CHAPTER XIIIERASMUS
In the writing of every book there occurs a crisis. Sometimes it comes during the first fifty pages. Upon other occasions it does not make itself manifest until the manuscript is almost finished. Indeed, a book without a crisis is like a child that has never had the measles. There probably is something the matter with it.
The crisis in the present volume happened a few minutes ago, for I have now reached the point where the idea of a work upon the subject of tolerance in the year of grace 1925 seems quite preposterous; where all the labor spent thus far upon a preliminary study appears in the light of so much valuable time wasted; where I would like best of all to make a bonfire of Bury and Lecky and Voltaire and Montaigne and White and use the carbon copies of my own work to light the stove.
How to explain this?
There are many reasons. In the first place, there is the inevitable feeling of boredom which overtakes an author when he has been living with his topic on a very intimate footing for too long a time. In the second place, the suspicion that books of this sort will not be of the slightest practical value. And in the third place the fear that the present volume will be merely used as a quarry from which our less tolerant fellow-citizens will dig a few easy facts with which to bolster up their own bad causes.
But apart from these arguments (which hold good formost serious books) there is in the present case the almost insurmountable difficulty of “system.”
A story in order to be a success must have a beginning and an end. This book has a beginning, but can it ever have an end?
What I mean is this.
I can show the terrible crimes apparently committed in the name of righteousness and justice, but really caused by intolerance.
I can depict the unhappy days upon which mankind fell when intolerance was elevated to the rank of one of the major virtues.
I can denounce and deride intolerance until my readers shout with one accord, “Down with this curse, and let us all be tolerant!”
But there is one thing I cannot do. I cannot tell how this highly desirable goal is to be reached. There are handbooks which undertake to give us instruction in everything from after-dinner speaking to ventriloquism. In an advertisement of a correspondence course last Sunday I read of no less than two hundred and forty-nine subjects which the institute guaranteed to teach to perfection in exchange for a very small gratuity. But no one thus far has offered to explain in forty (or in forty thousand) lessons “how to become tolerant.”
And even history, which is supposed to hold the key to so many secrets, refuses to be of any use in this emergency.
Yes, it is possible to compose learned tomes devoted to slavery or free trade or capital punishment or the growth and development of Gothic architecture, for slavery and free trade and capital punishment and Gothic architecture are very definite and concrete things. For lack of all other material we could at least study the lives of the men andwomen who had been the champions of free trade and slavery and capital punishment and Gothic architecture or those who had opposed them. And from the manner in which those excellent people had approached their subjects, from their personal habits, their associations, their preferences in food and drink and tobacco, yea, from the very breeches they had worn, we could draw certain conclusions about the ideals which they had so energetically espoused or so bitterly denounced.
But there never were any professional protagonists of tolerance. Those who worked most zealously for the great cause did so incidentally. Their tolerance was a by-product. They were engaged in other pursuits. They were statesmen or writers or kings or physicians or modest artisans. In the midst of the king business or their medical practice or making steel engravings they found time to say a few good words for tolerance, but the struggle for tolerance was not the whole of their careers. They were interested in it as they may have been interested in playing chess or fiddling. And because they were part of a strangely assorted group (imagine Spinoza and Frederick the Great and Thomas Jefferson and Montaigne as boon companions!) it is almost impossible to discover that common trait of character which as a rule is to be found in all those who are engaged upon a common task, be it soldiering or plumbing or delivering the world from sin.
In such a case the writer is apt to have recourse to epigrams. Somewhere in this world there is an epigram for every dilemma. But upon this particular subject, the Bible and Shakespeare and Izaak Walton and even old Benham leave us in the lurch. Perhaps Jonathan Swift (I quote from memory) came nearest to the problem when he said that most men had just enough religion to hate their neighborsbut not quite enough to love them. Unfortunately that bright remark does not quite cover our present difficulty. There have been people possessed of as much religion as any one individual could safely hold who have hated their neighbors as cordially as the best of them. There have been others who were totally devoid of the religious instinct who squandered their affection upon all the stray cats and dogs and human beings of Christendom.
No, I shall have to find an answer of my own. And upon due cogitation (but with a feeling of great uncertainty) I shall now state what I suspect to be the truth.
The men who have fought for tolerance, whatever their differences, had all of them one thing in common; their faith was tempered by doubt; they might honestly believe that they themselves were right, but they never reached the point where that suspicion hardened into an absolute conviction.
