by Will Durant
It was probably the notes that carried the book to a success that must have surprised author and publisher alike. The first edition was disposed of in three years; new and revised editions were issued in sixty-nine printings before Erasmus died. Criticism of the work was vehement; many errors were pointed out; and Dr. Johann Eck, professor at Ingolstadt and proto-antagonist of Luther, branded as scandalous Erasmus’ statement that the Greek of the New Testament was inferior to that of Demosthenes. Leo X, however, approved the work, and Pope Adrian VI asked Erasmus to do for the Old Testament what he had done for the New; but the Council of Trent condemned Erasmus’ translation, and pronounced Jerome’s Vulgate the only authentic Latin version of the Bible. Erasmus’ New Testament was soon superseded as scholarship, but as an event in the history of thought its influence was immense. It facilitated and welcomed the vernacular translations that were soon to follow. Said a fervent passage in the preface:
I would have the weakest woman read the Gospels and the Epistles of St. Paul.... I would have those words translated into all languages, so that not only Scots and Irishmen, but Turks and Saracens might read them. I long for the plowboy to sing them to himself as he follows the plow, the weaver to hum them to the tune of his shuttle, the traveler to beguile with them the dullness of his journey.... . Other studies we may regret having undertaken, but happy is the man upon whom death comes when he is engaged in these. These sacred words give you the very image of Christ speaking, healing, dying, rising again, and make him so present, that were he before your very eyes you would not more truly see him.
Rejoicing in the competence of Froben’s press and staff, Erasmus issued (November 1516) a critical edition of Jerome, and followed it with similarly revised classical and patristic texts, correcting 4,000 errors in the received text of Seneca; these were substantial services to scholarship. He retold the story of the New Testament in Paraphrases (1517). Such tasks required frequent stays in Basel, but a new attachment fixed his residence near the royal court at Brussels. Charles was at this time only King of Castile and ruler of the Netherlands, not yet Emperor Charles V. He was only fifteen, but his keen mind already ranged over diverse interests, and he was readily persuaded that his court might enhance its luster if he included the outstanding writer of the age among his privy councilors. It was so ordered; and on returning from Basel (1516) Erasmus accepted the honorary position at a modest salary. He was offered a canonry at Courtrai, with the promise of a bishopric; he refused it, remarking to a friend, “There’s a dream to amuse you.”42 He received and rejected invitations to teach at the universities of Leipzig and Ingolstadt. Francis I tried to detach him from Charles with a flattering request that he join the court of France; Erasmus said no with flowered courtesy.
Meanwhile Leo. X had sent to London the solicited dispensations. In March 1517, Erasmus crossed to London, and received the papal letters freeing him from his monastic obligations and the disabilities of bastardy. To the formal documents Leo added a personal note:
Beloved son, health and apostolic benediction. The good favor of your life and character, your rare erudition and high merits, witnessed not only by the monuments of your studies, which are everywhere celebrated, but also by the general vote of the most learned men, and commended to us finally by the letters of two most illustrious princes, the King of England and the Catholic King [of France], give us reason to distinguish you with special and singular favor. We have therefore willingly granted your request, being ready to declare more abundantly our affection for you when you shall either yourself minister occasion, or accident shall furnish it, deeming it right that your holy industry, assiduously exerted for the public advantage, should be encouraged to higher endeavors by adequate rewards.43
Perhaps it was a judicious bribe to good behavior, perhaps an honest gesture from a tolerant and humanist court; in any case Erasmus never forgot this papal courtesy, and would always find it hard to .break from a Church that had so patiently borne the sting of his critique.
