IN THE MONASTERY
1488-95
Erasmus as an Augustinian canon at Steyn--His friends--Letters
to Servatius--Humanism in the monasteries: Latin poetry--
Aversion to cloister-life--He leaves Steyn to enter the
service of the Bishop of Cambray: 1493--James Batt--
_Antibarbari_--He gets leave to study at Paris: 1495
In his later life--under the influence of the gnawing regret which his
monkhood and all the trouble he took to escape from it caused him--the
picture of all the events leading up to his entering the convent became
distorted in his mind. Brother Peter, to whom he still wrote in a
cordial vein from Steyn, became a worthless fellow, even his evil
spirit, a Judas. The schoolfellow whose advice had been decisive now
appeared a traitor, prompted by self-interest, who himself had chosen
convent-life merely out of laziness and the love of good cheer.
The letters that Erasmus wrote from Steyn betray no vestige of his
deep-seated aversion to monastic life, which afterwards he asks us to
believe he had felt from the outset. We may, of course, assume that the
supervision of his superiors prevented him from writing all that was in
his heart, and that in the depths of his being there had always existed
the craving for freedom and for more civilized intercourse than Steyn
could offer. Still he must have found in the monastery some of the good
things that his schoolfellow had led him to expect. That at this period
he should have written a 'Praise of Monastic Life', 'to please a friend
who wanted to decoy a cousin', as he himself says, is one of those naive
assertions, invented afterwards, of which Erasmus never saw the
unreasonable quality.
He found at Steyn a fair degree of freedom, some food for an intellect
craving for classic antiquity, and friendships with men of the same turn
of mind. There were three who especially attracted him. Of the
schoolfellow who had induced him to become a monk, we hear no more. His
friends are Servatius Roger of Rotterdam and William Hermans of Gouda,
both his companions at Steyn, and the older Cornelius Gerard of Gouda,
usually called Aurelius (a quasi-latinization of Goudanus), who spent
most of his time in the monastery of Lopsen, near Leyden. With them he
read and conversed sociably and jestingly; with them he exchanged
letters when they were not together.
Out of the letters to Servatius there rises the picture of an Erasmus
whom we shall never find again--a young man of more than feminine
sensitiveness; of a languishing need for sentimental friendship. In
writing to Servatius, Erasmus runs the whole gamut of an ardent lover.
As often as the image of his friend presents itself to his mind tears
break from his eyes. Weeping he re-reads his friend's letter every hour.
But he is mortally dejected and anxious, for the friend proves averse to
this excessive attachment. 'What do you want from me?' he asks. 'What is
wrong with you?' the other replies. Erasmus cannot bear to find that
this friendship is not fully returned. 'Do not be so reserved; do tell
me what is wrong! I repose my hope in you alone; I have become yours so
completely that you have left me naught of myself. You know my
pusillanimity, which when it has no one on whom to lean and rest, makes
me so desperate that life becomes a burden.'
Let us remember this. Erasmus never again expresses himself so
passionately. He has given us here the clue by which we may understand
much of what he becomes in his later years.
These letters have sometimes been taken as mere literary exercises; the
weakness they betray and the complete absence of all reticence, seem to
tally ill with his habit of cloaking his most intimate feelings which,
afterwards, Erasmus never quite relinquishes. Dr. Allen, who leaves this
question undecided, nevertheless inclines to regard the letters as
sincere effusions, and to me they seem so, incontestably. This exuberant
friendship accords quite well with the times and the person.
Sentimental friendships were as much in vogue in secular circles during
the fifteenth century as towards the end of the eighteenth century. Each
court had its pairs of friends, who dressed alike, and shared room, bed,
and heart. Nor was this cult of fervent friendship restricted to the
sphere of aristocratic life. It was among the specific characteristics
of the _devotio moderna_, as, for the rest, it seems from its very
nature to be inseparably bound up with pietism. To observe one another
with sympathy, to watch and note each other's inner life, was a
customary and approved occupation among the brethren of the Common Life
and the Windesheim monks. And though Steyn and Sion were not of the
Windesheim congregation, the spirit of the _devotio moderna_ was
prevalent there.
