6. “The Name of Erasmus Will Never Perish”

Between approximately 1511 and 1521 Erasmus enjoyed the most fruitful years of his life and attained the height of his fame and influence. At Queen’s College in Cambridge, where his English friends had secured him a lectureship, he completed his notes for a critical edition of St. Jerome’s Epistulae and collated Greek and Latin manuscripts for his path-breaking edition of the New Testament.^[1] It must have been at Cambridge, after the death of Pope Julius II (February 1513), that Erasmus penned the anonymous Julius Exclusus e Coelo (Julius Excluded from Heaven, published 1517), concerning the authorship of which there can no longer be any doubt.^[2] By the time he returned to the Continent in 1514, he was ready to speak more frankly, and in his own name, about senseless wars and other evils afflicting the Christian world. The 1515 Adagia, also prepared at Cambridge, was the first of Erasmus’s works to be published with his approval by Johann Froben in Basel, who was to become his printer of choice.^[3] The new entries for this edition were few in number, but many of them were substantial essays that lashed out at the greed and the dangerous amour propre of Christian princes and prelates of the church; some, like Dulce Bellum Inexpertis (War Is Sweet to the Inexperienced) were to be published separately and translated into vernacular languages.^[4]

Soon after landing in his native Low Countries in July 1514 Erasmus had found a new and powerful patron, Jean Le Sauvage, then president of the privy council for the fourteen-year-old Archduke Charles (the future Charles V) and a close political ally of Charles’s erstwhile guardian and most influential adviser, Guillaume de Croy, lord of Chièvres.^[5] As Erasmus made his first journey to the Froben press in Basel (September 1514), the author of the Enchiridion was lionized by humanist clerics and cultivated patricians of the upper Rhine, especially in Strasbourg; flattered, Erasmus felt himself a “German” among the ardent patriots of Alsace and prepared for a Strasbourg printer an edition of Moriae Encomium with new passages pillorying the hypocrisy of popes and cardinals in a manner not consistent with Folly’s ironic tone. Yet Erasmus hoped that Leo X (1513–1522), patron of humanists, would be a different kind of pope. Recognizing that the patronage of distinguished prelates (like William Warham, archbishop of Canterbury) would not shield his New Testament from attack by traditional theologians, he made overtures to Rome which enabled him to dedicate the book to Pope Leo himself.^[6]

In Basel (September 1514–March 1515) Erasmus made new friends among scholars in the Froben circle: Beatus Rhenanus, an editor of classical texts; Wolfgang Capito, Hebraist and cathedral preacher; and Ludwig Baer, a professor of theology at the university. Even while correcting proof he was still producing new material for his edition of the Epistulae and treatises that would make up the first four volumes of the Froben Opera Omnia of St. Jerome. Hieronymi Stridonensis Vita (Life of Jerome of Strido) is from one point of view a measure of Erasmus’s ambition, for as critics have noted there are striking resemblances between the Christian scholar Erasmus described (far different from the ascetic of hagiographic legends surrounding the figure of Jerome) and the role he claimed for himself in the contemporary world of letters. But the Vita also opened a fresh critical perspective on the holy man’s life and presented Erasmus’s view of what monasticism had been like prior to the virtual “slavery” of vows.^[7] During a longer stint at the Froben press in July 1515–May 1516, mainly to prepare the copy for his edition of the Greek and Latin New Testament (the Novum Instrumentum), Erasmus also added supplementary material, including the Paraclesis (Exhortation) imploring readers to put off all human pretense and embrace the simplicity of the Gospel, and the Methodus Verae Theologiae (Method of True Theology) showing how a knowledge of Scripture might be used to foster piety, as the Fathers of the Church had done, rather than to vaunt human pride, as in scholastic disputations. A greatly expanded version of the Method, entitled Ratio Verae Theologiae (1518), took on a life of its own as the programmatic statement for a new kind of theological education based on the biblical languages.^[8]

