Pierre Viam Mediam: Why the World’s First Rockstar Scholar is the Antidote to Modern Tribalism

Desiderius Erasmus, the illegitimate Dutch monk who armed Europe with Greek, mocked popes, and refused to join a mob, proves that while extremist zealots may control the present, champions of the moderate Middle Way inevitably conquer history.

If you spend more than five minutes scrolling through today’s digital public square, whether observing the hyper-partisan bardagulan of Philippine politics or the exhausting culture wars of the West, you will notice a disturbing trend. Nuance is dead. We are ruled by ideological tribes who scream at each other in echo chambers, rewarding theatrical outrage while condemning moderate thinkers as cowards or traitors.

We have been here before.

Five centuries ago, Europe was torn apart by a religious and intellectual civil war that makes our modern Reddit feuds look like a courteous afternoon tea. Amidst that deafening noise stood one man who refused to surrender his intellect to a mob: Desiderius Erasmus.

He is the guiding spirit behind this blog, Pierre Viam Mediam. The name is a deliberate, triple-layered pun: it invokes my own name (Pierre), plays on Erasmus’s cherished philosophical stance, the Via Media (the Middle Way), and translates via Latin wordplay to Per Viam Mediam: "Through the Middle Way."

This blog exists for three simple reasons:

• To fortify my own memory: Writing is my digital pensieve, helping me retain and crystallise what I learn.
• To share knowledge: Democratising ideas so they do not gather dust in academic silos.
• To resurrect a lost ethos: Championing the healing power of moderation, reason, and nuance among the deafening noise of contemporary extremism.

To understand why this ethos matters so desperately today, we must look at the brilliant, rakish, and stubbornly moderate life of the man who inspired it.

Who Was the Bastard Monk Who Taught Europe How to Speak?

In an era when your birth was entirely your destiny, Erasmus was the ultimate self-made man. Born in the provincial town of Rotterdam in 1466 as the illegitimate son of a priest, he was promptly dumped into a local monastery at the earliest opportunity. Growing up far from the glittering epicentres of the Italian Renaissance, his meteoric rise to stardom was fuelled purely by his terrifyingly sharp mind.

Erasmus became the last great intellectual of a united Christian Europe: a scholar of universal renown, a tutor to princes, a friend to kings, and a self-proclaimed "citizen of the world."

Before you assume he was just a dusty academic, consider how much of our daily speech we owe to his linguistic archaeology. His dictionary of proverbs rescued centuries of classical idioms from obscurity. Whenever you talk about "breaking the ice," "teaching an old dog new tricks," or "leaving no stone unturned," you are quoting Erasmus.

In 1511, he published In Praise of Folly, a satirical comic masterpiece that mocked the pompous and the pedantic with merciless glee. He attacked everyone from quack doctors to illiterate monks who brayed out memorised Latin psalms like donkeys without understanding a single word. His genius earned him a legion of devoted fans, the "Erasmians,” who flourished in royal courts across Europe and hung on his every pronouncement.

Yet, unlike so many great thinkers before and since, Erasmus never fell prey to fanaticism. He believed fervently in the civilising power of good wine, rich conversation, and scholarly comfort. As the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper aptly noted: "He lived in his study and died in his bed." When confronted by a king, and potential patron, he gracefully bent the knee; when challenged by a bully, he masterfully changed the subject.

How Do You Cure a Corrupt, Calcified Church Without Burning It to the Ground?

When Erasmus finally left his monastery to explore the world, he was horrified by the moral and intellectual decay of the Catholic Church. Nepotism was shameless: popes routinely fathered children and advanced them into lucrative church offices disguised as "nephews." The largest, most profitable businesses in Rome were the wine trade and prostitution.

Worse still, the papacy preyed on the gullibility of the laypeople by selling indulgences, what Erasmus blisteringly called "forged pardons for real sins." Pope Leo X, who reigned during Erasmus’s glory years, was the very spirit of institutional corruption made pudgy and pampered flesh.

The Church’s material greed was paralleled only by the intellectual dryness of the universities, which functioned as self-perpetuating oligarchies of obscurantists and sycophants. At the Sorbonne in Paris, a doctorate in theology took a minimum of eight years to complete and an average of eighteen. Erasmus described his university professors with characteristic wit and rapiers-edge brutality:

"Quasi-theologians whose brains are the most addled, tongues the most uncultured, wits the dullest, teachings the thorniest, characters the least attractive, lives the most hypocritical, talk the most slanderous, and hearts the blackest on Earth."

How do you rescue an institution so profoundly asleep at the wheel? Erasmus rejected the radical asceticism of Christians who demanded that everyone abandon their property to live in beggary. Instead, he argued that the Middle Way to reform the establishment was from within. The Church needed to be reinvigorated by returning to its original purpose, and society needed to be reformed by educating its rulers.

At age 30, Erasmus initiated a lifelong romance with ancient Greek, determined to make it as flawless as his Latin (already regarded as the finest in Europe). What he discovered in classical texts and early biblical fragments blew his mind. "We Latins have but a few small streams, a few muddy pools," he wrote, "while the Greeks possess crystal-clear springs and rivers that run with gold."

