FOOTNOTES:

Plate XXI. MARTIN LUTHER AS A MONK

Plate XXII. ULRICH VON HUTTEN

Hutten, knight and humanist, the enthusiastic herald of a national German uplift, the ardent hater of papacy and supporter of Luther, was certainly a hot-head and perhaps somewhat of a muddle-head. He had applauded Erasmus when the latter still seemed to be the coming man and had afterwards besought him to take Luther's side. Erasmus had soon discovered that this noisy partisan might compromise him. Had not one of Hutten's rash satires been ascribed to him, Erasmus? There came a time when Hutten could no longer abide Erasmus. His knightly instinct reacted on the very weaknesses of Erasmus's character: the fear of committing himself and the inclination to repudiate a supporter in time of danger. Erasmus knew that weakness himself: 'Not all have strength enough for martyrdom,' he writes to Richard Pace in 1521. 'I fear that I shall, in case it results in a tumult, follow St. Peter's example.' But this acknowledgement does not discharge him from the burden of Hutten's reproaches which he flung at him in fiery language in 1523. In this quarrel Erasmus's own fame pays the penalty of his fault. For nowhere does he show himself so undignified and puny as in that 'Sponge against Hutten's mire', which the latter did not live to read. Hutten, disillusioned and forsaken, died at an early age in 1523, and Erasmus did not scruple to publish the venomous pamphlet against his former friend after his demise.

Hutten, however, was avenged upon Erasmus living. One of his adherents, Henry of Eppendorff, inherited Hutten'sbitter disgust with Erasmus and persecuted him for years. Getting hold of one of Erasmus's letters in which he was denounced, he continually threatened him with an action for defamation of character. Eppendorff's hostility so thoroughly exasperated Erasmus that he fancied he could detect his machinations and spies everywhere even after the actual persecution had long ceased.

[18]Melanchthon,Opera, Corpus Reformatorum, XII 266, where he refers toQuerela pacis, which, however, was not written before 1517;videA. 603 and I p. 37.10.

Erasmus persuaded to write against Luther—De Libero Arbitrio: 1524—Luther's answer:De Servo Arbitrio—Erasmus's indefiniteness contrasted with Luther's extreme rigour—Erasmus henceforth on the side of conservatism—The Bishop of Basle and Oecolampadius—Erasmus's half-hearted dogmatics: confession, ceremonies, worship of the Saints, Eucharist—Institutio Christiani Matrimonii: 1526—He feels surrounded by enemies

At length Erasmus was led, in spite of all, to do what he had always tried to avoid: he wrote against Luther. But it did not in the least resemble thegesteErasmus at one time contemplated, in the cause of peace in Christendom and uniformity of faith, to call a halt to the impetuous Luther, and thereby to recall the world to its senses. In the great act of the Reformation their polemics were merely an after-play. Not Erasmus alone was disillusioned and tired—Luther too was past his heroic prime, circumscribed by conditions, forced into the world of affairs, a disappointed man.

Erasmus had wished to persevere in his resolution to remain a spectator of the great tragedy. 'If, as appears from the wonderful success of Luther's cause, God wills all this'—thus did Erasmus reason—'and He has perhaps judged such a drastic surgeon as Luther necessary for the corruption of these times, then it is not my business to withstand him.' But he was not left in peace. While he went on protesting that he had nothing to do with Luther and differed widely from him, the defenders of the old Church adhered to the standpoint urged as early as 1520 by Nicholas of Egmond before the rector of Louvain: 'So long as he refuses to write against Luther, we take him to be a Lutheran'. So matters stood. 'That you are looked upon as a Lutheran here is certain,' Vives writes to him from the Netherlands in 1522.

Ever stronger became the pressure to write against Luther. From Henry VIII came a call, communicated by Erasmus's old friend Tunstall, from George of Saxony, from Rome itself, whence Pope Adrian VI, his old patron, had urged him shortly before his death.

Erasmus thought he could refuse no longer. He tried some dialogues in the style of theColloquies, but did not get on with them; and probably they would not have pleased those who were desirous of enlisting his services. Between Luther and Erasmus himself there had been no personal correspondence, since the former had promised him, in 1520; 'Well then, Erasmus, I shall not mention your name again.' Now that Erasmus had prepared to attack Luther, however, there came an epistle from the latter, written on 15 April 1524, in which the reformer, in his turn, requested Erasmus in his own words: 'Please remain now what you have always professed yourself desirous of being: a mere spectator of our tragedy'. There is a ring of ironical contempt in Luther's words, but Erasmus called the letter 'rather humane; I had not the courage to reply with equal humanity, because of the sycophants'.

In order to be able to combat Luther with a clear conscience Erasmus had naturally to choose a point on which he differed from Luther in his heart. It was not one of the more superficial parts of the Church's structure. For these he either, with Luther, cordially rejected, such as ceremonies, observances, fasting, etc., or, though more moderately than Luther, he had his doubts about them, as the sacraments or the primacy of St. Peter. So he naturally came to the point where the deepest gulf yawned between their natures, between their conceptions of the essence of faith, and thus to the central and eternal problem of good and evil, guilt and compulsion, liberty and bondage, God and man. Luther confessed in his reply that here indeed the vital point had been touched.

