While Erasmus was thus promoting Christian comity, his own work was causing ever more strife. In Rome, Stunica (Diego López Zúñiga) was continuing to agitate against him. The Spanish scholar had completed a manuscript, called Erasmi Roterodami Blasphemiae et Impietates, that offered quotations and excerpts from Erasmus’s works along with lengthy comments seeking to show how closely his positions paralleled those of Luther. Stunica was reading from it at dinner parties and making the rounds of bookshops to press “his slanderous views,” as a friend reported from Rome. According to another correspondent, Stunica was intent on exposing ten thousand errors in Erasmus’s New Testament and to that end had mobilized a force of learned Italians to “make a sortie and bear down headlong on your writings.” Stunica had boasted that he was going to keep at it until Erasmus felt compelled to travel to Rome and recant. If he refused, he would be made to “burn in a coat of pitch” (a reference to the tunica molesta, or shirt of pain, made of pitch and set on fire to torture criminals).
While Catholic critics like Stunica were denouncing Erasmus as a covert Lutheran, Luther’s followers were deriding him as a Roman apologist. One of them, while studying Erasmus’s works for impieties, found an egregious example in the ninth chapter of his paraphrase of Romans (written in 1517). There, Erasmus had remarked that some part of salvation “depends on our own will and effort, although this part is very minor when compared to the free kindness of God.” This attribution to man of even a tiny bit of control over his actions infuriated the Lutherans. “Luther’s party in their public utterance tear me to pieces as a Pelagian, because they think I give more weight than they do to free will,” Erasmus wrote in frustration to his friend Willibald Pirckheimer in Nuremberg in early 1522. Six years earlier, Luther had charged Erasmus with this offense in his initial letter to Spalatin. Now the discovery of a fleeting remark about free will in one of his paraphrases was stirring an angry round of accusations. “All Luther’s party hate me passionately and pile slanders on me,” Erasmus wrote to Jean de Carondelet, an official at the imperial court, but, he added, “I shall never prove false either to the faith of Christ or to the glory of the emperor.”
Even as Erasmus was affirming his loyalty to the ruling powers, however, he was preparing a new volume that would rank among his most irreverent—and popular—works. It came about almost by accident. More than twenty years earlier, while working as a tutor in Paris, Erasmus had scribbled down some formulae, or patterns of polite conversation, to teach his students colloquial Latin. He had lent them to a fellow tutor, who never returned them. Somehow, they had ended up at the house of Froben, and in 1518 the Basel publisher brought them out as an eighty-page octavo.
Remarkably, the publishing house had not bothered to ask Erasmus’s permission, and when the Dutchman saw the volume—and the many errors in it—he exploded. But then he learned how favorably the book had been received, with reprints quickly appearing in Paris and Antwerp. Erasmus at once produced a corrected version, which was published in Louvain in March 1519 under the title Formulas of Familiar Conversations, by Erasmus of Rotterdam, useful not only for polishing a boy’s speech but for building his character. It sold even more briskly, with at least thirty reprints appearing by 1522.
In Basel, Erasmus began preparing a greatly enlarged edition, with the conversational sketches converted into fully realized dialogues. The first full edition of the Colloquies (as he called them) was published by Froben in March 1522. Erasmus would continue working on them for most of his remaining years, producing some sixty in all. In the eighteen years from their initial appearance until Erasmus’s death, about a hundred editions would appear. The Colloquies would bring both lasting acclaim and bitter controversy. They would be censured by monks, denounced by inquisitors, condemned by universities (especially the University of Paris), and listed in the Index of Prohibited Books, where they would remain until the end of the nineteenth century. Luther would repeatedly attack the Colloquies, declaring in his Table Talk that in his will he would forbid his sons to read them. Yet Melanchthon’s 1527 manual for German schools prescribed them for intermediate students, and for the next three centuries they would remain a standard text in schools across Europe.
