12. The Parable of the Tares

The age of Reformation and Counter-Reformation was also an age of religious war, in which the coexistence of two different forms of Christianity in the same territory was possible only after the two sides had tried unsuccessfully to crush each other.^[1] Against this somber background Erasmus has often been hailed as a pioneer of the idea of religious toleration, but Mario Turchetti has recently made the case that such accolades are misplaced. To say, in Erasmus’s words, that religious error was to be “tolerated for the time being [interdum tolerandus est]” was not the same as advocating toleration as a principle of civil law. With the exception of a few spiritualist dissenters, like the Savoyard Sebastien Castellio (d. 1563) or the Dutchman Dirk Volkertszoon Coornhert (d. 1590), no sixteenth-century writer could envision as acceptable a permanent religious division of the body politic, a “legitimation of one or more religions different from the official religion.” The great majority of both Protestant and Catholic authors who opposed the forcible suppression of religious dissidents envisioned instead the emergence, under state guidance, of a single broad church. The idea of harmonizing different currents of Christian belief within a single religious community may, with a qualification to be noted below, be accepted as the proper framework for Erasmus’s arguments against the use of force in matters of belief. He was indeed a pioneer, not of the ideal of toleration in the strict sense but of the ideal of religious concordia (concord).^[2]

To the extent that he kept in touch with his native country even after moving to Basel, Erasmus was familiar with a part of Catholic Europe where in the 1520s the campaign to eradicate Protestant dissent was more brutal than anywhere else. Charles V, unable to stop the rapid spread of Luther’s teaching in the vast Holy Roman Empire over which he had little effective control, was determined not to tolerate heresy in his well-governed native provinces. The two Augustinian friars (members of Luther’s order) who were burned at the stake in Brussels in January 1523 were Europe’s first Protestant martyrs. Erasmus’s reaction to these developments was necessarily personal, because the ultra-orthodox party that (unlike many in the Low Countries)^[3] backed the emperor’s placards (edicts) against heresy was also highly suspicious of Erasmus’s orthodoxy. But Erasmus was wise enough to elevate the debate to an issue of principle, in which three different strands of argument may be discerned.

First, Erasmus maintained that the use of force in religious matters was counterproductive. Writing in 1524 to Duke George of Saxony, an ardent Catholic patron who favored use of the temporal sword against heresy, he acknowledged that “one could argue” for the death penalty for anyone involved in “sedition” or for any who opposed “an article of faith or any other doctrine of the church that has been accepted by the general consensus of the church.” But such punishment employed on questions where theologians disagreed among themselves, such as papal authority, would have a result opposite to that intended: “Recantations, imprisonment, and the stake will simply make things worse. Two men were burned at Brussels, and it was precisely at that moment that the city began to favor Luther.” In case Duke George had not gotten the message, Erasmus repeated it nearly two years later to the duke’s humanist chancellor, Simon Pistoris: “Many think this evil can be quelled by laws and punishments, and perhaps it can be for a time, even for good, but the silent murmurs and judgments of consciences will not be stilled.” ^[4] To a man who seems to have been a member of the provincial Council of Brabant, one of the courts charged with enforcement of the heresy laws in the Low Countries, Erasmus put the same argument somewhat more bluntly: “Were this [heretical] way of thinking confined to a few, it might be restrained by savage means. As it is, there being more than twenty million people who support Luther in part and hate the pope, savagery against such numbers will be fruitless.” ^[5]

