Chapter VI: Erasmus (2)

Continuing, he declares that he has never been the occasion of discord or tumult in any way, and appeals with confidence to his numerous letters and works as sufficient evidence of his love of peace. “I love liberty,” he writes; “I neither can aid, nor desire to aid, any faction.” Already many confess that they were wrong in taking a part; and he sees many, who had thrown in their lot with Luther, now drawing back, and regretting that they had ever given any countenance to him.[189] His (Erasmus’s) sole object has been to promote good letters, and to restore Theology to its simple and true basis, the Holy Scripture. This he will endeavour to do as long as he has life. “Luther,” he says, “I hold to be a man liable to err, and one who has erred. Luther, with the rest of his followers will pass away; Christ alone remains for ever.”

In more than one place of this _Spongia_, Erasmus complains bitterly that what he had said in joke, and as mere pleasantry at the table, had been taken seriously. “What is said over a glass of wine,” he writes, “ought not to be remembered and written down as a serious statement of belief. Often at a feast, for example, we have transferred the worldly sovereignty to Pope Julius, and made Maximilian, the emperor, into the supreme Pontiff. Thus, too, we have married monasteries of monks to convents of nuns; we have sent armies of them against the Turks, and colonised new islands with them. In a word, we turn the universe topsy-turvy. But, such whims are never meant to be taken seriously, as our own true convictions.”

Von Hutten had complained that Erasmus had spoken harshly about Luther, and hinted that he was really actuated by a spirit of envy, on seeing Luther’s books more read than his own. Erasmus denies that he has ever called Luther by any harsh names, and particularly that he has ever called him “heretic.” He admits, however, that he had frequently spoken of the movement as a “tragedy,” and he points to the public discords and tumults then distracting Germany as the best justification of this verdict.[190]

Von Hutten having said that children were being taught by their nurses to lisp the name Luther, Erasmus declares that he cannot imagine whose children these can be; for, he says, “I daily see how many influential, learned, grave, and good men have come to curse his very name.”

The most interesting portion, however, of the _Spongia_ is that in which, at considerable length, Erasmus explains his real attitude to Rome and the Pope. “Not even about the Roman See,” he says, “will I admit that I have ever spoken inconsistently. I have never approved of its tyranny, rapacity, and other vices about which of old common complaints were heard from good men. Neither do I sweepingly condemn ‘Indulgences,’ though I have always disliked any barefaced traffic in them. What I think about ceremonies, many places in my works plainly show.… What it may mean ‘to reduce the Pope to order’ I do not rightly understand. First, I think it must be allowed that Rome is a Church, for no number of evils can make it cease to be a Church, otherwise we should have no Churches whatever. Moreover, I hold it to be an orthodox Church; and this Church, it must be admitted, has a Bishop. Let him be allowed also to be Metropolitan, seeing there are very many archbishops in countries where there has been no apostle, and Rome, without controversy, had certainly SS. Peter and Paul, the two chief apostles. Then how is it absurd that among Metropolitans the chief place be granted to the Roman Pontiff?”[191]

As to the rest, Erasmus had never, he declares, defended the excessive powers which for many years the popes have usurped, and, like all men, he wishes for a thorough apostolic man for Pope. For his part, if the Pope were not above all things else an apostle, he would have him deposed as well as any other bishop, who did not fulfil the office of his state. For many years, no doubt, the chief evils of the world have come from Rome, but now, as he believes, the world has a Pope who will try at all costs to purify the See and Curia of Rome. This, however, Erasmus fancies is not quite what von Hutten desires. He would declare war against the Pope and his adherents, even were the Pope a good Pope, and his followers good Christians. War is what von Hutten wants, and he cares not whether it brings destruction to cities and peoples and countries.

Erasmus admits that he knows many people who are ready to go some way in the Lutheran direction; but who would strongly object to the overthrow of papal authority. Many would rather feel that they have a father than a tyrant: who would like to see the tables of the money-changers in the temple overthrown, and the barefaced granting of indulgences and trafficking in dispensations and papal bulls repressed: who would not object to have ceremonies simplified, and solid piety inculcated: who would like to insist on the sacred Scriptures as the true and only basis of authoritative teaching, and would not give to scholastic conclusions and the mere opinions of schools the force of an infallible oracle. With those who think thus, says Erasmus, “if (as is the case) there is no compact on my part, certainly my old friendly feeling for them remains cemented by the bond of learning, even if I do not agree with them in all these things.”

