7. “The Most Corrupt Generation There Has Ever Been”

Preachers and reformers are by tradition pessimists in one sense, optimists in another. If they recognize the promise of betterment even for hardened sinners, they also harbor the belief that no age has been more sorely in need of betterment than the present. The underlying psychological truth seems to be that it is not humanly possibly to muster the energy to attack a problem unless one takes a view of its seriousness that dispassionate observers might consider exaggerated. Students of Erasmus’s program for the reform of Christian morals have not given much attention to his framing of the problem, perhaps because his claims about consummate evil in high places are too extreme and because his evident nostalgia for better and simpler days of yore is too conventional. But an eccentric or a perfectly commonplace idea is not for that reason any less vivid for those who profess it, and we cannot understand Erasmus’s remedy for the ills of Christendom unless we first look at the disease through his eyes. In the 1518 letter to the German abbot Paul Volz, Erasmus makes a major statement of the philosophia Christi, giving perhaps the fullest statement of his beliefs about the general wickedness of his age:

Is there any religious man who does not see with sorrow that this generation is far the most corrupt there has ever been? When did tyranny and greed lord it thus widely and go thus unpunished? When was so much importance ever attached to ceremonies? When did iniquity abound with so little to restrain it? When did charity wax colder? All we appeal to, all we read, all we hear, all our decisions—what do they taste of except of ambition and greed?^[1]

Historical aperçus that make the same point about specific domains of experience are scattered throughout Erasmus’s writings, especially the Adages, where comparisons between an admired ancient world and the present occur naturally. Thus in regard to ancient and modern conceptions of musical harmony, he bemoans the modern composers’ temerity in going beyond two full scales, the limit set by classical theorists, even though “nature herself seems to have fixed this sort of limit to consonances, by arranging that the human voice should not reach beyond the fifteenth interval.” Against certain unnamed moderns who have justified the taking of modest rates of interest on loans, Erasmus maintains the traditional blanket condemnation of usury, according to “the authority of the holy Fathers.” But mere usury is not enough for this present world, in which there is a “sordid class of merchants” busy “buying in one market to sell for twice the price in another, or [fleecing the wretched public with their monopolies].” Similarly, the Christian religion itself, “once flourishing far and wide, has contracted into a narrow space” (he has in mind North Africa and the Middle East, lost to the spread of Islam) because, “referring all things to our own glory and convenience,” modern Christians have abandoned the simple and true apostolic way of preaching: “We do not teach, we terrify, we threaten, we coerce.” Worse still for Erasmus, lover of peace, is the mercenary warfare of modern times. Apropos of Jesus’ words to the soldiers at Luke 3 : 14 (“Plunder no one”), he remarks, “We read that the Hebrews went to war, but not that they served for pay under foreign captains.” Pope Gregory I (d. 606) reckoned the merchant’s trade as one of those not worthy of being pursued by baptized Christians, “yet we count among Christians those who, tempted by any wage whatever, fly off to battle and the slaughter of Christians.” Even the printing press, the one modern invention an Erasmus surely ought to have appreciated, portended a decline of culture because printers were flooding the world with “useless rubbish” to the detriment of “honorable fields of study.” Speaking in the accents of a townsman in the Low Countries, where provinces that had enjoyed substantial independence now faced a powerful Habsburg dynasty, Erasmus went on to suggest that a decline in the learned professions would undermine the authority of all those bodies or estates of society that stood in the way of tyranny: “legislatures, councils, universities, lawyers, and theologians.” Owing to a progressive concentration of power in fewer and fewer hands, the danger is that “we shall see in our midst the same sort of barbarous tyranny that exists among the Turks.” If only human society could follow the order of nature, “every element in the body politic would retain its own legitimate authority.” ^[2]

This willingness to believe the worst of his own age may help to explain why Erasmus, perhaps the greatest critical scholar of his century, snapped up scurrilous rumors about the high and the mighty with an eagerness that can only be described as gullible. Of this tendency the anonymous dialogue Julius Exclusus is a special case. The heart of the matter is that Erasmus could see nothing but evil in a Vicar of Christ who donned armor to lead his troops into battle against fellow Christians, as Pope Julius had done in his assault on Bologna, where Erasmus was to witness his triumphal entry (1506). (Modern historians have tended to see Julius’s pontificate in a more positive light because he, unlike his immediate predecessors, used his conquests to consolidate the tottering Papal States rather than to enrich his family.)^[3] Erasmus had his informants about curial politics but evidently not very good ones. For example, Julius left strict orders in his will about the disposal of the surplus he had accumulated, but it was to be used for a crusade, not for continuance of the wars he had started against Christian states; and he did indeed postpone the Fifth Lateran Council, summoned to meet in Rome, but (contrary to what Julius Exclusus asserts) he did not then actually convene it on the day originally scheduled, so as to be able to hold “my council at Rome with just those I’d schooled for it.” Julius Exclusus also retails tidbits of gossip resembling the salacious limericks, or pasquillae, that Roman wits of this era often draped on statues, like the claim (common at the time, though not accepted by historians) that it was at the pope’s order that his nephew stabbed to death a curial foe, Cardinal Alidosi, or the rumors of homosexuality that were circulated by the pope’s enemies. In Erasmus’s dialogue Julius was not just a bad pope; in one outburst St. Peter describes him in language usually reserved for the Antichrist: “If the prince of evil, the devil, wanted to appoint a vicar, who better than a man like you?” ^[4]

