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Erasmus as Read by His Contemporaries
In Catholic Europe there were many “circles or settings” where Erasmus’s memory was cherished as he might have wished it to be cherished: “among the reforming bishops, in the Habsburg entourage, especially among the court humanists of the dynasty’s east European lands…and of the Netherlands.” Friedrich Nausea, a reforming bishop of Vienna (d. 1552) who was to argue at the Council of Trent in behalf of clerical marriage and Communion in both kinds for the laity, insisted that Erasmus’s only enemies had been ignorant monks and theologians whose god was their belly, for through Erasmus’s writings one could see and hear Christ as the disciples did; indeed, for Nausea, sanctus enim erat Erasmus (“Erasmus was a holy man”).[5] At Leuven the Collegium Trilingue, incorporating Erasmus’s scholarly ideals, continued to promote study of the biblical languages, even if scholarship was increasingly subservient to the needs of an embattled Catholic orthodoxy and thus lacked the boldness and independence of the master’s work. Meanwhile, patristic and Scripture studies made headway even among the theologians. The Augustinian school of thought for which Leuven would become famous (Cornelis Janssen, for whom the Jansenist movement was named, had been a professor of theology here) developed from the combined influence of Erasmian humanism and the Collegium Trilingue and the practical need to use Augustine in combating Protestant foes with their own weapons.[6]
Meanwhile, a very different Catholic view was taking hold in Italy. Girolamo Aleandro’s charges that Erasmus was secretly abetting Luther were echoed in no less than ten tracts published by Italian scholars between 1524 and 1534.[7] Many of the authors were members or associates of the Roman Academy whose criticisms of his un-Ciceronian Latin Erasmus had scornfully rejected in a long letter of 1524 (published in 1529)[8] as well as in the Ciceronianus of 1528. Like Aleandro in his dispatches from Germany and the Low Countries (1520–1521), Italian critics saw Erasmus as providing “kindling” for Luther, especially in works like the Colloquia, widely used in Italian schools, because of the way that his mockery of purely external religious observances undermined people’s faith in specific Catholic practices like abstinence laws and monastic vows. In fact, Italians called before the Inquisition on heresy charges between 1540 and 1550 were more likely to be accused of heterodox views on matters like abstinence laws or the veneration of saints than on justifying faith or the bondage of the will. In the 1560s, when the leader of a Calvinist circle in northern Italy sought to convert a local schoolmaster, he first gave him Erasmus’s Adagia to read, hoping to induce a critical attitude toward church authority.[9] In the Rome of Clement VII (1523–1534) the policy was to treat Erasmus with respect, lest he be provoked into joining the camp of the reformers—an attitude that nicely mirrors Erasmus’s suspicions of Pope Clement and his entourage.[10] But what Sylvana Seidel-Menchi calls the “Erasmus-is-a-Lutheran operation” had rapid success outside the Curia. Already in 1529 the Florentine humanist Francesco Vettori wrote a friend that he had stopped reading Erasmus, lest he be thought a Lutheran. Once Erasmus himself had passed from the scene, there was no reason for the Curia to withhold its support from the rising tide of condemnation. Pope Paul III (1534–1549) had offered Erasmus a cardinal’s hat in 1535,[11] but the imperious Paul IV (1555–1559) personally supervised preparation of the first Index of Forbidden Books (1555), in which all of Erasmus’s works were completely forbidden. Following protests of this decision from the Habsburg courts in Brussels and Vienna, the 1559 Index, approved by the Council of Trent in 1562, banned only certain of his works, including the Colloquia and the Praise of Folly, and stipulated that the rest should remain forbidden until the theologians of Paris or Leuven had drawn up a list of passages to be expurgated, as was done in the Antwerp Index Expurgatorius of 1570. These decisions could not fail to undermine what Bruce Mansfield calls the moderate Catholic interpretation of Erasmus, especially in Italy, where after 1559 “not a single voice was raised from within the Catholic Church to vindicate the orthodoxy of Erasmus.” [12]
In the kingdom of Castile, as in Italy, the fortunes of Erasmus were intimately connected with local trajectories of thought. Here his foes were led by Diego Lopez de Zuñiga, a scholar of biblical languages associated with the University of Alcala and its Complutensian Polyglot Bible (1522)[13] who was the first critic to argue that Erasmus’s works were radically heretical, not just on the externals of religion but on fundamental points like the divinity of Christ.[14] But Spain in these years had a home-grown movement of spiritual reform whose learned partisans were eager to connect their ideas with a figure of European stature like Erasmus, especially after about 1523. The allumbrados, or enlightened ones, who believed that prayer was a matter of turning the mind and heart to God, not of mumbling words, applauded in Erasmus not only his doctrina of a spiritual piety but also his disapproval of that dwelling in lugubrious detail on Christ’s Passion which was a staple of late medieval religious devotion. Hence in 1523 Erasmus Schets, the Antwerp banker, was informed by a correspondent in Valladolid that the leading men at court felt themselves “illumined by the Spirit of God” in reading Erasmus’s works.[15]
