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ERASMUS AND THE AGE OF REFORMATION
JOHAN HUIZINGA
_with a selection from the letters of Erasmus_
HARPER TORCHBOOKS / The Cloister Library
HARPER & ROW, PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK, EVANSTON, AND LONDON
[Illustration: WOODCUT BY HANS HOLBEIN. 1535]
ERASMUS AND THE AGE OF REFORMATION
_Printed in the United States of America_
Huizinga's text was translated from the Dutch by F. Hopman and first
published by Charles Scribner's Sons in 1924. The section from the
Letters of Erasmus was translated by Barbara Flower.
Reprinted by arrangement with Phaidon Press, Ltd., London
Originally published under the title: "Erasmus of Rotterdam"
First HARPER TORCHBOOK edition published 1957
Library of Congress catalogue card number 57-10119
CONTENTS
_Preface by G. N. Clark_ xi
CHAP.
I CHILDHOOD AND EARLY YOUTH, 1466-88 1
II IN THE MONASTERY, 1488-95 10
III THE UNIVERSITY OF PARIS, 1495-9 20
IV FIRST STAY IN ENGLAND, 1499-1500 29
V ERASMUS AS A HUMANIST 39
VI THEOLOGICAL ASPIRATIONS, 1501 47
VII YEARS OF TROUBLE--LOUVAIN, PARIS, ENGLAND, 1502-6 55
VIII IN ITALY, 1506-9 62
IX THE PRAISE OF FOLLY 69
X THIRD STAY IN ENGLAND, 1509-14 79
XI A LIGHT OF THEOLOGY, 1514-16 87
XII ERASMUS'S MIND 100
XIII ERASMUS'S MIND (_continued_) 109
XIV ERASMUS'S CHARACTER 117
XV AT LOUVAIN, 1517-18 130
XVI FIRST YEARS OF THE REFORMATION 139
XVII ERASMUS AT BASLE, 1521-9 151
XVIII CONTROVERSY WITH LUTHER AND GROWING CONSERVATISM, 1524-6 161
XIX AT WAR WITH HUMANISTS AND REFORMERS, 1528-9 170
XX LAST YEARS 179
XXI CONCLUSION 188
SELECTED LETTERS OF ERASMUS 195
_List of Illustrations_ 257
_Index of Names_ 263
PREFACE
_by G.N. Clark, Provost of Oriel College, Oxford_
Rather more than twenty years ago, on a spring morning of alternate
cloud and sunshine, I acted as guide to Johan Huizinga, the author of
this book, when he was on a visit to Oxford. As it was not his first
stay in the city, and he knew the principal buildings already, we looked
at some of the less famous. Even with a man who was well known all over
the world as a writer, I expected that these two or three hours would be
much like the others I had spent in the same capacity with other
visitors; but this proved to be a day to remember. He understood the
purposes of these ancient buildings, the intentions of their founders
and builders; but that was to be expected from an historian who had
written upon the history of universities and learning. What surprised
and delighted me was his seeing eye. He told me which of the decorative
_motifs_ on the Tower of the Four Orders were usual at the time when it
was built, and which were less common. At All Souls he pointed out the
seldom appreciated merits of Hawksmoor's twin towers. His eye was not
merely informed but sensitive. I remembered that I had heard of his
talent for drawing, and as we walked and talked I felt the influence of
a strong, quiet personality deep down in which an artist's
perceptiveness was fused with a determination to search for historical
truth.
