tT £E R IN S M US BY. J. HUIZINGA he rea PO ae GREAT HOLLANDERS Edited by EpwaArpD W. BOK ERASMUS Paks GREAT HOLLANDERS Edited by EDWARD W. BOK ~ TOeical stu KERASMUS BY J. HUIZINGA PROFESSOR OF HISTORY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF LEYDEN, NETHERLANDS WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY THE EDITOR CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS NEW YORK - LONDON 1924 Corrricar, 1924, Br ‘CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS Printed in the United States of America a ry yy A Ox.) \) Sof ey —s ip NOTE The translation of this book from the Dutch manuscript has been made by Mr. F. Hopman of Leyden. TO P. 8. AND H. M. ALLEN, THE AUTHOR, In dedicating this book to you I feel as though I were offering you a bunch of flowers picked in your own gar- den. My sole excuse is that you have enclosed the whole field. Nobody nowadays can enter upon the study of Erasmus without walking along the paths of your Opus Epistolarum Erasmt, that model of scholarly editing, and much more than that: a true historical thesaurus of all that appertains to the great spiritual movements of the age of Humanism and of the Reformation. The student of Erasmus feels safe, so long as you guide him with your sure and accurate information; when he comes to the tracts not yet trimmed by your patient labours, he still sees a wilderness before him. In writing a short life of Erasmus the chief difficulty is to avoid losing oneself in the immense wealth of subject- matter. It needs continual self-limitation and the omis- sion of facts that will scarcely bear omission. You will undoubtedly miss here more than you find. Only by keep- ing carefully to the point, which means to Erasmus him- self, have I been able to meet the requirements of a well- knit composition. A few lines had to suffice for each of the great events which form the background of Erasmus’ life. All his friends and foes, so familiar to you, have had to remain in the shadow. Even Thomas More, Peter Gilles, Froben, and Beatus Rhenanus could only be touched upon in passing, not to speak of Hutten, Budaeus, Pirk- heimer, Beda and so many others. One thing grieves me: that you are sure to find my opinion of Erasmus too unfavourable. I could only pre- vil sent him as I saw him, still I am ready to admit that, perhaps, after all has been said, your more sympathising judgment must be the truer one, because it is founded on the knowledge and the love of a life-work. To revert once more to my metaphor: I shall be con- tent, if you find here some flowers arranged in a way which may please you, or some herb whose virtue you did not know. Leypen, September, 1923. viii THE REASON FOR THIS SERIES It was only natural that, with the close of the Great War, and the opening of the reconstruction period, the attention of the people of the United States should be more strongly directed towards matters of international import. It is significant, however, that out of this in- terest there should have arisen a strong revival of a desire for knowledge of a people who remained neutral during the war. It is as if the American people had determined to renew the strong bond of kinship and friendliness which existed between them and the people of the Netherlands in the earlier days of the American republic. The establishment of a chair of Dutch history, ideals and literature at Columbia University; the formation of a Netherland-America Affiliation at New York City, and a similar organisation at The Hague; a proposed inter- change of professorships of American and Dutch univer- sities; the great awakening of American economic and financial interests in the Dutch possessions in the East and West Indies, as a result of the attention directed to the Netherlands Government as an imperial power of astonishing dimensions in the Far East, in the Conference for Limitation of Armament at Washington; the opening of the finest home of diplomacy at Washington in the new Royal Netherlands Legation; the creation of a Summer School for American Students at the University of Leyden next summer, at American behest,—all these elements have combined to focus a new interest in the history and men of that nation from which have come so many of ix x THE REASON FOR THIS SERIES the foundation-institutions of the republic of the United States. It seemed, therefore, to the publishers and editor of this series the appropriate occasion to group, for the first time in American historical literature, a few of those out- standing figures in the history of the Netherlands whose achievements not only made their own land great, but by their influence did so much to fashion and shape Ameri- can institutions of statesmanship, law, art, letters, philos- ophy, and religion. From the knowledge derived from such a source will come a new knowledge to many Ameri- cans of the sources and inspiration of their own institu- tions; and in addition they may gain a closer view of those wonderfully romantic figures whose influence gave to the world a new color and a thrill of hope in the centuries in which they lived, before the republic of the United States had been fashioned into its greatness as a nation. Tae EprIror. IN INTRODUCTION TO THIS VOLUME The great career of Erasmus has been chosen to open the series not only because of its intrinsic interest, but by reason of its familiarity, in part, to American students. I say, in part, because much has been learned about Erasmus in later years, and this material Professor Huizinga has drawn upon and used as a basis for his study of the great Rotterdam monk in this book. It is, therefore, an Erasmus brought up to modern rec- ords that we meet here, presenting a figure which stands out more sharply and clearer than ever as one of the great- est influences of his day. The reader will get from this book, I think, the strong feeling that here was a man of vast learning, sacred and secular, with whom scholarship was really a joyful pas- sion, and yet never did he allow himself to become the pedant or the dilettante—even in an age of dilettantism when sober Englishmen were wont to tie their shoe-strings in French fashion! Erasmus always remained the great human: he was the very soul of humanism: he was liked by all and popular in all lands where he traveled or lived. His was a delightful spirit of gentle wit. He was quick at satire, but yet, in the main, of gentle humor. He won with his sallies of humor rather than with his shafts of satire. And, gradually, as he traveled through the mo- rass of his time, men caught from him a new glimpse of the liberty of mind and an awakened desire for better things. He became the most sought-after man of his day: kings and universities alike implored his presence, until, Xl xii IN INTRODUCTION TO THIS VOLUME at the last, he nad stamped himself upon his age as the greatest spiritual authority of his time. He may not have directly influenced the Church to the extent he hoped, but he did contribute more than any figure in the sixteenth century to change the materialism of Europe to a spirit of idealism. Without the solid groundwork laid down by Erasmus in the early sixteenth century, the fresh start made by the human mind in the later years of that cen- tury and in the following hundred years might never have come to pass. This is the interesting personality which Professor Huizinga has portrayed and whose work he has analyzed in this book, and its successful presentation will make it seem entirely worthy of being the first glimpse which we shall get in this series of great Hollanders. Epwarp W. Box. MERION PENNSYLVANIA September 1923 ABBREVIATIONS USED IN THE FOOTNOTES A. = Allen, Opus Epistolarum Erasmi. The letters are quoted only by their number, the second figure de- notes the line, e. g., A. 16. 12 = Allen, vol. I, ep. 16, line 12, page 90. LB = Erasmus, Opera omnia in the Leyden edition, quoted by volume, column and part of the page, e. g., LB X 1219 F = Opera, vol. X, column 1219, at the bottom. LBE = Third volume of the same, containing the Epis- tles, quoted by column (not by number). I CHILDHOOD AND EARLY YOUTH THE LOW COUNTRIES IN THE 15TH CENTURY—THE BUR- GUNDIAN POWER—CONNECTIONS WITH THE GERMAN EMPIRE AND WITH FRANCE—THE NORTHERN NETHER- LANDS OUTSKIRTS IN EVERY SENSE—MOVEMENT OF DEVOTIO MODERNA: BRETHREN OF THE COMMON LIFE AND WINDESHEIM MONASTERIES—ERASMUS’ BIRTH: 1466—HIS RELATIONS AND NAME—AT SCHOOL AT GOUDA, DEVENTER AND BOIS-LE-DUC—HE TAKES THE VOWS: PROBABLY IN 1488. -When Erasmus was born, Holland had for about twenty years formed part of the territory which the dukes of Burgundy had succeeded in uniting under their dominion—that complexity of lands, half French in pop- ulation, like Burgundy, Artois, Hainault, Namur; half Dutch like Flanders, Brabant, Zealand, Holland. The appellation “Holland” was, as yet, strictly limited to the county of that name (the present provinces of North and South Holland), with which Zealand, too, had long sinee been united. The remaining territories which, to- gether with those last mentioned, make up the present kingdom of the Netherlands, had not yet been brought under Burgundian dominion, although the dukes had cast their eyes on them. In the bishopric of Utrecht, whose power extended to the regions on the far side of the river Ysel, Burgundian influence had already begun to make itself manifest. The projected conquest of Friesland was a political inheritance of the counts of Holland, who preceded the Burgundians. The duchy of Guelders, alone, still preserved its independence invio- 1 2 ERASMUS late, being more closely connected with the neigh- bouring German territories, and consequently with the Empire itself. All these lands—about this time they began to be re- garded collectively under the name of “Low Countries by the Sea”—had in most respects the character of “out- skirts.” The authority of the German Emperors had for some centuries been little more than imaginary. Holland and Zealand hardly shared the dawning sense of a na- tional German union. They had too long looked to France in matters political. Since 1299 a French-speak- ing dynasty, that of Hainault, had ruled Holland. Even the house of Bavaria that succeeded it about the middle of the 14th century had not restored closer contact with the Empire, but had itself, on the contrary, early become Gallicized, attracted as it was by Paris and soon twined about by the tentacles of Burgundy to which it became linked by means of a double marriage. The northern half of the Low Countries were “out- “skirts” also in ecclesiastical and cultural matters. Brought over rather late to the cause of Christianity (the end of the 8th century), they had, as borderlands, re- mained united under a single bishop: the bishop of Utrecht. The meshes of ecclesiastical organization were wider here than elsewhere. They had no university. ' Paris remained, even after the designing policy of the Burgundian dukes had founded the university of Louvain in 1425, the centre of doctrine and science for the north- ern Netherlands. From the point of view of the wealthy towns of Flanders and Brabant, now the heart of the Burgundian possessions, Holland and Zealand formed a wretched little country of boatmen and peasants. Chiv- CHILDHOOD AND EARLY YOUTH 3 alry, which the dukes of Burgundy attempted to invest with new splendour, had but moderately thrived among the nobles of Holland. The Dutch had not enriched courtly literature, in which Flanders and Brabant zeal- ously strove to follow the French example, by any con- tribution worth mentioning. Whatever was coming up in Holland flowered unseen; * it was not of a sort to attract the attention of Christen- dom. It was a brisk navigation and trade, mostly tran- sit trade, by which the Hollanders already began to emulate the German Hansa, and which brought them into continual contact with France and Spain, England and Scotland, Scandinavia, North Germany and the Rhine from Cologne upward. It was herring fishery, a humble trade, but the source of great prosperity,—a rising industry, shared by a number of small towns. Not one of those towns in Holland and Zealand, neither Dordrecht nor Leyden, Haarlem, Middelburg, Amsterdam, could compare with Ghent, Bruges, Lille, Antwerp or Brussels in the south. It is true that also in the towns of Holland the highest products of the human mind germinated, but those towns themselves were still too small and too poor to be centres of art and science. The most eminent men were irresistibly drawn to one of the great foci of secular and ecclesias- tical culture. Sluter, the great sculptor, went to Bur- gundy, took service with the dukes, and bequeathed no specimen of his art to the land of his birth. Dirk Bouts, the artist of Haarlem, removed to Louvain, where his best work is preserved; what was left at Haarlem has perished. At Haarlem, too, and earlier, perhaps, than anywhere else, obscure experiments were being made in v2 Y 4 ERASMUS that great art, craving to be brought forth, which was to change the world: the art of printing. There was yet another characteristic spiritual phe- nomenon, which originated here and gave its peculiar stamp to life in these countries. It was a movement designed to give depth and fervour to religious life; started by a burgher of Deventer, Geert Groote, toward the end of the 14th century. It had embodied itself in two closely connected forms—the fraterhouses, where the brethren of the Common Life lived together with- out altogether separating from the world, and the con- gregation of the monastery of Windesheim, of the order of the regular Augustinian canons. Originating in the regions on the banks of the Ysel, between the two small towns of Deventer and Zwolle, and so on the outskirts of the diocese of Utrecht, this movement soon spread, eastward to Westphalia, northward to Groningen and the Frisian country, westward to Holland proper. Fra- terhouses were erected everywhere and monasteries of the Windesheim congregation were established or affili- ated. The movement was spoken of as “modern devo- tion,” Devotio moderna. It was rather a matter of sen- timent and practice than of definite doctrine. The truly Catholic character of the movement had early been acknowledged by the church authorities. Sincerity and modesty, simplicity and industry, and, above all, con- stant ardour of religious emotion and thought, were its objects. Its energies were devoted to tending the sick and other works of charity, but especially to instruction and the art of writing. It is in this that it especially differed from the revival of the Franciscan and Domin- ican orders of about the same time, which turned to CHILDHOOD AND EARLY YOUTH 5 preaching. The Windesheimian and the Hieronymian (as the brethren of the Common Life were also called) exerted their crowning activities in the seclusion of the schoolroom and the silence of the writing cell. The schools of the brethren soon drew pupils from a wide area. In this way the foundations were laid, both here in the northern Netherlands and in lower Germany, for a generally diffused culture among the middle classes; a culture of a very narrow, strictly ecclesiastical nature, indeed, but which for that very reason was fit to per- meate broad layers of the people. What the Windesheimians themselves produced in the way of devotional literature is chiefly limited to edifying booklets and biographies of their own members; writings which were distinguished rather by their pious tenor and sincerity than by daring or novel thoughts. But of them all, the greatest was that immortal work of Thomas a Kempis, Canon of Saint Agnietenberg, near Zwolle, the Imitatio Christt. Foreigners visiting these regions north of the Scheldt and the Meuse, laughed at the rude manners and the deep drinking of the inhabitants, but they also men- tioned their sincere piety. These countries were already, what they have ever remained, somewhat contemplative and self-contained, better adapted for speculating on the world and for reproving it than for astonishing it with dazzling wit. Rotterdam and Gouda, situated upward of twelve miles apart in the lowest region of Holland, an extremely watery region, were not among the first towns of the county. They were small country towns, ranking after Vw 6 ERASMUS Dordrecht, Haarlem, Leyden and rapidly rising Amster- dam. They were not centres of culture. Erasmus was born at Rotterdam on the 27th of October, most prob- ably in the year 1466. The illegitimacy of his birth has thrown a veil of mystery over his descent and kinship. It is possible that Erasmus himself learned the circum- stances of his coming into the world only in his later years. Acutely sensitive of the taint in his origin, he did more to veil the secret than to reveal it. The picture which he painted of it in his ripe age was romantic and pathetic. He imagined that his father when a young man made love to a girl, a physician’s daughter, in the hope of marrying her. The parents and brothers of the young fellow, indignant, tried to persuade him to take holy orders. The young man fled before the child was born. He went to Rome and made a living by copying. His relations sent him false tidings that his beloved had died; out of grief he became a priest and devoted himself to religion altogether. Returned to his native country he discovered the deceit. He abstained from all contact with her whom he now could no longer marry, but took great pains to give his son a liberal edu- cation. The mother continued to care for the child, till an early death took her from him. The father soon fol- lowed her to the grave. To Erasmus’ recollection he was only twelve or thirteen years old when his mother died. It seems to be practically certain that her death did not occur before 1483, when, therefore, he was already seven- teen years old. His sense of chronology was always re- maarkably ill developed. Unfortunately it is beyond doubt that Erasmus him- self knew, or had known, that not all particulars of CHILDHOOD AND EARLY YOUTH 7 this version were correct. In all probability his father was already a priest at the time of the relationship to which he owed his life; in any case it was not the im- patience of a betrothed couple, but an irregular alliance of long standing, of which a brother, Peter, had been born three years before. We can only vaguely discern the outlines of a numer- ous and commonplace middle-class family. The father had nine brothers, who were all married. The grand- parents on his father’s side and the uncles on his mother’s side attained to a very great age. It is strange that a host of cousins—their progeny—has not boasted of a family connection with the great Erasmus. Their de- scendants have not even been traced. What were their names? The fact that in burgher circles family names had, as yet, become anything but fixed, makes it difficult to trace Erasmus’ kinsmen. Usually people were called by their own and their father’s name; but it also hap- pened that the father’s name became fixed and adhered to the following generation. Erasmus calls his father Gerard, his brother Peter Gerard, while a papal letter styles Erasmus himself Erasmus Rogerii. Possibly the © father was called Roger Gerard or Gerards. Although Erasmus and his brother were born at Rot- terdam, there is much that points to the fact that his father’s kin did not belong there, but at Gouda. At any rate they had near relatives at Gouda. Erasmus was his Christian name. There is nothing strange in the choice, although it was rather unusual. St. Erasmus was one of the fourteen Holy Martyrs, whose worship so much engrossed the attention of the multi- tude in the 15th century. Perhaps the popular belief 8 ERASMUS that the intercession of Saint Erasmus conferred wealth, had some weight in choosing the name. Up to the time when he became better acquainted with Greek, he used the form Herasmus. Later on he regretted that he had not also given that name the more correct and melodious form Erasmius. On a few occasions he half jocularly called himself so, and his godchild, Johannes Froben’s son, always used this form. It was probably for similar aesthetic considerations that he soon altered the barbaric Rotterdammensis to Roterdamus, later Roterodamus, which he perhaps accen- tuated as a proparoxytone. Desiderius was an addition selected by himself, which he first used in 1496; it is possible that the study of his favourite author Jerome, among whose correspondents there is a Desiderius, sug- gested the name to him. When, therefore, the full form, Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus, first appears, in the second edition of the Adagia, published by Josse Badius at Paris in 1506, it is an indication that Erasmus, then forty years of age, had found himself. Circumstances had not made it easy for him to find his way. Almost in his infancy, when hardly four years old, he thinks, he had been put to school at Gouda, to- gether with his brother. He was nine years old when his father sent him to Deventer to continue his studies in the famous school of the chapter of St. Lebuin. His mother accompanied him. His stay at Deventer must have lasted, with an interval during which he was a choir boy in the minster at Utrecht, from 1475 to 1484. Eras- mus’ explicit declaration that he was 14 years old when he left Deventer may be explained by assuming that in CHILDHOOD AND EARLY YOUTH 9 later years he confused his temporary absence from De- venter (when at Utrecht) with the definite end of his stay at Deventer. Reminiscences of his life there re- peatedly crop up in Erasmus’ writings. Those concern- ing the teaching he got inspired him with little gratitude; the school was still barbaric, then, he said; ancient medieval text books were used there of whose silliness and cumbrousness we can hardly conceive. Some of the masters were of the brotherhood of the Common Life. One of them, Johannes Synthen, brought to his task a certain degree of understanding of classic antiquity in its purer form. Toward the end of Erasmus’ residence Alex- ander Hegius was placed at the head of the school, a friend of the Frisian humanist, Rudolf Agricola, who on his return from Italy was gaped at by his compatriots as a prodigy. On festal days, when the rector made his oration before all the pupils, Erasmus heard Hegius; on one single occasion he listened to the celebrated “Agricola himself, which left a deep impression on his mind. His mother’s death of the plague that ravaged the town brought Erasmus’ schooltime at Deventer to a sud- den close. His father called him and his brother back to Gouda, only to die himself soon afterwards. He must have been a man of culture. For he knew Greek, had heard the famous humanists in Italy, had copied classie authors and left a library of some value. Erasmus and his brother were now under the protec- tion of three guardians whose care and intentions he afterwards placed in an unfavourable light. How far he exaggerated their treatment of him it is difficult to de- cide. That the guardians, among whom one Peter Winckel, schoolmaster at Gouda, occupied the principal 10 ERASMUS place, had little sympathy with the new classicism, about which their ward already felt enthusiastic, need not be doubted. “If you should write again so elegantly, please to add a commentary,” the schoolmaster replied grumblingly to an epistle on which Erasmus, then four- teen years old, had expended much care. That the guardians sincerely considered it a work pleasing to God to persuade the youths to enter a monastery can no more be doubted than that this was for them the easiest way to get rid of their task. For Erasmus this pitiful business assumes the colour of a grossly selfish attempt to cloak dishonest administration; an altogether repre- hensible abuse of power and authority. More than this: in later years it obscured for him the image of his own brother, with whom he had been on terms of cordial in- timacy. Winckel sent the two young fellows, 21 and 18 years old, to school again, this time at Bois-le-Duc. There they lived in the Fraterhouse itself, to which the school was attached. There was nothing here of the glory that had shone about Deventer. The brethren, says Erasmus, knew of no other purpose than that of destroying all natural gifts, with blows, reprimands and severity, in order to fit the soul for the monastery. This, he thought, was just what his guardians were aiming at; although ripe for the university they were deliberately kept away from it. In this way more than two years were wasted. One of his two masters, one Rombout, who liked young Erasmus, tried hard to prevail on him to join the Brethren of the Common Life. In later years Erasmus occasionally regretted that he had not yielded; for the CHILDHOOD AND EARLY YOUTH 11 brethren took no such irrevocable vows as were now in store for him. An epidemic of the plague became the occasion for the brothers to leave Bois-le-Duc and return to Gouda. Erasmus was attacked by a fever that sapped his power of resistance of which he now stood in such need. The guardians (one of the three had died in the meantime) now did their utmost to make the two young men enter a monastery. They had good cause for it, as they had ill administered the slender fortune of their wards, and, says Erasmus, refused to render an account. Later he saw everything connected with this dark period of his life in the most gloomy colours—except himself. Him- self he sees as a boy of not yet 16 years (it is nearly certain that he must have been 20 already) weakened by fever, but nevertheless resolute and sensible in refusing. He has persuaded his brother to fly with him and to go to a university. The one guardian is a narrow-minded tyrant, the other, Winckel’s brother, a merchant, a frivol- ous coaxer. Peter, the elder of the youths, yields first and enters the monastery of Sion, near Delft (of the order of the regular Augustinian canons), where the guardian had found a place for him. Erasmus resisted longer. Only after a visit to the monastery of Steyn or Hmmaus, near Gouda, belonging to the same order, where he found a schoolfellow from Deventer, who pointed out the bright side of monastic life to him, did Erasmus yield and enter Steyn, where soon after, prob- ably in 1488, he took the vows. II IN THE MONASTERY ERASMUS AS AN AUGUSTINIAN CANON AT STEYN—HIS FRIENDS—LETTERS TO SERVATIUS—HUMANISM IN THE MONASTERIES: LATIN POETRY—AVERSION TO CLOISTER- LIFE—HE LEAVES STEYN TO ENTER THE SERVICE OF THE BISHOP OF CAMBRAY: 140—JAMES BATT—ANTI- BARBARI—HE GETS LEAVE TO STUDY AT PARIS: 1495. In his later life—under the influence of the gnawing regret, which his monkhood and all the trouble he took to escape from it, caused him, the picture of all the events leading up to his entering the convent became distorted in his mind. Brother Peter, to whom he still wrote in a cordial vein from Steyn, became a worthless fellow, ever his evil spirit, a Judas. The schoolfellow whose advice had been decisive now appeared a traitor, prompted by self-interest, who himself had chosen con- vent-life merely out of laziness and the love of good cheer. The letters that Erasmus wrote from Steyn betray no vestige of his deep-seated aversion to monastic life, which afterwards he asks us to believe he had felt from the outset. We may, of course, assume that the supervision of his superiors prevented him from writing all that was in his heart, and that in the depths of his being there had always existed the craving for freedom and for more civilised intercourse than Steyn could offer. Still he must have found in the monastery some of the good things that his schoolfellow had led him to expect. That at 12 IN THE MONASTERY 13 this period he should have written a Praise of Monastic Life, “to please a friend who wanted to decoy a cousin,” as he himself says, is one of those naive assertions, in- vented afterwards, of which Erasmus never saw the unreasonable quality. | He found at Steyn a fair degree of freedom, some food for an intellect craving for classic antiquity, and friendships with men of the same turn of mind. There were three who especially attracted him. Of the schoolfellow who had induced him to become a monk, we hear no more. His friends are Servatius Roger of Rotterdam, and William Hermans of Gouda, both his companions at Steyn, and the older Cornelius Gerard of Gouda, usually called Aurelius (a quasi-latinization of Goudanus), who spent most of his time in the monastery of Lopsen, near Leyden. With them he read and con- versed sociably and jestingly; with them he exchanged letters when they were not together. Out of the letters to Servatius there rises the picture of an Erasmus whom we shall never find again—a young man of more than feminine sensitiveness; of a languish- ing need for sentimental friendship. In writing to Serva- tius, Erasmus runs the whole gamut of an ardent lover. As often as the image of his friend presents itself to his mind tears break from his eyes. Weeping he re-reads his friend’s letter every hour. But he is mortally dejected and anxious, for the friend proves averse to this exces- sive attachment. What do you want from me? he asks. What is wrong with you? the other replies. Erasmus cannot bear to find that this friendship is not fully returned. “Do not be so reserved; do tell me what is wrong! I repose my hope in you alone; I have become 14 ERASMUS yours so completely that you have left me nought of myself. You know my pusillanimity, which when it has no one on whom to lean and rest, makes me so desper- ate that life becomes a burden.” Let us remember this. Erasmus never again expresses himself so passionately. He has given us here the clue by which we may understand much of what he becomes in his later years. These letters have sometimes been taken as mere literary exercises; the weakness they betray and the complete absence of all reticence, seem to tally ill with his habit of cloaking his most intimate feelings which, afterwards, Erasmus never quite relinquishes. Dr. Allen, who leaves this question undecided, nevertheless inclines to regard the letters as sincere effusions, and to me they seem so, incontestably. This exuberant friendship ac- cords quite well with the times and the person. Sentimental friendships were as much in vogue in secu- lar circles during the 15th century as towards the end of the 18th century. Each court had its pairs of friends, who dressed alike, and shared room, bed and heart. Nor was this cult of fervent friendship restricted to the sphere of aristocratic life. It was among the spe- cific characteristics of the “devotio moderna,” as, for the rest, it seems from its very nature to be inseparably bound up with pietism. To observe one another with sympathy, to watch and note each other’s inner life, was a customary and approved occupation among the breth- ren of the Common Life and the Windesheim monks. And though Steyn and Sion were not of the Windesheim congregation, the spirit of the “devotio moderna” was prevalent there. IN THE MONASTERY 15 As for Erasmus himself, he has rarely revealed the foundation of his character more completely than when he declared to Servatius: “My mind is such that I think nothing can rank higher than friendship in this life, nothing should be desired more ardently, nothing should be treasured more jealously.” A violent affection of a similar nature troubled him even at a later date when the purity of his motives was questioned. Afterwards he speaks of youth as being used to conceive a fervent affection for certain comrades. Moreover, the classic examples of friends, Orestes and Pylades, Damon and Pythias, Theseus and Pirithous, as also David and Jona- than, were ever present before his mind’s eye. A young and very tender heart, marked by many feminine traits, replete with all the sentiment and with all the imaginings of classic literature, who was debarred from love and found himself placed against his wish in a coarse and frigid environment, was likely to become somewhat ex- cessive in his affections. He was obliged to moderate them. Servatius would have none of so jealous and exacting a friendship and, probably at the cost of more humiliation and shame than appears in his letters, young Erasmus resigns himself, to be more guarded in expressing his feelings in the future. The sentimental Erasmus disappears for good and pres- ently makes room for the witty Latinist, who surpasses bis older friends, and chats with them about poetry and literature, advises them about their Latin style, and lec- tures them if necessary. The opportunities for acquiring the new taste for classic antiquity cannot have been so scanty at Deventer, and in the monastery itself, as Erasmus, afterwards, 16 ERASMUS would have us believe, considering the authors he already knew at this time. We may conjecture, also, that the books left by his father, possibly brought by him from Italy, contributed to Erasmus’ culture, though it would be strange that, prone as he was to disparage his schools and his monastery, he should not have mentioned the fact. Moreover, we know that the humanistic knowledge of his youth was not exclusively his own, in spite of all he afterwards said about Dutch ignorance and obscurant- ism. Cornelius Aurelius and William Hermans likewise possessed it. In a letter to Cornelius he mentions the following authors as his poetic models—Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Juv- enal, Statius, Martial, Claudian, Persius, Lucan, Tibullus, Propertius. In prose he imitates Cicero, Quintilian, Sallust, and Terence, whose metrical character had not yet been recognised. Among Italian humanists he was especially acquainted with Lorenzo Valla, who on ac- count of his Elegantiae passed with him for the pioneer of “bonae literae”; but Filelfo, Aeneas Sylvius, Guarino, Poggio and others were also not unknown to him. In ecclesiastical literature he was particularly well read in Jerome. It remains remarkable that the education which Erasmus received in the schools of the “devotio mo- derna,” with their ultra-puritanical object, their rigid dis- cipline intent on breaking the personality, could produce such a mind as he manifests in his monastic period,— the mind of an accomplished humanist. He is only inter- ested in writing Latin verses and in the purity of his Latin style. We look almost in vain for piety in the correspondence with Cornelius of Gouda and William Hermans. They manipulate with ease the most difficult IN THE MONASTERY | 17 Latin metres and the rarest terms of mythology. Their subject-matter is bucolic or amatory, and, if devotional, their classicism deprives it of the accent of piety. The prior of the neighbouring monastery of Hem, at whose request Erasmus sang the Archangel Michael, did not dare to paste up his sapphic ode: it was so “poetic,” he thought, as to seem almost Greek. In those days poetic meant classic. Erasmus himself thought he had made it so bald that it was nearly prose;—‘the times were so barren, then,” he afterwards sighed. These young poets felt themselves the guardians of a new light amidst the dullness and barbarism which op- pressed them. They readily believed each other’s pro- ductions to be immortal, as every band of youthful poets does, and dreamt of a future of poetic glory for Steyn by which it would vie with Mantua. Their environment of clownish, narrow-minded conventional divines—for as such they saw them—neither acknowledged nor encour- aged them. Erasmus’ strong propensity to fancy him- self menaced and injured tinged this position with the martyrdom of oppressed talent. To Cornelius he com- plains in fine Horatian measure of the contempt in which poetry was held; his fellow-monk orders him to let his pen, accustomed to writing poetry, rest. Con- suming envy forces him to give up making verses. A horrid barbarism prevails, the country laughs at the laurel-bringing art of high-seated Apollo; the coarse peasant orders the learned poet to write verses. “Though I had mouths as many as the stars that twinkle in the silent firmament on quiet nights, or as many as the roses that the mild gale of spring strews on the ground, 1 could not complain of all the evils by which the sacred 18 ERASMUS art of poetry is oppressed in these days. I am tired of writing poetry.” Cornelius made a dialogue of this effusion which highly pleased Erasmus. Though in this art nine-tenths may be rhetorical fic- tion and sedulous imitation, we ought not, on that ac- count, to undervalue the enthusiasm inspiring the young poets. Let us, who have mostly grown blunt to the charms of Latin, not think too lightly of the elation felt by one who after learning this language out of the most absurd primers and according to the most ridiculous methods, nevertheless discovered it in its purity, and afterwards came to handle it in the charming rhythm of some artful metre, in the glorious precision of its struc- ture and in all the melodiousness of its sound. Nec si quot placidis ignea noctibus Scintillant tacito sydera culmine, Nec si quot tepidum flante Favonio Ver suffundit humo rosas, Tot sint ora mihi... . Was it strange that the youth who could say this felt himself a poet?—or who, together with his friend, could sing of spring in a Melibean song of fifty distiches? Pe- dantic work, if you like, laboured literary exercises, and yet full of the freshness and the vigour which spring from the Latin itself. Out of these moods was to come the first comprehen- sive work that Erasmus was to undertake, the manuscript of which he was afterwards to lose, to recover in part, and to publish only after many years—the Antibarbari, which he commenced at Steyn, according to Dr. Allen. IN THE MONASTERY 19 In the version in which eventually the first book of the Antibarbari appeared, it reflects, it is true, a somewhat later phase of Erasmus’ life, that which began after he had left the monastery; neither is the comfortable tone of his witty defence of profane literature any longer that of the poet at Steyn. But the ideal of a free and noble life of friendly intercourse and the uninterrupted study of the Ancients had already occurred to him within the convent walls. In the course of years those walls probably hemmed him in more and more closely. Neither learned and poetic correspondence nor the art of painting with which he occupied himself,* together with one Sasboud, could sweeten the oppression of monastic life and a narrow- minded, unfriendly environment. Of the later period of his life in the monastery, no letters at all have been pre- served, according to Dr. Allen’s carefully considered dat- ing. Had he dropped his correspondence out of spleen, or had his superiors forbidden him to keep it up, or are we merely left in the dark because of accidental loss? We know nothing about the circumstances and the frame of mind in which Erasmus was ordained on the 25th of April, 1492, by the bishop of Utrecht, David of Bur- gundy. Perhaps his taking holy orders was connected with his design to leave the monastery. He himself after- wards declared that he had but rarely read mass. He got his chance to leave the monastery when offered the post of secretary to the bishop of Cambray, Henry of Bergen. Erasmus owed this preferment to his fame as a 1 Allen no, 16.12 cf. IV p. XX, and vide LB. IV 756, where surveying the years of his youth he also commemorates ‘“Pingere dum meditor tenueis sine corpore formas,”’ 20 ERASMUS Latinist and a man of letters; for it was with a view to a journey to Rome, where the bishop hoped to obtain a cardinal’s hat, that Erasmus entered his service. The authorisation of the bishop of Utrecht had been obtained, and also that of the prior and the general of the order. Of course, there was no question yet of taking leave for good, since, as the bishop’s servant, Erasmus continued to wear his canon’s dress. He had prepared for his departure in the deepest secrecy. There is something touching in the glimpse we get of his friend and fellow- poet, William Hermans, waiting in vain outside of Gouda to see his friend just for a moment, when on his way south, he would pass the town. It seems there had been consultations between them as to leaving Steyn together, and Erasmus, on his part, had left him ignorant of his plans. William had to console himself with the literature that might be had at Steyn. Erasmus, then 25 years old, for in all probability the year when he left the monastery was 1493, now set foot on the path of a career that was very common and much coveted at that time: that of an intellectual in the shadow of the great. His patron belonged to one of the numerous Belgian noble families, which had risen in the service of the Burgundians and were interestedly de- voted to the prosperity of that house. The Glimes were lords of the important town of Bergen-op-Zoom, which, situated between the river Scheldt and the Meuse delta, was one of the links between the Northern and the Southern Netherlands. Henry, the bishop of Cambray, had just been appointed chancellor of the order of The Golden Fleece, the most distinguished spiritual dignity IN THE MONASTERY 21 at court, which although now Hapsburg in fact, was still named after Burgundy. The service of such an impor- tant personage promised almost unbounded honour and profit. Many a man would under the circumstances, at the cost of some patience, some humiliation, and a certain laxity of principle, have risen even to be a bishop. But Erasmus was never a man to make the most of his situation. To serve the bishop proved rather a disappointment. Erasmus had to accompany him on his frequent migra- tions from one residence to another in Bergen, Brussels, or Mechlin. He was very busy, but the exact nature of his duties is unknown. The journey to Rome, the acme of things desirable to every divine or student, did not come off. The bishop, although taking a cordial interest in him for some months, was less accommodating than he had expected. And so we shortly find Erasmus once more in anything but a cheerful frame of mind. “The hardest fate,” he calls his own, which robs him of all his old sprightliness. Opportunities to study he has none. He now envies his friend William, who at Steyn in the little cell can write beautiful poetry, favored by his “lucky stars.” It befits him, Erasmus, only to weep and sigh; it has already so dulled his mind and withered his heart that his former studies no longer appeal to him. There is rhetorical exaggeration in this and we shall not take his pining for the monastery too seriously, but still it is clear that deep dejection had mastered him. Contact with the world of politics and ambition had | probably unsettled Erasmus. He never had any aptitude for it. The hard realities of life frightened and distressed him. When forced to occupy himself with them he saw 22 7 ERASMUS nothing but bitterness and confusion about him. “Where is gladness or repose? Wherever I turn my eyes I only see disaster and harshness. And in such a bustle and clamour about me you wish me to find leisure for the work of the Muses?” Real leisure Erasmus was never to find during his life. All his reading, all his writing, he did hastily, “tumul- tuarie,” as he calls it repeatedly. Yet he must never- theless have worked with intensest concentration and an incredible power of assimilation. Whilst staying with the bishop he visited the monastery of Groenendael near Brussels, where in former times Ruysbroeck wrote. Pos- sibly Erasmus did not hear the inmates speak of Ruys- broeck and he would certainly have taken little pleasure in the writings of the great mystic. But in the library he found the works of St. Augustine and these he de- voured. The monks of Groenendael were surprised at his diligence. He took the volumes with him even to his bedroom. He occasionally found time to compose at this period. At Halsteren, near Bergen-op-Zoom, where the bishop had a country house, he revised the Antibarbari, begun at Steyn, and elaborated it in the form of a dialogue. It would seem as if he sought compensation for the agita- tion of his existence in an atmosphere of idyllic repose and cultured conversation. He conveys us to the scene (he will afterwards use it repeatedly) which ever remained the ideal pleasure of life to him: a garden or a garden house outside the town, where in the gladness of a fine day a small number of friends meet to talk over a simple meal or during a quiet walk, in Platonic serenity, about things of the mind. The personages whom he introduces, be- IN THE MONASTERY 23 sides himself, are his best friends. They are the valued and faithful friend whom he got to know at Bergen, James Batt, schoolmaster and afterwards also clerk of that town, and his old friend William Hermans of Steyn, whose literary future he continued somewhat to promote. William, arriving unexpectedly from Holland, meets the others, who are later joined by the burgomaster of Ber- gen and the town physician. In a lightly jesting, placid tone they engage in a discussion about the appreciation of poetry and literature,—Latin literature. These are not incompatible with true devotion, as barbarous dull- ness wants us to believe. A cloud of witnesses is there to prove it, among them and above all St. Augustine, whom Erasmus had studied recently, and St. Jerome, with whom Erasmus had been longer acquainted and whose mind was, indeed, more congenial to him. Sol- emnly, in ancient Roman guise, war is declared on the enemies of classic culture. O, ye Goths, by what right do you occupy, not only the Latin provinces (the dis- ciplinae liberales are meant) but the capital, that is Latinity itself? It was Batt who, when his prospects with the bishop of Cambray ended in disappointment, helped to find a — way out for Erasmus. He himself had studied at Paris, | and thither Erasmus also hoped to go, now that Rome was denied him. The bishop’s consent and the promise of a stipend were obtained and Erasmus departed for the most famous of all universities, that of Paris, probably in the late summer of 1495. Batt’s influence and efforts had procured him this lucky chance. lil THE UNIVERSITY OF PARIS THE UNIVERSITY OF PARIS—TRADITIONS AND SCHOOLS OF PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY—THE COLLEGE OF MON- TAIGU—ERASMUS’ DISLIKE OF SCHOLASTICISM—RELA- TIONS WITH THE HUMANIST, ROBERT GAGUIN, 1495— HOW TO EARN A LIVING—FIRST DRAFTS OF SEVERAL OF HIS EDUCATIONAL WORKS—TRAVELLING TO HOL- LAND AND BACK—BATT AND THE LADY OF VEERE—TO ENGLAND WITH LORD MOUNTJOY: 1499. The University of Paris was, more than any other place in Christendom, the scene of the collision and strug- gle of opinions and parties. University life in the middle ages was in general tumultuous and agitated. The forms of scientific intercourse themselves entailed an element of irritability; never-ending disputations, fre- quent elections, and rowdyism of the students. To those were added old and new quarrels of all sorts of orders, schools and groups. The different colleges contended among themselves, the secular clergy were at variance with the regular. The Thomists and the Scotists, to- gether called the Ancients, had been disputing at Paris for half a century with the Terminists, or Moderns, the followers of Ockam and Buridan. In 1482 some sort of peace was concluded between those two groups. Both schools were on their last legs, stuck fast in sterile tech- nical disputes, in systematizing and subdividing, a meth- od of terms and words by which science and philosophy benefited no longer. The theological colleges of the Do- minicans and Franciscans at Paris were declining; theo- 24 THE UNIVERSITY OF PARIS 25 logical teaching was taken over by the secular colleges of Navarre and Sorbonne, but in the old style. The general traditionalism had not prevented humanism from penetrating also in Paris during the last quarter of the 15th century. Refinement of Latin style and the taste for classic poetry here, too, had their fervent cham- pions, just as revived Platonism, which had sprung up in Italy. The Parisian humanists were partly Italians as Girolamo Balbi and Fausto Andrelini, but at that time a Frenchman was considered their leader, Robert Gaguin, general of the order of the Mathurins or Trinitarians, diplomatist, French poet and humanist. Side by side with the new Platonism a clearer understanding of Aris- totle penetrated, which had also come from Italy. Shortly before Erasmus’ arrival Jacques Lefévre d’Etaples had returned from Italy, where he had visited the Platonists, such as Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Miran- dola, and Ermolao Barbaro, the reviver of Aristotle. Though theoretical theology and philosophy generally were conservative at Paris, yet here as well as else- where movements to reform the Church were not wanting. The authority of Jean Gerson, the University’s “ great chancellor (about 1400), had not yet been forgot- ten. But reform by no means meant inclination to depart from the doctrine of the Church; it aimed, in the first place, at restoration and purification of the monastic orders and afterwards at the extermination of abuses which the Church acknowledged and lamented as exist- ing within its fold. In that spirit of reformation of spiritual life the Dutch movement of the “devotio moderna” had recently begun to make itself felt, also, at Paris. The chief of its promoters was John Stan- 26 ERASMUS donck of Mechlin, educated by the Brethren of the Common Life at Gouda and imbued with their spirit in its most rigorous form. He was an ascetic more austere than the spirit of the Windesheimians, strict indeed but yet moderate, required; far beyond ecclesiastical circles his name was proverbial on account of his abstinence;— he had definitely denied himself the use of meat. As provisor of the college of Montaigu he had instituted the most stringent rules there, enforced by chastisement for the slightest faults. To the college he had annexed a home for poor scholars, where they lived in a semi-mo- nastic community. To this man Erasmus had been recommended by the bishop of Cambray. Though he did not join the com- munity of poor students—he was nearly 30 years old— he came to know all the privations of the system. They embittered the earlier part of his stay at Paris and in- stilled in him a deep, permanent aversion to abstinence and austerity. Had he come to Paris for this;—to ex- perience the dismal and depressing influences of his youth anew in a more stringent form? The purpose for which Erasmus went to Paris was chiefly to obtain the degree of doctor of theology. This was not too difficult for him: as a regular he was exempt from previous study in the faculty of arts, and his learn- ing and astonishing intelligence and energy enabled him to prepare in a short time for the examinations and dis- putations required. Yet he did not attain this object at Paris. His stay, which with interruptions lasted, first till 1499, to be continued later, became to him a period of difficulties and exasperations, of struggle to make his way by all the humiliating means which at the time were in- THE UNIVERSITY OF PARIS 27 dispensable to that end; of dawning success, too, which, however, failed to gratify him. The first cause of his reverses was a physical one; he could not endure the hard life in the college of Montaigu. The addled eggs and squalid bedrooms stuck in his memory all his life; there he thinks he contracted the beginnings of his later infirmity. In the Colloquia he has commemorated with abhorrence Standonck’s system of abstinence, privation and chastisement. For the rest his stay there lasted only until the spring of 1496. Meanwhile he had begun his theological studies. He attended lectures on the Bible and the Book of the Sen- tences, the medieval handbook of theology and still the one most frequently used. He was even allowed to give some lessons in the college on Holy Scripture. He preached a few sermons in honour of the Saints, probably in the neighbouring abbey of St. Genevieve. But his heart was not in all this. The subtleties of the schools could not please him. That aversion to all scholasticism, which he rejected in one sweeping condemnation, struck root in his mind, which, however broad, always judged unjustly that for which it had no room. “Those studies can make @ man opinionated and contentious; can they make him wise? They exhaust the mind by a certain jejune and barren subtlety, without fertilizing or inspiring it. By their stammering and by the stains of their impure style they disfigure theology which had been enriched and adorned by the eloquence of the ancients. They involve everything whilst trying to resolve everything.” “Scot- ist,” with Erasmus, became a handy epithet for all school- men, nay, for everything superannuated and antiquated. He would rather lose the whole of Scotus than Cicero’s A is 28 ; ERASMUS or Plutarch’s works. These he feels the better for read- ing, whereas he rises from the study of scholasticism frig- idly disposed towards true virtue, but irritated into a disputatious mood. It would, no doubt, have been difficult for Hrasmus to find in the arid traditionalism which prevailed in the University of Paris, the heyday of scholastic philosophy and theology. From the disputations which he heard in the Sorbonne he brought back nothing but the habit of scofiing at doctors of theology, or as he always ironically calls them by their title of honour: Magistri nostri. Yawning, he sat among “those holy Scotists” with their wrinkled brows, staring eyes, and puzzled faces, and on his return home he writes a disrespectful fantasy to his young friend Thomas Grey, telling him how he sleeps the sleep of