LACUS
FORUM
XXXII
Networks
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THE FRIENDSHIP OF THOMAS MORE AND ERASMUS
Saul Levin
suny-Binghamton
in the fourteenth century, the printed books were mainly prayers in Latin. Even
before the famous Gutenburg Bible, small printing shops in the Netherlands sold, to ordinary men and women at a low pri­ce, the prayers for them to say from day to day. Previously
only the rich could afford a private copy of the prayers, made by the hand of a scribe. In
church the laymen were not expected to know how to speak to God, in Latin or any other
language, but some individuals absorbed by heart, through repetition, parts of the liturgy.
As more private individuals had access to the holy books, it became an issue whether to pray
in a native tongue or in the ancient one used by God’s own spokesmen—as well as who
should have access to the Holy Scriptures, and who is qualified to edit them.
A few reformers had tried to make religion accessible to Christians ignorant of Latin.
John Wyclif and his pupils translated the Bible from Latin into English. John Hus in Bohemia wanted his people not only to be free from the rule of a German prince, but also to
read the Scriptures in their native tongue, Czech.1 For that treason or heresy, he was burned
at the stake by a decree of the Council of Constance (1415).
The Christian faith could not be sealed up in any Latin text. Although the early Christians
in Rome shifted gradually away from Greek to Latin—in daily life and in the practice of
religion—the educated among them realized that the Latin language was secondary. But the
study of Greek, to supplement one’s Latin, was revived in the fourteenth century, and no longer required a sojourn in Constantinople. Learned Greeks had moved to Italy and brought
good manuscripts of the Iliad, many other pagan classics, and the holy Scriptures.
One Netherlander fastened upon the need to compare the Gospel in Latin with the
Greek original. Growing up in Rotterdam, he seldom used his Dutch name Gerrit Gerritszoon and avoided the language, except for communication with servants. He preferred
distant contacts, to whom he wrote letters in Latin; when they met in person, they conversed only in Latin. His name was first recorded in Latinized form as Erasmus Gerardi.2
His most illustrious friend was Sir Thomas More, who resided near London and was an
even more thorough Latinist.3 More, unlike Erasmus, was married and spoke to his wife
naturally in English; his letters to her, Maystres Alyce, were in English also. But to their
children he spoke only Latin; to the oldest daughter, his letters (Thomas Morus Margaretae filiae suae charissimae) were most numerous, and she—even more than his male admirers and her sisters—wrote and sent him letters in Latin.4
A contemporary in France, Michel de Montaigne, was brought up with similar emphasis upon Latin. His eccentric father kept him from hearing any servant, and instead placed
him under a tutor from Germany, who spoke only Latin.5 But the father sent his son, at
the age of six, to a school where the other boys spoke French. The result was happy for
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literature: this boy read very widely and put his knowledge to use in a new and easy kind
of composition, which he called an essay. It demanded nothing from a public of complete
strangers, who might be barely literate; for in each essay the author supplied the needed
information.
The success of the Essays by Montaigne invited imitation by an Englishman, Francis
Bacon, who had studied the ancient texts in Latin and Greek. The form of the essay was
very flexible; it enlisted an individual’s serious thought, at no great length and without fictitious embroidery. Throughout the European world, essays became the most accessible texts
for anyone to extend his understanding of things in general.
But in the age of Erasmus and More, the struggles of nations were intertwined with
religion, and these two men were embroiled in controversies that they could not avoid.
Martin Luther, an Augustinian monk in Germany, led a movement to reform the Christian
liturgy and to express it all in the German language. He began, however, with the famous
ninety-five Theses, which—being theological—were in Latin. They were so controversial
that prominent men expressed either support for Luther or disagreement. What began as
a regional war between Catholics and Protestants was taken up most heatedly in England.
Henry the Eighth, the young king of England, stood out against the Protestants;6 and the
Pope, Leo X, gratefully conferred upon Henry the title Defensor Fidei in 1521.
