Erasmus vs. Luther — a Rift That Defined the Course of Western Civilization

Erasmus vs. Luther — a Rift That Defined the Course of Western Civilization

By REBECCA NEWBERGER GOLDSTEIN

The New York Times

MARCH 29, 2018

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An 1877 painting by Anton von Werner depicts a defiant Martin Luther. Credit Anton von Werner

FATAL DISCORD
Erasmus, Luther and the Fight for the Western Mind
By Michael Massing
Illustrated. 976 pp. Harper. $45.

Often the best way to understand opposing viewpoints is to imagine the proponents in dialogue. How would Euripides have responded to Plato, his Athenian contemporary, concerning the philosopher’s banishing poets from his utopia? Or picture George Eliot cornering Arthur Schopenhauer to challenge his argument that women are unsuited for artistic and intellectual greatness. The history of ideas is filled with pairs of contemporary minds who missed the opportunity to confront each other point blank, leaving us to dream up hypothetical exchanges.

But sometimes our imaginations aren’t necessary. Desiderius Erasmus and Martin Luther, though they never met in person, were articulate in their assessments of each other. In their disdain for the power-hungry abuses of the church, the grotesque superstitions it encouraged in the laity and the equally grotesque scholasticism it encouraged in the era’s theologians, they might have been natural allies; instead they became implacable foes. Each, in opposing the other, clarified his own point of view. In the process, the two great reformist movements of their day — the Renaissance, embodied in Erasmus, and the Reformation, embodied in Luther — were torn asunder. Michael Massing’s riveting “Fatal Discord: Erasmus, Luther and the Fight for the Western Mind” is devoted to this fateful parting of ways.

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The everyday Erasmus, as shown by Quentin Massys (or Metsys) in Antwerp in 1517. Credit Quentin Massys

Last year, which saw the 500th anniversary of Luther’s posting of his 95 Theses attacking the church for its profit-making excesses, produced a stack of books to mark the occasion. But as far as I know, “Fatal Discord” is alone in addressing Luther by way of his relationship with Erasmus. It’s an inspired approach, and Massing, a journalist, has produced a sprawling narrative around the rift between the two men, laying out the sociological, political and economic factors that shaped both them and Europe’s responses to them, and tracing their theological disputes back to the earliest days of Christianity. Though a massive amount of material is marshaled, Massing’s journalistic skills keep the story line crisply coherent.

Massing’s book begins with chapters alternating equitably between the two men. However, Luther — obdurate and reckless, bilious and doctrinaire — eventually swamps the book, as he eventually swamped the urbane and ironic man of letters. The Christianity that Erasmus advocated — eschewing the finer points of metaphysics in favor of the humility, simplicity and charity he saw in Jesus of Nazareth — was overpowered by Luther’s conviction that the Word of God, revealed in Scripture, speaks unambiguously on all doctrinal matters, no matter how abstruse. For Luther, who as a young monk had suffered from Anfechtungen (his word for the terror and despair at the thought that God would momentarily be judging him and find him failing), only apodictic certitude would do.

   

Both men displayed a fierce determination in the way they overcame their inauspicious beginnings. Erasmus was the illegitimate son of a physician’s daughter and a priest; he rued the unlawfulness of the union all his life. He named himself Desiderius, meaning longed for. More apt would have been Desiderans, for longing. Both parents died early, and he was coerced by his guardian into a monastery and later into taking the vows of priesthood. He found monastic life suffocating, longing for the spirit of the Renaissance that had taken hold in Italy, inspired by the newly awakened passion for classical wisdom. Like Petrarch, Erasmus searched out the pagan manuscripts disintegrating in monasteries, laboriously taught himself ancient Greek and cultivated a stylistically dazzling Latin. Such achievements counted, for him, as moral achievements, almost on a par with the Christian virtues. He was a firm believer in human perfectibility, which is one of the convictions that would put him on a collision course with Luther, committed to the incorrigible depravity of human nature.

Erasmus’s humanist scholarship and reformist Christianity converged in his “Novum Instrumentum,” the first Greek New Testament ever to be published. His motivation was to better Christianity by correcting corruptions of the original Greek that had insinuated themselves into the Latin Vulgate. While the orthodox condemned him, the implication that errors were embedded in church tenets made him a hero to some, including an obscure young man seeking certitude in a monastery in Wittenberg.

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Where Erasmus had found it necessary to flee from monastic life, Luther fled to it, against his father’s wishes. But even within the monastery, his Anfechtungen continued. How could one know that all one’s pious efforts would be judged adequate in the eyes of God? He eventually found his answer, gleaned from his reading of Paul’s Epistle to the Romans: We need not worry about failing, since nothing we do makes any difference. Our fate is predestined by God, and our salvation will come through faith in that conviction. Luther’s famous principle of “justification by faith,” making (some of) us passive recipients of God’s unearned love, would become central in the movement that would eventually be known as Protestantism.

For Luther, nothing he didn’t personally hear reverberating within the words of Scripture could be sanctioned, including the vast hierarchy of the church and its self-serving dictums. Erasmus’s declaration (in his “Enchiridion”) that “monasticism is not piety” resonated with him. He also used Erasmus’s New Testament (the second of the five editions it would undergo) for his own translation of Scripture into German, so that the people themselves might take their religion directly from that one true source. “All Christians are priests,” Luther provocatively wrote.

Into that narrow space of questioning the church’s authority that Erasmus had pried apart, Luther stepped, and blasted it wide open. Erasmus was horrified — horrified at the violence of Luther’s certitude, horrified at the violence his certitude bred within Christendom. Erasmus was among the earliest of pacifists, calling Mars “the stupidest of all the gods,” so there is a tragic irony in his having contributed, no matter how indirectly, to the bloody sectarian turmoil that erupted from Christianity’s splintering.

In his divergence from Luther, Erasmus is often viewed as the one at a disadvantage. Whereas Luther displayed the courage of his convictions, Erasmus comes off as a self-protective pragmatist, seeking accommodation with the church so as to pursue his life with a minimum of upset. Little suggests otherwise in “Fatal Discord,” and that is regrettable. In the dialogue between Luther and Erasmus, Massing has omitted Erasmus’s strongest lines, which are epistemological in nature. Erasmus doubts Luther’s absolute rule of faith more than he doubts the institution of the church, whose flaws — he hoped — could be corrected. He is justifiably skeptical of a self-verifying criterion for truth that can generate the kind of knowledge Luther claimed for himself. This principled skepticism is the epistemological backbone that stiffened his anti-Lutheran stance.

Massing writes that Erasmus’s influences on us today, unlike Luther’s, are faint. I disagree. Modern philosophy was born in the century after Erasmus and Luther. It emerged, not coincidentally, in the wake of the ensanguined doctrinal disputes that killed off Europeans at a higher percentage of their population than did World War I. Modern philosophy would be marked by its refocus on epistemology, which scrupulously analyzes the conditions for knowledge, as opposed to mere belief, and which recognizes, in the spirit of Erasmus, that among the threats to human flourishing, we should not underestimate the dangers of misplaced certitude.

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein is the author, most recently, of “Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won’t Go Away.”