1 Overt and Hidden Significations of Scripture

Erasmus’ confrontation with Luther has often been described as a conflict between a sceptical resignation to Church tradition on the part of the Dutch humanist and a rigorous thinking-through of the utter imbalance between divine and human powers on the part of the German reformist—a characterisation that is true enough in itself. Yet what such a synopsis leaves out, is that there is also a fine and careful line of argumentation on Erasmus’ own part about how to interpret human-divine collaboration.⁴ The idea that, even if it is in the margins of God’s indispensable presence, we still always contribute some activity of our own, is an idea elegantly suggested by the intentions of the helpless child not being in any way annulled by the indispensable presence of the father. Aided in doing what it wishes to do but cannot do by itself (or even crying, we might add, when it is helped to perform something it never actually wanted), the child’s attitude and choices remain relevant even in the face of the overpowering assistance and encouragement of a father on which it entirely depends for any tangible result. Likewise, if human beings cannot do anything without God, they will still always also be doing something themselves.

It is in defence of this idea that Erasmus entered the stage of religious controversy between Luther and Rome in 1524 as a straightforward advocate of free will, consciously presenting a variety of constructive arguments to come to its defence. Defending free will was, of course, also a way for Erasmus to expose the new and dubious forms of dogmatism that were presenting themselves in Luther’s work and to measure these along the rod of accepted theological and philosophical analysis.⁵ For all the vividness of his simile of the helpless child, Erasmus had to put forward a delicately balanced argument here, based on wholly orthodox grounds. He therefore openly chose to sidestep his habitual humanist contempt for the theology of the recentiores, for instance by neatly enumerating the various levels of grace that scholastic theologians had previously authenticated. First, there is natural grace, which comes down to the concursus with which the Prime Cause accompanies the efficacy of all secondary causes—in other words, the hand of God supporting the operations of any natural being, including man. Next, there is grace in the stricter sense of the word, which is always the same, but may be divided in a threefold manner according to its immediate effects: first, there is stimulating grace, then there is cooperating grace, which is the grace “that makes the will effective” and, finally, there is the grace that brings God’s work in man to completion and will bring man to salvation.⁶ God, in other words, not only suggests and invites us to do good (stimulating grace), but also helps us to perform it (cooperating grace). And even if we can never fully meet the perfection that would be reason enough for God to reward us, he rewards us all the same, by adding what is known as ‘justifying’ or ‘sanctifying grace.’⁷

Always aware of the relevance of distinguishing the various levels of divine stimulation, help and perfection, Erasmus is sure to stay close to accepted theological terminology and argumentation, as he was wont to do in cases where established dogma was at stake.⁸ Doing so, he often even reverts to pleading the insignificance of the efficacy of human will in the face of the divine. Yet never should that be a reason for the denial of human free will itself, let alone to assume that we are under the spell of an absolute “necessity,” as Luther presumed. Right at the start of De libero arbitrio, Erasmus resorts to heavy weaponry by associating Luther’s position to the ancient religion of Manichaeism. Not yet mentioning Luther, but clearly implying him by drawing a comparison between Manichaeism on the one hand and the position of Luther’s medieval hero John Wycliffe (1330–1384) on the other, Erasmus in fact puts Manichaeism on a morally higher level in comparison to Luther for psychological reasons:

Although the Manichaean dogma has long since been utterly rejected and laughed out of court by universal consensus, yet I would hardly think that it is less conducive to true religion than Wyclif’s. For Manichaeus refers good and evil deeds to two natures in man, yet in such a way that our good deeds are owed to God as our creator. And in addition he leaves us grounds for imploring the creator’s aid against the powers of darkness, and this helps us to sin less gravely, and to do good more easily. But by referring everything to absolute necessity, what scope does Wyclif leave to our prayers or our endeavours?⁹

Praying to God to infuse us with goodness may be founded on a flawed concept of divinity in Manichaeism, but it is still more conducive to the avoidance of sin than the simple law of necessity that renders all human effort delusive. Manichaeism and Luther, in other words, may share the mistaken view of mankind as subject to a duality of good and evil forces, but Manichaeism at least inspires us “to sin less gravely and to do good more easily,” whereas Luther’s theory of “absolute necessity” leaves no room for trying anything.

Luther, it must be said, was fully prepared for such attacks. He would, of course, never endorse a position that attributed evil to God or designated him as the author of sin.¹⁰ Rather, he would say that sinful man is not in the hands of God at all, but in the hands of Satan. In itself, such a rejoinder was still likely to have struck any non-committed scholastic reader as insufficient for satisfactorily dealing with the question of evil. Even if, in the context of the battle between God and Satan for winning individuals to their cause, God has no stake in human sin, on a grander scale, God, as the Creator of the universe and the unique agent of providence, was still to be held responsible for events in a more comprehensive way. Yet neither would such an argument keep Luther from pronouncing himself in very explicit terms on God’s absolutist position—a standpoint that was not only to fuel the dialectic of infra- and supralapsarist views in the subsequent articulation of Protestant thought, but also the Reformist theme—and emphatic endorsement—of the incomprehensibility of the divine.

Evading the most obvious pitfalls of theodicy, Luther could ultimately only arrive at a complete as well as a non-Manichaean explanation of evil by referring to a two-level way of explaining God’s providence. Besides God’s apparent activity of saving at least some from Satan’s spell, he also acts on account of ulterior reasons that remain fully hidden from man. Thus, God’s direct role in the battle between good and evil in mankind, as well as between sin and faith on earth, should be distinguished from the Creator’s ulterior incentives. God’s revealed choices, in other words, are the outcome of hidden motivations we are unable to fathom. Luther admonishes:

We must discuss God in one way when we speak of his will as preached, revealed, offered, worshipped, and in another way when we speak of God as not preached, not revealed, not offered, not worshipped. Therefore, insofar as God hides himself and does not wish to be known by us, there is nothing for us to be concerned about.¹¹

Since God is “totally incomprehensible and inaccessible to human reason,” his justice is on that account totally to be secluded from our scrutiny.¹²

In order not to admit any contradictions in God, Luther thus emphasised a realm of hidden activity in God that is impenetrable to the human mind. This, however, opened up a field of theological commitments to truths outside of Scriptural territory. Conversely, what primarily stimulated Erasmus in his criticism of Luther’s denial of free will, would be to draw a contrast between a common-sense reading of Biblical demands and the hyperbolic interpretation of things that motivated Luther to arrive at his—at least according to Erasmus—most extravagant conclusions.

The conflict between the cooperative stance envisaged by Erasmus and Luther’s one-way enforcement of effects by a uniquely necessitating factor, was thus neither a conflict about the endorsement or the character of moral demands, nor about dissimilar moral considerations. Rather, it was a conflict between a position that made room for a multilayered and circumstantial account of considerations to be taken into account on the part of both God and man versus a position that denied either side any such elbowroom.¹³ With both Erasmus and Luther remaining intent on confirming the notion of divine justice, God’s justice is considered to be on a par with our own in Erasmus, whereas for Luther, there is no human justice, and God’s remains inscrutable.