But, he continues, it is not among these well-wishers of reform that von Hutten and Luther will find their support. This is to be found among the “unlettered people without any judgment; among those who are impure in their own lives, and detractors of men; amongst those who are headstrong and ungovernable. These are they who are so favourable to Luther’s cause that they neither know nor care to examine what Luther teaches. They only have the Gospel on their lips; they neglect prayer and the Sacraments; they eat what they like; and they live to curse the Roman Pontiff. These are the Lutherans.” From such material spring forth tumults that cannot be put down. “It is generally in their cups,” adds Erasmus, “that the Evangelical league is recruited.” They are too stupid to see whither they are drifting, and “with such a type of mankind I have no wish to have anything to do.” Some make the Gospel but the pretext for theft and rapine; and “there are some who, having squandered or lost all their own property, pretend to be Lutherans in order to be able to help themselves to the wealth of others.” Von Hutten wants me, says Erasmus, to come to them. “To whom? To those who are good and actuated by the true Gospel teaching? I would willingly fly to them if any one will point them out. If he knew of any Lutherans, who in place of wine, prostitutes, and dice, have at any time delighted in holy reading and conversation; of any who never cheat or neglect to pay their debts, but are ready to give to the needy; of any who look on injuries done to them as favours, who bless those who curse them--if he can show me such people, he may count on me as an associate. Lutherans, I see; but followers of the Gospel, I can discover few or none.”

Von Hutten had, in his attack, with much bitterness condemned Erasmus for not renouncing connection with those who had written strongly against Luther. Erasmus refused to entertain the notion. “There is,” he says, “the reverend Father John, Bishop of Rochester. He has written a big volume against Luther. For a long period that man has been my very special friend and most constant patron. Does von Hutten seriously want me to break with him, because he has sharpened his pen in writing against Luther? Long before Luther was thought of,” he says, “I enjoyed the friendship of many learned men. Of these, some in later years took Luther’s side, but on that account I have not renounced outwardly my friendship for them. Some of these have changed their views and now do not think much of Luther, still I do not cease to regard them as my friends.”

Towards the close of his reply, Erasmus returns to the question of the Pope. Von Hutten had charged him with inconsistency in his views, and Erasmus replies, “He who most desires to see the apostolic character manifested in the Pope is most in his favour.” It may be that one can hate the individual and approve of the office. Whoever is favourable to, and defends, bad Popes does not honour the office. He (Erasmus) has been found fault with for saying that the authority of the Pope has been followed by the Christian world for very many ages. What he wrote is true, and as long as the work of Christ is done may it be followed for ever. Luther wants people to take his _ipse dixit_ and authority, but he (Erasmus) would prefer to take that of the Pope. “Even if the supremacy of the Pope was not established by Christ, still it would be expedient that there should be one ruler possessing full authority over others, but which authority no doubt should be free from all idea of tyranny.… Because I have criticised certain points in the See of Rome, I have not for that reason ever departed from it. Who would not uphold the dignity of one who, by manifesting the virtues of the Gospel, represents Christ to us?” The paradoxes of Luther are not worth dying for. “There is no question of articles of faith, but of such matters as ‘Whether the supremacy of the Roman Pontiff was established by Christ:’ ‘whether cardinals are necessary to the Christian Church:’ ‘whether confession is _de jure divino_:’ ‘whether bishops can make their laws binding under pain of mortal sin:’ ‘whether free will is necessary for salvation:’ ‘whether faith alone assures salvation,’ &c. If Christ gave him grace,” Erasmus hopes that “he would be a martyr for His truth, but he has no desire whatever to be one for Luther.”

