Societas Christiana

Giannozzi Manetti (1396-1459) writes in his work On the Dignity of Man that while it is true that man’s life in the body is full of many vexations, at the same time God has provided many good things, both in terms of external sensory experience and interior intellectual and spiritual life, to offset these evils. After dwelling on these goods for a bit, he concludes his reflection on man’s dignity by grounding it ultimately in the fact that on the Last Day, Christ will raise up our mortal bodies and make them immortal. One intriguing thing about his argument is his speculation about the age we will all have when we are resurrected:

For we shall all arise in the perfect and complete age of just 30 years. As the Apostle says: “Until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ. (Eph. 4:13) Although in His 33rd year Christ underwent His passion yet it was in His 30th year that He came forth from the desert where He had so long hidden Himself in prayer and meditation and appeared in full view of the world. Because of this we shall rise at the suitable age of thirty. And, at the resurrection we shall be present not only in the age of Christ but also, mirabile dictu, with His bodily stature as the Apostle testifies in his own words when he says: “For those whom He foreknew He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son.” (Rom. 8:29) [In Two Views of Man: Pope Innocent III, On The Misery of Man, [and] Giannozzo Manetti, On the Dignity of Man, trans. and ed. Bernard Murchland (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1966), pp. 96-97]

After reading Our Food From God, I am even more convinced than ever that the Ancients had a much better sense of what human life is about than we, in our Modern “wisdom” do. That’s a huge topic with lots of side streets and alleys, but the basic point about the dehumanizing (and deanimalizing) effects of the industrialistic-scientific approach to the world seems clear and sound.

Of course, if you live in a city and you’re not a complete vegetarian, it is extremely difficult to imagine how you could eat at all without in some sense buying into this mentality. Where else are you going to get your meat but from a grocery store, all nice and neat and packaged in shrink-wrapped squares, everything possible having been done to remove from your consciousness all the dirty, nasty, bloody, abusive things that had to be done to get the “product” to you? Modern cities are machines, and they are so large and so complex that only a machine (the factory) could care for its needs. How do you have a robust concern for the True, the Good, and the Beautiful in a Modern city?

An important aspect of Renaissance humanism as discussed by Charles Trinkaus is exemplified by Petrarch’s concept of the life of faith as being primarily psychological rather than epistemological. This seems to correspond to the conflicts between humanism and scholasticism, between rhetoric and logic, between faith and reason, between mysticism and rational speculation. As a general rule, the humanists disliked the traditional emphasis on the reason of man, preferring instead an emphasis on the will of man. They preferred a concept of faith that was less about great, all-ecompassing “systems of doctrine” than about a grace-empowered ethical movement of man up out of his lowly condition to God. They preferred (like the Nominalists) to rest Christian faith directly on trust in revelation (the Scriptures) than submitting it to philosophical analysis. Like the mystics (particularly the “Modern Devotion” movement) they leaned toward personal experience of God rather than subsuming the individual into the Church.

Trinkaus lets Petrarch speak for himself on the predominance of a psychological rather than an epistemological approach to the Faith. Petrarch starts with man’s natural condition, which in so many ways (war, disease, poverty, natural disasters, and so on) can lead only to despair based on the awful recognition of one’s profoundly sinful status in separation from God. The enemy of man’s soul, writes Petrarch,

does not dare to assert that anything is impossible to God lest by any such open perfidy he rip away confidence in himself. What thence? He can do all; He wishes besides to give all goods to mankind: we however are unfit and unworthy to receive the divine gifts. And this meditation actually often disturbs the souls of many: God indeed is the best; I, moreover, the worst; what proportion is there in such great contrariety? I know not only by the authority of our writers but by Platonic assertion also how far removed envy is from That Best One, and on the contrary I know how tightly iniquity is bound to me. Moreover, what does it matter that He is ready to benefit when I am unworthy to be treated well? I confess the mercy of God is infinite, but I profess that I am not fit for it, and as much as it is greater, so much narrower, indeed, is my mind, filled with vices. Nothing is impossible to God: in me there is a total impossibility of rising, buried as I am in such a great heap of sins. He is potent to save: I am unable to be saved. For however great the clemency of God, certainly it does not exclude justice, and mercy as immense as you wish must be reduced to the measure of my miseries, for no actions of agents are operative with regard to an incapable recipient, as pleases the natural philosophers, and although a weak spark may ignite a dry reed, the force of water extinguishes a great flame. [Cited from "The Repose of the Religious," in In Our Image and Likeness: Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought (The University of Chicago Press, 1970), pg. 29]

Calling such thoughts of despair “a sort of silent counsel of angels loving us,” Petrarch moves immediately into emphasizing the infinite power of God to resolve all human difficulties.^[1] Because “the mercy of God by far transcends human misery and justice, and if it does not destroy it, still it tempers and limits it” (ibid., pg. 30),

Far be it from Him to [require punishment], far be it from us to believe it. Anyone who considers that He will not show mercy to someone who wishes forgiveness, or that He is only able to show mercy in proportion to a man’s sin, thinks badly about God and has a poor opinion concerning His power and mercy, since the sin of man, however great it is, is certainly finite, the goodness of God infinite, His power infinite.

