Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam

by Ephraim Emerton

"If I die I will forbid my children to read his Colloquies, for he says and teaches there many a godless thing, under fictitious names, with intent to assault the Church and the Christian faith. He may laugh and make fun of me and of other men, but let him not make fun of our Lord God!

"See now what poison he scatters in his Colloquies among his made-up people, and goes craftily at our youth to poison them."

Another product of the years of greatest party stress were the Latin Paraphrases of the New Testament books. No one of the serious works of Erasmus was so widely influential as this. Erasmus began his work on them immediately after the first publication of the New Testament in 1516, and continued it at intervals during the next seven or eight years. The timeliness of the Paraphrases is shown by their immediate translation into the common tongues. Erasmus himself says that they brought him very little odium, but abundant thanks. In a preface addressed to the "Pious Reader"[169] he makes an ample and admirable defence of bringing the Bible to the people both in the form of paraphrases and of translations. "I greatly differ," he says, "from those who maintain that the laity and the unlearned should be kept from the reading of the sacred volumes, and that none should be admitted to these mysteries except the few who have spent years over the philosophy of Aristotle and the theology of the schools."

There are two ways to this end: either all men must learn "the three tongues," or else the Scriptures must be translated. Erasmus makes the somewhat startling suggestion that, as the energy of the Roman princes had compelled all the world to speak Greek and Latin, merely to maintain their temporal Empire, it was quite within the bounds of possibility for the princes of Christendom to compel all men to learn Hebrew, Greek, and Latin that the eternal kingdom of Christ might be spread over the whole earth. However, he realises that this is not likely to happen very soon and meanwhile will be content if each may know the Scripture in his own tongue:

"if the farmer, as he holds the plough, shall sing to himself something from the Psalms; if the weaver, sitting at his web, shall lighten his toil with a passage from the Gospels. Let the sailor, as he holds the rudder, repeat a Scripture verse, and as the mother plies the distaff, let a friend or relative read aloud from the sacred volume."

Our limits forbid us to go in detail into the several long and bitter controversies in which Erasmus found himself engaged with the defenders of the ancient faith. They begin with the publication of his New Testament and continue for twenty years with little interruption. They were without exception undertaken by unofficial persons, representing the governing powers of neither Church nor State. It was Erasmus' constant boast that all the really important elements of European life were on his side and that the attacks upon him were only so many reflections upon the highest authorities themselves. There is truth enough in this boast to make it evident that these controversies were a private matter between himself and his immediate opponents; but it was plain also that at any critical moment the powers that were might be enlisted against him.

The charges which caused him most anxiety may be reduced to two. First, the accusation of scholarly inaccuracy, and second, the far more difficult and wide-reaching accusation of heresy with all its multitudinous meanings. As to the former charge of inaccurate scholarship, Erasmus had two forms of defence. Sometimes he admitted it and sought to explain it away by alleging hasty work and defending himself by readiness to accept correction and to prepare new editions of the faulty texts. He liked to represent himself as a pioneer, breaking the way for others more learned than himself and, he would venture to hope, stimulated to better things by his example. Or, again, he would deny the truth of the criticism and would then proceed to demonstrate at great length and, with all the amenities common to literary controversy in his day, to demolish the contentions of his opponent. In these discussions of purely literary and scholarly themes, where his antagonists were really men of some consideration, he kept his argument in the main to a reasonably high standard. Where, however, they seemed to him men of small account he descends to unmeasured personal abuse.

In the other kind of controversy called out by his attacks upon ignorant and vulgar superstitions or upon the excesses of clerical abuse, his method was somewhat different. Here he was always ready to repay slander by slander, to exaggerate the personal element both in attack and defence, and especially to insist that he was absolutely sound in his doctrinal beliefs. To the former class of controversies belong notably that with Edward Lee, later archbishop of York, called out by the early edition of the New Testament, that with Budæus, which was a liberal give-and-take of sharp criticism on purely literary matters, and that with the Spaniard Stunica. To the latter class belong such wranglings as his dealings with Natalis Bedda of Paris, Nicholas Egmund of Louvain, and Gerhardt of Nymwegen, the reformed preacher of Strassburg.

This controversial literature gives us but little insight into the real thought of Erasmus. Its value for us is only in furnishing us with evidence of his astonishing cleverness in winding his way out of difficulties and his immense command of the language of vituperation. Its study leaves one with an unpleasant sense of powers diverted for the time from their most profitable exercise into issues which did not tell with any great effect upon the final result of the scholar's life.

The anxiety of Erasmus as to the reception of his works begins to show itself from about the year 1526 in his dealing with the person and the probable fate of Louis de Berquin. The story of this first martyr to the reformed faith in France reflects better than any other episode the course of events and ideas in the early stages of the reformatory movement there. Berquin was a gentleman of Artois, a man of liberal education, serious in his character, and moved from the start to apply his learning to the remedy of obvious abuses in the clerical life. Through Lefèvre he was led to the study of the Lutheran leaders and became convinced that here he had found the true way to liberty and recovery from the low condition of the dominant religion. Like Erasmus he attacked principally those errors and abuses which seemed to rest mainly upon ignorance and superstition in those to whom the world had a right to look for learning and enlightenment. The scholars of the Sorbonne, the heads of the French ecclesiastical fabric and the leaders of French monasticism, were at once alarmed. They began, early in the movement of the reform, to bring every possible pressure upon the young, enlightened, and would-be liberal king to act promptly and with decision against these first threatening demonstrations of what they were ready instantly to stamp as "heresy." For six years, from 1523 to 1529, Berquin was subjected to one stage after another of a persecution which he was too brave to avoid. His chief offence in the eyes of his theological persecutors was that he had studied and translated into French, with "blasphemous" commentaries, several of the most dangerous writings of Erasmus and other alleged leaders of sedition. Twice arrested and imprisoned, he was twice released by the special order of the king, who seems to have taken his case very much to heart. Meanwhile were occurring that series of unhappy events,—the Italian campaign of 1525, the capture of Francis I., the treaty of Madrid, and the negotiations following it,—which were driving the king inevitably into the hands of the French clerical party. To save his kingdom and his "honour" he was forced to make sacrifices, and a ready victim was found in this man, who had defied the powers which were now clamouring for a royal edict of persecution. The king withdrew his protection and Berquin died upon the scaffold on the 17th of April, 1529.