The Age of Erasmus by P. S. Allen

P >> P. S. Allen >> The Age of Erasmus

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18

As Fabri made his way along, his heart was glad. His foot was on holy
ground, and at every step new associations came floating into his
thoughts. These were the mountains to which Moses had looked from
Pisgah; here Jephthah's daughter had made plaint for her young life;
hither had come Mary in the joy of the angel's message; the stones on
which he stumbled might have felt the feet of Christ. At the hill
called Mount Joy they should have seen Jerusalem; but the air was
thick, and they could only make out the Mount of Olives. So they
toiled on along their dusty way, between dry stone walls and thirsty
vegetable-gardens, until, as they reached the crest of a low ridge,
suddenly like a flash of light it shone before them, the City, the
Holy City.

At once their footsteps quickened with new life; and when at length
they found themselves in the courtyard of the Church of the Holy
Sepulchre, their pent-up emotions burst forth, into tears and groans,
sweet wailings and deep sighs. Some lay powerless on the ground,
forsaken by their strength and to all appearances dead. Others drifted
from one corner to another, beating their breasts, as though urged by
an evil spirit. Some knelt bare-kneed; as they prayed, stretching out
their arms like a rood. Others were shaken with such violent sobs that
they could only sit down and hold their heads in their hands. Some
lost all command of themselves, and, forgetting how to behave, sought
to please God with strange and childish gestures. On the other hand,
Fabri noted some who stood quite unmoved, and merely mocked at the
strange display: dull, unprofitable souls he calls them, brute beasts,
not having the spirit of God. Their self-contained temperament
misliked him, especially as thereafter they held aloof from those who
had given way to such enthusiasm or, as they felt it, weakness.

We cannot company with the party to all the numerous sites that piety
bade them visit. It was prodigiously fatiguing for them under the July
sun, and the ranks grew thin as the weaker spirits fell out dead
tired, to rest awhile in hospitable cloister or by cooling well. Fabri
found it very toilsome to struggle after mental abstraction, to rise
to such heights as he desired of devotion and comprehension of all the
holy influences around him, to seize every opportunity of
contemplation and lose nothing; being soon thoroughly exhausted with
his bodily exertions. Some alleviation there was: when holy
women--nuns of his own Order, who had a house in Jerusalem--washed his
scapular and tunic for him, and wrought other works of charity for
which he was very grateful.

The pilgrims had been warned not to wander away from their party. One
day as they went to the Dead Sea, they halted at a monastery; and
Fabri was tempted to ramble off alone to inspect a cliff which had
been hollowed out by hermits into innumerable caves. It was a
precipitous place; and at one point, where the path was narrow and the
cliff fell sheer below, he encountered an Eastern Christian. Seeing
that Fabri was afraid, the fellow began to trifle with him and
demanded money; and in the end Fabri was obliged to open his slender
purse. 'Ever since then', he says, 'I have abhorred the company of
Christians of that sort more than that of Saracens and Arabs, and have
trusted them less. Though perhaps he would not have thrown me down
the precipice, even had I given him nothing, yet it was wicked of him
to play with me in a place of such danger. If an Arab had done so, I
should have been pleased at his play, and should have held him to be a
good pagan; but I believe no good of that Christian.' When he rejoined
his party, the patron told him that the Eastern Christians were least
to be trusted of any men.

On arrival at Jordan there was much excitement. To bathe in that
ancient river was thought to renew youth, and so all the pilgrims were
eager to immerse themselves; even women of 80--a rather doubtful
figure--plunging into the lukewarm stream. Some had brought bells to
be blessed with Jordan water, others strips of material for clothes;
and wealthier members of the party jumped in as they were, in order
that the robes they had on might bring them luck in the future. Three
things were forbidden to the pilgrims: (1) to swim across the stream,
because in the excitement of emotion and amongst such crowds
individuals had often been drowned; (2) to dive in, because the bottom
was muddy; (3) to carry away phials of Jordan water. The first
regulation was openly violated. On his first journey Fabri had swum
across, but on the return had been seized with panic and nearly
drowned. So this time he contented himself with drawing up his
garments round his neck and sitting down in the shallow water among
the crowd who were splashing about and jestingly baptizing one
another. The prohibition of Jordan water was to appease the shipmen;
for it was thought to cause storms when carried over the sea.