In this day and age of super-patriotism, with our enthusiastic clamoring for a hundred-percent this and a hundred-percent that, it may be well to point to the lesson taught by nature which seems to have a constitutional aversion to any such ideal of standardization.
Purely bred cats and dogs are proverbial idiots who are apt to die because no one is present to take them out of the rain. Hundred-percent pure iron has long since been discarded for the composite metal called steel. No jeweler ever undertook to do anything with hundred-percent pure gold or silver. Fiddles, to be any good, must be made of six or seven different varieties of wood. And as for a meal composed entirely of a hundred-percent mush, I thank you, no!
In short, all the most useful things in this world are compounds and I see no reason why faith should be an exception.Unless the base of our “certainty” contains a certain amount of the alloy of “doubt,” our faith will sound as tinkly as a bell made of pure silver or as harsh as a trombone made of brass.
It was a profound appreciation of this fact which set the heroes of tolerance apart from the rest of the world.
As far as personal integrity went, honesty of conviction, unselfish devotion to duty and all the other household virtues, most of these men could have passed muster before a board of Puritan Inquisitors. I would go further than that and state that at least half of them lived and died in such a way that they would now be among the saints, if their peculiar trend of conscience had not forced them to be the open and avowed enemies of that institution which has taken upon itself the exclusive right of elevating ordinary human beings to certain celestial dignities.
But fortunately they were possessed of the divine doubt.
They knew (as the Romans and the Greeks had known before them) that the problem which faced them was so vast that no one in his right senses would ever expect it to be solved. And while they might hope and pray that the road which they had taken would eventually lead them to a safe goal, they could never convince themselves that it was the only right one, that all other roads were wrong and that the enchanting by-paths which delighted the hearts of so many simple people were evil thoroughfares leading to damnation.
All this sounds contrary to the opinions expressed in most of our catechisms and our text-books on ethics. These preach the superior virtue of a world illuminated by the pure white flame of absolute faith. Perhaps so. But during those centuries when that flame was supposed to be burning at its brightest, the average rank and file of humanitycannot be said to have been either particularly happy or extraordinarily comfortable. I don’t want to suggest any radical reforms, but just for a change we might try that other light, by the rays of which the brethren of the tolerant guild have been in the habit of examining the affairs of the world. If that does not prove successful, we can always go back to the system of our fathers. But if it should prove to throw an agreeable luster upon a society containing a little more kindness and forbearance, a community less beset by ugliness and greed and hatred, a good deal would have been gained and the expense, I am sure, would be quite small.
And after this bit of advice, offered for what it is worth, I must go back to my history.
When the last Roman was buried, the last citizen of the world (in the best and broadest sense of the word) perished. And it was a long time before society was once more placed upon such a footing of security that the old spirit of an all-encompassing humanity, which had been characteristic of the best minds of the ancient world, could safely return to this earth.
That, as we saw, happened during the Renaissance.
The revival of international commerce brought fresh capital to the poverty stricken countries of the west. New cities arose. A new class of men began to patronize the arts, to spend money upon books, to endow those universities which followed so closely in the wake of prosperity. And it was then that a few devoted adherents of the “humanities,” of those sciences which boldly had taken all mankind as their field of experiment, arose in rebellion against the narrow limitations of the old scholasticism and strayed away from the flock of the faithful who regarded theirinterest in the wisdom and the grammar of the ancients as a manifestation of a wicked and impure curiosity.
Among the men who were in the front ranks of this small group of pioneers, the stories of whose lives will make up the rest of this book, few deserve greater credit than that very timid soul who came to be known as Erasmus.
For timid he was, although he took part in all the great verbal encounters of his day and successfully managed to make himself the terror of his enemies, by the precision with which he handled that most deadly of all weapons, the long-range gun of humor.
Far and wide the missiles containing the mustard-gas of his wit were shot into the enemy’s country. And those Erasmian bombs were of a very dangerous variety. At a first glance they looked harmless enough. There was no sputtering of a tell-tale fuse. They had the appearance of an amusing new variety of fire-cracker, but God help those who took them home and allowed the children to play with them. The poison was sure to get into their little minds and it was of such a persistent nature that four centuries have not sufficed to make the race immune against the effects of the drug.
It is strange that such a man should have been born in one of the dullest towns of the mudbanks which are situated along the eastern coast of the North Sea. In the fifteenth century those water soaked lands had not yet attained the glories of an independent and fabulously rich commonwealth. They formed a group of little insignificant principalities, somewhere on the outskirts of civilized society. They smelled forever of herring, their chief article of export. And if ever they attracted a visitor, it was some helpless mariner whose ship had been wrecked upon their dismal shores.
