Contempt

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Then the cobbler adduced the text, ‘the bride must take off her night- gown and be naked, if she is to sleep with the bridegroom’, which he wrongly claimed was a saying by Jesus, concluding that “Therefore one must break all the images, so that we are free and cleansed of what is created.’” It was easy for Luther to mock the Orlamiinders’ ignorance and he made endless capital of it in the polemic he published against them in late 1524, Against the Heavenly Prophets, laughing at the peasants who ‘take the nightgown off the bride at Orlamiinde and the trousers off the bridegroom at Naschhausen’.* Karlstadt’s ministry had given his parishioners confidence in their own ability to interpret Scripture and articulate their views. The cobbler’s choice of words and use of a biblical text shows how villagers made sense of Karlstadt’s preaching, but may also hint at an uneasy ambiva- lence between sexual prurience and asceticism. “God wants the souls of all creatures to be naked, that is, unclothed and free’, another villager declared.* Luther's opposition to Karlstadt’s stress on Mosaic law may have been driven by his deep-seated anti-Judaism — he termed Karlstadt’s followers the ‘Jewish saints’.*° Not only did he mock Karlstadt’s adher- ence to Old Testament law but in starting to insist that churches ought to have images — a rather different position from the ambivalent line he had originally taken — Luther ensured that his churches would have nothing in common with the undecorated walls of Jewish synagogues. Tiring of the debate, Luther recommended that the villagers read his books. Then he and his supporters ‘hurried to their wagon’ — accompanied, Luther later said, by shouts of “Go in a thousand devils’ name, so you break your neck before you get out of town.” Two THE BLACK BEAR INN 255 or three days later, Karlstadt reportedly rang the church bells for over an hour to summon his parishioners from the surrounding area. Luther, he preached, had ‘unfortunately kicked the gospel under the bench’, the same accusation the cobbler had made. ‘Oh dear brothers and sisters, men and women citizens of God! Do not be afraid, but endure until the end, and you will be saved. God has made him [Luther] twist the Scriptures according to what he thinks right.”

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  For him and others the rejection of the Real Presence was also linked to their understanding of the role of the clergy, for they repu- diated the idea that a priest could perform the miracle of turning bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ. This tapped into a rich 308 MARTIN LUTHER vein of popular anticlericalism, especially as it concerned what many viewed as the hypocrisy of the immoral clergy. How, laypeople asked, could men who lived in sin with concubines exercise tyranny over the consciences of the laity through confession? Would the sacrament be valid, some wondered, if the priest who consecrated the bread and wine was a known sinner? Like Karlstadt, Zwingli wanted to overturn the division between clergy and laypeople. The Swiss and southern German evangelicals were deeply concerned about the Catholic abuse of the power of confession and absolution, and they targeted individual confession, replacing it with a general confession of the whole congregation. Zwingli prized communal values. He became a citizen of Zurich and accepted the burden of military service because citizenship demanded that a man should defend his city with his life. Zwingli saw the Eucharist as a collective event; salvation involved the whole town and it was vital that it be morally pure, otherwise God’s judgement would descend on the whole community. As a result, the Zurich authorities set about punishing all those guilty of fornication, adultery and gaming, and even paid spies to inform on the sins of their neighbours.’ Civic communalism, it seemed, could bring its own unforeseen tyrannies. By now Karlstadt himself was under surveillance, living at times in Segrehna with his wife's family, at times in Kemberg where the local preacher and the electoral official reported on his movements. In 1526 he asked the Wittenbergers — Justus Jonas, Johannes Bugenhagen and Luther’s wife — to be godparents to his son, and a delegation of Wittenberg dignitaries including Luther descended on Segrehna for the occasion. Named Andreas after his father, the two-year-old boy was unusually old for a baptism. He had been born when Karlstadt was banished from Saxony, and his mother, who had stayed behind, had not had him baptised — perhaps because Karlstadt was questioning infant baptism at this time, perhaps because she herself was sympa- thetic to Anabaptist ideas, which had spread after the Peasants’ War, that only adult believers should be baptised. Luther relished the irony of Karlstadt’s change of heart, remarking: “Who would have thought BREAKDOWN 309 a year ago that those who called baptism a “dog’s bath” would ask for baptism from their enemies?”

