Christening Pagan Mysteries: Erasmus in Pursuit of Wisdom 9781442632363

Table of contents :
Contents
Prologue
ONE. Under the Pear Tree
TWO. Scholars' Ink
THREE. Martyrs' Blood
Abbreviations
Notes
Bibliography of Primary sources cited
Index

Citation preview

Christening Pagan Mysteries Erasmus in Pursuit of Wisdom

This is the first book devoted to investigating the scholarly common­ place that Erasmus' revival of classical learning defines his evangelical humanism. It acknowledges that it was a feat for him to challenge the obscurantism of late mediaeval schooling by restoring classical studies. It recognizes that his editions of Greek and Latin authors alone fix his place in the history of scholarship. But the plainest questions about this achievement may still be asked, and the most popular texts freshly interpreted. Was his work only the expression in the 'idiom of the Renaissance' of a perennial Christian humanism? or did he advance on it theoretically as well as practically? Did Erasmus contribute concep­ tually to the integration of pagan wisdom with the Christian economy? Christening Pagan Mysteries proposes that he did. Although doctrinal issues are involved, this inquiry is not systema­ tically theological. Erasmus wrote no treatise on the subject that might be so explored. A rhetorical approach, complementary to his own method, discloses his evangelical humanism through the analysis of three significant texts. The seminal dialogue Antibarbari provides the conceptual key in one of the most important humanist declarations in the history of Christian thought to the Renaissance. The christocentric conviction it voices is then discerned through new interpretations of two other texts which christen pagan mysteries in original and impor­ tant ways: the Moria and the final colloquy, 'Epicureus,' in which a pagan goddess and a pagan philosopher are gathered to Christ. is the author of Erasmus on Language and Method in Theology in this series, and an editor of volumes for the Collected Works of Erasmus.

MARJORIE O'ROURKE BOYLE

This page intentionally left blank

Marjorie O'Rourke Boyle

Christening Pagan Mysteries Erasmus in Pursuit of Wisdom University of Toronto Press Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press 1981 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada ISBN 0-8020-5525-7

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Boyle, Marjorie O'Rourke, 1943Christening pagan mysteries Bibliography: p. Includes index. ISBN 0-8020-5525-7 i. Erasmus, Desiderius, d. 1536. 2. Christianity and religious humanism. I. Title. B785.E64B688 199.492 080-094854-8

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and with the help of a grant from the Publications Fund of University of Toronto Press.

This is Rachel's book

This page intentionally left blank

Tor the great and eternal disposer, who is wisdom itself, establishes all things with consummate skill, differentiates them with beautiful play of interchange, and orders them with perfect rightness, so that each balances another in a marvelous way, nor does he allow anything to move at random in all the immense variety of the world/ Erasmus, Antibarbari

This page intentionally left blank

Contents

Prologue xi i Under the Pear Tree 3 2

Scholars' Ink 27 3 Martyrs' Blood 63

Abbreviations 97 Notes 99 Bibliography

i63

Index 171

This page intentionally left blank

Prologue

' I F M O D E R N S C H O L A R S of Erasmus cannot congregate in his study to discuss with piety and learning the grammar of theological method, we can at least all meet where that grammar becomes syntax, in Eusebius' garden, where logos is truly flesh in Everyman/ This ending, or peroration, of Erasmus on Language and Method in Theology invites a second book, one which translates an understanding of the Logos as the principle of Erasmus' theological methodology to a discernment of its personal activity in Everyman's nature and history. This is the first book devoted to investigating the scholarly commonplace that Erasmus' revival of classical learning defines his evangelical humanism. It acknowledges that it was a feat for him to challenge the obscurantism of late mediaeval schooling by restoring classical studies. It recognizes that his editions of Greek and Latin authors alone fix his place in the history of scholarship. But the plainest questions about this achievement may still be asked, and the most popular texts freshly interpreted. Was his work only the expression in the 'idiom of the Renaissance' of a perennial Christian humanism? or did he advance on it theoretically as well as practically? Did Erasmus contribute conceptually to the integration of pagan wisdom with the Christian economy? Christening Pagan Mysteries proposes that he did. Our entry is by a garden gate, not Eusebius', but one which Erasmus invented earlier. By joining the Antibarbari in conversation, we may secure a key to all of Erasmus' work in one of the most important humanist declarations in the history of Christian

xii Christening Pagan Mysteries

thought to the Renaissance. Erasmus did not linger in that orchard in rural Brabant, however, for with Socrates he said, 'I am anxious to learn, and it is not fields and trees which can teach me, but men who live in towns/ The book follows after him to offer new interpretations of two other works which christen pagan mysteries in original and significant ways: Morias egkomion and the colloquy 'Epicureus,' in which a pagan goddess and a pagan philosopher are gathered to Christ. These works are understood as expressions of the christocentric conviction Erasmus voices in Antibarbari, although not as abstract deductions from it. They are the very stuff of Erasmus' life, in humanist conversation among men in towns. Although this investigation is freighted with historical research and literary criticism, its question is ultimately theological. Readers must not expect, however, that this question of the relation of pagan wisdom to the Christian economy will be explored conventionally. Erasmus wrote no treatise on the subject which might be examined systematically. These three texts in which he displays his evangelical humanism so remarkably are all rhetorical. It has therefore been necessary to develop a complementary rhetorical approach, one which would disclose the conceptual and thematic unity of the texts and still respect their unique historical and literary expressions. As with my previous volume in the series, the style is designed not merely to convey and analyse information but also to induce an empathic experience of Erasmus' own intellectual life. To anticipate those critics who suppose that my scholarship implies an uncritical, even romantic, agreement with Erasmus, let me state that it does not: it is simply a method aimed at promoting understanding. (The critique is yet to come.) If this method should occasion some perplexities, or even enigmas, please remember that Erasmus himself condoned it. As he advised schoolboys on the art of writing: This is no bad thing if you are speaking or writing for an educated audience, and not even if you are writing for the general public, for one should not write so that everyone can understand everything, but so that people should be compelled to investigate and learn some things themselves/ Patience is asked

Prologue xiii

especially from those readers who might prefer a more comprehensive and critical analysis of Erasmus' controversy with Luther than is broached here. A book devoted solely to that purpose is in progress, sponsored by a Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1979-80). Since this book investigates a commonplace, its inquiry has been all the more demanding; to extend a biblical metaphor, like kneading bread from stones. Yet if it is still a theologian's part, as was Erasmus', to divine mysteries in commonplaces, even scholarly ones, then this book may add to a subject already worn like a favoured stone to a polish by many hands. Among these hands, I most especially thank Charles Trinkaus, who generously read and commented on the entire manuscript and recommended to the University of Toronto Press its publication. Clarence Miller shared with me his erudition and his critical edition of Morias egkomion in advance of its publication. Harry McSorley offered his own perspective on Erasmus' controversy with Luther. E. A. Synan, then president, and the senior fellows of the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, Toronto, awarded me a year's appointment as a research associate to explore the mediaeval background of this and forthcoming essays on Erasmus; and the Canada Council awarded a grant in aid of research. My husband Michael made Rachel's book possible.

This page intentionally left blank

CHRISTENING PAGAN

MYSTERIES

Erasmus in Pursuit of Wisdom

This page intentionally left blank

ONE

Under the Pear Tree

C O M E , LET us D I S P U T E the loss of learning in our time. Some tragedy has wrenched from us the eloquent authors of antiquity and left an 'uneducated erudition/1 With this invitation, a youth 'born for restoring literature72 enrols his readers in a pastoral academy. We are in the company of Antibarbari (1487? -» i52o),3 Erasmus and his boyhood friends Willem Hermans and James Batt, and of the local burgomaster and physician, a sympathetic pair of foils. In retreat from the pestilential cities, Erasmus is secluded for study in rural Brabant when a surprise visit from Hermans prompts a scholarly reunion. Now earnest, now jesting the two, joined by Batt, stroll the lanes, gathering the townsmen into their conversation. Opinions are ventured and debated on the decline of learning into barbarism. Is the fault in the stars or in ourselves? they wonder.4 Erasmus spies a pear tree under whose shade the company may establish an academy. He offers them not the lone plane-tree of Platonic or Ciceronian dialogue but a whole orchard of real trees, especially that great pear. 'There is everything here which Socrates admired there; the pear-tree in the middle, as you see, serves our pleasure in three different ways: it is tall enough and has spreading branches which will protect us from the heat, and as it is now springtime it will not only gladden our eyes with blossom but refresh our nostrils with the sweetest scent/5 Here is Nature nurturing nature in classical harmony, a perfect setting for the antibarbarians to voice their ideals. Allured by this pleasant spot, one that 'Epicurus himself might praise/ Erasmus'

4 Christening Pagan Mysteries

band may pursue their topic, which he emphasizes is the prime subject of the day.6 But the notorious pear tree of all Christian literature is that from which another youth and his rowdy gang stole some fruit. 'A pear tree there was near our vineyard, laden with fruit, tempting neither for colour nor taste. To shake and rob this, some lewd young fellows of us went, late one night (having according to our pestilent custom prolonged our sport in the streets until then), and took huge loads, not for our eating, but to fling to the very hogs, having only tasted them/7 Marvelling at his conscience, as does Erasmus,8 interpreters have laboured to justify Augustine's judgment that this was his heinous sin - not idling in the streets and public baths, not whoring, not lingering in Manichean error, not even grieving his mother, but stealing pears. One scholar reads in Augustine's lapse an imitation of the Plotinian fall from the beatific vision of truth, a fall from which the soul must journey back to God.9 Another interprets the theft as a symbolic equivalent of Adam's representative sin, in perfect parody of religious motives.10 The incident also bears a plainer meaning, important for understanding Antibarbari. Every crime, Augustine philosophizes in his Confessionum libri, is committed from the desire for good, yet a lesser good than the true good. Even a murderer's intention complies with this law. 'What then,' he asks, 'did wretched I so love in thee, thou theft of mine, thou deed of darkness, in that sixteenth year of my age?'11 Searching his soul for its motive, Augustine at first fails to discover the false good which had lured him to steal. The fruit was fruitless. Hadn't he flung the pears to hogs? The only feast, he rues, was the sin itself. T lusted to thieve... I loved to perish' (piri, perire).*2 He accuses himself of gratuitous evil, of wanton malice.13 But pursuing his examination, Augustine at last uncovers the good he did love in the theft. His capital sin was not prompted by sheer malice, as he had first supposed, but by the most adolescently banal of reasons: the desire to be applauded by his peers. "O friendship too unfriendly!' It was his friends who had occasioned the sin and snared him in complicity. 'But when it is said: "Let's go, let's do it," we are ashamed not to be

Under the Pear Tree 5

shameless/14 There was no one to temper his disorder, Augustine regrets, to collect his 'piecemeal self within 'friendship's bright boundary/ The 'only care' of his feigned friends, he reports, 'was that I should learn to speak excellently, and be a persuasive orator/15 His parents ambitiously bred that value, educating him with borrowed money to fill the rhetor's chair at Carthage. His father cared about copious speech. His mother did not interfere with his own hope of learning, 'which both my parents were too desirous I should attain/16 And so for Augustine the conspiracy to sin regresses ultimately to the cultural valuing of rhetoric as a repository of wisdom. If the theft of pears in symbolically Augustine's re-enactment of Adam's primordial grasp for knowledge, it is literally his indictment of those 'buyers and sellers of grammar-learning/17 who dominated the education, and so the morals, of that waning classical world. Flog boys into memorizing the paradigms, teach them that the commission of a barbarism is more grievous than that of a sin, pump their heads with praise, choke their spirits with rules, and at the first holiday from school they will wantonly bear the fruits of such education, or steal them. The theft of pears climaxes Augustine's recollection of schooling: dodging the master's cane (his first prayer was that he not be beaten), enduring the hated Greek lessons, revelling at last in the echoed 'Well done! well done!' with which his declamations were praised above those of his schoolmates.18 He was covenanted to syllables rather than to truth, he confesses.19 He was forced to trace the wanderings of Aeneas, while forgetful of his own, and to weep for dead Dido, while he tolerated his own dying remote from God.20 As a 'salesman of words,'21 Augustine bit deeply into the fruits of classical learning, until in that second garden of conversion he flung them away, like pears to hogs. His initial conversion to wisdom had been prompted by reading Cicero's Hortensius. This book altered my affections ... I longed with an incredibly burning desire for an immortality of wisdom/22 he wrote. By reflecting on the method by which providence had lured him through pagan to Christian wisdom, Augustine might have allowed more for their integration in the

6 Christening Pagan Mysteries

divine economy and so in human learning. But once he had exchanged hawking words for preaching the Word, he emphasized their discontinuity more than their continuity. In his De doctrina Christiana, which Erasmus often cites, he urged theologians to 'put away false pride and learn what can be learned from men/23 But he appropriated the secular disciplines principally for polemic.24 He also composed a treatise on the classical cycle of learning, De ordine, but later in his Retractationum libri regretted that he had attributed so much to the liberal arts, when many saints were ignorant of them and many learned in them were not saints. He even apologized for having jokingly referred to the Muses as goddesses.25 When Erasmus edited Augustine's works (1529), he for the first time placed the retractions first in order, before all of Augustine's affirmations.26 Yet in Antibarbari Erasmus claims that Augustine did not repent of having written De ordine. 'But suppose it was really a sin,' he poses in defence of Augustine's treatise, 'that he was in error, acting in ignorance - why did he not point out this error when he was older and wiser?'27 Erasmus also indicates the evidence of Augustine's 'strict conscience - not to say hypercritical - that he often seems to me (I say it with apologies to so great a man) to tremble without cause, a thing which is easy to deduce from his life and from his Confessions and Retractions - Augustine, I say, being the great man he was, would certainly have dissuaded people from secular literature, as they call it, if he had though it harmful, or useless, or suspect.'28 Erasmus explains Retractationum libri as the humble work of an old man,29 and Augustine's disdain for heathen culture as the self-deprecation of one who had mastered it.30 It is less important, however, that Erasmus cites Augustine in Antibarbari than how he cites Augustine, and why, for the very barbarians Erasmus would refute also cited Augustine. Because Augustine's authority was so well established, if Erasmus is to be heard at all, he must necessarily cite him in support of his antibarbarian campaign, demonstrating their generous agreement concerning the appropriation of classical to Christian learning.31 Erasmus' method in Antibarbari is that of 'confuting authorities with authorities,' by which device

Under the Pear Tree 7

he conscripts even such unlikely allies as Gratian and Duns Scotus.32 He admits freely that 'I would not dare to attack these godlike creatures [barbarous theologians] if St Augustine himself had not made fun of their mindlessness, with a good deal of wit/33 He defers to Augustine throughout Antibarbari, includes a long synopsis of his De doctrina Christiana,34 and in the cardinal passage of Antibarbari cites Augustine on behalf of a doctrine of universal harmony.35 From this doctrine Erasmus will, however, extract theological affirmations discordant with Augustine's. Perceiving Augustine's ambivalence, Erasmus challenges him concerning the nature of wisdom and the christening of pagan mysteries in its pursuit. Had Augustine in glory spied on this young canon who initiated his humanist reform as an 'Augustinian regular,' he could not have been entirely at ease. For Augustine secular learning was an aid in the defence and persuasion of Christian wisdom. Christian intellectuals did not require eloquence, although they might practise it.36 Their vocation was not bene dicere but benedicere.37 Augustine advised theologians to study grammar and rhetoric, not furiously, as Erasmus would, but moderately,38 for he remained in the shade of his pear tree, wary of secular learning as vanity, mindful of its inferiority to the wisdom which is solely of God. This reserve characterizes the moderate but ambivalent attitude which Christian thinkers adopted towards the classics. They were flanked by the book burners ('more ardent than wise,' Erasmus calls them in Antibarbari39), and the book binders, who preserved the learning of antiquity against barbarian invasions of every sort. The program of Erasmus' evangelical humanism is, however, precisely bene dicere, because it is in speech as the expression of mature human nature that man most imitates the Logos, the divine discourse in which he was created and recreated, Christ the eloquent revelation of God. Rhetoric, and the grammar which serves it, is for Erasmus not merely propadeutic to theology, but its very definition, for it is as rhetoric that God has disclosed himself and in rhetoric that man appropriates that revelation.40 The enthusiasm of Erasmus' band under the pear tree is remote

8 Christening Pagan Mysteries

from Augustine's sobriety, disciplined by the memory of boyish vanity and its furtive fruits. Far from the prodigal youths of Thagaste are the prodigious ones of Halsteren, whose tree is not the sting of sin but the tutor of providence. The antibarbarians are ringed by what Augustine longingly called 'friendship's bright boundary/ that 'measure of love, of mind to mind,' he had not practised. They have a 'comradeship based on the shared studies of boyhood ... a stronger bond between men than any tie of blood or family relationship,' Erasmus explains.41 His affection for Hermans, his dearest friend from the cradle, has only increased with the 'pleasant association of our studies.'42 Batt is cemented to them as one 'lost in admiration before learned men' and impressed by good letters.43 They pass the night not prowling the streets, but telling literary stories,44 and in the morning they initiate a conversation which is a model of how Christians will conduct themselves if classically educated. In Erasmus' case that education was of his own devising. Instinct, he declares in Antibarbari's preface, propelled him from sterile exercise - declining pater meus, spewing that mash of mediaeval grammar which was the staple at school - to the service of the Muses. Hampered by a dearth of books and masters, with no praise or honour to incite him, Erasmus strained against this 'barbaric' schooling.45 By night he smuggled Terence to his room until he knew his comedy like the back of his hand.46 Cheered by the sight of a Greek book he could not yet decipher, he budgeted for more volumes and complained that he had so little leisure or money for a tutor.47 The mere sight of Rodolphus Agricola, fresh from the classical revival in Italy, thrilled him.48 Like Augustine, Erasmus 'surpassed all the other boys his age/ and won his own accolade from a sympathetic teacher: 'Well done, Erasmus, the day will come when you will scale the highest summit of erudition.'49 He braved the literary world, it has been said, inquiring after his father's library and quoting Ovid.50 In those letters which compose Erasmus' earliest writing, he reveals that he is playing schoolmaster with set exercises.51 They presage the pedagogical role he would assume when instinct matured to judgment, and

Under the Pear Tree 9

his disciples increased beyond the young canons at Steyn to encompass the schoolboys of Europe. Soon a longer literary imitation, De contemptu mundi (71488-1489 —> 1521), braced the conventional argument for monastic retreat with more classical allusions than biblical verses.52 'Had he been a true monk/ a critic has asserted, 'he would have omitted the quotations from classical writers, for they knew nothing about Christianity/53 But those allusions were not superficial or irrelevant to piety. Erasmus meets that accusation in Antibarbari. The classical citations which began as embellishments to a schoolboy's craft were soon grafted so solidly to Erasmus' evangelical humanism that he challenged all who dared to presume that any pagan wisdom was alien to Christ or therefore to man. Erasmus' baptism of pagan letters, his editing, translating, and commenting on classical literature for the advance of Christian learning is universally acknowledged as defining his evangelical humanism. His editions and translations alone are a sufficiently impressive achievement to secure his place in scholarship. Did Erasmus also contribute conceptually to the Christian appropriation of pagan wisdom? It was a feat for him to challenge the encrusted anticlassicism of his day and to secure with his reform the revival of antique learning. But was Erasmus' achievement only the expression of perennial Christian humanism in the 'idiom of the Renaissance'?54 The comparison of Erasmus and Augustine which motifs of Antibarbari have evoked indicate his bold departure from tradition. By joining the antibarbarians in conversation, an even profounder appreciation of this event may be developed. Why does Erasmus not merely allow that Christians may study pagans, but rather insist that they must? What principle permits and promotes that task which Erasmus made his own adventure? Obviously there was Erasmus' conviction that education establishes morality and that the best educators were the eloquent pagans of antiquity who invented and excelled in the arts. This conviction undergirds his pedagogical treatises specifically,55 and directs his whole enterprise of restoring classical literature viva voce, not only translating the ancients from Greek to Latin but

10 Christening Pagan Mysteries

transferring them across the centuries to serve colloquially as advisors and companions in the renewal of civilization. So many of those pagans were more moral than Christians, Erasmus often reflects.56 Their rectitude and the learning which nurtured it might be enlisted as exemplars of that 'well established nature' which he appreciated as God's primordial creation, now barbarically lapsed and in need of the restoration which was Christ's saving work and his saving work in Christ.57 Erasmus freely applies pagan examples: 'If the labours of Hercules show you that you achieve heaven by honest effort and tireless industry - are you not learning by means of fable the precepts offered by philosophers and theologians on how to live?'58 The moral orientation of Erasmus' evangelical humanism has been well recognized in scholarly writing. But this appreciation has often been detached or even divorced from an understanding of the christocentric theology which motivates that moral emphasis.59 An analysis of this christocentrism in Antibarbari will not only disclose the theological achievement of that text, but will provide the conceptual foundation for the christening of pagan mysteries which Erasmus made his own work. Erasmus exceeds the tradition of Christian humanism when in Antibarbari he welcomes pagans to the divine economy. Nothing is random, he asserts. From the prodigious variety of things is dispensed a universal harmony, and the name of harmony's disposer is wisdom itself, who is Christ. Nature and history are both arranged by divine plan. From the rooting of the pear tree to the spinning of the stars is an intelligent design which men may observe. 'Look at the trees,' Batt bids his companions, reciting the familiar cycle from leaf to fruit, and pairing this pattern with the revolution of the heavens. Nature's discord tends to concord and 'all things, both particular and universal, are carried in the same direction.'60 Rural Brabant, where the antibarbarians converse, is a microcosmic backdrop which tutors them to discern providence macrocosmically through secular signs. The theological lesson does not unfold in a church but in an orchard. And so the pear tree suggests the fruits of pagan literature which may be signs of providence.

Under the Pear Tree 11

Just as Nature evidences the divine design, so does history. In providence, Antibarbari teaches, the ages were each apportioned a work which would culminate in the golden age of Christ's nativity.61 To the pagans of antiquity was dispensed under divine guidance 'the business of discovering the disciplines.'62 In that undertaking, 'everything in the pagan world that was valiantly done, brilliantly said, ingeniously thought, diligently transmitted, had been prepared by Christ for his society. He it was who supplied the intellect, who added the zest for inquiry, and it was through him alone that they found what they sought.'63 Although Christ reserved for his own century the highest good, himself, he did not allow the pagans to labour in vain. In that same providence of his by which 'nature takes care that no portion of time shall slip away uselessly/ as in ripening the pear tree through all seasons, so 'he gave the centuries immediately preceding a privilege of their own: they were to reach the thing nearest to the highest good, that is, the summit of learning/64 Erasmus' antibarbarian defence of pagan learning does not 'stem from ethical optimism/65 then, but from his theological conviction of the sanction which Christ himself conferred on the wisdom of classical antiquity. That conviction allows Erasmus not 'optimism' but the virtue of hope, for the continual restoration of human nature in Christ and even for the salvation of those pagans who serve Christ's work. It is one theological idea that Christians may perceive that classical learning, with its profoundest truths about God borrowed from Hebrew Scripture, is their inheritance which they may adopt and convert to the glory of Christ. It is another idea entirely that Christ himself has ordained that pagan learning to his own glory and that Christians must appropriate it if they are to be faithful to the divine economy. If a tradition of Christian humanism may be characterized, it held the former view. Erasmus' conviction is the latter. Carving up the centuries in Antibarbari, Erasmus departs significantly from traditional exegesis, founded on Rom. 9:4-5, which had the preparation for Christ unfolding entirely within Israel. When Erasmus will paraphrase the verses usually cited for the prerogatives of Israel, he will

12 Christening Pagan Mysteries

emphasize that Christ is 'not the God of this or that particular race, but of men universally/66 Even more radically, he has Christ allot in Antibarbari the historical achievement 'nearest to the highest good' of his Incarnation not to the Hebrews in their law and prophets, but to the pagans of Greece and Rome in their learning. So entrenched was the apologetic for Israel that the Fathers had accounted for the similarity between the gospel and Greek philosophy by claiming that the Greeks had plagiarized their ideas from the Hebrew Scripture.67 Clement of Alexandria, for example, recognized in faith that the discovery of the unknown god among the pagans could not be accidental, but must be 'providential/68 He explained this, however, by asserting that Plato stole from Moses, that he was Mouses attikizon.69 Ambrose was certain that he had discovered in the Hebrew Scripture the true source of Cicero's wisdom.70 Tertullian asked, 'Which of the poets, which of the sophists is there who has not drunk from the fount of the prophets?/ as he charged that in doing so they had perverted Scripture.71 When Eusebius of Caesarea developed his influential Ekklesiastikes historias, the pagan emperor Constantine was incorporated into the Christian economy as the last of the patriarchs, with his rout of Maxentius' army likened to Moses' victory over Pharaoh at the Red Sea.72 The Roman empire was saluted as the messianic kingdom prophesied in Hebrew Scripture.73 An historiographic line was drawn intact from Abraham to Constantine, and all secular dates in the Chronographia were calculated by the biblical chronology. Eusebius wrote further that the men of antiquity were 'unable to receive the all-wise and virtuous teaching of the Christ/ It was only when the law of the Jews was disseminated abroad that 'then thanks to them, the minds also of the majority of the nations were now softened by their law-givers and philosophers everywhere, and their wild and fierce brutality was changed to a gentler mood/ Only then did the peace into which the Logos was ushered prevail,74 a peace not of human but divine plan.75 In reaction, Augustine neutralized Rome, allowing it no role whatever as an instrument of salvation, whether indirectly

Under the Pear Tree 13

through an adoption of Hebrew Scripture, or belatedly through Constantine's conversion.76 Augustine's six ages of the world, mirroring the days of creation and the phases of human life, derive solely from Scripture. None of the ages is apportioned to the virtues and labours of the pagans.77 The pax Romana into which Christ was born is noted only once in a subordinate clause (orbe pacato), while the dispersion of Hebrew learning is elaborated as the single preparation for the gospel.78 Prompted by Augustine to write Historiarum adversus paganos libri, Orosius achieved a different perspective, arguing that the Roman peace was God's providential preparation for Christ. He established this argument in the coincidence that on the sixth of January the gates of Janus in Rome were closed on Augustus' triply acclaimed triumphal return from the East, while on the same day of Epiphany Christ was hailed as king with three gifts from the East.79 'It is undoubtedly clear for the understanding of all, from their faith and investigation, that our Lord Jesus Christ brought forward this City,' he wrote of Rome 'to this pinnacle of power, prosperous and protected by His will; of this City, when he came, He especially wished to be called a Roman citizen by the declaration of the Roman census list.'80 The subsequent historiography tacks between these views. Isidore of Seville's Etymologiarum^ and Bede's De temporibus,32 for example, only repeat Augustine's chronology derived from Scripture of the six ages. The popular version of history which emerged on pageant wagons as the Corpus Christi plays also recited the ages traditionally, exclusively from Scripture.83 But Otto of Freising's Chronica included Orosius' analogy as well.84 Striving for a universal account, historians increasingly incorporated the histories of the nations, paralleling them with Israel's, as had Eusebius under the device of the four kingdoms. In Vincent of Beauvais' magisterial Speculum historiale, for example, the conception of Mary is preceded by the affair of Antony and Cleopatara, and more prophetically by Virgil's supposed messianism. Yet, in introducing the advent of Christ himself, Vincent still recites the chronicle 'from the beginning of the world up to our age' exclusively from Scripture.85 As the distinction between

14 Christening Pagan Mysteries

sacred and secular history diminished, however, with the ascendancy of barbarian kingdoms that could claim no biblical authority, not even as foils to Israel, historians turned from writing universal histories to writing particular chronicles of towns and institutions, from the six ages of the world to merely the sixth in which they lived. The once animated question of how pagan antiquity related to the advent of Christ was extinguished. With the concern of Italian humanists to understand 'the accommodation and separation in the destiny of mankind/ speculation was rekindled, but even they accepted the Hebrew apologetic of Mouses attikizon which the Fathers had adopted.86 Erasmus would prove the more imaginative theologian, and the better historian. Although it has been argued that, since mediaeval universalist accounts begin with creation, this establishes the histories of the nations under providence,87 there is rarely an explicit indication in the accounts that providence was benign to pagans. The opposite interpretation may be considered; namely, that the traditional view prevails even in those histories. The ancient kingdoms are foils to God's saving acts in Israel, and are not incorporated into the divine economy until their descendents accept the preaching of the incarnate Christ. Whenever the mediaeval universalist tradition does explicitly concede any beneficent role to be cast providentially for the pagans of antiquity, it is identified as the political power of Rome, for it established a universal and peaceful route along which the gospel might speed to the ends of the earth. Ado of Vienne, for example, was certain that 'through all these things is confirmed that the reign of Caesar was prepared for the coming of Christ by grace/88 But historians more often, even when they adopted the traditional chronology of the six ages, ignored the theological issue of the pagans, although a better historian than Ado, Matthew of Paris, seized upon the adoration by the shepherds at the nativity as an occasion for invective: 'Confounded therefore are the philosophers of the gentiles, who by their sagacious investigation were able to estimate that the world and the causes of things are composed from

Under the Pear Tree 15

four elements, but who seeking the author of the world in these elements, deserved to discover nothing/89 In Antibarbari Erasmus has divine wisdom, who is Christ the Logos dispelling human folly,90 cast for the pagans of antiquity a role in the economy of salvation, a positive role which emphatically predates the Incarnation. He also diverts the achievement of those pagans from political dominion to the discovery of the disciplines. In Isidore's account of the fifth age, for example, had occurred the notice, 'Rhetorical arts began at Rome,'91 and in the fourteenth-century Northumbrian poem, Cursor mundi, In {>is ilk lairs time, Was letters funden o la tine.92

