CHAPTER XI.

FAMILIAR COLLOQUIES--NEW TESTAMENT PARAPHRASES-- CONTROVERSIAL AND DIDACTIC WRITINGS--REMOVAL TO FREIBURG--LAST REFORMATORY TREATISES--RETURN TO BASEL--DEATH. 1523-1536 420

INDEX 465

ILLUSTRATIONS

PAGE

ERASMUS _Frontispiece_ From the portrait by Holbein in the Louvre.

STATUE OF ERASMUS AT ROTTERDAM 2

HOUSE AT ROTTERDAM IN WHICH ERASMUS WAS BORN 4 From Knight's "Life of Erasmus."

PARISH CHURCH AT ALDINGTON, KENT 20 From Knight's "Life of Erasmus."

HOLBEIN'S STUDIES FOR THE HANDS OF ERASMUS 48

THOMAS MORE 64 From the drawing by Holbein in Windsor Castle.

JOHN COLET 70 From the drawing by Holbein in Windsor Castle.

HENRY VIII. AND HENRY VII. 77 Fragment of a cartoon by Holbein in possession of the Duke of Devonshire.

FRONTISPIECE AND TITLE-PAGE FROM "L'ÉLOGE DE LA FOLIE," PUBLISHED AT LEYDEN IN 1715 124

ALDUS P. MANUTIUS 134 From an old print.

CARDINAL REGINALD POLE 146 From "Erasmi Opera," published at Leyden, 1703.

CARDINAL PETER BEMBO 154 From "Erasmi Opera," published at Leyden, 1703.

ERASMUS.--"FOLLY" AS PROFESSOR. 158 Holbein's illustrations to the "Praise of Folly"

A THEOLOGIAN.--A COUNCIL OF THEOLOGIANS. 162 Holbein's illustrations to the "Praise of Folly"

EVERYONE HAS HIS HOBBY.--PILGRIM FOLLY.--"FOLLY" CONCLUDES HER LECTURE. 166 Holbein's illustrations to the "Praise of Folly"

TITLE-PAGE OF THE NEW TESTAMENT, 1519 180

WILLIAM WARHAM, ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY 184 From a painting by Holbein in the Louvre.

QUEEN'S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE 190 From Knight's "Life of Erasmus."

JOHN FISHER, BISHOP OF ROCHESTER 195 From the drawing by Holbein in Windsor Castle.

CARDINAL XIMENES 200 From a portrait by C. E. Wagstaff, in the Florence Gallery.

DEVICE OF THE HOUSE OF FROBEN 205

DEVICE OF FROBEN 207

PORTRAIT OF FROBEN BY HOLBEIN. EPITAPH BY ERASMUS--FACSIMILE OF HANDWRITING 232 From Knight's "Life of Erasmus."

BONIFACE AMERBACH OF BASEL 236 From "Erasmi Opera," published at Leyden, 1703.

CHARLES V. 262 From an engraving by Bartel Beham, 1531.

PHILIP MELANCHTHON 280 From the drawing by Holbein in Windsor Castle.

FRONTISPIECE (ERASMUS SEATED) TO "ERASMI OPERA," PUBLISHED AT LEYDEN, 1703 296

ERASMUS WITH "TERMINUS" 315 From a woodcut by Holbein in the Basel Museum.

ERASMUS 334 From a copper engraving by Albert Dürer.

FACSIMILE OF LETTER OF ERASMUS TO JOHANNES LANGE 342

ULRICH VON HUTTEN 364 From a contemporary woodcut.

BILIBALD PIRKHEIMER OF NUREMBERG 415 From an engraving by Albrecht Dürer, in "Erasmi Opera," published at Leyden, 1703.

TITLE-PAGE TO THE "COLLOQUIES OF ERASMUS," PUBLISHED AT AMSTERDAM, 1693 424 Portrait of Erasmus and others.

TITLE-PAGE TO THE FIRST ENGLISH EDITION OF THE "APOPHTHEGMS OF ERASMUS," TRANSLATED BY UDALL, 1542 450

INSCRIPTION ON THE TOMB OF ERASMUS, AT BASEL 460 From Knight's "Life of Erasmus."