This last point was immediately taken up by the Lutherans. Von Hutten, as it has already been said, had died before the publication of the _Spongia_, and the reply to Erasmus was undertaken by Otto Brunfels. He rejected Erasmus’s suggestion that nearly all that the Lutherans were fighting for were matters of opinion. They were matters of faith, he says, and no uncertainty could be admitted on this point. In order to make the matter clear, he enumerates a great number of tenets of Lutheranism which they hold to as matters of revealed certainty. For instance: that Christ is the only head of the Church; that the Church has no corporate existence; that the mass is no sacrifice; that justification comes by faith alone; that our works are sins and cannot justify; that good men cannot sin; that there are only two Sacraments; that the Pope’s traditions are heretical and against Scripture; that the religious state is from the devil; and several score more of similar points more or less important.

That Erasmus’s views upon the necessity of the Papacy expressed in the _Spongia_ were not inconsistent with his previous position there is ample evidence in his letters, to which he himself appeals. Replying, for example, to one who had written to him deploring the religious differences in Bohemia, Erasmus declares that, in his opinion, it is needful for unity that there should be one head. If the prince is tyrannical, he should be reduced to order by the teaching and authority of the Roman Pontiff. If the bishop play the tyrant, there is still the authority of the Roman Pontiff, who is the dispenser of the authority and the Vicar of Christ. He may not please all, but who that really rules can expect to do that? “In my opinion,” he adds, “those who reject the Pope are more in error than they who demand the Eucharist under two kinds.” Personally, he would have allowed this, although he thinks that, as most Christians have now the other custom, those who demand it as a necessity are unreasonable and to be greatly blamed. Above all others, he reprobates the position of those who refuse to obey, speak of the Pope as Antichrist, and the Roman Church as a “harlot” because there have been bad Popes. There have been bad cardinals and bishops, bad priests and princes, and on this ground we ought not to obey bishop or pastor or king or ruler.[192] In the same letter he rebukes those who desire to sweep away vestments and ceremonies on the plea that they may not have been used in apostolic times.

Later on, in another letter, he complained that people call him a favourer of Luther. This is quite untrue. “I would prefer,” he says, “to have Luther corrected rather than destroyed; then I should prefer that it should be done without any great social tumults. Christ I acknowledge; Luther I know not. I acknowledge the Roman Church, which, in my opinion, is Catholic. I praise those who are on the side of the Roman Pontiff, who is supported by every good man.”[193]

Again, the following year, writing on the subject of the invocation of Papal authority against Luther, he says: “I do not question the origin of that authority, which is most certainly just, as in ancient times from among many priests equal in office one was chosen as the bishop; so now from the bishops it is necessary to make choice of one Pontiff, not merely to prevent discords, but to temper the tyrannical exercise of authority on the part of the other bishops and secular princes.”[194]

The publication of Erasmus’s book against Luther and of his reply to von Hutten made little change, however, in the adverse feeling manifested against him by those who were most busily engaged in combating the spread of Lutheran opinions. As he wrote to King Henry VIII., the noisy tumults and discords made him long for the end of life, when he might hope at least to find peace.[195] Luckily for him, he still retained the confidence of the Pope and some of the best churchmen in Europe. Had he not done so, the very violence of the attack against his good name might have driven him out of the Church in spite of himself. Kind words, he more than once said, would have done more for the cause of peace in the Church than all the biting sarcasm and unmeasured invective that was launched against Luther, and those who, like Erasmus, either were, or were supposed to be, associated with his cause. Luther was not delicate about the choice of his language when he had an enemy to pelt, but some of the preachers and pamphlet writers on the orthodox side were his match in this respect. In this way Erasmus puts the responsibility for “the tragedy” of Lutheranism upon the theologians, and in part especially upon the Dominicans and Carmelites. “Ass,” “pig,” “sow,” “heretic,” “antichrist,” and “pest of the world,” are terms named by Erasmus as samples of the epithets launched from the pulpit, or more deliberately set up in type, as arguments against Luther and himself.[196]

In writing to one of the cardinals after the publication of his _Spongia_, there is a touch of sadness in his complaints, that having been forced to do battle with the “Lutherans as against a hydra of many heads,” Catholics should still try and make the world believe that he was really a Lutheran at heart. “I have never,” he declares, “doubted about the sovereignty of the Pope, but whether this supremacy was recognised in the time of St. Jerome, I have my doubts, on account of certain passages I have noted in my edition of St. Jerome. In the same place, however, I have marked what would appear to make for the contrary opinion; and in numerous other places I call Peter ‘Prince of the apostolic order,’ and the Roman Pontiff, Christ’s Vicar and the Head of His Church, giving him the highest power according to Christ.”[197]

