Johan Huizinga

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!

If only Erasmus had been less concerned about public opinion! But that seemed impossible: he had a fear of men, or, we may call it, a fervent need of justification. He would always see beforehand, and usually in exaggerated colours, the effect his word or deed would have upon men. Of himself, it was certainly true as he once wrote: that the craving for fame has less sharp spurs than the fear of ignominy. Erasmus is with Rousseau among those who cannot bear the consciousness of guilt, out of a sort of mental cleanliness. Not to be able to repay a benefit with interest, makes him ashamed and sad. He cannot abide 'dunning creditors, unperformed duty, neglect of the need of a friend'. If he cannot discharge the obligation, he explains it away. The Dutch historian Fruin has quite correctly observed: 'Whatever Erasmus did contrary to his duty and his rightly understood interests was the fault of circumstances or wrong advice; he is never to blame himself'. And what he has thus justified for himself becomes with him universal law: 'God relieves people of pernicious vows, if only they repent of them,' says the man who himself had broken a vow.

There is in Erasmus a dangerous fusion between inclination and conviction. The correlations between his idiosyncrasies and his precepts are undeniable. This has special reference to his point of view in the matter of fasting and abstinence from meat. He too frequently vents his own aversion to fish, or talks of his inability to postpone meals, not to make this connection clear to everybody. In the same way his personal experience in the monastery passes into his disapproval, on principle, of monastic life.

The distortion of the image of his youth in his memory, to which we have referred, is based on that need of self-justification. It is all unconscious interpretation of the undeniable facts to suit the ideal which Erasmus had made of himself and to which he honestly thinks he answers. The chief features of that self-conceived picture are a remarkable, simple sincerity and frankness, which make it impossible to him to dissemble; inexperience and carelessness in the ordinary concerns of life and a total lack of ambition. All this is true in the first instance: there is a superficial Erasmus who answers to that image, but it is not the whole Erasmus; there is a deeper one who is almost the opposite and whom he himself does not know because he will not know him. Possibly because behind this there is a still deeper being, which is truly good.

Does he not ascribe weaknesses to himself? Certainly. He is, in spite of his self-coddling, ever dissatisfied with himself and his work. Putidulus, he calls himself, meaning the quality of never being content with himself. It is that peculiarity which makes him dissatisfied with any work of his directly after it has appeared, so that he always keeps revising and supplementing. 'Pusillanimous' he calls himself in writing to Colet. But again he cannot help giving himself credit for acknowledging that quality, nay, converting that quality itself into a virtue: it is modesty, the opposite of boasting and self-love.

This bashfulness about himself is the reason that he does not love his own physiognomy, and is only persuaded with difficulty by his friends to sit for a portrait. His own appearance is not heroic or dignified enough for him, and he is not duped by an artist who flatters him: 'Heigh-ho,' he exclaims, on seeing Holbein's thumbnail sketch illustrating the Moria: 'if Erasmus still looked like that, he would take a wife at once'. It is that deep trait of dissatisfaction that suggests the inscription on his portraits: 'his writings will show you a better image'.

Erasmus's modesty and the contempt which he displays of the fame that fell to his lot are of a somewhat rhetorical character. But in this we should not so much see a personal trait of Erasmus as a general form common to all humanists. On the other hand, this mood cannot be called altogether artificial. His books, which he calls his children, have not turned out well. He does not think they will live. He does not set store by his letters: he publishes them because his friends insist upon it. He writes his poems to try a new pen. He hopes that geniuses will soon appear who will eclipse him, so that Erasmus will pass for a stammerer. What is fame? A pagan survival. He is fed up with it to repletion and would do nothing more gladly than cast it off.

Sometimes another note escapes him. If Lee would help him in his endeavours, Erasmus would make him immortal, he had told the former in their first conversation. And he threatens an unknown adversary, 'If you go on so impudently to assail my good name, then take care that my gentleness does not give way and I cause you to be ranked, after a thousand years, among the venomous sycophants, among the idle boasters, among the incompetent physicians'.