But there was no attempt to relate this event with the Incarnation. Erasmus' shift of emphasis from the military might of Rome to its literary sway seems influenced by his pacifism, which would not likely have endorsed conquest as a sign of Christ's presence among men.93 More importantly, however, it derives from the classical rhetorical tradition which considered speech itself as the very foundation of civilization.94 Erasmus recounts in Antibarbari the bloodshed by which Rome subjugated the earth to one city, so that by divine consent the gospel might speed to the four corners of the earth. But he concentrates on the pagan discovery of the arts for speaking and writing, for philosophizing, for recording history.95 In his defence of the arts he seizes inspiration from the apologists of Christian antiquity, especially the Greeks who educated the Church from barbarism to culture by adapting the pagan philosophy of the Logos: the wisdom through whom the Father creates and administers all things, educating man to the maturity of his divine likeness, just as he brings the blade to the full ear of corn, by investing in all men in every age a 'seed' or 'spark' of himself, the 'love breathed into him.'96 The pages of Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, and Origen reverberate with this faith. A sample from Justin suffices. Erasmus admires him in Antibarbari as 'a philosopher even in his dress, and in the

16 Christening Pagan Mysteries

liberal disciplines a fine craftsman, [who] not only turned his most learned mind to the defence of the Christian religion, but spent his very soul upon it/97 Justin had testified: 'All writers by means of the engrafted seed of the Logos which was implanted in them, had a dim glimpse of the truth. The truths which men in all lands have rightly spoken belong to us Christians ... Everything that the philosophers and legislators discovered and expressed well, they accomplished through their discovery and contemplation of some part of the Logos ... We have been taught that Christ was First-begotten of God and we have indicated above that He is the Logos, of whom all mankind partakes. Those who lived according to the Logos are Christians, even though they have been considered atheists/98 The cardinal passage in Antibarbari is suffused with this persuasion of the penetration of the Logos in all Nature, in all human nature. The authority for Erasmus' judgment lies with those apologists who harmonized the gospel's claim to unique truth with the achievements of a pagan civilization. Antibarbari's very image of the pear tree is a translation of the corn stalk, which the Fathers wrested from Kore and gave to Christ, into the landscape of late fifteenth-century Brabant. The apologists had assimilated and transformed the classical paideia by proposing Christ as the supreme teacher of wisdom, his own, philosophia Christou. By the century in which Erasmus writes, their tentative concepts of the spermatic Logos, of the innate idea of God in man which establishes the consensus of nations, and of the natural law which men could reasonably perceive and freely elect to abide by, were fortified and refined by sophisticated scholastic arguments for, and exercise of, the rational knowledge of God. Justin or Clement had recognized the Logos among the pagans, but even they still supposed that the pagans stole their higher wisdom from Israel.99 It is historically, if ironically, true that because scholastic theologians could argue that reason establishes not only the existence of God but the method by which his attributes can be derived from this esse, Erasmus need no longer attribute pagan wisdom about God to their reading of Hebrew Scripture. In Antibarbari he cites from

Under the Pear Tree 17

Augustine the patristic commonplace of 'despoiling the Egyptians/100 But his own stance is no longer that of the Christian scholar who derives his authority for promoting pagan literature by assuming an Hebraic position. Several centuries of scholastic reasoning have yielded a new commonplace, and it is this scholastic conviction of the natural knowledge of God which allows the humanist declaration of Antibarbari. Yet Erasmus does not acknowledge his debt to scholasticism. In Antibarbari he declares that after Bede the lustre of theology dimmed then tarnished, with but few and inferior scholars surviving. He does admit, however, that 'there was never a time without plenty of plodding workers/101 Among the moderns, he concedes, 'that most noble writer Thomas Aquinas brought out commentaries on the pagan philosopher Aristotle, and even in his Theological Questions where he is reflecting about the first principle and about the Trinity, he offers evidence from Cicero and the poets/102 Had all the manuscripts of the Fathers perished, Erasmus could have found among that Middle Age's distinguished theologians, or among its nameless monks who laboured to illumininate manuscripts with their minds and their pens, an inspiration for learning. He does not actively seek his own inspiration among them, however. This is because scholasticism flowers in the conviction that human dignity achieves its highest natural expression in the exercise of reason, by which it can know God and so know itself. For Erasmus, philosophy was for the pagans of antiquity, just as the Mosaic law was for the Hebrews, the instrument which Christ dispensed to men for the knowledge of God before his advent in flesh among them. Philosophy was a manifestation of the covenant in common grace between Creator and creature. It was now surpassed, however, in the full incarnate revelation of the Logos by the philosophia Christi. This is wisdom, but not philosophy, for the Logos comes to man as he is from eternity, not as reason but as speech. His revelation, normatively declaimed in the text of Scripture, is not logical but oratorical. And so the new order of wisdom demands its appropriate hermeneutic in the exercise of grammar and rhetoric. There is no real tolerance in Erasmus' evangelical humanism

i8 Christening Pagan Mysteries

for the learning of even the best scholastics, for, although they too would understand theology as sacra pagina, they interpret the text by philosophical method, which he judges superseded. As learning is corrupted, men are corrupted. Erasmus radically indicts scholasticism, in principle as in practice. His antibarbarian campaign, founded in his conviction that man imitates the Logos most nobly in oratio, not rah'o,103 seeks the triumph of grammar and rhetoric over logic. When Erasmus recovers pagan wisdom, it is not philosophy which he essentially seeks, for Christians are informed by the higher revelation of the Logos, but grammar and rhetoric, to aid him in the interpretation of the sacred text and in its persuasion to men. In Antibarbari the gathering of all men in the Logos is quoted in Christ's own promise, 'If I be lifted up from the earth, I will draw all things to myself (Jn 12:32).104 Traditionally this verse was interpreted as his universal salvific will. Erasmus remarks that 'draw' (traho) is an apt word, since 'all things, whether hostile or heathen or in any other way far removed from him, must be drawn even if they do not follow, even against their will, to the service of Christ.'105 This insistence on the referral of everything to Christ for the disclosure and judgment of its meaning and value is fundamental to the grammar of Erasmus' method in theology. For Erasmus it is the Logos who, as the fully eloquent discourse of God, encompasses the alphabet and so establishes the hermeneutic for all utterances, human and divine. So it is that pagan wisdom must be measured according to the Logos, and that for Christians pagan widsom must further be measured by the disclosure of that Logos in his most revealing Scripture. There are innumerable things which we hold in common with pagan lovers of wisdom,' Erasmus writes, 'but this does not diminish the authority of our truths, but rather confirms it, because through the light of nature those philosophers saw something of our truths, which Scripture hands us. But,' he continues with a statement of his rule, 'we do not believe the philosophers, unless they agree with Scripture.'106 The perception of pagan antiquity was only partial, Erasmus consistently teaches, and it must not only be supplemented, as if by addition, with the

Under the Pear Tree 19

revelation of the Logos incarnate, but reinterpreted according to Christian faith in that Logos. Erasmus pastorally discerns the pagan wisdom that measures up to Christ, and he advises on it. He considers some literature more wholesome than other and he repeatedly suggests the authors and examples most appropriate for Christians, according to their vocation and maturity. He also instructs how the recommended texts may be read: by the errant soldier, newly recruited to Christ, 'with discrimination - not only warily and judiciously, but also rapidly, like someone just travelling through rather than taking up residence there';107 while he allows himself, as an enlightened theologian, a lifelong indulgence in the entire literature. Erasmus maintains that not all pagan writing reflects the Logos, for some men in antiquity freely chose to deny their humanity and revel in animality. Erasmus warns Christians of reading that will corrupt them,108 and he dissociates himself from those humanists who would study the pagans only to write what he judges 'filthy pestilent godless stuff/109 He is concerned at the outset of his antibarbarian campaign lest under the cover of a restoration of classical learning, paganism will rear its head.110 And in maturity he will compose a dialogue against the pagan affectations of the Ciceronianus (1528), and issue his advice to 'call in the physician Logos/111 These views about the classics are not the persuasions of a secular or sceptical mind, as has too often been charged. All of the widsom of antiquity, and all of the mysteries which transcend it, devolve for Erasmus in Christ, who recapitulates them in himself. 'Any truth wherever you find it is Christ's/112 Erasmus instructs, for it was Christ who gave its impetus and it is to him that it refers. In Antibarbari he ventures that 'there is no erudition in existence except what is secular (and this is their name for the learning of the ancients) or at least founded on and informed by secular literature,'113 He jibes at 'Christian erudition' as 'the very reverse of erudition/114 Here he criticizes not the mysteries of religion but the systems of learning invented since antiquity. Erasmus argues that Christ himself gave Christians the achievement of classical learning as a 'harvest of creative work/ precisely so that they would not need to labour at discovering systems of

2o Christening Pagan Mysteries

knowledge, but could more easily master and apply pagan learning for the adornment and support of religion.115 'None of the liberal disciplines is Christian/ he writes, paraphrasing Lorenzo Valla's fourth preface to Elegantia, 'because they neither treat of Christ nor were invented by Christians. But/ he continues importantly surpassing, even rebuking Valla, 'they all concern Christ. You need not boggle about it: no art is excepted/116 'I am the sum of everything/ Erasmus writes of Christ. 'Everything proceeds from me, as if from a font, and everything returns to the same, to the gate of happiness/117 Just as in Ratio verae theologiae (1518) the Logos encompasses the alphabet as the rhetorical summary of everything,ll8 so in Antibarbari is he the accountant of everything, for logos may mean a mathematical sum. Christ's act of recapitulating Adam was scripturally derived from the concept of anakephalaiosis, which literally means to add up a sum of figures to the top of a column.119 In reckoning the ages, therefore, Christ is the accountant who adds up all the pagan figures to himself, who accounts providentially that 'nothing be wasted/ So in Antibarbari Erasmus necessarily rails against the impudence of those scholastics who title their books summa or summa summarum, when they are but 'heaped-up piles of stuff which leave their readers in confusion 12° rather than secure in the fullness of Christ. Such treatises are false summations of wisdom that do not attend to the presence of the Logos in human nature, which had displayed itself in classical learning and which had been offered to Christians as a 'harvest/121 In Antibarbari Erasmus represents the temper of the times as brutish, a regression to animality which offends the order of creation and the humanism of Erasmus.122 It is an age in which leasts are held in honour' and men foolishly display their asses' ears while even the asses laugh.123 Erasmus affirms that he would 'far rather live my life among the animals like those early men ... than live among this kind of brute, the most brutish of all/124 Not content to 'worship their own uncouthness/ they 'condemn other men's teaching/ and more especially they preach to the uneducated the gravest sanction against learning; namely, that 'to know Greek is heresy,

Under the Pear Tree 21

and to speak like Cicero is heresy too/125 Thus they suppress the common people and ensure the perpetuation of ignorance. The impetus for Erasmus' revival of classical wisdom was then the collapse of the Christian humanist tradition, for although conceptually it still flourished in the most enlightened minds, practically it was eclipsed by the prevailing methods and texts in the schools. This pedagogy was reinforced by the preaching of unlettered men who scored classical literature as mythological and lascivious, and who insisted on a purely Christian culture, no matter if that were a tower of Babel constructed on the straw of scholastic commentaries.126 What did Basil's praise for the eloquence of Athens matter for the intellectual life of the society into which Erasmus tumbled, when Augustine's doubts prevailed as the nearly universal authority? What did it matter if Thomas Aquinas recommended Aristotle and Cicero, when schoolmasters preferred to run boys through Peter of Spain's 'little logicals' and impale them on the thorny questions of William of Ockham?127 Erasmus immediately judges in Antibarbari the particular culture which confronted him as student and monk, for the school at Deventer was not that of Alexandria, nor was it that of Chartres. This decline of learning engages the antibarbarians in conversation under the pear tree. The tragedy of the times, barbarism, is charged ultimately to none of the stock reasons which men of antiquity had proposed for that age's decline of learning: the fate governed by the stars, the advent of Christianity, or the senescence of the world. Erasmus emphatically rejects as answers both astrological determinism and the advent of Christianity. Although they had been popular pagan explanations of the dissolution of Roman fortune, Erasmus considers them anachronistic. As for the senescence of the world, a concept which Christian apologists had borrowed from pagan philosophy and which Augustine especially elaborated, he does not accept that fatality either, even in providential dress.128 It is in the wilful human neglect, even contempt, of the gift of the Logos in nature that the world has lost its nurture. 'It is in ourselves that these fatal comets are, which breathe their destroying influence

22 Christening Pagan Mysteries

over our best studies/129 Nature does not offend, nor does religion,130 but man offends both when he spurns the fanning through education of the divine inner spark. Erasmus blames teachers who betray their lapse from humanity in 'not speaking but he-hawing with more than asinine impudence/ parents who blindly entrust their children to them, and town fathers who neglect this most civic responsibility of education.131 The natural plague raging in the cities which prompts Erasmus' retreat in Antibarbari to the countryside is an apocalyptic sign. It is matched by a symbolic plague on human nature prevailing in the schools.132 This plague is not to be met with fatalism or with hysteria about the end-time. It is to be met, as Antibarbari exemplifies as well as teaches, with study and with eloquent disputation about the resolution of the tragedy. Human responsibility for the decline and rise of learning is a critical theme of Antibarbari, because for Erasmus freedom of choice is a moral exercise of the indwelling Logos who inclines man to good. Although Erasmus' understanding of history is teleological, it is not necessitarian.133 'We ought to imitate Prometheus,' he urges, 'who when he wanted life for his clay image dared to seek it from the stars, but only when he had already applied every means available to human skill/134 History is not emptied of the meaning or purpose which men confer on and in it, as if God had only cast man in a farce. Erasmus' humanism depends on the gospel and its patristic interpretation; these routed the fatalism of pagan religion and classical philosophy. The gospel proclaimed, and theology reflected on, God's gratuitous adoption in Christ of human nature, so that through Him man would be graced with the responsibility to participate in divine nature and its economy. Justin, for example, had believed that it was through the Logos, through the seed which preserves Nature, that God 'postpones the collapse and dissolution of the universe/135 It is through that same Logos, whose presence within them men would freely recognize and nurture, that Erasmus would alter the tragic decline of his own times. Just as history was in the classical system part of rhetoric, so would history be understood by Erasmus through rhetoric, in interpret-

Under the Pear Tree 23

ing the paradigmatic Text. And so would Erasmus have history be made through rhetoric, in persuading men to consent in the choices which would sustain and promote their commonwealth in Christ. The issue is survival. Erasmus is not, as was Augustine, confronted with the sack of the city of Rome, whose ruin he need only seek to understand by speculation on the city of God, but not remedy. The modern barbarians are not intruders at the gates but saboteurs well within them, pretending to be the pure Christians who would evict the unorthodox who know Greek and speak like Cicero. If Augustine charges his perishing to stealing the pears of pagan wisdom, Erasmus will pick those fruits anew, for Christ himself has planted their seeds for a 'harvest of creative work/ Erasmus' antibarbarian campaign will 'look at the trees' for its lesson. But it will not take them as masters, for otherwise, Erasmus supposes, those trees ought to be occupying chairs of theology rather than producing them. He speculates humorously that if the monastic reformer Bernard of Clairvaux truly did have oaks and beeches for schoolmasters, then such trees must have been seedlings from the tree of knowledge in the garden of paradise, or perhaps those which admired and trooped after Orpheus and his lyre, or even were great philosophers metamorphosed by the pity of the gods on their hardships.136 Erasmus approves rather the judgment of Socrates, who could appreciate the beauty of the garden to which Phaedrus drew him in dialogue, the garden which served Erasmus as a model for Antibarbari, and yet say: 'Forgive me, my dear Phaedrus, for I am anxious to learn, and it is not fields and trees which can teach me, but men who live in towns.'137 This conviction will carry Erasmus among men in many towns, until he can invent another literary garden in which to refresh himself with new companions and say, 'Saint Socrates, pray for us/138 His antibarbarians will 'look at the trees' to learn to appropriate Nature's humble tasks of nurturing, those tasks which scriptural allegories commonly alloted to Martha. Hers was not the 'better part' of wisdom, enraptured at Christ's feet, but the lesser part which allows finally for society to foster any mystics at all: that of every craft

24 Christening Pagan Mysteries

and every lay calling, all of which Erasmus emphasizes are in origin pagan, but especially the arts of speech which establish commerce and civilization. So while Erasmus' antibarbarians will 'look at the trees/ they will look harder at the texts, to nurture men. Does Wisdom not proceed from God's mouth?139 'Wisdom/ Erasmus writes in Antibarbari, in one of his most telling statements, 'wisdom is indeed to be sought from God ... [but] just like food and clothing and the other things necessary for human life. We are commanded by God to ask daily for our daily bread, and he gives it to us every day, but does he give it to the yawners? We ask for clothing and he gives it, but to those who work. On the same lines we ask for wisdom, but on the understanding that we do not relax our human effort.'140 Justin had been martyred for the Logos, but that was Christian witness in the gospel's nascent conflict with pagan culture. The Christian culture which established itself by an accommodation of classical paideiahas in Erasmus' judgment perished. A different witness, that of work, must re-establish its foundations. Broaching in Antibarbari the debate about whether Christianity has benefited more from the blood of martyrs or the pens of scholars, Erasmus decides for the simpler usefulness of scholars, without whose persuasive records and defences the martyrs would have died in vain. The martyrs died/ he reflects, 'and so diminished the number of Christians; the scholars persuaded others and so increased it.'141 Not all works are valid in Erasmus' judgment, however, certainly not the works of the law, which he relentlessly decries as a regression to Judaism. For Erasmus it is 'works of love/ such as humbly educating children, which define true religion and confound the wisdom of those who think perfection consists in abandoning the world for monastic contemplation.142 If a martyr is silenced, a monk is still silent. Erasmus' witness is to be an eloquent work which will lighten and enlighten the labours of others, allowing the farmer at his plough and the weaver at his loom to sing the praises of the Logos from His own Text.143 His witness is to extend even to the Marys who warble in their choirs.144 Erasmus is convinced that Christians must praise God from understanding; they must be literate. For the task of educat-

Under the Pear Tree 25

ing them, the divine pedagogue himself has dispensed Erasmus in the systems of classical knowledge the men from whom he may learn to teach. Although there is 'no lack of plodding workers' in his day, they are at the wrong tasks, doing false sums. His creative work will be the reaping of Christ's harvest. To understand Erasmus' christening of pagan mysteries in pursuit of wisdom, its witness must be sought where he claims it to be, in the work of his pen. Two such works especially promise enlightenment. They do not belong to that collection of his work which is acknowledged as classical scholarship, although they defend it and although they presuppose impressive erudition. In the rhetorical and pastoral spirit of collection which is Antibarbari's, one is an oration for his most cherished friend, the other a colloquy for his most effective enemy.

This page intentionally left blank

TWO

Scholars' Ink

HOE OUDER, HOE HOTTER HOLLANDER: the Dutch gTOW 1

dot-

tier with age. Already compelled in Antibarbari to play 'the greatest fool and clown of all/2 Erasmus was again to ally his fortune with folly two decades after he had exchanged the shelter of the pear tree for the stage of the world. Although it is a trick mirror of wisdom, Morias egkomion, Stultitiae laus (1509 -» 1511) seems implausible evidence for his christening of pagan mysteries, for by the traditional reading it has to do with the satirical instruction of society.3 Moria does flaunt herself as a pagan goddess, and one tutored in the claims of Christian mysticism; but there is no such goddess in classical canon. She plays the artificial fool.4 Yet, although it has been assumed that the Moria is 'ethical rather than mystical/5 Moria does conduct willing initiates profoundly into the mysteries. Follis, from which 'fool' derives, is a windbag, suggesting puffed cheeks and the hot air of nonsense, but wind is also an archaic representation of spirit,6 and there is insinuated in this opposition the religious enigma, the holy joke by which things are not what they are (wine is blood), or are reversed (in death is life), or confused (a man is God). So a fool's cheeks may be the bellows of wisdom. In his critical role as the outsider, privileged to play while others plough, in his juggling of appearance and reality, in his clairvoyance, the fool is a natural mystery; and natural fools have often been revered as mascots of the gods, endowed with magical powers and even mystical gifts.7

28 Christening Pagan Mysteries

Scratch a mime, clown, droll, or mummer of Erasmus' day and there lurks the satyr of Greek old comedy, an entertainment derived from the religious rites of Dionysius.8 Christians who wisely saw the folly in their own rites introduced fools into the dramatic enactment of their salvation, the mystery plays. Professional fools used to tumble in the aisles at performances,9 and there is record of one who prated even while the gaping audience venerated the corpse of a St Desiderius.10 Although the fool's part in the mysteries may seem marginal to the plot - his role was facetious comment on the actors and audience - it should not be supposed that this was only a diversion, a 'sheer irrelevance/ as one critic puts it, to vary the fare of spectators wearied by the solemnities of faith's drama.11 It was rather the perfect gloss, the wisest sort of theology. Only if you appreciated the mystery did you understand the joke. The fool's babble is the antiphony to the dramatic text. It is a mime, however lowly, of the ecstatic seizure which is a transcendent response to the acts of salvation. The capers of the villains and devils also provoke in the audience a laughter which is not only cathartic (as to the clashing of cauldrons some other dolt is hauled into hell's mouth), but catholic. In the York cycle, for example, the legionnaires on Calvary clown at the foot of the cross, embarrassed that they have bored the holes in the beams all wrong, so Jesus' body won't fit.12 There is irony in their double miscalculation: a banal mismeasurement of inches and a grave mismeasurement on the cosmic rule. The joking, while out of place in the hour of a man's passion, is in place in that of God's. The divine economy is not thwarted by human bungling, only complicated, as men pit their finitude against it to spoil the plot. The spontaneous amusement of the audience is not perverse. It is secure in the religious secret. It shares in the smile of resurrection. Comedy is eschatological in its context; it presupposes knowledge of a final order and resolution beyond death. Comedy is mysterious, for this knowledge is among Christians a certitude perceived by faith only through a clouded glass. Fooling is a human covenant with the sacred. As one of Erasmus' biographers has speculated, in play 'man's consciousness that he is

Scholars7 Ink 29

embedded in a sacred order of things finds its first, highest, and holiest expression/13 It is not in asceticism then, but in its transcendence, that mystics - and Moria - consummate union with God, in playful disregard even of piety. This insight has been so dimmed, especially since the Enlightenment, that a modern theologian has summoned the children of the secular city to The Feast of Fools,14 recalling the mediaeval inversion in which Vespers were brayed rather than prayed and parody intruded even on the celebration of the Eucharistic mysteries.15 But Erasmus needed no instruction in the alliance of laughter and the sacred, or in its eschatological context. What wisdom did in heaven, he knew, was to play (Prov. 8:30). And on earth, as it is in heaven, he confers in praise of Folly not her first, but perhaps her highest and holiest expression. Although imaginative scholarship has been invested in discerning Moria as Folly,16 her identity as a pagan goddess has hardly been considered.17 The oxymoron follywise has seemed adequate to the lesson of the Moria. But while the figure of the fool alone could have provided Erasmus with sufficient resources for moralizing, and even intimations of immortality, he is not satisfied to cast Moria as a conventional holy fool whose satirical wit participates in the sacred even while it burlesques it.l8 He has her announce herself as dea, recite her theogony and divine prerogatives, boast of her graces and worship.19 But as the mother of the gods advised through Homer, 'Gods take daunting shapes when they appear/20 Moria is not a goddess whose description can be had by method. She refuses 'to explain myself by definition, still less by division. It wouldn't bode well for the future/ she warns, 'either to limit and confine one whose divinity extends so far, or to cut her up when the whole world is united in worshipping her/21 The chaos in which fools shuffle and to which they reduce the pretence of order22 further proscribes analysis of her mystery. Erasmus, however, has a licence. He shares in the Homeric gift23 by which the poet is privileged by his special faculty and his knowledge of the religious tradition to name the very goddess stirring events, although her victims can barely discern the intervention of the divine. Already in

30 Christening Pagan Mysteries

Antibarbari he had indicated that poets and theologians were identical in antiquity,24 and he defends the Moria by that norm, refusing to allow a division of his labour.25 Erasmus the pedagogue becomes the mystagogue who conducts his readers to secret and sacred truths of folly, penetrating from common appearance to uncommon significance. The universality of Folly's cult is the obvious convention. The world is her temple; all unite in her worship.26 Moria claims to be the alpha of the gods,27 rivalling their separate potencies with absolute power. She is even present in all of them, she asserts;28 to her accrues the worship deflected to them, and the veneration paid to ancestors and saints.29 In this delightful inflection of the commonplace about the infinitude of fools30 are hidden even more striking revelations: allusions to the mystery cult of antiquity, to their doctrines of death and salvation, allusions which would not have been lost on More, who knew the classics. Moria's conception, for instance, is a commonplace: Folly propagated by the illicit union of riches and youthfulness.31 But her sire Plutos became venerated as the god of riches because he was first himself the riches, the offspring of the Kore ravished by Pluto, lord of the underworld, the riches of life newly conceived and born from the funeral pyre, even underground in death. This was the analogue of human immortality celebrated in antiquity as the Eleusinian mysteries.32 Moria inserts herself into this mythology and this mystery. By her birth from Plutos she prolongs the symbol of life after death. As soon as she appears, she significantly likens her theophany and its grace to Nature's cycle, especially to its greening in spring, which was revered by the initiates at Eleusis as the favourable sign of the goddess's victory over Pluto's deathly rule.33 'Now, when the sun first shows his handsome golden visage upon earth, or after a hard winter when the new-born spring breathes out its mild west breezes, it always happens that a new face comes over everything, new colour and a kind of youthfulness return; and so it only takes the mere sight of me to give you all a different look.'34 This analogy which has been taken as only a nice ornament, a classical elegance,35 signals that Moria is a mystery goddess and that her oration will disclose

Scholars'Ink 31

secrets of immortality. The brightening of her initiates, their 'different look' will soon be apparent. Perched on Olympus to survey the follies of mortals,36 Moria has a daughter's privileged access to that other world and is privy to its secrets. Her birthplace, the Fortunate Islands,37 is not chance either. Although commentators have glossed them as a type of Eden,38 classically these islands of the blessed were not a primordial but an eschatological place, to which the happy dead were borne by the favour of the gods on ships that plied monstered oceans.39 Moria disavows the cave as her birthplace,40 for, as she will reveal, her mysteries progressively surpass those of her encomium's three pagan caves: the cave of the traditional Homeric religion, that of the newer indigenous and oriental mystery cults, and that of Plato's philosophy. In her disparaging application to her initiates of the adage about emerging from Trophonios' cave41 is reassurance that her cult is of a different sort. While the adage only suggests glum faces produced by stern oracles,42 the cave of Trophonios in Lebadeia was more specifically the site of an important mystery (Orphic) cult. If in Moria's phrase e Trophonii specu reversi may be heard not only 'come from' the cave, as translations have had it,43 but 'turned around' or 'reversed' from the cave, she refers to the initiatory ritual. The candidate descended into an artificial chasm in the earth, wriggled feet-first into the hole, and once his knees were through, was drawn in for the revelation of mysteries, and then was turned around and spewed from the cavern to be questioned by the attending priests.44 From those cavernous depths sprang Lethe, from which the mystic drank to forgetfulness, to make Mnemosune's oracular draught unforgettable. This was analogous to the mythical drinking of the shades to forget their former lives.45 Moria boasts Lethe as her own companion,46 and she transfers her to her own precinct, the Fortunate Islands.47 Lethe will figure importantly in the unravelling of Moria's secret. While oracles of Trophonios left the initiate 'paralysed with terror and unconscious/ they ensured immortality, and the ritual of the cave ended with the recovery of the 'power to laugh.'48 Moria's catechumenate is a relief, however: we are born to her devotion.

