Chapter IX (2)

Erasmus had had to hear a good many bitter words in the years just past, but never such stinging reproaches as these. Doubtless the personal element played its part in adding a final goad to Hutten's indignation; but the _Expostulatio_ is far from being a mere personal reply to real or fancied wrongs. It is a scathing review of the whole attitude of Erasmus towards the reform. The chief note of the charge is cowardice, deceit, and time-serving. The underlying assumption throughout is that Erasmus was really in sympathy with the whole attack upon the church order from Reuchlin onwards. This assumption is proved out of his own mouth. At every new stage of the reform he was shown to have expressed approval, only to change approval into condemnation as soon as there was a prospect that anything would be done. So, on the other hand, Hutten shows Erasmus attacking all the enemies of reform, the pope, Aleander, Hoogstraaten, and the rest, and then changing his tone to a weak, snivelling flattery as soon as he saw any danger in prospect. A few specimens will illustrate the vigour and openness of Hutten's method. After the twistings and turnings of Erasmus' style, his reads like a model of strength and directness.

"Because of my health, or for some other reason, I could not be
away from my stove long enough to speak with you once or twice
in the whole fifty days I spent at Basel, though I would often
stand talking with friends in the midst of the market-place for
three hours at a time! Well, that is quite like your sincerity,
to take a perfectly simple thing and give it a false colouring
and to cover up the truth with an empty show.

"As I thought the matter over attentively several reasons
occurred to me why, perhaps, you might thus have fallen away
from yourself. First, your insatiable ambition for fame,
your greed for glory, which makes it impossible for you to
bear the growing powers of anyone else; and then the lack of
steadiness in your mind, which has always displeased me in you
as unworthy of your greatness and led me to believe that you
were terror-stricken by the threats of these men.... Finally I
explain it to myself by the pettiness of your mind, which makes
you afraid of everything and easily thrown into despair; for you
had so little faith in the progress of our cause, especially
when you saw that some of the chief princes of Germany were
conspiring against us, that straightway you thought you must
not only desert us, but must also seek their good-will by every
possible means."

Referring to Erasmus' charge that the Lutherans had set on foot a rumour that Hoogstraaten had burned his books, in order to make him write against the Church, Hutten says:

"Now, supposing it was our purpose to draw you into our party,
how could we hope to do it easily in this way, since it was
perfectly certain that you would never dare to do anything
against him or anybody else until you saw exactly how the land
lay--unless, indeed, Switzerland be so far from Brabant that we
could hope you would hear nothing from there for a whole year!
Away with this simple-heartedness of yours to some other world!
Our Germany knows no such morals as these.

"When the _Epistolæ obscurorum_ came out, you approved and
applauded more than anyone else; you gave the author a regular
triumph; you said there had never been discovered a more
complete way of attacking those people; that barbarians ought
to be ridiculed in barbarous language; and you congratulated us
on our cleverness. Before our fooleries were printed, you copied
some of them with your own hand, saying: 'I must send these to
my friends in England and France.' But soon after, when you saw
that the whole muck of the theologers were much disturbed and
that the hornets were stirred up in all directions and were
threatening ruin, you began to tremble, and lest suspicion might
fall upon you that you were the author or that you approved the
plan, you wrote a letter with that same candour of yours to
Cologne, trying to get ahead of the rumours and making a great
pretence of sympathy with them and regret at the affair and
saying many things against the whole business and abusing the
authors."

If Erasmus is such a man of peace, why, asks Hutten, does he now so bitterly attack the reformers? Some people had long since accused him of treachery, but at that time no one would believe them and Erasmus was satisfied to put it all upon the Fates:

"a fine notion and, as we now see, truly Erasmian! You say
that, being the man you are, you must deal with Germans after
their own fashion. Well, this is not the way of Germans, but
of men whose fickleness and inconstancy are altogether foreign
to Germans, men who can be tossed about hither and thither by
every change of wind, with whom nothing is fixed, but everything
slippery and shifting with the changes of fortune. Get you to
Italy with such doings, to those cardinals whom you are now
taking under your wing, where everyone may live according to his
own morals and his own character! Or else get back to your own
French-Dutchmen, if, perhaps, this is a national vice and one
common to you and them!"

