Desiderius Erasmus
esiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam was the most celebrated scholar of his age, the “prince of the humanists,” whose edition of the Greek New Testament in 1516 placed the apostles’ own words in the hands of the men who would lead the Reformation. He was ordained a priest, and he lived and died in the communion of the Roman Church. He lashed the vices of monks, prelates, and popes, and he called men to a simpler faith and a purer life. But when Luther set the Scriptures above the church and preached the free grace of God against the merit of man, Erasmus drew back and at last wrote against him.
For this reason Erasmus stands as a powerful illustration that the Reformation was categorically different from every other reform. Moral reform followed the Reformation, but the Reformation was first a return to the Scripture as the church’s supreme authority and a rediscovery of the gospel in it. Erasmus had an appetite for moral reform. He did not seek theological reform. Merle d’Aubigné drew the line plainly:
Erasmus never was, and never could have been, a Reformer, but he paved the way for others.1 J. H. Merle d’AubignéHistory of the Reformation in the Sixteenth Century
Rotterdam, Deventer, and Paris
Erasmus was born at Rotterdam on October 28, probably in 1466, though some put his birth as late as 1469.2, 3 He was the illegitimate son of Gerard of Gouda, who afterward became a priest, and of Margaret, a physician’s daughter. He was sent to school at Deventer, and before he was thirteen his master Sinthemius embraced him and declared, “This child will reach the highest pinnacles of science.” Both parents died while he was young, and his guardians pressed him, much against his will, into a house of Augustinian canons.1 He hated the rigor of the cloister and the scorn of its teachers for classical learning, and after his ordination as priest in 1492 he left it to serve as secretary to the Bishop of Cambrai, who sent him to study theology at the University of Paris.4, 2
Paris gave him poverty, bad food, and scholastic disputations he despised. He lodged for a time at the Collège de Montaigu, whose spoiled eggs he still complained of years later.5 “When I get a little money I buy books,” he wrote. “If any is left … I buy food and clothes.”4 From Paris he began the life of a wandering scholar, living by his pen, his pupils, and his patrons.
England, Oxford, and Cambridge
In 1499 Lord Mountjoy, who had known him at Paris, brought him to England. At the Lord Mayor’s table he met a witty young man of nineteen who matched him jest for jest until Erasmus cried, “Aut tu es Morus aut nullus” (“you are either More or nobody”), and Thomas More answered, “Aut tu es Erasmus aut diabolus.” They were friends for life. At Oxford he sat at the table of John Colet with Grocyn, Linacre, and a young bursar named Thomas Wolsey, and at Eltham he met the nine-year-old Prince Henry.6 Colet taught from the Scriptures themselves rather than from the layers of scholastic commentary, and he urged Erasmus to become a theologian of the old kind, one who studied the Bible as the church fathers had. From that time Erasmus gave himself to Greek.4
In 1506 he went to Italy, where he watched Pope Julius II enter conquered Bologna in triumph. Two years later, short of money, he took work as tutor to Alexander Stewart, the young Archbishop of St. Andrews and son of James IV of Scotland. The archbishop gave him a ring bearing the Roman god Terminus, and Erasmus took its motto for his own: Nulli concedo, “I yield to no one.”3 When Henry VIII came to the throne in 1509, Mountjoy wrote to him that “Our Henry Octavus, or rather Octavius, is on the throne,” and Erasmus hastened back to London.6 Between 1510 and 1514 he taught at Cambridge, holding for a short time a professorship of Greek. Not all of Cambridge welcomed him, and one college would later forbid the use of his New Testament.7, 2
The Satirist of Monks and Popes
On the road from Italy to England in 1509 Erasmus composed his Praise of Folly. Folly, speaking in her own person, mocks the theologians wandering in their maze of syllogisms, the monks with their ignorance and impurity, and the people who think a glance at a painted saint will preserve them for a day. Merle d’Aubigné compared him to Voltaire: a little fair-haired man with peering blue eyes, “constantly pouring out elegant and biting sarcasms against the theology and superstition of his age.”8 His Enchiridion, or Handbook of the Christian Soldier, called laymen to an inward piety nourished by Scripture and prayer. Years later William Tyndale would translate it into English.3, 7
After Julius died in 1513, a savage dialogue began to circulate, Julius Excluded from Heaven, in which the warrior pope finds that his key will not open the gate of heaven. Erasmus never owned it, though most modern scholars believe he wrote it.9 Yet even here the target was the man, not the system. David Fink observes that Erasmus “did not take issue with church doctrine,” but with the lure of power, the distractions of wealth, and a forgetfulness of God’s judgment.10 He would correct the manners of Rome. He would not question her doctrine.