32 Christening Pagan Mysteries

Moria boasts that her cult never lacks for initiates so long as there are men on earth.49 Since none have done their duty to praise her, however, she mounts a pedestal to eulogize herself.50 Familiarly she addresses her initiates, her mystae.5* Mystae is no idle salutation. It is Moria's early and only signal of her audience, and it is emphatically her very last word too.52 This term originated at Eleusis and is peculiar to the mystery religions.53 If it is properly rendered, Moria's listeners are candidates for the higher initiation, already purified in the lesser rites and privy to the lesser mysteries, that is, already fools, but yet to behold the goddess fully in the epopteia and share in her ineffable secret. At Moria's theophany the mystics thus 'brighten up,'54 not just because as Folly she is bound to entertain them, but because anagogically she confers a beatifying vision. In the theoria, said to constitute the essential religious experience of classical antiquity, seeing the god face-to-face bestowed a gift of seeing like the gods, a transparent knowledge of eternal forms. Although this theoria was usually mediated by statues,55 Moria spurns them. 'I'm not yet so foolish as to demand statues carved in stone and coloured with paint which can often do harm to the cult of us gods, when the stupid and thick-headed give their devotion to images instead of to the divinities they represent, and we suffer the same fate as those who are supplanted by their substitutes.'56 She confers her grace in person, and men reflect her image in their lives.57 Her apparition imitates the epopteia, the manifestations at Eleusis which, crowning the initiations, conferred on the candidates immortality and bliss. But this merely foreshadows in a pagan manner that Christian beatific vision58 which will climax her revelations. Already she observes on the faces of her mystics 'a new and unusual joy'59 as their frowns smooth away and their cares are dissolved60 in a mime of heavenly release. What other orators must labour to accomplish with eloquence, she achieves with a glance.61 But speech is a more reliable mirror of the spirit than appearance, Moria concedes,62 and so she composes her oration. It parodies the ancient cultic hieros logos or sacred discourse on the legend of the divinity adored by the assembly.63 Moria the pagan

Scholars' Ink 33

goddess dispenses in her own praise mysteries not stolen from Demeter's kiste64 but pulled from her own bag of tricks. A funny sort of goddess, prattling away her secrets, Moria is herself a mock of the mystery cults: their devotees are fools. Fresh from Italy where humanists intellectually indulged pagan mysteries, Erasmus seizes on this vogue. In the most deliciously occult way he lampoons those humanists who, deciphering mysteries in arcane books, celebrate paganism, and he induces them to sample the plainer but profounder mystery which these only foreshadow, Christ. Erasmus early associated paganism with some Italian humanism,65 and with his Italian trip, two memories of which were a barbaric bullfight at a pre-Lenten carnival in Siena,66 and a decadent Ciceronian sermon on Good Friday in Rome.67 Moria thus rejects, as does he, all mystery-seekers who stray from the true mystery hidden since the foundation of the ages, but manifested in Christ: philosophers who measure Nature's secrets with a bit of string,68 theologians who by weird logic and perverse grammar 'interpret hidden mysteries to suit themselves/69 astrologers who foretell marvels by the stars,70 alchemists searching for a fifth essence with 'new and secret devices.'71 Many classical and patristic texts on Eleusis and other ancient mystery cults were available to Erasmus, with sufficient information for launching his satire; some were already satirical.72 The mysteries themselves were not without satire. At Eleusis were gephurismoi or bridge jests, as hooded persons stood on the bridge over the river Kephisos and heaped insults on prominent citizens processing to the Telesterion, perhaps to humble them for the secrets.73 Erasmus probably borrowed his idea to apotheosize folly as a mystery goddess most directly from Lucian's expose of Alexander, sen Pseudomantis, a spoof of the mystery cults of antiquity, their charlatan priests and gullible devotees, which he had recently translated (1506).74 The oxymoron morosophoi, or foolosophers, on which conceit Moria's mystery turns, is taken from there.75 Already Erasmus had noted to the bishop of Chartres to whom he dedicated the translation that the work combined black and fair wits.76 'Now this false prophet is a rascal indeed/ he had written of Alexander, "but of all men he

34 Christening Pagan Mysteries

is the most serviceable for the detection and refutation of the impostures of certain persons who even today cheat the populace, either by conjuring up miracles, or with a pretence of holiness, or by feigned indulgences and other tricks of the kind/77 If Lucian had satirized the mystery religions as a vehicle for lauding pagan Epicureanism,78 Erasmus could appropriate the same device as a platform for its Christian version.79 Although the translation of Alexander was not one of those made in collaboration with More, More must have known the satire, and appreciating its contemporary parallels, would have relished its appropriation.80 As Folly's praise of folly, the Moria is a paradoxical encomium.8l But this eulogy is even more striking in its irony, and in its instruction, when its mystical overtones and funereal undertones are heard. Initiation into the mystery religions of antiquity had promised salvation by rite rather than right to a public that craved reprieve from its lot, not only civil servitude, but the universal portion of death. By following the formulas and guarding the secrets, the candidate secured apotheosis. By celebrating the seasonal victory of the Nature gods over death, he emerged from the celebrations divinely quickened and triumphantly reborn into eternal life. Through ritual and through instruction - the things triply shown, enacted, and said - his dread of death was alleviated and his immortality ensured. As one funerary inscription tells, the mystic was 'exempt from the lot of death.'82 Through the fiction of Moria's instruction to her mystae, Erasmus will also achieve a wise lesson for salvation, a lesson designed by its entertainment to impress all the more.83 The initiate More would get the joke. As the mediaeval Summa predicantium had observed ruefully of the English, Tf anyone should tell some open folly in the pulpit, they retain it well enough.'84 If this swaggering and even jolly speech of Moria's raises doubt that it could be a meditation for death, it must be remembered that she promises a 'complex delight.'85 Her very name of folly, moria, resembles moros, death.86 Once again Erasmus perceives and addresses the need to tutor Christians in an evangelical life. Through Moria he observes that

Scholars'Ink 35

priests, who are charged with initiating men to wisdom by meditation on death, are so blinded by folly that their vision of the last things is horribly distorted. She catalogues this default. First among the fools who boast a reputation for wisdom are the schoolmen. Their philosophy does not practice death, as Plato had advised,87 but is itself moribund. How do the scholastics treat death? They claim special knowledge, depicting the details of hell as if they had spent several years there, or adding at whim an extra sphere to heaven.88 The theologians among them dwell in a third heaven, disdaining the herds who crawl the earth.89 Next come the ceremonious monks who suppose that heaven will be insufficient reward for their observances. Although they are happy in their foolish expectations, Moria predicts they will be surprised on judgment day.90 She imagines them parading before Christ, reciting self-glorifications, but being banished to the occult heavens of some gnostic sect. Or, if he relents, they may order a new heaven custom-made by the men whose foolish teaching they have set above the command of charity.91 As for the supreme priests, the popes, they think death an unattractive prospect and dying on the cross like Peter an ignominious end.92 Since death must come, they hold it only glorious to render up one's soul to God on a battlefield strewn with the carnage of Christians.93 Yet while they shun any death for themselves but that of the miles gloriosus and fancy splendid rewards, they torment the faithful with death, brandishing the weapons of interdict, suspension, excommunication, anathema. They paint vivid scenes of judgment, and dispatch souls to hell with a thunderbolt stolen from Zeus, not Christ.94 In Moria's indictment they do not differ from the Orphiotelestai, the itinerant charlatan priests of Orphism, like Lucian's Alexander, who in ancient times terrorized the people with the horrors of Hades. And Moria would boost men up from Trophonios' cave. The people, Moria observes, are deluded about imaginary pardons for sins, measuring out their time in purgatory like water clocks. They snatch at pathetic promises which reserve them a heavenly seat beside Christ in exchange for muttering a few verses.95 If they notice a painting or carving of St Christopher,

36 Christening Pagan Mysteries

they imagine they cannot die that day.96 Yet as a hedge they make elaborate funeral arrangements.97 The churches are encumbered to the rafters with votives of those who have gleefully escaped death: from drowning, from rapier, from the gallows, from prison, from fever, from poison, from highway accident, from collapsing buildings, and the adulterer from a husband with murder in his eye.98 She ridicules the senile resorts of men and women who mask creeping death with wigs, cosmetics, and false teeth, as they lecherously chase youths.99 'Mortals would prefer to pray for deliverance from anything but me/100 Moria asserts, and priests encourage them in silly superstitions against death, for profit in their pockets.101 She speculates that if some wiseacre were to preach the truth about death, that metanoia and not money purchases salvation, this would destroy the world's peace of mind and plunge it into chaos.102 This would be 'mistimed wisdom/ she decides, like that of the wise man who told a mourner to laugh because his dead father was at last beginning to live.103 Mistimed wisdom Erasmus would avoid, so to secure an audience for this prickly subject he needs not only a goddess but a fool. It is wise to play the fool in season, Moria thinks.104 Truth has a genuine power to please, she reflects, but the gods have granted truth only to fools.105 Well she knows that mortals seldom attend to the wisdom of goddesses. Perhaps they will listen to folly, tolerating whatever wisdom is slipped into the nonsense. In mediaeval literature the fool was conventionally appropriated for instruction on the last things, as he joined the estates in the dance of death, and sometimes lent death itself his cap and bells.106 This moralizing on death through the medium of fools has been claimed most famously for Sebastian Brant's Narrenschiff, of which the English translation appeared in the same year as Erasmus did his own fooling.107 But if there is genius in arousing curiosity with the promise of immortal secrets, in prompting laughter about what the culture guards as its most solemn subject - death and salvation - and in dismissing the audience for home better men, Moria's lesson is the wiser one. The 'harsh necessity of death,'108 as she terms it, has been

Scholars'Ink 37

tutored engagingly, and in delight mystics have been initiated. If it has not been clear to readers that her oration is a mystical initiation to eschatological meditation, then that is partly a score of its success. It has been claimed that humanism 'insists above all on the association between Folly, Death, and Everyman/ but that this 'implies a profoundly pessimistic and demystifying view of the human world/109 If this is so, Moria is no humanist's fool. Erasmus was convinced that 'excellence in true learning can only be secured by those who find pleasure in its pursuit/110 A lesson on that most necessary subject of death must especially delight. Let moralists clamor, as they did, that folly should not be praised, but condemned;111 the mystics laughed on cue. Erasmus knew how to treat death more soberly, as his De contemptu mundi™2 and 'Epigramma de quatuor novissimis' (c. 1489) had already displayed.113 He would demonstrate this ability also in In genere consolatorio, Declamatio de morte (i5i7)114 and especially in a treatise on preparation for death, Quomodo se quisque debeat praeparare ad mortem (1533).115 But even this treatise is an exceptionally buoyant work, suffused with hope in God's promises through the grace of faith which is in Christ.116 Its tone and teaching are remote from the doleful monitions of his ascetical contemporaries, even from More's own tract On the Four Last Things.™7 As in the Moria, Erasmus agrees with Plato that philosophy is a practice of death, and he adds that theology greatly shares this purpose.ll8 For Erasmus the contemplation of death is really a vision of true life.119 Men shrink from remembering death, he claims, not just from love of worldly goods, but from weakness of faith.120 If they were more secure in the victory which Christ has seized from the underworld, they would consider death, especially through reading Scripture,121 as the 'mother of the spiritual life/122 Meditation on death through Scripture becomes Moria's practice, and it is that final exercise of hers which at last mothers her own rebirth into spiritual life. While Erasmus complains that philosophers who lament death do not recognize the example of Christ or hear Paul's death-wish to dissolve and be with him,123 Moria metamorphosed will realize this hope. Preoccupied with interpreting the metamorphosis

38 Christening Pagan Mysteries

of folly into wisdom, scholars seem not to have read the Moria as an initiation to practice for the last things. Yet the 'harsh necessity of death,'124 is the relentless fact which satirizes all human pretension, especially the pretension to wisdom. It is precisely the eschatological dimension of the Moria which allows the satire. Man is created in God's image. Without the transcendent exemplar there is no mirror in which man may observe himself, and, like the fool in Holbein's sketch,125 see his reflection stick out its tongue at him. Although Moria is divinely the daughter of Plutos, Erasmus says that he himself conceived her in memory of More. He asks his readers to imagine himself saddle-sore and bored with the vulgar conversation of his fellow-travellers, and so as reminiscing about the congenial friendships and shared studies which might be repeated on his arrival in England.126 That is partly a conceit, for the Moria seems to have been penned as a diversion while Erasmus was bedded down in More's house, recuperating from an attack of kidney stone.127 He found his malady so excruciating that he envied the martyrs who had only to endure one stroke of the axe.128 But there would be no martyr at Bucklersbury save More, and Erasmus settled to his own work with pen and ink. Having relished the memory of More in his absence,129 he now composes a memento in his presence. It's a trifle really, Erasmus protests, likening it to a gift of table napkins which a Roman host had once valued sentimentally. 'Accept it as a remembrance of your companion,' he begs.130 Thus the remembering of More becomes a remembrance for More. By the sleight of Easmus' wit this foolish memento is punned into a wise reminder: memento mori. Remember More, and be mindful that thou art to die. This is just the sort of Christian counsel seasoned with levity that More would have relished. It has been judged that 'the words "memento mori" were his motto if ever they were anybody's.'131 More's own treatise On the Four Last Things (1522) would be constructed on that epigram: Remember the last things and thou shalt never sin.132 More soberly than satirically, men stewing in their vices are shown up by More as fools. The madman who bangs his head against a post in Bedlam

Scholars7 Ink 39

is one kind of fool. The clever man who laughs to think he has outwitted his neighbour is another, for he casts his soul into hell-fire. Prisoners condemned to death are we all, tolls More, and so 'a secret sorrow marreth all such outward mirth/133 Men proud of their players' garments are foolish, for they will exit poor of them in death;134 covetous niggards seem wise, but in their hoardings are more foolish than those who live hand-tomouth, for death claims all treasure.135 Envy is a vice not only devilish but foolish;136 wrath is either foolish pride or proud folly.137 More too could play the fool about death, and there is little wonder that Erasmus recognized the ars moriendi, the art of dying, as the art of being More. In his De duplici copia verborum ac rerum commentarii duo (1512), Erasmus will propose to schoolboys for their copybooks no less than two hundred variations on this theme: remember More, remember death.138 Although Erasmus could scoff in Antibarbari at the senescence of the world,139 his own death preoccupied him during that return trip to More, as it had on his first transalpine journey.140 Just before his departure for Italy, Erasmus had confided to Servatius Rogerus, now his prior but a friend from youth, his resolution to contemplate death and the state of his soul, incited by the thought of the fleeting years which frail health still allowed him.141 On route he composed a 'Carmen de senectute' (1506), in which he regretted that the Erasmus who once flourished begins to sense the pressing dangers of old age.142 In Italy he laboured over a 'Consolatio de morte filii premature praerepti/143 And having ogled the spectacle of ambition in the Italian arena, and pilfered some of it for himself with the vain doctorate from Turin, he not only had death but folly on which to muse during that return journey. The Moria is alive with the types of humanity that clattered about him, but he confesses himself also Folly's minion.144 As he was so musing on her praise, the presentiment of death overshadowed him. By chance, just before leaving Italy for his stay with More, he had himself been given a memento, a signet ring whose emblem he took to be Terminus, the Roman god of boundaries. By choice he adopted the emblem as his own, and

40 Christening Pagan Mysteries

had a seal engraved with the added motto, Concede nulli.145 Unlike ancient Christians who scrupled to wear a ring with a pagan seal,146 Erasmus judged his a pagan god bearing Christian truths.147 He preserved it as a reminder to amend his life since death ends all, yielding to no man. More chillingly, he regarded the gift as an omen of his own impending death:148 a memento mori. Did the recurrent attack of kidney stone, which bedded him at Bucklersbury while writing the Moria, alarm him as the onslaught of this omened death? Erasmus could not blame the malady on More's good English board, as he had originally on the bad wine at Andreas Asulanus' home.149 If Erasmus did sense the warning of Terminus in this recurrent attack, survival may account for some of the effervescence of the Moria: a memento mori by a man reprieved. (Perhaps there is a double sense in which medicine is dubbed 'flattery7 in the Moria,150 for it flattered Erasmus with a stay of sentence.) The conception of Moria, the idea to praise folly, sprang from wisdom, Erasmus tells More.151 Is it fortuitous then that Moria's mother is Neotete? It seems only conventional for a nymph to bear folly, since the nymphs of classical mythology afflicted with madness whomever they encountered.152 But a darker significance may be plumbed. Neotete's Roman counterpart is Juventas, by legend Terminus' sole ally in his defiance against the construction of a temple to Jupiter. She is said to have lent Terminus the youthful visage which appears on Erasmus' seal.153 Neotete may allude to the alliance of wisdom with the final boundary of death, and that of folly with youthful origins. Just as in mythology Neotete is allied with Terminus, so in Erasmus' biography she may be a clue to the link between the gift of the Terminus ring and the conception of Moria, two memento mori. In writing of the gift of that ring he reverts to the very same Greek word he had used to convey the Moria to More: mnemosune.*54 And so a gift from one Alexander, a friend in whose memory Erasmus would only too soon compose a meditation on death,155 may have prompted Erasmus to consider how he might convert yet another Alexander into a gift for another friend.

Scholars'Ink 41

As the visionaries of Moria behold the goddess, seeking enlightenment about death and salvation, so they are viewed in turn.156 Hers is not the 'fixed grim stare' of wisdom,157 but one tempered by a sympathy recalling the laughter of the gods.158 As her lesson she does not recite aphorisms and axioms about the last things, but rather she parades her initiates before themselves as they are divinely perceived. Reflecting on this spectacle, the mystics may draw their own inferences about how better to practice death. There is no escaping Moria's cult - all must be fools - but there is a choice of disciplines. As she presents her various devotees, the audience may reflect on the kinds and degrees of initiation into folly, and decide which devotion to adopt. The ultimate decision will be between pagan and Christian folly, with a glorious revelation privileged to the few mystics who will scale the heights of folly. So avoiding the cave where those obsolete Homeric gods propagate, and emerging from Trophonios' cave, Moria's mystics are introduced to Plato's cave. There chained men marvel at shadows and scornfully evict the man of understanding who judges their illusions insane.159 In Plato's philosophy, which claimed to exceed the mysteries of Eleusis160 and which was enjoying a revival among Erasmus' contemporaries, including More,161 men are fettered to their mortal bodies, and so see only shadows of reality. By practising death, however, as Moria explains, they may train their minds to perceive incorporeal reality, and being seized by a divine furor may strain to break their bonds and win freedom.162 So do the mystics of the 'book mysteries' strive for immortality. There is, however, escape from this third cave too, Moria discloses, an escape testified to by mystics like Paul, who admitted being a fool while 'out of the body,' seized by a rapturous foretaste of hecivenly fooling.163 The book mysteries thus yield to the mystery of the Book. In the eschatological madness to which devout Christians aspire, Moria explains that the spirit will overcome the body which it has purged in preparation for transfiguration. The spirit itself will be overcome, by that very Logos who integrates all things to himself.164 And this, Moria

42 Christening Pagan Mysteries

triumphantly reveals, is the part of folly which is not taken away by the transformation of life, but made perfect/65 The same Folly that causes their death admits men to eternal life. Escape and ecstasy are possible, Moria discloses, because Christians have discovered a fourth and most mystical cave, the tomb of Christ, in which they recline foolishly with him through the eating and drinking of the Eucharistic mysteries.166 The significance of this ritual, she explains, is initiation into Christ's death, through which he was made a fool to aid human folly and sin to redeem sinners.167 But just as the mystics of antiquity whom Lucian satirized in Alexander were mired in the observance of ritual, scarcely perceiving the mysteries represented, so Moria complains that modern initiates of the Eucharist barely comprehend it. The crowd ... thinks the sacrifice of the mass means no more than crowding as close as possible to the altars, hearing the sound of the words, and watching the ritual down to the smallest detail/ she regrets.168 Taking her cue from the devout, Moria instructs that, while the rite should not be rejected, it is worthless, even harmful, if the spiritual element, symbolically represented in the physical elements of bread and wine, is ignored.169 The Eucharist, she affirms, 'represents the death of Christ, which men must express through the mastery and extinction of their bodily passions, laying them in the tomb, as it were, in order to rise again to a new life wherein they can be united with him and with each other. This then/ she concludes, 'is how the pious man acts, and this is his purpose/170 By entering this fourth cave, by being initiated wholly into the mysteries which the rites signify, Moria's mystics may secure the apotheosis for which men since Eleusis have longed: resurrection from the tomb, eternal communion with the gods. The choice is theirs. The instruction is clear, a direct address in which men are convicted of folly and summoned to her mysticism. 'I had exactly the same principles in the Praise of Folly as in my other works/ Erasmus was later to explain, 'although my method was different. In the Enchiridion I have a straightforward pattern for the Christian life ... In the Praise of Folly I did in a jesting fashion exactly what I had done in the Enchiridion.'*7* Erasmus

Scholars'Ink 43

has exploited a foolish pagan goddess for wise Christian instruction. The Moria glosses the rule of Enchiridion that 'he is happily a fool who is wise in Christ, miserably a fool who does not know him/172 The lesson of the Moria, in the eschatological light which justifies it, is plain to the perceptive reader. But although the Moria is a humanist memento mori, directing men to exchange their baser follies for higher ones, and so by this conversion to fool in eternal bliss, it remains her own paradoxical praise. And it is indeed her eulogy,173 but anagogically a funereal one. An amusing funeral oration? One demanding applause? Aristotle had ruled that the laus in all forms was solely for the delight of audiences, and it was under this rubric that the laudatio or contiofunebris was classically assumed. The orator stirred in the mourners a sympathetic memory of the departed and the desire to emulate his virtues, achievements, and ancestors.174 Dedicated equally to the praise of the deceased and to the praise of his ancestors, the eulogy marked the place of the deceased in the line of descendants from a common ancestor and highlighted his actions and honours as a personal contribution to the family's glory.175 Quintilian advised that the country of birth, parents, and ancestors ought to be mentioned first, and that the orator should then demonstrate either that the praised lived up to these good names, or that by his achievement he brought fame on humble origins. He noted that the audience especially enjoys hearing what the deceased was the first and only one to perform, with emphasis on what he did for others rather than for himself.176 Cicero thought it important to indicate that the praised had properly used his natural endowments and the advantages of his birth and station, that he had suffered loss with patience and achievement with virtue.177 The eulogy of noblewomen, allowed towards the end of the first century B.C., substituted for the apology of the masculine honores the feminine bona domestica, enumerating the virtues of modesty, compliance, courtesy, facility, honesty, diligence, and faith; skill at weaving; and the details of marriage, children, patrimony, and heritage.178 Adhering to these rhetorical rules, Moria obliges her audience: by delineating her country of birth, her parents and ancestors, and

44 Christening Pagan Mysteries

praising herself precisely through her indwelling in all those gods; by singling out her virtues and deeds, especially her unique achievements and her services to others. 'Since the boundary between virtue and vice is often ill defined/ with Quintilian's permission she tempers her vices.179 Her delivery is not tristis and summissa, as he had advised,180 but there is, even in this mock eulogy, an undertow of regret, of folly's lament for folly, that sustains the satire. Her eulogy is remote from the seminal epitaphios logos for the fallen heroes of Athens or Sparta. It is more like the clever speech for the dead, implying witty improvisation, of which Anaxandrides wrote.lSl Merrymaking by musicians and actors was allowed at the funerals of classical antiquity, and at least Vespasian's cortege was entertained by fools, especially the arch-buffoon Favor who caricatured the emperor.182 The masquerading in ancestral faces which was customary in the funeral procession and on the rostrum183 also suggests the element of play which pervades the Moria. Its anagogical instruction derives from the Christian funeral oration, which in the patristic era added to the pagan rhetorical form a catechesis in the mysteries of faith, especially the last things. But her eulogy most shares the mood of the riotous celebrations of the dying and rising gods in the mystery cults, and as her dying life winds around the spiral of the divine economy it ascends to the jubilee of the new Christian rites of spring. The signals of Moria's own death are there: in her metamorphosis from pagan wag to Christian sage and in her farewell to her initiates. When men of antiquity were in danger of dying, Moria clues her mystics early in her eulogy, the gods of fiction would rescue them by metamorphosis.184 This intervention was, she adds scornfully, 'as if becoming something else were not just the same as dying/ and she pities those saved by it.185 The metamorphosis of Moria, from pagan goddess to Christian mediatrix, imitates that same rescue, as wrought by the god of her own fiction, Erasmus. There is no corpse or burial. Moria's death is not natural. In Erasmus' theological scheme there are four kinds of death: spiritual, natural, transformative, and eternal,186 and of these Moria's is the third. Transformative death is the 'happiest'

Scholars' Ink 45

one, Erasmus teaches, for it changes man from the image of the old Adam to that of the new, Christ Jesus. It accomplishes this by a separation of spirit from flesh, so that men no longer live, but Christ in them.187 In the transformation of Moria's personality, Erasmus signals her death, even as by it he rescues her for another life. Moria's own method of metamorphosis was to lead the elderly to the spring of Lethe, where they would drink to forget their former lives as an easement into death.188 As she herself drifts into death, she becomes forgetful, in preparation for a true forgetting in which she will no longer live but Christ in her. 'But I've long been forgetting who I am/ she apologizes at the coda of her eulogy.189 This apology is a rhetorical device to bring the composition to its close. There has to be a limit sometime to a speech and I shall come to an end/ she explains.190 But her apology also marks the reason why the eulogy must end, as Moria forgets her former life and dies, mystically transformed. She claims she can ward off the relentless advance of old age.191 Can folly die? Moria's final appeal, plaudite,*92 recalls that her eulogy is fiction; the notion of folly's death, mordant. But the irony couches a humanist prognostication that if men do remember the last things, they will forget sin and so transform their pagan revels into Christian folly. Perhaps folly can die, Erasmus hints, if more men like More prevail, men 'completely stranger'193 to Moria's pagan cult. This eulogy is, after all, in praise of More too, and the ars moriendi the double art of dying and of being More. More himself would pun: You delay, in case your expectation of staying be extended; even a fool can advise you, More, on that score. Cease to delay and contemplate staying in heaven; even a fool can advise you, More, on that score.194

In Moria's farewell she issues a series of instructions to her initiates which resolve her oration: valete, plaudite, vivite, bibite, Moriae celeberrimi mystae.195 If Sir Thomas Chaloner's translation of vivite, bibite as 'Hue and drinke all out carelesse'196 is right, if

46 Christening Pagan Mysteries

Moria is only advising a foolish stupor to anaesthetize mortals against the sting of death, then her revelation is common epicureanism.197 But these commands may be imagined as her four last words on the four last things. Moria's eulogy ends not with the vale of the pagan departure ceremony at graveside, not with Virgil's rolling 'salve aeternum mihi, maxime Palla, aeternumque vale/ but with the bright invocation vale, vivas, the burial prayer of Christian antiquity.198 Ascending into heaven, Moria wishes her mystics eternal life as initiates of the new mysteries. She greets them from her new heights: Farewell, my fools, and may you live in Christ! She bids them also to drink, bibite. One of Moria's interpreters has emphasized this command as the most striking symbol of the transvaluation of values in her encomium. It seems preposterous, he argues, that Erasmus would counsel inebriation to remedy life's ills. 'Even his fool is not that foolish,' he claims. Rather the command 'demonstrates succinctly not only the iconoclastic gesture implied in rejecting sobriety, but also the humane common sense that creates the premises for the devil's advocate.' Recalling that since Noah's escapade overindulgence has been a conventional symbol for debasement and rejection of grace, it is clear to him that 'only a fool would praise drunkenness - and so Stultitia does.' Erasmus and his fool 'clink their glasses and urge us to drink up, to forget for a moment the cares of the soul, explaining in jesting tones of utmost earnestness that where ignorance is bliss, it is folly to be wise.'199 But this is only a moral reading, and it must finally be allowed, as it is, that 'on a higher level she is also asking us... to drink from 'that large flowyng well of eternal felicitee' which is Christ.'200 Drinking was conventionally the occupation of fools. In the Feast of Fools, when early each January the subdeacons attached to some cathedrals turned their vestments inside out, and with a great jangling of bells and censing with old shoes, leapt to the choir stalls to hold mock Mass, wine was the sap of celebration. It poured freely, washing down the black puddings eaten at the altar and fortifying the wit which lashed ecclesiastical superiors.201 In the literature of the Middle Ages and the Renais-

Scholars' Ink 47

sance, moreover, a toast conventionally capped a parodic sermon.202 But if mysteries may still be divined in commonplaces, Moria's invitation to a life of inebriation, vivite, bibite, is uttered more wisely than foolishly. Her initiates come to her already tipsy with the nectar and nepenthe of the Homeric gods.203 She offers them a drink surpassing that of the mystery god Dionysius: a 'perpetual intoxication'204 with transports of rejoicing and delight. Her command is a mystical summons to the drunkenness of divine possession. Drunkenness was indeed 'a conventional symbol for debasement and rejection of grace/ but it was also one for its antithesis. Moria's vivite, bibite is uttered anagogically in this second sense. It duplicates the ritual toast with which the initiates of the Dionysiac mysteries greeted one another.205 At Eleusis too there were 'gay revels, the merry cries ... reminiscent of the festivals of Dionysios,'206 and the ritual drinking of the kukeon.207 It was in the cultic banquets that the mystics communed most efficaciously with the gods. Drinking the cup of consecrated wine stirred in their still mortal flesh a divine indwelling, and anticipated the rapture of the banquet in the Elysian fields. Ritual drunkenness was thus revered as a divine possession, invigorating body and spirit.208 (This secret Moria would have imbibed from her wet nurse, none other than Bacchus' daughter, Drunkenness herself.)209 The frenzied repasts were also wakes for the dying gods of the mysteries, as the initiates revelled in the presence of Pluto (death) himself.210 The descent of the beloved god or goddess to the underworld to combat Hades and so to rescue the mystics prompted ritual lamentation. Clement of Alexandria, describing the mysteries as enacted in the second Christian century, reports that mourning for the gods was essential to the ritual: 'In one word, murders and funeral rites!'211 The parting words of Moria's eulogy assume in this context the significance of the last greeting at graveside.212 Since, as she mentions, none of her cult have done their duty to praise her,213 she must speak her own eulogy and greet her own survivors. Only with her death has come the overdue encomium. Only in being transformed does she merit praise. She enjoins her mystae

