11. A Reformation Gone Wrong

Erasmus’s view of Martin Luther was deeply ambiguous, both in terms of the practical struggle against “mendicant tyrants” and in terms of theology. At the practical level Erasmus found Luther indispensable, for without him “such a tyranny of monks will arise that we will want Luther back.” ^[1] Philip Melanchthon, the young humanist turned theologian who stood at Luther’s side, expressed a similar idea when he wrote to Erasmus that he and Luther were “mostly in agreement” about “the proper use of ceremonies,” if not on the question of human free choice^[2] in matters of salvation.^[3] Erasmus could even entertain the possibility that Luther’s rage against the enemies of the Gospel might be the “violent physic” that was sometimes necessary to cure a deep-seated illness.^[4]

Yet the extraordinary vitriol that Luther poured forth on the papal Antichrist and all his minions led Erasmus to have doubts from an early date about the “spirit [spiritus]” by which Luther was driven: “Whether it be from God I know not.” This phrase alludes to Acts 5 : 39, in which the high priest Gamaliel says that one must judge by the success of Jesus’ followers whether their faith is of God. Both contemporaries and modern scholars have taken Erasmus’s frequent comments about Luther’s spiritus as expressions of a prudent unwillingness to jump to conclusions, in the spirit of Gamaliel.^[5] But the word spiritus had for this lover of concord multiple contexts and associations. To Philip Melanchthon, a man who would take the point of such a comparison, he likened Luther’s “fiery and impetuous” animus (soul or spirit) to “the anger of Peleus’s son [Achilles], ‘who knows not how to yield.’ You understand what cunning schemes are laid for us by the enemy of mankind.” ^[6] A few months earlier, in a polemic against the late Ulrich von Hutten, the impetuous Luther’s more impetuous follower, Erasmus had offended Protestants by implying that unbridled attacks in the name of the Gospel looked like the work of the devil:

Even if I approved all of Luther’s doctrine, I could not but condemn such obstinacy in making assertions, and the bitter imprecations that for him lie so ready to hand. Nor can I persuade myself that the spirit of Christ dwells in the bosom from which such acrimony gushes forth. Would that my suspicion be wrong! The spirit of the Gospel has its own wrath, I understand, but of a different kind, for it never lacks the honey of charity to sweeten the bitter aloe of objurgation.^[7]

Erasmus never committed himself to the proposition that Luther was guided by “an evil and perverse spirit,” and indeed it was just this hesitation to condemn that he found wanting in the reformers, Luther included, of whose cheerful willingness to consign the pope and his legions to the devil Erasmus offered a savage parody in his treatise against Hutten: “Impious Antichrist, extinguisher of the Gospel, oppressor of public liberty, lickspittle of princes…give this good man your petitioner a benefice, lest all your appointments be wicked.” ^[8] The “spirit” in which one presented Gospel doctrine could not be just a side issue, precisely because doctrina was a means of teaching Christians how to live as Christians. Erasmus could not imagine how a torrent of imprecation could induce men and women to love their neighbors.

In terms of Luther’s theology Erasmus was equally torn between two quite different viewpoints. Having finally abandoned his unwillingness to attack Luther in public, he advertised the soon-to-appear De Libero Arbitrio (On Free Choice, September 1524) by telling friends that “the king of England [Henry VIII] urges me so hard to write against Luther that it looks as if he would take offense if I persist in saying no.” In fact, other friends had given Pope Clement VII and Henry VIII “reason to hope” that Erasmus would accede to their wishes, and “I too had somehow made promises that encouraged that hope.” ^[9] Keeping his own initiative in the background was part of an overall design to oppose Luther in such a way as not to “satisfy the Pharisees.” ^[10]