INTRODUCTION

The student of Erasmus is at first overwhelmed by the abundance of the material before him. A man who has left to posterity enough to fill eleven folio volumes would seem to have made a biographer unnecessary. Especially when two of these volumes are filled with personal letters, more than eighteen hundred in number, and addressed to some five hundred correspondents, it might well seem that the best biography would be a faithful transcript of what the man himself has given us. And, in fact, almost all that we know about Erasmus comes through himself. The singular thing is that with this great mass of material we know so little that is definite about him.

He lived in one of the most eventful periods of the world's history, and was in some kind of personal relation with its leading actors; and yet his life, from beginning to end, has not one event more important or stirring than a journey in winter, an attack of illness, a quarrel with some fellow scholar, or a change of residence. Our whole knowledge of his early life up to the period of production is derived from a very brief record made by himself many years afterward and made obviously with both a literary and a practical purpose.

His letters were largely collected and published by himself long after they were written, and were, so he himself tells us, freely altered for publication. Their chronology is hopelessly confused. Erasmus says that he supplied many of them with the day and year when he came to edit them. He was himself at all times curiously indifferent to the merely historical. It was always subordinate in his mind to the broadly human and philosophical. The letters must therefore be read with constant reference to their immediate purpose, and few of them are without purpose, though it would require a bold man indeed to be always sure just what it is. Luther's judgment upon them was unjustly severe: "In the epistles of Erasmus you find nothing of any account, except praise for his friends, scolding and abuse for his enemies, and that's all there is to it." The principles which governed Erasmus as editor of his own correspondence are indicated in a letter[1] of 1520 to Beatus Rhenanus.

[1] iii.¹, 552.

He represents himself as driven to edit them in order to check the publication of unauthorised editions, of which several had certainly appeared before 1519. He determined to make at least a selection and judiciously to modify the contents. "With this purpose I revised the collection. Some things I explained, which certain persons had interpreted unfavourably. Some, which I found had offended the oversensitive and irritable tempers of certain persons, I struck out. Some things I softened." But, after all, he says, as time went on, he repented him of his plan and urged Froben, to whom he had sent the "copy," to suppress it entirely or put it off to a more fitting time. But the work was so far along that Froben declared he would not throw away all that expense, and Erasmus just had to humour him. "I had to give way to him and incur myself perhaps the risk of my reputation in order to save him the risk of his money."[2]

[2] See also the long treatise, _de conscribendis epistolis_, i., 341-483.

Erasmus shared with most scholars of the Renaissance the _cacoethes scribendi_. He says of himself that his words were rather poured out than written. When he took his pen in hand it became an independent force, against which he had to contend lest it run away with him altogether, and it is one of his claims to greatness as a writer that on the whole he kept the mastery over it. This essentially literary quality must be constantly borne in mind by the historian and he must always be striving to fix the line where history ends and literature begins.

Again,--and here also Erasmus was eminently a Renaissance man,--he felt himself to be the centre of the world. In a sense that is, of course, true of every thinking man; but in Erasmus this newly awakened individual consciousness took on a form of acute personal sensitiveness which affected his relation to all persons and all things about him. Especially it reacted upon his writing. He could not be objective upon any question into which his personality entered ever so slightly. Whatever touched him as a man, as a scholar, a theologian, a churchman, or a citizen, began at once to lose its true perspective. He saw it only in its relation to himself, or at best to the cause of pure learning, which he always felt to be embodied in himself.

No writer upon Erasmus has failed to notice these qualities. The singular thing has been that, recognising them, the biographers have not tried in any consistent fashion to measure them as affecting the value of our sources of knowledge. It has generally sufficed to refer to them and then to treat the sources as pure historical information. Plainly the solution is not an easy one. If we should reject, for example, the letter to Grunnius[3] or the Colloquy on The Eating of Fish[4] as sources for Erasmus' early life, we should have very little left. If we should accept them as history we should be mingling fact and fancy in altogether uncertain proportions. The only safe method is, therefore, to try in each case to weigh the value of the text before us with fullest reference to all the circumstances.

[3] iii.¹, 1821.

[4] i., 787-810.