V. THE PHILOSOPHER
Returning to Brussels, he found himself further seduced to caution by cordial welcome at the royal court. He took his privy councilorship seriously, forgetting that brilliant authors are rarely equipped for statesmanship. In the busy year 1516 he composed in haste an Institutio principis Christiani (Education of a Christian Prince), rich in pre-Machiavellian platitudes of how a king should behave. In the dedication to Charles he wrote with bold directness: “You owe it to Providence that your realm has been acquired without injury to any; your wisdom will be best shown if you can keep it in peace and tranquillity.”44 Like most philosophers, Erasmus reckoned monarchy the least evil form of government; he feared the people as a “fickle, many-headed monster,” deprecated the popular discussion of laws and politics, and judged the chaos of revolution worse than the tyranny of kings.45 But he counseled his Christian prince to guard against the concentration of wealth. Taxes should fall only upon luxuries. There should be fewer monasteries, more schools. Above all, there should be no war among Christian states—nor even against the Turks. “We shall better overcome the Turks by the piety of our lives than by arms; the empire of Christianity will thus be defended by the same means by which it was originally established.”46 “What does war beget except war?—but civility invites civility, justice invites justice.”47
As Charles and Francis edged toward hostilities, Erasmus made appeal after appeal for peace. He complimented the French King on a passing mood of conciliation, and asked how anyone could think of waging war with France, “the purest and most flourishing part of Christendom.” 48 In Querela pacis (The Complaint of Peace, 1517) he reached his peak of passionate eloquence:
I pass silently over the tragedies of ancient wars. I will stress only those which have taken place in the course of these last years. Where is the land or sea where people have not fought in the most cruel manner? Where is the river that has not been dyed with human blood... with Christian blood? O supreme shame! They behave more cruelly in battle than non-Christians, more savagely than wild beasts.... All [these wars] were undertaken at the caprice of princes, to the great detriment of the people, whom these conflicts in no way concerned.... . Bishops, cardinals, popes who are vicars of Christ—none among them is ashamed to start the war that Jesus so execrated. What is there in common between the helmet and the miter?... Bishops, how dare you, who hold the place of the Apostles, teach people things that touch on war at the same time that you teach the precepts of the Apostles?... There is no peace, even unjust, which is not preferable to the most just of wars.49
Princes and generals may profit from war, but the masses bear the tragedies and the costs.50 It may sometimes be necessary to fight a war of self-defense, but even in such cases it may be wiser to buy off the enemy than to wage war.51 Let the kings submit their disputes to the pope. This would have been impracticable under Julius II, himself a warrior; but Leo X, “a learned, honest, and pious pontiff,” might arbitrate with justice, and preside effectively over an international court.52 Erasmus called nationalism a curse to humanity, and challenged statesmen to forge a universal state. “I wish,” he said, “to be called a citizen of the world.”53 He forgave Budé for loving France, but “in my opinion it is more philosophical to put our relations with things and men on such a footing as to treat the world as the common country of us all.”54 Erasmus was the least national spirit in the rising nationalism of the Reformation age. “The most sublime thing,” he wrote, “is to deserve well of the human race.”55
We must not look to Erasmus for any realistic conception of human nature, or of the causes of war, or of the behavior of states. He never faced the problem that Machiavelli was dealing with in those same years—whether a state can survive if it practices the morality that it preaches to its citizens. The function of Erasmus was to cut dead branches from the tree of life rather than to construct a positive and consistent philosophy. He was not even sure that he was a Christian. He frequently professed to accept the Apostle
s’ Creed; yet he must have doubted hell, for he wrote that “they are not as impious who deny the existence of God as are those who picture Him as inexorable.” 56 He could hardly have believed in the divine authorship of the Old Testament, for he averred his willingness to “see the whole Old Testament abolished” if that would quiet the furore raised over Reuchlin.57 He smiled at the traditions that Minos and Numa persuaded their peoples to obey uncongenial legislation by fathering it upon the gods,58 and probably suspected Moses of similar statesmanship. He expressed surprise that More was satisfied with the arguments for personal immortality.59 He thought of the Eucharist as a symbol rather than a miracle;60 he obviously doubted the Trinity, the Incarnation, and the Virgin Birth; and More had to defend him from a correspondent who declared that Erasmus had privately confessed his unbelief.61 He called in question one after another of the Christian