The Colloquies offered Erasmus an ideal vehicle for promoting his reform program. Under the cover of a lively textbook, he could smuggle his ideas into the minds of readers; since those ideas were expressed by characters, he could deny they were his own. Drawing on a lifetime of restless travels and diverse encounters, Erasmus offered a rich tableau of emblematic figures of early-sixteenth-century Europe—court preachers who claim in sermons that war is just, holy, and right; baseborn women who slather on the cosmetics of fine ladies; prostitutes who profit more from mendicants than from merchants; horse dealers expert at cheating their customers; knights who consider it a matter of principle to relieve travelers of their money; mercenaries ready for a trifling sum to cut a man’s throat; and priests who gossip about what they hear in confession—all described with Lucianic wit and driven by an underlying concern for moral and social improvement.
In “Inns,” for instance, Erasmus offers a contrast between the French and German variety that both instructs and entertains. In French inns, guests are warmly welcomed by comely women with delightful manners. The fare served is sumptuous, and in the rooms housekeepers cheerfully offer to wash one’s clothes. In German inns, there’s no one to greet guests, and eighty or ninety people are forced to use the same overheated public room. “One combs his hair, another wipes the sweat off, another cleans his rawhide boots or leggings, another belches garlic.” At dinner, the tablecloth seems to have been taken from a boat sail, and there’s a wait of an hour or more for the meal to begin. The cheese is full of worms and mold and the wine is sharp and pungent and served in such quantities that after a while there’s a deafening uproar, with the Germans singing, shouting, dancing, and stomping. In the rooms, the linen has not been washed for six months.
Erasmus’s account was no doubt exaggerated for effect, and there are contrary reports from the period. But the contrast he draws gives him an opportunity to make a broader point about the importance of cleanliness. “Nothing seems to me more dangerous than for so many persons to breathe the same warm air,” a character remarks. Quite apart “from the belching of garlic, the breaking of wind, the stinking breaths, many persons suffer from hidden diseases, and every disease is contagious.”
Elsewhere in the Colloquies, Erasmus proposes various preventive measures, such as changing the sheets in inns for each new guest and keeping people from drinking from the same cup—more evidence of his advanced views on matters of hygiene.
Many of the Colloquies deal with marriage, courtship, and women. Erasmus champions marriage over virginity but also acknowledges the many problems experienced by couples, not least in bed. Though both parties usually bear responsibility, he writes, it is up to the wives to make their husbands happy—a highly paternalistic position. In “A Marriage in Name Only, or The Unequal Match,” however, Erasmus is critical of arranged marriages, in this case of a charming young woman forced by her parents to marry a syphilitic older man. And, in “The Abbot and the Learned Lady,” he celebrates female erudition. The learned lady is Magdalia, whose love of books in Greek and Latin draws the disdain of the abbot, Atronius. He says that he is bored by serious study and discourages the monks in his charge from reading lest they become less tractable and talk back “by quoting from decrees and decretals, from Peter and Paul.” The proper equipment for women, he says, is “distaff and spindle”; it is not necessary for them to know Latin, since it does little to protect their chastity. “You think it unsuitable for me to know Latin in order to converse daily with authors so numerous, so eloquent, so learned, so wise?” Magdalia asks. “Books,” Atronius sniffs, “ruin women’s wits—which are none too plentiful anyway.” “If you’re not careful,” she warns, women will “preside in the theological schools, preach in the churches, and wear your miters.”
Of all the colloquies, the most Erasmian in spirit is “The Godly Feast.” A rebuke to all the raucous dinner parties Erasmus had to attend, it is set in a placid garden featuring an orchard, a fountain, three loggias, and an aviary with birds so tame that at dinnertime they fly through the window and eat from the hands of the guests. Eusebius, the host, says that he emphatically disagrees “with those who think a dinner party isn’t enjoyable unless it overflows with silly bawdy stories and rings with dirty songs. True gaiety comes from a clean, sincere conscience.” Over servings of lettuce, eggs, partridges, a shoulder of mutton, and a capon from the host’s own coop, the guests discuss passages from the Bible. The conversation is unfailingly courteous and high-minded. Along with the Gospels and Epistles, the guests cite Cicero and Plutarch. (It is in this colloquy that Erasmus offers his famous appeal, “St Socrates, pray for us!”) The diners contrast the empty nature of Judaic rites and ceremonies with true spiritual depth. They also note the importance of remembering the poor amid such plenty. Eusebius laments the existence of so many richly adorned monasteries and churches at a time when “so many of Christ’s living temples are in danger of starvation, shiver in their nakedness, and are tormented by want of the necessities of life.” As the meal winds down, he urges his guests to relax while he travels to a nearby village to comfort a friend who is critically ill.