De libero arbitrio diatribe(A Disquisition upon Free Will) appeared in September 1524. Was Erasmus qualified to write about such a subject? In conformity with his method and with his evident purpose to vindicate authority and tradition, thistime, Erasmus developed the argument that Scripture teaches, doctors affirm, philosophers prove, and human reason testifies man's will to be free. Without acknowledgement of free will the terms of God's justice and God's mercy remain without meaning. What would be the sense of the teachings, reproofs, admonitions of Scripture (Timothy iii.) if all happened according to mere and inevitable necessity? To what purpose is obedience praised, if for good and evil works we are equally but tools to God, as the hatchet to the carpenter? And if this were so, it would be dangerous to reveal such a doctrine to the multitude, for morality is dependent on the consciousness of freedom.

Luther received the treatise of his antagonist with disgust and contempt. In writing his reply, however, he suppressed these feelings outwardly and observed the rules of courtesy. But his inward anger is revealed in the contents itself ofDe servo arbitrio(On the Will not free). For here he really did what Erasmus had just reproached him with—trying to heal a dislocated member by tugging at it in the opposite direction. More fiercely than ever before, his formidable boorish mind drew the startling inferences of his burning faith. Without any reserve he now accepted all the extremes of absolute determinism. In order to confute indeterminism in explicit terms, he was now forced to have recourse to those primitive metaphors of exalted faith striving to express the inexpressible: God's two wills, which do not coincide, God's 'eternal hatred of mankind, a hatred not only on account of demerits and the works of free will, but a hatred that existed even before the world was created', and that metaphor of the human will, which, as a riding beast, stands in the middle between God and the devil and which is mounted by one or the other without being able to move towards either of the two contending riders. If anywhere, Luther's doctrine inDe Servo Arbitriomeans a recrudescence of faith and a straining of religious conceptions.

But it was Luther who here stood on the rockbed of a profound and mystic faith in which the absolute conscience of the eternal pervades all. In him all conceptions, like dry straw, wereconsumed in the glow of God's majesty, for him each human co-operation to attain to salvation was a profanation of God's glory. Erasmus's mind after all did not trulylivein the ideas which were here disputed, of sin and grace, of redemption and the glory of God as the final cause of all that is.

Was, then, Erasmus's cause in all respects inferior? Was Luther right at the core? Perhaps. Dr. Murray rightly reminds us of Hegel's saying that tragedy is not the conflict between right and wrong, but the conflict between right and right. The combat of Luther and Erasmus proceeded beyond the point at which our judgement is forced to halt and has to accept an equivalence, nay, a compatibility of affirmation and negation. And this fact, that they here were fighting with words and metaphors in a sphere beyond that of what may be known and expressed, was understood by Erasmus. Erasmus, the man of the fine shades, for whom ideas eternally blended into each other and interchanged, called a Proteus by Luther; Luther the man of over-emphatic expression about all matters. The Dutchman, who sees the sea, was opposed to the German, who looks out on mountain tops.

'This is quite true that we cannot speak of God but with inadequate words.' 'Many problems should be deferred, not to the oecumenical Council, but till the time when, the glass and the darkness having been taken away, we shall see God face to face.' 'What is free of error?' 'There are in sacred literature certain sanctuaries into which God has not willed that we should penetrate further.'

The Catholic Church had on the point of free will reserved to itself some slight proviso, left a little elbow-room to the consciousness of human libertyundergrace. Erasmus conceived that liberty in a considerably broader spirit. Luther absolutely denied it. The opinion of contemporaries was at first too much dominated by their participation in the great struggle as such: they applauded Erasmus, because he struck boldly at Luther, or the other way about, according to their sympathies. Not only Vives applauded Erasmus, but also more orthodox Catholics such as Sadolet. The German humanists,unwilling, for the most part, to break with the ancient Church, were moved by Erasmus's attack to turn their backs still more upon Luther: Mutianus, Zasius, and Pirckheimer. Even Melanchthon inclined to Erasmus's standpoint. Others, like Capito, once a zealous supporter, now washed their hands of him. Soon Calvin with the iron cogency of his argument was completely to take Luther's side.

It is worth while to quote the opinion of a contemporary Catholic scholar about the relations of Erasmus and Luther. 'Erasmus,' says F. X. Kiefl,[19]'with his concept of free, unspoiled human nature was intrinsically much more foreign to the Church than Luther. He only combated it, however, with haughty scepticism: for which reason Luther with subtle psychology upbraided him for liking to speak of the shortcomings and the misery of the Church of Christ in such a way that his readers could not help laughing, instead of bringing his charges, with deep sighs, as beseemed before God.'

TheHyperaspistes, a voluminous treatise in which Erasmus again addressed Luther, was nothing but an epilogue, which need not be discussed here at length.

Erasmus had thus, at last, openly taken sides. For, apart from the dogmatical point at issue itself, the most important part aboutDe libero arbitriowas that in it he had expressly turned against the individual religious conceptions and had spoken in favour of the authority and tradition of the Church. He always regarded himself as a Catholic. 'Neither death nor life shall draw me from the communion of the Catholic Church,' he writes in 1522, and in theHyperaspistesin 1526: 'I have never been an apostate from the Catholic Church. I know that in this Church, which you call the Papist Church, there are many who displease me, but such I also see in your Church. One bears more easily the evils to which one is accustomed. Therefore I bear with this Church, until I shall see a better, and it cannot help bearing with me, until I shall myself be better. And he does not sail badly who steers a middle course between two several evils.'

