Yet from his first visit to England (1498) down to his practical refusal of a Cardinal's Hat from Pope Adrian vi., on condition that he would reside at Rome and assist in [pg 173] fighting the Reformation, Erasmus had his own conception of what a reformation of Christianity really meant, and what share in it it was possible for him to take. It must be admitted that he held to this idea and kept to the path he had marked out for himself with a tenacity of purpose which did him honour. It was by no means always that of personal safety, still less the road to personal aggrandisement. It led him in the end where he had never expected to stand. It made him a man despised by both sides in the great controversy; it left him absolutely alone, friendless, and without influence. He frequently used very contemptible means to ward off attempts to make him diverge to the right or left; he abandoned many of his earlier principles, or so modified them that they were no longer recognisable. But he was always true to his own idea of a reformation and of his life-work as a reformer.
Erasmus was firmly convinced that Christianity was above all things something practical. It had to do with the ordinary life of mankind. It meant love, humility, purity, reverence,—every virtue which the Saviour had made manifest in His life on earth. This early “Christian philosophy” had been buried out of sight under a Scholastic Theology full of sophistical subtleties, and had been lost in the mingled Judaism and Paganism of the popular religious life, with its weary ceremonies and barbarous usages. A true reformation, he believed, was the moral renovation of mankind, and the one need of the age was to return to that earlier purer religion based on a real inward reverence for and imitation of Christ. The man of letters, like himself, he conceived could play the part of a reformer, and that manfully, in two ways. He could try, by the use of wit and satire, to make contemptible the follies of the Schoolmen and the vulgar travesty of religion which was in vogue among the people. He could also bring before the eyes of all men that earlier and purer religion which was true Christianity. He could edit the New Testament, and enable men to read the very words which Jesus spoke and [pg 174] Paul preached, make them see the deeds of Jesus and hear the apostolic explanations of their meaning. He could say:
“Only be teachable, and you have already made much way in this (the Christian) Philosophy. It supplies a spirit for a teacher, imparted to none more readily than to the simple-minded. Other philosophies, by the very difficulty of their precepts, are removed out of the range of most minds. No age, no sex, no condition of life is excluded from this. The sun itself is not more common and open to all than the teaching of Christ. For I utterly dissent from those who are unwilling that the Sacred Scriptures should be read by the unlearned translated into their vulgar tongue, as though Christ had taught such subtleties that they can scarcely be understood even by a few theologians, or as though the strength of the Christian religion consisted in men's ignorance of it. The mysteries of kings it may be safer to conceal, but Christ wished His mysteries to be published as openly as possible. I wish that even the weakest woman should read the Gospel—should read the Epistles of Paul. And I wish these were translated into all languages, so that they might be read and understood, not only by Scots and Irishmen, but also by Turks and Saracens. To make them understood is surely the first step. It may be that they might be ridiculed by many, but some would take them to heart. I long that the husbandman should sing portions of them to himself as he follows the plough, that the weaver should hum them to the tune of his shuttle, that the traveller should beguile with their stories the tedium of his journey.”[122]
The scholar who became a reformer could further make plain, by editing and publishing the writings of the earlier Christian Fathers, what the oldest Christian Theology had been before the Schoolmen spoiled it.
The conception that a reformation of Christianity was mainly a renovation of morals, enabled the Christian Humanist to keep true to the Renaissance idea that the writers of classical antiquity were to be used to aid the work of ameliorating the lot of mankind. The Florentine circle spoke of the inspiration of Homer, of Plato, and of [pg 175] Cicero, and saw them labouring as our Lord had done to teach men how to live better lives. Pico and Reuchlin had gone further afield, and had found illuminating anticipations of Christianity, in this sense and in others, among the Hebrews, the Egyptians, and perhaps the Brahmins. Erasmus was too clear-sighted to be drawn into any alliance with Oriental mysticism or cabalistic speculations; but he insisted on the aid which would come from the Christian reformer making full use of the ethical teaching of the wise men of Greece and Rome in his attempt to produce a moral renovation in the lives of his fellows. Socrates and Cicero, each in his own day and within his own sphere, had striven for the same moral renovation that Christianity promised, and, in this sense at least, might be called Christians before Christ. So persuaded was Erasmus of their affinity with the true spirit of Christianity, that he declared that Cicero had as much right to a high place in heaven as many a Christian saint, and that when he thought of the Athenian martyr he could scarcely refrain from saying, Sancte Socrates, Ora pro nobis.