The self-centred element in Erasmus must needs increase accordingly as he in truth became a centre and objective point of ideas and culture. There really was a time when it must seem to him that the world hinged upon him, and that it awaited the redeeming word from him. What a widespread enthusiastic following he had, how many warm friends and venerators! There is something naÏve in the way in which he thinks it requisite to treat all his friends, in an open letter, to a detailed, rather repellent account of an illness that attacked him on the way back from Basle to Louvain. His part, his position, his name, this more and more becomes the aspect under which he sees world-events. Years will come in which his whole enormous correspondence is little more than one protracted self-defence.

Yet this man who has so many friends is nevertheless solitary at heart. And in the depth of that heart he desires to be alone. He is of a most retiring disposition; he is a recluse. 'I have always wished to be alone, and there is nothing I hate so much as sworn partisans.' Erasmus is one of those whom contact with others weakens. The less he has to address and to consider others, friends or enemies, the more truly he utters his deepest soul. Intercourse with particular people always causes little scruples in him, intentional amenities, coquetry, reticences, reserves, spiteful hits, evasions. Therefore it should not be thought that we get to know him to the core from his letters. Natures like his, which all contact with men unsettles, give their best and deepest when they speak impersonally and to all.

After the early effusions of sentimental affection he no longer opens his heart unreservedly to others. At bottom he feels separated from all and on the alert towards all. There is a great fear in him that others will touch his soul or disturb the image he has made of himself. The attitude of warding off reveals itself as fastidiousness and as bashfulness. Budaeus hit the mark when he exclaimed jocularly: 'Fastidiosule! You little fastidious person!' Erasmus himself interprets the dominating trait of his being as maidenly coyness. The excessive sensitiveness to the stain attaching to his birth results from it. But his friend Ammonius speaks of his subrustica verecundia, his somewhat rustic gaucherie. There is, indeed, often something of the small man about Erasmus, who is hampered by greatness and therefore shuns the great, because, at bottom, they obsess him and he feels them to be inimical to his being.

It seems a hard thing to say that genuine loyalty and fervent gratefulness were strange to Erasmus. And yet such was his nature. In characters like his a kind of mental cramp keeps back the effusions of the heart. He subscribes to the adage: 'Love so, as if you may hate one day, and hate so, as if you may love one day'. He cannot bear benefits. In his inmost soul he continually retires before everybody. He who considers himself the pattern of simple unsuspicion, is indeed in the highest degree suspicious towards all his friends. The dead Ammonius, who had helped him so zealously in the most delicate concerns, is not secure from it. 'You are always unfairly distrustful towards me,' Budaeus complains. 'What!' exclaims Erasmus, 'you will find few people who are so little distrustful in friendship as myself.'

When at the height of his fame the attention of the world was indeed fixed on all he spoke or did, there was some ground for a certain feeling on his part of being always watched and threatened. But when he was yet an unknown man of letters, in his Parisian years, we continually find traces in him of a mistrust of the people about him that can only be regarded as a morbid feeling. During the last period of his life this feeling attaches especially to two enemies, Eppendorf and Aleander. Eppendorf employs spies everywhere who watch Erasmus's correspondence with his friends. Aleander continually sets people to combat him, and lies in wait for him wherever he can. His interpretation of the intentions of his assailants has the ingenious self-centred element which passes the borderline of sanity. He sees the whole world full of calumny and ambuscades threatening his peace: nearly all those who once were his best friends have become his bitterest enemies; they wag their venomous tongues at banquets, in conversation, in the confessional, in sermons, in lectures, at court, in vehicles and ships. The minor enemies, like troublesome vermin, drive him to weariness of life, or to death by insomnia. He compares his tortures to the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, pierced by arrows. But his is worse, for there is no end to it. For years he has daily been dying a thousand deaths and that alone; for his friends, if such there are, are deterred by envy.

