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Erasmus and the Age of Reformation

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Of particular value to the reader is the preface of this work, penned in 1952 by the then Provost of Oriel College, Oxford, G.N. Clark. The brief preface introduces not only the work but the author, Johan Huizinga, perhaps as a halting effort at rehabilitation. Clark reminds the readers that Huizinga had suffered through two world wars and was imprisoned by the Nazis, and died in February, 1945, literally days before his beloved Holland was liberated: an apologia of sorts for a most controversial scholar.

Huizinga had shaken the European and American historical and religious establishments with the publication of his most famous work, "The Waning of the Middle Ages," in 1919. In that work Huizinga introduced a novel gestalt for interpreting the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, upsetting historians of his day who still clung to the traditional strictures of epochs, and Churchmen, notably Catholic, for his candor in debunking ecclesiastical mythology of that era. ["The Waning" was actually placed on the Index of Forbidden Books for a time.] Clark argues that the Erasmus text is a companion piece to "The Waning," a useful point to remember in assessing this biography.

For all the energy generated by their respective forces, neither the Renaissance nor the Reformation was particularly rich in seminal philosophical inquiry. In fact, the sixteenth century was in many respects quite conservative, with its veneration of Classical thought, Aristotelian scientific method, and religious interest in primary sources. Erasmus's lifespan, 1466-1536, was an age of application, where orthopraxis was making a run at orthodoxy. Erasmus has always enjoyed reputation as the consummate "Renaissance Man," literary giant, man of letters, humane reformer, diplomat. In this work he is still the preeminent Renaissance man, but in the Renaissance of Huizinga's making, when being a "Renaissance Man" was a dicier proposition than popularly held. He was after all, a friend of both Thomas More and Henry VIII. Huizinga's Erasmus is brilliant, though not particularly original, and he was often broke, sick, insecure, unemployed, displaced-at the height of his reputation, no less.

The original literary works of Erasmus demonstrate scholarship, mastery of the pen, satire, wit, and synthesis. As Huizinga observed, Erasmus wrote less from piety than from humanistic reasoning. Despite the fact that his "Praise of Folly" is his best remembered original work, Erasmus had little patience for folly, which he would have defined in real life as extremism, violence, or pretension. His satire could be pointed, but he was never mad at the world per se, only those who would deface it needlessly. Theologically, he espoused "low church Catholicism" stripped of both spiritual and practical indulgences. His satire poked fun at Church excess, but this was hardly earthshaking at a time when many intellectuals laughed down their sleeves at ecclesiastical pomp.

His major gift to the Renaissance and subsequent ages, in my view, is his application of philology to the Sacred Scriptures, an effort that would also cause his greatest friction with Catholicism. With the reverence of antiquity so common to his age, Erasmus mastered Latin and Greek to the point where he was able to discover major linguistic flaws in the official Catholic translation of Scripture, St. Jerome's Latin Vulgate edition. Erasmus, an eminently reasonable man, assumed that his Church would tolerate-in fact, welcome-a cleaner, more accurate rendering of the Bible, and he proceeded to edit the Vulgate with available Greek manuscripts. Pascal was yet to be born, so perhaps Erasmus can be excused his shock that the loyal faithful remained devoted to the Vulgate "for reasons of the heart." The Vulgate translation in 1500 enjoyed an almost sacramental reverence; it was the official text for the sacraments and, in fact, for all of the great body of scholastic medieval theology that synthesized orthodox Catholicism and the cosmos.

As every contemporary Scripture scholar is painfully aware, every translation is in fact an interpretation, a point not lost upon the Roman Curia. Given his known temperament, one would have to concede that Erasmus, who routinely fled from confrontation, was rather innocent of the charge that he was undermining things sacred. But worse, Erasmus had opened the door to doubts regarding the credibility of a sacred work which was in its own right a part of antiquity, having been composed around 400 A.D. He had given fuel to Protestant reformers and added Jerome's masterpiece to the growing list of accretions that needed purging. Luther, a scripture scholar himself, recognized the value of Erasmus's work and courted him for years, mostly by mail. The winning of Erasmus's hand by Protestant suitors would have been a major symbolic victory.