Epimenides with the divines of the Sorbonne. Epimenides awoke after his forty-seven years of slum- ber, but the majority of our present theologians will never wake up. What may Epimenides have dreamt? What but subtleties of the Scotists: quiddities, formali- ties, etc.! Epimenides himself was reborn in Scotus, or rather, Epimenides was Scotus’ prototype. For did not he, too, write theological books, in which he tied such syllogistic knots that he would never have been able to loosen them? The Sorbonne preserves Epimenides’ skin written over with mysterious letters, as an oracle which men may only see after having borne the title of Magister noster for fifteen years. It is not a far cry from caricatures like these to the Sorbonistres and the Barbouillamenta Scoti of Ra- belais. “It is said,”’—thus Erasmus concludes his boutade,—‘‘that no one can understand the mysteries of THE UNIVERSITY OF PARIS 29 this science who has had the least intercourse with the Muses or the Graces. All that you have learned in the way of bonae literae has to be unlearned first; if you have drunk of Helicon you must first vomit the draught. I do my utmost to say nothing according to the Latin taste, and nothing graceful or witty; and I am already making progress, and there is hope that one day they will acknowledge Erasmus.” It was not only the dryness of the method and the barrenness of the system which revolted Erasmus. It was also the qualities of his own mind, which, in spite of all its breadth and acuteness, did not tend to penetrate “ deeply into philosophical or dogmatic speculations. For it was not only scholasticism that repelled him; the youthful Platonism and the rejuvenated Aristotelianism taught by Lefévre d’Etaples also failed to attract him. For the present he remained a humanist of aesthetic bias, with the substratum of a biblical and moral dispo- sition resting mainly on the study of his favourite Jerome. For a long time to come Erasmus considered himself, and also introduced himself, as a poet and an orator, by which latter term he meant what we call a man of letters. Immediately on arriving at Paris he must have sought contact with the headquarters of literary humanism. The obscure Dutch regular introduced himself in a long letter (not preserved) full of eulogy, accompanied by a much- laboured poem, to the general, not only of the Trinitar- ians but, at the same time, of Parisian humanists, Robert Gaguin. The great man answered very obligingly: “From your lyrical specimen I conclude that you are a scholar; my friendship is at your disposal; do not be so 30 ERASMUS profuse in your praise, that looks like flattery.” The correspondence had hardly begun when Erasmus found a splendid opportunity to render this illustrious person- age a service and, at the same time, in the shadow of his name, make himself known to the reading public. The matter is also of importance because it affords us an op- portunity, for the first time, to notice the connection that is always found between Erasmus’ career as a man of letters and a scholar and the technical conditions of the youthful art of printing. Gaguin was an all-round man and his Latin textbook of the history of France, De origine et gestis Francorum Compendium, was just being printed. It was the first specimen of humanistic historiography in France. The printer had finished his work on the 30th of September, 1495, but of the 136 leaves two remained blank. This was not permissible according to the notions of that time. Gaguin was ill and could not help matters. By judicious spacing the compositor managed to fill up folio 135 with a poem by Gaguin, the colophon and two panegyrics by Faustus Andrelinus and another humanist. Even then there was need of matter, and Erasmus dashed into the breach and furnished a long commendatory letter, com- pletely filling the superfluous blank space of folio 136.1 In this way his name and style suddenly became known to the numerous public which was interested in Gaguin’s historical work, and at the same time he acquired another title to Gaguin’s protection, on whom the exceptional qualities of Erasmus’ diction had evidently not been lost. 1Allen no. 43, p. 145, where the particulars of the case are expounded with peculiar acuteness and conclusions drawn with regard to the chronology of Erasmus’ stay at Paris. THE UNIVERSITY OF PARIS 31 That his history would remain known chiefly because it had been a stepping stone to Erasmus, Gaguin could hardly have anticipated. Although Erasmus had now, as a follower of Gaguin, been introduced into the world of Parisian humanists, the road to fame, which had latterly begun to lead through the printing press, was not yet easy for him. He showed the Antibarbari to Gaguin, who praised them, but no sug- gestion of publication resulted. A slender volume of Latin poems by Erasmus was published in Paris in 1496, dedi- cated to Hector Boys, a Scotchman, with whom he had become acquainted at Montaigu. But the more impor- tant writings at which he worked during his stay at Paris all appeared in print much later. While intercourse with men like Robert Gaguin and Faustus Andrelinus might be honourable, it was not di- rectly profitable. The support of the bishop of Cambray was scantier than he wished. In the spring of 1496 he fell ill and left Paris. Going first to Bergen, he had a kind welcome from his patron, the bishop; and then, having recovered his health, he went on to Holland to his friends. It was his intention to stay there, he says. The friends themselves, however, urged him to return to Paris, which he did in the autumn of 1496. He carried poetry by William Hermans and a letter from this poet to Gaguin. A printer was found for the poems and Erasmus brought his friend and fellow-poet also in con- tact with Faustus Andrelinus. The position of a man who wished to live by intellec- 4 tual labor was far from easy at that time and not always dignified. He had either to live on church prebends or on distinguished patrons or on both. But such a pre- 39 | ERASMUS bend was difficult to get and patrons were uncertain and often disappointing. The publishers paid consider- able copy-fees only to famous authors. As a rule the writer received a number of copies of his work and that was all. His chief advantage came from a dedication to some distinguished personage, who could compliment him for it with a handsome gift. There were authors who made it a practice to dedicate the same work repeatedly to different persons. Erasmus has afterwards defended himself explicitly from that suspicion and carefully noted how many of those whom he honored with a dedication gave nothing or very little. The first need, therefore, to a man in Erasmus’ cir- cumstances was to find a Maecenas. Maecenas with the humanists was almost synonymous with paymaster. Under the Adage “Ne bos quidem pereat” Erasmus has given a description of the decent way of obtaining a Maecenas. Consequently, when his conduct in these years appears to us to be actuated, more than once, by an undignified pushing spirit, we should not gauge it by our present standards. These were his years of weakness. On his return to Paris he did not again lodge in Montaigu. He tried to make a living by giving lessons to young men of fortune. A merchant’s sons of Liibeck, Christian and Henry Northoff, who lodged with one Au- gustine Vincent, were his pupils. He composed beautiful letters for them, witty, fluent and scented a trifle. At the same time he taught two young Englishmen, Thomas Grey and Robert Fisher, and conceived such a doting affection for Grey as to lead to trouble with the youth’s THE UNIVERSITY OF PARIS 33 guardian, a Scotchman, by whom Erasmus was exces- sively vexed. Paris did not fail to exercise its refining influence on Erasmus. It made his style affectedly refined and spar- kling ;—he pretends to disdain the rustic products of his youth in Holland. In the meantime, the works through which afterwards his influence was to spread over the whole world began to grow, but only to the benefit of a few readers. ‘They remained unprinted as yet. For the Northoffs was composed the little compendium of polite conversation (in Latin), Familiarium Colloqui- orum Formulae, the nucleus of the world-famous Collo- quia. For Robert Fisher he wrote the first draft of De conscribendis epistolis, the great dissertation on the art of letter writing (Latin letters), probably also the Para- phrase of Valla’s Elegantiae, a treatise on pure Latin, which had been a beacon-light of culture to Erasmus in his youth. De copia verborum ac verum was also such a help for beginners, to provide them with a vocabulary and abundance of turns and expressions; and also the germs of a larger work: De ratione studwi, a manual for arranging courses of study, lay in the same line. It was a life of uncertainty and unrest. The bishop gave but little support. Erasmus was not in good health and felt continually depressed. He made plans for a journey to Italy, but did not see much chance of effecting them. In the summer of 1498 he again travelled to Hol- land and to the bishop. In Holland his friends were little pleased with his studies. It was feared that he was contracting debts at Paris. Current reports about him were not favourable. He found the bishop, in the com- motion of his departure for England, on a mission, irri- 34 2 ERASMUS table and full of complaints. It became more and more evident that he would have to look out for another patron. Perhaps he might turn to the Lady of Veere, Anna of Borselen, with whom his faithful and helpful friend Batt had now taken service, as a tutor to her son, in the castle of Tournehem, between Calais and Saint Omer. Upon his return to Paris, Erasmus resumed his old life, but it was hateful slavery to him. Batt had an invitation for him to come to Tournehem, but he could not yet bear to leave Paris. Here he had now as a pupil the young Lord Mountjoy, William Blount. That meant two strings to his bow. Batt is incited to prepare the ground for him with Anna of Veere; William Hermans is charged with writing letters to Mountjoy, in which he is to praise the latter’s love of literature. “You should display an erudite integrity, commend me, and proffer your services kindly. Believe me, William, your repu- tation, too, will benefit by it. He is a young man of great authority with his own folk; you will have some one to distribute your writings in England. I pray you again and again, if you love me, take this to heart.” The visit to Tournehem took place at the beginning of 1499, followed by another journey to Holland. Hence- forward Anna of Veere passed for his patroness. In Hol- land he saw his friend William Hermans and told him that he thought of leaving for Bologna after Easter. The Dutch journey was one of unrest and bustle; he was in a hurry to return to Paris, not to miss any opportunity which Mountjoy’s affection might offer him. He worked hard at the various writings on which he was engaged, as hard as his health permitted after the difficult journey THE UNIVERSITY OF PARIS 35 in winter. He was busily occupied in collecting the money for travelling to Italy, now postponed until August. But evidently Batt could not obtain as much for him as he had hoped, and in May, Erasmus suddenly gave up the Italian plan, and left for England with Mountjoy at the latter’s request. IV FIRST STAY IN ENGLAND FIRST STAY IN ENGLAND: 1499-1500—-OXFORD: JOHN COLET —ERASMUS’ ASPIRATIONS DIRECTED TOWARDS DIVINITY —HE IS AS YET MAINLY A LITERATE—FISHER AND MORE —MISHAP AT DOVER WHEN LEAVING ENGLAND: 1500— BACK IN FRANCE HE COMPOSES THE ADAGIA—YEARS OF TROUBLE AND PENURY. _ Erasmus’ first stay in England, which lasted from the “early summer of 1499 till the beginning of 1500, was to become for him a period of inward ripening. He came there as an erudite poet, the protégé of a nobleman of rank, on the road to closer contact with the great world which knew how to appreciate and reward literary merit. He left the country with the fervent desire in future to employ his gifts, in so far as circumstances would permit, in more serious tasks. This change was brought about by two new friends whom he found in England, whose personalities were far above those who had hitherto crossed his path: John Colet and Thomas More. During all the time of his sojourn in England Erasmus is in high spirits, for him. At first it is still the man of the world who speaks, the refined man of letters, who must needs show his brilliant genius. Aristocratic life, of which he evidently had seen but little at the bishop of Cambray’s and the Lady of Veere’s at Tournehem, pleased him fairly well, it seems. ‘Here in England,” he writes in a light vein to Faustus Andrelinus, “we have, indeed, progressed somewhat. The Erasmus whom you know is almost a good hunter already, not too bad a 36 FIRST STAY IN ENGLAND 37 horseman, a not unpractised courtier. He salutes a little more courteously, he smiles more kindly. If you are wise, you also will alight here.” And he teases the volatile poet by telling him about the charming girls and the laudable custom, which he found in England, of accompanying all compliments by kisses. It even fell to his lot to make the acquaintance of roy- alty. From Mountjoy’s estate at. Greenwich, More, in the course of a walk, took him to Eltham Palace, where the royal children were educated. There he saw, sur- rounded by the whole royal household, the youthful Henry, who was to be Henry VIII, a boy of nine years old, together with two little sisters and a young prince, who was still an infant in arms. Erasmus was ashamed that he had nothing to offer and, on returning home, he composed (not without exertion, for he had not written poetry at all for some time) a panegyric on England, which he presented to the prince with a graceful dedi- cation. In October Erasmus was at Oxford which, at first, did not please him, but whither Mountjoy was to follow him. He had been recommended to John Colet, who de- “ clared that he required no recommendations: he already knew Erasmus from the letter to Gaguin in the latter’s historical work and thought very highly of his learning. There followed during the remainder of Erasmus’ stay at Oxford a lively intercourse, in conversation and in cor- respondence, which definitely decided the bent of Eras- mus’ many-sided mind. 1 Allen no. 103.17. Cf. Chr. Matrim. inst. LB. V. 678 and Cent nou- velles nouvelles 2.63, ‘‘ung baiser, dont les dames et demoiselles du dit pays d’Angleterre sont assez libérales de l’accorder.’’ 38 ERASMUS John Colet, who did not differ much from Erasmus in point of age, had found his intellectual path earlier and more easily. Born of well-to-do parents (his father was a London magistrate and twice lord mayor), he had been able leisurely to prosecute his studies. Not seduced by quite such a brilliant genius as Erasmus possessed into literary digressions, he had from the beginning fixed his attention on theology. He knew Plato and Plotinus, though not in Greek, was very well read in the older Fathers and also respectively acquainted with scholasti- cism, not to mention his knowledge of mathematics, law, history and the English poets. In 1496 he had estab- lished himself at Oxford. Without possessing a degree in divinity, he expounded St. Paul’s epistles. Although, owing to his ignorance of Greek, he was restricted to the Vulgate, he tried to penetrate to the original meaning of the sacred texts, discarding the later commentaries. Colet had a deeply serious nature, always warring against the tendencies of his vigorous being and he kept within restraint his pride and the love of pleasure. He had a keen sense of humor, which, without doubt, en- deared him to Erasmus. He was an enthusiast. When defending a point in theology his ardour changed the sound of his voice, the look in his eyes, and a lofty spirit permeated his whole person. Out of his intercourse with Colet came the first of Erasmus’ theological writings. At the end of a discussion regarding Christ’s agony in the garden of Gethsemane, in which Erasmus had defended the usual view that Christ’s fear of suffering proceeded from his human nature, Colet had exhorted him to think further about the matter. They exchanged letters about it and finally FIRST STAY IN ENGLAND 39 Erasmus committed both their opinions to paper in the form of a “Little disputation concerning the anguish, fear and sadness of Jesus,” Disputatiuncula de tedio, pavore, tristicia Jesu, etc., being an elaboration of these letters. While the tone of this pamphlet is earnest and pious, it is not truly fervent. The man of letters is not at once and completely superseded. ‘See, Colet,’ thus Erasmus ends his first letter, referring half ironically to himself, | “how I can observe the rules of propriety in concluding such a theologic disputation with poetic fables (he had | made use of a few mythologic metaphors). But as ° Horace says, Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret.” This ambiguous position which Erasmus still occupied, also in things of the mind, appears still more clearly from the report which he sent to his new friend, the Frisian John Sixtin, a Latin poet, like himself, of another dis- putation with Colet, at a repast, probably in the hall of Magdalen College, where Wolsey, too, was perhaps present. To his fellow-poet, Erasmus writes as a poet, loosely and with some affectation. It was a meal such as he liked, and afterwards frequently pictured in his Colloquies: cultured company, good food, moderate drinking, noble conversation. Colet presided. On his right hand sat the prior Charnock of St. Mary’s College, where Erasmus resided (he had also been present at the disputation about Christ’s agony). On his left was a divine whose name is not mentioned, an advocate of scholasticism; next to him came Erasmus, “that the poet should not be wanting at the banquet.” ‘The discussion was about Cain’s guilt by which he displeased the Lord. Colet defended the opinion that Cain had injured God 40 , ERASMUS by doubting the Creator’s goodness, and, in reliance on his own industry, tilling the earth, whereas Abel tended the sheep and was content with what grew of itself. The divine contended with syllogisms, Erasmus with argu- ments of “rhetoric.” But Colet kindled, and got the bet- ter of both. After a while, when the dispute had lasted long enough and had become more serious than was suit- able for table-talk—“then I said, in order to play my part, the part of the poet, that is—to abate the conten- tion and at the same time cheer the meal with a pleasant tale: ‘it is a very old story, it has to be unearthed from the very oldest authors. I will tell you what I found about it in literature, if you will promise me first that you will not look upon it as a fable.’” And now he relates a witty story of some very ancient codex in which he had read how Cain, who had often heard his parents speak of the glorious vegetation of Paradise, where the ears of corn were as high as the alders with us, had prevailed upon the angel who guarded it, to give him some Paradisal grains. God would not mind it, if only he left the apples alone. The speech by which the angel is incited to disobey the Almighty is a masterpiece of Erasmian wit. Do you find it pleasant to stand there by the gate with a big sword? We have just begun to use dogs for that sort of work. It is not so bad on earth and it will be better still; we shall learn, no doubt, to cure diseases. What that forbidden knowl- edge matters I do not see very clearly. Though, in that matter, too, unwearied industry surmounts all obstacles. In this way the guardian is seduced. But when God beholds the miraculous effect of Cain’s agricultural man- agement, punishment does not fail to ensue. FIRST STAY IN ENGLAND 41 A more delicate way of combining Genesis and the Prometheus myth no humanist had yet invented. But still, though Erasmus went on conducting himself as a man of letters among his fellow-poets, his heart was « no longer in those literary exercises. It is one of the peculiarities of Erasmus’ mental growth that it records no violent crises. We never find him engaged in those bitter inward struggles which are in the experience of so many great minds. His transition from interest in liter- ary matters to interest in religious matters is not in the nature of a process of conversion. There is no Tarsus in Erasmus’ life. The transition takes place gradually and is never complete. For many years to come Erasmus can, without suspicion of hypocrisy, at pleasure, as his interests or his moods require, play the man of letters or the theologian. He is a man with whom the deeper currents of the soul gradually rise to the surface; who raises himself to the height of his ethical consciousness under the stress of circumstances, rather than at the spur of some irresistible impulse. The desire to turn only to matters of faith he shows early. “TI have resolved,” he writes in his monastic period to Cornelius of Gouda, “to write no more poems in the future, except such as savor of praise of the saints, or of sanctity itself.’ But that was the youthful pious resolve of a moment. During all the years previous to the first voyage to England, Erasmus’ writings, and espe- cially his letters, betray a worldly disposition. It only leaves him in moments of illness and weariness. Then the world displeases him and he despises his own ambi- tion; he desires to live in holy quiet, musing on Scripture and shedding tears over his old errors. But these are 42 ERASMUS utterances inspired by the occasion, which one should not take too seriously. It was Colet’s word and example which first changed Erasmus’ desultory occupation with theological studies into a firm and lasting resolve to make their pursuit the object of his life. Colet urged him to expound the Penta- teuch or the prophet Isaiah at Oxford, just as he himself treated of Paul’s epistles. Erasmus declined; he could not do it. This bespoke insight and self-knowledge, by which he surpassed Colet. The latter’s intuitive Scrip- ture interpretation without knowledge of the original language failed to satisfy Erasmus. “You are acting imprudently, my dear Colet, in trying to obtain water from a pumice-stone (in the words of Plautus). How shall I be so impudent as to teach that which I have not learned myself? How shall I warm others while shivering and trembling with cold? ... You complain that you find yourself deceived in your expectations re- garding me. But I have never promised you such a thing; you have deceived yourself by refusing to believe me when I was telling you the truth regarding myself. Neither did I come here to teach poetics or rhetoric (Colet had hinted at that); these have ceased to be sweet to me, since they ceased to be necessary to me. I decline the one task because it does not come up to my aim in life; the other because it is beyond my strength... . But when, one day, I shall be conscious that the neces- sary power is in me, I, too, shall choose your part and devote to the assertion of divinity, if no excellent, yet sincere labour.” The inference which Erasmus drew first of all was that FIRST STAY IN ENGLAND 43 he should know Greek better than he had thus far been able to learn it. Meanwhile his stay in England was rapidly drawing to a close; he had to return to Paris. Towards the end of his sojourn he wrote to his former pupil, Robert Fisher, who was in Italy, in a high-pitched tone about the satis- faction which he experienced in England. A most pleas- ant and wholesome sky (he was most sensitive to it); so much humanity and erudition—not of the worn-out and trivial sort, but of the recondite, genuine, ancient, Latin and Greek stamp—that he need hardly any more long to go to Italy. In Colet he thought he heard Plato himself. Grocyn, the Grecian scholar; Linacre, the learned physician, who would not admire them! And whose spirit was ever softer, sweeter or happier than that of Thomas More! A disagreeable incident occurred as Erasmus was / leaving English soil in January, 1500. Unfortunately it not only obscured his pleasant memories of the happy island, but also placed another obstacle in the path of his career, and left a sting in his supersensitive soul, which vexed him for years afterwards. The livelihood which he had been gaining at Paris of late years was precarious. The support from the bishop had probably been withdrawn; that of Anna of Veere had trickled but languidly; he could not too firmly rely on Mountjoy. Under the circumstances a modest fund, some provision against a rainy day, was of the highest consequence. Such savings he brought from England, twenty pounds. An act of Edward III, re-enacted by Henry VII not long before, prohibited the exportation of gold and silver, but More and Mountjoy had assured 44 , ERASMUS Erasmus that he could safely take his money with him, if only it was not in English coin. At Dover he learned that the customhouse officers were of a different opinion. He might only keep six “angels’;—the rest was left behind in the hands of the officials and was evidently confiscated. The shock which this incident gave him perhaps contributed to his fancying himself threatened by robbers and murderers on the road from Calais to Paris. The loss of his money plunged him afresh into perplexity as to his support from day to day. It forced him to resume the profession of a bel esprit, which he already began to loathe, and to take all the humiliating steps to get what was due to it from patrons. And, above all, it affected his mental balance and his dignity. Yet this mishap had its great advantage for the world, and for Erasmus, too, after all. To it the world owes the Adagia; and he the fame which began with this work. The feelings with which his misfortune at Dover in- spired Erasmus were bitter anger, and thirst for revenge. A few months later he writes to Batt. “Things with me are, as they are wont to be in such cases: the wound received in England begins to smart only now that it has become inveterate, and that the more, as I cannot have my revenge in any way.” And half a year after this, “I shall swallow it. An occasion may offer itself, no doubt, to be even with them.” Yet meanwhile true insight told this man, whose strength did not always attain to his ideals, that the English whom he had just seen in such a favourable light, let alone his special friends among them, were not accessory to the misfertune. He never reproached More and Mountjoy whose inaccurate FIRST STAY IN ENGLAND 45 information, he tells us, had done the harm. At the same time his interest, which he always saw in the garb of virtue, told him that now especially it would be essential not to break off his relations with England, and that this gave him a splendid chance of strengthening them. Afterwards he explained this with a naiveté which often causes his writings, especially where he tries to suppress or cloak matters, to read like Confessions. “Returning to Paris a poor man, I understood that many would expect I should take my revenge for this mishap with my pen, after the fashion of men of letters, by writing something venomous against the king or against England. At the same time I was afraid that William Mountjoy having indirectly caused my loss of money, would be apprehensive of losing my affection. In order, therefore, both to put the expectations of those people to shame, and to make known that I was not so unfair as to blame the country for a private wrong, or so inconsiderate as, because of a small loss, to risk mak- ing the king displeased with myself or with my friends in England, and at the same time to give my friend Mount- joy a proof that I was no less kindly disposed towards him than before, I resolved to publish something as quickly as possible. As I had nothing ready, I hastily brought together, by a few days’ reading, a collection of Adagia, in the supposition that such a booklet, however it might turn out, by its mere usefulness would get into the hands of students. In this way I demonstrated that my friendship had not cooled off at all. Next in a poem I subjoined I protested that I was not angry with the king or with the country because of being deprived of my money. And my scheme was not ill received. That mod- 46 ERASMUS eration and candour procured me a good many friends in England at the time,—erudite, upright and influential men.” This is a characteristic specimen of semi-ethical con- duct. In this way Erasmus succeeded in dealing with his indignation, so that later on he could declare, when the recollection came up occasionally, “At one blow I had lost all my fortune, but I was so unconcerned that I returned to my books, all the more cheerfully and ar- dently.” But his friends knew how deep the wound had been. “Now (on hearing that Henry VIII had ascended the throne) surely all bitterness must have suddenly left your soul,” Mountjoy writes to him in 1509, possibly through the pen of Ammontus. The years after his return to France were difficult ones. He was in great need of money and was forced to do what he could, as a man of letters, with his talents and knowledge. He had again to be the homo poeticus or rhetoricus. He writes polished letters full of mythology and modest mendicity. As a poet he had a reputation; as a poet he could expect support. Meanwhile the elevating picture of his theological activities remained present before his mind’s eye. It nerves him to energy and perseverance. “It is incredible,” he writes to Batt, “how my soul yearns to finish all my works, at the same time becoming somewhat proficient in Greek, and after- wards to devote myself entirely to the sacred learning after which my soul has been hankering for a long time. — I am in fairly good health, so I shall have to strain every nerve this year (1501) to get the work we gave the printer, published, and by dealing with theological prob- lems, to expose our cavillers, who are very numerous, as FIRST STAY IN ENGLAND 47 they deserve. If three more years of life are granted me, I shall be beyond the reach of envy.” Here we see him in a frame of mind to accomplish great things, though not merely under the impulse of true devotion. Already he sees the instauration of genuine divinity as his task; unfortunately the effusion is con- tained in a letter in which he instructs the faithful Batt as to how he should handle the Lady of Veere in order te wheedle money out of her. For years to come the efforts to make a living were to cause him almost constant tribulations and petty cares. He had had more than enough of France and desired nothing better than to leave it. Part of the year 1500 he spent at Orleans. Adversity made him narrow. There is the story of his relations with Augustine Vincent Caminade, a humanist of lesser rank (he ended as syndic of Middelburg), who took young men as lodgers. It is too long to detail here, but remarkable enough as reveal- ing Erasmus’ psychology, for it shows how deeply he mistrusted his friends. There are also his relations with Jacobus Voecht, in whose house he evidently lived gratui- tously and for whom he managed to procure a rich lodger in the person of an illegitimate brother of the bishop of Cambray. At this time, Erasmus asserts, the bishop (Antimaecenas he now calls him) set Standonck to dog him in Paris. Much bitterness there is in the letters of this period. < Erasmus is suspicious, irritable, exacting, sometimes rude in writing to his friends. He cannot bear William Her- mans any longer because of his epicureanism and his lack of energy, to which he, Erasmus, certainly was a stranger. But what grieves us most is the way he speaks to honest 48 ERASMUS Batt. He is highly praised, certainly. Erasmus promises to make him immortal, too. But how offended he is, when Batt cannot at once comply with his imperious de- mands. How almost shameless are his instructions as to what Batt is to tell the Lady of Veere, in order to solicit her favor for Erasmus. And how meagre the expres- sions of his sorrow, when the faithful Batt is taken from him by death in the first half of 1502. It is as if Erasmus had revenged himself on Batt for having been obliged to reveal himself to his true friend in need more completely than he cared to appear to any- one; or for having disavowed to Anna of Borselen his fundamental convictions, his most refined taste, for the sake of a meagre gratuity. He has paid homage to her in that ponderous Burgundian style with which dynasties in the Netherlands were familiar, and which must have been hateful to him. He has flattered her formal piety. “TI send you a few prayers, by means of which you could, as by incantations, call down, even against her will, from Heaven, so to say, not the moon, but her who gave birth to the sun of justice.” Did you smile your delicate smile, O author of the Colloquies, while writing this? So much the worse for you. Vv ERASMUS AS A HUMANIST SIGNIFICANCE OF THE ADAGIA AND SIMILAR WORKS OF LATER YEARS—ERASMUS AS A DIVULGER OF CLASSICAL CULTURE—LATIN—ESTRANGEMENT FROM HOLLAND— ERASMUS AS A NETHERLANDER. Meanwhile renown came to Erasmus as the fruit of those literary studies which, as he said, had ceased to be dear to him. In 1500 that work appeared which Eras- mus had written after his misfortune at Dover, and had dedicated to Mountjoy, the Adagiorum Collectanea. It was a collection of about eight hundred proverbial sayings drawn from the Latin authors of antiquity and elucidated for the use of those who aspired to write an elegant Latin style. In the dedication Erasmus pointed out the profit an author may derive, both in .ornamenting his style and in strengthening his argumen- tation, from having at his disposal a good supply of sen- tences hallowed by their antiquity. He proposes to offer such a help to his readers. What he actually gave was much more. He familiarized a much wider circle than the earlier humanists had reached with the spirit of an- tiquity. Until this time the humanists had, to some extent, monopolized the treasures of classic culture, in order to parade their knowledge of which the multitude remained destitute, and so to become strange prodigies of learning and elegance. With his irresistible need of teaching and his sincere love for humanity and its general culture, 49 50 ERASMUS Erasmus introduced the classic spirit, in so far as it could be reflected in the soul of a 16th century Christian, among the people. Not he alone; but none more exten- sively and more effectively. Not among all the people, it is true, for by writing in Latin he limited his direct influence to the educated classes, which in those days were the upper classes. Erasmus made current the classic spirit. Humanism ceased to be the exclusive privilege of a few. According to Beatus Rhenanus he had been reproached by some humanists, when about to publish the Adagia, for divulg- ing the mysteries of their craft. But he desired that the book of antiquity should be open to all. The literary and educational works of Erasmus, the chief of which were begun in his Parisian period, though most of them appeared much later, have, in truth, brought about a transmutation of the general modes of expression and of argumentation. It should be repeated over and over again that this was not achieved by him single handed; countless others at that time were simi- larly engaged. But we have only to cast an eye on the broad current of editions of the Adagia, of the Colloquia, etc., to realize of how much greater consequence he was in this respect than all the others. “Erasmus” is the only name in all the host of humanists which has re- mained a household word all over the globe. Here we will anticipate the course of Erasmus’ life for a moment, to enumerate the principal works of this sort. Some years later the Adagia increased from hundreds to thousands, through which not only Latin, but also Greek, wisdom spoke. In 1514 he published in the same manner a collection of similitudes, Parabolae. It was a partial ERASMUS AS A HUMANIST 52 realisation of what he had conceived to supplement the Adagia—metaphors, saws, allusions, poetical and scrip- tural allegories, all to be dealt with in a similar way. Towards the end of his life he published a similar the- saurus of the witty anecdotes and the striking words or deeds of wisdom of antiquity, the Apophthegmata. In addition to these collections, we find manuals of a more grammatical nature, also piled up treasury-like: on the stock of expressions, De copia verborum et rerum, on letter writing, not to mention works of less importance. By a number of Latin translations of Greek authors Erasmus had rendered a point of prospect accessible to those who did not wish to climb the whole mountain. And, finally, as inimitable models of the manner in which to apply all that knowledge, there were the Colloquia and that almost countless multitude of letters which have flowed from Erasmus’ pen. All this collectively made up antiquity (in such quan- tity and quality as it was obtainable in the 16th century) exhibited in an emporium where it might be had at retail. Each student could get what was to his taste; everything was to be had there in a great variety of designs. “You may read my Adagia in such a manner,” says Erasmus (of the later augmented edition), “that as soon as you have finished one, you may imagine you have finished the whole book.” He himself made indices to facilitate its use. In the world of scholasticism he alone had up to now been considered an authority who had mastered the tech- nicalities of its system of thought and its mode of ex- pression in all its details and was versed in biblical knowledge, logic and philosophy. Between scholastic 5P4 ERASMUS parlance and the spontaneously written popular lan- guages, there yawned a wide gulf. Humanism since Petrarch had substituted for the rigidly syllogistic struc- ture of an argument, the loose style of the antique, free, suggestive phrase. In this way the language of the learned approached the natural manner of expression of daily life and raised the popular languages, even where it continued to use Latin, to its own level. The wealth of subject matter was found with no one in greater abundance than with Erasmus. What knowl- edge of life, what ethics, all supported by the indisput- able authority of the Ancients, all expressed in that fine, airy form for which he was admired. And such knowl- edge of antiquities in addition to all this! Illimitable was the craving for and illimitable the power to absorb what is extraordinary in real life. This was one of the principal characteristics of the spirit of the Renaissance. These minds never had their desired share of striking incidents, curious details, rarities and anomalies. There was, as yet, no symptom of that mental dyspepsia of later periods, which can no ionger digest reality and relishes it no more. Men revelled in plenty. And yet, were not Erasmus and his fellow-workers as leaders of civilisation on a wrong track? Was it true reality they were aiming at? Was their proud Latinity not a fatal error? There is one of the crucial points of history. A present-day reader who should take up the Adagia or the Apophthegmata with a view to enrich his own life (for they were meant for this purpose and it is what gave them value), would soon ask himself: “What mat- ERASMUS AS A HUMANIST 53 ters to us, apart from strictly philological or historical considerations, those endless details concerning obscure personages of antique society, of Phrygians, of Thessa- lians? They are nothing to me.” And—he will continue —they really mattered nothing to Erasmus’ contempora- ries either. The stupendous history of the 16th century was not enacted in classic phrases or turns; it was not based on classic interests or views of life. There were no Phrygians and Thessalians, no Agesilauses or Diony- siuses. The humanists created out of all this a mental realm, emancipated from the limitations of time. And did their own times pass without being influenced by them? That is the question, and we shall not attempt to answer it: to what extent did humanism influence the course of events? In any case Erasmus and his coadjutors greatly .“ heightened the international character of civilisation which had existed throughout the Middle Ages because of Latin and of the Church. If they thought they were really making Latin a vehicle for daily international use, they overrated their power. It was, no doubt, an amus- ing fancy and a witty exercise to plan in such an interna- tional milieu as the Parisian student world, such models of sports and games in Latin as the Colloquiorum for- mulae offered. But can Erasmus have seriously thought that the next generation would play at marbles in Latin? Still, intellectual intercourse undoubtedly became very easy in so wide a circle as had not been within reach in Europe since the fall of the Roman Empire. Henceforth it was no longer the clergy alone, and an occasional literate, but a numerous multitude of sons of burghers and nobles, qualifying for some magisterial office, who 54 ERASMUS passed through a grammar-school and found Erasmus in their path. Erasmus could not have attained to his world-wide celebrity if it had not been for Latin. To make his native tongue a universal language was beyond him. It may well puzzle a fellow-countryman of Erasmus to guess what a talent like his, with his power of observa- tion, his delicacy of expression, his gusto and wealth, might have meant to Dutch literature. Just imagine the Colloquia written in the racy Dutch of the 16th cen- tury! What could he not have produced if, instead of gleaning and commenting upon classic Adagia, he had, for his themes, availed himself of the proverbs of the vernacular? ‘To us such a proverb is perhaps even more sapid than the sometimes slightly finical turns praised by Erasmus. This, however, is to reason unhistorically; this was not what the times required and what Erasmus could give. It is quite clear why Erasmus could only write in Latin. Moreover, in the vernacular everything would have ap- peared too direct, too personal, too real, for his taste. He could not do without that thin veil of vagueness, of remoteness, in which everything is wrapped when ex- pressed in Latin. His fastidious mind would have shrunk from the pithy coarseness of a Rabelais, or the rustic violence of Luther’s German. * Kstrangement from his native tongue had begun for Erasmus as early as the days when he learned reading and writing. Estrangement from the land of his birth set in when he left the monastery of Steyn. It was fur- thered not a little by the ease with which he handled Latin. Erasmus, who could express himself as well in ERASMUS AS A HUMANIST 55 Latin as in his mother tongue, and even better, conse- quently lacked the experience of, after all, feeling thor- oughly at home and of being able to express himself fully, only among his compatriots. There was, however, an- other psychological influence which acted to alienate him from Holland. After he had seen at Paris the perspec- tives of his own capacities, he became confirmed in the conviction that Holland failed to appreciate him, that it distrusted and slandered him. Perhaps there was indeed some ground for this conviction. But, partly, it was also a reaction of injured self-love. In Holland< people knew too much about him. They had seen him in his smallnesses and feebleness. ‘There he had been obliged to obey others—he who, above all things, wanted to be free. Distaste of the narrow-mindedness, the coarseness and intemperance which he knew to prevail there, were summed up, within him, in a general con- demnatory judgment of the Dutch character. Henceforth he spoke as a rule about Holland with a sort of apologetic contempt. “I see that you are con- tent with Dutch fame,” he writes to his old friend William Hermans, who like Cornelius Aurelius had begun to de- vote his best forces to the history of his native country. “In Holland the air is good for me,” he writes elsewhere, “but the extravagant carousals annoy me; add to this the vulgar uncultured character of the people, the violent contempt of study, no fruit of learning, the most egre- gious envy.” And excusing the imperfection of his juve- nalia, he says: “At that time I wrote not for Italians, but for Hollanders, that is to say, for the dullest ears.” And, in another place, “eloquence is demanded from a Dutch- man, that is, from a more hopeless person than a Bceo- 56 ERASMUS tian.” And again, “If the story is not very witty, remember it is a Dutch story.” No doubt, false modesty had its share in such sayings. After 1496 he visited Holland only on hasty journeys. There is no evidence that after 1501 he ever set foot on Dutch soil. He dissuaded his own compatriots abroad from returning to Holland. Still, now and again, a cordial feeling of sympathy for his native country stirred within him. Just where he would have had an opportunity, in explaining Martial’s Auris Batava in the Adagia, for venting his spleen, he availed himself of the chance of writing an eloquent panegyric on what was dearest to him in Holland, “a country that I am always bound to honour and revere, as that which gave me birth. Would I might be a credit to it, just as, on the other hand, I need not be ashamed of it.” Their reputed boorishness rather redounds to their honour. “If a ‘Batavian ear’ means a horror of Martial’s obscene jokes, I could wish that all Christians might have Dutch ears. When we consider their morals, no nation is more inclined to humanity and benevolence, less savage or cruel. Their mind is upright and void of cunning and all humbug. If they are somewhat sensual and excessive at meals, it results partly from their plentiful supply: nowhere is import so easy and fertility so great. What an extent of lush meadows, how many navigable rivers! Nowhere are so many towns crowded together within so small an area; not large towns, indeed, but excellently governed. Their cleanliness is praised by everydody. Nowhere are such large numbers of moderately learned persons found, though extraordinary and exquisite eru- dition is rather rare.” ERASMUS AS A HUMANIST 57 They were Erasmus’ own most cherished ideals which he here ascribes to his compatriots—gentleness, sincerity, simplicity, purity. He sounds that note of love for Hol- land on other occasions. When speaking of lazy women, he adds: “In France there are large numbers of them, but in Holland we find countless wives who by their indus- try support their idling and revelling husbands.” And in the colloquy entitled The Shipwreck, the people who charitably take in the castaways are Hollanders. “There is no more humane people than this, though surrounded by violent nations.” In addressing American readers it is perhaps not super- fluous to point out once again that Erasmus when speak- ing of Holland, or using the epithet “Batavian,” refers to the county of Holland, which at present forms the provinces of North and South Holland of the kingdom of the Netherlands, and stretches from the Wadden islands to the estuaries of the Meuse. Even the nearest neigh- bours, such as Zealanders and Frisians, are not included in this appellation. But it is a different matter when Erasmus speaks of “patria,” the fatherland, or of “nostras,” a compatriot. In those days a national consciousness was just budding all over the Netherlands. A man still felt himself a Hol- lander, a Frisian, a Fleming, a Brabantine in the first place; but the community of language and customs, and still more the strong political influence which for nearly a century had been exercised by the Burgundian dynasty, which had united most of these low countries under its sway, had cemented a feeling of solidarity which did not even halt at the linguistic frontier in Belgium. It was still rather a strong Burgundian patriotism (even after 58 ERASMUS Hapsburg had de facto occupied the place of Burgundy) than a strictly Netherland feeling of nationality” People liked, by using a heraldic symbol, to designate the Netherlanders as “the Lions.’ Erasmus, too, em- ploys the term. In his works we gradually see the nar- rower Hollandish patriotism gliding into the Burgundian Netherlandish. In the beginning “patria” with him still means Holland proper, but soon it meant the Nether- lands. It is curious to trace how by degrees his feelings regarding Holland, made up of disgust and attachment, are transferred to the Low Countries in general. “In my youth,” he says in 1535, repeating himself, “I did not write for Italians but for Hollanders, the people of Bra- bant and Flemings.” So they now all share the reputa- tion of bluntness. To Louvain is applied what formerly was said of Holland: there are too many compotations; nothing can be done without a drinking bout. Nowhere, he repeatedly complains, is there so little sense of the bonae literae, nowhere is study so despised as in the Netherlands, and nowhere are there more cavillers and slanderers. But also his affection has expanded. When Longolius of Brabant plays the Frenchman, Erasmus is vexed: “I devoted nearly three days to Longolius; he was uncommonly pleasing, except only that he is too French, whereas it is well known that he is one of us.” When Charles V has obtained the crown of Spain, Eras- mus notes: “a singular stroke of luck, but I pray that it may also prove a blessing to the fatherland, and not only to the prince.” When his strength was beginning 1See the author’s study on the origins of Dutch national feeling in De Gids, 1912, vol. I. 2 Allen no. 1026.4, cf. 914, intr. p. 473. Later E. was made to believe that L. was a Hollander, cf. LBE. 1507 A. ERASMUS AS A HUMANIST 59 to fail he began to think more and more of returning to his native country. ‘King Ferdinand invites me, with large promises, to come to Vienna,” he writes from Basle, October Ist, 1528, “but nowhere would it please me bet- ter to rest than in Brabant.” VI THEOLOGICAL ASPIRATIONS AT TOURNEHEM: 1501I-THE RESTORATION OF THEOLOGY NOW THE AIM OF HIS LIFE—HE LEARNS GREEK—JOHN VITRIER—ENCHIRIDION MILITIS CHRISTIANI. The lean years continued with Erasmus. His liveli- hood remained uncertain, and he had no fixed abode. It is remarkable that in spite of his precarious means of support, his movements were ever guided rather by the care for his health than for his sustenance, and his studies rather by his burning desire to penetrate to the purest sources of knowledge than by his advantage. Repeatedly the fear of the plague drives him on: in 1500 from Paris to Orleans, where he first lodges with Augustine Cam- inade; but when one of the latter’s boarders falls ill, Erasmus moves. Perhaps it was the impressions dating from his youth at Deventer that made him so exces- sively afraid of the plague, which in those days raged practically without intermission. Faustus Andrelinus sent a servant to upbraid him in his name with his cowardice: “That would be an intolerable insult,” Eras- mus answers, “if I were a Swiss soldier, but a poet’s soul loving peace and shady places is proof against it.” In » the spring of 1501 he leaves Paris once more for fear of the plague: “the frequent burials frighten me,” he writes to Augustine. He travelled first to Holland, where, at Steyn, he obtained leave to spend another year outside the mon- astery, for the sake of study; his friends would be 60 THEOLOGICAL ASPIRATIONS . 