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
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.
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