5.
Human Stuff
Mainly the 1500s
Over the Alps, with the northern humanists—Conrad Celtis—Rodolphus Agricola—Desiderius Erasmus, who promoted civilized living and friendship among many—Michel de Montaigne, who turned humanism in a different direction—novelists.
Vesalius and his pear woodblocks were almost in danger of running into a traffic jam on their journey over the Alps, so numerous were artistic, medical, and literary travelers on that route. The exchange of visitors between north and south had been the norm for a long time. Italians went north out of curiosity or in search of new patrons to flatter and entertain. Northerners went south to acquire those desirable Italian things: a book collection, the finest university experiences available, the latest scholarly methods, and an extra level of humanistic polish in manners and language. Armed with these attainments, they returned to their own lands eager to share their findings with others, and to apply the methods to their own history and culture.
An early example of how this worked—and we are backtracking a little in time here—can be found by dipping into the life of Conrad Celtis, or Celtes, born in 1459 as Konrad Pickel. (Like many humanists, he switched to a Latinized version of his name.) He ran away from his tiny Bavarian hometown of Wipfeld by hopping on a timber raft headed down the river Main, then went on to study in the universities of Cologne and Heidelberg before spending two years traveling around Italy. While there, he hung out with the humanists of Venice, Padua, Ferrara, Bologna, Florence, and Rome—especially with members of the Academies of the latter two cities. He then went north again and had an illustrious career teaching in a series of universities, setting up his own Academies in several places. He tried to bestow the benefit of his experience on his compatriots, by scolding students for their drunkenness and advising his fellow professors to learn to speak properly instead of “honking like geese.”
Yet Celtis also took much interest and pride in Germanic literature. It was he who discovered the manuscript plays by the tenth-century nun Hrotswitha in the monastery of Saint Emmeram in Regensburg and spread the word about them. He helped Hartmann Schedel make revisions to his massive historical and geographical survey, the Nuremberg Chronicle. And he edited for publication a recently discovered work by the Roman historian Tacitus, Germania, which expressed admiration for the simple, honest, and rather sexily savage ways of the German peoples.
This was all typical Italianate humanist activity, applied to the materials of a different territory. But Celtis also advocated other forms of study. He urged everyone he knew to improve their intellectual level, not only in literary pursuits but also in fields that we would now think of as scientific:
Find out the nature of formless Chaos. . . . Find out with soaring mind the causes of individual things: investigate the blowing of the winds and the tides of the raging sea. . . . Find out why dark hollows of the earth produce sulphur and veins of fair metals, and why hot springs restore the bodies of the sick. . . . Learn something of the various peoples of the world and their different languages and customs.
A similar appetite for varied forms of knowledge emerged in advice given by a northerner from the Low Countries, Rudolf or Rodolphus Agricola, born Roelof Huysman. (Both forms of the surname meant “farmer.”) Writing to a fellow teacher, he recommended having students investigate “the geography and nature of lands, seas, mountains and rivers; the customs, borders and circumstances of nations that live on earth; . . . the medicinal properties of trees and herbs,” and so on. They should, of course, study literary and moral subjects, because these will help them to live well. But learning about “things themselves” is worthwhile just because they are so interesting.
The voracious eagerness of such lists invited mockery, and sure enough, in 1532 they attracted the wicked wit of the French satirist François Rabelais. He had his fictional giant, Gargantua, present his son, Pantagruel, with a similar syllabus to take off to university with him. Learn Greek, then Latin, then Hebrew, and also Chaldean and Arabic. Study history, arithmetic, music; learn “all of the beautiful texts of Civil Law by heart and compare them to moral philosophy.” Study nature; “let there be no sea, river or stream the fishes of which you do not know. Know all the birds of the air, all the trees, bushes and shrubs of the forests, all the herbs in the soil, all the metals hidden deep in the womb of the Earth.” Study medicine, and “by frequent dissections acquire a perfect knowledge of that other world which is Man. . . . In short, let me see you an abyss of erudition.” He added, “I see even today’s brigands, hangmen, mercenaries and stable-lads better taught than the teachers and preachers of my day. Even the very women and children have aspired to such praise and to the heavenly manna of sound learning.”
In fact, Rabelais had mastered a fair range of these topics himself, being a former monk, polyglot, trained lawyer, and practicing physician: he produced scholarly editions of Galen and Hippocrates and had some involvement in at least one public dissection. And Agricola had a similarly formidable array of accomplishments. Agricola sounds like another Leon Battista Alberti in the scope of his excellences and the charm of his manner. For ten years Agricola traveled in Italy, where he not only taught students rhetoric but also played the church organ; much of his time there was spent in the entourage of the duke of Este. His musical ear probably helped him in learning languages; those who knew him commented on how good his accent was. He spoke French, Italian, High German and Low German, the Frisian of his homeland, and of course Latin and Greek. Toward the end of his life he added some study of Hebrew. His other talents included drawing: he would secretly observe people’s faces in church (while playing organ at the same time? I wonder) and afterward reproduce them perfectly in charcoal. He was good-looking, with Vitruvian proportions, according to admiring descriptions by friends: “His frame was big and strong and he was taller than most, with wide shoulders and chest, to which the other parts of his body from head to foot harmoniously corresponded, so that as regards his whole body, he was striking to behold.” Everyone loved him, and his influence on others was greater than is implied by his relatively sparse, not terribly exciting publications.
