A Temple of Texts: Essays

by William H. Gass

  Erasmus and a companion needed to travel north, during what was a dreadful winter, to an island, Noord-Beveland, which a sizable leak in the land had created, but they were driven to a halt by the worst sleet storm (it was said) in a hundred years. Although the water was frozen, they could not see or stand, and had no sleigh, so they sat on their bottoms with their backs to the wind and let it blow them across the ice to the other side. On account of the lady’s most recent romance, the disapproval of her relatives, and a lack of cash, the job disappeared into the winter where the scenery dwelled, making their bottom-borne voyage vain.

  Alas, Folly seems to have authored this fiction. Erasmus went north for other reasons, and relates van Loon’s anecdote in vivid yet less mythmaking prose:

  Juno, who hates poets, called in Æolus to help her, and Æolus beat down upon us with hail, and snow, and rain, and wind, and fog—now one—now all together. After the storm came a frost; snow and water froze into lumps and sheets of ice. The road became rough. The mud hardened into ridges. The trees were coated with ice. Some were split, others lost their branches from the weight of the water which had frozen upon them. We rode forward as we could, our horses crunching through the crust at every step, and cutting their fetlocks as if with glass. Your friend Erasmus sate bewildered on a steed as astonished as himself. I cursed my folly for entrusting my life and my learning to a dumb beast. Just when the castle came in sight we found ourselves on a frozen slope. The wind had risen again and was blowing furiously. I got off and slid down the hill, guiding myself with a piked staff which acted as rudder. (First version: The Praise of Folly, introduced and illustrated by Hendrik Willem van Loon. New York: Classics Club, 1942; second version: Froude, quoting a letter of Erasmus.)

  “Erasmus of Rotterdam” was losing its meaning. “Far from Rotterdam” would be more appropriate. Classical scholars were rare and in demand. Erasmus became peripatetic and thus more European by the year, and when he finally settled down, it was to be in Switzerland. By 1499, he was in London, and would soon visit Oxford and Cambridge, as well. There he met Thomas More, even younger than he; John Colet, precisely his age; a passionate humanist, William Grocyn, who introduced the teaching of Greek to Oxford; and Thomas Linacre, scholar and medico, later physician to Henry VIII. These new friends reinforced Erasmus’s desire to learn Greek, and in three years—he was so energized—Erasmus was translating and editing Greek texts, from whose pages he picked ripe and relevant quotes for a compilation of aphorisms, to which he tacked his own, mostly amused, reflections. After citing the passage in Scripture that says that priests are obliged to devour the sins of their flocks, Erasmus remarks that these sins appeared to be so severe that only fine wine enabled the holy fathers to digest them. Since his pockets were, as usual, out of pence, he published these gems under the title, Adagia. The book was immensely popular, causing him to enlarge the collection through many editions; consequently when The Praise of Folly made Erasmus famous, it did so only by adding soup to a full bowl.

  Erasmus returned to England many times to visit his friends and refuel his engine. Because their relationship was one of face-to-face conversation and wine-smoothed dispute, they were able to take the measure of one another, and the influence of a personality was often greater than that of any written work. Because his visits were repeated and often lengthy, each of these men, as well as many others in France, Germany, Italy, and Switzerland, became lifelong friends and stimulating associates.

  Erasmus wanted the Church to allow the study of pagan authors because he often found them wise and in every way as virtuous as the accepted saints. Horace and Cicero, among them, praised the kind of character and recommended sorts of action that any Christian might admire and seek to emulate. Young Erasmus’s first effort, The Book Against the Barbarians, argued for a harmony between classical and Christian virtues. There were many others—Boccaccio and Chaucer had already made fun of the nobility and the holy servants of the Church—who shared his desire to widen the scope of the mind so that reason might determine one’s worldly views, duty dominate the social sense, and Jesus command the affections. In the spirit of the Old Testament prophets, these critics felt the Church was too devoted to ritual and rigmarole, to hollow argument and token service, to the secular profits of its sacred calling, and should practice what it ought to preach: a little gentle forbearance and liberality, some generosity and acceptance. To be honest and trustworthy, one did not need to consult the schoolmen (“Why is it not enough to hate sin?” he asks); the truth did not require a doctrine drawn up in its defense before it could be uttered; learning did not ask ignorance to keep scholarly subjects safely circumscribed; yet as Erasmus writes—again, in one of his letters:

  It may happen, it often does happen, that an abbot is a fool or a drunkard. He issues an order to the brotherhood in the name of holy obedience. And what will such an order be? An order to observe chastity? An order to be sober? An order to tell no lies? Not one of these things. It will be that a brother is not to learn Greek; he is not to seek to instruct himself. He may be a sot. He may go with prostitutes. He may be full of hatred and malice. He may never look inside the scriptures. No matter. He has not broken any oath. He is an excellent member of the community. While if he disobeys such a command as this from an insolent superior there is stake or dungeon for him instantly. (Froude.)

  Keep the hours, tally your attendance at Mass, tell your beads, fondle the relics, bruise your knees, but do not imitate Christ. When, in 1503, Erasmus published Handbook of a Christian Soldier, that was his complaint.

  Erasmus tells us that the title Encomium Moriæ, was a pun on Thomas More’s name, and that the idea of the work came from conversations they had together. In a sense, then, it is also “A Praise of More,” and, in the spirit of George Santayana’s sonnet, which begins “It is not wisdom to be only wise, / And on the inward vision close the eyes, / But it is wisdom to believe the heart,” we can understand Folly to be wiser than it was sometimes wise to be.

  For who but Folly can recognize the many follies that exist, let alone know how to praise them? Because that is what Folly does: it sees that what is commonly called folly is folly only in ways hidden from view and rarely discerned, and what is called churchly and scholarly and righteous and sensible is seldom so, but more likely a further form of foolishness. Those who pretend to represent the best may be among the worst, while those who are said to revel in vice may be promoting life.

  The response to Erasmus’s books was enthusiastic from the first. The Church was widely felt to be tyrannical, self-serving, and corrupt, as I’ve said, and the dissatisfactions that Luther would exploit were ready to welcome the work of More and Erasmus as they already had that of Thomas à Kempis. Yet it was Erasmus’s translation of the New Testament’s Greek, and his correction of Saint Jerome’s Latin version, that earned him such esteem that a scholar might boast he had received a letter from Erasmus and gain respect by virtue of its signature.

  Formidable bastions like those the scholastics had erected to protect themselves may appear to fall suddenly (the Soviets lose their Union seemingly overnight), but many small enemies have been at work undermining the walls for a long time, not just one large army at the gates armed with shouts, showy uniforms, and flags. Nation-states were forming and towns were growing by guilds and leagues. Voyages of discovery, both geographical and scientific, had lengthened every distance, even to the stars. Athens and Rome were being rebuilt by the imagination and occupied by the mind. Erasmus—immensely civilized and cosmopolitan—was just the man for this enterprising and industrious wider world.

  In his letters, Erasmus often referred to himself in the third person, especially when adopting an ironic mode, so that one message might begin: “Your Erasmus gets on well …” This is precisely the strategy chosen for The Praise of Folly. Folly’s tone is also present in the correspondence, letters that got handed round like leaflets.

  … the English girls are divinely pretty. Soft, pleasant, gent
le, and charming to the Muses. They have one custom which cannot be too much admired. When you go anywhere on a visit the girls all kiss you. They kiss you when you arrive. They kiss you when you go away; and they kiss you again when you return. Go where you will, it is all kisses; and, my dear Faustus, if you had once tasted how soft and fragrant those lips are, you would wish to spend your life here. (Froude.)

  Erasmus always spoke and wrote his mind, so it seems right that the first folly should be frankness: Say whatever comes into your head, without circumspection and revision. When we edit ourselves, we seek to persuade by means of flourishes that conceal the naked truth the way calligraphy may obscure the letter it celebrates; or we worry about whether what we say shall be well received, and so soften our thoughts, or turn them to show a nicer side. It is folly to speak as an innocent child does, as an idiot savant can, or as a follower of Christ should.