61 ashamed, if he returned, after so many years of study, without having acquired some authority. At Haarlem he visited his friend William Hermans, then turned to the south, once again to pay his respects to the bishop of Cambray, probably at Brussels. Thence he went to Veere, but found no opportunity to talk to his patroness. In July, 1501, he subsided into quietness at the castle of Tournehem with his faithful friend Batt. In all his comings and goings he does not for a moment lose sight of his ideals of study. Since his return from / England he is mastered by two desires: to edit Jerome, the great Father of the Church, and, especially, to learn Greek thoroughly. “You understand how much all this matters to my fame, nay, to my preservation,” he writes (from Orleans towards the end of 1500) to Batt. But, indeed, had Erasmus been an ordinary fame and success hunter he might have had recourse to plenty of other expedients. It was the ardent desire to penetrate to the source and to make others understand that impelled him, even when he availed himself of these projects of study to raise a little money. “Listen,” he writes to Batt, “to what more I desire from you. You must wrest a gift from the abbot (of Saint Bertin). You know the man’s dispo- sition; invent some modest and plausible reason for beg- ging. Tell him that I purpose something grand, viz., to restore the whole of Jerome, however comprehensive he may be, and spoiled, mutilated, entangled by the igno- rance of divines; and to re-insert the Greek passages. I venture to say, I shall be able to lay open the antiquities and the style of Jerome, understood by no one as yet. Tell him that I shall want not a few books for the pur- pose, and moreover the help of Greeks, and that there- 62 ERASMUS fore I require support. In saying this, Battus, you will be telling no lies. For I really mean to do all this.” He was, indeed, in a serious mood on this point, as he was soon to prove to the world. His conquest of Greek was a veritable feat of heroism. He had learned the sim- plest rudiments at Deventer, but these evidently amounted to very little. In March, 1500, he writes to Batt: “Greek is nearly killing me, but I have no time and I have no money to buy books or to take a master.” When Augustine Caminade wants his Homer back which he had lent to him, Erasmus complains: “You deprive me of my sole consolation in my tedium. For I so burn with love for this author, though I cannot understand him, that I feast my eyes and recreate my mind by looking at him.” Was Erasmus aware that in saying this he almost literally reproduced feelings which Petrarch had expressed a century and a half before? But he had already begun to study. Whether he had a master is not quite clear, but it is probable. He finds the language difficult at first. Then gradually he ventures to call himself “a candidate in this language,’ and he begins with more confidence to scatter Greek quotations through his letters. It occupies him night and day and he urges all his friends to procure Greek books for him. In the >» autumn of 1502 he declares that he can properly write all he wants in Greek, and that extempore. He was not deceived in his expectation that Greek would open his eyes to the right understanding of Holy Scripture. Three years of nearly uninterrupted study amply rewarded him for his trouble. Hebrew, which he had also taken up, he abandoned. At that time (1504) he made translations from the Greek, he employed it critically in his theolog- THEOLOGICAL ASPIRATIONS 63 ical studies, he taught it, amongst others, to William Cop, the French physician-humanist. A few years later he was to find little in Italy to improve his proficiency in Greek; he was afterwards inclined to believe that he car- ried more of the two ancient languages to that country than he brought back. Nothing testifies more to the enthusiasm with which Erasmus applied himself to Greek than his zeal to make his best friends share in its blessings. Batt, he decided, should learn Greek. But Batt had no time, and Latin appealed more to him. When Erasmus goes to Haarlem to visit William Hermans, it is to make him a Greek scholar too; he has brought a handbag full of books. But he had only his trouble for his pains. William did not take at all kindly to this study and Erasmus was so disappointed that he not only considered his money and trouble thrown away, but also thought he had lost a friend. Meanwhile he was still undecided where he should go in the near future. To England, to Italy, or back to Paris? In the end he made a fairly long stay as a guest, from the autumn of 1501 till the following sum- mer, first at Saint Omer, with the prior of Saint Bertin and afterwards at the castle of Courtebourne, not far off. At Saint Omer Erasmus became acquainted with a man whose image he was afterwards to place beside that - of Colet as that of a true divine, and of a good monk at the same time: Jean Vitrier, the warden of the Francis- < \ can monastery at Saint Omer. Erasmus must have felt attracted to him as being burdened with a condemnation pronounced by the Sorbonne on account of his too frank expressions regarding the abuses of monastic life. Vitrier 64 ERASMUS had not given up the life on that account, but he devoted himself to reforming monasteries and convents. Having ‘ progressed from scholasticism to Saint Paul, he had formed a very liberal conception of Christian life, strongly opposed to practises and ceremonies. This man, without doubt, considerably influenced the origin of one of Eras- mus’ most celebrated and influential works, the Hnchi- ridion militis christiant. Erasmus himself afterwards confessed that the Enchi- — ridion was born by chance. He did not reflect that some outward circumstance is often made to serve an inward impulse. The outward circumstance was that the castle of Tournehem was frequented by a soldier, a friend of - Batt, a man of very dissolute conduct, who behaved very badly towards his pious wife, and who was, moreover, an uncultured and violent hater of priests." For the rest he was of a kindly disposition and excepted Erasmus from his hatred of divines. The wife used her influence with Batt to get Erasmus to write something which might bring her husband to take an interest in religion. Eras- mus complied with the request and Jean Vitrier con- curred so cordially with the views expressed in these notes that Erasmus afterwards elaborated them at Lou- vain; in 1504 they were published at Antwerp by Dirck Maertensz. | This is the outward genesis of the Enchiridion. But the inward cause was that sooner or later Erasmus was bound to formulate his attitude towards the religious conduct of the life of his day towards ceremonial and 1That this should have been John of Trazegnies, as Allen thinks Possible and Renaudet accepts, is still all too uncertain, A. 164 t. I. p. 373; Renaudet, Préréforme 428. i id i ie THEOLOGICAL ASPIRATIONS 65 soulless conceptions of Christian duty, which were an eyesore to him. In point of form the Enchiridion is a manual for an illiterate soldier to attain to an attitude of mind worthy of Christ; as with a finger he will point out to him the shortest path to Christ. He assumes the friend to be weary of life at court—a common theme of contempo- rary literature. Only for a few days does Erasmus inter- rupt the work of his life, the purification of theology, to comply with his friend’s request for instruction. To keep up a soldierly style he chooses the title, Enchiridion, the Greek word that even in antiquity meant both a poniard and a manual’: the poniard of the militant Christian. He. reminds him of the duty of watchfulness and enu- merates the weapons of Christ’s militia. Self-knowledge . is the beginning of wisdom. ‘The general rules of the Christian conduct of life are followed by a number of remedies for particular sins and faults. Such is the outward frame. But within this scope Erasmus finds an opportunity, for the first time, to de- velop his theological programme. This programme calls upon us to return to Scripture. It should be tlie en- deavour of every Christian to understand Scripture in its purity and original meaning. To that end he should prepare himself by the study of the Ancients, orators, poets, philosophers; Plato especially. Also the great Fathers of the Church, Jerome, Ambrose, Augustine will 1Tn 1500 (A. 123.21) Erasmus speaks of the Enchiridion of the Father Augustine, cf, 135, 188; in 1501, A. 152.33, he calls the Officia of Cicero a “‘pugiunculus’’—a dagger. So the appellation had been in his mind for some time. 2? Miles with Erasmus has no longer the meaning of knight which it had in medieval Latin. 66 ERASMUS be found useful, but not the large crowd of subsequent exegetists. The argument chiefly aims at subverting the conception of religion as a continual observance of cere- monies. This is Judaic ritualism and of no value. It is better to understand a single verse of the psalms well, by this means to deepen one’s understanding of God and of oneself, and to draw a moral and line of conduct from it, rather than to read the whole psalter without atten- tion. If the ceremonies do not renew the soul they are valueless and hurtful. “Many are used to count how many masses they have heard every day, and referring to them as to something very important, as though they owed Christ nothing else, they return to their former habits after leaving church.” “Perhaps you sacrifice every day and yet you live for yourself. You worship the saints, you like to touch their relics; do you want to earn Peter and Paul? Then copy the faith of the one and \ the charity of the other and you will have done more than if you had walked to Rome ten times.” He does not reject formulae and practices; he does not want to shake the faith of the humble but he cannot suffer that Christ is offered a cult made up of practices only. And why is it the monks, above all, who contribute to the deterioration of faith? “I am ashamed to tell how super- stitiously most of them observe certain petty ceremonies, invented by puny human minds (and not even for this purpose), how hatefully they want to force others to conform to them, how implicitly they trust them, how boldly they condemn others.” Let Paul teach them true Christianity. “Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bond- THEOLOGICAL ASPIRATIONS 67 age.” This word to the Galatians contains the doctrine of Christian liberty, which soon at the Reformation was to resound so loudly. Erasmus did not apply it here in a sense derogatory to the dogmatics of the Catholic Church; but still it is a fact that the Enchindion pre- pared many minds to give up much that he still wanted to keep. The note of the Enchiridion is already what was to remain the note of Erasmus’ life-work: how revolting it is that in this world the substance and the shadow differ so and that the world reverences those whom it should not reverence; that a hedge of infatuation, routine and thoughtlessness prevents mankind from seeing things in their true proportions. He expresses it later in the Praise of Folly and in the Colloquies. It is not merely religious feeling, it is equally social feeling that inspired him. Under the heading: Opinions worthy of a Chris- tian, he laments the extremes of pride of class, national hostility, professional envy, and rivalry between religious orders, which keep men apart. Let everybody sincerely concern himself about his brother. “Throwing dice cost you a thousand gold pieces in one night, and mean- while some wretched girl, compelled by poverty, sold her modesty; and a soul is lost for which Christ gave his own. You say, what is that to me? I mind my own business, according to my lights. And yet you, holding such opinions, consider yourself a Christian, who are not even a man!” In the Enchiridion of the militant Christian, Erasmus had for the first time said the things which he had most at heart, with fervour and indignation, with sincerity and courage. And yet one would hardly say that this c— 68 ERASMUS booklet was born of an irresistible impulse of ardent piety. Erasmus treats it, as we have seen, as a trifle, composed at the request of a friend in a couple of days stolen from his studies (though, strictly speaking, this only holds good of the first draft, which he elaborated afterwards). The chief object of his studies he had already conceived to be the restoration of theology. One day he will expound Paul, “that the slanderers who con- sider it the height of piety to know nothing of bonae literae, may understand that we in our youth embraced the cultured literature of the Ancients, and that we ac- quired a correct knowledge of the two languages, Greek and Latin—not without many vigils—not for the pur- pose of vainglory or childish satisfaction, but because, long before, we premeditated adorning the temple of the Lord (which some have too much desecrated by their ignorance and barbarism) according to our strength, with help from foreign parts, so that also in noble minds the love of Holy Scripture may be kindled.” Is it not still the Humanist who speaks? We hear, moreover, the note of personal justification. It is sounded also in a letter to Colet written towards the close of 1504, accompanying the edition of the Lucu- brationes in which the Enchiridion was first published. “T did not write the Enchiridion to parade my invention or eloquence, but only that I might correct the error of those whose religion is usually composed of more than Judaic ceremonies and observances of a material sort, and who neglect the things that conduce to piety.” He adds, and this is typically humanistic, “I have tried to give the reader a sort of art of piety, as others have written the theory of certain sciences.” THEOLOGICAL ASPIRATIONS 69 The art of piety! Erasmus might have been surprised had he known that another treatise, written more than sixty years before, by another canon of the Low Coun- tries would continue to appeal much longer and much more urgently to the world than his manual: the Imitatio Christi by Thomas & Kempis. The Enchiridion, collected with some other pieces into a volume of Lucubrationes, did not meet with such a great and speedy success as had been bestowed upon the Adagia. That Erasmus’ speculations on true piety were considered too bold was certainly not the cause. They contained nothing antagonistic to the teachings of the Church, so that even at the time of the Counter Refor- mation, when the Church had become highly suspicious regarding everything that Erasmus had written, the di- vines who drew up the index expurgatorius of his work found only a few passages in the Enchiridion to expunge. Moreover, Erasmus had inserted in the volume some writings of unsuspected Catholic tenor. For a long time it was in great repute, especially with theologians and monks. A famous preacher at Antwerp used to say that a sermon might be found in every page of the Hnchi- ridion. But the book only obtained its great influence in wide cultured circles, when, upheld by Erasmus’ world- wide reputation, it was available in a number of transla- tions, English, Czech, German, Dutch, Spanish, and French. But then it began to fall under suspicion, for that was the time when Luther had unchained the great struggle. “Now they have begun to nibble at the Hn- chiridion also, that used to be so popular with divines,” Erasmus writes in 1526. For the rest it was only two passages to which the orthodox critics objected. Vil YEARS OF TROUBLE—LOUVAIN, PARIS, ENGLAND DEATH OF BATT: 1502-FIRST STAY AT LOUVAIN: 1502-1504— TRANSLATIONS FROM THE GREEK—AT PARIS AGAIN— VALLA’S ANNOTATIONES ON THE NEW TESTAMENT— SECOND STAY IN ENGLAND: 1505-1506-MORE PATRONS AND FRIENDS—DEPARTURE FOR ITALY: 1506-CARMEN ALPESTRE. Circumstances continued to remain unfavourable for Erasmus. “This year fortune has truly been raging vio- Jently against me,” he writes in the autumn of 1502. In the spring his good friend Batt had died. It is a pity that no letters written by Erasmus directly after his bereavement have come down to us. We should be glad to have for that faithful helper a monument in addition to that which Erasmus erected to his memory in the Antibarbari. Anna of Veere had remarried and, as a pa- troness, might henceforth be left out of account. In October, 1502, Henry of Bergen passed away. “I have commemorated the bishop of Cambray in three Latin epitaphs and a Greek one; they sent me but six guilders, that also in death he should remain true to himself.” In Francis of Busleiden, archbishop of Besancon, he lost at about the same time a prospective new patron. He still felt shut out from Paris, Cologne and England by the danger of the plague. , In the late summer of 1502 he went to Louvain, “flung thither by the plague,” he says. The university of Lou- 79 YEARS OF TROUBLE 71 vain, established ‘in 1425 to wean the Netherlands in spiritual matters from Paris, was, at the beginning of the 16th century, one of the strongholds of theological tradi- tion, which, however, did not prevent the progress of classical studies. How else should Adrian of Utrecht, later pope, but at that time dean of Saint Peter’s and professor of theology, have forthwith undertaken to get him a professorship? Erasmus declined the offer, how- ever, “for certain reasons,” he says. Considering his great distress, the reasons must have been cogent indeed. One of them which he mentioned is not very clear to us: “T am here so near to Dutch tongues which know how to hurt much, it is true, but have not learned to profit any one.” His spirit of liberty and his ardent love of the studies to which he wanted to devote himself en- tirely, were, no doubt, his chief reasons for declining. But he had to make a living. Life at Louvain was expensive and he had no regular earnings. He wrote some prefaces and dedicated to the bishop of Arras, chancellor of the University, the first translation from the Greek: some Declamationes by Libanius. When in the autumn of 1503 Philip le Beau was expected back in the Netherlands from his journey to Spain, Erasmus wrote, with sighs of distaste, a panegyric to celebrate the safe return of the prince. It cost him much trouble. “Tt occupies me day and night,” says the man who com- posed with such incredible facility, when his heart was in the work. “What is harder than to write with aversion; what is more useless than to write something by which we unlearn good writing?” It must be acknowledged that he really flattered as sparingly as possible; the practice was so repulsive to him that in his preface he 72 ERASMUS roundly owned that, to tell the truth, this whole class of composition was not to his taste. At the end of 1504 Erasmus was back at Paris, at last. Probably he had always meant to return and looked upon his stay at Louvain as a temporary exile. The circumstances under which he left Louvain are unknown to us, because of the almost total lack of letters of the year 1504. In any case, he hoped that at Paris he would sooner be able to attain his great end of devoting himself entirely to the study of theology. “I cannot tell you, dear Colet,” he writes towards the end of 1504, “how I hurry on, with all sails set, to holy literature; how I dislike everything that keeps me back, or retards me. But the disfavour of Fortune, who always looks at me with the same face, has been the reason why I have not been able to get clear of those vexations. So I returned to France with the purpose, if I cannot solve them, at any rate to rid myself of them in one way or another. After that I shall devote myself, with all my heart, to the divinae literae, to give up the remainder of my life to them.” If only he can find the means to work for some months entirely for himself and disen- tangle himself from profane literature. Can Colet not find out for him how matters stand with regard to the proceeds of the hundred copies of the Adagia which, at one time, he sent to England at his own expense? The liberty of a few months may be bought for little money. There is something heroic in Erasmus scorning to make ~ money out of his facile talents and enviable knowledge of the humanities, daring indigence to be able to realize his shining ideal of restoring theology. It is remarkable that the same Italian humanist who in YEARS OF TROUBLE 73 his youth had been his guide and example on the road to pure Latiny and classic antiquity, Lorenzo Valla, by chance became his leader and an outpost in the field of critical theology. In the summer of 1504, hunting in the old library of the Premonstratensian monastery of Pare, near Louvain (“in no preserves is hunting a greater de- light”), he found a manuscript of Valla’s Annotationes on the New Testament. It was a collection of critical notes on the text of the Gospels, the Epistles and Revelation. That the text of the Vulgate was not stainless had been acknowledged by Rome itself as early as the 13th cen- tury. Monastic orders and individual divines had set themselves to correct it, but that purification had not amounted to much, in spite of Nicholas of Lyra’s work in the 14th century. It was probably the falling in with Valla’s Annotationes / which led Erasmus, who was formerly more inspired with the resolution to edit Jerome and to comment upon Paul (he was to do both at a later date), to turn to the task of taking up the New Testament as a whole, in order to restore it in its purity. In March, 1505, already Josse Badius at Paris printed Valla’s Annotationes for Erasmus, as a sort of advertisement of what he himself one day hoped to achieve. It was a feat of courage. Erasmus did not conceal from himself that Valla, the humanist, had an ill name with divines, and that there would be an outcry about “the intolerable temerity of the homo grammaticus, who after having harassed all the disci- plinae, did not scruple to assail holy literature with his petulant pen.” It was another program much more explicit and defiant than the Enchiridion had been. Once more it is not clear why and how Erasmus \es 74 ERASMUS left Paris again for England in the autumn of 1505. He speaks of serious reasons and the advice of sensible peo- ple. He mentions one reason: lack of money. The re- print of the Adagia, published by John Philippi at Paris in 1505, had probably helped him through, for the time being; the edition cannot have been to his taste, for he had been dissatisfied with his work and wanted to extend it, by weaving his new Greek knowledge into it. From Holland a warning voice had sounded, the voice of his superior and friend Servatius, demanding an account of his departure from Paris. Evidently his Dutch friends had still no confidence in Erasmus, his work and his future. In many respects that future appeared more favorable to him in England than it had seemed anywhere, thus far. There he found the old friends, men of consideration and importance: Mountjoy, with whom, on his arrival, he stayed some months, Colet, and More. There he found some excellent Greek scholars, whose conversation promised to be profitable and amusing; not Colet, who knew little Greek, but More, Linacre, Grocyn, Latimer, and Tunstall. He soon came in contact with some high ecclesiastics who were to be his friends and patrons: Richard Foxe, Bishop of Winchester, John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester and William Warham, Archbishop of Can- terbury. Soon he would also find a friend whose con- genial spirit and interests, to some extent, made up for the loss of Batt: the Italian Andrew Ammonius, of Lucea. And lastly, the king promised him an ecclesiastical bene- fice. It was not long before Erasmus was armed with a dispensation of Pope Julius II, dated January 4th, YEARS OF TROUBLE . 75 1506, cancelling the obstacles in the way of accepting an English benefice. Translations from Greek into Latin were for him an easy and speedy means to obtain favour and support: a dialogue by Lucian, followed by others, for Foxe; the Hecuba and the Iphigenia of Euripides for Warham. He now also thought of publishing his letters. Clearly his relations with Holland were not yet satis- factory. Servatius did not reply to his letters. Erasmus ever felt hanging over him a menace to his career and his liberty embodied in the figure of that friend, to whom he was linked by so many silken ties, yonder in the monastery of Steyn, where his return was looked forward to, sooner or later, as a beacon-light of Christendom. Did the prior know of the papal dispensation exempting Erasmus from the “statutes and customs of the mon- astery of Steyn in Holland, of the order of Saint Au- gustine?” Probably he did. On the Ist of April, 1506, Erasmus writes to him: “Here in London I am, as it seems, greatly esteemed by the most eminent and eru- dite men of all England. The king has promised me a curacy: the visit of the prince necessitated a postpone- ment of this business.’’ He immediately adds: “I am deliberating again, how best to devote the remainder of my life (how much that will be, I do not know) entirely to piety, to Christ. I see life, even when it is long, as evanescent and dwin- dling; I know that I am of a delicate constitution and that my strength has been encroached upon, not a little, by study and also, somewhat, by misfortune. I see that 1A. 189, Philip le Beau, who had unexpectedly come to England because of a storm, which obliged Mountjoy to do court-service. 76 ERASMUS no deliverance can be hoped from study, and that it seems as if we had to begin over again, day after day. ‘Therefore I have resolved, content with my mediocrity (especially now that I, have learned as much Greek as suffices me), to apply myself to meditation about death and the training of my soul. I should have done so before and have husbanded the precious years when they were at their best. But though it is a tardy husbandry that people practise when only little remains at the bottom, we should be the more economical accordingly as the quantity and quality of what is left diminishes.” Was it a fit of melancholy which made Erasmus write those words of repentance and renunciation? Was he surprised in the middle of the pursuit of his life’s aim by the consciousness of the vanity of his endeavours, the consciousness, too, of a great fatigue? Is this the deepest foundation of Erasmus’ being, which he reveals for a moment to his old and intimate friend? It may be doubted. The passage tallies very ill with the first sen- tences of the letter, which are altogether concerned with success and prospects. In a letter he wrote the next day, also to Gouda and to a trusted friend, there is no trace of the mood: he is again thinking of his future. We do not notice that the tremendous zeal with which he continues his studies is relaxed for a moment. And there are other indications that towards Servatius who knew him better than he could wish, and who, moreover, as prior of Steyn, had a threatening power over him, he purposely demeaned himself as though he despised the world. _ Meanwhile nothing came of the English prebend. But suddenly the occasion offered to which Erasmus had so YEARS OF ‘TROUBLE 77 often looked forward: the journey to Italy. The court- physician of Henry VII, Giovanni Battista Boerio, of Genoa, was looking for a master to accompany his sons in their journey to the universities of Italy. Erasmus accepted the post, which charged him neither with the duties of tuition nor with attending to the young fellows, but only with supervising and guiding their studies. In - the beginning of June, 1506, he found himself on French soil once more. For two summer months the party of travellers stayed at Paris and Erasmus availed himself of the opportunity to have several of his works, which he had brought from England, printed at Paris. He was by now a well-known and a favourite author, gladly wel- comed by the old friends (he had been reputed dead) and made much of. Josse Badius printed all Erasmus offered him: the translations of Euripides and Lucian, a collection of Epigrammata, a new but still unaltered edition of the Adagia. In August the journey was continued. As he rode on horseback along the Alpine roads the most important poem Erasmus has written, the echo of an abandoned pursuit, originated. He had been vexed about his travel- ling company, had abstained from conversing with them, and sought consolation in composing poetry. The result was the ode which he called Carmen equestre vel potius alpestre, about the inconveniences of old age, dedicated to his friend William Cop. Erasmus was one of those who early feel old. He was < not forty and yet fancied himself across the threshold of old age. How quickly it had come! He looks back on the course of his life: he sees himself playing with nuts as a child, as a boy eager for study, as a youth 78 ERASMUS engrossed in poetry and scholasticism, also in painting. He surveys his enormous erudition, his study of Greek, his aspiration to scholarly fame. In the midst of all this old age has suddenly come. What remains to him? And again we hear the note of renunciation of the world and of devotion to Christ. Farewell jests and trifles, farewell philosophy and poetry, a pure heart full of Christ is all he desires henceforward. Here, in the stillness of the Alpine landscape, there arose something more of Erasmus’ deepest aspira- tions than in the lament to Servatius. But in this case, too, it is a stray element of his soul, not the strong impulse that gave direction and fullness to his life and with irresistible pressure urged him on to ever new studies. Vill IN ITALY ERASMUS IN ITALY: 1506-15099—-HE TAKES HIS DEGREE AT TURIN—BOLOGNA AND POPE JULIUS II—-ERASMUS IN VENICE WITH ALDUS: 1507-1508-THE ART OF PRINTING— ALEXANDER STEWART—TO ROME: 1509-NEWS OF HENRY VIII’S ACCESSION—ERASMUS LEAVES ITALY. At Turin Erasmus received, directly upon his arrival, on September 4th, 1506, the degree of doctor of theology. That he did not attach much value to the degree is easy to understand. He regarded it, however, as an official warrant of his competence as a writer on theological subjects, which would strengthen his position when assailed by the suspicion of his critics. He writes dis- dainfully about the title, even to his Dutch friends who in former days had helped him on in his studies for the express purpose of obtaining the doctor’s degree. As early as 1501, to Anna of Borselen he writes, “Go to Italy and obtain the doctor’s degree? Foolish projects, both of them. But one should conform to the customs of the times.”’ Again to Servatius and Johannes Obrecht, half apologetically, he says: “I have obtained the doc- tor’s degree in theology, and that quite contrary to my intention, only because I was overcome by the prayers of friends.” Bologna was now the destination of his journey. But * when Erasmus arrived there, a war was in progress _ which forced him to retire to Florence for a time. Pope Julius II, allied with the French, at the head of an army, 79 80 ERASMUS marched on Bologna to conquer it from the Bentivogli. This purpose was soon attained, and Bologna was a safe place to return to. On the 11th of November, 1506, Erasmus witnessed the triumphal entry of the martial pope. Of these days nothing but short, hasty letters of his have come down to us. They speak of unrest and rumours of war. There is nothing to show that he was impressed by the beauty of the Italy of the Renaissance. The scanty correspondence dating from his stay in Italy mentions neither architecture, nor sculpture, nor pictures. When much later he happened to remember his visit to the Chartreuse of Pavia, it is only to give an instance of useless waste and magnificence. Books alone seemed to occupy and attract Erasmus in Italy. At Bologna, Erasmus served as a mentor to the young Boerios to the end of the year for which he had bound himself. It seemed a very long time to him. He could not stand any encroachment upon his liberty. He felt caught in the contract as in a net. The boys, it seems, were intelligent enough, if not so brilliant as Erasmus had seen them in his first joy; but with their private tutor Clyfton, whom he at first extolled to the sky, he was soon at loggerheads. At Bologna he experienced many vexations for which his new relations with Paul Bombasius could only in part indemnify him. He worked there at an enlarged edition of his Adagia which now, by the addition of the Greek ones, increased from eight hundred to some thousands of items. From Bologna, in October, 1507, Erasmus addressed a letter to the famous Venetian printer, Aldus Manu- tius, in which he requested him to publish, anew, the IN ITALY 8t two translated dramas of Euripides, as the edition of Badius was out of print and too defective for his taste. What made Aldus attractive in his eyes was, no doubt, besides the fame of the business, though it was languish-. ing at the time, the printer’s beautiful type—“those most magnificent letters, especially those very small ones.” Erasmus was one of those true booklovers who pledge their heart to a type or a size or a book, not because of any artistic preference, but because of readableness and handiness, which to them are of the very greatest impor- tance. What he asked of Aldus was a small book at alow price. Towards the end of the year their relations had gone so far that Erasmus gave up his projected journey to Rome, for the time, to remove to Venice, there per-- sonally to superintend the publication of his works.. Now there was no longer merely the question of a little book of translations, but Aldus had declared himself willing to print the enormously increased collection of the Adagia. Beatus Rhenanus tells a story, which, no doubt, he had heard from Erasmus himself: how Erasmus on his arrival at Venice had gone straight to the printing office and was kept waiting there for a long time. Aldus was cor- recting proofs and thought his visitor was one of those inquisitive people by whom he used to be pestered. When he turned out to be Erasmus, he welcomed him cordially and procured him board and lodging in the house of his father-in-law, Andrea Asolani. Fully eight months did Erasmus live there, in the environment which,« in future, was to be his true element: the printing office. He was in a fever of hurried work, about which he would often sigh, but which, after all, was congenial to him. 82 ERASMUS The augmented collection of the Adagia had not yet been made ready for the press at Bologna. “With great temerity on my part,” Erasmus himself testifies, “we began to work at the same time, I to write, Aldus to print.” Meanwhile the literary friends of the New Acad- emy whom he got to know at Venice, Johannes Lascaris, Baptista Egnatius, Marcus Musurus and the young Je- rome Aleander, with whom, at Asolani’s, he shared room and bed, brought him new Greek authors, unprinted as yet, furnishing fresh material for augmenting the Adagra. These were no inconsiderable additions: Plato in the original, Plutarch’s Lives and Moralia, Pindar, Pausanias, and others. Even people whom he did not know and who took an interest in his work, brought new material to him. Amid the noise of the pressroom, Erasmus, to the surprise of his publisher, sat and wrote, usually from memory, so busily occupied that, as he picturesquely expressed it, he had no time to scratch his ears. He was lord and master of the printing office. A special corrector had been assigned to him; he made his textual changes in the last impression. Aldus also read the proofs. “Why?” asked Erasmus. “Because I am study- ing at the same time,” was the reply. Meanwhile Erasmus suffered from the first attack of his tormenting nephro- lithic malady; he ascribed it to the food he got at Aso- lani’s and later took revenge by painting that boarding- house and its landlord in very spiteful colours in the Colloquies. When in September, 1508, the edition of the Adagia was ready, Aldus wanted Erasmus to remain in order to write more for him. Till December he continued to work at Venice on editions of Plautus, Terence, and IN ITALY 83 Seneca’s tragedies. Visions of joint labour to publish all that classic antiquity still held in the way of hidden treas- ures, together with Hebrew and Chaldean stores, floated before his mind. Erasmus belonged to the generation which had grown up together with the youthful art of printing. To the world of those days it was still like a newly acquired organ; people felt rich, powerful, happy in the possession of this “almost divine implement.” ‘The figure of Eras- « mus and his oeuvre were only rendered possible by the art of printing. He was its glorious triumph and, equally, in a sense, its victim. What would Erasmus have been without the printing press? To broadcast the ancient documents, to purify and restore them was his life’s pas- sion. The certainty that the printed book places exactly the same text in the hands of thousands of readers, was to him a consolation that former generations had lacked. Erasmus is one of the first who, after his name as an author was established, worked directly and continually - for the press. It was his strength, but also his weakness. It enabled him to exercise an immediate influence on the reading public of Europe such as had emanated from none before him; to become a focus of culture in the full sense of the word, an intellectual central station, a touch- stone of the spirit of the time. Imagine for a moment what it would have meant if a still greater mind than his, say Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, that universal spirit who had helped in nursing the art of printing in its earliest infancy, could have availed himself of the art, as it was placed at the disposal of Erasmus! The dangerous aspect of this situation was that print- ing enabled Erasmus, having once become a centre and 84 ERASMUS an authority, to address the world at large immediately about all that occurred to him. Much of his later mental labour is, after all, really but repetition, ruminating, di- gression, unnecessary vindication from assaults to which his greatness alone would have been a sufficient answer, futilities which he might have better left alone. Much of this work written directly for the press is journalism at bottom, and we do Erasmus an injustice by applying to it the tests of lasting excellence. The consciousness that we can reach the whole world at once with our writings is a stimulant which unwittingly influences our mode of expression, a luxury that only the highest spirits can bear with impunity. The link between Erasmus and book-printing was Latin. Without his incomparable Latinity his position as an author would have been impossible. The art of printing undoubtedly furthered the use of Latin. It was the Latin publications which in those days promised success and a large sale for a publisher, and established his reputa- tion, for they were broadcast all over the world. The leading publishers were themselves scholars filled with enthusiasm for humanism. Cultured and well-to-do peo- ple acted as proof-readers to printers; such as Peter Gilles, the friend of Erasmus and More, the town-clerk of Antwerp, who corrected proof-sheets for Dirck Maer- tensz. The great printing offices were, in a local sense, too, the foci of intellectual intercourse. The fact that England had lagged behind, thus far, in the evolution of the art of printing, contributed not a little, no doubt, to prevent Erasmus from settling there, where so many ties held and so many advantages allured him. To find a permanent place of residence was, indeed, IN ITALY 85 and apart from this fact, very hard for him. Towards the end of 1508 he accepted the post of tutor of rhetorics to the young Alexander Stewart, a natural son of James IV of Scotland, and already, in spite of his youth, arch- bishop of Saint Andrews, now a student at Padua. The danger of war soon drove them from upper Italy to Siena. Here Erasmus obtained leave to visit Rome. < He arrived there early in 1509, no longer an unknown canon from the northern regions but a celebrated and honoured author. All the charms of the Eternal City lay open to him and he must have felt keenly gratified by the consideration and courtesy with which cardinals and prelates, such as John of Medici, afterwards Leo X, Domenico Grimani, Riario and others, treated him. It seems that he was even offered some post in the curia. But he had to return to his youthful archbishop with whom he thereupon visited Rome again, incognito, and afterwards travelled in the neighbourhood of Naples. He inspected the cave of the Sibylla of Cumae, but what it meant to him we do not know. This entire period following his departure from Padua and all that follows till the spring of 1511—in certain respects the most im- portant part of his life—remains unrecorded in a single letter that has come down to us. Here and there he has occasionally, and at a much later date, touched upon some impressions of Rome,’ but the whole remains vague and dim. It is the incubation period of the Praise of Folly that is thus obscured from view. On the 21st of April, 1509, King Henry VII of Eng- land died. His successor was the young prince whom Erasmus had saluted at Eltham in 1499, to whom he had 1LBE. no. 1175 c. 1375, visit to Grimani. 86 ERASMUS dedicated his poem in praise of Great Britain, and who, during his stay at Bologna, had distinguished him by a Latin letter as creditable to Erasmus as to the 15-year- old royal latinist If ever the chance of obtaining a patron seemed favourable, it was now, when this prom- ising lover of letters ascended the throne as Henry VIIt. Lord Mountjoy, Erasmus’ most faithful Maecenas, thought so, too, and pointed out the fact to him in a letter of May 27th, 1509. It was a pleasure to see, he wrote, how vigorous, how upright and just, how zealous in the cause of literature and men of letters was the con- duct of the youthful prince. Mountjoy,—or Ammonius, who probably drew up the flowery document for him, —was exultant. A laughing sky and tears of joy are the themes of the letter. Evidently, however, Eras- mus himself had, on his side, already sounded Mountjoy as to his chances, as soon as the tidings of Henry VII's death became known at Rome; not without lamentations about cares and weakened health. “The archbishop of Canterbury,” Mountjoy was able to apprise Erasmus, “is not only continually engrossed in your Adagia and praises you to the skies, but he also promises you a benefice on your return and sends you five pounds for travelling expenses,’ which sum was doubled by Mountjoy. We do not know whether Erasmus really hesitated before he reached his decision. Cardinal Grimani, he _ | asserts, tried to hold him back, but in vain, for in July, _ 1509, he left Rome and Italy, never to return. As he crossed the Alps for the second time, not on the French side now, but across the Spliigen, through Switzer- 2A, 206, where from Allen’s introduction one can form an opinion about the prince’s share in the composition. IN ITALY 87 land, his Genius touched him again, as had happened in those high regions three years before on the road to Italy. But this time it was not in the guise of the Latin Muse, who then drew from him such artful and pathetic poetical meditations about his past life and pious vows for the future;—it was something much more subtle and grand: the Praise of Folly. THE PRAISE OF FOLLY MORIAE ENCOMIUM, THE PRAISE OF FOLLY: 1509, AS A WORK OF ART—FOLLY, THE MOTOR OF ALL LIFE: INDIS- PENSABLE, SALUTARY, CAUSE AND SUPPORT OF STATES AND OF HEROISM—FOLLY KEEPS THE WORLD GOING— VITAL ENERGY INCORPORATED WITH FOLLY—LACK OF FOLLY MAKES UNFIT FOR LIFE—NEED OF SELF-COM- PLACENCY—HUMBUG BEATS TRUTH—KNOWLEDGE A PLAGUE—SATIRE OF ALL SECULAR AND ECCLESIASTICAL VOCATIONS—TWO THEMES THROUGHOUT THE WORK— THE HIGHEST FOLLY: ECSTASY—THE MORIA TO BE TAKEN AS A GAY JEST—CONFUSION OF FOOLS AND LUNATICS—ERASMUS TREATS HIS MORIA SLIGHTINGLY —ITS VALUE. While he rode over the mountain passes,” Erasmus’ restless spirit, now unfettered for some days by set tasks, ' occupied itself with everything he had studied and read in the last few years, and with everything he had seen. What ambition, what self-deception, what pride and con- ceit filled the world! He thought of Thomas More, whom he was now to see again ——that most witty and wise of all his friends, with that curious name Moros, the Greek word for a fool, which so ill became his per- sonality. Anticipating the gay jests which More’s con- versation promised, there grew in his mind that masterpiece of humour and wise irony, Moriae En- comium, the Praise of Folly. The world as the scene of universal folly; folly as the indispensable element making 1 That he conceived the work in the Alps follows from the fact that he tells us explicitly that it happened while riding, whereas, after passing through Switzerland, he travelled by boat. A. 1, IV 216.62. 88 THE PRAISE OF FOLLY 89 life and society possible and all this put into the mouth of Stultitia Folly itself (true antitype of Minerva), who in a panegyric on her own power and usefulness, praises herself. As to form it is a Declamatio, as he had trans- lated them from the Greek of Libanius. As to the spirit, a revival of Lucian, whose Gallus, translated by him three years before, may have suggested the theme. It must have been in the incomparably lucid moments of that brilliant intellect. All the particulars of classic reading which the year before he worked up in the new edition of the Adagia were still at his immediate disposal in that retentive and capacious memory. Reflecting at his ease on all that wisdom of the ancients, he secreted the juices required for his expostulation. He arrived in London, took up his abode in More’s house in Bucklersbury, and there, tortured by nephritic pains, he wrote down in a few days, without having his books with him, the perfect work of art that must have been ready in his mind. Stultitia was truly born in the manner of her serious sister Pallas. As to form and imagery the Moria is faultless, the product of the inspired moments of creative impulse. The figure of an orator confronting her public is sus- tained to the last in a masterly way. We see the faces of the auditors light up with glee when Folly appears in the pulpit; we hear the applause interrupting her words. There is a wealth of fancy, coupled with so much sober- ness of line and-colour, such reserve, that the whole presents a perfect instance of that harmony which is the essence of Renaissance expression. There is no exuber- ance, in spite of the multiplicity of matter and thought, but a temperateness, a smoothness, an airiness and clear- _ 90 ERASMUS ness which are as gladdening as they are relaxing. In order perfectly to realize the artistic perfection of Eras- mus’ book we should compare it with Rabelais. “Without me,” says Folly, “the world cannot exist for a moment. For is not all that is done at all among mortals, full of folly; is it not performed by fools and for fools?” “No society, no cohabitation can be pleasant or lasting without folly; so much so, that a people could not stand its prince, nor the master his man, nor the maid her mistress, nor the tutor his pupil, nor the friend his friend, nor the wife her husband for a moment longer, if they did not now and then err together, now flatter each other; now sensibly conniving at things, now smearing themselves with some honey of folly.” In that sentence the summary of the Laus is contained. Folly here is worldly wisdom, resignation and lenient judgment. He who pulls off the masks in the comedy of life is ejected. What is the whole life of mortals but a sort of play in which each actor appears on the boards in his specific mask and acts his part till the stage-manager calls him off? He acts wrongly who does not adapt him- self to existing conditions, and demands that the game shall be a game no longer. It is the part of the truly sensible to mix with all people, either conniving readily at their folly, or affably erring like themselves. And the necessary driving power of all human action is ‘Philautia,’ Folly’s own sister: self-love. He who does not please himself effects little. Take away that condi- ment of life and the word of the orator cools, the poet is laughed at, the artist perishes with his art. Folly in the garb of pride, of vanity, of vainglory, is the hidden spring of all that is considered high and great THE PRAISE OF FOLLY 91 in this world. The state with its posts of honour, patriot- ism and national pride; the stateliness of ceremonies, the delusion of caste and nobility—what is it but folly? War, the most foolish thing of all, is the origin of all heroism. What prompted the Deciuses, what Curtius, to sacrifice themselves? Vainglory. It is this folly which produces states; through her, empires, religion, law-courts, exist. This is bolder and more chilling than Machiavelli, more detached than Montaigne. But Erasmus will not have it credited to him: it is Folly who speaks. He purposely makes us tread the round of the circulus vitiosus, as in the old saw: A Cretan said, all Cretans are liars. Wisdom is to folly as reason is to passion. And there is much more passion than reason in the world. That which keeps the world going, the fount of life, is folly. For what else is love? Why do people marry, if not out of folly, which sees no objections? All enjoyment and amusement is only a condiment of folly. When a wise man wishes to become a father, he has first to play the fool. For what is more foolish than the game of procreation? Unperceived the orator has incorporated here with folly all that is vitality and the courage of life. Folly is spontaneous energy that no one can do without. He who is perfectly sensible and serious cannot live. The more people get away from me, Stultitia, the less they live. Why do we kiss and cuddle little children, if not because they are still so delightfully foolish. And what else makes youth so elegant? Now look at the truly serious and sensible. They 92 ERASMUS are awkward at everything, at meal-time, at a dance, in playing, in social intercourse. If they have to buy, or to contract, things are sure to go wrong. Quintilian says that stage fright bespeaks the intelligent orator, who knows his faults. Right! But does not, then, Quin- tilian confess openly that wisdom is an impediment to good execution? And has not Stultitia the right to claim prudence for herself, if the wise, out of shame, out of bashfulness, undertake nothing in circumstances where fools pluckily set to work? Here Erasmus goes to the root of the matter in a. psychological sense. Indeed the consciousness of falling short in achievement is the brake clogging action, is the great inertia retarding the progress of the world. Did he know himself for one who is awkward when not bend- ing over his books, but confronting men and affairs? Folly is gaiety and lightheartedness, indispensable to happiness. The man of mere reason without passion is a stone image, blunt and without any human feeling, a spectre or monster, from whom all fly, deaf to all nat- ural emotions, susceptible neither to love nor compas- sion. Nothing escapes him, in nothing he errs; he sees through everything, he weighs everything accurately, he forgives nothing, he is only satisfied with himself; he alone is healthy; he alone is king, he alone is free. It is the hideous figure of the doctrinaire which Erasmus is thinking of. Which state, he exclaims, would desire such an absolutely wise man for a magistrate? He who devotes himself to tasting all the bitterness of life with wise insight would forthwith deprive himself of life. Only folly is a remedy: to err, to be mistaken, to be ignorant is to be human. How much better it is THE PRAISE OF FOLLY 93 in marriage to be blind to a wife’s shortcomings than to make away with oneself out of jealousy and to fill the world with tragedy! Adulation is virtue. There is no cordial devotion without a little adulation. It is the soul of eloquence, of medicine and poetry; it is the honey and the sweetness of all human customs. Again a series of valuable social qualities is slyly in- corporated with folly: benevolence, kindness, inclination to approve and to admire. But especially to approve of oneself. There is no pleasing others without beginning by flattering ourselves a little and approving of ourselves. What would the world be if everyone was not proud of his standing, his calling, so that no person would change places with another in point of good appearance, of fancy, of good family, of landed property? Humbug is the right thing. Why should any one desire true erudition? The more incompetent a man, the pleasanter his life is and the more he is admired. Look at professors, poets, orators. Man’s mind is so made that he is more impressed by lies than by the truth. Go to church: if the priest deals with serious subjects the whole congregation is dozing, yawning, feeling bored. But when he begins to tell some cock-and-bull story, they awake, sit up, and hang on his lips. To be deceived, philosophers say, is a misfortune, but not to be deceived is a superlative misfortune. If it is human to err, why should a man be called unhappy be- cause he errs since he was so born and made, and it is the fate of all? Do we pity a man because he cannot fly or does not walk on four legs? We might as well call the horse unhappy because it does not learn grammar or 94 ERASMUS eat cakes. No creature is unhappy, if it lives according to its nature. The sciences were invented to our utmost destruction; far from conducing to our happiness, they are even in its way, though for its sake they are sup- posed to have been invented. By the agency of evil demons they have stolen into human life with the other pests. For did not the simple-minded people of the Golden Age live happily, unprovided with any science, only led by nature and instinct? What did they want grammar for, when all spoke the same language? Why have dialectics, when there were no quarrels and no differences of opinion? Why jurisprudence, when there were no bad morals from which good laws sprang? They were too religious to investigate with impious curiosity the secrets of nature, the size, motions, influence of the stars, the hidden cause of things. It is the old idea, which germinated in antiquity, here lightly touched upon by Erasmus, afterwards proclaimed by Rousseau in bitter earnest: civilisation is a plague. Wisdom is misfortune, but self-conceit is happiness. Grammarians, who wield the sceptre of wisdom—school- masters, that is—would be the most wretched of all people if I, Folly, did not mitigate the discomforts of their miserable calling by a sort of sweet frenzy. But what holds good of schoolmasters, also holds good of poets, rhetors, authors. For them, too, all happiness merely consists in vanity and delusion. The lawyers are no better off and after them come the philosophers. Next there is a numerous procession of clergy: divines, monks, bishops, cardinals, popes, only interrupted by princes and courtiers. THE PRAISE OF FOLLY 95 In the chapters’ which review these offices and callings, satire has shifted its ground a little. Throughout the work two themes are intertwined: that of salutary folly, which is true wisdom, and that of deluded wisdom, which is pure folly. As they are both put into the mouth of Folly, we should have to invert them both to get truth, if Folly . . . were not wisdom. Now it is clear that the first is the principal theme. Erasmus starts from it; and he returns to it. Only in the middle, as he reviews human accomplishments and dignities in their universal foolishness, the second theme predominates and the book becomes an ordinary satire on human folly, of which there are many though few are so delicate. But in the other parts it is something far deeper. Occasionally the satire runs somewhat off the line, when Stultitia directly censures what Erasmus wishes to censure; for instance: indulgences, silly belief in won- ders, selfish worship of the saints; or gamblers whom she, Folly, ought to praise; or the spirit of systematizing and levelling, and the jealousy of the monks. For contemporary readers the importance of the Laus Stultitiae was, to a great extent, in the direct satire. Its lasting value is in those passages where we truly grant that folly is wisdom and the reverse. Erasmus knows the aloofness of the ground of all things: all consistent think- ing out of the dogmas of faith leads to absurdity. Only look at the theological quiddities of effete scholasticism. The apostles would not have understood them: in the eyes of latter-day divines they would have been fools. Holy Scripture itself sides with folly. ‘“The foolishness 1 Erasmus did not divide the book into chapters. It was done by an editor as late as 1765. 