ERASMUS'S MIND-CONTINUED
Erasmus's mind: Intellectual tendencies--The world encumbered by
beliefs and forms--Truth must be simple--Back to the pure
sources--Holy Scripture in the original languages--Biblical
humanism--Critical work on the texts of Scripture--Practice
better than dogma--Erasmus's talent and wit--Delight in words
and things--Prolixity--Observation of details--A veiled
realism--Ambiguousness--The 'Nuance'--Inscrutability of the
ultimate ground of all things
Simplicity, naturalness, purity, and reasonableness, those are to
Erasmus the dominant requirements, also when we pass from his ethical
and aesthetic concepts to his intellectual point of view; indeed, the
two can hardly be kept apart.
The world, says Erasmus, is overloaded with human constitutions and
opinions and scholastic dogmas, and overburdened with the tyrannical
authority of orders, and because of all this the strength of gospel
doctrine is flagging. Faith requires simplification, he argued. What
would the Turks say of our scholasticism? Colet wrote to him one day:
'There is no end to books and science. Let us, therefore, leave all
roundabout roads and go by a short cut to the truth.'
Truth must be simple. 'The language of truth is simple, says Seneca;
well then, nothing is simpler nor truer than Christ.' 'I should wish',
Erasmus says elsewhere, 'that this simple and pure Christ might be
deeply impressed upon the mind of men, and that I deem best attainable
in this way, that we, supported by our knowledge of the original
languages, should philosophize _at the sources_ themselves.'
Here a new watchword comes to the fore: back to the sources! It is not
merely an intellectual, philological requirement; it is equally an
ethical and aesthetic necessity of life. The original and pure, all that
is not yet overgrown or has not passed through many hands, has such a
potent charm. Erasmus compared it to an apple which we ourselves pick
off the tree. To recall the world to the ancient simplicity of science,
to lead it back from the now turbid pools to those living and most pure
fountain-heads, those most limpid sources of gospel doctrine--thus he
saw the task of divinity. The metaphor of the limpid water is not
without meaning here; it reveals the psychological quality of Erasmus's
fervent principle.
'How is it', he exclaims, 'that people give themselves so much trouble
about the details of all sorts of remote philosophical systems and
neglect to go to the sources of Christianity itself?' 'Although this
wisdom, which is so excellent that once for all it put the wisdom of all
the world to shame, may be drawn from these few books, as from a
crystalline source, with far less trouble than is the wisdom of
Aristotle from so many thorny books and with much more fruit.... The
equipment for that journey is simple and at everyone's immediate
disposal. This philosophy is accessible to everybody. Christ desires
that his mysteries shall be spread as widely as possible. I should wish
that all good wives read the Gospel and Paul's Epistles; that they were
translated into all languages; that out of these the husbandman sang
while ploughing, the weaver at his loom; that with such stories the
traveller should beguile his wayfaring.... This sort of philosophy is
rather a matter of disposition than of syllogisms, rather of life than
of disputation, rather of inspiration than of erudition, rather of
transformation than of logic.... What is the philosophy of Christ, which
he himself calls _Renascentia_, but the insaturation of Nature created
good?--moreover, though no one has taught us this so absolutely and
effectively as Christ, yet also in pagan books much may be found that is
in accordance with it.'
Such was the view of life of this biblical humanist. As often as Erasmus
reverts to these matters, his voice sounds clearest. 'Let no one', he
says in the preface to the notes to the New Testament, 'take up this
work, as he takes up Gellius's _Noctes atticae_ or Poliziano's
Miscellanies.... We are in the presence of holy things; here it is no
question of eloquence, these matters are best recommended to the world
by simplicity and purity; it would be ridiculous to display human
erudition here, impious to pride oneself on human eloquence.' But
Erasmus never was so eloquent himself as just then.
What here raises him above his usual level of force and fervour is the
fact that he fights a battle, the battle for the right of biblical
criticism. It revolts him that people should study Holy Scripture in the
Vulgate when they know that the texts show differences and are corrupt,
although we have the Greek text by which to go back to the original form
and primary meaning.
He is now reproached because he dares, as a mere grammarian, to assail
the text of Holy Scripture on the score of futile mistakes or
irregularities. 'Details they are, yes, but because of these details we
sometimes see even great divines stumble and rave.' Philological
trifling is necessary. 'Why are we so precise as to our food, our
clothes, our money-matters and why does this accuracy displease us in
divine literature alone? He crawls along the ground, they say, he
wearies himself out about words and syllables! Why do we slight any word
of Him whom we venerate and worship under the name of the Word? But, be
it so! Let whoever wishes imagine that I have not been able to achieve
anything better, and out of sluggishness of mind and coldness of heart
or lack of erudition have taken this lowest task upon myself; it is
still a Christian idea to think all work good that is done with pious
zeal. We bring along the bricks, but to build the temple of God.'