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  They are thus highly important for under- standing his achievements; not only friendships but also the many, bitter fights with allies and enemies alike were integral to the nature and development of the Reform movement. Georg Witzel is a good example — a former acolyte, he turned on Luther and published a stinging attack in 1532, which tried to outdo his former mentor’s style. Luther, he wrote, ‘maintains, furthers and drives it all alone, and according to his brain, makes and unmakes, turns and reverses, says and lies, appoints and sacks everything according to his inclination and pleasure’. He was driven by his ‘raging, stormy, inconstant proud head, [and] bloodthirsty heart’.’ Luther’s world was primarily focused on the university. He was at once part of Wittenberg society and yet he did not think of himself as an ordinary citizen, in the way that Zwingli, for example, had done in Zurich. His exemption from the Tiirkensteuer in 1542, a levy on every inhabitant of the Reich to finance the campaign against the Turks, was an evident demonstration of this.’° Every other Wittenberg clergyman paid up without demur, but Luther was permitted to 366 MARTIN LUTHER estimate the value of his properties himself, and the Elector paid the tax he owed. It is significant that in his letters from Coburg, Luther envisaged his son playing with Melanchthon’s and Jonas’s sons, or with the other children in the monastery — but not with those of the Wittenberg citizens." His milieu consisted of those lodging with him, his acolytes and dependants, and the guests he invited to dinner. He called the members of the household —- who would have numbered between forty and fifty people at any given time, including servants, lodgers and visitors — his “Quirites’, a classical Latin term for Roman citizens.” A dig at the ‘Roman’ Pope, it suggested that, unlike the papal court, his was a community of equals, despite the patriarchal structure he had in fact created.* Even so, he knew some townsfolk well. His close friendship with Lucas Cranach stretched back to his early days in Wittenberg.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  As was his wont, Luther used scatology to trump pornography. The letters, which he said were delivered in person to his house, had been taken to the toilet, where they had been ‘lluminated’ with dung, and used to wipe the bottoms of the household.” Hasenberg gamely made another attempt, this time a set of four dialogues, Lvdvs lvdentem lvdervm 284 MARTIN LUTHER 46. Johann Hasenberg, Lvdvs lvdentem lvdervm lvdens, Leipzig, 1530. lvdens, the first of which imagined the dialogue between Luther and Katharina, as Luther addresses his ‘delicium’, his Venus, his ‘unica voluptas’ Katharina.® It even had an illustrated cover, but lost impact because it was in Latin and so its audience was limited; and the illus- trations were oddly respectful: Luther is well dressed but there is no implication of luxury, there is no beer mug, and Katharina, though she looks harried and bossy, is dressed as a respectable wife. The Catholics, it seemed, had not yet grasped the art of the popular polemic. Behind these two was the figure of Luther’s old antagonist Cochlaeus, now ensconced at Leipzig as Duke Georg’s chaplain. Taking the idea of mocking Luther’s marriage in drama to a whole new level, he wrote a vicious satirical play about the marriages of evangelical MARRIAGE AND THE FLESH 285 reformers, in which their wives reminisce about the wonderful times they enjoyed while their menfolk were away at the Imperial Diet. Luther appears as the stud who all the other wives want to bed. Mrs ‘Bishop of Altenburg’, Spalatin’s wife and a frightful snob, complains that no child will come of ‘kissing and cuddling’, and wants to borrow Luther for the night — in line with the reformer’s own advice that a woman who cannot conceive a child with her husband should lie with another, as Cochlaeus is not slow to point out.” In the play’s final scene, Katharina tries to get Luther to go to bed with her, insisting that as Paul says, she is the owner of his body and so he must be subject to her. Luther, impressed by her biblical knowledge, fears that she may have had recourse to another teacher — Cochlaeus insinuating that she had not been a virgin when she married Luther. * Luther’s remarkably uninhibited views about sexuality — and conse- quently marriage — were the result of his radical Augustinianism. If we can never do anything good, as all human acts are sinful, then sexual acts are no different or worse in kind than other types of sin. This gloomy anthropology paradoxically freed Luther to take a relaxed view of sexuality. Lust was part of human nature — it was how God had created mankind. Moreover, despite his decades of monastic observance, Luther believed that chastity could never be willed; indeed, we have no free will because we are always in bondage to the Devil. This was where Luther parted company with Karlstadt.

• From Satyricon (1)

  Their numbers and their deformity excite the horror of the indignant spectators, who are ready to execrate the memory of Semiramis for the cruel art which she invented of frustrating the purposes of nature, and of blasting in the bud the hopes of future generations. In the exercise of domestic jurisdiction the nobles of Rome express an exquisite sensibility for any personal injury, and a contemptuous indifference for the rest of the human species. When they have called for warm water, if a slave has been tardy in his obedience, he is instantly chastised with three hundred lashes; but should the same slave commit a wilful murder, the master will mildly observe that he is a worthless fellow, but that, if he repeats the offense, he shall not escape punishment. Hospitality was formerly the virtue of the Romans; and every stranger who could plead either merit or misfortune was relieved or rewarded by their generosity. At present, if a foreigner, perhaps of no contemptible rank, is introduced to one of the proud and wealthy senators, he is welcomed indeed in the first audience with such warm professions and such kind inquiries that he retires enchanted with the affability of his illustrious friend, and full of regret that he had so long delayed his journey to Rome, the native seat of manners as well as of empire. Secure of a favorable reception, he repeats his visit the ensuing day, and is mortified by the discovery that his person, his name, and his country are already forgotten. If he still has resolution to persevere, he is gradually numbered in the train of dependents, and obtains the permission to pay his assiduous and unprofitable court to a haughty patron, incapable of gratitude or friendship, who scarcely deigns to remark his presence, his departure, or his return. Whenever the rich prepare a solemn and popular entertainment, whenever they celebrate with profuse and pernicious luxury their private banquets, the choice of the guests is the subject of anxious deliberation. The modest, the sober, and the learned are seldom preferred; and the nomenclators, who are commonly swayed by interested motives, have the address to insert in the list of invitations the obscure names of the most worthless of mankind. But the frequent and familiar companions of the great are those parasites who practice the most useful of all arts, the art of flattery; who eagerly applaud each word and every action of their immortal patron, gaze with rapture on his marble columns and variegated pavements, and strenuously praise the pomp and elegance which he is taught to consider as a part of his personal merit.