96 ERASMUS of God is wiser than men,” says Saint Paul. “But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world.” “It pleased God by the foolishness (of preaching) to save them that — believe.” Christ loved the simple-minded and the igno- rant: children, women, poor fishermen, nay, even such animals as are farthest removed from vulpine cunning: the ass which he wished to ride, the dove, the lamb, the sheep. Here there is a great deal behind the seemingly light jest: “Christian religion seems in general to have some affinity with a certain sort of folly.’ Was it not thought the apostles were full of new wine? And did not the judge say: ‘Paul, thou art beside thyself.’ When are we beside ourselves? When the spirit breaks its fetters and tries to escape from its prison and aspires to liberty. That is madness, but it is also other-worldliness and the highest wisdom. True happiness is in selflessness, in the furor of lovers, whom Plato calls happiest of all. The more absolute love is, the greater and more rapturous is the frenzy. Heavenly bliss itself is the greatest insanity; truly pious people enjoy its shadow on earth already in their meditations. Here Stultitia breaks off her discourse, apologising in a few words in case she may have been too petulant or talkative, and leaves the pulpit. “So farewell, applaud, live happily, and drink, Moria’s illustrious initiates.” It was an unrivaled feat of art even in these last chapters neither to lose the light comical touch, nor to lapse into undisguised profanation. It was only feasible by veritable dancing on the tight-rope of sophistry. In the Moria Erasmus is all the time hovering on the brink of profound truths. But what a boon it was—still THE PRAISE OF FOLLY 97 granted to those times—to be able to treat of all this in a vein of pleasantry. For this should be impressed upon our minds: that the Moriae Encomium is a true, gay jest. The laugh is more delicate, but no less hearty than Rabelais’. “Valete, plaudite, vivite, bibite.” ‘All common people abound to such a degree, and everywhere in so many forms of folly, that a thousand Democrits would be insufficient to laugh at them all (and they would require another Democrit to laugh at them).” How could one take the Moria too seriously, when even More’s Utopia, which is a true companion-piece to it and makes such a grave impression on us, is treated by its author and Erasmus as a mere jest? ‘There is a place where the Laus seems to touch both More and Rabelais; the place where Stultitia speaks of her father, Plutus, the god of wealth, at whose beck all things are turned topsy-turvy, according to whose will all human affairs are regulated—war and peace, government and counsel, justice and treaties. He has begotten her on the nymph Youth, not a senile, purblind Plutus, but a fresh god, warm with youth and nectar, like another Gar- gantua. The figure of Folly, of gigantic size, looms large in the period of the Renaissance. She wears a fool’s cap and bells. People laughed loudly and with unconcern at all that was foolish, without discriminating between species of folly. It is remarkable that even in the Laus, delicate as it is, the author does not distinguish between the unwise or the silly, between fools and lunatics. Holbein, illustrating Erasmus, knows but of one representation of a fool: with a staff and ass’s ears. Erasmus speaks with- out clear transition, now of foolish persons and now of 98 ERASMUS real lunatics. They are happiest of all, he makes Stultitia say: they are not frightened by spectres and apparitions; they are not tortured by the fear of impending calami- ties; everywhere they bring mirth, jests, frolic and laughter. Evidently he here means harmless imbeciles, who, indeed, were often used as jesters. This identi- fication of denseness and insanity is kept up, however, like the confusion of the comic and the simply ridiculous, and all this is well calculated to make us feel how wide the gap has already become that separates us from Erasmus. In after years he always spoke slightingly of his Moria. He considered it so unimportant, he says, as to be un- worthy of publication, but yet no other had been received with so much applause. It was a trifle and not at all in keeping with his character. More had made him write it, as if a camel were made to dance. But these disparaging utterances were not without a secondary purpose. The Moria had not brought him only success and pleasure. The exceedingly susceptible age in which he lived had taken the satire in very bad part, where it seemed to glance at offices and orders, although in his preface he had tried to safeguard himself from the re- proach of irreverence. His airy play with the texts of Holy Scripture had been too venturesome for many. His friend Martin van Dorp upbraided him with having made a mock of eternal life. Erasmus did what he could to convince evil-thinkers that the purpose of the Moria was no other than to exhort people to be virtuous. In affirming this he did his work injustice: it was much more than that. But in 1515 he was no longer what he THE PRAISE OF FOLLY 99 had been in 1509. Repeatedly he had been obliged to defend his most witty work. Had he known that it would offend, he might have kept it back, he writes in 1517 to an acquaintance at Louvain. Even towards the end of his life, he warded off the insinuations of Alberto Pio of Carpi in a lengthy expostulation. Erasmus made no further ventures in the genre of the Praise of Folly. One might consider the treatise Lingua, which he published in 1525, as an attempt to make a companion-piece to the Moria. The book is called “Of the Use and Abuse of the Tongue.” In the opening pages there is something that reminds us of the style of the Laus, but it lacks all the charm both of form and of thought. Should one pity Erasmus because, of all his publica- tions, collected in ten folio volumes, only the Praise of Folly has remained a really popular book? It 1s, together with the Colloquies, perhaps the only one of his works that is still read for its own sake. The rest is now only studied from a historical point of view, for the sake of becoming acquainted with his person or his times. It seems to me that perfect justice has been done in this case. The Praise of Folly is his best work. He wrote other books, more erudite, some more pious,—some per- haps of equal or greater influence on his time. But each has had its day. Moriae Encomium alone was to be im- mortal. For only when humour illuminated that mind did it become truly profound. In the Praise of Folly Erasmus gave something that no one else could have given to the world, Xx THIRD STAY IN ENGLAND THIRD STAY IN ENGLAND: 1509-1514-NO INFORMATION ABOUT TWO YEARS OF ERASMUS’ LIFE: 1509 SUMMER TILL 1511 SPRING—POVERTY—EKASMUS AT CAMBRIDGE —RELATIONS WITH BADIUS, THE PARIS PUBLISHER—A MISTAKE PROFITABLE TO JOHN FROBEN AT BASLE— ERASMUS LEAVES ENGLAND: 1514—JULIUS EXCLUSUS— EPISTLE AGAINST WAR. From the moment when Erasmus, back from Italy in the early summer of 1509, is hidden from view in the house of More, to write the Praise of Folly, until nearly » two years later when he comes to view again on the road to Paris to have the book printed by Gilles Gourmont, “every trace of his life has been obliterated. Of the letters which during that period he wrote and received, not a single one has been preserved. Perhaps it was the hap- piest time of his life, for it was partly spent with his tried patron, Mountjoy, and also in the house of More in that noble and witty circle which to Erasmus appeared ideal. That house was also frequented by the friend whom, during his former sojourn in England Erasmus had made, and whose mind was perhaps more congenial to him than any other, Andrew Ammonius. It is not improbable that during these months he was able to work without interruption at the studies to which he was irresistibly attracted, without cares as to the immediate future, and not yet burdened by excessive renown, which afterwards was to cause him as much trouble and loss as joy. That future was still uncertain. As soon as he no 100 THIRD STAY IN ENGLAND 101 longer enjoys More’s hospitality, the difficulties and com- plaints reeommence. Continual poverty, uncertainty and dependence were extraordinarily galling to a mind re- quiring above all things liberty. At Paris he charged Badius with a new, revised edition of the Adagia, though the Aldine might still be had there at a moderate price. The Laus, which had just appeared at Gourmont’s, was reprinted at Strassburg as early as 1511, with a courteous letter by Jacob Wimpfeling to Erasmus, but evidently without his being consulted in the matter. By that time he was back in England, had been laid up in London with a bad attack of the sweating sickness, and thence had gone to Queens’ College, Cambridge, where he had resided before. From Cambridge he writes to Colet, August 24th, 1511, in a vein of comical despair. The journey from London had been disastrous: a lame horse, no vic- tuals for the road, rain and thunder. “But I am almost pleased at this, I see the track of Christian poverty.” A chance to make some money he does not see; he will be obliged to spend everything he can wrest from his Maecenases,—he, born under a wrathful Mercury. This may sound somewhat gloomier than it was meant, but a few weeks later he writes again: ‘ ‘Oh, this begging; you laugh at me, I know. But I hate myself for it and am fully determined, either to obtain some fortune, which will relieve me from cringing, or to imitate Diogenes altogether.” This refers to a dedication of a translation of Basilius’ Commentaries on Isaiah to John Fisher, the bishop of Rochester. Colet, who had never known pecuniary cares himself, did not well understand these sallies of Erasmus. He replies to them with delicate irony and covert rebuke, 102 ERASMUS which Erasmus, in his turn, pretends not to understand. He was now “in want in the midst of plenty,” “simul et in media copia et in summa inopia.” That is to say, he was engaged in preparing for Badius’ press the De Copia verborum ac reunm, formerly begun at Paris; it was dedicated to Colet. “I ask you, who can be more impu- dent or abject than I, who for such a long time already have been openly begging in England?” Writing to Ammonius he bitterly regrets having left Rome and Italy; how prosperity had smiled upon him there! In the same way he would afterwards lament that he had not permanently established himself in England. If he had only embraced the opportunity! he thinks. Was not Erasmus rather one of those people whom good fortune cannot help? He remained in trouble and his tone grows more bitter. “T am preparing some bait against the Ist of January, though it is pretty sure to be in vain,” he writes to Am- monius, referring to new translations of Lucian and Plutarch. At Cambridge Erasmus lectured on divinity and Greek, but it brought him little success and still less profit. The long wished-for prebend, indeed, had at last been given him, in the form of the rectory of Adington, in Kent, to which Archbishop William Warham, his patron, ap- pointed him in 1512. Instead of residing he was allowed to draw a pension of twenty pounds a year. The archbishop affirms explicitly that, contrary to his custom, he had granted this favour to Erasmus, be- cause he, “a light of learning in Latin and Greek litera- ture, had, out of love for England, disdained to live in Italy, France, or Germany, in order to pass the rest of THIRD STAY IN ENGLAND 103 his life, here, with his friends.” We see how nations already begin to vie with each other for the honour of sheltering Erasmus. Relief from all cares the post did not bring. Inter- course and correspondence with Colet was a little soured under the light veil of jests and kindness by his constant need of money. Seeking new resources by undertaking new labours, or preparing new editions of his old books, remained a hard necessity for Erasmus. The great works upon which he had set his heart, and to which he had given all his energies at Cambridge, held out no promise of immediate profit. His serious theological labours « ranked above all others; and in these hard years, he devoted his best strength to preparation for the great edition of Jerome’s works and emendation of the text of the New Testament, a task inspired, encouraged and promoted by Colet. For his living other books had to serve. He had a sufficient number now, and the printers were eager enough about them, though the profit which the author made by them was not large. After leaving Aldus at Venice, Erasmus had returned to the publisher who had printed for him as early as 1505,—Josse Badius, of Bra- bant, who, at Paris, had established the Ascensian Press (called after his native place, Assche) and who, a scholar himself, rivaled Aldus in point of the accuracy of his editions of the classics. At the time when Erasmus took the Moria to Gourmont, at Paris, he had charged Badius with a new edition, still to be revised, of the Adagia. Why the Moria was published by another, we cannot tell; perhaps Badius did not like it at first. From the Adagia he promised himself the more profit, but that 104 ERASMUS was a long work, the alterations and preface of which he was still waiting for Erasmus to send. He felt very sure of his ground, for everyone knew that he, Badius, was preparing the new edition. Yet a rumour reached him that in Germany the Aldine edition was being reprinted. So there was some hurry to finish it, he wrote to Eras- mus in May, 1512. Badius, meanwhile, had much more work of Erasmus in hand, or on approval: the Copia, which, shortly after- wards, was published by him; the Moria, of which, at the same time, a new edition, the fifth, already had ap- peared; the dialogues by Lucian; the Euripides and Seneca translations, which were to follow. He hoped to add Jerome’s letters to these. For the Adagta they had agreed upon a copy-fee of fifteen guilders; for Jerome’s letters Badius was willing to give the same sum and as much again for the rest of the consignment. “Ah, you will say, what a very small sum! I own that by no remuneration could your genius, industry, knowledge and labour be requited, but the gods will requite you and your own virtue will be the finest reward. You have already deserved exceedingly well of Greek and Roman literature; you will in this same way deserve well of sacred and divine, and you will help your little Badius, who has a numerous family and no earnings besides his daily trade.” Erasmus must have smiled ruefully on receiving Badius’ letter. But he accepted the proposal readily. He promised to prepare everything for the press and, on the 5th of January, 1513, he finished, in London, the preface to the revised Adagia, for which Badius was waiting. But then something happened. An agent who THIRD STAY IN ENGLAND 105 acted as a mediator with authors for several publish- ers in Germany and France, one Francis Berkman, of Cologne, took the revised copy of the Adagia with the preface entrusted to him by Erasmus to hand over to Badius, not to Paris, but to Basle, to Johannes Froben, < who had just, without Erasmus’ leave, reprinted the Ve- netian edition! Erasmus pretended to be indignant at this mistake or perfidy, but it is only too clear that he did not regret it. Half a year later he betook himself with bag and baggage to Basle, to enter with that same Froben into those most cordial relations by which their names are united. Beatus Rhenanus, afterwards, made no secret of the fact that a connection with the house of Froben, then still called Amerbach and Froben, had seemed attractive to Erasmus ever since he had heard of the Adagia being reprinted. Without conclusive proofs of his complicity, we do not like to accuse Erasmus of perfidy towards Badius, though his attitude is curious, to say the least. But we do want to commemorate the dignified tone in which Badius, who held strict notions, as those times went, about copyright, replied, when Berckman afterwards had come to offer him a sort of explanation of the case. He declares himself satisfied, though Erasmus had, since that time, caused him losses in more ways, amongst others by printing a new edition of the Copia at Strassburg. “Tf, however, it is agreeable to your interests and honour, I shall suffer it, and that with equanimity.” Their rela- tions were not broken off. In all this we should not lose sight of the fact that publishing at that time was yet a . quite new commercial phenomenon and that new com- mercial forms and relations of trade are wont to be 106 ERASMUS characterised by uncertainty, confusion and lack of established business morals. The stay at Cambridge gradually became irksome to Erasmus. “For some months already,” he writes to Am- monius, in November, 1518, “we have been leading a true snail’s life, staying at home and plodding. It is very lonely here; most people have gone for fear of the plague, but even when they are all here, it is lonely.” The cost of sustenance is unbearable and he makes no money at all. If he does not succeed, that winter, in making a nest for himself, he is resolved to fly away, he does not know where. “If to no other end, to die elsewhere.” Added to the stress of circumstances, the plague, reap- pearing again and again, and attacks of his kidney- trouble, there came the state of war, which depressed and alarmed Erasmus. In the spring of 1518 the English raid on France, long prepared, took place. In co-opera- tion with Maximilian’s army the English had beaten the French near Guinegate and compelled Therouanne to surrender, and afterwards Tournay. Meanwhile the Scotch invaded England, to be decisively beaten near Flodden. Their king, James IV, perished together with his natural son, Erasmus’ pupil and travelling compan- ion in Italy, Alexander, archbishop of Saint Andrews. Crowned with martial fame, Henry VIII returned in November to meet his parliament. Erasmus did not share the universal joy and enthusiastic admiration. “We are circumscribed here by the plague, threatened by robbers; we drink wine of the worst (because there is no import from France), but, io triwmphe! we are the conquerors of the world!” His deep aversion to the clamour of war, and all it THIRD STAY IN ENGLAND 107 represented, stimulated Erasmus’ satirical faculties. It is true that he flattered the English national pride by an epigram on the rout of the French near Guinegate, but soon he went deeper. He remembered how war had impeded his movements in Italy; how the entry of the pope-conqueror, Julius II, into Bologna had outraged his feelings. “The high-priest Julius wages war, conquers, triumphs and truly plays the part of Julius (Caesar)” he had written then. Pope Julius, he thought, had been the cause of all the wars spreading more and more over Europe. Now the pope had died in the beginning of the year 1513. And in the deepest secrecy, between his work on the New Testament and Jerome, Erasmus took revenge on the martial pope, for the misery of the times, by writing the masterly satire, entitled, Julius exclusus, in which the pope appears in all his glory before the gate of the Heavenly Paradise to plead his cause and find himself excluded. The theme was not new to him; for had he not made something similar in the witty Cain fable, by which, at one time, he had cheered a dinner-party at Oxford? But that was an innocent jest to which his pious fellow-guests had listened with pleasure. To the satire about the defunct pope many would, no doubt, also gladly listen, but Erasmus had to be careful about it. The folly of all the world might be ridiculed, but not the worldly propensities of the recently deceased pope. Therefore, though he helped in circulating copies of the manuscript, Erasmus did his utmost, for the rest of his life, to preserve its anonymity, and when it was universally known and had appeared in print, and he was presumed to be the author, he always cautiously 108 ERASMUS denied the fact; although he was careful to use such terms as to avoid a formal denial. The first edition of the Julius was published at Basle, not by Froben, Eras- mus’ ordinary publisher, but by Cratander, probably in the year 1518. Erasmus’ need of protesting against warfare had not been satisfied by writing the Julius. In March, 1514, no longer at Cambridge, but in London, he wrote a letter to his former patron, the abbot of Saint Bertin, Anthony of Bergen, in which he enlarges upon the folly of waging war. Would that a Christian peace were concluded between Christian princes! Perhaps the abbot might contribute to that consummation through his influence with the youthful Charles V and especially with his grandfather Maximilian. Erasmus states quite frankly that the war has suddenly changed the spirit of England. He would like to return to his native country if the prince would procure him the means to live there in peace. It is a remarkable fact and of true Erasmian naiveté that he cannot help mixing up his personal interests with his sincere indignation at the atrocities disgracing a man and a Christian. “The war has suddenly altered the spirit of this island. The cost of living rises every day and generosity decreases. Through lack of wine I nearly perished by gravel, contracted by taking bad stuff. We are confined in this island, more than ever, so that even letters are not carried abroad.” This was the first of Erasmus’ anti-war writings. He expanded it into the Adage Dulce bellum inexpertis, which was inserted into the Adagia edition of 1515, pub- lished by Froben and afterwards also printed separately. THIRD STAY IN ENGLAND 109 Hereafter we shall follow up this line of Erasmus’ ideas, as a whole. Though the summer of 1514 was to bring peace be- tween England and France, Erasmus had now definitely made up his mind to leave England. He sent his trunks to Antwerp, to his friend Peter Gilles and prepared to go to the Netherlands, after a short visit to Mountjoy at the castle of Hammes near Calais. Shortly before his departure from London he had a curious interview with a papal diplomat, working in the cause of peace, Count Canossa, at Ammonius’ house on the Thames. Ammonius passed him off on Erasmus as a merchant. After the meal the Italian sounded him as to a possible return to Rome, where he might be the first in place instead of living alone among a barbarous nation. Eras- mus replied that he lived in a land that contained the greatest number of excellent scholars among whom he would be content with the humblest place. This com- pliment was his farewell to England, which had favoured him so. Some days later, in the first half of July, 1514,< he was on the other side of the Channel. On three more occasions he paid short visits to England, but he lived there no more. XI A LIGHT OF THEOLOGY ON THE WAY TO SUCCESS AND SATISFACTION—HIS PRIOR CALLS HIM BACK TO STEYN—HE REFUSES TO COMPLY— FIRST JOURNEY TO BASLE: 1514-1516—CORDIAL WELCOME IN GERMANY—JOHN FROBEN—EDITIONS OF JEROME AND THE NEW TESTAMENT—A COUNCILLOR TO PRINCE CHARLES: INSTITUTIO PRINCIPIS CHRISTIANI, 1515— DEFINITIVE DISPENSATION FROM MONASTIC VOWS: 1517— FAME—ERASMUS AS A SPIRITUAL CENTRE—HIS CORRE- SPONDENCE—LETTER-WRITING AS AN ART—ITS DAN- GERS—A GLORIOUS AGE AT HAND. Erasmus had, as was usual with him, enveloped his departure from England with mystery. It was given out that he was going to Rome to redeem a pledge. Prob- ably he had already determined to try his fortune in the Netherlands; not in Holland, but in the neighbourhood of the princely court in Brabant. The chief object of his journey, however, was to Froben’s printing-office at Basle, personally to supervise the publication of the numerous works, old and new, which he brought with him, among them the material for his chosen task, the New Testament and Jerome, by which he hoped to effect the restoration of theology, which he had long felt to be his life-work. It is easy thus to imagine his anxiety when during the crossing he discovered that his handbag, containing the manuscripts, was found to have been taken on board another ship. He felt bereft, hav- ing lost the labour of so many years; a sorrow so great, he writes, as only parents can feel at the loss of their children. 110 A LIGHT OF THEOLOGY 111 To his joy, however, he found his manuscripts safe on the other side. At the castle of Hammes near Calais he stayed for some days, the guest of Mountjoy. There on the 7th of July a letter found him, written on the 18th of April, by his superior, the prior of Steyn, his old friend Servatius Rogerus, recalling him to the monastery after so many years of absence. The letter had already been in the hands of more than one prying person, before it reached him by mere chance. It was a terrific blow, which struck him in the midst of his course to his highest aspirations. Erasmus took counsel for a day and then sent a refusal. To his old friend, in addressing whom he always found the most serious accents of his being, he wrote a letter which he meant to be a justification and which was self-contempla- tion, much deeper and more sincere than the one which, at a momentous turning-point of his life, had drawn from him his “Carmen Alpestre.” He calls upon God to be his witness that he would fol- low the purest inspiration of his life. But to return to the monastery! He reminds Servatius of the circum- stances under which he entered it, as they lived in his memory: the pressure of his relations, his false modesty. He points out to him how ill monastic life had suited his constitution, how it outraged his love of freedom, how detrimental it would be to his delicate health, if now resumed. Had he, then, lived a worse life in the world? Literature had kept him from many vices. His restless life could not redound to his dishonour, though only with diffidence did he dare to appeal to the examples of Solon, Pythagoras, Paul and his favourite Jerome. Had he not everywhere won recognition from friends 112 ERASMUS and patrons? He enumerates them: cardinals, arch- bishops, bishops, Mountjoy, the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and, lastly, John Colet. Was there, then, any objection to his works: the Hnchiridion, the Adagia? (He did not mention the Moria.) The best was still to follow: Jerome and the New Testament. The fact that, since his stay in Italy, he had laid aside the habit of his order and wore a common clerical dress, he could excuse on a number of grounds. The conclusion was: I shall not return to Holland. “I know that I shall not be able to stand the air and the food there; all eyes will be directed to me. I shall return to the country, an old and grey man, who left it as a youth; I shall return a valetudinarian; I shall be exposed to the contempt, even of the lowest, I, who am accus- tomed to be honoured even by the greatest.” “It is not possible,” he concludes, “to speak out frankly in a letter. I am now going to Basle and thence to Rome, perhaps, but on my return I shall try to visit you... . I have heard of the deaths of William, Francis and Andrew (his old Dutch friends). Remember me to Master Henry and the others who live with you; I am disposed towards them as befits me. For those old tragedies I ascribe to my errors, or if you like to my fate. Do not omit to commend me to Christ in your prayers. If I knew for sure that it would be pleasing to Him that I should return to live with you, I should prepare for the journey this very day. Farewell, my former sweetest companion, now my venerable father.” Underlying the immediate motives of his high theolog- ical aspirations, Erasmus in refusing was doubtless actu- A LIGHT OF THEOLOGY 113 ated by his ancient, inveterate, psychological incentives of disgust and shame. Through the southern Netherlands, where he visited several friends and patrons and renewed his acquaintance with the university of Louvain, Erasmus turned to the Rhine and reached Basle in the second half of August, 1514. There the pleasures of fame awaited him as he had not yet tasted them. The German humanists hailed him as the light of the world—in letters, receptions, and ban- quets. They were more solemn and enthusiastic than Erasmus had found the scholars of France, England and Italy, to say nothing of his compatriots; and they ap- plauded him emphatically as being a German himself and an ornament of Germany. At his first meeting with Froben, Erasmus permitted himself the pleasure of a jocular deception: he pretended to be a friend and agent of himself, to enjoy to the full the joy of being recognised. The German environment was rather to his mind: “My Germany which to my regret and shame I got to know so late.” Soon the work for which he had come was in full swing. He was in his element once more, as he had been at Venice six years before: working hard in a large printing office, surrounded by scholars, who heaped upon him homage and kindness in those rare moments of leisure which he permitted himself. I move in a most agreeable Museon: so many men of learning, and of such exceptional learning!” Some translations of the lesser works of Plutarch were published by Froben in August. The Adagia was passing through the press again with corrections and 114 ERASMUS additions, and the preface which was originally destined for Badius. At the same time Dirck Maertensz, at Louvain, was also at work for Erasmus, who had, on passing through the town, entrusted him with a collec- tion of easy Latin texts; also M. Schurer at Strassburg, who prepared the Parabolae sive similia for him. For Froben, too, Erasmus was engaged on a Seneca, which appeared in 1515, together with a work on Latin con- struction. But Jerome and the New Testament remained his chief occupation. Jerome’s works had been Erasmus’ love in early youth, especially his letters. The plan of preparing a correct edition of the great Father of the Church was conceived in 1500, if not earlier, and he had worked at it ever since, at intervals. In 1513 he writes to Ammonius: “My enthusiasm for emending and annotating Jerome is such that I feel as though inspired by some god. I have almost completely emended him already by col- lating many old manuscripts. And this I do at in- credibly great expense.” In 1512 he negotiated with Badius about an edition of the letters. Now Froben’s partner, John Amerbach, who died before Erasmus’ arrival, had been engaged for years on an edition of Jerome. Several scholars, Reuchlin among others, had assisted in the undertaking when Erasmus offered himself and all his material. He became the actual editor. Of the nine volumes, in which Froben published the work in 1516, the first four contained Erasmus’ edition of Jerome’s letters; the others had been corrected by him and provided with forewords. His work upon the New Testament was, if possible, still nearer his heart. By its growth it had gradually changed A LIGHT OF THEOLOGY 115 its nature. Since the time when Valla’s Annotationes had directed his attention to textual criticism of the Vulgate, Erasmus had, probably, during his second stay in Eng- land, from 1505 to 1506 at the instance of Colet, made a new translation of the New Testament from the Greek original, which translation differed greatly from the Vul- gate. Besides Colet, few had seen it. Later, Krasmus understood it was necessary to publish also a new edition of the Greek text, with his notes. As to this he had made a provisional arrangement with Froben, shortly after his arrival at Basle. Afterwards he considered that it would be better to have it printed in Italy, and was on the point of going there, when, possibly persuaded by new offers from Froben, he suddenly changed his plan of travel and in the spring of 1515 made a short trip to England;—probably, among other reasons, for the pur- pose of securing a copy of his translation of the New Testament, which he had left behind there. In the sum- mer he was back at Basle and resumed the work in Fro- ben’s printing office. In the beginning of 1516 the Novum Instrumentum appeared, containing the purified Greek text with notes, together with a Latin translation in which Erasmus had altered too great deviations from the Vulgate. From the moment of the appearance of two such im- portant and, as regards the second, such daring theolog- ical works by Erasmus as Jerome and the New Testa- ment, we may say that he had made himself the centre of the scientific study of divinity, as he was at the same time the centre and touchstone of classic erudition and literary taste. His authority constantly increased 116 ERASMUS in all countries, his correspondence was prodigiously augmented. But while his mental growth was accomplished, his financial position was not assured. The years 1515 to 1517 are among the most restless of his life; he is still looking out for every chance which presents itself, a canonry at Tournay, a prebend in England, a bishopric in Sicily, always half jocularly regretting the good chances he missed in former times, jesting about his pursuit of fortune, lamenting about his “spouse, execrable poverty, which even yet I have not succeeded in shaking off my shoulders.” And, after all, ever more the victim of his own restlessness than of the disfavour of fate. He is now 50 years old and still he is, as he says, “sowing without knowing what I shall reap.” ‘This, however, only refers to his career, not to his life-work. In the course of 1515 a new and promising patron, John le Sauvage, chancellor of Brabant, had succeeded in procuring for him the title of councillor of the prince, the youthful Charles V. In the beginning of 1516 he was nominated: it was a mere title of honour, promising a yearly pension of 200 florins, which, however, was paid but irregularly. To habilitate himself as a councillor of the prince, Erasmus wrote the Institutio Principis Chris- tiani, a treatise about the education of a prince, which in accordance with Erasmus’ nature and _ inclination deals rather with moral than with political matters, and is in striking contrast indeed with that other work, writ- ten some years earlier, il Principe by Machiavelli. When his work at Basle ceased for the time being, — in the spring of 1516, Erasmus journeyed to the Nether- lands. At Brussels he met the chancellor, who, in addi- A LIGHT OF THEOLOGY Wy tion to the Prince’s pension, procured him a prebend at Courtray, which, like the English benefice mentioned above, was compounded for by money payments. At Antwerp lived one of the great friends who helped in his support all his life: Peter Gilles, the young town- clerk, in whose house he stayed as often as he came to Antwerp. Peter Gilles is the man who figures in More’s Utopia as the person in whose garden the sailor tells his experiences; it was in these days that Gilles helped Dirck Maertensz, at Louvain, to pass the first edition of the Utopia through the press. Later Quentin Metsys was to paint him and Erasmus, joined in a diptych; a present for Thomas More and for us a vivid memorial of one of the best things Erasmus ever knew: this triple friendship. In the summer of 1516 Erasmus made another short trip to England. He stayed with More, saw Colet again, also Warham, Fisher, and the other friends. But it was not to visit old friends that he went there. A pressing and delicate matter impelled him. Now that prebends and church dignities began to be presented to him, it was more urgent than ever that the impediments in the way of a free ecclesiastical career should be permanently obviated. He was provided with a dispensation of Pope Julius II, authorising him to accept English prebends, and another exempting him from the obligation of wear- ing the habit of his order. But both were of limited scope, and insufficient. The fervent impatience with which he conducted this matter of his definite discharge from the order makes it probable that, as Dr. Allen pre- sumes, the threat of his recall to Steyn had, since his 118 ERASMUS refusal to Servatius in 1514, hung over his head. There was nothing he feared and detested so much. With his friend Ammonius he drew up, in London, a very elaborate paper, addressed to the apostolic chan- cery, in which he recounts the story of his own life as that of one Florentius: his half-enforced entrance to the monastery, the troubles which monastic life had brought him, the circumstances which had induced him to lay his monk’s dress aside. It is a passionate apology, pathetic and ornate. The letter, as we know it, does not contain a direct request. In an appendix at the end, written in cipher, of which he sent the key in sympathetic ink in another letter, the chancery was requested to obviate the impediments which Erasmus’ illegitimate birth placed in the way of his promotion. The addressee, Lambertus Grunnius, apostolic secretary, was most probably an imaginary personage. So much mystery did Erasmus use when his vital interests were at stake. The bishop of Worcester, Silvestro Gigli, who was set- ting out to the Lateran Council, as the envoy of England, took upon himself to deliver the letter and to plead Erasmus’ cause. Erasmus having meanwhile at the end of August returned to the Netherlands, awaited the upshot of his kind offices in the greatest suspense. The matter was finally settled in January, 1517. In two letters bearing the signature of Sadolet, Leo X condoned Erasmus’ transgressions of ecclesiastical law, relieved him of the obligation to wear the dress of his order, allowed him to live in the world and authorised him to hold 1 The name Grunnius may have been taken from Jerome’s epistles, where it is a nickname for a certain Ruffinus, whom Jerome disliked very much. It appears again in a letter of 5 March, 1531, LB. X 1590 A. A LIGHT OF THEOLOGY 119 church benefices in spite of any disqualifications arising from illegitimacy of birth. So much his great fame had now achieved. The Pope had moreover accepted the dedication of the edition of the New Testament, and had, through Sadolet, expressed himself in very gracious terms about Erasmus’ work in general. Rome itself seemed to further his endeavours in all respects. Erasmus now thought of establishing himself perma- nently in the Netherlands, to which everything pointed. Louvain seemed to be the most suitable abode, the centre of studies, where he had already spent two years in former times. But Louvain did not attract him. It was the stronghold of conservative theology. Martin van Dorp, a Dutchman like Erasmus, and professor of divinity at Louvain, had, in 1514, in the name of his faculty, rebuked Erasmus in a letter for the audacity of the Praise of Folly, his derision of divines and also his temerity in correcting the text of the New Testament. Erasmus had defended himself elaborately. At present war was being waged in a much wider field: for or against Reuchlin, the great Hebrew scholar, for whom the authors of the Epistolae obscurorum virorum had so sensationally taken up the cudgels. At Louvain Erasmus was regarded with the same suspicion with which he distrusted Dorp and the other Louvain divines. He stayed during the remainder of 1516 and the first half of 1517 at Antwerp, Brussels and Ghent, often in the house of Peter Gilles. In February, 1517, there came tempting offers from France. Budaeus, Cop, Etienne Poncher, bishop of Paris, wrote to him that the king, the youthful Francis I, would present him with a generous prebend if he would come 120 ERASMUS to Paris. Erasmus, always shy of being tied down, only wrote polite, evasive answers, and did not go. In the meantime he received the news of the papal absolution. In connection with this he had, once more, to visit England, little dreaming that it would be the last time he should set foot on British soil. In Ammonius’ house of Saint Stephen’s Chapel at Westminster on the 9th of April, 1517, the ceremony of absolution took place, ridding Erasmus for good of the nightmare which had oppressed him since his youth. He was free! Invitations and specious promises now came to him from all sides. Mountjoy and Wolsey spoke of high ecclesiastical honours which awaited him in England. Budaeus kept pressing him to remove to France. Car- dinal Ximenes wanted to attach him to the University of Alcala, in Spain. The duke of Saxony offered him a chair at Leipsic. Pirckheimer boasted of the perfections of the free imperial city of Nuremberg. Erasmus, mean- while, overwhelmed again with the labour of writing and editing, according to his wont, did not definitely decline any of these offers; neither did he accept any. He always wanted to keep all his strings on his bow at the same time. In the early summer of 1517 he was asked to accompany the court of the youthful Charles, who was on the point of leaving the Netherlands, for Spain. But he declined. His departure to Spain would have meant for him a long interruption of immediate contact with the great publishing centres, Basle, Louvain, Strassburg, Paris, and that, in its turn, would have meant postpone- ment of his life-work. When, in the beginning of July, A LIGHT OF THEOLOGY 121 the prince set out for Middelburg, there to take ship for Spain, Erasmus started for Louvain. He was thus destined to go to this university environ- ment, although it displeased him in so many respects. Where he would have academical duties. Where young latinists would follow him about to get their poems and letters corrected by him. Where all those divines, whom he distrusted, would watch him at close quarters. But it was only to be for a few months. “I have removed to Louvain,” he writes to the archbishop of Canterbury, “till I shall decide which residence is best suited to old age, which is already knocking at the gate importunately.” As it turned out, he was to spend four years (1517- 1521) at Louvain. His life was now becoming more sta- tionary, but because of outward circumstances rather than of inward quiet. He kept deliberating all those years whether he should go to England, Germany or France, hoping at last to find the brilliant position which he had always coveted and never had been able or willing to grasp. The years 1516-1518 may be called the culmination of Erasmus’ career. Applauding crowds surrounded him more and more. The minds of men were seemingly pre- pared for something great to happen and they looked to Erasmus as the man! At Brussels he was continually bothered with visits from Spaniards, Italians and Ger- mans who wanted to boast of their interviews with him. The Spaniards, with their verbose solemnity, particularly bored him. Most exuberant of all were the eulogies with which the German humanists greeted him in their letters. This had begun already on his first journey to Basle in 122 ERASMUS 1514. “Great Rotterdamer,” “ornament of Germany,” “ornament of the world” were some of the simplest effusions. Town councils waited upon him, presents of wine, and public banquets were of common occurrence. No one expresses himself so hyperbolically as the jurist Ulrich Zasius of Freiburg. “I am pointed out in public,” he asserts, “as the man who has received a letter from Erasmus.” “Thrice greatest hero, you great Jove,” is a moderate apostrophe for him. “The Swiss,” Zwingli writes in 1516, “account it a great glory to have seen Erasmus.” “I know and I teach nothing but Erasmus now,” writes Wolfgang Capito. Ulrich von Hutten and Henry Glareanus both imagine themselves placed beside Erasmus, as Alcibiades stood beside Socrates. And Beatus Rhenanus devotes to him a life of earnest ad- miration and helpfulness that was to prove of much more value than these exuberant panegyrics. There is an element of national exaltation in this German enthusiasm for Erasmus: it is the violently stimulated mood into which Luther’s word will fall anon. The other nations also chimed in with praise, though a little later and a little more soberly. Colet and Tunstall promise him immortality, Etienne Poncher exalts him above the celebrated Italian humanists, Germain de Brie declares that French scholars have ceased reading any authors but Erasmus, and Budaeus announces that all Western Christendom resounds with his name. This increase of glory manifested itself in different ways. Almost every year the rumour of his death was spread abroad, malignantly, as he himself thinks. Again, all sorts of writings were ascribed to him, in which he A LIGHT OF THEOLOGY 123 had no share whatever, amongst others the Epistolae obscurorum virorum. But, above all, his correspondence increased immensely. The time was long since past when he asked More to procure him more correspondents. Letters now kept pouring in to him, from all sides, beseeching him to reply. A former pupil laments with tears that he cannot show a single note written by Erasmus. Scholars respectfully sought an introduction from one of his friends, before venturing to address him. In this respect Erasmus was a man of heroic benevolence, and tried to answer what he could, although so overwhelmed by letters every day that he hardly found time to read them. “If I do not answer, I seem unkind,” says Erasmus, and that thought was intolerable. We should bear in mind that letter-writing, at that time, occupied more or less the place of the newspaper at present, or rather of the literary monthly, which arose fairly directly out of erudite correspondence. It was, as in antiquity, which in this respect was imitated better and more profitably, perhaps, than in any other sphere, an art. Even before 1500 Erasmus had, at Paris, described that art in the treatise, De conscribendis epi- stolis, which was to appear in print in 1522. People wrote, as a rule, with a view to later publication, for a wider circle, or at any rate, with the certainty that the recipient would show the letter to others. A fine Latin letter was a gem, which a man envied his neighbour. Erasmus writes to Budaeus: “Tunstall has devoured your letter to me and re-read it as many as three or four times; I had literally to tear it from his hands.” Unfortunately fate did not always take into considera- 124 ERASMUS tion the author’s intentions as to publicity, semi-pub- licity or strict secrecy. Often letters passed through many hands before reaching their destination, as did Servatius’ letter to Erasmus in 1514. “Do be careful about letters,’ he writes more than once; “waylayers are on the lookout to intercept them.” Yet, with the curious precipitation that characterizes him, Erasmus was often very careless as to what he wrote. From an early age he preserved and cared for his letters, yet nevertheless, through his itinerant life, many were lost. He could not control their publication. As early as 1509 a friend sent him a manuscript volume of his own (Eras- mus’) letters, that he had picked up for sale at Rome. Erasmus had it burnt at once. Since 1515 he himself superintended the publication of his letters; at first only a few important ones; afterwards in 1516 a selection of letters from friends to him, and after that ever larger collections till, at the end of his life, there appeared a new collection almost every year. No article was so much in demand on the book market as letters by Eras- mus, and no wonder. They were models of excellent style, tasteful Latin, witty expression and elegant erudition. The semi-private, semi-public character of the letters often made them compromising. What one could say to a friend in confidence might possibly injure when many read it. Erasmus, who never was aware how injuri- ously he expressed himself, repeatedly gave rise to mis- understanding and estrangement. Manners, so to say, had not yet adapted themselves to the new art of print- ing which increased the publicity of the written word a thousandfold. Only gradually under this new influence ERASMUS’ MIND 125 was the separation effected between the public word, intended for the press, and the private communication which remains in writing and is read only by the recipient. Meanwhile, with the. growth of Erasmus’ fame, his earlier writings, too, had risen in the public estimation. The great success of the Enchiridion militis christian had begun about 1515, when the times were much riper for it than eleven years before. “The Moria is embraced as the highest wisdom,” writes John Watson to him in 1516. In the same year we find a word used, for the first time, which expresses better than anything else how much Erasmus had become a centre of authority: Erasmiani. So his German friends called themselves, according to John Sapidus. More than a year later Dr. Johannes Eck employs the word still in a rather friendly sense, as a generally current term: “all scholars in Germany are Erasmians,” he says. But Erasmus did not like the word. “I find nothing in myself,” he replies, “why anyone should wish to be an Erasmicus, and, alto- gether, I hate those party names. We are all followers of Christ, and to his glory we all drudge, each for his part.” But he knows that now the question is: for or against him! From the brilliant Latinist and the man of wit of his prime he had become the international pivot on which the civilisation of his age hinged. He could not help beginning to feel himself the brain, the heart and the conscience of his times. It might even appear to him that he was called to speak the great redeeming word, or perhaps, that he had already spoken it. The faith in an easy triumph of pure knowledge and Christian 126 ERASMUS meekness in a near future speaks from the preface of Erasmus’ edition of the New Testament. How clear did the future look in those years! In this period Erasmus repeatedly reverts to the glad motif of a golden age, which is on the point of dawning. Peren- nial peace is before the door. The highest princes of the world, Francis I of France, Charles, King of Spain; Henry VIII of England, and the emperor Maximilian have insured peace by the strongest ties. Uprightness and Christian piety will flourish together with the revival of letters and the sciences. As at a given signal the mightiest minds conspire to restore a high standard of culture. We may congratulate the age, it will be a golden one. But Erasmus does not sound this note long. It is heard for the last time in 1519; after which the dream of universal happiness about to dawn gives place to the usual complaint about the badness of the times, which may be found everywhere. XII ERASMUS’ MIND ERASMUS’ MIND: ETHICAL AND AESTHETIC TENDENCIES, AVERSION TO ALL THAT IS UNREASONABLE, SILLY AND CUMBROUS—HIS VISION OF ANTIQUITY PERVADED BY CHRISTIAN FAITH—RENASCENCE OF GOOD LEARNING— THE IDEAL LIFE OF SERENE HARMONY AND HAPPY WISDOM—LOVE OF THE DECOROUS AND SMOOTH—HIS MIND NEITHER PHILOSOPHIC NOR HISTORICAL, BUT STRONGLY PHILOLOGICAL AND MORALISTIC—FREEDOM, CLEARNESS, PURITY, SIMPLICITY—FAITH IN NATURE— EDUCATIONAL AND SOCIAL IDEAS. What made Erasmus the man from whom his contemporaries expected their salvation, on whose lips they hung to catch the word of deliverance? He seemed to them the bearer of a new liberty of the mind, a new clearness, purity and simplicity of knowledge, a new harmony of healthy and right living. He was to them as the possessor of newly discovered, untold wealth which he had only to distribute. What was there in the mind of the great Rotterdamer which promised so much to the world? The negative aspect of Erasmus’ mind may be defined as a heartfelt aversion to all that is unreasonable, insipid, purely formal, with which the undisturbed growth of medieval culture had overburdened and overcrowded the world of thought. As often as he thinks of the ridiculous textbooks out of which Latin was taught in his youth, disgust rises in his mind, and he execrates them—Mammetrectus, Brachylogus, Ebrardus and all the rest, as a heap of rubbish which ought to be cleared 127 128 ERASMUS away. But this aversion to the superannuated which had become useless and soulless, extended much further. He found society, and especially religious life, full of practices, ceremonies, traditions and conceptions, from which the spirit seemed to have departed. He does not reject them offhand and altogether: what revolts him is that they are so often performed without understanding and right feeling. But to his mind, highly susceptible to the foolish and ridiculous things, and with a delicate need of high decorum and inward dignity, all that sphere of ceremony and tradition displays itself as a useless, nay, a hurtful: scene of human stupidity and selfishness. And, intellectualist as he is, with his contempt for igno- rance, he seems unaware that those religious observances, after all, may contain valuable sentiments of unex- pressed and unformulated piety. Through his treatises, his letters, his Colloquies espe- cially, there always passes—as if one was looking at a gallery of Breughel’s pictures—a procession of ignorant and covetous monks who by their sanctimony and hum- bug impose upon the trustful multitude and fare sump- tuously themselves. As