SOURCE: Tracy, James D. “The Philosophy of Christ.” In Erasmus of the Low Countries, pp. 104-15. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.

[In the essay below, Tracy considers Erasmus's reform doctrine in the context of political and religious developments of his age. In his reform writings, Tracy claims, Erasmus struggles with the failures of the contemporary church to exemplify the doctrines of the Gospels.]

Erasmus began speaking of “the philosophy of Christ” (sometimes “Christian philosophy”) in works about 1515. Already in Julius Exclusus he seems on the threshold of introducing the idea when St. Peter contrasts the divine simplicity of Christ's teaching with the worldly arrogance of Pope Julius II:

The teaching of Christ [disciplina Christi] demands a heart wholly purged of the influence of worldly anxieties. Our great master did not come down from heaven to earth to give men some easy or common philosophy. It is not a carefree or tranquil profession to be a Christian.

To shun all pleasures like poison, to trample riches as if dirt, to hold one's life as of no account: this is the profession of the Christian man. Again in The Sileni of Alcibiades, one of the 1515 adages, he contrasts the riches and power that Christ forswore with “the philosophy of His choice, worlds away from the principles laid down by philosophers and by the reasoning of the world.”¹The Education of a Christian Prince (Institutio Principis Christiani, 1516) insists that the Christian prince is held to a standard unknown even to the best of pagan rulers: “You cannot defend your realm without a violation of justice, without a great waste of human blood and great damage to religion—rather lay down your title, and yield to the necessity of the moment.”² Yet if Christian charity demanded conduct very different from “the accepted tradition of centuries and the conduct laid down by princes in their laws,” princes should not be condemned for doing their duty as they saw it. What mattered was to preserve the integrity of the Gospel as a standard against which the world of power and privilege could be measured: one must not “sully that heavenly philosophy of Christ by confusing it with the decrees of man.”³

The philosophia Christi also demanded conduct very different from the traditions of the universities, where amid all the talk about philosophy and theology “religious minds heard scarcely a word” about Gospel teaching (doctrina Evangelica). Thus in responding to a letter from Johann Eck, scholastic theologian and celebrated debater, Erasmus praised his recent triumphs but added a wish that has overtones of a rebuke: “I shall rejoice with you still more when you are blessed with leisure and with the spirit to ponder the secrets of the philosophy of Christ in deepest silence and in your inmost heart, when the Bridegroom will lead you into his chamber.” Like other reformers of doctrina, Erasmus saw no point in “teaching” or “philosophy” that did not change the lives of those who professed it. At the outset of Methodus Verae Theologiae, his initial outline of a theology based on Scripture and the Fathers, he explained that “celestial philosophy,” unlike that of the Stoics or Aristotelians, requires a soul purified of vices “so that the image of that eternal truth may shine forth as if in a quiet pool or a shining mirror” (the metaphor is borrowed from Augustine's De doctrina Christiana). Thus the study of theology really meant to follow Christ: “to philosophize devoutly” in the New Testament, “praying rather than arguing, and seeking to be transformed rather than to be armed for combat.” “This kind of philosophy” was expressed “more in the emotions [affectibus] than in syllogisms,” it was a matter of “inspiration more than learning, transformation more than reasoning.”⁴

This motif of inner transformation, familiar in Erasmus's writings since the Enchiridion, is again highlighted in the passages where he sketches in outline form a “compendium” for easier understanding of the “philosophy” that Christ wished to be “accessible to all men, not beset with impenetrable labyrinths of argument”:⁵

Christ the heavenly teacher has founded a new people on earth, who depending wholly on heaven, and having put no trust in this world's defenses [huius mundi praesidiis], are rich in a different way, also wise, noble and happy in different ways. … Having eyes without guile, these folk know no spite or envy; having freely castrated themselves, and aiming at a life of angels while in the flesh, they know no unchaste lust; they know not divorce, since there is no evil they will not endure or turn to the good; they have not the use of oaths, since they neither distrust nor deceive anyone; they know not the hunger for money, since their treasure is in heaven, nor do they itch for empty glory, since they refer all things to the glory of Christ … these are the new teachings of our founder, such as no school of philosophy has ever brought forth.⁶

Thus the philosophy of Christ focuses on how Christians live, not on the credal statements they may espouse. Indeed, in Erasmus's view of the early church, “the number and complexity of creeds increased as faith began to dwindle.”⁷ But it would be a serious mistake to think of Erasmus as struggling to express something like the modern distinction between ethics and religion. Christ is always in the forefront, whether as the goal or target (scopus) to which Christians aspire, as the founder of a new people, as a “source of eternal fire” that “kindles and purifies [the order of priests] from all earthly contagion,” as the Bridegroom leading the soul into His chamber, or as “that solid rock” in whom the believer can place his trust even in the most perilous of times.⁸ Despite his critique of the Brethren of the Common Life,⁹ it apparently was not for nothing that Erasmus spent a good part of his youth in close contact with a religious movement whose most famous literary product was The Imitation of Christ.

