Zweig, Erasmus of Rotterdam leowong.micro.blog
Erasmus took on a duty of historical significance, a duty which, it must be confessed, exceeded his capacity: alone, amid the multitudinous exacerbations of the day, he set himself the task of incorporating the spirit of unclouded reason, to defend the unity of Europe, the unity of the Church, the unity of mankind, and the world-citizenship of humanity with the pen as his only weapon, and thus to protect all he loved against decay and annihilation. —Zweig, ibid.
To the popes of the Medici family, art was greater and more enduring and a hundredfold more important than a pettifogging dispute among churchmen in an obscure town in the province of Saxony; and precisely because the reigning pope [Leo X] was a man of wide vision, he failed to see the significance of the gesticulating little monk who was busily undermining the papal realm. —Zweig, ibid.
Because in this dread hour Erasmus did not put his weight into the scale on the side of reform, did not, with the whole force of his personality, his powers, and his presence, influence the assembly, because he failed in this moment of utmost need, his own cause was lost for ever. Luther, however, fought his fight with the utmost courage and with unstinted strength; he put his whole heart into the defence: therefore was his will transformed into action. —Zweig, ibid.
The Erasmic idea was dead....No one needed him; no one asked his opinion, no one hung upon his words... But lo, like a belated swallow, someone came knocking at his window already frosted by the cold of approaching winter. A message flew in to greet him with reverence and love. “Everything that I do, all that I am, I owe to you; and, were I to fail in acknowledging my debt, I should prove the most ungrateful man alive. Salve itaque etiam atque etiam, pater amantissime, pater desusque patriæ, literarum assertor, veritatis propugnator invictissime.” (Greeting and yet again greeting, dearest father and honour of the land which gave you birth, champion of the arts, invincible fighter for truth.) The name of the man who wrote these words, and one which was destined to outshine even the name of Erasmus, was Rabelais. —Zweig, ibid.
He who had always spoken Latin and thought and written in Latin, suddenly forgot that tongue, and, with the primitive fear of the animal upon him, he stammered out the words he had learned in earliest childhood, “lieve God” – the first words and the last words Erasmus ever spoke were in the Teutonic vernacular. —Zweig, ibid.