a fixed motif (such motifs are numerous with Erasmus) there always recurs his gibe about the superstition that a person was saved by dying in the gown of a Franciscan or a Dominican. Fasting, prescribed prayers, the observance of holy days should not be altogether neglected, but they become displeasing to God when we repose our trust in them and forget charity. The same holds good of confession, indulgence, all sorts of blessings. Pilgrimages are worth- less. The veneration of the Saints and of their relics is full of superstition and foolishness. The people think ERASMUS’ MIND 129 they will be preserved from disasters during the day if only they have looked at the painted image of Saint Christopher in the morning. ‘We kiss the shoes of the saints and their dirty handkerchiefs and we leave their books, their most holy and efficacious relics, neglected.” Erasmus’ dislike of what seemed antiquated and worn- out in his days, went further still. It comprised the whole intelilectual scheme of medieval theology and philosophy. In the syllogistic system he found only subtlety and arid ingenuity. All symbolism and allegory were fundamentally alien to him and indifferent, though he occasionally tried his hand at an allegory; and he never was mystically inclined. | Now here it is just as much the deficiencies of his own mind as the qualities of the system which made him unable to appreciate it. While he struck at the abuse of ceremonies and of Church practices both with noble indignation and well-aimed mockery, a proud irony to which he was not fully entitled preponderates in his condemnation of scholastic theology which he could not quite understand. It was easy always to talk with a sneer of the conservative divines of his time as “magistri nostri.” His noble indignation hurt only those who deserved castigation and strengthened what was valuable, but his mockery hurt the good as well as the bad in spite of him, assailed both the institution and persons, and injured without elevating them. The individualist Erasmus never understood what it meant to offend the honour of an office, an order, or an establishment, especially when that institution is the most sacred of all, the Church itself, 130 ERASMUS Erasmus’ conception of the Church was no longer purely Catholic. Of that glorious structure of medieval- Christian civilisation with its mystic foundation, its strict hierarchic construction, its splendidly fittmmg sym- metry he saw hardly anything but its load of outward details and ornament. Instead of the world which Thomas Aquinas and Dante had described, according to their vision, Erasmus saw another world, full of charm and elevated feeling, and this he held up before his compatriots. It was the world of Antiquity, but illuminated through- out by Christian faith. It was a world that had never existed as such. For with the historical reality which the times of Constantine and the great fathers of the Church © had manifested: that of declining Latinity and detericrat- ing Hellenism, the oncoming barbarism and the oncoming Byzantinism, it had nothing in common. Erasmus’ imag- ined world was an amalgamation of pure classicism (this meant for him, Cicero, Horace, Plutarch; for to the flour- ishing period of the Greek mind he remained after all a stranger) and pure, biblical Christianity. Could it be a union? Not really. In Erasmus’ mind the light falls, just as we saw in the history of his career, alternately on the pagan antique and on the Christian. But the warp of his mind is Christian; his classicism only serves him as a form, and from Antiquity he only chooses those elements which in ethical tendency are in conformity with his Christian ideal. And because of this, Erasmus, although he appeared after a century of earlier Humanism, is yet new to his time. The union of Antiquity and the Christian spirit which had haunted the mind of Petrarch, the father of ERASMUS’ MIND 131 Humanism, which was lost sight of by his disciples, enchanted as they were by the irresistible brilliance of the the antique beauty of form,—was brought about by Erasmus. What pure Latinity and the classic spirit meant to Erasmus we cannot feel as he did because its realisation does not mean to us, as to him, a difficult conquest and a glorious triumph. To feel it thus one must have acquired in a hard school, the hatred of barbarism, which already during his first years of authorship had suggested the composition of the Antibarbari. The abusive term for all that is old and rude is already Gothic, Goths. The term barbarism as used by Erasmus comprised much of what we value most in the medieval spirit. Erasmus’ conception of the great intellectual crisis of his day was distinctly dualistic. He saw it as a struggle between old and new, which, to him, meant evil and good. In the advocates of tradition he saw only obscurantism, conservatism, and ignorant opposition to bonae literae, that is, the good cause for which he and his partisans battled. Of the rise of that higher culture Erasmus had already formed the conception which has since dominated the history of the Renaissance. It was a revival, begun two or three hundred years before his time, in which, besides literature, all the plastic arts shared. Side by side with the terms restitution and re- florescence the word renascence crops up repeatedly in his writings. ‘The world is coming to its senses as if awaking out of a deep sleep. Still there are some left who recalcitrate pertinaciously, clinging convulsively with hands and feet to their old ignorance. They fear that if bonae literae are reborn and the world grows wise, 132 ERASMUS it will come to light that they have known nothing.” They do not know how pious the Ancients could be, what sanctity characterises Socrates, Virgil, and Horace, or Plutarch’s Moralia, how rich the history of Antiquity is in examples of forgiveness and true virtue. We should call nothing profane that is pious and conduces to good morals. No more dignified view of life was ever found than that which Cicero propounds in De Senectute. In order to understand Erasmus’ mind and the charm which it had for his contemporaries, one must begin with the ideal of life that was present before his inward eye as a splendid dream. It is not his own in particular. The whole Renaissance cherished that wish of reposeful, blithe, and yet serious intercourse of good and wise friends in the cool shade of a house under trees, where serenity and harmony would dwell. The age yearned for the realisation of simplicity, sincerity, truth and nature. Their imagination was always steeped in the essence of Antiquity, though, at heart, it is more nearly connected with medieval ideals than they them- selves were aware. In the circle of the Medici it is the idyll of Careggi, in Rabelais it embodies itself in the fancy of the abbey of Théléme; it finds voice in More’s Utopia and in the work of Montaigne. In Erasmus’ writings that ideal wish ever recurs in the shape of a friendly walk, followed by a meal in a garden-house. It is found as an opening scene of the Antibarbari, in the numerous descriptions of meals with Colet, and the nu- merous ‘“Convivia” of the Colloquies. Especially in the Convivium religiosum Erasmus has elaborately pictured his dream, and it would be worth while to compare it, on the one hand with Théléme, and on the other with ERASMUS’ MIND 133 the fantastic design of a pleasure garden which Bernard Palissy describes. The little Dutch 18th century country seats and garden-houses in which the national spirit took great delight are the fulfilment of a purely Erasmian ideal. The host of the Convivium religiosum says: “To me a simple country-house, a nest, is pleasanter than any palace, and, if he be king who lives in freedom and according to his wishes, surely I am king here.” Life’s true joy is in virtue and piety. If they are Epi- cureans who live pleasantly, then none are more truly Epicureans than they who live in holiness and piety. The ideal joy of life is also perfectly idyllic in so- far that it requires an aloofness from earthly concerns — ‘! and contempt for all that is sordid. It is foolish to be interested in all that happens in the world; to pride oneself on one’s knowledge of the market, of the King of England’s plans, the news from Rome, conditions in Den- mark. The sensible old man of the Colloquium Senile has an easy post of honour, a safe mediocrity, he judges no one and nothing and smiles upon all the world. Quiet for oneself, surrounded by books—that is of all things most desirable. On the outskirts of this ideal of serenity and harmony numerous flowers of aesthetic value blow, such as Eras- mus’ sense of decorum, his great need of kindly courtesy, his pleasure in gentle and obliging treatment, in cultured and easy manners. Close by are some of his intellectual peculiarities. He hates the violent and extravagant. Therefore the choruses of the Greek drama displease him. The merit of his own poems he sees in the fact that they pass passion by, they abstain from pathos alto- gether,—“‘there is not a single storm in them, no moun- a 134 ERASMUS tain torrent overflowing its banks, no exaggeration what- soever. There is great frugality in words. My poetry would rather keep within bounds than exceed them, rather hug the shore than cleave the high seas.” In another place he says: “I am always most pleased by a poem that does not differ too much from prose, but prose of the best sort, be it understood. As Philoxenus ac- counted those the most palatable fishes that are no true fishes and the most savoury meat what is no meat, the most pleasant voyage, that along the shores, and the most agreeable walk, that along the water’s edge; so I take especial pleasure in a rhetorical poem and a poet- ical oration, so that poetry is tasted in prose and the reverse.” That is the man of half-tones, of fine shadings, of the thought that is never completely expressed. But he adds: “Far-fetched conceits may please others; to me the chief concern seems to be that we draw our speech from the matter itself and apply ourselves less to showing off our invention than to present the thing.” That is the realist. From this conception results his admirable, simple clarity, the excellent division and presentation of his argument. But it also causes his lack of depth and the prolixity by which he is characterised. His machine runs too smoothly. In the endless apologies of his later years, ever new arguments occur to him; new passages to point, or quotations to support, his idea. He praises laconism, but never practises it. Erasmus never coins a sentence which, rounded off and pithy, becomes a proverb and in this manner lives. There are no current quotations from Erasmus. The collector of the Adagia has created no new ones of his own. ERASMUS’ MIND 135 The true occupation for a mind like his was paraphras- ing, in which, indeed, he amply indulged. Soothing down and unfolding was just the work he liked. It is charac- teristic that he paraphrased the whole New Testament except the Apocalypse. | Erasmus’ mind was neither philosophic nor historic. His was neither the work of exact, logical discrimination, nor of grasping the deep sense of the way of the world in broad historical visions in which the particulars them- selves, in their multiplicity and variegation, form the image. His mind is philological in the fullest sense of the word. But by that alone he would not have conquered and captivated the world. His mind was at the same time of a deeply ethical and rather strong aesthetic trend and those three together have made him great. The foundation of Erasmus’ mind is his fervent desire of freedom, clearness, purity, simplicity and rest. It is an old ideal of life to which he gave new substance by the wealth of his mind. Without liberty, life is no life; and there is no liberty without repose. The fact that he never took sides definitely resulted from an urgent need of perfect independence. Each engagement, even a temporary one, was felt as a fetter by Erasmus. An interlocutor in the Colloquies in which he so often, spon- taneously, reveals his own ideals of life, declares himself determined neither to marzy, nor to take holy orders, nor to enter a monastery, nor into any connection, from which he will afterwards be unable to free himself—at least not before he knows himself completely. “When will that be? never, perhaps.” “On no other account do I congratu- > late myself more than on the fact that I have never 136 ERASMUS attached myself to any party,’ Erasmus says towards the end of his life. Liberty should be spiritual liberty in the first place. “But he that is spiritual judgeth all things, yet he himself is judged of no man,” is the word of Saint Paul. To what purpose should he require prescriptions who, of his own accord, does better things than human laws require? What arrogance it is to bind by institutions a man who is clearly led by the inspirations of the divine spirit? In Erasmus we already find the beginning of that op- timism which judges upright man good enough to dis- pense with fixed forms and rules. As More, in Utopia, and Rabelais, Erasmus relies already on the dictates of nature, which produces man as inclined to good and which we may follow, provided we are imbued with faith and piety. In this line of confidence in what is natural and desire of the simple and reasonable, Erasmus’ educational and social ideas lie. Here he is far ahead of his times. It would be an attractive undertaking to discuss Eras- mus’ educational ideals more fully. They foreshadow exactly those of the eighteenth century. The child should learn in playing, by means of things that are agreeable to its mind, from pictures. Its faults should be gently corrected. The flogging and abusive schoolmaster is Erasmus’ abomination; the office itself is holy and vener- able to him. Education should begin forthwith from the moment of birth. Probably Erasmus attached too much value to classicism, here as elsewhere: his friend Peter Gilles should implant the rudiments of the ancient Jan- guages in his two-year-old son, that he may greet his ERASMUS’ MIND 137 father with endearing stammerings in Greek and Latin. But what gentleness and clear good sense shines from all Erasmus says about instruction and education! The same holds good of his views about marriage and woman. In the problem of sexual relations he distinctly sides with the woman from deep conviction. There is a great deal of tenderness and delicate feeling in his con- ception of the position of the girl and the woman. Few characters of the Colloquies have been drawn with s0 much sympathy as the girl with the lover and the cul- tured woman in the witty conversation with the abbot. Erasmus’ ideal of marriage is truly social and hygienic. Let us beget children for the State and for Christ, says the lover, children endowed by their upright parents with a good disposition and who see the good example at home which is to guide them. Again and again he reverts to the mother’s duty to suckle the child herself. He indicates how the house should be arranged, in a simple and cleanly manner; he occupies himself with the problem of useful children’s dress. Who stood up, as he did, at that time for the fallen girl, and for the prostitute compelled by necessity? Who saw so clearly the social danger of marriages of persons infected with the new scourge of Europe, so violently abhorred by Erasmus? He would wish that such a marriage should at once be declared null and void by the Pope. Erasmus does not hold with the easy social theory, still quite current in the literature of his time, which upon women casts all the blame of adultery and lewdness. With the savages who live in a state of nature, he says, the adultery of men is punished, but that of women is forgiven. 138 ERASMUS Here it appears, at the same time, that Erasmus knew, be it half in jest, the conception of natural virtue and happiness of naked islanders in a savage state. It soon crops up again in Montaigne and the following centuries develop it into a literary dogma. XIII ERAMUS’ MIND (Continued) ERASMUS’ MIND: INTELLECTUAL TENDENCIES—THE WORLD ENCUMBERED BY BELIEFS AND FORMS—TRUTH MUST BE SIMPLE—BACK TO THE PURE SOURCES—HOLY SCRIPTURE IN THE ORIGINAL LANGUAGES—BIBLICAL HUMANISM—CRITICAL WORK ON THE TEXTS OF SCRIP- TURE—PRACTICE BETTER THAN DOGMA—ERASMUS’ TALENT AND WIT—DELIGHT IN WORDS AND THINGS— PROLIXITY—OBSERVATION OF DETAILS—A VEILED REAL- ISM—AMBIGUOUSNESS—THE “NUANCE”’—INSCRUTABILITY OF THE ULTIMATE GROUND OF ALL THINGS. Simplicity, naturalness, purity, and reasonableness, those to Erasmus are the dominant requirements, also when we pass from his ethical and aesthetic concepts to his intellectual point of view; indeed, the two can hardly be kept apart. The world, says Erasmus, is overloaded with human constitutions, and opinions and scholastic dogmas, and overburdened with the tyrannical authority of orders, and because of all this the strength of gospel doctrine is flagging. Faith requires simplification, he argued. What would the Turks say of our scholasticism? Colet wrote to him one day: “There is no end to books and science. Let us, therefore, leave all roundabout roads and go by a short cut to the truth.” Truth must be simple. “The language of truth is simple, says Seneca; well then, nothing is simpler nor truer than Christ.” “TI should wish,’ Erasmus says else- where, “that this simple and pure Christ might be deeply impressed upon the mind of men, and that I deem best 139 140 ERASMUS attainable in this way, that we, supported by our knowl- edge of the original languages, should philosophis? at the sources themselves.” Here a new watchword comes to the fore: back to the sources! It is not merely an intellectual, philological requirement; it is equally an ethical and aesthetic neces- sity of life. The original and pure, all that is not yet overgrown or has not passed through many hands, has such a potent charm. Erasmus compared it to an apple which we ourselves pick off the tree. To recall the world to the ancient simplicity of science, to lead it back from the now turbid pools to those living and most pure fountain heads, those most limpid sources of gospel doc- trine,—thus he saw the task of divinity. The metaphor of the limpid water is not without meaning here; it re- veals the psychologic quality of Erasmus’ fervent prin- ciple. “How is it,” he exclaims, “that people give themselves so much trouble about the details of all sorts of remote philosophical systems and neglect to go to the sources of Christianity itself?” “Although this wisdom, which is so excellent that once for all it put the wisdom of all the world to shame, may be drawn from these few books, as from a crystalline source, with far less trouble than is the wisdom of Aristotle from so many thorny books and with much more fruit. . . . The equipment for that journey is simple and at everyone’s immediate dis- posal. This philosophy is accessible for everybody. Christ desires that his mysteries shall be spread as widely as possible. I should wish that all good wives read the Gospel and Paul’s Epistles; that they were translated into all languages; that out of these the husbandman ERASMUS’ MIND 141 sang while ploughing, the weaver at his loom; that with such stories the traveller should beguile his wayfaring. . . This sort of philosophy is rather a matter of disposition than of syllogisms, rather of life than of disputation, rather of inspiration than of erudition, rather of transformation than of logic. . . . What is the philosophy of Christ, which he himself calls Renascentta, but the insaturation of Nature created good ?—moreover, though no one has taught us this so absolutely and effectively as Christ, yet also in pagan books much may be found that is in accordance with it.” Such was the view of life of this biblical humanist. As often as Erasmus reverts to these matters, his voice sounds clearest. “Let no one,” he says in the preface to the notes to the New Testament, “take up this work, as he takes up Gellius’ Noctes atticae or Poliziano’s Mis- cellanies . . . We are in the presence of holy things; here it is no question of eloquence, these matters are best recommended to the world by simplicity and purity; it would be ridiculous to display human erudition here, impious to pride oneself on human eloquence.” But Erasmus never was so eloquent himself as just then. What here raises him above his usual level of force and fervour is the fact that he fights a battle, the battle for the right of biblical criticism. It revolts him that people should study Holy Scripture in the Vulgate when they know that the texts show differences and are corrupt, although we have the Greek text by which to go back to the original form and primary meaning. He is now reproached because he dares, as a mere grammarian, to assail the text of Holy Scripture, on the score of futile mistakes or irregularities. “Details they 142 ERASMUS are, yes, but because of these details we sometimes see even great divines stumble and rave.” Philological tri- fling is necessary. “Why are we so precise as to our food, our clothes, our money-matters and why does this accu- racy displease us in divine literature alone? He crawls along the ground, they say, he wearies himself out about words and syllables! Why do we slight any word of Him whom we venerate and worship under the name of the Word? But, be it so! Let whoever wishes imagine that I have not been able to achieve anything better, and out of sluggishness of mind and coldness of heart, or lack of erudition have taken this lowest task upon myself; it is still a Christian idea to think all work good that is done with pious zeal. We bring along the bricks, but to build the temple of God.” He does not want to be intractable. Let the Vulgate be kept for use in the liturgy, for sermon, in schools, but he who, at home, reads our edition, will understand his own the better in consequence. He, Erasmus, is pre- pared to render account and acknowledge himself to have been wrong when convicted of error. Erasmus perhaps never quite realised how much his philological-critical method must shake the foundations of the Church. He was surprised at his adversaries “who could not but believe that all their authority would perish at once when the sacred books might be read in a purified form, and when people tried to under- stand them in the original.” He did not feel what the unassailable authority of a sacred book meant. He re- joices because Holy Scripture is approached so much more closely, because all sorts of shadings are brought to light by considering not only what is said but also by whom, ERASMUS’ MIND 143 for whom, at what time, on what occasion, what pre- cedes and what follows, in short, by the method of his- torical philological criticism. To him it seemed so espe- cially pious when reading Scripture and coming across a place which seemed contrary to the doctrine of Christ or the divinity of his nature, to believe rather that one did not understand the phrase or that the text might be corrupt. Unperceived he passed from emendation of the different versions to the correction of the contents. The epistles were not all written by the apostles to whom they are attributed. The apostles themselves made mis- takes, at times. The foundation of his spiritual life was no longer a unity to Erasmus. It was, on the one hand, a strong desire of an upright, simple, pure and homely belief, the earnest wish to be a good Christian. But it was also the irresistible intellectual and aesthetical need of the good taste, the harmony, the clear and exact expression of the Ancients, the dislike of what was cumbrous and involved. Erasmus thought that good learning might render good service for the necessary purification of the faith and its forms. The measure of church hymns should be cor- rected. That Christian expression and classicism were incompatible, he never believed. The man who in the sphere of sacred studies asked every author for his cre- dentials, remained unconscious of the fact that he acknowledged the authority of the Ancients, without any evidence. How naively he appeals to Antiquity, again and again, to justify some bold feat! He is critical, they say? Were not the Ancients critical? He permits himself to insert digressions? So did the Ancients, etc. Erasmus is in profound sympathy with that revered 144 ERASMUS Antiquity by his fundamental conviction that it is the practice of life which matters. He is the great philoso- pher—not who knows the tenets of the Stoics or Peri- patetics by rote—but who expresses the meaning of phil- osophy by his life and his morals, for that is its purpose. He is truly a divine who teaches, not by artful syllogisms, but by his disposition, by his face and his eyes, by his life itself, that wealth should be despised. To live up to that standard is what Christ himself calls Renascentia. Erasmus uses the word in the Christian sense only. But in that sense it is closely allied to the idea of the Renais- sance as a historical phenomenon. The worldly and pagan sides of the Renaissance have nearly always been overrated. Erasmus is, much more than Aretino or Cas- tiglione, the representative of the spirit of his age, one over whose Christian sentiment the sweet gale of An- tiquity had passed. And in that very union of strong Christian endeavour and the spirit of Antiquity, is the explanation of Erasmus’ wonderful success. The mere intention and the contents of the mind do not influence the world, if the form of expression does not co-operate. In Erasmus the quality of his talent is a very important factor. His perfect clearness and ease of expression, his liveliness, wit, imagination, gusto and humour have lent a charm to all he wrote which to his contemporaries was irresistible and captivates even us, as soon as we read him. In all that constitutes his talent, Erasmus is perfectly and altogether a representa- tive of the Renaissance. There is, in the first place, his eternal & propos. What he writes is never vague, never dark,—it is always plausible. Everything seemingly ERASMUS’ MIND 145 flows of itself like a fountain. It always rings true as to tone, turn of phrase and accent. It has almost the light harmony of Ariosto. And it is, like Ariosto, never tragic, never truly heroic. It carries us away, indeed, but it is never itself truly enraptured. The more artistic aspects of Erasmus’ talent come out most clearly—though they are everywhere in evidence— in those two recreations after more serious labour, the More Encomium and the Colloquia. But just those two have been of enormous importance for his influence upon his times. For while Jerome reached tens of readers and the New Testament hundreds, the Moria and Collo- quies went out to thousands. And their importance is heightened in that Erasmus has nowhere else expressed himself so spontaneously. In each of the Colloquies, even in the first purely for- mulary ones, there is the sketch for a comedy, a novel- ette or a satire. There is hardly a sentence without its “point,” an expression without a vivid fancy. There are unrivalled niceties. The abbot of the Abbatis et eruditae colloquium is a Moliére character. It should be noticed how well Erasmus always sustains his characters and his scenes, because he sees them. In The woman in childbed he never forgets for a moment that Eutrapelus is an artist. At the end of The game of knuckle-bones, when the interlocutors, after having elucidated the whole no- menclature of the Latin game of knuckle-bones, are going to play themselves, Carolus says: “but shut the door first, lest the cook should see us playing like two boys.” As Holbein illustrated the Moria, we should wish to possess the Colloquia with illustrations by Breughel, so closely allied is Erasmus’ witty clear vision of incidents to 146 ERASMUS that of this great master. The procession of drunkards on Palm Sunday, the saving of the shipwrecked crew, the old men waiting for the travelling cart while the drivers are still drinking, all these are Dutch genre pieces of the best sort. We like to speak of the realism of the Renaissance. Erasmus is certainly a realist in the sense of having an insatiable hunger for knowledge of the tangible world. He wants to know things and their names: the par- ticulars of each thing, be it never so remote, such as those terms of games and rules of games of the Romans. Read carefully the description of the decorative painting on the garden-house of the Convivium religiosum: it is nothing but an object lesson, a graphic representation of the forms of reality. In its joy about the material universe and the supple, pliant word, the Renaissance revels in a profusion of imagery and expressions. The resounding enumerations of names and things, which Rabelais always gives, are not unknown, too, to Erasmus, but he uses them for intel- lectual and useful purposes. In de Copia verborum ac rerum one feat of varied power of expression succeeds another—he gives fifty ways of saying: “Your letter has given me much pleasure,” or: “I think that it is going to rain.” The aesthetic impulse is here that of a theme and variations: to display all the wealth and muta- tions of the logic of language. Elsewhere, too, Erasmus indulges this proclivity for accumulating the treasures of his genius; he and his contemporaries can never re- strain themselves from giving all the instances instead of one: in Ratio verae theologiae, in de Pronuntiatione, in Lingua, in Ecclesiastes. The collections of the Adagia, ERASMUS’ MIND 147 Parabolae, and of the Apophthegmata are altogether based on this eagerness of the Renaissance (which, by the way, was an inheritance of the Middle Ages them- selves) to luxuriate in the wealth of the tangible world, to revel in words and things. The senses are open for the nice observation of the curious. Though Erasmus does not know that need of probing the secrets of nature, which inspired a Leonardo da Vinci, a Paracelsus, a Vesalius, he is also, by his keen observation, a child of his time. For the significance in the habits and customs of nations he has an open eye. He notices the gait of Swiss soldiers, how dandies sit, how Picards pronounce French. He notices that in old pictures the sitters are always represented with half- closed eyes and tightly shut lips, as signs of modesty, and how some Spaniards still honour this expression in life, whereas German art prefers lips pouting as for a kiss. His lively sense of anecdote, to which he gives the rein in all his writings, belongs here. And, in spite of all his realism, the world which Eras- mus sees and renders, is not altogether that of the six- teenth century. Iiverything is veiled by Latin. Between the author’s mind and reality intervenes his antique diction. At bottom the world of his mind is imaginary. It is a subdued and limited sixteenth-century reality which he reflects. Together with its coarseness he lacks all that is violent and direct in his times. Compared with the artists, with Luther and Calvin, with the states- men, the navigators, the soldiers and the scientists, Eras- mus confronts the world as a recluse. It is only the influence of Latin. In spite of all his receptiveness and 148 ERASMUS sensitiveness, Erasmus is never fully in contact with life. All through his work not a bird sings or a wind rustles. But that reserve or fear of directness is not merely a negative quality. It also results from a consciousness of the indefiniteness of the ground of all things, from the awe of the ambiguity of all that is. If Erasmus so often hovers over the borderline between earnestness and mock- ery, if he hardly ever gives an incisive conclusion, it is not only due to cautiousness, and fear to commit himself. Everywhere he sees the shadings, the blending of the meaning of words. The terms of things are no longer to him, as to the man of the Middle Ages, as crystals mounted in gold, or as stars in the firmament. “I like assertions so little that I would easily take sides with the Sceptics wherever it is allowed by the inviolable authority of Holy Scripture and the decrees of the Church.” “What is exempt from error?” All subtle contentions of theological speculation arise from a dan- gerous curiosity and lead to impious audacity. What have all the great controversies about the Trinity and the Virgin Mary profited? “We have defined so much that without danger to our salvation might have re- mained unknown or undecided... . The essentials of our religion are peace and unanimity. These can hardly exist unless we make definitions about as few points as possible and leave many questions to indi- vidual judgment. Numerous problems are now post- poned till the cecumenical council. It would be much better to put off such questions till the time when the glass shall be removed and the darkness cleared away, and we shall see God face to face.” “There are sanctuaries in the sacred studies which God THE HUMANIST 149 has not willed that we should probe, and if we try to penetrate there, we grope in ever deeper darkness the farther we proceed, so that we recognise, in this manner, too, the inscrutable majesty of divine wisdom and the imbecility of human understanding.” XIV ERASMUS’ CHARACTER ERASMUS’ CHARACTER: NEED OF PURITY AND CLEANLI- NESS—DELICACY—DISLIKE OF CONTENTION, NEED OF CONCORD AND FRIENDSHIP—AVERSION TO DISTURB- ANCE OF EVERY KIND—TOO MUCH CONCERNED ABOUT OTHER MEN’S OPINION—NEED OF SELF-JUSTIFICATION —HIMSELF NEVER IN THE WRONG—CORRELATION BE- TWEEN INCLINATIONS AND CONVICTIONS—IDEAL IMAGE OF HIMSELF—DISSATISFACTION WITH HIMSELF—SELF- CENTREDNESS—A SOLITARY AT HEART—FASTIDIOUSNESS —SUSPICIOUSNESS—MORBID MISTRUST—UNHAPPINESS— RESTLESSNESS—UNSOLVED CONTRADICTIONS OF HIS BEING—HORROR OF LIES—RESERVE AND INSINUATION, Erasmus’ powerful mind met with a great response in the heart of his contemporaries and had a lasting influence on the march of civilisation. But one of the heroes of history he cannot be called. Was not his failure to attain to still loftier heights partly due to the fact that his character was not on a level with the ele- vation of his mind? And yet that character, a very complicated one, though he took himself to be the simplest man in the world, was determined by the same factors which determined the structure of his mind. Again and again we find in his inclinations the correlates of his convictions. At the root of his moral being we find—a key for the understanding of his character—that same profound need of purity which drove him to the sources of sacred science. Purity in the material and the moral sense is 150 ERASMUS’ CHARACTER 151 what he desires for himself and others, always and in all things. Few things revolt him so much as the practices of vintners who doctor wine and dealers who adulterate food. If he continually chastens his language and style, or exculpates himself from mistakes, it is the same impulse which prompts his passionate desire for cleanli- ness and brightness, of the home and of the body. He has a violent dislike of stuffy air and smelly substances. He regularly takes a roundabout way to avoid a malo- dorous lane; he loathes shambles and fishmongers’ shops. Fetors spread infection, he thinks. Erasmus had, earlier than most people, antiseptic ideas about the danger of infection in the foul air of crowded inns, in the breath of confessants, in baptismal water. Throw aside com- mon cups, he pleaded; let everybody shave himself, let us be cleanly as to bed-sheets, let us not kiss each other by way of greeting. The fear of the horrible venereal disease, imported into Europe during his life- time, and of which Erasmus watched the unbridled prop- agation with solicitude, increases his desire for purity. Too little is being done to stop it, he thinks. He cautions his men against suspected inns; he wants to have mea- sures taken against the marriages of syphilitic persons. In his undignified attitude towards Hutten his physical and moral aversion to the man’s evil plays an unmistak- able part. Erasmus is a delicate soul in all his fibres. His body forces him to be that. He is highly sensitive, among other things very susceptible to cold, “the scholars’ dis- order,” as he calls it. Early in life already the painful malady of the stone begins to torment him, which he resisted so bravely, when his work was at stake. He 152 ERASMUS always speaks in a coddling tone about his little body, which cannot stand fasting, which must be kept fit by some exercise, namely riding, and for which he carefully tries to select a suitable climate. He is at times circum- stantial in the description of his ailments. He has to be very careful in the matter of his sleep; if once he wakes up, he finds it difficult to go to sleep again, and because of that has often to lose the morning, the best time to work and which is so dear to him. He cannot stand cold, wind and fog, but still less overheated rooms. How he has execrated the German stoves, which are burned nearly all the year through and made Germany almost unbearable to him! Of his fear of illness we have spoken above. It is not only the plague which he flees—for fear of catching cold he gives up a journey from Louvain to Antwerp where his friend Peter Gilles is m mourning. Although he realises quite well that, “often a great deal of the disease is in the imagination,” yet his own imagination leaves him no peace. Never- theless, when he is seriously ill he does not fear death. His hygienics amount to temperance, cleanliness and fresh air, this last item in moderation: he takes the vicinity of the sea to be unwholesome and is afraid of draughts. His friend Gilles, who is ill, he advises: “do not take too much medicine, keep quiet and do not get angry.” ‘Though there is a Praise of Medicine among his works, he does not think highly of physicians and satirises them more than once in the Colloquies. Also in his outward appearance there were certain features betraying his delicacy. He was of medium height, well-made, of a fair complexion with blond hair ERASMUS’ CHARACTER 153 and blue eyes, a cheerful face, a very articulate mode of speech, but a thin voice. In the moral sphere Erasmus’ delicacy is represented by his great need of friendship and concord, his dislike of contention. With him peace and harmony rank above all other considerations, and he confesses them to be the guiding principles of his actions. He would, if it might be, have all the world as a friend. “Wittingly I dis- charge no one from my friendship,” he says. And though he was sometimes capricious and exacting towards his friends, yet a truly great friend he was: witness the many who never forsook him, or whom he, after a tem- porary estrangement, always won back—More, Peter Gilles, Fisher, Ammonious, Budaeus, and others too nu- merous to mention. ‘He was most constant in keeping up friendships,” says Beatus Rhenanus, whose own at- tachment to Erasmus is a proof of the strong affection he could inspire. | At the root of this desire of friendship lies a great and sincere need of affection. Remember the effusions of almost feminine affection towards Servatius during his monastic period. But at the same time it is a sort of moral serenity that makes him so: an aversion to disturbance, to whatever is harsh and inharmonious. He calls it “a certain occult natural sense” which makes him abhor strife. He cannot abide being at loggerheads with anyone. He always hoped and wanted, he says, to keep his pen unbloody, to attack no one, to provoke no one, even if he were attacked. But his enemies had not willed it, and in later years he became well accustomed to bitter polemics, with Lefévre d’Etaples, with Lee, with Ezmon- danus, with Hutten, with Luther, with Beda, with the 154 ERASMUS Spaniards, and the Italians. At first it is still noticeable how he suffers by it, how contention wounds him, so that he cannot bear the pain in silence. “Do let us be iriends again,’ he begs Lefévre, who does not reply. The time which he had to devote to his polemics he regards as lost. “I feel myself getting more heavy every day,” he writes in 1520, ‘not so much on account of my age as because of the restless labour of my studies, nay more even by the weariness of disputes than by the work, which, in itself, is agreeable.’ And how much strife was still in store for him then! / 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 exag- gerated 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 dis- charge the obligation himself, 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 circumstances or wrong advice; he is never to blame himself.” And what he has thus justified for himself becomes with him universal law: “God relieves people of pernicious vows, ERASMUS’ CHARACTER 155 if only they repent of them,” says the man who himself had broken a vow. There is in Erasmus a dangerous fusion between in- clination 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 passes 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 pic- ture are a remarkable, simple sincerity and frankness, which make it impossible to him to dissemble; inex- perience 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 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, 156 ERASMUS 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. “Pusillani- mous,” 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 per- suaded 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 illustrating 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’ modesty and the contempt which he dis- plays 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, com- mon 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 pass for a stammerer. What is fame? A pagan survival. He is fed up with it to reple- tion and would do nothing more gladly than cast it off. ERASMUS’ CHARACTER 157 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 con- versation. And he threatens an unknown adversary. “If you go on, so impudently to assail 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 in- crease 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 naive in the way in which he thinks it requi- site 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 corre- spondence 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. “TI 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 158 ERASMUS 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 attitude of warding off reveals itself as fastidiousness and as bashfulness. Budaeus hit 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 Hrasmus, 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 ERASMUS’ CHARACTER 159 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 com- plains. “What!” exclaims Erasmus, “you will find few people who are so little distrustful in friendship 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 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. Ep- pendorf has spies everywhere who watch Erasmus’ cor- respondence with his friends. Aleander continually sets people to combat him, and lies in wait for him wherever hecan. His interpretation of the intentions of his assail- ants has the ingenious self-centred element which passes 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 ships. The minor enemies, like troublesome vermin, drive him to weariness of life, or to death by insomnia. He compares his tor- tures to the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, pierced by arrows. But his is worse, for there is no end to it. For 160 ERASMUS 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 be- come 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, Lyp- sius, as well as Hutten and Beda. Occasionally we are struck by the expression of coarse pleasure at another’s misfortune. But in all this, as regards malice, we should not measure Erasmus by our ideas of delicacy and gentle- ness. 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 pro- ceeds from his general attitude 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 ERASMUS’ CHARACTER 161 terms. His life “is an Iliad of calamities, a chain of mis- fortunes. 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: 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 en- tanglements 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 1 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. 162 ERASMUS of them?” And Erasmus answers with Horace’s word: “Tn 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 realise what it means that time after time Erasmus, who, by nature, loved quiet and was fearful, and fond of com- fort, 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 circumstantial. “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 inter- mission. For years he has read only twmultuarie, 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 inexactitudes.” 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 passionately, “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’ CHARACTER 163 Erasmus labours there is again one of the unsolved con- tradictions 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 re- serve. The way in which Erasmus always tries to shirk defi- nite statements irritates us. How carefully he always tries to represent the Colloquies in which he had spon- taneously revealed so much of his inner convictions, 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 classes 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 out of caution, but because he saw the eternal am- biguity 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, like the little braggart of whom he tells in the Colloquies. That this reaction of aversion is genuine is not contra- dicted by the fact that we catch Erasmus himself in untruths. Inconsistencies, flattery, pieces of cunning, white lies, serious suppression of facts, simulated senti- ments 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 164 ERASMUS bigotry. He requested his best friend Batt to tell lies in his behalf. He most sedulously denied his authorship of the Julius-dialogue, for fear of the consequences, even to More, and always in such a way as to avoid saying out- right, “I did not write it.”—Those who know other hu- manists, and know how frequently and impudently they lied, will perhaps think more lightly of Erasmus’ 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 passage 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 be- fore 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. Half a year later followed the ERASMUS’ CHARACTER 165 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 cir- culated, 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 friendship was turned to hatred. In him was also a great Erasmus who knew how under the passion and infatuation with which the parties com- bated each other, the Truth he sought, and the Love he hoped would subdue the world, were obscured; who knew the God 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. XV AT LOUVAIN 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, 1513-HE REVISES THE EDITION OF THE NEW TESTAMENT—CONTROVERSIES WITH LATOMUS, BRIARD AND LEE—ERASMUS REGARDS THE OPPOSITION OF CONSERVATIVE THEOLOGY MERELY AS A CON- SPIRACY 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 God’s favour and the piety and wisdom of princes do not concern themselves about human matters.” But the forms which that great change would assume he did not in the least realise. He regarded his removal as merely temporary. It was only to last “till we shall have seen which place of resi- dence 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: to-morrow, to-morrow! 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 dis- 166 AT LOUVAIN 167. agreeable 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. Of 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 them- selves, 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 here 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 Paludanus, 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; 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 Eras- mus’ great satisfaction. Soon Erasmus found himself a member of the theological faculty. 168 ERASMUS Yet he did not feel at his ease among the Louvain theologians. The atmosphere was a great deal less con- genial to him than that of the world of the English scholars. Here he felt a spirit which he did not under- stand and distrusted in consequence. In the years in which the Reformation began, Eras- mus was the victim of a great misunderstanding, the result of the fact that his delicate, aesthetic, hovering spirit understood neither the profoundest depths of the faith, nor the hard necessities of human society. He was neither mystic nor realist. Luther was both. To Eras- mus the great problem of Church and state and society seemed simple. Nothing was required but restoration and purification by a return to the original, unspoilt sources of Christianity. A number of accretions to the faith, rather ridiculous than revolting, had to be cleared away. All should be reduced to the nucleus of faith, Christ and the Gospel. Forms, ceremonies, speculations should make room for the practice of true piety. The Gospel was easily intelligible to everybody and within everybody’s reach. And the means to reach all this was good learning, bonae literae. Had he not himself, by his edition of the New Testament and of Jerome, and even earlier by the now famous Enchiridion, done most of what had to be done? “I hope that what now pleases the upright, will soon please all.” As early as the begin- ning of 1517 Erasmus had written to Wolfgang Fabricius Capito, in the tone of one who has accomplished the great task. “Well then, take you the torch from us. The work will henceforth be a great deal easier and cause far less hatred and envy. We have lived through the first shock.” AT LOUVAIN 169 Budaeus writes to Tunstall in May, 1517: “Was any- one born under such inauspicious Graces that the dull and obscure discipline (scholasticism) does not revolt him, since sacred literature, too, cleansed by Erasmus’ diligence, has regained its ancient purity and brightness? But it is still much greater that he should have effected by the same labour the emergence of sacred truth itself out of that Cimmerian darkness, even though divinity is not yet quite free from the dirt of the sophist school. If that should occur one day, it will be owing to the beginnings made in our times.” ‘The philologist Budaeus believed even more firmly than Erasmus that faith was a matter of erudition. It could not but vex Erasmus that not everyone ac- cepted the cleansed truth at once. How could people continue to oppose themselves to what, to him, seemed as clear as daylight and so simple? He who so sincerely would have liked to live in peace with all the world, found himself involved in a series of polemics. To let the opposition of opponents pass unnoticed was forbidden not only by his character, for ever striving to justify himself in the eyes of the world, but also by the custom of his time, so eager for dispute. There were, first of all, his polemics with Jacques Le- févre d’Etaples, or in Latinized form, Faber Stapulensis, | the Parisian theologian, who as a preparer of the Refor- — mation may, more than anyone else, be ranked with Eras- mus. At the moment when Erasmus got into the travel- ling cart which was to take him to Louvain a friend drew his attention to a passage in the new edition of Faber’s commentary on Paul’s epistles, in which he controverted Erasmus’ note on the Second Epistle to the Hebrews, 170 ERASMUS verse 7. Erasmus at once bought Faber’s book, and soon published an apology. It concerned Christ’s relation to God and the angels, but the dogmatic point at issue hinged, after all, on a philological interpretation of Eras- mus’. Not yet accustomed to much direct wrangling, Erasmus was violently agitated by the matter, the more as he esteemed Faber highly and considered him a congenial spirit. “What on earth has occurred to the man? Have others set him on against me? All theologians agree that I am right,” he asserts. It makes him nervous that Faber does not reply again at once. Badius has told Peter Gilles that Faber is sorry about it. Erasmus in a dig- nified letter appeals to their friendship; he will suffer himself to be taught and censured. Then again he growls: let him be careful. And he thinks that his con- troversy with Faber keeps the world in suspense: there is not a meal at which the guests do not side with one or the other of them. But finally the combat abated and the friendship was preserved. Towards Easter, 1518, Erasmus contemplated a new journey to Basle, there to pass through the press during a few months of hard labour, the corrected edition of the New Testament. He did not fail to request the chiefs of conservative divinity at Louvain beforehand to state their objections to his work. Briard of Ath de- clared he had found nothing offensive in it, after he had first been told all sorts of bad things about it. “Then the new edition will please you much better,” Eras- mus had said. His friend Dorp and James Latomus, also one of the chief divines, had expressed themselves in the same sense, and the Carmelite Nicholas of Egmond AT LOUVAIN 171 had said that he had never read Erasmus’ work. Only a young Englishman, Edward Lee, who was studying Greek at Louvain, had summarised a number of criticisms into ten conclusions. Erasmus had got rid of the matter by writing to Lee that he had not been able to get hold of his conclusions and therefore could not make use of them. But his youthful critic had not put up with being slighted so, and worked out his objections in a more circumstantial treatise. Thus Erasmus set out for Basle once more in May, 1518. He had been obliged to ask all his English friends (of whom Ammonius had been taken from him by death in 1517) for support to defray the expenses of the jour- ney; he kept holding out to them the prospect that, after his work was finished, he would return to England. In a letter to Martin Lypsius, as he was going up the Rhine, he answered Lee’s criticism, which had irritated him ex- tremely. In revising his edition he not only took it but little into account, but ventured, moreover, this time to print his own translation of the New Testament of 1506 without any alterations. At the same time he obtained for the new edition a letter of approval from the Pope, a redoubtable weapon, against his cavillers. At Basle Erasmus worked again like a horse in a tread- mill. But he was really in his element. Even before the second edition of the New Testament, the Enchiridion and the Institutio Principis Christiani were reprinted by Froben. On his return journey, Erasmus, whose work had been hampered all through the summer by indisposition, and who had, on that account, been unable to finish it, fell seriously ill. He reached Louvain with difficulty (21st Sept., 1518). It might be the pestilence, and Eras- 172 ERASMUS mus, ever much afraid of contagion himself, now took all precautions to safeguard his friends against it. He avoided his quarters in the College of the Lily, and found shelter with his most trusted friend, Dirck Maer- tensz, the printer. But in spite of rumours of the plague and his warnings, first Dorp and afterwards also Ath came, at once, to visit him. Evidently the Louvain pro- fessors did not mean so badly by him, after all. But the differences between Erasmus and the Louvain faculty were deeply rooted. Lee, hurt by the little at- tention paid by Erasmus to his objections, prepared a new critique, but kept it from Erasmus, for the present, which irritated the latter and made him nervous. In the meantime a new opponent arose. Directly after his return to Louvain, Erasmus had taken much trouble to promote the establishment of the Collegium Trilingue, projected and endowed by Jerome Busleiden, in his testament, to be founded in the university. The three biblical lan- guages, Hebrew, Greek and Latin, were to be taught there. Now when James Latomus, a member of the theological faculty and a man whom he esteemed, in a dialogue about the study of those three languages and of theology, doubted the utility of the former, Erasmus judged himself concerned, and answered Latomus in an apology. About the same time (spring 1519) he got into trouble with Ath, the vice-chancellor himself. Erasmus thought that the latter had publicly censured him with regard to his Praise of Marriage, which had recently ap- peared. Though Ath withdrew at once, Erasmus could not abstain from writing an Apologia, however moderate, Meanwhile the smouldering quarrel with Lee assumed ever more hateful forms. In vain did Erasmus’ English AT LOUVAIN 173 friends attempt to restrain their young, ambitious com- patriot. Erasmus on his part irritated him furtively. He reveals in this whole dispute a lack of self-control and dignity which shows his weakest side. Usually so anxious as to decorum he now lapses into invectives: The British adder, Satan, even the old taunt ascribing a tail to Eng- lishmen has to serve once more. The points at issue disappear altogether behind the bitter mutual reproaches. In his unrestrained anger, Krasmus avails himself of the most unworthy weapons. He eggs his German friends on to write against Lee and to ridicule him in all his folly and brag, and then he assures all his English friends: “All Germany is literally furious with Lee; I have the greatest trouble in keeping them back.” Alack! Germany had other causes of disturbance: it is 1520 and the three great polemics of Luther were setting the world on fire. Though one may excuse the violence and the petty spitefulness of Erasmus in this matter, as resulting from an over-sensitive heart, falling somewhat short in really manly qualities, yet it is difficult to deny that he failed completely to understand both the arguments of his adversaries and the great movements of his time. It was very easy for Erasmus to mock the narrow- mindedness of conservative divines who thought that there would be an end to faith in Holy Scripture as soon as the emendation of the text was attempted. “ ‘They correct the Holy Gospel, nay, the Pater Noster itself!’ the preacher exclaims indignantly in the sermon before his surprised congregation. As if I cavilled at Matthew and Luke, instead of those who, out of ignorance and carelessness, have corrupted them. What do people 174 ERASMUS wish? That the Church should possess Holy Scripture as correct as possible, or not?” This reasoning seemed to Erasmus, with his passionate need of purity, a conclusive refutation. But instinct did not deceive his adversaries, when it told them that doctrine itself was at stake, if the linguistic judgment of a single individual might decide as to the correct version of a text. And Erasmus wished to avoid the inferences which assailed doctrine. He was not aware of the fact that his conceptions of the Church, the sacraments, the dogmas were no longer purely Catholic, because they had become subordinated to his philologic insight. He could not be aware of it, because he, in spite of all his natural piety and his fervent ethical sentiments, lacked the mystic insight which is the foundation of every creed. It was this personal lack in Erasmus which made him unable to understand the real grounds of the resistance of Catholic orthodoxy. How was it possible that so many, and among them men of high consideration, re- fused to accept what to him seemed so clear and irrefut- able! He interpreted the fact in a highly personal way. He, the man who would so gladly have lived in peace with all the world, who so yearned for sympathy and recognition, and bore enmity with difficulty, saw the ranks of haters and opponents increase about him. He did not understand how they feared his mocking acri- mony, how many wore the scar of a wound that the Moria had made. That real and supposed hatred troub- led Erasmus. He sees his enemies as a sect. It is espe- cially the Dominicans and the Carmelites who are ill- affected towards the new scientific theology. Just then a new adversary had arisen at Louvain in the person of AT LOUVAIN 175 his compatriot Nicholas of Egmond, prior of the Carmel- ites, henceforth an object of particular abhorrence to him. It is remarkable that at Louvain Erasmus found his fiercest opponents in some compatriots, in the nar- rower sense of the word: Vincent Dirks of Haarlem, William of Vianen, Ruurd Tapper. The persecution increases: the venom of slander spreads more and more every day and becomes more deadly; the greatest un- truths are impudently preached about him; he calls in the help of Ath, the vice-chancellor, against them. But it is no use; the hidden enemies laugh; let him write for the erudites, who are few; we shall bark to stir up the people. After 1520 he writes again and again: “I am stoned every day.” But Erasmus, however much he might see himself, not without reason, at the centre, could, in 1519 and 1520, no longer be blind to the fact that the great struggle did not concern him alone. On all sides the battle was being fought. What is it, that great commotion about matters of spirit and of faith? The answer which Erasmus gave himself was this: it is a great and wilful conspiracy on the part of the con- servatives to suffocate good learning and make the old ignorance triumph. This idea recurs innumerable times in his letters after the middle of 1518. “I know quite certainly,” he writes on the 21st of March, 1519, to one of his German friends, “that the barbarians on all sides have conspired to leave no stone unturned till they have suppressed bonae literae.” “Here we are still fighting with the protectors of the old ignorance”; cannot Wolsey persuade the Pope to stop it here? All that appertains to ancient and cultured literature is called “poetry” by 176 ERASMUS those narrow-minded fellows. By that word they indi- cate everything that savours of a more elegant doctrine, that is to say all that they have not learned themselves. All the tumult, the whole tragedy—under these terms he usually refers to the great theological struggle—originates in the hatred of bonae literae. “This is the source and hot-bed of all this tragedy; incurable hatred of linguistic study and the bonae literae.” ‘Luther provokes those enemies, whom it is impossible to conquer, though their cause is a bad one. And meanwhile envy harasses the bonae literae, which are attacked at his (Luther’s) insti- gation by these gadflies. They are already nearly insuf- ferable, when things do not go well with them; but who can stand them when they triumph? Either I am blind, or they aim at something else than Luther. They are preparing to conquer the phalanx of the Muses.” This was written by Erasmus to a member of the Uni- versity of Leipsic in December, 1520. This one-sided and academic conception of the great events, a conception which arose in the study of a recluse bending over his books, did more than anything else to prevent Erasmus from understanding the true nature and purport of the Reformation. —_ XVI FIRST YEARS OF THE REFORMATION BEGINNING OF THE RELATIONS BETWEEN ERASMUS AND LUTHER—ARCHBISHOP ALBERT OF MAYENCE, 1517— PROGRESS OF THE REFORMATION—LUTHER TRIES TO BRING ABOUT A RAPPROCHEMENT WITH ERASMUS, MARCH, 1519—ERASMUS KEEPS ALOOF; FANCIES HE MAY YET ACT AS A CONCILIATOR—HIS ATTITUDE BECOMES AMBIGUOUS—HE DENIES EVER MORE EMPHATICALLY ALL RELATIONS WITH LUTHER AND RESOLVES TO RE- MAIN A SPECTATOR—HE IS PRESSED BY EITHER CAMP TO TAKE SIDES—ALEANDER IN THE NETHERLANDS— THE DIET OF WORMS, 152I-ERASMUS LEAVES LOUVAIN TO SAFEGUARD HIS FREEDOM, OCTOBER, 1521. About the close of 1516 Erasmus received a letter from the librarian and secretary of Frederick, elector of Saxony, George Spalatinus, written in the respectful and reverential tone in which the great man was now ap- proached. “We all esteem you here most highly; the elector has all your books in his library and intends to buy everything you may publish in future.” But the object of Spalatinus’ letter was the execution of a friend’s commission. An Augustinian ecclesiastic, a great ad- mirer of Erasmus, had requested him to direct his atten- tion to the fact that in his interpretation of St. Paul, especially in the epistle to the Romans, Erasmus had failed to conceive the idea of justitia correctly, had paid too little attention to original sin: he might profit by reading Augustine. The nameless Austin friar was Luther, then still un- known outside the circle of the Wittenberg University, 177 178 ERASMUS in which he was a professor, and the criticism regarded the cardinal point of his hardly acquired conviction: justification by faith. Erasmus paid little attention to this letter. He re- ceived so many of that sort, containing still more praise and no criticism. If he answered it, the reply did not reach Spalatinus, and later Erasmus completely forgot the whole letter. Nine months afterwards, in September, 1517, when Erasmus had been at Louvain for a short time, he re- ceived an honourable invitation, written by the first prelate of the Empire, the young archbishop of May- ence, Albert of Brandenburg himself. The archbishop would be pleased to see him on an occasion: he greatly admired his work (he knew it so little as to speak of Erasmus’ emendation of the Old Testament, instead of the New) and hoped that he would one day write some lives of saints in elegant style. The young Hohenzoller, advocate of the new light of classical studies, whose attention had probably been drawn to Erasmus by Hutten and Capito, who sojourned at his court, had recently become engaged in one of the boldest political and financial transactions of his time. His elevation to the see of Mayence, at the age of twenty-four, had necessitated a papal dispensation, as he also wished to keep the archbishopric of Magdeburg and the see of Halberstadt. This accumulation of ecclesiastical offices had to be made subservient to the Brandenburg policy which opposed the rival house of Saxony. The Pope granted the dispensation in return for a great sum of money, but to facilitate its payment he accorded to the archbishop a liberal indulgence for the whole arch- FIRST YEARS OF THE REFORMATION 179 bishopric of Mayence, Magdeburg and the Brandenburg territories. Albert, to whom half the proceeds were tacitly left, raised a loan with the house of Fugger, and this charged itself with the indulgence traffic. When in December, 1517, Erasmus answered the archbishop, Luther’s propositions against indulgences, provoked by the archbishop of Mayence’s instructions regarding their colportage, had already been posted up (31st October, 1517), and were circulated throughout Germany, rousing the whole Church. They were levelled at the same abuses which Erasmus combated, the me- chanical, atomistical, and juridical conception of religion. But how different was their practical effect, as compared with Erasmus’ pacific endeavour to purify the Church by lenient means! “Lives of saints?” Erasmus asked replying to the arch- bishop. “I have tried in my poor way to add a little light to the prince of saints himself. For the rest, your endeavours, in addition to so many difficult matters of government, and at such an early age, to get the lives of the saints purged of old woman’s tales and disgusting style, is extremely laudable. For nothing should be suf- fered in the Church that is not perfectly pure or refined.” And he concludes with a magnificent eulogy of the excel- lent prelate. During the greater part of 1518, Erasmus was too much occupied by his own affairs—the journey to Basle and his red-hot labours there, and afterwards his serious ill- ness—to concern himself much with Luther’s business. In March he sends Luther’s theses to More, without comment, and, in passing, complains to Colet about the impudence with which Rome disseminates indulgences. 180 -ERASMUS Luther, now declared a heretic and summoned to appear at Augsburg, stands before the legate Cajetanus and refuses to recant. Seething enthusiasm surrounds him. Just about that time Erasmus writes to one of Luther’s partisans, John Lang, in very favourable terms about his work. The theses have pleased everybody. “I see that the monarchy of the Pope at Rome, as it is now, is a pestilence to Christendom, but I do not know if it is expedient to touch that sore openly. That would be a matter for princes, but I fear that these will act in con- cert with the Pope to secure part of the spoils. I do not understand what possessed Eck to take up arms against Luther.” The letter did not find its way into any of the collections. The year 1519 brought the struggle attending the elec- tion of an emperor, after old Maximilian had died in Jan- uary, and the attempt of the curia to regain ground with lenity. Germany was expecting the long-projected dis- putation between Johannes Eck and Andreas Karlstadt which, in truth, would concern Luther. How could Eras- mus, who himself was involved that year in so many polemics, have foreseen that the Leipsic disputation, which was to lead Luther to the consequence of rejecting the highest ecclesiastical authority, would remain of last- ing importance in the history of the world, whereas his quarrel with Lee would be forgotten? On the 28th of March, 1519, Luther addressed himself personally to Erasmus for the first time. “I speak with you so often, and you with me, Erasmus, our ornament and our hope; and we do not know each other as yet.” He rejoices to find that Erasmus displeases many, for this he regards as a sign that God has blessed him. Now FIRST YEARS OF THE REFORMATION 181 that his, Luther’s, name, begins to get known too, a longer silence between them might be wrongly interpreted. “Therefore, my Erasmus, amiable man, if you think fit, acknowledge also this little brother in Christ, who really admires you and feels friendly disposed towards you, and for the rest would deserve no better, because of his ignorance than to lie, unknown, buried in a corner.” There was a very definite purpose in this somewhat rustically cunning and half ironical letter. Luther wanted, if possible, to make Erasmus show his colours, to win him, the powerful authority, touchstone of science and culture, for the cause which he advocated. In his heart Luther had long been aware of the deep gulf separating him from Erasmus. As early as March, 1517, half a year before his public appearance, he wrote about Erasmus to John Lang: “human matters weigh heavier with him than divine,” an opinion that so many have pronounced about Erasmus,—obvious, and yet unfair. The attempt, on the part of Luther, to effect a rap- prochement was a reason for Erasmus to retire at once. Now began that extremely ambiguous policy of Erasmus to preserve peace by his authority as a light of the world and to steer a middle course without committing himself. In that attitude the great and the petty side of his per- sonality are inextricably intertwined. The error because of which most historians have seen Erasmus’ attitude towards the Reformation, either in far too unfavourable a light, or,—as for instance the German historian Kal- koff—much too heroic and far-seeing, is that they erro- neously regard him as psychologically homogeneous. Just that he is not. His double-sidedness roots in the depths of his being. Many of his utterances during the struggle 182 ERASMUS proceed directly from his fear and lack of character, also from his inveterate dislike of siding with a person or a cause; but behind that is always his deep and fer- vent conviction that neither of the conflicting opinions can completely express the truth, that human hatred and purblindness infatuate the minds. And with that con- viction is allied the noble illusion that it might yet be possible to preserve the peace, by moderation, insight, and kindliness. In April, 1519, Erasmus addressed himself by letter to the elector Frederick of Saxony, Luther’s patron. He begins by alluding to his dedication of Suetonius two years before; but his real purpose is to say some- thing about Luther. Luther’s writings, he says, have given the Louvain obscurants plenty of reason to in- veigh against the bonae literae, to decry all scholars. He himself does not know Luther and has glanced through his writings only cursorily as yet, but everyone praises his life. How little in accordance with theological gentleness it is, to condemn him offhand, and that before the indiscreet vulgar! For has he not proposed a dis- pute, submitted himself to everybody’s judgment? No one has, so far, admonished, taught, convinced him. Every error is not at once heresy. The best of Christianity is a life worthy of Christ. Where we find that, we should not rashly suspect people of heresy. Why do we so uncharitably persecute the lapses of others, though none of us is free from error? Why do we rather want to conquer than cure, suppress than instruct? But he concludes with a word that could not but please Luther’s friends, who so hoped for his support. “May FIRST YEARS OF THE REFORMATION 183 the duke prevent an innocent man from being surren- dered under the cloak of piety to the impiety of a few. This is also the wish of Pope Leo, who has nothing more at heart than that innocence be safe.” At this same time Erasmus does his best to keep Froben back from publishing Luther’s writings, “that they may not fan the hatred of the bonae literae still more.” And he keeps repeating: I do not know Luther, I have not read his writings. He makes this declaration to Luther himself, in his reply to the latter’s epistle of the 28th of March. This letter of Erasmus, dated May 30th, 1519, should be regarded as a newspaper leader, to acquaint the public with his attitude towards the Luther question. Luther does not know the tragedies which his writings have caused at Louvain. People here think that Erasmus has helped him in composing them and call him the standard bearer of the party! That seemed to them a fitting pretext to suppress the bonae literae. “I have declared that you are perfectly un- known to me, that I have not yet read your books and therefore neither approve nor disapprove anything.” “T reserve myself, so far as I may, to be of use to the reviving studies. Discreet moderation seems likely to bring better progress than impetuosity. It was by this that Christ subjugated the world.” On the same day he writes to John Lang, one of Luther’s friends and followers, a short note, not meant for publication: “I hope that the endeavours of your- self and your party will be successful. Here the Papists rave violently.... All the best minds are rejoiced at Luther’s boldness: I do not doubt he will be careful that things do not end in a quarrel of parties! ... We 184 ERASMUS shall never triumph over feigned Christians unless we first abolish the tyranny of the Roman see, and of its satellites, the Dominicans, the Franciscans and the Car- melites. But no one could attempt that without a serious tumult.” As the gulf widens, Erasmus’ protestations that he has nothing to do with Luther become much more frequent. Relations at Louvain grew ever more dis- agreeable and the general sentiment about him ever more unkind. In August, 1519, he turns to the Pope himself for protection against his opponents. He still fails to see how wide the breach is. He still takes it all to be quarrels of scholars. King Henry of England and King Francis of France in their own countries have im- posed silence upon the quarrelers and slanderers; if only the Pope would do the same! In October he was once more reconciled with the Louvain faculty. It was just at this time that Colet died in London,—the man who had, better perhaps than any one else, understood Erasmus’ standpoint. Kindred spirits in Germany still looked up to Erasmus as the great man who was on the alert to interpose at the right moment and who had made moderation the catchword, until the time should come to give his friends the signal. But in the increasing noise of the battle his voice already sounded less powerfully than before. A letter to Cardinal Albert of Mayence, of October 19th, 1519, of about the same content as that to Frederick of Saxony, written in the preceding spring, was at once circulated by Luther’s friends; and by the advocates of conservatism, in spite of the usual protestation, “I do not know Luther,” it was made to serve against Erasmus. FIRST YEARS OF THE REFORMATION 185 It became more and more clear that the mediating and conciliatory position which Erasmus wished to take up would soon be altogether untenable. The inquisitor Jacob Hoogstraten had come from Cologne, where he was a member of the University, to Louvain, to work against Luther there, as he had worked against Reuchlin. On the 7th of November, 1519, the Louvain faculty, follow- ing the example of that of Cologne, proceeded to take the decisive step: the solemn condemnation of a number of Luther’s opinions. In future no place could be less suitable to Erasmus than Louvain, the citadel of action against reformers. It is surprising that he remained there another two years. The expectation that he would be able to speak the conciliating word was paling. For the rest he failed to see the true proportions. During the first months of 1520 his attention was almost entirely taken up by his own polemics with Lee, a paltry incident in the great revo- lution. The desire to keep aloof got more and more the upper hand of him. In June he writes to Melanchthon: “I see that matters begin to look like sedition. It is perhaps necessary that scandals occur, but I should pre- fer not to be the author.” He has, he thinks, by his influence with Wolsey, prevented the burning of Luther’s writings in England, which had been ordered. But he was mistaken. The burning had taken place in London, as early as the 12th of May. The best proof that Erasmus had practically given up his hope to play a conciliatory part may be found in what follows. In the summer of 1520 the famous meet- ing between the three monarchs, Henry VIII, Francis I and Charles V, took place at Calais. Erasmus was to 186 ERASMUS go there in the train of his prince. How would such a congress of princes,—where in peaceful conclave the interests of France, England, Spain, the German Empire and a considerable part of Italy were represented to- gether—have affected Erasmus’ imagination, if his ideal had remained unshaken! But there are no traces of this. Erasmus was at Calais in July, 1520, had some conversation with Henry VIII there, and greeted More, but it does not appear that he attached any other im- portance to the journey than that of an opportunity, for the last time, to greet his English friends. It was awkward for Erasmus that just at this time, when the cause of faith took so much harsher forms, his duties as counsellor to the youthful Charles, now back from Spain to be crowned as emperor, circum- scribed his liberty more than before. In the summer of 1520 appeared, based on the incriminating material fur- nished by the Louvain faculty, the papal bull declaring Luther to be a heretic, and, unless he should speedily recant, excommunicating him. “I fear the worst for the unfortunate Luther,’ Erasmus writes, September 9, 1520, “so does conspiracy rage everywhere, so princes are incensed with him on all sides, and, most of all, Pope Leo. Would Luther had followed my advice and ab- stained from those hostile and seditious actions! They will not rest until they have quite subverted the study of languages and the good learning. . . . Out of the hatred against these and the stupidity of monks did this tragedy first arise. . . . I do not meddle with it. For the rest, a bishopric is waiting for me if I choose to write against Luther.” Indeed, Erasmus had become, by virtue of his enor- ——— FIRST YEARS OF THE REFORMATION 187 mous celebrity, as circumstances would have it, more and more a valuable asset in the great policy of emperor and pope. People wanted to use his name and make him choose sides. And that he would not do for any con- sideration. He wrote evasively to the Pope about his relations with Luther without altogether disavowing him. How zealously he defends himself from the suspicion of being on Luther’s side as noisy monks make out in their sermons, who summarily link the two in their scoffing disparagement. But also by the other side he is pressed to choose sides and to speak out. Towards the end of October, 1520, the coronation of the emperor took place at Aix-la-Chapelle. Erasmus was perhaps present; in any case he accom- panied the Emperor to Cologne. There, on the 5th of November, he had an interview about Luther with the Elector Frederick of Saxony. He was persuaded to write down the result of that discussion in the form of 22 Axiomata concerning Luther’s cause. Against his inten- tion they were printed at once. Erasmus’ hesitation in those days between the repudia- tion and the approbation of Luther is not discreditable to him. It is the tragic defect running through his whole personality: this refusal or inability ever to draw ulti- mate conclusions. Had he only been a calculating and selfish nature, afraid of losing his life, he would long since have altogether forsaken Luther’s cause. It is his misfortune affecting his fame, that he continually shows his weaknesses, whereas what is great in him lies deep. At Cologne Erasmus also met the man, with whom, as a promising young humanist, 14 years younger than him- self, he had, for some months, shared a room in the 188 | ERASMUS house of Aldus’ father-in-law, at Venice: Hieronymus Aleander, now sent to the Emperor as a papal nuncio, to persuade him to conform his imperial policy to that of the Pope, in the matter of the great ecclesiastical ques- tion, and give effect to the papal excommunication by the imperial ban. It must have been somewhat painful for Erasmus that this friend had so far surpassed him in power and posi- tion, and was now called to bring by diplomatic means the solution which he himself would have liked to see achieved by ideal harmony, good will and toleration. He had never trusted Aleander, and was more than ever on his guard against him. As a humanist, in spite of bril- liant gifts, Aleander was by far Erasmus’ inferior, and had never, like him, risen from literature to serious theological studies; he had simply prospered in the ser- vice of Church magnates (whom Erasmus had given up early). This man was now invested with the highest mediating powers. To what degree of exasperation Erasmus’ most violent antagonists at Louvain had now been reduced, is seen from the witty and slightly malicious account he gives Thomas More of his meeting with Egmondanus, before the rector of the university who wanted to reconcile them. Still things did not look so black as Ulrich von Hutten thought, when he wrote to Erasmus: “Do you think that you are still safe, now that Luther’s books are burned? Fly, and save yourself for us!” Ever more emphatic do Erasmus’ protestations be- come that he has nothing to do with Luther. Long ago he had already requested him not to mention his name, and Luther promised it: “Very well, then, I shall not FIRST YEARS OF THE REFORMATION 189 again refer to you, neither will other good friends, since it troubles you.” Ever louder, too, are Erasmus’ com- plaints become about the raving of the monks at him, and his demands that the mendicant orders may be de- prived of the right to preach. In April, 1521, comes the moment in the world’s his- tory to which Christendom has been looking forward: Luther at the Diet of Worms, holding fast to his opin- ions, confronted by the highest authority in the Empire. So great is the rejoicing in Germany that for a moment it may seem that the emperor’s power is in danger rather than Luther and his adherents. “If I had been present,” writes Erasmus, “I should have endeavoured that this tragedy would have been so tempered by mod- erate arguments that it could not afterwards break out again to the still greater detriment of the world.” The imperial sentence was pronounced: within the Empire (as in the Burgundian Netherlands before that time) Luther’s books were to be burned, his adherents arrested and their goods confiscated, and Luther was to be given up to the authorities. Erasmus hopes that now relief will follow. “The Luther tragedy is at an end with us here; would it had never appeared on the stage.” In these days Albrecht Diirer, on hearing the false news of Luther’s death, wrote in the diary of his journey that passionate exclamation: “OQ Erasmus of Rotterdam, where will you be? Hear, you knight of Christ, ride forth beside the Lord Christ, protect the truth, obtain the martyrs’ crown. For you are but an old manikin. I have heard you say that you have allowed yourself two more years, in which you are still fit to do some work; spend them well, in behalf 190 ERASMUS of the Gospel and the true Christian faith, . . . O Erasmus, be on this side, that God may be proud of you.” It expresses confidence in Erasmus’ power, but at bot- tom is the expectation that he will not do all this. Diirer had rightly understood Erasmus. The struggle abated nowise, least of all at Louvain. Latomus, the most dignified and able of Louvain divines, had now become one of the most serious opponents of Luther and, in so doing, touched Erasmus, too, indirectly. To Nicholas of Egmond, the Carmelite, another of Eras- mus’ compatriots had been added, as a violent antagonist, Vincent Dirks of Haarlem, a Dominican. Erasmus ad- dresses himself to the faculty, to defend himself against the new attacks, and to explain why he has never written against Luther. He will read him, he will soon take up something to quiet the tumult. He succeeds in getting Aleander, who arrived at Louvain in June, to prohibit preaching against him. The Pope still hopes that Alean- der will succeed in bringing back Erasmus, with whom he is again on friendly terms, to the right track. But Erasmus began to consider the only exit which was now left to him: to leave Louvain and the Nether- lands to regain his menaced independence. The occasion to depart had long ago presented itself: the third edition of his New Testament called him to Basle once more. It would not be a permanent departure, and he pur- posed to return to Louvain. On the 28th of October (his birthday) he left the town where he had spent four difficult years. His chambers in the College of the Lily were reserved for him and he left his books behind. On the 15th of November he reached Basle. ae FIRST YEARS OF THE REFORMATION 191 Soon the rumour spread that out of fear for Aleander he had saved himself by flight. But the representation, revived again in our days, in spite of Erasmus’ own painstaking denial, that Aleander should have cunningly and expressly driven him from the Netherlands, is inher- ently improbable. So far as the Church was concerned, Erasmus would at almost any point be more dangerous than at Louvain, in the headquarters of conservatism, under immediate control of the strict Burgundian gov- ernment, where, it seemed, he could sooner or later be pressed into the service of the anti-Lutheran policy. It was this contingency, as Dr. Allen has correctly pointed out, which he feared and evaded. Not for his bodily safety did he emigrate; Erasmus would not have been touched; he was far too valuable an asset for such measures. It was his mental independence, so dear to him above all else, that he felt was threatened; and, to safeguard that, he did not return to Louvain. ¢ XVII ERASMUS AT BASLE BASLE HIS DWELLING-PLACE FOR NEARLY EIGHT YEARS: 1521-1529—POLITICAL THOUGHT OF ERASMUS—CONCORD AND PEACE—ANTI-WAR WRITINGS—OPINIONS CONCERN- ING PRINCES AND GOVERNMENT—NEW EDITIONS OF SEVERAL FATHERS—THE COLLOQUIA—CONTROVERSIES WITH STUNICA, BEDDA, ETC.—_QUARREL WITH HUTTEN— EPPENDORFF. It is only towards the evening of life that the picture of Erasmus acquires the features with which it was to go down to posterity. Only at Basle—delivered from the troublesome pressure of parties wanting to enlist him, transplanted from an environment of haters and oppo- nents at Louvain to a circle of friends, kindred spirits, . helpers and admirers, emancipated from the courts of princes, independent of the patronage of the great, unre- mittingly devoting his tremendous energy to the work that was dear to him—did he become Holbein’s Eras- mus. In those late years he approaches most closely to the ideal of his personal life. He did not think that there were still fifteen years in store for him. Long before, since he became forty years old, in 1506, in fact, Erasmus had been in an old-age mood. “The last act of the play has begun,” he keeps saying, after 1517. He now felt practically independent as to money mat- ters. Many years had passed before he could say that. But peace of mind did not come with competence. It never came. He never became truly placid and serene, 192 ad ERASMUS AT BASLE 193 as Holbein’s picture seems to represent him. He was always too much concerned about what people said or thought of him. Even at Basle he did not feel thor- oughly at home. He still speaks repeatedly of a removal in the near future to Rome, to France, to England, or back to the Netherlands. Physical rest, at any rate, which was not in him, was granted him by circumstances: since for nearly eight years he now remained at Basle, and then he lived at Freiburg for six. Erasmus at Basle is a man whose ideals of the world and society have failed him. What remains of that happy expectation of a golden age of peace and light, in which he had believed as late as 1517? What of his trust in good will and rational insight, in which he wrote the Institutio Principis Christiani for the youthful Charles V? To Erasmus all the weal of state and society had always been merely a matter of personal morality and intellectual enlightenment. By recommending and spreading those two he at one time thought he had introduced the great renovation himself. From the moment when he saw that the conflict would lead to an exasperated struggle he refused any longer to be any- thing but a spectator. As an actor in the great ecclesias- tical combat Erasmus had voluntarily left the stage. But he does not give up his ideal. “Let us resist,’”’ he concludes an Epistle about gospel philosophy, “not by taunts and threats, not by force of arms and injustice, but by simple discretion, by benefits, by gentleness and tolerance.” Towards the close of his life, he prays: “If Thou, O God, deignst to renew that Holy Spirit in the hearts of all, then also will those external disasters cease. 194 ERASMUS ... Bring order to this chaos, Lord Jesus, let thy Spirit spread over these waters of sadly troubled dogmas.” Concord, peace, sense of duty and kindliness, were all valued highly by Erasmus; yet he rarely saw them real- ised in practical life. He becomes disillusioned. After the short spell of political optimism he never speaks of the times any more but in bitter terms—a most criminal age, he says—and again, the most unhappy and most depraved age imaginable. In vain had he always written in the cause of peace: Querela pacis, the complaint of peace, the adage Dulce bellum inexpertis, war is sweet to those who have not tried it, Oratio de pace et discordia, and more still. Erasmus thought rather highly of his pacifistic labours: “that polygraph, who never leaves off persecuting war by means of his pen,” thus he makes a character of the Colloquies designate himself. Accord- ing to a tradition noted by Melanchthon, Pope Julius is said to have called him before him in connection with his advice about the war with Venice,’ and to have remarked to him angrily, that he should stop writing on the con- cerns of princes: “You do not understand those things!” Erasmus had, in spite of a certain innate moderation, a wholly non-political mind. He lived too much out- side of practical reality, and thought too naively of the corrigibility of mankind, to realise the difficulties and necessities of government. His ideas about a good ad- ministration were extremely primitive, and, as is often the case in scholars of a strongly ethical bias, very revo- lutionary at bottom, though he never dreamed of drawing -1 Melanchthon, Opera, Corpus Reformatorum XII 266 where he refers to Querela pacis, which, however, was not written before 1517; vide A. 603 and I p. 37.10. ERASMUS AT BASLE 195 the practical inferences. His friendship with political and juridical thinkers, as More, Budaeus and Zasius, had not changed him. Questions of forms of government, law or right, did not exist for him. Economic problems he saw in idyllic simplicity. The prince should reign gratuitously and impose as few taxes as possible. “The good prince has all that loving citizens possess.” The unemployed should be simply driven away. We feel in closer contact with the world of facts when he enu- merates the works of peace for the prince: the cleaning of towns, building of bridges, halls, streets, draining of pools, shifting of river-beds, the diking and reclamation of moors. It is the Netherlander who speaks here, and at the same time the man in whom the need of cleansing and clearing away is a fundamental trait of character. Vague politicians like Erasmus are prone to judge princes very severely, since they take them to be respon- sible for all wrongs. Erasmus praises them personally, but condemns them in general. From the kings of his time he had for a long time expected peace in church and state. They had disappointed him. But his severe judg- ment of princes he derived rather from his classic reading than from political experience of his own times. In the later editions of the Adagia he often reverts to princes, their task and their neglect of duty, without ever mentioning special princes. “There are those who sow the seeds of dissension between their townships in order to fleece the poor unhindered and to satisfy their gluttony by the hunger of innocent citizens.” In the adage Scarabeus aquilam quaerit he represents the prince under the image of the Eagle as the great cruel robber and persecutor. In another, Aut regem aut fatuum 196 ERASMUS nasci oportere, and in Dulce bellum inexpertis he utters his frequently quoted dictum: “The people found and develop towns, the folly of princes devastates them.” “The princes conspire with the Pope, and perhaps with the Turk, against the happiness of the people,” he writes to Colet in 1518. He was an academic critic writing from his study. A revolutionary purpose was as foreign to Erasmus as it was to More when writing the Utopia. “Bad monarchs should perhaps be suffered now and then. The remedy should not be tried.” It may be doubted whether Eras- mus exercised much real influence on his contemporaries by means of his diatribes against princes. One would fain believe that his ardent love of peace and bitter arraignment of the madness of war had some effect. They have undoubtedly spread pacific sentiments in the broad circles of intellectuals who read Erasmus, but un- fortunately the history of the 16th century shows little evidence that such sentiments bore fruit in actual prac- tice. However this may be, Erasmus’ strength was not in these political declamations. He could never be a leader of men with their passions and their harsh in- terests. His life-work lay elsewhere. Now, at Basle, though tormented more and more frequently by his painful complaint which he had already carried for so many years, he could devote himself more fully than ever before to the great task he had set himself: the opening up of the pure sources of Christianity, the exposition of the truth of the Gospel in all the simple comprehensibil- ity in which he saw it. In a broad stream flowed the editions of the Fathers, of classic authors, the new edi- ERASMUS AT BASLE 197 tions of the New Testament, of the Adagia, of his own Letters, together with Paraphrases of the New Testa- ment, Commentaries on Psalms, and a number of new theological, moral and philological treatises. In 1522 he was ill for months on end; yet in that year Arnobius and the third edition of the New Testament succeeded Cyprian whom he had already annotated at Louvain and edited in 1520, closely followed by Hilary in 1523 and next by a new edition of Jerome in 1524. Later appeared Irenaeus, 1526; Ambrose, 1527; Augustine, 1528-9, and a Latin translation of Chrysostom in 1530. The rapid succession of these comprehensive works proves that the work was done, as Erasmus always worked: hastily, with an extraordinary power of concentration and a surpris- ing command of his mnemonic faculty, but without severe criticism and the painful accuracy that modern philology requires in such editions. Neither the polemical Erasmus nor the witty humor- - ist had been lost in the erudite divine and the disillu- sioned reformer. ‘The paper-warrior we would further gladly have dispensed with, but not the humorist, for many treasures of literature. But the two are linked inseparably. The Colloquies prove this. What was said about the Moria may be repeated here: if in the literature of the world only the Colloquies and the Moria have remained alive, that choice of his- tory is right. Not in the sense that in literature only Erasmus’ pleasantest, lightest and most readable works were preserved, whereas the ponderous theological eru- dition was silently relegated to the shelves of libraries. It was indeed Erasmus’ best work that was kept alive in the Moria and the Colloquies. With these his spar- 198 ERASMUS kling wit has charmed the world. If only we had space here to assign to the Erasmus of the Colloquies his just and lofty place in that brilliant constellation of 16th century followers of Democritus: Rabelais, Ariosto, Montaigne, Cervantes and Ben Jonson! When Erasmus gave the Colloquies their definite form at Basle, they had already had a long and curious gene- sis. At first they had been no more than Familiarium Colloquiorum Formulae, models of colloquial Latin con- versation, written at Paris before 1500, for the use of his pupils. Augustine Caminade, the shabby friend who was fond of living on young Erasmus’ genius, had collected them and had turned them to advantage within a limited compass. He had long since been dead, when one Lambert Hollonius of Liege sold the manuscript that he had got from Caminade to Froben at Basle. Beatus Rhenanus, although then already Erasmus’ trusted friend, had it printed at once without the latter’s knowledge. That was in 1518. Erasmus was justly offended at it, the more as the book was full of slovenly blunders and solecisms. So he at once prepared a better edition him- self, published by Maertensz at Louvain in 1519. At that time the work really contained but one true dia- logue, the nucleus of the later Convivium profanum. The rest were formulae of etiquette and short talks. But already in this form it was, apart from its usefulness to Latinists, so full of happy wit and humorous inven- tion that it became very popular. Even before 1522 it had appeared in 25 editions, mostly reprints, at Antwerp, Paris, Strassburg, Cologne, Cracow, Deventer, Leipsic, London, Vienna, Mayence. At Basle Erasmus himself revised an edition which was ERASMUS AT BASLE 199 published in March, 1522, by Froben, dedicated to the latter’s six-year-old son, the author’s godchild, Johannes Erasmius Froben. Soon after he did more than revise. In 1523 and 1524 first ten new dialogues, afterwards four, and again six, were added to the Formulae, and at last in 1526 the title was changed to Familiarium Collo- quiorum Opus. It remained dedicated to the boy Froben and went on growing with each new edition: a rich and motley collection of dialogues, each a masterpiece of literary form, well-knit, spontaneous, convincing, unsur- passed in lightness, vivacity and fluent Latin; each one a finished one-act play. From that year on, the stream of editions and translations flowed almost uninterrupt- edly for two centuries. Erasmus’ mind had lost nothing of its acuteness and freshness when, so many years after the Moria, he again set foot in the field of satire. As to form the Colloquies are less confessedly satirical than the Moria. With its telling subject, the Praise of Folly, the latter at once introduces itself as a satire: whereas, at first sight, the Colloquies might seem to be mere innocent genre-pieces. But as to the contents, they are more satirical, at least more directly so. The Moria, as a satire, is philosophical and general; the Colloquia are up-to-date and special. At the same time they combine more the positive and the negative elements. In the Moria Erasmus’ own ideal dwells unexpressed behind the representation; in the Colloquia he continually and clearly puts it in the foreground. On this account they form, notwithstand- ing all the jests and mockery, a profoundly serious moral treatise and are closely akin to the Enchiridion militis Christiani. What Erasmus really demanded of the world 200 ERASMUS and of mankind, how he pictured to himself that pas- sionately desired, purified Christian society of good morals, fervent faith, simplicity and moderation, kindli- ness, toleration and peace—this we can nowhere else find so clearly and well-expressed as in the Colloquia. In these last fifteen years of his life Erasmus resumes, by means of a series of moral-dogmatic disquisitions, the topics he broached in the Enchiridion: the exposition of simple, general Christian conduct; untrammeled and natural ethics. That is his message of redemption. It eame to many out of Hxomologesis, de Hsu carnium, Lingua, Institutio christiani matrimoni, Vidua christi- ana, Ecclesiastes. But, to far larger numbers, the message was contained in the Colloquies. The Colloquia gave rise to much more hatred and eontest than the Moria, and not without reason, for in them Erasmus attacked persons. He allowed himself the pleasure of ridiculing his Louvain antagonists. Lee had already been introduced as a sycophant and brag- gart into the edition of 1519, and when the quarrel was assuaged, in 1522, the reference was expunged. Vincent Dirks was caricatured in “The Funeral” (1526) as a eovetous friar, who extorts from the dying testaments in favour of hisorder. Heremained. Later sarcastic obser- vations were added about Beda and numbers of others. The adherents of Oecolampadius took a figure with a long nose in the Colloquies for their leader; “Oh, no,” replied Erasmus, “it is meant for quite another person.” Hence- forth all those who were at loggerheads with Erasmus, and they were many, ran the risk of being pilloried in the Colloquia. It was no wonder that this work, espe- ERASMUS AT BASLE 201 cially with its scourging mockery of the monastic orders, became the object of controversy. Erasmus never emerged from his polemics. He was, no doubt, serious when he said that, in his heart, he abhorred and had never desired them; but his caustic mind often got the better of his heart, and having once begun to quarrel he undoubtedly enjoyed giving his mockery the rein and wielding his facile dialectic pen. For understanding his personality it is unnecessary here to deal at large with all those fights on paper. Only the most important ones need be mentioned. Since 1516 a pot had been boiling for Erasmus in Spain. A theologian of the University at Alcala, Diego Lopez Zuniga, or, in Latin, Stunica, had been preparing Annotations to the edition of the New Testament: “a second Lee,” said Erasmus. At first Cardinal Ximenes had prohibited the publication, but in 1520, after his death, the storm broke. For some years Stunica kept persecuting Erasmus with his criticism, to the latter’s great vexation; at last there followed a rapprochement, probably as Erasmus became more conservative, and a kindly attitude on the part of Stunica. No less long and violent was the quarrel with the syndic of the Sorbonne, Noél Bedier or Beda, which began in 1522. The Sorbonne was prevailed upon to condemn several of Erasmus’ dicta as heretical in 1526. The effort of Beda to implicate Erasmus in the trial of Louis de Berquin, who had translated the condemned writings and who was eventually burned at the stake for faith’s sake, 1529, made the matter still more disagree- able for Erasmus. 202 ERASMUS It is clear enough that, both at Paris and at Louvain in the circles of the theological faculties the chief cause of exasperation was in the Colloquia. Egmondanus and Vincent Dirks did not forgive Erasmus for having acridly censured their station and their personalities. More courteous than the aforementioned polemics was the fight with a high-born Italian, Alberto Pio, prince of Carpi; acrid and bitter was one with a group of Spanish monks, who brought the Inquisition to bear upon him. in Spain “Erasmistas” was the name of those who inclined to more liberal conceptions of the creed. In this way the matter accumulated for the volume of Erasmus’ works which contains, according to his own arrangement, all his Apologiae: not “excuses,” but “vindications.” ‘Miserable man that I am; they just fill a volume,” exclaimed Erasmus. Two of his polemics merit a somewhat closer exam- ination: that with Ulrich von Hutten and that with Luther. Hutten, knight and humanist, the enthusiastic herald of a national-German uplift, the ardent hater of papacy and supporter of Luther, was certainly a hot-head and perhaps somewhat of a muddle-head. He had applauded Erasmus when the latter still seemed to be the coming man and had afterwards besought him to take Luther’s side. Erasmus had soon discovered that this noisy par- tisan might compromise him. Had not one of Hutten’s rash satires been ascribed to him, Erasmus? There came a time when Hutten could no longer abide Eras- mus. His knightly instinct reacted on the very weak- nesses of Erasmus’ character: the fear of committing ERASMUS AT BASLE . 