Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (101 page)

In other words, Erasmus acknowledged the ancient claim that there were matters of some importance which had to be taken on faith, because the Church said that they were true, rather than because they were found in the Bible. Erasmus had begun to discover a problem which became one of the major issues of the Reformation and which faced all those who called for Christianity to go back '
ad fonte
'. Did the Bible contain all sacred truth? Or was there a tradition which the Church guarded, independent of it? The issue of scripture versus tradition became a vital area of debate in the Reformation, which had no straightforward outcome for either side, whatever they might claim. Protestants were to find to their dismay that rather basic matters, like the justification for universal infant baptism, could only be resolved by appeal to tradition, rather than to any clear authority in the Bible.
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In a monumental set of dialogues or
Colloquies
intended to charm students into learning to speak elegant Latin, Erasmus made light comedy laced with biting criticism out of his pilgrimage journeys to the English shrines of Our Lady at Walsingham and Canterbury's Thomas Becket. So Menedemus and Ogygius snigger over Ogygius's visit to Norfolk's Marian cult centre, playing around with the fact that the shrine was guarded by a priory which was a community of Augustinian Canons Regular (see p. 392):

Og.
She has the greatest fame throughout England, and you would not readily find anyone in that island who hoped for prosperity unless he greeted her annually with a small gift according to his means.

Men.
Where does she live?

Og.
By the north-west [
sic
] coast of England, only about three miles from the sea. The village has scarcely any means of support apart from the tourist trade. There's a college of canons, to whom, however, the Latin title of regulars is added: an order midway between monks and the canons called secular.

Men.
You tell me of amphibians, such as the beaver.

Og.
Yes, and the crocodile. But details aside, I'll try to satisfy you in a few words. In unfavourable matters, they're canons; in favourable ones, monks.

Men.
So far you're telling me a riddle.

Og.
But I'll add a precise demonstration. If the Roman pontiff assailed all monks with a thunderbolt, then they'd be canons, not monks. Yet if he permitted all monks to take wives, then they'd be monks.

In reflecting on Becket's shrine, Eusebius observes to his friend Timothy:

it's robbery to lavish upon those who will make bad use of it that which was owed to the immediate needs of our neighbour. Hence those who build or adorn monasteries or churches at excessive cost, when meanwhile so many of Christ's living temples are in danger of starvation, shiver in their nakedness, and are tormented by want of the necessities of life, seem to me almost guilty of a capital crime. When I was in Britain I saw Saint Thomas's tomb, laden with innumerable precious jewels in addition to other incredible riches. I'd rather have this superfluous wealth spent on the poor than kept for the use of officials who will plunder it all sooner or later. I'd decorate the tomb with branches and flowers; this, I think, would be more pleasing to the saint.
⁷⁰

Such thrusts by Erasmus proved handy for officials who only a decade or two later did indeed zestfully plunder the wealth of shrines, in various Reformations enacted throughout Europe. Erasmus's moral indignation concealed a very personal agenda in his religion. When he published his New Testament, he wrote movingly and sincerely in his Prologue about his wish to see the countryman chant the Bible at his plough, the weaver at his loom, the traveller on his journey - even women should read the text. His zeal for Church reform was the opposite of the high clericalism of the likes of Jean Gerson, so enthusiastic for Dionysius the Areopagite. Erasmus wanted to end the excesses of clerical privilege, particularly the clergy's pretensions to special knowledge, and he was always ready to show contempt both for incompetent and unlearned clergy and for what he saw as the pompous obscurity of professional theologians. But lay piety was to be reconstructed on Erasmus's own terms. After Steyn, he had grimly disciplined himself never again to lose control of his emotions: his passions were to remain as abstractions of the intellect.