2 Authenticity within the Limits of Tradition

It had always been clear to Christian champions of free will, or so Erasmus argued, “that the contribution of free will is very small indeed; and that our very ability to direct our mind to the things that pertain to salvation, or to cooperate with grace, is itself a gift of God.”¹⁴ All the same, this does not force us to deny our freedom. Indeed, dire consequences for interpreting Scripture would evolve if it did. In his 1524 response to Luther, Erasmus was sure to present himself as being no less attentive to the relevance of Scripture than his opponent, as well as to expose Luther as someone distorting the meaning of what is found in Biblical verse. He does this by offering a straightforward reading of Scriptural passages that refer to divine commands that would be non-sensical if human beings would have no capacity to follow up on them.

The Bible, indeed, cannot be understood without accepting the idea of free will, according to Erasmus. If God demands of us to “avoid evil and choose what is good,” or if he asks Cain “Why are you angry? (…) If you do good, will you not receive?,” then surely Scripture is crystal clear about the fact that something is always demanded on our part—an initiative, or at least a willingness to make a contribution of our own towards establishing some desired effect.¹⁵ There is in fact no point, Erasmus argues, “in quoting a few passages of this kind when all of Holy Scripture is full” of such “exhortations.”¹⁶ Free will itself is even addressed in passages like the verse of Psalm 33 that says: “He who wishes to see good days, let him keep his tongue from evil”—where the phrase “he who wishes to see”, in fact “speaks” directly “of free will”—according to Erasmus.¹⁷ Countless of other examples, moreover, confirm this. Moses likewise explicitly explained to the children of Israel that human powers are up to their task by telling them that the “commandment that I lay upon you this day is not beyond you, nor is it far away.”¹⁸

In view of such Biblical exhortations to human effort and commitment, as well as of descriptions of the acts and attitudes of those we venerate as holy people, it is obvious, Erasmus argues, that, first, there is an element of merit to divine rewards, and, secondly, that Scripture offers no reason, let alone any evidence, for the mistaken Lutheran notion that “everything that even the godliest do is a sin, and such a sin that without the intervention of God’s mercy someone for whom Christ died would be cast into hell.”¹⁹ As Luther’s black-and-white kind of moral dualism leaves no room for human effort and evokes the idea of the absolute sinfulness of human nature in its fallen state, and as his notion of salvation excludes any contribution on our part and leaves everything to God’s direct and unilateral interference, Luther’s teachings, Erasmus argues, are in direct disagreement with the counsels of Scripture. What, accordingly, is primarily wrong with Luther, is that his views are entirely at odds with a fair and honest reading of God’s Word.

Again, Luther knew what was coming. Reflecting on the councils, appeals and encouragements offered to human beings in Scripture, he would argue these should actually not be interpreted as exhortations addressed to humans in order for them to comply. On his reading, they are something else entirely: not exhortations to righteousness or calls for good behaviour, but simply reminders of human sinfulness. What is expressed by God’s Law is not meant to inspire us to follow up on any divine demand by the power of our will, Luther reasons, but only to inform us about the very norms that, in our sinful state, we will always be unable to keep. Prefiguring the Protestant notion that, though helpless, we are in full knowledge of the good and are therefore inexcusable, Luther’s interpretation of all the Old Testament demands is that, instead of exhortations, we should read them as proclamations only, or, in the theological language Luther developed on the basis of Paul’s Letter to the Romans: what is expressed by the Law has relevance only as a basis for the knowledge of sin.²⁰

The Law, in other words, is not established to inspire us to follow up on it, but serves only as a reminder, a standard from which we may get an idea of our wickedness. It presents us with what we should have done, without spurring us to make us do it. In all of his commandments, God, as it were, is only rubbing in the deplorable fact that we are useless, or, again, in Luther’s words: “in all the expressions of the Law you see that sin is revealed inasmuch as it shows what we ought to do.”²¹ Besides intentionally adding an extra layer of non-revealed motivations in God, Luther thereby also added an alternative interpretation of Scriptural councils in the light of our presumed unworthiness. Anticipating Luther’s broader position, Erasmus was already having a ball in his 1524 Diatribe on Free Will musing about the moral consequences of such an unexpected and alternative reading of Scripture. In all cases in which the Bible seems to impel us in the direction toward the good, to follow up on the Law, to obey God, or “to walk in his ways”,²² we would be required not to take this literally, but rather to think in the other direction and deny ourselves what is asked of us. This, according to Erasmus, would not just be utterly ridiculous and freakishly inconsistent; it would also mean that we assume there is an evil intention on the part of God, who would be encouraging us to do things knowing full well that we have no chance of ever complying with such encouragement.

Erasmus offers quite some variations on the argument that Luther’s interpretation of Scriptural demands is like asking people to perform what they have no power to perform: it would be as if “someone standing at a crossroads were to be told ‘you see the two roads—take whichever you want,’ if only one were open”;²³ as if “someone tied up in such a way that he could only stretch out his arm to the left were to be told, ‘There is some excellent wine to your right, and poison to your left. Reach out and take whichever you want’ ”;²⁴ or “like saying to a man in shackles, whom one was not prepared to free, ‘Bestir yourself, come and follow me’.”²⁵

God being a Father who encourages us, rather than a cruel warden mistreating his helpless prisoners as he pleases, the blasphemy implicit in Luther’s position is obvious to Erasmus, making it not only theologically untenable, but also inexplicable in terms of justice. In fact, not only would God show absolutely no consideration for human requirements and needs; he would, again, be similarly responsible for what is evil just as much as for what is good:

those who say that there is no such thing as free will, but that everything happens by absolute necessity, are saying that God works not only good deeds in everyone, but bad ones too.²⁶

Rather than to end up on such a slippery slope by trying to probe God’s position in absolute terms, to accept the idea of our own contributions to salvation will allow us to appreciate our own moral roles.

This is not to say that Erasmus makes no use of causal or naturalistic imagery in relation to the understanding of human agency. Contrary to what Luther’s crude necessitarianism suggests, however, to act is not the same as to effect, according to Erasmus, and so humans may act just like any drug will act, quite apart from the question whether or not this is, or can ever be, effective.²⁷ Nor does the moral question whether one is committed one way or the other make any difference: donkeys always do something themselves, even if they completely obey.²⁸ The example of mules, referred to in what has become known as Hyperaspistes 1 (1526), Erasmus’ first answer to Luther’s De servo arbitrio of 1525, was not just a reply to Luther’s own comparison of the human will with an ass obeying either God or Devil, but a simile that had already had its function in scholastic accounts of divine grace, just as Jesus riding his donkey had been associated with converts following Christ—elements of theological disputation Erasmus does not fail to allude to.²⁹ In as far as it functions as a rejoinder to Luther, however, the donkey example is merely meant to make clear that even in obedience, a certain activity is at stake. Like all secondary causes, human beings are thought of as being active, but since, in the moral context, human activity involves conscious agreement and cooperation, Erasmus’ idea of what a human response to divine grace comes down to includes the idea of humans offering a reaction to divine requests whatever the overpowering force of the request or the minute contribution of the reaction.

