The Eve of the Reformation

Almost immediately after writing this letter Erasmus again bade farewell to England, and passed up the Rhine to Strasburg, where he made the acquaintance of Wimpheling, Sebastian Brant, and others. The following year, 1515, he went on to Basle, attracted by the great reputation of the printing-press set up in that city by Froben. He was there eagerly welcomed by the bishop of the city, who had gathered round him many men imbued with the true spirit of learning; and Erasmus soon became the centre of this brilliant group of scholars. From this time Basle became Erasmus’s home, although, especially in the early years, he was always on the move. He paid a flying visit once more, in 1517, to England, but he had learnt to love his independence too much to entertain any proposals for again undertaking duties that would tie him to any definite work in any definite place. Even the suggestions of friends that he would find congenial and profitable pursuits in England were unheeded, and he remained unmoved even when his friend Andrew Ammonius wrote to say the king himself was looking for his return. “What about Erasmus?” Henry had asked. “When is he coming back to us? He is the light of our age. Oh that he would return to us!”163

From England, however, he continued to receive supplies of money; although his circumstances improved so much with the steady circulation of his books, that he was not at this second period of his life so dependent upon the charity of his friends. About the year 1520 Erasmus settled permanently at Basle as literary superintendent of Froben’s press. What, no doubt, induced him to do so, even more than the offer of this position, was the fact that Basle had then become, by the establishment of printing-presses by Amberbach and Froben, the centre of the German book-trade. Froben died in 1527, and that circumstance, as well as the religious troubles which, separating Basle from the empire and making it the focus of civil strife, ended in wrecking learning there altogether, put an end to Erasmus’s connection with the press which for eight years had taken the lead of all the presses of Europe. Not only was the literary superintendence of the work completely in the hands of Erasmus during this period which he described as his “mill,” but all the dedications and prefaces to Froben’s editions of the Fathers were the distinct work of his own pen. His literary activity at this period was enormous, and only the power he had acquired of working with the greatest rapidity could have enabled him to cope with the multiplicity of demands made upon him. Scaliger relates that Aldus informed him Erasmus could do twice as much work in a given time as any other man he had ever met. This untiring energy enabled him to cope with the immense correspondence which, as he says, came pouring in “daily from almost all parts, from kings, princes, prelates, men of learning, and even from persons of whose existence I was, till then, ignorant,” and caused him not infrequently to write as many as forty letters a day.

On Froben’s death in 1527, the fanatical religious contentions forced him to remove to Freiburg, in Breisgau, where he resided from 1529 to 1535. The need for seeing his Ecclesiastes through the press, as well as a desire to revisit the scenes of his former activity, took him back to Basle; but his health had been giving way for some years, and, at the age of sixty-nine, he expired at Basle on July 12, 1536.

Such is a brief outline of the life of the most remarkable among the leaders of the movement known as the renaissance of letters. Without some general knowledge of the main facts of his life and work, it would be still more difficult than it is to understand the position he took in regard to the great religious revolution during the later half of his life. With these main facts before us we may turn to a consideration of his mental attitude towards some of the many momentous questions which were then searching men’s hearts and troubling their souls.

In the first place, of course, comes the important problem of Erasmus’s real position as regards the Church itself and its authority. That he was outspoken on many points, even on points which we now regard as well within the border-line of settled matters of faith and practice, may be at once admitted, but he never appears to have wavered in his determination at all costs to remain true and loyal to the Pope and the other constituted ecclesiastical authorities. The open criticism of time-worn institutions in which he indulged, and the sweeping condemnation of the ordinary teachings of the theological schools, which he never sought to disguise, brought him early in his public life into fierce antagonism with many devoted believers in the system then in vogue.

