Erasmus and the Age of Reformation

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Summary: Informative Historical Perspective
Review: 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.

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Summary: "An Intimate Portrait of the Great Erasmus"
Review: 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.

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Summary: Man in the Middle
Review: 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.