re impelled to revolutionize the curriculum out of the conviction that the classical world had been through a complete cycle of human experience, moral, intellectual, and imaginative, and that the ancients had given a luminously intelligent account of that experience, in perfect form, in imperishable works of thought, art, and literature (Mazzeo 15).
The humanists placed their emphasis on the human being as that individual would be revealed in the written records of classical antiquity.
The humanist thinker who would have the greatest influence over the Reformation was Erasmus, and he would be a source of inspiration to both the Zwinglians and the Anabaptists. Erasmus was dedicated to peace in his writings, and he was criticized for this by Luther, who said that he himself welcomed war even if the world were destroyed in the process. This rejoinder occurred in the context of the times as Catholic militants were pressing toward war in the 1520s. Erasmus was not one who sought war and indeed was a lifelong advocate for peace. It was when he visited Italy that he came face to face with the horror of war for the first time and with the equally horrifying spectacle of the involvement of the Pope in that war. He made reverence to Pope Julius II in his work Praise of Folly and linked Julius there with war (Sowards 105). Erasmus thus criticized the Pope but did not break with the Church as Luther did and as certain of his own followers would do.
The Lutheran Reformation started in the personal struggles of Martin Luther, who was tormented by the question of how a sinful man could stand in the presence of a righteous God. His great writings of 1520 elaborated the meaning of his evangelical experience, and his experience of the grace of God was not seen as unique but as one that illuminated the experiences of multitudes who had been burdened by the Catholic view that oppressed people with the necessity for winning God's favor...