Probably a more correct view of Erasmus’s real mind can hardly be obtained than in part of a letter already quoted (Ep. 501) addressed to Bishop Marlianus of Tuy in Galicia, on March 25, 1520. “I would have the Church,” he writes, “purified, lest the good in it suffer by conjunction with the evil. In avoiding the Scylla of Luther, however, I would have care taken to avoid Charybdis. If this be sin, then I own my guilt. I have sought to save the dignity of the Roman Pontiff, the honour of Catholic theology, and to look to the welfare of Christendom. I have, as yet, read no whole work of Luther, however short, and I have never even in jest defended his paradoxes. Be assured that if any movement is set on foot which is injurious to the Christian religion and dangerous to the public peace or the supremacy of the Holy See, it does not proceed from Erasmus.… In all I have written, I have not deviated one hair’s-breadth from the teaching of the Church. But every wise man knows that practices and teachings have been introduced into the Church partly by custom, partly by the canonists, partly by means of scholastic definitions, partly by the tricks and arts of secular sovereigns, which have no sound sanction. Many great people have begged me to support Luther, but I have ever replied that I would be ready to take his part when he was on the Catholic side. They have asked me to draw up a formula of faith; I have said that I know of none save the creed of the Catholic Church, and every one who consults me I urge to submit to the authority of the Pope.”[198]

In many ways Erasmus regarded the rise of Lutheranism as the greatest misfortune. Not only did it tend to make good men suspicious of the general revival of letters, with which without reason they associated it, but the necessity of defending the Catholic position against the assaults of the new sectaries naturally obscured the need of reform within the Church itself, for which far-seeing and good men had long been looking. To Bishop Tunstall he expressed his fears lest in pulling up the tares, some, and perchance much, of the precious wheat might perish. Whilst, undoubtedly, there was in Luther’s work a great deal that he cordially detested, there was also much that would never have been condemned, had the points been calmly considered by learned men, apart from the ferment of revolt. “This, however, I promise you,” he adds, “that for my part I will never forsake the Church.”[199]

This same sentiment he repeats the following year, 1526: “From the judgment of the Church I am not able to dissent, nor have I ever dissented.”[200] Had this tempest not risen up, he said, in another letter from Basle, he had hoped to have lived long enough to have seen a general revival of letters and theology returning more and more to the foundation of all true divinity, Holy Scripture. For his part, he cordially disliked controversy, and especially the discussion of such questions as “whether the Council was above the Pope,” and such like. He held that he was himself in all things a sound Catholic, and at peace with the Pope and his bishop, whilst no name was more hated by the Lutherans than that of Erasmus.[201]

So much with regard to the attitude of mind manifested by Erasmus towards the authority of the teaching Church, which is the main point of interest in the present inquiry. His disposition will probably be construed by some into a critical opposition to much that was taught and practised; but it seems certain that Erasmus did not so regard his own position. He was a reformer in the best sense, as so many far-seeing and spiritual-minded churchmen of those days were. He desired to better and beautify and perfect the system he found in vogue, and he had the courage of his convictions to point out what he thought stood in need of change and improvement, but he was no iconoclast; he had no desire to pull down or root up or destroy under the plea of improvement. That he remained to the last the friend of Popes and bishops and other orthodox churchmen, is the best evidence, over and above his own words, that his real sentiments were not misunderstood by men who had the interests of the Church at heart, and who looked upon him as true and loyal, if perhaps a somewhat eccentric and caustic son of Holy Church. Even in his last sickness he received from the Pope proof of his esteem, for he was given a benefice of considerable value, and it was hinted to him that another honour, as was commonly supposed at the time nothing less than the sacred purple, was in store for him.