One might object that rhetorical exaggeration is to be expected from a Christian moralist, especially one who knew, as Erasmus did, that unfavorable comparisons with unbelievers had been a staple of Christian preaching since the time of the Fathers: “The virtuous acts of pagans are a sharper spur to goodness in ourselves” than are the good deeds of Christians, “when we reflect what a disgrace it is that a heart illumined by the light of the Gospel should not see what was clearly seen by them with only nature’s candle to show them the way.” ^[5] As for the special case of Julius Exclusus, the satirist must have license for hyperbole and ridicule, else the world will have no satire. But it seems that Erasmus was not just interested in rhetorical effect, that he truly did see Julius II as the most wicked pope of all ages. The proof is that he was ready time and again to believe absolutely the worst of certain types of men thought to have power or influence. This more general point can be established by briefly reviewing what he has to say about monks and especially mendicant friars, about the politics of his native Low Countries, about the papacy of Julius’s successor, Leo X (especially his 1518 plans for a crusade), and about Christian Europe’s despised Jewish minority.

On Monks and “Mendicant Tyrants”

What exactly Erasmus’s views on monastic life were has been a matter for some dispute. Some modern scholars, like many of his contemporaries, have accused him of rejecting monasticism in principle and not just criticizing its abuses, despite his protestations to the contrary. He does have warm words for the monasticism of ancient times and for the modern Carthusians, an eremitical congregation whose austerity was widely respected even in the anticlerical atmosphere of early sixteenth-century Europe.^[6] Otherwise it is indeed hard to find in his writings an endorsement of contemporary monasticism which carries conviction. He was at all times severely critical of what he saw as the religious fear with which modern monks tenaciously adhered to even the least of their “ceremonies” or ritual obligations. The Enchiridion, for example, excoriated the “superstition” with which “many monks” observed “certain petty ceremonies invented by ordinary men” and the “hatred” with which “they demand the same things from others.” When called to account for such seeming attacks on monasticism as an institution he would respond that he was merely pointing out abuses in a way of life whose basic principles he endorsed. In his letter to Volz, the preface to the 1518 edition of the Enchiridion, Erasmus professes to respond to those who “interpret the principles of this small book” as “turning men’s minds away from monastic life.” Yet the paragraphs that follow say nothing that could possibly encourage anyone to join a contemporary religious order; all of Erasmus’s praise is reserved for the early history of Christian monasticism, when monks “lived in sandy wastes and deserts” and sought only to live “a life according to the teaching of the Gospel in liberty of spirit,” long before the world became filled with monasteries “whose ways have sunk lower than the laity” and with “men called monks who spend all their time in the very heart of worldly business and exercise a kind of despotism [tyrannidem] in human affairs.” Similarly, in extolling the monastic life as practiced by St. Jerome, his Life of Jerome notes that “the life of a monk was far different at that time from what we see today, trammeled as it is by ceremonial formality.” ^[7]

What Erasmus truly thought about the monasticism of his day is perhaps best expressed in an unpublished letter to Maarten Lips, the Augustinian canon who in Erasmus’s absences from Leuven was a reliable source of information about academic politics. As Lips wrote in the letterbook in which his copy of this letter from Erasmus is preserved, he had written to Erasmus referring to his “regrets” about the vow of celibacy “for I was afraid that he would think I made light of him if I appeared quite satisfied with my vows.” This was Erasmus’s response:

I do not approve of your regrets; so far are they from doing good that they may double your grievances. Though I should have no misgivings in dissuading a young man of promise from putting his neck into your noose, I would not dare persuade anyone who was once in the net to break out, unless some chance of freedom should present itself, so that it might seem heaven’s doing. So many are the traps and barricades with which those Pharisees of yours have fenced in their despotism [tyrannidem].

