(printed p. 326 — Book III)
What I have discussed above generally about the three sects of the Jews - whether, in today’s manner of speaking, they should be counted among heretics - must now be considered in the case of Johannes Drusius. For when in my Maccabees I praised him because, unlike the custom of other heretics, he abstained somewhat from insults and the bitter gall of a harsh style, I nevertheless confessed sincerely that he was read by me unwillingly, because he was a heretic. This stung him. I do not wonder. Although today it is common, it is nevertheless a great mark, an infamous name, scarcely to be borne by anyone, even by a Hasidaean.
There was once among the holy dwellers in the desert a man of the most tested virtue, Agatho. In order to test his humility and patience, certain people brought various accusations against him: pride, lust, slander, and finally also heresy. To all the others he indeed nodded humbly and patiently, although they were utterly false; but when he heard the name of heresy, he said: “Although I am guilty of many other sins, I am certainly not a heretic. May this be far from my soul.” When asked the reason,
[margin: Chapter XX begins; Serarius turns from the Jewish sects to Drusius.]
(printed p. 327)
he answered, among other things, these words: “Christ suffered for us, leaving us an example, that we might follow in his footsteps. Therefore we must bear all adversities with humility. But the speech by which you called me a heretic I could not bear, and I greatly abhorred it, because heresy is separation from God. For a heretic is separated from the living and true God and is joined to the Devil and his angels. Alienated from Christ, he no longer has God to whom he may pray for his sins, because he has perished on every side.”
And indeed Saint Gregory teaches that no one should rashly be branded with that name. “There are many of the faithful,” he says, “who are inflamed with unskilled zeal, and often, while they pursue certain people as though they were heretics, they make heresies.” For not every error, says Saint Augustine, is heresy, although every heresy which is reckoned a fault cannot be heresy without some error. And elsewhere: “A heretic and a person who believes heretics are not one and the same thing. For a heretic, as I think, is one who, for the sake of some temporal advantage, and especially for the sake of glory and his own preeminence, either begets or follows false and new opinions. But one who believes such men is a person deceived by a certain imagination of truth and piety.”
You do rightly, then, Drusius, to shudder at the name of heretic. Nor would I be free of fault if, when you were a Catholic, I called you a heretic. Yet it is common that those whom that stain of heresy most disgraces are the very ones who least of all wish to be thought such. “What shall I say,” says Saint Jerome, “about heretics, who, although they are outside, nevertheless call themselves Christians?”
[margin: Agatho on the horror of heresy; Gregory and Augustine on using the word “heretic” carefully.]
(printed p. 328)
The grammarian Cresconius, not unlike you, found it very hard to bear being called a heretic by Saint Augustine, as that same holy Father witnesses. And in these very days, while I was occupied with the final part of my refutation of your little book, a certain pious, learned, and friendly man brought me a little book by a Lutheran preacher against me. In it that Lutheran fumes because Luther is called a heretic, and he would like that to be proved. “If you wish,” he says, “to call our Luther a heretic, first teach what diseased and corrupt savor each codex of most holy Scripture has,” as though the same thing must always be done over again.
The Christian Church has judged, both through her visible head on earth, the Roman Pontiff, and through the ecumenical and general Synod of Trent, that Luther and Calvin are heretics, and likewise that their dogmas are heretical. Therefore, whenever these men or their followers, who are the more learned and the more obstinate, are called heretics, is it always necessary to prove by arguments hunted out anew that they are heretics?
I was reading your little book, Drusius, on the very day of Saint Michael, and there came to mind what Joshua said to Saint Michael himself, about which I have written elsewhere: “Are you one of ours, or one of our adversaries?” Tell me, then, I beg you: are you a Catholic, or not? You know whom I call a Catholic: a man of the ancient faith and of that Roman obedience which, as the Apostle testifies, has been spread abroad and made known through the whole world.
[margin: Cresconius and Luther cited as parallels; appeal to the Roman Pontiff and Council of Trent.]
(printed p. 329)
Say it, then, openly and roundly, without evasion and without stammering: are you ours, or one of our adversaries? If you are ours, I most willingly retract what I wrote. But if you are Lutheran, or rather Calvinian, as I learned long ago and will soon show, why do you judge your name to be slandered? Therefore, to keep the words of Saint Augustine against the grammarian mentioned before: “Why do you not wish to be called a heretic? Why do you grieve more at being called one than at being one?” Why do you not at last correct the bad choice of Calvin as master, and of his dogmas?
But so that I may show that you are what you are called, a heretic, I shall pursue the arguments by which you wish it proved that you are not one. Thus with one and the same hand, as it were, I shall establish my own statement and scatter yours. I find chiefly three such arguments.
The first is this: “For someone to be a heretic two things are required. First, that he err in the foundations of faith; then, that he defend his error with pertinacity. My slender knowledge is wholly occupied with grammar and history. I leave dogmas of faith to be treated by those more learned than I. In history there is no heresy; much less in grammar.”
As for pertinacity, Drusius, I agree with you; you will deal with that again in your third argument. But in error about the foundations of faith you seem to me to be hiding some snake. For what do you call the foundations of faith?
