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He first took up the cudgels against the obscurantists on behalf of Humanism as represented by Erasmus and Reuchlin, the latter of whom he bravely defended in his dispute with the Inquisition and the monks of Cologne, and in his contributions to the Epistolæ Obscurorum Virorum we see the youthful ardour of the Renaissance in full blast in its onslaught on the forces of mediæval obstruction.
His heart, he said, was so full of this matter that his tongue could not find utterance. Still, the bold satire with which his former college friend Crotus and other Humanists lashed their opponents and held them up to ridicule, as in the famous 'Epistolae Virorum Obscurorum, was not to Luther's taste at all. The matter was to him far too serious for such treatment.
With nothing like the satiric humor of the "Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum," it appeals to a much larger circle of readers. We are very glad to meet it again in so handsome a dress, and with such really clever illustrations. It is just the book for a Christmas gift. Reynard the Fox, after the German Version of Goethe. By THOMAS JAMES ARNOLD, Esq.
Their philosophy was founded on Aristotle; and while they were proud of their master, they were prouder still of the system they had created in his name: and thus they felt no impulse to look backwards to the past. Cf. F.G. Stokes, Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum, 1909, p. xvii. In the matter of language they had been led by a spirit of reaction.
This increase of glory manifested itself in different ways. Almost every year the rumour of his death was spread abroad, malignantly, as he himself thinks. Again, all sorts of writings were ascribed to him in which he had no share whatever, amongst others the Epistolae obscurorum virorum. But, above all, his correspondence increased immensely.
But we have nothing like the famous Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum, which are the very triumph of the style. See the extensive classification of the Greeks, as noticed and reproduced before. The "Letter to Sir W. Windham" of the one and the "Letter to a noble Lord" of the other, have ample justification. Letters on a Regicide Peace, great as they are in themselves, have less claim to their title.
At present war was being waged in a much wider field: for or against Reuchlin, the great Hebrew scholar, for whom the authors of the Epistolae obscurorum virorum had so sensationally taken up the cudgels. At Louvain Erasmus was regarded with the same suspicion with which he distrusted Dorp and the other Louvain divines.
The appearance of the Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum in 1515 exposed the scholastic teachers and their allies in the Church to such widespread ridicule that it is not easy for us now to realize the position which those dignitaries still held when Erasmus was young.
He, who in the 'Epistolae Virorum Obscurorum, had failed to exhibit in his satire the solemn earnestness which recommended itself to Luther's taste and judgment, now openly declared his concurrence with Luther's fundamental ideas of religion and theology, and his high appreciation of Scripture and of the Scriptural doctrine of salvation.
If you undertake to paraphrase what he says, and to reduce it to words of one syllable for infant minds, you will make as sad work of it as the good monk with his analysis of Homer in the "Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum." We look upon him as one of the few men of genius whom our age has produced, and there needs no better proof of it than his masculine faculty of fecundating other minds.
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