Quote of the Day (Desiderius Erasmus, on ‘Conniving at Your Friends' Vices’)

“Conniving at your friends' vices, passing them over, being blind to them and deceived by them, even loving and admiring your friends' egregious faults as if they were virtues—does not this seem pretty close to folly?”— Dutch monk and Renaissance scholar Desiderius Erasmus (1469-1536), In Praise of Folly (1509)

It also seems pretty close to complicity in an emerging American autocracy.

Quote of the Day (Desiderius Erasmus, on the ‘Incredible Delight’ Fools Take in Statements)

“A remarkable thing happens in the experience of my fools: from them not only true things, but even sharp reproaches, will be listened to; so that a statement which, if it came from a wise man's mouth, might be a capital offense, coming from a fool gives rise to incredible delight. Veracity, you know, has a certain authentic power of giving pleasure, if nothing offensive goes with it; but this the gods have granted only to fools.” — Dutch monk and scholar Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam (1469-1536), In Praise of Folly (1509)

Quote of the Day (Erasmus, on Leaders, Flatterers and the Truth)

“Yet in the midst of all their prosperity, princes in this respect seem to me most unfortunate, because, having no one to tell them truth, they are forced to receive flatterers for friends.” — Dutch monk and scholar Desiderius Erasmus (1469-1536), In Praise of Folly (1509)

Quote of the Day (Erasmus, on ‘The Charity of a Christian Man’)

“The charity of a Christian man knoweth no property: let him love good men in Christ, evil men for Christ’s sake, which so loved us first when we were yet his enemies, that he bestowed himself on us altogether for our redemption: let him embrace the one because they be good: the other nevertheless to make them good: he shall hate no man at all, no more verily than a faithful physician hateth a sick man: let him be an enemy only unto vices: the greater the disease is, the greater cure will pure charity put thereto: he is an adulterer, he hath committed sacrilege, he is a Turk: let a Christian man defy the adulterer, not the man: He must defy and abhor the vices, but not the man. Let him despise the committer of sacrilege, not the man: let him kill the Turk, not the man: let him find the means that the evil man perish such as he hath made himself to be, but let the man be saved whom God made: let him will well, wish well, and do well, to all men unfeignedly: neither hurt them which have deserved it, but do good to them which have not deserved it; let him be glad of all men’s commodities as well as of his own, and also be sorry for all men’s harms none otherwise than for his own. For verily this is that which the apostle commandeth: to weep with them that weep, to joy with them that joy, yea let him rather take another man’s harm grievouser than his own: and of his brother’s wealth be gladder than of his own. It is not a Christian man’s part to think on this wise: what have I to do with this fellow, I know not whether he be black or white, he is unknown to me, he is a stranger to me, he never did aught for me, he hath hurt me sometime, but did me never good. Think none of these things: remember only for what deserving can those things which Christ hath done for thee, which would his kindness done to thee, should be recompensed, not in himself, but in thy neighbour.”— Dutch Renaissance humanist, Catholic priest, social critic, teacher, and theologian Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466-1536), The Manual of a Christian Knight (1501)

Quote of the Day (Erasmus, Lamenting “This Marvelous Corrupt World”)

“Who being a good man in deed, doth not see and lament this marvelous corrupt world? When was there ever more tyranny? When did avarice reign more largely and less punished? When were ceremonies at any time more in estimation? When did our iniquity so largely flow with more liberty? When was ever charity so cold? What is brought, what is read, what is decreed or determined but it tasteth and savoureth of ambition and lucre?”—Erasmus of Rotterdam, The Manual of a Christian Knight (1501)

Quote of the Day (Erasmus of Rotterdam, on Where to Find God)

“Vocatus atque non vocatus, deus aderit” (Latin for “Bidden or unbidden, God is present.”)—Erasmus of Rotterdam, popularized by the psychologist Carl Jung

My pastor referred to this quote in a sermon last week, and a friend of mine who happens to be a priest subsequently told me he keeps it on a sign in his own room. Jung put the Latin inscription on the door of his house and upon his tomb.