Hovering over this serene sketch is the memory of John Colet. Though the fare served at this feast is far ampler than that offered by the English dean, the earnest discussion of Scripture over supper seems to have been inspired by the many meals Erasmus attended at St. Paul’s in London. With its air of uplift and concord, “The Godly Feast” lacks the bite of many other colloquies, but it captures Erasmus’s love of refined conversation and his belief that Scripture is open to varying interpretations that can be discussed with civility and respect.
The art of dining is a recurrent theme in the Colloquies. This reflected more than Erasmus’s epicureanism. In the great religious upheaval then under way, food was becoming a major point of contention. Paul and other early Christians had rejected the elaborate dietary regulations of the Jews, yet the rules of the medieval Church had become no less intricate. Palm Sunday was celebrated with bacchanalian revels, but, as a butcher in the colloquy “A Fish Diet” remarks, anyone who so much as tastes an egg is thrown into jail. Clothing and many other areas of Christian life had become subject to similar regulation, provoking bitter quarrels and hateful slanders. If such strife could be avoided, the butcher adds, “we could live in greater peace, not bothering about ceremonies but straining only after those things that Christ taught.”
Many reform-minded Christians agreed—especially in Switzerland. Whereas in Germany celibacy and the Mass had risen to the fore, in Switzerland food and fasting were emerging as the main catalysts. And a rebellion was gathering. Beginning in nearby Zurich, it would quickly spread to other Swiss cities, including Basel, where it would engulf the life of Erasmus. Initially developing parallel to the Lutheran Reformation, the Swiss Reformation (as it came to be known) would become its bitter rival. Over time, these two reformations would divide into separate branches of Protestantism: the Lutheran and the Calvinist (or Reformed). And the starting point for it all was a sausage.
On Ash Wednesday 1522, a dozen or so men, including bakers, vinedressers, and printers, gathered in the parlor of the home of Christoph Froschauer, a printer in Zurich, for a simple evening meal. The maid prepared two pork sausages as well as some eggs. The sausages and eggs were cut into pieces, then passed around and eaten—a clear violation of the Lenten fast. It would no doubt have been excused had it been explained as an accident or admitted to be sinful and absolution sought. The printers were rushing to complete a volume of Paul’s epistles in time for the spring fair in Frankfurt, and Froschauer maintained that they needed the sustenance to keep up their stamina—the type of loophole the authorities routinely recognized.
But one of those present, Huldrych Zwingli, had no interest in loopholes. A thirty-eight-year-old canon at the Grossmünster, Zurich’s largest and wealthiest church, Zwingli did not himself partake, but he believed that those who did were fully entitled to as pious Christians. A powerful preacher, Zwingli had excited his congregation with sharp attacks on indulgences, the veneration of saints, and the worship of Mary—none of which, he said, was sanctioned by the Bible. Christians should heed the divine words of Scripture over the fallible laws of man—even those issued by a pope or council.
The sausage eaten at Froschauer’s house was intended to test those rules. In its time of day, number of participants, and manner of distribution, the meal was consciously meant to evoke the Last Supper, and two weeks later Zwingli defended it in a sermon. While each person could choose on his own to fast and abstain from particular foods, he declared, the Church was not justified in proclaiming this a universal and unchanging law, since there was nothing to that effect in the New Testament. “How dare a man add to the testament, to the covenant of God, as though he would better it?”