The Novum Instrumentum itself was quite different from the commentary on the received Latin or Vulgate text (along the lines of Valla’s Adnotationes) which Erasmus had envisioned while at Cambridge. Encouraged by friends in the Froben circle, he prepared a Greek text, relying heavily on manuscripts available in Basel, as well as a first revision of his own Latin translation, substantially revised for the second edition of the Novum Testamentum (as it was thereafter called) in 1519.^[9] Annotations to the text, sometimes covering several columns, evaluated variant readings from manuscript sources or from the writings of the Church Fathers, raised questions of interpretation, and discussed applications of the text to the problems in the contemporary church. The annotations are a kind of imaginary conversation between Erasmus and the informed reader; phrases like “Let the diligent reader consider this” recur again and again, and he was uncommonly thorough about letting readers see for themselves the basis for his conclusions (direct quotes from earlier interpreters are often introduced with a disclaimer to the effect that he is only reproducing the words lest his critics accuse him of fabrication). In these pages readers could also see at work a critical intelligence that was not sparing of Christian apologetics founded on seeming falsehoods; Erasmus had a keen eye (perhaps too keen)^[10] for places where a word may have been added or subtracted by copyists in order to combat heresy or avoid giving scandal.^[11] His skill and acuity as a philologist were unmatched; for example, he intuited what modern scholars call the principle of the harder reading (that among variant readings the one that seems most puzzling is least likely to have been “corrected” by copyists over the centuries), even though this principle was not to be formally stated as such until over a hundred and fifty years after his death.^[12]

Erasmus seemed poised to reap the material rewards that such achievements deserved. Le Sauvage, now chancellor of Burgundy, secured him an honorary appointment as councillor to Archduke Charles, with a noble salary of two hundred gulden per year.^[13] Payments assigned on the treasury could often not be made, but Le Sauvage advanced him the first year’s arrears out of his own pocket.^[14] Better yet, Le Sauvage, who became chancellor of Castile when Charles claimed the realms of Ferdinand and Isabella (his maternal grandparents), gave him the income of a canonry in Tournai and promised him a bishopric in one of Spain’s dominions.^[15] Erasmus professed to desire only the quiet life of a scholar, but a scholar could after all live very well as an absentee bishop; he went to England in August 1516 apparently in order to make use of contacts there in his appeal for a papal dispensation that would allow him to hold ecclesiastical preferment despite his illegitimate birth.^[16] On his return he lived for a time in Brussels (September 1516–February 1517), in close proximity to the court; this must have been the period when, as he later complained, he was expected to wait upon Chancellor Le Sauvage in order to sup with him, even if the great man did not return to his quarters until midnight.^[17] Meanwhile, in his capacity as councillor to Charles, Erasmus wrote his Institutio Principis Christiani (Education of a Christian Prince, published in June 1516), intended “to expose in a way the springs [fontes] of all good counsel.” Erasmus was able to present a copy to the young king of Castile and Aragon later that summer.^[18] Another political treatise, Querela Pacis (The Complaint of Peace) was written “on the instructions of Jean Le Sauvage,” when the Low Countries government was preparing for the peace conference at Cambrai (March 1517).^[19] Both works allowed Erasmus to vent his general objections to Christian Europe’s dynastic wars, but Le Sauvage no doubt appreciated his not-so-veiled critique of the campaigns against France launched while Emperor Maximilian I had ruled the Low Countries in the name of his grandson; along with Chièvres, Le Sauvage had reversed course by seeking good relations with France, in hopes of securing for Charles a peaceful succession to his Spanish inheritance.^[20]

With Le Sauvage about to depart for Spain in the company of King Charles, Erasmus withdrew from Brussels to Antwerp, where his host was the learned town secretary, Pieter Gillis (February–June 1517). In Antwerp Erasmus wrote his Paraphrase of the Epistle to the Romans, intended to clarify difficult passages in the text and also to mollify those who were critical of interpretations he had presented in the Novum Instrumentum. The work was so well received that he proceeded over the next several years to paraphrase all the Pauline epistles, then all the Gospels. When Erasmus and Gillis had a famous diptych painted by Quentin Metsys (May 1517) as a gift to Thomas More, the Erasmus panel showed him “beginning his Paraphrase on the Epistle to the Romans. ” ^[21]

