2. Philosophia Christi

Erasmus and the Reform of Doctrina, 1511–1522

5. Reformers of Doctrina

Lorenzo Valla

Raised in a sophisticated Roman milieu—both his father and his maternal grandfather were legists attached to the papal Curia—Lorenzo Valla nonetheless had no university training. Instead, his family provided tutors in Greek and Latin and through the Curia he had contact with a stream of learned visitors, like the Florentine humanist Leonardo Bruni (d. 1440), who spent a good deal of time with the twenty-year-old Valla during his stay in Rome as envoy of the Florentine republic (1426). Like his teacher Coluccio Salutati (d. 1404), Bruni vigorously defended the humanist intellectual program articulated by Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca, d. 1374). Contrary to the pretensions of the “ridiculous Aristotelians” who dominated university faculties of liberal arts, Petrarch and his disciples understood the aims of education in terms of Cicero’s ideal of the orator. If scholastic logic had formed a contentious race of “modern sophists,” what Cicero had called the studies of humanity (studia humanitatis: poetry, rhetoric, history, moral philosophy) would form not just eloquent speakers but men deeply conscious of their civic responsibilities; for as Cato had said, an orator was by definition “a good man skilled at speaking [vir bonus dicendi peritus].” ^[1] When Valla saw a university classroom for the first time, it was as a lecturer on rhetoric (1431–1433) at the University of Pavia. Pavia was a stronghold of Latin Averroism, rather like the University at Padua, where Petrarch had written his On My Own Ignorance and That of Many Others to combat what he saw as the irreligious dogmatism of young scholars in the faculty of arts. To this ongoing debate Valla brought his grasp of the new humanist learning and the fresh perspective of an autodidact in traditional university subjects like dialectic (logic).^[2] After leaving Pavia, while earning his keep through secretarial positions at the Roman Curia or at the royal court of Naples, he worked out in the corpus of his writings nothing less than a root-and-branch alternative to scholastic doctrina.

While still at Pavia Valla completed an early version of his first major work, the dialogue De Vero Bono (On the True Good). His purpose was to refute certain learned men who contended that salvation could not be limited to believers in the true God because ancient pagans were capable of a virtue not inferior to that of Christian saints. Valla chooses the Stoics, those most strenuous of classical philosophers, as the defenders of a virtus based on reason alone and has them represented by the first speaker in his dialogue. The second speaker argues in behalf of the rival Epicurean school’s belief that pleasure, not virtue, is the true good: for Epicureans, those heroic suicides thought by Stoics to have chosen death over dishonor—Lucretia, raped by the son of a king, or Cato the Younger, facing the tyranny of a victorious Caesar—died in fact not for some imaginary good called virtue or “probity [honestas]” but rather to escape a life filled with real trouble (molestia), that is, the opposite of pleasure. The third and final speaker, presenting the Christian view, chides his predecessor for not recognizing that happiness with God in heaven is the highest of all pleasures but endorses the Epicurean attack on the Stoics.^[3] For the Christian the claim that any school of philosophy can attain a life of virtue is nothing but a sham; from St. Paul’s heartfelt cry about the law of the flesh that made him still a prisoner to sin (Rom. 7 : 23–25), it is clear that “the mind of a wise man cannot be possessed of that tranquillity and serenity of which lying philosophers always boast.” The conclusion is obvious: “Let philosophy therefore depart from the most holy temple, let her depart I say, and take herself off like a painted prostitute.” ^[4]

Yet philosophy could not be pulled down from her throne in the academy without confronting the massive authority of Aristotle. Earlier humanists, notably Bruni, sought to outflank the scholastics by noting the inadequacy of their Latin translations of Aristotle. Valla aimed at nothing less than refuting “Aristotle and the Aristotelians, in order to recall modern theologians from error, and bring them back to true theology.” This was the goal of Repastinatio Dialecticae et Philosophiae (The Uprooting of Dialectic and Philosophy), the earliest version of his treatise on dialectic, begun at Pavia and completed during his years in Naples.^[5] Valla repeatedly defends usage (usus) or “popular speech [popularis sermo],” which he considers the guide to correct speaking (magister loquendi), against the distortions of the Peripatetic or Aristotelian philosophers, whom he calls “a nation given to the corruption of native meanings” of words.^[6] The attempt to tear up Peripatetic philosophy by its linguistic roots begins with an attack on the “ten categories” of Aristotle’s logic, traditionally understood as defining not merely the basic rubrics of human thought but also the constituent properties of being. But “being” itself, the most important of the ten categories and the foundation stone of Aristotelian and Thomistic metaphysics, falls by the wayside as Valla analyzes “a being [ens]” to mean simply “a thing [res] that is,” so that the emphasis falls on res rather than on the property of existence, which properly speaking belongs only to God.^[7]

If Aristotle’s rationalism distorts the meaning of words, it distorts even more a proper and Christian understanding of human nature, especially as regards moral virtue. How can one defend a philosopher who could say that it was “indecent for anyone to say that he loves Zeus”? As for the foolish notion that emotions belong to an inferior part of the soul that passes away at death, “the spirits of the dead, who have spoken or shown themselves to many…could have taught [Aristotle] that they…are not lacking in feelings.” Humans differ from the animals not by virtue of reason—for animals have the ability to reason, Aristotle’s opinions notwithstanding—but by virtue of having been created in the image and likeness of God.^[8] In an Aristotelian conception of virtue it is reason that commands the will, but in truth reason is not even the teacher of the will, much less its commander: “The will is not taught; rather, native disposition [ingenium] teaches itself by its own labor, with the help of memory.” Aristotle’s understanding of virtue as the mean between two extremes is logically flawed (it is more precise to see each virtue as the contrary of a single vice) and contrary to Scripture, for it is not the hot or the cold but the lukewarm who will be vomited forth from the mouth of God (Apocalypse 3 : 15). Because virtue is in the emotions (affectus), not in the intellect, Aristotle’s notion that virtue is a habit acquired by practice is equally useless: “Teachings [doctrine] are indeed acquired gradually and by certain steps, as if climbing up, but virtues can come without gradations and by a certain impetus and (if I may so put it) flight.” ^[9] For Valla the “seat of the soul” is neither the intellect nor the will but “the heart [cor]”: “It sustains and moves and warms other members of the body, like sun which, remaining in its place, trembles and excites the whole world, suffusing it with light and heat.” The distinction between intellect and will is artificial, for it is “the one soul that understands and remembers, inquires and judges, loves and hates.” So too “love [charitas] is the only virtue, for it is love that makes us good”; for example, fortitude is the name for love “when it is called into strife,” as with the apostles “who from cowards became the bravest of men when they received the Holy Spirit, Who is the love of the Father and the Son.” ^[10]

