91: Neither Side: Erasmus and the Middle Ground

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Erasmus, Praise of Folly, 1511
“There is none good but one, that is God: for if whoever is not wise must be consequently a fool, and if, according to the Stoics, every man be wise so far only as he is good, the meaning of the text must be, all mortals are unavoidably fools; and there is none wise but one, that is God.”

In the summer of 1509, Erasmus crossed the Alps on horseback, heading north. He had spent three years in Italy—Venice, Bologna, Rome—and was not returning. He was riding toward England, toward Thomas More's house in London, expecting royal patronage and a clear purpose under the new king, Henry VIII.

He was in his late forties. He had spent eight months in Aldus Manutius's workshop in Venice, surrounded by Greek scholars, working on manuscripts that no one in northern Europe had touched. He watched Pope Julius II ride into Bologna in armor, a vicar of Christ transformed into a conquering general, and that sight confirmed something in him that was just beginning— a clear understanding of what the Church had become and what it was supposed to be.

Somewhere on that Alpine crossing, as he rode through the passes, the Praise of Folly began to take form in his mind. He hadn't planned it. He was thinking about his friend More, the upcoming trip to England, and the pun that the Greek word for folly — Moria — made with More's own name. And then it started coming.

He wrote it in a week at More's house while recovering from lumbago. Later, he would describe it as a trivial, recreational piece, unworthy of serious attention. He was not being entirely honest; he knew exactly what he had written.

The Praise of Folly is not just a satire. It has a structure, and that structure is the argument.

In the first movement, Folly steps into the spotlight and takes credit for everything that makes human life possible. Without her irrational energies—self-love, the reckless hope of lovers, the blinkered optimism of parents—the human species would simply cease to exist. No one would marry. No one would have children. No orator would take the stage, because the self-awareness that wisdom brings acts as a brake on action. Folly doesn't just support human foolishness; she sustains human life.

In the second movement, Folly's tone sharpens. Now she is the satirist, critiquing the estates of Europe — grammarians, lawyers, theologians, monks, bishops, cardinals, popes — and exposing how vanity and self-deception uphold each. The scholastic theologians who have reduced Christianity to a technical language that no ordinary believer can understand. The monks who perform their rituals with mechanical precision and call it piety. The pope — and here Erasmus is thinking of Julius— who wages territorial wars in the name of Christ and calls it the defense of the Church.

These were the same targets Erasmus had been aiming at since the Enchiridion. But in Praise of Folly, something new happens in the third movement, and this is where the book shifts from being pure satire.

Folly becomes mystical. She calls on Paul — the foolishness of God that is wiser than humans, the mystery beyond understanding, the self-forgetfulness of the saint who is no longer entirely themselves. She suggests that the highest wisdom is a kind of sacred folly — abandoning the calculating self and surrendering, a practice monks were meant to follow but often didn't. The book ends not in mockery but in something close to a vision.

Johan Huizinga, who wrote what remains the finest biography of Erasmus, called the Praise of Folly his greatest work — the only one still read purely for its own sake. Margaret Mann Phillips, whose study of Erasmus is still essential, notes that its subject is exactly the same as the Enchiridion's subject, just wearing a different face. The argument is identical. What has changed is the form — and the form, in this case, is everything. Erasmus told one of his critics that unpalatable truths are easier to swallow when flavored with laughter.

The Praise of Folly was published in Paris in 1511 and quickly became a sensation across Europe. It was reprinted in Strasbourg within months, without Erasmus's knowledge. By the time he arrived at Cambridge to give his Greek lectures, he was more famous than ever. The book had made him.

But fame, in Erasmus's world, had a specific value. It was only useful as long as it could be turned into patronage, position, and the freedom to work. In 1516, those three elements came together in a way they never had before.

The year 1516 is worth noting. Three books published within months of each other that together define a moment in European intellectual history that would not come again: Thomas More's Utopia, Erasmus's Greek New Testament — the first printed Greek text of Scripture, with a new Latin translation correcting the Vulgate — and a small book Erasmus published at the same time, dedicated to the sixteen-year-old Archduke Charles of Burgundy, who soon became Charles I of Spain and, three years later, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V.

The book was the Institutio Principis Christiani — the Education of a Christian Prince. It is one of the most unusual documents in the history of political thought: a work of remarkable moral clarity aimed at a man who would spend his entire reign doing almost exactly the opposite of what it advised.

The Institutio argues that a prince is made, not born. Character develops through education — in virtue, in Scripture, and in the classical philosophical tradition — and without that development, power is organized tyranny. A good ruler should prefer peace over war, govern by example rather than by fear, and see himself as the servant of a free people rather than their owner. The Divine Right of Kings is rejected. The prince should ideally be chosen, like Plato's philosophers, for his reluctance to rule. Power is not a reward; it is a burden, taken on in the spirit of Christ bearing his cross.

