Ep. 302: Erasmus Praises Foolishness (Part Two)

0:07 Nathan: Hey.

0:08 Mark: This is the Partially Examined Life, episode 302, part 2. We've been discussing Erasmus, the Praise of Folly, with guest Nathan Gilmour. You had a point. You wanted to start with Wes.

0:19 Wes: Well, I thought we talked a little bit about the role of folly in the sense of illusion and deceit and things like that in human social relations. And the way that was kind of reminiscent of Nietzsche. So I thought maybe we could read a little bit. I think it's page 43. He's just got done saying that prudence actually requires experience. So normally we associate with prudence with rationality and wisdom. And here he's going to say, well, experience requires us to be undeterred in our experimentation with life and not thwarted by sense of propriety, not thwarted by fear.

1:00 Mark: Street smart.

1:02 Wes: So that kind of experience. And then someone might come back and say, this is the next sort of extension of this argument. Let's just put it that way. So page 43 in the Penguin. But if people prefer the sort of prudence which comes from forming judgments on life, please hear how far those who pride themselves on that account are from having it in the first place. It's well known that all human affairs are like the figures of Silenus described by Alcibiades and have two completely opposite faces. So that what is death at first sight, as they say, is life if you look within, and vice versa, life is death.

The same applies to beauty and ugliness, riches and poverty, obscurity and fame, learning and ignorance, strength and weakness, the noble and the baseborn, happy and sad, good and bad, fortune, friend and foe, healthy and harmful. In fact, you'll find everything suddenly reversed if you open the Silenus. So, for example, the king may be rich and powerful, but if you look more closely, you'll see he lacks any spiritual good, so he's the poorest of men. Or that our vices might enslave us, even if we seem free in the exterior. And then he moves on to talk about the ways in which unmasking this surface level.

So it sounds like me, we might want to unmask those things and see within. He's going to argue that that in fact is not what we should do. So unmasking, in the same way that unmasking actors spoils a play and destroys the illusion, the same thing goes for life, because all of life is a play. So let me just read that little part on 44. If anyone tries to take the masks off the actors when they're playing a scene on the stage and show their true natural faces to the audience, he'll certainly spoil the whole play and deserve to be stoned and thrown out of the theater for a maniac.

For a new situation will suddenly arise in which a woman on the stage turns into a man. A youth is now old and the king of a moment ago, suddenly, while a god has shown up as the common little man. To destroy the illusion is to ruin the whole play, for it's really the illusion and makeup which hold the audience's eye. Now, what else is the whole life of man but a sort of play? Actors come on wearing their different masks and all play their parts until the producer orders them off the stage. And he can often tell the same man to appear in different costume, so that now he plays a king in purple and now a humble slave in rags.

It's all sort of pretense, but it's the only way to act out this farce. And Shakespeare definitely ripped us off.

3:36 Nathan: Yes, yes, he did.

3:38 Mark: I take little for our little opening jokes, as I'm going through, I'll pull out quotes that look good, and this is one of them that I pulled out, like, you know, waiting for the producer to pull me off the stage, playing my part until the producer pulls me off the stage.

3:51 Dylan: Mm.

3:52 Wes: Ah, yes. That's what I should have said.

3:54 Dylan: The part that I would point us to is to tie it up is in the middle of the next paragraph where he's talking about the way in which you have people who are. The first sentence is probably good enough at this point. Let us suppose some wise man dropped from heaven confronts me and insists that the man whom all look up to as God and a master is not even human, as he's ruled by his passions like an animal and is no more than the lowest slave for serving so many evil masters of his own accord. Or again, we might tell someone who is mourning his father to laugh because the dead man is only just beginning to live, seeing that his life of ours is nothing but a sort of death.

Another man who boasts of his ancestry he might call lowborn and bastard because he is so far removed from virtue, which is the sole source of nobility. If we had the same sort of thing to say about everyone else, what would happen? We should think him a crazy madman. Nothing is so foolish as mistimed wisdom and nothing so less sensible than misplaced sense. That's what I wanted to get to. That to me is a really important part about this. This goes back to the double edged part about folly that we were talking about earlier and how we understand the salinus that we have here.

This perspectivism, right, is when he says that there's nothing so foolish as mistimed wisdom and nothing less sensible than misplaced sense. Much of what we had, especially in the beginning, was really about the first part. Making fun of people for having mistimed wisdom so they don't have the right. He's the beginning talking about the right kind of foolishness and he's making fun, especially later on, of the foolishness of

5:32 Wes: people who are too honest in social situations.

5:36 Dylan: Yes, and then nothing less sensible than misplaced sense. That is the overwroughtness of trying to be too analytical about the world. For instance, among other things, it reminds

5:48 Wes: me of Nietzsche's On Truth and Lie in the non Moral sense and some of the things we talked about with that. Right, so what is a nerd and what gets a nerd into trouble?

