Erasmus

Theology

Three key distinctive features of the spirituality Erasmus proposed are accommodation, inverbation, and scopus christi.

In the view of literary historian Chester Chapin, Erasmus's tendency of thought was "towards cautious dulcification of the traditional [Catholic] view".

Accommodation

Historian Manfred Hoffmann has described accommodation as "the single most important concept in Erasmus's hermeneutic".

For Erasmus, accommodation is a universal concept: humans must accommodate each other, must accommodate the church and vice versa, and must take as their model how Christ accommodated the disciples in his interactions with them, and accommodated humans in his incarnation; which in turn merely reflects the eternal mutual accommodation within the Trinity. And the primary mechanism of accommodation is language, which mediates between reality and abstraction, which allows disputes of all kinds to be resolved and the gospel to be transmitted: in his New Testament, Erasmus notably translated the Greek logos in John 1:1 "In the beginning was the Word" more like "In the beginning was Speech: using Latin sermo (discourse, conversation, language) not verbum (word) emphasizing the dynamic and interpersonal communication rather than static principle: "Christ incarnate as the eloquent oration of God": "He is called Speech [sermo], because through him God, who in his own nature cannot be comprehended by any reasoning, wished to become known to us."

The role models of accommodation were Paul, that "chameleon" (or "slippery squid") and Christ, who was "more mutable than Proteus himself".

Following Paul, Quintillian (apte diecere) and Gregory the Great's Pastoral Care, Erasmus wrote that the orator, preacher or teacher must "adapt their discourse to the characteristics of their audience"; this made pastoral care the "art of arts". Erasmus wrote that most of his original works, from satires to paraphrases, were essentially the same themes packaged for different audiences.

In this light, Erasmus's ability to have friendly correspondence with both Thomas More and Thomas Bolyn, and with both Philip Melanchthon and Pope Adrian VI, can be seen as outworkings of his theology, rather than slippery insincerity or flattery of potential patrons. Similarly, it shows the theological basis of his pacificism, and his view of ecclesiastical authorities—from priests like himself to Church Councils—as necessary mediating peace-brokers.

Inverbation

For Erasmus, further to accommodating humans in his Incarnation, Christ accommodated humans by a kind of inverbation through text: we now knowing the resurrection, Christ is revealed by the Gospels in a way that we can know him better by reading him than those who actually heard him speak; this will or may transform us.

Since the Gospels become in effect like sacraments, for Erasmus reading them becomes a form of prayer which is spoiled by taking single sentences in isolation and using them as syllogisms. Instead, learning to understand the context, genres and literary expression in the New Testament becomes a spiritual more than academic exercise. Erasmus's has been called rhetorical theology (theologia rhetorica).

Scopus christi

Scopus is the unifying reference point, the navigation goal, or the organising principle of topics. According to his assistant-turned-foe, Œcolampadius, Erasmus's rule was "nihil in sacris literis praeter Christum quaerendum" ("nothing is to be sought in the sacred letters but Christ").

What Erasmus contributes [...] is a counsel of restraint in metaphysical speculation, an accent on the revelatory breadth of the eternal Word of God, and an invitation to think of Christ incarnate as the eloquent oration of God. But the central impulse [...] is the affirmation of the full incarnation of Christ in human existence [...] for the transformation of human life. With that, the ethical capstone of Erasmus' reflections on Christ centers on the responsibility to imitate Christ's love for others, and thus for advancing the cause of peace in personal and social life.

— Terrence J. Martin, The Christology of Erasmus

In Hoffmann's words, for Erasmus "Christ is the scopus of everything": "the focus in which both dimensions of reality, the human and the divine, intersect" and so He himself is the hermeneutical principle of scripture": "the middle is the medium, the medium is the mediator, the mediator is the reconciler". In Erasmus's early Enchiridion he had given this scopus in typical medieval terms of an ascent of being to God (vertical), but from the mid-1510s life he moved to an analogy of Copernican planetary circling around Christ the centre (horizontal) or Columbian navigation towards a destination.

One effect is that scriptural interpretation must be done starting with the teachings and interactions of Jesus in the Gospels, with the Sermon on the Mount serving as the starting point, and arguably with the Beatitudes and the Lord's Prayer at the head of the queue. This privileges peacemaking, mercy, meekness, purity of heart, hungering after righteousness, poverty of spirit, etc. as the unassailable core of Christianity and piety and true theology.

The Sermon on the Mount provides the axioms on which every legitimate theology must be built, as well as the ethics governing theological discourse, and the rules for validating theological products; Erasmus's philosophia christi treats the primary and initial teaching of Jesus in the first Gospel as a theological methodology.

For example, "peacemaking" is a possible topic in any Christian theology; but for Erasmus, from the Beatitude, it must be a starting, reference and ending point when discussing all other theological notions, such as church authority, the Trinity, etc. Moreover, Christian theology must only be done in a peacemaking fashion for peacemaking purposes; and any theology that promotes division and warmongering is thereby anti-Christian.

Mystical theology

Another important concept to Erasmus was "the Folly of the Cross" (which The Praise of Folly explored): the view that Truth belongs to the exuberant, perhaps ecstatic, world of what is foolish, strange, unexpected and even superficially repellent to us, rather than to the frigid worlds which intricate scholastic dialectical and syllogistic philosophical argument all too often generated; this produced in Erasmus a profound disinterest in hyper-rationality, and an emphasis on verbal, rhetorical, mystical, pastoral and personal/political moral concerns instead.

Theological writings

Several scholars have suggested Erasmus wrote as an evangelist not an academic theologian. Even "theology was to be metamorphic speech, converting persons to Christ". Erasmus did not conceive of Christianity as fundamentally an intellectual system:

Yet these ancient fathers were they who confuted both the Jews and Heathens [...]; they confuted them (I say), yet by their lives and miracles, rather than by words and syllogisms; and the persons they thus proselyted were downright honest, well meaning people, such as understood plain sense better than any artificial pomp of reasoning [...]

— Erasmus, The Praise of Folly

Historian William McCuaig commented "I have never read a work by him on any subject that was not at bottom a piece of evangelical literature."

We may distinguish four different lines of work, parallel with each other, and complementary. First, the establishing and critical elucidation of the biblical texts; alongside it, the editions of the great patristic commentators; then, the exegetical works properly so called, in which these two fundamental researches yield their fruit; and finally, the methodological works, which in their first state constitute a sort of preface to the various other studies, but which—in return—were nourished and enlarged by them as they went along.

— Louis Bouyer

Apart from these programmatic works, Erasmus also produce a number of prayers, sermons, essays, masses and poems for specific benefactors and occasions, often on topics where Erasmus and his benefactor agreed. His thought was particularly influenced by Origen.

He often set himself the challenge of formulating positive, moderate, non-superstitious versions of contemporary Catholic practices that might be more acceptable both to scandalised Catholics and Protestants of good will: the better attitudes to the sacraments, saints, Mary, indulgences, statues, scriptural ignorance and fanciful Biblical interpretation, prayer, dietary fasts, external ceremonialism, authority, vows, docility, submission to Rome, etc. For example, in his Paean in Honour of the Virgin Mary (1503) Erasmus elaborated his theme that the Incarnation had been hinted far and wide, which could impact the theology of the fate of the remote unbaptised and grace, and the place of classical philosophy:

You are assuredly the Woman of renown: both heaven and earth and the succession of all the ages uniquely join to celebrate your praise in a musical concord. [...]

