Erasmus

“ Who is not being taught by Erasmus? In whom does not Erasmus reign?—I mean, of course, among those who have a true love of letters. For I am glad enough and I reckon it among the gifts of Christ, that there are many who do not approve of you. By this test I discern the gifts of a loving from those of an angry God, and I congratulate you that while you are most acceptable to all good men, you are equally disliked by those who would like to be thought the only great ones and the only ones to be accepted. ”

“ Erasmus is almost completely transformed into an Englishman, with such distinguished consideration am I treated by very many others, but especially by my incomparable (unicus) Mæcenas, the archbishop of Canterbury,—patron not of me alone, but of all learned men, among whom I hold the lowest place, if indeed I hold any place at all. Eternal God! how happy, how productive, how ready is the talent of that man! What skill in unravelling the most weighty matters of business! what uncommon learning! ”

“ With his irresistible need of teaching and his sincere love for humanity and its general culture, Erasmus introduced the classic spirit, in so far as it could be reflected in the soul of a sixteenth-century Christian, among the people. Not he alone; but none more extensively and more effectively. Not among all the people, it is true, for by writing in Latin he limited his direct influence to the educated classes, which in those days were the upper classes.
Erasmus made current the classic spirit. Humanism ceased to be the exclusive privilege of a few. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The biographer of Erasmus is tempted to draw a somewhat pathetic picture of his last years; an aged man, broken with pain and disappointment, rejected by all parties, without influence in the world, living under continual fear of some unforeseen disaster,—these form, indeed, the elements for a sufficiently mournful description. And yet the end of Erasmus' course was such as he had been deliberately planning for himself all his life long. Isolation from all the various groupings of men upon great public questions had been his avowed ideal, and he had reached it. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Long before the Renaissance had run its course in Italy, its influences had begun to pass the Alps. But there is one man who, above all others, must be regarded as the herald of humanism in the North. It is the distinction of Erasmus that by the peculiar qualities of his genius, and by the unique popularity of his writings, he prepared the advent of the New Learning, not in his native Holland alone, but throughout Europe. ”

“ Just as his powerful will compelled his frail and suffering body to do the bidding of his unconquerable spirit, so the literary impulse carried him on to utterances far beyond the capacity of his personality to realise in action. If Erasmus could have lived up to himself, he would have been the greatest of men. Let us in our judgment of him beware lest we make superhuman demands upon him. It is as idle as it is unjust to ask that Erasmus should be both Erasmus and Luther at once. ”

“ Erasmus was of the same lively, merry wit as More, they both loved literature and the Greek learning, and so the two became fast friends. And it helps us to understand the power which Latin still held over our literature, and indeed over all the literature of Europe, when we remember that these two friends spoke to each other and wrote and jested in Latin as easily as they might have done in English. Erasmus was one of the most famous men of his time. He was one who did much in his day to free men's minds, one who helped men to think for themselves. ”

“ That Erasmus whom you used to know is almost a good hunter, a horseman not the worst, and no slouch of a courtier; he knows how to salute more gracefully and smile more sweetly and all this with Minerva against him. How are my affairs? Well enough. If you are a wise man you will fly over here too. Why should a man with a nose like yours grow old in that Gallic dung-heap? ”

“ Erasmus was, perhaps, the man in Europe who at that time displayed most docility; the man whom neither sickness, the desire for wealth and honour, the hope to conquer, the lust to engage in disputes, nor the adverse chances that held him half his life in debt and necessitous straits, and kept him all his life long a vagrant, constantly upon the road--the man in whom none of these things could weaken a marvellous assiduity to learn and help others to learn. ”

“ The self-centred element in Erasmus must needs increase accordingly as he in truth became a centre and objective point of ideas and culture. There really was a time when it must seem to him that the world hinged upon him, and that it awaited the redeeming word from him. What a widespread enthusiastic following he had, how many warm friends and venerators! There is something naïve in the way in which he thinks it requisite to treat all his friends, in an open letter, to a detailed, rather repellent account of an illness that attacked him on the way back from Basle to Louvain. ”

“ Erasmus, as he sits enthroned in a scholar's chair in the market-place at Rotterdam, the buildings about leaning on their insecure foundations out of the perpendicular, and the market-women, with their apple-bloom complexions, crowding around him, shows a somewhat withered face and figure, less genial than the handsome Heidelberg professor as he stands at Worms. ”

“ But if Erasmus was unlike the 18th century rationalist in that he did not declare war against the church, but remained a Catholic and mourned the disruption, he was yet a true rationalist in principle. The principle that reason is the one only guide of life, the supreme arbiter of all questions, politics and religion included, has its earliest and most complete exemplar in Erasmus. He does not dogmatically denounce the rights of reason, but he practically exercises them. ”

“ Erasmus, while eating and drinking enough for four, was entirely unconscious that he had become the object of general curiosity; when an aged man came up to him, took him by the hand, led him before the glass, and said to him—"Sir, you have no reflection; you are the devil or one of his people!" ”