We know in particular that he made an impression on one boy of about fourteen, a pupil at a school in Deventer in the Netherlands that Agricola visited in 1480. Agricola probably went there to address the students. We do not know what he said; it may have been along the lines of his advice in the letter I just quoted. He may even have gone on to add, as he said in that letter, that a student should not put too much reliance on what he learns at school. It is far more important to study history, poetry, and philosophy from the original sources, as well as religious texts, and above all to learn the ultimate skill: how to live well.
Whatever Agricola said that day, that teenage boy took it to heart. His name was Desiderius Erasmus—and, so far as we know, he actually was given this name at birth, rather than adopting it later. He grew up to be the most eminent northern humanist of his century. He is one of our two main subjects in this chapter, the other being the French writer Michel de Montaigne, another product of the transalpine influence. Montaigne belonged to a younger generation, and this made a difference to his sensibility. Erasmus’s Europe was that of the late 1400s and early 1500s—a time of dramatic social transformation to which he was an often-horrified witness. Montaigne, instead, would find himself in that transformed world from the start; its instability was a constant for him. This difference aside, the two men had similar temperaments, characterized by tolerance and a great love for the life of the mind; I am sure they would have liked each other had they been able to meet.
Erasmus and Agricola could have had a fine friendship, too, had they reencountered each other as adults and equals. Unfortunately, Agricola died too soon. It was a sudden death of the sort that was then common, and that could have been avoided in an era of better medicine. While traveling home from another Italian trip to his residence in Heidelberg, he developed a kidney infection and a fever. No effective treatment was available for such infections, and it killed him. He was only forty-two; Erasmus was then about nineteen and trying to decide what to do with his life.
Desiderius Erasmus is remembered as one of the most many-faceted of humanists, author of translations, dialogues, diatribes, theological tracts, writing manuals, study guides, proverb collections, amusing diversions, and astonishing quantities of letters. He developed a circle of correspondents and friends to rival Petrarch’s. By comparison with Petrarch, he had the benefit of almost two hundred years’ worth of extra scholarship to draw on, as well as an ever more well-connected continent to explore. He was no questioner of Christian faith, being very devout—but he did add his own deep belief in the importance of living wisely and well in this world. An advocate of principles of peace and friendship, he was also much concerned with manners and civilized behavior. He believed completely in the benefits of education and in the ways in which literature and study could help people to flourish in disturbing and complicated times.
None of that long list of cultural contributions would have seemed especially likely when he was born, in Rotterdam, probably in 1466. He was illegitimate: his parents, though living in domestic contentment, could not marry because his father was a priest. They took care to give Erasmus and his older brother the best schooling they could, however. This meant a series of monastic institutions culminating in the one in Deventer, run by a community called the Brethren of the Common Life.
The Deventer monks were highly respected, and the community had long been known for its excellent manuscript copying. But Erasmus came to view this and his previous schools with loathing. One reason was the air of violence. In that era it was considered normal, and even essential, to beat pupils, but Erasmus had been traumatized at his earlier school by being hit merely as a test of how good he was at bearing it, rather than because he had done anything wrong. As he wrote, “This incident destroyed all love of study within me and flung my young mind into such a deep depression that I nearly wasted away with heart-break.” The Deventer monks were probably less arbitrary, but they, too, seemed to Erasmus to want to knock the spirit out of the boys, all the better to prepare them for following the monastic life themselves.
Instead, the effect on Erasmus was to implant in him a lifelong aversion to cruelty or intimidation of any kind. He would have agreed with a remark made centuries later by E. M. Forster in describing the miseries of his own public-school education: “The worst trick it ever played me was to pretend that it was the world in miniature. For it hindered me from discovering how lovely and delightful and kind the world can be, and how much of it is intelligible.”
That was another reason Erasmus took a poor view of his schooling: the unworldliness and irrelevance to real life of the monks’ attitudes. It was a common humanist complaint to say that such institutions were old-fashioned, pedantic, and out of touch with reality. For Erasmus, as for Agricola, and later for Forster, a young mind needs to be liberated from meaningless, useless systems of knowledge as taught by unenlightened masters of an outmoded stamp who themselves have no idea how to live.
Erasmus came to this view slowly. At first, he did follow the expected path, and took orders himself in another monastery. He even wrote a treatise in praise of monastic existence: On Contempt for the World. But he wrote another one at around the same time, boldly called Anti-Barbarians, which attacked ill-educated monks and their tendency to ignore the humanistic subjects of moral philosophy, history, and good Latin. Erasmus was apparently trying his hand at different arguments, and showing his literary versatility. It was his writing skill that earned him his escape when the bishop of Cambrai took him on as a secretary to accompany him on his travels. After that departure, Erasmus never went back to the monastery. The bishop also arranged for him to be allowed to go to Paris and study at the university of the Sorbonne.
