Who was this Erasmus character?
Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam is one of the most
enigmatic and fascinating characters in all history. He was ordained a priest,
but left his cloister and rebuffed all attempts to bring him back. He was an
illegitimate child, he had no official position, no title, no power, and no
wealth in a rigidly hierarchical society, yet he was one of the most
influential men in history. He shattered the iron grip of the Church on
Christendom and opened the door for Luther, Calvin, and the English
Dissolution. He accomplished all this with the strength of his wit and his pen.
Before Erasmus, every person bold enough to challenge the power of the Church
was burned at the stake, but Erasmus conquered with humor and playfulness. He
did not condemn the excesses of the Church and society; he made fun of them.
His _Praise of Folly_ satirized all European society with irreverence and
wicked wit; readers howled and the great and powerful squirmed. His Colloquies,
Adages, and Apophthegmata continued the good-natured assault on pig-headed
authority, and his serious work on religious texts established his standing as
the leading Biblical scholar of his age.
Along the way, Erasmus demonstrated an almost
spookily modern outlook. In an age that regarded women as subhuman, Erasmus
demonstrated a shockingly liberated attitude toward women, urging their
education and the fullest development of their minds. He condemned persecution
of Jews and urged toleration for minorities. One of the first full-fledged
pacifists in Western history, he repeatedly and pointedly roasted the princes
of his day for their warmongering. His educational concepts were so far ahead
of his times that they were still being studied and implemented well into the
twentieth century. And his notions of religious ecstasy sound like something
out of the 1960s.
Erasmus was one of the most successful men in
history in that he profoundly, subtly, and constructively changed the world for
the better centuries into the future. Even today, our lives are affected by
this man. Did you read Aesop's fables as a child? You can thank Erasmus for
rescuing them from obscurity and making them part of early education. If you
ever read the King James Bible, you can thank Erasmus for championing the
notion that the Bible should be translated carefully from the original sources
into local languages. If you have ever used the phrases "crocodile
tears", "call a spade a spade", or "start from
scratch", you can thank Erasmus for digging them out of classical
literature and popularizing them. And for every time that you weren't beaten by
your teacher for failing to properly regurgitate memorized material, you owe
Erasmus a debt of gratitude: he was the first and most vociferous opponent of
such methods in education, and his eloquent condemnations of these brutal
methods have been quoted right up to the present day.
Most striking are his notions of the role of
play in the life of the mind; I doubt that we fully understand his thinking
here. He saw a deep connection between play and the most profound issues of
human existence. It is in the interplay between the comic and the profound that
Erasmus shines brightest.