1. Bonae Literae

The Making of a Low Countries Humanist, 1489–1511

1. The Burgundian-Habsburg Low Countries

The boundaries of the Low Countries are geographically ill defined and historically fluid.^[1] Inhabitants of the region today speak languages descended from those heard in Erasmus’s time: Frisian in Friesland, Dutch in the rest of the Netherlands and in northern Belgium, French in southern Belgium, and a form of Low German in Luxemburg. Speakers of Netherlandish and French dialects in the sixteenth century were divided not by territorial borders but by a linguistic frontier that followed the old Roman road from Boulogne to Cologne. That different language communities converged on this area was not without influence in making the region a meeting place for merchants from all over Europe by the late Middle Ages.^[2]

Political unification of the region was attempted more than once but never fully achieved. Between 1384 and 1477 the dukes of Burgundy brought most of the important territories under their control, including the three largely Netherlandish-speaking provinces of Flanders, Brabant, and Holland. But as the last duke lay dying on the field of battle in 1477 he left behind provinces and towns chafing under his hasty centralization.^[3] The new Habsburg dynasty in the person of Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor from 1495 to 1519, had to proceed cautiously in lands that he ruled only by right of his late wife (d. 1484), the daughter of the last duke of Burgundy. Maximilian was obliged to treat the distinct institutions of his separate Lowlands territories with respect, and it was in this era that Erasmus grew to manhood. Maximilian’s son, Archduke Philip the Handsome (reigned 1494–1506), was succeeded by his son, best known to history as the emperor Charles V (reigned in the Low Countries 1514–1555). As Charles was mostly absent from his native country, his authority was represented there by his aunt, Margaret of Austria (1506–1514, 1517–1530), and later by his sister, Mary of Hungary (1531–1555). These capable Habsburg women and their advisors made considerable progress in building national institutions.^[4] Still, the people of this nation in process of formation had no proper name for their country, and if they had a collective name for themselves it was “Burgundian,” in honor of the now-vanished dynasty.^[5] Under Charles’s successor, Philip II of Spain, the northern provinces, led by Holland, rebelled against Habsburg state building (1572–1648) and formed themselves into a new nation known to history as the Dutch Republic.

Politically fragmented, the Low Countries counted among Europe’s great powers only at intervals—under the fifteenth-century dukes of Burgundy or during the seventeenth-century era of Dutch naval supremacy. Yet as the patient work of economic and social historians has shown, the people of this region were often at the forefront of major transformations in European history. What defines the Low Countries geographically is the omnipresence of water: the North Sea, from Friesland to the Pas de Calais, and the Zuider Zee (South Sea); the Maas (Meuse), combining with the Scheldt and its tributaries to form a great delta; the Rhine, with branches running into the Zuider Zee, the North Sea, and the Maas delta; and the canals, which since Roman times have facilitated drainage and travel.^[6] By comparison with slow and costly methods of land travel, seas and rivers were the high roads of communication. This “exceptionally favorable geographic position” made the Low Countries in the late Middle Ages, along with northern Italy, “the most densely populated area in the world.” ^[7]

Urbanization is one ready index of social and economic development, and in this respect only northern Italy can be compared with the western Low Countries, especially Flanders and Holland. The great industrial city of Ghent (Flanders), with an estimated 64,000 people in the fourteenth century, was then surpassed in northern Europe only by Paris. In Erasmus’s native Holland urbanization was slower and cities were smaller, but nonetheless in the early sixteenth century a province no larger than the state of Delaware could boast of no fewer than twenty-five walled towns. Calculating the percentage of population living in cities over 10,000, Jan De Vries creates a scale of urbanization for various modern nations in 1550, fourteen years after Erasmus’s death; the highest figures are for Belgium (21 percent), the Netherlands (15.8 percent), and northern Italy (15.1 percent).^[8] If one lowers the threshold to include agglomerations of 5,000 or more, Flanders was 36 percent urban by 1500 and southern Holland, from the north bank of the Maas to the south shore of the Zuider Zee, 54 percent. By this measure Erasmus’s home ground was perhaps the single most urbanized region of Europe.^[9]

Urbanization on such a scale presupposes a flourishing agricultural economy. New land was brought under the plough all over Europe during the High Middle Ages, but in the Low Countries this process was enhanced by the reclamation of land that was waterlogged or even covered by water. From an early date villagers in what later became the County of Holland were cutting parallel drainage ditches into fenlands that rose gently above settled bottomlands, and “Hollanders” are first mentioned in a contract for such work (1117) in northern Germany. Monasteries and noble landlords along the Flanders coast pioneered in the building of sturdy dikes to enclose land under water at high tide, thus creating polders. By 1300 Holland was ringed by a network of sea dikes which ranks as one of the engineering wonders of the medieval world.^[10] Moreover, because of the stimulus that urban markets and urban investment provided to the spread of intensive farming, agricultural productivity continued to improve in the Low Countries during the period ca. 1300–1450 when productivity declined or stagnated elsewhere. If the labor of four peasants was required to feed a town dweller in most of the rest of Europe, here it required only two. Since productivity growth resumed after 1500, following a brief lag, and continued without interruption, Europe’s “Agricultural Revolution” dates in the Low Countries from the sixteenth century, much earlier than in England.^[11]

From about 1300 galley fleets from Venice and Genoa called regularly at Bruges in Flanders; when the north German Hanseatic League established one of its principal depots here, Bruges became the main north European entrepôt for the exchange of goods and the settlement of merchant accounts. Silks and spices from the fabled Asian caravan routes, coming by way of Italy, were traded for the raw products of the Baltic, especially rye and wheat from the Polish plain and (somewhat later) copper from the mines of central Europe. Ships returning to the Baltic also carried the fine woolens in which the great cities of Flanders had long specialized, English woolens finished in Brabant, or, in the sixteenth century, lighter fabrics that came into favor as the old industry declined. By about 1500 Antwerp, in Brabant, had begun to outstrip Bruges as a European entrepôt. It was to Antwerp that the Fuggers and other great merchants of southern Germany brought their copper, and to Antwerp too came factors of the king of Portugal bringing spices from the new sea route from India, where, as it happened, copper could be sold for a premium. Because of far-flung exchanges of this kind, Antwerp, with a population of about 90,000 in 1550, may be considered the first world market. Erasmus Schets, perhaps the greatest merchant-banker of Antwerp, was heavily involved in refinement of copper, bid for the exclusive right to import Portuguese spices, and through his Lisbon contacts launched one of the early sugar mills in Portuguese Brazil. Schets was also an accomplished Latinist, proud to serve as personal banker to his friend Erasmus of Rotterdam.^[12]

The political development of the Low Countries territories was in some respects commensurate with their advanced economy. Representative assemblies are common throughout Latin Christian Europe in the late Middle Ages,^[13] but none met so frequently as the provincial states of the Low Countries and few if any have left such copious documentation for this period.^[14] During the sixteenth century a Habsburg government desperate for funds to fight its wars had to grant the provincial states a growing share of authority in such matters as the collection and disbursement of tax revenues.^[15] There is at least one link between this vigorous tradition of representative government and the precocious economic development of the region: communal and interest-group associations here had long had the habit of managing their own economic affairs, and such habits had political implications. From the late eleventh century owners of land reclaimed from water organized themselves into polder boards that had the power to levy assessments and that were in time only partially brought under the control of the territorial princes. Crafts guilds were common in the southern Netherlands (not in the north), and after about 1300 they were a potent force in the industrial towns of Flanders; even in Brabant, where patrician and merchant interests remained stronger, the craft component or “member” of a sixteenth-century town magistracy could by itself hold up consent to a tax demanded by the central government. Before procedures for gaining subjects’ consent to taxation had developed into unified parliaments or “states” for each province, towns and landowners (noble and non-noble) in this region commonly sent representatives to district meetings where requests for an extraordinary tax had to be approved. There were also ad hoc assemblies of municipalities involved in the same trade, such as the “towns and villages engaged in the herring fishery” in Holland. The burghers who represented their towns at such meetings also had social organizations to mark their own elevated status. Low Countries towns were part of a cultural zone extending into Germany in which prominent burghers formed “shooting guilds,” or honorific militias; they were also part of another cultural zone extending into France in which burghers formed “guilds of rhetoric” for the performance of plays both pious and satirical.^[16] Rather than combating this penchant for corporative organization, the dukes of Burgundy sought to make use of it for their own purposes; they encouraged the formation of a unified parliament or states in each province to simplify consultative procedures and they gathered the great nobles of the region into a ceremonial brotherhood, the Order of the Golden Fleece, sworn to uphold the dynasty.