Finding in Luther’s doctrina much to admire and much to condemn, Erasmus sought to justify both dimensions of his reaction to the Saxon reformer by making distinctions where Luther himself would admit no distinction. On the one hand, Luther challenged Erasmus to recognize that the Bible was rather more pessimistic about human nature than were the classical authors or his favorite Church Fathers, like Origen or St. Jerome. Behind Luther stood St. Augustine, with his insistence that human free choice without the aid of divine grace is utterly incapable of doing or even willing the good. But I have noted earlier that Erasmus regarded Augustine as having been excessively assertive in theological matters,^[11] and his scant respect for free choice was a case in point. In his preface to the Opera of St. Hilary of Poitiers (January 1523), while explaining that “because of our hatred of one error we must beware of falling into another,” Erasmus remarked that “St. Augustine in combating Pelagius with all his energy attributes less to free choice than those who now reign in the theological schools think ought to be attributed.” For example, “only Augustine” rejected the interpretation that sought to evade the apparent determinism of Gen. 25 : 23 (“the elder [Esau] shall serve the younger [Jacob]”) by suggesting that God distinguished between the two twins on the basis of his foreknowledge of their respective merits [merita].^[12] Yet if Augustine differed sharply from “those who now reign in the theological schools,” it cannot have been altogether to his discredit. Erasmus saw intransigent defenders of the religious status quo as condemning in Luther doctrines that in fact came from Augustine or even from St. Paul: “If Augustine were to write today what he wrote then, and what in our age must be said, these men would not bear him any better than they bear me.” Likewise, “if Luther’s doctrine be suppressed altogether, a good part of the genuine Gospel and of public liberty will be lost along with it.” ^[13]

As to what “part of the genuine Gospel” would be lost if Luther were to be suppressed, we may think first of Luther’s moving testimony to the power of trust in God which he called faith. As one who had stressed that the philosophy of Christ meant putting one’s trust in the Lord rather than in “human defenses [praesidia humana],” Erasmus could not fail to be impressed. Catholic theologians who combed Erasmus’s writings for heretical nuances were quick to notice that his Gospel Paraphrases, mostly prepared in Basel, were larded with phrases like “ sola fide [by faith alone]” or “whoever has fiducia [trust] in the Son already possesses him.” ^[14] For a man as careful with words as Erasmus was, the resemblance to Luther’s distinctive vocabulary can hardly have been accidental. Yet in his 1526 Supputatio Errorum in Censuris Beddae (Reckoning of the Errors in the Censure by [Noel] Beda, syndic of the theology faculty in Paris) he asserted that it should have been clear that he did not mean the same thing by such language that Luther meant. Apropos of the New Testament context of the Paraphrases, he was saying that “only faith [sola fides]” was asked “of those who came from Judaism or paganism to the grace of the Gospel.” But Beda twisted his words by taking them to refer “to those baptized as infants, as if good works were not required of them.” ^[15]

Context did in fact make a crucial difference for Erasmus. As De Libero Arbitrio makes clear, the perspective from which he could view many of Luther’s views in a positive light was fundamentally rhetorical or, one may say, pastoral. Given the connection he assumed between doctrina and moral formation, the proper formulation of doctrina could well depend on the circumstances of those to whom the Gospel was being preached. Because human pride was so deeply ingrained Erasmus could “willingly applaud, even to the point of hyperbole” those whose concern was

that the whole man should hang on what God chooses, placing in his promises all his hope and trust, acknowledging from the heart his own wretchedness, in loving wonder at the boundless mercy freely given to us—in short submitting himself wholly to God’s will, whether He wish to save us or destroy us,^[16] arrogating to himself no praise for his good deeds, but ascribing all to divine grace, and thinking of human beings as nothing but living instruments of the divine Spirit.