The stage was set for a protracted struggle. Despite the influence of Zuñiga, Alcala, a new university where the new biblical philology was treated with respect, weighed in for Erasmus, while Salamanca, the traditional intellectual center of Old Castile and a bastion of scholastic theology, marshaled its legions against him. At a gathering of theologians convened in Valladolid to pronounce judgment on Erasmus’s works (1527), the Dominicans and Franciscans (with the men of Salamanca) attacked him, while the Benedictines and other orders (with Alcala’s theologians) were more favorable. The inconclusive result of the assembly was good news for Erasmus’s supporters, led by a trio of court humanists whom historian Marcel Bataillon describes as the “headquarters staff”: Juan Vergara, secretary to Juan de Fonseca, archbishop of Toledo and primate of Spain; Alonso Valdes, Charles V’s Latin secretary; and the Benedictine Alonso Ruiz de Virues, who at some time prior to 1531 was named court preacher for the emperor. These men published their own ideas on reform even as Erasmus’s works were translated into Spanish at a rate that in Bataillon’s view finds no parallel in other European languages.[16] But Valdes and Chancellor Mercurino Gattinara, an admirer of Erasmus, both died shortly after Charles V left Spain in 1530 for Italy and Germany, and Erasmus’s friends missed an opportunity when the Latin secretaryship did not go to the Fleming Cornelis de Schepper, another devoted admirer (de Schepper lacked the political clout of his successful rival, the nephew of the man now all-powerful in the emperor’s entourage, Francisco de los Cobos). Meanwhile, the Toledo chamber of the Inquisition brought formal charges against Vergara after a friar had identified him as a “Lutheran” because he said that St. Augustine had misunderstood the Bible because of his ignorance of Greek. Vergara stipulated that none of his judges should be monks or friars, and his mistrust of the regular clergy was borne out when Alonso Virues, Benedictine and erstwhile Erasmian (though initially mistrusted by Erasmus), came forward as a witness for the prosecution. Vergara was forced to make a public abjuration of his errors in December 1535. By now Charles V had returned to Spain (April 1533) with no Erasmians in his entourage. The new climate of opinion may be seen in the change of heart by Juan Maldonado, a priest-humanist of Burgos. This former correspondent of Erasmus now published On the Reading of Erasmus (1534), urging that the Colloquies and even the Paraphrases had best not be read, pending a judgment by the church.[17]
Protestant Europe was more evenly divided. Pier Paolo Vergerio, an Italian bishop who defected to Protestant Switzerland, regarded Erasmus as “a very important source [fonte]” for the different “streams” of Reformation doctrine. Thomas Cromwell (d. 1540), architect of the English Reformation under Henry VIII, sponsored translation of Erasmus’s writings into English in order to sow disrespect for the privileges of the old clergy and provide for lay devotion. Even under the more thorough-going Protestantism of Edward VI (1547–1553) an “Erasmian tradition” persisted in devotional literature.[18] Other proponents of the Reformation paid Erasmus the backhanded compliment of putting their own (or Luther’s) ideas forward under cover of Erasmus’s authority. Louis de Berquin (or an unknown editor) included snippets from Luther in a translation of Erasmus; works by Luther and his disciple Nikolaus van Amsdorf were published in Venice under Erasmus’s name; and in Alcala Juan de Valdes, Alonso’s younger brother, praised Erasmus in his Dialogo de Doctrina (1529) and had it printed by the publisher of Spanish translations of Erasmus, but only to disguise the fact that the book was in good part a pastiche of citations from Luther and Oecolampadius.[19] One assumes that in their own minds the authors of such stratagems were not so much foisting a deception on the public as closing the gap between Erasmus’s published statements and what the man who wrote as he did must surely have believed in private. In Italy an individual could be cited before the Inquisition for expressing doubt about the church’s fast and abstinence laws, and on the matter of “ceremonies” there was in fact little difference between Erasmus and Luther, as Melanchthon had written in a letter that Erasmus later published.[20] Melanchthon, who alone among the reformers remained close to Erasmus through his correspondence, later delivered the Oratio de Erasmo Roterodamo (1557) praising God for the work of this great scholar and describing him at the end of his life as wishing to be a member of the Protestant church of Basel.[21]