It is this idea that offers Erasmus the possibility to plead the acceptability of a whole range of theological positions on grace, all of which allow for human contributions to an outcome even if human beings lack the power to achieve it—as long, at least, as such positions do not concede too much to the effectiveness or absolute sovereignty of free will. Offering a categorisation all his own, Erasmus cleverly sums up a variety of positions, ruling out the Pelagian position according to which “grace is owing to human merit.”³⁰ This position was of no further interest to the debate, since it had already been condemned by the Church. For the rest, Erasmus can accept a host of diverging positions under a single heading for the sole reason that they all accept an activity of the human will. This is the category of thinkers “who attribute the least possible to free will but nevertheless do so in such a way as not to take it away entirely.”³¹ Erasmus counts authors as diverse as Augustine and Aquinas in this category, and because of the broad character of his criterion for dogmatic acceptability, he is also able implicitly to suggest that his own view belongs to this class of uncontroversially orthodox positions, especially since he himself regularly emphasised the pettiness of our free will in comparison to the divine. Two Reformist positions, by contrast, are framed in a very different way. First comes the view of Luther’s ally Andreas Karlstadt (1486–1541), who does not altogether take away free will, according to Erasmus, but argues that free will becomes wholly passive in our good deeds, since in such cases, it is actually divine grace that does all the acting; the other is Luther’s own position, according to which there is no free will, but “everything is done by sheer necessity.”³²

Quoting Luther’s words was crucial here, since Erasmus aimed to keep not just Luther and Karlstadt, but also Luther and Augustine apart, knowing full well that Luther himself held his own view and those of Augustine and Karlstadt to represent one and the same position. Unsurprisingly, Luther would retort by charging Erasmus with malignly presenting these views as different positions when there was actually only a difference of expression between them.³³ Erasmus, however, makes short work of this, referring in advance to Luther’s rigorous rejection of free will in the Assertio,³⁴ to his opinion that “free will has no power except to sin” and to his endorsement of positions already condemned by the Church such as those of John Wycliffe (1328–1384).³⁵ The whole point, as far as De libero arbitrio was concerned, was whether or not there was anything left of free will—which there was in Augustine, even if only nominally, but not in Luther. Here as elsewhere, Erasmus’ strategy implied that accepting free will was not a question of making humans strong enough to function on their own, or of denying the necessity of grace in our salvation, but of there being something for humans to contribute to God’s cause, whether negatively or in the form of wilful consent and collaboration.

A final category in his enumeration of theological positions Erasmus links to John Scotus, whom he believes to have argued that humans need only God’s general concurrence in order to do good works for which they may in turn merit God’s grace. This so-called de congruo-notion of deserving grace (“congruous merit”) is the most naturalising interpretation of a human contribution to salvation. Based on a Thomistic distinction between condignity and congruity, it was meant to explain how, even though there is no human action that might deserve being saved by God, so that there is nothing one might ever do that will merit divine redemption in absolute terms (“condignly”), there is nevertheless room for a congruous—i.e., an appropriately adjusted—type of merit, as God will acknowledge the positive value of the petty things we may ourselves contribute to deserve such recompense.³⁶

What Erasmus regarded as Duns Scotus’ de congruo type of merit is actually the position of a number of Franciscan and Augustinian thinkers who argued that, on the basis of the divine covenant, God bestows his generosity on human beings by taking into consideration their positive efforts even if these are not really meritorious, but only de congruo, i.e., considered in congruence with our limited powers.³⁷ Since human “moral capacities”³⁸ are the focus here, and since these are presented as being relevant for God’s decisions on granting humans his grace, it is this de congruo position on grace that comes closest to Pelagius’ considerations of our efforts being sufficient in themselves.³⁹ Clearly aware of the theological limits to an overt endorsement of this position, Erasmus, especially in the Hyperaspistes, is sure to keep his distance: “Since the Church, so far as I know, has not yet rejected this opinion, I neither defend nor refute it”⁴⁰ and “This opinion, I think, has not been condemned by the church.”⁴¹ As far as it is relevant to his discussions with Luther, however, Erasmus need not even necessarily endorse it. If the Church found it an acceptable position, it might serve as just another way to argue for the idea that there must be something for God to cooperate with—and thus equally illustrate why both Karlstadt’s view, according to which the human will loses its function in any good deed, and Luther’s even more radically expressed position, according to which the human will cannot do anything either for good or for ill, but that all things happen by pure and sheer necessity, must be rejected.⁴²

Positioning Luther beyond the pale of acceptable theological positions, Erasmus pictures the German theologian as a theological saboteur. Indeed, according to Erasmus, Luther is bent only on creating havoc. That God is both unchanging and ubiquitously present in everything human beings do, is something no theologian had ever denied.⁴³ Nor had any good theologian ever been unaware of the fact that we “can neither begin nor complete anything without the help of God’s grace.”⁴⁴ All this, however, is still no reason, Erasmus tells Luther, to discuss the most intricate questions of theology in the public domain—much less to do so in a manner that deliberately extols an exaggerated interpretation of things no previous theologian, except for the likes of radicals such as Wycliffe and John Hus (c. 1370–1415), had ever had in mind.⁴⁵ Likewise, Luther’s idea of the “despair” and “total devaluation” of human beings is not the expression of any former theologian’s analysis of grace, but only of Luther’s own inclination to come up with “paradoxes and hyperboles”—overstatements that have nothing to do with serious theology and will only lead to sedition.⁴⁶

3 A Theology of Consent and Co-operation

The criterion that there should at least be a part for free will to play without the all-encompassing presence of the divine being denied, thus offered Erasmus the possibility of grouping together a whole range of quite divergent interpretations of human-divine cooperation that Luther’s denial of free will was incompatible with.⁴⁷ The theoretically interesting aspect of this strategy is that presenting the issue in this way enabled Erasmus to avoid any discussion of the will’s presumed predetermination. Always steering clear from the possibility that the idea of human consent might get entangled—and then be crushed—in cumbersome and unhelpful discussions about God’s necessitating role in human choice and conduct, the question of how much we have to be helped by God becomes simply a matter of varying opinion. Though fully aware of the important difference between a free will that, however helplessly, prepares itself for justification by God, and a free will only responding in the right manner to God’s initial encouragement to advance in the right direction, the more important thing for Erasmus was that both of these interpretations about what humans could contribute themselves, whilst being discussed differently by theologians of various schools on the basis of all sorts of distinctions, ultimately made at least some room for human free will to contribute anything at all.⁴⁸

Erasmus’ God thus never forces us to anything through the provision of his grace. If Luther had a point when he insisted he was driven by considerations similar to those found in Augustine and St. Paul, Erasmus’ continued focus on the minimum presence of free will lent no ear to this. For him, there was no reason to accept that an emphasis on anticipatory grace should result in a more forceful vindication of divine determination. Scriptural hermeneutics forced us only to conclude that it is by invitation, by encouragement and support that God exerts an influence on humans. Grace, in other words, is not a question of enforcement in Erasmus, but of mental stimulus only. Defending himself against Luther’s accusation that, in defining free will, he forgot about grace, Erasmus makes clear that his own notion of grace is entirely conceptualised in terms of a mental appeal:

For just as no one suddenly becomes most corrupt, so too we are led gradually and step by step to the perfect gift of God, just as when someone is dwelling in the most impenetrable shadows, first the darkness thins out and then a doubtful light appears far away until finally vision becomes clear.⁴⁹

What leads to salvation are things that “admonish us from far off and prod the mind,” admonitions that may come in the form of readings, councils from friends, and sometimes, too, “by the soft whistling of the Sprit.”⁵⁰

It is, in other words, all the different encounters that help us find the right direction that may count as proof for the idea that “God admonishes us in various ways” to follow in his footsteps. In Hyperaspistes 1, Erasmus seems even to plead for the idea of an imperceptible transition from an initial and natural “desire for virtue” that has not been entirely extinguished in us, to an eventual call of grace. Yet even where the focus is on grace alone, this does not take away the requirement of our consent and activity. Indeed, as Hyperaspistes 2 (Erasmus’ long awaited 1527 completion of his answer to De servo arbitrio) explains, even according to St. Paul himself, whom God elected, called, and “furnished” with grace, it had been Paul who cooperated, as is evidenced by his own Scriptural acknowledgement:

‘Not I but the grace of God with me,’ and ‘In me grace was not in vain,’ and ‘I have worked harder than all of them,’ and ‘I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race.’⁵¹

Neither were Judas and Pharaoh unjustly set on the wrong track or would there be a need “to take refuge in the secret will of God” for understanding their strange plight. Indeed, “a satisfactory account can be given why some are rendered better and others worse,” Erasmus argues: “God is not to blame for this outcome, but rather they are to blame for rejecting impelling grace.”⁵² Even in the case of Judas, Erasmus would emphasise that God’s infallible foreknowledge never necessitated Judas’ own “will to betray.” As far as we can tell from Scripture, Judas was given all the opportunity to back down—indeed, “time and again at the Last Supper and after it he was called upon to repent.”⁵³ To take away all human responsibility in these cases is to simplify and take out the moral core of what is being described. Likewise, it is generally by refusing to distinguish “between free will undermined by sin and free will liberated, […] between impelling and sanctifying grace, […] between ‘not to be able’ and ‘not to be able in an unqualified way’ ”⁵⁴ that Luther grants himself the opportunity to make a quasi-mechanical farce of the morally laden plight of human beings faced with a divine appeal to their cooperative efforts. Of course, God can “employ force on the human will and drive it wherever he wants to.” The whole sense of Scripture, however, is that he generally “does not do this but rather brings impelling grace to bear.”⁵⁵

We might illustrate Erasmus’ emphasis on the Biblical call for human cooperation with the way in which his friend Thomas More would later write about the plight of Christ’s disciples in Gethsemane. In his ultimate work on the Sadness of Christ, More explicitly put forward the question why Jesus, if he was truly God, should return to his disciples on the eve of his crucifixion no less than three times after having prayed further afield, only to find them asleep. Why should Jesus even wish for his disciples to stay awake if he, being divine, could keep them awake himself? Might Christ not simply enforce what he was looking for? More’s answer is that, of course, Christ could bring to effect anything that he might wish “in an absolute and unqualified sense.” In this case, however, his wish was qualified, since it was not simply a wish for something to happen, but a wish for others to comply—a wish, in other words, that included the wish that his disciples, on their part, would wish the same themselves.⁵⁶

A similar notion of freedom informs Erasmus’ interpretation of Scripture. The Bible is to inspire the reader to incline towards the good, which evokes the idea of a cooperation between God and man—a cooperation not only suggestive of the moral interpretation of man’s religious mission, but also one that puts God and man in a shared domain of mutual accountability. Making everything dependent on either God or Satan is not just to present things in a way outperforming Manichaeism in its unchristian simplicity, but also a senseless way of interpreting what God requires of us, namely to assert ourselves in making a contribution, even if such contributions are ever so slight and accommodated to our own meagre and ultimately inadequate level of moral cooperation.

There is thus, for Erasmus, always an aspect of what, with regard to Franciscan teachings on justification, Alistair McGrath defined as a “minimum human response.”⁵⁷ Of course, where the question of salvation is concerned, divine grace adds a whole allowance of undeserved reparations to our account, but even in that case, no assumption has to be made of God overpowering our will. Even in view of the ultimate question of justification, indeed, human effort may still solicit what, by itself, it cannot bring into effect. For being saved, whatever we do will be insufficient, but not therefore irrelevant:

If anyone claims these [the efforts, attempts and works of the human will by its natural powers] are evil and call forth wrath, I will deny it. If anyone claims that they are not good because they are performed without grace, I will grant it, if he will only confess that they are morally good and do call upon the effective grace of God.⁵⁸

To accept the possibility for human beings to turn away or to apply themselves is not—as Luther claims—to have no eye for the grace of God, since God and humankind are drawn together in a moral setting that requires the activity of both. There are certainly differences between theologians arguing the importance of either of the two cooperating factors. Rather than to settle the allocation of forces in philosophical terms, however, what matters more for Erasmus is the mental effect that follows from an understanding of their proportionality. In the 1524 Diatribe, he had already approached and enumerated the various more technical interpretations of free will and grace from a rather neutral perspective, arguing only that:

St Augustine and his followers, considering how harmful to true godliness it is for people to trust in their own abilities, are more inclined to favour grace, which is constantly stressed by Paul.⁵⁹

It is a matter of perspective whether, on the one hand, one alludes to God’s conditioning work, his calling and his sanctifying acceptance, or rather to our responsiveness. Putting an emphasis on the former has always been the theologically preferable position, Erasmus argues, since it offers a view of things that is more conducive to piety.⁶⁰ The Lutheran position, by contrast, the position that imposes a “necessity of inevitability”⁶¹ on the human will, does not contribute to a similar strategy of enhancing religious motivation at all. Indeed, it destroys rather than promotes the cause of piety.

