Monday, February 11, 2019

For God has chosen the foolish things of the world...


No morons so play the fool as those who are obsessed with the ardor of Christian piety to the point they distribute their goods, overlook injuries, suffer themselves to be deceived, make no distinction between friends and enemies, eschew pleasure, glut themselves with hunger, vigils, tears, toils, and reproaches, who disdain life, who crave only death, who seem utterly to contemn all common sense, as if the soul lived elsewhere and not in the body. What is this if not insanity? No wonder that the apostles appeared to be drunk with new wine and Paul seemed to Festus to be mad. Christ himself became a fool when he was found in fashion as a man that he might bring healing by the foolishness of the cross. “For God has chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise, and the weak things of the world to confound the mighty.”

Desiderius Erasmus, Moriae Encomium

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Moriae Encomium (Latin) In Praise of Folly, also translated as The Praise of Folly, is an essay written in Latin in 1509 by Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam and first printed in June 1511

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