• From Satyricon (1)

  CHAPTER 116. “They either take in or else they are taken in.” “Captare” may be defined as to get the upper hand of someone; and “captari” means to be the dupe of someone, to be the object of interested flattery; “captator” means a succession of successful undertakings of the sort referred to above. Martial, lib. VI, 63, addresses the following verses to a certain Marianus, whose inheritance had excited the avarice of one of the intriguers: “You know you’re being influenced, You know the miser’s mind; You know the miser, and you sensed His purpose; still, you’re blind.” Pliny the Elder, Historia Naturalis, lib. XIV, chap. i, writes in scathing terms against the infamous practice of paying assiduous court to old people for the purpose of obtaining a legacy under their wills. “Later, childlessness conferred advantages in the shape of the greatest authority and Lower; undue influence became very insidious in its quest of wealth, and in grasping the joyous things alone, debasing the true rewards of life; and all the liberal arts operating for the greatest good were turned to the opposite purpose, and commenced to profit by sycophantic subservience alone.” And Ammianus Marcellinus, lib. XVIII, chap. 4, remarks: “Some there are that grovel before rich men, old men or young, childless or unmarried, or even wives and children, for the purpose of so influencing their wishes and them by deft and dextrous finesse.” That this profession of legacy hunting is not one of the lost arts is apparent even in our day, for the term “undue influence” is as common in our courts as Ambrose Bierce’s definition of “husband,” or refined cruelty, or “injunctions” restraining husbands from disposing of property, or separate maintenance, or even “heart balm” and the consequent breach of promise. CHAPTER 119. The rite of the Persians: Castration has been practiced from remote antiquity, and is a feature of the harem life of the Levant to the present day. Semiramis is accused of having been the first to order the emasculation of a troupe of her boy slaves. “Whether the first false likeness of men came to the Assyrians through the ingenuity of Semiramis; for these wanton wretches with high timbered voices could not have produced themselves, those smooth cheeks could not reproduce themselves; she gathered their like about her: or, Parthian luxury forbade with its knife, the shadow of down to appear, and fostered long that boyish bloom, compelling art-retarded youth to sink to Venus’ calling,” Claudianus, Eutrop. i, 339 seq. “And last of all, the multitude of eunuchs, ranging in age, from old men to boys, pale and hideous from the twisted deformity of their features; so that, go where one will, seeing groups of mutilated men, he will detest the memory of Semiramis, that ancient queen who was the first to emasculate young men of tender age; thwarting the intent of Nature, and forcing her from her course.” Ammianus Marcellinus, book xiv, chap. vi.

• From Satyricon (1)