This last comment suggests a second reason for mistrust of harsh measures: anticlericalism. Though himself a part of the clerical establishment—no small part of his income derived from ecclesiastical revenues assigned to him by his patrons—Erasmus was nonetheless among those priests and religious who could say of the wrath against the clergy touched off by Luther’s protest, “We have deserved worse.” ^[6] If Luther’s opinions won favor in the Low Countries, despite the fact that Charles V’s placards prescribed the death penalty for anyone who so much as possessed a Lutheran Bible, it was because “people are borne along by a more than capital hatred of the monks.” Men and women hauled off to the stake as heretics were widely seen as victims of the clergy’s determination to protect its wealth and power, much as Erasmus himself believed that Leuven theologians and others of their ilk acted under cover of the heresy laws to settle personal scores and preserve their own “tyranny.” ^[7] For this reason Erasmus considered violent rhetoric almost as counterproductive as the violence of a public execution: “Thus far, I do not know what has been accomplished by monks crying out from the pulpit, or the articles of theologians, or prison cells, or polemical treatises, or burnings.” Collecting “articles” or opinions from the writings of alleged heretics had not stopped Tertullian and Arius from spreading their teaching, nor would it stop Luther and his followers.^[8] The alternative to giving free rein to “men better suited for burning people at the stake than for conducting debate” was to “paper over [dissimulare] differences of belief by ambiguous articles.” Drawing on his knowledge of church history, Erasmus was convinced that “the authority of the church will not be shaken if certain things are changed by church leaders for grave reasons, for this was often done by our ancestors.” The changes he seems to have had in mind would have diminished the symbolic distance between clergy and laity. For example, he suggested in the above-mentioned letter to Simon Pistoris that just as the Bohemian Utraquists of the fifteenth century were reconciled to the church by permitting the laity to receive consecrated wine as well as consecrated bread in the Eucharist, church authorities of the present day might well decide to permit priests to marry or relax monastic vows.^[9] A church unwilling to make such concessions might itself become the victim in an all-out war against heresy: “Where will you find soldiers ready to fight for the rights of priests?” ^[10]

For those he thought might listen Erasmus enunciated a third, more principled objection to a policy of force. When Cardinal Lorenzo Campeggi asked his advice about negotiations with the Protestant estates at the forthcoming Diet of Nuremberg (1525), Erasmus reminded him of the Gospel parable: “Let it be seen that…you have no wish to pull out the tares in such a fashion that you pull up the wheat by the roots at the same time.” Some years later, when Campeggi was against representing Pope Clement VII at the crucial Diet of Augsburg (1530),^[11] Erasmus reminded him that in the late fourth century, when the church was beset by Donatist dissenters in the West and Arians in the East, the emperor Theodosius “used the reins with moderation and without any bloodshed gradually pruned back the monstrous growth of heresy.” ^[12] To be sure, St. Augustine had at one time endorsed the use of imperial troops against the Donatists in his native North Africa, but Erasmus preferred to stress Augustine’s eventual opposition to the use of force: if the “sophists” were angered by the preface Erasmus wrote to the Opera of Augustine, it was because he had said there that “St. Augustine had used only the sword of God’s word in fighting the heretics.” ^[13] Writing in 1533 to Jan Laski’s elder brother Hieronim, an influential Polish noble who had also enjoyed his hospitality in Basel, Erasmus could describe his friend Thomas More’s career as lord chancellor of England (1529–1532) in a manner that historians will have difficulty in recognizing: even though Protestant sects had caused “most pernicious tumults” in England, “More’s mildness is sufficiently established by the fact that not a one was burned, beheaded or hung, as has happened to many in other kingdoms.” Just as More could not understand why his friend Erasmus hesitated about issuing a full and forthright condemnation of Luther’s doctrine, Erasmus could not believe that Protestant dissenters were being sent to the stake under More’s authority.^[14]

If there was to be an alternative to the suppression of dissent by force, there had to be a plan for concord, and Erasmus thought he had one. His previous effort at conciliation, the anonymous Consilium cujusdam of 1520, had been a failure and may also have left a bad taste because Erasmus’s collaborator, the Augsburg Dominican Johann Faber, later “began denouncing me with great freedom, to please his brethren, as soon as he got to Rome.” ^[15] Nonetheless, soon after a Leuven theologian of his acquaintance, Adriaan Floriszoon of Utrecht, had become Pope Adrian VI (February 1522), Erasmus began dropping hints to members of Charles V’s entourage that he was working on “a short treatise on how to end this business of Luther”; he now had

high hopes that this plague may be rooted out in such a way that it may never grow again. This can be done if the roots are cut away from which this plague so often sprouts afresh, one of which is hatred of the Roman Curia (whose greed and tyranny were already past bearing), and along with that, much legislation of a purely human origin which was thought to lay a burden on the liberty of the Christian people. All these can easily be cured, without setting the world by its ear, by the emperor’s authority and by the integrity of the new pope.^[16]

