Moriae Encomium; or, Laus Stultitiae; or The Praise of Folly; or, Stupid talks up Stupid

You may have guessed from the title of this blog that I am a longtime fan of Erasmus' famous declamation.

Why?  I think it captures and expresses a number of important truths, put in the guise of a lengthy jest, under multiple layers of irony, in a form common enough in its day, but rarely used in our own.

The title alone gets us started.  "Moriae" is Greek, "Stultitiae" Latin, typically translated into English as "folly," "foolishness," "stupidity."  The term "folly," perhaps party due to standard translations of Erasmus, has acquired a kind of polish; "foolishness" and "stupidity" less so.  But however turned into English, moria is not normally praiseworthy.

And then there is that "ambiguous genitive."  The title suggests that someone is praising folly.  But, read another way, some encomium, some laudatory oration, is being made by folly, folly as the subject praising.  In contemporary English we do not typically personify abstract moral and intellectual qualities--but not so among Renaissance humanists, who breathed the atmosphere of a revived paganism, and whose mental universe was full of gods and goddesses embodying abstract ideas, and for whom Folly was (or could be) a goddess.

 (And Folly is a goddess rather than a god because "moria" in Greek and "stultitia" in Latin are both feminine nouns.  Does this make Erasmus a misogynist, as some have asserted?  Not necessarily, since Sophia--Wisdom--is also feminine, and hence also a goddess.)

So we either have someone praising the unpraiseworthy vice of folly, or perhaps the goddess Folly praising something.   Or, in fact, we have both genitives working--the goddess Folly praising folly, making a speech praising...herself.   This is in fact the situation, made plain in the very first lines.

So, how do we take it when Stupid praises Stupid?  With an enormous grain of salt.

This set-up, it must be said, is first of all a protective device.  Princes and prelates had various means at their disposal to punish those who wrote against them.  Putting the whole declamation into the mouth of Folly gave Erasmus a little deniability.  "Did I offend?  Look at who's speaking!"  As Erasmus writes in his dedication to More, "pulchrum esse a Stultitia vituperari."  To be called a fool by Folly is surely great praise, yes?

And yet Erasmus is doing more than protecting himself.  He is going to play with the various meanings and connotations of foolishness that may indeed be praiseworthy, but may be beneath the notice of the wise

So first he delves into the folly of love--erotic love, romantic love, the love of children.  What is Erasmus' sternly dignified  Stoic to do when he falls in love, when he wants children?  It's not that mighty brain, Folly notes, with which one procreates children.  What foolishness love is--but how worthless human life is without it.

Plato called love a divine madness, so Erasmus veers into the subject of whether the mad and the stupid are happier than the sane and the learned, and this gives Erasmus, the life-long student, who never in his whole life had a secure position, scope to expound on the miseries of the poor, neglected scholar.

There is then a long excursion into the various professions, the warriors, the lawyers, the philosophers, the theologians, the princes, the prelates.  All are held up to merciless ridicule, again and again because their logic, their quibbling, their learned distinctions--in short, the various conventional demonstrations of their superior wisdom, show them in fact to be fools.  What have a lawyer's subtile distinctions to do with justice?  Or the unfathomable arguments of the theologians with faith, hope and love?  Or the pride, display, and arrogance of bishops and cardinals with the humility and self-giving commanded by Jesus?

But as Erasmus approaches the end, he turns to an encomium on the foolishness of faith and devotion.  Ranging through the scriptures, he repeats St. Paul's rhetoric about the foolishness of God, and the folly of the cross.   He notes the praise of the child-like and the seemingly absurd condemnation of seeking after the world's rewards.

At this point, of course, things come quickly to an end--before the declamation becomes a sermon.  We can't be too surprised.  Erasmus is, after all, a cleric himself, and a professed religious (though a runaway who hated the cloister).  He may have been the greatest scholar of his age, editing the ancient Latin classics, producing the first accessible printed Greek text of the New Testament in the Latin West, publishing  guidebooks for improving  one's style.  And he was a theologian--just not a scholastic one.  His Handbook for the Christian Soldier promoted a Christian philosophy for the devout laity, emphasizing the simplicity of the written gospels over the ceremonial devotion so characteristic of the later Middle Ages.