For a doctrina that responds to this dynamic conception of human nature, Valla turns to rhetoric and especially to grammar, whose task it is to restore the Latin language to its former beauty and power. Elegantiae Linguae Latinae Libri VI (Six Books on the Elegance of the Latin Language), another work of his Neapolitan years, gives the correct or classical form for some four thousand locutions (at “about eighteen” the young Erasmus made a précis of the Elegantiae for a local schoolmaster).^[11] Prefaces to the several books extol pure Latin as the mother of civilization. During the many centuries when “no one could speak proper Latin,” the liberal arts declined and allied arts “such as painting and sculpture and architecture wholly degenerated and were in the same moribund state as letters.” But now that both letters and the visual arts are showing new life, “I am confident that the language of Rome will come back strongly…and with it all those disciplines will be restored to health.” With the fall of Rome, “Goths and Vandals” imposed on the Roman world not just their rule but their barbarous language, corrupting Latin script^[12] as well as the Latin tongue. One need only compare the “ornate and golden” Roman civil law to canon law, “which is for the most part Gothic.” As for the books of scholastic philosophy, “which not even Goths and Vandals can understand,” readers are referred to Valla’s On Dialectic. Only a beautiful language is suited to the praise of God: by restoring Latin to its former state, “we adorn the house of God, so that those entering the building will not be moved to contempt by its squalor, but rather excited to devotion by its splendor.” Though a theology student may forgo learning one or another of the arts, “if he be ignorant of eloquence, he is in my opinion utterly unworthy to speak of theology.” ^[13]

In the Augustinian program Scripture itself is the doctrina by which hearts are molded to the love of God, and for Valla Scripture needed purification from error at least as much as the Latin language did. His Collatio in Novum Testamentum (Comparison of the [Greek and Latin] New Testament) exists in two versions. The one done in Naples is known by this title and the other, done after Valla’s return to the papal court and eventually published by Erasmus in 1505, is known by the title Erasmus gave it, Adnotationes (Annotations). In both versions Valla aims to correct the Latin Vulgate against the Greek: if St. Jerome (d. 431) in his day complained that “the stream flowing from the fountain [fons]” had become troubled with textual errors, “the stream that was never properly cleansed has collected slime and dirt” in the subsequent millennium. Valla detected^[14] hundreds of minor errors or inaccuracies in the Vulgate text and exposed what a modern scholar calls “an astonishing mistranslation” at 1 Cor. 15 : 51.^[15] Yet in dealing with the New Testament Valla held his usual boldness^[16] in check; the conjectural emendations that are the hallmark of his editions of classical authors are entirely lacking in the Collatio.^[17] Here and there in the Adnotationes one can see signs of his tendency to defend human passions, as when he wonders why Christ should have condemned anyone who looks at a woman with desire (concupiscentia) in his heart (Matt. 5 : 28); perhaps, he speculates, the Greek word should be translated “wife” or “matron” rather than “woman.” ^[18] But in his sober exposition of the Greek fons of Gospel doctrine Valla provided an inspiration for Erasmus, and by refraining from critical examination of the Greek text itself he left room for the next great pioneer in humanist philology.^[19]

Juan Luis Vives

Juan Luis Vives (1492–1540) was born in Valencia of Jewish parents who had converted to Christianity. Following an education in his native city which included some Greek, he received a thorough training in scholastic logic at the Collège de Montaigu in Paris (1509–1512). Breaking off his university career, Vives found a home among the long-established Spanish merchant community in Bruges, where local humanist scholars secured him a position as tutor to a prominent young aristocrat, Guillaume II de Croy, who was about to begin his studies at the university at Leuven.^[20] Here Vives met Erasmus, who not only encouraged his ambitions but, with Thomas More and others, organized a publicity campaign to promote Vives’s first published work, a humanist critique of scholastic logic.^[21]In Pseudodialecticos (Against the Pseudo-Dialecticians, 1520) attacks Parisian dialectic but not its Aristotelian premises. Like Valla, Vives considers usage the teacher of speech: grammar, rhetoric, and logic “do not teach language [sermo], rather they accept as a given the language spoken by the people.” But scholastic logic in Vives’s day routinely pressed words into unaccustomed phraseology in order to evaluate different types of “supposition” or predication. For example, the proposition “Thou a man art not” (if addressed to something nonhuman) could be true in a material sense but “strictly speaking [de rigore]” false, because “a man” was placed before the verb. For Vives the role of the logic of suppositions in the university curriculum was “like a Trojan horse, from which has come the ruin and conflagration of all the liberal arts.” Unlike Valla, however, Vives did not see Aristotle himself as a corrupter of good usage: “Does anyone think that Aristotle accommodated his dialectic to a language he made up himself, rather than to the common Greek spoken by all the people?” ^[22] Vives’s aim was thus to restore logic to its Aristotelian clarity, and for this plan Erasmus praised him lavishly, comparing his own efforts to “restore theology…to its ancestral dignity” with Vives’s endeavors to “recall studies in the university to better things.” ^[23]

Just as Vives was beginning to make his reputation, news came that the Inquisition in Spain had arrested his father on charges of secretly practicing Judaism (1522); following his trial the elder Vives was burned at the stake in 1524. A few years later Vives’s mother, though dead since 1509, was tried posthumously for the same offense and her bones were exhumed in order to be burned. Vives’s extant writings contain not a whisper of these terrible events; indeed, the fate of his parents was not known to historical scholarship until the documents were published a few decades ago.^[24] Meanwhile, Erasmus had recruited Vives to assume responsibility for The City of God in the edition of St. Augustine’s works to be done by his publisher, Johann Froben in Basel. In his preface (1522) Vives lauds Erasmus as the restorer of true theology and explains that since he is a “profane man” (that is, a layman), his annotations on theological issues “will be more sparing than on other matters.” The annotations do in fact deal mostly with grammar, or classical literature, or Augustine’s Roman world, but occasional comments make it clear that Vives understood well enough the distinctive emphases of Augustine’s theology. A propos of Augustine’s comment that the body is not a mere ornament but “pertains to the very nature of man,” Vives contrasts Augustine’s “truer opinion” with that of the Platonists, for whom “the soul alone was man and the body something put on like clothing, or rather a prison.” Where Augustine says that even the most praiseworthy “yield in some things to carnal concupiscence,” Vives adds that nature has implanted sexual desire so deeply in the hearts of all besouled creatures “that we cannot even think of satisfying that desire without being touched by a certain hidden pleasure, which some consider at least a venial sin.” The views on sexual pleasure which Vives himself expounded in two later treatises on marriage have been characterized by a modern scholar as “almost Manichean.” ^[25] A sternly Augustinian view of the power of sin in human life was perhaps of some solace to a man whose parents had been so brutally stripped of life and reputation.

