Leadership – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

I've long wondered about what kind of leader I want to be. This week a coalescing of those ponderings. — Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane

I’ve long wondered about what kind of leader I want to be. This week a coalescing of those ponderings.

Leadership is one of the great qualities which we yearn for today, particularly in this country agreement among our leaders on the same basic principles of democracy and integrity. We seek the same fundamental truths even while truth is far more diffuse a concept than ever before. To take the first step towards this restoration we need to begin talking to each other again and really work towards rebuilding our mutual understanding of who we are and what we want out of our Union.

Throughout my life I’ve looked up to certain types of leaders: a citizen like Abraham Lincoln, a unifier like Eleanor Roosevelt, and a servant like Pope Francis. Each of these figures took their own stands in their own circumstances of time and place and worked to their own ends, and in some respects they were successful. 

I’ve been humbled to serve as a leader at varying moments and in several capacities and my own efforts are often rewarded by how I can connect with the people around me. I make a point of working with people, of listening to their ideas and trying to incorporate them into something all of us working together can be proud of.

Today then, I want to present to you a paper that I wrote at the end of my time as a Master’s Student at the University of Missouri-Kansas City in November and December of 2018. I presented this paper “Erasmus’s Enchiridion militis Christiani and the Humanist Knight in early-sixteenth-century England” at the American Catholic Historical Association’s 2019 annual meeting, co-current with the American Historical Association conference at the old Stevens Hotel, now the Hilton, on South Michigan Avenue in Chicago on Friday, 4 January 2019. I hope this offers two visions of leadership from the Renaissance, one rooted in Erasmus’s Christian Humanism which hearkens towards the social justice-rooted morality of my own Catholicism, and from the realpolitik of Niccolò Machiavelli in his timeless book The Prince.

Erasmus’s Enchirdion militis Christiani (The Handbook of the Christian Knight) was one of the most popular books of its day in Western and Central Europe; translated into eight languages between 1519 and 1542. Its most popular and widely disseminated edition was that published by Johann Froben in Basel in 1518. The Enchiridion‘s enduring popularity throughout the first half of the sixteenth century is a testament to its relevance at a time when Europe was witnessing tremendous social and religious upheaval through the Reformations of Luther, Calvin, and Henry VIII. The Enchiridion was intended to be a guide for Europe’s many princes, kings, and lesser lords on how to be good moral rulers, how to be “soldiers of Christ” as the title states. Through this role as a guide for good governance, the Enchiridion can be seen as a Christian Humanist equivalent to Machiavelli’s The Prince as a guide in Renaissance political philosophy. In considering the Enchiridion‘s role as a book of political philosophy, this study will consider both the 1518 Froben edition^[1], and the 1523 Alnwick manuscript^[2], the earliest known English translation of the Enchiridion, from which all quotes derive.

Originally written in 1502, the Enchiridion was said to be inspired by an unpleasant evening that Erasmus experienced in the castle of a knight recorded as “John the German.”^[3] The knight’s wife begged Erasmus to write a treatise offering her husband guidance on better manners, thus resulting in the Enchiridion.^[4] While the Enchiridion was first published in 1503 by Maartens in Antwerp^[5] it did not achieve widespread fame until its first publication by Froben in 1515.^[6] The Enchiridion‘s philosophical inspirations come from a number of different sources, both Biblical and Classical, from Moses, Solomon, and David to Julius Caesar and his nephew Augustus to the heroes of the Iliad and the Aeneid. While this work takes great influence from Platonic philosophy, it nevertheless bathes Platonism in a deep bath of Christian theology before allowing it to enter into the main work.

