Desiderius Erasmus · Philosophy
Erasmus was the Renaissance’s great voice against war. In the adage <em>Dulce bellum inexpertis</em> and <em>The Education of a Christian Prince</em>, he condemned war as the sum of all evils and demanded that a ruler serve his people in peace - the exact opposite of the cold counsel his contemporary Machiavelli was giving the prince.
Among the thousands of proverbs Erasmus collected and explained in his Adages, one grew into a passionate anti-war manifesto: Dulce bellum inexpertis - ‘war is sweet to those who have never tried it.’ The phrase, borrowed from the Greek poet Pindar, carries Erasmus’s whole argument in five words. Those who glorify war, he observed, are almost always those who have never seen it: the young, the safe, the ambitious prince in his palace. Those who have actually endured it - the maimed soldier, the burned farmer, the widow - know it as the sum of all human miseries. Erasmus turned this observation into a sustained cry against the wars that were tearing Christendom apart, wars waged, he charged, for the vanity and greed of princes while the innocent common people paid in blood and ruin. War, he insisted, is so monstrous and so contrary to nature and to Christ that no Christian should be able to speak of it lightly.
In 1516 Erasmus offered his positive vision in Institutio Principis Christiani - The Education of a Christian Prince - written for the young Charles of Habsburg, soon to be the most powerful ruler in Europe. It belongs to the old genre of the ‘mirror for princes,’ the book of advice held up to show a ruler his ideal self. Erasmus’s ideal is uncompromising: the prince exists for his people, not the people for the prince. His whole business is the common good. He must be educated from childhood in virtue and wisdom, rule by law and love rather than fear, keep the taxes light and the peace unbroken, and measure every policy by whether it serves his subjects’ welfare. Above all he must avoid war, entering it, if ever, only under the gravest necessity and with the greatest reluctance, since even a just war brings such calamity that a good prince will do almost anything to prevent it. The prince, in short, must model himself on Christ, becoming the servant of his people rather than their master.
The contrast could hardly be sharper, and it defines a permanent choice about political life. Erasmus insists the prince must be genuinely, Christianly good - truthful, merciful, peace-loving - because virtue is both right in itself and, he believes, the surest foundation of a stable and beloved rule; a ruler who serves and is loved needs no fortress. Machiavelli replies that this is a fatal fantasy: a prince who insists on being good among the many who are not good will be devoured, and a ruler’s first duty - on which everything else depends - is to keep his state, by fair means where possible and foul where necessary. Erasmus would rather a prince lose his throne than his soul; Machiavelli would rather he keep his throne and let the moralists keep their books. One holds up the mirror of Christ, the other the mirror of the fox and the lion. Between them lies the question every age must answer afresh: can power be exercised by the rules of ordinary goodness, or does ruling demand a morality of its own?
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Erasmus attacked war in the adage Dulce bellum inexpertis (‘war is sweet to those who have never tried it’) and set out an ideal of the peaceful, virtuous ruler in The Education of a Christian Prince (1516), directly opposing the realpolitik of Machiavelli’s The Prince . Explain his argument against w…
Leads to Niccolo Machiavelli.
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