  Folly claims Plutus and Neotes—wealth and youth—as parents; nowadays we would say moneybags and a gold digger, perfectly paired. They called their child Moria, as if they knew that, ages after, Sir Thomas More’s name would complete the pun, just as this exemplary man would laugh as Democritus had done at the diligent fool-hardiness of his fellows. More, like Folly himself, was doubtless born smiling. He died with a grin on his severed head, we must imagine, because he is reputed to have asked his executioner to spare his beard, since his beard at least had committed no crime. Serious levity is permitted the Christian, for did not Jesus rename Simon, his disciple, in Aramaic, Cephas, or “rock,” which in the Greek gospels is translated as Peter (petra, also “rock”) so he might then say, “Upon this rock I shall build my church”?

  Suckled by two pairs of breasts, Drunkenness and Stupidity, and surrounded by her handmaidens, Self-love, Flattery, Forgetfulness, Laziness, Pleasure, Delirium, and Luxury—the seven indolent sins—Folly is raised royally: a nutty, rich, sybaritic, ass-kissing, daydreaming narcissist, supremely suited for service at court, in business, or a papal entourage. So she would soon know what went on in self-serving society as well as in the selfish self.

  The presence of Folly’s second folly is made obvious by her boast: that among the gods, Folly is the one who brings good things to man—existence itself, as if that were a good—for if lustful pleasure did not drive men to risk their dignity, their fortunes, and their lives in heedless fornication, wombs would starve, and the race would become endangered, dwindle away; there’d be no souls to save or faggots to furnish the fires of hell that, with nothing to consume but themselves, would end utterly ash.

  To argue the least obvious, to plead the absurd, to fly in the face of received opinion—that is Folly’s office—but she is to do so by employing a strategy worthy of her, a strategy that depends, as the con artist does, on the greedy desires of men. She recommends sin, and her listeners laugh because they are supposed to be, like Calvin Coolidge, against it; but her discourse discloses the truth: If we are enjoying anything, it is probably deemed wicked and should be denied us, and if we seek release from our pain, we ought to be blamed for our intent and punished for its success; meanwhile, priests, Popes, cardinals, kings, bishops, princes, monks, nuns, abbots, ministers of state, courtiers, friars, theologians (in short, our leaders and their lackeys) relish their depravity and everything forbidden—no otherwise than we in what we want, only otherwise in what we and they receive.

  To act as if existence were to be prized, guarded, extended, ennobled even, is to commit the folly of follies. In 1500, life was hard: its beginnings hazardous, its maintenance laborious, its span brief, its conclusion miserable. Erasmus, whose conditions were more comfortable than most, writes to a friend:

  I am not so greatly attached to life; having entered upon my fifty-first year, I judge I have lived long enough; and on the other hand, I see in this life nothing so excellent or agreeable that a man might wish for it, on whom the Christian creed has conferred the hope of a much happier life, in store for those who have attached themselves closely to piety. Nevertheless, at present, I could almost wish to be rejuvenated for a few years, for this only reason that I believe I see a golden age dawning in the near future. (Quoted by J. Huizinga. The Waning of the Middle Ages. New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1954.)

  If monks clung to the writings of the Church as they might logs in an open ocean, and even skeptics like Erasmus saw the promise of land in a drowned leaf, poets exhibited no such sanguinity. Eustache Deschamps, for example, made the following moan:

  Time of mourning and temptation,

  Era of anger, envy, consternation,

  Time of torpor and damnation,

  An age defined by declination,

  Time of terror, error, horror,

  Period of falsehood, pride, and strife,

  Time without honor or honest judgment,

  World full of sorrow that shortens life.

  Gold is not a good color for an era anyway. Money, for instance, is our motto, and it has tarnished us. But, for Erasmus, gold it would be.

  Learning is springing up all round out of the soil; languages, physics, mathematics, each department thriving. Even theology is showing signs of improvement. Theology, so far, has been cultivated only by avowed enemies of knowledge. The pretence has been to protect the minds of the laity from disturbance. All looks brighter now. (Froude.)

  Golden ages are baubles that bewitch. Nowadays, Folly would be quick to point out that this or that church’s promises of paradise are merely encouragements to the miserable to endure with docility their slavery and suffering in this life out of their hope for a future one—a salvation whose failure to appear never disappoints. The more immediate progress that Erasmus foresaw was not to happen, either. Sectarian conflict made such hopes wholly vain and deepened the darkness of his declining days. In less than a year, resentments that had lain fallow burst forth like eager weeds, because the earth was being turned. Clergy everywhere had suffered his lash for a long time; now the monks of Louvain found the courage to attack him; this pulpit—and then that—followed suit, and was the place for an angry sermon. His supporters were no help, returning shout for shout and answering every invective with a curse.

