§ 69. KEUCHLIN AND EEASMUS. 641
a religious hero. " Erasmus is a man for himself " was the apt characterization often repeated in the Letters of Unfamed Men. Luther spoke to the German people and fought for them. Erasmus awakened the admiration of the polite by his scholarship and wit. The people knew him not. Luther spoke in German : Erasmus boasted that he knew as little Italian as Indian and that he was little conversant with German, French or English. He prided himself on his pure Latinity.
Erasmus never intended to separate from Rome any more than his English friends, John Colet and Tliomas More. He declared he had never departed from the judgment of the Church, nor could he. " Her consent is so important to me that I would agree with the Arians and Pelagians if the Church should approve what they taught." This he wrote in 1526 after the open feud with Luther in the controversy over the freedom of the will. The Catholic Church, however, never forgave him. All his works were placed on the InSex by two popes, Paul IV. in 1559 and Sixtus V., 1590,* as intentionally heretical. In 1564, b}'' the final action of the Council of Trent, this sweeping judgment was revoked and all the writings removed from the Index except the Colloquies^ Praise of Folly, Christian Marriage and one or two others, a decision confirmed by Clement VIII., 1596. And there the matter has rested since. ^
The Catholic historian of the German people, Janssen, in a dark picture of Erasmus, presents him as vain and conceited, ungrateful to his benefactors, always ready to take a neutral attitude on disputed questions and, for the sake of presents, flattering to the great. Janssen calls attention to his delight over the gold and silver vessels and other valuables he had received in gifts. My drawers, Erasmus wrote, " are filled with presents, cups, bottles, spoons, watches, some of them of pure gold, and rings too numerous to count." In only one respect, says Janssen, did he go beyond his Italian predecessors in his attack upon the Church. The Italians sneered and ridiculed, but kept their statements free from hypocritical piety, which Erasmus often resorted to after he had driven his dagger into
1 See Emerton, pp. 454-5. 2i
642 THE MIDDLE AGES. A.D. 1294-1517.
his opponent's breast. ^ In England, the old Puritan, Tyndale, also gave Erasmus no quarter, but spoke of him as one " whose' tongue maketh little gnats great elephants and lifteth up above the stars whosoever giveth him a little exhibition." ^ But no one has ever understood Erasmus and discerned what was his mission better than Luther. That Reformer, who had once called him " our ornament and hope — decus nostrum et spes," — expressed the whole truth when, in a letter to Q^colampadius, 1523, he said : " Erasmus has done what he was ordained to do. He has introduced the ancient languages in place of the pernicious scholastic studies. He will probably die like Moses in the land of Moab. . . . He has done enough to overcome the evil, but to lead to the land of promise is not, in my judgment, his business."
§ 70. Humanism in France.
Humanism in France found its way from Italy, but did not become a distinct movement until the ItJtli century was well on its way. Budaeus, 1467-1540, was the chief representative of classical studies; Faber Stapulensis, or, to use his French name, Lefevre d'Etaples, of Christian culture, 1469-1536, both of them living well into the period of the Reformation.'^ In France, as in Germany, the pursuit of the classics never went to the point of intoxication as it did in Italy. In France, the Renaissance did not reach its maturity till after the Reformation was well advanced in Germany,the time at which the springs of the movement in the Italian peninsula were dried up.
On the completion of the 100 years' war between France and England, the intellectual currents began to start. In 1464, Peter Raoul composed for the duke of Bourgogne a history of
1 Janssen, II. 9 sqq. The inventory of his goods contains a list of his furniture, wardrobe, napkins, nightcaps, cusliions, goblets, silver vessels, gold rings and money (722 gold gulden, 000 gold crowns, etc.) . See Sieber, Inventarium iiber die Hinterlassenschaft dps Erasmus vo7n 22Juli, 1536, Basel, 1889.
2 Pre/, to Pentateuch, Parker Soc. ed., p. 395.
3 Imbart, II. .382. In his Skeptics of the French Renaissance, Lond., 1893, Owen treats of Montaigne, Peter Ramus, Pascal and other men who were imbued with the spirit of free inquiry and lived after the period included in this volume.