Every few years I like to check in with the University of Toronto Press to see how one of the great megaprojects in the history of Canadian publishing is coming along. I refer to the Collected Works of Erasmus. The decision to make new and fully edited translations of almost everything by the great Dutch humanist and writer of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries was taken in 1968. The first volume in the series appeared in 1971. The most recent ones are Volumes 39 and 40, given over to the Colloquies. This collection of witty dialogues was Erasmus's best-known book during his lifetime, far more popular than Praise of Folly, a work in a similar format, which the modern audience tends to prefer; in fact, the Colloquies was one of the great bestsellers of the sixteenth century.
The next entry in the series will be No. 63, to be followed by Nos. 69 and 70. As you see, these fat instalments are not being published in numerical order, but rather have a logic all their own. More than forty have been brought out to date. When completed ("We're aiming for the year 2011," the editor tells me) the set will run to eighty-nine volumes: an extraordinary tribute to one of the true parents of scholarship.
Where to begin? The year Christopher Columbus set out on his first transatlantic voyage was the same year that Erasmus-Erasmus Desiderius or Erasmus of Rotterdam-entered the priesthood. The coincidence is significant, for Columbus and Erasmus were exemplars of the same phenomenon, the Renaissance: the one in southern Europe, the other in the north. This is part of Erasmus's enduring appeal.
There are numerous gaps in the life of this wandering scholar and teacher, who spent long periods in Basel, in Paris, in London, in Oxford, and in Cambridge. For instance, it's never been entirely certain when he was born. Current opinion favours 1466, but some sources cling to 1469. Yet for all that he is one of the best documented personalities of his time, simply because he was such a prolific writer -of commentaries, satires, all sorts of things, including letters. "As for correspondence," he noted in 1523, "I have written so much, and even today I write so much, that in the future two wagons will scarcely suffice for the load." So indeed it sometimes seems.
As early as 1538, two years after his death, one publisher had already started on an edition of his works in nine volumes. Other such long shelves, and a large number of biographies, have followed down through the centuries. In 1990 the University of Toronto Press recycled some of its vast translation effort to produce The Erasmus Reader, a paperback edited by Erika Rummel, a book designed to show the person himself as well as the theologian and writer on social and political topics. For my money, the Reader remains one of the most effective ways to approach the subject, though it includes nothing from the Colloquies.
Over the years I've sampled numerous biographies of Erasmus, such as Erasmus by Christopher Hollis, never with the satisfaction I had hoped for. Following other people's advice, I've long sought a copy of Erasmus of Rotterdam, an out-of-print work by the Hungarian poet (and former Canadian resident) George Faludy. In the end, I am left to recommend the short and attractive biography Erasmus: His Life, Works, & Influence, by Cornelius Augustijn, which tells as much of the story as one needs to get started.
Erasmus, the illegitimate son of a priest, spent his first twenty-five years in the province of Holland, later going south, to Brussels and Antwerp. No-one saw much potential in him until after he was thirty. He was trained for the monastic life but managed to avoid the pursuit of that ideal, about which he grew quite negative, and for most of his days was forced to earn a precarious living as a tutor and editor. It was while serving as a tutor that he met Thomas More, who got him entrée to the Tudor court. That's how Hans Holbein came to paint his famous Erasmus portrait; it shows a gaunt, large-snouted man, wrapped up against the cold, writing. There are lesser pictures as well. By custom, they usually carry the motto, "His writings will best show his likeness."
Sometimes Erasmus managed to secure patronage, as early on when he was appointed secretary to the bishop of Cambrai. But he had to keep scratching. In a famous letter, he instructs a friend who is to intercede with a noblewoman on his behalf. "Please explain to her how much greater is the glory she can acquire from me, by my literary works, than from the other theologians in her patronage," he writes. "They merely deliver humdrum sermons; I am writing immortal works." He was right, but such horn-tooting was painful. "O this begging!" he confided once to his friend John Colet, an English cleric. "I know you laugh at it. But I hate myself." By one means or another, mainly through a combination of adaptability and steadfastness, he managed to get his work done, though he was often dogged by religious disagreements.
"Humanist", the term most commonly used to describe Erasmus, has many conflicting meanings today, when the religious right uses it as a contemptuous synonym for atheists and people in university English departments employ it derisively against pre-postmodernists who dare to believe that culture is more important than theories of culture. In discussions of the sixteenth century, it refers to someone who believed that the proper study for religious people was not just God in the supernatural sense but also humankind and all its works-and thus, by extension, the literary culture which humanism itself caused to be created. Erasmus was the most important of the humanists in northern Europe. To what extent he was shaped by the humanist movement, as well as shaping it himself, is difficult to determine exactly; but it's clear enough that he was the main force fighting for scholasticism over a kind of superstitious, mediaeval view of the world. Then as now, truth was a dangerous business to be in.