But was it possible to keep to that course? On either side people turned away from him. 'I who, formerly, in countless letters was addressed as thrice great hero, Prince of letters, Sun of studies, Maintainer of true theology, am now ignored, or represented in quite different colours,' he writes. How many of his old friends and congenial spirits had already gone!

A sufficient number remained, however, who thought and hoped as Erasmus did. His untiring pen still continued to propagate, especially by means of his letters, the moderating and purifying influence of his mind throughout all the countries of Europe. Scholars, high church dignitaries, nobles, students, and civil magistrates were his correspondents. The Bishop of Basle himself, Christopher of Utenheim, was a man after Erasmus's heart. A zealous advocate of humanism, he had attempted, as early as 1503, to reform the clergy of his bishopric by means of synodal statutes, without much success; afterwards he had called scholars like Oecolampadius, Capito and Wimpfeling to Basle. That was before the great struggle began, which was soon to carry away Oecolampadius and Capito much further than the Bishop of Basle or Erasmus approved. In 1522 Erasmus addressed the bishop in a treatiseDe interdicto esu carnium(On the Prohibition of eating Meat). This was one of the last occasions on which he directly opposed the established order.

The bishop, however, could no longer control the movement. A considerable number of the commonalty of Basle and the majority of the council, were already on the side of radical Reformation. About a year after Erasmus, Johannes Oecolampadius, whose first residence at Basle had also coincided with his (at that time he had helped Erasmus with Hebrew for the edition of the New Testament), returned to the town with the intention of organizing the resistance to the old order there. In 1523 the council appointed him professor of Holy Scripture in the University; at the same time four Catholic professors lost their places. He succeeded in obtaining general permission for unlicensed preaching. Soon a far more hot-headed agitator, the impetuous Guillaume Farel, alsoarrived for active work at Basle and in the environs. He is the man who will afterwards reform Geneva and persuade Calvin to stay there.

Though at first Oecolampadius began to introduce novelties into the church service with caution, Erasmus saw these innovations with alarm. Especially the fanaticism of Farel, whom he hated bitterly. It was these men who retarded what he still desired and thought possible: a compromise. His lambent spirit, which never fully decided in favour of a definite opinion, had, with regard to most of the disputed points, gradually fixed on a half-conservative midway standpoint, by means of which, without denying his deepest conviction, he tried to remain faithful to the Church. In 1524 he had expressed his sentiments about confession in the treatiseExomologesis(On the Way to confess). He accepts it halfway: if not instituted by Christ or the Apostles, it was, in any case, by the Fathers. It should be piously preserved. Confession is of excellent use, though, at times, a great evil. In this way he tries 'to admonish either party', 'neither to agree with nor to assail' the deniers, 'though inclining to the side of the believers'.

In the long list of his polemics he gradually finds opportunities to define his views somewhat; circumstantially, for instance, in the answers to Alberto Pio, of 1525 and 1529. Subsequently it is always done in the form of anApologia, whether he is attacked for theColloquia, for theMoria, Jerome, theParaphrasesor anything else. At last he recapitulates his views to some extent inDe amabili Ecclesiae concordia(On the Amiable Concord of the Church), of 1533, which, however, ranks hardly any more among his reformatory endeavours.

On most points Erasmus succeeds in finding moderate and conservative formulae. Even with regard to ceremonies he no longer merely rejects. He finds a kind word to say even for fasting, which he had always abhorred, for the veneration of relics and for Church festivals. He does not want to abolish the worship of the Saints: it no longer entails danger of idolatry. He is even willing to admit the images: 'He who takes the imagery out of life deprives it of its highest pleasure; we oftendiscern more in images than we conceive from the written word'. Regarding Christ's substantial presence in the sacrament of the altar he holds fast to the Catholic view, but without fervour, only on the ground of the Church's consensus, and because he cannot believe that Christ, who is truth and love, would have suffered His bride to cling so long to so horrid an error as to worship a crust of bread instead of Him. But for these reasons he might, at need, accept Oecolampadius's view.

From the period at Basle dates one of the purest and most beneficent moral treatises of Erasmus's, theInstitutio Christiani matrimonii(On Christian Marriage) of 1526, written for Catherine of Aragon, Queen of England, quite in the spirit of theEnchiridion, save for a certain diffuseness betraying old age. Later followsDe vidua Christiana,The Christian Widow, for Mary of Hungary, which is as impeccable but less interesting.

All this did not disarm the defenders of the old Church. They held fast to the clear picture of Erasmus's creed that arose from theColloquiesand that could not be called purely Catholic. There it appeared only too clearly that, however much Erasmus might desire to leave the letter intact, his heart was not in the convictions which were vital to the Catholic Church. Consequently theColloquieswere later, when Erasmus's works were expurgated, placed on the index in the lump, with theMoriaand a few other works. The rest iscaute legenda, to be read with caution. Much was rejected of the Annotations to the New Testament, of theParaphrasesand theApologiae, very little of theEnchiridion, of theRatio verae theologiae, and even of theExomologesis. But this was after the fight against the living Erasmus had long been over.