Phillips compares the Institutio to More's Utopia and Machiavelli's The Prince — all three written within a few years of each other, all three responses to the same crisis in European political order.

The comparison clearly shows where Erasmus stands. More is the most radical of the three. Utopia envisions eliminating private property and rebuilding society from scratch based on completely different principles. It presents a vision of total transformation.

Machiavelli is, in some ways, the photographic negative of Erasmus. He is quite pessimistic about human nature. For Machiavelli, governance is not a moral issue — it’s a struggle for power. The ruler must be ready to do terrible things when necessary, because the world cannot be changed. It simply is what it is.

Erasmus positions himself between More's utopian ideals and Machiavelli's pragmatic realism—embodying a reformist approach that works within existing institutions to enhance them. He believes the difference between current rulers and their potential is truly surmountable—not through revolution or violence, but through education. With the right teacher, at the right time, and using the right book, change can happen.

He also addressed Charles through the Institutio, partly as a fellow Netherlander. Charles was born in Ghent and raised in the Low Countries under Burgundian guidance — the same world of cities and civic culture that shaped Erasmus. The book captures that world: its preference for peace over dynastic pursuits, its suspicion of foreign involvement, and its respect for the liberties of free towns. Erasmus isn’t just advising a prince. He’s reminding him of where he comes from and what that should mean.

The companion piece, published the next year, strengthens the anti-war argument with even more passion. The Complaint of Peace personifies Peace herself, who appears before the reader and, with weary precision, questions why she has been banished from human life. She condemns kings, philosophers, theologians, and even ordinary households for their discord. But her most serious accusation is against the institution that should most embody her: the Church, which blesses armies, approves crusades, and cloaks military ambition in the language of God's will.

Roland Bainton credits Erasmus with a truly original insight. The classical and medieval just-war tradition assumed wars could be just, developing criteria for legitimacy over centuries. Erasmus challenges this by asking: who decides? In civil courts, there's a judge; in international disputes, each belligerent or king acts as their own judge. Without an impartial authority, the criteria for a just war are useless. 

The Complaint of Peace was translated into English during the Napoleonic Wars. And again during the First World War. And again during the Second.

It was the most hopeful Erasmus had ever been. Then 1517 arrived, and October with it.

On October 31, an Augustinian friar in Wittenberg posted a challenge to public debate on the theology of indulgences. Erasmus read the Ninety-Five Theses and sent them to Thomas More, "largely approving their content." He had been criticizing the same abuses for twenty years. Luther's targets were his targets. The corruption of Rome, the mechanical religiosity of the monasteries, the scholastic theology that had turned the Gospel into a professional franchise — Erasmus had been writing about all of this since before Luther was ordained.

But he saw the danger almost immediately. Not in Luther's targets. In Luther's method.

Erasmus believed that change had to come from within—through persuasion, education, and the slow transformation of institutions by better minds over time. He believed, or wanted to believe, that the printing press, the Greek New Testament, the Enchiridion, and the Institutio were doing their work—that Europe was gradually becoming more capable of understanding what the Gospel truly said. He had spent thirty years building an alternative to confrontation. Luther was confrontation.

The years from 1517 to 1524 marked a period of mounting pressure from both sides and increasing difficulty for moderates. The Catholic Church wanted Erasmus to publicly condemn Luther — the pope himself wrote to him; bishops offered benefices; and Thomas More's lost 1523 letter seemingly pushed him toward the inevitable. Meanwhile, the Lutheran circle circulated his private letters of sympathy as endorsements, using the Enchiridion and New Testament annotations as ammunition, portraying him as the father of a movement he never officially joined.

There is a letter from May 1519 that captures the problem exactly. On the same day, Erasmus wrote two letters. The public one to Luther disclaimed knowledge of Luther's books and claimed neutrality, focusing on learning. The private letter to Luther's associate, John Lang, expressing sympathy with the cause and predicting that the tyranny of Rome would need to be overthrown by tumult. Two letters, same day, opposite messages. Huizinga finds him not so much dishonest as structurally split — the 'puny Erasmus' and the 'great Erasmus' pulling in different directions.

What was truly impossible was finding the middle ground itself. As the conflict intensified, every moderate remark was turned into a weapon. His letters defending Luther were circulated as endorsements; conservatives saw his protests of neutrality as bad faith. The logic of polarization left no space for a man who said "I acknowledge Christ; I do not know Luther" — and truly meant it.

By 1521, he left Louvain for Basel. The university's theologians were burning Luther's books while also attacking Erasmus. He explained his departure as a visit to oversee the third edition of his New Testament at Froben's press. Huizinga is direct: it was a flight, not from physical danger, but from the threat of being drafted into the anti-Lutheran policies of the emperor and the Church. He was defending the one thing he had never been willing to give up — his independence.

