ERASMUS
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ERASMUS
money for a trip to England he earned by acting as
tutor to three EngHshmen, from whom he also ob-
tained valuable letters of introduction. During his
stay in England (1498-90), he made the acquaintance
at Oxford of Colet, Thomas More, Latimer, and otliers,
with all of whom acquaintance ripened into lifelong
friendship. Colet showed him how to reconcile the
ancient faith with humanism by abandoning the
scholastic method and devoting himself to a thorough
study of the Scriptures. Consequently, on his return
to the Continent he took up with ardour the study of
Greek at Paris and Louvain. The first publications of
Erasmus occurred in this early period. In 1500 was
issued the "Adagia", a collection of Greek and Latin
proverbs, and in 1508 another greatly enlarged edition
of the same; in 1502 appeared the "Enchiridion mili-
tis christiani", in which he described the nature of
true religion and true piety, but with comments that
were bitmg and antagonistic to the Church; in 1505
Lorenzo Valla's " Annotationes" to the New Testa-
ment, the manuscript of which he had found in a mon-
astery at Brussels. His introduction to this work is
important, for in it occurred his first utterance con-
cerning the Scriptures, lajnng especial stress on the
necessity of a new translation, a return to the original
text, and respect for the literal sense.
In 1506 he was finally able, by the aid of his English friends, to attain his greatest desire, a journey to Italy. On his way thither he received at Turin the degree of Doctor of Divinity; at Bologna. Padua, and Venice, the academic centres of Upper Italy, he was greeted with enthusiastic honour by the most distinguished humanists, and he spent some time in each of these cities. At Venice he formed an intimate friendship with the famous printer Aldus Manutius. His recep- tion at Rome was equally flattering; the cardinals, especially Giovanni de' Medici (later Leo X), and Do- menico Grimani, were particularly gracious to him. He could not, however, be persuaded to fix his resi- dence at Rome, and refused all offers of ecclesiastical promotion. Henry VIII had just reached the throne of England, and thus awakened in Erasmus the hope of an advantageous appointment in that country, for which he accordingly set out. On his way out of Italy (1509) he wrote the satire known as "The Praise of Folly" ("Morise Encomium", or "Laus Stultitiae"), which in a few months went through seven editions. Originally meant for private circulation, it scourges the abuses and follies of the various classes of society, especially of the Church. It is a cold-blooded, delib- erate attempt to discredit the Church, and its satire and stinging comment on ecclesiastical conditions are not intended as a healing medicine but a deadly poison.
Erasmus may now be said to have reached the acme of his fame; he was in high repute throughout all Eu- rope, and was regarded as an oracle botli by princes and scholars. Every one felt it an honour to enter into correspondence with him. His inborn vanity and self-complacency were thereby increased almost to the point of becoming a disease; at the same time he sought, often by the grossest flattery, to obtain the favour and material support of patrons or to secure the continuance of such benefits. This was also the period of his greatest literary productivity. He wrote at this time works destinetl to influence profoundly the eccle- siastical revolution that was soon to break out. The next five years he spent in England, but never ac- cepted a permanent office; it was only for a short time that he held a professorship of Greek at Cam- bridge. When the hopes he had based on the friend- ship of Henry VIII proved vain and he realized that Henry's money was all needed in warlike schemes, Erasmus returned to Brabant, where he became one of the royal councillors of Archduke Charles, later Em- peror Charles V. This office gave him a fixed salary, and for his princely patron he now wrote the "Insti- tutio principis christiani", a humanistic portrait of
the ideal ruler. The archduke thought of making
Erasmus a bishop, wherefore, with the aid of the papal
legate Ammonius, the famous scholar obtained a papal
Brief releasing him from all obligations to his monas-
tery and also from the censures he had incurred by
discarding the dress of his order without permission.
No longer obliged to have permanent residence, Eras-
mus kept up his wandering life, occupied alternately
with the composition and the publication of his
works. In order to secure absolute freedom Erasmus
refused many brilliant offers, among them an invita-
tion from the King of France to reside at Paris, from
Arcliduke Ferdinand to come to Vienna, and from
Henry VIII to return to England. He frequently
went to Basle to visit the famous printer Froben, who
published henceforth nearly all the writings of Eras-
mus and procured for them a very wide circulation.
In this way Erasmus came into closer relations with
German humanism, and his influence did much to in-
crease its prestige in south-western Germany, inas-
much as the followers of the " new learning" in Basle,
Constance, Schlettstadt, and Strasburg, looked up to
him as their leader. One of his chief works at this
period is the "Colloquia Familiaria", first pubhshed
in 1518, issued in an enlarged form in 152fi, and often
reprinted. It is a kind of textbook for the study of
the Latin language, an introduction to the purely
natural formal training of the mind, and a typical ex-
ample of the frivolous Renaissance spirit. The de-
fects of ecclesiastical and monastic life are in tliis
work held up to pitiless scorn; moreover, he descends
only too often to indecent and cynical descriptions.
His edition of the Greek original of the New Testa-
ment, "Novum Instrumentum omne" (Basle, 1516),
no model of text-critical scholarship, was accompanied
by a classical Latin translation destined to replace the
Vulgate. Among the notes, partly textual criticism,
partly exegetical comments, were inserted sarcastio
slurs on the ecclesiastical conditions of the period. In
a general introduction he discussed the importance of
the Scriptures and the best method of studying them.
Although the Complutensian edition offered a better
text and was also printed, but not pulilished, at an
earlier date, yet the edition of Erasmus remained for a
long time authoritative on account of liis high reputa-
tion, and became the basis of the texlus receptus or re-
ceived text. No less instrumental in preparing the
way for the future Reformation, by setting aside the
scholastic method and untlermining the traditional
authority of the Scriptures, were the " Paraphrases of
the New Testament" (1517 and later). 'Tliis work
was dedicated to various princes and prelates, e. g. the
paraphrases of the Evangelists, to Charles V, Francis
I, Henry VIII, and P'erdinand I. In these publica-
tions the attitude of Erasmus towards the text of the
New Testament is an extremely radical one, even if he
did not follow out all its logical consequences. In his
opinion the Epistle of St. James shows few signs of the
Apostolic spirit; the Epistle to the Ephesians has not
the diction of St. Paul, and the Epistle to the Hebrews
he assigns with some hesitation to Clement of Rome.
In exegesis he favoured a cold rationalism and treated
the Biblical narratives just as he did ancient classical
myths, and interpreted them in a subjective and fig-
urative, or, as he called it, allegorical, sense.
The literary works issued by Erasmus up to this time made him the intellectual father of the Reforma- tion. What the Reformation destroyed in the organic life of the Church Erasmus had already openly or covertly subverted in a moral sense in his " Praise of Folly", his "Adagia", and "Colloquia", by his pitiless sarcasm or by his cold scepticism. Like his teacher Lorenzo Valla, he regarded Scholasticism as the greatest perversion of the religious spirit; according to him this degeneration dated from the primitive Christological controversies, which caused the Church to lose its evangelical simplicity and become the vie-