So long as he remained at Basle, or elsewhere, as the centre of a large intellectual group whose force could not be estimated, just because it did not stand out as a party—it was not known what turn he might yet take, what influence his mind might yet have on the Church. He remained a king of minds in his quiet study. The hatred that was felt for him, the watching of all his words and actions, were of a nature as only falls to the lot of the acknowledged great. The chorus of enemies wholaid the fault of the whole Reformation on Erasmus was not silenced. 'He laid the eggs which Luther and Zwingli have hatched.' With vexation Erasmus quoted ever new specimens of narrow-minded, malicious and stupid controversy. At Constance there lived a doctor who had hung his portrait on the wall merely to spit at it as often as he passed it. Erasmus jestingly compares his fate to that of Saint Cassianus, who was stabbed to death by his pupils with pencils. Had he not been pierced to the quick for many years by the pens and tongues of countless people and did he not live in that torment without death bringing the end? The keen sensitiveness to opposition was seated very deeply with Erasmus. And he could never forbear irritating others into opposing him.

FOOTNOTES:

[19]Luther's religiöse Psyche, Hochland XV, 1917, p. 21.

Erasmus turns against the excesses of humanism: its paganism and pedantic classicism—Ciceronianus: 1528—It brings him new enemies—The Reformation carried through at Basle—He emigrates to Freiburg: 1529—His view concerning the results of the Reformation

Nothing is more characteristic of the independence which Erasmus reserved for himself regarding all movements of his time than the fact that he also joined issue in the camp of the humanists. In 1528 there were published by Froben (the chief of the firm of Johannes Froben had just died) two dialogues in one volume from Erasmus's hand: one about the correct pronunciation of Latin and Greek, and one entitledCiceronianusorOn the Best Diction, i.e. in writing and speaking Latin. Both were proofs that Erasmus had lost nothing of his liveliness and wit. The former treatise was purely philological, and as such has had great influence; the other was satirical as well. It had a long history.

Erasmus had always regarded classical studies as the panacea of civilization, provided they were made serviceable to pure Christianity. His sincere ethical feeling made him recoil from the obscenity of a Poggio and the immorality of the early Italian humanists. At the same time his delicate and natural taste told him that a pedantic and servile imitation of antique models could never produce the desired result. Erasmus knew Latin too well to be strictly classical; his Latin was alive and required freedom. In his early works we find taunts about the over-precise Latin purists: one had declared a newly found fragment of Cicero to be thoroughly barbaric; 'among all sorts of authors none are so insufferable to me as those apes of Cicero'.

In spite of the great expectations he cherished of classical studies for pure Christianity, he saw one danger: 'that underthe cloak of reviving ancient literature paganism tries to rear its head, as there are those among Christians who acknowledge Christ only in name but inwardly breathe heathenism'. This he writes in 1517 to Capito. In Italy scholars devote themselves too exclusively and in too pagan guise tobonae literae. He considered it his special task to assist in bringing it about that thosebonae literae'which with the Italians have thus far been almost pagan, shall get used to speaking of Christ'.

How it must have vexed Erasmus that in Italy of all countries he was, at the same time and in one breath, charged with heresy and questioned in respect to his knowledge and integrity as a scholar. Italians accused him of plagiarism and trickery. He complained of it to Aleander, who, he thought, had a hand in it.

In a letter of 13 October 1527, to a professor at Toledo, we find theébaucheof theCiceronianus. In addition to the haters of classic studies for the sake of orthodox belief, writes Erasmus, 'lately another and new sort of enemies has broken from their ambush. These are troubled that thebonae literaespeak of Christ, as though nothing can be elegant but what is pagan. To their earsJupiter optimus maximussounds more pleasant thanJesus Christus redemptor mundi, andpatres conscriptimore agreeable thansancti apostoli.... They account it a greater dishonour to be no Ciceronian than no Christian, as if Cicero, if he should now come to life again, would not speak of Christian things in other words than in his time he spoke of his own religion!... What is the sense of this hateful swaggering with the name Ciceronian? I will tell you briefly, in your ear. With that pearl-powder they cover the paganism that is dearer to them than the glory of Christ.' To Erasmus Cicero's style is by no means the ideal one. He prefers something more solid, succinct, vigorous, less polished, more manly. He who sometimes has to write a book in a day has no time to polish his style, often not even to read it over.... 'What do I care for an empty dish of words, ten words here and there mumped from Cicero: I want all Cicero's spirit.' These are apes at whom one may laugh, for far more serious than these thingsare the tumults of the so-called new Gospel, to which he next proceeds in this letter.

And so, in the midst of all his polemics and bitter vindication, he allowed himself once more the pleasure of giving the reins to his love of scoffing, but, as in theMoriaandColloquia, ennobled by an almost passionate sincerity of Christian disposition and a natural sense of measure. TheCiceronianusis a masterpiece of ready, many-sided knowledge, of convincing eloquence, and of easy handling of a wealth of arguments. With splendid, quiet and yet lively breadth flows the long conversation between Bulephorus, representing Erasmus's opinions, Hypologus, the interested inquirer, and Nosoponus, the zealous Ciceronian, who, to preserve a perfect purity of mind, breakfasts off ten currants.

Erasmus in drawing Nosoponus had evidently, in the main, alluded to one who could no longer reply: Christopher Longolius, who had died in 1522.

The core of theCiceronianusis where Erasmus points out the danger to Christian faith of a too zealous classicism. He exclaims urgently: 'It is paganism, believe me, Nosoponus, it is paganism that charms our ear and our soul in such things. We are Christians in name alone.' Why does a classic proverb sound better to us than a quotation from the Bible:corchorum inter olera, 'chick-weed among the vegetables', better than 'Saul among the prophets'? As a sample of the absurdity of Ciceronianism, he gives a translation of a dogmatic sentence in classical language: 'Optimi maximique Jovis interpres ac filius, servator, rex, juxta vatum responsa, ex Olympo devolavit in terras,' for: Jesus Christ, the Word and the Son of the eternal Father, came into the world according to the prophets. Most humanists wrote indeed in that style.