We have not time to follow Fabri in more detail. On 24 August he left
Jerusalem with a small company of pilgrims who had not been deterred
from undertaking the journey to Sinai. There was much dispute about
the route they should follow. Some were for going by sea to
Alexandria, others wished to march down the sea coast; but finally
they made up their minds to go straight South across the desert.
Starting from Gaza on 9 September they reached St. Catherine's on the
22nd. Five days of very hard work sufficed for them to see all the
sacred sites and ascend the many towering peaks; and here again Fabri
impressed upon his companions that the days of miracles were over, and
that in these evil times God would show no more. On 27 September they
set forth again, and journeying through Midian reached Cairo on 8
October; having picked up on the shore of the Red Sea oyster shells
which should be an abiding witness of their pilgrimage. On 5 November
they set sail from Alexandria; but summer had departed from the sea,
and the winds blew obstinately. Three times they beat up to Cape
Malea, before they could round the point and make sail for the North;
and it was not till 8 Jan. 1484 that they landed in Venice. The
pilgrimage was over after seven months, and with what Guilford's
chaplain calls 'large departing of our money'.

X

THE TRANSALPINE RENAISSANCE

Hitherto we have viewed the age mainly through the personality of
individuals. It remains to consider some of the features of the
Renaissance when it had spread across the Alps--to France, to Spain,
to Switzerland, to Germany, to England--and some of the contrasts that
it presents with the earlier movement in Italy. The story of the
Italian Renaissance has often been told; and we need not go back upon
it here. On the side of the revival of learning it was without doubt
the great age. The importance of its discoveries, the fervour of its
enthusiasm have never been equalled. But though it remains
pre-eminent, the period that followed it has an interest of its own
which is hardly less keen and presents the real issues at stake in a
clearer light. Awakened Italy felt itself the heiress of Rome, and
thus patriotism coloured its enthusiasm for the past. To the rest of
Western Europe this source of inspiration was not open. They were
compelled to examine more closely the aims before them; and thus
attained to a calmer and truer estimate of what they might hope to
gain from the study of the classics. It was not the revival of lost
glories, thoughts of a world held in the bonds of peace: in those
dreams the Transalpines had only the part of the conquered. Rather the
classics led them back to an age before Christianity; and pious souls
though they were, the scholar's instinct told them that they would
find there something to learn. Christianity had fixed men's eyes on
the future, on their own salvation in the life to come; and had
trained all knowledge, even Aristotle, to serve that end. In the great
days of Greece and Rome the world was free from this absorbing
preoccupation; and inquiring spirits were at liberty to find such
truth as they could, not merely the truth that they wished or must.

Another point of difference between Italy and the Transalpines is in
the resistance offered to the Renaissance in the two regions. The
scholastic philosophy and theology was a creation of the North. The
greatest of the Schoolmen found their birth or training in France or
Germany, at the schools of Paris and Cologne; and with the names of
Duns, Hales, Holcot, Occam, Burley and Bradwardine our own islands
stand well to the fore. The situation is thus described by Aldus in a
letter written to the young prince of Carpi in October 1499, to
rejoice over some translations from the Greek just arrived from
Linacre in England: 'Of old it was barbarous learning that came to us
from Britain; it conquered Italy and still holds our castles. But now
they send us learned eloquence; with British aid we shall chase away
barbarity and come by our own again.' The teaching of the Schoolmen
made its way into Italy, but had little vogue; and with the Church,
through such Popes as Nicholas V, on the side of the Renaissance,
resistance almost disappeared. The humanists charging headlong
dissipated their foes in a moment, but were soon carried beyond the
field of battle, to fall into the hands of the forces of reaction.
Across the Alps, on the other hand, the Church and the universities
stood together and looked askance at the new movement, dreading what
it might bring forth. In consequence the ground was only won by slow
and painful efforts, but each advance, as it was made, was secured.

The position may be further illustrated by comparing the first
productions of the press on either side of the Alps: in the early
days, before the export trade had developed, and when books were
produced mainly for the home market. The Germans who brought the art
down into Italy, Sweynheym and Pannartz at Rome, Wendelin and Jenson
at Venice, printed scarcely anything that was not classical: Latin
authors and Latin translations from the Greek. Up in the North the
first printers of Germany, Fust and Schoeffer at Mainz, Mentelin at
Strasburg, rarely overstepped the boundaries of the mediaeval world
that was passing away or the modern that was taking its place.

