Durant W. The Reformation. A History of European Civilization from Wyclif to Calvin: 1300-1564
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they will satisfy you as to how... our Saviour was conceived in the
Virgin's womb, and will demonstrate, in the consecrated wafer, how
accidents may subsist without a subject... how one body can be in
several places at the same time, and how Christ's body in heaven
differs from His body on the cross or in the sacrament. `061422
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Think also of the nonsense purveyed as miracles and prodigies-
apparitions, curative shrines, evocations of Satan, and "such like
bugbears of superstition."
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These absurdities... are a good trade, and procure a comfortable
income to such priests and friars as by this craft get their
gain.... What shall I say of such as cry up and maintain the cheat
of pardons and indulgences?- that 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 saleable exemptions? Or what can be said bad enough of
others who pretend that by the force of such magical charms, or by the
fumbling over their beads in the rehearsal of such and such
petitions (which some religious impostors invented, either for
diversion, or, what is more likely, for advantage), they shall procure
riches, honors, pleasure, long life, and lusty old age, nay, after
death, a seat at the right hand of the Saviour? `061423
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The satire runs on at the expense of monks, friars, inquisitors,
cardinals, popes. Monks pester the people with begging, and think to
take heaven by a siege of soporific psalmodies. The secular clergy
hunger and thirst after money; "they are most subtle in the craft of
getting... tithes, offerings, perquisites, etc." `061424 All ranks and
varieties of the clergy agree in putting witches to death. The popes
have lost any resemblance to the Apostles in "their riches, honors,
jurisdictions, offices, dispensations, licenses, indulgences...
ceremonies and tithes, excommunications and interdicts," their lust
for legacies, their worldly diplomacy and bloody wars. `061425 How
could such a Church survive except through the folly, the gullible
simplicity of mankind? `061426
The Praise of Folly stirred the theologians to an understandable
fury. "You should know," wrote Martin Dropsius to Erasmus, "that
your Moria has excited a great disturbance even among those who were
formerly your most devoted admirers." `061427 But the satire in this
gay devastation was mild compared to that which marked Erasmus' next
outburst. The third and final year of his teaching at Cambridge (1513)
was the year of Pope Julius II's death. In 1514 there appeared in
Paris a skit or dialogue called Iulius exclusus. Erasmus made
every effort, short of explicit denial, to conceal his authorship, but
the manuscript had circulated among his friends, and More
unguardedly listed it among Erasmus' works. `061428 It may stand
here as perhaps an extreme sample of Erasmus the satirist. The dead
warrior-pope finds the gates of heaven closed against him by an
obstinate St. Peter.
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Julius: Enough of this. I am Julius the Ligurian, P.M....
Peter: P.M! What is that? Pestis maxima?
J: Pontifex Maximus, you rascal.
P: If you are three times Maximus ... you can't get in here
unless you are Optimus also.
J: Impertinence! You, who have been no more than Sanctus all these
ages- and I Sanctissimus, Sanctissimus Dominus, Sanctitas,
Holiness itself, with bulls to show it.
P: Is there no difference between being holy and being called
Holy?... Let me look a little closer. Hum! Signs of impiety
aplenty.... Priest's cassock, but bloody armor beneath it; eyes
savage, mouth insolent, forehead brazen, body scarred with sins all
over, breath loaded with wine, health broken with debauchery. Ay,
threaten as you will, I will tell you what you are.... You are
Julius the Emperor come back from hell....
J: Make an end, or I will excommunicate you....
P: Excommunicate me? By what right, I would know?
J: The best of rights. You are only a priest, perhaps not that-
you cannot consecrate. Open, I say!
P: You must show your merits first....
J: What do you mean by merits?
P: Have you taught true doctrine?
J: Not I. I have been too busy fighting. There are monks to look
after doctrine, if that is of any consequence.
P: Have you gained souls to Christ by pure example?
J: I have sent a good many to Tartarus.
P: Have you worked any miracles?
J: Pshaw! Miracles are out of date.
P: Have you been diligent in your prayers?
J: The invincible Julius ought not to answer a beggarly fisherman.
However, you shall know who and what I am. First, I am a Ligurian, and
not a Jew like you. My mother was a sister of the great Pope Sixtus
IV. The pope made me a rich man out of Church property. I became a
cardinal. I had my misfortunes. I had the French pox. I was
banished, hunted out of my country, but I knew all along that I should
come to be pope.... It came true, partly with French help, partly with
money which I borrowed at interest, partly with promises. Croesus
could not have produced all the money that was wanted. The bankers
will tell you about that. But I succeeded.... And I have done more for
the Church and Christ than any pope before me.
P: What did you do?
J: I raised the revenue. I invented new offices and sold them....