But to preach a doctrina was not the same as to assert a dogma. It made little sense to speak of docta pietas, as Erasmus did, if, as in Luther’s paradoxical assertions, “all the works even of pious men are sins” and “our will is no more active than clay in the hands of the potter” or if “whatever comes from us happens not by free choice by but pure [mera] necessity.” ^[17] At the deepest level Luther’s doctrine of divine grace and human nature involved an unequivocal either/or, as against the both/and implied by the philosophia Christi.^[18] For Luther, since God was omnipotent and salvation was not an accomplishment of which sinful human beings could boast, it was blasphemy to think that the free gift of irresistible grace could be conditioned by any human act. But in the philosophia Christi salvation meant the “kindling and purifying” of the heart, the imitation of Christ, the “rebirth” of a nature created good, in sum the “transformation” by stages of the life of nature into the life of grace.^[19] Thus although Erasmus could for pastoral purposes agree with Luther’s understanding of faith as unconditional trust in God, when it came to making dogmatic statements of his own Erasmus parted company with Luther by insisting that “faith itself is a human work in which free choice has a role.” Further, since as Luther himself maintained “the faith of the just is joined with fear and trembling,” Erasmus also rejected the reformer’s contention that the person of true faith “must pronounce with certitude that his works are pleasing to God,” on the grounds that “not to do so would be a mark of unbelief.” ^[20] If Erasmus endorsed Luther’s sola fides, he did so in a way that Luther himself would find no endorsement at all.

De Libero Arbitrio was thus permeated by the assumptions of humanist rhetoric,^[21] not just because Erasmus aimed at persuading Luther’s followers that a Christian could have the benefit of Luther’s doctrina without his “paradoxes” but also because he defined this benefit of Luther’s teaching as a homiletic remedy against entrenched human pride. What mattered for Erasmus was not dogmatic clarity but a doctrina that, in Augustine’s words, “shapes the minds of men.” ^[22] So little did Erasmus delight in dogmatic assertions that “I would willingly take the side of the skeptics, where it is permitted by the inviolable authority of divine Scripture and by the decrees of the church.” He could not see that much had been accomplished by the great controversies about the person and nature of Christ which had wracked the church of the fourth and fifth centuries, such as the question whether the Virgin Mary might properly be called Mother of God, “except that we love one another less.” Likewise, he thought it sufficient to Christian piety to hold that “if there is an evil we ascribe it to ourselves, and if there is any good, we ascribe it wholly to the goodness of God.” Hence it was not piety but “irreligious curiosity” that prompted questions of the kind that Luther was asking—questions that were “abstruse, lest I say vain,” such as “whether God may foreknow anything in a contingent way.” ^[23]

This basic stance, this defense of the ambiguous, patristic sense of doctrina, had two important corollaries. First, the test of what should be proclaimed to the Christian people was what was useful to piety, not what might be true in an abstract sense. Taking an example close to home, Erasmus asked readers to suppose it was true that the sacrament of Confession as now practiced was not instituted by Christ and was therefore not necessary for the church: “I would hesitate to broadcast such an opinion” because of the sinfulness of mortals, “whom we now see inhibited or at least restrained by the necessity of confessing their sins.” The same logic applied to points that Luther might wish to proclaim as truths: suppose it were true, as Augustine says, that “‘God works good and evil in us, rewarding in us his good deeds, and punishing in us his evil deeds.’ What a window to impiety such a statement would open for countless folk!” ^[24] Second, scriptural texts are to be read not as dogmatic statements but as elements of a spiritual rhetoric that shapes its words according to what different audiences most need to hear: “The special key to the understanding of divine Scripture is to look to the purpose the author has in mind.” Thus when St. Paul refuses to take any credit for what is accomplished in him by divine grace, he does not wish “to be understood as having done nothing; rather, he wishes to avoid seeming to ascribe to his own powers what he accomplished with the aid of divine grace.” Similarly, St. Augustine and those who followed him were “very much in favor of grace” because they knew “what a disaster for piety it is for a man to trust in his own powers.” ^[25] Hence if Erasmus too, in debate with Luther, tempered his words to the spiritual needs of Christian people, he was only following the path he saw marked out by Paul and Augustine.

This complicated strategy of articulating views that were pastorally appropriate and might command as much assent as possible sometimes left Erasmus defending opinions that were not really his own. In order to “applaud” the doctrine of trust in God, he had to suppress his own preference for a much more optimistic understanding of human participation in the process of salvation. Thus on the question whether human beings can prepare themselves to receive divine grace, he pronounced “quite probable” the opinions of those who insist that “man cannot even will the good without special grace, nor can he, without the constant help of sanctifying grace, embark, continue, or end his days in righteousness.” Yet elsewhere in De Libero Arbitrio Erasmus refused to exclude the possibility that “man can, before the advent of sanctifying grace, but with the help of God, prepare himself for the divine favor by works that are morally good.” ^[26] As to man’s need for grace, Erasmus finds that Luther and his followers “immensely exaggerate” Original Sin, making “even the finest human natures so corrupt they can do nothing of their own power except to ignore and hate God.” Here the middle ground is to hold that “the sin of our [first] forebears has devolved unto their posterity, so that a proclivity for sin is passed on to everyone.” But Erasmus had his doubts about how pervasive this inherent sinfulness was, because nature endowed some individuals with “the best disposition, as if they were born for virtue,” while instilling in others “a disposition so inclined to crime that they seem carried off in that direction as if by a force of fate.” ^[27]

Luther in his reply, the De Servo Arbitrio (Bondage of the Will, September 1525), pounced on the gaps in Erasmus’s argument, including the appropriation of St. Augustine’s authority for opinions favorable to free choice.^[28] When Thomas More inquired about the reasons for the delay of the publication of the second and longer part of Erasmus’s response to Luther, the Hyperaspistes (Shield for the Warrior), Erasmus admitted that “if I follow Paul and Augustine, very little is left to free will.” He himself “would not be averse to” the opinion that held that human beings can prepare themselves for grace “by the mere powers of nature, without the help of special grace, but St. Paul stands in the way.” As for the Augustine of the anti-Pelagian works, in which he attributed to grace “that we will the good, and that we do the good,” he “so praises grace that I do not see what there is left for free choice to do.” ^[29]

When Hyperaspistes II appeared a few months later (ca. August 1527) it did not signal a fundamental change in any of the positions Erasmus had articulated in De Libero Arbitrio; if anything, Erasmus was more forthright, as in his letter to More, in stating a personal preference for opinions that were more favorable to human free choice and thus less acceptable to a moderate Lutheran.^[30] But the later work did reflect a closer study of both Paul and Augustine. For example, regarding Rom. 9 : 18–22—a passage comparing human creatures to clay in the hands of a potter who makes both noble and ignoble pots, lines read not just by Luther but by many modern exegetes as a clear statement of the doctrine of predestination^[31]—Erasmus acknowledged the difficulty that Paul’s words presented for those who would defend human free choice. In De Libero Arbitrio he had thought to resolve the problem by reference to a parallel passage in 2 Tim. 2 : 10–11, where there is no absolute distinction between the two kinds of pots that come from the hands of the divine potter. In Hyperaspistes II Erasmus said that Luther’s reading would be correct if the passage were taken in isolation but that the context suggested a contrast between the Jews and the gentiles rather than between saved and damned souls and that it must be read against “thousands” of other texts that “do not admit” of Luther’s doctrine of absolute necessity.^[32] As for Augustine, Erasmus now admitted that many of his opinions “support Luther,” but he also pointed out more clearly where Luther himself had put forward novel ideas not sanctioned by the orthodox tradition. Unlike Luther, Augustine and those who followed him closely “never posit necessity where there is will, indeed they say that neither good nor evil can be imputed where necessity reigns.” In addition, only Luther had taught that “just as the sinner cannot of his own power turn to the good, he who has been reborn of the Spirit cannot turn to evil.” ^[33] In the final analysis these are the arguments not of a theologian firmly grounded in scholastic logic but of an astute New Testament and patristic scholar somewhat unsure of where he wants to take a dogmatic stand and willing, as it were, to argue with himself before the public eye. In a century of theological polemics conducted by men brimming with certitude, it is just this honest hesitation that makes Erasmus stand out.

