Erasmus, Desiderius
Erasmus of Rotterdam, 1469-1536
Erasmus, born on Oct. 27, 1469, in Rotterdam, Holland, was the greatest humanist scholar of the northern Renaissance. 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 work fostered the new humanist emphasis on the classics. His critique of ecclesiastical abuses, which he contrasted with a better age in the distant past, encouraged the urge for reform, which issued both in the Protestant Reformation and in the Catholic Counter-Reformation. 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 an enemy to fierce partisans on both sides and a beacon for those who valued freedom above orthodoxy.
The schoolboy Erasmus was clever enough to write classical Latin verse that impresses a modern reader as cosmopolitan. After both parents died, his guardians sent him 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, Erasmus entered an Augustinian monastery at Steyn, where he seems to have remained about seven years (1485-92). While at Steyn he paraphrased Lorenzo Valla's Elegantiae, which was a compendium of pure classical usage. Erasmus' monastic superiors became "barbarians" for him by discouraging his classical studies. After his ordination to the priesthood (April 1492), he was happy to escape the monastery by accepting a post as Latin secretary to Henry of Bergen, bishop of Cambrai. His Antibarbarorum Liber, (1494-95,) is a 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 secretary'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 Coll�ge de Montaigu, where he lodged initially, and described himself 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 would soon be in use in humanist schools throughout Europe.
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 roused Erasmus' ambition to be a "primitive theologian," who would expound Scripture not in the argumentative manner of the scholastics but in the expository manner of Jerome and other Church Fathers, who lived in an age when the classical art of rhetoric was still understood and practiced. Colet begged him to lecture on the Old Testament at Oxford, but 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 France (1501), Erasmus met the fiery preacher Jean Voirier, who lent him some works by Origen, the 3rd-century Christian writer who used an allegorical, spiritualizing mode of scriptural interpretation, with roots in Platonic philosophy. By 1502 Erasmus had settled in the university town of Louvain and was reading Origen and St. Paul in Greek. A fruit of this was Enchiridion Militis Christiani (1503/04; Handbook of a Christian Knight) urging readers to "inject into their vitals" the teachings of Christ by studying and meditating on the Scriptures, to make the text pertinent to moral concerns.
Erasmus sailed to England in 1505, hoping to find support for his studies. Instead he found an opportunity to travel to Italy, the land of promise for 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, and for the Aldine press he 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.
De Pueris Instituendis, written during this visit to Italy, is the clearest statement of Erasmus' 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 (Praise of Folly,) conceived as Erasmus crossed the Alps on his way back to England and written at Thomas More's house in Chelsea, 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. 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 spoke out more boldly about 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, the year before Martin Luther posted his 95 theses on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg. This was a time when Erasmus thought he saw "the world growing young again," and 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 died on July 12, 1536, in Basel, Switzerland.
(adapted from the substantial article on Erasmus in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2002)