In Our Time - Erasmus

Episode Date: February 9, 2012

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the life and work of the Dutch humanist scholar Desiderius Erasmus. In his lifetime Erasmus was almost universally recognised as the greatest classical scholar of his age, the translator and editor of numerous Latin and Greek texts. But above all he was a religious scholar who published important editions of the Bible which expunged many corruptions to the texts of the Scriptures. He was an outspoken critic of the Church, whose biting satire on its excesses, In Praise of Folly, was famed throughout Europe.When the Reformation began in 1517, however, Erasmus chose to remain a member of the Catholic Church rather than side with Martin Luther and the reformers, and a few years later he engaged in a celebrated debate with Luther on the subject of free will. Through his writings on the Church, on education and the wide gamut of humanist scholarship, Erasmus is remembered today as one of the greatest thinkers of the northern Renaissance.With:Diarmaid MacCullochProfessor of the History of the Church at the University of OxfordEamon DuffyProfessor of the History of Christianity at the University of CambridgeJill KrayeProfessor of the History of Renaissance Philosophy and Librarian at the Warburg Institute, University of London.Producer: Thomas Morris.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, one of Hans Holbein's best-known paintings is a portrait of a middle-aged man dressed in a luxurious fur coat. He sits at a table, gazing serenely into the middle distance,

his hands resting on a book. This scholar, Liffica, is desistening. Adirius Erasmus, one of the most celebrated intellectuals of the 16th in need of any century. Dutch by birth, 1467, Erasmus lived and worked all over Europe. He was a brilliant classical scholar, a theologian, and a translator of the Bible. He wrote satires, works of educational theory, and devastating attacks on those who sought to bring down the Catholic Church. During the early exchanges of the Protestant Reformation, he was involved in an inflamed and celebrated dispute with Martin Luther. He is one of the most widely bred writers of his age,

a thinker of lasting influence. With me to discuss his life and work of Erasmus are Dermyn McCulloch, Professor of the History of the Church at the University of Oxford, Eamon Duffy, Professor of the History of Christianity at the University of Cambridge, and Jill Kray, Professor of the History of Renaissance philosophy and librarian at the Warburg Institute, University of London.

Dermann McCulloch, can you give us some background on Erasmus? What do you know about his early life in education? Well, he's always called it Erasmus of Rotterdam, and he made this a sort of spin-doctoring title for himself. Well, we don't actually know where he was born. It might have been the town of Rotterdam. It might have been another town called Hauda. And that's interesting because actually Erasmus didn't want us to know much about his early life, and that's because he was the son of a priest.

In other words, in the terms of 15th century Western Europe, he was a non-person. You shouldn't have sons of priests. at the time. And I think there's a sense in which here's a man who needs to reinvent himself from nothing. He creates the person Erasmus of Rotterdam. And that's funny as well because

of Rotterdam, he was the citizen of Europe. He never really had a home. You get a sense of a rootless man who is just a brain, a sort of free-floating brain. And that's the key to his career.

His father was a scribe, as I understand, did he influence, and he died when Erasmus was in his mid, 15 or 16 in that sort of age, did he influence his son? Great silence on that. And what's he going to do this boy with a career in which he has no status in the world? Well, the thing you do in those circumstances is to go into the church. So the family put him on the first rungs of a career in the church. And they sent him off to a local monastery, an Augustinian monastery. the street at a place called Stein. And he hated it. Absolutely hated it.

He was miserable. He fell in love with a fellow monk. He was very upset by that. A few passionate letters survived from Erasmus to this monk, Sabatius Roger. And you can see the rest of the career is a sense running away from that first failed attempt of the family to launch him. We move forward to his interest in humanism. Can you briefly encapsulate what you? humanism meant at the time and how it drew Erasmus into its grip?

Well, what is humanism? I sometimes say to undergraduates that the best thing to say about humanism is it's the realization that there is more to life than the Middle Ages. Suddenly, people had this great flow of new manuscripts from the remote past, Greek and Latin manuscripts, accelerated because so much was coming in from the east from the fall of Constantinople when it was captured by the Ottoman Turks and all this is very exciting it's not just that they were finding new works to entertain them what they were finding were texts which could help them reorganize their lives

in a way that the ancient world gave them models and changed the society around them so humanism is not just playing around with texts do we know any Erasmus Latcht not just not necessarily a silly word Neone Erasmus became interested in it. Very early, I think, in the monastery in Stein, it was a way of escaping from the misery of being a monk. And it was also the way out of being a monk.

