2. Erasmus Against the Barbarians

The facts of Erasmus’s early life are still disputed, in part because of questions about the authenticity of his fullest description of these years, in the Compendium Vitae of 1524.^[1] Most likely he was born in Rotterdam, the second of two illegitimate sons of Gerardus and Margareta, in 1469;^[2] Gerardus was a priest when Erasmus knew him, if not at the time of his birth, and Margareta was the daughter of a physician. As a small boy Erasmus attended the town school in Gouda, where he was taught by Pieter Winckel, assistant pastor of the town church. According to the Compendium Vitae, Margareta accompanied the nine-year-old Erasmus to Deventer in Overijssel, where he enrolled in the well-known St. Lebuin’s town school, a school that had eight classes instead of the usual six; the rector, Alexander Hegius, was a pioneer of humanist education. Though Erasmus never had Hegius as a teacher (he reached only the third-highest class), he heard him lecture to the whole school on feast days, and it was from older boys in the classes of Hegius and Jan Synthen that Erasmus “first caught a whiff of better learning.” Beatus Rhenanus, a close friend who penned a laudatory biography, adds that Erasmus reached Synthen’s class.^[3]

When Erasmus was about fourteen his mother and father died within a few months of each other, and Erasmus, with his older brother Pieter, was entrusted to the care of three guardians, including the Gouda schoolmaster Pieter Winckel. Rather than sending Erasmus to a university, the guardians enrolled him for two years at the domus pauperum scolarium, or poor students’ hostel, of the Brethren in ’s Hertogenbosch in northern Brabant, which, like other such hostels run by the Brethren, was a recruiting ground for religious vocations. Since the town school attended by students at the hostel had only six classes there is support for Erasmus’s claim that ’s Hertogenbosch had nothing to teach him.^[4] Erasmus’s fullest description of his decision to enter the monastic life is clouded by the fact that the letter in question seeks to make the case that he was never suited for the cloister and should thus be dispensed from the obligation to return there. Erasmus and his brother had promised each other to remain firm against the self-interested wishes of their guardians, but Pieter yielded, joining the monastery of Augustinian Canons at Sion, near Delft, leaving Erasmus, “a youth of sixteen,” no basis for refusing what his guardians proposed. He chose to enter a house of the same congregation at Steyn, outside of Gouda (ca. 1485).^[5]

In the information we have on Erasmus’s youth there are two qualities that stand out. First, in a society where folk high and low depended on “kith and kin” for the advancement of their interests, the circumstances of Erasmus’s birth placed him in a precarious position. That Erasmus was shamed by his illegitimate origins is suggested by his reticence, for a man otherwise so loquacious gives only one rather problematic account of his birth, in the Compendium Vitae. He recounts that Gerardus, destined for the priesthood by his nine brothers lest the family estate be further diminished, set off for Italy, leaving behind Margareta, “the woman he hoped to marry,” who (unbeknownst to him) was pregnant; only when his family wrote (falsely) that Margareta had died did Gerardus become a priest. When he returned home he discovered the deception and “never again touched” Margareta. It is indeed likely that Gerardus was not yet a priest when Erasmus was born.^[6] But the Compendium Vitae suppresses the existence of Erasmus’s still-living older brother and fellow monk, Pieter, to whom he had referred in published writings. In other letters, especially in one that he never published and that is very close in time and content to the Compendium Vitae, Erasmus bitterly condemns Pieter for having given in to pressure from their guardians to enter a monastery, thus leaving him in an exposed position. The Compendium Vitae tells a similar tale of how Erasmus went unwillingly into the cloister but without naming the “companion” who “betrayed” him.^[7] Had Erasmus mentioned his older brother by name, he could not have presented his father and mother as unhappy lovers, cheated of their lawful desire by avaricious kinfolk. By shielding the memory of his parents, he guarded for himself the semblance of a family life. Yet he evidently thought of his paternal kin in the unfavorable way he describes them in Compendium Vitae; the text refers to two of his mother’s brothers whom he once visited but says nothing about his father’s many brothers or their children.^[8] In the world of the sixteenth century, such a man needed friends.