During the centuries of the previous age the oracles of the gentiles spoke of you in obscure riddles. Egyptian prophecies, Apollo's tripod, the Sibylline books, gave hints of you. The mouths of learned poets predicted your coming in oracles they did not understand. [...]

Both the Old and the New Testament, like two cherubim with wings joined and unanimous voices, repeatedly sing your praise. [...]

Thus indeed have writers religiously vied to proclaim you, on the one hand inspired prophets, on the other eloquent Doctors of the church, both filled with the same spirit, as the former foretold your coming in joyful oracles before your birth and the latter heaped prayerful praise on you when you appeared.

— Erasmus, Paean in Honour of the Virgin Mary (1503)

Religious reform

Personal Reform

Proper attitude to sacraments

Erasmus expressed much of his reform program in terms of the proper attitude towards the sacraments and their ramifications: notably for the underappreciated sacraments of Baptism and Marriage (see On the Institution of Christian Marriage) considered as vocations more than events; and for the mysterious Eucharist, pragmatic Confession, the dangerous Last Rites (writing On the Preparation for Death), and the pastoral Holy Orders (see Ecclesiastes). Historians have noted that Erasmus's commendation of the benefits of immersive, docile scripture-reading is put in sacramental terms.

A test of the Reformation was the doctrine of the sacraments, and the crux of this question was the observance of the Eucharist. Erasmus was concerned that the sacramentarians, headed by Œcolampadius of Basel, were claiming Erasmus held views similar to their own to try to claim him for their schismatic and "erroneous" movement. When the Mass was finally banned in Basel in 1529, Erasmus immediately abandoned the city, as did the other expelled Catholic clergy.

In 1530, Erasmus published a new edition of the orthodox treatise of Algerus against the heretic Berengar of Tours in the eleventh century. He added a dedication, affirming his belief in the reality of the Body of Christ after consecration in the Eucharist, commonly referred to as transubstantiation. Erasmus seems to have suspected that the scholastic formulation of transubstantiation stretched language past its breaking point, however he noted that even if transubstantiation were not true, as some Protestants has started to claim, it should not be a cause of preventing people with traditional views from worshipping (latria) God in the Host, as the divinity of God is everywhere present.

By and large, the miraculous real change that interested Erasmus, the author, more than that of the bread is the transformation in the humble partaker. Erasmus wrote several notable pastoral books and pamphlets on sacraments, always looking through rather than at the rituals or forms:

• on marriage and wise matches,
• preparation for confession and the need for pastoral encouragement by priests (whose primary duty was to shepherd, not just to consecrate/absolve),
• preparation for death and the need to assuage fear,
• training and helping the preaching duties of priests under bishops,
• baptism and the need for that faithful to own the baptismal vows made for them.

Catholic reform

Institutional reforms

The Protestant Reformation began in the year following the publication of his pathbreaking edition of the New Testament in Latin and Greek (1516). The issues between the reforming and reactionary tendencies of the church, from which Protestantism later emerged, had become so clear that many intellectuals and churchmen could not escape the summons to join the debate.

Historians have characterized the extent of Erasmus' criticisms differently. According to historian C. Scott Dixon, Erasmus not only criticised church failings but questioned many of his Church's basic teachings. However, according to biographer Erika Rummel, "Erasmus was aiming at the correction of abuses rather than at doctrinal innovation or institutional change. Unlike Luther, he accepted papal primacy and the teaching authority of the church and did not discount human tradition. " Historian Peter Kaufman is even milder: "Erasmus implied that some release from ecclesiastical regimentation was perfectly appropriate for some mature Christians (and that some forms of regimentation were inappropriate for all Christians), but neither Erasmus nor his humanist friends suggested that Christians were (or should be) ultimately independent."

In theologian Louis Bouyer's interpretation, Erasmus's agenda was "to reform the Church from within by a renewal of biblical theology, based on philological study of the New Testament text, and supported by a knowledge of patristics, itself renewed by the same methods. The final object of it all was to nourish [...] chiefly moral and spiritual reform".

At the height of his literary fame, Erasmus was called upon to take one side, but public partisanship was foreign to his beliefs, nature, and habits. Despite all his criticism of clerical corruption and abuses within the Western Church, especially at first he sided unambiguously with neither Luther nor the anti-Lutherans publicly (though in private he lobbied assiduously against extremism from both parties), but eventually shunned the breakaway Protestant Reformation movements along with their most radical offshoots.

I have constantly declared, in countless letters, booklets, and personal statements, that I do not want to be involved with either party.

— Erasmus, Spongia (1523)

The world had laughed at his satire, The Praise of Folly, but few had interfered with his activities. He believed that his work had commended itself to the religious world's best minds and dominant powers. Erasmus chose to write in Latin (and Greek), the languages of scholars. He did not build a large body of supporters among the unlettered; his critiques reached only a small, elite audience.

Erasmus was also notable for exposing several important historical documents of theological and political importance as forgeries or misattributions: including pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, the Gravi de pugna attributed to St Augustine, the Ad Herennium attributed to Cicero, and (by reprinting Lorenzo Valla's work) the Donation of Constantine.

Anti-fraternalism

Reacting from his own experiences, Erasmus came to believe that monastic life and institutions no longer served the positive spiritual or social purpose they once may have: in the Enchiridion he controversially put it "Monkishness is not piety." At this time, it was better to live as "a monk in the world" than in the monastery.

Many of his works contain diatribes against supposed monastic corruption and careerism, particularly against the mendicant friars (Franciscans and Dominicans). These orders also typically ran the university's Scholastic theology programs, from whose ranks came his most dangerous enemies. The more some attacked him, the more offensive he became about what he saw as their political influence and materialistic opportunism.

Alastor, an evil spirit: "They are a certain Sort of Animals in black and white Vestments, Ash-colour'd Coats, and various other Dresses, that are always hovering about the Courts of Princes, and [to each side] are continually instilling into their Ears the Love of War, and exhorting the Nobility and common People to it, haranguing them in their Sermons, that it is a just, holy and religious War. [...]"

Charon: "[...] What do they get out of it?"

Alastor: "Because they get more by those that die, than those that live. There are last Wills and Testaments, Funeral Obsequies, Bulls, and a great many other Articles of no despicable Profit. And in the last Place, they had rather live in a Camp, than in their Cells. War breeds a great many Bishops, who were not thought good for any Thing in a Time of Peace."

— Erasmus, "Charon", Colloquies

He was scandalised by superstitions (such as that if a person were buried in a Franciscan habit, they would go directly to heaven), crime, and child novices. He advocated various reforms, including a ban on taking orders until the 30th year; the closure of corrupt and smaller monasteries; respect for bishops; requiring work, not begging (reflecting the practice of his own order of Augustinian Canons); the downplaying of monastic hours, fasts and ceremonies; and a less mendacious approach to gullible pilgrims and tenants.

However, he was not in favour of speedy closures of monasteries, nor of closing larger reformed monasteries with important libraries: in his account of his pilgrimage to Walsingham, he noted that the funds extracted from pilgrims typically supported houses for the poor and elderly.

These ideas widely influenced his generation of humanists, both Catholic and Protestant, and the lurid hyperbolic attacks in his half-satire The Praise of Folly were later treated by Protestants as objective reports of near-universal corruption. Furthermore, "what is said over a glass of wine, ought not to be remembered and written down as a serious statement of belief", such as his proposal to marry all monks to all nuns or to send them all away to fight the Turks and colonise new islands.

