ERASMUS'S MIND
Erasmus's mind: Ethical and aesthetic tendencies, aversion to
all that is unreasonable, silly and cumbrous--His vision of
antiquity pervaded by Christian faith--Renascence of good
learning--The ideal life of serene harmony and happy
wisdom--Love of the decorous and smooth--His mind neither
philosophic nor historical, but strongly philological and
moralistic--Freedom, clearness, purity, simplicity--Faith in
nature--Educational and social ideas
What made Erasmus the man from whom his contemporaries expected their
salvation, on whose lips they hung to catch the word of deliverance? He
seemed to them the bearer of a new liberty of the mind, a new clearness,
purity and simplicity of knowledge, a new harmony of healthy and right
living. He was to them as the possessor of newly discovered, untold
wealth which he had only to distribute.
What was there in the mind of the great Rotterdamer which promised so
much to the world?
The negative aspect of Erasmus's mind may be defined as a heartfelt
aversion to everything unreasonable, insipid, purely formal, with which
the undisturbed growth of medieval culture had overburdened and
overcrowded the world of thought. As often as he thinks of the
ridiculous text-books out of which Latin was taught in his youth,
disgust rises in his mind, and he execrates them--Mammetrectus,
Brachylogus, Ebrardus and all the rest--as a heap of rubbish which ought
to be cleared away. But this aversion to the superannuated, which had
become useless and soulless, extended much farther. He found society,
and especially religious life, full of practices, ceremonies, traditions
and conceptions, from which the spirit seemed to have departed. He does
not reject them offhand and altogether: what revolts him is that they
are so often performed without understanding and right feeling. But to
his mind, highly susceptible to the foolish and ridiculous things, and
with a delicate need of high decorum and inward dignity, all that sphere
of ceremony and tradition displays itself as a useless, nay, a hurtful
scene of human stupidity and selfishness. And, intellectualist as he is,
with his contempt for ignorance, he seems unaware that those religious
observances, after all, may contain valuable sentiments of unexpressed
and unformulated piety.
Through his treatises, his letters, his _Colloquies_ especially, there
always passes--as if one was looking at a gallery of Brueghel's
pictures--a procession of ignorant and covetous monks who by their
sanctimony and humbug impose upon the trustful multitude and fare
sumptuously themselves. As a fixed motif (such motifs are numerous with
Erasmus) there always recurs his gibe about the superstition that a
person was saved by dying in the gown of a Franciscan or a Dominican.
Fasting, prescribed prayers, the observance of holy days, should not be
altogether neglected, but they become displeasing to God when we repose
our trust in them and forget charity. The same holds good of confession,
indulgence, all sorts of blessings. Pilgrimages are worthless. The
veneration of the Saints and of their relics is full of superstition and
foolishness. The people think they will be preserved from disasters
during the day if only they have looked at the painted image of Saint
Christopher in the morning. 'We kiss the shoes of the saints and their
dirty handkerchiefs and we leave their books, their most holy and
efficacious relics, neglected.'
Erasmus's dislike of what seemed antiquated and worn out in his days,
went farther still. It comprised the whole intellectual scheme of
medieval theology and philosophy. In the syllogistic system he found
only subtlety and arid ingenuity. All symbolism and allegory were
fundamentally alien to him and indifferent, though he occasionally tried
his hand at an allegory; and he never was mystically inclined.
Now here it is just as much the deficiencies of his own mind as the
qualities of the system which made him unable to appreciate it. While he
struck at the abuse of ceremonies and of Church practices both with
noble indignation and well-aimed mockery, a proud irony to which he was
not fully entitled preponderates in his condemnation of scholastic
theology which he could not quite understand. It was easy always to talk
with a sneer of the conservative divines of his time as _magistri
nostri_.
His noble indignation hurt only those who deserved castigation and
strengthened what was valuable, but his mockery hurt the good as well as
the bad in spite of him, assailed both the institution and persons, and
injured without elevating them. The individualist Erasmus never
understood what it meant to offend the honour of an office, an order, or
an establishment, especially when that institution is the most sacred of
all, the Church itself.
