In Praise of Folly

he cracks again; another produces more bundles of ceremonies than seven of the stoutest ships

would be able to carry; another brags he has not touched a penny these three score years without

two pair of gloves at least upon his hands; another wears a cowl so lined with grease that the poorest

tarpaulin would not stoop to take it up; another will tell you he has lived these fifty-five years like

a sponge, continually fastened to the same place; another is grown hoarse with his daily chanting;

another has contracted a lethargy by his solitary living; and another the palsy in his tongue for want

of speaking. But Christ, interrupting them in their vanities, which otherwise were endless, will ask

them, “Whence this new kind of Jews? I acknowledge one commandment, which is truly mine, of

which alone I hear nothing. I promised, ’tis true, my Father’s heritage, and that without parables,

not to cowls, odd prayers, and fastings, but to the duties of faith and charity. Nor can I acknowledge

them that least acknowledge their faults. They that would seem holier than myself, let them if they

like possess to themselves those three hundred sixty-five heavens of Basilides the heretic’s invention,

or command them whose foolish traditions they have preferred before my precepts to erect them

a new one.” When they shall hear these things and see common ordinary persons preferred before

them, with what countenance, think you, will they behold one another? In the meantime they are

happy in their hopes, and for this also they are beholding to me.

And yet these kind of people, though they are as it were of another commonwealth, no man dares

despise, especially those begging friars, because they are privy to all men’s secrets by means of

confessions, as they call them. Which yet were no less than treason to discover, unless, being got

drunk, they have a mind to be pleasant, and then all comes out, that is to say by hints and conjectures

but suppressing the names. But if anyone should anger these wasps, they’ll sufficiently revenge

themselves in their public sermons and so point out their enemy by circumlocutions that there’s no

one but understands whom ’tis they mean, unless he understand nothing at all; nor will they give

over their barking till you throw the dogs a bone. And now tell me, what juggler or mountebank

you had rather behold than hear them rhetorically play the fool in their preachments, and yet most

sweetly imitating what rhetoricians have written touching the art of good speaking? Good God!

what several postures they have! How they shift their voice, sing out their words, skip up and down,

and are ever and anon making such new faces that they confound all things with noise! And yet

this knack of theirs is no less a mystery that runs in succession from one brother to another; which

though it be not lawful for me to know, however I’ll venture at it by conjectures. And first they

invoke whatever they have scraped from the poets; and in the next place, if they are to discourse

of charity, they take their rise from the river Nilus; or to set out the mystery of the cross, from bell

and the dragon; or to dispute of fasting, from the twelve signs of the zodiac; or, being to preach of

faith, ground their matter on the square of a circle.

I have heard myself one, and he no small fool—I was mistaken, I would have said scholar—that

being in a famous assembly explaining the mystery of the Trinity, that he might both let them see

his learning was not ordinary and withal satisfy some theological ears, he took a new way, to wit

from the letters, syllables, and the word itself; then from the coherence of the nominative case and

the verb, and the adjective and substantive: and while most of the audience wondered, and some

of them muttered that of Horace, “What does all this trumpery drive at?” at last he brought the

matter to this head, that he would demonstrate that the mystery of the Trinity was so clearly expressed

in the very rudiments of grammar that the best mathematician could not chalk it out more plainly.

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In Praise of Folly

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And in this discourse did this most superlative theologian beat his brains for eight whole months

that at this hour he’s as blind as a beetle, to wit, all the sight of his eyes being run into the sharpness

of his wit. But for all that he thinks nothing of his blindness, rather taking the same for too cheap

a price of such a glory as he won thereby.

And besides him I met with another, some eighty years of age, and such a divine that you’d have

sworn Scotus himself was revived in him. He, being upon the point of unfolding the mystery of

the name Jesus, did with wonderful subtlety demonstrate that there lay hidden in those letters

whatever could be said of him; for that it was only declined with three cases, he said, it was a

manifest token of the Divine Trinity; and then, that the first ended in S, the second in M, the third

in U, there was in it an ineffable mystery, to wit, those three letters declaring to us that he was the

beginning, middle, and end (summum, medium, et ultimum) of all. Nay, the mystery was yet more

abstruse; for he so mathematically split the word Jesus into two equal parts that he left the middle

letter by itself, and then told us that that letter in Hebrew was schin or sin, and that sin in the Scotch

tongue, as he remembered, signified as much as sin; from whence he gathered that it was Jesus that

took away the sins of the world. At which new exposition the audience were so wonderfully intent

and struck with admiration, especially the theologians, that there wanted little but that Niobe-like

they had been turned to stones; whereas the like had almost happened to me, as befell the Priapus

in Horace. And not without cause, for when were the Grecian Demosthenes or Roman Cicero ever

guilty of the like? They thought that introduction faulty that was wide of the matter, as if it were

not the way of carters and swineherds that have no more wit than God sent them. But these learned

men think their preamble, for so they call it, then chiefly rhetorical when it has least coherence

with the rest of the argument, that the admiring audience may in the meanwhile whisper to

themselves, “What will he be at now?” In the third place, they bring in instead of narration some

texts of Scripture, but handle them cursorily, and as it were by the bye, when yet it is the only thing

they should have insisted on. And fourthly, as it were changing a part in the play, they bolt out with

some question in divinity, and many times relating neither to earth nor heaven, and this they look

upon as a piece of art. Here they erect their theological crests and beat into the people’s ears those

magnificent titles of illustrious doctors, subtle doctors, most subtle doctors, seraphic doctors,

cherubic doctors, holy doctors, unquestionable doctors, and the like; and then throw abroad among

the ignorant people syllogisms, majors, minors, conclusions, corollaries, suppositions, and those

so weak and foolish that they are below pedantry. There remains yet the fifth act in which one

would think they should show their mastery. And here they bring in some foolish insipid fable out

of Speculum Historiae or Gesta Romanorum and expound it allegorically, tropologically, and

anagogically. And after this manner do they and their chimera, and such as Horace despaired of

compassing when he wrote “Humano capiti,” etc.

But they have heard from somebody, I know not whom, that the beginning of a speech should be

sober and grave and least given to noise. And therefore they begin theirs at that rate they can scarce

hear themselves, as if it were not matter whether anyone understood them. They have learned

somewhere that to move the affections a louder voice is requisite. Whereupon they that otherwise

would speak like a mouse in a cheese start out of a sudden into a downright fury, even there too,

where there’s the least need of it. A man would swear they were past the power of hellebore, so

little do they consider where ’tis they run out. Again, because they have heard that as a speech

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Desiderius Erasmus

In Praise of Folly

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