Fatal Discord

by Michael Massing

  Yet in those pursuits he was making good progress. In some ways, the solitude was a blessing, for it allowed Erasmus to work undisturbed in his tower at Queen’s. In Cambridge, he found several important manuscripts for use in his revision of the New Testament. One, a codex in the Franciscan library, was of fairly recent vintage, having been copied around 1468 by a Greek scribe from Constantinople in the employ of the archbishop of York, but it was part of an important family of manuscripts that went back to the third century, and it provided Erasmus with a solid basis for assessing the accuracy of the Vulgate. (The manuscript is now known as the Leicestershire Codex, after its current home, the Leicestershire Record Office.)

  Cambridge was also rich in Jerome manuscripts, and Erasmus took the opportunity to resume his work on the learned Church Father. He was so excited at the prospect of editing Jerome’s letters, he wrote, that he felt “inspired by some god.” But the work was difficult and draining. The manuscripts had been “half eaten away and mutilated by worm and beetle” and were written in the heavy Gothic script favored by medieval copyists, forcing him to “go back to school” to decipher them. Almost every page was corrupted by scribal errors. “One man copies not what he reads but what he thinks he understands; another supposes everything he does not understand to be corrupted, and changes the text as he thinks best, following no guide but his imagination.” A third catches an error but while trying to emend it with a conjecture “introduces two mistakes in place of one, and while trying to cure a slight wound inflicts one that is incurable.” Sustaining Erasmus through all the tedium was his ongoing belief that Jerome’s letters offered a model of how literature and languages could serve as handmaidens to faith and piety.

  While working to restore the spirit of the early Church, Erasmus was also retrieving treasures from the storehouse of ancient learning. Two pagan writers in particular seemed rich in insight. One was Seneca the Younger. Erasmus had some reservations about Seneca’s style, finding it at times too vehement and prone to a tiresome loquacity, but in the letters and essays, he noted, Seneca “calls the mind away to heavenly things,” preaching the path of honor “with such fervor that it was quite clear he practiced all he preached.”

  On that last point, Erasmus was overlooking the great gulf between Seneca’s high-minded ideals and his often sordid conduct. Despite counseling modesty and self-sufficiency, he amassed a huge fortune, threw extravagant banquets, charged usurious interest rates, and condoned the murderous excesses of Nero, whom he served as an adviser and speechwriter. Even in his own day, Seneca was attacked as a hypocrite, an adulterer, a flatterer. Erasmus nonetheless felt that his appeals to brotherhood and his advice on how to maintain a sense of equanimity amid the clamor of daily life reinforced the teachings of the Gospels.

  Unfortunately, Seneca’s works had become badly garbled. Gaining access to two ancient manuscripts of them, Erasmus painstakingly sought to root out errors. He would later boast that he had slain more than four thousand of them (though, working as always in haste, he gave birth to many others).

  Erasmus also took up Plutarch. Of all the ancients, few had more influence on European thought than this Greek essayist and moralist of the first century C.E. His most famous work, Parallel Lives—biographical sketches of Greek and Roman generals and statesmen—was an early attempt to show how character shapes history. Erasmus, though, preferred his Moralia, genial (if overlong) musings on practical ethical and social problems. Seventy-eight of these treatises, dialogues, and lectures had survived, and as their titles show, Plutarch had many of the same concerns as Erasmus: “On Being a Busybody”; “On Praising Oneself Inoffensively”; “On Complaining”; “On Brotherly Love”; “On the Eating of Flesh”; “How to Profit by One’s Enemies.” Whereas Socrates “brought philosophy down from heaven to earth,” Erasmus observed, “Plutarch brought it into the privacy of the home and into the study and the bedroom of the individual.” Given how applicable his moral lessons were to ordinary life, “it is hard to understand why this author’s moral treatises are not constantly in people’s hands and not studied by the young.”

