Erasmus by Siegfried Kracauer

 

I sometimes wonder whether advancing age does not increase our susceptibility to the speechless plea of the dead; the older one grows, the more he is bound to realize his future is the future of the past – history


Roughly speaking, my interest lies with the nascent state of great ideological movements, that period when they were not yet institutionalized but still competed with other ideas for supremacy. And it centers not so much on the course followed by the triumphant ideologies in the process as on the issues in dispute at the time of their emergence. I should even say that it revolves primarily around the disputes themselves, with the emphasis on those possibilities which history did not see fit to explore.

 

This interest is intimately connected with an experience which Marx once pithily epitomized when he declared that he himself was no Marxist. Is there any influential thinker who would not have to protect his thoughts from what his followers – or his enemies, for that matter – make of them? Every idea is coarsened, flattened, and distorted on its way through the world. The world which takes possession of it does so according to its own lights and needs. Once a vision becomes an institution, clouds of dust gather around it, blurring its contours and contents. The history of ideas is a history of misunderstandings. Otherwise expressed, an idea preserves its integrity and fullness only as long as it lacks the firmness of a widely sanctioned belief. Perhaps the period of its inception is most transparent to the truths at which it aims in the midst of doubts.

 

One might argue here that history does not know such caesuras; that actually the controversy goes on after an idea, or what remains of it, has gained ascendency. As a matter of fact, the tradition of any ruling doctrine is a story of continual attempts to adjust it, however precariously, to contemporary demands, ever-changing situations. And these attempts at reinterpretation may lead far away from it; no dogma is immune against heresy and corrosion. But even so the initial phase of an accepted idea appears to have a significance of its own which distinguishes it from all subsequent phases. Were it otherwise, the history of many a powerful belief would not comprise efforts which tend to justify the concern with the time of its birth. They invariably spring from the conviction that the dominant creed of the epoch has been corrupted by accretions, misconceptions, and abuses which altogether obscure its precious core. And it is logical that this view should kindle a desire to undo the injurious work of tradition and rehabilitate that creed in its virgin purity. From its corrupted state in which it is all but unrecognizable the eyes turn back towards its yet unspoiled origins. A case in point is Luther. His development also shows that the return to the sources is sometime tantamount to a fresh departure, the restorer revealing himself as an innovator.

 

Be this as it may, I feel immensely attracted by the eras which preceded the final establishment of Christianity in the Graeco-Roman world, the Reformation, the Communist movement. The fascination they exert on me must be laid to my hunch that they carry a message as important and elusive as that of the trees which aroused Proust’s compassion. And what would the message be? One thing is certain: it does not figure among the contending causes of those eras but is hidden away in their interstices; it lurks, for instance, behind the debate between Celsus and Origen, or the religious disputes between Catholics and reformers. Its location is suggestive of its content. The message I have in mind concerns the possibility that none of the contending causes is the last word on the last issues at stake, that there is, on the contrary, a way of thinking and living which, if we could only follow it, would permit us to burn through the causes and thus to dispose of them – a way which, for lack of a better word, or any word at all, may be called humane. Werner Jaeger alludes to it when discussing the desire for mutual penetration between Greek culture and Christian faith in the second century A. D.:  ‘Both sides must finally have come to recognize that .  .  .  .an ultimate unity existed between them, and a common core of ideas, which so sensitive a thinker as Santayana did not hesitate to call ‘humanistic’ .  .  .   Actually both sides failed to achieve that ultimate ‘humanistic’ unity. Need I expressly mention that the possibility of it presents itself at every juncture of the controversy which threads the historical process? There are always holes in the wall for us to evade and the improbable to slip in. Yet even though the message of the humane is virtually omnipresent, it certainly does not claim attention with with equal urgency al the time. No doubt this message, whether received or not, is particularly pressing and definite in the eras  which reverberate with the birth pangs of a momentous idea.  It is they in which the mingling antagonists are challenged to ask the fundamental questions instead of having to tackle this or that sham problem handed down by tradition.

The figure of Erasmus, who lived among the antagonists  without belonging to them, illustrates most of what has been said just now in so striking a manner that I cannot resist the temptation to insert a few remarks about him. They are based on the assumption that he came as close as was possible in his situation to delineating a way of living free from ideological constraints; that in effect all that he did and was had a bearing on the humane.

