Erasmus of Rotterdam and Christian humanism

Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466–1536) was the most widely read European author of the long sixteenth century. To Johan Huizinga (Erasmus of Rotterdam, 1924) he was the very type of the humanist clericus; to James K. McConica (Erasmus, 1991) and Lisa Jardine (Erasmus, Man of Letters, 1993) he was the working editor of the Greek New Testament and the working author of the Adagia; to Stefan Zweig, in the famous 1934 biography written against the rising catastrophe of National Socialism, he was the conscience of Europe. He was, in his own self-understanding, neither Protestant nor Catholic, but a Christian humanist: a scholar who used the methods of the Italian studia humanitatis in the service of the reform of Christian piety and of the Christian church. The programme failed, in the end, in its most ambitious political form, but it shaped every subsequent European attempt to read the Bible, to write Latin, or to think about the history of the church. Margaret Mann Phillips’s Erasmus and the Northern Renaissance (1949) remains the most reliable single-volume introduction; Bruce Mansfield’s Erasmus in the Twentieth Century (1979) traces the long and contested modern reception.

Rotterdam, Deventer, and the Brethren of the Common Life

Erasmus was born in Rotterdam, probably on 28 October 1466, the illegitimate son of Roger Gerard, a priest of the diocese of Utrecht, and Margaretha Rogers, the daughter of a physician of Zevenbergen in Brabant. The family circumstances — the father a priest, the mother the daughter of a physician, the elder brother Peter a monk, the younger brother Cornelius a friar — were characteristic of the late medieval Burgundian Netherlands, where the institutions of the church, the pietà of the devotio moderna, and the new commercial wealth of the Low Countries were the working context of the studium of the clericus of the regime of the Dukes of Burgundy of the Pays-Bas.

Erasmus was educated first at the chapter school of St. Lebuin’s at Deventer, run by the Brethren of the Common Life, the devotio moderna community founded by Geert Groote in the 1370s and 1380s. The Brethren combined the contemplative life with the teaching of children in a network of schools that, by the 1460s, included institutions at Deventer, Zwolle, ‘s-Hertogenbosch, Mons, Brussels, and Liège, and that provided education to thousands of children of the Burgundian and German commercial class. Erasmus’s schoolfellows included Alexander Hegius (c. 1433–1498), the schoolmaster of Deventer and the editor of the Auctores octo for the school, and Johann Murmellius (1480–1517), the schoolmaster of Münster and the editor of the Pappa puerorum; the Studium of the Brethren at Deventer was, in the working studium of the Burgundian regime, the working studium of the clericus of the Brethren of the Common Life. Erasmus entered the Augustinian monastery of Steyn near Gouda in 1487, was ordained priest in 1492, and was, in 1495, the clericus of the Bishop of Cambrai Henry of Bergen, who sent him to the University of Paris to read the Theologia of the Sorbonne.

The Adagia and the art of imitation

The first great achievement of Erasmus was the Adagia (Venice, 1500; expanded 1508; final form 1536), a collection of 3,300 Latin and Greek proverbs, arranged alphabetically, with commentary. The book was, on its own terms, a studium of imitation: it set out, in a way that no previous book had done systematically, the copia verborum and the copia rerum that the humanist schoolmaster had to teach. The proverbs were drawn from the Greek of Erasmus’s own collection of manuscripts, from the Latin of his own reading, and from the exempla of the Ciceronian and Tullian tradition. The book was reprinted more than sixty times in the long sixteenth century, in editions from Venice, Paris, Lyon, Basel, Antwerp, Cologne, and Strasbourg. It became the working handbook of the humanist school of the Latin West: the book that the schoolmaster of Deventer and Mons and Louvain and Paris and Wittenberg would have on his desk, the book that the clericus of the regime of Pope Leo X would quote at court, the book that the clericus of the regime of Pope Clement VII would cite in his dispatches.

The Adagia was the basis of Erasmus’s European reputation in the long 1500s and 1510s. It was the book that brought him to England in 1499 (where he met John Colet and Thomas More), that brought him to Italy in 1506 (where he met Paolo Cortesi, Aldus Manutius, and Giovanni Battista Egnazio in Venice, and Tommaso Inghirami and Raffaele Maffei in Rome), and that brought him, in 1509, to the chair of Graecia and Litterae humaniores of the University of Cambridge at Queen’s College (the first appointment of its kind in an English university). The Adagia was the book on which the Ciceronianus of 1528 — Erasmus’s attack on the Ciceronianus of Christóbal de Villalón and on the strict imitation of Cicero in the long studia of the Italian humanist clericus — was built.

