The Life of Thomas More (17 page)

Erasmus returned to France in the first month of 1500, having first been relieved of all his money by officials at Dover. His stay in England had been profitable in other senses, however, not least because it inaugurated his long friendship with Thomas More. The story of their relationship is well known, at least by its fruits in
Moriae encomium
and
Utopia
, but it may be worth rehearsing certain of its aspects which throw some light on their conduct over the next few years. Both men looked after each other’s interests, ‘puffing’ works where necessary and providing elaborate testimonials to publishers, patrons and fellow-humanists. They shared other secular interests, too, but there were certain divergences of taste and opinion which materially affected their respective fates. It might be said that, in the end, Erasmus was not wholly convinced of More’s humanism and not wholly inclined to share his friend’s particular forms of piety. He did not share More’s temperamental attraction towards monasticism, for example, perhaps because he had experienced it at first hand, and he never really understood the darker recesses of More’s spiritual life. Certainly Erasmus was not interested in martyrdom of any kind, and his lament at what he believed to be More’s unnecessary fate was part of his general aversion to dogmatic dispute and doctrinal divisiveness.

Yet their shared belief in educational reform and their mutual interest in patristic literature provided the foundation for a friendship which survived the various pressures of many difficult years. They have been enrolled in the ranks of ‘humanism’ but it is better to be wary of the term, not least because it was coined at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The circumstances of ‘humanists’ in the period when More and Erasmus shared their enthusiasms can be better described by means of a book, a seal and an anecdote.

CHAPTER IX
IF YOU WANT TO LAUGH

N his return to Paris in February 1500, Erasmus set to work upon the publication of his first book.
Adagiorum Collectanea
came from a small press in the rue Saint-Marceau; it was announced as the first selection of classical adages and proverbs ever printed, or what Erasmus described as the material for
‘noui operis’
¹
or new work. He had collected more than eight hundred maxims, in Latin and Greek, to which he appended short commentaries of his own. In later years Erasmus was inclined to condemn it as roughly and hastily conceived, but this little volume of some 140 pages, published at the very beginning of the sixteenth century, was the harbinger of a literature which was to change the nature of European discourse. It was published in twenty-six editions within the lifetime of Erasmus himself, and for almost three centuries it was the companion of the parlours and bedsides of Europe. Yet its first impact was of a different kind; this slim book, printed in what was the then revolutionary ‘roman’ typeface as a mark of its novelty, offered for most contemporaries their first general and accessible view of the classical past. It was part of Erasmus’s aim to restore the meaning of that past by emphasising the presence and permanence of the truths that Greek and Latin authors had adumbrated, albeit in a language more polished and refined than anything to which a late medieval audience was accustomed. The
Adages
also furnished conclusive proof that classical wisdom and scriptural revelation were not incompatible; Erasmus’s quotations from Plato or from Cicero are amplified by biblical allusions, with the strong intimation that a forgotten area of spiritual and intellectual endeavour was being restored to a generation at last capable of profiting from it. In his dedicatory letter Erasmus credited his inspiration for
the work to Lord Mountjoy and to the prior of the Oxford college where he had stayed, and parcels of the book were sent across the Channel for the immediate perusal of More, Grocyn and others. He must have done some work of preparation and organisation in England, since it was published just six months after his departure from Dover, and there can be no doubt that he was actively encouraged by More and those other Englishmen who were also intent upon the study of Greek and Roman originals.

From Erasmus’s book we may move to More’s seal. It is known that in later life More acquired a collection of ancient coins; some of them he gave as presents to those who would appreciate them, while the rest have been dispersed and lost irretrievably. Perhaps his collection was confiscated, along with so much else, after his imprisonment. But one of his classical memorials survives intact; it is an impression of the private seal which he used for his correspondence. The seal had been remodelled from an antique coin bearing the head of the Emperor Titus, and takes its place with two others that More used—one seeming to bear the imprint of the goddess Fortuna and the other of a bearded Roman emperor or statesman. For More, also, the classical past did not comprise some closed library of books and manuscripts but, rather, it represented a valuable and living reality. It was a way of retrieving a lost inheritance in a world that seemed to More and his contemporaries to have grown stale and decayed in its attachment to old verities.

