Erasmus: Bridge to the Renaissance

The Andreas Center

Erasmus

Bridge to the Renaissance and Beyond

By Stephen Broyles. A paper presented in the Florence-Lauderdale Public Library during Renaissance Month, Oct. 25, 1989.

Hans Holbein. Portrait of Erasmus. 1523. Oil on wood. Louvre, Paris. Image courtesy of Carol Gerten-Jackson.

Desiderius Erasmus (1469-1536) was a Renaissance scholar who built bridges: bridges between the past and the present, between the pagan philosopher and the Christian theologian, between the common man and the teachings of the Bible. This article looks briefly at Erasmus’s life and three of his major works.

Vita

In the night of October 27/28, 1469, Desiderius Erasmus was born in Gouda. He was the son of a Dutch cleric, who, if he was at the time not quite a priest, was also not quite married, either. During the years 1475-1484, Erasmus went to school at Deventer, where he was educated by the Brethren of the Common Life, a grass-roots movement toward mystical piety that had sprung up outside the official church a hundred years earlier in the Netherlands. Many influential religious leaders and humanists emerged from their schools—Erasmus among them.

When his father died, Erasmus entered another school, the Cloister at Steyn. A year later he took vows as an Augustinian monk, and in 1492 he was ordained a priest. He escaped the secluded life—a good thing for him and for us—when in the following year he became secretary to Heinrich von Bergen, the Bishop of Cambrai. A year or two later the Bishop gave him permission to study in Paris, and Erasmus entered the Collège de Montaigu in 1495.

One of Erasmus’s pupils (he did private tutoring to support himself) was the Englishman William Lord Mountjoy. Mountjoy invited Erasmus to go with him to England in 1499. There he met Thomas More, John Colet, and Prince Henry—later to become Henry VIII. Thomas More (1478-1535) was twenty-one years old at the time (Erasmus was thirty) and not yet Sir Thomas, not yet the English lord chancellor, not yet beheaded by Henry VIII, but already the “supple, humorous, unassuming and sophisticated person” in Robert Bolt’s play, A Man for All Seasons. John Colet (ca. 1466-1519) was some three years Erasmus’s senior, an Oxford man, and a lecturer on the letters of Paul. Colet breathed the spirit of the Renaissance. His lectures on Paul cut behind medieval commentary and allegorization and sought to return to the original sources. Under Colet’s influence Erasmus undertook the study of Greek in order to apply his humanist interests to the study of the Greek Testament and the revival of primitive Christianity.

In 1500 Erasmus traveled to Paris to publish his first book, the Adagiorum Collectanea. The book was a collection of 818 proverbs with brief comments—something like an annotated “Quotable Quotes.” The publication of this slim volume of 152 pages was Erasmus’s first step in becoming a best-selling author, the first in the history of printing.

From this point on we have thirty-six years of Erasmus’s life and works and travels yet to do: to Italy, to England several more times, in and out of Basel, writing, publishing, editing. We are presently interested in only a selection of these complex events, and a table will display them better than a running narrative.

A glance at the table reveals the long-term interests of Erasmus’s career and their relation to other interests. The Adages were a constant occupation throughout his life: he produced ever new and expanded editions over a period of thirty years. The second edition of 1508 enlarged the original 818 adages to 3,260, and the edition of 1533, some three years before his death, contained 4,251.

His book The Praise of Folly was written quickly in 1509 and did not invite the kind of long-term revision which Erasmus gave to the Adages. And yet, like the Adages, it was immensely popular and went through many printings.

Erasmus’s interest in Greek and the text of the Greek Testament was long-running, although he did not make his biggest splash until 1516. That meant that by the time he and Basel publisher Johannes Froben produced his edition of the Greek Testament with new Latin translation and notes, he was famous throughout Europe for both the Adages and The Praise of Folly. His public relationship with Luther and the Reformation therefore came at a period when his reputation in letters and theology was already well established.

In 1529 the Reformation in Basel became too radical for Erasmus’s conciliatory spirit, so he moved to nearby Freiburg in Breisgau. After six years he returned to Basel to the Haus zum Luft on Bäumleingasse, the home of Johannes Froben’s oldest son, Hieronymus. Erasmus’ old friend Johannes had himself now been dead for eight years. Here Erasmus lived his final months and died, in the night of July 11/12, 1536.

