It must be said that Erasmus was not well suited for the study of divinity as it was taught at Paris. Scholastic theology, the specialty of the Sorbonne, was a kind of rational metaphysics, forged during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries through ingenious efforts to harmonize the doctrines of the medieval Church with the newly discovered logic of Aristotle. Erasmus was by nature and nurture neither a logician nor a metaphysician. Nor could he tolerate the “corrupt” medieval Latin and abstract dialectical forms in which theological arguments were advanced. He valued simple piety over complex doctrine, harmony over disputation, and classical literature over everything else. Instead of studying theology, he spent much of his time in Paris writing Latin poetry, hoping to become famous as a poet. To make ends meet he gave Latin lessons to schoolboys, composing clever Latin dialogues for his students to recite. He also began culling Latin proverbs from his omnivorous readings in Latin literature. In 1500, he published 818 of these, together with his own learned commentaries, under the title Collectanea. This was the first of many works of classical erudition to come. He also wrote a Christo-centric moral treatise in classical Latin style, which he published in 1503 under the title Enchiridion militis christiani, or Handbook of the Christian Soldier, the first of many works of Christian piety to come. Having discovered in Louvain a manuscript of philological annotations on the text of the Greek New Testament by the Italian humanist Lorenzo Valla, he published these too, in 1505, the first of many critical editions to come. And he threw himself heart and soul into the study of ancient Greek, teaching himself so well that in 1506 he could publish his own Latin translations of the comic author Lucian; in 1507, his own Latin translations of Euripides’s Hecuba and Iphigenia in Aulis; and in 1508, a new edition of the Collectanea, now titled the Adagia, containing four times as many proverbs, a vast number of them Greek.
Virtually all of Erasmus’s mature works can be seen as extensions of these Parisian beginnings—his great treatises on education and rhetoric; his moral treatises; his scholarly work on the Greek New Testament (including the first printed edition of the Greek New Testament in 1516); and most important for students of literature, his moral and satirical works: the Moriae encomium, or Praise of Folly (1511), a coruscating paradoxical encomium inspired by Lucian and directed against the follies and vices of contemporary Europe and its institutions; successive editions of the Adagia (1515 and following), in which commentaries on proverbs grew into immense essays on political, moral, and religious topics; and successive editions of the Colloquia, or Conversations (1518 and following), in which the early language-learning exercises were elaborated into complex Lucianic dialogues satirizing popular superstitions and abuses of the Church. Common to all these diverse works is the ideology that undergirds them: a characteristically Erasmian fusion of classical and biblical learning, of philology and exegesis, and a new kind of theology—an anti-theology, really—which Erasmus himself consistently referred to as the philosophia Christi (philosophy of Christ): an ethics founded directly on the words of Jesus as they are recorded in the Greek Testament and interpreted by the earliest Christians from Paul to Augustine, whose essence is peace, brotherly love, and freedom from the ritualistic constraints of both the Old Testament and the modern Church.
If France played a determining role in the making of this Erasmus, Erasmus played an even more determining role in the shaping of the Renaissance in France. It was Erasmus, more than any of the great Italian humanists of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, who inspired in the French a belated enthusiasm for antiquity, with the result that the ancient fontes, or “sources,” to which sixteenth-century French humanists strove to return—in keeping with the Renaissance watchword best formulated by Erasmus himself: “first and foremost you must hasten to the sources themselves, that is, to the Greeks and ancients”—were biblical and patristic as much as they were Greek and Roman. This fact lent a decidedly religious cast to the French Renaissance from the very beginning, and led directly to one of the greatest ideological clashes in French intellectual history. The Erasmian, “Renaissance” fusion of classical learning and the sacred texts of Christianity was radically incompatible with the scholastic, “medieval” fusion of Aristotelian logic and medieval Church doctrine, and from this incompatibility arose a long series of polar oppositions: grammar, rhetoric, and poetry versus dialectical logic; moral philosophy versus scholastic theology; original sources versus tradition; the primitive Church of the first four centuries versus the medieval Church of the twelfth through the fifteenth centuries—and most acutely in France, Christian humanists versus the Faculty of Theology of the University of Paris.
Because he had inspired one of the factions in this clash of opposing ideologies, and because he was the most famous Christian humanist in all of Europe, Erasmus quickly became the common point of reference and of contention in the power struggle that inevitably resulted. He was lavishly praised and promoted as an icon by his fellow humanists in Paris and viciously attacked and censured by the theologians of Paris. Erasmus’s copious correspondence contains fascinating firsthand glimpses into this conflict. Of his many French correspondents, two in particular, both exact contemporaries, can be taken as emblematic: Guillaume Budé (1468–1540), a like-minded humanist, author of erudite studies of Roman law and numismatics, and the most accomplished Hellenist in Europe, and Noël Béda (ca. 1470–1537), zealous defender of orthodoxy, master of the notorious Collège de Montaigu where Erasmus had spent his first, most miserable year in Paris, and all-powerful syndic of the very Faculty of Theology where Erasmus had once studied.
Erasmus’s correspondence with Budé consists of some forty-eight extant letters in elegant Latin and ancient Greek, exchanged between 1516 and 1528. Most tellingly, Budé tries repeatedly (first in 1517 and again in 1523–24) to entice his counterpart back to Paris to spearhead the humanist movement in France. In practical terms this meant assuming the directorship of Budé’s own pet project, a new institution of higher learning that would be devoted to the teaching of classical Latin, ancient Greek, and biblical Hebrew, and to the study of both Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian antiquity, sheltered by the king of France, François I, from the persecutions of the reactionary Sorbonne. In 1523, the king himself wrote to Erasmus, confirming Budé’s invitation and beseeching Erasmus to accept it. If the king of France had had his wish, Erasmus would have returned to Paris for good, not as a doctor of theology but as the inaugural director of the “College of King’s Readers,” or Collège Royal—one of France’s most prestigious institutions, which still exists today as the Collège de France. One cannot help but wonder how French literary and cultural history might have evolved differently had this royal plan for humanistic reform been realized.
Erasmus’s correspondence with Noël Béda tells the other side of this story. It consists of eleven extant letters exchanged between 1525 and 1527, at a time when the Faculty of Theology and its notorious syndic were out for blood in their relentless pursuit of a new heresy called Lutheranism—a “Lutheran” being anyone whose strict orthodoxy they suspected, Erasmus being easily the most conspicuous of these. In 1523 and again in 1526, the Faculty, acting on Béda’s recommendation, had censured several of Erasmus’s works. At issue in these letters is Erasmus’s edition of the Greek New Testament and what both correspondents refer to as his stated positions on “celibacy of the clergy, monastic vows, fasting and the interdiction against the eating of meat, the observance of feast days, the evangelical counsels, the translation of Holy Scripture into the vernacular, the canonical hours, divorce, the creeds of the church.” This catalog of hot-button issues is noteworthy in naming most of the practices that Erasmus consistently referred to as constitutiones humanae, or “human institutions”: ritual observances invented by the medieval clergy and enforced by the Church under pain of excommunication but for which no biblical or patristic authority exists and from which, moreover, Christ had explicitly liberated his followers: the cult of saints, dietary restrictions like
the Lenten fast, monastic orders, the priesthood, canonical hours, fixed liturgies, the Mass. While Erasmus attacked these as sacrilegious vestiges of paganism and “Judaism,” Béda defended them as holy practices necessary to salvation, sanctioned and even required by the Church. Their increasingly vitriolic exchange on these subjects was a dialogue of the deaf, turning on two incompatible notions of “orthodoxy” and “authority”: on the one hand, conformity with scripture as understood by the educated individual; on the other hand, submission to dogma as determined by theologians and enforced by the Church. Their letters ceased only when their dispute moved to a more public arena, with direct appeals to the Faculty of Theology and to the king of France and the publication of scurrilous pamphlets and ad hominem attacks. Béda eventually went too far by attacking the king’s own sister, Marguerite de Navarre. He was banished briefly from Paris in 1533 and exiled for good in 1535, one year before Erasmus’s death. But by this time, the dispute had escalated well beyond all individual actors to become a national crisis. The Erasmian dream of an enlightened Christian Renaissance was dead, the battle lines between Calvinists and Catholics were clearly drawn, and the Wars of Religion were looming on the horizon.
