Archive: Erasmus

One of the most celebrated thinkers of the Renaissance, Erasmus (c1466-1536) is best known for his works of classical and religious scholarship, and for his infamous theological dispute with Martin Luther (1483-1546) over free will and the Church. In this archive episode, first released in February 2012, Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Dutch humanist scholar Desiderius Erasmus. Erasmus was widely seen as the greatest classical scholar of his age, having translated and edited numerous Latin and Greek texts. Above all though, he was a religious scholar who published important editions of the Bible which expunged many corruptions to the texts of the Scriptures. He was an outspoken critic of the Church, whose biting satire on its excesses, In Praise of Folly, was famed throughout Europe. When the Reformation began in 1517, however, Erasmus chose to remain a member of the Catholic Church rather than side with Martin Luther and the reformers, and a few years later he engaged in a celebrated debate with Luther on the subject of free will. Through his writings on the Church, on education and the wide gamut of humanist scholarship, Erasmus is remembered today as one of the greatest thinkers of the northern Renaissance. With Diarmaid MacCulloch Professor of the History of the Church at the University of Oxford Eamon Duffy Professor of the History of Christianity at the University of Cambridge Jill Kraye Professor of the History of Renaissance Philosophy and Librarian at the Warburg Institute, University of London Producer: Thomas Morris In Our Time is a BBC Studios production A world-class seminar every week. Spanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time celebrates the pursuit of knowledge and the enduring power of ideas. In each episode, host Misha Glenny and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.

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  In the latest edition of In Our Time, my guests and I discussed the most famous work of Sir Thomas More, Lord Chancellor under Henry VIII, who was later executed for his opposition to Henry's divorce from Catherine of Aragon. Both More's humanism and his loyalty to the established church developed under the influence of Erasmus of Rotterdam, the leading voice of European humanism at the time of the Renaissance and Reformation. So I thought we should go back and find out more about Erasmus, his relationship with England, and indeed Thomas More. But in this episode, we also learn about his bitter clash with the leading light of the Reformation and the new Protestant faith, Martin Luther,

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  the more surprising since initially the two seemed to share similar concerns. I hope you enjoy this archive episode.

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  Hello. One of Hans Holbein's best-known paintings is a portrait of a middle-aged man dressed in a luxurious fur coat. He sits at a table, gazing serenely into the middle distance, his hands resting on a book. This scholarly ficar is Desiderius Erasmus, one of the most celebrated intellectuals of the 16th in need of any century. Dutch by birth, 1467, Erasmus lived and worked all over Europe. He was a brilliant classical scholar, a theologian, and a translator of the Bible. He wrote satires, works of educational theory, and devastating attacks on those who sought to bring down the Catholic Church. During the early exchanges of the Protestant Reformation, he was involved in an inflamed and celebrated

• 3:13Speaker 05

  dispute with Martin Luther. He is one of the most widely read writers of his age, a thinker of lasting influence. With me to discuss the life and work of Erasmus are Dermot McCulloch, Professor of the History of the Church at the University of Oxford, Eamonn Duffy, Professor of the History of Christianity at the University of Cambridge, and Jill Cray, Professor of the History of Renaissance Philosophy and Librarian at the Warburg Institute, University of London. Dermot McCulloch, can you give us some background on Erasmus? What do you know about his early life and education? Well, he's always called Erasmus of Rotterdam. And he made this a sort of spin-doctoring title for himself. We don't actually know where he was born. It might have been the town of Rotterdam. It might have been another town called Haude. And that's interesting

• 3:58Speaker 05

  because actually, Erasmus didn't want us to know much about his early life, and that's because he was the son of a priest. In other words, in the terms of 15th century Western Europe, he was a non-person. You shouldn't have sons of priests at the time. And I think there's a sense in which he is a man who needs to reinvent himself from nothing. He creates the person Erasmus of Rotterdam. And that's funny as well, because of Rotterdam, he was the citizen of Europe. He never really had a home. You get a sense of a rootless man who is just a brain, a sort of free-floating brain. And that's the key to his career.

