I need to say something about Erasmus now. Erasmus of Rotterdam was the foremost Northern European Christian Humanist of the Reformation period. I’ve already linked him to the English Reformation – and he is a very important figure to account for in deciding whether Parker could have been motivated by secret Universalist sympathies in abrogating the 42nd Article. So here is a sketch of what I know about Erasmus.
Erasmus influence on the broad Northern Christian Humanist tradition – for whom his ‘’Praise of Folly’ was a much loved classic - on Anglican tradition, on the Reformed tradition of Martin Bucer, and latterly on the Anabaptist Spiritual Tradition (and through them on the Quakers), on the Socinians, and on the Protestant Armenian tradition is well attested. His influence on political thought in the concept of European Community is also acknowledged by many today (and celebrated currently by the EEC funded ‘Project Erasmus’).
Erasmus’ biting ‘Satires’ on the abuses of Late Medieval Catholicism – the sale of indulgences, the monastic retreat from the world into an easy life etc – were one of the key factors that motivated the Reformation; indeed they were perhaps as influential as Luther’s promulgation of his 39 Theses. Certainly it was a reading of the Satires that first inspired the young Thomas Cranmer to enlist in the cause of Reform.
At first Erasmus supported Luther, but Erasmus dreamed of peaceful Reform of the Church, and of an inclusive/comprehensive Church in which all Christians could agree upon essentials, but exercise charity in agreeing to differ about the details. Erasmus never fully specified what the essentials of doctrine were; but it seems that what mattered to him most was imitation of Christ in a life of gentle self giving.
As well as a man of letters and a scholar of the Greek and Roman classics, Erasmus was also a great biblical scholar. He produced the ‘Textus Receptus’ of the Greek version of the New Testament – based on only six manuscripts out of the hundred or more available to scholars today. His Greek text was not entirely complete and he had to fill in the missing bits with translations from the Latin Vulgate - but it was a start. He also wrote paraphrases of his edition of the Greek New Testament which were translated into English and were in common use by the early, pre-Elizabethan, Anglican Church (in which his ’Satires’ were also loved). Matthew Parker would have known both texts well.
(Note: in an earlier post I sated that ‘regarding the ambiguous meaning of ‘aionos’ in New Testament Greek, D.P. Walker states that Thomas Burnett (c.1635–1715), an Anglican Theologian connected with the Cambridge Platonists and ‘others’ – presumably other associates of the Cambridge Platonists - argued ‘with some success, that the word used for eternal in Matthew XXV and other crucial texts, need not mean more than age-long…”(‘Decline of Hell’, p.7). Burnett is writing more the a hundred years after the Convocation met to establish the39 Articles – but this does not mean that the issue was unknown earlier’. I have not been able to find evidence that Erasmus was aware of this distinction in his lexical labours on the Textus Receptus – but who knows? This is an issue that the scholars on this site may well be able to help with. Any takers?)
Erasmus actually stayed in England during the reign of Henry VIII, at a time before the English Reformation had gathered any momentum. He became firm friends with his fellow Catholic Christian Humanist Sir Thomas Moore who was then Lord Chancellor of England. He also advised Dean Colet of St Pauls on Colet’s lectures about St Paul’s Epistles in the original Greek tongue.
As the Continental Reformation gathered an all too violent momentum, Erasmus and Luther fell out irreconcilably. The key issue was Justification by Faith. Luther, working from the theology of St Augustine of Hippo – he had been an Augustinian monk - argued that the human will was powerless. Erasmus begged to differ. He respected Augustine but placed another of the Fathers above him in terms of esteem and soundness of doctrine; namely, Origen the Father of Christian Universalism. From Origen Erasmus argued for a synergistic understanding of salvation – that this entails collaboration between the Human and Divine wills, and therefore it is wrong to speak too simply about the powerlessness/bondage of the Human will. A bitter falling out ensued, with bitter invective and counter-invective exchanged.
Origen was much in vogue amongst the Christian Humanists. Erasmus claimed that Origen’s metaphysical speculations about the pre-existence of souls, the Final Restoration of All in Christ etc., were of little interest to him. Rather he admired Origen for other virtues–
• First, for his doctrine of the (limited) freedom of the human will
• Second, as the prototype for the Christian Humanist scholars – Origen was the first truly significant Christian scholar and compiled a massive compendium of the Old Testament in Hebrew and the New Testament in Greek using comparison of multiple divergent texts to establish the best reading.
• Third as the systematiser of the threefold method of interpreting scripture according to the literal level, the moral level and the allegorical level of meaning in any specific text. I may get round to doing a supplementary post on his topic before moving on from the Elizabethan age to the 39 Articles in the context of later Anglican history. Suffice to say at the moment that Erasmus followed Origen in his interpretive methods. Luther also paid attention to the allegoric meaning of scriptural passages sometimes, but Calvin poured scorn on this method preferring the clear sense of the literal level of scripture.
