9. In Defense of Bonae Literae

From Erasmus’s perspective “mendicant tyrants” and other enemies of fine letters were especially dangerous because of their great influence at the centers of intellectual, religious, and political authority. Scholastic philosophers and theologians controlled the traditional university curriculum; mendicant friars wielded great influence with common folk because of their prestige as preachers and they often enjoyed unique influence in the courts of Europe through their role as confessors to princes. From Erasmus’s correspondence one can see that he paid such men the compliment of adopting a strategy to deal with them. First, he took pains not to give the “barbarians” a “handle” for attack. Sometimes this was a matter of simple tact, like checking with a mutual friend on rumors that he had been criticized by a fellow humanist rather than addressing the alleged offender directly, thus possibly giving ill-wishers a chance to crow over another humanist quarrel.^[1] Sometimes it was a matter of writing in such a way that his full opinions were obscured, if not actually contradicted. “Dissimulation” (dissimulatio) of this kind, Erasmus believed, was permissible to Christians and even warranted by the New Testament. Second, he did not allow direct attacks on himself to go unanswered. Many (though not all) of the criticisms of his works were inspired by ignorance, and Erasmus had a knack for bringing the foolishness of such carping to the attention of dispassionate readers. Finally, he spent a great deal of time cultivating secular rulers and princes of the church, whose common duty it was to defend learning as a public good by squelching its enemies. He had some successes in this regard, but they were in the end overmatched by his failure, following the death of his patron, Chancellor Le Sauvage (June 1518), to find consistent and reliable support in the entourage of Archduke Charles, king of Castile and Aragon, who following the imperial election of June 1519 became Holy Roman Emperor Charles V.

Dissimulatio

Many of the disputes between Erasmus and his critics led to an exchange of polemics (see Part III below), but others were apparently nipped in the bud by his consideration for the feelings of potential adversaries. For example, once he had determined that his Hieronymi Epistulae would be part of the edition of Jerome’s works planned by the Froben press, he made a point of asking for advice on certain textual difficulties from Gregor Reisch, a learned Carthusian who had been a principal adviser on the Jerome project. In addition, he tried as best he could to satisfy Maarten van Dorp’s critique of his Moriae Encomium, and despite his continuing doubts about Dorp’s loyalties, he avoided giving offense by deleting criticism of the young Leuven theologian from letters he sent on for publication in the Farrago Epistolarum (October 1519). To a friend of a scholar who aspired to the chair in Greek at the new Collegium Trilingue but whose candidacy Erasmus did not support, he wrote implying that the candidacy might succeed “unless some evil genius among the theologians prevents it.” ^[2]

Dissimulatio was Erasmus’s term for what might be called strategic tact, that is, refraining from stating views that would likely provoke a quarrel, but without belying one’s true opinion. In his annotation to Gal. 2 : 11, where Paul tells how he reproved Peter for abandoning the practice of eating with gentile Christians, Erasmus noted St. Thomas Aquinas’s opinion that Peter had sinned because of the scandal occasioned by his dissimulatio, that is, his feigned acceptance of Jewish Christian scruples about eating with gentiles. Yet in Erasmus’s view Peter “would have sinned more gravely by not dissimulating, for he would have given greater scandal to his own people, for whom he ought to have had more consideration.” At Acts 17 : 23 Erasmus followed Jerome in approving Paul’s “pious cunning” in his sermon on the Areopagus, referring to an altar “to unknown gods” as if the inscription read “to the Unknown God.” Such “politeness [civilitas],” which involved “dissimulating many things,” could well be imitated by those whose task it was to bring princes “to a better mind”; thus good councillors may “insinuate themselves into the affection of the prince,” provided that “they not be authors of things that are plainly evil, though at certain things they will have to connive against their will.” So too in Peter’s preaching, as reported in Acts, “he does not yet declare that Christ is both God and man; this mystery he reserves until its proper time. For the present he calls him a just man and declares him to be the Messiah.” ^[3]

