for me, and defends me nobly, though he seems to do nothing less than to take my part, so dextrous is he according to his wont. Perhaps the letter will be printed." It was indeed soon printed by Melchior Lotter at Wittenberg.1 Erasmus naturally took this indiscretion of Hutten's very ill; if chance gave the letter to the press, he exclaimed, it was most unlucky; if perfidy, it was more than Punic. In sending the letter to the press before he had even shown it to its addressee, it is probable that Hutten thought he was only carrying out the wishes of the writer; certainly the epistle was well adapted for public reading.3 Provoked as he was by the Reformers, Erasmus was still more enraged by the Catholics, and especially by his fellow theologians at Louvain. These "champions of bad letters," as he called them, issued, on August 31, 1519, a condemnation of a number of passages from Luther's works, which was solemnly ratified by the whole university on November 7th.* Luther answered Louvain and Cologne in March, 1520: "They have condemned not only me," he breaks forth," "but Occam, Mirandola, Valla, and Reuchlin, to say nothing of Wesel, Lefèvre d'Étaples, and Erasmus, that ram caught by the horns in the bushes!" Erasmus read the answer and wrote Melanchthon that it pleased him wonderfully, for it had begun to make his colleagues ashamed of their premature pronouncement, but that he wished his name had been left out, as it only brought odium on him and did not help Luther. His opinion of the Wittenberg professor was certainly more favorable 1 It was also printed at Leipzig in 1519. Bibliotheca Erasmiana, i, 93. 2 1520. Allen, ep. 1152. Hutteni Opera, ed. Böcking, ii, 311; P. Kalkoff: Ulrich von Hutten, 1920, p. 521. 4 Köstlin-Kawerau, i, 266. H. de Jongh: L'Ancienne Faculté de Théologie de Louvain, 1911, pp. 208 ff. 5 Werke, Weimar, vi, 183. 6 Corpus Reformatorum, i, 206. On a lost letter from Luther to Erasmus, of May, 1520, perhaps in answer to the one from Erasmus to Melanchthon, cf. Enders, ii, 397. L. C. ep. 254. than he thought it prudent to avow in his letters, at least in those designed for publication. A disciple, Hermann Hump, who lived with him during the last half of 1519 and the first months of 1520, wrote Luther on March 14, 1520, that Erasmus almost adored him, though he kept his opinion for his table companions.1 Indeed, the humanist himself wrote Jonas, April 9, 1520: "I would not have the Dominicans know what a friend I am to Luther. This university has contracted incurable madness. Atensis, indeed, has perished, but Egmond and Latomus act more odiously than he." The altercation with Egmond waxed very hot indeed about this time, the special cause of it being Erasmus's old letter to Luther "badly understood and worse interpreted.' The quarrel finally reached such a point that the rector of the university summoned both parties to a public conference to settle their differences. One of the wittiest bits of Erasmus's writings is the account of this conference for his friend More. Asked to make a specific complaint, Erasmus said that Egmond had accused him of favoring Luther, which was a lie. Egmond then lost his temper, burst into foul language, called Erasmus an old turncoat, Luther's harbinger, a falsifier of the Bible, a forger of papal letters, and a slanderer who had accused him, Egmond, of being drunk. Erasmus demurely admitted the last charge, though he said he only spoke of it as a matter of common knowledge, but added that, though Egmond might shout against Luther till he split for all he cared, he must not, in future, mix his, Erasmus's, name in the affair. To Egmond's demand that he write something against the heretic, or at least publish an opinion that he had been successfully refuted by Louvain, the humanist replied that, judging in the same 1 Enders, ii, 350-352. L. C. ep. 236. 2 Kawerau: Briefwechsel des Justus Jonas, i, 43. L. C. ep. 245. Allen, ep. 1088. Allen, ep. 1033. L. C. ep. 313. Louvain, November, 1520. Allen, ep. 1162. way, his opponent must be a Lutheran himself, for he had not written anything against Luther. On June 15, 1520, the bull, Exsurge Domine, threatening to excommunicate Luther if he did not recant within sixty days after its promulgation in Germany, was signed by Leo at Rome, and intrusted to Eck, who posted it during the last days of September in the dioceses of Brandenburg and Merseburg. About the same time Aleander was dispatched from Rome to the Netherlands to meet Charles, who was coming from Spain to be crowned emperor, in order to secure his support for the Church in suppressing the heretic. Erasmus now resolved to do all in his power to prevent extreme measures being taken. Judging that it would be both inexpedient for the attainment of his end and dangerous to himself to come out openly for Luther, he went to work in a quiet but persistent way to influence persons in power to act with leniency, and especially to moderate the passions of the leaders of each side. Luther and his friends sinned in the violence of their invective, but he hoped to bring them to reason. Their opponents, the monks, or "Pharisees," as he called them, were beyond the appeals of reason; so he merely worked to thwart them of the bloody triumph they desired. When he later became Luther's enemy he skillfully covered up as much as possible the traces of his activity in the summer of 1520, and, as he had acted with caution, it was not hard to do so. It is sometimes difficult to determine exactly how far his efforts went. To Ecolampadius he wrote, for example, on May 15, 1520, that Luther's books would have been burned in England but for the intervention of "a humble and vigilant friend. Not that I undertake to judge Luther's books,' he qualifies, "but this tyranny by no means pleases me." One of the first potentates whom he endeavored to 1 He wrote Spalatin, July, 1520, that he hoped Luther would moderate his language. Allen, ep. 1119. 2 So in a letter to Melanchthon, L. C. epp. 257, 258; Allen, epp. 1102, 1113. |