Erasmus was profoundly repelled by the everyday reality of layfolk grasping at the sacred, the physicality and tactility of late medieval popular piety. For him this was fleshly religion, ignoring the inner work of the Spirit which comes to the faithful through the mind and through pure use of the emotions: 'The Spirit gives life, but the flesh is of no use'! He bequeathed this austerity to much of Protestantism when it reconstructed worship in the Reformation. Erasmus would have applauded C. S. Lewis, the no-nonsense Anglican Oxford don of the twentieth century, when Lewis entitled an introductory devotional work
Mere Christianity
. His own planed-down, whitewashed version of medieval Western faith was set out in 1504 in his best-selling
Enchiridion Militis Christtiani
: the 'Dagger for a Christian Soldier', a dagger in the sense of an all-purpose tool, the spiritual equivalent of the modern Swiss Army knife. This sets out his vision of a purified, Christ-centred faith: it could appeal to readers who had previously devoured
Devotio Moderna
literature. Outward ceremonies and ritual mattered much less than quiet, austere devotion springing from inner contemplation. But contemplative ecstatic mysticism was equally not for Erasmus, and he never went down the humanist road which delighted in cabbalism or any of the ancient magical variants on the thought of Plato.

Erasmus later borrowed a phrase from the Dutch humanist abbot Rudolf Agricola to describe his vision of a cerebral, disciplined, biblically based Christianity, echoing in humanist style with the timbre of classical philosophers:
philophia Christi
, the learned wisdom of Christ.
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It was not surprising that a man with so little time for the everyday life and public liturgy of the Church showed no deep affection for its institutions. Of course he said respectful things about both liturgy and Church, and on one occasion he even composed a rather moving liturgy for a Marian Mass, but one should never place too much faith in individual writings of Erasmus, who wrote a great deal for effect, for money and to curry favour. The Church as a visible institution was chiefly important to him as one of his main sources of cash, as he sought a spectrum of patrons to sustain the writing and research which were his real concern.
⁷²
By contrast, Erasmus was enthusiastic for godly princes substituting for what he saw as the official Church's failures. With typical humanist optimism, he believed that he could improve the world with the help of the leaders of commonwealths (as long they read and paid for his books), and that he could make his own agenda of universal education and social improvement into theirs. He might even persuade them to abandon war, which threatened his programme for a sweetly reasonable and decently educated pan-European society. One of the most important sections of his
Adages
, a particularly sustained and impressive pioneering advocacy of pacifism, springs out of the proverb
Dulce bellum inexpertis
('war is sweet to those who have not experienced it').

By his last years Erasmus realized that princes like Henry VIII and Francois I had deceived him in their elaborate negotiations for universal peace, but his belief in the potential of princely power for good remained undimmed. In a letter to his friend Abbot Paul Volz, antiquary and future Lutheran preacher, written to preface the 1518 edition of the
Enchiridion
, Erasmus asked the rhetorical question, 'What is the state ['
civitas
'] but a great monastery?'
⁷³
This had important implications. First, it denied that there was anything distinctive or useful about monasteries: if the city-state or commonwealth (that is, the whole of society) was to become a monastery, then the monastic vocation which Erasmus himself loathed and had escaped was put firmly in its place, and perhaps his own personal guilt at his flight was exorcized. Second, in Erasmus's ideal society everyone was to be an active citizen of a '
civitas
' as in ancient Greek city-states, and everyone had a duty to behave as purely as monks were supposed to do under a monastic rule. Third, the person to make sure that they did so was the prince. This message much appealed to secular rulers, and fitted in with the existing late medieval trend towards princes and commonwealths taking power in matters of religion and morality out of the hands of churchmen. Catholic and Protestant alike developed this theme of Erasmian humanism, so that the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries became an age which historians have termed 'the Reformation of Manners', when governments began to regulate public morality and tried to organize every individual in society in an unprecedented fashion - on both sides of the Reformation chasm. That was one of the most long-lasting consequences of Erasmus's writings and in that respect sixteenth-century Europe is his Europe.

