The Colloquies of Erasmus:
A Moderate Voice in an Age of Religious Conflict

Stephanie Seery
Claremont Graduate University

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That is the purpose of studying the basic disciplines, of studying philosophy, of studying eloquence, to know Christ, to celebrate the glory of Christ.  This is the goal of all learning and eloquence.

- Erasmus, Ciceronianus[1]

The colloquies of Erasmus accomplish several things.  On a surface level, they are entertaining models for Latin scholars (and very funny in translation, too).  Second, and more importantly, they are vehicles for Erasmus’s humanist theology and for his moderate view of religious reform.  I would like to examine one of those colloquies in this paper.  It is called “A Pilgrimage for Religion’s Sake,” and it is a discussion between two friends about the journey one of them has made to several enormously popular shrines.  In my paper, I will look at the structure of this colloquy, the excesses Erasmus seeks to correct, the rhetorical strategy he uses, and the implications his work had for the Protestant Reformation.  The year this dialogue was printed, 1526, was a pivotal time of conflict between Erasmus and Luther.  Like much of Luther’s work, “Pilgrimage” mocks a variety of pietistic excesses.  However, it also offers the reader a via media between what Erasmus considered the obfuscation of medieval scholasticism and the superstition of popular piety on the one hand, and the schismatic views of the early reformers on the other.

I argue that this dialogue shows the difference between Erasmus’s views and those of reformers like Luther, who believed that revelation was the only source of grace.  Erasmus, by contrast, believes that the human mind is amenable to instruction, that church decoration and veneration can aid in that instruction, and that the worshiper can be led step by step towards a truer love of God.

At the beginning of “Pilgrimage,” we meet two friends, Menedemus and Ogygius.  They are discussing Ogygius’s pilgrimage to the wildly popular shrines of St. James of Compostella, Our Lady of Walsingham, and St. Thomas of Canterbury.  At the third shrine, Ogygius examines relics with another friend, Pullus.  Pullus was modeled on John Colet, an English bishop who, while loyal to Catholicism, was known for his criticism of the English church, particularly its clergy.  Colet actually accompanied Erasmus himself on pilgrimage,[2] and some of what Ogygius recounts can be seen as first-hand testimony.  Indeed, in an appendix to the 1526 edition of his colloquies, Erasmus criticizes both “those who with much ado have thrown all images out of the churches” and “those who are crazy about pilgrimages undertaken in the name of religion.”[3]  He claims that such trips might provide “spiritual benefit” to some pilgrims, but advises most people to “spend their time, money, and labor on other things more conducive to true godliness.”[4]  Erasmus seems to believe that most people are not able to understand the proper function of church decoration and pilgrimages; his colloquy will try to amend that ignorance.  While all three characters share some of Erasmus’s ideas, Ogygius functions most clearly as a mediating and a reformed figure.  At first, he appears to be a credulous worshiper.  But almost despite himself, he becomes a subtle critic of the abuses of pilgrimages, relics, devotional art and decoration.  The reader is implicitly encouraged to follow his lead.

The two friends first discuss Ogygius’s visit to St. James of Compostella.  Ogygius has returned bearing the weight of late-medieval religious excess on his own body:

MENEDEMUS:            … But what’s this fancy outfit?  You’re ringed with scallop shells, choked with tin and leaden images on every side, decked out with straw necklaces, and you’ve snake eggs on your arms.

OGYGIUS:            I’ve been on a visit to St. James of Compostella and, on my way back, to the famous Virgin-by-the-Sea, in England…

MEN.:              Out of curiosity, I dare say.

OGY.:              On the contrary, out of devotion (287-8).

. . . .

MEN.:              Tell me, how is the excellent James?

OGY.:              Much colder than usual.

MEN.:              Why?  Old age?

OGY.:              Joker!  You know saints don’t grow old.  But this newfangled notion that pervades the whole world results in his being greeted more seldom than usual.  And if people do come, they merely greet him; they make no offering at all, or only a very slight one, declaring it would be better to contribute that money to the poor.