But then along came Luther.  The Moriae Encomium was published in 1509.  In 1520, Luther publishes his Freedom of a Christian, Address to the German Nobility, and Babylonian Captivity of the Church.  The gauntlet has been thrown down--a gauntlet Erasmus never had any intention of throwing.  His refusal to cast his lot with Luther was puzzling.  Had they not said the same thing about the fat prelates, the corrupt abbots, the hypocrites, the time-servers and the wolves in sheeps' clothing?  Yes, indeed.  But it is part of Erasmus' foolishness to see that such folly is not going to end when new prelates are installed.   "I have never entered their churches, but I have seen them return from hearing the sermon, as if inspired by an evil spirit, the faces of all showing a curious wrath and ferocity."

So the time of jesting came to an end.  Erasmus was held in such esteem during his lifetime he was offered a cardinal's hat (he turned it down).  Shortly after his death his Moriae Encomium was put on the newly-created Index of Forbidden Books.  Europe was moving into a century of religious war.

It is ironic, perhaps, that the doctrine of original sin, so emphatic in Protestant theology in Luther's Bondage of the Will and Calvin's notion of total depravity, also grounds Erasmus' broad tolerance of human folly.  Individuals can improve, but foolishness is part of the human condition, and attempts to wrench it out or tamp it down are doomed to failure.  We can't eradicate stupidity, but we can laugh at it.  That may be the best we can do.

It some ways Erasmus' exultation of folly mirrors the nineteenth century's Romantic Rebellion against the the eighteenth century's Age of Reason and Scientific Revolution.  Reason and science are tremendous, but they cannot be the whole of human life.  Neither, of course, can folly, even in its more benign forms.  God knows we live in a time when ignorance is flaunted, science derided, and the great freedoms won in the Age of Reason under siege.  Stupidity simple and unadulterated produces hatred as well as love, tears as well as laughter.

But, ultimately, the folly that Erasmus truly praises is like the wisdom of Socrates.  The Delphic oracle proclaimed Socrates the wisest of all men.  Unconvinced, Socrates spent the rest of his life seeking out those thought wise, and questioning them, and finding their reputations overblown (and making quite a few powerful enemies in the process).  He concluded that he was the wisest man because he knew nothing, and knew he knew nothing, whereas those reputedly wise also knew nothing, but did not know they knew nothing.  It was an ignorance won after study and reflection.

At the risk of multiplying examples, consider Newton, one of the few incomparable geniuses of human history, comparing himself to a child picking up seashells on the beach, with the great undiscovered ocean of truth before him.  The more we know, the more we know that we don't know.

So the irony of Erasmus is never cynicism, or despair.  There is a claimed worldly wisdom in becoming corrupt to fit into a corrupt world, a corrupt church.  Erasmus suggests that the better way is the foolishness of love, friendship, faith, devotion and the pursuit of truth.  The world is what it is, but we ourselves remain free to choose the good, the true and the beautiful, with God's help.  It is for this vision of Christian humanism that I hold in such esteem the runaway monk of Rotterdam.

A pretty good definition

"Fascism might be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence, and without ethical or legal restraints, goals of internal cleansing and external expansion."




--Robert Paxton, 2009

The War between Men and Women

The battle of the sexes has gained an unprecedented prominence in our political and social life.  According to convention we had a sexual revolution a few decades back, and in some respects this last election sealed the revolution's victory, with one candidate representing the Betty Friedan wing, the other the Hugh Heffner wing.

Be that as it may, the sometimes tumultuous relationship between men and women is one which our literature has long noted, and which has become, in the last century, a central concern of our politics.  But I think it not inappropriate to observe initially that the relationship between the sexes, and the attempt to address some of the historic injustices it has entailed, stands in a category of its own.  That's the point that Chesterton makes here, in his inimitable fashion:

Alone among all such institutions [the family]begins with a spontaneous attraction; and may be said strictly and not sentimentally to be founded on love instead of fear.  The attempt to compare it with coercive institutions complicating later history has led to infinite illogicality in later times.  It is as unique as it is universal.  There is nothing in any other social relations in any way parallel to the mutual attraction of the sexes.  By missing this simple point, the modern world has fallen into a hundred follies....A Prussian does not feel from the first that he can only be happy if he spends his days and nights with a Pole.  An Englishman does not think his house empty and cheerless unless it happens to contain an Irishman....All the other revolts against all the other relations are reasonable and even inevitable, because those relations are originally only founded upon force or self interest.  Force can abolish what force can establish; self-interest can terminate a contract when self-interest has dictated the contract.  But the love of man and woman is not an institution that can be abolished, or a contract that can be terminated.  It is something older than all institutions or contracts, and something that is certain to outlast them all.  