Yet the philosphia Christi breathes a different spirit. Of that great, often excessive devotion to the monastic virtue of humility that one finds in the writings of the Brethren, there is in Erasmus not a trace. Instead, his way of conveying the inescapable contrast between the humble circumstances of Jesus' life and the pomp and splendor of the world is expressed by the concept of “human defenses [praesidia humana]” or “defenses of this world [huius mundi praesidia].” These terms encompass every imaginable form of strength and power in which human beings find pride and security. Thus Christ won men and women to himself “not by engines of war,” nor by “the syllogisms of philosophers or the rhetorical figures of the orators,” for “He did not wish any kind of human defenses to be involved in this affair.” St. Paul wrote his Epistle to the Romans to “take away the Jews' trust in themselves” and call them to rely only “on the defenses of Christ,” for “no one can truly trust in God unless he has abandoned trust in his own defenses.” In God's providence it was “the simple and popular doctrine of the Gospel” that renewed the world, as previously no school of philosophy had been able to do, “lest any of the praise be ascribed to human defenses.” This theme has points of contact with Luther's doctrine of “faith alone,” but it was clearly enunciated in prefatory writings to the 1516 Novum Instrumentum, and it was not something Erasmus learned from Luther.¹⁰ Rather, his own stress on the renunciation of praesidia humana helps to explain why he could see in Luther “a mighty trumpet of Gospel truth” (see chapter 9).

A further difference between Erasmus's philosophia Christi and the spirituality of the Brethren is the ideal of learned piety (docta pietas), as expressed when the letter to Paul Volz praises the abbot and others like him: “Being yourselves endowed with pious learning [pia doctrina] and with learned piety [docta pietas], I know that you would approve of nothing that is not equally pious and learned.”¹¹ In a general way, phrases like “learned piety” and “pious learning” convey the root notion with which Part II of this book began, that is, the notion of a doctrina that offers nurture for the heart as well as for the intellect. In a more specific sense, piety for Erasmus had to be “learned” in the sense that it drank in Christian doctrina “from the purest springs [fontes],” that is, from Scripture understood and expounded according to the best scholarly norms. In Erasmus's use of terms philosophia Christi is linked again and again to this simple but compelling metaphor: “All the springs and sources of Christian philosophy are enshrined in the books of the evangelists and the apostles”; the philosophy of Christ is drawn “from these few books, as if from the purest springs,” much more easily than Aristotle's philosophy is extracted from spiny tomes, “and I dare say with much more profit”; so as not to taint “the heavenly philosophy of Christ” with the laws and disciplines of men, “let that one spring remain uncorrupted, let that true sheet anchor of evangelical doctrine be preserved.”¹²

The “spring” metaphor expressed a principle for which Erasmus could claim the authority of both Jerome and Augustine—that is, that the Latin New Testament must be corrected against the Greek original, “for that is, as it were, the fountain-head.” In the same tradition humanist friends praised him for “opening the Greek sources [fontes]” of the New Testament or returning “to the Greek original (which means to abandon the runlets, and go back to the fountain-head.)”¹³ If still further support were needed for the equation fons = original text = saving doctrina, Erasmus found it through an allegorical interpretation of the story (Gen. 26: 14-19) of how Isaac reopened the wells dug in the days of his father Abraham but later stopped up and filled with dirt by the Philistines:

Judaism would have imposed on us the whole of Moses and even the crowning indignity of circumcision and would have reduced that heavenly philosophy to a matter of coarse and lifeless ritual, had not this valiant Isaac of ours [St. Paul] opened so many wells of the authentic Gospel, so many springs of living water against the Philistines that would fill all with dirt.¹⁴