The publication of his translation of the New Testament from the Greek brought matters to an issue. The general feeling in England and amongst those best able to judge had been favourable to the undertaking, and on its first appearance Erasmus was assured of the approval of the learned world at the English universities.164 More wrote Latin verses addressed to the reader of the new translation, calling it “the holy work and labour of the learned and immortal Erasmus,” to purify the text of God’s Word. Colet was warm in its praises. Copies, he writes to Erasmus, are being readily bought and read. Many approved, although, of course, as was to be expected, some spoke against the undertaking. In England, as elsewhere, says Colet, “we have theologians such as you describe in your Moriæ, by whom to be praised is dishonour, to be blamed is the highest praise.” For his part, Colet has, he says, only one regret that he did not himself know Greek sufficiently well to be able fully to appreciate what Erasmus had done, though “he is only too thankful for the light that has been thrown upon the true meaning of the Holy Scripture.” Archbishop Warham writes what is almost an official letter, to tell Erasmus that his edition of the New Testament has been welcomed by all his brother bishops in England to whom he has shown it. Bishop Tunstall was away in Holland, where, amidst the insanitary condition of the islands of Zeeland, which he so graphically describes, he finds consolation in the study of the work. He cannot too highly praise it – not merely as the opening up of Greek sources of information upon the meaning of the Bible, but as affording the fullest commentary on the sacred text.165 Bishop Fisher was equally clear as to the service rendered to religion by Erasmus in this version of the Testament; and when, in 1519, Froben had agreed to bring out a second edition, Erasmus turned to Fisher and More to assist in making the necessary corrections.166

More defended his friend most strenuously. Writing to Marten Dorpius in 1515, he upbraided him with suggesting that theologians would never welcome the help afforded to biblical studies by Erasmus’s work on the Greek text of the Bible. He ridicules as a joke not meriting a serious reply the report that Erasmus and his friends had declared there was no need of the theologians and philosophers, but that grammar would suffice. Erasmus, who has studied in the universities of Paris, Padua, Bologna, and Rome, and taught with distinction in some of them, is not likely to hold such absurd ideas. At the same time, More does not hesitate to say that in many things he thinks some theologians are to be blamed, especially those who, rejecting all positive science, hold that man is born to dispute about questions of all kinds which have not the least practical utility “even as regards the pietas fidei or the cultivation of sound morals.”

At great length More defends the translation against the insinuations made by Dorpius, who evidently regarded it as a sacrilege to suggest that the old Latin editions in use in the Church were incorrect. St. Jerome, says More, did not hesitate to change when he believed the Latin to be wrong, and Dorpius’s suggestion that Erasmus should have only noted the errors and not actually made any change would, had the same principle been applied, have prevented St. Jerome’s work altogether. If it was thought proper that the Latin codices should be corrected at that time by Greek manuscripts, why not now? The Church had then an equally recognised version before the corrections of St. Jerome.167

There were, indeed, as might be expected, some discordant notes in the general chorus of English praise. For the time, however, they remained unheeded, and, in fact, were hardly heard amid the general verdict of approval, in which the Pope, cardinals, and other highly-placed ecclesiastics joined. Erasmus, however, was fully prepared for opposition of a serious character. Writing to Cambridge at the time, he says that he knows what numbers of people prefer “their old mumpsimus to the new sumpsimus,” and condemn the undertaking on the plea that no such work as the correction of the text of Holy Scripture ought to be undertaken without the authority of a general Council.168