  This plan I confided to Ascyltos, who approved of the looting, but pointed out a more desirable solution without bloodshed: knowing all the crooks and turns, as he did, he led us to a store-room which he opened. We gathered up all that was of value and sallied forth while it was yet early in the morning. Shunning the public roads; we could not rest until we believed ourselves safe from pursuit. Ascyltos, when he had caught his breath, gloatingly exulted of the pleasure which the looting of a villa belonging to Lycurgus, a superlatively avaricious man, afforded him: he complained, with justice of his parsimony, affirming that he himself had received no reward for his k-nightly services, that he had been kept at a dry table and on a skimpy ration of food. This Lycurgus was so stingy that he denied himself even the necessities of life, his immense wealth to the contrary notwithstanding.) The tortured Tantalus still stands, to parch in his shifting pool, And starve, when fruit sways just beyond his grasp: The image of the miser rich, when his avaricious soul Robs him of food and drink, in Plenty’s clasp.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  124 MARTIN LUTHER In the meantime yet another emissary was sent, this time Karl von Miltitz, a courtier and a man of considerably less intelligence than Cajetan, who now tried to cajole Luther into recanting. While the aftermath of the Augsburg meeting was played out in correspondence between Luther, Cajetan, Spalatin and Friedrich, the conflict with the papacy was now replayed as farce. Luther was acid about the ‘Italian’, whom he easily bested in argument. Nor did he trust his false protes- tations of friendship, wincing as Miltitz kissed him, a kiss ‘of Judas’, as he wrote to a friend.” With Cajetan comprehensively defeated, or so it appeared to Luther, and with the Elector on his side, Luther seemed to be immune from attack, at least for the moment. 6 The Leipzig Debate The long-awaited debate with Johannes Eck, which had been brewing since the spring of 1518, was finally arranged for June 1519 at Leipzig, in the territory of Georg of Saxony. The meeting was another of the dramatic intellectual set pieces which pushed the Reformation forward, and was a decisive step in the movement reaching a wider public beyond an academic audience. But while it saw the emergence of a pro-Luther party, it also gave rise to the beginnings of a coalition against him. Moreover it marked yet a further radicalisation of Luther's theology; indeed, the older Luther would date his Reformation ‘break- through’ to around this time. For Luther, there was no going back after Leipzig. If the battle with Cajetan had been a tussle with father figures, the disputation with Eck was a battle of brothers. Unlike the hated Ital- ians at Augsburg, Eck was no papal courtier. Born in Egg near Memmingen in Swabia, he was the son of a peasant and had been raised by his uncle, a priest in Rottenburg am Neckar, who taught him classics and sent him to the University of Heidelberg. Eck’s intel- lectual formation was not unlike that of Luther’s: he had read Ockham, Aristotle and Augustine before becoming interested in mystical theology and humanism. He could not be dismissed out of hand as 22. (Overleaf) Lucas Cranach the Elder, Karlstadt’s Wagon. Divided horizontally into two halves, the woodcut shows a wagon driven by an old man in a beard, the true Chris- tian, leading to the Cross. Behind it stands the ‘hidden God’, Christ in suffering, an idea Luther had been developing in the Ninety-Five Theses and in the Heidelberg Debate. Below, a wagon driven by Eck leads to hell. Only faith in Christ, the cartoon argues, can lead the believer to truth.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  In his immediate circle, Justus Jonas translated the tracts into Latin, ensuring that they could be read throughout Christendom. Even Martin Bucer, who thought that Jews should be loved above other non-believers, suggested that they should be made to clean privies to teach them humility when he drafted a ‘Jewish Ordinance’ for Philip of Hesse in 1539.*° But while Bucer wanted to ban the building of new synagogues, Luther wanted existing ones razed to the ground. At the Frankfurt Imperial Diet of 1539, Melanchthon had advocated readmitting the Jews to Brandenburg, from where they had been expelled in 1530. The Lutheran Urbanus Rhegius, whose wife had also learnt Hebrew, consistently took a more tolerant line towards the Jews, interceding for a rabbi and asking the clergy of Braunschweig to oppose the expulsion of the Jewish community in 1540; while Andreas Osiander of Nuremberg bravely published a pamphlet (albeit anonymously) in which he rejected the blood libel after a ritual murder allegation surfaced in nearby Sappenfeld.“ Luther’s old opponent Johannes Eck responded with a nearly 200-page reply in which, like Luther, he repeated all the old allegations of poisoning and ritual murder. Yet even Eck argued that Jews should be tolerated, that they should be allowed to renovate existing synagogues, and that they should not be harmed, killed or exiled.” Unpleasant as Eck’s diatribe was, it neither advocated the cultural annihilation contained in Luther’s On the Jews and their Lies, nor displayed the phantasmagoric physicality of his Vom Schem Hamphoras. Nor was Luther’s virulence repeating earlier clichés. Medieval anti- Semitism had also often insisted on some toleration for Jews; Luther’s views were not a medieval relic but a development of it. Even more disturbingly, it was not incidental to his theology, a lamentable preju- dice taken over from contemporary attitudes. Rather, it was integral to his thought; his insistence that the true Christians — that is, the evangelicals — had become the chosen people and had displaced the Jews would become fundamental to Protestant identity. It was the central plank of his understanding of the Lutherans’ providential role 396 MARTIN LUTHER in history, and to secure it the Jews had to be pushed aside, discredited and, if necessary, eliminated. They are the better Jews. As he had argued in On the Jews and their Lies, “We foolish Gentiles, who were not God’s people, are now God’s people. That drives the Jews to distraction and stupidity, and over this they became Not-God’s-people, who were once his people and really should still be.” The Lutherans understand the Old Testament better and their exegesis is superior, Luther claims. Having lost their status as the chosen people and therefore no longer truly ‘Jews’, the Jews are ‘even changed into another people altogether, with nothing [of the original] left but a lazy remnant’ of foreign rascals or gypsies.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  The translation appeared with what had now become the standard image of Luther — based on Cranach’s depiction of him as the pious monk — and, printed in Augsburg, it simply served to spread Luther’s teaching yet more widely. The treatise opens with Luther jesting that booksellers and readers should burn his earlier work on indulgences, for it was simply not radical enough. Indeed, Luther now denounces the Pope as Nimrod, the ‘mighty hunter’, the biblical king and tyrant who set himself up against God. The papacy is the "GRAND HUNTING OF THE BISHOP OF ROME, that is, Rome is Babylon and the Pope is the Antichrist. Luther had already depicted the Pope as the Antichrist in To the Chris- tian Nobility of the German Nation, but there it had been hidden in the final sections of the tract; here it is emblazoned in block capitals at the start.“ Luther claimed that he owed this new insight to the attacks 164 MARTIN LUTHER of Eck, Emser and their ilk, because their lame defence of existing theology revealed just how corrupt it had become. His opponents’ works are dismissed as the ‘the filth of this vile-smelling cloaca’. They are ‘wicked men’, one of them even described as ‘driven by a messenger of Satan’.” Whereas Luther had tentatively suggested in 1519 that a Council of the Church might consider whether laypeople should receive the sacrament in both kinds, here he attacked the entire sacramental system of the Church and its significance for accompanying the indi- vidual through the different stages of life. Of the seven sacraments — baptism, confirmation, Communion, confession, marriage, ordination, last rites — only baptism and Communion were definitely sanctioned by Scripture. The others were just accretions of the Church, and should not be considered sacraments at all. Sacraments, Luther argued, are not works performed to please God. They are signs of God’s promise of future salvation and they require faith. Faith is what justifies the sinner, Luther proclaimed; ‘the sacra- ments . . . are not fulfilled when they are taking place, but when they are being believed’. Baptism is a sign that one belongs to the saved, and it is not just allegorical: it signifies “actual death and resurrection’. Once you are baptised, Luther argued, the sacrament remains valid forever: you lose its promise only if, out of despair, you turn your back on salvation.** But the Pope had introduced endless numbers of works and ceremonies that destroyed the true meaning of baptism. Monastic and clerical vows, for instance, should be abolished, Luther argued, because in the baptismal vow we have already pledged enough.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Very careful to distance himself, Karlstadt had his reply to Miintzer’s invitation to join his league printed, and ensured that a letter from his congregation of Orlamiinde rejecting Miintzer’s overtures was also printed at Wittenberg. By the time of their meeting at the Black Bear Inn, Luther may have thought that Karlstadt was changing his views, since the danger from Miintzer, now forced out of his stronghold at Allstedt, had apparently passed. If he did, this would prove to be a major miscalculation. * This was the immediate history preceding the events at the Black Bear Inn on 22 August 1524. And matters did not end there. The next day, Luther preached in the small town of Kahla, where the pastor was a supporter of Karlstadt. On mounting the pulpit, Luther found a smashed crucifix where he was to preach. When he then arrived in Orlamiinde the following morning — he had decided that it was too dangerous to spend the night there — he found nobody in the village to greet him; it turned out that everybody was busy with the harvest. The impatient Luther was finally met by the mayor and other local dignitaries, but refused to doff his hat as they did to him, a gesture of studied contempt. When the mayor invited a discussion, Luther replied that he had to leave soon, but that they might talk indoors.” The Orlamiinders may have wanted to engage with the reformer in debate out of doors: there was a long tradition of holding democratic meetings under the open sky. Democratic debate, however, was the last thing Luther had in mind. First he chided the Orlamiinders for a letter they had sent him on 16 August complaining that his letter to the Saxon princes had traduced Karlstadt as a heretic; he suggested contemptuously that it had been composed by Karlstadt misusing their seal.” The villagers, however, maintained that he had not written a single line of it. Then Luther's former collaborator appeared himself, but Luther would not permit 254 MARTIN LUTHER him to remain, insisting ‘you are my enemy, and I gave you a gold guilder on it’.* After Karlstadt left, Luther attacked the Orlamiinders’ theological ignorance, but instead of meek obedience, he was met with spirited argument. A cobbler stepped forward, addressing Luther with the informal ‘you’, a claim to social equality with the man who insisted on his title of ‘Doctor’. ‘If you will not follow Moses, you must nevertheless endure the gospel’, the man told the reformer, accusing him: “You have shoved the gospel under the bench.’ When Luther expostulated that getting rid of images was as good as saying that one should kill all women and pour away all wine just because they could be misused, another villager replied that unlike images, women and wine had been created for human comfort and need.