We can see Erasmus in his published letters practicing dissimulatio in his own way, especially as the growing controversy surrounding Luther in late 1520/early 1521 put him under pressure to take a public stand. In private letters he had written that the papal monarchy in its present form was “the plague of Christendom.” Now he declared his allegiance to the Roman See in published letters to Cardinal Lorenzo Campeggi and to Bishop Luigi Marliano of Tuy in Galicia, an influential figure at the Habsburg court, but in such a way that friends could read between the lines. He will not oppose “the Roman Church, which does not differ, I conceive, from the Catholic Church”; “the Church of Rome I recognize and think it does not disagree with the Catholic Church. From that church death shall not tear me asunder, unless the church is sundered openly from Christ.” With the reservation indicated in the last phrase, Erasmus was professing loyalty to the one Catholic Church, only secondarily to the papacy that presided over it. This distinction is clear also from other expressions in published letters of the same period: “I am not impious enough to dissent from the Catholic Church, I am not ungrateful enough to dissent from [Pope] Leo, of whose support and exceptional kindness to me I have personal experience”; and “I will not abandon the peace of the Catholic Church, the truth of the Gospel, and the dignity of the Roman pontiff.” ^[4] Anyone who could read Latin would understand that impiety and ingratitude were not offenses of the same gravity, and those who knew Erasmus knew that for him the peace of the church and the dignity of the pope were not values of the same weight. Similarly, though he had co-authored an anonymous tract (the Consilium cujusdam) attempting to discredit the papal bull excommunicating Luther, Erasmus could write in a published letter to a Dominican critic that “I never said a word to any mortal man” about the bull, presumably because a written comment would not have been “said.” ^[5]Dissimulatio involved an element of casuistry, but casuistry was in this case the honorable refuge of a thoughtful scholar caught between the terrible simplicity of Luther’s crusade against the Roman Antichrist and the terrifying clarity of a campaign against heresy for which the judicial machinery of church and state was now beginning to mobilize.

Erasmus and his Critics

There is little need to belabor the point that Erasmus was extraordinarily sensitive to criticism, even if it came indirectly, for instance, as slighting comments in printed works about an unnamed but nonetheless recognizable innovator or as verbal aspersions others were reported to have made.^[6] Intellectual pioneers as clever as Erasmus are usually well endowed with amour propre and can hardly be expected to suffer in good grace the kind of stupidities sometimes visited on Erasmus in the name of defending orthodoxy. The Dominican Vincentius Theodorici, one of the younger members of the Leuven theology faculty, complained about a passage where he thought Erasmus had called St. Thomas Aquinas (also a Dominican) “undeserving” (indignus) until “a theologian who knew some Latin” explained to him that the passage actually said of St. Thomas that he “did not deserve to live in such times,” that is, that he was “worthy of a happier intellectual climate.” ^[7] At Cambridge the members of a certain college “steeped in theology” were said to have sworn a solemn oath not to allow Erasmus’s Novum Instrumentum to be brought within the precincts of the college “by horse, boat, wagon, or porter.” In Bruges the Franciscan Nicolas Burreau denounced Erasmus and Luther from the pulpit as “beasts, donkeys, storks, and blockheads,” but when the town pensionary asked him what he found in Erasmus’s books to justify the charge: “‘I have not read Erasmus’s books,’ said he, ‘I meant to read the [New Testament] paraphrases, but the Latin was most lofty, so I am afraid he may be able to slip into some heresy, with all that lofty Latin.’” ^[8] Little wonder that Erasmus could think his most vociferous critics would be men who had never made their way through the Latin of his New Testament, much less the Greek: “If he puts a bold face on it and says he has read it, urge him to produce a passage he disapproves of. You will find no one who can.” ^[9]

Learned critics were of course not so easy to dismiss. Responding to the Leuven theologian Jacobus Latomus, Erasmus had to rein in the potentially anti-intellectual implications of his critique of the scholastic understanding of theology; he had never said that to be a theologian meant “nothing else” than to burn with the love of God (“or if I did say it, I am more than a little sorry”) but, alluding to De doctrina Christiana, he also pointed out that “before Augustine teaches us” about Scripture he asks us “to bring to the study of sacred letters a soul that is pure and as far as possible free of all vices.” ^[10] In 1517, in the second edition of his commentary on the Pauline epistles, the respected French humanist Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples vehemently defended his reading of Heb. 2 : 7, as against Erasmus’s criticism of it in the 1516 Novum Instrumentum (for Lefèvre, God had made Christ “a little lower than God,” but Erasmus preferred “a little lower than the angels”). Erasmus was loath to start a controversy among humanists that would give their common enemies cause for rejoicing (letters he received from other humanists made the same point). Yet he could not ignore Lefèvre’s characterization as “impious” his statement that Christ in his suffering had been made not just lower than the angels but “among the most abject of men.” When Erasmus wrote his annotation on Heb. 2 : 7, he explains, he thought “it would serve the glory of Christ if I magnified as much as possible the humiliation he suffered on our behalf.” ^[11] Unfavorable reaction to Erasmus’s translation of the Greek logos by the Latin sermo (“speech,” instead of the traditional verbum or “word”) at John 1 : 1, “In the beginning was the Word,” induced him to issue a short Apologia. As he did against Lefèvre, he cited patristic precedent for his translation, as one would expect in a debate between scholars. But Erasmus could not refrain from suggesting that more was at stake: his enemies (including the English Franciscan Henry Standish and the Antwerp Carmelite Nicolaas Baechem) must have chosen his translation of this verse as a weapon “against the best kind of studies,” for “at the same time they all started shouting to the populace” about the difference between sermo and verbum.^[12] As for the young Greek scholar Edward Lee, such was Erasmus’s antagonism to his English critic that he could not see in him anything but a willing instrument of the mendicant tyrants and their allies: “I suspect he has sung this song either from hatred of me, or to please certain others, and one man in particular.” ^[13]

