Erasmus

← Encyclopedia

Erasmus of Rotterdam (c. 1466–1536) was a Dutch humanist, ordained priest, and the most celebrated scholar of the Northern Renaissance — the man who put the tools of classical philology to work on the Bible and the Church Fathers, and who came, for a generation, to stand for learning itself. Born out of wedlock to a priest, schooled by the Brethren of the Common Life at Deventer, and pressed into an Augustinian house of canons regular at Steyn he never loved, he spent his life arranging to be elsewhere: a wandering scholar in Paris, Louvain, Basel, and Cambridge, living by his pen and the patronage of the powerful at a moment when print made that just barely possible. He was ordained on 25 April 1492, and from the start he treated the cloister as a thing to be escaped through study. A dispensation from the monastic habit, secured later in life, freed him in law for what he had already become in fact — a citizen of the republic of letters with no fixed see and no master but his correspondents.

The recovery of sources

His project was the recovery of sources. He held that the way back to authentic Christianity ran through the original languages and the earliest texts, cleared of the accretions of medieval commentary — what he called the philosophia Christi, a religion of inward devotion and ethical imitation rather than ceremony and the disputations of the schoolmen. He set it out first in the Enchiridion militis Christiani (Handbook of the Christian Soldier, 1503), a small book that turned the soul into a battlefield and the gospel into a rule of life: weapons against vice were prayer and knowledge, the spirit was to be preferred to the letter, and the imitation of Christ outranked any number of pilgrimages, relics, and mechanically counted prayers. The philosophia Christi was not a system but a disposition — Christ as teacher and pattern, the whole of Scripture read as an invitation to be remade. Set against it stood the university theology of the day, a dialectic built on Aristotle and the Sentences, expert at framing questions the gospel never asked; Erasmus thought it had buried the simple things of Christ under a thornbush of distinctions. The philosophia Christi carried, by implication, a quiet critique of the whole machinery of late-medieval piety, and the men who ran that machinery heard it.

The same conviction drove the scholarship. Where the schoolmen had argued about the text, Erasmus went to it. In 1516 the Basel printer Johann Froben issued his Novum Instrumentum omne: the first published printed Greek New Testament, set in parallel beside Erasmus’s own fresh Latin translation, with a third element — the Annotationes — running alongside to defend, explain, and at times demolish the readings of the Latin Vulgate that had been the Church’s Bible for a thousand years. The edition was assembled in haste and rests on a thin base of late manuscripts available at Basel; for the Book of Revelation he leaned on a single manuscript lent by the Hebraist Johann Reuchlin, and where its last verses were wanting in Greek he back-translated them from the Latin, so that a handful of words in the received Greek text descend from Erasmus’s own pen and from no ancient witness at all. Pressed by critics over the absence of the trinitarian gloss at 1 John 5:7, he restored the so-called Johannine Comma in his third edition of 1522 — against his own philological judgment, and on the strength of a single suspect manuscript. The whole went through five editions in his lifetime (1516, 1519, 1522, 1527, 1535), retitled Novum Testamentum from the second; flawed as it was, it reopened the question of what the text actually said. It became the spine of the textus receptus that underlay Martin Luther’s German Testament and, a century on, the English of the King James Bible, and every later biblical scholar, Catholic and Protestant alike, worked in its wake.

Alongside it ran an editorial labor of monumental scale. Erasmus prized Jerome above all the Fathers — the scholar-saint, the man who had gone to the Hebrew and the Greek — and in the same year, 1516, his hand stood behind the nine-volume Froben edition of Jerome’s works, taking personal charge of the four volumes of the letters. He went on to edit Origen, whose allegorical reading of Scripture and whose Platonizing cast of mind he loved, and whose orthodoxy he was willing to defend when others flinched — for the same Renaissance that had set Marsilio Ficino to translating Plato whole in Florence was teaching the north, too, that the ancient sources rewarded a reader who went back to them in their own tongue. He edited Augustine, in ten volumes; and Cyprian, Hilary, Ambrose, and Chrysostom besides. The Origen — his last great undertaking — appeared only after his death. Across this work he treated the Fathers not as oracles to be quoted but as authors to be edited: dated, weighed, sorted from the spurious, restored to the voice of a real man writing at a real desk. The Adagia, meanwhile, grew from a slim Paris collection of 1500 into the great Aldine chiliades of 1508 and, by the end, into more than four thousand classical proverbs, each unpacked into an essay that carried ancient learning into common European speech. Some of those essays — Festina lente, make haste slowly; Dulce bellum inexpertis, war is sweet to those who have not tried it — became small books in their own right, the second a sustained cry against the appetite of princes for war.

