By Anthony Kenny
Sixteen-Century
Philosophy
Humanism and Reform
The decade beginning in 1511 can
well be regarded as the high point of the Renaissance. In the Vatican Raphael
was frescoing the walls of the papal apartments, while Michelangelo covered the
ceiling of the Sistine Chapel with his paintings. In Florence the Medici
family, exiled since the time of the reformer Savonarola, returned to power and
patronage. One of the oYcers of the former republic, Niccolo` Machiavelli, now
under house arrest, used his enforced leisure to produce a classic text of
political philosophy, The Prince, which oVered rulers frank advice on the
acquisition and retention of power. Renaissance art and Renaissance ideas
travelled northward as far as Germany and England. A colleague of
Michelangelo’s designed Henry VII’s tomb in Westminster Abbey and the foremost
scholar of the age, the Dutchman Desiderius Erasmus, lectured at Cambridge
early in the reign of his son Henry VIII. Erasmus was a frequent guest at the
house of Thomas More, a lawyer about to begin a political career that would
make him, brieXy, the most powerful man in England after the king.
Erasmus and More and their
friends propounded in Northern Europe the humanist ideas that had taken root in
Italy in the previous century. ‘Humanism’ at that time did not mean a desire to
replace religious values with secular human ones: Erasmus was a priest who
wrote best-selling works of piety, and More was later martyred for his
religious beliefs. Humanists, rather, were people who believed in the
educational value of the ‘humane letters’ (literae humaniores) of the Greek and
Latin classics. They studied and imitated the style of classical authors, many
of whose texts had been recently rediscovered and were being published thanks
to the newly developed art of printing. They believed that their scholarship,
applied to ancient pagan texts, would restore to Europe long-neglected arts and
sciences, and, applied to the Bible and to ancient Church writers, would help
Christendom to a purer and more authentic understanding of Chris[1]tian truth.
Humanists valued grammar,
philology, and rhetoric more highly than the technical philosophical studies
that had preoccupied scholars during the Middle Ages. They despised the Latin
that had been the lingua franca of medieval universities, far removed in style
from the works of Cicero and Livy. Erasmus had been unhappy studying at the
Sorbonne, and More mocked the logic he had been taught at Oxford. In
philosophy, both of them looked back to Plato rather than to Aristotle and his
many medieval admirers.
More paid a compliment to Plato
by publishing, in 1516, a Wctional blueprint for an ideal commonwealth. In
More’s Utopia, as in Plato’s Republic, property is held in common and women
serve alongside men in the army. More, writing in an age of exploration and
discovery, pretended that his state actually existed on an island across the
ocean. Like Plato, however, he was using the description of a Wctional nation
as a vehicle for theoretical political philosophy and for criticism of
contemporary society.1 Erasmus was more sceptical about Plato as a guide to
politics. In the teasing Praise of Folly that he dedicated to More in 1511 he
mocks Plato’s claim that the happiest state will be ruled by philosopher kings.
History tells us, he says, ‘that no state has been so plagued by its rulers as
when power has fallen into the hands of some dabbler in philosophy’ (M, 100).
But when, in the same year as Utopia, he published his Instruction to a
Christian Prince, he did little but repeat ideas to be found in Plato and
Aristotle. For this reason his treatise of political philosophy has never
achieved the renown of Machiavelli’s or of More’s.
Erasmus was more interested in
divinity than in philosophy, and he cared more for biblical studies than for
speculative theology. Scholastics like Scotus and Ockham, he complained, merely
choked with brambles paths that had been made plain by earlier thinkers. Among
the great Christian teachers of the past his favourite was St Jerome, who had
translated the Bible from Hebrew and Greek into Latin. Erasmus worked for some
years annotating the Latin New Testament, and then decided to produce a Latin
version of his own to amend corruptions which had crept into the accepted text
(‘the Vulgate’) and, where necessary, to improve on Jerome himself. In 1516 he
published his new Latin version along with his annotations, and almost as an
appendix, he added a Greek text of the New Testament—the Wrst one ever to be
printed. In his Latin version, in striving for Wdelity to the Greek original,
he did not hesitate to alter even the most beloved and solemn texts. The Wrst
words of the fourth Gospel, In principio erat verbum, became In principio erat
sermo: what was in the beginning was not ‘the Word’ but ‘the Saying’.
