Word Finder - erudition

definition

Profound knowledge, especially that based on learning and scholarship.

He was a man of erudition, but he owed his fame chiefly to his personality.

The noticeable barrenness of Italian literature at this period is referable to the fact that men of genius and talent devoted themselves to erudition and struggled to express their thoughts and feelings in a speech which was not natural.

Resolute in recognizing erudition as the chief concern of man, he sighed over the folly of popes and princes, who spent their time in wars and ecclesiastical disputes when they might have been more profitably employed in reviving the lost learning of antiquity.

He had strong sense with profound erudition, was one of the best writers of his time and an excellent preacher.

His moderation, good sense, wisdom, temper, firmness and erudition made him as successful in this position as he had been when professor of theology, and he speedily surrounded himself with a band of scholarly young men.

Nicholas himself was a man of vast erudition, and his friend Aeneas Silvius (later Pope Pius II.) said of him that "what he does not know is outside the range of human knowledge."

Bochart was a man of profound erudition; he possessed a thorough knowledge of the principal Oriental languages, including Hebrew, Syriac, Chaldaic and Arabic; and at an advanced age he wished to learn Ethiopic. He was so absorbed in his favourite study, that he saw Phoenician and nothing but Phoenician in everything, even in Celtic words, and hence the number of chimerical etymologies which swarm in his works.

Greek, Latin and Hebrew erudition soon found itself at home on Teutonic soil.

His knowledge of the ancient authors was wide, but his taste was not select, and his erudition was superficial.

Nor were there wanting men who dedicated their powers to Hebrew and Oriental erudition, laying, together with the Grecians, a basis for those Biblical studies which advanced the Reformation.

Classical erudition had been adapted to the needs of modern thought.

In erudition, literary power, and force and versatility of intellect he far surpassed ev2ry contemporary.

To him Damasus entrusted the revision of the Latin text of the Bible and other works of religious erudition.

Penetrated by the conviction that ignorance was the worst of the inveterate evils of old Russia, a pitiless enemy of superstition of every sort, a reformer by nature, overflowing with energy and resource, and with a singularly lucid mind armed at all points by a farreaching erudition, Prokopovich was the soul of the reforming party after the death of Peter the Great.

The former, while his erudition in respect to the history of philosophical opinion has rarely been equalled, was not a clear thinker.

This is the reassertion of a principle which the middle ages had lost sight of - that knowledge, if it is to have any value, must be intelligence, and not erudition.

Schlozer's activity was enormous, and he exercised great influence by his lectures as well as by his books, bringing historical study into touch with political science generally, and using his vast erudition in an attempt to solve practical questions in the state and in society.

His incisive style, his fearless and often ruthless criticism, and his wide and penetrating erudition, make him a redoubtable adversary in the field of polemic. The Bulletin critique, founded by him, for which he wrote numerous articles, has contributed powerfully to spread the principles of the historical method among the French clergy.

His extensive and exact legal erudition, and the skill with which he argued the intricate libel case of Lord Cromwell (4 Rep. 13), and the celebrated real property case of Shelley (1 Rep. 94, 104), soon brought him a practice never before equalled, and caused him to be universally recognized as the greatest lawyer of his day.

Lambertini (Pope Benedict XIV.), De servorum Dei beatificatione et beatorum canonizatione (Bologna, 1 7341738), several times reprinted, and more remarkable for erudition and knowledge of canon law than for historical criticism; Al.

The Landrecht, a work of vast labour and erudition, combines the two systems of German and Roman law supplemented by the law of nature; it was the first German code, but only came into force in 1794, after Frederick's death.

It presented in an attractive style what were then the latest results of scholarly research, but was criticized as wanting in erudition.

He turns away contemptuously from the mere curiosities of literature, and is never tempted to make a display of trivial erudition.

The French Th i s period is marked by a many-sided erudition period.

What is true in this remark lies partly in the fact that scholarship in Aldo's days had flown beyond the Alps, where a new growth of erudition, on a basis different.