In a world troubled by the calamities of war (the Hundred Years War) and the horrors of plague (the Black Death), very harsh visions of God, and very extreme practices of piety toward Him because of His harshness, were very common. Petrarch, living with all of this as much as anyone else, nevertheless turns the Christian’s eyes away from his natural condition of misery and up to God’s supernatural love and grace:

This, therefore, is the sum of it: cling to hope, let no one take that away from you; and if what we hope for may well be large, they are large matters to us; to God nothing is large before Whom ‘our substance is as nothing’, and ‘before Whose eyes ‘a thousand years are as yesterday when it passes’. They are great things, I admit, indeed immense if compared to human merits. Elevate your minds to the Giver: everything will seem very small and not only possible but easy. For what is it, I ask, which makes hope waver and souls shake? We seem worthy of punishment, unworthy of mercy, and in both we are not mistaken: for it is our part to be afflicted, His to be merciful. And it is a worthy thing for His dignity to swallow up our lack of dignity, which certainly could not happen if the sin of man could impede the mercy of God. So be it, therefore, that we are worthy of hatred: He is worthy of mildness and mercy: He is worthy to spare, worthy to hate nothing of all the things which He made, worthy to abandon no one of those whom the Father delivered unto Him. [Ibid., pg. 31]

Note in this passage especially the predominance of the appeal to the personal and the subjective (faith, hope, and love) as over against the impersonal and the abstract (the grinding, crushing events of the world). Petrarch elevates the psychological above the epistemological, the ethical above the rational, warm, vibrant faith above cold, sterile reason. A final quote on this point is illuminating:

Thinking over these matters, since all works of God towards human kind seem miracles and full of ineffable grace, nothing seems impossible, nothing incredible; since this foundation stands that God is omnipotent and all-benevolent, nothing can be imagined so magnificent that He cannot do it, so beneficent that He does not wish it. Whatever faith constructs on this foundation will stand solid and unshaken by all the undermining and battering rams of the enemy, and whatever he has brought up, its impetus and force will be blunted by ready and easy obstacles. Once these things are received in faith everything is plain: God has come among men borne of a virgin and dwelt among us, taught us the way of life; having been crucified, He suffered and died, descended to the lower regions, despoiled Hell, ascended to heaven and is awaited for judgment. These are great things, I admit, but what of all these is impossible for God? (Ibid., pg. 32)

It is just after this quote that Trinkaus raises the intriguing observation I noted in my last post, namely, the relationship of this theology of grace and faith to that of the Reformation some 150 years later. Trinkaus doesn’t explore the question, but it surely seems worthy of exploration.

Charles Trinkaus argues intriguingly that the Renaissance ideal of human dignity rested, for the major humanists, on the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation rather than on a pagan-like overestimation of human powers. Trinkaus cites Petrarch, whom he calls “a man between despair and grace,” on the foundation of man’s consciousness of his misery in this world:

Between heaven, certainly, and earth there is a great distance, I admit, but finite; between God and man indeed infinite. Man certainly is earth whence he received his name, from earth born, on earth living, into earth returning; God, moreover, is not heaven but the creator of heaven, as much higher than heaven as earth, at the same time present in both and distant from both. [In Our Image and Likeness: Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought (The University of Chicago Press, 1970), pg. 36]

In other words, as Trinkaus summarizes, “Man’s natural knowledge of himself leads only to a knowledge of his misery and hence to despair, since man is even farther from God than earth is from heaven” (ibid.). However, Petrarch does not remain in despair. He is a Christian (and more particularly, an Augustinian), and so he knows that God has provided the ultimate bridge between Himself and man, the bridge of Jesus Christ:

Certainly our God came to us, so that we may go to Him, and at the same time our God was mixed with men, when ‘having been found clothed as a man’ he dwelt in us; for certainly, what not only Plato denying but Seneca confessing did not know, and what would have been wholly unknown to man if perchance divinity had not revealed it to him, by an unchanging law of divine wisdom from eternity humanity was to be raised up, divinity bent down. And both equally having happened, there occurred the salutary and celebrated union without which humanitas would have lain sick and torpid forever. Neither one could be done without the other; or rather it could be done through none other than through Him who ‘bowed down His heavens and descended’, who looked upon earth and made it tremble. And so through Him it was done and not through another. O indescribable sacrament! For where could humanity be lifted higher than that man consisting in a rational soul and human flesh, mortal man subject to accidents, dangers, our necessities, and, as I briefly shall say it, true and perfect man, ineffably adopted by the Word, the Son of God, consubstantial with the Father and co-eternal to God and the unity of person, should join together two natures in himself by a marvellous aggregation of wholly unequal things? Where I ask can man ascend higher than that man should be God? [Ibid., pg. 37]

Trinkaus then comments that the Incarnation is “one of the theological foundations of the humanists’ much repeated theme of the dignity and excellence of man, rooted in a conception of the Incarnation which reverses the traditional emphasis on human lowliness” [Ibid.]. As a parenthetical end note, I’d like to point out that Trinkaus had earlier said (pg. 32) that Petrarch’s discussions of grace and revelation are related in some sense (which he doesn’t explore) to the Reformation doctrine of sola fide and the Gospel. Interesting, since Petrarch flourished about 150 years before the Reformation.

Romans 1:18-32 starkly says:

The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities–his eternal power and divine nature–have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse. For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles. Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator–who is forever praised. Amen. Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion. Furthermore, since they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, he gave them over to a depraved mind, to do what ought not to be done. They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; they are senseless, faithless, heartless, ruthless. Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them.

This passage of Scripture often sees action in the attempts of some Christians to say that unregenerate man cannot “truly” understand anything about God, about themselves, or about the world, because in their sin they have “suppressed” the truth, their thinking has become “futile,” and they have been “given over by God” to the results of their sin. Hand-in-hand with verses like “The natural man does not understand the things of God for they are spiritually discerned” (1 Cor. 2:14), and “What fellowship has light with darkness” (2 Cor. 6:14), and “Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things” (Col. 3:2), the Romans passage is used by some to prove that the unregenerate are, almost as it were, an entirely different race of beings from the regenerate. They do not even understand the truth that stares them in the face, let alone accept it.

By contrast, Acts 17:17-33 conveys very clearly the idea that unbelievers can and do know quite a lot about God, themselves, and the world even though their minds are darkened by sin:

While Paul was waiting for them in Athens, he was greatly distressed to see that the city was full of idols. So he reasoned in the synagogue with the Jews and the God-fearing Greeks, as well as in the marketplace day by day with those who happened to be there. A group of Epicurean and Stoic philosophers began to dispute with him. Some of them asked, “What is this babbler trying to say?” Others remarked, “He seems to be advocating foreign gods.” They said this because Paul was preaching the good news about Jesus and the resurrection. Then they took him and brought him to a meeting of the Areopagus, where they said to him, “May we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting? You are bringing some strange ideas to our ears, and we want to know what they mean.” (All the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there spent their time doing nothing but talking about and listening to the latest ideas.) Paul then stood up in the meeting of the Areopagus and said: “Men of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: -to an unknown god. Now what you worship as something unknown I am going to proclaim to you. “The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything, because he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else. From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live. God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us. ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’ “Therefore since we are God’s offspring, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone–an image made by man’s design and skill. In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent. For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to all men by raising him from the dead.” When they heard about the resurrection of the dead, some of them sneered, but others said, “We want to hear you again on this subject.”

Notice some important things about the Acts passage relative to the Romans 1.

Despite the fact that unbelievers “suppress the truth in unrighteousness,” they do in fact know the truth about God because God has made it plain to them. Note that their suppressive activity is ethical - it results in God judging them by giving them over to a catalogue of grossly evil actions. Romans 1 does not indicate that man’s sin has made him ontologically evil or epistemologically blind. The Acts 17 passage makes it as plain as can be that God has ordered human life in such a way that man can seek him and perhaps “reach out for him and find him.” As another translation puts it, men can “grope for God.” As a general rule, men may try to get far from God, but God is not far from men. If He has arranged things such that men can “grope” for Him, and if, as we know from Hebrews 11, He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him, is it proper to read the Romans passage as an absolute rather than a rhetorical statement?

I’ve now added to this site a store where you can purchase audio materials about many of the issues I discuss on this blog. Currently I have a handful of MP3s and the two books I have written, in both printed and pdf format.

