Ep. 302: Erasmus Praises Foolishness (Part One)

0:07 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by. Some guys were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 302 is something like does foolishness enhance life? We read the Praise of Folly by Desiderius erasmus, written in 1509. For more information, please visit partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer, needing more than Democritus to laugh at my jokes properly in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:35 Wes: This is Wes Alwan, happy in my foolishness in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:40 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey, avoiding all sense of propriety that may cloud my judgment in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:46 Mark: And our special guest, in my own

0:48 Nathan: eyes, the first of men, terrifying the trembling crowd with threatening voice and looks. I'm Nathan Gilmour and I'm coming to you from Statham, Georgia.

0:56 Mark: Welcome, Nathan.

0:58 Dylan: Hey, Nathan.

0:58 Nathan: Thank you.

0:59 Wes: Welcome.

1:00 Mark: Folks might remember Nathan from many, many episodes ago when you came on and talked about faith with you and another theologian. This is a more normal episode, but we are doing. This is supposed to be a classic text of Christian humanism. And your podcast is the Christian Humanist Podcast.

1:15 Nathan: Yes, it is. And we have a Holbein's portrait of Erasmus on our podcast network logo. So I was thrilled when I got this invitation.

1:23 Mark: This was on our list because I was supposed to write this book introducing philosophy and there was this list of you should cover all these philosophers. And Erasmus was on it. I'm like, why would I cover Erasmus? I've never had cause to read Erasmus in any course. But this is of course a huge classic. Was certainly part of the canon at a certain point, but it's not, it's not in the St. John's canon. Right, Dylan and Wes.

1:47 Wes: No, you know, I think the thing is it's kind of quasi philosophical. Right. It's more work of rhetoric. And in a way that's part of what Erasmus represented as a humanist in response to the hair splitting of the scholastics, a return to not just the ancient Romans, but to the ancient Greeks and to an attention to the rhetorical.

2:08 Nathan: Yeah, that's about right. I mean, Erasmus did have texts that are certainly more philosophical than this one. His treatise on the freedom of the will was actually central to my own dissertation. So it's later career Erasmus that I'm more familiar with. But simply because this is the Erasmus text that everyone points to, of course, I've been familiar with it as well. And you're right that it's not really a philosophical text specifically. I mean, it is an encomium A species of rhetoric that Aristotle introduces in his treatise on rhetoric. And that kind of serves as the set piece to show your shots. So this is Erasmus having a bit of fun, showing what he can do. It's a lot of fun and it involves philosophy, so we can still talk about it.

2:48 Wes: I think I looked a little bit, by the way, at his piece on free will and it was a debate with Luther. Of course. The style of writing could not be more different. Luther is insulting and fanatical, and in my opinion, I'm sure I'll give some disagreement. But Erasmus, he has this same kind of benevolent tone. And again, I think the approach is softer and more rhetorical. But just getting back to my experience with Erasmus, I hadn't read this, even though this is another one of those books that had been on my mom's bookshelf and something that I always knew I was supposed to read and I didn't quite know why.

And I think I also associated it with something, you know, as part of the Northern Renaissance. And for some reason I associated it with a kind of stuffiness or something that might be a chore to get through. And it is completely the opposite. I read the Penguin translation, by the way, which is fantastic and it's a lot of fun to read. It's satire. It reminds me of points of Mark Twain. Of course, there are lots of commonalities with Nietzsche. This is a pre Nietzsche critique of morality that in many ways people will see that it prefigures a lot of what Nietzsche has to say.

So it's not exacting, it's not precise philosophical argumentation, but it's brilliant and fun to read.

4:05 Nathan: Yeah.

4:06 Mark: So a satire of the encomium form, the in praise of something or other, which I guess every rhetoric student knew how to do. And you sort of start by praising their parents and praising where they were born and kind of going on from there. And so it's the goddess Folly praising herself and saying how really a bit of folly makes everyone's life better. At least that's the first third of it. And then the second third is a critique of some of the same things Martin Luther would have a problem with. Of the stuffiness of the pretensions, of the excessive wealth of the Catholic Church, of his fellow theologians, of intellectuals like himself, you know, so it's a very self deprecating as well as this is what makes it gentle and humanistic, that it includes everyone in its scope.

One of the questions I wanted to start us off here is to what extent is folly the Same as sin, right? You hear certain preachers saying, everybody has sin. You know, that's the starting point, is nobody without sin. And so it's not that sin is great. We're not actually praising sin. But if it's part of human nature, if it's part of human makeup, then unlike, you know, original sin, this is the thing that we have to overcome. Maybe it is something that we are meant to live with. It should at least make us sympathetic to other people's plights. So that's the humanistic element.

