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Candlelight Studies
For a youth who, like Erasmus, had no parents, resources, or connections, there was one common destination: the monastery. It offered safety, sustenance, and a clear path to salvation. Erasmus’s principal guardian, Pieter Winckel (the same stern, irascible man who had served as the headmaster of the school in Gouda), strongly supported this course and pressed both Erasmus and his brother Pieter to take it. They refused. Now about sixteen, Erasmus had become so devoted to literature and so intent on seeing the world that the idea of withdrawing from it seemed intolerable. He wanted to attend a university. His father had left a collection of manuscripts that he had copied and which, if sold, could bring a decent sum. In a letter that Erasmus sent to Winckel at the end of 1484—the first of his to have survived—he urged him to put the books on the market. “Time flies by on wingèd feet,” he wrote, quoting Ovid, with a flourish that would rankle Winckel.
In a compromise, Winckel arranged for the boys to attend a school run by the Brethren of the Common Life in ’s Hertogenbosch (Dutch for “the Duke’s Wood”), thirty-five miles southeast of Gouda. The Brethren, he hoped, would persuade them of the merits of monastic life. But just the opposite occurred. Erasmus by this point had a greater command of Latin than his teachers, and the more than two years he spent under their tutelage seemed to him a complete waste of time. One teacher who felt special regard for him, wanting to test him, charged him with an offense of which he was in fact innocent, then flogged him. When the teacher realized his error, he expressed regret, but too late for Erasmus. “This incident,” he wrote, “destroyed all love of study within me and flung my young mind into such a deep depression that I nearly wasted away with heart-break.” The main purpose of the Brethren, he concluded, was to break the spirit of boys through punishment and threats in order to make them fit for monastic life.
When an outbreak of the plague in ’s Hertogenbosch forced Erasmus and his brother to return to Gouda, they found to their dismay that Winckel had arranged for both to enter a monastery near Delft. Erasmus insisted that he was too young to take monastic vows, which, once made, could not be revoked. He would be in a better position to make such a judgment if he were first allowed to spend some years in study. His brother agreed. Winckel flew into a rage. Eager to be rid of his charges, he denounced them as worthless rascals and claimed there was no money left to support them. When that failed to move them, he enlisted a procession of men and women, frocked and unfrocked, to impress on them the benefits of the cloister and the perils of the world. To Erasmus’s fury, Pieter quickly gave in, but Erasmus himself held out.
While being thus badgered, however, he ran into an old friend who was living in a nearby monastery and who painted a blissful picture of the serenity and concord of monastic life. The cloister had a well-stocked library and allowed ample time for reading, and to Erasmus it sounded less like a monastery than a “garden of the Muses.”
His resistance was further weakened by the conflict then raging in the Dutch lands. It pitted the Kabeljauws (“Cods”) against the Hoeks (“Hooks,” a reference to a hooked stick used to catch cod). One side supported the governing House of Burgundy and the other opposed it; the result was an unending series of atrocities and outrages. Crops were burned, villages torched, laborers killed, trade ties disrupted by brigands, and prisoners broken on the wheel. These horrors would make a deep impression on Erasmus, providing the seeds for the antiwar views that would become so central to his reform program. They also made monastic life seem somewhat less repellent, for cloisters were generally spared attack. Facing an increasingly exasperated Winckel and anxious about the depletion of his inheritance, Erasmus finally gave in, and in 1486 or 1487 he entered the monastery of the Canons Regular of St. Augustine at Steyn, about a mile outside Gouda. Now nineteen or so, he was about to get a firsthand look at this hallowed precinct of Christian life.
Because the monastery at Steyn burned down in 1549, little is known of its physical layout, but it no doubt followed the basic plan of the medieval cloister—an abbey church with a long nave for processions, a rectangular courtyard where monks could take the air, a refectory for eating, a dormitory for sleeping, a lavatorium for washing, a guesthouse, an infirmary, servants’ quarters, and the necessarium, a latrine usually connected to the dormitory and located over a stream that could carry waste away. Like most monasteries, it would have been largely self-sufficient, with a bakery, barns, pigsties, chicken coops, a stable for horses and donkeys, a cowshed smelling of milk and manure, extensive gardens producing vegetables and medicinal herbs, and granaries that, even in winter, remained comfortably full. For Erasmus, however, the accommodations fell well short of his exacting standards, and he would later describe the monastery as “so much decayed, so unhealthy that it was scarcely fit for keeping cattle, let alone for such a delicate constitution.”
