Erasmus, the Man Who Laid the Egg by Barth Hoogstraten

Author:Barth Hoogstraten
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Two Harbors Press

Five days later, on July 6, 1415, Jan Hus was condemned to be burned alive. His jailors took him to the stake. He knelt, prayed, and was denied a confessor He forgave his enemies and standing on the pyre with his hands tied behind his back and with a chain around his neck and the stake, he uttered his last words, "God is my witness that I have never taught that of which I have by false witnesses been accused. In the truth of the Gospel which I have written, taught and preached, I will die today with gladness."

He died without there being a pope in session. Gregory XII was pope in Rome and Benedict XIII ruled in Avignon supported by French cardinals. A Council of Pisa consisting of a second group of cardinals "dismissed" both popes and elected Alexander V, who reigned in Avignon for less than a year. After he died, the Pisa Council promoted another antipope, John XXIII, who quit or was forced out on May 29, 1415.

After Gregory XII resigned on July 4, 1415, the Curia waited until he died on October 18, 1417 before it elected a successor. There was no pope during the interval except the outlawed Benedict XIII.

Luther not only sympathized with much of what Hus had preached, but he could also identify with the man who was caught at a time when the leadership of the Church was in total disarray.

Until 1517, Luther did not know what to think of Erasmus. He greatly admired him for his translation of the New Testament that he used many times in the preparation of his lectures. However, when he read the Moriae Encomium, he could not fully appreciate the razor sharp sarcasm, the finely-tuned satire with which Erasmus laid bare the excesses of the Church. His Germanic sense of humor was different from that of the British and Erasmus had added some of his Dutch wit, which only the Dutch could fully appreciate. Perhaps at age thirty, Martin was not far enough along in his development to understand the finer nuances of Erasmus's rhetoric. Other than a failed trip to Rome, he had not traveled and he had not met the likes of Thomas More and Robert Gaguin. Never before had he read how someone had exposed the excesses of the Church, of the clergy and of the nobles and had gotten away with it. The writings of Erasmus gave him food for thought.

In a March 1, 1517 letter to his dear friend Johann Lange, then the prior at Erfurt, Martin stated:

"I am at present reading our Erasmus, but my heart recoils more and more from him. One thing I admire is that he constantly and learnedly accuses not only the monks and the priests of a lazy, deep-rooted ignorance. Only I fear that he does not spread Christ and God's grace sufficiently, of which he knows little. I warn you not to read blindly what he writes."

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