For a more permanent residence Erasmus looked to nearby Leuven, both with interest and with trepidation. Like other universities of the day, Leuven was a fortress of scholastic philosophy and theology and thus in Erasmus’s view a breeding ground for enemies of bonae literae. Three years earlier Maarten van Dorp, a humanist and candidate for the doctorate in theology, had employed good classical Latin in a long letter politely taking Erasmus to task for the seeming disrespect to religion conveyed by his Moriae Encomium and questioning the need for correcting the Vulgate Bible. In his response Erasmus offered the concession Dorp had asked for, namely, an avowal that he was “almost sorry” he had published his Folly because of the offense it had given.^[22] When Dorp in reply raised further questions, Thomas More, then in Bruges, intervened with a lengthy and thorough justification of Erasmus’s position. Apparently impressed, Dorp in his inaugural lecture as a professor of theology (July 1516) cited scholastic as well as patristic authorities for the principle of correcting the Latin New Testament against the Greek. But pressure from Dorp’s more conservative colleagues led him to publicize his own critical notes on Erasmus’s Novum Instrumentum, making Erasmus more suspicious than ever of Dorp and the Leuven theologians, especially the elderly Jean Briart. He took matters in hand by visiting Leuven for a formal reconciliation with Dorp (a second time) and Briart, boasting afterward that he “blew all the clouds away, ending up on most friendly terms with the theologians.” ^[23] Could he but trust the theologians, Leuven had many attractions for Erasmus. He already saw the need for a revised Novum Instrumentum, and since Leuven was “where I keep my library,” it was the logical place to settle down and work. He had offers of lodging from Jean Desmarez, an old friend who also enjoyed the patronage of Le Sauvage, as well as from a new friend, Jan de Neve, regent of the College of the Lily.^[24] He had also agreed to serve as one of the executors for a legacy planned by another old friend, Jérome de Busleiden, which would endow chairs for Greek, Hebrew, and Latin and thus foster the serious study of all three languages necessary for understanding Scripture. Busleiden’s death in August 1517, not long after Erasmus had moved to Leuven, opened the door for him to begin thinking about scholars to be recruited as professors for what was to be called the Collegium Trilingue. When the theologians soon voted to coopt him into their faculty, he was better able to work for acceptance within the university of the new college that promised to give bonae literae a precious institutional anchor.^[25]

But if Leuven seemed friendly, Erasmus and the new biblical scholarship still had enemies, especially, in his view, among certain orders of mendicant friars. Erasmus and his work were in fact attacked, and not just in Leuven, by preachers innocent of any knowledge of Greek and filled with an unreasoning zeal for combating heresy. No sooner had the Novum Instrumentum appeared than a certain Dominican in Strasbourg “was thundering against the book in full blast,” until one of Erasmus’s patrician friends ascertained that the indignant friar had not even seen the book. In England, according to More, Henry Standish, “that prince among the Franciscan divines…has entered into a conspiracy with certain choice spirits of the same Order and the same kidney to refute your errors in print, if they can find any.” In Leuven Nicolaas Baechem, the Carmelite prior of Antwerp and a member of the theology faculty, denounced Erasmus’s New Testament from the pulpit as a sign of the coming of Antichrist; on meeting Baechem some time later, Erasmus “asked him with some urgency to produce what had offended him,” only to be told that Baechem had neither read the book nor even seen a copy. On Pentecost 1517, as Erasmus attended mass with Pieter Gillis, an order-brother of Baechem’s, seeing Erasmus among those standing before his pulpit, denounced him to his face for having sinned against the Holy Spirit, first for daring to emend the Lord’s Prayer and the Hail Mary and second (as Erasmus recounted) for “attacking received truth, because having heard two preachers in one day, I had said at supper that neither of them really understood his text.” ^[26] Such incidents seemed to Erasmus to warrant an ominous conclusion: “The Dominicans and some of the Carmelites are beginning actually to call on the mob to start throwing stones, and nowhere do these pestilent folk flourish more than in my native country.” ^[27] Already in his response to Maarten van Dorp’s letter of 1514, Erasmus had suggested that those theologians who were ignorant of biblical languages were precisely the ones who “conspire” against good letters, for once the knowledge of ancient languages is revived, “it may become clear that they know nothing.” ^[28] Perhaps encouraged to think along these lines by reports from friends like Thomas More, Erasmus soon broadened the notion of conspiracy to include all the enemies of bonae literae, mendicants in their pulpits as well as theologians at their lecterns: “I know for an absolute certainty that the Philistines [barbaros] everywhere have put their heads together [conspirasse], meaning to leave no stone unturned that they may suppress humane studies [bonas literas].” Often repeated, the notion of a grand conspiracy against him and all he stood for, led by the mendicants, became something like an article of faith for Erasmus.^[29]