The second point that stands out is that the young Erasmus was remarkably skilled in re-creating the classical style of Latin prose and verse, as prescribed by Italian humanists like Guarino of Verona and Lorenzo Valla. There is no proof for Erasmus’s description of his father as a man of humanist learning who studied Greek and traveled to Italy where he heard the lectures of the famous Guarino. Yet Gerardus did leave a valuable library, and it is tempting to see Erasmus’s early attachment to the classics as a precious link to an admired and perhaps distant father.^[9] During his school years at Deventer, or “as a boy,” he was “carried off as if by a force of nature” to “fine letters” (bonae literae), especially Horace.^[10] According to Beatus Rhenanus, Erasmus’s teacher Synthen predicted he would “rise to the highest rooftops of learning,” and modern neo-Latin scholars have been impressed by the elegant Latinity of early writings, like the Carmen Bucolicum, a pastoral poem probably written at Steyn. Jozef IJsewijn describes it as “more humanistic than all the pastoral poetry of Petrarch” (Francesco Petrarca, d. 1374).^[11] In his earliest extant letter Erasmus instructed his guardian Pieter Winckel to arrange forthwith an auction of his father’s books. Winckel may well have been put off by the peremptory tone of this youthful missive, but Erasmus later recalls his being offended by its recondite classical vocabulary.^[12]

The young Erasmus thus outstripped his teachers in his mastery of the new classical style but could not turn to his kinfolk for support. Entering the cloister at Steyn may well have promised to provide what he needed most: a community of mutual love and support to replace the family he lacked and, as Erasmus himself says, the hope of an opportunity for further study.^[13] The Funeral Oration for Berta Heyen, written when he was nineteen, shows Erasmus comfortably taking his place as one of the “fathers” from Steyn whom this pious widow of nearby Gouda sometimes entertained at her table; the occasion for this declamatio in classical form allowed him to imitate consolatory letters in the Epistulae of his beloved St. Jerome.^[14]

When he was “scarcely twenty” Erasmus wrote a hortatory epistle encouraging a young man to enter a monastery. De Contemptu Mundi (On the Contempt of the World) has been variously interpreted. Erasmus distanced himself from this early work in his preface to the published version (1521) and lamented the loss of a later declamatio (ca. 1506) that gave reasons against embracing the monastic life. Erika Rummel has suggested identifying this otherwise unknown treatise with the twelfth and last book of the printed De Contemptu, a “warning” based on the experience of those who have “regretted” entering the cloister.^[15] Many scholars have found the main body of the work to lack the ascetic flavor characteristic of such works; monastic discipline is presented not as a means of repentance but as a higher form of voluptas (pleasure), that is, tranquillity of conscience, leisure for contemplation and study, and a safe harbor against the turmoil and temptations of “the world” (seculum).^[16] More recently, however, others have shown convincing parallels with de contemptu mundi treatises of patristic and medieval literature, even in regard to the claim that it is the monks, not those who live in the world, who have a truly “Epicurean” way of life.^[17]

Yet if Erasmus’s treatise fits into the great tradition of monastic writing, it fits less well with the heightened sense of sin that characterizes late medieval ascetic spirituality. As Jean Delumeau has written, “The fourteenth century witnessed the birth of what might be called a scruple sickness.…No civilization has ever attached as much importance to guilt and shame as did the Western world from the thirteenth to the eighteenth centuries.” ^[18] Thus the De Contemptu Mundi should be compared with contemporary ascetical works, like Jacobus de Vocht’s Narratio de Inchoatione Domus Clericorum in Zwollis, a house chronicle of a type often produced by the Brethren. De Vocht had entered the house in Zwolle (in Overijssel, not far from Deventer) in 1450, was ordained a priest in 1465, and was still compiling pious recollections of members of the community in 1503, when he was said to be in his eighties. Though the Brethren were not monks themselves, they were fierce champions of a life of prayer, penance, and seclusion from the sinful world; boys instructed at their hostels (as at ’s Hertogenbosch) were encouraged to embrace a religious life, either with the Brethren or with the Augustinian Canons Regular—especially in one of the houses grouped together in what was known as the Windesheim congregation. Hence even though the works of Erasmus and de Vocht are very different in genre—the one addressed to “worldly” persons willing to think about a cloister, the other to zealous companions who had long since forsaken the ways of the world—they come from the same spiritual milieu, that of the “new devotion,” or devotio moderna, associated with the Brethren. The group of Augustinian houses known as the congregation of Sion, to which the monastery at Steyn belonged, had been founded by members of the Brethren in the early fifteenth century, in the same spirit as the larger Windesheim congregation. Even the mature Erasmus sounds at times like a disciple of the Brethren, as when he describes the splendid Charterhouse of Pavia as nothing but a useless pile of marble filled by gawking tourists.^[19] Likewise, when he says that “Christian philosophy” should be so widely diffused that farmers behind the plow can recite the Gospels, he echoes not only the Epistulae of Jerome but also the practice of devout Brethren described by de Vocht.^[20] Despite his criticism of the Brethren in later life,^[21] Erasmus had more in common with de Vocht’s outlook than he might have cared to admit.

Yet Erasmus’s De Contemptu and de Vocht’s Narratio de Inchoatione are still so different that it is difficult to believe they could have come from the same background. By the conventions of monastic literature, the devout must flee a world (seculum) fraught with mortal peril; but if the leaders of de Vocht’s community fear contamination of the brothers and sisters through contact with “worldlings” (seculares), Erasmus sees “ those they call worldlings ” (seculares [quos vocant]) as merely misinformed: they flee monastic life because they have the impression it is sad and morose.^[22] While Erasmus speaks of attending a farewell dinner for a girl named Margareta who was entering a convent, the rector of a house of the Brethren roundly scolded a companion for having accepted “beguine cookies” from the sisters: “‘Cursed be all gifts that come to the brethren from women,’ he said, ‘especially from the sisters,’ and he crushed the cookies beneath his feet.” ^[23] De Vocht dwells on the importance of humilitas—the brothers compete to perform “the more vile tasks, the more humble duties”; they gladly endure humiliation in the presence of outsiders; and they “humble” one another by teasing—but Erasmus does not even mention this central monastic virtue.^[24] Erasmus writes about the tears of parting (at Margareta’s farewell the entire company weeps), but de Vocht writes about tears of remorse: in the privacy of his cell, the rector at Zwolle “often groaned and wept, for he was so penitent and fearful all the days of his life.” Erasmus can pity the “wretched soul…carried off to that austere and strict law court [praetorium]” of God’s judgment, but one hears a more frightening thunder in a sermon of another Zwolle rector: “Woe unto us, if we do not fix in our hearts and keep always before our eyes how great is the wrath of God and how much He is displeased by sin, on account of which He will cast the sinner into everlasting fire.” ^[25] De Vocht’s house chronicle provides evidence not only of the intellectual timidity and religious pessimism that historian R. R. Post has noted among the Brethren but also of a morbid preoccupation with death. Against this background there is much to be said for the sturdy good sense of Erasmus, who saw a positive value in the classical sense of self-esteem.^[26]

Yet the monks at Steyn were not all students of the classics. Many will have been much closer in spirit to de Vocht and will not have been receptive to any argument tempering the urgency of self-mortification, regardless of what its pedigree may have been in earlier monastic literature. The letters that Erasmus wrote while at Steyn show him chafing against the reins of monastic life.^[27] There is no clear indication of his being unable to endure fasts and vigils, as he later complained.^[28] Rather, he was thwarted first in his effort to form a close friendship with a fellow monk, Servatius Roger, and subsequently in his attempt to create a kind of literary circle that included Servatius. Erasmus described himself as having a deep need for friendship,^[29] and his earliest letters to Servatius (letters 4–9) are brimming with affection: “As often as I read [your letter], which I do almost hourly, I think I am listening to the sweet tones of my Servatius’s voice and gazing at his most friendly face. Since we are seldom permitted to talk face to face, your letter is my consolation.” Some interpreters have suggested reading these letters as rhetorical exercises, but they are more plausibly taken at face value, as confirmation of Erasmus’s need for friendship, if not, as others have suggested, as evidence of latent homosexuality.^[30]

In any case, beginning with letter 10, (as noted by P. S. Allen, the editor of Erasmus’s correspondence), Erasmus presents himself to a circle of friends, including Servatius, more as a teacher than as one seeking friendship. Some of what Erasmus-as-mentor now requires of Servatius and the others makes more sense if we assume that his friendship for Servatius was keenly felt as well as elegantly phrased: “It is of the greatest importance that you should be frank with me. Do you really think friends should have any secrets from each other? Our friend Horace describes the Graces as ‘ungirt,’ and yet you bind yourself about with a kind of girdle of pretense.” That Servatius does not respond to Erasmus’s letters seems linked to some kind of censure, presumably at the hands of a superior. Erasmus refers to this incident as “a small matter [rem exiguam],” as if the two had incurred the displeasure of their superiors because of some infraction of the rather stringent discipline observed in the congregation of Sion (for example, monks could converse freely only on Sundays and feast days).^[31]

When Erasmus exhorts his disciples to “follow my precepts,” he wants them to “shake off laziness” and devote themselves “to the study of letters” and the cultivation of virtue. References to classical authors make it clear what kind of reading he has in mind. He also wants his friends to cultivate their own Latin style, not by culling quotations from authorities but by writing letters “ ex tempore…whatever comes into your head” (letter 15); this manner of composing seems congruent with the candor and openness he requires, as in the letter to Servatius quoted above. Finally, these learned friends are to love one another, “for nothing is more worthy of humanity [humanius] than to return the love of him who loves us” and to “be ever cheerful [hilaris]” (letter 13).^[32] Several times in these letters Erasmus tells his friends they will surely follow his advice if they look to their own salus, a word that means “well-being” in classical Latin and “salvation” in Christian Latin. It is not apparent what the cultivation of a proper Latin style might have to do with salvation, yet because most of these letters were addressed to monks it is also difficult to imagine that Erasmus was talking about nothing more than well-being.^[33] Perhaps the solution lies in looking to the De Contemptu Mundi, which is roughly contemporaneous with these letters, where Erasmus described monastic life as combining the pleasures of study and of tranquillity of conscience, another classical idea with a definite Christian meaning.^[34] From this perspective, we see Erasmus in the letters to his disciples trying to create a community of classical learning and Christian love modeled on De Contemptu’s ideal conception of the larger monastic community.

The next set of letters—Erasmus’s correspondence with Cornelis Gerard (letters 17–30)—shows Erasmus grappling with what he saw as the anti-intellectualism of fellow monks. Some scholars have seen the significance of these letters in the influence the older Cornelis seems to have exercised on Erasmus, tempering his enthusiasm for the more risqué classical authors and eliciting from him a promise to devote his pen to religious themes, so as to be, like Cornelis, a theologian as well as a poet.^[35] Yet if one reads De Contemptu Mundi as congruent with the great tradition of monastic literature, it is not clear that Erasmus at this time needed much by way of “conversion.” Cornelis’s importance to Erasmus lay rather in his respected status in the larger community of Holland Augustinians, for he could lend needed moral support to the younger monk’s campaign against obscurantism within his own cloister. In his first surviving letter to Erasmus, Cornelis acknowledges receipt of a poem “against the contempt [contemptu, a suggestive word] of the art of poetry,” which Cornelis has now divided into parts, making a verse dialogue.^[36] In a subsequent letter Erasmus makes clear that the “barbarians” who attack a pagan literature they cannot understand come from a milieu he and Cornelis know very well: “ Had they looked carefully at Jerome’s letters, they would at least have seen that lack of culture is not holiness.” ^[37] By the time the correspondence breaks off, Erasmus had finished an “oration” against the barbarians requested by Cornelis.^[38]

The composition of Erasmus’s Book against the Barbarians, or Antibarbarorum Liber, roughly spans the years from 1489 to 1495, when little is known of his activities. He was ordained a priest (25 April 1492) by David of Burgundy, bishop of Utrecht, who gave him permission to leave the cloister in order to serve as Latin secretary to Hendrik van Bergen, bishop of Cambrai.^[39] Since Bishop Hendrik was a member of the privy council, Erasmus will have spent time at the Burgundian court in Brussels, but he was to be found as well in Bergen-op-Zoom (also in Brabant), the town ruled by Hendrik’s family, and at the bishop’s country house in Halsteren. It was at Halsteren that he finished the version of Antibarbari which survives in a sixteenth-century manuscript from Gouda. What started as an “oration” attributed to Cornelis Gerard was now a dialogue in which the main speaker was Jacob Batt, rector of the town school in Bergen and subsequently the town secretary. A layman, Batt was a friend of Erasmus’s, but he was no friend of clerical privilege,^[40] and he no doubt added spice to Erasmus’s polemic against those who lived in fear of contamination by worldlings (seculares). The text of 1493/1495^[41] represents a considered critique of the religious culture within which Erasmus had lived for ten years.

