BEGINNINGS OF THE REFORMATION--CORRESPONDENCE OF 1518-1519
On many accounts, the residence at Louvain ought to have been one
of the most satisfactory of Erasmus' life. He was in the midst of a
congenial activity not limited by any prescribed duties, free from
great anxiety about money, secure at any moment of some honourable
appointment if he chose to accept it, in fairly good health, and with
working powers quite undiminished by advancing years.
In the year 1518 there can be no question that the name of Erasmus
was the most widely known and honoured among European scholars.
His New Testament with its display of learning and its revelation
of a new principle of criticism, had demonstrated his character as
a serious thinker upon the most important questions of religious
faith and practice. If we seek to define this principle we shall be
unable to fix it by any categories of philosophy or of theological
precedent. In the last analysis we are brought back every time to the
principle of common sense working upon the accepted dogmatic bases of
the existing church system.
His freedom of speech had always been kept carefully within the
bounds of doctrinal orthodoxy. He could safely defy his critics to
point to a single instance of anything that might by any reasonable
interpretation be described as heresy. He knew that in his criticism,
so far as it had gone, he was supported by the best opinion of the
men of enlightenment everywhere, and relying upon this support he
could put on the confident tone of a man who feels himself on the
winning side.
The generation in which Erasmus had grown up to his fiftieth year
was eminently one of progress in every form of enlightenment and
expansion. He was twenty-five when Columbus discovered America and
gave the first impulse to that intoxicating sense of limitless
possibility which from time to time has seized upon a generation
of men and carried it on to great triumphs--but always also to
disappointments more keenly felt than its successes. Along with the
discovery of the earth had gone with equal, even with more rapid
pace, the discovery of man. The ban which throughout the Middle
Ages had lain upon the human spirit as individual, with powers of
its own and the right to use them, was rapidly being lifted. The
cunning plebeian who had learned how to mix the subtle ingredients
of gunpowder and put it into the hands of his fellow-plebeians, had
taught the world an argument against the rights of princes, more
potent than all the philosophers from Marsiglio of Padua down had
been able to furnish. That other plebeian group who had lit upon
the marvellously simple device of multiplying copies of writings by
means of movable types, had opened up possibilities of education and
therefore of achievement, whose end the imagination of man could not
compass.
At first, doubtless, this vast outlook into the unknown had terrified
as well as fascinated the world. All established institutions whose
claim to existence rested upon an undisputed tradition, trembled lest
their foundation should be shaken. Princes dreaded the union of the
long-oppressed peasants and citizens with gunpowder in their hands.
The guardians of the treasure of thought which had come down from
the past shuddered at the spreading of "dangerous" ideas broadcast
through the land by the busy printing-press.
But gradually these apprehensions had been allayed. The social
revolution threatened by gunpowder was delayed as has been so far
that which is threatened by dynamite. Economic laws would not
be broken and the forces of discontent, active during the late
fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, had been gradually brought
into an apparent harmony with the forces of order and tradition.
Once more the great leading powers had come out of a long conflict
victorious, though modified. The state-governments had overcome the
attacks of constitutionalism, and seemed to be more independent
of control than ever. The monarchy of Francis I., of Henry VIII.,
and Charles V. seemed to have beaten down every opposition, but it
had also learned its lessons. If it would control the public life
of its several states, it must itself meet the evident demands of
its subjects, so far as it could do so without abandoning its own
supreme prerogative. So the papacy, threatened by the aggressive
constitutionalism of the fifteenth-century councils, had overcome
that danger and during the lifetime of Erasmus had seemed to recover
more than its ancient prestige. But it had purchased this recovery
by vast adjustments to conditions it could not change. It, too, in
its turn had become "enlightened" and gone so far into the prevailing
liberalism of thought that it had deprived it of its sting. It might
well seem an idle task to turn the weapons of the "higher criticism"
against a papacy which was itself supporting the cause of critical
learning with every resource at its command.
No greater proof of this apparent readjustment of opposing forces
could be offered than the dedication of Erasmus' New Testament, the
ripest product of the critical scholarship of the time, to Pope Leo
himself. It was a bold stroke, but it paid. The unstinted approval of
the pope gave Erasmus a backing worth more to him at the moment than
any praise of scholars like himself. But it bound him also the more
firmly to an allegiance he dared not break, lest the form of success
most precious to him in life should be endangered.
We have spoken of the constitutional opposition to the papacy by the
fifteenth-century councils. Parallel with this and often combined
with it had gone an opposition growing out of national interests.
This, too, the papacy seemed to have overcome by the same policy of
adjustment. It had allowed the largest scope to national control of
the Church consistent with its supreme leadership, and had even
given emphasis to the national idea by pushing to the utmost its
claim to be one among the powers of Europe. The whole political
activity of the papacy during this most active generation was based
upon a recognition of the national states and a steady aim to gain
their recognition in turn for its own well developed sovereignty. A
pope's "niece" or "nephew" was as good a _parti_ for a royal house as
the offspring of any princely family in Europe.
So complete, apparently, was this adjustment of all the forces of
European society that the great outbreak of the Lutheran reform
movement was a complete surprise and an incredible shock to all
established institutions. The historian can, indeed, trace with
perfect continuity the lines of development which centre in that
wonderful movement, when a monk, in an obscure town in the remote
north of Germany, drew the eyes of all Europe to himself by gathering
up into one passionate expression the long-suppressed protest against
the tyranny of the dominant church system. But, on the surface of
things, in the year 1517, there was little to point to this historic
continuity. To all appearance the great impulse of Wiclif in England
had died out with the suppression of open Lollardry just a hundred
years before. John Hus, the spiritual heir of Wiclif, had been
sacrificed at Constance in 1415 to a combination of forces, some of
which were to prove themselves in reality the stoutest allies of the
ideas he represented. True, the fires at Constance had kindled a
flame in Bohemia, which defied all efforts of pope and emperor to
put it out until dissensions within the party of revolt scattered
and quenched the material on which it fed. But after the Council at
Basel (1431-1443) the great readjustment carried Bohemia, too, along
into the general scheme of conciliation. At that moment a party,
henceforth to be known as the party of enlightenment, seized upon the
papacy, and with Thomas Parentucelli (Nicholas V., 1447-1455) began
that series of humanistic popes, Æneas Sylvius Piccolomini (Pius
II., 1458-1464), Giuliano delle Rovere (Julius II., 1503-1513), and
Giovanni de' Medici (Leo X., 1513-1521), who were ready to sacrifice
all other interests to the aggrandisement of their personal power and
the advancement of a higher cultivation and refinement of life.
It must be said that in the things men cared most about in the two
generations before the year 1517, the government of the Church was
such as suited the peoples of Europe. It was an easy-going system.
It did not call for any application of the new spirit of inquiry to
the prevailing institutions in Church and State. It was not insisting
upon any too rigid morality either in the clergy or in the laity.
Nor, on the other hand, was it overzealous in pressing its own claims
too far. There is a grim sense of humour in the attitude of the
Church towards its own institutions, so long as their existence was
not threatened and no diminution of revenue was in sight. All the
system asked was to be let alone. The Church knew that many of its
claims had come to be absurd. Nowhere was this so well understood as
in Italy and above all at Rome. So frank a "heathen" as Leo X. was
not likely to insist too eagerly upon ideas or practices which he
knew to be mere superstitions of the vulgar--not likely, that is, to
press these matters until they were attacked.
If, on the other hand, they should be attacked, would this papacy
be thorough-going enough in its enlightenment and its indifference
to let them go, or would it rally to their defence all the forces
of reaction? That was the problem of the Reformation period. If
one approaches it from the side of enlightenment, one is at once
impressed with the vast opportunity opened to the papacy. It had
already adjusted itself to so many changes, it had so often found
ways of taking the sting out of ideas and movements which seemed to
threaten its very life, that sanguine men, like Erasmus, might well
feel encouraged to hope that it would once more rise to the occasion.
The world of Europe was filled with friendly criticism of its forms
and methods; but as yet there had been few voices raised against its
existence.
Dante, in his treatise on a single government for the world (_de
Monarchia_), still clings to the mediæval conception of a twin
administration of Christendom, only with the religious side
distinctly subordinated to the temporal. Even Wiclif and Hus had
been led to defy the papacy only by the logic of events; hostility
to a papal organisation of church life was not an essential part of
their original programme. Even Marsiglio of Padua had reserved to the
papacy a wide sphere of activity, limited only by constitutional
rights of governments and peoples. The literature of the conciliar
period, covering the first half of the fifteenth century, does not
succeed in casting off the spell of the papal idea, but aims to check
and control its dangers to the public welfare. A constitutional
papacy was the ideal of that time, not a Church without a papacy.
All these attacks the mediæval system had met with amazing success.
It had dealt its blows sparingly, but with great effect. Where its
enemies had been backed up by powerful interests, as was Wiclif in
England, it had seemed to fail and had bided its time. Where it could
itself combine with other interests against them, as against Hus at
Constance, it had hit hard and with precision.
It may be said with some certainty that if the papacy of the second
half of the fifteenth century had been inclined to meet criticism
half-way, criticism would not have turned into hostility. As one
looks over the field of European society and politics in the two
generations before 1517 one fails to find anything that can be
called an anti-Roman "party." By "party" we mean here a nucleus of
organisation with a programme or "platform" of its own towards the
accomplishment of which it bends its chief efforts. In that sense,
there was no party in Christendom which aimed at the overthrow of the
papal system.
On the other hand it might be said that there was no great public
interest in Europe which was not more or less directly threatened
by the papacy and likely, therefore, at any inopportune moment, by
some slip in the papal policy or even by the mere insistence of
the papacy upon some point it could not give up, to be turned from
apparent friendliness to open opposition. First among these public
interests was the principle of nationality. The papacy had, as we
have seen, apparently adjusted itself to this opposition, but this
adjustment was obviously unstable. How great a strain would it
bear? To what lengths of concession could the papacy afford to go
in recognising the right of kings to manage the affairs of their
kingdoms without interference? Were there questions of religion, or
of public morals so obviously beyond the sphere of temporal control,
that any conceivable papacy must cling to the right of final judgment
in them or go to the wall? When in the year 1341 the Emperor Ludwig
the Bavarian, had claimed for himself the divine right to declare a
certain princess divorced from an inconvenient husband, that he might
marry her to his son and bring her dowry to increase the Bavarian
estates, there was an almost universal cry of horror at this assault
upon a sacred prerogative of the Church. How would it be now, two
hundred years later, if a king, let us say of England, should find
it convenient to divorce a wife and marry another for no reason
but that he willed it so? Could the papacy afford to pay the price
of acquiescence, or could it better afford to lose for ever the
allegiance of England? That was the kind of question presented to the
papacy from the side of the national states.
So again from the point of view of the advancing thought of the
day;--how far could the papacy safely go in meeting this advance?