5:26 Nathan: The only reason I would balk at that is because he places folly as related to marriage, which by 1509 is a sacrament. So, I mean, it seems like that might be a stretch even for someone as freewheeling and playful as Erasmus is. I see the response here more as a response to a sort of resurgent stoicism than it is to church doctrine. Necessarily, at various points in the text, folly is opposed to reason. So it becomes, you know, the figure for passion. Sometimes it becomes a figure for a rhetorical sense of kairos, as opposed to the sort of systematic timelessness of philosophy. So, I mean, I get a sense that folly isn't identical with sin, but folly is a sort of monkey wrench in the systems that kind of govern the intellectual Life. There in 1509, he gives a list,

6:18 Wes: right in the beginning. And that list includes things like self love and flattery and forgetfulness, idleness, pleasure, madness, sensuality, revelry, sound sleep. I think things like madness and self love we'll talk more about. They play a sort of pivotal role in some of the progression of his argument. And the other thing to keep in mind is that when we start the encomium at the beginning, folly is like a universal principle, right? And also has something a lot to do with instinct. And the purpose of talking about folly is to talk about its advantages as we go forward.

Folly becomes a source of the kind of things that Erasmus or others obviously might want to condemn. So, for instance, the excesses of the Scholastics. So it reminds me of Nietzsche with will to power, right? So will to power is an overarching principle that explains premoral valuation, amoral valuation, but it also explains anti Natural valuation explains the exact opposite by way of a little twist. And the same thing happens here by way of self love. Folly can explain how it is that people can enjoy, for instance, being poor, lonely philosophers who have wasted their lives and their eyesights in text.

7:36 Mark: Dylan, do you have opening thoughts here?

7:39 Dylan: So to me, folly was about foolishness. Broadly speaking, I think the list that we had was about right. It didn't seem to me to have anything to do with sin. It had more to do with a juxtaposition with over intellectualization on one hand or an over seriousness. I agree with Wes's comment about the double edgedness of foolishness that comes out a little bit later. The beginning is more or less a praise of it, right? And the virtues of foolishness and the jester in the face of over constraint, that to me just felt like straight up anti scholastic and also a kind of anti.

Bureaucratic isn't quite the right word, but a compassionate partly about compassion, about understanding that it's not holding everybody to the letter of the law in order to get into heaven, that kind of thing. In that way, it's the praise of foolishness as being the source of energy and the source of our humanness. Just like you would want to call some activities by the scholastics foolish and therefore not give them the praise of their foolishness. There's a double edged sword to it.

8:49 Wes: I think Mark's question about sin can give us some perspective on some of these different categories of praise that he heaps on Folly, right? So the first one, sexual reproduction. And Folly has nothing but positive things to say about her role in that, right? Because it's a source of life. We owe our beginnings to sex. And despite that, in a way it's absurd. And the references made the kind of absurdity of the fact that genitalia are in a way that sacred font from which everything draws its being. So, you know, and then the irrationality required in making a commitment to marriage and childbirth and child rearing and all of those things, and the willingness to repeat the experience which requires forgetfulness.

But the other side of this, right, the thing that's not mentioned by Folly here is that you can always say yes and no to each of these forms of praise, right? So the church wants to regulate sexuality. Not just the church, but society in general. And so there's always the question of can we break this down and say some forms of sexuality are sinful, for instance, or bad, and some are not, just because Folly is avoiding that question, although she can't avoid it forever, it'll come up later on. And the distinction between two types of madness, for instance, it doesn't mean that we as readers have to avoid it.

So I think it helps to think in terms of the flip side of every form of ironic praise is the possibility of excess. The other side of that is the excess on the side of the church and trying to regulate sexuality out of existence, maybe in its extreme, or the excess of scholastics trying to understand things which can't be fully understood. So it's almost like there's a middle way.

10:37 Nathan: And one really nice example of that is that Folly never does say that I help people to commit adultery because that would be one of the sins of the church when it comes to sexuality. But there is this bizarre, and I think of it as Renaissance flavored because I also teach Shakespeare and it's just all over Shakespeare, praise of folly for allowing men to allow cuckoldry. And it's only because of folly that a man will take back his tearful and faithless wife. There's some misogyny there. We shouldn't skate past that.

11:06 Wes: Not just take her back, but say that she's like the paradigm of virtue. So basically to have the illusion that she's pure and faithful, even though it's obvious to everyone else that this is

11:16 Mark: super common is what he says. Like this has happened all the time.

11:19 Nathan: Oh yeah. And like I said, I mean, I only teach Shakespeare every other year and every time I do it just blows my mind how many cuckold jokes there are just shot through comedies, tragedies, just all of those plays. You can't get away from the cuckold jokes.