The appearance of the _Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum_ in 1515 exposed
the scholastic teachers and their allies in the Church to such
widespread ridicule that it is not easy for us now to realize the
position which those dignitaries still held when Erasmus was young.
The stream of contempt poured upon them by the triumphant humanists
obscures the merit of their system as a gigantic and complete engine
of thought. Under its great masters, Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas,
Duns Scotus, scholasticism had been rounded into an instrument capable
of comprehending all knowledge and of expressing every refinement of
thought; and, as has been well said, the acute minds that created it,
if only they had extended their inquiries into natural science, might
easily have anticipated by centuries the discoveries of modern
days.[39] In expressing their distinctions the Schoolmen had thrown to
the winds the restraints of classical Latin and the care of elegance;
and with many of them language had degenerated into jargon. But in
their own eyes their position was unassailable. Their philosophy was
founded on Aristotle; and while they were proud of their master, they
were prouder still of the system they had created in his name: and
thus they felt no impulse to look backwards to the past.

[39] Cf. F.G. Stokes, _Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum_, 1909, p.
xvii.

In the matter of language they had been led by a spirit of reaction.
The literature of later classical times had sacrificed matter to form;
and the schools had been dominated by teachers who trained boys to
declaim in elegant periods on any subject whatever, regardless of its
content; thus carrying to an extreme the precepts with which the great
orators had enforced the importance of style. The Schoolmen swung the
pendulum back, letting sound and froth go and thinking only of their
subject-matter, despising the classics. In their turn they were
confronted by the humanists, who reasserted the claims of form.

There was sense in the humanist contention. It is very easy to say the
right thing in the wrong way; in other spheres than diplomacy the
choice of language is important. Words have a history of their own,
and often acquire associations independent of their meaning. Rhythm,
too, and clearness need attention. An unbalanced sentence goes
haltingly and jars; an ambiguous pronoun causes the reader to stumble.
An ill-written book, an ill-worded speech fail of their effects; it is
not merely by sympathy and character that men persuade. But of course
the humanists pushed the matter too far. Pendulums do not reach the
repose of the mean without many tos and fros. Elegance is good, but
the art of reasoning is not to be neglected. Of the length to which
they went Ascham's method of instruction in the _Scholemaster_ (1570)
is a good example. He wished his scholar to translate Cicero into
English, and then from the English to translate back into the actual
words of the Latin. The Ciceronians did not believe that the same
thing could be well said in many ways; rather there was one way which
transcended all others, and that Cicero had attained. Erasmus,
however, was no Ciceronian; and one of the reasons why he won such a
hold upon his own and subsequent generations was that, more than all
his contemporaries, he succeeded in establishing a reasonable accord
between the claims of form and matter in literature.

In their neglect of the classics the Schoolmen had a powerful ally.
For obvious reasons the early and the mediaeval Church felt that much
of classical literature was injurious to the minds of the young, and
in consequence discouraged the use of it in schools. The classics were
allowed to perish, and their place was taken by Christian poets such
as Prudentius or Juvencus, by moralizations of Aesop, patchwork
compositions known as 'centos' on Scriptural themes, and the like. The
scholars, therefore, who went to Italy and came home to the North
carrying the new enthusiasm, had strenuous opposition to encounter.
The Schoolmen considered them impertinent, the Church counted them
immoral. To us who know which way the conflict ended, the savage blows
delivered by the humanists seem mere brutality; they lash their fallen
foes with what appears inhuman ferocity. But the truth is that the
struggle was not finished until well into the sixteenth century. Biel
of Tubingen, 'the last of the Schoolmen', lived till 1495. Between
1501 and 1515 a single printer, Wolff of Basle, produced five massive
volumes of the _Summae_ of mediaeval Doctors. Through the greater
part, therefore, of Erasmus' life the upholders of the old systems and
ideals, firmly entrenched by virtue of possession, succeeded in
maintaining their supremacy in the schools.

Between the two periods of the revival of learning, the Italian and
the Transalpine, a marked line is drawn by the invention of printing,
_c._ 1455: when the one movement had run half its course, the other
scarcely begun. The achievements of the press in the diffusion of
knowledge are often extolled; and some of the resulting good and evil
is not hard to see. But the paramount service rendered to learning by
the printer's art was that it made possible a standard of critical
accuracy which was so much higher than what was known before as to be
almost a new creation. When books were manuscripts, laboriously
written out one at a time, there could be no security of identity
between original and copy; and even when a number of copies were made
from the same original, there was a practical certainty that there
would be no absolute uniformity among them. Mistakes were bound to
occur; not always at the same point, but here in one manuscript, there
in another. Or again, when two unrelated copies of the same book were
brought together, there was an antecedent probability that examination
would reveal differences: so that in general it was impossible to feel
that a fellow-scholar working on the same author was using the same
text.

