Re-Envisioning Christian Humanism

In thefinal section of his great satirical workIn Praise of Folly, where he

shifts to a more serious tone in assessing the current state of the church and

Christian piety, Erasmus states that‘in absolutely every activity of life, the

pious manflees from whatever is related to the body and is carried away in the

pursuit of the eternal and invisible things of the spirit’. He is at this point in

the narrative speaking more as himself and less as Folly. He notes that once the

body has been

purged and refined... the spirit will be absorbed by that highest mind of all,

whose power is infinitely greater, in such a way that the whole man will be outside

of himself, and will be happy for no other reason than that his is located outside

himself, and will receive unspeakable joy from that Highest Good which gathers

all things to himself.^56

The victorious spiritual warrior, assured of his salvation, through the use of
the weapons of prayer and knowledge, and specifically knowledge of the
Scriptures gained through an exegetical method learned through thestudia
humanitatis, by the grace of God ascends from the visible and natural to the
invisible and supernatural and becomes one with God.
This progression, however, is not a purely individualistic effort, but rather
one that can only come about in a community of faith where the love of Christ
can be seen and experienced. This communal element is central to what
Erasmus describes as thephilosophia Christi, which he discusses at length in
his work entitledSileni Alcibiades.
Originally described in Plato’sSymposium, the‘Sileni were small images
divided in half, and so constructed that they could be opened out and
displayed; when closed, they represented some ridiculous, uglyflute-player,
but when opened, they suddenly revealed thefigure of a god, so that the
amusing deception would show off the art of the carver’.^57 The expression,
however, is also used in a more generalized sense,‘either with reference to a
thing which in appearance... seems ridiculous and contemptible, but on
closer and deeper examination proves to be admirable, or else with reference
to a person whose looks and dress do not correspond to what he conceals in
his soul’.^58 In his opening speech in theSymposium, Alcibiades describes
Socrates as being asilenus: one who externally was an ugly‘yokel’and an
ignorant (or so he claimed) clown, however when viewed from within was
greater than most men, a‘god rather than a man, a great, lofty and truly
philosophic soul, despising of those things for which other mortals jostle and

(^56) Erasmus,The Praise of Folly, trans. Clarence Miller, 2nd edn (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2003), 136–7.
(^57) Plato,Plato’s Symposium215b, trans. Avi Sharon (Newburyport, MA: Focus, 1998), 67.
(^58) Erasmus,Sileni AlcibiadesinErasmus on His Times, 77. Erasmus also refers to theSileniin
theEnchiridion 67 – 8.
Erasmus, Christian Humanism, and Spiritual Warfare 129