Erasmus

• 1. Introduction

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  Desiderius Erasmus woke before dawn, ink already on his fingers, and on a busy day he wrote or answered as many as forty letters in his own hand. He did not work after dinner. He carted boxes of research notes from city to city, commonplace observations sorted by theme, which he crossed out one by one as he poured them into new books. By the 1530s his writings accounted for between 10 and 20 percent of all book sales in Europe. He has been called, simply, the most read author of his age. Yet this Dutch humanist, priest, and philologist was born out of wedlock to a Catholic priest, orphaned by plague, and pushed by poverty into a monastery he never wanted. How did a sickly, bookish orphan become the man whose New Testament shaped translations for centuries? Why did his refusal to take sides leave him hunted by Catholics and reformers alike? And what did he mean when, near the end, he wished he had written some things differently, or not at all?

• 2. The Boxes Of Commonplaces

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  Forty letters a day, written by hand before breakfast, were only the surface of Erasmus's output. The Catalogue of the Works of Erasmus, published in 2023, runs to 444 entries across 120 pages, almost all of them from the latter half of his life. He wrote translations, paraphrases, textbooks, plays for schoolboys, poems, liturgies, satires, sermons, and prayers, in both Latin and Greek. His method, set out in De copia and De ratione studii, was to take notes on everything he read and sort them by theme. When building a book, he worked through these topics, striking out each note as he used it. The system let him assemble works quickly, though many were woven from the same threads. As his dexterity failed late in life, he hired secretaries and amanuenses to transcribe, rewrite, and finally take his dictation, while he still kept most letters in his own hand. For much of his career he wrote standing at a desk, the pose Dürer captured in his portrait. His letter to Ulrich von Hutten describing Thomas More's household has been called the first real biography in the modern sense.

• 3. An Orphan's Education

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  On the vigil of Simon and Jude, the 27th or the 28th of October in the late 1460s, Erasmus was born in Rotterdam, a city he lived in for only four years and never returned to. He was named after Erasmus of Formiae, a saint his father Gerard favored. His parents could not legally marry: Gerard was a Catholic priest, and his mother Margaretha Rogerius was the daughter of a doctor from Zevenbergen. Erasmus described a loving household and the best education available to a young commoner, until both parents died of the bubonic plague in 1483. At one of the best Latin schools in the Netherlands, at Deventer, owned by the chapter clergy of St. Lebuin's Church, he began learning Greek. A previous student there was Thomas a Kempis. The principal Alexander Hegius renewed the curriculum, and for the first time in Europe north of the Alps, Greek was taught below university level. Plague struck the city around 1483, killing twenty of his fellow students along with his mother and father. Sent next to a cheaper school at 's-Hertogenbosch run by the Brethren of the Common Life, he met the Devotio moderna movement and the book The Imitation of Christ, but resented the harsh rules. Wanting university, perhaps Italy, the birthplace of Latin, he instead found his brother Peter leaving for a canonry, and felt betrayed. Shipwrecked am I, and lost, mid waters chill, he wrote forlornly to a friend.

• 4. Voluntarily But Not Freely

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  Poverty drove the teenaged orphan into the consecrated life, and in 1487 Erasmus entered the novitiate at the canonry of Stein, near Gouda. He professed his vows as a Canon regular of St. Augustine in late 1488. He later said he had joined voluntarily but not freely, and counted himself among the immature boys coerced or tricked into religious orders, a chief target of his later calls for reform. The Letter to Grunnius, his fictionalized account, mocks the recruiters who sort boys for monkhood. While at Stein, he formed what he called a passionate attachment, fervidos amores, with a fellow canon, Servatius Rogerus, calling him half my soul in a series of love letters. No sexual accusations were ever made against Erasmus in his lifetime, and his works praise moderate desire in marriage between men and women. He was ordained a priest on the 25th of April, in either 1492 or 1495. In 1493 his prior arranged his move to Brabant as Latin Secretary to Henry of Bergen, Bishop of Cambrai, prized for his Latin. From 1500 he avoided returning to Stein, insisting the diet and hours would kill him. Pope Julius II granted him a dispensation from the vow of poverty in 1505, and Pope Leo X confirmed his independence in 1517, while he remained, formally, an Augustinian canon all his life.

