The loathing between Catholics and Protestants (and between nations) was so great that when the antagonists finally agreed to negotiate, it took five years to bring the carnage to an end. The Peace of Westphalia, signed on October 24, 1648, ended more than a century of religion-stoked violence, dating back to the first executions of Luther’s followers in the Netherlands in the early 1520s. The fanaticism and savagery set off by the Reformation had led to the dispossession, maiming, execution, and slaughter of millions of people. German commerce and manufacturing lay in ruins, and intellectual life stagnated as many scholars fled and those who remained withdrew into an arid conservatism. While Catholics and Protestants continued to detest one another, they grudgingly agreed not to kill one another, and a tenuous pluralism took hold.
The main victors of the Thirty Years’ War were the states. The Peace of Westphalia marked the emergence of the modern nation-state. Newly strengthened sovereigns exercised strict control over the churches in their lands. While individuals were granted freedom of worship and dissidents guaranteed civil rights, ecclesiastical affairs would be even more tightly regulated than they had been before the Reformation. The confessional divisions in Europe fossilized into patterns that would shape life on the Continent for centuries to come. With churches closely associated with princes, clergy with the state, and faith with orthodoxy, Erasmian humanism seemed all but dead.
Yet the calamity of the Thirty Years’ War opened up a new space in Europe. With Christianity in retreat and religion as a whole discredited, the search was on for a new design for living, and interest in Erasmus revived—especially in his homeland. At the start of the seventeenth century, the Dutch Republic was entering its Golden Age—a century-long period of growing trade, spreading literacy, expanding cities, and soaring prosperity. In addition to being the wealthiest corner of Europe, Holland was the most open, welcoming Huguenots from France, Jews from Portugal, Socinians (anti-Trinitarians) from Poland, Quakers from England, and Mennonites from Germany. The country thus became a hothouse of innovation, protest, and dissent. Among Dutch burghers, the memory of Erasmus and his creed of modest piety was venerated, and in 1622 a large bronze statue of him was installed on one of Rotterdam’s main squares (the same one that is on display in the city today). The University of Leiden, founded in 1575, quickly established itself as one of Europe’s top learning centers, and its faculty included many admirers of Erasmus.
Yet the same Erasmian moderation and flexibility that so appealed to the urban elite riled the ruling Calvinists. As the leaders of the revolt against Spain, they enjoyed great prestige. The Dutch Reformed Church was the only religious body allowed to perform its rites in public, and acceptance of its doctrines was a condition for holding public office. As the country flourished and diversified, the resistance to Calvinist domination and dogmatism grew.
Among the dissenters was Jacobus Arminius. Studying in Geneva with Theodore Beza, Calvin’s famous successor, Arminius absorbed Calvinism in its most concentrated form, and after being ordained a minister, he took a position in 1588 in Amsterdam. While preaching on the Epistle to the Romans, however, he began to develop doubts about the doctrine of predestination. Its insistence that God had decided the fate of all men from the beginning of time seemed to Arminius a truly horrible decree, for it held that God had created people knowing that they would sin and that he would duly condemn them. He instead supported the idea of conditional election, by which the conferring of grace is conditioned on whether one accepts or rejects Christ—a decision God can foresee. Arminius was thus restoring to man a modicum of free will. Like Erasmus, he was accused of being a Pelagian, and in his defense he cited his Dutch forebear, along with the Church Fathers. In 1603, Arminius accepted a position as a professor of theology at Leiden, but the attacks on him increased. His attempts to carve out a place for human initiative in Calvinist theology nonetheless proved popular with educated Dutchmen, and there took root an Arminian movement supporting some human autonomy. It represented a crack in the rampart of Calvinist orthodoxy—and offered an early sign of Erasmus’s renewed influence.
The most important heir to the Erasmian tradition, however, would, remarkably, be a Jew. Baruch (later Benedict) Spinoza was the product of a well-to-do Portuguese Jewish family that had come to the Netherlands at the start of the seventeenth century to escape the Iberian Inquisition. Raised in the heterodox environment of Amsterdam, Spinoza had a uniquely rich education. In addition to learning Hebrew and reading the Old Testament, he studied with a radical former Jesuit who taught him Latin and exposed him to the great works of the classical tradition. Along the way, Spinoza developed doubts about the authority of the Bible and key Judaic tenets, and on July 27, 1656, the Jewish elders of Amsterdam—citing his “abominable heresies” and “monstrous deeds”—excommunicated him.
Intent on pursuing his studies, Spinoza left the bustle of Amsterdam for, first, Rijnsburg, a town outside Leiden, and then the village of Voorburg near The Hague. Supporting himself as a lens grinder, Spinoza fell in with the many Collegiants in the area—freethinkers who, shunning membership in any organized church, met instead in informal “colleges” and who, like Erasmus, rejected dogmatic sectarianism, opposed religious persecution, and considered moral action more important than confessional purity. Spinoza—having borne the wrath of the rabbis and felt the suffocating control of the Calvinist clergy—conceived of a project to challenge clerical authority in general. The result was his first great treatise, the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. Though Erasmus’s name appears nowhere in it, his spirit is palpable throughout. In the same way that the Dutch scholar had used his command of Greek and the Fathers to deconstruct the New Testament, Spinoza now applied his knowledge of Hebrew and the prophets to the Old, seeking in the process to undermine its claims to divine revelation.
“I have often wondered,” Spinoza observed Erasmically in his preface, “that persons who make a boast of professing the Christian religion . . . should quarrel with such rancorous animosity, and daily display towards one another such bitter hatred.” Religion had been largely reduced to its outward forms, while faith had become “a mere compound of credulity and prejudices,” a “tissue of ridiculous mysteries” that held men in thrall. As a result, he had decided “to examine the Bible afresh in a careful, impartial, and unfettered spirit.” Spinoza proceeded to offer a piercing analysis of both the authority of the Hebrew Bible and the superstition he felt pervaded it. He questioned not only Moses’s authorship of the five books attributed to him (a question others had asked before him) but the very idea that those books represented God’s word. To Spinoza, the Hebrew prophets were not oracles of divine wisdom but rather men of vivid imagination. To demonstrate this, he compared the writing styles of the various books of the Bible, suggested the different eras in which they had been written, pointed out inconsistencies in the text, and cited errors likely to have been introduced by scribes.
Many passages in the Tractatus echo Erasmus. “The true meaning of Scripture,” Spinoza wrote, “is in many places inexplicable, or at best mere subject for guesswork,” but “the precepts of true piety are expressed in very ordinary language, and are equally simple and easily understood.” (In his diatribe on free will, Erasmus had observed that “there are numerous places in the Holy Scriptures whose meaning many have guessed at but whose ambiguity no one has clearly resolved,” while God intended certain other things “to be absolutely clear to us: such are the precepts for a good life.”) Like Erasmus, Spinoza argued that, apart from a small number of core doctrines, including the existence of God and his supreme dominion over all things, “everyone should be free to choose for himself the foundation of his creed.” The true enemies of Christ are those who persecute honorable and justice-loving men because they do not subscribe to the same religious beliefs; as the Bible makes clear, whoever loves justice and charity is a true man of faith. If such a course were followed, “there would be no further occasion for controversies in the Church.”
Erasmus—writing at a time when the authority of sovereigns seemed incontestable—accepted princely rule as more or less a given. Spinoza, writing in an era of far greater openness, held out democracy as the system of government “most consonant with individual liberty.” Theocracy, by contrast, could only breed instability and rebellion. Most tyrannical of all are those governments that make crimes of opinions, “for everyone has an inalienable right over his thoughts.” Spinoza lamented the many schisms that had arisen in the Church “from the attempt of the authorities to decide by law the intricacies of theological controversy!” Everyone “should think what he likes and say what he thinks.”
In issuing a general call for freedom of belief in a democratic system, Spinoza was recasting Erasmus’s views for a new secular age. He was, in effect, stripping the “Christian” from the Christian humanism that Erasmus had expounded. That Spinoza nowhere acknowledged his debt to Erasmus shows how Erasmus’s ideas and methods helped shape the Western liberal tradition even when his contribution was not explicitly recognized.
Even during the Enlightenment, when such Erasmian values as rationalism, skepticism, and toleration were widely embraced, Erasmus himself was not. As one scholar has noted, the philosophes “cited Erasmus, but scarcely read him.” In Diderot’s Encyclopédie, Erasmus was mentioned occasionally, but almost always fleetingly. Even Voltaire, whose irony, concern for justice, and attacks on superstition placed him squarely in the Erasmian tradition, produced only a few fragments about him. One was a dialogue among Lucian, Erasmus, and Rabelais in the Champs Élysées. In it, Lucian expresses delight at finding that Erasmus, though living in a barbarous land, had excelled in the same enterprise Lucian had—making fun of all. Yes, Erasmus says, but he had had a much harder time of it, for whereas the Greek gods of Lucian’s day were considered little more than actors on a stage, Erasmus was surrounded by religious fanatics ready to send anyone who disagreed with them to the stake, and as a result he had had to show far more caution. As a monk, moreover, he was subject to various vows and other institutional constraints. Asked by Lucian to explain what a monk is, Erasmus says that it is someone “useless to the human race” and living “in dependency on others.” At one point Rabelais enters, and Erasmus notes that, as a priest rather than a monk, he was able to go much further in expressing his scorn. “You were perhaps too reserved in your raillery,” Rabelais says, “and I was perhaps too bold in mine, but at present we both think the same.” Soon Jonathan Swift shows up, and all four head off to dinner.
The dialogue captures the aspect of Erasmus’s work that Voltaire most valued—his mocking of the clergy. Erasmus’s program to correct the Bible and revitalize Christendom held little appeal for a man whose attitude toward organized religion was summed up in his celebrated cry, Écrasez l’infâme (“Crush the infamous thing”). For Enlightenment thinkers as a whole, Erasmus’s efforts to blend classical harmony and Christian piety into a philosophy of Christ seemed stuffy and passé. In the century preceding the French Revolution, the Praise of Folly appeared in more than sixty editions, many of them in French; reform tracts like the Enchiridion and A Complaint of Peace, by contrast, were seldom reprinted.
As the rationalism and classicism of the Enlightenment gave way to the passion and drama of romanticism, the neglect of Erasmus turned to contempt. Poets and artists valued the heroic and authentic, the sensual and spontaneous—qualities Erasmus was deemed to lack. To German thinkers in particular, the Dutchman stood for cowardly vacillation, especially when measured against the boldness and vigor of Luther. Johann Gottfried von Herder, the chief theorist of German romanticism, celebrated the expressiveness of national languages in contrast to the sterility of Latin, and he praised Luther for waking the German language, previously “a sleeping giant.” Seeking to encourage a sense of German national identity, Herder wrote an essay hailing Ulrich von Hutten for his fearless actions on behalf of the German people. Erasmus, by contrast, he dismissed as a self-regarding intellectual who disgracefully refused to receive his desperate, ailing friend.
Throughout the nineteenth century, this image of Erasmus as an effete equivocator prevailed. “A great scholar but a weak character” was the judgment of Ludwig Pastor, the renowned (Catholic) author of a forty-volume history of the popes that began appearing in the 1890s; Pastor’s formulation was repeated over and over by Catholic and Protestant scholars alike. Amid the enthusiasm for the mother tongue and the fatherland, soil and blood, folklore and mythology, Erasmus’s calls for concord and brotherhood seemed the musty artifacts of an obsolete cosmopolitanism.
Even after Europe’s nationalist rivalries helped precipitate the cataclysm of World War I, Erasmian-style humanism remained out of favor, as was apparent in a biography by Johan Huizinga. A professor of history at Leiden from 1915 to 1942, Huizinga won international acclaim for The Waning of the Middle Ages, an elegiac study of cultural and intellectual life in France and the Low Countries in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. His Erasmus of Rotterdam, published in 1924, was erudite, informed—and laced with condescension. Huizinga made light of Erasmus’s physical frailties, his obsession with hygiene, his “maidenly coyness.” “Let us try ever to see of that great Erasmus as much as the petty one permits,” he wrote. Huizinga did credit Erasmus with being “the enlightener of an age from whom a broad stream of culture emanated” and “the fervently sincere preacher of that general kindliness which the world so urgently needs,” but, he flatly declared, “his influence has ceased. He has done his work and will speak to the world no more.” After the book appeared, Huizinga acknowledged that he felt little admiration for Erasmus and tried to put him out of his mind.
Huizinga’s study did, however, inspire another writer, the Austrian Stefan Zweig. Reading the book against the backdrop of Hitler’s rise to power, Zweig identified with Erasmus’s struggles, and in 1934 he came out with a biographical study. Although Erasmus was “the greatest and most brilliant star” of his century, Zweig wrote, he had become “hardly more than a name.” In fact, he was “the first conscious European, the first to fight on behalf of peace, the ablest champion of the humanities and of a spiritual ideal.” Under his leadership, there had taken hold the unheard-of ideal of “a United States of Europe under the aegis of a common culture and a common civilization.”
But, Zweig wrote, that ideal was never realized, and the reason was clear. Erasmus and his fellow humanists, in overestimating the effects of civilization, had “overlooked the terrible and well-nigh insoluble problem of mass-hatred and the vast and passionate psychoses of mankind.” They had mistakenly sought to teach the masses “from the heights of their idealism” rather than go down among them and try to understand and learn from them. Meanwhile, there arrived on the scene someone who did understand those masses: Luther. Just as the Germanic hordes of old had descended on the world of classical Rome, so did this “fanatical man of action, backed by the irresistible force of a mass movement,” sally forth “to swamp and destroy” the dream of a united Europe. Zweig called Luther “a swaggering, brimming, almost bursting piece of living matter, the embodiment of the momentum and fierceness of a whole nation assembled in one exuberant personality.” Summoning the world to arms, this “werewolf raging with uncouth and unjustifiable scorn” split Christian Europe in two. Though Erasmus tried with his pen to defend European unity and the “world-citizenship of humanity,” he proved unequal to the task.
The rivalry between Erasmus and Luther thus became for Zweig an allegory for the crisis afflicting Nazi Germany and Europe as a whole. And he remained gloomy about the prospects for the Erasmian ideal. Erasmus’s thought, he wrote, had never taken sufficient shape and substance “to exercise a tangible influence” on the molding of European destinies. The “great humanistic dream” of resolving disputes in a spirit of justice and of achieving the unification of nations under the banner of a common culture had remained a Utopia, never yet established and perhaps unattainable.
For Zwei
g himself, the humanistic dream would, sadly, prove insufficient to sustain him. In 1942, while living in exile in Brazil, he committed suicide. And the inferno consuming Europe seemed to bear out his judgment that that dream could not become reality. Yet, remarkably, just the opposite occurred. The spectacle of mass graves, razed cities, displaced populations, and death camps that confronted Europe in 1945 drove home the urgent need to make the utopian real—to set aside narrow national loyalties and historical enmities in favor of a new internationalist order designed to make future wars unthinkable. In 1946, Winston Churchill, speaking at the University of Zurich, called for a “United States of Europe,” and three years later Robert Schuman, the French foreign minister, delivered an address in Strasbourg that would in many ways mark the birth of a united Europe. “Our century,” he declared, “which has witnessed the catastrophes resulting in the unending clash of nationalities and nationalisms, must attempt and succeed in reconciling nations in a supranational association,” with the goal of putting an end to war and guaranteeing an eternal peace. He cited the “audacious minds” that over the centuries had conceived the framework for such an association: Dante, Erasmus, Abbé de Saint Pierre, Rousseau, Kant, and Proudhon.
Making that abstraction a reality began with the formation of the European Coal and Steel Community in 1952, designed to coordinate policies among six nations in two industries considered essential to any war effort. It was followed by the creation in 1957 of the European Economic Community, forming a common market, and the direct election of a European Parliament in 1979. In 1993, after the signing of the Maastricht Treaty, the European Union (EU) came into being, and in 1999 the euro became its common currency. In 2000 the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights was proclaimed, guaranteeing freedom of thought, religion, conscience, expression, and assembly; the right to an education; equality before the law; social security; and much else. (The charter did not become legally binding until 2009.)
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