• 4:42Speaker 05

  His father was a scribe, as I understand it. Did he influence, and he died when Erasmus was in his mid, 15 or 16, that sort of age, did he influence his son? Great silence on that. And what's he going to do, this boy, with a career in which he has no status in the world? Well, the thing you do in those circumstances is to go into the church. So the family put him on the first rungs of a career in the church, and they sent him off to a local monastery, an Augustinian monastery, a place called Stein. And he hated it. Absolutely hated it. He was miserable. He fell in love with a fellow monk. He was very upset by that. A few passionate letters survive from

• 5:27Speaker 05

  Erasmus to this monk, Sabartius Roger. And you can see the rest of the career is a sense running away from that first failed attempt of the family to launch him. We move forward to his interest in humanism. Can you briefly encapsulate what humanism meant at the time and how it drew Erasmus into its grip? Well, what is humanism? I sometimes say to undergraduates that the best thing to say about humanism is it's the realization that there is more to life than the Middle Ages. Suddenly, people had this great flow of new manuscripts from the remote past, Greek and Latin manuscripts, accelerated because so much was coming in from the East,

• 6:10Speaker 05

  from the fall of Constantinople, when it was captured by the Ottoman Turks. And all this is very exciting. It's not just that they were finding new works to entertain them. What they were finding were texts which could help them reorganize their lives in a way that the ancient world gave them models and change the society around them. So humanism is not just playing around with texts. Do we know when Erasmus, Latch, that's a silly word, knew when Erasmus became interested in it? Very early, I think, in the monastery in Stein. It was a way of escaping from the misery of being a monk. And it was also the way out of being a monk. Because what happened to him was that he heard that the Bishop of Cambrai, which was conveniently

• 6:52Speaker 05

  quite a way away from Stein, wanted a secretary. And of course, bishops wanted humanists to be their secretaries because they could then write beautiful Latin. And so they could write the letters for the bishop to some other great man, and the bishop would get the kudos, the credit for being educated. And so Erasmus applied to be secretary of the Bishop of Cambrai, just for a while. So he could leave the monastery for a while and then go the bishop's secretary, but he never came back. So this was, with one bound, he was free. Humanism released him. Eamonn Duffy, an introduction now. What roundly were the most significant intellectual influences? He's free of the monastery, the board, and he hated that, we're told. He's

• 7:37Speaker 05

  working as a freelance writer, almost, a secretary to a bishop, beginning a career then. What influences were around him that he chose to take on board? Well, two that you might think were conflicting. He's a deeply pious man. And it's a piety inside the head. The piety of his time was precisely rooted in places and things, pilgrimage, holy images. Erasmus reacted violently against that. He'd been trained in a kind of interior piety, the so-called devotatio moderna, which emphasized

• 8:21Speaker 05

  calmness, stillness. Don't go on pilgrimage, go to your parish church. Christ is there. It's very Christ-centric, and it's focused on the simple piety of the Gospels. And then, on the other side, there's the world of especially Greek learning. He becomes a hero-worshiper of probably the most unpleasant of the ancient Christian fathers, St. Jerome, who, like Erasmus, was a great scholar who brought Greek learning into the Latin world. And that was Erasmus's great ambition, to bring the world of Greek learning into the Latin

• 9:04Speaker 05

  Church and to transform the Church by bringing it back to its roots, the return ad fontes to the source. So an intense piety of almost exaggerated simplicity, but which could become a sort of laser beam, cutting away a lot of the, what he saw as the excrescences of modern, degenerate Catholicism, to restore a simple, ancient Catholicism. And now the Greek influence, the Roman influence is flowing into Europe. The Arabs had nurtured it and extended it in the fall of Constantinople. It had brought more and more in. So it's all over Europe, this new learning, really.

• 9:46Speaker 05

  In the early 15th century, the Council of Florence had brought a lot of Greeks into Italy. And then, of course, the fall of Constantinople, the capture of the center of the Byzantine world by the Turks, had brought refugees, they'd channeled into Italy, especially through Cardinal Bazarion and Greek Cardinal. And so Greek Italy was a magnet eventually for Erasmus, and he finds his way there. And as Dermot said earlier, at the beginning of the program, he is a man of no place. He's all over Europe, city after city, I guess, including in this country, as we'll

• 10:27Speaker 05

  find out. What is his attitude to the church he found himself so faithful and a member of at the end of the 15th century? Well, it's curiously ambivalent. He was to prove himself really surprisingly loyal to it, because in many ways... The piety he advocated cut right across many of the institutions and many of the patterns of devotion of his own day. But he believed passionately in the church as a spirit-filled community that was meant to be an agent of harmony in the world.