5:56 Dylan: That's the short title of that book,

5:58 Wes: Nietzsche on Nerd and Jock in the Right. So the nerd in the stereotype and then the pejorative stereotype. Maybe not the more recent positive stereotype, but in the pejorative stereotype of the nerd. It means evaluation of the truth at all costs. Evaluation of the truth at the expense of relationships. So when someone says something in a social circumstance, nerd says, well actually such and such, not realizing that most communication on a social level is suffused with metaphor and play and satire even, and irony and even deceit. And you don't tell the mourner to laugh because his loved one is in heaven.

Even if nominally right, we're all Christians and we're supposed to believe that. We're supposed to believe rationally. Well, why should we treat death as a misfortune? The fact is just that we do. And no one needs to be reminded of even of a religious truth at that moment. We defer to the human emotion in that situation. And remember that this is him getting the end of his prudence argument and saying true sign of prudence is basically telling these White lies and social circumstances, and willing to overlook people's bullshit, willing to overlook things with the rest of the world, as he puts it, and wear illusions with good grace.

So in other words, to honor the fact that life is a kind of comedy, it's a kind of play. And not to treat it as a thing in itself, in a sense. Right. As absolute reality with which I am always engaged in a rational way.

7:26 Mark: I want to make this into a question for Nathan, which is, is this kind of thing that you're talking about. Wes is talking about what makes him a humanist. That I know that humanists are. Well, they also brought in Greek sources. It was not just all about the Bible, but is it that what a humanism is in opposition to is a church that is like this monk like church is like the nerd church, where it's all in. The more godly are, the more imitatio Christi that you are, the better a recognition that, no, we were made in a certain way to have a human nature. And our point can't be to just throw aside that human nature and try to become Christ, like try to become gods.

8:06 Nathan: Part of the answer to that is that Erasmus actually does the work that you just narrated by bringing the Bible back in. You know, one of his big critiques of the. And he doesn't call them Paris theologians all the time, but it's mainly Paris theologians he's talking about is that they do try to emphasize the apatheia of Christ. You know, the stoic virtue that gets Christianized. He was never overcome by fear, never overcome by lust, never overcome by rage, so on and so forth, forth. And return to some episodes from the four canonical gospels that highlight the humanity of Christ. You know, the Jesus wept part of Christ. The Jesus turns on Peter and says, get behind me, Satan part of Christ

8:46 Mark: knocking over the tables. Well, what about the temple?

8:49 Nathan: That's the stereotype, though. I was trying to stay away from that one stereotype.

8:53 Dylan: That's like the perfect canonical example for a good reason.

8:56 Nathan: Understand the circle I travel in, Dylan. I gotta.

8:59 Wes: The badass Christ, the leather jacket wearing. Yes.

9:03 Dylan: He rides up on a motorcycle with a baseball bat in that scene.

9:06 Nathan: Oh, man. Not quite. Oh, for sure.

9:10 Dylan: Come on, people.

9:12 Nathan: After spending a day with crowds, goes away alone. And when he's in the boat, he falls asleep. One of the things that, you know, Erasmus criticizes in this text as well as in some other places where he goes after those theologians is precisely that they downplay those parts of the New Testament because they don't fit with the systematic kind of Aristotelian philosophy and theology that they're teaching at the University of Paris. What's interesting is in our day, because we do have the unflappable super Jesus stereotype floating around in the world. It sounds like he's going away from imitatio Christi. I think if you would ask Erasmus himself, he would say, I am bringing imitatio Christi into its fullness. I'm bringing in the parts that other people are ignoring.

9:59 Dylan: So this is where I just don't know that much about humanism. But the little bit that I was reading about to try to acquaint myself, to orient myself to why Erasmus is a humanist and made me think a lot about the politics involved in deprivation and making people not just comfortable with, but that they ought to understand their deprivation and their place as being strong in the face of it, that kind of thing. And it makes me wonder about how much of it's really about what Erasmus is reacting to, is really about theological questions about being over Aristotelian or something like that, and how much of it is just about a politics of deprivation. That question is probably not a fair question because it's really not about Erasmus. That's about the history of humanism and what humanism is reacting to and the history.

10:50 Nathan: But I can take a swing at it. You know, I think that the two are related. So I think that the supremacy of the monastic life in so much Christian writing of the Middle Ages is something that Erasmus is definitely starting to call into question, both because of his New Testament studies and because of his supreme interest in rhetoric, because rhetoric is a science of desires. I think this is why in this text and other places, he is allergic to Stoicism, because Stoicism as he understands Stoicism. And I know you guys have done some very good episodes on Stoicism, so feel free to complicate this.

But Stoicism, as he takes it, tries to purge emotion from human experience. Whereas the great masters of rhetoric, whether you're talking about Aristotle or Quintilian or Cicero or whoever else, they are supremely psychological thinkers. And they want to engage with a much broader range of human experiences, most of which involve emotion. I think that that rhetorical emphasis certainly has something to do with it. And then, I mean, a new engagement and a dealgorized engagement with texts like Hesiod and Ovid and, you know, all of the great mythological texts of antiquity are also giving these humanistic writers, whether you're talking about Erasmus or Valla or Ficino or whoever else you're talking about gives them an appreciation for that side of human experience that you're right.