But Luther came to discover that even the most rational "Renaissance Men" have reasons of the heart. The reasonable Erasmus was traumatized by the irrationality of division. Perhaps the executions of his friends Thomas More and John Fisher or the general polemic and bloodshed that accompanied religious revolution led him to do the unthinkable for a humanist: make a decision. He threw his lot with Roman Catholicism. The reaction of both sides tells the stakes: Luther excoriated Erasmus in the choicest terms of his rich vocabulary. The Curia forgave Erasmus his translations and offered him a red hat shortly before his death. Both gestures indicate that we may never capture, at this distance, the reasons of the hearts of those who admired Erasmus as a man, a writer, and a symbol. But Huizenga makes a noble effort.

Johan Huizinga writes great history. I do not think many contemporary historians can match his prose. He does an excellent job of providing the reader a unique perspective of certain events, and the people involved with them as they unfold.

In this book, Huizinga writes about Erasmus, a man who is arguably one of the great thinkers of the 16th century. I did not know a lot about Erasmus before I read this book, but now feel like I have a much greater understanding about the man, his ideas, and the era in which he lived.

A word of warning about this book - it helps if you have a pretty good understanding of 16th century European history. If you are a novice, like me, you may struggle through some sections. It is well worth the effort though, in the end.

The best thing about Huizinga's book is that you get more than just the history of Erasmus. The author includes a lot of analysis and his perspective into Erasmus' life, which are fascinating.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who is familiar with 16th century European history, and wants to learn more about Erasmus. If you are new to this era of history, or do not know much about Erasmus, I would consider reading a more general history before making your way through this book.

Of all volumes of study which concern the learned scholar Desiderius Erasmus, it must be said, quite simply, that Johan Huizinga's work stands out among the greatest. Huizinga skillfully and colorfully weaves the many aspects of Erasmus' life together into one intimate portrait which places the man respectfully within the setting of his time. In this work, the reader will find that Huizinga always seems to surface the inmost sentiments of Erasmus, even amidst all the triumph, turmoil, and controversy which marked the age he lived in. From Erasmus' early years as an Augustinian canon, to his final days as an accomplished and conscientious scholar, the same underlining genius will be discovered by anyone who comes to grips with this classic work. Huizinga's, Erasmus and the Age of the Reformation, is a work worthy of praise, even eighty years after its first publication. Also, found here are several valuable letters of Erasmus', which display his dutiful correspondence with individuals like St Thomas More and Martin Luther. Any study of Desiderius Erasmus is not complete without Huizinga's timeless masterpiece at hand.

It is not often that a book manages to take an eminently fascinating historical figure and completely subsume the material within an experience so tormenting that the reader is incapable of finishing the material at hand, yet the book in question not only accomplishes the aforementioned feat, but does so with aplomb. I can only surmise that the praise this book has received in other reviews for its readability, accessibility and elegance of prose refers to either an earlier edition or its original Dutch publication, for this particular edition exhibits none of these characteristics.

The first thing the reader is presented with (in this edition) is a text entirely without capitalization. One does not perhaps fully appreciate the importance of capitalization until it is entirely absent from a text. The absurdity of such a rudimentary element being overlooked (or ignored) by the publisher is matched only by the tediousness of plodding through a text with no immediate visual markers to delineate places, persons, or beginnings of sentences. Such an egregious oversight would perhaps be forgivable if not accompanied by an equally appalling style of prose that leaves the reader wondering if the manuscript was edited by a 1st-year college student failing English 101. The resulting marriage of poor layout and poor style results in an experience fraught with frustration. I was only able to read about 65% of this book before the level of frustration with the layout and style compelled me to purchase a different book about Erasmus.