MEN.:              A wicked notion! (288)

This exchange is an example of one type of early modern rhetoric, called place-theory, which actually overlaps the two disciplines of rhetoric and dialectic.  On the one hand, rhetoric “dealt in ways of finding, manipulating and expressing arguments in order to induce belief.”  On the other, “dialectic dealt in logically tenable relationships that ensure[d] conviction… Place-theory [was] a method of generating discourse by putting one’s initial theme through a recognized series of questions.”  Its aim was to promote moral judgment in the hearer or reader.[5]  In this exchange, we can see that Ogygius’s clownish figure represents the lengths to which some pilgrims go.  This is the initial theme.  Then Menedemus poses ironic questions to his friend, and they have an absurd discussion about the saint’s health and the decline in devotions to him, as if James were an attraction at a seedy amusement park.  Finally, the implied tone of Menedemus’s “A wicked notion!” plays against the meaning of the words.  Obviously, our author is saying, the true believer would prefer to give alms than to visit such a trap.

In this dialogue, Erasmus wants his reader to recognize and accept the dictates of logic.  He mocks the deluded believer’s faith in the power of relics and other religious objects.  Though Ogygius seems genuinely devout, he has fallen for a trick.  He wanted spiritual benefits; he gets seashells instead.  Yet he seems happy enough.  When Menedemus questions the worth of his vow to make a pilgrimage, he replies that he didn’t dare break it; the saint would have cursed him or his family.  “You know the ways of the mighty,” he tells his friend (ibid).  Here, his belief in the saint’s response is tempered by the ridiculous contrast between a statue that conveniently dispenses shells and the idea of James’s possible vengeance.[6] 

In this scenario, Ogygius’s piety becomes, of course, nothing more than idolatry.  But Erasmus also has something to say to those who have no respect for shrines.  These people have adopted “this newfangled notion that pervades the whole world” – the nascent Protestant Reformation.  Ogygius goes on to talk about the material effects of newfangled notions on the shrine.  He says, “So great an apostle, accustomed to shine from head to foot in gold and jewels, now stands a wooden figure with hardly a tallow candle to his name” (289).  Menedemus, as if speaking of some unfortunate mutual friends, replies, “If what I hear is true, there’s danger that other saints may come to the same pass” (ibid).  Erasmus’s colloquy stands at the crossroads between two worldviews:  one in which everyday objects can be hallowed by tradition, and the other, in which the power of the Word has begun to take precedence.

The clash between worldviews is even more obvious when the dialogue turns to Mariology.  Ogygius next tells his friend that he has a letter from the Virgin Mary herself.  In it, she thanks “Glaucoplutus,” a “follower of Luther,” for “busily persuading people that the invocation of saints is useless” (289).  “Glaucoplutus” is a Greek translation of “Ulrich,” Zwingli’s first name.[7]  In 1519, Zwingli had indeed preached in Zurich against the veneration of saints; later, in the early 1520s, he would supervise the removal of relics and images in local churches.[8]  In this passage, Erasmus again implies the need for moderation and maturity in faith.  On the one hand, he makes the Virgin say that she is exhausted by idiotic pleas for luck in gambling and in avoiding punishment for sin.  If she tells her supplicants to ask Jesus, they tell her, “He wills whatever you will,” since they think that Christ is “always a baby (because he is carved and painted as such at my bosom), still needing his mother’s consent” (289-290).  Therefore, Erasmus helps the reader to see that much intercession to the Virgin is a mockery, and sometimes is simply unnecessary.

Yet even though the Virgin tells Glaucoplutus that she is grateful not to be bothered so much, she also complains that as a result, she has no power.  Still, she refuses to go without a fight:  “But me, however defenseless, you shall not eject unless at the same time you eject my Son whom I hold in my arms” (291).  She warns Zwingli that her “mind is absolutely made up”; if he rejects her, he rejects Christ (ibid).  When Menedemus hears this, he says, “A dreadful, threatening letter indeed!  Glaucoplutus will take warning, I imagine.”  And Ogygius answers, “If he’s wise.”  This is not a cheap sneer at Zwingli, with whom Erasmus had had an amiable correspondence in the past.[9]  Instead, Erasmus notes that Zwingli’s reforms have made their way into common practice, and he applauds the eradication of superstition even as he emphasizes the Virgin’s importance.

