LIKE

CHAPTER I

APPRENTICE YEARS

IKE all great and complex movements, the Renaissance is capable of interpretation in various ways and from opposite standpoints. When we think of its importance in the preparation of our modern habit of mind, we are inclined to class it with the great epochs of advance, such as the Athenian Age and the Enlightenment. But if we take the testimony of its own writers we learn that its ideals were in the past, a restoration and not a progress. Its most enlightened champions appealed not to reason, but to the Roman poets; not to nature, but to classic authority. While the glorious freedom of thought attained by many of its representatives entitles it to be regarded as an insurgence of reason, its passionate rebellion against the rationalism of Aristotle and Aquinas forces us to consider it an artistic, emotional reaction against reason, like the Romantic Movement of the early nineteenth century.

Nor is there any consensus of opinion as to the relations of the Renaissance and the Reformation. For long they were regarded as sisters, similar in origin and analogous in result; emancipations both, in different fields and with different emphases but with a friendly alliance, so that the elder sister prepared for the younger and the younger consummated the work of the elder. But of late it has been asserted that the Reformation was a reaction of backward minds against the Renaissance; the different points of view of the two have been stressed, and their rivalry and even hostility pointed out. "Where the Reformation triumphed" we may paraphrase a famous saying of Erasmus-"the Renais

sance perished"; and contrariwise where humanism attained its perfect work the Lutheran gospel met with a cold reception.

A part of the confusion of thought on this subject is due to the lack of a precise understanding of what is meant by the term "Renaissance." Sometimes it is made to cover all the intellectual phenomena of the fourteenth to the sixteenth century, and even (as by Burckhardt) extended to the political development; again it is narrowly restricted to the rebirth of enthusiasm for classical antiquity. For the sake of clarity it should be pointed out that the vast change which came over the human spirit in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, marking the transition from medieval to modern times, can be analyzed into at least three very distinct factors. In the first place, there was the Social Shift, manifesting itself in politics in the rise of the national state and in economics in the change from the gild system of production to the capitalistic method. Secondly, there was a large number of new Discoveriesgeographical exploration, the invention of printing, gunpowder, glass lenses, and the compass, and the revival of natural science with Copernicus and his fellows. Thirdly, there was the Rebirth of Antiquity, manifesting itself, according to the view here set forth, in the Renaissance and in the Reformation. All three great lines of progress interacted, as for example, nationalism in the rise of vernacular literature, and the discovery of printing in the spread of culture, but each is separable in thought, and might conceivably have acted independently.

The Renaissance and the Reformation were, therefore, really one. The conscious opposition of the champions of each, the intense warfare arising from their propinquity and concern with the same interests, have concealed the real similarity of their natures, just as the warfare between Catholics and Protestants has greatly exaggerated the popular estimate of their differences

and obscured their numerous and fundamental agreements. Though both Renaissance and Reformation, by breaking down the old barriers and by stimulating new thought and claiming new freedoms, did much to prepare the modern world, both, as the first syllable of each name indicates, represented a turning back to the past, and to about the same period of the past, the first century of the vulgar era. Their opposition was a recrudescence of the great alignment of the first centuries of the Roman Empire; that between Christianity and paganism. Many of the Italian humanists repudiated the gospel in the name of the Greek and Roman poets and philosophers; most of the Reformers denounced or lamented the errors of the heathen and of their recent disciples. The versatile virtuosi of Italy longed for the return of that golden age when the Roman Capitol swayed a world of poetry and of sensual pleasure, when all made for the joy of living and the still greater joy of learning. The earnest Calvinist panted for the virtues and the faith of an apostolic age.

But, before Luther as after him, there were men, particularly among the serious-minded scholars of the North, who felt the need of amalgamating both streams of influence, the Latin and the Judæan. Splendid was the heritage of the classic poets and philosophers; precious was the message of the gospels; could not the two possessions, so different in spirit and in quality, be united in one rich synthesis, cleared from the rust and accretions of a thousand years, and turned to the profit of a new civilization? The solution of this problem was the task consciously and conscientiously set themselves by the Transalpine humanists; their success has been of high value to their own world and to ours, and their achievement, though like all great works the product of many minds, was due more to Erasmus than to any other one man. He cared little for the inventions and, discoveries of his age; he was not even aware of the significance of the main economic and political changes;

but he does represent, better than any other one man, the common spirit of the Renaissance and of the ReformHis own life typifies their similar origin and their final divergence.

ation.