Considering Psalm 53:3 (“There is none who does good, no, not one”) and the Apostle’s reaffirmation of this in Romans 3:10 (“There is none righteous, no, not one”), what Luther does is mistakenly to read a proof against free will into what is in itself a simple restatement of the fact that no human being can ever attain full righteousness in the eyes of God.⁶² While there are genuine shortcomings to human moral achievements, Erasmus never saw the need for—and, indeed, even dreaded the idea of—reducing human engagement to a puppet-like form of passivity. Consistently avoiding having to discuss grace in terms of being overpowered, Erasmus was yet aware of the theological dangers involved in pleading the case of free will and at times even showed a hesitancy to continue the debate. A letter to Thomas More, dating from the period in between his first and second replies to Luther’s De servo arbitrio, indicates that part of this reluctance was due to the radicality of his own particular standpoint:

For myself, I should not be averse to the opinion according to which we can of our own natural powers and without particular grace acquire congruent grace, as they say, except that Paul opposed this view.⁶³

Clearly suggesting that the de congruo position was actually his own favourite, the letter is also revealing for the way in which Erasmus repudiates St. Augustine. Augustine, Erasmus argues,

does indeed affirm the existence of free will; but he makes such a case for the power of grace that I do not see what is left to free will. He admits that works performed before the action of grace are dead; he attributes to grace our ability to repent, our will to do good, the good we have done, our perseverance in doing good. He admits that grace works all these things in us. Then where is merit? Confronted by this dilemma Augustine had recourse to saying that God imputes his good works to us as merits and crowns his own gifts in us. Is that not a clever defence of free will?⁶⁴

In view of what we analysed above, it is significant that Erasmus obviously acknowledged the deterministic tendencies in Augustine’s position, even if, in his published works on the issue, he was always careful to make sure not to associate any accepted theological position with a notion of grace other than his own mentalistic interpretation in terms of support, encouragement and incitement, and singled out only Karlstadt and Luther for having taken the wrong turn by introducing a more necessitating notion of divine assistance.

The critical tone he adopts in his letter to More indicates to what extent Erasmus consciously avoided discussing his own disagreements with the Church Father when dealing with Luther. Yet, apart from his apparent confession that he would rather defend the de congruo position than agree with Augustine that it was grace that worked all good things in us, what is most telling is that the letter identifies the Word of St. Paul as Erasmus’ major hindrance for overtly advancing the potentially controversial elements in his own way thinking. What, exactly, Erasmus is saying here, is open to interpretation, if only for the fact that the phrase nisi refragaretur Paulus (Ep. 1804 Allen lines 93–94), translated in CWE as “except that Paul opposed this view,” is vague enough also to suggest “unless Paul would contradict this.” Erasmus had always held to the view that Paul belittled free will in order to diminish our inclination to attribute too much to ourselves, and he repeats this in his letter to More. Still, as Luther had made St. Paul his hero and as many a Biblical word by the Apostle—Ephesians 2:8–10, for instance⁶⁵—does indeed seem to leave little room for human initiative and to outline a predetermining notion of grace like the one Augustine ultimately presented, Erasmus knew that dealing with Paul was the chief precondition for continuing the debate in any theological detail.

It is thus no surprise that Erasmus felt forced to develop his interpretation of Paul in the wake of his confrontation with Luther and that the Apostle would remain a central focus of his Biblical hermeneutics in later life. In Erasmus in the Footsteps of St. Paul, a 2011 book on the later Erasmus, Greta Grace Kroeker has even pictured the Dutchman as a “Pauline Theologian” on the basis of what she uncovered as the development, in Erasmus, of a more and more “Lutheranizing” way of theologising in the wake of his earlier discussions with Luther. Originally, of course, Erasmus’ St. Paul had been very different from Luther’s. Where the latter had found in Paul a new interpretation of “faith” in terms of a change of mental direction passively received by an infusion of Spirit, Erasmus had always had an eye for the anti-legalistic and anti-ritualistic interpretation Paul had given to the notion of faith, as well as for the latter’s conception of religious calling as a mental disposition that is inwardly experienced.

Analysing the changes Erasmus made over the years to his Annotations on Romans, as well as to his Paraphrases on Romans and Galatians, Kroeker evidenced a concern in Erasmus to come closer to the kind of emphasis on grace that Reformist theology had found in the words of the Apostle. The challenge was nothing less than to balance Paul’s theory of divine grace with the notion of a Philosophia Christi in theologically acceptable ways; and thus also to establish what role, precisely, was left for free will in the justification of man. As Kroeker points out: “Erasmus used verses from Paul’s Epistle to the Romans in the De libero arbitrio and the Hyperaspistes very differently than he interpreted them in the later Annotationes and Paraphrases.”⁶⁶ Coming much closer to Luther in his wording, he was entering a new stage in his theological thinking—formulating a theology that, at the same time, Kroeker herself describes as one that was all his own.⁶⁷ Erasmus, in other words, delved into the typically Pauline themes of grace and justification that had formerly been Luther’s focus. As a result, he developed the idea that neither the remission of sins nor human peace of conscience are due to “the strength of human wisdom” or to “the observance of the Mosaic law”, but entirely to the generosity of God, both Father and Son.⁶⁸ His explicit identification, moreover, of “the gospel” itself with the “justification through faith in Jesus Christ”⁶⁹ may undoubtedly also be seen as a late attempt in Erasmus to try and show a closer attention to the kind of dogmatic issues Reformists had accentuated in their reading of Paul’s Letter to the Romans.⁷⁰

In the light of what we have examined above, let us nevertheless establish that this in itself does not make the late Erasmus a would-be Lutheran. Indeed, even if Erasmus would become more and more convinced of the need to emphasise that it is only through God’s generosity that our sins are forgiven, and even if he would gradually come to agree that the New Testament gospel offers a specific message of the “justification through faith in Jesus Christ,”⁷¹ it is still open to discussion how such “faith” might be interpreted and how it might come about. In this sense, there is an ambiguity to the idea that Erasmus developed a more “Lutheran” type of theology. Trying out his own proficiency in dealing with some of the Pauline idiom that Luther had aimed to monopolize, rather than becoming a Lutheran himself, Erasmus’ ongoing preoccupation with the themes of grace and justification, although it indicated that he was mindful of the need to come to a more sophisticated theological understanding of these issues, does not imply he was coming any closer to Luther on free will.⁷² The emphasis on the free gift of God and the notion that it is through faith in Jesus Christ alone that we may be absolved, do seem to indicate that Erasmus had grown more conscious of the manner in which crucial aspects of the Christian faith went beyond a philosophical understanding of the good life. The themes of the remission of sins and of salvation itself, were themes exclusively linked to a belief in Christ and to the redemption that had been promised in his coming throughout the Old Testament. Yet neither had the young Erasmus ever denied that justification is dependent on the special grace of God. References to “faith” as the harbinger of justification, such as in Romans 4:8, in which it is said of the believer that “faith is imputed toward justice according to the plan of God’s grace” do not in themselves prove anything against free will. They only do so in case the Pauline notion of an imputation of faith is interpreted in the Lutheran sense of an inescapable imposition of an unsolicited and uncalled-for kind of rescue by an overpowering divinity. Dealing with Paul, Erasmus, in other words, may well have kept polishing his views on grace while continuing to reject Luther’s extremist viewpoints.

The question whether and to what extent the various ways of coming to terms with the Pauline text would give Erasmus reason to modify any of his earlier views, is a question that goes well beyond the context of this article. Continuing to publish popular humanistic moral commentaries and prose during the years in which he developed his own theology of grace, he is not likely to have lost any of the basic intuitions he had always had about how to approach the notion of free will, nor to have come closer to Luther in denying the need for human improvement. Neither, moreover, had Erasmus had any misgivings in De libero arbitrio with confirming that “even faith, the doorway to salvation, is itself a freely given gift of God.”⁷³ In fact, what is of most interest here is that his heightened awareness to intricate questions of Christian dogma is another example of the way in which neither his presumed scepticism nor his rhetorical bent ever kept Erasmus from being deeply engaged in coming to terms with the technicalities of philosophical and theological conjecture.

