| 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' 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' 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, 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 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' 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' 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' 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 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 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.
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. 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' 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 Louvain, 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' 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 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' 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 Erasmus approached 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'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.
Major Works:
Theological Works
Enchiridion militis Christiani (1503; The Manuell of the
Christen Knyght, trans. by W. Tyndale, 1533); Annotationes
in Novum Testamentum (1516); Paraphrases in Novum Testamentum
(1517; Paraphrase of Erasmus upon the Newe Testamente, 1548);
Ratio verae theologiae (1519); De libero arbitrio diatribe
(1524); Hyperaspistes diatribae adversus servum arbitrium
Martini Lutheri (1526).
Educational And Occasional Writings
Adagia (1500; Proverbs or Adagies, 1539); Moriae encomium
(1511; The Praise of Folie, 1549); Institutio principis
Christiani (1516; The Education of a Christian Prince, 1936);
Querela pacis (1517; The Complaint of Peace, 1559); Colloquia
(1522–33); Ciceronianus (1528; Ciceronianus: or, A
Dialogue on the Best Style of Speaking, 1908); De pueris
instituendis (1529).
Collections And Translations
Opera omnia, emendatiora et auctiora, 10 vol. in 11, ed.
by Jean Leclerq (1703–06, reprinted 1961–62),
remains the most complete and authoritative among the early
editions. Opera omnia Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami: recognita
et adnotatione critica instructa notisque illustrata (1969–
) is a modern critical and annotated edition by an international
team of scholars, under the auspices of the Royal Academy
of The Netherlands. The multivolume edition is arranged
not chronologically but according to the canon laid down
by Erasmus himself. Opus epistolarum Des. Erasmi Roterdami,
ed. by P.S. Allen, 12 vol. (1906–58), is a standard
edition of the correspondence of Erasmus, whose letters
are indispensable for any understanding of his work. For
translations, the ongoing series Collected Works of Erasmus
(1974– ), published by the University of Toronto Press,
has set high standards for accuracy. Other notable translations
include The “Adages” of Erasmus: A Study with
Translations, by Margaret Mann Phillips (1964); and The
Colloquies of Erasmus, trans. by Craig R. Thompson (1965).
|