  While in Cambridge, Erasmus translated several of those treatises into Latin, including his favorite, “How to Distinguish a Flatterer from a Friend.” In it, Plutarch discusses how to identify not obvious sycophants and toadies but more cunning operators who seek to ingratiate themselves with the powerful and prominent by showering them with praise and working subtly to gain their trust. True friends, Plutarch asserts, are those who deal with us straightforwardly and speak plainly to us about our faults. Erasmus believed that Plutarch’s observations deserved to be widely circulated, especially among kings and princes, whose exalted status made it hard for them to distinguish true friends from false.

  Erasmus dedicated the translation to Henry VIII. As he explained, he was doing so to show Henry, “of all kings the most illustrious,” the continued “loyalty and devotion which I expressed to you long ago when you were a boy full of promise.” The irony of his praising Henry while sending him an essay about the perils of flatterers was surely not lost on Erasmus. His relations with Henry would always be complex. Throughout his life, he would seek to cultivate good ties to the king, who was in a position to provide not only financial support but also physical security in an age when independent thinking could prove fatal. But Henry’s actions would become increasingly distasteful to Erasmus, making it hard for him to produce the effusive displays the king demanded. Henry’s stinginess toward Erasmus no doubt reflected his own suspicion that, for all his flattery, the Dutch scholar was not a true friend.

  It was during Erasmus’s time in Cambridge, in fact, that his disillusionment with Henry began to set in, over a matter that would figure prominently in his reform program: war. Across Europe, armies were mobilizing and populations being roused into fits of nationalist fury. As usual, Italy was the great vortex, but even in England the mood was darkening, as was apparent in Erasmus’s letters. In October 1511, he wrote to Andrea Ammonio of his longing to hear “how things are in Italy and what the most invincible Julius is up to.” Ammonio informed him that the pope, having successfully reclaimed the Papal States with the help of the French, had recently turned against them and, together with Venice and Ferdinand of Aragon, had formed a Holy League with the goal of driving them from Italian soil. The Venetians had ambushed the French and destroyed more than five hundred of their horses. The Spanish king seemed on the verge of war with France, “and the English will not, it is guessed, stay idly looking on,” Ammonio observed.

  “What you tell me of Italian affairs is anything but happy news to me,” Erasmus replied, “not because I love the French king but because I hate war.” With every day bringing news of “the most trivial of raids” taking years to end, “what will be the prospect if such an extensive war breaks out?” In November, Ammonio wrote that the French were once again “in the ascendant” in Italy.

  In pressing his campaign against France, Julius hoped to enlist England, and as a sign of his esteem, he sent Henry a Golden Rose. Until this point, Henry, who was barely twenty years old, had shown little interest in state affairs. He liked to linger at his palace in Greenwich with its two-hundred-acre park, where he could hunt and hawk. His nights were given over to elaborate banquets, frilly balls, high-stakes card games, and barely concealed womanizing. Shuttling between his palaces at Greenwich, Eltham, Westminster, and the Tower, Henry glided along the Thames in a magnificent state barge; when visiting his country estates, he insisted on bringing along much of the royal court, at staggering expense.

  Such domestic pleasures, however, failed to satisfy him. As a youth, Henry had been dazzled by the tales of King Arthur and his court and stirred by the accounts of Henry V’s great victory at Agincourt in 1415; he now craved similar glory. Eager to establish England as a world power on a par with France and Spain, he exhorted his male subjects to practice archery rather than play at tennis or bowling. He drew close to Thomas Wolsey, a member of the privy
council on whom he was coming increasingly to rely. At Wolsey’s urging, Henry on November 13, 1511, joined the Holy League. Four days later, he signed a separate agreement with Ferdinand of Aragon—Catherine’s father—to come to the Church’s defense against France and to force the French to return Bologna to papal control. The prospect of going to war with France thrilled Henry, for the opportunity it would offer both to show off his knightly skills and to resume the Hundred Years’ War and thereby recover the lands lost by his predecessors. In November 1512, Henry summoned Parliament and announced that the royal army was preparing to invade France and that when the campaign began, he would lead it.

