Desiderius Erasmus
born Oct. 27, 1469, Rotterdam, Holland [now in The
Netherlands]
died July 12, 1536, Basel, Switz.
humanist who was the greatest scholar of the northern
Renaissance, the first editor of the New Testament, and also
an important figure in patristics and classical literature.
Using the philological methods pioneered by Italian
humanists, Erasmus helped lay the groundwork for the
historical-critical study of the past, especially in his
studies of the Greek New Testament and the Church Fathers.
His educational writings contributed to the replacement of
the older scholastic curriculum by the new humanist emphasis
on the classics. Bycriticizing ecclesiastical abuses, while
pointing to a better age in the distant past, he encouraged
the growing urge for reform, which found expression both in
the Protestant Reformation and in the Catholic
Counter-Reformation. Finally, his independent stance in an
age of fierce confessional controversy—rejecting both
Luther's doctrine of predestination and the powers that were
claimed for the papacy—made him a target of suspicion for
loyal partisans on both sides and a beacon for those who
valued liberty more than orthodoxy.
Early life and career
Erasmus was the second illegitimate son of Roger Gerard, a
priest, and Margaret, a physician's daughter. He advanced
asfar as the third-highest class at the chapter school of
St. Lebuin's in Deventer. One of his teachers, Jan Synthen,
was ahumanist, as was the headmaster, Alexander Hegius. The
schoolboy Erasmus was clever enough to write classical Latin
verse that impresses a modern reader as cosmopolitan.
After both parents died, the guardians of the two boys sent
them to a school in 's Hertogenbosch conducted by the
Brethren of the Common Life, a lay religious movement that
fostered monastic vocations. Erasmus would remember
thisschool only for a severe discipline intended, he said,
to teachhumility by breaking a boy's spirit.
Having little other choice, both brothers entered
monasteries. Erasmus chose the Augustinian canons regular at
Steyn, near Gouda, where he seems to have remained about
seven years (1485–92). While at Steyn he paraphrased Lorenzo
Valla's Elegantiae, which was both a compendium of pure
classical usage and a manifesto againstthe scholastic
“barbarians” who had allegedly corrupted it. Erasmus'
monastic superiors became “barbarians” for him by
discouraging his classical studies. Thus, after his
ordination to the priesthood (April 1492), he was happy to
escape the monastery by accepting a post as Latin secretary
to the influential Henry of Bergen, bishop of Cambrai. His
Antibarbarorum liber, extant from a revision of 1494–95, is
a vigorous restatement of patristic arguments for the
utility of the pagan classics, with a polemical thrust
against the cloister he had left behind: “All sound learning
is secular learning.”
Erasmus was not suited to a courtier's life, nor did things
improve much when the bishop was induced to send him to the
University of Paris to study theology (1495). He disliked
the quasi-monastic regimen of the Collège de Montaigu, where
he lodged initially, and pictured himself to a friend as
sitting “with wrinkled brow and glazed eye” through Scotist
lectures. To support his classical studies, he began taking
in pupils; from this period (1497–1500) date the earliest
versions of those aids to elegant Latin—including the
Colloquia and the Adagia—that before long would be in use in
humanist schools throughout Europe.
Hans the Younger Holbein
Erasmus
The wandering scholar
In 1499 a pupil, William Blount, Lord Mountjoy, invited
Erasmus to England. There he met Thomas More, who became a
friend for life. John Colet quickened Erasmus' ambition to
be a “primitive theologian,” one who would expound Scripture
not in the argumentative manner of the scholastics but in
the manner of Jerome and the other ChurchFathers, who lived
in an age when men still understood and practiced the
classical art of rhetoric. The impassioned Coletbesought him
to lecture on the Old Testament at Oxford, but the more
cautious Erasmus was not ready. He returned to the Continent
with a Latin copy of St. Paul's Epistles and the conviction
that “ancient theology” required mastery of Greek.
On a visit to Artois, Fr. (1501), Erasmus met the fiery
preacher Jean Voirier, who, though a Franciscan, told him
that“monasticism was a life more of fatuous men than of
religious men.” Admirers recounted how Voirier's disciples
faced death serenely, trusting in God, without the solemn
reassurance of the last rites. Voirier lent Erasmus a copy
of works by Origen, the early Greek Christian writer who
promoted the allegorical, spiritualizing mode of scriptural
interpretation, which had roots in Platonic philosophy. By
1502 Erasmus had settled in the university town of Louvain
(Brabant) and was reading Origen and St. Paul in Greek. The
fruit of his labours was Enchiridion militis Christiani
(1503/04; Handbook of a Christian Knight). In this work
Erasmus urged readers to “inject into the vitals” the
teachings of Christ by studying and meditating on the
Scriptures, using the spiritual interpretation favoured by
the “ancients” to make the text pertinent to moral concerns.
