The Eve of the Reformation

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.

CHAPTER VII

THE LUTHERAN INVASION

It is not uncommonly asserted that the religious changes in England, although for convenience’ sake dated from the rejection of Papal supremacy, were in reality the outcome of long-continued and ever-increasing dissatisfaction with the then existing ecclesiastical system. The Pope’s refusal to grant Henry his wished-for divorce from Katherine, we are told, was a mere incident, which at most, precipitated by a short while what had long been inevitable.208 Those who take this view are bound to believe that the Church in England in the early sixteenth century was honeycombed by disbelief in the traditional teachings, and that men were only too ready to welcome emancipation. What then is the evidence for this picture of the religious state of men’s minds in England on the eve of the Reformation?

It is, indeed, not improbable that up and down the country there were, at this period, some dissatisfied spirits; some who would eagerly seize any opportunity to free themselves from the restraints which no longer appealed to their consciences, and from teachings they had come to consider as mere ecclesiastical formalism. A Venetian traveller of intelligence and observation, who visited the country at the beginning of the century, whilst struck with the Catholic practices and with the general manifestations of English piety he witnessed, understood that there were “many who have various opinions concerning religion.”209 But so far as there is evidence at all, it points to the fact, that of religious unrest, in any real sense, there could have been very little in the country generally. It is, of course, impossible to suppose that any measurable proportion of the people could have openly rejected the teaching of the Church or have been even crypto-Lollards, without there being satisfactory evidence of the fact forthcoming at the present day.

The similarity of the doctrines held by the English Reformers of the sixteenth century with many of those taught by the followers of Wycliffe has, indeed, led some writers to assume a direct connection between them which certainly did not exist in fact. So far as England at least is concerned, there is no justification for assuming for the Reformation a line of descent from any form of English Lollardism. It is impossible to study the century which preceded the overthrow of the old religious system in England without coming to the conclusion that as a body the Lollards had been long extinct, and that as individuals, scattered over the length and breadth of the land, without any practical principle of cohesion, the few who clung to the tenets of Wycliffe were powerless to effect any change of opinion in the overwhelming mass of the population at large. Lollardry, to the Englishman of the day, was “heresy,” and any attempt to teach it was firmly repressed by the ecclesiastical authority, supported by the strong arm of the State; but it was also an offence against the common feeling of the people, and there can be no manner of doubt that its repression was popular. The genius of Milton enabled him to see the fact that “Wycliffe’s preaching was soon damped and stifled by the Pope and prelates for six or seven kings’ reigns,” and Mr. James Gairdner, whose studies in this period of our national history enable him to speak with authority, comes to the same conclusion. “Notwithstanding the darkness that surrounds all subjects connected with the history of the fifteenth century,” he writes, “we may venture pretty safely to affirm that Lollardry was not the beginning of modern Protestantism. Plausible as it seems to regard Wycliffe as ‘the morning star of the Reformation,’ the figure conveys an impression which is altogether erroneous. Wycliffe’s real influence did not long survive his own day, and so far from Lollardry having taken any deep root among the English people, the traces of it had wholly disappeared long before the great revolution of which it is thought to be the forerunner. At all events, in the rich historical material for the beginning of Henry VIII.’s reign, supplied by the correspondence of the time, we look in vain for a single indication that any such thing as a Lollard sect existed. The movement had died a natural death; from the time of Oldcastle it sank into insignificance. Though still for a while considerable in point of numbers, it no longer counted among its adherents any men of note; and when another generation had passed away the serious action of civil war left no place for the crotchets of fanaticism.”210

On the only evidence available, the student of the reign of Henry VII. and of that of Henry VIII. up to the breach with Rome is bound to come to the same conclusion as to the state of the English Church. If we except manifestations of impatience with the Pope and Curia, which could be paralleled in any age and country, and which were rather on the secular side than on the religious, there is nothing that would make us think that England was not fully loyal in mind and heart to the established ecclesiastical system. In fact, as Mr. Brewer says, everything proves that “the general body of the people had not as yet learned to question the established doctrines of the Church. For the most part, they paid their Peter pence and heard mass, and did as their fathers had done before them.”211

It may be taken, therefore, for granted that the seeds of religious discord were not the product of the country itself, nor, so far as we have evidence on the subject at all, does it appear that the soil of the country was in any way specially adapted for its fructification. The work, both of raising the seed and of scattering it over the soil of England, must be attributed, if the plain facts of history are to be believed, to Germans and the handful of English followers of the German Reformers. If we would rightly understand the religious situation in England at the commencement of the Reformation, it is of importance to inquire into the methods of attack adopted in the Lutheran invasion, and to note the chief doctrinal points which were first assailed.

Very shortly after the religious revolt had established itself in Germany, the first indications of a serious attempt to undermine the traditional faith of the English Church became manifest in England. Roger Edgworth, a preacher during the reigns of Henry and Queen Mary, says that his “long labours have been cast in most troublesome times and most encumbered with errors and heresies, change of minds and schisms that ever was in the realm… Whilst I was a young student in divinity,” he continues, “Luther’s heresies rose and were scattered here in this realm, which, in less space than a man would think, had so sore infected the Christian folk, first the youth and then the elders, where the children could set their fathers to school, that the king’s Majesty and all Christian clerks in the realm had much ado to extinguish them. This they could not so perfectly quench, but that ever since, when they might have any maintenance by man or woman of great power, they burst forth afresh, even like fire hid under chaff.”212

Sir Thomas More, when Chancellor in 1532, attributed the rapid spread of what to him and most people of his day in England was heresy, to the flood of literature which was poured forth over the country by the help of printing. “We have had,” he writes, “some years of late, plenteous of evil books. For they have grown up so fast and sprung up so thick, full of pestilent errors and pernicious heresies, that they have infected and killed, I fear me, more simple souls than the famine of the dear years have destroyed bodies.”213

We are not left in ignorance as to the books here referred to, as some few years previously the bishops of England had issued a list of the prohibited volumes. Thus, in October 1526, Bishop Tunstall ordered that in London people should be warned not to read the works in question, but that all who possessed them should deliver them over to the bishop’s officials in order that they might be destroyed as pernicious literature. The list included several works of Luther, three or four of Tyndale, a couple of Zwingle, and several isolated works, such as the Supplication of Beggars, and the Dyalogue between the Father and the Son.214

In 1530 the king by proclamation forbade the reading or possession of some eighty-five works of Wycliffe, Luther, Œcolampadius, Zwingle, Pomeranus, Bucer, Wesselius, and indeed the German divines generally, under the heading of “books of the Lutheran sect or faction conveyed into the city of London.” Besides these Latin treatises, the prohibition included many English tracts, such as A book of the old God and the new, the Burying of the Mass, Frith’s Disputation concerning Purgatory, and several prayer-books intended to propagate the new doctrines, such as Godly prayers; Matins and Evensong with the seven Psalms and other heavenly psalms with commendations; the Hortulus Animæ in English,215 and the Primer in English.

In his proclamation Henry VIII. speaks of the determination of the English nation in times past to be true to the Catholic faith and to defend the country against “wicked sects of heretics and Lollards, who, by perversion of Holy Scripture, do induce erroneous opinions, sow sedition amongst Christian people, and disturb the peace and tranquillity of Christian realms, as lately happened in some parts of Germany, where, by the procurement and sedition of Martin Luther and other heretics, were slain an infinite number of Christian people.” To prevent like misfortunes happening in England, he orders prompt measures to be taken to put a stop to the circulation of books in English and other languages, which teach things “intolerable to the clean ears of any good Christian man.”216