Conclusion

Erasmus’s program for the reform of Christian society through a reform of doctrina can be summarized in four mutually supportive assertions, each of which reflects several different strands in his thinking. First, the philosophia Christi is expressed “more in the emotions than in syllogisms,” it is a matter of “inspiration more than learning, transformation rather than reasoning” and its efficacy is shown not in argumentation but in the way a person lives. The believer must renounce all of “this world’s defenses,” including intellectual prowess, and “refer all things to the glory of Christ.” The philosophy of Christ is found in the plain words of Jesus’ teaching, not in the subtle refinements of men who have sought to accommodate it to their interests, like “bishops singing the praise of war”: “I think Christ intended that those who would be perfect should not swear at all” (see above, pp. 105–106, 109). Erasmus’s version of the Christian message is not the first that has stressed the unadorned rigor of Gospel ethics; one thinks, for example, of the preaching of St. Francis of Assisi. But Erasmus was part of the humanist tradition, like Valla and Vives, and for him the philosophy of Christ had to be a doctrina in the sense of Augustine’s De doctrina Christiana, a teaching that offers sustenance for both the mind and the heart. In fact, intellectual achievement of a high order is required, for the “wellspring” of New Testament truth can be restored to its original purity of meaning, and hence its efficacy, only by cleansing the Greek text of the accumulated errors of centuries, especially those caused by “Philistines” who have “tipped earth into the Gospel springs” (see above, p. 108). There must be scholars and preachers to light the way for others, yet learning alone will not break open the meaning of the sacred page; in the Ratio Verae Theologiae, as in the patristic and indeed the scholastic tradition, the scholar of divine things must first be a believer. Regardless of whether or to what extent Erasmus personally exemplified this hoped-for harmony of simple trust in God and critical philology—docta pietas (learned piety)—he gave the ancient ideal of a synthesis between faith and reason a new and compelling formulation.

Second, doctas pietas was not just for scholars or theologians. The wellsprings of Christian philosophy were directly accessible to any believer with a modicum of learning. When Erasmus says that “any man can take [Gospel medicine] for himself, provided he has a faithful and true heart, and is eager to get well” (see above p. 130), he is thinking of his Gospel Paraphrases, meant to make the text more clear for all who could read Latin. As a native of the Low Countries, he could not have failed to be impressed by the intense loyalties binding people to the various self-standing units that made up the hierarchical and corporative society of Catholic Europe. Indeed, he accepted this framework when it suited him, arguing, for example, that the partisans of bonae literae were an ordo, or estate, like others, and hence, according to the rules of the game, entitled to be treated with respect. Yet he insisted, early and late, that the Christian’s true allegiance lay with the overarching Body of Christ, whose members were individual believers, not the legally or socially recognized corporate bodies (see above, pp. 88, 38–39). Ideally, even lack of Latinity ought not be a barrier to earnest seekers, for, as texts like the Paraclesis of 1516 assert, the message of Christ must be diffused as widely as possible, through vernacular translations. In practice, the scholar who himself used Latin even for life’s daily necessities had a more limited range. His writings, early and late, were aimed at cultivated readers who could understand themselves both as citizens of the republic of letters and as individual members of the Body of Christ. Coupled with his critique of monastic religion, this charter of spiritual autonomy for the educated laity helps account for the popularity of works like the Enchiridion (see above, pp. 39–40). Amid the tumults of the Reformation years the same idea took on a new dimension. For Erasmus the Christian body politic, the respublica Christiana, was both in its civil and ecclesiastical spheres an ordered polity subject to law and precedent, not the tyranny of raw power, so that even in a religiously divided society it was right and proper “to leave each party to its own place, and each citizen to his own conscience” (see above pp. 97, 114–115, 169–170). This ideal of a Christian civility (pp. 50–51), this framework of law and custom that ought to secure for cultivated individuals^[1] the freedom to drink for themselves at the Gospel springs, has often reminded historians of classical liberal ideals about the self-sufficiency of the individual in a properly ordered society.^[2] The point is not that we should apply to Erasmus a term that belongs to the political discourse of the nineteenth century but that the liberal conception of freedom has a long and complex pedigree.

Third, if Erasmus was for a time full of hope for changes to be wrought in readers of the pure Gospel and hearers of sermons based on it, if he believed that the springs of truth, flowing fresh, might produce “a more genuine kind of Christian,” it was because he saw a deep congruity between the teachings of Jesus and an innate human longing for harmony and tranquillity: “Whatever is according to nature is easily borne” and “That which is most in keeping with nature will easily take root in the souls of all” (see above, pp. 72–73, 111). In a general way, we see here evidence of Erasmus’s fondness for classical moral philosophy, with its confidence in the power of reason to dominate or at least guide man’s unruly emotions, and also his respect for the Church Fathers (like Origen and St. Jerome), who mirrored his own optimism about the moral capacities of human nature. More particularly, we may see evidence of his focus on those good and gentle spirits who were drawn to learning for its own sake, the prototype perhaps of the cultivated reader who could best profit from his annotated New Testament or the Paraphrases. Drawn to truth and beauty by an inner passion and to the philosophy of Christ by its deep congruity with human nature, such men had little need for the strict discipline and pugnacious loyalty characteristic of corporate or quasi-corporate bodies, like monasteries or schools of thought among scholastic philosophers; nor did they require the services of a “barbarous” schoolmaster cracking the whip or an ignorant friar thundering from the pulpit about the fires of hell. Unlike Lorenzo Valla and Juan Luis Vives, who had drunk more deeply at the Augustinian springs of Western Christian theology (see above, pp. 70–73), Erasmus did not think of conversion as a sudden transformation of the passions of the heart, nor did he envision institutional ways of using relatively benign forms of selfishness to check more destructive ones. Sweet persuasion coupled with a certain “dissimulation” in the face of ignorant prejudices (see above, pp. 116–118) was his prescription for the ills of Christian society.