• From Satyricon (1)

  Kind Providence unto our needs has tempered its decrees And met our wants, our carping plaints to still Green herbs, and berries hanging on their rough and brambly sprays Suffice our hunger’s gnawing pangs to kill. What fool would thirst upon a river’s brink? Or stand and freeze In icy blasts, when near a cozy fire? The law sits armed outside the door, adulterers to seize, The chaste bride, guiltless, gratifies desire. All Nature lavishes her wealth to meet our just demands; But, spurred by lust of pride, we stop at naught to gain our ends! (Our philosopher began to moralize, when he had gorged himself, leveling many critical shafts at those who hold every-day things in contempt, esteeming nothing except what is rare.) CHAPTER THE NINETY-THIRD. (“To their perverted taste,” he went on,) everything one may have lawfully is held cheap and the appetite, tickled only by forbidden indulgences, delights in what is most difficult to obtain. The pheasant from Colchis, the wild-fowl from African shores, Because they are dainties, the parvenu’s palate adores The white-feathered goose, and the duck in his bright-colored plumes Must nourish the rabble; they’re common, so them Fashion dooms! The wrasse brought from dangerous Syrtis is much more esteemed When fishing-boats founder! And even the mullet is deemed, No matter how heavy, a weight on the market! The whore Displaces the wife; and in perfumes, the cinnamon more Is esteemed than the rose! So whatever we have, we despise, And whatever we have not, we think a superlative prize!” “Is this the way in which you keep your promise not to recite a single verse today?” I demanded; “bear in mind your promise and spare us, at least, for we have thrown no rocks at you yet. If a single one of those fellows drinking under this very roof were to smell out a poet in their midst, he would arouse the whole neighborhood and involve all of us in the same misunderstanding!” Giton, who was one of the gentlest of lads, took me to task for having spoken in that manner, denying that I did rightly in criticising my elders and at the same time forgetting my duties as host by offering an affront to one whom I had invited out of kindness. And much more, full of moderation and propriety, which was in exquisite keeping with his good looks. CHAPTER THE NINETY-FOURTH.