This secondary metaphor—the wells of Abraham that have to be cleansed of Philistine dirt—provides a warrant for Erasmus's combative stance against his critics and detractors. With his patient textual labors he was not merely cleansing the “springs” of Christian philosophy from the unconscious errors of copyists, he was also removing impurities deliberately introduced into the well, for “we are [not] quite free of Philistines nowadays,” who “tip earth into the Gospel springs.”¹⁵ In the first instance, these enemies of truth were, as passages like the one quoted above suggest, proponents of a religion of ceremonies, ranging from the Judeo-Christians of the early church (Paul's adversaries) to the monks and friars of modern times. Erasmus's New Testament annotations offered a platform for showing how particular passages had been “twisted” to provide justification for modern “ceremonies,” as may be illustrated here by a few examples from Matthew. Thus at Matt. 3:2 (“Do penance” in the Vulgate) he points out that the Greek verb metanoiete (“repent” or “be changed in your heart”) has nothing to do with “the prescribed penalties by which one atones for sins” after receiving the sacrament of Confession, regardless what the “common herd” of theologians may think. At Matt. 6:7 (“In praying, do not multiply words”) he inveighs against the “little chants, clamors, murmurs and bombast” that have invaded the liturgy of the church, and he denounces especially certain prayers resembling “maunderings of old men or the foolishness of old women” which have been mixed in with the divine office that priests were obliged to recite daily. At 11:30 (“My yoke is easy”) he concludes that “a general council” of the church is the only remedy for the “tyranny” of laws and ceremonies which has so infested the lives of the faithful. At 16:18 (“Thou art Peter”) he marvels that certain theologians have “twisted” the reference to the rock on which Christ will build his church, “making it refer to the Roman Pontiff” rather than to all Christians, or to Peter's faith, or to Christ himself, as the ancient interpreters suggest. Finally, at 23:2 (“The Scribes and Pharisees have sat on the chair of Moses”) he reads Christ as saying that only those who teach the law truly deserve respect: “But who will bear [bishops] measuring everything by their own profit and majesty, legislating for their own convenience, against the doctrine of Christ, exercising plain tyranny over the people.”¹⁶

Dirt was also “tipped in Gospel wells” by palliating or explaining away the stringent moral demands of Christ in the Gospel. Here too Erasmus's annotations on Matthew, especially for the Sermon on the Mount, may provide illustrations. At Matt. 5:22 (“Everyone who is angry with his brother”) he noted that some Greek manuscripts read “without cause,” but he accepted Jerome's opinion that the addition had come from “some temerious scribe who wished to mitigate a saying that seemed too harsh.” At 5:37 (“Let your speech be, ‘Yes, yes’; ‘No, no’; and whatever is beyond this comes from the evil one”), he marveled how theologians had “twisted” the passage to mean that “evil” came from those who swore an oath falsely: “I think Christ intended that those who would be perfect should not swear at all, even on those occasions when people usually take oaths.”¹⁷

The worst distortion of all was to blunt Christ's injunction to suffer persecution in his name (Matt. 5:10-11), a command that stood squarely athwart the quarreling and war-making proclivities of sinful humankind. It was amazing how Christians turned a cold shoulder to such “dogmas of Christ's most holy philosophy,” for

even those professing perfect religion are not ashamed to evade this commandment, as if it were antiquated and obsolete. They think it impious not to have made a successful career, no matter what it takes. Thus war is praised even in the churches by bishops, by theologians, by monks. I know certain men who have made themselves bishops by singing the praises of war.

He had equally harsh words for medieval commentators who read Luke 22:36 (“Let him who has no sword sell his tunic and buy one”) as a charter for undertaking wars in a just cause:

To me no heresy is more pernicious, no blasphemy more criminal, than when someone following the example of the Philistines fills with dirt the wells of the Gospel fields, converting the spiritual sense to a carnal one, and corrupting heavenly teaching [doctrina] into something earthly. … It troubles me not a whit that some are worried lest the right of making war be taken away from princes, for it is hardly necessary to teach princes what they do anyway far too eagerly. I will not go into how princes fight wars nowadays, if indeed they do fight wars, instead of colluding among themselves for the destruction of the people, using the pretext of war to consolidate their own tyranny.¹⁸

This passage neatly illustrates how the philosophia Christi was calibrated to Erasmus's perception of the deep and secret evils that afflicted Christendom. It was only because the wells of Gospel doctrina had been filled with dirt that the shameless effrontery of wicked men could cast off all restraint. Conversely, if the wells of Gospel doctrine could again flow freely, the machinations of princes and their tame theologians would be set at naught.

