Selections from Erasmus | Page 4

not by design, he came into relations with John Froben of Basel, who with the three sons of his late partner, John Amorbach, was printing works of sound learning with all his energy--especially the Fathers. In July 1514 Erasmus set forth, and after a triumphal progress through Germany, fêted and welcomed everywhere, he settled at Basel to see Jerome and the New Testament through the press. By 1516 they were complete, and Erasmus had achieved--almost by an afterthought, for his first project had been a series of annotations like Valla's--the work which has made his name great.
Mark Pattison says of Erasmus that he propounded the problem of critical scholarship, but himself did nothing to solve it. By critical scholarship is meant the examination of the grounds on which learning rests. In youth we are uncritical, and accept as Caesar or Livy the books from which we read those authors; but with growing experience we learn that a copy is not always a true representation of its original; and with this, even though there is little perception of the changes and chances through which manuscripts have passed, the first lesson of criticism has been learnt.
The problem may be stated thus--In no single case does an autograph manuscript of a classical author survive: for our knowledge of the works of the past we are dependent on manuscripts written at a later date. Only rarely is there less than 300 years' interval between an author's death and the earliest manuscript now extant of his works; in a great many cases 1,000 years have elapsed, and in the extreme--Sophocles and Aristophanes--1,400. The question therefore arises, How far do our manuscripts represent what was originally written? and it is the work of scholars to compare together existing manuscripts, to estimate their relative value, and where they differ, to determine, if possible, what the author actually wrote.
The manuscripts of the New Testament which scholars have examined and collated are now numbered by hundreds. Erasmus was content for his first edition with two lent to him by Colet from the library of St. Paul's Cathedral, and a few of little value which he found at Basel. And though for subsequent editions he compared one or two more, the work never reached a high standard of scholarship. He had done enough, however, for his age. Before Erasmus men were accustomed to read the New Testament in Latin; after 1516 no competent scholar could be content with anything but the Greek. But though the priority actually belongs to Erasmus, it must be stated that the Greek version had already been printed in January 1514 in a Polyglott Bible published under the orders of Cardinal Ximenes at Alcala in Spain. For definite reasons, however, this great edition was not put into circulation till 1520.
By this time Erasmus had attained his highest point. As years went on his activity continued unabated, his fame grew and his material circumstances reached a level at which he was far above want and could gratify his generous impulses freely. But a cloud arose which overshadowed him; and when it broke--long after Erasmus's death--it overwhelmed Europe. The causes which raised it up were not new. For centuries earnest and religious men--Erasmus himself among the number--had been protesting against evil in the Church. In December 1517 Martin Luther, a friar at Wittenberg, created a stir by denouncing a number of the doctrines and practices of the Church; and when the Pope excommunicated him, proceeded publicly to burn the Papal Bull with every mark of contempt. From this he was driven on by opposition and threatened persecution, which he faced with indomitable courage, to a position of complete hostility to Rome; endeavouring to shatter its immemorial institutions and asserting the right of the individual to approach God through the mediation of Christ only instead of through that of priests: the individual, as an inevitable consequence, claiming the right of private judgement in matters religious instead of bowing to dogma based on the authority of the Church from ages past.
These conclusions Erasmus abhorred. He was all for reform, but a violent severance with the past seemed to him a monstrous remedy. He always exercised, though he did not always claim, the right of thinking for himself; but he would never have dreamed of allowing the same freedom to the ignorant or the unlearned. The aim of his life was to increase knowledge, in the assurance that from that reform would surely come; but to force on reform by an appeal to passion, to settle religious difficulties by an appeal to emotion was to him madness.
The ideals of Erasmus and Luther were irreconcilable: and bitterness soon arose between them. From both sides Erasmus was assailed with unmeasured virulence. The strict Catholics called him a heretic, the Lutherans a coward. But