Both parts of his injunction to Lips should be taken seriously: one may not cast off the yoke of vows “unless some chance of freedom should present itself,” but a grievous yoke it is, far different from the mild yoke of which Jesus spoke in the Gospel.^[8]

The letter in which Erasmus petitioned Pope Leo X for (among other things) a renewal of his dispensation from the obligation of wearing monastic dress seems to have provided an occasion for venting some personal feelings. Whatever the actual circumstances of his entry into the cloister may have been, he was surely thinking of himself when he described monastic efforts to recruit boys “of unusual gifts or honorable birth” as “more monstrous than any form of kidnapping,” for “these skillful actors contrive to label as piety what is really a crime. One must flee to Christ, they say, even if it means trampling on one’s family.” He did not reject the possibility that some who take the cowl are inspired by the spirit of Christ, but “much the largest crowd is moved by folly or ignorance or desperation or a desire for idleness and good dinners.” Here one meets again the allegedly hypocritical “barbarians” who bedeviled Erasmus’s studies at Steyn and were the target of his Antibarbarorum Liber. Indeed, he believed, such was the low state of discipline in most monasteries that “in comparison with them there is more sobriety and more innocence in a brothel.” Yet monks “pride themselves on their ceremonies like the Pharisees, locating the whole of religion in externals and for the sake of ceremonial whipping boys to death every day.”

For the protection of their false reputation for piety, no stratagem was too wicked, especially for the mendicant orders. Swiss Cardinal Matthäus Schiner of Sion (Valais), who as a servitor of the Habsburgs had occasion to visit Brussels, was Erasmus’s source for the story about a friary where “the Dominicans buried a man alive because his father, who was a knight, was demanding the return of the son whom they had carried off by stealth.” It was perhaps also from the cardinal that he heard how “in Poland a certain nobleman, who in his cups had fallen asleep in a church, saw two Franciscans after the nightly office buried alive.” Schiner was well versed in such matters through his involvement in the notorious trial of four Dominicans at Bern; a lay brother, found to have fabricated a story about apparitions of the Blessed Mother, accused the four friars of masterminding the plot. Erasmus tells a similar story of an admired mentor from his days with Bishop Hendrik van Bergen, the Franciscan Jean Vitrier, who sought to reform a small convent where discipline was “so far collapsed that it was more truly a brothel than a nunnery.” When eight recalcitrant nuns lay in wait for the zealous preacher and “strangled him with their scarves…until by some chance they were interrupted,” Vitrier knew that his enemy, a Dominican theologian and suffragan bishop, was “responsible for this conspiracy.” ^[9]

But we must remember that accusations of poisoning and other devilish tricks were rather thick on the ground in this era and, as in the case of the fabled crimes of Cesare Borgia and his sister Lucrezia, have often not withstood critical scrutiny. As for the Bern Dominicans, burned at the stake in 1509, some scholars now believe they were victims of a hasty decision by judges (including Schiner) who were predisposed to believe the charges against them. Moreover, though Erasmus showed little interest in witchcraft, these reports about Franciscans and Dominicans, seemingly anchored by facts (for example, “a knight,” “in Poland”), bear a disquieting similarity to the highly detailed reports presented in witchcraft treatises of the later sixteenth century, some by the greatest scholars of that era, like Jean Bodin.^[10] The truth is that learned folk, like everyone else, can choose to suspend critical judgment and believe what they want to believe.

Finally, Erasmus saw something sinister in the desire of layfolk to participate more fully in the life of the church by imitating monastic practices, like following the book of hours in the vernacular (there were now many such editions). For him it was a matter not of imitation but of entrapment. Though he did not condemn all mendicant friars, he was certain there were “very many” who “for gain and despotic power, deliberately ensnare the consciences of men.” For example, as one who displayed a rare willingness to recognize that orthodox dogma had evolved historically,^[11] Erasmus did not think it should matter whether auricular confession was instituted by the church rather than, according to the traditional view, by Christ himself. But when “certain men among us” vehemently protested the idea that the sacrament had not been instituted by Christ, Erasmus pointed out that they were “afraid lest their profit [quaestus] be taken away” (confession was a specialty of the friars). Similarly, Erasmus blamed the tumult associated with Luther on “certain men [who] saw their profit [quaestus] threatened by the purer doctrine of Christ,” which had no room for indulgences and dispensations, “nor for consciences falsely ensnared.” For proof of such greed he noted the cult of preposterous relics, like milk from the Virgin Mary or fragments of the true cross, “which if piled in a heap could scarcely be accommodated by a freight ship.” Such abuses were not just tolerated by the clergy as a way of indulging the religious feelings of simple folk (plebecula) but rather “described as the peak of religious devotion, because of the greed of priests, and the hypocrisy of certain monks, who are nourished by the foolishness of the people.” ^[12]