As for Erasmus himself, he has rarely revealed the foundation of his
character more completely than when he declared to Servatius: 'My mind
is such that I think nothing can rank higher than friendship in this
life, nothing should be desired more ardently, nothing should be
treasured more jealously'. A violent affection of a similar nature
troubled him even at a later date when the purity of his motives was
questioned. Afterwards he speaks of youth as being used to conceive a
fervent affection for certain comrades. Moreover, the classic examples
of friends, Orestes and Pylades, Damon and Pythias, Theseus and
Pirithous, as also David and Jonathan, were ever present before his
mind's eye. A young and very tender heart, marked by many feminine
traits, replete with all the sentiment and with all the imaginings of
classic literature, who was debarred from love and found himself placed
against his wish in a coarse and frigid environment, was likely to
become somewhat excessive in his affections.
He was obliged to moderate them. Servatius would have none of so jealous
and exacting a friendship and, probably at the cost of more humiliation
and shame than appears in his letters, young Erasmus resigns himself, to
be more guarded in expressing his feelings in the future. The
sentimental Erasmus disappears for good and presently makes room for the
witty latinist, who surpasses his older friends, and chats with them
about poetry and literature, advises them about their Latin style, and
lectures them if necessary.
The opportunities for acquiring the new taste for classic antiquity
cannot have been so scanty at Deventer, and in the monastery itself, as
Erasmus afterwards would have us believe, considering the authors he
already knew at this time. We may conjecture, also, that the books left
by his father, possibly brought by him from Italy, contributed to
Erasmus's culture, though it would be strange that, prone as he was to
disparage his schools and his monastery, he should not have mentioned
the fact. Moreover, we know that the humanistic knowledge of his youth
was not exclusively his own, in spite of all he afterwards said about
Dutch ignorance and obscurantism. Cornelius Aurelius and William Hermans
likewise possessed it.
In a letter to Cornelius he mentions the following authors as his poetic
models--Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Juvenal, Statius, Martial, Claudian,
Persius, Lucan, Tibullus, Propertius. In prose he imitates Cicero,
Quintilian, Sallust, and Terence, whose metrical character had not yet
been recognized. Among Italian humanists he was especially acquainted
with Lorenzo Valla, who on account of his _Elegantiae_ passed with him
for the pioneer of _bonae literae_; but Filelfo, Aeneas Sylvius,
Guarino, Poggio, and others, were also not unknown to him. In
ecclesiastical literature he was particularly well read in Jerome. It
remains remarkable that the education which Erasmus received in the
schools of the _devotio moderna_ with their ultra-puritanical object,
their rigid discipline intent on breaking the personality, could produce
such a mind as he manifests in his monastic period--the mind of an
accomplished humanist. He is only interested in writing Latin verses and
in the purity of his Latin style. We look almost in vain for piety in
the correspondence with Cornelius of Gouda and William Hermans. They
manipulate with ease the most difficult Latin metres and the rarest
terms of mythology. Their subject-matter is bucolic or amatory, and, if
devotional, their classicism deprives it of the accent of piety. The
prior of the neighbouring monastery of Hem, at whose request Erasmus
sang the Archangel Michael, did not dare to paste up his Sapphic ode: it
was so 'poetic', he thought, as to seem almost Greek. In those days
poetic meant classic. Erasmus himself thought he had made it so bald
that it was nearly prose--'the times were so barren, then', he
afterwards sighed.
These young poets felt themselves the guardians of a new light amidst
the dullness and barbarism which oppressed them. They readily believed
each other's productions to be immortal, as every band of youthful poets
does, and dreamt of a future of poetic glory for Steyn by which it would
vie with Mantua. Their environment of clownish, narrow-minded
conventional divines--for as such they saw them--neither acknowledged
nor encouraged them. Erasmus's strong propensity to fancy himself
menaced and injured tinged this position with the martyrdom of oppressed
talent. To Cornelius he complains in fine Horatian measure of the
contempt in which poetry was held; his fellow-monk orders him to let his
pen, accustomed to writing poetry, rest. Consuming envy forces him to
give up making verses. A horrid barbarism prevails, the country laughs
at the laurel-bringing art of high-seated Apollo; the coarse peasant
orders the learned poet to write verses. 'Though I had mouths as many as
the stars that twinkle in the silent firmament on quiet nights, or as
many as the roses that the mild gale of spring strews on the ground, I
could not complain of all the evils by which the sacred art of poetry is
oppressed in these days. I am tired of writing poetry.' Of this effusion
Cornelius made a dialogue which highly pleased Erasmus.
