Erasmus Against War

One entry of the *Adages*, lifted out and sold as a pamphlet, that presses across Europe reprinted within a decade.

English, a translation held here, and your language

Original title: Dulce bellum inexpertis
First published: 1515(aged 49)
Original language: Latin

Overview

Nature armed the bull with horns, the lion with claws and the boar with tusks, Erasmus observes, and sent man into the world naked, soft-skinned and unfit to fight, made for kindness and mutual help. War therefore offends against nature before it offends against Christ, and Christians, who should know better than anyone, have fought longer and more cruelly than the heathen ever did. He had lamented the war between England and France in a letter of March 1514 to Antoon van Bergen, abbot of Saint-Bertin and his former patron, and over the following winter he turned the complaint into a treatise under the proverb Dulce bellum inexpertis, war is sweet to those who have not tried it. The treatise answers the arguments for fighting one at a time: that Peter drew his sword, that wrongdoing must be punished, that nature allows force to be met with force, that a prince may go to war for his rights, to which Erasmus replies that no war ever lacked a claim to justice. Crusades against the Turks get no exemption. What is won by war, he argues, is lost again by war, and Christians would do better to convert the Turks by living as the Gospel commands. The treatise ends by praising the new pope, Leo X, as a bringer of peace. Froben printed it on its own in April 1517, a pamphlet of twenty pages, and within ten years it had been reprinted at Louvain, Strasbourg, Mainz, Leipzig, Paris, Cologne, Antwerp and Venice, with German translations in 1519 and 1520. Thomas Berthelet, the king's printer in London, issued an English translation in the winter of 1533–34; its translator is unknown, only a few copies survive, and it was not reprinted until 1907.

Key concepts

What does “Dulce bellum inexpertis” mean?

It is a Latin proverb: war is sweet to those who have not tried it. Erasmus takes it as the title of his essay because the enthusiasm for war belongs to people who have never seen one. He then makes the reader see it: the menacing faces, the blare of trumpets, the thunder of guns, the shouting and the dead, after which nobody, he thinks, could call war sweet.

Why does Erasmus say men at war are worse than beasts?

Because beasts fight only when hunger drives them or they fear for their young, and the fiercest seldom turn on their own kind: lions do not make war on lions. Men fight each other for trifles and arm themselves with weapons nature never gave them. And when beasts do fight it is one against one and soon over: nobody ever heard of a hundred thousand beasts slain at one time.

What does Erasmus say about a prince's claim to a just war?

That such a claim settles nothing, because no war ever lacked one. Princes go to war, he writes, for vain titles, for childish anger, even over a woman, and every side calls its cause right. Weighing the gains of war against its losses, he concludes that an unjust peace is far better than a righteous war, and asks who but a madman would fish with a golden hook.

Why does the essay single out Christians at war?

Because Christians, who of all people have been taught love, fight more often and more cruelly than anyone. Christ, John and Peter speak of nothing but charity, Erasmus notes, yet Christendom is a greater pool of what Christ condemned than the lands of the Turks. Christians curse the Turk while killing each other, and nothing could please the Turks more.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Sweet Only to Those Who Have Not Tried It

If people saw a battle before they praised one, would anyone still choose war? The essay answers by reading the human body, the Gospel and the arguments of war's defenders in turn.

Nature armed the bull, the lion and the boar, and made man naked, soft and able to weep, a creature built for friendship. Beasts fight from hunger or fear and seldom their own kind; men forge weapons to kill men. Against the defenders of war Erasmus takes their proofs one by one: Peter fought, but before he was truly a Christian, and soon denied his master; every prince has a title, and none ever lacked one. Even an unjust peace, he concludes, is better than a righteous war.

war
peace
violence
human nature
christianity
nonviolence
justice
christian ethics

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held: 63
distinct concepts: 114
by passages held, corpus-wide: #609