Men were moving on step by step from one audacious thought to
another, until it was beginning to seem as if there were no limit
to the speculation of this awakened human spirit. The Church had
grown great upon a system of thought in which the institution, the
established order, the class, the tradition, had been everything,
and the individual had been nothing. It had been a man's first duty,
not to have ideas of his own, but to take those which were offered
to him by the highest prevailing authority. So far all opposition
to this method of thought had been effectually silenced. John Hus
had declared that the essence of the Church lay in its being the
assembly of believers acknowledging Christ alone as its head. Hus
had been disposed of, and again the papacy had risen triumphant. The
same men who had pressed most eagerly the condemnation of Hus were at
that moment aiding his cause by putting forward a theory of church
life which thrust the papacy into the background and would have
brought into its place a legislature of national churches as the true
expression of the will of Western Christendom. That opposition too
had been overcome.
But now a more subtle development of individualism was beginning
to make itself felt. The Church had thus far succeeded in keeping
itself before the world as the one sole and sufficient medium of
salvation for sinful man. It had developed a vast and imposing
system of mediation between man and God by its priesthood, its
ceremonies, its philosophy of morals, and its elaborately conducted
methods of bookkeeping with the consciences of the faithful.
Indeed, so elaborate had this soul-saving machinery become that
the wear and tear of it threatened the durability of its parts. An
immense proportion of its energy had to be devoted to keeping the
system going. What now would happen if somehow it should be made
clear to the Christian conscience that there was a shorter way to
salvation, a more direct, a less expensive, and, more than all, a
better-established way? How far would the Church dare to carry its
policy of going half way toward such an idea as that?
The test upon this point came in the revival of all that group of
notions which, for lack of a better term, we express by the word
"Augustinianism." Setting aside all refinements of theology for
the moment, the word Augustinian represents to us the conception
of the individual human soul as a sinful thing, thrown out in all
its nakedness and isolation upon an angry sea of retribution, from
which nothing can save it but the arbitrary action of the grace of
God. Here was individualism indeed! We have seen how the Church had
got on with the æsthetic individualism of the Renaissance--with its
sham heathenism, its theatrical exploiting of antiquity to justify
a license which affronted all true Christian self-respect, and yet,
after all, its readiness to conform itself to all existing forms
of social and religious organisation. From such individualism as
this the Church had little direct injury to fear. It laughed with
it and at it and used it for its purposes. Poggio Bracciolini, the
most foul-mouthed blackguard of the second generation of Italian
Humanists, spent his life as papal secretary without fear and
without reproach.
Strange collocation of ideas, that the same impulse which drove
these unchecked scoffers into an æsthetic defiance of literary
tradition should have forced Luther and Calvin into a death-struggle
with the whole existing church order! The Church had tolerated the
individualism of taste; how far could it tolerate the individualism
of the soul? The one had declared that the salvation of the human
mind was to be found by going back to the unfailing sources of
culture in the Greek and Latin classics. The other was to declare
that the only salvation of the soul was to be found by overleaping
all the vast accumulation of forms and traditions of the past
thousand years and going straight back to the early proclamations of
the divine grace through faith in Christ alone.
* * * * *
While Erasmus was studying, writing, planning, and travelling, with
Louvain as the centre of his manifold activities, the great assault
was gathering its force in a quarter of the world from which it
might least have been expected. The north of Germany lay almost
entirely beyond the circle of vision of Erasmus and such as he.
The Universities of Leipzig and Erfurt, the most important of the
Saxon schools, had thus far contributed little to the advance of
general culture. They were still mainly under the influence of the
scholastic traditions, guided by such men as those who had been made
the butts of the _Epistolæ obscurorum virorum_. The University of
Wittenberg, founded in 1502 by the Elector Frederic of Saxony, was
just in time to gain for its chairs some of the first-fruits of the
revived classical spirit, which men like Reuchlin and Rudolf Agricola
had imported into Germany from the Italian fountainhead. The call
of Martin Luther in 1508 from the Augustinian cloister at Erfurt
to a professorship of theology at Wittenberg, while it cannot be
described as a demonstration in favour of the New Learning, brought
a young man into active professional work who was already familiar
with the new spirit of study and who was likely to apply it to his
theological teaching, without being seduced by its æsthetic charm.
The invitation of Philip Melanchthon four years later to teach Greek
was a more pronounced declaration that Wittenberg was to look forward
and not back in setting the tone of its instruction. Melanchthon was
a promising youth of twenty-one, a relative and pupil of Reuchlin and
recommended by him for this place. He was already well known as an
accomplished Grecian, an amiable, but decided personality, destined
to be through a lifetime of contention the balance-wheel of the
Lutheran party.
[Illustration: PHILIP MELANCHTHON.
FROM THE DRAWING BY HOLBEIN, IN WINDSOR CASTLE.]
It cannot be our purpose to rehearse here the familiar story
of Luther's early career. Friends and enemies alike have done
their utmost to set before us the engaging but often mysterious
personality of the man. Our only interest can be to review very
briefly such aspects of his development as may serve to illustrate
the similarities and the differences between his course and that of
Erasmus and thus prepare us to understand the connection of the
latter with the reform movement of Luther. If our earlier judgments
as to the youth of Erasmus are correct we shall have to believe
that Luther's years of apprenticeship were far more truly years of
hardship and struggle than were his. Poverty, stern discipline,
and unsatisfied desire left their lifelong marks upon a physical
constitution none too strong, but could not crush the inherent
cheerfulness and courage which proved his dominant characteristics.
We seek in vain through the record of Luther's earlier years for
indications of that stormy, passionate zeal for improvement in the
conditions about him which almost any student of the later reform
would suppose to be the moving impulse of his character. Conformity
to the demands of his immediate surroundings is as marked a trait
with him as were resistance and restlessness with Erasmus. He goes
and does as he is bidden. He enters a monastery of his own free
will and conforms with painful exactness to the requirements of the
rule. Even long after he has begun to lead the fight against the
limitations of the existing order, he continues to wear the dress
and to live in the cloister of the local Augustinians. The impulse
to the Lutheran reform cannot, therefore, be found in any restless
impatience of personal limitation on Luther's part. It must be sought
in some great, overpowering conviction which drove him out of the
attitude of conformity into the attitude of resistance.
This overmastering impulse came in the form of that Augustinian
proposition we were just now examining--the proposition that the
salvation, or, better still, the justification, of a man's soul was
to come, not through any institution, nor through the due performance
of anything whatever, but through the direct act of the grace of God,
and, furthermore, that the only condition of receiving such grace
was an honest opening of the soul to its action,--or, in theological
language, "faith." Luther was not a great "theologian," as that word
was used, in reverence by some and in ridicule by others. He had
not worked himself out into clearness by a scholastic process, and
whenever he tried to defend himself by scholastic methods, he was
almost sure to confuse himself in contradictions and exaggerations.
His clearness of vision came rather by an indefinable process of
revelation and self-realisation, and then it became his life-problem
to interpret to others what had brought such abundant illumination
and satisfaction to himself. The boldness of Luther was not that of
a man defiant by nature, who enjoys the game of give and take, but
rather that of a man who puts off the moment of his attack until he
can do so no longer, and then lets himself go, driven from behind,
as it were, by a will greater than his own and against which he is
powerless.
With a nature and a method like this Erasmus could never have had
much sympathy. Compare their two views of Italy. We have seen Erasmus
seeking there the rewards of scholarship, cultivating the society
of learned men, playing the rôle of the famous scholar himself,
making himself acceptable to the powers that were, getting out of
Italy what he could--then coming away and letting all the shafts of
his biting satire play upon this society where he has been feeling
himself at home. He could eat the bread and take the pay of Aldus,
and then hold him up to the laughter of the world.
Luther went to Italy at almost the same time on an errand from the
Saxon Augustinians to the general chapter at Rome. He travelled as
a monk, stopping at the houses of his order along the way. At Rome
he visited all the shrines of the saints, like the most pious of
pilgrims. He was almost sorry, he says, that his parents were living,
so many were the advantages offered to the souls of the departed
at these altars of divine grace. He performed his commission, went
back to his place, and continued for seven years longer to fulfil
his duties as monk, priest, and teacher, without any outward show of
hostility to the Roman system. Only in his preaching and writing, one
can trace the steady advance of confidence in his guiding principle
of "faith" as the one sufficient guarantee of a life "justified" or
"adjusted" to the divine requirement. He did not seek the fight; he
waited in his place until the battle sought him out and then he dared
not refuse the challenge.
Compare again the animating principle of these two men. If it be
true that faith alone is the sufficient basis of all justification
before God, then it would seem to follow that the individual will
has little to do with determining the fate of man either here or
hereafter. Superficially viewed, this doctrine seems to place man
within the circle of a kind of blind fatalism. Such reproaches have
been heard ever since the days of Augustine, whenever this subject
has been prominently before men's minds. "Has Christianity brought us
out of the old fatalism of the Greeks only to plunge us into a new
fatalism, as hard, but not as picturesque, as the old one?" was asked
in Augustine's own time. Nor had the Augustinian party ever failed
to draw more or less strictly the evident conclusion from its own
premises. It had always insisted that the will of man was not morally
free, but was enslaved by a certain principle of evil, which had
entered into man with the "fall of Adam" and been transmitted from
father to son ever since.
Now the Church had always regarded Augustine as one of its greatest
ornaments. He was one of the "four Fathers" upon whom, as upon four
pillars, rested its majestic structure. Yet in practice, the Church
had never lived up to the doctrine of the enslaved will. When,
in the ninth century, the Saxon Gottschalk, spiritual progenitor
of the Saxon Luther, had turned his unpractised logic upon this
subject and had worked out to a conclusion the doctrine of a double
predestination, the Church, through its ablest representative,
Hincmar of Rheims, had promptly flogged him and shut him up for life
where he would do no harm. So far as the Church had ever formulated
its views on the matter, it had been "Semi-Pelagian." It recognised
in human justification both the grace of God and the will of man,
but did not draw with absolute clearness a conclusion as to the
preponderance of one over the other. In fact the Church had done
something better than to speculate. It had acted. It had evolved a
marvellous system of justifying agencies, administered by itself,
and had said to its members, in practice if not in theory, "Do these
things and you shall be saved." While this excellent machinery
worked, there was obviously no occasion for any good Christian to
worry about the conditions of justification, and in fact, from the
ninth to the fifteenth century, the Augustinian doctrines are not
once brought prominently before the world for discussion. It was only
when men began once more to doubt whether the church method of doing
specific things and getting certificates for them was, after all, the
only way, or even the best way, to find one's adjustment with God,
that this whole group of subjects began, once more, to demand their
attention. The doctrine of the enslaved will, narrow and revolting
though it may seem to the larger thought of our time, was the opening
gate through which a way might be found into that very same largeness
of view. The world learns slowly and the dim vision of to-day becomes
the flooding glory of a newly risen to-morrow.