As the task of reconciling the streams of ancient culture flowing from Judæa and from Athens was universal, it was fitting, perhaps necessary, that its master should have been born in the most cosmopolitan of European states. In the fifteenth century the Netherlands supplied the exchange and entrepôt not only of merchandise, but of ideas. Italian goods, material and spiritual, floated down the Rhine; those of England were borne across the North Sea; those of Germany and France were close at hand. In this focus arose a man who wrote, "I wish to be called a citizen of the world, the common friend of all states, or, rather, a sojourner in all." "That you are very patriotic," he said to a French friend, "will be praised by some and easily forgiven by everyone; but in my opinion it is more philosophic to treat men and things as though we held this world the common fatherland of all." Significant it seemed to him that he was born "between the banks of the Rhine"-that is, in the delta, as though he were intended to share the culture of the two great bordering states. For at that time the Dutch did not think of themselves as a separate nation; half of the Burgundian state was German, the other half French, and those persons born near the frontier might choose to which of the two nations they belonged. Erasmus preferred now one and now the other country, but did not care to decide the matter finally, for, as he wrote:

I should like not only France and Germany, but all countries and all cities to claim Erasmus; for it would be a useful emulation which would stimulate many to noble deeds. Whether I am a

1 To Zwingli, September 5 (“5 nonas Septembres") 1522; Z. W. vii, ep. 235 2 To Budé, Allen, ep. 480.

LB. x, 1662; LB. ep. 803; Lond. xii, 43.

4 To Peter Manius, October 1, 1520, Allen, ep. 1147.

Batavian I am not sure. I cannot deny that I am a Hollander by birth, from that part, if one may trust the maps, which borders on France rather than on Germany, but assuredly from the region situated on the frontiers of France and Germany.

But though the name Holland applied not to a nation, as in common speech it does now, but merely to a province, Erasmus loved it well. If at times he expressed discontent with a country which appreciated its own son less than did other nations, elsewhere he praised highly its rich soil, its hardy fishermen, its numerous, wealthy, and cultured cities, and the humane and intelligent character of the inhabitants.'. Holland was then a part of the Burgundian state, welded into a powerful land by Philip the Good and Charles the Bold, but with little of the national feeling already characteristic of the French, the English, and the Germans. About his birth and childhood in this country Erasmus in after-life wove a web of romance founded on fact, which may be here repeated after him.

During the last years of Duke Philip the Good there lived at Gouda, a town about twelve miles from Rotterdam, a man named Elias.2 The Dutch at that time had no family names, but took their surnames either from the baptismal name of their fathers, or from the town where they were born or with which they were later connected. Thus Adrian of Utrecht, who became pope in 1522, was called after the city of his birth and, occasionally, Rogers, a patronymic. Elias and his wife, Catharine, had ten sons, of whom the youngest save one, and the most gifted, was called Gerard, "the Beloved." With a natural aptitude for learning he

1 "Auris Batava," Adagia, LB. i, 1083 f. Cf. L. Enthoven: "Erasmus Weltbürger oder Patriot?" Neue Jahrbücher für das Klassische Altertum, etc., xxix, 205.

2 On Erasmus's parents and early life, Allen, i, 46 ff and ep. 447; Nichols, i, pp. 5 ff, and ep. 443. Erasmus hated his uncles, who dealt as hardly with him as they had done with his father. One of them tried to rob him of a shirt. Allen, ep. 76. On the Dutch lack of family names, L. Pastor: History of the Popes, tr. by B. F. Kerr, ix, 34; N. Paulus: Die Deutschen Dominikaner im Kampfe gegen Luther, 1906, p. 68.