Swiss and South German Evangelicals

Erasmus was not troubled by any similar doubts or ambiguities concerning the Swiss and south German reformers.^[34] As soon as De Libero Arbitrio appeared, he forwarded copies to two men with whom he had been on friendly terms and who were now among Luther’s closest collaborators, Philip Melanchthon and Georg Spalatin. In both letters Erasmus distinguished between the fundamental saneness and integrity of Luther’s party and the extremism and duplicity of the “Evangelicals.” Lutherans “teach that those who cast out images as something impious are in error,” but in the Swiss canton of Zurich the reformer Ulrich Zwingli had roused an “uproar” by persuading the city council to order that all images be removed from the churches. Likewise, “You [Lutherans] teach that bishops and episcopal constitutions must be tolerated unless they lead to impiety,” ^[35] but “here [in Basel] they teach that all are impious and anti-Christian.” Likewise, Evangelical preachers “throw off the cowl and marry and then defend what they have done.” They are also wont to “scribble lunatic pamphlets with no name to them or a false name.” By contrast, “in this respect I approve of Luther: he puts his name to what he writes and teaches that things are lawful which he himself makes no use of.” ^[36]

Erasmus’s differences with the Reformation in what would come to be known as its “Reformed” ^[37] version were partly a matter of what he saw as the duplicitous tactics of the Evangelicals. Though himself the anonymous author of a savage lampoon of the late Pope Julius II, he was offended by the yet more savage attack on Pope Adrian VI in Ulrich Zwingli’s anonymous Suggestion for Deliberating on the Proposition Made by Pope Hadrian to the German Princes at Nuremberg: “If the author had put his name to it, he would have been raving mad.” ^[38] More often than not, it was also Swiss or south German Protestants that Erasmus accused of devious tricks such as publishing letters of his that were obviously not meant for publication,^[39] repeating to others remarks he had made in private conversation,^[40] or praising him in public so as to associate him against his will with their cause.^[41] Thus much as he objected to the characteristic doctrines of the Swiss Reformation, such as that “there is nothing in the Eucharist but bread and wine,” “the morals of the preachers displease me even more than their dogmas.” ^[42]

There was also the matter of temperament. Erasmus instinctively feared radical change, but preachers in towns like Zurich and Basel and Strasbourg were now beginning to attack Luther for not having gone far enough, for not having jettisoned all vestiges of “popish superstition”; such was the contempt of these men for tradition, Erasmus feared, that former priests and monks “take a wife for no other reason than that the laws of our ancestors do not permit it.” ^[43] Erasmus’s quarrel with Evangelical reformers, like his running battle with the Leuven theologians, was at times quite personal. For the former Paris professor and humanist preacher Guillaume Farel (Farellius), eager to sweep away idolatry and all its works in a surge of righteous indignation, the cautious and circumspect Erasmus could barely contain his loathing. The first one hears in Erasmus’s correspondence about the man he persisted in calling “Phallicus” is that “he grew angry with me because in the Spongia I expressed doubts about Luther’s spiritus. ” ^[44] Erasmus also knew that Farel was the author of a pamphlet (1524) “about the Paris school and the pope” marked by “pointless virulence, the slandering of many men by name. And yet the author is the one man whose name does not appear.” In return, Farel taunted Erasmus as a venal “Balaam,” on the grounds of rumors that he had accepted ecclesiastical preferment in return for a promise to write against Luther. Incensed, Erasmus demanded a meeting in the presence of others (May or June 1524). Erasmus challenged Farel’s biblicism: if he rejected invocation of the saints “because there was nothing expressly about it in Scripture,” let him “demonstrate from Scripture” that the Holy Spirit is to be invoked as God. Farel cited the so-called Johannine comma (1 John 5 : 7–8), which asserts that Father, Son, and Spirit are one, but Erasmus reminded him (as Farel might have known from his Novum Testamentum) that this highly dubious passage is not attested in any ancient Greek manuscript, “nor is it quoted by any of the principal opponents of the Arians.” Erasmus’s own views about the invocation of the saints are a bit hard to pin down,^[45] but he was convinced that “people are fools who take a tradition which dates back to the first beginnings of the church and is godly in itself, and make an uproar trying to expel it.” ^[46] In the sequel Farel published three no longer extant pamphlets against Erasmus, in one of which “there are sometimes ten consecutive lines without a single syllable of truth.” Erasmus’s complaint to the city council was instrumental in having Farel expelled from Basel. On the recommendation of Basel’s leading reformer, Johann Oecolampadius, Farel began, in nearby Montebeliard, what would be a long and successful career as a preacher of the reformed gospel around Lake Geneva. But Oecolampadius and others were troubled by the vehemence of his attacks on the Catholic clergy: “You have been sent to evangelize, not to curse.” How much Erasmus knew about Farel’s stormy career as a preacher is not clear, but he knew enough (or thought he did) to describe him as “the most poisonous and subversive liar I have ever seen.” ^[47]

