Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam

by Ephraim Emerton

This sounds very fine and would impress one with a great sense of Erasmus' ingenuous nature, if one could forget that this is precisely the time when he was carrying on the correspondence with Battus and the Marchioness of Veere which we have already examined.[53] Indeed the years from 1500 to 1506 are the most perplexing in Erasmus' whole life. He was continually on the move, now at Paris, now at Orleans, again in the Low Countries, visiting this friend and that, with no regular source of income, yet somehow pulling himself through. During all this time there is hardly a letter which does not speak of him as the victim of a cruel fate. Of course it is always the fault of someone else, but human nature has not so greatly changed in four hundred years that we can afford to take his word for it that all his patrons had deserted him with no cause whatever on his part. To get the proper perspective for an understanding of the situation we must remind ourselves that Erasmus was as yet a very doubtful investment. His real individuality was hardly showing itself. He had positively rejected all proposals of regular occupation; he was making considerable demands on life, but he would take life only on his own terms.

The motive of Erasmus' wanderings in these early years of the century is not clear. More easily perceptible than any other is his fear of the plague and a nervous dread of other illness. When things went badly in one place he betook himself to another, but it is hard to find much principle even in his health-seeking. He speaks of finding relief in his native land and again writes that Zeeland is hell to him, he "never felt a harsher climate or one less suited to his poor little body." The bishop of Cambrai had long since failed him. The bishop's brother, the abbot of St. Bertin, formerly a great friend, was of no use; the Marchioness was herself in some mysterious trouble; Battus alone, his precious Battus, was quite true to him, but not able to do much for him. Altogether it seems most probable that the conspiracy of the fates against our scholar may have been nothing more than a common feeling of distrust toward a sturdy beggar, who had not yet proved his value and who was not inclined to put up with any half-way charity.

But meanwhile Erasmus was always at work. His real, permanent, and persistent interest was his own self-culture—not in any narrow or mean sense, but that he might be equal to the great demands he was preparing to make upon himself. Of all things he wished to make himself strong in Greek, and it is clear that he was dissatisfied with any teaching which thus far had been open to him. From this we ought not hastily to draw conclusions as to the badness of Greek teaching at Paris. Erasmus, like most men of original genius, was not a docile pupil. He knew intuitively, what it takes most of us a lifetime to find out, that every man must teach himself all that he ever really and effectively knows, and that this is especially true of all linguistic knowledge. Erasmus complains of his Greek teachers, but he did not sit down and wait for better ones. He went to work with such appliances as he had and read Greek books and gradually came to read them well. He learned Greek, in short, as he had learned Latin, by using it.

From time to time, however, he gave evidences of his progress in culture by some production intended for wider circulation. A specimen of such occasional writing is his Enchiridion militis christiani, a title which has almost invariably been rendered, "A Handbook of the Christian Soldier," but which bears equally well the meaning, "The Christian Soldier's Dagger." The essential point is that it was a something "handy," a vade mecum for the average gentleman who aimed to be a good Christian. Erasmus uses the word in both meanings at different times. Writing, according to his own reckoning, nearly thirty years afterwards,[54] Erasmus gives us an account of the origin of this treatise, which is interesting as showing how unsystematic were the motives which led, or which he imagined led, to the writing of many of his most famous works. He says "the thing was born of chance." He was at Tournehens to escape the plague then raging in Paris and there came into relations with a friend of Battus, a gentleman who was "his own worst enemy," a gay and reckless liver. This gentleman's wife was a woman of singular piety and in great distress for her husband's soul. She begged Erasmus to write something which might move him to repentance, but to be careful that this warning should not appear to come from her; for "he was cruel to her even to blows, after the manner of soldiers." So Erasmus noted down a few things and showed them to his friends, who approved them so highly that some time afterward at Louvain he employed his leisure in putting them into shape. For a while the book attracted little attention; but later it became one of the most popular and widely read of its author's more serious works. It was first printed in 1503 and after that ran through edition after edition with great rapidity. Naturally, it brought out also no little opposition; but that will explain itself when we have examined a little more carefully the aim and contents of the book.

Its object is especially to emphasise the difference between a true religion of the heart and an outward, formal religion of observances. It is divided into thirteen chapters of varying length, each headed with a caption rather vaguely indicating its contents. After a somewhat long introduction he proceeds to a definition of the human soul, following in the main the lead of the early Fathers, especially of Origen. He distinguishes between the soul of man and a something higher yet, which they describe as spirit. The body is the purely material, the spirit is the purely divine, but the soul, living between the two, belongs permanently to neither, but is tossed back and forth from one to the other according as it resists or gives way to the temptations of the flesh. The body is the harlot, soliciting to evil. "Thus the spirit makes us gods; the flesh makes us beasts; the soul makes us men." This distinction is again and again illustrated, and the chapter ends with a declaration of the true rule of Christian piety; viz., that every man see to it that he judge himself according to his own temptation.[55]

"One man rejoices in fasting, in sacred observances, in going often to church, in repeating psalms, as many as possible—but in the spirit. Now ask, according to our rule, what he is doing:—if he is looking for praise or reward, he smacks of the flesh—not of the spirit. If he is merely indulging his own nature, doing what pleases him, this is not a thing to be proud of, but rather to be feared. There is your danger. You pray and you judge the man who prays not; you fast and you condemn the man who eats. Whoever does not do as you do, you think is inferior to you. Look out that your fasting be not to the flesh! Your brother needs your help, but you meanwhile are mumbling your prayers to God and neglecting your brother's poverty: God will be deaf to such prayers as that.... You love your wife just because she is your wife; that is very little, for the heathen do the same. Or you love her only for your own pleasure; then your love is to the flesh: but if you love her chiefly because you see in her the image of Christ, piety, modesty, sobriety, chastity, then you love her not in herself, but in Christ—nay, you love Christ in her and so God in the spirit."

The book then goes on to more specific injunctions to the Christian life, always with the undernote of sincerity as the main thing. Here is a striking passage from the second canon of the eighth chapter:[56]

"Christ said to all men that he who will not take up his cross and follow after him is not worthy of him. Now you have no concern with dying to the flesh with Christ, if living in his spirit does not concern you. It is not yours to be crucified to the world, if living to God be not yours. To be buried with Christ is nothing to you, if rising in glory is nothing to you. Christ's humility, his poverty, his trial, his scorn, his toil, his struggle, his grief, are nothing to you, if you have no care for his kingdom. What more base than to claim for yourself the reward with others, but to put off upon a certain few the toil for which the reward is offered? What more wanton than to wish to reign with our Head, when you are not willing to suffer with him? Therefore, my brother, do not look about to see what others do and flatter yourself with their example;—a difficult thing indeed and known to very few, even to monks, is this dying to sin, to carnal desire and to the world. Yet this is the common profession of all Christians."

So again in the fourth canon:[57]

"You fast,—a pious work indeed to all appearance; but to what purpose is this fasting? Is it to save provisions or to seem to be more pious than you are? Then your eye is evil. Or do you fast to keep your health? Why then do you fear disease? Lest it keep you from pleasure? Your eye is evil. Or do you desire health that you may devote yourself to study? Then to what end is this study?—that you may get a church office? But why do you wish the office?—that you may live to yourself and not to Christ? Then you have wandered from the standard which the Christian ought to have set up everywhere. You take food that your body may be strong, but you desire this strength that you may be equal to the study of sacred things and to holy vigils:—you have hit the mark; but if you look after your health lest you lose your beauty and so be incapable of sensual pleasure, then you have fallen away from Christ and have set up another God for yourself.