• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 424 0

had been the guffaw, mirth for its own sake; as Rabelais had written in his prologue to Gargantua, that kind of laughter is almost a man’s birthright (“Pour ce que rire est le propre de l’homme”). Erasmus, instead, wrote devastating satire. If the guffaw is a broadsword, satire is a rapier. As such, it always has a point. Erasmus’s points were missed by the common people, lay as well as clerical, but the coming religious revolution was not going to be a mass movement. It would be led by the upper and middle classes, which were gaining in literacy every day, and his brilliant thrusts had the unexpected effect of convulsing them and then arousing them.

In the beginning his intentions were very different. He meant to reach a small, elite audience which would be moved to act behind the scenes, within the existing framework of their faith. Instead his works became best-sellers. The first of them, written during his first year in England, was Encomium moriae (The Praise of Folly). Its Latinized Greek title was partly a pun on his host’s name, but moros was also Greek for “fool,” and moria for “folly.”

His postulate for the work was that life rewards absurdity at the expense of reason.

COMING FROM A MAN OF GOD, it was an astonishing volume. Some passages might have been written by a radical, atheistic German humanist, and had the author been a man of lesser renown, he would certainly have been condemned by the inquisitors. Being Erasmus, he laughed at them, daring them to “shout ‘heretic’ … the thunderbolt they always keep ready at a moment’s notice to terrify anyone to whom they are not favorably inclined.”

He opened his argument by declaring that the human race owed its very existence to folly, for without it no man would submit

Desiderius Erasmus (1466?–1536)

to lifelong monogamy and no woman to the trials of motherhood. Bravery was foolish; so were men who pursued learning; and so, he added slyly, were theologians, whom he mocked for defending the absurdity of original sin, for spreading the myth that “our Saviour was conceived in the Virgin’s womb,” for presuming, during holy communion, to “demonstrate, in the consecrated wafer … how one body can be in several places at the same time, and how Christ’s body in heaven differs from His body on the cross or in the sacrament.”

Next he went after the clergy, his targets running up the ecclesiastical scale from friars, monks, parish priests, inquisitors, to cardinals and popes. To him, curative shrines, miracles, and “such like bugbears of superstition” were “absurdities” which merely served as “a profitable trade, and [to] procure a comfortable income to such priests and friars as by this craft get their gain.” He mocked “the cheat of pardons and indulgences.” And “what,” he asked, “can be said bad enough of others who pretend that by the force of … magical charms, or by the fumbling over their beads in the rehearsal of such and such petitions (which some religious impostors invented, either for diversion, or, what is more likely, for advantage), they shall procure riches, honors, pleasure, long life, and lusty old age, nay, after death, a seat at the right hand of the Saviour?” As for the pontiffs, they had lost any resemblance to the Apostles in “their riches, honors, jurisdictions, offices, dispensations, licenses … ceremonies and tithes, excommunications and interdicts.” Erasmus, the intellectual, could find only one explanation for their success: the stupidity, ignorance, and gullibility of the faithful.

Encomium moriae was translated into a dozen languages. It enraged the priestly hierarchy. “You should know,” one of them wrote him, “that your Moria has excited a great disturbance even among those who were formerly your most devoted admirers.” But few academic writers, having tasted popular success, can turn away from it, and he was no exception. His faith in the wisdom of his cause was now confirmed. Indeed, his next satire, which appeared three years later, turned out to be even more startling. This time he assailed a specific pontiff, “the warrior pope,” Julius