He believed the only vow necessary for Christians should be the vow of baptism, and others such as the vows of the evangelical counsels, while admirable in intent and content, were now mainly counter-productive.

However, Erasmus frequently commended the evangelical counsels for all believers, and with more than lip service: for example, the first adage of his reputation-establishing Adagia was "Between friends all is common", where he tied common ownership (such as practised by his order's style of poverty) with the teachings of classical philosophers and Christ.

His main Catholic opposition was from scholars in the mendicant orders. He purported that "Saint Francis came lately to me in a dream and thanked me for chastising them." After his lifetime, scholars of mendicant orders have sometimes disputed Erasmus as hyperbolic and ill-informed. A 20th-century Benedictine scholar wrote of him as "all sail and no rudder".

Erasmus did also have significant support and contact with reform-minded friars, including Franciscans such as Jean Vitrier and Cardinal Cisneros, and Dominicans such as Cardinal Cajetan, the former master of the Order of Preachers.

Protestant reform

The early reformers built their theology on Erasmus's philological analyses of specific verses in the New Testament: repentance over penance (the basis of the first thesis of the Luther's 95 Theses), justification by imputation, grace as favour or clemency, faith as hoping trust, human transformation over reformation, congregation over church, mystery over sacrament, etc. In Erasmus's view, they went too far, downplayed Sacred Tradition such as Patristic interpretations, and irresponsibly fomented bloodshed.

Erasmus was one of many scandalised by the sale of indulgences to fund Pope Leo X's projects. His view, given in a 1518 letter to John Colet, was less theological than political: "The Roman curia has abandoned any sense of shame. What could be more shameless than these constant indulgences? And now they put up war against the Turks as a pretext, when their aim really is to drive the Spaniards from Naples."

Increasing disagreement with Luther

Erasmus and Luther impacted each other greatly. Each had misgivings about each other from the beginning (Erasmus on Luther's rash and antagonistic character, Luther on Erasmus's focus on morality rather than grace) but strategically agreed not to be negative about the other in public.

Noting Luther's criticisms of corruption in the Church, Erasmus described Luther to Pope Leo X as "a mighty trumpet of gospel truth" while agreeing, "It is clear that many of the reforms for which Luther calls" (e.g., on the sale of indulgences) "are urgently needed." However, behind the scenes Erasmus forbade his publisher Froben from handling the works of Luther and tried to keep the reform movement focused on institutional rather than theological issues, yet he also privately wrote to authorities to prevent Luther's persecution. In the words of one historian, "at this earlier period he was more concerned with the fate of Luther than his theology."

In 1520, Erasmus wrote that "Luther ought to be answered and not crushed." However, the publication of Luther's On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church (October 1520), which largely repudiated Church teaching on sacraments, and his subsequent bellicosity drained Erasmus's and many humanists' sympathy, even more as Christians became partisans and the partisans took to violence.

Luther hoped for his cooperation in a work which seemed only the natural outcome of Erasmus's own, and spoke with admiration of Erasmus's superior learning. In their early correspondence, Luther expressed boundless admiration for all Erasmus had done in the cause of a sound and reasonable Christianity and urged him to join the Lutheran party. Erasmus declined to commit himself, arguing his usual "small target" excuse, that to do so would endanger the cause of bonae litterae which he regarded as one of his purposes in life. Only as an independent scholar could he hope to influence the reform of religion. When Erasmus declined to support him, the "straightforward" Luther became angered that Erasmus was avoiding the responsibility due either to cowardice or a lack of purpose.

However, any hesitancy on the part of Erasmus may have stemmed not from lack of courage or conviction, but rather from a concern over the mounting disorder and violence of the reform movement. To Philip Melanchthon in 1524 he wrote:

I know nothing of your church; at the very least it contains people who will, I fear, overturn the whole system and drive the princes into using force to restrain good men and bad alike. The gospel, the word of God, faith, Christ, and Holy Spirit – these words are always on their lips; look at their lives and they speak quite another language.

Erasmus attempted various distinctions to escape accusations of Lutheranism: for example for the claim that he emphasized faith to the exclusion of charity he wrote "[My paraphrases] do not offer even the tiniest support to the Lutheran heresy, since my propositions [faith alone suffices without merits] speak of those who are purified by baptism, whereas Luther speaks of the good works of adults after baptism."

Catholic theologian George Chantraine notes that, where Luther quotes Luke 11:21 "He that is not with me is against me", Erasmus takes Mark 9:40 "For he that is not against us, is on our part."

Though he sought to remain accommodative in doctrinal disputes, each side accused him of siding with the other, perhaps because of his perceived influence and what they regarded as his dissembling neutrality, which he regarded as peacemaking accommodation:

I detest dissension because it goes both against the teachings of Christ and against a secret inclination of nature. I doubt that either side in the dispute can be suppressed without grave loss.

— On Free Will

Dispute on free will

By 1523, and first suggested in a letter from Henry VIII, Erasmus had been convinced that Luther's ideas on necessity/free will were a subject of core disagreement deserving a public airing, and strategised with friends and correspondents on how to respond with proper moderation without making the situation worse for all, especially for the humanist reform agenda. He eventually chose a campaign that involved an irenical 'dialogue' The Inquisition of Faith, a positive, evangelical model sermon On the Measureless Mercy of God, and a gently critical 'diatribe' On Free Will.

The publication of his brief book On Free Will initiated what has been called "The greatest debate of that era", which still has ramifications today. They bypassed discussion on reforms which they both agreed on in general, and instead dealt with authority and biblical justifications of synergism versus monergism in relation to salvation.

Luther responded with On the Bondage of the Will (De servo arbitrio) (1525).

Erasmus replied to this in his lengthy two-volume Hyperaspistes and other works, which Luther ignored. Apart from the perceived moral failings among followers of the Reformers—an important sign for Erasmus—he also dreaded any change in doctrine, citing the long history of the Church as a bulwark against innovation. He put the matter bluntly to Luther:

We are dealing with this: Would a stable mind depart from the opinion handed down by so many men famous for holiness and miracles, depart from the decisions of the Church, and commit our souls to the faith of someone like you who has sprung up just now with a few followers, although the leading men of your flock do not agree either with you or among themselves – indeed though you do not even agree with yourself, since in this same Assertion you say one thing in the beginning and something else later on, recanting what you said before.

— Hyperaspistes I

Continuing his chastisement of Luther – and undoubtedly put off by the notion of there being "no pure interpretation of Scripture anywhere but in Wittenberg" – Erasmus touches upon another important point of the controversy:

You stipulate that we should not ask for or accept anything but Holy Scripture, but you do it in such a way as to require that we permit you to be its sole interpreter, renouncing all others. Thus the victory will be yours if we allow you to be not the steward but the lord of Holy Scripture.

— Hyperaspistes, Book I

"False evangelicals"

In 1529, Erasmus wrote "An epistle against those who falsely boast they are Evangelicals" to Gerardus Geldenhouwer (former Bishop of Utrecht, also schooled at Deventer).

You declaim bitterly against the luxury of priests, the ambition of bishops, the tyranny of the Roman Pontiff, and the babbling of the sophists; against our prayers, fasts, and Masses; and you are not content to retrench the abuses that may be in these things, but must needs abolish them entirely.