Applying Italian Renaissance techniques of textual criticism to northern European biblical study, Erasmus produced his masterwork: the Novum Instrumentum. It was the first Greek New Testament ever published, placing the original Greek alongside the Church's standard Latin Vulgate and his own "pure" Latin translation, which stripped away centuries of linguistic errors and corruptions.

Long before the Protestant Reformation erupted, Erasmus championed the radically democratic notion that Christ’s message belonged to everyone, not just gatekeeping theologians. He wrote:

• "I would have women read the Gospels and the Epistles of St Paul."
• "I would have the ploughman and the craftsman sing them at work."
• "I would have the traveller recite them to forget the weariness of his journey."
• "True theology is possessed by every man who is possessed of the spirit of Christ, be he digger or weaver."

Erasmus leveraged his immense fame to guide the ruling class toward Christian enlightenment. He maintained correspondence with the kings of France and Portugal, tutored the king of Scotland, and became a particular favourite of Archduke Charles (who would become Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor and the most powerful man in Europe). The brilliant artist Hans Holbein the Younger painted several famous portraits of him.

To reform governance in an age of absolute monarchs, Erasmus wrote The Education of a Christian Prince (1516) as practical advice for Archduke Charles. In direct defiance of Machiavelli’s The Prince, which had argued three years earlier that it is better for a ruler to be feared than loved, Erasmus argued that a king is a servant of the people who must rule by honour and sincerity. It is far better, he insisted, to be loved than feared. An uneducated ruler, he warned, is "at the mercy of impulses that are worse than those of a wild beast."

He didn't stop with kings. His Enchiridion Militis Christiani ("Handbook of a Christian Soldier") reframed Christianity not as mechanical rituals, but as an ethical system of love, charity, and generosity. He produced delightful school textbooks replacing tedious grammar drills with engaging selections from classical authors.

All of this was supercharged by technology. The printing press, invented a quarter-century before his birth, allowed master printers like Thierry Martens in Lausanne, Jose Badius in Paris, and Aldus Manutius in Venice to build international distribution networks. In Praise of Folly became one of the world's first secular bestsellers, running through more than 30 Latin editions in Erasmus’s lifetime alone. He enjoyed a famous, intellectually intoxicating friendship with the English humanist Thomas More, proving that a scholar could be genial, civilised, and deeply influential without being a monk or a zealot.

What Happens When the Middle Way Gets Bulldozed by a Hammer and 95 Theses?

Erasmus’s comfortable, civilised world began to shatter in October 1517. Martin Luther, a fiery German monk seventeen years his junior, nailed his 95 theses to the door of the Wittenberg Castle church.

Here lay the great tragedy of Erasmus’s life: this champion of moderation had the terrible misfortune to live in a revolutionary era.

At first, Erasmus sympathised with Luther’s critiques of church corruption. But he despised Luther’s dogmatic, uncompromising temperament. He foresaw with chilling clarity that Luther’s extremism would inevitably provoke a reactionary counter-extremism from Rome, destroying the delicate Christian humanism he had spent his life building.

As historian Michael Massing vividly details in Fatal Discord: Erasmus, Luther and the Fight for the Western Mind (2018), both sides of the emerging schism initially tried to recruit the great scholar. Erasmus was trapped in an impossible bind:

1. He could not repudiate Luther without betraying his own valid criticisms of the Church.
2. He could not support the Pope without implicitly endorsing rampant corruption and intellectual decay.

Ultimately, Erasmus made a calculated choice: he stuck with the Catholic Church. His rationale was pragmatic: he believed that flawed institutions are ultimately easier to reform than fanatical mobs led by charismatic demagogues.

In the short term, this proved to be disastrous for his reputation. Rather than adopting Erasmus’s Middle Way, the Church doubled down on rigid orthodoxy, empowering reactionary hardliners to crush heresy at all costs. Princes were forced to choose sides in a 16th-century Cold War, and Erasmianism as an active political movement collapsed. Some followers reinvented themselves as orthodox zealots; others hushed. The "citizen of the world" could no longer safely roam Europe pouring honeyed advice into royal ears, and spent his final years holed up in the free city of Basel.

In the eyes of extremists on both sides, the Middle Way looked like cowardice. Erasmus was reduced from hero to universal bogeyman:

• Luther's Vitriol: The Protestant leader denounced Erasmus as an "enraged reptile," a "vainglorious beast," and an "instrument of Satan."
• The Church's Wrath: Catholic hardliners branded him a proto-Lutheran. A monk from Cologne famously snarled: "Erasmus laid the eggs; Luther hatched them. God grant that we may smash the eggs and stifle the chicks." One of Erasmus’s translators was burned at the stake.
• Institutional Cancellation: In 1546, ten years after Erasmus died, the Council of Trent obliterated his life’s work by declaring the Latin Vulgate the only acceptable Bible translation. By 1559, the Church placed his entire oeuvre on the Index of Prohibited Books, alongside 550 other writers. (Astonishingly, this ban was not officially withdrawn until 1966!)