One thread that runs through these controversies is that Erasmus’s early critics had at best a slender appreciation of the philological problems his work sought to address. Yet another common theme is that Erasmus himself had little appreciation of the way what Wolfgang Capito once called his “wonderful gift of indirect expression” ^[14] could work against him. Erasmus did not think his warm praises for a theology of the heart had given Latomus cause to think he was denying the intellect its due, but he could not be sure. When he disagreed with Lefèvre on Heb. 2 : 7, he did so not just because of a recognized theological principle (that Christ had “emptied” himself of his divinity in becoming man) but also for the rhetorical purpose of “magnifying” this principle “as much as possible.” He could not understand Lefèvre’s attack on him, partly because of the verbal clues by which he had signaled, even in passages critical of Lefèvre, that he did not want a fight: though he could have raised many objections, he pointed out, “I dissimulated many things”; he cited Lefèvre “superfluously,” that is, praising him in places where he need not have mentioned him to make his point; finally, Lefèvre had also missed the “character of the language” by which he qualified certain statements, as in saying that St. Jerome “seems not altogether to have approved” an interpretation supported by Lefèvre.^[15] Such a careful wordsmith was too careful by half. In his own philological scholarship Erasmus exemplified the skill with which a finely honed critical mind infers shades of meaning from an ancient text. But he seems to have expected readers to bring to his own words the same dispassionate finesse. The dissimulatio by which Erasmus steered his own path between unacceptable alternatives was not the least of the reasons why he continued to have enemies.

The Politics of Reform

It was Erasmus’s good fortune that many of his humanist friends and admirers were in the service of princes temporal and ecclesiastical. He was therefore able to procure a letter from Pope Leo X for printing with his 1519 Novum Testamentum; the pope expressed “no little satisfaction” with the prospect of a revised and enriched edition: “Go forward then in this same spirit: work for the public good, and do all you can to bring so religious an undertaking into the light of day.” This valued endorsement came not by way of the cardinals Erasmus had met while in Rome but through a humanist friend from Bologna, Paolo Bombace, now secretary to Cardinal Lorenzo Pucci, who had Bombace’s draft of a papal letter to Erasmus “copied on parchment and sent to Pope Leo…to be examined and, unless he did not like it, sealed.” ^[16] Erasmus boasted of invitations or admiring letters from Francis I, king of France; Henry VIII, king of England; Duke Ernst of Bavaria; Elector Frederick the Wise of Saxony; Albrecht of Brandenburg, archbishop and later cardinal of Mainz; Philip of Burgundy, prince-bishop of Utrecht; Erard de la Marck, prince-bishop of Liège; Étienne Poncher, bishop of Paris; Cardinal Francisco Jimenez de Cisneros, archbishop of Toledo; Christoph von Utenheim, bishop of Basel; and his friend John Fisher, bishop of Rochester. His contacts with these great men were often mediated by humanists in their entourage, and in his published correspondence one sometimes finds back-to-back letters to the humanist and the bishop or the prince.^[17] With the court of Henry VIII Erasmus had connections through Thomas More, who joined the king’s council in 1518; through William Blount, Lord Mountjoy, once a pupil of Erasmus’s in Paris, who served in various military capacities; through Archbishop William Warham of Canterbury, who assigned Erasmus a pension on the income from a pastorate in Kent and who was chancellor of the realm until 1515; and through the new chancellor and royal favorite, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, archbishop of York.^[18] But at the court in Brussels, following Chancellor Le Sauvage’s death, Erasmus’s contacts were less reliable. He was invited to be the tutor for Archduke Ferdinand, Charles V’s younger brother, who was in Brussels between 1518 and 1521 (Erasmus declined, recommending Juan Luis Vives instead), and he was no doubt pleased to hear that Ferdinand “has constantly in his hands” a copy of the Institutio Principis Christiani.^[19] But there was no such report of Charles, to whom he had presented the volume, and Erasmus feared the influence of Charles’s confessor in the years 1517–1520, Jean Briselot, suffragan bishop of Cambrai and a protégé of Chièvres: “There is never a drinking party at which he does not hold forth against Erasmus, being particularly hot against the Moria, saintly character that he is, because he cannot bear any reflections on my lords Christopher and George.” ^[20] Relating how Henry VIII had “put to silence” certain “rascals” who were publicly attacking the study of Greek at Oxford, Erasmus wished that “we had some such prince or viceroy.” ^[21]

