted the new learning much later, near a century later than the Italians, when an occasional student, such as Agricola and Reuchlin, visited Bologna or Rome. It spread slowly. Of the seventeen universities, some, such as at Vienna, Heidelberg, Erfurt, admitted the new studies; others, like Cologne, resisted. There was not the patriotic sentiment, the national enthusiasm. It was the importation of a foreign element, the setting up of an old enemy, the restoration of a world the Germans, under Alaric and Theodoric, had overthrown. They began with the invention of printing, which exactly coincided with the fall of Constantinople, as the earliest specimens of print are indulgences for the Turkish war. This gave assurance that the work of the Renaissance would last, that what was written would be accessible to all, that such an occultation of knowledge and ideas as had depressed the Middle Ages would never recur, that not an idea would be lost. They got their classics generally from Italy; but after Aldus had published his series of ancient writers, still treasured by those whom Greek contractions do not repel, the New Testament and the Fathers, edited by Erasmus, were printed at Bale by Froben and Amerbach.
The pagan spirit, the impatience of Christianity, appears only in one or two Germans, such as Mutianus Rufus, who kept his convictions to himself. There were no great theologians, but there was the greatest religious writer that ever lived, the author of the Imitation, and he was not a solitary thinker, but a member of a congregation which kept religion alive, especially in North Germany. The opposition which arose was stronger and more defined than anything in Italy, but it was against Catholicism, not against Christianity.
The only matter in which German philology surpassed Italian was science. The man who turned the course of the new learning into those channels was Johannes Muller of Konigsberg, near Coburg, therefore known as Monteregio; as Regiomontanus Bessarion gave him a MS. of Ptolemy, and he designed a scheme to print the whole body of Greek mathematicians. His Ephemerides are the origin of the Nautical Almanack, and enabled Columbus and Vasco and Vespucci to sail the high seas; and Nuremberg, where he lived, became the chief seat of the manufacture of nautical instruments. He was made a bishop, and summoned to Rome to reform the calendar. There was one Italian who possessed the scientific spirit, without help from books, by the prerogative of genius; that was Leonardo da Vinci. But he confided his thoughts to diaries and remained unknown and useless in his time.
The conflict between the new learning and the old, which was repressed in Italy by the policy of Rome, broke out in Germany, where it was provoked by the study of Hebrew, not of Greek. At Rome in 1482 a German student translated a passage of Thucydides so well that the lecturer complained that Greece was settling beyond the Alps. It was the first time that the rivalry appeared. That student was Reuchlin. His classical accomplishments alone would not have made his name one of the most conspicuous in literary history; but in 1490 Pico della Mirandola expounded to him the wonders of oriental learning, and Reuchlin, having found a Rabbi at Linz, began to study Hebrew in 1492. His path was beset with difficulties, for there were no books in that language to be found in all Germany. Reuchlin drew his supply from Italy, and was the first German who read the Cabbala. He shared many popular prejudices against the Jews, and read their books to help him with the Old Testament, as he read Greek to help him with the New. He had none of the grace, the dexterity, the passion, of the Humanists, and very little of their enthusiasm for the classics. He preferred Gregory Nazianzen to Homer. Savonarola shocked him by his opposition to Alexander VI. His writings had little scientific value, but he was a pioneer, and he prized the new learning for the sake of religion. Therefore, when he was summoned to give an opinion on the suppression of Jewish books, he opposed it, and insisted on the biblical knowledge and the religious ideas to be found in them. Divines, he said, would not have made so many mistakes if they had attended to the Jewish commentators.
At that time persecution was raging against the Jews in the Peninsula. They had always had enemies in the German towns, and in July 1510, thirty-eight Jews were executed at Berlin. This intolerant spirit began, in 1507, to be directed against their books. None were printed in Germany until 1516; but from 1480 they had Hebrew presses in Italy, at Naples, Mantua, Soncino, and at Constantinople. If their study was encouraged while the printing was permitted, the Jews would become a power such as they never were before printing began, and when none but a few divines could read Hebrew. The movement in favour of destroying them had its home at Cologne, with Hochstraten, the Inquisitor; Gratius, a good scholar, whose work, known as Brown's Fasciculus, is in the hands of every medieval student; and Pfefferkorn, who had the zeal of a recently converted Jew. In his anxiety to bring over his former brethren he desired to deprive them of their books. He would allow them to retain only the Old Testament, without their commentaries. He would compel them to hear Christian sermons. By degrees he urged that they should be expelled, and at last that they should be exterminated.
