Erasmus
So provident has that great parent of mankind, Nature, been that there should not be anything without its mixture and, as it were, seasoning of Folly.
Desiderius Erasmus
Erasmus of Rotterdam was the Prince of the Humanists, the most famous scholar in Europe, a man who could make princes and popes wait on his pen. He laughed at the follies of his age in a small book that has never gone out of print, and he spent his life on a patient and revolutionary labor: returning Christianity to its sources by the tools of scholarship. It was said that Erasmus laid the egg that Luther hatched, and he did expose the abuses that the Reformation would seize on. But when the moment came, Erasmus refused to follow Luther into schism. He chose the middle way, scholarship and satire over force, persuasion over violence, the unity of Christendom over revolution, and for that choice both sides came to mistrust him.
The corpus and how the chat cites it. This room reads Erasmus's masterpiece, The Praise of Folly (Moriae Encomium, 1511), in John Wilson's 1668 English translation, public domain by way of Project Gutenberg. His wider achievement, the vast Adages, the 1516 Greek New Testament, the Colloquies, the Enchiridion, and the Education of a Christian Prince, stands behind the conversation, but the chat's quotations come from the Folly. It cites by work title. Expect citations to The Praise of Folly by title.
Life. Erasmus was born around 1466 in Rotterdam, the illegitimate son of a priest, and was educated by the Brethren of the Common Life, whose inward, undogmatic devotion marked him for good. He became an Augustinian canon, escaped the cloister for studies in Paris, and on a visit to England formed the friendships that shaped him, above all with Thomas More and with John Colet, who turned his learning toward Scripture. From Paris to Louvain to Italy to Basel he moved as a citizen of the whole republic of letters, writing a Latin of unmatched grace, courted everywhere and belonging nowhere, the independent scholar as a new kind of European figure. His learning reshaped the study of antiquity and of the Bible for centuries.
Where to begin. Start with The Praise of Folly, short, funny, and deceptively deep. Move then to the Adages and the Colloquies for the wit and the classical learning, to the Enchiridion for the inward piety, and to On Free Will for the philosophical stand against Luther.
The Praise of Folly. The masterwork is a mock-encomium: the goddess Folly herself mounts the rostrum and delivers a speech in her own praise, arguing that no part of life runs without a saving dose of her, not love or friendship or marriage, not politics or war or even religion. Erasmus dedicated it to Thomas More, and the Greek title puns on his friend's name. As the speech goes on, the satire sharpens against worldly monks, pompous theologians, and grasping prelates, until it turns, suddenly and movingly, to the folly of the cross, the holy foolishness that the world calls madness and that is the highest wisdom of all. The book is comic, savage, and devout in a single breath.
Back to the sources, and the philosophy of Christ. Erasmus's lifework was the return to the sources, ad fontes: cleansing the texts of antiquity and of Scripture by careful philology. His Greek New Testament of 1516, the first published, set beside a fresh Latin translation and notes, exposed errors that had crept into the Vulgate and handed the Reformation its textual ground. Against the hair-splitting of the schools he set the philosophy of Christ, a Christianity that is simple, inward, and ethical, a following of Christ open to the plowman at his plow and the weaver at his loom rather than a system of speculative theology.
Christian humanism. Erasmus joined the recovered eloquence and wisdom of the ancients, the good letters he loved, to the piety of the Gospel, and refused to see them as enemies. He revered the pagan sages so warmly that a speaker in his Colloquies can cry "Saint Socrates, pray for us." Learning and devotion were allies; the educated, eloquent, pious person was his ideal; and the reform of education through good letters was the cause of his life.
Peace and tolerance. He was Europe's great voice for peace. His adage that war is sweet only to those who have never tried it, and his Complaint of Peace, condemn war as the worst of all follies and crimes, and worst of all between Christians. He pleaded for moderation, for settling differences by reason rather than the sword, and he distrusted every fanaticism, whether it wore a Catholic or a Protestant face.
The break with Luther. When the Reformation broke, Erasmus first sympathized with Luther's attack on abuses but drew back from his violence and his determinism. In On Free Will (1524) he defended a real if modest role for the human will cooperating with grace; Luther answered with On the Bondage of the Will, insisting that the will in matters of salvation is wholly bound. The rupture was final. Erasmus would not tear apart the unity of the Church in order to reform it, and so he was left exposed between the camps, too critical for Rome and too moderate for Wittenberg.
Against the fence-sitter caricature. Erasmus is often dismissed as timid, the man who lit the fire and fled it. But his refusal of schism was a principled choice, not cowardice. He believed that reform by scholarship, satire, and persuasion was better than reform by force and division, and that the unity of Christendom was worth keeping. His defense of free will and human dignity against Luther's determinism was a serious philosophical stand, and his vision of an eirenic, learned, inward Christianity outlived the wars of religion to feed the later traditions of tolerance and liberal thought.
Reception, and adjacent reading. Erasmus shaped the tolerant skepticism of Montaigne, the whole tradition of Christian humanism, and the enduring ideal of the citizen of letters. Read now, he is the scholar who returned Europe to its sources and the humane satirist who taught that a little folly seasons all of life. He stands beside his dear friend Thomas More, with whom he shared the Northern humanist project and to whom he dedicated the Folly; his ironic, undogmatic wisdom flows into Michel de Montaigne; he revered Socrates almost as a Christian saint of reason; he wrote the humane mirror for princes that stands against the cold counsel of Niccolo Machiavelli; and he shared with Pico della Mirandola the Renaissance faith in human dignity and the dignity of learning. His union of scholarship, piety, and peace has never stopped offering an alternative to the fanaticisms of every age.