It is a shame that this book is marred by such shortcomings, for the material contained within is excellent. The author clearly brings his eminent expertise to bear upon the subject matter. It is simply unfortunate that the material is buried beneath poor layout and style, rendering it essentially inaccessible to all but the most ardent students of Erasmus studies.

I think this is a good book. I wanted to know more about Erasmus, and now I do. This book was referred to in another book I read Christianity: The First Three Thousand Yearsso I feel like it is a good source for info. Knowing the author's sad history with the Nazis made it moving.

Huizinga, Johan, Erasmus and the Age of Reformation with a selection from the Letters of Erasmus (London, Phoenix Press, 1924)
Be careful of which edition you buy. Some may be much poorer than others.

This book, by Johan Huizinga (1872 - 1945) the noted Dutch historian of the late Middle Ages, does much to answer the question of why Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam, is so well remembered, at least in name, among those today who make inquiries into the Reformation and the Renaissance. Erasmus did not even make an appearance in the Britannica Great Books of the Western World, and the sole title for which he may be known today, The Praise of Folly (Greek Morias Enkomion, Latin Stultitiae Laus, written originally in Latin, in 1509), is a satire, a lonely genre, in which the only other really well-known work may be Voltaire's Candide. An added irony of Erasmus name and fame is that while he was born and raised in the lands which are now a part of Holland, he spent very little time in `Dutch' lands, and then mostly in Leuven (Louvain), 15 miles east of Brussels, in modern Belgium.

The Greek name for The Praise of Folly is significant, because it can also be translated as `In Praise of More', bringing to the front the fact that Erasmus was a great friend of the Englishman, Sir Thomas More, and that the original work was written in two weeks, at More's estate, during one of Erasmus' long stays in England. This highlights the fact that throughout the latter part of his career, which really `took off' after his publication of a new Greek edition of the New Testament in 1514, Erasmus had connections to virtually every major European center for learning, holding even the pope, Leo X as a patron.

Erasmus appears to be the primary bridge between the Renaissance and the Reformation. His Greek edition of the New Testament was the basis for Martin Luther's translation of the New Testament into German. He published countless editions of classic Latin works. One of his more popular works, in his own time, was the Adages, a sort of Latin Bartlett's Quotations, which Erasmus began around 1500, publishing revised and expanded editions throughout his life. `The Adages was above all a defense of "good learning" and every possible occasion was taken to insist on the point...'. Erasmus seems to be a Renaissance Clement of Alexandria, drawing frequent comparisons between the Gospels and the classics, especially between Jesus' parables and the use of parables and myths in classic writers such as Plato.

Erasmus seems to have established the model for the `modern' intellectual from the Renaissance to the end of the Enlightenment (beginning of the Romantic era) with the career of Immanuel Kant. Most of the great names from the Age of Reason, were independent thinkers, with jobs outside the university. Although Erasmus frequently had offers to serve in either clerical or professorial posts in Germany, Holland, France, England, Spain, and Italy, he preferred to remain independent. The irony is that up until middle age, Erasmus was constantly in search of funds to do even the simplest things, such as being able to travel from Holland to Italy. When he started his study of Greek, he literally had to beg his friends for copies of Greek texts, most of which he found wanting. His `natural habitat' was the publishing house rather than the classroom. The word picture Huizinga draws is far different from the pictures we commonly see of Erasmus, the placid scholar in his study. He spent months on end in the offices of his Swiss and Dutch publishers, in spite of constant complaints about physical ailments.