203 himself and the inclination to repudiate a supporter in time of danger. Erasmus knew that weakness himself: “Not all have strength enough for martyrdom,” he writes to Richard Pace in 1521. “I fear that I shall, in case it results in a tumult, follow St. Peter’s example.” But this acknowledgment does not discharge him from the burden of Hutten’s reproaches which he flung at him in fiery language in 1523. In this quarrel Erasmus’ own fame pays the penalty of his fault. For nowhere does he show himself so undignified and puny as in that “Sponge against Hutten’s mire,” which the latter did not live to read. Hutten, disillusioned and forsaken, died at an early age in 1523, and Erasmus did not scruple to pub- lish the venomous pamphlet against his former friend after his demise. Hutten, however, was avenged upon Erasmus living. One of his adherents, Henry of Eppendorff, inherited Hutten’s bitter disgust with Erasmus and persecuted him -for years. Getting hold of one of Erasmus’ letters in which he was denounced, he continually threatened him with an action for defamation of character. Eppen- dorff’s hostility so thoroughly exasperated Erasmus that he fancied he could detect his machinations and spies everywhere even after the actual persecution had long ceased. XVIII CONTROVERSY WITH LUTHER AND GROWING CONSERVATISM ERASMUS PERSUADED TO WRITE AGAINST LUTHER—D#2 LIBERO ARBITRIO: 1524-LUTHER’S ANSWER: DE SERVO ARBITRIO—ERASMUS’ INDEFINITENESS CONTRASTED WITH LUTHER’S EXTREME RIGOUR—ERASMUS HENCE- FORTH ON THE SIDE OF CONSERVATISM—THE BISHOP OF BASLE AND OECOLAMPADIUS—ERASMUS’ HALF- HEARTED DOGMATICS: CONFESSION, CEREMONIES, WOR- SHIP OF THE SAINTS, EUCHARIST—INSTITUTIO CHRIS- TIANI MATRIMONII: 1523-HE FEELS SURROUNDED BY ENEMIES. At length Erasmus was led, in spite of all, to do what he had always tried to avoid: he wrote against Luther. But it did not in the least resemble the “geste” Erasmus at one time contemplated, in the cause of peace in Christendom and uniformity of faith, to call a halt to the impetuous Luther, and thereby to recall the world to its senses. In the great act of the Reformation their polemics were merely an after-play. Not Erasmus alone was disillusioned and tired,—Luther too was past his heroic prime, circumscribed by conditions, forced into the world of affairs, a disappointed man. Erasmus had wished to persevere in his resolution to remain a spectator of the great tragedy. “If, as appears from the wonderful success of Luther’s cause, God wills all this,’—thus did Erasmus reason—“and He has per- haps judged such a drastic surgeon as Luther necessary for the corruption of these times, then it is not my busi- ness to withstand him.” But he was not left in peace. While he went on protesting that he had nothing to do 204 CONTROVERSY WITH LUTHER 205 with Luther and differed widely from him, the de- fenders of the old Church adhered to the standpoint urged as early as 1520 by Nicholas of Egmond before the rector of Louvain: “So long as he refuses to write against Luther, we take him to be a Lutheran.” So matters stood. “That you are looked upon as a Lutheran here is certain,” Vives writes to him from the Nether- lands in 1522. Ever stronger became the pressure to write against ‘Luther. From Henry VIII came a call, communicated by Erasmus’ old friend Tunstall, from George of Saxony, from Rome itself, whence Pope Adrian VI, his old pa- tron, had urged him shortly before his death. Erasmus thought he could refuse no longer. He tried some dialogues in the style of the Colloquies, but did not get on with them; and probably they would not have pleased those who were desirous of enlisting his services. Between Luther and Erasmus himself there had been no personal correspondence, since the former had promised him, in 1520: “Well, then, Erasmus, I shall not mention your name again.” Now that Erasmus had prepared to attack Luther, however, there came an epistle from > the latter, written April 15th, 1524, in which the re former, in his turn, requested Erasmus in his own words: “Please remain now what you have always professed yourself desirous of being: a mere spectator of our tragedy.” There is a ring of ironical contempt in Luther’s words, but Erasmus called the letter “rather humane; I had not the courage to reply with equal humanity, because of the sycophants.” In order to be able to combat Luther with a clear conscience Erasmus had naturally to choose a point on 206 ERASMUS which he differed from Luther in his heart. It was not’ one of the more superficial parts of the Church’s struc- ture. For these he either, with Luther, cordially re y jected, such as ceremonies, observances, fasting, etc.,. or, though more moderately than Luther, he had his! doubts about them, as the sacraments or the primacy of St. Peter. So he naturally came to the point where the deepest gulf yawned between their natures, between their conceptions of the essence of faith, and thus to the” central and eternal problem of good and evil, guilt and compulsion, liberty and bondage, God and man. Luther confessed in his reply that here indeed the vital point had been touched. De Libero Arbitrio diatribe, ie. A Disquisition upon Free Will, appeared in September, 1524. Was Erasmus qualified to write about such a subject? In conformity with his method and with his evident pur- pose to vindicate authority and tradition, this time, ‘Erasmus developed the argument that Scripture teaches, doctors affirm, philosophers prove, and human reason testifies man’s will to be free. Without acknowledg- ment of free will the terms of God’s justice and God’s mercy remain without meaning. What would be the sense of the teachings, reproofs, admonitions of Scrip- ture (Timothy III) if all happened according to mere and inevitable necessity? To what purpose is obedience praised, if for good and evil works we are equally but tools to God, as the hatchet to the carpenter? And if this were so, it would be dangerous to reveal such a doctrine to the multitude, for morality is dependent on the consciousness of freedom. Luther received the treatise of his antagonist with CONTROVERSY WITH LUTHER 207 disgust and contempt. In writing his reply, however, he suppressed these feelings outwardly and observed the rules of courtesy. But his inward anger is revealed in the contents itself of De Servo Arbitrio, On the will not ~ free. For here he really did what Erasmus had just reproached him with,—trying to heal a dislocated mem- ber by tugging at it in the opposite direction. More fiercely than ever before, his formidable boorish mind drew the startling inferences of his burning faith. With-/ out any reserve he now accepted all the extremes of : absolute determimism. In order to confute indeter-— minism in explicit terms, he was now forced to have. recourse to those primitive metaphors of exalted faith striving to express the inexpressible: God’s two wills, which do not coincide, God’s “eternal hatred of mankind, a hatred not only on account of demerits and the works of free will, but a hatred that existed even before the world was created,” and that metaphor of the human will, which, as a riding beast, stands in the middle between God and the devil and which is mounted by one or the other without being able to move towards either of the two contending riders. If anywhere, Luther’s doctrine in De Servo Arbitrio means a recrudescence of faith and a straining of relig- ious conceptions. But it was Luther who here stood on the rockbed of a profound and mystic faith in which the absolute con- science of the eternal pervades all. In him all concep- tions, like dry straw, were consumed in the glow of God’s majesty, for him each human co-operation to attain to salvation was a profanation of God’s glory. Erasmus’ mind after all did not truly live in the ideas which were ee 208 ERASMUS here disputed, of sin and grace, of redemption and the glory of God as the final cause of all that is. Was, then, Erasmus’ cause in all respects inferior? Was Luther right at the core? Perhaps. Dr. Murray | rightly reminds us of Hegel’s saying that tragedy is not the conflict between right and wrong, but the conflict =) oO) between right and right. The combat of Luther and Erasmus proceeded beyond the point at which our judg- ment is forced to halt and has to accept an equivalence, nay a compatibility of affirmation and negation. And this fact, that they here were fighting with words and metaphors in a sphere beyond that of what may be known and expressed, was understood by Erasmus. Erasmus, the man of the fine shades, for whom ideas eternally blended into each other and interchanged, called a Proteus by Luther; Luther the man of over- emphatic expression about all matters. The Dutchman, who sees the sea, was opposed to the German who looks out on mountain tops. , “This is quite true that we cannot speak of God but with inadequate words.” “Many problems should be deferred, not to the cecumenical council, but till the time when, the glass and the darkness having been taken away, we shall see God face to face.” “What is free of error?” “There are in sacred literature certain sanc- tuaries into which God has not willed that we should penetrate further.” The Catholic Church had on the point of free will reserved to itself some slight proviso, left a little elbow- room to the consciousness of human liberty under grace. Erasmus conceived that liberty in a considerably broader CONTROVERSY WITH LUTHER 209 spirit. Luther absolutely denied it. The opinion of contemporaries was at first too much dominated by their participation in the great struggle as such: they ap- plauded Erasmus, because he struck boldly at Luther, or the other way about, according to their sympathies. Not only Vives applauded Erasmus, but also more orthodox Catholics such as Sadolet. The German humanists, un- willing, for the most part, to break with the ancient Church, were moved by Erasmus’ attack to turn their backs still more upon Luther: Mutianus, Zasius, and Pirkheimer. Even Melanchthon inclined to Erasmus’ standpoint. Others, like Capito, once a zealous sup- porter, now washed their hands of him. Soon Calvin with the iron cogency of his argument was completely to take Luther’s side. It is worth while to quote the opinion of a con- temporary Catholic scholar about the relations of Erasmus and Luther. “Erasmus,” says F. X. Kiefl, . “with his concept of free, unspoiled human nature was intrinsically much more foreign to the Church than Luther. He only combated it, however, with haughty scepticism: for which reason Luther with subtle psychol- ogy upbraided him for liking to speak of the shortcom- ings and the misery of the Church of Christ in such a way that his readers could not help laughing, instead of bringing his charges, with deep sighs, as beseemed before God.” The Ayperaspistes, a voluminous treatise, in which Erasmus again addressed Luther, was nothing but an epilogue, which need not be discussed here at length. 1 Luther’s religidse Psyche, Hochland XV, 1917, p. 21. 210 ERASMUS Erasmus had thus, at last, openly taken sides. For, apart from the dogmatical point at issue itself, the most important part about De Libero Arbitrio was that in it he had expressly turned against the individual religious conceptions and had spoken in favour of authority and tradition of the Church. He always regarded himself as a Catholic. “Neither death nor life shall draw me from the communion of the Catholic Church,” he writes in 1522, and in the Hyperaspistes in 1526: “I have never been an apostate from the Catholic Church. I know that in this Church, which you call the Papist Church, there are many who displease me, but such I also see in your Church. One bears more easily the evils to which one is accustomed. Therefore I bear with this Church, until I shall see a better, and it cannot help bearing with me, until I shall myself be better. And he does not sail badly who steers a middle course between two several evils.” But was it possible to keep to that course? On either side people turned away from him. “I who, formerly, in countless letters was addressed as thrice great hero, Prince of letters, Sun of studies, Maintainer of true theology, am now ignored, or represented in quite dif- ferent colours,” he writes. How many of his old friends and congenial spirits had already gone! A sufficient number remained, however, who thought and hoped as Erasmus did. His untiring pen still con- tinued to propagate, especially by means of his letters, the moderating and purifying influence of his mind throughout all the countries of Europe. Scholars, high church dignitaries, nobles, students, and civil magis- trates were his correspondents. ‘The bishop of Basle CONTROVERSY WITH LUTHER 211 himself, Christopher of Utenheim, was a man after Eras- mus’ heart. A zealous advocate of humanism, he had attempted, as early as 1503, to reform the clergy of his bishopric by means of synodal statutes, without much success; afterwards he had called scholars like Oecolam- padius, Capito and Wimpheling to Basle. That was be- fore the great struggle began, which was soon to carry away Oecolampadius and Capito much further than the bishop of Basle or Erasmus approved. In 1522 Erasmus addressed the bishop in a treatise De interdicto esu car- nium, on the prohibition of eating meat. This was one of the last occasions on which he directly opposed the established order. The bishop, however, could no longer control the movement. A considerable number of the commonalty of Basle and the majority of the council were already on the side of radical Reformation. About a year after Erasmus, John Oecolampadius, whose first residence at Basle had also coincided with his (at that time he had helped Erasmus with Hebrew for the edition of the New Testament), returned to the town with the intention of organising the resistance to the old order there. In 1523 the council appointed him professor of Holy Scripture in the University; at the same time four Catholic pro- fessors lost their places. He succeeded in obtaining general permission for unlicensed preaching. Soon a far more hot-headed agitator, the impetuous Guillaume Farel, also arrived for active work at Basle and in the environs. He is the man who will afterwards reform Geneva and persuade Calvin to stay there. Though at first Oecolampadius began with caution to introduce novelties into the church service, Erasmus saw 212 ERASMUS these innovations with alarm. Especially the fanati- cism of Farel, whom he hated bitterly. It was these men who retarded what he still desired and thought possible: a compromise. His lambent spirit, which never fully decided in favour of a definite opinion, had, with regard to most of the disputed points, gradually fixed on a_ half-conservative midway standpoint, by means of which, without denying his deepest convic- tion, he tried to remain faithful to the Church. In 1524 he had expressed his sentiments about confession in the treatise Hxromologesis, or the way to confess. He accepts it halfway: if not instituted by Christ, or the Apostles, it was, in any case, by the Fathers. It should be piously preserved. Confession is of excel- lent use, though, at times, a great evil. In this way he tries “to admonish either party,” “neither to agree with nor to assail” the deniers, “though inclining to the side of the believers.” In the long list of his polemics he gradually finds op- portunities to define his views somewhat; circumstan- tially, for imstance, in the answers to Alberto Pio, of 1525 and 1529. Consequently it is always done in the form of an apology, whether he is attacked for the Col- loquia, or the Moria, Jerome, the Paraphrases or any- thing else. At last he recapitulates his views to some extent in De amabili Ecclesiae concordia, On the Ami- able Concord of the Church, of 1533, which, however, ranks hardly any more among his reformatory en- deavours. On most points Erasmus succeeds in finding moderate and conservative formulae. Even with regard to cere- monies he no longer merely rejects. He finds a kind CONTROVERSY WITH LUTHER 213 word to say even for fasting, which he had always ab- horred, for the veneration of relics and for Church fes- tivals. He does not want to abolish the worship of the Saints: it no longer entails danger of idolatry. He is even willing to admit the images: “He who takes the imagery out of life deprives it of its highest pleasure; we often discern more in images than we conceive from the written word.” Regarding Christ’s substantial pres- ence in the sacrament of the altar he holds fast to the Catholic view, but without fervour, only on the ground of the Church’s consensus, and because he cannot believe that Christ, who is truth and love, would have suffered his bride to cling so long to so horrid an error as to worship a crust of bread instead of him. But for these reasons he might, at need, accept Oecolampadius’ view. From the period at Basle dates one of the purest and most beneficent moral treatises of Erasmus’, the Jnstitu- tio Christiant matrimonii, On Christian Marriage, of 1526, written for Catherine of Aragon, queen of Eng- land, quite in the spirit of the Enchiridion, save for a certain diffuseness betraying old age. Later follows De Vidua christiana, the Christian Widow, for Mary of Hungary, which is as impeccable but less interesting. All this did not disarm the defenders of the old Church. They held fast to the clear picture of Erasmus’ creed that arose from the Colloquies and that could not be called purely Catholic. There it appeared only too clearly that however much Erasmus might desire to leave the letter intact, his heart was not in the convic- tions which were vital to the Catholic Church. Conse- quently the Colloquies were later, when Erasmus’ works were expurgated, placed on the index in the lump, with 214 ERASMUS the Moria and a few other works. The rest is “caute legenda,” to be read with caution. Much was rejected of the Annotations to the New Testament, of the Para- phrases and the Apologiae, very little of the Enchiridion, of the Ratio verae theologiae, and even of the Ezomo- logesis. But this was after the fight against the living Erasmus had long been over. So long as he remained at Basle, or elsewhere, as the centre of a large intellectual group whose force could not be estimated, just because it did not stand out as a party,—it was not known what turn he might yet take, what influence his mind might yet have on the Church. He remained a king of minds in his quiet study. The hatred that was felt for him, the watching of all his words and actions, were of a nature as only falls to the lot of the acknowledged great. The chorus of enemies who laid the fault of the whole Reformation on Erasmus was not silenced. “He laid the eggs which Luther and Zwingli have hatched.” With vexation Erasmus quoted ever new specimens of narrow-minded, malicious and stupid controversy. At Constance there lived a doctor who had hung his portrait on the wall merely to spit at it as often as he passed it. Erasmus jestingly compares his fate to that of Saint Cassianus who was stabbed to death by his pupils with pencils. Had he not been pierced to the quick for many years by the pens and tongues of countless people and did he not live in that torment without death bringing the end? The keen sensitiveness to opposition was seated very deeply with Erasmus. And he could never forbear irritating others into opposing him. XTX AT WAR WITH HUMANISTS AND REFORMERS ERASMUS TURNS AGAINST THE EXCESSES OF HUMANISM: ITS PAGANISM AND PEDANTIC CLASSICISM—CICERONI- ANUS: 1528-IT BRINGS HIM NEW ENEMIES—THE REFOR- MATION CARRIED THROUGH AT BASLE—HE EMIGRATES TO FREIBURG: 1529-HIS VIEW CONCERNING THE RE- SULTS OF THE REFORMATION. Nothing is more characteristic of the independence which Erasmus reserved for himself regarding all move- ments of his time than the fact that he also jained issue in the camp of the humanists. In 1528 there were pub- lished by Froben (the chief of the firm of John Froben had just died) two dialogues in one volume from Erasmus’ hand: one about the correct pronunciation of Latin and Greek, and one with the title Ciceronianus or, on the Best Diction, i.e. in writing and speaking Latin. Either was a proof that Erasmus had lost nothing of his liveliness and wit. The former treatise was purely philo- logic, and as such has had great influence; the other was satirical as well. It had a long history. Erasmus had always regarded classical studies as the panacea of civilisation, provided they were made ser- viceable to pure Christianity. His sincere ethical feeling made him recoil from the obscenity of a Poggio and the immorality of the early Italian humanists. At the same time his delicate and natural taste told him that a pedantic and servile imitation of antique models could never produce the desired result. Erasmus knew Latin 215 216 ERASMUS too well to be strictly classical; his Latin was alive and required freedom. In his early works we find taunts about the over-precise Latin purists: one had declared newly found fragment of Cicero to be thoroughly bar- baric; “among all sorts of authors none are so insuffer- able to me as those apes of Cicero.” In spite of the great expectations he cherished of classical studies for pure Christianity, he saw one danger: “that under the cloak of reviving ancient litera- ture paganism tries to rear its head, as there are those among Christians who acknowledge Christ only in name but inwardly breathe heathenism.” ‘This he writes in 1517 to Capito. In Italy scholars devote themselves too exclusively and in too pagan guise to bonae literae. He considered it his special task to assist in bringing it about that those bonae literae “which with the Italians have thus far been almost pagan, shall get used to speaking of Christ.” How it must have vexed Erasmus that in Italy of all countries he was, at the same time and in one breath, charged with heresy and questioned in respect to his knowledge and integrity as a scholar. Italians accused him of plagiary and trickery. He complained of it to Aleander, who, he thought, had a hand in it. In a letter of the 13th of October, 1527, to a professor at Toledo, we find the “ébauche” of the Ciceronianus. In addition to the haters of classic studies for the sake of orthodox belief, writes Erasmus, “lately another and new sort of enemies has broken from their ambush. These are troubled that the bonae literae speak of Christ, as though nothing can be elegant but what is pagan. To their ears Jupiter optimus maximus sounds HUMANISTS AND REFORMERS 217 more pleasant than Jesus Christus redemptor mundi, and patres conscripti more agreeable than sancir apostoli, ... They account it a greater dishonour to be no Ciceronian than no Christian, as if Cicero, if he should now come to life again, would not speak of Christian things in other words than in his time he spoke of his own religion! . . . What is the sense of this hate- ful swaggering with the name Ciceronian? I will tell you briefly, in your ear. With that pearl-powder they cover the paganism that is dearer to them than the glory of Christ.” To Erasmus Cicero’s style is by no means the ideal one. He prefers something more solid, succinct, vigorous, less polished, more manly. He who sometimes has to write a book in a day has no time to polish his style, often not even to read it over. . . . “What do I care for an empty dish of words, ten words here and there mumped from Cicero: I want all Cicero’s spirit.” These are apes at whom one may laugh, for far more serious than these things are the tumults of the so-called new Gospel, to which he next proceeds in this letter. And so, in the midst of all his polemics and bitter vindication, he allowed himself once more the pleasure of giving the reins to his love of scoffing, but, as in the Moria and Colloquia, ennobled by an almost passionate sincerity of Christian disposition and a natural sense of measure. The Ciceronianus is a masterpiece of ready, many-sided knowledge, of convincing eloquence, and of easy handling of a wealth of arguments. With splendid, quiet and yet lively breadth flows the long conversation between Bulephorus, representing Erasmus’ opinions, Hypologus, the interested inquirer, and Nosoponus, the 218 ERASMUS zealous Ciceronian, who, to preserve a perfect purity of mind, breakfasts off ten currants. Erasmus in drawing Nosoponus had evidently, in the main, alluded to one who could no longer reply: Chris- topher Longolius, who had died in 1522. The core of the Ciceronianus is where Erasmus points out the danger to Christian faith of a too zealous clas- sicism. He exclaims urgently: “It is paganism, believe me, Nosoponus, it is paganism that charms our ear and our soul in such things. We are Christians in name alone.” Why does a classic proverb sound better to us than a quotation from the bible: “corchorum inter olera,” “chick-weed among the vegetables,” better than “Saul among the prophets”? As a sample of the ab- surdity of Ciceronianism, he gives a translation of a dog- matic sentence in classical language: “Optimi maximique. Jovis interpres ac filius, servator, rex, juxta vatum re- sponsa, ex Olympo devolavit in terras,” for: Jesus Christ, the Word and the Son of the eternal Father, came into the world according to the prophets. Most humanists wrote indeed in that style. Was Erasmus aware that he here attacked his own past? After all, was it not exactly the same thing which he had done, to the indignation of his opponents, when translating Logos by Sermo instead of by Veum? Had he not himself desired that in the church hymns the metre should be corrected, not to mention his own classical odes and paeans to Mary and the saints? And was his warning against the partiality for classic prov- erbs and turns applicable to anything more than to the Adagia? We here see the aged Erasmus on the path of reaction HUMANISTS AND REFORMERS 219 which might eventually have led him far from human- ism. In his combat with humanistic purism he fore- shadows a Christian puritanism. As always his mockery procured him a new flood of invectives. Bembo and Sadolet, the masters of pure Latin, could afford to smile at it, but the impetuous Julius Caesar Scaliger violently inveighed against him, especially to avenge Longolius’ memory. Erasmus’ per- petual feeling of being persecuted got fresh food: he again thought that Aleander was at the bottom of it. “The Italians set the imperial court against me,” he writes in 1530. A year later all is quiet again. He writes jestingly: “Upon my word I am going to change my style, after Budaeus’ model and to become a Ciceronian according to the example of Sadolet and Bembo.” But even near the close of his life he was engaged in a new contest with Italians, because he had hurt their national pride; “they rage at me on all sides with slan- derous libels, as at the enemy of Italy and Cicero.” There were, as he had said himself, other difficulties touching him more closely. Conditions at Basle had for years been developing in a direction which distressed and alarmed him. When he established himself there in 1521, it might still have seemed to him as if the bishop, old Christopher of Utenheim, a great admirer of Erasmus and a man after his heart, would succeed in effecting a reformation at Basle, as he desired it; abol- ishing acknowledged abuses, but remaining within the fold of the Church. In that very year, 1521, however, the emancipation of the municipality from the bishop’s power—it had been in progress since Basle, in 150], 220 ERASMUS had joined the Swiss Confederacy,—was consummated. Henceforth the council was number one, now no longer exclusively made up of aristocratic elements. In vain did the bishop ally himself with his colleagues of Con- stance and Lausanne to maintain Catholicism. In the town the new creed got more and more the upper hand. When, however, in 1525, it had come to open tumults against the Catholic service, the council became more cautious and tried to reform more heedfully. Oecolampadius desired this, too. Relations between him and Erasmus were precarious. Erasmus him- self had at one time directed the religious thought of the impulsive, sensitive, restless young man. When he had, in 1520, suddenly sought refuge in a convent, he had expressly justified that step towards Erasmus, the condemner of binding vows. And now they saw each other again, at Basle in 1522: Oecolampadius having left the monastery, a convinced adherent and apostle of the new doctrine; Erasmus, the great spectator which he wished to be. Erasmus treated his old coadjutor coolly, and as the latter progressed, retreated more and more. Yet he kept steering a middle course and in 1525 gave some moderate advice to the council, which meanwhile had turned more Catholic again. The old bishop, who for some years had no longer resided in his town requested, in 1527, the chapter to re- lieve him of his office, and died shortly afterwards. Then events moved very quickly. After Bern had, meanwhile, reformed itself in 1528, Oecolampadius de- manded a decision also for Basle. Since the close of 1528 the town had been on the verge of civil war. A popular rising put an end to the resistance of the Coun- HUMANISTS AND REFORMERS 221 cil and cleared it of Catholic members; and in February, 1529, the old service was prohibited, the images were removed from the churches, the convents abolished, and the University suspended. Oecolampadius became the first minister in the “Miinster” and leader of the Basle church, for which he soon drew up a reformatory ordi- nance. The new bishop remained at Porrentruy, and the chapter removed to Freiburg. The moment of departure had now come for Erasmus. His position at Basle in 1529 somewhat resembled, but in a reversed sense, the one at Louvain in 1521. Then the Catholics wanted to avail themselves of his services against Luther, now the Evangelicals would fain have kept him at Basle. For his name was still as a banner. His presence would strengthen the position of reformed Basle; on the one hand, because, as people reasoned, if he were not of the same mind as the reformers, he would have left the town long ago; on the other hand, because his figure seemed to guarantee moderation and might attract many hesitating minds. It was, therefore, again to safeguard his independence that Erasmus changed his residence. It was a great wrench this time. Old age and invalidism had made the restless man a stay-at-home. As he foresaw trouble from the side of the municipality, he asked Archduke Ferdinand,—who for his brother Charles V governed the German empire and just then presided over the diet of Speyer,—to send him a safe conduct for the whole empire and an invitation, moreover, to come to court which he did not dream of accepting. As a place of refuge he had selected the not far distant town of Frei- burg in Breisgau, which was directly under the strict 222 ERASMUS government of the Austrian house, and where he, there- fore, need not be afraid of such a turn of affairs as that at Basle. It was, moreover, a juncture at which the imperial authority and the Catholic cause in Germany seemed again to be gaining ground rapidly. Erasmus would not or could not keep his departure a secret. He sent the most precious of his possessions in advance, and when this had drawn attention to his plan, he purposely invited Oecolampadius to a farewell talk. The reformer testified his sincere friendship for Erasmus, which the latter did not decline, provided he granted him to differ on certain points of dogma. Oecolampadius tried to keep him from leaving the town, and, when it proved too late for that, to persuade him to return later. They took leave with a handshake. Erasmus had de- sired to jom his boat at a distant landing-stage, but the Council would not allow this: he had to start from the usual place near the Rhine bridge. A numerous crowd witnessed his embarkation, April 13th, 1529. Some friends were there to see him off. No unfavour- able demonstration occurred. His reception at Freiburg convinced him that, in spite of all, he was still the celebrated and admired prince of letters. The Council placed at his disposal the large, though unfinished house which had been built for the Emperor Maxmilian himself; a professor of theology offered him his garden. Anthony Fugger had tried to draw him to Augsburg by means of a yearly allowance. For the rest he considered Freiburg by no means as a permanent place of abode. “I have resolved to remain here this winter and then to fly with the swallows to the place whither God shall call me.” But he soon recog- HUMANISTS AND REFORMERS 223 nised the great advantage which Freiburg offered. The climate, to which he was so sensitive, turned out better than he expected, and the position of the town was ex- tremely favourable for emigrating to France, should circumstances require this, or for dropping down the Rhine back to the Netherlands, whither many always called him. In 1531 he bought a house at Freiburg. The old Erasmus at Freiburg, ever more tormented by his painful malady, much more disillusioned than when he left Louvain in 1521, of more confirmed views as to the great ecclesiastical strife, will only be fully revealed to us, when his correspondence with Boniface Amerbach, the friend whom he left behind at Basle,— a correspondence not found complete in the older col- lections,—shall have been edited by Dr. Allen’s care. From no period of Erasmus’ life, as 1t seems, may so much be gleaned, in point of knowledge of his daily habits and thoughts, as from these very years. Work went on without a break in that great scholar’s work- shop where he directs his famuli, who hunt manu- scripts for him, and then copy and examine them, and whence he sends forth his letters all over Europe. In the series of editions of the Fathers followed Basil and new editions of Chrysostom and Cyprian; his editions of classic authors were augmented by the works of Aristotle. He revised and republished the Colloquies three more times, the Adages and the New Testament once more. Occasional writings of a moral or politico-theological nature kept flowing from his pen. From the cause of the Reformation he was now quite estranged. “Pseudevangelici,’ he contumeliously calls the reformed. “I might have been a corypheus in 224 ERASMUS Luther’s church,” he writes in 1528, “but I preferred incurring the hatred of all Germany than to be separate from the community of the Church.” The authorities should have paid a little less attention at first to Luther’s proceedings; then the fire would never have spread so violently. He had always urged theologians to let minor concerns which only contain an appearance of piety rest, and to turn to the sources of Scripture. Now it was too late. Towns and countries united ever more closely for or against the Reformation. “If—what I pray may never happen”—he writes to Sadolet in 1530, “you should see horrible commotions of the world arise, not so much fatal for Germany as for the Church, then remember Erasmus prophesied it.” To Beatus Rhenanus he frequently said that, had he known that an age like theirs was coming, he would never have written many things, or would not have written them as he had. “Just look,” he exclaims, “at the Evangelical people, have they become any better? Do they yield less to luxury, lust and greed? Show me a man whom that Gospel has changed from a toper to a temperate man, from a brute to a gentle creature, from a miser into a liberal person, from a shameless to a chaste being. I will show you many who have become even worse than they were.” Now they have thrown the images out of the churches and abolished mass (he is thinking of Basle especially): has anything better come instead? | “I have never entered their churches, but I have seen them return from hearing the sermon, as if inspired by an evil spirit, the faces of all showing a curious wrath and ferocity, and there was no one except one old man HUMANISTS AND REFORMERS 225 who saluted me properly, when I passed in the company of some distinguished persons.” He hated that spirit of absolute assuredness so in- separably bound up with the reformers. “Zwingli and Bucer may be inspired by the Spirit, Erasmus from him- self is nothing but a man and cannot comprehend what is of the Spirit.” There was a group among the reformed to whom Erasmus in his heart of hearts was more nearly akin than to the Lutherans or Zwinglians with their rigid dogmatism: the Anabaptists. He rejected the doctrine from which they derived their name, and abhorred the anarchic element in them. He remained far too much the man of spiritual decorum to identify himself with these irregular believers. But he was not blind to the sincerity of their moral aspirations and sympathised with their dislike of brute force and the patience with which they bore persecution. ‘They are praised more than all others for the innocence of their life,” he writes in 1529. Just in the last part of his life came the episode of the violent revolutionary proceedings of the fanatic Anabaptists; it goes without saying that Erasmus speaks of it only with horror. One of the best historians of the Reformation, Walter Kohler, calls Erasmus one of the spiritual fathers of Ana- baptism. And certain it is that in its later, peaceful development it has important traits m common with Erasmus: a tendency to acknowledge free will, a certain rationalistic trend, a dislike of an exclusive conception of a Church. It seems possible to prove that the south- German Anabaptist Hans Denk derived opinions directly from Erasmus. For a considerable part, however, this 226 ERASMUS community of ideas must, no doubt, have been based on peculiarities of religious consciousness in the Netherlands, whence Erasmus sprang, and where Anabaptism found such a receptive soil. Erasmus was certainly never aware of these connections. Some remarkable evidence regarding Erasmus’ altered attitude towards the old and the new Church is shown by what follows. The reproach he had formerly so often flung at the advocates of conservatism that they hated the bonae literae, so dear to him, and wanted to stifle them, he now uses against the evangelical party. “Wherever Luther- ism is dominant the study of literature is extinguished. Why else,”—he continues using a remarkable sophism,— “are Luther and Melanchthon compelled to call back the people so urgently to the love of letters?” “Just com- pare the University of Wittenberg with that of Louvain or Paris! ... Printers say that before this Gospel came they used to dispose of 3,000 volumes more quickly than now of 600. A sure proof that studies flourish!” XX LAST YEARS RELIGIOUS AND POLITICAL CONTRASTS GROW SHARPER— THE COMING STRIFE IN GERMANY STILL SUSPENDED— ERASMUS FINISHES HIS ECCLESIASTES-DEATH OF FISHER AND MORE—ERASMUS BACK AT BASLE: 1535— POPE PAUL III WANTS TO MAKE HIM WRITE IN FAVOUR OF THE CAUSE OF THE COUNCIL—FAVOURS DECLINED BY ERASMUS—DE PURITATE ECCLESIAE—THE END: 12 JULY, 1536. During the last years of Erasmus’ life all the great issues which kept the world in suspense were rapidly taking threatening forms. Wherever before compromise or reunion had still seemed possible, now sharp con- flicts, clearly outlined party-groupings, binding formulae were barring the way to peace. While in the spring of 1529 Erasmus prepared for his departure from Basle, a strong Catholic majority of the diet at Speyer got the recess of 1526, favourable for the Evangelicals, re- called, only the Lutherans among them keeping what they had obtained; and secured a prohibition of any further changes or novelties. The Zwinglians and Ana- baptists were not allowed to enjoy the least tolerance. This was immediately followed by the Protest of the chief evangelical princes and towns, which henceforth was to give the name to all anti-Catholics together (19th April, 1529). And not only between Catholics and Protestants in the Empire did the rupture become complete. Even before the end of that year the ques- tion of the Lord’s supper proved an insuperable stum- 227 228 ERASMUS bling-block in the way of a real union of Zwinglians and Lutherans. Luther parted from Zwingli at the colloquy of Marburg with the words, “Your spirit differs from ours.” In Switzerland civil war had openly broken out be- tween the Catholic and the Evangelical cantons, only calmed for a short time by the first peace of Kappel. The treaties of Cambray and Barcelona, which in 1529 restored at least political peace in Christendom for the time being, could no more draw from old Erasmus jubilations about a coming golden age, like those with which the concord of 1516 had inspired him. A month later the Turks appeared before Vienna. All these occurrences could not but distress and alarm Erasmus. But he was outside them. When reading his letters of that period we are more than ever impressed by the fact that he, for all the width and liveliness of his mind, is remote from the great happenings of his time. Beyond a certain circle of interests, touching his own ideas or his person, his perceptions are vague and weak. If he still meddles occasionally with questions of the day, he does so in the moralizing manner, by means of generalities, without emphasis: his Advice about declar- ing war on the Turks (March, 1530) is written in the form of an interpretation of psalm 28, and so vague that, at the close, he himself anticipates that the reader may exclaim: “But now say clearly: do you think that war should be declared or not?” In the summer of 1530 the Diet met again at Augs- burg under the auspices of the Emperor himself to try once more “to attain to a good peace and Christian truth.” The Augsburg Confession, defended all too LAST YEARS 229 weakly by Melanchthon, was read here, disputed, and declared refuted by the Emperor. Erasmus had no share in all this. Many had exhorted him in letters to come to Augsburg; but he had in vain expected a summons from the Emperor. At the instance of the Emperor’s counsellors he had postponed his pro- posed removal to Brabant in that autumn till after the decision of the Diet. But his services were not needed for the drastic resolution of repression with which the Emperor closed the session in November. The great struggle in Germany seemed to be approach- ing: the resolutions of Augsburg were followed by the formation of the league of Schmalkalden uniting all Prot- estant territories and towns of Germany in their opposi- tion to the Emperor. In the same year (1531) Zwingli was killed in the battle of Kappel against the Catholic cantons, soon to be followed by Oecolampadius, who died at Basle. “It is right,” writes Erasmus, “that those two leaders have perished. If Mars had been favourable to them, we should now have been done for.” In Switzerland a sort of equilibrium had set in; at any rate matters had come to a standstill; in Germany the inevitable struggle was postponed for many years. The Emperor had understood that he, to combat the Ger- man Protestants effectively, should first get the Pope to hold the Council which would abolish the acknowledged abuses of the Church. The religious peace of Nurem- berg (1532) put the seal upon this turn of imperial policy. It might seem as if before long the advocates of mod- erate reform and of a compromise might after all get a 230 . ERASMUS chance of being heard. But Erasmus had become too old to actively participate in the decisions (if he had ever seriously considered such participation). He does write a treatise, though, in 1533, “On the sweet concord of the Church,” like his Advice on the Turks in the form of an interpretation of a psalm (83). But it would seem as if the old vivacity of his style and his power of expression, so long unimpaired, now began to flag. The same remark applies to an essay “On the preparation for death,’ published the same year. His voice was growing weaker. During these years he turned his attention chiefly to the completion of the great work which more than any other represented for him the summing up and complete exposition of his moral-theological ideas: “Ecclesiastes or, On the way to preach.” Erasmus had always re- garded preaching as the most dignified part of an eccle- siastic’s duties. As preachers, he had most highly valued Colet and Vitrarius. As early as 1519 his friend, John Becar of Borselen, urged him to follow up the Enchi- ridion of the Christian soldier and the Institutio of the Christian prince, by the true instruction of the Christian preacher. “Later, later,’ Erasmus had promised him, “at present I have too much work, but I hope to undertake it soon.” In 1523 he had already made a sketch and some notes for it. It was meant for John Fisher, the bishop of Rochester, Erasmus’ great friend and brother-spirit, who eagerly looked forward to it and urged the author to finish it. The work gradually grew into the most voluminous of Erasmus’ original writings: a forest of a work, “operis sylvam,” he calls it himself, In four books he treated his subject, the art of preaching LAST YEARS 231 well and decorously, with an inexhaustible abundance of examples, illustrations, schemes, etc. But was it possible that a work, conceived already by the Erasmus of 1519, and upon which he had been so long engaged, while he himself had gradually given up the boldness of his earlier years, could still be a revelation in 1533, as the Enchi- ridion had been in its day? Ecclesiastes is the work of a mind fatigued, which no longer sharply reacts upon the needs of his time. As _the result of a correct, intellectual, tasteful instruction in a suitable manner of preaching, in accordance with the purity of the Gospel, Erasmus expects to see society improve. “The people becomes more obedient to the authorities, more respectful towards the law, more peace- able. Between husband and wife comes greater concord, more perfect faithfulness, greater dislike to adultery. Servants obey more willingly, artisans work better, merchants cheat no more.” At the same time that Erasmus took this work to Froben, at Basle, to print, a book of a young French- man, who had recently fled from France to Basle, passed through the press of another Basle printer, Thomas Platter. It too was to be a manual of the life of faith: the Institution of the Christian Religion, by Calvin. Even before Erasmus had quite completed the Hcclesi- astes, the man for whom the work had been meant was no more. Instead of to the bishop of Rochester, Erasmus dedicated his voluminous work to the bishop of Augsburg, Christopher of Stadion. John Fisher, to set a seal to his spiritual endeavours, resembling those of 232 , ERASMUS Erasmus in so many respects, had left behind, as a testi- mony to the world, for which Erasmus knew himself too weak, that of martyrdom. On the 22nd of June, 1535, he was beheaded by command of Henry VIII. He died for being faithful to the old Church. Together with More he had steadfastly refused to take the oath to the Statute of Supremacy. Not two weeks after Fisher, Thomas More mounted the scaffold. The fate of those two noblest of his friends grieved Erasmus. It moved him to do what for years he had no longer done; to write a poem. But rather than in the fine Latin mea- sure of that Carmen heroicum one would have liked to hear his emotion in language of sincere dismay and indignation in his letters. They are hardly there. In the words devoted to Fisher’s death in the preface to the Ecclesiastes there is no heartfelt emotion. Also in his letters of those days, he speaks with reserve. “Would More had never meddled with that dangerous business, and left the theological cause to the theolo- gians.” As if More had died for aught but simply for his conscience! When Erasmus wrote these words, he was no longer at Freiburg. He had in June, 1535, gone to Basle, to work in Froben’s printing office, as of old; the Hcclesi- astes was at last going to press and still required care- ful supervision and the final touches during the process; the Adagia had to be reprinted, and a Latin edition of Origenes was in preparation. The old, sick man was cordially received by the many friends who still lived at Basle. Hieronymus Froben, Johannes’ son, who after his father’s death managed the business with LAST YEARS 233 two relatives, sheltered him in his house Zum Luft. In the hope of his return a room had been built expressly for him and fitted up as was convenient for him. Eras- mus found that at Basle the ecclesiastical storms which had formerly driven him away, had subsided. Quiet and order had returned. He did feel a spirit of distrust in the air, it is true, “but I think that, on account of my age, of habit, and of what little erudition I possess, I have now got so far that I may live in safety anywhere.” At first he had regarded the removal as an experiment. He did not mean to stay at Basle. If his health could not stand the change of air, he would return to his fine, well- appointed, comfortable house at Freiburg. If he should prove able to bear it, then the choice was between the Netherlands (probably Brussels, Mechlin or Antwerp, perhaps Louvain) or Burgundy, in particular Besancon. Towards the end of his life he clung to the illusion which he had been cherishing for a long time that Burgundy wine alone was good for him and kept his malady in check. There is something pathetic in the proportions which this wine-question gradually assumes: that it is so dear at Basle might be overlooked, but the thievish waggoners drink up or spoil what is imported. In August he doubted greatly whether he will return to Freiburg. In October he sold his house and part of his furniture and had the rest transported to Basle. After the summer he hardly left his room, and was mostly bedridden. Though the formidable worker in him still yearned for more years and time to labour, his soul was ready for death. Happy he had never felt; only during the last years he utters his longing for the end. He 234 ERASMUS was still, curiously enough, subject to the delusion of being in the thick of the struggle. “In this arena I shall have to fall,” he writes in 1533. “Only this con- soles me, that near at hand already, the general haven comes in sight, which, if Christ be favourable, will bring the end of all labour and trouble.” Two years later his voice sounds more urgent: “That the Lord might deign to call me out of this raving world to his rest.” Most of his old friends were gone. Warham and Mountjoy had passed away before More and Fisher; Peter Gilles, so many years younger than he, had de- parted in 1533; also Pirkheimer had been dead for years. Beatus Rhenanus shows him to us, during the last months of his life, reperusing his friends’ letters of the last few years, and repeating: “This one, too, is dead.” As he grew more solitary, his suspiciousness and his feeling of being persecuted became stronger. “My friends decrease, my enemies increase,” he writes in 1532, when Warham has died and Aleander has risen still higher. In the autumn of 1535 he thinks that all his former servant-pupils betray him, even the best beloved ones like Quirin Talesius and Charles Utenhove. They do not write to him, he complains. In October, 1534, Pope Clement VII was succeeded by Paul III, who at once zealously took up the Coun- cil-question. The meeting of a Council was, in the eyes of many, the only means by which union could be re- stored to the Church, and now a chance of realising this seemed nigh. At once the most learned theolo- gians were invited to help in preparing the great work. Erasmus did not omit, in January, 1535, to address to the new Pope a letter of congratulation, in which he pro- LAST YEARS 235 fessed his willingness to co-operate in bringing about the pacification of the Church, and warned the Pope to steer a cautious middle-course. On the 31st of May followed a reply full of kindliness and acknowledgment. The Pope exhorted Erasmus, “that you too, graced by God with so much laudable talent and learning may help us in this pious work, which is so agreeable to your mind, to defend, with us, the Catholic religion, by the spoken and the written word, before and during the Council, and in this manner by this last work of piety, as by the best act to close a life of religion and so many writings, to refute your accusers and rouse your admirers to fresh efforts.” Would Eramus in years of greater strength have seen his way to co-operate actively in the council of the great? Undoubtedly, the Pope’s exhortation correctly represented his inclination. But once faced by the necessity of hard, clear resolutions, what would he have effected? Would his spirit of peace and toleration, of reserve and compromise, have brought alleviation and warded off the coming struggle? He was spared the experiment. He knew himself too weak to be able to think of strenuous church-political propaganda any more. Soon there came proofs that the kindly feelings at Rome were sincere. There had been some question also of number- ing Erasmus among the cardinals who were to be nomi- nated with a view to the Council; a considerable bene- fice connected with the church of Deventer was already offered him. But Erasmus urged the Roman friends who were thus active in his behalf to cease their kind offices; he would accept nothing, he a man who 236 ERASMUS lived from day to day, in expectation of death and often hoping for it, who could hardly ever leave his room—would people instigate him to hunt for deaneries and cardinals’ hats! He had subsistence enough to last him. He wanted to die independent. Yet his pen did not rest. The Ecclesiastes had been printed and published and Origenes was still to fol- low. Instead of the important and brilliant task to which Rome called him, he devoted his last strength to a simple deed of friendly cordiality. The friend to whose share the honour fell to receive from the old, death-sick author a last composition prepared expressly for him, amidst the most terrible pains, was the most modest of the number who had not lost their faith in him. No prelate or prince, no great wit or admired divine, but Christopher Eschenfelder, customs officer at Boppard on the Rhine. On his passage in 1518 Erasmus had, with glad surprise, found him to be a reader of his work and a man of culture. That friend- ship had been a lasting one. Eschenfelder had asked Erasmus to dedicate the interpretation of some psalm to him (a form of composition often preferred by Erasmus of late). About the close of 1535 he re- membered that request. He had forgotten whether Eschenfelder had indicated a particular psalm and chose one at haphazard, psalm 14, calling the treatise On the purity of the Christian Church. He expressly dedicated it to “the publican” in January, 1536. It is not remarkable among his writings as to contents and form, but it was to be his last. On the 12th of February, 1536, Erasmus made his final preparations. In 1527 he had already made a will LAST YEARS 237 with detailed clauses for the printing of his complete works by Froben. In 1534 he drew up an accurate inventory of his belongings. He sold his library to the Polish nobleman Johannes a Lasco. The arrange- ments of 1536 testify to two things which had played an important part in his life: his relations with the house of Froben and his need of friendship. Boniface Amerbach is his heir. Hieronymus Froben and Nicholas Episcopius, the managers of the business, are his executors. ‘To each of the good friends who were left to him he bequeathed one of the trinkets which spoke of his fame with princes and the great ones of the earth, in the first place to Louis Ber and Beatus Rhenanus. The poor and the sick were not forgotten, and he remembered especially girls about to marry and youths of promise. The details of this charity he left to Amerbach. In March, 1536, he still thinks of leaving for Bur- gundy. Money-matters occupy him and he speaks of the necessity of making new friends, for the old ones leave him: the bishop of Cracow, Zasius at Freiburg. According to Beatus Rhenanus, the Brabant plan stood foremost at the end of Erasmus’ life. The Regent, Mary of Hungary, did not cease to urge him to return to the Netherlands. Erasmus’ own last utterance leaves us in doubt whether he had made up his mind. “Though I am living here with the most sincere friends, such as I did not possess at Freiburg, I should yet, on account of the differences of doctrine, prefer to end my life elsewhere. If only Brabant were nearer.” This he writes on June 28th, 1536. He had felt so poorly for some days that he had not even been able 238 . ERASMUS to read. In the letter we again trace the delusion that Aleander persecutes him, sets on opponents against him, and even lays snares for his friends. Did his mind at last give way too? On the 12th of July the end came. The friends who were standing around his couch heard him groan in- cessantly: “O Jesu, misericordia; Domine libera me; Domine miserere mei!” And at last in Dutch: “Lieve God.” XXT CONCLUSION CONCLUSION—ERASMUS AND THE SPIRIT OF THE SIX- TEENTH CENTURY—HIS WEAK POINTS—A THOROUGH IDEALIST AND YET A MODERATE MIND—THE EN- LIGHTENER OF A CENTURY—HE ANTICIPATES TENDEN- CIES OF TWO CENTURIES LATER—HIS INFLUENCE AFFECTS BOTH PROTESTANTISM AND CATHOLIC REFORM —THE ERASMIAN SPIRIT IN THE NETHERLANDS. Looking back on the life of Erasmus the question still arises: why has he remained so great? For ostensi- bly his endeavours ended in failure. He withdraws in alarm from that tremendous struggle which he rightly calls a tragedy; the sixteenth century, bold and ve- hement, thunders past him, disdaining his ideal of mod- eration and tolerance. Latin literary erudition, which to him was the epitome of all true culture, has gone out as such. Erasmus, so far as regards the greater part of his writings, is among the great ones who are no longer read. He has become a name. But why does that name still sound so clear and articulate? Why does he keep regarding us, as if he still knew a little more than he has ever been willing to utter? What has he been to his age, and what was he to be for later generations? Has he been rightly called a precursor of the modern spirit? Regarded as a child of the sixteenth century, he does seem to differ from the general tenor of his times. Among those vehemently passionate, drastically ener- getic and violent natures of the great ones of his day, Erasmus stands as the man of too few prejudices, with 239 240 ERASMUS a little too much delicacy of taste, with a deficiency, though not, indeed, in every department, of that Stzl- titia which he had praised as a necessary constituent of life. Erasmus is the man who is too sensible and mod- erate for the heroic. What a surprising difference there is between the accent of Erasmus and that of Luther, Calvin, and Santa Teresa! What a difference, also, between his accent, that is, the accent of humanism, and that of Albrecht Diirer, of Michelangelo, or: of Shakespeare. Erasmus seems, at times, the man who was not strong enough for his age. In that robust sixteenth century it seems as if the oaken strength of Luther was neces- sary, the steely edge of Calvin, the white heat of Loyola; not the velvet softness of Erasmus. Not only were their force and their fervour necessary, but also their depth, their unsparing, undaunted consistency, sincerity and outspokenness. They can not bear that smile which makes Luther speak of the guileful being looking out of Erasmus’ fea- tures. His piety is too even for them, too limp. Loyola has testified that the reading of the Hnchiridion militis christiant relaxed his fervour and made his devotion grow cold. He saw that warrior of Christ differently, in the glowing colours of the Spanish-Christian, medieval ideal of chivalry. Erasmus had never passed through those depths of self-reprobation and that consciousness of sin which Luther had traversed with toil; he saw no devil to fight with, and tears were not familiar to him. Was he altogether unaware of the deepest mystery? Or did it rest in him too deep for utterance? CONCLUSION 241 Let us not suppose too quickly that we are more nearly allied to Luther or Loyola because their figures appeal to us more. If at present our admiration goes out again to the ardently pious, and to spiritual ex- tremes, it is partly because our unstable time requires strong stimulus. To appreciate Erasmus we should begin by giving up our admiration of the extravagant, and for many this requires a certain effort at present. It is extremely easy to break the staff over Erasmus. His faults lie on the surface, and though he wished to hide many things, he never hid his weaknesses. He was too much concerned about what people thought, and he could not hold his tongue. His mind was too rich and facile, always suggesting a superfluity of arguments, cases, examples, quotations. He could never let things slide. All his life long he grudged him- self leisure to rest and collect himself, to see how un- important after all was the commotion roundabout him, if only he went his own way courageously. Rest and independence he desired most ardently of all things; there was no more restless and dependent creature. Judge him as one of a too delicate constitution who ventures out in a storm. His will-power was great enough. He worked night and day, amidst the most violent bodily suffering, with a great ideal steadfastly before him, never satisfied with his own achievements. He was not self-sufficient. As an intellectual type Erasmus was one of a rather small group: the absolute idealists who, at the same time, are thoroughly moderate. They can not bear the world’s imperfections; they feel constrained to oppose. 