It must be remembered also that Erasmus had a genuine and noble horror of war, which was by no means the mere shrinking of a man whose nerves were always quivering. He preached peace as boldly and in as disinterested a fashion as did his friend John Colet. He could not bear the thought of a religious war. This must not be forgotten in any estimate of his conduct and of his relation to the Reformation. No man, not even Luther, scattered the seeds of revolution with a more reckless hand, and yet a thorough and steadfast dislike to all movements which could be called revolutionary was one of the most abiding elements in his character. He hated what he called the “tumult.” He had an honest belief that all public evils in State and Church must be endured until they dissolve away quietly under the influence of sarcasm and common sense, or until they are removed by the action of the responsible authorities. He was clear-sighted enough to see that an open and avowed attack on the [pg 176] papal supremacy, or on any of the more cherished doctrines and usages of the mediæval Church, must end in strife and in bloodshed, and he therefore honestly believed that no such attack ought to be made.
When all these things are kept in view, it is possible to see what conception Erasmus had about his work as a reformer, with its possibilities and its limitations. He adhered to it tenaciously all his life. He held it in the days of his earlier comparative obscurity. He maintained it when he had been enthroned as the prince of the realm of learning. He clung to it in his discredited old age. No one can justify the means he sometimes took to prevent being drawn from the path he had marked out for himself; but there is something to be said for the man who, through good report and evil, stuck resolutely to his view of what a reformation ought to be, and what were the functions of a man of letters who felt himself called to be a reformer. Had Luther been gifted with that keen sense of prevision with which Erasmus was so fatally endowed, would he have stood forward to attack Indulgences in the way he did? It is probable that it would have made no difference in his action; but he did not think so himself. He said once, “No good work comes about by our own wisdom; it begins in dire necessity. I was forced into mine; but had I known then what I know now, ten wild horses would not have drawn me into it.” The man who leads a great movement of reform may see the distant, but has seldom a clear vision of the nearer future. He is one who feels the slow pressure of an imperious spiritual power, who is content with one step at a time, and who does not ask to see the whole path stretching out before him.
Erasmus lost both his parents while he was a child, and never enjoyed the advantages of a home training. He was driven by deceit or by self-deception into a monastery when he was a lad. He escaped from the clutches of the monastic life when he was twenty years of age, broken in health, and having learned to know human nature on its bad side and to trade on that knowledge. He was one of [pg 177] the loneliest of mortals, and trusted in no one but himself. With one great exception, he had no friendship which left an enduring influence on his character. From childhood he taught himself in his own way; when he grew to manhood he planned and schemed for himself; he steadfastly refused to be drawn into any kind of work which he did not like for its own sake; he persistently shunned every entanglement which might have controlled his action or weighted him with any responsibility. He stands almost alone among the Humanists in this. All the others were officials, or professors, or private teachers, or jurists, or ecclesiastics. Erasmus was nothing, and would be nothing, but a simple man of letters.
Holbein has painted him so often that his features are familiar. Every line of the clearly cut face suggests demure sarcasm—the thin lips closely pressed together, the half-closed eyelids, and the keen glance of the scarcely seen blue eyes. The head is intellectual, but there is nothing masculine about the portrait—nothing suggesting the massiveness of the learned burgher Pirkheimer; or the jovial strength of the Humanist landsknecht Eobanus Hessus; or the lean wolf-like tenacity of Hutten, the descendant of robber-knights; or the steadfast homely courage of Martin Luther. The dainty hands, which Holbein drew so often, and the general primness of his appearance, suggest a descent from a long line of maiden aunts. The keen intelligence was enclosed in a sickly body, whose frailty made continuous demands on the soul it imprisoned. It needed warm rooms with stoves that sent forth no smell, the best wines, an easy-going horse, and a deft servant; and to procure all these comforts Erasmus wrote the sturdiest of begging letters and stooped to all kinds of flatteries.
The visit which Erasmus paid to England in 1498 was the turning-point in his life. He found himself, for the first time, among men who were his equals in learning and his superiors in many things. “When I listen to my friend Colet,” he says, “it seems to me like listening to Plato [pg 178] himself. Who does not marvel at the complete mastery of the sciences in Grocyn? What could be keener, more profound, and more searching than the judgment of Linacre? Has Nature ever made a more gentle, a sweeter, or a happier disposition than Thomas More's?” He made the acquaintance of men as full of the New Learning as he was himself, who hated the Scotist theology more bitterly than he did, and who nevertheless believed in a pure, simple Christian philosophy, and were earnest Christians. They urged him to join them in their work, and we can trace in the correspondence of Erasmus the growing influence of Colet. The Dean of St. Paul's made Erasmus the decidedly Christian Humanist he became, and impressed on him that conception of a reformation which, leaving external things very much as they were, undertook a renovation of morals. He never lost the impress of Colet's stamp.