Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam

by Ephraim Emerton

He was therefore compelled, if he wished to meet the pressure of the Roman party by some open service, to turn to the more speculative side of the reform. He there found a topic naturally adapted to draw out his hostility, the topic of the freedom of the human will. It was a subject especially suited to the Erasmian method. Its problem involved the riddle of the ages: To what degree is the action of man determined by his own will and to what degree by some power—Fate, God, Devil, call it what we may—outside himself? That man had a will of his very own had never been totally denied. The question was, how far was this will free to act?

Within the history of Christianity this problem had early found its expression in the great Augustinian-Pelagian controversy of the fifth century. Both of these parties had admitted that man's will was somehow affected by the divine will. The difference, the hopeless and perpetual difference, had been on the question of the possibility of good action through the human impulse alone. This possibility the Pelagian party had maintained, adding, however, that such original good impulse of the human will was immediately aided by the divine grace. The party of Augustine had denied the possibility of any good action without a previous impulse of the divine grace. The Church, sane and clever always in the long run, had steered its course carefully between the two extremes. It had condemned Pelagius as a heretic and reverenced Augustine as a saint; but it had never gone to those lengths of opinion which might be discovered in Augustine's writings by one who wished to find them there.

In other words, the Church had instinctively recognised that the problem is insoluble. As the practical administrator of a system of morals, it had concerned itself only with providing a machinery whereby the consequences of evil action could be averted from its faithful members. It had never said to them, "You are compelled to these sins by a power you cannot resist," but it had said, "You will infallibly sin and you will suffer for your sins, unless you remove them by the means we offer." So far that had worked. The world had accepted the situation and gone merrily on, knowing when it sinned, but knowing also that a kind and indulgent Church would see to it that its sins were taken care of at a very reasonable charge. Only from time to time men like Savonarola and groups of men like the Waldensians had raised their cry of protest and called men back again to the sense of direct responsibility to, and direct dependence on, God alone.

That was the essence also of Luther's protest. Every individual Christian was once again called upon to deal directly with his God. So far the Lutheran teaching was in complete harmony with the whole drift of Erasmus' thought. But here we find another illustration of similar conclusions reached by different ways. Erasmus was quite satisfied to let the whole speculative side of the question take care of itself. Luther could not rest until he had harmonised his practical aims with some theological principle, which should give them consistency and support. That principle he found in the Augustinian doctrine of predestination and the unfree will. Erasmus was content, as the Church was, to accept both sides of the controversy at once, and trim them to suit each other. Luther cared little for nice distinctions, but convinced himself that the salvation of his cause lay in emphasising, so far as a mind so eminently sound and human as his could do, the idea of a divine fate, responsible—yes, he would even say this if he must—responsible even for the seeming evil of this world.

Now it is obvious that, viewed abstractly, the whole group of ideas we call "Augustinian" are open to the gravest question. They seem to sap the foundations of Christian morality and to throw men back upon the dreary fatalisms from which it was the mission of Christianity to release them. In fact, however, it cannot be denied that from time to time they have worked, where other means have failed, to recall men sharply and uncompromisingly to the sense of sin and thereby to a more vivid and convincing moral purpose. Such a time was come once more in the day of Luther and Erasmus and Calvin. This theology may have been illogical, but it worked. It ought, perhaps, in all reason, to have sent men flying off into a mad indifference to morality, since nothing they could do would influence their ultimate fate; but for every weak and shuffling conscience which broke under this burden there were a hundred others that were steeled and nerved by it to a complete moral regeneration. The doctrine of the impotent will has produced some of the most masterful wills before which the world has ever had to bend.

Here, then, was a point upon which Erasmus might safely attack Luther without compromising himself. His essay on the Freedom of the Will[152] was announced some time before its appearance. In the course of the year 1523 he sent a rough draft to King Henry VIII., promising, if this seemed worth while to the king "and other learned men," to finish it as soon as his health and certain engagements would permit. A letter of Luther to Erasmus in 1524 suggests that he had heard of his intention to attack in some way the doctrines of the Reformation, though he nowhere alludes to the subject of free will. This letter is interesting as showing the lofty tone of a man who believes himself to be the spokesman of a cause higher than any human considerations. He, like Hutten, sees in Erasmus an ally who, after the measure of the gift of God, is fighting the same battle. Only he feels the limitations of that gift.

"I see that God has not yet granted you the courage and the insight to join freely and confidently with me in fighting those monsters. Nor am I the man to demand of you what goes beyond my own strength and my own limitations. But weakness like my own and a measure of the gift of God I have borne with in you and have respected it. For this plainly the whole world cannot deny: that learning flourishes and prevails, whereby men have come to the true understanding of Scripture and this is a great and splendid gift of God in you. In truth I have never wished that you should go beyond your own limitations and mingle in our camp, for though you might help us greatly with your genius and eloquence, yet since your heart is not in it it would be safer to serve within your own gift. The only thing to be feared was that you would sometime be persuaded by our enemies to publish some attack upon our doctrine, and then necessity would compel me to answer you to your face. I have restrained others who were trying to draw you into the arena with things they had already written, and that was the reason why I wished Hutten's Expostulatio had never been published,—and still more your Spongia, through which, if I am not mistaken, you now see how easy it is to write about moderation and to accuse Luther of lacking it, but how difficult, nay, impossible it is to practice it except through a singular gift of the Spirit.

"Believe me, then, or not, yet Christ is my witness that I pity you from my heart, because the hatred and the active efforts of so many and so great men are stirred up against you. I cannot believe that you are not disturbed by these things, since your human virtue is unequal to such a burden. And yet perchance they too are moved by a justifiable warmth, because they feel themselves attacked by you with unworthy methods....

"I, however, have up to this time restrained my pen, no matter how bitterly you have stung me, and have told my friends, in letters which you have read, that I was going to restrain it until you should come out openly.... Now then, what can I do? Either way is most trying to me. I could wish—if I could be the mediator—that my allies would cease to attack you with such zeal and would permit your old age to fall asleep in the peace of God and this they would do, in my opinion, if they would consider your infirmity and the greatness of our cause, which has long since passed beyond your limitations; especially now that the matter has gone so far that there is little to fear for our cause, even if Erasmus fight against it with all his might, nay, though sometimes he scatter stings and bites. Yet, on the other hand, my dear Erasmus, if only you would consider their weakness and would restrain from those biting and cutting figures of rhetoric, so that if you cannot or dare not go with us altogether, you may at least leave us alone and deal with your own subjects. For that they [Erasmus' 'Lutheran' assailants] are but ill bearing your attacks, there is good reason, namely, because their human weakness greatly dreads the name and authority of Erasmus and because to be once bitten by Erasmus is quite a different thing from being crushed by all the papists together.

"I desire to have said these things, most excellent Erasmus, in witness of my friendly feeling towards you. I pray that God may give you a spirit worthy of your fame; but if God delays with his gift to you, I beg you meanwhile, if you can do no more, to remain a spectator of our conflict and not to join forces with our opponents, especially not to publish books against me, as I will publish nothing against you. Finally, consider that those who complain that they are attacked under the Lutheran name are men like you and me, in whom much ought to be overlooked and forgiven. As Paul says: 'Bear ye one another's burdens.' There has been biting enough; now let us see to it that we be not consumed by mutual strife, a spectacle the more wretched inasmuch as it is perfectly certain that neither side is at heart opposed to true piety and that if it were not for obstinacy, each would be quite satisfied with its own. Pardon my feeble speech and farewell in the Lord."