Why I
do not recommend reading Erasmus
March 11th, 1998
Erasmus is my hero, but I don't
recommend that you read his stuff. Why not? Because Erasmus just doesn't suit
modern tastes. To understand why, you have to take yourself back 500 years.
Erasmus was born just a few years after the invention of the printing press.
Right up until his early adulthood, printed books were still quite rare; most
books were still copied by hand. Erasmus' own father supported himself as a
book copyist.
Thus, the people of the early
sixteenth century were not bombarded with information as we are. They didn't
have radio, television, movies, newspapers, magazines, handbills, billboards,
or any of the other communications that jostle for our attention. Back then,
information of any kind was a rare and precious commodity. A good library might
possess a few dozen books. Anything with more than a hundred books was held in
awe. Indeed, even Erasmus' own library was apparently rather small until his
last years. During his many travels, he apparently was able to move all his
books and papers in a few chests. Compare this with the dozens of books you'll
find in even the least scholarly of modern households.
The significance of this
lies in the effect on people's attitudes towards information. For us modern-day
readers, information is cheap and ubiquitous, and our concern is to prioritize
it, to reject all the junk info that comes our way. Our communication styles
have accordingly shifted over the years to emphasize conciseness. We don't have
time to waste on long-winded tomes; we want to get to the point and move on.
Not so our sixteenth-century
forbears. For them, a single book might well be the only source of knowledge
available -- so they wanted the author to pack as much information into the
book as possible. There's a story that Erasmus, walking across the market
square, noticed a scrap of paper lying on the ground. He picked it up and read
it. Who knows, maybe there'd be something interesting on it.
Erasmus met this demand for
well-upholstered books by larding everything he wrote with all the excess
baggage he could think of. His writing is filled with allusions to classical
letters. Indeed, he wrote an entire book on the subject of adding fluff to your
writing. He didn't call it "fluff" -- he called it "copia",
and the title of his book was "On Copia of words and ideas." Here he
lays out formulae for amplifying, extending, or otherwise padding your writing.
We moderns have no interest in methods of padding our writing, but Erasmus was
a master of technique and it made his books especially popular.
Here's a sample of Erasmus'
writing, from The Complaint of Peace:
"If I am truly that
peace so extolled by God and by men; if I am really the source, the nourishing
mother, the preserver and the protector of all good things in which heaven and
earth abound; if, without me, no prosperity can endure here below; if nothing
pure or holy, nothing that is agreeable to God or to men can be established on
earth without my help; if, on the other hand, war is incontestably the
essential cause of all the disasters which fall upon the universe and this
plague withers at a glance everything that grows; if, because of war, all that
grew and ripened in the course of the ages suddenly collapses and is turned into
ruins; if war tears down everything that is maintained at the cost of the most
painful efforts; if it destroys things that were most firmly established; if it
poisons everything that is holy and everything that is sweet; if, in short, war
is abominable to the point of annihilating all virtue, all goodliness in the
hearts of men, and if nothing is more deadly for them, nothing more hateful to
God than war -- then, in the name of this immortal God I ask: who is capable of
believing without great difficulty that those who instigate it, who barely
possess the light of reason, whom one sees exerting themselves with such
stubbornness, such fervor, such cunning, and at the cost of such effort and
danger, to drive me away and pay so much for the overwhelming anxieties and the
evils that result from war -- who can believe that such persons are still truly
men?"
Yes, the entire quotation is
a single sentence, and it's one sentence in the original Latin.
There are other problems
with Erasmus' writing that interfere with the comprehension of the modern
reader. Erasmus writes in a strong cultural context, and makes reference to
many issues that we no longer concern ourselves with. A simple example is his
frequent religious allusions; in the above quotation, there are no less than
six religious references. This kind of thing was entirely appropriate in the
sixteenth century, but we denizens of the twentieth century are unfamiliar and
perhaps uncomfortable with such frequent appeals to religious belief. Then
there were the medicant friars, itinerant religious orders that begged for
their living and promulgated a crude and intolerant Christianity. Erasmus
managed to take pot shots at them in just about everything he wrote, but how
many of us have ever met a friar, much less the now-extinct class of mendicant
friars?
Another difficulty is that
Erasmus had to write with great subtlety to avoid getting himself condemned for
heresy. By Erasmus' time, Christianity had undergone so much hardening of the
arteries that Christian belief was a minefield of required and prohibited
beliefs, extending down to many fine details. A single carelessly worded
statement could get a man condemned for heresy. Yet Erasmus objected to many of
the sillier aspects of Christian practice. Hence the need to clothe his
writings in subtleties, innuendoes, and other confusing tricks. Readers in his
time could understand his elliptical references, but the modern reader finds
them befuddling.
Thus, Erasmus has a high
threshold of utility. If you read only his Praise of Folly, his most popular
work with modern readers, you might understand an adequate fraction of his wit
and intellect, but much would inevitably be lost upon you. Only after you've
read a goodly chunk of his work -- the Praise of Folly, the Colloquies, some of
his letters, some of the Adages, the Julius Exclusus, and the Complaint of
Peace -- can you start to appreciate the depth and subtlety of the man's
thought. I suppose that the fairest summation is that Erasmus is an acquired
taste, and one acquired only at the cost of great effort.