He also wrote On Free Will, The Praise of Folly, The Complaint of Peace, Handbook of a Christian Knight, On Civility in Children, Copia: Foundations of the Abundant Style and many other popular and pedagogical works.

)[note 6] Poverty[27] had forced the sickly, bookish, teenaged orphan Erasmus into the consecrated life, entering the novitiate in 1487[28] at the canonry at rural Stein, very near Gouda, South Holland: the Chapter of Sion community[note 7] largely borrowed its rule from the larger monkish Congregation of Windesheim who had historical associations with the Brethren of the Common Life, but also with the notable pastoral, mystical[29]: ch1  and anti-speculative post-scholastic theologians Jean Gerson[30]: 315  and Gabriel Biel: positions associated also with Erasmus.

[47] In 1505, Pope Julius II granted a dispensation[48] from the vow of poverty to the extent of allowing Erasmus to hold certain benefices, and from the control and habit of his order, though he remained a priest and, formally, an Augustinian canon regular[note 20] the rest his life.

[50]: 410 Erasmus traveled widely and regularly, for reasons of poverty, "escape"[51]: 154  from his Stein canonry (to Cambrai), education (to Paris, Turin), escape from the sweating sickness plague (to Orléans), employment (to England), searching libraries for manuscripts, writing (Brabant), royal counsel (Cologne), patronage, tutoring and chaperoning (North Italy), networking (Rome), seeing books through printing in person (Paris, Venice, Louvain, Basel), and avoiding the persecution of religious fanatics (to Freiburg).

[52] In 1495 with Bishop Henry's consent and a stipend, Erasmus went on to study at the University of Paris in the Collège de Montaigu, a centre of reforming zeal,[note 22] under the direction of the ascetic Jan Standonck, of whose rigors he complained.

[62]: 518 Erasmus also became fast friends with Thomas More, a young law student considering becoming a monk, whose thought (e.g., on conscience and equity) had been influenced by 14th century French theologian Jean Gerson,[63][64] and whose intellect had been developed by his powerful patron Cardinal John Morton (d. 1500) who had famously attempted reforms of English monasteries.

Opponents: Noël Béda (or Bédier) Following his first trip to England, Erasmus returned first to poverty in Paris, where he started to compile the Adagio for his students, then to Orléans to escape the plague, and then to semi-monastic life, scholarly studies and writing in France, notably at the Benedictine Abbey of Saint Bertin at St Omer (1501,1502) where he wrote the initial version of the Enchiridion (Handbook of the Christian Knight.)

[77] He found employment tutoring and escorting Scottish nobleman Alexander Stewart, the 24-year old Archbishop of St Andrews, through Padua, Florence, and Siena[note 27] Erasmus made it to Rome in 1509, visiting some notable libraries and cardinals, but having a less active association with Italian scholars than might have been expected.

Opponents: Latomus • Edward Lee • Ulrich von Hutten • Nicolaas Baechem (Egmondanus) His residence at Leuven, where he lectured at the University, exposed Erasmus to much criticism from those ascetics, academics and clerics hostile to the principles of literary and religious reform to which he was devoting his life.

[86] Apart from Froben's production team, he had his own household[note 37]with a formidable housekeeper, stable of horses, and up to eight boarders or paid servants: who acted as assistants, correctors, amanuenses, dining companions, international couriers, and carers.

[129][note 45] In the 1530s, life became more dangerous for Spanish Erasmians when Erasmus' protector, the Inquisitor General Alonso Manrique de Lara fell out of favour with the royal court and lost power within his own organization to friar-theologians.

[135] His amanuensis Gilbert Cousin died in prison at age 66, shortly after being arrested on the personal order of Pope Pius V.[114] When his strength began to fail, he finally decided to accept an invitation by Queen Mary of Hungary, Regent of the Netherlands (sister of his former student Archduke Ferdinand I and Emperor Charles V), to move from Freiburg to Brabant.

[142] Erasmus had received dispensations (from Ferdinand Archduke of Austria, and from Emperor Charles V in 1530) to make a will rather than have his wealth revert to his order (the Chapter of Sion), or to the state, and had long pre-sold most of his personal library of almost 500 books to Polish humanist Jan Łaski.

Terence J. Martin identifies an "Erasmian pattern" that the supposed (by the reader) otherness (of Turks, Lapplanders, Indians, Amerindians,[note 63] Jews, and even women and heretics) "provides a foil against which the failures of Christian culture can be exposed and criticized.

[99]: s1.7.4  He spoke more freely about this matter in letters sent to his friends like Thomas More, Beatus Rhenanus and Adrianus Barlandus: a particular target of his criticisms was the Emperor Maximilian I, whom Erasmus blamed for allegedly preventing the Netherlands from signing a peace treaty with Guelders[172] and other schemes to cause wars in order to extract money from his subjects.