Was Erasmus aware that he here attacked his own past? After all, was it not exactly the same thing which he had done, to the indignation of his opponents, when translatingLogosbySermoinstead of byVerbum? Had he not himself desired that in the church hymns the metre should be corrected, not to mention his own classical odes and paeans to Mary and theSaints? And was his warning against the partiality for classic proverbs and turns applicable to anything more than to theAdagia?

We here see the aged Erasmus on the path of reaction, which might eventually have led him far from humanism. In his combat with humanistic purism he foreshadows a Christian puritanism.

As always his mockery procured him a new flood of invectives. Bembo and Sadolet, the masters of pure Latin, could afford to smile at it, but the impetuous Julius Caesar Scaliger violently inveighed against him, especially to avenge Longolius's memory. Erasmus's perpetual feeling of being persecuted got fresh food: he again thought that Aleander was at the bottom of it. 'The Italians set the imperial court against me,' he writes in 1530. A year later all is quiet again. He writes jestingly: 'Upon my word, I am going to change my style after Budaeus's model and to become a Ciceronian according to the example of Sadolet and Bembo'. But even near the close of his life he was engaged in a new contest with Italians, because he had hurt their national pride; 'they rage at me on all sides with slanderous libels, as at the enemy of Italy and Cicero'.

There were, as he had said himself, other difficulties touching him more closely. Conditions at Basle had for years been developing in a direction which distressed and alarmed him. When he established himself there in 1521, it might still have seemed to him as if the bishop, old Christopher of Utenheim, a great admirer of Erasmus and a man after his heart, would succeed in effecting a reformation at Basle, as he desired it; abolishing acknowledged abuses, but remaining within the fold of the Church. In that very year, 1521, however, the emancipation of the municipality from the bishop's power—it had been in progress since Basle, in 1501, had joined the Swiss Confederacy—was consummated. Henceforth the council was number one, now no longer exclusively made up of aristocratic elements. In vain did the bishop ally himself with his colleagues of Constance and Lausanne to maintainCatholicism. In the town the new creed got more and more the upper hand. When, however, in 1525, it had come to open tumults against the Catholic service, the council became more cautious and tried to reform more heedfully.

Oecolampadius desired this, too. Relations between him and Erasmus were precarious. Erasmus himself had at one time directed the religious thought of the impulsive, sensitive, restless young man. When he had, in 1520, suddenly sought refuge in a convent, he had expressly justified that step towards Erasmus, the condemner of binding vows. And now they saw each other again at Basle, in 1522: Oecolampadius having left the monastery, a convinced adherent and apostle of the new doctrine; Erasmus, the great spectator which he wished to be. Erasmus treated his old coadjutor coolly, and as the latter progressed, retreated more and more. Yet he kept steering a middle course and in 1525 gave some moderate advice to the council, which meanwhile had turned more Catholic again.

The old bishop, who for some years had no longer resided in his town, in 1527 requested the chapter to relieve him of his office, and died shortly afterwards. Then events moved very quickly. After Berne had, meanwhile, reformed itself in 1528, Oecolampadius demanded a decision also for Basle. Since the close of 1528 the town had been on the verge of civil war. A popular rising put an end to the resistance of the Council and cleared it of Catholic members; and in February 1529 the old service was prohibited, the images were removed from the churches, the convents abolished, and the University suspended. Oecolampadius became the first minister in the 'Münster' and leader of the Basle church, for which he soon drew up a reformatory ordinance. The new bishop remained at Porrentruy, and the chapter removed to Freiburg.

Plate XXIII. ERASMUS'S RESIDENCE AT FREIBURG, 1529-31

The moment of departure had now come for Erasmus. His position at Basle in 1529 somewhat resembled, but in a reversed sense, the one at Louvain in 1521. Then the Catholics wanted to avail themselves of his services against Luther, now the Evangelicals would fain have kept him at Basle. For hisname was still as a banner. His presence would strengthen the position of reformed Basle; on the one hand, because, as people reasoned, if he were not of the same mind as the reformers, he would have left the town long ago; on the other hand, because his figure seemed to guarantee moderation and might attract many hesitating minds.

It was, therefore, again to safeguard his independence that Erasmus changed his residence. It was a great wrench this time. Old age and invalidism had made the restless man a stay-at-home. As he foresaw trouble from the side of the municipality, he asked Archduke Ferdinand—who for his brother Charles V governed the German empire and just then presided over the Diet of Speyer—to send him a safe conduct for the whole empire and an invitation, moreover, to come to court, which he did not dream of accepting. As place of refuge he had selected the not far distant town of Freiburg im Breisgau, which was directly under the strict government of the Austrian house, and where he, therefore, need not be afraid of such a turn of affairs as that at Basle. It was, moreover, a juncture at which the imperial authority and the Catholic cause in Germany seemed again to be gaining ground rapidly.

