Durant W. The Reformation. A History of European Civilization from Wyclif to Calvin: 1300-1564

seen in German lands." `061559 He met Erasmus, Lucas van Leyden,

Bernaert van Orley, and other Netherlands worthies, and was feted in

the cities by the artists' guilds. In the mosquito swamps of Zeeland

he contracted the malaria that ruined the health of his remaining

years.

One entry in his journal reads: "I have bought Luther's tract for

five white-pennies, and have given one for the Condemnation of that

mighty man." `061560 At Antwerp (May 1521) a rumor reached him that

Luther had been "treacherously seized" on leaving the Diet of Worms.

Durer did not know that this abduction had been arranged to protect

the Reformer; and fearing that Luther had been killed, he wrote in his

journal a passionate defense of the rebel, and an appeal to Erasmus to

come to the aid of his party:

-

So this man, enlightened by the Holy Ghost to be the continuer of

the true faith, has disappeared.... If he has suffered it is for the

Christian truth against the unchristian papacy, which works against

the freedom of Christ, exacting from us our blood and sweat

therewith to nourish itself in idleness while the peoples famish. O

God! never were men so cruelly put down under human laws as under

those of the Roman See.... Everyone sees how clear is the doctrine

announced in Luther's books, and how it conforms to the Holy Gospel.

We must preserve these books from being burned; rather let us throw

into the fire the books written to oppose him.... All you pious

Christians, deplore with me the loss of this man, and pray the Lord

that he will send another guide. O Erasmus of Rotterdam, where wilt

thou remain? Wilt thou see the injustice and blind tyranny of the

powers now ruling? Hear me, knight of Christ, ride by the side of

Our Lord XS; old as thou art... thou too mayst win the martyr's

crown.... Make thy voice heard!... O Erasmus, may God thy Judge be

glorified in thee! `061561

-

When Durer returned to Nuremberg he devoted himself almost wholly to

religious art, and with new emphasis on the Gospels. In 1526 he

completed his greatest group of paintings- The Four Apostles -

improperly named, since Mark the Evangelist was not one of the Twelve;

but perhaps that very error pointed to the Protestant idea of

returning from the Church to the Gospels. The two panels are among the

proudest possessions of that Haus der Kunst in which war-wounded

Munich has regathered her famous collections of art. One panel

pictures John and Peter, the other Mark and Paul- all four in

gorgeously colored robes hardly befitting fishermen communist

saints; in these vestments Durer bowed to Italian idealization,

while in the broad and massive heads he asserted his German

environment. Probably these majestic figures had been intended to form

the wings of a triptych for a Catholic church. But in 1525 the

municipal council of Nuremberg declared for the Reformation.

Abandoning the plan for an altarpiece, Durer presented the panels to

the city, and affixed to each panel inscriptions strongly stressing

the importance of the Gospels. Despite the keys in Peter's hand-

usually taken as representing the divine establishment and powers of

the Church- these paintings could be interpreted as Durer's Protestant

testament.

He had now only two more years to live. Periodic attacks of malarial

fever broke both his health and his spirit. Even in 1522 he had

drawn his final self-portrait as the Man of Sorrows, naked,

disheveled, haggard, sickly, in pain, holding in his hands the scourge

and whip of the Passion of Christ. Nevertheless he worked to the

end. When he died (April 6, 1528), aged fifty-seven, he left enough

drawings, woodcuts, and engravings- besides 6,000 florins- to

support his widow in somber comfort for the remainder of her life.

Pirkheimer, who mourned him as "the best friend I have had in my

life," wrote a simple epitaph for the tomb:

-

QUICQUID ALBERTI DURERI MORTALE

FUIT SUB HOC CONDITUR TUMULO

-

-"Whatever was mortal of Albrecht Durer lies under this mound."

He missed supreme stature as an artist by sacrificing the greatest

task of art to a lesser one: he was so charmed to see the passing

shapes of persons, places, and things take lasting life under his

hands that he absorbed himself chiefly in representing the real-

lovely or ugly, significant or meaningless- and only occasionally

fused the scattered elements of sense perception to form in creative

imagination, and then in line or color, ideal beauties to give us

goals to aim at, or revealing visions to offer understanding or peace.