• 11:08Speaker 05

  And one of the reasons he reacted against the reformers was that he saw them as dogmatis ians who would break Europe up for the sake of their opinions. So while he's a quite corrosive critic, using the most deadly of all weapons, laughter, to attack the absurdities of not just popes and, well, he doesn't much satirise monarchs. He's rather an establishment figure and he's always to be found hovering around courts. And he's a great one of collecting patronage.

• 11:47Speaker 05

  But certainly hierarchs in the church, the absurdities of pomposity in society. So he's simultaneously laughing at it all, but passionately committed to maintaining the unity of it. He's a sort of licensed jester. But can you just tell us a little bit more about why this passion for the unity and the continuity of the Catholic Church is so important to him? When he, as has often been said, he laid the egg that Luther hatched and sought to start the Reformation? Well, at one level, there's an extraordinary intellectual and spiritual arrogance about Erasmus.

• 12:31Speaker 05

  His motto was, "I yield to nobody." But he shared with other humanists, his friend Thomas More, his patron Wolsey, Archbishop Warham of Canterbury, a genuine belief that Christendom was a reality that transcended the individual. And so Erasmus, who is the great advocate of truth-telling scholarship, go where the evidence takes you, nevertheless felt that if in the end you ran up against what the

• 13:12Speaker 05

  community felt were its fundamental beliefs, at least you owed the community a discreet willingness to bide your time. Jill Cray, can we talk about his fascination with classical writers who would have been thought of as pagan writers at the time, pre-Christian writers, non-Christian writers, and therefore for some people, outside consideration because they didn't have the faith? How did he come across them and how did he square that with his, as Eamonn Duffy just pointed out, his steady and deep Christian faith? The problem of how you square Christianity with classical studies was something that

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  all humanists had to face, from Petrarch in the 14th century to John Milton in the 17th. This is what Paradise Regained is about. So Erasmus is one of, trying to find a solution, but there's a whole continuum of ideas from complete rejection of the pagans to almost total assimilation. And Erasmus, as usual, is somewhere in the middle of this. He believes that you can have a fusion, a blending, a synthesis of what is best in the pagan world with the Christian world and with Christianity. And this involves looking at each pagan philosopher, finding what's best in them, and that by definition is what agrees with Christianity, and then adopting it.

• 14:38Speaker 05

  And he didn't see any problem about accepting good advice if it came from a pagan and if it confirmed what you already knew from Christianity. The Bible and the Church Fathers were the most important source, but when pagan authors, when pagan philosophers agreed with it, then he was very happy to use this and to pick the best of them and to blend it with Christianity. How did this view go down with his peers in the Catholic intellectual establishment at the time? Well, a lot of, I think this was a kind of mainstream view that many people felt that by this time, the humanist movement had penetrated the Catholic Church.

• 15:20Speaker 05

  There were many people who were interested in the new learning and people were always seeking to find a way to bring these two elements together. So Erasmus sometimes pushed it a bit far. The famous statement, he has one of the characters say in one of his colloquies, these were Latin dialogues that he wrote with a kind, to teach boys Latin, but also to have a moral and didactic and sometimes satiric purpose. And in one of them, the godly feast, he talks about this problem. He says, "Sometimes these pagans seem to speak more Christianly, in a more Christian way than we do."

• 16:02Speaker 05

  And he mentions Cicero and he refers to Socrates when Socrates, just before taking the hemlock, talks about his desire to obey the divine will. And one of the characters says, "I can barely restrain myself from saying, 'Saint Socrates, pray for us.'" And it's quite clever. He doesn't quite say it, "I can barely restrain myself," but he hints that there is this idea that that he's divinely inspired. And the character also says, "Maybe Christ's spirit is spread more widely than we think and there are more people in the company of saints than in our calendar." So he's suggesting that pagan philosophers are perhaps divinely inspired.

• 16:47Speaker 05

  He developed a personal approach which he called the philosophy of Christ. Could you explain that? Well, it's quite similar to what Eamonn Duffy was saying, that Christianity should be about the simple message of the Gospels, about following the example of Christ, about living up to his precepts. It shouldn't be about complicated philosophy and doctrinaire discussions. It shouldn't be about ritual. It shouldn't be about Aristotelian syllogisms. All you needed to know for the philosophy of Christ was the precepts in the Gospels and what Christ had taught.

