ERASMUS
In the writing of every book there occurs a crisis. Sometimes it comes
during the first fifty pages. Upon other occasions it does not make
itself manifest until the manuscript is almost finished. Indeed, a book
without a crisis is like a child that has never had the measles. There
probably is something the matter with it.
The crisis in the present volume happened a few minutes ago, for I have
now reached the point where the idea of a work upon the subject of
tolerance in the year of grace 1925 seems quite preposterous; where all
the labor spent thus far upon a preliminary study appears in the light
of so much valuable time wasted; where I would like best of all to make
a bonfire of Bury and Lecky and Voltaire and Montaigne and White and use
the carbon copies of my own work to light the stove.
How to explain this?
There are many reasons. In the first place, there is the inevitable
feeling of boredom which overtakes an author when he has been living with
his topic on a very intimate footing for too long a time. In the second
place, the suspicion that books of this sort will not be of the slightest
practical value. And in the third place the fear that the present
volume will be merely used as a quarry from which our less tolerant
fellow-citizens will dig a few easy facts with which to bolster up their
own bad causes.
But apart from these arguments (which hold good for most serious books)
there is in the present case the almost insurmountable difficulty of
“system.”
A story in order to be a success must have a beginning and an end. This
book has a beginning, but can it ever have an end?
What I mean is this.
I can show the terrible crimes apparently committed in the name of
righteousness and justice, but really caused by intolerance.
I can depict the unhappy days upon which mankind fell when intolerance
was elevated to the rank of one of the major virtues.
I can denounce and deride intolerance until my readers shout with one
accord, “Down with this curse, and let us all be tolerant!”
But there is one thing I cannot do. I cannot tell how this highly
desirable goal is to be reached. There are handbooks which undertake
to give us instruction in everything from after-dinner speaking to
ventriloquism. In an advertisement of a correspondence course last Sunday
I read of no less than two hundred and forty-nine subjects which the
institute guaranteed to teach to perfection in exchange for a very small
gratuity. But no one thus far has offered to explain in forty (or in
forty thousand) lessons “how to become tolerant.”
And even history, which is supposed to hold the key to so many secrets,
refuses to be of any use in this emergency.
Yes, it is possible to compose learned tomes devoted to slavery or free
trade or capital punishment or the growth and development of Gothic
architecture, for slavery and free trade and capital punishment and
Gothic architecture are very definite and concrete things. For lack of
all other material we could at least study the lives of the men and
women who had been the champions of free trade and slavery and capital
punishment and Gothic architecture or those who had opposed them.
And from the manner in which those excellent people had approached
their subjects, from their personal habits, their associations, their
preferences in food and drink and tobacco, yea, from the very breeches
they had worn, we could draw certain conclusions about the ideals which
they had so energetically espoused or so bitterly denounced.
But there never were any professional protagonists of tolerance. Those
who worked most zealously for the great cause did so incidentally. Their
tolerance was a by-product. They were engaged in other pursuits. They
were statesmen or writers or kings or physicians or modest artisans.
In the midst of the king business or their medical practice or making
steel engravings they found time to say a few good words for tolerance,
but the struggle for tolerance was not the whole of their careers.
They were interested in it as they may have been interested in playing
chess or fiddling. And because they were part of a strangely assorted
group (imagine Spinoza and Frederick the Great and Thomas Jefferson and
Montaigne as boon companions!) it is almost impossible to discover that
common trait of character which as a rule is to be found in all those
who are engaged upon a common task, be it soldiering or plumbing or
delivering the world from sin.
In such a case the writer is apt to have recourse to epigrams. Somewhere
in this world there is an epigram for every dilemma. But upon this
particular subject, the Bible and Shakespeare and Izaak Walton and even
old Benham leave us in the lurch. Perhaps Jonathan Swift (I quote from
memory) came nearest to the problem when he said that most men had just
enough religion to hate their neighbors but not quite enough to love
them. Unfortunately that bright remark does not quite cover our present
difficulty. There have been people possessed of as much religion as
any one individual could safely hold who have hated their neighbors as
cordially as the best of them. There have been others who were totally
devoid of the religious instinct who squandered their affection upon all
the stray cats and dogs and human beings of Christendom.
No, I shall have to find an answer of my own. And upon due cogitation
(but with a feeling of great uncertainty) I shall now state what I
suspect to be the truth.
The men who have fought for tolerance, whatever their differences, had
all of them one thing in common; their faith was tempered by doubt;
they might honestly believe that they themselves were right, but they
never reached the point where that suspicion hardened into an absolute
conviction.