  War fever surged, and Erasmus was dismayed at the sudden change that came over the island. The price of everything soared, he had trouble posting his letters, and he “nearly perished” from a bout of the stone that he attributed to “some horrible flat stuff” he had to drink as a result of shrinking wine supplies. “I cannot tell you how grieved I am to see our fellow-countrymen gradually slipping into the present conflict,” he wrote to his friend Pieter Gillis. He was especially disturbed at the failure of his fellow clerics to speak out. “Ah, those tongueless theologians, those mute bishops, who look on such dire human disasters and say nothing.”

  There was an exception. From his pulpit at St. Paul’s, John Colet had continued to reproach his fellow clergymen for neglecting their pastoral duties. In early February 1512, in what is considered the most important pre-Reformation sermon in England, Colet chastised the English clergy for “four evils”—devilish pride, carnal concupiscence, worldly covetousness, and secular living. “What eagerness and hunger after honor and dignity are found in these days among ecclesiastical persons!” The Church needed a thoroughgoing reformation. Simony should be banned, curates should be required to reside at their churches, and the clergy in general should rededicate themselves to “humility, sobriety, charity, spiritual occupations.” Colet’s words bit so deeply that the bishop of London accused him of heresy.

  He would not back off, however. On March 27, 1513 (Good Friday), Colet was to preach before the king and his top retainers at Greenwich. It was a critical moment. A fleet of ships was being readied to carry the royal army to France and along with it twelve giant cannons, each bearing the likeness of one of the twelve apostles. Colet boldly denounced the zeal with which Christians were preparing to slaughter one another. Antagonists claimed to be fighting in the name of Christ when in fact they were marching under the banner of the Devil. It was Christ the peacemaker whom Christians should imitate, not Alexander the Great or Julius Caesar. Angered by Colet’s audacity, Henry summoned him to a private meeting to explain himself. Colet was somehow able to mollify the king, and at the end of their hour-long conversation, Henry drank a cup of wine with him and sent him off with an embrace.

  In June 1513, the 25,000-man English army departed from Dover aboard three hundred ships bound for Calais, which sat in a narrow sleeve of territory controlled by England. Henry himself soon followed, accompanied by Wolsey, heralds, trumpeters, and hundreds of other members of his household, plus two bishops and assorted nobles. After three weeks of planning and pageantry, a large force of infantry, cavalry, and artillery set off for the small French town of Thérouanne, some thirty miles away. On arriving, the soldiers immediately laid siege to it; they were soon joined by a small contingent led by Maximilian, the Holy Roman Emperor. On August 16, French cavalry arrived to relieve the besieged town, but, encountering English fire, they quickly turned and galloped off, thus giving the skirmish its name: the Battle of the Spurs. Within a week, Thérouanne fell, and Henry and Maximilian triumphantly entered the town; Maximilian ordered it razed (except for the church), and what was not leveled was burned by looters. The allied army then proceeded fifty miles east to Tournai, a scenic town on the Scheldt River; after battering its walls with the holy cannons, the English succeeded in starving the town into submission, and on September 24 Henry entered it in triumph. Unlike Thérouanne, the town was preserved as an English garrison, and Henry presided over three weeks of feasts and tournaments.

  While he was thus occupied, King James IV of Scotland, who was allied with France, took advantage of Henry’s absence to invade England from the north. It proved a disastrous decision. The English counterattacked, and on September 9, 1513, on the field of Flodden, some ten thousand Scots died, among them James and his young son Alexander—the same Alexander whom Erasmus had tutored in Italy. In late October, Henry arrived back in Dover to thunderous acclaim. Thus buoyed, he immediately began planning another expedition against France for the following summer.

  Erasmus had fond memories of Alexander, and his senseless death fed his grief and anger at this display of Christian bloodletting and the great hardship the fighting was inflicting on the English people. “We are shut in by the plague and beset by highway robberies, instead of wine we drink vinegar and worse than vinegar, and our coffers are emptying, but ‘hurrah for victory!’—that is what we sing, being the world-conquerors we are,” he wrote to Andrea Ammonio in December 1513.

