The Spanish Polemic on Colonisation
Part 1: Erasmus, Luther and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (2)
Erasmus of Rotterdam
There are literary giants who fare badly with the passage of time, and Erasmus is a prime example. A single book of his remains famous, the one you’ve a fairly good chance of finding in a bookshop’s classics section: In Praise of Folly. There he speaks in the voice of a woman, the goddess of foolishness, who is powerful wherever there are human beings. However, as Marcel Bataillon says, that’s like reducing the man’s whole working life to the entertainment he invented during a week’s holidays. Erasmus was a deeply serious writer, and without that seriousness he could hardly have sustained his superhuman productivity or kept his independent position to the end of his life. Even when he was joking, which he did quite a lot, he pursued his serious purpose. He used humour to undermine everything in European Christian culture that he thought was ossified and “Jewish” (or mechanically ceremonial). Bataillon remarks how In Praise of Folly is “so aggressive, under the veil of irony, against everything he considered dead in Catholicism”. (3) Some people were shocked that he had translated Lucian, a Greek writer who mocked the colourful stories told by the poets about the gods and therefore had a reputation as an atheist. Luther taunted him about this. And Erasmus replied: Lucian, if he were living today, had it in him to be an excellent Christian!
“A single thought gives life and contemporary relevance to everything that he wrote. So what was the nature of this message so avidly received? It is summed up in two words, Christ’s Philosophy” (Bataillon). For Erasmus, the perfect thinking was to be found in the Gospels. The high point of his career came in 1516, when he produced a Greek edition of the New Testament (used by Luther when producing his German version), with a new Latin translation, notes and commentary. He followed this up with paraphrases of the four Gospels, highlighting what he considered the essentials.
Erasmus believed that the divinely created order of the universe was in harmony with the law of Christ, as expressed in the Gospels. (4) By nature everything tended to be Christian, but human beings had taken a wrong course. Nevertheless, the best minds even among the pagans, the greatest philosophers, had said many things which accorded with Christianity. Our natural reason steered us towards living the right way, the Christian way. But reason needed an adequate and reliable guide, and we could find that only in the Gospels. Erasmus said that every woman, every labourer, absolutely everyone without exception, ought to read the Gospels. They should be translated into all the languages of the world, so that not just the Scots and Irish but even the Turks and the Moors could read them. (5) Everyone could find good guidance in them, suitable to his/her level of mind. The point was to discover sound principles for living. Real Christianity was not about scholastic subtlety: it was something that had to be lived. It was the perfect philosophy of life.
To get at the really valuable things in Scripture, the principles for living, it wasn’t enough just to read things literally. You had to find the allegories behind the stories. Erasmus explains this in the extraordinarily popular handbook he wrote for young Christian noblemen, Enchiridion (1503). The Old Testament especially, one gathers, is a waste of time unless one can get beyond the literal meaning. If you read “without the allegory”, (6) Erasmus says, the story of how Adam was formed from clay and a spirit was breathed into him; how Eve was formed from his rib; how the two of them ate the fruit of the forbidden tree, urged to do so by the snake; how they tried to hide but were found by God; how they were evicted from Eden and an angel with a flaming sword was posted at the entrance to see that they didn’t get back in – then you might be as well off reading about how Prometheus stole fire from Heaven. Indeed, “a poet’s fable in the allegory shall be read with somewhat more fruit, than a narration of Holy Books if (you remain) in the rind or outer part”. (7) For example, when you read about the labours of Hercules you might reflect that “Heaven must be obtained with honest labours and (tireless efforts)”, (8) in which case you’ll have gathered a piece of sound philosophy from the fable. That’s a lot better than reading about Esau selling his birthright for a mess of pottage, David killing Goliath with a slingshot, and Samson having his hair cut off, if you can’t see beyond the colourful stories.
The apostle Paul, and other early Christian writers such as Origen, had explored the allegories. Why was it, Erasmus asked, that Christian thinkers were not doing that still? There were two reasons. First of all, the16th century Christians didn’t have the gift that Paul and Origen had, of bringing Christian thought to life. And secondly, preference had been given to Aristotle as a philosophical guide instead of Plato, who was much better at training the mind for allegories. Christian writers had degenerated over time and currently they tended to be anything but clear. “It is a great shame... for lawyers and also physicians, that they have... (deliberately) made their art and science full of difficulty... (so) that both their gains and advantage might be more plentiful and their glory and praise among the unlearned people the greater: but it is a much more shameful thing to do the same in the philosophy of Christ.” (9) In these circumstances, essentially the young nobleman is told to learn to do the work for himself: ensure “that the literal sense little regarded, you look chiefly to the mystery”. (10) (But Erasmus, of course, would help him.)
It follows that Christianity, as Erasmus preached it, is very much Christianity for readers. (He was a great educator, producing any number of books with titles like How to Write Letters, The Point of Studying, A Little Book of Good Manners for Children, On the Best Style of Speaking, and so on.) But what if you belonged to the great majority, the non-readers? Very well, you could have your superstitious prayers, practices, customs and ceremonies! Erasmus didn’t want to abolish all those, or not immediately. When someone advances in knowledge, this ought not to mean “he should hurt his brother who is yet weak”. (11) But the Christianity of the illiterate is very much a second-class version: there are times when one feels that it isn’t much more than a means of keeping them quiet and orderly. Erasmus acknowledged that there was no more useful class in the community than the peasants and he hated to see them cruelly treated by their lords, but he didn’t have much taste for lower-class culture. (Mikhail Bakhtin expresses an opposite opinion in his book on Rabelais: In Praise of Folly is “one of the most eminent creations of carnivalesque laughter in all of world literature”. (12) I think he could not be more wrong. Erasmus wasn’t in any sense whatever a carnival creature.)
If Europe were to become truly Christian, the ordinary person would work at his or her Christianity, not just go through the motions of mechanical devotion like a Jew; the priests would concern themselves with promoting Christ’s philosophy rather than making money; rulers would seek the welfare of their subjects rather than aggrandising themselves; and the nations of Christians Europe (ideally all mankind, though one might have no option but to fight the Turks) would live in mutual peace. The existing institutional religion would be gradually reformed in a number of ways. For example, the cult of the saints would be de-paganised, getting rid of the superstitions and bad behaviour that accompanied it currently. The numbers of idle, good-for-nothing monks would be drastically reduced. The Church’s material demands on the people would be reduced also. A more reasonable and flexible attitude would be taken to practices like not eating meat on Fridays. Rather than rely entirely on the Popes with their varying characters, a General Council would set the Church firmly on a reforming course. And hopefully there would never be another Pope like Julius II, who had plunged Europe into war in pursuit of his interests as a secular ruler.
Erasmus was optimistic (in this Bataillon compares him to Jean-Jacques Rousseau). All over Europe, from England to Rome, he had friends and admirers in high places, as he loved to boast. He felt part of a Europe-wide movement of enlightenment that was growing in power. “The reformed and genuine study of literature and the liberal disciplines... is now pursued with equal enthusiasm in different regions of the world, in Rome by Pope Leo, in Spain by the Cardinal of Toledo, in England by King Henry who is something of a scholar himself, in our country by King Charles, a divinely gifted young man, in France by King Francis,... in Germany... especially by the Emperor Maximilian, who in his old age, wearied by so many wars, has decided to relax in the arts of peace, which will prove both more appropriate to his time of life and more beneficial to the Christian world” (26/2/1517, letter to Wolfgang Capito). (13) But he had scarcely written that letter when things began going wrong.
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