Maximilian, the emperor, turned with every wind. Reuchlin, the defender of toleration, was attacked by Pfefferkorn, as a sceptic and a traitor, and was accused before the ecclesiastical court. In 1514 the Bishop of Spires, acting for the Pope, acquitted Reuchlin; the sentence was confirmed at Rome in 1516, and the Dominicans, who were plaintiffs, agreed to pay the costs. Nevertheless they appealed, and in 1520 Rome reversed the previous judgment and condemned Reuchlin. In the midst of greater things the sentence escaped attention, and was only brought to light by a scholar who is still living. But in the meantime the Humanists had taken up the cause of Reuchlin, and the result had been disastrous for the Dominicans. They had not directly assailed the new learning, but their attack on the study of Hebrew had been the most crass exhibition of retrograde spirit. If Jews were not allowed to read Jewish books, such as Maimonides, to whom St. Thomas owes so much, how could Christians be allowed to read pagan classics, with their highly immoral gods and goddesses?
The golden opportunity of making intolerance ridiculous could not be neglected. In the summer of 1515 a volume appeared purporting to contain letters to Ortwin Gratius; and it was followed two years later by another. With some good satire and some amusing caricature, they also contained much personal insult and calumny. The wit is not enough to carry on the joke through 108 letters, carefully composed in Teutonic dog Latin by the best Latinists north of the Brenner. Erasmus, who was diverted at first, afterwards turned away with disgust, and Luther called the authors buffoons. The main writer of the first volume was Crotus Rubianus, and of the other, Hutten. Reuchlin himself disapproved. But he shared in the victory, which was so brilliant that his condemnation by Rome passed without notice, and it was not till our day that the success of the despised Pfefferkorn became known to the world. It was the first effective appeal to opinion against constituted authority, and the most decisive demonstration of the power of the press. And it gave the Humanists occasion so to define the issue that all could understand, in spite of the reserve of Erasmus and of Reuchlin himself.
Erasmus Rogers, the greatest figure in the Renaissance, was born at Rotterdam and brought up in extreme poverty, and he was a valetudinarian and an invalid in consequence of early privation. He lived in France and Belgium, in England and Italy, in Switzerland and Germany, so that each country contributed to his development, and none set its stamp upon him. He was eminently an international character; and was the first European who lived in intimacy with other ages besides his own, and could appreciate the gradual ripening and enlargement of ideas. He devoted himself on equal terms to classical and to Christian antiquity, and drew from both alike the same lessons of morality and wisdom; for he valued doctrine chiefly for the sake of a good life and a happy death, and was impatient of subtle dialectics and speculative disputations. With so much of Renaissance studies as did not serve the good estate of souls he showed little sympathy, and was indifferent to art, to metaphysics, to antiquarian pedantry. He endeavoured to make men familiar with the wisdom of the ancients by a collection of 1451 adages selected from their works. His Colloquies, the most popular book of his age, sold in 24,000 copies. At first he was more a scholar than a divine; and though he learnt Greek late, and was never a first-rate Hellenist, published editions of the classics. In later life the affairs of religion absorbed him, and he lived for the idea that reform of the Church depended on a better knowledge of early Christianity, in other words, on better self-knowledge, which could only result from a slow and prolonged literary process. He started from the beginning by his edition of the Greek Testament, begun here, at Queens' in 1512, published at Bale by Froben in 1516. It had already been printed from better MSS. by Cardinal Ximenes in the fifth volume of the Complutensian Polyglot, which did not appear until 1522. Therefore Erasmus's edition is the first ever published. It was produced at last, in a hurry, to secure the priority, and was not greatly improved afterwards. Part of the Apocalypse was wanting in all his MSS. He restored it by translating it into Greek from the Vulgate, and in six verses made thirty mistakes. His second edition had a letter of approbation from Leo X, and it was the edition which Luther used for his translation. It is a sign of the want of religious interest in the Renaissance, especially in Italy, that printing had been going on for sixty years, and 24,000 works issued from the press, some of them more than a hundred times, before anybody thought of the Greek Testament.
