A History of the Reformation Volume I Part 10

Paul; and the very luxuriance of imagination and bewildering confusion of symbolism in these writings, their elusiveness as opposed to the precision of Thomas Aquinas or of John Duns the Scot, enabled him the more easily to find in them the germs of his own more definite opinions.

When one studies the abstracts of the _Hierarchies_(118)-which Colet wrote out from memory-with the actual text of the books themselves, it is scarcely surprising to find how much there is of Colet and how little of Dionysius.(119)

While it is impossible to say how far Colet, and the Christian Humanists who agreed with him, would have welcomed the principles of a Reformation yet to come, it can be affirmed that he held the same views on two very important points. He did not believe in a priesthood in the mediaeval nor in the modern Roman sense of the word, and his theory of the efficacy and meaning of the sacraments of the Christian Church was essentially Protestant.

According to Colet, there was no such thing as a mediatorial priesthood whose essential function it was to approach G.o.d on men's behalf and present their offerings to Him. The duty of the Christian priesthood was ministerial; it was to declare the love and mercy of G.o.d to their fellow-men, and to strive for the purification, illumination, and salvation of mankind by constant preaching of the truth and diffusion of gospel light, even as Christ strove. He did not believe that priests had received from G.o.d the power of absolving from sins. "It must be needfully remarked," he says, "lest bishops be presumptuous, that it is not the part of men to loose the bonds of sins; nor does the power belong to them of loosing or binding anything,"-the truth Luther set forth in his Theses against Indulgences.

Colet is even more decided in his repudiation of the sacramental theories of the mediaeval Church. The Eucharist is not a sacrifice, but a commemoration of the death of our Lord, and a symbol of the union and communion which believers have with Him, and with their fellow-men through Him. Baptism is a ceremony which symbolises the believer's change of heart and his vow of service to his Master, and signifies "the more excellent baptism of the inner man"; and the duty of sponsors is to train children in the knowledge and fear of G.o.d.(120)

We are told that the Lollards delighted in Colet's preaching; that they advised each other to go to hear him; and that attendance at the Dean's sermons was actually made a charge against them. Colet was no Lollard himself; indeed, he seems to have once sat among ecclesiastical judges who condemned Lollards to death;(121) but the preacher who taught that t.i.thes were voluntary offerings, who denounced the evil lives of the monks and the secular clergy; who hated war, and did not scruple to say so; whose sermons were full of simple Bible instruction, must have recalled many memories of the old Lollard doctrines. For Lollardy had never died out in England: it was active in Colet's days, leavening the country for the Reformation which was to come.

Nor should it be forgotten, in measuring the influence of Colet on the coming Reformation, that Latimer was a friend of his, that William Tyndale was one of his favourite pupils, and that he persuaded Erasmus to turn from purely cla.s.sical studies to edit the New Testament and the early Christian Fathers.

-- 3. Erasmus.

Erasmus, as has often been said, was a "man by himself;" yet he may be regarded as representing one, and perhaps the most frequent, type of Christian Humanism. His character will always be matter of controversy; and his motives may, without unfairness, be represented in an unfavourable light,-a "great scholar but a petty-minded man," is a verdict for which there is abundant evidence. Such was the final judgment of his contemporaries, mainly because he refused to take a definite side in the age when the greatest controversy which has convulsed Western Europe since the downfall of the old Empire seemed to call on every man to range himself with one party or other. Our modern judgment must rest on a different basis. In calmer days, when the din of battle has almost died away, it is possible to recognise that to refuse to be a partisan _may_ indicate greatness instead of littleness of soul, a keener vision, and a calmer courage. We cannot judge the man as hastily as his contemporaries did. Still there is evidence enough and to spare to back their verdict.

Every biographer has admitted that it is hopeless to look for truth in his voluminous correspondence. His feelings, hopes, intentions, and actual circ.u.mstances are described to different correspondents at the same time in utterly different ways. He was always writing for effect, and often for effect of a rather sordid kind. He seldom gave a definite opinion on any important question without attempting to qualify it in such a manner that he might be able, if need arose, to deny that he had given it. No man knew better how to use "if" and "but" so as to shelter himself from all responsibility. He had the ingenuity of the cuttle-fish to conceal himself and his real opinions, and it was commonly used to protect his own skin.

All this may be admitted; it can scarcely be denied.

