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ERASMUS' defence of his DE LIBERO ARBITRIO, as edited in English in Controversies, CWE 76 & 77
My review of these two volumes in Moreana n° 166-167, p. 255268 was limited to Erasmus' De libero arbitrio (October 1524). When Luther responded with De servo arbitrio (1525), More urged Erasmus to pursue the vital debate with a rebuttal longer than the 1524 essay. The result was Hyperaspites, in two volumes published in 1526 and 1527, which Clarence Miller has translated in the two volumes of The Collected Works of Erasmus, Toronto. The English text claims 203 pages in CWE76 (1999), and 415 pages in CWE77 (2000). The annotations, by Clarence Miller and Charles Trinkaus, take a fair amount of space, up to half of many pages.
Erasmus answers Luther's text in detail, as Fisher and More had done in 1523, hence an inevitable amount of repetition. The risk of boredom is attenuated by his literary skill, his copia verborum, as would be true in 1532 of More's Confutation of Tyndale's Answer, which nevertheless, drew the reproach from the heretics: 'they find first for a great fault that my writing is overlong, and therefore too tedious to read' (CW 9, 5/7-8). The main reason for the tedium was, of course, a lack on interest in the issues at stake. Desire Nisard, in his sympathetic portrait of Erasmus (1855, see Moreana 123-124, p. 161), shows disdain and even pity for a debate in which the free-thinker he is encounters only 'des sophismes'.
More would have been the last to voice such a reproach because the existence of man's freewill was vital to his theology, his pedagogy, and his judicial duties, which rested on the assumption of man's moral responsibility. His very first English work included this sentence from Pico's first letter to his nephew Gianfrancesco: "Very happy is a Christian man sith [since] that the victory is both put in his own freewill, and the reward of the victory shall be far greater than we can either hope or wish" (CW 1, 78/16-19), translating Magna Christiani felicitas, quando et in aus arbitno posita est victoria, et omni vincentis voto omnique expectatione maiora futura sunt praemia (CW 1, 342/3-5). Thirty years later, in A Dialogue of Comfort, to assuage...