He referred to his irenical disposition in the Preface to On Free Will as a secret inclination of nature that would make him even prefer the views of the Sceptics over intolerant assertions, though he sharply distinguished adiaphora from what was uncontentiously explicit in the New Testament or absolutely mandated by Church teaching.

Erasmus wrote Inquisitio de fide to say that the Lutherans (of 1523) were not formally heretics: he pushed back against the willingness of some theologians to cry heresy fast in order to enforce their views in universities and at inquisitions.

[16]: 200 Erasmus' pacificism included a particular dislike for sedition, which caused warfare: It was the duty of the leaders of this (reforming) movement, if Christ was their goal, to refrain not only from vice, but even from every appearance of evil; and to offer not the slightest stumbling block to the Gospel, studiously avoiding even practices which, although allowed, are yet not expedient.

[196]: 211  Erasmus wrote several notable pastoral books and pamphlets on sacraments, always looking through rather than at the rituals or forms: The Protestant Reformation began in the year following the publication of his pathbreaking edition of the New Testament in Latin and Greek (1516).

The final object of it all was to nourish[...]chiefly moral and spiritual reform[...]"[note 86] At the height of his literary fame, Erasmus was called upon to take one side, but public partisanship was foreign to his beliefs, nature, and habits.

Despite all his criticism of clerical corruption and abuses within the Western Church,[note 87] especially at first he sided unambiguously with neither Luther nor the anti-Lutherans publicly (though in private he lobbied assiduously against extremism from both parties), but eventually shunned the breakaway Protestant Reformation movements along with their most radical offshoots.

I doubt that either side in the dispute can be suppressed without grave loss.By 1523, and first suggested in a letter from Henry VIII, Erasmus had been convinced that Luther's ideas on necessity/free will were a subject of core disagreement deserving a public airing, and strategized with friends and correspondents[216] on how to respond with proper moderation[217] without making the situation worse for all, especially for the humanist reform agenda.

He put the matter bluntly to Luther: We are dealing with this: Would a stable mind depart from the opinion handed down by so many men famous for holiness and miracles, depart from the decisions of the Church, and commit our souls to the faith of someone like you who has sprung up just now with a few followers, although the leading men of your flock do not agree either with you or among themselves – indeed though you do not even agree with yourself, since in this same Assertion[220] you say one thing in the beginning and something else later on, recanting what you said before.Continuing his chastisement of Luther – and undoubtedly put off by the notion of there being "no pure interpretation of Scripture anywhere but in Wittenberg"[222] – Erasmus touches upon another important point of the controversy: You stipulate that we should not ask for or accept anything but Holy Scripture, but you do it in such a way as to require that we permit you to be its sole interpreter, renouncing all others.

You declaim bitterly against the luxury of priests, the ambition of bishops, the tyranny of the Roman Pontiff, and the babbling of the sophists; against our prayers, fasts, and Masses; and you are not content to retrench the abuses that may be in these things, but must needs abolish them entirely.

"[259] Useful "philosophy" needed to be limited to (or re-defined as) the practical and moral: You must realize that 'philosopher' does not mean someone who is clever at dialectics or science but someone who rejects illusory appearance and undauntedly seeks out and follows what is true and good.

And the primary mechanism of accommodation is language,[note 118]: 6  which mediates between reality and abstraction, which allows disputes of all kinds to be resolved and the gospel to be transmitted:[262] in his New Testament, Erasmus notably translated the Greek logos in John 1:1 "In the beginning was the Word" more like "In the beginning was Speech:[263] using Latin sermo (discourse, conversation, language) not verbum (word) emphasizing the dynamic and interpersonal communication rather than static principle:[note 119] "Christ incarnate as the eloquent oration of God":[184] "He is called Speech [sermo], because through him God, who in his own nature cannot be comprehended by any reasoning, wished to become known to us.

[262]: 9  In Erasmus' early Enchiridion[note 130]: 82  he had given this scopus in typical medieval terms of an ascent of being to God (vertical), but from the mid-1510s life he moved to an analogy of Copernican planetary circling around Christ the centre (horizontal) or Columbian navigation towards a destination.

For example, in his Paean in Honour of the Virgin Mary (1503) Erasmus elaborated his theme that the Incarnation had been hinted far and wide, which could impact the theology of the fate of the remote unbaptized and grace, and the place of classical philosophy:[283] "You are assuredly the Woman of renown: both heaven and earth and the succession of all the ages uniquely join to celebrate your praise in a musical concord.

Thus indeed have writers religiously vied to proclaim you, on the one hand inspired prophets, on the other eloquent Doctors of the church, both filled with the same spirit, as the former foretold your coming in joyful oracles before your birth and the latter heaped prayerful praise on you when you appeared."

Towards the end of his life, as he lost dexterity, he employed secretaries or amanuenses who performed the assembly or transcription, re-wrote his writing, and in his last decade, recorded his dictation; letters were usually in his own hand, unless formal.