As a work of Christian Humanism, the Enchiridion contains a thorough retelling of the many morality stories found in the Bible. It appears, through the wording of the Biblical quotes in Froben’s Latin edition, that Erasmus used his own revised translation of the New Testament throughout the Enchiridion, which had been published by Froben in its most widely read form in 1516.^[7] Nevertheless, Erasmus draws just as heavily from the Old Testament, looking at Moses, David, and Solomon as good and worthy models for the Christian knight of his day. For Erasmus, a Christian ruler should follow closely the teachings of the Church and its Old Testament forbearers. Countering Machiavelli’s view that the two safest manners for a prince to control a population is to either “destroy them or reside there,”^[8] Erasmus argued that it is a “grete obomynation … if a man forsake his fynge or theiss lorde [Christ].”^[9] For Erasmus, temporal power was secondary to spiritual wellbeing, arguing later in the same chapter of the Enchiridion that the death of the soul is far more consequential than the death of the body, as the death of the soul “is extreme misery,”^[10] even greater than bodily death. The key difference here is that Machiavelli wrote as a politician, while Erasmus set his words to paper as a theologian. 

The disparity between the political realities of early sixteenth century Italy and the theological expectations on morality at the same time are stark. Erasmus’s chief concern is the wellbeing of the soul, while Machiavelli’s is the accumulation of power and its subsequent preservation. Erasmus’s knight is a moralist, while Machiavelli’s prince is a pragmatist. Yet where Machiavelli’s vision of rulership is often shown as a testament to the various leaders in Italy during the Italian Wars, Erasmus’s shows the theological ideal of a Christian Humanist ruler, akin in character to Plato’s philosopher kings who should rule in a conjunction between “political power and philosophical intelligence.”^[11] Both Erasmus and Machiavelli reference Moses as fine examples of leadership, the former spending the first chapter of his Enchiridion discussing Moses’s role as leader of the Hebrews and his loyalty to God’s will and light^[12], while Machiavelli names Moses alongside Cyrus, Romulus, and Theseus as “the most excellent”^[13] of princes. While Machiavelli considered striking Moses from this list because he was “a mere executor of things, that were made ordained by God,”^[14] and thus less a prince in his own right and more a vassal for a Higher Power, he nevertheless respected Moses’s leadership of the Hebrews and saw him as an equal to Cyrus, Romulus, and Theseus through his deliverance of the Hebrews out of slavery.^[15]

Erasmus’s Enchiridion makes great use of Platonic philosophy, referring back to the Athenian academic’s teachings time and again in his work. Erasmus noted in the fifth chapter of his Enchiridion, entitled “Off the dyusitue of affeccions” that Plato and the later Stoics both saw  “philosophy to be nothing else but a remembrance of Deth.”^[16] Interestingly, in Froben’s 1518 Latin edition this line reads, “with nothing else [Plato] thinks Philosophy however to be a meditation of death.”^[17] The differences in meaning between the words remembrance and meditation is striking. While they are synonyms, the former appears to have changed in meaning over the centuries, becoming today a manner of meditation about a person or event that takes place only after that person has died, while a meditation can happen when they are still living. For the translator of the Alnwick Manuscript, this difference does not appear to have been as profound, and by and large it would appear that, at least in that translator’s eyes, remembrance and meditation are a good pair of cognates. 

Machiavelli’s text looks at death as an inevitability and in many cases a means to an end, especially for men who “forget more quickly the death of the father than the loss of their inheritance.”^[18] In Machiavelli’s view, while the living may mourn the dead, they celebrate in the riches left behind by the deceased and seek to improve their own fortunes off of the demise of their fathers. Machiavelli accepts that this degree of swift respect for the dead is tantamount to theft, yet he dismisses any degree of moral ambiguity by noting how common and easy the practice can be, writing, “it is always easy to find cause to take away property,” and “anyone who lives by theft will always find reasons to occupy the things of others.”^[19] For Erasmus, death is a moment of great spiritual significance, one to be taken seriously in securing the sanctity of one’s soul; yet for Machiavelli, death is a moment of great personal significance, one to be taken seriously in securing one’s fortune and power from the deceased, whether they be one’s father or another.