I recoined the currency and made a great sum that way. Nothing can
be done without money. Then I annexed Bologna to the Holy See.... I
set all the princes of Europe by the ears. I tore up treaties, and
kept great armies in the field. I covered Rome with palaces, and
left five millions in the treasury behind me....
P: Why did you take Bologna?
J: Because I wanted the revenue....
P: And how about Ferrara?
J: The duke was an ungrateful wretch. He accused me of simony,
called me a pederast.... I wanted the duchy of Ferrara for a son of my
own, who could be depended upon to be true to the Church, and who
had just poniarded the Cardinal of Pavia.
P: What? Popes with wives and children?
J: Wives? No, not wives, but why not children?...
P: Were you guilty of the crimes of which they accused you?
J: That is nothing to the purpose....
P: Is there no way of removing a wicked pope?
J: Absurd! Who can remove the highest authority of all?... A pope
can be corrected only by a general council but no general council
can be held without the pope's consent.... Thus he cannot be deposed
for any crime whatsoever.
P: Not for murder?
J: No, not even if it were parricide.
P: Not for fornication?
J: Not for incest.
P: Not for simony?
J: Not for 600 acts of simony.
P: Not for poisoning?
J: No, nor for sacrilege.
P: Not for all these crimes gathered in a single person?
J: Add 600 more to them, there is no power that can depose the pope.
P: A novel privilege for my successors- to be the wickedest of
men, yet be safe from punishment. So much the unhappier the Church
that cannot shake such a monster off its shoulders.... The people
ought to rise with paving stones and dash such a wretch's brains
out.... If Satan needed a vicar he could find none fitter than you.
What sign have you ever shown of an apostle?
J: Is it not apostolic to increase Christ's Church?...
P: How have you increased the Church?...
J: I filled Rome with palaces... troops of servants, armies,
offices....
P: The Church had nothing of this when it was founded by Christ....
J: You are thinking of the old affair when you starved as pope, with
a handful of poor hunted bishops about you. Time has changed all
that.... Look now at our gorgeous churches... bishops like kings...
cardinals gloriously attended, horses and mules checked with gold
and jewels and shod with gold and silver. Beyond all, myself,
Supreme Pontiff, borne on soldiers' shoulders in a golden chair, and
waving my hand majestically to adoring crowds. Hearken to the roar
of the cannon, the bugle notes, the boom of the drums. Observe the
military engines, the shouting populace, torches blazing in street and
square, and the kings of the earth scarce admitted to kiss my
Holiness's foot.... Look at all this, and tell me, is it not
magnificent?... You perceive what a poor wretch of a bishop you are,
compared to me.
P: Insolent wretch! Fraud, usury, and cunning made you pope.... I
brought heathen Rome to acknowledge Christ; you have made it heathen
again. Paul did not talk of the cities he had stormed, the legions
he had slaughtered... he talked of shipwrecks, bonds, disgraces,
stripes; these were his apostolic triumphs, these were the glories
of a Christian general. When he boasted it was of the souls he had
recovered from Satan, not of his piles of ducats....
J: All this is news to me.
P: Very likely. With your treaties and your protocols, your armies
and your victories, you had no time to read the Gospels.... You
pretend to be a Christian, you are no better than a Turk; you think
like a Turk, you are as licentious as a Turk. If there is any
difference you are worse....
J: Then you won't open the gates?
P: Sooner to anyone else than to such as you....
J: If you don't give in I will take your place by storm. They are
making fine havoc below just now; I shall soon have 60,000 ghosts
behind me.
P: O wretched man! O miserable Church!... I am not surprised that so
few now apply here for admission, when the Church has such rulers. Yet
there must be good in the world, too, when such a sink of iniquity can
be honored merely because he bears the name of pope. `061429
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This, of course, is outrageously one-sided. No such unredeemed
rascal as was here represented could have freed Italy from her
invaders, replaced the old St. Peter's with the new, discovered,
directed, and developed Michelangelo and Raphael, united Christian and
classic civilization in the Stanze of the Vatican, and offered to
Raphael's skill that visage of profound thought and exhausting care
pictured in the incomparable portrait of Julius in the Uffizi Gallery.
And poor Erasmus, calling all priests to apostolic poverty while
himself importuning his friends for coin! That a priest should pen
so savage an indictment of a pope reveals the rebellious mood of the
time. In 1518- year 2 of Luther- Peter Gillis wrote to Erasmus from
Antwerp: "The Iulius exclusus is for sale everywhere here.
Everyone is buying it, everyone is talking of it." `061430 No wonder
the Reformers later reproached Erasmus for having sounded the tocsin
of revolt and then himself fled.
