Chapter VIII: Beginnings of the Reformation--Correspondence of 1518-1519 (3)

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.

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.