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    Fatal Discord: Erasmus, Luther, and the Fight for the Western Mind
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    Fatal Discord: Erasmus, Luther, and the Fight for the Western Mind
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    Fatal Discord: Erasmus, Luther, and the Fight for the Western Mind
    Ebook1,514 pages27 hours

    Fatal Discord: Erasmus, Luther, and the Fight for the Western Mind

    By Michael Massing

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    A deeply textured dual biography and fascinating intellectual history that examines two of the greatest minds of European history—Desiderius Erasmus and Martin Luther—whose heated rivalry gave rise to two enduring, fundamental, and often colliding traditions of philosophical and religious thought.

    Erasmus of Rotterdam was the leading figure of the Northern Renaissance. At a time when Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael were revolutionizing Western art and culture, Erasmus was helping to transform Europe’s intellectual and religious life, developing a new design for living for a continent rebelling against the hierarchical constraints of the Roman Church. When in 1516 he came out with a revised edition of the New Testament based on the original Greek, he was hailed as the prophet of a new enlightened age. Today, however, Erasmus is largely forgotten, and the reason can be summed up in two words: Martin Luther. As a young friar in remote Wittenberg, Luther was initially a great admirer of Erasmus and his critique of the Catholic Church, but while Erasmus sought to reform that institution from within, Luther wanted a more radical transformation. Eventually, the differences between them flared into a bitter rivalry, with each trying to win over Europe to his vision.

    In Fatal Discord, Michael Massing seeks to restore Erasmus to his proper place in the Western tradition. The conflict between him and Luther, he argues, forms a fault line in Western thinking—the moment when two enduring schools of thought, Christian humanism and evangelical Christianity, took shape. A seasoned journalist who has reported from many countries, Massing here travels back to the early sixteenth century to recover a long-neglected chapter of Western intellectual life, in which the introduction of new ways of reading the Bible set loose social and cultural forces that helped shatter the millennial unity of Christendom and whose echoes can still be heard today. Massing concludes that Europe has adopted a form of Erasmian humanism while America has been shaped by Luther-inspired individualism.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateFeb 27, 2018
    ISBN9780062870124
    Author

    Michael Massing

    Michael Massing is a former executive editor of the Columbia Journalism Review and a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. His work has also appeared in the New York Times, the Nation, the Atlantic, and the Los Angeles Times. He is the author of The Fix, a critical study of the U.S. war on drugs, and Now They Tell Us: The American Press and Iraq. He is a co-founder of the Committee to Protect Journalists and sits on its board. He received a bachelor’s degree from Harvard College and a master’s degree from the London School of Economics and Political Science. In 1992, he was named a MacArthur Fellow, and in 2010-2011 he was fellow at the Leon Levy Center for Biography at CUNY. A native of Baltimore, he lives in New York City.

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    Reviews for Fatal Discord