In 1514 another product of Erasmus' pen startled the intellectual
world of Western Europe. From 1497 onward he had composed informal
dialogues, professedly to teach Latin style and conversation, but
incidentally discussing a rich variety of lively topics guaranteed
to rouse schoolboys from their daily slumbers. His friend Beatus
Rhenanus, with his permission, published a series of these as
Familiarium colloquiorum formulae - "Forms of Familiar Conversations,
by Erasmus of Rotterdam, useful not only for polishing a boy's
speech but for building his character." Later editions added more
colloquies, so that they became Erasmus' most substantial composition.
They are a strange concoction- serious discussions of marriage and
morals, exhortations to piety, exposes of absurdities and abuses in
human conduct and belief, with a sprinkling of pungent or risque
jokes- all in a chatty and idiomatic Latin which must have been harder
to write than the formal language of learned discourse. An English
translator in 1724 judged "no book fitter to read which does, in so
delightful and instructing a manner, utterly overthrow almost all
the Popish Opinions and Superstitions." `061431 This slightly
overstates the point, but certainly Erasmus, in his gay way, used
his "textbook of Latin style" to attack again the shortcomings of
the clergy. He condemned relic-mongering, the misuse of
excommunication, the acquisitiveness of prelates and priests, the
false miracles foisted upon the credulous, the cult of saints for
worldly ends, the excesses of fasting, the shocking contrasts
between the Christianity of the Church and the Christianity of
Christ. `061432 He made a prostitute praise monks as her most faithful
clients. `061433 He warned a young lady who wished to keep her
virginity that she should avoid "those brawny, swill-bellied monks....
Chastity is more endangered in the cloister than out of it." `061434
He deplored the exaltation of virginity, and sang a paean to married
love as superior to celibacy. He mourned that men so carefully mated
good horses with good, but, in marriages of financial convenience, wed
healthy maids to sickly men; and he proposed to forbid marriage to
syphilitics or persons with any other serious disability or
disease. `061435 Mingled with these sober reflections were passages of
broad humor. Boys were advised to salute people when they sneezed, but
not when they "broke wind backward"; `061436 and a pregnant woman
was hailed with a unique blessing: "Heaven grant that this burden that
you carry... may have as easy an exit as it had an
entrance." `061437 Circumcision was recommended, "for it moderates the
itch of coition." A long dialogue between "The Young Man and the
Harlot" ended reassuringly with the lady's reform.
Critics complained that these colloquies were a very reckless way of
teaching Latin style. One alleged that all the youth of Freiburg
were being corrupted by them. `061438 Charles V made their use in
school a crime punishable with death. Luther here agreed with the
Emperor: "On my deathbed I shall forbid my sons to read Erasmus'
Colloquies. " The furore assured the book's success; 24,000 copies
were sold soon after publication; till 1550 only the Bible outsold it.
Meanwhile Erasmus had almost made the Bible his own.
IV. THE SCHOLAR
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He left England in July 1514, and made his way through fog and
customs to Calais. There he received from the prior of his forgotten
monastery at Steyn a letter suggesting that his leave of absence had
long since expired, and that he had better return to spend his
remaining years in repentant piety. He was alarmed, for in canon law
the prior might call upon secular power to drag him back to his
cell. Erasmus excused himself, and the prior did not press the matter;
but to avoid a recurrence of the embarrassment the wandering scholar
asked his influential English friends to secure for him, from Leo X, a
dispensation from his obligations as a monk.
While these negotiations were proceeding, Erasmus made his way up
the Rhine to Basel, and offered to Froben the printer the manuscript
of his most important production- a critical revision of the Greek
text of the New Testament, with a new Latin translation and a
commentary. It was a labor of love, pride, and risk for author and
publisher alike: the preparation had taken years, the printing and
editing would be laborious and expensive, the presumption to improve
upon Jerome's Latin version, long sanctified as the "Vulgate," might
be condemned by the Church, and the sales would probably fail to
meet the costs. Erasmus reduced one hazard by dedicating the work to
Leo X. In February 1516, Froben at last brought out Novum
Instrumentum omne, diligenter ab Erasmo Rot. recognitum et emendatum.
A later edition (1518) changed Instrumentum to Testamentum. In
parallel columns Erasmus presented the Greek text as revised by him,
and his Latin translation. His knowledge of Greek was imperfect, and
he shared with the typesetters the responsibility for many errors;
from the standpoint of scholarship this first edition of the Greek New
Testament to be published in print was inferior to that which a
corps of scholars had completed and printed for Cardinal Ximenes in
1514, but which was not given to the public till 1522. These two works
marked the application of humanistic learning to the early
literature of Christianity, and the beginning of that Biblical
criticism which in the nineteenth century restored the Bible to
human authorship and fallibility.
