Quotes About Erasmus

The roar of an engine blasted from his left—and a Harley-Davidson motorcycle with flame decals jumped the sidewalk in front of him. A small crowd of travelers scattered. "How do you say, 'You jerk!' in Turkish?" Jake asked. "Erasmus!" Dan cried with relief. Jake balled his fist angrily and shouted, "Erasmus!"

It was a notable speech of Erasmus, if spoken in ear nest, and his wit were not too quick for his con science[47]—he said he desired wealth and honour no more than a feeble horse doth a heavy cloak-bag. And I think every Christian in his right temper would be of his mind.

A course on philosophy introduced her to a new hero, the Renaissance scholar Erasmus, who "believed in one aristocracy—the aristocracy of intellect," she wrote in a paper. "He had one faith—faith in the power of thought, in the supremacy of ideas." Elizebeth, a smart person from a working-class family, found this concept liberating: the measure of a person was her ideas, not her wealth or her command of religious texts.

the Renaissance scholar Erasmus, who "believed in one aristocracy—the aristocracy of intellect," she wrote in a paper. "He had one faith—faith in the power of thought, in the supremacy of ideas.

For Luther the religious was the thing of greatest importance on earth; for Erasmus it was the human.

Why did Erasmus[…] transform the image of a woman yielding to the temptation of an enormous storage jar into the image of a woman carrying with her a small pyxis [box] ?" Dora and Erwin Panofsky, Pandora's Box: The changing aspects of a Mythical Symbol, p. 18

Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch, which ought to be applied as sparingly as possible. I dislike the stuff. I do not believe in it, for its own sake, at all... My lawgivers are Erasmus and Montaigne, not Moses and St Paul. My temple stands not upon Mount Moriah but in the Elysian Field where even the immoral are admitted. My motto is 'Lord, I disbelieve — help thou my unbelief.

Europe's leading humanist and scriptural scholar, Erasmus of Rotterdam

Erasmus argued that the father of the Reformation was wrong—that man does have free will.

The man who discovered the power behind that authority was not Gutenberg or Caxton or even Luther. It was Erasmus of Rotterdam.

Few students or teachers were interested in Cicero or Erasmus's other literary heroes. There was, however, a new teacher at Magdalen College named John Colet, who had immersed himself in the humanism coming out of Italy and its Platonist themes. He and Erasmus found an instant harmony. In listening to Colet speak, Erasmus wrote later, he "seemed to be listening to Plato himself."14

translation of the New Testament in 1516. By exposing many of the errors of the old Latin Vulgate, Erasmus established a new appreciation for "pure Scripture" as the final authority on all things spiritual as well as many secular.

It was also Colet who suggested to Erasmus that he fuse his two interests, the Bible and ancient literature, into one. He urged him to do for ancient Christian literature, including the New Testament, what Ficino had done for Plato: use the techniques of philology to produce a clean, definitive text free from copyists' errors and scholastic muddles, a "pure Scripture" that would show people what the Bible really said, not what tradition or the allegorists said it meant.

Now, thanks to Erasmus's In Praise of Folly, a contempt for universities and their Aristotle-centered curriculum acquired intellectual chic.

One by one, Erasmus's works poured out and were handed over to Venetian merchants, who loaded them aboard ships and pack mules to carry to every city in Europe. Aldus Manutius's Aldine Press made Erasmus the first writer to earn a living with his pen.

The humanist education that Erasmus and his friends invented wound up creating its own schools. One of the first was St. Paul's in London, founded by John Colet.

The example of Saint Socrates, as Erasmus once called him, would gently lead everyone to see that the soul's highest goal is wisdom and that the "philosophy of Christ" (philosophia Christi) is the highest form of wisdom there is.

Erasmus had no intention of becoming a martyr. In the end, he preferred to work within the boundaries of the Church, not outside them. Despite their mutual antipathy toward the Aristotle of the scholastics, Luther's opposition ran far deeper. It hinged on an issue that had separated Boethius and Saint Augustine at the onset of the Middle Ages. It had at its heart the clash between Plato and Aristotle on free will.

IN ONE OF HIS letters to Erasmus, Luther said, "YOUR thoughts of God are too human." Probably

I do not say, however, that every delusion or wandering of the mind should be called madness. Erasmus of Rotterdam, The Praise of Folly There

All Europe, including Erasmus, has followed Luther.

gloom is a useless emotion. In order to escape from it, I have been driven to study the past with more attention than I had formerly given to it, and have found, as Erasmus found, that folly is perennial and yet the human race has survived.

He was not interested in pure analysis; he was interested in helping the church. Second, Sproul draws attention to Luther's claim that a theologian must make assertions. Erasmus, Luther's debate partner on the issue of the bondage of the will, made equivocations.

No seventeenth-century pedagogue would have publicly advised his disciple, as did Erasmus in his Dialogues, on the choice of a good prostitute.