Chapter VI. Humanism And Reformation.(105)

§ 1. Savonarola.

When the Italian Humanism seemed about to become a mere revival of ancient Paganism, with its accompaniments of a cynical sensualism on the one hand, and the blindest trust in the occult sciences on the other, a great preacher arose in Florence who recalled men to Christianity and to Christian virtue.

Girolamo Savonarola was an Italian, a countryman of Giaocchino di Fiore, of Arnold of Brescia, of Francis of Assisi, of John of Parma, and, like them, he believed himself to be favoured with visions apocalyptic and other. He belonged to a land over which, all down through the Middle Ages, had swept popular religious revivals, sudden, consuming, and transient as prairie fires. When a boy, he had quivered at seeing the pain in the world around him; he had shuddered as he passed the great grim palaces of the Italian despots, where the banqueting hall was separated from the dungeon by a floor so thin that the groans of the prisoners mingled with the tinkle of the silver dishes and the wanton conversation of the guests. He had been destined by his family for the medical profession, and the lad was set to master the writings of Thomas Aquinas and the Arabian commentaries on Aristotle—the gateway in those days to a knowledge of the art of healing. The _Summa_ of the great Schoolman entranced him, and insensibly drew him towards theology; but outwardly he did not rebel against the lot in life marked out for him. A glimpse of a quiet resting-place in this world of pain and evil had come to him, but it vanished, swallowed up in the universal gloom, when Roberto Strozzi refused to permit him to marry his daughter Laodamia. There remained only rest on God, study of His word, and such slight solace as music and sonnet-writing could bring. His devotion to Thomas Aquinas impelled him to seek within a Dominican convent that refuge which he passionately yearned for, from a corrupt world and a corrupt Church. There he remained buried for long years, reading and re-reading the Scriptures, poring over the _Summa_, drinking in the New Learning, almost unconsciously creating for himself a philosophy which blended the teachings of Aquinas with the Neo-Platonism of Marsiglio Ficino and of the Academy, and planning how he could best represent the doctrines of the Christian religion in harmony with the natural reason of man.

When at last he became a great preacher, able to sway heart and conscience, it should not be forgotten that he was mediæval to the core. His doctrinal teaching was based firmly on the theology of Thomas Aquinas. His intellectual conception of faith, his strong belief in the divine predestination and his way of expressing it, his view of Scripture as possessing manifold meanings, were all defined for him by the great Dominican Schoolman. He held strongly the mediæval idea that the Church was an external political unity, ruled by the Bishop of Rome, to whom every human soul must be subject, and whom everyone must obey save only when commands were issued contrary to a plain statement of the evangelical law. He expounded the fulness of and the slight limitations to the authority of the Pope exactly as Thomas and the great Schoolmen of the thirteenth century had done, though in terms very different from the canonists of the Roman Curia at the close of the Middle Ages. Even his appreciation of the Neo-Platonist side of Humanism could be traced back to mediæval authorities; for at all times the writings of the pseudo-Dionysius had been a source of inspiration to the greater Schoolmen.

His scholarship brought him into relation with the Humanist leaders in Florence, the earnest tone of his teaching and the saintliness of his character attracted them, his deep personal piety made them feel that he possessed something which they lacked; while no Neo-Platonist could be repelled by his claim to be the recipient of visions from on high.

The celebrated Humanists of Florence became the disciples of the great preacher. Marsiglio Ficino himself, the head of the Florentine Academy, who kept one lamp burning before the bust of Plato and another before an image of the Virgin, was for a time completely under his spell. Young Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s whole inner life was changed through his conversations with the Prior of San Marco. He reformed his earlier careless habits. He burnt five books of wanton love-songs which he had composed before his conversion.(106) He prayed daily at fixed hours, and he wrote earnestly to his nephew on the importance of prayer for a godly life:

“ ‘I stir thee not,’ he says, ‘to that prayer that standeth in many words, but to that prayer which in the secret chamber of the mind, in the privy-closet of the soul, with every affect speaketh to God; which in the most lightsome darkness of contemplation not only presenteth the mind to the Father, but also uniteth it with Him by unspeakable ways which only they know who have assayed. Nor care I how long or how short thy prayer be; but how effectual, how ardent, and rather interrupted and broken between with sighs, than drawn on length with a number of words.... Let no day pass but thou once at the leastwise present thyself to God in prayer.... What thou shalt in thy prayer ask of God, both the Holy Spirit which prayeth for us and also thine own necessity shall every hour put in thy mind.’ ”(107)

He studied the writings of Thomas Aquinas, which contained the favourite theology of Savonarola, and spoke of the great Schoolman as a “pillar of truth.”(108) He handed over the third part of his estates to his nephew, and lived plainly on what remained, that he might give largely in charity.(109) He made Savonarola his almoner, who on his behalf gave alms to destitute people and marriage portions to poor maidens.(110) He had frequent thoughts of entering the Dominican Order, and

“On a time as he walked with his nephew, John Francis, in a garden at Ferrara, talking of the love of Christ, he broke out with these words: ‘Nephew,’ said he, ‘this will I show thee; I warn thee keep it secret; the substance I have left after certain books of mine are finished, I intend to give out to poor folk, and, fencing myself with the crucifix, barefoot, walking about the world, in every town and castle I purpose to preach Christ.’ ”(111)

It is also recorded that he made a practice of scourging himself; especially “on those days which represent unto us the Passion and Death that Christ suffered for our sake, he beat and scourged his own flesh in remembrance of that great benefit, and for cleansing his old offences.”(112) But above all things he devoted himself to a diligent study of the Holy Scriptures, and commended the practice to his nephew:

“ ‘Thou mayest do nothing more pleasing to God, nothing more profitable to thyself, than if thine hand cease not day and night to turn and read the volumes of Holy Scripture. There lieth privily in them a certain heavenly strength, quick and effectual, which, with a marvellous power, transformeth and changeth the readers’ mind into the love of God, if they be clean and lowly entreated.’ ”(113)

The great Platonist forsook Plato for St. Paul, whom he called the “glorious Apostle.”(114) When he died he left his lands to one of the hospitals in Florence, and desired to be buried in the hood of the Dominican monks and within the Convent of San Marco.