usages of his time—indulgences, fasting, pilgrimages, auricular confession, monasticism, clerical celibacy, relic worship, prayers to the saints, the burning of heretics. He gave allegorical or rational explanations of many Biblical passages; he compared the story of Adam and Eve with that of Prometheus, and advised “the least literal” interpretation of the Scriptures.62 He resolved the pains of hell into “the perpetual anguish of mind that accompanies habitual sin.”63 He did not broadcast his doubts among the people, for he had no comforting or deterrent myths to offer in place of the old ones. “Piety,” he wrote, “requires that we should sometimes conceal truth, that we should take care not to show it always, as if it did not matter when, where, or to whom we show it.... Perhaps we must admit with Plato that lies are useful to the people.”64
Despite this strong bent toward rationalism, Erasmus remained externally orthodox. He never lost his affection for Christ, for the Gospels, and for the symbolic ceremonies with which the Church promoted piety. He made a character in the Colloquies say: “If anything is in common use with Christians that is not repugnant to the Holy Scriptures, I observe it for this reason, that I may not offend other people.” 65 He dreamed of replacing theology with “the philosophy of Christ,” and strove to harmonize this with the thought of the greater pagans. He applied to Plato, Cicero, and Seneca the phrase, “divinely inspired”;66 he would not admit that such men were excluded from salvation; and he could “scarce forbear” praying to “Saint Socrates.” He asked the Church to reduce the essential dogmas of Christianity to as “few as possible, leaving opinion free on the rest.” 67 He did not advocate the full tolerance of all opinions (who does?), but he favored a lenient attitude toward religious heresy. His ideal of religion was the imitation of Christ; we must admit, however, that his own practice was less than evangelical.
VI. THE MAN
How, actually, did he live? At this time (1517) he resided for the most part in Flanders—at Brussels, Antwerp, and Louvain. He dwelt in celibate privacy with one servant, but often accepted the hospitality of the prosperous, who courted his company as a social distinction and an intellectual feast. His tastes were fastidious; his nerves and feelings were refined to the point of frequent suffering from the vigorous vulgarities of life. He drank wine abundantly, and prided himself on his ability to carry it steadily. It may have been part cause of the gout and stones that galled him, but he thought it relieved his pain by dilating his arteries. In 1514, aged forty-five or forty-eight, he described himself as “a gray-headed invalid .... who must drink nothing but wine,” and must “be nice in what he eats.” 68 Fasting disagreed with him, and he fumed against fish; perhaps his bile colored his theology. He slept poorly, like most people whose busy brains recognize no curfew. He consoled himself with friends and books. “I seem deprived of myself when I am shut out from my usual habits of study.... . My home is where I have my library.” 69
It was partly to buy books that he solicited money with all the assiduity of a parish priest. He received regular pensions from Mountjoy and Warham, substantial gifts like the 300 florins ($7,500?) from Jean le Sauvage, Chancellor of Burgundy, and royalties exceeding those earned by any other author of his time. He disclaimed any love of money; he sought it because, as a man without moorings, he feared the insecurity of a lonely old age. Meanwhile he continued to refuse lucrative posts that would have extended his income at the cost of his freedom.
His appearance was at first unimpressive. He was short, thin, pale, weak in voice and constitution. Fie impressed by his sensitive hands, his long, sharp nose, his blue-gray eyes flashing with wit, and his speech—the conversation of the richest and quickest mind of that brilliant age. The greatest artists among his northern contemporaries were eager to paint his portrait, and he consented to sit for them because such portraits were welcomed as gifts by his friends. Quentin Massys pictured him in 1517—absorbed in writing, bundled in a heavy coat as protection against the chilly rooms of those centuries; this was presented to More. Dürer made a charcoal drawing of Erasmus in 1520, and a remarkable engraving in 1526; here the German touch gave the “good European” a thoroughly Dutch physiognomy; “if I look like that,” said the sitter, “I am a great knave.”70 Holbein surpassed all these efforts in the many portraits that he made of Erasmus. One is in Turin, another in England, a third in Basel, the best in the Louvre—all masterly performances by the greatest portrait painter in the north. Here the scholar has become a philosopher, quiet, meditative, somewhat melancholy, reluctantly resigned to the careless neutrality of nature and the mortality of genius. “What our lot brings must be borne,” he wrote in 1517, “and I have composed my mind for every event”71—a Stoic ataraxia that he never really achieved. “He loves glory,” he said of an ambitious youth, “but he does not know what a weight glory is”;72 yet Erasmus, like many a noble soul, labored night and day to win that incubus.
