we put in our churches, it is an anachronism. Bembo, Sadoleto and the rest write purely in a dead language. Erasmus’s Latin was a living and spoken tongue. Though Erasmus had passed nearly all his life in England, France and Germany, his conversation was Latin; and the language in which he talked about common things he wrote. Hence the spontaneity and naturalness of his page, its flavour of life and not of books. He writes from himself, and not out of Cicero. Hence, too, he spoiled nothing by anxious revision in terror lest some phrase not of the golden age should escape from his pen. He confesses apologetically to Christopher Longolius (Ep. iii. 63; 402) that it was his habit to extemporize all he wrote, and that this habit was incorrigible; “effundo verius quam scribo omnia.” He complains that much reading of the works of St Jerome had spoiled his Latin; but, as Scaliger says (Scaliga 2a), “Erasmus’s language is better than St Jerome’s.” The same critic, however, thought Erasmus would have done better “if he had kept more closely to the classical models.”
In the annals of classical learning Erasmus may be regarded as constituting an intermediate stage between the humanists of the Latin Renaissance and the learned men of the age of Greek scholarship, between Angelo Poliziano and Joseph Scaliger. Erasmus, though justly styled by Muretus (Varr. Lectt. 7, 15) “eruditus sane vir, ac multae lectionis,” was not a “learned” man in the special sense of the word—not an “érudit.” He was more than this; he was the “man of letters”—the first who had appeared in Europe since the fall of the Roman empire. His acquirements were vast, and they were all brought to bear upon the life of his day. He did not make a study apart of antiquity for its own sake, but used it as an instrument of culture. He did not worship, imitate and reproduce the classics, like the Latin humanists who preceded him; he did not master them and reduce them to a special science, as did the French Hellenists who succeeded him. He edited many authors, it is true, but he had neither the means of forming a text, nor did he attempt to do so. In editing a father, or a classic, he had in view the practical utility of the general reader, not the accuracy required by the gild of scholars. “His Jerome,” says J. Scaliger, “is full of sad blunders” (Scaliga 2a). Even Julien Garnier could discover that Erasmus “falls in his haste into grievous error in his Latin version of St Basil, though his Latinity is superior to that of the other translators” (Pref. in Opp. St. Bas., 1721). It must be remembered that the commercial interests of Froben’s press led to the introduction of Erasmus’s name on many a title page when he had little to do with the book, e.g. the Latin Josephus of 1524 to which Erasmus only contributed one translation of 14 pages; or the Aristotle of 1531, of which Simon Grynaeus was the real editor. Where Erasmus excelled was in prefaces—not philological introductions to each author, but spirited appeals to the interest of the general reader, showing how an ancient book might be made to minister to modern spiritual demands.
Of Erasmus’s works the Greek Testament is the most memorable. It has no title to be considered as a work of learning or scholarship, yet its influence upon opinion was profound and durable. It contributed more to the liberation of the human mind from the thraldom of the clergy than all the uproar and rage of Luther’s many pamphlets. As an edition of the Greek Testament it has no critical value. But it was the first, and it revealed the fact that the Vulgate, the Bible of the church, was not only a second-hand document, but in places an erroneous document. A shock was thus given to the credit of the clergy in the province of literature, equal to that which was given in the province of science by the astronomical discoveries of the 17th century. Even if Erasmus had had at his disposal the MSS. subsidia for forming a text, he had not the critical skill required to use them. He had at hand a few late Basel MSS., one of which he sent straight to press, correcting them in places by collations of others which had been sent to him by Colet in England. In four reprints, 1519, 1522, 1527, 1535, Erasmus gradually weeded out many of the typographical errors of his first edition, but the text remained essentially such as he had first printed it. The Greek text indeed was only a part of his scheme. An important feature of the volume was the new Latin version, the original being placed alongside as a guarantee of the translator’s good faith. This translation, with the justificatory notes which accompanied it, though not itself a work of critical scholarship, became the starting-point of modern exegetical science. Erasmus did nothing to solve the problem, but to him belongs the honour of having first propounded it.