It is hardly surprising that a scholar of Erasmus’s stature played such an important catalyzing role within the elite, Latinate sphere in which French humanism clashed with the traditionalism of the Sorbonne. Less expected but no less consequential is Erasmus’s influence on a whole generation of French writers in the vernacular—a generation that flowered in the 1530s and 1540s and that French literary history often identifies as the “première Renaissance,” conveniently represented by three major writers: the great comic author François Rabelais (1483?–1553), the charming court poet Clément Marot (1496–1544), and an authentic royal: Marguerite d’Angoulême (1492–1549), beloved sister of King François I, duchess of Alençon through her marriage in 1509 to Duke Charles, and queen of Navarre through her marriage in 1527 to Henri d’Albret.
This influence is all the more surprising when we consider that Erasmus himself—one of the most prolific writers in an age of astoundingly prolific writers—never wrote a word in any vernacular language: not even his native Dutch, much less a foreign vernacular like French. Nor did he have the slightest interest in any work that was not written in one of the humanists’ “three languages”: Latin, Greek, or Hebrew. His influence appears more remarkable still when we consider that two of the most salient characteristics of French literature of this period are a systematic recourse to popular medieval literary forms and a predilection for a style that is “vulgar” in all senses of the word—not only vernacular but often popular and sometimes extremely crude. Between Erasmus’s elegant, classicizing Latin prose and Rabelais’s ribald and often coarse comic epics, or Marot’s medieval allegories, or Marguerite’s farces and pop songs, there would seem to be no common ground. And yet Erasmus informs all of these in some crucial way. Discerning this influence can help us discover not only the character and meaning of these works but significant differences among them. These three writers, and lesser writers like them, knew one another, supported one another, and on occasion even collaborated with one another, but their works are radically different in some respects—because, one is tempted to say, they are Erasmian to such different degrees and in such different fashions.
As paradoxical as it may seem to the modern reader, rowdy Rabelais was by far the most consciously and enthusiastically Erasmian writer of the three. It would be no exaggeration to say that without Erasmus there would have been no Gargantua or Pantagruel. Nearly as paradoxical, perhaps, is the fact that the pious and decorous Marguerite was the least Erasmian of the three. Despite many shared values and convictions—belief in the unique authority of the Bible, a radically Christo-centric vision of Christianity, an inward piety, and a loathing for rational theology—she was deeply hostile to everything Erasmus came to represent.
Once again Erasmus’s correspondence offers a fascinating glimpse into crucial distinctions and oppositions, this time within the single camp of the Renaissance avant-garde. Near the end of 1532, Rabelais sent a very Erasmian letter to Erasmus, written in elegant Latin interspersed with long passages in Greek, in which he expressed his boundless admiration and gratitude to the great humanist, whom he calls his “most humane father” and more: “I would also call you ‘mother,’ if by your indulgence that were permitted me. … You have given me my education, you have never ceased to feed me with the purest milk of your divine learning; whatever I am, whatever I am good for, it is to you alone that I owe it.” This letter is by no means uncharacteristic of its author. As early as 1520 and 1521, Rabelais had written two similar letters, also in elegant Latin and Greek, to Guillaume Budé, and in 1532 he published three scholarly works—one of them the editio princeps of two short works by Hippocrates and Galen, in Greek, with Rabelais’s own annotations in Latin—all preceded by dedicatory epistles to French humanists written in the same Latin and Greek style. Rabelais, a former monk and self-taught Hellenist like Erasmus, clearly viewed himself as a humanist in the Erasmian mold. Yet in the same year of his first scholarly editions and his letter to Erasmus, he published the first and most popular of his works in the vernacular, Pantagruel. The question that arises, then, is not why the author of Gargantua and Pantagruel would write to Erasmus, but why an Erasmian humanist like Rabelais would write such vulgar works in the vernacular as Gargantua and Pantagruel? For the moment, it must simply be observed that Erasmus never answered Rabelais’s letter. This is perhaps not surprising, because in 1532 Rabelais was completely unknown while Erasmus was the most famous man in Europe, admired by multitudes and loathed by as many, mired in controversies and in failing health, with only four more years to live.
