Abstract
European scholars of the 1930s and 1940s often hailed the Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus (1466?–1536) as a “universalist” and “cosmopolitan” thinker, a “citizen of all Europe” whose intellectual concerns “transcended race, religion, and nation” and thus provided a remedy to the Völkisch nationalism of German Nazism.1 In recent decades, however, this image of Erasmus has been challenged by scholars who find Erasmus’ political views to fall short of cosmopolitan ideals or regard him less as a citizen of a transnational res publica litterarum than as a lifelong Netherlander or “Batavian” who never rejects his cultural or linguistic origins and must therefore be recognized as a “local hero” rather than an “international man of letters.”2 Erasmus does reject patriotic sentiments as “trivial” (frivola) in light of the “natural ties” (naturae nexus) and the “bonds of Christ” (Christi vincula) that unite humanity, and he does remain, for many contemporary intellectual and literary historians, a symbol of the intellectual bonds that unite learned humanists of the sixteenth century across national, linguistic, and ideological boundaries. Yet the recent scholarly discomfort with characterizing Erasmus as a cosmopolitan thinker suggests that new ways of defining both the sources and the aims of Erasmus’ cosmopolitanism might be necessary. This essay locates Erasmus’ cosmopolitanism not in the traditional locations of his anti-patriotic sentiments or his eirenic vision of a united Europe but rather in the conception of a “cosmopolitan” method of reading that grows out of Erasmus’ understanding of the figure of Saint Paul and the interpretive strategies Erasmus cultivates as an editor and annotator of the New Testament.3
Erasmus is fascinated but also deeply conflicted by what it means, according to the New Testament, to be “all things to all men,” and his interpretation of the relevant biblical verses is an attempt to redefine Stoic-Cynic models of cosmopolitanism according to Christian doctrine.
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Notes
Bruce Mansfield, Erasmus in the Twentieth Century (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), p. 24;
C. R. Thompson, “Erasmus as Internationalist and Cosmopolitan,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 46 (1955): 167–95;
Leon Botstein, “Stefan Zweig and the Illusion of the Jewish European,” Jewish Social Studies 44.1 (Winter 1982): 63–84, especially 66;
Stefan Zweig, Erasmus of Rotterdam, trans. Eden and Cedar Paul (New York, 1934), pp. 3–22, 121–23, 240–47.
On Erasmus as an “individualistic cosmopolitan,” see also Fritz Caspari, “Erasmus on the Social Functions of Christian Humanism,” Journal of the History of Ideas 8.1 (1947): 78–106, especially 78 and 102. As Henry M. Pachter has pointed out, the tradition of identifying Erasmus as cosmopolitan grows largely out of the 1930s scholarship of Johan Huizinga, the “Dutch patriot” and “cosmopolitan humanist” who regarded Erasmus as a symbol of “everything Hitler was out to destroy” (Pachter, “Masters of Cultural History III: Johan Huizinga—The Historian as Magister Ludi,” Salmagundi 46 (1979): 103–19, especially 110).
On Erasmus’ perception of his national identity, see Ari Wesseling, “Are the Dutch Uncivilized? Erasmus on Batavians and His National Identity,” ERSY 13 (1993): 68–102;
Istvan Bejczy, “Erasmus Becomes a Netherlander,” Sixteenth-Century Journal 28.2 (1997): 387–99,
responding to James Tracy, “Erasmus Becomes a German,” Renaissance Quarterly 21.3 (1968): 281–88;
Jan Papy, “Erasmus, Europe, and Cosmopolitanism: the Humanist Image and Message in His Letters,” in Erasmo da Roterodam e la cultura europea. Atti dell’Incontro di Studi nel V cententario della laurea di Erasmo all’Università di Torino, ed. Pietro B. Rossi (Florence: SISMEL-Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2008), pp. 27–42, 35;
L. Enthoven, “Erasmus Weltbürger oder Patriot?,” in Neue Jahrbüucher für das klassische Alterum 29 (1912): 205–15;
J. C. Margolin, “La Conception de l’Europe selon Erasme de Rotterdam,” in La Nascità dell’Europa. Per una storia delle idée fra Italia e Polonia, ed. S. Graciotti (Florence: Olschki, 1995), pp. 43–70;
Johan Huizinga, “Erasmus über Vaterland und Nationem,” in Gedenkschrift zum 400. Todestage des Erasmus von Rotterdam (Basel: Braus-Riggerbach, 1936);
Lisa Jardine, Erasmus, Man of Letters: The Construction of Charisma in Print (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 11.
James Tracy, The Politics of Erasmus: A Pacifist Intellectual and His Political Milieu (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978), p. 6, argues that despite the various claims for Erasmus’ cosmopolitanism, “his political views and his closest contacts with statesmen were often those of a Netherlander.”
