Johan Huizinga

Erasmus's mind: Intellectual tendencies—The world encumbered by beliefs and forms—Truth must be simple—Back to the pure sources—Holy Scripture in the original languages—Biblical humanism—Critical work on the texts of Scripture—Practice better than dogma—Erasmus's talent and wit—Delight in words and things—Prolixity—Observation of details—A veiled realism—Ambiguousness—The 'Nuance'—Inscrutability of the ultimate ground of all things

Simplicity, naturalness, purity, and reasonableness, those are to Erasmus the dominant requirements, also when we pass from his ethical and aesthetic concepts to his intellectual point of view; indeed, the two can hardly be kept apart.

The world, says Erasmus, is overloaded with human constitutions and opinions and scholastic dogmas, and overburdened with the tyrannical authority of orders, and because of all this the strength of gospel doctrine is flagging. Faith requires simplification, he argued. What would the Turks say of our scholasticism? Colet wrote to him one day: 'There is no end to books and science. Let us, therefore, leave all roundabout roads and go by a short cut to the truth.'

Truth must be simple. 'The language of truth is simple, says Seneca; well then, nothing is simpler nor truer than Christ.' 'I should wish', Erasmus says elsewhere, 'that this simple and pure Christ might be deeply impressed upon the mind of men, and that I deem best attainable in this way, that we, supported by our knowledge of the original languages, should philosophize at the sources themselves.'

Here a new watchword comes to the fore: back to the sources! It is not merely an intellectual, philological requirement; it is equally an ethical and aesthetic necessity of life. The original and pure, all that is not yet overgrown or has not passed through many hands, has such a potent charm. Erasmus compared it to an apple which we ourselves pick off the tree. To recall the world to the ancient simplicity of science, to lead it back from the now turbid pools to those living and most pure fountain-heads, those most limpid sources of gospel doctrine—thus he saw the task of divinity. The metaphor of the limpid water is not without meaning here; it reveals the psychological quality of Erasmus's fervent principle.

'How is it', he exclaims, 'that people give themselves so much trouble about the details of all sorts of remote philosophical systems and neglect to go to the sources of Christianity itself?' 'Although this wisdom, which is so excellent that once for all it put the wisdom of all the world to shame, may be drawn from these few books, as from a crystalline source, with far less trouble than is the wisdom of Aristotle from so many thorny books and with much more fruit.... The equipment for that journey is simple and at everyone's immediate disposal. This philosophy is accessible to everybody. Christ desires that his mysteries shall be spread as widely as possible. I should wish that all good wives read the Gospel and Paul's Epistles; that they were translated into all languages; that out of these the husbandman sang while ploughing, the weaver at his loom; that with such stories the traveller should beguile his wayfaring.... This sort of philosophy is rather a matter of disposition than of syllogisms, rather of life than of disputation, rather of inspiration than of erudition, rather of transformation than of logic.... What is the philosophy of Christ, which he himself calls Renascentia, but the insaturation of Nature created good?—moreover, though no one has taught us this so absolutely and effectively as Christ, yet also in pagan books much may be found that is in accordance with it.'

Such was the view of life of this biblical humanist. As often as Erasmus reverts to these matters, his voice sounds clearest. 'Let no one', he says in the preface to the notes to the New Testament, 'take up this work, as he takes up Gellius's Noctes atticae or Poliziano's Miscellanies.... We are in the presence of holy things; here it is no question of eloquence, these matters are best recommended to the world by simplicity and purity; it would be ridiculous to display human erudition here, impious to pride oneself on human eloquence.' But Erasmus never was so eloquent himself as just then.

What here raises him above his usual level of force and fervour is the fact that he fights a battle, the battle for the right of biblical criticism. It revolts him that people should study Holy Scripture in the Vulgate when they know that the texts show differences and are corrupt, although we have the Greek text by which to go back to the original form and primary meaning.

He is now reproached because he dares, as a mere grammarian, to assail the text of Holy Scripture on the score of futile mistakes or irregularities. 'Details they are, yes, but because of these details we sometimes see even great divines stumble and rave.' Philological trifling is necessary. 'Why are we so precise as to our food, our clothes, our money-matters and why does this accuracy displease us in divine literature alone? He crawls along the ground, they say, he wearies himself out about words and syllables! Why do we slight any word of Him whom we venerate and worship under the name of the Word? But, be it so! Let whoever wishes imagine that I have not been able to achieve anything better, and out of sluggishness of mind and coldness of heart or lack of erudition have taken this lowest task upon myself; it is still a Christian idea to think all work good that is done with pious zeal. We bring along the bricks, but to build the temple of God.'