However, not all of Mary’s shrines are empty of pilgrims.  Again attesting to the transitional nature of the times, Ogygius tells Menedemus that Walsingham, by contrast, has a Mary chapel “so dazzling… with jewels, gold and silver” that its main church is sadly neglected (292).  He explains that as “the cult spreads more widely, different things are displayed in different places.”  Menedemus adds, “In order, perhaps, that the giving may be more generous” (293).  Whether donations are given out of fear or a genuine desire to aid others is not explicitly stated.  Instead, Ogygius tells his friend that a number of pilgrims see the riches of Mary’s chapel as goods to be plundered.  Here, Erasmus draws a sly parallel between Walsingham’s two worship spaces and those who visit them.  The chapel is bejeweled and the central worship space is bare; pilgrims bestow gifts and thieves nab them.  The commodification of religion could easily provoke a reformer’s fury, but Erasmus leaves the reader to make the connection.

Just in case the reader misses the connection, however, Erasmus introduces a third character whose fury is more pointed.  Ogygius next tells Menedemus about the experience he had at the shrine of St. Thomas of Canterbury with his friend Pullus.  At Canterbury, Pullus rages against the commodification of relics.  Pullus, modeled on John Colet,[10] is a “learned and upright man,” who is shown a supposed relic of St. Thomas’s bloody arm.  He looks at the arm “with the bloodstained flesh still on it… [and shrinks] from kissing this, looking rather disgusted” (305).  Since he has gone on pilgrimage, no doubt Pullus has some affinity for traditional piety.  Still, he despises this morbid display.  He even asks one of the monks if St. Thomas wouldn’t be happier if the riches displayed at his shrine were given to the poor (307).  Ogygius, calling his friend “impulsive” and “one who liked to joke,” agrees with the gist of his words but advises moderation.  He takes his own advice, too, avoiding conflict by handing the monk some money (ibid). 

But Menedemus agrees with Pullus and wonders how to justify any relics or, indeed, church decoration, “when meanwhile our brothers and sisters, Christ’s living temples, waste away from hunger and thirst” (307).  Ogygius, perhaps taking Erasmus’s view, counters that better churches should be ornate than “bare and dirty, as some are, and more like stables than churches” (307).  His reason is not idolatrous, as some reformers might think; instead, he justifies church decoration for two reasons.

First, if the money spent on decoration were diverted from the church, the wealthy would gamble it away or use it for warfare.  And what the rulers of the land do, the common people emulate; therefore, no one would give money for decoration at all (ibid).  I think that this cynical note is an authorial aside, spoken with some bitterness.  It rings with truth in a time when religious strife often led to civil war.  Erasmus tries to persuade the reader that the desire to denude churches of their finery did not always stem from pious or enlightened motives.

Second, Ogygius also represents the moderate reformer’s view that churches, as sacred spaces, should be decorated as befits their role.  Even the real Colet, who died long before the height of the iconoclastic trend in England, believed that the trappings of religion could aid the worshiper if understood rightly.  For instance, incense, like the proper veneration of saints, was a symbol of God’s grace in worship, because “the attraction of the fragrance… draws the faithful upwards to the heavenly throne.”  Images and objects point to the divine, and all of creation is at one in the sacred space.[11]

Just as Erasmus accompanied Colet on pilgrimage in real life, Erasmus the teacher accompanies the reader on a pilgrimage towards heaven.  This inward pilgrimage involves sympathy for each character’s perspective.  Menedemus stays at home (the meaning of his name in Latin), occupies himself with domestic matters, and trusts in the teachings of Scripture, not in the intercession of the saints.  Pullus shrinks away from the repulsive relics the monks foist on him – bloody bones, bits of filthy cloth, and old shoes.  But perhaps the reader understands Ogygius most clearly.  Beneath the excess of the shrines, he sees the goodness that sustains the community, especially the poor.  In response to his friends’ anger and skepticism, he says, “This piece of shoe supports a house of poor men” (311).  For him, the relics are valid as signs of earthly good, because the veneration of saints can lead to charity and because common values are preserved.