Carefully manoeuvring the theological landscape, it was always the equilibrium demanded by practical piety that Erasmus was mindful of. Even if he tended towards the de congruo position, the surest way to go was to subscribe to a penchant towards the other side of the spectrum. This is what Erasmus already consistently did in Hyperaspistes 1, where he declared:

Even now there is insufficient agreement among theologians about whether or not a person without a special grace can solicit the effective grace of God by means of morally good deeds. My definition is open to both opinions, since I reject neither one, though I am inclined to the one which attributes more to grace.⁷⁴

Reading St. Paul, Erasmus seems never to have been inclined to consider the Apostle a philosopher of necessitarianism. Nor would he have seen any religious interest in trying this out. By way of mental support, one may always offer confidence to others emphasising that God will do things for you or warn someone by issuing threats using extravagant phrases such as that man is “nothing but sin [or] deceit,” but such hyperbolic forms of mental assurance and intimidation should never be turned into a theory that goes beyond the spirit of Scripture. If the opinion of those who go “farthest from Pelagius’ views” seem to offer a “highly probable opinion,” since they attribute almost everything to grace and hardly anything to free will—though they “do not deny it altogether”—it is still to “run away beyond the house” (fugere praeter casam), as the saying has it,⁷⁵ to defend the extremist view that “free will can do nothing but sin, and that grace alone works good in us, not through or in cooperation with, but in free will (…).”⁷⁶ That would simply be to take too seriously one’s own shorthand explanation of things unknown to us.

In the end, therefore, St. Paul was neither a real threat to Erasmus, as his goal was not to find his own particular place on the scale between Pelagius and Luther, between self-determination and determinism, but to highlight the moral aspects of the cooperative plane on which God and human beings meet.⁷⁷ Criticizing the tendency of trying theoretically to reconstruct the method and system of God’s help or the schemes of his management of human history apart from what Scripture reveals, Erasmus refused to abandon the idea of human agency or to destroy the notion of human accountability on the basis of misplaced natural philosophical or metaphysical presuppositions.

4 Theology in Context

Philosophical notions of human freedom come in many forms and are bound to be conceptualized according to the great variety of motivations and questions that occasion them.⁷⁸ As we have seen, there is surprisingly little philosophical argumentation to be found in either Luther or Erasmus.⁷⁹ The debate between them was rather confined to the interpretation of Scripture and to the theological alternatives their varying interpretations might produce. We have also seen how this brought Erasmus to a defence of freedom that combined a common-sense reading of Scripture with an aversion to far-fetched explanations involving forms of knowledge we have no access to, as well as to an emphasis on the possibility of humans to contribute to their own moral and social improvement. It is significant that such a decidedly this-worldly type of mental orientation sets Erasmus’ position apart from Luther’s interest in a rather more metaphysically and eschatologically oriented type of theology.

Judging Erasmus a rhetorician rather than a theologian, it was Luther, too, who initiated Erasmus’ portrayal as a sceptic.⁸⁰ This was an image that stuck, even though, depending on the context, the designation could just as well serve as a title of honour. Erasmus would later become known as a source of modern scepticism, not only on account of his refusal to be pinned down on blunt theoretical positions, but also for keeping to Church doctrine in difficult matters of interpretation.⁸¹ For the civilised manner, moreover, in which he professed his own ultimate uncertainty in questions of dogma, Erasmus has also been hailed independently of being called a sceptic.⁸² What our analysis has made clear, however, is that a sharp feeling for theoretical sophistication on Erasmus’ part should not be misread as an unwillingness to enter into difficult or dangerous debates, nor as a shallow preference for avoiding theoretical detail. Indeed, though readily accepting scepticism where it came to suspending one’s judgement about questions too obscure to be certain about, Erasmus rejected a sceptic attitude towards the meaning of Scripture “whenever the sense is quite clear.”⁸³

In a recent re-evaluation of his rhetorical stance, Erasmus’ presumed “sceptical attitude” has also been linked to a “retreat from doctrinal strife” thought to be characteristic of his way of being involved in “rhetorical collecting rather than in dialectical discerning or system building.”⁸⁴ But is that all there is to Erasmus? It is certainly true that he was no principled party member of any philosophical school and was unafraid to refer in positive ways to sceptical positions even in theological contexts.⁸⁵ It is equally true that, in the best manner of dialectical invention, Erasmus took his arguments wherever he might find them and applied rhetorical copia in order to avoid the kind of entrenched technical standpoints characteristic of scholastic ways of analysis. Yet, even if the shadows of Pyrrhonism and Scepticism were to loom large over some of the sixteenth and seventeenth-century religious conflicts that may be said to have started with Erasmus and Luther, this still does not mean we should either reduce Erasmus’ philosophical involvement in discussing theological dogma to a non-committal form of oratory or his position on free will to a form of scepticism.

Debating Luther, Erasmus was not trying to establish an alternative position on certitude but was rather discouraging his opponent from trying to find certainty where it could not be found. More important than the search for hidden forms of knowledge was the certainty and clarity found in experience, philosophy, and Scripture on the question of how to shape one’s conduct in the practical domain. In the context of his sceptical interpretation of Erasmus, Richard Popkin accordingly argued that “what is important is a simple, basic, Christian piety, a Christian sprit. The rest, the superstructure of the essential belief, is too complex for a man to judge.”⁸⁶ Here again, however, although it is true that Erasmus was prone to argue in favour of piety and feared that theoretical paradoxes would detract from a religiously inspired understanding of God’s Word, this should not lead us to imply that Erasmus only wished to position himself on practical matters in theology or to keep to a “rule of faith” since clarity and certainty could only be found in the decisions made by earlier Councils of the Church. For Erasmus, there were in fact plenty of theoretical things to discuss. Neither, therefore, was he ever concerned that philosophy might suffer from the impossibility of finding a “criterion of truth.”⁸⁷

Erasmus, indeed, had no problem with theorizing. The only problem was that piety might suffer from desperately wishing to penetrate the unknown. Piety itself had always been an accepted element of orthodox positions on grace. Aquinas, for instance, had made use of the same argument Erasmus frequently comes back to, namely that it is in the context of piety that one chooses to accentuate either grace or freedom. Explaining Paul’s insistence on the primacy of grace, Aquinas contended that even if we acknowledge that human volition and concurrence are involved in every act, it would be “offensive to pious ears” to emphasize this.⁸⁸ What is typical for Erasmus, is that he uses the argument the other way, too. On the one hand, “who would not confess that it is pious for a person not to have faith in himself and to depend totally on the mercy of God?”⁸⁹ A certain emphasis on divine grace is always important, not for reasons of philosophical insight, but in view of quilling human presumption. Yet to follow Luther would be to let impiety slip in the other way. As Erasmus indicates both in his published works and in the letter to More which reveals so much of his position, the possibility that people might quit doing good works at all was a serious motivation for Erasmus.⁹⁰ For one’s thoughts and conduct to be of real moral relevance, one has to take one’s own contribution into account. No one, Erasmus argues, will try to cross the ocean without the help of ship and wind, but doing so, neither is anyone idle whilst sailing. Likewise, “professing free will does not tend to make a person attribute less to the mercy of God but rather keeps him from not responding to operating grace and gives him reason to blame himself if he perishes.”⁹¹