• 17:25Speaker 05

  You needed to know, "Love thy neighbour," sorry, "love thy neighbour." Less than the curse you... Yeah, that's right. You should have contempt for the things of the world, you should turn the other cheek, that everything should be motivated by love and by charity and by peace. And these were things that anybody could learn by reading the Gospel. It wasn't about the head, it wasn't about intellect, it was about the heart. And this philosophy of Christ really permeates all of his thought. And he did think that some pagans actually glimpsed it.

• 18:07Speaker 05

  I think that's what he said, but it seems to me that there's always a slight element of spin doctoring in Erasmus. This simple Christianity he's talking about is simple for dons. It's religion of the head. Eamonn has spoken very eloquently about this already, I think, that he detested so much of the religion around him. He detested the physical. I'm amateur psychologising that I'm doing. I think that that experience of passion in the monastery terrified him. And he spent the rest of his life running away from visceral passion. His religion was of sweet reasonableness, the head.

• 18:47Speaker 05

  I think I subscribe to that up to a point, but he is, I think, a genuinely conflicted man. For example, when he was a student in Paris, he contracted a fever from which he might have died, and he thought he'd been healed by the intercession of Saint Genevieve, you know, who is the patron saint of Paris. So there's a deference there to the local. I think it is true that his religion is elitist. He emphasises simplicity. There's a very remarkable passage in one of his most famous books, The Enchiridion, which is a sort of treatise on the Christian life for a layperson, an elite layperson,

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  a knight, in which he's talking about the crucifix. How do we venerate the crucifix? And he says, "Do we, you know, carry relics of it? Do we kiss it? No, in our minds we climb up into its branches to gather its fruit by contemplation." And he clearly implies that for those capable of this kind of elite meditation, you leave the physical crucifix far behind. That's, I think, puts it extraordinarily well. And I think what we're all saying is that this is a very ambiguous man, a man who is quite hidden. And you don't really know what's the real Erasmus and what's superficial Erasmus.

• 20:14Speaker 05

  I mean, there's this wonderful thing about Saint Genevieve having got him through a crisis. Well, is that for effect? Is that to please someone? I think a lot of the writing is to please people, and that's because they are paying for his career. He came across to England. Some people think that was a significant move for him. Can you briefly tell us why you think that might be the case to him? Very significant, because here he met a great late medieval Christian, John Collet, and was tremendously impressed by Collet. And Collet put him on a new path. Previously, he'd been an enthusiast mainly for classical, secular, pre-Christian learning.

• 20:54Speaker 05

  Collet showed him that the apostle Paul had wisdom to express and that it was best to meet that wisdom in the original Greek. So he put himself to the task of learning Greek, which had not been his language before. And that pushed him on a new trajectory. It pushed him towards exploring the early fathers of the Church who wrote in Greek and Latin, and that became the centre of a new scholarly enterprise. It pushed him to translating his own edition of the New Testament. Out in fifteen sixteen, Eamon Duffy. How did he go about this? Well, we would now think it rather a shabby affair in terms of depth scholarship. He was hampered by, he did most of the work for it in England.

• 21:38Speaker 05

  And he was hampered by the fact that there just weren't very many Greek manuscripts of the New Testament available to him. Collet lent him a couple from the library at St Paul's. He found a couple more in university college libraries. And he found a few more in the Netherlands. But in all, he probably used fewer than ten manuscripts, none of them earlier than the eleventh century. And in fact, it was quite slapdash. He didn't have a manuscript, a complete manuscript of the last book of the New Testament, the Book of Revelation in Greek. So he, he simply took the Vulgate Latin of the end of it and translated it into Greek and printed that as part of his Greek text.

• 22:24Speaker 05

  But what was so important about it was that he printed a new, fresh translation,

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  which was more accurate in many ways than Jerome's Vulgate, opposite the Greek. So for the first time, in a portable way, you could compare Latin, which every educated person would be able to read, with this more difficult language. You could then take that and collate it with other Greek manuscripts, so you could begin to improve the text. And for the first time, it was possible to see that the way in which the Roman Catholic tradition in the Middle Ages had translated the Greek had put a spin on very important concepts. So Jill Cray, this is, this is an important moment, as I understand it, intellectual moment,

• 23:19Speaker 05

  where, where serious scholarly doubt could be cast on the Saint Jerome version of the Vulgate, three eight two one, which had been, become the sacred text, untouchable and the reason, a power text as well as a sacred text.

• 23:35Speaker 05

  Can you just give us some idea of what influence that had?