In this day and age of super-patriotism, with our enthusiastic clamoring
for a hundred-percent this and a hundred-percent that, it may be well to
point to the lesson taught by nature which seems to have a constitutional
aversion to any such ideal of standardization.
Purely bred cats and dogs are proverbial idiots who are apt to die
because no one is present to take them out of the rain. Hundred-percent
pure iron has long since been discarded for the composite metal called
steel. No jeweler ever undertook to do anything with hundred-percent pure
gold or silver. Fiddles, to be any good, must be made of six or seven
different varieties of wood. And as for a meal composed entirely of a
hundred-percent mush, I thank you, no!
In short, all the most useful things in this world are compounds and I
see no reason why faith should be an exception. Unless the base of our
“certainty” contains a certain amount of the alloy of “doubt,” our faith
will sound as tinkly as a bell made of pure silver or as harsh as a
trombone made of brass.
It was a profound appreciation of this fact which set the heroes of
tolerance apart from the rest of the world.
As far as personal integrity went, honesty of conviction, unselfish
devotion to duty and all the other household virtues, most of these men
could have passed muster before a board of Puritan Inquisitors. I would
go further than that and state that at least half of them lived and died
in such a way that they would now be among the saints, if their peculiar
trend of conscience had not forced them to be the open and avowed enemies
of that institution which has taken upon itself the exclusive right of
elevating ordinary human beings to certain celestial dignities.
But fortunately they were possessed of the divine doubt.
They knew (as the Romans and the Greeks had known before them) that the
problem which faced them was so vast that no one in his right senses
would ever expect it to be solved. And while they might hope and pray
that the road which they had taken would eventually lead them to a
safe goal, they could never convince themselves that it was the only
right one, that all other roads were wrong and that the enchanting
by-paths which delighted the hearts of so many simple people were evil
thoroughfares leading to damnation.
All this sounds contrary to the opinions expressed in most of our
catechisms and our text-books on ethics. These preach the superior virtue
of a world illuminated by the pure white flame of absolute faith. Perhaps
so. But during those centuries when that flame was supposed to be burning
at its brightest, the average rank and file of humanity cannot be said
to have been either particularly happy or extraordinarily comfortable. I
don’t want to suggest any radical reforms, but just for a change we might
try that other light, by the rays of which the brethren of the tolerant
guild have been in the habit of examining the affairs of the world. If
that does not prove successful, we can always go back to the system of
our fathers. But if it should prove to throw an agreeable luster upon a
society containing a little more kindness and forbearance, a community
less beset by ugliness and greed and hatred, a good deal would have been
gained and the expense, I am sure, would be quite small.
And after this bit of advice, offered for what it is worth, I must go
back to my history.
When the last Roman was buried, the last citizen of the world (in the
best and broadest sense of the word) perished. And it was a long time
before society was once more placed upon such a footing of security
that the old spirit of an all-encompassing humanity, which had been
characteristic of the best minds of the ancient world, could safely
return to this earth.
That, as we saw, happened during the Renaissance.
The revival of international commerce brought fresh capital to the
poverty stricken countries of the west. New cities arose. A new class
of men began to patronize the arts, to spend money upon books, to endow
those universities which followed so closely in the wake of prosperity.
And it was then that a few devoted adherents of the “humanities,” of
those sciences which boldly had taken all mankind as their field of
experiment, arose in rebellion against the narrow limitations of the
old scholasticism and strayed away from the flock of the faithful who
regarded their interest in the wisdom and the grammar of the ancients as
a manifestation of a wicked and impure curiosity.
Among the men who were in the front ranks of this small group of
pioneers, the stories of whose lives will make up the rest of this book,
few deserve greater credit than that very timid soul who came to be known
as Erasmus.
For timid he was, although he took part in all the great verbal
encounters of his day and successfully managed to make himself the terror
of his enemies, by the precision with which he handled that most deadly
of all weapons, the long-range gun of humor.
Far and wide the missiles containing the mustard-gas of his wit were
shot into the enemy’s country. And those Erasmian bombs were of a very
dangerous variety. At a first glance they looked harmless enough. There
was no sputtering of a tell-tale fuse. They had the appearance of an
amusing new variety of fire-cracker, but God help those who took them
home and allowed the children to play with them. The poison was sure to
get into their little minds and it was of such a persistent nature that
four centuries have not sufficed to make the race immune against the
effects of the drug.
It is strange that such a man should have been born in one of the dullest
towns of the mudbanks which are situated along the eastern coast of the
North Sea. In the fifteenth century those water soaked lands had not yet
attained the glories of an independent and fabulously rich commonwealth.
