Theological Origins of Modernity

328 notes to pages 148–152
50. Erasmus, Collected Works, 76:199.
51. Ibid., 76:210.
52. Ibid., 76:218.
53. Ibid., 76:252.
54. Ibid., 76:245, 261.
55. Ibid., 76:190.
56. Ibid., 76:286, 77:349.
57. Ibid., 76:289.
58. Cornelis Augustijn, Erasmus: His Life, Works, Infl uence, trans. J. C. Grayson (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1991), 139.
59. Charles Trinkaus, “Erasmus, Augustine, and the Nominalists,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte
67 (1976): 9. Erasmus was especially concerned by Luther’s
radical claim that man remains a sinner even aft er he is justifi ed by grace (8).
60. Rabil, “Desiderius Erasmus,” 254.
61. Th e view of freedom that Erasmus assigns to Scotus is more properly assigned
to Biel. Gordon Rupp, trans. and ed., Luther and Erasmus: Free Will and Salvation
(Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1969), 11. In contrast to Luther, Erasmus
sees nothing unacceptable in Biel’s position. McSorley, Luther: Right or Wrong,
290–91.
62. Gerrish, “De Libero Arbitrio (1524),” 196.
63. Tracy, “Two Erasmuses, Two Luthers,” 72.
64. Ibid., 208.
65. McSorley, Luther: Right or Wrong, 285.
66. Oberman, Luther, 216. Luther was convinced that little time was left . Köselleck
notes that he became extremely angry when Melanchthon suggested that the
Apocalypse might not occur for another four hundred years. Cited in Reinhardt
Köselleck, “Historia Magistra Vitae. Über die Aufl ösung des Topos im horizont
neuzeitlich bewegter Geschichte,” in Natur und Geschichte: Karl Löwith zu 70.
Geburtstag, ed. G. Braun and M. Riedel (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1967), 212.
67. Surprisingly, Luther never seizes on Erasmus’s truly Pelagian notion that nature is
itself divine grace. Tracy, “Two Erasmuses, Two Luthers,” 43.
68. Boyle, Rhetoric and Reform, 60.
69. Oberman, Luther, 301; Tracy, “Two Erasmuses, Two Luthers,” 44.
70. WA 18:600–601.29; LW 33:15–17.
71. Boyle, Rhetoric and Reform, 46.
72. WA 18:603.22–23; LW 33:20.
73. Boyle, Rhetoric and Reform, 47–48. Bernard Wills defi nes this notion: “A kataleptic
impression was defi ned as one . . . stamped and molded out of the object
from which it came with a character such as it could not have if it came from an
object other than the one which it did come from (Cicero, Academica 2.18). . . . If
a certain impression had the character of a kataleptic impression, it could compel
assent to the objective reality of that which was conveyed in the impression. . . . On
this basis all forms of conceptual knowledge were thought to rest. Secure in his
grasp of the physical Cosmos the Stoic was secure as well in his grasp of the divine