Fatal Discord

by Michael Massing

  As copies began circulating, the magnitude of Erasmus’s achievement was immediately recognized. “You have protected your name against all the assaults of time and completed a task as acceptable to almighty God as it is necessary and useful to all Christ’s faithful,” wrote Willibald Pirckheimer, Nuremberg’s leading intellectual. “Well done, well done indeed. You have achieved a result that has been denied to all men this side of a thousand years.” Gerardus Listrius, who in Basel had worked on the new edition of Erasmus’s Adages and Praise of Folly and who was now the rector of a school in Zwolle, near Deventer, wrote that “all scholars and true Christians here are devoted to you.” The Novum Instrumentum “is read eagerly here in Greek even by the aged.” Many people, he added, “have been won over and inspired by what you write, and are now devoted to the study of Scripture and the Christian way of life,” leaving behind the husks of the pagan authors.

  Particularly sweet to Erasmus was the tribute he received from John Colet, who had provided the initial inspiration for the project. Copies of the New Testament, he wrote, were being “eagerly bought” and “everywhere read.” Expressing regret at never having learned Greek, Colet said that he now intended to begin studying it despite his advanced age (he was nearing fifty). He also marveled at the fecundity of Erasmus’s mind: “You conceive so much, have so much in gestation, and bring forth some perfectly finished offspring every day, especially as you have no certain abode and lack the support of any fixed, substantial endowment.” Now, he added, he looked forward to getting a copy of the Institutio Principis Christiani (“The Education of a Christian Prince”).

  That was the title that Erasmus had given to the tract on governance that he had somehow managed to complete even while working on the New Testament. It was still in the presses when, in May 1516, he decided to leave Basel for the Low Countries. He wanted to pay his respects to Prince Charles and see what kind of stipend might be attached to his new position as councilor. He received a rousing send-off. “The number of horses that escorted my departure; the emotion with which they bade me farewell!” he wrote to Thomas More. The New Testament, he added, “wins approval even from the people I thought most likely to malign it; the leading theologians are delighted with it. My Enchiridion is universally welcome; the bishop of Basel carries it around with him everywhere—I have seen all the margins marked in his own hand.”

  By May 30, 1516, Erasmus was in Antwerp, where he stayed with his friend Pieter Gillis. To his delight, he found the Jerome on sale there. He took a break from writing so that he could tend to his desperate financial state. Andrea Ammonio in London was coordinating his efforts to obtain a papal dispensation that would allow him to hold one or more benefices despite his illegitimate birth and to wear only a symbolic version of his Augustinian habit (which he had abandoned many years earlier). In August Erasmus made a quick visit to England to consult with him. By the start of October he was in Brussels, where he took a small room near the Burgundian court and became absorbed in its affairs while exploring his prospects for promotion.

  While in Brussels, Erasmus received from Thomas More a manuscript that he had recently completed about a fictional New World island. It was titled Nusquama—a play on the Latin for “no place.” More asked for Erasmus’s assistance in getting it published and in arranging “glowing testimonials,” i.e., blurbs. Happy to oblige, Erasmus helped see it through the press of Dirk Martens in Louvain, and it would come out in late 1516 under the new title More had given it: Utopia (“No place” in Greek).

  Interestingly, Utopia appeared around the same time that The Education of a Christian Prince was coming off the press in Basel. Not long before, Niccolò Machiavelli in Italy had completed The Prince. This was thus a formative moment in the history of political thought, when three distinct currents—utopian, Machiavellian, and Erasmian—made their debuts. Comparing Erasmus’s work with the other two can help point up the distinctive nature of his own political program.