    4.5/5

    29 ratings3 reviews

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    • 5/5
      This is an excellent parallel biography of Luther and Erasmus. The pattern of alternating chapters dedicated to these rivals keeps up through the whole book. That creates a sturdy chain on which to hang discussions of many of the momentous events of that tumultuous time, roughly 1515-1530. I've read enough bits and pieces about this time period to be vaguely familiar with most of the events discussed. This book does a great job of providing a narrative that creates a home for lots of details. It's about 820 pages long but there is never a dull moment. The story never disintegrates into a list of events. The events are all parts of evolving situations. I don't think Cornelius Agrippa makes an appearance here. Reading about Agrippa is how I first learned about Reuchlin. There is a fair amount about Reuchlin in the early part of the book, where Erasmus is the dominant figure as he is looking at early Biblical manuscripts to look past Jerome's Vulgate translation to its sources. Another episode in the book that stood out for me was the Peasant's Revolt of around 1526. I'd heard about that but never in any detail. Here I learned about the Twelve Articles that were the founding document of the revolt, along with its early victories and its thorough defeat. This is history that is fundamental to Europe and really to the world. The afterwords are very quick sketches but provide at least starting points for further digging. I don't think Max Weber's discussion of Calvin and Capitalism was mentioned, for example. But really, the crack that opened in 1517 is so fundamental to European thought that any kind of complete afterward would have to be an encyclopedia of modern European culture. I'd have to say that everybody should read this book. Probably the real experts will shake their heads at all the errors and omissions - inevitabilities in a work of this scope. But I expect this book will inspire a lot of fresh thinking and revisiting of this history, and the experts will want to see how that discussion got its initial momentum.
    • 5/5
      Fatal Discord is the book for anybody who wants a clearly stated, engaging overview of Western thought during the period of the Reformation with solid looks back at the thinkers who influenced Erasmus and Luther and solid looks ahead at their mental/spiritual progeny. Massing is also able to open their times to our scrutiny, so we get the horrors of the Peasants' War and the persecution of the Anabaptists as well as glimpses of Henry VIII's court through Erasmus' eyes, the burgeoning printing trade, travel in Western Europe, and the marriage of that most famous ex-monk and ex-nun, Martin and his Anna.Massing's well-digested presentation of the development of the thought of these two giants is easy to read and understand. The crux of their argument is the difference between Erasmus' insistence on free will and Luther's insistence that man is saved by faith in God's grace alone. I feel but can't substantiate that Massing makes their differences too black-and-white. I am also a bit leery of his conclusions that Luther is the father of the evangelicals, and Erasmus of the humanists. On the other hand, the material that he quotes backs up his thinking.Quibble aside, this is well worth reading for the person who has time for 827 pages of text.
    • 5/5
      I found this book riveting, even though I could not manage to read it straight through. I got it from the library months ago and have been reading it in large chunks. I have now finished it and re-read parts, and I'm thinking about buying a copy and considering giving copies as gifts.Before starting to write this review I looked at some of the *, and ** reviews and, as often happens, I think some people weren't reading the same book was. The oddest of these negative reviews (aside from the one saying the book can't be interesting to anyone who isn't religious, to whom I offer my own heathen *****) is the review complaining that Michael Massing doesn't have a central thesis. I think Massing tells us very clearly what he is getting at with the book's subtitle and then at length in the Introduction and even greater length in the final chapter: Origins and Acknowledgements. Massing sees the Fatal Discord between Erasmus and Luther is a lens through which the divergence between the Renaissance and Reformation worldview. From early days, the followers of Christ preached, discussed, argued, harangued, and fought over doctrine and practice. The scope and heat of these disputes expanded and contracted over the centuries during which what becomes the Roman Catholic Church with a pope seated in Rome, used the sword, superstition, and terror of damnation to consolidate power and material wealth ever more tightly. Beginning in about 1350, another expansion of loud criticism of the Church and its practices began. These critics were brutally suppressed, yet the arguments persisted, growing more harsh and more open in the next century. Erasmus, born 1466, and Luther, born 1483, rose to prominence among the great clamor for change, through their exquisite use of disputation techniques in an era of formalized disputation.Massing focuses on several key figures in the early church who influenced Erasmus and Luther, and shows how these historical writings are interpreted by successive generations of theologians, most of whom could not read the works in the original languages. Luther and especially Erasmus, were linguists and Massing, a modern journalist, honors their use of original sources.In addition to theological history, "Fatal Discord" can be read as an exploration of the rapidly changing world in which these men lived. I was particularly fascinated by the role publishing houses – large and small – played in shaping the world. Thousands of copies of books were shipped every. Books were favored gifts and, along with letters and tracts, crossed Europe in weeks. As always, I am astounded by how often people travelled around, often on foot. Scholars and students wandered everywhere.To place Erasmus and Luther among their forebears and peers, Massing offers mini-biographies of a vast number of the real people. In the case of early Church luminaries, we learn a bit about their historical-cultural world, and why their works persist into the modern world, often overcoming disdain and neglect of prior ages. Massing includes some wonderful tidbits along the line. I am delighted to learn that Paul's clarification that followers of Christ don't have to follow Jewish law was largely to reassure converts that they didn't have to get circumcised. Well OK then, no snip.There is no question that reading a book of this size and density requires an investment of time and attention. If you are undecided, read the Introduction and Origins and Acknowledgements. Massing's discussion there is an invitation to read. I was hooked by the 2018 NYT book review and by Massing's lecture on the book on YouTube at watch?v=bOC5WVCnw_k NB: I think this book would be difficult to finish as an ebook. It's just too long. But the ebook form would be useful because the index (in the hardback, anyway) is not great. Because I was reading in chunks and because there is such a huge amount of information, sometimes I could not remember a phrase or reference. The index was unhelpful in the 3 or 4 instances I needed to use it. Fortunately Dr. Google and my own ability to link a phrase to something else, got me through.