Because what happened to him was that he heard that the bishop of Cambrai, which was conveniently quite a way away from Stein, wanted a secretary. And of course, the bishops wanted humanists to be their secretaries because they could then write beautiful Latin. And so they could write the letters for the bishop to some other great man, and the bishop would get the kudos, the credit for being educated.

And so Erasmus applied to be secretary of the bishop of Cambrai, just for a while. So he'd leave the monastery for a while and then go to the bishop's secretary, but he never came back. So this was, with one bound he was free. Humanism released him. Amen Duffy, an introduction now from Dammit. What roundly were the most significant intellectual influences?

He's free of the monastery, the board and he, He hated that, we're told. He's working as a freelance writer almost, a secretary to a bishop, beginning a career then. What influences were around him that he chose to take on board? Well, two, that you might think were conflicting. He's a deeply pious man. And it's a piety inside the head. The piety of his time was precisely rooted in places and things, pilgrimage.

holy images. Erasmus reacted violently against that. He'd been trained in a kind of interior piety, the so-called Devotio Moderna, which emphasized calmness, stillness, don't go on pilgrimage, go to your parish church. Christ is there. It's very Christocentric, and it's focused on the simple piety of the Gospels. And then on the other side, there's the world of especially Greek learning. He becomes a hero worshipper of probably the most unpleasant of the ancient Christian father, St. Jerome, who, like Erasmus, was a great scholar who brought Greek learning into the Latin world. And that was Erasmus's great ambition to bring the world of Greek learning in. into the Latin Church and to transform the church

by bringing it back to its roots, the return ad fontes to the source. So an intense piety of almost exaggerated simplicity, but which could become a sort of laser beam cutting away a lot of what he saw as the excrescences of modern degenerate Catholicism to restore a simple ancient Catholicism. And now the Greek influence, the Roman influence was flowing into Europe.

The Arabs had nurtured it and extended it and the fall of Constantinople. I brought more and more in, so it's all over Europe. Yes, and this new learning really. In the early 15th century, the Council of Florence had brought a lot of Greeks into Italy and then, of course, the fall of Constantinople. The capture of the center of the Byzantine world by the Turks had brought refugees that channeled into... Italy, especially through Cardinal Basarion, and Greek Cardinal.

And so Greek Italy was a magnet eventually for Erasmus, and he finds his way there. And as Norman said earlier, at the beginning of the programme, he is a man of no place. He is all over Europe, city after city. He goes to, including in this country, as we'll find out. What is his attitude to the church he found himself so faithful, a member of at the end of the 15th century? Well, it's curiously ambivalent. He was to prove

himself really surprisingly loyal to it because in many ways the piety he advocated cut right across many of the institutions and many of the patterns of devotion of his own day.

But he believed passionately in the church as a spirit-filled community that was meant to be an agent of harmony in the world. And one of the reasons he reacted against the reformers was that he saw them as dogmaticians who would break Europe up for the sake of their opinions.

So while he's a quite corrosive critic using the most deadly of all weapons, laughter, to attack the absurdities of violence of violence, not just popes and well he doesn't much satirize monarchs he's rather an establishment figure

and he's always to be found hovering around courts and he's a great one of collecting patronage but certainly hierarchs in the church the absurdities of pomposity in society so he's

simultaneously laughing at it all but passionately committed to maintaining the unity of it. He's a sort of licensed jester. But can you just tell us a little bit more about why this passion for the unity and the continuity of the Catholic Church is so important to him

when he, as has often been said, he laid the egg that Luther hatched and sought to start the Reformation? Well, at one level, there's an extraordinary intellectual and spiritual arrogance about Erasmus. His motto was, I yield to nobody. But he shared with other humanists,

his friend Thomas Moore, his patron Woolsey, Archbishop Warham of Canterbury, a genuine belief that Christendom was a reality that transcended the individual. And so Erasmus, who, is the great advocate of truth-telling scholarship. Go where the evidence takes you. Nevertheless, felt that if in the end you ran up against