If philosophy is merely a meditation on death, as Erasmus argued, then what is life but a march towards that inevitable fate and, if one is fortuitous enough, Heaven, which “is promysed to hym that fighteth swftely.”^[20]The Humanist Knight, therefore, should strive to fight their battles with speed, and in doing so keeps in mind the prospect of eternal life in Heaven, and end the suffering of those whom they are fighting sooner. Fighting should only be a last resort, as the Humanist Knight should consider their moral and spiritual wellbeing before taking up arms against another. The promise of Heavenly reward drives the Humanist Knight, sending them into their world with the purpose of ensuring their own moral wellbeing and salvation. One’s soul should be “refresshed with manna from heven and with water that kame oute of the harde Rock,”^[21] consuming the heavenly donation and fortifying oneself so that “neither strength neither hie / nor lowe : nor no other Creature shall seperat us from the love of god which is Christ [Jesus].”^[22] In this sense, Erasmus argued that the rewards of mortal riches and conquests should not come before the spiritual rewards awaiting the Humanist Knight, faithful to Christ, in Heaven.

In contrast, Machiavelli argued in favor of prolonged war, if only to secure a prince’s authority over their own people and supremacy over their adversaries. A prolonged war, according to Machiavelli, is sometimes necessary to secure the authority of the prince against threats both foreign and domestic, and while one might lose some territory, or even some cities, as in the case of Philip V of Macedon, yet the loss of a few cities ranks lower as a threat to the stability and security of a prince’s power.^[23] For Machiavelli, Philip V was a strong leader because he acted when others would have passively watched as events unfolded in front of them. He stands as a good example of the Machiavellian prince, as he was willing to make sacrifices of his cities and territories, their populations included, in order to preserve his power. In contrast, for Machiavelli a bad prince is one who loses “their principalities after so many years of rulership not because of fortune but because of their own sloth.”^[24] The Machiavellian prince is an active ruler, directing their supporters on the ground with a tenacity that is matched in the Humanist Knight by the latter’s desire to ensure the purity of their soul, despite the devilish business of the titular Enchiridion, not only a handbook but also a hand dagger.

Both the Machiavellian Prince and the Humanist Knight have agency, the chief difference is in how they use it. For the Prince, their agency is best utilized through the fortifying of oneself and one’s possessions to weather any future assaults or other attempts at threatening the Prince’s standing. The Prince acts only to ensure the stability of their power and its continued vitality, standing on one’s own two feet rather than with the support of another. As Machiavelli wrote, the only sure way to preserve one’s power is through one’s own “virtue” or “power”, depending on the translation.^[25] The use of the word virtù for both “virtue” and “power” in Italian is striking, showing the intense relationship between one’s morality and one’s authority. With virtue and power standing hand-in-hand, Machiavelli’s perspective comes clearer to light. He is writing not just as a pragmatist, but also as a political veteran of his times, advising princes how to seek virtue, much like Erasmus’s advice to the Humanist Knight, only Machiavelli’s idea of virtue is clothed in the unstable trappings of the Italian Wars that raged throughout his life and deeply affected the world of the Italian city states.

For Erasmus, virtue comes from God, and is shared by all humanity; thus, Erasmus writes to the Humanist Knight “thow shalt be able to do all thing in the power of God”^[26] but in order to do this the Knight must “take hede that thow be a member of the body”^[27] It is interesting here that the Alnwick manuscript translator of the Enchiridion does not conjugate thow shalt be as thow shalt art or thow shalt beest as was used in some dialects of Early Modern English. This particular pair of lines in the Alnwick manuscript do not match exactly the Latin in Froben’s edition, where in English the Knight can do all things “in the power of God” in Latin they will be able to achieve the same “in capite”, who is identified in the previous sentence as Christ. Two points can be taken from this, firstly that Early Modern English verb conjugations inherited the structures of their Germanic roots, moving the conjugation onto the modifiers as in German and Old English. Thus, the verb appears as thow shalt be rather than thow shall art, which mirrors this verb’s Modern descendant you should be. Secondly, the translator of the Alnwick manuscript rephrased and adapted the text to fit the expectations of an English-speaking audience, especially when translating from a language with more fluid word order like Latin to one with strict rules like English.

