Desiderius Erasmus was a Dutch scholar, writer, and humanist; prolific editor and translator of the classics; first editor of the New Testament in Greek; and internationally famous satirist.
Background
Erasmus was born in Rotterdam, probably on October 27, 1466 (accounts vary between 1465 and 1469), and was at first called Herasmus, a popular medieval name which he later changed to approximate a Greek original, adding the Latin form Desiderius. He called himself Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus. He was the illegitimate son of Margaret, daughter of a Sevenbergen physician, and Gerard of Gouda, who became a priest. His father's name seems to have been Rogerius Gerardus.
Education
Erasmus's first schooling was at Gouda under Peter Winckel, who was afterwards vice-pastor of the church. In the dull round of instruction in "grammar," he did not distinguish himself and was surpassed by his early friend and companion, William Herman, who was Winckel's favorite pupil.
Erasmus was eager to go to a university, but the guardians, acting under a perhaps genuine enthusiasm for the religious life, sent the boys to another school at Hertogenbosch; and when they returned after two or three years, prevailed on them to enter monasteries. At the suggestion of a friend, James Batt, he applied to his patron for leave to go to Paris University. The bishop consented and promised a small pension; and in August 1495 Erasmus entered the "domus pauperum" of the college of Montaigu, which was then under the somewhat rigid rule of the reformer Jan Standonck. He continued to read nevertheless for a degree in theology, and at some time completed the requirements for a Bachelor's Degree.
John Fisher (bishop of Rochester), who was then superintending the foundation of Christ's College for the Lady Margaret, took him down to Cambridge for the king's visit; and at length, the opportunity came to fulfill his dream of seeing Italy. Erasmus obtained a firm grounding in classical Latin and an appreciation of a spirit of Christianity beyond its doctrinal basis.
Career
Erasmus entered the Augustinian monastery at Steyn in 1487 and took monastic vows in 1488; he was ordained a priest in 1492. His reading in classical literature and Christian sources matured, but Erasmus found Steyn crude and rustic. Scholarship offered the first step out, when the bishop of Cambrai employed Erasmus as his secretary in 1493 and rewarded his work with a stipend for study at Paris in 1495.
Paris provided a diverse environment which Erasmus cultivated between recalls to the Low Countries in the late 1490s. He moved in literary circles, writing poetry and dedications and experimenting with styles of educational writing which bore fruit in the later publications Adagia and Colloquia. He sought students and patrons until, in 1499, his student Lord Mountjoy took him to England.
The visit was decisive to Erasmus. English humanists were studying Scripture and the early Church fathers and advocating reform of the Church and the educational process that served it. Friendships with John Colet, Sir Thomas More, and others restored Erasmus' interest in devotional studies and turned him to the Greek language as the key for his research.
In 1506 Erasmus fulfilled a long-standing ambition by traveling to Italy. He watched Pope Julius II conquer Bologna that year; the sharpest edge of his wit can be discerned in a tract, Julius exclusus (published anonymously in 1517; he never admitted authorship), in which St. Peter bars Julius from heaven and scathingly damns his wars and treasure. Erasmus polished his Greek in Italy and formed, with Aldus Manutius's press in Venice, the first of the crucial links to publishing enterprises that secured his financial and professional independence.
Back in England by 1509, disillusioned with the Church's wars and its clergy's shortcomings, Erasmus wrote Encomium moriae (The Praise of Folly), a satiric exposition of the obstacles restricting the fulfillment of Christ's teaching. Though not formally released from monastic vows until 1517, Erasmus was now effectively freed of Steyn by his mounting reputation. He held a professorship at Cambridge (1511–1514) and settled into the vocation for which his study and travel had prepared him.
Erasmus' Novum instrumentum, a heavily annotated edition of the New Testament placing texts in Greek and revised Latin side by side, appeared in 1516 from the Basel press of Johannes Froben. As the first published Greek text and a basis for further clarification of the New Testament, it was a landmark for scholars and reformers. It attuned educated Europeans more closely to Erasmus' early works, which were now widely translated from the Latin of his originals, and paved the way for the literary and educational classics of the Christian humanist fellowship.