11:32 Wes: It's that great big swingers club known as the Renaissance.

11:35 Mark: Yeah. So like you were saying, Nathan, the overall philosophical point here is the foil is the stoic or the hyper rationalist Socratic Platonic philosopher that just says knowledge is virtue, reason is virtue. Put all yourself, like, why would you spend even one second being distracted by the things of the flesh? Fill yourself with reason. So it's a particular interpretation of the Platonic tradition. Do we think that Erasmus started with that point and like, how can I make this point? Or did this start as a lawyerly exercise of like. Like you're saying, I want to show off my chops, I want to do something with this encomium thing.

I'm going to praise the unpraisable. I'm going to praise idiocy, foolishness itself. And by thinking about that really hard, you know, I can come up with some good stuff. I can make a case for this. Of course it's a one sided case, like a lawyer's case. Like Wes was just saying, you can say, well, it's actually not good to love yourself too much, but at least you could make this case like, well, in moderation, you know, being too serious pursuing the Socratic thing to the point that the Stoics did actually makes you inhuman. Maybe we better back off and think again.

Which is a more actually Socratic approach.

12:51 Nathan: Oh, absolutely Socratic. And what jumped out at me on this reading, because I haven't read Praise of Folly for a few years now since the Christian humanist did our episode on it. But what jumped out at me is that there seems to be a direct assault on the Christianized Stoicism of Boethius, because Boethius has that long discussion about the emptiness of fame, that you can be famous on every patch of land on the globe, but the fish have never heard of you. And you can be famous for 10 generations, but 100 generations from now, no one will know of you.

And you could be famous to all of the best people now, but within a generation styles will change and they'll forget you. And Folly comes across and just takes a direct run at that and says, yeah, but think about all the great things people do so they'll get famous. There's almost a direct contradiction of Boethius in particular. You know, who is one of the philosophers in the medieval Christian tradition. I've got to think that it begins as that lawyerly exercise, that encomium, that showing off. But you're right, it does kind of get away from him.

He even reproaches himself at one point for slipping into satire. He says, well, I. Folly started speaking with Erasmus voice. Let me reset here for a moment. Yeah.

14:02 Wes: I think at each point we get into the paradox of the fact that any sort of fault of which we might accuse human beings is kind of essential to their humanity, which is a point that Folly makes it a certain point. You know, why not be true to type, so to speak? So we can't ever just throw it all out. And that includes deceit and kinds of deception that are inherent in social life. We can't actually really, and this is another very Nietzschean sounding thing, we can't actually ever get rid of all of those. So as much as we might want to talk about honesty, we become unrealistic when we pretend that we're always going to be honest with everyone all the time, when in fact we're concealing how we feel and we're not expressing everything that we might want to say and we might be flattering someone a little bit if they ask us a question about how they look in that outfit or anything like that.

So social deceit, as Nietzsche might put it, untruth, is a condition of life and it's a condition of the social. So if we want to talk about truthfulness in a realistic way. Even if we don't want to talk about the virtues of truthfulness, we have to be sensitive to the other side of things. And that's something that a satire like this is really good at bringing out.

15:16 Mark: So I mentioned moderation and that was something I was thinking a lot about here, that he at one point talks about how folly actually can support prudence, which is, you know, one of the virtues of moderation. But it seems that the overall critique sounds like Aristotelian moderation sounds like, yes, of course you should have values, of course you should care about scholarship, of course you should care about learning, but not too much. You gotta go home and rest, you gotta be in a marriage, you gotta tolerate people. You know, all these things that he says are kind of foolish.

They're foolish from the point of view of sort of your work self, your dignified, academic, professional self. But life would be terrible if we only had that thin veneer of the serious work self. We have to have more to life than that. So it's like be a well rounded person. But folly also, as we're saying, is what lets us fall into excess, that benefits people. Right. So the Nietzschean talk about asceticism really came to me. On the one hand he criticizes in part two of this, like the monks. Oh, I don't like those monks. They're so high and mighty.

They look down at everybody and they do crazy stuff. You know, I'm going to have a vow of silence, I'm going to put all these plates on my head for 16 days. You know, whatever the things that he named specifically it was, I'm going to

16:38 Nathan: put gloves on before I ever touch money.

16:40 Mark: Yes, this kind of stuff, he thinks that that's ridiculous. But on the other hand, folly is how all great really. Anything great. And he even includes war in this. It's a little weird. He doesn't like going to detail of why he thinks war might be great but actually accomplishing anything.

16:56 Wes: But he's also pretty anti war later on. Oh yeah, we could talk about that later.