This kind of observation has not gone unchallenged.  In fact, the whole notion of marital love seems sometimes up for grabs.  It is a commonplace, almost a contemporary dogma, that "marriage for love" is a new phenomenon.  It's a point too broad for arguing here.  At best I can point to what seem to be significant counter-examples.  Shakespeare's comedies.   Chaucer's Knight's Tale.  Giovanni Pontano's Renaissance cycle on married love.  And, quite apart from literary examples, the nagging feeling that surely human nature doesn't so radically change so quickly.  Marital love is a complex emotion, compounded of sexual attraction, affection, friendship, and faithfulness, raised to a higher key (but also attended with new difficulties) by its ordinary consequence, the arrival of children.

The oft-repeated claim that our ancestors married for "dynastic" reasons, or for economic advantage, isn't so much false as incomplete.  Of course material considerations entered into when and to whom people married.  It often did in the past, and it often does now.  Not everyone married for love then, nor does everyone now.  And of course, ultimately, I don't know if it's possible to say why anyone marries, what motivations predominate, what interests and desires and expectations may be primary, whether in ancient China, or medieval Provence, or contemporary America.  But the witness of literature--even if one can't parse out what factors may have, on average, moved our ancestors--does certainly testify to the reality and strength (if not necessarily to the ubiquity) of marital love.

Not that it's always easy.  The Navajos have a legend that, long ago (I think in a prior world), men and women quarreled so badly that they separated, and lived entirely apart from one another.  The results were not pretty, and one result was the birth of the monsters.  The slaying of those monsters--after the men and women made up--forms, if I recall correctly, the next round of stories, and the plain implication was that, however difficult men and women find life together, that is immeasurably better than life apart.

Never Let Me Go

It's always a question whether a novel has been long enough in the world that its "twists" should be discussed without some sort of spoiler alert.  Never Let Me Go is probably a novel best experienced with no expectations.  But I didn't read it that way, and the gradual "reveal" of the novel's fundamental premise isn't, ultimately, what the novel is about.  So I suppose I should say, "spoiler alert" for those who wish to read the novel (or see the movie) without preconceptions.

I've never read Ishiguro before this, except through the indirect medium of the film treatment of his Remains of the Day.   I think you would call Never Let Me Go dystopian fiction.  It takes place in the immediate past of the 1970's through 1990's, but in an alternative past, which began deviating from our own in the 1950's.  In the world of the novel a number of medical breakthroughs after the second world war, centered on organ transplanting, led to a dramatic decrease in human mortality, and a considerable lengthening of human life-spans.  Hand in hand is a precocious advance in cloning technology.

But the novel begins with with no references to these changes, or any clues, for quite some time, that it takes place in any but our own world.  It begins as our narrator, Kathy, looks back on her childhood at a boarding school, Hailsham, and her story revolves around her best friends  Ruth and Tommy, following conventional lines of friendship and jealousy among children and teenagers.

But fairly early we also begin to glean the meaning of Hailsham--it is a school for clones, who are given a happy and healthy childhood before, in their twenties, beginning their "donations"--the removal of increasingly vital bodily organs, so that the second or third donation is invariably fatal.

The details of this horrifying premise are only slowly sketched out, to the reader as to the characters.  But, unlike the reader, the characters are brought up to accept their fate as normal.  And quite differently from most dystopian novels, where the protagonists rebel and resist when they realize the true extent of their predicament, there is little more than sadness and regret among these young people as they approach the predestined ends of their lives.