I wish to turn now to a discussion of three works which illuminate Erasmus’s humanist spirit and show how he made useful and usable bridges. I will not go into his relations with Martin Luther and the other Protestants. That would be to go a bridge too far, and anyway to a bridge that failed. Rather I will limit my remarks to the Adages, The Praise of Folly, and the work on the text of the Greek Testament.

Adages

In the Adages Erasmus made a bridge from the classical world to the present. He immersed himself in the literature of Athens and Rome and returned to the sixteenth century bearing distilled wisdom from the past. In the Adages he collected proverbs or sayings from the ancient world, traced their occurrences in the classical literature, explained their origin and meaning, and made them meaningful for modern life. “The essential aim,” according to Erasmus scholar Margaret Mann Phillips, “was to recapture, in this handy portmanteau form, the outlook and way of life of the classical world, through its customs, legends, and social institutions, and to put within reach of a modern public the accumulated wisdom of the past” (Erasmus on His Times: A Shortened Version of the Adages of Erasmus (Cambridge University Press, 1967), p. xiii).

Many of the adages are still in common use:

A necessary evil

There’s many a slip twixt the cup and the lip

To leave no stone unturned

God helps those who help themselves

The mills of the gods grind slowly

The grass is greener in the next field

The cart before the horse

One swallow doesn’t make a summer

His heart fell into his boots

A rare bird

Swansong

To dirty one’s own nest

Neither fish nor fowl

In wine is truth

To have one foot in the grave

To be in the same boat

I’ll sleep on it

To call a spade a spade

To break the ice

To die laughing

To have an iron in the fire

Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth

Like father, like son

Clothes make the man

He blows his own trumpet

Bad company spoils good morals

Make haste slowly

It is a good question whether these sayings have survived to our own time because they form part of a great common fund which we share with other people of the west, or because the immense popularity of the Adages rescued them from oblivion. It may be a little of each.

In the Paris edition of 1500 the adages were each accompanied by a few lines of commentary. In later editions Erasmus added further adages and commentary. Some of the adages became take-off points for long essays—some very long indeed and capable of being printed as separate pamphlets (like the anti-war tractate Dulce bellum inexpertis: “War Is Sweet to Those Who Have Never Experienced It”).

Margaret Phillips cites “Front before back” as typical of Erasmus’s treatment of the proverbs. Erasmus first gives the adage in its Latin form and Greek equivalent. Then he briefly explains that it means that the front of a man’s head is better than the back of it. That is, a man can best watch after his business by being personally present and attending to it himself rather than by being absent and giving its care over to others. Then Erasmus tracks down the saying in classical literature. In this instance he finds it in Cato: the master will be more successful if he is frequently present on the farm—front before back (On Farming 4). He finds it also in Pliny: “But the man who will be a good owner comes often into his field, and the master’s forehead does it more good then the back of his head,—so they say, and truly” (History of the World 18.5). He finds the idea again in Aristotle (Economics 2) and quotes the passage in Greek. Then he ranges through the literature finding the same wisdom in similar images. He reports the story told by Gellius about a fat man who rode a skinny horse. When asked about it, the fat man said it was not surprising, since he got up his own meals himself, whereas his horse was looked to by a slave. Erasmus concludes his treatment of “Front before back” by applying the wisdom of the past to modern statecraft:

The person who should most take note of this is the prince, if he really has the mind of a prince and not of a pirate, that is if he has the public good at heart. But in these days bishops and kings do everything through other people’s hands, ears and eyes, and think the common good is no affair of theirs, swollen up as they are with their own possessions or entirely bent on pleasure.

As much as Erasmus admired his classical sources, he was not a slave to them. He was able to criticize them as well. If there are many points where we do well to imitate the classical example, there are many others where we do ill. Commenting on the adage Ignaris semper feriae sunt (we would perhaps say, “For the lazy every day is Saturday”), Erasmus complains that the Christian holy days, like the old heathen holidays, have become the occasion for “drinking, lechery, gambling, quarrelling, and fighting.” He disapproves of all that and exclaims, “We are never better at imitating the heathen, than at the very times when we ought to be most Christian!” (Phillips p. 76).