The premature death of young Croy (1521) left Vives without a livelihood, and for the next several years, with the help of Erasmus’s friend Thomas More, he hunted for patronage in England, albeit without much success.^[26] It was during this period of his life that Vives turned his thoughts to some of the great public issues of the day. Not surprisingly, his writings on war and peace appropriate some of Erasmus’s views, for example, the idea that wars come about because young noblemen are bored by their idleness in times of peace and because self-serving councillors fill the heads of young princes with dreams of emulating the glory of Caesar or Alexander the Great.^[27] But De Europae Dissidiis et Bello Turcico (On Europe’s Wars and the Campaign against the Turk, 1525) advances an idea that would have shocked Erasmus. Toward the end of a dialogue in which the shades of ancient and modern dead discuss Europe’s sad state, the great Scipio, hitherto silent, proposes that Europe’s Christian princes, raging against one another in blind fury, can satisfy their overweening ambition “more lavishly and copiously” by warring against the Turk; the vast riches of Asia lie open, for “Europe has never invaded Asia without capturing and holding it,” because “Asians are timid men little suited to war, more like women than men.” ^[28]

De Europae Dissidiis conveys stereotypes about Asia conventional in European literature from the time of the Greeks,^[29] but it hardly reflects military reality in an era when the armies of Sultan Suleiman the Lawgiver (1520–1560) seemed invincible. Much better grounded in everyday life is Vives’s De Subventione Pauperum (On the Subvention of the Poor, 1526), which mirrors the grim social realities of the great industrial cities of Flanders and helped provoke discussion that led to the eventual adoption in much of Europe of poor laws aimed at centralizing the control of charitable agencies and putting sturdy beggars to work. Vives excoriates the tribes of beggars who “extort rather than plead,” importuning pious burghers even at mass. Meanwhile, though “the rich from their superfluity can support horses, dogs, whores, and elephants,” the honest poor “gnash their teeth in indignation, because they lack the wherewithal to feed their starving children.” In many an urban civil war, he notes, the angry multitude has “vented against the rich the first evidence of its fury.” Hence magistrates make a grave mistake if they think they are “put in office to decide disputes about money, when they ought to think more about how to make their people good citizens.” ^[30] In other words, just as it would profit the Christian commonwealth if princes slaked their thirst for empire at the expense of infidels, magistrates can both safeguard the property of the wealthy and improve the morals of their citizens by providing relief for the deserving poor while subjecting the unruly poor to the discipline of work. Vives did not inhabit a world in which human kindness was strong enough to contain human cruelty; his was a world ruled by sin—we may call it an Augustinian world—in which the best hope of struggling humankind lay in turning from greater evils to lesser ones.

Vives’s major works, dating from the last decade of his life, provide a bridge between early tracts on the humanist reform of the curriculum and the sober appraisals of practical reform in his treatises of the 1520s. De Anima et Vita (On Life and the Soul, 1538) features a rich and nuanced analysis of human passions, while De Tradendis Disciplinis (On the Handing on of Disciplines, 1532) describes how liberal learning can be an auxiliary force in the struggle to keep passion under control. Vives is more optimistic than Valla about reason’s place in the kingdom of the soul. In a passage reminiscent of humanist arguments about whether a wise councillor can influence his prince to the good (as in the first book of Thomas More’s Utopia), De Anima compares the will to a sovereign prince who can command his councillors to give him advice and then decide to ignore it. But Vives rejects the argument that animals can reason and, again contrary to Valla, believes that reason can indeed function as the “adviser [consultrix],” even the “teacher [magistra]” of the will.^[31]

In order to play its proper role reason needs the help that a liberal education can provide. De Tradendis aims to make the liberal arts suitable for use in the education of the soul by drawing them “from pagan darkness into the light of our faith.” ^[32] For Vives, as for Valla, the pagan model of human behavior is one that sharply divides reason from emotion, while the Christian (or, one may say, Augustinian) model is one that recognizes their interpenetration.^[33] In the section “The Causes of the Corruption of the Arts,” Vives departs from the humanist paradigm according to which the pure fons (spring) of a putatively pristine antiquity can be taken as the standard against which to judge the turgid waters of modernity.^[34] From their earliest beginnings, he contends, the arts were corrupted by an undue admixture of human passion (affectus), so that, for instance, legists deliberately made their precepts as complicated as possible and philosophers put forward foolish ideas “out of lust for making a name for themselves.” If the text of Aristotle has indeed been corrupted by bad translations, “water from this spring [fons] was already turbulent when it went into the pipe,” for on some topics (like rhetoric and poetry) Aristotle was not free of the philosopher’s lazy habit of repeating the opinions of others rather than thinking things through for himself.^[35] Through their pagan origins the arts as they have been handed down are especially corrupt in their understanding of morals. Fortunately, Lorenzo Valla has shown that Aristotle was wrong about virtue being a mean between two extremes and that virtue is a vehemence of feeling (energeia) rather than a habit of the intellect; for if one compares the Beatitudes in the Gospel with Aristotle’s concept of happiness (beatitudo) on earth, it is clear that “if Aristotelian happiness is to be sought here on earth, the happiness of Christ is not to be sought.” As for the poets, “Homer expresses his image of the ideal prince in Achilles, than whom no one was more truculent or inhumane.” Orators imagined that to learn eloquence is to learn wisdom—as in Cato’s dictum that an orator is “a good man skilled at speaking”—but even Cicero glimpsed the truth of the matter when he said that teaching evil men to speak well is like giving weapons to madmen.^[36]

In truth, piety is the goal of Christian schooling, and for Vives “piety is more a matter of behavior [actio] than a matter of expertise [peritia].” Yet no “knowledge of things” is in itself harmful to piety, not even if such knowledge comes from books written by pagans or Muslims or Jews. Moreover, in the struggle against that domination of our nature by passion which is the legacy of Adam’s sin, we must learn to know ourselves inside and out, especially “by what things passions are aroused or increased, and by what things they are checked, calmed, taken away”; to this end we may summon “the precepts of moral philosophy, like an army.” In the same way, history rightly taught—not the kind of history that glorifies an Alexander or a Caesar—is the “nurse” of the kind of prudence (prudentia) required to rule cities and peoples, “for what greater prudence is there than to understand by what things the passions of men are either aroused or quieted?” ^[37] The school Vives has in mind must isolate boys from girls and must not be located near a princely court or in a mercantile city; masters should be paid from the public purse and not by pupils; and boys should if possible live at home so as not to risk exposure to shabby and impure masters of the common type. Boys need public disputations to spur their competitive spirits, but not so often as to provide occasions for arrogance and boasting. If education is to “bring the Christian people back to true and genuine simplicity,” the liberal arts must have “fewer of those sparks by which souls are set ablaze”; students do not need to have their critical judgment “sharpened on the whetstone of depravity” if the goal is to make them “not more cunning [astutiores], but more prudent.” ^[38] To such a school a father may send his son not to gain riches or honor but for “cultivation of the soul [cultura animi], a rare and precious thing, so that the young man becomes learned and through sound teaching [doctrina] advances in virtue.” ^[39]

John Calvin

Martin Luther (1484–1547) imbibed the principles of humanist philology at the margins of a typically scholastic theological education.^[40] John Calvin (1509–1564), born a generation later, received his legal education from humanist scholars who had set aside the glosses of medieval commentators in order to return to the fontes of ancient Roman jurisprudence. Calvin’s earliest works were a commentary on Seneca’s De clementia (1532) and a refutation of heretical ideas about the “sleep of souls” prior to the Last Judgment (1534); the latter showed a deep familiarity with the works of humanist pioneers in biblical philology, like Erasmus and Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples (1465–1534), whom Calvin visited just before leaving France for Protestant Basel. Thus when Calvin gave himself heart and soul to the new theology, he carried into his career as a reformer “humanist linguistic and textual techniques for the interpretation of Scripture” as well as a characteristically humanist sense of “the importance attached to the study of the Fathers” and “the acceptance of a kind of Christian philosophy.” ^[41] As part of an ongoing polemic with erstwhile confreres in the French humanist movement,^[42] he was therefore able to employ humanist conventions about the reform of doctrina in the service of a theological teaching utterly at variance with humanist optimism about the moral endowments of the human soul.

