Desiderius Erasmus - Against War

The Treatise on War, of which the earliest English translation is herereprinted, was among the most famous writings of the most illustriouswriter of his age. Few people now read Erasmus; he has become for theworld in general a somewhat vague name. Only by some effort of thehistorical imagination is it possible for those who are not professedscholars and students to realize the enormous force which he was at acritical period in the history of civilization. The free institutions andthe material progress of the modern world have alike their roots inhumanism. Humanism as a movement of the human mind culminated in the age,and even in a sense in the person, of Erasmus. Its brilliant flower was ofan earlier period; its fruits developed and matured later; but it was inhis time, and in him, that the fruit set! The earlier sixteenth century isnot so romantic as its predecessors, nor so rich in solid achievement asothers that have followed it. As in some orchard when spring is over, theblossom lies withered on the grass, and the fruit has long to wait beforeit can ripen on the boughs. Yet here, in the dull, hot midsummer days, isthe central and critical period of the year's growth.

The life of Erasmus is accessible in many popular forms as well as in morelearned and formal works. To recapitulate it here would fall beyond thescope of a preface. But in order to appreciate this treatise fully it isnecessary to realize the time and circumstances in which it appeared, andto recall some of the main features of its author's life and work up tothe date of its composition.

That date can be fixed with certainty, from a combination of external andinternal evidence, between the years 1513 and 1515; in all probability itwas the winter of 1514-15. It was printed in the latter year, in the"editio princeps" of the enlarged and rewritten Adagia then issued fromFroben's great printing-works at Basel. The stormy decennate of PopeJulius II had ended in February, 1513. To his successor, Giovanni de'Medici, who succeeded to the papal throne under the name of Leo X, thetreatise is particularly addressed. The years which ensued were a timesingularly momentous in the history of religion, of letters, and of thewhole life of the civilized world. The eulogy of Leo with which Erasmusends indicates the hopes then entertained of a new Augustan age of peaceand reconciliation. The Reformation was still capable of being regarded asan internal and constructive force, within the framework of the societybuilt up by the Middle Ages. The final divorce between humanism and theChurch had not yet been made. The long and disastrous epoch of the wars ofreligion was still only a dark cloud on the horizon. The Renaissance wasreally dead, but few yet realized the fact. The new head of the Church wasa lover of peace, a friend of scholars, a munificent patron of the arts.This treatise shows that Erasmus, to a certain extent, shared or strove toshare in an illusion widely spread among the educated classes of Europe.With a far keener instinct for that which the souls of men required, anAugustinian monk from Wittenberg, who had visited Rome two years earlier,had turned away from the temple where a corpse lay swathed in gold andhalf hid in the steam of incense. With a far keener insight into the realstate of things, Machiavelli was, at just this time, composing The Prince.

In one form or another, the subject of his impassioned pleading for peaceamong beings human, civilized, and Christian, had been long in Erasmus'smind. In his most celebrated single work, the Praise of Folly, he hadbitterly attacked the attitude towards war habitual, and evillyconsecrated by usage, among kings and popes. The same argument had formedthe substance of a document addressed by him, under the title ofAnti-Polemus, to Pope Julius in 1507. Much of the substance, much even ofthe phraseology of that earlier work is doubtless repeated here. Beyondthe specific reference to Pope Leo, the other notes of time in thetreatise now before us are few and faint. Allusions to Louis XII of France(1498-1515), to Ferdinand the Catholic (1479-1516), to Philip, king ofAragon (1504-1516), and Sigismund, king of Poland (1506-1548), are allconsistent with the composition of the treatise some years earlier. At theend of it he promises to treat of the matter more largely when hepublishes the Anti-Polemus. But this intention was never carried intoeffect. Perhaps Erasmus had become convinced of its futility; for theevents of the years which followed soon showed that the new Augustan agewas but a false dawn over which night settled more stormily and profoundlythan before.