That was unsatisfactory, too, and for similar reasons. The Sorbonne was another bastion of medieval scholasticism, at a time when other European universities were slowly becoming more hospitable to humanist ideas of learning. Not in Paris: there, the professors still seemed to be socially inept oddballs, preoccupied with paradoxes and syllogisms. Also, Erasmus’s lodgings were squalid, and he was very poor. A lack of civilized living conditions formed another aspect of the attitude of “contempt for the world” that Erasmus was now rejecting. Instead, he felt that education should train a person to be at home in the world, in tune with fellow humans, able to make friends, act wisely, and share the light of knowledge while treating all people with courtesy. That is, it should encourage the development of humanitas.
So he left Paris, too, and adopted the pattern of life that he would continue to follow for the rest of his days: that of a traveling humanist. He would earn his way as a scholar, a writer, a publisher’s assistant, a teacher, and a sort of general humanist consultant in institutions all over Europe. It was not easy: he had no truly settled home, and, like so many other humanists, remained dependent on pleasing those who supported him. But intellectually, for the most part, it was a life of freedom.
His sojourns in various countries included several in England. During one of these, from 1509 to 1514, he taught at both Oxford and Cambridge—universities that were now relaxing their medieval syllabus slightly to allow in a little of the humanistic light. Erasmus contributed to that process. He also worked with the English humanist John Colet to design a curriculum for Colet’s newly opened school at St. Paul’s Cathedral. Another Englishman who became a great friend during this time was Thomas More, the lawyer and statesman who later entangled himself fatally with King Henry VIII. You can feel the exuberance of his and Erasmus’s friendship by reading the two books they wrote in each other’s honor. Erasmus’s In Praise of Folly—Moriae encomium, a pun on More’s name—is a flight of mischievous fancy, including some daring ideas but putting them into the mouth of “Folly,” which means they can be safely disowned. More’s political satire Utopia tells of travels to an imaginary island society that has a tolerant, almost Epicurean approach to religion, alongside some eccentric ideas about the sharing of jobs and houses. Erasmus did much to help him compose and publish it.
On the basis of his experiences in developing educational programs in England, Erasmus produced a series of treatises on the subject of training the young in humanistic life and techniques of study. Like Celtis and others, he thought it was vital for students to acquire good manners—which is to say, ways of expressing fellow feeling and consideration for others. His 1530 work De civilitate morum puerilium, or On Good Manners for Boys, summed up the dos and don’ts of civilized behavior. Don’t wipe your nose on your sleeve, but blow it with a handkerchief—not too loudly, because trumpeting is for elephants. If you must sneeze, turn away from others, and when people bless you (or when you assume they have, since while sneezing you won’t hear them), raise your cap in acknowledgment. When you spit, aim it so you don’t spray people. Look after your teeth, although there is no need to whiten them with powder. “To brush them with urine is a custom of the Spaniards.” Don’t toss your hair like a frolicsome horse. To deal with intestinal gas, opinions differ: some say you should clench your buttocks to block its exit, yet “it is no part of good manners to bring illness upon yourself,” so just be considerate and step away from others, or at least cover the sound with a cough. While doing all this, maintain an easy, relaxed look. “The brow also should be cheerful and smooth, indicating a good conscience and an open mind: not lined with wrinkles, a sign of old age; not irresolute like a hedgehog’s; not menacing like a bull’s.”
The aim is something like Castiglione’s ideal of casual poise, but it is not done mainly with the intention of showing off one’s own cool. The aim is, rather, to make life nicer for others. It is a method for not separating oneself from the world, like those awkward Sorbonne teachers or bad-tempered monks. It means knowing how to put companions at ease and to take your place in a generally pleasant society, living with humanity in every sense. It even makes you human. “Manners maketh man,” as the motto of Winchester College and New College, Oxford, still maintains—a line dating from a couple of centuries earlier, in fact.
Of course, there is more to education and humanitas than looking relaxed and farting quietly. Erasmus also taught the habits needed for a fulfilling intellectual life, and here the key thing is to have a richly stocked mind with as large a frame of reference as possible. This will bring better judgment and an ability to express yourself with understanding as well as elegance. He recommends reading good books and following a popular technique of the time: keeping notes grouped by subject, so you can remember what you read and combine it with other ideas in useful ways. If no paper is to hand, you can paint notes on a wall, or even scratch them into window glass. The important thing is to build up a treasure house—the literal meaning of “thesaurus”—in your mind, so it is always there as a resource.
He gave ample materials for such a treasure house himself in his work On the Abundant Style, or, in Latin, De copia, which evokes both copying and abundance. (The “abundant” implication is also there in the English word copious.) This treatise lists ways of varying and expanding what you want to say, according to a principle quoted from the rhetorician Quintilian: “Nature above all delights in variety.” For example, you might develop an account of an event by looking into its causes or consequences, or by expanding vivid details connected with it. Erasmus gives an example from Plutarch, who really pushed the boat out in finding ways of describing Cleopatra’s famously luxurious barge. Most of Erasmus’s text consists of lists of phrases and variations for conveying concepts such as “customary,” “doubt,” or “wheedling.” Number 195 could come in useful if your parrot dies:
mortem obiit: he met his end.
vita defunctus est: he has done with life.
vixit: his life is over.
in vivis esse desiit: he has ceased to be numbered with the living. . . .
concessit in fata: he passed to his fated end.
vitae peregit fabulam: he has played his last scene in life.