This rule applies as well to the treatises as to the letters, whenever the personal element enters into the account. Where no such issue can be raised, as, for example, in the purely philological essays or in the treatises against war, or in abstract moral or didactic writing, we are often forced to admire the vigour and decision of Erasmus' utterance. But if his personal judgment was assailed, as it frequently was, then even on a merely grammatical question his sensitive temper was readily roused to a kind of defence which we find very difficult to accept as a calm statement of fact.

Another source of confusion is Erasmus' amazing command of classic literature and his cleverness in utilising, not merely the forms, but at times the ideas and even the phrases of ancient authors. How much of what he says, for example, in his descriptions of persons, whether favourably or unfavourably, is really his own and how much borrowed is often quite impossible to discover. This borrowing or adapting is so much a habit that he obviously borrows from himself, using under similar circumstances what seem to have become almost formulas of his thought. He _must_ be literary; he _might_ be accurate.

Of contemporary biographical attempts we have almost nothing. Erasmus' younger friend, Beatus Rhenanus of Schlettstadt in Alsatia, one of the Basel circle of scholars, has left us two fragments, one a dedication to the Emperor Charles V. of the 1540 edition of Erasmus' works, and the other from the dedication to an edition of Origen in 1536 with Erasmus' revision. These two brief sketches fill but six printed folio pages. They are disfigured by elaborate panegyric, not only of Erasmus, but of the emperor as well, are obviously drawn from Erasmus' own account of himself, and contribute little original material to our knowledge.

In regard to his writings, Erasmus on two occasions made attempts to summarise his work, once in 1524 at the request of John Botzheim, a canon of the church at Constance, and again, during his residence at Freiburg, in reply to an inquiry from Hector Boëthius of the University of Aberdeen. The latter is a mere table of contents for a possible complete edition of his works, but the former includes a great deal of description of the circumstances under which many of the works were written. These descriptions are at times so trivial that they can hardly command our respect, and yet it would of course be impossible to deny that a work of great importance may have had a trivial suggestion. This longer catalogue gives us also a good many sidelights upon Erasmus' personality and movements. The general arrangement and division into volumes suggested by Erasmus himself were followed in the first Basel edition of 1540, and have been preserved in the Leyden edition of Leclerc in 1703-1706 which we have used.

That the following pages will give a clear and consistent impression of Erasmus' motive at each stage of his career is more than we can hope for. The best we can offer is an honest appreciation of his great service to the cause of reform, often in ways he little expected or desired, often very indirectly, and always without relation to any definite scheme of action. We may, however, fairly hope that as each occasion arises, we have so plainly set the possibilities before the reader that he may form an intelligent judgment as to the probability.

The most serious problem at every step is what weight to give to Erasmus' statements about himself. The only reasonable test is to be found in what he actually did. If, for example, he professes undying love for the city of Rome and an uncontrollable desire to end his days there; at the same time protests that everyone at Rome is longing to have him there, and yet takes no steps to go, we are forced to inquire what were the reasons which kept him away, and may have to conclude that all this was a bit of comedy arranged for some effect which we, as plain historians, should be glad to understand.

In applying these tests to Erasmus' declarations about the Reformation we find the largest scope for the critical method. All that is mysterious in his personality up to that time becomes doubly so when he finds himself--he would have us believe quite against his will--thrust forward into prominence as a rebel against the existing order. Several courses of action were open to him: First, and most obvious, to keep silent; second, to join with the party of reform, try to hold it to the essential things, and supply it with the weapons of learning which none could prepare so well as he; third, to denounce the reform, seek his safety in close alliance with Rome, and then try to moderate, as far as he could, the extremes of Roman abuse. No one of these methods commended itself wholly to his judgment or to his nature. He could not be silent; he would not lend himself to what he called "sedition"; and he neither could, nor did he quite dare, trust himself in the hands of the Church he professed to serve, lest he find his liberty of action restricted beyond endurance.

The world into which Erasmus was born was a world of violent contrasts. The papal system, having come victorious out of the struggle with the conciliar movement of the fifteenth century, seemed to control without resistance every current of ecclesiastical life and thought. Yet the deep and steady flow of sincere and simple faith best represented by the mystical writers, individual and associated, was gaining in force and was making Europe ready for a revolt they never even thought of. The spirit of modern science, which is nothing more than a desire to see things in their true relations, was making itself felt in invention and discovery and in the revelation of Man to himself as a being worth investigating. Yet over against this spirit of light and liberty hovers the dark shadow of the Inquisition and its kindred manifestations of an exclusive claim to the knowledge and control of the Truth. Vast political powers were contending for the possession of long-disputed territories, while within their borders great social and industrial discontents were gathering to a demonstration whenever the strain of these dynastic struggles should become unbearable.