The Exhortation (Paraclesis) prefaced to the 1516 Novum Instrumentum has a bright vision of the future. Although “it would perhaps be better to keep the mysteries of kings hidden from view, Christ wants his mysteries made known as widely as possible.” Thus Erasmus urged that the New Testament be translated into all vernacular languages, to be read “not just by Scots and Irishmen but even by Turks and Saracens,” so that snatches of the Gospel story could be sung by farmers at the plow, or weavers at their looms, or told among travelers to enliven a tedious journey, “for these are the occasions when Christians talk with one another, and we are such as our daily conversations make us.” As a dyed-in-the-wool Latinist Erasmus could not follow through on his own suggestion about translating Scripture, but he did his part through the New Testament Paraphrases, intended to explicate difficult passages and thus make the text more accessible to the Latin-reading public.¹⁹ But mere spreading of the Gospel was not the only task. There would be within not too many years “a more genuine kind of Christian” if “the three estates of men whose task it is to establish and promote the Christian religion” were of one mind in promulgating the pure Gospel:

If princes would stand by this seemingly ordinary philosophy [of Christ], if preachers would inculcate it in their sermons, if schoolmasters would instill it in their pupils, instead of a more learned philosophy drawn from the springs of Aristotle or Averroës, the Christian republic would not be troubled in this way by nearly unceasing wars, we would not see everywhere such a mad zeal for amassing riches by means fair or foul, we would not hear everywhere the echo of civil and ecclesiastical litigation, and we would not differ only in name and in ceremonies from those who do not profess the philosophy of Christ.²⁰

This in a nutshell was Erasmus's vision of a reform of doctrina, radiating outward from a cleansing of the Gospel springs, with the cooperation of civil and religious authorities as well as of those who taught from lectern or pulpit and over time bearing fruit in a world in which the Christian people would be spared much litigation and many wars.

The great hope that the Paraclesis expresses seems to rest on several disparate premises. All of his life Erasmus was fascinated by the charm and the power of language and for him the divine speech of Scripture was the most compelling of all: “That heavenly World which once came down to us from the heart of the Father still lives and breathes for us and acts and speaks with more efficacy” in the writings of the evangelists and apostles “than in any other way.”²¹ In addition, he drew encouragement from what he saw as the congruence between the philosophy of Christ and the inherent goodness of human nature: “That which is most in keeping with nature will easily take root in the souls of all. For what is the philosophy of Christ, which he calls a rebirth [renascentia], but the renewal of a human nature that was created good?” Gospel doctrine was “in keeping with nature” because “the consciousness of having done no wrong is the wellspring of true pleasure, as even Epicurus admits.” Erasmus explains Christ's statement that his yoke is light by saying that “he prescribed nothing except mutual love,” adding that “whatever is according to nature is easily borne”; to grasp his meaning, we may connect this passage from the New Testament Annotations with another in Querela Pacis, where, borrowing from Cicero, he speaks of nature implanting in man “a mild and gentle disposition which is inclined towards good will between him and his fellows, so that he delights in being loved for himself and takes pleasure in being of service to others—so long as he has not been corrupted by base desires.”²² Neither St. Augustine nor the other reformers of doctrina discussed earlier in chapter 5 would have suggested that base and quarrelsome desires are a corruption of man's true nature. Here again one sees the profound congruity between Erasmus's diagnosis of the ills of Christian society and his understanding of the philosophia Christi. If a political and religious elite “corrupted by base desires” had for its own selfish purposes “tipped dirt in the Gospel wells,” one could hope that the springs of truth, flowing fresh, might indeed produce “a more genuine kind of Christian.” In effect, his program for the renewal of Christendom was his own unique version of the ancient Christian principles that where evil abounds, there grace abounds more fully.

PHILOSOPHIA ERASMI

Erasmus's presentation of Gospel doctrine was both a work for the ages and a work very much limited by its author's own horizon. It is possible that no one has ever done as much as Erasmus to disclose the meaning of the New Testament books in their original language, but it is clear that the message of Erasmus's Gospel was very much in tune with his own ideas about religion. This idiosyncratic character of the philosophia Christi may be seen in his understanding of human nature (to be discussed in chapter 11, in connection with the debate with Luther). Here, the same point may be illustrated by considering first his use of allegorical exegesis to press home the attack on “ceremonies” and second the distinctive nuances of his understanding of ecclesiastical authority.

