Fourteenth Annual Erasmus Birthday Lecture:

The Social Realism o f Erasmus:

Some Puzzles and Reflections

by Bruce E. Mansfield

in a late colloquy of Erasmus asks why, on the dynamics of Ar-

speaker
istotle, dwellers in the Antipodes do not fall off the surface of the earth. 1
The Antipodes may no longer seem strange. You should at least put it down
to Antipodean perversity that I dare to speak on Erasmus here in Leiden. May
I first record my awareness of the honor of the invitation to deliver this Annual
Birthday Lecture?
The Franco-Prussian war interrupted H. Durand de Laur in the last stages
of preparing what was to become the longest study of Erasmus in the nine-
teenth century. He had already written a passage on the continuing search for
peace in the spirit of Erasmus. War, he said, while not disappearing had be-
come nobler and rarer. The devastating events of 1870 did not break his faith
in progress. Despite set-backs, he wrote after the event, progress begins anew
and makes up lost time. On the eve of a conflict far more serious than that
of 1870, Percy Stafford Allen published his essay "Force and Fraud," remarking
incidentally on how far the civilization of 1914 had come from the deliberate
savageries of the sixteenth century: "Our peace-lapped imaginations cannot
2
picture the terror of flames kindled aforethought."2
I have for long been puzzled by the relative lack of interest of Erasmus'
nineteenth-century biographers and other commentators of the time in his
political writings. This was, after all, an age of constitutional debate, of reform
bills, charters, and constituent assemblies, and of peace thinking, culminating
in the Hague peace conferences at the end of the century.3 For example,
R. B. Drummond, in what contemporary reviewers and later commentators
alike considered the century's best biography was dismissive: Erasmus' precepts
on government were, he said, "tolerably obvious." The exceptions to the rule

[1]
2

of low-key assessments and dismissive judgments were-paradoxically, it

might seem-those whose approach to politics was skeptical and hard-nosed.
I think of Henry Hallam, the reclusive Whig and opponent of the Reform Bill
of 1832; of Emile Amiel, Opportunist of the Third French Republic; and of
Frederic Seebohm, the Quaker, whom John Burrow calls a "hard-headed
Liberal-Unionist." These did not deny Erasmus some sense for practical
4
politics.4
That Drummond's indifference was more representative of the century is
confirmed by the relative dearth of editions of Erasmus' political writings. Fer-
dinand van der Haeghen's summary list includes no edition of the Education
of a Christian Prince (the Institutio) and but one ( 1802) of the Complaint of Peace
(Querela pacis). Only the adage Dulce bellum inexpertis balances the picture to
some extent. There was a number of English, American, and French editions
of that work; their dates coincide with wars of the time, the Napoleonic, the
British-American of 1812, and the Crimean, or with rumors of wars. They all
derived from the one edition, that of 1794 by Vicesimus Knox entitled
5
Anti-polemus: Or, the PLea of Reason, Religion, and Humanity, against War.
It is possible to explain the nineteenth century's relative indifference to the
political writings by recalling its preoccupation with other issues in Erasmus'
biography and in Erasmus' thought. His place in the church struggles of the
sixteenth century had priority; from that derived questions about his theology,
character and judgment that absorbed nineteenth century writers. I suggest an-
other, perhaps more profound explanation. These writers felt no particular
need of Erasmus' advice on political matters. The harsh realities of his time
were superseded; he belonged literally to another age. The contemporary world
had gone, or was going, beyond him in the very matters that concerned him
most, the moralizing of government, the fixing of the mutual responsibilities
between rulers and ruled, restraints on arbitrary or irresponsible power, the
elimination of court extravagance and licentiousness, the preservation of
peace. Hence Drummond's remark that his precepts on government were tol-
erably obvious. Hence also the sanguine asides by Durand de Laur and Allen
with which we began. Erasmus' ideas for the political sphere lacked actuality,
 3

not because they were too moralistic and optimistic (as has often been said
since), but because reality had passed them by. Allen's hopeful understanding
of the state of civilization in 1914 was, as we know, shared by many, though
there were some, as we also know, looking for apocalypse or Armageddon.
H. N. Brailsford, the radical or socialist author, wrote in 1914: "In Europe the
epoch of conquest is over.... My own belief is that there will be no more
wars among the six Great Powers. "6
I do not need to dwell on what the Great War did to that optimism. For
many-writers, artists, intellectuals-it brought a sense of historical discon-
tinuity from the time before the war, a gap in consciousness.7 What did it do
to the reputation of Erasmus, who had, as we have seen, been bypassed by an
earlier optimism? Did it give new actuality to the apostle of peace, trenchant
critic of the cruelties of war? What did it do to the Erasmian sensibilities of
scholars in the different countries of Europe, who had given their working lives
to studying such a one? How far were their responses shaped by Erasmus him-
self, by their years of thinking about Erasmus?
I have sought answers to these questions in the war-time correspondence
of P. S. Allen, Erasmus' great editor, deposited with his other papers in the
Bodleian Library. Between 1893, when he began work on editing Erasmus' let-
ters, and 1914, Allen had gathered an international cohort of scholars to sup-
port his labors. He travelled constantly, seeking those who had in their keep-
ing the treasures he sought. In the preface to the third volume of Erasmus'
letters (published in 1913), he wrote of the "sympathetic interest" of "welcom-
ing friends" in many lands and mentioned Belgium, France, Germany, Hol-
land, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, America, and his own country. These bonds
meant much to Allen. To no one-by interest or temperament-could war
be more uncongenial. Friends spoke of the calm and balance and goodwill that
marked his life. In 1923 Johan Huizinga was to write of the "quiet harmony"
of the Allens' home.88
Allen's first response to the outbreak in August 1914 was, apart from ex-
asperation at those he thought immediately responsible for the catastrophe,
the Serbians (a "set of cutthroats"),9 in line with all Erasmus had had to say
about the irrationality of war and rested on an Erasmian sense of the unity of
4