It is this acceptance of their fate, and the acquiescence of those shamefacedly but unhesitatingly shepherding them toward it, that gives the novel, for me, its bitter bite.  Ruth in particular expresses anguish, in one scene only, at first seeing herself as something to be used and thrown away, and is shocked and dismayed to find out that the outer world has occasionally taken a mild interest in whether the clones might possess souls.  Much of the dramatic tension of the novel turns on the hope that those who show evidence of a soul might earn a temporary reprieve-- a year or two of adult happiness.

There is one convention that Never Let Me Go does share with other dystopian novels--the final scene where the protagonists ask their questions and receive explanations.  Here, almost at the end, the young people learn from their now-retired headmistress something of the ambivalence of the outside world toward them, of the debates about--not the morality of what is done to them--but how they should be treated, what dignity should be accorded them, over their short lives.

But one consideration trumps all:  "How can you ask a world that has come to regard cancer as curable, how can you ask such a world to put away that cure, to go back to the dark days?"  This is how what, to the reader, is plain murder, the preying on the young for the gratification of the old, becomes unquestionable.  The headmistress was one of the good people, founding Hailsham as an experiment in giving the clones happy lives, meaningful human lives--an experiment apparently in the process of being rejected.    But even for these reformers, these tender good people, the students must, regrettably, give up their lives.

And that, to me, is the greatest horror of the novel, that apparent plasticity of right and wrong, the common acceptance of the once-unthinkable when some great benefit beckons, the ease with which a world murdering its young can't bear to return to what it thinks of as "the dark days," and the inability, ultimately, to distinguish the light from the dark.  

These themes underly a quiet, subtle and thought-provoking story, which I heartily recommend.

I should add that the novel has been made into a movie, a pretty good one, but one, typically, falling far short of the book.  The movie, not surprisingly, emphasizes the love triangle.  That's there in the novel, but with a really more interesting "friendship triangle" going the conventional way only toward the end.  But I also found in the movie's last scene a sort of pulling back, a substitute gee-don't-we-all-really-live-brief-lives meditation that unforgivably blunted the hard questions of the novel.

Notre Dame de Paris

I have just recently finished Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris.  Its title of course somehow got into English as The Hunchback of Notre Dame, which is curious because, as I think I noted in an earlier post, Quasimodo, the poor deaf bell-ringer, though an important figure in the novel, is by no means the center of it.  Surely that role has to be assigned to Esmeralda.

It is in many ways a mess of a book--lurid, garish, twisted and, in the end, wrenchingly cruel.  When I first read it, in English translation, I found it awkward and melodramatic, almost embarrassing in its studious and unrelenting pursuit of the picturesque and grotesque.  In French--perhaps because of my elementary grasp of the nuances of the language--I found it touching, and often moving (though I never caught myself on the verge of weeping, as I did at the conclusion of Les Miserables).

As I indicated above, there is less a protagonist that a central figure, Esmeralda.  She is the sun around whom the other characters revolve:  Pierre Gringoire, the poor student-poet with whom she makes a nominal marriage in the Cour des Miracles, to prevent his being hanged by the Truands; Claude Frollo, archdeacon and alchemist, seized by a relentless and murderous lust; Phoebus de Chateaupers, the callous young captain whose attempted seduction leads to her death sentence, and of course Quasimodo, to whom she shows mercy on the pillory, awakening a tender (and ultimately futile) care and a painful deepening of his isolation.

This is a narrative form that is echoed in other well-known French works.  In Madame Bovary--in approach as different a novel from Notre Dame as imaginable--there is again a central female figure, Emma, married to the hapless Charles, seduced by Rudolphe and Leon, and financially ruined by Monsieur Lheureau  Or in film, in Carne's great Les enfants du paradise, the courtesan Garance is pursued by the mime Baptiste, the actor Frederick, the thief Pierre, and the aristocrat, Edouard, compte de Montray.  And at this risk of dragging this out even Bertrand Blier's mid-seventies farce, Preparez vos Mouchoirs comes to mind, the baffling melancholy of the beautiful Solange leading to increasingly desperate measures from her husband Raoul, his newly acquired Mozart-obsessed pal Stephane, and their unnamed neighbor, ending in the unforeseen machinations of a Mozart-like pre-teen prodigy, and seducer.