Schoolmaster Batt “was as much an enemy to the barbarians as they were to letters,” and mendicant friars in Bergen denounced him for discarding traditional textbooks.^[42] One hears in Batt’s oration overtones of Lorenzo Valla’s polemic against the “Goths” who ruined Latin culture as well as Valla’s spirited defense of “secular” or “pagan” learning.^[43] One of the speakers suggests that the early Christians scorned pagan literary culture “from a zeal for the faith that was more vehement than wise,” but Batt insists that religion is nothing more than an “excuse” or “pretext” for men who are too lazy to learn about the writings they denounce.^[44] When he refutes the argument (put forward by “barbarians”) that Christian learning depends on divine inspiration, Batt’s language reaches a pitch of sarcasm that is rare in Erasmus:

There is a book to be written, let [the Holy Spirit] fly to our side and control our pen, with no effort of ours. A speech is to be written—then let him sit by our ear in the shape of a dove and himself guide our tongue—all we have to do is to remember to open our mouth, as one might sing with the psalmist, “I opened my mouth, and drew in my breath [spiritus].” ^[45]

The barbarians against whom “Batt” takes aim come from a spiritual milieu that has characteristics distinctive to the devotio moderna. Like the Brethren of the Common Life, also known as “Hieronymites,” and like the monks at Steyn who did not “rightly understand” Jerome’s Epistulae,^[46] they evidently had a special devotion to St. Jerome: Batt’s list of citations from “authorities” to refute the barbarians begins (as did Erasmus’s, while at Steyn) with a discussion of Jerome’s Epistulae. Elsewhere he attributes to his foes an argument that alludes to Jerome’s description of baptism as an oath (sacramentum) of service to Christ.^[47] Among the “splendid titles [the barbarians] adorn their nonsense with” is the Rosetum Exercitium Spiritalium of Jan Mombaer, a monk of the Windesheim congregation in Zwolle.^[48] Like Pieter Winckel, who feared that Erasmus and Pieter might “breathe in something of a worldly spirit ” if they attended a university, the barbarians “never…cease to urge the citizens not to send their children to the secular schools they call universities.” ^[49] Finally, if one keeps in mind a work like the de Vocht’s Narratio de Inchoatione Domus Clericorum Zwollensis, it is easy to understand Batt’s scorn for his adversaries’ excessive fear of falling into the sin of pride of intellect: “The childish, not to say perverse, timorousness of these people is what David was talking about…‘They were afraid where no fear was.’” ^[50]

Some barbarians are altogether afraid of learning, but others are learned in canon law and scholastic theology,^[51] and in his critique of the latter Batt develops the ideal of a return to vetus theologia (ancient theology). It was a humanist convention that poets had been the “theologians” of ancient times, masking the truth about things divine in allegories. Erasmus alludes to this idea when one of the speakers adduces against the barbarians “proofs from the first theologians [priscis theologis], though of our religion [nostratibus].” ^[52] The old theologians of the Christian persuasion—that is, the Church Fathers—cultivated a “refined literary style,” and Batt says with praise of one of their modern imitators that he was “no less a rhetorician than a theologian.” Erasmus thus also followed Lorenzo Valla in his call for setting aside the scholastic theology of the Middle Ages, formed in a university culture dominated by Aristotelian logic, in favor of a theology nurtured by the rhetorical culture in which the Fathers had been educated.^[53]

In effect, Erasmus’s grievance against the barbarians was that they accepted as suitable for Christians the passion for argumentation that animated students of logic but they rejected the passion for beauty and style that animated students of grammar and rhetoric. Yet while the logic-chopping of pagan philosophers was, according to Valla and Erasmus, a seedbed of heresy^[54] and thus a genuine danger to Christian faith, the taste for a more sophisticated literary culture was not in itself harmful. Indeed, as one of the speakers remarks, “Religion without letters has something about it that is almost supine and doltish, from which those with a taste for letters distance themselves as far as possible.” The literary culture of pagan antiquity not only can support a life of Christian virtue but was ordained to do so in the economy of salvation. Taking up a patristic theme, Batt/Erasmus contends that the subjugation of the world to Rome “through such great disasters and bloodstained victories” was “according to the divine plan, so that when the Christian religion was born, it might spread abroad the more easily.” The great cultural achievements of Greece and Rome served a preparatory function in like manner: “In law, in philosophy, how the ancients labored! Why did all this happen? So that we on our arrival could hold them in contempt? Was it not rather that the best religion should be adorned and supported by the finest studies?” ^[55] The Roman Empire was no more, but there was for Erasmus even in his day a litteraria res publica (republic of letters),^[56] and in his vision of Christian culture this international community of scholars and amateurs of good Latinity was meant to serve the res publica Christi (Christian commonwealth) as divine providence had ordained.

Notes