I plan to add more audios and printed materials as I have time, and, being sensitive to the times we live in, I plan to keep the prices as low as I can. This new store isn’t about making me money to pay my bills, but about trying to disseminate some of these materials more widely than has yet happened. The reason I’m charging even the small fees for them that I am charging is simply because it takes time for me to do the recordings, and as Scripture says, “the workman is worthy of his hire.”

NOTES:

(1) On the audios, at present I only have single MP3 files available. However, if enough people let me know that normal CD format would be helpful, or that grouping files together and burning them on CDs for sale, I may be able to offer that as well. If you purchase the MP3 files, my preferred way of getting them to you is by e-mail attachment, so you will need to have broadband Internet. If this is simply not possible for you, let me know and I may be able to work out burning multiple files that you are interested in and shipping you a CD.

(2) At present the only payment option on the store is PayPal, so if you don’t have an account with them you’ll have to set one up.

Discussing the concept of the will as man’s fundamental feature, a concept profoundly shaped by Augustine’s Confessions, Charles Trinkaus points out the very different use of Augustine’s ideas which Renaissance writers such as Petrarch fostered, which differed greatly from Augustine’s own:

although he remained marvellously aware of the personal and spiritual elements of religion, in his subsequent career as a Churchman [Augustine] created an objective theological structure and an ecclesiastical programme that was to endure for centuries. The more intense and sensitive medieval ecclesiastics, for instance Bernard of Clairvaux or Bonaventura, always could rediscover the subjective depths of religious feeling in St. Augustine but for the most part his great influence over the medieval centuries was through the structural and doctrinal elements of his writings. It was with the Italian humanists that Augustine’s great spirituality was again comprehended, but this time without the ecclesiastical context with which he objectified and surrounded his deep personal insights. [In Our Image and Likeness: Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought Vol. 1 (The University of Chicago Press, 1970), pg. 20]

In other words, long before the Reformation, the force of a much more personal-moral and will-oriented Christianity found in Augustine was unleashed by the Italian humanists in direct contrast to the more bureaucratic-scientific and reason-oriented approach of the Church hierarchy. Note that while this represented to some extent a modification of Augustine, it nevertheless came from Augustine. And note also that this is all part of a massive and systematic change taking place on all fronts of culture, with no one able to see how it was going to turn out. Medieval blends almost seamlessly into Renaissance, and Renaissance blends almost seamlessly into Reformation, Augustine modifies Augustine, and in the confused and exciting and oh so very human jumble very few can be accurately said to be “Black Hats” or “White Hats.” This story isn’t about Truth Vs. Error, Light Vs. Darkness, the Gospel vs. the False Gospel, Christ’s One True Apostolic Bureaucracy Vs. Individual Heretic-Rebels Wielding Private Judgment, or any of the other vain, shallow caricatures of developed post-16th century polemical traditions. God almost always seems to work in ways much more mysterious than that.

This quote from Richard of Bury (1281-1385) is surely somewhat rhetorical, but I think it nevertheless strikes home as a critique of our own shallow world:

Although the novelties of the moderns were never disagreeable to our desires, who have always cherished with grateful affection those who devote themselves to study and who add anything either ingenious or useful to the opinions of our forefathers, yet we have always desired with more undoubting avidity to investigate the well-tested labours of the ancients. For whether they had by nature a greater vigour of mental sagacity, or whether they perhaps indulged in closer application to study, or whether they were assisted in their progress by both these things, the one point we are perfectly clear about is that their successors are barely capable of discussing the discoveries of their forerunners, and of acquiring those things as pupils which the ancients dug out by difficult efforts of discovery. [Cited in R.R. Bolgar, The Classical Heritage and It's Beneficiaries, pp. 240-241]

The more I dig into classical, Renaissance, and Medieval texts, the more I become convinced that we Moderns have simply lost the robust, holistic way of thinking and living that our pre-Reformation and earliest Reformation fathers and brothers had. This isn’t some romantic pining after a mythical lost “Golden Age,” or some merely curmudgeonly whining - it’s a justifiable lament that in so many ways we today don’t have the basic tools to truly understand the world that our fathers had. We have people who go to seminary for years to learn how to cite Calvin from memory, but precious few of them could themselves actually write what Calvin wrote. We have people who bluster about the “compromises” of past generations of pagans and Christians, but who exhibit next to no interest in actually reading widely, sympathetically, and comprehensively so as to actually understand what they are talking about. On and on it goes - but on almost every front we are, as Bury said, “barely capable of discussing the discoveries of our forerunners.” Yet we have the arrogance to imagine that we are better and more spiritual than them, that our truncated little lives of obsessing about “sound doctrine” and “the solas” and “being consistently biblical” actually constitute intelligent thought and living. We don’t have any Augustines or Dantes or Calvins today because, as I often quote from King Alfred, “we have lost the wealth and the wisdom because we have not wished to set our minds to the track.”