Erasmus’s relations with Ulrich von Hutten and with Hutten’s many loyal friends were even more important in forming his impression of the Evangelical Reformation. Hutten, a scholar among the Holy Roman Empire’s free imperial knights, had thrown himself with gusto into the humanist campaign against papal tyranny over the German nation, publishing an oration against papal demands for a crusade tax (1518) as well as several bitterly satirical dialogues (1519–1520).^[48] Like many German humanists he saw Luther and Erasmus as allies in the campaign against Roman oppression, and Erasmus initially reciprocated his admiration, writing letters that helped Hutten obtain a post at the court of Albert of Brandenburg, cardinal-archbishop of Mainz. Subsequently, however, Hutten committed what Erasmus regarded as a serious breach of trust by publishing a letter to the cardinal in which Erasmus gave his candid assessment of Luther. At about the same time, in June 1520, Erasmus gave Hutten letters of introduction to the court in Brussels but refused to back his plan for an armed assault on the wealth of the German church. In the end, failing to achieve the backing he expected from his allies among the imperial knights, Hutten launched raids of his own on church property in late summer 1521, holding up to ransom the Dominicans of Strasbourg. He did not join in the general uprising of the imperial knights in 1522, but when the revolt was put down by secular princes who came to the aid of their ecclesiastical brethren, Hutten fled Germany, already suffering from the syphilis that would soon claim his life; he was granted asylum in Basel in November.^[49]

The subsequent quarrel between Erasmus and Hutten turns on Erasmus’s refusal to meet Hutten, a decision for which Erasmus subsequently offered a variety of reasons. In the response Erasmus wrote to Hutten’s polemic against him the following year, he said he had sent word he would be happy to receive his old friend if the matter was important, but otherwise he would prefer to avoid the obloquy (invidia) of being associated with Hutten. Some years later Erasmus recalled being told by Hutten’s go-between, Heinrich Eppendorf, that the meeting would have to be held in a room with a pot-bellied stove for the sake of Hutten’s health; Erasmus had replied that he himself was made ill by anything but an open-hearth fire. In a subsequent letter Hutten had written Erasmus that “Eppendorf stoutly denies” that Erasmus had said anything about not being able to tolerate German stoves. In Ecclesiastes (1535) Erasmus mentioned that doctors advised against speaking with syphilitics. Finally, in a letter to Melanchthon, Erasmus reports that Hutten had been cadging money from friends in Selestat and Zurich, as Zwingli had written, and no one could bear his “bitterness and endless boasting.” ^[50] In any event Hutten read Erasmus’s standoffishness as confirmation of what he had suspected, that Erasmus was too cowardly to give his public support to the bold positions he freely took in private conversation. By the time Hutten moved on to Mulhouse early in 1523 he was already at work on the Expostulatio, which appeared in July, to which Erasmus responded immediately with the Spongia (Sponge against the Aspersions of Hutten), which appeared shortly after Hutten’s death in August.^[51]

