Erasmus wrote expositions of eleven Psalms between 1515 and 1535. CWE 65 is a translation of the last three: Psalm 38 (1532), Psalm 83 (1533), and Psalm 14 (1535). All three reveal him still wrestling with problems that had concerned him all his life.
The first, on Psalm 38, is dedicated to a bishop and longtime correspondent whom Erasmus admired for his exemplary life. He details his own personal experiences of facing malice and slander, and being misunderstood. He holds up Christ, the apostles, and the martyrs as role models and condemns everything in this life that seems to offer happiness but does not. He portrays himself as a stranger on earth who will find his true happiness only in the next life. And he develops these themes with reference to the church fathers and, behind them, the Hebrew and Greek texts.
He entitles his exposition of Psalm 83 “Mending the Peace of the Church.” Erasmus had refused an invitation to the Diet of Augsburg in 1530 which attempted unsuccessfully to end the strife between Catholics and Lutherans. In 1532 he had published a “Prayer for the Peace of the Church,” and his exposition of Psalm 83 followed in 1533. It is dedicated to a prominent German Catholic ecclesiastic who sought some accommodation with the Lutherans; and it is a response as well to an attack on Lutherans published in 1530, which also implicated Erasmus. Erasmus invokes the ideal church but asks how the broken one on earth is to be mended: his answer is that it should happen largely through changes in the behavior of individual Christians. Consensus building follows, with decisions deferred until a church council confirms consensus. Violence should be avoided on all sides. He has Lutherans in mind as the counterparts to the Catholic Church. He is not so irenic when he discusses Anabaptists and other radical groups. This commentary was published six times between 1533 and the first collected edition of Erasmus's works in 1540. It was also translated into Dutch, Danish, and German, reflecting widespread interest in the topic.
His third and final commentary, on Psalm 14, “On the Purity of the Tabernacle or of the Christian Church,” was the last work he published (January 1536) before he died (July 1536). Dedicated to an old friend, it was popular, reprinted four times in 1536 and again in 1537. After Erasmus's death it was translated into several vernaculars. In structure, his discussion follows the fourfold interpretation of scripture (literal, allegorical, moral, anagogical), with greatest emphasis on the moral sense, the application of scripture to the individual's life, which he felt to be more in keeping with the early church. The Reformation promoted this same ideal, which may help account for the popularity of this commentary.
In all these texts we see that Erasmus is still Erasmus as his life drew to a close, using his intimate acquaintance with the church fathers and classical sources to enhance the spiritual lives of Christians while helping them avoid the consequences of divisions within the church. In the latter he did not succeed. But these texts show us that he never gave up hope of holding the church together even as it was breaking apart.
The translations are not only accurate but very readable, with the sources identified in notes on each page. Both the general introduction by the book's editor, Dominic Baker-Smith, and the shorter ones to each text by the translators, Carolinne White and Emily Kearns, orient the reader well. They have, where necessary, even corrected the definitive critical edition of Erasmus's output, the ASD, published in Amsterdam by Elsevier Science. Erasmus has perhaps been fortunate that a complete translation of his works blossomed only after the culture wars produced by the Reformation had grown old and, for the most part, run their course. In any case, the Toronto project of translating Erasmus is not only comprehensive but consistently of the highest quality. Even in mid-passage it has become one of the great achievements of scholarship in our time.
