Desiderius Erasmus

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Desiderius Erasmus

1466–1536

Humanist

Dissatisfaction. The illegitimate son of a man who at some point became a priest and his housekeeper, Desiderius Erasmus was born in Rotterdam, Holland. He received a good foundation in classical literature both from his father, who knew some classical Latin, and the Brothers of the Common Life. At age twenty-one he entered a monastery and five years later was ordained a priest. Dissatisfied with life in the monastery, he received permission to leave. He went to the University of Paris to study scholastic theology but soon found that distasteful as well, later making a crack that the University was a place “where the eggs were stale and the theology was staler.” Having experienced life as a monk and a theologian and having developed a deep aversion to both lifestyles, Erasmus made monks and theologians the special targets of his biting wit.

Ancient Wisdom. Despite his complaints about the lack of learning in his monastery, Erasmus had continued his classical studies there, and while in Paris he earned a living teaching classical literature to wealthy young men. One of them, an English nobleman, took him to England in 1499. There he met the English humanist, John Colet, and became fast friends with Sir Thomas More. Colet persuaded him to improve his Greek, which allowed Erasmus to make his first mark as a humanist in 1500 by publishing Adagia (Adages), a collection of Greek proverbs. Erasmus greatly expanded it through six subsequent editions. Besides demonstrating his command of classical Greek, Erasmus intended the work to serve the cause of the reform of education. Like all humanists, he believed that ancient wisdom provided a surer guide to moral instruction and a productive life in the world than could be found in the contemporary schools. Other major works on this theme included The Handbook for the Christian Knight (1503) and Instructions for a Christian Prince, written in 1516 for the future emperor, Charles V. An important aspect of his political views was a belief in pacifism.

Folly. Erasmus traveled across Europe over the next nine years but returned to England in 1509, living for six years with More. There he wrote the best known of his literary works, The Praise of Folly (1509), which in Latin is a pun on More's name, moria being both folly and the Latinized spelling of More. Erasmus depicts Folly as a cheerful goddess who praises her followers in all elements of European society, but no groups are satirized as sharply as monks and theologians. Perhaps the sharpest piece of satire, which Erasmus always denied writing but common consensus has attributed to him, is the poem Julius Excluded. It depicts the notorious warrior Pope Julius II as having died and arriving at the gates of Heaven only to have St. Peter deny him entrance because he does not recognize him as Pope with his armor and weapons. Erasmus's purpose in his satires, directed largely against the clergy, was church reform. He believed that the Church needed to return to the purity of the early Church, from which the Church of his era had strayed in its emphasis on formal ritual and scholastic theology. His remedy for the ills of the Church was Philosophia Christi, by which he meant that ancient wisdom should be integrated into Christian belief. The tools of humanism must be put to work for the benefit of religion. Thus, Erasmus produced many critical editions of Greek classical authors. He believed that humanistic learning should be employed for the restoration of the earliest texts of the Bible and the Christian classics by the church fathers. He accordingly provided critical editions of the works of a dozen church fathers, including St. Jerome and St. Augustine.

Greek New Testament. The crowning work among Erasmus's editions was his critical edition of the Greek New Testament. In 1511 he was appointed to the faculty at the University of Cambridge, where he began work on it. Erasmus included his own Latin translation of his Greek text and pointed out places where he felt the official Latin version used by the Catholic Church, Jerome's Vulgate, was in error. In his annotations to the text, he expressed his disagreement with the scholastic theologians' interpretation of biblical texts. Although it was in itself a major accomplishment of biblical scholarship, Erasmus's Greek New Testament is best known as the source for Martin Luther's German translation of the Bible and, through a French translation of it, the King James Version. The Greek New Testament's publication in 1516, by which time Erasmus had left England, established his reputation as “Prince of Humanists.” He was lionized across Europe, and his program for both church and education reform seemed within reach.

Religious Toleration. Luther's bursting forth on the scene in late 1517 proved a disaster for him, even if Luther proclaimed at first that he was simply following Erasmus's lead. There is no question that Erasmus, with his calls for Church reform, biting satire against the clergy, and critical editions of major texts of the early Church, played a role in the first stage of the Reformation. Erasmus, however, could not accept the radical break with the Catholic Church that Luther soon was leading. Both sides in the emerging religious split castigated him: Catholics, for providing so much ammunition to the Protestants; and Protestants, as the “failed first reformer” who lacked courage to lead the Reformation. In 1525 he and Luther became involved in a bitter debate over the question of human free will, in which Erasmus defended the ability of humans to make moral judgments on their own. His disdain for debating theology led him to advocate religious toleration, one of few who did so in the sixteenth century. He remained a Catholic until his death in Basel, although the papacy later placed his books on the Index of Forbidden Books.

Significance. Perhaps no other intellectual sums up in himself the essence of a period of thought the way Erasmus does for Northern humanism. He touched on every theme found in it; he knew or corresponded with nearly every other Christian humanist; and he spent time in nearly all the centers of Northern humanism. His own path from the most respected and lionized man in Europe in 1517 to becoming almost an afterthought in the wake of the coming of the Reformation traces the destiny of Christian humanism as well.