Yet his legacy was much wider. Beyond the appreciation of scholars, cultivated people showed their cultivation by enjoying his prose. The people of the Netherlands were proud of his birth there and they did not forget his pleas for tolerance. Significantly, the Roman Inquisition at one stage tried to ban all his writings, and religious radicals of whom mainstream Protestants disapproved found much varied inspiration in what he had written. One important matter to interest radicals was that Desiderius Erasmus did not share in Western theologians' general stampede to praise Augustine of Hippo. He had too much respect for creativity and dignity in human beings to accept Augustine's premise that the human mind had been utterly corrupted in the fall of Adam and Eve. Even before he turned towards theology as his main preoccupation, he began around 1489 drafting a work called the
Antibarbari
, eventually published in 1520. One of the aims of this was to defend humanist learning against scholastics, but it had a more general underlying purpose: Erasmus was protesting against the whole perspective on knowledge which sees the only real truth as what is revealed by divine grace, rather than what is available through the reasoning faculties of the human mind and through the acquisition of education. He was expressing his distrust of mysticism, such as that of the
Devotio Moderna
so strong in his native Netherlands, and he deplored the rejection of the created world which often accompanied it; his detestation of the monastic life was related to this feeling.
⁷⁴

So Augustinian pessimism was not for Erasmus. Instead he preferred that other giant of the early Church's theology, the great counterpoint to Augustine across the centuries, Origen. Origen's works first became readily available to Latin-speakers in a good scholarly edition in 1512, but Erasmus's esteem for Origen is already evident in the
Enchiridion
. One major reason was Origen's distinctive view of humanity (in jargon terms, his 'anthropology'), which the Alexandrian had built on a passing phrase in Paul's letter to the Thessalonian Church: a human being was made up of three parts, flesh, spirit and soul.
⁷⁵
Although Paul had not been very helpful in explaining the difference between spirit and soul, Origen and now Erasmus drew their own inferences from the passage. Of the three components of humanity, Origen had said, only the flesh had been thoroughly corrupted, and the highest part, the spirit, was still intact. No wonder Erasmus made so much of the Spirit in his theology. Here was a splendid basis for humanist optimism in the face of Augustine.
⁷⁶

Naturally, with his usual instinct for self-preservation, Erasmus made disapproving noises in his writings about the officially condemned side of Origen's thought - the amount of Platonizing heresy which he had produced - and he also covered his tracks thoroughly against charges of Pelagianism, a word which Augustine had established as one of the ultimate put-downs in Christian vocabulary. However, when Erasmus wrote his interpretations of Paul's Epistle to the Romans, the crucial part of the Bible on which Augustine had constructed his bleak view of humanity, he frequently turned both to Origen and to Jerome's analysis of them, but he was notably more reticent about his attitude to what Augustine had said. Likewise, Erasmus's fierce belief in pacifism, consistently one of the emphatic and radical elements in his thinking, was opposed to the discussion of the legitimacy of war which Augustine had pioneered and which Aquinas had then developed into a theory of 'just war'. Occasionally he could be remarkably bold, as in his studied comment in a long letter to the celebrated theologian of Ingolstadt Johann Eck: 'a single page of Origen teaches me more Christian philosophy than ten of Augustine'.
⁷⁷

Erasmus's discreet fascination with Origen and equally discreet coldness towards Augustine was a pointer to a possible new direction for Western Christianity in the early sixteenth century. It was a direction rejected alike by mainstream Protestantism and those who remained loyal to the pope, but it did inspire many of the more adventurous minds of the period, radicals who refused to be absorbed into hardening theological categories - many of whom no doubt first encountered the unfamiliar name of Origen through the pages of Erasmus's
Enchiridion
. Pacifist radicals also honoured his pacifism, while others noted certain discreet indications that he might not have been entirely convinced of the adequacy of the views of God, Christ, salvation and Trinity which the Council of Chalcedon summed up back in 451. Erasmus had rightly (but at the time unsuccessfully) poured scorn on the so-called 'Johannine comma', the suspect text in I John 5.7-8 which is the only explicit mention in the Bible of the Trinity in something like its developed form.
⁷⁸
Erasmus had also noted that the term 'God' is rarely used for Christ in the biblical text, being normally reserved for the Father alone. When editing the fourth-century theologian Hilary of Poitiers he acutely picked up the same phenomenon in Hilary, besides Hilary's total silence on the divine status of the Spirit. And it was hard to miss one very individual strand running through so much of Erasmus's writing: he brought an ironic smile to the contemplation of the divine and the sacred, and he discerned an ironic smile on the face of the divinity. That sense of irony has not left Western theology since.
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