Among many of the Church Fathers a multiplicity of meanings in Scripture was seen as expressing the inexhaustible riches of divine wisdom. For Erasmus the practice of looking for spiritual or allegorical meanings was an essential part of the “ancient” or “rhetorical” theology he sought to emulate. In Ratio Verae Theologiae Erasmus, like the Fathers, argued that “there must be a figure of speech hidden in the words” where a scriptural passage seems “unsuitable to the divine nature or to the teachings of Christ.” Though critical of the excesses of some of the Fathers in this regard, Erasmus continued to defend the principle of allegorical interpretation, even though many of those who supported the humanist program for a theology based on the biblical languages argued for an exclusive focus on the literal meaning of the text.²³ One may ask what was the basis for his allegiance to a method of exegesis many of his intellectual allies thought outmoded. Allegorical exegesis may have been for Erasmus, as for the Fathers, a means of conveying the central Christian mystery of the Incarnation; this view of the question has been proposed by one astute interpreter but doubted by another.²⁴ What cannot be doubted is that he often used allegory, for example in the Ratio, as a means of conveying his trademark critique of the religion of ceremonies. Thus when Jesus tells the Canaanite woman it is “not fair to take the children's bread and cast it to dogs” (Matt. 15:26), he speaks, according to Erasmus, “in the voice of the Jews, who thought they alone were holy.” When Jesus curses the fig tree that had green leaves but no fruit, he was “indicating that no kind of men is more hateful than those who are impious under the pretext of piety and live irreligiously while professing religion by their title and their dress.”²⁵ One may observe a similar tendency in the Paraphrases, where Erasmus exercised a certain freedom in presenting the text for a literate but nonscholarly audience. When St. Paul says that fire will test the materials one uses to build on Christ as a foundation (1 Cor. 3:11-13), Erasmus knows what kinds of materials the fire will consume: “petty human constitutions, on dress or food or frigid ceremonies and such things, which men are wont to mix in not for the sake of Christ but for their own glory, even for their own profit.” When Paul asserts that “food does not commend us to God” (1 Cor. 8:8), Erasmus has a bit more to say: “Choice among foods can make one superstitious, never pious. Christ taught no distinction in such things, and for some little man to burden another with constitutions of this sort is presumptuous.”²⁶ Those who viewed the fast and abstinence laws of the church rather more favorably than Erasmus might wonder at such use of the sacred text. If Erasmus had trouble understanding how he had given his critics any cause for offense,²⁷ it was partly because he had trouble seeing that his own reading of the New Testament was, like anyone else's, an interpretation.

Erasmus's vision of the reform of Christendom was poised between an extraordinary optimism and an equally extraordinary pessimism, between the depths of evil to which major “orders” of Christendom had sunk (popes, princes, and mendicants) and the bright future that lay in prospect if only the Gospel springs could be cleansed of the dirt deposited by the self-interested proponents of the religion of ceremonies. Surely he could not have been so hopeful about what the philosophy of Christ might accomplish had he not fixed his attention on a kind of depravity that sprang not from the depths of human nature but from the greed and vindictiveness of certain powerful men.

This combination of optimism about the Gospel and pessimism about the church also sets up a certain tension in Erasmus's thought; in effect, one may ask how his espousal of the pure philosophy of Christ squares with his professions of loyalty to a church that was far from pure. This question now seems less urgent than it did some decades ago, partly because careful scholarship has established that Erasmus never ceased to understand himself as a Catholic,²⁸ partly because a better appreciation of the diversity of opinion within pre-Tridentine Catholicism makes some of his views seem less eccentric. For example, if his philosophia Christi has relatively little to say about the sacraments of the church, the same is true for the Imitation of Christ, except for a section presenting the mass as the enactment of a spiritual drama played out in the individual soul, an understanding Erasmus also expresses in the Enchiridion. It was thus not without reason that Erasmus grew tired of being told to say explicitly that he submitted his opinions to the judgment of the church: “So indeed I do, but to give and take many sureties is a sign of bad faith [signum malae fidei].” Moreover, as a critical student of church history, he knew better than most that “sometimes it is none too clear where the church might be found.”²⁹

Precisely this uncertainty about “where the church might be found” points to Erasmus's belief that the determination of orthodox doctrine had been conditioned by historical circumstances, a view that many of his contemporaries would have found disconcerting. On the one hand, Erasmus knew enough about the early church not to accept modern popes and bishops as moral equivalents of the apostles in whose stead they claimed to rule; in his brief description of the five ages of the church, the fifth and last age is that of the church “lapsing and declining from the pristine vigor of the Christian spirit.”³⁰ On the other hand, he knew too much about the first few Christian centuries to be wholly captivated by the primitivist implications of the beloved humanist metaphor about the fontes of pure doctrine in early times. Thus he also believed that “it is possible that the spirit of Christ did not reveal the whole truth to the church all at once.” In context, he is defending his plea for modifying the church's ban on divorce in his 1519 Novum Testamentum, at 1 Cor. 7:39. Here, in the longest by far of his New Testament annotations on a single verse, Erasmus had asked whether it would not be better for the church to allow some marriages to be dissolved, for grave reasons, than to force a man whose wife was “covered in crimes” either to continue living with her or to part from her only to live “the rest of his life bereft, destitute, and as it were emasculated.” To the objection that the “lapsing and declining” modern church lacked authority to dispense from Christ's explicit prohibition of divorce, Erasmus would demur: “In regard to the sacrament of the altar, the church was late in prescribing the doctrine of transubstantion; for many centuries it sufficed to say that the true body of Christ is present, either under the consecrated bread or in some other manner.”³¹

