The Cave and the Light

by Arthur Herman

  The idea of basing one’s entire study on reading the Bible might strike us as rather narrow, but the fact was Erasmus had a strong case. It seems incredible today to realize that students in late medieval universities, which were dominated by the Church, learned almost nothing about religion. The traditional arts faculty ran everything, and it was no longer up to the standards of an Abelard or Aquinas. Most teachers were scarcely older than their teenage charges. They preferred to stick to rote memorization and to the traditional trivium of grammar, rhetoric, and logic, the last of which had come to mean memorizing the rules for conducting a formal dialectical disputation. No one ventured to discuss God or the soul or the Bible in class. With the Inquisition always watching, it was much too dangerous.20

  As for philosophy, that subject largely came down to memorizing passages from Aristotle’s Physics on the movement of the planets or parts of the soul. Much the same was true in medical schools (which is why even today a medical school graduate is referred to as a “physician”). Only the law schools presented some semblance of life and curiosity, which is why they would fuel the intellectual explosion in the last decades of the Reformation.‡

  Like the Church itself, by 1500 Europe’s universities had become victims of their own success. They had become degree factories, and quality control suffered as a result. Just as there were priests who didn’t know the Mass or drank or kept mistresses, so there were philosophy professors who invoked the name of Aristotle without having read a single one of his works, and theology professors who had never turned a page of the Summa or The City of God—or the letters of Saint Paul.21

  Now, thanks to Erasmus’s In Praise of Folly, a contempt for universities and their Aristotle-centered curriculum acquired intellectual chic. It has left its trace to this day, as when we talk about something being “trivial” (derived from trivium) or call someone a “dunce” (after the original “dunce,” John Duns Scotus). When we turn to the popular literature and drama of the time, the scholar or university man cuts a very poor figure. Rabelais has Gargantua’s university-trained tutor spend ten years teaching his charge to recite his grammar book backward. Shakespeare’s Doctor Holofernes in Love’s Labour’s Lost is the typical pedant, whose mind is clouded by trivial obscurities or verbal quibbles in Latin. And when Shakespeare has Hamlet say, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” the philosophy he is referring to is Aristotle.22

  Thanks to Erasmus, the new trend of the 1500s was away from universities and toward an entirely revolutionary idea: homeschooling. Printed books made it possible for a well-to-do merchant or country squire to teach his son (and sometimes his daughter) to be a classical scholar without leaving the house. Why bother going to Paris or Oxford to learn what the best minds had written, people began to realize, when your children could discover that for themselves on the shelves of your own library?

  Erasmus’s friends and disciples got into the act. Spain’s Lluís Vives, England’s Roger Ascham, and a host of others wrote bestselling treatises on how to immerse your children in “Christian learning” and the joys of ancient literature (which rarely included Aristotle). Erasmus even urged a friend to start his son on the classical languages at age two, so that the boy could greet his father when he came home with cries of, “Daddy! Daddy!” in Latin and Greek.23

  The appeal involved a certain social snobbery as well. Since many university students came from lower-class backgrounds (ironically, like Erasmus himself) and drank and whored and gambled with the locals in their college dorms, the appeal of homeschooling was obvious to Europe’s governing elites. Under the humanists’ guidance, they hired tutors to train their sons in Latin, Greek, and (for the truly progressive) Hebrew—all in order to enrich their young minds with the riches of both antiquity and the Holy Bible and to make them part of an intellectual as well as social elite.

  The humanist education that Erasmus and his friends invented wound up creating its own schools. One of the first was St. Paul’s in London, founded by John Colet. Indeed, the program of classics-based humanities would enjoy a long history, almost as long as that of the medieval university—although eventually it took over there as well. Up through Victorian times, the educated gentleman was the man who could “read Plato with his feet on the fender,” in Thomas Macaulay’s phrase: in other words, read him in the original Greek without needing a dictionary. Elite schools like St. Paul’s and Eton in England, or the Lycée Henri-IV in Paris, made generations of pupils grind their way through Virgil and Homer right down to World War I.