The satirist

He was also, in his way, a satirist. The Praise of Folly (Moriae Encomium), conceived as he crossed the Alps and written in 1509 in the London house of his friend Thomas More — its very title a pun on More’s name — lets the goddess Folly mount a mock-oration in her own honor, and from inside that self-praise she strips the vanity of theologians, monks, prelates, and popes who have mistaken the trappings of religion for the thing itself. First printed in 1511, it was an instant European success, to its author’s alternating delight and alarm. The Colloquies, Latin dialogues that began as exercises in elegant conversation and swelled into a running comedy of European manners, did the same in another key — puncturing superstition, mercenary clergy, and empty ritual with a smile that drew blood. The barbs were sharp enough that when Luther broke with Rome, many assumed Erasmus had laid the egg Luther hatched. He reported the Franciscans saying exactly that of him, and answered that he had laid a hen’s egg — what Luther hatched was a bird of a quite different breed.

The limit of reform

He refused the role the age tried to assign him. For years he had hoped Luther’s protest might be the goad that finally moved the Church to reform itself; for years he held his peace, unwilling to attack a man who said much he himself believed, and unwilling to be drawn into a quarrel he thought ruinous to learning and to peace. When at last he broke his silence, he did it on the ground he knew best. In 1524 he published De libero arbitrio — a measured discussion, cast as a diatribe in the ancient sense, of the freedom of the will. He argued that the human will, though weak and dependent on grace, retains some real cooperative power in the work of salvation, and that Scripture itself is too obscure on the deepest questions for anyone to assert their resolution with Luther’s confidence. Luther answered the next year, at length and without mercy, in De servo arbitrio — On the Bondage of the Will — denying free will outright: the will is bound, salvation is wholly God’s work, and the Christian who will not assert what Scripture teaches has no faith at all. The exchange became one of the founding set-pieces of the Reformation, joining two incompatible temperaments — Erasmian restraint against Lutheran certainty — to two incompatible doctrines of grace, and it marked the outer limit of Erasmus’s reform. He wanted the Church corrected from within, by scholarship and good sense and the slow pressure of restored texts, not shattered. He would not follow Luther into schism, and he would not be silent about the schism’s cost.

That refusal cost him both sides. Reformers judged him a coward who saw the truth and would not act on it; defenders of the old order grew to distrust the scholar whose questions had unsettled everything — the more so as his philology cut at the Vulgate, his satire at the clergy, and his philosophia Christi at the whole edifice of merit, ceremony, and scholastic theology in which the medieval Church had housed salvation. The younger reformers carried his tools further than he would go: John Calvin, a generation after, would lean on the Erasmian Greek text and the humanist philology even as he hardened the doctrine of grace into the very monergism Erasmus had resisted. He spent his last years in Freiburg, having quit Basel when the city turned Protestant, then returned to Basel in 1535 to see his final books through the press; he died there in the night of 11–12 July 1536, and was buried with honor in the cathedral. Within a generation his victory and his defeat arrived together. The methods he pioneered — the return to the Greek, the dated edition, the corrected text — became the permanent equipment of every confession, while his name was placed on the Roman Index of Prohibited Books, his entire output condemned under Pope Paul IV in 1559 before later, milder indexes settled for expurgating him.

Scholarship and texts

The documentary Erasmus is unusually well served. His letters — more than three thousand survive — are the great map of the early sixteenth-century learned world, and the standard critical edition remains the Opus Epistolarum Des. Erasmi Roterodami edited by P. S. Allen and his collaborators (Oxford, 1906–58). The collected Latin works are appearing in the monumental Amsterdam critical edition, the Opera Omnia Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami (North-Holland and Brill, from 1969), while the Collected Works of Erasmus from the University of Toronto Press (from 1974) is rendering the whole corpus into English — its volume of Patristic Scholarship documenting the Jerome edition in detail. For the central confrontation of his career, the texts of De libero arbitrio and De servo arbitrio are set side by side in Luther and Erasmus: Free Will and Salvation, edited by E. Gordon Rupp and Philip S. Watson for the Library of Christian Classics (1969). The classic interpretive life is Johan Huizinga’s Erasmus (1924), which fixed the image of the scholar caught in the hinge of the age; Erika Rummel’s Erasmus (2004) is the compact modern reassessment. On the 1516 New Testament itself, the surviving title page and parallel columns can be examined directly through the Cambridge Digital Library’s facsimile of Queens’ College’s copy.

Historians have long read him as the figure caught in the hinge of the age — too critical for the Church he stayed in, too moderate for the revolt he helped make thinkable. His name stood less for a party than for a temperament: the conviction that careful reading, irony, and restraint might do more good than zeal. The century did not reward that conviction. The desk did. He had staked everything on a single wager — that the road back to Christ runs through the grammar of the gospels, that a faith is mended by being read more exactly, not shouted more loudly — and to the end he kept the wager, correcting proofs of Origen in a Basel he had to flee and return to, dying at the work he had chosen over the cloister, the cardinalate, and the safety of either side.

→ Related: Johann Reuchlin · Aristotle · Martin Luther · Free Will · Jerome · Origen · Augustine Of Hippo · New Testament · Bible · Christianity · Scholasticism · John Calvin · Marsilio Ficino · Plato