Erasmus would not or could not keep his departure a secret. He sent the most precious of his possessions in advance, and when this had drawn attention to his plan, he purposely invited Oecolampadius to a farewell talk. The reformer declared his sincere friendship for Erasmus, which the latter did not decline, provided he granted him to differ on certain points of dogma. Oecolampadius tried to keep him from leaving the town, and, when it proved too late for that, to persuade him to return later. They took leave with a handshake. Erasmus had desired to join his boat at a distant landing-stage, but the Council would not allow this: he had to start from the usual place near the Rhine bridge. A numerous crowd witnessed his embarkation, 13 April 1529. Some friends were there to see him off. No unfavourable demonstration occurred.

His reception at Freiburg convinced him that, in spite of all, he was still the celebrated and admired prince of letters. TheCouncil placed at his disposal the large, though unfinished, house built for the Emperor Maximilian himself; a professor of theology offered him his garden. Anthony Fugger had tried to draw him to Augsburg by means of a yearly allowance. For the rest he considered Freiburg by no means a permanent place of abode. 'I have resolved to remain here this winter and then to fly with the swallows to the place whither God shall call me.' But he soon recognized the great advantage which Freiburg offered. The climate, to which he was so sensitive, turned out better than he expected, and the position of the town was extremely favourable for emigrating to France, should circumstances require this, or for dropping down the Rhine back to the Netherlands, whither many always called him. In 1531 he bought a house at Freiburg.

The old Erasmus at Freiburg, ever more tormented by his painful malady, much more disillusioned than when he left Louvain in 1521, of more confirmed views as to the great ecclesiastical strife, will only be fully revealed to us when his correspondence with Boniface Amerbach, the friend whom he left behind at Basle—a correspondence not found complete in the older collections—has been edited by Dr. Allen's care. From no period of Erasmus's life, it seems, may so much be gleaned, in point of knowledge of his daily habits and thoughts, as from these very years. Work went on without a break in that great scholar's workshop where he directs his famuli, who hunt manuscripts for him, and then copy and examine them, and whence he sends forth his letters all over Europe. In the series of editions of the Fathers followed Basil and new editions of Chrysostom and Cyprian; his editions of classic authors were augmented by the works of Aristotle. He revised and republished theColloquiesthree more times, theAdagesand the New Testament once more. Occasional writings of a moral or politico-theological nature kept flowing from his pen.

From the cause of the Reformation he was now quite estranged. 'Pseudevangelici', he contumeliously calls the reformed. 'I might have been a corypheus in Luther's church,'he writes in 1528, 'but I preferred to incur the hatred of all Germany to being separate from the community of the Church.' The authorities should have paid a little less attention at first to Luther's proceedings; then the fire would never have spread so violently. He had always urged theologians to let minor concerns which only contain an appearance of piety rest, and to turn to the sources of Scripture. Now it was too late. Towns and countries united ever more closely for or against the Reformation. 'If, what I pray may never happen,' he writes to Sadolet in 1530, 'you should see horrible commotions of the world arise, not so fatal for Germany as for the Church, then remember Erasmus prophesied it.' To Beatus Rhenanus he frequently said that, had he known that an age like theirs was coming, he would never have written many things, or would not have written them as he had.

'Just look,' he exclaims, 'at the Evangelical people, have they become any better? Do they yield less to luxury, lust and greed? Show me a man whom that Gospel has changed from a toper to a temperate man, from a brute to a gentle creature, from a miser into a liberal person, from a shameless to a chaste being. I will show you many who have become even worse than they were.' Now they have thrown the images out of the churches and abolished mass (he is thinking of Basle especially): has anything better come instead? 'I have never entered their churches, but I have seen them return from hearing the sermon, as if inspired by an evil spirit, the faces of all showing a curious wrath and ferocity, and there was no one except one old man who saluted me properly, when I passed in the company of some distinguished persons.'

He hated that spirit of absolute assuredness so inseparably bound up with the reformers. 'Zwingli and Bucer may be inspired by the Spirit, Erasmus from himself is nothing but a man and cannot comprehend what is of the Spirit.'

There was a group among the reformed to whom Erasmus in his heart of hearts was more nearly akin than to the Lutherans or Zwinglians with their rigid dogmatism: the Anabaptists. He rejected the doctrine from which they derivedtheir name, and abhorred the anarchic element in them. He remained far too much the man of spiritual decorum to identify himself with these irregular believers. But he was not blind to the sincerity of their moral aspirations and sympathized with their dislike of brute force and the patience with which they bore persecution. 'They are praised more than all others for the innocence of their life,' he writes in 1529. Just in the last part of his life came the episode of the violent revolutionary proceedings of the fanatic Anabaptists; it goes without saying that Erasmus speaks of it only with horror.

One of the best historians of the Reformation, Walter Köhler, calls Erasmus one of the spiritual fathers of Anabaptism. And certain it is that in its later, peaceful development it has important traits in common with Erasmus: a tendency to acknowledge free will, a certain rationalistic trend, a dislike of an exclusive conception of a Church. It seems possible to prove that the South German Anabaptist Hans Denk derived opinions directly from Erasmus. For a considerable part, however, this community of ideas must, no doubt, have been based on peculiarities of religious consciousness in the Netherlands, whence Erasmus sprang, and where Anabaptism found such a receptive soil. Erasmus was certainly never aware of these connections.

Some remarkable evidence regarding Erasmus's altered attitude towards the old and the new Church is shown by what follows.

