4. Erasmus

Erasmus of Rotterdam (q.v.) in his person and career marks the point where the "new learning" had arrived at the parting of the ways. He felt an affinity for Lucian; his Encomium Morioe, a vitriolic satire, dealt not gently with clerical corruption. He edited the New Testament and dedicated it to Leo X. He had no desire to abandon the old Church; the bounties and pensions which he received were all derived from princes or clerics who adhered to the papacy. He pretended that he could not read the German writings of Luther. Erasmus wrote that "Luther's movement was not connected with learning," and, at the same time he wrote to Pope Hadrian VI.: "I could find a hundred passages where St. Paul seems to teach the doctrines which they condemn in Luther." Other utterances show his unwillingness to serve the Reformation or to be held responsible for any part of it: "I have written nothing which can be laid hold of against the established orders. . . . I would rather see things left as they are than to see a revolution which may lead to one knows not what. Others may be martyrs, if they like. I aspire to no such honor. . . . I care nothing what is done to Luther, but I care for peace. . . . If you must take a side, take the side which is most in favor." His keen sense of actual dependencies in the movement of things led him to see situations and realities with wonderful clearness; but his genius, like that of many scholars, was essentially negative. When he was fifty-one, not long before 1517, he wrote to Fabricius at Basel: "My chief fear is that with the revival of Greek literature there may be a revival of paganism. There are Christians who are Christians but in name, and are Gentiles at heart." In the fall of that grave year 1525, when central Germany had been harried by the Peasants' War, he wrote (Oct. 10, 1525): "You remember Reuchlin. The conflict was raging between the Muses and their enemies, when up sprang Luther, and the object thenceforward was to entangle the friends of literature in the Lutheran business, so as to destroy both them and him together."

5. Effect on Theological Science

It is customary to speak of German Humanists, also Colet and More and Linacre may be so called perhaps as representing the new learning in Britain. But these in the main were men of great spiritual earnestness. As for the wider knowledge of Greek grammar and letters, of course it quickened the study of the New Testament. As to the positive aspects of theological and spiritual regeneration, little, very little, can be attributed to the movement of the Humanists. The overvaluation

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of formal and literary and esthetical things, and a profound indifference toward spiritual things has been, and still is, a serious failing of much classicism from Petrarch to the present time. The classicists were secular to the core.

E. G. Sihler.

Bibliography: J. Burckhardt, ut sup. (somewhat vitiated by the underlying Hegelianism); G. Voigt, Die Wiederbelebung des classischen Alterthums, 3 vols., Berlin, 1880-1881; P. Schaff, The Renaissance; Revival of Learning and Art in the 14th and 15th Centuries, New York, 1891; F. A. Gasquet, The Eve of the Reformation, London, 1898; R. C. Jebb, Humanism in Education, ib. 1899; Cambridge Modern History, vol. i., chaps. xvi.-xvii., New York, 1902; L. Einstein, Italian Renaissance in England, ib. 1902; E. Borkowsky, Aus der Zeit des Humanismus, Jena, 1905; H. Hermelink, Die religiosen Reformbeetrebungen des deutschen Humanismus, Tübingen, 1907; J. S. Mackenzie, Lectures on Humanism, New York, 1907; J. M. Robertson, Pioneer Humanists, London, 1907; F. C. S. Schiller, Studies in Humanism, ib. 1907; Lichtenberger, ESR, vi. 409-419. An excellent mirror of the point of view of the Humanists is given by P. Giovio's Elopia virorum literis illustrium, Antwerp, 1557.