The final Latin edition of Calvin’s summary of Christian doctrine, the 1559 Institutio Christianae Religionis (Institutes of the Christian Religion) is the one Calvin himself regarded as definitive.^[43] The Institutio’s use of a favorite humanist metaphor provides the clue to a radical shift in perspective. For humanists like Valla and Vives, as for St. Jerome, the contrast between fons (spring) and rivuli (streams) denoted the difference between an original text and the copies or translations derived from it; by analogy, the same contrast could also describe other forms of dependence on an originating principle.^[44] But for Calvin no human or created instrument, not even Scripture, could properly be called the source of anything good: God and God alone is “the wellspring [fons] of all good things…nowhere will be found even a drop [gutta] of wisdom and light, or justice, or power, or righteousness, or genuine truth, that does not flow from him.” In a related image, he maintained that such is the omnipresent power of God, as taught by Scripture, that “it is certain not even a drop [gutta] of rain falls without his express command.” ^[45]

If for Valla the decay of doctrina subjected the world to Gothic barbarism, for Calvin the decay of doctrina subjected the world to medieval superstition: if “papists” argued that religious images are the bibles of the poor, Calvin admitted that “there are today people who cannot do without such so-called books, but whence comes that stupidity of theirs, except that they have been deprived of the doctrina uniquely suited to form their minds?” The doctrina Calvin has in mind is of course that of Scripture, whose distinctive power is “evident from the fact that no human text, no matter how artfully crafted, can affect us nearly as much.” Like Valla and Vives, Calvin too believed that the test of doctrina was whether it could break through the hardness of the human heart: “The heart’s lack of trust is greater than the mind’s blindness, and it is harder to gird the spirit with confidence than it is to instill thoughts into the mind.” ^[46] Yet while Valla believed in the power of pure language to touch the heart and Vives reposed a like confidence in the prudentia that understands human passions, for Calvin the abnegation of self that Scripture commands “is something of which our souls are not in the least capable,” especially since self-love has so many disguises. In different ways Valla and Vives had both rejected the Platonic idea that the human propensity for evil comes only from the passions of the body, not from the aspirations of the soul. But Calvin went farther, insisting that the corruption of sin “is diffused through all parts of the soul,” so that “wicked impiety occupies the very citadel of the mind, and pride has invaded the vitals of the heart.” ^[47]

Yet from this impasse Scripture itself promises a way out: “There is no remedy but that love of conflict and self-love, noxious above all things, be torn up by the roots from our inmost vitals: as indeed they are torn up by the doctrina of Scripture.” What Scripture teaches is encapsulated in two complementary principles, bound together by a faith that trusts solely and entirely in God:

Above all, these two points are to be kept in mind, namely, that the glory of the Lord remain undiminished, as if under a sound roof, and that in the face of his judgment our consciences maintain a restful calm and a serene tranquility.…In a nutshell, no man may without sacrilege claim any particle of justice for his own, for in so doing he takes away and befouls just as much from the justice and glory of God.^[48]

It follows that in his critique of what pagan philosophers have said about the life of virtue, Calvin made none of the compromises that Valla and especially Vives were prepared to make. In Calvin’s view, even though Christian writers have acknowledged the power of sin, “many have been far too close to the philosophers” in their discussion of human nature. One of the speakers in Cicero’s On the Nature of the Gods neatly expresses the problem when he says that virtue would be nothing to boast of were it a gift from God rather than a human achievement. For Calvin the native disposition (ingenium) in which philosophers (and Valla) placed such hope is real enough and not at all hopeful: because “an outstanding native disposition will not bear imperious mastery by another,” it is precisely those most apt for that self-glorification that philosophers would call virtue who are least able to suffer the discipline of God’s Word. Not that Calvin refused to recognize any difference between persons of great valor (Camillus, who saved Rome from an attack by the Gauls) and great wickedness (the emperor Caligula). Rather, Calvin in one place agrees with St. Augustine that the virtue of good emperors, like Trajan, amounted to the lesser vice of ambition, by which greater vices are held in check; in another, he says that the “most certain and the simplest” explanation of Camillus’s virtue is that it has to do “not with the common endowments of nature, but with special graces from God.” ^[49] Indeed it is the “special grace” of God, incomprehensible to human reason, that alone provides the tranquillity of soul of which philosophers boasted in vain:

However much [philosophers] may subscribe to Paul’s statement [Acts 17 : 28] that it is in God that we live, move, and have our being, they are nonetheless far from understanding the meaning of the grace whereof Paul speaks, for they have no inkling of the special care that God has for us, by which alone we come to know his favor towards us.

For Calvin, consciences plagued by doubts and troubled by scruples will never attain serenity “unless we seek it deeper than any human arguments or judgments or conjectures, namely, in the secret testimony of the Holy Spirit.” What the Spirit testifies in the heart of the believer is that God has chosen this one person to stand forever among his elect: “We will never be as persuaded as we ought to be that our salvation flows from the wellspring [fons] of God’s gratuitous mercy until we grasp that eternal election by which God grants his favor to some and denies it to others.” ^[50]

The clearest line of demarcation among these four thinkers is one that separates Calvin from Valla, Vives, and Erasmus. By insisting on the absolute sufficiency of divine grace and the absolute impotence of the human will, he negates the belief in the possibility of collaboration between nature and grace that the three humanists have in common. Yet there are differences too among the humanists. Valla differs from Erasmus in his thoroughgoing rejection of the claims of pagan philosophy, starting with a passionate attack on Aristotle’s logic (a topic in which Erasmus took only a mild interest) and a debunking of Stoic moral wisdom, similar to what Erasmus does in the Praise of Folly but not elsewhere in his writings. In contrast to Valla’s stress on the sovereignty of the will, not even teachable by the intellect, Erasmus shared a more conventional humanist belief in the character-building value of precepts,^[51] whether those of Seneca or those of Jesus in the Gospels. Vives differs from Erasmus by virtue of his sober grasp of human institutions; living among merchants, he understood something of the working of what would now be called market forces, and his reform treatises proposed checking one evil by a lesser one, just as in his pedagogical writings he stressed learning to recognize the incitements that touch off disorderly passions. Living among scholars, Erasmus preferred to hold up to the unruly world a standard or ideal defined by what he called the philosophy of Christ.

More important for the discussion in the following chapters, in a different sense Erasmus stands opposed to Valla, Vives, and Calvin.^[52] Despite their differences, the three other reformers of doctrina each laid claim to the broad intellectual heritage of St. Augustine. To be sure, the Augustine Calvin admired was less the author of De doctrina Christiana, an early work, than the author of the later treatises against Pelagius and his followers, which denied the human will any role at all in the process of salvation. (Even this Augustine was not “Augustinian” enough for Calvin, for he noted that “between us and Augustine there is this difference,” that though Augustine admits that the faithful while still in the body must needs burn with concupiscence, “he dares not call this malady sin.”)^[53] But contrary to some still prevalent impressions of the Renaissance humanist movement, it was not at all out of character for humanists to subscribe to some version of Augustine’s pessimistic doctrine of human nature.^[54] Valla may be called Augustinian in his emphasis on human passions and in his rejection of the mastery of reason over the emotions, as was taught in different ways by the ancient Stoic and Aristotelian philosophers. In his treatment of the relations between reason and the emotions Vives followed Aristotle more than Valla, but he too may be considered Augustinian in his understanding of the dominion of sin in the human soul and in human society.