what the community felt were its fundamental beliefs, at least you owed the community a discreet willingness to bide your time. Jol Kray, can we talk about his fascination with classical writers who would have been thought of as pagan, writers at the time, pre-Christian writers, non-Christian writers, and therefore for some people, outside consideration, because they didn't have the faith. How did he

come across them and how did he square that with his as Amunduffer just pointed out, his steady and deep Christian faith? The problem of how you square Christianity with classical studies was something that all humanists

had to face, from Petrarch in the 14th century to John Milton in the 17th. This is what Paradise Regained is about. So Erasmus is one of trying to find a solution, but there's a whole continuum of ideas from complete rejection of the pagans to almost total assimilation. And Erasmus, as usual, is somewhere in the middle of this. He believes that you can have a fusion, a blending, a synthesis of what is best in the pagan world with the Christian world and with Christianity. And this involves looking at each pagan philosopher, finding what's best in them, and that by definition

is what agrees with Christianity, and then adopting it. And he didn't see any problem about accepting good advice if it came from a pagan, and if it confirmed what you already knew from Christianity. The Bible and the church fathers were the most important source, but when pagan authors, when pagan philosophers agreed with it, then he was very happy to use this. and to pick the best of them and to blend it with Christianity. How did this view go down with his peers in the Catholic intellectual establishment at the time? Well, I think this was a kind of mainstream view that many people felt that by this time the humanist movement had penetrated the Catholic Church.

There were many people who were interested in the new learning, and people were always seeking to find a way to bring these two elements. together. So Arasmus sometimes pushed it a bit far. The famous statement he has one of the characters say in one of his colloquies. These were Latin dialogues that he wrote with a kind to teach boys Latin but also to have a moral and didactic and sometimes satiric purpose. And in one of them the godly feast, he talks about this problem. He says sometimes these pagan seem to speak more Christianly in a more Christian way than we do

and he mentions Cicero and he refers to Socrates when Socrates just before taking the hemlock talks about his desire to obey the divine will and one of the characters says

I can barely restrain myself from saying St. Socrates pray for us and it's quite clever he doesn't quite say it I can barely restrain myself but he hints that there is this idea that he's divinely inspired. And the character also says maybe Christ's spirit is spread more widely than we think,

and there are more people in the company of saints than in our calendar. So he's suggesting that pagan philosophers are perhaps divinely inspired. He developed a personal approach which he called the Philosophy of Christ. Could you explain that? Well, it's quite similar to what Amon Duffy was saying, that Christianity should be about the simple message of the Gospels, about following the example of Christ, about living up to his precepts. It shouldn't be about complicated philosophy and doctrinaire discussions. It shouldn't be about ritual. It shouldn't be about Aristotelian syllogisms. All you needed to know for the

philosophy of Christ was the precepts and the Gospels and what Christ had taught. You needed to know love thy neighbor sorry love thy neighbor bless them to curse you yeah that's right you should have contempt for the things

of the world you should turn the other cheek that everything should be motivated by love and by charity and by peace and these were things that anybody could learn by reading the gospel it wasn't about the head it wasn't about intellect it was about the heart it was about the

heart and this philosophy of Christ really permeates all of his thought. And he did think that some pagans actually glimpsed it. I think that's what he said, but it seems to me that there's always a slight element of spin-docturing in Erasmus. This simple Christianity he's talking about is simple for don's. It's religion of the head. Amon has spoken very eloquently about this already, I think, that he detest. so much of the religion around him. He detested the physical.

Amateur psychologising that I'm doing, I think that that experience of passion in the monastery terrified him, and he spent the rest of his life of running away from visceral passion. His religion was of sweet reasonableness, the head. I think I subscribe to that up to a point, but he is, I think, a genuinely conflicted man.

For example, when he was a student in Paris, He contracted a fever from which he might have died, and he thought he'd been healed by the intercession of Saint-Jeanvieve, who is the patron saint of Paris. So there's a deference there to the local. I think it is true that his religion is elitist. He emphasizes simplicity. There's a very remarkable passage in one of his most famous books, the Enchoridium, which is a sort of tree. on the Christian life for a layperson, an elite layperson, a knight,

in which he's talking about the crucifix. How do we venerate the crucifix? And he says, do we carry relics of it, do we kiss it? No, in our minds we climb up into its branches to gather its fruit by contemplation. And he clearly implies that for those capable of this kind of elite meditation, you leave the physical crucifix far behind.