Referring to the use of the term "Lutherans," about which Erasmus was so much distressed, Hutten says:

"Therefore, although I have never had Luther for my master or my
companion and am carrying on this business on my own account,
and although I am most terribly opposed to being counted in any
party whatever, nevertheless, since it is a fact that those who
are opposed to the Roman tyranny--among whom I desire above all
things to be reckoned--and those who dare to speak the truth
and who are turning back from human ordinances to the teaching
of the Gospel, are commonly called Lutherans, therefore I am
ready to bear the burden of this nickname, lest I seem to deny
my faith in the cause.... Now you know why I accept the name of
Lutheran, and anyone can see that for the same reasons you too
are a Lutheran, and that so much the more than I or anyone else
as you are a better writer and a more accomplished orator."

One may search the writings of Erasmus from beginning to end without finding an utterance to compare with this in decision and clear-cut discrimination of the truth. At great length and with the appearance of entire sincerity Hutten warns Erasmus of the danger he is now in of appearing to be only the hired man of the papacy. He may still, in his heart, be true to his former convictions; but who will believe it? All this bragging about his great friends at Rome with their flattering offers can only confirm the Lutherans in their distrust of him. If he will not be warned now, then let him go on

"to fulfil the hopes of those who have long been looking about
for a leader for the enemies of the truth. Gird yourself; the
thing is ripe for action; it is a task worthy of your old age;
put forth your strength; bend to the work! You shall find your
enemies ready! the party of the Lutherans, which you would
like to crush to earth, is waiting for the battle and cannot
refuse it. Our hearts are full of courage; we are sustained by
a certain hope and, relying upon our conscious rectitude and
honour, we will decline no challenge, no matter whither you may
call us. Nay, that you may see how great is the faith that is
in us, the more furiously you assault us, the keener you shall
find us in defending the cause of truth.... One half of you will
stand with us and be in our camp; your fight will be, not so
much with us as with your own genius and your own writings. You
will turn your learning against yourself and will be eloquent
against your own eloquence. Your writings will be fighting back
and forth with each other."

The Lutherans will trust in God and joyfully take up the encounter.

There can be no doubt that Hutten was uttering the voice of the great Lutheran party, as it must now be called. Although called out by a personal attack, the _Expostulatio_ keeps itself throughout on higher than personal grounds. It is not an apology for Hutten; it is a fierce outburst of honest indignation against a man who seemed to be throwing away a noble mind and conspicuous gifts through lack of courage and simple honesty. Hutten's expressions of admiration for his opponent have the ring of absolute sincerity. He had admired him above all other men, and his wrath is tempered by pain and honest sorrow at his failure to lead where none could lead so well. If Hutten made the mistake which so many have made since his time, of asking from Erasmus a kind of service for which he was by nature unfitted, it was a mistake which honours him who made it. The time for balancing good and evil had gone. If anything was to be done, it must be by the united action of all who were in substantial agreement upon the great essential questions of the hour. There had been enough of apologising and trimming, and this great word of Hutten was the proclamation of what was inevitably to come.

When it came into Erasmus' hands he determined at once to reply, and the result was the famous pamphlet which he called _Spongia adversus aspergines Hutteni_, "a sponge to wipe out the bespatterings of Hutten." It is a work twice as long as the _Expostulatio_, written, so its author says, in six days during the month of July, 1523, but not published until the autumn and after the death of Hutten, which occurred August 29th. The _Spongia_ is as distinctly a work of personal apology as the _Expostulatio_ was the opposite. It takes up, one by one, the points made by Hutten and deals with them after the fashion with which we are now so familiar that any extended examination would in no way enlarge our understanding of Erasmus' true position. The greater part of Hutten's charges he accepts in one or another sense and then tries to take away their force. The most common way of doing this is by showing that he has never really been inconsistent with himself, but has only adapted himself for the moment to given conditions lest the one great cause of pure learning should suffer by too great zeal. Nowhere does Erasmus show himself a more complete master of the word "if." He will admit everything with an "if." Hutten has accused him of keeping on too good terms with the pope after all the abuse which he has heaped upon things papistical--very well, he has praised popes, but he has done this because he believed them to be men who meant well to the cause of Christ. If otherwise he would be the last to praise them.