The reproach he had formerly so often flung at the advocates of conservatism that they hated thebonae literae, so dear to him, and wanted to stifle them, he now uses against the evangelical party. 'Wherever Lutherism is dominant the study of literature is extinguished. Why else,' he continues, using a remarkable sophism, 'are Luther and Melanchthon compelled to call back the people so urgently to the love of letters?' 'Just compare the University of Wittenberg with that of Louvain or Paris!... Printers say that before this Gospel came they used to dispose of 3,000 volumes more quickly than now of 600. A sure proof that studies flourish!'

Religious and political contrasts grow sharper—The coming strife in Germany still suspended—Erasmus finishes hisEcclesiastes—Death of Fisher and More—Erasmus back at Basle: 1535—Pope Paul III wants to make him write in favour of the cause of the Council—Favours declined by Erasmus—De Puritate Ecclesiae—The end: 12 July 1536

During the last years of Erasmus's life all the great issues which kept the world in suspense were rapidly taking threatening forms. Wherever compromise or reunion had before still seemed possible, sharp conflicts, clearly outlined party-groupings, binding formulae were now barring the way to peace. While in the spring of 1529 Erasmus prepared for his departure from Basle, a strong Catholic majority of the Diet at Speyer got the 'recess' of 1526, favourable for the Evangelicals, revoked, only the Lutherans among them keeping what they had obtained; and secured a prohibition of any further changes or novelties. The Zwinglians and Anabaptists were not allowed to enjoy the least tolerance. This was immediately followed by the Protest of the chief evangelical princes and towns, which henceforth was to give the name to all anti-Catholics together (19 April 1529). And not only between Catholics and Protestants in the Empire did the rupture become complete. Even before the end of that year the question of the Lord's supper proved an insuperable stumbling-block in the way of a real union of Zwinglians and Lutherans. Luther parted from Zwingli at the colloquy of Marburg with the words, 'Your spirit differs from ours'.

In Switzerland civil war had openly broken out between the Catholic and the Evangelical cantons, only calmed for a short time by the first peace of Kappel. The treaties of Cambray and Barcelona, which in 1529 restored at least political peace in Christendom for the time being, could no longer draw from old Erasmus jubilations about a coming goldenage, like those with which the concord of 1516 had inspired him. A month later the Turks appeared before Vienna.

All these occurrences could not but distress and alarm Erasmus. But he was outside them. When reading his letters of that period we are more than ever impressed by the fact that, for all the width and liveliness of his mind, he is remote from the great happenings of his time. Beyond a certain circle of interests, touching his own ideas or his person, his perceptions are vague and weak. If he still meddles occasionally with questions of the day, he does so in the moralizing manner, by means of generalities, without emphasis: his 'Advice about declaring war on the Turks' (March 1530) is written in the form of an interpretation of Psalm 28, and so vague that, at the close, he himself anticipates that the reader may exclaim: 'But now say clearly: do you think that war should be declared or not?'

In the summer of 1530 the Diet met again at Augsburg under the auspices of the Emperor himself to try once more 'to attain to a good peace and Christian truth'. The Augsburg Confession, defended all too weakly by Melanchthon, was read here, disputed, and declared refuted by the Emperor.

Erasmus had no share in all this. Many had exhorted him in letters to come to Augsburg; but he had in vain expected a summons from the Emperor. At the instance of the Emperor's counsellors he had postponed his proposed removal to Brabant in that autumn till after the decision of the Diet. But his services were not needed for the drastic resolution of repression with which the Emperor closed the session in November.

The great struggle in Germany seemed to be approaching: the resolutions of Augsburg were followed by the formation of the League of Schmalkalden uniting all Protestant territories and towns of Germany in their opposition to the Emperor. In the same year (1531) Zwingli was killed in the battle of Kappel against the Catholic cantons, soon to be followed by Oecolampadius, who died at Basle. 'It is right', writes Erasmus, 'that those two leaders have perished. IfMars had been favourable to them, we should now have been done for.'

In Switzerland a sort of equilibrium had set in; at any rate matters had come to a standstill; in Germany the inevitable struggle was postponed for many years. The Emperor had understood that, to combat the German Protestants effectively, he should first get the Pope to hold the Council which would abolish the acknowledged abuses of the Church. The religious peace of Nuremberg (1532) put the seal upon this turn of imperial policy.

It might seem as if before long the advocates of moderate reform and of a compromise might after all get a chance of being heard. But Erasmus had become too old to actively participate in the decisions (if he had ever seriously considered such participation). He does write a treatise, though, in 1533, 'On the sweet concord of the Church', like his 'Advice on the Turks' in the form of an interpretation of a psalm (83). But it would seem as if the old vivacity of his style and his power of expression, so long unimpaired, now began to flag. The same remark applies to an essay 'On the preparation for death', published the same year. His voice was growing weaker.

During these years he turned his attention chiefly to the completion of the great work which more than any other represented for him the summing up and complete exposition of his moral-theological ideas:Ecclesiastesor,On the Way to preach. Erasmus had always regarded preaching as the most dignified part of an ecclesiastic's duties. As preachers, he had most highly valued Colet and Vitrarius. As early as 1519 his friend, John Becar of Borselen, urged him to follow up theEnchiridionof the Christian soldier and theInstitutioof the Christian prince, by the true instruction of the Christian preacher. 'Later, later,' Erasmus had promised him, 'at present I have too much work, but I hope to undertake it soon.' In 1523 he had already made a sketch and some notes for it. It was meant for John Fisher, the Bishop of Rochester, Erasmus's great friend and brother-spirit, who eagerly looked forward to it and urged the author to finish it. The workgradually grew into the most voluminous of Erasmus's original writings: a forest of a work,operis sylvam, he calls it himself. In four books he treated his subject, the art of preaching well and decorously, with an inexhaustible abundance of examples, illustrations, schemes, etc. But was it possible that a work, conceived already by the Erasmus of 1519, and upon which he had been so long engaged, while he himself had gradually given up the boldness of his earlier years, could still be a revelation in 1533, as theEnchiridionhad been in its day?