48 Christening Pagan Mysteries

to the feast due her, especially the wine and water which quench the insatiable thirst of the dead, whose mouths wither when their humours dry up. Inebriation was the rule at the funerals of antiquity. The customary feasts on the grave and on the dead man's hearth were not solemn but riotous, as the drinks went round to dissolve grief and to console the shade for his lot. Archaeological excavation of potsherds strewn on graves attests to the custom of pouring liquid down pipes to the calcinating bones. One Roman clamoured in his epitaph, 'Passerby, if you are benevolent pour wine into the cup, drink and give me some.' Even Christians were to pray, as they still do in the modern requiem, for the 'refreshment' of the dead, although Tertullian observed of the merry mourners, 'You really make the offerings to yourselves and you return home tipsy.'214 With the diffusion of the mystery religions, participation in a funeral banquet became a guarantee of the salvation of those sharing it. The stupor of mourners at the graveside became confused with the bacchanalian communion in which wine was the liquor of immortality. The forgetfulness of cares which the sacred drink conferred was linked with the drinking of Lethe. And so the graveyard libations came to presage the banquet at which the blessed would feast posthumously. The toast 'drink and live' was an act of faith in salvation through the merry meals which gathered men about the grave.215 With her toast, Moria bids her mystics, who are 'most celebrated'216 because they are most celebrating, to live and drink. They will live if they drink of her companion Lethe to forget Moria's pagan cult which has absorbed them, and to prepare themselves for transformative death and rebirth to a spiritual life. Once they have drunk from Lethe, or forgetting, they must slake their thirst for living water at the well of Mnemosune, remembering. Mnemosune was essential to the ancient mystery rites: the initiate's recollection of the secrets revealed in ecstasy.217 It is christened in the Moria. Mnemosune is first the Moria itself, for that is exactly the word Erasmus used to convey its gift to More, the remembering of More which became a rememberance for More. At its deep and covert spring Moria's

Scholars' Ink 49

initiates must drink. In the wisdom of that praising memento they will discover Mnemosune as the waters which flow most purely, not from Trophonios' cave but from another one, the tomb of Christ, where Christians drink to remember his death: in the stream, mingled with blood, which flowed from his side, down the cross, soaking into the underworld peopled with holy ancients whom he would release, running to the Jordan where he had been baptized into death and into whose death Christians would be baptized, a water to be turned into wine, a wine for immortality. Moria recalls that pagans judged the apostles, the first initiates of the new mysteries, to be 'drunk on new wine/218 and she claims their folly as entirely hers. If Folly is silly, however, it is in the old sense of 'blessed/ A celebration is thus in order for Moria's wake. But while her eulogy is declaimed at a feast of fools, it promises no fool's paradise. Erasmus pretended to entertain More with only table napkins, but he has spread a mystical banquet, the holiday to which his workdays add, 'for all studies are directed toward beatitude/219 Moria's apparition is only appearance, however. To assume reality, and so to transcend her fiction in an afterlife which Erasmus leaves his readers to prolong meditatively, she must herself be initiated to a higher epopoteia, the vision of God in Christ. Vision, traditionally a theological metaphor for eschatological participation in God, is a transforming, purifying perfection. And so it is that Moria must be changed, into her 'better part' which more resembles her parent the god than the nymph. Moria must mount the pedestal to eulogize her dying self because foolishly she has mounted the cross. While the death of God was the death of the gods, it was especially hers. It was she who abetted Christ's passion; while the disciples slept, she encouraged him. Hadn't she done her duty since 'being a god means helping mortals'?220 'All the emotions belong to Folly/ Moria explains, 'and this is what marks the wise man off from the fool; he is ruled by reason, the fool by his emotions/221 Christ's death was not a reasonable act, she explains, and so by definition, unwise. If folly means being swayed by the will of the passions, then in its total passion Christ's death on the cross was folly's

50 Christening Pagan Mysteries

death.222 Before the collaboration of Moria with Christ, death was not foolish. It was the inexorable law of nature, enforced by fate, Moria's shadow-sister Moira.223 Only attempts to transgress beyond that natural law which defines man as mortal and demands of him only his death were foolish. The death-defying act of birth was especially ridiculous.224 In propagating and in priding themselves on honour, wealth, and fame, men strove foolishly to escape necessity and win immortality. (As Augustine observed under the pear tree, all sin is a perverse imitation of God.225) Such folly devoted all men to Moria. What tricked her was the one unnecessary death, the death of God, who foolishly chose it. In that death, death itself was confounded, and so was folly. Moria was truly mystified. Her eulogy necessarily differs then from the classical laments of tragic heroines for their own deaths.226 She is a comic figure in the profound sense which Christ's death and resurrection allow. She enjoins her initiates to celebrate, therefore, a new festival, for if the pagan gods used to laugh at mortal men, new men immortalized may now rejoice with them. Moria's sire Plutos could only give her riches, the sort of death money bought and the guarantee of a pagan immortality. But in her collaboration with Christ, Moria has undergone that conversion which she claims is the true price of salvation.227 And so she becomes an eschatological woman,228 deserving of praise. If it was by Maria's consent that Christ was born, it was by Moria's that he died. Moria is only a slip of a vowel from Maria229 whom Christians have venerated as the antithesis of pagan folly, as the true wisdom who plays before God's throne. And Maria is only a vowel removed from Moria because in her God has confounded the wisdom of men by choosing a foolish playmate. It was the very verse from Maria's Magnificat chanted at Vespers, 'He has put the mighty from their thrones, and exalted those of low degree' (Lk 1:52), that initiated the traditional Feast of Fools, allowing fools to parody the sacred and usurp its privileges.230 Although Moria initially denies that she is wise, she pleads only her appearance as betraying her identity.231 Appearances deceive, however; metamorphosed she assumes reality. Once

Scholars7 Ink 51

her mystics are released from the caves where shadows are mistaken for reality into the strong illumination of evangelical truth, they will behold their goddess glorying in the higher epopteia which is the vision of God in Christ. All human affairs, Moria says, are a Silenus, like the ridiculous carvings of antiquity which concealed divine images. Especially is death such a Silenus: look within it and discover its opposite.232 Just as Silenus figured importantly in the ancient mysteries,233 so is he emblematic of the new, for Christ as wisdom made folly is a Silenus,234 as is Moria, folly made wisdom. Moria's imitative exchange of roles with Maria is the female counterpart of the transformation of the old Adam into the new, who is Christ.235 Having in her collaboration with Christ's passion usurped Maria's role as co-redemptrix, Moria inherits her privilege as mediatrix of all graces too. She pleads the cases of men before Christ in heaven. It is Moria, the folly in men, who saves them. Tolly finds favour in heaven,' she explains, 'because she alone is granted the forgiveness of sins.' She relates how the wise men of Israel depended on her to excuse their faults to God.236 'Still more forceful,' she continues, 'is the argument that when Christ prayed on the cross for his enemies, "Father, forgive them7' he made no other excuse for them but their ignorance: "for they do not know what they do." What else is acting ignorantly/ she pleads, 'than acting foolishly, with no evil intent.'237 The apostle Paul, who was mystically initiated even in this life, admits his foolishness and confirms that mercy is only dispensed through folly's defence.238 Because folly has collaborated with Christ, even against her pagan will,239 she is privileged by his words of forgiveness in his moronic moment of passion. She has a claim on him that rivals the one mediaeval devotees supposed Maria had as his natural mother: the ability to make him relent mercifully, even against his will, to smile for folly's sake on her devotees. Although the apostolic community (Col 1:15-20) and the Fathers had interpreted personified wisdom as Christ, by an extension of the communicatio idiomatum, in which the human and divine natures of Christ were explained to share the attributes proper to each, mediaeval apologists increasingly yielded to

52 Christening Pagan Mysteries

Maria the roles and prerogatives of her Son. The popular Mariale announced that, just as Christ had been the redeemer through his passion, so is Maria the adjutor-redeemer through her compassion.240 De laudibus Sanctae Mariae portrayed her as more merciful than God. She enjoyed a special power to resuscitate sinners just dead and in the devil's grasp, so that they might still do penance.241 Other apologists more boldly asserted that she was redemptrix and saviour. Not all theologians were as flamboyant in their praise of Maria as humanist and Protestant reformers would later claim. Thomas Aquinas, for example, concedes only that, through giving birth to the author of grace, Maria brought grace to men 'somehow,' and he avoids in his Summa theologiae any discussion of her intercession in heaven or her association with redemption on the cross.242 But the din of devotion was sufficiently loud to arouse Erasmus. Moria complains in her encomium that the ordinary, ignorant man attributes more to Maria than to her Son,243 encouraged by the extrapolations of theologians, who prove more facts about her through logic than the apostles who knew her personally ventured to state.244 And so, while the emulation of her virtues is neglected, supplicatory candles flare to Maria even in broad daylight.245 In his annotation of Lk 2:51, Erasmus later rails against devotees who imagine that Christ is under the thumb of his mother. This is preposterous, he declares, when even civil law allows sons of age to do as they will without parental consent.246 And through the mediation of Erasmus' pen, Maria finally sends to earth a grateful note, expressing her relief that Luther has put a stop to the prayers incessantly ascending to her. For it is always she who is asked, she complains in exhaustion, as if her Son were still a nursling who would not refuse her anything for fear she would deny him the breast.247 In Erasmus' correction of kecharitomene at Lk 1:28 she is not 'full of grace' (gratia plena) but more modestly 'in favor' (gratiosa).248 In allowing Moria to usurp Maria's popular prerogatives, even her biblical title gratiosa,2*9 Erasmus suggests that salvation does not require extraordinary interventions, but is nurtured within every man's nature, as graced by God's benevolent smile. What wins favour with God is the very folly which defines man even as

Scholars'Ink 53

he strives to heighten it; this is gratuitous love of Creator for creature. Because the Son has assumed that same human nature, becoming a fool, he can appreciate the human predicament. Erasmus might well have repeated the scriptural encouragement: Tor we have not a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin. Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need' (Heb 4:15-16). In Moria's heaven, a fool's paradise, none are condemned. Even those itinerant charlatan priests of the new mysteries, whom Christ will not recognize for their lack of charity, are allowed to construct a heaven of their own.250 And so the transformation of Moria into Maria repeats the palindrome Eva/Ave by which one woman's foolishness for the race is recapitulated by another's. In her eulogy Moria adapts the classical encomium and the contemporary genre of the mock sermon. But she also cleverly parodies a more ancient discourse than these: the self-praise of Wisdom in Proverbs 8-9. In that instruction which climaxes the prologue to the proverbs, lady Wisdom appears at the city's crossroads, crying: O men! I am calling to you; my cry goes out to the sons of men. You ignorant ones! Study discretion; and you fools, come to your senses! (Prov 8:4-5) She enumerates her rights to attention: her sincerity - her words conform precisely to her reality (6-11); her gifts of discretion, lucidity of thought, advice and sound judgment (12-16), her favours of justice, riches, and honour (17-21), all of which guarantee success in regulating one's life and in guiding others; her divine origin as first-born from the Lord, playing in his presence (22-26); and her role in creation, playing everywhere, delighting to be with the sons of men (27-31). Erasmus exploits these verses as Moria appears, publicly enumerating the very same rights to attention as had lady Wisdom: her sincerity, her gifts, her divine origin, and her playful role in heaven and on

54 Christening Pagan Mysteries

earth. She need not seek disciples, as lady Wisdom must, and so she asserts her right to be pronounced alpha, the first-born who plays among the gods and men.251 The parallel between Proverbs and the Moria continues. Concluding her biblical discourse, Wisdom slaughters beasts, prepares wine, and dispatches maidservants to invite men to her banquet: 'Who is ignorant? Let him step this way/ To the fool she says, 'Come and eat my bread drink the wine I have prepared! Leave your folly and you will live, walk in the ways of perception.' (9:4-6)

Aping Wisdom, dame Folly appears. Acting on impulse, a childish know-nothing, she sits by her doorstep and invites passersby: 'Who is ignorant? Let him step this way/ To the fool she says, 'Stolen waters are sweet, and bread tastes better when eaten in secret/ (16-18)

Scripture comments on her invitation: The fellow does not realize that here the Shades are gathered, that her guests are heading for the valleys of Sheol. (18)

In this biblical parallel, fools are publicly addressed and summoned to choose between two banquets: one which fortifies them for life, one which drags them to death (sheol = underworld). The banquet which Wisdom spreads suggests the eschatological banquet which Yahweh promises Israel. For Christian exegetes it adumbrates the messianic banquet which Jesus serves, the wine of wisdom and the bread of teaching which he extends, and also his flesh and blood in the Eucharist, which itself anticipates the heavenly feast.252 Exegetes agree, however, that most immediately Wisdom's banquet is the several collec-

Scholars'Ink 55

tions of proverbs which follow her discourse.233 Her self-praising prologue is, as she compares it, an entrance-hall for that house of instruction in which the conduct of the wise man and the fool are contrasted. In a clever parody of this pericope, Erasmus too has Moria conclude her self-praise with an invitation to a banquet: bibite, drink up, fools. She utters this not as biblical lady Wisdom nor as dame Folly, but as herself, the transfigured Foolosopher. Perception, Wisdom had taught, is the beginning of wisdom. Those mystics who have discerned Moria's mysteries will choose the part of her which is not taken away in death but perfected. They will feast on the bread and wine of immortality, presaging the enlightenment of a beatific vision and the eschatological banquet they will enjoy in her company. Those mystics who are still fettered by their bodies and perceive only shadows will look instead to their daily bread and butter, mired in the physical order which is her baser self. The Moria, Erasmus had told More, is only table napkins.254 Where then is the literary feast? Moria quotes Proverbs freely: 'Folly is joy to the fool/ A dash of Proverbs fits in her satire.255 They often bite, and their prevalent literary form ma$al, likely originated in popular forms of satire and clever observation.256 But if the literary imitation of Proverbs may be extended, then Moria's festal invitation may allude to yet another collection of proverbs, one to follow her discourse as if to supply the peroration she had skipped.257 Perhaps the intimated feast is in the shipment of Erasmus' books, due to arrive at More's house any day: the Adagiorum Chiliades (i5o8)258 which Erasmus had compiled in Italy and sweated through the Aldine press. It was the work which had secured Erasmus' triumphant return to England, as, impressed by its erudition, the archbishop of Canterbury, William Warham, had sent him funds for travel and the promise of a benefice.259 Moria refers explicitly to Adagia, feigning that she doesn't wish her mystics to imagine she has been plundering the notebooks of her friend Erasmus.260 But plunder she does, bagging so much seasoning for her encomium. Liking to say, 'whatever is on the tip of my tongue' (itself an adage),261

56 Christening Pagan Mysteries

she spews a mishmash of sayings to rival that method of farrago from which her author had learned at De venter.262 Dozens of adages dot her speech, betraying Erasmus' new collection. In the prolegomena to Adagia, Erasmus specifies as approval for his task the authority to the Hebrew sages, who compiled books of proverbs and couched in them mysteries for adoration.263 Christ took particular delight in these proverbs, he notes, and he should be imitated, by veneration of them as a sacred accommodation of mysteries.264 Erasmus thus aligns his labour with biblical Wisdom literature, notably Proverbs, and implies that his own anthology extends its tradition. The function of biblical proverbs as accommodations of divine mysteries further suggests that Erasmus' Adagia might be read imaginatively as Moria's legomena, an equivalent to the 'sayings' which comprised the instruction of the mystery cults of antiquity.265 How are adages to be used? Erasmus asks. They may be appropriated, he advises, not as food but as condiment, that is, not to satiety but for grace.266 Adagia then is not the entire feast Erasmus would spread. That would only be served in the text of the New Testament, edited, translated, annotated, and paraphrased, as the colloquy 'Convivium religiosum' (1522) tells.267 Adagia provides instead accompaniments to table napkins: condiments to whet a man's taste for wisdom's full banquet, appetizers as it were, although many of its samplers found the volume substantial enough. Wisdom, sapientia, derives etymologically from taste, sapor, and means first of all good taste. So Erasmus' gift of the Moria to More may be summarized by an adage which recommends such remembering: Salem et mensam ne praetereas: 'Do not forget friendship's laws: salt and a shared meal.'268 In Adagia, from which either an adolescent or an accomplished humanist could draw embellishment for his writing, and be tutored in good scholarship by observing Erasmus' method of indicating authorities, contesting sources and interpretations, and approving the best, he might secure something of those intellectual virtues which lady Wisdom had promised through the study of her Proverbs: discretion, lucidity of thought, advice, and sound judgment. Adagia are not overtly religious, or even

Scholars' Ink 57

always moral. Only one is included from Proverbs, Ferrum ferro acuitur.269 Apologizing for his slight attention to Scripture in Adagia, Erasmus explains that Scripture requires special reverence, and that its sayings are readily available.270 He had intended to accompany his collection of classical adages with other classical resources - remarkable metaphors, witty sayings, poetic allegories - and with an anthology of patristic allegories on the good life, but had abandoned the work in fatigue and for lack of Greek books.271 The biblical proverbs, however, are not so obviously spiritual either, in dispensing such advice as: Gathering in summer is the mark of the prudent, sleeping at harvest is the sign of the shameless,

which owes more to the mores of an agricultural society than to any covenant with Yahweh, or As vinegar to the teeth, smoke to the eyes, so the sluggard to the one who sends him,

which reflects conventionally the irritation of masters with dawdling messengers, or A golden ring in the snout of a pig is a lovely woman who lacks discretion.

With philological methods which Erasmus would pioneer, exegetes in this century have displayed the parallels of Hebrew Proverbs with those of neighbouring pagan cultures, the Egyptian Sebayit for example,272 demonstrating that there is no monopoly on wisdom or divine disapproval of appropriating its pagan expression to teach the ways of God. In his Adagia Erasmus also juxtaposes pagan wisdom with Scripture and the Fathers who interpreted it. All adages which utter honest words may stand in Wisdom's roomy house among her seven pillars. From them a man may extract a learning invested with wisdom.273 As one adage proclaims, it is out of sorts to have 'an ass bearing mysteries.' This saying originated, Erasmus instructs, from the ancient practice of having an ass carry the sacred objects in procession at Eleusis. But that, he draws the analogy, is

58 Christening Pagan Mysteries

as inappropriate as an unlearned man donning the doctoral hood and ring.274 Erasmus hadn't so dissembled; neither should his readers. 'An ass bearing mysteries' describes Moria well. But if her transformed mystics are to bear her mysteries, they will have to unload asinine ways and shoulder learning. Adagia can be an excellent tutor in the perception that is the beginning of wisdom. The Christian service to which these pagan sayings were put has already been well emphasized.275 Such accommodation imitated the pedagogy by which God uses familiar, secular things to teach sacred mysteries. This model of accommodation, derived from patristic usage, is indicated in Erasmus' introduction to Adagia. Earlier, Erasmus had written in Enchiridion that 'divine wisdom stoops to our understanding as a mother to her babe.'276 And Moria taught that it was for this purpose that Christ became a fool and taught foolishly.277 Adagia, as the Moria, represents more than 'despoiling the Egyptians,'278 as had the Hebrews who stole their gold and proverbs. It appreciatively integrates pagan wisdom with the Christian economy, in agreement with the theological conviction voiced in Antibarbari. In this century, scholars seeking to wrest the thought of Thomas Aquinas from the Thomism of manuals and textbooks have argued against the division of his labour. He was not a theologian and a philosopher, they assert, but a theologian even in philosophy. By its engagement, its service, and its purpose, his philosophy is theology. Even though this theological employment can be distinguished from philosophy itself, in Thomas, philosophy assumed the shape, not of its own rationality, but of its religious service.279 There is no comparable textbook Erasmianism. But the division of his labour into grammar and theology, or classical and biblical editions, or literary and religious commentaries, is a commonplace of scholarship which obscures his work. Erasmus did distinguish between the role of the grammarian and the role of the theologian, and for important apologetic reasons, particularly in preparing his edition of the New Testament.280 When the service of his evangelical humanism is comprehensively evaluated, however, the radical unity of his labour emerges. Erasmus was a theologian even in philology. By its engagement, its ser-

Scholars' Ink 59

vice, and its purpose, his grammatical chore in editing, translating, and commenting on classical texts was a theological task for the orientation of wisdom to its source in Christ, and so for the gathering of men.281 Although with the division of his labour the Moria has been declared literature, and has enjoyed fine interpretation as such, Erasmus makes plain to More that this literature comes from the pen of a theologian. His presentiment that 'there will perhaps be some wrangling critics who will falsely assert either that these trifles are too airy to be quite suifable to a theologian's pen, or that they are more sarcastic than suits the modesty of a Christian,'282 was soon realized. His antibarbarians have died, and Erasmus must converse with new, less faithful friends. One, Maarten Bartholomeuszoon van Dorp, confronts the Moria with the very judgment of Augustine. 'You must not think, my dear Erasmus/ writes Dorp, 'that our theologians do not understand what they read, and what belongs to their subject, even if they speak like barbarians/ Challenging Erasmus' contention that barbarism is a malady, almost a heresy, he cites from Augustine's Confessionum libri: '"Behold, O Lord God," says Augustine, "behold with patience, as Thou ever dost, how these men observe the rules of grammar which they have received from their ancestors, and neglect the eternal rules of everlasting salvation which they have received from Thee; so that one who maintains and teaches those old conventions of euphony, if he breaks the rules of grammar and says ominem without an aspirate in the first syllable, gives far more offence than if he breaks Thy rules and hates his fellowman/"283 In his familiar reply to Dorp, Erasmus defends his work. The issue between them is not 'the existence of a literature emancipated from theology/284 as has been claimed. Rather it is that of the integration of literature and theology on the classical model expressed in Antibarbari, where Erasmus observes that in antiquity theologians and poets were identical.285 The criticism which the Moria incurred from his contemporaries in theology derives first from conflicting models of the nature and methods of that discipline.286 It also owes historically to Erasmus' employment of

60 Christening Pagan Mysteries

a fool as his satiric mouthpiece precisely when ecclesiastical authorities were succeeding in suppressing this custom with diocesan decrees.287 It has been judged that in the Feast of Fools, which survived even in Erasmus' day, 'paganism made its most startling and persistent recoil upon Christianity.'288 The Council of Basel had condemned it, and the faculty of theology at the University of Paris had long since decried the 'superstitious and scandalous rite which some call the feast of fools, an idolatry which takes its origin and impetus from pagan, heathen ritual.'289 Moria's brilliant literary appearance as a fool who mocks perverted mores, and does so openly as a pagan goddess more perceptive than Christian ministers, and with the opportunity of disseminating her oration broadly through the press, must have aroused alarm among churchmen of a revival of satiric fools. Erasmus, however, could discern the truth in a fool, even a pagan one, and transmute any dross by the touchstone of Christ. The dramatic metaphor of the Moria especially reveals this secret. 'Now what else is the whole life of man but a sort of play?' Moria asks. 'Actors come on wearing their different masks and all play their parts until the producer orders them off the stage, and he can often tell the same man to appear in different costume, so that now he plays a king in purple and now a humble slave in rags. It's all a sort of pretence' she advises, "but it's the only way to act out this farce.'290 Moria's speech here epitomizes the philosophical observation of Lucian's Menippos who descended to Hades in search of wisdom.291 By this paraphrase Erasmus underscores the eschatological dimension of the Moria. But whereas Menippos rose from his meditation among the dead by wriggling out of the very hole of Trophonios' cave,292 Moria has by her change of costume provided her mystics an alternative route. In this passage Erasmus also alludes to and plays on traditional Christian reports of the pagan mystery cults as dramatic enactments.293 To the ancient Christians, the cult at Eleusis was prompted by demons.294 Clement of Alexandria had declared polemically against those rites: 'I will not burlesque them ... but will thoroughly lay bare, in accordance with the principle of truth, the

Scholars' Ink 61

trickery they conceal, and as for your so-called gods themselves, to whom the mystic rites belong, I will display them on the stage of life, as it were, for the spectators of truth/295 In his fiction Erasmus exposes those same true and false mysteries of the world's staging, but precisely by burlesqueing them. He converts the Eleusinian mysteries to the service of Christ by exploiting the comedy to which the newer mysteries have enlightened them. He replaces those rites Clement had decried, where the celebrants shrieked, 'Eva, that Eva through whom error entered the world,296 with the mystery of Christ, as revealed by a new prototypical woman. She is not a refutation of paganism, but its humane and humanist assimilation: Moria, in whom men sin, but in whom they are saved, if only they cry 'Ave/ Although Erasmus says in Antibarbari that the question of the salvation of the pagans is 'unworthy even of women/297 in Moria he saves one worthily. Its gabby goddess creates a striking antithesis to that other woman who for Christian ascetics allegorized pagan wisdom: the captive woman of Deut 21:10-13, an abject slave with her head shaved, her nails pared, and her robes stripped.298 For Erasmus wisdom does not consist in despoiling a humiliated paganism, but in collaborating pedagogically with its highest expression. So Moria, imitating divine pedagogy, initiates her mystics first to her pagan cohorts, anthropomorphic gods who are foolish in human, understandable ways, and at last to a more mysterious God who is oddly foolish. And as her eulogy winds from the ordinary follies which beset mortals and gods, to the extraordinary follies of Christ's indulgence, so is repeated the palindrome Eva/Ave, by which one woman's folly for humanity was recapitulated by another's. So are pagan mysteries christened.

This page intentionally left blank

THREE

Martyrs' Blood

WHEN ERASMUS PEERED for mysteries into the fool's mirror, he saw himself. For Christ's sake he exchanged a monk's hood for a scholar's cap, although its stiffer contours, like the soft folds of the habit, seemed no less likely to sprout ass's ears and jingle bells. He could have agreed with the mystical Lauda for Christ: He who enters in this school Learns a new and wondrous rule: 'Who hath never been a fool, Wisdom's scholar cannot be.'1

While foolish implies being of small wit, 'not all there,' it equally applies to being 'too much there,' bumbling into large objects or conventions.2 Erasmus is a Dutch clod whose imagination conflicted with the rationality of those who prided themselves on not being fools and with the values which propped their roles in society. In the years that follow Moria's encomium he resorts to her metaphor of life-as-a-play to characterize his own situation.3 Through the commonplace of the player, Erasmus controls how others may perceive him. Those who played on the stage in the same performance or who backstage fitted his costume and prompted him must have recognized Erasmus when the mask slipped. But scholars who stand on yet 'another stage, in another theatre in a new world,'4 have only his script, the lines he has written for himself and delivered. While it was characteristic of dramatic fools to stand back from the main action, as they tended to dissolve rather than to focus events,5 Erasmus is a fool who

64 Christening Pagan Mysteries

stirs the action, focusing the plot while non-fools act to dissolve it. As a bored student, doodling through a lecture on logic at Paris, he sensed that he was fit for a part,6 and later decided that his role was cast.7 But this scholar's part was not fate but free choice: doubly ars liberalis. Necessity was abandoned at Steyn, when he accepted the secretarial post which led him under that pear tree, plotting an antibarbarian campaign.8 As early as the letter to Anna van Borssele, begging funds for the Italian trip and doctorate, his personal metaphor of the play emerges: 'It is no use putting on a good performance if everyone hisses it. I must therefore put on the lion's skin, in order that those who judge a man by his title and not by his books, which they cannot understand, may believe that I too have learnt my letters.'9 Moria would soon counsel him that asking for the play not to be a play is perverse wisdom.10 She would also temper his part, advising, 'What's the harm in the whole audience hissing you if you clap yourself,' and assure him of her assistance.11 A decade later Erasmus chronicles his play for another patron: 'I am taking no mean part in the theatre of the world. But the perverse malice of some of the spectators makes me weary now and then of so immense a task; while on the other hand I am consoled by the consciousness of the important service, which if I am not mistaken, my work will render to good men. If I was born for this object, it does not become me to fight... Having made my entry upon the stage, the play must be played out, and we have by this time almost reached the catastrophe. But I shall continue to act my part both more willingly and more carefully, with your encouragement and applause, but above all with the approval, as I hope, of Christ, whose sanction alone is abundant enough.'12 Again he prays that his performance will 'win the applause of all good men, and above all that Christ, who is the one great producer of the play, may approve.'13 Just as plays were customarily divided into five acts, so there remains to him but the fifth act of his drama.14 One of these had been the edition of Jerome,15 another the Moria, 'when I wore the mask of Folly ... and acted my part in disguise.'16 The final act which Erasmus plotted was to be the revision of his edition of the Novum Instrumentum (1516;

Martyrs'Blood 65

1519). In the same month of March 1518 when he chronicles his play for Warham, who had a decade earlier made possible the journey to praise More, he writes four other English friends. To More himself he reports, ' I am off to either Basel or Venice, principally for the publication of my New Testament. This, my More, belongs to my destiny; I shall play out this act of my play, and after that, I have nearly made up my mind to sing a song for myself and the Muses .. ,'17 Applause would come from good men, but not the retirement for which he hoped. When he first published his plot in Antibarbari Erasmus exposed his antagonists as masqueraders in religious costume: 'Like characters in a play, they act out their tragic parts/18 In the very month after he confides to More his hope of retirement, Erasmus is complaining about his antagonists as a 'conspiracy of some masked players, who bark their lines offstage, but in my presence fall silent/19 Although Moria had promised that 'fortune favours the fool/20 it thwarted Erasmus, as critical reviews of his play absorbed him in apologies and revisions. Then yet another Martin strutted on his stage, provoking a new act, which Erasmus wrote with reluctance and much offstage prompting. Of all the misunderstandings of Erasmus' part, the gravest symbolically was Luther's. Criticizing Erasmus for considering Christian faith a drama,21 he judged that Erasmus had Nemesis for a god and in no other believed.22 Yet if in classical mythology the lady who dealt one's fate was Moira; and in mediaeval devotion, Maria; in Erasmus' evangelical humanism it is Moria, who 'gets on well with Nemesis,'23 but whose metamorphic fooling well exceeds the wisdom of her sisters. When Erasmus divulges that he is 'playing the part in a theological comedy,'24 he profoundly characterizes his pursuit of wisdom, for his entire production is a rewriting of the classical tragedy into Christian comedy. His portrayal of his hissing critics as 'tragedians' is a damning, if covert, judgment of who the real pagans are. Although Moria had observed that the 'Christian church was founded on blood, strengthened by blood and increased in blood,'25 the rally for Erasmus to 'ride forth and earn the martyr's