There's a much longer running monastic version of denying desire. But even within Erasmus's day, just as people are starting to question that, there's a resurgent Stoicism that once again comes to question it from a different angle. And I think that Erasmus is taking a run at that truncated view of human nature, whether it's coming from the new Stoics or whether it's coming from the old monks.

12:43 Mark: So what made you. I probably asked this last time you were on the show.

12:47 Nathan: That was seven years ago. No one's going to remember it.

12:49 Mark: Call your podcast the Christian Humanist Podcast to identify. It's certainly not the same position within the set of historical influences that Erasmus or Ficino would be taking up, but it is also supposed to show as, or I think in common parliance. Well, humanism is the thing that is the alternative to religion is that, well, you could be into God or you could be into actual people. And that's Nietzsche's take on why religion is, you know, it's all anti life. It's all, you're ignoring the people right in front of you.

13:23 Nathan: Although it does make us interesting, which is one of my favorite sentences in the Genealogy of Morals. I'm like, I wouldn't want to play tennis with that man, because that was a backhand.

13:31 Mark: So it's Christian humanism now related to what we're actually talking about here.

13:35 Nathan: So I became interested in the phrase as an Undergrad in the mid-90s, you know, I was in an interdisciplinary humanities program, you know, modeled, roughly speaking, off of St. John's so I feel like I'm a kindred spirit with Dylan and Wes in that respect. But we read some Erasmus and, you know, we were introduced in our history readings to this notion that there were Christian humanists. And I had come up in a broadly evangelical youth group culture as a teenager, and I was told to be aware of secular humanism, which is Francis Schaeffer's great bugbear.

And so when I discovered that the word was much older than Francis Schaeffer and much older than the Humanist Manifesto, eventually I discovered that the Renaissance humanist borrowed it from Cicero. So it's even pre Christian. It's not even a Christian era kind of concept. I just became fascinated with it. When we were going to start our podcast. There weren't that many podcasts around at the time. So when we were kind of fishing around for titles, I said, why not the Christian Humanist podcast? And I kind of explained my fascination with them.

And I kind of finished my pitch to David and Michael with, and besides that, we control the atheists because they'll say, you stole our word. And we can say it was our word first. And honestly, I think it was that last bit, because we all have that sense of humor. I think that might have been what sold him on it.

14:51 Mark: So let's segue this, then back to Erasmus we were talking at the beginning of. Is this philosophy? Is this ethics? We've been hinting about it, you know, in these connections to Nietzsche. You know, when we talked about On Truth and Lie the first time, the tension was between people that interpreted Nietzsche. And you could interpret Erasmus here, maybe, as a relativist, right? If you say, well, everything is two sides, you know, or at least two sides. And so it depends on your mood, how you take it. You could take it. I could have faith this way, you could have faith that way.

You could have, you know, because even though faith means one thing for these guys, of course faith is going to lead you to Christianity. But from a modern perspective, well, why would I have faith in your religion as opposed to somebody else? You know, it just seems like faith is not directed. You know, that's a very existentialist take. Maybe, you know, if you're Kierkegaard, you're like, yeah, faith could jump in any number of directions. I'm going to jump it the one that it was inspired by this particular historical tradition, but it is an act of will.

15:48 Nathan: The reason I wouldn't call it philosophy is because in 1508, I don't think anyone would have recognized this as a philosophical text. I think that in its disruptive character, it is tiptoeing towards things that we can recognize as Nietzschean, like you guys nodded to, as dialectical, as we talked about briefly, even as Wittgensteinian, in certain ways. The most generous I could be with it on a philosophy podcast is to say that it is bumping up against walls that later philosophy would break through, but it doesn't quite break through them yet, because he is playing.

16:24 Mark: It could be relativism, or it could be, as we actually concluded and our guest concluded on that episode, merely that truth is not always useful. It's not that there is no truth. It's not that truth is relative in any sense. It's just that as we've been staying here, the nerd version that Wes was outlining, stating the truth on a particular circumstance, in all particular circumstances, is not necessarily called for. That there are Other values that need to be weighed against truth. It might be actually good for us to be deceived about some things.

16:52 Nathan: Right. Which is a supremely rhetorical position. The systematic impulse in philosophy says that whatever we say must be true for all cases, for all rational beings, for every possibility. Whereas I say this as someone who's taught freshman writing for 20 years. The constant mantra is, attend to your subject matter, attend to your audience, attend to your purpose, attend to your circumstances. We're not after here what is true in a geometrical sense, but we are interested in inviting people to see truth that they're unable to see right now. And that's going to mean attending to them psychologically in a way that a geometrical proof just doesn't have to do.

