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.