But he rose to the call of his time. He cut into wood or copper a

biography of his expectant and generative generation; his pen or

pencil, burin or brush evoked the hidden souls of the forceful men who

trod the stage of the age; he made that epoch live for us, across four

centuries, in all its enthusiasms, devotions, fears, superstitions,

protests, dreams, and wonderment. He was Germany.

VI. THE GERMAN HUMANIST

-

It was a lusty Germany in letters as well as in life and art.

Literacy was spreading. Books were pouring forth from sixteen

publishers in Basel, twenty in Augsburg, twenty-one in Cologne,

twenty-Four in Nuremberg; there Anton Koberger alone employed

twenty-four presses and a hundred men. The trade in books was a

major line in the busy commerce of the fairs at Frankfurt, Salzburg,

Nordlingen, and Ulm. "Everybody nowadays wants to read and write,"

said a contemporary German; and another reported: "There is no end

to the new books that are written." `061562 Schools multiplied in

the towns; every city provided bursaries or scholarships for poor

but able students; nine new universities were founded in this

half-century; and those at Vienna, Heidelberg, and Erfurt opened their

doors to the New Learning. Literary academies arose in Strasbourg,

Augsburg, Basel, Vienna, Nuremberg, and Mainz. Rich burghers like

Peutinger and Pirkheimer, and the Emperor Maximilian himself, opened

their libraries, art collections, and purses to eager scholars; and

great ecclesiastics like Johann von Dahlberg, Bishop of Worms, and

Albrecht of Brandenburg, Archbishop of Mainz, were enlightened patrons

of scholarship, poetry, and art. The Church in Germany, following

the lead of the popes, welcomed the Renaissance, but emphasized

linguistic studies of Biblical and patristic texts. The Latin

Vulgate Bible was printed in twenty-six editions in Germany between

1453 and 1500; there were twenty German translations of the Bible

before Luther's; `061563 the spread of the New Testament among the

people prepared them for Luther's challenging contrast between the

Gospels and the Church; and the reading of the Old Testament shared in

the Protestant re-Judaizing of Christianity.

The humanist movement in Germany was at first- and after its

flirtation with Luther- more orthodox in theology than its Italian

counterpart. Germany had no classical past like Italy's; she had not

had the privilege of being conquered and educated by Imperial Rome;

she had no direct bond with non-Christian antiquity. Her memory hardly

went beyond her Christian centuries; her scholarship, in this age,

hardly ventured beyond the Christian fathers; her Renaissance was a

revival of early Christianity rather than of classic letters and

philosophy. In Germany the Renaissance was engulfed in the

Reformation.

Nevertheless German humanism took its lead from Italy. Poggio

Bracciolini, Aeneas Sylvius, and other humanists, visiting Germany,

brought the seed; German students, pilgrims, ecclesiastics, merchants,

and diplomats, visiting Italy, came back bearing on them, even

unwittingly, the pollen of the Renaissance. Rodolphus Agricola, son of

a Dutch parish priest, received plentiful schooling at Erfurt,

Cologne, and Louvain; gave seven years to further studies of Latin and

Greek in Italy; and returned to teach at Groningen, Heidelberg, and

Worms. The age marveled at his unpopular virtues- modesty, simplicity,

honesty, piety, chastity. He wrote in a Latin almost worthy of Cicero;

he predicted that Germany would soon "appear no less Latin than

Latium"; `061564 and indeed, in the next generation, Agricola's

Holland produced in Erasmus a Latinist who would have been quite at

home in the Rome of Tacitus and Quintilian. It was on a trip to Rome

that Agricola contracted the fever from which he died at Heidelberg at

the age of forty-two (1485).

He was rivaled in influence- hardly in amiability- by Jakob

Wimpheling, whose temper was as harsh as his Latin was smooth.

Resolved to lift Germany to Italy's level in education and letters,

this "Schoolmaster of Germany" drew up plans for a system of public

schools, established learned societies, and yet foresaw how

dangerous intellectual advance would be without moral development.

