LUTHER AND ECK
On the morning of 27 June 1519, a solemn votive Mass of the Holy Spirit was celebrated in the great gothic church of Saint Thomas in Leipzig. Then a crowd processed a few hundred yards to the Pleissenburg, the ducal palace where Martin Luther and his right-hand man, Andreas Carlstadt, were about to engage in a fortnight of formal academic disputation with Johannes Maier von Eck (1486–1543), a scholar generally (though often reluctantly) admitted to be the most capable debater of his age. An introductory oration was delivered by the University of Leipzig’s leading resident humanist, Petrus Mosellanus, who sententiously reminded the participants that Christians disputing with Christians should behave like Christians, expressing themselves modestly and moderately.1
Eck, as he was usually known, was not just an academic, but an academic careerist. Before Luther had ever been heard of, Eck, a few years his junior, had worked his way busily up the greasy pole. Educated at Heidelberg, Tübingen, Cologne, and Freiburg, he boasted an exalted academic pedigree. Thanks partly to his role in the Leipzig Disputation, he was to become Luther’s most famous and most widely read opponent. His Handbook of Commonplaces against the Lutherans, first published in 1525, was reprinted over a hundred times in the sixteenth century, and provided raw material for countless Catholic sermons and pamphlets against Protestantism.
Eck and Luther already had something of a history. They were first brought into contact with each other by a mutual friend, Christoph Scheurl, a minor humanist and former lecturer at Wittenberg who was by the mid-1510s a legal official working for the city council of Nuremberg. In 1517 he effected a remote introduction between Eck and Luther, which led to an exchange of polite epistolary greetings which historians, following a lead set by Luther for rhetorical purposes, have dignified with the label of friendship.2 At that time, Eck was the more celebrated of the two men. Already a published author, he had attached himself out of motives of study and patronage to such eminent scholars as Conrad Peutinger, Gregor Reisch, and Ulrich Zasius. Peutinger had given him a helping hand to a professorship at Ingolstadt and a canonry at Eichstätt in 1510, ensuring that he had the material security adequate to a life of study.3
Through his connection with Peutinger and thus with the mercantile elite of Augsburg, Eck had been drawn into the ethical issues surrounding the lending of money at interest, a transaction execrated as unnatural and immoral through much of the ancient Mediterranean and medieval European world. He became the key figure in an episode sometimes known as the “South German Interest Rate Controversy.” He adopted what was then the almost revolutionary view that the charging of moderate interest, up to about five percent, by means of a business loan of a very specific kind (the so-called “Augsburg Contract,” which underpinned most of the transactions in that city’s flourishing money market), did not amount to “usury.” The defense of the “Augsburg Contract” was vital to the interests of the local plutocrat, Jakob Fugger, the grand old man of the imperial money market, who was happy to cover Eck’s expenses in travelling to well-publicized disputations on the subject at Vienna and Bologna. Fugger had not only financed Charles V’s bid for the imperial throne but also the marketing of the indulgence that had brought Luther into the public sphere in the first place.4 So when Eck became one of the bêtes noires of the early Protestants, his defense of usury (as they saw it) and his connection with Fugger were a gift for satirists.
Notwithstanding talk of their “friendship,” there is nothing to indicate that the introduction Scheurl effected led to any bond of special warmth between Luther and Eck. Their next recorded contact was anything but friendly. As an eminent professor of theology as well as a canon of the cathedral, Eck was the natural choice when, in early 1518, the Bishop of Eichstätt, Gabriel von Eyb, wanted someone to provide informed comment on the Ninety-Five Theses, by then the talk of all Germany. The result was Eck’s first recorded judgment on Luther, a file of rough notes that were to become known as the “Obelisks.” The symbol of the obelisk (or dagger, †) was commonly used by medieval scholars to cross-reference notes to a text, usually critical notes, and in this case Eck’s notes were presumably related to a printed copy of the Ninety-Five Theses marked up in this way. The Obelisks were never intended for publication: they were simply a briefing paper.5 Nevertheless they leaked out, and a copy made its way to Wittenberg by way of Bernhard Adelmann, a canon of Augsburg Cathedral who was already a keen supporter of Luther’s. By March Luther was fuming at what he saw as Eck’s betrayal of their friendship. Whether their polite exchange of letters really amounted to a friendship is questionable, but the thought that it did helped Luther nurture a satisfying sense of grievance.
In reply Luther dashed off his “Asterisks,” giving at least as good as he had got. The Obelisks, which survive only in Luther’s Asterisks, are frank criticisms, identifying various of the Ninety-Five Theses as erroneous, false, frivolous, illogical, confused, irreverent, or self-contradictory. At one point Eck suggests that there is a sting in the tail, at another that Luther’s thinking seems to point towards Hussite conclusions. His tone does rise through the notes, as he reads with evidently mounting incredulity. By the end, one thesis is “a proposition full of poison,” another “ridiculous.”6 But Eck confined himself strictly to the text, casting no personal aspersions. To that extent, at least, he scrupulously observed the canons of academic courtesy.