17:33 Dylan: Now, you want to make me want to talk about the rhetoric of a geometrical proof, but that's a completely different.

17:38 Mark: Okay, well, well, so how did you guys take this as a piece of rhetoric that is trying to get you to what ethical insight. What ethical insight are we getting out of it?

17:50 Nathan: So, first of all, I need to go ahead and say, in the interest of disclosure, Michael Farmer, as he often is when I pick the subject matter, was just utterly unimpressed and vaguely resentful that we were talking about it. David Grubbs thought it was just delightful, as David Grubbs tends to do. And as a trio, I think what we arrived at is kind of what I was getting at earlier, that this is a rhetorical performance. It relies on enthymeme truth. So, in other words, things that the reading public, to the extent that there's a reading public in 1508 already, can basically consent to in its elements.

But it is combining them in a playful and in an artistic way that gets people to confront certain things that they knew but they didn't want to know. So it's not necessarily that it's generating new knowledge, but because it is rearranging that knowledge artistically, it might get people to confront it. So, I mean, in that way, it's more like a really good sermon than it is like a philosophical treatise.

18:50 Mark: So, Wes, were you just delighted by the style, or did you feel like it was making some salient ethical points, or was it merely the psychological point?

18:58 Wes: Yeah, all of those things.

18:59 Mark: Well, what have we not talked about yet that we. What are some more points we want to pull out of the text?

19:04 Wes: Should we talk a little bit about the role of self love?

19:07 Mark: Yes.

19:08 Dylan: Can we talk about self love and forgetfulness, too?

19:11 Mark: Surgeon General recommends some self love to.

19:16 Wes: There's Two main parts of this, I would say, where self love comes up the most. But it sort of gets used after a certain point as a explanation. But early on, around page 35, he'll talk about the way in which self love is an important so self love, which is an extension of foolishness, is important because it grounds our ability to love others and tolerate others. So for instance, instead of envying others, if we have a overestimation of ourselves, that'll tamp down envy. And the same goes for any graceful act, any pleasant act. It plays a role in art and medicine and rhetoric.

Mark, you were talking about a little bit before. We need to have a certain amount of self esteem and maybe even overvaluation of ourselves before we can go about doing things designed to win the esteem of others. This is the first part of this, I'd say maybe if we want to read from some of this, but there's a second part of this whole self love thing that comes up later on.

20:24 Dylan: Go ahead.

20:26 Wes: So let's see, page 36. And since for the most part, happiness consists in being willing to be what you are, my self love has provided a shortcut to it by ensuring that no one is dissatisfied with his own looks, character, race, position, country and way of life. And so no Irishman would want to change places with an Italian, and so on and so forth. So we get into questions of identity here and being a type of person, right? So whether that's at the level of a racial or national identity, but also just the level of one's personality, one's character.

This is actually a pretty deep psychological point. Once we delve into it, it would be weird to suddenly be someone else. It would be very discordant with our identity and we would rebel against that. So we have an irrational attachment just to continue to be the type of entity that we are. And of course, our attachments to our country and to our family are ultimately irrational as well. They're based in self love in the sense of personal self love, but also the love of one's group, because one's group is part of one's type, part of one's typology, but also has a formative influence on you.

And then there's that connection. This point is actually quite profound when you start thinking about it.

21:48 Nathan: For Erasmus, I think why that psychological reality is important is because it is the root of most of our good works. So I mean, you know, most of us don't have the capacity that St. Paul sings of Christ in Philippians 2, that we can empty ourselves and take on the form of a servant, and so on and so forth. We have to feel good about ourselves when we do it. And you were alluding to this earlier, Wes, that in order to do those good works for others, we have to think ourselves important enough and competent enough to actually do benefit for the other.

Since we've been looping Nietzsche into this thing, I mean, this is the good deeds that only the great can do. Except Erasmus, I guess, responding to Nietzsche several hundred years earlier than Nietzsche is saying, what's even better than being a great man is thinking yourself a great man. Because then you are doing good for others in spite of your smallness and you don't run into all that sin.

22:42 Mark: Just to read one of the next sentences here, what remarkable foresight of nature it was to level out all these variations and make all alike. We all have the same sort of self esteem. Where she has withheld some of her gifts, she generally adds a tiny bit more self love. But silly of me to say this, seeing that self love is her greatest gift. Just let me add that no great deed was ever performed without my prompting and no new art discovered unless I was responsible. So there's actually several points shoved into there.

23:10 Wes: In contemporary psychological terms, we would be talking about narcissism, which is often. Right, pejorative, taken to be a pejorative, but. So this is a good example of the kind of Erasmus pivot, right? When we think of narcissism, we probably think of pathological narcissism and narcissists we've met and grandiosity and other sorts of negative traits. But also narcissism is just very basic to human psychology and it's absolutely necessary at this fundamental level. So Folly, the goddess Folly, can take anything that we might normally have a negative association with and say actually if we strip it down, we can show how it's fundamental to human psychology and even has a beneficial effect, which of course is not.

