Sebastian Franck

Steven Avery

Administrator
BCEME
A likely source for many of the opinions expressed in the transcript of Vlekwijk’s trial is Sebastian Franck’s Chronicle (1531), published in Dutch translation in 1558, and reprinted in 1562, 1563, 1583 and 1595.92 A comparison of Franck’s Chronicle with the published trial record provides unexpected insights.

Sebastian Franck was a man of wide reading and independent thought. After ordination as a Catholic priest, he converted to Lutheranism, but soon broke from the magisterial reformation to develop an illuminist spirituality that conceived of the inner Word of God within each person as the source of religious truth and authority. Franck shared Erasmus’ desire to cut away centuries of ignorance and sophistry, but when Franck’s Chronicle was published, Erasmus was horrified that he had been associated with its anti-imperial undertone, offensive and potentially dangerous to Erasmus’ patron Ferdinand I. Erasmus, seeing himself reflected in the distorting mirror of Franck’s catalogue of heretics, must have recognised with shock that his attempts to defend his own orthodoxy over the previous decade had led in directions he had not foreseen. When Franck wrote to Erasmus in 1531 from prison, not to offer an apology, but ‘to demand thanks for the great honour he has done me’, Erasmus complained to Martin Bucer that he allowed radicals like Franck say and print whatever they liked at Strasbourg.93
Franck’s account of the history of religious thought in his Chronicle includes an account of the ‘Roman heretics from Peter to Clement VII’. Amongst these, Franck devoted nine folio pages to Erasmus, presenting his ‘heresy’ as the attempt to restore Christianity to its pristine state. The first passage Franck quoted is an abbreviated extract from Erasmus’ annotation on 1 Jn 5:7, which emphasises the futility of theological speculation on the inner workings of the Trinity.94 Franck also cited Erasmus’ report of Hilary of Poitiers’s argument that the Son is truly God, despite the fact that in the gospels, only the Father is called true God, and the Holy Spirit is never described as God, or worthy of worship. As his sources, Franck named Erasmus’ preface to his edition of Hilary and his devotional tract Modus orandi deum, precisely the works Adriaenssen identified as the source of Vlekwijk’s opinion.95 Adriaenssen’s account of Erasmus’ annotation on Rom 9:5 also resembles Franck’s summary.96 Indeed, the correspondences between the words of both Vlekwijk and Adriaenssen on one side, and Franck’s presentation of Erasmus’ ‘heresy’ on the other, are so striking as to suggest that the text of the trial record published in Adriaenssen’s biography (1607–1608) is not a verbatim transcript. Rather, it seems that Adriaenssen placed Erasmus’ words, as presented in the Dutch translation of Franck’s Chronicle, in Vlekwijk’s mouth, to make the Anabaptist’s statements square more closely with Erasmus’ position. The published record of Vlekwijk’s trial is thus to some extent a literary fiction.
 
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