Europe. He wrote to his friend Aurel Stein, the archaeologist and explorer,
"Armageddon has come, and we are overwhelmed w. shame for Europe. As
the result of a few mad hours of self-willed diplomacy Europe is to rend itself,
& the good are to suffer for the evil." He added, "How different wd our feelings
be if it were a real war, against barbarians. Now we grieve almost as much
for the enemy as for ourselves. "1° One is reminded of Erasmus' concession in
the Complaint of Peace: "But if war ... is not wholly avoidable, that kind
would be a lesser evil than the present unholy conflicts and clashes between
Christians."11 l
Throughout the war a sense of outrage at its folly and futility reappears in
Allen's correspondence. But this was early overlaid by anger at Germany, at
the Kaiser himself and what he called "Kaiserism." What worked the change
was the invasion of Belgium and, above all, the burning of Louvain, a potent
symbol for the editor of Erasmus and the student of humanism. The horrors
in Belgium, he wrote to Stein on 4 September 1914, "pass all belief." It was
a terrible moment of disenchantment for one who had grown up amid the Vic-
torian certainties and had written but a year before of "peace-lapped imagi-
nations" unable to "picture the terror of flames kindled aforethought." He
blamed German professors for "playing up to the Prussian militarists" and in-
12
culcating Nietzsche's "foul doctrine that might is right."
As the years passed and the war seemed endless and inescapable, the sense
of its cruelty and futility and the will for victory over Germany, shared with
his countrymen and their allies, jostled one another in Allen. I have found
only one direct appeal to Erasmus in all this war-time correspondence, in a
letter of early 1915 from W. H. Woodward, the educational historian: "Would
not Erasmus have felt once more the truth of his conviction that 'nationality'
was a less civilised sentiment than the craving for an ideal 'pax Romana' in
which war was impossible?" It was a fair question, but Woodward overlooked
Erasmus' own doubts about the worth of a pax Romana. Allen himself, at the
end of 1917, listed for an enquirer all Erasmus' major adages on politics and
war, adding a parenthetic note to Spartam nactus es, hanc orna: "Foreign con-
quest vain." (Might that adage's recollection of Erasmus' own pupil Alexander
Stewart, lost at Flodden in 1513, have reminded Allen of Oxford's young men
 5

lost in Flanders?) 13 The relentless storm had almost carried Erasmus away,
swept him to the margins, but not quite.
When the storm had passed and peace came, Allen's mixed feelings per-
sisted. On one side, he shared Belgian and French resentment against Ger-
many ; on the other side, he was, within a month of the armistice, in a letter
to Preserved Smith urging the idea of a League of Nations. 14 The war had shat-
tered the scholarly community around Allen, indeed the whole "republic of
learning," which, as he wrote in the preface to the fourth volume (1922) had
before 1914 exhibited "a pattern for a larger commonwealth," a mutually re-
sponsible community of nations. If Erasmus had been a presence in those
hopes, it was not a strident or even an especially prominent one, since their
fulfillment was confidently expected. He was then submerged, if not totally,
under the harsh realities of 1914-18. For Allen hope modestly re-emerged in
the post-war world: "... a war is over; once more the work of reconstruction
must be attempted, and the world is hoping for a league of free nations, re-
lieved, as are private men, from the anxieties and suspicions which accompany
the necessity of self-defence. Nowhere is it more possible to begin welding up
the fragments than in the sphere of learning; which cannot abate its intema,
tional character without losing its inspiration. The task is not easy, especially
for those who have suffered grievously; but it will be undertaken, and with
15
hope it will be carried through." The inspiration of Erasmus is not lacking
here. Allen was deliberately taking up the threads again, of work on Erasmus
and reconstituting the Erasmian community, but against the odds, because he
and his collaborators felt burdened with the legacies of the war. As for Erasmus,
in the hard, disenchanted post-war world, the world beyond the abyss, his po-
litical writings have not taken on greater actuality than in the relative calm
of mid-Victorian optimism or in the dark days of the war. In the post-war years
they attracted more scholarly attention than in the past but also new handicaps
on any acceptance of their usefulness or relevance. This era first entrenched
the view that in his political writings Erasmus was too moralistic and idealistic
to have anything to say to a world of power-politics.
In 1930 Ferdinand Geldner in a still serviceable study addressed this issue
systematically for the first time. The heart of Geldner's book is a critique of
6