Though in this art nine-tenths may be rhetorical fiction and sedulous
imitation, we ought not, on that account, to undervalue the enthusiasm
inspiring the young poets. Let us, who have mostly grown blunt to the
charms of Latin, not think too lightly of the elation felt by one who,
after learning this language out of the most absurd primers and
according to the most ridiculous methods, nevertheless discovered it in
its purity, and afterwards came to handle it in the charming rhythm of
some artful metre, in the glorious precision of its structure and in all
the melodiousness of its sound.
[Illustration: I. ERASMUS AT THE AGE OF 51]
[Illustration: II. VIEW OF ROTTERDAM, EARLY SIXTEENTH CENTURY]
Nec si quot placidis ignea noctibus
Scintillant tacito sydera culmine,
Nec si quot tepidum flante Favonio
Ver suffundit humo rosas,
Tot sint ora mihi...
Was it strange that the youth who could say this felt himself a
poet?--or who, together with his friend, could sing of spring in a
Meliboean song of fifty distichs? Pedantic work, if you like, laboured
literary exercises, and yet full of the freshness and the vigour which
spring from the Latin itself.
Out of these moods was to come the first comprehensive work that Erasmus
was to undertake, the manuscript of which he was afterwards to lose, to
recover in part, and to publish only after many years--the
_Antibarbari_, which he commenced at Steyn, according to Dr. Allen. In
the version in which eventually the first book of the _Antibarbari_
appeared, it reflects, it is true, a somewhat later phase of Erasmus's
life, that which began after he had left the monastery; neither is the
comfortable tone of his witty defence of profane literature any longer
that of the poet at Steyn. But the ideal of a free and noble life of
friendly intercourse and the uninterrupted study of the Ancients had
already occurred to him within the convent walls.
In the course of years those walls probably hemmed him in more and more
closely. Neither learned and poetic correspondence nor the art of
painting with which he occupied himself,[1] together with one Sasboud,
could sweeten the oppression of monastic life and a narrow-minded,
unfriendly environment. Of the later period of his life in the
monastery, no letters at all have been preserved, according to Dr.
Allen's carefully considered dating. Had he dropped his correspondence
out of spleen, or had his superiors forbidden him to keep it up, or are
we merely left in the dark because of accidental loss? We know nothing
about the circumstances and the frame of mind in which Erasmus was
ordained on 25 April 1492, by the Bishop of Utrecht, David of Burgundy.
Perhaps his taking holy orders was connected with his design to leave
the monastery. He himself afterwards declared that he had but rarely
read mass. He got his chance to leave the monastery when offered the
post of secretary to the Bishop of Cambray, Henry of Bergen. Erasmus
owed this preferment to his fame as a Latinist and a man of letters; for
it was with a view to a journey to Rome, where the bishop hoped to
obtain a cardinal's hat, that Erasmus entered his service. The
authorization of the Bishop of Utrecht had been obtained, and also that
of the prior and the general of the order. Of course, there was no
question yet of taking leave for good, since, as the bishop's servant,
Erasmus continued to wear his canon's dress. He had prepared for his
departure in the deepest secrecy. There is something touching in the
glimpse we get of his friend and fellow-poet, William Hermans, waiting
in vain outside of Gouda to see his friend just for a moment, when on
his way south he would pass the town. It seems there had been
consultations between them as to leaving Steyn together, and Erasmus, on
his part, had left him ignorant of his plans. William had to console
himself with the literature that might be had at Steyn.
* * * * *
Erasmus, then twenty-five years old--for in all probability the year
when he left the monastery was 1493--now set foot on the path of a
career that was very common and much coveted at that time: that of an
intellectual in the shadow of the great. His patron belonged to one of
the numerous Belgian noble families, which had risen in the service of
the Burgundians and were interestedly devoted to the prosperity of that
house. The Glimes were lords of the important town of Bergen-op-Zoom,
which, situated between the River Scheldt and the Meuse delta, was one
of the links between the northern and the southern Netherlands. Henry,
the Bishop of Cambray, had just been appointed chancellor of the Order
of the Golden Fleece, the most distinguished spiritual dignity at court,
which although now Habsburg in fact, was still named after Burgundy. The
service of such an important personage promised almost unbounded honour
and profit. Many a man would under the circumstances, at the cost of
some patience, some humiliation, and a certain laxity of principle, have
risen even to be a bishop. But Erasmus was never a man to make the most
of his situation.
