Editing Erasmus (section)

=====Institutional reforms=====
[[File:Albrecht Dürer - Portrait of Erasmus - WGA07088.jpg|thumb|Albrecht Dürer, ''Portrait of Erasmus'', sketch: black chalk on paper, 1520]]
The [[Protestant Reformation]] began in the year following the publication of his [[Textus receptus|pathbreaking]] edition of the [[Novum Instrumentum omne|New Testament]] in Latin and Greek (1516). The issues between the reforming and reactionary tendencies of the [[Catholic Church|church]], from which [[Protestantism]] later emerged, had become so clear that many intellectuals and churchmen could not escape the summons to join the debate.

According to historian C. Scott Dixon, Erasmus not only criticized church failings but questioned many of his Church's basic teachings;<ref group=note name="Dixon 2012">"Erasmus had been [[criticism of the Catholic Church|criticizing the Catholic church]] for years before the [[Protestant Reformers|reformers]] emerged, and not just pointing up its failings but questioning many of its basic teachings. He was the author of a series of publications, including a [[Novum Instrumentum omne|Greek edition of the New Testament]] (1516), which laid the foundations for a model of Christianity that called for a pared-down, internalized style of religiosity focused on Scripture rather than the elaborate, and incessant, outward rituals of the [[Christianity in the Middle Ages|medieval church]]. Erasmus was not a forerunner in the sense that he conceived or defended ideas that later made up the substance of the Reformation thought. [...] It is enough that some of his ideas merged with the later Reformation message." {{cite book |last=Dixon |first=C. Scott |year=2012 |title=Contesting the Reformation |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=i6kf0Tv_i1AC&pg=PA60 |publisher=[[Wiley-Blackwell]] |page=60 |isbn=978-1-4051-1323-6 }}</ref> however, according to biographer Erika Rummel, "Erasmus was aiming at the correction of abuses rather than at doctrinal innovation or institutional change."{{refn |group=note|"Unlike Luther, he accepted papal primacy and the teaching authority of the church and did not discount human tradition. The reforms proposed by Erasmus were in the social rather than the doctrinal realm. His principal aim was to foster piety and to deepen spirituality."
<ref name=rummel1>{{cite journal |last1=Rummel |first1=Erika |title=The theology of Erasmus |journal=The Cambridge Companion to Reformation Theology |series=Cambridge Companions to Religion |date=2004 |pages=28–38 |url=https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/cambridge-companion-to-reformation-theology/theology-of-erasmus/A1916A5FFA073EEC8D42C60E03F028E3 |publisher=Cambridge University Press |doi=10.1017/CCOL0521772249.005 |isbn=978-0-521-77224-2 |access-date=10 November 2023 |archive-date=10 November 2023 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20231110071325/https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/cambridge-companion-to-reformation-theology/theology-of-erasmus/A1916A5FFA073EEC8D42C60E03F028E3 |url-status=live }}</ref>{{rp|37}} }}

In theologian Louis Bouyer's interpretation,<ref name=bouyer1/> Erasmus' agenda was "to reform the Church from within by a renewal of biblical theology, based on philological study of the New Testament text, and supported by a knowledge of patristics, itself renewed by the same methods. The final object of it all was to nourish [...] chiefly moral and spiritual reform".<ref group=note>"Rigorously scientific biblical study must sustain an effort to renew the interior life, and the interior life must itself be at once the agent and the beneficiary of a renewal of the whole of Christian society." This went beyond the  {{lang|la|devotio moderna}}, which "was a spirituality of teachers"m</ref>

At the height of his literary fame, Erasmus was called upon to take one side, but public partisanship was foreign to his beliefs, nature, and habits. Despite all his [[Criticism of the Catholic Church|criticism of clerical corruption and abuses within the Western Church]],{{refn|group=note|Writer Gregory Wolfe notes however "For Erasmus, the narrative of decline is a form of despair, a failure to believe that the tradition can and will generate new life."<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Wolfe |first1=Gregory |title=The Erasmus Option |journal=Image Journal |issue=94 |url=https://imagejournal.org/article/erasmusoption/ |access-date=19 January 2024 |archive-date=19 January 2024 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20240119230956/https://imagejournal.org/article/erasmusoption/ |url-status=live }}</ref>}} especially at first he sided unambiguously with neither Luther nor the anti-Lutherans publicly (though in private he lobbied assiduously against extremism from both parties), but eventually shunned the breakaway Protestant Reformation movements along with their most [[Radical Reformation|radical offshoots]].<ref name="Hoffmann 1989"/>

{{Blockquote|I have constantly declared, in countless letters, booklets, and personal
statements, that I do not want to be involved with either party.|source=Erasmus, ''Spongia'' (1523)}}

The world had laughed at his satire, ''[[The Praise of Folly]]'', but few had interfered with his activities. He believed that his work had commended itself to the religious world's best minds and dominant powers. Erasmus chose to write in Latin (and Greek), the languages of scholars. He did not build a large body of supporters among the unlettered; his critiques reached a small but elite audience.<ref>{{cite book|last=Wallace|first=Peter G.|title=European History in Perspective: The Long European Reformation|year=2004|publisher=Palgrave Macmillan|location=New York|isbn=978-0-333-64451-5|page=70}}</ref>

Erasmus was also notable for exposing several important historical documents of theological and political importance as forgeries or misattributions: including pseudo-[[Dionysius the Areopagite]], the {{lang|la|[[Gravi de pugna]]}} attributed to [[St Augustine]], the {{lang|la|[[Ad Herennium]]}} attributed to Cicero, and (by reprinting [[Lorenzo Valla]]'s work)<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Levine |first1=Joseph M. |title=Reginald Pecock and Lorenzo Valla on the Donation of Constantine |journal=Studies in the Renaissance |date=1973 |volume=20 |pages=118–143 |doi=10.2307/2857015 |jstor=2857015  |issn=0081-8658}}</ref> the [[Donation of Constantine]].