Even with writers of one's own day uniformity was hardly to be
attained. Not uncommonly, as a mark of attention, an author revised
manuscript copies of his works, which were to be presented to friends;
and besides correcting the copyists' errors, might add or cut out or
alter passages according to his later judgement. Subsequent copies
would doubtless follow his revision, and then the process might be
repeated; with the result that a reader could not tell to what stage
in the evolution of a work the text before him might belong: whether
it represented the earliest form of composition or the final form
reached perhaps many years afterwards. To understand the conditions
under which mediaeval scholars worked, it is of the utmost importance
to realize this state of uncertainty and flux.

Not that in manuscript days there was indifference to accuracy.
Serious scholars and copyists laid great stress upon it. With
insistent fervour they implored one another to be careful, and to
collate what had been copied. But there are limits to human powers.
Collation is a dull business; and unless done with minute attention,
cannot be expected to yield perfect correctness. When a man has copied
a work of any length, it is hard for him to collate it with the
original slowly. Physically, of course, he easily might: but the
spirit is weak, and, weary of the ground already traversed once, urges
him to hurry forward, with the inevitable result.

With a manuscript, too, the possible reward might well seem scarcely
worth the labour; for how could any permanence be ensured for critical
work? A scholar might expend his efforts over a corrupt author, might
compare his own manuscript with others far and near, and at length
arrive at a text really more correct. And yet what hope had he that
his labour was not lost? His manuscript would pass at his death into
other hands and might easily be overlooked and even perish. Like a
child's castle built upon the sand, his work would be overwhelmed by
the rising tide of oblivion. Such conditions are disheartening.

Thus mediaeval standards of accuracy were of necessity low. In default
of good instruments we content ourselves with those we have. To draw a
line straight we use a ruler; but if one is not to be had, the edge of
a book or a table may supply its place. In the last resort we draw
roughly by hand, but with no illusions as to our success. So it was
with the scholar of the Middle Ages. His instruments were imperfect;
and he acquiesced in the best standards he could get: realizing no
doubt their defects, but knowing no better way.

But with printing the position was at once changed. When the type had
been set up, it was possible to strike off a thousand copies of a
book, each of which was identical with all the rest. It became worth
while to spend abundant pains over seeking a good text and correcting
the proofs--though this latter point was not perceived at first--when
there was the assured prospect of such uniformity to follow. One
edition could be distinguished from another by the dates on title-page
and colophon; and work once done was done for all time, if enough
copies of a book were taken off. This necessarily produced a great
change in methods of study. Instead of a single manuscript, in places
perhaps hopelessly entangled, and always at the mercy of another
manuscript of equal or greater authority that might appear from the
blue with different readings, the scholar received a text which
represented a recension of, it may be, several manuscripts, and whose
roughnesses had been smoothed out by the care of editors more or less
competent.

The precious volumes to which modern book-lovers reverently give the
title of 'Editio princeps', had almost as great honour in their own
day, before the credit of priority and antiquity had come to them; for
in them men saw the creation of a series of 'standard texts', norms to
which, until they were superseded, all future work upon the same
ground could be referred. As a result, too, of the improved
correctness of the texts, instead of being satisfied with the general
sense of an author, men were able to base edifices of precise argument
upon the verbal meaning of passages, in some confidence that their
structures would not be overset.

But the new invention was not universally acclaimed. Trithemius with
his conservative mind quickly detected some weaknesses; and in 1492 he
composed a treatise 'In praise of scribes', in vain attempt to arrest
the flowing tide. 'Let no one say, "Why should I trouble to write
books, when they are appearing continually in such numbers? for a
moderate sum one can acquire a large library." What a difference
between the results achieved! A manuscript written on parchment will
last a thousand years: books printed on paper will scarcely live two
hundred. Besides, there will always be something to copy: not
everything can be printed. Even if it could, a true scribe ought not
to give up. His pen can perpetuate good works which otherwise would
soon perish. He must not be amazed by the present abundance that he
sees, but should look forward to the needs of the future. Though we
had thousands of volumes, we must not cease writing; for printed books
are never so good. Indeed they usually pay little heed to ornament and
orthography.' It is noticeable that only in this last point does
Trithemius claim for manuscripts superior accuracy. In the matter of
permanence we may wonder what he would have thought of modern paper.