This author suggests in the middle of his piece that Augustine’s “Two Cities” construct in City of God was akin to Plato’s “Two Worlds,” and that the Renaissance humanists were attempting to overcome the artificial separation and reconcile the Two Cities.

That’s simply a fascinating thought. My politics professor recently argued that Augustine made a fundamental mistake in separating the Two Cities so radically - that is, in making the City of God primary and much more important than the City of Man - because in the real world of human experience the two are always intertwined in complex ways that aren’t easily teased apart. The Renaissance humanists certainly reacted strongly against the Medieval elevation of the spiritual over the temporal, the Church over the Republic, the priests over the people, Aristotle over Plato, and other such pairings.

In this light I find the author’s suggestion that the humanists were trying to reconcile Augustine’s Two Cities fascinating. Especially when one considers the Augustinianism of Petrarch, the father of the Renaissance. Petrarch kept the Confessions of Augustine with him always, and was a thoroughgoing Augustinian in his understanding of human nature, sin, and redemption. Petrarch never mastered Greek, and thus never got as deep into Plato as later humanists (like Ficino) would, but what Plato he knew, he loved. Petrarch wanted the ideal life of solitary intellectual contemplation, and yet he passionately desired the unification of Italy, which could only be brought about through the mundanities and vulgarities of politics. So the interesting thing is that humanism loved Plato, but humanism also didn’t love the Platonic separation of the Two Worlds. Were the humanists Augustinians trying to out-Augustine the Saint?

By way of clever and often very funny satire, the French humanist Francois Rabelais (1494-1553) attacked the perceived sterility of Scholastic logic and the world-denial of the traditional monastic orders. One of his attacks came in the form of a monastic order he himself invented, the Thelemites. This passage outlines a whole program of education for a free people. I like this passage, especially his summary at the end about being “a veritable abyss of knowledge” so that one can go out into the world and attack the enemies and defend one’s friends.

The Rules According to Which the Thélèmites Lived

All their life was regulated not by laws, statutes, or rules, but according to their free will and pleasure. They rose from bed when they pleased, and drank, ate, worked, and slept when the fancy seized them. Nobody woke them; nobody compelled them to either eat or to drink, or to do anything else whatsoever. So it was that Gargantua had established it. In their rules there was only one clause:

DO WHAT YOU WILL!

because people who are free, well-born, well-bred, and easy in honest company have a natural spur and instinct which drives them to virtuous deeds and deflects them from vice; and this they called honour. When these same men are depressed and enslaved by vile constraint and subjection, they use this noble quality which once impelled them freely towards virtue, to throw off and break this yoke of slavery. For we always strive after things forbidden and covet what is denied us.

Making use of this liberty, they most laudably rivaled one another in all of them doing what they saw pleased one. If some man or woman said, “Let us drink,” they all drank; if he or she said, “Let us play,” they all played; if it was “Let us go and amuse ourselves in the fields,” everyone went there. If it were for hawking or hunting, the ladies, mounted on fine mares, with their grand palfreys following, each carried on their daintily gloved wrists a sparrow-hawk, a lanneret, or a merlin, the men carrying the other birds.

So nobly were they instructed that there was not a man or woman among them who could not read, write, sing, play musical instruments, speak five or six languages, and compose in them both verse and prose. Never were seen such worthy knights, so valiant, so nimble both on foot and horse; knights more vigorous, more agile, handier with all weapons than they were. Never were seen ladies so good-looking, so dainty, less tiresome, more skilled with the finger and the needle, and in every free and honest womanly pursuit than they were . . . .

Now every method of teaching has been restored, and the study of languages has been revived: of Greek, without which it is disgraceful for a man to call himself a scholar, and of Hebrew, and Latin. The elegant and accurate art of printing, which is now in use, was invented in my time, by divine inspiration; as, by contrast, artillery was inspired by diabolical suggestion. The whole world is full of learned men, of very erudite tutors, and of most extensive libraries, and it is my opinion that neither in the time of Plato, of Cicero, nor of Papinian were there such faculties for study as one finds today. No one, in future, will risk appearing in public or in any company, who is not well polished in Minerva’s workshop. I find robbers, hangmen, freebooters, and grooms nowadays more learned than the doctors and preachers were in my time.