There is an anecdote of More told by another contemporary ‘humanist’ and courtier, Richard Pace. It seems that More, while still an
adolescens
, was in the company of two scholastic philosophers who informed him that King Arthur had manufactured a cloak from the beards of the giants whom, according to Geoffrey of Monmouth, he had slain in battle. More apparently received the news with his customary composure, perhaps not even remarking that in Geoffrey’s account it is the giant Retho who disposes of his hirsute victims in that manner. Instead he asked them the technique which Arthur used, and was informed that the hair of the dead stretches wonderfully well. The young More asked them, in turn, if it were true that when one of them milked a he-goat the other waited with a sieve to collect the drops. This little sally, a tribute to futility and ignorance, actually comes from Lucian’s
Demonax
; but there is no reason why he should not have borrowed it for the occasion.
For Pace it was another example of More’s sarcasm, but it can also be seen as an indication of his dislike for the vagaries of scholastic enquiry. His borrowing from Lucian was highly appropriate, too, as we shall soon discover.

Book, seal and anecdote illustrate the complexity of the term ‘humanism’. If Cardinal Wolsey, Desiderius Erasmus, Marsilio Ficino and Thomas More were all humanists, then the term has such a wide applicability that it becomes for all practical purposes useless. If we stay close to the immediate context, however, we may define the humanist as a student of classical learning in the related fields of grammar, rhetoric and literature. This is
studia humanitatis
, the pursuit of
bonae litterae
, which in turn is related to educational reform and to a more disciplined training in the principles of good government. It was in one aspect, then, a civic and secular movement which directly affected developments in rhetoric, medicine and law; in retrospect, at least, it seems also to have demonstrated a certain piety and purity of intent with its return to the pristine sources of classical literature and with its aversion to medieval codes of war and chivalry.

It has of course been related to the gradual decay or dissolution of the old European medieval order, at least in those historical narratives which treat the past as a form of heroic fiction in which various protagonists fight for mastery. But it might be more fruitful to recognise in the writings of the humanists a culmination of various aspects of medieval thought which had hitherto escaped intense examination or elaboration. The pursuit of classical rhetoric, for example, had always been part of the life of the Italian city-states; the
dictatores
or public orators had followed the model of Cicero or Quintilian throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. There were ‘humanists’—scholars who were interested in obtaining and reading classical texts—at both English universities throughout the fifteenth century. Manuscript copies of Cicero, Plato and Plutarch, among many others, were available in college libraries, while there was a steady trade in imported books during the last decades of the century. In addition, Greek and Italian scholars were welcomed both in the universities and in the courts of Edward IV and Richard III. It would be quite wrong, therefore, to suggest some sudden awakening or resurgence of learning in England.

The single most important patron of humanistic learning in More’s
lifetime was Henry VII. He was known for his partiality towards foreign scholars (sometimes to the chagrin of the indigenous variety) and throughout his reign he employed ‘humanists’ in various royal and ecclesiastical duties. These clerks and secretaries were patronised precisely because of their rhetorical skills, in the writing of letters as much as in the delivery of formal orations. Indeed, More’s eventual entry to the court of Henry VII’s successor was not some misjudgement on More’s part—as has been suggested by those who wish to emphasise the saintly or scholarly aspects of the man—but the obvious and almost inevitable culmination of his career as a practising orator and trained grammarian.

Yet this affirmation of continuity, rather than change, might be questioned by those who note the scorn of More and others for the ‘barbarism’ of much earlier learning; it was More, after all, who is supposed to have laughed at the scholastic theologians and who on many occasions was scathing about the ignorance and triviality of those who refused to acknowledge the merits of
‘graecarum … literarwn’
²
or
‘seculares disciplinas’.
³
There can be no doubt that there was a sense of ‘new learning’ in the air, together with an atmosphere of reform and renovation; but how exactly, then, does More’s interest in classical literature differ from that of previous scholars? It is a matter of timing and of time itself. When Erasmus appends his commentaries to the maxims of Plato or of Terence in his
Adagiorum Collectanea
, he invokes a long temporal perspective in which the implications and connotations of those phrases have changed; he is creating a history of usage. It was also plain to his first readers that the civilisations of Rome and Athens were markedly superior to any they might see around them; as well as being a history of usage, the
Collectanea
was a history of decline (and even, sometimes, fall). Repeatedly Erasmus emphasises the dangers and inconstancies of the modern world as opposed to a classical culture erected upon ‘the noble old systems of thought’.
⁴
This perspective—which we might describe, perhaps anachronistically, as one of historical relativism—is quite different from any that More would have known in the scriptural dramas and historical compilations of his youth. In a play where Noah or Judas would wear contemporary dress, and in a history where miracle and legend emphasised the archetypal significance of events, there is no decline and no progress, only the re-enactment of the
rituals of eternity. The world was suspended in a cosmos of unchanging truths. It is all in marked contrast, therefore, to that history of change, decay and possible restoration which is at the centre of the humanist enterprise as outlined by Erasmus and More.