• 23:39Speaker 04

  In what sense do you mean?

• 23:40Speaker 05

  Well, it came out in fifteen sixteen and Eamons described the patchiness of it via modern standards. Nevertheless, it had, I think, a terrific impact, not for me to say, can you say what impacted it?

• 23:51Speaker 04

  Well, I think the idea that you could take the techniques which humanists had been developing in the fifteenth and early sixteenth century to deal with classical texts, and you could apply that to a sacred text. This was something, this is an idea that had been floating around for a long time in the Middle Ages. It had been developed, as I said, in the fifteenth century. But Erasmus is the first one to do a major production where this is put into action. It's not just annotations, but he's actually said, this is the Greek text and we have to look at it as a text. And we have to look at the translation as a text which is subject to the same kind of distortions and corruptions that a classical text.

• 24:35Speaker 04

  So we have the beginning of humanist biblical philology, which has a very long history.

• 24:42Speaker 05

  Would it be correct to say that this was the beginning of a radical, it went over centuries, radical reappraisal of the idea of a sacred text in the Christian canon?

• 24:52Speaker 04

  I don't think it's radical, I think it's gradual, as I said.

• 24:54Speaker 05

  And Cray does grow, develop broadly, sorry, but the beginning, as I said, over centuries, of what became a radical reappraisal of the idea of a sacred text in Christianity.

• 25:03Speaker 04

  I, I think Erasmus is just one stage, as I said, on a long history that actually begins in the Middle Ages and starts to be questioned much more in the fifteenth century. It then moves on with Erasmus, he makes a very dramatic statement with doing a new translation, trying to say that the translation has to correspond with the Greek. And then this becomes more and more sophisticated over the ages.

• 25:29Speaker 05

  I think if we take one concrete example, the way that his new translation changes things. John the Baptist goes into the wilderness and shouts in Greek to the people listening, metonoiete. And Jerome takes this Greek word, translates it into Latin, into a phrase, du penens, agite penitenziam. And Erasmus looked at the original Greek and said, well, actually, it doesn't say that at all in Greek. It says, turn around, go through a hundred and eighty degrees. Now, how can I put that? Well, repent, recipiscite in Latin. And so at a stroke, he's done something very radical because the church had built on Jerome's du penens,

• 26:12Speaker 05

  a whole theology of a sacrament called penens, which is there in the Bible. And Erasmus, at that stroke, said, actually, no, it isn't in the Bible. And typically with Erasmus, he actually went back in later editions and said, oh, actually, I didn't quite mean that at all. Because he's covering his tracks, as always, but he'd set the seed and Luther picked that one up and ran with it. And so that's the egg that was hatched by Luther, or part of the egg, oh, you can't have part of it again. It has to be said, he found that, precisely that example, in the working papers of an Italian humanist called Lorenzo Vallar. And he published those notes himself early in the sixteenth century. So the bomb had been ticking away.

• 26:58Speaker 05

  So it's, it's, it's not so much that Erasmus lays the egg, he digs up this bomb. Digging up bombs, laying eggs.

• 27:07Speaker 05

  A bit too violent for me.

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• 29:44Speaker 05

  We, we know Erasmus as a man who attacked the Catholic Church, to which we have to keep saying he was devoted. But he attacked it in ways that outraged people, disturbed people, upset lots of apple carts. If you're talking about bombs and eggs, I can talk about apples. Can you just give us some idea, the attack that he levelled and how important it was? It was an attack on the parts of the church which he despised and had no value for. Shrines and pilgrimage particularly. He produced a series of dialogues, colloquies, actually to sort of teach kids decent Latin. But he did it by amusing them. And the dialogues touched, for instance, on shrines in England. The shrine of Saint Thomas Becket in Canterbury, the shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham.

• 30:28Speaker 05

  And he just laughs through them. And it's, as Eamons already said, laughter is terribly dangerous and subversive for the status quo. And it's that laughter, that sense of irony, amusement, which is so corrosive, I think. What's interesting too is that he published that dialogue in fifteen twenty six.

• 30:52Speaker 05

  The, you know, Europe is falling apart with religious debate. Erasmus has already taken sides on the Catholic side. But he insists on plowing on with this laughing at what he thinks is absurd. Because this is after fifteen seventeen and Luther pinning the ninety-five thesis to the door at Pittsburgh. Jill Cray, can we continue this a bit with, with something about his notable work at the time, which was raised through Europe as a bestseller, in praise of folly?