16:59 Nathan: He's anti war between Christian kings. In his plea for peace, and this is an embarrassing part of it for Christian teachers like me, he says, you know, Christian kings should not be going to war with each other. It's just a travesty that the Prince of Peace is inspiring Christian French to go to war against Christian Prussians. There was no Prussia at the time. I realized, run with me. But what we should be doing is directing all of our energy towards going to war against the Turks. It's the moment in John Locke's Letter Concerning Toleration where he says, you know, we should not outlaw any kind of religion. So we have space to convince each other. Except for the Catholics. Gotta outlaw the Catholics.

17:34 Wes: It's when he mentions war. This is where he gets into the distinction between two types of insanity.

17:40 Nathan: Yes.

17:40 Wes: Which is the first place that he's really acknowledging the double edged side of this that we've been talking about. So he'll say one kind of insanity leads to hell, war, sacrilege, a bunch of other things. And the other is a blessing and widespread. I don't know if we need to get into that now. I think, Mark, you were still making a specific point. Right.

18:00 Mark: This is earlier so on, like page 78 of the Penguin edition, I'm looking at all deeds which win praise. Isn't war the seed and source? But what is more foolish than to embark on a struggle of this kind for some reason or other when it does more harm than good to every other side? And then he talks about how the soldiers are all meatheads. Like, you need people who are not fitting that Socratic rational ideal to actually do the fighting for you if you're going to have war. Or really I just would generalize this into sort of getting stuff done, do great things. If you're going to build a pyramid, you can't have everybody be a biblical scholar just sitting around like nothing would get done. This is a sort of elitist point.

18:38 Dylan: Especially when you characterize as meatheads. Right.

18:41 Wes: He says it's the worst sort of people that you need as soldiers. Right. You don't need wise people. You need this long list of dummies, including pimps. I think the word pimp is used.

18:53 Mark: Plunderers, pimps, robbers, murderers, peasants, morons, debtors, and that sort of scum of the earth who provide the glories of war, not philosophers. And their midnight oil reminds me of

19:02 Wes: that scene in Blazing Saddles. Do you remember that? Where he's hiring outlaws. The reference to war that I was thinking about was. And the reference to the two kinds of insanity comes earlier. I think that's what Dylan had found.

19:15 Mark: Did you want to read that, Dylan?

19:17 Dylan: The nature of insanity is surely twofold. One kind is sent from hell by the vengeful furies whenever they let loose their snakes and assail the hearts of men with lust of war, insatiable thirst for gold, the disgrace of forbidden love, parricide, incest, sacrilege, or some other sort of evil. Or when they pursue the guilty conscience stricken soul with their avenging spirits and flaming brands of terror. The other is quite different, desirable above everything, and is known to come from me. It occurs whenever some happy mental aberration frees the soul from its anxious cares and at the same time restores it by the addition of manifold delights.

This is the sort of delusion Cicero longs for as a great gift of the gods in his letter to Atticus, for it would have the power to free him from awareness of his great trouble. So interestingly, folly doesn't take credit for insanity in general, but only the good kind, right?

20:09 Nathan: I mean, it's reminiscent of the two Aphrodites from Pausanias in the symposium, right? You know, the demotic Aphrodite is the one that causes people to pursue sexual lust, but the heavenly Aphrodite is the one that causes people to seek the betterment of the souls of the beautiful young man. I don't think it's exactly the same here, but I mean, I think that it's kin to it. So I mean, you know, they have the name in common and they have certain family resemblances, but they're entirely different things.

20:36 Wes: The whole work ends on this Platonic note of getting rid of the body and the entire reward for human beings, the religious reward is a form of madness which turns out to be love, or t calls it the supreme reward for man is madness. So I think it's a very apt.

20:54 Mark: Yeah, comparison again, I think maybe this is when you start writing long enough, then you eventually contradict yourself or sort of think outside your original project. He'd already sort of deviated from what he started was by the second part where he's criticizing monks, among others. But by here, this sure sounds like monkish behavior. What you're saying is actually the essence of Christianity, that folly ends up recommending prudence at the beginning. But folly is also sort of what you would normally think of and pursue something to excess.

And so that's part of what, not just the monks, but people who are really into gambling, who are really into building things. And they build and build and, and it's just kind of stupid. But they've had a great life, they've really had a good time with it. Like it's sort of a double edged. Like is he saying that somebody obsessed with building is bad or should we take them at face value that, well, it's foolish to condemn people basically for their hobbies, right? People and, or people, you know, by their overestimation. I Was thinking of this.