In all these stories the female central character is, to various extents, passive, arguably reflecting common stereotypes of the feminine.  Hugo in Notre Dame is plainly aware of this essential passivity, but also extends it to all his characters, through a motif announced in the novel's preface:  "Il y a quelque anneés qu'en visitant, ou, pour mieux dire, en furetant Notre-Dame, l'auteur de ce livre trouva, dans un recoin obscure de l'un des tours, ce mot gravé á la main sur le mur:  ΆNANΓKH.”

In the Greek word for fate, necessity, compulsion, bondage, fatality, Hugo seems to anticipate Burkhardt's assertion that only after the Renaissance did the "individual," in the modern sense, appear.  Hugo characters here are more "types" than individuals, some would say stereotypes, the puppets of a medieval mystery imagined by a humane progressive of the nineteenth century.  In contrast to the theme of redemption in Les Miserables, these characters seem doomed from the start.  

And yet they continue to live, even if in odd forms.  Film has loved this story, and though I've seen bits and pieces of the classic treatments starring Lon Chaney and Charles Laughton, I've never been able to sit through either film in its entirety.  Neither have I seen the cartoon musical put out by Disney.  But, having read a plot summary, I'm afraid a lot of kids are going to be in for a shock when they decide to go on to the novel.

NOTE ON THE PICTURES:  The exotic world of Notre Dame de Paris has always attracted illustrators.  The edition I just completed was published by Collection Metamorphose and extensively illustrated by Benjamin Lacombe.  I have already used a few of his images in this blog, a shot of the cover at the end of the post for October 14, 2015, another on July 7, 2017.The image at the top of this post is also from Lacombe.  Very different, but equally arresting, is the set of illustrations made by Bernard Lamotte, taken here from an English translation published by the Easton Press.  Three of those illustrations are reproduced below.

From Peter Ackroyd's Life of Thomas More

"Some years later [Thomas More] advised Thomas Cromwell that, in serving the king, 'ever tell him what he ought to do but never what he is able to do...For if a lion knew his own strength, hard were it for any man to rule him.'  This is similar to the recommendation given by Thomas Wolsey to another royal servant:  'I warn you to be well advised and assured what matter ye put in his head; for ye shall never pull it out again.'  Wolsey, too, dwells upon the cupidity of the king--'rather than he will either miss or want any part of his will or appetite, he will put the loss of one half of his realm in danger.'  Both men spoke of a man whom they knew intimately, but perhaps even they could not have guessed the carnage and destruction which would follow their own deaths."

Our "Muslim Problem," Part Three: Islam as a Civilization

Christianity is not Christendom.  Christianity is a religion.  Christendom is the civilization that Christianity formed.

Every religion has some effect on its social and political environment.  Christianity and Islam are religions that obviously have had something more than "some effect."  The Islamic religion has indisputably formed a large, distinctive "world-historical" civilization.  For some thirteen hundred years it has held sway over a great swath of the globe, beginning in northern and western Africa, through the "hot deserts" of the Near East and Arabia, up across the Iranian plateau, into northwest India and through the "cold deserts" of  Central Asia and China.  And it would tempting to call it the "Civilization of the Great Deserts" were it not for the fact that the largest single Islamic nation is Indonesia, an equatorial island archipelago between the Pacific and Indian Oceans.

Just as Latin and its progeny shaped Western Christendom, the Arabic language has been a unifying factor, sometimes displacing older languages (such as Coptic in Egypt), but more often supplementing the native languages of Berbers and Persians and Turks.

It some sense I've been a little paralyzed by the apparent hubris of summarizing Islamic civilization in a blog post.  I have little real familiarity, other than some grasp of the history--much of it through interaction, positive and negative, with Christendom--and odds and ends that have become popular in the West--I'm thinking of the Arabian Nights--and some familiarity with the impressive philosophical tradition that both bridged the gap between Aristotle and Aquinas and raised in a unique way how we came to think about existence and essence, necessity and contingency, eternity and temporality.  No decent account of Western philosophy would be complete without the names of Al-Farabi, Avicenna, Al-Ghazali and Averroes.