Erasmus never tired of spreading the message of it. His editions of the Greek New Testament and the Fathers as well as his Adagia and Colloguia with their constant recourse to Greek and Latin authors clearly testified to his desire to revive the original simplicity of the Christian doctrine and to accept the ancients he admired into the company of the saints. His satires on monasticism and the corruption of the clergy were no less public property than his demands for Church reform in the spirit of Christian humanism. Nor did he easily miss an opportunity to publicize his ideas about the pitiable condition of the poor, the greed of the princes and other secular affairs; his tracts and letters teem with references to topical issues, conveying views whose often far-sighted modernism owed much to his de-dogmatized Christian outlook. He abhorred violence and sympathized with the common man, the simple soul. All this the contemporaries knew. They also knew that he was loath to take sides and shunned clear-cut decisions. And they could not help noticing that he invariably rejected the positions offered him by popes and kings. ( the stock opinion that he did so out of his sense of independence is a model case of sloppy thinking.)

The conclusion that Erasmus stood out like a monument for everybody to see would seem to e unavoidable. However, the strange thing is that in spite of his outspokenness he was the most elusive of men. ‘Nobody has been privileged,’ a friend of his formulated, ’to look in the heart of Erasmus, and yet it is full of eloquent content.’

Secrets mean a challenge to the interpreter. Judging from the evidence, the psychological make-up of Erasmus related to the build of his mind in a significant way. It should therefore be possible to trace the diverse aspects of this figure to a hypothetical common source. Such an attempt may not afford insight into the heart of Erasmus but it will at least reveal something about the forces that shaped its contents. Now both the personal leanings and the intellectual pursuits of Erasmus coincide in suggesting that he was possessed with a fear of all that is definitely fixed. To state the same in terms involving his spiritual self, he was essentially motivated  by the conviction that the truth ceases to be true as soon as it becomes dogma, thus forfeiting the ambiguity which marks it as truth. His fear –or should I say, his nostalgia for perfect immediacy? – reflected this conviction; a spiritual rather than a psychological fear, it was largely identical with the mystical strain in him which has been repeatedly emphasized in the literature.

Everything falls into a pattern once you think of this fear as the prime mover behind the scenes. For one thing, various seemingly unrelated personality traits of Erasmus find their natural explanations in its stirrings It makes one understand his distrust of philosophical speculations and his unwillingness to participate in theological disputations, bound as they were to run into a medley of categorical assertions. It accounts for his ingrained repugnance to any binding commitments and his skeptical attitude towards alleged solutions of certain religious problems which, he observed on some occasion, had better be put off till the time when ‘we shall see God face to face.’ And it naturally was at the bottom of his hatred of the absolute assuredness in which Luther indulged – Luther whose turn to the Bible and fight against the abuses in the Church Erasmus unswervingly approved at the risk of getting increasingly entangled in polemics which incommoded him greatly.

More decisive, his fear of the fixed also explains the position which his Christian humanism was to occupy among the competing ideologies of the period. To be sure, Erasmus championed a cause in the sense that he aimed at religious regeneration and social improvements. But since his aversion to formulas and recipes  with their congealed contents prompted him to keep his ideas, so to speak, in a fluid, they did not, and could  not, jell into an institutionalized program; from the outset, their true place was in the interstices between Catholic doctrine, as established by tradition, and the hardening creeds of the reformers. One might even assume that Erasmus would have disavowed, or indeed no longer recognized, his own message had it confronted him in the guise of one of these beliefs; their hold on the masses was bought at a price he was not willing to pay. His cause was precisely to put an end to the historical causes.

This carries all-important implications for the way in which the world responded to Erasmus. The universal fame he rapidly won indicates that at least some of his ideas and endeavors ingratiated themselves with people at large. Not to mention his influence on the Spiritualists, the Spanish mystics, and, in later days, enlightened 18^th-century minds – influences partly due to misunderstandings - , he led the theologians back to the sources of Christianity, spread the gospel of humanism, and encouraged fuller literary expression. It cannot be doubted either that his concern for a better society, his belief in perfectibility through knowledge and education, and his insistence on what has time and again been confused with tolerance gave a voice to longings whose existence the soft halo surrounding his public image tends to confirm. Many may have welcomed Erasmus as a liberator redeeming them from narrow-mindedness and prejudice. In the ‘Erasmus-atmosphere,’ to use Walther Koehler’s term, they could breathe more freely.

But they were scattered in the crowd; they did not rally round Erasmus. His message proper was of little practical consequence; it created a mood rather than a movement, a mood as intangible as a transient glow in the night, a fairly-tale‘s  promise. There were Lutherans, no Erasmians. How could have it been otherwise?  True, Erasmus wanted to change institutions, yet he did not want the world to corrupt his inner most cravings by institutionalizing them. Out of his all-pervading fear of the fixed he himself prevented  his  ‘cause’  from degenerating  into a cause, even though he was aware that his reluctance to become ‘engaged’ inevitably spelled defeat. ‘I am afraid,’ he wrote seven years before his death, ‘that the world will ultimately carry the day.’

