The complicated sixteenth century

The sixteenth (16th) century presents a complicated, at times unnerving, and at other times invigorating sense of Church history.

16th century Characters include:

• Ignatius Loyolla
• Charles V
• Erasmus
• St. Thomas More
• Martin Luther

Erasmus, 1465-1535

Considered a great figure in the northern Renaisance humanism movement, as a Catholic leader Erasmus is complicated. He promoted "humanism," or a human-centric view of the world that emphasizes the human condition (especially happiness, liberty, peace), learning through Classical education focused on Greek and Roman language, philosophy and rhetoric), he called for Church reform in matters of monasticism ("Monkishmness is not piety") and formulatistic sacerdotalism (that relgious ceremony had become habit and doctrinially overly complex, even going so far as to accuse certain types of priests as being pharisitical), and for focus on Sacred texts and its language, bordering Lutheran sola scriptura. Above all, he opposed "scholasticism," and thus St, Thomas Aquinas, although not by name, attacking, instead, Aquinas' heirs, known as the Scholastics. With brilliance and borderline irreverance, he wrote scathing satires and critiques about them the Scholastics and certain clergy. By way of rejection of the Vulgate Bible, he penned his own dual Greek-Latin translation of the New Testament, issued in 1516 with his own commentary and theory.

While sharing their spirit of reform and humanistic views that had moved Luther and others into a break from the Church, and while he defended Luther from charges of heresy, he abhored the schism and criticized Luther for being confrontational. Erasmus upheld the doctrine of Transubstantiation, even joining a Catholic exodus from Basel after a Calvinist leader banned the Holy Mass 1529. Erasmus rejected the Lutherin and Calvinistic doctrines of sole fide ("belief only) and predestination, arguing that humans exercise free will (a view consistent with his upholding of the importance of the Sacrament of Reconcilation). It's no small thing, as free will is a fundamental basis for the necessity of Grace for salvation.

This article, Desiderius Erasmus | Catholic Answers Encyclopedia, offers a critical view of Erasmus and his humanism, which aligned him with Martin Luther in many respects. Erasmus never rejected the Church and, by the end of his life, he had distanced himself from Luther. Erasmus's close friend, (Saint) Thomas More shared those 16th century humanistic views, but never strayed from Church orthodoxy. We may assume that Erasmus' friendship with More grounded him more firmly in the Catholic faith, as many of his contemporaries such as William Tyndale, Martin Luther, and others were not.

Chivalry

In 1501, Erasmus issued, Enchiridion militis Christiani, or "Handbook of the Christian Soldier." The work was at the quest of the wife of an errant soldier who begged a friend of Erasmus to help change her husband's behavior. The medieval notion of "chivalry" arose in the 12th century as a code of conduct for knights and noblemen and inspired a literary genre (such as the legend of King Arthur) as well as formal codes of behavior for military orders and for court life, generally. Chivarly was deeply intwined with Christianity, perhaps best seen in the Teutonic Knights who venerated the Vigin Mary as patroness. By the time of Erasmus, and with the avent of gunpowder and large state armies, chivalry had morphed into ritualistic expressions of knighthood such as jousting, hunting, and heraldry, which consisted of displays of rank and pedigree through emblems, flags, and banners.

As a civilizing code, chivalry focused on duty to country, duty to God, and duty to protecting the weak, especially women. Its origins lay in the very real necessity for controlling behaviors in feudal society that lacked controlling centrol authority outside of the Church, especially in the political vacuum following the collapse of the Carolingian Empire. In 989, a Church assemby at Charroux, France, declared the Pax Dei, or "Peace of God" to protect unarmed clerics or innocent noncombattants, especially virgins and widows (i.e. who lacked the protection of a male partner) from both targeted and random violence. The Pax Dei declared churches, monestaries and cemeteries protected, consecrated places, as well as Sundays and feast days, and used excommunication for enforcement.While not widespread, the Pax Dei, inspired another prohibition on knightly wilding, as it were, the Treuga Dei, or "Truce of God", this time at the Council of Clermont in 1095. The Treuga Dei expanded the periods of truce to include Advent and Lent through Easter (up to Pentecost) and protected larger groups, including merchants, who were themselves amidst their large role in the creation of modern Europe.

Violence settles itself through vanquish or exhaustion, and negotiated peace always results from oppositional power and self-interest, not from recognition of what's best for the good of man.Thus, these movements to moderate violence would have had no authority without the Church. Scripture and common worship channel a common interest between Christian combattants, but, more largely, the Church itself produced a philosophy of war and peace. The Roman philosopher Cicero wrote about just war, but it was St. Augustine who defined just war and just peace as absent that all-too human impulse of revenge, which was a plenty good cause for Cicero.

As professor of architecture William Ward Watkin notes,

War and peace, with creative construction and Christian civilization, required for solution the quality of justice, and justice was still understood as a quality of the will of God. The ages which have followed the thirteenth century have more and more omitted this third quantity in their atempted solutions.

Clearly, war and violence persisted, but the power of the Pax Dei and Treuga Dei was such that doctrine and practice required harmony when the one didn't conform to the other. As such, two centuries later, St. Thomas Aquinas studied the problem and argued that warfare in self-defense is justifiable even on feast days.

Technologies, trade, and, especially, state formation changed the nature of war to its more modern impersonal forms of destruction justified by "reasons of state," or, more precisely, war justifying itself. By the time of Erasmus, war and chivalry yet persisted on horseback, but gunpowder behind fortifications was already beginning to defeat personal armor and horse-driven mobilty.

