Selections from Erasmus: Principally from his Epistles

Erasmus of Rotterdam was born on October 27, probably in 1466. His father belonged to Gouda, a little town near Rotterdam, and after some schooling there and an interval during which he was a chorister in Utrecht Cathedral, Erasmus was sent to Deventer, to the principal school in the town, which was attached to St. Lebuin's Church. The renewed interest in classical learning which had begun in Italy in the fourteenth century had as yet been scarcely felt in Northern Europe, and education was still dominated by the requirements of Philosophy and Theology, which were regarded as the highest branches of knowledge. A very high degree of subtlety in thought and argument had been reached, and in order that the youthful student might be fitted to enter this arena, it was necessary that he should be trained from the outset in its requirements. In the schools, in consequence, little attention was paid to the form in which thought was expressed, provided that the thought was correct: in marked contrast to the classical ideal, which emphasized the importance of expression, in just appreciation of the fact that thought expressed in obscure or inadequate words, fails to reach the human mind. The mediaeval position had been the outcome of a reaction against the spirit of later classical times, which had sacrificed matter to form. And now the pendulum was swinging back again in a new attempt to adjust the rival claims.

The education which Erasmus received at Deventer was still in thraldom to the mediaeval ideal. Greek was practically unknown, and in Latin all that was required of the student was a sufficient mastery of the rudiments of grammar to enable him to express somehow the distinctions and refinements of thought for which he was being trained. Niceties of scholarship and amplitude of vocabulary were unnecessary to him and were disregarded. From a material point of view also education was hampered. Printing was only just beginning, and there were few, if any, schoolbooks to be had. Lectures and lessons still justified their name 'readings'; for the boys sat in class crowded round their master, diligently copying down the words that fell from his lips, whether he were dictating a chapter in grammar, with its rules of accidence and syntax, or at a later stage a passage from a Latin author with his own or the traditional comments. Their canon of the classics was widely different from ours; instead of the simplified Caesar or Ovid that is now set before the schoolboy, Terence occupied a principal position, being of the first importance to an age when the learned still spoke Latin. Portions of the historians were read, for their worldly wisdom rather than for their history; Pliny the Elder for his natural science, and Boethius for his mathematics; and for poetry Cato's moral distiches and Baptista of Mantua, 'the Christian Vergil.'

In this atmosphere Erasmus's early years were spent; but from some of his masters he caught the breath of the new life that came from Italy, and this he never lost. By 1485, shortly after he had left Deventer, both his parents were dead, and a few years later he was persuaded to enter the monastery of Steyn, near Gouda, a house of Augustinian canons. The life there was uncongenial to him; for though he had leisure to read as much as he liked, his temperament was not suited to the precision and regularity of religious observance. An opportunity for escape presented itself, when the Bishop of Cambray, a powerful ecclesiastic, was inquiring for a Latin secretary. Erasmus, who had already become very facile with his pen, obtained the post and for a year or more discharged its duties.

At length in 1495 he persuaded the Bishop to fulfil a desire which he had long cherished, and send him with a stipend to a University. He went to Paris and began reading for a Doctor's degree in Theology. But the course was too cramping, and he therefore used his opportunity to educate himself more widely; eking out the Bishop's grant by taking pupils. It was a hard life, and his health was delicate; but he did not flinch from his task, doing just enough paid work--and no more--to keep himself alive and to buy books. In 1499 one of his pupils, a young Englishman, Lord Mountjoy, brought him to England for a visit, and in the autumn sent him for a month or two to Oxford. There he fell in with Colet, a man of strong character and intellect, who was giving a new impulse to the study of the Bible by historical treatment. Colet's enthusiasm encouraged Erasmus in the direction to which he was already inclined; and when he returned to Paris in 1500, it was with the determination to apply his whole energy to classical learning, and especially to the study of Theology, which in the new world opening before him was still to be the queen of sciences. For the next four years he was working hard, teaching himself Greek and reading whatever he could find, at Paris or, when the plague drove him thence, at Orleans or Louvain. By 1504 his period of preparation was over, and the fruitful season succeeded. His first venture in Theology was to print in 1505 some annotations on the New Testament by Lorenzo Valla, an Italian humanist of the fifteenth century with whose critical temperament he was much in sympathy.

