An intellectual biography of a Dutch monk in print’s dawning era who effectively became the first of ‘public intellectuals’, and yet a Catholic whose humanism was only tangential to the Reformation.

Erasmus’ success turned on prodigious work-rate and philological genius combined with a highly aesthetic and ethical perspective. Prizing liberty of conscience, his bonae literae promoted moral education and general tolerance as the means of spiritual harmony.

For a theologian, Erasmus was little concerned with personal revelation. His youthful character had been delicate; he was obliged to moderate it, replacing sentimentality with wit expressed in elegant Latin; and his transition from literature to religion was no conversion. His mental growth reveals no defining crises, unusual for a great mind.

Highly prolific, Erasmus’ oeuvre subtly passed, almost imperceptibly to him, from emending Latin and Greek in order to simplify and clarify the original spirit of Christianity, to theological intervention and even innovation. Jerome was his favorite. The essentials of Christianity were ‘peace and unanimity’, and one should leave as many questions as possible to individual conscience.

At the dawn of Reformation, he characteristically avoided taking sides, to preserve independence. Consequently his influence was extensive but not intensive: he made nothing like Luther’s decisive mark on history.

Erasmus idealized the antiquity of Cicero, Horace, and Plutarch against an obscurantist medieval Church, whose allegories and scholastic syllogisms (including the work of the ‘baptised Hellenes’) he ridiculed. His individualism overlooked redeeming values of institutional forms and customs.

The Adagiorum Collectarea (1500) established his name. The 16th-century educated classes could now access hundreds (and later thousands) of classical proverbial sayings. Where scholasticism used technical systems of thought addressed the Bible, humanism turned on rhetoric and philology to express daily life, in the vernacular. Erasmus thus crossed ethics and common sense, ancient and contemporary life.

In Praise of Folly (1511) demonstrated the difference between foolishness and salutary myths that smooth over the intolerable with worldly wisdom, resignation, leniency. No creature is unhappy that lives in accord to its nature. The humor which enlivened Praise is what made Erasmus’ mind immortal. The Colloquia (1518) best captures his ideals: good morals born of Christianity, simplicity, moderation, kindliness, and toleration.

Erasmus disdained sinecures, so as to promote ecumenism, but was also constantly pleading his case of benefactors, and frequently relocating. He relished the new technology of publishing, often working in the printer’s office, and equally he enjoyed books as a product. Such immersion led to his producing a great many booklets and letters which would now be considered journalism or even polemics. (Important men were conscious many would read their correspondence, and newly becoming aware it would be published.)

The years 1516-18, mostly resident in modern Belgium, were his apogee of fame if not productivity. Ahead lay conflict with Luther, which would compel the ambivalent Dutchman to confirm himself Catholic, disappointing fellow intellectuals.

Huizinga is a consummate historian, well read of original sources, sympathetic to his protagonist, cautious of the unwarranted.

NB: caute legenda – to be read with caution.