• From Satyricon (1)

  He would not permit me to declaim longer in the portico than he himself had sweat in the school, but exclaimed, “Your sentiments do not reflect the public taste, young man, and you are a lover of common sense, which is still more unusual. For that reason, I will not deceive you as to the secrets of my profession. The teachers, who must gibber with lunatics, are by no means to blame for these exercises. Unless they spoke in accordance with the dictates of their young pupils, they would, as Cicero remarks, be left alone in the schools! And, as designing parasites, when they seek invitations to the tables of the rich, have in mind nothing except what will, in their opinion, be most acceptable to their audience --for in no other way can they secure their ends, save by setting snares for the ears--so it is with the teachers of rhetoric, they might be compared with the fisherman, who, unless he baits his hook with what he knows is most appetizing to the little fish, may wait all day upon some rock, without the hope of a catch.” CHAPTER THE FOURTH. What, then, is there to do? The parents who are unwilling to permit their children to undergo a course of training under strict discipline, are the ones who deserve the reproof. In the first place, everything they possess, including the children, is devoted to ambition. Then, that their wishes may the more quickly be realized, they drive these unripe scholars into the forum, and the profession of eloquence, than which none is considered nobler, devolves upon boys who are still in the act of being born! If, however, they would permit a graded course of study to be prescribed, in order that studious boys might ripen their minds by diligent reading; balance their judgment by precepts of wisdom, correct their compositions with an unsparing pen, hear at length what they ought to imitate, and be convinced that nothing can be sublime when it is designed to catch the fancy of boys, then the grand style of oratory would immediately recover the weight and splendor of its majesty. Now the boys play in the schools, the young men are laughed at in the forum, and, a worse symptom than either, no one, in his old age, will confess the errors he was taught in his school days. But that you may not imagine that I disapprove of a jingle in the Lucilian manner, I will deliver my opinions in verse,-- CHAPTER THE FIFTH. “The man who emerges with fame, from the school of stern art, Whose mind gropes for lofty ideals, to bring them to light, Must first, under rigid frugality, study his part; Nor yearn for the courts of proud princes who frown in their might: Nor scheme with the riff-raf, a client in order to dine, Nor can he with evil companions his wit drown in wine Nor sit, as a hireling, applauding an actor’s grimace.

• From Satyricon (1)

  “What should we say was the hardest calling, after literature?” he asked. “That of the doctor or that of the money-changer, I would say: the doctor, because he has to know what poor devils have got in their insides, and when the fever’s due: but I hate them like the devil, for my part, because they’re always ordering me on a diet of duck soup: and the money-changer’s, because he’s got to be able to see the silver through the copper plating. When we come to the dumb beasts, the oxen and sheep are the hardest worked, the oxen, thanks to whose labor we have bread to chew on, the sheep, because their wool tricks us out so fine. It’s the greatest outrage under the sun for people to eat mutton and then wear a tunic. Then there’s the bee: in my opinion, they’re divine insects because they puke honey, though there are folks that claim that they bring it from Jupiter, and that’s the reason they sting, too, for wherever you find a sweet, you’ll find a bitter too.” He was just putting the philosophers out of business when lottery tickets were passed around in a cup. A slave boy assigned to that duty read aloud the names of the souvenirs: “Silver s--ham,” a ham was brought in with some silver vinegar cruets on top of it; “cervical”--something soft for the neck--a piece of the cervix--neck--of a sheep was brought in; “serisapia”--after wit--“and contumelia”--insult--we were given must wafers and an apple-melon--and a phallus--contus--; “porri”--leeks--“and persica,” he picked up a whip and a knife; “passeres”--sparrows” and a fly--trap,” the answer was raisins--uva passa--and Attic honey; “cenatoria”--a dinner toga--“and forensia”--business dress--he handed out a piece of meat--suggestive of dinner--and a note-book--suggestive of business--; “canale”--chased by a dog--“and pedale”--pertaining to the foot--, a hare and a slipper were brought out; “lamphrey”--murena--“and a letter,” he held up a mouse--mus--and a frog--rana--tied together, and a bundle of beet--beta--the Greek letter beta--. We laughed long and loud, there were a thousand of these jokes, more or less, which have now escaped my memory. CHAPTER THE FIFTY-SEVENTH.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Luther argued that since the Church seemed unable to reform itself, lay authorities must step in. In a single stroke, Luther swept away the obstacles that had prevented lay authorities 160 MARTIN LUTHER from dealing with abuses in the Church, because they did not have ecclesiastical authority or imperial backing. Papal power, Luther argued, was buttressed by ‘three walls’: that the Church had its own spiritual law; that the papacy alone had the right to interpret Scripture; and that only the Pope could call a Council of the Church. He made short work of each of these defences: spiritual law was merely an invention of the papacy, designed to frustrate laypeople from reforming the Church; the authority of Scripture must come before that of the Pope; anyone can call a council when the need arises, and those most suitable to do so are the temporal authorities. Luther's rhetoric bril- liantly exploited the opposition between the Curia and the emperor and the German princes, as he drew out the political consequences of granting the German secular authorities power to act. Rome is a centre of business, sucking Germany dry of money, Luther argued as he listed the Church’s financial abuses, from the pallium fee incoming bishops had to pay to charging money for matrimonial dispensations. ‘If that is not a brothel above all imaginable brothels, then I do not know what brothels are’, he concluded.” These complaints were not new. They had been part of the ‘Gravamina’ literature, German grievances presented to the Imperial Diets which had circulated since the mid-fifteenth century; at the Diet of Worms in 1521 too, the German princes would ask the emperor to reform the Church.* We know that the electoral court had briefed Luther on these long-standing complaints, but what made Luther’s argument so effective was that he presented the abuses he attacked as examples of avarice — one of the seven deadly sins. The whole papacy, Luther argued, was organised around its lust for money, making it a monstrosity. He described the complicated financial vehicles of the papacy as Wucher, or usury, a brilliant polem- ical move that aligned the financial practices of the Church with the complex manipulations of the big merchant houses — the hated ‘big Jacks’ — and the Jews. This is the rhetoric of the mine owner’s son, who had witnessed how the big capitalists’ control of money manipu- lated the world of his father in Mansfeld. But the genius of the tract was to combine the economic grievances about the Church’s financial affairs with the religious issue of the authority of Scripture.