Erasmus occupied his later years with the works of the Fathers, also printed by Froben, the Greeks in Latin translations. "Letters," he said, "had remained Pagan in Italy, until he taught them to speak of Christ." Just as he was entirely destitute of the national fibre, so too he stood apart from the schools or currents of his time. His striving was to replace the scholastics by the Fathers, systematic theology by spiritual religion; and those Doctors of the Church who inclined to system, such as St. Augustine, repelled him. It may be said that he was not attracted by St. Paul, and preferred the Gospels to the Epistles. He esteemed Seneca more highly than many Christian divines. Although he chose to employ the weapon of irony, and abstained from the high horse and the big word, he was earnest in his desire for the reform of abuses in the Church. He disliked contention, and desired to avoid offence; but he made enemies in all parts of Europe, and was vehemently denounced by the theologians of Paris and Louvain, by the Spanish friars, by Archbishop Lee, by Zuniga, the Count of Carpi, and especially by the very learned Steuchus of Gubbio. In later days he was one of the first writers put on the Index. But throughout his career as a divine, that is, for the last quarter of a century that he lived, he was consistently protected, defended, consulted by Popes, until Paul III offered him a Cardinal's hat and desired that he would settle at Rome. He told Leo X that he thought it a mistake to censure Luther, with whom he agreed as to many of the matters calling for reform. But whilst Luther attributed the prevailing demoralisation to false dogmas and a faulty constitution, Erasmus sought the cause in ignorance and misgovernment. What came from this division of opinion pertains to the next lecture. Erasmus belonged, intellectually, to a later and more scientific or rational age. The work which he had initiated, and which was interrupted by the Reformation troubles, was resumed at a more acceptable time by the scholarship of the seventeenth century.
DURING THE latter part of the Middle Ages, the desire for reform of the Church was constant. It was strongest and most apparent among laymen, for a famous monastic writer of the fourteenth century testified that the laity led better lives than the clergy. To the bulk of ordinary Christians reform meant morality in the priesthood. It became intolerable to them to see the Sacrament administered habitually by sacrilegious hands, or to let their daughters go to confession to an unclean priest. The discontent was deepest where men were best. They felt that the organisation provided for the salvation of souls was serving for their destruction, and that the more people sought the means of grace in the manner provided, the greater risk they incurred of imbibing corruption. In the days when celibacy was imposed under Gregory VII, it was argued that the validity of orders depended on conduct; and that idea of forfeiture by sin, essentially fatal to the whole hierarchical system, was not yet extinct. People learnt to think of virtue apart from the institutions of the Church, and the way was paved for a change which should reduce the part of the clergy in men's lives, and give them families of their own. The hope that a stricter discipline would be enforced by authority from within died away. When Eugenius IV directed Cesarini to dissolve the Council of Basle, the Cardinal replied that if he obeyed they would be thought to be mocking God and men, and to have abandoned the notion of reform, and the laity would have some reason to believe that it was a good deed to destroy, or at least to plunder, the clergy.
The religious influence of the Church was brought low by its record of failure. The scheme for governing the world by the hierarchy, pursued for three centuries, had terminated in disaster. For a whole generation no man knew whether the Papacy was in Italy or in France. The attempt to effect improvement through the Councils had been abandoned after many experiments, and the failure to reconcile the Greeks had established the Ottoman Empire in Europe. With the decline of the Church the State rose in power and prerogative, and exercised rights which for centuries had been claimed by the hierarchy. All this did not suggest Lutheranism to Luther, but it prepared the world for it.
Amidst the abuses and excesses of that epoch of lax discipline and indistinct theology, the point of breaking was supplied by a practice of very recent growth. Indulgences had long existed, and after a time they were applied to souls in purgatory. When, at last, plenary indulgences, that is, total remissions of penalty, were transferred to the dead, it meant that they were straightway released from purgatory and received into heaven. Five churches in Rome enjoyed the privilege that a soul was released as often as mass was said at one of the altars, technically known as privileged altars, or as often as certain prayers were said by persons visiting them. There were privileged altars at St. Peter's, at St. Prassede, at Santa Pudentiana, at the Scala Santa. At one, five masses were required; at another, thirty. In the crypt of St. Sebastian one visit was enough. A particular prayer repeated during forty days remitted one-seventh of the punishment, and on the fortieth day the dead man would appear to his benefactor, to thank him. All the benefits available to a pilgrim visiting Rome could be enjoyed at a distance by the purchase of an indulgence from the friars sent round to sell them. Such an indulgence, published by Julius II for the construction of St. Peter's, was revived by Leo X in 1517, half the proceeds to go to the Archbishop of Mentz, that he might pay back a loan to Fugger of Augsburg. The banker's agent went round with the appointed preacher and kept the strong box. Tetzel, a Dominican, preached the indulgence in Saxony, though not in the territory of the elector, and he employed to the utmost the arguments authorised by the custom of the day. Speaking of him and of his colleagues, Benedict XIV said that they were the cause of all the trouble that followed.