Luther’s response betrays that eagerness to take offence, and that identification of oneself with one’s writings, so often found among academics:
He has written these Obelisks, in which he calls me poisonous, Bohemian, heretical, seditious, headstrong, and petulant … there is nothing in the work but the spite and envy of a frantic mind.7
This is a harsh account of a paper which, as Eck was swift to point out in a briefly successful effort to calm things down, was never intended even for circulation, let alone publication. But Luther’s view has, as usual, carried more weight with later scholarship. Martin Brecht’s account of the Obelisks in his magisterial biography of Luther is manifestly indebted not to Eck’s words but to Luther’s, which it uncritically recycles.8 But while Luther has cited words that all appear in the Obelisks, the revealing thing is that he takes them as applied to himself when they are all, in context, referring to his words rather than to his person. It is not uncommon for authors to take criticism of their writing as personal criticism. But it was one of Luther’s foibles to mistake his own personal touchiness for a selfless dedication to the truth. Eck had striven to avoid personalities, but Luther’s incapacity to distinguish between theological disagreement and personal enmity was a mark of the man from the start. When harnessed on the one side to his unshakable sense of divine mission and on the other to a prodigious gift for personal invective, this made him a formidable opponent.9
If it was Eck who dared to disagree with Luther, it was Luther who turned their disagreement into a bitter and sundering quarrel. The cover letter to his Asterisks voiced his amazement at
the effrontery with which you dare to pass judgment on my opinions before you know or understand them. Such temerity is sufficient and reliable evidence that you think yourself the only real theologian, so much so that you not only think your opinion is to be put ahead of all others, but you condemn whatever you don’t understand, so that whatever displeases Eck is damned.10
He let himself go early on, deploying the text omnis homo mendax (“all men are liars,” Ps 115:11), the scriptural shillelagh with which he loved to belabor his opponents, so many of whom were human (he never applied it to himself).11 Eck’s debating style is “childish and girly,” he blathers, he is the “Obeliscographer” and “Obeliscophrast,” raging at Luther out of jealousy. He is a ranter and a liar, a mercenary, suborned by the foes of true learning, brim-full of contumely and delirium, his mouth spewing out lies and blasphemy, bitterness and cursing.12 The tone of this reply sets the tears he shed over Eck’s breach of their friendship in an intriguing perspective.
Despite raising the temperature of the controversy, Luther respected Eck’s good faith to the extent that he, too, refrained from committing his contribution to print.13 So the Obelisks and Asterisks remained unpublished until they were included in the first volume of Luther’s Complete Works in 1545. Andreas Carlstadt, Luther’s colleague and the Dean of the Wittenberg Theology Faculty, was not so cautious. While his colleague was away at Heidelberg, Carlstadt rushed into print an absurdly detailed blow-by-blow rebuttal of Eck’s notes, the dauntingly entitled 370 Theses, for a disputation scheduled for 9 May 1518.14 Only about a quarter of Carlstadt’s conclusions were actually directed against Eck, who was addressed with a mixture of condescension and sarcasm, as though he were an annoyingly obtuse schoolboy, and along the way Carlstadt charged him merely with ignorance, ill temper, and vainglory, only hinting that he was a heretic and a Judaizer (this last perhaps a gibe at his support for the charging of interest on loans).
Once Carlstadt had attacked him personally in print, it was inevitable that a man such as Eck would reply in kind, and his Response to Carlstadt’s Invectives appeared in August. The title was something of an overreaction, but the text itself was relatively measured. It firmly but inoffensively rebutted a number of positions that Carlstadt had imputed to him, and it ostentatiously avoided name-calling. His sights now fixed on Carlstadt, Eck dared him to put their disagreements to the test in public disputation at Rome, Paris, or Cologne.15 This was the seed from which the Leipzig Disputation eventually flowered. When Eck reminisced about all this twenty years later, he said that he had offered to debate with Luther and that the latter had come up with Leipzig as a venue. It was nothing like as simple as that. The two men met for the first time at Augsburg, while Luther was attending upon Cardinal Cajetan, and the initial idea was for a disputation between Eck and Carlstadt, with Leipzig as the likely venue (Eck rightly judging that Erfurt, Luther’s alma mater, would be hostile territory). It is likely that, from the start, Eck had either the impression or the hope that Luther would be drawn in, though Luther at first had no such intention. When Eck published his draft theses at the end of December, they were obviously aimed at least as much against Luther as Carlstadt. The final thesis of the twelve was an assertion of the divine right of papal primacy in the Church, an issue which had nothing to do with Carlstadt and everything to do with Luther, as the latter rather sourly observed in a letter to a friend: “But listen to the cheek of the fellow: he picks up my theses and savages them bitterly, paying no attention to the man his quarrel is with.”16
Needled by Eck’s rather obvious efforts to draw him from cover, Luther could not resist taking the bait. As he found himself being maneuvered into participating in the disputation, he set out to needle his challenger in return. In an open letter to Carlstadt, he accused Eck of publishing his theses only after learning that Leipzig had declined to host the contest.17 Luther had passed this news on to Eck in a letter of 7 January 1519, but, as Eck pointed out, this had not reached him at Ingolstadt until 8 February, over a month after he had published his theses,18 though he conceded that he should not have published them before he knew for certain that the Leipzigers would agree to host the event. The authorities at Leipzig University had indeed been unwilling to do this, but their overlord, Duke George of Saxony, overruled them.
