Chapter 4 MEDICI LEARNING: Rulers of Evil by F. Tupper Saussy in HTML Web Format

Rulers of Evil by F. Tupper Saussy in HTML Web Format

August 14, 2018 James Arendt

Chapter 4 MEDICI LEARNING

GUTENBERG CHOSE the Bible to demonstrate movable type not so much that the common man might be brought nearer to God, but that he and his backer, Dr. Johannes Faust, might make a killing in the book trade.
Prior to 1450, Bibles were so rare they were conveyed by deed, like parcels of real estate. A Bible took nearly a year to make, commanding a price equal to ten times the annual income of a prosperous man. Johannes Gutenberg intended his first production, a folio edition of the 6th-century Latin Bible
(known as the Vulgate), to fetch manuscript prices. Dr. Faust discreetly sold it as a one-of-a-kind to kings, nobles, and churches. A second edition in 1462 sold for as much as 600 crowns each in Paris, but sales were too sluggish to suit Faust, so he slashed prices to 60 crowns and then to 30.
This put enough copies into circulation for Church authorities to notice that several were identical. Such extraordinary uniformity being regarded as humanly impossible, the authorities charged that Faust had produced the Bibles by magic. On this pretext, the Archbishop of Mainz had Gutenberg’s shop raided and a fortune in counterfeit Bibles seized. The red ink with which they were embellished was alleged to be human blood. Faust was arrested for conspiring with Satan, but there is no record of any trial.
Meanwhile, the pressmen, who had been sworn not to disclose Gutenberg’s secrets while in his service, fled the jurisdiction of Mainz and set up shops of their own. As paper manufacture improved, along with technical improvements in matrix cutting and type-casting, books began to proliferate. Most were editions of the Vulgate. In the decade following the Mainz raid, five Latin and two German Bibles were published. Translators busied themselves in other countries. An Italian version appeared in 1471, a Bohemian in 1475, a Dutch and a French in 1477, and a Spanish in 1478.
As quickly as our generation has become computer-literate, the Gutenberg generation learned to read books, and careful readers found shocking discrepancies between the papacy’s interpretation of God’s Word and the Word itself.
In 1485, the Archbishop of Mainz issued an edict punishing unauthorized Bible-reading with excommunication, confiscation of books, and heavy fines. The great Renaissance theologian Desiderius Erasmus challenged the Archbishop by publishing, in 1516, the first printed edition of the Greek New Testament. He addressed the anti-Bible mentality in his preface with these words:

I vehemently dissent from those who would not have private persons read the Holy Scriptures nor have them translated into the vulgar tongues, as though either Christ taught such difficult doctrines that they can only be understood by a few theologians, or the safety of the Christian religion lay in ignorance of it. I should like all women to read the Gospel and the Epistles of Paul. Would that they were translated into all languages so that not only the Scotch and Irish, but Turks and Saracens might be able to read and know them.