For the most part the currents of devotion and reform that defined medieval religious history were not of local origin and swept into the Low Countries from France and Germany. Moreover, prior to Philip II’s controversial redrawing of diocesan boundaries in 1559, bishops here were answerable to superiors in France or Germany. It seems too that waves of religious enthusiasm, or religious fear, were in this area tempered by a certain moderation. During the era of Europe’s great witch-hunt (ca. 1450–1650), for example, there were witchcraft trials in the Low Countries but few examples of the witchcraft panics that took place in parts of France, Germany, and Switzerland. But moderation did not mean indifference. In particular, the energy and sophistication of lay society in the Low Countries was visible also in the degree to which laypeople appropriated the devotional practices and the spiritual outlook of the religious orders. From the thirteenth century pious nuns and monks penned Netherlandish treatises on the life of prayer and spiritual perfection, suggesting an audience for such works among devout layfolk (especially women) who could not read Latin. To accommodate the admiration of monastic piety, there were richly illuminated books of hours for ladies of the court and in important urban parishes endowments for choral singing of the zeven getijden, or seven hours of the monastic office. Parishes also had multiple brotherhoods and sisterhoods for specific purposes, such as nursing the sick or honoring the patron saint of the parish. If a special characteristic distinguished Low Countries religious life, it was in the prominence of movements having at least a partly lay character. The Beguines, religious communities of unmarried laywomen, were in the thirteenth century a movement of European scope, but only in this region did they survive the hostile scrutiny of church authorities suspicious of any such groups lacking the discipline of monastic vows; well into the sixteenth century every Low Countries town of any size had its beguinage or begijnhof. The Brothers and Sisters of the Common Life, founded by Gerard Groote (d. 1384), spread mainly through Groote’s native northern Low Countries and adjacent regions of Germany. Like the Beguines, members of these communities remained free to leave and to marry. But many houses converted themselves into religious communities in the more normal sense, adopting either the Franciscan or the Augustinian rule, and the remaining houses of the Brethren developed into communities mainly composed of priests, with a special focus on the spiritual instruction of youth.^[17]

The Low Countries might once again be compared with Italy in terms of the European fame and influence of local artists. To be sure, the international reputation of Low Countries musicians and painters profited from the patronage and prestige of the Burgundian court. The roster of leaders in the new polyphonic music of the fifteenth century includes a cluster of Low Countries composers who spent most of their careers at French or Italian courts. As for painting, the brothers Jan and Hubert van Eyck, pioneers in the ars nova with its stunning realism of detail, never left their native region, but what Italians called il dipingere di Fiandra soon commanded a good deal of interest in foreign art markets; in the next century, at least by the 1540s, Netherlands paintings were being exported to Spain by the crate.^[18] The sculptor Klaas Sluter, another creator of the ars nova and a contemporary of the Van Eycks, had no successors of comparable talent. But the elaborately carved polychrome wooden altarpiece, or retable, originating in the southern Netherlands around 1400, soon developed here a distinctive plasticity of form, and by 1500 retables too were an important export item. Save for Jan Borremans of Brussels, whose work can be found in places like Sweden and Estonia, no individual artist stands out. Rather, retables were known by the distinctive styles of the Brabant towns where they were mainly produced (Antwerp, Brussels, and Mechelen). Guilds of sculptors, cabinetmakers, and painters collaborated in the production of retables, and, in a form of quality control well known in other industries, guild masters affixed their trademark to each finished piece. After about 1480 the production of fine tapestries—yet another artistic export—was centered in Brussels and came under the stylistic influence of contemporary retables.^[19]

In sum, corporative organization was the law of life in this highly urbanized society. In a sense the starting point for this conception of social order was the extended family. As elsewhere in Europe, people high and low depended on “kith and kin” (vrienden en magen) for protection and advancement.^[20] It was also a widespread European practice for people to band together at all levels to defend themselves against common foes and to further common economic interests, creating as it were an artificial family.^[21] Any society whose basic building blocks were the extended family and the sworn association, as was certainly true for the Low Countries, must be deemed “medieval” rather than “modern” in its principles of organization. Must we conclude, then, that the society in which Erasmus grew up was destined to decline, making way for modernity? Johan Huizinga’s Waning of the Middle Ages, still the most influential historical portrait of the Burgundian Netherlands, treats the late bloom of medieval ideals and institutions here as “overripe” and incapable of withstanding a challenge from the truly innovative spirit of the Italian Renaissance. Yet the question of what constitutes modernity has no simple answer. Huizinga’s argument holds up best in the case of religious literature, where subsequent and more thorough studies have found for the same period a widespread intensification of religious guilt, coupled with a timidity and anxiety in light of which the rebellious reaction of an Erasmus (or a Luther) is more readily comprehensible.^[22] But the case is not the same for aristocratic culture, not even for the ponderously ceremonious etiquette of the Burgundian court. We cannot, for example, dismiss as outdated and artificial an institution so useful to rulers as the Knights of the Golden Fleece.^[23] Guilds have likewise been found to have more vitality than was formerly thought, and even where guilds were not permitted, the impulse for collective solidarity could take other and equally impressive forms: it was precisely in the guild-free new industrial towns of Flanders that craftsmen formed the backbone for Calvinist or Anabaptist churches that flourished in the teeth of persecution by the Habsburg state. When the Dutch Revolt broke out not many years later, the rebellion was principally justified in the name of the cherished privileges or “liberties” that had always been a rallying point for local solidarity.^[24] Thus Burgundian culture was not about to collapse from its own weight and complexity; indeed the Low Countries pattern of continuous innovation within a traditional corporate framework turned out to have a promising future.

To come finally to learned literature in Latin, the aspect of Low Countries culture that bears most immediately on Erasmus’s intellectual formation, the traditional framework is here more in evidence than are any signs of innovation. The university of Leuven (Louvain), founded in 1427, was for some time under the shadow of its models, Paris and Cologne. The curriculum was dominated by scholastic logic and by a Latin that in the judgment of neo-Latin literature scholar Jozef IJsewijn had considerably declined from the achievements of medieval authors of earlier centuries; only occasionally did a professor of arts or theology show an interest in the new (Italian) humanist emphasis on classical Latin. The Brethren of the Common Life had scriptoria for copying manuscripts and often maintained a domus pauperum for poor boys enrolled in the town school, in order to encourage religious vocations. But the devotional treatises of the Brethren tended to be severely practical, discouraging intellectual curiosity as a form of sinful pride. By default, then, until the end of the fifteenth century monasteries were the main centers of a nascent humanist movement. The Premonstratensian abbey of Parc, outside Leuven, built a library rich in Italian humanist manuscripts, where Erasmus was to find Lorenzo Valla’s unpublished work on the New Testament, the Adnotationes (see chapter 6 below). The Cistercian abbey of Adwerth in Friesland was the meeting place for a circle of scholars that included Wessel Gansfort, a reformist theologian, and Rudolph Agricola (d. 1485), the earliest Low Countries humanist of any distinction, who felt more at home in Italy than in his native land. In Holland the most interesting early humanists were to be found in monasteries of Augustinian Canons Regular: Cornelis Gerard at Hemsdonk, near Schoonhoven, and at Steyn, near Gouda, Willem Hermans—and Erasmus of Rotterdam. This was a milieu in which the new humanist learning was understood mainly as an ornament to the study of theology.^[25] One certainly would not expect this milieu to produce a young man—the same Erasmus—whose goal was an intellectual revolution.

Notes

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

3. The Ideal of Christian Civility

Erasmus came to Paris in 1495 hoping to enhance his credentials as “poet and theologian,” after the manner of Cornelis Gerard.^[1] Bishop Hendrik van Bergen’s patronage permitted a few years of study at the University of Paris, if not the doctorate in theology Erasmus dreamed of earning at the University of Bologna.^[2] The Paris theology faculty, with its entrenched scholastic traditions, compelled this rather bemused “ primitive theologian” to “turn Scotist,” as he wrote to a pupil: “If only you could see your Erasmus sitting agape among these glorified Scotists…if you could but observe his furrowed brow, his uncomprehending look and worried expression, you would say it was another man.” ^[3] In November 1495 the completion of a small volume of poetry featuring an ode on the Nativity marked Erasmus’s return to the serious religious poetry he had been writing at Steyn. Robert Gaguin, general of the Trinitarian order and leading figure among Paris humanists, responded graciously to Erasmus’s overtures and gave the manuscript Antibarbari a good review. In turn, Erasmus adopted Gaguin’s standards for a chaste Christian eloquence in his laudatory preface (November 1496) to the Sylva Odarum of Willem Hermans, a longtime friend and member of Erasmus’s literary circle at Steyn who was also Gerard’s cousin.^[4] But as Jozef IJsewijn has suggested, Erasmus knew Latin poetry too well not to recognize his own limits. To a Netherlands friend (1499) he characterized his poetry as “dry, feeble, lacking both blood and vital sap, partly through a certain poverty of talent” and partly because he had been writing for Dutch ears, “that is, for very dull ears.” ^[5] Erasmus would find a way to the “primitive theology” that he at this time only dimly envisioned, but not through poetry and not in Paris.

