No wonder that the letters of Erasmus, written during these his first months spent at Oxford, should bear witness to the delight with which he found himself received, all stranger as he was, into the midst of a group of warm-hearted friends, with whom, for the first time in his life, he found what it was to be at home. ‘I cannot tell you,’ he wrote to his friend Lord Mountjoy, ‘how delighted I am with your England. With two such friends as Colet and Charnock, I would not refuse to live even in Scythia!’[194]
III. CONVERSATION BETWEEN COLET AND ERASMUS ON THE SCHOOLMEN (1498 or 1499).
But although Erasmus had formed the closest friendship with Colet, and was learning more and more to understand and admire him, it was long before he was sufficiently one in heart and purpose to induce Colet to unburden to him his whole mind.
Scholastic skill of Erasmus.
He did so only by degrees. When he thought his friend really in earnest in any passing argument he would tell him fully what his own views were. But Colet hated the Schoolmen’s habit of arguing for argument’s sake, and felt that Erasmus was as yet not wholly weaned from it. It was a habit which had been fostered by the current practice of asserting wiredrawn distinctions and abstruse propositions for the mere display of logical skill; and Colet’s reverence for truth shrunk from this public vivisection of it merely to feed the pride of the dissector. It pained and disgusted him.
Erasmus had been educated at Paris in the ‘straitest sect’ of Scholastic theologians. He had there studied theology in the college of the Scotists, and been trained in that logical subtlety for which the school of Duns Scotus was distinguished.[195]
Colet dislikes the Scotists.
But he found Colet, instead of regarding the Scotists as wonderfully clever, declaring that ‘they seemed to him to be stupid and dull and anything but clever. For to cavil about different sentences and words, now to gnaw at this and now at that, and to dissect everything bit by bit, seemed to him to be the mark of a poor and barren mind.’[196]
But Colet had not quarrelled only with the logical method of the Schoolmen; he owed the scholastic philosophy itself a still deeper grudge.
What the system of the Schoolmen was.