It looks as if such messages had the intended effect, as may be inferred from a remark by Mercurino Gattinara, Charles V’s chancellor, about a now lost letter from Erasmus: “‘This letter seems to hint at something else.’” In the letter in question Erasmus mentioned an “approach [via]” to religious peace, but, as Gattinara remarked, the letter did not explain what he meant.^[17] But there is no extant letter in which Erasmus sets forth his “approach” to the imperial court, and he later recalled, in reference to his correspondence with Gattinara and the emperor at this time, “they responded to the other points in my letters, not to this one.” ^[18]

In any case Erasmus apparently shifted his attention to Pope Adrian: “If your Holiness instructs me, I will make so bold as to give you an outline in a secret letter of my own proposal…for putting an end to this evil in such a way that it will not easily sprout again.” When the pope responded favorably, Erasmus sent off a letter known only from the version of it he published in 1529 which breaks off abruptly, presumably because he did not wish to print in full a document meant to be confidential.^[19] The letter restates his objections to those who think that disunion in the Christian commonwealth “should be healed by severity”:

I see more danger than I could wish that this matter may end in appalling bloodshed. I am not discussing now what they deserve but what is best for the public peace. This cancer has gone to far to be curable by the knife or cautery. In former times, I agree, that is how the Wycliffite party in England was suppressed by the royal power; but it was suppressed rather than extinguished. And yet what could be done at that period in a kingdom which was subject entirely to the will of one individual is not practical here [that is, in the Holy Roman Empire], over such a vast area and cut up among so many princes.

Thus instead of harsh measures, Erasmus proposes that “the world should be given some hope of changes in certain points where complaints of oppression are not unjustified. At the sweet name of liberty all men will breathe afresh.” Just as Erasmus is about to explain the steps to be taken “to relieve one’s consciences of their burdens, but no less at the same time to safeguard the dignity of princes and bishops,” the letter (as it survives) breaks off. In a nearly contemporary letter to a Low Countries friend now in Pope Adrian’s entourage, he expressed the hope that the pope might act in such a way that “Germans feel that he is not opposed to the abolition of things which even devout people find hard to bear, and which lay traps for the consciences of all men for the profits of a few.” ^[20] Thus the letter to Pope Adrian will have expressed Erasmus’s long-standing belief that “mendicant tyrants” posed the gravest threat to true religion. This message was not well received at the papal Curia. In a letter to Erasmus, John Eck, Luther’s most conspicuous Catholic adversary, boasted that his own consilium had met with approval in Rome. When Erasmus had no reply to his own letter after four months he concluded that the pope was offended by it.^[21] In any event Adrian VI died soon afterward (September 1523), and of his successor, Clement VII (1523–1534), Erasmus grew deeply suspicious.^[22]

Still, Erasmus kept his “approach” on the shelf: “If monarchs really want my advice, whatever it is worth, I will not hesitate to impart it, provided it be done in secret.” ^[23] Erasmus and his ideas for religious peace were a part of the atmosphere at the Diet of Augsburg in 1530. With Zwingli and his followers excluded, Philip Melanchthon’s statement of Lutheran doctrine in the Augsburg Confession (June) impressed many Catholics by its moderation, and, despite the fact that Catholic theologians presented a confutatio in the emperor’s name, the way was opened to discussion between the parties. As of August 1, Melanchthon had heard what he considered a reliable report that Erasmus had written Charles V urging that Protestants be granted concessions with regard to the marriage of the clergy, Communion in both kinds for the laity, and monastic vows. (This report could have some connection with the above-mentioned letter to Simon Pistoris, published in the Opus Epistolarum of 1529, in which Utraquism and clerical marriage were linked, though only the latter was suggested by Erasmus; by 1529 Pistoris himself was reported by another of Erasmus’s correspondents at the Saxon court to favor both clerical marriage and Communion in both kinds for the laity.)^[24] Erasmus at once replied to Melanchthon (August 2) that he had written not to the emperor but to Cardinal Campeggi, the papal legate to the imperial court in Germany, and to Christoph von Stadion, bishop of Augsburg; he did not indicate what he had written to them.^[25] Three other pertinent letters of Erasmus are preserved, written between August 12 and August 17, just as the formal negotiations between Catholic and Protestant theologians and church leaders began. One letter assures Melanchthon that zealous Catholics urging their princes to make war against the Protestants will have no hope of success “once specific terms [conditiones] are put on the table.” A letter to Campeggi, so secret that Erasmus did not want his secretary to know about it, asserted that “if certain specific terms [conditiones] are conceded to the Lutheran sect, it will be a grave evil, I admit, but much better than a war.” Finally, in a letter to Stadion he judges that “the three proposals [conditiones] you mention can be conceded without any loss to religion, though I doubt very much that the leaders of the sect will be content with them.” From the first two of these references, if not the third,^[26] it looks as if Erasmus was endorsing the strategy of negotiating with the Lutherans. In September Campeggi (awaiting approval from the Vatican) signed off on a proposal that would concede clerical marriage and Communion in both kinds to the Lutherans, provided they in turn recognized papal authority, but in the end neither side could accept these terms.^[27]