Erasmus was fortunate in one respect. The Canons Regular of St. Augustine followed a less severe regimen than that of many other orders. It loosely adhered to the Rule of St. Augustine—guidelines for a cloistered life drawn from the writings of Augustine of Hippo of the late fourth and early fifth centuries. The Augustinian Canons, as they were also known, were not strictly monks who lived a reclusive life but a type of priest who performed services in the outside world. Erasmus was initially a postulant, i.e., on probation; during this period, his desire to become a monk was tested. Fulfilling expectations, he moved on to his novitiate, a period lasting a year and a day that would culminate (if both parties agreed) in the taking of vows. As at all monasteries, the day was built around the canonical hours—seven sessions of prayer, beginning with matins at around two in the morning and ending with compline in the evening. Meals were simple and featured readings from the Bible and Church Fathers. Several hours a day were given over to individual prayers, the study of prescribed religious texts, and contemplation, plus manual chores like gardening, chopping wood, and copying manuscripts. Silence was enjoined, though not nearly as strictly as by more rigorous orders. The values were those of the Devotio Moderna: simplicity, modesty, tranquility.
When the delicacy of Erasmus’s constitution became clear, special allowances were made for him. On fast days, when the morning meal was postponed until early afternoon and meat and dairy products were proscribed, Erasmus would grow weak and so was permitted to take some food earlier in the day; because he loathed fish (the mere smell of which gave him a severe headache), he was allowed alternatives. Because he had trouble falling asleep and, once awake, had trouble falling back, he was given permission to skip matins. As for chores, Erasmus probably performed most of his in the scriptorium, copying books. The cloister had a decent library, and Erasmus was allowed to linger there.
As the days passed, Erasmus settled into a routine. But then the unexpected happened: he fell in love. The object of his affection was a fellow monk named Servatius Rogerus. Erasmus had only fleeting opportunities to speak with him directly (probably at chapel) and so instead sent him long, tender notes. Remarkably, nine have survived, and they offer a revealing look into Erasmus’s state of mind.
Initially, all went well. “If we cannot be together in person, which would of course be the most pleasant thing possible,” he wrote, “why should we not come together, if not as often as might be, at least sometimes, by exchanging letters?” Servatius was of the same mind, and a period of bliss followed. After a while, though, Servatius’s mood seemed to darken, and Erasmus pressed him to explain why. “You surely know that you are dearer to me than my life itself and that there is no task so difficult or unpleasant that I would not undertake it gladly for your sake.”
After some days passed without any word forthcoming, and with Servatius seeming to go out of his way to avoid him, Erasmus began to worry that he himself was the source of his distress. Crushed, he poured forth his anguish: “What is it that makes you so hard-hearted that you not only refuse to love him who loves you so well but do not even regard him with esteem
?” His waking hours were an annoyance; his sleep was restless; his food was tasteless. The few days that had passed without his company “seemed longer than an entire year to me; they exhausted me with such pain and racked me with such lamentations that I actually came to the point, in my hatred of life’s cruelty, where I more than once begged for death.”
When a letter finally arrived affirming Servatius’s affection, Erasmus was overjoyed. But the reprieve proved short-lived; Servatius again cooled. From Servatius’s overcast look Erasmus could see that his own presence had become a burden to him. Gradually and painfully, Erasmus reconciled himself to Servatius’s indifference. Deftly altering course, he recast himself as Servatius’s mentor. Erasmus urged him to shake off his sluggishness, strip away his faintheartedness, and throw himself into literary studies. If he did, Erasmus would be there to help. “Do not be ashamed of any solecism you fall into. You will find that my purpose is to correct you, not to sneer at you.”
