to the Church who would otherwise have forsaken it, and many join it who would otherwise have kept aloof.” He himself was not to be drawn by invective to embrace Luther’s cause. He even ventures to affirm that he was the first, who, almost single-handed (“ipse primus omnium ac pene solus restiti pullulanti malo”), opposed Luther, and that he had proved a true prophet in predicting that the play which the world had greeted with such warm applause would have a sad termination.—He speaks more truly when he seriously regrets having fanned the flames by his writings. Thus, in 1521, he writes to Baron Mountjoy: “Had I known beforehand that things would shape themselves so, I would either have refrained from writing certain things, or have written them differently.”[714]
If Luther, after having met with strong opposition from Erasmus, in place of the support he had anticipated, denounced him as an infidel Epicurean, he only demonstrated anew how far passion and bitter disappointment could carry him.[715] “Luther,” says Kawerau, “when passing judgment on Erasmus, sees only the dark side of his character, and this the more as years go by.” “In his writings, and even in his most harmless utterances, Luther scents evil. In the contempt he pours upon him he is often grossly unfair, and, as a whole, his judgment of him does not do justice either to the greatness or the character of Erasmus.”[716]
Even where Luther does not actually attribute unbelief and untruthfulness to his opponent he frequently goes too far in blaming his sarcasm. He says, for instance, at a later date, that Erasmus could do nothing but jeer; that to refute or disprove anything he was utterly unable. “If I were Papist I would easily get the upper hand of him. … By merely laughing at opponents no one will succeed in vanquishing them.”[717] He could see in Erasmus only the idle cynic Lucian and nothing else. As early as 1517 he declaims against the “Erasmic” habit of “making fun of the faults and miseries of the Church of Christ instead of bewailing them before God with deep sighs.” It has, however, been pointed out by a Protestant theologian that such serious complaints concerning the disorders in the Church are not lacking even in the earlier writings of Erasmus.[718]
A severe but not unfair criticism of Erasmus—which does not charge him with unbelief or apostasy though censuring him for other grave faults—is to be met with in two German writers, both of them well conversant with their age, viz. Kilian Leib, Prior of the monastery of Rebdorf, and Bl. Peter Canisius.
The former, in dealing in his “Annales” with the year 1528, complains of the effect on the religious world of the sceptical and critical manner of his contemporary. “Wherever Erasmus had expressed a wish, or even merely conveyed a hint, there Luther has broken in with all his might.”[719] He is here referring to the strictures contained in the Annotations of Erasmus on the New Testament, in particular on Math. xi., upon the fasts and feasts, marriage laws and practice of confession, on the heavy burden of prayers, the number of Decretals and the endless ceremonial rules.
The other, Peter Canisius, speaks of Erasmus in the Preface to his edition of the Letters of St. Jerome. He says that Erasmus is distinguished by the “fluency and richness of his literary style” and his “rare and admirable eloquence.” In polite literature he had undoubtedly done good service, but he should either have refrained from meddling with theology or have treated it with more reserve and fairness. No one before him had ventured to censure the Fathers, the Schoolmen and the theologians in so severe and overbearing a fashion, nor was one to be found more touchy when contradicted. “He has carried this so far that he is now made as little of in the Catholic as in the opposite camp. In his writings he paid more attention to the form than to the matter.” The following sentence is worthy of attention: “I know not by what spirit he was really led, for he dealt with the Church’s doctrine according to the theology of Pyrrhus [the sceptic].”[720]
What, we may ask in this connection, was the origin of the saying which became later so widely current: “Erasmus laid the egg which Luther hatched”?
It is first alluded to by Erasmus himself in 1523, where he informs a friend that this had been said of him by certain Franciscans; he adds, that he had indeed laid a hen’s egg, but that Luther had hatched out quite a different nestling.[721] In 1534 he speaks more definitely of the German Franciscans as the purveyors of this saying, and in particular of the Cismontane commissioner of the Order, Nicholas Herborn, who with the assistance of other Friars had caused a volume of sermons to be printed at Antwerp in which appeared “the favourite asseveration of the brethren,” viz.: “Erasmus is Luther’s father; he laid the eggs and Luther hatched out the chicks; Luther, Zwingli, Œcolampadius and Erasmus are the soldiers of Pilate who crucified Jesus.”[722]
Similar utterances were indeed current in Catholic circles. Canisius mentions that he had frequently heard a saying which agrees with the words in Leib: “Ubi Erasmus innuit, illic Lutherus irruit,”[723] and might be rendered: Where Erasmus merely indicated, Luther violently eradicated. So general was the feeling that the head of the Humanists had really paved the way for Luther’s action.
As we have frequently pointed out, Luther’s speedy and unhoped-for success is altogether inexplicable, unless his way had been prepared beforehand by others, and that particular kind of Humanism which Erasmus had been largely instrumental in furthering cannot but be regarded as one of the causes which contributed to the spread of Lutheranism.
It is true that Humanism in some regards presented an inspiring and attractive spectacle. The revival of classical learning, the union of which with Christian truth had been the original aim both of the Humanists and of the Church, who had encouraged them; the idea of liberty and of the rights of the individual; the criticism and revision of ecclesiastical studies; all this, within due limits, seemed to presage a spring-tide in the development of the Christian nations at the close of the Middle Ages. The sanguine dreamt of a happy amalgamation of the ancient faith with the new culture of an age which was striving mightily upwards in all that concerned citizenship. Yet even enthusiastic patrons of the Christian Humanism of the day could not praise all the ideas current among those of its representatives who looked up to Erasmus; in such quarters many were the grievances raised against the Church, it being urged that religion had been corrupted, and that a purer Christianity should be established on the model of the earlier ages, and minus the mediæval errors. Ideas such as these were distinctly revolutionary, especially when they had taken root in the heads of the masses in an even worse form. “It cannot as a matter of fact be denied,” says the French Academician P. Imbart de la Tour, “that the Humanists by their mode of criticising, accelerated the gathering of the revolutionary storm-clouds of the sixteenth century.”[724]
It was in the nature of an expiation that, along with Erasmus, many like-minded Humanists, following the example of their leader, deserted Luther’s cause, as soon as the air had been cleared by the master’s work against Luther and the denial of free-will. At the head of the German Humanists, Mutian, now an old man, welcomed the defence of free-will embodied in the “Diatribe.”[725] Zasius and Crotus, like Pirkheimer, returned to the Church. Others, especially those of Erfurt, were not to be separated from Luther, such were Justus Jonas, Johann Lang, Adam Kraft, Euricius Cordus, Draconites, Camerarius, Menius and Eobanus Hessus, who, however, wavered long.[726]
Summing up all that has been said, we must discount both the exaggerated charges brought against Erasmus, and the one-sided eulogies lavished upon him. A type of the unfair critic was Hieronymus Aleander, who was chiefly responsible for the violent attack made on Erasmus by Prince Albert Pius of Carpi. In 1521 Aleander declared: “Erasmus has written worse things against the faith than Luther”; he is of opinion that Erasmus had preached a real “intellectual revolt in Flanders and the Rhine-Lands.”[727] Equally exaggerated in the opposite direction is the statement ascribed to the Emperor Charles V, which must have been due to the glowing accounts given by the admirers of Erasmus, viz. that Erasmus had greatly reduced the number of Lutherans and achieved what Emperors, Popes, Princes and Universities had previously striven to do, but in vain. The allusion would seem to be to the great Humanist’s work against Luther’s denial of free-will.
What has been said tends to place in a true light a certain view which has been put forward in modern days. Thanks to a wrong interpretation of his antagonism to Luther’s principles and of his criticism of Catholic doctrine and practice,