I was doing a lot in the last week to put up the music that I've created over my life to get it out on some public spaces. And just the self confidence that one has to have to create anything. Unless people are there just begging you, you know, if you recognize as a prodigy from a young age and oh, you must do this, that's one thing. But for most people, just on your own, I'm gonna just paint more or whatever, and you feel like it's worth something. It's not just that I'm amusing myself right now. I'm. I'm created like this. Definitely a folly, but one that Erasmus seems to think that the rest of us should be thankful for, right?

Because nobody would devote their life to art or anything like that. And so I then compare the religious excess that he actually is saying is the path to salvation is very much that kind of folly. It was folly for Socrates to drink the hemlock. It was folly to neglect the stuff that common sense would tell you is important, your reputation, keeping your body healthy. To become a philosopher at all is great folly.

22:53 Wes: We should be careful to distinguish between what Folly says and what Erasmus says. Even though, Mark, I think you're right. There's always a grain of truth of what Erasmus thinks to be the truth in any of. In, I think, any of what Folly says, right? All of it's informative, but all of it is excessive and Erasmus would reject it. Right? He even has Folly attack the humanists and attack him by name, right? And say things like, philosophy entirely is stupid. No one should ever read any books and waste their time on that stuff. So obviously this is not the view of Erasmus, not in that raw, unadulterated form, but it contains a grain of truth that we all recognize.

So then we can ask ourselves, when is it the case that Erasmus's actual voice is louder in a way, is a louder or more prominent overtone in what folly is actually saying. And I think, of course, the positive account in the end of how Christianity is akin to folly because of the demand for a kind of simplicity, you might say, well, that's more straightforwardly something that Erasmus would write down in a non satirical, non ironic text.

24:02 Nathan: He also has a moment, and it's page 112 in my volume, where Folly actually says something along the lines of, I need to be careful. I'm slipping into Erasmus voice there in mine.

24:13 Wes: It's on page 113. So my penguin, I had the hard copy. You guys may be looking at the true copy. It Turned out to have different.

24:20 Nathan: So, yeah, I don't want you to imagine I've been plundering the notebooks with my friend Erasmus.

24:25 Wes: Yes.

24:26 Nathan: And that seems to be where he kind of hits the reset button and says, okay, now I'm going to get back writing this in the voice of the character Folly.

24:32 Wes: Right? Because he's just engaged in a long condemnation of princes and kings and courtiers and the clergy. And that's another point where you could say, yes, well, straightforwardly, this is Erasmus condemning the excesses of the church, which of course it is through the Persona of Folly. And then at this point he's getting back to the idea that fortune favors the injudicious and makes wise men weak and apprehensive. And that's closer to what comes before those condemnations. And then it's right after that that we get the foray into theology and the positive account.

25:07 Mark: He's got this rhetorical trick that it's Folly saying, but you know, I'm just foolish, so don't listen to me. What are we supposed to take out of this? That it sort of leaves it open to the reader, I think, in terms of how seriously do you want to take this? I mean, this is an advocate, this is somebody making a lawyerly argument, I feel like. And so you should think that maybe I'm only hearing half the story. And she even says, Folly says there are two sides to everything. And one example is enough, that everybody thinks a king is great, but a king is very rich.

A king that is not virtuous. A king is going to be poor in many ways. And so that example will suffice, which I wish he had given several more examples of this two sidedness of everything. But it gave me this picture of. It sort of depends. It's not just like what facets we isolate in the thing. In other words, there's good and bad in everything. Like, yes, okay, there's that point. But it's also sort of. It's how you take it at the time. Some of what he's critiquing here is a matter of mood, right? If we're saying that the problem is not so much that you're studying virtue, that you like Plato, that you think Plato is a model to go after, because clearly at the end he does think Plato's a model to go after, but that you're sort of just doing it with the wrong attitude, which I thought was interesting of like, well, how substantial a critique is it?

Just to say you're being too serious

26:31 Wes: again, it reminds me of the whole gay science approach with Nietzsche, right? The idea of the fusion of the irrational and the rational. And I think that's a really fundamental point here because what we get in the beginning is he's pointing us to folly in a way, is about irrationality. It's about the irrationality of goal directed behavior. Part of what that means is that it's the concept of an Aristotelian end where you just, you say, why did you do that? Why did you do that? For pleasure, for happiness, whatever. At a certain point you stop saying why.

And it's nature and as we know evolution that defined these urges like sexual urges, right? There's no good reason for sexual urges. They're completely irrational. If you entirely approach it in terms of reasons, you're not going to get anywhere. But you can actually just simply do away with the irrational. When you're talking about virtue, even if you want to talk about virtue is having something to do with rational activity, as he points out, virtue is a motivated behavior. And any motivated goal directed behavior ultimately has an element of our irrationality.