Gary Remer, Humanism and the Rhetoric of Toleration (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1996), p. 95.
Constance Furey, Erasmus, Contarini, and the Religious Republic of Letters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 24;
Kathy Eden, Friends Hold All Things in Common: Tradition, Intellectual Property, and the Adages of Erasmus (New Haven, CT:Yale University Press, 2001).
Tracy, Erasmus, p. 176; Furey, Republic, p. 50. Compare Fritz Caspari, “Erasmus on the Social Functions of Christian Humanism,” JHI 8 (1947): 78–106, especially 92, which argues that Erasmus’ pedagogical texts are “completely cosmopolitan in outlook, and directed to no one particular country or religion.”
Cicero, De Re Publica 9:269, in Cicero, trans. Clinton W. Keyes, 28 vols (Cambridge, MA: LCL, 1988); Richard E Hardin, “The Literary Conventions of Erasmus’ Education of a Christian Prince: Advice and Aphorism,” Renaissance Quarterly 35.2 (1982): 151–63, 158.
On the influence of Erasmus’ Apophthegmata, see Hugh Gerald Arthur Roberts, Dogs’ Tales: Representations of Ancient Cynicism in French Renaissance Texts (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), pp. 63, 68–70.
Ep. 1314, Erasmus to Ulrich Zwingli (CWE 9); Latin text quoted from Opus epistolarum Des. Erasmi Roterodami, ed. P. S. Allen (Oxford, 1908–1958), vol. 5, 129–30; the letter is discussed by Cornelis Augustijn, Erasmus: His Life, Works, and Influence, 2nd ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), p. 183
and by David Weil Baker, Divulging Utopia: Radical Humanism in Sixteenth-Century England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), pp. 38–39. The phrase “citizen of the world” (kosmopolitês) derives principally from Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, VI.63.
Ambrosio Traversari’s Latin translation of Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of the Philosophers was first printed at Rome in 1472 (the Greek text was first printed at Basel in 1533). In addition to the Dialogues of Lucian, which Erasmus began reading and translating at the very beginning of his career (Thomas More translated Lucian’s Cynicus), another source for the sayings of Diogenes the Cynic was Plutarch’s Moralia, first printed by Aldus Manutius in 1509. On Erasmus’ sources for Cynic philosophy, see Sylvain Matton, “Cynicism and Christianity from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance,” pp. 240–64 of The Cynics:The Cynic Movement in Antiquity and Its Legacy, ed. R. Bracht Branham and Marie-Odile Goulet-Cazé (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p. 242.
I.i.93 (Polypi mentem obtine), CWE 31: 134, ASD II.1.200: “vnicuique regioni quaedam peculiaria esse instituta, quae hospites non damnare, sed pro virili nostra imitari atque exprimere debeamus.” For some typical Roman expressions of the Roman concept of sensus communis, see Cicero’s discussion of “common usage” (De Oratore 1.3.12), Juvenal’s condemnation of the wealthy as diffident or lacking in “sensus communis” (Satires 8.73–74) and Seneca’s assertion in De Beneficiis (1.12.3) that “there should be common sense in a gift: one should obey time, place, and persons” (Sit in beneficio sensus communis: tempus, locum observet, personas). On Diogenes as a figure who “held to the same line of conduct, not changing his ways,” see Dio Chrysostom, Discourse 9, in Discourses, 5 vols, trans. J. W. Cohoon (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1932), 1: 407.
Ambrose, Epistulae, ed. O. Faller. Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum 82.1 (Leipzig, 1968), p. 237;
the passage is discussed by George Boas, Primitivism and Related Ideas in the Middle Ages, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), p. 43
and by Robert R. Edwards, “‘The Metropol and the Mayster-Toun’: Cosmopolitanism in Late Medieval Literature,” pp. 33–62 of Cosmopolitan Geographies, ed. Vinay Dharwadker (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 39. Patristic writers often express a sort of cosmopolitanism in their emphasis upon the temporary exile of mortal life: compare Augustine, Sermo, III.2, in Patrologia Latina, ed. Migne, 38: 642–43 and Tertullian, De Corona XIII.4.
On Erasmus’ emblem and motto, see Edgar Wind, “Aenigma Termini: The Emblem of Erasmus,” JWCI 1 (1937–1938): 66–69;
and J. K. McConica, “The Riddle of the ‘Terminus,’” Erasmus in English 2 (1971): 2–7.
On early modern interpretations of the idea that God is “no respecter of persons” (ouk estin prosôpolêptês o theos) at Acts 10:34 (compare Rom. 2.8–11), see Gregory Kneidel, Rethinking the Turn to Religion in Early Modern English Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008);
Reid Barbour, Literature and Religious Culture in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 118–50;
Debora Kuller Shuger, Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance: Religion, Politics, and the Dominant Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 94–102.