Erasmus was hardly unique in harboring deep suspicions about the friars. After a slow start in the Low Countries, Dominicans and Franciscans, especially in the stricter Observant congregations, had flourished during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, but by Erasmus’s generation they were also provoking strong opposition, especially in towns that already had a surfeit of tax-exempt religious property and could not readily tolerate another convent or friary. One sometimes gets the impression that Erasmus would fain have seen the secular clergy recoup the role they formerly enjoyed in urban religious life before the friars gained such prominence as confessors and circuit preachers. For example, in the case of a Holland Franciscan who continued attacking him from the pulpit despite prohibitions from the magistrates, Erasmus saw “no steps one can take” except to cut off the income of such men by refusing the begging friars admission to decent households, by encouraging people to “confess to their parish priest,” and by depriving preachers of an audience by quitting the church “when they start ranting in this fashion.” ^[13] From this perspective it is evident that despite his vision of a Christendom in which bitterness and division would be dissolved in common allegiance to the philosophy of Christ, Erasmus was himself very much a part of a contentiously corporate social framework in which “orders” within the church (like the secular clergy and the mendicants) complained about their rivals’ devious tricks, just like rival “orders” (humanists and scholastics) within the smaller world of the university. Finally, it is now clear that Erasmus’s view of “mendicant tyrants” as the main opponents of his program of learning and reform had a deeper background. For him many or most of the friars (he would always add a qualification) were not just enemies of fine letters, they were enemies of Christ.

The Habsburg Government of the Low Countries

Just as he gave credence to charges of criminal behavior by the friars, Erasmus readily accepted rumors that painted the government of the Low Countries as bent on filching the wealth of an industrious people by any means possible. For the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I, the great adversary of the Netherlands court faction led by Chièvres and Le Sauvage, Erasmus could barely disguise his contempt. When a largely English army jointly led by Henry VIII and Maximilian captured the French city of Tournai (1514), the English king, reportedly angered by insults from townsmen, insisted on a siege to satisfy his honor, even thought the city had wished to surrender at once. But Erasmus nonetheless made Maximilian the prince who vindicated his honor in this way. In a thinly veiled reference to Maximilian and the sums he demanded of the Netherlands estates for governing the territory during his grandson’s minority (1506–1514), one of the 1515 adages notes that although nature does not allow the obnoxious eagle to hatch more than two eaglets at a time, “this practice is more to be desired than observed in Roman eagles, for whom there is neither any measure nor any end to fleecing the people.” Another 1515 adage seems to allude to the great nobles of the Habsburg-Burgundian Netherlands, often portrayed wearing the distinctive gold-chain necklaces that marked them as members of the Order of the Golden Fleece: “nowhere will you find less true nobility” than among those braggart dignitaries resplendent in their “golden collars.” ^[14] Not only were princes greedy, but Erasmus held the firm conviction that they regularly “colluded,” making war solely to extract more funds from their subjects. “They speak of just war when princes collude in a game [inter se colludunt], of which the outcome is to exhaust and oppress the commonwealth”; when all other means of filling the prince’s fisc have failed, “war is the excuse put forward: the generals all play the same game [colludunt], and the unfortunate public is sucked to the marrow.” ^[15]

Erasmus spoke freely of such matters only in letters to close friends or confidants. To Thomas More (March 1517) he connected Maximilian’s presence in Brussels with an armed band, as well as mysterious troop movements in the nearby countryside, with deliberations in the provincial states of Brabant, where the third or urban estate^[16] were considering a request for a “vast sum of money” to which the clerical and noble estates (“the only people, that is, who will pay nothing”) had already given their consent: “I pity this poor country, gnawed by so many vultures! How happy it would be, if only the cities could agree among themselves.” To More again a few months later he reported (incorrectly) that the emperor had prevented Charles’s government from signing a peace with the duke of Guelders, France’s ally and the great enemy of the Netherlands; according to Erasmus, Maximilian acted as he did “for fear that we have no war anywhere.” To Beatus Rhenanus in Basel (August 1517) he reported on the rampage through Holland that summer by a mercenary army known as the Black Band, which put to the sack both the notable but unwalled city of Alkmaar and the small walled town of Asperen. The Black Band was in the pay of the duke of Guelders, but whether Erasmus knew this or not he thought there was more to the story: because the provincial states of Holland had refused to grant a subsidy, which he (incorrectly) described as intended to pay for Charles’s impending journey to Spain, “the storm was deliberately unleashed” on the Hollanders: “Everyone can see it was a trick, but it is not easy to find a remedy, nor safe to speak the truth.” This campaign was still in his mind when in August 1519 he commented to Georg Spalatin, Luther’s friend, on a mercenary force that was gathering in Württemberg, not far from the frontiers of the Netherlands: “Many people are still terrified by the example of Asperen, which was annihilated two years ago.” According to some, Erasmus said, the army in Württemberg was being kept in readiness by the powers-that-be “so as to have a weapon handy to oppress the common people if they show any reluctance to do as they are told.” In any case he did not view the outlook as good, for “I see how power is being gathered into a few men’s heads, while the relics of our traditional democracy [democratia] are being done away with.” ^[17]