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, searchingrestlessly 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.
But he steadily refused all such invitations because they seemed to contain a threat of permanence and dependency. Before all things he wanted to be free. He preferred a comfortable room to a bad one, he preferred amusing companionsto dull ones, he knew the difference between the good rich wine of the land called Burgundy and the thin red ink of the Apennines, but he wanted to live life on his own terms and this he could not do if he had to call any man “master.”
The rôle which he had chosen for himself was really that of an intellectual search-light. No matter what object appeared above the horizon of contemporary events, Erasmus immediately let the brilliant rays of his intellect play upon it, did his best to make his neighbors see the thing as it really was, denuded of all frills and divested of that “folly,” that ignorance which he hated so thoroughly.
That he was able to do this during the most turbulent period of our history, that he managed to escape the fury of the Protestant fanatics while keeping himself aloof from the fagots of his friends of the Inquisition, this is the one point in his career upon which he has been most often condemned.
Posterity seems to have a veritable passion for martyrdom as long as it applies to the ancestors.
“Why didn’t this Dutchman stand up boldly for Luther and take his chance together with the other reformers?” has been a question which seems to have puzzled at least twelve generations of otherwise intelligent citizens.
The answer is, “Why should he?”
It was not in his nature to do violent things and he never regarded himself as the leader of any movement. He utterly lacked that sense of self-righteous assurance which is so characteristic of those who undertake to tell the world how the millennium ought to be brought about. Besides he did not believe that it is necessary to demolish the old home every time we feel the necessity of rearranging our quarters. Quite true, the premises were sadly in need ofrepairs. The drainage was old-fashioned. The garden was all cluttered up with dirt and odds and ends left behind by people who had moved out long before. But all this could be changed if the landlord was made to live up to his promises and would only spend some money upon immediate improvements. Beyond that, Erasmus did not wish to go. And although he was what his enemies sneeringly called a “moderate,” he accomplished quite as much (or more) than those out and out “radicals” who gave the world two tyrannies where only one had been before.
Like all truly great men, he was no friend of systems. He believed that the salvation of this world lies in our individual endeavors. Make over the individual man and you have made over the entire world!
Hence he made his attack upon existing abuses by way of a direct appeal to the average citizen. And he did this in a very clever way.
In the first place he wrote an enormous amount of letters. He wrote them to kings and to emperors and to popes and to abbots and to knights and to knaves. He wrote them (and this in the days before the stamped and self-addressed envelope) to any one who took the trouble to approach him and whenever he took his pen in hand he was good for at least eight pages.
In the second place, he edited a large number of classical texts which had been so often and so badly copied that they no longer made any sense. For this purpose he had been obliged to learn Greek. His many attempts to get hold of a grammar of that forbidden tongue was one of the reasons why so many pious Catholics insisted that at heart he must be as bad as a real heretic. This of course sounds absurd but it was the truth. In the fifteenth century, respectable Christians would never have dreamed oftrying to learn this forbidden language. It was a tongue of evil repute like modern Russian. A knowledge of Greek might lead a man into all sorts of difficulties. It might tempt him to compare the original gospels with those translations that had been given to him with the assurance that they were a true reproduction of the original. And that would only be the beginning. Soon he would make a descent into the Ghetto to get hold of a Hebrew grammar. From that point to open rebellion against the authority of the Church was only a step and for a long time the possession of a book with strange and outlandish pothooks was regarded as ipso facto evidence of secret revolutionary tendencies.
Quite often rooms were raided by ecclesiastical authorities in search of this contraband, and Byzantine refugees who were trying to eke out an existence by teaching their native tongue were not infrequently forced to leave the city in which they had found an asylum.
In spite of all these many obstacles, Erasmus had learned Greek and in the asides which he added to his editions of Cyprian and Chrysostom and the other Church fathers, he hid many sly observations upon current events which could never have been printed had they been the subject of a separate pamphlet.
But this impish spirit of annotation manifested itself in an entirely different sort of literature of which he was the inventor. I mean his famous collections of Greek and Latin proverbs which he had brought together in order that the children of his time might learn to write the classics with becoming elegance. These so-called “Adagia” are filled with clever comments which in the eyes of his conservative neighbors were by no means what one had the rightto expect of a man who enjoyed the friendship of the Pope.