Huizinga's great success and reputation came suddenly when he was over
forty. Until that time his powers were ripening, not so much slowly as
secretly. His friends knew that he was unique, but neither he nor they
foresaw what direction his studies would take. He was born in 1872 in
Groningen, the most northerly of the chief towns of the Netherlands, and
there he went to school and to the University. He studied Dutch history
and literature and also Oriental languages and mythology and sociology;
he was a good linguist and he steadily accumulated great learning, but
he was neither an infant prodigy nor a universal scholar. Science and
current affairs scarcely interested him, and until his maturity
imagination seemed to satisfy him more than research. Until he was over
thirty he was a schoolmaster at Haarlem, a teacher of history; but it
was still uncertain whether European or Oriental studies would claim him
in the end. For two or three years before giving up school-teaching he
lectured in the University of Amsterdam on Sanskrit, and it was almost
an accident that he became professor of history in the University of his
native town. All through his life it was characteristic of him that
after a spell of creative work, when he had finished a book, he would
turn aside from the subject that had absorbed him and plunge into some
other subject or period, so that the books and articles in the eight
volumes of his collected works (with one more volume still to come)
cover a very wide range. As time went on he examined aspects of history
which at first he had passed over, and he acquired a clear insight into
the political and economic life of the past. It has been well said of
him that he never became either a pedant or a doctrinaire. During the
ten years that he spent as professor at Groningen, he found himself. He
was happily married, with a growing family, and the many elements of his
mind drew together into a unity. His sensitiveness to style and beauty
came to terms with his conscientious scholarship. He was rooted in the
traditional freedoms of his national and academic environment, but his
curiosity, like the historical adventures of his people and his
profession, was not limited by time or space or prejudice. He came more
and more definitely to find his central theme in civilization as a
realized ideal, something that men have created in an endless variety of
forms, but always in order to raise the level of their lives.
While this interior fulfilment was bringing Huizinga to his best, the
world about him changed completely. In 1914, Holland became a neutral
country surrounded by nations at war. In 1914, also, his wife died, and
it was as a lonely widower that he was appointed in the next year to the
chair of general history at Leyden, which he was to hold for the rest of
his academic life. Yet the year after the end of the war saw the
publication of his masterpiece, the book which gave him his high place
among historical writers and was translated as _The Waning of the Middle
Ages_. This is a study of the forms of life and thought in France and
the Netherlands in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the last
phase of one of the great European eras of civilization. In England,
where the Middle Ages had been idealized for generations, some of its
leading thoughts did not seem so novel as they did in Holland, where
many people regarded the Renaissance and more still regarded the
Reformation as a new beginning of a better world; but in England and
America, which had been drawn, unlike Holland, into the vortex of war,
it had the poignancy of a recall to the standards of reasonableness. It
will long maintain its place as a historical book and as a work of
literature.
The shorter book on Erasmus is a companion to this great work. It was
first published in 1924 and so belongs to the same best period of the
author. Its subject is the central intellectual figure of the next
generation after the period which Huizinga called the waning, or rather
the autumn, of the Middle Ages; but Erasmus was also, as will appear
from many of its pages, a man for whom he had a very special sympathy.
Something of what he wrote about Erasmus might also have been written
about himself, or at least about his own response to the transformation
of the world that he had known.
This is not the place for an analysis of that questioning and
illuminating response, nor for a considered estimate of Huizinga's work
as a whole; but there is room for a word about his last years. He was
recognized as one of the intellectual leaders of his country, and a
second marriage in 1937 brought back his private happiness; but the
shadows were darkening over the western world. From the time when
national socialism began to reveal itself in Germany, he took his stand
against it with perfect simplicity and calm. After the invasion of
Holland he addressed these memorable words to some of his colleagues:
'When it comes, as it soon will, to defending our University and the
freedom of science and learning in the Netherlands, we must be ready to
give everything for that: our possessions, our freedom, and even our
lives'. The Germans closed the University. For a time they held Johan
Huizinga, now an old man and in failing health, as a hostage; then they
banished him to open arrest in a remote parish in the eastern part of
the country. Even in these conditions he still wrote, and wrote well. In
the last winter of the war the liberating armies approached and he
suffered the hardships of the civilian population in a theatre of war;
but his spirit was unbroken. He died on 1 February 1945, a few weeks
before his country was set free.