He does not want to be intractable. Let the Vulgate be kept for use in
the liturgy, for sermons, in schools, but he who, at home, reads our
edition, will understand his own the better in consequence. He, Erasmus,
is prepared to render account and acknowledge himself to have been wrong
when convicted of error.
Erasmus perhaps never quite realized how much his philological-critical
method must shake the foundations of the Church. He was surprised at his
adversaries 'who could not but believe that all their authority would
perish at once when the sacred books might be read in a purified form,
and when people tried to understand them in the original'. He did not
feel what the unassailable authority of a sacred book meant. He rejoices
because Holy Scripture is approached so much more closely, because all
sorts of shadings are brought to light by considering not only what is
said but also by whom, for whom, at what time, on what occasion, what
precedes and what follows, in short, by the method of historical
philological criticism. To him it seemed so especially pious when
reading Scripture and coming across a place which seemed contrary to the
doctrine of Christ or the divinity of his nature, to believe rather that
one did not understand the phrase _or that the text might be corrupt_.
Unperceived he passed from emendation of the different versions to the
correction of the contents. The epistles were not all written by the
apostles to whom they are attributed. The apostles themselves made
mistakes, at times.
The foundation of his spiritual life was no longer a unity to Erasmus.
It was, on the one hand, a strong desire for an upright, simple, pure
and homely belief, the earnest wish to be a good Christian. But it was
also the irresistible intellectual and aesthetic need of the good taste,
the harmony, the clear and exact expression of the Ancients, the dislike
of what was cumbrous and involved. Erasmus thought that good learning
might render good service for the necessary purification of the faith
and its forms. The measure of church hymns should be corrected. That
Christian expression and classicism were incompatible, he never
believed. The man who in the sphere of sacred studies asked every author
for his credentials remained unconscious of the fact that he
acknowledged the authority of the Ancients without any evidence. How
naively he appeals to Antiquity, again and again, to justify some bold
feat! He is critical, they say? Were not the Ancients critical? He
permits himself to insert digressions? So did the Ancients, etc.
Erasmus is in profound sympathy with that revered Antiquity by his
fundamental conviction that it is the practice of life which matters.
Not he is the great philosopher who knows the tenets of the Stoics or
Peripatetics by rote--but he who expresses the meaning of philosophy by
his life and his morals, for that is its purpose. He is truly a divine
who teaches, not by artful syllogisms, but by his disposition, by his
face and his eyes, by his life itself, that wealth should be despised.
To live up to that standard is what Christ himself calls _Renascentia_.
Erasmus uses the word in the Christian sense only. But in that sense it
is closely allied to the idea of the Renaissance as a historical
phenomenon. The worldly and pagan sides of the Renaissance have nearly
always been overrated. Erasmus is, much more than Aretino or
Castiglione, the representative of the spirit of his age, one over whose
Christian sentiment the sweet gale of Antiquity had passed. And that
very union of strong Christian endeavour and the spirit of Antiquity is
the explanation of Erasmus's wonderful success.
* * * * *
The mere intention and the contents of the mind do not influence the
world, if the form of expression does not cooperate. In Erasmus the
quality of his talent is a very important factor. His perfect clearness
and ease of expression, his liveliness, wit, imagination, gusto and
humour have lent a charm to all he wrote which to his contemporaries was
irresistible and captivates even us, as soon as we read him. In all that
constitutes his talent, Erasmus is perfectly and altogether a
representative of the Renaissance. There is, in the first place, his
eternal _a propos_. What he writes is never vague, never dark--it is
always plausible. Everything seemingly flows of itself like a fountain.
It always rings true as to tone, turn of phrase and accent. It has
almost the light harmony of Ariosto. And it is, like Ariosto, never
tragic, never truly heroic. It carries us away, indeed, but it is never
itself truly enraptured.
The more artistic aspects of Erasmus's talent come out most
clearly--though they are everywhere in evidence--in those two
recreations after more serious labour, the _Moriae Encomium_ and the
_Colloquia_. But just those two have been of enormous importance for his
influence upon his times. For while Jerome reached tens of readers and
the New Testament hundreds, the _Moria_ and _Colloquies_ went out to
thousands. And their importance is heightened in that Erasmus has
nowhere else expressed himself so spontaneously.
In each of the Colloquies, even in the first purely formulary ones,
there is the sketch for a comedy, a novelette or a satire. There is
hardly a sentence without its 'point', an expression without a vivid
fancy. There are unrivalled niceties. The abbot of the _Abbatis et
eruditae colloquium_ is a Moliere character. It should be noticed how
well Erasmus always sustains his characters and his scenes, because he
_sees_ them. In 'The woman in childbed' he never forgets for a moment
that Eutrapelus is an artist. At the end of 'The game of knucklebones',
when the interlocutors, after having elucidated the whole nomenclature
of the Latin game of knuckle-bones, are going to play themselves,
Carolus says: 'but shut the door first, lest the cook should see us
playing like two boys'.
