The Two Erasmuses (Part 2)

Editor's Note: The following is a continuation of Part 1 of The Two Erasmuses.

Between Scylla and Charybdis: 1517-24

On December 11, 1516, George Spalatin, secretary to Elector Frederick of Saxony, wrote a letter to Erasmus. Spalatin had been asked to pass on a statement from his friend, “an Augustinian priest, not less famous for the sanctity of his life than for his theological erudition.” Spalatin was referring to a letter he received two months previous, wherein the priest wrote,

“What displeases me in Erasmus, though a learned man, is that in interpreting the apostle on the righteousness of works, or of the law, or our own righteousness, as the apostle calls it, he understands only those ceremonial and figurative observances…I have no hesitation in disagreeing with Erasmus, because in interpreting the Scriptures I consider Jerome as much inferior to Augustine as Erasmus thinks he is superior.”

The Augustinian priest was, of course, Martin Luther. Whether Erasmus read Spalatin’s letter is unknown, for he never responded. But already, Luther had identified the ground on which they would clash. Though both belonged to the Order of Saint Augustine, Erasmus preferred the works of Jerome. Luther was coming to the realization that human works played no part in salvation, whereas Erasmus left room for them. Already, Luther connects Erasmus’ position with that of Pelagius, Augustine’s great opponent. Luther saw his dispute with Erasmus in terms of who was the true heir of Augustine.

If Erasmus did not know the name Luther then, he would soon hear little else. The following year brought the indulgence controversy that made Luther a bestselling author. Initially, it was possible for Erasmus to imagine that the two of them held much in common. After all, he had been promoting reform for years. It pleased the private Erasmus greatly to see Luther angering his old enemies in Paris and Louvain. All the right people were offended!

In 1520, Erasmus met with Elector Frederick of Saxony and George Spalatin. Their conversation grew comfortable enough that, for a moment, the private Erasmus made an appearance. “At the interview Frederick talked German, Erasmus Latin, and Spalatin interpreted. ‘What sin had Luther committed?’ asked Frederick. ‘Two,’ said Erasmus. ‘He has struck at the tiara of the pope and the bellies of the monks.’”

These private remarks soon became public, a breach of confidence that rankled Erasmus. For as Luther became increasingly notorious, earning the censure of the Church, the conservatives blamed Erasmus. After all, Luther had been an early adopter of Erasmus’ 1516 Greek New Testament, and many of Erasmus’ admirers in the biblical humanist movement were joining the Lutheran cause. They openly praised Erasmus and credited him with inspiring their work. Thus, Erasmus became the man who “laid the egg that Luther hatched.” It was a serious embarrassment for the public Erasmus. His frequent correspondent, Duke George of Saxony, did not hold back. “The blame for this, to speak my mind freely, falls in the first place on you.”

The situation could hardly have been more dangerous. Erasmus knew the conservatives loyal to Rome had the power to ban his books, remove him from polite society, and even kill him. To make matters worse, many of Luther’s followers were becoming increasingly radical and social disorder was spreading. As Roland Bainton notes, “His dream was that Christian Humanism might serve as a check upon nationalism…The threat of division and war implicit in the Reformation frightened him.” Erasmus’ dream of a golden age in which war would give way to peace was now obliterated. “I am still made wretched by the fear that things will end in open conflict.” In such a situation, it seemed best to keep his mouth shut, but that was unacceptable to the rest of the world.

“In Rome some make me out to be a supporter of Luther, in Germany I am an arch anti-Lutheran, and there is no one they rage against more than myself because they think it is entirely my fault that they are not triumphant. My life upon it, I would rather die outright than kindle such a blaze of hatred round me.”

He describes himself in this period attempting to navigate between Scylla and Charybdis. (Modern equivalent: Between a rock and a hard place.) The public Erasmus had long been optimistic about the possibility of human progress and expanding freedom, but the private Erasmus knew the horrors of life full well and had never felt free.

After Luther’s refusal to recant at the 1521 Diet of Worms and subsequent flight to the safety of electoral Saxony, the conservatives loyal to Rome began pressuring Erasmus: he must write a book opposing Luther. Pope Adrian VI, a former colleague of Erasmus’ at the University of Louvain, wrote to him in no uncertain terms.

“Can you then refuse to sharpen the weapon of your pen against the madness of these men, whom it is clear that God had already driven out from before his face and manifestly abandoned to a reprobate mind, that they might say and teach and do what is not right? By them the whole church of Christ is thrown into confusion, and countless souls are involved together with them in the guilt of eternal damnation. Arise therefore to bring aid to God’s cause, and employ your eminent intellectual gifts to his glory, as you have done down to this day.”

The progress of Erasmus’ thoughts on the matter can be traced through his letters. On May 25, 1523, he insists that he is not sharpening his pen to attack Luther and asserts that doing so would only “make the disorder more severe.” In a letter to Zwingli on August 31, Erasmus writes that although “the pope, the emperor, kings and princes” are begging him to write against Luther, “I am resolved either not to write, or to write in such a strain that my writing will not satisfy the Pharisees.”