• Fourth as a model of good rhetorical style – and the teaching of good rhetorical style was a key feature of the Christian Humanist education programme.
Well this is what Erasmus claimed – but perhaps he was being less than open about his interest in Origen’s metaphysical speculations – at least regarding the Restoration of All Things in Christ. I note the following from D.P. Walker’s ‘The Decline of Hell’ (p. 75) –
‘’…Erasmus of course was far too prudent to make any pronouncements about the eternity of hell. Indeed when he was criticised for the following passage in his ‘Enchiridon’:
The flame in which that rich feaster in the Gospel is tortured, and the torments of hell, about which the poets have written much, are nothing but the perpetual anxiety of mind which accompanies habitual sin
He replied, not very convincingly, that he was writing only of remorse in this life,
Nor was there then any doubt in my mind about the fire of Gehenna
But the whole tone of his evangelical philosophy of Christ, and his great admiration for Origen, might easily lead disciples to reject eternal torment.
So what is going on here? We can only speculate within the bounds of the possible. Erasmus may well have been a hopeful Universalist emulating the caution of his master Origen on this matter. I refer agina to D.P. Walker(p.5 this time) –
**The peculiar dangers attached to any discussion of the eternity of hell were such that they produced a theory of double truth: there is a private, esoteric doctrine, which must be confined to a few intellectuals, because its effect on the mass of people will be morally disastrous; and a public, exoteric doctrine, which these same intellectuals must preach, although they do not believe it. The second kind of truth is not, of course, a truth at all, but a useful, pragmatically justifiable lie. This secrecy was already being advocated by Origen, who, when discussing hell in his ‘Contra Celsum’, forbore to go beyond the mere statement that it was a place of punishment, because:
To ascend beyond this is not expedient, for the sake of those who are with difficulty restrained, even by fear of eternal punishment, from plunging into any degree of wickedness, and into the flood of evils which result from sin**
We today may find Origen’s argument depressing in its expediency – but it was the only show in town for magisterial Christians of a Universalist temper in the West until moral reasoning from the psychology of fear started to be questioned in the Eighteenth Century. I think Erasmus may well have been playing at the same game of ‘double truth’.
Open confession of Universalist sympathies would also have been the end of the road for Erasmus who had no enthusiasm for unnecessary martyrdom. He saw his friend Thomas Moore’s death in a different noble cause as pure ‘waste’. Indeed there appears to have been a strong tradition of dissembling during the dangerous times of Reformation Europe – with people outwardly appearing to conform to ‘orthodox’ beliefs (as defined by the religious system of power in which they lived and moved) but inwardly holding different beliefs. Elizabeth avoided death under Mary by outwardly confessing Catholic beliefs. Thomas Moore dissembled in silence and prevarication until he could no longer hold his peace about his views on Henry VIIIs divorce from Catherine of Aragon. Therefore, I think this is another good reason, in supplement to ‘double truth’ to the disparity between Erasmus’s utterances about hell noted above.
(Incidentally, the tradition of religious dissembling went under the title of ‘Nicodemite dissembling’ first named by Calvin in his Excuse à messieurs les Nicodemites after Nicodemus who in John’s Gospel comes to see his Lord Jesus by night while remaining a pious member of the Jewish Sanhedrin by day).
Matthew Parker – and even perhaps Elizabeth - when viewed in this context could well have been Universalists holding to a standard of double truth out of expediency, and perhaps even Nicodemites if they feared that open Universalism could mean that their supporters would lose respect for them and unseat/kill them. We cannot prove any of this – but I have made the case as best as I can.
Finally, all of this dissembling and double truth telling in a dangerous time took its toll and could, I believe, have people living with split consciousness. For example, Thomas Moore, who in his fantasy ‘Utopia’ seems to recognise religious toleration as a good thing in an ideal world, in the real world, as Lord Chancellor of England, was a fierce persecutor of English Protestants (and pilloried for this as a villain ,with some cause, by John Foxe in his Book of Protestant Martyrs). Erasmus, the champion of toleration, in a few passages seems to advocate persecution of those who leave the comprehensive Church as sectarians.
John Jewell was another man with a split mind. I referred to him in an earlier post. He was Bishop of Salisbury during Elizabeth’s reign and an accomplished Humanist scholar. IN 1569 he wrote guardedly in support of his fellow Humanist scholar, the German Gerhard Jam Voss who in 1569was the first to cast doubt on the authorship of the Athanasian Creed – thus denting the authority of the Creed used in Elizabethan England to support the burning of heretics – as we shall see. However Jewel was also a strong supporter of the death penalty for heretics.
Christian Humanists were not always moderate people – but the general tendency of the movement, in the spirit of Erasmus, was towards moderation and tolerance.
All the best
Dick