He mercilessly pillories his patrons in a row for their stinginess. Now and again there suddenly comes to light an undercurrent of aversion and hatred which we did not suspect. Where had more good things fallen to his lot than in England? Which country had he always praised more? But suddenly a bitter and unfounded reproach escapes him. England is responsible for his having become faithless to his monastic vows, 'for no other reason do I hate Britain more than for this, though it has always been pestilent to me'.

He seldom allows himself to go so far. His expressions of hatred or spite are, as a rule, restricted to the feline. They are aimed at friends and enemies, Budaeus, Lypsius, as well as Hutten and Beda. Occasionally we are struck by the expression of coarse pleasure at another's misfortune. But in all this, as regards malice, we should not measure Erasmus by our ideas of delicacy and gentleness. Compared with most of his contemporaries he remains moderate and refined.

Erasmus never felt happy, was never content. This may perhaps surprise us for a moment, when we think of his cheerful, never-failing energy, of his gay jests and his humour. But upon reflection this unhappy feeling tallies very well with his character. It also proceeds from his general attitude of warding off. Even when in high spirits he considers himself in all respects an unhappy man. 'The most miserable of all men, the thrice-wretched Erasmus,' he calls himself in fine Greek terms. His life 'is an Iliad of calamities, a chain of misfortunes. How can anyone envy me?' To no one has Fortune been so constantly hostile as to him. She has sworn his destruction, thus he sang in his youth in a poetical complaint addressed to Gaguin: from earliest infancy the same sad and hard fate has been constantly pursuing him. Pandora's whole box seems to have been poured out over him.

This unhappy feeling takes the special form of his having been charged by unlucky stars with Herculean labour, without profit or pleasure to himself:[16] troubles and vexations without end. His life might have been so much easier if he had taken his chances. He should never have left Italy; or he ought to have stayed in England. 'But an immoderate love of liberty caused me to wrestle long with faithless friends and inveterate poverty.' Elsewhere he says more resignedly: 'But we are driven by fate'.

That immoderate love of liberty had indeed been as fate to him. He had always been the great seeker of quiet and liberty who found liberty late and quiet never. By no means ever to bind himself, to incur no obligations which might become fetters—again that fear of the entanglements of life. Thus he remained the great restless one. He was never truly satisfied with anything, least of all with what he produced himself. 'Why, then, do you overwhelm us with so many books', someone at Louvain objected, 'if you do not really approve of any of them?' And Erasmus answers with Horace's word: 'In the first place, because I cannot sleep'.

A sleepless energy, it was that indeed. He cannot rest. Still half seasick and occupied with his trunks, he is already thinking about an answer to Dorp's letter, just received, censuring the Moria. We should fully realize what it means that time after time Erasmus, who, by nature, loved quiet and was fearful, and fond of comfort, cleanliness and good fare, undertakes troublesome and dangerous journeys, even voyages, which he detests, for the sake of his work and of that alone.

He is not only restless, but also precipitate. Helped by an incomparably retentive and capacious memory he writes at haphazard. He never becomes anacoluthic; his talent is too refined and sure for that; but he does repeat himself and is unnecessarily circumstantial. 'I rather pour out than write everything,' he says. He compares his publications to parturitions, nay, to abortions. He does not select his subjects, he tumbles into them, and having once taken up a subject he finishes without intermission. For years he has read only tumultuarie, up and down all literature; he no longer finds time really to refresh his mind by reading, and to work so as to please himself. On that account he envied Budaeus.

'Do not publish too hastily,' More warns him: 'you are watched to be caught in inexactitudes.' Erasmus knows it: he will correct all later, he will ever have to revise and to polish everything. He hates the labour of revising and correcting, but he submits to it, and works passionately, 'in the treadmill of Basle', and, he says, finishes the work of six years in eight months.

In that recklessness and precipitation with which Erasmus labours there is again one of the unsolved contradictions of his being. He is precipitate and careless; he wants to be careful and cautious; his mind drives him to be the first, his nature restrains him, but usually only after the word has been written and published. The result is a continual intermingling of explosion and reserve.

