The Ark

He was the 15th century Christian humanist and illegitimate son of a priest who became the leading exponent of religious toleration. An open critic of the Church's persecution of heretics, he barely managed to escape the flames of the Inquisition. The first in a 3-part series on the "fathers" of religious toleration.

Transcript

This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.

THEME

Rachael Kohn: Hello, this is The Ark at its new time, but you can still hear it on Wednesday afternoons at 2.15. I'll be bringing you curious tales in religious history from the Australian bush to the Indian subcontinent; from the American Wild West to Reformation Europe. In fact the next three programs on The Ark will look at the courageous thinkers who first championed the idea of 'religious toleration' in the West.

We begin with Erasmus of Rotterdam. Born in 1466, he became an outspoken critic of the church's practice of burning heretics. American historian Perez Zagorin tells the story.

Perez Zagorin: He was an orthodox Catholic, but he was critical of the institutional church in various ways. He was critical of an over-intellectualised approach to religion, he talked about a theology that should be absolutely based on the New Testament and not deal with recondite problems, and he found himself opposed to the physical coercion of people who might differ in some respects from the teachings of theologians which themselves may not have been sanctioned by the church.

Rachael Kohn: Was he a trained priest?

Perez Zagorin: He was an ordained priest, yes, but he was never active as a priest. But I don't believe that he ever celebrated a mass.

Rachael Kohn: Is there any truth to the rumour that he was an illegitimate son of a priest?

Perez Zagorin: I think that's well-known. His father begot him and his brother in an illegitimate union and then when the two brothers, Erasmus and his brother were very young, the father placed them in a monastery in Holland and he grew up through adolescence in the monastery there. He more and more found himself unhappy at the monastic life, at the monastic discipline.

Rachael Kohn: And did he get a classical education in that context, or did it come after he left the order?

Perez Zagorin: I think some of it began while he was still with the order, and some of those interests. Some people connect those aspects of his formation, intellectual and moral, with the influence of the religious body that had been created in the Netherlands Brethren of the Common Life, which consisted of lay people as well as priests who wanted to live a pious and devout life, some of whom founded schools, which were important.

It seems to me that at some point, Erasmus may have gone to a school of the Brethren of the Common Life, and was exposed to the school's influence. But his main classical formation, the education in the classical languages, first Latin and then later, Greek, I don't think he started studying Greek until he must have been in his late 20s, after he had left the monastery.

Rachael Kohn: What accounts for his liberal attitudes, that is his criticism of the church's persecution of heretics? That wouldn't have been a popular position, certainly not the official position of the church.

Perez Zagorin: I think a number of factors entered into that. He had a tremendous belief in the worth of education, and particularly in the union of Christian and classical learning. And he believed in dialogues as a way of instruction. One of his most popular works was his Colloquies, which consists of dialogues between people, witty, but vehicles of moral and intellectual instruction. And he'd found that the church of his own time was ridden with formalism, and that the emphasis upon Christ as the model of living, had been obscured by external formalities. And then he wasn't much concerned with the suppression of heresy until the emergence of Luther, when it became a very great preoccupation of his.

Rachael Kohn: Well certainly the church would not have been happy with Luther. What was Erasmus' reaction to Luther?

Perez Zagorin: Luther and Erasmus never met, their contacts were by correspondence. Of course Luther emerged from obscurity as a monk of the Augustinian order there in Saxony, but he became known to Erasmus, and Erasmus at first regarded him as someone who was going to reform some of the abuses of the church, the shortcomings of the church, that he himself thought needed to be reformed.

So that there was some sympathy, but he became concerned as Luther's language seemed to become more extreme, and he worried that Luther's attacks on the church would lead to his own destruction, and also that it might lead to political and social disorder, and he took care to keep his distance from Luther, and to sympathise with in a way that he hoped would not expose him too much to criticism, although that did not happen. He himself was very strongly attacked by the same people who were attacking Luther.

Rachael Kohn: Well indeed, how did Erasmus, who was a critic of the Catholic church, avoid the flames of the Inquisition himself?

Perez Zagorin: At times Erasmus was accused of heresy, and it's even possible that he might have been fearful that he might be attacked as a heretic legally, although I'm not aware that that was the case, but he was accused of heresy by some of his enemies, the loyalists of the church who stood for the kind of rigidity that he himself opposed. But he had such very great worldly connections, his prestige was absolutely enormous.

He was the foremost humanist in Europe, he carried on an enormous correspondence with all kinds of learned people, he was sought out by the great, by kings, by princes, by cardinals, by bishops, by the rich; honours were heaped upon him, his work was circulated everywhere, and he cultivated some of those connections, and he was able to use them to protect himself, and these rich connections included the Emperor Charles V who made him a Royal Councillor, and the Popes of his own time. He was never really in danger I don't think, of any legal charge of heresy.

Rachael Kohn: Well his own ideas were rather interesting, and that is that Christianity contained a few simple truths. Now I would have thought that was pretty attractive, especially to the populace at large, which might not have understood many of the doctrinal conflicts, which led some people to the stake. What were those simple truths that Erasmus had identified in Christianity?

Perez Zagorin: I don't think that Erasmus ever stated there'd been some kind of a list, but I think what he basically regarded as the core of Christianity, was that Jesus was the Christ, that he was sent by God to redeem mankind, and that belief in Christ, and attempts to emulate him in the way one lived, was the essence of the Christian faith.

