THE GREAT ONES
Desiderius Erasmus
V.K. SUBRAMANIAN
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Erasmus (1466 -1536 A.D.) was concerned with morality and proper behaviour.
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Illustration: V.K. SUBRAMANIAN
Erasmus, the Dutch philosopher, held that like religion philosophy and the arts could be a guide to a moral life.
He was of the view that all human evils were rooted in ignorance and infatuation and therefore education of humanity was the most important task of his life.
Erasmus was born in Rotterdam, The Netherlands in 1466 A.D., out of wedlock. His mother died when he was hardly six or seven.
He was brought up in a monastery and became a priest in 1492.
In 1495, he went to Paris where he lived as a teacher and moved to England in 1498, and became a professor at Cambridge.
Erasmus was fascinated by the English. He met England’s great scholars like Thomas More, Willliam Lyly, John Colet and Thomas Linacre.
His philosophy
In 1509, he wrote his famous book: The Praise of Folly, and the masterpiece, Colloquia, in 1519.
He spent his later years in Basle, where he died on June 6, 1536.
Erasmus was more concerned with morality and proper behaviour than with doctrines of sin and repentance or details of rituals.
Reason, common sense, tolerance and mediation were his tools; the wisdom of the Greek and Roman classicists was his touchstone.
Modern historians refer to him as “the Voltaire of the Renaissance”.
Though Erasmus was sympathetic to many of the goals of the Reformation, he wrote to Martin Luther: “Do not get angry. Do not hate anybody. Do not be excited over the noise you have made.” The excesses of the ideological struggle between the established church and the Reformation repelled the sensitive Erasmus, whom Bertrand Russell called “a liberal adrift in a sea of warring fanatics”.
Erasmus’s view was: “Where there is hatred in judgement, judgement is blind.”
This is an extract from the book The Great Ones by V.K.Subramanian, Abhinav Publications,
New Delhi
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