The way in which Erasmus always tries to shirk definite statements irritates us. How carefully he always tries to represent the Colloquies, in which he had spontaneously revealed so much of his inner convictions, as mere trifling committed to paper to please his friends. They are only meant to teach correct Latin! And if anything is said in them touching matters of faith, it is not I who say it, is it? As often as he censures classes or offices in the Adagia, princes above all, he warns the readers not to regard his words as aimed at particular persons.

Erasmus was a master of reserve. He knew, even when he held definite views, how to avoid direct decisions, not only from caution, but also because he saw the eternal ambiguity of human issues.

Erasmus ascribes to himself an unusual horror of lies. On seeing a liar, he says, he was corporeally affected. As a boy he already violently disliked mendacious boys, such as the little braggart of whom he tells in the Colloquies. That this reaction of aversion is genuine is not contradicted by the fact that we catch Erasmus himself in untruths. Inconsistencies, flattery, pieces of cunning, white lies, serious suppression of facts, simulated sentiments of respect or sorrow—they may all be pointed out in his letters. He once disavowed his deepest conviction for a gratuity from Anne of Borselen by flattering her bigotry. He requested his best friend Batt to tell lies in his behalf. He most sedulously denied his authorship of the Julius dialogue, for fear of the consequences, even to More, and always in such a way as to avoid saying outright, 'I did not write it'. Those who know other humanists, and know how frequently and impudently they lied, will perhaps think more lightly of Erasmus's sins.

For the rest, even during his lifetime he did not escape punishment for his eternal reserve, his proficiency in semi-conclusions and veiled truths, insinuations and slanderous allusions. The accusation of perfidy was often cast in his teeth, sometimes in serious indignation. 'You are always engaged in bringing suspicion upon others,' Edward Lee exclaims. 'How dare you usurp the office of a general censor, and condemn what you have hardly ever tasted? How dare you despise all but yourself? Falsely and insultingly do you expose your antagonist in the Colloquia.' Lee quotes the spiteful passage referring to himself, and then exclaims: 'Now from these words the world may come to know its divine, its censor, its modest and sincere author, that Erasmian diffidence, earnest, decency and honesty! Erasmian modesty has long been proverbial. You are always using the words "false accusations". You say: if I was consciously guilty of the smallest of all his (Lee's) false accusations, I should not dare to approach the Lord's table!—O man, who are you, to judge another, a servant who stands or falls before his Lord?'

This was the first violent attack from the conservative side, in the beginning of 1520, when the mighty struggle which Luther's action had unchained kept the world in ever greater suspense. Six months later followed the first serious reproaches on the part of radical reformers. Ulrich von Hutten, the impetuous, somewhat foggy-headed knight, who wanted to see Luther's cause triumph as the national cause of Germany, turns to Erasmus, whom, at one time, he had enthusiastically acclaimed as the man of the new weal, with the urgent appeal not to forsake the cause of the reformation or to compromise it. 'You have shown yourself fearful in the affair of Reuchlin; now in that of Luther you do your utmost to convince his adversaries that you are altogether averse from it, though we know better. Do not disown us. You know how triumphantly certain letters of yours are circulated, in which, to protect yourself from suspicion, you rather meanly fasten it on others ... If you are now afraid to incur a little hostility for my sake, concede me at least that you will not allow yourself, out of fear for another, to be tempted to renounce me; rather be silent about me.'

Those were bitter reproaches. In the man who had to swallow them there was a puny Erasmus who deserved those reproaches, who took offence at them, but did not take them to heart, who continued to act with prudent reserve till Hutten's friendship was turned to hatred. In him was also a great Erasmus who knew how, under the passion and infatuation with which the parties combated each other, the Truth he sought, and the Love he hoped would subdue the world, were obscured; who knew the God whom he professed too high to take sides. Let us try ever to see of that great Erasmus as much as the petty one permits.

FOOTNOTES:

[15] Cf. the letter to Beatus Rhenanus, pp. 227-8.