Abstract
Terence Martin has composed a set of Erasmian meditations with a contemporary application. One meditation concerns the proper dialectical complexity, playful dissemblance and ironic character of truth telling, another meditation concerns the ‘insanity’ (p. 96) of war, and the final meditation concerns the appropriate role of pleasure in pursuit of the truly good life. As the key issues emerge in the second meditation on war, including the divine madness of Christ in his total commitment to peace and adamant promotion of concord, I focus a short review entirely on this issue, noting from the start that Terence Martin is a skilled and learned expositor, like his much admired model. My problem is my distinctly qualified admiration for Erasmus, especially his characterization of what is involved in the issues of war and peace.
If, like Martin, we take the contemporary application of Erasmus on war seriously we are obliged to say that his remarks about people ‘liking’ (p. 96) war and about the role of vicious elites in fomenting it have only limited contextual relevance. You cannot talk in generalized a-historical terms about war as natural or as unnatural and irrational. The properly relevant consideration here concerns the default position in human history based on honour codes, especially among warrior castes. As for Erasmus’s suggestion that the rest of nature is peaceable, that is sentimental moonshine.
Moreover, there are plenty of instances where bourgeois elites have been extremely reluctant to fight wars and actually made them more likely and more disastrous in their consequences. The issue is not the ‘meagre political advantages’ (p. 97) of fighting, which is usually true enough, but the permanent disadvantage of conceding that might can determine what is right. Erasmus is the early modern model of the almost pacifist intellectual, who in the last analysis, after much excoriation of every ghastly circumstance associated with war, actually admits that in some circumstances war is ‘sometimes permissible’ (pp. 109 and 151), given the alternatives, while also specifying impossible conditions.
This is where Erasmus’s account of the teaching of Christ is relevant. Erasmus presents Christ as the holy fool reversing the wisdom of the wise, suggesting (falsely, in my view) that the only alternative to this folly is to dismiss Christianity as just a story. Erasmus also seems to embrace a utilitarian calculus whereby holy folly is the optimum policy option. Principled objection to war is yoked to utilitarian calculations of the benefits of peace where you enjoy the benefits for yourself leaving third parties to suffer monstrous oppression. Clearly this bears on the right to resist oppression. Christian intellectuals are despised for their services to governments seeking legitimation in their determination to evade the biblical ‘challenge’ (p. 126) of peaceability when costly truth brings ‘not peace but a sword’. The question requires analysis of the emergence of a radical challenge to the honour code and how that challenge encounters the necessities of social and international order and the demands of justice, with an alternative vision.