ERASMUS, DESIDERIUS

Humanist, classical and patristic scholar, first editor of the Greek New Testament; b. Rotterdam, Holland, Oct. 27, 1466; d. Basel, Switzerland, July 12, 1536. He was an illegitimate child and his father eventually became a priest. Educated first at Gouda, and then from 1475 under the brethren of the common life, Erasmus remained at Deventer for eight years; there is no doubt that this tradition shaped his later educational ideals.

Career. In 1483 his parents died; his guardians sent him to a school at s' Hertogenbosch, also maintained by the Brethren. In 1487 he was persuaded, in part by a friend and in part by his guardian, to enter the Augustinian monastery of canons regular at Steyn. Although lacking a genuine vocation, he was no doubt partly attracted by the ordered life of the monastery; he found some congenial companions, and he had opportunities for the study of Christian and classical literature. However, even before his ordination (April 25, 1492) he seems to have found the intellectual horizon too confined and was ready to seek a wider opportunity for the development of his intellectual interests. This came in 1494 with an invitation from the bishop of Cambrai to enter his service. Erasmus received a dispensation from residence in his monastery, which he never entered again. Within the year he had persuaded the bishop to allow him to go to Paris to study for a degree in theology.

When Erasmus arrived in Paris in 1495, he took up residence in Montaigu College, where he soon found little to his liking the discipline imposed by the director, Jean Standonck. Equally uncongenial were the lectures on scholastic philosophy and theology at the university. Erasmus tried to escape from this environment by cultivating prominent literary figures, among whom were Italian humanist exiles who were beginning to introduce new standards of taste. At the same time, in order to improve his economic circumstances, he began to take pupils for instruction in Latin. These included some wealthy and highly placed Englishmen, and through one of them he received an invitation to visit England in 1499.

This first visit to England marks a decisive stage in Erasmus's intellectual development. He had an opportunity to meet such men as John colet, Thomas more, and Archbishop warham. Through these friends he came into more direct contact with the heritage of the Italian renaissance and realized what might be achieved by applying to the great texts of the Christian tradition the same methods of exegesis that the Italian humanists had applied to the classics. To this task Erasmus determined to devote the rest of his life. From his English visit dates his serious application to the study of Greek. A few years later his ambition to provide a more accurate knowledge of the basic texts of the Christian tradition was further confirmed by his discovery in a monastery in the Low Countries of a MS of Lorenzo valla's Annotations on the New Testament. Erasmus had already been greatly influenced by Valla's ideas on the uses of philology, and he then published the Annotations in Paris in 1505 with an enthusiastic introduction.

The English visit was the first of Erasmus's many changes of residence. He returned to France in 1500 and spent some years there and in the Low Countries. A second visit to England in 1505–06 was followed by three years in Italy (1506–09), during which he was associated with the Aldine Academy in Venice and had an opportunity to visit the Rome of julius ii. From Rome Erasmus returned to England on the accession of henry viii, in the hope of sharing in the royal patronage. In 1511 he settled in Queen's College, cambridge, where he spent two and a half years. Leaving England again in 1514, he went first to Basel and then for brief periods to Louvain and to Holland. In 1521 he returned to Basel, where he remained for the next eight years, his longest residence in one place. The official acceptance of the reformation in Basel in 1529 caused his retreat to Freiburg, where he spent the next six years.

The refusal to identify himself with any of the national cultures in Europe was characteristic of Erasmus. In spite of invitations from France, England, and the Empire he preferred to retain his independence. His increasing literary fame enabled him to lead the life of a man of letters unattached to any institution. The poor scholar who had had to take in pupils for a living became a comparatively wealthy man through the rewards bestowed on him by many patrons.

Works. At the height of his fame, Erasmus occupied a position in the history of European literature rivaled perhaps only by that of voltaire. In every country, admiring followers accepted his leadership. His letters provide the most comprehensive source for the intellectual history of his age. Of the many works that secured his reputation, the first to bring him public notice was the Adages. This collection of classical proverbs with an explanation of their meaning furnished students with a convenient handbook and digest of the subject matter of classical literature, arranged under such headings as misfortune, love, modesty, liberality, war. In 1508 Erasmus brought out at the Aldine Press (see manutius) in Venice a second edition containing three times as many adages as the first and reflecting what he had learned from the refugee Greek scholars at Venice. This remained one of the most popular of Erasmus's works; it went through many editions and its influence can be traced in the vernacular literature of every European country in the 16th century.

In the Enchiridion militis christiani, first published in Antwerp (1503), Erasmus expounded his conception of a Christianity infused with the spirit of the Gospels. This little treatise presented life as a struggle between virtue and vice. Here is found the combination of piety and learning, the docta pietas, which Erasmus emphasized in so many of his later works. In the analysis of the soul in the Enchiridion he follows, on the whole, origen and the Greek Fathers, who had a profound effect on his thinking. Erasmus later maintained that his chief purpose in writing the book had been to remedy the errors of those who confused ceremonial observances with true piety. The conclusion of the treatise is that there is a regular progression through nature to grace and that the philosophy of Christ depends on the inner action of the spirit rather than on conformity to external rites.