A few years later, however, Henry, for deeper dynastic and personal concerns, rejected
the supremacy of the Pope (Clement VII, who succeeded Leo) over the laws of marriage
and divorce. Sir Thomas More had been appointed Lord Chancellor by King Henry in 1529,
to replace Cardinal Wolsey. When the struggle within the royal family reversed everything
in England, More was brought down, as were men even wiser. He would have preferred
to stay out of any political dispute, and he resigned from office. But his precautions were
in vain. He was pressed, either to agree with the king’s claim of being head of the church,
or to show what law, if any, limited the royal power. Although More did his best to evade
the ticklish issue, he was trapped by an interrogator appointed by Henry to report More’s
words falsely.
The greatest lawyer in England mounted the scaffold with dignity and humor. He left
behind a masterpiece, composed in his leisure and titled VTOPIA (No-Place). He was
inspired by reports of sailors returning from distant islands. It was the last creation in Latin
to win favor as a literary classic throughout Europe; it influenced political thinkers, even
in the nineteenth century.
Martin Luther had a rare talent to wage and win a national or international religious
controversy. For the common people of Germany, he gave something simple but literary
and musical: hymns to cheer everyone in church. One of them, ‘Ein feste Burg ist unser
Gott’, became a favorite outside of Germany as well.7 Just as scholarly was his translation
of the New Testament from Greek into German, and then the Old Testament from the
Hebrew.
Erasmus managed not to take sides for or against Luther. His discreet mission, instead,
was to spread knowledge of the ancient languages. His finest monument was an edition of
the Greek New Testament (Nouum Instrumentum, printed in Basle, 1516), with his own
exact translation into Latin, set beside the Greek. He did not directly call attention to the
THE FRIENDSHIP OF THOMAS MORE AND ERASMUS
339
discrepancies between the Greek original and the Latin version known as the Vulgate. But
any reader, even if not very strong in Greek, could compare the text provided by Erasmus
with the one most familiar in Latin manuscripts or printed books, and could thus recognise wherever the Latin is unreliable.
He undermined especially one argument of the Roman Catholic Church against the
Greek Orthodox. In the Gospel according to John (15:26):
“When the Paraclete [literally, advocate] comes, whom I will send to you from the
father—the spirit of truth, which proceeds from the father—that one will testify
about me.”
Where the Greek text is:
τὸ πνεῦμα τῆς ἀληθείας ὃ παρὰτοῦ πατρὸς ἐκπορεύεται
spiritus ueritatis qui a patre filioque procedit
the Latin Vulgate has, right after a patre ‘from the father’, an added word filioque ‘and the
son’.
Soon the Latin word filioque was tossed back and forth by the Catholic and Protestant
disputants. Erasmus could not steer clear of them; he stated that in the Greek manuscripts
he saw only παρὰ τοῦ πατρὸς but after it no equivalent to filioque. A spokesman for the
Vatican retorted that the Greek equivalent και τοῦ ὑιοῦ is written at that point, in a manuscript belonging to the Papal library. Peaceably, Erasmus accepted this datum; and when
his edition of the New Testament was reprinted, he incorporated the correction. Others
remained suspicious of some deceit by their opponents, and eventually demanded that the
manuscript in question be brought out for them to inspect with their own eyes. The custodians in the Vatican had to admit then that the manuscript had disappeared.8
Erasmus also, comparing the Greek and Latin languages, discovered that the medieval or Byzantine pronunciation of Greek was grossly at odds with the rendering of Greek
names and other Greek words by Cicero and other ancient Latin authors. Erasmus and his
followers thus restored some of the original sounds of Greek.9
Margaret More was nearly equaled in learning—or even surpassed—by the Princess Elizabeth, the second daughter of King Henry. He appointed Roger Ascham, from St. John’s
College at Cambridge, to tutor the royal children. Elizabeth was more clever than anyone
before or after her. One exercise that was assigned to her has luckily been preserved from
that century and for all time. She was given a Greek passage from the tragedy of Euripides,
Ἰφιγένεια ἡ ἐν Ταύροις. The princess translated it into Latin, a language which, along with
French and Italian, she already knew deeply. And her mastery of Latin never waned: In 1597,
when she was sixty and had been queen for nearly forty years, an ambassador arrived from
the king of Poland to complain that Polish ships and crews had been seized in England. The
ambassador, in Latin, addressed the queen of England, who was sitting at Greenwich with
her court.10 She listened to the entire complaint; then she replied, ‘Oh, quam decepta fui;
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Saul Levin
expectaui orationem; tu uero querelam mihi adduxisti…’ and went on brilliantly in her own
Latin vituperation, like Cicero denouncing Verres.11
Not by coincidence was the reign of Elizabeth the summit of English literature. Shakespeare, near the beginning of his career in drama, adapted the Menaechmi of Plautus freely
to become The Comedy of Errors; and in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the amusing play
within the play—the love of Pyramus and Thisbe—was based likewise on an episode in the
Metamorphoses of Ovid, a Latin classic which everyone had read through at school, or had
at least sampled. On a like theme, but more terribly powerful, Shakespeare produced the
first of his great tragedies, Romeo and Juliet.12
1
Hus was a pioneer, besides, in improving the orthography of a modern language. Heretofore, the
educated among his countrymen were used to writing in German; and they carried over many
conventions from German spelling to their own vernacular, such as the clumsy trigraph sch for the
less frequent sibilant sound (which in the International Phonetic Alphabet is now shaped ∫ or š).