That, I think, puts it extraordinarily well. And I think what we're all saying is that this is a very ambiguous man, a man who is quite hidden. And you don't really know what's the real Erasmus and what's superficially Erasmus. I mean, this is this wonderful thing about San Genevieve having got him through a crisis? Well, is that for effect?

Is that to please someone? I think a lot of the writing is to please people. and that's because they are paying for his career. He came across to England. Some people think that was a significant move for him. Can you briefly tell us why you think that might be the case, David? Very significant, because here he met a great late medieval Christian, John Collett, and was tremendously impressed by Collett.

And Colin put him on a new path. Previously, he'd been an enthusiast mainly for classical, secular, pre-Christian learning. Collett showed him that the Apostle Paul had wisdom to express, and that it was best to meet that wisdom in the original Greek. So he put himself to the task of learning Greek, which had not been his language before, and that pushed him on a new trajectory. It pushed him towards exploring the early fathers of the church

who wrote in Greek and Latin, and that became the centre of a new scholarly enterprise. It pushed him to translating his own edition of the New Testament, came out in 1516, Amman Duffy. How did he go about this? Well, we would now think it was rather a shabby affair in terms of depth scholarship. He was hampered by...

He did most of the work for it in England, and he was hampered by the fact that there just weren't very many Greek manuscripts of the New Testament available to him. Collet lent him a couple from the library at St. Paul's. He found a couple more in university, college libraries,

found a few more in the Netherlands, but in all he probably used fewer than ten manuscripts, none of them earlier than the 11th century. And in fact, it was quite slapdash. He didn't have a manuscript, a complete manuscript, of the last book of the New Testament, the Book of Revelation in Greek. So he simply took the Vulgate Latin of the end of it

and translated it into Greek and printed that as part of his Greek text. But what was so important about it was that he printed a new fresh translation, which was more accurate in many ways than Jerome's Vulgate opposite the Greek. So for the first time, in a portable way, you could compare Latin, which every educated person would be able to read, with this more difficult language, you could then take that and collate it with other Greek manuscripts so you could begin to improve the text.

And for the first time, it was possible to see that the way in which the Roman Catholic tradition in the Middle Ages had translated the Greek had put a spin on very important concepts. So, Gilgrey, this is an important moment, as I understand it, intellectual moment, where serious scholarly doubt can be cast on the St. Jerome version of the Vulgate,

3.81, which had been, become the sacred text, untouchable, and a power text, as well as a sacred text. Can you just give us some idea of what influence that had? In what sense do you mean? Well, it came out in 1516, and Amunds described the patchiness of it by modern standards, nevertheless it had a, I think, a terrific impact,

not for me to say. Can you say what would be it? Well, I think the idea that you could take the techniques which humanists had been developing in the 15th and early 16th century to deal with classical texts, and you could apply that to a sacred text. This was something, this is an idea that had been floating around for a long time in the Middle Ages, it had been developed, as I said, in the 15th century. But Erasmus is the first one to do a major production where this is put into action.

It's not just annotations, but he's actually said, this is the Greek text, and we have to look at it as a text. And we have to look at the translation as a text, which is subject to the same kind of distortions and corruptions that are classical text. So we have the beginning of humanist biblical philology, which has a very long history. Would it be correct to say that this is the beginning of a radical,

went over centuries, radical reappraisal of the idea of a sacred text in the Christian canon? I don't think it's radical, I think it's gradual, as I said. It does develop broadly, sorry, but the beginning, as I said, over centuries of what became a radical reappraisal of the idea of a sacred text in Christianity. I think Erasmus is just one stage,

as I said, on a long history that actually begins in the Middle Ages and starts to be questioned much more in the 15th century. it then moves on with Erasmus, he makes a very dramatic statement with doing a new translation, trying to say that the translation has to correspond with the Greek. And then this becomes more and more sophisticated over the ages. I think it would take one concrete example, the way that his new translation changes things. John the Baptist goes into the wilderness and shouts in Greek to the people listening Metaunayete.