The message of the Enchiridion was reiterated in a very different form in the Praise of Folly, which has remained the work by which Erasmus is perhaps best known to the general public. It was composed in 1509 while Erasmus was traveling from Italy to England and was dedicated to Thomas More with the pun on his name contained in the title Encomium moriae. Erasmus imagined Folly personified delivering a classical oration in her defense. This device gave him an opportunity to satirize many aspects of contemporary society, both ecclesiastical and lay. In the end, however, Folly becomes serious and makes her hearers recognize that what is, in the eyes of the world, the greatest folly, namely Christianity, is in reality the highest wisdom.

The same themes were taken up in many of Erasmus's Colloquies of which the first authorized edition was published in 1519. Later the dramatic possibilities of these little dialogues appealed to Erasmus, and he created a whole gallery of characters, through the medium of whose conversation he managed to take up all the great issues of politics and religion of his generation. The style of these compositions was particularly consonant with Erasmus's character. The dialogue form emphasized the rhetorical arts of persuasion that had been so central to the educational curriculum of the Renaissance. Furthermore, this form had the advantage that the views of the author could be concealed beneath those attributed to one of the characters.

The homilies, satires, and colloquies that Erasmus wrote did not interrupt the course of his scholarly work. The number of his editions of classical and patristic works is formidable. Some of these represented no great labor on his part, such was the Basel Aristotle of 1531, to which Erasmus contributed only a preface. Others represented years of patient work. What the Aldine Press in Venice had accomplished at the turn of the century for classical literature, froben in Basel aspired to do for patristic literature, and it was upon Erasmus that his establishment chiefly depended. Of the patristic works edited by Erasmus, the most important were the Jerome of 1516, the Augustine of 1529, the Chrysostom of 1530, and the Origen of 1536. To the edition of jerome, with whom he felt a kind of affinity, Erasmus devoted a particular effort, not only emending the text and providing an extensive commentary, but also contributing a preface with an account of the life and works of the translator of the Vulgate.

Erasmus had decided, perhaps as early as his edition of Valla's Annotations, to occupy himself with the text of the New Testament. This project grew to be an edition of the Greek text with a new Latin translation and a commentary on which Erasmus was seriously at work from 1512. The Novum instrumentum, which appeared in 1516, was the first published version of the Greek text. Erasmus's work is far from the standards of modern scholarship in both method and content. He established his text on a limited number of MSS, rather haphazardly consulted; his knowledge of Greek was insufficient to deal with many philological problems; his footnotes contained frequent irrelevant digressions. The work, nevertheless, was of epoch-making importance. His Greek text was the basis of many of the vernacular versions produced during the sixteenth century.

Erasmus and the Reformation. The Novum instrumentum was dedicated to Leo X, whom Erasmus hailed as introducing a new age in which scholarship and the arts would flourish and peace would reign. These hopes, however, were disappointed by the religious revolution in the outbreak of which his own work had played a very large part. His widely read criticism of abuses in the Church, his revolt against formalism, and his appeal for a restoration of an earlier and purer piety awoke an enthusiastic response among his contemporaries and the younger generation. One of his readers was Martin luther, who had sought Erasmus's approval as early as 1516 but felt that "with him, human things were of greater value than divine" ("humana praevalent in eo plus quam divina"). In 1519 he begged for Erasmus's support in his struggle with the Curia. Erasmus replied not very cordially, professing ignorance of Luther's writings, but declaring that he had urged moderation in influential quarters.

With the papal condemnation and Luther's treatises of 1520, Erasmus's attitude changed. He feared the consequences of what he now saw to be a revolution, and he deplored Luther's appeal to the general public. As the Lutheran movement took shape and the gap between Rome and Wittenberg widened, Erasmus's position became increasingly uncomfortable. Many of his former friends, such as Dürer and hutten, condemned him for not supporting Luther. Others, such as Aleandro, once his roommate in Venice, accused him of having attacked the basic institutions of the Church and prepared the way for Luther. He was urged by friends on both sides to clarify his position and at first seems to have believed that it was still possible to deal with these great issues in the manner of the Colloquies. The Inquisitio de fide probably represents his attempt to explore in a dialogue the implications of the religious division. He soon saw, however, that this congenial approach was no longer possible, and he composed his treatise on the freedom of the will, published in 1524, to define his religious position against that of Luther. Luther replied with the De servo arbitrio, in which he disdainfully repudiated the theological arguments of Erasmus. This elicited from Erasmus the first and second Hyperaspistes, in which he elaborated his original argument. During the same period he had to defend himself from the attacks of his enemies on the other side, especially Alberto Pio, Prince of Carpi, and the Spanish monks.

In spite of these controversies and the bitterness that Erasmus had to face in the last years of his life, he continued his literary and scholarly publications, producing, among other works, in the years at Freiburg the treatise on preaching, Ecclesiastes, and the edition of Origen. It was to see these volumes through the press that he returned to Basel in 1535. There he died in the house of Froben, surrounded by his friends. In the absence of a priest, he did not receive the Last Sacraments. He was buried in the cathedral at Basel, which had been converted into a Protestant church.