If the discussions at Augsburg in 1530 had no clear result, they nonetheless gave life to the idea of a reconciliation between Lutherans and Catholics, and many who thought in such terms continued to look to Erasmus for guidance. In May 1531, for example, Julius Pflug, humanist canon of Merseburg and an official in the service of Duke George of Saxony, wrote Erasmus that “the eyes of all who hope for peace are turned to you,” because only Erasmus had the authority to persuade Catholic princes that “certain of the church’s regulations may be relaxed and that human laws can be moderated in the interest of the church.” If Erasmus could perform this role, perhaps someone would step forward from the other side “a good man who is not adverse to peace among Christians, like Philip Melanchthon.” In reply, Erasmus pointed to published writings in which he had “suggested remedies for calming this tumult,” and he joined in Pflug’s praise of Melanchthon: “He tried very hard at the Diet of Augsburg to achieve what you propose, and had illness not prevented me from being there I would gladly have joined my efforts with his.” ^[28] In subsequent years Pflug helped promote a series of colloquies between Protestant and Catholic theologians, of which the first was sponsored by Duke George (1534). The climax to this development came at the Diet of Regensburg in 1541, where three Catholic and three Protestant theologians (including Melanchthon) agreed on a statement of the doctrine of justification by faith before disagreeing on the Eucharist and the nature of the church. Even after this failure, there were efforts lasting into the 1560s to reconcile Catholics and Lutherans on practical terms by allowing priests to marry and by allowing lay people to receive Communion in both kinds.^[29] The idea of religious concord was thus seriously pursued during what subsequent centuries look back to as the era of religious wars, and Erasmus’s role in giving the idea a concrete shape was, if difficult to determine precisely, not negligible.

But concord was not the only alternative to religious war. The policy of temporizing (if it may be called a policy) was sanctioned by the Recess of the Diet of Nuremberg in 1526, which suspended enforcement of the Edict of Worms (by which Luther had been condemned as an outlaw) and authorized the princes and the free cities of the empire to regulate religious affairs under the judgment of God until such time as a future council might settle contentious issues.^[30] One could at least imagine that such forbearance might extend not just to free cities within the empire but also to religious parties within the free cities. Erasmus took this further step in a letter of April 1526 to Johann Fabri, auxiliary bishop of Constance and a key adviser of Archduke Ferdinand: “It would perhaps be better if cities where the evil has taken root were asked only to leave each party to its own place, and each citizen to his own conscience, until the passage of time brings an opportunity for peace.” ^[31]

Erasmus was of course alluding to the position of Catholic minorities in cities that now had a Protestant majority. In fact, in most German towns where the new doctrine took hold, Catholic worship was sooner or later suppressed altogether,^[32] in keeping with the ancient and deep-seated Christian belief that God would punish any territory that tolerated blasphemy or false worship; the suppression was often undertaken at the insistence of the craft guilds, which mostly represented ordinary folk. By 1526 Catholicism had already been banned in Ulrich Zwingli’s Zurich, but Erasmus hoped that coexistence might still be possible in Basel, where he lived, and in Augsburg, on which he was unusually well informed.^[33] He saw the religious division as following the major socioeconomic fault line between the commons, or major pars (greater part), and sanior pars (the wiser part), or patriciate,^[34] and since commons and patriciate had worked out a power-sharing modus vivendi over the centuries he may have assumed that Protestants and Catholics could do the same. He could accept an urban Reformation that, as in “the more moderate cities [ciuitates],” banned new admissions to the cloisters while allowing monks and nuns who wished to do so to continue in their former life.^[35] But he was offended by what he saw as infringements on the rights of the Catholic minority, as in Basel, when his friend Ludwig Baer was named a substitute cathedral preacher during his absence but the city council barred him from the pulpit “because he was attracting too many listeners: when such things can happen in a city, what is the use of laws?” It was of course far worse when Catholics were altogether denied the practice of their religion and even “forced by threats to take part in a Eucharist they abominate.” ^[36]

Even when the Reformation triumphed completely in Basel (1529) and Augsburg (1533), Erasmus believed that matters had come to such a pass only because leaders of the Catholic parties in both cities had made tactical errors, thus rousing Protestants to still greater fury against the old religion.^[37] He evidently did not want to abandon his belief in the possibility of a coexistence that was both an alternative to religious war and an expression of the principle that in a properly ordered Christian polity, especially in a city, one ought to leave “each party to its own place and each citizen to his own conscience.” Erasmus’s argument lacks consistency because the few passages in which he couches the principle of forbearance in terms of the legal rights of minorities refer to Catholics under Protestant jurisdiction, while the more numerous passages making the same plea in behalf of Protestant minorities present the toleration of error as a lesser evil, as in his reference to the Gospel parable of the tares. Yet it is well to remember that most of these letters are addressed to Catholics in positions of authority who could not likely be persuaded to anything but the most grudging recognition of Protestant parties. It does represent a distortion of Erasmus’s stated position, but not a great distortion, to suggest that in the absence of any seditious behavior no government had right to force the consciences of Christian citizens, much less burn them at the stake.^[38]

Emperor Charles V and the Dawning of “Confessionalization”

Men like Erasmus seem to have sensed that to champion religious peace was to struggle against the flow of events. His particular brand of pessimism focused on the emperor Charles V, the only Catholic prince who had the stature to promote a religious settlement on his own initiative, with or without papal approval.^[39] For a variety of reasons Erasmus was convinced that the emperor would never accept any solution short of the complete submission and/or annihilation of the Protestant party. As a Netherlander under Habsburg rule, Erasmus cherished the strong but false belief that an alien dynasty was milking the Low Countries for the needs of its other lands.^[40] Netherlandish too, in a more partisan sense, was his belief that responsibility for the continuing wars with France could be laid at Charles’s door.^[41] This enemy of “mendicant tyrants” also feared the emperor’s piety, for he took Charles’s devotion to “ceremonies” as implying a dependence on the friars.^[42] When Charles had a Franciscan confessor, Jean Glapion (d. 1522), Erasmus “dared not trust” the man, despite Glapion’s professions of support for him, “so important did the sacred habit seem.” Years later Erasmus admitted he had been mistaken.^[43] Such suspicions were to some degree mutual—courtiers grumbled that Erasmus did not come from Basel to pay his respects while Charles was in Germany, just as Erasmus complained that his “spies” in Brussels could not fathom what the emperor’s political aims were.^[44]

Worst of all, Erasmus believed that Charles V had come under the baneful influence of Pope Clement VII. Erasmus was dubious of the role that popes played in high politics, as is evident from his comment to Krzysztof Szydlowiecki, the chancellor of Poland, about Pope Clement’s failure to end the strife between Christendom’s greatest monarchs, Charles V and Francis I of France: “In fact, bad popes like nothing less than peace among the greatest princes, whose dissension makes them not just popes but kings of kings. I wonder that princes have not learned this after so many centuries.” As for Pope Clement himself: “It would be better if the pope placed his trust in the strength [praesidiis] of Christ, rather than in the crowd of cardinals, the armed might of princes, and the wickedness of the monks whose manner of living was the seedbed for all these troubles.” ^[45] Like many humanists in Germany, Erasmus saw the ritual by which the emperor kissed the pope’s foot as an odious symbol of a papal will to power, as at Charles’s coronation as Holy Roman Emperor at Bologna in 1530.^[46] Soon thereafter, Erasmus formed a bad impression of the Medici pope from the subjugation of Florence to Medici rule by Spanish troops which took place in April 1530 as part of an overall reconciliation between the pope and the emperor.^[47] Thus in letters of this period Erasmus reiterated that even though “the world has never had a Caesar more powerful than this one, because of his piety and sense of religious duty to the Roman See, he will do whatever the bishop of Rome tells him.” ^[48]