Erasmus was a Renaissance humanist who loved the classics and the wisdom of the past. He was also a Christian who loved the Scriptures and the teachings of Christ. In the Adages he sought to bring these two loves together: to create, quoting Phillips once more, “a synthesis between classical thought and Christianity” (p. xiii). The old heads of Greece and Rome, he found, often perceived truth which we also find in the gospel. They perceived it more dimly, perhaps, but it was truth all the same. And sometimes Erasmus found they were even more Christian than we are. Therefore we Christians, Erasmus believed, have much to learn from them. (A fine example of Erasmus’s devotion both to humanism and to Christ is the long essay Dulce bellum inexpertis (“War is sweet to those who have never experienced it”). He opposes war as opposed to humanist principles, and he builds those principles from the teaching of Christ.)

Praise of Folly

In 1509 Erasmus went to England for the third time, on this occasion invited by Henry VIII. He stayed there five years, during which time he was professor of Greek at Cambridge University.

In the first year of this stay, at Thomas More’s house in London, Erasmus wrote his second best-seller, Praise of Folly. He tells us that he wrote the book in seven days. (George Bernard Shaw said that he made his living by thinking fifteen minutes a day: Erasmus preferred to make his by thinking all day long for seven days in a row.) Thomas More figures in the book in at least two ways. The title of the book was a pun on his friend’s name: Encomium Moriae (moria is Latinized Greek for “folly”). And in Chapter 2 Erasmus tells a joke on More:

I know a man by my name [Folly says, who is the speaker throughout the book], a practical joker, who gave his new wife some imitation jewels and persuaded her that they were genuine and very valuable. Now what difference did it make to the girl? She was delighted with the glass trinkets and kept them locked in a secret place. In the meantime, the husband had saved money, had enjoyed fooling his wife, and had won her devotion as well as he would have by a more expensive present. (My quotations from Praise of Folly are from the translation by Leonard F. Dean (Hendricks House Farrar Straus, 1946)).

This story about how Thomas More became the man of the hour is as a good place as any to see the controlling idea of the whole work. Under the cold eye of analytical reason, More’s wife really has no basis for being happy with a string of glass beads. And, by the way, cold reason would probably also deny her happiness even with genuine jewels. But in truth she is happy with jewelry, she is deceived that the jewels are real, and therefore her happiness rests not upon cold, rational analysis but on the foibles of human and womanly nature, in a word, on Folly.

I’ll give you other examples. Folly takes credit for all human life itself, the thing most dear and precious. For what is it that propagates human life? Not the spear of Pallas Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom. Not the shield of cloud-controlling Jove. No, it is Folly—or rather, to speak openly, “the job is done by that foolish, even ridiculous part which cannot be named without laughter.” Even serious, high-minded, rational, and cerebral people will have to assume the nature of a fool to beget children. “The Stoics,” Folly says,

assert that they are almost god-like. But give me one who is three, four, or six hundred times a stoic, and if on this occasion he does not remove his beard, the sign of wisdom (in common with goats), at least he will shed his gravity, stop frowning, abandon his rock-bound principles and for a while be a silly fool. In short, the wise man must send for me if he wants to be a father.

Erasmus knew, like the rest of us, that life can sometimes treat us unkindly. How is it that people are able to bear up under the sorrow and suffering of life? By keeping a stiff upper lip? Facing into the wind? Shoulder to the wheel? Never say die? That is the stoic response, but not the response of Folly. Folly says, “By a timely mixture of ignorance, thoughtlessness, forgetfulness of evil, hope of good, and a dash of delight, I bring relief from troubles.”

Consider the aged and the infirm. They enjoy life in their advanced years because of Folly:

Clearly it is because of my good work [Folly says] that you everywhere see old fellows of Nestor’s age, scarcely recognizable as members of the human race, babbling, silly, toothless, whitehaired, bald—or better let me describe them in the words of Aristophanes: “dirty, stooped, wrinkled, bald, toothless, and toolless.” And yet they are so in love with life and so eager to be young that one of them dyes his white hair, another hides his baldness with a wig, another obtains false teeth from heaven knows where, another is infatuated with some young girl and is a sillier lover than any adolescent.

Folly describes the corresponding antics of older women as well, and says,

Everyone laughs at all this, and very properly, since it is the greatest folly in the world; yet the old ladies are well pleased with themselves. They are perfectly happy solely because of me.

Then Erasmus deals a blow to the stuffed shirts who would condemn these harmless follies:

Those who scorn this kind of behavior might consider whether it is not better to lead a life of pleasant folly than to look for a rafter and a rope.