The Enchiridion was a manifesto of lay piety in its
assertion that “monasticism is not piety.” Erasmus' vocation
as a “primitive theologian” was further developed through
his discovery at Park Abbey, near Louvain, of a manuscript
of Valla's Adnotationes on the Greek New Testament, which he
published in 1505 with a dedication to Colet.
Erasmus sailed for England in 1505, hoping to find support
for his studies. Instead he found an opportunity to travel
to Italy, the land of promise for northern humanists, as
tutor to the sons of the future Henry VIII's physician. The
party arrived in the university town of Bologna in time to
witness the triumphal entry (1506) of the warrior pope
Julius II at the head of a conquering army, a scene that
figures later in Erasmus' anonymously published satiric
dialogue, Julius exclusus e coelis (written 1513–14). In
Venice Erasmus was welcomed at the celebrated printing house
of Aldus Manutius, where Byzantine émigrés enriched the
intellectuallife of a numerous scholarly company. For the
Aldine press Erasmus expanded his Adagia, or annotated
collection of Greek and Latin adages, into a monument of
erudition with over 3,000 entries; this was the book that
first made him famous. The adage “Dutch ear” (auris Batava)
is one of many hints that he was not an uncritical admirer
of sophisticated Italy, with its theatrical sermons and its
scholars who doubted the immortality of the soul; his aim
was to write for honest and unassuming “Dutch ears.”
De pueris instituendis, written in Italy though not
published until 1529, is the clearest statement of Erasmus'
enormous faith in the power of education. With strenuous
effort the very stuff of human nature could be molded, so as
to draw out (e-ducare) peaceful and social dispositions
while discouraging unworthy appetites. Erasmus, it would
almost be true to say, believed that one is what one reads.
Thus the “humane letters” of classical and Christian
antiquity would have a beneficent effect on the mind, in
contrast to the disputatious temper induced by scholastic
logic-chopping or the vengeful amour propre bred into young
aristocrats by chivalric literature, “the stupid and
tyrannical fables of King Arthur.”
The celebrated Moriae encomium, or Praise of Folly,
conceived as Erasmus crossed the Alps on his way back to
England and written at Thomas More's house, expresses a very
different mood. For the first time the earnest scholar saw
his own efforts along with everyone else's as bathed in
auniversal irony, in which foolish passion carried the day:
“Even the wise man must play the fool if he wishes to beget
achild.”
Little is known of Erasmus' long stay in England (1509–14),
except that he lectured at Cambridge and worked on scholarly
projects, including the Greek text of the New Testament. His
later willingness to speak out as he did may have owed
something to the courage of Colet, who risked royal
disfavour by preaching a sermon against war at the court
just as Henry VIII was looking for a good war in which towin
his spurs. Having returned to the Continent, Erasmus made
connections with the printing firm of Johann Froben and
traveled to Basel to prepare a new edition of the Adagia
(1515). In this and other works of about the same time
Erasmus showed a new boldness in commenting on the ills of
Christian society—popes who in their warlike ambition
imitated Caesar rather than Christ; princes who hauled
wholenations into war to avenge a personal slight; and
preachers who looked to their own interests by pronouncing
the princes' wars just or by nurturing superstitious
observances among the faithful. To remedy these evils
Erasmus looked to education. In particular, the training of
preachers should be based on “the philosophy of Christ”
rather than on scholastic methods. Erasmus tried to show the
way with his annotated text of the Greek New Testament and
his edition of St. Jerome's Opera omnia, both of which
appeared from theFroben press in 1516. These were the months
in which Erasmus thought he saw “the world growing young
again,” and the full measure of his optimism is expressed in
one of the prefatory writings to the New Testament: “If the
Gospel were truly preached, the Christian people would be
spared many wars.”
Erasmus' home base was now in Brabant, where he had
influential friends at the Habsburg court of the Netherlands
in Brussels, notably the grand chancellor, Jean Sauvage.