  A Christian prince should have one main object, Erasmus wrote—to serve the public good. “Only those who dedicate themselves to the state, and not the state to themselves, deserve the title ‘prince,’” he declared, and in his tract he offered guidance as to how to accomplish this. Central to his program was education. Because the progress of any state depends so heavily on the quality of its schools, the prince, Erasmus argued, should give them his utmost care, with special attention paid to girls. Taxation should be kept low so as not to oppress the people, but to the extent that it is necessary, the burden should fall most heavily on those most able to afford it. Since gross disparities of income can create so many problems, measures should be taken “to prevent the wealth of the many from being allocated to the few.” The penalties for crimes should be kept light and aimed more at curing the disease than killing the patient. The state should establish public institutions to look after the sick and elderly and should boost the economy by improving its infrastructure—enhancing cities, constructing bridges, erecting public buildings, draining plague spots, diverting rivers whose courses are destructive, and ensuring that abandoned fields are tilled so as to increase the food supply.

  In his own life, meanwhile, the prince should be a model of economy and moderation. Rather than undertake costly tours abroad, he should stay at home and tend to the welfare of his people. When he considers enlarging his retinue or making a brilliant marriage for his granddaughter or sister, he should keep in mind the many thousands of families that will go hungry and be forced into debt as a result of such a diversion of resources. Above all, the prince should avoid war—the greatest source of human misery. Even more forcefully than he had in Dulce bellum inexpertis, Erasmus questioned whether any war can be considered just. Any prince who succeeds in ending “this long-standing and terrible mania among Christians for war” and establishes peace and harmony “will have performed a far more dazzling deed than if he had subdued all Africa by arms.”

  Like Erasmus, Machiavelli had witnessed both the violent struggles for power in northern Italy and the bellicose actions of the Renaissance popes, but from them he had drawn very different conclusions. “A man who strives after goodness in his acts,” he observed in The Prince, “is sure to come to ruin, since there are so many men who are not good.” A prince, in pursuing his objectives, should feel free to show ruthlessness and deceit. Ideally, a prince would be both loved and feared, but since that is rarely possible, he should strive to be feared (while avoiding being hated). Because war offers the most effective path to power, “a prince must have no other objective, no other thought, nor take up any profession but that of war, its methods and its discipline, for that is the only art expected of a ruler.” As models of effective cruelty, Machiavelli held up Alexander the Great, Hannibal, Cesare Borgia, Ferdinand of Aragon (for despoiling the Marranos and driving them from his kingdom)—and Julius II. Unlike Erasmus, who condemned the pope’s assault on Bologna, Machiavelli extolled it. With “characteristic fierceness and haste,” he wrote, Julius had been able to accomplish what no other pope, exercising “all possible prudence,” could have achieved. Julius’s actions inspired one of Machiavelli’s most oft-quoted aphorisms: “It is better to be impetuous than to be cautious, for fortune is a woman, and in order to be mastered she must be beaten and bullied.”

  Whereas Machiavelli in writing The Prince was grounded in hardheaded realism, Thomas More offered a beguiling alternative to reality. Appalled by the cruelty, injustice, and chaos of England, he conjured up in Utopia a society that is clean, egalitarian, and orderly. Everyone lives in one of fifty-four splendid towns all organized on the same plan, with modest houses set on tidy streets, and all meals taken communally. Everyone farms and works at a trade but for only six hours a day; since everyone works, this is all that is needed to provide the essentials. There are no wine taverns, alehouses, brothels, or secret meeting places allowing opportunities for seduction. There is no private property—everything is owned by the state. In fact, there is no privacy of a
ny kind, for everyone is watched all the time. The Utopians disapprove of cosmetics, see no value in gems, use silver and gold to make chamber pots, and have no tailors or dressmakers, since everyone wears the same comfortable homemade clothes. They also have slaves, who consist mostly of convicts and condemned criminals from other countries; the slaves work in chain gangs and do all the butchering of animals so as to spare the locals such unpleasantness. In short, all of the basic needs of Utopia’s citizens are met, though at a considerable cost in terms of freedom and privacy.

  The world More created in Utopia was so imaginative and entertaining that it gave rise to an entire new genre of literature, including such works as Tommaso Campanella’s The City of the Sun, Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. The Prince is no less original; never before had anyone so dared to dissociate political action from moral considerations. By comparison, The Education of a Christian Prince is prosaic and workmanlike. Unlike More and Machiavelli, Erasmus had no actual political experience and so relied heavily on Plato, Aristotle, and other classical thinkers. The main measure he proposed for ensuring enlightened rule—providing the future prince with a good humanist education—seems entirely inadequate. Preachy and plodding, The Education of a Christian Prince reads like a manual for good governance.

