Erasmus of Rotterdam: biography of this Dutch philosopher

Seen by some as a heretic who prepared the ground for the Protestant Reformation, by others as a coward who was not actively involved in such reform. The figure of Erasmus of Rotterdam is acclaimed and, at the same time, hated in a chiaroscuro of opinions and beliefs.

Be that as it may, there is no doubt that this Dutch philosopher was a man of ideas humanists, son of the Renaissance in which he lived and gave a new interpretation to the Bible and the Catholic faith.

Despite ending up quite detested by the two religious groups that "coexisted" in 16th century Europe. (and ironic) is that Erasmus of Rotterdam was a pacifist, faithful to the Church and condemned any fight for the sake of religion. Let's see next the interesting and intense life of him through a biography of Erasmus of Rotterdam.

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Short biography of Erasmus of Rotterdam

Erasmus of Rotterdam (in Dutch Desiderius Erasmus van Rotterdam and Latin Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus) was born on October 28, 1466 in Rotterdam, Holland.

He grew up in a family involved in religious matters since his father was a priest, from Gouda, and his mother was a woman of bourgeois origin, which gave the family certain comforts.

Between 1478 and 1483 he attended Saint Lebwin's school in Deventer, where he would have the opportunity to meet people like Alexander Hegius and establish contact with humanism. This first contact would be transcendental in the work and life of Erasmus of Rotterdam since, in the long run, he would be known as "the prince of the humanists".

In 1492 he was ordained a priest by the order of Saint Augustine and, after that, he decided to travel to France to study at the University of Paris. The French capital had become a bustling city, in which thinkers of all stripes and walks of life shared knowledge in the midst of the Renaissance, a movement that France experienced as intensely as it did in Italy. By having access to all kinds of opinions and new currents, Erasmus begins to shape his particular humanist thought at this time.

Beginnings of his philosophical training

Erasmus of Rotterdam he was always a traveler. Although interesting, his life in Paris was not interesting enough for him to stay longer, deciding to leave for England and residing in London between 1499 and 1500, where he would meet John Colet and attend the University of Oxford Colet taught Erasmus many things about the life of Saint Paul, carrying out an intense and deep reading of the Bible under a humanistic and novel vision.

It would also be during this time that Erasmus, together with the collaboration of Publio Fausto Andrelini, would write his book "Adagios", which included originally from 800 sayings and morals drawn from the ancient traditions of Greece and Rome, as well as comments by the author on its origin and meaning. This proverb would acquire importance at the popular level, many of them being used today. Erasmus would expand it throughout his life, having 3400 sayings in 1521 and 5251 at the time of his death.

During his stay in England he began to hold a chair as Senior Lecturer in Theology at the University of Cambridge, a place where he would meet great thinkers of the British philosophical and intellectual scene, including Tomás Moro and Thomas Linacre. In addition, he was offered a job for life at Queen’s College at the same university, but Erasmus’s traveling and restless spirit led him to reject it. The Dutch philosopher never liked routine, much less do the same for the rest of his life.

It is for all this that between 1506 and 1509 he would travel again, this time going to the very center of the Renaissance: Italy. Most of his time was spent working in a printing press through which he was able to establish connections with members of different universities and writers who appeared there to publish their books. His time in Italy was very profitable, surrounding himself with people who thought like him, who shared a humanistic perspective and critical of the abuses of members of the Catholic Church.

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Getting famous

While in Italy the philosopher did not go unnoticed. More and more people knew who Erasmus of Rotterdam was and were interested in his opinions. There were those who were supporters of his ideas, but others were the most fervent detractors, openly rejecting his ideas and criticizing him harshly. This is why, despite having gained great fame in Italy, Erasmus he considered that the best thing he could do at that time was to move to a more friendly place, deciding to go to Basel.

Taking advantage of his stay in the Swiss city, Erasmo becomes clearer about his dissatisfaction with the institutions and authority. It is not known what was the origin of this dissatisfaction, if he started when he went to primary school in his youth, during his stay in the Augustus convent where he was ordained a priest or during his studies at the University of Paris. Be that as it may, what can be extracted is that his opinion of the educational institutions of the time was of prisons for free thought.

Erasmus of Rotterdam and his criticisms

Erasmus of Rotterdam was a person who He risked a lot by strongly criticizing the Catholic Church at a time when this institution used its executing body, the Holy Inquisition., to "convince" the people. It is not that he was against the Catholic religion, nor against the institution itself, but against the abuses that committed by its members and how the Church was cutting off freedom of thought in schools and universities. As the official academies did not depart from Christianity, Erasmus decided to look for new ideas in the texts of Greek and Roman thinkers, all of them pre-Christian.