Ogygius is probably not a mirror image of Erasmus the writer.  Instead, he is the average, educated, late-medieval worshiper whom Erasmus wants to persuade.  He is devout, but not unquestioning.  He is at least willing to accept the possibility of miracles but is grounded in the commonplace and the apparent.  His criticism of the veneration of saints is always indirect, and his Everyman status and his reaction to his friends help Erasmus slip in his more radical views without resorting to direct polemic.[12]  Though more susceptible than his creator, Ogygius, like Erasmus, wants peace and harmony among believers.[13]

What is the significance of this colloquy for the Protestant Reformation?  I would argue that it represents the middle road not taken.  In the decades after this colloquy was printed, churches would indeed by stripped of their fixtures.  New excesses would replace the excesses that Erasmus and Colet wanted to correct, until few of the signs of the old religion would remain.  For example, Eamon Duffy discusses England’s early years of reform as exhibiting “the necessity of destroying, of cutting, hammering, scraping or melting into a deserved oblivion the monuments of popery.”[14]  Worshipers were compelled to refocus their piety on Scripture, in which Christ, the only valid sign of God’s grace, was revealed.

We can also see the progress of reform in the works of Martin Luther, with whom Erasmus had a sometimes contentious relationship.  In 1521, before the Diet of Worms, Luther wrote a tract defending reasoned veneration of Mary and the saints.  This early work, Commentary on Magnificat, sounds in many places like our colloquy.  In fact, Erasmus may have been influenced by such passages as

…the world is captive to a dreadful abuse – the sale and distribution of good works…[The Virgin} takes it amiss that…vain chatterers preach and write so many things about her merits…they spoil Magnificat, make the Mother of God a liar, and diminish the grace of God.[15]

However, by 1546, perhaps chagrined by continued, unreflective and materialist piety, Luther came to scorn Marian adoration and its focus on Christ: 

So you have the picture of God as angry and Christ as judge; Mary shows to Christ her breast, and Christ His wounds to the wrathful Father.  That’s the kind of thing this comely bride, the wisdom of reason, cooks up:  Mary is the Mother of Christ, surely Christ will listen to her…[16]

These words also sound very Erasmian.  The major difference between the two, however, was that Erasmus, unlike Luther, maintained the authority of the papacy and church teaching and defended them (if under duress) against Luther himself.

In fact, “A Pilgrimage for Religion’s Sake” was published a year after Luther’s On the Bondage of the Will, which appeared in December 1525.  This document was itself a response to Erasmus’s reluctant defense of the Church, On the Freedom of the Will, published in September 1524.  It is clear that in 1526, Erasmus the apologist continues to maintain that the human will is amenable to instruction.  Luther, on the other hand, championed revelation as the only source of right knowledge.[17] 

As Erasmus said more directly in another, more formal treatise, the soul must be brought from earthly things toward the divine; it “must never come to a standstill anywhere in temporary gratifications, but… [must] ascend… step by step… to the love of the spiritual.”[18]  Insofar as objects, or even theology itself, draw us toward the love of God, they are good.  When they remain ends in themselves, however, they are worse than useless.

Erasmus may have foreseen that the more subtle points of his moderate criticism of saint- and relic-veneration would be lost in the overwhelming iconoclasm and schisms of the future.  Also doomed were his attempts at promoting a consensus through dialogue within the Roman Church.  Shortly after the 1526 edition of the Colloquies, a Dominican who saw Erasmus as a heretic published a forgery of the book in Paris and suppressed much of it.  Erasmus complained that the suppressed parts included passages dealing with the very topics he treats in our document.[19]

Though Erasmus may have influenced late-medieval theologians to focus more on Scripture and less on the material aspects of piety,[20] his satirical treatment of the abuses of the Church was less pointed—and less effective—than Luther’s exhortations on the grace of Christ as the only means to salvation.  Moreover, Luther’s theological beliefs destroyed what Margaret Aston has called “the delicate, easily-altered balance between the scholarly and the evangelical.”  Erasmus himself said sadly that “Luther attributes very little importance to scholarship, and most of all to the spirit.”  Erasmus thought that revelation untempered by reason would only lead to conflict.[21]  In Luther’s case, he was not so far wrong.  Nevertheless, Erasmus’s colloquy is significant not only as a historical document, but also as a careful, subtle attempt to teach through the folly of institutions and persons, to restore order through increased knowledge, and to bestow piety upon its rightful object.

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