Early Modern Aging: Erasmus' Epigram "On the troubles o f old age"
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Auteurs : Katherine G. RodgersSource :
- Erasmus of Rotterdam Society Yearbook [ 0276-2854 ] ; 2007.
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DOI: 10.1163/187492707X00087
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<p>[69] Early Modern Aging: Erasmus' Epigram "On the troubles o f old age" by Katherine G. Rodgers When it comes to cliches about old age, the sixteenth century tended to W agree with the Dutch proverb quoted in the Praise of Folly: "the older a Dutchman the stupider."' The joke was as much on the old as the Dutch. De- spite the vigorous defense of old age in a well-known classical precedent like Cicero's De senectute (where old age is pictured as a relatively harmonious season of life and the inevitable burdens of the aging body are seen to have their compensation in the attainment of wisdom), the sixteenth century gen- erally followed the lead of Roman satirists who regarded the old as ridiculous and doddering-objects of scorn, not respect. According to the social histo- rian Georges Minois, the reason for this disdain towards the old is not hard to explain: the humanist movement was prone to reviling old people because humanist ideals themselves promoted a cult of youths As committed reform- ers, the humanists necessarily used old age as a figure for decadence and regu- larly portrayed old people as decrepit caricatures of the young. I mention the Praise of Folly by design. The Dutch proverb Folly quotes early in her oration turns out to epitomize her opinion on the matter of ag- ing. As she tells us later, old men (and women) generally are her creatures: It is my doing that you see everywhere men as old as Nestor, who no longer even look like men: driveling, doting, toothless, whitehaired, bald, or (in the words of Aristophanes) "filthy, crookbacked, wretched, shriveled, bald, toothless, and lame of their best limb." ... But it is even more amusing to see these old women, so ancient they might as well be dead, yet they are always mouthing the proverb "life is sweet."' It is only fair to point out that Folly does not speak for all humanists at all times. Thomas More's Utopians, for example, are relatively sensitive to the needs of old people. The Utopians treat their aging citizens with deference, providing for their care and seating them at the table of honor at communal ' I paraphrase the translation of Clarence H. Miller, The Praise of Folly (New Haven and Lon- don : Yale University Press, 1979), 23. .. 2 See Minois' History of Old Age From Antiquity to the Renaissance, trans. Sarah Hanbury Teni- son (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 249-87. ' Miller's translation, The Praise of Folly, 48.</p>
<p>70 meals. But even the Utopians advocate euthanasia for those who have be- come so incapacitated that they are useless or burdensome to their society. As long as the old are healthy, they pose no threat to the efficient whirring of the well-run state; if their advanced age is accompanied by debilitating ill- ness, they become disposable.' Utopian practice notwithstanding, Folly represents an important strain in humanist thought and may even be partly responsible for perpetuating it.' It is significant, therefore, to discover that as a poet, Erasmus was more sympa- thetic than Folly and less impersonal than the Utopians in his treatment of the old. The subject of old age interested him as a poetic theme; indeed, three of his early poems (nos. 95, 99, and 104 in the Toronto edition, from which I shall be quoting) are devoted to it.' These early poems treat the subject of old age by inverting the conventional pattern of a carpe them argument: the speaker laments the passage of time or enjoins an unnamed friend to take advantage of his youth by devoting himself to spiritual improvement before "crooked-back old age" steals away the best years of life.' But it is poem 2 in CWE 85, the "Epigram on the troubles of old age," that gives fullest expres- sion to this theme and most thoroughly challenges the cliches about old age which dominate the thinking of Erasmus' contemporaries. As many readers have noticed, this poem (written in 1506 during a journey through the Alps en route to Italy) achieves a greater psychological depth than Erasmus' earlier ones on the subject of growing old. Indeed, Reedijk and others have sug- gested that the epigram is superior to the earlier poems because it possesses an emotional and psychological authenticity that the others do not: its author (these readers speculate) must have been in the grip of a midlife crisis as he traveled by horseback to Turin. Frustrated by his inability to achieve the recognition as a scholar he desired and oppressed by the futility of worldly pursuits, he thus wrote a deeply personal account of the experience of grow- ing old. How else to explain this unusually autobiographical treatment of old age by a writer who was not yet forty years old and was just coming into his own as the most famous humanist in Europe?' 