The Dutch philosopher was enraged when he thought about how the university had betrayed him. He thought that new ideas would be taught there, but what really happened is that antiquated theories from the first centuries of the Middle Ages were taught and perpetuated, a time that was supposed to be over. He criticized the fact that the university of his time, far from advancing and representing the most advanced institution with the rest of society, was obsolete and seemed to be immutable.

Saving yourself from ecclesiastical persecution

As we said, Erasmus was very critical of the Catholic Church, but not because of his doctrine or because of the institution itself, but because of the behavior of those who called themselves men of God. Many of them, especially those who resided in Rome, behaved in a sinful way, requesting the prostitute service, taking financial advantage of its faithful and promising salvation in exchange for a small fee price. All of these abuses and many more were clearly contrary to God's ideas.

This is why Erasmus considered that something could be done to change the situation. Taking the ideas of the friends of the Augustinian monasteries and also those of his friend John Colet, Erasmus he began to carefully analyze the most important and representative books of Classical Antiquity that, despite being older than the Christian Era, the Dutch philosopher considered that in them he could extract ideas that would help him to modernize the world in which he had lived.

Thanks to the fact that the city of Basel welcomed him very warmly and allowed him to express himself without religious persecution, at least for that moment, Erasmus exposed his criticism, gaining several followers. In fact, it was in this city that he began to write "seriously" around 1521, at the age of 55, which at that time was considered a too late start as a writer. The reason why he finally decided to write, albeit late, was that He considered that whoever does not know how to write will always be wrong when trying to convey his message, and he wanted not to make mistakes.

To ensure that he expressed himself correctly he wanted to have an extensive command of prose in the Latin language before beginning to compose his thoughts. He considered that Latin was the ideal language, clearer and more suitable to transmit his complex ideas, besides that it was the vehicle of transmission of all scientific and philosophical ideas of the sixteenth century. Like French and English today, Latin was the language of communication at the European level and whoever did not master it was not sure that his opinion would leave his country.

Her polemics with the Catholic Church have been misinterpreted on multiple occasions, leading to the belief that she positioned herself against Catholicism. Really, and as we have commented, she was against the abuse of her members, but she was in communion with Catholic doctrine and with the Church's own organization. What bothered him was that she was quite old-fashioned, anchored in routines, superstitions and ignorance, in addition to not allowing free access and interpretation of the Bible.

Erasmus wanted to use his university training and his ideas to clarify Catholic doctrines and make the Catholic Church allow more freedom of thought, something that not all the bishops of the 16th century wanted, much less with the imminent threat of the Lutheran reform. Even so, the Dutch philosopher considered that his intellectual work would allow him to free the Church from its paralysis intellectual and cultural, taking it out of the Middle Ages in which it was still and introducing it into the Renaissance.

What really brought him problems, more than his criticism of the priest's lifestyle, was his failure to position himself within the religious conflict that Europe was experiencing at that time. After centuries of abuse and hypocrisy on the part of the Church, the countries of northern Europe began reforms that they were going to take with or without the permission of the Holy See. Given the humanistic ideas and wanting changes in the Catholic Church, there were not a few who considered Erasmus of Rotterdam a threat against the institution.

This is why he had to give explanations and publicly say that his attacks were not against the institution itself, much less against God as a source of intelligence and justice, but to the evil do of many bishops and friars who profited financially from the word of God and the Bible, taking advantage of their flock. Thanks to his understanding, Erasmus was able to avoid the dark and long shadow of the Holy Inquisition, especially thanks to his brilliant work with the Bible that confirmed his faith and devotion to God.

Relationship with Martin Luther

In general, Erasmus he agreed with the early ideas of Martin Luther, especially in the criticisms of the way to administer the Church. In fact the two became personal friends, Luther being one of the few people Erasmus of Rotterdam admitted to publicly admiring. And Luther always defended the ideas of Erasmus, arguing that they were the result of clean work and a supreme intellectuality.

However, this admiration and peaceful situation between the two did not last forever. Soon Luther began to pressure Erasmus to publicly support his reformist proposals, to which the Dutchman, who was not in favor of taking a position, strongly refused. In fact, Luther himself insisted even more, asking him to become the visible face of the reformists.

