Edward Lee (bishop) - Controversies With Erasmus

Controversies With Erasmus

He spent time in 1518 at the University of Louvain, studying Greek, where he encountered Erasmus, at that time reshaping the humanist views in particular on the New Testament. From an initially friendly disagreement, there evolved a series of polemics between Erasmus and Lee, with Lee emerging as the advocate of a traditionalist position.

Erasmus wrote to Lee explaining that he had not been able to make use of certain annotations which Lee had written. By 1519 Lee was a prominent opponent of Erasmus. Erasmus declared that Lee was a young man desirous of fame, and that he spread about reports to his disadvantage; he further said that Lee had circulated among religious houses an unfavourable criticism of his New Testament without having sent it to him, and he threatened Lee with punishment at the hands of German scholars. During 1520 the dispute was carried on with bitterness on both sides. Erasmus said that Lee's chief supporter was Henry Standish. Lee put forth sundry attacks on Erasmus, who retaliated by the Epistolæ aliquot Eruditorum Virorum, and sent an Apologia to Henry VIII defending himself against Lee. Thomas More, who said that he had loved Lee from boyhood, regretted the dispute, and set up a formal reconciliation at Calais in 1520, where diplomatic negotiations were taking place; but the meeting of Erasmus and Lee had little immediate effect, and the quarrel was not made up until 1522.

Lee provided substantive theological criticisms of In Praise of Folly, by close reading, in a fashion also later adopted by Noël Béda and Rodolfo Pio da Carpi. In dealing with the concept of ecstasy, Erasmus was accused by Lee of straying into territory explored by German mystical thinkers, and deemed heretical by the Church. Erasmus shrugged off the comparisons with the Beghards and Turlupins; but he found it less easy to place a distance between himself and Meister Eckhart or Johan Tauler. The heresy of Montanism was too close to some of what he had written, and he was thrown somewhat on the defensive, in later writings avoiding the term "spirit" in its Platonic associations.