ERASMUS IN LOVE WITH HUMANITY

As a child, long before I knew the names of Bruni, Pico della Mirandola, and many other great humanists, I knew the name of Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus (1466-1536), both as “the first humanist” and as one of the most admirable persons who had ever lived. Both these conceptions of my childhood were perhaps a bit overstated, but there are indeed some very good reasons for keeping Erasmus in high esteem.

It may be argued that he was not a philosopher, but this opinion depends on the point of view. He was not fond of all systematizations, rejecting them as a legacy of scholasticism and dark-age narrow-mindedness. He had, no doubt, a clear philosophical outlook in his views, and a love of learning, not as hypertrophied as in Pico, but commendably well-balanced. For his work on the annotated translation of the Bible, he taught himself Greek, but finding Hebrew excessively difficult, he sensibly dropped his study of the latter, concentrating instead on what he could accomplish in depth, which was primarily the New Testament, in working on which he excelled.

His life can be sharply divided into two major periods: one prior to Luther’s Reformation, the other during the time when the Reformation had begun. The thrust of his first period was criticizing the practices of the Church. His best-known satirical work Encomium Moriae was written during this period and published in 1511. Being extremely critical of the Catholic Church, often crossing the line from satire into invective, it was predictably mistaken by Luther as a declaration of war on Catholicism, which he himself was about to undertake. Soon, however, Luther was to learn that Erasmus was not prepared to take sides in the ensuing religious confrontation. When Erasmus lambasted the Popes for their failure to imitate Christ by personal humility and poverty---

(“Their only weapons ought to be those of the Spirit; and of these indeed they are mighty liberal, as of their interdicts, of their suspensions, of their denunciations, of their aggravations, of their greater and lesser ex-communications, and of roaring bulls, that fight whomever they are thundered against; and these most holy fathers never issue them out more frequently than against those who, at the instigation of the devil, and not having the fear of God before their eyes, do feloniously and maliciously attempt to lessen and impair Saint Peter’s patrimony.”)

---he was not rising against them, but was challenging them and other Catholic ecclesiastics to change their corrupt and evil ways. With Erasmus, Luther was up for a big disappointment, for which he was never going to forgive the cause of his disappointment.

Indeed, during the bloody onslaught of the Reformation, Erasmus refused to join the fight on either side. It seems to me that Bertrand Russell is downright unfair to Erasmus in comparing him with Thomas More, his friend. Russell writes:

“He (Erasmus) had always been timid, and the times were no longer suited to timid people. For honest men, the only honorable alternatives were martyrdom or victory. His friend Sir Thomas More was compelled to choose martyrdom, and Erasmus commented: ‘Would More had never meddled in that dangerous business, and left the theological cause to the theologians.’

Erasmus lived too long into an age of new virtues and new vices, heroism and intolerance, neither of which he could acquire.”

I do not, however, see Erasmus’s unwillingness to participate in the Christian internecine war as a sign of timidity, but rather as an expression of revulsion for the unnecessary destructive violence that was to split Christianity forever. He was appalled by Luther’s radical actions, and at the end remained with that same Catholicism which he had been attacking all his life, not because he somehow repented, but because he never wanted it to be so drastically undermined, in the first place.

Even in this sense where Russell accuses Erasmus of timidity, Erasmus showed himself as a quintessential humanist, who abhorred war and blamed Luther for the unwarranted divisiveness and extremism. Whether Erasmus was right or wrong in his attitude, he was at least consistently humanistic. It was, therefore, tragic for him personally and for his age that both sides would denounce him, and that he would end his days in a spiritual and physical isolation.

And lastly, referring the reader to my earlier entry In Love With The Dead in the Mirror section, I want to quote from a 1519 letter of Erasmus to his friend Ulrich von Hutten (who was to take Luther’s side in the Reformation, causing the eventual irrevocable split between the two of them), where Erasmus expresses his love for humanity in a very compelling way, which, as the reader may have already found in my writing, is so close to my own heart:

“…It is an example of what Plato says of that sweet wisdom, which excites much more ardent love among men than the most admirable beauty of form. It is not discerned by the eye of sense, but the mind has eyes of its own, so that even here the Greek saying holds true that out of Looking grows Liking; and so it comes to pass that people are sometimes united in the warmest affection, who have never seen or spoken to each other.”

It is perhaps a fitting tribute to Erasmus to close this entry with this signature expression of his love for all humanity.