A Life in the Low Countries
It remains to see how Erasmus actually lived as a man. In 1517 he spent most of his time in Flanders: at Brussels, Antwerp and Louvain. He was unmarried and kept a single servant, but he often accepted the invitation and hospitality of some wealthy person who counted his company a social privilege and an intellectual feast. His taste was hard to please, and his feelings and nerves were so delicate, so trained and refined, that he suffered constantly from the coarse and vulgar side of life.
He drank wine freely and took pride in his capacity to withstand it. It may be that this was one cause of the gout and the bladder stone that tormented him, though he himself thought that wine, by opening the arteries, eased his pain. In 1514, when he was forty-five or forty-eight (the book gives both), he described himself as a sickly, gray-haired man who must drink nothing but wine and should be glad of what he eats. He had no liking for fasting and disliked fish; perhaps his bilious temperament left a mark on his theology. He slept little and, like everyone with a busy mind, knew no time for rest. His consolations were friends and books. When I am cut off from my ordinary daily studies, he wrote, I seem not to be myself; my home is where my library is.
The persistence with which he asked one patron or another for money, like a parish priest, was partly a matter of buying books. He received a regular allowance from Mountjoy and from Warham, and Jean le Sauvage, chancellor of Burgundy, sent him considerable sums, for example three hundred florins (about seven thousand five hundred dollars, by the book's conversion). His royalties exceeded those of any other writer of his age. He rejected the charge of avarice: if he sought money, it was because he was a disorderly man and feared loneliness and helplessness in old age. At the same time he refused lucrative offices that would have raised his income but cost him his freedom.
The Face in the Portraits
His appearance did not impress at first meeting. He was short, thin and pale, with a weak voice and constitution. Yet his sensitive hands, his long sharp nose, his gray-blue eyes shining with intelligence, and his conversation made a deep impression on the richest and quickest minds of that brilliant age. Quentin Massys painted him in 1517, absorbed in writing, wrapped in a thick gown against the cold of the rooms of those centuries; the picture was a gift to Thomas More. Dürer made a charcoal drawing of him in 1520 and a notable engraving in 1526; here the German taste of the painter gave our good European a thoroughly Dutch look. Erasmus himself remarked of it: if I look like that, I am a great scoundrel.
Holbein surpassed all other painters in the many portraits he made of Erasmus. One is in a continental city, another in England, a third in Basel, and the best of all in the Louvre; all of them, by the greatest portraitist of the north, are masterly works. In the Louvre portrait the scholar has the calm, thoughtful and somewhat melancholy face of a philosopher who has reluctantly submitted to the impartial carelessness of nature and the mortality of genius. In 1517 Erasmus wrote that we must bow to whatever fate brings, and that he had prepared his mind for any event: the very calm and tolerance of Stoic philosophy, which he never truly attained. Of an ambitious youth he wrote that he loves glory but does not know how heavy greatness is. Yet Erasmus himself, like many great men, pursued that fleeting phantom day and night.
Faults, Virtues and Tastes
His faults are conspicuous; his virtues are secrets known only to his friends. He could hold out his hand shamelessly as a beggar, but with equal ease he could forgive, and many lives grew in the warmth of his praise. When Reuchlin was attacked by Pfefferkorn, Erasmus wrote to his friends among the cardinals in Rome and asked for their help in securing protection and safety for the harassed Hebrew scholar. He lacked humility and gratitude, which hardly surprises in a man favored by kings and popes. He could not bear criticism and grew deeply offended and angry, and sometimes answered critics with abuse, the manner of that quarrelsome age. He also shared in the anti-Semitism of his time, in which even the scholars of the Renaissance took part.
His desires were as delicate and exact as they were strong. He loved literature when it came dressed as philosophy, and loved philosophy when it set logic aside for life; but he left science, natural scenery, music and art wholly to indifference. He laughed at the astronomers strutting in the field of science, and the stars of heaven went along with him. In his countless letters one finds no description of the Alps, or of the architecture of Oxford and Cambridge, or of the paintings of Raphael and the sculptures of Michelangelo, both of whom were at work for Julius II when Erasmus stopped in Rome in 1509. The stirring hymns of the later reforming congregations offended his ear.
His wit was usually subtle and polite, sometimes like Rabelais's jesting, often barbed, and once inhumane: on hearing that some heretics had been burned, he wrote to a friend that he would pity them less if burning them, since winter was near, raised the price of fuel. (The book gives the remark in full; it is only summarized here and is offered as a sign of the harshness of the age.) He was not only naturally self-regarding, like all men, but gave rein to that hidden vanity without which a writer or an artist would be crushed in the merciless assaults of this indifferent world. He liked flattery, and despite rejecting such charges, agreed with it. To a friend he said that eminent judges say that I write better than all living authors.
Master of Latin
That statement was true, if only of Latin. He wrote French badly, spoke only a little English and Dutch, knew very little Hebrew, in the book's words, and Greek imperfectly; but in Latin he had complete mastery and used it as a living language to express the non-Latin details of his time. An age that had just begun to love the new classics forgave his errors for his spirited expression, his majestic style, the freshness of his speech and the sharpness of his mockery. His letters rival those of Cicero in grace and courtesy and surpass them in spirit and wit. Moreover the Latin he wrote was his own, not an imitation of Cicero's; it was lively, vigorous and flexible, not the echo of a dead tongue of fifteen hundred years before.
His letters, like Petrarch's, ranked next to his Colloquies in the desire of every scholar and prince. He says, perhaps with some literary exaggeration, that he received twenty letters a day and wrote forty. Several volumes of them were beautifully printed in his lifetime under his own supervision, since he knew well the welcome posterity would give. Among his correspondents were Leo X, Hadrian VI, Marguerite, queen of Navarre, Sigismund I of Poland, Henry VIII, More, Colet and Pirckheimer. More, that modest and reserved scholar, wrote that when it crosses my mind that I shall be introduced to future centuries as a friend of Erasmus, I cannot hold back a feeling of pride. No contemporary writer's fame matched his, unless we count Luther a writer. In 1520 a bookseller of Oxford reported that a third of all the books he sold were by Erasmus.
The Hope and the Warning
His enemies were many, especially among the theologians of Louvain; but his pupils and followers in many universities, and the humanists across Europe, praised him and saluted him as their model and leader. In the field of letters he and his works united the Renaissance and the humanist movement. Their admiration for the classics and the fluent, uniform Latin style, and their generous agreement that one must not break with the Church or disturb the unavoidable myths of the masses, prepared the Church to wink at the free thought of the educated classes and to allow a systematic reform of abuses, follies and trifles from within. Like all humanists, Erasmus rejoiced at the elevation of Leo X; their dream had come true. A man who was a humanist, a scholar, a gentleman, and a unifier of Renaissance and Christianity sat on the greatest throne. Surely now the Church would be purified in peace, education would spread, people would keep their beloved ritual and consoling faith, and the mind of man would be freed.
Almost to the threshold of Luther's appearance Erasmus kept this hope in his heart. But on September 9, 1517, he wrote from Antwerp to Thomas, cardinal of York, an ominous sentence: I am sorry, but a great upheaval is about to break out in this part of the world. In less than two months the upheaval began.