Erasmus' political ethic. He was unable to reconcile the policing function of

the state and the gospel's "anarchy of love." To incoherence on the main eth-
ical question-the relation of power and love-he added uncertainty over the
place of structures: "For him the disposition was everything, the institution
nothing." Geldner's comments on Erasmus' handling of two classic New Tes-
tament texts on political obligation, Christ's injunction at Matthew 22:21
("Render unto Caesar") and Paul's call for obedience in Romans 13, support
these judgments. In each case he singles out an element in Erasmus' text sug-
gesting his indifference to the state or at least the low value he put on the po-
litical. For Erasmus, Geldner concludes, the whole concentration of the Chris-
tian should be on piety, on what one owes to God; service to the state is no
Christian duty. Geldner attributes to Erasmus an unresolved paradox: he
leaves the state without Christian significance, while expecting of the ruler
adherence to the Christian ethic in its highest form, the precepts of the Ser-
mon on the Mount. For Geldner, Erasmus' political writings lacked actuality
because they evaded the realities and imperatives of power. 16
Other writers of the inter-war period denied any or much political sense to
Erasmus. In an essay for the five hundredth anniversary of Erasmus' death in
1936 Rudolf Liechtenhan has Erasmus swinging between excessive optimism
and despair in his thinking about politics; like all "rationalists," he greatly
overestimated the force of enlightenment and appeared among the battling
European rulers "like a schoolmaster. Here in Leiden it is fitting to recall
Johan Huizinga's wrestling with this problem. In his anniversary essay on what
Erasmus did not understand he wrote: "Erasmus was never a political spirit,
in any sense of the word. He belonged to those who make their political judge-
ments by giving free rein, on the one side, to their moral indignation and, on
the other, to their idyllic vision of perfect happiness."18 Thirteen years before,
in December 1923, he had made the same point more poignantly to the Allens,
part of the correspondence over the differences in their judgments of Erasmus.
Perhaps out of deference to the Allens, he had omitted from his Erasmus
 7

biography an intended remark about Erasmus' "contempt for commerce, law

and politics." He adds, nevertheless, "though I am still inclined to think he
did hate them."19
Huizinga recognized that the sources he assembled to support this judgment
were not conclusive, and it might be rewarding to reflect on them briefly. The
first was Ep. 61, a letter composed in 1497 for Erasmus' pupil Henry Northoff
in Paris to send to his brother Christian in Libeck, wherein the latter purports
to regret-through the images of a dream-his abandonment of studies for
the sordid cares of business. Literature is presented as the rival of all worldly
cares and satisfactions. But the tone of the letter is playful, even tongue-
in-cheek ; it was possibly a model of composition for Erasmus' pupils.2° It can
hardly be taken to represent his considered view of the active life. The same
could be said of his mild mockery of a friend's "prattling about nothing else
save fields and finances" while serving as steward of his monastery (Ep. 37).
More interesting is Erasmus' eulogy of the father of his Antwerp friend Pieter
Gillis, who had served as second treasurer of the city. He may not have sought
great wealth or high office but, in Erasmus' pen-portrait, he appears as a model
of the bourgeois man of the world, honest, sober, prudent, self-controlled and
self-supporting, devoted to his family and his city (Ep. 715).21 In this place,
too, Erasmus seems far from negative about commerce and politics.
I have been suggesting that through the nineteenth and well into this cen-
tury, Erasmus' political writings were held, for different reasons at different
times, to lack relevance or actuality. We have identified three stages. In the
first, Erasmus was seen as overtaken by the prospects for peace and social de-
velopment in the modern world; his rudimentary idealism was left behind. In
the second, he was marginalized by the Great War; even those devoted to
studying him scarcely mentioned his name in connection with the war,
though - once the guns were silent - he experienced some revival, in company
with hopes of a new political order in the post-war world. At the third stage,
he was considered too moralizing and idealistic to have anything pertinent to
say in a world where, despite those hopes, the politics of power remained the
reality. That that view of him has persisted to the present is demonstrated by
this editorial comment of 1986 on the "moralistic idealism" of his major po-
litical writings (1515-17): "Erasmus' view of the duties of princes at this date
takes so little account of drives for power, political realities, and patterns of
8

human behaviour as to read more like the euphoric projection of a dream than
a serious programme for political education
In the summary just given, I have, of course, been painting with a broad
brush. A qualification is necessary immediately. One can trace well back
into the nineteenth century an awareness of Erasmus' sense of community,
what I might call his sociability. I find this awareness especially among
nineteenth-century writers on Erasmus and education. Despite the constraints
of an excessively verbal and literary culture, Erasmus' precepts on education
were, for them, not bookish or smelling too much of the lamp. Pupils were
being prepared for life in the community and the vocations, according to their
natural bents. The aims of education were social. This awareness of Erasmus'
sociability is not missing from writers of the inter-war period. Despite his sharp
criticisms, Huizinga characteristically introduces balancing reflections. To
those insisting that he did not understand power-politics, Erasmus could reply
that they may not have understood "the principles of a social life which raises
man above the level of the beast." Liechtenhan speaks at one point of the
"warm social feeling" breaking out of Erasmus' writings on war.23
In the last thirty years scholars have found actuality in Erasmus' social and
political writings along a number of routes. By "actuality" here I mean engage-
ment with the social and political realities of his time in a way that invalidates
the charge made against them of being merely academic exercises; they become
worthy of study, not as guides to social action, but as models of Christian hu-
manist response in particular circumstances. I mention four such approaches.
Each, in a distinctive way, locates Erasmus in his historical setting. They save
him from the appearance of floating above his society, or lecturing it from a
height, like an irritable schoolmaster.
The first two address the nature of his moralizing itself. One argues that
since contemporaries saw society as above all a moral construct, any attempt
at social reform must be cast in moral terms. Interventions aimed, as were those
of Erasmus, at restoring the pristine values of Christian society, were then far
from disengaged moralizing. They were engaged with social reality as contem-
poraries understood it. 24 The second is related to what contemporaries be-
lieved about the powers of speech; it linked Erasmus' writings on politics
to the rhetorical tradition come down from antiquity. What might to the
 9