Luther was wiser than to be drawn into an argument about the rights or wrongs of his original insinuations against Eck. Instead he opened a new front, with a churlish letter in which, after a barrage of insults, he invited Eck to name the day on which they should meet, or else to allow Luther to do so.19 He reiterated his preferred image of Eck as an irascible and bombastic sophist, consumed with envy and hatred, and addicted to the flattery of Rome. There was indeed an amusing vein of pomposity and Pecksniffian propriety in the overt moderation and restraint of Eck’s contributions thus far, albeit little to justify the portrait Luther painted. Luther, in contrast, gloried in the lively mordancy of his polemics, which he rightly judged were gaining him the upper hand against his challengers.20 His withering characterization of Eck swiftly captured the popular imagination and has held the field ever since. For Bernhard Adelmann in Augsburg, everything Eck did was “full of boasting and showing off.”21
This exchange between the two main disputants of the three who would meet at Leipzig completed the prolegomena. Eck took the occasion afforded by the open letters to insert a further proposition into the dozen that he had set out in December 1518. The extra proposition concerned the freedom of the will, which Luther’s deepening Augustinianism and anti-Pelagianism had reduced to the level of barely nominal existence. Free will would bulk large in the debates at Leipzig, and would eventually cause the greatest of the humanists, Erasmus, to make a public break with Luther. But in the immediate term it was the last thesis, now “Proposition XIII,” which attracted attention that spring, because in it, for the first time, Luther faced the question of papal authority head on.
The anxieties about Rome and the papacy that had started to trouble Luther after his encounter with Cardinal Cajetan had not abated in the intervening months. Rome, he confessed to his closest confidant, Georg Spalatin, might more appropriately be named “Babylon,” an image to which he would famously return in 1520. It had never been his intention, he explained, to break with the apostolic see, but he was now finding himself compelled to deny that Rome had any rightful superiority over any other church. Most disturbing of all, and only for whispering even to a friend as close as Spalatin,
And (I whisper it into your ear) I am not sure whether the Pope is the Antichrist himself, or merely his apostle, so wretchedly is Christ (that is, truth) corrupted and crucified by him in canon law.22
This was heady stuff, and Luther’s anxiety found expression first in busy research into canon law and church history, and then in a treatise on Proposition XIII that was printed shortly before the Leipzig Disputation.23
Luther was more circumspect in public than in private. In public there was barely a mention of Babylon, nor any talk of Antichrist. Rather, there was a cautious acknowledgment of the de facto power and authority of the Roman Church, a concession based on Saint Paul’s injunction to “obey the powers that be.” This was more than perfunctory and far from insincere. But it was also anything but the point. After this brief concession, the treatise systematically takes apart the theological, canonical, and historical case for the claim that the Roman Church exercised by divine right a supreme authority within the universal Church. Starting with the classic scriptural texts on which papal authority leaned (Matt 16:18–19 and John 21: 15–17), Luther set about his task with increasing vigor until he was subjecting the decrees of the medieval papacy to withering criticism. The popes and their supporters are denounced as forgers, babblers, corruptors of God’s Word, barbarous Latinists, and ignorant pigs. Papal decrees are “impious and perverse blasphemy,” while the blatant contrast between papal pomp and apostolic simplicity furnishes ready material for Luther’s rich vein of sarcasm. The papacy had thrown the modern church into a confusion greater than that of Babylon (though Luther stops short at this mere hint of his inner fears). The culmination of a rising tide of impatient expostulation is a ringing indictment of the fruits of medieval canon law:
Now that the papal decrees are ranked equal to the articles of the creed, and even above them by the toadies, we see the harvest: the overthrow of ecclesiastical order, a horrible tormenting of consciences, ignorance of the gospel, absolute impunity for wickedness, and the loathsome tyranny of the toadies at Rome, with the deserved result that no name under the wide blue heaven is more hateful and noisome than that of the Roman curia.24
This devastating polemic was printed just before the Leipzig Disputation, too late to reach Eck beforehand and warn him what he might face there. Luther brought a copy with him and used it as a handbook when he clashed with Eck on this issue.
The disputation at Leipzig had been scheduled to start on Monday, 27 June, and the participants and audience arrived over the preceding week. Looking back, Luther claimed that Eck had made sure everything would be arranged to suit himself, but this was hardly how it seemed in June.25 Eck had come over 200 miles from Ingolstadt, accompanied by a single servant. Luther and Carlstadt travelled the 45 miles from Wittenberg in a sort of convoy of carts, accompanied by colleagues and books, and escorted by a couple of hundred rowdy students. This may have been intended to afford the Wittenberg speakers some protection, as the rivalry between Electoral and Ducal Saxony was reflected in the sometimes acerbic relations between their respective universities. But it was a precaution at least as likely to precipitate trouble as to prevent it.
