The Complaint of Peace

Written for a meeting of four rulers that never took place, it asks why Christians of all people cannot stop killing one another.

by Desiderius Erasmus150 passages held

Latin, the original language
English, a translation held here, and your language

Original title: Querela pacis
First published: 1517(aged 51)
Original language: Latin

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Overview

Peace herself is the speaker, and her complaint is that no one in Christendom will let her stay. She looked for a home among princes and found intrigue, among scholars and found the logician at war with the rhetorician, among friars and found one order railing against another. Christians are the worst offenders, since they mark their churches and their clothes with the cross and then march under it to kill one another. When England and France last fought, the clergy of each country preached war against the other from the pulpit. The quarrels of peoples are no better grounded: an Englishman is told he is the natural enemy of a Frenchman for no reason except that the other man is French. The book concedes nothing to the old theory of the just war. Treaties and royal marriages, Peace says, have achieved nothing; most people curse war and pray for peace, and only a few, whose fortunes depend on everyone else's misery, want war. A prince should give up land, money and even power rather than start one. Erasmus wrote the book in 1517 at the request of Jean Le Sauvage, chancellor of Burgundy, whose faction at the court of the young Charles of Burgundy wanted peace with France. A congress was planned at Cambrai, where Charles, the Emperor Maximilian, Francis I of France and Henry VIII of England were to settle their differences. It never took place. Erasmus sent a manuscript copy to Philip of Burgundy, bishop of Utrecht, that October, and Froben printed it in Basel in December. The English translation of 1795, attributed to Vicesimus Knox, the headmaster of Tonbridge School, appeared while Britain was at war with revolutionary France. A German edition of 2024 presents it as the founding text of the peace movement.

Key concepts

Why does Erasmus make Peace the speaker of the book?

Because a complaint in Peace's own mouth turns an argument into an accusation. Peace is a person here, a guest who has been turned away, and she can describe what she found at each door she tried. The device, a declamation in an imagined voice, is the one Erasmus had used for Folly, but here it is meant entirely seriously.

What remedy for war does the Complaint of Peace propose?

Arbitration: kings should make wise, impartial men their umpires instead of the sword. Even if such judges were unjust, Peace argues, the parties would lose less by their verdict than by any war. She also asks the clergy to speak against war from the pulpit, in church and in private, rather than blessing it, so that the remedy works on opinion as well as on princes.

What does Christian unity mean in the Complaint of Peace?

It means that all Christians form one house and one family. Peace draws it from the first words of the Lord's Prayer: 'Our Father' is the prayer of one person and yet the request of all. Whoever says it calls every other Christian a brother, so killing another Christian contradicts the very words the soldier prays.

How does custom keep people from seeing war, according to Peace?

Custom dulls surprise. Peace says that if long familiarity had not destroyed people's astonishment, nobody would believe that human beings could be filled with such rage for war. Habit also manufactures hatred: people are taught that an Englishman is the natural enemy of a Frenchman simply because he is French, and accept it as if it were a fact.

Themes of the book

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

Peace Without a Home

Why can Christians, who pray to one Father, not live together in peace? Peace herself asks, having knocked at every door in Christendom and found none open.

Peace goes looking for a place to stay: in cities, at court, among scholars where the logician feuds with the rhetorician, among friars split into warring orders, even in marriage, where two become one. Everywhere she is driven out. The guilt falls heaviest on Christians, who carry the cross into battle and whose clergy, English and French alike, preached war from the pulpit. Erasmus refuses the comfort of just-war theory and offers practical remedies instead: arbitration by wise and impartial men, and kings who will yield a point rather than spend their peoples' lives.

peace
war
christian unity
religious hypocrisy
clergy
nationalism
kingship
common good
political responsibility

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Within this work

passages held: 150
distinct concepts: 223
by passages held, corpus-wide: #411

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: “peace” and “war”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 23 pairings. 85 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
peace	war	42
christian ethics	war	19
religious hypocrisy	war	11
peace	political ethics	10
christian ethics	peace	9
human nature	peace	9
christian ethics	religious hypocrisy	8
peace	religious hypocrisy	7
political ethics	war	7
peace	religion	5
religion	war	5
human nature	war	4
religious hypocrisy	war and peace	3
christian ethics	war and peace	2
human nature	political ethics	2
political ethics	war and peace	2
christian ethics	political ethics	1
christian ethics	religion	1
human nature	war and peace	1
peace	war and peace	1
political ethics	religious hypocrisy	1
religion	religious hypocrisy	1
religion	war and peace	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)
The fullest essay on war in the Adages and the core of Erasmus's writings for peace; The Complaint of Peace restates its case two years later in Peace's own voice.
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) you are here 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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