Where should we expect to find Erasmus, as we have been making
acquaintance with him to the year 1518, on this great new question of
human justification? Our answer must follow two main lines. First,
as to the general notion of the freedom of the will, we may fairly
conclude from all his moral teaching up to that time, that the idea
of Luther in itself would be most repugnant to him. The whole tone
of the Enchiridion, for example, is to emphasise the function of
the individual conscience in determining action. The call to duty
is imperative; the assumption is that man can do what he ought to
do. The freedom of the will in human action is so completely assumed
that there is no need of discussing it. The ultimate appeal is never
to any outside power. If, on the one hand, Erasmus avoids all final
reference to an ecclesiastical authority, so, on the other hand, he
equally avoids reference to a theological "grace of God" which is
to do our moral work for us. The same impression comes from a study
of the Christian Prince. The prince is a "good prince," not because
he is a special instrument in the hand of God, nor because he is a
faithful servant of any church authority, but because he does his
duty as a man, in the station to which he is called. He ought to do
this thing or that simply because it is the right and the wise thing
to do, tending most directly toward the welfare of his subjects and
the interest of the prince himself. The Christian state is such
because it tends toward a realisation of the teaching of Christ, not
because it corresponds to any abstract ideal set for it by the church
power or by any direct working of the divine agency.
Our second point of view is thus already suggested. In so far as the
Lutheran position dealt with man as an individual being, responsible
directly to God, without the need of any intervening human agency, in
so far it could not fail to command the sympathy of whatever was most
sound and most sincere in the thought of Erasmus. His moral appeal
throughout is completely free from any really convincing reference
to a highest church tribunal, whose decisions must be final. One can
find plenty of passages in which he has, even before 1518, expressed
his respect for the papal system; but it would be hard to think of
any one of these as representing his really deepest convictions.
Either they are purely conventional, having no bearing upon the issue
of the Reformation, or they are evident "hedging," put in to guard
their author against the suspicion of having gone too far on the way
of criticism. It is always difficult to know which of his selves is
the real self; but wherever in Erasmus' moral writing we seem to feel
the ring of a sincere emotion, it is always when he is appealing to
the essential manliness of man--never when he is making his apologies
to the powers that be.
Again, it was plain, once for all, as early as 1518, that Erasmus had
not in him the stuff out of which great leaders of men in critical
times are made. No one would have acknowledged this more readily
than he, and nothing could have been farther from the line of his
ambition than such leadership. Even if we make large deductions from
his account of the great positions he had declined, enough remains
to make us quite sure that, if he had chosen, he might have held any
one of many places, which, by their very importance, would have given
him an effective leverage upon European affairs. Such influence lay
within the field neither of his gifts nor of his desires. Such effect
as he might have upon the course of events must come through the
natural channel of his work as a scholar and a critic.
The difficulty of our problem is greatly increased by the almost
hopeless complication of questions which entered into that one
great demonstration we call the Reformation. Even at this distance
of time it is impossible, without resorting to some rather large
generalisation, to say in a single phrase what the issue of the
Reformation was. Still less, of course, was such clear discrimination
possible to one who stood, as Erasmus did, in the midst of these
rapid and ever-shifting and often conflicting currents and was called
upon to say just where his standing-ground was, or with which one of
these currents he was willing to drift.
Luther nailed his Theses on Indulgences to the door of the
Palace-Church at Wittenberg on the last day of October in the year
1517. When and where the news of this action reached Erasmus we
do not know. It is impossible that it can have been more than a
few weeks before he, in common with all intelligent persons, had
read this first proclamation of a war that was to be to the death.
The Theses attacked indulgences, but these were only the outward
form under which the whole theory of a mechanical salvation was
expressed. If the indulgence was wrong, not merely in practice, but
in theory as well, then the whole church system, in so far as it was
a soul-saving apparatus, was wrong too. Doubtless there was room for
infinite refinements upon this simple deduction. The same thesis
about indulgences had been put forth many times before. Men had
come to the same conclusions by many different roads; but never yet
had any one person travelled so many of these roads. In Luther there
spoke the monk, who had tried faithfully the method of conformity;
the priest, who had gone directly to the souls of men with the
consolations of religious hope; the scholar, who had caught the gleam
of that new light of reason which was changing the whole aspect of
human thought; the patriot, who saw his fellow-countrymen victimised
by a vast foreign oppression; and finally the man, who had worked
through the awful problem of human sinfulness until he saw it clearly
solved by reference to the common inheritance of humanity.
That is why Luther's appeal was heard. Everyone to whom it came found
in it some echo of his own experience. From every part of Europe
and from every human interest came almost immediately a response
which showed that a voice had been heard for which men had long
been waiting. The Theses were a temperate document. The tone of
impatience, even of violence, that was to mark so much of Luther's
later writing, was here as yet only suggested by a rare decision and
certainty of utterance. Already Luther spoke as one who could not
help it. At last the conflict had forced itself upon him, and for
him, being the man he was, there was no alternative. The form of the
Theses was that of a challenge to discussion. Luther put himself
forward as a learner, who was prepared to change his view whenever
a better one should appear. The replies, in so far as they were
hostile, simply continued the discussion.
Probably there was no other man in Europe from whom a decisive word
in his favour would have been so welcome to Luther as a word at this
moment from Erasmus. Nor, on the other hand, was there a champion
whom the existing system would more gladly have seen on its side.
The word was not spoken, but neither did Erasmus array himself as
yet frankly in opposition to Luther. Indeed we have no reason to
believe that the issue in all its magnitude was clearly present to
his thought.
Some things he saw only too clearly. His clever, analytical mind
perceived that usages and forms might in themselves be innocent or
even helpful, while the wrong use of them was harmful in the extreme.
So his instinct was in every case to say: Let us amend the wrong use
of these things, but let us not disturb the innocent and helpful
practice itself. Whatever subject he touched called out at once this
overfine discriminating power. He drew a picture of the thing he
wanted to express and believed himself to be heightening the effect
of this picture when he refined upon it until its outlines became
obscured and the very effect he had aimed at was defeated. The art
of fine distinctions was an admirable one. The question of the hour,
however, was not to be solved in that way. The time had come when men
were going down deep below these refinements and were about to ask
the fatal question: whether forms and systems which could not bear
the strain of daily use by plain human nature without gross abuses,
were not better reformed out of existence once for all. Erasmus
said, "Be good and all these evils will vanish." Quite true, but if
all men were good there would be no need of institutions at all. The
question was, whether the experiment had not been tried long enough,
and that was the issue which Erasmus seems not to have grasped.
For the moment the discussion turned on the question of indulgences.
On this subject Erasmus had made no utterance which could be
understood as committing him on the theory as a whole. In the Praise
of Folly he had ridiculed the grosser absurdities of the practice,
especially the counting up of the days and years of redemption from
Purgatory, as if salvation were a thing of the multiplication-table.
The teaching of the Enchiridion was hopelessly against any such
conception of moral regeneration. Anyone who had read Erasmus could
not have a moment's doubt that the system of indulgences, as it was
practised throughout Europe, must have been repulsive to him in the
extreme. The idea that Erasmus could ever have invested a penny in
such traffic for the advantage of his own soul or that of anyone dear
to him, was grotesquely absurd. Moreover the circumstances of that
special sale of indulgences in Germany which called out the wrath of
Luther were such as must have seemed equally outrageous to Erasmus.
The barefaced openness with which the Prince Elector of Mainz had
lent himself to the papal exaction, on condition that half the
plunder should go into his own pocket to pay for the _pallium_ which
the papacy itself had just granted him, brought out into clearest
relief the purely mercantile nature of the whole transaction. It
required all the hair-splitting of all the schools to carry a man
through the stages of that bargain and leave him at last with any
tenderness whatever for the system that made it possible. Yet this
was precisely the feat which Erasmus was apparently to perform.
We gain a glimpse at the working of his mind on this subject in the
letter to Volzius, called forth by criticism of the Enchiridion, and
dated in August, 1518[121]:
[121] iii.¹, 343-E.
"If anyone finds fault with the preposterous opinion of the
vulgar, which gives to the highest virtues the lowest place and
_vice versa_ and is specially shocked by unimportant evils and
the reverse, then one is straightway called to account as if
one favoured those evils which seem to him less than some other
evil; or as if he were condemning certain good actions because
he thinks others are even better. So if one teaches that it is
safer to trust in good deeds than in the papal pardons, he is
not condemning those pardons, but is giving the preference to
what is more certainly in accord with the teaching of Christ.
So also, if one thinks that they act more wisely who stay at
home and look after their wives and children, than they who go
running about to Rome or Jerusalem or Compostella, and that
the money wasted in long and dangerous journeys were much more
piously spent upon the worthy and honest poor, one is not
condemning the pious impulse of those persons, but is only
preferring what comes nearer to true piety. In truth it is not
a fault of our times alone to attack certain evils as if they
were the only ones, while we smooth over, as if they were not
evils at all, others far worse than those we are abusing."
One feels here an allusion to that overemphasis on outward
organisation which was to be Erasmus' great objection to the
German reform. Instead of this he would have the true value of the
institution so clearly brought out that it would counteract all
tendency to abuse. This letter was one of the last pieces of Erasmus'
writing at Basel before the long illness of which he speaks in the
letter about his journey to Louvain. He had spent the year 1518
chiefly at Basel in tireless industry. He arrived at Louvain only,
as we have seen, to break down again. It was 1519 before we find him
drawn directly into the Lutheran controversy.
The letter to Volzius just quoted was printed as a preface to a
new edition of the Enchiridion in 1518. The first step in the
correspondence with Luther was taken by Luther himself in March,
1519, and seems to have been suggested by the very passage we have
here made use of to show Erasmus' feeling about indulgences. Luther's
tone in this first letter is eminently characteristic of his attitude
during these early years of his public activity. It is modest
and self-depreciating to a degree. Words fail him to express his
admiration for the great scholar. It is really monstrous that they
should not know each other, when he has so long been worshipping in
silence.[122]
[122] i., 423-D.
"Who is there whose inmost being is not filled by Erasmus?
Who is not being taught by Erasmus? In whom does not Erasmus
reign?--I mean, of course, among those who have a true love of
letters. For I am glad enough and I reckon it among the gifts of
Christ, that there are many who do not approve of you. By this
test I discern the gifts of a loving from those of an angry God,
and I congratulate you that while you are most acceptable to all
good men, you are equally disliked by those who would like to be
thought the only great ones and the only ones to be accepted.
But here am I, clumsy fellow, approaching you thus familiarly
with unwashed hands and without formal phrases of reverence and
honour, as one unknown person might address another. I beg you
by your kind nature, lay this to the account of my affection
or my inexperience. In truth, I whose life has been passed
among the schoolmen, have not so much as learned how to address
a truly learned man by letter. Otherwise, how I would have
wearied you already with epistles! I would not have suffered
you alone to speak to me all this time in my study. Now, since
I have learned from Fabricius Capito that my name is known to
you through my trifles about indulgences and learned also from
your most recent preface to the Enchiridion, that my notions
have not only been seen, but have also been accepted by you, I
am compelled to acknowledge, even though in barbarous style,
your noble spirit, which enriches me and all men.... And so, my
dear and amiable Erasmus, if you shall see fit, recognise this
your younger brother in Christ, indeed a most devoted admirer of
yours, but worthy, in his ignorance, only to be buried in his
corner and to be unknown to the same sky and sun with you."
