Erasmus and the Age of Reformation Part 10

If only Erasmus had been less concerned about public opinion! But that seemed impossible: he had a fear of men, or, we may call it, a fervent need of justification. He would always see beforehand, and usually in exaggerated colours, the effect his word or deed would have upon men. Of himself, it was certainly true as he once wrote: that the craving for fame has less sharp spurs than the fear of ignominy. Erasmus is with Rousseau among those who cannot bear the consciousness of guilt, out of a sort of mental cleanliness. Not to be able to repay a benefit with interest, makes him ashamed and sad. He cannot abide 'dunning creditors, unperformed duty, neglect of the need of a friend'. If he cannot discharge the obligation, he explains it away. The Dutch historian Fruin has quite correctly observed: 'Whatever Erasmus did contrary to his duty and his rightly understood interests was the fault of circ.u.mstances or wrong advice; he is never to blame himself'. And what he has thus justified for himself becomes with him universal law: 'G.o.d relieves people of pernicious vows, if only they repent of them,' says the man who himself had broken a vow.

There is in Erasmus a dangerous fusion between inclination and conviction. The correlations between his idiosyncrasies and his precepts are undeniable. This has special reference to his point of view in the matter of fasting and abstinence from meat. He too frequently vents his own aversion to fish, or talks of his inability to postpone meals, not to make this connection clear to everybody. In the same way his personal experience in the monastery pa.s.ses into his disapproval, on principle, of monastic life.

The distortion of the image of his youth in his memory, to which we have referred, is based on that need of self-justification. It is all unconscious interpretation of the undeniable facts to suit the ideal which Erasmus had made of himself and to which he honestly thinks he answers. The chief features of that self-conceived picture are a remarkable, simple sincerity and frankness, which make it impossible to him to dissemble; inexperience and carelessness in the ordinary concerns of life and a total lack of ambition. All this is true in the first instance: there is a superficial Erasmus who answers to that image, but it is not the whole Erasmus; there is a deeper one who is almost the opposite and whom he himself does not know because he will not know him.

Possibly because behind this there is a still deeper being, which is truly good.

Does he not ascribe weaknesses to himself? Certainly. He is, in spite of his self-coddling, ever dissatisfied with himself and his work.

_Putidulus_, he calls himself, meaning the quality of never being content with himself. It is that peculiarity which makes him dissatisfied with any work of his directly after it has appeared, so that he always keeps revising and supplementing. 'Pusillanimous' he calls himself in writing to Colet. But again he cannot help giving himself credit for acknowledging that quality, nay, converting that quality itself into a virtue: it is modesty, the opposite of boasting and self-love.

This bashfulness about himself is the reason that he does not love his own physiognomy, and is only persuaded with difficulty by his friends to sit for a portrait. His own appearance is not heroic or dignified enough for him, and he is not duped by an artist who flatters him: 'Heigh-ho,'

he exclaims, on seeing Holbein's thumbnail sketch ill.u.s.trating the _Moria_: 'if Erasmus still looked like that, he would take a wife at once'. It is that deep trait of dissatisfaction that suggests the inscription on his portraits: 'his writings will show you a better image'.

Erasmus's modesty and the contempt which he displays of the fame that fell to his lot are of a somewhat rhetorical character. But in this we should not so much see a personal trait of Erasmus as a general form common to all humanists. On the other hand, this mood cannot be called altogether artificial. His books, which he calls his children, have not turned out well. He does not think they will live. He does not set store by his letters: he publishes them because his friends insist upon it. He writes his poems to try a new pen. He hopes that geniuses will soon appear who will eclipse him, so that Erasmus will pa.s.s for a stammerer.

What is fame? A pagan survival. He is fed up with it to repletion and would do nothing more gladly than cast it off.

Sometimes another note escapes him. If Lee would help him in his endeavours, Erasmus would make him immortal, he had told the former in their first conversation. And he threatens an unknown adversary, 'If you go on so impudently to a.s.sail my good name, then take care that my gentleness does not give way and I cause you to be ranked, after a thousand years, among the venomous sycophants, among the idle boasters, among the incompetent physicians'.

The self-centred element in Erasmus must needs increase accordingly as he in truth became a centre and objective point of ideas and culture.

There really was a time when it must seem to him that the world hinged upon him, and that it awaited the redeeming word from him. What a widespread enthusiastic following he had, how many warm friends and venerators! There is something nave in the way in which he thinks it requisite to treat all his friends, in an open letter, to a detailed, rather repellent account of an illness that attacked him on the way back from Basle to Louvain. _His_ part, _his_ position, _his_ name, this more and more becomes the aspect under which he sees world-events. Years will come in which his whole enormous correspondence is little more than one protracted self-defence.

Yet this man who has so many friends is nevertheless solitary at heart.