Yet humanists were not necessarily disciples of Augustine. Erasmus in particular had the unusual distinction of being chided by contemporaries for being “unfair” to Augustine or for not taking his views into account.^[55] Certainly he took Augustine to task on many occasions—for accepting the legend (exposed by St. Jerome) that the standard Greek version of the Old Testament had been done by seventy scholars who all arrived independently at the same readings; for saying that one should rather starve to death than eat meat that had been offered to pagan gods; for being “mightily credulous”; and for having misread the New Testament in various places because of his inability to use Greek.^[56] Erasmus’s own preference for Jerome, the linguist and scholar among the Latin Fathers, is well known. When he listed eight Greek and Latin Fathers whose writings contributed to an understanding of Scripture, Augustine was last on the list; when challenged directly about his views on Augustine, Erasmus responded that he learned “more of Christian philosophy [philosophia Christiana] from one page of Origen than from ten of Augustine.” Elsewhere, he asserted that Augustine was not to be compared with any of the Greek Fathers and that among the Latins Ambrose and Hilary and even Cyprian were “more learned than he…but they wrote less.” ^[57]

There are several reasons why Erasmus may have found Augustine uncongenial. He himself was dubious about the religious value of monasticism (see below, chapter 7), yet St. Augustine was one of monasticism’s great patrons; unlike modern scholars, Erasmus questioned the authenticity of the rule attributed to St. Augustine, in use among the Augustinian Canons, but he recognized that its contents were closely paralleled in one of Augustine’s genuine letters. Augustine may even have been something of a bogeyman at one point in Erasmus’s life; the humanist’s account of being pressured into taking his final vows as an Augustinian Canon relates that one of the monks warned him of the danger that “St. Augustine in a temper would visit some great evil on [me] in return for the insult of [my] abandoning the habit, and of this he recalled several horrifying examples.” ^[58] Erasmus may also have been cool to Augustine because scholastic theology, with its penchant for dogmatizing, had found in that Father such a great authority:

The reason why the academic fraternity [scholasticae tribus] put Augustine above Jerome is that he is more frequently quoted by those authors who have acquired a despotic position in our universities, either because they have found him easier to understand, or because he defines things more assertively than they do.^[59]

Finally, Erasmus balked at Augustine’s vision of a human will enslaved to sin. In his annotation to Romans 5 : 11, he was “the first in the history of Western exegesis” to give a variant reading for the text long thought to be the clearest scriptural justification for the doctrine of Original Sin; for Erasmus it was “death entered in for all men in that all have sinned” rather than “ in whom [Adam] all have sinned.” ^[60]

At Rom. 7 : 23–25 (“the law of sin in my members…who will deliver me from the body of this death?”) patristic interpreters were divided as to whether the apostle’s words had reference to the power of sin in the life of a faithful Christian like himself or in the lives of sinful men before they were redeemed by divine grace. Lorenzo Valla (as noted above) used this passage to show the vanity of hopes that mere philosophy could calm the turbulent passions of the human breast. By contrast, Erasmus used it to show that the apostle often spoke in a persona other than his own; in other words, Paul himself was not the wretched sinner described in these words.^[61] Similarly, where St. Paul says (Rom. 9 : 16) “There is question not of him who wills, nor of him who runs, but of God showing mercy,” Erasmus in his 1517 Paraphrase on Romans added a gratuitous qualification: “Or rather, some part of it depends on our own will and effort, although this part is so small it seems like nothing at all in comparison with the free kindness of God.” These passages may help to explain why critics accused Erasmus of paying too little attention to Augustine and too much to Origen, who was a source for each of the readings indicated.^[62] Origen, if not Augustine, permitted Erasmus to believe that Christ’s yoke is indeed light (Matt. 11 : 30) because his teachings correspond to desires for peace and harmony deeply imbedded in human nature: “Whatever is according to nature is easily borne.” ^[63] Thus, Erasmus’s understanding of the philosophia Christi, unlike Valla’s, would stress that innate goodness in human nature to which pagan philosophers also appealed. In diagnosing the evils of Christian society, Erasmus, unlike Vives, would stress the wickedness of powerful men, not the intractable power of sin.

Notes

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

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

8. The Philosophy of Christ

Erasmus began speaking of “the philosophy of Christ” (sometimes “Christian philosophy”) in works about 1515. Already in Julius Exclusus he seems on the threshold of introducing the idea when St. Peter contrasts the divine simplicity of Christ’s teaching with the worldly arrogance of Pope Julius II:

The teaching of Christ [disciplina Christi] demands a heart wholly purged of the influence of worldly anxieties. Our great master did not come down from heaven to earth to give men some easy or common philosophy. It is not a carefree or tranquil profession to be a Christian.

To shun all pleasures like poison, to trample riches as if dirt, to hold one’s life as of no account: this is the profession of the Christian man. Again in “The Sileni of Alcibiades,” one of the 1515 adages, he contrasts the riches and power that Christ forswore with “the philosophy of His choice, worlds away from the principles laid down by philosophers and by the reasoning of the world.” ^[1]The Education of a Christian Prince (Institutio Principis Christiani, 1516) insists that the Christian prince is held to a standard unknown even to the best of pagan rulers: “You cannot defend your realm without a violation of justice, without a great waste of human blood and great damage to religion—rather lay down your title, and yield to the necessity of the moment.” ^[2] Yet if Christian charity demanded conduct very different from “the accepted tradition of centuries and the conduct laid down by princes in their laws,” princes should not be condemned for doing their duty as they saw it. What mattered was to preserve the integrity of the Gospel as a standard against which the world of power and privilege could be measured: one must not “sully that heavenly philosophy of Christ by confusing it with the decrees of man.” ^[3]

The philosophia Christi also demanded conduct very different from the traditions of the universities, where amid all the talk about philosophy and theology “religious minds heard scarcely a word” about Gospel teaching (doctrina Evangelica). Thus in responding to a letter from Johann Eck, scholastic theologian and celebrated debater, Erasmus praised his recent triumphs but added a wish that has overtones of a rebuke: “I shall rejoice with you still more when you are blessed with leisure and with the spirit to ponder the secrets of the philosophy of Christ in deepest silence and in your inmost heart, when the Bridegroom will lead you into his chamber.” Like other reformers of doctrina, Erasmus saw no point in “teaching” or “philosophy” that did not change the lives of those who professed it. At the outset of Methodus Verae Theologiae, his initial outline of a theology based on Scripture and the Fathers, he explained that “celestial philosophy,” unlike that of the Stoics or Aristotelians, requires a soul purified of vices “so that the image of that eternal truth may shine forth as if in a quiet pool or a shining mirror” (the metaphor is borrowed from Augustine’s De doctrina Christiana). Thus the study of theology really meant to follow Christ: “to philosophize devoutly” in the New Testament, “praying rather than arguing, and seeking to be transformed rather than to be armed for combat.” “This kind of philosophy” was expressed “more in the emotions [affectibus] than in syllogisms,” it was a matter of “inspiration more than learning, transformation more than reasoning.” ^[4]

This motif of inner transformation, familiar in Erasmus’s writings since the Enchiridion, is again highlighted in the passages where he sketches in outline form a “compendium” for easier understanding of the “philosophy” that Christ wished to be “accessible to all men, not beset with impenetrable labyrinths of argument”:^[5]