Yet from his first visit to England (1498) down to his practical refusal of a Cardinal's Hat from Pope Adrian VI., on condition that he would reside at Rome and a.s.sist in fighting the Reformation, Erasmus had his own conception of what a reformation of Christianity really meant, and what share in it it was possible for him to take. It must be admitted that he held to this idea and kept to the path he had marked out for himself with a tenacity of purpose which did him honour. It was by no means always that of personal safety, still less the road to personal aggrandis.e.m.e.nt. It led him in the end where he had never expected to stand. It made him a man despised by both sides in the great controversy; it left him absolutely alone, friendless, and without influence. He frequently used very contemptible means to ward off attempts to make him diverge to the right or left; he abandoned many of his earlier principles, or so modified them that they were no longer recognisable. But he was always true to his own idea of a reformation and of his life-work as a reformer.

Erasmus was firmly convinced that Christianity was above all things something practical. It had to do with the ordinary life of mankind. It meant love, humility, purity, reverence,-every virtue which the Saviour had made manifest in His life on earth. This early "Christian philosophy"

had been buried out of sight under a Scholastic Theology full of sophistical subtleties, and had been lost in the mingled Judaism and Paganism of the popular religious life, with its weary ceremonies and barbarous usages. A true reformation, he believed, was the moral renovation of mankind, and the one need of the age was to return to that earlier purer religion based on a real inward reverence for and imitation of Christ. The man of letters, like himself, he conceived could play the part of a reformer, and that manfully, in two ways. He could try, by the use of wit and satire, to make contemptible the follies of the Schoolmen and the vulgar travesty of religion which was in vogue among the people.

He could also bring before the eyes of all men that earlier and purer religion which was true Christianity. He could edit the New Testament, and enable men to read the very words which Jesus spoke and Paul preached, make them see the deeds of Jesus and hear the apostolic explanations of their meaning. He could say:

"Only be teachable, and you have already made much way in this (the Christian) Philosophy. It supplies a spirit for a teacher, imparted to none more readily than to the simple-minded. Other philosophies, by the very difficulty of their precepts, are removed out of the range of most minds. No age, no s.e.x, no condition of life is excluded from this. The sun itself is not more common and open to all than the teaching of Christ. For I utterly dissent from those who are unwilling that the Sacred Scriptures should be read by the unlearned translated into their vulgar tongue, as though Christ had taught such subtleties that they can scarcely be understood even by a few theologians, or as though the strength of the Christian religion consisted in men's ignorance of it. The mysteries of kings it may be safer to conceal, but Christ wished His mysteries to be published as openly as possible. I wish that even the weakest woman should read the Gospel-should read the Epistles of Paul. And I wish these were translated into all languages, so that they might be read and understood, not only by Scots and Irishmen, but also by Turks and Saracens. To make them understood is surely the first step. It may be that they might be ridiculed by many, but some would take them to heart. I long that the husbandman should sing portions of them to himself as he follows the plough, that the weaver should hum them to the tune of his shuttle, that the traveller should beguile with their stories the tedium of his journey."(122)

The scholar who became a reformer could further make plain, by editing and publis.h.i.+ng the writings of the earlier Christian Fathers, what the oldest Christian Theology had been before the Schoolmen spoiled it.

The conception that a reformation of Christianity was mainly a renovation of morals, enabled the Christian Humanist to keep true to the Renaissance idea that the writers of cla.s.sical antiquity were to be used to aid the work of ameliorating the lot of mankind. The Florentine circle spoke of the inspiration of Homer, of Plato, and of Cicero, and saw them labouring as our Lord had done to teach men how to live better lives. Pico and Reuchlin had gone further afield, and had found illuminating antic.i.p.ations of Christianity, in this sense and in others, among the Hebrews, the Egyptians, and perhaps the Brahmins. Erasmus was too clear-sighted to be drawn into any alliance with Oriental mysticism or cabalistic speculations; but he insisted on the aid which would come from the Christian reformer making full use of the ethical teaching of the wise men of Greece and Rome in his attempt to produce a moral renovation in the lives of his fellows. Socrates and Cicero, each in his own day and within his own sphere, had striven for the same moral renovation that Christianity promised, and, in this sense at least, might be called Christians before Christ. So persuaded was Erasmus of their affinity with the true spirit of Christianity, that he declared that Cicero had as much right to a high place in heaven as many a Christian saint, and that when he thought of the Athenian martyr he could scarcely refrain from saying, _Sancte Socrates, Ora pro n.o.bis_.