Another work which made his reputation in his own time was the Handbook of a Christian Knight, Latin Enchiridion militis Christiani, a manual similar to Machiavelli's The Prince, except that it taught Christian soldiers how to behave in a Christian manner. It also had similarities to the much better-known work of a fellow Dutchman, Thomas à Kempis and his Imitatio Christie. Erasmus' handbook was a mix of both sacred and secular advice. `Under the heading: Opinions worthy of a Christian, he laments the extremes of pride of class, national hostility, professional envy, and rivalry between religious orders, which keep men apart. Let everyone sincerely concern himself about his brother. `Throwing dice cost you a thousand gold pieces in one night, and meanwhile some wretched girl, compelled by poverty, sold her modesty; and a soul is lost for which Christ gave his own. You say, what is that to me? I mind my own business, according to my lights. And yet you, holding such opinions, consider yourself a Christian, who are not even a man!'.

The irony of this Handbook is that like many of his other popular works, Erasmus considered a `throwaway' work, an interruption to his true vocation, the illumination of the Scriptures. But next to The Praise of Folly, Erasmus' work best known today is his Colloquia, which was also satirical, except that unlike the Morias, the Colloquia named names of contemporaries, and Erasmus simply could not keep his sharp pen to himself. `The Colloquia gave rise to much more hatred and contest than the Morias, and not without reason, for in them Erasmus attacked persons. He allowed himself the pleasure of ridiculing his Louvain antagonists.' Oddly enough, Erasmus was perennially adverse to offending people and making enemies. He seemed to be constantly making up with people through his letters. This, in spite of the fact that he could change positions on affections completely, with little basis in reason. Earlier in his life, he was immensely fond of England, and enjoyed the time he spent there; however, he turned his back on it with strong words later in his life.

Erasmus was central to the Reformation on at least three counts. The first was the importance, he shared with the younger Luther, on the importance of returning to the original scriptures and to the early church fathers, especially Augustine and Jerome. The second was with his improved editions of the Greek New Testament. The third was his criticisms of scholastic theology and the elaborate apparatus of tradition created by the Roman church. In the end, he did not have the fortitude or disposition to come out on the side of the Reformers. Where Luther and Calvin were like great lions, implacable in their beliefs, and tenacious in their attacks and positions, Erasmus seemed to have no firm foundation. In temperament, he was very much like Luther's wingman, the conciliatory Melanchthon, except that it seems as if Erasmus didn't know how to be conciliatory. Luther and the other early reformers dearly wanted Erasmus on their side, but Erasmus seemed to get bogged down in minor squabbles far outside the main arena of the Reformation.

The one great encounter we celebrate was between Erasmus and Luther over the nature of free will and grace. The opening shot was from Erasmus, in his De Libero Arbitrio (The Freedom of the Will). Luther replied with what may be his most important theological writing, De Servo Arbitrio (The Bondage of the Will).

The overall impression one gets of Erasmus is that he was a 16th century Epicurean, in the truest sense of the word. His primary interests were freedom from discomfort, abundant good friends with whom he could converse and correspond, and ample time for his studies. The irony is that in the end, the Catholics considered him a corrupter of the church, and the reformers as a betrayer of the gospel. But his conciliatory nature seems to have won out as he stands as a model for moral education and tolerance.

There are fewer good biographies of Erasmus than there are of Luther, and I suspect this is one of the better. I would have liked to see a better index, bibliography, and references. But this is a very easy read. It gives little depth on his works, but it has great depth in explaining Erasmus role in his times and in the age following the Reformation.

In the preface, G. N. Clark tells us of Johan Huizinga that his "great success and reputation came suddenly when he was over forty. Until that time his powers were ripening, not so much slowly as secretly."

Huizinga starts his history of Erasmus with his childhood. He was born in Rotterdam, Holland in 1466. His years in the monastery are covered in the second chapter. We're told he was well read in Jerome. Furthermore he was consumed with the works of St. Augustine. In the summer of 1495 his studies carried him to the University of Paris. It was on this campus that a struggle of ideas was occurring. The story continues as Erasmus goes to England.

Erasmus was a true wandering scholar at times with no home of his own. In describing his travels, his studies, his love of God, his calling, the modern Christian scholar can sense the continuity of the personalities who went ahead to pave the way for our contritutions.