66 Christening Pagan Mysteries

crown'26 failed. Erasmus would acknowledge that the praise of martyrs resounded through the universe to the applause of angels.27 But there was nothing in the dispute with Luther which he considered worth his martyrdom, although he would die for the truths of the Christian faith.28 Reviews of De libero arbitrio, Diatribe sive collatio suggest that there was little he thought deserving of spilled ink either, for it has been judged one of Erasmus' less accomplished works.29 Erasmus argues that man has the faculty of freedom of choice. His conviction about the various opinions of its operation is not fixed, however;30 the issue has become a scholastic wrestling match for which he confesses himself unpractised and out of temperament.31 Frankly he forwards his view that man's freedom of choice is shrouded in mystery. Tor there are some secret places in the Holy Scriptures into which God has not wished us to penetrate more deeply and, if we try to do so, then the deeper we go, the darker and darker it becomes, by which means we are led to acknowledge the unsearchable majesty of the divine wisdom, and the weakness of the human mind.'32 Although many opinions about the operation of freedom of choice have been ventured, and Erasmus catalogues some of them, there is no ecclesiastical pronouncement, he decides, and thus he may reserve judgment. Scrutiny is intrusive, the 'impious curiosity' against which he had cautioned in Ratio verae theologiae.33 Resorting again to the image of a cave, he writes of freedom of choice that 'it is like that cavern near Corycos of which Pomponius Mela tells, which begins by attracting and drawing the visitor to itself by its pleasing aspect, and then as one goes deeper, a certain horror and majesty of the divine presence that inhabits the place makes one draw back/34 The course of human wisdom, Erasmus advises, is to cry out in wondering antiphony the wisdom of God. 'How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!'35 A time will come, he continues, when these mysteries will be displayed. Men will no longer peer through a clouded glass but contemplate glory. But that will only be eschatologically, in the beatific vision, 'when the Lord's face shall be revealed.'36 For

Martyrs' Blood 67

now, freedom of choice should be applied to good living, and its gift venerated as God is, in mystic silence.37 Moria had already lampooned theologians who pried sophistically into mysteries.38 Luther's colleagues are portrayed in Diatriba as a new brand of enthusiasts who claim special knowledge, one not derived scholastically from the machinations of logic, or cabbalistically from the manipulations of symbolism, but by immediate possession of the Spirit, a method which cannot, like Erasmus' modest grammar, be verified.39 Although Erasmus prefers wise silence, Luther must be accommodated. Erasmus thus assumes the part pressed on him and initiates a dialogue, carefully circumscribing his role: T play the debater, not the judge; the inquirer, not the dogmatist.'40 He stoops to enter the Corycian cave, and striking a light by his wits, records in Diatriba what shadows he perceives, whether those veiled in Scripture or those human opinions at which men marvel as if they were reality. Luther judges this a fool's part. Personifying Diatriba as if it were Moria herself, Luther responds in De servo arbitrio that 'if she [Diatribe] has been pleased to play the fool in a matter of such importance, we shall be pleased to expose her voluntary fooleries to public contempt.'41 Luther accuses Erasmus of substituting for the issue of freedom of choice a list of things sufficient for Christian religion which any gentile, ignorant of Christ, could compose;42 in short, of writing like a pagan. Erasmus, he declares, makes madness a tenet.43 Luther's allegation rings true, but not as he intends it. The mystic adoration of this mystery, which Erasmus enjoins above argument and anxiety, is madness, but one which he has already claimed in Moria's praise as wisdom. It is not fortuitous that in addressing Luther Erasmus counsels the ecstatic cry of a man possessed, Paul, or indicates the example of two holy fools, Francis and Dominic.44 Luther reproaches him, 'You breathe out on me a vast drunken folly.'45 Yet Moria's mystics could revel in that delicious compliment Luther had unwittingly paid Erasmus. To be sure, Luther added that Erasmus' folly was that of Epicurus, not Christ. But as Erasmus would plead in his very last

68 Christening Pagan Mysteries

colloquy, 'Epicureus' (1535), There are no people more Epicurean than godly Christians ... and no one better deserves the name of Epicurean than the revered founder and head of Christian philosophy/46 In this colloquy Erasmus enfolds into the divine economy the very pagan philosophy which had rejected the doctrine of providence, the philosophy which even the ancient Christian apologists for the Logos had scorned.47 Whatever Erasmus' philosophical debt may be to that lively tradition among Italian humanists of debating Epicureanism,48 his own colloquy is not a speculative exercise prompted by an abstract, intellectual sympathy with it. The matrix of his 'Epicureus' is distinct. That colloquy is Erasmus' defence practically and precisely in response to Luther's slur, 'You breathe out on me the vast drunken folly of Epicurus.' The accusation was occasioned by Erasmus' alleged dismissal of inquiry on free choice as 'useless and unnecessary.' Luther's charge about 'the vast drunken folly of Epicurus' occurs in the most intense passage of De servo arbitrio, where Luther asserts about the question of freedom of choice, 'I consider it vital.' Lapsing emotionally into German he tells Erasmus, das ist zu uiel ('You go too far!'), and orders him to 'quit the field.'49 Three other times in De servo arbitrio Luther calls Erasmus an Epicurean. In replying to Erasmus' accusation that his obstinacy threatens the peace of Christendom, Luther imputes that 'by such tactics you only succeed in showing that you foster in your heart a Lucian, or some other pig from Epicurus' sty who, having no belief in God himself, secretly ridicules all who have a belief and confess to it.'5° Luther presses further: 'Your words certainly sound as if you thought, like Epicurus, that the Word of God and a future life were fables; for you seek with your magisterial advice to persuade us that, as favor to pontiffs and princes or for the sake of peace, we ought if the occasion arises to give way and set aside the most sure Word of God.'51 And Luther says that in arguing that some things, even if true and knowable, ought not to be prostituted publicly, Erasmus has proceeded 'to turn us into modest and peace-loving Epicureans.'52 Luther even alleges that Erasmus exceeds Epicurus: 'See now, my dear Erasmus, what

Martyrs' Blood 69

that most moderate and peace-living theology of yours leads to! ... By this ill-advised labor of yours you teach us to cultivate ignorance of God (which comes of its own accord, and indeed is inborn in us), and to despise faith, let go the promises of God, and treat all the consolations of the Spirit and certitudes of conscience as of no account. Such advice Epicurus himself would scarcely give!'53 Stung by this, Erasmus riposted in Hyperaspistes Diatribae adversus servum arbitrium Martini Lutheri (1526, 1527). What nettled Erasmus was the contentious audacity of Luther's reply, which sank to name-calling spiked with mock deferences to 'my dear Erasmus.' The insult 'Epicurean' rankled him. A dozen different times in the first book of Hyperaspistes Erasmus cites it, incredulously repeating the calumny.54 He writes Luther a letter, asking why he had lied so scurrilously.55 And, citing the label, he also appeals to John Elector of Saxony for protection.56 But for all the spleen that Erasmus vents in reporting Luther's charge, his defence is confined to its incredulous repetition. In the second, more temperate book of Hyperaspistes, he recalls the epithet 'Epicurean' but once.57 As Erasmus aligns himself there 'with the orthodox, with the Church, with the holy doctors of the Church,' he can even venture, 'Who will not laugh at this charge?'58 and end his conversation with Luther concordantly. But Luther did not laugh, and he did not relent. 'Epicurean' increasingly becomes his epithet for those who resist the gospel he preaches. When the word of God is despised, he lectures, smug ungodliness follows and people lapse into Epicureanism, bereft of reason.59 Applying garbled conventional accounts of Epicurus and his historical school60 to contemporary affairs, Luther identifies Epicureanism as the denial of three essential doctrines: the existence of God, the immortality of the soul, and the omnipotent providence of God. Among the heathens, he reports falsely, the Epicureans alone denied the universal knowledge of God.61 He charges, also falsely, that they mocked and derided God,62 that they were faithless, godless.63 And so he dubs their successor, Erasmus, atheos.64 'An Epicurean,' as Luther diagnoses it, 'has no need of faith in God because he lives

70 Christening Pagan Mysteries

the life of an animal. Therefore he thinks it makes little difference whether he lives or dies/65 Luther cites the example of Julius Caesar who thought sudden death best because he was an infidel and needed no faith. 'When life is finished, all is finished for the Epicureans/66 Luther comments. But, he asserts, those who believe in the Word will never be influenced by Epicurean nonsense about the finality of death.67 Epicureans, he also reports, 'do not agree that there is a passing from a turbulent kind of life to a rest. For this reason the Epicureans bandy these sayings: "After death there is no pleasure," "Perish the fellow who bothers about what the future holds," "Neither fear nor wish for your last day/"68 They despise death, he continues, and they banish both the fear and the hope of immortality. '"Of what should I be afraid? Or what should I hope for?" they say. "Because there is no God, let us eat, drink, be merry/"69 Luther judges Erasmus one of them. By the year in which Erasmus writes 'Epicureus/ Luther is certain that an autopsy will disembowel from Erasmus nothing but ridicule.70 Even after Erasmus' death he will scoff at him: 'Epicurisimus: In his manner of life he was without God, lived with a great sense of security, and died in the same way/71 Luther reports further, and more correctly, that Epicureans disbelieved the omnipotent providence of God. They argue that God is a liar because he promises kindly but gives evilly.72 'Moved by the infinite inequality and confusion of matters in this life, where they see wicked men more fortunate than good and godly men/ they deny the providence of God, including the ministry of angels,73 Luther writes. He considers that, Tf I had lived at the time of Epicurus and had been a wicked scoundrel, I would like to have played a trick on him. I would have taken his wife and child and put them to shame. Then I would have said, "Oh, there's no divine providence! God doesn't care about this. Look out for it yourself!"/74 Again, Luther allies Erasmus with the Epicureans because Erasmus consumes so much of Diatriba with the issue of determinism. Luther scores Epicureans as 'carnal people ... who delight and indulge in carnal pleasures/75 They are 'dissolutes'76 who 'stuff themselves,... play and dance/77 and 'sin taking pains to do it/78

Martyrs7 Blood 71

Citing the epigram, 'Let us live, eat, and drink; tomorrow we die/ Luther equates this with eliminating the difference between man and beast.79 He favours calling Epicureans 'sows' and 'swine/ as he notes their ancient critics did.80 All of these transgressions, despising the Word and living wantonly, conspire to make Epicureans 'most deserving of the hatred of God and men/81 Luther draws the moral that men should hate their own flesh, 'which often incites us, too, to Epicureanism, when we give ourselves up wholly to temporal cares and so smugly disregard the eternal blessings/82 And yet he faults Epicureans for teaching that riches should be rejected.83 As the years advance and the tensions of the Reform mount, Luther reads the spread of Epicureanism as an apocalyptic sign. 'For a most pestilential age is now arising/ he warns, 'and the Epicureans are increasing in number. This is most certain proof of the confusion of everything and of the approaching judgment/84 Identifying the pope as Antichrist, he calls him an Epicurean sow, and his court, a litter.85 From Luther's wholesale claim that 'the peasants and nobility are becoming Epicureans/86 to his vague indications of Epicureans gathering against him, especially it seems to question his doctrines of providence and predestination,87 he considers the ancient philosophy a contemporary menace. Courtesans and mercenaries travelling north from Rome are infecting the motherland with Epicureanism, he says. This may drag in Italian domination of state and church, he fears, and with it, Italian plagues. 'And that will be the end of Germany. It will be "done for."/88 But in the rash of texts which decry Epicureanism during Erasmus' lifetime Luther indicts only one contemporary of his consistently by name: Erasmus.89 The importance Luther attaches to the doctrines which Epicureanism historically or conventionally opposes confronts that philosophy with the gospel. In this context then, Erasmus' Christian defence of pagan Epicureanism assumes a significance which outstrips any that the colloquy could have if read simply in philosophical continuity with the Italian humanist debate. Its sentiments are commonplaces of that tradition. The formula for the christening of this pagan mystery pales, however, before the

72 Christening Pagan Mysteries

act of its christening in a divided Church. 'Epicureus' is a prime humanist statement, in which the ill-debated issue of nature and grace is polarized around one res and verbum. Here is an historic conflict, recapitulating a perennial tension between the gospel and classical culture. Erasmus himself had given Luther excuse for the pejorative use of 'Epicurean/ If he could pen those elated but damning lines in De contemptu mundi about the pleasures of monastic life,90 he could also in Enchiridion lump the Epicureans with sybarites and libertines as 'contrivers of voluptuousness/ whose collective pleasures are disgusting in comparison with Christ's.91 The treatment of Epicureanism in Antibarbari as well had been conventionally disparaging.92 Nevertheless, although Erasmus' multiplied citations of Luther's epithet in Hyperaspistes were calculated to convey the impression of denying it, Erasmus does not explicitly deny there that he is Epicurean. He only repeats Luther's reproaches, then virtually ends his defence with an invitation to consider the witness of his familiars that he has 'never spit out a word either in jest or in earnest which savoured of Lucian or Epicurus/93 This assertion would be preposterous, uttered as it is by Lucian's popularizer, if it were not clear that it responds to Luther's connotation of 'Epicurean' as 'pacifist atheist/ Erasmus preserves and emphasizes throughout Hyperaspistes the word atheos with which Luther has taunted him by insinuating with the Greek that classical learning has reduced him to paganism. It is in 'Epicureus' that Erasmus makes his masterly defence, as he resumes conversation with Luther, not in the plain talk of Diatriba or Hyperaspistes, for that had failed, but in the fiction at which he excelled as pedagogue and mystagogue. Fiction allows him the latitude to express his judgment without openly inviting a retort from Luther. It allows him, moreover, to honey the lesson with pleasure, in adherence with his humanist conviction about persuasion by delight, so that this colloquy about pleasure may itself be pleasurable. The strategy of the colloquy is neither to affirm nor deny that he himself is Epicurean, but to refute the charge that the philoso-

Martyrs' Blood 73

phy is unchristian, and so to undo Luther's accusation. Referring to the slogan 'Epicurean' as name-calling, Erasmus seeks to progress beyond the reputation of the word, its connotation of illicit sensuality, to 'the matter in itself,'94 by aligning verbum with res. Erasmus' understanding and defence of the res is fortified by the texts, especially perhaps by the editio princeps of Diogenes Laertius, as the publication of 'Epicureus' coincides with the tenth anniversary of that edition, and is issued by the same press.95 The edition of Diogenes Laertius was a transcription from a manuscript owned by Matthaus Aurogallus, a professor of Hebrew at Wittenberg, whose philological conversation with Luther in 1532 is recorded. Luther respected Aurogallus well enough to accept his advice in revising his own translation of the Psalms.96 From his association with Aurogallus, Luther likely knew of the edition of Diogenes Laertius. The coincidence of the publication of 'Epicureus' with the tenth anniversary of that of Diogenes Laertius seems to be a signal from Erasmus to Luther. The traditional mass of information and slander about Epicurus supported Luther, who would have only dismissed the rectifying appreciation of the Italian humanists as pagan. But Erasmus now advances authoritatively from the common word about Epicurus, to the matter of the authentic text of Diogenes Laertius, and so back to enlightened conversation. The argument of the colloquy depends on a reasoned definition of pleasure, informed by Christian revelation of the beatitude of risen life in the vision of God. Moria's mystery is again revealed by the god of her fiction, as Luther's pejorative reading of the Epicurean epigram, 'Eat, drink, and be merry; tomorrow we die,' is mystically reinterpreted. Pagan philosophy is measured and transformed by the 'truth/ 'head and fount,' the 'sighting' (scopus), which is Christ.97 Resorting to the grammar which so often enlightens his theology, Erasmus declares Christ himself 'Epicurean,' because epikouros means 'helper.'98 'Being a god/ Moria had said, 'means helping mortals.'99 Will Luther deny that Christ is God, or that he helps men? And so, in 'Epicureus/ pagan mysteries are again christened in the pursuit

74 Christening Pagan Mysteries

of wisdom, in a work which itself derives from the most notorious of all Christian debates about the validity of work itself for such salvations. Luther too had engaged in historic conversation under a pear tree, whose boughs graced the garden at Wittenberg where Staupitz's pleading for sense and the mercy of God salved his conscience. On two such meetings under that tree his prior had urged the distressed and resistant monk to earn his doctorate, 'for you will have some real work to do/100 It seems unlikely from the progress of events, however, that like the antibarbarians they disputed 'the loss of learning in our time' and how classical studies might revive civilization. Like Augustine and Erasmus, Luther could rail against his grammar-schooling,101 but his reforms were directed differently. Like them, he too went to the head of his class,102 but he picked all his pears in the biblical woods.103 Although the pear tree lingered in Luther's memory ('Even today it stands in the middle of my yard'),104 the exchanges beneath it were spiritual and only recorded in the ensuing decisions of his life. What were eventually published, however, are spirited excerpts, dating from 1531, of other conversations, those over communal suppers in Luther's home. At times he dictated exacerbating statements about Erasmus. To the motley of fugitive nuns, visiting dignitaries, and children who shared his hospitality, Luther announces in Tischreden (Table Talk) that the opinions Erasmus expresses in his Colloquia are 'wicked' and 'corrupting of youth.'105 At table in 1532, the year before Erasmus published his colloquy 'Epicureus,' Luther is still labelling him 'Epicurean.'106 Whether by report or rumour these remarks stole under Erasmus' door, Erasmus does compose a deliberately Epicurean colloquy, a little talk to turn the tables on Luther. He had once intended to accompany the Moria with an encomium of nature, and one of grace, but did not compose them because of his critics' morositas towards Moria.107 He had later promised that he would write three dialogues for Luther.108 Whether or not 'Epicureus' was intended to fulfil these promises, it serves that

Martyrs' Blood 75

purpose, for it is a conversation with Luther - one which in its defence of pleasure is a defence of nature. If the colloquy's argument is followed, Luther must confess himself Epicurean. Erasmus' argument hangs on the assertion that 'nothing is more wretched than a bad conscience.'109 This was an old line for Erasmus, one which dated to the monastic exercise De contemptu mundi, where he had cited the highest earthly pleasure as 'freedom from the torture of an unclean conscience, as Epicurus says.'110 Once the assertion is conceded and how could Luther, whose scruples had upset the whole Church, deny it? - the game falls to Erasmus. It falls not to the solution of monastic retreat but humanist reform, a reform which recognizes the synergism of nature and grace, a reform in which pagan classics are not quoted merely for moral or rhetorical punctuation, but are assimilated in their wisdom to Christian life, acknowledging, as had Antibarbari, that Christ has ordained them so in his saving plan. Concerning bad conscience, Luther was an expert. Although his most recent biographer has argued sanely that monastic routine and educational requirements could not have allowed him the time to be consumed entirely by spiritual anxiety,111 Luther does reduce his experience to that: 'We had enough to eat and drink in the monastery, but our hearts and consciences were heavy with suffering and torment, and the suffering of the soul is the greatest suffering of all.'112 Luther recalls that as a monk he took fright at the name of Jesus and saw the crucifix in a flash of lightning. How he frequented confession for what Staupitz called 'toy sins,' and how his heart 'trembled and pounded at the thought of God's mercy to me,'113 is history, for his distraught search for assurance of salvation yielded to his conviction of justification by faith, and that conviction seized the hearts of many. The real punishment of hell, Luther thought, is bad conscience itself. 'A heart that is sick and always conscious of sin is a perpetual hell, which [hell] will be nothing else than a evil conscience itself,' he expounded, even duplicating Erasmus' phrase from 'Epicureus/ animus sibi male conscius.™4 Tf the devil did not

76 Christening Pagan Mysteries

have an evil conscience, he would be in heaven/ Luther wrote. 'But an evil conscience kindles the flames of hell and stirs up horrible fearful tortures and Erinyes in the heart/115 Certainly then the assertion of 'Epicureus' that 'Nothing is more wretched than a bad conscience/ could have been confessed religiously by Luther. It is, however, a pagan quip. By plucking from Plautus116 a truth to which Luther could subscribe, Erasmus teaches that the authors of antiquity, however pagan, and even in comedy, reflected morally on experience. By quoting, moreover, from a 'rascally slave' (nequissimi serui dictum),**7 Erasmus alludes to the servitude of Luther's own will. In 'Epicureus' he demonstrates that human bondage is not to the necessarily sinful will, as Luther had famously argued against him in De servo arbitrio, but to false pleasures. Erasmus advances the conversation beyond the argument about whether or not there is freedom of choice. He considers rather the choices, which are true and false pleasures. At stake is their discernment and definition. This colloquy extends the position he had espoused in Diatriba, namely, that it is less necessary to debate how there is freedom of choice than to exercise it properly. The incentive for the earnest but amicable deliberation in 'Epicureus' is puzzlement over a text, not the text of Scripture, as in the previous exchange between Erasmus and Luther, but Cicero's dialogue De finibus.**8 Cicero was the philosopher Luther most admired; just the year before this colloquy's publication he had lauded him as 'the paragon of human wisdom.'119 And so Erasmus secures a common ground with his antagonist in a pagan's wisdom. Like freedom of choice, the ends of goods is a disputed question. The conflicting opinions of eminent men are again emphasized, as in Diatriba.*20 But the agreed foundation on which Erasmus constructs his argument is, 'Nothing is more wretched than a bad conscience.'121 As the colloquy progresses, torment of conscience, dread of eternal punishment, is stressed, and it is argued to be the result of pursuing false pleasures. Poverty or pox may not always accompany free choice of false pleasures, it states, 'but torment of conscience - and we've

Martyrs7 Blood 77

agreed there's nothing worse - is always the companion of unlawful pleasures/122 Erasmus applies a pagan fable. Over the heads of men whose licence has produced bad conscience hangs a stone more ponderous than the one Jupiter set over Tantalus. This weight presses on their minds and afflicts their hearts with the hourly expectation of being cast into hell.123 Drawing the moral, Erasmus pleads that 'no one lives enjoyably unless he lives piously; that is, enjoys true goods. Only piety renders a man blessed - only piety, which alone reconciles God, the source of the supreme good, to man.'124 Defining evil as 'whatever destroys amity between God and man,'125 Erasmus is confident that those who have laved their sins with the soap of repentance and purified their souls in the furnace of charity are not culpable.126 It is the man pursuing false pleasures whom death terrifies; it torments his conscience all the more excruciatingly for his insensitivity.127 But if those who have advanced to old age in piety are the most fortunate, and those who have recovered early from youthful debauchery are next in favour,128 Erasmus still has counsel for the wretched old man who perceives his last days dragging in hell: T urge him to take refuge in God's mercy.'129 He had advised this recourse before in Diatriba as his reply to the question of free choice, although Luther had rejected it.13° In his treatise on preparation for death, published in the same year as 'Epicureus,' he again recommends stealing heaven as did the penitent thief.131 In 'Epicureus' Erasmus advises that unlike Jupiter who will not not revoke his decrees, the Christian God cancels a man's disasters if he repents of them.132 If a man being crushed to the grave by the Tantalean stone should shout for mercy, Erasmus promises, The Lord will take away the Tantalean stone, will grant him the sound of joy and gladness, and his bones broken by contrition shall rejoice for sins forgiven.'133 Once the proposition that 'Nothing is more wretched than a bad conscience' is accepted, then, Erasmus argues, 'it follows that nothing is happier than a good one.'134 If Luther boasts of good conscience, as after his conversion he must,135 then he is

78 Christening Pagan Mysteries

most happy: Epicurean. Q.E.D. For Luther to deny his now good conscience would be to undercut his wholehearted faith in that justification on which he had staked his soul and the reform of the Church. Yet Luther might still think repentance and charity smacked of works, and demand, Where is Christ? Drawing from the rule in Enchiridion that true pleasure derives from the love of Christ,136 Erasmus' colloquy 'Epicureus' affirms Christ as him from whose spirit pours the heavenly love which extinguishes the dread of death, and makes even its prospect pleasant.137 Christ is he who is most deserving of the name 'Epicurean/ because he is the reality of that word which means 'helper.'138 'He alone,' the colloquy claims, 'when the law of Nature was all but blotted out by sins, when the law of Moses incited to lusts rather than cured them, when Satan ruled in the world unchallenged, brought timely aid to perishing humanity.'139 Nature and the Law as redeemed by Christ was an assertion Luther could have applauded. Yet even as Erasmus writes this, Luther bellows about his paganism, that in all his writings there is not a single line about Christ.140 The colloquy 'Epicureus' had reasoned from the agreement that nothing is more wretched than a bad conscience, to a converse that nothing is more pleasurable than a good conscience, then from the definition of a good conscience as righteousness in Christ, and the definition of pleasure as Epicurean, to the equation of Christ and Epicurus, or Christianity and Epicureanism. If Luther followed this constraint, which would have him confess himself fervently Epicurean, he did not accept it.141 The moral which the colloquy derives from the identification of Christ as the true epicure diverges from Luther's sentiments. It indicates an even profounder difference in theology. Erasmus reasons that, 'Completely mistaken, therefore, are those who talk in their foolish fashion about Christ's having been sad and gloomy in character and calling upon us to follow a dismal mode of life. On the contrary, he alone shows the most enjoyable life of all and the one most full of true pleasure, so far away is the Tantalean rock.'142 Erasmus may have had in mind here only the ascetic ideal of sobriety which derived from Basil's supposition

Martyrs'Blood 79

that Christ never laughed, and which was circulated by the Benedictine Rule.143 Counselling a middle course between dissolute Epicureanism and gloomy monasticism, Luther too could write that God hates sadness.144 He declared that sadness follows when God has forsaken a man.145 His own reputation for depression suggests he often experienced such abandonment.146 In a counterpart of Erasmus' commentary on the first psalm, 'Beatus vir' (1515),147 Luther instructed that Christian happiness is hidden, hidden in the mystery of the cross and perceptible only to faith. Essentially it is an eschatological reality.148 For Luther, the life of the Christian is a discipleship in suffering, in repeating daily Christ's disgrace and lowliness. The Christian's lot is forsakenness, impotence, and despair; his only glory is in this weakness. In suffering God meets man, for only in man's utter annihilation can God use him. It is Luther's conviction of the hiddenness of God, which he elaborates profoundly in this theology of the cross,149 that causes him to break with Erasmus, who formerly had tutored him well. Tor I saw,' he writes after his conversion, 'that Erasmus was far from the knowledge of grace, since in all his writings he is not concerned for the cross but for peace.'150 This charge of 'peace' is not essentially an accusation of Erasmus' pacifism in politics. It rather makes the accusation that Erasmus knows God not from His sufferings (the theology of the cross) but from His works, and thus represents the opposing 'theology of glory.' As Luther defines this, 'a theologian of glory does not recognize, along with the Apostle, the crucified and hidden God alone. He sees and speaks of God's glorious manifestation among the heathen, how his invisible nature can be known from the things which are visible and how he is present and powerful in all things everywhere. This theologian of glory, however, learns from Aristotle that the object of the will is the good and the good is worthy to be loved, while the evil, on the other hand, is worthy of hate. He learns that God is the highest good and exceedingly lovable.'151 The accusation sticks. Erasmus is a prime exponent of all this. Luther's definition of the theology of glory reads, moreover, like a program for the colloquy 'Epicureus': God's glorious manifesta-

8o Christening Pagan Mysteries

tion among the pagans, the good as the will's object, and God as its highest good. In that colloquy, Erasmus glories in the revelation of God in Nature, alleging that those who call her 'stepmother' abuse the Creator, while the pious man marvels at these works and delights in them.152 He glories even more in human nature, when good choice aligns in with its highest good, God.153 He celebrates the wisdom of a pagan philosopher as Christ's own. Finally, the advice of the colloquy that 'to invite troubles, that is, poverty, bad health, persecution, disgrace, except when Christian charity compels, is not piety but folly,'154 confronts Luther's discipleship of suffering. Erasmus does perceive the cross, but with a different vision: not only as a sign of contradiction - wisdom made folly - but as in that a sign of convergence. When he raised his metaphorical cross-staff heavenward to fix on Christ155 he borrowed ancient Christian eyes. With them he sighted the creative Logos, who 'hanging from that cross' is 'imprinted on the universe' and so, embracing the compass-points, gathers the cosmos together to the knowledge of God;156 and in pentimento, the world-soul in the form of the heavenly chi, by which a pagan philosopher had intimated it.157 'Christ hanging from the cross,' Erasmus writes in this Epicurean year, 'is a triumphal sign, a sign of victory, a sign of g/on/.'158 For, as Erasmus had also written, the Creator did not endure his image to perish, but rescued it by the very death of the Son through whom it had been formed, so that it might be a new creature.159 All nations are therefore crucified with Christ, he continues, so that they may enjoy a renaissance in him, and by walking in newness of life deserve to be glorified.160 Antibarbari had once reverently cited the verse,' "And lifted up, I will draw all things to myself." 'l61 This is why, it had instructed, Christians may adopt pagan wisdom. It was the paradigmatic tree of the cross which allowed Erasmus and his sympathizers to converse humanistically under Brabant's lowly pear. Moria, too, had indicated that most fruitful tree of the cross.162 For while Erasmus mocked the pagan gods as 'mute sticks of wood: how foolish,'163 here was eloquent wood. Admiring Cicero's argument from the conversion of the spe-