These letters raise obvious questions about Erasmus’s sexuality. Some have dismissed them as epistolary exercises of the sort monks of the period commonly engaged in. Erasmus’s frequent citations of Horace, Ovid, and Virgil lend support to this idea. Yet something far more fundamental seems at work. The fierceness of Erasmus’s devotion, the rapid fluctuations in his mood, the disruption of his sleep, the loss of his appetite—all suggest a deep passion. A. L. Rowse, an Oxford historian who in 1977 published a book titled Homosexuals in History, includes Erasmus (along with Leonardo and Michelangelo) in a chapter on the Renaissance. He cites not only Erasmus’s letters to Servatius but also the strong attachment Erasmus later formed to a young Englishman whom he tutored in Paris. In the end, the evidence seems too thin to allow firm conclusions. What does seem clear, though, is that the young Erasmus, sequestered in the drab, regimented world of the monastery, craved intimacy and found it with a fellow monk. (Servatius, interestingly, would become the prior of Steyn, and he and Erasmus would remain on cordial terms.)
As the end of his novitiate approached, Erasmus—tiring of the monastery’s unvarying routines—felt sure that the cloister was not for him and told his superiors so. They were furious. If he left, they warned, he would be considered an apostate and would never again be able to show his face in Christian company; he would fare even worse in the afterlife. They also enlisted Erasmus’s guardians and some of his friends to press him, and in the end Erasmus felt he had no choice but “to accept the halter,” as he put it, “much as captives in war offer their hands to the victor to be manacled.”
Spurned in love and bored by his monastic rounds, Erasmus found another outlet for his devotion: books. The joys of ancient literature that he had discovered in Deventer and that had sustained him at ’s Hertogenbosch became his lifeline at Steyn, and he spent more and more time in its library. Its holdings included not only authorized religious texts but also a number of classical ones, and it was to these that he was most drawn. Because the Church considered many Roman poets and playwrights immoral and blasphemous, Erasmus had to read them on the sly. So, during the day, he read Augustine, Jerome, Origen, Chrysostom, and other early Church Fathers; at night, by candlelight, he consumed Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Cicero, Quintilian, and Terence. With their wit, elegance, reflections on virtue, and insights into human nature, these writers seemed much better company than the taciturn drudges and narrow-minded moralists around him.
Erasmus organized a small reading group of like-minded monks to recite poetry, discuss texts, and share compositions. His closest collaborator was his friend Cornelis Gerard, who was living in a monastery near Leiden. Erasmus’s letters to him abound in references to “Apollo’s lyre” and “Pan’s rustic reed,” “your Horace” and “our favorite Virgil.” In place of the tearful pleas he had formerly directed at Servatius, he now sent Cornelis stylized professions of chaste love based on their “bond of affection”—a shared devotion to literature. Inspired by Virgil’s eclogues, Erasmus wrote a long Carmen Buccolicum (“Rural Song”) that featured dancing naiads, dryad maidens, Aonian Muses, and a shepherd who from afar falls in love with the goddess-like Gunifolda.
On one occasion, Erasmus sent a friend a play by Terence that he had copied with his own hand. The plays of this Roman writer of the second century B.C.E. feature an unsavory cast of cads, flatterers, shrews, and priapic schemers forever trying to seduce young maidens, and many clerics considered them unfit for Christian minds. In his accompanying letter, Erasmus vigorously defended Terence against “the prattling of those ignorant and indeed malevolent dwarfs” who failed to perceive “how much moral goodness exists in Terence’s plays, how much implicit exhortation to shape one’s life.” Those content to stammer could make do with the standard medieval texts, but anyone wanting to speak clearly had to read Terence, whom “no one but a barbarian has ever failed to love.”