With regard to the locus of authority within the church, it was equally hard to pin Erasmus down. Though the belief that the popes exercised supreme authority in the church by divine right was gaining ground among sixteenth-century Catholics, Erasmus interpreted Christ's promise to Peter—“Upon this rock I will build my church” (Matt. 16:18)—as referring to the whole body of believers. As for the theories of papalist canon lawyers, “if it be true, as some assert, that the Roman Pontiff cannot err in judgment, what need is there of general councils?” In fact, theologians and canonists who doubted papal claims looked to an ecumenical council to remedy the abuses of papal authority, but Erasmus was not exactly a conciliarist either, for he thought that even a council could be subverted to evil purposes.³² Yet he did see church and state as analogous commonwealths, each threatened by the tyranny of a few and each equipped with a framework of law and precedent which could be invoked to restrain tyranny, if only each estate in the church body or the body politic limited itself to its proper function.³³ Thus the pope's role in the body of Christendom was to intervene “with exhortations and prayers” in case “some prince designs to seize despotic power” or so that “if some bishop behaves like a tyrant, the common people will have a remedy.” The duties of a pastor included building up a library for the education of his flock and not allowing scurrilous circuit-preachers the use of his pulpit; an inquisitor's duty was to make “inquiries and put the right people on notice,” not to stir up trouble by taking his case to the people in sermons.³⁴

This vaguely constitutional sense of the church as an ordered polity was perhaps appropriate to the life experience of one who was both a Netherlander and a privileged cleric. What is more important, this attitude seems to have filled in for Erasmus what would otherwise have been a terrible chasm between the pure philosophy of Christ and the unspeakable tyranny sometimes exercised by those who claimed to rule in Christ's name. Even though the reform of Christian society ultimately depended on the will of Christ, there might after all be a few “human defenses” for Gospel doctrine, and Erasmus was determined to use the slender threads of his influence as best he could to persuade those in positions of power to do their duty and set limits to the “tyranny” of the mendicants and their allies.

Notes

1. Wallace K. Ferguson, Opuscula Erasmi (The Hague, 1933), 120 (CWE 27:194); Sileni, LB 2:772A (CWE 34:264-265). There are precedents for “philosophy of Christ” in the Greek Fathers, who appropriated the classical sense of “philosophy” as a way of life, not just a quest for enlightenment: Léon-E. Halkin, Erasmus: A Critical Biography, trans. John Tonkin (Oxford, 1993), 284; Louis Bouyer, Autour d'Érasme (Paris, 1955), 95-135; Werner Jaeger, Early Christianity and Greek Paideia (Cambridge, Mass., 1961), 130-131. Cornelis Augustijn, Erasmus: His Life, Works, and Influence (Toronto, 1991), 75, believes the term “philosophy of Christ” was first used in the 1515 Adagia (The Sileni of Alcibiades).

2. Institutio Principis Christiani, ASD IV:1, 146-147, lines 327-336, and 148, lines 367-387. It is possible that during his stay in Italy Erasmus had heard of Federigo de Montefeltre (d. 1487), duke of Urbino, condottiere, and celebrated patron of humanist learning, who on one occasion withdrew before an invader rather than inflict a war on his subjects, only to return a few years later and have the populace rally to him as soon as he crossed the frontier.

3. To Paul Volz (1518), letter 858:226-232, in Allen, 3:337-338.

4. Letter 1033:154-157, in Allen, 4:104; and letter 844:285-288, in Allen, 3:338 (CWE 7:113, 6:36, 79); Georges Chantraine, S.J., “Mystère” et “Philosophie du Christ” selon Érasme (Gembloux, 1971), 157-158, citing Methodus Verae Theologiae, in Annemarie Holborn and Hajo Holborn, eds., Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus Ausgewählte Werke (Munich, 1933), 150, and Augustine, De doctrina Christiana, I, x, 10; Paraclesis (also prefaced to the 1516 Novum Instrumentum), Holborn and Holborn, Ausgewählte Werke, p. 146, lines 3-12, and p. 144.35-p. 145.1.

5. Chantraine, “Mystère” et “Philosophie du Christ,” 205, notes that the metaphors of spiritual progress in the Enchiridion are vertical, suggesting a Platonic inspiration, while those of the Ratio Verae Theologiae (1518) are horizontal (e.g., initiation, advance), suggesting a firmer anchoring in the theological tradition.

