Winter King by Thomas Penn

Author:Thomas Penn [Penn, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781846145094
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2011-07-19T16:00:00+00:00

10

New Heaven, New Earth

In autumn 1504 Desiderius Erasmus was in Paris; as usual, he was broke. News reached him from England, where his friend John Colet, the ascetic mentor of Thomas More, had been appointed to the lucrative and influential post of dean of St Paul’s Cathedral. Erasmus sensed an opportunity. Overcoming his terror of the ‘ill-famed’ cliffs of Dover, on which he had been ‘wrecked’ – the exactions of Henry’s customs officers lingered in his mind, four years after they had confiscated the hard currency that he had tried to take out of the country – he decided to try his luck in England again. For Erasmus felt he had something new to offer.

His previous visit to England had jolted Erasmus out of his intellectual comfort zone. In the intervening years, his scholarship had started to blossom into maturity, his writings exhibiting the deceptively easy, colloquial eloquence that would become his trademark. He had also mastered Greek, which had opened up to him the writings of the early Church fathers, and the original language of the New Testament. Study of the classics, Erasmus had begun to believe, could reinterpret the world anew. It could reform society, strip away ingrained customs and traditions that blinded people to the evils of the world – like chivalric culture, which conferred a veneer of legitimacy and glory on the war and conquest of the military classes, and the outward rituals and observances, the indulgences and graven images that were the expressions of a church riddled with corruption. Knowledge, Erasmus believed, should be liberated from the clutches of the scholastics, with their arcane, hair-splitting debates, and, through the new technology of print, be brought out into the full light of the world and put to the service of humanity. He was, in short, becoming the complete humanist.

Nonetheless, he also remained a pragmatist. He knew how power politics worked and was perfectly happy to tailor his thinking to it. If princes were to be the true rulers of society, they should abandon their militaristic tendencies, embrace the studia humanitatis and rule not through the abuse of power but through wisdom. Yet as with many humanists, it was impossible to tell where his reforming zeal stopped and his self-interest began. Behind every good prince was a good educator. Erasmus needed a patron. That December, from a wintry Paris, he wrote to Colet.

His letter, he knew, had to be finely judged. Insulated by his family’s phenomenal mercantile wealth and connections, Colet viewed with fastidious distaste the desperate scrabbling-after-favour of the less privileged, of networking academics and clergymen who ran, panting, after ‘fat benefices and high promotions’ – even when it involved his friends. Erasmus pressed all the right buttons. Heaping fulsome praise on Colet’s scholarship, he said how desperate he was for someone to help him realize his ‘burning zeal for sacred studies’, and enclosed a copy of his new book, the Enchiridion, of which he knew Colet would approve: an all-purpose spiritual guide to everyday life

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