Quote of the Day (Lord Mountjoy to Erasmus, on New Hopes for a New Head of State)

“I have no fear but when you heard that our Prince, now Henry the Eighth, whom we may call our Octavius, had succeeded to his father's throne, all your melancholy left you at once. What may you not promise yourself from a Prince with whose extraordinary and almost Divine character you are acquainted? When you know what a hero he now shows himself, how wisely he behaves, what a lover he is of justice and goodness, what affection he bears to the learned I will venture to swear that you will need no wings to make you fly to behold this new and auspicious star. Oh, my Erasmus, if you could see how all the world here is rejoicing in the possession of so great a prince, how his life is all their desire, you could not contain your tears for joy."-- Lord Mountjoy, in a letter to Desiderius Erasmus, May 27, 1509 on promising young English monarch Henry VIII, quoted in Robert Lacey, The Life and Times of Henry VIII (1972)

Well, I guess we all know how that one turned out, don’t we?

Henry VIII (pictured here at the time of his accession to the throne, well before he became the bloated, gout-ridden, perhaps syphilitic-ridden fellow we know today), looked like he’d be such an improvement over those who came immediately before him: his skinflint of a father, Henry VII, and Richard III, the murderous tyrant (I don’t buy the revisionist theory that poor Richard was the victim of Thomas More’s Tudor propaganda) that his father overthrew.

I could go on, offering chapter and verse on how the teenage Henry turned out—but then again, I already have. In any case, Mark Twain, the great enemy of royalty, put it far better than I (or, indeed, anyone else) ever could, in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: “My, you ought to seen old Henry the Eight when he was in bloom. He was a blossom. He used to marry a new wife every day, and chop off her head next morning. And he would do it just as indifferent as if he was ordering up eggs.”

(Okay, young Huck got a little confused after this—describing the Duke of Wellington, for instance, as Henry’s father—but, as we all know from our English classes, his heart was in the right place, which is more than you can say for Henry.)

This Day in Religious History (“Warrior Pope” Julius II Gets Tough With Venice)

April 27, 1509—Summoning the wrath that earned him the sobriquet pontefice terribile, Pope Julius II struck back at the rulers of Venice by putting the entire city-state under an interdict. Thus, all God-fearing members of this center of commerce and culture—whose leaders had recently crossed the Vatican—found themselves under a solemn ecclesiastical edict cutting them off from the sacraments.

Nowadays, we know Julius best through his association with two transcendent artists whose unfortunate lot was to be rivals for his patronage. Raphael painted the pope’s upstairs rooms in the Vatican palace, then did Julius’ portrait—the image accompanying this post.

You’d never know, scrutinizing this image without any knowledge of the subject, that Julius was positively feared—maybe even more than longtime executive editor Abe Rosenthal was in the New York Times newsroom! If anything, the pope’s portrait reminds me of King Lear at the end of his rope—and, indeed, at the time of his sitting Julius had survived one life-threatening illness and was a year away from succumbing to another.

Julius was pretty much what you’d expect in a Renaissance pope:

* Promiscuous—he’d fathered three daughters out of wedlock by the time he became pope in his early 60s, and he gave away one in marriage during his reign.
* Corrupt—he’d resorted to bribery to play kingmaker (or, in this case, pope-maker) for Cardinal Ciba (i.e., Innocent III), then used the same skullduggery to secure his own election 19 years later.
* Cultured—though best known for commissioning the basilica of St. Peter, the ceiling in the Sistine Chapel, and Michelangelo’s Moses for his own tomb, Julius also issued in 1512 a papal bull establishing the Capella Julia for the study of music and the chant.

Besides Raphael, the other artist most strongly associated with Julius is, of course, Michelangelo. I suspect that, like me, at least some of you have an image of him drawn from Irving Stone’s The Agony and the Ecstasy. In the 1965 film adaptation, one scene lingers, more than 35 years later, in my memory, of Rex Harrison as the pope, raising his voice to Michelangelo (Charlton Heston, naturally) on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, demanding: “When will you make an end?”

“When I am finished!” comes the reply, the eternal cry of the perfectionist artist.