Erasmus's conception of the Church was no longer purely Catholic. Of
that glorious structure of medieval-Christian civilization with its
mystic foundation, its strict hierarchic construction, its splendidly
fitting symmetry he saw hardly anything but its load of outward details
and ornament. Instead of the world which Thomas Aquinas and Dante had
described, according to their vision, Erasmus saw another world, full of
charm and elevated feeling, and this he held up before his compatriots.
[Illustration: XV. THE HANDS OF ERASMUS]
It was the world of Antiquity, but illuminated throughout by Christian
faith. It was a world that had never existed as such. For with the
historical reality which the times of Constantine and the great fathers
of the Church had manifested--that of declining Latinity and
deteriorating Hellenism, the oncoming barbarism and the oncoming
Byzantinism--it had nothing in common. Erasmus's imagined world was an
amalgamation of pure classicism (this meant for him, Cicero, Horace,
Plutarch; for to the flourishing period of the Greek mind he remained
after all a stranger) and pure, biblical Christianity. Could it be a
union? Not really. In Erasmus's mind the light falls, just as we saw in
the history of his career, alternately on the pagan antique and on the
Christian. But the warp of his mind is Christian; his classicism only
serves him as a form, and from Antiquity he only chooses those elements
which in ethical tendency are in conformity with his Christian ideal.
[Illustration: XVI. ERASMUS AT THE AGE OF 57]
And because of this, Erasmus, although he appeared after a century of
earlier Humanism, is yet new to his time. The union of Antiquity and the
Christian spirit which had haunted the mind of Petrarch, the father of
Humanism, which was lost sight of by his disciples, enchanted as they
were by the irresistible brilliance of the antique beauty of form, this
union was brought about by Erasmus.
What pure Latinity and the classic spirit meant to Erasmus we cannot
feel as he did because its realization does not mean to us, as to him, a
difficult conquest and a glorious triumph. To feel it thus one must have
acquired, in a hard school, the hatred of barbarism, which already
during his first years of authorship had suggested the composition of
the _Antibarbari_. The abusive term for all that is old and rude is
already Gothic, Goths. The term barbarism as used by Erasmus comprised
much of what we value most in the medieval spirit. Erasmus's conception
of the great intellectual crisis of his day was distinctly dualistic. He
saw it as a struggle between old and new, which, to him, meant evil and
good. In the advocates of tradition he saw only obscurantism,
conservatism, and ignorant opposition to _bonae literae_, that is, the
good cause for which he and his partisans battled. Of the rise of that
higher culture Erasmus had already formed the conception which has since
dominated the history of the Renaissance. It was a revival, begun two or
three hundred years before his time, in which, besides literature, all
the plastic arts shared. Side by side with the terms restitution and
reflorescence the word renascence crops up repeatedly in his writings.
'The world is coming to its senses as if awaking out of a deep sleep.
Still there are some left who recalcitrate pertinaciously, clinging
convulsively with hands and feet to their old ignorance. They fear that
if _bonae literae_ are reborn and the world grows wise, it will come to
light that they have known nothing.' They do not know how pious the
Ancients could be, what sanctity characterizes Socrates, Virgil, and
Horace, or Plutarch's _Moralia_, how rich the history of Antiquity is in
examples of forgiveness and true virtue. We should call nothing profane
that is pious and conduces to good morals. No more dignified view of
life was ever found than that which Cicero propounds in _De Senectute_.
In order to understand Erasmus's mind and the charm which it had for his
contemporaries, one must begin with the ideal of life that was present
before his inward eye as a splendid dream. It is not his own in
particular. The whole Renaissance cherished that wish of reposeful,
blithe, and yet serious intercourse of good and wise friends in the cool
shade of a house under trees, where serenity and harmony would dwell.
