Palinodiam Canere: Rhetoric, Philosophy, & Theology in

Brian Cummings

“Erasmus posuit oua; Luther exclusit pullos.”1 By the end of his life the saying was a cliché: Erasmus laid the eggs, Luther hatched the chicks. Is it possi- ble to assess the theology of Erasmus without locating him in relation to or his ? Erasmus quoted other dicta: he was the father of Luther, the soldier of Pilate. Such were those dreadful monkish jokes, prouerbia ἀδελφικα.2 Now, the cure was worse than the disease, a prov- erb Erasmus was using by 1521.3 It goes without saying that Erasmus was not pleased to be judged in Luther’s shadow.4 In a letter to Justus Jonas in May 1521, he commented that his own books were written before Luther’s appearance.5 It is a curious irony of history, Diarmaid MacCulloch has com- mented, that Erasmus’ reputation reached its apogee just as Luther entered the scene.6 The result is that on theology, Erasmus is judged in retrospective terms. As Irena Backus has argued, it is clear from his editions of the Church Fa- thers that Erasmus considered the dogma of the early Church to be fluid and “nondoctrinaire.”7 However, this ambivalence has affected the question of whether he can be granted the status of theologian at all. Even a sympathetic Catholic voice in the nineteenth century, Durand de Laur, states of Erasmus that « Né pour les lettres et l’éloquence, il montra fort peu de goût pour la

1 Ep. 2956, Erasmus to Johannes Sinapius, 31 July 1534, Opus Epistolarum Erasmi, ed. P.S. Al- len, 12 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906–58), 11:21 (Henceforth cited using the abbrevi- ation EE.) 2 EE, 11:21 3 Ep. 1203, Erasmus to Ludwig Bär, 14 May 1521, EE 4:494. 4 “nomen meum coniungens cum Luthero;” Ep. 1581 to Noël Béda, 15 June 1525; EE, 6: 96. In March 1527, he complains to that Aleander and Alberto Pio “miscens Luteri negocium cum meo;” EE 7: 12. 5 Ep. 1202, Erasmus to Justus Jonas, 10 May 1521, EE 4:491. 6 Diarmaid MacCulloch, Reformation: Europe’s House Divided, 1490–1700 (London: Allen Lane, 2003), 105. 7 Irena Backus, “Erasmus and the Spirituality of the Early Church,” in Erasmus’s Vision of the Church, ed. Hilmar M. Pabel (Kirksville: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1995), 95–114; this ref. 103.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/9789004356795_029 450 Cummings théologie scholastique. »8 Although de Laur is no friend of scholasticism, he accepts implicitly that Erasmus practises outside the discipline of theology. Au- gustin Renaudet in the 1930s went further, concluding, somewhat notoriously: « Erasme n’était pas théologien. »9 Yet this is not, as is sometimes thought, a rebuke. Erasmus appears to Renaudet, as to de Laur, as a precursor of modern- ism, a proto-Enlightenment figure who bypasses the narrow roads of academic theology. In this sense he is reclaimed from the criticisms of the Sorbonne as a philosophe, avant la lettre. Erika Rummel, in a recent summary of the evidence, is dubious about such anachronisms. Instead she argues that Erasmus is best seen as a theologian on his own terms and his own words, one “who fittingly explicates the scriptures, who speaks movingly of piety … and excites passion for heavenly things.”10 Nonetheless, this perhaps makes too little of Erasmus’ attempts to wrestle with the debates of his times. A different approach is taken by Christine Christ-von Wedel. Here, for all his commitment to peace, Erasmus emerges as a less irenic theologian.11 In this context, I here re-examine how Erasmus engaged in controversy. For someone who claimed to be above or be- yond controversy, Erasmus spent a considerable amount of time engaging with it. Yet as always, his literary use of irony makes this hard to pin down.

1 Erasmus in Controversy: Dorp, Lefèvre, and Lee

The conclusion in outline is that Erasmus’s theology is defined by his oppo- nents, beginning with those at Louvain.12 Even the intermediate positive anal- ysis offered by Rummel places him in such a context. Instead, in this essay I propose following the deceptive path of Erasmus’s method of controversy more closely. The first point is to dispute the grounds on which argument tends to be based. Everyone knows Erasmus was ambivalent; he was ambivalent about himself, never more so than when asked to express a position. The key is

8 Hyppolyte Durand de Laur, Érasme, précurseur et initiateur de l’esprit moderne (Paris: Di- dier et Cie, 1872), 24. 9 Augustin Renaudet, Études érasmiennes (1521–1529) (Paris: E. Droz, 1939), 45. 10 Erika Rummel, “The theology of Erasmus,” in The Cambridge Companion to Reformation Theology, ed. David Bagchi and David C. Steinmetz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 38. 11 Christine Christ-von Wedel, Erasmus of Rotterdam: Advocate of a New (­Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 9–11. 12 Erika Rummel, The Humanist-Scholastic Debate in the Renaissance and Reformation (Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Press, 1995), 71.