6. Ratio Verae Theologiae, in Holborn and Holborn, Ausgewählte Werke, 193-194; cf. letter 858:60-63, 139-148, in Allen, 3:363, 365 (CWE 6:74, 77).

7. Ratio Verae Theologiae, in Holborn and Holborn, Ausgewählte Werke, 211.

8. On Christ as scopus, an image borrowed from Origen, see André Godin, Érasme, lecteur d'Origène (Paris, 1982), 45-48; letter 858:245-247, in Allen, 3:368 (CWE 7:80); on the interpretation of letter 1183:133-138, in Allen, 4:442 (CWE 8:153) (cf. letter 2114:14-16, in Allen, 8:74), “I shall plant my feet firmly on that solid rock,” see Chantraine, “Mystère” et “Philosophie du Christ,” 114-115.

9. See chapter 2, note 37, above.

10. Ratio Verae Theologiae (1518), in Holborn and Holborn, Ausgewählte Werke, 221, 231, 234-235; Erasmus's Paraphrase of 1 Cor. 1:25, in LB 7:863C; see Paraclesis (1516), in Holborn and Holborn, Ausgewählte Werke, p. 143, lines 3-10.

11. Letter 858:1-15, in Allen, 3:362; for examples in Erasmus's writings of the couplet pia doctrina and docta pietas, see Chantraine, “Mystère” et “Philosophie du Christ,” 101-102.

12. Letter 858:134-136, in Allen, 3:365 (CWE 6:77); Paraclesis, in Holborn and Holborn, Ausgewählte Werke, p. 141, lines 12-27 (cf. p. 146, lines 3-12); Ratio Verae Theologiae, in Holborn and Holborn, Ausgewählte Werke, 204; see also letter 916:224-229, in Allen, 3:486 (CWE 6:244).

13. Letter 373:12-17, in Allen, 2:166 (CWE 3:198) (cf. a similar comment by Maarten van Dorp, letter 304:128-131, in Allen, 2:15 [CWE 3:22], and for a pertinent passage from Jerome cited by Valla, see above, chapter 5, note 14); letter 663:78-82, in Allen, 3:88, and letter 520:68-70, in Allen, 2:440 (CWE 123, 4:200).

14. Letter 916:216-229, in Allen, 3:486 (CWE 6:244); for the same idea, letter 1062:35-44, in Allen, 4:181 (CWE 7:197); Novum Instrumentum, at Luke 22:36, in Anne Reeve and Michael Screech, eds., Erasmus's Annotations on the New Testament: The Gospels (London, 1986), 209-213; and Ratio Verae Theologiae, in Holborn and Holborn, Ausgewählte Werke, 260-261.

15. Letter 858:185-212, in Allen, 3:366-367 (CWE 7:78-79).

16. Reeve and Screech, Erasmus's Annotations on … the Gospels, 13 (from 1516), 33-34 (1519), 53-56 (1519), 70-71 (1516, 1519), 91 (1519).

17. Reeve and Screech, Erasmus's Annotations on … the Gospels, 27 (1516), 30 (1516); cf. letter 1006:220-227, in Allen, 3:48 (CWE 7:51). The Sermon on the Mount, Matt. 5:6, pp. 25-39 in Reeve and Screech, occupies more space in the Annotations than any comparable section of the Gospels.

18. Reeve and Screech, Erasmus's Annotations on … the Gospels, 26 (1519), 209-213 (1516, 1519).

19. Paraclesis, in Holborn and Holborn, Ausgewählte Werke, p. 142, lines 14-25; on the Paraphrases, see the introduction to CWE; for the ideas that “we are such as our daily conversations make us,” see “Evil conversations corrupt good manners” (1508), Adages, LB 2:288D-289D (CWE 32:266-267), my italics; for colloquia, CWE has “communications.”

20. Paraclesis, in Holborn and Holborn, Ausgewählte Werke, p. 143, line 32-p. 144, line 12. Gospel doctrine was thus the remedy for the ills of the Christian body politic as Erasmus had often described them, for example in the Enchiridion (see above, my chapter 3, note 47).

21. To Leo X, preface to the Novum Instrumentum, letter 384:42-49, in Allen, 2:185 (CWE 3:222). These words are also an indication that for Erasmus the presence of Christ in the sacraments of the church was less important than his presence in Scripture: see John B. Payne, Erasmus: His Theology of the Sacraments (Richmond, 1970).

22. Paraclesis, Holborn and Holborn, Ausgewählte Werke, p. 145, lines 4-7, 23-25; Reeve and Screech, Erasmus's Annotations on … the Gospels, 53-56 (Matt. 11:30, 1519), and Querela Pacis (1517), LB 4:627BC (CWE 27:295, with note 15).

