Based on a video lecture. Watch here (in russian)

Erasmus of Rotterdam is one of my favourite figures in world history. A great humanist, forerunner of the Reformation, a man who could not abide fanaticism in any form, and who left a deep mark on the intellectual life of Europe. He was, in fact, the author of one of the first secular bestsellers in European history.

Good material on Erasmus in Russian is scarce. The best I found is a programme from the Kultura channel. The format of “philosophy in five minutes” exists for students who need to pass an exam without doing the reading. So: a proper treatment today, covering biography, ideas, and texts.

Origins: A History Shrouded in Obscurity

The early biography of Erasmus is genuinely obscure. Neither his place nor his year of birth can be established with certainty.

Two dates: 1466 or 1469. Soviet scholarship preferred 1466; 1469 now dominates. Two places: Rotterdam, or Gouda, the famous cheese town, which is right next door.

Despite being Dutch by birth, Erasmus never considered himself a Dutch patriot. He died in Basel and spent his life moving between England, Italy, and elsewhere. Spain was the only country he never visited. A genuine cosmopolitan, a citizen of Europe.

This rootlessness started at birth: Erasmus was the illegitimate son of a priest. A deeply precarious position.

Many sources, including Natalia Basovskaya in an interview with Venediktov, repeated a romantic story: Erasmus’s father wanted to marry his beloved, was sent to Rome by his parents to study theology, received a letter announcing her death, took holy orders in grief, returned home, and discovered she was alive and had borne him a son. Beautiful. One problem: Erasmus had an older brother, two or three years his senior. If he was not the firstborn, the whole romantic construction collapses. This story was partly circulated by Erasmus himself, partly by later biographers. Today it is considered unreliable.

The full name, Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus, took its final form only in 1496. According to Huizinga, the leading 20th-century biographer of Erasmus, the stress in Roterodamus falls on the third syllable from the end.

Both parents died of plague. Erasmus and his older brother Peter were left with guardians who, by his own later account, were not enthusiastic about their duties and wanted to pack both boys off to a monastery.

Monastery, Paris, and Early Disappointments

Erasmus attends school without much enthusiasm, though the mention of ancient authors lights something up in him. He writes poetry, he writes letters, vast quantities of earnest youthful letters. In 1487–1488 he lives in Steyn monastery, where he finally has access to a substantial library. He hates the monastic routine: grey days, no ancient authors, no possibility of simply reading and writing. In 1492 he takes holy orders and immediately begins angling for assignments, postings, any reason to leave.

He becomes secretary to the Bishop of Cambrai. He works with documents. He does not enjoy it. In 1495 the bishop approves a trip to Paris to pursue a doctorate in theology. Erasmus sets off with enthusiasm and quickly discovers: first, the degree takes between eight and fifteen years; second, it requires study according to scholastic tradition. Scholasticism is precisely what Erasmus inwardly resisted, even though he had been formed by it. The model of scholasticism is Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica: a hierarchical logical system designed to confirm the truth of Christian doctrine by means of reason. Erasmus does not stay.

How Intellectuals Survived in the Sixteenth Century

In Paris, Erasmus works as a tutor: Latin and theology for the children of wealthy families. He lives modestly. In 1499 one of his pupils, William Blount, Lord Mountjoy, invites him to England. There Erasmus meets people who will become his closest friends: Thomas Linacre, John Colet, and above all Thomas More, author of Utopia. Erasmus wrote that there was nothing more joyful than watching More’s smile.

When Erasmus left England, a catastrophe occurred. To understand why it hit him so hard, one has to understand how intellectuals survived at the time. Living by mental labour was genuinely difficult. Spinoza, living a century later, ground lenses for a living and died from the occupation (weak lungs, tuberculosis).

A contemporary intellectual had exactly two paths. First: hold a church or state position. Second: receive money from a patron, dedicate works to them in exchange for support. Ideally both at once. A market economy in the modern sense did not exist: selling a book and living off the proceeds was virtually impossible, though Erasmus eventually managed it.

At the English customs post, his money was confiscated. He had been told, both by Colet and Mountjoy, that foreign currency could be exported freely. The customs officers explained that it could not. They left him almost nothing. Erasmus described this in letters with such fury that it reads like an account of armed robbery. In a sense, it was. Poverty became the leitmotif of his life.

To survive, he wrote commissioned verse and pamphlets. He published a collection of proverbs, the Adages, which brought him recognition but did not solve his financial problems. He kept searching for patronage for a very long time.