Christ the heavenly teacher has founded a new people on earth, who depending wholly on heaven, and having put no trust in this world’s defenses [huius mundi praesidiis], are rich in a different way, also wise, noble and happy in different ways.…Having eyes without guile, these folk know no spite or envy; having freely castrated themselves, and aiming at a life of angels while in the flesh, they know no unchaste lust; they know not divorce, since there is no evil they will not endure or turn to the good; they have not the use of oaths, since they neither distrust nor deceive anyone; they know not the hunger for money, since their treasure is in heaven, nor do they itch for empty glory, since they refer all things to the glory of Christ.…these are the new teachings of our founder, such as no school of philosophy has ever brought forth.^[6]

Thus the philosophy of Christ focuses on how Christians live, not on the credal statements they may espouse. Indeed, in Erasmus’s view of the early church, “the number and complexity of creeds increased as faith began to dwindle.” ^[7] But it would be a serious mistake to think of Erasmus as struggling to express something like the modern distinction between ethics and religion. Christ is always in the forefront, whether as the goal or target (scopus) to which Christians aspire, as the founder of a new people, as a “source of eternal fire” that “kindles and purifies [the order of priests] from all earthly contagion,” as the Bridegroom leading the soul into His chamber, or as “that solid rock” in whom the believer can place his trust even in the most perilous of times.^[8] Despite his critique of the Brethren of the Common Life,^[9] it apparently was not for nothing that Erasmus spent a good part of his youth in close contact with a religious movement whose most famous literary product was The Imitation of Christ.

Yet the philosphia Christi breathes a different spirit. Of that great, often excessive devotion to the monastic virtue of humility that one finds in the writings of the Brethren, there is in Erasmus not a trace. Instead, his way of conveying the inescapable contrast between the humble circumstances of Jesus’ life and the pomp and splendor of the world is expressed by the concept of “human defenses [praesidia humana]” or “defenses of this world [huius mundi praesidia].” These terms encompass every imaginable form of strength and power in which human beings find pride and security. Thus Christ won men and women to himself “not by engines of war,” nor by “the syllogisms of philosophers or the rhetorical figures of the orators,” for “He did not wish any kind of human defenses to be involved in this affair.” St. Paul wrote his Epistle to the Romans to “take away the Jews’ trust in themselves” and call them to rely only “on the defenses of Christ,” for “no one can truly trust in God unless he has abandoned trust in his own defenses.” In God’s providence it was “the simple and popular doctrine of the Gospel” that renewed the world, as previously no school of philosophy had been able to do, “lest any of the praise be ascribed to human defenses.” This theme has points of contact with Luther’s doctrine of “faith alone,” but it was clearly enunciated in prefatory writings to the 1516 Novum Instrumentum, and it was not something Erasmus learned from Luther.^[10] Rather, his own stress on the renunciation of praesidia humana helps to explain why he could see in Luther “a mighty trumpet of Gospel truth” (see chapter 9).

A further difference between Erasmus’s philosophia Christi and the spirituality of the Brethren is the ideal of learned piety (docta pietas), as expressed when the letter to Paul Volz praises the abbot and others like him: “Being yourselves endowed with pious learning [pia doctrina] and with learned piety [docta pietas], I know that you would approve of nothing that is not equally pious and learned.” ^[11] In a general way, phrases like “learned piety” and “pious learning” convey the root notion with which Part II of this book began, that is, the notion of a doctrina that offers nurture for the heart as well as for the intellect. In a more specific sense, piety for Erasmus had to be “learned” in the sense that it drank in Christian doctrina “from the purest springs [fontes],” that is, from Scripture understood and expounded according to the best scholarly norms. In Erasmus’s use of terms philosophia Christi is linked again and again to this simple but compelling metaphor: “All the springs and sources of Christian philosophy are enshrined in the books of the evangelists and the apostles”; the philosophy of Christ is drawn “from these few books, as if from the purest springs,” much more easily than Aristotle’s philosophy is extracted from spiny tomes, “and I dare say with much more profit”; so as not to taint “the heavenly philosophy of Christ” with the laws and disciplines of men, “let that one spring remain uncorrupted, let that true sheet anchor of evangelical doctrine be preserved.” ^[12]

The “spring” metaphor expressed a principle for which Erasmus could claim the authority of both Jerome and Augustine—that is, that the Latin New Testament must be corrected against the Greek original, “for that is, as it were, the fountain-head.” In the same tradition humanist friends praised him for “opening the Greek sources [fontes]” of the New Testament or returning “to the Greek original (which means to abandon the runlets, and go back to the fountain-head.)” ^[13] If still further support were needed for the equation fons = original text = saving doctrina, Erasmus found it through an allegorical interpretation of the story (Gen. 26 : 14–19) of how Isaac reopened the wells dug in the days of his father Abraham but later stopped up and filled with dirt by the Philistines:

Judaism would have imposed on us the whole of Moses and even the crowning indignity of circumcision and would have reduced that heavenly philosophy to a matter of coarse and lifeless ritual, had not this valiant Isaac of ours [St. Paul] opened so many wells of the authentic Gospel, so many springs of living water against the Philistines that would fill all with dirt.^[14]

This secondary metaphor—the wells of Abraham that have to be cleansed of Philistine dirt—provides a warrant for Erasmus’s combative stance against his critics and detractors. With his patient textual labors he was not merely cleansing the “springs” of Christian philosophy from the unconscious errors of copyists, he was also removing impurities deliberately introduced into the well, for “we are [not] quite free of Philistines nowadays,” who “tip earth into the Gospel springs.” ^[15] In the first instance, these enemies of truth were, as passages like the one quoted above suggest, proponents of a religion of ceremonies, ranging from the Judeo-Christians of the early church (Paul’s adversaries) to the monks and friars of modern times. Erasmus’s New Testament annotations offered a platform for showing how particular passages had been “twisted” to provide justification for modern “ceremonies,” as may be illustrated here by a few examples from Matthew. Thus at Matt. 3:2 (“Do penance” in the Vulgate) he points out that the Greek verb metanoiete (“repent” or “be changed in your heart”) has nothing to do with “the prescribed penalties by which one atones for sins” after receiving the sacrament of Confession, regardless what the “common herd” of theologians may think. At Matt.…(“In praying, do not multiply words”) he inveighs against the “little chants, clamors, murmurs and bombast” that have invaded the liturgy of the church, and he denounces especially certain prayers resembling “maunderings of old men or the foolishness of old women” which have been mixed in with the divine office that priests were obliged to recite daily. At 11 : 30 (“My yoke is easy”) he concludes that “a general council” of the church is the only remedy for the “tyranny” of laws and ceremonies which has so infested the lives of the faithful. At 16 : 18 (“Thou art Peter”) he marvels that certain theologians have “twisted” the reference to the rock on which Christ will build his church, “making it refer to the Roman Pontiff” rather than to all Christians, or to Peter’s faith, or to Christ himself, as the ancient interpreters suggest. Finally, at 23 : 2 (“The Scribes and Pharisees have sat on the chair of Moses”) he reads Christ as saying that only those who teach the law truly deserve respect: “But who will bear [bishops] measuring everything by their own profit and majesty, legislating for their own convenience, against the doctrine of Christ, exercising plain tyranny over the people.” ^[16]