  This steadfast devotion to Latin and Greek as the basis of a liberal education instead of science or math, however, did not start as willful blindness or upper-class bias.24 It simply reflected the fact that in Erasmus’s time, both languages were essential for reading the printed books of the day and for understanding Scripture as the first step toward reforming an intellectually bankrupt Church.

  This had been Erasmus’s goal from the start. Just as Aristotle and scholasticism obscured the soul’s access to Christ’s truth, he argued, so did the cult of saints and relics. In the mind of the Erasmians, the corruption of Aristotle’s university was matched by the corruption of the Church and the deadwood of the arts faculty by the deadwood of the priesthood and monasteries. Both institutions were lost in the cave; both urgently needed new luminous guidance.

  Erasmus was confident that where popes and bishops had failed, friends like Colet and Thomas More (whose house resembled Plato’s Academy, Erasmus said, more than anyplace he ever visited) would use their learning to elucidate the Gospels’ message instead of clouding it over. The example of Saint Socrates, as Erasmus once called him, would gently lead everyone to see that the soul’s highest goal is wisdom and that the “philosophy of Christ” (philosophia Christi) is the highest form of wisdom there is.

  Given the acuity of Erasmus’s attacks on scholasticism and the Church in In Praise of Folly and elsewhere (at one point, he even has Pope Julius II being sent to hell), what is amazing is how little official disapproval he actually faced. In fact, far from treating him as a pariah, kings and popes competed to get him to come to stay at their courts. It wasn’t just a symptom of Erasmus’s celebrity. It was a sign that everyone knew something had to be done about reforming the Church.

  In the end, Erasmus turned them all down. At the same time, his friend More became Henry VIII’s lord chancellor, and another colleague, Guillaume Budé, became cultural adviser to France’s king Francis I and helped to create the Collège de France.25

  Oddly, it was in Spain that Erasmus’s influence reached its height, under the leadership of the most unlikely of all Erasmians: Cardinal Cisneros, the head of the Spanish Inquisition. Spain had been the land of the Reconquista, of the original cruzada or crusade against all heretics, including Muslims and Jews. Its hero was Diego el Rodrigo, El Cid, and its instrument the Inquisition. Yet Cisneros was not at all threatened by Erasmus’s call for a return to pure Scripture. In fact, it would inspire Cisneros to launch what would become the Manhattan Project of Christian humanism: a project so vast that it dwarfed the resources and achievements of Erasmus himself.

  This was a printed edition of the entire Bible, Old and New Testaments, with the original Hebrew plus Greek, Aramaic, and Latin versions (including Erasmus’s translation of the New Testament) set side by side, page by page, so that scholars everywhere could have a complete authoritative text of Scripture from Genesis to Apocalypse. Nothing like it had ever appeared before. It was the supreme achievement not only of Erasmian humanism, but of the new print culture. The Polyglot Bible seemed to promise a rebirth of understanding Christianity, just as the Renaissance had brought a rebirth of Plato and classical antiquity.

  “The world is coming to its senses,” Erasmus wrote, “as if awakening out of a deep sleep.”26 Work on the Polyglot’s Old Testament was completed in 1517. That same year, Martin Luther broke out with his own revolt against Aristotle, one that would put
the entire humanist program at risk.

  “Here I stand, I can do no other.”

  In 1521, Martin Luther faced official condemnation from Rome for his heretical views not only on papal indulgences, but on salvation through faith alone and his belief that the papacy was in direct league with the devil. He was undaunted. He publicly burned a copy of the canon law in front of his students, saying that church law “made the pope a god on earth.” Luther had also wanted to burn Aquinas’s Summa and Duns Scotus, but none of his colleagues would lend him their copies.27

  The battle was on. The key question was, who would back Luther in his onslaught against the status quo? Luther condemned the corruption of the Church; so had Erasmus. Luther attacked papal indulgences as a scandal and a blasphemy; so had Erasmus. Luther said the only way to get back to the truth of Christianity was through “pure Scripture”; so had Erasmus.