It must be remembered also that Erasmus had a genuine and n.o.ble horror of war, which was by no means the mere shrinking of a man whose nerves were always quivering. He preached peace as boldly and in as disinterested a fas.h.i.+on as did his friend John Colet. He could not bear the thought of a religious war. This must not be forgotten in any estimate of his conduct and of his relation to the Reformation. No man, not even Luther, scattered the seeds of revolution with a more reckless hand, and yet a thorough and steadfast dislike to all movements which could be called revolutionary was one of the most abiding elements in his character. He hated what he called the "tumult." He had an honest belief that all public evils in State and Church must be endured until they dissolve away quietly under the influence of sarcasm and common sense, or until they are removed by the action of the responsible authorities. He was clear-sighted enough to see that an open and avowed attack on the papal supremacy, or on any of the more cherished doctrines and usages of the mediaeval Church, must end in strife and in bloodshed, and he therefore honestly believed that no such attack ought to be made.

When all these things are kept in view, it is possible to see what conception Erasmus had about his work as a reformer, with its possibilities and its limitations. He adhered to it tenaciously all his life. He held it in the days of his earlier comparative obscurity. He maintained it when he had been enthroned as the prince of the realm of learning. He clung to it in his discredited old age. No one can justify the means he sometimes took to prevent being drawn from the path he had marked out for himself; but there is something to be said for the man who, through good report and evil, stuck resolutely to his view of what a reformation ought to be, and what were the functions of a man of letters who felt himself called to be a reformer. Had Luther been gifted with that keen sense of prevision with which Erasmus was so fatally endowed, would he have stood forward to attack Indulgences in the way he did? It is probable that it would have made no difference in his action; but he did not think so himself. He said once, "No good work comes about by our own wisdom; it begins in dire necessity. I was forced into mine; but had I known then what I know now, ten wild horses would not have drawn me into it." The man who leads a great movement of reform may see the distant, but has seldom a clear vision of the nearer future. He is one who feels the slow pressure of an imperious spiritual power, who is content with one step at a time, and who does not ask to see the whole path stretching out before him.

Erasmus lost both his parents while he was a child, and never enjoyed the advantages of a home training. He was driven by deceit or by self-deception into a monastery when he was a lad. He escaped from the clutches of the monastic life when he was twenty years of age, broken in health, and having learned to know human nature on its bad side and to trade on that knowledge. He was one of the loneliest of mortals, and trusted in no one but himself. With one great exception, he had no friends.h.i.+p which left an enduring influence on his character. From childhood he taught himself in his own way; when he grew to manhood he planned and schemed for himself; he steadfastly refused to be drawn into any kind of work which he did not like for its own sake; he persistently shunned every entanglement which might have controlled his action or weighted him with any responsibility. He stands almost alone among the Humanists in this. All the others were officials, or professors, or private teachers, or jurists, or ecclesiastics. Erasmus was nothing, and would be nothing, but a simple man of letters.

Holbein has painted him so often that his features are familiar. Every line of the clearly cut face suggests demure sarcasm-the thin lips closely pressed together, the half-closed eyelids, and the keen glance of the scarcely seen blue eyes. The head is intellectual, but there is nothing masculine about the portrait-nothing suggesting the ma.s.siveness of the learned burgher Pirkheimer; or the jovial strength of the Humanist _landsknecht_ Eoba.n.u.s Hessus; or the lean wolf-like tenacity of Hutten, the descendant of robber-knights; or the steadfast homely courage of Martin Luther. The dainty hands, which Holbein drew so often, and the general primness of his appearance, suggest a descent from a long line of maiden aunts. The keen intelligence was enclosed in a sickly body, whose frailty made continuous demands on the soul it imprisoned. It needed warm rooms with stoves that sent forth no smell, the best wines, an easy-going horse, and a deft servant; and to procure all these comforts Erasmus wrote the st.u.r.diest of begging letters and stooped to all kinds of flatteries.

The visit which Erasmus paid to England in 1498 was the turning-point in his life. He found himself, for the first time, among men who were his equals in learning and his superiors in many things. "When I listen to my friend Colet," he says, "it seems to me like listening to Plato himself.

Who does not marvel at the complete mastery of the sciences in Grocyn?

What could be keener, more profound, and more searching than the judgment of Linacre? Has Nature ever made a more gentle, a sweeter, or a happier disposition than Thomas More's?" He made the acquaintance of men as full of the New Learning as he was himself, who hated the Scotist theology more bitterly than he did, and who nevertheless believed in a pure, simple Christian philosophy, and were earnest Christians. They urged him to join them in their work, and we can trace in the correspondence of Erasmus the growing influence of Colet. The Dean of St. Paul's made Erasmus the decidedly Christian Humanist he became, and impressed on him that conception of a reformation which, leaving external things very much as they were, undertook a renovation of morals. He never lost the impress of Colet's stamp.