A few years earlier, however, in 1525 and in 1527, Erasmus had written two letters to Rabelais’s younger contemporary Marguerite, addressing her first as the recently widowed duchess of Alençon, then as the newly married queen of Navarre. The first is a personal tribute and an expression of condolence for Marguerite’s recent losses and calamities; the second is an expression of support for Louis de Berquin, Marguerite’s protégé and Erasmus’s imprudent French translator, who was then suffering the persecutions of Noël Béda. We know that Marguerite never answered the first letter, and we can safely assume she never answered the second. And yet between 1521 and 1524, Marguerite had pursued a long and intense correspondence with Guillaume Briçonnet, bishop of Meaux—another Christian humanist and victim of Noël Béda—centered on the meaning of the Bible and its implications for a purely interior, personal form of Christian devotion. Marguerite snubbed Erasmus, just as Erasmus, more understandably, would snub Rabelais.
The symmetry of these two unreciprocated epistolary overtures throws into sharp relief some of the paradoxes of Erasmian influence and suggests fault lines within a defining feature of the première Renaissance that literary history usually represents as monolithic and identifies, for want of a better term, as “evangelism.” By probing these paradoxes and fault lines one can arrive at a fairly complete and nuanced appreciation of French vernacular literature of the 1530s and 1540s. But first we must know how to recognize Erasmus’s influence.
One measure of this influence is the force and frequency with which Erasmus’s signature themes and ideas are expressed. Another is the use of literary devices and modes that Erasmus was the first to introduce and that for a very long time remained closely associated with him: the paradoxical encomium, the satirical dialogue, and a pervasive irony so mercurial that it is sometimes extremely difficult to pin down. Many of these features can be traced directly to the second-century Greek rhetorician and satirist Lucian of Samosata, whose works Erasmus and his friend Thomas More began publishing in Latin translation in 1506. Anything that looks “Lucianic” is in fact almost certain to be Erasmian. Most of Erasmus’s mature Colloquies are satirical dialogues in the Lucianic style, in which two or more characters holding opposing views on religious a
nd moral questions work out their differences (or not) in dialectical fashion. In most cases one side quickly emerges as the correct one, the other as untenable and even ridiculous. “The Shipwreck” (1523), for example, presents a powerful case against the traditional practice of making vows to saints. “The Girl with No Interest in Marriage” and “The Repentant Girl ” (1523) condemn premature monastic vows and hint at the sordid goings-on in convents. “Julius Excluded from Heaven” (1518), an anonymous dialogue never acknowledged by Erasmus but universally attributed to him, condemns war in the person of the recently deceased “warrior-pope” Julius II, who boasts to Saint Peter—thereby unwittingly indicting himself—of his countless military campaigns against Christian princes in defense of the temporal power of the Church. The dialogue ends as Peter points out the incompatibility of war and the philosophia Christi and sends Julius down to his rightful abode in hell.
Other colloquies are more subtle and complex. “A Fish Diet” (1526), for example, stages a long and very learned argument between a fishmonger and a butcher about the legitimacy of Lenten fasting, the former arguing pro on the basis of doctrinal discussions he has overheard among Dominican doctors of theology, the latter contra on the basis of his own, self-directed readings of the Bible. The butcher seems to come out ahead, as one would expect in Erasmus, but rather than reaching a definitive conclusion, the two agree to leave the issue unresolved and dine together instead, in a characteristically Erasmian spirit of nondogmatic brotherly love.
The work for which Erasmus is best known to modern readers—The Praise of Folly, first published in Paris in 1511 and 1512 and expanded in 1514 and 1516—is the best and most complex example of Erasmian irony. What distinguishes this paradoxical encomium from similar works by Lucian and other ancients is that it is also a prosopopoeia, in which the allegorical personification of foolishness itself, Stultitia, does the talking, praising herself (a foolish thing to do, as befits Folly). Since it is not Erasmus but Folly who speaks, we have to interpret her words accordingly. Everything she praises we understand to be either trivial or harmful—except when it is not, as when she extols the “folly of the Cross,” expanding on 1 Corinthians 1:17–25 and 3:18–23 (for one can hardly expect Folly to be consistent!). Erasmus takes great pains to point this out in the prologue to the work, reminding his readers not to take offense at anything Folly says because it is not an insult but rather “an honor to be insulted by Folly.”
A History of Modern French Literature Page 7