And in the depth of that heart he desires to be alone. He is of a most retiring disposition; he is _a recluse_. 'I have always wished to be alone, and there is nothing I hate so much as sworn partisans.' Erasmus is one of those whom contact with others weakens. The less he has to address and to consider others, friends or enemies, the more truly he utters his deepest soul. Intercourse with particular people always causes little scruples in him, intentional amenities, coquetry, reticences, reserves, spiteful hits, evasions. Therefore it should not be thought that we get to know him to the core from his letters. Natures like his, which all contact with men unsettles, give their best and deepest when they speak impersonally and to all.

After the early effusions of sentimental affection he no longer opens his heart unreservedly to others. At bottom he feels separated from all and on the alert towards all. There is a great fear in him that others will touch his soul or disturb the image he has made of himself. The att.i.tude of warding off reveals itself as fastidiousness and as bashfulness. Budaeus. .h.i.t the mark when he exclaimed jocularly: '_Fastidiosule!_ You little fastidious person!' Erasmus himself interprets the dominating trait of his being as maidenly coyness. The excessive sensitiveness to the stain attaching to his birth results from it. But his friend Ammonius speaks of his _subrustica verecundia_, his somewhat rustic _gaucherie_. There is, indeed, often something of the small man about Erasmus, who is hampered by greatness and therefore shuns the great, because, at bottom, they obsess him and he feels them to be inimical to his being.

It seems a hard thing to say that genuine loyalty and fervent gratefulness were strange to Erasmus. And yet such was his nature. In characters like his a kind of mental cramp keeps back the effusions of the heart. He subscribes to the adage: 'Love so, as if you may hate one day, and hate so, as if you may love one day'. He cannot bear benefits.

In his inmost soul he continually retires before everybody. He who considers himself the pattern of simple unsuspicion, is indeed in the highest degree suspicious towards all his friends. The dead Ammonius, who had helped him so zealously in the most delicate concerns, is not secure from it. 'You are always unfairly distrustful towards me,'

Budaeus complains. 'What!' exclaims Erasmus, 'you will find few people who are so little distrustful in friends.h.i.+p as myself.'

When at the height of his fame the attention of the world was indeed fixed on all he spoke or did, there was some ground for a certain feeling on his part of being always watched and threatened. But when he was yet an unknown man of letters, in his Parisian years, we continually find traces in him of a mistrust of the people about him that can only be regarded as a morbid feeling. During the last period of his life this feeling attaches especially to two enemies, Eppendorf and Aleander.

Eppendorf employs spies everywhere who watch Erasmus's correspondence with his friends. Aleander continually sets people to combat him, and lies in wait for him wherever he can. His interpretation of the intentions of his a.s.sailants has the ingenious self-centred element which pa.s.ses the borderline of sanity. He sees the whole world full of calumny and ambuscades threatening his peace: nearly all those who once were his best friends have become his bitterest enemies; they wag their venomous tongues at banquets, in conversation, in the confessional, in sermons, in lectures, at court, in vehicles and s.h.i.+ps. The minor enemies, like troublesome vermin, drive him to weariness of life, or to death by insomnia. He compares his tortures to the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, pierced by arrows. But his is worse, for there is no end to it. For years he has daily been dying a thousand deaths and that alone; for his friends, if such there are, are deterred by envy.

He mercilessly pillories his patrons in a row for their stinginess. Now and again there suddenly comes to light an undercurrent of aversion and hatred which we did not suspect. Where had more good things fallen to his lot than in England? Which country had he always praised more? But suddenly a bitter and unfounded reproach escapes him. England is responsible for his having become faithless to his monastic vows, 'for no other reason do I hate Britain more than for this, though it has always been pestilent to me'.

He seldom allows himself to go so far. His expressions of hatred or spite are, as a rule, restricted to the feline. They are aimed at friends and enemies, Budaeus, Lypsius, as well as Hutten and Beda.

Occasionally we are struck by the expression of coa.r.s.e pleasure at another's misfortune. But in all this, as regards malice, we should not measure Erasmus by our ideas of delicacy and gentleness. Compared with most of his contemporaries he remains moderate and refined.

Erasmus never felt happy, was never content. This may perhaps surprise us for a moment, when we think of his cheerful, never-failing energy, of his gay jests and his humour. But upon reflection this unhappy feeling tallies very well with his character. It also proceeds from his general att.i.tude of warding off. Even when in high spirits he considers himself in all respects an unhappy man. 'The most miserable of all men, the thrice-wretched Erasmus,' he calls himself in fine Greek terms. His life 'is an Iliad of calamities, a chain of misfortunes. How can anyone envy _me_?' To no one has Fortune been so constantly hostile as to him. She has sworn his destruction, thus he sang in his youth in a poetical complaint addressed to Gaguin: from earliest infancy the same sad and hard fate has been constantly pursuing him. Pandora's whole box seems to have been poured out over him.