Was the Champion of Nuance Ultimately Vindicated by History's Bloodbath?

Erasmus had explicitly warned that Luther’s theological intransigence would lead to physical warfare. "The long war of words and pamphlets," he predicted, would soon be waged "with halberds and cannons."

He was horrifically right. The next century of European history proved his warnings in blood.

The cycle of intolerance heightened into a cycle of manic self-righteousness. Luther publicly denounced the Pope as the Antichrist, comparing Rome to Sodom and Gomorrah; the Pope returned the favour by calling Luther a "roaring sow." Pamphlet wars devolved into statue-smashing and book-burning, which quickly graduated to burning human beings at the stake. Protestants slaughtered Catholics, Catholics slaughtered Protestants, and rival Protestant sects slaughtered each other to prove who possessed the purest heart and the fiercest faith.

Decent, ethical behaviour ceased to be the metric of a good Christian. The new test was simple: Who could shout the loudest? Who could persecute heresy most vigorously? Who could apply fuel to the burning pyres with the most enthusiasm?

This fanaticism culminated in the Thirty Years War, a conflict of unimaginable brutality that wiped out more than a third of the German population. Europe was drenched in atrocities: torched villages, mass rapes, and widespread torture, including the systemic use of waterboarding.

Yet, as history repeatedly demonstrates, great ideas are much harder to kill than human beings.

When the fires of religious fanaticism finally burned out, Erasmianism, which had survived underground and in private libraries, began to resurface:

• The Catholic Underground: The Jesuits quietly smuggled Erasmian humanism into their philosophy; St. Ignatius of Loyola structured his famous Spiritual Exercises directly upon Erasmus’s Enchiridion.
• The Protestant Moderates: When a more tolerant, reasoned style of Protestantism emerged in Britain after the bloody excesses of the Puritan revolution, scholars eagerly dusted off their copies of Erasmus.
• The Sceptical Enlightenment: Arguably the most brilliant reviver of the Erasmian tradition was a Jewish philosopher, Baruch Spinoza, who placed the Erasmian notion of scepticism and intellectual tolerance at the very core of his masterwork, the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus.

Today, five hundred years later, the man who was rejected by both sides of the Reformation is universally celebrated by people of all religious inclinations and none. In his hometown of Rotterdam, a university, a prestigious grammar school, and a subway station proudly bear his name. The European Union’s massive student-exchange programme, which has improved the lives of more than 10 million students, is named the Erasmus Programme.

At the University of Toronto, scholars have produced an monumental 89-volume edition of Erasmus’s collected works: one of the most ambitious scholarly projects of our time. In a poetic twist of historical irony, one of the project's lead editors, James McConica, is a Roman Catholic priest who embodies the very same learned, epicurean, and civilised style that Erasmus championed five centuries ago.

Why Must We Resurrect the Erasmian Ethos in Our Age of Digital Tribalism?

We would be fools to think we have outgrown the follies of the 16th century. The spirit of the Middle Way has not conquered the world. Today, the global public square is once again gripped by rival extremisms that mock every principle of reason, tolerance, and intellectual charity that Erasmus treasured.

Everywhere you look, modern ideologues are enthusiastically breaking eggs and murdering chicks:

• In Britain, radical Brexiteers echoed 16th-century zealots by denouncing moderate "citizens of the world" as "citizens of nowhere," purging talented moderates from public life while anti-Brexiteers remained wilfully blind to the condescension of establishment liberalism.
• In America, hyper-progressive "woke" extremists ruin careers over slips of the tongue and campaign against unconscious bias, while reactionary right-wing bigots burn books and wage war on academic freedom.
• In the Philippines, our political discourse is frequently hijacked by rabid personality cults. Educated citizens who refuse to blindly worship either the current administration or the opposition are routinely red-tagged, dismissed as dilawan or pinklawan, or branded as unpatriotic sell-outs.

In this toxic ecosystem, intellectual mediocrities are rewarded with university chairs, media empires, and political offices simply because they scream the loudest and toe the tribal line. Intellectuals who refuse to join a mob are forced to stand on the sidelines, watching the halberds and cannons of online warfare tear our social fabric apart.

This is why Erasmus’s story is both a solemn caution and an inspiring hope for modern moderates. He proves that we are right to warn against the disastrous consequences of extremism, polarisation, and intolerance: no matter how unpopular that stance may be in the heat of the moment.

More importantly, Erasmus proves that you can triumph in the long term even if you are crushed in the short term.

Those of us who choose to walk Per Viam Mediam may not be rewarded with instant viral fame, political appointments, or an 89-volume collected works published in our honour. But by rejecting the pressure to join the mob, we secure a far more valuable prize: our intellectual integrity.

We gain the quiet, enduring comfort of knowing that when future generations look back at the frantic, tribal fanaticism of our current era, we were on the right side of history. Like the bastard monk from Rotterdam, we chose conversation over condemnation, reason over rage, and the healing power of nuance among the deafening extremist noise.