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Updated: May 8, 2025
It is characteristic that he paraphrased the whole New Testament except the Apocalypse. Erasmus's mind was neither philosophic nor historic. His was neither the work of exact, logical discrimination, nor of grasping the deep sense of the way of the world in broad historical visions in which the particulars themselves, in their multiplicity and variegation, form the image.
Sir Thomas More and Erasmus were close friends, and More's Utopia and Erasmus's Greek New Testament appeared the same year, probably while Tindale was a student at Cambridge. But he came at a troubled time. The new learning had no power to deepen or strengthen the moral life of the people. It could not make religion a vital thing. Morality and religion were far separated.
The abusive term for all that is old and rude is already Gothic, Goths. The term barbarism as used by Erasmus comprised much of what we value most in the medieval spirit. Erasmus's conception of the great intellectual crisis of his day was distinctly dualistic. He saw it as a struggle between old and new, which, to him, meant evil and good.
The German humanists, unwilling, for the most part, to break with the ancient Church, were moved by Erasmus's attack to turn their backs still more upon Luther: Mutianus, Zasius, and Pirckheimer. Even Melanchthon inclined to Erasmus's standpoint. Others, like Capito, once a zealous supporter, now washed their hands of him.
I sat by it yesterday, and read Erasmus's Militis Christiani Enchiridion. Piozzi Letters, ii. 3. See post, April 9 and 30, 1778. At the following Easter he recorded: 'My memory is less faithful in retaining names, and, I am afraid, in retaining occurrences. Pr. and Med. p. 170. I am told that Horace, Earl of Orford, has a collection of Bon-Mots by persons who never said but one.
Briard of Ath declared he had found nothing offensive in it, after he had first been told all sorts of bad things about it. 'Then the new edition will please you much better, Erasmus had said. His friend Dorp and James Latomus, also one of the chief divines, had expressed themselves in the same sense, and the Carmelite Nicholas of Egmond had said that he had never read Erasmus's work.
As Holbein illustrated the Moria, we should wish to possess the Colloquia with illustrations by Brueghel, so closely allied is Erasmus's witty clear vision of incidents to that of this great master.
If in the Dutch patriciate of that time those aspirations lived and were translated into action, it was Erasmus's spirit of social responsibility which inspired them. The history of Holland is far less bloody and cruel than that of any of the surrounding countries.
But, in the present state of historical science, the arguing against miracles is, as Colet remarked of his friend Erasmus's warfare against the Thomists and Scotists of Cambridge, "a contest more necessary than glorious or difficult."
According to Beatus Rhenanus, the Brabant plan stood foremost at the end of Erasmus's life. The Regent, Mary of Hungary, did not cease to urge him to return to the Netherlands. Erasmus's own last utterance leaves us in doubt whether he had made up his mind.
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