Through Sauvage he was named honorary councillor to the
16-year-old archduke Charles, the future Charles V, and was
commissioned to write Institutio principis Christiani (1516;
The Education of a Christian Prince) and Querela pacis
(1517; The Complaint of Peace). These works expressed
Erasmus' own convictions, but they also did no harm to
Sauvage's faction at court, which wanted to maintain peace
with France. It was at this time too that he began his
Paraphrases of the books of the New Testament, each one
dedicated to a monarch or a prince of the church. He was
accepted as a member of the theology faculty at nearby
Louvain, and he also took keen interest in a newly founded
Trilingual College, with endowed chairs in Latin, Greek, and
Hebrew. Ratio verae theologiae (1518) provided the rationale
for the new theological education based on the study of
languages. Revision of his Greek New Testament, especially
of the copious annotations, began almost as soonas the first
edition appeared. Though Erasmus certainly made mistakes as
a textual critic, in the history of scholarship he is a
towering figure, intuiting philological principles that in
some cases would not be formulated explicitly until 150
years after his death. But conservative theologians at
Louvain and elsewhere, mostly ignorant of Greek, were not
willing to abandon the interpretation of Scripture to
upstart “grammarians,” nor did the atmosphere at Louvain
improve when the second edition of Erasmus' New Testament
(1519) replaced the Vulgate with his own Latin translation.
Albrecht Durer - Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam
The Protestant challenge
From the very beginning of the momentous events sparked by
Martin Luther's challenge to papal authority, Erasmus'
clerical foes blamed him for inspiring Luther, just as some
of Luther's admirers in Germany found that he merely
proclaimed boldly what Erasmus had been hinting. In fact,
Luther's first letter to Erasmus (1516) showed an important
disagreement over the interpretation of St. Paul, and in
1518 Erasmus privately instructed his printer, Froben, to
stop printing works by Luther, lest the two causes be
confused. Ashe read Luther's writings, at least those prior
to The Babylonian Captivity of the Church (1520), Erasmus
found much to admire, and he could even describe Luther, in
a letter to Pope Leo X, as “a mighty trumpet of Gospel
truth.” Being of a suspicious nature, however, he also
convinced himself that Luther's fiercest enemies were men
who saw the study of languages as the root of heresy and
thus wanted to be rid of both at once. Hence he tugged at
the slender threads of his influence, vainly hoping to
forestall a confrontation that could only be destructive to
“good letters.” When he quit Brabant for Basel (December
1521), he did so lest he be faced with a personal request
from the Emperor to write a book against Luther, which he
could not have refused.
Erasmus' belief in the unity of the church was fundamental,
but, like the Hollanders and Brabanters with whom he was
most at home, he recoiled from the cruel logic of religious
persecution. He expressed his views indirectly through the
Colloquia, which had started as schoolboy dialogues but now
became a vehicle for commentary. For example, in the
colloquy “Inquisitio de fide” (1522) a Catholic finds to his
surprise that Lutherans accept all the dogmas of the faith,
that is, the articles of the Apostles' Creed. The
implication is that bitter disputes like those over papal
infallibility or Luther's doctrine of predestination are
differences over mereopinion, not over dogmas binding on all
the faithful. For Erasmus the root of the schism was not
theology but anticlericalism and lay resentment of the laws
and “ceremonies” that the clergy made binding under pain of
hell. As he wrote privately to the Netherlandish pope Adrian
VI (1522–23), whom he had known at Louvain, there was still
hope of reconciliation, if only the church would ease the
burden; this could be accomplished, for instance, by
grantingthe chalice to the laity and by permitting priests
to marry: “At the sweet name of liberty all things will
revive.”
When Adrian VI was succeeded by Clement VII, Erasmus could
no longer avoid “descending into the arena” of theological
combat, though he promised the Swiss reformer Huldrych
Zwingli that he would attack Luther in a way that would not
please the “pharisees.” De libero arbitrio (1524) defended
the place of human free choice in the process of salvation
and argued that the consensus of the church through the ages
is authoritative in the interpretation of Scripture. In
reply Luther wrote one of his most important theological
works, De servo arbitrio (1525), to which Erasmus responded
with a lengthy, two-part Hyperaspistes (1526–27). In this
controversy Erasmus lets it be seen that he would like to
claim more for free will than St. Paul and St. Augustine
seem to allow.
