Desiderius Erasmus

Desiderius Erasmus, (born October 27, 1469, Rotterdam, Holland [now in the Netherlands]—died July 12, 1536, Basel, Switzerland), Dutch 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. By criticizing 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 as far as the third-highest class at the chapter school of St. Lebuin’s in Deventer. One of his teachers, Jan Synthen, was a humanist, 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 this school only for a severe discipline intended, he said, to teach humility 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 against the scholastic “barbarians” who had allegedly corrupted it. Erasmus’s 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.

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’s 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 Church Fathers, who lived in an age when men still understood and practiced the classical art of rhetoric. The impassioned Colet besought 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, France (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 Leuven (Brabant [now in Belgium]) 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’s vocation as a “primitive theologian” was further developed through his discovery at Park Abbey, near Leuven, 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’s 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 intellectual life 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’s 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 a universal irony, in which foolish passion carried the day: “Even the wise man must play the fool if he wishes to beget a child.”

Little is known of Erasmus’s 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 to win 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 whole nations 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 the Froben 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’s 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’s 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 Leuven, 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 soon as 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 Leuven and elsewhere, mostly ignorant of Greek, were not willing to abandon the interpretation of Scripture to upstart “grammarians,” nor did the atmosphere at Leuven improve when the second edition of Erasmus’s New Testament (1519) replaced the Vulgate with his own Latin translation.

The Protestant Challenge

From the very beginning of the momentous events sparked by Martin Luther’s challenge to papal authority, Erasmus’s 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. As he 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’s 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 mere opinion, 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 Leuven, there was still hope of reconciliation, if only the church would ease the burden; this could be accomplished, for instance, by granting the 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), which suggested 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 the disciples 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’s 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’s 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 were generally 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’s writings, and those Protestant tendencies that bear some comparison to Erasmus’s 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’s 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 Erasmus approached the text of the New Testament was for a long time submerged by the exigencies of theological polemics.

Erasmus’s 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’s works) were once again taking a more critical approach to biblical texts. By Voltaire’s time, 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, was long influential. Only in the past several decades have scholars given due recognition to the fact that the goal of his work was a Christianity purified by a deeper knowledge of its historic 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.

Citation:

Tracy, J. D. (2018, October 23). Desiderius Erasmus. Retrieved January 9, 2019, from https://www.britannica.com/biography/Desiderius-Erasmus