Erasmus allowed only some of these opinions to enter the public domain, and then only at the right time. He did publish the second letter to More and the letter to Spalatin, but only in a collection that appeared eight months after Maximilian’s death, the Farrago Nova Epistolarum. More explicit comments, as in the first letter to More and the letter to Beatus, he never published. Despite some factual errors in what Erasmus says, his familiarity with the workings of government shows that he was either reasonably well informed about Low Countries politics or frequented the company of men who were. But there is no shred of documentary evidence to support his picture of the deeper significance of these events. Many of his claims will strike a modern historian (especially a historian of state finance) as ludicrous: that rulers still indebted from previous wars could hope to make more money from war taxes than they spent on war costs; that any government would connive at the destruction of the tax-paying capacities of its own subjects; or that the Habsburg government would keep troops in the field as a way of bending the will of urban deputies in the provincial states, when it could do so much more cheaply by judiciously timed special concessions to the cities that had voting rights—as Erasmus himself hinted in wishing the towns could stick together.^[18]

The more interesting point is that Erasmus’s way of thinking about such matters was, as he suggests, widely shared, at least in the Low Countries. Adrianus Barlandus, a friend and sometime professor in the Collegium Trilingue at Leuven, writing of the sack of a Brabant town by a Guelders army (1507), imputed a sinister motive to the Habsburg commander who waited passively nearby (in fact, as we now know, he had orders not to risk his forces in battle). Several other chroniclers, writing in Latin or Dutch, assert that major invasions of Holland by forces loyal to Guelders (1517, 1528) had the secret connivance of the Habsburg government. One could cite similar suspicions about the government from authors writing in other parts of Europe and under other governments.^[19] Erasmus’s comments and those of Low Countries chroniclers are in fact but tiny fragments of a vast and as yet unwritten history whose topic would be not the actual harm that rulers have done to their subjects but the much greater harm that their subjects have suspected rulers of wanting to do. Since suspicions are likely to be enhanced among those who have some knowledge of a situation but cannot control it, the Low Countries region, with its strong tradition of participation in affairs of state by urban elites, would have a prominent place in this hypothetical history.

The Netherlands provincial states, unlike many other such bodies at the time, regularly attached strategic conditions to their consent to subsidies (for example, that an army invade enemy territory, not just defend the frontier) and claimed a share in the management of war finance. Deputies from the states served as commissioners of muster, they badgered commanders for not observing the conditions set by the states, and they demanded and sometimes got access to government account books to determine whether their money was in fact being spent for the present war instead of for paying off debts from the last one.

Urban deputies’ mistrust of the government was all the stronger because Maximilian and Charles were absentee rulers; because provincial states had a keen sense of local interests, less so for the interests of the larger polity; and because of the social gap between Netherlandish-speaking burghers in the most populous provinces and members of a largely French-speaking high aristocracy who served the Habsburg dynasty just as their ancestors had served the Burgundian court. Erasmus’s comments reflect a decidedly urban and states perspective, despite his connections to the court through Le Sauvage. Thinking back to a protracted civil war among Holland’s towns, extending into his own lifetime, he blames not the bellicosity of the towns but the negligence of their ruler, Duke Charles the Bold of Burgundy (d. 1477). According to Querela Pacis, “the majority of the common people loathe war and pray for peace; only a handful of individuals, whose evil joys depend on general misery, desire war.” One of the 1515 adages laments that there is no “line of Brutus” to rise up against the sort of princes “and princes’ chief ministers” who are “cruel in their love of destruction, merciless in their tyranny.” Such men see clearly that “the one remaining sheet-anchor of public prosperity is the restraint of despotic power by honorable agreement between citizens and between cities [civitatum].” Ordinary property holders in the Netherlands were understandably resentful of the practice whereby noble commanders on both sides of a war made private truces to spare their own lands from fire and sword, and this complaint too one hears from Erasmus: if war must come, let it fall on the heads of those responsible, but as things are now “princes wage war unscathed and their generals thrive on it, while the main flood of misfortune sweeps over the peasants and humble citizens.” ^[20] If Erasmus was wholly one-sided, even naive in his view of conflicts between the provincial states and the Habsburg dynasty, he faithfully reflects something of the enduring tension that, under still more aggravated circumstances, erupted in the Revolt of the Netherlands some thirty years after his death. Paradoxically, he was perhaps nowhere more a Netherlander than in his profound suspicion of the Netherlands government.

