Zweig, Erasmus of Rotterdam leowong.micro.blog

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As soon as I arrive, I deal blows with my cudgel. —Martin Luther, quoted, ibid.

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Erasmus, as Christian and as humanist, could not conceive of a combative Christ or a fighting God. —Zweig, ibid.

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Human affairs mean more to him than divine things, —Luther on Erasmus, quoted, ibid.

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Erasmus laid the egg and Luther hatched it. —saying from the time, ibid.

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Erasmus took on a duty of historical significance, a duty which, it must be confessed, exceeded his capacity: alone, amid the multitudinous exacerbations of the day, he set himself the task of incorporating the spirit of unclouded reason, to defend the unity of Europe, the unity of the Church, the unity of mankind, and the world-citizenship of humanity with the pen as his only weapon, and thus to protect all he loved against decay and annihilation. —Zweig, ibid.

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To the popes of the Medici family, art was greater and more enduring and a hundredfold more important than a pettifogging dispute among churchmen in an obscure town in the province of Saxony; and precisely because the reigning pope [Leo X] was a man of wide vision, he failed to see the significance of the gesticulating little monk who was busily undermining the papal realm. —Zweig, ibid.

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The absent are always wrong. —Zweig, ibid.

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Because in this dread hour Erasmus did not put his weight into the scale on the side of reform, did not, with the whole force of his personality, his powers, and his presence, influence the assembly, because he failed in this moment of utmost need, his own cause was lost for ever. Luther, however, fought his fight with the utmost courage and with unstinted strength; he put his whole heart into the defence: therefore was his will transformed into action. —Zweig, ibid.

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The problem selected by Erasmus as the basis of discussion [with Luther] has been a bone of contention among theologians down the ages: the question of the freedom or the non-freedom of the human will. —Zweig, ibid.

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. . . Volition

Is naught but willing what we have to will.

—Goethe, quoted, ibid.

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I, Martin Luther, have slain all the peasants who died during this rebellion, for I goaded authority to the slaughter. Their blood be on my head. Ibid.

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I intend to kill Satan [Erasmus] with my pen. Just as I slew Münzer, whose blood is on my head. —Luther, quoted, ibid.

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But even in his rages and precisely when his blood was at boiling-point, Luther, as artist and man of genius, was never false to the German language [in De servo arbitrio]. —Zweig, ibid.

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This war is our Lord God’s war. He has unchained it, and never will it cease raging until all the enemies of His word have been wiped from the face of the earth. —Luther, quoted, ibid.

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He who crushes Erasmus cracks a bug which stinks even worse when dead than when alive. —Luther, quoted, ibid.

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Erasmus was sixty years of age; he was weary and worn out. —Zweig, ibid.

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Increasingly disappointed, Erasmus withdrew from a world estranged, a world which refused to keep the peace, a world which had slain reason by means of passion, and justice by means of violence. —Zweig, ibid.

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These words ‘Evangel,’ ‘God’s truth,’ ‘faith,’ ‘Christ,’ ‘spirit,’ are perpetually spilling from their mouths, and yet I see many of them so conducting themselves as if they were possessed of the devil. —Erasmus, quoted, ibid.

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We respect the authority of the pope and the Church so long as the pope of Rome refrains from casting us out. —Melanchthon, quoted, ibid.

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What had happened at the Diet of Worms happened again now [at the Diet of Augsburg, 1530]. Erasmus failed to put in an appearance. —Zweig, ibid.

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Thomas Münzer was done to death with tortures which even the heathen or the Chinese could not have made more horrible. —Zweig, ibid.

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The Erasmic idea was dead....No one needed him; no one asked his opinion, no one hung upon his words... But lo, like a belated swallow, someone came knocking at his window already frosted by the cold of approaching winter. A message flew in to greet him with reverence and love. “Everything that I do, all that I am, I owe to you; and, were I to fail in acknowledging my debt, I should prove the most ungrateful man alive. Salve itaque etiam atque etiam, pater amantissime, pater desusque patriæ, literarum assertor, veritatis propugnator invictissime.” (Greeting and yet again greeting, dearest father and honour of the land which gave you birth, champion of the arts, invincible fighter for truth.) The name of the man who wrote these words, and one which was destined to outshine even the name of Erasmus, was Rabelais. —Zweig, ibid.

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He who had always spoken Latin and thought and written in Latin, suddenly forgot that tongue, and, with the primitive fear of the animal upon him, he stammered out the words he had learned in earliest childhood, “lieve God” – the first words and the last words Erasmus ever spoke were in the Teutonic vernacular. —Zweig, ibid.