13. Circumspect Reformer

Early and late, Erasmus described himself as excessively “free” in expressing his thoughts, both in conversation with friends and in his writings. In 1499 he wrote to his friend Thomas More, himself an inveterate practical joker, that he appreciated their friendship because he was not afraid “that my plain-speaking may have offended you, for you are quite well aware of the Spartan habit of jousting without drawing blood [ad cutem vsque pugnandi].” ^[1] In his Apologiae he acknowledged that his besetting fault as a writer was that “what I publish is aborted rather than properly brought to birth; this vice is deeply engrained in me, and I cannot bear the tedium of revision.” In the last year of his life Erasmus still thought of himself as “extemporaneous by nature, and wondrously lazy about revising my works.” Amid the controversies of the Reformation era he was in fact frequently obliged to make excuses for the bons mots he tossed off among friends, such as that “my stomach is Lutheran” (he could not abide the fish that Catholic fast laws required).^[2] He knew he could make blunders, as when he added to a treatise written for Catherine of Aragon, even as King Henry VIII was beginning to think about divorce, a reference to his own view that divorce should be allowed in certain cases: “I had determined to say nothing of the sort, but while my thoughts went in one direction my pen wrote something else.” ^[3] If he was quick to suspect that friends had taken offense, even when they had not, it was because “I have so often experienced how much trouble the simplicity of my soul and the freedom of my tongue has caused me.” Yet Erasmus also believed that the best letters were those that expressed the mind of the author; for example, when selecting letters from eminent men for inclusion in his published correspondence, he chose “only those that I saw were written not by secretaries, but in the man’s own hand, and in his own spirit.” ^[4] The counterpart of the candor he admired in a letterwriter was good will on the reader’s part. Apropos of the medieval scribes who introduced errors into the text of works of St. Hilary of Poitiers, Erasmus remarked that “it is a mark of civility [civilitas] to interpret a work with indulgence [commode],” but to “change arbitrarily the actual words in the works of the ancients” was an “act of rashness, not to say irreverence.” Later in the same letter, he noted that even though this venerable Father of the Church had erred in certain ways, “it is the part of evangelical honesty [simplicitas] to interpret fairly the deeds and writings of our brothers [fratrum],” in the sure knowledge that “everyone errs.” ^[5]

Putting these comments together, one may glean from Erasmus’s works elements of the idea that civility is the basis for intellectual exchange. It is in fact difficult to imagine a universe of meaningful debate founded on any other premise. The proposition that human beings can communicate intelligibly through their writings is of course under challenge in our day, and in its defense philosophers and critics like Hans Georg Gadamer or George Steiner have developed, in a far more sophisticated way, the basic idea suggested in these texts by Erasmus: a reader must pay the author the “courtesy” of presuming that he has something to say and taking what he says in its most reasonable sense.^[6]

But if civility in discourse means treating respectfully even those with whom one strongly disagrees, this norm has not always prevailed, certainly not in the religious polemics of the sixteenth century, in which the more usual premise was that those who set themselves in the face of saving truth must be not just defeated by argument but overwhelmed with anathemas and obloquy.^[7] Even for its partisans, civility has often been an ideal shimmering in the distance, rather like Erasmus’s vision in the Enchiridion of a seamless Christianitas not riven by human factionalism.^[8] The learned world Erasmus inhabited was knit together by correspondence, and hand-written letters, though often eulogized as the vehicle of honest self-expression, in fact offered a multitude of opportunities for double-entendre and plain duplicity. A letter could be written to one person with the unstated intention of having it seen by a third party,^[9] it could be forged by someone who had learned to imitate another’s hand,^[10] it could be opened by intermediaries along the way,^[11] it could be reconfigured for publication,^[12] and it could be copied for unauthorized distribution and then misinterpreted^[13] or even given to a printer.^[14] Erasmus at one point circulated a “letter patent” to rebut the claims of a former servant-pupil that he entertained heretical opinions on the Eucharist:^[15] rather like a prince of intellect, Erasmus found it necessary to still gossip by addressing to particular persons letters that were in fact meant for all and sundry.