Significance. Erasmus's significance has been as variously estimated as it was ambiguous in his own lifetime. Rightly regarded as one of those who had prepared the way for the religious revolution, he nevertheless repudiated decisively the work of Luther and zwingli. Although he was offered a cardinal's hat by Paul III, his work was put on the Index by the Council of Trent. To the Enlightenment he appeared a figure in the history of European rationalism. He has often been accused of having been wavering and cowardly in the great crisis of his generation. In fact, however, he maintained with remarkable consistency throughout his life the position defined by his ideals as a Christian humanist. As a Christian, he declared again and again that his whole life had been devoted to the cause of the gospel. He professed always his willingness to submit to the authority of the Church, even though he never committed himself in detail on how that authority was to be defined. Many of the points on which his orthodoxy was questioned were clarified only after his death by the decisions of the Council of trent. As a humanist, he believed that even the deepest commitments should be defended, and the cause of truth advanced by persuasion rather than by force. It was the tragedy of his later life that he pleaded for peace and unity in a Christian world that had become so deeply divided that a continuing dialogue was no longer possible.

Bibliography: Works. Opera omnia, ed. j. le clerc, 10 v. in 11 (Leiden 1703–06); Opuscula, ed. w. k. ferguson (The Hague 1933); Ausgewählte Werke, ed. h. and a. holborn (Munich 1933); Opus epistolarum, ed. p. s. allen et al., 12 v. (Oxford 1906–58); Poems, ed. c. reedijk (Leiden 1956); Colloquies, tr. n. bailey, ed. e. johnson, 3 v. (London 1900); Inquisitio de fide, ed. c. r. thompson (New Haven 1950); The Education of a Christian Prince, tr. and ed. l. k. born (New York 1936); Handbook of the Militant Christian, tr. and ed. j. p. dolan (Notre Dame, IN 1962); The Epistles of E., from his Earliest Letters to his Fifty-first Year, Arranged in Order of Time, tr. and ed. f. m. nichols, 3 v. (New York 1901–18); The Free Will in Discourse on Free Will, tr. and ed. e. f. winter (New York 1961), treatises by Erasmus and Martin Luther; The Praise of Folly, tr. h. h. hudson (Princeton 1941); Colloquies, tr. c. r. thompson (Chicago 1965). f. f. e. vander haeghen et al., 7 v. (Ghent 1897–1908). Collected Works of Erasmus (Toronto 1974–). Studies. j. huizinga, Erasmus of Rotterdam (New York 1952). p. smith, Erasmus: A Study of his Life, Ideals and Place in History (New York 1923). p. mestwerdt, Die Anfänge des E.: Humanismus und "Devotio moderna," ed. h. von schubert (Leipzig 1917). a. hyma, The Youth of Erasmus (Ann Arbor 1930). e. f. rice, "Erasmus and the Religious Tradition, 1495–1499," Journal of the History of Ideas 11 (1950) 387–411. Erasmus and the National Traditions. m. bataillon, É. et l'Espagne (Paris 1937). m. mann, É. et les débuts de la réforme française, 1517–1536 (Paris 1934). a. renaudet, É. Et l'Italie (Geneva 1954); Préréforme et humanisme à Paris pendant les premières guerres d'Italie, 1494–1517 (2d ed. Paris 1953). l. w. spitz, The Religious Renaissance of the German Humanists (Cambridge, Mass. 1963). Erasmus and Humanism. r. pfeiffer, Humanitas Erasmiana (Berlin 1931). o. schottenloher, Erasmus im Ringen um die humanistische Bildungsform (Münster 1933). m. p. gilmore, "Erasmus and the Cause of Christian Humanism: The Last Years, 1529–1536," Humanists and Jurists (Cambridge, MA 1963) 115–145. s. a. nulli, Erasmus e il Rinascimento (Turin 1955). Religious Thought. l. bouyer, Erasmus and his Times, tr. f. x. murphy (Westminster, MD 1959). k. h. oelrich, Der späte Erasmus und die Reformation (Münster 1961). É. v. telle, É. De Rotterdam et le septième Sacrement (Geneva 1954). h. jedin, History of the Council of Trent, tr. e. graf (St. Louis 1957–60) v.1. d. knowles, The Religious Orders in England, 3 v. (Cambridge, England 1948–60) 3:141–156. Special topics. j. hoyoux, "Les Moyens d'existence d'É.," Bibliothèque d'Humanisme et Renaissance NS 5 (1944) 7–59. p. smith, A Key to the Colloquies of Erasmus (Cambridge, MA 1927). Bibliotheca Erasmiana, comp. l. halkin, Erasmus: A Critical Biography, j. tonkin, tr. (Oxford 1993). l. jardine, Erasmus, Man of Letters (Princeton 1993). m. screech, Erasmus: Ecstacy and the Praise of Folly (London 1980). j. tracy, Erasmus of the Low Countries (Berkeley 1996); Erasmus, the Growth of a Mind (Berkeley 1972).

[m. p. gilmore]