The years in Basel (1522–29) were filled with polemics, some
of them rather tiresome by comparison to the great debate
with Luther. Irritated by Protestants who called him a
traitor to the Gospel as well as by hyper-orthodox Catholic
theologians who repeatedly denounced him, Erasmus showed the
petty side of his own nature often enough. Although there is
material in his apologetic writings that scholars have yet
to exploit, there seems no doubt that on the whole he was
better at satiric barbs, such as the colloquy representing
one young “Pseudo-Evangelical” of his acquaintance as
thwacking people over the head with a Gospel book to gain
converts. Meanwhile he kept at work on the Greek New
Testament (there would be five editions in all), the
Paraphrases, and his editions of the Church Fathers,
including Cyprian, Hilary, and Origen. He also took time to
chastise those humanists, mostly Italian, who from a
“superstitious” zeal for linguistic purity refused to sully
their Latin prose with nonclassical terms (Ciceronianus,
1528).
Final years
In 1529, when Protestant Basel banned Catholic worship
altogether, Erasmus and some of his humanist friends moved
to the Catholic university town of Freiburg im Breisgau. He
refused an invitation to the Diet of Augsburg, where Philipp
Melanchthon's Augsburg Confession was to initiate the first
meaningful discussions between Lutheran and Catholic
theologians. He nonetheless encouraged such discussion in De
sarcienda ecclesiae concordia (1533), whichsuggested that
differences on the crucial doctrine of justification might
be reconciled by considering a duplex justitia, the meaning
of which he did not elaborate. Having returned to Basel to
see his manual on preaching (Ecclesiastes, 1535) through the
press, he lingered on in a city he found congenial; it was
there he died in 1536. Like thedisciples of Voirier, he
seems not to have asked for the last sacraments of the
church. His last words were in Dutch: “Lieve God” (“dear
God”).
Influence and achievement
Always the scholar, Erasmus could see many sides of an
issue. But his hesitations and studied ambiguities were
appreciated less and less in the generations that followed
his death, as men girded for combat, theological or
otherwise, in the service of their beliefs. For a time,
while peacemakers on both sides had an opportunity to pursue
meaningful discussions between Catholics and Lutherans, some
of Erasmus' practical suggestions and his moderate
theological views were directly pertinent. Even after
ecumenism dwindled to a mere wisp of possibility, there were
a few men willing to make themselves heirs of Erasmus'
lonely struggle for a middle ground, like Jacques-Auguste de
Thou in France and Hugo Grotius in the Netherlands;
significantly, both were strong supporters of state
authority and hoped to limit the influence of the clergy of
their respective established churches. This tradition was
perhaps strongest in the Netherlands, where Dirck
Volckertszoon Coornhert and others found support in Erasmus
for their advocacy of limited toleration for religious
dissenters. Meanwhile, however, the Council of Trent and the
rise of Calvinism ensured that such views weregenerally of
marginal influence. The Catholic index expurgatorius of 1571
contained a long list of suspect passages to be deleted from
any future editions of Erasmus' writings, and those
Protestant tendencies that bear some comparison to Erasmus'
defense of free will—current among the Philippists in
Germany and the Arminians in the Netherlands—were bested by
defenders of a sterner orthodoxy. Even in the classroom,
Erasmus' preference for putting students directly in contact
with the classics gave way to the use of compendiums and
manuals of humanist rhetoric and logic that resembled
nothing so much as the scholastic curriculum of the past.
Similarly, the bold and independent scholarly temper with
which Erasmusapproached the text of the New Testament was
for a long time submerged by the exigencies of theological
polemics.
Erasmus' reputation began to improve in the late 17th
century, when the last of Europe's religious wars was fading
into memory and scholars like Richard Simon and Jean Le
Clercq (the editor of Erasmus' works) were once again taking
a more critical approach to biblical texts. By
Voltaire'stime, in the 18th century, it was possible to
imagine that the clever and rather skeptical Erasmus must
have been a philosophe before his time, one whose
professions of religious devotion and submission to church
authority could be seen as convenient evasions. This view of
Erasmus, curiously parallel to the strictures of his
orthodox critics, waslong influential. Only in the past
several decades have scholars given due recognition to the
fact that the goal of hiswork was a Christianity purified by
a deeper knowledge of itshistoric roots. Yet it was not
entirely wrong to compare Erasmus with those Enlightenment
thinkers who, like Voltaire, defended individual liberty at
every turn and had little good to say about the various
corporate solidarities by which human society holds
together. Some historians would now trace the enduring
debate between these complementary aspects of Western
thought as far back as the 12th century, and in this very
broad sense Erasmus and Voltaire are on the same side of a
divide, just as, for instance, Machiavelli and Rousseau are
on the other. In a unique manner that fused his multiple
identities—as Netherlander, Renaissance humanist, and pre-Tridentine
Catholic—Erasmus helped to build what may be called the
liberal tradition of European culture.
James D. Tracy
Encyclopedia Britannica
