ERASMUS OF ROTTERDAM (Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus). - Humanist, b. at Rotterdam on 27 Oct. 1469 and d. at Basel on 12 July 1536. The illegitimate son of a burgher, Rotger Gerrit (or Gerrits), who later became a priest, and of a certain Margherita, the daughter of a physician, deprived at a tender age of both parents, he had a sad youth devoid of affection, under the guidance of three guardians, anxious to steer the young man early toward the religious life so as to have free disposal of the patrimony which in the name of E. and of a brother of his they were to administer. E. did in fact enter, around 1488, a monastery of Canons Regular at Emmaus (Steyn, near Gouda).
At first he was not displeased with it, as the letters of that time attest. Later, having tasted the boundless freedom of the wandering humanist, he felt a reluctance to return to the monastery and, finding it difficult to free himself from the ties to his own Order, E. would give a retrospective vision in dark colors of that life, and there took ever deeper root in him an aversion toward monks and religious in general. Ordained a priest in 1492, he passed, the following year, into the service of the bishop of Cambrai, Henry of Bergen, who sent him to Paris to study. He remained there for some time, cultivating humanistic studies, at first with a predominantly formal bent. In 1499 E. set out for England: it was the beginning of that long and never interrupted series of journeys that constituted one of the most characteristic traits of his restless and feverish life. Among lesser wanderings he passed from England (1499-1500) to France, to the Low Countries, to Louvain (1502-1504), to England again (1505-1506), to Italy (1506-1509), to England for a third time (1509-14), to Basel (1514-16), to Holland and Belgium and again to Basel (1521-29), to Freiburg (1529-1535) and, finally, briefly, to Basel. Fame, praise, honors accompanied in a crescendo the pilgrimage of this man of difficult, surly character, most ambitious of glory and yet unsatisfied by the renown it procured him. In England he formed perhaps his most sincere and cordial friendships: with John Colet, who had a singular influence in directing him toward a humanistic, ethical-philological theology; with Thomas More, whom E. loved as a gentle and happy scholar, and with John Fisher, bishop of Rochester (while he was in Holland, Leo X, by a brief of 26 Jan. 1517, freed him from his religious vows and granted him to live as a secular priest).
From the attentive study of Lorenzo Valla, his first ideal master, E. turned with passionate spirit to pagan and Christian antiquity, aiming at an ever more harmonious reconciliation between an ideal of evangelical morality — pure, linear, sincere — and classical wisdom, composed and majestic. Of this balance the most vivid example remains his Latin, supple, harmonious, skilled in psychological subtleties, but elevated and colored by a moral throb and traversed by a singular exhortative force. Not for nothing did he love St. Jerome as the favorite among his authors and masters. The most famous sayings of ancient wisdom were gathered by E. long and patiently: hence the collections of sentences Adagiorum collectanea, issued in 1500 in a number of eight hundred and then, subsequently, more than tripled. They were followed by the Parabolae (1514) and, in the last years of his life, by the Apophthegmata. The study of Greek, begun systematically in 1500 on his return from England, gave a solid foundation to his philological-critical revision of theology, which he conceived as a return to the Scriptures, understood in the original and withdrawn from the "ignorant" and "barbaric" interpretation — as he called it — of the scholastics.
Method and purpose of this theology of his E. set forth, among other places, in the celebrated little book Enchiridion militis Christiani (1501-1504), so called because it was originally written for a soldier. Absent from it is the asceticism preached by the Imitation of Christ, and its ideal may be called rather intellectualistic; in it he proposed the exercise of a practical Christianity which, far from all asceticism and mystical particularism, from every supererogatory practice such as vows, fasts, pilgrimages, etc., should rest on the exercise of those Christian virtues that were to crown that measured humanism proper to the man devoted to culture, that is, to erudition and to pietas.
Theology meant in substance, for E., polemic over the method of theological studies, the search for moral linearity, a radical critique of what he regarded as plain and simple degenerations of spiritual and religious life. When one day, after endless hesitations, E. took up the pen against Luther, he did not cease, even then, from manifesting his diffidence toward "cut-and-dried assertions," aspiring rather to place himself "willingly among the skeptics, whenever this should be permitted by the inviolable authority of Scripture and by the decrees of the Church" (De libero arbitrio, Leiden ed., IX, 1215 D-1217 B).
The polemical and sarcastic side of these ideas was popularized by E. in a celebrated writing of his, perhaps the liveliest, along with some of the Colloquies, of all his works: the Moriae encomium, or Praise of Folly. E. composed it on his return from Italy (1509), after years of fruitful labor. A satire full of freshness and lively representational force, which now amiably derides human vanity, now holds up to ridicule superstition and formalistic religiosity, now lashes the presumption of theologians and the "barbarisms" of the scholastics, now, becoming grave and severe, launches its barbs against the customs of religious and seculars, the greed of rulers, the unworthiness of bishops, cardinals and popes. No one, in short, is spared in it. A corrosive and penetrating satire which, if in its genre it had had precedents and would have imitators, in no one as in E. ever attained equal refinement and vividness at once; a satire that resolves itself, nevertheless, beyond the author's intentions, into a critique of institutions, far more than of men. The Praise of Folly appeared, moreover, already then, in an age largely given over to every kind of anti-ecclesiastical and anti-theological satire, as an exceedingly bold text, such as to provoke severe censure and deep dissent. And E., for his part, was astonished as at something incredible that such malicious intentions should be attributed to what he regarded as nothing but an occasional writing, light and jesting.