They formed a group of little insignificant principalities, somewhere
on the outskirts of civilized society. They smelled forever of herring,
their chief article of export. And if ever they attracted a visitor, it
was some helpless mariner whose ship had been wrecked upon their dismal
shores.
But the very horror of a childhood spent among such unpleasant
surroundings may have spurred this curious infant into that fury of
activity which eventually was to set him free and make him one of the
best known men of his time.
From the beginning of life, everything was against him. He was an
illegitimate child. The people of the Middle Ages, being on an intimate
and friendly footing both with God and with nature, were a great deal
more sensible about such children than we are. They were sorry. Such
things ought not to occur and of course they greatly disapproved. For the
rest, however, they were too simple-minded to punish a helpless creature
in a cradle for a sin which most certainly was not of its own making.
The irregularity of his birth certificate inconvenienced Erasmus only in
so far as both his father and his mother seem to have been exceedingly
muddle-headed citizens, totally incapable of handling the situation and
leaving their children to the care of relatives who were either boobs or
scoundrels.
These uncles and guardians had no idea of what to do with their two
little wards and after the mother had died, the children never had a
home of their own. First of all they were sent to a famous school in
Deventer, where several of the teachers belonged to the Society of the
Brothers of the Common Life, but if we are to judge by the letters which
Erasmus wrote later in life, these young men were only “common” in a
very different sense of the word. Next the two boys were separated and
the younger was taken to Gouda, where he was placed under the immediate
supervision of the head-master of the Latin school, who was also one of
the three guardians appointed to administer his slender inheritance. If
that school in the days of Erasmus was as bad as when I visited it four
centuries later, I can only feel sorry for the poor kid. And to make
matters worse, the guardians by this time had wasted every penny of his
money and in order to escape prosecution (for the old Dutch courts were
strict upon such matters) they hurried the infant into a cloister, rushed
him into holy orders and bade him be happy because “now his future was
secure.”
The mysterious mills of history eventually ground this terrible
experience into something of great literary value. But I hate to think of
the many terrible years this sensitive youngster was forced to spend in
the exclusive company of the illiterate boors and thick-fingered rustics
who during the end of the Middle Ages made up the population of fully
half of all monasteries.
Fortunately the laxity of discipline at Steyn permitted Erasmus to spend
most of his time among the Latin manuscripts which a former abbot had
collected and which lay forgotten in the library. He absorbed those
volumes until he finally became a walking encyclopedia of classical
learning. In later years this stood him in good stead. Forever on the
move, he rarely was within reach of a reference library. But that was not
necessary. He could quote from memory. Those who have ever seen the ten
gigantic folios which contain his collected works, or who have managed
to read through part of them (life is so short nowadays) will appreciate
what a “knowledge of the classics” meant in the fifteenth century.
Of course, eventually Erasmus was able to leave his old monastery. People
like him are never influenced by circumstances. They make their own
circumstances and they make them out of the most unlikely material.
And the rest of his life Erasmus was a free man, searching restlessly
after a spot where he might work without being disturbed by a host of
admiring friends.
But not until the fateful hour when with an appeal to the “lieve God” of
his childhood he allowed his soul to slip into the slumber of death, did
he enjoy a moment of that “true leisure” which has always appeared as the
highest good to those who have followed the footsteps of Socrates and
Zeno and which so few of them have ever found.
These peregrinations have often been described and I need not repeat
them here in detail. Wherever two or more men lived together in the name
of true wisdom, there Erasmus was sooner or later bound to make his
appearance.
He studied in Paris, where as a poor scholar he almost died of hunger
and cold. He taught in Cambridge. He printed books in Basel. He tried
(quite in vain) to carry a spark of enlightenment into that stronghold
of orthodox bigotry, the far-famed University of Louvain. He spent much
of his time in London and took the degree of Doctor of Divinity in the
University of Turin. He was familiar with the Grand Canal of Venice
and cursed as familiarly about the terrible roads of Zeeland as those
of Lombardy. The sky, the parks, the walks and the libraries of Rome
made such a profound impression upon him that even the waters of Lethe
could not wash the Holy City out of his memory. He was offered a liberal
pension if he would only move to Venice and whenever a new university was
opened, he was sure to be honored with a call to whatever chair he wished
to take or to no chair at all, provided he would grace the Campus with
his occasional presence.
