Philosophy
c. 1466 to 1536, Rotterdam, Holland
Prince of the humanists, who turned philology, irony, and the inward philosophy of Christ into instruments of reform.
Start learning Desiderius →Erasmus’s wittiest book lets the goddess Folly mount the rostrum and praise herself - a mock oration that, under cover of a joke, exposes the vanity of scholars, courtiers, and churchmen, and ends by daring to call true…
Erasmus’s core religious vision, set out in the Enchiridion and named in the Paraclesis : the ‘philosophy of Christ’ is not a system of doctrines or a schedule of ceremonies but an inward disposition of the heart - and…
The humanist watchword ad fontes - ‘back to the sources’ - became a weapon in Erasmus’s hands: his 1516 Greek New Testament used textual criticism to correct the Church’s official Latin Bible, showing how a scholar with…
In 1524 Erasmus finally broke with Luther over the deepest question of all: does the human will contribute anything to salvation? His On Free Will defended a real, if small, human cooperation with grace; Luther’s feroci…
Erasmus was the Renaissance’s great voice against war. In the adage Dulce bellum inexpertis and The Education of a Christian Prince , he condemned war as the sum of all evils and demanded that a ruler serve his people i…
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