Erasmus’ Latin version was not
generally adopted, though passages of it can still be read in the chapel
windows of King’s College Cambridge. However, the Greek text he published was
the foundation for the great vernacular testaments of the sixteenth century,
beginning with the monu[1]mental German version
published in 1522 by Martin Luther.
Luther was an Augustinian monk,
as Erasmus had been until released by papal dispensation from his monastic
commitments. Like Erasmus, Luther had made a close study of St Paul’s Epistle
to the Romans. This had made him question fundamentally the ethos of
Renaissance Catholicism. The year after the publication of Erasmus’ New
Testament Luther issued, in the University of Wittenberg, a public denunciation
of abuses of papal authority, in particular of a scandalously promoted oVer of
an indulgence (remission of punishment due to sin) in return for contributions
to the building of the great new church of St Peter’s in Rome.
Erasmus and More shared Luther’s
concern about the corruption of many of the higher clergy: they had both
denounced it in print, Erasmus pungently in a satire on Pope Julius II, More
with ironic circumspection in Utopia. But both were alienated when Luther went
on to denounce large parts of the Catholic sacramental system and to teach that
the one thing needful for salvation is faith, or trust in the merits of Christ.
In 1520 Pope Leo X condemned forty-one articles taken from Luther’s teaching,
and followed this up with an excommunication after Luther had burnt the Bull of
Condemnation. King Henry VIII, with some help from More, published an Assertion
of the Seven Sacraments, which earned him the papal title ‘Defender of the
Faith’.
Erasmus strove in vain to dampen down the
controversy. He tried to persuade Luther to moderate his language, and to
submit his opinions for judgement to an impartial jury of scholars. On the
other hand, he ques[1]tioned the
authenticity of the papal bull of condemnation and he persuaded the emperor
Charles V to give Luther a hearing at the Diet of Worms in 1521. But Luther
refused to recant and was placed under the ban of the empire. Pope Leo died and
was succeeded by a Dutch schoolfriend of Erasmus, who took the name Adrian VI.
The new pope urged Erasmus to take up his pen against the reformers. Very
reluctantly, Erasmus agreed, but his book against Luther did not appear until
1524, by which time Pope Adrian was dead.
Sin, Grace, and Freedom
The ground Erasmus chose for
battle was Luther’s position on the freedom of the will. This had been the
subject of one of the theses which had been nailed to the door at Wittenberg in
1517. Among the propositions con[1]demned by Leo X was
‘freewill after sin is merely an empty title’. In response, Luther reinforced
his assertion. ‘Free will is really a Wction and a label without reality,
because it is in no man’s power to plan any evil or good’ (WA VII.91).
In his Diatribe de Libero Arbitrio Erasmus
piles up texts from the Old and New Testament and from Church doctors and
decrees to show that human beings have free will. His constant theme is that all
the exhort[1]ations, promises,
commands, threats, reproaches, and curses to be found in the Scriptures would
lose all point if it was necessity, and not free will, that determined good or
evil acts. Questions of Bible interpretation dominate both Erasmus’ book and
Luther’s much longer reply, De Servo Arbitrio.
Philosophically, Erasmus is
unsubtle. He refers to, but does not improve upon, Valla’s dialogue on free
will. He repeats commonplaces of centuries of scholastic debate which are
inadequate responses to the problem of reconciling divine foreknowledge with
human freedom—he insists, for instance, that even humans know many things that
will happen in the future, such as eclipses of the sun. A theory of free will
that leaves us no freer than the stars in their courses is not a very robust
answer to Luther. But Erasmus is anxious to avoid philosophical complications.