“ At the time of Erasmus' first visit to England, 1499, London was far more a centre of the new intellectual life than either Oxford or Cambridge. He rejoiced in his first meeting with Colet, and in their walks in Oxford gardens in the soft October sunshine; his Prior at St. Mary's was benign and helpful; and he found a young compatriot, Johnp 129 Sixtin, of Bolsward in East Friesland, studying law, and engaged with him in a contest of that arid elegance which the taste of the age still demanded. ”

“ So far Erasmus had stood in an attitude of studied neutrality. We have to gather from his emphasis and from the undercurrent of his eloquence our impression as to the side on which his sympathies really lay. If the world could only have stood still long enough for his wise and cautious suggestions to affect the parties, all might yet have been well. Unhappily for the Erasmians of all times, the world moves, and it does not move strictly according to rule. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Budæus then goes on to say that he has little to do with court affairs, but that if Erasmus likes it, he may well promise himself a fine position in Paris.
"Immortal gods! what an honour for you! what a splendid fortune in the judgment of all learned men, to be summoned into a distant land by the greatest and most illustrious of kings on the sole recommendation of your learning!... As far as one can guess, he desires to be the founder of a splendid institution, so that in the future, quite otherwise than in the past, liberal learning may seem to be a thing of profit." ”

“ The way in which Erasmus always tries to shirk definite statements irritates us. How carefully he always tries to represent the Colloquies, in which he had spontaneously revealed so much of his inner convictions, as mere trifling committed to paper to please his friends. They are only meant to teach correct Latin! And if anything is said in them touching matters of faith, it is not I who say it, is it? As often as he censures classes or offices in the Adagia, princes above all, he warns the readers not to regard his words as aimed at particular persons. ”

“ The chapter on Erasmus emphasises the fact that, apart even from the chief divisions of university work under which the publications of the times were classified, a writer of the sixteenth century who had a work of literature, and even of light literature, to present to the world, was able through the use of Latin to reach at once all the cultivated communities. Such books as the Praise of Folly and the Colloquies of Erasmus, or the Ship of Fools of Brandt, became, within a wonderfully short time after their publication, the talk of society in all circles and in all cities of Europe. ”

“ He was not a Greek scholar; but it was he who, more than anyone else, encouraged Erasmus to print the New Testament in the original tongue. Thomas More, who was then a youth of twenty, had left Oxford, and was reading law in London, where Erasmus first met him. The story that they met at dinner, and that, before an introduction, each recognised the other by his wit, is perhaps apocryphal. At any rate, it expresses the truth that such perfectly congenial minds would be drawn to each other at once. ”

“ First, he is
"moved by the countless good qualities of Erasmus, a man of consummate ability in Latin and Greek literature, who adorns our age with his learning and talent like a star, to draw back a little from our general principle. And no one ought to think it strange if in the case of so rare a man and one placed beyond every hazard of genius, we thought we ought to change somewhat of our previous custom. ”

“ Erasmus was the most facetious man, and the greatest critic of his age. He carried on a reformation in learning at the same time he advanced that of religion; and promoted a purity of style as well as simplicity of worship. This drew on him the hatred of the ecclesiastics, who were no less bigotted to their barbarisms in language and philosophy, than they were to their superstitious and gaudy ceremonies in religion ”

“ As a man of the Renaissance one might have looked to find Erasmus, even before his departure, in correspondence with some of the lights of the later Italian Humanism; yet, so far as we know, he went over the Alps a stranger, except for the slight reputation of his own writings, and chiefly of the Adages. The enormous activity of all those great producers in every field of art, who have made the turning-point of the fifteenth to the sixteenth century one of the great epochs in human history, seems simply to have escaped his notice. ”

“ As to Erasmus himself, his course during the same period is easily told: he had published his Greek Testament and his learned editions of the Fathers, and had thereby earned a European reputation; he had flitted about from England to Paris, from Paris to Germany, from Germany back again to England, and thence to Rome. Courted, flattered, and admired by all, he was the great bel-esprit of the day, and the lighter productions of his pen were telling upon public opinion, much [679] perhaps in the same sort of way that clever journalism affects it in our own day. ”

“ 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? ”

“ While Erasmus was at Basel, he was, so he tells us, invited by Duke Ernest of Bavaria to come to his university at Ingolstadt. He speaks of this in a letter to the bishop of Rochester, as one among the numerous indications of the favour with which the first edition of the New Testament had been received. He had so many offers that he could not remember them. "Some bishop in Germany whose name I have forgotten" wanted him for his university. He knows he is unworthy of all these [Pg 248] honours, but is pleased to find that all his pains have earned the approval of good men. ”

“ He dragged me to his house and there on a little table, among his toll-receipts, lay the writings of Erasmus. He cries out that he is a blessed man, calls his wife, his children, and all his friends. To the clamorous boatmen he sends two jugs of wine and when they burst out into new clamours he sends some more, and promises that on their return he will remit the toll because they have brought him so great a guest. From here I was escorted as far as Coblenz by John Flaminius, head of a convent of women there, a man of angelic purity, of sound and sober judgment, and of unusual learning. ”