Putting such rascals to silence and thus protecting the enterprise of good letters as a public good was for Erasmus part of the duties of rulers in church and state. Even though he himself was to organize a literary campaign against Edward Lee, he professed to find it a waste of time for scholars to do battle with the likes of Cologne inquisitor Johann Pfefferkorn, the great adversary of the Hebrew scholar Johann Reuchlin: “This is a task for the bishops. It is for that most just emperor Maximilian, it is for the magistrates of the famous city of Cologne.” Thus the “conspiracy” of Erasmus’s foes at court was for a time checked by the nobility, “who have a particular dislike of all divines,” and partly by Gianpietro Caraffa, who was then papal nuncio to Brussels (1516–1517). Spanish theologian Diego Lopez de Zu;atniga, another critic of Erasmus’s New Testament Greek scholarship, was able to bring “his poison out into the open” only because of the death (1517) of Cardinal Jimenez de Cisneros, archbishop of Toledo, who had forbidden him to publish. Once reassured of Leo X’s good will, Erasmus besought the pope in August 1519 to silence the enemies of good letters where such intervention was needed; the kings of England and France had done their part, but Germany was “parceled out among several lesser rulers,” and in the Low Countries the prince was “good and great alike but very far away.” ^[22]

Closer to home, Erasmus sought the protection of influential men for the young and as yet fragile Collegium Trilingue at Leuven. He was convinced, with good reason, that traditional scholastic theology could not maintain its dominance once “knowledge of the three languages begins to secure public recognition in the universities, as it has already begun to do.” Writing to his humanist friend Juan Luis Vives, he rejoiced that “almost every university in the world enjoys a change of heart and settles down as it were to steady progress,” citing Paris (where Vives’s In Pseudodialecticos had been well received) and Cambridge, where John Fisher was chancellor; it seemed that “Louvain alone” was putting up “obstinate resistance” to the advance of fine letters.^[23] When Leuven’s arts faculty prohibited a course announced by Wilhelm Nesen, a German humanist associated with the Trilingue, four of Nesen’s pupils, in arms, called at the rector’s house to deliver a letter threatening him, and Rutger Rescius, the Trilingue’s Greek professor, was arrested for complicity in their disorderly conduct. Protesting Rescius’s innocence, Erasmus at once appealed for support from the respected dean of Mechelen, a fellow-executor of Jérome de Busleiden’s will: the arrest was a farce, for “conceal it how they will, those men cannot abide this college. ” When Nesen appealed the university’s decision to the Council of Brabant Erasmus wrote one of its members on his behalf, asking him to decide in favor of “academic freedom [libertas studiorum]” and against “a small cabal of men satisfied with their own attainments and more interested in filthy lucre than in fine letters.” ^[24]

For a time Erasmus hoped that even the furor surrounding Martin Luther might be contained if the proper authorities behaved judiciously. In the spring of 1520 he intervened with Cardinal Wolsey to prevent (for the time being) the burning of Luther’s books in England: “I am not the man to pass judgment on what Luther writes, but I cannot swallow this dictatorial procedure [tyrannis].” ^[25] Meanwhile, when Froben was planning to issue further editions of Luther, Erasmus used “threats” to dissuade him, lest the printer now identified with his works should by publishing Luther as well lend credence to claims about Luther and good letters going hand in hand.^[26] But for all who would refuse to choose between Luther and his enemies, things were immensely complicated by the arrival in Germany and the Low Countries of Exsurge, Domine, the papal bull of excommunication. On 8 October 1520 Cardinal Girolamo Aleandro, bearer of the bull, presided over a burning of Luther’s books at Leuven, at which Erasmus’s great enemy Nicolaas Baechem stepped up and made water on the embers. Aleandro, a Greek scholar, had once befriended Erasmus at the Aldine press in Venice (1508), but Erasmus now believed he had chosen to serve the foes of good letters for his own reasons: “The Italians seem to have made a conspiracy with the object of depriving the Germans of all credit for scholarship. This is nearer to Aleandro’s heart than the Luther business.” ^[27]

