Erasmus's monastic career is controversial. He benefited from many exceptions from the more ascetic parts of the rule. He contracted an intimate and emotional friendship with a fellow monk, Servatius, and he looked for support to a wealthy widow active in good works, Berthe de Heyen. He was the source of a humanist enthusiasm in the priory, and the Anti-Barbari in its original form was the result of his superiors' desire to restrain his humanist enthusiasm. It seems certain that he had no real monastic vocation, but only a boyish and rather timid devotion which made monastic discipline less than totally uncongenial and at any rate tolerable for the sake of his studies and his religious life. He was pious as well as prudent throughout his life and if later he was occasionally bitter or stinging, he none the less showed a control of the aggressive reactions by which many of his contemporaries were overcome. Without his monastic years Erasmus might never have found the patient and comparatively tranquil intellectual firmness which kept him faithful to his own true vocation.