The letter closes with an affectionate eulogy of Philip Melanchthon
as the indispensable companion of his studies.
There is no reason to doubt the sincerity of Luther's attitude at
this critical moment. It was quite true that Erasmus was far beyond
him in scholarly attainment and reputation. It was true also that the
plain meaning of Erasmus' reference to indulgences in the preface to
the Enchiridion was directly in accord with Luther's own position in
the Theses. If he could be made now, in some more decided manner, to
commit himself to Luther's cause, it would be a great point gained
for reform.
Erasmus gave himself two months before answering these first advances
of Luther. His reply is what we might, from our previous knowledge,
have predicted. The letter appeals to him strongly[123]:
[123] iii.¹, 444-D
"Beloved brother in Christ, your letter was most acceptable, at
once showing the subtilty of your genius and breathing the very
spirit of Christ."
Then his own personality comes in and he is completely absorbed in
the effect of Luther's action upon himself.
"I have no words to tell you what an excitement your books have
raised here. Up to the present moment the false suspicion cannot
be torn from the minds of these creatures that your works have
been written by my assistance and that I am the standard-bearer
of this 'faction' as they call it. Some think that a handle is
given them for attacking sound learning, toward which they have
a deadly hatred as an offence against Her Theological Majesty,
for whom they care vastly more than they do for Christ,--and
also for quashing me, whom they fancy to be of some avail in
encouraging learning.
"The whole affair is carried on with shoutings, with insolent
cunning, with slander and trickery, so that if I had not seen
it--nay, even felt it myself, I would never have believed, on
any authority, that theologians could be so insane. You might
suppose it was a regular plague; and yet the poison of this evil
began with a few and crept into the many, so that now a great
part of this much frequented university is infected with this
poisonous disease. I have sworn that you were totally unknown
to me, that I had not yet read your books, and therefore that
I neither approved nor disapproved anything in them. I only
advised them not to keep bawling out so hatefully to the people
about your books, which they had not yet read, but to await the
judgment of those whose opinion ought to have most weight. I
begged them to consider whether it was well to abuse before a
promiscuous crowd things which ought more properly to be refuted
in books or discussed by learned men, especially as there was
but one opinion as to the excellence of the author's life. But
nothing did any good;--so furious are they in their underhanded
and scandalous discussions."
[Illustration: FRONTISPIECE (ERASMUS SEATED) TO "ERASMI OPERA,"
PUBLISHED AT LEYDEN, 1703.]
He, Erasmus, becomes at once the central point in his own field of
vision. Luther has friends in England, even some in Louvain.
"But I keep myself, so far as I can, _integrum_ [shall we say
'uncompromised'?] in order that I may the better serve the
reviving cause of letters; and I think a well-mannered reserve
will accomplish more than violence, etc. We ought to keep an
even temper, lest it be spoiled by anger, hatred, or vainglory;
for in the very midst of a zeal for religion these things are
apt to be lying in wait for us. I am not urging you to do all
this, but just to keep on as you are doing. I have glanced over
(_degustavi_) your commentaries on the Psalms; they appeal to me
greatly and I hope they will be of great value."
We have omitted a string of commonplaces about moderation and
gentleness, which must have helped to make this letter rather cold
comfort to Luther. If it meant anything to him, it meant that Erasmus
really agreed with his views on indulgences and the state of the
Church in general, but was already dreading the effect of putting
these views boldly and clearly before the world. What Luther wanted
in the spring of 1519 was not pious exhortation to keep his temper,
but a grip of the hand and a frank word of approval. Whether Erasmus
was going to have a bad time with the men of darkness at Louvain
could not interest him. The question was: would Erasmus stand by
him,--yes or no? and so far the answer was not encouraging. To one
who knew the kind of language Erasmus was wont to apply to his
opponents, it must have seemed grotesquely out of place for him to
exhort Luther to gentleness of speech.
The dread of being charged with the authorship of Luther's works and
of others similar in their purpose, seems to have been the one thing
uppermost in the mind of Erasmus during these years 1518 and 1519.
His correspondence is full of it. He took pains, in a fashion which
he had never before shown, to set himself right with all the great
persons with whom he had any connection.
The earliest in the group of apologetic letters brought out by the
charge that Luther was only expressing Erasmus' ideas in somewhat
bolder form is one written to Cardinal Wolsey in May, 1518.[124] Here
begin the phrases afterwards to become so familiar:
[124] This is Leclerc's date. Stichart prefers Dec. 18, 1517.
"Luther is as unknown to me as he is to anyone, nor have I
had leisure to turn over his books except here and there
a page;--not that I shrank from the work, but that other
occupations left me no time for it. And yet certain persons,
as I hear, are saying that I have been helping him. If he
has written well I deserve no praise; if otherwise I merit
no blame--since in all his writings not so much as one jot
is mine, and anyone can prove this who wishes to investigate
it. The man's way of life is approved by all, and this is no
slight argument in his favour, that his character is so sound
that not even enemies can find anything to criticise. But even
if I had ever so much time for reading him I cannot take upon
myself to pronounce upon the writings of so great a man, even
though nowadays boys are everywhere, with the greatest boldness,
declaring this to be false and that to be heretical. At one time
indeed I was a little hard upon Luther, fearing that some cause
for enmity against sound learning might be given, and desiring
not to see that cause burdened any further. For I could not
help seeing how much enmity would be aroused if things were
to be broken up from which a rich harvest was being reaped by
priests and monks.
"There appeared first quite a number of propositions about papal
indulgences; then one and another pamphlet about confession and
penance. When I heard that certain persons were eager to publish
these I seriously advised against it, lest they should be
adding to the enmity against learning. There will be witnesses
of this, even men who wish well to Luther. Finally there came
a swarm of pamphlets; no one saw me reading them; no one heard
me praising them or not praising them. For I am not so rash as
to approve what I have not read, nor such a trickster as to
condemn what I know nothing about,--though this is nowadays a
regular practice of those who ought to know better. Germany has
some young men who give great promise of learning and eloquence,
through whose work I predict that she may some day have cause to
boast as England is now boasting with the best of reasons. Of
these no one is personally known to me except Eobanus, Hutten,
and Beatus. These men are fighting with every form of weapon
against the enemies of the languages and of sound learning,
which all good men are favouring. I should admit myself that
their freedom of speech was intolerable, did I not know in
what shameful fashion they are annoyed both in public and in
private. Their opponents allow themselves in public preaching,
in schools, in banquets, to declaim anything they please in the
most hateful, nay, in the most treasonable manner, before the
ignorant multitude, yet think it an unbearable thing if one of
these scholars dares to comment. Why! the very bees have stings
to strike with when they are hurt and flies have teeth to defend
themselves if they are attacked. Whence comes this new race of
gods? They make 'heretics' of whom they will, but move heaven
and earth if anyone calls them slanderers....
"I am in favour of these scholars in this sense: that I look
rather to their virtues than to their vices. And when one
considers how soaked in vice were those men who in Italy
and France gave the first impulse to the revival of ancient
learning, one cannot help favouring these men of ours whose
characters are such that their theological censors would do well
to imitate them rather than abuse them.
"Now whatever they write is suspected to be my work, even with
you in England, if only men of affairs who come hither from
there are telling the truth. Indeed, I confess frankly: I cannot
help admiring their talent, but a too free pen I approve in no
man. First Hutten sent out as a joke his _Nemo_; everyone knows
the argument of it was mere folly, but the Louvain theologians
kept saying it was my work, and they fancy themselves more
sharp-sighted than Lynceus himself. Then came the _Febris_
[also by Hutten]; that was mine too! though the whole spirit
and style of it differed from mine. Then appeared the _Oratio_
of Mosellanus in which he takes the part of the three languages
against these tongue-lashers. They thought to make me smart
for it, even when I had not yet heard that the _Oratio_ was in
existence; as if whatever comes into the head of this man or
that man to write, I must be accountable for it or as if I had
not enough to do to defend what I have written myself. They
are Germans; they are young men; they have pens; they are not
wanting in ability; nor are there lacking those who irritate
them by their hatred, nor those who spur them on, and then pour
cold water on them.
"All these I have warned in my letters to keep their freedom
within bounds; at all events not to attack the leading men of
the Church, lest they provoke against learning the hostility of
those very men through whose patronage it is standing up against
its enemies and thus burden the defenders of polite letters with
this enmity. But what can I do? I can warn, but I cannot compel.
To moderate my own style is within my power, but not to answer
for another's pen. The most ridiculous thing is that the recent
work of the bishop of Rochester against Faber is ascribed to me,
whereas the difference of style is as great as I am far removed
from the learning of that divine prelate. Why! there were some
who charged More's _Utopia_ upon me! whatever appears is mine,
willing or no....
"I have never sent forth a work, and I never will, without
putting my name to it. Some time ago I wrote for amusement my
_Moria_, without malice though perhaps with more than enough
freedom of speech. But I have always taken pains that nothing
should go forth from me which could corrupt youth by its
obscenity, or could in any way offend religion, or give rise to
sedition or party violence, or make a single black line upon the
good name of another. The sweat I have spent up to this time
has been spent in aiding solid learning and in advancing the
religion of Christ. All are thanking me for it on every hand,
excepting a very few theologians and monks, who refuse to be
made either better or more learned....
"If anyone cares to make the trial he will find Erasmus serving
the See of Rome with his whole heart and especially Leo the
tenth, to whose piety he is well aware how much he is indebted."
Precisely the same tone of nervous anxiety about himself appears in
a letter to Cardinal Campeggio, the papal legate in England.[125] He
assures him that, so far as in him lay, he has tried to maintain the
cause of Christ and the Church. Of course he cannot please everyone,
but he has been satisfied with the praise of the best men from Pope
Leo down.
[125] iii.¹, 436.
"But see," he cries, "the perverse and ungrateful ill-will of
some men. They do not trust to writings and arguments, but
attack me with slanderous tricks. Whatever books come out in
these days, in which anybody is too free with his pranks, they
put it upon me. There appeared the _Nemo_--for that is the name
of a certain silly book; they charged me with it and would
have made out their case if the angry author had not appeared
and claimed his work for himself. There came out certain
foolish letters and there were plenty of people to say I had
helped to write them. Finally there came--I know not with what
parentage--a work of Martin Luther, an author as unknown to me
as the most unknown person in the world; I have not yet read the
book through and yet at the very beginning they kept saying it
was my work, the truth being that not one stroke in it is mine."
He begs Campeggio to contradict these scandalous lies, and to rest
assured that he never has written and never will write books of this
sort. The cardinal's reply was as friendly and reassuring as could
be wished, but may interest us especially because it makes no direct
reference to the Lutheran movement.
