Desiderius Erasmus · Philosophy
In 1524 Erasmus finally broke with Luther over the deepest question of all: does the human will contribute anything to salvation? His <em>On Free Will</em> defended a real, if small, human cooperation with grace; Luther’s ferocious reply, <em>On the Bondage of the Will</em>, insisted the will is wholly bound - and Erasmus refused the necessity Luther demanded.
For years Erasmus tried to stay out of the fight. He had criticized the Church’s corruptions as sharply as anyone, and he shared much of Luther’s hunger for reform; but he dreaded schism, distrusted Luther’s violence, and hoped to remain a scholar above the fray. Both sides pressed him: Rome wanted the most famous man in Europe to condemn the heretic, and Luther’s followers wanted him to declare for the Gospel. In 1524 he finally acted, and chose his ground with care. He would not argue about the pope, or indulgences, or the mass. He would engage Luther on the one issue he thought most fundamental and most dangerous in Luther’s teaching: the freedom of the will. His treatise De Libero Arbitrio - On Free Will - asked whether the human will contributes anything at all to our salvation, or whether, as Luther taught, we are entirely passive in the hands of God. On the answer hung the whole meaning of human responsibility.
Erasmus builds his case on three pillars. First, Scripture itself: the Bible is full of commands, exhortations, warnings, and rewards - ‘choose life,’ ‘if you are willing’ - which would be meaningless, even cruel, if human beings had no power whatever to respond. Why command what cannot possibly be done? Second, moral responsibility: if God alone moves the will and we contribute nothing, then it is God who effectively works both our good and our evil, which makes him the author of sin and turns human praise and blame into a farce. Third, and characteristically, reverent doubt: Erasmus argues that this question is genuinely obscure, that the greatest authorities have disagreed, and that on such a dark and difficult matter the wise and humble course is not dogmatic certainty but a modest, probable judgment that leaves the mystery intact. He would rather hold a careful, tentative view than force a hard doctrine that dishonours God and crushes the ordinary Christian’s sense that his striving matters.
Luther’s reply, De Servo Arbitrio - On the Bondage of the Will (1525) - is one of the fiercest and most powerful works of the Reformation, and he considered it among his best. His answer to Erasmus is absolute: the will, in the things of salvation, is not free but enslaved. Fallen human beings cannot, of themselves, will anything toward God; the will is like a beast of burden, ridden either by God or by Satan, and it does not get to choose its rider. Salvation is entirely God’s work, given by grace to those God chooses, and the human being contributes precisely nothing. Behind this stands Luther’s conviction of divine sovereignty: all things happen by God’s immutable will and foreknowledge, by necessity, though not (Luther insists) by external compulsion. To grant the will even a sliver of real freedom, Luther thought, is to steal glory from God and to leave the sinner trusting, fatally, in himself. Erasmus had wanted to preserve human responsibility; Luther was willing to sacrifice it entirely to preserve the absolute freedom and grace of God.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Erasmus’s De Libero Arbitrio (1524) defined free choice as a power to apply oneself to or turn from what leads to salvation, defending human cooperation with grace and the obscurity of the question; that Luther’s De Servo Arbitrio (1525) denied all such freedom; and that Erasmus rejected Luther’s dete…
Leads to Martin Luther.
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