  Luther said that Aristotle and the scholastic theology had polluted the Christian faith; so had Erasmus. Would Erasmus now step forward and endorse Luther as one of his own? Would he acknowledge that they were fighting on the same side and lend the tremendous weight of his reputation to the Lutheran cause?

  Some hoped he might. “O Erasmus of Rotterdam,” the artist Albrecht Dürer, then working in Italy, wrote in his diary, “where will you be? Ride forth beside the Lord Christ, protect the truth, obtain the martyr’s crown.”28 However, Erasmus had no intention of becoming a martyr. In the end, he preferred to work within the boundaries of the Church, not outside them. Despite their mutual antipathy toward the Aristotle of the scholastics, Luther’s opposition ran far deeper. It hinged on an issue that had separated Boethius and Saint Augustine at the onset of the Middle Ages. It had at its heart the clash between Plato and Aristotle on free will.

  It all went back to Aristotle’s Ethics where he proposes that all moral action is about making the right choices, and choice is about intention: “Intention is the decisive factor in virtue and character”—a point Thomas Aquinas made a cornerstone of Catholic moral teaching. On the other side, Aristotle’s teacher Plato argued that doing good versus evil was a matter of knowledge versus ignorance: in other words, the man who is ignorant of the good can no more choose good than one who is ignorant of algebra can solve a quadratic equation.

  Saint Augustine extended that definition of ignorance to include ignorance of God. Truly knowing God, Augustine asserted, having that blind faith in Him that suffuses our lives and gains us salvation, is impossible for our corrupt human nature unless God acts to put it there. He, not us, determines our capacity for virtue, just as He determines our fate.

  A grim conclusion—one that had troubled Boethius. His doubts about this denial of free will had led him to reassert Aristotle’s point that the choices we make as rational beings are the causes of our right actions.§ It was an attractive, not to say morally compelling, argument. From Abelard to Aquinas and Duns Scotus, the Church had come out more and more on Boethius’s side. Avoiding sin, it insisted, requires an active act of will—like the drug addict who suddenly decides he won’t go back to the needle. Such an act has merit in the eyes of God; by choosing to avoid sin and learning to do good, we have taken the first step toward changing from sinner into a righteous person.29 This process not only makes us a good citizen, but lays the foundation of our salvation as a rational—perhaps even a calculated—process.

  The word calculation applies here for many reasons. By the 1400s, the Church was regularly speaking of sinners as “debtors of Christ.”30 It was prepared to argue that Man’s original sin was like a mortgage or credit card balance. Christ’s sacrifice on the cross paid off some, if not most, of that debt. By adhering to the rules of orthodoxy, by following the outward forms and norms of the Catholic Church from pilgrimages and penance and attending Mass to special devices like papal indulgences (a sort of debt forgiveness), we could continue to pay off the balance until the day we died. Whatever was left, it was assumed, would be paid off in those long years in purgatory.

  As a monk, Luther had once bought into the system. Now, sitting in his study in Wittenberg, surrounded by the texts that justified that approach to moral action, he saw it as systematic blasphemy. Instead, he swung back to Saint Augustine. Original sin is not a mortgage but a crushing, ineradicable stain that touches everything we do or say. Nothing less than God’s personal grace will lift it from us. Nothing less will restore the power of the soul to will the good and choose good over evil. “A man without grace can will nothing but evil,” he wrote—no matter how moral or upright he appears to others.31

  Today, Luther would not be at all surprised or distressed to see bestsellers like The God Delusion or The Atheist Manifesto—or see that their authors base their claims on reason. Nothing would be more natural. Man by his nature despises God. In our hearts, Luther says, we despise God’s commandments. “If it were possible, the will of every man would prefer a state of affairs where there was no law at all” and he was free to do whatever he wants.32 Human beings think they want freedom; what they really want is license.

