A world lit only by fire_ the medieval m - William Manchester [61]
That decided Erasmus; he packed his bags. The offer was irresistible—for private reasons. In Rome, even if he became a cardinal, his manuscripts would be carefully scrutinized for possible heresy, but in England he would be free, protected by a powerful sovereign. This was important because there were certain unorthodox reflections Erasmus wanted to put on paper and then publish. Had his hosts at the Vatican known of them, it is likely that he would never have left the city. Given the morality of the time, it is even possible that his body, like so many thousands before it, would have been washed up by the waters of the Tiber.
IN REASONING that truth must sometimes be concealed in the name of piety, Erasmus had been completely sincere. He had, in fact, done exactly that with the sacred college. Safe in England, he intended to attack the entire Catholic superstructure. But he was no hypocrite. Nor, by his lights, was he guilty of treachery; betrayal as we know it was so common in that age that it carried few moral implications and aroused little resentment, even among sovereigns, prelates, and the learned. Furthermore, he was moved by a higher loyalty. He had always assigned absolute priority to principles and was baffled by those who didn’t. “We must not look to Erasmus for any realistic conception of human nature,” writes an intellectual historian. Brilliant, an accomplished linguist, familiar with all the capitals of Europe, he was nevertheless ignorant of, and indifferent to, the secular world.
He never pondered, for example, the dilemma which was troubling Machiavelli in these years: whether a government can remain in power if it practices the morality it preaches to its people. Nor had he ever coped with the vulgar tensions of everyday life—sexual tension (he was a celibate), for example, or the need to earn a living. Others had always handled money matters for him. It was no different in England. On his arrival there, the bishop of Rochester endowed him with $1,300 a year, a Kentish parish awarded him its annual revenues, and friends and admirers provided him with cash gifts. He was spared any concern about lodgings by Sir Thomas More, who, taking him into his own home, provided him with a servant. Erasmus scarcely noticed. He said: “My home is where I have my library.”
His, in short, was the peculiar naïveté of the isolated intellectual. As an ecclesiastic, he had an encyclopedic knowledge of clerical scandals, including the corruption in Rome. Other humanists had withdrawn from this squalor and found solace in the Scriptures. Not Erasmus; by force of reason, he believed, he could resolve the abuses of Catholicism and keep Christendom intact.
He miscalculated. Because the press as we know it had not even reached an embryonic stage, his knowledge of the world around him, like that of his contemporaries, was confined to what he saw, heard, was told, or read in letters or conversation. And because those around him were all members of the learned elite, he had no grasp of what the masses, the middle class, or most of the nobility knew and thought. His appeal was to his peers. Once he took his stand, they would find him immensely persuasive. But since his message would be incomprehensible to the lower clergy, where it counted, his appeals for reform would be impotent, his triumph literally academic.
Had that been the sum of it, he would have been unheard. But he was a man of many gifts, and one of them altered history. He possessed the extraordinary talent of making men laugh at the outrageous. Medieval men had known laughter—it is hard to see how they could have got through the day without it—but their expression of merriment