To supplement his meager support from the bishop Erasmus gave lessons to boys who lodged with a guardian or tutor, and in the materials he prepared to teach them good Latin, not the scholastic Latin of the lecture halls, one can see the nucleus of his later pedagogical program. De Ratione Studii (On the Method of Study, 1497, published 1512) was meant for Thomas Grey and De Conscribendis Epistolis (On the Writing of Letters, 1498, published 1521) for Robert Fischer, another English pupil. He also wrote the earliest version of Familiarium Colloquiorum Formulae (Formulas for Friendly Conversation, ca. 1497, published 1518) for two brothers from Lübeck, Christian and Heinrich Northoff, and De Duplici Copia Rerum ac Verborum (Foundations of the Abundant Style, ca. 1499, published 1512) for Adolph of Burgundy, the son of Jacob Batt’s new patroness, Lady Anna van Borssele.^[6] The first publication that gained him notice among the learned, the Adagia (Adages) of 1500, was dedicated to William Blount, Lord Mountjoy, a pupil who had become a patron, and his first venture into textual scholarship, the 1501 edition of Cicero’s De Officiis (On Moral Duties), was dedicated to Jacobus de Voecht of Antwerp, a tutor to whose charges Erasmus gave lessons while staying briefly in Orléans.^[7]

In a letter that Erasmus wrote for Heinrich Northoff to his brother Christian, “Heinrich” tells what he has learned from Erasmus:

He remarked that [bonae literae, fine letters] alone formed man’s proper wealth, wealth that Fortune could neither bestow nor take away.…They were not conferred, like worldly honors, upon the idle and undeserving. They did not distract one from practicing virtue but themselves conferred it. They alone, said he, could give peace to the spirit and abide as a refuge. Finally, without them we could not even be human.^[8]

This capsule summary reflects a common humanist program, with roots in the Quattrocento (especially in Valla’s Elegantiae) and, among ancient authors, in the writings of Cicero, Quintilian, and Plutarch: Latin must be learned not from grammatical rules but from the usage of the great age of Latinity, roughly from Cicero to Quintilian: teachers should not whip pupils into compliance but rather engage their better instincts in the game of learning, for example, by using competition to appeal to their self-esteem. And just as it was the power of oratory that once persuaded savage men to leave their caves and dwell together in settled communities, so too the charm of bonae literae would soothe savage passions and fortify the instincts of sociability that Cicero called humanitas (humaneness).^[9]

Yet even in Erasmus’s earliest educational writings there are signs of a distinctive emphasis. The young Erasmus’s humanist heroes were Lorenzo Valla and, in his native Low Countries, Rodolphus Agricola, both of whom wrote important textbooks on dialectic (logic) in order to provide a humanist alternative in what was still the dominant field of study in the university arts curriculum. Erasmus borrowed a copy of Valla’s Dialectica from Robert Gaguin and later promoted efforts to locate manuscripts of Agricola’s De Inventione Dialectica, of which a partial edition appeared in 1515.^[10] But just as Erasmus was peculiar among humanists in not including any philosophers or theologians among the staple authors of his curriculum,^[11] his textbooks on Latin show a conscious focus on what Cicero called sermo, or familiar speech, as opposed to contentio, or argumentation. He apparently conducted his own teaching in a conversational setting, and he wanted his pupils to write down their thoughts as soon as they came to mind, in keeping with his own practice. Orators and dialecticians over the centuries had provided precepts aplenty for argumentation, but Erasmus’s Colloquia provided precepts for sermo, as did the De Conscribendis Epistolis, for he felt that writing letters should be like “whispering in a corner with a friend.” Of the various types of argument listed by classical rhetoricians, the only one in which he showed real interest was exempla—stories, or concrete images—which persuaded by their charm, not by boxing someone into a logical corner. De Duplici Copia skimps on the other kinds of argument in favor of a fulsome treatment of exempla, and the adages he so carefully collected from his reading of the classics were but pithy and striking exempla.^[12]

This preference for a discourse that was friendly and familiar rather than formal and contentious seems to mirror the human qualities Erasmus most admired in others and liked to think he himself possessed. Thus Thomas Grey, a pupil for whom he conceived an affection strong enough to rouse suspicions in the boy’s guardian, is praised for his “modest and gentle disposition.” Two years later Erasmus advertised himself to John Colet as “straightforward, frank, outspoken, incapable alike of pretense and concealment.” Just as with Servatius Roger at Steyn, Erasmus passed from being Grey’s friend to being his benevolent mentor. In both cases the connection between personal attachments and a cultural ideal is clear in outline, if elusive in its details: a man with a need for affection, who had not found in the monastic community a replacement for the comforting solidarity of family life, threw himself heart and soul into an intellectual program thought by its promoters to cultivate not merely learning and discernment but Cicero’s humanitas.^[13] If the scholastic curriculum, with its emphasis on dialectic, produced men who were “seduced by the perverted and insatiable passion for quibbling,” it would be otherwise with the devotees of bonae literae. As Erasmus said in initiating correspondence with a man evidently well disposed to the new learning, “Associations between scholars are sacred and have to be inaugurated by a kind of holy pledge.” ^[14] There still shimmered in his imagination the humanist “republic of letters” of which he had spoken in Antibarbari.

Meanwhile, however, Erasmus’s own humanitas was sorely tested as he struggled with the practical ambiguities of his position as a professed monk living outside his cloister. It is hard to imagine that the author of Antibarbari can still have thought of the cloister as his home. Yet his ties to the Augustinian Canons Regular provided emotional support during the difficult Paris years when efforts to reform the Augustinians in France brought Low Countries monks to Paris, including Erasmus’s spiritual father, Nicholas Werner, to whom Erasmus reported how he had been cured of a quartan fever by the intercession of Ste. Geneviève.^[15] Erasmus would later have bad memories of his first lodging place in Paris, at the austere Collège de Montaigu, presided over by “our worshipful master Jan Standonck,” a native Brabander and reformer in the spirit of the devotio moderna. His relations with Standonck cannot have improved when, a few years later, the latter was deputed by Hendrik van Bergen to investigate persistent rumors that Erasmus was “wasting…time here in frivolity, feasting, and love affairs.” ^[16] When Erasmus briefly returned to Steyn after an illness in 1496 his friends encouraged him to continue his studies, but subsequent visits to Holland left him discouraged: he could not “stomach those Epicurean banquets; besides, the people are mean and uncultivated, humane studies are most actively despised.” ^[17]

More pressing was the problem of material support. By late 1498, when Bishop Hendrik was “giv[ing] nothing while promising much,” Erasmus was beating importunately on the door of his old friend Batt, whose patroness, Anna van Borssele, was to be suitably instructed about Erasmus’s merits and deserts. Despite a visit to Tournehem castle, the family seat of Lady Anna’s father-in-law, Erasmus was not encouraged and chose to try his luck in England (ca. July–December 1499), whither he had been invited by Baron Mountjoy.^[18] England’s learned men delighted Erasmus—John Colet and Thomas More became friends for life, William Grocyn and Thomas Linacre impressed him by their knowledge of Greek^[19]—but English customs regulations left him poorer for the experience: the precious gold and silver he had accumulated in his purse, with a value of twenty pounds sterling, was confiscated as he waited to take ship to Dover.^[20] There now followed a stream of letters to Batt in which Erasmus was by turns demanding, petulant, and obsequious. At one point he feared that Willem Hermans, whom he had introduced to Batt, might precede him in Lady Anna’s favor: “When you [Batt] sent me Willem’s letter, you seemed to me to be commanding me to choose, with the least possible delay, a tree from which to hang myself.” At other times he dictated to the ever-patient Batt flattering descriptions of himself: “Please explain to her [Lady Anna] how much greater is the glory she can acquire from me, by my writings [meis literis], than from the other theologians in her patronage. They merely deliver humdrum sermons; I am writing books that may last forever.” ^[21]

In the end Erasmus had to make his own supplications. At Batt’s suggestion he addressed himself to Bishop Hendrik’s brother, Antoon van Bergen, abbot of St. Bertin in Saint-Omer (near Tournehem castle), with a long account of a witchcraft trial he had learned about while in Orléans.^[22] To Lady Anna herself Erasmus promised that his pen would make her equal in the eyes of posterity to the “three Annas…on whom ancient literature conferred enduring fame.” On the same day Erasmus wrote Batt that he had never written anything “so much against the grain” as the “nonsense” contained in his letters to Lady Anna and the abbot of St. Bertin.^[23] But flattery well applied proved to have useful results. These contacts permitted Erasmus to live better than a year in the vicinity of Tournehem castle and Saint-Omer until he established himself in the university town of Leuven (September 1502)^[24] where he was welcomed by the town council and by Adrian of Utrecht, then professor of philosophy and dean of St. Peter’s church, later to be chosen pope under the name Adrian VI.

