But Erasmus inculcated and practised other excellencies than this. Variety of construction is emphasized and rules given for the proper uses of the copious, and of the concise, manner. But the secret of his own charm is something more elusive and personal than any style acquired by mere study and rote could be. Like all great masters of speech, he invested everything he said with a peculiar and appropriate pungency. By whetting his words to a keen edge, he attained delicate polish and glow of supple beauty. One of the more external and striking elements of his style was the habitual moderation of his statement; the careful guarding against all glares of affirmation or denial. Is a reading in the New Testament ambiguous? No; it is only "slightly ambiguous" (nonnihil ambigo). Does Erasmus reject an argument? Far be such brutal positiveness from him; he "begins to have a glimmering of doubt" (subdubitare coepi). Erasmus thought that Luther wrote excellently well, but all he chooses to assert is that the professor's books are "rather more like Latin than the average" (sermo paulo latinior). Double negatives tone down an otherwise too conspicuous assertion. Except when he is writing to patrons for expected gifts, Erasmus speaks of his friends as "persons not altogether unknown to me." Diminutives play their part is qualifying the brutal shock of things; the writer's person is usually his "poor little body" (corpusculum). But even as we grasp and press the style, its secret eludes us; the beauty of Erasmus's writings is something more subtle, more difficult, than can be readily indicated by rough analysis. Now and then there is a rapier thrust of perfect epigram; a stab, planted like a wasp's sting, infallibly on the nerve ganglion of the chosen victim. Still more perfect in its way is the repressed irony of the author, never more effective than when most latent, the dry wit that held up to scorn or ridicule an institution or a person, apparently by a simple, matter-of-fact narrative without an abusive, or vulnerable, word in it. It was this that made the persons attacked so furious; they felt that they were being stripped naked and pilloried, while they could not find any weapon of defense. A candid, almost naïve description of a pilgrimage or of an inquisitor makes the reader wonder how anything so silly or so malignant was ever allowed to exist, but what was there in it all tangible enough to strike? A critic, after reading Anatole France's Île des Pengouins, a satire much in the Erasmian manner, said that there was nothing left to do but to commit suicide. When the monks read the Folly and the Colloquies they felt there was no appropriate comment but to murder the author. CHAPTER XII THE CONTROVERSY WITH LUTHER HE importance of Erasmus's biography lies not of the world, but also in his representative function. In his own person he went through exactly the same evolution as did the Renaissance in the whole of western Europe, that of being at first the preparer, then the moderate supporter, and finally the enemy, of the Reformation. What was the cause of this process? The problem is one of the deepest in history, one of the most studied, and one in which there is least agreement. The answer here proposed is as follows: Hitherto undue emphasis has been placed upon the Renaissance and Reformation in the history of the period of transition from mediæval to modern times. These movements have, together with politics and exploration, occupied almost the whole field of the history of the time. But contemporary with them there was taking place an equally important economic revolution, the change from gild production to capitalism. And outside of both there was a change in life perhaps most important of all made by the new discoveries: printing, glass lenses, gunpowder, the compass, and in the field of pure knowledge the Copernican hypothesis, and the lesser, but still important, achievements in mathematics and in natural science of Leonardo, Cardan, Servetus, Stevins, and Gesner. These are sometimes included in the Renaissance, but it would conduce to clarity of thought could that name be restricted, as it often is, to the literary and artistic revival of the classic spirit. So much must be said, in order to put the Renaissance and Reformation in their proper perspective. When it is once grasped that they are, not absolutely but relatively, smaller than they commonly appear to be, it will be easier to see that they are fundamentally two different branches of the same movement. Many writers, especially since Nietzsche, have regarded the Reformation as totally different from the Renaissance, a reaction against it and not a development of it. But, according to the view here presented, this is an error, and the older opinion, common in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, that the two movements were nearly allied, is more correct. No one can deny the striking similarity between the two. Both were animated by a desire for a return to antiquity, a nostalgia for the golden age of both pagan Rome and of Christianity. Both were revolts against 7 the medieval scholasticism. Neither was primarily intellectual or rational; both were literary and emotional reactions against the pure but barren rationalism of Aquinas and Scotus. Both were children of a new individualism, whether expressed in the art of Titian or in the doctrine of justification by faith only. The contrast sometimes drawn between their attitudes toward the things of this world and of the next is really unwarranted; both were reactions against the asceticism and other-worldliness of the Middle Ages. The Renaissance saw the cultural, the Reformation the ethical, value of wealth, industry, prosperity, and of woman; and both, in comparison with Catholicism, stressed the claims of this world rather than those of the next. Finally, both were children of the newly grown cities and of the bourgeois class, first brought to power in the state by the capitalistic revolution. Why then, being so closely akin, did the two movements finally come to so bitter an antagonism that both could hardly survive on the same soil? It may be pointed out that the struggle itself is a proof of propinquity; one 1 See my Age of the Reformation, pp. 730 ff. cannot have a battle between a whale and elephant, nor can a firm dealing in shoes compete closely with one producing automobiles. The two fought because they were so near together; because both cultivated and both sought to dominate one sphere of human interest, the spiritual-mental for which we have no single word, but which the Germans call geistig. But perhaps the compound English word just used has its advantages, for it points out the difference in the ideals of the two movements, the one appealed primarily to the mental life of art and thought, the other primarily to the spiritual life of religion and morals. And this is the only difference, save one presently to be discussed, which can be pointed out. It is impossible to call one movement liberal and the other conservative. Luther's rejection of the sacramental system of the Church shocked Erasmus by its radicalism as much as the humanist's play of mind over dogma repelled the Reformer by its liberalism. If, in his general attitude, the Dutch scholar was more open-minded, in particular points the Saxon heresiarch was more advanced. Even those men of the Renaissance who rejected the Christian mysteries did so not primarily on rational grounds, but rather on the authority of the ancients. If Livy exalted the Roman religion because it was patriotic, Machiavelli drew the conclusion that it was preferable to Christianity; if Tacitus spoke of Christianity as a vile superstition, his editor, Poggio, implicitly followed his ipse dixit. Nor can we see a general rejection of superstition by the leaders of either Renaissance or Reformation. Sir Thomas More was convinced the miracles did happen at shrines and that devils existed, and Benvenuto Cellini saw devils, just as did Luther. Nor was Erasmus himself altogether free from these obsessions of his age. Like his contemporaries, he hung votive offerings in churches,1 and like them occasionally consulted astrologers. He re 1 LB. v., 1335. |