Erasmus of Rotterdam

Erasmus of Rotterdam by Stefan Zweig, translated by Eden and Cedar Paul, 247 pages

Desiderius Erasmus was a giant of his time, the center of the republic of letters, a friend of St Thomas More and Martin Luther, the man whose Greek edition of the New Testament became the basis for the Textus Receptus recognized as authoritative for three centuries.  A master scholar and master ironist, Erasmus managed to simultaneously fulfill the roles of Europe's leading intellectual and her leading fool.

Stefan Zweig was one of the most celebrated biographers of the early twentieth century, and it is easy to see why - rather than attempting to construct a detailed photograph of his subject's life, he paints an engrossing word-portrait.  In his estimation, Erasmus was the first of a new type - the man of the book, set apart equally from the man of war, the man of the land, and the man of the Church.  He lived his life, it seems, in the pages of books, either reading or, far more often, writing.  Indeed, Zweig provides a rare example of the term "ivory tower" being used in a positive sense, although even he expresses a little frustration at a subject who often "lighted up a problem" but "never solved one."  An Austrian writing in 1934, like Zweig, might view a lifelong refusal to commit to a cause - any cause - as an admirable trait, but readers in other times and places might not.  If it is true that his is an "essentially modern spirit", an evaluation of Erasmus as a brilliant but ultimately hollow man has a much broader application than the historical figure himself.