When Erasmus took up residence at Tournehem in the summer of 1501 he had a much clearer notion than he did in Paris of how to focus his considerable energies. His first sojourn in England had brought an unexpected turn in his intellectual development, though not in the way in which the story has often been told. John Colet could not at this time have shaped Erasmus’s understanding of what it meant to be a theologian; as John Gleason has recently shown, Colet’s commentaries on Scripture are almost all of later date, and he lacked the humanist imperative for studying a text in its original language. Yet Grocyn and Linacre were in a position to show Erasmus something of the riches that lay open to those who knew Greek, and it seems to have been in England that he acquired the conviction that vetus theologia required a thorough knowledge of Greek so as to understand at least the New Testament in its pristine words.^[25] Apart from a reference to Rodolphus Agricola’s knowledge of Greek, there is no mention of Greek studies in Erasmus’s early letters, but within a few months of returning to the Continent Greek had become his passion: though readings in Greek without a tutor “all but crush my spirit,” he knew enough to see that “Latin education is imperfect without [Greek],” and he asked Batt to understand how much it meant “to my reputation, indeed my salvation ” to finish off his current projects and “acquire a certain limited competence in the use of Greek, and thereby go on to devote myself entirely to sacred literature.” Only with this solid foundation could he “edit works of divinity” in such a way as to “bid my multitudes of hostile critics go hang.” Erasmus was driven by the kind of ambition that, as he said in Antibarbari, applies a spur to the mind. Like Peter Abelard,^[26] one of the founding fathers of scholastic philosophy and theology, this man who would be the great pioneer of humanist biblical scholarship dreamed of a more solid glory, and he committed himself to the effort it demanded: “I would rather win a fame that is a little delayed, but endures, than a speedier reputation which I must afterward regret.” ^[27]

The first fruit of these labors was the Enchiridion Militis Christiani (Handbook of the Christian Soldier), begun at Tournehem castle in the summer of 1501 and published in February 1503. Erasmus agreed to “write down a few things to shake religion into” a friend of his and Batt’s, a German cannon founder recently established in the Low Countries whose wife feared for his salvation (salus) and believed Erasmus was the one theologian to whom her husband might listen. He was encouraged to work further on the manuscript by the favorable reaction of “learned men, especially Jean Vitrier” (d. 1516), warden of the Observant Franciscan friary at Saint-Omer.^[28] The Enchiridion was thus more than an occasional piece.^[29] It can fairly be described as a distillation of all of Erasmus’s concerns in recent years: his newfound enthusiasm for Greek; his studies in classical literature; his efforts to revive the “primitive theology [vetus theologia]” that was the only viable alternative to scholasticism; and, last but not least, his bitter recollections of life in the cloister.

Origen (d. A.D. 223) was the first great scholar among the Greek Fathers, but his orthodoxy was considered dubious, and there is no evidence Erasmus had read him prior to meeting Jean Vitrier. He at first had his doubts about Vitrier, whose forthright attacks on loose-living clergy, popular superstition, and papal indulgences had got him in difficulty with church authorities. Soon, however, Erasmus was devouring a Greek manuscript of Origen’s works lent him by Vitrier, and his later sketch of Vitrier describes a man after his own heart. While respecting the vocation in which he found himself, Vitrier “used to say in my hearing” that doing everything by the sound of a bell “was a life for idiots rather than religious men.” He also quieted Erasmus’s scruples about breaking the fasting regulations at the abbey of St. Bertin (where he was then staying) so as not to hinder his studies.^[30] Not surprisingly, Erasmus’s preoccupation with Origen is highly visible in the Enchiridion, as has been demonstrated with exemplary subtlety and precision by André Godin. In structure the Enchiridion is a loosely knit series of “rules” for Christian piety, and both sixteenth-century readers and modern commentators are agreed on the central importance of what is by far the longest section, the “Fifth Rule,” which is that “perfect piety is the attempt to progress always from visible things…to the invisible.” ^[31] This principle suggests the influence of Plato, who is in fact cited more often than any pagan author, but as Godin remarks the Fifth Rule is inspired less by Plato himself than by “Christian Platonists,” that is, by Origen and possibly the Florentine Neoplatonists who were Erasmus’s near contemporaries, Marsiglio Ficino (d. 1499) and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (d. 1494).^[32] The allegorical interpretations of the Old Testament that Erasmus uses to show the spiritual or deeper meaning of seemingly random events are often drawn from Origen, and Erasmus is nowhere fonder of allegory than in the Enchiridion.^[33] When he urges his readers to “choose especially those interpreters of divine Scripture who depart as much as possible from the literal sense,” it is Origen, after St. Paul, that he has most in mind. Origen is even more central for Erasmus’s doctrine of human nature. The crucial identification of St. Paul’s distinction between “flesh” and “spirit” with the philosophical distinction between “reason” and “emotions” comes from Origen. Erasmus followed Origen again in offering an alternative tripartite division of human nature, with explicit reference to the sin of Adam and Eve as the source of the rebelliousness of man’s lower nature against the rule of reason, or spirit. In this view the three parts of man are spirit (spiritus), “by which we reproduce a likeness of the divine nature”; flesh, “in which through the fault of our first parents the cunning serpent has inscribed the law of sin”; and soul (anima), which is “free to incline to whichever direction it wishes.” Indeed, in language characteristic of Origen, Erasmus maintains that soul is “transformed” into one or the other, depending on whether it “hearkens to the harlot, that is, the flesh,” or despises the flesh “and is raised up to the spirit.” ^[34]

In his own day Origen (d. 223) had exalted man’s moral freedom in order to combat the heretical determinism of Gnostic Christians, for whom some individuals were created with an immutable “carnal” nature.^[35] For Erasmus Origen’s moral optimism seems to have provided a welcome bridge between the outlook of his beloved classical authors and the Christian doctrine of sin. The Enchiridion makes assertions about the perfectibility of human nature that have some basis in works by Origen cited in the Enchiridion. First, man’s immortal soul has “such a capacity for divinity that we can soar past the minds of the angels and become one with God. If the body had not been added to you, you would be a divinity [numen].” The body pursues temporal things and “sinks downward,” but the soul, “remembering its heavenly origin, strives upward [nititur] with all its might.” ^[36] Despite being weighed down by the body, the soul still has within itself the power to restore reason to its rightful place as “king” of the inner commonwealth: he who “wants to be a Christian” with all his heart and soul can hardly fail, for “the human mind has never made vehement demands on itself that it has not accomplished.” Putting one’s heart into something might seem to mean engaging one’s passions, but for Erasmus the power of the soul to command man’s lower nature is really the power of reason, or understanding, which must always be clearly distinguished from emotion of any kind. In discussing Origen’s tripartite division of man, Erasmus warns against being deceived by certain neutral or indifferent passions “that seem honorable in appearance and are disguised by the mask of virtue.” The man who enjoys “fasting, attending religious ceremonies, going to church regularly” has no reason to be pleased with himself “if he is merely gratifying his own inclinations.” Thus piety is not a matter of feeling; the key is to have imbibed “convictions worthy of Christ,” as a child or even as an adult. Plato’s Socrates had a glimpse of this truth when he defined virtue as “knowledge of what is to be sought after and what avoided.” Aristotle was wrong to criticize Socrates for not understanding the difference between knowing and loving the good, for in Plato’s Protagoras “Socrates proves that knowledge has so great an importance in all virtue that sins arise solely from false opinions.” Plato envisioned a hierarchy of the soul in which noble passions, like the desire for honor, were reason’s allies in the struggle against base emotions like greed and lust. But Erasmus here seems (like Origen) more inclined to the opinion of the Stoics, for whom “the perfect wise man should be free of such promptings as if they were diseases of the mind.” In any event he performs the neat trick of detaching Socrates from the philosophers of the Peripatetic school—Plato and Aristotle—and associating him rather with the Stoic view.^[37]

Yet the Enchiridion has its own hierarchy of emotions, one quite different from Plato’s. In Plato’s Republic the warrior-aristocrats of the commonwealth of the soul are animated by what he calls thumos, usually translated in Latin as spiritus, or spirit, in the sense that one might call a horse spirited. This noble passion involves a capacity to feel both anger and shame, and its role is to abet “king” reason in the conquest of shameful desire; it is akin to the “greatness of soul [magnitudo animi]” that for Aristotle is characteristic of the heroic temper, as illustrated by Homer’s account of the wrath of Achilles in the Iliad.^[38] But Erasmus had no special admiration for spiritus in this sense of the term.^[39] The Enchiridion alludes to Plato’s argument by recognizing that anger may be an “incitement” to bravery, but the connection is merely instrumental, since “envy” can be a spur to “industry” in precisely the same way. The common herd of men (vulgus) believes that greatness of soul means “seeth[ing] with anger at the slightest injury,” but Erasmus insists that true magnitudo animi means rather that one does not lose one’s equanimity “because of a simple word.” There are indeed aristocrats (optimates) of the inner commonwealth, but for Erasmus they are emotions like “filial respect for one’s parents, love for one’s brothers and sisters, kindness towards friends,” and “fear of disgrace.” Plato’s “part of the soul which partakes of courage and wrath” is mentioned not among the “aristocrats” but merely as “a passion that is rebellious and must be held in check, but is not entirely bestial.” ^[40]