Ecclesiastesis the work of a mind fatigued, which no longer sharply reacts upon the needs of his time. As the result of a correct, intellectual, tasteful instruction in a suitable manner of preaching, in accordance with the purity of the Gospel, Erasmus expects to see society improve. 'The people become more obedient to the authorities, more respectful towards the law, more peaceable. Between husband and wife comes greater concord, more perfect faithfulness, greater dislike of adultery. Servants obey more willingly, artisans work better, merchants cheat no more.'

At the same time that Erasmus took this work to Froben, at Basle, to print, a book of a young Frenchman, who had recently fled from France to Basle, passed through the press of another Basle printer, Thomas Platter. It too was to be a manual of the life of faith: theInstitution of the Christian Religion, by Calvin.

Even before Erasmus had quite completed theEcclesiastes, the man for whom the work had been meant was no more. Instead of to the Bishop of Rochester, Erasmus dedicated his voluminous work to the Bishop of Augsburg, Christopher of Stadion. John Fisher, to set a seal on his spiritual endeavours, resembling those of Erasmus in so many respects, had left behind, as a testimony to the world, for which Erasmus knew himself too weak, that of martyrdom. On 22 June 1535, he was beheaded by command of Henry VIII. He died for being faithful to the old Church. Together with More he had steadfastly refused to take the oath to the Statute of Supremacy.Not two weeks after Fisher, Thomas More mounted the scaffold. The fate of those two noblest of his friends grieved Erasmus. It moved him to do what for years he had no longer done: to write a poem. But rather than in the fine Latin measure of thatCarmen heroïcumone would have liked to hear his emotion in language of sincere dismay and indignation in his letters. They are hardly there. In the words devoted to Fisher's death in the preface to theEcclesiastesthere is no heartfelt emotion. Also in his letters of those days, he speaks with reserve. 'Would More had never meddled with that dangerous business, and left the theological cause to the theologians.' As if More had died for aught but simply for his conscience!

When Erasmus wrote these words, he was no longer at Freiburg. He had in June 1535 gone to Basle, to work in Froben's printing-office, as of old; theEcclesiasteswas at last going to press and still required careful supervision and the final touches during the process; theAdagiahad to be reprinted, and a Latin edition of Origenes was in preparation. The old, sick man was cordially received by the many friends who still lived at Basle. Hieronymus Froben, Johannes's son, who after his father's death managed the business with two relatives, sheltered him in his houseZum Luft. In the hope of his return a room had been built expressly for him and fitted up as was convenient for him. Erasmus found that at Basle the ecclesiastical storms which had formerly driven him away had subsided. Quiet and order had returned. He did feel a spirit of distrust in the air, it is true, 'but I think that, on account of my age, of habit, and of what little erudition I possess, I have now got so far that I may live in safety anywhere'. At first he had regarded the removal as an experiment. He did not mean to stay at Basle. If his health could not stand the change of air, he would return to his fine, well-appointed, comfortable house at Freiburg. If he should prove able to bear it, then the choice was between the Netherlands (probably Brussels, Malines or Antwerp, perhaps Louvain) or Burgundy,in particular Besançon. Towards the end of his life he clung to the illusion which he had been cherishing for a long time that Burgundy wine alone was good for him and kept his malady in check. There is something pathetic in the proportions which this wine-question gradually assumes: that it is so dear at Basle might be overlooked, but the thievish wagoners drink up or spoil what is imported.

In August he doubted greatly whether he will return to Freiburg. In October he sold his house and part of his furniture and had the rest transported to Basle. After the summer he hardly left his room, and was mostly bedridden.

Though the formidable worker in him still yearned for more years and time to labour, his soul was ready for death. Happy he had never felt; only during the last years he utters his longing for the end. He was still, curiously enough, subject to the delusion of being in the thick of the struggle. 'In this arena I shall have to fall,' he writes in 1533. 'Only this consoles me, that near at hand already, the general haven comes in sight, which, if Christ be favourable, will bring the end of all labour and trouble.' Two years later his voice sounds more urgent: 'That the Lord might deign to call me out of this raving world to His rest'.

Most of his old friends were gone. Warham and Mountjoy had passed away before More and Fisher; Peter Gilles, so many years younger than he, had departed in 1533; also Pirckheimer had been dead for years. Beatus Rhenanus shows him to us, during the last months of his life, re-perusing his friends' letters of the last few years, and repeating: 'This one, too, is dead'. As he grew more solitary, his suspiciousness and his feeling of being persecuted became stronger. 'My friends decrease, my enemies increase,' he writes in 1532, when Warham has died and Aleander has risen still higher. In the autumn of 1535 he thinks that all his former servant-pupils betray him, even the best beloved ones like Quirin Talesius and Charles Utenhove. They do not write to him, he complains.

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