Thus encouraged, other Zurich citizens also began testing the fasting regulations. From these modest actions would spring the Swiss Reformation. Zwingli would be its father. He was one of the most learned—and least likable—men of the sixteenth century. A statue of him standing outside the Wasserkirche (Water church) in Zurich shows him holding a Bible in one hand and a sword in the other—an apt image of his militant attachment to the Word of God. At an early age, he would lose his life in religious warfare. What he left unfinished in Zurich, John Calvin would complete in Geneva.
That Zwingli became such a militant reformer is all the more striking in that he began as an Erasmian. As a young man, he was so taken with the Dutch humanist that in the spring of 1515 or 1516 he traveled to Basel to meet him. At the time, Zwingli was serving as a parish priest in Glarus, a rural market town eighty miles from Basel. There, he had turned the second story of his parish house into a library. It eventually contained some three hundred volumes—an extraordinarily large collection for a parish priest. Intent on reading the Greek Fathers, he dedicated himself to learning their language. And he devoured Erasmus, including the Enchiridion, the Adages, De Copia, the Praise of Folly, the Jerome, and his writings on war, which made a special impression. Twice during his years in Glarus, Zwingli served as a chaplain to Swiss mercenaries fighting in northern Italy, and he was present in September 1515 when, at the battle of Marignano, more than ten thousand Swiss were slaughtered. In addition to witnessing the bloodshed, Zwingli had to deliver the news to the families of the fallen. From this experience he emerged an Erasmian-style pacifist steadfastly opposed to the mercenary trade.
In his meeting with Erasmus, Zwingli told him that he read his books every night before going to sleep. Erasmus was gracious in return, and back in Glarus Zwingli wrote him an effusive thank-you note, saying that he had made a name for himself simply by boasting that he had seen Erasmus, “the man who has done so much for liberal studies and the mysteries of Holy Scripture.” Writing back, Erasmus warmly but patronizingly advised Zwingli to practice his pen from time to time: “This is the best way to learn to express yourself. I perceive Minerva has given you the gift, if you would but exercise it.�
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When Erasmus’s revised New Testament appeared, Zwingli was among the first to obtain a copy, and it changed his entire outlook. Reading the Gospels and Epistles in their original language, he felt as if he were gaining direct access to God’s words, untainted by errors in translation or transcription. Moved by Paul’s missionary work, he copied out his letters in Greek. The simple piety of the first Christians seemed greatly at odds with the ornate ritualism of the Swiss clergy. Reading Erasmus’s explanation of the distinction between poenitentia and metanoia, he could see that Christ was calling on the faithful to repent rather than perform rote acts of penance. More generally, Zwingli absorbed Erasmus’s philosophy of Christ, with its embrace of interior spirituality and its summons to moral improvement.
In the spring of 1516, Zwingli relocated to Einsiedeln, the site of a famous shrine to the Black Virgin that attracted pilgrims from many miles around. It, too, was a backwater, however, and two years later, when a position for a people’s priest at the Grossmünster in Zurich opened up, he made his interest known. Zwingli’s candidacy was damaged by rumors that he had seduced the virgin daughter of a prominent Einsiedeln citizen. In a letter of self-defense, Zwingli admitted having had relations with the woman, but seeking to shift the blame, he said that she was no virgin and that in any case it was she who had seduced him. That satisfied the search committee, and in December 1518 he got the post. A flourishing trade center on the banks of the Limmat River, Zurich was Switzerland’s most powerful city. Like most of the cantons and communes of the Swiss Confederation, it had a long history of self-rule and enjoyed considerable independence from both emperor and pope. In this regard Switzerland contrasted sharply with the princely territories of the Holy Roman Empire, with their absolutist rulers. The reform movement spawned by Zwingli would reflect this, incorporating a tradition of civic participation and communal purpose. It would also feature an Erasmian impulse toward moral improvement. Overall, the Swiss Reformation would have a far more activist spirit than its Lutheran counterpart, apparent in its relentless push to reorganize society along scriptural lines.
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