Theological Origins of Modernity

humanism and the apotheosis of man 97
Christian pacifi sm not bellicose dogmatism. 91 He deeply feared that the
process of reform would become violent and destructive, throwing the
world into war. In place of such revolutionary change, he pinned his hopes
on a gradual process of reform through a system of education in humane
letters and the study of Scripture, a process that in his mind ended in a
moralistic Christian humanism purged of Italian paganism. 92
As diffi cult as this project was, Erasmus had good reasons to believe
that he and his fellow humanists were on the verge of success. Not only
was he an advisor to the emperor, one of his former students had become
Pope Adrian VI, and his friend and fellow spirit Th omas More was an advisor
to Henry VIII. Given the broad infl uence of his thought and the very
real infl uence he and his fellow humanists exercised in political aff airs,
Erasmus was convinced that he lived at the dawn of another golden age. 93
However, within a very few years all of these hopes were dashed, and the
future looked bleak, promising not an age of gold but an age of iron, not
an age of peace and prosperity but an age of war and destruction in which
competing religious parties fought to the death over doctrinal diff erences.
Th e source of this unexpected reversal was, of course, Luther.
erasmus’s philosophy of christ
Erasmus like most humanists had an antipathy to metaphysics, which in
his mind was closely connected to scholasticism and to the debates between
the scholastics and the nominalists. He famously described these
debates as “higher lunacy.” 94 However, this rejection of metaphysical speculation
and disputation was not a rejection of philosophy per se. In fact, it
was part and parcel of a reconceptualization of philosophy on an ancient
model as moral philosophy. Like his humanist predecessors, he believed
that the purpose of philosophizing was action and not mere speculation.
Philosophizing thus was closely linked to rhetoric. Erasmus, however, was
a Christian humanist and was interested not only in promoting morality
but in reconciling it with Christian piety. Th e center of his intellectual
enterprise was thus the attempt to develop a philosophy of Christ (philosophia
Christi) that combined the individualism of Italian humanism (devoid
of its martial heroism) with the imitation of Christ (imitatio Christi)
of the devotio moderna by means of a humanistic study that combined the
study of pagan literature and Scripture within the Neoplatonic horizon of
Origen, Jerome, and Augustine as well as Petrarch, Valla, and Pico.
Although Erasmus had little interest in metaphysical speculation, he
could not avoid making a number of metaphysical assumptions. Like most