It is easy to understand the grounds upon which men who had been trained on old methods looked with anxiety, and even horror, at this new departure. Scholarship and literary criticism, when applied to the pagan classics, might be tolerable enough; but what would be the result were the same methods to be used in the examination of the works of the Fathers, and more especially in criticism of the text of the Holy Scripture itself? Overmuch study of the writings of ancient Greece and Rome had, it appeared to many, in those days, hardly tended to make the world much better: even in high places pagan models had been allowed to displace ideals and sentiments, which, if barbarous and homely, were yet Christian. Theologians had long been accustomed to look upon the Latin Vulgate text as almost sacrosanct, and after the failure of the attempt in the thirteenth century to improve and correct the received version, no critical revision had been dreamt of as possible, or indeed considered advisable. Those best able to judge, such as Warham and More and Fisher, were not more eager to welcome, than others to condemn and ban, this attempt on the part of Erasmus to apply the now established methods of criticism to the sacred text. Not that the edition itself was in reality a work of either sound learning or thorough scholarship. As an edition of the Greek Testament it is now allowed on all hands to have no value whatever; but the truth is, that the Greek played only a subordinate part in Erasmus’s scheme. His principal object was to produce a new Latin version, and to justify this he printed the Greek text along with it. And this, though in itself possessing little critical value, was, in reality, the starting-point for all modern Biblical criticism. As a modern writer has said, “Erasmus did nothing to solve the problem, but to him belongs the honour of having first propounded it.”

It must, however, be borne in mind that the publication of Erasmus’s New Testament was not, as is claimed for it by some modern writers, a new revelation of the Gospel to the world at large, nor is it true that the sacred text had become so obscured by scholastic theological disquisitions on side issues as almost to be forgotten. According to Mr. Froude, “the New Testament to the mass of Christians was an unknown book,” when Erasmus’s edition, which was multiplied and spread all over Europe, changed all this. Pious and ignorant men had come to look on the text of the Vulgate as inspired. “Read it intelligently they could not, but they had made the language into an idol, and they were filled with horrified amazement when they found in page after page that Erasmus had anticipated modern critical corrections of the text, introduced various readings, and re-translated passages from the Greek into a new version.”169 The truth is that the publication of the New Testament was in no sense an appeal ad populum, but to the cultivated few. A writer in the Quarterly Review, commenting upon Mr. Froude’s picture of the effect of the new edition on the people generally, is by no means unjust when he says, “Erasmus beyond all question would have been very much astonished by this account of the matter. Certain it is that during the Middle Ages the minds of the most popular preachers and teachers (and we might add of the laity too) were saturated with the sacred Scriptures.”170

Loud, however, was the outcry in many quarters against the rash author. His translations were glibly condemned, and it was pointed out as conclusive evidence of his heterodoxy that he had actually changed some words in the Our Father, and substituted the word congregatio for ecclesia.171

The year 1519 witnessed the most virulent and persistent attacks upon the good name of Erasmus. Of these, and the malicious reports being spread about him, he complains in numerous letters at this period. One Englishman in particular at this time, and subsequently, devoted all his energies to prove not only that Erasmus had falsified many of his translations, but that his whole spirit in undertaking the work was manifestly uncatholic. This was Edward Lee, then a comparatively unknown youth, but who was subsequently created Archbishop of York. In February 1519, Erasmus wrote to Cardinal Wolsey, complaining of these continued attacks upon his work, although so many learned men, including bishops, cardinals, and even the Pope Leo X. himself, had given their cordial approval to the undertaking. Those who were at the bottom of the movement against the work, he considered, were those who had not read it, though they still had no shame in crying out against it and its author. He was told that in some public discourses in England he had been blamed for translating the word verbum in St. John’s Gospel by sermo, and about this matter he addressed a letter to the Pope defending himself.172 To the Bishop of Winchester he wrote more explicitly about his chief opponent. “By your love for me,” he says, “I beg you will not too readily credit those sycophants about me, for by their action all things seem to me at present infected by a deadly plague. If Edward Lee can prove that he knows better than I do, he will never offend me. But when he, by writing and speech, and by means of his followers, spreads rumours hurtful to my reputation, he is not even rightly consulting his own reputation. He has openly shown a hostile spirit against me, who never, either in word or deed, have done him harm. He is young, and lusts for fame… Time will bring all to light. Truth may be obscured; overcome it cannot be.”173 To the English king he writes that in all he had published he had been actuated by the sole desire to glorify Christ, and in this particular work had obtained the highest approval, even that of the Pope himself. Some people, indeed, have conspired to destroy his good name. They are so pleased with their “old wine,” that “Erasmus’s new” does not satisfy them. Edward Lee had been instigated to become their champion, and Erasmus only wished that Lee were not an Englishman, since he owed more to England than to any other nation, and did not like to think ill even of an individual.174

