Among the great number of works which the "Ship of Fools" suggested, there was one which directly and powerfully prepared the way for Luther. Erasmus, while residing in England, from 1497 to 1506, Luther being still a student, read Brandt's work, and was stirred by it to write his "Praise of Folly," which, under the most transparent disguise, is chiefly a satire upon the ecclesiastics of the day. We may at least say that it is only in the passages aimed at them that the author is at his best. Before Luther had begun to think of the abuses of the Church, Erasmus, in his little work, derided the credulous Christians who thought to escape mishaps all day by paying devotion to St. Christopher in the morning, and laughed at the soldiers who expected to come out of battle with a whole skin if they had but taken the precaution to "mumble over a set prayer before the picture of St. Barbara." He jested upon the English who had constructed a gigantic figure of their patron saint as large as the images of Hercules; only the saint was mounted upon a horse "very gloriously accoutred," which the people scarcely refrained from worshiping. But observe this passage in the very spirit of Luther, though written fifteen years before the reformer publicly denounced indulgences:
"What shall I say of such as cry up and maintain the cheat of pardons and indulgences? who by these compute the time of each soul's residence in purgatory, and assign them a longer or shorter continuance, according as they purchase more or fewer of these paltry pardons and salable exemptions?... By this easy way of purchasing pardon, any notorious highwayman, any plundering soldier, or any bribe-taking judge shall disburse some part of their unjust gains, and so think all their grossest impieties sufficiently atoned for.... And what can be more ridiculous than for some others to be confident of going to heaven by repeating daily those seven verses out of the Psalms?"
These "fooleries," which Erasmus calls most gross and absurd, he says are practiced not merely by the vulgar, but by "such proficients in religion as one might well expect should have more wit." He ridicules the notion of each country and place being under the special protection of a patron saint, as well as the kindred absurdity of calling upon one saint to cure a toothache, upon another to restore lost goods, upon another to protect seamen, and upon another to guard cows and sheep. Nor does he refrain from reflecting upon the homage paid to the Virgin Mary, "whose blind devotees think it manners now to place the mother before the Son." He utterly scouts and reviles the folly of hanging up offerings at the shrines of saints for their imaginary aid in getting the donors out of trouble or danger. The responsibility of all this folly and delusion he boldly assigns to the priests, who gain money by them. "They blacken the darkness and promote the delusion, wisely foreseeing that the people (like cows which never give down their milk so well as when they are gently stroked) would part with less if they knew more." If any serious and wise man, he adds, should tell the people that a pious life is the only way of securing a peaceful death, that repentance and amendment alone can procure pardon, and that the best devotion to a saint is to imitate his example, there would be a very different estimate put upon masses, fastings, and other austerities. Erasmus saw this prophecy fulfilled before many years had rolled over his head.
Christ, the True Light. (Holbein, about 1520.)
It is, however, in his chapters upon the amazingly ridiculous subtleties of the monastic theology of his time that Erasmus gives us his most exquisite fooling. Here he becomes, indeed, the merry Erasmus who was so welcome at English Cambridge, at Paris, at Rome, in Germany, in Holland, wherever there were good scholars and good fellows. He pretends to approach this part of his subject with fear; for divines, he says, are generally very hot and passionate, and when provoked they set upon a man in full cry, and hurl at him the thunders of excommunication, that being their spiritual weapon to wound such as lift up a hand against them. But he plucks up courage, and proceeds to discourse upon the puerilities which absorbed their minds. Among the theological questions which they delighted to discuss were such as these: the precise manner in which original sin was derived from our first parents; whether time was an element in the supernatural generation of our Lord; whether it would be a thing possible for the first person in the Trinity to hate the second; whether God, who took our nature upon him in the form of a man, could as well have become a woman, a beast, an herb, or a stone; and if he could, how could he have then preached the gospel, or been nailed to the cross? whether if St. Peter had celebrated the eucharist at the time when our Saviour was upon the cross, the consecrated bread would have been transubstantiated into the same body that remained on the tree; whether, in Christ's corporal presence in the sacramental wafer, his humanity was not abstracted from his Godhead; whether, after the resurrection, we shall carnally eat and drink as we do in this life; how it is possible, in the transubstantiation, for one body to be in several places at the same time; which is the greater sin, to kill a hundred men, or for a cobbler to set one stitch in a shoe on Sunday? Such subtleties as these alternated with curious and minute delineations of purgatory, heaven, and hell, their divisions, subdivisions, degrees, and qualities.
He heaps ridicule also upon the public preaching of those profound theologians. It was mere stage-playing; and their delivery was the very acme of the droll and the absurd. "Good Lord! how mimical are their gestures! What heights and falls in their voice! What toning, what bawling, what singing, what squeaking, what grimaces, what making of mouths, what apes' faces and distorting of their countenances!" And their matter was even more ridiculous than their manner. One of these absurd divines, discoursing upon the name of Jesus, subtly pretended to discover a revelation of the Trinity in the very letters of which the name was composed. It was declined only in three cases. That was one mysterious coincidence. Then the nominative ended in S, the accusative in M, and the ablative in U, which obviously indicated Summus, the beginning; Medius, the middle; and Ultimus, the end of all things. Other examples he gives of the same profound nature. Nor did the different orders of monks escape his lash. He dwelt upon the preposterous importance they attached to trifling details of dress and ceremonial. "They must be very critical in the precise number of their knots, in the tying-on of their sandals, of what precise colors their respective habits should be made, and of what stuff; how broad and long their girdles, how big and in what fashion their hoods, whether their bald crowns be of the right cut to a hair's-breadth, how many hours they must sleep, and at what minute rise to prayers."
In this manner he proceeds for many a sprightly page, rising from monks to bishops and cardinals, and from them to popes, "who pretend themselves Christ's vicars," while resembling the Lord in nothing. Luther never went farther, never was bolder or more biting, than Erasmus in this essay. But all went for nothing with the great leader of reform, because Erasmus refused to abandon the Church, and cast in his lot openly with the reformers. Luther calls him "a mere Momus," who laughed at Catholic and Protestant alike, and looked upon the Christian religion itself very much as Lucian did upon the Greek. "Whenever I pray," said Luther once, "I pray for a curse upon Erasmus." It was certainly a significant fact that in the heat of that contest Erasmus should have given the world a translation of Lucian. But he was a great, wise, genial soul, whose fame will brighten as that age becomes more justly and familiarly known to us.
The first place in the annals of such a warfare belongs of right to the soldiers who took their lives in their hands and went forth to meet the foe in the open field, braving torture, infamy, and death for the cause. Such were Luther and his followers. But there is a place in human memory for the philosopher and the humorist who first made the contest possible, and then rendered it shorter and easier.