  Erasmus hoped to harmonize classical and Christian ways; that proved impossible. He wished to reform the Church from within by filling it with Christianity once again; instead, it leaked like a sieve. He was accused of attacking an ancient institution without offering anything rejuvenating in return; however, he would not replace the dogmas he despised with others equally awful. So in the face of Luther’s challenge, and the promise of reforms Erasmus had often urged, the humanist appeared to temporize, to attack the priesthood while enjoying the protection of the Pope; when, in fact, for a man whose contempt was cold and scorn rational, between two fanaticisms, there was nothing to choose. In fact, there were madmen everywhere, and no one they would amuse.

  [April 10, 1532] The factions here will leave no one alone. Where the Evangelicals are in power they do as they please, and the rest must submit; we are already Lutherans, Zwinglians, and Anabaptists; the next thing will be we shall turn Turks. [August 20, 1531] Never was so wild an age as ours; one would think six hundred Furies had broken loose from hell. Laity and clergy are mad together…. I do not know what the Pope intends. As burning heretics at the stake has failed, the priests now wish to try the sword. It is not for me to say if they are right. The Turks perhaps will not leave them leisure for the experiment. The better way would be to restore the Gospel as a rule of life, and then choose a hundred and fifty learned men from all parts of Christendom to settle the points in dispute. Opinions on special subjects need not be made Articles of Faith. (Froude.)

  Murder, Erasmus knew, solved nothing. It only made murderers. Reason could only look on in despair, another human faculty to be abused—along with the ability to laugh.

  Time has destroyed many things, including the clock’s face: Countries have changed their names, their occupants even; cities have risen, only to be ground into dust; seas have dried up,
islands sunk, glaciers melted, mountains exploded; wealth, regal power, influence has been dissipated—inheritance frittered, credit used up, goodwill wasted; customs have changed—clothes, cosmetics, manners, diet (what is safe to eat, what is forbidden)—turned like collars, altered like cuffs; standards of beauty are, like heroes on horseback, extolled, then toppled from their mounts, or screwed like a whore in a cheap house; methods and means of war are embraced or abandoned; the way plagues rage—even what the epidemics are—shift as the winds do their force and direction; beliefs have been dissed, disposed of, replaced, species exterminated, languages lost, words forsaken or respelled, for who reads Chaucer easily now without a bit of practice, even the Franklin’s tempting menus …

  Without bake mete was never his hous,

  Of fissh and flessh, and that so plenteuous

  It snewed in his hous of mete and drynke.

  Of alle deyntees that men koude thynke …

  so that we often cannot recognize the past when we first encounter it: Who is a béguine? How long is a paternoster? What are gillies? Yet there remain constants: the greed of our guts, the desires of our loins, the hopes of our hearts, our fears, our anxious eyes, our need of love; because people have always cherished memories of evil done to their ancestors; they have gotten drunk, stolen kisses, picked pockets, eaten too much, murdered their enemies, whose grandfathers are said to have murdered theirs, lied to authorities, believed bunk, betrayed their gods, their kings, their countries, their spouses, beaten their children, seduced the maids, backbit and tattled, slandered and perjured and maligned. Be reminded that even in Erasmus’s day games and sporting affairs were often forbidden because of the violence they provoked—men were murdered for cheating at chess; and though we now sometimes play bingo at the behest of the Church, the casino is as common as the cold, and the state runs the numbers racket for the sake of the public schools. Over time, only what has been enjoined has changed, not its practice, for we beat up our umpires and upbraid our opponents as we have in all the so-called golden ages; consequently, Folly may preach to us today as it spoke to yesterday’s fools and dupes and victims, in the same terms, in the same tones, to complain of our life’s bitter business and all the blood shed in wars between snarling dogmas—vicious and unrestrainable—when what is wanted is a bit of simple decency, an honest show of kindness, and a soft foot for the common road.