When men are thoroughly alarmed, they do not stop to reason or count the cost; and so those, who saw in the work of Erasmus nothing but danger to the Church, at once jumped to the conclusion that the root of the danger really lay in the classical revival itself, of which he was regarded as the chief exponent and apostle. The evil must be attacked in its cause, and the spread of the canker, which threatened to eat into the body of the Christian Church, stayed before it was too late. From the theologians of Louvain, with which university Erasmus was then connected, he experienced the earliest and most uncompromising opposition. He was “daily,” to use his own words, “pounded with stones,” and proclaimed a traitor to the Church.175 His opponents did not stop to inquire into the truth of their charges too strictly, and Erasmus bitterly complains of the damaging reports that are being spread all over Europe concerning his good name and his loyalty to religion. To him all opposition came from “the monks,” who were, in his eyes, typical of antiquated ecclesiastical narrowness and bigotry. In a letter written in 1519, at the height of “the battle of the languages,” as it was called, he gives several instances of this attitude towards himself at Louvain when he suggested some alteration in a text of Holy Scripture. A preacher told the people that he had declared the Gospel “to be merely a collection of stupid fables,” and at Antwerp, a Carmelite attacked him in a sermon, at which he happened to be present, and denounced the appearance of his New Testament as a sign of the coming of Antichrist. On being asked afterwards for his reasons, he confessed that he had never even read the book himself. “This,” says Erasmus sadly, “I generally find to be the case: that none are more bitter in their outcry than they who do not read what I write.” In this same letter, Erasmus describes the ferment raised in England against the study of languages. At Cambridge, Greek was making progress in peace, “because the university was presided over by John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, a theologian of learning and uprightness of life.” At Oxford, however, fierce public attacks were made in sermons on Greek studies; “but the king,” continues Erasmus, “as one not unlearned himself, and most favourable to the cause of letters, happened to be in the neighbourhood, and hearing of the matter from More and Pace, ordered that all wishing to study Greek literature should be encouraged, and so put a stop to the business.”

The contest was not confined to the schools. “A theologian preaching in the royal palace before the king took this opportunity to inveigh boldly and uncompromisingly against Greek studies and the new methods of interpretation. Pace, who was present, glanced at the king to see how he took it, and Henry smiled at Pace. After the sermon the theologian was bidden to the king, and to More was assigned the task of defending Greek learning against him, the king himself desiring to be present at the discussion. After More had spoken for some time most happily, he paused to hear the theologian’s reply; but he, on bended knees, asked pardon for what he had said, asserting that whilst talking he was moved by some spirit to speak about Greek as he had done. Thereupon the king said, ‘And that spirit was not that of Christ, but of folly!’ Then Henry asked him whether he had read Erasmus’s works – he admitted that he had not. Then said the king, ‘By this you prove your folly, in condemning what you have not read.’ Finally the king dismissed him, and ordered that he should never be allowed to preach in the royal presence again.”

Those who desired to carry on the campaign to extremities, endeavoured, and even with temporary success, to influence Queen Katherine against Erasmus and the party for the revival of letters which he represented. Her confessor, a Dominican bishop, persuaded her that in correcting St. Jerome, Erasmus had perpetrated a crime which admitted of no excuse.176 It was but another step to connect the renaissance of letters generally with the revolt now associated with the name of Luther. In England, however, it was not so easy to persuade people of this, since, among the chief supporters of the movement were to be numbered the best and wisest of churchmen and laymen whose entire orthodoxy was not open to suspicion. Abroad, however, the cry once started, was quickly taken up. A theologian at Louvain, writes Erasmus, who up to this time had been noted for his sober judgment, before a large audience, after having spoken of Lutheranism, attacked “the teaching of languages and polite letters, joining the two together, and asserting that heresy came from these springs, as if experience had shown eloquence to be a mark rather of the heretics than of the orthodox, or that the Latin authors of heresy were not mere children so far as languages went, or that Luther had been schooled by those masters and not rather by the scholastics, according to scholastic methods.”177