The age yearned for the realization of simplicity, sincerity, truth and
nature. Their imagination was always steeped in the essence of
Antiquity, though, at heart, it is more nearly connected with medieval
ideals than they themselves were aware. In the circle of the Medici it
is the idyll of Careggi, in Rabelais it embodies itself in the fancy of
the abbey of Theleme; it finds voice in More's _Utopia_ and in the work
of Montaigne. In Erasmus's writings that ideal wish ever recurs in the
shape of a friendly walk, followed by a meal in a garden-house. It is
found as an opening scene of the _Antibarbari_, in the numerous
descriptions of meals with Colet, and the numerous _Convivia_ of the
_Colloquies_. Especially in the _Convivium religiosum_ Erasmus has
elaborately pictured his dream, and it would be worth while to compare
it, on the one hand with Theleme, and on the other with the fantastic
design of a pleasure garden which Bernard Palissy describes. The little
Dutch eighteenth-century country-seats and garden-houses in which the
national spirit took great delight are the fulfilment of a purely
Erasmian ideal. The host of the _Convivium religiosum_ says: 'To me a
simple country-house, a nest, is pleasanter than any palace, and, if he
be king who lives in freedom and according to his wishes, surely I am
king here'.
Life's true joy is in virtue and piety. If they are Epicureans who live
pleasantly, then none are more truly Epicureans than they who live in
holiness and piety.
The ideal joy of life is also perfectly idyllic in so far that it
requires an aloofness from earthly concerns and contempt for all that is
sordid. It is foolish to be interested in all that happens in the world;
to pride oneself on one's knowledge of the market, of the King of
England's plans, the news from Rome, conditions in Denmark. The sensible
old man of the _Colloquium Senile_ has an easy post of honour, a safe
mediocrity, he judges no one and nothing and smiles upon all the world.
Quiet for oneself, surrounded by books--that is of all things most
desirable.
On the outskirts of this ideal of serenity and harmony numerous flowers
of aesthetic value blow, such as Erasmus's sense of decorum, his great
need of kindly courtesy, his pleasure in gentle and obliging treatment,
in cultured and easy manners. Close by are some of his intellectual
peculiarities. He hates the violent and extravagant. Therefore the
choruses of the Greek drama displease him. The merit of his own poems he
sees in the fact that they pass passion by, they abstain from pathos
altogether--'there is not a single storm in them, no mountain torrent
overflowing its banks, no exaggeration whatever. There is great
frugality in words. My poetry would rather keep within bounds than
exceed them, rather hug the shore than cleave the high seas.' In another
place he says: 'I am always most pleased by a poem that does not differ
too much from prose, but prose of the best sort, be it understood. As
Philoxenus accounted those the most palatable fishes that are no true
fishes and the most savoury meat what is no meat, the most pleasant
voyage, that along the shores, and the most agreeable walk, that along
the water's edge; so I take especial pleasure in a rhetorical poem and a
poetical oration, so that poetry is tasted in prose and the reverse.'
That is the man of half-tones, of fine shadings, of the thought that is
never completely expressed. But he adds: 'Farfetched conceits may please
others; to me the chief concern seems to be that we draw our speech from
the matter itself and apply ourselves less to showing off our invention
than to present the thing.' That is the realist.
From this conception results his admirable, simple clarity, the
excellent division and presentation of his argument. But it also causes
his lack of depth and the prolixity by which he is characterized. His
machine runs too smoothly. In the endless _apologiae_ of his later
years, ever new arguments occur to him; new passages to point, or
quotations to support, his idea. He praises laconism, but never
practises it. Erasmus never coins a sentence which, rounded off and
pithy, becomes a proverb and in this manner lives. There are no current
quotations from Erasmus. The collector of the _Adagia_ has created no
new ones of his own.
The true occupation for a mind like his was paraphrasing, in which,
indeed, he amply indulged. Soothing down and unfolding was just the work
he liked. It is characteristic that he paraphrased the whole New
Testament except the Apocalypse.