'See Utopia, ed. Edward Surtz and J. H. Hexter, Complete Works of Saint Thomas More, vol. 4 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1965), 142 and 186. 5See Minois, 249-87. "CWE 85-86. The reader is reminded that CWE 85 prints both the Latin texts and (prose) English translations of the poems. The numbering is the same as in the ASD edition. 'See CWE 85: Introduction, xvi. 'See, e.g., C. Reedijk, 121-23; Jean-Claude Margolin, " 'Le chant alpestre' d'Erasme: poeme sur la vieillesse," Bibliotheque d'Humanisme et Renaissance 27 (1965): 37-448; and James D. Tracy, Erasmus: The Growth of a Mind (Geneva: Droz, 1972), 114-15.</p>
<p>71 This intriguing but unverifiable view has been ably disputed in Harry Vredeveld's fine commentary and introduction in the Toronto edition of Erasmus' poems. Vredeveld argues persuasively that since no independent source provides evidence of an Erasmian midlife crisis, the poem should rather be seen as a particularly powerful example of deliberative rhetoric in which Erasmus has used himself as the subject of a poetic sermon about using time well. If the epigram is superior to the earlier efforts, it is because Erasmus had become a more accomplished poet by 1506 than he had been in 1480. In any case, in using himself as an example, he might without incongruity have drawn on late medieval medical thought that placed the onset of old age (senectus) at forty.9 Vredeveld is right to emphasize the rhetorical acuity of Erasmus' offering himself as an example of the ravages of time. However, I would add that this rhetorical strategy includes narrative modes as well as deliberative ones, and that these are crucial to the epigram's poetic success. To the devices of rhe- torical poetry, Erasmus joins fictionalized points of view, offering a three- dimensional (as opposed to autobiographical) treatment of the aging person. In short, narrative sophistication joins rhetorical control as the means by which this poem achieves its depth of insight into the human problem of aging. From a rhetorical standpoint, the poem follows the orderly, well-established pattern of deliberative argument. As Vredeveld has shown, the poem is orga- nized into four parts: an exordium introducing the problem, a dissuasio on the burdens of age, an exhortatio urging the wise use of time, and an epilogue, which takes the form of a prayer.'° Within this rhetorical framework, how- ever, the poem's discursive modes are complex, and the viewpoints it presents are neither predictable nor orderly. To begin with, it presents us with an im- plied dialogue between the speaker and a specific audience: Erasmus' friend and fellow humanist Guillaume Cop, a doctor and translator of works by Galen and Hippocrates. In so doing, it explicitly places Cop in the role of interlocutor as the speaker deliberates the ravages of time. Cop's role as the "you" to whom Erasmus addresses himself is important to the theme: the in- commoda of old age are first pictured as a medical problem, one even a doctor as gifted as Cop cannot solve. Erasmus thus sets up his conclusion that only Christ (a greater physician than Cop) is capable of healing the disease of old age: "No medicines can drive away that monstrous disease, hideous old age" (says Erasmus in line 7); only the last day can restore the "perpetual spring- time" of body and mind (he concludes at the end of the poem). `'See CWE 85: Introduction, xliii. '°Ibid.</p>
<p>72 Thus summarized, the poem might appear to be mainly a Christianized version (though a rhetorically masterful one) of another cliche about old age: that it is an incurable disease." The idea that age transforms the youthful self into someone different and unfamiliar was a commonplace of literary treat- ments of aging.12 At first Erasmus draws on this tradition in fairly conven- tional ways. Old age is here an allegorical figure who snatches away both the physical and mental capacities of the human being: "old age, that monstrous disease, ... wears down ... beauty, posture, coloring, the part of the mind which remembers, understanding, eyesight, sleep, strength, enthusiasm" (8- 18). The effects of age destroy both body and mind-they steal "the whole man from himself" (totum hominem... surripit ipsi, 23). Erasmus reminds Cop that no less an authority than Aristotle suggests that old age begins to destroy the inner nature (ingenii sacros ... nervos, 51) before a person turns fifty. An earlier poem on the subject of aging (poem 95 CWE), an elegy pub- lished without Erasmus' consent in 