Theological Origins of Modernity

the contradictions of premodernity 167
since everything depends on God alone. Th ere is thus no path to salvation
for Luther. In Erasmus’s view this univocal focus on divine will utterly
undermines morality. Almost as if refl ecting on Luther’s famous advice
to Melanchthon to “Sin boldly!” Erasmus remarks: “If it is predetermined
that I am damned, any eff ort I make is useless. If I am destined to be saved,
there is no reason not to follow my every whim.” 150 Humans can be improved
by a proper upbringing and by education. Th ey can also improve
themselves by combining humanitas and pietas within the philosophia
Christi. Erasmus was convinced that “a large part of goodness is the will
to be good. Th e further that will leaves imperfection behind, the closer a
person is to grace.” 151 To abandon morality and moral education, to see the
formation of character as irrelevant to human well-being, can end only
in a world in which force alone rules, a world in which the murderer, the
rapist, and the tyrant rule, or worse a world in which the faithful rape,
murder, and tyrannize over others in the name of God and as agents of his
omnipotent and indiff erent will.
alpha and omega
In 1516 Erasmus had written his Education of a Christian Prince to train the
prince destined to be the greatest emperor in Europe since Charlemagne.
Th is moment was in a sense the culmination of his project for the transformation
of Europe from above. A ruling class of Christian humanists
gradually spreading the fruits of an education in the philosophy of Christ
would, he believed, create a new European order. However, with the appearance
of Luther, the schism in the church, and the outbreak of the Peasants’
Rebellion, he saw his hopes for a peaceful reformation of the Christianity
and Christendom dissolve before his eyes. As a result of his quarrel
with Luther, Erasmus fell into a pessimism from which he never entirely
recovered. 152 His pessimism was justifi ed. Humanism would continue to
exercise an important infl uence on intellectuals and on some members of
the upper classes, but as an agent of social change it had been surpassed by
the religious passions unleashed fi rst by the Reformation and then a few
years later by the Counter-reformation. Th ese passions reached a much
broader population than humanism and moved them in more immediate
and more violent ways. Th e humanist project in which Erasmus had placed
such great hopes would be revived, but only in a world that had been radically
transformed by the Wars of Religion, the exploration and colonization
of the New World, the Copernican Revolution, and the development
of a new mathematical natural science. Th e intervening period was a time