Q by Luther Blissett (most recommended books txt) 📖

Antwerp, 6_th__ May 1538_

‘The day of the apocalyptic preachers has passed. The last one was beheaded before my eyes in Vilvoorde a month ago. But during these past ten years I’ve known so many of them, on every street corner, in every brothel, in the remotest churches. My peregrinations have been so studded with those encounters that I could write a treatise about them. Some of them were merely charlatans and actors, others believed in their own sincere terror, but only a very few had the stuff of prophets, the brilliance, the ardour, the courage to repaint John’s great fresco in the souls of men. They were capable of choosing the right words, seizing situations, taking the gravity of the moment and filling it with the imminent event, bringing it into the present moment. Mad, of course, but skilful too. I don’t know whether it was God or Satan who suggested their words and visions to them, that’s irrelevant. I didn’t care then, and I still don’t. Frankenhausen had taught me not to wait for a host of angels: no God would descend to help the wretched. They would have to help themselves. And the prophets of the kingdom were still the ones who could lift them up and give them a hope to fight for, the idea that things would not always be like this.’

‘You mean you joined the battle again?’

Eloi looks astonished. I take a sip of water to clear my throat.

‘I didn’t know what to do. Ursula and I started to hate those theologians who went on talking and talking, presenting themselves as great thinkers of the Christian faith, talking about the mass and the eucharist in the drawing-rooms of the wealthy people of Strasbourg. Their tolerance was a luxury for the affluent, which would never go beyond granting a plate of soup to the poor. These well-fed shopkeepers could afford to maintain that band of doctors, and even to bestow their magnanimity upon the heretics, because they were rich. It was wealth that guaranteed the fame of Strasbourg. It was that fame that brought writers and students flooding to the city.’

I sigh. ‘They were scared, oh yes, really scared, when we pointed out to them that the poor, the humble, the ones they wanted to help with alms, in order to ease their mercantile consciences, aspired to steal their purses and even to cut their lovely white throats. We didn’t have long to wait because Capito and Bucer responded to our provocations, introducing subtle distinctions between “peaceful” and “seditious” Baptists. We clearly fell into the second category.’

Eloi smiles crookedly, perhaps he’s thinking about his Antwerp, but he doesn’t interrupt me.

‘It wasn’t a matter of restarting a war that we had lost. That would have been stupid. But Ursula had brought me back to life, it was as though her belly had given birth to me for a second time. We wanted to cause some trouble, exasperate the hypocritical philanthropy of those people so that they would reveal themselves for what they were: an army of the wealthy attached to gold, disguised as pious Christians. It was one of the most carefree times of my life.’

I stop to draw breath, perhaps I’m waiting for a question to pick up the thread of the story. Eloi asks one.

‘How long did it take?’

An effort of memory. ‘About a year. Then, in the spring of ‘29 the man who would be responsible for the start of my journey arrived in Strasbourg. Now he’s rotting in that city’s dungeons. He committed the fatal error of setting foot there again after everything that we’d done.’

‘Melchior Hofmann.’

‘Who else? One of the oddest prophets I’ve ever met, pretty much one of a kind, and in terms of madness and oratory maybe second only to the great Matthys.’

‘I’m all ears.’

I take another drink and reconstruct that far-off face. ‘Hofmann had been a furrier. One day he had a Damascene experience, and started preaching. He had courted Luther until he managed to get him to write a letter of introduction to the communities in the North. That signature had opened the doors of the Baltic countries and Scandinavia to him, allowing him to acquire notoriety and even a certain following. He had travelled a great deal in the North. Then one fine day he had convinced himself that the kingdom of Christ and the Saints was at hand, and had started preaching repentance and the abandonment of all worldly goods. It wasn’t long before Luther renounced him. He told me he’d been expelled from Denmark with the promise that if he ever set foot there again his head would end up on a pole. He was really a mad genius. He’d known good old Karlstadt, and he shared his complete rejection of violence. He arrived in Strasbourg convinced that he was the prophet Elijah, in search of the martyrdom that would confirm that the coming of the Lord was nigh. He immediately fell in love with the local Anabaptists, and managed to fall foul of all the Lutheran reformers, first Bucer and then Capito and the rest.

‘Ursula and I knew immediately that this was the man we were looking for to turn the city upside down. It came to us spontaneously, we didn’t even have to talk about it: over dinner we improvised some complicated revelations, Ursula worked herself up to a state of ecstasy before his very eyes, while I told him how the rich and powerful would be swept away by the fury of the Lord. In the weeks that followed, we gradually dictated our visions to him, and he didn’t miss a single word. When everything was ready, I found the way to send everything he had written to the printers: two treatises containing Ursula’s prophecies and my own. He started preaching to the crowd in the main square. Some people spat in his face, others tried to hit him, others still tried to attack a pawnshop to distribute the goods to the poor. When the writings were distributed by the booksellers, Bucer tried to have him put in prison. Those were days of ferment. It was a year of fire, I felt the blood boiling in my veins, the rope on the point of snapping.

‘And so it was, at the beginning of ‘30, if I remember correctly: Hofmann had himself rebaptised and preached for the last time, proclaiming the imminence of the kingdom of Christ, denouncing attachment to worldly goods and demanding that the Anabaptists be allowed to use one of the city churches. It was the final straw. Bucer put the most severe pressure on the Council to have him expelled from the city. At Easter, he received the injunction to leave Strasbourg. If he failed to comply, that would be him done for.

‘Things were looking difficult for me, too. Cellarius could no longer protect us from the fury of Bucer and Capito: he was quite open with me, well aware that he would lose me again, this time for ever. That was the fate I had chosen for myself, and old Martin couldn’t do a thing about it. I hugged him again and said goodbye, just as I had done years before in Wittenberg when I went in search of a master and a new fate. My old friend, who knows where he’ll have ended up: I expect he’s either still in Strasbourg or in some new university talking about theology.’

I shrug to wipe out the sadness. Eloi, all ears, wants to hear the ending.

‘I’d decided to go with Hofmann. To Emden, in Eastern Frisia. Southern Germany was lost, it was a desolate moor that I was glad to leave to Luther and the wolves. Huge numbers of people had been expelled from the Low Countries for their profession of faith: new people, much less attached to Luther’s habit than those in Strasbourg. There was ferment, this was the place where things could happen. I had backed the right horse: my Swabian Elijah prophesying the imminent coming of Christ and preaching against the rich. As passports go, he was difficult to manage, but enthusiastic enough to be successful.’

‘And what about Ursula?’

A moment of silence allows him to regret his question, but it’s too late. I still smile at the memory of that woman.

‘The season passed, to make way for a new year.’