G. N. CLARK
Oriel College, Oxford
April 1952
ERASMUS
_and the Age of Reformation_
CHAPTER I
CHILDHOOD AND EARLY YOUTH
1466-88
The Low Countries in the fifteenth century--The Burgundian
power--Connections with the German Empire and with France--The
northern Netherlands outskirts in every sense--Movement of
_Devotio moderna_: brethren of the Common Life and Windesheim
monasteries--Erasmus's 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 population,
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 since been
united. The remaining territories which, together 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 inviolate, being more closely connected with the
neighbouring German territories, and consequently with the Empire
itself.
All these lands--about this time they began to be regarded collectively
under the name of 'Low Countries by the Sea'--had in most respects the
character of outskirts. 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 national German union. They had too
long looked to France in matters political. Since 1299 a French-speaking
dynasty, that of Hainault, had ruled Holland. Even the house of Bavaria
that succeeded it about the middle of the fourteenth 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 'outskirts' also in
ecclesiastical and cultural matters. Brought over rather late to the
cause of Christianity (the end of the eighth century), they had, as
borderlands, remained 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 northern
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.
Chivalry, 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
zealously strove to follow the French example, by any contribution worth
mentioning.
Whatever was coming up in Holland flowered unseen; it was not of a sort
to attract the attention of Christendom. It was a brisk navigation and
trade, mostly transit 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 in the
towns of Holland also 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 ecclesiastical culture. Sluter,
the great sculptor, went to Burgundy, 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 that great art, craving to be brought forth, which was to change
the world: the art of printing.
There was yet another characteristic spiritual phenomenon, 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
fourteenth century. It had embodied itself in two closely connected
forms--the fraterhouses, where the brethren of the Common Life lived
together without altogether separating from the world, and the
congregation 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. Fraterhouses were erected everywhere and monasteries
of the Windesheim congregation were established or affiliated. The
movement was spoken of as 'modern devotion', _devotio moderna_. It was
rather a matter of sentiment 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, constant 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 Dominican orders of about the same time, which turned to
preaching. The Windesheimians and the Hieronymians (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 permeate 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 Christi_.
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 mentioned 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
Dordrecht, Haarlem, Leyden, and rapidly rising Amsterdam. They were not
centres of culture. Erasmus was born at Rotterdam on 27 October, most
probably 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 circumstances of his coming into the world
only in his later years. Acutely sensitive to 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 education.
The mother continued to care for the child, till an early death took her
from him. The father soon followed her to the grave. To Erasmus's
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 seventeen years old. His
sense of chronology was always remarkably ill developed.
Unfortunately it is beyond doubt that Erasmus himself knew, or had
known, that not all particulars of 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
impatience 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 numerous and commonplace
middle-class family. The father had nine brothers, who were all married.
The grandparents 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 descendants 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's
kinsmen. Usually people were called by their own and their father's
name; but it also happened 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 Rotterdam, 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 multitude
in the fifteenth century. Perhaps the popular belief that the
intercession of St. 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 accentuated 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, suggested 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, together 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. Erasmus's
explicit declaration that he was fourteen years old when he left
Deventer may be explained by assuming that in later years he confused
his temporary absence from Deventer (when at Utrecht) with the definite
end of his stay at Deventer. Reminiscences of his life there repeatedly
crop up in Erasmus's writings. Those concerning 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's residence Alexander 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's
school-time at Deventer to a sudden 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 classic authors and left a library of some value.
Erasmus and his brother were now under the protection 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 decide.
That the guardians, among whom one Peter Winckel, schoolmaster at Gouda,
occupied the principal 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 fourteen 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 reprehensible 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
intimacy.
Winckel sent the two young fellows, twenty-one and eighteen 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
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. Himself he sees as a boy of not yet sixteen
years (it is nearly certain that he must have been twenty 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 frivolous 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 Emmaus, near Gouda, belonging to the same order, where he found
a schoolfellow from Deventer, who pointed out the bright side of
monastic life, did Erasmus yield and enter Steyn, where soon after,
probably in 1488, he took the vows.