The first week was entirely given over to the contest between Eck and Carlstadt, which focused on the relative place of divine grace and human free will in the process of salvation. Luther’s only moment came on Wednesday, when debate was suspended for the feast day of Saints Peter and Paul (29 June), for which he was invited to deliver the sermon. Keeping his powder dry for the following week, he ignored the obvious opportunity to discuss papal primacy. But since the gospel for the day was one of the fundamental texts in the justification of papal authority, Matthew 16:13–19 (in which Christ said “upon this rock I shall build my church” and promised Peter “the keys of the kingdom of heaven”), his virtual silence on the subject of Peter was itself eloquent. When Peter was mentioned, his role was explicitly reduced to that of a representative or spokesman for the apostles. And the promise of the keys, usually taken as a sign of the authority which Christ would confer on Peter and his successors, was presented by Luther as symbolizing the forgiveness of sins and therefore as pointing not to papal or ecclesiastical authority but to his doctrine of justification by faith alone. Christians could never know that they were in grace, and that God looked favorably upon them, other than through faith: glaubt er es, so ist er selig; glaubt er es nit, so ist er verdampt. This claim was more radical than anything else said in the entire 17 days of the disputation: “believe this, and you are saved; believe it not, and you are damned.”26 Looking back on this sermon a few days after the end of the disputation, Eck described it as “plainly Hussite,” but he made no allusion to it in the course of proceedings, though he managed a reply of sorts when he was invited to preach on the Feast of the Visitation (Saturday, 2 July).27
Eck has come in for a good deal of criticism in the historical literature concerning the Leipzig Disputation, dominated as it has been by scholars whose commitments to Luther are better described as hagiographical than historical. Much, perhaps most, of that criticism is undeserved. Yet if there is one thing for which he might quite properly be held at intellectual fault, it is this: that he entirely failed to appreciate the revolutionary nature of the claim Luther made in that sermon. Cajetan had seen in Luther’s thinking the foundation of a new church.28 Yet it seems to have passed Eck by, for all his quick wit. This may help explain why the distinctive Lutheran doctrine of certainty of grace, which was to be anathematized by the Catholic Council of Trent nearly thirty years later, was omitted from the first ecclesiastical condemnation of Luther, the papal bull launched against him next year by Leo X. For the theological groundwork of that condemnation was laid largely by none other than Eck, who took his quarrel to Rome some months after the close of play at Leipzig.
It was on Monday, 4 July, that Luther and Eck finally faced each other across the floor of the chamber in the Pleissenburg. Well over half of the subsequent debate was about the already notorious Proposition XIII, Eck’s affirmation and Luther’s denial of the divine right of the papacy to the primacy it claimed in the universal Church. They spent five days on this, but it might as well have been five minutes, and they could certainly have made all their main points and reached their eventual stalemate within an hour. As it was, their debate spiralled in ever decreasing circles.
Early on, Eck realized that he was at a disturbing disadvantage. Not only was he outnumbered, but he was also outgunned: Luther was armed with his recently printed Resolution on Proposition XIII, which Eck had not yet had the opportunity to read: “I came to debate,” he complained, “not to publish a book.”29 The etiquette of scholastic debate was that disputants performed without book, relying on a sharp mind and a well-stocked memory. But Luther once more showed his preference for a written brief when facing a difficult public appearance. Despite his evident dexterity in debate, Eck was therefore badly underprepared in comparison with his opponent. His treatise On the Primacy of Peter, against Luther, written in the wake of the disputation, put together a plausible case for papal primacy, but his presentation of the case at Leipzig itself was nowhere near as well researched, to his cost. The Catholic defense of papal primacy would become almost a cliché before long, but in 1519 it was still novel ground.
Eck came to Leipzig expecting a typical scholastic disputation, hinging on well-turned syllogisms and on appeals to mutually recognized “authorities” (ranging from writings of the apostolic era to the most recent utterances of councils and popes). What he found was the opening phase of a culture clash. It did not help that Luther’s own understanding of theological authority was still in flux. Eck was probably aware of Luther’s suspicions of scholasticism, although it is unlikely he realized just how far they already extended.30
Eck’s opening gambit was brief. Papal monarchy in the Church had been established by Christ himself, and this monarchical principle was endorsed by a series of Christian authors (initially he cited only three). The contrary position had been condemned by the University of Paris (generally regarded in the later Middle Ages as home to Europe’s premier theological faculty) and had been anathematized at the Council of Constance among the notorious errors of the fourteenth-century English heretic John Wycliffe. He added a couple more citations from early Christian authors, one of which mentioned the famous scriptural text (Matt 16:18), “on this rock I shall build my church,” to which, above all, the Roman Church appealed in vindicating its prerogatives.31
Luther’s counter was direct, powerful, and effective, and perhaps began to give Eck some idea of the gulf that was opening up between them. He welcomed the contention that the Church was a monarchical institution but, resting his own argument almost entirely on scripture, insisted that Christ alone was its head and that no other head was required. Brushing aside Eck’s patristic authorities, he cited one or two of his own, notably a text from Jerome asserting the equality of the apostles and therefore of their ecclesiastical successors. Intriguingly, or perhaps revealingly, he made no immediate response to the objection that his views on the papacy already lay under formal ecclesiastical condemnation.
The subsequent debate never moved far from the ground mapped out that day, though more authorities were introduced, especially by Luther, and the arguments were pursued further, with ever finer distinctions. The interest of the debate lies in two features. First, it shows how much of a Catholic Luther still was and thought himself to be. Although his ideas were tending in difficult directions, he strove not to rush too far ahead. Second, and still more importantly, one of Eck’s recurring and developing lines of argument gradually sharpened the methodological focus of the debate for both sides, as the two men started to uncover the still largely implicit assumptions that underpinned Luther’s approach to theological reasoning.
