Week 2 Blog Post

Erasmus and The Age of Reformation Ch. 4-6

This week, I read quite a bit about Erasmus's beginning within the Church, and it seemed pretty standard to start off. It all kind of began with his first stay within Europe, which lasted for a single year. He showed up there primarily as a poet, which was interesting because he later became a humanist of sorts, which made me question if the poetry roots had anything to do with his path. The reasoning for this was that quite a bit of poets tend to lean more towards the humanist side anyways, regardless of what they write about. He supposedly showed early that he leaned towards faith though within his poetry. Although he seemed to be more of a scholar than a devout religious believer, his poems spoke for himself. He praised priests and saints within his works, and did so continuously as far as I can tell. My only question was what sort of topics he actually wrote poetry on before he took to a theological life. Only one incident really occurred during his stay within Europe, and it was right as he was about to leave as well. Basically, the king at the time prohibited the export of silver or gold, so when Erasmus attempted to leave with twenty pounds, they were confiscated and he was throw in jail. Surprisingly, he did not even retaliate, he simply wrote a booklet that was directed at students within England who might not know about the law. This really showed that Erasmus was able to keep a cool head even in a tight situation such as that one, where he was basically robbed. 

Within chapter five were details of Erasmus's change into a humanist, which was basically the equivalent of somebody who put humanity before all else. This was interesting, especially due to how he began as somebody who really only cared about just making it through his childhood. I never particularly understood what drives humanists, but it seemed as though he had some backing to his beliefs. It was actually funny how the book mentioned how his name itself became a household name just because of his works that he published, mainly because I'm sure that was not what he intended at all. It seemed like his work was primarily aimed at praising priests and saints, although he also made sure to have humanistic values within them as well. Later on, actually only about two to three years later, he headed out to Greece in order to study abroad and to gain more authority before returning home. There, he attempted to learn their language, but he could not afford to get any text or a master of sorts. He did end up studying the language, but nobody has ever been certain on if he had a master or not. Later on, when he returned to the monastery, he took on teaching the masses to just read the scripture, not rely on the Church for all of their beliefs. Although he did not go to the extent some other writers of that time did, he did have firm beliefs that the scripture held the answer, and for that he has my respect.