"What profits all our learning," he asked, "if our characters be not

correspondingly noble, or all our industry without piety, or all our

knowledge without love of our neighbor, or all our wisdom without

humility?" `061565

The last of these orthodox humanists was Johannes Trithemius,

Abbot of Sponheim, who nevertheless wrote in 1496: "The days of

building monasteries are past; the days of their destruction are

coming." `061566 A less devout humanist, Celtes, described

Trithemius as "abstemious in drink, disdaining animal food, living

on vegetables, eggs, and milk, as did our ancestors when... no doctors

had begun to brew their gout-and-fever-breeding

concoctions." *06037 `061567 In his brief life he became a very

summa of learning: skilled in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and their

literatures, and carrying on a correspondence with Erasmus,

Maximilian, Imperial electors, and other celebrities. The common

people of the time could only explain his attainments on the theory

that he possessed secret supernatural powers. However, he died at

fifty-four (1516).

Conradus Celtes was the most zealous and effective of the German

humanists. Passing like some hurried diplomat of letters from city

to city, studying in Italy, Poland, and Hungary, teaching in

Cologne, Heidelberg, Cracow, Prague, Mainz, Vienna, Ingolstadt, Padua,

Nuremberg, he unearthed precious forgotten manuscripts like the

plays of Hrotswitha, and ancient maps like that which he gave to

Peutinger, whose name it came to bear. Wherever he went he gathered

students about him, and inspired them with his passion for poetry,

classical literature, and German antiquities. In 1447, at Nuremberg,

the Emperor Frederick III crowned him poet laureate of Germany. At

Mainz Celtes founded (1491) the influential Rhenish Literary

Society, which included scientists, theologians, philosophers,

physicians, historians, poets, such lawyers as the distinguished

jurist Ulrich Zasius, and such scholars as Pirkheimer, Trithemius,

Reuchlin, and Wimpheling. At Vienna, with funds provided by

Maximilian, he organized (1501) an Academy of Poetry which became an

honored part of the university, and in which teachers and pupils lived

together in the same house and enterprise. In the course of his

studies Celtes apparently lost his religious faith; he raised such

questions as "Will the soul live after death?" and "Is there,

really, a God?" In his travels he took many samples of femininity, but

none to the altar; and he concluded lightheartedly that "there is

nothing sweeter under the sun, to banish care, than a pretty maid in a

man's arms." `061568

This skeptical amoralism grew in fashion among the German

humanists in the final decades before Luther. Eoban Hesse wrote in

good Latin Heroides Christianae (1514), which imitated Ovid even

more in scandal than in form; he included love letters from Magdalen

to Jesus, and from the Virgin Mary to God the Father. To suit the deed

to the word, he lived as loosely as Cellini, outdrank all rivals,

and thought nothing of emptying a bucket of ale at one draught.

Conradus Mutianus Rufus, however, achieved an amiable reconciliation

of skepticism with religion. After studying at Deventer, at Erfurt,

and in Italy, he contented himself with a modest canonry at Gotha, put

over his door the motto Beata tranquillitas, collected admiring

students, and taught them to "esteem the decrees of philosophers above

those of priests"; `061569 but, he warned them, they must conceal

their doubts of Christian dogma from the multitude by a gentlemanly

adherence to ecclesiastical ceremonies and forms. `061570 "By

faith," he said, "we mean not the conformity of what we say with fact,

but an opinion about divine things founded upon credulity and

profit-seeking persuasion." `061571 He objected to Masses for the dead

as useless, to fasts as unpleasant, and to auricular confession as

embarrassing. `061572 The Bible, he thought, contains many fables,

like those of Jonah and Job; probably Christ had not really died on

the cross; the Greeks and the Romans, so far as they lived

honorably, were Christians without knowing it, and doubtless went to

paradise. `061573 Creeds and ceremonies are to be judged not on

their literal claims but by their moral effects; if they promote

social order and private virtue they should be accepted without public

questioning. Mutianus demanded a clean life from his disciples; and in

his later years he vowed, "I will turn my studies to piety, and will

learn nothing from poets, philosophers, or historians save what can

promote a Christian life." `061574 Having lived with all the

consolations of philosophy, he died with all the blessings of the

Church (1526).

The natural resentment aroused among the orthodox by the

skepticism of the later humanists fell in accumulation upon the

mildest and kindliest scholar of the time. Johannes Reuchlin

observed the medieval tradition of gathering education from a dozen

centers, through the ubiquity of Latin as the language of

instruction in Western Europe. In the grammar school of his native

Pforzheim, in the universities of Freiburg, Paris, Basel, Orleans, and

Poitiers, in Linz, Milan, Florence, and Rome, he pursued with almost

fanatical ardor the study of Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and law.

