The satirically reasonable voice of Desiderius Erasmus.

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                In the swirl of the Reformation with the cacophony of the voices of both Protestants and Catholics alike, there was the satirically reasonable voice of Desiderius Erasmus. He was unquestionably the prophet and king of the intellectual revolution with religious overtones. Through his many writings and letters Erasmus poured beliefs and views on to the world stage with relentless fervour. In his Colloquies especially in A Pilgrimage for Religion’s Sake, one gets a clear picture of the level of contempt that Erasmus held for the corrupt state the Church had descended into and his wishes to return to original Christianity, like the "primitive Church," and be free from "formalism and superstition."  . In the extract the criticism while satirical is in fact a damning and incisive attack on superstitious, illogical, and money centred practises such as that of pilgrimage and the cult of relics and saints. Whether or not these harsh criticisms are justified is debatable, when one considers Erasmus’ own ambiguousness and that of contemporary historians.

                Erasmus’ mind is the key to understand truly what he meant by A Pilgrimage for Religion’s Sake. He had no interest in mysticism and was an advocate of the philological thought. Thus he disliked the place superstition had in society. His mind was a “heartfelt aversion to everything unreasonable, insipid, purely formal, with which the undisturbed growth of medieval culture had overburdened and overcrowded the world of thought” (Huizinga). He looked upon society especially religious life as being full of practises, ceremonies, traditions and conceptions from which the spirit seems to have departed. He treated people who followed these traditions without understanding or right feeling with contempt. Erasmus saw such blind faith as foolish, and the people were fools for believing in it.

                Erasmus’ highlights this abhorrence in the Praise of Folly and in his Colloquies especially. He sees pilgrimages as worthless and the veneration of saints and relics as foolishness. People of the time believed they would be preserved from disasters during the day if they had looked at a picture of St. Christopher in the morning. Erasmus commenting on these illogical beliefs said, “We kiss the shoes of the saints and their dirty handkerchiefs, and we leave their books, and their most holy and efficacious relics neglected.” Repeatedly, Erasmus wanted Christians to put "less trust in outward ceremony and more in true piety" (Gilmore, 121). Furthermore the purpose of the works of Erasmus appears on the surface to intend to criticize and poke fun of people such as clergymen and scholars.  However, he wanted to humiliate them into changing the "ridiculous" into the "rational" (Rabil, 76).

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                In no other works, with the exception of Moria, has Erasmus so spontaneously expressed his ideals of life than in the Colloquies. Even in the first purely formulary one, there is hardly a sentence without it’s point an expression of a vivid fancy. Drummond, accuses Erasmus in this work of making his biggest mistake “by letting his pen run away with him,” however Huizinga sees the writings as “witty clear vision of incidents.” In A Pilgrimage for Religion’s Sake, Erasmus clearly attacks the superstitious traditionalistic nature of the Catholic Church.

                The sources for “A Pilgrimage . . .” was two ...

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