I will give a last example, one in which Erasmus laughs at himself. Folly points out that the arts nearest to common sense are the ones most esteemed and rewarded by men. The doctors of medicine get applause and good fees, even in the sixteenth century when, as Erasmus says, medicine was “a branch of the art of flattery,” even more so than now. The lawyers come next, whom the philosophers laugh at as so many jackasses. Yet all affairs are arbitrated by these jackasses, and their lands increase. At the bottom of the heap is the starving theologian, “who has mastered a trunkful of manuscripts, lives on beans, and wages a gallant war against lice and fleas.” So common sentiment turns things on their heads, putting the most serious things on the bottom and flattery and sophistry on top. Thus is confirmed Folly’s assertion that folly receives the most praise.

In the final chapter of the book, Erasmus changes tone. After a good deal of good-natured satire and buffoonery, he turns to the relationship between Folly and Christianity. There he is of course able to quote Paul's words that “God has chosen the foolish things of the world [to confound the wise]” (1 Cor. 1:27), and “It has pleased God to save the world by foolishness” (1 Cor. 1:21). He can quote Christ’s words to God, “Thou knowest my foolishness” (Psalm 69:5. Erasmus does not give the words their historical meaning: on a modern critical reading, the speaker is the psalmist himself, not Christ). He can quote Christ’s thanksgiving that God has concealed the mystery of salvation from the wise but has revealed it to babes, that is, to fools (Matthew 11:25). He can quote God as saying through the prophet Isaiah, “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and I will reject the prudence of the prudent” (Isaiah 29:14; cited in 1 Corinthians 1:19). He can appeal also to the great proportion of Christian believers, among whom children, old people, women, and fools—more than the wise—take most delight in God. He can point out that Christian piety gives away property, overlooks injuries, and treats friends and enemies alike. “What is this,” Folly asks, “if not to be mad?” The testimony of common believer, of Paul, of Christ, of God himself confirms that even to please God, one must be a bit of a fool.

One sentence in the Praise of Folly strikes me as summing up all of Folly’s wisdom. It tells in a few words what a truly good man would be like:

He would be able to please those like himself or nearly everyone; he would be kind to his wife, a jolly friend, a gay companion, a polished guest; finally, he would consider nothing human to be alien to him.

The last words are an echo from the classical world, from Terence: “I am a man: nothing human do I consider alien to me” (Self Tormentor 1.77). Another bridge.

The Greek Testament

One of the rallying cries of Renaissance scholarship was ad fontes, “back to the sources.” As humanist scholarship was applied to the Bible, this meant the mastery of three languages: Hebrew and Greek, because these are the original languages of Scripture, and Latin, because this is the language of the Vulgate, whose need for revision was increasingly recognized, as well as the language of theology, which, as many believed, would be renewed through the renewal of Latin.

The revival of good Latin was already well underway in Italy in the mid-fifteenth century, as demonstrated by Valla’s Elegantiae Latini Sermonis (1444). And throughout the Middle Ages anyone willing to risk raising the suspicion of the Church could persuade a rabbi to teach him Hebrew. In fact, modern knowledge of the text of the Hebrew Bible has not progressed so very far beyond the work of the brilliant medieval Jewish scholars. Today’s standard edition of the Hebrew Bible is still for all practical purposes a reproduction of the Leningrad Codex B 19^A, which, according to a note in the manuscript itself, was copied out in a.d. 1008/9 following exemplars corrected by Aaron ben Moses ben Asher.

But in 1500 few scholars in western Europe had a dependable knowledge of Greek. Few European scholars possessed manuscripts of the Greek Testament, and none of them had printed copies of it, because no such thing existed. Erasmus contributed to the improvement of this situation in three ways: he prepared a printed edition of the Greek Testament, he made a fresh translation of it into Latin, and he provided notes and commentary on the text.

Erasmus had given thought to a critical printed edition of the Greek Testament as early as 1507, for he mentioned it in a letter of October 28 to the Venetian printer Aldus Manutius. While lecturing in Cambridge in 1512, he had examined Greek and Latin manuscripts and made notes on them. But when the moment came, it came suddenly, and Erasmus had to act with all haste. Here is how it happened.

In 1514 Erasmus went to Basel and made a proposal to the publisher Johannes Froben. In the early stages of the negotiations, Erasmus seems to have been thinking of a commentary on the Vulgate. In letters of that year he tells friends that he has revised the text (presumably he means a textual revision of the Vulgate, which he had been comparing with Greek and older Latin manuscripts) and has made notes on over a thousand passages.