In addition to the high culture of Islamic civilization--literature, philosophy, theology, mathematics, medicine, architecture--there is the complex inheritance of the cultures that adopted Islam--the desert-dwelling Beduin of Arabia, the cosmopolitan Arabs of Egypt, the Persian successors of the Achaemenids and Parthians, the various Turkish sultanates all along the Silk Road.  There are also the distinctive political cultures of the great dynasties and califates--the Umayyads of Damascus, the Abbasids of Baghdad, the Fatimids of Cairo, the Almohads and Almoravids of Al-Andalus, the Mughals of Delhi, and the empire of the Ottoman Turks, who eventually appropriated to themselves the riches of Byzantium.

Because these were Islamicized cultures and polities, we associate their laws and folkways, their virtues and vices, their characteristic successes and failures with Islam.  The prohibition against images has been very widespread in Islam, for instance.  But I don't think it's in the Qur'an.  And it obviously hasn't been universal (see image above).  But all Islamic governments issue passports with photos.  Most allow televisions and movies.  For all our ideas about what Islamic civilizations require, they change and make allowances like almost all polities.

Now there's no question that Islam has more often than not been bound up in what we would consider secular governance.  And, from my perspective as a Christian, Christianity benefited from existing its first three centuries as, not only a non-governing faith, but an outlaw faith.  Admittedly, during the next fifteen hundred years the Christian faith became tightly interwound with secular governance, but there was always a sense of separate roles, and ecclesiastical independence, and the decoupling of such long-standing entanglement over the last couple of centuries suggests to me that the same thing can happen with Islam.  It's not a necessary development; I don't believe that hardly anything human must necessarily happen.  But the mere existence of Islam outside of the Islamic world means that an Islamic government isn't a necessary condition to being a good Muslim.

So, is there a reason to fear that Muslims, coming from countries governed by pervasively Islamic governments (by profession, at least), cannot be good Americans, and live under a religiously-neutral government?  I don't think so.  Will Muslims bring new and different perspectives to our social life?  Of course.  Would I judge all of them to be positive?  Certainly not.  But might they contribute as well to the improvement of American life from their unique experience, as so many immigrant groups have done?  Undoubtedly.

Pluggin' On

I am happy to note the publication of a new book by Dr. S. J. Allen, also known to me as "my little sister":  An Introduction to the Crusades.  The book appears designed for undergraduate courses in medieval history, and can be read alone or in tandam with a sourcebook on the crusades edited by the said Dr. Allen and her distinguished colleague Emily Amt, as previously plugged on this blog in October 2014.

My first real introduction to the crusades was reading Stephen Runciman's three-volume history a couple of decades ago ("The First Crusade," "The Kingdom of Jerusalem," and "The Kingdom of Acre"), a beautifully written, clearly sourced and straightforward history published in the 1950's.  It can now fairly be called a classic, but it is also a daunting read, and my sense, when reading it, was of being largely overwhelmed by the flood of unfamiliar names in a distant century among foreign mores, telling a detailed story of murky motivations, multiple military campaigns over generations, repeated clashes of class and culture--peasant and noble, Frank and German, Arab and Persian and Turk and Mongol--in what looked at first like a lengthy narrative but which, in retrospect, was a lot of event in a small space.

Dr. Allen's Introduction is, more modestly, a true introduction.  Its first sixty pages contain the briefest summary of the events of the crusades, followed by chapters on the logistics of going on crusade (and living through one), the details of medieval combat, a case study on the negotiations between Richard and Saladin regarding Jerusalem in the Third Crusade, and a final section on how the crusades have been understood and rhetorically used, from the Reformation to the present.

There are maps, the occasional half-page topical "box" (on, for example, Prester John, or the Children's Crusade), and, toward the end, a 6-page chronology, an 11-page glossary, and an 8-page "Who's who."  It's the kind of thing that I wish I had had handy when reading the "God's Plenty" of Runciman.

The Introduction can be read alone, or, as noted above, in tandem with the 400-odd pages of the Reader, a good way of putting contemporary and eye-witness flesh on the bones of the Introduction.  And for those whose appetite is then whetted for one of the most controversial, most colorful, and most consequential encounters in our history, it provides a good solid foundation for further reading.

I highly recommend it.  But, admittedly, I am not without my bias in favor of the distinguished author.