The relationship between the Humanist Knight and the Machiavellian Prince shows the diverging perspectives of Renaissance Humanists on both sides of the Alps. Whereas Italy was embroiled in war between rival city states supported by distant powers, fueling the pragmatic political philosophy of The Prince, the political structures of Northern Europe remained largely stable, with the old kings, princes, and magnates ruling over the continent. Erasmus’s Humanist Knight seeks power, but only through the blessing and support of God. Thus, the Humanist Knight must remain a moral and upright person, standing firm in the warm glow of God’s grace. While the Prince believes he will find victory through his own exploits and prowess as both a politician in the government of his principality, and as a commander on the battlefield, the Knight believes that victory is “putt hole in the handes of God and by hym in our handes.”^[28] The greatest difference between the Knight and the Prince is their understanding of virtue. For the Knight this comes from God’s favor of one’s good deeds, while for the Prince it results from political stability. 

What can be seen in Erasmus’s Enchiridion and Machiavelli’s Prince are two very different views of the role of the ruler and the source of that ruler’s power. This reflects the differing political situations between Italy and Northern Europe in the early sixteenth century, when both authors were writing. Furthermore, when translated into English in the form of the Alnwick manuscript, the Enchiridion offers the modern reader not only an idea of what the ideal knight was for Erasmus and the manuscript’s translator through the translator’s interpretation of Erasmus, but also an image of the role of the faith in the promulgation of Humanist values amongst the English gentry and aristocracy in the first decades of the sixteenth century.

Thank you for bearing with an admittedly unusual Wednesday Blog this week. This idea began somewhat differently than it ended. I hope to return to this topic of leadership again and write about Pope Francis’s vision of the servant leader which I find quite compelling.

^[1] Desiderius Erasmus, Enchiridion militis Christiani cum alijs quoru[m] Catalogum pagellae, (Basel: Johann Froben, 1518), http://www.mdz-nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn=urn:nbn:de:bvb:12-bsb10164787-8.

^[2] “A compendus tretis of the sowdear of Christ called enchiridion which Erasmus Roteradame wrote unto a certen courtear & Frende of his,” [1523], Additional Manuscripts, 89149, British Library, London.

^[3] Anne M. O’Donnell, S.N.D., “Rhetoric and Style in Erasmus’s Enchiridion militis Christiani,” Studies in Philology, Vol. 77, No. 1: (Winter 1980), 26-49, at 30.

^[4] Brian Moynahan, William Tyndale: If God spare my Life: A Story of Martyrdom, Betrayal, and the English Bible, (London: Abacus, 2003), 26-27.

^[5] Judith Rice Henderson, “Language, Race, and Church Reform: Erasmus’ ‘De recta pronuntiatione’ and ‘Ciceronianus’, Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme, Vol. 30, No. 2: (Spring / Printemps 2006), pp. 3-42, at 8.

^[6] Diane Shaw, “A Study of the Collaboration Between Erasmus of Rotterdam and His Printer Johann Froben at Basel During the Years 1514 to 1527,” Erasmus of Rotterdam Society Yearbook, Vol. 6: (1986), pp. 31-124, at 35.

^[7] Erasmus, Novum Instrumentum omne, (Basel: Johann Froben, 1516), http://www.mdz-nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn=urn:nbn:de:bvb:12-bsb11059002-1.

^[8] Niccolò Machiavelli, Il libro del principe, (Florence: Bernardo di Giunta, 1532), 7a, http://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k852526w; the original Italian reads “tal che la più sicura a via è, spegnerle, ó habitarvi.”

^[9] “A compendus tretis of the sowdear of Christ called enchiridion which Erasmus Roteradame wrote unto a certen courtear & Frende of his,” [1523], Additional Manuscripts, 89149 f.3v (1:140-141), British Library, London. In the Latin, “Quantus pudor, quanta penè publica humani generis execratio, cum à duce principe deficit homo?”

^[10] “A compendus tretis,” BL Add. MS 89149 f.5v (1:235-6). In Froben’s Latin edition this reads as “At animam mori, infelicitatis extremæ est,” Erasmus, Enchiridion militis Christiani, (Basel: Froben, 1518), 6.

