The Life of Martin Luther (Part 8): Erasmus and the Bondage of the Will (1525)

Um, just to kind of a quest- uh, just a question f- my first question for you, Dr. Cocris.

Uh, who is Erasmus? Why is he important for the reformation outside of this later debacle with Luther? Like, why is he important for the reformation especially early on, and who is this guy?

It's, it, it's a very excellent question.

So he's born in b- in, uh, 1569, um, in Rotterdam.

His, um, uh, parents are not married.

His father kind of skips the family, uh, and leaves them very little and then goes off to Rome and becomes a, a priest.

And basically he has some money a- and they say, you know, "Basically all the money's been used up.

We're gonna dump you in a monastery." And so he gets du- he doesn't wanna go in, so he's, he goes to the monastery, and eventually convinces them to let him go to the University of Paris where he gets a degree.

And after that he essentially becomes a kind of itinerant scholar, and what, what he's doing is he's bringing...

I mean, he's not the only one, but he's bringing, um, what like a lot of other people, the humanistic tradition of, um, the Re- the Renaissance to Northern Europe.

And the Renaissance humanist tradition goes back to, um, the late 14th, uh, century, um, uh, with, um, a number of figures.

But the, the, the idea was that, um, the idea was retrieving ancient knowledge from Greece and Rome, uh, which, uh, will help the Italian city-states.

So, so there, there's, like, a political goal with retrieva- retrieving the information from Ancient Greece and Rome.

Ancient Greece and Rome were originally city-states, and the Italians declared their essentially in the 11th century, 11th, 12th century, they declare their independence of the Holy Roman Empire and become their own independent city-states and then get become very, very wealthy.

Of course, they're autocracies.

They're built, uh, by kind of mafia-like wealthy families, and what they want to do is restore civic virtue.

Like the, all the Greeks, they lived in city-states.

Ancient Rome was a city-state.

And so you can retrieve great, through, through great, um, works of literature and philosophy and things like this, you can g- you can retrieve civic virtue.

Erasmus takes this model over and he brings it to the n- the, the North and, and, and he's interested in applying this model then to Christianity.

And he says, "If we can retrieve, uh, the original Christianity Um, then we can reform the church.

There's a lot of corruption in the church, and so the ancient church looked really good, so we can model ourselves on the ancient church, and that means being, going ad fontes, back to the sources.

So not only to the Bible, but also he edits critical editions of the works of Jerome, St. Jerome, who he, he wants to model himself on, uh, as a c- as a humanist scholar.

Remember, Jerome was the one who translated, um, the, uh, Hebrew and the Greek into the Latin for the Vulgate under the commission of the, the Bishop of Rome.

Uh, and so, uh, his final project that's very influential on the reformers is his edi- editing of a critical edition of the New Testament in Greek based on a series of really crummy manuscripts of the Greek New Testament that he discovers in a attic in Basel, Switzerland.