SIXTEENTH-CENTURY PHILOSOPHY between diVerent Bible texts: we should go to extremes, deny free will altogether, and ascribe everything to God Distaste for scholastic subtlety was not peculiar to Luther: it was shared by Erasmus, and also by More More himself entered the debate on free will in his controversy with Luther’s English admirer, the Bible translator William Tyndale To counter Lutheran determinism More uses a strategy which goes back to discussions of fate in Stoic philosophy: One of their sect was served in a good turn in Almayne, which when he had robbed a man and was brought before the judges, he would not deny the deed, but said it was his destiny to it, and therefore they might not blame him; they answered him, after his own doctrines, that if it were his destiny to steal and that therefore they must hold him excused, then it was also their destiny to hang him, and therefore he must as well hold them excused again (More 1931: 196) The claim that if determinism is true everything is excusable, would no doubt be rejected by Luther, since he believed that God justly punished sinners who could not otherwise than sin From a philosophical point of view these early Reformation debates on freedom and determinism no more than rehearse arguments which were commonplaces of ancient and medieval philosophy They illustrate, however, the negative side of humanist education Scholastic debates, if sometimes arid, had commonly been sober and courteous Thomas Aquinas, for instance, was always anxious to put the best possible interpretation on the theses of those he disagreed with Erasmus shared something of Aquinas’ eirenic spirit; but More and Luther attack each other with bitter vituperation made only the more vulgar by the elegant Latin in which it is phrased The pugnacious conventions of humanist debate were a factor which led to the hardening of positions on either side of the Reformation divide Authority and Conscience The debate on free will continued and ramiWed through and beyond the sixteenth century, and, as we shall see in later chapters, more sophisticated controversialists were to bring new subtlety into the philosophical treatment of the topic For the present the most important new element introduced into the debate by Luther was a general hostility not just to