Pope Leo X

In a comment meant for public consumption, Erasmus described Giovanni de’ Medici, Pope Leo X, as the opposite of Julius II: this learned man and friend of humanists would calm the storms of war unleashed by Julius and usher in “an age of gold” to replace an “age of iron.” ^[21] At the very least, he needed good relations with the Curia for papal endorsement of his Novum Instrumentum, as a shield against the criticism he expected, and for the dispensation removing canonical obstacles to his holding ecclesiastical preferment. In this context the publication of Julius Exclusus (1517) was a distinct embarrassment. When a servant-messenger reported to Erasmus in August 1517 that the Julius was being widely read in Cologne, perhaps still in manuscript, he wrote humanist friends to “get this kind of impious stuff suppressed before it can be printed” or to “have it suppressed, or destroyed, or anything else there may be of the same sort.” ^[22] In Cologne the following year, en route to or from Basel, he took occasion “in person” to “rebut” the “shameless calumny” that “that pamphlet fit only to be burned was written by me.” To friends in Rome he sent disclaimers, though couched in such a way as to leave the door ajar for a surmise that he might have had something to do with the Julius: “The man who wrote it was a fool, the man who published it deserves a heavier penalty.” ^[23]

Erasmus may have had doubts about Leo when he learned in July 1517 that an old friend and patron, Raffaele Riario, was one of three cardinals arrested for complicity in a plot to assassinate the pope.^[24] But he was clearly convinced of the pope’s duplicity by the time he wrote five letters to friends in England, dated from about 22 February to about 5 March 1518, none of which he later published. The burden of these letters was that “the pope and the emperor have a new game on foot: they now use war against the Turks as an excuse, though they have something very different in mind.” His reference is to Leo X’s Consultationes of November 1517, sent to invite the major courts of Europe to join in a crusade to counter recent Turkish successes in the East. An essential premise of these discussions was a marriage alliance cementing the reconciliation between the French king Francis I (1515–1547) and the Medici pope, who at the beginning of his reign had allied with Spain, France’s enemy, as a means of restoring his family to power in Florence.^[25] This Medici family connection was the focus of Erasmus’s suspicions. “From Switzerland” he was informed that the real object of the pope’s machinations was to end Spanish rule in the Kingdom of Naples and place on the throne his nephew, Lorenzo de’ Medici, whose new bride was a kinswoman of Francis I. To Thomas More Erasmus sent a copy of the Consultationes, spinning out for More’s amusement a fictive papal regulation commanding that wives and husbands “may not even exchange kisses until by the mercy of Christ this terrible war is successfully concluded.” As if suggesting an antidote to the “new plays” being staged by pope and princes, he also enclosed a copy of Luther’s Ninety-five Theses. Truly, he wrote John Colet, “the Roman Curia has abandoned any sense of shame,” and “if this turmoil goes any further, the rule of Turks will be more tolerable than the rule of Christians like them.” He confided these fears to friends in England apparently because he was in these weeks thinking of settling among the English, “a people on the edge of the world, and perhaps the least infected province of Christianity,” where he might find a “retreat from the corruption of the whole world.” ^[26]

Where Erasmus might have got special interpretation of papal and princely machinations he so readily accepted is not altogether clear. Beatus Rhenanus, in Basel, had evidently heard the same reports, for in an unpublished letter to him Erasmus could simply remark that “Pope and kings regard the people not as human beings but as beasts for the market,” without having to explain his meaning. Cardinal Schiner, based in Zurich and (unlike Beatus) Swiss himself, is a possible source, in light of his well-known antipathy to France and to the French influence that was then paramount in Switzerland, except for Zurich. If Erasmus did get his information from Schiner, he probably gave it a twist, casting in the villain’s role Pope Leo himself, then the emperor and other “princes,” but not France, which he was used to seeing as a victim of scheming by the war party in the Netherlands. In any case he could scarcely have received this picture of international developments from regions close to the Ottoman threat, like Austria or Italy. Friends based in Venice and Rome conveyed something of the alarm widely felt in Christian lands after Sultan Selim I crushed the armies of the Mamluk empire (1516–1517), whose control of Egypt and Syria had hitherto formed a counterweight to Ottoman power in the eastern Mediterranean.^[27] In letters that he published Erasmus at least refrained from expressing the full measure of his suspicion. “Rumors” of Turkish military preparations were “suspected by most people, who have so often discovered before now that while the oarsmen face one way the boat goes another,” an allusion to the many fruitless crusade plans over the previous century. Even if the rumors proved correct, “movements on the part of the Turks need give us no cause for fear, if only the Christian princes would be of one mind.” ^[28]