To the modern eye, it may seem odd that, linking common-sense experience to a common-sense reading of Scripture, Erasmus put both of these above any theoretical reasoning denying the existence of free will. We should be aware, however, that this does not in itself amount to a sceptical refusal of theory. Rather, it is a recognition of the fact that the burden of proof against free will has always lain with the other side, from Homer’s depiction of men and gods, Zeus and the Moirai, up to our own neurophysiological denials and compatibilist defences of free will. Even if there may in fact be no ultimate similarities between the many philosophical debates on freedom that run through intellectual history, the way in which Erasmus allowed human beings the ability either freely to cooperate with, or to get in the way of divine will, and the way in which he reformulated standard theological positions according to this criterion, may serve as an exemplary acknowledgment of the philosophical concern not to give leeway to theoretical complacency or to the acceptance of all too easy conclusions on the basis of things only apparently understood.

In positive terms, what Erasmus consistently holds onto is an understanding of human freedom according to which the human type of agency should never be reduced to non-human forms of activity but be acknowledged to exhibit its full scale of reaction patterns. In the context of grace, this means that human beings have a consciously cooperative role to play next to God’s helping hand. Erasmus is in fact so persistent in not denying human beings their agency, that even when explicitly referring to the idea of prevenient grace in Bernard of Clairvaux, who had said that “the entire initiation is owing to grace,” he is so bold, in Hyperaspistes 1, as to continue emphasising the critical relevance of our reaction to grace, using yet another metaphor derived from Augustine:

Certainly, when our will operates with operating grace, it applies itself to grace, accommodating its natural powers to operating grace, just as when the sun rises we open our eyes, or else [our will] turns away, just as if we should close our eyes when the sun is up.⁹²

Neither had discussing the idea of prevenient grace, the kind of grace Augustine had labelled God’s ‘operating’ grace, compelled Erasmus to interpret this in necessitating terms.⁹³ Rather, he chose to borrow from Augustine the comparison of grace with light, without which no eye can see, though there is still activity in the seeing itself—an image he also offered in De libero arbitrio, just before expounding the image of the father and the child.⁹⁴ All such imagery brings human beings onto a plane of activity in which everything that transpires involving human agency is touched by God and creature alike. Such a position is indeed wholly at odds with Luther’s position—not just on account of Luther’s insistence on the absolute impotence of human beings, but also because Luther’s reconstruction turns the attention away from a common-sense understanding to an indirect reading of Scripture that favours explanatory assumptions based on the idea of causative priorities. Not only does this alternative bring the inevitable power differences between creator and creation to the fore; it also brings with it a tendency to highlight concealed redemption arrangements. In Luther’s case, there are in fact no human beings on the stage. Here, only Father, Son, and Spirit play the major roles, with lesser figures such as pharaohs and Judases actually being no more than stage props like any other human being. Luther’s theology thereby exemplifies a paradox that would also show up in later Protestant and Augustinian-leaning Catholic positions—the paradox, namely, that the Biblical manifestations of Christ’s activities on earth, including his counsels and miracles, and even his suffering and death, form a relatively unimportant sequence of events in comparison to the fiercely disputed dogma of Divine predetermination that itself hardly forms part of the Biblical narrative.

Despite Augsburg, Trent, and Heidelberg, the dividing line between these two approaches would continue to define positions within each of the separate religious spheres all the way into the seventeenth century. For Luther, as well as for later Reformers like Calvin and Gomarus and Catholic hardliners such as Báñez and Jansenius, the Augustinian notion that grace works in us in a determinant way brought the theological spotlight squarely on what is thought to happen behind the scenes: God’s activity of imputing faith in man, thereby developing his own plan of salvation. Divine necessity thus called for an alternative narrative of redemption and election overruling the Scriptural plot of the need to emulate a moral standard exemplified by Christ. I have previously characterized the opposition between early seventeenth-century Arminianism and orthodox Calvinism in terms of an opposition inspired by a mental preoccupation with moral fairness on the one hand and personal salvation of the other.⁹⁵ Each in their own way, Erasmus and Luther stood at the basis of precisely this opposition.

Indeed, the 1524 debate itself may be said to have brought to the fore a tension within religious systems between moral aims and the motivational means to follow up on them. Both of these no doubt represent equally fundamental aspects of human mental life. In Christianity, part of what drives people is to support fairness and to imitate Christ. Historically, however, this is a theme that would often lose out in doctrinal fights with other themes, especially with the idea of being saved by Christ no matter what. The kind of dogma that can trigger the latter notion may easily become the more popular one, so that religious factions interested in the more metaphysically and eschatologically oriented type of theology—which, for early-modern Europe, is to say: the more orthodox factions on both sides of the Catholic-Protestant religious divide—were often capable of—at least temporarily—quelling the success of their Erasmian, Jesuit, spiritualist or Socinian alternatives.

In such a theological context, it may be unhelpful to try and understand Erasmus’ and Luther’s contrasting positions in terms of a contrast between the ‘conservative’ and the ‘liberal’, since the difference rather concerns a contrast of religious content. On the one hand, Erasmus’ view was closely linked to the idea of moral fairness and the ideal of achieving socially profitable types of conduct—a theme equally related to philosophy as it may be to religious types of motivation. Luther-like parties by comparison expressed a more purely religious drive—a motivation, moreover, that links up with the psychologically alluring themes of death, the possibility of salvation, and the ultimate security of one’s soul. Putting these on the agenda in combination with the idea that personal salvation is driven by hidden mechanisms that are as overwhelming as they are beyond our power, is to introduce into religion a far subtler play of discomfort and exhilaration than would ever be achieved with an exclusive focus on human improvement. Likewise, whatever timeless appeal there may be in moral fairness, justice, questions of fair distribution and good conduct, such existential questions as the ultimate salvation of one’s soul seem to have cut much deeper into the emotional awareness of sixteenth and seventeenth-century believers.

It may well be that Luther’s evocation of human moral incapacities and the theology connected to it had a similarly enticing effect as what had once settled the triumph of Christianity itself. Indeed, long before Erasmus and Luther entered the stage, the idea of human helplessness may have been one of the crucial factors why St. Paul himself had been successful in offering a spiritual type of inspiration that philosophy proved incapable of competing with. The Christian notion of sinfulness, in any case, proved to be a far more successful meme at the dawn of the Common Era than what ancient philosophies of empowerment such as Stoicism and Epicureanism provided. As Terence Irwin phrased it when contrasting Christian moral views to the Greek tradition in moral philosophy: although even within the Greek tradition, “the most demanding” moral standards were thought to be achievable only by those who developed “the appropriate knowledge and character”, Christianity stands against this Greek philosophical tradition, in so far as it denies any ordinary human capacity for the sort of virtue that is demanded by the moral law.⁹⁶

Here, Luther had St. Paul on his side and Erasmus was entering a fight that left him hardly a chance for victory among future sixteenth- and seventeenth-century theologians if he did not himself develop a more emotionally affecting theory of grace.