Another distinguished member of the Florentine Academy, Angelo Poliziano, was also one of Savonarola’s converts. We find him exchanging confidences with Pico, both declaring that love and not knowledge is the faculty by which we learn to know God:

“ ‘But now behold, my well-beloved Angelo,’ writes Pico, ‘what madness holdeth us. Love God (while we be in this body) we rather may, than either know Him, or by speech utter Him. In loving Him also we more profit ourselves; we labour less and serve Him more. And yet had we rather always by knowledge never find that thing we seek, than by love possess that thing which also without love were in vain found.’ ”(115)

Poliziano, like Pico, had at one time some thoughts of joining the Dominican Order. He too was buried at his own request in the cowl of the Dominican monk in the Convent of San Marco.

Lorenzo de Medici, who during his life had made many attempts to win the support of Savonarola, and had always been repulsed, could not die without entreating the great preacher to visit him on his deathbed and grant him absolution.

Italian Humanism was for the moment won over to Christianity by the Prior of San Marco. Had the poets and the scholars, the politicians and the ecclesiastics, the State and the Church, not been so hopelessly corrupt, there might have been a great renovation of mankind, under the leadership of men who had no desire to break the political unity of the mediæval Church. For it can scarcely be too strongly insisted that Savonarola was no Reformation leader in the more limited sense of the phrase. The movement he headed has much more affinity with the crude revival of religion in Germany in the end of the fifteenth century, than with the Reformation itself; and the aim of the reorganisation of the Tuscan congregation of the Dominicans under Savonarola has an almost exact parallel in the creation of the congregation of the Augustinian Eremites under Andreas Proles and Johann Staupitz. The whole Italian movement, as might be expected, was conducted by men of greater intelligence and refinement. It had therefore less sympathy than the German with pilgrimages, relics, the niceties of ceremonial worship, and the cult of the vulgarly miraculous; but it was not the less mediæval on these accounts. It was the death rather than the life and lifework of Savonarola that was destined to have direct effect on the Reformation soon to come beyond the Alps; for his martyrdom was a crowning evidence of the impossibility of reforming the Church of the Middle Ages apart from the shock of a great convulsion. “Luther himself,” says Professor Villari, “could scarcely have been so successful in inaugurating his Reform, had not the sacrifice of Savonarola given a final proof that it was hopeless to hope in the purification of Rome.”(116)

§ 2. John Colet.

While Savonarola was at the height of his influence in Florence, there chanced to be in Italy a young Englishman, John Colet, son of a wealthy London merchant who had been several times Lord Mayor. He had gone there, we may presume, like his countrymen Grocyn and Linacre, to make himself acquainted with the New Learning at its fountainhead. There is no proof that he went to Florence or ever saw the great Italian preacher; but no stranger could have visited Northern Italy in 1495 without hearing much of him and of his work. Colet’s whole future life in England bears evidence that he did receive a new impulse while he was in Italy, and that of such a kind as could have come only from Savonarola. What Erasmus tells us of his sojourn there amply confirms this. Colet gave himself up to the study of the Holy Scriptures; he read carefully those theologians of the ancient Church specially acceptable to the Neo-Platonist Christian Humanists; he studied the pseudo-Dionysius, Origen, and Jerome. What is more remarkable still in a foreign Humanist come to study in Italy, he read diligently such English classics as he could find in order to prepare himself for the work of preaching when he returned to England. The words of Erasmus imply that the impulse to do all this came to him when he was in Italy, and there was no one to impart it to him but the great Florentine.

When Colet returned to England in 1496, he began to lecture at Oxford on the Epistles of St. Paul. His method of exposition, familiar enough after Calvin had introduced it into the Reformed Church, was then absolutely new, and proves that he was an original and independent thinker. His aim was to find out the _personal_ message which the writer (St. Paul) had sent to the Christians at Rome; and this led him to seek for every trace which revealed the personality of the Apostle to the Gentiles. It was equally imperative to know what were the surroundings of the men to whom the Epistle was addressed, and Colet studied Suetonius to find some indications of the environment of the Roman Christians. He had thus completely freed himself from the Scholastic habit of using the Scriptures as a mere collection of isolated texts to be employed in proving doctrines or moral rules constructed or imposed by the Church, and it is therefore not surprising to find that he never lards his expositions with quotations from the Fathers. It is a still greater proof of his daring that he set aside the allegorising methods of the Schoolmen,—methods abundantly used by Savonarola,—and that he did so in spite of his devotion to the writings of the pseudo-Dionysius. He was the first to apply the critical methods of the New Learning to discover the exact meaning of the books of the Holy Scriptures. His treatment of the Scriptures shows that however he may have been influenced by Savonarola and by the Christian Humanists of Italy, he had advanced far beyond them, and had seen, what no mediæval theologian head been able to perceive, that the Bible is a personal and not a dogmatic revelation. They were mediæval: he belongs to the Reformation circle of thinkers. Luther, Calvin, and Colet, whatever else separates them, have this one deeply important thought in common. Further, Colet discarded the mediæval conception of a mechanical inspiration of the text of Scripture, in this also agreeing with Luther and Calvin. The inspiration of the Holy Scriptures was something mysterious to him. “The Spirit seemed to him by reason of its majesty to have a peculiar method of its own, singularly, absolutely free, blowing where it lists, making prophets of whom it will, yet so that the spirit of the prophets is subject to the prophets.”(117)