Erasmus certainly brought copious abundance to his own work. His expanding, burgeoning method appears most strikingly in a collection of Adages, which gives commentaries on well-worn quotations and phrases such as “to leave no stone unturned” or “to be in the same boat.” From a first version with 818 adages, this grew to a final edition with 4,251 of them. Some of the commentaries themselves became so long that they appeared as separate books, often including more personal reflections alongside the erudite glosses of literature. Having started as a literary exercise, the Adages evolved into something like a portrait of Erasmus’s own voluminous mind. They are suffused with his personality: wry, learned, generous with his knowledge, and informed by his years of traveling, reading, and friendship.
Those were the three great themes of his life, and each of them fed the others. Traveling brought endless new friends; friends brought new projects, appointments, and ideas for further study; and these in turn prompted further travels. And so it went on. He followed where these opportunities led, sometimes staying for long periods, sometimes only briefly passing through. As he once said: “My home is wherever I keep my library.”
One of Erasmus’s longest sojourns was in the Swiss city of Basel. This was a great city for humanists, having an excellent university and many publishers—which was why Vesalius would choose it for his Fabrica edition in 1543. During the slightly earlier period when Erasmus was there, the city’s leading humanist printer was Johannes Froben, himself very scholarly and, like Aldus Manutius in Venice, the host of a bookish community. Erasmus moved into Froben’s house and wrote excitedly to a friend, “They all know Latin, they all know Greek, most of them know Hebrew too; one is an expert historian, another an experienced theologian; one is skilled in the mathematics, one a keen antiquary, another a jurist. . . . I certainly have before never had the luck to live in such a gifted company. And to say nothing of that, how open-hearted they are, how gay, how well they get on together!” He admired Froben for his joyful dedication to the literary life: “It was delightful to see him with the first pages of some new book in his hands, some author of whom he approved. His face was radiant with pleasure.”
Erasmus brought his own works in progress with him, including the latest Adages expansion, and also started on an important project for Froben: producing a new Latin translation of the New Testament, breaking away from the standard fourth-century one by Jerome. Such work was in line with Erasmus’s other intellectual endeavors: he sought not only to improve the general education of Europeans but also to improve the moral excellence and quality of their spiritual lives, by going back to the original sources. It was just as important for Christians to have a good version of Scripture based on the latest research as it was for classicists to have good texts of their ancient authors. New scholarship, he thought, would invigorate people’s belief—rather than undermining it, as some apparently feared.
The possibility of retranslating the biblical text itself was partly inspired by our old friend Lorenzo Valla, who had picked holes in Jerome in his Annotations on the New Testament, implying that some of what the church considered unalterable truth might be the result of human errors. Erasmus knew Valla’s ideas well. In his youth, he had even written an abridgment of Valla’s style manual the Elegances, an unobjectionable work—vanilla Valla. The Annotations were more controversial, but Erasmus had found a copy of them in an abbey near Louvain and arranged for them to be published in 1505. Now he picked up on Valla’s implications and went back to the Greek testament himself, to create his new, dual-language Greek and Latin edition. It came out from Froben in 1516, and as was his wont, Erasmus kept adding revisions at regular intervals after that—because of course he was as prone to error as other humans. He vented his annoyance at those who objected that he should not have done any of it in the first place, exclaiming, “How much more truly Christian it would be to have done with quarrelling and for each man cheerfully to offer what he can to the common stock and to accept with good will what is offered!”
Alas, the cheerful putting aside of quarrels was just what was not happening in Europe at that time. After Martin Luther’s posting of his ninety-five anticlerical theses in Wittenberg in 1517 and his subsequent break with Rome, the pope excommunicated him, and so western Europe was set on its long path of religious conflict. Centuries of intermittent, bloody wars, complicated by political struggles, would shatter communities and bring suffering, most of it to people who would not normally expect to have their lives affected greatly by theology at all. Erasmus, and his later admirers and followers, spoke up against such destruction where they could, but usually found they could do little to prevent it from happening.
In the early stages, Erasmus showed a certain sympathy for Luther’s position, feeling that the church ought to have dealt more wisely and sensitively with such challenges to its authority. What is to be gained, he asked in 1519, from people’s being quick to cry “heresy” at such times?
Whatever is not pleasing, whatever they do not understand is a heresy. To know Greek is a heresy. To speak in a polished manner is a heresy. Whatever they themselves do not do is a heresy. . . . Who does not see what these men stand for and in what direction they are heading? Once the restraints on their evil passions are relaxed, they will begin to rage indiscriminately against every good man.
