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.