Erasmus's character: Need of purity and cleanliness—Delicacy—Dislike of contention, need of concord and friendship—Aversion to disturbance of any kind—Too much concerned about other men's opinions—Need of self-justification—Himself never in the wrong—Correlation between inclinations and convictions—Ideal image of himself—Dissatisfaction with himself—Self-centredness—A solitary at heart—Fastidiousness—Suspiciousness—Morbid mistrust—Unhappiness—Restlessness—Unsolved contradictions of his being—Horror of lies—Reserve and insinuation
Erasmus's powerful mind met with a great response in the heart of his contemporaries and had a lasting influence on the march of civilization. But one of the heroes of history he cannot be called. Was not his failure to attain to still loftier heights partly due to the fact that his character was not on a level with the elevation of his mind?
And yet that character, a very complicated one, though he took himself to be the simplest man in the world, was determined by the same factors which determined the structure of his mind. Again and again we find in his inclinations the correlates of his convictions.
At the root of his moral being we find—a key to the understanding of his character—that same profound need of purity which drove him to the sources of sacred science. Purity in the material and the moral sense is what he desires for himself and others, always and in all things. Few things revolt him so much as the practices of vintners who doctor wine and dealers who adulterate food. If he continually chastens his language and style, or exculpates himself from mistakes, it is the same impulse which prompts his passionate desire for cleanliness and brightness, of the home and of the body. He has a violent dislike of stuffy air and smelly substances. He regularly takes a roundabout way to avoid a malodorous lane; he loathes shambles and fishmongers' shops. Fetors spread infection, he thinks. Erasmus had, earlier than most people, antiseptic ideas about the danger of infection in the foul air of crowded inns, in the breath of confessants, in baptismal water. Throw aside common cups, he pleaded; let everybody shave himself, let us be cleanly as to bed-sheets, let us not kiss each other by way of greeting. The fear of the horrible venereal disease, imported into Europe during his lifetime, and of which Erasmus watched the unbridled propagation with solicitude, increases his desire for purity. Too little is being done to stop it, he thinks. He cautions against suspected inns; he wants to have measures taken against the marriages of syphilitic persons. In his undignified attitude towards Hutten his physical and moral aversion to the man's evil plays an unmistakable part.
Erasmus is a delicate soul in all his fibres. His body forces him to be that. He is highly sensitive, among other things very susceptible to cold, 'the scholars' disorder', as he calls it. Early in life already the painful malady of the stone begins to torment him, which he resisted so bravely when his work was at stake. He always speaks in a coddling tone about his little body, which cannot stand fasting, which must be kept fit by some exercise, namely riding, and for which he carefully tries to select a suitable climate. He is at times circumstantial in the description of his ailments.[15] He has to be very careful in the matter of his sleep; if once he wakes up, he finds it difficult to go to sleep again, and because of that has often to lose the morning, the best time to work and which is so dear to him. He cannot stand cold, wind and fog, but still less overheated rooms. How he has execrated the German stoves, which are burned nearly all the year through and made Germany almost unbearable to him! Of his fear of illness we have spoken above. It is not only the plague which he flees—for fear of catching cold he gives up a journey from Louvain to Antwerp, where his friend Peter Gilles is in mourning. Although he realizes quite well that 'often a great deal of the disease is in the imagination', yet his own imagination leaves him no peace. Nevertheless, when he is seriously ill he does not fear death.
His hygienics amount to temperance, cleanliness and fresh air, this last item in moderation: he takes the vicinity of the sea to be unwholesome and is afraid of draughts. His friend Gilles, who is ill, he advises: 'Do not take too much medicine, keep quiet and do not get angry'. Though there is a 'Praise of Medicine' among his works, he does not think highly of physicians and satirizes them more than once in the Colloquies.
Also in his outward appearance there were certain features betraying his delicacy. He was of medium height, well-made, of a fair complexion with blond hair and blue eyes, a cheerful face, a very articulate mode of speech, but a thin voice.
In the moral sphere Erasmus's delicacy is represented by his great need of friendship and concord, his dislike of contention. With him peace and harmony rank above all other considerations, and he confesses them to be the guiding principles of his actions. He would, if it might be, have all the world as a friend. 'Wittingly I discharge no one from my friendship,' he says. And though he was sometimes capricious and exacting towards his friends, yet a truly great friend he was: witness the many who never forsook him, or whom he, after a temporary estrangement, always won back—More, Peter Gilles, Fisher, Ammonius, Budaeus, and others too numerous to mention. 'He was most constant in keeping up friendships,' says Beatus Rhenanus, whose own attachment to Erasmus is a proof of the strong affection he could inspire.
At the root of this desire of friendship lies a great and sincere need of affection. Remember the effusions of almost feminine affection towards Servatius during his monastic period. But at the same time it is a sort of moral serenity that makes him so: an aversion to disturbance, to whatever is harsh and inharmonious. He calls it 'a certain occult natural sense' which makes him abhor strife. He cannot abide being at loggerheads with anyone. He always hoped and wanted, he says, to keep his pen unbloody, to attack no one, to provoke no one, even if he were attacked. But his enemies had not willed it, and in later years he became well accustomed to bitter polemics, with Lefèvre d'Étaples, with Lee, with Egmondanus, with Hutten, with Luther, with Beda, with the Spaniards, and the Italians. At first it is still noticeable how he suffers by it, how contention wounds him, so that he cannot bear the pain in silence. 'Do let us be friends again,' he begs Lefèvre, who does not reply. The time which he had to devote to his polemics he regards as lost. 'I feel myself getting more heavy every day,' he writes in 1520, 'not so much on account of my age as because of the restless labour of my studies, nay more even by the weariness of disputes than by the work, which, in itself, is agreeable.' And how much strife was still in store for him then!