Why, the very women and girls aspire to the glory and reach out for the celestial manna of sound learning. So much so that at my present age I have been compelled to learn Greek, which I had not despised like Cato, but which I had not the leisure to learn in my youth. Indeed I find great delight in reading the Morals of Plutarch, Plato’s magnificent Dialogues, the Monuments of Pausanias , and the Antiquities of Athenaeus, while I wait for the hour when it will please God, my Creator, to call me and bid me leave this earth.

Therefore, my son, I beg you to devote your youth to the firm pursuit of your studies and to the attainment of virtue. You are in Paris. There you will find many praiseworthy examples to follow. You have Epistemon for your tutor, and he can give you living instruction by word of mouth. It is my earnest wish that you shall become a perfect master of languages. First of Greek, as Quintillian advises; secondly, of Latin; and then of Hebrew, on account of the Holy Scriptures; also of Chaldean and Arabic, for the same reasons; and I would have you model your Greek style on Plato’s and your Latin on that of Cicero. Keep your memory well stocked with every tale from history, and here you will find help in the Cosmographies of the historians. Of the liberal arts, geometry, arithmetic, and music, I gave you some smattering when you were still small, at the age of five or six. Go on and learn the rest, also the rules of astronomy. But leave divinatory astrology and Lully’s art alone, I beg of you, for they are frauds and vanities. Of Civil Law I would have you learn the best texts by heart, and relate them to the art of philosophy. And as for the knowledge of Nature’s works, I should like you to give careful attention to that too; so that there may be no sea, river, or spring of which you do not know the fish. All the birds of the air, all the trees, shrubs, and bushes of the forest, all the herbs of the field, all the metals deep in the bowels of the earth, the precious stones of the whole East and the South — let none of them be unknown to you.

Then scrupulously peruse the books of the Greek, Arabian, and Latin doctors once more, not omitting the Talmudists and Cabalists, and by frequent dissections gain a perfect knowledge of that other world which is man. At some hours of the day also, begin to examine the Holy Scriptures. First the New Testament and the Epistles of the Apostles in Greek; and then the Old Testament in Hebrew. In short, let me find you a veritable abyss of knowledge. For, later, when you have grown into a man, you will have to leave this quiet and repose of study, to learn chivalry and warfare, to defend my house, and to help our friends in every emergency against the attacks of evildoers.

[From The Histories of Gargantua and Pantagruel]

Peter Leithart has this interesting short post on Bavinck and Total Depravity. I’m not sure where he’s quoting from, but it’s very interesting. Perhaps it’s because much of my early formation in Calvinism came from populist TULIP-thumpers and Van Tillian polemicists, but it’s always refreshing to me to read Reformed theologians talking about central Reformed doctrines in a more moderate and qualified sense like Bavinck does here. This is what I was getting at in my post a few months ago “Iustitiam Carnis and Total Depravity.”

I believe that some of the biggest problems with contemporary Reformed thinking come from the fanatical rejection of pretty much everything outside of what is speciously called “the plain meaning of Scripture.” The endless and pretty much inane assaults on truths outside of Scripture and on man’s ability to truly know things apart from Scripture cripple the Reformed ability to really engage not just with unbelievers but with other Christian traditions as well. This approach to the world fosters a silly idealism about “Truth” that basically turns Reformed Theology into an intellectual ghetto. It’s nice, via men like Hodge, Dabney, and Bavinck, to be reminded that it doesn’t have to be this way.

In a comment on Doug Wilson’s blog, a “Mister Ed” cited Gary North’s book The Myth of Pluralism in response to another commenter’s questions about the Founding Fathers in relation to contemporary American political thought. I haven’t read the North book, but according to the commenter, North “argues the shrewd (and relatively unexplored) thesis that the founders…were NOT the same group of worthies as were the framers (of the constitution.) Whereas the founders took Christo-centrism for granted, the framers explicitly left it out, thereby setting the stage for the political polytheism that besets us today. The foundational error made by the framers is the belief that pluralism in a culture is sustainable. It is not. The more pluralistic our society becomes, the more difficult it becomes to prop up the myth of neutrality.”

This is simply a fascinating comment. Let me explain why.