  This is why, of all Aristotle’s writings, the one Luther despised most was the one Raphael and the Renaissance had most celebrated: Aristotle’s Ethics. Left to ourselves, we don’t choose good, only lesser degrees of evil, like the heroin addict who switches to methadone. And reason, that supreme false god of the humanists, operates only to preserve the illusion that we are free and whole when we are not.33

  Virtue for Luther is not a continuum. It was not possible, as the humanists fondly imagined, to progress from Aristotle’s virtues to opening our heart and accepting God’s grace. Instead, “To love God is to hate oneself.” In the end, “we ought to want not so much what our will wants to want but just what God wants.” This meant, among many other things, that Erasmus and Pico were wrong. There was not going to be a final reconciliation, with Socrates and Christ ending up sharing the same stage. There is no Big Push. There is only one decisive breakthrough, that of Christ. As Augustine explained in The City of God, His truth has set all the rest aside. The path of reason doesn’t lead us toward the light of God, but only deeper into the cave: in fact, right to the gates of hell.

  And in the larger picture, how could we ever compare our power with His power? If God foreordains all things, then nothing happens without His will, meaning there can be no free will in man or angel or in any creature. Receiving God’s grace is the only real freedom that’s left. Whatever happens, good, bad, or indifferent, “when He reveals His glory we shall all clearly see that He both was and is just!”

  It was at this point that Erasmus finally roused himself to respond. Without the acknowledgment of man’s free will, he replied to Luther, God’s justice and mercy, and teaching of Scripture, would be without meaning. What would be the purpose of all those admonishments and parables of Christ, if everything happened according to God’s predetermined necessity, “if good and evil were equally but tools of God, as the hatchet to the carpenter?” And what would happen if ordinary people, the multitude, came to this same conclusion—since the preservation of law and order depended on people believing that their choice of good over evil had some meaning?

  Luther hit back hard. Erasmus’s problem, Luther said, was that he refused to accept that the truth has consequences: “You do not think it matters what anyone believes anywhere, so long as the world is at peace.” Instead, Erasmus wanted to treat the truths of Scripture as if they were human truths open to interpretation and revision, like the texts of his beloved pagan philosophers. However, “the Holy Spirit is no skeptic, and the things He has written in our hearts are not doubts or opinions, but assertions truer and more certain than sense and life itself.”34

  Indeed, intellectual and moral certainty was the hallmark of Luther’s life and work. Certainty led him to scrap five of the seven sacraments, leaving only baptism and communion. It led him to throw out clerical celibacy and marry a former nun. It led him to turn against not only Aristotle and the scholastics, but that ot
her pillar of Christian theology, the Pseudo-Dionysius: “Whoever he may have been, he shows hardly any signs of solid learning … being more a Platonist than a Christian.”35

  Read Plato, Aristotle, and others of that tribe. They will, I admit, allure you, delight you.… But betake yourself from them to this sacred reading. Then, in spite of yourself, so deeply will it affect you, so penetrate your heart, fix itself in your very marrow, that, compared with its deep impression, such vigor as the orators or philosophers have will nearly vanish.

  The words are not Martin Luther, but John Calvin.36 In 1536—the same year Erasmus died—Calvin published the ultimate fusion of “pure Scripture” with the theology of Saint Augustine, his Institutes of the Christian Religion. Calvin’s single-mindedness in breaking with the Catholic Church exceeded even Luther’s. His message turned the proposition that original sin guaranteed that man had no say in his own salvation into a full-fledged theory of predestination.

  We are damned or saved from before our birth; man’s powerlessness to affect his destiny by his own actions is complete. And as a refuge for that tiny minority who would be spared the torments of hell, John Calvin turned the Swiss city of Geneva into a bastion of piety and virtue (no cards, no dancing, all day Sunday at prayer) that rivaled Plato’s Republic in its single-minded dedication to an ideal of spiritual perfection.

  We’ve learned to be suspicious of certainty like this. It’s the kind of dogmatic self-assurance that flies planes into buildings or herds dissidents and other “undesirables” into concentration camps. Luther says blood-chilling things about witches and Jews that remind us of another German leader four centuries later. These days we prefer Erasmus. Like that of the men and women of the Enlightenment who grew leery of Christian dogma after a century and a half of bloody religious wars, our distrust is born of hard experience.