Erasmus' analysis of the papal power here is a monument of his skill in turning about words to suit his purpose.

"I have never," he says, "spoken inconsistently of the Roman
See. Tyranny, greed, and other vices, ancient grounds of
complaint common to all good men, I have never approved. Nor
have I ever totally condemned indulgences, though I have
always hated this shameless trade in them. What I think about
ceremonies, my books declare in many places. But when have I
abused the Canon Law or the papal decretals? Whatever he means
by 'calling the pope to order' I am not quite clear. I suppose
he will admit that there is a church at Rome; for the multitude
of its sins cannot cause it to be any the less a church--if this
is not so then we have no churches at all. And I assume that it
is an orthodox church; for if certain bad men are mingled with
the rest, yet the church abides in the good ones. And I suppose
he will allow that this church has a bishop, and that this
bishop is a metropolitan ... now then among metropolitans what
is there absurd in giving the first place to the Roman pontiff?
for this great power which they have been usurping to themselves
during several centuries, no one has ever heard me defend.

"But Hutten will not endure a wicked pope;--why, that is what we
are all praying for, that the pope may be a man worthy of his
apostolic office. But, if he be not that, let him be deposed;
and by the same token, let all bishops be deposed who do not
duly perform their functions. But an especial plague of the
world has been flowing now for many years from Rome. Would
that it could be denied! Now, however, has come a pope who is
striving, as I believe, with all his might, to give back to us
that See and that Curia purified."

Yet Erasmus had been overwhelming the dead Leo, the source of this pestilent flood, with every conceivable kind of flattery. Now he abuses him, in order to make his point that things are all going to be set right by the excellent Adrian. But this way of setting things right is just what Hutten does not hope for, he says.

"Yet there are many reasons for this hope, and charity,
according to Paul, 'hopeth all things.' If Hutten were declaring
war upon evils, not upon men, he would hasten to Rome and help
this pope who is now trying to do the very same things he is
himself striving for. But Hutten has declared war upon the Roman
pontiff and all his followers.... The Romanists would like
always to have such enemies as Hutten."

If there was an honest Erasmus anywhere under this mass of words, it seems pretty clear that he was for Hutten rather than against him. That Erasmus had any such honest side one is tempted to doubt when one reads his defence against the charge of trifling with the truth. Hutten had accused him[147] of saying that the truth ought not always to be spoken, and that a great deal depended upon how it was put forth.

[147] _Expostulatio_, § 180.

"That blasphemous speech of yours," he had said, "ought to have
been thrust down your throat (my cause compels me to speak more
angrily than I would) if those had done their duty who are now
compelling heretics to recant or throwing them to the flames."

Erasmus could not deny the words, but replies[148]:

[148] _Spongia_, § 274, x., 1660-E, and _Hutteni opera_, ii., 306.

"When Christ first sent out the Apostles to preach the Gospel he
forbade them to declare that he was the Christ. If, then, the
Truth himself ordered that truth to be kept in silence, without
the knowledge of which there is no salvation to any man, what is
there strange in my saying that the truth ought sometimes to be
suppressed?"

Then he gives several similar illustrations of repression of truth by silence on the part of Jesus, and goes on:

"If I had to defend the cause of an innocent man before a
powerful tyrant should I blurt out the whole truth and ruin
the case of the innocent man, or should I keep many things
silent? Hutten, a brave man and most zealous for the truth,
would, no doubt, speak thus: 'O most accursed tyrant, you who
have murdered so many of your fellow-citizens, is your cruelty
not yet sated, that you must tear this innocent man from their
midst?' Well, that is about as clever as the way in which some
are defending the cause of Luther, by raging against the pope
with seditious writings. Or if he [Hutten] were asking from a
wicked pope a benefice for some good man, he would write to
him after this style: 'O impious Antichrist, destroyer of the
Gospel, oppressor of civil liberty, flatterer of princes, thou
givest basely so many a benefice to wicked men and still more
basely sellest them, grant this one to this good man that all
may not fall into evil hands.' You smile, reader; but these
people are pleading the cause of the Gospel with no more caution
than that.... But what is more foolish than to call me back from
a place where I never was and to summon me to the very place I
am now in? He calls me back from the party of the wicked who
support the tyranny of the Romanists, who overturn the truth of
the Gospel, who darken the glory of Christ; but I have always
been fighting those very men. He summons me to his own side; but
as yet I am not clear where Hutten himself stands."

