ERASMO da ROTTERDAM (Desiderius Erasmus Roteradamus). — Humanist, born in Rotterdam on 27 October 1469 and died in Basel on 12 July 1536. The natural son of a burgher, Rotger Gerrit (or Gerrits), who later became a priest, and of a certain Margherita, the daughter of a physician, he was deprived of both parents at an early age and spent a sad youth, devoid of affection, under the guidance of three tutors. These were concerned to initiate the young man as soon as possible into the religious life so that they might freely dispose of the patrimony which they were to administer in the name of E. and one of his brothers. In fact, around 1488 E. entered a monastery of Canons Regular at Emmaus (Steyn, near Gouda).
At first he was not dissatisfied with it, as the letters of that period attest. Later, having experienced the boundless freedom of the wandering humanist, he felt a reluctance to return to the monastery; and, finding it difficult to free himself from his ties to his Order, E. would give a retrospectively dark account of that life, while his aversion to monks and religious in general would become increasingly rooted. Ordained a priest in 1492, the following year he entered the service of the bishop of Cambrai, Enrico di Bergen, who sent him to Paris to study. He remained there for some time, cultivating humanistic studies, at first with a predominantly formal orientation. In 1499 E. left for England: this marked the beginning of that long and uninterrupted series of journeys which constituted one of the most characteristic features of his restless and feverish life. With shorter peregrinations in between, he went from England (1499–1500) to France, the Netherlands, and Leuven (1502–1504), to England once again (1505–1506), to Italy (1506–1509), to England for a third time (1509–14), to Basel (1514–16), to Holland and Belgium and back to Basel (1521–29), to Freiburg (1529–1535), and finally, for a short time, to Basel. Fame, praise, and honors accompanied, in an ever-growing crescendo, the wanderings of this man of difficult and irritable character, exceedingly ambitious for glory yet impatient of the reputation they brought him. In England he formed perhaps his most sincere and cordial friendships: with Giovanni Colet, who exercised a singular influence in directing him toward an ethical-philological humanist theology; with Tommaso Moro, whom E. loved as a gentle and happy scholar; and with Giovanni Fisher, bishop of Rochester. (While he was in Holland, Leo X, by a brief dated 26 January 1517, released him from his religious vows and granted him permission to live as a secular priest.)
Through the attentive study of Lorenzo Valla, his first ideal master, E. turned with passionate zeal to pagan and Christian antiquity, aiming at an increasingly harmonious reconciliation between an ideal of pure, straightforward, and sincere evangelical morality and the composed and majestic wisdom of the classics. The most living example of this equilibrium remains his Latin: supple, harmonious, and adept at psychological refinement, yet elevated and colored by a moral pulse and traversed by a singular exhortatory force. It was not without reason that he loved s. Girolamo as the favorite among his authors and masters. E. collected the most famous sayings of ancient wisdom over a long period and with great patience: hence the collections entitled Adagiorum collectanea, published in 1500 with eight hundred entries and subsequently more than tripled in size. They were followed by the Parabolae (1514) and, in the last years of his life, the Apophtegmata. The study of Greek, begun systematically in 1500 upon his return from England, provided a solid foundation for his philological-critical revision of theology, which he conceived as a return to the Scriptures, understood in the original and freed from the “ignorant” and “barbaric” interpretation—as he called it—of the scholastics.
E. set forth the method and aims of this theology, among other places, in the celebrated little book Euchiridium militis Christiani (1501–1504), so called because it was originally written for a soldier. The asceticism preached by the Imitation of Christ is foreign to it, and its ideal may instead be described as intellectualistic; it proposed the practice of a practical Christianity which, far removed from every form of asceticism and mystical particularism, and from every supererogatory practice such as vows, fasts, pilgrimages, and so forth, would concentrate on the exercise of those Christian virtues that were to crown the measured humanism proper to a man devoted to culture, that is, to erudition and pietas.
For E., theology essentially meant polemic concerning the method of theological studies, the search for moral clarity, and a radical critique of what he regarded as nothing more than degenerations of spiritual and religious life. When one day, after endless hesitation, E. took up his pen against Luther, he did not, even then, cease to express his distrust of “categorical assertions,” aspiring rather to place himself “willingly among the skeptics, whenever this were permitted by the inviolable authority of Scripture and the decrees of the Church” (De libero arbitrio, Leiden ed., IX, 1215 D–1217 B).