Moreover, this was an age when even the most critical minds had to struggle constantly to sort out the difference between rumor and event. For example, Erasmus made up his mind about the exact circumstances of Louis de Berquin’s death by fire in Paris by assessing the trustworthiness of his various informants. He reported to friends how rumors of his own death were embellished with detail in the interests of verisimilitude: “They give the place, the year, the month, the day and the hour, and they say they were present at burial, and trod on my grave.” There are few references in Erasmus’s works to the belief in witchcraft that was even then growing stronger, but his criteria for judging truth and falsehood apparently did not permit him to exclude all such reports. One can see him making a rough distinction between what was credible and what was not in his report of an incident alleged to have occurred in a village near Freiburg: “The rumor of this nearby event is so constant that it seems the story cannot have been made up. They tell many other things of this sort, but I will not burden your ears with these tales of the unlearned.” ^[16] In the same way, he could not altogether exclude the idea that his enemies were hatching devilish machinations. Thus in practice the ideal of courteous reading gave way to the suspicio that Erasmus brought to the writings of those he mistrusted, especially monks and friars, as when he decided that the tract written in his defense by a Spanish Benedictine must be a devious plot, until Juan Luis Vives assured him of the man’s good faith.^[17]

Erasmus evidently concluded that in self-defense he also had to adopt a practice of saying things between the lines, so that only the right people would take his meaning; thus the ideal of candor in writing gave way in practice to what he called dissimulatio. As noted above in chapter 9, dissimulatio as Erasmus used the term meant saying less than the whole truth, especially when the intended audience was not prepared to receive or benefit from the whole truth.^[18] In this sense the term is closely related to discretion, as when Erasmus declined a friend’s request to publish a poem that he thought would bring the author “hostility” rather than “praise” or warned another friend for being too “free” in expressing his opinions in letters.^[19] But even if one believes (as I do) that one can usually read Erasmus’s dissimilitudo as a practice of mental reservation, there are times when he makes statements that could only have the effect of deceiving an intended reader. For example, in 1521, while planning to leave for Basel, he wrote his old friend Paolo Bombace, now attached to the papal court, that he might move on to Rome, especially since he was invited there by Girolamo Aleandro, “whose counsel in the affairs of life I value no less than his opinion on things literary.” This comment, in a letter that apparently appeared in print before it was sent, can only have been meant for the eyes of Aleandro, his presumed mortal enemy.^[20] In 1522 Cardinal Wolsey was told that Erasmus had always urged both Luther and his friends to “moderate his style of writing” and that while in Cologne in November 1520 Erasmus did not say “anything different” to Luther’s prince, Elector Frederick of Saxony. According to Georg Spalatin, who served as interpreter, Erasmus did indeed censure Luther’s “immoderate criticism” of the existing ecclesiastical order, but he also wrote out at the elector’s request a page of Axiomata or “Brief Notes for the Cause of Luther,” in which he said (among other things) that “Luther’s critics are using arguments which no Christian audience can tolerate” and “the pope should set Christ’s glory before his own, and the gaining of souls before any short-term gain.” ^[21] Writing to the theologians of Leuven, again in 1522, Erasmus discussed a statement in one of his colloquies to the effect that the youthful speaker would have been content to confess his sins to Christ alone “if the leaders of the church had been of that same opinion.” From these words a critic had (rightly) inferred that Erasmus was suggesting that auricular confession had been instituted by the church, not by Christ. Not wishing to acknowledge that this was in fact his opinion, he wiggled out of a tight spot by suggesting that this interpretation of the Colloquies passage would be plausible “if Christ were not one of the leaders of the church”; but since, “according to the words of Peter (1 Peter 5 : 4), he is the chief of shepherds,” it follows that “whoever speaks of the leaders of the church does not exclude Christ.” ^[22] When Erasmus in De Libero Arbitrio spoke of an “inclination [pronitas] to evil that is found in many people,” Luther not unreasonably asked whether God through Scripture “speaks of many men, and not rather of all.” In Hyperaspistes II he replied that proneness to evil “is not found, I think, in the mother of Christ, nor in Christ himself, and perhaps in many others unknown to us.” ^[23] It is sometimes difficult to imagine how he expected an adversary to credit his words, as when he wrote to a Franciscan critic that “I have always favored your congregation because it is less corrupt than the others,” or when he reminded Martin Bucer that even though a copy of the Julius Exclusus in his own hand was known to exist, “he who copies out a manuscript is not necessarily the author.” ^[24]

Little wonder that enemies saw Erasmus’s skill at fine-tuning his words as a weapon of war, as Hutten’s defender Otto Brunfels charged:

Being unable to refute the charges [Hutten] brought against you with so much truth, you…overwhelm him with your rhetorical tricks, irony, innuendo, question-begging, suggestion, guesswork, and all the conjurer’s devices with which you habitually varnish over any deception and conceal any unwelcome truth.

