How did later thinkers such as Voltaire view Desiderius Erasmus?

By the 18th century, thinkers like Voltaire viewed Desiderius Erasmus as a philosophe born before his time.1

Rather than seeing him as a devout figure, Enlightenment thinkers often interpreted Erasmus’s professions of religious faith and his submission to church authority as convenient evasions. They perceived him as a clever, skeptical intellectual whose work aligned with their own defense of individual liberty and their general disdain for the corporate institutions that held society together.1

While this interpretation—which viewed Erasmus as a secret skeptic—was long influential, it was a simplification of his actual goals. Modern scholarship recognizes that Erasmus’s primary objective was to purify Christianity through a deeper understanding of its historical roots. Nevertheless, historians often place Erasmus and Voltaire on the same side of a broad divide in Western thought, as both contributed to the development of the liberal tradition of European culture.1