Colet saw clearly, and denounced the abounding evils which were ruining the Church of his day. The Convocation of the English Church never listened to a bolder sermon than that preached to them by the Dean of St. Paul’s in 1512—the same year that Luther addressed an assembly of clergy at Leitzkau. The two addresses should be compared. The same fundamental thought is contained in both—that every true reformation must begin with the individual man. Colet declared that reform must begin with the bishops, and that once begun it would spread to the clergy and thence to the laity; “for the body follows the soul; and as are the rulers in a State, such will the people be.” He urged that what was wanted was the enforcement of ecclesiastical laws which were already in existence. Ignorant and wicked men were admitted to holy orders, and there were laws prohibiting this. Simony was creeping “like a cancer through the minds of priests, so that most are not ashamed in these days to get for themselves great dignities by petitions and suits at court, rewards and promises”; and yet strict laws against the evil were in existence. He proceeded to enumerate the other flagrant abuses—the non-residence of clergy, the worldly pursuits and indulgences of the clergy; the scandals and vices of the ecclesiastical law-courts; the infrequency of provincial councils to discuss and remedy existing evils; the wasting of the patrimony of the Church on sumptuous buildings, on banquets, on enriching kinsfolk, or on keeping hounds. The Church had laws against all these abuses, but they were not enforced, and could not be until the bishops amended their ways. His scheme of reform was to put in operation the existing regulations of Canon Law. “The diseases which are now in the Church were the same in former ages, and there is no evil for which the holy fathers did not provide excellent remedies; there are no crimes in prohibition of which there are not laws in the body of Canon Law.” Such was his definite idea of reform in this famous Convocation sermon.

But he had wider views. He desired the diffusion of a sound Christian education, and did the best that could be done by one man to promote it, by spending his private fortune in founding St. Paul’s school, which he characteristically left in charge of a body of laymen. He longed to see a widespread preaching in the vernacular, and believed that the bishops should show an example in this clerical duty. It is probable that he wished the whole service to be in the vernacular, for it was made a charge against him that he taught his congregation to repeat the Lord’s Prayer in English. Besides, he had clearly grasped the thought, too often forgotten by theologians of all schools, that the spiritual facts and forces which lie at the roots of the Christian life are one thing, and the intellectual conceptions which men make to explain these facts and forces are another, and a much less important thing; that men are able to be Christians and to live the Christian life because of the former and not because of the latter. He saw that, while dogma has its place, it is at best the alliance of an immortal with a mortal, the union between that which is unchangeably divine and the fashions of human thought which change from one age to another. For this reason he thought little of the Scholastic Theology of his days, with its forty-three propositions about the nature of God and its forty-five about the nature of man before and after the Fall, each of which had to be assented to at the risk of a charge of heresy. “Why do you extol to me such a man as Aquinas? If he had not been so very arrogant, indeed, he would not surely so rashly and proudly have taken upon himself to define all things. And unless his spirit had been somewhat worldly, he would not surely have corrupted the whole teaching of Christ by mixing it with his profane philosophy.” The Scholastic Theology might have been scientific in the thirteenth century, but the “scientific” is the human and changing element in dogma, and the old theology had become clearly unscientific in the sixteenth. Therefore he was accustomed to advise young theological students to keep to the Bible and the Apostles’ Creed, and let divines, if they liked, dispute about the rest; and he taught Erasmus to look askance at Luther’s reconstruction of the Augustinian theology.

But no thinking man, however he may flout at philosophy and dogma, can do without either; and Colet was no exception to the general rule. He has placed on record his detestation of Aquinas and his dislike of Augustine, and we may perhaps see in this a lack of sympathy with a prominent characteristic of the theology of Latin Christianity from Tertullian to Aquinas and Occam, to say nothing of developments since the Reformation. The great men who built up the Western Church were almost all trained Roman lawyers. Tertullian, Cyprian, Augustine, Gregory the Great (whose writings form the bridge between the Latin Fathers and the Schoolmen) were all men whose early training had been that of a Roman lawyer,—a training which moulded and shaped all their thinking, whether theological or ecclesiastical. They instinctively regarded all questions as a great Roman lawyer would. They had the lawyer’s craving for exact definitions. They had the lawyer’s idea that the primary duty laid upon them was to enforce obedience to authority, whether that authority expressed itself in external institutions or in the precise definitions of the correct ways of thinking about spiritual truths. No branch of Western Christendom has been able to free itself from the spell cast upon it by these Roman lawyers of the early centuries of the Christian Church.

If the ideas of Christian Roman lawyers, filtering slowly down through the centuries, had made the Bishops of Rome dream that they were the successors of Augustus, at once Emperor and Pontifex Maximus, master of the bodies and of the souls of mankind, they had also inspired the theologians of the Mediæval Church with the conception of an intellectual imperialism, where a system of Christian thought, expressed with legal precision, could bind into a comprehensive unity the active intelligence of mankind. Dogmas thus expressed can become the instruments of a tyranny much more penetrating than that of an institution, and so Colet found. In his revolt he turned from the Latins to the Greeks, and to that thinker who was furthest removed from the legal precision of statement which was characteristic of Western theology.

It is probable that his intercourse with the Christian Humanists of Italy, and his introduction to Platonists and to Neo-Platonism, made him turn to the writings of the pseudo-Dionysius; but it is certain that he believed at first that the author of these quaint mystical tracts was the Dionysius who was one of the converts of St. Paul at Athens, and that these writings embodied much of the teaching of the Apostle to the Gentiles, and took the reader back to the first generation of the Christian Church. After he had learned from Grocyn that the author of the _Celestial_ and the _Terrestrial Hierarchies_ could not have been the convert of St. Paul, and that the writings could not be earlier than the sixth century, he still regarded them as evidence of the way in which a Christian philosopher could express the thoughts which were current in Christianity one thousand years before Colet’s time. The writings could be used as a touchstone to test usages and opinions prevalent at the close of the Middle Ages, when men were still subject to the domination of the Scholastic Theology, and as justification for rejecting them.

They taught him two things which he was very willing to learn: that the human mind, however it may be able to feel after God, can never comprehend Him, nor imprison His character and attributes in propositions—stereotyped aspects of thoughts—which can be fitted into syllogisms; and that such things as hierarchy and sacraments are to be prized not because they are in themselves the active sources and centres of mysterious powers, but because they faintly symbolise the spiritual forces by which God works for the salvation of His people. Colet applied to the study of the writings of the pseudo-Dionysius a mind saturated with simple Christian truth gained from a study of the Holy Scriptures, and especially of the Epistles of St. Paul; and the very luxuriance of imagination and bewildering confusion of symbolism in these writings, their elusiveness as opposed to the precision of Thomas Aquinas or of John Duns the Scot, enabled him the more easily to find in them the germs of his own more definite opinions.