Shortly afterwards a visit to England brought him what he had long desired--an opportunity of going to Italy. He set out in June 1506, as supervisor of the studies of two boys, the sons of Henry VII's physician. After taking the degree of D.D. at Turin in September he settled down at Bologna with his charges and worked at a book which he had had in hand for some years, and of which he had already published a specimen in 1500. To this book, the Adagia, he owed the great fame which he obtained throughout Europe, before any of the works on which his reputation now rests had been published. Its scheme was a collection of proverbial sayings and allusions, which he illustrated and explained in such a way as to make them useful to those who desired to study the classics and to write elegant Latin. In these days of lexicons and dictionaries the value of the Adagia has passed away; but to an age which placed a high value on Latinity and which had little apparatus to use, the book was a great acquisition. It was welcomed with enthusiasm when Aldus published it at Venice in 1508: and throughout his life Erasmus brought out edition after edition, amplifying and enlarging a book which the public was always ready to buy.

From Venice Erasmus went on to Rome, where he had a flattering reception, and, though a northerner, was recognized as an equal by the humanists of Italy. He was pressed to stay, but the death of Henry VII brought him an invitation to return to England, in the names of Warham, Archbishop of Canterbury, and his old patron Mountjoy, who was loud in his praises of the 'divine' young king.

As he rode hastily northwards, his active brain fell to composing a satire on the life he saw around him. He was a quick observer, and his personal charm had won him admission to the halls of the great; whilst bitter experience had shown him the life of the poor and needy. His satire, The Praise of Folly, cuts with no gentle hand into the deceits to which human frailty is prone and lays bare their nakedness. High and low, rich and poor, suffer alike, as Folly makes merry over them. There was much in the life of the age which called for censure, as there had been in the past and was to be in the future. On untrained lips censure easily degenerates into abuse and loses its sting: Erasmus with his gifts of humour and expression caught the public ear and set men thinking.

In England, where he spent the next years, 1509-14, Erasmus began the great work of his life, an edition of the New Testament and of the Letters of Jerome. His time was spent between Cambridge and London, and his friends did what they could for his support. Warham presented him with a living--Aldington in Kent--and then as Erasmus could not reside and discharge the duties of a parish priest, allowed him to resign and draw a pension from the living--in violation of his own strict regulation. Mountjoy gave him another pension, and Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, sent him to Cambridge and gave him rooms in Queens' College. For a time he held the Professorship of Divinity founded in Cambridge, as in Oxford, by the Lady Margaret Tudor, mother of Henry VII. But teaching was not his gift. Others might inspire students from the teacher's chair: his talent could only enlighten the teacher through his books.

At length the time came to publish. By fortunate accident, if not by design, he came into relations with John Froben of Basel, who with the three sons of his late partner, John Amorbach, was printing works of sound learning with all his energy--especially the Fathers. In July 1514 Erasmus set forth, and after a triumphal progress through Germany, fêted and welcomed everywhere, he settled at Basel to see Jerome and the New Testament through the press. By 1516 they were complete, and Erasmus had achieved--almost by an afterthought, for his first project had been a series of annotations like Valla's--the work which has made his name great.

Mark Pattison says of Erasmus that he propounded the problem of critical scholarship, but himself did nothing to solve it. By critical scholarship is meant the examination of the grounds on which learning rests. In youth we are uncritical, and accept as Caesar or Livy the books from which we read those authors; but with growing experience we learn that a copy is not always a true representation of its original; and with this, even though there is little perception of the changes and chances through which manuscripts have passed, the first lesson of criticism has been learnt.

The problem may be stated thus--In no single case does an autograph manuscript of a classical author survive: for our knowledge of the works of the past we are dependent on manuscripts written at a later date. Only rarely is there less than 300 years' interval between an author's death and the earliest manuscript now extant of his works; in a great many cases 1,000 years have elapsed, and in the extreme--Sophocles and Aristophanes--1,400. The question therefore arises, How far do our manuscripts represent what was originally written? and it is the work of scholars to compare together existing manuscripts, to estimate their relative value, and where they differ, to determine, if possible, what the author actually wrote.

The manuscripts of the New Testament which scholars have examined and collated are now numbered by hundreds. Erasmus was content for his first edition with two lent to him by Colet from the library of St. Paul's Cathedral, and a few of little value which he found at Basel. And though for subsequent editions he compared one or two more, the work never reached a high standard of scholarship. He had done enough, however, for his age. Before Erasmus men were accustomed to read the New Testament in Latin; after 1516 no competent scholar could be content with anything but the Greek. But though the priority actually belongs to Erasmus, it must be stated that the Greek version had already been printed in January 1514 in a Polyglott Bible published under the orders of Cardinal Ximenes at Alcala in Spain. For definite reasons, however, this great edition was not put into circulation till 1520.