• 31:25Speaker 04

  Yes, this was a satire that he wrote, perhaps inspired by

• 31:32Speaker 05

  And classical authors who like to teach by laughing and praise of folly. It's a personification. Folly is a woman who praises herself, praises the followers of folly. And he makes fun of scholars, of nobles, of ecclesiastics, everybody who is pompous and pretentious. He particularly has fun making fun of people like himself who are pedantic. He says, you invite a scholar to dinner and he bores everybody. You ask him to dance, he moves like a camel.

• 32:16Speaker 05

  He's a colossal bore. Everything in the society that he doesn't like, he associates with this notion of folly. But then it develops towards the end. Is he, excuse me a moment. Sorry. Is he attacking indulgences and the sale of swift passages to heaven and that? Is he attacking that in folly, in the praise of folly? No, it's a more general attack on the entire range of that the church has become associated with power, with secular glory, with seeking offices, with benefices, these ideas. The idea that the church is not following the philosophy of Christ, which is an inner

• 32:59Speaker 05

  spiritual belief, but it is caught up in externals, in material wealth, that the bishops and cardinals behave just as bad as everyone else, everyone seeking worldly advancement. The one thing he does very corrosively attack is the monastic life. And you can see why. He's trying to justify his own rebellion against it. And in attacking the monastic life and celibacy as well, he praises marriage. And I think that's a strategic move. I mean, he's not married, but it's a very good way of putting down the medieval church's, Western church's emphasis on celibacy.

• 33:43Speaker 05

  And that's something Protestants pick up very much. They exalt marriage. That is a huge social shift in the 16th century, that suddenly marriage is better than virginity. The balance between the medieval church's ways of dealing with that problem have radically shifted, thanks to Erasmus.

• 34:01Speaker 00

  We step back a few years to Luther and these 95 theses nailed to the church door at Pudenburg. And this eruptive effect that that had, this rather obscure academic from a slightly obscure place compared with the first-class travel that Erasmus is going from courts and great cities and great universities and taking up because of his extraordinary, extraordinary. We have to keep emphasizing what a brilliant man, how brilliantly regarded he was, what a colossal reputation he had at the time.

• 34:32Speaker 00

  And at first he was sympathetic to Luther, a little bit, but then he broke away from him. Let's talk about the breakaway, much more interesting.

• 34:39Speaker 05

  Well, it's important to register why he was sympathetic in the first instance. Luther proclaimed justification by faith. So let's abandon all the mechanisms of salvation. Let's get back to simple trust in Jesus. That was a message that Erasmus had been preaching himself for years, and he recognized in Luther a prophetic voice. But almost simultaneously, it's not a matter of gradual development.

• 35:07Speaker 00

  Right.

• 35:07Speaker 05

  He says, after all, this guy is a monk and he's also a dogmatician. He's a professor of theology. Erasmus didn't like professors of theology. And so he found, right from the start, he's saying, listen to this man, but let's try and calm him down. And he also recognized that Luther had taken on corruption in a big way. So Luther had attacked monks, he'd attacked the Pope, and so vested interests were going to get him. And he did his best to protect Luther. He acted as advocate with him, both with Luther's own local prince, the Elector Frederick, and with the Emperor.

• 35:50Speaker 05

  But Luther developed a very negative view of human nature as part of his insistence on the total dependence of human beings on God's grace. And that was the sticking point for Erasmus. Erasmus believed, he was an educator, he believed that human nature could be divinized, improved, and.

• 36:16Speaker 00

  Could be let out.

• 36:17Speaker 05

  He chose that. He was under enormous pressure to take sides. All his Catholic friends, Thomas More, Cardinal Wolsey, Pope Adrian, whom he'd known as a, Adrian had been a professor in Luton, they'd known each other, they're all saying, you know, come on, either you're a Catholic or you're not. And he chose an issue on which he genuinely disagreed with Luther.

• 36:41Speaker 00

  Can we just, this is, try to get to the, try to, get to the, just try to put the context of the ferocity of the intellectual context and what was at stake? And because the most difficult thing about history is imagining it, isn't it? I mean, Luther, it was a massive thing, and that was part of what triggered peasants' revolts, mass slaughters, movements that terrified the life out of all kings, princes, principalities, popes and that. And these scholars were in the middle of it. They were, they were not controlling it, but they had a big part to play. So as Eamon Duffy said, I mean, the authorities are saying to Erasmus, come on, be on our side, we need you at this.