[margin: Drusius’s first argument: heresy requires error in foundations of faith and pertinacious defense.]
(printed p. 330)
Do you mean all things about which faith is concerned as its object and matter, or only the chief things among them? If you call them foundations in the former sense, you speak quite obscurely and, as a grammarian, not grammatically enough. For who calls everything of which a building consists by the name of foundations? If all things that fall under faith are foundations of faith, then those parts which belong to the construction of the spiritual building, the walls and even the roofs themselves, will be called foundations.
If you call foundations in the latter sense, then in your judgment one will not be a heretic who errs pertinaciously in some matter belonging to faith, provided it is not among certain great and principal heads. What do you say, Drusius? Even this error of yours, if it has obstinacy joined to it, is heresy. “Whoever offends in one point has become guilty of all.” Saint Augustine says: “Those in the Church of Christ who savor anything diseased and corrupt, if, when corrected so that they may savor what is sound and right, they resist stubbornly and refuse to amend their pestilential and deadly dogmas, but persist in defending them, become heretics and, going outside, are counted among enemies who exercise us.”
Saint Athanasius in the Creed which is received not only by Catholics but also by Lutherans and Calvinists, as I have proved elsewhere, says: “Whoever wishes to be saved must above all hold the Catholic faith; unless each person preserves it whole and inviolate, he will without doubt perish eternally.”
[margin: Serarius rejects limiting heresy only to chief articles of faith; Augustine and the Athanasian Creed cited.]
(printed p. 331)
Indeed, when I consider your skill in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew grammar, I have no doubt that you follow the latter meaning of foundations. For whatever things are principal in any matter are usually called its heads and foundations. Thus the first heads of the Christian faith are customarily called by us articles. So too among the Jews they are called עמודים and עקרים, foundations, as a little book on the foundations of the Jewish faith explains. Indeed the common rabbinic expression uses כלל ועקר, “rule and foundation,” for the universal and principal thing, and כל עקר, “every foundation,” for every principal matter; wicked men and atheists are likewise called among them כפרין בעקר, deniers of the foundation, as the Chaldaean Targum on Psalm 12 has it, and Elias Levita in his Tishbi.
But you say: in history there is no heresy. On the contrary, if someone denied the histories of the patriarchs, Moses, Aaron, Joshua, David, and others; if he denied that Christ Jesus was born in the time of Caesar Augustus, that the census was taken under Quirinius as governor, and that he was crucified when Tiberius was emperor and Pilate procurator of Judea, he would be a heretic. And in other histories, do not Carion, Funccius, and Sleidanus insert many heretical things even in our own age?
Drusius goes on: “Much less is there heresy in grammar.” If grammar were content only with the parts of speech, the declensions of nouns and verbs, the rules for speaking and writing correctly, and even the interpretation of poets and orators, it would certainly be immune from heresy.
[margin: Hebrew terms for foundations of faith; Serarius argues that historical denial can be heretical.]
(printed p. 332)
For it does not belong to heresy whether you say or write “Hesseans” or “Hasidaeans,” nor whether you think these were also Pharisees. Do not fear, Drusius: no one is a heretic because of those things and things like them. But when grammar rises even to the explanation of the sacred letters, why should it not be able to deprave their sense, introduce foreign opinions, and defend and propagate those opinions once introduced? And who are now leading the household in this kind of work? Are they not the grammarians Melanchthon, Beza, Castellio, and those like them?
The very explanation of words has shown how much darkness it once cast over matters of the greatest weight: in Saint Jerome and Nazianzen, hypostasis; in Saint Athanasius and others, homoousion; likewise in Saint Basil’s book against Eunomius those very small particles, ex and dia, “in” and “through.” What of Catholic transubstantiation, and the Lutheran, or rather, as Beza was pleased to call it, consubstantiation?
“Philosophers,” says Saint Augustine, “speak with free words, and in matters very difficult to understand they do not fear offense to religious ears. But for us it is lawful to speak according to a fixed rule.” Saint Basil, in Theodoret, says: “Those who have been educated in the sacred letters do not permit even one syllable of the divine dogmas to be betrayed; rather, for their defense, if need be, they willingly embrace every kind of death.” Therefore heresy can exist both in the discipline that is guardian of things and in the discipline that is guardian of words.
[margin: Grammar can become heretical when it interprets Scripture; theological terms and Basil cited.]
(printed p. 333)
The second argument is this: “Serarius knows me only from my books. What in them is not orthodox? Or, if there is something, why does Serarius not warn me about it?”
I have certainly at times marked heterodox and wrong things in your books, and from them I easily recognized that you were dwelling in an enemy camp outside the holy Catholic Church. But because I never had all your little books, and because even of those I once had I now have none at hand, I shall not attempt to list those wrong things of yours from memory alone. Rather I shall say that you deceive yourself when you claim that you are known to me only from your books. For I have also spoken with those who know you face to face, and I know you from the books of others too, especially Beza’s.