Many people thought the indulgences, as then practised, a mischief, because people took them as equivalent to absolution; and the general of the Augustinians spoke of them as an encouragement to sin. But the extreme point was the theory that payment of a few pence would rescue a soul from purgatory. Therefore, when Luther raised a protest against such propositions, he said no more than what many other people were saying, and less than some. And he had no idea that he was not speaking in thorough harmony with the entire Church, or that the ground he occupied was new. The Dominicans stood by Tetzel and made his cause their own. They were able to say of him that he had only uttered current doctrine, though it had not the sanction of former ages. Three hundred of them were present when he received a degree at Frankfort on the Oder, and the Dominicans at Rome defended even the most extreme and grotesque of the sayings attributed to him.
Leo committed the whole business to Silvester Prierias, Master of the Sacred Palace and official theologian of the Holy See. Prierias was not a reputable defender of any religious cause. In one of his books he advises a judge that he may obtain a confession by a promise of mercy, meaning mercy to the community, and charges the notary to put down in what sense the words were spoken. Accordingly he made the worst possible defence. St. Thomas, discussing indulgences as they were in his time, urges that they may be accepted as they are given by authority. Prierias, an ardent Thomist, regards this as a valid argument for the practices that were now contested. The problem of right is settled by the evidence of fact. The questors, as they were called, acted as legitimate agents of the Holy See. To deny what authority tacitly approves, is to deny authority; and to appeal from the Pope to the Bible, is to appeal from a higher authority to a lower. This was to ignore the difficulty and to make reforms impossible. The reason for this compendious evasion was that Leo, prior to his election, had taken an oath to revoke the indulgence of Julius II, and to supply otherwise the money required for St. Peters. The capitulation was in March 1513. The breach of the capitulation, in March 1515. It was not desirable to raise a controversy as to the broken oath, or to let Luther appear as the supporter of the Cardinals against the Pope, or of the Pope expecting the tiara against the Pope in possession of it. The effect was to deprive Luther of the hope that he was at issue with a too eager subordinate in Saxony, and to transfer his attack to Rome. It was now officially declared that whatever is is right, and that no improvement or reform is wanted in high places.
A graver personage came upon the scene when it was agreed that Luther should appear before the Legate at Augsburg. Cardinal Cajetan was the weightiest divine of the Court of Rome, and a man of original mind, who was denounced in his order as a dangerous innovator, and whose writings could not be reprinted without large omissions. He is commemorated, in political literature, among the advocates of tyrannicide. He was more dexterous than Prierias, although he also refused a revision of current practices. By putting forward a decree of Clement VI, he drove Luther to declare that no papal decree was a sufficient security for him. So that, having assailed authority in that which it tolerated or ignored, he assailed it now in that which it directly affirmed, and was no longer a mere intruder, proffering unwelcome advice, but a barbarian thundering at the gates of Rome. Cajetan dismissed him ungraciously; and having been warned that a Dominican cardinal might be perilous company in the circumstances, he went off secretly and made his way home. He was already a popular figure in Germany, and the Diet of Augsburg had complained that the drain caused by indulgences left no supplies for the Turkish war.
When Luther returned to Wittenberg he was aware that his ideas extended much farther than he had supposed. Since the refusal to listen to his remonstrance, he knew that he was involved in a conflict in which Rome would be against him. He knew also that many of his countrymen would be on his side. The same discovery was unexpectedly made by the next papal emissary, Miltitz, a Saxon layman, who was sent to convey the Golden Rose to Luther's patron, the elector Frederic. It was well understood at Rome that Cajetan, in pushing Luther one step beyond his original Thesis, by transferring the question from the discretion of Tetzel to the authority under which he acted, had mismanaged the affair. Uncompromising rigour having failed, the opposite treatment was now applied. Miltitz, finding the majority of Germans favourable to Luther, deposited the Golden Rose at Nuremberg, and came into his own country with a resolution to be conciliatory. The friends whom he saw on his way informed Luther, and urged him to meet his countryman in the same spirit. Miltitz saw Tetzel and silenced him; and the inauspicious preacher did not long survive his disgrace. Having given this proof that he entertained no adverse prejudice, that on the immediate problem they were in sympathy, Miltitz had a conference with Luther at Altenburg.