For ten or a dozen years Erasmus had stood at the head of Europeanscholarship. His name was as famous in France and England as in the LowCountries and Germany. The age was indeed one of those in which themuch-abused term of the republic of letters had a real and vital meaning.The nationalities of modern Europe had already formed themselves; thenotion of the Empire had become obsolete, and if the imperial title wasstill coveted by princes, it was under no illusion as to the amount ofeffective supremacy which it carried with it, or as to any life yetremaining in the mediaeval doctrine of the unity of Christendom whether asa church or as a state. The discovery of the new world near the end ofthe previous century precipitated a revolution in European politicstowards which events had long been moving, and finally broke up thepolitical framework of the Middle Ages. But the other great event of thesame period, the invention and diffusion of the art of printing, hadcreated a new European commonwealth of the mind. The history of thecentury which followed it is a history in which the landmarks are foundless in battles and treaties than in books.

The earlier life of the man who occupies the central place in the literaryand spiritual movement of his time in no important way differs from theyouth of many contemporary scholars and writers. Even the illegitimacy ofhis birth was an accident shared with so many others that it does not markhim out in any way from his fellows. His early education at Utrecht, atDeventer, at Herzogenbosch; his enforced and unhappy novitiate in a houseof Augustinian canons near Gouda; his secretaryship to the bishop ofCambray, the grudging patron who allowed rather than assisted him tocomplete his training at the University of Parisall this was at the timemere matter of common form. It is with his arrival in England in 1497, atthe age of thirty-one, that his effective life really begins.

For the next twenty years that life was one of restless movement andincessant production. In England, France, the Low Countries, on the upperRhine, and in Italy, he flitted about gathering up the whole intellectualmovement of the age, and pouring forth the results in that admirable Latinwhich was not only the common language of scholars in every country, butthe single language in which he himself thought instinctively and wrotefreely. Between the Adagia of 1500 and the Colloquia of 1516 comes a massof writings equivalent to the total product of many fertile andindustrious pens. He worked in the cause of humanism with a sacred fury,striving with all his might to connect it with all that was living in theold and all that was developing in the newer world. In his travels no lessthan in his studies the aspect of war must have perpetually met him as atonce the cause and the effect of barbarism; it was the symbol ofeverything to which humanism in its broader as well as in its narroweraspect was utterly opposed and repugnant. He was a student at Paris in theominous year of the first French invasion of Italy, in which the death ofPico della Mirandola and Politian came like a symbol of the death of theItalian Renaissance itself. Charles VIII, as has often been said, broughtback the Renaissance to France from that expedition; but he brought herback a captive chained to the wheels of his cannon. The epoch of theItalian wars began. A little later (1500) Sandro Botticelli painted thatamazing Nativity which is one of the chief treasures of the LondonNational Gallery. Over it in mystical Greek may still be read thepainter's own words: "This picture was painted by me Alexander amid theconfusions of Italy at the time prophesied in the Second Woe of theApocalypse, when Satan shall be loosed upon the earth." In November, 1506,Erasmus was at Bologna, and saw the triumphal entry of Pope Julius intothe city at the head of a great mercenary army. Two years later the leagueof Cambray, a combination of folly, treachery and shame which filled evenhardened politicians with horror, plunged half Europe into a war in whichno one was a gainer and which finally ruined Italy: "bellum quo nullum,"says the historian, "vel atrocius vel diuturnius in Italia post exactosGothos majores nostri meminerunt." In England Erasmus found, on his firstvisit, a country exhausted by the long and desperate struggle of the Warsof the Roses, out of which she had emerged with half her ruling classkilled in battle or on the scaffold, and the whole fabric of society toreconstruct. The Empire was in a state of confusion and turmoil no lessdeplorable and much more extensive. The Diet of 1495 had indeed, by anexpiring effort towards the suppression of absolute anarchy, decreed theabolition of private war. But in a society where every owner of a castle,every lord of a few square miles of territory, could conduct public war onhis own account, the prohibition was of little more than formal value.Humanism had been introduced by the end of the fifteenth century in someof the German universities, but too late to have much effect on the risingfury of religious controversy. The very year in which this treatiseagainst war was published gave to the world another work of even widercirculation and more profound consequences. The famous EpistolaeObscurorum Virorum, first published in 1515, and circulated rapidly amongall the educated readers of Europe, made an open breach between thehumanists and the Church. That breach was never closed; nor on the otherhand could the efforts of well-intentioned reformers like Melancthon bringhumanism into any organic relation with the reformed movement. When mutualexhaustion concluded the European struggle, civilization had to startafresh; it took a century more to recover the lost ground. The very ideaof humanism had long before then disappeared.