ERASMUS

(1465 ?-1536)

BY ANDREW D. WHITE

N ANY view of modern civilization Erasmus is a leading personage, for he is one of the two great militant literary men of modern times; - one of the two men of letters who have taken a stronger hold and exercised a wider influence on the thought of the civilized world than have any others, from the Roman Empire to this day.

He was born at Rotterdam, most biographers say in 1467: Hallam thought that he had proved the date to be 1465: others see reasons for believing that it was 1466: Burigny insisted that no one knew the exact year- not even Erasmus himself.1 But more important than a precise date is the fact that he was born only about ten years after the downfall of the Eastern Empire; only about a quarter of a century after the discovery of printing; about twenty years before Luther; and but little longer before the great age of discovery — the period of Columbus, Vasco da Gama, and Magellan; the period also of a new awakening of scholarship in Germany, shown in the founding of new universities and the putting of new life into old ones; the period of new horizons, hopes, and activities. He stood in the centre of this great epoch, and acted most powerfully upon it."

Though an illegitimate child, he took his paternal name Gerard, which, being interpreted to mean amiable, was put into Latin as Desiderius, and into Greek as Erasmios or perhaps Erasmos. So, in accordance with the custom of men of his sort in his time, he called himself Desiderius Erasmus; just as Schwartzerd or Black-earth translated his name into Greek and called himself Melanchthon.

The first years of Erasmus were full of hardship. His patrimony was stolen from him by faithless guardians; his liberty was wheedled from him by zealous monks: but a remarkable keenness, shrewdness,

1 For Hallam's argument regarding the exact date of Erasmus's birth, see his 'Introduction to the Literature of Europe' (London, 1847), page 287, note; see also Drummond. For Burigny, see his Vie d'Érasme) (Paris, 1757), pages 5 and 6, and note.

2 Regarding the strengthening of university life and of thought generally in Germany at this period, see especially Creighton, History of the Papacy during the Reformation.>

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and passion for knowledge asserted itself in him; though struggling against poverty throughout his early life, and against ill health always, he grew rapidly and symmetrically in the best knowledge of his time, and especially in the new learning;— that new study of Latin thought to which thinking men, weary of scholastic philosophy, had turned toward the close of the Middle Ages; and above all, to that study of Greek thought which had taken refuge in Western Europe at the downfall of the Eastern Empire, and especially at the Turkish conquest of Constantinople in 1453.

It happened, to the great good fortune of the world, that the scholarship in which Erasmus was nurtured had in it not only enlightenment, but manliness and earnestness. In the little town of Deventer in Holland, Gerard Groot had founded in 1400 an order called the Brotherhood of the Life in Common, or as they were more popularly known, the Good Brethren. The order was devoted to plain living and high thinking. Property was for the most part held in common. Manual labor was exacted of all. All showed a fervency in devotion and an energy in well-doing such as the older orders of monks had not known for many generations.

Among other things, the Brethren devoted themselves to a scheme of education at once thorough and comprehensive; not disdaining to work in primary schools, not shrinking from the most advanced scholarly inquiry. This Deventer school acted powerfully in fusing what was best in mediæval thought with the new learning. Its influence was felt in all parts of Northern Europe. In 1433 the order numbered forty-five houses, in 1460 three times as many. Several of its scholars became famous; among them Thomas à Kempis, and Nicholas of Cues, the poor fisherman's son, who became the Cardinal de Cusa,―scholar, statesman, and reformer,—the forerunner of Copernicus in teaching the new astronomy.'

From these men of the Deventer school Erasmus received the first strong impulse toward his great career; and though he remained at the school only until about his fourteenth year, he secured recognition as a youth of wonderful promise.

Now came an evil period. He was entrapped into a monastery, and finally, about the time of his coming of age, was induced to take priestly orders. Yet even in the monastery the spirit of the Deventer school was still working within him; for now it was, in his monastery at Stein, about 1490, that he took up the work of the man who first brought the modern spirit of scholarly criticism to bear upon Biblical research,- the brilliant Italian scholar Laurentius Valla. Out

For the value of the Deventer school, see Hallam, 'History of Literature,' Vol. i., page 125; also a reference in Cantù, which is very striking as coming from so devoted a Catholic; also Creighton as above, Vol. v., Chap. i.