Besides translating and editing the New Testament, Erasmus paraphrased the whole, except the Apocalypse, between 1517 and 1524. The paraphrases were received with great applause, even by those who had little appreciation for Erasmus. In England a translation of them made in 1548 was ordered to be placed in all parish churches beside the Bible. His correspondence is perhaps the part of his works which has the most permanent value; it comprises about 3000 letters, which form an important source for the history of that period. For the same purpose his Colloquia may be consulted. They are a series of dialogues, written first for pupils in the early Paris days as formulae of polite address, but afterwards expanded into lively conversations, in which many of the topics of the day are discussed. Later in the century they were read in schools, and some of Shakespeare’s lines are direct reminiscences of Erasmus.
His complete works have been printed twice; by the Froben firm under the direction of his literary executors (9 vols., Basel, 1540); and by Leclerc at Leiden (11 vols., 1703–1706). For his life the chief contemporary sources are a Compendium vitae written by himself in 1524, and a sketch prefixed by Beatus Rhenanus to the Basel edition of 1540. Of his writings he gives an account in his Catalogus lucubrationum, composed first in January 1523 and enlarged in September 1524; and also in a letter to Hector Boece of Aberdeen, written in 1530. An elaborate bibliography, entitled Bibliotheca Erasmiana, was undertaken by the officials of the Ghent University Library; it is divided into three sections, for Erasmus’s writings, the books he edited, and the literature about him. Listes sommaires were issued in 1893; and since 1897 the completed volumes have been appearing at intervals. There is an excellent sketch of Erasmus’s life down to 1519 in F. Seebohm’s Oxford Reformers (3rd ed., 1887); and of the many biographies those by S. Knight (1726), J. Jortin (2 vols., 1758–1760) and R. B. Drummond (2 vols., 1873) may be mentioned. There are also two volumes (1901–1904) of translations by F. M. Nichols from Erasmus’s letters down to 1517, with an ample commentary which amounts almost to a biography; and an edition of the letters, in Latin, was begun by the Oxford University Press in 1906 (vol. ii., 1910). (M. P.; P. S. A.)
ERASTUS, THOMAS (1524–1583), German-Swiss theologian,
whose surname was Lüber, Lieber, or Liebler, was born of poor
parents on the 7th of September 1524, probably at Baden, canton
of Aargau, Switzerland. In 1540 he was studying theology at
Basel. The plague of 1544 drove him to Bologna and thence to
Padua as student of philosophy and medicine. In 1553 he
became physician to the count of Henneberg, Saxe-Meiningen,
and in 1558 held the same post with the elector-palatine, Otto
Heinrich, being at the same time professor of medicine at Heidelberg.
His patron’s successor, Frederick III., made him (1559)
a privy councillor and member of the church consistory. In
theology he followed Zwingli, and at the sacramentarian conferences
of Heidelberg (1560) and Maulbronn (1564) he advocated
by voice and pen the Zwinglian doctrine of the Lord’s Supper,
replying (1565) to the counter arguments of the Lutheran
Johann Marbach, of Strassburg. He ineffectually resisted the
efforts of the Calvinists, led by Caspar Olevianus, to introduce
the Presbyterian polity and discipline, which were established
at Heidelberg in 1570, on the Genevan model. One of the first
acts of the new church system was to excommunicate Erastus
on a charge of Socinianism, founded on his correspondence with
Transylvania. The ban was not removed till 1575, Erastus
declaring his firm adhesion to the doctrine of the Trinity. His
position, however, was uncomfortable, and in 1580 he returned to
Basel, where in 1583 he was made professor of ethics. He died on
the 31st of December 1583. He published several pieces bearing
on medicine, astrology and alchemy, and attacking the system of
Paracelsus. His name is permanently associated with a posthumous
publication, written in 1568. Its immediate occasion was
the disputation at Heidelberg (1568) for the doctorate of theology
by George Wither or Withers, an English Puritan (subsequently
archdeacon of Colchester), silenced (1565) at Bury St Edmunds