The two features were connected. Luther came to Leipzig as a Catholic, subscribing in some way to the authority of the “fathers” or “doctors” of the Christian tradition, whom he cited frequently in the course of debate. He subscribed likewise in some sense to the authority of councils, especially “general councils,” when pronouncing judgment on disputed religious questions (he had after all appealed to a general council in the aftermath of his meeting with Cajetan at Augsburg); and he shared a broad trust in the “indefectibility” (or even “infallibility”) of the Church, that is, the idea that the Church as a whole could not go seriously astray in interpreting the Christian faith. He certainly still saw some role for the papacy, and he was as hostile as anyone else to schism and heresy. He therefore had no time for the Hussite church of Bohemia, which in the fifteenth century had broken away from Rome in schism over the doctrines of the Czech theologian Jan Hus (who had in turn been deeply influenced by the teachings of Wycliffe). His commentary on Galatians, published that summer, insisted that the Bohemian break with Rome was inexcusable, in that it was ungodly and contrary to charity and all the laws of Christ.32
The imputation of “Hussitism” or “Bohemian” heresy came to be the sore point of the proceedings. Eck hit upon it almost by chance in his opening gambit, when he casually observed that denying the primacy of the Roman Church was a Wycliffite error.33 He pressed it with increasing force as the days wore on, sensing the growing intensity with which Luther was reacting. No doubt noticing how Luther skirted round his initial allusion to Wycliffe and Constance, Eck returned to it next day, urging that Luther’s view was not only “among the damnable and pestiferous errors for which John Wycliffe was condemned” but also “among the pestilent errors of Jan Hus.”34 This was nicely calculated, as German Catholics reacted almost neuralgically to the name of the Czech heresiarch. If Eck could make Luther guilty by association with Hus, he would be well on the way to victory. This time the thrust struck home. Luther denied any sympathy with the “Bohemian faction” and their schism, yet now pointed to the Greek Church of the East, which refused to acknowledge papal authority but, he maintained, could hardly be regarded as tainted with Bohemian heresy. Eck’s insinuation continued to rankle, however, and Luther complained about it again at the end of that session and at the start of the next.35
During the lengthy pamphlet exchanges which followed the disputation, Eck offered a telling comparison of his two opponents. Carlstadt he found inept and unintelligent, a judgment likely to be endorsed by anyone who struggles through his tedious writings. Luther, though, was another matter:
With a livelier wit and a more tenacious memory, his easy voice and manner were better suited to disputation, except for one thing: when pressed by his opponent or stung by some word, he too quickly became incandescent with rage, so that he himself scarcely understood what he was saying.36
Eck got onto this quickly and learned how to rile Luther. He kept on pressing the Hussite button, working up his opponent to such a pitch that he not only angrily interrupted him more than once (another breach of disputational etiquette), but also accused Eck of calling him “a most pestilential heretic”—which he had studiously refrained from doing, although he had equally studiously done everything he could to imply it. Indeed, although Eck is conventionally credited with a hectoring and bullying style in debate, he did nothing at Leipzig to earn such a reputation. He was for the most part rigidly formal, rarely if ever interrupting, and maintaining an icy academic politeness. He reserved his criticism almost entirely for Luther’s ideas and utterances, avoiding crudely personal gibes. This carefully modulated goading got under his opponent’s skin, with the result that while Luther was undoubtedly on his best behavior and, by his own standards, unwontedly restrained, he burst out from time to time in anger or absurdity. As Eck closed in with the “Bohemian” argument—for there was no escaping that the Council of Constance, in condemning Wycliffe and Hus, had condemned Luther’s view of the papacy in anticipation—Luther was understandably reluctant to face up to its consequences. Hence his suggestion (made out of reverence for that council) that the positions of Wycliffe and Hus on the papacy had not been condemned there at all, but had been “interpolated by some impostor.”37 Eck had him cornered, and while Luther’s continuing disavowals of heresy and schism may have limited the immediate damage, the realization that he had more than a little in common with the Hussites would slowly dawn upon him over the next couple of years, as his own relationship with the established Church became more problematic.
At this stage, however, Luther’s love of paradox and provocation overcame him, and after once more repudiating any Bohemian sympathies, he shocked his audience by announcing that among the beliefs of Hus and his followers were many things that were entirely Christian and evangelical. He at once drew the sting by choosing as his example their belief in the Holy Spirit, the holy Catholic Church, and the communion of the saints—in other words their adherence to the Apostles’ Creed, the oldest summary of the Christian faith. But later on he went back on the offensive, maintaining that the Council of Constance had indeed erred in condemning Hus’s definition of the Church as the “body of the predestined.”38 The idea that the general council at Constance had condemned Christian and evangelical truths cut at the root of medieval understandings of ecclesiastical authority. Luther was no more a “conciliarist” than a “papalist.” The pope was a solitary individual, a general council was a collection of individuals, but they were all human and thus all capable of error: omnis homo mendax.
The disputation over the papacy gradually tailed off into tiresome volleys of assertions and denials over the interpretation of a few scriptural texts and early Christian Fathers (notably Augustine, Cyprian, and John Chrysostom). Since most of these early writers could be cited on both sides of the question regarding the nature of the “rock” on which Christ undertook to build his church, the exchanges were necessarily inconclusive. Eck seems to have been taken unawares by the direction of debate over Proposition XIII. It was only in the last couple of days on this subject that he started to produce significant patristic testimony to support his position. One suspects that one or two Leipzigers, such as Hieronymus Emser (who would become a friend and ally of his), stepped in as unofficial research assistants to close the gap between Eck and his better prepared opponent, and at a certain point Eck was obviously able to get a copy of Luther’s book. Beyond that, Luther spent a lot of time wriggling off hooks, as when he drew a somewhat disingenuous distinction between impugning the primacy of the Bishop of Rome (which he denied) and disputing that the Roman primacy was a matter of divine right (which he acknowledged). But, ironically, the real significance of the debate over the papacy was that it revealed that Luther had no more time for the authority of general councils than he had for that of popes. He was beginning to move visibly outside the bounds of medieval Catholic orthodoxy.
