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"The further my observation has extended," he says, "the more satisfied I am that no knowledge of things will supply the place of the early study of letters, literae humaniores. I do not doubt the value of any honest mental labor.
All that appertains to ancient and cultured literature is called 'poetry' by those narrow-minded fellows. By that word they indicate everything that savours of a more elegant doctrine, that is to say all that they have not learned themselves. All the tumult, the whole tragedy under these terms he usually refers to the great theological struggle originates in the hatred of bonae literae.
After that I shall devote myself, with all my heart, to the divinae literae, to give up the remainder of my life to them. If only he can find the means to work for some months entirely for himself and disentangle himself from profane literature.
His description of the place is interesting: 'The town is beautiful, and so are the women. The University has not so many faculties as Pavia, nor are they so well attended; but literae humaniores seem to be in the very air.
They fear that if bonae literae are reborn and the world grows wise, it will come to light that they have known nothing. They do not know how pious the Ancients could be, what sanctity characterizes Socrates, Virgil, and Horace, or Plutarch's Moralia, how rich the history of Antiquity is in examples of forgiveness and true virtue.
Some remarkable evidence regarding Erasmus's altered attitude towards the old and the new Church is shown by what follows. The reproach he had formerly so often flung at the advocates of conservatism that they hated the bonae literae, so dear to him, and wanted to stifle them, he now uses against the evangelical party. 'Wherever Lutherism is dominant the study of literature is extinguished.
Humanism applies to the revival of classic literature, and was so called by its leaders, following the example of Petrarch, because they held that the study of the classics, literae humaniores, i.e. the "more human writings," rather than the old theology, was the best means of promoting the largest human interests.
'I know quite certainly', he writes on 21 March 1519 to one of his German friends, 'that the barbarians on all sides have conspired to leave no stone unturned till they have suppressed bonae literae. 'Here we are still fighting with the protectors of the old ignorance'; cannot Wolsey persuade the Pope to stop it here?
Among Italian humanists he was especially acquainted with Lorenzo Valla, who on account of his Elegantiae passed with him for the pioneer of bonae literae; but Filelfo, Aeneas Sylvius, Guarino, Poggio, and others, were also not unknown to him. In ecclesiastical literature he was particularly well read in Jerome.
In a letter of 13 October 1527, to a professor at Toledo, we find the ébauche of the Ciceronianus. In addition to the haters of classic studies for the sake of orthodox belief, writes Erasmus, 'lately another and new sort of enemies has broken from their ambush. These are troubled that the bonae literae speak of Christ, as though nothing can be elegant but what is pagan.
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