Even though the goddess Folly ignores this, it's not to say that there isn't such a thing also as pathological narcissism, which we might want to say apply to certain princes and popes and things like that in order to explain their behavior, which he will do in a way later on. He's going to use this term self love later on in the work to explain how it is that people doing all these silly and bad and often arrogant and entitled things could get any enjoyment out of that. It all comes down to this sort of self satisfaction. So this is another like madness, this is another sort of split concept.

24:30 Dylan: Is self satisfaction run awry, you want to say, or just like madness gone awry? They said there's a kind of possible dissatisfaction here. Maybe it's more of like, you recognize what Rasmus is talking about in taking delight in the satire of the importance of madness that is the antithesis of over seriousness, the kind of foolishness that reminds us and is the source of our humanity. But there's an overdoing it. There's a. I guess a line that is crossed and I guess he points to those things, but understanding exactly how you go from the kind of self love that is part of what makes us human and part of what makes us all part of one group that allows self recognition and a kind of comedy of relationship that makes that possible, to it being the vice of princes or a source of destruction. Yeah, I don't know that he gets to how we recognize those differences, except just pointing to them.

25:34 Wes: Yeah, it's a complicated question. And I also think, by the way, it's related to Thomas and the desire for recognition and ambition. And it's, you know, ambition can be malignant and overreaching and make us miserable, but it's not like we can just eliminate ambition and the desire for recognition from our lives. But to give you an example of the way he deploys this, he starts really deploying it as a concept in around page 76 and 77, when he wants to talk about all the different forms of folly. And he will start talking about. After he talks quickly about the vulgar crowd and all the stupid things they do, he will get into schoolmasters, which is a lot of fun.

So he's going to talk about a lot of different people who have a reputation for wisdom. And schoolmasters is the first category. And you know, he's going to talk about how they're famished and dirty and deaf with clamor, and yet they think they're among the best of men. They get some satisfaction from lording it over little kids and punishing them. And even though they are really in a position of servitude and squalor, in a way, maybe squalor is not the right word. They think of that as a kind of sovereignty. And part of that is being in a position of authority, being able to punish.

But part of that is also just the pleasure they take in their own learning and includes digging up manuscripts. It includes thinking maybe that they're a great poet and engaging in sort of mutual admiration societies with other intellectuals or engaging in pedantry and things like that. So what I would say about this is there's an element of narcissism and sublimation, any form of sublimation, because you are redirecting your desire away from something external towards one's own activity. Right. The pleasure of one's own particular artistic activities and creations.

But there's a very fine line between that and getting overly engaged with thinking about the audience and the recognition one gets from that sublimating artistic activity. So those are, in a way, two different forms of self love. So the movement from being creative, which really is a form of self love, I think, to getting aggrandized by, hey, look how great I am at being a creator.

27:56 Mark: The examples he gives those 99 on my. Here's a man uglier than an ape who rivals Nereus in his own eyes. And here's another who has only to trace three arcs with a compass to imagine himself Euclid. And when the ass playing the lyre with a voice worse than a squawking cock when he pecks his hen believes he sings like a second Hermogenes. In fact, that was one of my rejected intros believing that I sing like a second Hermogenes. So there's nothing right here that implies that that's necessarily the self deception is necessarily a matter of the boasting and projecting it toward others. It's merely thinking that it's like the earlier point that he made that isn't it nice? Isn't folly nice that when people aren't given equal gifts, one person is much uglier?

28:41 Wes: Maybe.

28:42 Mark: But then that person is compensated by having more self love and delusion about their bad looks.

28:48 Wes: Yeah. So this is a different point than the one it's earlier on in the text. Just to make a note of that. It's a little bit of a different point. And the stuff about schoolmasters and stuff comes in about 10 or 15 pages later.

29:01 Nathan: Right. That was the source of my opening quote because I loved it so much. Sounded like the Pink Floyd classroom.

29:06 Wes: Oh, really? The school masterpiece.

29:08 Nathan: Yep. Yep.

29:09 Mark: Yes. Roger Waters lifted directly from this book to write another brick in the wall. Erasmus says we don't need no education.

29:17 Nathan: One part that I enjoyed is 15 pages before that. Part of what makes this text so much fun is that folly is a moving target. Right. So I mean, in this passage, which is 57. Yeah. Fools can speak truth and even open insults and be heard with positive pleasure. Indeed, the words which would cost a wise man his life are surprisingly enjoyable when uttered by a clown. For truth has a genuine power to please if it manages not to give offense. But this is something the gods have granted only to fools. Here. Folly is not a deficiency of character. It's not a deficiency of intellect even, but it is a certain social standing.

If you are able to play the role of the fool, then you can say things that would get people who play the role of the sage in all kinds of trouble. And this is one of the things that I find most delightful about this text is that there's absolutely no attempt to pin down a single fixed definition of what folly is. It's just whatever it happens to mean in a given passage, that's what it means in that passage.