Rather than connecting the sense of shame (“fear of disgrace”) with anger, as Plato does, Erasmus connects it with gentle and humane qualities. Thus in his reading of Socrates’ fable (in Phaedrus) of the charioteer driving two very different horses, symbolizing noble passion and base desire, the good horse is like those who are “born with such a moderate disposition and are so tractable that they can be instructed in the path of virtue without difficulty.” Similarly, just as “pernicious arrogance” always follows the diabolical wisdom of the world, “modesty and docility” are the attendants of the wisdom of Christ, and “the flesh, slavery, disquiet, and contention are inseparable companions, as are the spirit, peace, love, and liberty. The Apostle [Paul] drives this home over and over again.” ^[41] St. Paul is indeed Erasmus’s source for the contrast between charity and contentiousness. But the hierarchy of possible temperamental endowments which favors dispositions like modesty and docility comes neither from St. Paul nor Plato but from wellsprings of Erasmus’s personality which lie beyond the historian’s ken. One is reminded of the “modest and gentle disposition” for which he praised his dear pupil Thomas Grey or of the educational writings pointed at instruction in the familiar rather than the argumentative genus of discourse. It is also worth noting that the men whose character and integrity the Erasmus of these years most admired—John Colet and Jean Vitrier were known for intemperate zeal in defense of what they thought was right. Yet in the Enchiridion zeal for God (zelum Dei) denotes not the passionate ardor of the reformer but a mask for the jealousy and envy of self-righteous monks. Christ did come to bring a sword but, for Erasmus, only against that enslavement of reason to the passions which is falsely called peace.^[42] One thus finds in the Enchiridion a tension between two ethical imperatives: the subjugation of all emotion to the rule of the spirit, preached by Origen and the Stoics, and the inherent goodness of “humane” emotions, a point of view more distinctive to Erasmus.

Cutting across this tension is a deeper conflict between classical and Christian values, both of which were for Erasmus fused together in the vetus theologia he so admired in the Fathers. The harmonization of classical and Christian culture was at one level a matter of style, or rather of the connection between style and moral persuasion. As John O’Malley points out, Erasmus’s antagonism to the “recent theologians [neoterici]” springs from “dissatisfaction with the scholastic enterprise itself,” that is, its definition of theology “as primarily a ‘contemplative’ discipline,” which divorced it from piety and created a rupture in the “true and more ancient” theological tradition. If, as the Enchiridion says, “the ancient commentators” were able to provide “sustenance for the soul rather than mere titillation of the intellect,” it was because, schooled in eloquence, they knew how to move the hearts of listeners or readers. The Word of God does the soul no good, Erasmus repeats, if it does not pass “into the bowels of the emotions [viscera].” This accommodation of Scripture to the needs of the individual soul is best done through allegorical interpretation, but recent theologians either despise allegory or do it badly, for “mystical exegesis cannot fail to fall flat if it is not seasoned with the powers of eloquence and a certain gracefulness of style, in which the ancients achieved an excellence that we cannot even approach.” ^[43]

Here and in many of his later writings^[44] one can see Erasmus himself imitating the eloquence of the Fathers, working bits of Scripture into the flow of his language, and using allegory to accommodate the text to everyday life. But if the Enchiridion seems lacking in persuasive power, it is at times because Erasmus fails to recognize that classical and Christian ethics cannot always be harmonized. He knows that the root of evil is called “foolishness [stultitia]” by the Stoics and “malice” by Christians, but he treats the two as equivalent, as in his endorsement of the principle that knowledge is virtue. Elsewhere he tempers the Gospel parable about the lilies of the field with bourgeois sagacity. He who thinks only of making more money is not a Christian, for he “has no confidence in the promise of Christ”; yet Erasmus has “no great admiration for those who abandon their whole fortune all at once so they can shamelessly beg what belongs to another.” Though the Enchiridion often insists that merely doing what pagans would be ashamed not to do (like loving one’s family) is not good enough for Christians, the Seventh Rule offers a halfway house for those who may not want to follow Christ just yet: “If Christ is of little account to you, although you cost him dearly, refrain from base conduct at least for your own sake.” ^[45] Such tepid injunctions, if heeded, might have made life a bit easier for the long-suffering wife of Erasmus’s cannon-founder friend. But they seem out of place in the manual of piety the Enchiridion in its finished form was meant to be.

Conversely, Erasmus is at his best when pointing up the contrast between standards the Christian world has grown comfortable with and the demands of the Gospel. Is your soul not stirred, asks Erasmus, when you see your brother treated unjustly, “as long as your own fortunes are not endangered?” Your soul is dead, for (echoing the Holy Thursday hymn) “where God is, there is love.” Likewise, the priest who “celebrate[s] the sacrifice of the mass daily” but is “not affected by the misfortunes of [his] neighbors” has only a “carnal” understanding of the mass. But “if you are afflicted by the misfortunes of others as if they were your own, then you celebrate mass with great profit, since you do so spiritually.” This appreciation of the mass as a communal rite is by no means peculiar to Erasmus or the Enchiridion; one can find comparable sentiments in (for example) The Imitation of Christ.^[46] But for Erasmus the traditional understanding of the church as the mystical body of Christ means not just the solidarity of the faithful but a vision of what Christian society might be. Among “pagans good will or ill will is influenced to some degree by what orators call circumstances,” that is, affinities of kinship or place of birth. But Christians “are all members one of the other” and hence

it does not savor of Christianity that a general animosity should exist between courtier and townsman, countryman and city-dweller, patrician and plebeian, magistrate and private citizen, rich man and poor man, a man of renown and one of no notoriety, the powerful and the weak, the Italian and the German, the Frenchman and the Englishman, the Englishman and the Scot, the grammarian and the theologian, the logician and the rhetorician, the doctor and the lawyer, the learned man and the illiterate, the eloquent and the inarticulate, the bachelor and the husband, the young man and the old man, the cleric and the layman, the priest and the monk, the Franciscan and the Colletine, the Carmelite and the Dominican.

These lines from the Enchiridion are not a bad capsule description of Catholic Europe in 1500, suggesting larger conflicts among national monarchies as well as incessant local rivalries framed by the tightly knit corporative structure of society, as was nowhere more evident than in Erasmus’s native Low Countries. Broadly speaking, the church had modeled corporative organization, through its religious orders, and had sanctioned the community-forming impulse by providing parish churches for rural villages and patron saints for urban guilds. This traditional order, deeply embedded in custom and in its history deeply Catholic, Erasmus now questioned. The passage just cited continues with Erasmus insisting that the Body of Christ did not permit of such divisions: “These are all one: God, Christ, the body and the members. The common sayings ‘Like is attracted to like’ and ‘Dissimilarity is the mother of hatred’ have no rightful place among Christians.” ^[47] His countrymen were accustomed to using the term “members” or corporate bodies that had a vote in larger entities.^[48] But Erasmus envisioned individual believers, without intermediation, as members of the body of Christ. Now firmly anchored in the theological tradition, it was the “republic” of like-minded souls of which he had spoken in Antibarbari.

Sending John Colet a copy of the Enchiridion nearly two years after its publication, Erasmus said he had written the book “solely to remedy the error of the common herd who make religion consist of almost more than Jewish ceremonies and observances of physical things, to the great neglect of those things that pertain to piety.” ^[49] The critique of a superstitious attachment to monastic “ceremonies” is one of the book’s principal themes. If “monastic piety is everywhere so cold, languid, and almost extinct,” it is because monks do not understand that “meditation on a single verse will have more savor and nourishment…than the whole Psalter chanted monotonously.” Perhaps thinking of such practices as laymen reciting from books of hours in the vernacular or the monastic hours (getijden) sung in town churches of his native provinces, Erasmus knew “from experience” that this error has also “taken hold of the minds of the common people.” ^[50] That common folk have a superstitious devotion to ritual is bad enough, but worse is the fact that the same error grips many priests and theologians and “practically all the flocks of those [greges eorum] who in name and dress [cultu] profess the spiritual life.” Erasmus deemed it shameful to contemplate “with what superstition so many of them observe silly little ceremonies” or “with what spite they exact these same ceremonies of others.” ^[51] At this point Erasmus breaks into a long apostrophe to self-righteous monks: “Is this the result of so many years of toil, that you are the worst element of mankind and think you are the best?” Instead of charity and the fruits of the spirit described by St. Paul, “I still detect in you the works of the flesh: jealousy worse than you would find in a woman, a military proneness to anger and violence, an insatiable passion for quarrelling.” These words were aimed not at openly immoral monks, detested even by the world, but at “those whom the common people admire not as men but as angels.” In fact even among the strictest orders there are “very few who do not walk in the flesh. And from this derives this great weakness of souls, which tremble with fear where there is nothing to be afraid of.” ^[52]