More worrisome was that some good friends, or erstwhile good friends, did not trust Erasmus to stick to what they took to be his real convictions. In 1523 Wolfgang Capito, a humanist friend from the Froben press and now a reformer of Strasbourg, was defending Erasmus to those who suspected him of changing his opinions “because you cast aspersions on Luther while extolling the pope, I say this is just prudence”; but the time for such “prudence” was past, for “whether you will or no, you must be seen to be a clear friend of the truth or a dissembler.” A few months earlier Johann Botzheim, canon of Constance and a loyal friend, feared Erasmus would support the papal cause out of his love for peace and harmony: “I know your natural disposition [ingenium] in this regard. You would like to preserve truth entirely intact, if no one were hurt by it—which rarely or never happens.” ^[25]

In many cases Erasmus could and did reply that his words had been distorted in ways for which no author would reasonably be held accountable. He recalled, for example, that Jean Briart (d. 1520), the late dean of the Leuven theology faculty, withdrew his criticism of a particular work when informed that the word declamatio (oration) did not have the same meaning as concio (sermon). When Erasmus wrote that he had a plan for “extinguishing the Lutheran conflagration” in such a way that it would not be easily rekindled, Guillaume Farel thought he meant extinguishing the Gospel. When Erasmus in the “preface to the pious reader” in his Paraphrase on Matthew proposed introducing a ritual in which boys and girls reaching the age of puberty would reaffirm their baptismal vows, Noel Beda took him to be proposing rebaptism. Luther in reading De Libero Arbitrio sometimes either missed Erasmus’s qualifiers or failed to grasp that he was stating a given opinion only for the purpose of refuting it.^[26] As Erasmus put the matter more generally, “Since in our times everything is driven to extremes, how is it possible to express an opinion in such a thoughtful way [circumspecte] that it will not be used by others as an occasion for catering to their own wishes?” ^[27]

At times Erasmus’s attempts to put the blame for misinterpretations on his readers are unconvincing, particularly when he assumed that readers (and listeners) must surely bring to his words the same refined techniques of analysis that he himself brought to the texts he studied and edited. Ulrich von Hutten, for example, should have been able to recognize that the “flattery” of Dominican inquisitor Jacob Hoogstraten in Erasmus’s published letter to him was not in earnest, because “the letter is not lacking in barbs, for when I call [him] an old friend, who does not fail to see the irony?” While the two were drinking after dinner and Hutten was telling Erasmus about his plans for a “war against the Romanists,” Hutten should have taken the circumstances into account in evaluating Erasmus’s flippant query, “And when shall we see Hoogstraten hang?” When Erasmus made statements to the effect that “even had [the Reformation] been a pious cause” it could better have been accomplished by other means, Martin Bucer, and by extension other Protestants, should have noted that the crucial clause was in the conditional, not the indicative. Similarly, when Erasmus published a letter to Francis I of France in which he described as “unfair” the terms of the treaty the king had had to sign with Charles V to obtain his release from captivity, partisans of the emperor should have understood that in a consolatory letter, as this one was, the writer makes accommodations to the feelings of the intended recipient. In the same vein Noel Beda should have understood from context that when Erasmus used the term sola fide, he was speaking “not about salvation in general [as Luther would use the term], but only about the first access to salvation.” To Beda again Erasmus expressed frustration that his efforts to anticipate the way in which his works could be read had been in vain: as he was working on his translation of the New Testament, “it seemed to me that I was saying things in such a temper that no sedition might arise from my words; certainly I tried as best I could.…Who could have forseen that this fatal storm would break upon the world?” ^[28]