Luther followed the advice of his friends at Nuremberg. The specific evil he had denounced was now admitted by the authorised representative of the Holy See. He obtained, through him, a reassuring glimpse of Roman opinion, and the certainty that there were men on the spot, unlike Prierias and Cajetan, whose convictions in regard to unreformed abuses were as clear as his own, and whose opportunities were better. They came to an understanding. Luther was to publish an explanation and then the subject was to drop. It did not mean that he was approved; but dubious points were not pressed, for the sake of those on which the force of his case was felt. He wrote to a friend that he would suppress much rather than offend, and the whole thing would die out of itself. The contrast between Miltitz and Cajetan was such that he had reason to be satisfied. Miltitz also considered that he had done well, and had extinguished a conflagration that might have become serious. He advised the Elector not to send the Wittenberg professor out of the country. More eager spirits were impatient of so tame a conclusion; for there were some to whom plenary indulgences for the living or the dead were a drop of water in an ocean of controversy, whilst others thought that authority had been outraged on one side and surrendered on the other. Before the dispute was reopened Luther wrote a letter to Leo X, saying the ecclesiastical authority must be upheld to the utmost. This saying, of little account in his theology, is significant in his entire system of thought. What he meant was that the papal supremacy in the government of the Church had endured so long that the divine sanction was upon it. He did not trace it much farther back than the twelfth century. But that, he considered, constituted a legitimate claim.
Luther, who was a profound conservative and a reluctant innovator, and who felt the fascination that belongs to lapse of time, employed on behalf of the Papacy an argument by which Dante had defended the Empire. Machiavelli derived right from success, and Luther from duration. In reality he held both doctrines, for he thought Zwingli's death in battle an evident judgment on his low sacramental theory. Promoted at the same time by the two most powerful writers in the world, the idea that heaven is responsible for results acquired immense prestige, and long influenced European thinking. The argument by which he justified the Papacy amounted, in fact, to a negation of its claim to divine institution; and at the time when he produced it, early in 1519, he had come to reject not only the excesses of Tetzel, but the entire scheme of indulgences. Although he held to the Papacy only by an ingenious sophism, beyond the Pope there was the Council; and he might still deem himself a Catholic after the manner of Gerson and the Gallican divines of Constance, who depreciated Rome. That was possible, if nothing in the sequence of his views came into collision with any decree of a General Council.
This was now the question of the day, the question for the summer of 1519. The man who brought it to an issue was John Eck, a theologian of Ingolstadt University, who came to Leipzig to dispute with Luther's colleague Carlstadt, and ended by a disputation with Luther himself. He imagined that Luther did not perceive the consequences. Because he defied the Popes, it did not follow that he would defy the Councils, especially a Council held in Germany, under the protection of a German Emperor, a Council zealous for reform and honoured by Germans, as their avenger on the national enemy John Hus. Luther had no special preference for an assembly which burnt an obnoxious professor of theology, and no great interest in reforms which he deemed external, and not making for inward change. He said that there were points on which Hus was right, and the sentence that condemned him was wrong. He admitted, in the end, that Councils as well as Popes might be against him, and that the authority by which he stood was the divine revelation. That is how "the Bible, and the Bible only," became the religion of Protestants.
Having succeeded in forcing Luther from his original positions, Eck carried the matter to Rome. A theory so uncertain in its method, so imperfectly tested by the regulated comparison of authorities, might crumble to pieces if all its consequences were made manifest. It was conceivable that a man who had raised such a storm without looking up his books, without weighing the language of Councils or thinking out his thoughts, upon whom the very obvious objections of Cajetan and Eck came as a surprise, who at every step abandoned some previous proposition, might not feel absolutely and finally sure that he was right, or might even recognise the force of the saying that it is well to die for the truth, but not for every truth. Eck joined with Cajetan in urging the strongest measures of repression. A different line of policy suggested itself, in the spirit of Erasmus. It was to hail Luther as an auxiliary, as the most powerful leader in the work of eradicating evils which were a familiar scandal to all religious men, and the constant theme of ineffective Cardinals on every solemn occasion. Then they might have confronted whatever was to follow with cleaner hands and a better conscience.