Following the custom of the German humanists, he changed his name-

which he derived from rauchen, to smoke- to Capnio- kapnos being

Greek for smoke. At twenty he compiled a Latin dictionary, which

went through several editions. At Rome Johannes Argyropoulos gave

him a difficult passage in Thucydides to translate; Reuchlin responded

so readily that the old Greek exclaimed: "Greece has now fled beyond

the Alps." `061575 The avid student let no rabbi pass without learning

some Hebrew from him; Mutianus claimed to have heard of Reuchlin

giving a Jewish scholar ten gold pieces for explaining one Hebrew

phrase- `061576 but this may have been a humanist's dream. Pico

della Mirandola persuaded Reuchlin to seek wisdom in the Cabala.

Comparing Jerome's translation of the Old Testament with the

original Hebrew text, "Capnio" pointed out many errors in what

theologians habitually quoted as an infallible document. At

thirty-eight (1493) he was appointed professor of Hebrew in the

University of Heidelberg. The Hebrew dictionary and grammar that he

composed put the study of Hebrew and of the Old Testament on a

scientific basis, and contributed to the powerful influence of the

Hebrew Scriptures on Protestant thought. Gradually his admiration

for Hebrew eclipsed his devotion to the classics. "The Hebrew

language," he wrote, "is unadulterated, concise, and brief. It is

the language in which God spoke to man, and in which man conversed

with the angels face to face." `061577 Through all his studies he

retained the orthodox faith. He muddied it a bit with mysticism, but

he devoutly submitted all his writings and teachings to the

authority of the Church.

A strange medley of circumstances made him the hero of the German

Renaissance. In 1508 Johannes Pfefferkorn, a rabbi turned priest,

issued a book, Judenspiegel ( Mirror of the Jews ), condemning

persecution of the Jews, and clearing them from legendary crimes

popularly laid to their charge, but urging them to give up

moneylending and the Talmud, and accept Christianity. Supported by the

Dominicans of Cologne, he submitted to the Emperor a recommendation

that all Hebrew books except the Old Testament should be suppressed,

Maximilian ordered that all Jewish literature critical of Christianity

should be surrendered to Pfefferkorn, and that it should be examined

by the universities of Cologne, Erfurt, Mainz, and Heidelberg, by

Jakob van Hoogstraeten, head of the Inquisition at Cologne, and by

Reuchlin because of his fame for Hebrew learning. All but Reuchlin

advised that the books should be confiscated and burned. Reuchlin's

minority opinion proved a landmark in the history of religious

toleration. He divided Jewish books into seven classes; one group,

consisting of works expressly mocking Christianity, should be

burned; all the rest, including the Talmud, should be preserved, if

only because they contained much of value to Christian scholarship.

Moreover, he argued, the Jews had a right to freedom of conscience,

both as citizens of the Empire and as having undertaken no obligations

to Christianity. `061578 In private correspondence Reuchlin spoke of

Pfefferkorn as an "ass" who had no real understanding of the books

he proposed to destroy.

Pfefferkorn responded to these courtesies in a Handspiegel

( Hand Mirror ) that attacked Reuchlin as a bribed tool of the Jews.

Reuchlin retorted in the same vituperative vein in an Augenspiegel

( Eyeglass ) that aroused a storm among the orthodox. The

theological faculty at Cologne complained to Reuchlin that his book

was making the Jews too happy, and they urged him to withdraw it

from circulation. Maximilian forbade its sale. Reuchlin appealed to

Leo X; the Pope turned the matter over to various counselors, who

reported that the book was harmless. Leo suspended action, but assured

the humanists around him that no harm should come to Reuchlin.

Meanwhile Pfefferkorn and his Dominican supporters accused Reuchlin,

before the tribunal of the Inquisition at Cologne, as an unbeliever

and a traitor to Christianity. The archbishop interposed, and remitted

the case to Rome, which passed it on to the episcopal court of Speyer,

which acquitted Reuchlin. The Dominicans in their turn appealed to

Rome; and the university faculties of Cologne, Erfurt, Mainz, Louvain,

and Paris ordered Reuchlin's books to be burned.

