Erasmus of Rotterdam

Desiderius Erasmus was born at Rotterdam, most likely on October 28, 1466, he was vague about the year, and had reason to be. He was the illegitimate son of a priest and a physician's daughter, which under church law barred him from most offices and required a papal dispensation later in life to get around.

Both parents died of plague while he was a teenager. Guardians pushed him into a monastery. He took vows as an Augustinian canon at Steyn around 1487 and was ordained priest in 1492, and he spent the rest of his life getting further from the cloister without ever formally leaving the church.

He escaped into books. He learned Greek in his thirties by sheer grind, because he had concluded that no one could understand the New Testament through the Latin Vulgate alone. He studied and taught at Paris, Louvain, Cambridge, Basel, and Freiburg, made a living from patrons and from the printing press, and became the most famous scholar in Europe.

In 1516 the Basel printer Johann Froben published his Novum Instrumentum omne: the Greek New Testament in one column with Erasmus's own fresh Latin translation beside it, plus notes. It was the first Greek New Testament to appear in print, and it was rushed, he used the handful of late manuscripts he could lay hands on, and he later admitted the thing was precipitated rather than edited. He revised it four more times. Later printed editions descending from that text stood behind Luther's German and Tyndale's English.

He wanted the Bible in every hand. In his preface to it he wrote that he wished the Scriptures were translated into every language, so that the farmer might sing them at the plough, the weaver hum them at the shuttle, and the traveler lighten the road with them.

He also made Europe laugh at itself. In Praise of Folly (1511), written in about a week at Thomas More's house in England, is a mock oration by Folly herself that skewers monks, theologians, princes, and popes. The Handbook of the Christian Soldier argued that real religion is inward, not ceremonial. His Adages collected thousands of classical proverbs and taught a continent how to write.

Luther's admirers claimed him. Erasmus refused them. He had attacked indulgences, relics, ignorant clergy, and the wealth of Rome for years, but he would not break the unity of the church, and he thought Luther's certainty dangerous. In 1524 he wrote On the Freedom of the Will; Luther answered in 1525 with The Bondage of the Will, one of the fiercest books of the century, telling Erasmus that he alone had gone for the throat of the real question. They never reconciled.

Then both sides turned on him. Catholics said he had laid the egg that Luther hatched; Erasmus replied that he had laid a hen's egg and Luther had hatched a fighting cock. Protestants called him a coward. He kept editing the fathers, Jerome, Augustine, Origen, Chrysostom, to the end.

He died at Basel on the night of July 11–12, 1536, in a city that had gone Protestant, still a Catholic, and was buried in its cathedral.

Sources: Erasmus, Novum Instrumentum omne (1516) and its preface, the Paraclesis; In Praise of Folly; Roland Bainton, Erasmus of Christendom; Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, vol. 7.