1490, also addresses itself to a specific in- terlocutor, an unnamed youth Erasmus calls Stultus for wasting his best years in immorality. In the later epigram, however, addressing Cop as a foil for the point that old age is beyond the reach of medical science is only a starting place for the different perspectives from which the speaker will reflect on growing old. Indeed, even as the speaker invokes Aristotle, he offers Cop the more immediate and vivid perspective of personal experience, here introduc- ing himself as the prime example of the moral that no one is exempt from growing old: But what need is there, I beg you, for such a great authority when experi- ence itself establishes our credence firmly, all too firmly, alas! How short a time ago did you see this Erasmus flourishing amidst the greenery of his youth! Now this man, by a sudden change, begins to feel the damage thrust upon him by the onset of old age. He is getting to be someone else, different from himself, and the circle of Phoebus has not yet re- verted forty times to the day of his birth, which comes at the onset of winter on the fourth day before the beginning of November. Now a few white hairs are already sprinkled on my temples, and the hair on my chin, which is just beginning to get white, reminds me that the years of my springtime are already gone by as the winter of my declining lifetime approaches and freezing old age presses upon me. (57-69) "See, for example, Augustine, Confessiones 10.31.43-44. ¡2For the convention that old age transforms the self into another person, see Vredeveld's commentary note, CWE 86:423.</p>
<p>73 The complex modes of discourse are striking. The speaker begins by ad- dressing Cop (Cedit fugitque morbi / Ingenio genus omne tuo), proceeds to speak of himself in the third person (hunc Erasmum), and finally draws a self- portrait in the first-person singular (Nunc mihi iam raris sparguntur tempora canis). A kind of rueful objectivity and self-consciousness are gained by the third-person perspective; at the same time, the first-person details (regardless of whether or not they register an autobiographical dilemma) are direct and psychologically resonant. If the received Aristotelian wisdom is that age turns the self into another person, the speaker himself becomes that newly aged other while simultaneously remaining the poet who is conscious of growing old. If such shifting viewpoints complicate the dispassionate rhetorical struc- ture of the poem, they also emphasize its varied tonal registers. Addressing Cop or referring to himself, the speaker's tone is by turns affectionate and wistful, playful and serious, but it remains conversational. When at line 75 he begins formally to lament the passing of youth, the effect is to draw the con- trast between the conversational and the declamatory: Hold, 0 better part of our fleeting life span! Alas, the better part is the very part that hurries away faster! 0 flower of a perishing lifetime, blos- som all too brief which no skill can restore. (75-78) The next forty-four lines are given over to this lament, with its grand invoca- tions and tightly controlled parallel structures. But just as the speaker intro- duces a series of subordinate clauses that he will maintain with poetic virtu- osity for twenty lines, he slips back into the first person: And just so, woe is me, while as a little boy I was playing with nuts, while as a beardless youth I was passionately devoted to reading and writing, while I examined the controversies and the schools of the philosophers, while I was madly in love with the figures of the rhetori- cians and the beguiling fictions of mellifluous poetry, while I wove together syllogisms, ... while I joyed and delighted in clambering over the snowy Alps, while I strove to acquire sweet friends and took pleasure in becoming well known to learned men, all the while sluggish old age stole imperceptibly over me, and I feel-with amazement I feel-my strength suddenly slacken. (89-111 ) Regardless of whether or not this account signals an autobiographical anx- iety about aging or chronicles specific events, it organizes this part of the poem as a narrative account of the author's life, accumulating vivid details</p>