Erasmus had now returned to the Continent to the manuscripts and printing houses on which his massive efforts relied. Froben published his nine-volume edition of St. Jerome in 1516 and in the next two decades issued Erasmus' comprehensive editions of early Christian authors, including St. Cyprian (1520), St. Ambrose (1527), and St. Augustine (1529); he also circulated commentaries and treatises on divinity and revised editions of the literary works.
Another dimension to Erasmus' writing appeared in 1516, while he briefly served the future emperor Charles V as councilor. Following current humanist practice, he prepared a guide for educating princes to rule justly, Institutio principis Christiani, and in 1517 composed Querela pacis (The Complaint of Peace), condemning war as an instrument of tyranny and warning temporal rulers to fulfill their obligation to preserve Christian harmony. Erasmus thus demonstrated, before Luther's impact was clear, his sensitivity to Europe's impending fragmentation.
Erasmus' influence could not realize the vision of Christian renovation expressed in his New Testament dedication and preface, which urged Pope Leo X to make Rome the center of reform and to make Christ's words available to every plowboy in the field. Following Luther's lead, many intellectuals, impatient for action, rejected humanism's "halfway house" and used presses and pulpits to move Europe's masses as Erasmus never had. The Erasmians' style of persuasion was countered by simpler, vernacular tracts on theology, the Sacraments, and Church structure, sometimes linked with social and political issues. In 1516 Erasmus had foreseen a golden age, but by 1521, dismayed by the partisan tone and substance of the reformers' appeals, he was calling his own times the worst since Christianity began.
Erasmus' eventual response, after an important exchange with Luther in 1524–1525 about the role of human will in salvation to which he contributed De libero arbitrio (On the Freedom of the Will), was a gradual disengagement from the disputing theologians and their secular sponsors. He avoided Europe's major courts and capitals, and he left congenial intellectual homes in Catholic Louvain in 1521 and Protestant Basel in 1529, when denominational advocacy invaded their scholarship and governance. Printing presses continued to hold his audience: they were the lifelines of this complex man, rootless at birth, whose temperament, circumstances, and dislike of permanent commitments consistently separated him from friends and institutions eager to harness his talents.
He died on July 12, 1536. The embattled Catholic Church, which he never left, condemned some of Erasmus' work for its critical attitude and moderation against heretics, while much modern opinion based on Protestant, nationalist viewpoints has judged him harshly.
Religion
Certain works of Erasmus laid a foundation for religious toleration and Ecumenism. For example, in De libero arbitrio, opposing certain views of Martin Luther, Erasmus noted that religious disputants should be temperate in their language, "because in this way the truth, which is often lost amidst too much wrangling may be more surely perceived." Gary Remer writes, "Like Cicero, Erasmus concludes that truth is furthered by a more harmonious relationship between interlocutors."
Views
Erasmus once again discovered for the world such a phenomenon as the world of the child, the world of childhood. Many of the pedagogical views of Erasmus were innovative for their time and remain important to this day. His humanistic ideas had a great influence on the theory and practice of pedagogy.
In his book Enchiridion militis Christiani (Handbook of the Militant Christian, published 1503, though begun a decade before) Erasmus outlined conduct which would foster man's spiritual capacities and usher in the ethics and piety of what Erasmus' group called the "philosophy of Christ." It gave these scholars an international audience and steady patronage among educated laymen.
Quotations:
"No Man is wise at all Times, or is without his blind Side."
"You must acquire the best knowledge first, and without delay; it is the height of madness to learn what you will later have to unlearn."
"The most disadvantageous peace is better than the most just war."
Personality
Among humanists Erasmus enjoyed the sobriquet "Prince of the Humanists," and has been called "the crowning glory of the Christian humanists." Using humanist techniques for working on texts, he prepared important new Latin and Greek editions of the New Testament, which raised questions that would be influential in the Protestant Reformation and Catholic Counter-Reformation.
In spite of frequent illnesses, he got through an incredible amount of work.
The white wines of Baden or the Rhine did not suit him; he could only drink those of Burgundy or Franche-Comte. He could neither eat nor bear the smell of, fish.
For his constant journeys, he required two horses, one for himself and one for his attendant.
Physical Characteristics:
Erasmus was never physically strong, and the finely cut features of his portraits by Matsys, Holbein, and Dürer suggest a delicacy of the constitution as well as the sensitivity of mind.