While the principles underlying the European Union clearly have many sources, they closely reflect the reform program that Erasmus had spent so many years preparing and promoting. His call for a pan-European identity transcending borders and nationalities as spelled out in A Complaint of Peace; his appeals for tolerance and mutual understanding as expressed in such works as On Mending the Peace of the Church and his preface to the Hilary edition; his admonitions to Christian princes to avoid wars and foreign adventures and instead devote themselves to enhancing the welfare of their people; his stress on keeping doctrinal differences to a minimum and emphasizing all that binds humankind together; his statement that he would like to be “a citizen of the world, to be a fellow-citizen to all men”—all are ideals on which the EU is built. Erasmus would no doubt have taken special pleasure in the EU’s matrix of regulatory agencies aimed at ensuring food safety, protecting the workplace, preventing disease, and safeguarding the environment—fulfillments of his repeated calls for improved hygiene and cleanliness. And one can only imagine the wonder he would have felt at seeing a train whisk passengers between London and Paris in just over two hours, gliding beneath the perilous channel that had caused him such dread and discomfort.
Erasmus’s contribution to the EU has been explicitly recognized in one of its most popular initiatives. Through the Erasmus Program, students in one member country can spend up to a year at a university in another, with grants to help defray the cost. Since it began, in 1987, more than three million students have participated, taking the opportunity to learn new languages, experience other cultures, make friends in foreign lands, and have romances. The program inspired the 2002 film L’Auberge Espagnole (“The Spanish Inn”), about an economics graduate student who, seeking a government job in Paris, is told that spending a year in Spain would boost his chances. Through the Erasmus Program, he arranges to study in Barcelona. There he shares a flat with students from around Europe, learns Spanish, lingers in bars, meets a girl. On his return to Paris, he decides to give up economics and become a writer, with his Erasmus experience the subject of his first book.
The Erasmus Program (now called Erasmus+) is a fitting tribute to a nomadic scholar who traveled from city to city in search of libraries, printers, good wine, bright conversation, and the freedom to think and write, and who placed education at the core of his program to form a new type of citizen committed to a new Europe. Umberto Eco, in a 2012 interview with La Stampa, credited the Erasmus Program with helping to create “the first generation of young Europeans. I call it a sexual revolution: a young Catalan man meets a Flemish girl—they fall in love and get married and they become European, as do their children.” A 2014 study by the European Commission calculated (based on fertility rates) that the Erasmus Program had been responsible for producing one million babies since 1987.
Yet questions have been raised about how widely the benefits of that program have been shared. Only about 5 percent of all European graduates participate in it, and they tend to come from better-off families. An Erasmus sojourn has become a marker of distinction and privilege, and the improved job prospects it brings reinforce the advantages of those participating. In short, the program has taken on an elitist air.
That, of course, is a concern for the European project as a whole. The vote by Britain in June 2016 to leave the EU exposed the gulf between the well-to-do urbanites of London and Oxbridge and the less mobile residents of smaller communities who have felt left behind in the great global gold rush. The flood of migrants and succession of terrorist acts have produced a backlash against open borders, while economic stagnation has raised questions about the viability of the euro. More generally, the control that unelected policy makers and bureaucrats in Brussels and Frankfurt have over the lives of the EU’s 500 million people has fed charges of unaccountability and high-handedness, further exposing the union’s fragility. At a Conservative Party conference in October 2016, the British prime minister Theresa May declared, “If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere”—an Adages-like statement that seemed aimed directly at Erasmus.
These developments would no doubt have seemed familiar to Erasmus. His rationalist, ethics-based, pluralistic, and internationalist creed came under constant assault. As Stefan Zweig observed, Erasmus failed to find a way to communicate his ideals to the masses. He wrote in Latin for a highly educated slice of society. He and his fellow humanists rarely mingled with ordinary people and had only limited knowledge of their attitudes, needs, and appetites. So, when it came to defending his ideals in the face of rising nationalism, disruptive technology, and deepening social and economic rifts, he lacked both the tools and vocabulary. European humanists today often seem similarly at a loss. If humanists think that their own values represent those of all humanity and offer the best design for living, they should be able to do a better job of making that case.