And Aristotle acknowledges this is about habit, this is about character. This is about the regulation of one's emotions, including, for instance, their desire, the gratification they get out of being good, for instance, the gratification they get out of being recognized by others as good and early on by one's parents. The kind of displacement of irrational desires from just our immediate needs like sex and food and things like that to these higher level gratifications that replace them, that compensate us for what we lose when we give this up.

28:13 Dylan: I mean, straight out of the symposium, right? You have the link of those lower level gratifications with the higher level pleasures of philosophy. Or you could link it up with other intellectual gratifications of figuring something out of those kinds of experiences of pleasure. Intellectual pleasures seem to me, for Plato, straight up linked with physical pleasures.

28:39 Wes: Yeah, the physical is a ladder.

28:40 Dylan: Yes, the physical is a ladder. In fact, you should start having sex with as many people as possible to start on that ladder. Right, right.

28:47 Nathan: Which is a departure from what Pausanias says. He says that if you are after sexual gratification, you've already missed the boat. Whereas, you know, Diotima in the Socrates speech says, yeah, you're right, I mean, represents rungs on a ladder to the other. Socrates encompasses and transcends what Pausanias said. And I think that a similar sort of thing's going on here in calling certain things, you know, the diabolical folly that we talked about earlier. But the opposite of that diabolic folly is not angelic apathy the way it would be for a Christian writer like Evagrius, the Christian Stoic. But it is the good kind of

29:22 Dylan: folly in this category. It's the way the piece changes. I can't quite put my finger on it. And so I'll just ask if you guys felt the same way at the beginning. I felt like it was straightforwardly and self consciously satirical in a way that you might be making fun of your family or making fun of your friends. So you're pointing out their peccadillos and you're overstating things and you're saying things in a way that makes stuff itself recognizable. So this stuff about wedlock, if you ever wanted to have a father, then you have to have me kind of thing, right?

And it's satirical, but includes being, like I said, from a point of loyal opposition kind of thing, making fun of your friends. Towards the end, it just feels less satirical. It's praising folly, but it just doesn't feel like he's being satirical at all. It feels like he's being more straightforwardly making an argument that is a Platonic argument for madness. The edge of the satirical has fallen away significantly by the end of it, and I couldn't point to a specific place in it, but that was my reader's sense.

30:38 Nathan: I'll go ahead and be foolish and say it's the last 20 pages of the text, because, I mean, once he says, I need to quit cribbing from Erasmus notebooks, I mean, that's where he begins with his scriptural exegesis. And folly stops being a peccadillo. I like that term for it. And it becomes the transcendent value that St. Paul talks about as the controversial character of his discipleship to Christ. I have become a fool. For Christ is not the same as aren't husbands foolish putting up with their faithless wives? Those are two different connotations of folly there.

So, I mean, I think those last 20 pages is where, ironically enough, foolishness becomes something supremely serious, because it is the character of St. Paul and ultimately the character of Christ. And so, I mean, Erasmus, you know, as a Christian writer, I mean, has to treat the apostles and Christ with the utmost seriousness. So even in St. Paul calling himself a fool, he has to be a serious fool.

31:37 Wes: I was thinking when Dylan was talking is it always helps to think of this in terms of being directed at hypocrisy or someone who takes themselves too seriously, so someone for instance, who acts as if they are not a sexual being. You know, like the scholastics or the theologians and the clergy and all that, pretending that they are gods and pretending, being holier than thou, acting like they're not sexual beings. And it helps to point them to the fact that that is not the case. Which is not to say that we go to the other extreme. For instance, this is not to say that we say that there is no such thing as piety.

What is it about simplicity and foolishness that are helpful to the faithful? We don't want to say it's, oh, they're just easily deceived. We want to say that they are not the type of hypocrite who thinks that they know more than they do, who thinks they know everything and therefore would reject faith. They can be open minded, they can acknowledge their own fallibility. That's what foolishness is looks like in that circumstance. So, for instance, what might go on between husband and wife? So it's an extreme statement to talk about tolerating other people's infidelity, but we do have to tolerate other people's flaws.

That definitely is a part of any relationship. And part of tolerating those flaws means stepping away from a position where one thinks one knows everything towards a position of modesty. It might mean, for instance, just saying, well, I don't know why that person did that thing, instead of saying, oh, they did that to piss me off. They did that to be assholes, or something like that. So I think we could draw some connections between those two forms of folly.

33:16 Mark: Well, I feel like I should name drop here, that we did an episode on Paul Ricoeur at some point, and one of the big concepts in there was the second naivete, which I bet Nathan can explain much more clearly than I can. But it's not that people believe in religion because they're just fools. No, but despite your learning. Finish the sentence, Nathan.