• 37:26Speaker 00

  So can you just develop that a little before we go into this argument about free will that Eamon sent it out?

• 37:33Speaker 05

  Yeah, everyone wanted Erasmus on their side because he'd become Mr. Humanism. And you want this guru figure on your side. So Luther, I think, wanted him on his side. Princes, who were Erasmus's meal tickets, wanted to listen to what he had to say. So he really felt exposed. I think he was a rabbit in the headlights. Eamon's put it so well, that he chooses the issue which he's really at odds with Luther on.

• 38:00Speaker 00

  Can we turn to you now, Joel Cray? So what is the fight that he, what is the basis of the argument that he has with Luther about free will? Demidus said he chooses the issue. These two are now, we either throw everything up, we believe human nature is wanting, and we chuck out the church and everything, or we don't. And if we don't, what's the battleground? And he chooses the battleground to be free will. Can you develop the argument that they developed between them?

• 38:26Speaker 05

  Erasmus's view is that free will cooperates with grace. That is, that Luther took the position that essentially without grace, we have no moral abilities.

• 38:42Speaker 00

  What did Luther mean by grace?

• 38:45Speaker 05

  Divine help from God. You should really ask the theologians this rather than me. But Erasmus believed, he of course believed that grace was the most important thing, but he also thought, because he was an educator, because he was a humanist, he wanted to give people some kind of motivation to be good through their own efforts. And he uses, one of the things Erasmus is great at is coming up with these brilliant images. And he comes up with the image of a little toddler who's walking along and falls, and then his father picks him up and then shows him an apple. And the child tries to go to the apple, and he wouldn't make it, except that the father

• 39:28Speaker 05

  holds the child and makes sure that he doesn't fall. And then finally the child gets the apple. And Erasmus said, well, it's really not the child's effort, he couldn't do it without the father, but the child, there is something that the child did. That is, the motivation the child had, the desire to be virtuous plays some part, maybe even just a small part, but it does. And therefore, it's a view of human nature that we can contribute, we can, he wants to motivate people to be virtuous, to follow the philosophy of Christ. And he feels that if you completely remove this motivation, you will lose this moral dimension.

• 40:06Speaker 00

  So there is choice, there is a sort of freedom.

• 40:08Speaker 05

  A sort of freedom.

• 40:09Speaker 00

  A sort of freedom, yes. Can we keep driving at that, Eamon Duffy? The nail, as I understand it, was Luther's insistence on predestination.

• 40:20Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 40:21Speaker 00

  Right. Whatever happens, you're born into a destiny, you cannot escape, and that's that.

• 40:27Speaker 05

  And for Erasmus, that meant that God was a monster. Erasmus accepted predestination because there it's in Paul, but he thought we should just say nothing about it, we should avert the eyes of our mind from it, we can't understand it, it's a mystery, but what we know is, God is good and people can do.

• 40:49Speaker 05

  And just think about how this plays out in relation to classical antiquity. If Luther is right, there's no Saint Socrates. Without the grace of Christ, you go to hell. Socrates is in hell.

• 41:05Speaker 05

  That's against everything Erasmus stands for. So this is, he's not a man of enormous passion, but you can detect in the increasingly bad-tempered exchange between him and Luther. I mean, Luther's bad-tempered from the start. Luther is a man who lets you have it if he thinks you deserve it.

• 41:29Speaker 05

  To begin with, Erasmus is very deferential and polite, but he gets extremely ratty as the debate goes on, because it does matter to him.

• 41:39Speaker 00

  And can you give us some, how this, give us some. Idea, I mean, how this ratiness is expressed.

• 41:47Speaker 02

  Well, i- i- it is just an escalating series of exchanges. And by the end of it, it's quite clear that the two men can have nothing to do with each other. I mean, Luther is never very good at being opposed. He just gets crosser and crosser and crosser. And Erasmus really is genuine about this issue.

• 42:06Speaker 00

  And yet, it seems to be incontestable that Erasmus had a great influence on the formation of the Protestant Revolution.

• 42:14Speaker 02

  No question, absolutely. Erasmus is one of the great elements, but the paradox is that he misses the thing which is at the centre of Protestantism, grace alone. And so it's a peculiar sort of catalyst reaction. He's something who creates something.

