ERASMUS ON THE NATURE OF COGNITIONIn his blistering attack on the egregious moral abuses of the late medieval
church in hisEnchiridion militis Christianiof 1503, Erasmus draws a telling
parallel between Plato’s theory of knowledge with his own philosophia
Christi.^1 The philosopher’s turning away from thefleeting images of sensuous
‘phantasy’on coming out of the Cave, and towards the brilliant luminosity
of the intellectual Sun—Plato’s Form of the Good—represents for Erasmus a
model of conversion to what he terms‘quick and vigorous adulthood in
Christ’, that is a religious life characterized by inward clarity of cognition as
contrasted with perfunctory observance of external ceremony and ritual. In
the peroration to thefifth rule of theEnchiridion, in a passage vividly remin-
iscent of Pico della Mirandola’s celebratedOration on the Dignity of Man
(1486), Erasmus sums up his case for religious reform as consistingfirst
and foremost inmetanoia—a radical conversion of the mind.^2 In classically
Neoplatonic style, Erasmus combines the epistemological imagery of Plato’s
Republicwith the erotic metaphor of the soul’s ascent to the intellectual
heaven inPhaedrusand fuses both with Jacob’s dream of angels ascending
and descending a ladder between heaven and earth, rendered here in the
translation published in 1533, long attributed to William Tyndale but more
probably the work of Nicholas Udall:
Thou therfore my brother / leest with sorowfull laboures thou shuldest not moche
preuayle / but that with meane exercyse myghtest shortely waxe bygge in Christe and
lusty / dyligently embrace this rule / & crepe not alwaye on the grounde with the
vncleane beestes / but always sustayned with those wyngis which Plato beleueth to
springe euer a fresshe / through the heate of loue in the mynde of men. Lyfte vp thy
selfe as it were with certayne steppes of the ladder of Iacob / from the body to the
spyrit / from yevisyble worlde vnto the inuysible / from the letter to the mystery /
from thynges sencyble to thynges intellygible / from thyngis grosse and compounde
vnto thynges syngle and pure. Who so euer after this maner shall approche and
drawe nere to the lorde / the lorde of his parte shall agayne approche and drawe
nyghe to hym. And if thou for thy parte shalte endeuoyre to aryse out of the
darknesseandtroubles of thesensuallpowers/hewyllcome agaynstetheeplesauntly
& for thy profyte / out of his lyght inaccessyble / and out of that noble scylence
incogytable: In whiche not only all rage of sensuall powers / but also simylytudes or
ymagynacions of all the intellygyble powers dothe cease and kepe scylence.^3(^1) Desiderius Erasmus,Enchiridion militis Christiani saluberrimus praeceptis refertum contra
omnia vitiorum...(Antwerp: D. Martens, 1503). On Erasmus and thePhilosophia Christias‘a life
centered on Christ and characterized by inner faith rather than external rites’, see Erika Rummel
(ed.),The Erasmus Reader(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), 138–54.
(^2) See Giovanni Pico della Mirandola,Oration on the Dignity of Man, trans. A. Robert Caponigri
(South Bend, IN: Regnery Gateway, 1956), 17–19.
(^3) See also Desiderius Erasmus,Ratio seu methodus compendio perueniendi ad ueram theolo-
giam: Paraclesis, id est adhortatio ad sanctissimum, ac saluberrimum Christianæ philosophiæ
96 Torrance Kirby