Dirt was also “tipped in Gospel wells” by palliating or explaining away the stringent moral demands of Christ in the Gospel. Here too Erasmus’s annotations on Matthew, especially for the Sermon on the Mount, may provide illustrations. At Matt. 5 : 22 (“Everyone who is angry with his brother”) he noted that some Greek manuscripts read “without cause,” but he accepted Jerome’s opinion that the addition had come from “some temerious scribe who wished to mitigate a saying that seemed too harsh.” At 5 : 37 (“Let your speech be, ‘Yes, yes’; ‘No, no’; and whatever is beyond this comes from the evil one”), he marveled how theologians had “twisted” the passage to mean that “evil” came from those who swore an oath falsely: “I think Christ intended that those who would be perfect should not swear at all, even on those occasions when people usually take oaths.” ^[17]

The worst distortion of all was to blunt Christ’s injunction to suffer persecution in his name (Matt. 5 : 10–11), a command that stood squarely athwart the quarreling and war-making proclivities of sinful humankind. It was amazing how Christians turned a cold shoulder to such “dogmas of Christ’s most holy philosophy,” for

even those professing perfect religion are not ashamed to evade this commandment, as if it were antiquated and obsolete. They think it impious not to have made a successful career, no matter what it takes. Thus war is praised even in the churches by bishops, by theologians, by monks. I know certain men who have made themselves bishops by singing the praises of war.

He had equally harsh words for medieval commentators who read Luke 22 : 36 (“Let him who has no sword sell his tunic and buy one”) as a charter for undertaking wars in a just cause:

To me no heresy is more pernicious, no blasphemy more criminal, than when someone following the example of the Philistines fills with dirt the wells of the Gospel fields, converting the spiritual sense to a carnal one, and corrupting heavenly teaching [doctrina] into something earthly.…It troubles me not a whit that some are worried lest the right of making war be taken away from princes, for it is hardly necessary to teach princes what they do anyway far too eagerly. I will not go into how princes fight wars nowadays, if indeed they do fight wars, instead of colluding among themselves for the destruction of the people, using the pretext of war to consolidate their own tyranny.^[18]

This passage neatly illustrates how the philosophia Christi was calibrated to Erasmus’s perception of the deep and secret evils that afflicted Christendom. It was only because the wells of Gospel doctrina had been filled with dirt that the shameless effrontery of wicked men could cast off all restraint. Conversely, if the wells of Gospel doctrine could again flow freely, the machinations of princes and their tame theologians would be set at naught.

The Exhortation (Paraclesis) prefaced to the 1516 Novum Instrumentum has a bright vision of the future. Although “it would perhaps be better to keep the mysteries of kings hidden from view, Christ wants his mysteries made known as widely as possible.” Thus Erasmus urged that the New Testament be translated into all vernacular languages, to be read “not just by Scots and Irishmen but even by Turks and Saracens,” so that snatches of the Gospel story could be sung by farmers at the plow, or weavers at their looms, or told among travelers to enliven a tedious journey, “for these are the occasions when Christians talk with one another, and we are such as our daily conversations make us.” As a dyed-in-the-wool Latinist Erasmus could not follow through on his own suggestion about translating Scripture, but he did his part through the New Testament Paraphrases, intended to explicate difficult passages and thus make the text more accessible to the Latin-reading public.^[19] But mere spreading of the Gospel was not the only task. There would be within not too many years “a more genuine kind of Christian” if “the three estates of men whose task it is to establish and promote the Christian religion” were of one mind in promulgating the pure Gospel:

If princes would stand by this seemingly ordinary philosophy [of Christ], if preachers would inculcate it in their sermons, if schoolmasters would instill it in their pupils, instead of a more learned philosophy drawn from the springs of Aristotle or Averroës, the Christian republic would not be troubled in this way by nearly unceasing wars, we would not see everywhere such a mad zeal for amassing riches by means fair or foul, we would not hear everywhere the echo of civil and ecclesiastical litigation, and we would not differ only in name and in ceremonies from those who do not profess the philosophy of Christ.^[20]

This in a nutshell was Erasmus’s vision of a reform of doctrina, radiating outward from a cleansing of the Gospel springs, with the cooperation of civil and religious authorities as well as of those who taught from lectern or pulpit and over time bearing fruit in a world in which the Christian people would be spared much litigation and many wars.

The great hope that the Paraclesis expresses seems to rest on several disparate premises. All of his life Erasmus was fascinated by the charm and the power of language and for him the divine speech of Scripture was the most compelling of all: “That heavenly World which once came down to us from the heart of the Father still lives and breathes for us and acts and speaks with more efficacy” in the writings of the evangelists and apostles “than in any other way.” ^[21] In addition, he drew encouragement from what he saw as the congruence between the philosophy of Christ and the inherent goodness of human nature: “That which is most in keeping with nature will easily take root in the souls of all. For what is the philosophy of Christ, which he calls a rebirth [renascentia], but the renewal of a human nature that was created good?” Gospel doctrine was “in keeping with nature” because “the consciousness of having done no wrong is the wellspring of true pleasure, as even Epicurus admits.” Erasmus explains Christ’s statement that his yoke is light by saying that “he prescribed nothing except mutual love,” adding that “whatever is according to nature is easily borne”; to grasp his meaning, we may connect this passage from the New Testament Annotations with another in Querela Pacis, where, borrowing from Cicero, he speaks of nature implanting in man “a mild and gentle disposition which is inclined towards good will between him and his fellows, so that he delights in being loved for himself and takes pleasure in being of service to others—so long as he has not been corrupted by base desires.” ^[22] Neither St. Augustine nor the other reformers of doctrina discussed earlier in chapter 5 would have suggested that base and quarrelsome desires are a corruption of man’s true nature. Here again one sees the profound congruity between Erasmus’s diagnosis of the ills of Christian society and his understanding of the philosophia Christi. If a political and religious elite “corrupted by base desires” had for its own selfish purposes “tipped dirt in the Gospel wells,” one could hope that the springs of truth, flowing fresh, might indeed produce “a more genuine kind of Christian.” In effect, his program for the renewal of Christendom was his own unique version of the ancient Christian principles that where evil abounds, there grace abounds more fully.

Philosophia Erasmi

Erasmus’s presentation of Gospel doctrine was both a work for the ages and a work very much limited by its author’s own horizon. It is possible that no one has ever done as much as Erasmus to disclose the meaning of the New Testament books in their original language, but it is clear that the message of Erasmus’s Gospel was very much in tune with his own ideas about religion. This idiosyncratic character of the philosophia Christi may be seen in his understanding of human nature (to be discussed in chapter 11, in connection with the debate with Luther). Here, the same point may be illustrated by considering first his use of allegorical exegesis to press home the attack on “ceremonies” and second the distinctive nuances of his understanding of ecclesiastical authority.