It is a piece of irreligious curiosity to inquire, as the scholastics did,
whether God’s foreknowledge is contingent or necessary.
Luther, though no friend to the
scholastics, Wnds this outrageous. ‘If this is irreligious, curious, and
superXuous,’ he asks, ‘what, then, is religious, serious and useful knowledge?’
God, Luther maintains, foresees nothing contingently. ‘He foresees, purposes,
and does all things according to His immutable, eternal, and infallible will.
This thunderbolt throws free will Xat and utterly dashes it to pieces’ (WA
VII.615).
Luther endorses the opinion that the Council
of Constance ascribed to Wyclif: that everything happens of necessity. He
distinguishes, however, between two senses of ‘necessity’. The human will is
subject to ‘necessity of immutability’: it has no power to change itself from
its innate desire for evil. But it is not subject to another form of necessity,
namely compulsion: a human being lacking grace does evil spontaneously and
willingly. The human will is like a beast of burden: if God rides it, it wills
and goes where God wills; if Satan rides it, it goes where Satan wills. It has
no freedom to choose its rider.
Luther prefers to abandon
altogether the term ‘free will’; other writers, before and after, have regarded
the spontaneity that he accepts as being the only thing that can genuinely be
meant by the term.2 Luther’s principal concern was to deny free will in matters
that make the diVerence between salvation and damnation. In other cases he
seems to allow the possibility of genuine choice between alternative courses of
action. Humans have free will in respect not of what is above them, but in
respect of what is below them. The sinner, for instance, can make his choice
between a variety of sins (WA VII.638).
The Bible, as Erasmus had
copiously shown, contains many passages that imply that human choices are free,
and also many passages that proclaim that the fate of humans is determined by
God. Over the centuries, scholastic theologians had sought to reconcile these
contradictory messages by mak[1]ing careful
distinctions. ‘Much toil and labour has been devoted to excusing the goodness
of God,’ Luther says, ‘and to accusing the will of man. Here those distinctions
have been invented between the ordinary will of God and the absolute will of
God, between the necessity of consequence and the necessity of the consequent,
and many others. But nothing has been achieved by these means beyond imposing
upon the unlearned.’ We should not waste time, Luther believes, in trying to
resolve the contradiction between diVerent Bible texts: we should go to
extremes, deny free will altogether, and ascribe everything to God.
Distaste for scholastic subtlety was not
peculiar to Luther: it was shared by Erasmus, and also by More. More himself
entered the debate on free will in his controversy with Luther’s English
admirer, the Bible translator William Tyndale. To counter Lutheran determinism
More uses a strategy which goes back to discussions of fate in Stoic
philosophy:
One of their sect was served in a
good turn in Almayne, which when he had robbed a man and was brought before the
judges, he would not deny the deed, but said it was his destiny to do it, and
therefore they might not blame him; they answered him, after his own doctrines,
that if it were his destiny to steal and that therefore they must hold him
excused, then it was also their destiny to hang him, and therefore he must as
well hold them excused again. (More 1931: 196)
The claim that if determinism is true everything is excusable, would no doubt be rejected by Luther, since he believed that God justly punished sinners who could not do otherwise than sin. From a philosophical point of view these early Reformation debates on freedom and determinism do no more than rehearse arguments which were commonplaces of ancient and medieval philosophy. They illustrate, however, the negative side of humanist education. Scholastic debates, if sometimes arid, had commonly been sober and courteous. Thomas Aqui[1]nas, for instance, was always anxious to put the best possible interpretation on the theses of those he disagreed with. Erasmus shared something of Aquinas’ eirenic spirit; but More and Luther attack each other with bitter vituperation made only the more vulgar by the elegant Latin in which it is phrased. The pugnacious conventions of humanist debate were a factor which led to the hardening of positions on either side of the Reformation divide.
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