When one studies the abstracts of the _Hierarchies_(118)—which Colet wrote out from memory—with the actual text of the books themselves, it is scarcely surprising to find how much there is of Colet and how little of Dionysius.(119)

While it is impossible to say how far Colet, and the Christian Humanists who agreed with him, would have welcomed the principles of a Reformation yet to come, it can be affirmed that he held the same views on two very important points. He did not believe in a priesthood in the mediæval nor in the modern Roman sense of the word, and his theory of the efficacy and meaning of the sacraments of the Christian Church was essentially Protestant.

According to Colet, there was no such thing as a mediatorial priesthood whose essential function it was to approach God on men’s behalf and present their offerings to Him. The duty of the Christian priesthood was ministerial; it was to declare the love and mercy of God to their fellow-men, and to strive for the purification, illumination, and salvation of mankind by constant preaching of the truth and diffusion of gospel light, even as Christ strove. He did not believe that priests had received from God the power of absolving from sins. “It must be needfully remarked,” he says, “lest bishops be presumptuous, that it is not the part of men to loose the bonds of sins; nor does the power belong to them of loosing or binding anything,”—the truth Luther set forth in his Theses against Indulgences.

Colet is even more decided in his repudiation of the sacramental theories of the mediæval Church. The Eucharist is not a sacrifice, but a commemoration of the death of our Lord, and a symbol of the union and communion which believers have with Him, and with their fellow-men through Him. Baptism is a ceremony which symbolises the believer’s change of heart and his vow of service to his Master, and signifies “the more excellent baptism of the inner man”; and the duty of sponsors is to train children in the knowledge and fear of God.(120)

We are told that the Lollards delighted in Colet’s preaching; that they advised each other to go to hear him; and that attendance at the Dean’s sermons was actually made a charge against them. Colet was no Lollard himself; indeed, he seems to have once sat among ecclesiastical judges who condemned Lollards to death;(121) but the preacher who taught that tithes were voluntary offerings, who denounced the evil lives of the monks and the secular clergy; who hated war, and did not scruple to say so; whose sermons were full of simple Bible instruction, must have recalled many memories of the old Lollard doctrines. For Lollardy had never died out in England: it was active in Colet’s days, leavening the country for the Reformation which was to come.

Nor should it be forgotten, in measuring the influence of Colet on the coming Reformation, that Latimer was a friend of his, that William Tyndale was one of his favourite pupils, and that he persuaded Erasmus to turn from purely classical studies to edit the New Testament and the early Christian Fathers.

§ 3. Erasmus.

Erasmus, as has often been said, was a “man by himself;” yet he may be regarded as representing one, and perhaps the most frequent, type of Christian Humanism. His character will always be matter of controversy; and his motives may, without unfairness, be represented in an unfavourable light,—a “great scholar but a petty-minded man,” is a verdict for which there is abundant evidence. Such was the final judgment of his contemporaries, mainly because he refused to take a definite side in the age when the greatest controversy which has convulsed Western Europe since the downfall of the old Empire seemed to call on every man to range himself with one party or other. Our modern judgment must rest on a different basis. In calmer days, when the din of battle has almost died away, it is possible to recognise that to refuse to be a partisan _may_ indicate greatness instead of littleness of soul, a keener vision, and a calmer courage. We cannot judge the man as hastily as his contemporaries did. Still there is evidence enough and to spare to back their verdict. Every biographer has admitted that it is hopeless to look for truth in his voluminous correspondence. His feelings, hopes, intentions, and actual circumstances are described to different correspondents at the same time in utterly different ways. He was always writing for effect, and often for effect of a rather sordid kind. He seldom gave a definite opinion on any important question without attempting to qualify it in such a manner that he might be able, if need arose, to deny that he had given it. No man knew better how to use “if” and “but” so as to shelter himself from all responsibility. He had the ingenuity of the cuttle-fish to conceal himself and his real opinions, and it was commonly used to protect his own skin. All this may be admitted; it can scarcely be denied.

Yet from his first visit to England (1498) down to his practical refusal of a Cardinal’s Hat from Pope Adrian VI., on condition that he would reside at Rome and assist in fighting the Reformation, Erasmus had his own conception of what a reformation of Christianity really meant, and what share in it it was possible for him to take. It must be admitted that he held to this idea and kept to the path he had marked out for himself with a tenacity of purpose which did him honour. It was by no means always that of personal safety, still less the road to personal aggrandisement. It led him in the end where he had never expected to stand. It made him a man despised by both sides in the great controversy; it left him absolutely alone, friendless, and without influence. He frequently used very contemptible means to ward off attempts to make him diverge to the right or left; he abandoned many of his earlier principles, or so modified them that they were no longer recognisable. But he was always true to his own idea of a reformation and of his life-work as a reformer.

Erasmus was firmly convinced that Christianity was above all things something practical. It had to do with the ordinary life of mankind. It meant love, humility, purity, reverence,—every virtue which the Saviour had made manifest in His life on earth. This early “Christian philosophy” had been buried out of sight under a Scholastic Theology full of sophistical subtleties, and had been lost in the mingled Judaism and Paganism of the popular religious life, with its weary ceremonies and barbarous usages. A true reformation, he believed, was the moral renovation of mankind, and the one need of the age was to return to that earlier purer religion based on a real inward reverence for and imitation of Christ. The man of letters, like himself, he conceived could play the part of a reformer, and that manfully, in two ways. He could try, by the use of wit and satire, to make contemptible the follies of the Schoolmen and the vulgar travesty of religion which was in vogue among the people. He could also bring before the eyes of all men that earlier and purer religion which was true Christianity. He could edit the New Testament, and enable men to read the very words which Jesus spoke and Paul preached, make them see the deeds of Jesus and hear the apostolic explanations of their meaning. He could say:

“Only be teachable, and you have already made much way in this (the Christian) Philosophy. It supplies a spirit for a teacher, imparted to none more readily than to the simple-minded. Other philosophies, by the very difficulty of their precepts, are removed out of the range of most minds. No age, no sex, no condition of life is excluded from this. The sun itself is not more common and open to all than the teaching of Christ. For I utterly dissent from those who are unwilling that the Sacred Scriptures should be read by the unlearned translated into their vulgar tongue, as though Christ had taught such subtleties that they can scarcely be understood even by a few theologians, or as though the strength of the Christian religion consisted in men’s ignorance of it. The mysteries of kings it may be safer to conceal, but Christ wished His mysteries to be published as openly as possible. I wish that even the weakest woman should read the Gospel—should read the Epistles of Paul. And I wish these were translated into all languages, so that they might be read and understood, not only by Scots and Irishmen, but also by Turks and Saracens. To make them understood is surely the first step. It may be that they might be ridiculed by many, but some would take them to heart. I long that the husbandman should sing portions of them to himself as he follows the plough, that the weaver should hum them to the tune of his shuttle, that the traveller should beguile with their stories the tedium of his journey.”(122)

The scholar who became a reformer could further make plain, by editing and publishing the writings of the earlier Christian Fathers, what the oldest Christian Theology had been before the Schoolmen spoiled it.

The conception that a reformation of Christianity was mainly a renovation of morals, enabled the Christian Humanist to keep true to the Renaissance idea that the writers of classical antiquity were to be used to aid the work of ameliorating the lot of mankind. The Florentine circle spoke of the inspiration of Homer, of Plato, and of Cicero, and saw them labouring as our Lord had done to teach men how to live better lives. Pico and Reuchlin had gone further afield, and had found illuminating anticipations of Christianity, in this sense and in others, among the Hebrews, the Egyptians, and perhaps the Brahmins. Erasmus was too clear-sighted to be drawn into any alliance with Oriental mysticism or cabalistic speculations; but he insisted on the aid which would come from the Christian reformer making full use of the ethical teaching of the wise men of Greece and Rome in his attempt to produce a moral renovation in the lives of his fellows. Socrates and Cicero, each in his own day and within his own sphere, had striven for the same moral renovation that Christianity promised, and, in this sense at least, might be called Christians before Christ. So persuaded was Erasmus of their affinity with the true spirit of Christianity, that he declared that Cicero had as much right to a high place in heaven as many a Christian saint, and that when he thought of the Athenian martyr he could scarcely refrain from saying, _Sancte Socrates, Ora pro nobis_.

It must be remembered also that Erasmus had a genuine and noble horror of war, which was by no means the mere shrinking of a man whose nerves were always quivering. He preached peace as boldly and in as disinterested a fashion as did his friend John Colet. He could not bear the thought of a religious war. This must not be forgotten in any estimate of his conduct and of his relation to the Reformation. No man, not even Luther, scattered the seeds of revolution with a more reckless hand, and yet a thorough and steadfast dislike to all movements which could be called revolutionary was one of the most abiding elements in his character. He hated what he called the “tumult.” He had an honest belief that all public evils in State and Church must be endured until they dissolve away quietly under the influence of sarcasm and common sense, or until they are removed by the action of the responsible authorities. He was clear-sighted enough to see that an open and avowed attack on the papal supremacy, or on any of the more cherished doctrines and usages of the mediæval Church, must end in strife and in bloodshed, and he therefore honestly believed that no such attack ought to be made.

When all these things are kept in view, it is possible to see what conception Erasmus had about his work as a reformer, with its possibilities and its limitations. He adhered to it tenaciously all his life. He held it in the days of his earlier comparative obscurity. He maintained it when he had been enthroned as the prince of the realm of learning. He clung to it in his discredited old age. No one can justify the means he sometimes took to prevent being drawn from the path he had marked out for himself; but there is something to be said for the man who, through good report and evil, stuck resolutely to his view of what a reformation ought to be, and what were the functions of a man of letters who felt himself called to be a reformer. Had Luther been gifted with that keen sense of prevision with which Erasmus was so fatally endowed, would he have stood forward to attack Indulgences in the way he did? It is probable that it would have made no difference in his action; but he did not think so himself. He said once, “No good work comes about by our own wisdom; it begins in dire necessity. I was forced into mine; but had I known then what I know now, ten wild horses would not have drawn me into it.” The man who leads a great movement of reform may see the distant, but has seldom a clear vision of the nearer future. He is one who feels the slow pressure of an imperious spiritual power, who is content with one step at a time, and who does not ask to see the whole path stretching out before him.

Erasmus lost both his parents while he was a child, and never enjoyed the advantages of a home training. He was driven by deceit or by self-deception into a monastery when he was a lad. He escaped from the clutches of the monastic life when he was twenty years of age, broken in health, and having learned to know human nature on its bad side and to trade on that knowledge. He was one of the loneliest of mortals, and trusted in no one but himself. With one great exception, he had no friendship which left an enduring influence on his character. From childhood he taught himself in his own way; when he grew to manhood he planned and schemed for himself; he steadfastly refused to be drawn into any kind of work which he did not like for its own sake; he persistently shunned every entanglement which might have controlled his action or weighted him with any responsibility. He stands almost alone among the Humanists in this. All the others were officials, or professors, or private teachers, or jurists, or ecclesiastics. Erasmus was nothing, and would be nothing, but a simple man of letters.

Holbein has painted him so often that his features are familiar. Every line of the clearly cut face suggests demure sarcasm—the thin lips closely pressed together, the half-closed eyelids, and the keen glance of the scarcely seen blue eyes. The head is intellectual, but there is nothing masculine about the portrait—nothing suggesting the massiveness of the learned burgher Pirkheimer; or the jovial strength of the Humanist _landsknecht_ Eobanus Hessus; or the lean wolf-like tenacity of Hutten, the descendant of robber-knights; or the steadfast homely courage of Martin Luther. The dainty hands, which Holbein drew so often, and the general primness of his appearance, suggest a descent from a long line of maiden aunts. The keen intelligence was enclosed in a sickly body, whose frailty made continuous demands on the soul it imprisoned. It needed warm rooms with stoves that sent forth no smell, the best wines, an easy-going horse, and a deft servant; and to procure all these comforts Erasmus wrote the sturdiest of begging letters and stooped to all kinds of flatteries.