E. popularized the polemical and sarcastic side of these ideas in one of his celebrated writings, perhaps the liveliest, together with some of the Colloquia, among all his works: the Moriae encomium, or Praise of Folly. E. composed it on his return from Italy (1509), after years of fruitful labor. It is a satire full of freshness and vivid representational power: at times it amiably derides human vanity; at times it ridicules superstition and formalistic religiosity; at times it lashes the presumptuousness of theologians and the “barbarian” scholastics; and at times, adopting a grave and severe tone, it launches its shafts against the conduct of religious and secular persons, the greed of rulers, and the unworthiness of bishops, cardinals, and popes. No one, in short, is spared. A corrosive and penetrating satire which, although it had precedents and would have imitators in its genre, attained in no one as in E. an equal combination of refinement and vividness; a satire which nevertheless, beyond the author’s intentions, became a critique of institutions far more than of individuals. The Praise of Folly appeared, moreover, at a time already broadly accustomed to every kind of anti-ecclesiastical and anti-theological satire, as an extraordinarily audacious text, provoking severe criticism and profound disagreement. For his part, E. was astonished, as at something incredible, that such malicious intentions should be attributed to what he considered merely an occasional, light-hearted, and playful work.
In 1522 he published his Colloquia familiaris, dialogues full of wit and sharpness, in which he targeted the vices of the society of his time, directing his satirical pen here as well particularly against the conduct of ecclesiastics, and especially of religious, the gross ignorance of so large a part of Christendom, and so forth.
Critical-philological work dominated E.’s life in an astonishing crescendo: his world was that of learned humanists, discoverers and editors of the treasures of classical antiquity, who agreed in proclaiming him the luminary and master of that very world.
His edition of the original Greek text of the New Testament, printed by Froben at Basel in 1516, aroused immense interest among scholars; it was somewhat improved in the subsequent edition of 1519 and reprinted thereafter down to the critical editions of our own age. Thus he formed a “textus receptus sed non recipendus,” as it was called; for E. published it on manuscripts of little value, preferring variants that departed most widely from the Latin Vulgate. E. accompanied it with his own Latin version, in which, while professing to remain faithful to the Greek, he gave it a classical flavor that pleased the circles of scholars of the time, but is far removed from the simplicity of the Vulgate. In 1518 he added to the text his Adnotationes, humanistic in character and modeled on those of Lorenzo Valla. The Paraphrases of the books of the New Testament (except the Apocalypse) were published by E. in Paris in 1517–24. He also published, in various places between 1515 and 1516, the Enarratio, commentarius, etc., in 11 volumes. He accompanied these biblical works with the assiduous editing of the texts of the Fathers. In this E. was merely continuing work already begun, but he intended to give it greater critical perfection. Foremost among all was the edition of s. Girolamo, issued in 9 volumes in 1516–20; he also became the editor of s. Cipriano (1520), of s. Ilario, and of Arrobio’s Commentari on Salud (1522). In 1525 he published several translated treatises of Grisostomo; in 1527, s. Ambrogio; in 1528, s. Ireneo; and in 1529, a treatise by Lattanzio. During these years his edition of s. Agostino also appeared; in 1532 E. still had the strength to publish s. Basilio.
In this atmosphere of intense scholarly activity, aspiring to a renewal of the culture and life
of the Church through the work of the learned and enlightened, the Protestant Reformation arose. From many quarters E. was regarded as an arbiter, indeed as a living symbol of that united Christianity, founded upon spiritual and moral values, which ought not to be divided. But events soon made E. seem almost outdated, and at that time only the less attractive sides of his character and his human weaknesses came to the fore. His work had undoubtedly helped to create the atmosphere favorable to the rise and flourishing of the Protestant movement. At first, indeed, he viewed with sympathy
E. did not, in fact, have a clear perception of what the events he had witnessed, essentially as a spectator, signified. He was disturbed by the passions and hatreds unleashed, as though by the threat of an obscure barbarism, and he was vexed by those sudden events that came to affect his secluded life as a scholar, such as, for example, the establishment of the Reformation at Basel (1529), which compelled him to move to
Fribourg. There, in 1533, he published the work D'ijarciendo Ecclesiae concordia, in which, while censuring on the one hand the radicalism of the innovators and on the other the excessive severity of the theologians who saw heresies in everything, he argued that the schism could still be healed with a little goodwill; but he was mistaken. His chief concerns, besides certain literary controversies, were his work on the classics and on the Fathers of the Church, to which he devoted himself with inexhaustible energy. It was precisely for this reason that, in 1535, he decided to move once again to Basel, to be near the publisher Froben. There, still wholly absorbed in his work, he was carried off by an attack of gout.
In those years events were maturing that were destined to overwhelm the “Erasmian” ideals. If there was a moment when all Europe seemed “Erasmian,” so that even in 1527 Charles V greeted E. as the “star of Christendom” and placed him above popes, emperors, and princes, the years that followed marked the end of the ideal unity of Europe in which E., in his own way, had nevertheless believed. The champions of the Counter-Reformation judged him very severely; in 1557 the Inquisition condemned his works to the flames, and in 1559 and 1590 Paul IV and Sixtus V prohibited their reading outright. E.’s fame, though not entirely extinguished, revived during the Enlightenment and early Romanticism: at that time judgments of him also softened in Catholic circles, and, among others, Tiraboschi vindicated, though with some reservations, his essential orthodoxy. - Vedi tav. XXXVI.