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “violence” and “war”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 19 pairings. 75 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
violence	war	15
peace	war	10
human nature	war	8
christianity	war	7
human nature	violence	6
prudence	war	6
christian ethics	peace	5
christianity	peace	4
justice	war	4
christian ethics	war	3
peace	prudence	3
human nature	peace	2
justice	peace	2
justice	prudence	2
peace	violence	2
christian ethics	violence	1
christianity	human nature	1
christianity	violence	1
prudence	violence	1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

1500 Adages (Adagia)
The work that first made Erasmus famous and the one he revised for longest, from 1500 until the year he died; Erasmus Against War began as one of its entries.
LA
1503 The Manual of the Christian Knight (Enchiridion militis Christiani)
The earnest twin of In Praise of Folly: when critics attacked the satire, Erasmus answered that it treats the same subject as this manual, only in a playful spirit.
EN
1504 Panegyric for Archduke Philip of Austria (Panegyricus ad Philippum Austriae ducem)
Erasmus's advice to a ruler, delivered as a speech of welcome; The Complaint of Peace and the essay on war later make its case for peace without the obligatory flattery.
LA
1511 In Praise of Folly (Moriae encomium)
A mock oration in Folly's own voice and Erasmus's most famous book; The Tongue of 1525 has been read as an attempt at a companion piece.
LAEN
1511 On the Method of Study (De ratione studii)
Part of the same English years' work as De copia, with which it was later printed; Erasmus's later The Education of Children moves the same programme back to infancy.
LA
1515 Erasmus Against War (Dulce bellum inexpertis) you are here EN
1516 The Education of a Christian Prince (Institutio principis christiani)
Erasmus's one full treatise on government, in the old genre of advice books for rulers; The Complaint of Peace followed a year later.
LA
1517 The Complaint of Peace (Querela pacis)
A declamation in the voice of Peace, the device of In Praise of Folly turned to a serious purpose, and the most direct of Erasmus's several writings against war.
LAEN
1518 Familiar Colloquies (Colloquia familiaria)
The book that carried Erasmus's views on fasting, pilgrimage and monks to far more readers than his devotional treatises ever reached.
LAEN
1518 In Praise of Marriage (De laude matrimonii)
A schoolroom piece that turned into a controversy: the first of three works on marriage, followed by The Institution of Christian Matrimony in 1526 and On the Christian Widow in 1529.
LA
1520 The Antibarbarians (Antibarbari)
The first statement of the cause Erasmus served all his life, classical learning as the ally of Christian faith, written before any of the books that made his name.
LA
1521 On Disdaining the World (De contemptu mundi)
The counterweight to everything Erasmus later wrote about monks, from The Manual of the Christian Knight to the Familiar Colloquies, and probably the earliest of his surviving prose works.
LA
1524 On Praying to God (Modus orandi Deum)
Pastoral rather than polemical, though written in the same year as On Free Will, his challenge to Luther; the first of the late handbooks on Christian practice that end with An Explanation of the Apostles' Creed.
LA
1525 The Tongue (Lingua)
Erasmus's fullest treatment of a theme that runs through all his writing, speech as the mirror of the soul, written in Basel in the middle of the polemics of the 1520s.
LA
1526 The Institution of Christian Matrimony (Christiani matrimonii institutio)
Commissioned through the English court and dedicated to its queen, it is Erasmus's main statement on the law and practice of marriage, where In Praise of Marriage had been a single persuasive letter.
LA
1528 The Ciceronian (Dialogus cui titulus Ciceronianus)
Satire aimed at fellow humanists rather than at theologians, unusual in Erasmus's later years; it first appeared in one volume with his dialogue on the pronunciation of Latin and Greek.
LA
1529 On the Christian Widow (Vidua christiana)
The last of Erasmus's writings on women's lives, after In Praise of Marriage and The Institution of Christian Matrimony, and like the second of those dedicated to a queen.
LA
1529 The Education of Children (De pueris statim ac liberaliter instituendis)
Dedicated to a prince's heir, like The Education of a Christian Prince, but concerned with every child's first years rather than with government; the most personal of Erasmus's books on schooling.
LAEN
1533 An Explanation of the Apostles' Creed (Explanatio symboli)
Erasmus's catechism, written for lay readers rather than theologians three years before his death.
LA

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