In this sense, Lutheranism may have provided a more meaningful interpretation of what religion held in promise for the individual Christian. Even if Erasmus’ humanistic and moral-philosophical understanding of faith rendered a reasonableness to religion and promoted a morally and politically profitable view of the ideal of the social alignment of human behaviour, it would also remain the more demanding position for individuals to live up to. The contrast itself, meanwhile, continues to inspire interpretations of later forms of political division. In his marvellous book Fatal Discord, Michael Massing has recently parallelled the divisive atmosphere in present-day politics to an Erasmus-vs.-Luther type of division that continues to haunt the Western mind.⁹⁷ Rather than to prove, however, that there are prolonged cultural aftereffects of their sixteenth-century discussion, what the ongoing possibility to associate ourselves with Luther and Erasmus may indicate, is that there is great literary and philosophical potential in drawing on the anthropological distinctions exemplified by these two antagonists. It may, indeed, be worthwhile to contrast the human need for a conscious reinforcement of moral demands with individual motivations of allegiance to a cause in the context of any historical setting, emphasising the difference between social demands that require a slow-thinking mentality, an attachment to reason and other aspects of a mentality that do not come automatically, with more imaginative types of drives that have a more immediate and personal appeal.

Historically, both Erasmus and Luther had their share of followers. Whether people are ultimately more profoundly motivated by the idea of being saved than by the idea of doing good, there can be no doubt that, within the history of early-modern European culture, the notion of moral development continued to be of enormous intellectual importance next to the notion of beatifying grace.⁹⁸ One might even speculate that, as alternative forms of mental software for training individuals successfully to participate in the development of public life, what Erasmus and Luther stood for may conjointly have contributed to the social schooling of early-modern Europeans. Showing a combined interest in philosophy and religion, Erasmus’ position would form the minority position within theology, yet as an instrument of optimism within the cultural education of individuals, its notion of moral autonomy must still be considered a very effective force, especially in its secularist reinterpretation beyond the seventeenth century. Luther’s form of religiosity would meanwhile continue to compete with such forms of moral optimism not just in the 1600s, but well beyond. As a more purely religious instrument of mental formation, its accompanying view of human nature called for obedience and submission rather than moral autonomy, but each approach having its own characteristic advantages as an instrument of cultural formation, Erasmus’ and Luther’s interpretations of Christianity may well be expected both to have had their share in offering individuals the means to adapt to their natural and social environments.

If Erasmus and Luther may therefore be seen as complementary poles in our cultural self-understanding, we should still avoid considering their legacy sufficient for explaining our political culture. Indeed, with regard to the present, the more obvious observation to make is that the question of freedom vs. grace as it appears in Erasmus and Luther was relevant to a set of moral demands that is only loosely connected to the personal questions we tend to associate with the notion of freedom today. Thinking of human freedom in terms of the human ability or disability to contribute to the good, Erasmus and Luther were debating a notion of freedom quite unrelated to what, 500 years later, we now understand by that notion. Set in the context of divine law and human conduct, the kind of optimism and pessimism they articulated revolved around the question whether or not humans were able to comply to a moral imperative, even if they were so obviously disturbed by the subversive influence of sinful passions. From a twenty-first-century perspective, this classic philosophico-theological theme can hardly cover what we find of importance in the notion of freedom today, as this has become intricately tied up with questions alien to both Luther and Erasmus. The ideas of being able to be oneself, or to be given the possibility to stick to one’s own personal preferences, are significant of post-Romantic concerns for the rights of the individual that link the question of freedom to idiosyncratic psychological needs—needs to which neither premodern Western philosophy nor premodern Christian theology gave any attention. Rather than showing an interest in the personal development of individuals, Luther, Erasmus and their contemporaries were exclusively concerned with the possibility for humans to contribute to the development of a shared mentality. Whether formulated in terms of Virtue and Reason or in terms of Piety and Spirit, the ideal mental development was defined according to a universal norm. Personal considerations played no part at all here, and, historically, had to await the likes of Descartes and Mandeville, Goethe and Rousseau, De Staël and Mill, before the Western mind would accept them as serious aspects within a theoretical account of human functioning.

Not all of our problems, then, are those of Luther and Erasmus. If, in the present arena of intellectual history, Luther’s notion of human helplessness may seem to stand closer to present-day mental dispositions, coupled as it implicitly is to a notion of unconditional love that will not only be of psychological effect within any culture or generation, but also link up with our own emphasis on the personal sphere, Erasmus’ concerns nevertheless continue to be of relevance for society as a whole. As freedoms in the private sphere, in order to flourish, tend to depend on the previous emergence of public freedoms, as they historically did in modern Europe, Erasmus’ contribution to the history of the concept of freedom may continue to inspire not just because of its strong emphasis on moral and social consequences, but because it links up with precisely the public type of values that express what we understand and cherish as political freedoms today.

In this way, even if it was bound to a specific theological problem, Erasmus’ plea for strengthening individual moral proficiencies is still of value 500 years later. In fact, an aspect of timelessness is also reflected in the more purely theological aspects of his work. If, from what we have described above, Erasmus comes out as much more of an interesting theologian than he has often been portrayed, we may also conclude that by keeping a sharp eye for the subordination of theory to the acceptability of its consequences, Erasmus had a special talent to bring to the fore the universalist potential in both Christian theology and Western moral theory. As Greta Grace Kroeker argued, the name of Erasmus “will never perish” especially because

his nuanced approach to theology and [his] skepticism about doctrinal certitude and theological intransigence gained a modern audience and informed ecumenical movements among Christians and non-Christians.⁹⁹

This success was neither the result of Erasmus’ loyalty to the Church nor the effect of a lack of philosophical refinement on his part, but rather due to the sharpness of wit and honest way of understanding that made Erasmus sensitive to the need always to pay tribute to the human dimension of things. In the context of understanding the compatibility of freewill and grace, Thomas Aquinas had already emphasised the impossibility of separating the human from the divine parts in the causal production of human activities.¹⁰⁰ Staying true to this premise by carefully and creatively grafting a notion of freedom that consistently evoked the idea of a companionship between God and human beings, Erasmus expounded a theology bent on leaving human agents the possibility (even if only in the slightest way) to act on a shared causal plane with God. This, for him, was what made religion meaningful, and it is ultimately because of this clear-cut belief in what religion and culture were really about, that Erasmus was able to defy the natural inflexibility of rigorously dogmatic systems, to ignore speculations about the arcane, and to prefer to tend to the real needs of human beings.