Most people are of course chiefly interested in the determination of Erasmus’s general attitude to the great religious movement of the age. In this place, however, one or two minor points in his literary history can hardly be passed over in silence. His attitude to the monks and the religious Orders generally, was one of acknowledged hostility, although there are passages in his writings, some of which have been already quoted, which seem to show that this hostility was neither so sweeping nor so deeply rooted as is generally thought. Still, it may be admitted that he has few good words for the religious Orders, and he certainly brings many and even grave accusations against their good name. There is little doubt, however, that much he had to say on the subject was, as he himself tells us, said to emphasise abuses that existed, and was not intended to be taken as any wholesale sweeping condemnation of the system of regular life. Very frequently the _Enconium Moriæ_ has been named as the work in which Erasmus hits the monks the hardest. Those who so regard it can hardly have read it with attention, and most certainly they fail to appreciate its spirit. It was composed, as we have seen, at Sir Thomas More’s suggestion, and in his house at Chelsea in 1512, on Erasmus’s return from Italy. It is a satire on the ecclesiastical manners and customs in which all abuses in turn come in for their share of sarcastic condemnation; superstitions of people as to particular days and images, superstitions about “magic prayers and charmlike rosaries,” as to saints set to this or that office, to cure the toothache, to discover stolen goods, &c., in the first place came under the lash of Erasmus’s sarcasm. Then come, in turn, doctors of divinity and theologians, “a nest of men so crabbed and morose” that he has half a mind, he says, to leave them severely alone, “lest perchance they should all at once fall upon me with six hundred conclusions, driving me to recant.” They are high and mighty and look down on other men, thinking of common individuals as “silly men like worms creeping on the ground,” and startling ordinary folk by the variety of their unpractical discussions and questions. “Nowadays,” he says, “not baptism, nor the Gospel, nor Paul, nor Peter, nor Jerome, nor Augustine, nor yet Thomas Aquinas, are able to make men Christians, unless those Father Bachelors in divinity are pleased to subscribe to the same. They require us to address them as _Magister noster_ in the biggest of letters.”

Following upon this treatment of the scholastic theologians come the few pages devoted to monks, those “whose trade and observance were surely most miserable and abject, unless I (Folly) did many ways assist them.” They are so ignorant (at least so says Folly), that they can hardly read their own names. Erasmus makes merry over the office they chant, and the begging practised by the friars, and jeers amusingly at their style of dressing, at their mode of cutting their hair, and at their sleeping and working by _rule_. “Yea,” he says, “some of them being of a straightened rule are such sore punishers of their flesh, as outwardly they wear nought but sackcloth and inwardly no better than fine holland.” In a word, he laughs at the general observance of regular life, and in one place only passes a hint that some of their lives are not so saintly as they pretend. As a whole, however, the sarcasm is not so bitter as that addressed to other ecclesiastics, and even to the Pope himself. In view of Sir Thomas More’s subsequent explanation about the spirit of the _Enconium Moriæ_, there can be no doubt that it was intended mainly as a playful, if somewhat ill-judged and severe, lampoon on some patent abuses, and in no sense an attack upon the ecclesiastical system of the Catholic Church.[202]

One other misunderstanding about Erasmus’s position in regard to the revival of letters may be here noticed. The great scholar has been regarded as the incarnation of the spirit of practical paganism, which, unfortunately, was quickly the outcome of the movement in Italy, and which at this time gave so much colour and point to the denunciations of those of the opposite school. No view can be more unjust to Erasmus. Though he longed anxiously for the clergy to awake to a sense of the importance of studies in general, of classical and scriptural studies in particular, there was no one who saw more clearly the danger and absurdity of carrying the classical revivalist spirit to extremes. In fact, in his _Ciceroniana_, he expressly ridicules what he has seen in Rome of the classical spirit run mad. Those afflicted by it, he says, try to think that old Rome has returned. They speak of the “Senate,” the “conscript fathers,” the “plebs,” the “chief auger,” and the “college of soothsayers,” “Pontifices Maximi,” “Vestals,” “triumphs,” &c. Nothing can be more unlike the true Ciceronian spirit. Am I, he asks, as a Christian speaking to Christians about the Christian religion to try and suppose I am living in the age of Cicero, and speak as if I were addressing a meeting of the conscript fathers on the Capitol? Am I to pick my words, choose my figures and illustrations from Cicero’s speeches to the Senate? How can Cicero’s eloquence help me to speak to a mixed audience of virgins, wives, and widows in praise of fasting, penance, prayer, almsgiving, the sanctity of marriage, the contempt of the fleeting pleasures of this world, or of the study of Holy Scripture. No, a Christian orator dressed in Cicero’s clothes is ridiculous.[203]