There were men in this vast conflict of ideas to whom it was given to lead others along some visible and definable road to some determinable end: Thomas à Kempis along the way of faith to the haven of religious peace; Luther and Calvin along the way of doctrinal clearness through ecclesiastical revolution to deliberate reconstruction; Descartes through a single, all-inclusive philosophical proposition to ultimate certainty of thought; the great artists through "painting the thing as they saw it" to a new basis of æsthetic judgment. The special function of Erasmus in the Great Readjustment was, as he conceived it, to bring men back to the standards of a true Christianity by constant reference to the principles of ancient learning, and by an appeal to the tribunal of common sense. His activity took many forms; but he was always, whether through classical treatise or encyclopædic collection or satirical dialogue or direct moral appeal--always and everywhere, the preacher of righteousness. His successes were invariably along this line. His failures were caused by his incapacity to perceive at what moment the mere appeal to the moral sense was no longer adequate. His services to the Reformation were warmly recognised even by so violent an opponent as Hutten; his personal limitations were in danger of making those services of no avail, and there was the point where he and those with whom he ought to have worked parted company.

Our work divides itself naturally into two parts: First, the development of Erasmus up to the outbreak of the Lutheran Reformation in 1517, and second, his relation to the leading persons and ideas of the next twenty years. In treating the former period we shall examine the traditional story of Erasmus' early education, and shall illustrate by selections showing as fairly as may be what proved to be the dominant traits of his mind and character. In the second part we shall endeavour to show how the traits thus formed determined his attitude towards the unexpected demands of a new time.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

It would be idle to attempt here an Erasmian bibliography, since the elaborate undertaking of the University Library at Ghent in 1893[5] has placed the material available up to that date in a form accessible to every reader. The same editors are now engaged upon a still more stupendous enterprise, a bibliography,[6] in 16º form, giving complete titles of all known editions of every work. Begun in 1897, it thus far includes only the editions of the _Adagia_. I give here, therefore, only the sources likely to interest the general reader and especially such as I have consulted in the preparation of this volume.

[5] _Bibliotheca Erasmiana; Repertoire des œuvres d'Érasme._ Ghent, 1893.

[6] _Bibliotheca Erasmiana; Bibliographie des œuvres d'Érasme._ Ghent, 1897.

I have used constantly the Leyden edition of Erasmus' works[7] based upon the Basel edition of 1540. The arrangement is roughly according to the nature of the material. The editorial work is meagre and careless. The indexes are elaborately and exasperatingly useless. In the case of the letters, though the editor is perfectly conscious of false arrangement and dating, he leaves them as he finds them, and the reader is compelled to discover the inaccuracies for himself. Professor Adalbert Horawitz of Vienna was preparing to write a Life of Erasmus when he was interrupted by death in 1888. His preliminary studies[8] have supplied much new material and given us many valuable critical suggestions. In 1876 Professor W. Vischer of Basel, acting on the suggestion of Horawitz, published a series of very interesting documents which he had discovered in the Basel University Library, and which throw much light upon several obscure points in the life of Erasmus.[9] An article by the late Dr. R. Fruin,[10] which came to my knowledge after the completion of the manuscript, quite confirms my view of the utter untrustworthiness of Erasmus' accounts of his early life. Jortin's _Life of Erasmus_, first published in 1758-60, 2d ed., in 3 vols., 1808, is little more than a translation of Leclerc's _Vie d'Érasme_[11] which was published as a kind of résumé and advertisement at once of the Leyden _Opera_. Jortin gives, however, in addition, a good many documents and a mass of more or less relevant remarks.

[7] _Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami opera omnia, emendatiora et auctiora_, etc., ed. Johannes Clericus (Jean Leclerc), 10 vols., folio. Leyden, 1703-1706.