However, in a letter to King Henry VIII of England five days later, he claims, “I have something on the stocks against the new doctrines, but would not dare publish it unless I have left Germany first, for fear I prove a casualty before I enter the arena.” Did Erasmus change his mind in the intervening period, or was he telling both sides what they wanted to hear? The latter seems likely.

Two weeks later, Erasmus expresses his fear “that anything I write may put me in danger of my life and arouse fresh uproar.” This may be a bit of the private Erasmus showing through, for while the public Erasmus needed to uphold his reputation, the private one valued survival and feared death.

In a letter to Cardinal Lorenzo Campeggi in February 1524, Erasmus first reveals the topic will be the freedom of the will and says he is writing “under pressure from princes, and especially from the king of England.” It is also to Campeggi that he admits his fear of imminent death, not from the violence of Lutherans or Romanists, but from his ongoing maladies. “My state of health is such that I make ready daily for my last hour, and this makes me all the less willing to do what Christ would disapprove.” He did not want to appear before an angry judge!

Probably in March 1524, Erasmus sent a first draft of On Free Will to King Henry VIII, who had been applying the greatest pressure. “If your Majesty, and other learned men, approve this sample of my work, I shall finish it and arrange for its printing elsewhere.” It is a sign of how nervous Erasmus was about Henry VIII’s reaction (and the possible loss of English patronage) that he invited him to exert influence on the text itself. On April 30, Pope Clement VII wrote to say he was “delighted to hear” about Erasmus’ forthcoming book. Unable to satisfy the evangelical reformers, Erasmus was desperate to keep these major figures onside, not least to protect his own life.

A final attempt was made to dissuade him. Erasmus received a letter from Martin Luther himself, who entreated him to “be no more than a spectator of this trouble in which we are engaged; only do not side with our adversaries and join forces with them, and above all do not publish any attack on me, while I shall refrain from attacking you.” Erasmus bristled in his response.

“Perhaps Erasmus’ opposition will do more for the gospel than all the support you receive from dullards, who will not let me be a spectator and watch the tragedy unfold – I only hope it does not have a tragic ending! These people are driving me into the opposite camp – even if pressure from the princes were not pushing me in the same direction.”

In a letter dated July 3, Erasmus states that the book is being printed. Soon after, he writes to his friend Willibald Pirckheimer, “Now that rumors have spread about my book on the freedom of the will, I think it best to publish, so that they cannot suspect it to be worse than it is. For I treat the topic with such moderation that I know Luther himself will not take offence.” This was clearly wishful thinking on Erasmus’ part.

Upon the book’s publication a few weeks later, he stated that he was “entering the arena, having become a gladiator instead of a member of the band.” In a letter to Cuthbert Tunstall, he gave a good summation of his feelings at that critical moment. “The die is cast. I have published a small book on the freedom of the will, most temperately written but likely, if I am not mistaken, to excite very serious opposition…All the same, they are frightened; let them hate me as long as they fear me too.” The boldness of the public Erasmus was in conflict with the anxieties of the private Erasmus.

That he ever published On Free Will is entirely due to these outside influences. Erasmus knew he was not a skilled theologian and normally avoided writing things that might open him up to serious criticism on that front. In composing his argument, he relied on the assistance of Ludwig Baer, a Paris-trained theologian and professor at the University of Basel. This was an effort to outflank the conservatives rather than the reformers. The latter were by that point considered a lost cause, as demonstrated in his comment to Duke George of Saxony that “if we must be slaves, let popes and bishops be our masters, whatever one may think of them, rather than this or that mean and petty Phalaris, more intolerable than a whole bench of bishops.” (Phalaris was an ancient Greek tyrant known for cannibalism.)

The book itself is tentative, less an argument and more an exercise in non-commitment. It bears little of the humor which had endeared Erasmus to the reading public, and his whole heart is clearly not in the endeavor, except at one point: the only element Erasmus controlled was the choice of topic, and there he selected what mattered to him above all else.

Freedom had always been his dream. He wanted to believe in the goodness of God, the kindness of men, and the possibility of peace. He longed to escape the embarrassments of the past, the violence of the present, and his fears for the future. Defending free will was one of the few things the public and private Erasmuses ever did together.

A Bloody Tragedy: 1525-36

The release of On Free Will brought Erasmus a few months of relative peace. He was praised by those loyal to Rome, and while reformers such as Johannes Oecolampadius did oppose him in print, Luther remained silent. Philip Melanchthon wrote to say that the book received a “mild reception” in Wittenberg. (He was indicating the book’s measured tone more than its content.) For just a moment, it seemed that the conflict Erasmus feared would not materialize.

Then came the inevitable turn: a peasant uprising in the German lands, beginning in the region of the Black Forest and quickly spreading. Inspired in part by firebrand preachers like Thomas Müntzer, peasants who had labored in serfdom began rising against their lords. Some released a list of reasonable demands, while others seemed interested only in destruction and revenge. By the close of 1524, Erasmus was despairing. “If I did not know that God governs the affairs of men and often brings a play which we have started very badly to a happy outcome, I could not imagine any way out from our situation except of the most bloody kind.” Nine months later, after much of the rebellion had been crushed, his mood had still not improved.