Erasmus’s polemic was thus aimed at freeing layfolk from what he saw as the incubus of imitating monastic piety. He concludes the Enchiridion with the hope that his pious reader will not fall into the hands of those who “attempt to thrust you into a monastic order by means of the most impudent urging and threats and cajoleries, as if Christianity did not exist outside the cowl.” Such men teach one “how to tremble, not how to love. Being a monk is not the state of holiness, but a manner of life, which may be beneficial or not according to each person’s physical or mental constitution.” ^[53] This broad attack on monastic ceremonies is congruent with Erasmus’s adoption of Origen’s tripartite division of human nature, for, as noted above, taking pleasure in such things as “fasting, attending religious ceremonies, going to church regularly” belongs to the neutral realm of anima, not to the realm of spiritus. Yet the Enchiridion was also the work of a disenchanted Augustinian canon: “If Augustine, whom most of them vaunt as the founder of their way of life, were now to come back to life, he would not recognize this breed of men.” One may infer at times—as in the references to the superstitious fear of monks or their habit of gaining recruits by “threats and cajoleries”—a personal recollection that doubtless added spice to Erasmus’s principled critique of ritualism. Little wonder that in his preface to the 1518 edition Erasmus is aware that “certain people interpret the principles of this small book…as turning men’s minds away from the monastic life.” ^[54]

As historian Cornelis Augustijn says, the implicit leveling effect of the critique of monasticism in the Enchiridion helps account for the many contemporary editions and translations of a rambling and diffuse book whose appeal is not always apparent to modern readers familiar with the rich literature of Christian spirituality. Monks led a different kind of life than layfolk but were not by that fact better Christians: “Did you think it was only to monks that private possessions were forbidden and poverty imposed? You were wrong. Both rules were meant for all Christians,” for Christ will “punish you if you withhold what is yours from your brother in need.” At the same time, as Augustijn remarks further, the Enchiridion was addressed to a spiritual elite, lay as well as clerical—those who were sufficiently independent-minded to see the merits of what Erasmus said about conventional piety and sufficiently learned to profit from his counsels about reading Scripture as the Fathers did. Thus he urged his reader: “Forcefully separate yourself from the common crowd” but without “reviv[ing] the practices of the [ancient] Cynics by snarling indiscriminately at the beliefs of others.” In the same vein he expected “those who have achieved [spiritual] manhood” not to scorn “the external ceremonies of Christians and the devotions of the simple-minded,” since such things “are almost a necessity for infants in Christ.” But “magical formulas” must not be allowed to entrap those who know better: “As for you, who are endowed with such good mental abilities, I should wish you not to linger over the sterile literal sense, but to hasten on to more profound mysteries.” ^[55] In sum, Erasmus was writing for cultivated souls who could understand themselves both as citizens of the republic of letters and as individual members of the Body of Christ.

Notes

4. Between Wisdom and Folly

Following the death of his friend Jacob Batt in July of 1502 Erasmus was again in need of patronage to continue his studies. Jean Desmarez, from a town near Saint-Omer, offered him hospitality at the college over which he presided at Leuven, but for real financial support Erasmus hoped to make connections with the entourage of Archduke Philip the Handsome (d. 1506), son of the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I and father of Charles V. In Orléans Erasmus had made friends with Jérome de Busleiden, whose brother François was archbishop of Besançon and Philip’s former tutor and a member of his council. Erasmus regretted not cashing in on this opportunity before Jérome went to Italy and François died in Spain (August 1502) while accompanying Philip on a visit to his in-laws, Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile.^[1] Erasmus got another chance in the fall of 1503, when Desmarez and Jérome de Busleiden (now returned from Italy) introduced him to Nicholas de Ruistre, bishop of Arras and a member of the council. The bishop commissioned Erasmus to prepare a Latin oration to welcome the archduke on his impending return from Spain by way of Innsbruck, where he was to visit his father. By accepting this commission, Erasmus was in effect changing sides in an ongoing battle between two court factions. One, including Hendrik van Bergen (d. September 1502), the bishop of Cambrai, and his family, loyally backed Emperor Maximilian in his bellicose policy toward France, but the other, led by the late Jérome de Busleiden, had managed to guide the young archduke to a reconciliation with France. Erasmus was not so naive as to think he could be a client of both the Bergens and the Busleidens. But the Bergen family had not been very generous of late, and Erasmus was in any case not very sympathetic to the arguments made by partisans of imperial authority, as may be seen from the lukewarm preface he agreed to supply (April 1503) for the treatise On the Excellence of Imperial Power by Jacob Anthoniszoon, who had been Bishop Hendrik van Bergen’s vicar-general. Erasmus’s Panegyricus for Archduke Philip, delivered at the ducal court in Brussels on the feast of the Epiphany, 1504, and published soon thereafter, mixes flattery of Philip with clear signs of his patrons’ perspective: the late François de Busleiden is eulogized and Philip is warmly praised for making peace with France and reminded that after satisfying his obligations to God, a prince’s duty is owed first to patria (the Low Countries), not to pater (Maximilian).^[2]

For his pains the archduke granted Erasmus “a very generous reward”—fifty Holland pounds, plus another ten pounds some months later, “to aid and maintain me,” as Erasmus acknowledged in the receipt he signed “at the colleges of Leuven, where I am presently studying.” ^[3] Erasmus may have had qualms about this way of earning his bread. His preface to Desmarez defends the panegyric as a genus of oratory in which the speaker is able to slip in some good advice along with the flattery a ruler expects, and when he sent Colet some of his works he deflected anticipated criticism of the Panegyricus by flattering himself, claiming, “I was completely frank while I flattered” Philip. Erasmus was now angling for patronage in England and by the summer of 1505 he was staying with Baron Mountjoy in London.^[4] Meanwhile, in the rich library of the Premonstratensian abbey of Park, just south of Leuven, Erasmus came upon Lorenzo Valla’s Adnotationes, offering corrections of the Vulgate (Latin) New Testament from Greek manuscripts, which Erasmus subsequently published in Paris (March 1505). Such was the modest beginning of the interest in New Testament philology that was to become Erasmus’s life work and his principal claim to an honored place in the history of scholarship. Thus if he came to Leuven in search of funding, the treasure he found there was Valla’s manuscript.

During the space of nearly a year in England Erasmus polished his knowledge of Greek. He and Thomas More both worked on translations of Lucian’s satirical dialogues. More, who had played a trick on Erasmus the first time they met, could appreciate the wit of this pagan whose satires on religion were useful for exposing “the impostures of certain persons who even today cheat the populace, either by conjuring up miracles, or with a pretence of holiness.” ^[5] Erasmus also found, at last, a means of traveling to Italy, as director of studies for the sons of the English king’s physician, Giovanni Boerio.^[6]

The mercurial figure of Pope Julius II (1503–1513) dominated Italian politics in the early sixteenth century. Julius first went to war to subjugate refractory towns within the Papal States (including Bologna), then adhered (April 1509) to the anti-Venetian League of Cambrai in order to reconquer the formerly papal territory of Romagna, and finally sought to expel from the peninsula the French “barbarians” who had been his allies against Venice (Holy League, 1512). Little wonder that the deeds of this warrior pontiff also determined Erasmus’s movements during his sojourn (1506–1509) in the land where humanist scholarship was born. Italy for Erasmus had always meant Bologna and its university, but he and his party were barely established there when (as he later recalled) he heard the very walls of the city shaken by the thunder of papal artillery. While Julius in his battle armor personally directed the siege, Erasmus and his charges took refuge in Florence,^[7] but they were back in Bologna in time to witness the pope’s triumphal entry on 15 November 1506. This episode burned itself into Erasmus’s memory (see chapter 5 below) as an example of consummate hypocrisy—the Vicar of Christ making war on Christians. There are at least a few hints of this critical reaction in Erasmus at the time. In a letter to Jérome de Busleiden, published with some of his translations from Lucian, he described the triumphant pope as “playing Julius [Caesar] to the life”; since Erasmus’s Panegyricus had described Caesar as one who slaughtered men by the thousands for his own glory, this was not a compliment. Paolo Bombace, the professor of Greek and rhetoric at Bologna who became Erasmus’s friend for life, was an ardent partisan of the Bentivoglio, the ruling family ousted by Pope Julius, and cannot have encouraged in Erasmus kindly thoughts about the city’s new sovereign.^[8]

