Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the history of philosophy podcast brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU and Munich online at history of philosophy.net today's episode

books that last forever Erasmus. Over the last 500 years, standards have slipped quite a lot when it comes to celebrities. Famous names of the early 21st century include Pierce Morgan, Donald Trump, and the real housewives of Beverly Hills, whereas in the 16th century, they had desiderious Erasmus.

Nowadays, you can get famous just by abusing people on reality television. Back then, you had to do something more impressive, like re-editing the Greek text of the New Testament.

This achievement and other prodigious feats of scholarship gave Erasmus renowned across Western chrysanthem. He has in fact been called, perhaps the first celebrity in European history, famous in part because he was so famous.

Humanists saw him as the greatest exponent of their movement and could think of no greater honor than receiving a word of praise from his pen.

Rulers invited him to their courts, scholastics fretted over his impact, and when the reformation began, Protestants and Catholics alike hoped that Erasmus's influential voice would be raised in their defense.

But Erasmus was not one for taking sides.

Across his life and his works, he sought nuance and subtlety, a master of striking balances. He was a reformer who stayed within the church, a devotee of pagan literature whose worldview was deeply Christian, a proud native of the low countries who said that his nation was any place where learning flourished.

He was born in Brototum in the late 1460s as the illegitimate child of a priest, and in due course became a priest himself. Characteristically, he had mixed feelings about this and, equally, characteristically, he expressed them in eloquent writing.

One of his earliest texts is a discussion of monastic retreat from the world, which largely treats this life in favorable terms, but warns readers not to embrace it without due consideration.

In due course, Erasmus would become a harsh critic of the monastic orders, he called mendicant tyrants.

He coined an absurdly long word for the battle between them and humanists, the lovers of the muses, Tochotorano Philomusomachia.

In this case, there was no doubt which side Erasmus was on, but his critique of the hypocrisy of the monastic orders came together with the conviction that a true life of Christian asceticism would be one worth living.

In the 1490s, Erasmus tried out another road to religious fulfillment only to find that it led nowhere.

He enrolled as a student of theology at the University of Paris, but dropped out.

About a decade later, he would get his degree from Trudein, albeit by jumping over certain requirements.

But by this time he had already settled on his true calling, a fusion of faith with philological scholarship that he called Learned Piety, Dr. Pietus.

His first edition was in 1501 of a work on ethics by Who Else, Cicero, a figure who elicited another balancing act from Erasmus.

He greatly admired this foremost Latin stylist, of course, yet he would later write a work mocking Italian humanists who were so enthralled by Ciceronian style that they abandoned the concerns of the Christian faith.

At the time of that edition, he was already traveling around Europe as he would continue to do for the coming decades.

In England, he forged important friendships with the humanist John Colette and Thomas Moore.

While there, he became convinced of the need to acquire deep expertise in ancient Greek, the language of the New Testament.

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