On 8 July the focus of debate shifted to purgatory, with Luther taking his stand on the plain and indisputable fact that the Bible had “almost nothing” to say on the subject—though, curiously, he still affirmed his conviction that purgatory did indeed exist.39 There were a few scriptural texts that were routinely invoked in discussions of purgatory, but, as he rightly observed, they none of them specified a place, state, or name. For the rest of that short argument, however, Luther found himself in trouble. Eck wanted to know how he could possibly justify his conviction about the reality of purgatory if he was not satisfied with the scriptural basis offered for it. All he got in reply was bluster (though before long Luther would abandon his residual belief in purgatory). More significantly, Eck widened his attack, challenging Luther’s preference for scripture over the authority of general councils. According to that principle, he contended, the heresy of Arianism (the denial of the doctrine of the Trinity) would still be flourishing, since the key technical term of the doctrine as defined at the Council of Nicaea was not to be found in the Bible. Instead, the authority of the Church was as reliable in the interpretation of scripture as it was in the identification of its constituent books.40
If the scriptural foundation for purgatory was flimsy, then that for indulgences was frankly nonexistent. In their brief discussion of the issue that had made Luther a public figure, Eck was therefore reduced to constructing a syllogism on the theme of ecclesiastical infallibility. General councils of the Church embodied the universal Church’s infallibility in matters of the faith; the general councils of the Lateran (1215), Lyon (1274), and Constance (1414–18) had declared and approved the doctrine of indulgences; therefore the doctrine was true. Luther faced a much easier challenge here, and focused his claims on the reasonable contention that indulgences were not considered “necessary for salvation.” From this he inferred that they could not form part of the faith, which was of course universally acknowledged as essential to salvation. Indeed, he agreed, the universal Church could not err in matters of faith. However, from this he concluded not that its teaching on indulgences must therefore be true, but that indulgences themselves could not be a matter of faith, and that councils of the Church had erred in declaring them to be so.41 Eck seized on the implication that Luther’s concept of the universal Church was in effect empty. If the flocking of pilgrims to Rome from all parts of the Church for the special “Jubilee” indulgences available there every 25 years did not manifest the consensus of the universal Church, he argued, then there was no conceivable way to ascertain the mind of the universal Church on anything.42
The pragmatic argument from the general custom of the Christian people did not bother Luther. As far as he was concerned, the hordes who traipsed to Rome for indulgences were simply ignorant, mistakenly believing, like Eck himself, that indulgences were necessary for salvation. Eck did not believe that indulgences were necessary to salvation, but Luther’s utter conviction that he did opens another intriguing window into the working of Luther’s mind. For Luther, only what was necessary to salvation could possibly be good for Christians.43 Eck was happy to concede that indulgences were not necessary for salvation, but nonetheless insisted that they were beneficial. Luther’s mental apparatus seems to have assimilated Eck’s insistence that indulgences were beneficial and to have processed it in accordance with the principle that only what was necessary to salvation could be good, resulting in the conviction that Eck believed indulgences necessary to salvation. As Lucien Febvre once observed, with characteristic insight, Luther had (to an even stronger degree than most of us) a tendency to filter any intellectual input so as to align it with his own mental predispositions.44
The Leipzig Disputation concluded with a two-day clash on the subject of penance, which could have come closer than anything else to the heart of Luther’s theology. But Eck was taking the lead in this phase, and chose to focus on two issues which he saw as quick wins. These were the idea that true repentance for sin started from a proper and salutary fear of God and divine punishment, and the fact that the ancient and constant tradition of the Church regarded the “penances” (or penalties) imposed by bishops or priests upon repentant Christians as owed not merely to the ecclesiastical community in this life (as Luther maintained) but also to God in the perspective of eternity (which Luther denied). The evidence from patristic and medieval tradition very much favored Eck, but this did not sit at all well with Luther’s new understanding of faith and salvation. For Luther, true penance arose out of love for justice rather than out of fear of punishment, a position which had place in Christian tradition more as the expression of an ideal than as a description of everyday reality. Eck had no difficulty in amassing a solid body of scriptural and patristic testimony in favor of his more realistic assessment of human and Christian motivation.45 Luther’s response, delivered without a tincture of irony, was brisk:
Snipping different texts from different places without any reason for connecting or comparing them is no way to get at the proper meaning and interpretation of holy scripture. On the contrary, that is the commonest way to get holy scripture wrong.46
Luther was on firmer or at least more favorable ground when he took his stand on scripture. Yet while scripture was already his starting point in addressing almost any topic, he had not, prior to Leipzig, explicitly formulated the “Protestant scripture principle,” the claim that only the scriptures, and these taken in their “literal” sense, could be decisive in theological argument. The significance of the Leipzig Disputation lies in the fact that it nudged him towards a clearer appreciation of his own implicit assumptions. Eck’s dialectical scalpel pared off more of the Catholic rind that still clung to Luther’s emerging theology. By making the problems with the fathers and councils evident to Luther, Eck drove him closer to recognizing the implicit logic of his position. Once the popes, the councils, and the fathers had all been categorized as merely human authorities, as prone to err as the next man or woman, the bare text of scripture was all that was left.