On the other hand, he also became repelled by the aggression of Luther, who was a born contrarian and fighter. Erasmus was not of that type, and he thought that it would make more sense “to mitigate through courteous treatment an issue sharp by its very nature than to add ill will to ill will.” Courtesy, of course, was everything to him: more than just a social veneer, it was the very basis for all mutual respect and concord. He and Luther had theological disagreements, too, notably on the question of human free will. (Erasmus, remaining consistent with the church’s position, believed that humans could freely choose their own path, for good or ill; Luther thought we had no such freedom and that our only route to salvation lay through God’s grace.)
Erasmus’s increasing aversion to Luther’s approach caused difficult moments with Froben, who was working on a set of Luther’s works—a good publishing proposition at a moment when Luther’s rebellion was the subject much of Europe was talking about. Feeling uncomfortable in an increasingly pro-Reformist Basel, Erasmus moved again, to Freiburg im Breisgau: another university town but one that remained calmly Catholic. He made no secret of the fact that he preferred tranquility. “When popes and emperors make the right decisions I follow, which is godly; if they decide wrongly I tolerate them, which is safe.” Erasmus did have courage, but it was of a different sort: he preferred to be discreet but to advance arguments for peace quietly and persistently.
What he hated above all was war. Already before the Reformation, he had used his In Praise of Folly to describe war as a monster, a wild beast, and a plague. In his 1515 Adages, he included a long entry discussing a saying by Vegetius: Dulce bellum inexpertis—three neat Latin words that come out more laboriously in English as “War is sweet to those who have not experienced it.” Here and in his 1517 Complaint of Peace, Erasmus set out reasons to avoid war. The most fundamental one is that, in his view, it contradicts our true humanity, which we should be striving to develop and fulfill.
Like Protagoras and Pico before him, he communicates his view of human nature through a flight of narrative fancy. Imagine, he says, Nature coming to the human world and seeing a battlefield full of soldiers. She exclaims in horror: “Where did you get that threatening crest on your head? that glittering helmet? those horns of iron? those winged elbow-cops? that scaly cuirass? those brazen teeth? that plate armour? those death-dealing darts? that more than savage voice? that more than bestial face?” These are not the proper features of human beings. “I made you a creature near divine,” says Nature. What got into you, to change yourselves into such beasts?
Erasmus takes us on a tour of the body and mind, pointing out each of the features that obviously suit us better to a life of mutual assistance and kindness, rather than one of fighting. A bull has horns and a crocodile has armor, but we have soft skin, embracing arms, and “friendly eyes, revealing the soul.” We laugh and cry, revealing our sensitivity. We have speech and reason, with which to communicate. We even have a natural attraction to the love of learning, which “has the greatest power of knitting up friendships.”
Of course, being free, we can choose to ignore these affinities in ourselves. But if only we followed the promptings of our natural humanity, we would do far better. Erasmus evokes a scene reminiscent of that in Lorenzetti’s Sienese fresco The Allegory of Good Government: well-tilled fields, grazing flocks, workers putting up new buildings or renovating old ones, all the arts flourishing, the young studying, the elderly enjoying their leisure. This is a life of peace, and he defines it beautifully as “friendship among many.”
Instead of such a life, however, we keep unleashing the furor of war and its ugly consequences: rape, the sacking of churches, “the trampled crops, the burnt-out farms, the villages set on fire, the cattle driven away.” That is not friendship but murder among many.
So why do we do it? Erasmus’s explanation is the same as that suggested by the Siena frescoes: bad government. Wars start because rulers are foolish or irresponsible, whipping up the worst of human emotions. Lawyers and theologians, who ought to be looking for peaceful solutions, instead make things worse. The situation escalates, and it becomes too late to stop it. War is a blunder: a failure to be human. In Protagoras’s story, Zeus had given humans the skills for a happy society, but it is up to us to develop and refine those skills, or they will be of no use. Erasmus agreed with this notion. We have what we need in our nature already, yet we must still learn to manage our relationships, society, and politics. This learning is acquired from each other, and we in turn should always pass it on. This is a key reason why education, especially in the arts of civics and civility, is so central to the humanist view of the world.
Later commentators observed, with sadness, that Erasmus seemed to underestimate the real depth of human attraction to violence, unreason, and fanaticism—probably because of his own cordial personality. Immune to the thrill of battle and the intoxication of radical ideas himself, he simply could not understand why others found them so powerful. He was no Machiavelli in his reading of the psychological (or political, or economic) machinery that can lead to war. Other humanists have had a similar blind spot, in other times, and many are thus left helplessly wondering again and again why everyone around them seems to have gone mad. But then, they are not always wrong: sometimes the Erasmian spirit does return, at least for a while, and when it does, it is often a reaction against the episodes of suffering caused by its opposite.
Like many generally peaceful people, meanwhile, Erasmus could also be stubborn, and his friends would commemorate this aspect of him. In 1536, approaching his seventieth birthday and in fragile health, he was on the point of taking up an offer from Queen Mary of Hungary, regent of the Netherlands, to return—after his lifetime of wandering—to live near his birthplace, in Brabant. First, however, he went to spend a little time in Basel again. While there, that July, he had a sudden bout of dysentery and died. His Basel friends arranged for him to be buried in the city’s minster; they created a memorial plaque featuring the emblem and motto of Terminus, Roman god of boundaries and limits. The motto was one Erasmus had long adopted as his own: Concedo nulli, or “I yield to no one.”