A Catholic monk named Martin Luther, against the advice of his superiors, plunged into the New Testament of Erasmus. He was shocked by the absence of scriptural authority for so many Church traditions. Of the seven Church Sacraments only two, Baptism and the Lord’s Supper, were grounded in Scripture. The remaining five – Confirmation, Absolution, Ordination, Marriage, and Extreme Unction – were the inventions of post-biblical councils and decrees. Luther found no scriptural mandate for celibacy of monks and nuns, or for pilgrimages and the veneration of relics. The Church taught that prayer, good works, and regular participation in the Sacraments might save man from eternal damnation. Luther found this to be opposed to the teaching of Scripture. According to Scripture, only one thing can save man from the consequences of his sins: God’s grace, and that alone.
The most explosive result of Luther’s Bible-reading was its attitude toward the papacy. Nowhere in Scripture could the passionate monk find that God had ordained an imperious Roman “Vicar of Christ” to rule over a vast economy based on selling rights to do evil. These rights were called indulgences. They had been a Church tradition since Pope Leo III had begun granting them in the year 800, payable in the money coined by Pope Adrian I in 780.
Indulgences were floated on the Church’s credibility, rather like government bonds are issued on the credibility of states today. In 1491 , for example, Innocent VII granted the 20-year Butterbriefe indulgence, by which Germans could pay 1/20th of a guilder for the annual privilege of eating dairy products even while meriting from fasting. The proceeds of the Butterbriefe went to build a bridge at Torgau.¹ Rome’s indulgence economy was as extensive as America’s income tax system today. And it was every bit as fueled by the people’s trembling compliance, voluntarily, to a presumption of liability.
In 1515 Pope Leo X issued a Bull of Indulgence authorizing letters of safe conduct to Paradise and pardons for every evil imaginable, ² from a 25-cent purgatory release (the dead left purgatory the instant one’s coins hit the bottom of the indulgence-salesman’s bucket) to a license so potent that it would excuse someone who had raped the Virgin Mary. For the payment of four ducats, one could be forgiven for murdering one’s father. Sorcery was pardoned for 6 ducats. For robbing a church, the law could be relaxed for only 9 ducats. Sodomy was pardoned for 12 ducats. Half the revenues from Leo’s indulgence went to a fund for the building of St. Peter’s Cathedral, and the other half to paying 40 % interest rates on bank loans subsidizing the magnificent works of art and architecture with which His Holiness was establishing Rome as the cultural capital of the Renaissance. Historians have glorified Leo, whose father happened to be the great Florentine banker Lorenzo d’Medici, by marking the sixteenth century as “the Century of Leo X.”
In early 1521 (Note from Webmaster: It was really on October 31, 1517. Too bad Mr. Saussey is not alive today to correct it.), Martin Luther formally protested the indulgence racket by nailing his famous Ninety-five Theses Upon Indulgences to the door of the castle church of Wittenburg. The church was said to own a lock of the Holy Virgin’s hair worth two million years of indulgences. Luther’s Theses exhorted Christians “to follow Christ, their Head, through penalties, deaths, and hells,” rather than purchase “a false assurance of peace” from Church indulgence-salesmen.
Leo had Luther arrested and detained for ten months in Wartburg Castle. (Note from Webmaster: I read from other sources that Luther was abducted by the prince of the castle to protect him from the Pope’s men!) While in custody, Luther managed to translate the Greek New Testament of Erasmus into German. Its publication alarmed the broadest reaches of Roman authority. D’Aubigne, in his History of the Reformation, tells us that “Ignorant priests shuddered at the thought that every citizen, nay every peasant, would now be able to dispute with them on the precepts of our Lord.”
Meanwhile, Leo X died. The new pope, Adrian VI, hardly eulogized Leo when confessing to the Diet of Nuremberg that “for many years, abominable things have taken place in the Chair of Peter, abuses in spiritual matters, transgressions of the Commandments, so that everything here has been wickedly perverted.”³
Adrian died shortly after speaking these lines, to be succeeded by the Cardinal who had been handling Martin Luther’s case all along, another Medici, Leo X’s first cousin, Giulio d’Medici. Giulio took the papal name Clement VII.
Just as Leo X’s corruption had ignited Luther, Clement VII’s shrewdness determined how the Church would deal with the proliferation of Bibles. Clement was personally advised by the cagey Niccolo Machiavelli, inventor of modern political science, and Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, Chancellor of England. Machiavelli and Wolsey opined that both printing and Protestantism could be turned to Rome’s advantage by employing movable type to produce a literature that would confuse, diminish, and ultimately marginalize the Bible. Cardinal Wolsey, who would later found Christ Church College at Oxford, characterized the project as “to put learning against learning.”⁴
Against the Bible’s learning, which demonstrated how man could have eternal life simply by believing in the facts of Christ’s death and resurrection, would be put the learning of the gnostics. Gnosticism held out the hope that man could achieve everlasting life by doing good works himself. To put it succinctly, Bible-learning was Christ-centered; gnostic learning was man-centered.
An enormous trove of gnostic learning had been brought from the eastern Mediterranean by agents of Clement VII’s great-grandfather, Cosimo d’Medici. Suppressed since the Emperor Justinian had piously shut down the pagan colleges of Athens back in 529, these celebrated mystical, scientific and philosophical scrolls and manuscripts flattered humanity. They taught that human intelligence was competent to determine truth from falsehood without guidance or assistance from any god. Since, as Protagoras put it, “man is the measure of all things,” man could control all the living powers of the universe. If elected and initiated into the secret knowledge, or gnosis, man could master the cabalah – the “royal science” of names, numbers, and symbols – to create his very own divinity.
Cosimo had stored huge quantities of this pagan material in his library in Florence. The Medici Library, whose final architect was Michaelangelo, welcomed scholars favored by the papacy. These scholars, not surprisingly, soon began emulating the papacy in focusing more upon humanity than upon the Old and New Testaments. So extensive was the Medici Library’s philosophical influence that even scholars today consider it the cradle of Western civilization.
Martin Luther, seeing that learning against learning was the future of Christianity, voiced an “Appeal to the Ruling Classes” (1520), in which he wrote, rather prophetically:

Though our children live in the midst of a Christian world, they faint and perish in misery because they lack the Gospel in which we should be training and exercising them all the time. I advise no one to place his child where the Scriptures do not reign paramount. Schools will become wide-open gates of hell if they do not diligently engrave the Holy Scriptures on young hearts. Every institution where men are not increasingly occupied with the word of God must become corrupt.

It was one thing to recommend learning against learning, and quite another to manage its multiple dimensions. Learning against learning amounted to no less than making war on the Bible. To wage such a war, the papacy needed a new priestly order of pious soldiers conditioned to wield psychological weapons on a battlefield of… human thought. But first, there had to be a general. The man chosen to lead the assault on the Bible was a swashbuckling adventurer from the proud Basque country of northern Spain.