The term “barbarian” is a tip-off to Erasmus’s membership in a growing fraternity of philosophers, poets, scholars, and clergymen who saw in the gleam of the ancient world an inspiring alternative to the gloom of their own. Erasmus was, in short, feeling the glow of the Renaissance. More than a century after it had first surfaced in Italy, this movement was finally gaining a foothold north of the Alps. Though that label for the period did not come into broad use until the nineteenth century, it captures the sense of rebirth that scholars felt as they rediscovered the classical past. In Italy itself, this renewal was transforming art, architecture, literature, science, and urban design. At no point, however, would it significantly challenge the political or social order. The Roman Church, Italy’s dominant institution, would succeed in absorbing and co-opting it. In the north, however, the Renaissance would prove far more unsettling, testing axioms and institutions that had gone unchallenged for centuries. Erasmus would be a bridge as the movement traveled from south to north, and in his hands it would take on a far more disruptive character.
For Erasmus, the Italian Renaissance meant not the frescoes being applied to church walls or the statues going up in town squares but rather the journey that scholars were making ad fontes—to the sources. Rummaging about in musty libraries, they were discovering ancient works of literature, poetry, philosophy, rhetoric, and history that had for centuries been lost or forgotten. And they were reading familiar texts anew—not as collections of disaggregated opinions to be worked up into theorems, as with the Scholastics, but as living documents with ideas relevant to the present. The impact was dramatic. For a millennium, Christian thinkers had placed God the Almighty at the center of the universe and cast man as his frail, sinful dependent. Now, with the recovery of Greek and Roman literature, a new appreciation for the individual and his capabilities was taking root. It was promoted by a group of inquisitive and cultivated men who called themselves umanisti, or humanists, in recognition of the group to which they most owed their allegiance: humankind. This new human-centered outlook provided the intellectual foundation for the Renaissance. It was, in effect, a revolution in consciousness, and it was set in motion by one man: Francesco Petrarch.
Today, Petrarch is best known for the Canzoniere, his cycle of Italian sonnets, but during his own lifetime (1304 to 1374) he was most celebrated for his tireless efforts to revive and spread awareness of the classical past. Petrarch was the first to see the medieval centuries as a distinct period and the first to label it a “Dark Age”—a time when the cultural lights went out across Europe. Seeking an alternative, Petrarch found in antiquity a set of virtues and ideas that seemed to speak to his own day. Introspective, idiosyncratic, and relentlessly self-promoting, he is widely considered the father of Renaissance humanism. Some call him the first modern man. The attitudes and methods Petrarch pioneered would provide the foundation for the intellectual innovations that Erasmus would later use to such effect in the north.
Petrarch’s new outlook arose in reaction to the revulsion he felt at the squalor and corruption of his own world. Though born in Arezzo, Tuscany, he spent much of his life in Avignon. His father,
a notary, moved there in 1312 in search of work. There was plenty of it, for just three years earlier Pope Clement V had made that city his seat. His reign marked the start of the papacy’s Babylonian Captivity, a term Petrarch himself coined. With the pope’s arrival, thousands of strangers poured into this Provençal town, seeking employment, adventure, patronage, and pardons. The papal court became a great fiscal machine in which fees were charged for every service and offices were auctioned off to the highest bidder. The pope himself was given to unbridled ostentation, hosting nine-course banquets that featured roebucks and stags eaten off plates of gold and silver—a life of indulgence that contrasted with the fetid conditions in which most residents lived. Avignon was notorious for the terrible odor rising from the great pools of waste that collected in the town. The city, Petrarch declared, was “the most dismal, crowded, and turbulent in existence, a sink overflowing with all the gathered filth of the world,” with rank-smelling alleys filled with “obscene pigs and snarling dogs.”
As the papal court offered the clearest path to a lucrative career, Petrarch decided to become a cleric. Skilled in Latin and silken in manners, he gained entrée to the salons and boudoirs of the elite. He became a fixture at the palace of Cardinal Giovanni Colonna, a member of a great noble Italian family, who would become his chief patron.
While attending church one day in April 1327, Petrarch caught sight of the beautiful wife of a local nobleman. Her name was Laura, and he was instantly smitten. She did not return his ardor, however, and Petrarch would spend years pouring his frustration and anguish into his poetry. In the 366 poems that make up the Canzoniere, he abandoned the courtly conventions of medieval verse for intense emotional expression and obsessive self-analysis. His lyrical style was to become the model for Italian poetry for the next three centuries, earning him a claim to be the first modern poet.
Fatal Discord Page 5