Here Erasmus complains of the doctrines and morals of the Reformers, applying the same critique he had made about public Scholastic disputations:

Look around on this 'Evangelical' generation, and observe whether among them less indulgence is given to luxury, lust, or avarice, than among those whom you so detest. Show me any one person who by that Gospel has been reclaimed from drunkenness to sobriety, from fury and passion to meekness, from avarice to liberality, from reviling to well-speaking, from wantonness to modesty. I will show you a great many who have become worse through following it. [...] The solemn prayers of the Church are abolished, but now there are very many who never pray at all. [...]

I have never entered their conventicles, but I have sometimes seen them returning from their sermons, the countenances of all of them displaying rage, and wonderful ferocity, as though they were animated by the evil spirit. [...]

Who ever beheld in their meetings any one of them shedding tears, smiting his breast, or grieving for his sins? [...] Confession to the priest is abolished, but very few now confess to God. [...] They have fled from Judaism that they may become Epicureans.

— Epistola contra quosdam qui se falso iactant evangelicos.

Other

According to historian Christopher Ocker, the early reformers "needed tools that let their theological distinctions pose as commonplaces in a textual theology; [...] Erasmus provided the tools", but this tendentious distinction-making, reminiscent of the recent excesses of Scholasticism to Erasmus's eyes, "was precisely what Erasmus disliked about Luther" and "Protestant polemicists".

Erasmus wrote books against aspects of the teaching, impacts or threats of several other Reformers:

• Ulrich von Hutten: Spongia adversus aspergines Hutteni (1523)
• Martin Bucer: Responsio ad fratres Inferioris Germaniae ad epistolam apologeticam incerto autoreproditam (1530)
• Heinrich Eppendorf: Admonitio adversus mendacium et obstrectationem (1530)

However, Erasmus maintained friendly relations with other Protestants, notably the irenic Melanchthon and Albrecht Dürer.

A common accusation, supposedly started by antagonistic monk-theologians, made Erasmus responsible for Martin Luther and the Reformation: "Erasmus laid the egg, and Luther hatched it." Erasmus wittily dismissed the charge, claiming that Luther had "hatched a different bird entirely". Erasmus-reader Peter Canisius commented: "Certainly there was no lack of eggs for Luther to hatch."

Philosophy

Erasmus has a problematic standing in the history of philosophy: whether he should be called a philosopher at all, (as, indeed, some question whether he should be considered a theologian either). Erasmus deemed himself to be a rhetorician (rhetoric being the art of argumentation to find what was most probably true on questions where logic could not provide certainty) or grammarian rather than a philosopher. He was particularly influenced by satirist and rhetorician Lucian. Erasmus's writings shifted "an intellectual culture from logical disputation about things to quarrels about texts, contexts, and words".

Classical

Erasmus syncretistically took phrases, ideas and motifs from many classical philosophers to furnish discussions of Christian themes: academics have identified aspects of his thought as variously Platonist (duality), Cynical (asceticism), Stoic (adiaphora), Epicurean (ataraxia, pleasure as virtue), realist/non-voluntarist, and Isocratic (rhetoric, political education, syncretism). However, his Christianized version of Epicureanism is regarded as his own.

Erasmus was sympathetic to a kind of epistemological (Ciceronian not Cartesian) Scepticism:

A Sceptic is not someone who doesn't care to know what is true or false ... but rather someone who does not make a final decision easily or fight to the death for his own opinion, but rather accepts as probable what someone else accepts as certain ... I explicitly exclude from Scepticism whatever is set forth in Sacred Scripture or whatever has been handed down to us by the authority of the Church.

— Erasmus

Historian Kirk Essary has noted that from his earliest to last works Erasmus "regularly denounced the Stoics as specifically unchristian in their hardline position and advocacy of apatheia": warm affection and an appropriately fiery heart being inalienable parts of human sincerity; however, historian Ross Dealy sees Erasmus's decrial of other non-gentle "perverse affections" as having Stoical roots.

Following Rufinus' translation of Origen's commentary on Romans, Erasmus wrote in terms of a tri-partite nature of man, with the soul (animus) as the seat of free will: choosing the spirit (spiritus) over the warring flesh/carnality (carnis) creates right order.

The body is purely material; the spirit is purely divine; the soul ... is tossed back and forward between the two according to whether it resists or gives way to the temptations of the flesh. The spirit makes us gods; the body makes us beasts; the soul makes us men.

— Erasmus

Erasmus also put it that the mind (anima) should act a ruler over the body (corpus) and the spirit, which he used to provide political analogies: correct rule (by the prince=mind) produces peace in the body and the body politic.

According to theologian George van Kooten, Erasmus was the first modern scholar "to note the similarities between Plato's Symposium and John's Gospel", first in the Enchiridion then in the Adagia, pre-dating other scholarly interest by 400 years.

Anti-scholasticism

Erasmus did not have a metaphysical bone in his frail body, and had no real feeling for the philosophical concerns of scholastic theology.

— Lewis W. Spitz

He usually eschewed metaphysical, epistemological and logical philosophy as found in Aristotle: in particular the curriculum and systematic methods of the post-Aquinas Schoolmen (Scholastics) and what he regarded as their frigid, counter-productive Aristotelianism: "What has Aristotle to do with Christ?"

They can deal with any text of scripture as with a nose of wax, and knead it into what shape best suits their interest.

— The Praise of Folly

Erasmus held that academics must avoid philosophical factionalism as an offence against Christian concord, to "make the whole world Christian". "Men are drawn to Godliness by a thousand means." Indeed, Erasmus warned that Scholastic philosophy actually could distract participants from their proper focus on immediate morality, unless used moderately, and by "excluding the Platonists from their commentaries, they strangle the beauty of revelation." "They are windbags blown up with Aristotle, sausages stuffed with a mass of theoretical definitions, conclusions, and propositions." Duns Scotus, or his uninspiring proponents, generally came off even worse than Aquinas, nevertheless, despite his biting sharp comments, Erasmus paraded that he did not reject any medieval theologians totally, merely that he was championing the return to the fresh springs.

Nevertheless, Protestant church historian Ernst Kohls has commented on a certain closeness of Erasmus's thought to Thomas Aquinas', despite Erasmus's scepticism about runaway Aristotelianism and his methodological dislike of collections of disconnected sentences for quotation. Ultimately, Erasmus personally owned Aquinas' Summa theologiae, the Catena aurea and his commentary on Paul's epistles.

Philosophia Christi

Everything in the pagan world that was valiantly done, brilliantly said, ingeniously thought, diligently transmitted, had been prepared by Christ for his society.

— Erasmus, Antibarbari

(Not to be confused with his Italian contemporary Chrysostom Javelli's Philosophia Christiana.)

Erasmus approached classical philosophers theologically and rhetorically: their value was in how they pre-saged, explained or amplified the unique teachings of Christ (particularly the Sermon on the Mount): the philosophia Christi.

A great part of the teaching of Christ is to be found in some of the philosophers, particularly Socrates, Diogenes and Epictetus. But Christ taught it much more fully, and exemplified it better ...

— Erasmus, Paraclesis

In fact, he said, Christ was "the very father of philosophy" (Anti-Barbieri). His characteristic combination of a Hellenic-informed Jesus whose teaching emphasis was on inter-personal relations more than abstract spiritual truths has been criticized e.g. by a view "however, Erasmus sought only what was human in the Sermon on the Mount, just as he found what was Christian in the moral philosophy of the Stoics."

