Erasmus


Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus, commonly known in English as Erasmus of Rotterdam or simply Erasmus, was a Dutch humanist, Christian theologian, and pioneering philologist and educationalist. He was, through his writings and translations, one of the most influential scholars of the Northern Renaissance and a major figure of Western culture.
Erasmus was an important figure in Renaissance classical scholarship who wrote in a spontaneous, copious and correct but natural Latin style. As a Catholic priest developing humanist techniques for working on texts, he prepared pioneering new Latin and Greek scholarly editions of the New Testament and of the Church Fathers, with annotations and commentary that were immediately and vitally influential in both the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Reformation. He also wrote On Free Will, The Praise of Folly, The Complaint of Peace, Handbook of a Christian Knight, On Civility in Children, Copia: Foundations of the Abundant Style and many other academic, popular and pedagogical works.
Erasmus lived against the backdrop of the growing European religious reformations. He developed a biblical humanistic theology in which he advocated the religious and civil necessity both of peaceable concord and of pastoral tolerance on matters of indifference. He remained a member of the Catholic Church all his life, remaining committed to reforming the church from within, but faced dangerous pushback from some university theologians. He promoted what he understood as the traditional doctrine of synergism, which some prominent reformers such as Martin Luther and John Calvin rejected in favour of the doctrine of monergism. His influential middle-road approach disappointed, and even angered, partisans in both camps.

Works

Erasmus was the most popular, most printed and arguably most influential author of the early sixteenth century, read in all nations in the West and frequently translated. By the 1530s, his writings accounted for 10–20% of book sales in Europe. "Undoubtedly he was the most read author of his age." His vast number of Latin and Greek publications included translations, paraphrases, letters, textbooks, plays for schoolboys, commentary, poems, liturgies, satires, sermons, and prayers. A large number of his later works were defences of his earlier work from attacks by Catholic and Protestant theological and literary opponents.
The Catalogue of the Works of Erasmus runs to 444 entries, almost all from the latter half of his life. He usually wrote books in particular classical literary genres with their different rhetorical conventions: complaint, diatribe, dialogue, encomium, epistle, commentary, liturgy, sermon, etc. His letter to Ulrich von Hutten on Thomas More's household has been called "the first real biography in the real modern sense."
From his youth, Erasmus had been a voracious writer. Erasmus wrote or answered up to 40 letters per day, usually waking early in the morning and writing them in his own hand. He did not work after dinner. His writing method was to make notes on whatever he was reading, categorised by theme: he carted these commonplaces in boxes that accompanied him. When assembling a new book, he would go through the topics and cross out commonplace notes as he used them. This catalogue of research notes allowed him to rapidly create books, though woven from the same topics. Towards the end of his life, as he lost dexterity, he employed secretaries or amanuenses who performed the assembly or transcription, re-wrote his writing, and in his last decade, recorded his dictation; letters were usually in his own hand, unless formal. For much of his career he wrote standing at a desk, as shown in Dürer's portrait.

New Testament editions

In the second half of his life, Erasmus worked on New Testament studies in a project that eventually saw his intended detailed Annotations on the New Testament expand with a revised Vulgate recension, his own new Latin translation, an accompanying Greek text, essays justifying his approach, and lengthy Paraphrases of the entire New Testament except Revelation.
These went through multiple revisions and editions, and progressively involved many leading scholars and introduced several readings which were taken up by Protestant and Catholic reformers. Other publishers, such as Erasmus's earlier collaborator Aldine Press in Venice, immediately brought out their own editions, sometimes with their own corrections, and sometimes without the Annotations, or the Latin, or the Greek. Up to 300,000 copies of the various editions appear to have been printed in Erasmus's lifetime.
This body of work formed the basis for the majority of Textus Receptus Protestant translations of the New Testament in the 16th-19th centuries, including those of Martin Luther, William Tyndale and the King James Version.
Erasmus denied he was making a critical edition: "I certainly did not undertake this task 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." He also later wrote to several Protestant and Catholic friends and critics, notably to his friend Pope Adrian, that " had I known that a generation such as this would appear, I should either not have written at all some things that I have written or should have written them differently."

Notable writings

Erasmus wrote for educated audiences both
  • on subjects of humanist interest: "Three areas preoccupied Erasmus as a writer: language arts, education, and biblical studies. All of his works served as models of style. He pioneered the principles of textual criticism." and
  • on pastoral subjects: "to Christians in the various stages of lives:for the young, for married couples, for widows," the dying, clergy, theologians, religious, princes, partakers of sacraments, etc.
He is noted for his extensive scholarly editions of the New Testament in Latin and Greek, and the complete works of numerous Church Fathers. These formed the basis of the so-called Textus Receptus Protestant bibles. His editions of Greek and Roman moralists and rhetoricians such as Plutarch, Ovid, Ptolemy, Lucian, Seneca and Cicero re-introduced their broader thought to the West.
The only works with enduring popularity in modern time are his satires and semi-satires: The Praise of Folly, Julius Excluded from Heaven and The Complaint of Peace. However, his other works, such as his several thousand letters, continue to be a vital source of information to historians of numerous disciplines.

