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Notes

The Spanish Polemic on Colonisation

Part 1: Erasmus, Luther and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (3)


Erasmus and Luther 

When Martin Luther challenged the institutional Church with his 95 Theses in Wittenberg in 1517, Erasmus agreed with most of what he said. (14) As Luther’s movement developed, this essential agreement did not change. Even in 1523, when the conflict was very sharp indeed, Erasmus wrote to a friendly cardinal in Rome: “Luther’s accusations against the tyranny, the rapacity, the corruption of the Roman court – I wish to God that they were false!” (15)

But Luther was launching frontal assaults at a series of points (confession, indulgences, pilgrimage, fasting, the cult of the saints, monasticism, papal power) where Erasmus had probed and queried, or indeed protested and condemned in his literary Latin. What effect would such a challenge have in practice? What were the implications for the movement of Christian enlightenment? Erasmus wanted an orderly reform of the institutions. “I see that the monarchy of the Roman high priest, as it is now, amounts to a plague in Christendom... And yet I do not know if it is advisable to touch this ulcer openly. That would be a task for the princes, but I’m afraid they’re together with the Pope under one quilt, taking their share of the booty” (Letter to Johann Lang, 17/10/1518, Briefe p.220). 

Erasmus urged moderation on all sides and refused to take any side. He didn’t trust Luther and wouldn’t support him. What sense would it make, to be burdened with responsibility for a movement he couldn’t control? At the same time, he didn’t want to line up with Luther’s enemies. Hoping against hope that the Lutheran movement would eventually produce some positive outcome, Erasmus put his head down and used all his arts to avoid having to choose. – (Well, I wouldn’t know what to write about Luther, good or bad, because I’m not familiar with what he’s been saying. I haven’t got round to reading his books: I’ve never had the time! My work, my work – have you any idea how busy I am?) 

But his enemies (principally those theologians “whose brains are the most addled, tongues the most uncultivated, wits the dullest, teachings the thorniest, characters the least attractive, lives the most hypocritical, talk the most slanderous, and hearts the blackest on earth”, to quote his own description (16))  began to identify him with Luther and to treat him as Luther’s trail-blazer. Some German Franciscan came up with the formula: “Erasmus laid the egg and Luther hatched it!” (17) A Spanish monk living in Rome went through all the works of Erasmus and came up with some thousands of places where he said things that seemed to be unorthodox; he presented this dossier to the Pope, who was spurred to action. Erasmus could have been faced with a choice between a humiliating self-criticism and condemnation as a heretic, if that particular Pope had not died.  

At the same time, some of the Lutherans were producing abusive pamphlets (e.g. Ulrich van Hutten, Expostulation), denouncing him as someone who didn’t have the courage of his own convictions. The last straw was when his friends at the court of Charles V, wanting only to help him, came up with the idea of making him an imperial grand inquisitor, with full powers to sort out the Lutheran question! Erasmus, living at that time in Louvain, didn’t fancy the role in the least. He decided he had to become unavailable. So he moved to Switzerland. 

But the Pope, his good friend King Henry VIII of England, and others kept pressing him to take a stand against Luther. And Erasmus was beginning to feel that the German cure might be worse than the Roman disease. At the very least, Luther had gone to an opposite extreme: he was plunging into confrontations which were making it less likely that there could be agreed reform for Christian Europe as a whole. To argue the point, Erasmus chose one philosophical issue where Luther seemed to have drawn his conclusions recklessly, with incalculable implications. This was the question of free will. 

Giving philosophical force to his campaign against indulgences, pilgrimages, fasting, prayers to the saints etc., Luther declared that everything happened by necessity. There was no free will. And since there was no free will, there could be no human merit before God, so one couldn’t build up credit by “doing good works”. Faith, not works, was what God demanded from the few whom he had decided to save – not because of their merits (since they didn’t have any) but arbitrarily, for unknowable divine reasons. 