Just as Erasmus saw “mendicant tyrants” conspiring to safeguard their own interests by attacking bonae literae, he also saw behind Hutten’s impetuousness a coterie of cynical men using Hutten for their own purposes. He especially blamed Eppendorf, a young humanist with whom he had been on friendly terms for some months before the quarrel with Hutten. Eppendorf, he now believed, had deliberately distorted the messages he carried between Hutten and Erasmus; his purpose was to provoke Hutten to write against Erasmus and then use the threat of publication to extort money from Erasmus to settle debts accumulated while Eppendorf was a student at Freiburg.^[52] Zwingli too had played a role, more than he had acknowledged in his letters (or so Erasmus thought), for Hutten had found a final refuge in Zurich: “Everyone here is persuaded that any support [Hutten] has in your part of the world he has through you, however much you may twist and turn.” ^[53] Behind Eppendorf’s continuing campaign against Erasmus was his erstwhile good friend Wolfgang Capito, now a Reformation preacher in Strasbourg, who had also instigated the Strasbourg schoolmaster Otto Brunfels to publish a defense of Hutten against Erasmus’s Spongia: “So much points to it that I know rather than suspect it is you who stir up Eppendorf to attack me as you did Otto before.” Like Eppendorf, Capito too continued his clandestine campaign to smear Erasmus, to such an extent that Erasmus had no qualms about resorting to tricks of his own, like availing himself of a letter that Capito had written to the Basel preacher Konrad Pellikan:

In an intercepted letter I have, Capito writes you that I must be made against my will to profess what you people profess. But six hundred Capitos will not make me profess something of which I am not persuaded. My end is not far, and I will at least offer my conscience to Christ whole and entire.^[54]

This letter alludes to the controversy about the Eucharist, the one dogmatic question on which Erasmus found it necessary to make a public attack on the doctrines of the Reformed Reformation. But even here the theological disagreement was complicated by matters of personal ethics, having to do with Erasmus’s charges that Pellikan and others had both betrayed and distorted comments he had made in private conversation. Debate about the sacrament of the altar had begun in earnest when first Andreas von Carlstadt (1524) and then Ulrich Zwingli (1525) published works contending that the body of Christ was only symbolically present in the Lord’s Supper as reenacted among the faithful.^[55] In some of his published writings Erasmus admitted to questions about the Catholic understanding of the sacrament. Regarding the “form of words” by which the elements of bread and wine were consecrated, he could have wished for “a more certain response to the contentious,” for “what shall we say about the fact that the words used in the Latin rite are not found in the Greek liturgy?” He also wondered “whether the church has clearly enough defined how the body of Christ be present, whether under the accidents of bread or under true bread.” In an unpublished letter to his good friend Willibald Pirckheimer, who had himself joined in the public controversy, Erasmus went a bit further: “I do not see what purpose is served by a body not perceptible to the senses…provided that spiritual grace be present in the symbols, and yet I cannot withdraw from the consensus of the church.” ^[56]

Erasmus was referring here to the doctrine presented in De Genuina Verborum Dei: “Hoc Est Corpus Meum” Expositione (On the true meaning of God’s words: ‘This is my body’), recently published by Basel’s leading reformer, Johannes Oecolampadius. In Oecolampadius’s view, as it was also explained to Erasmus by Konrad Pellikan, the “virtue” or spiritual power of Christ’s body and blood was present in the elements of bread and wine but not the body and blood themselves. This view, similar to the position later taken by John Calvin, was intermediate between Luther’s insistence on the real presence of the body and blood of Christ in the sacrament and Zwingli’s interpretation of the bread and wine as merely symbolizing Christ’s body and blood.^[57] Shortly after Oecolampadius’s book appeared, Erasmus wrote Konrad Pellikan to rebuke him for saying that he endorsed Oecolampadius’s opinion. Recounting a conversation with Pellikan in which “he felt he could speak freely,” Erasmus admitted having said that the new interpretation of the sacrament “ seemed simpler to me, for one could in this way avoid many labyrinthine questions [mihi istuc videri simplicius: quod ita vitarentur varii difficultatum labyrinthi si],” but he insisted that he had added a qualification: “if Christians could dissent from anything which had been established on the authority of councils and supported by the consensus of every church and nation throughout the centuries.” For him it was no small matter to hold that the elements of Eucharist are “nothing but bread and wine”: “May Christ himself deny me his mercy if such an idea ever lodged [insedit] in my mind! If some fleeting thought did ever enter my head, I rid myself of it at once.” ^[58]