Sometimes Erasmus dug in his heels against criticism, as when he wrote Noel Beda that “I judged the Christian religion would be in danger, had I dissimulated on the matters I addressed.” Indeed, taking a second look at the issues raised by Beda, such as “the celibacy of the clergy, monastic vows, fasting and the interdiction of the eating of meat.…I see nothing to repent of and I would say so (as God is my witness) even if my life were near its end.” ^[29] But Erasmus was also at pains to anticipate the criticisms of men like Beda and Sadoleto, for he routinely had his treatises on sensitive topics screened before publication by the orthodox Catholic theologians he counted among his friends, like Ludwig Baer in Basel or Ambrosius Pelargus in Freiburg.^[30] Erasmus also responded to objections by issuing revised editions of some of his more controversial works, like the Colloquies and the Paraphrases. The Epistolae too he corrected before publication, setting some aside and correcting in others the passage that “seemed likely to cause anger,” though for the Epistolae Floridae of 1532 he was surprised, on taking the volume in hand, to see “how many things were included that should have been omitted, whether through my error, or that of scribes who copied out the wrong letters for the printer.” ^[31] Sometimes he admitted writing some things in a partisan spirit he later regretted, as he wrote on two occasions to a much friendlier critic, Jacopo Sadoleto, the humanist bishop of Carpentras: “Only now do I see how little I was helped by the applause of friends, and by voices crying ‘Go ahead, go ahead!’” ^[32]

At other times Erasmus claimed for his practice of dissimulatio—suggesting rather than fully stating ideas that could lead to fundamental change—the most exalted of all precedents: if Ulrich von Hutten found it “sacrilegious” that Erasmus had “said somewhere that the truth is not always to be brought forth, and that how it is brought forth is more important,” let him consider that Christ himself, in summoning the apostles to preach the Gospel, “forbade them to reveal that he was the Christ.” ^[33] In keeping with his fundamental belief that human free choice had a role to play in the economy of salvation, Erasmus maintained, against Luther, that God’s grace acted to transform human nature step by step, rather than all at once:

We speak more worthily of the Holy Spirit when we say that He so tempers the force of his action that the human will is able to cooperate with the active power of grace, rather than if we say [as had Luther] that He acts in us in the same way as in an ass or an ox.^[34]

In this perspective one way of allowing divine grace time to soften the hardness of the human heart could be “dissimulation for the time being [dissimulatio ad tempus],” as when Erasmus told Martin Bucer (1532) that the “tyranny” of the pope might have been “broken” if certain things could have been dissimulated for a time or when he wrote Jacopo Sadoleto (1531) that it would be better to “dissimulate and bear the Protestants for a time, as we have hitherto borne the Hussites and the Jews.” ^[35]

Thus Erasmus was not sorry for what he had written, for certain opinions should not be dissimulated; yet he sought to have comments that would provoke hostility screened out of his works before publication, and he was often willing to remove offending passages in a second or third edition. He regretted that he had written some things to please his friends (presumably friends who were not fond of “mendicant tyrants”), yet he also believed that some part of Gospel truth had to be insinuated into the world, rather than proclaimed openly, and he insisted that by “dissimulating” in this fashion he followed the plan that Christ and his apostles had exemplified for converting a sinful world. The one common denominator that ties together these different strands in Erasmus’s complex strategy of communicating his sense of the truth of things may be found in a character trait his friends sometimes noted, not always with admiration: circumspection. Duke George of Saxony, calling on Erasmus to attack Luther more forcefully, complained that the Catholic cause had not been appreciably helped by De Libero Arbitrio: “You must see that however circumspect [circumspectis] and prudent your advice may have been, it has not taken us very far.” Erasmus himself, responding to Noel Beda, said he had found Beda’s charges so severe that “Your scolding has had some effect, for I have begun to look at myself critically [circunspiciens] to see if such deadly weaknesses might be lurking somewhere in my character.” ^[36] Erasmus was nothing if not circumspect, always “looking about” to see what portion of the truth as he saw it could best be stated openly, and what should not be said to avoid giving needless offense, and after he had said something “looking about” again to see what might need to be said differently.

In the normal course of events, one does not expect those animated by reforming zeal to be “looking about” to gauge the possible consequences of their words, nor does one expect the truly circumspect to be launching reform programs that bite deeply enough to raise a firestorm of criticism. Erasmus cared enough about the ills of Christian society to work out a novel vision of reform, yet he understood enough about the fragility of human institutions to pull back from any tearing up of the spiritual ground that had allowed wheat to grow along with the tares. Once we see Erasmus as the circumspect reformer—once we grasp that these two dimensions of the human spirit that more commonly occur separately were joined in Erasmus—we can also grasp the inner logic of a way of looking at sixteenth-century Christendom that infuriated his contemporaries because of its ambiguity and that engages the abiding interest of posterity because of its subtlety.

Notes