and Jerome takes this Greek word, translates it into Latin, into a phrase do penance. Agite penitentium. And Erasmus looked at the original Greek and said, well, actually, it doesn't say that at all in Greek. It says, turn around and go through 180 degrees. Now, how can I put that? Well, repent, Recipisite in Latin. And so at a stroke, he's done something very radical because the church had built on Jerome's due penitenti. a whole theology of a sacrament called penance,

which is there in the Bible. And Erasmus, at that stroke, said, actually, no, it isn't in the Bible. And typically with Erasmus, he actually went back in later editions and said, oh, no, actually, I didn't quite mean that at all, because he's covering his tracks, as always, but he'd set the seed, and Luther picked that one up and ran with it. And so that's the egg that was hatched by Luther, a part of the egg.

Well, you can't have part of it again. So it has to be said, he found that, precisely that example, in the working papers of an Italian humanist called Lorenzo Vala, and he published those notes himself early in the 16th century.

So the bomb had been ticking away. So it's not so much that Erasmus lays the egg. He digs up this bomb. Dicking up bombs laying eggs. You'd be too violent for me. We know Erasmus as a man who attacked the Catholic Church,

to which we have to keep saying it was devoted. But he attacked it in ways that outrage people, disturbed people, upset lots of apple carts. If you're talking about bombs and eggs, I can talk about apples. Can you just give us some idea the attack that he leveled and how important it was? It was an attack on the parts of the church which he despised and had no value for,

shrines and pilgrimage particularly. He produced a series of dialogues, colloquies, actually to teach kids decent Latin, but he did it by amusing them. And the dialogues touch, for instance, on shrines in England, the shrine of St Thomas Beckett and Canterbury, the shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham. And he just laughs through them.

And as Amon's already said, laughter is terribly dangerous and subversive for the status quo. And it's that laughter, that sense of irony, amusement, which is so corrosive, I think. What's interesting too is that he published that dialogue in 1526. Europe is falling apart with religious debate. Erasmus has already taken sides on the Catholic side, but he insists on ploughing on with this laughing at what he thinks is absurd.

Because this is after 1517 and Luther pinning the 95 thesis to the door at Bidman. Jill Cray, can we continue this a bit with something about his notable work at the time which was raged through Europe as a bestseller in praise of folly? Yes, this was a satire

that he wrote perhaps inspired by Lucian and classical authors who like to teach by laughing and praise of folly it's a personification folly is a woman

who praise She praises herself, praises the followers of folly, and he makes fun of scholars, of nobles, of ecclesiastics. Everybody who is pompous and pretentious, he particularly has fun making fun of people like himself who are pedantic. He says, you invite a scholar to dinner and he boars everybody. you ask him to dance, he moves like a camel, he's a colossal boar, everything in the society that he doesn't like, he associates with this notion of folly.

But then it develops towards the end. Excuse me a moment. Is he attacking indulgences and the sale of swift passages to heaven and that? Is he attacking that in folly, in the praise of folly? No, it's a more general attack on the entire range of that, the church has become associated with power, with secular glory, with seeking offices, with benefices, these ideas. The idea that the church is not following the philosophy of Christ,

which is an inner spiritual belief, but it is caught up in externals, in material wealth, that the bishops and cardinals behave just as bad as everyone else, everyone's seeking worldly advancement. The one thing he does very corrosively attack is the monastic life. And you can see why. He's trying to justify his own rebellion against it. And in attacking the monastic life and celibacy as well, he praises marriage.

I think that's a strategic move. I mean, he's not married, but it's a very good way of putting down the medieval churches, Western churches, emphasis on celibacy. And that's something Protestants pick up very much. They exalt marriage. That is a huge social shift in the 16th century, that suddenly marriage is better than virginity. The balance between the medieval church's ways of dealing with that problem

have radically shifted thanks to Erasmus. We step back a few years to Luther and these 95,000, thesis nailed to the church door at Puddenburg. And this eruptive effect at that had, this rather obscure academic from a slightly obscure place compared with the first-class tramble that Erasmus

is going from courts and great cities and great universities and taking them because of his extraordinary, extraordinary. We must keep emphasising with a brilliant man, how brilliantly regarded he was, with a colossal reputation he had at the time. And at first he was sympathetic to Luther a little bit,

But then he broke away from him. Let's talk about the break away. Much more interesting. Well, it's important to register why he was sympathetic in the first instance. Luther proclaimed the justification by faith. So let's abandon all the mechanisms of salvation. Let's get back to simple trust in Jesus. That was a message that Erasmus had been preaching himself for years, and he recognized in Luther a prophetic voice.

