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Updated: May 8, 2025
There is a valuable commentary on the Enchiridion by Simplicius, who lived in the time of the emperor Justinian. Indeed, the doctrines of Epictetus and Antoninus are the same, and Epictetus is the best authority for the explanation of the philosophical language of Antoninus and the exposition of his opinions. But the method of the two philosophers is entirely different.
High or Low it was all the same to him. What excited his curiosity most was the Enchiridion Militis Christiani of Erasmus in Latin of course, and that he could easily read but almost equally exciting was a Greek and Latin vocabulary; or again, a very thin book in which he recognised the New Testament in the Vulgate.
Indeed, Zeus says plainly that men do attribute their sufferings to the gods, but they do it falsely, for they are the cause of their own sorrows. Epictetus in his Enchiridion makes short work of the question of evil. He says, "As a mark is not set up for the purpose of missing it, so neither does the nature of evil exist in the universe."
And yet you, holding such opinions, consider yourself a Christian, who are not even a man! In the Enchiridion of the militant Christian, Erasmus had for the first time said the things which he had most at heart, with fervour and indignation, with sincerity and courage. And yet one would hardly say that this booklet was born of an irresistible impulse of ardent piety.
The book has become known as a favourite of R.L. Stevenson, who said of it that "there is not the man living no, nor recently dead that could put, with so lovely a spirit, so much honest, kind wisdom into words." Reader, this Enchiridion I present thee which is the fruit of solitude; a school few care to learn in, though none instructs us better.
The chief object of his studies he had already conceived to be the restoration of theology. We hear, moreover, the note of personal justification. It is sounded also in a letter to Colet written towards the close of 1504, accompanying the edition of the Lucubrationes in which the Enchiridion was first published.
In these last fifteen years of his life Erasmus resumes, by means of a series of moral-dogmatic disquisitions, the topics he broached in the Enchiridion: the exposition of simple, general Christian conduct; untrammelled and natural ethics. That is his message of redemption.
On this account they form, notwithstanding all the jests and mockery, a profoundly serious moral treatise and are closely akin to the Enchiridion militis Christiani.
Shortly afterwards followed the 'Little Catechism, called also the 'Enchiridion' which contains in an abbreviated form, adapted to children and simple understandings, the contents of his larger work, set out here in the form of question and answer.
They cannot bear that smile which makes Luther speak of the guileful being looking out of Erasmus's features. His piety is too even for them, too limp. Loyola has testified that the reading of the Enchiridion militis Christiani relaxed his fervour and made his devotion grow cold. He saw that warrior of Christ differently, in the glowing colours of the Spanish-Christian, medieval ideal of chivalry.
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