But if Erasmus’s New Testament provoked genuine hostility from real clerical obscurantists, conspiracy theories usually tell us more about the theorist than about the alleged conspirators. Erasmus had a special animus against the mendicants, especially the Dominicans.^[30] He was the son of a secular priest, and, since doffing the habit of the Augustinian Canons in Italy, he dressed as a secular priest. Since the thirteenth century the mendicant orders, with the backing of the papacy, had contested the rights of secular priests in urban parishes and in university theology faculties. Erasmus bemoaned the fact that though the secular clergy, who were no less an “estate” (ordo) of Christian society than any mendicant order (ordo), the latter were much quicker than the former to defend their collective honor if attacked. He was no doubt thinking of mendicants—famous for their denunciation of clerical immorality—when he criticized preachers who “exaggerate in tragic fashion” breaches of clerical celibacy while overlooking worse sins; one wonders if he was remembering abuse heaped on his own father.^[31] Erasmus also saw the friars as lackeys of the papal monarchy (of which more below) and dangerous in their own right because of their influence among the commons; from his days in Italy he remembered a bit of gossip that had Pope Alexander VI (d. 1503) saying it was less dangerous to offend some powerful monarch “than any one individual among the troops of mendicants, who under the pretext of a humble name ruled Christendom, he said, with a tyrant’s rod.” ^[32] “Mendicant tyrants” became Erasmus’s pet name for the chief enemies of good letters and of the renewal of Christian life that good letters could make possible.^[33] The Dominicans in particular were “always setting on foot some mischief in the world”: the rabble-rousing career of Friar Girolamo Savonarola in Florence, burned at the stake in 1498; the scandal at Bern, where four Dominicans were burned (1509) on charges of having suborned a lay brother to make fake reports of a vision in which the Blessed Mother denounced the Franciscans and their advocacy of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception (always opposed by the Dominicans); and the attack on Johann Reuchlin, Christian Hebraist and defender of Jewish scholarship, by the Dominicans of Cologne. The Carmelites, for their part, were “no doubt jealous of the Preachers [the Dominicans were known as the Order of Preachers] for the publicity Reuchlin gave them.” ^[34]