To Pope Leo Erasmus wrote in regard to the second edition of his New
Testament.[126] The first edition had been, he says, well received
by all but very few. His description of these few critics is highly
characteristic:
[126] iii.¹, 490.
"Some are too stupid to be convinced by reasonable argument;
some too conceited to be willing to learn better; some too
obstinate to give up their position, bad though it be; some too
old to hope ever to do anything worth doing; some so ambitious
that they cannot bear to seem to have been ignorant of anything;
but all are men of such a kind, that it is not worth while to
try for their approval. Indeed that was a clever saying of
Seneca: 'There are people by whom it is better to be abused than
praised.'
"Among these people there is scarce one who has read my books.
They were afraid for their power, some even for their gain,
if the world should begin to grow wiser. What they themselves
really think I know not, but they try to make the uneducated
crowd believe that a knowledge of the languages and what
they call good letters are opposed to the study of theology,
whereas there is no science to which they are a greater help
and adornment. These men, born under the wrath of the Muses and
the Graces, are fighting ceaselessly against learning, which in
these our days is just rising to greater fruitfulness. Their
chief hope of victory is in slanderous trickery. If they come
out in books they simply betray their folly and ignorance.
If they are met by reasoning, the evident truth overcomes
them at once. So they confine themselves to making an uproar
with the ignorant mob and among foolish women, who are easy
to impose upon, especially under the pretext of religion,
which these people are wonderfully clever in assuming. They
put forth terrible words--'heresy!' 'Antichrist!' They keep
declaring that the Christian religion is in danger and already
toppling over, and pretend that they are holding it up on their
shoulders; and in all these hateful charges they mingle the
names of the languages and of polite literature. These horrible
things, they say, have sprung from 'poetry'--for so they call
whatever belongs to elegant learning--that is, whatever they
themselves do not understand. Such nonsense as this they do not
hesitate to blather out in public sermons, and then ask to be
called heralds of apostolic doctrine! They abuse the name of the
Roman pontiff and of the Roman see, a thing sacred to everyone,
as it ought to be.
"By these trickeries they are preparing to assault the cause
of letters, now just beginning to flourish, and also that
purified theology which is learning to know once more its own
true sources. Nothing is left untried; every sort of calumny
is thought out against those by whose work these studies seem
to be growing; and among these they reckon me. Now, how much
of importance I have contributed I know not, but surely I have
striven with all my might to kindle men from those chilling
argumentations in which they had so long been frozen up, to
zeal for a theology which should be at once more pure and more
serious. And that this labour has so far not been in vain I
perceive from this, that certain persons are furious against me,
who cannot value anything which they are not able to teach and
are ashamed to learn. But, trusting to Christ as my witness,
whom my writings above all would guard, to the judgment of your
Holiness, to my own sense of right, and the approval of so many
distinguished men, I have always disregarded the yelpings of
these people. Whatever little talent I have, it has been, once
for all, dedicated to Christ; it shall serve his glory alone; it
shall serve the Roman Church, the prince of that Church, but
especially your Holiness, to whom I owe more than my whole duty.
"I might, if I had listened to other arguments, have been
advanced to wealth and dignities; I can prove by the most solemn
testimony that what I am saying is true. But this seemed to me a
greater reward; I preferred to serve the glory of Christ, rather
than my own. From a boy I have made it my care never to write
anything irreligious or scurrilous or against authority. Or if I
formerly chattered away a little too freely, after the habit of
youth, certainly nothing becomes my present age but serious and
holy things. No one was ever made one hair the blacker or the
less religious by my writings; no disturbance has ever arisen
or ever shall arise on my account. No malice of my accusers
shall ever overcome this fixed determination of my mind. Let
others see to it what they write; I am not judging the slave of
another; let every man stand or fall to his own master. My only
grief is that through the bitter controversies of some persons
the peace of learning and of the Christian commonwealth is being
endangered."
Here he seems to shift his ground from the attacks of the men of
darkness to the Lutheran "tragedy."
"The affair seems no longer to be conducted with the weapons of
argument, but the battle rages with violent abuse on both sides;
biting pamphlets are the weapons and the uproar is swelling
into madness, with mutual maledictions. There is no one, unless
he were more than man, who does not sometimes slip, but these
human lapses, if they are of such sort that we cannot wink at
them, ought to be corrected with Christian charity. Now they
are turning to evil even that which is rightly spoken, often
that which they do not understand. With bitter words they make
raw sores which might have been healed by Christian gentleness;
they alienate by harshness men whom they might have kept by
kindness. The word 'heresy' is straightway in their mouths, if
at any point they differ or wish to seem to differ. If anything
does not exactly suit them, they raise seditious cries among the
rude and untaught people. These things, springing from slight
beginnings, have often kindled a widespread conflagration, and
it comes to pass that an evil, overlooked at first as of small
account, increasing little by little, finally bursts forth
into a serious disturbance of the peace of Christendom. Great
praise is due to those excellent kings who have quieted the very
beginnings of these dissensions, as Henry VIII. in England,
and Francis I. in France. In Germany, because that country is
divided up among so many little kings, the same cannot be done.
Among us, since we have but just acquired our prince [Charles
V. was elected emperor, June 28, 1519], great and excellent as
he is, yet he is so far removed that, up to the present time,
certain men are exciting tumults without reproof. I think,
therefore, that your Holiness would be acting most acceptably
to Christ if you should impose silence upon such contentions as
these and should do for the whole Christian world what Henry
and Francis have done, each for his own kingdom. Your piety is
bringing the most powerful kings into harmony; it remains for
you, by the same means, to restore to learning the peace which
is its due. This will come to pass, if by your order they who
cannot speak shall cease their babbling against polite learning,
and they who have no tongues for blessing shall cease cursing
those who are devoted to the tongues."
This letter rewards somewhat careful reading. Two ideas are obviously
before the writer's mind: First, the cause of sound learning and its
application to theology, the cause with which he identifies himself
so completely that every attack upon it seems a personal assault upon
him, and _vice versa_. Second, the Lutheran uprising, now beginning
to show its possibilities of danger. Erasmus names no names, but
the solemn warning to the pope as to the little flame that may grow
to a consuming fire seems to point plainly enough to Luther, and
the distinction so carefully drawn between Germany and the compact
monarchies of France and England confirms this idea. It is a warning
prophetic in its clearness of insight, but naïve to the point of
childishness in its suggestions of a remedy. The new little emperor
was not only _ingenti semotus intervallo_ from the field of Luther's
activity, but the very constitution of Germany made it utterly out of
the question that he could take any action whatever against Luther
except by the consent of the prince who was his immediate sovereign.
The "_reguli_," the "little kings" in Germany, had not bought their
independence by centuries of conflict to suffer any such burnings at
the stake and cutting-off of heads by any emperor as those capable
youths, Henry and Francis, could command at will in London or Paris.
Nor was there any more promise in Erasmus' suggestion that the pope
should order the parties in conflict to keep silence. The Leipzig
disputation of Luther with John Eck in July of this same year (1519)
was to bring out clearly that, after all, the real issue touched the
papal authority, and when that was questioned it was idle to imagine
that any papal action whatever could really affect the course of
events.
There is a certain variation upon this suggestion in the dedication
to Cardinal Campeggio of the paraphrases of certain epistles of Paul
in 1519.[127] After a most flattering eulogy of Leo X. for his great
interest in sound learning, Erasmus says:
[127] vii., 969.
"If a means of pacification is sought for, I think it might
most easily be accomplished if the pope should command that
each person prepare a statement of his own belief and set it
forth, without abuse of opposing views, so that the madness
of tongue and pen may be restrained, especially by those to
whom such control belongs. But if there is a difference, as
it often happens that our judgments differ like our tastes,
let the whole contention be held within the limits of courtesy
and not run over into mad excess. And if there be any point
specially touching upon doctrine--for everything ought not to be
dragged in, neck and heels, under the head of doctrine--let it
be discussed by men who are thoroughly versed in the mysteries
of the faith, who will not seek their own interests under the
pretence of the faith and who will carry on the affair with
prudent judgment, not with seditious disturbances."
Erasmus thinks he can easily persuade Campeggio and that the cardinal
will easily persuade the excellent Leo. Where the superhuman beings
are to be found who will carry out his innocent suggestions he does
not say. We are bound to give him credit for any constructive ideas
he may have had, and in all his writings there is nothing that comes
much nearer to positive constructive planning than this.
If one may judge from the letter to Leo, Erasmus' early conception
of the Lutheran movement was much like that which prevailed at Rome.
It was a squabble of monks; Luther was an Augustinian, Tetzel a
Dominican. Most monks were enemies of learning--Luther was a man of
learning, but inclined to violence and not willing to keep the matter
to a purely intellectual issue. He was, of course, right on many
points, but was going too fast and was drawing after him many foolish
people, who ought to be held in check by the established powers.
Quite the same tone appears in a long letter[128] to Albert of
Brandenburg, archbishop of Mainz, the papal agent in the German
indulgence of 1517 and the principal clergyman in Germany. Erasmus
takes the opportunity of acknowledging the gift of a loving-cup from
the archbishop to go at length into the Lutheran question. He reaches
it again through the medium of his own personal difficulties. For a
time, he says, he had made peace with the "theologians" at Louvain.
They were to hold their scandalous tongues; he was to do his best
to keep his pen still. If only they had had the archbishop's cup to
drink their mutual faith in, the agreement might have lasted longer.
As it is, an unhappy letter, badly understood and worse interpreted,
has brought on an attack more furious than ever. He begs to
explain[129]:
[128] iii., 513-D.
[129] iii.¹, 514-A.
"In the first place, I have never had anything to do, either
with the Reuchlin business or with the affair of Luther.
Whatever Cabala and Talmud may be, they have never attracted
me. Those contentions between Reuchlin and the followers of
Hoogstraaten were most displeasing to me. Luther is to me
unknown as the most unknown of men. His writings I have not had
time to read, excepting that I have just barely skimmed over
some of them."
It is very difficult to believe that these statements are true.
Erasmus had interested himself in Reuchlin's affairs enough to write
to two Roman cardinals in his behalf. He knew enough about Luther's
writings to have convinced himself that their tone was too decided to
suit him; if he had not read every word of them, he was thoroughly
informed as to their contents. The motive of his denial appears in
the next words:
"If he has written well, no praise belongs to me, if not there
is nothing which can be laid to my charge.... I was sorry that
the books of Luther were published and when first some writings
or other of his began to be shown about, I did my best to
prevent their publication, especially because I feared that
some tumult would be caused thereby. Luther had written me a
letter in what I thought a very Christian spirit and I answered,
warning the man not to write anything seditious or insolent
against the Roman pontiff, but to preach the apostolic doctrine
with pure heart and in all gentleness. I did this politely that
it might have the more effect. I added that there were some here
who favoured him, that he might the more accommodate himself to
their judgment. Now some have most stupidly interpreted these
words as if I favoured Luther, whereas no one of those persons
gave him any advice; I was the only one who warned him. I am
neither the accuser of Luther, nor his patron, nor his judge. As
to the man's spirit, I dare not judge him, for that is a most
difficult matter, especially if I must judge him unfavourably.