Martyrs'Blood 81

cies, Luther taught at table against Epicureanism: 'An apple tree doesn't become a pear tree ... therefore it's necessary to conclude that the world is ruled by divine providence.'164 Erasmus too was careful about the identification of things. He blamed the scholastics for confusing fish for tree, and he launched a reform of such ignorance.165 But his religious aesthetic allows generously for Eden's apple tree to yield symbolically to Brabant's pear, because all species of trees have been divinely metamorphosed in Calvary's one. That, for Erasmus, establishes divine providence. 'Peace' is man's task of harmonization, the humanist enterprise of aligning verbum with res, of a boy's behaviour with his nature, pagan wisdom with Christian. Once the grammar of the Logos is mastered, there is no longer rigid association, but fluid rhetoric in which Epicurean may come to mean Christian, and Christ himself be named Epicurean in a humanist fiction. This conviction sets Erasmus apart from Augustine and Luther under their own pear trees. Disputing in his Confessionum libri with his own friends about the very subject on which Erasmus engages Luther, the end of goods, Augustine had almost awarded Epicurus the palm. If only he had believed in life after death, Augustine regretted.166 Dante consigned Epicurus to the sixth circle of hell.167 Luther damned him too. Before all of these critics, however, Alexander, that false prophet of Lucian's dialogue who inspired the Moria, had detested Epicurus. Because Epicureans banded with Christians to expose his chicanery, Alexander had advised stoning Epicurus and he damned him to Hades: 'With leaden fetters on his feet in filthy mire he sitteth.'168 But for Erasmus, it is a matter of discerning mysteries. Epicurus was an initiate of Eleusis.169 His christening, like Moria's, is a providential and delightful metamorphosis. Luther did not despise classical learning. De servo arbiirio, for example, is stocked with more classical allusions and aphorisms than Erasmus' corresponding work;170 it was Erasmus who criticized them as inappropriate.171 On a scrap of paper left on his nightstand just before he died, Luther was comparing favourably the knowledge needed to understand the Bible with that required for reading Virgil and Cicero.172 The Bible, 'this divine Aeneid,'

82 Christening Pagan Mysteries

he wrote, in virtually his last words.173 He published a German version of his favourite author, Aesop, the preservation of whose fables he thought 'providential/ Next to Scripture, Luther recommended Aesop for reading in schools.174 While Luther was convinced that Christians have the books that teach the kingdom of heaven, he was equally certain that the pagans have those which teach 'virtue, laws, and wisdom with respect to temporal goods, honour, and peace on earth/ God himself both 'gave and preserved' these writings of the poets, historians, and jurists, he wrote, so that pagans might have their own prophets, apostles, and theologians for secular government.175 And if Erasmus had Terminus, Luther was not above sealing a few of his own letters with a cameo engraved in the figure of an ancient goddess, also a gift.176 But Luther was not by conviction a humanist.177 Deliberating in the year of 'Epicureus' on the difference in strength between Samson and Caesar, he conceded that 'we can also speak of the Spirit among the heathen; that is, God also acts among them. But/ he concluded 'this is not sanctifying action/178 On the authority of Romans 1:19 he accepted the universal knowledge of God among the pagans, opposing what he supposed to be the Epicurean view.179 The crux, however, is what this knowledge represents for Luther. Lecturing on Jonah in 1526, the year of Hyperaspistes, he teaches that, while this knowledge of God among the pagans from nature and reason is a 'bright light/ it manifests two defects. Reason argues that God is able and competent to help men, but it does not know whether he wills to do this 'for me/ This question is the nub of Luther's anxiety, which was only resolved in the assurance of justification by faith. Also, Luther lectures, reason knows there is a God, but not who or which is the true God. 'Nature knows the former - it is inscribed in everybody's heart; the latter is taught only by the Holy Spirit/180 Luther elaborates on this second defect in his commentary on Romans. He speculates that if the pagans had agreed to worship the God they knew by reason, simply worship him, without naming him or designating him as this or that image, 'without a doubt they would have been saved/181 Such specula-

Martyrs7 Blood 83

tion, however, is just that, for apart from Christ crucified there is for Luther no such grace. The religion of the pagans is necessarily the illegitimate theology of glory, a knowledge of God in his works of creation.182 This is why Luther can write about Erasmus, even as 'Epicureus' is in press, 'His business is heathen affairs ... ours is theology/183 Lecturing on Erasmus' high praise of pagan virtue, Luther will agree that the poets and statesmen of antiquity surpassed Christians in works. But, he teaches, 'if either Cicero or Socrates had sweat blood, he would nevertheless not have pleased God for this reason/ Given a choice, Luther would prefer 'the most sordid and most rustic work of a Christian peasant or maid ... Why? Because God is here and the devil is there/ Applying a scholastic distinction, he writes, This is the essential difference. The material of the works is the same, but the distinguishing characteristics and the difference are infinitely diverse/ He observes that 'not even Erasmus saw it. Only believers understand the worth and importance of their works as Christians/184 When Luther wants to score forensically, he will 'save' the pagans, as in this snatch of table talk: Cicero 'will sit much higher [in the world to come] than Duke George or the margrave, who died between two whores. Oh, if they sat where Cicero does they would be saved!'185 But he will excoriate Erasmus for saving the pagans, because unlike him he means it.186 Whatever 'bright light' Luther allows for pagan philosophy, Epicureans do not share it. Moreover, it was on their account, he thinks, that the revelation of the mysteries of God was hidden, until Christ should come.187 Epicureans are excluded from providence. Their purpose is to burn. In a lecture Luther rhetorically assumes God's voice: 'I shall not give you [Christians] the world as I have given it ... to the Epicureans ... before whom I must set the wealth of the world and whom I must fatten for the eternal fire/188 The theological principles which Erasmus had early voiced in Antibarbari he elaborated in Diatriba, where he assumes the synergism of nature and grace. There is, he writes, a 'native light' or 'law of nature' thoroughly engraved in the minds of all men.189 This declares the golden rule. 'And the philosophers/ he con-

84 Christening Pagan Mysteries

tinues, 'without the light of faith, and without the assistance of Holy Scripture, drew from created things the knowledge of the everlasting power and divinity of God/190 From this they derived precepts for right living which conform wholeheartedly with evangelical teaching.191 Erasmus surmises that the inclination of their will towards good was, however, 'useless for eternal salvation without the addition of grace by faith/192 But he strikes on to speculate that 'if certain philosophers have had some knowledge of God, they might have had faith and charity toward God, for they did not act out of vainglory, but from a love of virtue and goodness, which, according to their teaching, is to be embraced for no other reason than that it is good/193 Whether this faith was a saving faith or not, Erasmus does not immediately elaborate. But he thinks the pagans were graced, and possibly graced with faith. The 'more probable' opinion, Erasmus states, is that grace is more likely given to the baptized than to the unbaptized.194 But 'let us grant/ he argues, 'as indeed we must, that it is possible that the Spirit might reveal to a single humble and unlearned man what he has not revealed to the wise and prudent.. /195 If this is conceded, then the analogy can be extrapolated, as Erasmus does, that grace may be given to the unbaptized. 'There is a common grace/ he asserts, 'which is not called grace, although it is. It is analogous to the miracle of God's creating, preserving, and ordering all things. Neither is this act called a miracle, although it surpasses curing a leper, because it is universal and everyday/196 He teaches that in the human spirit there is a striving for virtue, which he equates with the patristic doctrine of the seeds of the Logos (logos spermatikos).*97 Everything comes from God, who in this Logos brings to maturity human striving for virtue, just as he had once instructed Erasmus under the pear tree. It has been well said that Erasmus preoccupies himself with a wisdom that is prudential,198 for he plays the pedagogue who would instruct men in the necessity of free and active moral choices in the world. Even Moria's contemplative ecstasy serves this end through a published oration. It does not follow, however, as has also been claimed, that for Erasmus 'the insights of

Martyrs'Blood 85

wisdom are natural products of human reason' or that the moral wisdom of the ancients was 'self-achieved/ Neither is there in Erasmus any 'emphasis on the sufficiency of ethics for salvation.'1" Nor did he evidence 'belief in man's power of self-determination.'200 From Antibarbari to Diatriba and Hyperaspistes20* the evidence is stable that for Erasmus human nature is animated by the presence of the Logos, who gives every impetus to virtue, by his common grace 'which is not called grace, although it is/202 'Everything in the pagan world/ it may be repeated from Antibarbari, 'that was valiantly done, brilliantly said, ingeniously thought, diligently transmitted, had been prepared by Christ for his society. He it was who supplied the intellect, who added the zest for inquiry, and it was through him alone that they found what they sought.'203 Erasmus' conviction of a human nature illuminated by common grace is implied in the definition he offers in De pueris instituendis (1529): 'I call nature a deeply implanted docility and propensity to morally upright goods.'204 The sower of the seeds of grace is Christ, who educates men to maturity, from the partial knowledge of his person hidden in God during pagan antiquity, to the most intimate revelation of himself, an incarnation among men, when the time was ripe. There is no raw human nature for Erasmus. The common grace by which men are created and sustained is fundamental, he believes, and can never be extinguished, only weakened by the free choice of false pleasures.205 When Erasmus wishes to speak about the lapse of human nature, to immorality or sin, he does so by dropping that nature a notch in the order of creation, by resorting to animal imagery. Men may freely choose not to acknowledge and cooperate with their logos, and so be governed by animality. But the divine spark may still illuminate even animalistic men so that they may freely choose the good. Thus when Erasmus pens such sentiments as 'the pagans have common virtues instilled by natural reason, experience in living, or precepts of philosophers,'206 it must be understood that reason, which allows moral reflection upon experience, and ultimately engenders philosophical precepts, already participates in the

86 Christening Pagan Mysteries

common grace of the Logos, who mysteriously attracts to his yet hidden self the very propensity of reason to him. This is why Erasmus can agree that there are many teachings in pagan literature which coincide with the gospel, not because Plato stole from Moses, but because men in every dispensation of grace, whether that of nature, law, or revelation, share in him through whom they were made. A bristling question in his controversy with Luther was whether this common grace suffices for salvation.207 In his commentary on 'Beatus vir/ Erasmus praises the efforts of pagan lovers of wisdom to understand the human yearning for beatitude, but regrets that they could not arrive at it, 'because that one teacher of true wisdom, the spirit of Christ, was lacking to them/208 Again in De concordia he repeats that 'we can praise the temperance of Zeno, the probity of Xenocrates, the humility of Socrates, but because they acted without Christ they did not attain true felicity/209 If swnma or vera felicitas means eternal salvation, Erasmus vacillated. But his paraphrase on Paul's address on the Areopagus concerning the worship of the unknown God among the pagans indicates that Erasmus' meaning in such contexts is not salvation, but revelation. He writes there of the ancient pagans that 'they attained some knowledge of God, the true knowledge of whom is the highest felicity.'2™ In Antibarbari Erasmus had declined to 'enter here on that quarrelsome discussion about the pagans, which is unworthy even of women; it is not for us/ he had written, indicating his companions, 'to discuss the damnation of the heathen, those, I mean, who lived before our faith/ He had declared, however, that 'if we wished to indulge in guesswork, I could easily prove that the great men among the pagans are saved, or else no one is/211 In the later colloquy 'Convivium religiosum/ some pagan literature seems so divinely inspired that Erasmus ventures, 'Perhaps the spirit of Christ is more widespread than we understand, and the company of saints includes many not in our calendar/212 In the dedicatory preface to his edition of Cicero's Tusculanae quaestiones (1523) he concedes that 'it is perhaps not for human judgment to pronounce where the shade of Cicero now

Martyrs'Blood 87

walks/ But, he adds, he would not censure those who hope it is in heaven. Erasmus speculates that if a certain confused and raw faith was sufficient to salvation for the Hebrews, then 'an even coarser knowledge might bring to salvation a pagan, to whom the Mosaic law was unknown, especially if his life was one of integrity/213 And Erasmus argues directly against Luther in Hyperaspistes that it is 'probable' that by the death of Christ many Hebrews were saved who did not 'expressly believe Christ ... [for] that faith for the time, of whatever kind it was, sufficed for them/ He then asks, 'What if there were also among pagans those whose faith God approved? For they believed God to be a certain mind, than which nothing better or greater could be conceived, the creator and governor of all things, the rewarder of piety and punisher of impiety/ Addressing Luther's concerns about the designation which they gave to this God known by reason, Erasmus argues that 'it does not matter by what name they called him, whether world, or nature, or Jove/ In support of his speculation he cites De vocatione gentium that the providence of God wished no age, no race, no people to lack salvation.214 Erasmus does not require of the pagans even an implicit faith in Christ,215 rather only a faith in the God known through the gift and exercise of logos. He does not resort to other traditional solutions such as Christ's evangelization of the pagans during his descent into hell.216 Still he thinks that if the faith of the ancient pagans is not in Christ, since they lack revelation of him, it is nevertheless through Christ, who gives by his common grace their every impetus to the knowledge of God and to the virtues which flow from such religion. Their salvation is a 'gift of Christ/217 The prime example of this common grace, for Erasmus, was Augustine, who even when pagan was morally good.218 Yet this is the same Augustine who conceded little to the pagans after his conversion from them, and who allowed Luther to preach the discontinuity rather than the continuity of God's transforming grace in human nature.219 The year of 'Epicureus' witnesses also the publication of De concordia, which not only recapitulates Erasmus' familiar solicitude for the peace of the Church but which also reinforces the

88 Christening Pagan Mysteries

colloquy. Phrased as an interpretation of Psalm 83 (84MT), this commentary is again a humanist response to Luther.220 The Greek text of the psalm itself yields the clue, in the invocation of verse 10: huperaspista hemon ide ho Theos. Erasmus thus extends Hyperaspistes by raising another shield in defence against the epithet 'Epicurean/ He does this by displaying that it is biblical wisdom to be peace-loving. As Erasmus interprets Ps 83, the Holy Spirit himself commends concord.221 In his exegesis of verse 10, Erasmus recounts the scriptural assurances of divine protection, and names God his own huperaspista. Alluding to the eponym of the name he chose for himself, Desiderius or beloved, rather than the one which Luther conferred on him, he professes himself to be divinely safeguarded: God looks on him whom he loves.222 This defence repeats Erasmus' acknowledgment in 'Epicureus' that his pacifism is Epicurean. To invite troubles, that is, poverty, bad health, persecution, disgrace, except when Christian charity compels,' he had said there, 'is not piety but folly/223 Erasmus often charged that charity did not compel Luther's strident stand against freedom of choice, disrupting as it was the peace of Christendom. Erasmus' preoccupation in De concordia with the title of the psalm, involving him in detailed exegesis of the phrase 'for the wine presses,' also permits him to refute Luther's slur that, in avoiding the issue of freedom of choice, he had spewed out on Luther drunken vomit. The association of Epicureanism and drunkenness was conventional, if not historical.224 But Luther's rhetoric in De servo arbitrio is a more pointed antithesis to Erasmus' likening of him in Diatriba to one Lycurgus, who in his hatred of drunkenness had ordered the vines cut down rather than lead the people to the water-fountain.225 If Erasmus will have Luther a crazed abstainer, Luther will have Erasmus a drunk. As Erasmus had once expressed in prayer, however, it was only the poisonous pleasures of the world that he would vomit.226 Erasmus makes evident in De concordia that his interest is in the sort of drinking that accompanied the festal days of Israel, a drinking in thanksgiving to God for his benevolent

Martyrs7 Blood 89

harvest, a drinking accompanied by psalmody and the dancing of prophets.227 He repudiates the pagan practice of celebrating 'with profane and shameless rites in honor of a sportive Bacchus/228 Regarding the feast of Tabernacles as a type of the Church, he repudiates the drunken self-gratification of those Christians who despoil the temple.229 Reinforcing this view in the colloquy 'Epicureus,' Erasmus' interlocutors agree that a drunk, laughing and dancing, gives only the illusion of pleasure; he indulges in a mad enjoyment.230 Too much drinking brings fever, headache, colic, fuzzimindedness, disgrace, loss of memory, vomiting, ruined digestion, and palsy. Why even Epicurus would advise against it, they agree.231 Physical intoxication can be cured by sleep, however. There is a more dangerous kind they name, that of a mind drunk in sinful desires. Erasmus' true hedonist laments, 'How many men do we see who from youth to feeble old age never sober up, never recover from the intoxication of ambition, greed, lust, and gluttony!'232 Erasmus' Epicureanism is not a sensuously drunken one, but Moria's mystical intoxication. In the colloquy 'Epicureus' he repeats her instruction that the truest pleasures, those which the eye has not seen, will be eschatological.233 And in the same year he publishes his handbook on preparation for death.234 'Epicureus' settled nothing. In the year following its publication, Luther only accelerates his campaign against Epicureanism. Lecturing on Psalm 90, he condemns in the first breath two tenets, 'Neither fear for, nor long for, the last day,' and 'Eat, drink, play; there is no pleasure after death.'235 What is the psalm's teaching? 'The whole scope of this psalm,' Luther decides, 'is the desire of Moses to drive a holy fear into the hearts of hardened and smug Epicureans, who believe it to be their duty in life to scorn God's wrath and death and to live like brutes who have no hope after this life.'236 Epicureanism is under Luther's rapid fire: Epicurus is guilty of despicable conceit in scorning God;237 he and his kind prosper on earth but go down to hell;238 they are 'smug sinners' because of whom the revelation of salvation had to be hidden until Christ;239 they falsely search for a means to mitigate the inescapable evil of God's wrath.240 Inter-

90 Christening Pagan Mysteries

preting verse seven, 'For we perish because of Thy wrath, and we are terrified because of Thy furious anger/ Luther explicitly repudiates Erasmus' colloquy. Advising his students of its 'frivolous advice/241 he reports: 'In this dialogue the author makes the point that the Christian religion possesses the stone of Tantalus, since after the sorrows of this life man is condemned to eternal fire as well. What can be, so Erasmus argues, a more effective remedy against this evil than unbelief or insanity, which refuses to believe God's threat?'242 To demonstrate that Erasmus allies himself with that historical philosophy, Luther relies on Cicero's report of Epicurus' advice: 'Become either insane or incredulous and thus rid yourself of this feeling of wrath and sin when you find yourself in the throes of misery and death.'243 This is the argument of blasphemous reason, Luther concludes.244 Against the emphasis of the colloquy 'Epicureus' on 'a settled conviction and a firm hope of attaining heaven/245 Luther lectures that practising death is essentially a pagan wisdom. Only the Holy Spirit can give hope,246 he holds. He asks, 'What of it when Epicurus dies? He not only does not know that there is a God, but even fails to understand his own misery and recognize the disaster he is experiencing.'247 But even Luther concedes in these lectures that being an Epicurean is 'obviously preferable' to practising death, if the sinner's fear of God's wrath does not yield to the assurance of mercy.248 His distortion of Erasmus' colloquy is patent. Reflecting on the Tantalean oppression, the interlocutor Hedonius had posed, 'What, I ask you, in human affairs (italics mine) is so sweet that it could really cheer a mind menaced by such a stone?' Spudaeus had replied, 'Nothing, surely, except madness or unbelief.'249 The debaters proceeded immediately, however, to concur on the divine remedy for alleviating the Tantalean stone, that is, the helping (epicurean) mercy of Christ. The Lord will take away the Tantalean stone, will grant him the sound of joy and gladness/ they agree, 'and his bones broken by contrition shall rejoice for sins forgiven.'250 These are the last words of the colloquy. They are not, however, Erasmus' final defence of pagan mys-

Martyrs' Blood 91

teries, much as he longed to retire from the pursuit of wisdom, writing in that same year of the instinct to nest.251 At table Luther still complains about Erasmus that 'in defending his own case ... he shows his true colours ... always shielding Epicurus.'252 In 1534 Luther addresses to Nicolaus von Amsdorf an invective against Erasmus, in which he traces the origin of his awareness that Erasmus is Epicurean to a passage in Paraclesis (1516). That passage allegedly had stated that Christ came from heaven so that he might excel more perfectly and absolutely over other holy teachers. It was then/ Luther relates, 'that I began to suspect him of being simply an Epicurean/253 Luther's inference here, of course, is that Erasmus took Christ as a teacher, not a redeemer. When later in De servo arbitrio Luther continually likened Erasmus to Epicurus, he explains that he was only discerning his spirit, in hope of reforming it. Instead, Luther complains to Amsdorf, he stirred a snake and incurred the Viperaspides.254 Under the device of explaining why Erasmus should not be answered, he accuses him in this new invective of an irreverent comment about John the evangelist, a lie about orthodox faith in the Holy Spirit, and the use of the word coitus to describe the action of God in Mary. All of these Luther links with paganism, especially Epicureanism.255 He imagines Erasmus with his coEpicureans 'laughing at us fools/256 for he only knows how to teach tomfoolery257 and 'neglects sacred matters to chase jokes and him an old man and a theologian!'258 'I have it on the respected authority of wise men/ Luther confides, 'that Erasmus is truly crazy.'259 Determined at first not to reply, Erasmus portrays himself as preparing for death, indeed an old man, broken by work and stricken by mad books. He is unable, he writes, to see what fruit there would be in irritating Luther further.260 Then he sends to press Purgatio adversus epistolam non sobriam Lutheri (1534), 'for Luther undertakes to persuade everyone that Erasmus not only believes nothing of divine matters, but for some time now acts with every deceit, snare, and all his strength to overthrow and destroy the entire Christian religion and in its place restore paganism to the world.'261 Erasmus complains of Luther's party

92 Christening Pagan Mysteries

that, if he should produce Aristotle to propose or refute various questions, or Quintilian to teach a point of eloquence, they clamour, 'Pagans! pagans!'262 Soberly he refutes each charge of the accusation that he is satanically tempting simple souls, only to hurl them into paganism.263 A dozen different times again Erasmus resurrects the slogan Epicurean.264 Since Luther attributes to him the entire Epicurean sect, Erasmus strikes Moria's ironic pose and complains of the ingratitude of men, 'not one of whom to this day has either greeted me, or thanked me for it/265 Erasmus is outraged by Luther's 'murderous hatred.'266 'I, Epicurus,' he avows, 'if I had survived to the time of the apostles and had heard them preaching the gospel so scurrilously, I am afraid I should have remained Epicurus.'267 Referring to the passage in Paraclesis which had first alienated Luther from him, he suggests 'how much more human is Erasmus, who has never alienated his spirit from Martin.'268 Erasmus had written before that in this most factitious of ages it is such dissension of spirits which corrupts the Church. 'She does not weep over the deaths of martyrs, but celebrates them with joyful expressions, calling them "births"; but she does lament with bitterest tears the massacre of Christ's innocents/ like Rachel who refuses to be comforted because they have all perished.269 The fool's part, mistaken for pagan frivolity in serious times, has betrayed Erasmus. Luther notes in the margin of his personal copy of the Moria that, 'When Erasmus wrote his Folly, he begot a daughter like himself. He turns, twists, bites like an awl, but he, as a fool, has written true folly.'270 Erasmus objects that Luther 'throws up at me that in this most troublesome age (he would have said "most furious" more correctly) I play, and, to use his own word, "act the fool." I played Moria,' he remembers, 'in a tranquil age, a role which I easily, if it should seem so, shall have devoted to harm.'271 Thus is his antibarbarian campaign upset with a new barbarism, morionari,272 while he defends a sense of humour and judges that 'to intone only excessively tragic voices is more demented than eloquent.'273 The tragic chorus of scholastics which had incited the antibarbarian reform has been swelled by new tenors. No stage is left Erasmus 'to sing a song for myself

Martyrs'Blood 93

and the Muses/274 In half a century Giordano Bruno will be praising the displacement of Moria's banquet to Wittenberg: Here Wisdom built again her hall And carved her seven pillars tall; Here set again the table of the Lord With sacrifical wine outpoured. Then welcomed all the guests to come, To come from all of Christendom. They came from all peoples and every land Where culture and order were in demand: From morn to eve, from noon to night, Welding the new day's circle tight.275

From the very last paragraph which Erasmus will write escapes a sigh which, more than an old man's longing to be home, recalls his youthful pursuit: 'Would that Brabant were nearer!'276 While all this world was winding down, Juan de Zumarraga was smashing idols in Mexico, although he prided himself on being an Erasmian,277 and although the Aztec religion celebrated mysteries on which the missionaries might have capitalized humanistically. Erasmus was unstirred to christening the pagan mysteries of the new world to whose exploitation and exaltation the history of European civilization after him would be cemented. Striking his pen against the local furor, he was distracted from that foreign bloody seeding of the Church. Briefly he reflected in Ecdesiastes sive concionator euangelicas (1535) on the 'evangelical seed' cast abroad.278 In his Symbolum sive catechismus (1533) he speculated that 'perhaps there might be on earth other lands, whether islands or continents, still undiscovered by navigators or geographers, in which Christian faith may bloom.'279 But only a Dutch vessel, 'De Liefde,' sailed out, with but a carving of 'Erasmus' on its stern, perhaps of the humanist, perhaps of the martyr in whose name he had been christened. When the ship foundered in Japanese waters, the carving of 'Erasmus' was salvaged and erected for veneration in a temple in Tokyo, and

94 Christening Pagan Mysteries

inscribed with the motto Hollanda Ebisu, 'a Dutch barbarian/280 It was for More to speculate about new pagans in Utopia) it was for More to house a fool281 and to spill martyr's blood. When Erasmus pondered that martyrdom in an age gone mad, he longed for the Epicurean ideal which Luther had so detested, lathe biosas, 'to have lived unknown.'282 Erasmus died in bed on 12 July 1536, comforted by the ministry of his manuscripts and reciting from the penitential psalms.283 At Moria's prompting he was entering her fourth, most mystical cave. In his own treatise on death, Erasmus had advised: 'Christ said, "Come to me all you that labour." Take refuge then in his cave in the rocks.' Erasmus had counselled that the way to enter paradise is that of the penitent thief, to mount the cross spiritually and say,' "The world to me is crucified and I to the world."/284 The scholastic Anselm, who had also written a fool's part, prayed on his monastic deathbed for a reprieve, anxious that no one else could complete his work.285 Erasmus, having lived to see the diffusion of his labours beyond the confines of Steyn, only asked mercy on what he had done. Luther would not allow him even this. Alleging that the last cries of Erasmus are fabrications, Luther imputes 'Epicurean!' to the end.286 But scoffing in Antibarbari at the barbarous titles dear to theologians, Erasmus had once avowed, 'For my part, I will allow myself to be called after any pagan so long as he was deeply learned or supremely eloquent; nor shall I go back on this declaration, if only the pagan teaches me more excellent things than a Christian.'287 He did not go back on his conviction, but took his pagan name of Epicurus christianly to the grave. Yet when it came to speak of handing over their souls to Christ, each, Erasmus and Luther, in his own tongue commonly adopted the diminutive: animula, Seelichen.2SS Erasmus was buried under the stone effigy of Terminus. The epitaph servator Christi2*9 applied to both. If the faith of 'Epicureus' may be applied, Terminus had yielded to Christ, 'for the mercy of the Lord knows neither bound nor limit.'290 In the design of Terminus for glass-painting which Hans Holbein the Younger had executed, a huge slab is suspended in the air on ropes, just a fraction in front of the herm of Terminus, who looks

Martyrs' Blood 95

up at it apprehensively. It seems to be an adaptation of the Tantalean stone, which Erasmus reported in Adagia as 'a danger about to fall on a man's head'291 and symbolized in 'Epicureus' as the bad conscience hanging oppressively over a man who anticipates meeting his end (terminus) in death. If even old man epicure cries out for mercy, he had promised, 'the Lord will take away the Tantalean stone, will grant him the sound of joy and gladness, and his bones broken by contrition shall rejoice for sins forgiven.'292 A youthful Erasmus had speculated in Antibarbari that 'wisdom is indeed to be sought from God,' but that he gives it 'to those who work.'293 And he had acknowledged that 'death will take over, but I would rather that it took me studying than idling.'294 As Erasmus died repenting, he also died working. He was editing Origen,295 another luminous initiate of the mysteries. Those who call his pursuit of wisdom plain folly will suspend Erasmus in the celestial ether, frustrated eternally between pagan and Christian heavens.296 Those who call it foolosophy will have him supping at common table with Christ and Cicero, in final compensation for the bad wine which an earthly printer of his scholar's ink had notoriously doled him.297 Vale, vivas.

This page intentionally left blank

Abbreviations

ASD C

CCSL CR CSEL CWE DB EE H K LB LW MGH MX PL PG

Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam, Opera omnia. Amsterdam: North Holland, 1971Martin Luther, De servo arbitrio. Edited by Otto Clemen. In Luthers Werke in Auswahl. 6 vols. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1960. iv, pp.94-293 Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina Corpus reformatorum Corpus scriptorum ecclesiasticorum latinorum The Collected Works of Erasmus. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974Martin Luther, Die Deutsche Bibel Erasmi Epistolae. Edited by P.S. Allen et al. 12 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1906-58 Desiderius Erasmus, Ausgewahlte Werke. Edited by Hajo Holborn with Annemarie Holborn. Munich: C.H. Beck, 1964 Desiderius Erasmus, Morias egkomion, Stultitiae laus. Edited by I.E. Kan. The Hague, 1898 Desiderius Erasmus, Opera omnia. Edited by J. Clericus. 11 vols. Leiden, 1703-6 Luther's Works. Edited by Helmut T. Lehmann et al. 54 vols. St Louis: Concordia, 1955Monumenta Germaniae historiae Masoretic Text Patrologia latina Patrologia graeca

98 Christening Pagan Mysteries

RBMAS RSV ST

W

WA WBr WTr

Rerum Britanicarum Medii Aevi Scriptores Revised Standard Version Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae. In Opera omnia. 16 vols. Rome: Polyglota S.C. De Propaganda Fide, 18821948 Desiderius Erasmus, De libero arbitrio, Diatribe sive collatio. Edited by Johannes von Walter. Quellenschriften zur Geschichte des Protestantismus, vm. Leipzig: A. Deichert, 1910 Martin Luther, Werke. 58 vols. Weimar: H. Bohlau; Graz: Akademische Druck-u. Verlaganstalt, 1964Martin Luther, Briefwechsel. 14 vols. Martin Luther, Tischreden. 6 vols.

