Download Free Leo X Erasmus Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Leo X Erasmus and write the review.

A deeply textured dual biography and fascinating intellectual history that examines two of the greatest minds of European history—Desiderius Erasmus and Martin Luther—whose heated rivalry gave rise to two enduring, fundamental, and often colliding traditions of philosophical and religious thought. Erasmus of Rotterdam was the leading figure of the Northern Renaissance. At a time when Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael were revolutionizing Western art and culture, Erasmus was helping to transform Europe’s intellectual and religious life, developing a new design for living for a continent rebelling against the hierarchical constraints of the Roman Church. When in 1516 he came out with a revised edition of the New Testament based on the original Greek, he was hailed as the prophet of a new enlightened age. Today, however, Erasmus is largely forgotten, and the reason can be summed up in two words: Martin Luther. As a young friar in remote Wittenberg, Luther was initially a great admirer of Erasmus and his critique of the Catholic Church, but while Erasmus sought to reform that institution from within, Luther wanted a more radical transformation. Eventually, the differences between them flared into a bitter rivalry, with each trying to win over Europe to his vision. In Fatal Discord, Michael Massing seeks to restore Erasmus to his proper place in the Western tradition. The conflict between him and Luther, he argues, forms a fault line in Western thinking—the moment when two enduring schools of thought, Christian humanism and evangelical Christianity, took shape. A seasoned journalist who has reported from many countries, Massing here travels back to the early sixteenth century to recover a long-neglected chapter of Western intellectual life, in which the introduction of new ways of reading the Bible set loose social and cultural forces that helped shatter the millennial unity of Christendom and whose echoes can still be heard today. Massing concludes that Europe has adopted a form of Erasmian humanism while America has been shaped by Luther-inspired individualism.
The tranquil world reflected in Erasmus’ early letters from Louvain gradually disintegrated in the years covered by Volume 7. In the letters of Volume 8, which spans the period of Erasmus’ last fifteen months in the Netherlands and his move to Basel during 1520 and 1521, his situation worsens. On the political front, the golden age of peace for which he had hoped is further destroyed by the war-mongering of Francis I, Henry VIII, Leo X and Charles V. In spiritual matters, Erasmus continues to be pressed harder to take a firm position for or against Luther. He persists in his earlier view, that Luther was right in his spirit but wrong in his language, and chooses not to make a public judgment against him, saying only that he will plant his feet firmly ‘on the same side, whatever it may be, as the peace of the Gospel.’ For the next seven and a half years, Erasmus is to live in Basel, a city as yet undecided which side it will take in the religious conflict, while he works ahead on his editions of the Christian Fathers and attempts to cope with the conflicts in the world around him. An exchange of letters between Juan de Vergara and Diego López Zúñiga which bears on the controversy then raging between Erasmus and Zúñiga is included as an appendix to this volume. Volume 8 of the Collected Works of Erasmus series.
The tranquil world reflected in Erasmus’ early letters from Louvain gradually disintegrated in the years covered by Volume 7. In the letters of Volume 8, which spans the period of Erasmus’ last fifteen months in the Netherlands and his move to Basel during 1520 and 1521, his situation worsens. On the political front, the golden age of peace for which he had hoped is further destroyed by the war-mongering of Francis I, Henry VIII, Leo X and Charles V. In spiritual matters, Erasmus continues to be pressed harder to take a firm position for or against Luther. He persists in his earlier view, that Luther was right in his spirit but wrong in his language, and chooses not to make a public judgment against him, saying only that he will plant his feet firmly ‘on the same side, whatever it may be, as the peace of the Gospel.’ For the next seven and a half years, Erasmus is to live in Basel, a city as yet undecided which side it will take in the religious conflict, while he works ahead on his editions of the Christian Fathers and attempts to cope with the conflicts in the world around him. An exchange of letters between Juan de Vergara and Diego López Zúñiga which bears on the controversy then raging between Erasmus and Zúñiga is included as an appendix to this volume. Volume 8 of the Collected Works of Erasmus series.