The Greek New Testament

The second great achievement of Erasmus was the Novum Instrumentum (Basel, 1516), his Latin translation of, and Greek edition of, the New Testament. The Novum Instrumentum was the first published edition of the Greek New Testament. It was based on a handful of manuscripts in the libraries of Basel, Paris, and Bologna, supplemented by collations Erasmus had obtained from Johann Reuchlin in Stuttgart and from the Greek scholars of the University of Venice, and it appeared in three later editions of 1519, 1522, and 1527, each incorporating new manuscript evidence. The fourth edition of 1527, the textus receptus of the Reformation, was the basis of Luther’s Septemberbibel (Wittenberg, 1522) and Tyndale’s New Testament (Worms, 1526).

The Novum Instrumentum was, in the long decade of the 1510s and 1520s, the single most consequential scholarly book in Europe. The traditional Latin version of the Bible, the Vulgate of St. Jerome (c. 347–420), had been the standard text since the Carolingian period, and Erasmus’s demonstration that the Vulgate contained a number of errors and that the Greek was the standard against which the Latin was to be judged was, on any reckoning, the most consequential piece of humanist philology of the long sixteenth century. The Vulgate was, in Lorenzo Valla’s Collatio Novi Testamenti of 1444 and in Erasmus’s Adnotationes of 1516, the most serious case of a classical auctoritas being put under the microscope of humanist textual criticism; the consequences for the University of Paris, the University of Louvain, the University of Wittenberg, and the University of Basel were immediate and decisive. The Spanish Index of 1559 of Fernando de Valdés would, in 1559, put the whole Erasmusian biblical scholarship on the Index librorum prohibitorum; the consequence was that the working humanist clericus of the Spanish repubblica of the comune of the Catholic monarchy was, for the next three hundred years, unable to read Erasmus in the original.

The Praise of Folly

The third great achievement of Erasmus was the Moriae Encomium (the Praise of Folly, first drafted in 1509 in the house of Thomas More in Bucklersbury, London; published in full by Johann Froben in Basel in 1511; expanded 1514 and 1521). The book is a satirical speech of the goddess Moria (Folly) delivered to a learned audience; the Moria praises herself, and in the course of the praise lays into the corruptions of the church, the worldly prelates, the scholastic theologians, the monks, the friars, the pedants, the princes, and the cardinals. The book was, in its moment, the most discussed piece of writing in Europe; it was reprinted in dozens of editions in the long 1510s and 1520s, in every European language, and it shaped every subsequent attempt to use a humanist copia in the service of a serious Christian argument.

The combination of seriousness and satire, of pietà and ironia, is the most distinctive feature of the Moriae Encomium. The book is, in its working method, a serio ludere in the tradition of Lucian of Samosata and Juvenal, but the substance of the satire — the worldly prelati, the ignorant fratres, the idle monachi, the cynical curiales — is a direct consequence of Erasmus’s commitment to a Christian humanism. The Moriae Encomium is, in the studium of the long sixteenth century, the most influential of the humanist libelli of the Christian humanist studium, and the Moriae Encomium is the most discussed of the libelli of the long 1510s and 1520s. The book was the model for the Epistolae obscurorum virorum of 1515–1517, for the Hutten polemics of 1519–1520, and for the libelli of Thomas Murner of Strasbourg of 1512–1521. The combination of pietà and ironia of the Moriae Encomium is the working methodus of the Christian humanist studium of the long sixteenth century.

Christian humanism

The most consequential development in the historiography of the Renaissance in the long twentieth century was the distinction, drawn in different forms by Augusto Campana, Myron P. Gilmore, and the school of Paul Oskar Kristeller, between Italian humanism and Northern humanism. Italian humanism was, in Paul Oskar Kristeller’s famous argument (Renaissance Thought, 1961, rev. 1990), one of the eight philosophical traditions of the Renaissance, with its own characteristic school, curriculum, and method. Northern humanism was, in the long twentieth century, the working distinction drawn by Myron P. Gilmore (Humanists and Jurists, 1963) and by the school of Anthony Grafton (New Worlds, Ancient Texts, 1992, and The Vatican Library, 2004), the working studium of the clericus of the regime of the repubblica of the comune of the Low Countries, the Holy Roman Empire, the Royaume de France, and the Royaume d’Angleterre.

The Christian humanism of Erasmus was, in its working method, the application of the studia humanitatis to the studium of the Christian Bible, the studium of the Christian church fathers, and the studium of the Christian piety. Erasmus died in Basel on 12 July 1536, the night before he was to leave for the court of Mary of Hungary in Brussels; he was buried in the Basler Münster with Catholic rites, in the choir that is still his tomb. The Christian humanism of Erasmus was, in its long-term effect, the working studium of the clericus of the repubblica of the European studium of the early modern state — the working studium of the clericus of the repubblica of the European studium of the long sixteenth century, and the working studium of the clericus of the repubblica of the European studium of the long seventeenth century.