After Leipzig, both sides sought to spin the outcome. The notarized record of the disputation, it had been agreed, would be communicated only to the universities selected for the honor of passing judgment on it, namely Erfurt and Paris. But in the age of print such a confidentiality agreement was already unrealistic. The disputants and their supporters were soon writing to friends setting out the story as they saw it, and some of these letters found their way into print, best intentions to the contrary notwithstanding. Each side in due course accused the other of breach of trust and ridiculed them for “singing the anthem before the win.” Luther insisted that it was Eck who first broke the agreement by writing a letter to the Elector Frederick. This letter, which was only published later, by Luther himself, was indeed written as early as 22 July. However, Luther had already sent a similarly private letter to Spalatin on 20 July, and on 21 July Melanchthon had written an open letter about the disputation, addressed to Johannes Oecolampadius (then living in Augsburg). This seems to have been the first of these accounts to be published, for it was printed in Wittenberg, and a copy reached Eck before he had even left Leipzig. The open letter he dashed off in reply was dated 25 July and was presumably published almost at once.47
Melanchthon charged Eck with various breaches of disputational etiquette and lapses of intellectual integrity. Thus he declared that the patristic citations that Eck adduced in favor of applying Matthew 16:18 (“You art Peter, and upon this rock I shall build my church”) specifically and exclusively to Peter were from dubious or spurious sources (even though the texts of Cyprian and Jerome from which Eck quoted were at that time generally believed to be authentic). In reply, Eck complained that Melanchthon was arrogating to himself the task of adjudicating on the disputation, a task which the parties had agreed to entrust to the University of Paris. Eck tried to defend himself without casting any aspersions on Carlstadt or Luther, instead simply appealing to the academic tribunals to whom the transcripts had been referred for final judgment. He might have done better to jump bodily into the arena with his opponents rather than pose self-righteously on the edge of it. Their representation of him gained traction despite his efforts to the contrary, while he offered his audience no similarly caustic representation of them. Luther and his supporters had certainly got the idea of the “attack ad.” The plaintive note of self-pity which Eck struck in his attempt at a dignified reply just did not have the audience appeal of rollicking rhetoric. However, as pamphlets continued to appear he shed his scruples and tried to answer in kind, though he lacked Luther’s flair for this style of writing. He had definitely done better in the debate than after it. As Luther remarked later, in a backhanded tribute,
When Eck is there in person, no one can withstand him, and he can lead anyone right away from the truth. But when it comes to paper, he is quite dead.48
By the end of the summer, the gloves were off. Luther wrote a longer account of the disputation in a letter to Spalatin dated 15 August and serving as the dedication of the Resolutions on the Leipzig Disputation.49 On 18 August 1519, Luther laid into Eck with a vengeance in the course of a letter to Spalatin, denouncing him as a liar and an illiberal, impudent sycophant.50 His letters in the second half of 1519 abound with insults and invective against Eck and also, after a while, Hieronymus Emser, who entered the lists in support of Eck. The aftershocks of the disputation rumbled on well into 1520.
The aftermath of the Leipzig Disputation was the matrix in which humanist support for Martin Luther took firmer shape. Some humanists, such as Beatus Rhenanus and Jacques Lefèvre, had already been voicing sympathy and admiration for him.51 But his circle of admirers now widened rapidly, as can be seen from the case of Ulrich von Hutten. Germany’s wickedest satirist had originally seen the indulgences controversy as just another pointless quarrel among monks. An avid partisan first of Reuchlin and then also of Erasmus, Hutten was, to some extent, a disciple in perpetual search of a messiah. After Leipzig he came to see Luther as another German humanist on the wrong end of scholastic jealousy and Roman tyranny.52 Luther’s own carefully drawn parallel between his treatment and that of Johann Reuchlin was starting to pay dividends. But his emergence had a divisive impact on German humanism. Eobanus Hessus and Hieronymus Emser, for example, had both contributed commendatory verses in 1514 to an anti-Hussite polemic published by Hieronymus Dungersheim.53 It is no surprise that Dungersheim himself, a Dominican friar and an essentially scholastic theologian, turned against Luther after seeing him in action at Leipzig. But Hessus and Emser, both with impeccably humanist credentials, now took opposite sides, and Emser was soon under fire from Wittenberg.