In November 1507, as he was about to leave Bologna for a visit to Rome, Erasmus sent copies of what historian Erika Rummel has called his “virtuoso” translations of two of Euripides’ tragedies to the famous Venetian printer, Aldo Manuzio, hoping that Aldo’s careful work and his “elegant” Greek type would yield a better result than the error-filled volume produced by his Paris printer, Josse Bade.^[9] Aldo’s enthusiastic response led Erasmus to change plans and spend the better part of a year in Venice, where he lodged in the house of Aldo’s business partner, sharing a room and (as was the custom) a bed with the Hebrew and Greek scholar Girolamo Aleandro. Profiting from the advice of Aleandro and other members of the so-called Aldine Academy, Erasmus now guided through the press the fruit of all his reading of the classics over the last eight years. The modest Adagia of 1500, with its 838 entries, had now burgeoned into a fat book entitled Thousands of Adages (Adagiorum Chiliades), with 3,260 entries. This is the book for which Erasmus first achieved real fame.^[10]

Erasmus then moved on to the university town of Padua, in Venetian territory, where he gave lessons to Alexander Stewart, the natural son of King James IV of Scotland who at the age of fifteen was already archbishop of St. Andrews. But as it was likely that Venice would be assaulted by the forces of the League of Cambrai, Erasmus and his pupil settled in Siena, whence he made at least two extended visits to Rome. Among the dignitaries who made him welcome there were the cardinals Giovanni de’ Medici, the future pope Leo X, and Raffaele Riario, Julius II’s nephew, who introduced Erasmus to the noted orator Tommaso Inghirami.^[11] Riario also invited him, “in Julius’s name,” to compose a hortatory memorandum urging the pope not to join in the war against Venice and another urging him to do so: “The latter oration won the day, although I worked harder on the former, which was more after my own heart.” Erasmus thought a summary of the main arguments for this losing speech was still “hiding somewhere among my papers,” and in fact lists of reasons why the pope should not make war on Venice are included among sample arguments in two of his writings.^[12] Yet it bears noting that the same Pope Julius whose wars Erasmus opposed had granted him in January 1506 a dispensation to hold ecclesiastical benefices (he was apparently hoping for preferment in England) despite the canonical obstacle posed by his illegitimate birth. Moreover, in Bologna he had abandoned the habit of an Augustinian canon—mistaken here for the clothing worn by those who tended plague victims—for the less distinctive garb of a secular priest. Fearing the sanction of his order, Erasmus apparently obtained a further papal dispensation approving his decision. Thus whatever his feelings about Julius may have been, Erasmus’s behavior in Rome was scrupulously correct. He refrained from accepting an invitation from Domenico Grimani, the Venetian cardinal, until just after it became known that Venice had surrendered to the pope and his allies.^[13]

There are precious few extant letters from Erasmus’s stay in Italy, and none at all from the nearly two years he spent (ca. August 1509–April 1511) at Thomas More’s house in Bucklersbury, along with the Italian humanist Andrea Ammonio, who was then Mountjoy’s secretary. Letters are extant again from September 1511 when Erasmus established himself at Queen’s College in Cambridge and he and Ammonio in their frequent exchanges guardedly traded learned banter about the serious matter of papal hypocrisy. It may be, as historian J. K. Sowards suggests, that earlier letters were suppressed because Erasmus was too free in speaking his mind about Julius II.^[14] In any event we must gauge the impact of Erasmus’s experience in Italy from three major works produced in Italy or shortly after his return to England: the 1508 Adagia, the De Pueris Statim ac Liberaliter Instituendis (On the Education of Children), which Erasmus says he wrote in Italy though it was not published until 1529,^[15] and Moriae Encomium (The Praise of Folly), published in Paris in June 1511.

The Aldine Adagia is a monument of scholarship, but its learned explanations of ancient proverbs are not yet (as they will be in the 1515 Basel edition) vehicles for Erasmus to convey his assessment of the evils afflicting contemporary Christian society. The longer essays of this edition do allow him to exercise his talent for ranging freely over a variety of topics loosely connected to a main theme. “Make Haste Slowly,” for example, manages to touch on good Roman emperors, the noble pedigree of Aldo Manuzio’s dolphin-and-anchor emblem, and Egyptian hieroglyphics.^[16] The very last adage in 1508, and in all subsequent editions, was “Auris Batava” (“the Dutch Ear”). Erasmus had once used this phrase from the Latin epigrammist Martial to explain why his poetry was not well received, that is, because he wrote for boorish or “Batavian” ears. Now he wishes that “all Christians had ‘Dutch ears,’ so they would not take in the pestilential jests” of Martial. “If you call that rusticity, we freely admit the impeachment, along with the virtuous Spartans.” He goes on to praise Hollanders (Batavians) for being exceptionally “open to humanity and kindness” and for their “straightforward nature, without treachery or deceit”; if contemporary Batavia has few classicists, “in no country are there more people who have a tincture of learning than in Holland.” It has recently been suggested that Erasmus was here incorporating ideas from a treatise by his old friend Cornelis Gerard, identifying modern Holland with what the Romans called the island (between rivers) of the Batavians.^[17]

We may also see in these lines a healthy reaction to the Italian penchant for treating other Europeans as “barbarians.” In Venice the Florentine Bernardo Rucellai insisted on speaking to Erasmus only in a vernacular he did not understand, even though from Rucellai’s Latin histories “you would think him another Sallust.” ^[18] Erasmus apparently had a northerner’s reaction to the pagan veneer of Italian literary culture; at a banquet in Rome he was called on to refute Pliny’s argument against the immortality of the soul, and he remembered the Latin poems of Michael Marullus (d. 1500) as “sounding just like a pagan.” ^[19] The 1508 adage “Labors of Hercules,” which Erasmus applies to his own Adagia, seems pointed against those who expected in such a work “flowers of rhetoric” for which he had no time. A reasonable man might consider clear explanations of these difficult matters eloquence enough, but there are certain “apes of eloquence,” or partisans of what they call “Roman eloquence,” who are pleased only by “flowers of speech” interwoven from Cicero and Sallust. This text is reminiscent of a much later work, the Ciceronianus of 1528, in which Erasmus recalls a Good Friday sermon at the papal court which friends promised him would show “how the language of Rome sounds in the mouth of a Roman.” The unnamed preacher employed the standard tactic of humanist rhetoric (used, for example, by Erasmus in the Enchiridion), arguing that just as the ancient Romans felt deeply about those heroes who sacrificed themselves for the republic, so Christians must a fortiori mourn the sufferings of Christ and rejoice in his triumphs. Yet Erasmus saw no one “in all that assembly showing the slightest sign of sorrow when he deployed his every oratorical gift in a harrowing description of the unjust sufferings of the entirely innocent Christ.” ^[20] Taken together, these passages suggest that Erasmus’s experience in Italy led him to reconsider not merely the “Batavian” roots he at times affected to despise but also the much vaunted elegance of Italianate Latinity.

De Duplici Copia, one of the as yet unedited educational writings Erasmus brought with him to Italy, shows how a theme can be treated “copiously” as well as briefly. The Declamatio de Pueris Statim ac Liberaliter Instituendis was the “theme” he chose for illustrating his own precepts. As historian Jean-Claude Margolin points out in his fine introduction to the text, the two classical authors whose influence is especially noticeable in De Pueris are Quintilian and Plutarch. The former’s Institutes of Oratory was the starting point for the discussion in De Copia, and Erasmus mentions that in Venice he had access to a Greek manuscript from which the first complete edition of Plutarch’s Lives and Moralia was being prepared by the Aldine press.^[21]De Pueris differs from similar works by Italian humanists of the Quattrocento in its insistence that, as the title suggests (statim, at once), boys should be introduced to the rudiments of classical learning as early as age three or four. According to Erasmus, character can easily be trained at a tender age but only with difficulty as boys grow older: “Nothing will the child learn more readily than goodness, nothing will it learn to reject more than stupidity, if only parents have worked to fill the natural void from the start.” One often hears that children are naturally prone to evil, “but these accusations against nature are unfair. The evil is largely due to ourselves,” for it is we who corrupt young minds before teaching them what is right. To be sure, even in the earliest years “it is always easier to forget good habits than to unlearn bad ones.” This truth caused pagan philosophers “great perplexity,” because they did not know that “since Adam, the first man of the human race, a disposition to evil has been deeply implanted in us.” Yet Adam’s sin is not the prime culprit: “The greater portion of this evil stems from corrupting relationships and a misguided education, especially as they affect our early and most impressionable years.” “While nature is strong, education is more powerful still.” ^[22] Thus in De Pueris, as in the Enchiridion, the problem is not the malice of a will corrupted by sin but (as Plato said) ignorance of the good on the part of those who have a natural disposition to virtue. The path to upright living is through the inculcation of right opinions, either in childhood, as Erasmus recommends here, or, with more difficulty, in adulthood. Plutarch and Origen make the same strenuous demand, albeit in different ways, for the conquest of passion by reason or spirit and express the same Stoic^[23] optimism about the moral powers of a mind armed with true doctrine. In this respect, then, the added knowledge of the classics Erasmus was able to gain in Italy merely strengthened a basic tendency of his thought.

