In Praise of Folly

willingly acknowledge the kindnesses I have done them, yet even these too stand fast bound to me

upon no ordinary accounts; while being happy in their own opinion, and as if they dwelt in the third

heaven, they look with haughtiness on all others as poor creeping things and could almost find in

their hearts to pity them; while hedged in with so many magisterial definitions, conclusions,

corollaries, propositions explicit and implicit, they abound with so many starting-holes that Vulcan’s

net cannot hold them so fast, but they’ll slip through with their distinctions, with which they so

easily cut all knots asunder that a hatchet could not have done it better, so plentiful are they in their

new-found words and prodigious terms. Besides, while they explicate the most hidden mysteries

according to their own fancy—as how the world was first made; how original sin is derived to

posterity; in what manner, how much room, and how long time Christ lay in the Virgin’s womb;

how accidents subsist in the Eucharist without their subject.

But these are common and threadbare; these are worthy of our great and illuminated divines, as

the world calls them! At these, if ever they fall athwart them, they prick up—as whether there was

any instant of time in the generation of the Second Person; whether there be more than one filiation

in Christ; whether it be a possible proposition that God the Father hates the Son; or whether it was

possible that Christ could have taken upon Him the likeness of a woman, or of the devil, or of an

ass, or of a stone, or of a gourd; and then how that gourd should have preached, wrought miracles,

or been hung on the cross; and what Peter had consecrated if he had administered the Sacrament

at what time the body of Christ hung upon the cross; or whether at the same time he might be said

to be man; whether after the Resurrection there will be any eating and drinking, since we are so

much afraid of hunger and thirst in this world. There are infinite of these subtle trifles, and others

more subtle than these, of notions, relations, instants, formalities, quiddities, haecceities, which no

one can perceive without a Lynceus whose eyes could look through a stone wall and discover those

things through the thickest darkness that never were.

Add to this those their other determinations, and those too so contrary to common opinion that

those oracles of the Stoics, which they call paradoxes, seem in comparison of these but blockish

and idle—as ’tis a lesser crime to kill a thousand men than to set a stitch on a poor man’s shoe on

the Sabbath day; and that a man should rather choose that the whole world with all food and raiment,

as they say, should perish, than tell a lie, though never so inconsiderable. And these most subtle

subtleties are rendered yet more subtle by the several methods of so many Schoolmen, that one

might sooner wind himself out of a labyrinth than the entanglements of the realists, nominalists,

Thomists, Albertists, Occamists, Scotists. Nor have I named all the several sects, but only some of

the chief; in all which there is so much doctrine and so much difficulty that I may well conceive

the apostles, had they been to deal with these new kind of divines, had needed to have prayed in

aid of some other spirit.

Paul knew what faith was, and yet when he said, “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, and

the evidence of things not seen,” he did not define it doctor-like. And as he understood charity well

himself, so he did as illogically divide and define it to others in his first Epistle to the Corinthians,

Chapter the thirteenth. And devoutly, no doubt, did the apostles consecrate the Eucharist; yet, had

they been asked the question touching the “terminus a quo,” and the “terminus ad quem” of

transubstantiation; of the manner how the same body can be in several places at one and the same

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time; of the difference the body of Christ has in heaven from that of the cross, or this in the

Sacrament; in what point of time transubstantiation is, whereas prayer, by means of which it is, as

being a discrete quantity, is transient; they would not, I conceive, have answered with the same

subtlety as the Scotists dispute and define it. They knew the mother of Jesus, but which of them

has so philosophically demonstrated how she was preserved from original sin as have done our

divines? Peter received the keys, and from Him too that would not have trusted them with a person

unworthy; yet whether he had understanding or no, I know not, for certainly he never attained to

that subtlety to determine how he could have the key of knowledge that had no knowledge himself.

They baptized far and near, and yet taught nowhere what was the formal, material, efficient, and

final cause of baptism, nor made the least mention of delible and indelible characters. They

worshipped, ’tis true, but in spirit, following herein no other than that of the Gospel, “God is a

Spirit, and they that worship, must worship him in spirit and truth;” yet it does not appear it was at

that time revealed to them that an image sketched on the wall with a coal was to be worshipped

with the same worship as Christ Himself, if at least the two forefingers be stretched out, the hair

long and uncut, and have three rays about the crown of the head. For who can conceive these things,

unless he has spent at least six and thirty years in the philosophical and supercelestial whims of

Aristotle and the Schoolmen?

In like manner, the apostles press to us grace; but which of them distinguishes between free grace

and grace that makes a man acceptable? They exhort us to good works, and yet determine not what

is the work working, and what a resting in the work done. They incite us to charity, and yet make

no difference between charity infused and charity wrought in us by our own endeavors. Nor do

they declare whether it be an accident or a substance, a thing created or uncreated. They detest and

abominate sin, but let me not live if they could define according to art what that is which we call

sin, unless perhaps they were inspired by the spirit of the Scotists. Nor can I be brought to believe

that Paul, by whose learning you may judge the rest, would have so often condemned questions,

disputes, genealogies, and, as himself calls them, “strifes of words,” if he had thoroughly understood

those subtleties, especially when all the debates and controversies of those times were rude and

blockish in comparison of the more than Chrysippean subtleties of our masters. Although yet the

gentlemen are so modest that if they meet with anything written by the apostles not so smooth and

even as might be expected from a master, they do not presently condemn it but handsomely bend

it to their own purpose, so great respect and honor do they give, partly to antiquity and partly to

the name of apostle. And truly ’twas a kind of injustice to require so great things of them that never

heard the least word from their masters concerning it. And so if the like happen in Chrysostom,

Basil, Jerome, they think it enough to say they are not obliged by it.

The apostles also confuted the heathen philosophers and Jews, a people than whom none more

obstinate, but rather by their good lives and miracles than syllogisms: and yet there was scarce one

among them that was capable of understanding the least “quodlibet” of the Scotists. But now, where

is that heathen or heretic that must not presently stoop to such wire-drawn subtleties, unless he be

so thickskulled that he can’t apprehend them, or so impudent as to hiss them down, or, being

furnished with the same tricks, be able to make his party good with them? As if a man should set

a conjurer on work against a conjurer, or fight with one hallowed sword against another, which

would prove no other than a work to no purpose. For my own part I conceive the Christians would

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