But almost simultaneously, it's not a matter of gradual. development. He says, after all, this guy is a monk and he's also a dogmatian. He's a professor of theology. Erasmus didn't like professors of theology. And

so he found, right from the start, he's saying, listen to this man, but let's try and calm him down. And he also recognized that Luther had taken on corruption in a big way. So he said, Luther had attacked monks, he'd attack the Pope.

and so vested interests were going to get him. And he did his best to protect Luther. He acted as advocate with him, both with Luther's own local prince, the elector of Frederick, and with the emperor. But Luther developed a very negative view of human nature as part of his insistence on the total dependence of human beings on God's grace.

and that was the sticking point for Erasmus. Erasmus believed he was an educator. He believed that human nature could be divinized, improved. Could be led out. He chose that. He was under enormous pressure to take sides. All his Catholic friends, Thomas Moore, Cardinal Woolsey, Pope Adrian,

whom he'd known as a... Adrian had been a professor in Levine. They'd known each other. they're all saying, you know, come on, either you're a Catholic or you're not, and he chose an issue on which he genuinely disagreed with Luther. Can we just, this is try to get to, try to put the context of the ferocity of the intellectual context and what was at stake, and because the most difficult thing about history is imagining it, isn't it? I mean, Luther had, it was a new massive thing, and that was part of what triggered

peasants revolts, mass slaughters, movements that terrified the life out of all kings, princes, principalities, popes and that. And these scholars were in the middle of it. They were not controlling it, but they had a big part to play. So, as Aynne Duffis said,

I mean, the authorities are saying to your arms, come on, be on our side. We need you at this. So can you just develop that little, before we go into this argument about free will, will that Amos ended up. Yeah, everyone wanted Erasmus

on their side because he'd become Mr. Humanism and you want this guru figure on your side. So Luther, I think, wanted him on his side. Princes, who were Erasmus' meal tickets, wanted to listen to what he had to say. So he really felt exposed

I think it was a rabbit in the headlights. Amos put it so well that he chooses the issue which he's really at odds with Luther on. Can we turn to do? you now, Joe Cray. So what is the fight that he has, what is the basis

of the argument that he has with Luther about free will? Demeter said he chooses the issue. These two are now we either throw everything up, we believe human nature is wanting, and we chuck out the church and everything, or we don't. And if we don't, what's the battleground? And he chooses

the battleground to be free will. Can you develop the argument that they develop between them? Erasmus's view is that free will, cooperates with grace. That is that Luther took the position

that essentially without grace, we have no moral abilities. What did Luther mean by grace? Divine help from God. You should really ask the theologians this rather than me. But Erasmus

believed, he of course believed that grace was the most important thing, but he also thought, because he was a an educator because he was a humanist. He wanted to give people some kind of motivation to be good through their own efforts. And he uses a... One of the things

Erasmus is great at is coming up with these brilliant images. And he comes up with the image of a little toddler who's walking along and falls. And then his father picks him up and then shows him an apple. And the child tries to go to the apple and he wouldn't make it

except that the father holds the child and make sure that he doesn't fall. and then finally the child gets the apple. And Erasmus said, well, it's really not the child's effort. He couldn't do it without the father. But the child, there is something that the child did. That is the motivation the child had, the desire to be virtuous, plays some part, maybe even just a small part, but it does.

And therefore, it's a view of human nature that we can contribute. He wants to motivate people to be virtuous, to follow the philosophy of Christ, and he feels that if you completely remove this motivation, you will lose this moral dimension. So there is choice, there is a sort of freedom. A sort of freedom, yes. Can we keep driving at that, Eam and Duffy? The nail, as I understand it, was Luther's insistence on predestination.

Yes. Right, whatever happens, you're born into a destiny, you cannot escape, and that's that. And for Erasmus, that meant that God was a monster. Erasmus accepted predestination because there it's in Paul, but he thought we should just say nothing about it, we should avert the eyes of our mind from it, we can't understand it, it's a mystery, but what we know is, God is good and people can do.