Notes

EPIGRAPH

Antibarbari, ed. Kazimierz kumaniecki, ASD, 1-1, p. 82,11.13-17; trans., Margaret Mann Phillips, CWE, xxm, p. 60 PROLOGUE Ibid p. 135,11. 23-7; trans., CWE, xxm, p. 119 Decopia verborum ac rerum, LB, i, 19A; trans. Betty I. Knott, CWE, xxiv, p. 336 ONE: UNDER THE PEAR TREE 1 Antibarbari, ed. Kasimierz Kumaniecki, ASD, 1-1, p. 45,11.17-27; p. 47,11.35-7; trans., Margaret Mann Phillips, CWE, xxm, p. 26 2 From Adriaan Cornelissen van Baerland to Cornelis van Baerland, EE, n, p. 390 (Ep492:126-7) 3 Antibarbari, ASD, 1-1, pp. 38-138. For discussion and bibliography see also the introductions by Kumaniecki, pp. 7-32, and Phillips, CWE, xxm, pp. 2-15. For a theological interpretation which maybe compared with mine see Ernst-W. Kohls, Die Theologie des Erasmus (2 vols.; Theologische Zeitschrift, i; Basle: Friedrich Reinhardt, 1966), i, pp. 35-68; and for background, James D. Tracy, 'Against the "Barbarians": The Young Erasmus and His Humanist Contemporaries/ Sixteenth Century Journal, xi (1980), 3-22. 4 Antibarbari, ASD, 1-1, p. 38,1.1 - p. 64,1.20. The heart of the issue is at p. 45., 11.3-9,17-27. 5 Ibid p. 65,11.11-16; trans., CWE, xxm, p. 40

ioo Notes to pages 4-5

6 Ibid p. 64,121 - p. 65,1.23; p. 45,11.2-3 7 Augustine, Confessionum libri 2.4; trans., E. B. Pusey, The Confessions of St. Augustine (London and Toronto: J.M. Dent and Sons; New York: E.P. Dutton, 1907), pp. 25-6 8 See n. 28. John Locke tells an undocumented story on Erasmus 'how - in the matter of pears stolen from the monastery garden- he played a trick on his superior and fellow-monk/ in an entry for Jean LeClerc's Bibliothequeuniverselleethistorique, vm, pp. 136-7. Bruce Mansfield, Phoenix of His Age: Interpretations of Erasmus c 1550-1750 (Erasmus Studies, 4; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), p. 250 n.7 9 Robert J. O'Connell, St. Augustine's Confessions: The Odyssey of a Soul (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1969), pp. 46-50,23-36 10 Kenneth Burke, The Rhetoric of Religion: Studies in Logology (Boston: Beacon, 1961), pp. 93-101 11 Augustine, Confessionum libri 2.6; trans., Pusey, p. 27 12 Ibid2.4; trans., Pusey, pp. 25,26. Burke, The Rhetoric of Religion, p. 97 13 Augustine, Confessionum libri 2.4. But Augustine's examination of conscience does not end here, for his book is more a confessio in the sense of declaring God than of acknowledging sinfulness. Continuing, he reasons that there can be no human malice which opposes itself in antithesis to God, no sin for the sake of sin. Pride, ambition, curiosity, foolishness, sloth, luxury, prodigality, covetousness, envy, anger, fear, grief, every sin and dark emotion is the underside of grace. The sinner pervertedly mimics God. Confessionum libri 2.6. The motive for the theft then cannot be sheer malice, for sin mimics God and confesses him by perverse implication. So Augustine resumes probing. 14 Augustine, Confessionum libri 2.9; trans., Pusey, p. 31. See also the triple refrain, 'And yet alone I would not have done it.' 2.8,9. This was not his first offense. He admits that the goad to multiplying his fornication was the competitive boasting among the boys. He habitually lied to exaggerate his feats. 2.3 15 Ibid2.i,2.2;trans.,Pusey,p.23 16 Ibid2.3; trans., Pusey, p. 25 17 Ibid 1.13; trans., Pusey, p. 14

Notes to pages 5-6 /101

18 On the hated Greek lessons see Augustine, Confessionum libri i. 1314; on flogging, 1.9; on barbarisms, 1.18; on applause, 1.13; trans., Pusey, p. 13. 19 Augustine, Confessionum libri i. 18 20 Ibid 1.13 21 Ibid 4.2 22 Ibid3.4; trans., Pusey, p. 36 23 Augustine, Dedoctrina Christiana praef. 5 24 Ibid 4.3 25 Augustine, Retractationum libri 1.3 26 Sister Mary Inez Bogan in her introduction to Saint Augustine: The Retractations (The Fathers of the Church, 60; Washington, D.C. : Catholic University of America Press, 1968), p. xiv 27 Antibarbari, ASD, 1-1, p. 128,11.27-8,30-1; trans., CWE, xxm, p. 109 28 Antibarbari, ASD, 1-1, p. 114,11.6-12; trans., CWE, xxm, p. 94 29 Antibarbari, ASD, 1-1, p. 92,11.17-22 30 Ibid p. 78,11.10-14 31 Charles Bene argues for the influence of Augustine on Erasmus in Erasme et Saint Augustin ou Influence de Saint Augustin sur VHumanisme d'Erasme (Travaux d'humanisme et renaissance, 103; Geneva: Droz, 1969), esp. pp. 59-91 on Antibarbari. This very useful and scholarly documentation of Erasmus' citation of Augustine seems not to take sufficiently into account the historical context in which Erasmus cites Augustine; namely, a period in the history of theology in which Augustine was universally cited as the prime authority. Because of this historical factor, it becomes particularly imperative that the function of these citations of Augustine in Erasmus' writing be analysed. An evaluation and comparison of the issue of the relation of pagan to Christian culture in Augustine and in Erasmus indicates that their positions differ greatly, because of varying theological perspectives which will be indicated below. This variance does not exclude agreement between Augustine and Erasmus, or even the influence of Augustine, concerning certain aspects of the issue, particularly concerning the instruction of classical literature in Christian schools. But as to whether pagan literature is wisdom for Christians, Augustine and Erasmus are in conflict, and this is a critical difference. Bend's interpretation, therefore, seems simplistic.

io2 Notes to pages 7-8 32 Antibarbari, ASD, 1-1, p. 105,1.16; p. 108,1.16 - p. no, 1.22; p. 129,11. 11-13 33 Antibarbari, ASD, 1-1, p. 131,11.22-4; trans., CWE, xxm, p. 115 34 Antibarbari, ASD, 1-1, p. 114,1.12 - p. 118,1.10 35 Ibid p. 82,11.23-4. On this cardinal passage, see below pp. 19-20. Phillips suggests that this is perhaps the central text of Antibarbari in her introduction, CWE, xxm, p. 9. 36 Henri-I. Marrou, Saint Augustin et la fin de la culture antique (4th ed.; Paris: Boccard, 1958), pp. 505-40, and on Augustine's repudiation of classical culture, pp. 345-56. Tour saint Augustin, la vie intellectuelle du chretien doit s'opposer de fagon radicale a la culture traditionelle des lettr£s de son temps/ pp. 345-6. See also Charles N. Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture (rev. ed.; London: Oxford University Press, 1944), pp. 376-455.

37 Augustine, Decatechizandisrudibusy 38 Ratioseu methoduscompendiaperveniendiadveram theologiam (1518), H, p. 182,11.10-14

39 Antibarbari, ASD, 1-1, p. 46,1.29; trans., CWE, xxm, pp. 24-5 40 See Boyle, Erasmus on Language and Method in Theology (Erasmus Studies, 2; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977). 41 Antibarbari, ASD, 1-1, p. 39,11.20-2; trans., CWE, xxm, pp. 19-20. On Erasmus and friendship in these early years see Yvonne Charlier, Erasme et I'amitie d'apres sa correspondance (Bibliotheque de la Faculte de Philosophic et Lettres de 1'Universite de Liege, 219; Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1977), pp. 65-94; James D. Tracy, Erasmus: The Growth of a Mind (Travaux d'humanisme et renaissance, 126; Geneva: Droz, 1972), pp. 37-44. 42 Antibarbari, ASD, 1-1, p. 38,1.20 - p. 39,11.15-7; trans., CWE, xxm, p. 19 43 Antibarbari, ASD, 1-1, p. 40,11.18-20; trans., CWE, xxm, p. 20 44 Antibarbari, ASD, 1-1, p. 40,11.24-6 45 To Johannes Witz, EE, iv, p. 278 (Ep 1110:1-7). See also To Johann von Botzheim (Catalogus omnium lucubrationum), EE, i, p. 2 (Ep i: 29-32), and to Botzheim (Compendium vitae), EE, i, p. 48 (Ep n: 34-5). This description is accepted by R.R. Post, The Modern Devotion: Confrontation with Reformation and Humanism (Studies in Medieval and Reformation Thought, 3; Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1968), but

Notes to pages 8-10 /103

rejected by Albert Hyma, The Youth of Erasmus (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1930) and The Life of Desiderius Erasmus (Assen: VanGorcum, 1972), pp. 14-21. 46 Beatus Rhenanus to Hermann von Wied, ££, i, p. 55 (Ep in: 84); Beatus Rhenanus to Charles v, ££, i, p. 57 (Ep iv: 36) 47 To James Batt, ££, i, p. 321 (Ep 138:36-41) 48 To Johann von Botzheim (Catalogus omnium lucubrationum), ££, i, p. 2 (Ep 1:24-7) 49 Beatus Rhenanus to Charles v, ££, i, p. 57 (Ep iv: 16-8,25-6) 50 Phillips, 'Erasmus and the Classics/ in Erasmus, ed. T. A. Dorey (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), p. 2, referring to the letter To Pieter Winckel, ££, i, p. 74 (Ep i: 7-11) 51 Epp 4-15, especially To Servatius Rogerus, ££, i, pp. 89-90 (Ep 15: 32-66). See also D.F.S. Thomson, 'Erasmus as a Poet in the Context of Northern Humanism/ De Gulden Passer, XLVII (1969), 192-7. 52 Decontemptu mundi, ed. S. Dresden, ASD, v-i, pp. 40-86 53 Hyma, The Youth of Erasmus, pp. 179-80; The Contributions by Erasmus to Dynamic Christianity/ in Scrinium Erasmianum, ed. J. Coppens (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1969), n, pp. 165-7 54 'Of one thing we may be sure: his hopes for Socrates, Cicero, and the rest of the noble ancients were not peculiar either to him or to the Renaissance. They were rather the expression, in the idiom of the Renaissance, of a type of Christian philosophy almost as old as Christianity itself/Craig R. Thompson, ed., Inquisitio defide (Yale Studies in Religion, 15; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950), p. 120. The inquiry Thompson has initiated will be broadened to consider not only Erasmus' theological view on the salvation of the ancient pagans but also his own work of 'saving' them for the progress of Christian learning. 55 De pueris statim ac liberaliter instituendis, ed. Jean-Claude Margolin, ASD, 1-2, pp. 23-78; Derationestudii, aclegendiinterpretandique auctores, ibid., pp. 113-51; Rat io verae theologiae, H, pp. 177-305 56 This comparison is commonplace in Erasmus' writing and borrowed from a long tradition in Christian rhetoric. 57 See Boyle, Erasmus on Language and Method in Theology, pp. 33-57. 58 Enchiridion militischristianae, H, p. 71,11.5-7; trans., RaymondHimelick, The Enchiridion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963),

104 Notes to pages 10-12

59

60 61

62

63

64

65

66

p. 106. Erasmus compares his own labours to those of Hercules in Herculeilabores.Adagia3.1.1; LB, n, 7070-7178 Neither the extensive literature on Erasmus and the classics nor the controversy concerning the orthodoxy of his evangelical humanism can be documented here. Antibarbari, ASD, 1-1, p. 83,1.27 - p. 84,1.4; trans., CWE, xxm, pp. 60,61 'Hie aureo seculo, quo nasci decreuerat, voluit, vt omnes et anteactae et sequuturae seruirent aetates, ad huius vnius felicitatem decusque cumulandum, quaecunque in rerum natura essent, referri placuit, quod ipsum se perfecturum pollicebatur/ Antibarbari, ASD, 1-1, p. 82,11.17-20 'Quinimo admirabilem rerum ordinem et harmoniam quam vocant paulo penitius introspicienti, videri mihi prorsus solet, nee mihi adeo soli, visum est idem et plerisque grauissimis autoribus, non sine diuino consilio disciplinarum inuendiendarum negocium ethnicis datumesse/ Antibarbari, ASD, 1-1, p. 82,11.10-13; trans., CWE, xxm, p. 59 with change 'Omnia ethnicorum fortiter facta, scite dicta, ingeniose cogitata, industrie tradita, suae Rei p. praeparauerat Christus. Ille ministrauerat ingenium, ille quaerendi ardorem adiecerat, nee alio autore quaesita inueniebant/ Antibarbari, ASD, 1-1, p. 83,11.17-19; trans., CWE, xxm, p. 60. Italics mine 'Optimus igitur ille moderator Christus, cum suo seculo summi boni cognitionem peculiariter destinasset, proximis ante seculis id tribuendum putatuit, quod ad summum bonum proxime accederet, summan videlicet eruditionem/ Antibarbari, ASD, 1-1, p. 83,1.24p. 84,1.7; trans., CWE, xxm, pp. 60,61 Tracy, Erasmus, p. 53, agreeing with Paul Mestwerdt, DieAnfangedes Erasmus (Leipzig: R. Haupt, 1917), pp. 253-5. The hope Erasmus does hold about the educability of man derives from his faith in the indwelling Logos. In epistolam Pauli ad Romanes paraphrasis, IB, vn, 8o6D. A thorough scholarly study, which will be adequate both theologically and historically, of Erasmus' understanding of Israel in the divine economy is still required. For partial accounts see Harry S. May, The Tragedy of Erasmus: A Psycho-historic approach (St Charles, Mo: Piraeus, 1975),

Notes to pages 12-13 /105

67 68 69 70

71

72 73 74

75

76

77

although I would not approve of this work; Guido Kisch, Erasmus' Stellung zu Juden undjudentum (Philosophic und Geschichte, 83-4; Tubingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1969); Charles Zika, 'Reuchlin and Erasmus: Humanism and Occult Philosophy/ Journal of Religious History, ix(i977), 223-46; Werner L. Gundersheimer, 'Erasmus, Humanism and the Christian Cabala/ Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, xxvi(i963), 38-52. The apologetic itself was borrowed from Hebrew defences of its race's antiquity. Josephus, De ludaeorum vetustate sive Contra apionem 2 Clement of Alexandria, Stromateis i. 19.94 Clement of Alexandria, Stromateis i. 22.150; Protrepticus 6.70 Ambrose, De officiis ministrorum i .36.178-9. See also Gerard L. Ellspermann, The Attitude of the Early Christian Latin Writers toward Pagan Literature and Learning (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1949), pp. 113-16. Tertullian, Apologeticum 47.2-4,9; trans., Rudolph Arbesmann etal., Tertullian: Apologetical Works and Minucius Felix Octavius (The Fathers of the Church, 10; New York: The Fathers of the Church, 1950), p. 115 Eusebius of Caesarea, Ekklesiastikes historias 9.9.5-8 Ibidio.i-4 Ibid 1.2.17,23; trans., Hugh J. Lawlor and John E.L. Oulton, Eusebius: The Ecclesiastical History and the Martyrs of Palestine (2 vols.; London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1927), pp. 8,9 Eusebius, Euaggelikes apodeixeos 3.7.139-40, which passage Theodore E. Mommsen especially indicates in 'St. Augustine and the Christian Idea of Progress: The Background of The City of God/ in Medieval and Renaissance Studies, ed. Eugene Rice (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1959), p. 282. But it seems clear from the preceding text that the preparation is in Israel. What is under discussion in this text is the divine synchronization of Jesus' sojourn among men with the pax Romana, and not its preparation in Rome. The texts with which Eusebius praises the empire are those of the Hebrew Scripture; it is Israel that prophesies Rome. Augustine, DecivitateDei. SeeR.A. Markus, Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of St. Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 25-71, especially 54-5. First expressed in De Genesi contra Manichaeos 1.23.35 - 24.42. See

io6 Notes to pages 13-15

78

79

80

81

Markus, Saeculum, pp. 16-19,41- Augustine does recognize the praiseworthy mores of individual pagans, whose example maybe imitated even by Christians, as in books 1-5 of De civitate Dei, but he does not consider pagan wisdom or virtue a preparation for Christ. For the classical and patristic traditions of the ages of the world see A. Luneau, L'histoire du salut chez les Peres de I'Eglise: la doctrine des ages du monde (Theologie historique, 2; Paris: Beauchesne, 1964). Augustine, De civitate Dei 18.46. There is no other trace in Augustine's treatment of the Roman empire of its constituting in his eyes a praeparatioevangelica.' Markus, Saeculum, p. 52 Orosius, Historiarum adversus paganos libri 6.20.1-4. See also Mommsen, 'Orosius and Augustine,' in Medieval and Renaissance Studies, ed. Rice, especially pp. 340-1. Orosius, Historiarum adversus paganos libri 6.22.8; trans., Roy J. Deferrari, Paulus Orosius: The Seven Books of History against the Pagans (The Fathers of the Church, 50; Washington, D.C. : Catholic University of America Press, 1964), pp. 281-2 Isidore of Seville, Etymologiarum libri 5.38.5. For a survey see Beryl Smalley, Historians in the Middle Ages (London: Thames and Hudson,

1974). 82 Bede, De temporibus 16 83 V. A. Kolve, The Play Called Corpus Christi (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1966), pp. 57-100 84 Otto of Freising, Chronica: sive, Historia de duabus civitatibus 3.6.6-29 85 Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum historiale 6.53,63-4,88 86 See Charles Trinkaus, In Our Image and Likeness: Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought (2 vols.; London: Constable, 1970), n, pp. 722-60. 87 C. A. Patrides, The Grand Design of God: The Literary Form of the Christian View of History (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972), pp. 28-39 88 Ado of Vienne, Chronicon, in PL, cxxm, 746 89 Matthew of Paris, Chronica major a, inRBMAS, LVII/I, p. 83 90 '... sapientiae auctor atque ipsa adeo sapientia Christus lesus, qui verum est lumen, stultitiae mundanae noctem solus discutiens, splendor paternae gloriae, qui nobis in se renatis uti f actus est

Notes to pages 15-17 /107 redemptio atque iustificatio ...' Enchiridion militis Christiani, H, p. 38, 11. 21-4 91 Isidore of Seville, Etymologiarum libri 5.39.25 92 Cursor mundi 7039-40 93 See Querela pads, undique gentium eiectae profligataeque, ed. Otto Herding, ASD, iv-2, pp. 61-100. Dulcebelluminexpertisin Adagia4.1.1;LB, n, 951A-970E 94 See Boyle, Erasmus on Language and Method in Theology, pp. 53-4. 95 Antibarbari, ASD, 1-1, p. 82,1.28-p. 83,11.5,7-17 96 The argument from Nature is common, e.g., Irenaeus, Adversus haereses 4.25,4.34.4,4.36.2,5.23; Clement of Alexandria, Paedagogus 1.3.7. The concept of /ogos spermatikos is also common in the Greek Christian apologists. For orientation see Werner Jaeger, Early Christianity and Greek Paideia (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press; London: Oxford University Press, 1962); Henry Chadwick, Early Christian Thought and the Classical Tradition: Studies in Justin, Clement, and Origen (Oxford: Clarendon, 1966); L.G. Patterson, God and History in Early Christian Thought: A Study of Themes from Justin Martyr to Gregory the Great (Studies in Patristic Thought; London: Adam and Charles Black, 1967); H.B. Timothy, The Early Christian Apologists and Greek Philosophy: Exemplified by Irenaeus, Tertullian and Clement of Alexandria (Philosophical Texts and Studies, 21; Assen: Van Gorcum 1973); R.L.P. Milburn, Early Christian Interpretations of History (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1954). 97 Antibarbari, ASD, 1-1, p. 127,11.5-8; trans., CWE, xxm, pp. 107-8. Clement of Alexandria and Origen are included in the same passage, which appears in the published edition of 1520. 98 Justin Martyr, Apologia 2.13; 210 (1.44); 1.46; trans., Thomas B. Falls, Saint Justin Martyr (The Fathers of the Church; New York: Christian Heritage, 1948), pp. 133-4,83, with changes 99 Justin Martyr, Apologia 1.59-60; Logos parainetikos pros Hellenas. Clement of Alexandria, Stromata, passim 100 Antibarbari, ASD, 1-1, p. 116,1.2i-p. 11,1.6 101 Ibid p. 129,11.5-8; trans., CWE, xxm, p. 111 102 Antibarbari, ASD, 1-1, p. 129,11.8-11; trans., CWE, xxm, p. 111.

108 Notes to pages 18-20

See, however, J.-P. Massaut, 'Erasme et Saint Thomas/ in Colloquia Erasmiana Turonensia: Stage Internationale a"'etudes humanistes i2e, Tours, 1969, ed. Margolin (De Petrarque a Descartes, 24; 2 vols.; Paris:}. Vrin, 1972), n, pp. 581-611. 103 See Boyle, Erasmus on Language and Method in Theology, pp. 39-42. 104 Antibarbari, ASD, 1-1, p. 82,11.20-1; trans., RSV. In his annotation to Evangeliumsecundumjoannem, 12:32, Erasmus argues for the reading omnia over omnes, LB, vi, 391E-F; and in his In evangelium ]oannis paraphrasis, 12:32, he repeats the traditional reading of the verse, that is, how suspended from the cross Christ breaks the tyranny of Satan, LB, vn, 599A-B. See also chapter three pp. 119-20. John W. O'Malley also notes this verse in 'Erasmus and Luther, Continuity and Discontinuity as Key to Their Conflict/ Sixteenth Century Journal, v (1974), 47-65. 105 Antibarbari, ASD, 1-1, p. 82,11. 21-3; trans., CWE, xxm, p. 59 106 Hyperaspistes Diatribae adversus servum arbitrium Martini Lutheri (1526), LB, x, 1294C 107 Enchiridion, H, p. 32,11.28-32 108 Antibarbari, ASD, 1-1, p. 81,11.22-5 109 To Maarten Bartholomeuszoon van Dorp, EE, n, p. 99 (Ep 337: 336-8); trans., R.A. B. MynorsandD.F.S. Thomson, CWE, n,p. 122 no To Wolfgang Faber Capito, EE, n, p. 491 (Ep 541:133-5) 111 Ciceronianus, ed. Pierre Mesnard, ASD, 1-2, p. 710,11.2-3. See also To Francisco Vergara, EE, vn, pp. 193-4 (Ep 1885:112-61). 112 Enchiridion, H, p. 35,11. 33-4. Modestius van Straaten also finds this an example of the logos spermatikos in Erasmus' thought. 'Erasmus en de antieken/ Hermeneus: Maandblad voor die Anticke Cultuur, xxvn (1956), 93 113 'Ego igitur nullam esse eruditionem puto, nisi quae sit secularis (sic enim appellant antiquam) aut certe seculari literatura condita et instructa/ Antibarbari, ASD, 1-1, p. 84,11. 28-9; trans., CWE, xxm, p. 62 114 Antibarbari, ASD, 1-1, p. 84,11.23-5; trans., CWE, xxm, p. 61 115 Antibarbari, ASD, 1-1, p. 83,11.15-17, p. 84 116 'Nulla autem ex liberalibus disciplinis Christiana est, quia neque de Christo agunt, neque a Christianis inuentae, ad Christum autem omnes referuntur. Nee est, quod tergiuerseris, nullam artem ex-

Notes to pages 20-21 /109

cepit../ Antibarbari, ASD, 1-1, p. no, 11.14-16; trans., CWE, xxm, p. 90. See also n. 113. Compare, 'Quid de tot disciplinis. Certe omnes seculares sunt, atque adeo gentiles, id est, no a Christianis, nee de Christiana religione coscripte/ Lorenzo Valla, Elegantiae, praef. 4. Studies which have indicated, with some justification, Erasmus' debt to Valla in Antibarbari are Salvatore I. Camporeale, 'Lorenzo Valla tra Medioevo e Rinascimento: Encomion s. Thomae -1457,' Memorie Domenicanevii (1976), 135-40; Tracy, 'Against the "Barbarians": The Young Erasmus and His Humanist Contemporaries/16-22. Tracy notes the parallel of these sentences in Valla and Erasmus concerning the secular nature of the disciplines, p. 17, but does not recognize in the continuation of Erasmus' statement his important theological divergence from Valla. Although Camporeale did not note Erasmus' paraphrase of Valla, I am grateful for his suggestion to me of the general influence of Valla's Elegantiae on Antibarbari which led to my independent discovery of the parallel and the parting. 117 Adagia 1.1.8; LB, n, 28F. On navigational imagery in Erasmus' theological methodology see Boyle, Erasmus on Language and Method in Theology, pp. 59-60,78-81. 118 See Boyle, ibid pp. 91-4. 119 'anakephalaiousthai' Eph 1:10 120 Antibarbari, ASD, 1-1, p. 90,11. 2-4 121 Ibid p. 83,1. 20 122 For the significance of this animal imagery see Boyle, Erasmus on Language and Method in Theology, pp. 42-4. 123 Antibarbari, ASD, 1-1, p. 53,1.31. See also p. 73,1.2i-p. 74,11.2, 13-14. 124 Ibid p. 5,11.24-7; trans., CWE, xxm, p. 32 125 Antibarbari, ASD, 1-1, p. 56,11.27-8,17-18; trans., CWE, xxm, p. 32 126 On the tower of Babel see Boyle, Erasmus on Language and Method in Theology, pp. 106-7. 127 Antibarbari, ASD, 1-1, p. 52,11.29-31. On the antithesis of the verdant garden and the thorny underbrush as symbolic of rhetorical and scholastic theologies respectively, see Boyle, Erasmus on Language and Method in Theology.

no Notes to pages 21-24 128 Antibarbari, ASD, 1-1, p. 45,1.2$-p. 48,1.32. On the senescence of the world see Markus, Saeculum, pp. 22-7; Kohls, Die Theologiedes Erasmus, i, pp. 46-7. 129 Antibarbari, ASD, 1-1, p. 55,11.19-20; trans., CWE, xxm, p. 31 130 Antibarbari, ASD, 1-1, p. 55,11.13-14 131 Ibid p. 49,1.32-p. 54,1.23; p. 51,11.14-16; trans., CWE, xxm, p. 28 132 Antibarbari, ASD, 1-1, p. 38,11.11-12; p. 51,1.33-p. 52,11.15-16 133 See also Myron P. Gilmore, Tides et eruditio: Erasmus and the Study of History/ in Teachers of History: Essay in Honor of Laurence Bradford Packard, ed. H. Stuart Hughes (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press for Amherst College, 1954), pp. 24-5; rpt. in his Humanists and Jurists: Six Studies in the Renaissance (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963), pp. 87-114. For the contrary view that for Erasmus, 'Historical events, despite the breathing actuality of, say, the Reformation, are ultimately not real but symbolic of a happening beyond all limits of time and space' and 'Only the catastrophe of the mystery-play will reveal the meaning of history,' see Peter G. Bietenholz, History and Biography in the Work of Erasmus of Rotterdam (Travaux d'humanisme et renaissance, 87; Geneva: Droz, 1966), pp. 26-7. This seems not to make enough allowance for the emphasis on free choice in Erasmus' thought, a criticism also voiced byTrinkaus, 'Erasmus, Augustine, and the Nominalists,' Archivfilr Reformationsgeschichte, LXVII (1976), 29-30, n. 51. 134 Antibarbari, ASD, 1-1, p. 134,11.10-13. Compare this text with Bietenholz's statement that Erasmus has 'little use' for Prometheus and that there seems to be 'only one serious reference' to him, namely Ecclesiastes, LB, v, 7871. History and Biography in the Workof Erasmus of Rotterdam, p. 88 and n. 152 135 Justin Martyr, Apologia 2.7; trans., Falls, p. 126 136 Antibarbari, ASD, 1-1, p. 134,1.3O-p. 136,1.1 137 Ibid p. 135,11.23-7; trans., CWE, xxm, p. 119. Plato, Phaedrus 23oc-d 138 'Convivium religiosum,' in Colloquia, ed. L.-E. Halkin et al., ASD, 1-3, p. 254, 11. 709-10; trans., Thompson, The Colloquies of Erasmus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), p. 68 139 See nn. 90, 114-17. See Boyle, Erasmus on Language and Method in Theology. Also, 'La sagesse erasmienne est active, et cette activity est

