is not at all consonant with wisdom. If you want evidence of this, consider first that children, old men, women, and idiots delight in ceremonies and religious rites beyond all others, and are always nearest the altars, impelled thereto by a strong impulse of nature. Next you observe that the earliest founders of our religion were men who had embraced a wonderful simplicity of life, and that they were most strenuous enemies of learning. Finally, no fools seem more foolish than all those whom the ardor of Christian piety has once seized hold of: they pour out their wealth, they pay no notice to affronts, they suffer themselves to be deceived, and make no distinction between friend and foe, they shun pleasures, but grow fat on hunger, watchings, griefs, toil and contumely; they feel a disgust for the things of the world, and long only for death; in short, they seem to have become benumbed as regards all common sense, just as if their soul dwelt elsewhere than in their body. What else indeed is this but madness? So we ought not to think it strange that the Apostles were doomed to be drunk with new wine, or that Paul was considered mad by Festus. . . . And since I have said thus much I will say more, namely, that the heaven of Christians which they seek to win with so much toil, is nothing else than a certain kind of madness and foolishness."

1. Ibid., chaps. lix-lxvi.

CHAPTER XXII

ENGLAND: EFFECTS OF THE "MORIAE ENCOMIVM"

Fearing that our readers might have begun to deem us both mad and foolish had we transferred any more of this inconsequent and silly, not to say blasphemous, work to our pages, we have stopped at that point. These words seem strange when used in depreciation of any work of Erasmus; but a close perusal of the extracts here presented will convince anyone that Erasmus was not normal when he wrote it, and still less so when he published it. Remembering his caution in the preface of the book when addressing it to Sir Thomas More, that "perchance there will be fault-finders who will misrepresent the things I have written," we have deemed it only just to him to quote his exact words in the extracts given above. The greater part of the work was delicious raillery of men and things, and was written in the true satiric vein of Lucian, and without the truculence which so often spoils Juvenal. But when he comes to the monks, the Cardinals, and the Popes, the delicate shafts of his wit disappear, and we find instead only barbed weapons tipped with gall. The satiric weapon is a dangerous one, not only to the person satirized, but more especially to its wielder, inasmuch as the personal element may enter in and so distort his judgment. Another fact in connection with satirists is that a great many of them were saddened, disillusioned, and disappointed men, who railed at a world which they thought had injured them, or which had not appreciated them to their own satisfaction. Some of them were physically deformed, and others mentally unbalanced. For instance, Pope was a hunchback and sickly; Swift was mentally defective from his earliest years and ended his brilliant but erratic career by insanity, his end proving that his entire life had been abnormal; Byron was lame and a degenerate; Beranger's satire was rendered caustic by successive fines and imprisonment; Burns revenged himself on Scotch fanaticism, which bore too hard on his weakness for toddy, by consigning "Holy Willie" to eternal ridicule. William Cowper wrote some good satiric passages, but we know now that he was insane for the greater part of his days. Rabelais cannot be placed in this category, for we know nothing about when he was born, or how he died. George Saintsbury, in his admirable sketch of Rabelais which he wrote for the Encyclopedia Britannica, admits that this satirist had no plan or scope that is discernible to any reader, that he is outside of the limits of ordinary classification, and that his meaning often defies analysis. Could his brilliant inexplicability be the result of emotional insanity? We refer this question to the psychiatrists. Voltaire was one of a pair of puny twins, the other dying at birth, from which circumstances we need no