The Greek New Testament of 1516
In 1514 Erasmus came to Basel, where the bishop received him with honor and the learned gathered around him.11 There, in the shop of the printer Johann Froben, he hurried into print in 1516 the first published Greek New Testament, set beside his own fresh Latin translation and annotations. The full story of that book is told on our page on the Greek New Testament. Erasmus knew what he hoped it would do:
I wish … to bring to its level that frigid, wordy, disputatious thing, termed Theology.12 Desiderius Erasmuson publishing his New Testament, as quoted by Merle d’Aubigné
“It is not from human reservoirs, fetid with stagnant waters, that we should draw the doctrine of salvation,” he wrote, “but from the pure and abundant streams that flow from the heart of God.” He called for the Scriptures to be translated into every tongue: “The husbandman should sing them as he holds the handle of his plough, the weaver repeat them as he plies his shuttle.” His book was carried to London, Oxford, and Cambridge, and the priests answered with fury. “He has corrected the Vulgate,” they cried, and “this book calls upon men to repent, instead of requiring them, as the Vulgate does, to do penance!”13 Humanists celebrated the second edition of 1519, and Thomas Linacre is reported to have said, after first reading the New Testament in Greek, “Either this is not the gospel, or we are not Christians.”14
Merle d’Aubigné judged that Erasmus did not see the scope of his own work: “Had he foreseen it, he would perhaps have recoiled in alarm.” He believed all good men would unite to raise a spiritual temple, and he offered his book as “the foundation stone.” But he laid a stone he would not build upon. “Erasmus, like Caiaphas, prophesied without being aware of it.”13 At Cambridge, Thomas Bilney bought the forbidden book in secret for the elegance of its Latin and found there the words, “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners; of whom I am chief.”15 At Wittenberg, the Greek metanoia helped teach Luther that repentance is a turning of the heart, not a sacrament of penance.14 As Merle d’Aubigné put it, “Reuchlin and Erasmus restored the Bible to the learned; Luther restored it to the people.”12
Zwingli and the Swiss
From Basel Erasmus greeted the young priest of Glarus, Ulrich Zwingli: “I congratulate the Swiss nation,” he wrote, “that by your studies and your manners, both alike excellent, you labour to polish and elevate them.” Zwingli came to see him and offered himself as a disciple: “I give you what Eschines gave—I give you myself.” Back in his mountains he wrote, “There is nothing of which I boast so much as of having seen Erasmus.” In the same circle Erasmus befriended Johannes Oecolampadius, and told him, “In the Holy Scriptures … one thing only ought to be sought, viz., Jesus Christ.”11
A poem of Erasmus, in which Christ complains that men do not seek all good from Him, struck Zwingli to the heart. “All!” he repeated. “Christ is our only treasure.”16 Erasmus could write such words. He could not follow them. As the Reformation advanced he assured Zwingli, “I shall not be unfaithful to the cause of Christ … at least so far as the age will permit me.”17 In 1526 he confessed, “The sentiments of Œcolampadius would not displease me if the testimony of the Church were not against them.”18 There lay the whole difference. The Reformers bowed to Scripture against the church. Erasmus bowed to the church against his own reading of Scripture.
From Admiration to Controversy with Luther
At first the two men seemed to many to preach the same gospel. Luther’s first letter to Erasmus, in 1519, hailed him as “our delight and our hope.”19 In a letter to Luther, Erasmus said he could not describe “the emotions, the truly tragic scenes,” Luther’s writings had produced, and Froben sent six hundred copies of Luther’s works into France and Spain.20 But Luther saw the difference. “Erasmus knows very well how to expose error,” he said, “but he knows not how to teach the truth.”1
In December 1520 Frederick the Wise asked Erasmus at Cologne what he thought of Luther. Erasmus twisted his mouth, bit his lips, and at last said half in jest:
Luther has committed two great faults; he has attacked the pope’s crown and the monks’ belly.21 Desiderius Erasmusto Frederick the Wise at Cologne, 1520, as reported by Merle d’Aubigné
Then, more seriously, he told the Elector that the bull against Luther showed none of the meekness of a vicar of Christ, that “out of so many universities two only” had attacked Luther (they were Cologne and Louvain),22 and that “the world is thirsting for evangelical truth.” Yet as soon as he had written down his opinion, fear of the papal nuncio Aleander seized him, and he begged for the paper back.21 At Louvain the conservative theologians made his life intolerable. Seeing that the choice would soon lie between the stake and exile, and confessing that he was not made for martyrdom, he moved to Basel in 1521.23, 2 “Others may aspire to martyrdom,” he had written. “Were some tumult to arise, I fear I would play the part of Peter.”24 To Leo X he gave his assurance: “I am not so mad as to fly in the face of the Vicar of Christ.”25