Aftermath: Luther
If tracing Erasmus’s influence is difficult because his fingerprints are so faint, tracing Luther’s is difficult because his offspring are so plentiful. Today, the Protestant faith that he helped found has an estimated 800 million adherents (second only to Roman Catholicism, with 1.1 billion). Worldwide, there are eleven thousand Protestant denominations. The varieties of Protestant experience include Southern Baptists praying in suburban megachurches, Methodists worshipping in Main Street sanctuaries, Quakers gathering in Spartan meeting houses, Jehovah’s Witnesses ringing doorbells, Mennonites refusing to bear arms, Seventh-day Adventists observing the Sabbath on Saturday, premillennialists awaiting the rapture, and televangelists proclaiming the prosperity gospel. In one form or another, all of these groups can trace their origins back to the moment in late October 1517 when Luther posted his Ninety-Five Theses in Wittenberg.
Yet, in many of them, Luther’s presence is hard to detect. A large and growing number of Protestants belong to the Pentecostal and Charismatic movements. Both movements believe in the blessings conferred by the Holy Spirit and feature faith healing, speaking in tongues, and other “spiritual gifts” that recall the practices of the Zwickau Prophets whom Luther so excoriated. The Anglican Communion, with about eighty-five million adherents, features a Catholic-like hierarchy and an Erasmian aversion to doctrinal certitude that Luther would no doubt condemn. In Scotland, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and France, the dominant form of Protestantism is a version of the Reformed faith that goes back not to Luther but to Zwingli and Calvin.
In Europe, Luther’s most direct descendants are, naturally, in Germany, and it is there that one would most expect to find his imprint. In 2003, German public television conducted a call-in poll to determine Unsere Besten—“Our Best,” i.e., the greatest Germans. Luther placed second, ahead of Marx, Bach, Goethe, Bismarck, and Einstein and behind only Konrad Adenauer—a showing all the more impressive in that Adenauer is a figure of the twentieth century and Luther is one of the sixteenth. This obstinate, forceful, audacious, and fervent patriarch remains a towering presence in his homeland, as can be seen in the undiminished popularity of the Luther Bible (150,000 copies published annually), the continued use of his catechisms, and the prominent place in German society of the Lutheran pastor (Angela Merkel is the daughter of one). Nearly 30 percent of all Germans belong to churches affiliated with the Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland, Germany’s main Protestant federation and the heir to Luther’s movement.
Yet these measures of influence are to a degree misleading. As esteemed as Luther is among the German people, his ideas have gradually lost their hold on them—a result of a series of struggles, setbacks, and fatal missteps, as well as of more general social and political developments in Germany as in Europe as a whole.
In 1555, when the Peace of Augsburg was signed, Lutheranism seemed an unstoppable force in Germany. That pact—ending eight years of warfare between the forces of Charles V and those of the Schmalkaldic League—granted each ruler in the Holy Roman Empire the right to determine the faith of his s
ubjects, and many of those rulers were Lutheran. Most of northern Germany was Lutheran, as were half of Franconia and about fifty of the empire’s sixty-five imperial free cities. The Catholic Church had disappeared from much of the country; hundreds of parishes had no priest, and many monasteries were empty. Around 1560, however, the Counter-Reformation got underway in earnest. The Roman Church—reinvigorated by Trent, urged on by prince-bishops, propelled by Jesuit educators and propagandists—set out to re-Catholicize Europe. From Geneva, meanwhile, militant Calvinists were infiltrating Germany, where they clashed with the Lutherans over the Eucharist and where a number of princes went over to the Reformed faith.
The Lutherans themselves continued to assail one another. In an effort at peacekeeping, a group of theologians met to produce a new confession. The Formula of Concord, as it was called, offered a codification of Lutheran positions on such key matters as original sin, justification, and works. While helping to reduce strife, however, the Formula was so detailed, dense, and convoluted as to be intelligible only to those who had drafted it. Lutheran theologians proceeded to turn out arcane, long-winded commentaries, capped by the Loci Theologi of Johann Gerhard—a nine-volume Scholastic thicket. Aristotelian logic was used to defend Lutheran propositions, and Aristotle’s Metaphysics was smuggled back into university curricula. Lutheranism thus entered its “age of orthodoxy.”