Harrison’s casting in the role was doubtless a function of box-office clout—after all, he’d only just won the Oscar for My Fair Lady. But Hollywood execs could not have asked for anyone better suited to this role, because “Sexy Rexy” (he was, like Henry VIII, married six times) was the sole shining light of the 1963 film that launched a thousand Tinseltown nervous breakdowns, Cleopatra.

The cynical wit of Harrison’s Julius Caesar in the 20th-Century Fox debacle represented a thin veneer for a character born to dominate. A life in the theater had prepared the actor exceptionally well for this (particularly so when he scared ingénue co-star and musical newcomer Julie Andrews practically out of her wits before the Broadway opening of My Fair Lady).

How does Julius Caesar relate to Julius II, besides the superficial matter of that first name? Go back to the beard in the Raphael painting. Julius II wore it as a tribute to the destroyer of the Roman Republic, who had gone hirsute as a pledge against his enemies in the field, the Gauls.

If possible, Julius II had even more enemies than Caesar: the French, successors to the Gauls as a troubling presence to the north, but also the Turks and the Bolognese. You can imagine this pope as a chieftain, a commander, even a Carnegie-style captain of industry with his disdain for the hoi polloi, support of culture, and demand for results right now. But you can’t possibly envision him as a successor to St. Peter, the fisherman all too aware of his own frailty even as he became the rock on which the Church was built.

One person who definitely couldn’t see Julius as successor to Peter was Erasmus of Rotterdam. In 1517, four years after Julius had died, the humanist scholar satirized the first pope meeting his most recent deceased successor in Julius exclusus e coelis.

In it, St. Peter, standing at the pearly gates, inquires of Julius what he has done to merit entrance. The reply becomes the occasion for a ferocious (and, conveniently for the author, anonymously published) attack in which the late pontiff is blamed for an entire catalogue of sins—not just simony and sorcery, but also—especially telling for the pacifist humanist—the fact that Julius “kept great armies in the field,” leaving a trail of blood across Italy.

General Sherman had nothing on Julius. In a suit of gleaming silver armor, the pontiff led armies into battle himself, and would leave even cardinals shaking in their boots when they quailed at following his path through snowdrifts that reached as high as their chests--even when they were mounted.

Before assuming the papacy, Julius had been regarded as a good friend of Venice. But before long, by taking various places in the Romagna—territory that belonged in those days to the papacy—by filling various religious offices without input from the pope, and by subjecting clergy to a secular tribunal rather than ecclesiastical courts, leaders of the watery city-state pushed the pope into cooperating with Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I and King Louis XII of France in the League of Cambrai.

Julius was not at all happy about this alliance—he was a kind of clerical but undemocratic Garibaldi, hoping to unite Italy by driving out hated foreigners such as the French—but he’d do what he felt he had to in order to protect papal prerogatives.

I’m not going to bore you with the multiple switches in diplomatic and military policy that ensued at the papal court during these years—they gave me whiplash just trying to follow it all. Instead, I’ll leave it to John Julius Norwich, summing things up with typical effortless elegance in A History of Venice:

“In scarcely more than four years, the three principal protagonists in the war of the League of Cambria had gone through every possible permutation in the pattern of alliances. First France and the Papacy were allied against Venice, then Venice and the Papacy ranged themselves against France; now Venice and France combined against the Papacy—and, indeed, all comers….Alliances were matters, above all, of tactical convenience; when they no longer served a useful purpose they were broken off and new, more promising ones formed in their place….Ultimately, always, there was only one rule to be followed: that of each man for himself.”

Then as now, armies cost money. Amazingly, Julius left the papal coffers full at the time of his death—but, as a product of the curial culture of the time, he’d perpetuated a cycle of spending, then looking for any ready means to pay for his high art and low wars.

His successor, Leo X, was such a spendthrift that he hired Dominican friar Johannes Tetzel to sell indulgences to raise funds for Julius’ pet project, an entirely rebuilt St. Peter’s Basilica. That sale sparked Martin Luther’s wrath.

The consequences of that righteous anger were spelled out in a sermon I heard some years ago in my parish. An English Jesuit was escorting some friends through the Sistine Chapel. Gaping at the ceiling, they inquired how much the magnificent images had cost.

“Half of Europe,” the priest answered drily.