30:20 Wes: And this is really about being a comedian, right?

30:23 Nathan: Oh, yeah, yeah.

30:24 Dylan: And that's the way the whole beginning of it opens, right? It's a stand up routine.

30:30 Wes: Yeah. So as a satirist, he's doing that. Of course, he pissed off a lot of people.

30:37 Nathan: Yeah. And I don't know if you guys got a chance to look at the letter to Van Dorp that is published with this, what's amusing, especially knowing what we know about his exchange with Luther towards the end of his career in a much more pleasant way, to be sure, but in a way that's not dissimilar, kind of pulling a Luther on Van Dorp and saying, well, you know, of course, I mean, if you're not one of these vicious characters. I wasn't talking about you, so I don't know why you're acting so offended. Van Dorp, clearly I was only talking about the bad theologians. You're not one of those, are you? When I read this, because I'd never read this letter to Van Dorp before, it kind of diminished my pity for Erasmus when Luther goes off on him. Because I'm thinking, okay, you've been doing this to other theologians your whole career, Bob. You sowed the wind, let's use the biblical phrase.

31:23 Mark: Yeah, it's so nice. I mean, you create a piece of art and it has this irony and it's suspended. Then as soon as you start talking about it and you have to like, oh, no, no, what I meant, it just ruins it. You kind of just wish you didn't know any of that. But like, you know, by putting a thing out in the world and being an author who's standing behind it and getting attacked for it by necessity, you're going to get clarify. Which as scholars, we should be, of course, grateful for, that we actually get to know what Erasmus Actual views and don't just have to figure it out if this were the one and only thing that survived from him.

31:54 Dylan: Right?

31:54 Nathan: And one of the passages from this letter I just found just so insightful, even though a lot of it, Mark, just like you said, is someone trying to explain his jokes, which is always terrible. Page 160 of the paperback Penguin talking about these battles of words. What is surprising about such people is that for them there's no middle course. In some of the authors they read, they can find a trivial pretext for defending even the grossest of errors which come to their notice. While against others they are so prejudiced that nothing can be said without sufficient circumspection to escape their trumped up accusations.

Instead of behaving like this, tearing others to pieces and then being torn themselves, wasting their time and everyone else's, how much better it would be if they would learn Greek or Hebrew, Latin at least knowing that knowledge of these languages is so important for understanding the Holy Scriptures that it seems to me gross impertinence for anyone to assume the name of theologian if he is ignorant of them. So I read a little bit farther than I should have. What I found so pleasant, I'll put it that way, because it's not something that I hadn't thought before, but it's nice seeing it in a text from 500 years ago.

Is this awareness that these theological disputes are personality disputes just as much as they are disputes about propositions.

33:10 Wes: You're making me think of the dispute again with Luther. And yes, I don't know if you've heard of this book. It was called Fatal Discord by this journalist, Michael Massing.

33:20 Nathan: I got about 400 pages into it and a semester started, so I haven't. It's a doorstop of a book, the

33:26 Wes: Rasmus Luther and the Fight for the Western Mind. And it's really, really gripping. Right. It's just like. It's so engaging from the beginning, but it sort of sets up like Luther's path in a way won out. And it treats Erasmus's path, which was, you know, Erasmus was still focused on church reform, but from within and from a more modest, less fanatical standpoint, but you know, as sort of the road, the path not taken by Western civilization. We could have gone Erasmus humanist style, but instead what we got was the Protestant Reformation.

34:02 Nathan: And we're trying to do in our little corner of the Internet. There's a reason we don't have Luther's portrait on our podcast,

34:11 Mark: Dan Dennett's book that we Read for our four atheist horsemen is explaining like why religion catch on because it has this memetic quality. And you can see that the Luther point of view with the fanaticism like has this. You could see why politically, not just as if they were just put against each other intellectually, but just something that makes people actually want to fight for it. As opposed to Erasmus's, let's all calm down and be oh, absolutely, like that thing is not going to catch fire and conquer the world.

34:43 Wes: He was into both sidesism, false equivalence. He's one of those centrists that everyone hates. Yeah.

34:50 Nathan: Oh, you're hurting me. Last week, I will say, I don't know why I'm getting autobiography. I think I'm getting old and getting tired. But getting autobiographical here. But that's one of the things that hurts me most when my alumni from over the years, this is my 14th year as an English professor there at that little evangelical college. But they will, after they graduate, get really hardcore into progressive politics. And I often get accused of having taken a right wing swing after they graduated. And I always try to tell them, I mean, I'm just still your old English professor who has more questions than he has answers. And I'm trying to do this Erasmus thing and they want me to get Luther. You speak truth, Wes. You speak truth.

35:32 Wes: You're either with us or against us. Oh, man.