He does not want to be intractable. Let the Vulgate be kept for use in the liturgy, for sermons, in schools, but he who, at home, reads our edition, will understand his own the better in consequence. He, Erasmus, is prepared to render account and acknowledge himself to have been wrong when convicted of error.

Erasmus perhaps never quite realized how much his philological-critical method must shake the foundations of the Church. He was surprised at his adversaries 'who could not but believe that all their authority would perish at once when the sacred books might be read in a purified form, and when people tried to understand them in the original'. He did not feel what the unassailable authority of a sacred book meant. He rejoices because Holy Scripture is approached so much more closely, because all sorts of shadings are brought to light by considering not only what is said but also by whom, for whom, at what time, on what occasion, what precedes and what follows, in short, by the method of historical philological criticism. To him it seemed so especially pious when reading Scripture and coming across a place which seemed contrary to the doctrine of Christ or the divinity of his nature, to believe rather that one did not understand the phrase or that the text might be corrupt. Unperceived he passed from emendation of the different versions to the correction of the contents. The epistles were not all written by the apostles to whom they are attributed. The apostles themselves made mistakes, at times.

The foundation of his spiritual life was no longer a unity to Erasmus. It was, on the one hand, a strong desire for an upright, simple, pure and homely belief, the earnest wish to be a good Christian. But it was also the irresistible intellectual and aesthetic need of the good taste, the harmony, the clear and exact expression of the Ancients, the dislike of what was cumbrous and involved. Erasmus thought that good learning might render good service for the necessary purification of the faith and its forms. The measure of church hymns should be corrected. That Christian expression and classicism were incompatible, he never believed. The man who in the sphere of sacred studies asked every author for his credentials remained unconscious of the fact that he acknowledged the authority of the Ancients without any evidence. How naÏvely he appeals to Antiquity, again and again, to justify some bold feat! He is critical, they say? Were not the Ancients critical? He permits himself to insert digressions? So did the Ancients, etc.

Erasmus is in profound sympathy with that revered Antiquity by his fundamental conviction that it is the practice of life which matters. Not he is the great philosopher who knows the tenets of the Stoics or Peripatetics by rote—but he who expresses the meaning of philosophy by his life and his morals, for that is its purpose. He is truly a divine who teaches, not by artful syllogisms, but by his disposition, by his face and his eyes, by his life itself, that wealth should be despised. To live up to that standard is what Christ himself calls Renascentia. Erasmus uses the word in the Christian sense only. But in that sense it is closely allied to the idea of the Renaissance as a historical phenomenon. The worldly and pagan sides of the Renaissance have nearly always been overrated. Erasmus is, much more than Aretino or Castiglione, the representative of the spirit of his age, one over whose Christian sentiment the sweet gale of Antiquity had passed. And that very union of strong Christian endeavour and the spirit of Antiquity is the explanation of Erasmus's wonderful success.

The mere intention and the contents of the mind do not influence the world, if the form of expression does not cooperate. In Erasmus the quality of his talent is a very important factor. His perfect clearness and ease of expression, his liveliness, wit, imagination, gusto and humour have lent a charm to all he wrote which to his contemporaries was irresistible and captivates even us, as soon as we read him. In all that constitutes his talent, Erasmus is perfectly and altogether a representative of the Renaissance. There is, in the first place, his eternal À propos. What he writes is never vague, never dark—it is always plausible. Everything seemingly flows of itself like a fountain. It always rings true as to tone, turn of phrase and accent. It has almost the light harmony of Ariosto. And it is, like Ariosto, never tragic, never truly heroic. It carries us away, indeed, but it is never itself truly enraptured.

The more artistic aspects of Erasmus's talent come out most clearly—though they are everywhere in evidence—in those two recreations after more serious labour, the Moriae Encomium and the Colloquia. But just those two have been of enormous importance for his influence upon his times. For while Jerome reached tens of readers and the New Testament hundreds, the Moria and Colloquies went out to thousands. And their importance is heightened in that Erasmus has nowhere else expressed himself so spontaneously.

In each of the Colloquies, even in the first purely formulary ones, there is the sketch for a comedy, a novelette or a satire. There is hardly a sentence without its 'point', an expression without a vivid fancy. There are unrivalled niceties. The abbot of the Abbatis et eruditae colloquium is a MoliÈre character. It should be noticed how well Erasmus always sustains his characters and his scenes, because he sees them. In 'The woman in childbed' he never forgets for a moment that Eutrapelus is an artist. At the end of 'The game of knucklebones', when the interlocutors, after having elucidated the whole nomenclature of the Latin game of knuckle-bones, are going to play themselves, Carolus says: 'but shut the door first, lest the cook should see us playing like two boys'.