In June 1520, after a year's deliberation, Luther was condemned as the teacher of forty-one heresies; and in January, after he had made a bonfire of the Papal Bull and of the Canon Law, he was excommunicated. According to imperial constitutions three centuries old, the next step was that the civil magistrate, as the favourite phrase was, would send the culprit through the transitory flames of this world to the everlasting flames of the next. If that was not done, it might come to pass that the zeal of Prierias, Cajetan, and Eck would serve to inform the world that the medieval reign was over, and that the pen of an angry, rude, and not very learned monk was stronger than the Papacy and the Empire. It was known from the first that the Elector of Saxony would defend Luther, without being a Lutheran. Indeed, he shocked him by his zeal for indulgences and his collection of 19,000 relics. But he protected Luther as the most famous teacher of his university. They never met, and when the Elector on his deathbed sent for him, Luther was away. Since the Disputation of Leipzig he was the most conspicuously popular man in Germany. What he had said about the use and abuse of indulgences had not inflamed the nation. But the appeal to Scripture was definite and clear, and it met many objections and many causes of opposition.
When Luther was discussing the value of indulgences here and in the other world he meant no more and saw no farther. But now he saw the chasm, and possessed a principle on which to found his theology, his ethics, his politics, his theory of Church and State, and he proceeded to expound his ideas thoroughly in three celebrated works, known as his Reformation Tracts, which appeared in 1520. Luther's fundamental doctrine had come to him in early life, not from books, but from a friend. When all the efforts and resources of monastic criticism had led him only to despair, one of the brethren told him that his own works could not bring relief from the sense of unforgiven sin, but only faith in the merits of Christ. He found such comfort in this idea, which became the doctrine of imputation, and he grasped it with such energy that it has transformed the world. Predestination seemed to follow logically, and the rejection of free-will; and, as the office of the ordained priest became superfluous, the universal priesthood, with the denial of Prelacy. All this was fully worked out in the writings of 1520.
Luther was unconscious at first of the tremendous revolution he was preparing, because he found satisfaction in the strong language of St. Bernard. Under the shadow of the greatest doctor of the medieval church he felt assured of safety. And when he spoke of the Bible only, that was not textually more than had been said by Scotus and others, such as Erasmus, and quite lately the Bishop of Isernia at the Lateran Council. He did not start with a system or an apostolate; but now that his prodigious power as a writer of German had been revealed, he rejoiced in the conflict. He obtained his opportunity at the Diet of Worms. The young Emperor had come over from Spain to receive the crown, and he had accepted the Bull of Leo against Luther. At that moment he was on friendly terms with Rome, but his chancellor, Gattinara, warned him that the people throughout Germany favoured the reformer; and Tunstall wrote to Wolsey that 100,000 men would give their lives rather than let him be sacrificed to the Papacy. Even at Mentz, an episcopal city, the Nuncio Aleander was in danger of being stoned. "The conflicts of Church and State in the Middle Ages," he wrote, "were child's play to this." Therefore, although Luther had been condemned and excommunicated for forty heresies, although he had publicly thrown the Pope's Bull into the fire, and was worthy of death by ecclesiastical and municipal law, the Emperor gave him a free pass to the Diet and back, and sent a herald to arrange the journey.
At Erfurt, on his way, he learnt for the first time how the country was with him. When within sight of the towers and spires of Worms, he was warned by the Saxon minister Spalatin that his life would not be safe; and he returned the famous answer that he would go on if every tile in the city was a devil. At Oppenheim, almost the last stage, Bucer was waiting his arrival with a strange and unexpected message. A French Franciscan, Glapion, was the Emperor's confessor, and he was staying at Sickingen's castle, a few miles off, in company with Sickingen himself, the dreaded free-lance, with Ulrich von Hutten and with the unfrocked Dominican Bucer, who was to prove the ablest of the German reformers next to Luther. He sent Bucer, with an escort of Sickingen's troopers, to invite Luther to visit him there before he proceeded to Worms. It was clear that the Diet would end with a repulse for authority. The very presence there of a man who had written with such violence, and had been so solemnly condemned, was a defiance. Glapion was a reforming Catholic, and desired the assistance of Luther. He was clever enough to find ground in common with Erasmus, Ulrich von Hutten, and Bucer, and he was ready with far-reaching concessions to secure Luther. Then, he thought, his Emperor would be enabled to purify the Church. Bucer was of opinion that there was nothing to prevent agreement if Luther would interpret his contested writings as Bucer had explained them to Glapion. Gattinara was urgent for a reforming Council; the union of so many forces would be enough to invigorate the Italian cardinals, and they could carry Rome with them. It was the party of Reform attempting to conciliate the party of Reformation, that they might co-operate in saving the work of the Renaissance and renewing the Church from within. By renouncing "The Babylonish Captivity" alone of his numerous writings, Luther, who had already revoked so many utterances, might obtain acceptance for his main dogma, and bind the united Humanists and the Imperial government to his cause. Those were the terms of the proposed alliance. They were at once rejected.