And just think about how this plays out in relation to classical antiquity. If Luther is right, there's no St. Socrates. Without the grace of Christ, you go to hell. Socrates is in hell. That's against everything Erasmus stands for. So this is, he's not a man of enormous passion, but you can detect in the increasingly bad-tempered exchange between him and Luther. I mean, Luther's bad-tempered from the start.

Luther is a man who lets you have it. if he thinks you deserve it. To begin with, Erasmus is very deferential and polite, but he gets extremely ratty as the debate goes on, because it does matter to him. And can you give us some idea, how this ratiness is expressed? Well, it is just an escalating series of exchanges,

and by the end of it, it's quite clear the two men can have nothing to do with each other. Luther is never very good at being opposed. He just gets crosser and crosser and crosser. And Erasmus really is genuine about this issue. And yet it seems to be incontestable that Erasmus had a great influence on the formation of the Protestant Revolution.

No question. Absolutely. Erasmus is one of the great elements. But the paradox is that he misses the thing which is at the center of Protestantism, grace alone. and so it's a peculiar sort of catalyst reaction. He's something who creates something.

We haven't mentioned a key element in this. Erasmus is lifelong, passionate commitment to peace. Some of his greatest writings are writings about peace and against war. He wrote a famous essay, Dolce Bellamy in expertise. Wars wonderful if you haven't tried it. and he saw Luther and the other the intransigence of the reformers as having plunged Europe into war

and it broke his heart if he had a heart to break there would have been a tiny crack somewhere Jill I want to come to you for another question but please join in this I think he thought war was terrible but war between Christians was the worst of all because Christians are defending Christ

the Prince of Peace and now they're killing each other and the breaking up of the unity of the church was the thing that I think really pushed him to dissociate himself with Luther. He couldn't put up with that. That was the core of Erasmus at time perhaps. But let's move to one other aspect as time's running out. This great book of adages, he kept adding to it. It would be ended as 4,000 pages, proverbs, essays on proverbs as Amiduffis already mentioned, which became an enormous best sell. I've mentioned almost every classical author that they'd ever been. Why is that so important?

Well, it was a book that every scholar had on his bookshelf. For hundreds of years? For hundreds of years. It's an incredibly useful book. It brings together the entire wisdom of classical antiquity and makes it, and I think the important thing about is Erasmus takes these proverbs.

He explains them, he tells you the context, he tells you the literal, meaning, but then he develops their relevance for the modern world. I think that was really important to him. He didn't want this just to be a book for scholars. He wanted it to be a book that people could actually use. So you develop the idea about war. You develop the idea. One of the great essays about the philosophy of Christ is called the Salini of Alcibiades, another proverb about how you shouldn't look at the outside of something which might be ugly, but look at the inside. He, he thinks that all the, that you can use the wisdom of classical antiquity

to help cure the ills of society. And this book allowed him to kind of put it in an agreeable form so that it was easier to swallow. It was a kind of shortcut to all of classical wisdom. I'm afraid I've got to take a shortcut to the ending now. So, I'm sorry, we should go over a long way. Never mind. Dermott, can you just briefly tell us how Erasmus was regarded

by the Catholic Church at his death and immediately after his death? At his death, he's okay, though he is buried, it was a monument to him, in a Protestant church, Basel Cathedral, ex-cathedral. But after that, he is seen as the source of all that's gone wrong. So his books were put on the index of the Inquisition later, and his additions of even the fathers were regarded with great suspicion. And rightly so, it seems to me, because so many very dodgy people in 16th century terms had admired him and went on developing him his thought. Radicals, people who denied the Trinity, looked to Erasmus. And finally, Amund Duffy, did his influence go through the centuries?

Yes, there were always people, both in Catholic and Protestant camps, who picked up both the critical edge and the insistence that scholarship had rights, but also the commitment to peace and to reconciliation. and so there's a long line of Erasmian mildness in both Catholic and Protestant Christianity. Just the idea and the ideal of being a great scholar in itself. Well, thank you very much, Jill Cray, Devin Baculloch and Aymann Duffy. Next week we'll be talking about the An Lushan Rebellion in 8th Century China.

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