It’s strangely disconcerting when two completely unconnected lines of thought suddenly join up.
Today I read this review of the movie V for Vendetta, which says that while the movie is ostensibly anti-fascism, the main character is actually (and without a sense of irony) a fascist. Further down in the article it mentions a book called Modern Fascism by Gene Veith, an author I can highly recommend.
So I popped on over to Veith’s blog, where he was talking about the death of humanism and that we should revive the Reformation term “Christian humanism.”
I didn’t know what that was, so I googled it and found this article about Christian humanism. It mentions a guy named Desiderius Erasmus as “the most influential of the Christian humanists,” so I looked up his book “In Praise of Folly.” It was written for Sir Thomas More, who I recently read a book about, but that’s just an aside.
Okay, here ends path #1.
Later, apropos of nothing, I was trying to remember the name of the pope during the Reformation. So I googled and found this page and read about him (Pope Leo X).
Right below him was something about Martin Luther, so I read that, and it mentioned that he wrote Bondage of the Will against Erasmus! (I knew I’d heard that name somewhere! I’m sure my liberal-artsy friends are chuckling at me now.) Sure enough, I found that Erasmus wrote Freedom of the Will against Luther’s theology of salvation!
It’s just weird to me. Why did (1) reading a movie review, and (2) wondering who was pope during the Reformation, lead to the same guy?
My knowledge of history is woefully incomplete, but little things like this are what make me want to read more history to fill in the holes.