Froben saw an additional possibility. If he knew the trade scuttlebutt, he knew that two other publishing houses were not far from placing Greek Testaments on the shelves of Europe’s bookstores.

Already in Spain, Cardinal Ximenes and a group of scholars had prepared a trilingual edition of the entire Bible in six volumes, with Greek glossary, Hebrew lexicon, and Hebrew grammar. The printed leaves lay in a warehouse: as soon as Ximenes received official permission from Pope Leo X, the volumes would be bound and distributed. (As it happened, sanction only arrived in 1520, two years after Ximenes had died, and publication was delayed some two years beyond that. The edition, known as the Complutensian Polyglot (from Complutum, the Latin name of the Spanish town Alcalá), only ran to six hundred copies, whereas the first two editions of Erasmus totaled 3,300: Basil Hall, “Biblical Scholarship: Editions and Commentaries,” in The Cambridge History of the Bible (Cambridge University Press, 1963), 3:61.)

Already the Aldine Press in Venice had in 1504 published six chapters of the Gospel of John in Greek, and in 1518/19 it would publish the entire Greek Bible. (The Septuagint, as it turned out, would be a reissue of Erasmus’s first edition.)

The time was clearly ripe for some publisher, some where, to issue a Greek Testament. Erasmus’s Greek scholarship was equal to the task, and so Froben put it to him in no uncertain terms: if Erasmus did not edit and publish a Greek Testament, somebody else soon would (Letter to Erasmus, April 1515).

Erasmus accepted the challenge. For six months he went at the project hammer and tongs. He had with him his copious notes which he had brought from England, and these made constant reference to readings in the Greek manuscripts he had studied. But they were still notes, not a Greek text. That had to be taken from whatever materials were available locally. In Basel Erasmus located three Greek manuscripts and borrowed two more from his friend Johannes Reuchlin. From these, with instructions and emendations written on them in Erasmus’s own hand, the compositors set the type. (All five of these manuscripts still exist. Four are still in Basel in the Universitätsbibliothek. They are MS 1 from the twelfth century, containing the Gospels, Acts, and Epistles; 2^e from the twelfth century, containing the Gospels; 2^ap from the twelfth century, containing the Acts and Epistles; and 817 from the fifteenth century, containing the Gospels. The fifth, one of those borrowed from Reuchlin, is 1^r, a codex of Revelation from the twelfth century, now in the Öttingen-Wallersteinische Bibliothek in Schloss Harburg.)

Thus Froben and Erasmus pulled off the publishing coup of the century, and the first published edition of the Greek Testament saw the light of day, March 1, 1516.

Not that, by modern standards, it was a very good edition. It was full of printer’s errors, and the manuscripts upon which Erasmus placed most reliance would nowadays be judged inferior. Erasmus’s single manuscript of Revelation lacked the last six verses, so Erasmus, alas, produced them by back-translation from the Vulgate. And yet the publication of this book was a milestone in Renaissance learning. Now, for the first time, the cry ad fontes—which in this case amounted to “back to the text”—could truly be heeded by Christian theologians.

And the first edition of Erasmus was even more. It contained, in addition to the text, his own lucid translation into Latin (knowledge of Greek in the West was still not so widespread that the text could stand altogether on its own). The translation was not so much intended to replace the Vulgate as to give clear, contemporary expression to the meaning of the text. And the edition contained his annotations. We must look briefly at these before we are done.

In his haste to produce his first edition, Erasmus was driven by a more elegant motive than mere commercial advantage. He wished to make a bridge from the Greek sources of Christian truth to the men and women of sixteenth-century Europe. He wished for his edition to facilitate the making of modern translations of the Bible directly from its sources, not from a secondary Latin version. His wish is expressed in these words from the preface:

I would have the weakest woman read the Gospels and the Epistles of St. Paul. I would have those words translated into all languages, so that not only Scots and Irishman, but Turks and Saracens might read them. I long for the plowboy to sing them to himself as he follows the plow, the weaver to hum them to the tune of his shuttle, the traveler to beguile with them the dullness of his journey.