"And yet, even if I did favour him as a good man, which his
enemies admit him to be; or as an accused man, and that the laws
permit even to sworn judges; or as a man oppressed and crushed
down by those who, under some made-up pretext, are working all
they can against pure learning, what ground of fault-finding
against me were that, so long as I do not mix myself in the
matter? In fine, it seems to me the part of a Christian to
favour Luther, in this sense, that if he is innocent I do not
wish him to be crushed by the factions of the wicked; if he is
wrong I wish him to be set right, not ruined....
"But now certain theologians whom I know are neither warning
nor teaching Luther, but are only with mad howlings reviling
him before the people and tearing him in pieces with the most
violent abuse and continually having in their mouths the words
'heresy!', 'heretic', 'heresiarch!', 'schism!', 'antichrist!'
It cannot be denied that these clamours were raised among the
people chiefly by men who had never seen the books of Luther.
It is well proved that things are condemned by these people as
heretical in Luther which in Bernard or Augustine are read as
orthodox, nay, as pious words. I warned them at the beginning
to abstain from clamour of this sort and to carry on the
affair rather with writings and arguments. I said they ought
not publicly to condemn what they had not read and carefully
thought out, I will not say, understood. Then I told them it
was unbecoming for theologians to carry anything through by
violence, for their judgment ought to be of the most serious
kind, and that it was not an easy thing to gain their point
by raging against a man whose life was approved by everyone.
Finally, that perhaps it was not a safe thing to touch upon
such matters before a mixed crowd, in which there are many who
greatly dislike the confession of secret sins and if these
should hear that there are theologians who say one need not
confess all faults, they will readily snatch at it and get a
perverted notion. Now though all this must strike every man of
spirit as it does me, yet from this friendly admonition they
have conceived the suspicion that Luther's books are in great
part mine, and produced at Louvain, whereas not one stroke in
them is mine or published with my knowledge or my will. Still,
acting upon this false suspicion and in spite of all denial,
they have raised here disturbances more furious than I have ever
seen in my life.
"Further, though the special function of theologians is to
teach, I see many nowadays who are doing nothing but compelling
men, bringing them to ruin or to silence, whereas Augustine,
even in the case of the Donatists, who were not merely heretics
but furious brigands, does not approve those who would merely
compel, without also teaching them. Men to whom gentleness is
a duty, seem to be simply thirsting for human blood, so eager
are they to ensnare and ruin Luther. Now this is playing the
butcher, not the theologian. If they want to show themselves
great theologians let them convert the Jews, let them turn to
Christ those who are strangers to him, let them mend the public
morals of Christians, even more corrupt than those of Turks.
What justice is there in leading him to punishment, who has now
first proposed for discussion things which have always been
discussed in all the schools of theologians? Why ought he to be
persecuted, who begs to be instructed, who submits himself to
the judgment of the Roman See and of the schools, which they
call 'universities?' And if he refuses to trust himself in the
hands of certain persons who would rather see him crushed than
instructed, surely that is not strange."
For a man who was a total stranger to Luther and his books, Erasmus
shows himself surprisingly well informed.
"Let us examine into the origin of the present troubles. The
world is burdened with human devices, with the opinions and the
dogmas of the schools, with the tyranny of the Mendicant Friars,
who, though they are the servants of the Roman See, are making
themselves a danger to the pope himself and even to kings, by
their power and their numbers. When the pope is working for
them he is more than a God; if he does anything contrary to
their convenience, he is of no more account than a dream. I am
not condemning them all; but very many are the kind of persons,
who for the sake of power and gain are seeking to ensnare
the consciences of men. With shameless effrontery they were
beginning to leave out Christ entirely and to preach nothing but
their own novel and impudent doctrines. About indulgences they
were talking in a way that not even idiots could stand. Through
this and many other things the vigour of apostolic teaching was
gradually disappearing and it was likely to happen that things
would go from bad to worse until that spark of Christian piety
should be extinguished, from which the dying flame of Christian
love might have been rekindled. The whole of religion was
turning towards more than Jewish ceremonialism. Good men grieved
over all these things. Even theologians who are not monks, and
some monks, confessed to them in private conversation. These are
the things, as I think, which first moved the heart of Luther to
set himself boldly against the intolerable insolence of certain
persons. For what else can I suspect of a man who is aiming at
neither honours nor wealth? As to the propositions which they
object to in Luther, I am not at present discussing them, but
only the manner and the occasion of them.
"Luther dared to have doubts about indulgences, but others
before him had made bold enough statements about these. He
dared to speak rather unrestrainedly about the authority of the
Roman pontiff; but others had shown little enough restraint in
this matter, and among them especially Alvarus, Sylvester, and
the cardinal of San Sisto. He dared despise the judgment of
St. Thomas, but the Dominicans had almost set Thomas above the
Gospels. He dared in the matter of the confessional to discuss
certain scruples, but in this thing the monks have entangled the
consciences of men without limit. He dared in part to despise
the conclusions of the schools; but they had laid far too
great weight upon these, and yet cannot agree upon them among
themselves, but are always changing them, cutting out the old
and putting in new. This was a pain to pious souls: to hear in
the schools scarcely a word about the apostolic teaching,
but to learn that the ancient sacred writers, long approved by
the Church, were now quite antiquated, and to hear in public
preaching seldom a word of Christ, but always of the power of
the pope and the opinions of the moderns; to know that the
whole discourse was filled with lust of gain, with flatteries,
ambition, and deceit.
[Illustration: ERASMUS WITH "TERMINUS."
FROM A WOODCUT BY HOLBEIN, IN THE BASEL MUSEUM.]
"I think the blame ought to be put upon these things, if Luther
wrote a little too violently. Whoever defends the apostolic
doctrine defends the pope, who is its chief herald, as the rest
of the bishops are his heralds. All bishops stand in the place
of Christ, but among them the Roman pontiff stands first. We
must believe of him that he cares for nothing more than the
glory of Christ, whose minister he boasts himself to be. They
deserve very badly of him who ascribe to him things which he
would not himself recognise and which are far from helpful to
the flock of Christ. And yet some who are stirring up these
disorders are not doing it out of love for the pope, but are
abusing his authority for their own profit and power. We have,
as I believe, a pious pope; but in the vast flood of affairs
there are many things of which he is ignorant, which even if
he would he cannot get at, but as Virgil says, the driver is
'swept along by the steeds and the car heeds not the rein.' He
therefore is aiding the good-will of the pope, who exhorts him
to those things that are especially worthy of Christ.
"It is no secret that there are persons who are stirring up
his Holiness against Luther and against all who dare to murmur
against their dogmas. But the great princes ought rather to
consider what is demanded by the permanent will of the pope,
than by a loyalty extorted by base means. What kind of people
the authors of these dissensions are I could make perfectly
clear, if I did not fear that while I am telling the truth I
may seem to be uttering abuse. Many of them I know intimately;
many have declared their quality by their writings, so that no
mirror could more clearly reflect the image of their heart and
life. Would that they who take up the Censor's rod to drive out
of the Senate of Christians whomever they will, had drunk more
deeply of the teaching and the spirit of Christ....
"I say these things the more freely because I stand in every way
utterly apart from the case of Reuchlin and Luther. I should
never care to write things of that sort, nor can I claim so much
learning for myself as to defend what others have written, but
I cannot help making this mystery plain: that those men [the
opponents of Luther] are aiming at something quite different
from what they pretend. They have long been unable to bear
the idea of sound learning and the languages flourishing, the
ancient authors coming to life, who were until just now lying
covered with dust and eaten up by moths, the world called back
to the original sources themselves. They tremble for their own
emptiness, they are unwilling to appear ignorant of anything;
they fear to lose something of their own authority. They have
long been pressing upon this sore, and at last it has broken,
for the pain could no longer be concealed. Before the books of
Luther appeared they were most urgent in this thing, especially
Dominicans and Carmelites, of whom I would that many were not
more wicked than ignorant.
"When Luther's books came out they seized upon them as a
handle and began to bring the cause of the languages, of sound
learning, of Reuchlin and Luther, nay, even my cause also,
together into one bundle,--making not only a bad exposition, but
also a bad distinction. For, in the first place, what has sound
learning to do with the question of faith, and, in the next
place, what have I to do with the case of Reuchlin and Luther?
But these people have cunningly mingled these matters together
so as to involve in one common hatred all who cultivate sound
learning. That they are not acting honestly is evident from this
fact: they confess that there is no one among ancient or modern
writers who has not made mistakes and they will make a heretic
of anyone who obstinately defends himself; but why do they pass
over the rest and so persistently examine into one or two? They
are not disturbed because Alvarus and the cardinal of San Sisto
and Sylvester Prierias have often erred; they say not a word of
these because they are Dominicans. They cry out against Reuchlin
alone because he is an enthusiastic lover of the languages;
against Luther because they imagine him to be endowed with our
learning, whereas he has but just barely touched it. Luther has
written many things rather rashly than wickedly, and among these
things they are especially enraged because he has little respect
for Thomas Aquinas, because he is diminishing the revenue from
indulgences, because he cares little for the begging Friars,
because he pays less respect to the dogmas of the schools
than to the Gospels, because he takes no account of human
argumentations about disputed points. Intolerable heresies these
are!
"But these things they pass over and make hateful charges to the
pope, these men who are united and eager only in doing harm.
Formerly the heretic was heard respectfully and absolved if he
gave satisfaction, but if he persisted and was convicted, the
extreme penalty was that he was not admitted to the communion
of the Catholic Church. Now the charge of heresy is a different
thing and yet, for some slight reason, no matter what,
straightway their mouths are full of the cry: 'This is heresy!'
Formerly he was a heretic who differed from the Gospels or the
articles of faith or from something which had an authority equal
to these. Now, if anyone differ from Thomas, he is called a
heretic; nay, if he differ from some new-fangled logic, patched
up but yesterday by any sophist of the schools. Whatever they do
not like, whatever they do not understand, is heresy! to know
Greek is heresy! to speak correctly is heresy! whatever they do
not do is heresy! I confess that the charge of violation of the
faith is a serious one, but not any and every question ought to
be turned into a question of faith. They who deal with matters
of faith ought to be far removed from every form of ambition,
of money-making, of personal hatred, or of revenge. But what
these people are chiefly concerned with, who can be in doubt?
If once the reins of their greed are let loose, they will begin
everywhere to rage against every good man. Finally they will
threaten the bishops themselves and even the Roman pontiffs;
and in fact you may call me a liar, if we are not seeing this
done by some already. How far the order of the Dominicans will
dare to go we may learn from Jerome Savonarola and the crime
of Bern.[130] I am not bringing up again the bad name of that
order, but I am only giving warning as to what we must look out
for if they are to succeed in whatever they are bold enough to
undertake. What I have said thus far has nothing to do with
Luther's cause; I am speaking only of the manner and the danger
of it. The case of Reuchlin the pope has taken upon himself.