In Ancient political thought, a constitution was not, as it is for us, a written document standing above and beyond an abstract “system of government,” a mechanism, which is thought to be self-contained, neutral with respect to ideology, and unrelated to the personal views of the people who fill its offices. In Ancient political thought, a constitution was, rather, a whole mode of life encompassing morality, economics, the arts, and a concept of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful at which the society was supposed to aim and for the attainment of which it was supposed to train its citizens. In this connection, at least two of Plutarch’s Lives, Lycurgus and Marcus Cato, take time to chronicle their subjects’ views that if a city allows foreign influences to freely enter it, the pluralism of viewpoints that results from exposing the citizens to new and different ideas than the ones advocated by their own constitution will undermine and probably even destroy the city. To this end, Lycurgus absolutely forbade his Spartans to allow foreigners into Sparta, and Plutarch says the resulting purity of political vision is one reason why Sparta’s republic lasted 900 years. Similarly, Marcus Cato vehemently protested the influx of Greek philosophy and rhetoric into Rome, believing that in time it would utterly destroy the Republic.

In the Ancient world, to change a set of rulers simply entailed changing the whole constitution of a city. Think of this in terms of the three good forms of government which Ancient political thinkers recognized. A democratic leader would necessarily set the city on a democratic constitutional path.^[1] An aristocratic party would necessarily set the city on an aristocratic constitutional path. A monarchical leader would necessarily set the city on a monarchical constitutional path. Each of these constitutions addressed different parts of the soul: democracy addressed the Many (the appetites), aristocracy addressed the Few (the desire for Virtue), and monarchy addressed the One (reason). Further, each of these constitutions had a particular corruption into which it might fall: democracy tended toward lawless mob rule, aristocracy tended toward a selfish oligarchy, and monarchy tended toward crude tyranny.

Furthermore, for Plato, Aristotle, and Plutarch, the maintenance of a given constitution (again, a whole way of life) necessarily implied a particular form of publicly-sponsored education for the citizens. Plutarch says that Numa Pompilius, the second legendary king of Rome before the Republic was founded, was the very fulfillment of Plato’s ideal of “the philosopher king,” but Numa’s peaceful program for Rome did not outlast his death because he left education to individual families’ private preferences, thus producing a welter of conflicting viewpoints within the city. The Romans could only come together as a true unity in times of emergency, when everyone was threatened by a common enemy. In all normal times there was immense discord within the city because, thanks to disunified education, the citizens labored against each other in accord with their numerous competing concepts of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful.

The message of the Ancient concept of politics seems to be exactly what “Mister Ed” stated in reference to North’s Myth of Pluralism: “The foundational error made by the framers is the belief that pluralism in a culture is sustainable. It is not. The more pluralistic our society becomes, the more difficult it becomes to prop up the myth of neutrality.” In other words, the more competing visions of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful which a society tolerates living side by side, the more fragmented it becomes. But since fragmentation of a society is undesirable (it means the destruction of unity), the only way to stave off recognition of the fragmentation is to try all the harder to prop up the myth of a more fundamental unity. The more “diverse” America becomes, the less unified it is, and yet the one thing everyone must believe, as is hammered home in public schools by the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance, is that America is “one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” America is, we are taught in the public schools and in our entertainment outlets, neutral with respect to morality and religion. What matters more than everything else is “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” and, of course, “justice for all.”

But to bring the wisdom of the Ancients to bear on our Modern problems, what exactly are these things called “liberty” and “justice” and “life” and “the pursuit of happiness”? America has no common vision of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful, but rather a welter of visions about these things. Morality and religion are relative to what goes on inside the four walls of your church or inside your own personal heart, based on “what works for you.” Americans are all over the map on abortion, women’s rights, racial equality, homosexuality, economics, religion, and, yes, even politics. America is supposed to be a “melting pot” of diverse ideas, the place where “out of Many come One” (e pluribus unum) and yet as we increasingly see in our day - especially in such things as the current presidential election and the conflict in California over homosexual marriage - the “melt” has somehow failed to produce a coherent, well-blended and unified product.

The great “myth of neutrality” is, as “Mister Ed” said, getting harder and harder to prop up, because the fundamental fragmentation of our society is increasingly tending toward the exaltation of the hopelessly conflicting mass of private goods to the status of public truth. That is, there is no single public truth for which we are all striving, unless it is the public truth that public truth is whatever I and my group think it should be. So to come back to the application of Ancient wisdom, “politics” is for us is a mere instrument, a mere machine with buttons and levers and knobs and switches, equally amenable to the hands of anyone who happens to get into office, regardless of race, religion, moral views, or character. The true “Constitution” that we follow isn’t the written document we are all taught in public school to revere, but rather the peculiar vision of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful that is summed up by the phrase “pluralism” - a vision in which those things, supposedly unified entities, are actually fragmented and incoherent.