As Holbein illustrated the _Moria_, we should wish to possess the
_Colloquia_ with illustrations by Brueghel, so closely allied is
Erasmus's witty clear vision of incidents to that of this great master.
The procession of drunkards on Palm Sunday, the saving of the
shipwrecked crew, the old men waiting for the travelling cart while the
drivers are still drinking, all these are Dutch genre pieces of the best
sort.
We like to speak of the realism of the Renaissance. Erasmus is certainly
a realist in the sense of having an insatiable hunger for knowledge of
the tangible world. He wants to know things and their names: the
particulars of each thing, be it never so remote, such as those terms of
games and rules of games of the Romans. Read carefully the description
of the decorative painting on the garden-house of the _Convivium
religiosum_: it is nothing but an object lesson, a graphic
representation of the forms of reality.
In its joy over the material universe and the supple, pliant word, the
Renaissance revels in a profusion of imagery and expressions. The
resounding enumerations of names and things, which Rabelais always
gives, are not unknown to Erasmus, but he uses them for intellectual and
useful purposes. In _De copia verborum ac rerum_ one feat of varied
power of expression succeeds another--he gives fifty ways of saying:
'Your letter has given me much pleasure,' or, 'I think that it is going
to rain'. The aesthetic impulse is here that of a theme and variations:
to display all the wealth and mutations of the logic of language.
Elsewhere, too, Erasmus indulges this proclivity for accumulating the
treasures of his genius; he and his contemporaries can never restrain
themselves from giving all the instances instead of one: in _Ratio verae
theologiae_, in _De pronuntiatione_, in _Lingua_, in _Ecclesiastes_. The
collections of _Adagia_, _Parabolae_, and _Apophthegmata_ are altogether
based on this eagerness of the Renaissance (which, by the way, was an
inheritance of the Middle Ages themselves) to luxuriate in the wealth of
the tangible world, to revel in words and things.
The senses are open for the nice observation of the curious. Though
Erasmus does not know that need of proving the secrets of nature, which
inspired a Leonardo da Vinci, a Paracelsus, a Vesalius, he is also, by
his keen observation, a child of his time. For peculiarities in the
habits and customs of nations he has an open eye. He notices the gait of
Swiss soldiers, how dandies sit, how Picards pronounce French. He
notices that in old pictures the sitters are always represented with
half-closed eyes and tightly shut lips, as signs of modesty, and how
some Spaniards still honour this expression in life, while German art
prefers lips pouting as for a kiss. His lively sense of anecdote, to
which he gives the rein in all his writings, belongs here.
And, in spite of all his realism, the world which Erasmus sees and
renders, is not altogether that of the sixteenth century. Everything is
veiled by Latin. Between the author's mind and reality intervenes his
antique diction. At bottom the world of his mind is imaginary. It is a
subdued and limited sixteenth-century reality which he reflects.
Together with its coarseness he lacks all that is violent and direct in
his times. Compared with the artists, with Luther and Calvin, with the
statesmen, the navigators, the soldiers and the scientists, Erasmus
confronts the world as a recluse. It is only the influence of Latin. In
spite of all his receptiveness and sensitiveness, Erasmus is never fully
in contact with life. All through his work not a bird sings, not a wind
rustles.
But that reserve or fear of directness is not merely a negative quality.
It also results from a consciousness of the indefiniteness of the ground
of all things, from the awe of the ambiguity of all that is. If Erasmus
so often hovers over the borderline between earnestness and mockery, if
he hardly ever gives an incisive conclusion, it is not only due to
cautiousness, and fear to commit himself. Everywhere he sees the
shadings, the blending of the meaning of words. The terms of things are
no longer to him, as to the man of the Middle Ages, as crystals mounted
in gold, or as stars in the firmament. 'I like assertions so little that
I would easily take sides with the sceptics whereever it is allowed by
the inviolable authority of Holy Scripture and the decrees of the
Church.' 'What is exempt from error?' All subtle contentions of
theological speculation arise from a dangerous curiosity and lead to
impious audacity. What have all the great controversies about the
Trinity and the Virgin Mary profited? 'We have defined so much that
without danger to our salvation might have remained unknown or
undecided.... The essentials of our religion are peace and unanimity.
These can hardly exist unless we make definitions about as few points as
possible and leave many questions to individual judgement. Numerous
problems are now postponed till the oecumenical Council. It would be
much better to put off such questions till the time when the glass shall
be removed and the darkness cleared away, and we shall see God face to
face.'
'There are sanctuaries in the sacred studies which God has not willed
that we should probe, and if we try to penetrate there, we grope in ever
deeper darkness the farther we proceed, so that we recognize, in this
manner, too, the inscrutable majesty of divine wisdom and the imbecility
of human understanding.'