But Erasmus’s reaction to the imperial diet of Augsburg (August 1518), when the Dominican Cardinal Cajetan sought approval for a crusade tithe, shows him as convinced as ever that a devilish plot was afoot. An unpublished letter to Colet described a topsy-turvy world in which “the princes, together with the pope, and I dare say the Grand Turk as well, are all in league against the well-being of the common people.” ^[29] If Erasmus was not alone in charging the Netherlands government and its enemies with “collusion” in making war, he had even more company, especially in Germany, in his jaundiced view of papal crusading efforts. Germany in the early decades of the sixteenth century was rife with antipapal sentiment, fanned by Maximilian’s conflicts with Rome and by German humanists who in their search for a proud national past hit upon noble medieval emperors ignominiously forced to bow to the yoke of papal tyranny. The frontispiece of Erasmus’s 1519 Novum Testamentum showed (probably without his knowledge) Arminius, the annihilator of three Roman legions (the battle of the Teutoberg Forest, A.D. 9), striking off the heads of a hydra; it need hardly be said that the monster, this primeval enemy of German freedom, was labeled “Roma.” ^[30] But unlike Luther, whom some humanists were already styling the liberator of Germany (eleutherios in Greek), Erasmus could not bring himself to think of the papacy as Antichrist, no matter the depths of wickedness to which individual popes might sink.^[31] Nonetheless he and Luther were as one in regarding the Roman Curia as a sink of iniquity.

The Anti-Semitism of Erasmus

During the fall of 1517 Erasmus learned of a new book published in Cologne by the inquisitor Johann Pfefferkorn, who was both the chief adversary of Johann Reuchlin, the humanist Hebrew scholar, and a fanatic opponent of Jewish learning. The book contained a slighting reference to Erasmus, though without mentioning his name; Erasmus had it translated from German into Latin and sent to his friend John Fisher, bishop of Rochester, an admirer of Reuchlin.^[32] Letters from this period (November 1517) to German humanist friends, none of which he later published, are replete with vicious attacks on Pfefferkorn as a converted Jew: “He had no other motive in getting himself dipped in the font than to be able to deliver more dangerous attacks on Christianity, and by mixing with us to infect the entire folk with his Jewish poison”; “what could these circumcised wretches hope for more, or Satan their leader, than to see the unity of simple Christians rent in twain” by the Reuchlin affair; and “if only the only saying were not true, that a bad Jew makes a worse Christian.” ^[33] It has been noted that Erasmus’s correspondence contains no previous outburst of this kind. Nonetheless, the notion that a bad Jew makes a worse Christian is evident elsewhere, as in his disdain for the New Christians, Spaniards whose ancestors (like the parents of Juan Luis Vives) had converted from Judaism. In his arguments for peace between France and the Low Countries, Erasmus liked to point out that France was the only Christian country not “infected” by heretics or schismatics, nor by “Jews” and “half-Jewish marranos” (an insulting term for New Christians). Even in supporting Reuchlin for trying to see to it that “the Jews should not suffer more than is just [ne quid praeter aequum patiantur],” Erasmus takes it for granted that no Christian will have a good word for Jews: “If it is Christian to detest the Jews, on this count we are all good Christians, and to spare.” ^[34]

In an essay published in 1969 Swiss historian Guido Kisch opened a scholarly debate on anti-Semitism in Erasmus, finding in passages like those just quoted a “deep-rooted and boundless hatred of Jews” that aligned Erasmus with decidedly anti-Jewish writers of the time rather than with more tolerant Christian authors like Reuchlin. The issue is complicated by Erasmus’s persistent references to the “religion of ceremonies” that he so opposes as “Jewish,” or as a new form of Judaism. One explanation is that “Judaism” for Erasmus meant not the living religion, of which sixteenth-century Christians were wholly ignorant, but the self-righteous punctiliousness of the ancient Pharisees, denounced by Jesus in the Gospels. Seizing on this ambiguity, a defender of Erasmus has argued that even remarks that seem directed against Jews are in fact expressions of a religious “anti-Mosaïsm” that has nothing to do with actual Jews. But another scholar discounts the theological context and takes passages dealing with the “religion of ceremonies” as evidence that Erasmus’s hatred of Jews had become an “obsession.” Historian Heiko A. Oberman strikes a proper balance but one that is hardly favorable to Erasmus: Erasmus indeed hated Jews, and his thought was also permeated by a “virulent theological anti-Judaism” that was consistent with contemporary Christian fears of actual Judaism, even if it targeted Christian legalism rather than Jews.^[35]