He did not return to Louvain.

He settled into Basel and kept producing a steady stream of work. However, the pressure from both sides continued to mount. Rome demanded a formal statement, and Luther's circle wanted one too. The middle ground he was defending was becoming increasingly difficult to maintain with each passing month.

Then Thomas More wrote to him. The letter is lost, but its impact was not. In 1524, Erasmus published De Libero Arbitrio — On Free Will. 

He had chosen his position.

Luther recognized it immediately. He thanked Erasmus, with his usual mix of disdain and reluctant respect, for focusing on the real issue rather than debating indulgences and the papacy. The question of free will was, Luther said, the question. And he was right.

The debate between Erasmus and Luther over free will isn't really a debate about theology in the narrow sense. It's really about what human beings are.

Erasmus argues that humans retain some ability to cooperate with God's grace. Not much — the initial inspiration is God's, and the final achievement is God's — but there is something genuine in the middle. Some real responsiveness of the human will that makes moral effort meaningful, and that helps us understand God's justice. Without free will, he argues, God becomes a tyrant who damns people for what they cannot help. That is not only morally unacceptable; it is philosophically incoherent.

Scripture, he continues, is genuinely ambiguous regarding predestination. When it is unclear, the consensus of the Church's tradition serves as the best guide. The most profound questions should be left unanswered. "Many problems," he writes, "should be deferred until we shall see God face to face."

For Luther, that last sentence is precisely the problem: the deference to tradition and the willingness to leave things unresolved. He sees a tendency toward scholarly hesitation when faced with a Gospel he believes is anything but unresolved. In 1525, he responds with De Servo Arbitrio — On the Bondage of the Will — his most sustained and fiery critique of Erasmus, and perhaps the most significant theological work of the Reformation. Luther argues that the will is completely in bondage — entirely, fundamentally, with no exceptions. According to him, humans cannot cooperate with God because they are not free to cooperate with anything except sin. Salvation, he insists, entirely belongs to God's mysterious grace, given to the elect and withheld from others by a will that surpasses human moral understanding. Luther acknowledges Erasmus for grasping the gravity of the issue. Then, he dismissively calls him a babbler, a hog from the Epicurean sty, a Proteus — a man of shifting, unstable positions who has never truly embraced the Gospel.

The compliment hidden within the contempt is genuine. Luther sees Erasmus as the only opponent who truly addressed the core issue.

Huizinga expresses it this way: the conflict was not between right and wrong but "between right and right." At the point they were fighting, the dispute had moved beyond what ordinary judgment can follow. He provides a geographical image that is also a psychological portrait: the Dutchman who sees the sea, opposed to the German who looks out on mountain tops. Different landscapes. Different instincts about where the horizon is.

Phillips introduces the anthropological aspect. Both men agree that salvation comes only through faith and that man cannot earn his way to God. What separates them is whether man can respond at all.

And that one key difference cascades into everything else. Erasmus's reliance on persuasion versus Luther's on proclamation. Erasmus's preference for leaving deep questions open versus Luther's insistence on defining them publicly, loudly, and definitively. Erasmus's Latin cosmopolitanism versus Luther's German nationalism. Erasmus's irony versus Luther's fury.

Bainton summarizes the core disagreement: Erasmus thought that when a man believes in a truth and authorities condemn it, he should quietly wait for God to prove him right. In contrast, Luther believed that a truth that is truly proclaimed cannot be silenced for peace’s sake. This distinction, Bainton explains, lies at the heart of the difference between Catholic and Protestant perspectives. Neither man could fully grasp why the other failed to see it the same way.

Erasmus responded with the Hyperaspistes — a work of exhausted, increasingly bitter self-defense spanning two volumes in 1526 and 1527. He had been outwitted rhetorically, and he knew it. But he refused to give in.

He had presented his case. Luther had done the same. Neither side budged. Gradually, the surrounding world started to mirror that conclusion.

In 1529, Basel officially embraced the Reformation. Erasmus watched the iconoclasts move through the city's churches — statues destroyed, frescoes whitewashed, the Mass overthrown by popular force in a single night. He packed his belongings and moved to Freiburg, a quiet Habsburg university town across the Rhine in Catholic territory. He could not live in a Reformed city. He would not return to Rome. He declined a cardinalate. He was caught between worlds, and there was no third option available.

The years at Freiburg were not quiet, despite appearances. Erasmus kept producing at a pace that seems almost physically impossible for a man who was often carried in a litter and suffered constantly from kidney stones, arthritis, and gout. 

But the tone had shifted. Where the Erasmus of 1516 spoke of a golden age about to begin — peace secured by great princes, with learning and piety flourishing together — the Erasmus of the 1530s wrote in a tone of prophecy. "If, what I pray may never happen, you should see horrible commotions of the world arise — remember Erasmus prophesied it."