twentieth-century observer appear hopelessly optimistic-apparently high-

flown appeals to princes, for example-would for contemporaries be persua-
sive attack (deriving from the humane tradition or the Word of the gospel)
on the root and origin of all wars and civil disorders, viz. evil dispositions; what
might appear too discursive and insipid would for them be crisp restatement
of well-established and irrefragable truths, admonitory or constructive. z5
Thirdly, there is the interpretation with which Otto Herding accompanies
his editorial presentation of Erasmus' political writings: here is the politics of
the gospel, a gospel which imposes a cross on all Christians, lay as well as
religious-and on the ruler the cross of disciplined service to the people-and
liberates all so that subjects may no longer be treated as slaves.26 Fourthly,
there are the demonstrations that these political writings addressed specific and
contested issues of policy, and even spoke for parties at court and in the Neth-
erlands government. They did not, in short, remain at the level of abstraction.
Pre-eminent is James Tracy's study of Erasmus' political opinions against the
background of Netherlands politics.27
It seems to me that a perplexity remains. Does Erasmus face the issue of
power and Christian ethics, or does he evade it (as Geldner thought and others
also, more recently) ? Tracy attributes to him a kind of defeat; he could not
sustain consistently his application of a theology of the cross to the ways of
princes, "nor did he try": "Ultimately, it is not for historians to decide whether
one who presents to his contemporaries an ethical ideal impossible of fulfil-
ment is engaged in prophecy or folly...." 28
I want now to reflect on some Erasmian passages touching on the issue of
power and love, i.e. modestly to reopen the question of Erasmus' realism, tak-
ing realism as might Reinhold Niebuhr: a recognition that self-interest is uni-
versal, that Christian reform must begin with people and institutions as they
10

are and that the exercise of power is inescapable. 29Then I want to make one,
perhaps surprising, point about Erasmus' social values, ask fleetingly about his
idea of lay vocation, and conclude with a summative comparison and contrast
between his conception of human community and that of his English friend
and colleague John Colet.
Let me begin with his commentary on Jesus' response, "Render therefore
unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's," to the question cunningly put to
him by the Pharisees: "Is it lawful to give tribute unto Caesar or not?" (Matt.
22:21 ) . Jesus, Erasmus says, escaped the trap of offending one party or the other
over that vexed question by making distinctions. Through those distinctions
we can identify the different strands in Erasmus' thought. First, paying the trib-
ute (or not paying it) did not affect piety. Establishing piety was Christ's sole
mission. Hence his pretense of not even recognizing Caesar's superscription.
Secondly, there is nevertheless no offense to piety in paying the tribute. In-
deed, the Christian could go beyond what is asked, always so long as piety is
not threatened. That what he demands is in fact Caesar's due is not always
self-evident. A judgment must be made. Thirdly, if what is asked makes us im-
pious, it is devilish, the payment is to the devil. Erasmus' conclusion is that
the pagan state did not exist to establish piety, but pious people could support
it. How far? The answer would depend on a prudent assessment of what was
being asked, its appropriateness and legitimacy.3o
From the other classic text on political obedience, Romans 13, Erasmus
draws the standard conclusion that the political order deserves support, even
if the ruler is pagan, evil, and, indeed, persecuting. That order, his paraphrase
says, should not be disturbed under pretext of religion, by provoking or resist-
ing persecution. Here is the familiar distinction between the office and the per-
son. In a late addition to his annotations on this text (1527), Erasmus remarks:
Paul does not say that all rulers are from God, but rule, authority is, just as
marriage is from God, but not all unions are made in heaven.31
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There is a strong drift towards dualism in this treatment. Nothing of secular

rule belongs to Christ. But Erasmus checks the drift: Christ has accepted sec-
ular rule for the limited good it can do. The paraphrase reads: "Christ has not
sanctioned such laws, but he has not condemned them either; he gave no
thought to them, as it were, because he had more important things to do. "-32
This way of thinking depends on a threefold ethical division which Erasmus
owes to Jerome.33 At one end are the heavenly virtues which are beyond the
ruler's province. At the other are the vices, and a ruler requiring vicious deeds
should not be obeyed. He should be obeyed on the neutral things in between,
for pragmatic reasons (order is necessary and useful), but also on principle, for
the ruler bears a "sort of image of God." He is a kind of servant of God when
he nurtures and favors the good.34 This check to dualism seems to limit the
common ground between Erasmus and the "ethic of the original Anabaptist
community in Zurich," which has been discovered by some.35 He was not a
quietist. He rejected Origen's argument that only some (the crasser, more
fleshly) are subject to earthly rule, Origen taking the first words of the chapter
(omnis anima) to refer to less than spiritual human beings.36
Erasmus' critics, notably among the Spanish monks and theologians
(1527), fastened on his note on Romans 13:8, "Owe no man anything, but
to love one another." He had found among commentators two interpretations
of this verse. On one interpretation it posed for Christians the issue of justice
and love. The injunction meant: pay what you owe and, that done, obligation
ceases; but the obligation to love never ceases. The second interpretation, to
which Erasmus inclines, relates the verse to its predecessor, where Paul enjoins
the paying of taxes, tribute, respect, and honor. This previous verse defines
the Christian's relations with the pagan community; the verse "Owe no man
anything, but to love one another" describes relations within the Christian
community. Here is the distinction between two communities; the Christian
belongs to one - the pagan, secular community-in a limited way, to the other
12