  Yet its humdrum quality was precisely what made it distinctive. Whereas “utopian” came to suggest the unattainable and “Machiavellian” the amoral, “Erasmian” would come to mean practical, commonsense reform. At a time when Europe was beset by political rivalries, princely despotism, stark social inequities, and recurrent wars, Erasmus was urging its rulers to construct a more humane order based on the principle that the state should serve the people and the powerful should protect the weak—in short, to organize society along the lines of the Gospels. That, in the end, was the central idea underlying the sweeping reform program he had been working on for so many years.

  And, remarkably, that program was catching on. The books, essays, and editions of Erasmus that were issuing from the presses were being bought, read, and avidly discussed in Germany and France, England and the Netherlands. The Enchiridion, with its vision of heartfelt piety practiced outside the monastery, would appear in fifteen editions over the next three years, emerging as the most influential humanist work north of the Alps. Jerome’s letters were calling new attention to the vitality of the early Church, the Adages were advertising the wisdom of classical culture, and the Praise of Folly was everywhere causing chortles at the expense of the mighty. In courts and at universities, aspiring men of letters were studying Greek, reading Seneca and Plutarch, and asking whether any war could be considered just. Above all, the Novum Instrumentum was encouraging Christians to approach the Bible as a guide to virtuous living rather than a trove of Scholastic propositions.

  A new era of enlightenment seemed to be dawning, with Erasmus at its center. Not since Petrarch had an intellectual figure so dominated public discourse as Erasmus did in that enchanted spring of 1516. People wrote to him in the hope of receiving a response that they could show their friends, while young scholars made visits to him as if to the shrine of a saint. “Everywhere in all Christendom your fame is spreading,” wrote John Watson, a rector with whom he had become friends while in Cambridge. “By the unanimous verdict of all scholars, you are voted the best scholar of them all, and the most learned in both Greek and Latin.” “The devotees of literature flock round you from the whole of Germany,” wrote Johann Witz, the master of the famous town school in Sélestat, who signed off, “Greetings to Beatus Rhenanus and all the Erasmians.”

  Of course, those Erasmians represented a small sliver of society. It was the educated, Latin-speaking elite, dominated by Christian humanists, who most thrilled to the new Erasmian gospel. The kings and princes who actually wielded power were far more inclined to follow Machiavelli, and few of the weavers and plowmen mentioned in the Paraclesis knew enough Latin to read it.

  Among religious scholars, meanwhile, the backlash to Erasmus’s work that had been predicted by Martin Dorp was beginning to appear. From England, Thomas More wrote to warn that some people there had formed a conspiracy to read all that Erasmus had written, in search of errors. “I do beg and beseech you to lose no time in going through and correcting everything,” he wrote, for “these men are very sharp, and they have decided to keep a keen look-out for any such opportunity, and seize it greedily and gladly.” He urged Erasmus to mobilize all his resources “to deal with so great a danger.”

  From Basel, Wolfgang Capito—a professor of the Old Testament who had helped Erasmus with his New Testament—similarly pressed him to prepare a careful revision of that work so as to rebut “charges of inconsistency.” Given the many places at which Erasmus’s Latin translation failed to agree with his notes, he should go over it and “bring the whole into agreement with that skillful pen of yours.” And he should do so quickly, for his enemies were seeking opportunities to cause him trouble and denounce him as “a public enemy of Christianity.” By June 1516, Erasmus was already at work on a new edition.