33:37 Wes: Yeah.

33:37 Nathan: You don't necessarily absolutize what used to be absolute. Instead what you do is relativize the critique that allowed you to make it absolute in the first place. And so it becomes a place of rootlessness in some way, but it is a happy rootlessness because you allow yourself to. To claim myth and legend and such things. Not necessarily in a way that you want to systematize it, but in a way that it can function in a way that I think of as allegorical. You can allegorize it politically, psychologically, so on and so forth, and it becomes something that can be enriching. Without being stifling the way that the first naivete is.

34:17 Mark: So there's probably more packed into that than we want to unpack right now. But there was certainly something back in ancient Christianity or, you know, Renaissance Christianity that we're talking about here that absolutely grasped some version of that, which it's Montaigne's type of skepticism, whereas Descartes type of skepticism, at least that he plays with is. Would lead you to saying, why would you think that there's a God? That's ridiculous, you know, and demanding that somebody prove it to you. But Montaigne's type of criticism is, I don't understand this stuff, so I'm just going to take it on faith, right, that there's at least a practical grounds.

This is getting back to the last discussion that we had with you, but there's maybe a lot of reasons for your life that you might choose to be a faithful person, a believing person, but it's not because you've undergone some Cartesian from the ground up. Reason has taught you this and this and this. And now I believe in the stuff, and I don't even need faith, because faith is for people that can't prove their beliefs. No, for the Montaigne skeptic, you can't prove this stuff. Therefore, we have to, not as idiots, not because we were brainwashed as children to do this, but as a conscious adult choice to say, I'm going to lower my intellectual standards of rigor, or rather change them, and not demand the same kind of proof about matters of faith or about matters of whether my wife really loves me or personal matters.

This is, I hear connections between people arguing for faith that it's not a matter of. I just think that Trump won the election. I know there's no evidence, but I just think that he did. It's not that kind of thing. It's more like, how do you know that everybody around you doesn't secretly despise you, just take it on faith.

35:57 Nathan: You guys were talking Nietzsche earlier. I think that's where Nietzsche gets Christianity on a certain level, that someone like Immanuel Kant, who's kind of a vaguely Protestant Enlightenment thinker, doesn't. Because, I mean, Kant wants to turn everything into a universal claim that has bearing on every possible rational being, whereas Nietzsche wants to say, well, no, I mean, this is a historical happening, it is a slave revolt, it is something that could have been otherwise, and now that we're here, we have to deal with it. And, you know, whatever unbelief looks like, it should Be a post Christian unbelief. We shouldn't pretend that Christianity never happened in some ways, although Erasmus wouldn't use this vocabulary because God hadn't invented Hegel yet. I think that Erasmus is tiptoeing into something like historicism with this.

36:42 Dylan: There's a lot in here about the way in which we hold history and forgetting and stuff like that. But I need Nathan to explain to me a little bit more.

36:52 Nathan: This is my best way to make sense of that middle part where he shifts into Erasmus voice. Because one of his big criticisms of the theologians and of the philosophers, and you know, by philosophers I take him to mean roughly Stoics, is that they are treating a certain number of very, very abstract and very, very technical terms as synonymous with faith or synonymous with virtue. And I think what Erasmus is doing is taking a rhetorician's tack and saying that virtue is like rhetoric, so complex that you have to consider audience and context and purpose and all these sorts of things that a very, very abstract Stoic elevation of apathy just doesn't take into account.

And likewise for the theologians, when you insist on these very, very technical Thomist, Aristotelian categories and you make them the content of the faith, what that means is that when you read certain parts of the New Testament, and I picked the New Testament rather than the Old, because that's what Erasmus spent far more time working on, certain things that Jesus says that are genuinely scandalous get allegorized to death so there's no scandal left in them anymore. So they can't actually do their work disrupting things because we're so busy making sure they fit into a system.

38:12 Dylan: So that makes sense, particularly about the notion of why folly is important and the way you just linked up the importance of the disruptiveness of, just like say, this story of Jesus in the account in the New Testament, the deep disruptiveness of that as being related to folly, that also makes a lot of sense. But I'm curious about the historicism that you mean, because that seems to me more pointing towards a direction of the world story, that it's aimed towards some

38:43 Nathan: kind of fruition, but it gets there by contradiction. I think that's where I see the historicism. Right, Because Hegel says that the dialectic,

38:50 Dylan: that's the part that you're referring to. You're thinking of the dialectic rather than the teleological aspect of it.

38:55 Nathan: Yes. It's not where we get, but how we get there. Right. We get there by contradiction. We get there by. And I'm trying To remember my Hegelian terminology.

39:02 Dylan: Well, thesis, antithesis, resolution.