fully. In his paraphrase of Romans 13, there are traces of both interpretations,
but the second is apparent: "Among yourselves there should be no right or
debt, except of mutual love. "37
Now Erasmus' critics applied this to the Christian community as they un-
derstood it. Erasmus was proposing that there be nothing between Christians
but mutual love; that was to deny Christian rulership, any relation of ruler to
subject. Criticism was reinforced by the critics' reading of the Institutio, where
Erasmus had made the historical point that Paul in his injunctions to pay taxes,
tribute and so on could only have been thinking of pagan societies. Among
Christians there was no obligation but love.38
How did Erasmus defend himself against the charge that he is looking for
a kind of Christian anarchy? He develops his historical point-that Paul could
have known only pagan societies-into an a fortiori argument. If Paul required
Christians to pay taxes and give respect to pagan rulers who at best preserved
a public order essentially unchristian in character, how much more should they
do the same for Christian princes who supported the Christian religion as well
as the public peace? He also applies a common-sense realism: "How would
princes perform their functions, if the people did not pay their taxes?" "This
is," says Herding, "quite realistic, almost technical argument."39
Already in the Institutio Erasmus had anticipated the objection that by in-
sisting on the mutual obligation of Christian prince and people, he had, by
contrast with pagan rulers on whom by definition no such obligation rested,
diminished the "rights" of Christian princes. The Christian prince has not lost
his authority; he holds it in another way (aliter possidet). Indeed, he holds it
more securely because, through mutual obligation, a polity is created in which
both prince and people have a stake. The distinction between the pagan tyrant
and the Christian prince derives from their respective behaviors-to that ex-
tent it is a moralistic distinction-but also from the different relationships be-
tween them and their peoples. This is the difference between commanding
slaves and ruling a free people, with whom there is the possibility of earning
respect and winning willing support.4o
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The fundamental distinction, to which Erasmus often returns, is that be-

tween dominium or imperium on the one hand and administratio on the other.
It is related to the ancient distinction between ruler and tyrant and also to Au-
gustine's depiction of Christian rulership: thus, for Augustine, there are in the
earthly city "ambitious conquerors led by the lust of sovereignty"; in the heav-
enly city "all serve each other in charity, both the rulers in counselling and
the subjects in obeying."41 I want to argue that the distinction has structural
consequences. Administratio carries-to quote the Toronto translation-the
connotation of "orderly control. "42The idea excludes the suggestion that for
Erasmus the disposition was everything and the institution nothing. What he
says in the last section of the Institutio on the laws, on the prince's acquaintance
with the regions he rules, on the tax system confirms the impression. At many
points in his commentary on the Institutio, Herding points to the practical im-
port of the advice Erasmus is giving. Particularly appealing is Erasmus' picture
of the full-time ruler, a professional, constantly out-and-about on administra-
tive tasks. He makes the contrast with Persian potentates who kept themselves
hidden in order to enhance their majesty. The tasks were, as Herding remarks,
especially appropriate to his own country: inspecting cities, building public
works, draining swamps, controlling the sea, increasing the food supply, dis-
couraging inappropriate cultivation.43 None of these can be done without ad-
ministrative back-up, without a hands-on awareness of social, technological,
and institutional realities.
Evidence of dualism may be found also in a long note Erasmus wrote, partly
in 1516 and partly in 1519, to Jesus' words after the last supper, as recorded
in Luke 22:36: "he that hath a purse, let him take it ... and he that hath
no sword, let him sell his garment, and buy one." He poured scorn on earlier
commentators who had read the words as advice to the apostles to furnish
themselves with supplies and arms against the coming persecutions. He himself
read them figuratively: Christ was preparing his disciples psychologically for
enduring suffering; the sword was a spiritual one. Here then Erasmus is alle-
gorizing and, to a degree, spiritualizing the text. The grosser things of the
world-we might say the sphere of politics and power-had nothing in com-
mon, no point of connection with Christ's teaching. "He came from heaven
to teach heavenly things, the grosser things he disregarded or rejected or
14

neglected." Thus he did not recognize the emperor's image and refused to di-
vide the inheritance between the quarrelling brothers.
Once again, however, Erasmus does not let the spiritualizing drift carry him
away completely; he does not finish in a sectarian withdrawal from the world.
Realism breaks in. Ambrose, he recalls, praised emperors who preserved the
Christian peace against barbarian invaders; but this was not of the essence of
the gospel, non puritatis Evangelicae. In an addition of 1527, which draws per-
haps on the experience of the disorders of the 1520s, he strengthens this point.
Many things are allowed which are not themselves gospel teaching. In the end
this hardens into a doctrine of the lesser evil: "In human affairs there are nec-
essary evils, which we endure because they prevent greater ones, not because
we approve of them as gospel teaching. "44
Let me summarize what I have been saying in this part of the paper. We
cannot expect to find in Erasmus a developed doctrine of the state, though
some have seen him as the precursor of the tutelary state as it emerged in the
German Protestant territorial states and, later, in enlightened despotism (they
have done so because he has given the Christian ruler the role of moral guard-
ian and educational provider).45 Does he then lack a sense for institutions,
look for an unrealizable community of Christian love, and take "so little ac-
count of drives for power, political realities, and patterns of human behaviour
as to read more like the euphoric projection of a dream"? On the functions
of the Christian ruler Erasmus says two distinct things. First the ruler supports
Christian institutions and promotes Christian education and, for that reason,
much care must be taken over his own formation. Hence Erasmus' admonitions
to the rulers of the age, as we find them in the prefaces to the gospel paraphrases
dedicated to them in the early 1520s. Thus to the emperor Charles V and his
brother Ferdinand: emperors are appointed that they might "protect or amend
or propagate the religion of the gospel"; "the prince does not teach the gospel,
 15