The pope, the emperor, Henry VIII, and men like Duke George of Saxony pressed him to write against Luther. Duke George lost patience: “My dear Erasmus, wash the fur for me, and do not merely wet it.”1 “It is very easy to say, Write against Luther,” Erasmus told one Roman theologian, “but it is a matter full of peril.” In April 1524 Luther wrote to him plainly: “Since you are wanting in courage, remain where you are.… Be satisfied to remain a spectator of our tragedy; and publish no books against me; and for my part, I will write none against you.” Erasmus took the letter as an insult.26
In the autumn of 1524 he published De libero arbitrio, his Discussion on Free Will. “The die is cast,” he wrote to Henry VIII. “I expect I shall be stoned for it.”27 Roland Bainton notes that when Erasmus finally named his quarrel with Luther, it was neither indulgences nor the Mass but the doctrine of man.28 Merle d’Aubigné saw the irony: “Unable to be the champion of Romanism in what it has added to Christianity, he undertook to defend it in what it had taken away.” Luther thanked him for it: “You are the only man that has gone to the root of the matter.… I would rather be occupied with this subject than with all these secondary questions about the pope, purgatory, and indulgences.”27
Erasmus allowed that no one can earn true merit before God, but he held that God graciously accepts man’s good intentions and efforts as worthy of reward. As Reeves and Chester observe, he appears to have missed Luther’s answer entirely, that sinners who have no righteousness of their own may have the righteousness of Christ credited to them.29 He had plainly set himself against the scriptural truth of man’s depravity and God’s sovereign grace. Luther found the book “so much eloquence in so bad a cause,” like “mud and dung on dishes of silver and gold,” and at the end of 1525 he answered with The Bondage of the Will. “The Holy Ghost is no sceptic,” he wrote. Erasmus was beside himself. In his Hyperaspistes he called the Reformer a liar and a blasphemer and prophesied “that no name under the sun will be held in greater execration than Luther’s.”27
Basel, Freiburg, and the End
Erasmus mocked the Reformation as a matter of marriages. When Oecolampadius married in 1528, he quipped, “Luther’s affair is called a tragedy, but I maintain it is a comedy, for each act of the drama ends in a wedding.” In February 1529 Basel abolished the Mass and cleared the images from its churches. Erasmus remarked dryly that the saints had worked no miracle to save themselves, and for a long time he would turn his head aside when he met his old friend Oecolampadius. “It is all over,” he wrote. “I am resolved to leave Basle.” He wanted to slip away from a quiet landing, but the city made him board his boat at the great bridge before a crowd, and he went down the Rhine to Freiburg im Breisgau.30, 2
In his last years, aged and ill, he returned to Basel. A young French exile named John Calvin had taken refuge in the same city, and in March 1536 the first edition of his Institutes of the Christian Religion came from a Basel press.31 Erasmus died at Basel on July 12, 1536. He did not receive the last sacraments of the church he had refused to leave.32 Rome repaid his loyalty poorly. In 1537 the Spanish Inquisition banned the reading of his works,31 and in time Rome itself forbade them.33
Learned, but Not a Reformer
Merle d’Aubigné’s verdict was severe and just: “He was, first of all, a learned, and, in the second place only, a Christian man.” Erasmus believed that “a disadvantageous peace … is far better than the justest war,” and that the corruptions of Rome, however grave, were “no affair of mine, or of those like me.” He tried to reform with the church’s approval, and when he saw that the Reformation and Rome could not be reconciled, he deserted the Reformation and “lost himself with all parties.” The monks called him “a second Lucian,” and the noblest men of his age lost their esteem for him.1
Reeves and Chester observe that Erasmus’s idea of reformation matched his idea of Christianity: the church, like the sinner, needed only some improvement.29 Timothy George draws the line between him and Luther. Luther’s protest was “not primarily moral, as was that of Erasmus and other reformers, but rather theological.”34 That is why the humanist could acknowledge a true need for change without having the means for true change. Moral reforms come and go, and they have no staying power. Only the recovery of the gospel itself accounts for the unique providence of the Reformation.
Erasmus, fearing strife and the loss of favor with princes, sought to correct Rome’s abuses with soft words, yet held fast to her doctrinal errors. His wisdom was that of the world, not the wisdom that is from above (James 3:17). He sought peace without truth, and he made himself a stumbling block to the work of God’s Reformation. Yet God used even his labors. The Greek Testament he gave to the learned became, through Luther, Zwingli, and Tyndale, the Bible of the plowboy, and the scholar who would not follow the gospel had placed it in the hands of those who would.