• 5. England And Italy

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  In 1499 William Blount, 4th Baron Mountjoy, invited Erasmus to England, and those six months made lifelong friendships among the leaders of English thought under King Henry VIII. He reported becoming a better horseman and a tolerable courtier. At Oxford he met the Greek scholars Thomas Linacre, William Grocyn, and William Lily, and was struck by the Bible teaching of John Colet, whose preaching followed the church fathers rather than the Scholastics. Colet turned his interests toward patristic theology and biblical philology, the work of his second half of life. He also befriended Thomas More, then a young law student. Leaving England with a full purse, he lost his gold and silver to English customs officials who confiscated it, on bad legal advice from his friends. A turning point came on the road: his discovery at Park Abbey of Lorenzo Valla's New Testament Notes prompted him to study Scripture through philology. At Turin in 1506 he was awarded the degree of Doctor of Sacred Theology per saltum. In Venice he worked on an expanded Adagia at the Aldine Press of Aldus Manutius, who wrote that Erasmus could do twice as much work in a given time as any man he had met. Crossing the Splügen Pass toward England, he began composing The Praise of Folly, which would become a best-seller written in More's house.

• 6. The Greek New Testament

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  Up to 300,000 copies of the various editions of Erasmus's New Testament appear to have been printed in his lifetime. The project grew from his Annotations, modeled on Valla's work, into a revised Vulgate, his own new Latin translation, an accompanying Greek text, essays defending his approach, and Paraphrases of the entire New Testament except Revelation. He published the first edition in 1516, alongside his complete works of Jerome. This body of work became the basis for most Textus Receptus Protestant translations from the 16th through the 19th centuries, including those of Martin Luther, William Tyndale, and the King James Version. Erasmus denied making a critical edition, writing that he undertook the task not to provide a standard from which it would not be possible to diverge, but to make a substantial contribution both to the correction and to the understanding of the sacred books. Other publishers, including the Aldine Press, immediately issued their own editions, sometimes without the Annotations, or the Latin, or the Greek. Much of the work was supervised by the Basel printer Froben, whose press used the new Roman type and elegant layouts; Hans Holbein the Younger cut several woodblock capitals for the editions. The annotations introduced readings taken up by both Protestant and Catholic reformers, making his scholarship immediately influential in both reformations.

• 7. The Middle Road

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  His influential middle-road approach disappointed, and even angered, partisans in both camps. Erasmus promoted synergism, the doctrine that he understood as traditional, which Martin Luther and John Calvin rejected in favour of monergism. In De libero arbitrio, opposing Luther, he urged disputants to be temperate in their language, because in this way the truth, often lost amidst too much wrangling, may be more surely perceived. For Luther, Erasmus was an eel, slippery, evasive, and impossible to capture. He often wrote in a highly ironical idiom, especially in his letters, leaving them open to opposite readings; Ulrich von Hutten claimed he was secretly a Lutheran, and Erasmus replied that von Hutten had missed the irony. Peace was central to his theology: the sum and summary of our religion is peace and unanimity. The longest entry in his Adages, number 3,001, was War is sweet to those who have never tasted it. He had been privately involved in early attempts to shield Luther and his sympathisers from charges of heresy, writing Inquisitio de fide to argue that the Lutherans of 1523 were not formally heretics. It is better to cure a sick man than to kill him, he wrote, opposing the death penalty for private or peaceable dissent. After the Edict of Worms, his neutral stance drew attacks from the theological faculty.

• 8. Refugee And Last Words

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  On the 1st of April 1529, Basel banned the Catholic Mass, and on the 13th of April Erasmus departed by ship for the Catholic university town of Freiburg im Breisgau, under the protection of his former student Archduke Ferdinand of Austria. I preferred to risk my life rather than appear to approve a programme like theirs, he wrote to Thomas More. He worked on a manual on preaching, Ecclesiastes, and a small book on preparing for death. The years brought a roll of losses. In 1535 his friends Thomas More, Bishop John Fisher, and the Brigittine monk Richard Reynolds were executed by Henry VIII, whom Erasmus had first met as a boy. Despite illness, he wrote the short, anonymous Expositio Fidelis, the first biography of More and Fisher, calling them the new martyrs of Christendom slain by another Herod. In 1535 he moved back to the Froben compound in Basel. On the 12th of July 1536 he died of dysentery, in the company of friends including Bonifacius Amerbach and Hieronymus Froben. His last words, recorded by Beatus Rhenanus, were Lord, put an end to it, then Dear God. The Protestant city authorities allowed his funeral to be an ecumenical Catholic requiem Mass, and he was buried with great ceremony in the Basel Minster. Long before, he had sold most of his library of almost 500 books to the Polish humanist Jan Laski, and his estate funded scholarships for local students and the needy, among them the impoverished Protestant humanist Sebastian Castellio.