Erasmus's mind was neither philosophic nor historic. His was neither the
work of exact, logical discrimination, nor of grasping the deep sense of
the way of the world in broad historical visions in which the
particulars themselves, in their multiplicity and variegation, form the
image. His mind is philological in the fullest sense of the word. But by
that alone he would not have conquered and captivated the world. His
mind was at the same time of a deeply ethical and rather strong
aesthetic trend and those three together have made him great.
The foundation of Erasmus's mind is his fervent desire of freedom,
clearness, purity, simplicity and rest. It is an old ideal of life to
which he gave new substance by the wealth of his mind. Without liberty,
life is no life; and there is no liberty without repose. The fact that
he never took sides definitely resulted from an urgent need of perfect
independence. Each engagement, even a temporary one, was felt as a
fetter by Erasmus. An interlocutor in the _Colloquies_, in which he so
often, spontaneously, reveals his own ideals of life, declares himself
determined neither to marry, nor to take holy orders, nor to enter a
monastery, nor into any connection from which he will afterwards be
unable to free himself--at least not before he knows himself completely.
'When will that be? Never, perhaps.' 'On no other account do I
congratulate myself more than on the fact that I have never attached
myself to any party,' Erasmus says towards the end of his life.
Liberty should be spiritual liberty in the first place. 'But he that is
spiritual judgeth all things, yet he himself is judged of no man,' is
the word of Saint Paul. To what purpose should he require prescriptions
who, of his own accord, does better things than human laws require? What
arrogance it is to bind by institutions a man who is clearly led by the
inspirations of the divine spirit!
In Erasmus we already find the beginning of that optimism which judges
upright man good enough to dispense with fixed forms and rules. As More,
in _Utopia_, and Rabelais, Erasmus relies already on the dictates of
nature, which produces man as inclined to good and which we may follow,
provided we are imbued with faith and piety.
In this line of confidence in what is natural and desire of the simple
and reasonable, Erasmus's educational and social ideas lie. Here he is
far ahead of his times. It would be an attractive undertaking to discuss
Erasmus's educational ideals more fully. They foreshadow exactly those
of the eighteenth century. The child should learn in playing, by means
of things that are agreeable to its mind, from pictures. Its faults
should be gently corrected. The flogging and abusive schoolmaster is
Erasmus's abomination; the office itself is holy and venerable to him.
Education should begin from the moment of birth. Probably Erasmus
attached too much value to classicism, here as elsewhere: his friend
Peter Gilles should implant the rudiments of the ancient languages in
his two-year-old son, that he may greet his father with endearing
stammerings in Greek and Latin. But what gentleness and clear good sense
shines from all Erasmus says about instruction and education!
The same holds good of his views about marriage and woman. In the
problem of sexual relations he distinctly sides with the woman from deep
conviction. There is a great deal of tenderness and delicate feeling in
his conception of the position of the girl and the woman. Few characters
of the _Colloquies_ have been drawn with so much sympathy as the girl
with the lover and the cultured woman in the witty conversation with the
abbot. Erasmus's ideal of marriage is truly social and hygienic. Let us
beget children for the State and for Christ, says the lover, children
endowed by their upright parents with a good disposition, children who
see the good example at home which is to guide them. Again and again he
reverts to the mother's duty to suckle the child herself. He indicates
how the house should be arranged, in a simple and cleanly manner; he
occupies himself with the problem of useful children's dress. Who stood
up at that time, as he did, for the fallen girl, and for the prostitute
compelled by necessity? Who saw so clearly the social danger of
marriages of persons infected with the new scourge of Europe, so
violently abhorred by Erasmus? He would wish that such a marriage should
at once be declared null and void by the Pope. Erasmus does not hold
with the easy social theory, still quite current in the literature of
his time, which casts upon women all the blame of adultery and lewdness.
With the savages who live in a state of nature, he says, the adultery of
men is punished, but that of women is forgiven.
Here it appears, at the same time, that Erasmus knew, be it half in
jest, the conception of natural virtue and happiness of naked islanders
in a savage state. It soon crops up again in Montaigne and the following
centuries develop it into a literary dogma.