It would appear from one of Erasmus' letters that Colet urged him to write commentaries on some portions of the New Testament; but Erasmus would only work in his own way; and it is probable that his thoughts were soon turned to preparing an edition of the New Testament in Greek. The task was long brooded over; and he had to perfect himself in his knowledge of the language.

This determination to undertake no work for which he was not supremely fitted, together with his powers of application and acquisition, gave Erasmus the reputation of being a strong man. He was seen to be unlike any other Humanist, whether Italian or German. He had no desire merely to reproduce the antique, or to confine himself within the narrow circle in which the "Poets" of the Renaissance worked. He put ancient culture to modern uses. Erasmus was no arm-chair student. He was one of the keenest observers of everything human-the Lucian or the Voltaire of the sixteenth century. From under his half-closed eyelids his quick glance seized and retained the salient characteristics of all sorts and conditions of men and women. He described theologians, jurists and philosophers, monks and parish priests, merchants and soldiers, husbands and wives, women good and bad, dancers and diners, pilgrims, pardon-sellers, and keepers of relics; the peasant in the field, the artisan in the workshop, and the vagrant on the highway. He had studied all, and could describe them with a few deft phrases, as incisive as Durer's strokes, with an almost perfect style, and with easy sarcasm.

This application of the New Learning to portray the common life, combined with his profound learning, made Erasmus the idol of the young German Humanists. They said that he was more than mortal, that his judgment was infallible, and that his work was perfect. They made pilgrimages to visit him. An interview was an event to be talked about for years; a letter, a precious treasure to be bequeathed as an heirloom. Some men refused to render the universal homage accorded by scholars and statesmen, by princes lay and clerical. Luther scented Pelagian theology in his annotations; he scorned Erasmus' wilful playing with truth; he said that the great Humanist was a mocker who poured ridicule upon everything, even on Christ and religion. There was some ground for the charge. His sarcasm was not confined to his _Praise of Folly_ or to his _Colloquies_. It appears in almost everything that he wrote-even in his Paraphrases of the New Testament.

That such a man should have felt himself called upon to be a reformer, that this Saul should have appeared among the prophets, is in itself testimony that he lived during a great religious crisis, and that the religious question was the most important one in his days.

The princ.i.p.al literary works of Erasmus meant to serve the reformation he desired to see are:-two small books, _Enchiridion militis christiani_ (_A Handbook of the Christian Soldier_, or _A Pocket Dagger for the Christian Soldier_-it may be translated either way), first printed in 1503, and _Inst.i.tutio Principis Christiani_ (1518); his _Encomium Moriae_ (_Praise of Folly_, 1511); his edition of the _New Testament_, or _Novum Instrumentum_ (1516), with prefaces and paraphrases; and perhaps many of the dialogues in his _Colloquia_ (1519).

Erasmus himself explains that in the _Enchiridion_ he wrote to counteract the vulgar error of those who think that religion consists in ceremonies and in more than Jewish observances, while they neglect what really belongs to piety. The whole aim of the book is to a.s.sert the individual responsibility of man to G.o.d apart from any intermediate human agency.

Erasmus ignores as completely as Luther would have done the whole mediaeval thought of the mediatorial function of the Church and its priestly order.

In this respect the book is essentially Protestant and thoroughly revolutionary. It a.s.serts in so many words that much of the popular religion is pure paganism:

"One wors.h.i.+ps a certain Rochus, and why? because he fancies he will drive away the plague from his body. Another mumbles prayers to Barbara or George, lest he fall into the hands of his enemy.

This man fasts to Apollonia to prevent the toothache. That one gazes upon an image of the divine Job, that he may be free from the itch.... In short, whatever our fears and our desires, we set so many G.o.ds over them, and these are different in different nations.... This is not far removed from the superst.i.tion of those who used to vow t.i.thes to Hercules in order to get rich, or a c.o.c.k to aesculapius to recover from an illness, or who slew a bull to Neptune for a favourable voyage. The names are changed, but the object is the same."(123)

In speaking of the monastic life, he says:

" 'Love,' says Paul, 'is to edify your neighbour,' ... and if this only were done, nothing could be more joyous or more easy than the life of the 'religious'; but now this life seems gloomy, full of Jewish superst.i.tions, not in any way free from the vices of laymen and in some ways more corrupt. If Augustine, whom they boast of as the founder of their order, came to life again, he would not recognise them; he would exclaim that he had never approved of this sort of life, but had organised a way of living according to the rule of the Apostles, not according to the superst.i.tion of the Jews."(124)

