Desiderius Erasmus

Oh my goodness.

Where he borrows a story from Erasmus and it's the tale of a priest who says mopsimus instead of sump-simus and refuses to change it when it's incorrect.

Sumptuous or sump-simus? So the Latin word sumpsimus.

And he refused to change it.

This, of course, was subversive in a world of religious and secular monarchs.

Erasmus of Rotterdam started his career as an Augustinian friar and became one of the most influential scholars and mediators of humanist thought of his generation.

He and his English friend, Sir Thomas More, represented a strand of humanism that integrated classical learning and its human insights with Christianity in a much more sober style.

That sober style itself owed much to the ideals of the devotio moderna we looked at before, getting close to the Jesus of the Gospels and the simple basic messages of Scripture, growing in virtue.

This week, I also had the opportunity to interview Jordan Cooper, who is a Lutheran scholar and was grateful to get the opportunity to talk to him.

And he and I talked a little bit about the subject of the bondage of the will, which was obviously Luther's famous work where he addressed the arguments of Desiderius Erasmus regarding the bondage of man in sin.

And Cooper says that Luther's work I didn't know this, and he said it was written in a week, it was written very quickly, and so there were some things in the bondage of the will that were very Luther-like, meaning he was verbose and he was powerful in his speech and sometimes a little less precise but very bold.

When we compare the bondage of the will with Luther and the freedom of the will with Luther, I've said in the past, I think the bondage of the will is intended to be polemic, it's opposing Erasmus, it's responding to arguments.

In the Greek poet Hesiod's telling, Pandora opens a jar and releases every evil into the world.

It became, by the way, a box, Pandora's box, only in the 16th century through a mistranslation by the scholar Erasmus.

In the Garden of Eden, It is Eve who reaches for the fruit of knowledge.

In Charles Perrault's fairy tale Blueberry, published in 1697, a young wife is nearly killed for opening the one door she was forbidden to open.

They were starting to get tired of the stranglehold of the Pope.

Humanists, and we tend to think of humanism as anti-church in our day, but the humanists were actually within the Catholic Church at the time, particularly people like Erasmus.

They turned scholars back to biblical sources, especially Erasmus because he produced the Greek New Testament in 1516.

And then Luther... emerged to preach a message that could be re-preached, printed, and sung.

And that message was that sinners are justified by grace through faith.

if you do not want to commit suicide always have something to do suicide must have been forever tempting him for he was ever at work it was because he was so thoroughly alive that he filled the whole era with his life contemporary with one of the greatest of centuries sixteen ninety four to seventeen seventy eight he was the soul and essence of it to name voltaire said victor hugon is to characterize the entire eighteenth century italy had a renaissance and germany had a reformation but france had voltaire he was for his country both renaissance and reformation and half the revolution He carried on the antiseptic scepticism of Montaigne and the healthy, earthy humour of Rabelais.

He fought superstition and corruption more savagely and effectively than Luther or Erasmus, Calvin or Knox or Melanchthon.

He helped to make the powder with which Mirabeau and Marat, Danton and Robespierre, blew up the old regime.

if we judge of men by what they have done said lamartine then voltaire is incontestably the greatest writer of modern europe destiny gave him eighty-three years of existence that he might slowly decompose the decayed age he had the time to combat time and when he fell he was the conqueror no never has a writer had in his lifetime such influence despite exile imprisonment and the suppression of almost every one of his books by the minions of church and state He forged fiercely a path for his truth until at last kings, popes, and emperors catered to him, thrones trembled before him, and half the world listened to catch his every word.

I think maybe the central point of what you're getting at is the role of the will when it comes to salvation.

This is where Luther tells Erasmus in The Bondage of the Will, you've got right to the central question.

And it's going to fit under here.

If I need to make a decision for Jesus to be saved...

He engages very carefully with texts.

And Melanchthon was very much part of what we think of as the Renaissance, the humanists, someone like Desiderius Erasmus, who obviously comes into conflict with Luther.

Melanchthon always has something of a relationship with Erasmus.

And so he's from a very different background than Luther is theologically.