• From Satyricon (1)

  I could eat no more, so I turned to my whilom informant to learn as much as I could and sought to draw him out with far-fetched gossip. I inquired who that woman could be who was scurrying about hither and yon in such a fashion. “She’s called Fortunata,” he replied. “She’s the wife of Trimalchio, and she measures her money by the peck. And only a little while ago, what was she! May your genius pardon me, but you would not have been willing to take a crust of bread from her hand. Now, without rhyme or reason, she’s in the seventh heaven and is Trimalchio’s factotum, so much so that he would believe her if she told him it was dark when it was broad daylight! As for him, he don’t know how rich he is, but this harlot keeps an eye on everything and where you least expect to find her, you’re sure to run into her. She’s temperate, sober, full of good advice, and has many good qualities, but she has a scolding tongue, a very magpie on a sofa, those she likes, she likes, but those she dislikes, she dislikes! Trimalchio himself has estates as broad as the flight of a kite is long, and piles of money. There’s more silver plate lying in his steward’s office than other men have in their whole fortunes! And as for slaves, damn me if I believe a tenth of them knows the master by sight. The truth is, that these stand-a-gapes are so much in awe of him that any one of them would step into a fresh dunghill without ever knowing it, at a mere nod from him!” CHAPTER THE THIRTY-EIGHTH.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  And yet within a few months, Luther had again seized the initiative. This was partly because Germany’s humanist elite did not care for Eck, whose earlier attack on Erasmus had cost him their support. Men like Justus Jonas and Petrus Mosellanus mocked Eck as an ambitious show-off, engaging in gladiatorial combat with Luther for his own glory. The aggression and tricks of argument that pleased the crowd in Leipzig did not resonate well with them. Then, in the summer of 1520, Eck’s reputation took a sharp knock from which it never recov- ered, when a brilliant anonymous satire was published, full of puns, anagrams and humanist wit. A fantastic flight of fancy that would have done Aristophanes proud, Eccius dedolatus was one of the best satires of the period — if Luther had described the Leipzig Debate as both a ‘comedy’ and a ‘tragedy’, now it had become pure farce. In the satire, Eck has his own witch, Candida, run his errands for him. Ill from the effects of drink, he sends her to Leipzig to get Rubius’s advice and to fetch him a doctor, where the gatekeeper tells her ‘you'll find the fellow keeping house in the nearest synagogue’, insinuating that Luther’s opponents are Jews. The highlight is their return to Ingolstadt by flying goat, which will only ascend when the names of Hoogstraaten and Pfefferkorn are uttered backwards. As they fly over 140 MARTIN LUTHER Nuremberg, Augsburg and on to Ingolstadt, Rubius, Eck’s close supporter, defecates all over the goat: he is, the author implies, a truly ‘shitty’ poet.“ The second half of the satire is lifted from students’ initiation rituals, as the surgeon ‘planes off Eck’s corners’, a play on his name which meant ‘corner’.® The scene climaxes with Eck’s gelding — Eck’s dalli- ances with the ladies of Leipzig was now common knowledge — as the surgeon proclaims that he will remove ‘the carnality from this little grandson of Venus and hang it from his neck like a rattle on a child’. Witches, defecation, castration: the satire’s deadly effect was to ally Eck with the old guard of Hoogstraaten, Pfefferkorn, and the other anti-humanists who had been so wittily trounced in Letters of Obscure Men, a text that had appeared during the persecution of the Hebrew scholar Johannes Reuchlin by the Dominicans. Luther, the satire suggests, is another Reuchlin, whose cause any humanist ought to support.

• From Satyricon (1)