There are indications that Erasmus began a treatise on the Eucharist about this time but abandoned the project for reasons he only hints at. P. S. Allen, the editor of Erasmus’s letters, has plausibly suggested that Erasmus came to an agreement with the Basel reformers whereby he would not write against them and they would not maintain that his position on the Eucharist was the same as theirs.^[59] If there was such an agreement, Erasmus considered it shattered by the appearance in April 1526 of an anonymous German pamphlet claiming him as a partisan of the reformed Eucharistic theology, The Opinions of the Most Learned Erasmus of Rotterdam and Dr. Martin Luther on the Last Supper of Our Lord. Erasmus knew that the author was Leo Jud, a close collaborator of Zwingli, but he believed that Pellikan had put him up to it, just as he believed that Capito in Strasbourg was behind a larger effort to force him (“against my will”) to take his stand with the Swiss and south German reformers.^[60] Meanwhile, Erasmus took considerable pains to explain exactly what he had and had not said in private conversations with Pellikan so as to clear away any doubts about his orthodoxy on the Eucharist. To Jan Laski, a young Polish nobleman who had stayed with him for a time and was friendly also with Pellikan, Erasmus offered his own reconstruction of the crucial moments of his conversation with Pellikan:

[Erasmus:] “Do you believe that the body and blood of Christ is present only as a sign?” “No,” he [Pellikan] said, “I believe that the power [virtus] of Christ is also present.” I persisted: “Do you not believe that the body of Christ is present in substance [substantia]?” He admitted that he did not believe it. Then I asked him if he had ever heard me utter such an opinion, and he said what is true, that I never had.^[61]

Invited by the Swiss Confederacy to attend a religious disputation at Baden, where Catholic and Protestant cantons were to present their views, Erasmus declined but took the occasion to denounce Jud’s pamphlet and to assert that “there has never settled into [desedit] my mind” any opinion on the Eucharist that conflicts with “what the Catholic church has hitherto defended with a great consensus. ” What prompted Erasmus to adhere to the consensus of the church was not “a human fear, but a matter of religion, and fear of the wrath of God.” ^[62] He made the same point in his reply to Jud, the Praestigiarum Libelli Cujusdam Detectio (Uncovering the Deceptions of a Certain Book), in which he gave an orthodox reading to passages from his earlier writings which Jud and others had tried to press into service for their cause: “My views in old age are no different than in my youth, though I might now have been able to waver because of the arguments on both sides, did not the authority of the church strengthen me.” ^[63]

Thus the duplicity (as he saw it) of the Swiss and south German Protestants made Erasmus all the more aware of his own sense of identity with the consensus of the church, that broad faith of the ages from which he could depart only at the peril of his soul. Precisely because his sense of religious identity lay with the Catholic tradition broadly conceived rather than with the church militant girding for battle with its enemies, Erasmus’s adhesion to the consensus ecclesiae did not mean breaking off contact with adherents of the Reformation. There were Reformation preachers who were grateful to Erasmus for having led them “from the muddy pools of the scholastics to the sacred founts of Scripture” and who prayed God to spare him for that free council of all Christians that must sooner or later be convened. Erasmus himself claimed that he had “never renounced a friendship because of differences over dogma.” In contrast to those who betrayed and distorted Erasmus’s confidences, Melanchthon promised that “anything you write to me I shall keep absolutely to myself,” ^[64] and the candor of subsequent letters to Luther’s younger friend and ardent supporter shows that Erasmus took him at his word. For a man like Erasmus, as indeed for a man like Melanchthon, there had to be bridges across the religious divide.

Notes