As with other humanists in our story, his real memorial and afterlife are found in the legacy of his ideas: on education (where Erasmian advice and principles remained hugely influential), on religion (his theological tracts as well as translations remained standard for a long time), and on the movement for peace and international cooperation.
One of the most admirable examples of the latter is found in a program inaugurated in 1987 and administered by the European Union. It enables students to travel and study in each other’s countries and to have their resulting qualifications recognized as equally valid everywhere in the union. The program was a long time in the making and required plenty of stubbornness from its supporters, notably the Italian educationalist Sofia Corradi, who came up with the idea in 1969 and campaigned for it for eighteen years. At the time I am writing, over ten million people have participated, gaining immensely from the opportunity to live in different countries, learn languages, and make friends and professional contacts that can last a lifetime.
Officially, the name of this program is European Region Action Scheme for the Mobility of University Students (now with an added “+” on the end). What a lucky coincidence that this just happens to spell out ERASMUS+. It thus honors the legacy of Europe’s great pioneer of peace, mutual understanding, educational innovation, the sharing of knowledge and experience, free movement, and especially “friendship among many.”
As Erasmus was dying, a three-year-old boy in southwestern France was receiving an unusual education at the hands of a father who had been completely won over by the new humanistic approach. The son’s name was Michel Eyquem de Montaigne; he would go on to take that humanistic education, excel in it, turn it around, deconstruct it, and send it off in a completely new direction.
It all began with that father. Pierre Eyquem had never been very humanistically polished himself. But he had been to Italy, admittedly as a soldier in the French wars of invasion, which was perhaps not the most Erasmian way to get to know the place. He must have absorbed some of the Italian spirit, however—and of Erasmianism, too—because, when his eldest son, Michel, was born, he decided to give him a perfect Latinized start in life. He set out to make the boy something that had not been seen for a thousand years: a native Latin speaker. The method was to bring in a German-born tutor who knew Latin but no French, and to forbid anyone else, even the servants, to use anything but Latin in the boy’s hearing. Even the most extreme Ciceronians hadn’t dreamed of doing this.
The result of these early years was that Montaigne grew up to write a vast, erudite, wide-ranging work of humanistic literature—in French. He explained that he made this choice because French was a fleeting, changeable modern language that might disappear entirely from the world, rather than the supposedly eternal language of the ancients. Since he, too, was fleeting and changeable and would definitely disappear from the world in a few years, the choice seemed appropriate.
A similar taste for instability and endless movement inspired the book itself: Essais (a word he coined, meaning “tryouts” or “attempts”), first published in 1580 and enlarged later. The words flow, take unexpected changes of direction, and contradict each other; they tumble into digressions, some of which become many pages long. They trace the changes in Montaigne’s own mind as he comes up with new thoughts. The book also records the vagaries of his physical existence: one day he feels exuberant because the sunshine feels good; the next day he has a corn on his toe and is bad-tempered. One piece, recalling a day when he nearly died after being thrown from his horse, explores what it feels like to drift near death in a state of semiconsciousness. Others give excruciating amounts of detail about his diet, illnesses, sexual habits, and aging process.
Montaigne’s interests in both physicality and change make you wonder if he has been reading Epicurean philosophy, and, sure enough, he has. His copy of Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things survives, and is filled with his notes and marginal marks, so we know he read it closely. But he would also have absorbed a sense of the transitory and unpredictable nature of human life from the general state of affairs around him. He lived in a time of political and religious upheaval—the long-term consequences of the first stirrings Erasmus had seen earlier in the century. In Montaigne’s case, it lasted his whole adult life: France suffered one wave after another of civil war, driven by religion and the maneuvering of various political factions for power. The split between Catholic and Protestant carved through communities and families, including his own: he was on the Catholic side, but he had siblings who became Protestants.
Had Erasmus lived to see any of this, he would have come close to losing hope. The belligerent spirit of a Luther, or of a John Calvin (the even more uncompromising theologian based in Geneva, and influential in Protestant France), seemed to have won. These were times of the kind when fanatics are admired for the intensity of their commitment, while those who prefer tolerance or compromise are vilified. Montaigne, like Erasmus before him, was fanatically nonfanatical. He had no time for the idea that “we gratify heaven and nature by committing massacre and homicide, a belief universally embraced in all religions.” He, too, respected the god of limits, looking for middle paths in everything, and he generally sought to practice the methods of openness and reconciliation.
Montaigne’s dislike of violence made him abhor the prevailing tendency to burn heretics, witches, and anyone else thought to be in league with the Devil. As he said, it was “putting a very high price on one’s conjectures to have a man roasted alive because of them.” Yet he had no intention of putting a high price on his own thoughts, either—or paying a high price for them. Like Erasmus, he preferred to follow the path of discretion, and would have liked to keep himself aloof from political divisions. This was not easy, since he held posts as a magistrate and later as the mayor of Bordeaux, and he was a friend of the future king Henri IV. He also had many practical obligations to fulfill on his own wine-growing estate, which he had inherited on the death of his father. Still, in between such worrisome duties, Montaigne would slip away to his little stone tower, at one corner of the estate, and write.