  “Lest longer mute tongue stays that In festal jest, from Fescennine, Nor yet deny their nuts to boys, He-Concubine! who learns in fine His lordling’s love is fled. Throw nuts to boys thou idle all He-Concubine! wast fain full long With nuts to play: now pleased as thrall Be thou to swell Talasios’ throng He-Concubine throw nuts. Wont thou as peasant-girls to jape He-whore! Thy Lord’s delight the while: Now shall hair-curling chattel scrape Thy cheeks: poor wretch, ah’ poor and vile:-- He-Concubine, throw nuts.” and further on, addressing the husband: “‘Tis said from smooth-faced ingle train (Anointed bridegroom!) hardly fain Hast e’er refrained; now do refrain! O Hymen Hymenaeus io, O Hymen Hymenaeus! We know that naught save licit rites Be known to thee, but wedded wights No more deem lawful such delights. O Hymen Hymenaeus io, O Hymen Hymenaeus.” (LXI. Burton, tr.) The Christian religion strongly prohibits this love; the theologians put it among the sins which directly offend against the Holy Ghost. I have not the honor of knowing just why this thing arouses his anger so much more than anything else; doubtless there are reasons. But the wrath of this honest person has not prevented the Christians from having their “pathici,” just as they have in countries where they are authorized by the reigning deities. We have even noticed that they are the priests of the Lord and especially the monks who practice this profession most generally amongst us. The children of Loyola have acquired well-merited renown in this matter: when they painted “Pleasure” they never failed to represent him wearing trousers. Those disciples of Joseph Calasanz who took their places in the education of children, followed their footsteps with zeal and fervor. Lastly, the cardinals, who have a close acquaintance with the Holy Ghost, are so prejudiced in favor of Greek love that they have made it the fashion in the Holy City of Rome; this leads me to wonder whether the Holy Ghost has changed His mind in regard to this matter and is no longer shocked by it; or whether the theologians were not mistaken in assuming an aversion against sodomy which He never had. The cardinals who are on such familiar terms with him would know better than to give all their days over to this pleasure if He really objected to it. I shall terminate this over-long note with an extract from a violent diatribe against this love which Lucian puts into the mouth of Charicles. He is addressing Callicratidas, a passionate lover of young boys, with whom he had gone to visit the temple of Venus at Cnidus.

• From Satyricon (1)

  Those who are brought up on such a diet can no more attain to wisdom than a kitchen scullion can attain to a keen sense of smell or avoid stinking of the grease. With your indulgence, I will speak out: you--teachers --are chiefly responsible for the decay of oratory. With your well modulated and empty tones you have so labored for rhetorical effect that the body of your speech has lost its vigor and died. Young men did not learn set speeches in the days when Sophocles and Euripides were searching for words in which to express themselves. In the days when Pindar and the nine lyric poets feared to attempt Homeric verse there was no private tutor to stifle budding genius. I need not cite the poets for evidence, for I do not find that either Plato or Demosthenes was given to this kind of exercise. A dignified and, if I may say it, a chaste, style, is neither elaborate nor loaded with ornament; it rises supreme by its own natural purity. This windy and high-sounding bombast, a recent immigrant to Athens, from Asia, touched with its breath the aspiring minds of youth, with the effect of some pestilential planet, and as soon as the tradition of the past was broken, eloquence halted and was stricken dumb. Since that, who has attained to the sublimity of Thucydides, who rivalled the fame of Hyperides? Not a single poem has glowed with a healthy color, but all of them, as though nourished on the same diet, lacked the strength to live to old age. Painting also suffered the same fate when the presumption of the Egyptians “commercialized” that incomparable art. (I was holding forth along these lines one day, when Agamemnon came up to us and scanned with a curious eye a person to whom the audience was listening so closely.) CHAPTER THE THIRD.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  He allegedly proclaimed that ‘no one could get to heaven in a cowl’ and that saying Mass was a ‘diabolical thing’. These reports of his preaching were partisan, but he appears to have exploited the widespread anticlerical feeling at the time. In his services Zwilling also began to remove everything that smacked of the idea that the Mass was a sacrifice, and he abolished the elevation and adoration of the sacrament. The Augustinians themselves were divided over Zwilling, with the prior Conrad Helt opposed to these changes; he subsequently complained that, because he had forbidden Communion to be cele- brated in two kinds, he could not go safely about the streets for fear of the ‘loose mob’.* Meanwhile a committee of university members and members of the collegiate church chapter was set up to develop a policy that would steer a course between the Augustinians, intent on reform, and the Elector, whose approval would be needed for any change. The hand-picked committee consisted mainly of supporters of the Reformation, including Melanchthon and Karlstadt and the jurist Hieronymus Schurff, who had accompanied Luther at Worms. Its recommendations backed reform: private Masses should be abol- ished and Communion should be held in both kinds. It tried to put the brakes on a little, however, pressuring Zwilling to explain that he had never rejected the adoration of the sacrament.* But the nascent movement soon found itself facing more serious opposition from the clerics of the foundation of All Saints, who began to lobby the Elector direct. Moreover, despite its largely evangelical membership, the IN THE WARTBURG 213 committee was not united, and when it went so far as to advocate abolishing private Masses and offering Communion in both kinds, one of its members, Johann Délsch, put in a separate memorial, arguing that since the sacrament was spiritual, one kind was sufficient.“ Zwilling was not acting alone. Students and townspeople themselves began to take direct action to bring about religious change; and their targets reveal what they understood by Luther’s Reformation. These were not what one might expect. Top of their agenda was the rejec- tion of begging, which was itself an expression of their anticlericalism. During the summer there were sporadic attacks on priests’ houses, and in October, when ‘St Anthony’s messenger’ would traditionally walk around town ringing a bell and requesting alms, the hapless man was mocked and students pelted him with dung, some of it mixed with stones. ‘How well you ring that bell,’ the students taunted him, ‘but you'd have to ring a long time before I'd give you so much as a penny.’® Again, these attacks seem to have had much in common with the students’ own rituals, which they had used to such effect with the burning of the bull.