Finally, Erasmus’s conception of the reform of Christian society remains incomprehensible unless we also take into account his beliefs about the real sources of the prejudices that obstructed true Christian philosophy. In his criticism of monks and friars for being excessively attached to their “ceremonies,” Erasmus sometimes envisioned members of religious orders as trapped within a superstitious mentality not of their own making. More often, and especially in a polemical context, he saw the friars in particular as serving their own “bellies” by deliberately fostering such superstition in the simple folk entrusted to their spiritual care (see above, pp. 90–94) and thus gravely threatened by the truth of the Gospel. Suspicions of this kind have a context and are seldom the product of one man’s imagination; Erasmus’s hostile image of the mendicants may reflect a popular anticlericalism that targeted these orders, or perhaps his own background as the son of a secular priest, just as his constant wariness about the Habsburg government has a background in the political culture of the Low Countries. But it is significant that all of Erasmus’s suspicions (including his anti-Semitism) come together in a single idea that targets the mendicant friars, who were in fact the chief opponents of the new biblical philology he represented: the Philistines who have “tipped earth” into the Gospel wells are none other than the friars, who have too long imposed on a credulous Christian world the “religion of ceremonies” or “more than Jewish ceremonies” (see above, pp. 102–103). Thus if sweet persuasion or Gospel medicine did not of itself produce the desired result, it was not because Erasmus’s assumptions about human nature were in need of revision but because these influential and respected men knowingly obstructed the philosophy of Christ for their own selfish reasons.

These four assertions form a pattern of thinking about reform which is fairly coherent, save for one glaring inconsistency. On the one hand, Erasmus preaches that the Christian’s true loyalty is to the community of the faithful, the Body of Christ, rather than to any of the often feuding subgroups (like religious orders) included within the larger community; on the other hand, he inveighs against the friars with a zeal that makes it seem he is mindful not only of contemporary polemics between friars and biblical scholars like himself but also of a more traditional fault line in Western Christendom between the secular clergy and the religious orders, the friars in particular. This seeming division of Erasmus within himself is directly related to the difficulty in which he found himself amid the controversies of the Reformation, for if Catholics mistrusted him and Protestants saw him as an ally, albeit a timid one, it was in no small part because of the criticism, indeed the ridicule, meted out to religious orders and to the “ceremonies” associated with them in works like The Praise of Folly and the Colloquies. There is no reason not to take Erasmus seriously when he declares allegiance to the Catholic church, which he understands as the community or consensus of believers through the centuries, or when he says that he fears “the wrath of God” if he departs from the consensus of the church on an essential matter of belief (pp. 118, 161–162). But there is a sting in his continuing jeremiads against “mendicant tyrants” (pp. 136–138), a tone that Catholics and Protestants alike found difficult to understand in a man who professed loyalty to a church now under attack from all sides. Yet at the time that Erasmus penned (for example) The Praise of Folly, the church suffered more from complacency than from any dissident movement, and at a distance of some centuries we can perhaps better appreciate his complaint that his words were being read out of season: “It seemed to me that I was saying things in such a temper that no sedition might arise from my words…Who could have foreseen that this fatal storm would break upon the world?” (p. 180). We must remember that in the history of Latin Christendom the conflicts of the Reformation era were preceded not by an era of good feeling but by bitter religious recriminations of a lesser sort. When, for example, Erasmus readily entertains terrible suspicions about the mendicants (see above, p. 92), he may be echoing the views of secular clerics (like Cardinal Schiner), who in turn would have been paying the friars back for their long habit of “ranting on against [secular] priests in such wise that they almost provoke people to throw stones.” ^[3] The age of rival Christian orthodoxies that was dawning as Erasmus died could not tolerate the ambiguities that in the pre-Reformation church were more or less accepted as instances of the regrettable fractiousness that must needs darken a sinful world. Since Erasmus could neither condemn the papacy as the Antichrist nor embrace the mendicants as paladins of the Gospel, he was labeled a “slippery” man (see above, p. 188). Conversely, he has gained new appreciation in a century when it has sometimes seemed, as to William Butler Yeats, that “the best lack all conviction, and the worst are full of passionate intensity.” If Erasmus continues to attract the attention of those who would understand the sixteenth century, it is perhaps because he himself spoke, in his varying assertions, for the divided consciousness of an as yet undivided Latin Christian Europe.

Notes