For all of these reasons Erasmus greatly feared the designs of this now mature ruler for whom as an adolescent he had written his Institutio Principis Christiani. What the Christian world needed was “ambiguous articles” to forestall a war between Protestants and Catholics, but, as Erasmus said of Charles’s treaty with France in 1526, “no treaty will be concluded among the princes except on condition that Luther’s faction is stamped out, and the emperor will not feel he is really emperor unless he brings that about.” Severitas would not work, as he said to anyone who might listen, yet “Charles and his brother Ferdinand seem to be looking to severitas as their last best hope.” Knowing that Charles planned to go to Germany after settling affairs in Italy following his coronation, Erasmus feared

lest the emperor’s arrival will touch off bloody uprisings in Germany, for many cities are prepared for the worst. Great is Caesar’s power, I know, but the greatest part of the people is everywhere devoted to the new sects, and nearly all the peasants too, for they have not forgotten their defeat [in the Peasants Revolt of 1525].^[49]

Events in Florence intensified his anxiety: “I fear the devout obedience [to the pope] of this good prince will do great harm to Germany, as it has done to the Florentines.” That summer, while the diet was convened at Augsburg, Erasmus suspected Charles of making false promises to the Protestant estates: “He has said he will present the secular and ecclesiastical princes of the empire with a plan for remedying abuses in the church; but meanwhile, cities are told they must restore the property that have taken from priests and bishops.” Reports from friends in Augsburg led him to fear what might “befall that city of yours,” with its Protestant majority, for “the wrath of Caesar is keen, and King Ferdinand is high-spirited in no small degree.” ^[50]

Erasmus thus saw the emperor presenting himself as a defender of orthodoxy in order to increase his power, a design he attributed also to Charles’s Catholic allies, the dukes of Bavaria.^[51] The hypersuspicious Erasmus, expressing fears and anxieties that seem to have been widely shared among well-informed contemporaries, we have already met in these pages. Similarly, there has also been occasion to describe him as a thoughtful and consistent advocate of what historian of political thought Anthony Black has called “civil society.” ^[52] For Erasmus the proper Christian order was one that we might call protoliberal, characterized by the rule of law, pluriformity, and respect for the rights of all the various ordines that made up a Christian body politic, including, possibly, peaceable Christian religious minorities. But the middle decades of the sixteenth century were increasingly inspired by new visions of a uniform Christian social order. “Civil society” in Black’s sense of the term was losing out to what historians now call “confessionalization,” a process in which state power was enhanced as both Protestant and Catholic princes threw their full authority behind efforts to mold disparate populations into a cohesive community guided by a single standard of morals and belief.^[53] Erasmus seems to have had little sympathy for the principle of religious solidarity, whether on the part of Catholics who put aside their own criticisms in order to rally to the defense of an embattled church (like his friend Thomas More) or on the part of Protestants who demanded that the whole city conform to the true evangelical religion (like his friends in Basel). But he knew very well that such visions of the world were gaining ground. The future did indeed belong to those who on both sides of the divide called upon coreligionists to join together and gird themselves for a climactic struggle; it belonged also to the princes who built their own strength on a renewed alliance between throne and altar. From such a world an Erasmus could only withdraw, as he more and more did, and in the letters of his later years he often repeated that Christians could hope for an improvement in the affairs of the world only if God himself intervened, “as happens in Greek tragedies, when a deus ex machina suddenly shows himself.” ^[54] In a Christian body politic dominated by increasingly violent religious polemics and increasingly powerful princes, Erasmus could only wonder what the real impact of his own words had been, and this too he pondered in his waning years.

Notes