In works such as his Enchiridion, The Education of a Christian Prince and the Colloquies, Erasmus developed his idea of the philosophia Christi, a life lived according to the teachings of Jesus taken as a spiritual-ethical-social-political-legal philosophy:

Christ the heavenly teacher has founded a new people on earth, ... Having eyes without guile, these folk know no spite or envy; having freely castrated themselves, and aiming at a life of angels while in the flesh, they know no unchaste lust; they know not divorce, since there is no evil they will not endure or turn to the good; they have not the use of oaths, since they neither distrust nor deceive anyone; they know not the hunger for money, since their treasure is in heaven, nor do they itch for empty glory, since they refer all things to the glory of Christ.…these are the new teachings of our founder, such as no school of philosophy has ever brought forth.

— Erasmus, Method of True Theology

In philosopher Étienne Gilson's summary: "the quite precise goal he pursues is to reject Greek philosophy outside of Christianity, into which the Middle Ages introduced Greek philosophy with the risk of corrupting this Christian Wisdom."

Useful "philosophy" needed to be limited to (or re-defined as) the practical and moral:

You must realize that 'philosopher' does not mean someone who is clever at dialectics or science but someone who rejects illusory appearance and undauntedly seeks out and follows what is true and good. Being a philosopher is in practice the same as being a Christian; only the terminology is different.

— Erasmus, Anti-Barbieri

Biographers, such as Johan Huizinga, frequently draw connections between many of Erasmus's convictions and his early biography: esteem for the married state and appropriate marriages, support for priestly marriage, concern for improving marriage prospects for women, opposition to inconsiderate rules (notably, institutional dietary rules), a desire to make education engaging for the participants, interest in classical languages, horror of poverty and spiritual hopelessness, distaste for friars begging when they could study or work, unwillingness to be under the direct control of authorities, laicism, the need for those in authority to act in the best interest of their charges, a prizing of mercy and peace, an anger over unnecessary war, especially between avaricious princes, an awareness of mortality, the wisdom of avoiding danger, etc.

More than any other Renaissance figure, the humanist from the Low Countries was committed to the goal of building an alternative to medieval civilisation...As a rule, the ancient elements were essential to him, whereas he tended to discard most "recent" (that is, medieval) phenomena as superfluous or harmful.

— István Bejczy, Erasmus and the Middle Ages

"He was above all a popularizer, and he gloried in it. He was one of the main channels by which certain ideas entered the modern world, and his originality was in the blending of these ideas. His talent was for synthesis...it is not in any ordinary sense that he can be called an original thinker, but he was far too great to be a mere imitator or vulgarizer."

— Margaret Mann Phillips

Manner of thinking

Erasmus had a distinctive manner of thinking, a Catholic historian suggests: one that is capacious in its perception, agile in its judgements, and unsettling in its irony with "a deep and abiding commitment to human flourishing". "In all spheres, his outlook was essentially pastoral." He was an "incurable idealist".

Erasmus has been called a seminal rather than a consistent or systematic thinker, notably averse to over-extending from the specific to the general, who nevertheless should be taken very seriously as a pastoral and rhetorical theologian, with a philological and historical approach—rather than a metaphysical approach—to interpreting Scripture and interested in the literal and tropological senses. French theologian Louis Bouyer commented, "Erasmus was to be one of those who can get no edification from exegesis where they suspect some misinterpretation."

A theologian has written of "Erasmus' preparedness completely to satisfy no-one but himself". He has been called moderate, judicious and constructive even when being critical or when mocking extremes; but thin-skinned against slanders of heterodoxy.

Manner of expression

Irony

Erasmus often wrote in a highly ironical idiom, especially in his letters, which makes them prone to different interpretations when taken literally rather than ironically.

• Ulrich von Hutten claimed that Erasmus was secretly a Lutheran; Erasmus chided him saying that von Hutten had not detected the irony in his public letters enough.
• Antagonistic scholar J. W. Williams denies that Erasmus's letter to Ammonius, "let your own interests be your standard in all things", was in apparent jest, as claimed by those more sympathetic to Erasmus.
• Erasmus's aphoristic quote on the persecution of Reuchlin, "If it is Christian to hate Jews, we are all abundantly Christians here", is taken literally by Theodor Dunkelgrün and Harry S. May as being approving of such hatred; the alternative view would be that it was sardonic and challenging.

He frequently wrote about controversial subjects using the dialogue to avoid direct statements clearly attributable to himself. For Martin Luther, he was an eel, slippery, evasive and impossible to capture.

Copiousness

Erasmus's literary theory of "copiousness" endorses a large stockpile of rich adages, analogies, tropes and symbolic figures, rather than using limited number of stock phrases. Copiousness allows the compressed communication of complex ideas (between those educated in the stockpile) but some of which, to modern sensibilities, may promote, rather than play off, stereotypes.

• Erasmus's lengthy collections of proverbs, the Adagia, established a vocabulary he and his contemporaries then used extensively and habitually: according to philosopher Heinz Kimmerle, it is necessary to know the explanations of various proverbs given by Erasmus's Adages to adequately understand many passages in Erasmus's and Luther's written debate on free will (see below).
• When Erasmus wrote of 'Judaism', he most frequently (though not always) was not referring to Jews: instead he referred to those Catholic Christians of his time, especially in the monastic lifestyle, who mistakenly promoted excessive external ritualism over interior piety, by analogy with Second Temple Judaism.
  • "Judaism I call not Jewish impiety, but prescriptions about external things, such as food, fasting, clothes, which to a certain degree resemble the rituals of the Jews."
  • Erasmus's counter-accusation to Spanish friars of "Judaizing" may have been particularly sharp and bold, given the prominent role that some friars with the Spanish Inquisition were playing in the lethal persecution of some conversos.

Terence J. Martin identifies an "Erasmian pattern" that the supposed (by the reader) otherness (of Turks, Lapplanders, Indians, Amerindians, Jews, and even women and heretics) "provides a foil against which the failures of Christian culture can be exposed and criticized."

• In a 1518 letter to John Fisher, Erasmus wrote: "The cunning of princes and the effrontery of the Roman curia can go no further; and it looks as though the state of the common people would soon be such that the tyranny of the Grand Turk would be more bearable."
• In De bello Turcico, Erasmus personifies that we should "kill the Turk, not the man.[...] If we really want to heave the Turks from our necks, we must first expel from our hearts a more loathsome race of Turks: avarice, ambition, the craving for power, self-satisfaction, impiety, extravagance, the love of pleasure, deceitfulness, anger, hatred, envy."

Pacifism

Peace, peaceableness, and peacemaking, in all spheres from the domestic to the religious to the political, were central distinctives (though with solid precedents) of Erasmus's writing on Christian living and his mystical theology: "the sum and summary of our religion is peace and unanimity". At the Nativity of Jesus "the angels sang not the glories of war, nor a song of triumph, but a hymn of peace":

He (Christ) conquered by gentleness; He conquered by kindness; he conquered by truth itself. [...] Long ago, he was called God of Powers, the 'Lord of Hosts/Armies'; for us he is called 'God of Peace'.

— Method of True Theology, 4

Erasmus was not an absolute pacifist but promoted political pacificism and religious Irenicism. Notable writings on irenicism include De Concordia, On the War with the Turks, The Education of a Christian Prince, On Restoring the Concord of the Church, and The Complaint of Peace. Erasmus's ecclesiology of peacemaking held that the church authorities had a divine mandate to settle religious disputes, in an as non-excluding way as possible, including by the preferably-minimal development of doctrine. It was especially important that princes be educated to be wise, because of the ease with which new rulers slip into wars for adventure or on impulse: Erasmus is direct: "What is a mistake in other people is a crime in the prince."

