Erasmus

Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam was a Dutch humanist, priest and scholar, the most famous intellectual in Europe in the early sixteenth century. He made the printing press his platform, publishing best-selling satires, handbooks of Latin style and the first published edition of the Greek New Testament. He called for a simple, inward Christianity based on the Gospels, mocked the abuses of the church and the subtleties of scholastic theology, and pleaded for peace. When the Reformation came, he refused to join either side wholeheartedly, and was attacked by both.

Erasmus was born in Rotterdam on 27 or 28 October, probably in 1466, though some scholars argue for 1469. He was the illegitimate son of a priest, Roger Gerard, and a physician's daughter, Margaret, a fact that troubled him all his life. He went to school at Deventer, where he gained his first taste of classical literature, and later at 's-Hertogenbosch with the Brethren of the Common Life, a lay movement that stressed personal devotion.

After both parents died of plague, his guardians steered him into the house of Augustinian canons at Steyn, near Gouda, where he took vows and was ordained priest in 1492. He found friends and books there but no vocation, and later claimed he had been pushed into it. He escaped by becoming secretary to the bishop of Cambrai, who in 1495 sent him to study theology at the Collège de Montaigu in Paris. He disliked both the harsh regime and the scholastic theology taught there, and supported himself by tutoring.

In 1499 a pupil, Lord Mountjoy, took him to England. There he met Thomas More, who became a lifelong friend, and John Colet, who encouraged him to turn from classical letters to the study of scripture. Erasmus resolved to master Greek, which he largely taught himself in the following years.

For two decades he moved between France, the Low Countries, England and Italy, always in search of patrons, manuscripts and good printers. In 1506 he obtained a doctorate in theology at Turin, and in Venice he worked with the great printer Aldus Manutius on an enlarged edition of his Adages. From 1511 to 1514 he taught at Cambridge. He later lived at Leuven, in today's Belgium, and from 1521 at Basel, where he worked closely with the printer Johann Froben. When Basel adopted the Protestant Reformation in 1529, he moved to Catholic Freiburg im Breisgau, returning to Basel in 1535. He died there on 12 July 1536, and was buried in its cathedral, by then a Protestant church.

Erasmus was a master of Latin and wrote almost entirely in it. The Adages, a collection of classical proverbs with commentary that grew to more than four thousand entries, made ancient wisdom available to every reader. His Colloquies, dialogues written to teach Latin conversation, became lively commentaries on religion and society. The Praise of Folly, written in More's house in 1509 and published in 1511, is a speech by Folly herself, who praises her own followers and then turns her irony on monks, theologians, popes and princes.

His greatest scholarly work was the Novum Instrumentum of 1516, the first edition of the New Testament in Greek to be published, printed by Froben alongside his own revised Latin translation and notes. It was assembled quickly from a handful of late manuscripts and had many faults, but it allowed scholars to compare the official Latin Vulgate with the original language, and later editions became the basis of the Greek text used by Protestant translators, including Martin Luther and William Tyndale. He also produced editions of Church Fathers such as Jerome and Augustine of Hippo.

In the Enchiridion (Handbook of the Christian Soldier, 1503) and in prefaces to his New Testament, Erasmus set out what he called the philosophy of Christ. True religion, he argued, lay not in ceremonies, relics, pilgrimages and fine points of doctrine, but in inner faith and a life shaped by the teaching of the Gospels, which should be translated so that even farm labourers and weavers could read them. Learning and piety went together: the classics, read wisely, prepared the mind for scripture.

He applied the same outlook to politics. The Education of a Christian Prince (1516), written for the young future emperor Charles V, urged rulers to serve their people, avoid war and govern by law. The Complaint of Peace (1517) condemned war among Christians as a betrayal of Christ. His pacifism, and his ideal of a learned, tolerant Europe, set him apart from almost all contemporaries.

Many observers said that Erasmus laid the egg that Luther hatched. At first he defended Luther's right to be heard and shared his criticism of church abuses, but he disliked Luther's violence of language and feared that the Protestant Reformation would split Christendom. Under pressure from the pope and princes, he published On Free Will in 1524, arguing that human beings play some part, however small, in their own salvation. Luther replied fiercely in The Bondage of the Will (1525), and Erasmus answered with a long defence. Catholic critics, meanwhile, accused him of opening the door to heresy; the theology faculty in Paris censured his writings, and after his death his works were placed on the Index of Prohibited Books.

Erasmus did more than anyone to spread humanist learning north of the Alps and to show what the printing press could do for a single author; around three thousand letters to and from him survive. He is a central figure of Renaissance Philosophy and of the Renaissance in northern Europe. His ideals of tolerance, education and peace were later taken up by thinkers of the Enlightenment, and the European Union's student exchange programme bears his name. In the Netherlands he is remembered as the country's first great writer of European stature, and Rotterdam's university is named after him.