But the pressures weren't coming from just one side. Pope Clement VII pressured him to explicitly attack the Protestants, inviting him to the Vatican library for documentation. But despite such an invitation Erasmus of Rotterdam continued to refuse to work on any side, being considered a coward and disloyal. The phrase with which the Church accused Erasmus of having helped in the Protestant cause is popular: “You laid the egg, and Luther hatched him ", legend has it that Erasmus answered with an ironic phrase" Yes, but I expected a chicken from another class"

There are many letters that show the relationship of friendship and respect between Erasmus of Rotterdam and Martin Luther. In the first letters the reformer never tires of praising the work of Erasmus in favor of a better and greater Christianity, without mentioning the Reformation that he himself was going to initiate. As time went by, Luther began to beg him and then demand that he leave Catholicism and join the then newborn Protestant side.

Erasmus responded to letters with understanding, respect, and sympathy for the reformist cause when he was not yet a secessionist, and politely refused to take a partisan attitude. He explained to Luther that if he became a religious leader he would destroy his reputation as a scholar and jeopardize the pure thinking he was trying to expose in his works, a work that was the result of intense work over decades, work that Erasmus of Rotterdam considered the sole objective of his existence.

While Protestants defended the idea of ​​individual freedom, Catholicism denied that the human being could even be free, a debate in which, for a change, Erasmus of Rotterdam. However, Erasmus of Rotterdam himself did acknowledge and attack Luther's exaggerations in his book De libero arbitrio diatribe sive collatio (1524). However, shortly afterwards he would analyze the contrary arguments of the Catholics and ended up concluding, again, that both positions had parts of truth.

Erasmus of Rotterdam claimed that, indeed, Man is born tied to sin, but he also has the appropriate ways to request God to allow him to untie himself. The proper form to ask for it is offered only by the Catholic Church, and it is up to the sinner to know how to take advantage of it. This was the great contribution about the great dilemma of his time, which he had faced with Protestants and Catholics.

Last years

Erasmus of Rotterdam he spent his last years harassed by both Catholics and Reformers. The Catholics saw him as a possible dissident, and the Protestants as a person who did not dare to make the leap towards the new reforms. These times embittered him because of these harsh disputes between men and both sides, taking advantage of his old age, they tried to discredit the figure of Erasmus of Rotterdam.

In 1529 the city of Basel, in which Erasmus continued to live, officially joined the Reformation, which made the old man once again have to travel due to the harassment of the Swiss Protestants. He established his new residence in the imperial city of Freiburg, populated by many Catholics. He would continue his tireless literary activity there, reaching the conclusion of his most important work of this time, the "Ecclesiastical" (1535), a paraphrase of the biblical book with the same name.

Shortly after the publication of this book he returned to Basel. Immediately he connected perfectly with a group of scholars who were analyzing Lutheran doctrine in detail. There are those who say that it was that moment in which he definitively broke with Catholicism, although others also consider it simply another change of opinion within the equidistance of him. Be that as it may, he would maintain this position until the day of his death on July 12, 1536 in the city of Basel, at the age of 69.

The importance of his philosophical legacy

Although the figure of Erasmus of Rotterdam was criticized in his time and, in fact, all of his works ended up in the "Index librorum prohibitorum" of the Holy SeeWith the passage of time, the European, pacifist and multinational character of this philosopher was valued, who had the opportunity to visit several universities and cultural centers during his lifetime. It is for this reason that the European Community Network for Academic Exchanges bears the name of Erasmus Program in honor of the character and work of this great thinker.

Plays

The works of Erasmus of Rotterdam show his interest in reforming, although not in the Lutheran sense, the Church Catholic, in addition to a great interest in the classical world and the humanist and Renaissance ideas so widespread in his epoch. Some of his most popular works are listed below:

• Adagios (1500-1536)
• Enchiridion militiis christiani (1503)
• By ratione studii (1511)
• Enchomion moriae seu laus stultitiae (1511)
• Institutio principis christiani (1516)
• Novum Instrumentum (1516)
• Paraphrase of the New Testament (1516)
• Colloquia (1517),
• Spongia adversus aspergines Hutteni (1523)
• De libero arbitrio diatribe (1524)
• First volume of Hyperaspistes (1526)
• Second volume of Hyperaspistes (1527)
• De pueris statim ac liberaliter instituendis (1528)
• Ciceronianus, sive de optimo dicendi genere (1528)
• Utilissima consultatio de bello turcis inferendo (1530)
• Ecclesiastes and Preparatio ad mortem (1534)

Bibliographic references:

• Bejczy, Istvan Pieter (2001). Erasmus and the Middle Ages: The Historical Consciousness of a Christian Humanist. Brill Academic Publishers, Collection Brill's Studies in Intellectual History, London. ISBN 90-04-12218-4.
• Zweig, Stefan (2005). Erasmus of Rotterdam: Triumph and Tragedy of a Humanist. Paidós Ibérica Editions, Barcelona. ISBN 84-493-1719-3