Politics proved difficult to evade, but what of religion? Here he had a very different attitude to that of Erasmus. The earlier humanist had been deeply engaged in religious thought and scholarship. Montaigne seemed to think very little about it at all. He showed no interest in close reading or editing or retranslating of Scripture, or in revitalizing Christianity to raise the moral standards of Europe. Having been born a Catholic, he declared himself happy to believe whatever the church told him to believe. This, he explained, had helped him to remain safe and undisturbed during the wars.
His real religion, if that is what it is, seems best captured by a line near the end of the last essay in the book:
I love life and cultivate it just as God has been pleased to grant it to us. . . . I accept with all my heart and with gratitude what nature has done for me, and I am pleased with myself and proud of myself that I do. We wrong that great and all-powerful Giver by refusing his gift, nullifying it, and disfiguring it.
And if this statement summarizes Montaigne’s theology, then another in the same essay expresses his philosophy:
There is nothing so beautiful and legitimate as to play the man well and properly, no knowledge so hard to acquire as the knowledge of how to live this life well and naturally; and the most barbarous of our maladies is to despise our being.
These thoughts, combined with the whole skeptical, literary, and civilized spirit of the Essays, make Montaigne one of the great humanists of history. But he was no ordinary humanist.
For one thing, the passages I just quoted have an odd ring to them, coming at the end of a book in which Montaigne has spent hundreds of pages debunking all human claims to rationality or excellence. “Is it possible to imagine anything so ridiculous as that this miserable and puny creature, who is not even master of himself, exposed to the attacks of all things, should call himself master and emperor of the universe, the least part of which it is not in his power to know, much less to command?” Montaigne even strikes a blow against Protagoras, saying that he must have been having a laugh by making “man the measure of all things,” when, like all of us, he could not even have achieved any definite measure of himself.
Also, for a humanist, his relationship with books is different from what we have come to expect from Petrarch onward. Montaigne did know his classics intimately, and his love for his favorite authors was profound. He built up his own book collection and housed them on shelves built to fit the round interior of his tower. He also had that tower’s ceiling beams painted with quotations, so that he could look up and see them at any time—as if taking Erasmus at his word about carving notes into the fixtures and fittings. In pride of place was Terence’s Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto: “I am human, and consider nothing human alien to me.” The Essays themselves are studded with pungent classical quotations like cloves in an orange. It could not be a more bookish book, or one more immersed in humanist culture.
Yet Montaigne trashes all the humanistic pieties on the subject of reading. As soon as he gets bored with a book, he says, he flings it aside. The books that bore him most are the most revered ones: he comes right out with it and calls Cicero “nothing but wind.” One can almost hear the gasps from the humanists behind us in earlier chapters. Virgil is all right, says Montaigne, but he wonders if the poet might have done more to brush up certain passages in the Aeneid. He also had little patience with the subjects of rhetoric and eloquence. It is a fine thing to speak well, “but it is not as fine as they make it out; and I am vexed that we keep busy all our life at that.”
Instead, he likes books when they enhance life and when they expand his understanding of the many people who have lived in the past. Biographies and histories are good, because they show the human being “more alive and entire than in any other place—the diversity and truth of his inner qualities in the mass and in detail, the variety of the ways he is put together, and the accidents that threaten him.” Terence’s plays also represent “to the life the movements of the soul and the state of our characters; at every moment our actions throw me back to him.” Montaigne was not the only humanist to look for such personal connections in books, but he is exceptional in his insistence that the books in themselves have no appeal to him. (He just happens to read an enormous number of them, build shelves for them, and have hundreds of quotes at his fingertips as well as literally hanging over his head.)
Montaigne was certainly a humanist: the Essays return constantly to the classic humanist themes of moral judgment, courtesy, education, virtue, politics, elegant writing, rhetoric, the beauties of books and texts, and the question of whether we are excellent or despicable. But, pondering each of these themes with a skeptical and questioning eye, he dismantles them. Once they are lying around him in pieces, he reassembles them in a more interesting, more disconcerting, and more thought-provoking spirit than before.
Thus, he writes as a moralist, but a moralist who acknowledges fallibility and slips out from underneath every consistent moral rule. He is political, but expresses his views through evasiveness, insistence on privacy, and refusal to conform. He has an educational theory, but it is one that has no time for schools or rhetorical exercises or compulsion of any kind. When it comes to etiquette, style, virtue, or almost anything else, he constantly adds remarks along the lines of “But I don’t know” or “Then again” before switching to some unexpected new angle.