Moriae Encomium is a work of extraordinary complexity.^[24] The goddess Folly (Moria) speaks here in praise of herself. Erasmus says he wrote the book at More’s house in the space of seven days while waiting for his books to arrive from Italy. Moriae Encomium is a pun on More’s name and was dedicated to More since, as Erasmus said, “you take immense pleasure in frolics of this sort.” Nothing is said of how the text may have changed between the time he “showed a specimen of what I had begun to several good friends” and its publication in 1511.^[25] The knottiest problem for interpreters is that Folly seems to assume three distinct personae in the course of her oration. For about half the book she praises herself as the benefactress of mankind, for it is only in their delusions that human beings find happiness. She then assumes the mantle of a satirist, mocking the self-serving pretensions of “important personages”—all those who think themselves wise, powerful, or holy. Finally and more briefly, she plays the theologian, citing chapter and verse to prove that the highest happiness to which Christians can aspire is that “folly” which is a foretaste of heaven.^[26] Whether Folly’s changes of role are marked also by shifts in tone is less clear. The text is most commonly read in a version that includes major additions, especially from the editions at Strasbourg (November 1514) and Basel (1516). The most striking of these, in the 1514 editions, pillory the impudence of scholastic theological speculation, the superstitious pedantry of mendicant sermons, and the self-righteousness of monks. In the cautious phrase of neo-Latin scholar Clarence Miller, Erasmus in these passages “seems perhaps more serious and straightforward than his persona allows.” ^[27] Literature scholar Michael Screech has argued that the 1511 text, stripped of these later accretions, acquires a unity of plan in which the irony of parts one and two, showing the folly of human wisdom, allows Erasmus to speak for himself in part three, thus vindicating his claim (1515) that “ Folly is concerned in a playful spirit with the same subject as the Enchiridion. ” But others, including Miller, find the irony sustained also in part three, suggesting that Erasmus and Folly are not wholly of the same mind. Moreover, even in the 1511 edition there are some sections of part 2 (see below) in which Folly’s mood of amused detachment seems to give way to indignation.^[28]

Whether its various parts are successfully integrated or not, the 1511 Moria clearly shows the influence of Erasmus’s stay in Italy. If modern college students find The Praise of Folly almost impossible to read with pleasure, it is because of the corruscation of allusions flowing as if unbidden from the pen of one who, with access to Italian libraries, had now mastered the known corpus of Greek and Latin literature.^[29] Folly’s mask also permitted Erasmus a hitherto unwonted freedom of expression concerning Pope Julius II. Part 2 of Moria builds to a climax in the section dealing with popes. This passage initially sustains the underlying tone of irony—how miserable the popes would be if they imitated the poverty and the cross of Christ—but gives way to something more like anger as Erasmus broaches the subject of Julius’s wars against Bologna and Venice. For the popes of Erasmus’s day, to be conquered would be “disgraceful and quite unsuitable for one who hardly allows the greatest kings to kiss his blessed foot.” ^[30] The “horrific lightning bolt” of excommunication the popes employ “with a mere nod” ^[31] and “hurl at no one more fiercely than those who, at the instigation of the devil, seek to diminish and gnaw away the patrimony of Peter.” ^[32] Although war is so inhuman that it befits beasts rather than men and so impious that it is “utterly foreign to Christ,” the popes

neglect everything else and do nothing but wage war. Here you can see rickety old men demonstrate the hardiness of a youthful spirit, not upset by any expense, not wearied by any labors, not the least bit disturbed by the thought of reducing all human affairs, laws, religion, peace, to utter chaos.

Julius’s name is not mentioned, but many of Erasmus’s readers would have known the story of how the sixty-three-year-old pontiff led his army through the mountains in a November snow to besiege Bologna. There is more than a hint here of the biting sarcasm to come after the pope’s death in Julius Excluded from Heaven (1514).^[33]

More interesting in terms of Erasmus’s intellectual development is Moria’s distinct animus against the moral doctrines of the Stoics. The foibles of all mortals are fair game for Folly in part 1, but the Stoic wise man is nonetheless the butt of the joke. Though “the Stoics rank themselves only a little lower than the gods,” even a Stoic must play the fool “if he ever wants to be a father.” According to the Stoics, wisdom means being led by reason alone, while folly (stultitia)^[34] means “being swept along at the whim of emotion.” But Jupiter, “to keep human life from being dreary and gloomy,” established a proper proportion between the two, that is, “a pound of feeling to an ounce of thought.” Indeed, left to themselves “these gods of wisdom” cannot even strike up an ordinary friendship, and no one wants to see them socially: “Bring a wiseman to a party: he will disrupt it either by his gloomy silence or his tedious cavils.” When Seneca, “that died-in-the-wool wiseman,” removes “all emotion whatever” from his wise man, “he is left with something that cannot even be called human.” If there truly were such a man, “Who would not flee in horror from [him], as he would from a monster or a ghost?” ^[35] With the ground prepared in this fashion, Folly-as-theologian is able to show how Christ “despises and condemns those savants who rely on their own wisdom.” Rather, Christ himself “became somehow foolish in order to relieve the folly of mortals,” just as he became sin in order to heal sin. “Nor did he choose any other way to heal them but through the folly of the Cross, through ignorant and doltish apostles.” ^[36]

Literature scholar Wayne Rebhorn has noted the sharp contrast between these passages and parts of the Enchiridion where Erasmus expounds a near-Stoic doctrine of man’s perfectibility. The difference in this sense between Moriae Encomium and De Pueris is even more striking, given that the latter was written while Erasmus was in Italy and the former shortly after his return to England. Diversity of genre mitigates the contrast, since De Pueris was a straightforward declamation and Moria a “paradoxical encomium.” Moreover, had Erasmus himself been conscious of attempting something radically different from the Enchiridion in his Moria, he would hardly have introduced, toward the end, a passage about the spiritual meaning of the Eucharist which could have been lifted from the Enchiridion.^[37] But it will not do to overlook the conflict between Erasmus the neo-Stoic and Erasmus the critic of Stoic righteousness. The former does not disappear after 1511, but the latter’s appearance for the first time in Moriae Encomium marks a shift in Erasmus’s thought which has enduring consequences. The philosophia Christi that he begins to expound in his works about 1515 conveys a different vision of life than the Christian neo-Stoicism of the Enchiridion. It may be fruitful to make a comparison between the way he now questioned the moral wisdom of the ancients—the Stoics, in particular—and the way that some adages of the 1508 Adagia (as noted above) question the excessive devotion of learned Italians to classical forms. In both cases, it seems, Italy taught Erasmus the need to fashion a more subtle understanding of bonae literae. As Christians appropriated the pagan culture of the past as a counterweight to “barbarism” in their own ranks, it was not enough merely to follow in the footsteps of those “ancient theologians,” the Church Fathers. Rather, learned men of Erasmus’s day—citizens of the republic of letters and members of the Body of Christ—must sort out for themselves what did or did not comport with the Gospel.

Antibarbarorum Liber looks backward as well as forward. The notion of a res publica literaria in the service of Christ is but the projection onto a broader canvas of that ideal community of learning and Christian love that Erasmus had earlier striven to delineate and make compelling in letters to his circle of disciples at Steyn and in the De Contemptu Mundi. The Enchiridion gives this same basic idea yet another formulation in its discussion of the Body of Christ. This vision of a free society of cultivated individuals owes much to the Italian humanists (especially Valla), whose writings had been a breath of life to a precocious youth stifled by the turgid Latinity of the cloister. But my argument in Part I owes something too to Erasmus’s reaction against the familiar corporate solidarities of his native provinces, particularly as represented by the Brethren and by the Augustinian Canons Regular. Anthony Black, a historian of political thought, has identified the relation between “guild” and “civil society” as a defining polarity in European political thought, from the rise of towns in the twelfth century down to the nineteenth century. Together, the two sets of values—“mutual aid and craft honor” on one hand and “legal equality” on the other—formed “the moral infrastructure of our civilization.” At first, “the corporate organization of labor” and “liberal values” were balanced and harmonized; only later were the two seen as being in conflict.^[38] Students of religious history have suggested in similar terms that the community values of the medieval parish and the individual piety nurtured in the Reformation and Counter-Reformation form a defining polarity in the history of Christian thought.^[39] In this broad framework we may discern a deeper significance in the spiritual journey of the author of Antibarbari. Erasmus was striving not merely to envision an ideal community of Christian men of letters but also to condemn what he saw as the entrapment of the spirit within contemporary religious communities bound by inherited rules. Perhaps Erasmus’s true historical importance lies in his role as an uncompromising advocate for one of the two sides in a great dialogue that helped shape European civilization. If he was too much the Netherlander to be in fact the “citizen of the world” that he sometimes thought himself to be,^[40] his heart and his greatest effectiveness lay in propagating the idea of a Christian civility.

Notes