Hus showed the difference from the ordinary consonant s by instead adding a dot above the letter
s. Eventually his dot evolved to a more recognizable superscript ˇ called haček.
2
The double name Desiderius Erasmus was chosen, whether by himself or by his father. Desiderius
was a modification of the Latin neuter noun desiderium. (The participle desideratus would have
been more normal grammatically.) The equivalent Greek noun ἐρασμός (masculine) does not
occur in the ancient and medieval texts but was valid as a back-formation from the derived adjective ἐράσμιος ‘lovely’. Ἐρασμός became Erasmus, in Latin letters. The name Desiderius carried the
implication that the child, although born outside the law of marriage, was wanted.
On the biography of Erasmus, my friend Arthur Tegelaar has sent me informative letters from
his home in Oegstgeest (Netherlands).
3
Germain Marc’Hadour, ‘Thomas More in Emulation and Defense of Erasmus’, in Erasmus of Rotterdam, The man and the scholar (edited by J. S. Weiland and W. Th. M. Frijhoff; Leiden: E. J. Brill,
1988), 203–11.
4
Margaret More, on her own, translated into English a long prayer composed by Erasmus, Precatio dominica in septem portiones distributa. She, and possibly her husband William Roper, also
composed in Latin, or finished a commentary, De quattuor nouissimis, on the final words of the
Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 7:27).
5
Montaigne, in his Autobiographie, tells not much about his mother, Antoinette de Louppes,
although she resided with him before and after his marriage and she outlived him. Her family
was Jewish and had fled from Spain and settled in Toulouse and Bordeaux; they professed to be
Protestant Christians.
6
Assertio septem sacramentorum aduersus Martinum Lutherum, aedita ab … Henrico … octauo
(1521).
7
Some rules of standard High German have changed since Luther. Now it would be ‘Eine feste
Burg…’.
8
The missing manuscript was probably not a codex of the Bible, but a record from the Council of
Nicaea (in the year 325), when the disagreements between the Greek and the Latin Church were
thrashed out. My colleague and friend, Prof. Daniel Williman, has been very helpful to me.
THE FRIENDSHIP OF THOMAS MORE AND ERASMUS
9
341
The Greeks of Constantinople learned of this ‘Erasmian’ challenge to their Byzantine tradition,
mainly in the eighteenth century, when the sons of wealthy Greek families studied at the universities of Italy. See pages 169–70 of my article, ‘The Perennial “Language Question” among the
Greeks’, in General Linguistics 27 (1987):162–72.
10 The ambassador was no doubt aware that this queen was highly educated; so there was no need to
speak French, as was usual among ladies anywhere in Europe. Lytton Strachey, in Elizabeth and
Essex, summarizes the incident from the point of view of the main character.
11 Elizabeth’s speech, or at least an abridgement of it, was recorded at the time, and much later published by John Nichols (ed.), The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth (London,
1823; photo-reprint, New York: Burt Franklin [1970]) III, 417.
12 In one scene of the ‘historical’ play King Henry the Fifth, Shakespeare has the French princess
Katherine trying to learn a little English from her attendant Alice. Later in the action, Henry
gently flirts with his bride-to-be, as she replies to him in a broken mixture of both languages.
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