39:04 Nathan: Yeah, but that's the British Hegelians. I was trying to remember his words. But yes, let's use that. Without that antithesis, you don't get the energy that drives towards new possibility. I get the sense that Erasmus, who is in this tradition of, ironically enough, the Scholastics, whose big point of faith is the infinity of God, realizes that any kind of system is going to limit an infinite God. And therefore, I mean, you know, I'm almost certain I'm reading my 21st century biblical studies background back into Erasmus and I'm okay with that.

But I think that what Erasmus wants to do is leave room for the New Testament to create that antithesis, but not in the Calvinist sense, and not in the British Hegelian sense, but just more broadly a disruption so that in that moment of folly, some undiscovered kind of virtue becomes possible. Now, I might be just completely anachronizing here and I'll grant that possibility.

40:02 Wes: I like that point. I just think, you know, I wouldn't see whatever's happening dialectically, I wouldn't see that as culminating in the way that it does with Hegel. Right? In that.

40:11 Nathan: No, no, no, no. For Erasmus, nothing culminates.

40:14 Wes: Right. So I take the skeptical strain in this very seriously, in the sense of modesty about what one can know rationally and scientifically. And he even makes comments about how philosophers can never agree and they act like they're secretaries to nature. Right. Running around trying to. And so I think that's a very important part of his humanism and the focus on rhetoric and the critique of the hair splitting of the scholastics, which ultimately can never be resolved. Right. And it's the same thing with contemporary analytic philosophy, in my opinion.

But although I think some of it's useful, and I think probably Erasmus might concede that some of it's useful as well, but it in the skeptical frame of mind again, and this is not Cartesian methodological skepticism where I say I don't know if the world exists. Of course, Descartes was doing that because he was not a skeptic. He was doing a reductio absurdum on skepticism in order to get to his rationalism. And although I think he preserve some of the skeptical strain of mine and this distinction between, say, clear and distinct ideas versus other kinds of ideas.

But anyway, we can never be certain about anything that we know philosophically and scientifically. And so that always leaves room for faith in this sense of folly that he Gets to at the very end. Folly is, in a way, our fallenness, our predicament.

41:38 Nathan: Right. And I just want to make sure, just so the Hegelians don't come after me. I didn't say that he was a historicist. I said he's tiptoeing up on it.

41:45 Wes: Yeah, I wasn't accusing you of that. I just wanted to.

41:47 Nathan: Okay, okay, okay. I just wanted to make sure. I don't want to get angry Internet Hegelians on me.

41:52 Mark: So just to connect a thread, you know, it's like Kant's antinomies. Like you were just saying, Wes, that these metaphysical issues that the scholastics want to consider are irresolvable. Well, I want to connect that to there being opposites apparent in phenomena, depending on which point of view that you take. So there's a perspectivism. I don't know if it's full on historicism, but it's certainly perspectivism. And then I want to connect that to the emotions. Some of it is your temperament that would cause you to focus on the free will versus focus on the determinism.

You know, just to take an antinomy that's very close to our heart. We have both the feeling of freedom and in that we have the responsibility and we have the recognition of determinism such that maybe we shouldn't be so condemning of others that do wrong things because there was a causal chain that led to that it wasn't their entire free will that we should then condemn them. So those are both accurate. And it sort of depends on, well, are you a judgmental asshole such that you're going to be scolding everybody, or are you going to be really, oh, just tender and understanding and like, oh, everybody's.

You had a tough background. Like both of those. It's an emotional shift. And both of those are sort of incomplete and involve faith in some way. Right. Faith in people or faith in the universe producing certain kind. You know, that certainly hasn't cleared up anything, but at least I wanted to connect the dots here as far as I could see them.

43:20 Wes: We should all just put a footnote on that. Right. To say that the substance of his debate with Luther was that Luther was denying free will and he was defending the concept of free will.

43:29 Nathan: Right, right, right. And Luther wrote a treatise three times the length of on the freedom of the will to try to smash him into little pieces.

43:37 Wes: Yep. And it's very mean. I was looking with great pleasure at this. It was just like, I'm like, wow, this is Amazing.

43:43 Dylan: Luther really was an asshole. Is that what you're saying?

43:46 Nathan: In every part of his career he was. And also as a Protestant, I think he had some brilliant theology. And both of those can be true.

43:53 Wes: I thought I got into trouble early on by calling him a fanatic, which was my impression from reading him and.

43:58 Nathan: Okay, no, no, no, no, no. That means you read him carefully.

44:00 Wes: Yes. All right.

44:02 Mark: This sounds like a good place to end. Part one supporters can get. Part two is the next thing in your feed. Just go to it. Thank you.