longer wonder that he was always physically weak and morally unstable, as he made very evident by hiring himself as a spy to Dubois. Pascal was precocious as a child, dyspeptic in young manhood, and finally a paralytic, the autopsy made after his death showing a serious lesion of the brain. Fielding wrote his satiric pages while suffering from the gout, and the disappointments of his life are common knowledge. Machiavelli, falling from wealth and position with the overthrow of the Florentine Republic, wrote satire when not engaged with his boon companions or occupied with his amours, according to J. Addington Symonds. Not to lengthen out this list unduly, Erasmus tells us the archsatirist Ulric von Hutten was of a feeble constitution and delicate all his days, which did not prevent him from acquiring a loathsome disease, the result of his immorality. We have purposely omitted the three greatest satirists of all time, Aristophanes, Lucian, and Juvenal, for the sufficient reason that we know practically nothing about their private lives. As for Horace, all we know about him supports our theory. He was not morally brave and, when he did use satire, he took care that he did not offend the great, but singled out those only who would not, or could not, strike back. So we feel we are justified in saying that in many, perhaps in most instances, the satiric impulse springs from infirmity of mind or body, or both, engendering a bitterness of spirit which beclouds the judgment and destroys all sense of fairness in examining the actions or sayings of others.

Now, after speaking of satire and satirists in general, let us return to Erasmus and his Praise of Folly. After holding up to his readers' ridicule women, gluttons, backbiters, cuckolds, the vanity of actors, musicians, orators, artists, and doctors, of old men and old women, lawyers, savants, authors, and a multitude of others, he comes at last to the superstitious who believe in portents, spectres, imps, and ghosts. Belief in such things was common in the Middle Ages, and the castigation that it receives at the hands of Erasmus is well merited. But it is somewhat droll to see Erasmus commenting on such superstitions, when we know what stress he laid on good luck and bad luck, and his belief that he was born to be unlucky and that it could not be otherwise with him. He reproves those who gaze on the image of St. Christopher, or invoke the intercession of St. Barbara, expecting their prayer to be heard, but he forgets the while that, although he had the services of Dr. Cop in one of his own serious illnesses, he did not neglect to implore the help of St. Genevieve in addition.

But it is when he comes to the theologians that he carefully examines his sword and tests its edge, for he knows that here no false blow must be struck, not a single thrust miss its aim. And properly so, since we have already learned that he was no skilled theologian himself, as he intimated to Colet during his first visit to England. And we see no reason to question the accuracy of the surmise we made on a previous page, that one of the reasons why he did not seek a degree in theology at the University of Paris was his lack of confidence in his own theological acquirements. However, the many great things that he was may readily excuse this one thing that he was not, had he been content to

refrain from censuring the defects of those who were undoubtedly his superiors in this respect. When he proceeds to ridicule unmercifully their notions, relations, quiddities, and tenuities, their conclusions, corollaries, and other fine-spun distinctions, he does not lose our sympathy, for some of them most surely argued from the flimsiest premises and drew therefrom the most tenuous conclusions. We have no doubt that the question about how many angels might stand on the point of a needle was of interest to some of these theologasters, as he loved to call them; and that God could not cause two and two to make five may have had its fascinations for others as an arguable thesis is not an improbable supposition. But that the Schoolmen as a class spent their time in arguments of this sort is no longer entertained as a possibility by modern scholars. We recognize that their aim was something far higher than this, and that as a class they are entitled to our respect for the uprightness and candor of their motives. What those motives were, Landerer, a Protestant writer, tells us very succintly:

The problem which the Schoolmen undertook to solve was simply to give each dogma a rational substructure sufficient to elevate it from a mere matter of faith to a matter of science, and to form the whole mass of dogmas into a consistent and harmonious totality, a system. They were not patres: they were only doctores

1 Professor E. K. Rand of Harvard University, speaking before the Mediaeval Academy of America recently, gave utterance to a few remarks on this very topic which are as true as they are appropriate here:

Even mediaeval theology has its plastic elements. Not that the goal was shifting the conviction of the existence of ultimate theological truth made the quest of the seeker real and inspired his great attempt. But the ultimate and revealed truth of theology was one thing, and the human solution of the seeker another. His quest was permanent and not static. One gets curious notions sometimes about the philosophy of the Schoolmen, particularly from those who have not read a tractatulus of their writings, and who characterize the main object of scholastic thought as the calculation of the number of angels who could stand on the point of a pin-a quæstio subtilis, I venture to think. that can nowhere be found in the works of St. Thomas Aquinas or his confederates. Freedom of thought was not repressed in the Middle Ages. It was fostered by the allegorical method of interpretation, whereby the philosopher could connect his private theory with established truth. This, too, is what I mean,' he would say in the phrase of Mephistopheles, nur mit ein Bischen anderen Worten.' He was aware, likewise, that his instrument was human and fallible. He did not desire to be heretical, any more than a scholar to-day desires to be unscientific. He did his best, in his own way, with difficult problems, and if the result was not approved by authority, he retracted his solution or took his medicine, sometimes with a very wry cast of countenance.

"Abelard in the twelfth century, did not relish his perfectly proper condemnation at the Council of Soissons. In all of his theological writings, Abelard had been utterly free. He wrote a little work entitled Sic et Non-Yes and No'in which he had collected the very divergent views of the Fathers on a number of theological topics. In the charming preface to that work, he recalls that the boy Christ had not laid down the law to the doctors in the temple, but had asked and answered questions. 'Ask and it shall be given you; seek and ye shall find; knock and it shall be opened unto you.' There is a growth of mediaeval thinking; read DeWulf. There are diverse schools of mighty thinkers, from John the Scot to St. Thomas Aquinas."

et magistri. The very name "scholasticism" shows the character of the movement."

2

Whether they succeeded or failed need not delay us here: it is sufficient to know that they had a lofty motive and were deeply penetrated with the desire to further God's kingdom on earth. Medicine has had its charlatans in all ages, and Law its swindlers; it would be too much to expect that, human nature being what it is, Theology could escape entirely unsmirched. Now we do not utterly condemn either Law or Medicine on that account, nor shall we uphold Erasmus in his attempt to misrepresent a class such as the theologians simply because some of them spent their time splitting hairs. But after saying about them the most bitter things that he can think of at the moment, he provides himself with his usual loophole of escape from an untenable position by stating that "among these divines themselves there are some of the more learned who are offended to the soul by these frivolous subtleties . . . and consider it the height of impropriety to speak with an unclean mouth of things that are so sacred...

And yet Erasmus, who speaks thus of others, seems not to be aware of his own blasphemy in calling Christ a fool, and we hope we may be pardoned for repeating his sacrilegious words: "What else do all these examples proclaim to us, other than that all men are fools, even the godly, yea, even Christ himself, when He came to repair the folly of mortals, although He was the wisdom of the Father?"

And lest we may mistake his meaning, he goes on to speak of the foolishness of the crucifixion, and alludes to the stupid and ignorant Apostles, whom he represents the Savior as admonishing against the effects of wisdom. The whole episode is too blasphemous to bear repetition or comment, so we will pass on with the remark with which we opened this digression, and say again in all charity that Erasmus was not normal when he wrote it. Seneca somewhere says, "There has never been any great genius without a spice of madness"; and even before his day Aristotle had made the same observation.

A good many of the modern biographers of Erasmus, though we regret that Seebohm is not among them, have commented unfavorably on this phase of the Praise of Folly. Drummond says:

The declamation concludes in truly orthodox style with a copious citation of Scriptural texts in commendation of Folly; and the free way in which Scripture is handled, and even the most sacred names introduced, while it certainly shows great want of taste, if not even of reverence, might reasonably have given offense to persons who were neither very superstitious nor very bigoted. The age, however, was one in which there was hardly any reverence and a great deal 2 Schaff-Herzog, Encyclopaedia of Religious Knowledge. Vol. III. Art. "Scholastic Theology."

3

Moria ecomium, chap. liii.

"Haec quid aliud clamitant, nisi mortaleis omneis stultos esse, etiam pios, ipsum quoque Christum? quo stultitiæ subueniret, cum esset sapientia Patris? (Moriæ encomium, chap. lxv.)