One important detail: he wrote everything in Latin. The humanists of the Northern Renaissance were trying to restore Latin as the shared intellectual language of Europe. Latin was the language of monasteries and the Catholic Church; it was in demand. Though later scholars sometimes wondered what might have been had Erasmus written in other languages — Latin is somewhat dry, and does not give his literary gifts room to breathe fully.

The Praise of Folly: A Trifle That Changed History

The next significant year is 1509. Erasmus is sailing to England to visit Thomas More and, over the course of a week at sea, writes The Praise of Folly. By cruel irony, this is his most famous work. Erasmus always called it a trifle: written in a week as a gift for a friend. There is also a wordplay: More in Greek is close to Moria, which means folly.

This trifle turned out to have the greatest influence on subsequent generations of any work Erasmus ever wrote.

The structure is simple: Folly recites an ode to herself, explaining that she is responsible for all social phenomena. And Erasmus proceeds to go after everything.

On theologians:

At their own pleasure they expound the most sacred and secret mysteries… Other questions, truly worthy of great theologians: at what precise moment did the divine birth take place? Could god have taken the form of a woman, the devil, an ass, a gourd, or a stone? And if he had turned into a gourd, could that gourd have preached, performed miracles, and been crucified?

He is mocking the scholastic tradition built around answering questions like how many angels fit on the head of a pin. All this from someone who remained a faithful Catholic to the end. His books went into the Index of Forbidden Books, and he stayed a Catholic. The criticism was fierce, but it came from inside.

On lawyers:

Among the learned, lawyers claim the first place and are distinguished by the highest self-satisfaction. Meanwhile they diligently roll their Sisyphean stone, quoting hundreds of laws in one breath, caring not at all whether they have any relevance to the case, piling glosses on glosses and commentaries on commentaries, so that their work appears the most difficult of all.

I find myself not quite agreeing with Erasmus here: legal technique has value, and glosses arise for reasons — law reflects the realities of the world in which we live. But that is a separate conversation.

On philosophers — this one, I think, is precisely on target:

Knowing nothing in reality, they imagine they know everything, and cannot even know themselves; often they do not notice the ditches and stones at their own feet.

On kings:

They are convinced they are honestly performing their monarchical duty if they hunt diligently, keep fine horses, sell offices and titles to their advantage, and daily devise new means of draining the citizens’ wealth.

The Praise of Folly became a sensation. It is short, readable in an evening, funny and sharp. Erasmus became the leading intellectual of Europe overnight.

The Colloquies: Opposition Literature for Children

In 1518 a second book appears: the Colloquies. Huizinga noted that Erasmus disliked the feeling of completion: he kept adding to the Colloquies, which went through an enormous number of editions.

The genre is pedagogical: dialogues of varying wit, good for learning to read Latin. Erasmus thought seriously about education. His principle: love of a subject comes through love of the teacher. This sounds like a modern pedagogical commonplace — he was saying it in the sixteenth century.

The satire is present throughout. Here is a dialogue on indulgences. Arnold has returned from a pilgrimage; Cornelius asks whether everyone came back safely:

“All except three. One died on the very day of departure… another died in Rome… the third was left in Florence, already beyond hope. I imagine he is now in heaven.” “Was he so devout?” “Not at all, the most worthless of men!” “Then how do you account for this?” “He had stuffed his bag to the brim with the most generous indulgences.”

This is in a book intended for children. Consider the degree of free-thinking involved. From someone who depended on the Catholic Church for his livelihood, who received commissions from bishops and taught at the University of Leuven.

And the anti-war dialogue, Hanno and Thrasymachus. Thrasymachus has returned from war, having killed and looted. Hanno says:

“I do not see how you can cleanse yourself from such pollution unless you go to Rome.” “I know a shorter road.” “Which?” “I’ll go to the Dominicans and get everything settled cheaply.” “Even for sacrilege?” “Even if I had robbed Christ himself and cut off his head as well, their indulgences are so generous and their power to arrange everything so complete.”

Pure opposition, in a children’s textbook.

The Theological Programme: Back to Scripture

In 1500, Erasmus begins studying Greek intensively. By 1502 he writes fluently. Greek underpins his major works: the translation of the New Testament, translations of Jerome, the creator of the Vulgate (the vernacular, that is, widely accessible, Latin Bible; “vulgate” and “vulgar” share the same root).

In this period his theological programme takes shape: back to Scripture. This sounds very much like Luther, and not by accident. Erasmus calls for reading Scripture and the Church Fathers — Jerome, Ambrose, Augustine above all — and opposes treating liturgy as mechanical ritual. He does not propose abandoning icons, tradition, or the saints; he proposes building one’s life from Scripture rather than from the later accretions that had accumulated in the Catholic Church.