This unhappy feeling takes the special form of his having been charged by unlucky stars with Herculean labour, without profit or pleasure to himself:[16] troubles and vexations without end. His life might have been so much easier if he had taken his chances. He should never have left Italy; or he ought to have stayed in England. 'But an immoderate love of liberty caused me to wrestle long with faithless friends and inveterate poverty.' Elsewhere he says more resignedly: 'But we are driven by fate'.

That immoderate love of liberty had indeed been as fate to him. He had always been the great seeker of quiet and liberty who found liberty late and quiet never. By no means ever to bind himself, to incur no obligations which might become fetters--again that fear of the entanglements of life. Thus he remained the great restless one. He was never truly satisfied with anything, least of all with what he produced himself. 'Why, then, do you overwhelm us with so many books', someone at Louvain objected, 'if you do not really approve of any of them?' And Erasmus answers with Horace's word: 'In the first place, because I cannot sleep'.

A sleepless energy, it was that indeed. He cannot rest. Still half seasick and occupied with his trunks, he is already thinking about an answer to Dorp's letter, just received, censuring the _Moria_. We should fully realize what it means that time after time Erasmus, who, by nature, loved quiet and was fearful, and fond of comfort, cleanliness and good fare, undertakes troublesome and dangerous journeys, even voyages, which he detests, for the sake of his work and of that alone.

He is not only restless, but also precipitate. Helped by an incomparably retentive and capacious memory he writes at haphazard. He never becomes anacoluthic; his talent is too refined and sure for that; but he does repeat himself and is unnecessarily circ.u.mstantial. 'I rather pour out than write everything,' he says. He compares his publications to parturitions, nay, to abortions. He does not select his subjects, he tumbles into them, and having once taken up a subject he finishes without intermission. For years he has read only _tumultuarie_, up and down all literature; he no longer finds time really to refresh his mind by reading, and to work so as to please himself. On that account he envied Budaeus.

'Do not publish too hastily,' More warns him: 'you are watched to be caught in inexact.i.tudes.' Erasmus knows it: he will correct all later, he will ever have to revise and to polish everything. He hates the labour of revising and correcting, but he submits to it, and works pa.s.sionately, 'in the treadmill of Basle', and, he says, finishes the work of six years in eight months.

In that recklessness and precipitation with which Erasmus labours there is again one of the unsolved contradictions of his being. He _is_ precipitate and careless; he _wants_ to be careful and cautious; his mind drives him to be the first, his nature restrains him, but usually only after the word has been written and published. The result is a continual intermingling of explosion and reserve.

The way in which Erasmus always tries to s.h.i.+rk definite statements irritates us. How carefully he always tries to represent the _Colloquies_, in which he had spontaneously revealed so much of his inner convictions, as mere trifling committed to paper to please his friends. They are only meant to teach correct Latin! And if anything is said in them touching matters of faith, it is not I who say it, is it?

As often as he censures cla.s.ses or offices in the _Adagia_, princes above all, he warns the readers not to regard his words as aimed at particular persons.

Erasmus was a master of reserve. He knew, even when he held definite views, how to avoid direct decisions, not only from caution, but also because he saw the eternal ambiguity of human issues.

Erasmus ascribes to himself an unusual horror of lies. On seeing a liar, he says, he was corporeally affected. As a boy he already violently disliked mendacious boys, such as the little braggart of whom he tells in the _Colloquies_. That this reaction of aversion is genuine is not contradicted by the fact that we catch Erasmus himself in untruths.

Inconsistencies, flattery, pieces of cunning, white lies, serious suppression of facts, simulated sentiments of respect or sorrow--they may all be pointed out in his letters. He once disavowed his deepest conviction for a gratuity from Anne of Borselen by flattering her bigotry. He requested his best friend Batt to tell lies in his behalf.

He most sedulously denied his authors.h.i.+p of the Julius dialogue, for fear of the consequences, even to More, and always in such a way as to avoid saying outright, 'I did not write it'. Those who know other humanists, and know how frequently and impudently they lied, will perhaps think more lightly of Erasmus's sins.

For the rest, even during his lifetime he did not escape punishment for his eternal reserve, his proficiency in semi-conclusions and veiled truths, insinuations and slanderous allusions. The accusation of perfidy was often cast in his teeth, sometimes in serious indignation. 'You are always engaged in bringing suspicion upon others,' Edward Lee exclaims.

'How dare you usurp the office of a general censor, and condemn what you have hardly ever tasted? How dare you despise all but yourself? Falsely and insultingly do you expose your antagonist in the _Colloquia_.' Lee quotes the spiteful pa.s.sage referring to himself, and then exclaims: 'Now from these words the world may come to know its divine, its censor, its modest and sincere author, that Erasmian diffidence, earnest, decency and honesty! Erasmian modesty has long been proverbial. You are always using the words "false accusations". You say: if I was consciously guilty of the smallest of all his (Lee's) false accusations, I should not dare to approach the Lord's table!--O man, who are you, to judge another, a servant who stands or falls before his Lord?'