The success of the endeavor is vindicated by history. (See the details in “Continental Versions to c. 1600” in Cambridge History of the Bible, 3:94-140.) The work of Erasmus can be traced directly or indirectly in many European versions. The German translation of Martin Luther (1522) was based on Erasmus’s Greek text and Latin version, taken from his second edition of 1519. The first important Italian version made not from the Vulgate but from the original languages appeared in 1530, the work of a Florentine, Antonio Brucioli. Twenty years later another Florentine, Massimo Teofilo, rendered an Italian Testament, which in some reprintings was accompanied by Erasmus’s Latin version.

The business of translating made less headway in France and also more: new translations appeared in a flood, but not from the font. Although not effectively observed, the Edict of Châteaubriant of 1551 shows the official attitude of the church in France: translation of any part of the Bible is forbidden, as well as “the printing or selling of translations, commentaries, scholia, annotations, tables, indices or epitomes concerning Holy Scripture written during the preceding fifty years in any language” (R. A. Sayce in Cambridge History of the Bible 3:113-14). The work of Erasmus is not singled out but is of course included.

In the sixteenth century a number of new Dutch versions appeared. The Latin of Erasmus was the basis of two of these, one printed in Amsterdam in 1523, the other in Delft in 1524. Francisco de Enzina’s Spanish Testament of 1543 was made from Erasmus’s Greek text, but it was suppressed because of its marginal notes and because the translator printed in capital letters those verses in Romans 3 supportive of justification by faith. The first Czech version to depart from the Vulgate was that of Optát Benes and Petr Gzel (1533), made from Erasmus’s Latin version. Luther’s version, and thus indirectly Erasmus’s, underlay parts of the first Danish Testament (1524). The Swedish Testament (1526) was also based on Luther, but with one eye also on the Greek and Latin texts of Erasmus. The first English Testament made directly from the Greek (1525) was based squarely on an early edition of Erasmus. It was made by an expatriate Cambridge scholar, William Tyndale, whose famous words to a die-hard churchman echo the preface of Erasmus:

If God spare my life, ere many years I will cause a boy that driveth the plough shall know more scripture than thou dost.

I must not leave the impression that no European possessed vernacular Scriptures before Erasmus, or that all new versions depended solely on his edition. The situation was much more complex: it was the dense flowering of scholarly and religious energy throughout Europe. But among the many voices, one of the clearest and most authoritative was that of Erasmus.

The annotations which make up the third part of Erasmus’s work were predominantly philological. They gave objective support for his translation and choice of variant readings, and without them he believed his newly edited text would be “cast into the teeth of critics naked and unarmed” (Epistle 1010:3; cited by Erika Rummel, Erasmus’ Annotations on the New Testament: From Philologist to Theologian (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986), 181).

But Erasmus’s critical notes were not merely antiquarian: they served a lively purpose, to lead to the rediscovery of the biblical literature so that the voice of Scripture could again be heard in the church. For Erasmus, the message of the Bible could not be understood without hard grammatical study of the text, and without that message the church would never be renewed.

We will have come full circle when we read Erasmus’s comment on Jesus’ words, “For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light” (Matthew 11:30):

Truly the yoke of Christ would be sweet and his burden light, if petty human institutions added nothing to what he himself imposed. He commanded us nothing save love for one another, and there is nothing so bitter that charity does not soften and sweeten it. Everything according to nature is easily borne, and nothing accords better with the nature of man than the philosophy of Christ, of which almost the sole end is to give back to fallen nature its innocence and integrity. (Cited by Henry Preserved Smith, The Age of the Reformation (New York: Henry Holt, 1920), 58.)

Here is Erasmus’s humanist spirit exactly: to be a Christian is to be at last a man. Here the Gospel and graeco-roman philosophy speak with a unified voice: “Nothing human is alien to me.”

The enduring accomplishment of Erasmus is that he made bridges. He made a bridge for Renaissance people back to the classical period by plunging into the old texts and bringing up their treasures. He made a bridge between sixteenth-century Europeans and first-century Christians, between the Christian Scriptures and the man who drives the plow, by supplying scholars with tools for making the old texts speak anew. He made a bridge between classical thought and Christian thought, between the nature of God and the nature of man, by showing that the teachings of Christ allow man the fullest expression of his humanity. And (not the least of his accomplishments) he makes a bridge from ourselves to the Renaissance—and beyond.

Haus zum Luft

Haus zum Luft, Basel, Switzerland, where Erasmus lived his last days.

Folly speaks to the people.

Folly speaks to the people. Hans Holbein the Younger made this drawing in the margin of a copy of Praise of Folly.

MS 1

MS 1, in the library of the University of Basel.