As Holbein illustrated the Moria, we should wish to possess the Colloquia with illustrations by Brueghel, so closely allied is Erasmus's witty clear vision of incidents to that of this great master. The procession of drunkards on Palm Sunday, the saving of the shipwrecked crew, the old men waiting for the travelling cart while the drivers are still drinking, all these are Dutch genre pieces of the best sort.

We like to speak of the realism of the Renaissance. Erasmus is certainly a realist in the sense of having an insatiable hunger for knowledge of the tangible world. He wants to know things and their names: the particulars of each thing, be it never so remote, such as those terms of games and rules of games of the Romans. Read carefully the description of the decorative painting on the garden-house of the Convivium religiosum: it is nothing but an object lesson, a graphic representation of the forms of reality.

In its joy over the material universe and the supple, pliant word, the Renaissance revels in a profusion of imagery and expressions. The resounding enumerations of names and things, which Rabelais always gives, are not unknown to Erasmus, but he uses them for intellectual and useful purposes. In De copia verborum ac rerum one feat of varied power of expression succeeds another—he gives fifty ways of saying: 'Your letter has given me much pleasure,' or, 'I think that it is going to rain'. The aesthetic impulse is here that of a theme and variations: to display all the wealth and mutations of the logic of language. Elsewhere, too, Erasmus indulges this proclivity for accumulating the treasures of his genius; he and his contemporaries can never restrain themselves from giving all the instances instead of one: in Ratio verae theologiae, in De pronuntiatione, in Lingua, in Ecclesiastes. The collections of Adagia, Parabolae, and Apophthegmata are altogether based on this eagerness of the Renaissance (which, by the way, was an inheritance of the Middle Ages themselves) to luxuriate in the wealth of the tangible world, to revel in words and things.

The senses are open for the nice observation of the curious. Though Erasmus does not know that need of proving the secrets of nature, which inspired a Leonardo da Vinci, a Paracelsus, a Vesalius, he is also, by his keen observation, a child of his time. For peculiarities in the habits and customs of nations he has an open eye. He notices the gait of Swiss soldiers, how dandies sit, how Picards pronounce French. He notices that in old pictures the sitters are always represented with half-closed eyes and tightly shut lips, as signs of modesty, and how some Spaniards still honour this expression in life, while German art prefers lips pouting as for a kiss. His lively sense of anecdote, to which he gives the rein in all his writings, belongs here.

And, in spite of all his realism, the world which Erasmus sees and renders, is not altogether that of the sixteenth century. Everything is veiled by Latin. Between the author's mind and reality intervenes his antique diction. At bottom the world of his mind is imaginary. It is a subdued and limited sixteenth-century reality which he reflects. Together with its coarseness he lacks all that is violent and direct in his times. Compared with the artists, with Luther and Calvin, with the statesmen, the navigators, the soldiers and the scientists, Erasmus confronts the world as a recluse. It is only the influence of Latin. In spite of all his receptiveness and sensitiveness, Erasmus is never fully in contact with life. All through his work not a bird sings, not a wind rustles.

But that reserve or fear of directness is not merely a negative quality. It also results from a consciousness of the indefiniteness of the ground of all things, from the awe of the ambiguity of all that is. If Erasmus so often hovers over the borderline between earnestness and mockery, if he hardly ever gives an incisive conclusion, it is not only due to cautiousness, and fear to commit himself. Everywhere he sees the shadings, the blending of the meaning of words. The terms of things are no longer to him, as to the man of the Middle Ages, as crystals mounted in gold, or as stars in the firmament. 'I like assertions so little that I would easily take sides with the sceptics whereever it is allowed by the inviolable authority of Holy Scripture and the decrees of the Church.' 'What is exempt from error?' All subtle contentions of theological speculation arise from a dangerous curiosity and lead to impious audacity. What have all the great controversies about the Trinity and the Virgin Mary profited? 'We have defined so much that without danger to our salvation might have remained unknown or undecided.... The essentials of our religion are peace and unanimity. These can hardly exist unless we make definitions about as few points as possible and leave many questions to individual judgement. Numerous problems are now postponed till the oecumenical Council. It would be much better to put off such questions till the time when the glass shall be removed and the darkness cleared away, and we shall see God face to face.'

'There are sanctuaries in the sacred studies which God has not willed that we should probe, and if we try to penetrate there, we grope in ever deeper darkness the farther we proceed, so that we recognize, in this manner, too, the inscrutable majesty of divine wisdom and the imbecility of human understanding.'