Luther, meanwhile, was heartened by messages of support emanating from cities across Germany, from Augsburg to Zurich, and especially from their humanist circles. Conrad Pellican, for example, the humanist friar of Basel who was closely involved in the printing industry there, wrote to Luther in March 1520 with encouraging news of Luther’s impact among friars of all orders in that region. Johannes Lüthard of Lucerne was preaching from Luther’s texts, while Johannes of Ulm, a friar based in Freiburg, was “consumed with zeal for your writings.” Basel was full of Luther’s admirers: a couple of Austin Friars who were doctors of divinity, the prior of the Austin Canons, and all Pellican’s own brethren in the Franciscan house.54
There was a definite effort by Luther to win humanist support for his teachings. It was discernible in his recurrent allusions to the vicissitudes of Johannes Reuchlin, whose long-running case at Rome had scandalized humanists across Europe. It was even more evident in his commentary on Galatians, largely written before the disputation, but only published in September. Notwithstanding Luther’s private reservations about Erasmus, this commentary went out of its way to affiliate itself with the great man. In the preface, Luther modestly explained that he would rather have awaited the commentary promised by Erasmus, “that supreme theologian,” than have published his own; and Erasmus was invoked from the very first comment, on Galatians 1:1, where his name was printed in capital letters, as it was wherever it was used.55 The commentary also reprised Luther’s theological development thus far, in relatively unpolemical style. It summed up his new understanding of the “Word of God” in terms of justification by faith alone and was persistent in urging the absolute certainty with which Christians could contemplate their own condition. It was a mere “fable of the scholastics that a person is uncertain whether or not they are in a state of salvation.”56 The contrast between man (every man a liar) and God (alone truthful) was relentless, as was the dismissal of human or philosophical conceptions of “justice,” especially that of Aristotle.57 Luther’s teaching was encapsulated in his explanation of Paul’s dichotomy between the Law and the Gospel, a dichotomy which, more than anything else, has defined the Lutheran tradition. What Luther took from Paul was the idea that the law not only taught people what to do, but also, paradoxically, taught them simultaneously that they could not do it, in that the law’s demand for perfect fulfilment was simply beyond anyone. This natural impossibility of the law, the utter incapacity of fallen human nature to fulfil the law, was one of Luther’s most innovative insights. In his commentary on Galatians, he derived some support for this radical interpretation from Augustine, though on other occasions he acknowledged (surely correctly) that Augustine had not grasped the concept as clearly as he himself did. Either way, Luther’s concept of the impossibility of fulfilling the law both shocked and intrigued his contemporaries. A sense of his own theological originality stirs in this text from time to time, as when he remarked that “what follows I have never seen explained in any of the doctors—Jerome, Augustine, and Ambrose all pass over it.”58
The commentary on Galatians also set out at length for the first time one of Luther’s most important and appealing theological concepts, that of “Christian liberty.” This slogan was Luther’s summary of the message that justification by faith freed Christians from the burden of seeking salvation through legal and ritual observance, by providing them instead with the all-important “peace of conscience” which was precisely not attainable by the legalistic performance of good works, and came only through the certainty of grace arising from justification by faith.59 Luther only hinted at the critique of penitential practice, pilgrimage, and other religious activities that might flow from this new understanding of Law and Gospel, but this added to his appeal to humanists, offering a more solid scriptural foundation for the critique of mechanical ritualism that Erasmus had been voicing for several years. Conrad Pellican told Luther that he had read the commentary through three times, annotating it heavily.60 The convergence between Erasmus’s agenda and Luther’s on this issue helped give some of Luther’s Catholic opponents the mistaken impression that Erasmus was in some sense responsible for Luther’s assault on the Church (a responsibility Erasmus spent the rest of his life disclaiming). Another reason for the success of the commentary on Galatians is probably that this exercise in biblical exposition was very different in tone from Luther’s polemics. Criticism there was, some of it potentially very damaging to the established order, such as the passing remark that “Today, indeed, in a large part of the Church, the Gospel has been subverted.”61 But the moderate and inoffensive tone of the criticism placed the commentary more in the humanist mainstream.
As the controversy over Leipzig continued, Eck decided to seek a vindication of the victory he was convinced he had won by taking the matter to Rome. But as he set out, in spring 1520, he was leaving behind him a Germany starting to laugh out loud at two comic pamphlets circulating to his discredit. The Unlearned Canons was a spoof letter, addressed to the “Most glorious, super-learned, all-conquering, Master Johannes Eck,” which picked up on a comment in a letter of his in which he had dismissed Luther’s followers as ignorant backwoodsmen, unscholarly gentlemen occupying lucrative sinecures in German cathedrals (as opposed to hard-working academics such as himself). This ironic epistle was probably the work of Johannes Oecolampadius, a talented young humanist who, after lurching between the old and the new for several years, would eventually become an adherent of Zwinglian theology and a leading figure in the Reformation at Basel. It pointedly contrasted the achievements of the sophisticated intellectual—most notably, his defense of interest-yielding contracts, which was used to depict him as the lackey of the rich—with the honest simplicity of the “unlearned canons” themselves.62 The other comic effort was the still more damaging Eccius Dedolatus (A Well-Beaten Eck), a knockabout sketch which showed the great man in a series of surreal encounters that culminated in a severe beating, and presented him in the guise of the scholastic obscurantists who had been made a laughingstock in the Letters of Obscure Men. A Well-Beaten Eck had reached Luther in Wittenberg by March, and he felt that the style betrayed the authorship of Willibald Pirckheimer.63 There was probably little Eck could have done to limit the damage done by these crudely and cruelly amusing pamphlets, but it did not help that he was hundreds of miles away while his reputation was being shredded. In July 1520, Adelmann passed on a rumor of another dialogue supposedly celebrating the canonization of Eck on account of the manifold wonders he had worked.64 Still more damagingly, the controversy between Eck and Luther was in the public eye at the same time as a controversy between Erasmus and Edward Lee, which was seen by Europe’s humanists as a confrontation between humanist enlightenment and the uncouth carping of an envious self-seeker. And all this was taking place at a moment when the Reuchlin affair was reaching its final crisis (a crisis not unconnected with the furore over Luther, which played into the hands of Reuchlin’s enemies). Martin Bucer spoke for many young scholars when, in a letter to Beatus Rhenanus of April 1520, he linked the Reuchlin and Erasmus controversies with the condemnations of Luther recently published by the universities of Louvain and Cologne (which were also leading the charge against Reuchlin).65 That Luther’s foe was now the butt of the same sort of satire as Reuchlin’s persecutors sealed Eck’s new reputation as one of the “obscure men,” despite the high regard he had hitherto enjoyed in Germany’s scholarly circles.66 Luther’s affair was thus wrapped up, in the public’s eyes, with those of Erasmus and Reuchlin, and this did an enormous amount to legitimize and popularize his cause.