The more one studies the _Praise of Folly_, the more evident it becomes that Erasmus did not intend to write a satire on human weakness in general: the book is the most severe attack on the mediaeval Church that had, up to that time, been made; and it was meant to be so. The author wanders from his main theme occasionally, but always to return to the insane follies of the religious life sanctioned by the highest authorities of the mediaeval Church. Popes, bishops, theologians, monks, and the ordinary lay Christians, are all unmitigated fools in their ordinary religious life. The style is vivid, the author has seen what he describes, and he makes his readers see it also. He writes with a mixture of light mockery and bitter earnestness. He exposes the foolish questions of the theologians; the vices and temporal ambitions of the Popes, bishops, and monks; the stupid trust in festivals, pilgrimages, indulgences, and relics. The theologians, the author says, are rather dangerous people to attack, for they come down on one with their six hundred conclusions and command him to recant, and if he does not they declare him a heretic forthwith. The problems which interest them are:

"Whether there was any instant of time in the divine generation?

... Could G.o.d have taken the form of a woman, a devil, an a.s.s, a gourd, or a stone? How the gourd could have preached, wrought miracles, hung on the cross?"(125)

He jeers at the Popes and higher ecclesiastics:

"Those supreme Pontiffs who stand in the place of Christ, if they should try to imitate His life, that is, His poverty, His toil, His teaching, His cross, and His scorn of this world ... what could be more dreadful!... We ought not to forget that such a ma.s.s of scribes, copyists, notaries, advocates, secretaries, mule-drivers, grooms, money-changers, procurers, and gayer persons yet I might mention, did I not respect your ears,-that this whole swarm which now burdens-I beg your pardon, honours-the Roman See would be driven to starvation."(126)

As for the monks:

"The greater part of them have such faith in their ceremonies and human traditions, that they think one heaven is not reward enough for such great doings.... One will show his belly stuffed with every kind of fish; another will pour out a hundred bushels of psalms; another will count up myriads of fasts, and make up for them all again by almost bursting himself at a single dinner.

Another will bring forward such a heap of ceremonies that seven s.h.i.+ps would hardly hold them; another boast that for sixty years he has never touched a penny except with double gloves on his hands.... But Christ will interrupt their endless bragging, and will demand-'Whence this new kind of Judaism?'

"They do all things by rule, by a kind of sacred mathematics; as, for instance, how many knots their shoes must be tied with, of what colour everything must be, what variety in their garb, of what material, how many straws'-breadth to their girdle, of what form and of how many bushels' capacity their cowl, how many fingers broad their hair, and how many hours they sleep...."(127)

He ridicules men who go running about to Rome, Compostella, or Jerusalem, wasting on long and dangerous journeys money which might be better spent in feeding the hungry and clothing the naked. He scoffs at those who buy Indulgences, who sweetly flatter themselves with counterfeit pardons, and who have measured off the duration of Purgatory without error, as if by a water-clock, into ages, years, months, and days, like the multiplication table.(128) Is it religion to believe that if any one pays a penny out of what he has stolen, he can have the whole slough of his life cleaned out at once, and all his perjuries, l.u.s.ts, drunkennesses, all his quarrels, murders, cheats, treacheries, falsehoods, bought off in such a way that he may begin over again with a new circle of crimes? The reverence for relics was perhaps never so cruelly satirised as in the Colloquy, _Peregrinatio Religionis Ergo_.

It must be remembered that this bitter satire was written some years before Luther began the Reformation by an attack on Indulgences. It may seem surprising how much liberty the satirist allowed himself, and how much was permitted to him. But Erasmus knew very well how to protect himself. He was very careful to make no definite attack, and to make no mention of names. He was always ready to explain that he did not mean to attack the Papacy, but only bad Popes; that he had the highest respect for the monastic life, and only satirised evil-minded monks; or that he reverenced the saints, but thought that reverence ought to be shown by imitating them in their lives of piety. He could say all this with perfect truth. Indeed, it is likely that with all his scorn against the monks, Erasmus, in his heart, believed that a devout Capuchin or Franciscan monk lived the ideal Christian life. He seems to say so in his Colloquy, _Militis et Carthusiani_. He wrote, moreover, before the dignitaries of the mediaeval Church had begun to take alarm. Liberal Churchmen who were the patrons of the New Learning had no objection to see the vices of the times and the Church life of the day satirised by one who wrote such exquisite latinity. In all his more serious work Erasmus was careful to shelter himself under the protection of great ecclesiastics.