He hated that spirit of absolute assuredness so inseparably bound up with the reformers. 'Zwingli and Bucer may be inspired by the Spirit, Erasmus from himself is nothing but a man and cannot comprehend what is of the Spirit.'
There was a group among the reformed to whom Erasmus in his heart of hearts was more nearly akin than to the Lutherans or Zwinglians with their rigid dogmatism: the Anabaptists. He rejected the doctrine from which they derived their name, and abhorred the anarchic element in them. He remained far too much the man of spiritual decorum to identify himself with these irregular believers. But he was not blind to the sincerity of their moral aspirations and sympathized with their dislike of brute force and the patience with which they bore persecution. 'They are praised more than all others for the innocence of their life,' he writes in 1529. Just in the last part of his life came the episode of the violent revolutionary proceedings of the fanatic Anabaptists; it goes without saying that Erasmus speaks of it only with horror.
One of the best historians of the Reformation, Walter Köhler, calls Erasmus one of the spiritual fathers of Anabaptism. And certain it is that in its later, peaceful development it has important traits in common with Erasmus: a tendency to acknowledge free will, a certain rationalistic trend, a dislike of an exclusive conception of a Church. It seems possible to prove that the South German Anabaptist Hans Denk derived opinions directly from Erasmus. For a considerable part, however, this community of ideas must, no doubt, have been based on peculiarities of religious consciousness in the Netherlands, whence Erasmus sprang, and where Anabaptism found such a receptive soil. Erasmus was certainly never aware of these connections.
Some remarkable evidence regarding Erasmus's altered attitude towards the old and the new Church is shown by what follows.
The reproach he had formerly so often flung at the advocates of conservatism that they hated the bonae literae, so dear to him, and wanted to stifle them, he now uses against the evangelical party. 'Wherever Lutherism is dominant the study of literature is extinguished. Why else,' he continues, using a remarkable sophism, 'are Luther and Melanchthon compelled to call back the people so urgently to the love of letters?' 'Just compare the University of Wittenberg with that of Louvain or Paris!... Printers say that before this Gospel came they used to dispose of 3,000 volumes more quickly than now of 600. A sure proof that studies flourish!'
CHAPTER XX
LAST YEARS
Religious and political contrasts grow sharper—The coming strife in Germany still suspended—Erasmus finishes his Ecclesiastes—Death of Fisher and More—Erasmus back at Basle: 1535—Pope Paul III wants to make him write in favour of the cause of the Council—Favours declined by Erasmus—De Puritate Ecclesiae—The end: 12 July 1536
During the last years of Erasmus's life all the great issues which kept the world in suspense were rapidly taking threatening forms. Wherever compromise or reunion had before still seemed possible, sharp conflicts, clearly outlined party-groupings, binding formulae were now barring the way to peace. While in the spring of 1529 Erasmus prepared for his departure from Basle, a strong Catholic majority of the Diet at Speyer got the 'recess' of 1526, favourable for the Evangelicals, revoked, only the Lutherans among them keeping what they had obtained; and secured a prohibition of any further changes or novelties. The Zwinglians and Anabaptists were not allowed to enjoy the least tolerance. This was immediately followed by the Protest of the chief evangelical princes and towns, which henceforth was to give the name to all anti-Catholics together (19 April 1529). And not only between Catholics and Protestants in the Empire did the rupture become complete. Even before the end of that year the question of the Lord's supper proved an insuperable stumbling-block in the way of a real union of Zwinglians and Lutherans. Luther parted from Zwingli at the colloquy of Marburg with the words, 'Your spirit differs from ours'.
In Switzerland civil war had openly broken out between the Catholic and the Evangelical cantons, only calmed for a short time by the first peace of Kappel. The treaties of Cambray and Barcelona, which in 1529 restored at least political peace in Christendom for the time being, could no longer draw from old Erasmus jubilations about a coming golden age, like those with which the concord of 1516 had inspired him. A month later the Turks appeared before Vienna.