Scholars have been reluctant to recognize Erasmus’s hatred of the Jews because it seems so inconsistent with his earnest efforts to forestall or at least mitigate the increasingly violent intra-Christian polemics of the early Reformation era. But the apostle of concord was also a great hater of the evil designs he saw lurking beneath the self-professed good intentions of mendicant friars, princes, and popes. This readiness to believe the worst of certain kinds of people provides a context in which the fantasies of a Christian anti-Semitism seem, alas, perfectly natural. Erasmus’s comments about Pfefferkorn make it clear that in his mind “Jews” in some general sense were, through Pfefferkorn, conspiring to sow dissension among Christians, possibly even to subject Christians to the tyranny of “Jewish” ceremonies. To be sure, Erasmus’s denunciation of Jews was more global than his denunciation of hypocritical friars and princes and popes; in this one case he never (to my knowledge) qualified his remarks by saying that he was only speaking about evil Jews, not the good ones. Still, anti-Semitism may be counted as not the least but certainly the saddest example of Erasmus’s tendency to acquiesce in thinking of certain groups as sources of evil, then to give credence to “informed” reports of their devilish plots.

In the various kinds of fear or suspicion depicted here, Erasmus was hardly an original thinker setting out his own vision of the world. He was instead a barometer for different segments of contemporary opinion: for the unceasing distrust of the mendicant orders among secular clergy; for the sullen certitude of Low Countries taxpayers about betrayal in high places; for the antipapalism of an age when secular governments commanded increasingly more respect and the clergy increasingly less; and for the prejudices of sixteenth-century Christians, for whom hatred of the infidel (especially Jews and Muslims) was considered a virtue. Erasmus displayed his imaginative powers by fusing these disparate conventional themes into a single pattern of belief and behavior by which Christians were alienated from their true spiritual heritage and set on a path of wickedness: this he called the religion of ceremonies. He defined “ceremonies” in the Education of the Christian Prince (Institutio Principis Christiani) when he warned against identifying the Christian religion with “mere ceremonies, that is, precepts no longer seriously observed, and the constitutions of the church.” For Erasmus, the environment in which princes were raised was thoroughly corrupted by the hypocritical courtesies of ambitious courtiers and by the “magic superstition” of those who made it a crime to address a pope or a king with the wrong epithet: “Who introduced this superstition about titles into the world? Doubtless that pharisaical race of men who by other ceremonies and by the deception of false teaching [doctrina] and false religion have long tricked the gullible human race.” ^[36] This pharisaical race wore cowls, for, as Erasmus wrote Servatius Roger, his former friend and now the prior of the monastery to which he refused to return, “this belief [in monastic ceremonies] deceives and imposes on you, and not you alone, but almost all other men.” Jesus’ proclamation that his yoke is light (Matt. 11 : 30) was vital to Erasmus’s thinking here; his annotation on this passage points a finger at the popes who proclaimed regulations on external behavior as laws of the church and at the mendicant orders who spread among men the poisonous belief that such “ceremonies” were the heart of religion: “What would St. Augustine say could he see the free Christian people” caught up in “so many laws, ceremonies, and snares,” oppressed by the tyranny not just of secular princes but of cardinals and popes, “and beyond that of their hangers-on [satellites, that is, the friars], who having put on the mask of religious life serve the interests of their bellies?” As for “Judaism,” when “certain men abuse even the sacraments instituted for our salvation for their own profit, for pomp, for tyranny, for oppressing simple folk [plebecula],” the result is that Christians are more anxious even than Jews in the observance of laws relating to such practices as fasting and the keeping of feast days.^[37]

Whether or not Erasmus was correct in diagnosing sixteenth-century Catholicism as suffused with a morbid anxiety about the externals of religion (an “obsessive-compulsive neurosis,” as one scholar has put it), the question is of great interest. Certainly a number of modern historians have noted a felt excess of the religious sense of guilt as a fundamental characteristic of the age and as an explanation for contemporaries’ experience of Luther’s theology of grace as a form of liberation.^[38] But Erasmus came to this profound question with something of an axe to grind; his perception of what religion meant to the plebecula and even to fellow monks was filtered through a personal experience in which monastic religion of a certain type stood as the principal obstacle to true piety as well as to genuine learning. By posing the problem of religious guilt in the way he did, he was able to trace the wicked behavior of Christians to a false version of Christian doctrina: the “religion of ceremonies” was only too efficacious in people’s lives because it had been taught only too well. The implication was that Christian doctrina truly understood and rightly taught would have a very different result. Erasmus’s critique of “ceremonies” served in his mind thus to clear the way for his exposition of that true and saving doctrina, the philosophia Christi, the only remedy for the ills of Christendom.

Notes