His commentaries are of permanent value, not only because of the author's originality, but also because of his erudition.

He was the author of a number of Biblical commentaries (no longer extant), which are said to have been characterized by great erudition.

He was a scholar of much erudition, with great power of administrative organization, simple, generous and kindly in character.

Its touch on classical mythology is original, rarely imitative or pedantic. The art of the Renaissance was an apocalypse of the beauty of the world and man in unaffected spontaneity, without side thoughts for piety or erudition, inspired by pure delight in loveliness and harmony for their own sakes.

The lack of printed books in the first period of the Revival, and the comparative rarity of Greek erudition among students, combined with the intense enthusiasm aroused for the new gospel of the classics, gave special value to the personal teaching of these professors.

His incommensurable and indescribable masterpiece of mingled humour, wisdom, satire, erudition, indecency, profundity, levity, imagination, realism, reflects the whole age in its mirror of hyperAristophanic farce.

This became the centre of fashion as well as of erudition in the southern capital, and subsisted long after its founder's death.

But he accompanied this with numerous other books, chiefly of erudition, such as the Vico, the Mdmoires de Luther ecrits par lui-meme, the Origines du droit franQ21s, and somewhat later the Proces des templiers.

Such Cynic crudity Chrysippus rightly judged to be out of keeping with the requirements of a great dogmatic school, and he laboured on all sides after thoroughness, erudition and scientific completeness.

The principal feature of Klaproth's erudition was the vastness of the field which it embraced.

This singular romance is diversified by, or, to speak more properly, it is the vehicle of the most bewildering abundance of digression, burlesque amplification, covert satire on things political, social and religious, miscellaneous erudition of the literary and scientific kind.

His claim to greatness rests upon his vast erudition and his sound judgment.

Without attempting a complete list of Petrarch's works, it may be well to illustrate the extent of his erudition and his activity as a writer by a brief enumeration of the most important.

Editio princeps (Milan, 1475); Casaubon (1603) showed great critical ability in his notes, but for want of a good MS. left the restoration of the text to Salmasius (1620), whose notes are a most remarkable monument of erudition, combined with acuteness in verbal criticism and general vigour of intellect.

But gradually he devoted less of his time to practice and more to lecturing in the Harvard Law School, to editing court reports and to contributions to law journals, especially on historical and biographical lines, in which his erudition was unsurpassed.

Many of his speeches were monuments of erudition, but the wealth of detail, of allusion, and of quotation, often from the Greek and Latin, sometimes detracted from their effect.

His inaugural lecture on "The Study of History," afterwards published with notes displaying a vast erudition, made a great impression in the university, and the new professor's influence on historical study was felt in many important directions.

There is but little attempt to give any dramatic character to the dialogue; in each book some one of the personages takes the leading part, and the remarks of the others serve only as occasions for calling forth fresh displays of erudition.

The author develops the Platonic theory of pre-existence, and shows that true education consists not in mere erudition, but rather in the formation of character.

Rabbinic erudition could not forget the repression of vicious desires in the tenth commandment, the stress laid in Deuteronomy on the necessity of service to God, or the inculcation by later prophets of humility and faith.

In that year appeared also the first volume of Bishop Finn Jonsson's Historia Ecclesiastica Islandiae, a work of high value and much erudition, containing not only ecclesiastical but civil and literary history, illustrated by a well-chosen mass of documents, 870-1740.

The students of the university he taught in daily lectures, passing in review the weightiest and lightest authors of antiquity, and pouring forth a flood of miscellaneous erudition.

His erudition was large but ill-digested; his knowledge of the ancient authors, if extensive, was superficial; his style was vulgar; he had no brilliancy of imagination, no pungency of epigram, no grandeur of rhetoric. Therefore he has left nothing to posterity which the world would not very willingly let die.

Their staple consists of Byzantine erudition; and their value depends chiefly on what they have preserved of older criticism.

A scholar and a man of considerable erudition, he showed a strong preference for historical studies; and about the time when he was preferred to the deanery he began to collect materials for the history of his own times.