Yet the predominant opinion among Lutherans was quite different. Following the publication of Hyperaspistes II (1527), Luther himself was relieved of all doubt that Erasmus was irreligious through and through: “All religions serve him as an occasion for ridicule, he writes not a single word in earnest”; or “He is as certain that there is no eternal life as I am that I have two eyes.” Even a seemingly pious work like Erasmus’s Explanation of the Creed was rejected out of hand by Luther, who thought it would have been better for even his educational writings “to be blown out of our schools”; Luther simply refused to believe reports from Capito and Bucer that Erasmus had died calling on the name of God. Amid the bitter struggles among German Lutherans that followed Luther’s death (1546) and Charles V’s victory in the First Schmalkaldic War (1547), Melanchthon and his party were more and more discredited.[22] The future thus belonged to loyal followers of Luther like Johann Mathesius, an ardent foe of the “Philippists” (followers of Melanchthon), who in one of his sermons recounted a story about Erasmus’s staunch Catholic patron, Duke George of Saxony:
When the slippery man had given an equivocal and twisted answer, blowing neither hot nor cold, the wise Duke said: Dear Erasmus, you wash without making clean, I prefer the men of Wittenberg, who are not mealy-mouthed but say freely and honestly what they think.[23]
In German-speaking Protestant Switzerland such views were regarded as excessive; while Erasmus yet lived, Heinrich Bullinger, Ulrich Zwingli’s successor in Zurich, objected to Luther’s “calumnies” against “an old man who has deserved well of the church and of letters.” But in French-speaking Geneva the first preacher of the Reformation had been none other than Erasmus’s worst enemy among Protestants, Guillaume Farel. In Basel in 1557 Erasmus’s dear friend Bonifacius Amerbach, who had helped to make his now Protestant city a haven for religious refugees of all descriptions, had a bitter dispute about Erasmus with two Genevan travelers, Farel and Theodore de Bèze, who would succeed John Calvin on his death in 1564. In his Icones or Images of famous men, Bèze characterized Erasmus as one who preferred his own opinion to the authority of Scripture, who had been content to carp at superstition and refused to learn the truth.[24] Spiritualist reformer Sebastian Franck (d. 1542/1543) launched a separate tradition of dissenter commentary on Erasmus with his Geschichtsbibel (Strasbourg, 1531), which presented as the sole teachers of religious truth all of those whom Catholic authorities had condemned as heretics. Erasmus was outraged to find himself in Franck’s catalog of counterheroes, all the more so because Franck attributed to him such radical ideas as the rejection of infant baptism. Antitrinitarian writers later took up a similar argument, finding in Erasmus’s critical review of biblical proof-texts used by the Fathers against Arianism a basis for repudiating the doctrine of Christ’s divinity. This appropriation of Erasmus by radical theologians naturally served only to confirm the orthodox, Protestant as well as Catholic, in their growing certitude that the Rotterdam humanist had been fundamentally unsound.[25]
The image of “slippery” Erasmus that now took shape was thus a by-product of Europe’s steady movement in the second half of the sixteenth century toward the consolidation of religious orthodoxies, a process known to historians as “confessionalization.” [26] Conversely, his memory was honored among the loose-knit fraternity of those who resisted confessionalization in the name of “concord” among Christians.[27] These men drafted proposals for theological compromise or participated in the ecumenical colloquies organized under the auspices of various rulers, as at Dresden in 1538 (promoted by Duke George of Saxony), Regensburg in 1541 (by Charles V), or Poissy in 1562 (by Catherine de Medici as regent for her son, Charles IX). Protestant irenicists looked to the example of Philip Melanchthon and Martin Bucer, parties to the most promising of these discussions, at Regensburg, where Catholic and Protestant theologians agreed on a formulation for the doctrine of justification. For many unity-minded Catholics Erasmus was the exemplar, not least because of his treatise De Sarcienda Ecclesiae Concordia (On Restoring the Concord of the Church, 1533).[28] George Witzel (1501–1573), a lay Catholic theologian who had been both a priest and a Lutheran pastor, urged the aged Erasmus to play a leading role in working “for the peace of the church.” [29] François Bauduin, a humanist jurist who helped organize the Colloquy of Poissy, drew on Erasmus for some of his ideas, like the notion that the mystical body of Christ should find its visible expression in the respublica Christiana.[30] In a letter written the same year that the Council of Trent decreed the expurgation of Erasmus’s works, Joris Cassander (1515–1566), a Flemish humanisttheologian and sometime collaborator of Witzel and Bauduin, could write of Erasmus that “because of his uncommon good sense in ecclesiastical matters he seems to me to have been almost a prophet.” [31]