Against the mendicant tyrants and their allies Erasmus envisioned the proponents of bonae literae drawn up in battle array. This self-described lover of peace will never be properly understood unless we recognize that he also loved a good fight. In the preface to Antibarbarorum Liber, published for the first time in 1520, Erasmus recalled how “a sort of inspiration fired me with devotion” to classical Latin: “I developed a hatred for anyone I knew to be an enemy of bonae literae, and a love for those who delighted in them.” ^[35] Indeed, it is hardly possible that one can have been captivated by the beauty of a bygone language without conceiving at the same time a loathing for the unfeeling clods who prattled away contentedly in barbarous Latin. Modern scholars, heeding the intellectual common ground shared by humanists and scholastics, play down conflicts between the two parties, even in regard to a cause celèbre like the controversy surrounding Johann Reuchlin, in which Reuchlin’s friends produced the celebrated Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum (Letters of Benighted Men) to lampoon their enemies.^[36] But we should not underestimate the intense passions felt by many contemporaries. When Maarten van Dorp asked why he wrote only to please “those who are steeped in humane studies [litterati]” and not also for “rustics” not versed in classical Latin, Erasmus apparently could not see the point of the question.^[37] As indicated in the last chapter, his vision of the res publica Christiana emphasized the love that should bind all Christians in one body, in contrast to the actual fault lines of a Christendom divided by bitter rivalries among nations, towns, guilds, and religious orders. Yet Erasmus was himself a product of this culture, deeply imbued with corporate loyalties, and he therefore saw the devotees of good letters as constituting an ordo (estate) of society, no less entitled than any other ordo to the respect and privileges that were their due. Thus when the French humanist Germain de Brie got into a patriotic battle of words with Thomas More, Erasmus urged him to make peace because devotees of good literature must agree among themselves, “especially since there is such a rancorous conspiracy everywhere against men of our estate [nostra ordo].” ^[38] Just as the young Erasmus saw the world of Latin learning divided into two warring camps, the barbarians and the followers of the Muses, the mature Erasmus saw the world of Latin learning divided by warfare between the partisans of good letters and the mendicant tyrants. In a letter from Leuven to a German humanist friend, he coined a long Greek word for this ongoing struggle: “You in your turn will want to know what is happening here. The Ptochoturannophilomousomachia [battle between mendicant tyrants and lovers of the Muses] still rages.” ^[39]

The perspective of an ongoing combat against the foes of good letters defined Erasmus’s rather idiosyncratic view of Martin Luther’s early career as a reformer. In March 1518 he forwarded a copy of the Ninety-five Theses, printed at Wittenberg in November, to Thomas More. While he was in Basel (May–August 1518), preparing the second edition of his Novum Testamentum for the press, Froben issued a new edition of the Enchiridion, to which Erasmus appended a long letter to Abbot Paul Volz of Hügshofen (Alsace) which constituted an important statement of the philosophia Christi. In this letter he made an allusion that he knew would resonate through Germany: among Christians, the Philistines have grown in strength, preaching things “which tend not to Christ’s glory but to the profit of those who traffic in indulgences…and suchlike merchandise.” In the dedicatory letter (February 1519) for his Paraphrase on Corinthians, to Erard de la Marck, prince-bishop of Liège, he gave a thumbnail history of “what are now called indulgences, out of which I only wish it were as much our good fortune to grow rich in religion as it is certain other persons’ to fill their coffers with coin.” Yet it seems Erasmus also had doubts about Luther from an early date. Wolfgang Capito, the Basel Hebrew scholar, was the mutual friend who made sure Luther heard about Erasmus’s encouraging words in the letter to Volz.^[40] But as early as April 1519 Capito warned Erasmus to hold back on Luther: “Do not, I beg you, disparage the business of Luther in public. You know how much your vote matters.…There is nothing his enemies wish more than to see you indignant with him.” ^[41]

As one of Erasmus’s confidants, Capito knew well that not everything Erasmus said or wrote was for public consumption. Another confidant, Maarten Lips, an Augustinian canon in Leuven, was told on one occasion to recopy Erasmus’s letter in his own hand if he meant to keep it; the autograph he should burn, lest it fall into the wrong hands. Often, like his humanist correspondents, Erasmus thought it caution enough to put a crucial phrase in Greek, as if daring the enemies of good letters to puzzle it out. Yet he could also write to a correspondent in the sure expectation that someone else he did not wish to contact directly would get the message.^[42] But there was much demand for published examples of Erasmus’s admired epistolary style, and since by this time he had an amanuensis who kept copies of most of his correspondence, he was not loath to choose letters to edit for publication; by far the largest such collection to date, the Farrago Nova Epistolarum Erasmi, would appear in August 1519. In effect, then, Capito was asking Erasmus not to let anything that might encourage Luther’s enemies appear in his published correspondence.^[43]