The first advance, then, rendered possible by the invention of
printing was to more uniform and better texts: the next step forward
was no less important. To scholars content with the general sense of a
work, a translation might be as acceptable as the original. Improved
standards of accuracy led men to perceive that an author must be
studied in his own tongue: in order that no shade of meaning might be
lost. Here again the two periods are easily distinguished. Nicholas V
set his scholars, Poggio and Valla, to translate the Greeks, Herodotus
and Thucydides, Aristotle and Diodorus. The feature of the later epoch
is the number of Greek editions which came out to supplant the
versions in common use. The credit for this advance in critical
scholarship must be given to Aldus for his Greek Aristotle, which
appeared in 1495-9; and he subsequently led the way with numerous
texts of the Greek classics. At the same time he proposed to apply the
same principle to Biblical study. As early as 1499 Grocin in a letter
alludes to Aldus' scheme of printing the whole Bible in the original
'three languages', Hebrew, Greek and Latin; and a specimen was
actually put forth in 1501.

In this matter precedence might seem to lie with the Jewish printers,
who produced the Psalms in Hebrew in 1477, and the Old Testament
complete in 1488; but as the Jews never at any period ceased to read
their Scriptures in Hebrew, there was no question of recovery of an
original. Aldus did not live to carry his scheme out; and it was left
to Ximenes and the band of scholars that he gathered at Alcala, to
produce the first edition of the Bible complete in the original
tongues, the Complutensian Polyglott, containing the Hebrew side by
side with the Septuagint and the Vulgate, and for the Pentateuch a
Syriac paraphrase. The New Testament in this great enterprise was
finished in 1514, and the whole work was ready by 1517, shortly before
Ximenes' death. But as publication was delayed till 1522, the actual
priority rests with Erasmus, whose New Testament in Greek with a Latin
translation by himself appeared, as we have seen, in 1516.

Thus by an accident Germany gained the credit of being the first to
assert this new principle, the importance of studying texts in the
original, in the field where resistance is most resolute and victory
is hardly won. And now it was about to enter upon a still greater
contest. Erasmus' New Testament encountered hostile criticism in many
quarters: conservative theologians made common cause with the friars
in condemning it. But at the very centre of the religion they
professed, the book was blessed by the chief priests. The Pope
accepted the dedication, and bishops wished they could read the Greek.
Far otherwise was it with the impending struggle of the Reformation:
there the cleavage of sides followed very different lines. Into that
wide field we cannot now expatiate; but it is important to notice an
element which the German Renaissance contributed to the Reformation,
and which played a considerable part in both movements--the
accentuation of German national feeling.

At the middle of the fifteenth century Italy enjoyed undisputed
pre-eminence in the world of learning. The sudden splendour into which
the Renaissance had blazed up on Italian soil drew men's eyes thither
more than ever; and to its ancient universities students from the
North swarmed like bees. To graduate in Italy, to hear its famous
doctors, perhaps even to learn from one of the native Greeks brought
over out of the East, became first the ambition, and then the
indispensable requirement of every Northern scholar who could afford
it; and few of Erasmus' friends and colleagues had not at some time or
other made the pilgrimage to Italy. Consequence and success brought
the usual Nemesis. The Italian _hubris_ expressed itself in the
familiar Greek distinction between barbarian and home-born; and the
many nations from beyond the Alps found themselves united in a common
bond which they were not eager to share. We have seen the kind of gibe
with which Agricola's eloquence was greeted at Pavia. The more such
insults are deserved, the more they sting. We may be sure that in many
cases they were not forgotten. Celtis returning from Italy to
Ingolstadt in 1492 delivered his soul in an inaugural oration: 'The
ancient hatred between us can never be dissolved. But for the Alps we
should be eternally at war.' In other countries the feeling, though
less acute, was much the same. Thus in 1517 spoke Stephen Poncher,
bishop of Paris, after his first meeting with Erasmus: 'Italy has no
one to compare with him in literary gifts. In our own day Hermolaus
and Politian have rescued Latin from barbarism; and their services can
never be forgotten. When I was there, too, I met a number of men of
rare ability and learning. But with all respect to the Italians, I
must say that Erasmus eclipses every one, Transalpine and Cisalpine
alike.'

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18