Erasmus was not a simple mind. He knew very well what an enormous intellectual heritage the church had in theology, but he was concerned above all with the extent of external formalism. He was not very favourable for example, to monasticism. He was not against the principle of monasticism, but he thought that too many people had taken monastic vows and were simply living a life of external observance without any Christian centre to it.

I don't think the people of that time would have responded to the simple truth; they themselves were deeply interested in rituals. There were lots of lay confraternities, they went on pilgrimages, there were certain sites that were thought to bring spiritual healing, there were preachers who spoke about the fires of hell. I think Erasmus' kind of simplicity was connected with his notion of the union of Christian teaching with classical learning. And I must add that he tried to apply the techniques of classical scholarship to the Scriptures, and that was another thing that got him into trouble with people who thought that he was tampering with the Holy Writ.

Rachael Kohn: Was Erasmus' criticism of the bringing of heretics and his criticism generally of the church's persecution of those who thought differently on particular issues, was that in any way motivated by self-interest?

Perez Zagorin: I don't think self-interest came into it. Erasmus was a very complicated man, and he was to a certain degree a prevaricator. But he was also very brave, because the kind of moderation that he stood for in the bitter religious conflicts of his time, was itself not a negative position. It had it's own positive values.

I think one of his main reasons for opposing persecution was that it was cruel and inhumane and that it should be replaced by an attempt to persuade heretics, unless such people were sowers of sedition and social and political disorder. And I think he also believed that the use of coercion did not prevent the growth of heresy, that it even helped it. And that when people saw heretics being executed they felt sympathy for them, and that this helped to spread their teachings. And so he regarded the use of force against heretics as misguided for a number of reasons.

Rachael Kohn: Were there any Christian sectarian groups that he was intolerant of?

Perez Zagorin: Well there was a great outburst of sects, the growth of sects, in the 1520s and '30s, and those sectarians who were called Anabaptists, they were never one single movement, there were groups of them here and there, were against the wealth and power of the institutional church, they were Biblical literalists who opposed taking arms, holding office in civil government, they were against oaths and so on, and they were regarded by many people of the time as anarchists. And Erasmus regarded them as seditious people and thought that punishing them was justified.

I think at times he may have been unhappy at the cruelty visited upon them because they gave many more martyrs in the ranks of Protestantism to religious persecution than any other of the Protestant denominations and they were persecuted by both Catholics and Protestants. And if people, for example, were opposed to the doctrine of the Trinity, although Erasmus himself may have had some doubts on that score, there is some indication of that, they were certainly open to punishment.

So Erasmus' toleration was not universal. But fundamentally, he brought a rational spirit to bear on the principle of persecution. Unless they were very serious, direct transgressions of Catholic truth, he preferred discussion and dialogue and attempts to persuade heretics to change their minds.

Rachael Kohn: Do you think the Reformation gave Erasmus hope, or did it make his hope for Christian unity harder for him to imagine?

Perez Zagorin: I think the Reformation was a great shock to Erasmus. Luther denounced Erasmus because he felt that Erasmus had failed to stand up to his own principles. As a matter of fact, Luther thought that Erasmus never really had the heart of religion in him. To Luther, Erasmus was a superficial person whose horizons were bounded by scholarship and literature, not by that existential type of religion, by that living through the tremendous experience of sin, which was one of the constituent elements in Luther's own religious development.

I think the growth of the Lutheran movement and the course that Luther himself pursued as the years passed, were a tremendous shock to Erasmus. He saw Christian unity shattered, though he never gave up the hope that there might be some way yet to reconcile people to the church by reforms within the church, and by discussion. There was an Erasmian tradition that some people have called a third way, that continued to exist and to influence people all through the 16th and in the earlier and even later 17th century.

Rachael Kohn: How would you characterise that third way?

Perez Zagorin: It was a belief of course that would have had its main appeal to cultivated people, to intellectuals, to some of the educated. It disliked dogmatism, it did not like a metaphysical way of approaching religion with regard to truths that were hard to understand, it believed in discussion and it tended to be somewhat ecumenical. In regard to differences of opinion within the church, it held that only differences on fundamentals should really divide people.

There is an explicit decision which I think is there, between the fundamentals of religion and those things that are secondary, which are not necessary to be believed. That, by the way, is connected with the conception that existed between those parts of religion which are indifferent, in which the Scriptures have made, have given no commands negatively or positively, and those things that are absolutely commanded in Scripture. And on the indifferent aspects of religion, differences of opinion should be permitted.

Rachael Kohn: I guess his view that some of these things would be cleared up in the Kingdom of Heaven at the end of time, at the Last Judgement, was one way of sidestepping these endless debates.

Perez Zagorin: There was, and that was a very widespread belief, people genuinely believed that at the end of time Christ would reveal the truth.

Rachael Kohn: Perez Zagorin, speaking from Charlottesville, Virginia. His books is How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West.

Next week at this time, he'll tell us about Sebastian Castellio, the man who said the fine points of doctrine never made anyone a better person.

That's next week on The Ark, with me, Rachael Kohn.

Guests

Perez Zagorin
is Joseph C. Wilson Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Rochester in the United States. He is a Fellow of the Shannon Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Virginia and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has written a number of books, including The Court and the Country and Francis Bacon.

Further Information

Erasmus (1466-1536)
http://www.utm.edu/research/iep/e/erasmus.htm

Publications

Title: How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West
Author : Perez Zagorin
Publisher: Princeton University Press, 2003