It would appear from one of Erasmus' letters that Colet urged him to write commentaries on some portions of the New Testament; but Erasmus would only work in his own way; and it is probable that his thoughts were soon turned to preparing an edition of the New Testament in Greek. The task was long brooded over; and he had to perfect himself in his knowledge of the language.
This determination to undertake no work for which he was not supremely fitted, together with his powers of application and acquisition, gave Erasmus the reputation of being a strong man. He was seen to be unlike any other Humanist, whether Italian or German. He had no desire merely to reproduce the antique, or to confine himself within the narrow circle in which the “Poets” of the Renaissance worked. He put ancient culture to modern uses. Erasmus was no arm-chair student. He was one of the keenest observers of everything human—the Lucian or the Voltaire of the sixteenth century. From under his half-closed eyelids his quick glance seized and retained the salient characteristics of all sorts and conditions of men and women. He described theologians, jurists and philosophers, monks and parish priests, merchants and soldiers, [pg 179] husbands and wives, women good and bad, dancers and diners, pilgrims, pardon-sellers, and keepers of relics; the peasant in the field, the artisan in the workshop, and the vagrant on the highway. He had studied all, and could describe them with a few deft phrases, as incisive as Dürer's strokes, with an almost perfect style, and with easy sarcasm.
This application of the New Learning to portray the common life, combined with his profound learning, made Erasmus the idol of the young German Humanists. They said that he was more than mortal, that his judgment was infallible, and that his work was perfect. They made pilgrimages to visit him. An interview was an event to be talked about for years; a letter, a precious treasure to be bequeathed as an heirloom. Some men refused to render the universal homage accorded by scholars and statesmen, by princes lay and clerical. Luther scented Pelagian theology in his annotations; he scorned Erasmus' wilful playing with truth; he said that the great Humanist was a mocker who poured ridicule upon everything, even on Christ and religion. There was some ground for the charge. His sarcasm was not confined to his Praise of Folly or to his Colloquies. It appears in almost everything that he wrote—even in his Paraphrases of the New Testament.
That such a man should have felt himself called upon to be a reformer, that this Saul should have appeared among the prophets, is in itself testimony that he lived during a great religious crisis, and that the religious question was the most important one in his days.
The principal literary works of Erasmus meant to serve the reformation he desired to see are:—two small books, Enchiridion militis christiani (A Handbook of the Christian Soldier, or A Pocket Dagger for the Christian Soldier—it may be translated either way), first printed in 1503, and Institutio Principis Christiani (1518); his Encomium Moriæ (Praise of Folly, 1511); his edition of the New Testament, or Novum Instrumentum (1516), with [pg 180] prefaces and paraphrases; and perhaps many of the dialogues in his Colloquia (1519).
Erasmus himself explains that in the Enchiridion he wrote to counteract the vulgar error of those who think that religion consists in ceremonies and in more than Jewish observances, while they neglect what really belongs to piety. The whole aim of the book is to assert the individual responsibility of man to God apart from any intermediate human agency. Erasmus ignores as completely as Luther would have done the whole mediæval thought of the mediatorial function of the Church and its priestly order. In this respect the book is essentially Protestant and thoroughly revolutionary. It asserts in so many words that much of the popular religion is pure paganism:
“One worships a certain Rochus, and why? because he fancies he will drive away the plague from his body. Another mumbles prayers to Barbara or George, lest he fall into the hands of his enemy. This man fasts to Apollonia to prevent the toothache. That one gazes upon an image of the divine Job, that he may be free from the itch.... In short, whatever our fears and our desires, we set so many gods over them, and these are different in different nations.... This is not far removed from the superstition of those who used to vow tithes to Hercules in order to get rich, or a cock to Æsculapius to recover from an illness, or who slew a bull to Neptune for a favourable voyage. The names are changed, but the object is the same.”[123]
In speaking of the monastic life, he says:
“ ‘Love,’ says Paul, ‘is to edify your neighbour,’ ... and if this only were done, nothing could be more joyous or more easy than the life of the ‘religious’; but now this life seems [pg 181]gloomy, full of Jewish superstitions, not in any way free from the vices of laymen and in some ways more corrupt. If Augustine, whom they boast of as the founder of their order, came to life again, he would not recognise them; he would exclaim that he had never approved of this sort of life, but had organised a way of living according to the rule of the Apostles, not according to the superstition of the Jews.”[124]
The more one studies the Praise of Folly, the more evident it becomes that Erasmus did not intend to write a satire on human weakness in general: the book is the most severe attack on the mediæval Church that had, up to that time, been made; and it was meant to be so. The author wanders from his main theme occasionally, but always to return to the insane follies of the religious life sanctioned by the highest authorities of the mediæval Church. Popes, bishops, theologians, monks, and the ordinary lay Christians, are all unmitigated fools in their ordinary religious life. The style is vivid, the author has seen what he describes, and he makes his readers see it also. He writes with a mixture of light mockery and bitter earnestness. He exposes the foolish questions of the theologians; the vices and temporal ambitions of the Popes, bishops, and monks; the stupid trust in festivals, pilgrimages, indulgences, and relics. The theologians, the author says, are rather dangerous people to attack, for they come down on one with their six hundred conclusions and command him to recant, and if he does not they declare him a heretic forthwith. The problems which interest them are: