Praise Of Folly

One of the intellectual leaders of the northern Renaissance, Erasmus was born around 1466 in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and he died in Basel, Switzerland in 1536. He was educated at religious schools and showed an early interest in humanistic learning. Erasmus lived a monastic life near Gouda for about seven years and was ordained a priest in 1492. His experiences as a monk convinced him that western Christendom should move beyond the scholastic method (consisting of rational defenses of the faith) and reacquaint itself with the classics of Greco-Roman and Christian antiquity. As a proponent of educational reform, Erasmus considered the study of Greek, Latin, and Hebrew as essential for religious knowledge and scholarship. To this end, he prepared new, critical translations of the New Testament and the Church Fathers, who were theologians of Christianity’s first few centuries, with the hopes of seeing Christian civilization “purified by a deeper knowledge of its historic roots.” (Tracy, James D. “Erasmus.” Encyclopedia Britannica, 7 Jan. 2021, www.britannica.com/biography/Erasmus-Dutch-humanist.)

Erasmus’s travels brought him to Rome where, in 1506, he saw the “warrior pope,” Julius II, return to the city at the head of a conquering army; this event fueled his satire against church institutions. In addition to his time in Italy, Erasmus lived in the Netherlands, Belgium, and England, forming alliances with other humanist scholars including Sir Thomas More. His friendship with More led to Praise of Folly, which scholars describe as his most popular, widely read and controversial book. For some, Erasmus’s mocking tone and insistence on upsetting settled ways of thinking and habit equated to knocking down cherished institutions. Others viewed his ideas as a much-needed corrective.

When Martin Luther began his protest against the established church around 1517, Erasmus was an intellectual ally. However, the temperate and peace-loving Erasmus eventually distanced himself from Luther, remaining a loyal Catholic and seeking a middle ground to preserve the unity of the church. Many of Erasmus’s ideas about church reform anticipated the Protestant and Catholic Reformations. His emphasis on language learning and the correct interpretation of texts laid the groundwork for the historical-critical study of the past which remains an important part of scholarship today.