Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam

by Ephraim Emerton

"All this I too most heartily approve. It agrees with holy Scripture. It answers to the profession of those who, once dead to the world, are at the same time buried with Christ by baptism, so that through mortifying the flesh, they may live and act in the spirit of Jesus, in whose body they are implanted by faith. Truly a pious opinion and worthy of all approval, which takes away from us all pride, which lays all the glory and all our hope upon Christ, which casts out all fear of men or demons and makes us distrustful of our own defences, but bold and full of courage in God. I applaud all this gladly until it becomes extravagant. For when I hear that man is so completely without merit that all the works, even of pious men, are sinful; when I hear that our wills can do no more than clay in the hand of the potter; when I hear that all we do or will is to be referred to absolute necessity,—my mind is disturbed by many scruples."

We see how near he comes to the Lutheran position. Its emphasis on the sinfulness of man and the direct responsibility to God appeals to him. Only, like so many before and since, he revolts against the injustice of a theory which would punish man for sins he has not committed. He cannot escape from the ordinary standards of human reward and punishment. His idea of God is offended by what seems to him a cruel and unfeeling conception. He cannot ascribe to God any quality which would be a disgrace to manhood.

"Surely everyone would call him a cruel and unjust master, who should flog a slave to death because he was not beautiful enough or had a crooked nose or was otherwise deformed. Would not the slave be right in complaining to the master who was slaying him: 'Why should I be punished for what I cannot help?' And he would be still more justified in saying this if it were in the power of the master to remedy the defect of the slave, as it is in the power of God to change our wills or if the master had caused in the slave the very defect at which he now takes offence, as, for example, if he had cut off his nose or disfigured his face with scars, as God, according to some people, has wrought all the evil that is in us."[155]

This is the familiar argument of all anti-Augustinianism from the beginning until now. So long as the discussion has to be carried on with the weapons of the ancient theology, it is hard to see how the issue can be stated otherwise. So long as both parties were acting on the theory of a universe with a God outside of it and assumed the existence of good and evil as absolute entities, they must necessarily part company in their definitions of this God and of his relation to good and evil. Each would fall back upon such human analogies as seemed to come nearest to his own divine ideal. The real issue was far beyond the comprehension of either party. Each was seeking a solution where no solution was possible. Erasmus said:

"In my judgment free will might have been so defined as to avoid that confidence in our own merits and those other difficulties which Luther avoids and also the difficulties I have enumerated above, without losing those valuable things which Luther praises. This solution seems to me to be found in the opinion of those who ascribe entirely to grace the first impulse by which our minds are set in motion, and only in the course of this motion allow a something to the will of man which has not withdrawn itself from the grace of God. But since all things have three parts, beginning, progress, and completion, they ascribe the two extremes to grace and only in the progress admit that the free will does something;—but even this it does in such a way that in the same individual act two causes work together, the grace of God and the will of man, grace being the principal cause and the will the secondary cause, which of itself can do nothing, whereas the principal cause is sufficient to itself. Just as the native force of fire burns and yet the principal cause [of the burning] is God, who acts through the fire and would be sufficient alone, whereas the fire if this should withdraw itself could accomplish nothing without it."[156]

This has an almost Pelagian sound. It is in fact nearly the attitude of the moderate anti-Augustinian party of the fifth century, when it was trying to show how orthodox it was. Erasmus goes on to illustrate the same point with abundant and clever illustration, and finally comes to the question of "original sin," the inevitable crux of the whole discussion.

"[157] They exaggerate original sin beyond all measure," he says; "they would have it that the most splendid powers of our human nature are so corrupted by it, that we can do nothing of ourselves except to be ignorant of God and to hate Him. Not even he who is justified by faith can do any act which is not a sin; this very tendency to sin left over to us from the sin of our first parents they call sin, and declare it irresistible, so that there is no command of God which even a man justified by faith can fulfil; but so many commands of God have no other aim than that God's grace may be magnified through his granting of salvation without regard to our merits!... If God has burdened man with so many commands which have no other effect than to make him hate God the more, do they not make him out more unmerciful than Dionysius, tyrant of Sicily, who purposely made many laws which he expected most persons would not obey unless insisted upon, then for a while overlooked offences until he saw that almost everyone had violated them, and then began to call them to account, and so made everyone hate him?

"This kind of extravagance Luther seems to delight in, in order that he might, as the saying is, split the evil knot of others' excesses with an evil wedge. The foolish audacity of certain men had gone to extremes. They were selling the merits, not only of themselves, but of all the saints. And for what kind of works? for incantations, for muttering of psalms, eating of fish, fastings, vestments, titles. Now Luther drove out this nail with another by saying that there are no merits of saints at all, but that all the works of pious men are sins, and will bring damnation, unless faith and God's mercy come to their aid.

"Again, the other party was making a profitable trade out of confessions and penances, wherein they had terribly ensnared the consciences of men; and also out of Purgatory, about which they had handed down certain marvellous notions. This error their opponents would correct by saying that confession is a device of Satan and ought not to be required; that works can give no satisfaction for sin since Christ has completely paid the penalty for the sins of all men, and, finally, that there is no such thing as Purgatory. So one side says that the decrees even of their little priors can bind us by the pains of hell and does not hesitate to promise eternal life to those who obey them. The other side tries to moderate this extravagance by saying that all the decrees of popes, councils, and bishops are heretical and anti-Christian. If one side had exalted extravagantly the power of the pope, the other says such things about him as I dare not repeat. Again, one party says that the vows of monks and priests bind men by the pains of hell, and that for ever; the other says that such vows are utterly impious and ought not to be taken;—or, if they have been taken, ought not to be kept. Now it is from the collision of such excesses as this that the thunders and lightnings have arisen which are now shattering the world. If both sides are to go on thus bitterly defending their extreme views I perceive that the battle will be like that between Achilles and Hector, who were so equal in savagery that only death could separate them.... I prefer the opinion of those who attribute something to free will, but a great deal to grace. For we ought not so to avoid the Scylla of pride as to be swept into the Charybdis of despair and indifference."

So the treatise ends as it began, by showing what all reasonable men knew before, that the question has two sides to it, but without giving that kind of decided utterance which the critical moment demanded. Viewed as an abstract treatment, quite independently of the circumstances, it was a moderate, clever, good-tempered discussion of a philosophic problem; but it did not give that clear note of leadership for which, above all else, men were listening. Intellectually, Erasmus' position was as superior to that of Luther as was the temper of his argument better than that of Luther's reply. The De libero arbitrio was welcomed by all the moderates of the day and doubtless did its work in holding to the status quo many a wavering spirit which otherwise might have been drawn into the reforming ranks. While the weight of the argument is obviously thrown as far as possible on Luther's side, it called attention sharply to the weakest points in the Reformation theology.