Thus consumed with doctrine and dialectic, the Lutherans were unprepared when war broke out in 1618. Over the next thirty years, the armies of Catholic states reclaimed huge swaths of the Holy Roman Empire. The Peace of Westphalia compounded the problem. The control that princes gained over the churches in their territories was even more complete in Protestant than in Catholic territories. Attendance at church and knowledge of the catechism were firmly enforced, and the Lutheran clergy often seemed agents of the state—a legacy of Luther’s own history of collaboration with the princes.
Amid such rigidity and control, there was a growing desire for more heartfelt forms of devotion, and a new reformer stepped forth to provide it. Philipp Jakob Spener, while studying Luther’s theology at Strasbourg, was struck by his teaching that all Christians are priests. Clearly, this principle had gotten lost. In 1670, while serving as a pastor in Frankfurt, Spener began hosting small groups in his home to pray, read the Bible, and discuss how to apply it to their lives. These collegia pietatis, as he called them, stressed the spiritual regeneration of individuals over the memorization of creeds and the performance of rites.
Spener summed up this new approach in a book titled Pia Desideria (“Pious Desires”). After caustically cataloguing the “corrupt conditions” in the Lutheran church—the fruitless meddling by the princes, the sterile exercises of the theologians, the “sins and debaucheries” of the Lutheran authorities—he proposed a series of concrete ideas for renewal, based on the same type of groups he had introduced in Frankfurt. In these “churches within the church,” Scripture was to be restored as the chief source of authority and instrument of salvation. Preachers were encouraged to edify their congregations rather than show off their learning, and princes were admonished to stick to the temporal realm. More generally, Spener urged Christians to practice the “diligent exercise of the spiritual priesthood.”
Soon, collegia pietatis were appearing across Germany, in a movement that came to be known as Pietism. From the start, however, it faced fierce opposition. Spener was charged with heresy for ignoring doctrine, and his groups were accused of “separatism” for operating outside official channels. The rulers of Prussia were more sympathetic, however, and Spener accepted an invitation to continue his work in Berlin. In 1694, the Prussian government established a university at Halle, and August Hermann Francke, a disciple of Spener’s, became a professor there. Like Spener, Francke wanted to show how faith could be made active in the world, and he established a school for poor children, a home for orphans, a Bible institute, a pharmacy, and a printing house to spread the word. Halle became Pietism’s “New Jerusalem,” attracting earnest students from around Germany. To that point, Lutheranism had not shown much interest in proselytizing, but Francke started a missionary training school, and soon graduates were heading off to the Americas, South African, even India—the start of Protestantism’s global expansion.
The most eye-catching—and peculiar—Pietist experiment occurred on the estate of Nikolaus Ludwig Zinzendorf, an engaging but eccentric Saxon count. Inheriting some land near Dresden, Zinzendorf in 1722 opened it up to religious refugees, including the Moravian Brethren. Heirs to the Hussite movement, the Moravians had suffered intense persecution during the Church’s brutal recovery of Czech lands. Under Zinzendorf’s protection, they established a village, called Herrnhut (“the Lord’s watch”), in which they sought to build a new Christian order. It developed into a sort of commune, with families replaced by “choirs” organized by age, sex, and marital status and responsible for providing education and child care. From around Europe, mystics and seekers came to see this center of evangelistic renewal. Its very success, however, made it suspect to the authorities, and Zinzendorf was banished from his estate.
The Moravians themselves developed cult-like features, including chiliastic outbursts, continuous prayer watches, and an almost erotic preoccupation with Christ’s wounds. The Pietists as a whole seemed to delight in alienating others. Their leaders demanded strict austerity in personal conduct, including rigid observance of the Sabbath and a ban on card-playing and theater-going. The emphasis placed on conversion bred disdain for those who failed to measure up; with Scripture held up as the sole authority, scholarship and learning were often neglected. In the end, though, what stirred the most opposition was the Pietists’ offer of a form of devotion outside official institutions. Had they been allowed to form a new denomination, they might have become an established presence, but this was prohibited by law, and by the time of Francke’s death, in 1727, the movement had lost much of its vitality. In Germany, there was little room for the priesthood of all believers.