Erasmus puts the position even more clearly in a letter to Pope Leo X. on the publication of the revised version of his New Testament in August 1519. The book is now in people’s hands, he says, and as it has appeared under the direct auspices of the Holy Father himself, it may be regarded as his work. Some foolish people, he understands, have been trying to get the Pope to believe that a knowledge of languages is detrimental to the true study of theology, whereas, in reality, the very contrary is obviously the case. Such people will not reason, they cry out and will not listen. They suggest damning words, such words for example as “heretics,” “antichrists,” &c., as appropriate to their opponents. They call out that even the Christian religion is imperilled, and beg the Pope to come forward and save it. On his part Erasmus hopes that the Pope will believe that all his work is for Christ alone, and His Church. “This only reward do I desire, that I may ever seek the glory of Christ rather than my own. From boyhood I have ever endeavoured to write nothing that savoured of impiety or disloyalty. No one has ever yet been made blacker by my writings; no one less pious, no one stirred up to tumult.”178 Again, writing to Cardinal Campeggio, when sending him a copy of the New Testament “which Pope Leo had approved by his Brief,” Erasmus tells him that, to his great regret, many at Louvain were doing their best not to allow good letters to flourish. As for himself, his only real desire was to serve Christ and increase the glory of His Church; though, he adds, “I am a man, and as such liable to err.” No one has ever succeeded in pleasing every one, and he, Erasmus, will not try to do the impossible. Still he wishes to be judged by what he really has said and written; whereas all kinds of things, letters, books, &c., are attributed to him, about which he knows nothing: “even Martin Luther’s work, amongst the rest,” whilst the truth is, he does not know Luther, and certainly has never read his book.179

At the end of the following year, 1520, Erasmus again writes to Cardinal Campeggio at great length. After telling him that he had hoped to have passed the winter in Rome to search in the libraries for Greek manuscripts, he informs him that in Louvain those who prefer the old barbarism are now rampant. Some think to please the people by opposition to learning, and amongst the aiders and abettors of the Lutheran movement they place Erasmus in the forefront. The Dominicans and Carmelites, he says, will regard him only as their enemy. Why, he does not know, for in reality he reverences true religion under “any coloured coat.” If on occasion he has said something about the vices of the monks, he does not think it were more right for the religious, as a body, to turn against him, than it would be for priests as a body, when their vices were spoken against. He does not in the least wish to be thought opposed to the religious life, as such. The condemnation of Luther had been interpreted by many as a condemnation of learning, and had been turned against Reuchlin and Erasmus. As for himself, he has never, he declares, even seen Luther, who has certainly never been famous for good letters or for any knowledge of ancient tongues, and hence the revival of letters has no connection whatever with the Lutheran movement. The prefaces of some of Luther’s books, because written in good Latin, are considered sufficient proof of his (Erasmus’s) connection with the matter, and it is asserted openly that he was working cordially with the Reformer; whereas, as a fact, he had not suggested even so much as a full stop or comma for his writings. He had, he admitted, written to Luther, and this and another letter to the Cardinal of Mentz were pointed to as proof positive of his Lutheran leanings. For these he has been denounced to bishops as a heretic and delated to the Pope himself, while all the time, in truth, he has never read two pages of Luther’s writings. Certainly, indeed, he recognised in Luther considerable power, but he was not by any means alone in doing so. Men of undoubted faith and uprightness had congratulated themselves on having fallen in with Luther’s works. For himself, he adds, “I have always preferred to look for the good rather than to search for the evil, and I have long thought that the world needed many changes.” Finally, before passing from the subject, he begs Cardinal Campeggio to look at the letter in question himself, and see whether it could justly be said to favour Luther in any way.180