In The Complaint of Peace, Lady Peace insists on peace as the crux of Christian life and for understanding Christ:

"I give you my peace, I leave you my peace" (John 14:27). You hear what he leaves his people? Not horses, bodyguards, empire or riches – none of these. What then? He gives peace, leaves peace – peace with friends, peace with enemies.

— The Complaint of Peace

A historian has called him "The 16th Century's Pioneer of Peace Education and a Culture of Peace".

Erasmus's emphasis on peacemaking reflects a typical pre-occupation of medieval lay spirituality as historian John Bossy (as summarised by Eamon Duffy) puts it: "medieval Christianity had been fundamentally concerned with the creation and maintenance of peace in a violent world. 'Christianity' in medieval Europe denoted neither an ideology nor an institution, but a community of believers whose religious ideal—constantly aspired to if seldom attained—was peace and mutual love."

War

Historians have written that "references to conflict run like a red thread through the writings of Erasmus". Erasmus had a simple view of the renaissance state, where ultimately warfare was determined by single individuals: sovereign rulers (i.e. pope, emperor, king, duke, etc.) with malformed ambitions; so directing sovereigns towards inter-Christendom pacifism was thus a key practical prescription for peace, which in turn required a new curriculum for educating princes that did not encourage vainglorious milititarism.

Erasmus had experienced war as a child and was particularly concerned about wars between Christian kings, who should be brothers and not start wars; a theme in his book The Education of a Christian Prince. The longest entry in his Adages was #3,001 "War is sweet to those who have never tasted it" (Dulce bellum inexpertis from Pindar's Greek).

He promoted and was present at the Field of Cloth of Gold, and his wide-ranging correspondence frequently related to issues of peacemaking. He saw a key role of the Church in peacemaking by arbitration and mediation, and the office of the Pope was necessary to rein in tyrannical princes and bishops.

He questioned the practical usefulness and abuses of just war theory, further limiting it to feasible defensive actions with popular support and that "war should never be undertaken unless, as a last resort, it cannot be avoided". Appeasement should be considered. Defeat should be endured rather than fighting to the end. In his Adages he discusses (common translation) "A disadvantageous peace is better than a just war", which owes to Cicero and John Colet's "Better an unjust peace than the justest war." Expansionism could not be justified. Taxes to pay for war should cause the least possible hardship on the poor.

He hated sedition as, often, an excuse or cause of oppression.

Erasmus was highly critical of the warlike way of important European princes of his era, including some princes of the church. He described these princes as corrupt and greedy. Erasmus believed that these princes "collude in a game, of which the outcome is to exhaust and oppress the commonwealth". Further, "'When princes purpose to exhaust a commonwealth, they speak of a just war; when they unite for that object, they call it peace." He spoke more freely about this matter in letters sent to his friends like Thomas More, Beatus Rhenanus and Adrianus Barlandus: a particular target of his criticisms was the Emperor Maximilian I, whom Erasmus blamed for allegedly preventing the Netherlands from signing a peace treaty with Guelders and other schemes to cause wars to extract money from his subjects.

One of his approaches was to send and publish congratulatory and lionising letters to princes who, though in a position of strength, negotiated peace with neighbours, such as King Sigismund I the Old of Poland in 1527.

Erasmus "constantly and consistently" opposed the mooted idea of a Christian "universal monarch" with an over-extended empire who could supposedly defeat the Ottoman forces: such universalism did not "hold any promise of generating less conflict than the existing political plurality"; instead, advocating concord between princes, both temporal and spiritual. The spiritual princes, by their arbitration and mediation do not "threaten political plurality, but acts as its defender."

Intra-Christian religious toleration

He referred to his irenical disposition in the Preface to On Free Will as a "secret inclination of nature" that would make him even prefer the views of the Sceptics over intolerant assertions, though he sharply distinguished adiaphora from what was uncontentiously explicit in the New Testament or absolutely mandated by Church teaching. Concord demanded unity and assent: Erasmus was anti-sectarian as well as non-sectarian. To follow the law of love, our intellects must be humble and friendly when making any assertions: he called contention "earthly, beastly, demonic" and a good-enough reason to reject a teacher or their followers. In Melanchthon's view, Erasmus taught charity, not faith. The centrality of Christian concord to Erasmus's theology contrasted with the insistence of Martin Luther and, for example, later English Puritans, that (Protestant) truth naturally would create discord and opposition.

Certain works of Erasmus laid a foundation for religious toleration of private opinions and ecumenism. For example, in De libero arbitrio, opposing particular views of Martin Luther, Erasmus noted that religious disputants should be temperate in their language "because in this way the truth, which is often lost amidst too much wrangling may be more surely perceived". Gary Remer writes, "Like Cicero, Erasmus concludes that truth is furthered by a more harmonious relationship between interlocutors."

In a letter to Cardinal Lorenzo Campeggio, Erasmus lobbied diplomatically for toleration: "If the sects could be tolerated under certain conditions (as the Bohemians pretend), it would, I admit, be a grievous misfortune, but one more endurable than war." But the same dedication to avoiding conflict and bloodshed should be shown by those tempted to join (anti-popist) sects:

Perhaps evil rulers should sometimes be tolerated. We owe some respect to the memory of those whose places we think of them as occupying. Their titles have some claim on us. We should not seek to put matters right if there is a real possibility that the cure may prove worse than the disease.

— Erasmus, The Sileni of Alcibiades (1517)

Heresy and sedition

Erasmus had been privately involved in early attempts to protect Luther and his sympathisers from charges of heresy. Erasmus wrote Inquisitio de fide to say that the Lutherans (of 1523) were not formally heretics: he pushed back against the willingness of some theologians to cry heresy fast in order to enforce their views in universities and at inquisitions.

For Erasmus, punishable heresy had to involve fractiously, dangerously, and publicly agitating against essential doctrines relating to Christ (i.e., blasphemy), with malice, depravity, obstinacy. As with St Theodore the Studite, Erasmus was against the death penalty merely for private or peaceable heresy or for dissent on non-essentials: "It is better to cure a sick man than to kill him." The Church, he said, has the duty to protect believers and convert or heal heretics; he invoked Jesus' parable of the wheat and tares.

Erasmus's pacificism included a particular dislike for sedition, which caused warfare:

It was the duty of the leaders of this [reforming] movement, if Christ was their goal, to refrain not only from vice, but even from every appearance of evil; and to offer not the slightest stumbling block to the Gospel, studiously avoiding even practices which, although allowed, are yet not expedient. Above all they should have guarded against all sedition.

— Letter to Martin Bucer

Erasmus allowed the death penalty against violent seditionists to prevent bloodshed and war: he allowed that the state has the right to execute those who are a necessary danger to public order—whether heretic or orthodox—but noted (e.g., to Natalis Beda) that Augustine had been against the execution of even violent Donatists: Johannes Trapman states that Erasmus's endorsement of suppression of the Anabaptists springs from their refusal to heed magistrates and the criminal violence of the Münster rebellion, not because of their heretical views on baptism. Despite these concessions to state power, Erasmus suggested that religious persecution could still be challenged as inexpedient (ineffective).

Outsiders

Most of his political writing focused on peace within Christendom with almost a sole focus on Europe. In 1516, Erasmus wrote, "It is the part of a Christian prince to regard no one as an outsider unless he is a nonbeliever, and even on them he should inflict no harm", which entails not attacking outsiders, not taking their riches, not subjecting them to political rule, no forced conversions, and keeping promises made to them.

