Note 798 — Chapter XIV · (continued 3)

Ibid., p. 787 = 368: “Ego vero hoc libro non contuli, sed asserui et assero, ac penes nullum volo esse iudicium, sed omnibus suadeo, ut præstent obsequium.” The extraordinary self-confidence of these words is more easily explained if we consider them as aimed against the literary device of Erasmus. After the manner of the Humanists, at the beginning of his “Diatribe,” he had declared that he intended merely to enter upon an examination, a collatio (cp. διατριβή), and that he hated logical demonstrations, an exaggeration for which Luther soundly rated him in the very first pages, urging that he must be either a “frivolous orator” or a “godless writer,” if he could not take so important a question seriously (p. 120). The termination of Erasmus’s work, where he says: “Contuli, penes alios stet ultimum iudicium” (ed. J. v. Walter, p. 92), is played upon word for word in the conclusion of the “De servo arbitrio.”