Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam

by Ephraim Emerton

"Had you not done your duty when after so many years and such a storm of pamphlets you had persecuted a quite obscure man, who perhaps would never have been known at all, if you had not made him famous? and this after the Roman pontiff, learning that the affair was of such a kind that it was better to drop it than keep it in agitation any longer, had ordered silence. If any error dangerous to Christian piety appears, it is first to be carefully worked out by the discussions of learned men and then is to be reported to the bishop. When you have done that your part as inquisitor is done. You have made the inquiry and have brought it before the proper authorities. You are not called upon to stir up heaven and earth and to raise such tumults as these. Would that you had spent as much pains, as much money and time, in preaching the Gospel of Christ. If you had, I am greatly mistaken or Jacob Hoogstraaten would be a greater man than he is now, and his name would be far more honoured among all good men, or at least would be less hated. As it is, a great part of this hatred falls upon your Order, which, heavily burdened already by serious hostilities on many accounts, ought not to be weighed down by new ones."

Then follows a long defence of some words of Erasmus quoted by Hoogstraaten, without naming their author, but which seemed to draw him into the Reuchlin quarrel. "May Christ be as favourable to me as I am little favourable to the Cabbala!" He cares nothing for the Jews:

"Who is there among us who does not sufficiently hate this race of men? If it is a Christian thing to hate Jews, we are all good Christians enough! The one thing that makes all the trouble is the neglect of learning. You will be serving much better the cause, not only of the Dominican order, but also of Theology as a whole, if you will check by your authority the vacant abuse of certain persons who everywhere, in public and private discourses, in disputations, at banquets, and what is most serious, in public preaching are brawling against skill in the languages and against polite letters, mingling with their hatred of these, cries of 'Antichrist!' 'heresy!' and other violent words of this sort, whereas it is perfectly clear how greatly the Church is indebted to men skilled in languages and in eloquence. These studies do not hide the dignity of theology, but make it more plain; do not oppose it, but serve it. You would not straightway brand the art of music as heretical, if perchance some musician were to be apprehended as a backslider. The error of the man is to be condemned, but honour is still to be paid to his studies.... If Theology will join in doing honour to these studies she will in turn be adorned by them; but if she abuses and reviles them, I fear it will come to pass, as Paul says, that while they are assailing each other with mutual bites, they will simply be the death of each other."

In view of this correspondence of 1518-19 we may well consider here the much-discussed question of Erasmus' personal courage. Of all the charges brought against him on both sides that of timidity is the most frequent. Of all the explanations of his attitude toward the Reformation this is the most obvious and the most popular. If one can accept it, it settles promptly and once for all a multitude of perplexing questions. "Why did Erasmus not do or say this thing or that thing? He was afraid." In pursuance of our principle not to pretend to know the motive of every act of Erasmus' life, we shall not attempt to give one answer that will fit all cases, but shall venture to be a little Erasmian ourselves and try to view this matter from more than one side.

We shall have done our work but badly so far if we have not made it clear that Erasmus believed in his right to bring all human institutions to judgment at the bar of his own mind and conscience. Nothing which offended his own sense of right could be wholly acceptable to him. In so far he was an individual, and claimed his right as such. As an individual, with a mind and conscience of his own, he had a right, not only to have opinions upon every subject of human interest, but to express them. There was no call upon him, any more than upon a hundred others, to address himself thus to kings, princes, prelates, popes, inquisitors, and instruct them as to their duty in a great public crisis. He did this out of some impelling sense of duty and of right. If we may put any confidence in anything he ever said or did, we may rely upon this: that he felt himself the spokesman of a cause greater than himself,—the cause of a free and sane scholarship.

He was an individual, but of the fifteenth, not of the eighteenth century. The great word of deliverance to the modern mind, the "cogito ergo sum," had not yet been spoken. Man was still content to think of himself as hemmed in by standards of thought and action not created for him by his own mind, but given to him as a part of his human inheritance from the traditions of the past. No estimate of individual force can be complete without this limitation. If Erasmus had lived in the eighteenth century, he might have been a Voltaire; but he was not living in the eighteenth century. He saw where his time was out of joint, but he did not believe himself called upon to set it right. His function was only to point out the evils and, so far as he could, to appeal to those in authority to remedy them.

A man merely timid and nothing more could have found a far easier way to keep himself safe from any danger of persecution. He might simply have kept silent, and no one could have said it was his duty to speak out. It required a very considerable exercise of courage to say even as much as Erasmus was willing to say, in a day when Savonarola had so lately been done to death for merely attempting to set up in Florence a kingdom of Christ without the help of the pope. The arm of the Inquisition was long, its watch was vigilant, and its weapons were subtle. A man who valued merely his own peace of mind would hardly be likely to incur its displeasure. So far we may go in granting to Erasmus the quality of courage. He knew he was making enemies among powerful vested interests. If his principles of sound learning and reasonable criticism were to prevail, then, as he frequently said, the profits of a vast body of place-holders and traders in all sacred things were going to be diminished, and they would not suffer this without making a great demonstration of their power.

On the other hand, nothing was farther from his nature than any kind of open rupture with established forms of organisation. His hatred of war extended to the world of institutions. Revolution was abhorrent to him, because he thought its evils were greater than any advantage it might bring. The moment he fancied he saw this spectre of revolution, even in the far distance, he was impelled to modify and explain and warn until he had, for the moment, satisfied his sense of what was wise and prudent.

The genius of Erasmus was eminently critical, not constructive. His misfortune was to live at a crisis when the merely critical attitude would no longer serve. The struggle for new construction was beginning, and there was where Erasmus began to fail. Men were looking to him for leadership. Probably he grossly exaggerates the degree to which all the criticism of the day was charged upon him. That exaggeration was nothing more than we might expect from his nervous vanity and his uncontrollable impulse to make literature whenever he took pen in hand. Still it contains just this germ of truth: that the world of scholars felt his power and would have been glad to follow his lead if he had chosen to take a leader's place.