Luther's business is referred to the universities and whatever
they may decide is no risk of mine."
[130] The reference is to a celebrated fraud perpetrated by the
Dominicans of Bern to demonstrate their superiority over their
Franciscan rivals. The fraud was detected and the ringleaders
were burned alive, 1509.
The letter concludes with the now familiar protestations that he,
Erasmus, has nothing whatever to do with the present troubles, but is
merely giving a timely warning.
This letter to Archbishop Albert is the most important in the group
we are now considering. It shows us practically every aspect of
Erasmus' position in the year 1519, and suggests the numerous lines
of comment thereon. The least convincing parts of it are those which
refer to himself personally. These may be sufficiently explained by
that joy in fancying himself persecuted which we have noted in him
from the first. It needed but very slight foundations for him to
build up a whole fabric of imaginary assaults, aimed at him because
he was the one great source from which all intellectual energy might
seem to flow. It was like his vanity to be vastly flattered if
someone suggested that Luther could never have done what he had done
without Erasmus' help, and he magnified that suggestion by saying
it over and over to his numerous correspondents in every possible
variation. The repeated declaration that he knew nothing about Luther
or his books is too silly to deserve attention. He shows the most
complete comprehension of what Luther was doing, and practically
contradicts himself within the space of a few lines by stating that
he has "taken a taste" of certain Lutheran books and been greatly
attracted by them.
Another curious point is his insistence upon grouping Luther and
Reuchlin together and setting himself over against them. In fact the
points of view of these two men were at least as different as was
that of Erasmus from either of them. Reuchlin was above all things a
Humanist, a man of "the languages," and the "tragedy" in which he was
concerned, his quarrel with the Dominicans of Cologne, had reference
to the use which might properly be made of Hebrew by a sound
Christian scholarship. All this was certainly very closely allied
with the work of Erasmus and had no direct connection with that of
Luther; yet Erasmus, furiously anxious not to seem to have anything
in common with either, has no scruple in joining them together in one
common reproach.
All this gives an effect of pettiness to Erasmus' attitude towards
the Reformation and tends to obscure his actual service. So far as
one can get at his real meaning, it is something like this: the real
authors of the present troubles are the mysterious people whom he
here continually refers to as "certain persons" or "those men," and
whom he occasionally defines more specifically as the monks or the
enemies of sound learning. Luther is right in calling attention to
the evils of church life; he is not the first to do it, and Erasmus
heartily agrees with him. "Those people" are attacking Luther because
they feel, as well they may, that their rights and privileges are
in danger, if men are going to listen to his criticism. They are
catching, therefore, at every excuse to charge him with heresy.
Erasmus affects to believe that pope, cardinals, and all good and
reasonable men will see through these attempts and will hasten to
save the Church by accepting what is valuable in this Lutheran
criticism and acting upon it at once.
But,--and here is the line of distinction,--there was also in
Luther's appeal an element of doctrine, an implication at least that
the Church was false to its own teaching as to the direct relation
between God and the soul of man. The consequences of this doctrinal
implication were, as Erasmus must have felt at once, of the most
far-reaching sort, and he was not prepared to follow them up. An
unconditional declaration in Luther's favour would have seemed to
commit him to the doctrinal as well as to the practical conclusions
from Luther's premises.
This gives at least a shadow of reasonableness to his refinement
of distinction between merely reading over the works of Luther and
making such careful study of them as would enable him to attempt a
reply. On the 23rd of September, 1521, he writes to Bombasius in
Bologna[131]:
[131] iii.¹, 665-B.
"I am wholly occupied with revising my New Testament and some
other works, trying like the bears gradually to lick into shape
the crude product of my talents. But soon I hope to have more
leisure. I have been trying hard to persuade Aleander to give
me permission to read Luther's writings; for nowadays the world
is full of sycophants and prize-fighters. He said emphatically
he could not do this without a special permit from the pope; so
I wish you would get this for me in the form of some kind of a
brief. For I do not want to give a handle to these knaves, who
would like nothing better."
His _bête noire_ at Louvain seems to have been a person called
Egmund, a Carmelite monk, who may serve us as the type of "those
persons" who were trying to identify Erasmus with the Lutheran cause.
Writing[132] to the _Rector Magnificus_ of the University of Louvain,
still in 1519, Erasmus says that this Egmund had been expressing the
pious hope that as St. Paul had been converted from a persecutor
to a doctor of the Church, so Erasmus and Luther might some day be
converted.
[132] iii.¹, 537.
"What will become of these men? The one thing they want is
to do harm in some way, and it offends them that I am not a
Lutheran, as indeed I am not, except in so far as Luther serves
the glory of Christ. I know that I am rather free of tongue,
but yet no one has heard me approve the doctrine of Luther. I
have never taken pains to read his books, excepting a few pages,
and these rather skimmed than read. Your contentions against
Luther I have always consistently favoured, but far more your
writings, especially those of John Turenholtius, who, as I hear,
has carried on the discussion in a scholarly way and without
personalities."
He has not read Luther, yet he has steadily approved the Louvain
contentions against him and especially the writings of a man of whom
he knows only by hearsay that he writes in good temper!
"If his [Luther's] books were to be burnt, no one would find me
any the sadder. I have written privately and said many things to
prevent him from writing so seditiously, and yet I am called a
Lutheran! If these jokes amuse your university, I am man enough
to bear them; for I would rather do this than take revenge for
them; but in my judgment the cause would be better served by
other methods. Vincentius is charging me with the tumult in
Holland, in which after a most foolish discourse, he came near
being stoned to death; whereas the truth is I have never written
to any Dutchman either for Luther or against him."
He writes to Mountjoy in the same year[133]:
[133] iii.¹, 538-C.
"While you are happy for so many reasons I am compelled to fight
with certain monsters rather than men. By Hercules! I would like
to try what eloquence might do, were it not that as I lay my
hand upon the hilt a certain Christian modesty, like Pallas in
Homer, seizes me by the hair and restrains me."
So far Erasmus had stood in an attitude of studied neutrality. We
have to gather from his emphasis and from the undercurrent of his
eloquence our impression as to the side on which his sympathies
really lay. If the world could only have stood still long enough
for his wise and cautious suggestions to affect the parties, all
might yet have been well. Unhappily for the Erasmians of all times,
the world moves, and it does not move strictly according to rule.
Even while Erasmus was exhorting to mildness, events were forcing
men into partisan attitudes which made his counsel of no avail.
There were enough men who felt passionately the wrongs which he
felt only academically, to force the discussion into the fighting
stage. The more this becomes evident, the more clearly we see Erasmus
moving over from the position of sympathetic neutrality towards the
reforming party into that of suspicion and declared hostility.
In the correspondence we have just quoted, the weight of emphasis is
on the provocation which the reformers had received. They were pretty
violent, but their enemies were worse, and if the highest authority
were to act at all, it would do better to compel the men of darkness
to silence rather than the excellent Luther and his worthy followers.
How far Erasmus, whether in 1519-20 or at any later time, really
changed his opinion on any of the points at issue, will probably
always remain a subject for controversy. We are concerned with the
change of emphasis by which his final attitude was determined.
Two letters of 1519, one to Philip Melanchthon, in the centre of the
Lutheran camp, and one to the Dominican Jacob Hoogstraaten, the head
of the Inquisition at Cologne, will serve to show how evenly at this
time Erasmus distributed the discipline he felt himself called upon
to administer to the new and more tumultuous generation.
One can hardly help smiling at this passage from the letter
to the gentle and peace-loving Melanchthon, by all means the
sweetest-natured of all the Reformation champions. Erasmus makes him
some very pretty compliments on his books and then goes on[134]:
[134] iii.¹, 431.
"But, if you will take advice from Erasmus, I wish you would
take more pains in setting forth good learning than in attacking
its enemies. They are indeed worthy of being assailed by good
men with every sort of abuse, but, if I am not mistaken, we
shall accomplish more in the way I advise. Besides, we ought to
fight in such fashion that we may seem to be their superiors,
not only in eloquence but also in modesty and in good breeding.
Everyone here approves of Martin Luther's character, but there
are divers opinions as to his beliefs. I myself have not yet
read his books. Certain things he is right in calling attention
to, but I wish he had done it as happily as he has boldly. I
have written about him to Duke Frederic."
This letter to Frederic of Saxony,[135] wanting in our collection,
emphasises as strongly as possible the excellence of Luther as a
man, and, while disclaiming all interest in his doctrine, urges the
Elector to defend him against his persecution.
[135] Karl Hartfelder, "Friedrich der Weise von Sachsen und D.
Erasmus," in _Zeitschrift für vergleichende Literaturgeschichte_,
etc., N. F., iv., 1891.
Doubtless he was no less favourable to Luther than he was in the
following year, when the Elector Frederic, finding himself at Cologne
on imperial business, had an interview with Erasmus, of which his
intimate counsellor and biographer Spalatin gives an account[136]:
[136] _Friedrichs des Weisen Leben und Zeitgeschichte_, von G.
Spalatin, Jena, 1851, p. 164.
"There at Cologne the most learned Erasmus of Rotterdam was with
the Elector, who talked with him on all kinds of subjects and
asked him if he believed that Doctor Martin Luther had erred in
his writing and preaching. Thereto he answered in Latin: 'Yes,
on two points, namely, that he has attacked the crown of the
pope and the bellies of the monks.'"
Thereat the Elector laughed and he recalled the saying a year or so
before his death (1525).
Luther contributes to our impression of this interview in his
Table-talk:
"Doctor Martin said that the Elector Frederic of Saxony had an
interview with Erasmus at Cologne in 1519 and had given him a
cloak and said afterward to Spalatin: 'What kind of a man is
Erasmus? one cannot tell where one stands with him.' And Duke
George said, after his fashion: 'Plague take him! One never
knows what he is at. I like better the way of the Wittenbergers;
they say yes and no.'"[137]
[137] Walch, Luther's _Werke_, xxii., 1623-4.
The letter to Hoogstraaten, who had been the chief enemy of Reuchlin,
was the boldest venture of Erasmus in this early stage of the
Lutheran contest. It is a monument to the writer's skill in defending
two sides of a question at once. It is dated in August, 1519, and
begins[138]:
[138] iii.¹, 484.
"When I was reading, some time ago, the books in which your
quarrel with Reuchlin is contained, I was often impelled to
write to you, first by Christian love, then by the profession
of our common studies and further by the special affection
with which from a boy I have ever regarded your Order [!], and
lastly by an uncommon attraction towards you, whom I understand
to be a man of agreeable and courteous manners. That you are
most eagerly devoted to our new studies, your writings clearly
proclaim, which affect throughout refinement and elegance of
diction and leave no doubt what your opinion is as to sound
learning."