  Two months later, Erasmus left Cambridge. Back in London, he poured his fury into a long, impassioned letter to his friend Antoon van Bergen, an abbot and a diplomat at the Burgundian court in the Netherlands. Aimed at a wide audience, it was Erasmus’s first major statement on war. “I can see vast disturbances in the making, and what their outcome will be is not clear; may God in his mercy vouchsafe to quiet the storm that now afflicts Christendom.” He wondered what it was “that drives the whole human race, not merely Christians, to such a pitch of frenzy that they will undergo such effort, expense, and danger for the sake of mutual destruction.” Whereas animals fight only for food or in defense of their young, human wars “are generally caused by ambition, anger, lust, or some such disease of the mind.” Christians are named after Christ, who preached and practiced only gentleness. How, then, could anything in the world “be so important as to impel us to war, a thing so deadly and so grim that even when it is waged with perfect justification, no man who is truly good approves it?”

  He went on: “But, you will say, the rights of princes must be upheld.” Yet many princes first make up their minds as to what they want, then find a specious pretext to justify their actions. With so many treaties signed and abrogated, no one lacks a reason to go to war. If a rival refuses to accept arbitration, a true Christian prince should reflect on how much it will cost to defend his rights; if the misery, slaughter, and bereavement likely to result are excessive, as is usually the case, he should refrain from pressing his claim.

  This was a radical statement. At a time when war was viewed as an ineradicable feature of European life, Erasmus was fiercely denouncing it. At a time when princes leading troops into battle were invariably hailed as protectors of the nation, Erasmus was calling them enemies of the people. And he did not hesitate to name the man he held most responsible for this “hurricane of wars”: Julius. (Julius had died in March 1513, making it safer for Erasmus to cite him.)

  At this time, Erasmus was preparing a new edition of the Adages. Pleased with the reception of the long essays in the Aldine edition, he decided to expand on several more entries in this one, hoping to use the printing press to arouse the public. One was Dulce bellum inexpertis—“War is sweet to those who have not experienced it.” In earlier editions, he had dispatched this saying in a few lines; now, building on his letter to Antoon van Bergen, he prepared an indictment of war that would prove a landmark in European political thought.

  His main target was the doctrine of just war, which was central to Christian thinking on the subject. The doctrine’s main architect was Augustine. War, he maintained, could be considered just if it met three criteria: if it was waged by a legitimate authority, if it was fought for a cause considered just, and if it was carried out with righteous intention. During the Middle Ages, the doctrine had been refined by Thomas Aquinas, who argued in the Summa Theologica that a war can be considered just if those attacked “des
erve it on account of some fault” and if the attacking party has “a rightful intention,” intending “the advancement of good” and “the avoidance of evil.” In practice, this standard was not hard to meet, and by the early sixteenth century the Church was declaring virtually every military action just. Religion and war had become so entwined that swords were engraved with scenes from the Passion and saints were entreated by generals as they prepared for battle.

  Erasmus scorned such thinking: “Two armies advance on each other and both carry the standard of the cross.” That heavenly banner “represents the ineffable union of all Christians,” but under it men “rush to mutual slaughter, and of this wicked deed we make Christ the witness and author.” In fact, Christ “forbade anyone to resist evil.” If one weighs the advantages and disadvantages and finds that an unjust peace is preferable by far to a just war, “why should you prefer a throw of the dice with Mars?” If the cost seems to outweigh the profit, “is it not better to give way a little on your rights than to trade such countless ills for so small an advantage?”

  Erasmus’s hatred of war ran so deep that he questioned its value even when it was waged against the Turks. At the time, Christian Europe lived in dread of the Ottomans and their huge army. After the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the Turks had seized control of much of eastern Europe and some of the territories held by Venice, and Vienna was widely thought to be next. Hardly anyone questioned the need to fight them—except Erasmus. The Muslims, he maintained, were best subdued not through the deployment of armies or the weapons of war but by showing “the sure marks of Christians: a blameless life, the desire to do good even to our enemies, an unshakable tolerance of all injuries, a scorn for money, a disregard for glory, a life held cheap.”