23. Ratio Verae Theologiae, Holborn and Holborn, Ausgewählte Werke, p. 180, lines 11-19. James D. Tracy, Erasmus: The Growth of a Mind (Geneva, 1972), 163-166, 217-219.

24. Chantraine, “Mystère” et “Philosophie du Christ”; for André Godin, the master among those who have studied Erasmus's use of the Fathers, this argument lacks a solid semantic base: Érasme, lecteur d'Origène (Paris, 1982), 204-205. Jacques Chomarat, Grammaire et Rhetorique Chez Érasme, 2 vols. (Paris, 1981), 1:328-343, errs in the opposite direction, finding nothing of interest in the examples the Ratio offers of an allegorical reading of the Old Testament.

25. Ratio Verae Theologiae, in Holborn and Holborn, Ausgewählte Werke, p. 197, lines 24-30, p. 252, lines 16-20, and p. 256, lines 32-35. Erasmus's tendency to understand Christ as “signifying” things by his actions is so strong that, heedless of his own argument against Colet many years earlier, he accepts Augustine's suggestion that Christ's wish in Gethsemane not to drink the chalice presented him was spoken in the name of the faithful, that is, the members of his body: p. 197, lines 8-10.

26. Paraphrases, LB 7:819F-820A (CWE 42:73); Paraphrases in Epistolas ad Corinthios et Galatas (Froben, 1520), 226, 229 (LB 7:868AB, 887B). For an example of how Erasmus might take liberties with a text in the Paraphrases but not the Annotations, see his treatment of Rom. 1:24 at CWE 42:18 n. 20.

27. See Peter Bietenholz's comment at letter 1007:81, in Allen, 4:53 (CWE 7:58 n. 10).

28. Augustin Renaudet, Études Érasmiennes, 1521-1529 (Paris, 1939), compared Erasmus to the heterodox Catholic Modernists of the late nineteenth century. Without fully answering Renaudet's question, Karl Schätti, Erasmus von Rotterdam und die Römische Kurie (Basel, 1954), Karlheinz Oelrich, Der Späte Erasmus und die Reformation (Münster, 1961), Cornelis Augustijn, Erasmus en de Reformatie (Amsterdam, 1962), and Georg Gebhardt, Die Stellung des Erasmus zur Römischen Kurie (Marburg, 1966), have shown that he never intended to separate himself from the unity of the church.

29. Unpublished to Capito, letter 734:41-46, in Allen, 3:164 (CWE 5:233); italics mine; for signum malae fidei CWE has “argues lack of confidence,” which seems to me unnecessarily ambiguous.

30. Ratio Verae Theologiae, in Holborn and Holborn, Ausgewählte Werke, 199-201.

31. Letter 1006:171-261, in Allen, 4:47-49 (CWE 7:49-52); Anne Reeve and Michael Screech, Erasmus's Annotations on the New Testament: Acts, Romans, I and II Corinthians (Leiden, 1990), 467-481. Transubstantio occurs for the first time in a confession of faith imposed on Berengarius of Tours (d. 1074).

32. Reeve and Screech, Erasmus's Annotations to … the Gospels, Matt. 16: 18 (1516, 1519), 70-71, Luke 10:26 (1519), 187-188, and Matt. 11:30 (1519, on councils), 55; Reeve and Screech, Annotations on the New Testament, at 1 Cor. 7:39 (1519, on papal power), 472-473.

33. “As warts grow on the eye,” Adages (1517), LB 2:653F-654C (CWE 34:74-76): “The place of godless grandees in the state is perhaps taken in the church by some members of what are commonly called Mendicant Orders.”

34. Letter 1039:98-117, in Allen, 4:115-116; letter 1200:10-47, in Allen, 4:483-484; letter 1006:124-129, in Allen, 4:46 (CWE 7:123; 8:199-200; 7:48).

Works Cited

Allen, P. S. Opus Epistolarum Des. Erasmi Roterodami. 12 vols. Oxford, 1906-1958. Abbreviated “Allen.”

Leclercq, Jean. Opera Omnia Des. Erasmi Roterodami. 10 vols. Leiden, 1703-1706. Abbreviated LB.

Opera Omnia Des. Erasmi Roterodami. Chairman of editorial board, Hans Trapman. Vols. to be published in 9 groupings, or ordines; 16 vols. have appeared to date, e.g., Ordo I, vols 1-6. Amsterdam and The Hague, 1969. Abbreviated ASD.

Collected Works of Erasmus. Chairman of editorial board, James K. McConica. To be published in 82 vols., of which 28 have appeared thus far. Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1974-. Abbreviated CWE.