In a way Erasmus did more than what Capito wanted. In the crucial two-year period that culminated with Luther’s condemnation by Rome (the papal bull was published in Germany in September 1520) and by the princes of the Holy Roman Empire at the Diet of Worms (April 1521), Erasmus’s opinion did count and he weighed his words carefully. Letters that he published himself struck a careful balance. He praised Luther’s talent for expounding the Gospel “after the ancient manner” and he blamed the turmoil in Christendom on the “mendicant tyrants” who, for the sake of their own bellies, seized on Luther as an excuse for destroying bonae literae; it was they who, by their merciless and unreasoning attacks, provoked Luther to an ever more wrathful response. But Erasmus also stressed his allegiance to the one Catholic Church and insisted that whatever “mendicant tyrants” might say to the contrary, the cause of Luther, a scholastic theologian by training, was not to be identified with the cause of bonae literae. In unpublished letters to ardent followers of Luther, Erasmus signaled his assent to the proposition that “the absolute rule of the Roman High-Priest, ” abetted by mendicant allies, was “the plague of Christendom. ” ^[44] But he also deplored Luther’s vehemence, and he urged friends to moderate Luther’s wrath. Unpublished letters to Catholic friends warned them about sending letters to Germany (some of his letters were published without his knowledge) and expressed deep misgivings about Luther’s wrathful “spirit” (spiritus). The correspondence as a whole suggests a desire to forestall an open breach between Luther and the church (see below, chapter 9). This strategy came to a head in the fall of 1520 when Erasmus collaborated on the Consilium cujusdam (Advice of a Certain Man), an anonymous treatise attempting to discredit the authenticity of the recently published papal bull excommunicating Luther.^[45] Thus in Erasmus’s mind he and Luther had the same enemies, if not the same inspiration. Strange as it may seem in the hindsight, in these years Erasmus saw the whole Lutheran controversy in terms of its bearing on his own program for a reform of Christendom through the advance of bonae literae.

In this larger struggle Leuven was the battleground that mattered most to Erasmus. The appropriateness of languages for biblical study had become a subject for debate when in March 1519 Jacobus Latomus, a member of the theology faculty hitherto friendly to Erasmus, published a defense of the traditional theological curriculum, rejecting the new plan of study put forward in Erasmus’s Ratio Verae Theologiae, although without mentioning him by name. Erasmus published a temperate response and was kept busy denying his responsibility for a scurrilous attack on Latomus and his colleagues penned by a young German friend who lodged, as Erasmus did, at the College of the Lily.^[46] Erasmus’s abilities as a Greek scholar were also under challenge. Edward Lee, an English priest and son of a former lord mayor of London, came to Leuven to learn Greek (1516) and his studies were at first encouraged by Erasmus. Trouble between the two men began when Erasmus declined to include Lee’s critical notes on the 1516 Novum Instrumentum in the Novum Testamentum that would appear in 1519. After Erasmus accused Lee of refusing to let him see the notes, and Lee accused Erasmus of blocking his efforts to have them published by printers in Leuven, their quarrel became a feud. Of the 343 extant letters from Erasmus in the years 1518–1520, over 70 deal at least in part with Lee.^[47] Why Erasmus should have been so exercised over criticism by a second-rate scholar (he was right about the slender value of Lee’s notes) has been something of a puzzle. But Lee could at least read Greek, making it more difficult for Erasmus to claim that his critics were “stupid, obstinate, or old,” men who had not read his New Testament and indeed could not. More ominously, he saw Lee as having been suborned by leaders of “the criminal conspiracy against truly Christian scholarship and humane studies,” including the English Franciscan Henry Standish.^[48]