The whole aim of the _Spongia_ and its effect upon the world were simply to make it perfectly plain that Erasmus would not take sides. If the purpose of the _Expostulatio_ was to force him to do so, it was a conspicuous failure. Nothing could be plainer than Erasmus' own declaration[149]:

[149] _Spongia_, § 176, x., 1650-B, and _Hutteni opera_, ii., 291.

"in so many letters, so many books, and by so many proofs, I am
continually declaring that I am unwilling to be involved with
either party. I give many reasons for this determination, but
have not put forth all of them. And in this matter my conscience
makes no charge against me before Christ my judge. In the midst
of such confusion and danger to my reputation and my life I have
so moderated my judgments as neither to be the author of any
disturbance nor to help any cause which I do not approve. If
Hutten is enraged because I do not support Luther as he does, I
protested three years ago in an appendix added to my Familiar
Colloquies at Louvain, that I was totally a stranger to that
faction and always would be. I am not only keeping outside of it
myself, but I am urging as many friends as I can to do the same,
and I will never cease to do so. I mean by 'faction' the zeal of
a mind sworn as it were to everything that Luther has written or
is writing or ever will write. This kind of a sentiment often
imposes upon good men; but I have openly announced to all my
friends that if they cannot love me except as a Lutheran they
may have whatever feeling they like about me. I am a lover of
liberty. I will not and I cannot serve a party."

Here once more Erasmus saves himself by a definition. If to be a Lutheran were to swear to every word of Luther's, then, of course, no man in his senses would confess to the party name. Erasmus knew as well as anyone that parties for action were never formed by any such test. Men joined a party because they were in general sympathy with others and believed that the time for common action had come. This common action was the thing he could not bear to think of. To him it meant _confusiones_, _tumultus_, _tragœdias_, and all the other horrors of open conflict. We leave the Hutten episode, closed as it was by the untimely death of the brilliant, reckless genius who had brought it on, with the feeling that Hutten's charge was substantially true. Erasmus, with all the best part of him, was fighting the Lutheran battle and knew he was doing it. He recoiled before the fear of violence and then had to justify himself.

It would be interesting to know how far the definition of the papacy as a metropolitan see among others represented a real opinion of Erasmus. Probably it was a rhetorical conclusion; but it can hardly have made the _Spongia_ a welcome visitor at Rome, and it is not surprising that this passage was expurgated by the Roman censorship.

An incident of the year 1524 well illustrates the temper of Erasmus at the time and also the decline in regard for him on the Lutheran side. A certain Scotch printer at Strassburg had published some writing of Hutten against Erasmus, probably the _Expostulatio_, with offensive illustrations, and in a second edition had added an invective by another author, in which "whatever one blackguard could say of another" was said of Erasmus. What touched him especially was that he was called a traitor to the Gospel, and charged with having been hired for money to fight against it, and moreover was accused of being ready to be pulled in any direction by the chance of a crumb of bread. Erasmus wrote two very angry letters[150] to the magistrates of Strassburg asking them to punish the printer, and defending himself in his usual fashion from these charges.

[150] iii.¹, 793, 804.

Evidently nothing was done about it, for some time later Erasmus wrote to Caspar Hedio, one of the Lutheran preachers at Strassburg,[151] complaining of this neglect. His suggestions about the way to treat an offending printer are amusing.

[151] iii.¹, 844.

"You say this Scotchman has a wife and little children. Would
that be thought an excuse if he should break open my money-chest
and steal my gold? I should say not; and yet he has done a thing
far worse than that. Or perhaps you think I care less for my
reputation than for my money. If he can't feed his children,
let him go a-begging. 'That would be a shame,' you say. Well,
aren't such actions as this a shame? Let him prostitute his wife
and snore away with watchful nose over his cups. 'Horrible,'
you say. And yet what he has done is more horrible still. There
is no law to punish with death a man who prostitutes his wife;
but everyone approves capital punishment for those who publish
slanderous writings."