Erring Together: Renaissance Humanists in Certainty’s Shadow

Abstract

Everyone makes mistakes. Still, getting things wrong can be a lonely experience. In religious thought as in philosophy or cognitive science, error is equated with imperfection: anyone who wants to be right needs to correct or supersede mistakes. Indeed, certainty—the need to be sure one is right—has been identified as the obsession that defined the age in Susan Schreiner’s powerful recent study of early modern Christianity. In what follows, I suggest first that this argument about the centrality of certainty obscures the importance of making mistakes—of errancy—to religious movements of the sixteenth century. The Reformation era was, as Schreiner maintains, defined by the fear of deception and the need to be sure—of God, of salvation, of scriptural interpretation. However, error can also facilitate camaraderie. This was the counterintuitive conviction voiced by Desiderius Erasmus and Thomas More, humanists writing during the time Schreiner surveys, when error was a threat not only to a scholar’s status but to life itself—both temporal and eternal. What is remarkable about these two Reformation-era intellectuals is that despitemanifest differences in their ecclesiology, both understood error as a source of fragile solidarity, even a sacred bond of charity. In dedicatory letters, devotional treatises, and ironic writings, Erasmus andMore portrayed making and correcting mistakes as a communal process that enabled friendship and right religion by disabling pedantic certainty. This has implications for the study of religion because of the widespread assumption ðarguably influenced by the Reformation attitudes Schreiner