“Here a cruel and bloody tragedy is being played out. The peasants are rushing to their deaths. Everyday there are fierce battles between them and the princes; the fighting is so close that we are within earshot of the guns and cannons and can almost hear the groans of the dying. You can guess how safe we are in this place! It is a terrible disaster, and it is spreading with remarkable speed into every region of the world.”

The whole Reformation was, for Erasmus, a bloody tragedy. Its main effect as he saw it was to radicalize all parties involved. He had sown the seed of peace and reaped the fruit of war. “What a disaster this means all the time for Christian concord! How hard it is to find anywhere that old-fashioned genuine and straightforward friendship that nothing sour can spoil!” The finer points of justification seemed insignificant compared to the violence in front of his face. For years, he had dragged himself out of the abyss of poverty and anonymity, but everything he had created was crumbling into dust.

Then in December 1525, Luther’s book On Bound Will was published. It exceeded Erasmus’ work in nearly every way: overall length, depth of biblical exegesis, and number of personal insults. It was, both implicitly and explicitly, a condemnation of Erasmus and everything for which he stood. Or was it? For Luther took aim at the public Erasmus—he could not have known the private Erasmus.

Perhaps because of the number of classical illusions, Erasmus convinced himself that Luther did not write the work himself. “The Servum arbitrium has come out under the name of Martin Luther, but it is the work of many people produced over a long period of time – in fact, as we were told by those who claimed to have seen a few pages, printing began a year ago and the work was evidently prepared with the greatest care.” Again, this was wishful thinking.

Though his public words were cordial enough, Erasmus was privately enraged at the way he had been treated. It particularly galled him that people seemed to think Luther had gotten the better of their exchange. “I wanted to take some of the smugness out of the triumph they were preparing to celebrate before the victory was won…You will soon have more decisive evidence of victory in this debate.” He could have accepted respectful disagreement,

“But he has countered with an overweight volume, so full of sneers, witticisms, abuse, threats, and allegations that there is more malice in this single book than in all the works he has published to this day. If he had called me a drunken, ignorant fool, a blockhead, a ninny, or a dolt, I could have put up with that. These are human weaknesses and I am human. But he goes further and repeatedly make me out to be an atheist, like Lucian, affirming that I do not believe in the existence of God…”

Erasmus quickly began work on a lengthy response, the Hyperaspistes, which would find few readers. Indeed, he was not to have another literary hit for the rest of his life. In 1529, there was an outbreak of iconoclasm in Basel, and Erasmus fled to the city of Freiburg, one of the few remaining Catholic strongholds on the Rhine. Bitter and in poor health, he struggled to find his purpose in a world that had turned so completely against him.

In 1535, he returned to Basel to die. He was buried in the cathedral, which by that point was a Reformed church. Hoping to be a friend of every man, he ended his life with few true comrades, and fewer still to whom he dared divulge the private Erasmus. Seeking to find common ground, he instead witnessed the drawing of confessional fault lines that would lead to tremendous acts of violence over the next century.

The song “Free Will” by the band Rush puts it well. “If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.” Thus, despite his protestations to the contrary, Erasmus most certainly joined a faction. To do nothing, write nothing, speak nothing is sometimes the boldest choice of all. By refusing to join the Reformation, he endorsed the status quo: Rome. There he remained for the rest of his life. It was impossible to reconcile the public and the private, the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation. As Huizinga concludes,

“His double-sidedness roots in the depths of his being. Many of his utterances during the struggle proceed directly from his fear and lack of character, also from his inveterate dislike of siding with a person or a cause; but behind that is always his deep and fervent conviction that neither of the conflicting opinions can completely express the truth, that human hatred and purblindness infatuate men’s minds. And with that conviction is allied the noble illusion that it might yet be possible to preserve the peace by moderation, insight, and kindliness.”

This was Erasmus’ tragedy: that he could reconcile neither the disparate parts of Christendom nor those within himself, and that he spent his life chasing a false hope when true hope was on offer. The things of this earth would never bring him satisfaction, and the things of heaven were always beyond his grasp. He sought to take hold but could not admit that he was forever held in the awesome hands of the Almighty. Had he been able to accept that truth, he might have found it not a fearsome thing, but the very essence of freedom in Christ. He might have felt free, at last, to truly be himself, uniting the public and the private.

How often we fall into the same trap! We seek always to control events, not trusting the divine hands in which we are held. We long to make this world a better place, but do so from a position of fear, always striving, always coming up short. It is only in surrendering ourselves to the divine plan that we become free to love our neighbor and look in hope to that day when the earth will be made new and we will be resurrected to life eternal. We need not fear the breaking and remaking of the earth if we know the one who laid its foundations.

The moral law alone could not produce the change Erasmus wished to see. For all his reading of biblical texts, he never understood the freedom of the gospel. May God bring us now to that place where perfect love casts out fear, and after we have striven with God, may we receive his blessing: the promise of salvation.