In 1522 he published his Colloquia familiaria, dialogues full of spirit and vivacity, in which he takes aim at the vices of the society of his time, striking with particular satirical verve here too at the customs of ecclesiastics and in particular of religious, the crass ignorance of so great a part of Christendom, etc.
Critical-philological work dominated, in an impressive crescendo, the life of E.: his world was the world of the learned humanists, of the discoverers and editors of classical treasures, unanimous in proclaiming him, of this same world, a luminary and master.
A vast echo among scholars was aroused by his edition of the original Greek text of the New Testament, printed by Froben in Basel in 1516, slightly improved in the subsequent edition of 1519, and reprinted thereafter down to the critical editions of our own age. He thus formed what was called a "textus receptus sed non recipendus," because E. published it on the basis of codices of little value and preferred the variants that departed furthest 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 cultured circles of the time but is far from the simplicity of the Vulgate. In 1518 he added to the text his Adnotationes, humanistic in character, on the model of 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 vols. He accompanied these biblical works with the assiduous editing of the texts of the Fathers. In this E. was doing no more than continuing a work already begun, but he intended to give it a greater critical perfection. Foremost among all was the edition of St. Jerome, issued in 9 vols. in 1516-20; he also made himself editor of St. Cyprian (1520), of St. Hilary and of the Commentaries of Arnobius on the Psalms (1522). In 1525 he published some treatises of Chrysostom in translation; in 1527 St. Ambrose; in 1528 St. Irenaeus; in 1529 a treatise of Lactantius. In these years his edition of St. Augustine also appeared; in 1532 E. still had the strength to publish St. Basil.
In this atmosphere of intense scholarly activity, aspiring to a renewal of culture and of the life of the Church through the work of the learned and the enlightened, the Protestant Reformation found him. From many quarters E. was looked upon as an arbiter, indeed as a living symbol of that Christianity united in the name of the spiritual and moral values that ought not to divide. But events very soon made E. almost a man of the past, and of him there then appeared only the less admirable sides of his character and his human weaknesses. His work had undoubtedly contributed to creating the atmosphere favorable to the rise and prosperity of the Protestant movement. At first, indeed, he viewed with sympathy
Luther's revolt of the Germanic spirit against Rome, which urged him to take sides with the Protestant Reformation. E. promised, evaded, sought not to compromise himself. Already on 28 March 1519 Luther had written to him inviting him to take part in the movement. E. wanted an intimate and spiritual religion without too many rigid observances, a broader intellectual freedom within Catholicism, a piety free from superstitions. When he opened his eyes and realized that the Lutheran movement was turning into a revolution that rejected the priesthood and the primacy, he changed (in 1521) his attitude toward Luther, and thereafter passed over to opposition: in the autumn of 1522 he deplored the ruin of culture and reproached Luther for a freedom which, sinisterly employed, redoubled servitude. Hutten, who had already acclaimed E., presented himself before him at Basel, worn out and broken by a disease contracted amid his dissolute youthful excesses. But E. rebuffed him. From Zurich, where he had dragged himself, Hutten hurled against him his Expostulatio cum E. (1523), a bitter invective in which the great humanist was treated as greedy, fearful, egoistic, and hostile toward Luther. E.'s irritated and sarcastic reply, Spongia adversus adspergines Hutteni, reached his adversary in the tomb. The following year (1524) E. entered the fray, attacking Luther directly with the celebrated writing De libero arbitrio, to which Luther replied with his harsh and contemptuous De servo arbitrio. E. responded in 1525 with a Hyperaspistes, underscoring the Lutheran errors. There followed a reply of Luther and then a "defense" of E. to which Luther no longer responded in print. But this polemic between great figures was, with respect to history, a thing of the past: the Protestant revolt was passing from the hands of the reformers into those of the princes and was turning from a religious movement into a political phenomenon. Moreover, the defense of human autonomy and of freedom of the will was made by E. rather with an eye to humanistic dignity and to the cause of the bonae literae than with regard to the fundamental theological-moral problem that it implied.
E. did not, in fact, have a clear perception of what the events he had witnessed meant, being in substance a spectator. Unleashed passions and hatreds troubled him, almost a threat of a dark barbarism, and those sudden events that came to touch his sheltered life as a scholar went against him, as, for example, the establishment of the Reformation in Basel (1529), on account of which he had to move to Freiburg. There in 1533 he published the writing De sarcienda Ecclesiae concordia, in which, blaming on the one hand the radicalism of the innovators and on the other the excessive zeal of the theologians who saw crises in everything, he showed that the schism was still healable with a little good will: but he was mistaken. His greater preoccupation was, besides certain literary polemics, his work on the classics and on the Fathers of the Church, which he pursued with tireless energy. Precisely for this reason he was induced, in 1535, to move once more to Basel, to the publisher Froben. Here, always absorbed in work, an attack of gout brought him to his death.
In those years events were maturing that were destined to sweep away 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 Christianity" 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 also believed. The champions of the Counter-Reformation judged him very severely; in 1557 the Inquisition condemned his works to the fire, and in 1559 and 1590 Paul IV and Sixtus V purely and simply prohibited their reading. The fame of E., though not entirely extinguished, revived in the Enlightenment and in early Romanticism: then even in Catholic circles judgments about him became milder and, among others, Tiraboschi vindicated, albeit with some reservations, his substantial orthodoxy. - See pl. XXXVI.
Bibliography15 works
Franco Bolgiani