Erasmus’s short book On Free Will appeared in 1524. There are questions which overstretch the capacities of the human mind, he begins, and free will is one of them. Nothing can be gained by forcing deep and bitter divisions over matters like these. What benefit has anyone had from the furious conflicts over whether the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father and the Son or only from the Father, or whether the Virgin Mary was conceived immaculately? If we discuss such things at all, we should do so calmly and temperately. In the present case I am not coming forward as a judge, inquisitor or dogmatist; I am simply a participant in debate. And I am sure that Luther will acknowledge my right to disagree with him, since he himself has asserted his right to differ with the most eminent teachers of the Catholic Church over thirteen centuries. 

There are certain things we should not say in public in front of everyone, even if we believe they are true. “To tell the truth is allowed, but it isn’t judicious to tell it to anyone, anywhere, anyhow.” (18) The apostle Paul had deliberately not preached certain things to certain audiences. “Even if we were to accept that in a certain sense what Wycliffe taught and Luther has proclaimed is true, that everything which originates with us is done not on the basis of our free decision but from plain necessity, what could be more inappropriate than to communicate this paradox to the world?... Or Saint Augustine’s statement that God himself works good and evil within us, rewarding us for his good deeds and punishing us for his bad deeds. What a huge entrance-gate to godlessness words such as these, given out to everyone, would open up for countless people! ... What feeble creature would still commit himself to the long hard struggle with his own flesh? What wretch would try to live better?” (19) 

But we should hesitate, Erasmus says, before accepting that Luther’s doctrine is true. Apart from him, there are only three writers of the past thirteen centuries who have completely denied free will: Mani (leader of the Manichaeans); Wycliffe; and a comparatively insignificant Italian writer of the 15th century, Lorenzo Valla. On the other side, the Greek Fathers of the Church, the Latin Fathers, the scholastic theologians, Popes, Councils and universities, have all acknowledged that free will has some agency, however limited. And what should persuade us to side with Luther against all of those? Has he perhaps worked miracles? 

“The apostles worked miracles, and even then they had hard work to make people believe them, because they were preaching things that went against human reason. Today there are advocates of a still more paradoxical teaching, but so far none of them have been able even to cure a lame horse.” Of course, the Lutherans say that the time of miracles is past and today the sign of the truth is the spirit. But “how is it possible that the spirit of Christ would have kept his church in darkness and regarded so many holy men over 1300 years as unworthy of this insight, which according to the Lutherans is the climax of all his evangelical teaching?” (20)

Erasmus then turns to a presentation of statements from the Old and New Testaments which support free will. He goes on to present other statements which seem to reject free will, but argues that in fact they are compatible with a limited belief in free will, such as he himself holds. Then, in the last section of the book, he returns to the argument that what Luther is saying is culturally and socially destructive. Luther’s doctrine seems to remove the basis for any kind of moral sense. It makes nonsense of good and evil, right and wrong, Heaven and Hell, and turns God into a monster. 

“If human efforts are entirely vain, how can those who seek to keep God’s commandments be praised and how can those who break them be condemned? ... Why should God want us to keep asking him for something he has already once and for all decided to give or not to give?”  

The Lutherans make God “practically a savage”. When he punishes, what does he punish for? “It is hard to explain how it can be just (not to mention merciful) to condemn to eternal punishment all those others in whom God has not permitted good to operate, when they are not able to do anything good by themselves, since they have no free will, or if they have any, it only serves for committing sins... 

What ruler could be regarded as just and loving if he lavishly rewarded a successful commander whom he had sent to war with abundance of siege machinery, soldiers, money, and all auxiliary materials, while he had someone else, whom he sent to war unarmed and with none of the proper resources, hanged for his failure? ... And what would anyone think of a master who had his slave whipped because he was physically underdeveloped, or his nose was too long?” (21)

I cannot see how Luther could have made a reasonable reply to this. But he did produce a reply, On The Enslaved Will, and he himself thought it was one of the best things he had ever written. It is one of the great destructive pamphlets. Luther sets out systematically to demolish the opponent’s self-respect, if possible, but in any case to discredit him in the eyes of readers. For this purpose all is legitimate. The aim is to show that Erasmus is a moral bankrupt, and the very best he can do is to recognise the fact, repent publicly, and hereafter humbly follow where Luther leads him. And if he doesn’t, the public will have been shown what Erasmus is. His high culture is sometimes cunningly praised (“You’ve put a fox-skin over your lion’s skin, and you smear me with poisonous honey,” Erasmus complained (22)), only then to be viciously trampled on and degraded: what is it but a golden vessel full of shit? As for Luther himself, “I am but a barbarian and do all things barbarously” he says, with mocking self-deprecation. (23) 

The book can be summed up in a few words: if the Spirit inspires you, and therefore you believe, well and good; and if you don’t believe, to Hell with you – quite literally. 