Beza has a notable habit in his annotations on the New Testament: he praises those who share the same errors with him, and he splendidly attacks the rest, whether Catholics or heretics. For, to pass over the Jesuits and other Catholics, he says: “Sebastian Castellio had no learning in these matters and was endowed with no judgment.” “That sophist Illyricus of unhappy memory, no less foolishly than shamelessly.” And elsewhere: “Illyricus of execrable memory, the pest of the Church.”
As for Erasmus, because in religion he seems to have been an amphibious animal, Beza at one time raises him with praises and at another casts him down with attacks. “I am compelled,” he says,
[margin: Drusius’s second argument: Serarius knows him only from books; Beza’s praise and blame used as evidence.]
(printed p. 334)
“as far as the collation of passages itself is concerned, to desire somewhat greater attentiveness in Erasmus. In this matter I have noticed that he sinned more than once in citing both Greek and Latin theologians.” And again: “There was no reason why Erasmus, for I shall say what the matter is, should openly resist the truth and obscure to the best of his power this passage, Philippians 2:6, than which hardly any other is more illustrious for refuting all heresies against the person of Christ.” Again: “Erasmus’s judgment in this argument about the Apocalypse, as in many others, seems to me so variable that one can hardly judge what he decided.”
But what does Beza say of the men of his own sect? “Mercerus of pious memory”; “our Tremellius, and that most learned Hebrew, Emmanuel Tremellius, of blessed memory”; “our Franciscus Junius, a most learned man, of happy memory”; “Vadianus”; “Beroaldus, a man of blessed memory, and in former years my colleague in this Church”; “my colleague Bertramus”; “Casaubon, my colleague in this school at Geneva”; “the faithful servant of Christ and of blessed memory, Ambrose Blaurer”; “that great Joseph Scaliger, my very close friend, a man of recondite learning, and never praised enough either for sharpness of intellect or for tireless diligence.”
Now prick up your ears, Drusius. Are you a Catholic? Beza will pierce you with curses. Are you a Lutheran, or of another sect diverging from Calvin? You are not safe from him. But are you a Calvinian? O blessed man! For you have obtained Beza as the herald of your praises. “Johannes Drusius, a man learned in these investigations and very diligent,”
[margin: Beza’s judgments of Erasmus and his praises of Reformed scholars; page ends mid-sentence in Beza’s praise of Drusius.]
(printed p. 335)
and elsewhere: “Johannes Drusius, often named by me in these books, and deservedly.” You see, then, Drusius, how I know you not only from your books. What about the places and schools in which you either learned or taught, and in which you teach up to the present? What about those whom you praise in your writings and to whom you dedicate them? What about that little book of yours on the Hasidaeans? What about the phrases by which you reject the Catholic Genebrard? You name Calvin, Danaeus, and others as very weighty theologians, and you join Bellarmine to them as if a white dove were joined with crows by you. You call the Calvinian preachers, to whom your double preface is addressed, outstanding theologians and faithful servants of Christ. Do not all these things show the Calvinian stench of your breast?
As for what you add, “If there is anything not orthodox, why does Serarius not warn me about it?”, the reason is ready at hand. I am not the general admonisher of all. The Church warns you enough. Whoever does not hear her is like a heathen and a publican.
The third argument is this: “Pertinacity makes a heretic, not simple error. For to err is human. I know that nothing human is alien to me. Once warned, I shall not be pertinacious, and I never was. I once professed, and now repeat again, that I subject all my writings to the judgment of the Church.”
As to the past, since with the learning you have you could not until now have been ignorant of the Church’s voice calling you away from Calvin and all new opinions, I do not see how you can be excused from pertinacity. For when you say that you subject everything to the judgment of the Church,
[margin: Continuation of Beza’s praise; Serarius answers Drusius’s second and third arguments.]
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you seem indeed to speak well and modestly. But since you know that any heretic, Lutheran, Calvinian, Anabaptist, or Schwenckfeldian uses the same words, by that very fact you show yourself not to be Catholic, because you do not clearly and plainly indicate which Church you understand. For although in reality there is only one true Church, and all the rest are not Churches of Christ but synagogues of Satan, nevertheless, because every sect claims that true Church for itself, you ought to have said without any wrappings or evasions of words what I willingly and gladly profess for myself: “I subject all my writings to the judgment of the holy, Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman Church.”
As to the future time, by all means see to it, Drusius, that you perform what you here assert in word: be no longer pertinacious. “Today, if you hear his voice,” that is, the voice of God admonishing you through his spouse, “harden not your heart.” “A hard heart will fare badly at the end, and he who loves danger will perish in it.”
Cassian, when he narrates that Leporius was converted from heresy to the Catholic faith, says: “The first thing is not to incur error; the second is to repudiate it well.” And Agatho, praised at the beginning of this chapter not more in name than in reality, says: “If a heretic is converted to the true and Catholic faith of the holy Church, he is received by our good and pious Savior Jesus Christ, and is joined to the true God, our Creator and Savior Christ.”
[margin: Serarius demands explicit submission to the holy Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman Church.]
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That this may happen to you, Johannes Drusius, and to all others wandering from the way of Catholic truth, I pray from my heart.
Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.
End.
At the foot of the source page the index begins with the catchword “Of Things.”
[margin: Formal end of the main treatise; the index begins at the foot of this source page.]