Among many of the Church Fathers a multiplicity of meanings in Scripture was seen as expressing the inexhaustible riches of divine wisdom. For Erasmus the practice of looking for spiritual or allegorical meanings was an essential part of the “ancient” or “rhetorical” theology he sought to emulate. In Ratio Verae Theologiae Erasmus, like the Fathers, argued that “there must be a figure of speech hidden in the words” where a scriptural passage seems “unsuitable to the divine nature or to the teachings of Christ.” Though critical of the excesses of some of the Fathers in this regard, Erasmus continued to defend the principle of allegorical interpretation, even though many of those who supported the humanist program for a theology based on the biblical languages argued for an exclusive focus on the literal meaning of the text.^[23] One may ask what was the basis for his allegiance to a method of exegesis many of his intellectual allies thought outmoded. Allegorical exegesis may have been for Erasmus, as for the Fathers, a means of conveying the central Christian mystery of the Incarnation; this view of the question has been proposed by one astute interpreter but doubted by another.^[24] What cannot be doubted is that he often used allegory, for example in the Ratio, as a means of conveying his trademark critique of the religion of ceremonies. Thus when Jesus tells the Canaanite woman it is “not fair to take the children’s bread and cast it to dogs” (Matt. 15 : 26), he speaks, according to Erasmus, “in the voice of the Jews, who thought they alone were holy.” When Jesus curses the fig tree that had green leaves but no fruit, he was “indicating that no kind of men is more hateful than those who are impious under the pretext of piety and live irreligiously while professing religion by their title and their dress.” ^[25] One may observe a similar tendency in the Paraphrases, where Erasmus exercised a certain freedom in presenting the text for a literate but nonscholarly audience. When St. Paul says that fire will test the materials one uses to build on Christ as a foundation (1 Cor. 3 : 11–13), Erasmus knows what kinds of materials the fire will consume: “petty human constitutions, on dress or food or frigid ceremonies and such things, which men are wont to mix in not for the sake of Christ but for their own glory, even for their own profit.” When Paul asserts that “food does not commend us to God” (1 Cor. 8 : 8), Erasmus has a bit more to say: “Choice among foods can make one superstitious, never pious. Christ taught no distinction in such things, and for some little man to burden another with constitutions of this sort is presumptuous.” ^[26] Those who viewed the fast and abstinence laws of the church rather more favorably than Erasmus might wonder at such use of the sacred text. If Erasmus had trouble understanding how he had given his critics any cause for offense,^[27] it was partly because he had trouble seeing that his own reading of the New Testament was, like anyone else’s, an interpretation.

Erasmus’s vision of the reform of Christendom was poised between an extraordinary optimism and an equally extraordinary pessimism, between the depths of evil to which major “orders” of Christendom had sunk (popes, princes, and mendicants) and the bright future that lay in prospect if only the Gospel springs could be cleansed of the dirt deposited by the self-interested proponents of the religion of ceremonies. Surely he could not have been so hopeful about what the philosophy of Christ might accomplish had he not fixed his attention on a kind of depravity that sprang not from the depths of human nature but from the greed and vindictiveness of certain powerful men.

This combination of optimism about the Gospel and pessimism about the church also sets up a certain tension in Erasmus’s thought; in effect, one may ask how his espousal of the pure philosophy of Christ squares with his professions of loyalty to a church that was far from pure. This question now seems less urgent than it did some decades ago, partly because careful scholarship has established that Erasmus never ceased to understand himself as a Catholic,^[28] partly because a better appreciation of the diversity of opinion within pre-Tridentine Catholicism makes some of his views seem less eccentric. For example, if his philosophia Christi has relatively little to say about the sacraments of the church, the same is true for the Imitation of Christ, except for a section presenting the mass as the enactment of a spiritual drama played out in the individual soul, an understanding Erasmus also expresses in the Enchiridion. It was thus not without reason that Erasmus grew tired of being told to say explicitly that he submitted his opinions to the judgment of the church: “So indeed I do, but to give and take many sureties is a sign of bad faith [signum malae fidei].” Moreover, as a critical student of church history, he knew better than most that “sometimes it is none too clear where the church might be found.” ^[29]

Precisely this uncertainty about “where the church might be found” points to Erasmus’s belief that the determination of orthodox doctrine had been conditioned by historical circumstances, a view that many of his contemporaries would have found disconcerting. On the one hand, Erasmus knew enough about the early church not to accept modern popes and bishops as moral equivalents of the apostles in whose stead they claimed to rule; in his brief description of the five ages of the church, the fifth and last age is that of the church “lapsing and declining from the pristine vigor of the Christian spirit.” ^[30] On the other hand, he knew too much about the first few Christian centuries to be wholly captivated by the primitivist implications of the beloved humanist metaphor about the fontes of pure doctrine in early times. Thus he also believed that “it is possible that the spirit of Christ did not reveal the whole truth to the church all at once.” In context, he is defending his plea for modifying the church’s ban on divorce in his 1519 Novum Testamentum, at 1 Cor. 7 : 39. Here, in the longest by far of his New Testament annotations on a single verse, Erasmus had asked whether it would not be better for the church to allow some marriages to be dissolved, for grave reasons, than to force a man whose wife was “covered in crimes” either to continue living with her or to part from her only to live “the rest of his life bereft, destitute, and as it were emasculated.” To the objection that the “lapsing and declining” modern church lacked authority to dispense from Christ’s explicit prohibition of divorce, Erasmus would demur: “In regard to the sacrament of the altar, the church was late in prescribing the doctrine of transubstantion; for many centuries it sufficed to say that the true body of Christ is present, either under the consecrated bread or in some other manner.” ^[31]

With regard to the locus of authority within the church, it was equally hard to pin Erasmus down. Though the belief that the popes exercised supreme authority in the church by divine right was gaining ground among sixteenth-century Catholics, Erasmus interpreted Christ’s promise to Peter—“Upon this rock I will build my church” (Matt. 16 : 18)—as referring to the whole body of believers. As for the theories of papalist canon lawyers, “if it be true, as some assert, that the Roman Pontiff cannot err in judgment, what need is there of general councils?” In fact, theologians and canonists who doubted papal claims looked to an ecumenical council to remedy the abuses of papal authority, but Erasmus was not exactly a conciliarist either, for he thought that even a council could be subverted to evil purposes.^[32] Yet he did see church and state as analogous commonwealths, each threatened by the tyranny of a few and each equipped with a framework of law and precedent which could be invoked to restrain tyranny, if only each estate in the church body or the body politic limited itself to its proper function.^[33] Thus the pope’s role in the body of Christendom was to intervene “with exhortations and prayers” in case “some prince designs to seize despotic power” or so that “if some bishop behaves like a tyrant, the common people will have a remedy.” The duties of a pastor included building up a library for the education of his flock and not allowing scurrilous circuit-preachers the use of his pulpit; an inquisitor’s duty was to make “inquiries and put the right people on notice,” not to stir up trouble by taking his case to the people in sermons.^[34]

This vaguely constitutional sense of the church as an ordered polity was perhaps appropriate to the life experience of one who was both a Netherlander and a privileged cleric. What is more important, this attitude seems to have filled in for Erasmus what would otherwise have been a terrible chasm between the pure philosophy of Christ and the unspeakable tyranny sometimes exercised by those who claimed to rule in Christ’s name. Even though the reform of Christian society ultimately depended on the will of Christ, there might after all be a few “human defenses” for Gospel doctrine, and Erasmus was determined to use the slender threads of his influence as best he could to persuade those in positions of power to do their duty and set limits to the “tyranny” of the mendicants and their allies.

Notes

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