242 | ERASMUS But extremes are uncongenial to them; they shrink back from action, because they know it pulls down as much as it erects, and so they withdraw themselves, and keep calling that everything should be different; but when the crisis comes, they reluctantly side with tradition and conservatism. Here too is a fragment of Erasmus’ life-tragedy: he was the man who saw the new and coming things more clearly than anyone else,— who must needs quarrel with the old and yet could not accept the new. He tried to remain in the fold of the old Church, after having damaged it seriously, and renounced the Reformation, and to a certain extent even Humanism, after having furthered both with ail his strength. Our final opinion about Erasmus has been concerned with negative qualities, so far. What was his positive importance? Two facts make it difficult for the modern mind to understand Erasmus’ positive importance: first that his influence was extensive rather than intensive, and there- fore less historically discernible at definite points, and second, that his influence has ceased. He has done his work and will speak to the world no more. Like Saint Jerome, his revered model, and Voltaire, with whom he has been occasionally compared, “he has his reward.” But like them he has been the enlightener of an age from whom a broad stream of culture emanated. As historic investigation of the French Revolution is becoming more and more aware that the true history of France during that period should be looked for in CONCLUSION 243 those groups which as “Centre” or “Marais,” seemed for a long time but a drove of supernumeraries, and understands that it should occasionally protect its eyes a little from the lightning flashes of the Gironde and Mountain thunderstorm; so the history of the Refor- mation-period should pay attention,—and it has done so for a long time,—to the broad central sphere per- meated by the Erasmian spirit. One of his opponents said: “Luther has drawn a large part of the Church to himself, Zwingli and Oecolampadius also some part, but Erasmus the largest.” Erasmus’ public was numer- ous and of high culture. He was the only one of the Humanists who really wrote for all the world, that is to say, for all educated people. He accustomed a whole world to another and more fluent mode of ex- pression: he shifted the interest, he influenced by his perfect clarity of exposition, even through the medium of Latin, the style of the vernacular languages, apart from the numberless translations of his works. For his contemporaries Erasmus put on many new stops, one might say, of the great organ of human ExTEssiOn, | as Rousseau was to do two centuries later. He might well think with some complacency of the influence he had exerted on the world. “From all parts of the world,’—he writes towards the close of his life— “T am daily thanked by many, because they have been kindled by my works, whatever may be their merit, into zeal for a good disposition and sacred literature; and they who have never seen Erasmus, yet know and love him from his books.” He was glad that his trans- lations from the Greek had become superfluous; he had everywhere led many to take up Greek and Holy 244 ERASMUS Scripture, “which otherwise they would never have read.” He had been an introducer and an initiator. He might leave the stage after having said his say. His word signified something beyond a classical sense and biblical disposition. It was at the same time the first enunciation of the creed of education and per- fectibility, of warm social feeling and of faith in human nature, of peaceful kindliness and toleration. “Christ dwells everywhere; piety is practised under every gar- ment, if only a kindly disposition is not wanting.” In all these ideas and convictions Erasmus really heralds a later age. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries those thoughts remained an undercurrent: in the eighteenth Erasmus’ message of deliverance bore fruit. In this respect he has most certainly been a pre- cursor and preparer of the modern mind: of Rousseau, Herder, Pestalozzi and the English and American think- ers. It is only part of the modern mind which is repre- sented by all this. To a number of its developments Erasmus was wholly a stranger, to the evolution of natural science, of the newer philosophy, of political economy. But in so far as people still believe in the ideal that moral education and general tolerance may make humanity happier, humanity owes much to Erasmus. This does not imply that Erasmus’ mind did not di- rectly and fruitfully influence his own times. Although Catholics regarded him in the heat of the struggle as the corrupter of the Church, and Protestants as the betrayer of the Gospel, yet his word of moderation and kindliness did not pass by unheard or unheeded on either side. Eventually neither camp finally rejected CONCLUSION 245 Erasmus. Rome did not brand him as an arch-heretic, but only warned the faithful to read him with caution. Protestant history has been studious to reckon him as one of the Reformers. Both obeyed in this the pro- nouncement of a public opinion which was above parties and which continued to admire and revere Erasmus. To the reconstruction of the Catholic Church and the erection of the evangelical churches not only the names of Luther and Loyola are linked. The moderate, the intellectual, the conciliating have also had their share of the work;—figures like Melanchthon here, Sa- dolet there, both nearly allied to Erasmus and sympa- thetically disposed towards him. The frequently re- peated attempts to arrive at some compromise in the great religious conflict, though they might be doomed to end in failure, emanated from the Erasmian spirit. Nowhere did that spirit take root so easily as in the country that gave Erasmus birth. A curious detail shows us that it was not the exclusive privilege of either great party. Of his two most favoured pupils of later years, both Netherlanders, whom as the actors of the colloquy Astragalismus, the game of knucklebones, he has immortalised together, the one Quirin Talesius, died for his attachment to the Spanish cause and the Catholic faith: he was hanged in 1572 by the citizens of Haarlem, where he was a burgomaster. The other, Charles Utenhove, was sedulous on the side of the re- volt and the Reformed religion. At Ghent, in concert with the Prince of Orange, he turned against the narrow- minded Protestant terrorism of the zealots. A Dutch historian recently tried to trace back the opposition of the Dutch against the king of Spain to the 246 . ERASMUS influence of Erasmus’ political thought in his arraignment of bad princes—wrongly as I think. Erasmus’ political diatribes were far too academic and too general for that. The desire of resistance and revolt arose from quite other causes. The “Gueux” were not Erasmus’ progeny. But there is much that is Erasmian in the spirit of their great leader, William of Orange, whose vision ranged so widely beyond the limitations of re- ligious hatred. Thoroughly permeated by the Erasmian spirit, too, was that class of municipal magistrates who were soon to take the lead and to set the fashion in the established Republic. History is wont, as always with an aristocracy, to take their faults very seriously. After all, perhaps no other aristocracy, unless it be that of Venice, has ruled a state so long, so well and with so little violence. If in the seventeenth century the institutions of Holland, in the eyes of for- eigners, were the admired models of prosperity, charity and social discipline, and patterns of gen- tleness and wisdom, however defective they may seem to us,—then the honour of all this is due to the municipal aristocracy. If in the Dutch paitriciate of that time those aspirations lived and were translated into action, it was Erasmus’ spirit of social responsi- bility which inspired them. The history of Holland is far less bloody and cruel than that of any of the sur- rounding countries. Not for naught did Erasmus praise as truly Dutch those qualities which we might also call truly Erasmian: gentleness, kindliness, moderation, a generally diffused moderate erudition. Not romantic virtues, if you like; but are they the less salutary? One more instance. In the Republic of the Seven CONCLUSION 247 Provinces the atrocious executions of witches and wiz- ards ceased more than a century before they did in all other countries. This was not owing to the merit of the Reformed pastors. They shared the popu- lar belief which demanded persecution. It was the magistrates whose enlightenment even as early as the beginning of the 17th century no longer tolerated these things. Again, we are entitled to say, though Erasmus was not one of those who combated this practice: the spirit which breathes from this is that of Erasmus. Cultured humanity has cause to hold Erasmus’ mem- ory in esteem, if for no other reason than that he was the fervently sincere preacher of that general kindliness which the world still so urgently needs. APPENDIX THE PORTRAITS OF ERASMUS Erasmus was portrayed during his lifetime by three of the greatest artists of his age, and on their work are based the innumerable pictures of him, found every- where, which testify to his lasting and astonishing celebrity. In 1517 Erasmus and his friend Peter Gilles had themselves painted together at Antwerp by Quentin Metsys, in a diptych, in order to offer this double por- trait to their common friend Thomas More, who not long before had insured lasting fame for Gilles by mak- ing him the host in his setting of the Utopia. More received the portrait at Calais in October, 1517. He was enchanted and expressed his admiration and gratitude in a Latin eulogy on the friends and the artist.’ The portrait of Peter Gilles has been preserved, and is now in the possession of Earl Radnor at Longford Castle, near Salisbury. That of Erasmus probably ex- ists in copies alone, in the Lincei Gallery at Rome, at Hampton Court, and at the Amsterdam State Museum. Gilles holds a letter from More in one hand and points with the other at a book inscribed Anti- barbari (which, however, had not yet been printed in 1 Allen nos. 584.6, 601.50, 616.9, 654.1, 669.1, 681.9, 683, 684, 688.8. Reproduction: Allen, p. 576-77 and elsewhere. 249 250 : ERASMUS 1517, nor was in Gilles’ possession in manuscript). Erasmus is writing the beginning of his Paraphrase of the Epistle to the Romans. Behind him are several other books (vide Allen III, p. 106.14). In 1519 Quentin Metsys, at Antwerp, made a medal of Erasmus which is found in lead and in bronze, and was presented by Erasmus himself to several friends and patrons? In 1524, through the agency of Pirk- heimer, he had new bronze casts made at Nuremberg from a damaged leaden one.” A smaller modified re- production of 1531 is perhaps by the hand of Janus Secundus, Latin poet and son of Erasmus’ friend, Nicholas Everaert, who in 1520 received the Metsys medal from him. The medal of 1519 bears on either side of the head the name #r. Rot., under it the date 1519, and for legend: rav xpeirrw Ta ovyypaupara Seite Imago ad vivam effigiem expressa. The reverse shows a Terminus with a Greek and a Latin inscription. The Greek inscription, “the better image his writings will show you,” which recurs on later pictures, cor- responds to a thought that Erasmus frequently ex- pressed.* As for the Terminus, Erasmus had in 1509 received a ring as a present from Alexander Stewart in which there was an antique gem representing Ter- minus. After an Italian antiquary had drawn his at- tention to the representation, Erasmus made Terminus —_——_—_______ +A. 1092, 1101.8, 1119.5, 1122.18 cf. LBE. 954C, 1073F. 2 LBE. 646 C, 744 A, 669 C, 783 A, 727 C, 847 E, app. 327 C, 1704 C. 30pa 7éX\os axpod Biov, Mors ultima ratio rerum. 4A. 875.17, 943.30, 981.20, 1101.7. APPENDIX 251 his emblem, meaning it to be a reminder of the close of life. He had Cedo nulli, “I yield to none,’ en- graved on the stone and used it as a seal. He meant by it the unshakableness of death, as did the inscriptions on the reverse of the Metsys medal, but his enemies reproached him with it as an expression of pride.’ Pirk- heimer had the Terminus engraved on a cup which he offered Erasmus, and Boniface Amerbach had it carved on his tombstone. From the medal a woodcut was made’ in 1521 and in 1522 a new and freer reproduction. At Basle Erasmus came into contact with Hans Hol- bein whose art was to be most closely associated with Erasmus’ fame. In a copy of Froben’s edition of the Moria of March, 1515, Holbein had (probably in that same year, when at the age of 17, he came to Basle), at the request of the owner, Myconius, and to amuse Erasmus, drawn the series of exquisite illustrations, among which was a thumb-nail sketch of the author.’ It accompanies the sentence: “But I shall stop quot- ing proverbs that I may not seem to have plundered the work of my Erasmus,” and represents him writing the Adagia. The name Erasmus is written in the window niche. The drawing is said to have drawn from Erasmus the jesting exclamation cited above. In 1523 Holbein made three painted portraits of 1LBB. X. 1757, LBE. 1283 DE. Allen I, p. 70, III 604.2, 16. R. Fruin, Verspreide Geschriften VIII 268. 2A, 1092 t. IV p. 238 note. 8 Zeitschr. f. bild. Kunst 1899 N. F. X, p. 47. 4A, 394, 739. The drawings are all reproduced in Kan’s edition of the Moria. The original is preserved in the Art Museum at Basle. 5 Cap. 61 ed. Kan p. 155-6. 202 ; ERASMUS Erasmus. ‘Two are almost identical representations in profile showing Erasmus writing, now at Basle and at Paris (Louvre), and one is in trois quart, with the hands resting on a book, at Longford Castle." The por- trait at Basle was probably a study for that at Paris. He is writing the beginning of his Paraphrase of the gospel of Saint Mark. On the book of the Longford portrait we read in Greek: “the labours of Hercules” (his adage no. 2001), to which Erasmus repeatedly com- pared his life-work. The Basle panel came from the collection of Amer- bach to whom it was most likely presented by Erasmus. The Longford portrait is probably the one which he gave to the archbishop of Canterbury. That in the Louvre, coming from English collections, possibly first belonged to More.” The Louvre also has two pages of studies of Erasmus’ hands used in the Longford and the Louvre portraits.’ Holbein’s success in England was undoubtedly due to a great extent to his Erasmus portraits. They made him known there, even before he set out for that country in 1526, with recommendations from Erasmus to More among others.* More was the first whom he painted in England. During Holbein’s second stay at Basle, from 1528 till 1532, before he permanently removed to England, he repeatedly painted Erasmus, probably only once 1Ganz, P., H. Holbein d. J., Klassiker der Kunst XX, 1912, pp. 37, 38, 39. 2LBE. app. 327 C, 1704 C, 813 E. 3 Ganz. p. xxiii. 4LBE. no. 832 C, 951 F. APPENDIX 253 from life, however, as the latter left Basle in 1529, The new set, all made about 1530, gives a quite new interpretation of the face, which had considerably aged in the meantime. The series is represented by the small round portrait at Basle, out of the Amerbach collection; by the portrait at the Metropolitan Museum im New York which is an elaboration of the former, and by the portrait at Parma which Erasmus’ friend Goclenius presented to the bishop of Kulm.’ Holbein, however, also continued to work out his conception of 1523, the Longford portrait, in new pictures. On this are based two pieces, at Paris (Walter Gay) and at Hampton Court;* this last was in the 17th cen- tury, joined, as a companion picture, with a por- trait of Froben. According to an old tradition, Eras- mus really had himself painted with Froben in a diptych, but this has not been preserved. Lastly there is a composition in which Holbein has blended the two models: the portrait at Petrograd,* of which the head represents the set of 1530, whereas the hands are taken from the Longford portrait. Of the numerous imitations of these various por- traits, the ones by George Pencz (1533, Vienna; 1537, Windsor) deserve to be mentioned. Lastly, Holbein pictured Erasmus twice in woodcut: in medallion (cut by Hans Liitzelburger) appearing 1 Unless we assume as does P. Ganz, p. xxxvi, that Holbein went to Freiburg for the purpose. 2Ganz, pp. 90, 91, 86. ®Ganz, pp. 206, 207. Ganz, p. 214. 254 j ERASMUS first in the Adagia-edition of 1533, and also worked up into an ornamental composition.” For both he did not use his own earlier studies but availed himself of the medal by Metsys or the woodcuts derived from it. On the last-nazned composition Erasmus is represented at full length, his right hand on the head of a Terminus under a richly ornamented renaissance arch. The drawing on parchment, in octavo, from the face of the dead Erasmus, mentioned in an inventory of Boni- face Amerbach, and unfortunately not preserved, cannot have been made by Holbein,’ as he was not at Basle in the summer of 1536. The third great master who has portrayed Erasmus was Albrecht Diirer. They became acquainted during Diirer’s journey in the Netherlands in 1520. Diirer twice made a sketch of him: at Antwerp and at Brus- sels, both in August.* The second, a charcoal drawing, nearly full faced, and the only one in that aspect, has been preserved and is at present in the Louvre, a bequest of L. Bonnat,’ over which the artist himself has written: “1520, Erasmus fon rottertam.” Through their common friend Pirkheimer Erasmus afterwards retained his attachment for Diirer, whose art he has praised in De Pronunciatione® On the 8th of 1 Reproduction in B. Kruitwagen, Erasmus en zijn drukkers-uitgevers Amsterdam, 1923. The woodcuts dealt with by J. F. M. Sterck, Over een portret van E., Het Boek, 1916, p. 225, are imitations of this, 2 Tietze-Conrat, pl. 6. ® As was supposed by Haarhaus, Zeitschr. f. bild. Kunst, 1. ¢. p. 54. 4 Allen 1132, 1136 intr. ® Allen, IV p. 330-1, Tietze-Conrat, no. 7, Veth-Muller, I, pl. 23. Heong I 928 C-F, cf. LBE. C 1028 E, 1075 E and also c 744 AB. t APPENDIX 200 January, 1525, Erasmus wrote to Pirkheimer’ to thank him for his portrait by Diirer, sent to him. He adds: “TI should like to be portrayed? by Direr; who would not by such a great artist? But how can he do it? He began at one time at Brussels in charcoal, but I must have faded from his mind long ago. If he can do anything with the medal and from memory, then let him do for me what he has done for you, whom he has made slightly stouter.’” Diirer has indeed used Metsys’ medal for the well- known copper-engraving of 1526,* representing him standing and writing (as was his habit) at a desk, a vase of flowers before him, and surrounded by books. The Greek inscription has been taken from the medal; the Latin one adapted from it. The face, though near akin to that of the medal, shows marked resemblances with Diirer’s own drawing of 1520: in the nose, mouth, eyelids, eyebrows, locks of hair, even the turned-down undergarment reminds us of it. We shall therefore have to assume that Diirer himself had kept the sketch as being unfinished. Erasmus, although grateful to the artist, was not satis- fied with the resemblance: “No wonder,” he wrote, “for I am no longer the man I was five years ago.’” “Diirer has portrayed me, but it is not like me at all,” he writes 1LBE. C 847 DE; also already 19 July 1522 LBE. c 721 B. 2‘'Pingere,”’ with Erasmus, does not only mean to paint. 8This to be taken ironically. Erasmus had indeed become much thinner, cf. LBE. c 944 F. 4 Tietze-Conrat, no. 8. Veth-Muller, I, pl. 24. SLBE. C 944 F. As usual Erasmus is wrong about the years: it WSE Bix. 256 ; ERASMUS later.» Modern art-critics also are inclined to reject Diirer’s engraving as a likeness, perhaps too decidedly. It is a great pity that there is not the slightest ground to believe that a drawing by Lucas of Leyden, of 1521, in the Teyler Museum at Haarlem” represents Erasmus. One would have liked to find him also linked to this compatriot. Innumerable times has the portrait of Erasmus been copied, in pictures, drawings, engravings; among them are works by Van Dyck and Chodowiecki. There are no other truly original portraits of him. The statue at Rotterdam also deserves mention. When Philip II of Spain entered Rotterdam, on Sep- tember the 27th, 1549, a wooden ornamental statue of the great scholar stood before the house where he was born, to honour the monarch with a Latin eulogy, which the figure held in its hand written on a scroll. In 1557 it was replaced by a painted stone statue, which was torn down by the Spaniards in 1572. It was afterwards erected again, however, in the market- place. In 1622 this was replaced—in spite of the violent resistance of the Calvinist clergy who decried Erasmus as a libertine, a scoffer at all religion*—by a 1LBE. C 1073 F. 2 Reproduced in Zeitschr. f. bild. Kunst, 1, c. p. 53; Handzeichnungen alter Meister der holliindischen Schule, Kleinmann, Haarlem, and elsewhere. 2 See about this J. H. W. Unger, De standbeelden van Desiderius Erasmus, Rotterdamsch Jaarboekje, 1890, p. 265 s.s. It was asserted. among other things, that some one had been seen kneeling before the stone statue. When in 1674, the statue was temporarily removed by the municipal authorities, the magistrate of Basle at once tried to buy it, in which he nearly succeeded. Typically Dutch is also the fact that the old stone statue was used for strengthening a jetty-head, placed upright in the ground where during the prolonged drought of 1634 it became visible. APPENDIX 257 brass image, made by Hendrik de Keyzer; which to this day, in his fatherland of old so sparing in erecting statues, testifies to the uncommon fame of this son. It remains highly characteristic that, for a few centuries, practically the only public statue in Holland was not that of a soldier, prince or statesman, nor of a poet, but of a scholar and that of a scholar who had rather neglected and despised his fatherland. INCONOGRAPHY Haarhaus, J. R., Die Bildnisse des Erasmus von Rotter- dam, Zeitschrift fiir Bildende Kunst 1899 N.F.X. p. 44. Machiels, A., Les Portraits d’Erasme, Gazette des Beaux Arts 1911, 58e année t. II p. 349. Moes, E. W., Iconographia Batava. no. 2385. Tietze-Conrat, E., Erasmus van Rotterdam in de Kunst, No. 8 of the Series: Kunst in Holland. Vienna, 1922. ae > <—_ Jj i BIBLIOGRAPHY 1. Editions. Desiderii Erasmi Opera omnia, ed. J. Clericus, t. 10, Lugduni Batavorum, 1703-6. Opus epistolarum Des. Erasmi Roterodami, ed. P.S. Allen (from t. IV, P. 8. et H. M. Allen), Oxonii, t. I-V, 1906-1922)* Brought up to 1521 for earlier edition of Erasmus’ Letters see Allen, I, appendix 7, pp. 593-602. 2. Some books on Erasmus and his times. Bibliotheca Erasmiana, Répertoire des oeuvres d’Erasme, listes sommaires, Gand, 1893. Only some of Erasmus’ works have been treat- ed in full, see Allen t. IV, p. xv. Allen, P. S., The Age of Erasmus, Oxford, 1914. Various studies of intellectual life in the 15th and 16th centuries. Binns, Leonard Elliott, Krasmus the Reformer, A Study in Restatement, London, 1923. Appeared after the completion of this volume. Drummond, R. B., Erasmus, his Life and Char- acter, 2 vol., London, 1873. The best of the numerous Lives of Erasmus. Jongh, H. de—, L’ancienne faculté de théologie de Louvain, 1432-1540, Louvain, 1911. Important for the period 1517-1521 of Eras- mus’ Life. 1The 5th volume, containing the letters up to 1524 has appeared after the completion of this book. 259 260 ERASMUS Kan, J. B., Mwpiao eyxcmov Stultitiae Laus, Des. Erasmi Rot. declamatio, Hagae Com. 1898. Best edition of the Praise of Folly. Lindeboom, J., Erasmus, Onderzoek naar zijne theologie en zijn godsdienstig gemoedsbestaan, Leiden, 1909. ie: Erasmus, Inquiry into his theology and his personal religious life. idem, Het Bijbelsch Humanisme in Nederland, Leiden, 1913. e.: Biblical Humanism in the Netherlands. Mestwerdt, P., Die Anfange des Erasmus. Hu- manismus und Devotio moderna (Studien zur Kultus und Geschichte der Reformation II), Ti- bingen, 1917. Murray, R. H., Erasmus and Luther: their Atti- tude to Toleration, London, 1920. Nichols, F. M., The Epistles of Erasmus, from his earliest letters to his fifty-first year, English translations with a commentary, t. 3. London, 1901-1917. Nolhac, P. de, Erasme en Italie, Paris, 1888. Pastor, L. von—, Geschichte der Papste seit dem Ausgang des Mittelalters, 9 vol., Freiburg i. B. 1899-1923. English translation by F. I. Antrobus, R. Kerr, London, 1906, etc. Renaudet, A., Préréforme et Humanisme 4 Paris, 1494-1517, Paris, 1916. Very important for the spiritual movements preceding the Reformation. BIBLIOGRAPHY 261 Renaudet, A., Erasme, sa vie et son oeuvre jusqu’en 1517, d’aprés sa correspondance, Revue historique, vol. 111 et 112. Seebohm, F., The Oxford Reformers, John Colet, Erasmus and Thomas More, 3d edition, Lon- don, 1887. Smith, Preserved," The Age of the Reformation, American Historical Series, New York, 1920. Veth, J., and Muller, S., Albrecht Diirers Niederlan- dische Reise, 2 vol., Berlin-Utrecht, 1918. The second volume gives a general description of life and conditions in the Netherlands at the beginning of the 16th century. 1Erasmus, A Study of His Life, Ideals and Place in History, by the same author, New York and London 1923, appeared after the completion of this volume. INDEX Abbatis et eruditae collo- quium, 145 Academy, at Venice, 82 Adagia, 8, 32, 44, 49ss., 54, 56, 69, 72, 74, 77, 80ss., 86, 89, 101, 1038ss., 108, 112, 113, 184, 168, 195, 197, 218, 220, oan 20l; 254 Adrian of Utrecht, 71, 167, 205 Advice about declaring war on the Turks, 228, 230 Aeneas Sylvius, 16 Agesilaus, 53 Agricola, Rudolf, 9 Aix-la-Chapelle, 187 Albert of Brandenburg, Archbishop of Mayence, 178 ss., 184 Alcala, University of, 120, 201 Alcibiades, 122 Aldington, 102 Aldus Manutius, Printer at Venice, 80ss., 101, 103, 104, 188 Aleander, Jerome, 82, 159, 188, 190, 191, 216, 219, 234, 238 Allen, Dr. P. S., 14, 18, 19, 64n, 117, 191, 223 Ambrose, Saint, 65, 197 Amerbach, Boniface, 228, 237; 201,)202. 88, Amerbach, Johannes, 114 Ammonius, Andreas, 46, 74, 86, 100, 102, 106, 109, 114, 118, 120, 153, 158, 159, 171 Amsterdam, 3, 6 Amsterdam, State Museum of, 249 Anabaptists, 225, 226, 227 Andrelini, Fausto, 25, 30, 31, 36, 60 Annotationes on the N. T. by L. Valla, 73, 115 Antibarbarz, 18, 19, 22, 31, 70, 131, 132, 249 Antiquity, Ancients, 51, 52, 65, 68, 180, 182, 148, 144 Anti-war writings, 108, 194 Antwerp, 3, 64, 69, 84, 109, 117, 119, 152, 198, 233, 249, 254 Apocalypse, 135 Apologiae, 172, 202, 214 Apophthegmata, 51, 52, 147 Apostles, 212 Aquinas, Thomas, 130 Aretino, Pietro, 144 Ariosto, Ludovico, 145, 198 Aristotle, 25, 29, 140, 223 Arnobius, 197 105, 263 264 : INDEX Arras, Bishop of, 71 Artois, county of, 1 Ascensian Press, 103 Asolani, Andrea, 81, 82 Assche, 103 Astragalismus, Colloquium, 145, 245 Ath, Jean Briard of, 167, 170, 172, 175 Augsburg, 180, 222 Augsburg confession, 228 Augsburg, Diet of, 228s. Augustine, Saint, 22, 23, 65, 177, 197 Augustinians, 4, 11, 75, 177 Aurelius, Cornelius, 13, 16, 17, 18, 41, 55 “Auris Catava,” 56 “Aut regem aut fatuum nasci oportere,” Ada- gium, 195 Badius, Josse, printer in Paris, 8, 73, 77, 81, 101, 103 ss., 114, 170 Balbi, Girolamo, 25 Barbaro, Ermolao, 25 Barcelona, Treaty of, 228 Basilius, 101, 223 Basle, 105, 108, 110, 112, 113, 115, 116, 120, 157, 162, 170, 171, 179, 190, 192 ss., 210, 231ss., 251 ss. Batavia, 56, 57 Batt, James, 23, 34, 44, 46, 47, 48, 61 ss., 70, 74, 164 Bavaria, house of, 2 Becar, John, of Borselen, 230 Beda, Noél, 153, 160, 200, 201 Bedier, Noél, see Beda Belgium, 57 Bembo, Pietro, 219 Bentivogli, 80 Ber, Louis, 237 Bergen, Anthony of, Abbot of Saint Bertin, 108 Bergen, Henry of Glimes, lord of, bishop of Cam- bray, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 26, 31, 33, 36, 43, 47, 61, 70 Bergen op Zoom, 20, 21, 22, 23; a1 Berkman, Francis, 105 Bern, 220 Berquin, Louis de, 201 Besancon, 70, 233 Blount, see Mountjoy Boeotians, 55 Boerio, family, 80 Boerio, Giovanni Battista, 77 Bois-le-Duc, 10, 11 Bologna, 34, 80, 86, 107 Bombasius, Paul, 80 “Bonae literae,” 16, 29, 58, 68, 131, 168, 175, 176, 182, 183 ss., 216, 226 Bonnat, L., 254 Book-printing, 4, 81, 83ss., 105 Boppard, 236 Borselen, Anna of, Lady of Veere, 34, 36, 43, 47, 48, 61, 70, 79, 163 Bouts, Dirk, 3 INDEX Boys, Hector, 31 Brabant, duchy of, 1, 2, 3, 57, 58, 59, 103, 110, 229, 237 Brachylogus, 127 Brandenburg, House of, 178, 179 Breughel, Peter, 128, 145 Brie, Germain de, 122 Bruges, 3 Brussels, 3, 21, 22, 61, 116, 119, 121, 233, 254, 255 Bucer, Martin, 225 Bucklersbury, 89 Budaeus, William, 119, 120, 122, 123, 153, 158, 159, 160, 162, 169, 195, 219 Bulephorus, 217 Burgundy, county of, 233, 237 Burgundy, David of, bishop of Utrecht, 19 Burgundy, duchy, dukes, dominions of, 1, 2, 3, 20, 21, 48, 57, 58, 189, 191 Burgundy, wine of, 233 Buridan, John, 24 Busleiden, Francis of, Arch- bishop of Besancon, 70 Busleiden, Jerome, 172 Byzantinism, 130 Caesar, Julius, 107 Cajetanus, papal legate, 180 Calais, 34, 44, 109, 111, 185, 186, 249 Calvin, John, 147, 209, 211, 231, 240 265 Calvinists, 256 Cambray, bishop of, see Bergen, Henry of Cambray, Treaty of, 228 Cambridge, 101, 102ss., 106, 108 Cambridge, University of, 112 Caminade, Augustine Vin- cent, 32, 47, 60, 62, 198 Canossa, Count, 109 Canterbury, Archbishop of, see Warham Capito, Wolfgang, 122, 168, 178, 209, 210 Careggi, 1382 Carmelites, 190 Carmen alpestre, 77, 111 Carmen heroicum, 232 Castiglione, Baldassare, 144 Catherine of Aragon, Queen of England, 213 Catholicism, 174, 208, 209, 210, 211, 213, 220 ss., 235, 244 Ceremonies, 128s., 212s. Cervantes, Miguel, 198 Chaldean literature, 83 Charles V, 58, 108, 116, 120, 126, 185, 186, 193, 221, 228 ss. Charnock, Richard, 39 Chodowiecki, Daniel, 256 Chrysostom, 197, 223 Church, Erasmus’ concep- tion of the, 130 Cicero, 16, 27, 130, 216 ss. 174, 175, 184, 132, 266 Ciceronianus, 215 Classicism, 10, 15, 17, 43, 49, 50, 58, 175, 215 ss. Claudian, 16 Clement VII, Pope, 234 Clyfton, William (?), 80 Colet, John, 36ss., 63, 68, 72, 74, 101, 102, 103, 112, 115, 117, 122, 132, 155, 179, 184, 196, 230 Collegium, Trilingue, 172 Colloquia, 27, 33, 39, 48, 50, 51, 54, 67, 82, 99, 128, 132, 185, 1387, 145, 152, 168, 164, 194, 198 ss., 202, 205, 212, 218, 217,223 Colloquium senile, 133 Cologne, 3, 70, 185, 187, 198 Common Life, Brethren, brotherhood of the, 4, 9, 10, 14, 26 Compendium, De origine et gestts Francorum, by Robert Gaguin, 30, 37 Constance, 214, 220 Constantine, Emperor, 130 Convivium profanum collo- quy, 198 Convivium religiosum, col- loquy, 132, 133, 146 Cop, William, 63, 77, 119 Copia verborum ac verum, de, 33, 51, 102, 104, 105, 146 Cornelius, Gerard, see Aure- lius Council of the Church, 229, 234 ss. Counter Reformation, 69 INDEX Courtebourne, 63 Courtray, 117 Cracow, 198 Cracow, Bishop of, 237 Cratander, Printer at Basle, 108 Cretans, 91 Cumae, 85 Curtius, 91 Cusa, Nicholas of, Cardinal, 83 Cyprian, 197, 223 Czech language, 69 Dante, 130 Decius, 91 Declamationes, 71, 8 Delft, 11 Democrit, 97, 198 Denk, Hans, 225 Desiderius, taken as a name by Erasmus, 8 Deventer, 4, 8, 9, 10, 11, 15, 60, 62, 198, 235 “Devotio moderna,” 4, 14, 16, 25 Diogenes, 101 Dionysius, 53 Dirks, Vincent, 175, 190, 200, 202 Disputatiuncula de_ tedio, pavore, tristicia Jesu, 39 Dogmatics, 212, 213 Dominicans, 4, 24, 128, 174, 184, 190 Dordrecht, 3, 6 Dorp, Martin van, 98, 119, 162, 167, 170, 172 INDEX Dover, 44, 49 Drama, Greek, 133 ‘Dulce bellum inexpertis,” Adagium, 108, 194 Diirer, Albrecht, 189, 190, 240, 254 ss. Dutch language, 54, 69, 238 Dutchmen, 55ss., 71, 74, 79, 119, 167, 195, 208 Dyck, Anthony van, 256 Ebrardus, 127 Ecclesiae concordia, De amabilt, 212, 230 Beclesiastes, 146, 200, 230 ss., 236 Eck, Johannes, 125, 180 Education, 136 Edward III, King of Eng- land, 43 Egmondanus, Nicholas, 153, 170, 175, 188, 190, 205 Egnatias, Baptista, 82 Elegantiae latinae linguae, by Lorenzo Valla, 16, 33 Eltham, palace, 37, 85 Emmaus, see Steyn Emperors, German, 2 Empire, German, 2, 186, 189, 221 Enchiridion militis chris- tiant, 6488., 73, 112, 125, 168, 171, 213, 214, 230, 231, 240 England, 3, 33, 34, 36ss., 61, 63, 69, 70, 74, 75, 77, 84, 100, 101, 102, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 113, 115, 116, 118, 120, 121, 126, 26% 160, 161, 167, 168, 172, 173, 185, 186, 193 England, panegyric on, 37, 86 Epicureans, 133 Epigrammata, 77 Epimenides, 28 Episcopius, Nicholas, 237 Epistolae obscurorum vtro- rum, 119, 123 Epistols, De conscribendss, 33, 123 Eppendorf, Heinrich of, 159, 203 “Hrasmiani,’ 125 “Hrasmistas,” 202 Erasmius, 8 Eschenfelder, 236 Esu carnium, de interdicto, 200, 210 Euripides, 75, 77, 81, 104 Evangelicals, 223 ss., 227 ss. Everaert, Nicholas, 250 Exomologesis, 200, 212, 214 Christopher, Faber Stapulensis, see Le- févre d’Etaples Familiarium colloquorum Formulae, 33, 53, 198 Farel, Guillaume, 211, 212 Fasting, 128, 211, 213 Fathers of the Church, 38, 61, 65, 180, 196, 212 Ferdinand, Archduke, King of the Romans, 59, 221 Ficino, Marsilio, 25 Filelfo, 16 268 . INDEX Fisher, John, Bishop of Rochester, 74, 101, 117, 153, 230, 234 Fisher, Robert, 32, 33, 43 Flanders, county of, Flem- ings, 1, 2, 3, 57, 58 Flodden, 106 Florence, 79 Florentius, 118 Foxe, Richard, Bishop of Winchester, 74, 75 France, Frenchmen, 2, 3, 47, 57.58. F2) C150 10, ae, 105, 106, 107, 109, 113, 119, 120,121; 122,-'126; 186, 223 Francis I, King of France, 119, 126, 184, 185 Franciscans, 4, 24, 63, 128, 184 Fraterhouses, 4, 10 Free Will, controversy on, 205 ss. Freiburg, 122, 193, 221ss., 232 ss., 237 French language, 69, 147 Friesland, territory of Frisi- ans, 1, 4, 57 Froben, Hieronymus, 232, 237 Froben, Johannes, printer at Basle, 8, 105, 108, 110, 113, 114, 115, 171, 183, 198, 199, 215, 232, 251, 253 Froben, Johannes Erasmius, 8, 199 Froben, house, 231, 232, 237 Fruin, Robert, 154 Fugger, Anthony, 222 Fugger, house, 179 Funeral, colloquy, 200 Gaguin, Robert, 25, 29, 30, 31, 37, 161 Gallus, 89 Gargantua, 97 Gellius, Aulus, 141 Genoa, 77 . Gerard, Erasmus’ father, 6, 7, 9, 16 German language, 54, 69 Germany, Germans, see Em- pire, 2, 3, 5, 102, 103, 105, 113, 121, 122, 125, 147, 152) 165; 167,) ia: sae 179, 184, 189, 202, 208, 209, 224, 229 Gerson, Jean, 25 Ghent, 3, 119, 245 Gigli, Silvestro, Bishop of Worcester, 118 Gilles, Peter, 84, 109, 117, 119, 1386, 152, 153, 170, 234, 249 Glareanus, Henry, 122 Glimes, see Bergen, Henry of, 20 Goclenius, Conrad, 253 Golden Age, 94 Golden Fleece, 20 Goths, Gothie, 23, 131 Gouda, 5, 7, 8, 9, 11, 13, 20, 26 Gourmont, Gilles, printer at Paris, 100, 101, 103 Greek language, 7, 9, 38, 43, 46, 50, 51, 61ss., 68, 70, INDEX 71, 74, 75, 76, 80, 82, 102, 104, 115, 130, 137, 141, 160, 172, 243 Greenwich, 37 Grey, Thomas, 28, 32 Grimani, Domenico, Cardi- nal, 85, 86 Grocyn, William, 43, 74 Groenendael Monastery, 22 Groningen, 4 Groote, Geert, 4 Grunnius, Lambertus, 118 Guarino, 16 Guelders, duchy of, 1 “Gueux,” 246 Guinegate, 106, 107 Haarlem, 3, 6, 61, 63, 175, 190, 245 Haarlem, Teyler Museum at, 256 Hainault, county of, 1, 2 Halberstadt, bishopric of, 178 Halsteren, 22 Hammes, 109, 111 Hampton Court, 249 _ Hansa, German, 3 Hapsburg, 21, 58 Hebrew language and litera- ture, 62, 83, 119, 172, 210 Hecuba, of Euripides, 75 Hegel, G. W. F., 208 Hegius, Alexander, 9 Hellenism, 130 Hem, Monastery, 17 Henry, Master, 112 Henry VII, King of Eng- land, 43, 75, 77, 85, 86 269 Henry VIII, King of Eng- land, 37, 46, 85, 86, 106, 126, 184, 185, 186, 205, 232 Herasmus, 8 Herder, J. G., 244 Hermans, William, 13, 16, 20, 21, 23, 31, 34, 47, 55, 61, 112 Hieronymians, see Common Life Hilary, 197 Hohenzollern, 178 Holbein, Hans, 145, 155, 192, 193, 251 ss. Holland, county of, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 23, 31, 33, 34, 55ss., 60, 74, 75, 110, 112 Hollanders, 55 ss. Hollonius, Lambert, 198 Homer, 62 Hoogstraten, Jacob, 185 Horace, 16, 39, 130, 182, 162 Humanian, Humanists, 9, 16, 25, 29, 47, 50, 52, 63, 68, 72, 113, 121, 122, 130, 131, 209, 215 ss., 242, 243 Hutten, Ulrich von, 122, 151, 153, 160, 165, 178, 188, 202, 203 Hyperaspistes, 209, 210 Hypologus, 217 Imitatio Christi, 5, 69 Index expurgatorius on the works of Erasmus, 69, 213 Indulgences, 179 270 Institutio christiant matri- moni, 200, 213 Institutio principis chris- tiant, 116, 171, 193, 230 Institution of the Christian Religion by Calvin, 2381 Iphigenia of Euripides, 75 Irenaeus, 197 Isaiah, 42, 101 Italians, 55, 58, 72, 109, 121, 122, 154, 202, 215ss. Italy, 9, 16, 25, 33, 35, 43, 63, 77, 79ss., 100, 102, 106, 107, 112, 118, 115, 161, 186, 216 ss. James IV, King of Scotland, 85, 106 Jerome, Saint, 8, 16, 23, 29, 61, 65, 73, 103, 104, 107, 110, 111, 114, 118, 145, 168, 197, 212, 242 Jonson, Ben, 198 Judaicism, 66, 68 Julius II, Pope, 74, 79ss., 107, 117 Julius exclusus, 164, 194 Juvenal, 16 107, 108, Kalkoff, P., 181 Kappel, 228, 229 Karlstadt, Andreas, 180 Kempis, Thomas A, 5, 69 Kent, 102 Keyzer, Hendria de, 257 Kiefl, F. X., 209 Kohler, Walter, 225 Kulm, bishop of, 253 INDEX Lang, John, 180, 181, 183 Lascaris, Johannes, 82 Lasco, Johannes a, 237 Lateran Council, 118 Latin language and litera-~ ture, 15, 17, 18, 23, 25, 29, 33, 49ss., 52, 53, 54, 55, 63, 68, 70, 75, 84, 102, 104, 114, 127, 131, 137, 147, 163, 172, 198, 215 ss., 239, 243 Latomus, James, 170, 172, 190 Laus stultitiae, see More Encomium Lausanne, 220 Lee, Edward, 153, 157, 164, 171ss., 180, 185, 201 Lefévre d’Etaples, Jacques, 25, 29, 153, 154, 169 ss. Leipsic, 198 Leipsic, disputation of, 180 Leipsic, University of, 176 Leo X, Pope, 85, 118, 119, 171, 175, 178, 183, 184, 187 Le Sauvage, John, 116 Letters of Erasmus, 51, 123 ss., 197 Leyden, 3, 6, 13 Leyden, Lucas of, 256 Libanius, 71, 89 libero Arbiirio diatribe, de, 206 ss. Lille, 3 Lily, College of the, at Lou- vain, 167, 172, 190 Linacre, Thomas, 43, 74 Lincei Gallery, at Rome, 249 INDEX Lingua, 99, 146, 200 Lives, by Plutarch, 82 London, 75, 89, 101, 104, 108, 109, 118, 185, 198 Longford Castle, 249 ss. Longolius, Christopher, 58, 218, 219 Lopsen, monastery, 13 Louvain, 3, 58, 64, 70, 71, 72, 99, 117, 119, 120, 121 ss., 152, 157, 161, 166 ss., 198, 200, 202, 204, 221, 223, 233 Louvain, University of, 2, 70, 71, 113, 166 ss., 226 Louvre, 252, 254 “Low Countries,” see Netherlands, 2, 58, 69 Loyola, Ignatius, 240, 241, 245 Liibeck, 32 Lucan, 16 Lucea, 74 Lucian, 75, 77, 89, 102, 104 Lucubrationes, 68, 69 Luther, Martin, 54, 69, 122, 147, 153, 164, 165, 173, 176, 177ss., 202, 204ss., 214, 221, 224, 226, 228, 240, 243, 245 Lutherans, 204, 226, 227 Liitzelburger, Hans, 253 Lypsius, Martin, 160, 171 Lyra, Nicholas of, 73 Machiavelli, Niccolo, 91, 116 Maertensz, Dirck, printer at Antwerp and Louvain, 64, 84, 114, 117, 172, 198 271 Magdalen College, Oxford, 39 Magdeburg, archbishopric of, 178, 179 “Magistri nostri,” 28, 129 Mammetrectus, 127 Marburg, Colloquy of, 228 Margareta, Erasmus’ mother, 6, 7, 8,9 Marriage, Ideas on, 137 Martial, 16, 56 Mary of Hungary, Regent of the Netherlands, 213, 237 Mathurins, 25 Maximilian, Emperor, 106, 108, 126, 180, 222 Mayence, archbishopric of, 178, 179, 198 Mechlin, 21, 26, 233 Medici, family, 132 Medici, John of, see Leo X Melanchthon, Philip, 185, 194, 209, 226, 229, 245 Metsys, Quentin, 117, 249 ss. Meuse, river, 5, 20, 57 Michelangelo, 240 Middelburg, 3, 47, 121 Middle Ages, 53, 147, 148 Moderns (term of scholas- ticism), 24 Moliére, 145 Monks, 128 Montaige, Michel EKyguem de, 91, 132, 138, 198 Montaigu, College of, 26, 27, 31, 32 Moralia by Plutarch, 82, 132 272 More, Thomas, 36, 43, 44, 74, 84, 88, 89, 97, 100, 101, 117, 123, 132, 136, 153, 162, 164, 179, 186, 188, 195, 196, 232, 234, 249 ss. Moriae Encomium, Praise of Folly, 67, 85, 87, 88 ss., 101, 103, 104, 112, 119, 125, 145, 155, 162, 167, 174, 197, 199, 200, 212, 214, 217, 251 Mountjoy, William Blount, Lord, 34, 35, 36ss., 43, 44, 45, 46, 49, 74, 86, 100, 109, 111, 112, 120, 234 Murray, R. H., 208 Musurus, Marcus, 82 Mutianus, Conrad, 209 Myconius, Oswald, 251 Mysticism, 129 Nemur, county of, 1 Naples, 85 Navarre, College of, at Paris, 25 Netherlands, 1, 2, 5, 20, 57ss., 70, 71, 109, 110, 116, 118, 119, 120, 167 ss., 189, 190, 191, 193, 205, 223, 233, 237, 245 ss., 254 New Testament, 73, 103, 107, 110, 114, 115, 119, 126, 135, 145, 166, 167 ss., 178, 190, 197, 201, 210, 214, 223 New York, Metropolitan Museum in, 253 INDEX Noctes atticae, 141 Northoff, Christian, 32, 33 Northoff, Henry, 32, 33 Nosoponus, 217, 218 Novum Instrumentum, see New Testament Nuremberg, 120, 250 Nuremberg, religious peace of, 229 Obrecht, Johannes, 79 Ockam, William of, 24 Oecolampadius, John, 200, 211, 213, 220ss., 229, 243 Old Testament, 178 Orange, William of, 245, 246 Oratio de pace et discordia, 194 Origenes, 232, 236 Orleans, 47, 60, 61 Ovid, 16 Oxford, 37ss., 107 Oxford, University of, 112 Pace, Richard, 203 Padua, 85 Paganism, 216 ss. Palissy, Bernard, 133 Paludanus, Johannes, 167 Panegyric, Philip le Beau, 7a Parabolae, 50, 114, 147 Paracelsus, 147 Paraphrases of the New Testament, 197, 212, 214, 250, 252 Parc, Monastery, 73 Paris, 2, 8, 23, 24ss., 43s8s., 47, 60, 63, 70, 71, 72, 74, 77, 100, 101, 102, 103, INDEX 105, 119, 120, 123, 198, 202, 252 Paris, University of, 24ss., 226 Parma, 253 “Patria,” meaning of, with Erasmus, 58 Paul III, Pope, 234 ss. Pausanias, 82 Pavia, 80 Pencz, George, 253 Peripatetics, 144 Persius, 16 Pestalozzi, J. H., 244 Peter, Erasmus’ brother, 7, 11, 12 Petrarch, 52, 62, 130 Petrograd, 253 “Philantia,” 90 Philip le Beau, Archduke, 71 Philip II, King of Spain, 256 Philippi, John, printer at Paris, 74 Philoxenus, 134 Phrygians, 53 Pico della Mirandola la, Giovanni, 25 Pilgrimages, 128 Pindar, 82 Pio, Alberto, Prince of Carpi, 99, 202, 212 Pirekheimer, Wilibald, 120, 209, 234, 250, 251, 254s. Plato, 38, 48, 65, 96 Platonism, 25, 29 Platter, Thomas, printer at Basle, 231 Plautus, 42, 82 273 Plotinus, 38 Plutarch, 28, 82, 102, 113, 130, 132 - Plutus, 97 Poems, Latin, by Erasmus, Vial ges, ALL oe Poetry, Latin, 16, 17, 18, 21, 39, 175 Poggio, 16, 215 Political ideas of Erasmus, 194 ss. Poliziano, Angelo, 141 Poncher, Etienne, Bishop of Paris, 119, 122 Popedom, 180, 184 Porrentruy, 221 Praeparatione ad mortem de, 230 Praise of Folly, see Moriae Encomium Pratse of Marriage, 172 Praise of Medicine, 152 Praise of Monastic Life, 13 Premonstratensians, 73 Primacy of St. Peter, 206 Princes, 195 Principe, tl, of Machiavelli, 116 Pronuntiatione, de, 146, 215, 254 Propertius, 16 Protest of 1529, 227 Protestantism, 244, 245 Psalms, commentaries on,. 197 Publishing, 32 Puerpera, colloquium, 145 Puritate, Fcclesiae chris- tianae, de, 236 274 . Pythagoras, 111 Queen’s College, Cambridge, 101 Querela pacts, 194 Quintilian, 16 Rabelais, Francois, 28, 54, 90, 97, 132, 136, 146, 198 Radnor, Earl, 249 Ratio verae theologiae, 146, 214 Ratione studi, de, 33 Realism, 146 ss. Reform of the Church, 25 Reformation, 67, 168 ss., 176, 181ss., 204ss., 210ss., 214, 219 ss., 223, 242 ss. Reformers, 245 Renaissance, 52, 80, 89, 97, 131, 132, 144, 146, 147 “Renascentia,” 141, 144 Renaudet, A., 64 Reuchlin, Johannes, 119, 165, 185 Revolution, French, 242 Rhenanus, Beatus, 50, 81, 105, 122, 153, 198, 224, 234, 237 Rhine, river, 3, 114 Riario, Raffaelle, Cardinal, 85 Ritualism, 66 Roger, see Servatius Roman Empire, 53 Rombout, 10 Rome, 20, 21, 23, 73, 85, 86, 102, 109, 110, 112, 119, 124, 193, 205 114, INDEX Roterodamus, surname of Erasmus, 8 Rotterdam, 5, 6, 13, 122, 256 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 94, 154, 243, 244 Ruffinus, 118 Ruysbroeck, 22 Sadolet, James, Cardinal, 118, 119, 209, 219, 224, 245 Saint Agnietenberg, 5 Saint Andrews, 85 Saint Bertin, 61, 63, 108 Saint Cassianus, 214 Saint Christopher, 129 Sainte Genevieve, abbey of, 27 Saint Erasmus, 7 Saint Lebuin, school of, 8 Saint Mary’s College, Ox- ford, 39 Saint Omer, 34, 63 Saint Paul, Epistles, 38, 42, 64, 66, 68, 96, 111, 136, 169, 177 Saint Peter, 203 Saint Sebastian, 159 Saint Stephen’s Chapel, 120 Saints, Veneration of the, 128 s., 213 Salisbury, 249 Sallust, 16 Santa Teresa, 240 Sapidus, John, 125 Sasboud, 19 Saxony, Frederick, elector of, 177, 182, 184, 187 INDEX Saxony, George, duke of, 120, 205 Saxony, House of, 178 Scaliger, Julius Caesar, 219 Scandinavia, 3 “Scarabeus aquilam quaerit,” 195 Sceptics, 148 Scheldt, river, 5, 20 Schmalkalden, League of, 229 Scholasticism, 24, 27, 28, 51, 129, 139 Schiirer, Matthias, printer at Strassburg, 114 Scotch, 106 Scotists, 24, 27, 28 Scotland, 3 Scotus, Johannes Duns, 27, 28 Scripture, Holy, 42, 62, 65, 68, 73, 141 ss., 148, 173 ss., 206, 210, 243, 244 Secundus, Janus, 250 Seneca, 83, 104, 114, 139 Senectute, De, by Cicero, 132 Sentimental friendship, 14 Servatius Roger, 13, 14, 15, 74, 75, 78, 79, 111, 118, 124, 153 Servo Arbitrio, De, 207 Shakespeare, William, 240 Shipwreck, The, Colloquy, 57 Sicily, 116 Siena, 85 Sion, Monastery of, 11, 14 Sixtin, John, 39 Sluter, Claus, 3 275 Socrates, 122, 132 Solon, 111 Sorbonne, College of, at Paris, 25, 28, 63, 201 Spain, Spaniards, 3, 71, 120, 121, 126, 147, 154, 167, 186, 201, 202, 240, 256 Spalatinus, George, 177, 178 Spanish language, 69 Speyer, Diet of, 221, 227 Spliigen, 86 Spongia adversus asrersiones Hutteni, 203 Stadion, Christopher of, bishop of Augsburg, 231 Standonck, John, 25, 26, 27, 47 Statius, 16 Stewart, Alexander, Arche bishop of Saint Andrews, 85, 106, 250 Steyn, Monastery of, 11, 12, 13, 14, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 54, 60, 75, 76, 111, 117 Stoics, 144 Strassburg, 101, 105, 120, 198 Stunica, Diego Lopez Zu- fliga, 201 Suetonius, 182 Swiss soldiers, 60 Switzerland, Swiss, 86, 122, 147, 220, 228, 229 Synthen, Johannes, 9 Talesius, Quirin, 234, 245 Tapper, Ruurd, 175 Terence, 16, 82 Terminists, 24 Terminus, 250 276 Thames, 109 Théléme, abbey of, 1382 Therouanne, 106 Thessalians, 53 Thomists, 24 Tibullus, 16 Tournay, 106, 116 Tournehem, castle of, 34, 61, 64 Translations Works, 69 Trazegnies, John of, 64 Trinitarians, 25, 29 Tunstall, Cuthbert, 74, 122, 169, 205 Turin, 79 Turks, 196, 228 Utenheim, Christopher of, bishop of Basle, 210, 219, 220 Utenhove, Charles, 234, 245 Utopia, 97, 117, 132, 136, 249 Utrecht, bishop of, see Bur- gundy, David of, 2, 19 Utrecht, bishopric of, 1, 4 Utrecht, see Adrian, 8, 9 Valla, Lorenzo, 16, 33, 73, 115 Veere, see Borselen, 61 Venice, 80ss., 103, 105, 113, 188, 246 Vesalius, Andreas, 147 Vianen, William of, 175 Vidua christiana, 200, 213 Vienna, 59, 198, 228, 253 Vincent, Augustine, see Ca- minade Vinci, Leonardo da, 147 Virgil, 16, 132 of Erasmus’ INDEX Vitrier, Jean, 63 s., 230 Vives, Juan Luis, 204, 209 Voecht, Jacobus, 47 Voltaire, 242 Vulgate, 38, 73, 115, 141, 142 Wadden Islands, 57 Warham, William, Arch- bishop of Canterbury, 74, 75, 86, 102, 117, 121, 234, 252 Watson, John, 125 Westminster, 120 Westphalia, 4 Wimpheling, Jacob, 101, 210 Winckel, Peter, 9, 10 Windesheim, Monastery, congregation of, 4, 5, 14, 26 Windsor, 253 Wittenberg, University of, 177, 226 Wolsey, Thomas, Cardinal, 39, 120, 175, 185 Worms, Diet of, 189 Ximenes, Cardinal, 120, 167, 201 Ysel, river, 1, 4 Zasius, Ulrich, 122, 195, 209, 237 Zealand, county of, 1, 2, 3, 57 “Zum Luft,” house at Basle, 233 Zufiga, see Stunica Zwingli, Ulrich, 122, 214, 225, 229, 243 Zwinglians, 227, 228 Zwolla, 4, 5 iy aah i ran AP puter ty aah aa th vA PRINTEDINU.S.A. vy m yy Ai ‘ie ' to. yt H svi Bie aay) Fi