Just at this perilous moment Erasmus embarked on a bold gamble. He had struck up an acquaintance with Johann Faber, a Dominican from Augsburg who arrived in Leuven just as Charles V, whom he had hoped to see, was preparing for a journey to Aachen for his coronation as King of the Romans, the title by which an emperor-elect ruled in Germany. As a Conventual Dominican, Faber had a quarrel with the stricter Observant branch of the order, to which many of Erasmus’s critics belonged; he also discussed with Erasmus his plans for a trilingual college in Augsburg. It is thought the two men were jointly responsible for an anonymous tract seeking to discredit Exsurge, Domine, for the phraseology of the tract resembles that of Erasmus’s contemporary letters. The brief Consilium cujusdam was apparently carried by Faber to various important men who would be present for the coronation and to whom Erasmus now wrote letters of introduction, including Erard de la Marck and Albert of Brandenburg.^[28] Its message is that Luther has not had a fair hearing, that the so-called papal bull was concocted by the theologians of Leuven, and that the real villains of the piece are those whom Erasmus would call mendicant tyrants: “As far as the case of Luther is concerned, the greatest part of this trouble should be blamed on those who both in sermons and pamphlets made claims about the nature of indulgences and the power of the pope which no educated and religious audience could tolerate.” Pope Leo, whose mild spirit is not reflected in the bull ascribed to him, is urged to remand the question to a committee of scholars to be chosen by Charles V and by the kings of England and Hungary. Meanwhile, Erasmus too followed in the wake of the emperor’s entourage, in his capacity as honorary councillor. Following the coronation the train of princes repaired to Cologne. There Aleandro demanded that Elector Frederick of Saxony hand over Luther. This was the backdrop for Erasmus’s interview with Elector Frederick, to whom he complained about Luther’s “immoderate criticism” of abuses in the church. But Erasmus also noted that “it is said that the best authorities and those closest to the doctrine of the Gospel are least offended by Luther.” ^[29]

For the project outlined in the Consilium there was only one flicker of hope. In December, not long after returning to Leuven, Erasmus was able to report to Capito that

our Hollanders have firmly rejected this bull from the pope, or rather from Louvain. The president [of the Council of Holland] has replied that he is waiting for something in writing from the pope when he is better informed, and that he has not yet received any proclamation from the prince [Charles V], but that if it arrives he will know by what means to give the prince satisfaction.

The president, Nocilaas Everaerts, was an old friend of Erasmus’s, and the council over which he presided was known to remonstrate with Habsburg authorities before agreeing to carry out their orders; it could well have agreed to recommend in this case the classic strategy for those who dissented from papal decisions, that is, the appeal to a pope “better informed.” ^[30] But by February Erasmus was acknowledging to Everaerts that Luther’s “ De Captivitate Babylonica alienates many people, and he is proposing something more frightful every day.” Erasmus could in perfect justice explain to the theologians of Leuven that Consilium cujusdam had been circulated “before the publication of De Captivitate Babylonica, when the situation was at yet more capable of remedy,” but it did him little good. By September 1521 Aleandro had started the rumor that Erasmus himself could well have been the author of De Captivitate.^[31]

The question now was whether Erasmus’s credibility in Catholic circles was sufficiently damaged that he would have to write against Luther in order to restore it. A new collection of letters published in August 1521 contained a letter to William Warham saying that “some people are very urgent that I should write something against Luther”; he added that when he had disentangled himself from current tasks “I shall devote myself to reading all the works of Luther and his opponents.” Another letter in the same collection asks Paolo Bombace to get him the papal permission to read Luther’s works that he said Aleandro had denied him.^[32] But Erasmus seems not so much making a promise as fending off pressure to do something he did not want to do. Letters written after he had settled in Basel make it clear he was concerned that Charles V was “nearly convinced that I was the fountainhead of all the trouble over Luther” but also persuaded that “I was above all the ideal person to undertake” the task of refuting Luther. Had he remained in the Low Countries, Erasmus feared lest “the task of doing battle with Luther’s party might have been entrusted to me by a personage to whom it would have been unlawful to say no,” that is, by the emperor himself.^[33] Basel was a place where he could evade this daunting eventuality. At a time when Christendom seemed about to be sundered by the fury of mendicant tyrants, abetted by the opposing excesses of Luther and his party, Basel was also a place where Erasmus could ponder what future the philosophia Christi might have.

Notes