35:34 Mark: So one of the problems with the book, I actually want to read this passage about building like the transition from everybody's foolish and foolishness helps us. It helps us forget. It helps, you know, all the points that Nietzsche was making in that, you know, history essay that we just talked about in the last couple episodes ago. But then he makes this transition where he's actually criticizing people. There's a thing about a hunter is right before this, this is 95. In my version, much the same is the class of people are consumed with an insatiable passion for building, forever changing round to square and square to round without limit of proportion until they're reduced to utter destitution with nowhere to live and nothing to eat. I don't know who he's talking about here, but what is.

36:13 Nathan: I have no idea either.

36:15 Mark: But then he says, what does that matter? They've spent several years enjoying themselves to the full. Wait, are you saying is.

36:21 Wes: Are you still making the point she

36:24 Mark: is folly still making the point that who cares if what we're doing is ultimately meaningful or hitting at truth or is the thing that would maximize utility. If you're enjoying yourself, then this is not a bad way to spend your life, or is folly actually saying, yeah, this is a waste of your life. So it could be that some of these things, even against the theologians, the fact that he's against himself, are just trying to, again, point out excesses. It's not like he's against theologians. It's just. Don't you think some of these points that you were arguing about, even the disciples themselves would not have an opinion on?

36:59 Nathan: I think that's the important point is that you have made into gatekeeping questions you have made into tests of fellowship, to use the phrase, from my own church tradition, these things that were of no importance to the apostles. I think that's where, for me, the text gets out of his hands, because that's where it gets personal. Because he has been on the receiving end of the Paris theologians and their disciples for all of his young career. And so, I mean, he is personally exasperated that they want to come after him because, you know, of his quantities and his quiddities.

And he wants to say, no, no, no, let's read the Gospel of John. That's where the good stuff is. And they say, well, I mean, we can, but first we need to make sure that we've got our natura straight. And our. My theological Latin, as you can tell, is very bare. But you get the point, right? I think that that's why he gets personal there when he doesn't, when he's writing about even warfare, which he is about as pacifist a writer as you're going to find there in the 16th century. But he doesn't have personal beef against soldiers. He has personal beef against those parasites, theologians.

38:05 Wes: One other point about this whole building example, he's doing that as a follow up to his defense of ignorance against the learned. Then he gets into the idea that the Stoic frogs say there's nothing more pitiable than insanity. Then he makes that two forms of insanity distinction, one hellish and one that frees the souls from anxious cares and gives it manifold delights. But I think the point here is just that what's involved here is love, passion for things, right? Whether it's building or exploring, or even mentions gamblers, which is a weird example.

I think one of the ideas here is that there's no correspondence theory of truth for love. The same epistemological issues aren't at work. You're not thinking about how a subject, in some rational or accurate way hooks up with an object. Are they really beautiful? It just is what it is. It's a commitment. It's an act of faith, and you can call it madness, and there may even be terrible consequences to it.

39:04 Dylan: Right.

39:04 Wes: But it's good in and of itself in a sense.

39:07 Nathan: Right. The propositional takes a backseat to the ethical.

39:10 Mark: When Madonna demands that you justify my love, I'm incensed by that. That is a category mistake.

39:17 Wes: Madonna, Madonna, any love for you is completely unjustified I think we can all agree and yet we do it anyway.

39:26 Mark: Q E D so one of things about himself, it's this thing near the end about trilingual pedantry is what I wrote down. But as far as I. I knew that he himself was very into. I'm going to express this in the Greek, I'm express this in Latin. I'm going to express this, you know, that you had to know all of the modern and to understand anything, and that this was one of his peccadillos. And he's making fun of people like that, like himself. Because, likewise, Paul the Apostle didn't speak three languages. Of course, it wasn't like an issue back then of textual interpretation.

But, yeah, it's another one of these gatekeeping things. So it's just a weird mixture. You're saying it's personal, and some of it sounds like he's critiquing, like he's a theater critic. Like, oh, these people giving these sermons. And they've read their rhetoric books where, you know, you're supposed to be very quiet at first, and then they get. They get loud for no reason.

40:16 Nathan: On the evening that we are recording this, I was in our college's chapel service and present for a preacher that Erasmus might have been describing. So that part when I was going over my notes for tonight, I mean, that was even more hilarious than it was when I read it the first time. And remember, I mean, Erasmus himself writes a guide for preachers. The Ecclesiastes, not to be confused with the biblical book, it's very much a Christianized Quintilian. So, I mean, it is the good man speaking. Well, it is equal parts the character of the preacher and the.

Basically, a brief Guide to Rhetoric for Preachers. So when he sees these monks who are moral wretches getting up and doing sort of. I watched a YouTube video. Now I can deliver sermons. Yeah. I mean, he is not only, you know, a connoisseur of them, but part of his career is teaching preachers to preach. His preaching guide was both for Tridentine Catholics and for Reformed Protestants, the preacher's guide for the Reformation. So, again, that's personal.