he sets an example of it, and he who sets an example teaches too. "46 Secondly,
much that goes into rule, like fighting a defensive war, has nothing to do with
the gospel. It may be "necessity," but no Christian claim can be made for it. 41
Is there not here an opening, however small, for the emergence of a new sec-
ular morality of politics? The spiritualizing thrust is strong: Christ has nothing
to say on the political order, his message is "heavenly," spiritual. The ideal
of a Christian brotherhood bound by Christian love alone draws Erasmus
powerfully. Yet he is never completely carried away.48 Realism, as I have said
more than once, breaks in. This is more than pessimistic realism, more than
a doctrine of the lesser evil, though that is certainly present. There is a sense
of what can be achieved through the political order. Thus he can say in the
dedicatory prefaces of the 1520s: the prince's true Christian service is in pre-
serving the peace, safeguarding the public liberties, averting famine, checking
corruption. 49
The two contentions do not fit easily together: that Christ has nothing to
do with political power and that rulers may serve him even in their mundane
activities. I have discussed elsewhere the striking image he uses to hold to-
gether these disparate tendencies in his thought; it seems apposite to summa-
rize the matter here. This is the image of the three circles as set out in Ep.
858, the letter to Paul Volz ( 1518).5° Christ stands at the center of three
concentric circles, the first composed of priests, monks, and bishops, the
second of secular rulers, and the third of the common people. The image has
been broadly interpreted in two ways, one structural and the other theological.
On the first interpretation Erasmus is, much like his medieval predecessors,
defining a hierarchy, the relations between church, state, and people. The
16

second interpretation makes the image more dynamic. Christ does not merely
sit at the center; rather, he is constantly active, drawing those in all three cir-
cles towards himself, and they in turn serve his missionary purpose. This in-
terpretation does justice to the fact that, as Erasmus describes them, the circles
have fluid and changing boundaries; there is movement upward and down-
ward. By contrast, the first interpretation is static and too limiting. But a prob-
lem remains with the second interpretation: why do the secular rulers occupy
the place they do in this depiction of the gospel at work, of evangelical dy-
namics as we might say?
This puzzle can be resolved only by observing how the image of three circles
fits into the whole argument of the letter to Volz. Erasmus begins with a char-
acteristic contrast between the simplicity of the gospel and the complexity of
what has replaced it, scholastic theology. In the ethical sphere the latter has
produced an elaborate casuistry. There should be a return to the single imper-
ative of love: "If the rule of Christian love is present, everything else will easily
conform to it." Immediately, however, Erasmus recognizes the problems of
civil society, of rules less than the law of love but necessary for maintaining
public order. The image of the three circles introduced at that point is a way
of confronting the dilemma of power and love. It both protects the validity
of temporal rule and leaves it under a higher judgment. Rulers serve Christ
in their own fashion "either while in just war they overcome the enemy and
defend the public peace, or while with lawful punishment they restrain evil-
doers." This is necessary and praiseworthy but it falls short of Christ's demand:
"For by the service of these men we are not made good, but less evil, and those
who are evil do less harm to the commonwealth
Among Erasmus' social values, I would like to single out productiveness.
It was commonplace to condemn idleness. Erasmus' targets in his brief cam-
paign against idleness in the Institutio are predictable: the monk, the soldier,
and the nobleman. The cases differ. The community could do with fewer mon-
asteries and colleges, partly because there idleness and bad living often go to-
gether. The soldier's is a busy kind of idleness, the very opposite of the rest-
fulness the word otium sometimes conveys. The soldier's activity is idleness
because it is unproductive or, worse, recklessly destructive. The nobleman's
idleness goes with injustice: he claims much more from society than the cob-
bler or farmer but produces much less. Then there is the whole train of
hangers-on, parasitical on state administration, commerce, and the landed
aristocracy: "taxfarmers, pedlars, usurers, brokers, panders, estate managers,
 17

game wardens, the whole gang of agents and retainers." These people draw
wealth without creating it or manage operations without producing anything
in the end. Idleness is not only unproductive. It has a psychopathology. Those
addicted to it will resort to criminal ways in supporting it.52 Erasmus' social
thought is pragmatic; outcome is the standard of judgment. This may stem in
part from an agrarian ideal of society, but it is also bourgeois, at least in the
distinction constantly drawn between productive and unproductive ways of
life.53 Alberto Pio criticized his call for limiting the number of monasteries:
"It is devoutly to be wished that praises be sung to the Lord everywhere."
Erasmus' was a response of exemplary realism: "If all are singing praises, who
will feed them ?"54
To put the point simply: Erasmus is on the side of the wealth-producers.
There is a famous passage in the Complaint of Peace: "It is the humble and de-
spised populace which founds noble cities, administers their foundations con-
siderately, and enriches them in doing so. Then rulers slip in, and like drones
steal the products of other men's industry, so that what was properly amassed
by the majority is frittered away by a few, and a sound foundation is brutally
destroyed. "55 Erasmus returns frequently to this picture of flourishing cities de-
stroyed by a conspiracy of rulers and their henchmen, or those they can suborn
to make trouble. These have time on their hands; they are the opposite of pro-
ductive citizens. The picture is in his letter of 1514 to Anthony of Bergen,
his first extended appeal for peace (Ep. 288), and in the Institutio. It appears
in a poignant form towards the end of the latter. To build a city, Erasmus says,
is a harder and finer thing than to destroy one. The harder thing is done by
"private citizens, simple men" (ab idiotis et privatis), the easy and destructive
one by princes. 56 Usually Erasmus uses the word "private" in a bad sense. All
through his political writings he distinguishes between the public interest
and the private concerns of rulers. Public policy should not be set by private
affections.57 But in the passage about city-building he is speaking with
18