But he steadily refused all such invitations because they seemed to
contain a threat of permanence and dependency. Before all things he
wanted to be free. He preferred a comfortable room to a bad one, he
preferred amusing companions to dull ones, he knew the difference
between the good rich wine of the land called Burgundy and the thin red
ink of the Apennines, but he wanted to live life on his own terms and
this he could not do if he had to call any man “master.”
The rôle which he had chosen for himself was really that of an
intellectual search-light. No matter what object appeared above the
horizon of contemporary events, Erasmus immediately let the brilliant
rays of his intellect play upon it, did his best to make his neighbors
see the thing as it really was, denuded of all frills and divested of
that “folly,” that ignorance which he hated so thoroughly.
That he was able to do this during the most turbulent period of our
history, that he managed to escape the fury of the Protestant fanatics
while keeping himself aloof from the fagots of his friends of the
Inquisition, this is the one point in his career upon which he has been
most often condemned.
Posterity seems to have a veritable passion for martyrdom as long as it
applies to the ancestors.
“Why didn’t this Dutchman stand up boldly for Luther and take his chance
together with the other reformers?” has been a question which seems
to have puzzled at least twelve generations of otherwise intelligent
citizens.
The answer is, “Why should he?”
It was not in his nature to do violent things and he never regarded
himself as the leader of any movement. He utterly lacked that sense
of self-righteous assurance which is so characteristic of those who
undertake to tell the world how the millennium ought to be brought
about. Besides he did not believe that it is necessary to demolish the
old home every time we feel the necessity of rearranging our quarters.
Quite true, the premises were sadly in need of repairs. The drainage
was old-fashioned. The garden was all cluttered up with dirt and odds
and ends left behind by people who had moved out long before. But all
this could be changed if the landlord was made to live up to his promises
and would only spend some money upon immediate improvements. Beyond
that, Erasmus did not wish to go. And although he was what his enemies
sneeringly called a “moderate,” he accomplished quite as much (or more)
than those out and out “radicals” who gave the world two tyrannies where
only one had been before.
Like all truly great men, he was no friend of systems. He believed that
the salvation of this world lies in our individual endeavors. Make over
the individual man and you have made over the entire world!
Hence he made his attack upon existing abuses by way of a direct appeal
to the average citizen. And he did this in a very clever way.
In the first place he wrote an enormous amount of letters. He wrote them
to kings and to emperors and to popes and to abbots and to knights and
to knaves. He wrote them (and this in the days before the stamped and
self-addressed envelope) to any one who took the trouble to approach him
and whenever he took his pen in hand he was good for at least eight pages.
In the second place, he edited a large number of classical texts which
had been so often and so badly copied that they no longer made any sense.
For this purpose he had been obliged to learn Greek. His many attempts
to get hold of a grammar of that forbidden tongue was one of the reasons
why so many pious Catholics insisted that at heart he must be as bad as a
real heretic. This of course sounds absurd but it was the truth. In the
fifteenth century, respectable Christians would never have dreamed of
trying to learn this forbidden language. It was a tongue of evil repute
like modern Russian. A knowledge of Greek might lead a man into all sorts
of difficulties. It might tempt him to compare the original gospels with
those translations that had been given to him with the assurance that
they were a true reproduction of the original. And that would only be the
beginning. Soon he would make a descent into the Ghetto to get hold of a
Hebrew grammar. From that point to open rebellion against the authority
of the Church was only a step and for a long time the possession of a
book with strange and outlandish pothooks was regarded as ipso facto
evidence of secret revolutionary tendencies.
Quite often rooms were raided by ecclesiastical authorities in search of
this contraband, and Byzantine refugees who were trying to eke out an
existence by teaching their native tongue were not infrequently forced to
leave the city in which they had found an asylum.
In spite of all these many obstacles, Erasmus had learned Greek and in
the asides which he added to his editions of Cyprian and Chrysostom and
the other Church fathers, he hid many sly observations upon current
events which could never have been printed had they been the subject of a
separate pamphlet.
But this impish spirit of annotation manifested itself in an entirely
different sort of literature of which he was the inventor. I mean his
famous collections of Greek and Latin proverbs which he had brought
together in order that the children of his time might learn to write the
classics with becoming elegance. These so-called “Adagia” are filled with
clever comments which in the eyes of his conservative neighbors were
by no means what one had the right to expect of a man who enjoyed the
friendship of the Pope.
And finally he was the author of one of those strange little books which
are born of the spirit of the moment, which are really a joke conceived
for the benefit of a few friends and then assume the dignity of a great
literary classic before the poor author quite realizes what he has done.
It was called “The Praise of Folly” and we happen to know how it came to
be written.