Erasmus' notes were published in a separate volume. They were
written in clear and idiomatic Latin, intelligible to all college
graduates at the time, and were widely read. Though generally
orthodox, they anticipated many findings of later research. In his
first edition he omitted the famous Comma Johanneum (I John 5: 7),
which affirmed the Trinity but is rejected by the Standard Revised
Version today as a fourth-century interpolation. He printed, but
marked as probably spurious, the story of the woman taken in
adultery (John 7: 53; 8: 11), and the last twelve verses of the Gospel
of Mark. He repeatedly signalized the difference between primitive and
current Christianity. So on Matthew 23: 27, he commented:
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What would Jerome say could he see the Virgin's milk exhibited for
money, with as much honor paid to it as to the consecrated body of
Christ; the miraculous oils; the portions of the true cross, enough,
if collected, to freight a large ship? Here we have the hood of St.
Francis, there our Lady's petticoat, or St. Anne's comb... not
presented as innocent aids to religion, but as the substance of
religion itself- and all through the avarice of priests and the
hypocrisy of monks playing upon the credulity of the people.
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Noting that Matthew 19: 12 ("Some have made themselves eunuchs for
the kingdom of heaven's sake") was alleged to counsel monastic
celibacy, Erasmus wrote:
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In this class we include those who by fraud or intimidation have
been thrust into that life of celibacy where they were allowed to
fornicate but not to marry; so that if they openly keep a concubine
they are Christian priests, but if they take a wife they are burned.
In my opinion parents who intend their children for celibate
priesthood would be much kinder to castrate them in infancy, rather
than to expose them whole against their will to this temptation to
lust. `061439
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And on I Timothy 3: 2:
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There are priests now in vast numbers, enormous herds of them,
seculars and regulars, and it is notorious that very few of them are
chaste. The great proportion fall into lust and incest and open
profligacy. It would surely be better if those who cannot be continent
should be allowed lawful wives of their own, and so escape this foul
and miserable pollution. `061440
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Finally, in a note on Matthew 11: 30, Erasmus sounded the basic note
of the Reformers- the return from the Church to Christ:
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Truly the yoke of Christ would be sweet, and his burden light, if
petty human institutions added nothing to what he himself imposed.
He commanded us nothing save love for one another, and there is
nothing so bitter that affection does not soften and sweeten it.
Everything according to nature is easily borne, and nothing accords
better with the nature of man than the philosophy of Christ, of
which the sole end is to give back to fallen nature its innocence
and integrity.... The Church added to it many things, of which some
can be omitted without prejudice to the faith... as, for example,
all those philosophic doctrines on... the nature of- and the
distinction of persons in- the Deity.... What rules, what
superstitions, we have about vestments!... How many fasts are
instituted!... What shall we say about vows... about the authority
of the pope, the abuse of absolutions and dispensations?... Would that
men were content to let Christ rule by the laws of the Gospel, and
that they would no longer seek to strengthen their obscurant tyranny
by human decrees! `061441
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It was probably the notes that carried the book to a success that
must have surprised author and publisher alike. The first edition
was disposed of in three years; new and revised editions were issued
in sixty-nine printings before Erasmus died. Criticism of the work was
vehement; many errors were pointed out; and Dr. Johann Eck,
professor at Ingolstadt and proto-antagonist of Luther, branded as
scandalous Erasmus' statement that the Greek of the New Testament
was inferior to that of Demosthenes. Leo X, however, approved the
work, and Pope Adrian VI asked Erasmus to do for the Old Testament
what he had done for the New; but the Council of Trent condemned
Erasmus' translation, and pronounced Jerome's Vulgate the only
authentic Latin version of the Bible. Erasmus' New Testament was
soon superseded as scholarship, but as an event in the history of
thought its influence was immense. It facilitated and welcomed the
vernacular translations that were soon to follow. Said a fervent
passage in the preface:
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I would have the weakest woman read the Gospels and the Epistles
of St. Paul.... I would have those words translated into all
languages, so that not only Scots and Irishmen, but Turks and Saracens
might read them. I long for the plowboy to sing them to himself as
he follows the plow, the weaver to hum them to the tune of his
shuttle, the traveler to beguile with them the dullness of his
journey.... Other studies we may regret having undertaken, but happy
is the man upon whom death comes when he is engaged in these. These
sacred words give you the very image of Christ speaking, healing,
dying, rising again, and make him so present, that were he before your
very eyes you would not more truly see him.
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Rejoicing in the competence of Froben's press and staff, Erasmus
issued (November 1516) a critical edition of Jerome, and followed it
with similarly revised classical and patristic texts, correcting 4,000
errors in the received text of Seneca; these were substantial services