Censorship of 16th-Century Big Thinker Erasmus Revealed

[microrobert]

Censorship of 16th-Century Big Thinker Erasmus Revealed

More than 400 years before modern-day governments tried shutting down blogs or blocking tweets, two people tasked with censoring a sometimes-critic of the Catholic Church in Renaissance Europe took to their duties in very different ways: one with great beauty, the other with glue and, it appears, a message.

Now, two books, housed at separate libraries at the University of Toronto, illustrate two unusual approaches censors took when dealing with the same author, Erasmus.

http://www.livescience.com/20310-censorship-16th-century-erasmus.html

[GeistFaust]

Erasmus was a key force in the critiquing of the materialism and and hypocrisy of the church hierarchy and culture, and was advocating for an internal reform on the basis of the early Church fathers. I owe his critique of the crass materialism and individualism within the church at that time to his Gothic Germanic perspective. That said his desire to revive the customs and practices of the early Church fathers in order to save the Church as a whole was completely idealistic in its framework.


A few people seem to have acted out in a manner that paralleled his own visions for the Church, such as St Francis of Assisi, but they were far to isolated and self-alienated to make a profound influence on the masses. Although they did establish a new social group, which served as a foundational unit to keep the church functioning in a relatively healthy manner. Erasmus was against Martin Luther in regards to his response to the moral and power crisis occurring in the Catholic Church, but I bet he agreed with him in some regards.


I bet they want to censure Erasmus, because of the manner in which he criticized all social, political, and religious institutions, which oriented themselves on a hegemony. This kind of structure tends to lead to degeneracy and a one sided crass materialism, which negates at the internal structures of that specific institution.


This hegemony can be seen in the political and social structures of the day, which are dictated by the corrupt plutocrats, who are about making a profit off the people through corrupt means and by corrupting them with crass materialism and global capitalism. We need an Erasmus of this day to challenge these people, and sometimes the best way to approach the present and the future is to read the approaches of previous great men, like Erasmus.