And finally he was the author of one of those strange little books which are born of the spirit of the moment, which are really a joke conceived for the benefit of a few friends and then assume the dignity of a great literary classic before the poor author quite realizes what he has done. It was called “The Praise of Folly” and we happen to know how it came to be written.
It was in the year 1515 that the world had been startled by a pamphlet written so cleverly that no one could tell whether it was meant as an attack upon the friars or as a defense of the monastic life. No name appeared upon the title page, but those who knew what was what in the world of letters recognized the somewhat unsteady hand of one Ulrich von Hutten. And they guessed right; for that talented young man, poet laureate and town bum extraordinary, had taken no mean share in the production of this gross but useful piece of buffoonery and he was proud of it. When he heard that no one less than Thomas More, the famous champion of the New Learning in England, had spoken well of his work, he wrote to Erasmus and asked him for particulars.
Erasmus was no friend of von Hutten. His orderly mind (reflected in his orderly way of living) did not take kindly to those blowsy Teuton Ritters who spent their mornings and afternoons valiantly wielding pen and rapier for the cause of enlightenment and then retired to the nearest pot-house that they might forget the corruption of the times by drinking endless bumpers of sour beer.
But von Hutten, in his own way, was really a man of genius and Erasmus answered him civilly enough. Yea, as he wrote, he grew eloquent upon the virtues of his Londonfriend and depicted so charming a scene of domestic contentment that the household of Sir Thomas might well serve as a model for all other families until the end of time. It was in this letter that he mentions how More, himself a humorist of no small parts, had given him the original idea for his “Praise of Folly” and very likely it was the good-natured horse-play of the More establishment (a veritable Noah’s ark of sons and daughters-in-law and daughters and sons-in-law and birds and dogs and a private zoo and private theatricals and bands of amateur fiddlers) which had inspired him to write that delightful piece of nonsense with which his name is forever associated.
In some vague way the book reminds me of the Punch and Judy shows which for so many centuries were the only amusement of little Dutch children. Those Punch and Judy shows, with all the gross vulgarity of their dialogue, invariably maintained a tone of lofty moral seriousness. The hollow voiced figure of Death dominated the scene. One by one the other actors were forced to appear before this ragged hero and give an account of themselves. And one by one, to the everlasting delight of the youthful audience, they were knocked on the head with an enormous cudgel and were thrown on an imaginary scrap-heap.
In the “Praise of Folly,” the whole social fabric of the age is carefully taken apart while Folly, as a sort of inspired Coroner, stands by and favors the public at large with her comments. No one is spared. The whole of Medieval Main Street is ransacked for suitable characters. And of course, the go-getters of that day, the peddling friars of salvation with all their sanctimonius sales-talk, their gross ignorance and the futile pomposity of their arguments, came in for a drubbing which was never forgotten and never forgiven.
But the Pope and his cardinals and his bishops, incongruous successors to the poverty stricken fishermen and carpenters from the land of Galilee, were also on the bill and held the stage for several chapters.
The “Folly” of Erasmus however was a much more substantial personage than the usual Jack-in-the-Box of humorous literature. Throughout this little book (as indeed throughout everything he wrote) Erasmus preached a gospel of his own which one might call the philosophy of tolerance.
It was this willingness to live and let live; this insistence upon the spirit of the divine law rather than upon the commas and the semi-colons in the original version of that divine law; this truly human acceptance of religion as a system of ethics rather than as a form of government which made serious-minded Catholics and Protestants inveigh against Erasmus as a “godless knave” and an enemy of all true religion who “slandered Christ” but hid his real opinions behind the funny phrases of a clever little book.
This abuse (and it lasted until the day of his death) did not have any effect. The little man with the long pointed nose, who lived until the age of seventy at a time when the addition or omission of a single word from an established text might cause a man to be hanged, had no liking at all for the popular-hero business and he said so openly. He expected nothing from an appeal to swords and arquebusses and knew only too well the risk the world was running when a minor theological dispute was allowed to degenerate into an international religious war.
And so, like a gigantic beaver, he worked day and night to finish that famous dam of reason and common sense which he vaguely hoped might stem the waxing tide of ignorance and intolerance.
Of course he failed. It was impossible to stop those floods of ill-will and hatred which were sweeping down from the mountains of Germany and the Alps, and a few years after his death his work had been completely washed away.
But so well had he wrought that many bits of wreckage, thrown upon the shores of posterity, proved exceedingly good material for those irrepressible optimists who believe that some day we shall have a set of dykes that will actually hold.
Erasmus departed this life in July of the year 1586.
His sense of humor never deserted him. He died in the house of his publisher.