^[11] Plato, Republic 5.473d in Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vols. 5 & 6 trans. Paul Shorey, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd., 1969) in the original Greek, δύναμίς τε πολιτική καὶ φιλοσοφία.

^[12] “A compendus tretis,” BL Add. MS 89149 f.1v-f.9r (1:1-397); Froben’s: Enchiridion, 1-9.

^[13] Machiavelli, Il libro del principe, 7b, “li più eccellenti.”

^[14] Machiavelli, “E benché di Moisè non si debbe ragionare, essendo stato un’mero esecutore delle cose, che gli erano ordinate da Dio.”

^[15] Machiavelli, “Era adunque necessario à Moise trovare il Popolo d’Israel in Egitto schiano, et opresso da gli Egittii: accioche quelli, per usare di servitù, se disponessino à seguirlo.”

^[16] “A compendus tretis,” BL Add. MS 89149 f.28v (5:39-41)

^[17] Froben’s Enchiridion, 30, “cum nihil aliud putat esse Philosophiam, cumque mortis meditationinem.”

^[18] Machiavelli, Il libro del principe, 26a, “per che gli huomini dimenticano più tosto la morte del padre, che la perdita del patrimonio.”

^[19] Machiavelli, “Di poi le cagioni del torre la robba non macono mai,” and “e sempre colui, che comincia à vivere con rapina, truova cagioni d’occupare quel d’altri.”

^[20] “A compendus tretis,” BL Add. MS 89149 f.5r (1:208); Froben’s Enchiridion, 5, “Cœlum promittitur strenue pugnanti.“

^[21] Machiavelli, f.10v (2:114-115); Froben’s Enchiridion, 12, “quam esset manna cœlesti, et aqua de petra scatente refectus.”

^[22] Machiavelli, f.18v (2:554-556); Froben’s Enchiridion, 20, “neque fortitudo, neque altitudo, neque pfundum, neque cretura alia, poterit nos se parare à charitate dei, quæ est in Christo Iesu.” This is a quote from Romans 8:38-39. The Greek original reads οὔτε δυνάμεις, οὔτε ὔφωμα, οὔτε βάθος οὔτε τις κτίσις ἐτέρα δυνήσεται ἠμᾶς χωρίσαι ἀπὸ ἀγάπης τοῦ θεοῦ τῆς ἐν Χριστῶ Ἰησοῦ. The Vulgate and Erasmus’s Novum Instrumentum differ in their translations of the Greek, in the Vulgate, “neque fortitudo, neque altitudo, neque profundum, neque cretura alia poterit nos separare a caritate Dei, quæ est in Christo Jesu” while in Erasmus’s NIO, “neque futura, neque altitudo, neque profunditas, neque ulla cretura alia, poterit nos separe a dilectione dei, quæ en in Christo Iesu”. The NASB translates this verse as “… nor powers, ³⁹ nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is Christ Jesus…” The NIO leaves out neque fortitudo, jumping from neque futura to neque altitudo.

^[23] Machiavelli, Il libro del principe, 38.

^[24] Machiavelli, “Per tanto questi nostri Principi; i quali molti anni erano sta ti nel loro Principato, per haverlo di poi perso; non accusino la fortuna, ma la ignavia loro.”

^[25] Machiavelli, Il libro del principe, 38b, “Et quelle difese solamente sono buone, certe, et durabili; che dipendono da te proprio, et da la virtù tua.” 

^[26] “A compendus tretis,” BL Add. MS 89149 f.8r (1:367); Froben’s Enchiridion, 9, “et omnia poteris in capite.”

^[27] BL Add. MS 89149 f.8r (1:366); Froben’s Enchiridion, 9, “Tu modo cura ut sis in corpore.”

^[28] “A compendus tretis,” BL Add. MS 89149 f.8r (1:373); Froben’s Enchiridion, 9, “neuticibus à fortuna pendeat victoria, sed eaomnis in manu sita sit dei, ac per eum nostris quoquibus in manibus.”