Admirer of Erasmus, handling parody and satire, Rabelais fights for tolerance, peace, an evangelical faith and the return to the knowledge of ancient Greco-Roman, beyond the "Gothic darkness" that characterizes the Middle Ages, taking up the theses of Plato to counter the excesses of Aristotelianism. He attacks the abuses of princes and men of the Church, and opposes to them on the one hand evangelical humanist thought, and on the other hand popular culture, bawdy, "joking", marked by the taste of wine and games, thus manifesting a humble and open Christian faith, far from any ecclesiastical weight. He shared with Protestantism the criticism of scholasticism and monasticism, but the religious reformer John Calvin also attacked him in 1550.