This was the first violent attack from the conservative side, in the beginning of 1520, when the mighty struggle which Luther's action had unchained kept the world in ever greater suspense. Six months later followed the first serious reproaches on the part of radical reformers.

Ulrich von Hutten, the impetuous, somewhat foggy-headed knight, who wanted to see Luther's cause triumph as the national cause of Germany, turns to Erasmus, whom, at one time, he had enthusiastically acclaimed as the man of the new weal, with the urgent appeal not to forsake the cause of the reformation or to compromise it. 'You have shown yourself fearful in the affair of Reuchlin; now in that of Luther you do your utmost to convince his adversaries that you are altogether averse from it, though we know better. Do not disown us. You know how triumphantly certain letters of yours are circulated, in which, to protect yourself from suspicion, you rather meanly fasten it on others ... If you are now afraid to incur a little hostility for _my_ sake, concede me at least that you will not allow yourself, out of fear for another, to be tempted to renounce me; rather be silent about me.'

Those were bitter reproaches. In the man who had to swallow them there was a puny Erasmus who deserved those reproaches, who took offence at them, but did not take them to heart, who continued to act with prudent reserve till Hutten's friends.h.i.+p was turned to hatred. In him was also a great Erasmus who knew how, under the pa.s.sion and infatuation with which the parties combated each other, the Truth he sought, and the Love he hoped would subdue the world, were obscured; who knew the G.o.d whom he professed too high to take sides. Let us try ever to see of that great Erasmus as much as the petty one permits.

FOOTNOTES:

[15] Cf. the letter to Beatus Rhena.n.u.s, pp. 227-8.

[16] Ad. 2001 LB. II, 717B, 77 c. 58A. On the book which Erasmus holds in his hand in Holbein's portrait at Longford Castle, we read in Greek: The Labours of Hercules.

CHAPTER XV

AT LOUVAIN

1517-18

Erasmus at Louvain, 1517--He expects the renovation of the Church as the fruit of good learning--Controversy with Lefevre d'etaples--Second journey to Basle, 1518--He revises the edition of the New Testament--Controversies with Latomus, Briard and Lee--Erasmus regards the opposition of conservative theology merely as a conspiracy against good learning

When Erasmus established himself at Louvain in the summer of 1517 he had a vague presentiment that great changes were at hand. 'I fear', he writes in September, 'that a great subversion of affairs is being brought about here, if G.o.d's favour and the piety and wisdom of princes do not concern themselves about human matters.' But the forms which that great change would a.s.sume he did not in the least realize.

He regarded his removal as merely temporary. It was only to last 'till we shall have seen which place of residence is best fit for old age, which is already knocking'. There is something pathetic in the man who desires nothing but quiet and liberty, and who through his own restlessness, and his inability not to concern himself about other people, never found a really fixed abode or true independence. Erasmus is one of those people who always seem to say: tomorrow, tomorrow! I must first deal with this, and then ... As soon as he shall be ready with the new edition of the New Testament and shall have extricated himself from troublesome and disagreeable theological controversies, in which he finds himself entangled against his wish, he will sleep, hide himself, 'sing for himself and the Muses'. But that time never came.

Where to live when he shall be free? Spain, to which Cardinal Ximenes called him, did not appeal to him. From Germany, he says, the stoves and the insecurity deter him. In England the servitude which was required of him there revolted him. But in the Netherlands themselves, he did not feel at his ease, either: 'Here I am barked at a great deal, and there is no remuneration; though I desired it ever so much, I could not bear to stay there long'. Yet he remained for four years.

Erasmus had good friends in the University of Louvain. At first he put up with his old host Johannes Paluda.n.u.s, Rhetor of the University, whose house he exchanged that summer for quarters in the College of the Lily.

Martin Dorp, a Dutchman like himself, had not been estranged from him by their polemics about the _Moria_; his good will was of great importance to Erasmus, because of the important place Dorp occupied in the theological faculty. And lastly, though his old patron, Adrian of Utrecht, afterwards Pope, had by that time been called away from Louvain to higher dignities, his influence had not diminished in consequence, but rather increased; for just about that time he had been made a cardinal.

Erasmus was received with great complaisance by the Louvain divines.

Their leader, the vice-chancellor of the University, Jean Briard of Ath, repeatedly expressed his approval of the edition of the New Testament, to Erasmus's great satisfaction. Soon Erasmus found himself a member of the theological faculty. Yet he did not feel at his ease among the Louvain theologians. The atmosphere was a great deal less congenial to him than that of the world of the English scholars. Here he felt a spirit which he did not understand and distrusted in consequence.