At the same time he writes the Enchiridion, or Handbook of the Christian Soldier, a kind of catechism that carried considerable weight in the Christian world.

Despite his success, Erasmus keeps wandering. Many researchers find signs of clinical depression in his letters: constant anxiety, melancholy, unsettledness. The humour and self-irony never leave him. But his was a genuinely difficult life.

Erasmus and Luther: The Dispute over Free Will

Now for the most interesting part: the relationship between Erasmus and Luther.

Timeline: 1517, the Ninety-Five Theses. 1521, the Diet of Worms, Luther declared a heretic, his books ordered burned, he goes into hiding and translates the Bible into German. Luther is, among other things, one of the founders of literary German.

In 1519, Luther writes to Erasmus with great deference. Erasmus initially supported Luther’s theses. But as he came to know Luther better, he understood: Luther was a fanatic. And fanaticism was the one thing Erasmus could not abide in any form. Luther was prepared to die and to shed others’ blood for the victory of his idea. For Erasmus this was unacceptable. Relations broke down irreparably.

Luther later called Erasmus a “cowardly pacifist,” using it as an insult. Luther was educated, brilliant with languages, but categorically intolerant of any disagreement. An absolute fanatic. Apparently these are the people history pushes forward.

Erasmus was pressured from both sides: the Catholic Church wanted him to denounce Luther publicly; the Protestants expected him to join them any day. He did neither. Under sustained pressure, he eventually wrote against Luther — but on a point where they genuinely disagreed: free will.

In 1524, Erasmus publishes the Diatribe on Free Will. Luther responds first with an angry letter, then, a year later, with On the Bondage of the Will.

The core disagreement: Erasmus held that human free will exists and matters substantially, because without it the concept of sin loses all meaning. Luther held that the human being is saved by faith alone and by divine grace alone, and that free will is illusory. Both draw on Augustine, but from different periods of his thought. This dispute has no definitive resolution. The question of free will remains open in contemporary science: Sapolsky, Harris, and other biological determinists deny it; philosophers continue arguing.

In 1526, Erasmus states plainly: “I have never fallen away from the Catholic Church.” He picks a side. Both sides accused him of cowardice, of being unable to commit. They said he had laid the egg that Zwingli and Luther hatched.

Final Years

In 1535, Thomas More is executed. Henry VIII, a man who had, by all accounts, completely lost his bearings, killed More for refusing to endorse yet another royal divorce. (The mnemonic for Henry’s wives: divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived.) More was Erasmus’s closest friend. This he could not recover from.

On 12 July 1536, after prolonged illness, Erasmus died in Basel. He had lived approximately 67 to 70 years, depending on which birth date one accepts.

There is a curious paradox here. Almost everything Erasmus put his hand to looks incomplete or inconclusive: not a great theologian, not a great writer, not a great satirist, not a great public figure. He did not support the Reformation. Imagine if he had: he would be an icon in Lutheran countries, in England, Scandinavia. He did not, because he was a principled pacifist and humanist, and remained so throughout his life.

And yet direct lines run from him to Voltaire, to Rousseau, to the French and English Enlightenment. He was a shaper of minds, could have changed the world with a word, and chose not to, staying above the conflict. A remarkable person.

Erasmus in Soviet Historiography

A final note: how Soviet historiography read Erasmus.

Despite the fact that Erasmus was a believing Catholic who never once expressed doubt in his faith, he was widely celebrated in the Soviet Union. There is an article by A.L. Subbotin in a book titled From Erasmus of Rotterdam to Bertrand Russell: The Problem of Bourgeois Atheism and Free Thought (1966). Read that again: a fervent Christian placed in the same volume as Bertrand Russell, who wrote Why I Am Not a Christian.

What does Subbotin write?

That is why the name of Erasmus of Rotterdam is so dear and close to us — the outstanding humanist scholar who, at the very dawn of the modern era, laid the foundations of those traditions of free thought and intellectualism, humanised science and moral ideology, rational community life and peaceable politics, without which we cannot conceive of either our present or our future.

The anti-clerical dimension is extracted and elevated: the criticism of empty ritual, greedy bishops. The fact that Erasmus made an enormous contribution to the development of Western theological thought is quietly set aside.

This is a fascinating moment: from a complete person, the convenient part is taken and made absolute. Erasmus valued and respected across Europe — even by a homeland he did not always acknowledge. His Praise of Folly, written in a week as a gift for a friend, reads freshly today.