Serving the bishop proved to be rather a disappointment. Erasmus had to
accompany him on his frequent migrations from one residence to another
in Bergen, Brussels, or Mechlin. He was very busy, but the exact nature
of his duties is unknown. The journey to Rome, the acme of things
desirable to every divine or student, did not come off. The bishop,
although taking a cordial interest in him for some months, was less
accommodating than he had expected. And so we shortly find Erasmus once
more in anything but a cheerful frame of mind. 'The hardest fate,' he
calls his own, which robs him of all his old sprightliness.
Opportunities to study he has none. He now envies his friend William,
who at Steyn in the little cell can write beautiful poetry, favoured by
his 'lucky stars'. It befits him, Erasmus, only to weep and sigh; it has
already so dulled his mind and withered his heart that his former
studies no longer appeal to him. There is rhetorical exaggeration in
this and we shall not take his pining for the monastery too seriously,
but still it is clear that deep dejection had mastered him. Contact with
the world of politics and ambition had probably unsettled Erasmus. He
never had any aptitude for it. The hard realities of life frightened and
distressed him. When forced to occupy himself with them he saw nothing
but bitterness and confusion about him. 'Where is gladness or repose?
Wherever I turn my eyes I only see disaster and harshness. And in such a
bustle and clamour about me you wish me to find leisure for the work of
the Muses?'
Real leisure Erasmus was never to find during his life. All his reading,
all his writing, he did hastily, _tumultuarie_, as he calls it
repeatedly. Yet he must nevertheless have worked with intensest
concentration and an incredible power of assimilation. Whilst staying
with the bishop he visited the monastery of Groenendael near Brussels,
where in former times Ruysbroeck wrote. Possibly Erasmus did not hear
the inmates speak of Ruysbroeck and he would certainly have taken little
pleasure in the writings of the great mystic. But in the library he
found the works of St. Augustine and these he devoured. The monks of
Groenendael were surprised at his diligence. He took the volumes with
him even to his bedroom.
He occasionally found time to compose at this period. At Halsteren, near
Bergen-op-Zoom, where the bishop had a country house, he revised the
_Antibarbari_, begun at Steyn, and elaborated it in the form of a
dialogue. It would seem as if he sought compensation for the agitation
of his existence in an atmosphere of idyllic repose and cultured
conversation. He conveys us to the scene (he will afterwards use it
repeatedly) which ever remained the ideal pleasure of life to him: a
garden or a garden house outside the town, where in the gladness of a
fine day a small number of friends meet to talk during a simple meal or
a quiet walk, in Platonic serenity, about things of the mind. The
personages whom he introduces, besides himself, are his best friends.
They are the valued and faithful friend whom he got to know at Bergen,
James Batt, schoolmaster and afterwards also clerk of that town, and his
old friend William Hermans of Steyn, whose literary future he continued
somewhat to promote. William, arriving unexpectedly from Holland, meets
the others, who are later joined by the Burgomaster of Bergen and the
town physician. In a lightly jesting, placid tone they engage in a
discussion about the appreciation of poetry and literature--Latin
literature. These are not incompatible with true devotion, as barbarous
dullness wants us to believe. A cloud of witnesses is there to prove it,
among them and above all St. Augustine, whom Erasmus had studied
recently, and St. Jerome, with whom Erasmus had been longer acquainted
and whose mind was, indeed, more congenial to him. Solemnly, in ancient
Roman guise, war is declared on the enemies of classic culture. O ye
Goths, by what right do you occupy, not only the Latin provinces (the
_disciplinae liberales_ are meant) but the capital, that is Latinity
itself?
It was Batt who, when his prospects with the Bishop of Cambray ended in
disappointment, helped to find a way out for Erasmus. He himself had
studied at Paris, and thither Erasmus also hoped to go, now that Rome
was denied him. The bishop's consent and the promise of a stipend were
obtained and Erasmus departed for the most famous of all universities,
that of Paris, probably in the late summer of 1495. Batt's influence and
efforts had procured him this lucky chance.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Allen No. 16.12 cf. IV p. xx, and _vide_ LB. IV 756, where surveying
the years of his youth he also writes 'Pingere dum meditor tenueis sine
corpore formas'.