Another focal point for continuing admiration of Erasmus was his native Low Countries. In works of the “images of illustrious writers” genre published in the southern Netherlands, Erasmus was criticized for speaking too freely of theological matters, but Catholic authors of this region still retained something of the older, favorable interpretation. Petrus Opmeer (1526–1595) was the scion of a patrician family and a pupil of one of Erasmus’s Amsterdam friends. His works include a history of fellow Catholics martyred by partisans of the triumphant Reformation in Holland and the Opus Chronographicum (written in 1572 but published after his death), which presented the most well-informed account of Erasmus’s life that had yet appeared; Opmeer passed over in silence his hero’s censure by the Council of Trent. Erasmus had perhaps even more admirers among Dutch Protestant writers, though not among adherents of the orthodox Calvinist party that had by 1618/1619 asserted its full control over the Dutch Reformed Church. Among dissident Remonstrants,[32] many of whom were disciples of Jacobus Arminius (d. 1609), Erasmus was proof that yearning for reform in the church was not the exclusive property of any one faction in Europe’s theological battles. Martin Lydius, an Amsterdam divine and friend of Arminius, may have been the first churchman who read Erasmus to clarify his own position. His Apologia pro Erasmo Roterodamo, written to prove Erasmus’s agreement with Protestantism, appeared for the first time in the monumental Opera Omnia of Erasmus (Leiden, 1703–1706), published by the Huguenot refugee Jean Leclercq.[33] Arminius himself was known to quote Erasmus in support of some of his views, and his circle included men like Dominicus Baudius, who wrote an essay exculpating Erasmus of the charge of Arianism, and Paulus Merula, who penned an important early life of Erasmus.[34] When members of the Arminian or Remonstrant party were expelled from the Reformed Church and forced to create their own ecclesiastical structures, the memory of Erasmus was a source of historical legitimacy for the new church. Simon Episcopius, rector of the Arminian seminary in Amsterdam, defended the inclusion of Erasmus in the curriculum by asserting that all of his works “breathed nothing but counsels of peace, tolerance, and moderation, no less learned than salutary.” For Geeraert Brandt, the Remonstrant church historian, Erasmus had helped fortify civil magistrates in the Netherlands with a sense of their own dignity in struggles against an overbearing Dutch Reformed clergy; the dominees read Calvin, in Brandt’s view, but the magistrates read Erasmus.[35]
Patriotic pride had of course more than a little to do with such sentiments. During Erasmus’s lifetime the provincial parliament, or states, of Holland had voted the not inconsiderable sum of two hundred guilders for a jewel or fur hat for Erasmus, “by reason of our common fatherland.” [36] When the future King Philip II visited Rotterdam (1549), he found a wooden statue of Erasmus created for the occasion hard by the gate where he entered the city, with a man behind the statue speaking words of welcome in the name of Rotterdam’s most famous native son.[37] Somewhat more than a hundred years later, when Rotterdam proposed to erect a stone statue of Erasmus to replace the wooden one torn down by Spanish troops during the revolt, even the Calvinist synod of South Holland approved of the gesture on the grounds that honoring Erasmus was a political and not a religious act.[38] In later centuries the cult of Erasmus in the Netherlands led Johan Huizinga to suggest that the Rotterdam humanist had imprinted his own outlook on his countrymen, especially among the patrician elite of the wealthy and prosperous towns in his native province of Holland:
More recent Dutch scholarship has shown a healthy reaction against ascribing undue influence to Erasmus;[40] rather than calling the Dutch Erasmian, it makes more sense to recognize that Erasmus was himself a product of the highly urbanized culture of the core provinces of the Burgundian-Habsburg Low Countries. Huizinga was not insensitive to this nuance, as his next sentence indicates: “Not for naught did Erasmus praise as truly Dutch those qualities which we might also call truly Erasmian: gentleness, kindliness, moderation, and a generally diffused moderate erudition.” [41]Thoroughly permeated by the Erasmian spirit, too, was that class of municipal magistrates who were soon to take the lead and to set the fashion in the established Republic…If in the Dutch patriciate of that time those aspirations lived and were translated into action, it was Erasmus’s spirit of social responsibility which inspired them. The history of Holland is far less bloody and cruel than any of the surrounding countries.[39]