Erasmus had asked whether anyone would try to live better if he didn’t believe in free will. “Who (you say) will endeavour to amend his life? I answer, No man! For your self-amenders without the Spirit, God regards not, for they are hypocrites. But the elect, and those that fear God, will be amended by the Holy Spirit; the rest will perish unamended.” (24) 

And again, Erasmus had asked why we needed to preach the non-existence of free will. Answer: God has willed it, and that is enough for those who fear him. But there are two other reasons. Our human pride must be humbled, and this cannot be done thoroughly until we know that salvation is beyond our own powers. And secondly, to make room for faith we must confront the apparent iniquity of God. 

“This is the highest degree of faith – to believe that he is merciful, who saves so few and damns so many; to believe him just who, according to his own will, makes us necessarily damnable, that he may seem, as Erasmus says, “to delight in the torments of the miserable, and to be an object of hatred rather than of love”. If, therefore, I could by any means comprehend how that same lord can be merciful and just, who carries the appearance of so much wrath and iniquity, there would be no need of faith. But now, since that cannot be comprehended, there is room for exercising faith, while such things are preached and openly proclaimed: in the same manner as while God kills, the faith of life is exercised in death.” (25) 

What is called for here is a kind of lunatic faith. At least, if one doesn’t have this special faith which despises all human notions of right and justice, I think it is difficult not to regard these statements as lunatic. The course that Luther had set out on implied that if Christianity were still possible, it would be a Christianity of lunatic self-righteousness. 

Or it might take a social tack. While the Lutherans were accusing Erasmus of not following through the logic of his own convictions, Thomas Münzer was making the same charge against Luther himself. Didn’t he know that Christianity had to be lived – collectively, in real human society? Luther suddenly found himself confronted with a spreading rebellion of peasants who were identified as a wing of Reformed Christianity, with a spokesman who was preaching Christian communism. There was a danger that Luther would be blamed for it (as indeed Erasmus blamed him, in his reply to On The Enslaved Will: “This vehemence of yours, which in vain I tried to restrain, has shaken the whole world with fateful discord... events have gone to the point of bloody carnage, and one fears still worse... It seems to me you don’t want to know anything about these rebels, but they want to know something about you!” (26)) And the princes who had protected him and his movement... how long would they continue to do so?  

Luther saved his position with a most ferocious and bloodthirsty book. “I think there is not a devil left in Hell; they have all gone into the peasants.” The rebels had committed terrible sins against God and man. They all had to be killed, and it didn’t matter who killed them: anyone was entitled to kill a rebel. “There is no place for patience or mercy. It is the time of the sword, not the day of grace.” Luther says quite plainly that he is prepared to support Catholic rulers in putting the peasants down. “Stab, smite, slay, whoever can!” (27)

“You’ve written an angry book against the peasants to remove suspicion from yourself,” Erasmus said, “but you aren’t able to make people believe that you gave no impetus to this revolt”. (28) Luther’s approach to all things was disorderly, including the question of free will. “I would never have taken up the issue,” Erasmus told him, “if you hadn’t transferred the discussion of free will from the universities to the pubs... Nowadays even the tanners discuss free will when they meet for a drink.” (29) As for the book denouncing the peasants, it was “not unjustified, but immoderately cruel”. (30) But Luther, having shaken the foundations of Europe, had decided to be a pillar of order, and he never did things by halves. Having declared in an earlier book that Christians could not fight the Turks, rather they must meekly accept whatever the heathen inflicted, he now revealed that they would have to fight the Turks after all – only not as Christians, merely as subjects of the state, which it was their Christian duty to obey.  

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