<p>74 and vignettes even as it draws attention to its own rhetorical flourishes. We see an Erasmus not just growing old, but living his life-playing boyhood games, hiking in the Alps, engaged in study, pursuing a career. I suggest that this strategy is effective rhetorically because of its narrative method. In this sense, the temporal markers emphasized by the parallel structure ("while ... while ... while") are persuasive because they enact the aging process; taken together with the other markers which round out this part of the poem ("sud- denly ... already"), they provide a means of observing the very passage of time which the speaker laments." In the context of the formal dissuasio in which they are embedded, these apparently autobiographical references allow Erasmus to create a semi-fictional self to grapple with the problem of old age. A similar pattern is repeated in the exhortatio, where the speaker rehearses the futility of trying to escape the ravages of time. Initially, Erasmus employs a series of conventional topoi on this theme, using an impersonal first person plural: "What once pleased us ... now tortures us" (lines 176ff). But this point of view gives way, once again, to the first person singular, with a strik- ing shift into the third: But now, how large a part of my life have I drowsily given over to trifles - and such trifles, alas! Enough of this dallying, poor wretch, enough of this slumbering! Now is the time, Erasmus, to shake off sleep; now is the time to wake up and come to your senses with your mind totally alert. (185-89) From a narrative standpoint, it is also significant that Erasmus here refigures the "you" to whom the poem is at first addressed. At first, "you" is Cop; now it is the speaker himself. This refiguration is signaled by a new understanding of the temporal marker. Though the word (nunc) used in both places is the same, it is as if there were a subtle difference between "now" at line 58, de- noting a present in which old age is setting in, and "now" at line 185, a pres- ent in which the aging person can discover new life. Because such temporal distinctions are subtle indeed, the final "you" of the poem is Christ, "the cre- ator and restorer of life," to whom the speaker prays "that these things may happen in due course": human narratives, the prayer acknowledges, are al- ways fictions; only divine acts can both create and restore new life (Haec fac- ito ut rata sint, vitae exorabilis autor / Vitaeque restitutor, 242-46). "Vredeveld suggests that the meter of the poem has a similar effect-Uactylic hexameter imi- tates the rapid movement of time while catalectic iambic dimeter "cuts short" the line "before its time"; CWE 86:415.</p>
<p>75 A poem about the troubles of old age inevitably turns to the theme of mortality, but it might also be said that a poem about mortality inevitably adopts the methods of narrative. Certain narrative theorists have told us to understand stories as a means of cheating death; that, after all, was Sche- herazade's great secret.14 Erasmus' epigram seems to confirm this understand- ing. By no stretch of the imagination could this be called a narrative poem or even a dramatic monologue, yet it seems to me to illustrate in a profound way the two essential principles of narrative identified by Tzvetan Todorov: suc- cession and transformation. 15 Succession is achieved in the poem's organiza- tion not only by the rhetorical modes of deliberation, but also by the tempo- ral markers and perspectival shifts which allow the speaker to narrate the process of his own aging; transformation is achieved by refiguring these poetic elements so that the speaker proceeds from addressing Cop (a merely mortal physician) to addressing Christ (a doctor with power over the incurable dis- ease of death). I am thus not troubled by the incongruity of a not-yet-forty-year-old Eras- mus claiming to be old. The poem is the more persuasive as a semi-fictional account of aging from several perspectives-a demonstration of negative ca- pability, if you will, revealing the very gift for fictionalized viewpoints that produced Erasmus' greatest character-Folly (herself conceived on a journey through the Alps). Erasmus will perhaps never be remembered as a great poet, but this great poem suggests his genius for multiple perspectives and dis- cursive modes. In so doing it also gives voice to a more sympathetic attitude toward the aging self than Folly (and many humanists) were prepared to en- dorse. The contemporary study of gerontology asks us to rethink the cliche that the old are failed versions of the young; in this sense, the aging person is a fundamentally different person from his or her youthful self." Ahead of his time, Erasmus here suggests that it is this transformed, though aging, person who turns out to be capable of real life-that is, life in Christ. "See, e.g., J. Hillis Miller, Aspects of Narrative (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971 ), 85-112; Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 2:100- 152. '" genres in Discourse, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge University Press, 1990), 27-38. this view is sensitively explored by Simon Biggs in "Beyond Appearances: Perspectives on Identity in Later Life and Some Implications for Method," The Journal of Gerontology, 60B:3 (May, 2005), 118-29.</p>
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