Erasmus: In Praise of Folly (Excerpt 1/5)
“Introduction in Praise of Erasmus” by Horace J. Bridges (Excerpt One)
“Introduction in Praise of Erasmus” (Parts I - II of X)
I
THE FAMILIAR PHRASE about the history of the world being the judgment of the world is a deadly and detestable heresy, if it is taken to mean either that whatever has happened was bound to happen, or that the mere fact of a cause having been lost is proof that it was never worth winning or dying for. I do not deny that the German apothegm may be patient of another and a truer construction. The objection to it is precisely its lack of precision, its Delphic vagueness. A saying that may mean anything actually means nothing. Many causes have failed that ought to have succeeded, and the world may have to retrace its steps over more than one travelled road. Where this is impossible, it may still be our duty to recognize that past errors have made present conditions poorer than they need have been, and subjected the nations to suffering and loss that could have been escaped.
These reflections should stand at the head of any appreciation of the glorious Erasmus of Rotterdam, since his life was one long losing fight, one endless victory in defeat and defeat in victory, for the greatest of all lost causes. This was a cause better worth losing than any other in that age was worth winning. It was a cause that lifted its elect minority of advocates above the smoke and stir of their time, and united them with the far past and the distant future. It was the attempt to preserve a principle and an ideal indispensable to the perfection of humanity,—— a principle and an ideal, the obliteration of which in men’s consciousness was the major cause of the confusions, wars, and travails of the ensuing four centuries; a principle and an ideal to which mankind is painfully endeavoring to struggle back, in the assurance, hammered by stern experience Into the subconsciousness of the race, that only by building on that principle and orienting society towards that ideal can the possible efflorescence of the genius of man be attained, amid the secure peace which is at once its indispensable condition and its crowning glory.
The principle was that of the moral and spiritual unity of the human race: that we truly are one body of many members, the very diversity of which, alike in structure and in function, is but the out-working of a single life-energy, and instrumental to the fulfilment of a common purpose, the attainment of a common destiny. The more the members of the one body (individuals, families, vocations, nations) are individuated and differentiated, the greater becomes the need of reciprocal interaction between them, and the more imperative the creation or maintenance of a central organ to mediate their interaction and remind them of their interdependence and their common destiny.
Such was the principle. And the ideal was the reformation, without destruction, of that great international organization which, first as the Roman Empire and later as the Roman Church, had been for Europe the source, reservoir, and soul of civilization. The source, — because it had put law, order, union and communion in the place of barbarous anarchy and disunion; the reservoir, — because in and through it had been conserved and ‘treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life’ the spiritual streams flowing from those twin headwaters of our civilization, Palestine and Greece; and the soul, — because, bolding within it these principles of life, it was able, even amid the wreck of its own imperial structure, to avert their extinction, to preserve their vitality, to sustain them latent yet living through the long night of sleeping generations and unconscious centuries; — to be thus truly
the prophetic soul
Of the wide world dreaming on things to come;
— and, in Humanity’s favoring hour, to bring them forth from its treasury and make them the nurturing substance of a new, and potentially a nobler, civilization.
II
The task, then, was to preserve this indispensable element at the heart of the Roman Church — namely, its unfulfilled prophecy of Catholicism (for more than an unfulfilled prophecy, lamentably remote from fulfilment, it never has been, and is now least of all). And the first thing necessary to this end was to attack the actual Church. For the Church was a huge organization and concentration of power, in hands that had long since become irresponsible; and power irresponsible is but a periphrase for power abused.
Functions neglected; disciplinary rules ignored and forgotten; a vast governmental system of extortion substituted for what should have been a system of super-national service and succor, insolent and domineering ignorance usurping foundations intended for labor and social service; unspeakable and indescribable vice and sottishness in the very refuges built for virtue and idealism; Rome itself a sink of iniquity, graft, robbery, assassination and all pollution; Borgia Popes; a Tammanyized cardinalate and episcopate; all branches of the clerisy debauched, simonized, profligate; the whole organization, in each land and internationally, rotten with politics in the worst American sense of that degraded word; a clergy Immune from secular justice, and responsible only to corrupt ecclesiastical courts that always favored them, no matter what their crimes; and a laity condemned — nay, compelled — to accept and practice a vast system of fetishistic superstition in place of the predominantly ethical religion of Jesus and St. Paul: such was the frightful parody of a Catholic Church on which the eyes of Erasmus gazed as he wandered over Europe at the end of the XV and the beginning of the XVI century.
And let the reader note well, that this account of the unreformed Church is no invention of its enemies, but the indisputable testimony of faithful sons, who hoped against hope that its universal corruption might be cleansed and purged away, so that its essential values might be released and made of service to the new Europe, which was coming to birth in the form of a galaxy of nations. Every count in the indictment can be proved to the hilt out of the writings of Erasmus and countless other loyal Catholics before his time, without summoning a single Protestant witness to the bar.
Attack, therefore, was indispensable. The Church, in Tyrrell’s striking phrase, was ‘in the grip of the hawk’, and when has the hawk — especially where his name is Legion — been dislodged from the quarry without a struggle? But there are two modes of attack: one for renovation and one for destruction. The difference between the prophet and the iconoclast, it has been well said, is that the prophet always knows the value of what he attacks. His onslaught is made for the sake of that value. His quarrel with the institution is not that it exists, and cumbers the ground he wants to clear, but that it has failed of its purpose, forgotten its function, and become something disastrously unlike its prime design and wholly unadapted to its purposed end. His attack is a challenge to it to be itself, to remember why it exists, to perform the work for which it was created.
Erasmus, and the little band of reformers who stood with him, were prophets in this as well as in other senses. In that day — before the rivalry of Protestantism had led to the sharpening of old dogmatic definitions and the forging of new ones; before Trent, before Jesuitism, before Jansenism and Gallicanism, before the Papal war of the XIX century against democracy, liberalism, and modern culture, which culminated in the probably irretrievable blunder of the Infallibility Decree of 1870 — it was possible for a Catholic Christian to be, over large fields of speculation and action, a free thinker, and a critic and reformer of his Church. Erasmus could excoriate the rascally system of the monks, and denounce the abominations connected with the sale of indulgences, with a vigour unsurpassed by Luther himself. He could do this in books dedicated to liberal Popes and princes of the Church. He could bring to the attack all the incomparable resources of his learning, wit, irony, and descriptive skill. He could ridicule pilgrimages, fraudulent relics, the interpretation of natural events as miracles, the grotesque ignorance of secular and regular clergy alike, with as much freedom as any modern rationalist, and with far more point and effect. For he could do all this without intending schism, and without being misunderstood as wishing not the reformation but the destruction of the Church. In short, he could attack the Church like a modern patriot attacking corruption and misgovernment in his own country, under no suspicion of being a foreigner or a traitor, or of not loving that which he desires to amend, And every reader of his ‘Colloquies,’ his ‘Adages,’ his ‘Notes on the New Testament,’ and his ‘Praise of Folly,’ — to say nothing of his countless wonderful Letters, — knows with what inimitable wit and skill, with what unrivalled penetration and success, he did it.
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We hope you have enjoyed reading this excerpt from In Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus, translated by White Kennett, edited with an Introduction by Horace J. Bridges, illustrated by Anthony Angarola, Hans Holbein, Gene Markey, and Paul L. McPharlin, with revisions and corrections by Ether Editors, published in 2023 by Ether Editions. In Praise of Folly is available from Major Online Retailers.