The visit which Erasmus paid to England in 1498 was the turning-point in his life. He found himself, for the first time, among men who were his equals in learning and his superiors in many things. “When I listen to my friend Colet,” he says, “it seems to me like listening to Plato himself. Who does not marvel at the complete mastery of the sciences in Grocyn? What could be keener, more profound, and more searching than the judgment of Linacre? Has Nature ever made a more gentle, a sweeter, or a happier disposition than Thomas More’s?” He made the acquaintance of men as full of the New Learning as he was himself, who hated the Scotist theology more bitterly than he did, and who nevertheless believed in a pure, simple Christian philosophy, and were earnest Christians. They urged him to join them in their work, and we can trace in the correspondence of Erasmus the growing influence of Colet. The Dean of St. Paul’s made Erasmus the decidedly Christian Humanist he became, and impressed on him that conception of a reformation which, leaving external things very much as they were, undertook a renovation of morals. He never lost the impress of Colet’s stamp.

It would appear from one of Erasmus’ letters that Colet urged him to write commentaries on some portions of the New Testament; but Erasmus would only work in his own way; and it is probable that his thoughts were soon turned to preparing an edition of the New Testament in Greek. The task was long brooded over; and he had to perfect himself in his knowledge of the language.

This determination to undertake no work for which he was not supremely fitted, together with his powers of application and acquisition, gave Erasmus the reputation of being a strong man. He was seen to be unlike any other Humanist, whether Italian or German. He had no desire merely to reproduce the antique, or to confine himself within the narrow circle in which the “Poets” of the Renaissance worked. He put ancient culture to modern uses. Erasmus was no arm-chair student. He was one of the keenest observers of everything human—the Lucian or the Voltaire of the sixteenth century. From under his half-closed eyelids his quick glance seized and retained the salient characteristics of all sorts and conditions of men and women. He described theologians, jurists and philosophers, monks and parish priests, merchants and soldiers, husbands and wives, women good and bad, dancers and diners, pilgrims, pardon-sellers, and keepers of relics; the peasant in the field, the artisan in the workshop, and the vagrant on the highway. He had studied all, and could describe them with a few deft phrases, as incisive as Dürer’s strokes, with an almost perfect style, and with easy sarcasm.

This application of the New Learning to portray the common life, combined with his profound learning, made Erasmus the idol of the young German Humanists. They said that he was more than mortal, that his judgment was infallible, and that his work was perfect. They made pilgrimages to visit him. An interview was an event to be talked about for years; a letter, a precious treasure to be bequeathed as an heirloom. Some men refused to render the universal homage accorded by scholars and statesmen, by princes lay and clerical. Luther scented Pelagian theology in his annotations; he scorned Erasmus’ wilful playing with truth; he said that the great Humanist was a mocker who poured ridicule upon everything, even on Christ and religion. There was some ground for the charge. His sarcasm was not confined to his _Praise of Folly_ or to his _Colloquies_. It appears in almost everything that he wrote—even in his Paraphrases of the New Testament.

That such a man should have felt himself called upon to be a reformer, that this Saul should have appeared among the prophets, is in itself testimony that he lived during a great religious crisis, and that the religious question was the most important one in his days.

The principal literary works of Erasmus meant to serve the reformation he desired to see are:—two small books, _Enchiridion militis christiani_ (_A Handbook of the Christian Soldier_, or _A Pocket Dagger for the Christian Soldier_—it may be translated either way), first printed in 1503, and _Institutio Principis Christiani_ (1518); his _Encomium Moriæ_ (_Praise of Folly_, 1511); his edition of the _New Testament_, or _Novum Instrumentum_ (1516), with prefaces and paraphrases; and perhaps many of the dialogues in his _Colloquia_ (1519).

Erasmus himself explains that in the _Enchiridion_ he wrote to counteract the vulgar error of those who think that religion consists in ceremonies and in more than Jewish observances, while they neglect what really belongs to piety. The whole aim of the book is to assert the individual responsibility of man to God apart from any intermediate human agency. Erasmus ignores as completely as Luther would have done the whole mediæval thought of the mediatorial function of the Church and its priestly order. In this respect the book is essentially Protestant and thoroughly revolutionary. It asserts in so many words that much of the popular religion is pure paganism:

“One worships a certain Rochus, and why? because he fancies he will drive away the plague from his body. Another mumbles prayers to Barbara or George, lest he fall into the hands of his enemy. This man fasts to Apollonia to prevent the toothache. That one gazes upon an image of the divine Job, that he may be free from the itch.... In short, whatever our fears and our desires, we set so many gods over them, and these are different in different nations.... This is not far removed from the superstition of those who used to vow tithes to Hercules in order to get rich, or a cock to Æsculapius to recover from an illness, or who slew a bull to Neptune for a favourable voyage. The names are changed, but the object is the same.”(123)

In speaking of the monastic life, he says:

“ ‘Love,’ says Paul, ‘is to edify your neighbour,’ ... and if this only were done, nothing could be more joyous or more easy than the life of the ‘religious’; but now this life seems gloomy, full of Jewish superstitions, not in any way free from the vices of laymen and in some ways more corrupt. If Augustine, whom they boast of as the founder of their order, came to life again, he would not recognise them; he would exclaim that he had never approved of this sort of life, but had organised a way of living according to the rule of the Apostles, not according to the superstition of the Jews.”(124)

The more one studies the _Praise of Folly_, the more evident it becomes that Erasmus did not intend to write a satire on human weakness in general: the book is the most severe attack on the mediæval Church that had, up to that time, been made; and it was meant to be so. The author wanders from his main theme occasionally, but always to return to the insane follies of the religious life sanctioned by the highest authorities of the mediæval Church. Popes, bishops, theologians, monks, and the ordinary lay Christians, are all unmitigated fools in their ordinary religious life. The style is vivid, the author has seen what he describes, and he makes his readers see it also. He writes with a mixture of light mockery and bitter earnestness. He exposes the foolish questions of the theologians; the vices and temporal ambitions of the Popes, bishops, and monks; the stupid trust in festivals, pilgrimages, indulgences, and relics. The theologians, the author says, are rather dangerous people to attack, for they come down on one with their six hundred conclusions and command him to recant, and if he does not they declare him a heretic forthwith. The problems which interest them are:

“Whether there was any instant of time in the divine generation? ... Could God have taken the form of a woman, a devil, an ass, a gourd, or a stone? How the gourd could have preached, wrought miracles, hung on the cross?”(125)

He jeers at the Popes and higher ecclesiastics:

“Those supreme Pontiffs who stand in the place of Christ, if they should try to imitate His life, that is, His poverty, His toil, His teaching, His cross, and His scorn of this world ... what could be more dreadful!... We ought not to forget that such a mass of scribes, copyists, notaries, advocates, secretaries, mule-drivers, grooms, money-changers, procurers, and gayer persons yet I might mention, did I not respect your ears,—that this whole swarm which now burdens—I beg your pardon, honours—the Roman See would be driven to starvation.”(126)

As for the monks:

“The greater part of them have such faith in their ceremonies and human traditions, that they think one heaven is not reward enough for such great doings.... One will show his belly stuffed with every kind of fish; another will pour out a hundred bushels of psalms; another will count up myriads of fasts, and make up for them all again by almost bursting himself at a single dinner. Another will bring forward such a heap of ceremonies that seven ships would hardly hold them; another boast that for sixty years he has never touched a penny except with double gloves on his hands.... But Christ will interrupt their endless bragging, and will demand—‘Whence this new kind of Judaism?’

“They do all things by rule, by a kind of sacred mathematics; as, for instance, how many knots their shoes must be tied with, of what colour everything must be, what variety in their garb, of what material, how many straws’-breadth to their girdle, of what form and of how many bushels’ capacity their cowl, how many fingers broad their hair, and how many hours they sleep....”(127)

He ridicules men who go running about to Rome, Compostella, or Jerusalem, wasting on long and dangerous journeys money which might be better spent in feeding the hungry and clothing the naked. He scoffs at those who buy Indulgences, who sweetly flatter themselves with counterfeit pardons, and who have measured off the duration of Purgatory without error, as if by a water-clock, into ages, years, months, and days, like the multiplication table.(128) Is it religion to believe that if any one pays a penny out of what he has stolen, he can have the whole slough of his life cleaned out at once, and all his perjuries, lusts, drunkennesses, all his quarrels, murders, cheats, treacheries, falsehoods, bought off in such a way that he may begin over again with a new circle of crimes? The reverence for relics was perhaps never so cruelly satirised as in the Colloquy, _Peregrinatio Religionis Ergo_.

It must be remembered that this bitter satire was written some years before Luther began the Reformation by an attack on Indulgences. It may seem surprising how much liberty the satirist allowed himself, and how much was permitted to him. But Erasmus knew very well how to protect himself. He was very careful to make no definite attack, and to make no mention of names. He was always ready to explain that he did not mean to attack the Papacy, but only bad Popes; that he had the highest respect for the monastic life, and only satirised evil-minded monks; or that he reverenced the saints, but thought that reverence ought to be shown by imitating them in their lives of piety. He could say all this with perfect truth. Indeed, it is likely that with all his scorn against the monks, Erasmus, in his heart, believed that a devout Capuchin or Franciscan monk lived the ideal Christian life. He seems to say so in his Colloquy, _Militis et Carthusiani_. He wrote, moreover, before the dignitaries of the mediæval Church had begun to take alarm. Liberal Churchmen who were the patrons of the New Learning had no objection to see the vices of the times and the Church life of the day satirised by one who wrote such exquisite latinity. In all his more serious work Erasmus was careful to shelter himself under the protection of great ecclesiastics.

Erasmus was not the only scholar who had proposed to publish a correct edition of the Holy Scriptures. The great Spaniard, Cardinal Ximenes, had announced that he meant to bring out an edition of the Holy Scriptures in which the text of the Vulgate would appear in parallel columns along with the Hebrew and the Greek. The prospectus of this Complutensian Polyglot was issued as early as 1502; the work was finished in 1517, and was published in Spain in 1520 and in other lands in 1522. Erasmus was careful to dedicate the first edition of his _Novum Instrumentum_, (1516) to Pope Leo X., who graciously received it. He sent the second edition to the same Pope in 1519, accompanied by a letter in which he says:

“I have striven with all my might to kindle men from those chilling argumentations in which they had been so long frozen up, to a zeal for theology which should be at once more pure and more serious. And that this labour has so far not been in vain I perceive from this, that certain persons are furious against me, who cannot value anything they are unable to teach and are ashamed to learn. But, trusting to Christ as my witness, whom my writings above all would guard, to the judgment of your Holiness, to my own sense of right and the approval of so many distinguished men, I have always disregarded the yelpings of these people. Whatever little talent I have, it has been, once for all, dedicated to Christ: it shall serve His glory alone; it shall serve the Roman Church, the prince of that Church, but especially your Holiness, to whom I owe more than my whole duty.”

He dedicated the various parts of the _Paraphrases_ of the New Testament to Cardinal Campeggio, to Cardinal Wolsey, to Henry VIII., to Charles V., and to Francis I. of France. He deliberately placed himself under the protection of those princes, ecclesiastical and secular, who could not be suspected of having any revolutionary designs against the existing state of things in Church or in State.