It is remarkable- and eloquent of Germany's cultural vitality in

this age- how many notables now came to Reuchlin's defense: Erasmus,

Pirkheimer, Peutinger, Oecolampadius of Basel, Bishop Fisher of

Rochester, Ulrich von Hutten, Mutianus, Eoban Hesse, Luther,

Melanchthon, even some of the higher clergy, who, as in Italy, favored

the humanists. Imperial electors, princes, and fifty-three cities

proclaimed their support of Reuchlin. Letters from his defenders

were collected and published (1514) as Clarorum virorum epistolae

ad Johannem Reuchlin. In 1515 the humanists sent forth a more

devastating book, Epistolae obscurorum virorum ad venerabilem virum

magistrum Ortuinum Gratium ( Letters of Obscure Men to the

Venerable Master Ortuinus Gratius, professor of literature at

Cologne). This is one of the major satires in literary history. It

succeeded so well that an enlarged edition was issued in 1516, and a

continuation a year later. The authors pretended to be pious monks,

admirers of Gratius and enemies of Reuchlin, and concealed

themselves under grotesque pseudonyms- Nicolaus Caprimulgius

(goat-milker), Johannes Pellifex (skin-maker), Simon Wurst

(sausage), Conradus Unckebunck. In Latin made deliberately bad to

imitate the monastic style, the writers complained of the ridicule

heaped upon them by the "poets" (as the German humanists were called);

they inquired eagerly about the prosecution of Reuchlin; meanwhile

they exposed their absurd ignorance, the grossness of their morals and

their minds; they argued ridiculous questions in solemn Scholastic

form, quoted Scripture in extenuation of obscenities, and

unwittingly made fun of auricular confession, the sale of indulgences,

the worship of relics, the authority of the pope- the very themes of

the Reformation. All literate Germany puzzled over the authorship of

the volumes; only later was it admitted that Crotus Rubianus of

Erfurt, a disciple of Mutianus, had written most of the first edition,

and Hutten most of the continuation. Roused to anger, Leo X forbade

the reading or possession of the book, condemned Reuchlin, but let him

off with the costs of the Speyer trial (1520). Reuchlin, sixty-five

and exhausted, retired into obscurity, peacefully lost in the glare of

the Reform.

The German humanist movement too disappeared in that

conflagration. On one side it was fought by most of the

universities; on the other, the Reformers, engaged in a struggle for

life, strengthened their cause with a religious faith that centered on

personal salvation in the other world and left little time for studies

of classical civilization, or of human amelioration here below. The

German humanists themselves invited defeat by failing to advance

from Greek literature to Greek philosophy, by wandering into coarse

polemics or a mysticism far less mature than Eckhart's. They left no

major works; the grammars and dictionaries that Reuchlin hoped would

be his "monument more lasting than brass" were soon superseded and

forgotten. And yet who knows if Luther would have dared sling his

David's shots at Tetzel and the popes if the mind of Germany had not

been in a measure freed from ultramontane terrors by the humanists?

The followers of Reuchlin and Mutianus were a vigorous minority at

Erfurt, where Luther studied for four years. And the greatest German

poet of the age, nurtured in humanism, became the ardent herald of the

Reformation.

VII. ULRICH VON HUTTEN

-

There were no giants in the German literature of this age before

Luther; there was only an amazing effervescence and fertility.

Poetry was written to be read aloud, and was therefore welcomed in

cottage and palace. Mystery and Passion plays continued to be acted,

overlaying a rough piety with a strong interest in dramatic art. By

1450 the German popular drama was largely secularized. It included,

even in the course of religious plays, crude and sometimes

scandalous farces. `061579 Humor frolicked in the literature; now

the vicissitudes and drolleries of Till Eulenspiegel that wandering

trickster (literally, owlglass), romped through Germany, his merry

pranks sparing neither layman nor priest; and in 1515 his adventures

took printed form. Time and again the literature, as well as the

art, showed monks and priests being dragged down to hell. `061580

Satire flourished in every literary form.

The most effective satire of the time was the Narrenschiff (1494),

or Ship of Fools, of Sebastian Brant; no one could have expected

so lively a performance from a professor of law and classical

literature at Basel. Brant imagined a fleet (he forgot it en

voyage and later called it a ship) manned by fools and trying to

navigate the sea of life. One fool after another struts the scene; one

Durant W. The Reformation. A History of European Civilization from Wyclif to Calvin: 1300-1564

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.