[8] Horawitz, Adalbert, _Erasmiana_; in _Sitzungsberichte der K. Akademie der Wissenschaften_. Vienna, 1878-1885. Text and documents. _Ueber die Colloquia des Erasmus_; in Raumer's _Historisches Taschenbuch_. 1887.

[9] Vischer, Wilhelm, _Erasmiana_. Basel, 1876.

[10] Fruin, R., _Erasmiana_; in _Bijdragen voor vaderlandsche geschiedenis en ouheidkunde_, new series, x., 1880; 3d series, i., 1882.

[11] Jean Leclerc, _Vie d'Érasme tirée de ses lettres_, etc., in _Bibliothèque choisie_. Amsterdam, 1703 _sqq._, vols. i., v., vi., viii.

Of more recent biographies, that of R. B. Drummond[12] is, all things considered, the best; careful and serious, but showing the almost universal tendency to take Erasmus at his word, even while admitting his incapacity to tell the truth.

[12] Drummond, Robert B., _Erasmus, his Life and Character as shown in his Correspondence and Works_. 2 vols. London, 1873.

Durand de Laur[13] gives in his first volume a sketch of Erasmus' life with little critical sifting of evidence, and in the second an interesting examination of his achievements in the several lines of his activity.

[13] Durand de Laur, H., _Érasme, précurseur et initiateur de l'esprit moderne._ 2 vols. Paris, 1872.

Froude's _Life and Letters_[14] illustrates the author's familiar qualities,--his remarkable distinctness of view and his complete indifference to accuracy of detail.

[14] Froude, James Anthony, _Life and Letters of Erasmus_; lectures delivered at Oxford, 1893-94. London and New York, 1894.

Samuel Knight's _Life_,[15] 1726, is still readable. It deals chiefly with the relations of Erasmus to England, and gives a great deal of "curious information" about persons incidentally connected with him.

[15] Knight, Samuel, _The Life of Erasmus_. Cambridge, 1726. With many valuable documents.

Other works likely to be of interest to the reader and student are:

Altmeyer, J. J., _Les précurseurs de la Réforme aux Pays-bas_. Brussels, 1886. _Érasme et les hommes de son temps_, vol. i., pp. 258-343.

Amiel, Émile, _Un Libre-penseur du XVI siècle: Érasme_. Paris, 1889.

Burigny, J. L. de, _Vie d'Érasme_. 2 vols. Paris, 1757.

Butler, Charles, _Life of Erasmus_. London, 1825.

Feugère, Gaston, _Érasme,--Étude sur sa vie et ses ouvrages_. Paris, 1874.

Hartfelder, Karl, _D. Erasmus von Rotterdam und die Päpste seiner Zeit_; in Raumer's _Historisches Taschenbuch_, 1891.

Hartfelder, Karl, _Friedrich der Weise und D. Erasmus von Rotterdam_; in _Zeitschrift für vergleichende Literaturgeschichte_, etc., new series, iv., 1891.

Janssen, Joh., _Geschichte des Deutschen Volkes seit dem Ausgang des Mittelalters_. Freiburg, 1879, and in repeated editions. On Erasmus in vol. ii.

Kämmel, H., _Erasmus in Deventer_; in _Jahrbücher für classische Philologie_, vol. cx.

Müller, Adolph, _Leben des Erasmus_. Hamburg, 1828.

Nolhac, Pierre de, _Érasme en Italie; étude sur un épisode de la Renaissance avec douze lettres inédites d'Érasme_. Paris, 1888.

Pennington, A. R., _The Life of Erasmus_. London, 1875.

Richter, Arthur, _Erasmus-Studien_. Dresden, 1891.

Seebohm, Frederic, _The Oxford Reformers of 1498: Colet, Erasmus, More_. London, 1867; 3d ed., 1887.

Staehelin, R., _Erasmus' Stellung zur Reformation_. Basel, 1873.

Stichart, F. O., _Erasmus von Rotterdam, Seine Stellung zu der Kirche und zu den kirchlichen Bewegungen seiner Zeit_. Leipzig, 1870.

Woltmann, A., _Holbein und seine Zeit_. Leipzig, 1866-68, 2 parts; 2d ed., 1874-76, 2 vols. English translation, _Holbein and his Time_. London, 1872.

DESIDERIUS ERASMUS

DESIDERIUS ERASMUS