Two Revivals in Conflict
The reformers' unyielding attachment to dogma, their abusive language, their hostility to works of art and secular learning, their theology of predestination, their indifference to secular knowledge, their faith in demons, hell, heaven and salvation after death, and the splitting of Protestantism into hostile branches turned the humanists away from the Reformation. Since humanism was a return to the classical culture of pagan antiquity, and Protestantism a return to the way of St. Augustine, to early Christianity and even to the Judaism of the Old Testament's making, the meeting of the two movements revived the old conflict of Hellenism with Judaism. Humanists had gained considerable influence among Catholics, and under Nicholas V and Leo X they had brought the papal court under their sway. The popes not only got along with the humanists but helped them find lost works of literature and art, with the tacit understanding that their writings would circulate in Latin, for scholars, without disturbing the faith of Christians. Now, with the arrival of Protestantism, the humanists found that Teutonic Europe cared more for the heart-warming words of preachers who spoke of God, hell and personal salvation in the common tongue than for their aristocratic culture.
The humanists mocked the heated quarrels of Luther with Eck, Karlstadt and Zwingli over questions that to them were dead and long forgotten. They had no interest in theology and thought heaven and hell fables less true than the myths of Greece and Rome. They considered Protestantism a betrayal of the Renaissance, believing that by turning human thought back beyond nature, spreading superstitions and magic that had darkened the Middle Ages, it set people back and put the freed mind in chains. Luther's contempt for reason and his praise of a faith that Protestants poured into rigid, unchanging molds angered them. If all events in the world, the heroisms, sacrifices and works of human genius, are creatures of God's eternal knowledge, working inevitably through weak and will-less man, what is left of the greatness of man that Pico della Mirandola praised so highly? Though they criticized the Church, the humanists did not leave it, and some of them, like Wimpfeling, Beatus Rhenanus, Thomas Murner and Sebastian Brant, labored to prove their loyalty to it. Many humanists who first praised Luther's revolt as a cleansing of the Church's shameful corruptions turned from him once a Protestant school of theology formed and the reformers fell out among themselves.
Voices of Disillusion
Willibald Pirckheimer, who had been excommunicated by the pope for supporting Luther, was so offended by Luther's abusive language that he withdrew from the Protestant revolution. In 1529, still discontented with the state of the Catholic Church, he wrote:
I do not deny that Luther's actions looked right and useful at the start, for no good man can be pleased with the errors and corruptions that crept into Christianity by degrees. So Luther's actions gave me, like many others, hope of purifying the Church; but I was badly deceived. Before the old errors were removed, intolerable errors crept in, beside which the old corruptions seem children's play. The errors of the Gospel Christians have made the baseness of the popes bearable and even pleasant. With his wild and shameless tongue, Luther has either gone mad or been taken by evil spirits.
Mutianus agreed with Pirckheimer. Once he had called Luther "the morning star of Wittenberg"; soon he was calling him "a madman." Crotus Rubeanus, whose Letters of Obscure Men had cleared the way for Luther's progress, returned to the Catholic Church in 1521. Reuchlin wrote Luther a courteous letter and kept Eck from burning Luther's books at Ingolstadt. But he scolded his grandnephew Melanchthon for following Luther's views, and died in the bosom of the Catholic Church. Johannes Cochlaeus, at first a supporter of Luther, turned against him in 1522 and rebuked him in a sharp letter:
Do not suppose that we overlook or defend the sins and crimes of the clergy. God forbid! We shall be your allies in rooting out these corruptions as far as it can be done by lawful means. But Christ did not teach your abusive terms, such as "Antichrist," "whores," "den of the devil," and "sewer," or your threats of sword, bloodshed and slaughter. Luther, Christ did not teach you to treat them this way.
In blaming Luther, the German humanists forgot that their Italian forerunners, such as Filelfo and Poggio Bracciolini, had set the precedent for such abuse with their insults. But Luther's style of battle was only the outward sign of their grievances. Like Luther, they were grieved by the decline of morals and manners in Germany; they blamed it on the collapse of the Church's authority and Luther's denial of the virtue of "good works." Protestant neglect of schooling, Karlstadt's proclamation of the equality of peasants and scholars, and Luther's scorn for science and letters wounded the humanists. Erasmus, speaking for the humanists and with Melanchthon's sad agreement, declared that wherever the Lutheran movement had triumphed, learning and letters had declined. The Protestants replied that such complaints came from the humanists' confining learning to the works and history of the classical pagans. Within a generation the market for books and tracts of religious controversy so boomed in Germany and Switzerland that other publications (apart from satires) found no readers. As a result printers like Froben at Basel and a Vienna press that had issued substantial, instructive books went bankrupt (the book's name for the Vienna printer is garbled). Religious bigotry and narrowness blighted the young German Renaissance, and Christianity stopped the German Renaissance from turning toward the culture and civilization of pagan times.
The Loyal Few
A few German humanists, such as Eobanus Hessus and Ulrich von Hutten, stayed true to the Reformation. Eobanus Hessus went from town to town looking for work, and in 1533 returned to Erfurt to teach, but found the university there deserted; he turned to poetry and finally died at Marburg (1540).
Ulrich von Hutten's Last Days
After the fall of Sickingen, Ulrich von Hutten fled to Switzerland, and on the way, the book says, stole to ease his hunger. At Basel, sick and in despair, he tried to visit Erasmus (1522), though he had called Erasmus a coward for not joining the reformers. Erasmus would not receive him, saying his stove was not hot enough to warm Hutten's bones. Hutten then wrote a poem against Erasmus, a reproach, and threatened to publish it if Erasmus did not pay him. Erasmus put him off and urged him to settle their differences peacefully. But Hutten secretly published a copy of his satire. When Erasmus learned of it, with the cooperation of the city's clergy he got the Basel council to expel this troublesome satirist. Hutten printed the reproachful poem and fled to Mulhouse; the people there attacked him, so he fled on to Zurich, where Zwingli took him in (June 1523; the book's "1533" is a misprint). Zwingli, a reformer now more human than this humanist, said: "Look at this destructive man, the terrible Hutten, and see how kindly he treats people and children! From the lips of one who has hurled a storm at the pope only pure and gentle words come." Meanwhile Erasmus hurriedly wrote a pamphlet, Erasmus's Shield (Spongia), against Hutten's slanders, answering his reproach. Not content, he wrote a letter to the Zurich council about the poet's lies and asked that he be expelled. But Hutten was by then close to death.
Doctrinal quarrels and illness had left him no strength. At last, with one suit of clothes and one pen, at thirty-five, he died on an island in Lake Zurich (August 29, 1523).