41:17 Mark: So it's folly to make rhetorical mistakes, but it's also folly to be overly concerned with rhetoric. It's moderation again, I guess that's what we're getting.

41:25 Nathan: It's folly, Mark. It's folly. It is moderation. And again, you guys can absolutely call me on reading Hegel back into Erasmus. I really think that he's creeping up on something like it is both true that an ignorance of rhetoric is poisonous to sermonizing and also an overemphasis on rhetoric is poisonous to sermonizing. And both of those can't be true at the same time. And also both of them have to be true at the same time.

41:51 Wes: Well, and it has something to do with the paradox of self consciousness, Right. And the fact that there's a virtue to knowing how to do something, but then that gets undermined by the sense of self importance or that comes with knowing how to do it, taking oneself too seriously or leaning too much into the advice or performing it perfunctorily or mechanically. Right. That's one of the critiques he makes of the monks is where you lose, you know, and this is one of the critiques of the Protestant Reformation as well. Right? You give up actual faith.

And actually for Erasmus, duty and charity and good works, that all gets ignored in favor of. It's almost like these OCD type rituals. If I just have a collar of a certain thickness, and if I perform these rituals unthinkingly, even prayers, then that's good. I'm in. I'm in heaven. So it's not about what's in your heart anymore. It's simply about all these ceremonial symbolic acts.

42:50 Nathan: And if I can point to one more of Erasmus text that I think sheds some light on what he's doing. His rhetoric textbook, called the Copia, includes exercises where he recommends that students translate text from Greek into Latin and then from Latin back into the Greek. He suggests taking a sentence and rewriting it as many times as possible. And in fact, he even says, split your students up into groups and see which groups can come up with the most variations. He's a consummate teacher. But what emerges from that is that in that plenty, in that copiousness of expression, what happens is it's not that you get one right way and then an ever increasing pile of wrong ways to express or to communicate or to persuade, but you get a cumulative effect where because you've got so many options, you have a better chance to suit what you are doing to the audience, the occasion, the purpose, and so on and so forth that actually Confronts you.

So I know I keep returning to this, but I mean, I think that Praise of Folly is an exhibition of Erasmus as the consummately rhetorical thinker. And that goes all the way down to philosophy, that goes all the way down to theology. It goes all the way down to psychology, as west demonstrates.

44:08 Mark: Well, that sounds like a good closing thought, but let's go around. What you say makes me want to read some Zen or something, because I. The dialectic, to me it's, you know, because this whole thing is. This sentence that I'm saying now is false. Right. I am folly. I'm going to speak nothing but foolishness and then goes on for 100 pages. How are we supposed to take that? It's this paradox that is then supposed to lead you to somehow transcend that. You get something more profound out of it than if it was just stated literally up front.

44:37 Nathan: Or, I mean, if you want to go over to German speaking lands, it's Kant versus Wittgenstein.

44:41 Mark: Dylan, do you have any final thoughts? Are you going to write a stern letter to St. John saying, Put this in your curriculum?

44:47 Dylan: I will never do that. I was not disappointed by reading it, but I found it kind of tiresome myself. Honestly, I didn't find it particularly funny. It felt like it was trying too hard for my taste. I felt like it was deeply performative in terms of its satire. It wasn't like Mark Twain to me. It wasn't like Swift.

45:08 Mark: It was more like Andy Dick.

45:11 Dylan: Yeah. So yes, even not even having any mind of who Andy Dick is, I recognize and enjoyed the different pieces of it that we talked about. But I wouldn't recommend reading.

45:22 Mark: It's not coming to Dylan's desert island.

45:26 Dylan: So it's not coming to my desert island. Right.

45:29 Nathan: It was fine.

45:30 Wes: I would definitely put it on the St. John's reading list. I regret that I haven't read more and thought about humanism in general.

45:38 Mark: I might have turned up my nose at this if we'd read it in the first 50 episodes. I don't feel like it is in the core of like, oh, this is what you must read in philosophy. But at the point we're at now, compared to Ficino, I enjoyed this quite a lot more. And I can see why you're a humanist.

45:54 Nathan: And I'd be a pretty big hypocrite if I disagreed too much with Dylan because I teach a lot of Erasmus. I've never put this on a syllabus, so I'll set bounds to my hypocrisy.

46:05 Dylan: All Right.

46:05 Mark: Well, thanks so much for obviously your deep experience with Erasmus and this whole tradition, I think very much enriched our conversation here. Thank you, supporters. Why don't you reach out to us and let us know what you want us to read instead of things like Erasmus PL partially examinedlife.com or through the website, or follow us on Facebook or Twitter. Next time we're reading two selections in the Philosophy of Law by HLA Hart. His essay Positivism and the Separation of Law and Morals from 1958, and chapters five and six from his 1961 book the Concept of Law. Thanks everybody and good night.

46:43 Dylan: Good night.

46:44 Wes: Good night.

46:44 Nathan: Good night.