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Erasmus, Enchiridion Militis Christiianii: An English Version11 ERASMUS, Enchiridion Militis Christiani: An English Version, edited by Anne M. O'Donnell, S.N.D. The Early English Text Society. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1981. lvi + 324 pp.; 3 plates.
To read the Enchiridion is to experience, in seminal form, what Erasmus came to call the philosophia Christi. Distinguishing true goodness from false piety, the spirit from the letter, the Enchiridion sets out to encourage even the laggard and recalcitrant soul to find Christ, and to show him how to do so. On the one hand it is concerned with the active life and the day to day practice of virtue, refusing to separate faith from acts of charity. On the other it calls for a radical transvaluation of self and world in the light of things eternal and invisible. The vital question facing every Christian is how best to make Christ the pattern and rule of living, the vital image and topos, the Christian soldier. Thus Erasmus attacked both worldliness and the false mystique of ceremonial, what he described in a letter written to John Colet in 1504 as "rituals and observances of an almost more than Jewish formality."2 And he gave his readers (potentially all of Christendom) an art of virtuous living or "a method of morals," to borrow his characterization of it from this same letter. Yet this handbook of Christian humanistic piety continually spills over the boundaries of its "method" or rules, formally defined, and its central chapters are a dilation of two ideas: the need to turn from things visible to things invisible and to see Christ alone as the archetype of godliness. So Erasmus anticipated many of the paradoxes of his Praise of Folly and later works and adumbrated the true mysteries of the human condition, as he perceived it-fallen, and yet redeemed by Christ.
Written in 1501, and first published in 1503/04, the Enchiridion became an extremely popular work throughout Europe in the course of the sixteenth century. If we make due allowance for Erasmus' hyperbole, we can follow some part of its early progress through his own letters. In 1514 he reported to Servatius Roger (prior of Steyn) that "many people testify that it has fired them with religious enthusiasm." Rather self-consciously...