This was exactly what happened: the world, a world split into camps, blurred his intentions and objectives. His wide visibility notwithstanding, Erasmus remained largely invisible. Conservative Catholics and reformers alike lacked the language to comprehend a message which cut across, and transcended, the doctrines to which they adhered. The language they used was geared to their respective causes. So the vision of Erasmus disappeared behind a veil of misinterpretations. Small wonder that he sat between all chairs imaginable. Luther rudely called him an Epicurean, which in measure he was, and zealous schoolmen accused him of having touched off a religious and social revolution, which was not entirely untrue either. And since he heeded his own counsels in sifting the good from the bad in the conflicting doctrines, the warring antagonists, offended by his refusal to let himself be cast in the role of a partisan, presented him as a weakling who wavered irresponsibly between Rome and Wittenberg and took refuge in unavailing compromises.

 

From the angle of the world Erasmus was a fickle customer indeed. He defended the uprising of the German peasants as a revolt of misery and despair, but no sooner did they commit excesses than he (sadly) admitted the necessity of repressive countermeasures. He attacked the rigidity of a tradition which opposed the philological revision of sacred texts and yet exhorted the pious to bear with traditional abuses, arguing that it was impossible to create a new world overnight. His evasive attitude towards the cult of the saints and the confession – institutions which he neither criticized nor wholeheartedly endorsed – could not but strengthen the impression of his intrinsic ambiguity. And this ambiguity went hand in hand with his eternally reiterated pleas for peaceful agreements at all costs. ‘I love concord to such a degree,’ Erasmus declared in 1522, ‘that should a debate develop I would rather forsake part of the truth than trouble the peace.’

These words hint of the motives behind his conduct. With Erasmus, the notion of peace was pregnant with Christian meanings; it foreshadowed a fulfillment beyond the reach of established creeds which, poor substitutes of the unattainable truth, breed only conflict and bloodshed. Hence, what the staunch devotees among Catholics and Protestants stigmatized as undecided wavering on his part was in reality nothing but the deceptive outward appearance of his unwavering determination to move straight ahead towards the peace he envisioned. Fortunately, he was a masterful navigator; for as matters stood, he was obliged to steer his way between rivalling parties with prudence and much finesse. Yet despite the fact that he pursed a middle course and what looked to the world as such, Erasmus was the opposite of a compromiser. His efforts to bring the dissenters back to the fold and impress upon the Church the need for reforms did not result from opportunistic, basically anti-Utopian considerations but, conversely, amounted to an utterly uncompromising attempt to remove the causes that prevented the arrival of peace. Utopian  visionaries condemn those who stick to the middle of the road on the ground that that they callously betray mankind to perpetuate a state of imperfection. In the case of Erasmus  the middle way was the direct road to Utopia – the way of the humane. It is not by accident that he was a friend of Thomas Moore.

That most of his contemporaries should ignore an approach which would have lost all its meaning if it had become a cause lay in the nature of things. The question is whether Erasmus himself realized where the way he followed would lead him. His message pointed into an abyss: did he fathom its depths? In one of his Colloquies he has Eusebius, its protagonist, extol the divine power moving such ancient authors as Cicero or Plutarch and then proposes that ‘perhaps the spirit of Christ or Plutarch is more widespread than we understand.’ It is the very thought of Erasmus which Eusebius epitomizes. Taking his cue from the apologists and the revered Origen, Erasmus held that the pagan sages too were inspired by divine revelation and that, because of  the radiant manifestation of the Logos in Jesus Christ, Christianity was the consummation of the best of antiquity. This extension of Christianity into the virtual goal of all worthy non-Christian strivings permitted him to reconcile his devotion to ‘Saint Socrates’ with his faith in transubstantiation and to protest the Christian quality of his humanistic concerns. He conceived of the humaneness to which he aspired as an outgrowth of Christian liberty.

For all we know this might well be the whole story. But is it? Note that Erasmus was reportedly as inscrutable as he was outspoken. There must have been things he left unsaid -  perhaps things too dangerous to be revealed? To venture a guess at what will forever remain his secret, it is not entirely improbable that, in pondering his road and its destination, Erasmus arrived a conclusions which so filled him with fright that he preferred to lock them away in his heart. He may ( or may not) have surmised that in the last analysis he aimed at something beyond the pale of Christianity; that, thought to the end, his true design was once and for all to wreck the wall of fixed causes with their dogmas and institutional arrangements for the sake of that ‘ultimate unity’ which the causes mean and thwart.