The theology faculty’s formal condemnation of Martin Luther’s teaching on 7 November 1519 opened the door to the most dangerous line of attack on good letters. During the following year the Carmelite Nicolaas Baechem, an old enemy, began bringing Erasmus’s name into his regular denunciations of Luther from the pulpit of St. Pieter’s, the university church. Erasmus’s complaints to the rector of the university led to a formal interview between the two men in the rector’s presence, but nothing was accomplished. Evidently seeing Erasmus as responsible for Luther’s doctrines, a fellow Hollander, the Dominican Vincentius Theodorici, blamed Erasmus publicly for his having been hooted out of the pulpit at Dordrecht when he sought to denounce Luther. Finally, since editions of the Consilium cujusdam were now being printed with Erasmus’s name as author, he had to accept a measure of responsibility for its views.^[49] But since the initial appearance of this tract in November 1520 Luther had been declared an outlaw in the Holy Roman Empire by the Edict of Worms (8 May 1521), and in a letter Erasmus complained that Luther “burns the decretals, publishes his De Captivitate Babylonica, issues his overemphatic [Assertion]—and has made the evil to all appearances incurable.” ^[50] Within two weeks of writing these last words Erasmus had migrated from Leuven to the village of Anderlecht, outside Brussels, accepting the generous hospitality of the schoolmaster, a canon of the collegiate church. He told friends he had made the move in order to improve his digestion in the fresh country air, and there is no reason to doubt that digestive considerations weighed heavily on a man plagued with kidney stones.^[51] But his change of residence can also be taken as an indication that he now believed his position in Leuven could not be maintained. He had not changed in his belief that “the source [fontes]” of this tumult among Christians lay in the fact that “the world…is burdened with the tyranny of the mendicant friars, who, though they are minions [satellites] of the Roman See, have risen to such influence and such numbers that the pope himself…finds them formidable.” ^[52] But now that Luther in his wrath had played into the hands of his (and Erasmus’s) enemies, the “mendicant tyrants” in Leuven were too powerful to resist. In October Erasmus embarked on a journey to Basel, where he was to prepare the copy for the third edition of his New Testament. He would never again return to his native Low Countries.

When the Novum Instrumentum and the Opera Omnia of Jerome appeared in print, both in February of 1516, Erasmus had done enough to rank as one of the great pioneers in the history of scholarship, even if he never published another word. Yet by his own lights, scholarship in and of itself was not enough for a Christian man. His ideal was to be, as St. Jerome had been, both a critical scholar and a man of prayer. One of the more perceptive historical portraits of Erasmus focuses on his sense of vocation as a Christian scholar, bound to the truth but bound also to the Gospel and to the communion of the church. But in Erasmus’s voluminous correspondence the scholar is rather more evident than the man of prayer. In the preface to a 1518 edition of his Enchiridion in which Erasmus praises Abbot Paul Volz for exemplifying the ideal of “pious learning” and “learned piety,” he admits that a friend had once quipped about his Enchiridion, “holiness of life is more noticeable in the book than in its author.” One recent historian has ventured a guardedly positive answer to the implicit question whether Erasmus himself ever made progress toward his fond hope of being “transformed” in the image of Christ. But again from his correspondence it is clear that his labors to uncover the pure text of the New Testament still had something to do with that burning desire to win immortal fame, so evident in the early letters to Batt. He surely did have a sense of calling, but he was also in some way driven. Another recent historian argues that Erasmus’s carefully constructed image as the devout scholar masks the overweening ambition that lent him the audacity to envision himself as another Jerome.^[53] This is hardly the place to speculate about what makes a saint or even a great scholar, but it may not be amiss to suggest that ambition of a kind has something to do with both. Alexander Pope in his Essay on Man captured well the ambiguous but hopeful sense of human striving that Erasmus himself conveyed in his better moments:

	The surest virtues thus from passions shoot
	Wild nature’s vigor working at the root.

In any case it seems wiser to focus on the larger cultural conflict of which this dimly discernible internal tension is in a sense the personal sedimentation. Like the Church Fathers who enfolded pagan culture within the ambit of Christian doctrina and like the scholastic doctors who read Aristotle and Scripture as expressing different aspects of the same truth, Erasmus refused to harken to those who would use religious faith as an excuse for intellectual timidity. He deserves our respect, not merely as a great scholar but also as one of those who have striven, however imperfectly, for a way of seeing the world which permits the mind’s irrepressible logic and the unquenchable yearning of the heart to live at peace.

Notes