Erasmus was a supreme linguist (he had to be, to live and work in so many different cultures, connecting each to the others), and for him the study of languages was inseparable, not only from literary endeavour, but also from religion. He wrote: "Unlettered religion has something of the flabby stupidity which is violently distasteful to those who know letters." He was one of the key figures in the revival of classical literature-in fact, one of the inventors of classicism, which began building after his death till it reached a crest in the eighteenth century. His translations of Euripides, Plutarch, Lucian, and others, and his commentaries on them, arose from his devotion to the concept of bonae litterae. The whole idea of good letters included the study of the best of the past, which he thought necessary for true culture and self-knowledge. These were no secular goals, but part and parcel of the religious life as he saw it.
When he produced an edition of the New Testament in Greek along with a fresh Latin translation intended to replace the Vulgate of the fourth century, "it was not just a technical exercise, it was intended to lead to a new spirituality, a contemporary piety." So writes Dr. Augustijn. Yet Erasmus's philological approach got him into trouble with those who held that the existing Latin text could not contain any errors because the church, which used it, was, after all, infallible. Such mediaeval thinking was impervious to the new humanist vision. For a while, Erasmus seemed a radical. When Luther first began his attacks on indulgences, it might have appeared that Erasmus and Luther had common ground. But events got out of control. Please forgive a long quotation from Dr. Augustijn's book:
"From the perspective of hindsight we speak of the `Reformation' or the `glaubensspalthung' and think first of an ecclesiastical phenomenon and only after that of its possible social consequences. For many who lived through those years a world was passing away and the existing order was disintegrating around them. The Peasants' Wars of the years 1524 and 1525 were a traumatic experience for them: subjects in rebellion, castles burned to the ground, ecclesiastical and secular lords compelled to make pacts with people of the lowest sort, monasteries looted, nuns violated, even former priests lending their aid to the rebels. For adherents of the old church these events could not be separated from the revolt against the bishops and the people, which broke up the whole established structure. Certainly Erasmus experienced these events in this way. For him the whole of society was at stake. From Luther's first appearance on the scene, he had feared this result, but the reality of the 1520s surpassed his gloomiest expectations. In these years he faced the question: can anything be saved of the old world, of the community of Christian Europe, of the existing culture?"
Being a man of peace, Erasmus was left to call urgently for reforms within the church. So although he started out a radical, he came to seem a reactionary by remaining a moderate as events swept by him with such destructive force. By having learned that there is in fact no objective truth, he had made himself dangerous-probably, without ever quite figuring out how he came to be viewed that way. He lived long enough to see many of his books banned.
Near the end, he settled once again in Basel, where he had spent his happiest and some of his most productive times. The physical environment was peaceful but he himself was lonely and sick. A messenger from Zurich asked if he would accept the key to the city. He sent back the message: "I wish to be a citizen of the world, to belong to everyone, or rather, to be an alien everywhere." The statement has to do with solitariness, not necessarily cosmopolitanism. He hadn't set foot in the Netherlands in thirty-two years and wouldn't last to see it again. (His old house there, by the way, was destroyed by bombing during the Second World War.)
One can devote considerable space to charting the twists and turns of Erasmus's reputation at various times and in various circles, Catholic and Protestant. In the past generation, Erasmus has once again come to be seen as though he were primarily a theologian. This despite his wit, his critical skill, his prose style, his antiquarianism, and despite those wagons full of letters, many of which are tantamount to well-considered essays on subjects of the day, designed to influence public opinion. Without a doubt, this return to a very old notion has much to do with the interest generated by the U of T Press Collected Works. But surely a lot of Erasmus's appeal is in other circles and at a quite different and more lively level of perception.
Erasmus stood at the point in time where the printing press was beginning to change the world, and by the manner of his writing as much as by what he wrote, he influenced what took place for the next four centuries in St. Paul's Churchyard and Paternoster Row and other such centres of the world. He was the highest example of the independent scholar, a serious generalist, the bookish professional who was expert enough in the ways of writing and publishing to spend a lifetime working out his ideas, in a variety of different forms, for the broadly educated audience to read. Reading him, in fact, was part of how people came to be educated in the first place. Without him, no Peter Levi would have come along in England in our time nor a Jack Lindsay in Australia nor a George Woodcock in Canada. Erasmus invented whatever it is you wish to call what it is that such people do.