admiration of the privati, private citizens, who by their labors-by diligently

going about their business-build and adorn cities. This ethos is bourgeois.
The picture of a peaceable citizenry betrayed by the cupidity and adventurism
of rulers corresponded to fears widespread in the urban population of the Neth-
erlands in the early years of the sixteenth century. Tracy has shown that these
fears were exaggerated. But that Erasmus tapped into deep anxieties among his
own people shows how far he was from abstract and disengaged moralizing.58
I would like, before leaving these remarks on Erasmus in praise of produc-
tiveness, to dwell for a moment on one image. The satraps, he says, "like
drones steal the product of other men's industry." In some editions of the Com-
plaint there is at this point a marginal heading: "Bad princes are nothing but
drones of the commonwealth. "59 In many places Erasmus praises the bee com-
munities as models of industry and public service. These praises derive from
the ancient authors-Varro, Pliny, Vergil, Seneca-and in part repeat an-
cient misunderstandings. The picture of the drones in Vergil's Georgics, feed-
ing on the labors of others, fits the distinction, dear to Erasmus, between the
productive and non-productive classes. Pliny added the robber bees, largest of
the drones, which, black and broad-bellied, steal and devour honey.60 Did
Erasmus recall the terror of his native land, the murderous Black Band of mer-
cenaries ?61 In any case, the image served his social-critical purpose admirably.
War meant, he said at one place, the wasting on monsters and murderers of
what honest skills, crafts and industries had won.62
The image had a long past; it was also to have a future. We have learned
well the lesson that anachronism is the worst of sins for the historian, that texts
express the intentions of particular authors for particular audiences in partic-
ular situations and that weaving chains of similar-sounding ideas across the
centuries is likely to be misleading and end in absurdity.63 Nevertheless, I
would want to argue for a judicious tracing of a seductive idea through gen-
erations of thinkers and suggest that his place in such a line is part of any think-
 19

er's historical significance. Part of Erasmus' significance in the history of

ideologies is that he comes in the line, stands towards the beginning of the
line, of those who exalt the active, industrious, productive classes and de-
nounce the various unproductive classes, including the courtly and military
castes which themselves made no wealth and drained the wealth created by
others into luxury, display, and even more destructive pastimes like war and
civil disorder.64
We might then ask: does Erasmus have a work ethic, a sense of temporal
vocation, to accompany his exalting of the useful and productive over the mer-
etricious and non-productive? In an essay entitled "Talent and Vocation in
Humanist and Protestant Thought," Richard M. Douglas has argued that
Erasmus' idea of vocation is connected with a sense of the self, of one's natural
talents and disposition. To follow a way of life (genus vitae) beyond or contrary
to one's inclinations or the endowments of one's nature is to court disaster.
Vocation must be self-selected. Erasmus' thought on this matter is, in Doug-
las's judgment, "pre-eminently secular, at times vaguely naturalistic." It was,
he says, in line with a movement in Italian humanism towards "a secular ethic
of work and human achievement as things good in themselves." Here Erasmus
was in sharp contradiction to the Protestant Reformers, who saw temporal
vocation as a direct command from God.65
Now I am not convinced that the sources on which Douglas has relied justify
these conclusions, which on the face of it seem one-sided. I would expect to
find, as we did in the case of Erasmus' political ethics, a balance of tendencies
in his thought on temporal vocation, tendencies pulling somewhat against one
another, a secularizing tendency certainly, a spiritualizing tendency also, the
two held in some kind of balance by a practical, realistic sense for the Christian
lay life. I cannot now follow this question far, but let me at least offer a re-
flection on one illuminating passage.
At one point in Book 3 of Ecclesiastes, his great work on preaching, Erasmus
deals with the meanings of the word "world" (mundus). He is here demonstrat-
ing how contemporary preachers and theologians distort the meanings of scrip-
tural words. In the scriptures, he says, "world" has two very different meanings.
It refers to God's good creation which, of course, scripture does not condemn,
and to men living out their lives in this creation. It also refers to what Chris-
tians have renounced, the order of things alienated from God. The distortion
20

lies in the claim that only monks, professed religious, have escaped the world
in that sense, and that lay Christians remain worldly. On the contrary, says
Erasmus, "there is no kind of life" (vitae genus : he uses here the very phrase
Douglas associates with a self-selected way of life congenial to one's natural
disposition) "in which one ought not and cannot be dead to the world." Death
to the world in a spiritual sense applies not only to monks, priests, and bishops
but also to princes, soldiers, and married people, to all in short who have pro-
fessed contempt for the world and Satan in baptism. 66 Erasmus makes a parallel
argument about other words, e. g. "sacred" and "profane": it is effrontery to
hold as profane hearts set apart as temples by the Holy Spirit. Those called
"lay" people, "of the world," come to believe that what scripture teaches about
evangelical perfection does not apply to them. Erasmus says again: "in every
kind of life perfection is possible, each in its own way. 1167 Here may be felt a
strong spiritualizing tendency; the spiritual demand on the laity is high. But
the argument also cuts the other way, as might be expected from the rival
meaning of the word "world," the sphere of God's creation and of men living
and working within it. Where lay people live and work is full of possibilities.
What belongs to them is sacred in its own way, and what they give to their
wives, children, and needy relations is as much given to God as any gift to
a monastery. 68 This gives the lay life and temporal vocation dignity, if not full
autonomy. This dignity invests the secular world; nevertheless, the secular-
izing tendency here is by no means pre-eminent. It is checked by a dominant
pietism, but there is left a healthy appreciation of the lay life, which any reader
of the Colloquies will recognize.
I have been arguing that Erasmus has a positive appreciation of civil society.
He does not simply stand over against it, applying a rule-of-thumb morality
and rejecting all that he does not like, which is most of it. He has no con-
ception of secular society; he remains within the bounds of Christendom,
Christian civilization. But there is in his thought a kind of secularization. Tem-
poral rule has its own rationale; its actions are less than piety but they are nev-
ertheless necessary, even acceptable and sometimes wholesome, if also some-
times corrupt. Erasmus is not ignorant of the dilemmas of power and love and
 21