Luther owed much to Erasmus, but they could never combine. He looked upon the purpose of the other as essentially rationalistic, Pelagian, and pagan. He foresaw that the coming struggle would be not with the old school, but with the new; that the obstacle to the Reformation was the Renaissance, and the enemy's name Erasmus. The Franciscan's profound and dazzling scheme miscarried, and Luther appeared before the Diet. Prompted by Glapion, the Imperial spokesman took no notice of Luther's own specific views, or of the Papal Bull against them. But he invited him to dissociate himself from Wyclif and John Hus on those matters which had been censured at Constance. That Council was the venerated safeguard of Catholic and Imperial reformers, and the strongest weapon of opposition to Rome. A Council which compelled the Emperor to burn a divine alive, after giving him a safe-conduct, was in no good odour just then with Luther, standing by the waves of the Rhine, which swept the ashes of John Hus away into oblivion. They then represented to Luther that the Diet was on his side, against Roman encroachments and the theory of penance; they praised his writings generally, and proposed that unsettled matters should be left to the decision of a future Council. To this he was willing to agree. But he stipulated that there should be no judgment except by the standard of Scripture. They replied that it stood to reason, and could not be made the object of a special condition. They meant different things, and the discussion came to naught. But important concessions had been made, and many opportunities had been offered, for the Diet was drawing up "the grievances of the German nation," and for that policy he was a desirable ally. Luther declined to concede anything, and a month later the Emperor signed the sentence of outlawry. In his Spanish dominions he was a jealous upholder of the Inquisition, even against the Pope, and of all the princes at Worms, secular or ecclesiastical, he was the most hostile and the most impatient.
Meanwhile Luther had gone back to Saxony, had preached on his way to the Benedictines of Hersfeld, and then disappeared in the Thuringian Forest. It was reported that he was dead; that his body had been found with a sword through it. When Charles V was dying, a baffled and disappointed man, he is said to have lamented that he kept his word to the turbulent friar who had triumphantly defied him. But Leo X sent orders that the passport should be respected and that the traveller should depart in peace.
Luther at Worms is the most pregnant and momentous fact in our history, and the problem is to know why he so rigidly repelled the advances of the confessor, of the Chancellor of Baden, and the Elector of Treves. Was it simply the compelling logic of Protestantism, or was there some private saltpetre of his own, a programme drawn from his personality and habits of mind? There was no question at issue which had not either been pronounced by him insufficient for separation, or which was not abandoned afterwards, or modified in a Catholic sense by the moderating hand of Melanchthon. That happened to every leading doctrine at Augsburg, at Ratisbon, or at Leipzig. Predestination was dropped. The necessity of good works, the freedom of the will, the hierarchical constitution, the authority of tradition, the seven sacraments, the Latin mass, were admitted. Melanchthon confessed that he held all Roman doctrine, and that there was no difference except as to the celibacy of the clergy and communion under both kinds; the rest was the work of agitators; and he bitterly resented Luther's tyrannical treatment. As Melanchthon had the making of the official statements of doctrine, it would almost appear as if Luther never became a Lutheran. And the truth is that he held one doctrine which he never succeeded in imposing, and which forbade all approach and all endeavours to explain. For he believed that the Pope was anti-Christ. The idea came to him from Lorenzo Valla, whose tract on the Donation was published in 1518 by Hutten. He became convinced almost immediately after writing to Leo that deferential letter which he had agreed upon with Miltitz. It obliged him to force on a breach at Worms. His main objection to the Confession of Augsburg was that this article was excluded from it.