In common with his times, Erasmus regarded the Jewish and Islamic religions as Christian heresies (and therefore competitors to orthodox Christianity) rather than separate religions, using the inclusive term half-Christian for the latter.

However, there is a wide range of scholarly opinion on the extent and nature of antisemitic and anti-Muslim prejudice in his writings: historian Nathan Ron has found his writing to be harsh and racial in its implications, with contempt and hostility to Islam.

Turks

In his last decade, he involved himself in the public policy debate on war with the Ottoman Empire, which was then invading Western Europe, notably in his book On the war against the Turks (1530), as the "reckless and extravagant" Pope Leo X had in previous decades promoted going on the offensive with a new crusade. Erasmus reworked Luther's rhetoric that the invading Turks represent God's judgement of decadent Christendom, but without Luther's fatalism: Erasmus not only accused Western leaders of kingdom-threatening hypocrisy, he reworked a remedy already decreed by the Fifth Council of the Lateran: anti-expansionist moral reforms by Europe's disunited leaders as a necessary unitive political step before any aggressive warfare against the Ottoman threat, reforms which might themselves, if sincere, prevent both the internecine and foreign warfare.

Jews

Erasmus perceived and championed strong Hellenistic rather than exclusively Hebraic influences on the intellectual milieux of Jesus, Paul, and the early church: "If only the Christian church did not attach so much importance to the Old Testament!" Perhaps the only Jewish book he published was his loose translation of the first century Hellenistic-Judaic On the Sovereignty of Reason, better known as 4 Maccabees.

Erasmus's pervasive anti-ceremonialism treated the early Church debates on circumcision, food, and special days as manifestations of cultural chauvinism by the initial Jewish Christians in Antioch.

While many humanists, from Pico della Mirandola to Johannes Reuchlin, were intrigued by Jewish mysticism, Erasmus came to dislike it: "I see them as a nation full of most tedious fabrications, who spread a kind of fog over everything, Talmud, Cabbala, Tetragrammaton, Gates of Light, words, words, words. I would rather have Christ mixed up with Scotus than with that rubbish of theirs."

In his Paraphrase on Romans, Erasmus voiced, as Paul, the "secret" that in the end times, "all of the Israelites will be restored to salvation" and accept Christ as their Messiah, "although now part of them have fallen away from it".

Several scholars have identified cases where Erasmus's comments appear to go beyond theological anti-Judaism into slurs or approving certain anti-semitic policies, though there is some controversy.

Slaves

On the subject of slavery, Erasmus characteristically treated it in passing under the topic of tyranny: Christians were not allowed to be tyrants, which slave-owning required, but especially not to be the masters of other Christians. Erasmus had various other piecemeal arguments against slavery: for example, that it was not legitimate to enslave people taken in an unjust war; but it was not a subject that occupied him. However, his belief that "nature created all men free" (and slavery was imposed) was a rejection of Aristotle's category of natural slaves.

Politics

Erasmus promoted the idea that a prince rules with the consent of his people, notably in his book The Education of a Christian Prince (and, through More, in the book Utopia, which proposed a "republic completely lacking sovereignty"). He may have been influenced by the Brabantine custom of an incoming ruler being officially told of his duties and welcomed: the Joyous Entry was a kind of contract. A monarchy should not be absolute: it should be "checked and diluted with a mixture of aristocracy and democracy to prevent it ever breaking out into tyranny". The same considerations applied to church princes.

Erasmus contrasts the Christian Prince with the Tyrant, who has no love from the people, will be surrounded by flatterers, and can expect no loyalty or peace. Unspoken in Erasmus's views may have been the idea that the people can remove a tyrant; however, espousing this explicitly could expose people to capital charges of sedition or treason. Erasmus typically limited his political discussion to what could be couched as personal faith and morality by or between Christians, his business as a doctor of theology.

He produced a Latin edition of Plutarch's "How to tell a flatterer from a friend" (Πῶς ἄν τις διακρίνειε τὸν κόλακα τοῦ φίλου) with an introductory dedication to Henry VIII, humorously over-praising Henry while raising the serious concern.

Legacy

Since the origin of Christianity there have been perhaps only two other men—St Augustine and Voltaire—whose influence can be paralleled with Erasmus.

— W.S. Lily, Renaissance Types

Erasmus was much later given the sobriquet "Prince of the Humanists", and has been called "the crowning glory of the Christian humanists". He has also been called "the most illustrious rhetorician and educationalist of the Renaissance".

By the 1570s, "Everyone had assimilated Erasmus to one extent or another."

— Christophe Ocker

However, at times he has been viciously criticised, his works suppressed, his expertise corralled, his writings misinterpreted, his thought demonised, and his legacy marginalised. He was never judged and declared a heretic by the Catholic Church, during his lifetime or after: a semi-secret trial in Vallodolid Spain, in 1527 found him not to be a heretic, and he was sponsored and protected by Popes and Bishops. In 1531 the prestigious theology faculty of the University of Paris censured over 100 propositions they claimed were in his writings, however he denied the accuracy of the interpretations and the logic of the conclusions.

Exhumation

In 1928, the site of Erasmus's grave was dug up, and a body identified in the bones and examined. In 1974, remains were dug up in a slightly different location, accompanied by an Erasmus medal. Both remains have been claimed to be Erasmus'. However, it is possible neither is. The first bones were taller than expected and syphilitic; the second fitted the reported size and age but were accidentally smashed during photography.

Personal

Name used

• The European Erasmus Programme of exchange students within the European Union is named after him.
  • The original Erasmus Programme scholarships enable European students to spend up to a year of their university courses in a university in another European country, commemorating Erasmus's impulse to travel.
  • The European Union cites the successor Erasmus+ programme as a "key achievement": "Almost 640,000 people studied, trained or volunteered abroad in 2020."
  • The parallel Erasmus Mundus project is aimed at attracting non-European students to study in Europe.
• The Erasmus Prize is one of Europe's foremost recognitions for culture, society or social science. It was won by Wikipedia in 2015.
• The Erasmus Lectures are an annual lecture on religious subjects, given by prominent Christian (mainly Catholic) and Jewish intellectuals, most notably by Joseph Ratzinger in 1988.
• A peer-reviewed annual scholarly journal Erasmus Studies has been produced since 1981.
• Rotterdam has the Erasmus University Rotterdam:
  • It has the Erasmus Institute for Philosophy and Economics (EIPE), which produces the Erasmus Journal of Philosophy and Economics
  • Erasmus University College is an "international, interdisciplinary Bachelor of Science programme in Liberal Arts and Sciences."
• From 1997 to 2008, the American University of Notre Dame had an Erasmus Institute.
• The Erasmus Building in Luxembourg was completed in 1988 as the first addition to the headquarters of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). The building houses the chambers of the judges of the CJEU's General Court and three courtrooms. It is next to the Thomas More Building.
• Rotterdam has an Erasmus Bridge.
• Queens' College, Cambridge, has an Erasmus Tower, Erasmus Building and an Erasmus Room. Until the early 20th century, Queens' College used to have a corkscrew that was purported to be "Erasmus's corkscrew", which was a third of a metre long; as of 1987, the college still had what it calls "Erasmus's chair".
• Several schools, faculties and universities in the Netherlands and Belgium are named after him, as is Erasmus Hall in Brooklyn, New York, US.