of the compromises necessary for riding them out, if not for resolving them.
All that may have gone against the grain for one schooled in the piety of the
Brethren or formed by Franciscan values, but he was too perceptive not to un-
derstand that the world could not be ruled like a Brethren house or a mon-
astery. About lay activity in the world-in the family and in temporal
vocations-he was enthusiastic, because of its usefulness and productivity, and
because it offered a genuine Christian alternative to the life of withdrawal, the
monastic life. When in his letter to Volz he asks: "What else, I ask you, is a
city than a great monastery?" he is not, it seems to me, wanting to turn civil
society into a monastery, or make monastic rules the standard for Christian
life generally. 69He is wanting to give civil society a status, make Christian life
in the family and temporal vocation in its own way a genuinely Christian life,
the equal of any other.
To this affirmation of civil society, compare the dark picture of the same
subject by John Colet. Erasmus' relationship with Colet, which scholars long
thought decisive for his personal and theological development, following their
first meeting at Oxford in 1499, now appears more problematic, paradoxical
and beset by cross-currents. They were separated by, among other things, Co-
let's exceedingly somber view of the human condition, of human society and
culture. 10There is a danger of going to the other extreme and denying any in-
fluence of Colet on Erasmus. One can find a trace of Colet's negativism towards
civil society, its conflicts and judgments, in Erasmus' remark that Christ dis-
regarded or rejected or neglected such things. But over all their tone is mark-
edly different. Colet, like Erasmus, used the image of the circle (in comment-
ing on Romans 4), and it is revealing to compare the two men's use of this
image. Both have Christ at the center; for both, evil and the vices are dom-
inant beyond the circumference. In some sense, for both the circle describes
the Christian community. Let us ask for Colet, as we have already asked for
Erasmus: in what sense?
We must place Colet's use of the image in the context of his Expositio
of the first five chapters of Romans; it actually belongs to a long digression
on law at Romans 4:13.71 Colet makes clear, in presenting the image itself,
what his purpose is. In part he is describing the ecclesiastical hierarchy: the
laity are at the circumference, the priests and bishops closer to the center. But
the structure, if we may call it such, is less institutional than moral. Colet is
22

grappling with the inherited problem of precepts and counsels. Within the cir-
cumference are the precepts, the duties required of all Christians; with the fail-
ure to perform these a Christian ceases to be a Christian and falls outside the
circumference. For lay Christians any higher demand, any movement towards
the center is not a precept or requirement but counsel; for those who have
taken vows and thus stand closer to the center-priests and monks-the
higher demands become precepts, obligations. Now Colet, with characteristic
moral intensity, wishes for movement towards the center, but accepts that the
church must be indulgent towards those who cannot go beyond meeting the
Christian precepts binding on all
In this use of the image, unlike that of Erasmus, no place is assigned to the
temporal rulers. Colet discusses what degree of pastoral indulgence is due lay
people, but not how lay people might grapple with the ethical issues that come
up in their own lives: how far may Christians obey temporal authorities, for
example, how useful-in a Christian sense-are their own daily vocations?
Colet's circle is entirely within-church, so to speak; this is Christian commu-
nity in the narrower sense, where Christ's law alone prevails, the law of love.
Positive law, civil society and political authority lie beyond the circumference.
A perusal of the long lead-in to the circle image, the digression on law, con-
firms the impression made by the image itself. Since the fall, all law other than
God's law has belonged to the realm of sin, folly and death, the common law
as well as statutes and the decrees of princes. 73 The various forms of political
constitution are but "particular corruptions from the general depravity:
branches, so to speak, from a decayed root." The laws are caught up in the
clash of private interests, from which have arisen all the catastrophes of human
history. The law of England, Colet says, is "made up of the absurd decisions
of wrangling men," utterly condemned (the words are "exploded and hissed
off stage") by the divine law of faith and love.74 Erasmus too denounced the
domination of private interests over public policy, but he also envisaged a pub-
lic realm where some kind of rationality could prevail, where human needs
could be met and Christian vocations lived out, even if that meant at times
no more than choosing the lesser evil. 75The adage Summum ius, summa iniuria,
 23

which for Erasmus demonstrated the dangers of following the letter of the law
rather than the intention of the law-maker, Colet took as meaning that the
so-called rights of nations were, "before and without Christ," "men's highest
"76
wrongs.
What is in Erasmus one tendency held in check and counteracted by other
tendencies, i.e. a tendency towards separating the community of grace from
a world seen as utterly fallen and depraved, becomes in Colet the whole pic-
ture. All the warmth and attractiveness in Colet's cosmic picture is in the
church, where God's love is at work and there is mutual service and a kind
of equality.77 Outside is neither love nor hope. Compare the following from
Colet with what we know of Erasmus' view of temporal vocation: "And those
who are distracted among the many affairs of this world, with varying hope
and expectation regarding these affairs, do not truly exist, for since they do
not hope in God they are nothing. "78 By contrast, Erasmus' hope extends to
this world, where the application of Christian values is at least possible, where
the creation of a humane society is at least thinkable, where prince and cobbler
may carry their cross by daily service of their fellows. ?9

University of Sydney