War was back on as a full-time business, and for its own justification, prompting Erasmus to observe in his 1517 essay, "The Complaint of Peace,"

“It seems to be cause enough to commence a just and necessary war that a neighboring land is in a more prosperous, flourishing and free condition than your own.”

Erasmus continues,

"God made man unarmed. But anger and re- venge have mended the work of God, and furnished his hands with weapons invented in hell. Christians attack christians with engines of destruction, fabricated by the devil, A cannon ! a mortar! no human being could have devised them originally; they must have been suggested by the evil one."

By then, chilvary, had become a lifestyle or status measure more than a military strategy, with armies coming to be run by professional strategists using trained soldiers in wars between states. Chivalry had not devolved into the ridiculousness that Cervantes portrayed in Don Quixote a hundred years after Erasmus penned "Handbook," as knights on horses were formidable, especially against the unarmed, who, with or without Church rules offered plentful opportunity for mischief, such as that carried on by the husband of the woman who pleaded for help to Erasmus' friend.

Enchiridion militis Christiani (Handbook of the Christian Soldier)

While varied in interests and critiques, the consistencies in Erasmus' point of view converge from his core beliefs in Christian virtue, the Church, the Liturgy, the Virgin Mary, and the Word of God. He wanted the Bible to be available in secular languages, but he wanted young Christian men to be educated in Latin and Greek. He sympathized with the reformers' outrage at clerical abuse, but he refused to draw drastic lines between the Church and reform. He wanted peace, concord, learning and faith truly lived.

Unlike protestant reformers, when confronted with Church or other hypocrisy, Erasmus' impulse was to attack the hypocrisy, not its source. Of excessive veneration of relics of Saints, rather than attacking the form of worship, Erasmus made fun of the excesses while warning against iconoclasm and, what historian Eamon Duffy would later call "stripping of alters," or complete protestant removal of saintly relics, images, and veneration. Of abuses of the indulgence, which Luther is so famous for critizing (the "95 Theses" was actually titled, "Disputation on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences"), Erasmus retorts,

"I have never approved of (the Roman See's) tyranny, rapacity, and other vices about which of old common complaints were heard from good men. Neither do I sweepingly condemn ‘Indulgences,’ though I have always disliked any barefaced traffic in them.

So, when Erasmus took on the problem of unchilvaric behavior, he did not go after chivalry itself, he looked to channel it towards higher purpose and faith. Where the knight defends himself behind armor of steel, the Christian soldier will wear armor of the spirit -- taken from Paul's Letter to the Ephesians, of course.

Here Erasmus presages Reformation complaints about piety of form over virtue, with,

Paul everywhere (as I have said) commendeth charity, but specially writing unto the Coiynthes he preferreth charity both before miracles and prophecies, and also before the tongues of angels. And say not thou by and by that charity is, to be oft at the church, to crouch down before the images of saints, to light tapers or wax candles, to say many lady psalters or Saint Katheryne's knots. God hath no need of these things. Paul calleth charity to edify thy neighbour, What to count that we all be members of one body, charity. to think that we all are but one in Christ, to rejoice in God of thy neighbour's wealth even as thou doest of thine own, to remedy his incommodities or losses as thine own. 

or,

Moreover he putteth us in remembrance that the use of the spiritual life standeth not so greatly in ceremonies as in the charity of thy neighbour. Seek (saith he) judgment or justice, succour him that is oppressed, give true judgment and right to him that is fatherless and motherless or friendless, defend the widow.

But he isn't so much condemning ceremonial piety as asking -- as did Saint Paul, and, the Lord himself -- for our hearts to be set right not just our outward acts:

 Oh citizens, citizens, first seek money, after seek virtue. When was riot or excess more 
immoderate than now ? When was adultery and 
all other kinds of unchaste living either more 
appert in the sight of every man, or more un- punished, or else less had in shame, rebuke or 
abomination ? WThile princes favour their own vices, in other men suffering them unpunished, 
and every man accounteth that most comely and beautiful to be done whatsoever is used and 
taken up among courtiers. To whom seemeth 
not poverty extreme evil, and uttermost shame 
The liberty and rebuke ? 

p 190

We can see each of these threads in Handbook, as we will call it, which is part of why it was enormously popular and translated into variuos languages.

A book called in Latin Enchiridion militis Christiani, and in English The manual of the Christian knight : Erasmus, Desiderius, d. 1536 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

Erasmus' influence upon Loyola

Erasmus' works were translated into many languages, including Spanish, which gave him, according to scholar Terence O'Reilly, "enormously popularity in Spain during the 1520s not, primarily, as a satirist, nor as a scholar, but as the author of Enchiridion militis christiani."

• ERASMUS, IGNATIUS LOYOLA, AND ORTHODOXY on JSTOR
  • for a review of O'Reilly's essay, see Terence O'Reilly, The Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius Loyola
• Handbook of a Christian Knight | work by Erasmus | Britannica

"Handbook of a Christian Knight" would have fit like a glove upon the knight-turned-spiritual warrior, Loyola. Written for a wayward soldier, St. Ignatius, while not wayward was a former soldier looking for a fight -- and honor. Erasmus showed him the path.

Ironically, it would seem that both men helped one another. Loyola responded to Erasmus' call to holiness, while Loyola pushed, albeit separately and in vastly different ways, for Church reform. Both were questioned and distrusted -- and both earned the deep respect of the Popes they served.

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