All this tempted Erasmus to give him some good advice; but then, on
the other hand, he reflected that good advice is seldom acceptable
and generally harms the adviser. The bishop of Cologne, however, had
removed this scruple, and, if he tells the truth about Hoogstraaten,
Erasmus thinks he may venture on some gentle admonition. At first he
was dreadfully afflicted at Reuchlin's violence; but then friends
told him that Reuchlin must have had terrible provocation, for that
he was naturally the mildest of men. Then certain persons said hard
things of Hoogstraaten, and finally, when Erasmus came to read him,
he was compelled to say that he had liked him better before he
began to defend himself. Then, a little while after, he had picked
up "in another person's library" certain furious letters against
Hoogstraaten and, little as these pleased him, he was able partly to
excuse them, having read the pamphlets which had called them forth.
He is not fighting Reuchlin's battle; rather Hoogstraaten's, for he
is trying to tell him what will be for his advantage. If he answers
that this is simply his office as inquisitor, very well; let him
perform his office, but in such a manner that he may seem to everyone
to be doing solely the service of Christ.
"Had you not done your duty when after so many years and such a
storm of pamphlets you had persecuted a quite obscure man, who
perhaps would never have been known at all, if you had not made
him famous? and this after the Roman pontiff, learning that the
affair was of such a kind that it was better to drop it than
keep it in agitation any longer, had ordered silence. If any
error dangerous to Christian piety appears, it is first to be
carefully worked out by the discussions of learned men and then
is to be reported to the bishop. When you have done that your
part as inquisitor is done. You have made the inquiry and have
brought it before the proper authorities. You are not called
upon to stir up heaven and earth and to raise such tumults as
these. Would that you had spent as much pains, as much money
and time, in preaching the Gospel of Christ. If you had, I am
greatly mistaken or Jacob Hoogstraaten would be a greater man
than he is now, and his name would be far more honoured among
all good men, or at least would be less hated. As it is, a
great part of this hatred falls upon your Order, which, heavily
burdened already by serious hostilities on many accounts, ought
not to be weighed down by new ones."
Then follows a long defence of some words of Erasmus quoted by
Hoogstraaten, without naming their author, but which seemed to draw
him into the Reuchlin quarrel. "May Christ be as favourable to me as
I am little favourable to the Cabbala!" He cares nothing for the Jews:
"Who is there among us who does not sufficiently hate this
race of men? If it is a Christian thing to hate Jews, we are
all good Christians enough! The one thing that makes all the
trouble is the neglect of learning. You will be serving much
better the cause, not only of the Dominican order, but also of
Theology as a whole, if you will check by your authority the
vacant abuse of certain persons who everywhere, in public and
private discourses, in disputations, at banquets, and what is
most serious, in public preaching are brawling against skill in
the languages and against polite letters, mingling with their
hatred of these, cries of 'Antichrist!' 'heresy!' and other
violent words of this sort, whereas it is perfectly clear how
greatly the Church is indebted to men skilled in languages and
in eloquence. These studies do not hide the dignity of theology,
but make it more plain; do not oppose it, but serve it. You
would not straightway brand the art of music as heretical, if
perchance some musician were to be apprehended as a backslider.
The error of the man is to be condemned, but honour is still to
be paid to his studies.... If Theology will join in doing honour
to these studies she will in turn be adorned by them; but if
she abuses and reviles them, I fear it will come to pass, as
Paul says, that while they are assailing each other with mutual
bites, they will simply be the death of each other."
In view of this correspondence of 1518-19 we may well consider here
the much-discussed question of Erasmus' personal courage. Of all
the charges brought against him on both sides that of timidity is
the most frequent. Of all the explanations of his attitude toward
the Reformation this is the most obvious and the most popular. If
one can accept it, it settles promptly and once for all a multitude
of perplexing questions. "Why did Erasmus not do or say this thing
or that thing? He was afraid." In pursuance of our principle not to
pretend to know the motive of every act of Erasmus' life, we shall
not attempt to give one answer that will fit all cases, but shall
venture to be a little Erasmian ourselves and try to view this matter
from more than one side.
We shall have done our work but badly so far if we have not made
it clear that Erasmus believed in his right to bring all human
institutions to judgment at the bar of his own mind and conscience.
Nothing which offended his own sense of right could be wholly
acceptable to him. In so far he was an individual, and claimed his
right as such. As an individual, with a mind and conscience of his
own, he had a right, not only to have opinions upon every subject of
human interest, but to express them. There was no call upon him, any
more than upon a hundred others, to address himself thus to kings,
princes, prelates, popes, inquisitors, and instruct them as to their
duty in a great public crisis. He did this out of some impelling
sense of duty and of right. If we may put any confidence in anything
he ever said or did, we may rely upon this: that he felt himself the
spokesman of a cause greater than himself,--the cause of a free and
sane scholarship.
He was an individual, but of the fifteenth, not of the eighteenth
century. The great word of deliverance to the modern mind, the
"_cogito ergo sum_," had not yet been spoken. Man was still content
to think of himself as hemmed in by standards of thought and action
not created for him by his own mind, but given to him as a part of
his human inheritance from the traditions of the past. No estimate of
individual force can be complete without this limitation. If Erasmus
had lived in the eighteenth century, he might have been a Voltaire;
but he was not living in the eighteenth century. He saw where his
time was out of joint, but he did not believe himself called upon to
set it right. His function was only to point out the evils and, so
far as he could, to appeal to those in authority to remedy them.
A man merely timid and nothing more could have found a far easier
way to keep himself safe from any danger of persecution. He might
simply have kept silent, and no one could have said it was his duty
to speak out. It required a very considerable exercise of courage
to say even as much as Erasmus was willing to say, in a day when
Savonarola had so lately been done to death for merely attempting
to set up in Florence a kingdom of Christ without the help of the
pope. The arm of the Inquisition was long, its watch was vigilant,
and its weapons were subtle. A man who valued merely his own peace
of mind would hardly be likely to incur its displeasure. So far we
may go in granting to Erasmus the quality of courage. He knew he was
making enemies among powerful vested interests. If his principles
of sound learning and reasonable criticism were to prevail, then, as
he frequently said, the profits of a vast body of place-holders and
traders in all sacred things were going to be diminished, and they
would not suffer this without making a great demonstration of their
power.
On the other hand, nothing was farther from his nature than any kind
of open rupture with established forms of organisation. His hatred of
war extended to the world of institutions. Revolution was abhorrent
to him, because he thought its evils were greater than any advantage
it might bring. The moment he fancied he saw this spectre of
revolution, even in the far distance, he was impelled to modify and
explain and warn until he had, for the moment, satisfied his sense of
what was wise and prudent.
The genius of Erasmus was eminently critical, not constructive.
His misfortune was to live at a crisis when the merely critical
attitude would no longer serve. The struggle for new construction
was beginning, and there was where Erasmus began to fail. Men were
looking to him for leadership. Probably he grossly exaggerates the
degree to which all the criticism of the day was charged upon him.
That exaggeration was nothing more than we might expect from his
nervous vanity and his uncontrollable impulse to make literature
whenever he took pen in hand. Still it contains just this germ of
truth: that the world of scholars felt his power and would have been
glad to follow his lead if he had chosen to take a leader's place.
How natural the expectation was that Erasmus would do this we may
see from an entry in the diary of Albert Dürer.[139] It was the year
1521. Luther on his return from Worms had been spirited away, no one
knew whither. Rumours of his death were spread abroad and carried
terror to his numerous followers. The simple-hearted painter who the
year before had visited Erasmus in the Low Countries was overwhelmed
with dismay. In the midst of his prosaic little jottings down of
travels, paintings, presents, and petty bargainings he suddenly
breaks out into a wail of despair:
[139] Albrecht Dürer's _Tagebuch der Reise in die Niederlande_.
Ed. Fr. Leitschuh, 1884, pp. 83, 84.
"Ah God! is Luther dead; who will henceforth so clearly set
forth the Gospel to us? Ah God! what might he not have written
in the next ten or twenty years! Oh! all ye pious Christian men,
help me earnestly to pray and mourn for this God-inspired man,
and pray to God that he send us another enlightened man.
"Oh! Erasmus of Rotterdam, where art thou? Behold what the
unjust tyranny of earthly power, the might of darkness, can do.
Hear, thou champion of Christ! ride forth by the side of the
Lord Christ; defend the truth; gain the martyr's crown! As it
is, thou art but a frail old man. I have heard thee say thou
hadst given thyself but a couple more years of active service;
spend them, I pray, to the profit of the Gospel and the true
Christian faith and believe me the gates of Hell, the See of
Rome, as Christ has said, will not prevail against thee. And
though thou becomest like thy master Christ and bearest shame
from the liars of this world and so diest a little earlier,
yet wilt thou so much the sooner pass from death unto life and
be glorified in Christ. For if thou shalt drink of the cup he
drank of, so wilt thou reign with him and judge with equity them
that have done foolishness. O Erasmus! stand by us, that God may
praise thee, as is written of David; for thou art mighty and
thou canst slay Goliath; for God stands by the holy Christian
churches, as he stands also among the Romans, according to his
divine will."
Doubtless this heartfelt petition of the excellent Dürer represents
the first impulse of many an honest soul who thought of Erasmus as
a man straightforward as himself, and without any special knowledge
of him jumped to the conclusion that here was the natural leader of
a redeemed generation. No such illusion could long affect anyone who
had come to know him in his true character.
[Illustration: ERASMUS.
FROM A COPPER ENGRAVING BY ALBERT DÜRER.]
It is somewhat difficult to imagine what Erasmus would have done if
his personal safety had been seriously brought into question. It
is not impossible that, if the issue of retraction or punishment
had ever been squarely presented to him by any authority capable of
enforcing its judgment, he might have risen to a higher plane of
action than he was ever in fact called upon to reach. Such attacks
as he had to meet were wholly from individuals, representing no
recognised authority either of Church or State, and his defence was
always that the highest persons in both these worlds had approved
him. This judgment is at all events more favourable than Erasmus was
sometimes inclined to demand for himself. Writing to Richard Pace
in the critical year 1521 he says[140]:
[140] iii.¹, 651-C.
"What help could I give Luther, by making myself the companion
of his danger, except that two men should perish instead of
one? I cannot wonder enough at the temper in which he has
written, and surely he has brought great enmity upon the friends
of sound learning. He has given us many splendid sayings and
warnings; but would that he had not spoiled his good things by
his intolerable faults. But even if everything he wrote had been
right, I had no intention of putting my head in danger for the
sake of the truth. It isn't every one that has the strength for
martyrdom, and I sadly fear that if any tumult should arise,
I should follow the example of Peter. I obey the decrees of
emperor and pope when they are right, because that is my duty;
when they are wrong I bear it, because that is the safe plan.
This I believe to be permitted even to good men if there is no
hope of improvement."
There was precisely the point. Erasmus was ready to bear the ills of
the world because he saw no power at hand disposed to remedy them.
When others began to take the remedy into their own hands, then he
could see in their efforts only riot, confusion, sedition, and all
their attendant brood of horrors.