It was in the year 1515 that the world had been startled by a pamphlet
written so cleverly that no one could tell whether it was meant as an
attack upon the friars or as a defense of the monastic life. No name
appeared upon the title page, but those who knew what was what in the
world of letters recognized the somewhat unsteady hand of one Ulrich
von Hutten. And they guessed right; for that talented young man, poet
laureate and town bum extraordinary, had taken no mean share in the
production of this gross but useful piece of buffoonery and he was proud
of it. When he heard that no one less than Thomas More, the famous
champion of the New Learning in England, had spoken well of his work, he
wrote to Erasmus and asked him for particulars.
Erasmus was no friend of von Hutten. His orderly mind (reflected in his
orderly way of living) did not take kindly to those blowsy Teuton Ritters
who spent their mornings and afternoons valiantly wielding pen and rapier
for the cause of enlightenment and then retired to the nearest pot-house
that they might forget the corruption of the times by drinking endless
bumpers of sour beer.
But von Hutten, in his own way, was really a man of genius and Erasmus
answered him civilly enough. Yea, as he wrote, he grew eloquent upon
the virtues of his London friend and depicted so charming a scene of
domestic contentment that the household of Sir Thomas might well serve
as a model for all other families until the end of time. It was in this
letter that he mentions how More, himself a humorist of no small parts,
had given him the original idea for his “Praise of Folly” and very likely
it was the good-natured horse-play of the More establishment (a veritable
Noah’s ark of sons and daughters-in-law and daughters and sons-in-law and
birds and dogs and a private zoo and private theatricals and bands of
amateur fiddlers) which had inspired him to write that delightful piece
of nonsense with which his name is forever associated.
In some vague way the book reminds me of the Punch and Judy shows which
for so many centuries were the only amusement of little Dutch children.
Those Punch and Judy shows, with all the gross vulgarity of their
dialogue, invariably maintained a tone of lofty moral seriousness. The
hollow voiced figure of Death dominated the scene. One by one the other
actors were forced to appear before this ragged hero and give an account
of themselves. And one by one, to the everlasting delight of the youthful
audience, they were knocked on the head with an enormous cudgel and were
thrown on an imaginary scrap-heap.
In the “Praise of Folly,” the whole social fabric of the age is carefully
taken apart while Folly, as a sort of inspired Coroner, stands by and
favors the public at large with her comments. No one is spared. The whole
of Medieval Main Street is ransacked for suitable characters. And of
course, the go-getters of that day, the peddling friars of salvation with
all their sanctimonius sales-talk, their gross ignorance and the futile
pomposity of their arguments, came in for a drubbing which was never
forgotten and never forgiven.
But the Pope and his cardinals and his bishops, incongruous successors to
the poverty stricken fishermen and carpenters from the land of Galilee,
were also on the bill and held the stage for several chapters.
The “Folly” of Erasmus however was a much more substantial personage than
the usual Jack-in-the-Box of humorous literature. Throughout this little
book (as indeed throughout everything he wrote) Erasmus preached a gospel
of his own which one might call the philosophy of tolerance.
It was this willingness to live and let live; this insistence upon the
spirit of the divine law rather than upon the commas and the semi-colons
in the original version of that divine law; this truly human acceptance
of religion as a system of ethics rather than as a form of government
which made serious-minded Catholics and Protestants inveigh against
Erasmus as a “godless knave” and an enemy of all true religion who
“slandered Christ” but hid his real opinions behind the funny phrases of
a clever little book.
This abuse (and it lasted until the day of his death) did not have any
effect. The little man with the long pointed nose, who lived until the
age of seventy at a time when the addition or omission of a single word
from an established text might cause a man to be hanged, had no liking
at all for the popular-hero business and he said so openly. He expected
nothing from an appeal to swords and arquebusses and knew only too well
the risk the world was running when a minor theological dispute was
allowed to degenerate into an international religious war.
And so, like a gigantic beaver, he worked day and night to finish that
famous dam of reason and common sense which he vaguely hoped might stem
the waxing tide of ignorance and intolerance.
Of course he failed. It was impossible to stop those floods of ill-will
and hatred which were sweeping down from the mountains of Germany and the
Alps, and a few years after his death his work had been completely washed
away.
But so well had he wrought that many bits of wreckage, thrown upon
the shores of posterity, proved exceedingly good material for those
irrepressible optimists who believe that some day we shall have a set of
dykes that will actually hold.
Erasmus departed this life in July of the year 1586.
His sense of humor never deserted him. He died in the house of his
publisher.