As an illustration of the height of absurdity to which the madness of the classical craze had brought people in Rome in his day, Erasmus relates the story of a sermon he himself once heard in the Eternal City during the pontificate of Pope Julius II. “I had been invited,” he says, “a few days before, by some learned men to be present at this sermon (to be preached on Good Friday). ‘Take care not to miss it,’ they said, ‘for you will at last be enabled to appreciate the tone of the Roman language, spoken by a Roman mouth.’ Hence, with great curiosity, I went to the church, procuring a place near the orator so as not to miss even one word. Julius II. was himself present, a very unusual thing, probably on account of his health. And there were also there many cardinals and bishops, and in the crowd most of the men of letters who were then in Rome.

“The exordium and peroration were nearly as long as the rest of the discourse, and they all rang the changes of praise of Julius II. He called him the almighty Jove, and pictured him as brandishing the trident, casting his thunderbolts with his right hand, and accomplishing all he willed by the mere nod of his head. All that had taken place of late years in Gaul, Germany, Spain, &c., were but the efforts of his simple will. Then came a hundred times repeated, such words as ‘Rome,’ ‘Romans,’ ‘Roman mouth,’ ‘Roman eloquence,’ &c.” But what, asks Erasmus, were all these to Julius, bishop of the Christian religion, Christ’s vicegerent, successor of Peter and Paul? What are these to cardinals and bishops who are in the places of the other apostles?

“The orator’s design,” he continues, “was to represent to us Jesus Christ, at first in the agony of His Passion, and then in the glory of His triumph. To do this, he recalled the memory of Curtius and Decius, who had given themselves to the gods for the salvation of the Republic. He reminded us of Cecrops, of Menelaus, of Iphigenia, and of other noble victims who had valued their lives less than the honour and welfare of their country. Public gratitude (he continued, in tears and in most lugubrious tones) had always surrounded these noble and generous characters with its homage, sometimes raising gilded statues to their memory in the forum; sometimes decreeing them even divine honours, whilst Jesus Christ, for all His benefits, had received no other reward but death. The orator then went on to compare our Saviour, who had deserved so well of His country, to Phocion and to Socrates, who were compelled to drink hemlock though accused of no crime; to Epaminondas, driven to defend himself against envy roused by his noble deeds; to Scipio and to Aristides, whom the Athenians were tired of hearing called the ‘Just one,’ &c.

“I ask, can anything be imagined colder and more inept? Yet, over all his efforts, the preacher sweated blood and water to rival Cicero. In brief, my Roman preacher spoke Roman so well that I heard nothing about the death of Christ.[204] If Cicero had lived in our days,” asks Erasmus, “would he not think the name of God the Father as elegant as Jupiter the almighty? Would he think it less elegant to speak of Jesus Christ than of Romulus, or of Scipio Africanus, of Quintus Curtius, or of Marcus Decius? Would he think the name of the Catholic Church less illustrious than that of ‘Conscript Fathers,’ ‘Quirites,’ or ‘Senate and people of Rome’? He would speak to us of faith in Christ, of the Holy Ghost, or the Holy Trinity?” &c.[205]

At considerable length Erasmus pours out the vials of his scorn upon those who act so foolishly under the influence of the false classical spirit. He points out the danger to be avoided. People, he says, go into raptures over pagan antiquities, and laugh at others who are enthusiastic about Christian archæology. “We kiss, venerate, almost adore a piece of antiquity,” he says, “and mock at relics of the Apostles. If any one finds something from the twelve tables, who does not consider it worthy of the most holy place? And the laws written by the finger of God, who venerates, who kisses them? How delighted we are with a medal stamped with the head of Hercules, or of Mercury, or of Fortune, or of Victory, or of Alexander the Great, or one of the Cæsars,[206] and we deride those who treasure the wood of the cross or images of the Virgin and saints as superstitious.”[207] If in dealing with his subject Erasmus may appear to exaggerate the evil he condemns, this much is clear, that his advocacy of letters and learning, however strenuous and enthusiastic, was tempered by a sense of the paramount importance of the Christian spirit in the pursuit of science.