Pietism would not disappear, however. Its warm spirituality and sense of fellowship appealed to the lowly and learned alike. Many of the leading figures of the German Enlightenment, in fact, had religious roots, in contrast to the more skeptical philosophes of France. The result, however, would be to undo religion from within.
The pioneer of the German Enlightenment, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, was born (in 1646) into a pious Lutheran family in Leipzig. As a young prodigy, however, he became interested in mathematics and jurisprudence, and by the age of forty he had developed calculus independently of Newton. Reflecting his scientific bent, Leibniz saw the universe as an orderly place whose harmonic operations could be described by the laws of logic. His God was not an angry, inscrutable figure but a rational and benevolent father who rewarded men and women according to their deeds. Human sinfulness was not an innate and ineradicable condition but a relative weakness that could be overcome by making the right choices. For Leibniz, in short, the relationship between God and man more closely resembled Erasmus’s father leading his son to the apple than Luther’s hapless rider of a donkey, and the reformer would no doubt have condemned his ideas as gross blasphemies.
Leibniz’s claim that the universe is the best of all possible worlds would be satirized by Voltaire in the figure of Doctor Pangloss. But his belief in a just God and man’s ability to do good would become a fixture of the German Enlightenment, as was apparent in the work of its supreme representative, Immanuel Kant. Born in 1724, Kant was raised in a family of devout Pietists in Königsberg, the capital of East Prussia; at the university there, he came under the influence of a Pietist professor of logic and metaphysics. But he also studied Newtonian science, and in his writings on religion he would ruthlessly suppress all traces of the supernatural, as was apparent in the title of his main work on the subject: Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone (published in 1793). No Pangloss, Kant believed in the existence of “radical innate evil” in humankind—a concept a
kin to original sin. But he also believed that man has a “seed of goodness” within and that he must work continually to overcome the evil and strive for the good. Human freedom and choice were at the heart of Kant’s vision. “It is not essential, and hence not necessary, for everyone to know what God does or has done for his salvation,” he wrote. It is essential, however, “to know what man himself must do in order to become worthy of this assistance.” Kant dismissed prayer, churchgoing, and other practices aimed at pleasing God as elements of a “fetish-faith,” and he mocked those who seek through the means of grace to become “favorites” of God rather than strive to fulfill the human duty to behave ethically.
For such put-downs of conventional religion, Kant was denounced by the Prussian authorities, but the damage was done. His ideas would provide a foundation for a new school: liberal Protestantism. It equated religion with morality, saw Christ primarily as an ethical guide, and considered man capable of constant self-betterment. By the end of the eighteenth century, Luther’s doctrine of justification by faith was all but dead among German intellectuals; though raised Lutheran, they were all turning Erasmian.
Luther’s influence would further recede as a result of the radical advances taking place in biblical studies. Building on the innovations of the Renaissance, German scholars set out to determine the identity and intent of the authors of the books of the Bible. Whereas Valla and Erasmus had used grammar and philology to arrive at the most reliable version of the text, the higher criticism (as it was called) raised questions about the accuracy and authenticity of that text. The most sensational work to emerge from this school was the Life of Jesus, Critically Examined, by David Friedrich Strauss. Published in 1835, when Strauss was just twenty-seven, it subjected the four Gospels to an exhaustive critical analysis. The miraculous deeds described in the New Testament, Strauss argued, were best understood as myths created by the followers of Jesus to fulfill the Judaic prophecies about the coming of the Messiah. Such events as the virgin birth and the resurrection were nothing more than inventions designed to establish Christ’s divinity. Loudly attacked for undermining the articles of the faith, Strauss was banned from future theological employment, but his Life ushered in a new era of scholarship in which Scripture was ruthlessly deconstructed and demystified. Paradoxically, then, it was in Germany, where Luther had proclaimed the Bible the lone authority, that its sacral quality was most unceremoniously stripped away.
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