The deaths of friends came in clusters. Then, in 1535, More was beheaded for refusing to acknowledge Henry VIII's supremacy over the Church. The friendship that began in that English house in 1499, the man Erasmus called, in one of his letters, the one friend he had found "without a shadow," was gone, lost to the world that his own generation had helped create.

He returned to Basel in 1535. Basel, even Reformed, was home in a way Freiburg had never been. A life that had been defined by motion had simply run out of it.

He died on July 12 at Jerome Froben's house, his printer. In his final hours, he groaned in Latin — the language he had thought, worked, and written in for sixty years. Then, at the end, in the language he had spoken as a boy in a small Dutch town before all of it began: Lieve God. Dear God.

The Dutch words mattered. Huizinga understood why.

Johan Huizinga published his biography of Erasmus in 1924, and it remains, a century later, essential reading. He challenged two long-standing tendencies that have divided Erasmus's reputation since his death: the Protestant tradition that dismissed him as a coward — a man who saw what Luther saw, had the tools and the reputation to act, but flinched; and the Catholic tradition that claimed him as a defender of Rome — a man who came to his senses in time. Huizinga argued that both are wrong. They are wrong in the same way because they are both asking the same question: whose side was he on?

Huizinga's response is that this is the wrong question.

His Erasmus is neither a failed reformer nor a reluctant conservative. He embodies a distinctly Netherlandish way of inhabiting the world: moderate but confident in education and persuasion, skeptical of coercion—opposing forced conscience, book burning, and statue smashing as the will of God. This sensibility, the violent 16th century largely could not accommodate, as it was too certain and hungry for total commitment, needing Luthers and Loyolas.

Erasmus's legacy, Huizinga argues, belongs less to the century he lived in than to the one that followed. You find it not in the settlement at Augsburg or the Council of Trent, not in the victory of either side in the wars of religion, but in the Dutch Republic of the seventeenth century — in its municipal aristocracy's spirit of social responsibility and moderation, its generally diffused erudition, its practical tolerance, the remarkable fact that witch executions ceased in the Dutch Republic more than a century before they ceased anywhere else in Europe. You find it in William of Orange's vision, which, as Huizinga puts it, "ranged so widely beyond the limitations of religious hatred" that it could hold together Calvinist and Catholic, merchant and nobleman, in a common civic enterprise. None of that is Erasmian in the sense of being derived from the Institutio or the Complaint of Peace. Huizinga is explicit: the connection is cultural, not causal. The Dutch civic culture—urban pride, conscience over conformity, humanist values— stems from and is linked to Erasmus's world.

He offers a detail that carries more weight than it might seem. When Erasmus died, two pupils from his circle — Talesius and Utenhove — served on opposite sides of the Dutch war. Talesius died for Catholicism; Utenhove for the Reformed. They became enemies in the religious wars. Their commonality was not a confession but a broad vision — Erasmus's belief that conscience couldn't be coerced and that the faith of the farmer and scholar was, properly understood, the same, with no institution overriding the other.

The Praise of Folly had said as much in 1511, joking about it.

Huizinga's final assessment of Erasmus is both honest and generous in a way that few biographers can often manage. Erasmus, he writes, "was not strong enough for his age."  The sixteenth century needed Luther's oak, not Erasmus's velvet. The great upheavals of that century — the confessional wars, the systematic violence of both Reformations, the world splitting into armed camps along lines that would not be fully resolved for a hundred and thirty years — required men who could commit completely, who could burn their bridges and stand at Worms and say here I stand, I can do no other. Erasmus could not do that. It was not in him.

But the age's strength, Huizinga insists, was also its blindness. And Erasmus saw things that Luther, Calvin, and Loyola could not see or would not admit. That toleration is not weakness. That the man who holds his tongue while waiting for God's vindication may be practicing a form of wisdom that, from the outside, seems indistinguishable from cowardice. That the reform of human beings is slow work, requiring patience, persuasion, and a very long view — and that a culture capable of supporting that work is ultimately worth more than any single decisive battle.

He was, Huizinga writes, "the fervently sincere preacher of that general kindliness which the world still so urgently needs."

That is the Low Countries, from which Erasmus came and never quite returned. It is also, in some essential sense, the Low Countries we are heading toward — the world that will make the Dutch Revolt possible, that will produce the Republic, Grotius, and Spinoza, and the most unlikely experiment in pluralism that early modern Europe managed to create. The journey there passes through catastrophe — through the violence Erasmus spent his life trying to prevent, but failed to. But it also passes through him. Through the Praise of Folly and the Institutio. Through Lieve God, spoken in Dutch, at the end.

With our next episode we return to the world of the Low Countries under Emperor Charles V.

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