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History of the Reformation. Thomas M. Lindsay
Читать онлайн.Название History of the Reformation
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isbn 4064066379995
Автор произведения Thomas M. Lindsay
Жанр Документальная литература
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“One worships a certain Rochus, and why? because he fancies he will drive away the plague from his body. Another mumbles prayers to Barbara or George, lest he fall into the hands of his enemy. This man fasts to Apollonia to prevent the toothache. That one gazes upon an image of the divine Job, that he may be free from the itch. … In short, whatever our fears and our desires, we set so many gods over them, and these are different in different nations. … This is not far removed from the superstition of those who used to vow tithes to Hercules in order to get rich, or a cock to Æsculapius to recover from an illness, or who slew a bull to Neptune for a favourable voyage. The names are changed, but the object is the same.”123
In speaking of the monastic life, he says:
“ ‘Love,’ says Paul, ‘is to edify your neighbour,’ … and if this only were done, nothing could be more joyous or more easy than the life of the ‘religious’; but now this life seems gloomy, full of Jewish superstitions, not in any way free from the vices of laymen and in some ways more corrupt. If Augustine, whom they boast of as the founder of their order, came to life again, he would not recognise them; he would exclaim that he had never approved of this sort of life, but had organised a way of living according to the rule of the Apostles, not according to the superstition of the Jews.”124
The more one studies the Praise of Folly, the more evident it becomes that Erasmus did not intend to write a satire on human weakness in general: the book is the most severe attack on the mediæval Church that had, up to that time, been made; and it was meant to be so. The author wanders from his main theme occasionally, but always to return to the insane follies of the religious life sanctioned by the highest authorities of the mediæval Church. Popes, bishops, theologians, monks, and the ordinary lay Christians, are all unmitigated fools in their ordinary religious life. The style is vivid, the author has seen what he describes, and he makes his readers see it also. He writes with a mixture of light mockery and bitter earnestness. He exposes the foolish questions of the theologians; the vices and temporal ambitions of the Popes, bishops, and monks; the stupid trust in festivals, pilgrimages, indulgences, and relics. The theologians, the author says, are rather dangerous people to attack, for they come down on one with their six hundred conclusions and command him to recant, and if he does not they declare him a heretic forthwith. The problems which interest them are:
“Whether there was any instant of time in the divine generation? … Could God have taken the form of a woman, a devil, an ass, a gourd, or a stone? How the gourd could have preached, wrought miracles, hung on the cross?”125
He jeers at the Popes and higher ecclesiastics:
“Those supreme Pontiffs who stand in the place of Christ, if they should try to imitate His life, that is, His poverty, His toil, His teaching, His cross, and His scorn of this world … what could be more dreadful! … We ought not to forget that such a mass of scribes, copyists, notaries, advocates, secretaries, mule-drivers, grooms, money-changers, procurers, and gayer persons yet I might mention, did I not respect your ears—that this whole swarm which now burdens—I beg your pardon, honours—the Roman See would be driven to starvation.”126
As for the monks:
“The greater part of them have such faith in their ceremonies and human traditions, that they think one heaven is not reward enough for such great doings. … One will show his belly stuffed with every kind of fish; another will pour out a hundred bushels of psalms; another will count up myriads of fasts, and make up for them all again by almost bursting himself at a single dinner. Another will bring forward such a heap of ceremonies that seven ships would hardly hold them; another boast that for sixty years he has never touched a penny except with double gloves on his hands. … But Christ will interrupt their endless bragging, and will demand—‘Whence this new kind of Judaism?’
“They do all things by rule, by a kind of sacred mathematics; as, for instance, how many knots their shoes must be tied with, of what colour everything must be, what variety in their garb, of what material, how many straws'-breadth to their girdle, of what form and of how many bushels' capacity their cowl, how many fingers broad their hair, and how many hours they sleep. …”127
He ridicules men who go running about to Rome, Compostella, or Jerusalem, wasting on long and dangerous journeys money which might be better spent in feeding the hungry and clothing the naked. He scoffs at those who buy Indulgences, who sweetly flatter themselves with counterfeit pardons, and who have measured off the duration of Purgatory without error, as if by a water-clock, into ages, years, months, and days, like the multiplication table.128 Is it religion to believe that if any one pays a penny out of what he has stolen, he can have the whole slough of his life cleaned out at once, and all his perjuries, lusts, drunkennesses, all his quarrels, murders, cheats, treacheries, falsehoods, bought off in such a way that he may begin over again with a new circle of crimes? The reverence for relics was perhaps never so cruelly satirised as in the Colloquy, Peregrinatio Religionis Ergo.
It must be remembered that this bitter satire was written some years before Luther began the Reformation by an attack on Indulgences. It may seem surprising how much liberty the satirist allowed himself, and how much was permitted to him. But Erasmus knew very well how to protect himself. He was very careful to make no definite attack, and to make no mention of names. He was always ready to explain that he did not mean to attack the Papacy, but only bad Popes; that he had the highest respect for the monastic life, and only satirised evil-minded monks; or that he reverenced the saints, but thought that reverence ought to be shown by imitating them in their lives of piety. He could say all this with perfect truth. Indeed, it is likely that with all his scorn against the monks, Erasmus, in his heart, believed that a devout Capuchin or Franciscan monk lived the ideal Christian life. He seems to say so in his Colloquy, Militis et Carthusiani. He wrote, moreover, before the dignitaries of the mediæval Church had begun to take alarm. Liberal Churchmen who were the patrons of the New Learning had no objection to see the vices of the times and the Church life of the day satirised by one who wrote such exquisite latinity. In all his more serious work Erasmus was careful to shelter himself under the protection of great ecclesiastics.
Erasmus was not the only scholar who had proposed to publish a correct edition of the Holy Scriptures. The great Spaniard, Cardinal Ximenes, had announced that he meant to bring out an edition of the Holy Scriptures in which the text of the Vulgate would appear in parallel columns along with the Hebrew and the Greek. The prospectus of this Complutensian Polyglot was issued as early as 1502; the work was finished in 1517, and was published in Spain in 1520 and in other lands in 1522. Erasmus was careful to dedicate the first edition of his Novum Instrumentum, (1516) to Pope Leo x., who graciously received it. He sent the second edition to the same Pope in 1519, accompanied by a letter in which he says:
“I have striven with all my might to kindle men from those chilling argumentations in which they had been so long frozen up, to a zeal for theology which should be at once more pure and more serious. And that this labour has so far not been in vain I perceive from this, that certain persons are furious against me, who cannot value anything they are unable to teach and are ashamed to learn. But, trusting to Christ as my witness, whom my writings above all would guard, to the judgment of your Holiness, to my own sense of right and the approval of so many distinguished men, I have always disregarded the yelpings of these people. Whatever little talent I have, it has been, once for all, dedicated to Christ: it shall serve His glory alone; it shall serve the Roman Church, the prince of that Church, but especially your Holiness, to whom I owe more than my whole duty.”
He dedicated the various parts of the Paraphrases of the New Testament to Cardinal Campeggio, to Cardinal Wolsey, to Henry viii., to Charles v., and to Francis i. of France. He deliberately placed himself under the protection of those princes, ecclesiastical and secular, who could not be suspected of having any revolutionary designs against the existing state of things in Church or in State.
In all this he was followed for the time being by the most distinguished Christian Humanists in England,