Life and career

Erasmus's almost 70 years may be divided into quarters.
  • First was his medieval Dutch childhood, ending with him being orphaned and impoverished;
  • Second, his struggling years as a canon, a clerk, a priest, a failing and sickly university student, a would-be poet, and a tutor;
  • Third, his flourishing but peripatetic High Renaissance years of increasing focus and literary productivity following his 1499 contact with a reformist English circle notably John Colet and Thomas More, then with radical French Franciscan Jean Vitrier, and later with the Greek-speaking Aldine New Academy in Venice; engaging with leading intellectuals and reform-minded churchmen of the West; and
  • Fourth, his financially more secure Reformation years first in Basel and then as a Catholic religious refugee in Freiburg: as a prime influencer of European thought through his New Testament projects and increasing public opposition to aspects of Lutheranism, in direct correspondence with kings and popes.

    Early life

Desiderius Erasmus is reported to have been born in Rotterdam on 27 or 28 October in the late 1460s. He was named after Erasmus of Formiae, whom Erasmus's father Gerard personally favored. Although associated closely with Rotterdam, he lived there for only four years, never to return afterwards.
File:Rotterdam standbeeld Erasmus.jpg|thumb|left|upright=.8|Statue of Erasmus in Rotterdam. Gilded bronze statue by Hendrick de Keyser, replacing a stone, and a wooden.
The year of Erasmus's birth is unclear: in later life he calculated his age as if born in 1466, but frequently his remembered age at major events actually implies 1469. Furthermore, many details of his early life must be gleaned from a fictionalized third-person account he wrote in 1516 in a letter to a fictitious Papal secretary, Lambertus Grunnius.
His parents could not be legally married: his father, Gerard, was a Catholic priest who may have spent up to six years in the 1450s or 60s in Italy as a scribe and scholar. His mother was Margaretha Rogerius, the daughter of a doctor from Zevenbergen. She may have been Gerard's housekeeper.
Although he was born out of wedlock, Erasmus was cared for by his parents, with a loving household and the best education, until their early deaths from the bubonic plague in 1483. His only sibling Peter might have been born in 1463, and some writers suggest Margaret was a widow and Peter was the half-brother of Erasmus; Erasmus on the other hand called him his brother.
Erasmus's own story, in the possibly forged 1524 Compendium vitae Erasmi was along the lines that his parents were engaged, with the formal marriage blocked by his relatives ; his father went to Italy to study Latin and Greek, and the relatives misled Gerard that Margaretha had died, on which news grieving Gerard romantically took Holy Orders, only to find on his return that Margaretha was alive; many scholars dispute this account.
In 1471 his father became the vice-curate of the small town of Woerden and in 1476 was promoted to vice-curate of Gouda.
Erasmus was given the highest education available to a young commoner of his day, in a series of private, monastic or semi-monastic schools. In 1476, at the age of 6, his family moved to Gouda and he started at the school of Pieter Winckel, who later became his guardian Historians who date his birth in 1466 have Erasmus in Utrecht at the choir school at this period.
In 1478, at the age of 9, he and his older brother Peter were sent to one of the best Latin schools in the Netherlands, located at Deventer and owned by the chapter clergy of the Lebuïnuskerk. A notable previous student was Thomas à Kempis. Towards the end of his stay there the curriculum was renewed by the new principal of the school, Alexander Hegius, a correspondent of pioneering rhetorician Rudolphus Agricola. For the first time in Europe north of the Alps, Greek was taught at a lower level than a university and this is where he began learning it. His education there ended when plague struck the city about 1483, and his mother, who had moved to provide a home for her sons, died from the infection; then his father. Following the death of his parents, as well as 20 fellow students at his school, he moved back to his patria where he was supported by Berthe de Heyden, a compassionate widow.
File:Hieronymus Bosch - Triptych of Temptation of St Anthony - WGA2585.jpg|thumb|centre|475px|Hieronymous Bosch, Temptation of St Anthony, triptych, painted in 's-Hertogenbosch, later owned by his friend Damião de Gois
In 1484, around the age 14, he and his brother went to a cheaper grammar school or seminary at 's-Hertogenbosch run by the Brethren of the Common Life: Erasmus's Epistle to Grunnius satirises them as the "Collationary Brethren" who select and sort boys for monkhood. He was exposed there to the Devotio moderna movement and the Brethren's famous book The Imitation of Christ but resented the harsh rules and strict methods of the religious brothers and educators. The two brothers made an agreement that they would resist the clergy but attend the university; Erasmus longed to study in Italy, the birthplace of Latin, and have a degree from an Italian university. Instead, Peter left for the Augustinian canonry in Stein, which left Erasmus feeling betrayed. Around this time he wrote forlornly to his friend Elizabeth de Heyden "Shipwrecked am I, and lost, 'mid waters chill'." He suffered quartan fever for over a year. Eventually Erasmus moved to the same abbey as a postulant in or before 1487, around the age of 16