Who Was Desiderius Erasmus?
Desiderius Erasmus was born in Rotterdam around 1466, entered a monastery as a young man, and was ordained a priest, though a papal dispensation from his monastic vows freed him to pursue the scholarly and literary career for which he became known across Europe. Educated in Paris and shaped by his encounters in England with John Colet and Thomas More, Erasmus became the foremost representative of Christian humanism – a movement that applied the philological tools of Renaissance scholarship to Scripture and the early Church Fathers, with the aim of recovering, as Erasmus put it, the “philosophy of Christ” beneath centuries of scholastic accretion.
Erasmus's two most consequential achievements were his 1516 critical edition of the Greek New Testament – the first published edition of its kind, which became the basis for Luther's German translation and much subsequent Protestant biblical scholarship – and The Praise of Folly (1511), a satirical oration delivered in the voice of Folly herself, who praises her own dominion over human affairs while, in the process, exposing the vanity, pedantry, and corruption Erasmus saw throughout the church and the academy of his day.
Erasmus is significant for TLA because The Praise of Folly operates on two levels at once. Much of what Folly praises is, straightforwardly, foolish – the self-importance of theologians, the credulity of pilgrims chasing relics, the vanity of preachers. But Folly's oration also gestures toward a different kind of folly – the “folly of the cross” that Paul describes in 1 Corinthians, a wisdom that looks like foolishness to the world precisely because the world's categories of wisdom and folly have themselves been inverted. Erasmus, despite his criticisms of the church, remained within it through the Reformation crisis, refusing to follow Luther, and died in 1536.
In Their Own Words
“The world is a stage, and Folly is the leading lady.”
– The Praise of Folly, 1511“Christianity itself…seems to have a certain affinity with some sort of folly.”
– The Praise of Folly, 1511“Ad fontes” – “to the sources.”
– the motto of Erasmus's scholarly programSelected Bibliography
- The Praise of Folly – 1511
- Novum Instrumentum (Greek New Testament) – 1516
- Handbook of a Christian Knight – 1503
- On Free Will – 1524