In all this he was followed for the time being by the most distinguished Christian Humanists in England, France, and Germany. They were full of the brightest hopes. A Humanist Pope sat on the throne of St. Peter, young Humanist kings ruled France and England, the Emperor Maximilian had long been the patron of German Humanism, and much was expected from his grandson Charles, the young King of Spain. Erasmus, the acknowledged prince of Christian learning, was enthusiastically supported by Colet and More in England, by Buddæus and Lefèvre in France, by Johann Staupitz, Cochlæus, Thomas Murner, Jerome Emser, Conrad Mutianus, and George Spalatin in Germany. They all believed that the golden age was approaching, when the secular princes would forbid wars, and the ecclesiastical lay aside their rapacity, and when both would lead the peoples of Europe in a reformation of morals and in a re-establishment of pure religion. Their hopes were high that all would be effected without the “tumult” which they all dreaded, and when the storm burst, many of them became bitter opponents of Luther and his action. Luther found no deadlier enemies than Thomas Murner and Jerome Emser. Others, like George Spalatin, became his warmest supporters. Erasmus maintained to the end his attitude of cautious neutrality. In a long letter to Marlianus, Bishop of Tuy in Spain, he says that he does not like Luther’s writings, that he feared from the first that they would create a “tumult,” but that he dare not altogether oppose the reformer, “because he feared that he might be fighting against God.” The utmost that he could be brought to do after the strongest persuasions, was to attack Luther’s Augustinian theology in his _De Libero Arbitrio_, and to insinuate a defence of the principle of ecclesiastical authority in the interpretation of Scripture, and a proof that Luther had laid too much stress on the element of “grace” in human actions. He turned away from the whole movement as far as he possibly could, protesting that for himself he would ever cling to the Roman See.

The last years of his life were spent in excessive literary work—in editing the earlier Christian Fathers; he completed his edition of Origen in 1536, the year of his death. He settled at Louvain, and found it too hotly theological for his comfort; went to Basel; wandered off to Freiburg; then went back to Basel to die. After his death he was compelled to take the side he had so long shrunk from. Pope Paul IV. classed him as a notorious heretic, and placed on the first papal “Index” “all his commentaries, notes, scholia, dialogues, letters, translations, books, and writings, even when they contain nothing against religion or about religion.”

We look in vain for any indication that those Christian Humanists perceived that they were actually living in a time of revolution, and were really standing on the edge of a crater which was about to change European history by its eruption. Sir Thomas More’s instincts of religious life were all mediæval. Colet had persuaded him to abandon his earlier impulse to enter a monastic order, but More wore a hair shirt next his skin till the day of his death. Yet in his sketch of an ideal commonwealth, he expanded St. Paul’s thought of the equality of all men before Christ into the conception that no man was to be asked to work more than six hours a day, and showed that religious freedom could only flourish where there was nothing in the form of the mediæval Church. The lovable and pious young Englishman never imagined that his academic dream would be translated into rude practical thoughts and ruder actions by leaders of peasant and artisan insurgents, and that his _Utopia_ (1515), within ten years after its publication, and ten years before his own death (1535), would furnish texts for communist sermons, preached in obscure public-houses or to excited audiences on village greens. The satirical criticisms of the hierarchy, the monastic orders, and the popular religious life, which Erasmus flung broadcast so recklessly in his lighter and more serious writings, furnished the weapons for the leaders in that “tumult” which he had dreaded all his days; and when he complained that few seemed to care for the picture of a truly pious life, given in his _Enchiridion_, he did not foresee that it would become a wonderfully popular book among those who renounced all connection with the See of Rome to which the author had promised a life-long obedience. The Christian Humanists, one and all, were strangely blind to the signs of the times in which they lived.

No one can fail to appreciate the nobility of the purpose to work for a great moral renovation of mankind which the Christian Humanists ever kept before them, or refuse to see that they were always and everywhere preachers of righteousness. When we remember the century and a half of wars, so largely excited by ecclesiastical motives, which desolated Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, few can withhold their sympathy from the Christian Humanist idea that the path of reformation lay through a great readjustment of the existing conditions of the religious life, rather than through ecclesiastical revolution to a thorough-going reconstruction; although we may sadly recognise that the dynastic struggles of secular princes, the rapacity and religious impotence of Popes and ecclesiastical authorities, and the imperious pressure of social and industrial discontent, made the path of peace impossible. But what must fill us with surprise is that the Christian Humanists seemed to believe with a childlike innocence that the constituted authorities, secular and ecclesiastical, would lead the way in this peaceful reform, mainly because they were tinged with Humanist culture, and were the patrons of artists and men of learning. Humanism meant to Pope Leo X. and to the young Archbishop of Mainz additional sources of enjoyment, represented by costly pictures, collections of MSS., and rare books, the gratification of their taste for jewels and cameos, to say nothing of less harmless indulgences, and the adulation of the circle of scholars whom they had attracted to their courts; and it meant little more to the younger secular princes.

It is also to be feared that the Christian Humanists had no real sense of what was needed for that renovation of morals, public and private, which they ardently desired to see. Pictures of a Christian life lived according to the principles of reason, sharp polemic against the hierarchy, and biting mockery of the stupidity of the popular religion, did not help the masses of the people. The multitude in those early decades of the sixteenth century were scourged by constant visitations of the plague and other new and strange diseases, and they lived in perpetual dread of a Turkish invasion. The fear of death and the judgment thereafter was always before their eyes. What they wanted was a sense of God’s forgiveness for their sins, and they greedily seized on Indulgences, pilgrimages to holy places, and relic-worship to secure the pardon they longed for. The aristocratic and intellectual reform, contemplated by the Christian Humanists, scarcely appealed to them. Their longing for a certainty of salvation could not be satisfied with recommendations to virtuous living according to the rules of Neo-Platonic ethics. It is pathetic to listen to the appeals made to Erasmus for something more than he could ever give:

“ ‘Oh! Erasmus of Rotterdam, where art thou?’ said Albert Dürer. ‘See what the unjust tyranny of earthly power, the power of darkness, can do. Hear, thou knight of Christ! Ride forth by the side of the Lord Christ; defend the truth, gain the martyr’s crown! As it is, thou art but an old man. I have heard thee say that thou hast given thyself but a couple more years of active service; spend them, I pray, to the profit of the gospel and the true Christian faith, and believe me the gates of Hell, the See of Rome, as Christ has said, will not prevail against thee.’ ”(129)

The Reformation needed a man who had himself felt that commanding need of pardon which was sending his fellows travelling from shrine to shrine, who could tell them in plain homely words, which the common man could understand, how each one of them could win that pardon for himself, who could deliver them from the fear of the priest, and show them the way to the peace of God. The Reformation needed Luther.