At length in 1495 he persuaded the Bishop to fulfil a desire which he had long cherished, and send him with a stipend to a University. He went to Paris and began reading for a Doctor's degree in Theology. But the course was too cramping, and he therefore used his opportunity to educate himself more widely; eking out the Bishop's grant by taking pupils. It was a hard life, and his health was delicate; but he did not flinch from his task, doing just enough paid work -- and no more -- to keep himself alive and to buy books. In 1499 one of his pupils, a young Englishman, Lord Mountjoy, brought him to England for a visit, and in the autumn sent him for a month or two to Oxford. There he fell in with Colet, a man of strong character and intellect, who was giving a new impulse to the study of the Bible by historical treatment. Colet's enthusiasm encouraged Erasmus in the direction to which he was already inclined; and when he returned to Paris in 1500, it was with the determination to apply his whole energy to classical learning, and especially to the study of Theology, which in the new world opening before him was still to be the queen of the sciences. For the next four years he was working hard, teaching himself Greek and reading whatever he could find, at Paris or, when the plague drove him thence, at Orleans or Louvain. By 1504 his period of preparation was over, and the fruitful season succeeded. His first venture in Theology was to print in 1505 some annotations on the New Testament by Lorenzo Valla, an Italian humanist of the fifteenth century with whose critical temperament he was much in sympathy.
Shortly afterwards a visit to England brought him what he had long desired -- an opportunity of going to Italy. He set out in June 1506, as supervisor of the studies of two boys, the sons of Henry VII's physician. After taking the degree of D.D. at Turin in September he settled down at Bologna with his charges and worked at a book of which he had already published a specimen in 1500. To this book, the Adagia, he owed the great fame which he obtained throughout Europe, before any of the works on which his reputation now rests had been published. Its scheme was a collection of proverbial sayings and allusions, which he illustrated and explained in such a way as to make them useful to those who desired to study the classics and to write elegant Latin. In these days of lexicons and dictionaries the value of the Adagia has passed away; but to an age which placed a high value on Latinity and which had little apparatus to use, the book was a great acquisition. It was welcomed with enthusiasm when Aldus published it at Venice in 1508; and throughout his life Erasmus brought out edition after edition, amplifying and enlarging a book which the public was always ready to buy.
From Venice Erasmus went on to Rome, where he had a flattering reception, and, though a northerner, was recognized as an equal by the humanists of Italy. He was pressed to stay, but the death of Henry VII brought him an invitation to return to England, in the names of Warham, Archbishop of Canterbury, and his old patron Mountjoy, who was loud in his praises of the 'divine' young king.
As he rode hastily northwards, his active brain fell to composing a satire on the life he saw around him. He was a quick observer, and his personal charm had won him admission to the halls of the great; whilst bitter experience had shown him the life of the poor and needy. His satire, The Praise of Folly, cuts with no gentle hand into the deceits to which human frailty is prone and lays bare their nakedness. High and low, rich and poor, suffer alike, as Folly makes merry over them. There was much in the life of the age which called for censure, as there had been in the past and was to be in the future. On untrained lips censure easily degenerates into abuse and loses its sting: Erasmus with his gifts of humour and expression caught the public ear and set men thinking.
In England, where he spent the next years, 1509-14, Erasmus began the great work of his life, an edition of the New Testament and of the Letters of Jerome. His time was spent between Cambridge and London, and his friends did what they could for his support. Warham presented him with a living -- and then as Erasmus could not reside and discharge the duties of a parish priest, allowed him to resign and draw a pension from the living -- in violation of his own strict regulation. Mountjoy gave him another pension, and Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, sent him to Cambridge and gave him rooms in Queens' College. For a time he held the Professorship of Divinity founded in Cambridge, as in Oxford, by the Lady Margaret Tudor, mother of Henry VII. But teaching was not his gift. Others might inspire students from the teacher's chair: his talent could only enlighten the teacher through his books.
At length the time came to publish. By fortunate accident, if 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, feted 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 that 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 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 Polyglot 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 the 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 throughout these stormy years he never wavered. At the end he was still pursuing the ideal which he had sought at the outset of his public career -- reform guided by knowledge. He lived to see some of the disasters which he had dreaded as the result of encouragement given to lawless passion -- the Peasants' Revolt in 1525, and the Anabaptist horrors at Munster ten years later. If he could have foreseen the course of the next century, he would not have lacked instances with which to enforce his moral.
After 1516 Erasmus returned to England, and then after a few weeks settled in the Netherlands, first at the court of Brussels, where he had been appointed Councillor to the young Archduke Charles; and then at the University of Louvain. He was incessantly at work, a new edition of the New Testament being projected within a few weeks of the publication of the first. This appeared in 1519, after Erasmus had journeyed to Basel in the summer of 1518 to help with the printing. In the autumn of 1521 he determined to remove to Basel altogether, to escape the attacks of the Louvain theologians and to be near his printers. For the next few years he was at Froben's right hand, editing the Fathers in one great series of volumes after another, and unsparing of his health.
It was during this period that one of the best known of his works, the Colloquia, attained maturity. These were composed first in Paris for a pupil, as polite forms of address at meeting and parting. In their final shape they are a series of lively dialogues in which characters, often thinly disguised, discuss the burning questions of the day with lightness and humour. In all subsequent times they have been a favourite book for school reading; and some of Shakespeare's lines are an echo of Erasmus.
In 1529 religious dissension drove him from Basel and he took refuge at Freiburg in the Breisgau, which was still untouched by the Reformation. There he worked on, in the intervals of severe illness; his courage never failed him and he was comforted by the affection of his friends. In 1535 he returned again to Basel, to be at hand in the printing of a work on preaching, the Ecclesiastes, to which he had given his recent efforts; and there death, which for twelve years had not seemed far away, overtook him on July 12, 1536.