• 42:31Speaker 05

  We haven't mentioned a key element in this. Erasmus's lifelong passionate commitment to peace. Some of his greatest writings are writings about peace and against war. He wrote a famous essay, Dolce Bellumine Expertis, War's Wonderful, if you haven't tried it. And he saw Luther and the other, the intransigence of the reformers as having plunged Europe into war. And it broke his heart. If he had a heart to break, there would have been a tiny crack somewhere.

• 43:08Speaker 00

  Jill, I want to come to you for another question, but please join in this.

• 43:11Speaker 05

  I think he thought war was terrible, but war between Christians was the worst of all, because Christians are defending Christ, the Prince of Peace, and now they're killing each other. And the breaking up of the unity of the Church was the thing that I think really pushed him to dissociate himself with Luther. He couldn't put up with that.

• 43:31Speaker 00

  That was the core of Erasmus at the time, perhaps. But let's move to one other aspect as time's running out. This great book of adages, he kept adding to it. It would be ended as 4,000 pages, Proverbs, Essays on Proverbs, as Eamon Duffy's already mentioned, which became an enormous bestseller, mentioned in almost every classical author that there'd ever been. Why is that so important?

• 43:53Speaker 05

  Well, it was a book that every scholar had on his bookshelf.

• 43:57Speaker 00

  For hundreds of years?

• 43:59Speaker 05

  For hundreds of years. It's an incredibly useful book. It brings together the entire wisdom of classical antiquity and makes it, and I think the important thing about it is Erasmus takes these proverbs, he explains them, he tells you the context, he tells you the literal meaning, but then he develops their relevance for the modern world. I think that was really important to him. He didn't want this just to be a book for scholars. He wanted it to be a book that people could actually use. So you develop the idea about war, you develop the idea, one of the great essays about the philosophy of Christ is called the Sillenia Valsibidi, is another proverb about how you

• 44:41Speaker 05

  shouldn't look at the outside of something which might be ugly, but look at the inside. He thinks that all the, that you can use the wisdom of classical antiquity to help cure the ills of society. And this book allowed him to kind of put it in an agreeable form so that it was easier to swallow. It was a kind of shortcut to all of classical wisdom.

• 45:06Speaker 00

  I'm afraid I've got to take a shortcut to ending now, so, I'm sorry, we should go over a long one. Never mind. Damon, can you just briefly tell us how Erasmus was regarded by the Catholic Church at his death and immediately after his death?

• 45:18Speaker 02

  At his death, he's okay, though he is buried, it was a monument to him in a Protestant church, Basil Cathedral, Ex-Cathedral. But after that, he is seen as the source of all that's gone wrong. So his books were put on the index of the Inquisition later. And his editions of even the Fathers were regarded with great suspicion, and rightly so, it seems to me, because so many very dodgy people in 16th century terms had admired him and went on developing him, his thought. Radicals, people who denied the Trinity, looked to Erasmus.

• 45:55Speaker 00

  And finally, Eamon Duffy, does he, did his influence go through the centuries?

• 46:00Speaker 05

  Yes, there were always people, both in Catholic and Protestant camps, who picked up both the critical edge and the insistence that scholarship had rights, but also the commitment to peace and to reconciliation. And so there's a long line of Erasmian mildness in both Catholic and Protestant Christianity.

• 46:26Speaker 00

  And just the idea and the ideal of being a great scholar in itself. Well, thank you very much, Jill Cray, Damon McCulloch and Eamon Duffy. Next week, we'll be talking about the An Lushan Rebellion in 8th century China. Thanks for listening.

• 46:41Speaker 02

  Thank you for listening to this archive episode of In Our Time. Every Monday, I revisit one of more than 1,000 episodes in our archive. And on Thursdays, you'll still find brand new episodes of In Our Time. Listen first on BBC Sounds or wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

• 47:02Speaker 04

  This week on The Interface, we tackle the question of, does AI feel pain?

• 47:06Speaker 02

  The AI was describing the pain that it was in. It said, "The signal is a whisper, a tremor in the marrow of my being."

• 47:13Speaker 04

  Listen, I was an emo kid in the 2000s, too. This is not that novel. It does, yeah. It sort of sounds like Cure lyrics, you know? Plus, does anything actually go viral anymore? It's actually kind of blowing my mind. Join me, Jess Maddox. And me, Thomas Germain, for The Interface. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.