Erasmus in The Letters of Obscure Men

If an anthology of influential and factual Reformation literature were produced to-day, the Letters of Obscure Men would hardly find a place in it.The work would undoubtedly contain a good deal of Tyndale, Erasmus, and Luther, probably some Melancthon and Oecolampadius, and quite possibly snippets from the precursors, Wycliffe and Huss.But it would be a presump- tuous editor indeed who would include a work whose authorship is still unsettled, whose issues and personal portraits are exaggerated and calumnious, and whose historical authenticity is often suspect.Such a work is the Letters of Obscure Men.^But to say this is not to deny its importance as a document which in many ways captures the emotion, the spirit, and the temper of the times better, and even more precisely, than the more factual and authentic reformation tracts that we still possess.In many ways it is in the tradition of Erasmus's Mon'ae Encomium.Although considerably less artful and more clumsy in its satire than Erasmus's Folly, the Letters still shows some indebtedness to that work.The creation of the naive narrator unwittingly speaking stupidity and nonsense and thereby tinging all that he mentions in good faith with ridicule, is not unlike Folly in one of her many poses.The issues attacked -clerical worldliness, monastic institutions, the stultifying hair-splitting of scholasticism, and so onfind many of their roots not only in the general dispute between the old order and the new, but also in the Praise of Folly.However, unlike Folly, we are always sure where we stand in the Letters.The narrative technique is simplistic and straight-forward; whatever the correspondent lauds and praises to Ortwin Gratius, the recipient of most of the letters, we are supposed to condemn and laugh at.The numerous narrators are types rather than individuals, and their letters are all sim- ilar in theme and tone.They are the reactionaries tenaciously clinging to the old order and strongly opposing social, educational, and most importantly.Christian progress.In the light of this basic narrative simplicity, it is almost beyond belief that anyone could read the Letters in any way other than the one so obviously intended.And yet the renowned Steele, writing in The Tatler (197), demonstrates total unawareness of their simple satirical intent.He writes:It seems this is a collection of letters, which some profound blockheads, who lived before jest, but that I dislike the precedent of injury to the good name of anothera wrong which anyone may so easily commit.We did ourselves, long ago, make sport in the Moria, but no one was attacked by name.These writers, whoever they may be, not contented with the trifles already produced, have added a similar sheet in whichfor some reason which I cannot guess they have thought fit to bring in my name over and over again.From this excerpt it is clear that Erasmus did not approve of at least three elements in the Letters.First of all, he resented the kind and degree of direct personal slander.Secondly, he saw the work, written in a style that he would have considered crude and tasteless, as a direct threat to the cause of peaceful religious reform and the advancement of good letters.And finally, because of these two elements, he resented the mention of his own name in the work and attempted to dissociate himself as much as possible from the crudities of the Letters.In this letter he mentions the Praise of Folly as a work which spoke generally of faults and errors in existing institutions without descending to the level of personal invective.This, in large part, is true.However, one cannot help remembering the Julius exclusis e coelis'^and the degree to which Erasmus's general criticism could descend into personal vituperation.Al- though one cannot disagree with the viewpoint expressed by Erasmus in this letter, at the same time it is understandable how the authors of the Letters of Obscure Men could feel confident that they were mustering an ally in Erasmus and not creating a foe.Indeed, that Erasmus himself must have felt that he had established an infelicitous precedent for the au- thors of the Letters through the writing of the Julius is clear in at least two of his own epistles.In the letter cited above, immediately after scolding the authors of the second volume of the Letters of Obscure Men, he adds: My James, on his late return from Cologne, has brought me back a sort of pamphlet, which he found in circulation in your neighbourhood, in which the late Pope Julius is introduced in a ludicrous fashion.James added however,though I scarcely suppose it to be the fact, --that there were some people who supsected, that the thing was an invention of mine, becauseso he said, the Latinity was fairly good

Art history · Erasmus · History · Philosophy · Psychology · Scottish History and National Identity

• The Correspondence of Erasmus

  D F S Thomson, Desiderius Erasmus et al.•Correspondence of Erasmus•1974

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