guidance, walking in the night, hastens on his way to eternal night.’In
contrast,‘Jesus Christ is the author of wisdom and indeed wisdom itself.’^48
The defeat of the supernatural enemy, Belial, allows the Christian warrior the
opportunity to begin the process of gaining the wisdom of Christ, which is the
same as becoming like Christ, becoming transformed more thoroughly into
his image. This involves a continuation of the spiritual war, with the locus of
battle now shifted to a struggle between the‘outer and inner man’.^49
Erasmus cites both Plato and the apostle Paul in his description of humans
as essentially dualistic, composed of body and spirit:
Plato distinguished two souls in man. Paul in one and the same man puts two
men, stuck together in such a way that neither will be in glory or in hell without
the other, but on the other hand so distinct that the death of one is the life of the
other.^50Erasmus closely follows Origen’s tripart division of the human into spirit, soul,
andflesh.^51 The object of the spiritual battle between the inner and outer man
is over the soul, which can either ascend to the spirit or descend into the body:
‘The spirit makes us gods, theflesh makes us brute animals. The soul consti-
tutes us as human beings; the spirit makes us religious, theflesh irreligious, the
soul neither the one nor the other. The spirit seeks heavenly things, theflesh
seeks pleasure, the soul what is necessary. The spirit elevates us to heaven, the
flesh drags us down to hell, the soul has no charge imputed to it.’^52 Humans
have the capacity to leave behind the inferior aspects of ‘brute creation’
associated with the‘outer man’and share in the divine:‘with regards to the
soul we have such a capacity for divinity that we can soar past the minds of the
angels and become one with God’.^53 In other words—theosis.
Nevertheless, even though‘reason plays the role of king’in humans, the
process of spiritual ascent is contingent on God’s work, by means of:
the spirit, by which we reproduce a likeness of the divine nature, in which the
supreme maker has engraved with hisfinger, that is, his Spirit, the eternal law of
goodness, drawn from the archetype of this own mind, by which we are glued to
God and are made one with him...^54Becoming transformed into the image of Christ means the natural and the
visible are to be rejected in favour of the invisible and supernatural:‘perfect
piety is the attempt to progress always from visible things, which are usually
imperfect or indifferent, to invisible’.^55
(^48) Erasmus,Enchiridion38. (^49) Erasmus,Enchiridion41.
(^50) Erasmus,Enchiridion47.
(^51) See David Marsh,‘Erasmus on the Antithesis of Body and Soul’,Journal of the History of
Ideas37/4 (1976), 673–88.
(^52) Erasmus,Enchiridion52. (^53) Erasmus,Enchiridion41.
(^54) Erasmus,Enchiridion42, 51. (^55) Erasmus,Enchiridion65.
128 Darren M. Provost