Roberts, Dog’s Tales, p. 56; Michèle Clement, Le Cynicisme à la Renaissance d’Erasme à Montaigne (Geneva: Droz, 2005), pp. 96, 90.
On the influence of Hellenistic philosophy on early Christian culture, see Henry Chadwick, Early Christian Thought and the Classical Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966);
R. Wallace and W. Williams, The Three Worlds of Paul of Tarsus (London: Routledge, 1998);
E. Ferguson, Background of Christian Origins (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993).
For the argument that Jesus and Paul were influenced by Cynic philosophy, see F. Gerald Downing, Cynics, Paul, and the Pauline Churches (London: Routledge, 1988), Cynics and Christian Origins (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1992) and his “Cynics and Early Christianity,” pp. 281–304 of Le Cynisme ancient et ses prolongements, ed. Marie-Odile Goulet-Cazé and Robert Goulet (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1993).
Downing, Cynics, pp. 185, 120–22; 138–39. On the cynic and Pauline appropriations of Odyssean versatility, also see Dale B. Martin, Slavery as Salvation: The Metaphor of Slavery in Pauline Christianity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990);
Abraham J. Malherbe, Paul and the Popular Philosophers (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1989), pp. 99–110;
W. B. Stanford, The Ulysses Theme: A Study in the Adaptability of a Traditional Hero (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1968), p. 91.
Plutarch, How to Tell a Flatterer from a Friend (Quomodo adulator ab amico internoscatur), in Moralia, trans. Frank Cole Babbitt (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1927), 1:281; compare Plutarch, Alcibiades 23.5, in Lives, trans. Bernadotte Perrin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1916), vol. 4: “It was not that [Alcibiades] could so easily pass entirely (eis heteron ex heterou tropon) from one manner of man to another, nor that he actually underwent in every case a change (metabolên) in his real character; but when he saw that his natural manners were likely to be annoying to his associates, he was quick to assume any counterfeit exterior (schêma kai plasma) which might in each case be suitable for them.”
Plutarch, Essay on the Life and Poetry of Homer, ed. J. J. Keaney and Robert Lamberton (Atlanta, GA: American Classical Studies Association, 1996), pp. 136–37;
Alice Levine Rubenstein, “The Notes to Poliziano’s Iliad,” Italia medioevale e umanistica 25 (1982): 205–39, 213. The biography ascribed to Plutarch was first printed in the 1488 editio princeps of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey (Florence: Bernardo and Nero Nerli, 1488) and also appeared in the 1504 and 1517 Aldine editions of Homer.
Clarence E. Glad, Paul and Philodemus: Adapatability in Epicurean & Early Christian Psychagogy (Leiden: Brill, 1995), pp. 62–64, 334–35, 86.
On seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European cosmopolitanism and the idea of a Republic of Letters, see Robert Mayhew, “British Geography’s Republic of Letters: Map** an Imagined Community, 1600–1800,” JHI 65.2 (2004): 251–76, 251;
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1991), pp. 5–7;
P. Kleingeld, “Six Varieties of Cosmopolitanism in Late Eighteenth Century Germany,” JHI 60 (1999): 505–24;
Peter Miller, Peiresc’s Europe: Virtue and Learning in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001);
Anne Goldgar, Impolite Learning: Conduct and Community in the Republic of Letters, 1650–1750 (New Haven, CT:Yale University Press, 1995);
Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters:A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994).
Denis Cosgrove, “Globalism and Tolerance in Early Modern Geography,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 93.4 (2003): 852–70: 852;
compare John M. Headley, “Geography and Empire in the Late Renaissance: Botero’s Assignment, Western Universalism, and the Civilizing Process,” Renaissance Quarterly 53 (2000): 1119–55.
William West, Theaters and Encylopedias in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 1;
Vassilis Lambropoulos, “Syncretism as Mixture and Method,” Journal of Modern Greek Studies 19 (2001): 221–35, especially 221.
On early modern encyclopedic texts, see also Anthony Grafton, “The World of the Polyhistors: Humanism and Encyclopedism,” Central European History 18.1 (1985): 31–47;
and Ann Blair, The Theater of Nature: Jean Bodin and Renaissance Science (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 153–79.
Thomas Greene, “Ben Jonson and the Centered Self,” Studies in English Literature 10 (1970): 333, 337.
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Wolfe, J.L. (2013). The Cosmopolitanism of The Adages: The Classical and Christian Legacies of Erasmus’ Hermeneutics of Accommodation. In: Ganim, J.M., Legassie, S.A. (eds) Cosmopolitanism and the Middle Ages. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137045096_11
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