His faults leaped to the eye; his virtues were secrets known only to his intimates. He could beg shamelessly, but he could also give, and many a rising spirit expanded in the warmth of his praise. When Reuchlin was assailed by Pfefferkorn, Erasmus wrote to his friends among the cardinals at Rome, and helped to win protection for the harassed Hebraist. He lacked modesty and gratitude, which came hard to one courted by popes and kings. He was impatient and resentful of criticism,73 and sometimes answered it in the abusive manner of that polemic age. He shared the anti-Semitism of even the scholars of the Renaissance. His interests were as narrow as they were intense: he loved literature when it clothed philosophy, and philosophy when it left logic for life, but he almost ignored science, scenery, music, and art. He smiled at the systems of astronomy that then strutted the stage, and the stars smiled with him. In all his multitudinous correspondence there is no appreciation of the Alps, or the architecture of Oxford and Cambridge, or the painting of Raphael or the sculpture of Michelangelo, who were working for Julius II when Erasmus was in Rome (1509); and the lusty singing of the Reformed congregations would later offend his educated ears. His sense of humor was usually subtle and refined, occasionally Rabelaisian, often sarcastic, once inhuman, as when he wrote to a friend, on hearing that some heretics had been burned, “I would pity them the less if they raise the price of fuel now that winter is coming on.”74 He had not only the natural egoism or selfishness of all men, but also that secret and cherished egotism, or selfconceit, without which the writer or artist would be crushed in the ruthless rush of an indifferent world. He loved flattery, and agreed with it despite frequent disclaimers. “Good judges,” he told a friend, “say that I write better than any other man living.”75
It was true, though only in Latin. He wrote bad French, spoke a little Dutch and English, “tasted Hebrew only with the tip of the tongue,”76 and knew Greek imperfectly; but he mastered Latin thoroughly, and handled it as a living tongue applicable to the most un-Latin nuances and trivia of his time. A century newly enamored of the classics forgave most of his faults for the lively brilliance of his style, the novel charm of his understatements, the bright dagger of his irony. His letters rival Cicero’s in elegance and urbanity, surpass them in vivacity and wit. More
over, his Latin was his own, not imitatively Ciceronian; it was a living, forceful, flexible speech, not an echo 1,500 years old. His letters, like Petrarch’s, were coveted by scholars and princes only next to the stimulus of his conversation. He tells us, perhaps with some literary license, that he received twenty letters a day and wrote forty.77 Several volumes of them were published in his lifetime, carefully edited by their author so conscious of posterity. Leo X, Adrian VI, Queen Marguerite of Navarre, King Sigismund I of Poland, Henry VIII, More, Colet, Pirkheimer, were among his correspondents. The modest More wrote: “I cannot get rid of a prurient feeling of vanity .... when it occurs to my mind that I shall be commended to a distant posterity by the friendship of Erasmus.”78
No other contemporary writer equaled his fame, unless we think of Luther as a writer. One Oxford bookseller reported in 1520 that a third of all his sales were of works by Erasmus. He had many enemies, especially among the theologians of Louvain, but he had disciples in a dozen universities, and humanists throughout Europe hailed him as their exemplar and chief. In the field of literature he was the Renaissance and humanism embodied—their cult of the classics and a polished Latin style, their gentlemen’s agreement not to break with the Church, and not to disturb the inevitable mythology of the masses, provided the Church winked at the intellectual freedom of the educated classes and permitted an orderly, internal reform of ecclesiastical abuses and absurdities. Erasmus, like all humanists, was heartened by the elevation of Leo X to the papacy; their dream had come true—a humanist, a scholar, and a gentleman, the living unification of the Renaissance and Christianity, had mounted the greatest of thrones. Surely now a peaceful cleansing of the Church would come; education would spread; the people would keep their lovely ritual and consolatory faith, but the human mind would be free.79