Notes to pages 24-27 /111

"verbale."' S. Dresden, 'Sagesse et folie d'apres Erasme,' in Colloquia Erasmiana Turonensia, ed. Margolin, i, p. 293 140 Antibarbari, ASD, 1-2, p. 132,1.3o-p. 133,1.4; trans., CWE, xxm, p. 116 141 Antibarbari, ASD, 1-1, p. 103,1.28-p. 104,1.3; trans., CWE, xxm, p. 83. But for his appreciation of martyrs see Deamabiliecclesiaeconcordia (1533), LB, v, 47OA. 142 To John Colet, EE, i, pp. 478-9 (Ep 237:71-89) 143 Paradesis (1516), H, p. 142,11.21-3 144 Antibarbari, ASD, 1-1, p. 123,11.20-2 TWO: SCHOLARS' INK 1 Morias egkomion, id est, Stulticiae laus, ed. Clarence H. Miller, ASD, iv~3, p. 84,11.254-5. IRms commentary, Gerardus Listrius gives the saying as, 'Brabantus quo natu grandior, hoc stultitior/ LB, iv, 415E. See also, The Commentary of Gerardus Listrius on Erasmus' Praise of Folly: A Critical Edition and Translation with Introduction and Commentary, by Joseph A. Gavin, unpublished PH D dissertation, St Louis University, 1973. Kan annotates the reference, K, p. 21, as, 'Hoe ouder, hoe zotter Brabander/ Hoe ouder hoe botter Hollander,' and refers to PJ. Harrebomee, Spreekwoordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal (3 vols.; Utrecht, 1853-70), i, p. 86. 2 Antibarbari, ed. Kazimierz Kumaniecki, ASD, 1-1, p. 66,11.8-9; trans., Margaret Mann Phillips, CWE, xxm, p. 40 3 The didactic force of the satire in the Moria is argued by Sister Geraldine Thompson, Under Pretext of Praise: Satiric Mode in Erasmus' Fiction (Erasmus Studies, i; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973), pp. 51-85; Walter Kaiser, Praisers of Folly: Erasmus, Rabelais, Shakespeare (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963), p. 12-13, 19-90; A.E. Douglas, 'Erasmus as a Satirist/ in Erasmus, ed. T. A. Dorey (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), pp. 31-54. 4 The artificial or professional fool, who assumes the role, is distinguished from the natural fool, as in Moria, ASD, iv-3, p. 114, 11.813-18. K, p. 65. For histories and analyses of the fool see especially Enid Welsford, The Fool: His Social and Literary History (London: Faber and Faber,

112 Notes to page 27

1935); Barbara Swain, Fools and Folly during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932); William Willef ord, The Fool and His Sceptre: A Study in Clowns and Jesters and Their Audience (n. p.: Northwestern University Press, 1969). Kaiser also writes on natural and artificial fools in Praisers of Folly, pp. 5-8, as does William Empson in The Structure of Complex Words (London: Chattoand Windus, 1951), pp. 105-24. 5 Swain, Fools and Folly during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, pp. 188-9,n-1O- Btrt compare Kaiser's comment that 'Erasmus carries his argument on behalf of folly to its logical conclusion by demonstrating that the final state of folly is to lose onself in God... [It gives] a mystical vision of man in eternal joy.' Praisers of Folly, p. 60. And on that same final passage, 'Malgr£ toutes les objections qu'on pourra faire et malgre les doutes qu'on a exprimes a cet sujet, je n'hesite pas - les termes erasmiens memes m'invitent a le faire - a parler ici d'une extase mystique.' S. Dresden, 'Sagesse et folie d'apres Erasme,' in Colloquia Erasmiana Turonensia: Stage internationaled'etudes humanistes i2e, Tours, 1969, ed. Jean-Claude Margolin (De Petrarque a Descartes, 24; 2 vols.; Paris: J. Vrin, 1972), i, p. 296. PierreMesnard also comments very generally on 'la perspective mystique' in 'Erasme et la conception dialectique de la folie,' in L'Umanesimo e 'la Folliaf by E. Castellietal. (Rome: Abete, 1971), pp. 59-60. The mysticism of the Moria is much more pervasive than the final passage, however, as this study will demonstrate. 6 Willeford, The Fool and His Sceptre, p. 10. He interprets this: The fool has the freedom and unpredictability of spirit with neither focus nor direction. The fool's wind scatters things and meanings yet in the confusion reveals glimpses of a counterpole to spirit: nature with the purposes and intelligence of instinct, which, like spirit, cannot be accommodated to rational understanding.' pp. 10-11 7 This sentence compresses considerable scholarship on the fool's relation to the sacred, but see especially Welsford, The Fool, pp. 55-112; Willeford, The Fool and His Sceptre, pp. 73-99,137-8,230-5; Swain, Fools and Folly during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, p. 52; and the related studies, n. 14. Moria relates the folk custom of caring for natural fools because

Notes to pages 27-29 /113

they are thought to be under the protection of the gods, Moria, ASD, iv-3, p. 114,11. 813-18. 8 Thelma Niklaus, Harlequin: Or the Rise and Fall of a Bergamask Rogue (New York: George Braziller, 1956), p. 18 9 Swain, Fools and Folly during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, pp. 60-63, and on the related issue of fools in drama, e.g., their role in the sottiesof theSoci£tesJoyeux, pp. 91-113,157-71. For general historical comment on fools and other comic elements in religious drama, see Allardyce Nicoll, Masks, Mimes and Miracles: Studies in the Popular Theatre (New York: Cooper Square, 1963), pp. 163-87. E.K. Chambers notes a record of paying a fool for his pastime before and after the miracle-plays in The Mediaeval Stage (2 vols.; Cambridge: Oxford University Press, 1903), n, p. 141. 10 Swain, Fools and Folly during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, pp. 62-3, citing L. Petit dejulleville, LesMysteres (Paris, 1880), i, pp. 240, 235 11 Swain states that the fool's addition to the play was to provide comic relief, in his 'sheer irrelevance' a suitable variation to relax the audience . Fools and Folly during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, pp. 61-2 12 The Pynneres (and Paynters), 'Crucifixio Christi/ in York Plays, pp. 349-58 For other observations on religious laughter, see V. A. Kolve, The Play Called Corpus Christi (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1966), p. 124-44. 13 Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: Vom Ursprung der Kultur im Spiel (Rowohlts deutsche Enzyklopadie, 21; Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1956), p. 25; trans., George Steiner, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (London: Temple Smith, 1970), p. 36. This suggests why Huizinga considers the Moria to be the only work of Erasmus destined for immortality, in the profound illumination which humour gave his writing. Erasmus of Rotterdam, trans. F. Hopman (London: Phaidon, 1952), p. 78 See also Hugo Rahner, Der spielende Mensch (Einsiedeln: Johannes, 1952); Josef Pieper, Zustimmung zur Welt: eine Theorie des Festes (Munich: Kosel, 1963); Hans-George Gadamer, WahrheitundMethode:

ii4 Notes to page 29

14 15

16

17

Grundzuge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik (Tubingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1972), pp. 19-127; Roger Callois, Lesjeux et les hommes: le masqueet le vertige (rev. ed.; Paris: Gallimard, 1958); Eugen Fink, Spiel als Weltsymbol (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1960). Harvey Cox, The Feast of Fools: A Theological Essay on Festivity and Fantasy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969) See Chambers, The Medieval Stage, i, pp. 274-335; Welsford, The Fool, pp. 200-3; Swain, Fools and Folly during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, pp. 70-4. Chambers argues that 'the ruling idea of the feast is the inversion of status/ p. 235, as the lowly subdeacons assume parodistically the ritual functions of priests. It may be added that theologically this burlesque is a mimesis of the inversions which the sacred rites memorialize and confer; namely, the divinization of man through the inhominization of God. The merry madness of the participants in the mock feast imitates the redemptive inversion of human status, which promotes joy in this life and beatitude in the next. The Feast of Fools also deserves more analysis of its social function, as Natalie Z. Da vis's study of the Abbey of Misrule in France, especially the charivari, would suggest. See her The Reasons of Misrule' in Society and Culture in Early Modern France: Eight Essays (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975), pp. 97-123. Especially Kaiser, who has insisted that the interpretation of the satire depends more on the analysis of Moria than on the butts of her oration. Praisers of Folly, p. 50. But see also Barbara Konneker on 'die Selbstdarstellung der Moria/ in Wesen und Wandlung der Narrenidee im Zeitalter des Humanismus: Brant - Murner - Erasmus (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1966), pp. 260-91; and Empson on the senses of folly in The Structure of Complex Words, pp. 105-24. It is not treated by Kaiser or Thompson. Konneker writes, 'Dass er daher die Moria als antike Gottin erscheinen lasst, geschieht keinesfalls bloss zu dem Zweck, seine reiche Bildung und Kenntnis grieschischer Mythologie und Dichtung zur Schau zu stellen. Es ist vielmehr ein sorgfaltig gewalhtes Mittel der Verfremdung, das Verbliiffung und Uberraschung auslosen und den Blick, von Vorurteilen und Voreingenommenheit unverstellt, auf neue Moglichkeiten der Sinndeutung lenken soil.' Wesen und Wandlung der Narrenidee im

Notes to page 29/115

18 19

20 21

22 23

ZeitalterdesHumanismus, p. 262. See also, 'Cestqu'iln'est pas inutile de faire observer que la Stultitia est une de* esse, mais un deesse si Ton peut dire mondaine: elle ne regne pas seulement sur le monde, elle est du monde/ Dresden, 'Sagesse et folie d'apres Erasme,' p. 295. There is general discussion of the metamorphosis of pagan to Christian Folly in a note by Lynda G. Christian, where taking occurrences of Stultitia as pagan and Moria as Christian, she relates this to the 'dynamic relationship between the natural and the reborn man/ Her linguistic argument is unconvincing, however. The Metamorphoses of Erasmus' "Folly,"' Journal ofthe History ofIdeas, xxxn (1971), 289-94 On this phenomenon of the holy fool and satire, see Willeford, The Fool and His Sceptre, p. 232. For dea, Moria, ASD, iv-3, p. 76,1.90, p. 80,1.137; the rest, passim, but especially p. 76,1.88- p. 78,1.111; p. 80,11.136-142; p. 132, 1.140 - p. 134,1.184 Iliad 20.131; cf. Odyssey 16.161; trans., Robert Fitzgerald, The Iliad (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor/Doubleday, 1974), p. 477 Moria, ASD, iv-3, p. 74,11.57-60, trans., BettyRadice, Praiseof Folly and Letter to Martin Dorp 1515 (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, *97i)/ PP- 66-7 A satirical slap at rhetorical method, this relates to Moria as a parodic oration, on which see Sander L. Gilman, The Parodic Sermon in European Perspective: Aspects of Liturgical Parody from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1974). He suggests that 'Erasmus selects, as the structure of his work, the mock encomion with the exterior form of the university oration' and that there are similarities between the general outline of the Moria and the satire on schooling within it, pp. 28-9. See Willeford, The Fool and His Sceptre, pp. 100-14. See Ove Jorgensen, 'Das Auftreten der Goetter in den Buechern L- jx der Odysee/ Hermes, xxxix (1904), 357-82; G.F. Else, 'God and Gods in Early Greek Thought/ Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association, LXXX (1949), 24-36, in which he also mentions p. 26 n. 16, E. Heden, Homerische Gotterstudien, unpublished dissertation, Uppsala, 1912, and Erland Ehmark, The Idea of God in Homer (Uppsala, 1935), pp. 64-5. Moria resorts 'ad Homericum exemplar,' Moria, ASD, iv~3, p. 88,1.

n6 Notes to pages 29-30

24 25 26 27 28 29 30

31 32

313 and cites him explicitly on the gods, p. 76,1.107; p. 86,1.286; p. 88,1.300; p. 112,1.784; p. 132,1.149. But she counters him by declaring his gods obsolete, p. 76,11.91-3. Antibarbari, ASD, 1-1, p. 96,11.16-17 Seen.285. Moria, ASD, iv-3, p. 134,11.173-5. See also n.22. Ibid p. 80,11.138-44 Ibid p. 86,1.288 - p. 88,1.290 Ibid p. 132,11.143-155; p. 164,1.623 - p. 166,1.625 Eccl. i:i5b, although the RSV has 'what is lacking cannot be numbered/ Moria cites the verse, Moria, ASD, iv-3, p. 180,11.919-20. See also p. 126,11.11-13. Virgil, Aeneid 6.625-7. Moria, ASD, iv-3, p. 76,11.91-4,103-5 The most ancient and enduring of the indigenous mystery religions of classical antiquity was the Eleusinian, which focused on the mythology of Demeter-Kore. Although the mystery religions varied in the age of their origin and flourishing, in geographical centre and diffusion, in cult and in myth, for our purposes only the common doctrine need be extracted: the ineffable secret of immortality into which the mystic was ritually and didactically initiated. For an orientation adequate enough for the argument here, see George E. Mylonas, Eleusis and the Eleusinian Mysteries (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961); C. Kerenyi, Eleusis: Archetypal Image of Mother and Daughter, trans., Ralph Mannheim (Bollingen Series LXV, 4; New York: Pantheon/Random House, 1967); Martin P. Nilsson, Greek Popular Religion (Lectures on the History of Religions, new series i; New York: Columbia University Press, 1940), pp. 42-64, and The Dionysiac Mysteries of the Hellenistic and Roman Age (Lund: C.W.K. Gleerup, 1957); W.K.C. Guthrie, Orpheus and the Greek Religion: A Study of the Orphic Movement (2d ed. rev.; London: Methuen, 1952); Franz Cumont, Les Religions orientales dans lepaganisme romain (4th ed. rev.; Paris: Paul Geuthner, 1929). These studies document many classical and patristic texts from which Erasmus could have derived knowledge of the mystery religions sufficient for his satire. Since his antibarbarian campaign recovers only Greek and Roman literature, I am excluding from discussion the Egyptian cult of Isis and the Persian cult of Mithras, although he refers to the latter in Adagia: Omnia

Notes to pages 30-31 /117

octo 1.7.26; LB, ii, 2720273A; Plures adorant solem orientem, quam occidentem 3.3.15; 786A-D; and Mythragyrtes, non daduchus, 4.8.55; 11353. Erasmus may have derived his knowledge of Mithras from Jerome's letter 'Ad Laetem, de institutione filiae/107.2. Edward L. Surtz, The Praise of Wisdom: A Commentary on the Religious and Moral Backgrounds of St. Thomas More's Utopia (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1957), p. 26. Erasmus refers to cultic initiation to the mysteries of Bacchus, Ceres, and Cybelein Lingua (1525), ed. F. Schalk, ASD, iv-i, p. 362,11.541-46; and to the mysteries in Samothrace, p. 279, 11.459-61. Ker£nyi especially emphasizes the significance of the birth of Plutos from the dead goddess on her funeral pyre; he considers it the secret of Eleusis, pp. 92-4. Stressing the agrarian origin of the mysteries, Nilsson offers an opposing view. Greek Popular Religion, p. 62 33 For references to agricultural origins, aspects, and analogies in the mystery religions, see the studies cited in the note above. 34 Moria, ASD, iv-3, p. 71,1.13 - p. 72,1.17; trans., Radice, p. 63 35 '... quasi-Lucretian description of spring.' Kaiser, Praisers of Folly, p. 42. A.H.T. Levi finds the reference to mild west breezes reminiscent of Horace, in his notes to Radice's translation, p. 63, n. 2. For other conventions, see ASD, iv-3, pp. 71-2, nn. 14-16. 36 Moria, ASD, iv-3, p. 136,11.199-201 37 Ibid p. 78,11.112-15. This alludes also perhaps to the English isle on which Erasmus conceived her, an isle he hoped would prove fortunate for him. 38 E.g., Kaiser, Praisers of Folly, p. 47 39 Franz Cumont, After Life in Roman Paganism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1923), pp. 8o-i;J.M.C. Toynbee, Death and Burial in the Roman World (London: Thames and Hudson, 1971), p. 38 40 Moria, ASD, iv-3, p. 78,11.112-15 41 Ibid p. 71,1.13 42 Adagia 1.6.77; LB, n, 292F-294B 43 '... come lately from,'Sir Thomas Chaloner, trans., The Praise ofFolie, ed. Clarence H. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the Early English Text Society, 1965), p. 7; 'come up from,' Radice, p. 63; 'come from/ John Wilson, trans., The Praise of Folly (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1958), p. 7; 'come out of/ Leonard F. Dean, trans.,

n8 Notes to pages 31-32 The Praise of Folly (Chicago: Packard, 1946), p. 43; Hoyt Hopewell Hudson, trans., The Praise of Folly (New York: Modern Library, 1941), p. 7; 'come back from/ Clarence Miller, trans., The Praise of Folly (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 9 44 On the rites of the Trophoniads see Jane Ellen Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1908), pp. 579-80, and Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1912), pp. 508-11; B.C. Dietrich, Death, Fate and the Gods: The Development of a Religious Idea in Greek Popular Belief and in Homer (London: University of London, The Athlone Press, 1965), appendix vi, pp. 348-51. The classical reference is to Pausanius, Hellados periegeseos 9.39.5-14. 45 On the relationship of mnemosune and anamnesis see Harrison, Themis, pp. 511-14; Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, pp. 574-83; Guthrie, Orpheus and Greek Religion, pp. 176-8. 46 Moria, ASD, iv-3, p. 78,11.124-6,128-9. Lethe is mentioned third, after Philautia or self-love and Kolakia or flattery. See also p. 80,1. I67.

47 Seen. 188. 48 Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, p. 579. Pausanius, Hellados periegeseos 9-39-13/ trans., W.H.S. Jones, Description of Greece (5 vols.; London: William Heinemann; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1955), iv, p. 355 49 Moria, ASD, iv-3, p. 134,11.173-5 50 Ibid p. 74,11.43-8. But she catalogues those who have indeed praised her, p. 178,1.891 - p. 188,1.140. 51 'Viri, Quid addam epitheti? Quid nisi stultissimi? Nam quo alio honestiore cognomine Mystas suos compellet Dea STULTITIA?' Moria, ASD, iv-3, p. 76,11.88-90. See also p. 134,1.175. Compare 'studiosos mei cultores/ but not in direct address, p. 84,11.254-5. 52 'Quare valete, plaudite, viuite, bibite, Moriae celeberrimi mystae/ telos. Moria, ASD, iv-3, p. 194,1.276 53 In the Eleusinian mysteries the mustai were those initiated in the lesser mysteries at Agrai (muesis) and vowed to secrecy (aporrheton). But they had not yet participated in the greater mysteries at the Telesterion at Eleusis, specifically the telete and epopteia, whose

Notes to page 32/119 visionaries were called epoptes, since they had seen the ineffable secret (arrheton). Mylonas, Eleusis and the Eleusinian Mysteries, pp. 237,239; Kerenyi, Eleusis, pp. 45-7. (The term arrheton occurs satirically in Moria, ASD, rv-3, p. 164,1.616). Harrison mentions additional occurrences of mustai for initiates, such as in Crete's public rites, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, pp. 153-4. The usual term for an initiate in the Dionysiac mysteries, however, is speira (L. spira), although mystae also occurs. Nilsson, The Dionysiac Mysteries of the Hellenistic and Roman Age, pp. 50,49,54 The definition of mysta by Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short, A Latin Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon, 1879), p. 1182, is unsupported by the ancient literary and modern archaeological evidence: 'a priest of the secret rites of divine worship, a priest of the mysteries/ As initiates, the mystae were distinct from the priests and other cultic functionaries, who bore titles corresponding to an elaborate division of duties. At Eleusis, for example, the priest was the hierophantes. For a convenient summary see Mylonas, Eleusis and the Eleusinian Mysteries, pp. 229-37;and for the Dionysiac mysteries, Nilsson, The Dionysiac Mysteries of the Hellenistic and Roman Age, pp. 52-4. Thus the translation of mystae as 'priests' is inaccurate, as by Radice, p. 140, rendering Moria, ASD, iv-3, p. 134,1.175. Listrius' first edition (1515) of commentary on Moria gives this gloss of the first occurrence of mystae: 'Mystae dicuntur initiati mysterijs alicuius numinis, unde et symmystae dicuntur iisdem initiati sacris. Dicuntur autem para to mueo quod est initio, quod a muo id est occulto arcana mysteriorum, quae nefas erat reuelare, dicitur.' And the 1516 edition adds this gloss of mystae as Moria's final word: 'Sunt qui dei cuiuspiam sacris sunt initiati.' This comment is not by Listrius; it may be by Erasmus himself. See the article by Miller and Gavin, Erasmus in English, in press. 54 Moria, ASD, rv-3, p. 71,1.9; trans., Radice, p. 63 55 On theoria see Kerenyi, The Religion of the Greeks and Romans (London: Thames and Hudson, 1962), pp. 141-54. The style of classical religion, he argues, is a 'religion of show.' 56 Moria, ASD, iv-3, p. 134,11.175-9; trans., Radice, p. 140. See Moria's disparagement of the Christian worship of images of Christ, p. 152, 11.441-4, which is meant to imply analogously that true worship

i2o Notes to pages 32-33

57 58

59 60 61

62

63

consists in putting on Christ in one's life, just as Moria's followers imitate her. Ibid p. 134.11.179-80 On the epopteia as the Eleusinian version of the beatific vision see Kerenyi, Eleusis, pp. 95-102; and on epopteia also Mylonas, Eleusis and the Eleusinian Mysteries, pp. 274-85,299. Emphasizing happiness as a characteristic of the Eleusinian phenomenon, Kerenyi writes that the source of the beatitude is precisely in seeing, in this case, Kore (Persephone). Seen.55. Moria, ASD, iv~3, p. 71,11.10-11 Ibid p. 72,11.17-19. The visual imagery of the Moria, especially the play on appearance and reality, is an important key to its interpretation which I develop in an essay in progress. Ibid p. 74,11.67-8. On this theme see Boyle, Erasmus on Languageand Method in Theology (Erasmus Studies, 2; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), pp. 38-57On the hieros logos see Cumont, Lux Perpetua (Paris: Paul Geuthner,

i949)/P-23764 In which the sacred objects for initiatory viewing were hidden. See Mylonas, Eleusis and the Eleusinian Mysteries, pp. 245, 319, passim; Kerenyi, Eleusis, pp. 66, passim-, and onDionysios' liknon, Nilsson, The Dionysiac Mysteries of the Hellenistic and Roman Age, pp . 30-9 . 65 While Italian humanists were devoted to the so-called 'book mysteries' of philosophy, rather than to the ritualistic revival of ancient cults, the recovery of the mythology represented in the mystery cults was also essential to their renaissance of classical learning. See Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (2d ed. rev.; London: Faber and Faber, 1968); Jean Seznec, La survivance des dieux antiques; essai sur le role de la tradition mythologique dans I'humanisme et dans I'art de la Renaissance (London: Warburg Institute, 1939), and with revisions, The Survival of the Pagan Gods, trans., Barbara F. Sessions (Bollingen Series xxxvin; New York: Pantheon, 1953). See also chapter one n. no. 66 Supputatio errorum in censuris Beddae (1526), LB, ix, 5i6-5i7A. On the Italian trip and the Moria see also Paul O. Kristeller, 'Erasmus from an Italian Perspective/ Renaissance Quarterly, xxm (1970), 1-14; Tibor

Notes to page 33/121

67

68

69 70 71 72 73 74

75

Kardos, 'Zur Entstehungsgeschichte des Lobes der Torheit/ FilologiaiKozlony, iv(i958), 583-94. Ciceronianus, ed. Pierre Mesnard, ASD, 1-2, p. 637,1.20 - p. 639,1.17. If the sermon is accurately reported, it was not typical. See John W. O'Malley, 'Preaching for the Popes/ in The Pursuit of Holiness in Late Medieval and Renaissance Religion: Papers from the University of Michigan Conference, ed. Charles Trinkaus with Heiko Oberman (Studies in Medieval and Reformation Thought, 10; Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1974), pp. 408-40; and his Praise and Blame in Renaissance Rome: Rhetoric, Doctrine, and Reform in the Sacred Orators of the Papal Court, c. 1450-1521 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1979), especially pp. 29-31,114. Moria, ASD, iv-3, p. 144,11.361-7. Erasmus' objection to Christian cabbalism is also relevant here. See Charles Zika, 'Reuchlin and Erasmus: Humanism and Occult Philosophy,' Journal of Religious History, ^(1977), 223-46; Werner L. Gundersheimer, 'Erasmus, Humanism, and the Christian Cabala/ Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, xxvi (1963), 38-52. Moria, ASD, iv-3, p. 146,1.395; trans., Radice, p. 154. See alsoMoria's comments on their methods of interpreting mysteries. Moria, ASD, iv-3, p. 144,11.378-80 Moria, ASD, iv-3, p. 120,11.932-4; trans., Radice, p. 124 See n. 33 for studies in which they are cited. Mylonas, Eleusis and the Eleusinian Mysteries, p. 256; Kerenyi, Eleusis, p. 65 Lucian, Alexander, seu Pseudomantis, trans., Erasmus, LB, i, 23IA244c Craig R. Thompson emphasizes in general the Lucianic character of Moria in The Translations of Lucian by Erasmus and St. Thomas More (Ithaca, NY: n.pr., 1940), pp. 1-2, 22, 44; and see also the introductions to the translations by Dean and Hudson; Kardos, 'Zur Entstehungsgeschichte des Lobes der Torheit/ pp. 578-82; Mesnard, 'Erasme et la conception dialectique de la folie/ pp. 55-7. None suggests, however, that Alexander is a source for Moria. Moria, ASD, iv-3, p. 74, 1. 76; trans., Miller, p. 13, after Sir Thomas Chaloner. Erasmus renders it 'desipienter sapientes' in his own translation of Alexander 40, LB, i, 2395. The theological source for Erasmus' oxymoron is i Cor. 3:18, as Moria herself documents, ASD,

122 Notes to pages 33-34

iv-3, p. 186,11. 71-2. Kaiser's claim that Nicholas of Cusa's paradoxical docta ignorantia and coincidentia oppositorum are the 'philosophical assumptions upon which Erasmus' concept of the fool is based' seems unlikely. Praisers of Folly, pp. 9-10. The passage from Moria, ASD, iv-3, p. 120,1.953 - p. 122,1.960 seems more reminiscent of Alexander than of Philopseudes, which the marginal note to Listrius' commentary suggest, ASD, iv-3, p. 121, n. 954. 76 To Rene d'llliers, EE, i, p. 431 (Ep 199:1-2,16-8); trans., R. A.B. Mynors and D.F.S. Thomson, CWE, n, p. 199. Cf. this dedication as a 'memento' of himself with that of the Moria to More. See n. 130. 77 ToRen£ d'llliers, EE, i, p. 431 (Ep 199:4-8); trans., CWE, n, p. 199 78 Lucian, Alexander 61.'... but mostly and this will give greater pleasure to you also - to right the wrongs of Epicurus, a man truly saintly and divine in his nature, who alone truly discerned right ideals and handed them down, who proved himself the liberator of all who sought his converse.' Trans., A.H. Harmon, in Lucian, trans., Harmon et al. (8 vols.; William Heinemann; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1921-67), iv, p. 253 79 On Epicureanism iniMon'a see Kaiser, Praisers of Polly, pp. 76-82. 80 On More's knowledge, appreciation, and translations of Lucian see Craig R. Thompson, The Translations of Lucian by Erasmus and St. Thomas More, pp. 1-3,8-12,23-47; and his introduction to The Complete Works of Thomas More, Vol. 111:1, Translations of Lucian. 81 On the ironic mock encomion see Kaiser, Praisers of Polly, pp. 35-50; Hudson, 'Analysis,' in his translation, pp. 129-42. 82 See the references in n. 33; and Cumont, After Life in Roman Paganism, pp. 116-24; LuxPerpetua, pp. 235-74. 83 For the apology for pleasurable instruction with reference to Moria see To Thomas More, EE, i, p. 461 (Ep 222:43-6,62-4,71-2) and To Maarten Bartholomeuszoon van Dorp, EE, n, pp. 93-4 (Ep 337: 84-120). 84 Cited by G.R. Owst, Preaching in Medieval England: An Introduction to Sermon Manuscripts of the Period c. 1350-1450 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1926), p. 185 85 Moria, ASD, iv-3, p. 118,1. 880; trans., Hudson, p. 52 86 'Vnde Graecis dicta mows para to meird, quod omnibus ex aequo sit

Notes to pages 35-37 /123

distributa...' Quomodo se quisque debeat praeparare ad mortem (1533), ed. A. van Heck, ASD, v-i, p. 352,11.274-5 87 Moria, ASD, iv-3, p. 190,11.161-3. Plato, PhaedrusSoe-Sia 88 Moria, ASD, iv-3, p. 158,11.504-8. In his annotation novos orbes Listrius explains this as the addition of spheres for the blessed, which increased the number from the traditional seven to ten. LB, iv, 469*. Erasmus may also allude to scholastic theses about purgatory. 89 Moria, ASD, iv-3, p. 146,11.387-9 90 Ibid p. 160,1.556 - p. 162,1.560 91 Ibid; p. 162,11.560-76 92 Ibid p. 174,11. 796-7 93 Ibid p. 174,1.806-25 94 Ibid p. 174,1.798-801 95 Ibid p. 122,1.970 - p. 124,1.977 96 Ibid p. 122,11.961-3 97 Ibid p. 126,11.23-7. On mourning see p. 136,11.203-4;an