History of Western Philosophy - Bertrand Russell [291]
There are passages where the satire gives way to invective, and Folly utters the serious opinions of Erasmus; these are concerned with ecclesiastical abuses. Pardons and indulgences, by which priests 'compute the time of each soul's residence in purgatory'; the worship of saints, even of the Virgin, 'whose blind devotees think it manners to place the mother before the Son'; the disputes of theologians as to the Trinity and the Incarnation; the doctrine of transubstantiation; the scholastic sects; popes, cardinals, and bishops—all are fiercely ridiculed. Particularly fierce is the attack on the monastic orders: they are 'brainsick fools', who have very little religion in them, yet are 'highly in love with themselves, and fond admirers of their own happiness'. They behave as if all religion consisted in minute punctilio: 'The precise number of knots to the tying on of their sandals; what distinct colours their respective habits, and what stuff made of; how broad and long their girdles,' and so on. 'It will be pretty to hear their pleas before the great tribunal: one will brag how he mortified his carnal appetite by feeding only upon fish: another will urge that he spent most of his time on earth in the divine exercise of singing psalms: … another, that in threescore years he never so much as touched a piece of money, except he fingered it through a thick pair of gloves.' But Christ will interrupt: 'Woe unto you, scribes and pharisees, … I left you but one precept, of loving another, which I do not hear any one plead that he has faithfully discharged.' Yet on earth these men are feared, for they know many secrets from the confessional, and often blab them when they are drunk.
Popes are not spared. They should imitate their Master by humility and poverty. 'Their only weapons ought to be those of the Spirit; and of these indeed they are mightily liberal, as of their interdicts, their suspensions, their denunciations, their aggravations, their greater and lesser excommunications, and their roaring bulls, that fight whomever they are thundered against; and these most holy fathers never issue them out more frequently than against those who, at the instigation of the devil, and not having the fear of God before their eyes, do feloniously and maliciously attempt to lessen and impair St Peter's patrimony.'
It might be supposed, from such passages, that Erasmus would have welcomed the Reformation, but it proved otherwise.
The book ends with the serious suggestion that true religion is a form of Folly. There are, throughout, two kinds of Folly, one praised ironically, the other seriously; the kind praised seriously is that which is displayed in Christian simplicity. This praise is of a piece with Erasmus's dislike of scholastic philosophy and of learned doctors whose Latin was unclassical. But it has also a deeper aspect. It is the first appearance in literature, so far as I know, of the view set forth in Rousseau's Savoyard Vicar, according to which true religion comes from the heart, not the head, and all elaborate theology is superfluous. This point of view has become increasingly common, and is now pretty generally accepted among Protestants. It is, essentially, a rejection of Hellenic intellectualism by the sentimentalism of the North.
Erasmus, on his second visit to England, remained for five years (1509–14), partly in London, partly at Cambridge. He had a considerable influence in stimulating English humanism. The education at English public schools remained, until recently, almost exactly what he would have wished: a thorough grounding in Greek and Latin, involving