But the very horror of a childhood spent among such unpleasant surroundings may have spurred this curious infant into that fury of activity which eventually was to set him free and make him one of the best known men of his time.
From the beginning of life, everything was against him. He was an illegitimate child. The people of the Middle Ages, being on an intimate and friendly footing both with God and with nature, were a great deal more sensible about such children than we are. They were sorry. Such things ought not to occur and of course they greatly disapproved. For the rest, however, they were too simple-minded to punish a helpless creature in a cradle for a sin which most certainly was not of its own making. The irregularity of his birth certificate inconvenienced Erasmus only in so far as both his father and his mother seem to have been exceedingly muddle-headed citizens, totally incapable of handling the situation and leaving their children to the care of relatives who were either boobs or scoundrels.
These uncles and guardians had no idea of what to do with their two little wards and after the mother had died, the children never had a home of their own. First of all they were sent to a famous school in Deventer, where several of the teachers belonged to the Society of the Brothers of the Common Life, but if we are to judge by the letters which Erasmus wrote later in life, these young men were only “common” in a very different sense of the word. Next the two boys were separated and the younger was taken to Gouda, where he was placed under the immediate supervision of the head-master of the Latin school, who was also one of the three guardians appointed to administer his slender inheritance. If that school in the days of Erasmus was as bad as when I visited it four centuries later, I can only feel sorry for the poor kid. And to make matters worse, the guardians by this time had wasted every penny of his money and in order to escape prosecution (for the old Dutch courts were strict upon such matters) they hurried the infant into a cloister, rushed him into holy orders and bade him be happy because “now his future was secure.”
The mysterious mills of history eventually ground this terrible experience into something of great literary value. But I hate to think of the many terrible years this sensitive youngster was forced to spend in the exclusive company of the illiterate boors and thick-fingered rustics who during the end of the Middle Ages made up the population of fully half of all monasteries.
Fortunately the laxity of discipline at Steyn permitted Erasmus to spend most of his time among the Latin manuscripts which a former abbot had collected and which lay forgotten in the library. He absorbed those volumes until he finally became a walking encyclopedia of classical learning. In later years this stood him in good stead. Forever on the move, he rarely was within reach of a reference library. But that was not necessary. He could quote from memory. Those who have ever seen the ten gigantic folios which contain his collected works, or who have managed to read through part of them (life is so short nowadays) will appreciate what a “knowledge of the classics” meant in the fifteenth century.
Of course, eventually Erasmus was able to leave his old monastery. People like him are never influenced by circumstances. They make their own circumstances and they make them out of the most unlikely material.
And the rest of his life Erasmus was a free man, searching restlessly after a spot where he might work without being disturbed by a host of admiring friends.
But not until the fateful hour when with an appeal to the “lieve God” of his childhood he allowed his soul to slip into the slumber of death, did he enjoy a moment of that “true leisure” which has always appeared as the highest good to those who have followed the footsteps of Socrates and Zeno and which so few of them have ever found.
These peregrinations have often been described and I need not repeat them here in detail. Wherever two or more men lived together in the name of true wisdom, there Erasmus was sooner or later bound to make his appearance.
He studied in Paris, where as a poor scholar he almost died of hunger and cold. He taught in Cambridge. He printed books in Basel. He tried (quite in vain) to carry a spark of enlightenment into that stronghold of orthodox bigotry, the far-famed University of Louvain. He spent much of his time in London and took the degree of Doctor of Divinity in the University of Turin. He was familiar with the Grand Canal of Venice and cursed as familiarly about the terrible roads of Zeeland as those of Lombardy. The sky, the parks, the walks and the libraries of Rome made such a profound impression upon him that even the waters of Lethe could not wash the Holy City out of his memory. He was offered a liberal pension if he would only move to Venice and whenever a new university was opened, he was sure to be honored with a call to whatever chair he wished to take or to no chair at all, provided he would grace the Campus with his occasional presence.