Health

Erasmus was a quite sickly man and frequently worked from his sickbed. As a teenager he contracted Quartan fever, a non-lethal type of malaria which recurred numerous times for the rest of his life: he attributed his survival to the intercession of St Genevieve. His digestion gave him trouble: he was intolerant of fish, beer and some wines, which were the standard diet for members of religious orders; he eventually died following an attack of dysentery.

In Cambridge he was ill, possibly with the English sweating sickness. He suffered kidney stones from his time in Venice and, in late life, with gout In 1514, he suffered a fall from his horse and injured his back.

In 1528 he suffered recurrent episodes of the stone, "from which he almost died." In 1529 his self-removal from Basel was delayed because of headcold and fever. In 1530 while travelling he suffered some near-fatal illness which several doctors diagnosed as the plague (which had killed his parents) but several others diagnosed as not the plague.

Various illnesses have been diagnosed of the skeletons claimed to be his, including pustulotic arthro-osteitis, syphilis or yaws. Other doctors have diagnosed from his written descriptions ailments such as rheumatoid arthritis, enteric rheumatism and spondylarthritis.

Clothing

Until Erasmus received his 1505 and 1517 Papal dispensations to wear clerical garb, he wore versions of the local habit of his order, the Canons regular of St Augustine, Chapter of Sion, which varied by region and house, unless travelling: in general, a white or perhaps black cassock with linen and lace choir rochet for liturgical contexts, or otherwise with white sarotium (scarf) (over left shoulder), or almuce (cape), perhaps with an asymmetrical black cope of cloth or sheepskin (Latin: cacullae) or long black cloak.

From 1505, and certainly after 1517, he dressed as a scholar-priest. He preferred warm and soft garments: according to one source, he arranged for his clothing to be stuffed with fur to protect him against the cold, and his habit counted with a collar of fur which usually covered his nape.

All Erasmus's portraits show him wearing a knitted scholar's bonnet.

Signet ring and personal motto

Erasmus chose the Roman god of borders and boundaries Terminus as a personal symbol and had a signet ring with a herm he thought depicted Terminus carved into a carnelian. The herm was presented to him in Rome by his student Alexander Stewart and in reality depicted the Greek god Dionysus. The ring was also depicted in a portrait of his by the Flemish painter Quentin Matsys.

The herm became part of the Erasmus branding at Froben, and is on his tombstone. In the early 1530s, Erasmus was portrayed as Terminus by Hans Holbein the Younger.

The diamond ring Erasmus wears in the famous Holbein portrait was a gift from his long-time friend and correspondent, Cardinal Lorenzo Campeggio, as a "memorial of our friendship" ("amicitiae nostrae noμνημόσυνον").

He chose Concedo Nulli ("I concede to no-one") as his personal motto. The obverse of the medal by Quintin Matsys featured the Terminus herm. Mottoes on medals, along the circumference, included "A better picture of Erasmus is shown in his writing", and "Contemplate the end of a long life" and Horace's "Death is the ultimate boundary of things," which re-casts the motto as a memento mori. There were anachronistic claims that his motto was a favourable nod to Luther's "Here I stand" which Erasmus denied.

In popular culture

Visual representations

Erasmus frequently gifted portraits and medals with his image to friends and patrons.

• Hans Holbein painted him at least three times and perhaps as many as seven, some of the Holbein portraits of Erasmus surviving only in copies by other artists. Holbein's three profile portraits – two (nearly identical) profile portraits and one three-quarters-view portrait – were all painted in the same year, 1523. Erasmus used the Holbein portraits as gifts for his friends in England, such as William Warham, the Archbishop of Canterbury. (Writing in a letter to Warham regarding the gift portrait, Erasmus quipped that "he might have something of Erasmus should God call him from this place.") Erasmus spoke favourably of Holbein as an artist and person but was later critical, accusing him of sponging off various patrons whom Erasmus had recommended, for purposes more of monetary gain than artistic endeavour. There were scores of copies of these portraits made in Erasmus's time. Holbein's 1532 profile woodcut was particularly lauded by those who knew Erasmus.
• Albrecht Dürer also produced portraits of Erasmus, whom he met three times, in the form of an engraving of 1526 and a preliminary charcoal sketch. Concerning the former Erasmus was unimpressed, declaring it an unfavorable likeness of him, perhaps because around 1525 he was suffering severely from kidney stones. Nevertheless, Erasmus and Dürer maintained a close friendship, with Dürer going so far as to solicit Erasmus's support for the Lutheran cause, which Erasmus politely declined. Erasmus wrote a glowing encomium about the artist, likening him to famous Greek painter of antiquity Apelles. Erasmus was deeply affected by his death in 1528.
• Quentin Matsys produced the earliest known portraits of Erasmus, including an oil painting from life in 1517 (which had to be delayed as Erasmus's pain distorted his face) and a medal in 1519.
• In 1622, Hendrick de Keyser cast a statue of Erasmus in (gilt) bronze replacing an earlier stone version from 1557, itself replacing a wooden one of 1549, possibly a gift from the City of Basel. This was set up in the public square in Rotterdam, and today may be found outside the St. Lawrence Church. It is the oldest bronze statue in the Netherlands.
• In 1790, Georg Wilhelm Göbel struck commemorative medals.'
• Canterbury Cathedral, England has a statue of Erasmus on the North Face, placed in 1870.
• The Whitechapel Gallery in London has a weathervane depicting Erasmus riding back-to-front on a horse, by Rodney Graham in 2009.

Interest in developments of visual arts or artists is notably absent in Erasmus's writing, despite moving in circles where he shared friends and patron with famous artists: for example, in Venice Erasmus's friend Giulio Camillo worked with Titian. Erasmus was personal friends of Hans Holbein and Albrecht Dürer.

In literature and media

• Renaissance composer Benedictus Appenzeller wrote a five-part motet Plangite Pierides (Lament on the Death of Erasmus) over a cantus firmus Cecidit corona capitis nostri (Lam. 5:16), score available Open Source. Appenzeller was part of the court of dowager Queen Mary of Hungary, whose invitation in 1535 of haven in Brabant Erasmus had contingently accepted the year before his death. It has been recorded several times: by Konrad Ruhland with Capella Antiqua München and by Jordi Savall with La Capella Reial De Catalunya
  • The Savall recording Erasmus – Praise of Folly is a program of 16th century music, notably la folia, and recitation of famous excerpts from Erasmus, Luther, etc. and released in multiple European languages.
• Erasmus is a character in the comic Act III, scene 1, of the Elizabethan play Sir Thomas More, though not in the passages attributed to Shakespeare.
  • In the play, More is just about to be made Lord Chancellor; visiting famous poet Erasmus is meeting him for the first time; judge More plays a merry trick ("I'll see if great Erasmus can distinguish merit and outward ceremony") by disguising a rough servant as himself; he pretends to be the porter and speaks Latin to Erasmus outside; Erasmus launches into a Latin speech directed to the fake More, but repeatedly questions that this could, in fact, be More; More reveals himself; they bond over mirth and love of poetry:

    More: Thus you see,
    My loving learned friends, how far respect
    Waits often on the ceremonious train
    Of base illiterate wealth, whilst men of schools,
    Shrouded in poverty, are counted fools.
    Pardon, thou reverent German, I have mixed
    So slight a jest to the fair entertainment
    Of thy most worthy self;
    ...
    Erasmus: Study should be the saddest time of life.
    The rest a sport exempt from thought of strife.

• Actor Ken Bones portrays Erasmus in David Starkey's 2009 documentary series Henry VIII: The Mind of a Tyrant