Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam

by Ephraim Emerton

The relations of Erasmus with Berquin began by a letter from the latter written in 1526 and expressing the greatest admiration for the learning and services to true religion of the man to whom he looked up as his chief example. He assures Erasmus that the main object in persecuting him had been to throw suspicion upon Erasmus' own works; but that he had assured his judges that if anything in these works seemed contrary to the faith it was the result of misunderstanding or perversion of the original text. He exhorts Erasmus to write, not casually, as he has already done to Bedda, but at length, with arguments and with the authorities from Scripture, to refute these calumnies.

This letter of Berquin[170] is a noble and touching appeal. Not a word of complaint or of fear for himself, though he had just for the second time barely escaped from the clutches of enemies who were determined to destroy him. He appeals to Erasmus, not in his own behalf, but in behalf of that truth which he found above all in the writings of the man he was glad to call his master.

The reply[171] was as brief and cold as could well be.

"I have no doubt that you are acting with the best of intentions, most learned Berquin, but meanwhile you are bringing upon me, who am too heavily burdened already, a weight of odium by translating my books into the common tongue and bringing them to the knowledge of theologians."

Two later letters[172] have the same tone of petulant self-interest and cold indifference to the fate which he predicts if Berquin does not moderate his attacks.

After Berquin's death he wrote to Pirkheimer,[173] giving an account of the affair as he had heard it, and added:

"If he deserved this, I am sorry; if he did not deserve it, I am doubly sorry. The real facts in the case are not quite clear to me. I had no acquaintance with Berquin, except from his writings and from the reports of several persons.... I always feared that things would end with him as they have, and I never wrote to him except to urge upon him to cease from contentions which could only have an evil end."

The same story is repeated, with more detail, in a letter to Utenhoven.[174]

In these letters there is not a word of real sympathy with the fate of a man whose worst fault was the publication of Erasmus' own writings! Not a word of honest admiration for his courage—only a grudging admission that he was an honest fellow, but really too obstinately determined upon ruining himself! Worst of all is the shabby pretence that Erasmus had not really looked into the case of Berquin and after all was not quite sure whether he had deserved his punishment or not. Of all the triumphs of the Erasmian "If," none is more complete or more significant than this.

For several years, from about 1523 on, Erasmus had been engaged in personal controversy with individual theologians at Paris; but it was not until 1525 that the Sorbonne Faculty as a body was brought to act in the premises. A decree of that year condemned certain passages in the translations of several of Erasmus' books. In 1526 another attack was made especially against the Familiar Colloquies and the Paraphrases of the New Testament. The former were definitely prohibited to students who were candidates for degrees. The decree of the Faculty was arranged under thirty-two headings, each concerning some special point of alleged divergence from the true teaching of the Church. In his reply,[175] published in 1529, Erasmus takes up these points one by one and fills over seventy printed folio pages with specific answers. As to the style of his defence we are prepared to anticipate it. His method is precisely that of Berquin,—to declare that he is true to the real doctrine of the Fathers and that his critics—not, of course, the learned Faculty itself—are those who are in error. How these charges can really come from the Faculty as a whole he cannot comprehend, but he proposes to appeal from the Faculty asleep to the Faculty awake. He has made errors: to err is human. But why condemn as error in him what the greatest lights of the Church have said without reproof? When Augustine is praising virginity he goes a little far in dispraise of marriage; is it strange if Erasmus in defending marriage has seemed to have too little respect for virginity?