Those angles often derive from his respect for diversity and variety. “I believe in and conceive a thousand contrary ways of life,” he writes. This belief makes him an advocate of travel as the best means of encountering some of those varied ways. His own commitments at home meant that he could not move around as much as Erasmus did. (Also, he would have hated to be beholden to employers and patrons as Erasmus and many other humanists were; Montaigne was lucky in having the independence brought by inheriting an estate.) Still, he did manage one major eighteen-month tour of German, Swiss, and Italian territories in the early 1580s: his ERASMUS experience. He used it to immerse himself in the atmosphere of each place and to meet as many people as he could. In order to learn something of cultures from farther afield, he filled his library with travelers’ tales. He even managed to talk briefly with some Tupinambá people from Brazil, who had crossed the Atlantic on a French ship. He asked them, through a translator, what they thought about France; they replied, among other things, that they were shocked to see rich people gorging themselves at banquets while their poorer “other halves” starved beside them. That could never happen in their own society, they said disapprovingly. Montaigne relished the reminder that European assumptions of superiority over other cultures were not beyond question; they could always be viewed in reverse. (Not that he stopped attending or hosting banquets himself.) So great was his love of diverse perspectives that he chose the word diversité to close the first edition of his Essays: “And there were never in the world two opinions alike, any more than two hairs or two grains. Their most universal quality is diversity.”
Yet the whole project of the Essays also relies on a belief that all people share an essential, common humanity. Montaigne writes that each of us is a bearer of the human condition in its “entire form.” This is why we can recognize ourselves in the experiences and characters of others, however much we diverge from them in cultural attitudes or background. This forms part of his justification for writing so much about himself: he is an ordinary example of a human being, and one he happens to know intimately. “You can tie up all moral philosophy with a common and private life just as well as with a life of richer stuff.”
It is this writing-out of his essential humanity that makes his book such an advance in humanistic writing. It is a human book, both in the traditional sense of a work of gentlemanly scholarship and in a revolutionary new way, at once philosophical and personal. Its humanness brings another benefit. Writing a book of this sort, Montaigne knows he need not have compunctions about ignoring theological questions. “I set forth notions that are human and my own, simply as human notions considered in themselves,” he writes. He goes on to say that he has heard of other writers being criticized for being too “human,” in that they omit any considerations of the divine realm. Good for them: he intends to do the same. Let us leave divine writing to its own rank, he says, just as royalty sets itself apart from commoners. We are then free to write as human beings, about human things. It was as close as he came to writing a manifesto for himself and for the countless essayists and novelists who would follow him.
Montaigne founded no formal school of thought; he strove for no philosophical rigor, and promoted no dogma. Yet his impact on literature was enormous. The century after his own, the seventeenth, saw an explosion of personal essays written on his model: reflective, skeptical, witty, self-indulgent, sometimes mercilessly critical, and generally dedicated to the spirit of freethinking in the widest sense. The modern world is still filled with such writing. Every time we enjoy reading someone’s spontaneous-looking airing of feelings or thoughts, online or off, characterized by greater or lesser degrees of erudition or profundity, we are reaping a little of the afterlife of Montaigne.
The same digressive, exploratory, personal spirit also permeated other genres, producing what the nineteenth-century critic Walter Pater would call “the Montaignesque element in literature.” In particular, it found its way into a very successful form: the novel. You can see Montaigne himself as a kind of novelist, albeit one who features just one central character—himself—along with walk-on roles for others encountered in his life or reading. He pioneered the stream-of-consciousness narration that would be a feature of modern novels long before consciously modernist experiments in that line came along in the twentieth century. The great psychological and social novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are positive waterfalls of streaming consciousness. They allow us to hitch a ride inside each of several characters in turn, occupying their perspectives as they reflect on events or interact with each other, and as they change through experience. A spirit of Montaignesque abundance often prevails: the rich texture of human existence is seen as it plays out through time. Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, of 1749, opens the story by promising the reader that the “provision” (as in a restaurant’s bill of fare) offered to them is nothing less than “HUMAN NATURE.” It is just one dish, it is true—but do not fear that it will be monotonous: “Here collected under one general name, is such a prodigious variety, that a cook will have sooner gone through all the several species of animal and vegetable food in the world, than an author will be able to exhaust so extensive a subject.”
Later novels delved ever more deeply into characters’ minds, reaching virtuoso level in Tolstoy’s War and Peace or Anna Karenina, or in George Eliot’s Middlemarch. The latter novel—humanistic in several senses, intellectually sophisticated, and constantly surfing between characters—was described by the psychologist William James as “fuller of human stuff than any novel that was ever written.” This makes a good description of Montaigne’s Essays, too: a book all about human stuff.
George Eliot believed that reading imaginative fiction brought real moral benefits, because of the way it enlarged the circle of our sympathy, or what we would now call “empathy.” In an essay, she wrote, “The greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet, or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies. . . . A picture of human life such as a great artist can give, surprises even the trivial and the selfish into that attention to what is apart from themselves, which may be called the raw material of moral sentiment.”
In recent times, some research has supported this argument, suggesting that reading fiction does lead us to be more empathetic and make more morally generous choices. Other commentators disagree, and some even wonder whether heightening empathy is a good thing, since reason may at times be a better guide to action. The whole question, for the moment, remains in a Montaignesque state of complexity and undecidability.
There is another factor, too. Merely understanding and sympathizing with the sufferings of others gets us only so far. Much better would be to prevent such sufferings from happening at all. George Eliot believed this, and so did a number of writers who lived between Montaigne’s time and hers: thinkers who are sometimes referred to under the label “Enlightenment.” It is time for them to join our story.