ABSTRACT
Erasmus linked biblical ecstasy with the ecstasies which Plato wrote about. He further insists that the madness of the Christian ecstatic is indistinguishable from a bout of medically attested insanity. The Greek word for practising raises few problems when Socrates uses it. But the classical Latin word used to translate it is normally meditatio. In the Moria and in his straightforward theological works Erasmus uses it over and over again to refer to that 'practising of dying' which is philosophical ecstasy - and, for the enraptured Christian, true religious ecstasy. The point is made clearly by Folly in the Moria. In the New Testament the great example of that phenomenon is the speaking in tongues of the disciples at Pentecost. That is often taken nowadays as an example of glossolalia - of ecstatic utterances which are close to gibberish.