  In short, the haste with which Erasmus had prepared his New Testament was beginning to catch up with him. As readers were discovering, his new Latin translation was very uneven—lightly revised in some places, completely reworded in others, left untouched elsewhere. The Greek text was even more flawed, with hundreds of editing, spelling, and typographical errors. At many points, the Greek version differed for no apparent reason from the manuscripts on which it was based, thus offering readings with no foundation in the textual tradition. On top of it all, the codices on which Erasmus relied most heavily for his Greek text were relatively late copies now known to be highly undependable. (Other codices of the New Testament that he examined in Basel but rejected as untrustworthy are now recognized as being far more reliable.) Finally, there were hundreds of printer’s errors.

  In Erasmus’s defense, he was working at the dawn of modern biblical scholarship. Not until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries would the science of critical editing advance to the point where it could pinpoint the dates of manuscripts with great accuracy, and it seems unfair to hold Erasmus to that standard. But the errors resulting from his own carelessness would have lasting consequences. Because his Greek New Testament was the first to appear in print and because it bore his prestigious name, it would be reprinted many times. In 1633, an edition of it was brought out in Leiden by Abraham and Bonaventura Elzevir; its preface stated, Textum ergo habes, nunc ab omnibus receptum—“Here you have the text now received by all.” Because of that phrase, their edition came to be known as the Textus Receptus, or “received text.” This edition became so revered as to achieve divinely ordained status, and it would become the foundation for all Protestant biblical scholarship until the nineteenth century. In other words, the Greek text that Erasmus had prepared on the basis of very flawed codices and which had been printed with such haste and so little copyediting as to become riddled with errors would for three centuries serve as the primary text for scriptural study in the West. It would also provide the basis for the many vernacular editions of the Bible produced over the next century, including the King James Bible of 1611, which would incorporate many of the errors in Erasmus’s Greek text. One renowned nineteenth-century biblical scholar called the text “the most faulty book I know.”

  For all Erasmus’s shortcomings as an editor, however, it was his theological observations that would ultimately cause him the most trouble. A foretaste came in a letter from George Spalatin, the secretary to Prince Frederick of Saxony. Spalatin assured Erasmus of his friendly intentions: “We are devoted to you, all of us who have signed on as students of a new and better learning. The output of your gifted mind is held in such high esteem among us that nothing is more eagerly sought for in the fairs or more quickly sold out at the booksellers.” Prince Frederick had in his ducal library every book of Erasmus’s that Spalatin had been able to find.

  Now, however,
he was writing on behalf of an Augustinian priest, who, having studied Erasmus’s work on the New Testament, had two concerns. One was Erasmus’s assertion that Paul in Romans was not speaking about original sin. The priest suggested that Erasmus read Augustine’s writings against the Pelagians, which, he felt sure, would help him “not only understand the Apostle correctly but also pay much greater reverence to St. Augustine.”

  The priest also objected to Erasmus’s interpretation of Paul’s comments about works. This referred not “merely to ceremonies,” as Erasmus suggested, but to “the keeping of the whole Ten Commandments.” According to the priest, “we do not become just by performing just actions,” but “we become just first and then act justly. For the person must first be changed, and then his works.” Because Erasmus carried such worldwide authority, the priest was afraid that he would “encourage people to rush to the defense of the dead, that is, the literal interpretation, which has filled the work of almost everyone since Augustine.”

  Whether because of his crushing workload or the critical tone of the letter, Erasmus never replied. Soon, however, he would be hearing much more about the Augustinian priest.

  14

  A Friar’s Cry

  Sometime during the summer of 1516, while Luther was still lecturing on the Epistle to the Romans, Erasmus’s Novum Instrumentum arrived in Wittenberg. As he examined its comments on cases and tenses, syntax and vocabulary, Luther immediately saw the great help that this text could provide in grasping Paul’s meaning, and Erasmus quickly replaced all other commentators (except Augustine) as his main guide. Luther’s first explicit acknowledgment of the Dutchman’s contribution came at Romans 9:19. Struggling with the voice of the Latin queritur (“find fault”), Luther wrote: “Some, like Laurentius Valla, take this phrase to be passive. Stapulensis understands it as referring to a person; but Erasmus says that all Greek interpreters take it as a deponent, and he agrees with them.” From that point on, Erasmus’s name would regularly show up in Luther’s lecture notes.