On the Ancient understanding of politics, our constitution actually changes with every change of leadership, and the only way in which we are “one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all,” is in a sense in which all of the key terms are open to as many definitions as there are individual citizens. The confused, mish-mash of conflicting political visions seems to be but tenuously held together by the force of an increasingly weakening cultural inertia, and the myth of “neutrality” gets harder and harder to maintain in direct proportion to the emphasis on “diversity.” I am reminded of a point that Orson Scott Card made in his novel Empire, about the cleverly-engineered transformation (by a Caesar-like figure) of the American Republic into the American Empire. Card said that he has become distressed to notice that political rhetoric in America increasingly seems to be the verbal equivalent of physical civil war. It makes sense, really - the more a society stresses that its unity is really endless diversity, the less it can handle internal dissent and the more it finds itself troubled by serious fault lines and warnings of approaching quake.

The question all of this immediately raises is, of course, if we ought not to have plural visions, what one vision should we follow?

Yesterday my politics professor made a point about constitutions that I had never heard before. According to him, the first written constitutions were the constitutions of the American colonies, which started a trend in Europe. In Ancient times, politics was viewed as the whole life of a people, aimed a forming their moral character in relation to a concept of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. Because it was a life, it didn’t have to be (couldn’t be?) written down. But, said my professor, once constitutions started to be written down, they ceased to be concretely concerned with forming a good life and instead became the abstract judges of a good life. Thus, for example, in contemporary American political life it is possible for the Supreme Court to judge school prayer, a matter of spiritual life and moral character formation, to be “unconstitutional.” By writing down the constitution, character formation has been separated from politics and politics has become an abstract and merely material end unto itself.

A very intriguing thought, to be sure. I wonder how the point might interact with the usual Protestant understanding of the Scriptures as a kind of “constitution” for the Christian life.

“[Love] interprets,” [Diotima] replied, “between gods and men, conveying and taking across to the gods the prayers and sacrifices of men, and to men the commands and replies of the gods; he is the mediator who spans the chasm which divides them, and therefore in him all is bound together, and through him the arts of the prophet and the priest, their sacrifices and mysteries and charms, and all prophecy and incantation, find their way. For god mingles not with man; but through Love all the intercourse and converse of god with man, whether awake or asleep, is carried on. The knowledge which understands this is spiritual; all other knowledge, such as that of arts and handicrafts, is mean and vulgar…”^[1]

I quoted this passage last year when I read through Plato’s dialogue the Symposium, and at that time I commented that it well shows how many of the Church Fathers could have believed that Greek philosophy prepared the way for the Gospel. I’m even more convinced of this perspective now that I’ve had a chance to read some of Marsilio Ficino’s commentary on the Symposium. Ficino (1433-1499) was a Christian and one of the best of the Renaissance-era advocates of Platonism. Here are some samples of Ficino’s exposition of the Symposium’s view of love and the Divine.

In Speech III of his commentary, Ficino writes that “Love is present in all things and extends through all things,” just before saying that Love creates and preserves “all works that according to nature and is the lord of all the arts (III.1). Like attracts like, which is why our souls are drawn to God and the parts of our bodies and the elements of the world adhere to each other in mutual concord. Love rules the reins of all things, holds the key of all things, is “the eternal knot and link of the world,” “the immovable support of its parts,” and “the firm foundation of the whole machine” (III.2-3). Love is the author of our very beings, and through Him as our author, father, and protector we exist, live, are governed, and taught to live well and happily (III.4).^[2]

In Speech IV of his commentary, Ficino explains the Fall of man by explaining that because love draws like things to like things, the soul tried to imitate God by being self-sufficient like God is. The soul has two lights, a natural (or innate) light and a divine (or infused) light. The problem is that the soul became enraptured with its own natural light instead of remaining content with the divine light: “our soul fell into the body when, neglecting the divine light, it used its own light alone and began to be content with itself.” But as self-sufficiency is an attribute which only God, the Infinite Being, can have, the soul “made itself equal to God when it wished to be content with itself alone, as if it could be sufficient to itself no less than God” (IV.4) In this striving after what it could not have (which was, ironically, prompted by Love!), the soul fell “into the abyss of the body,” and “forgetting itself for a time, it is seized by the senses and lust, as though by police and a tyrant” (IV.5). Later he will say that “the soul, in pursuing the body, neglects itself, but finds no gratification in its use of the body. For it does not really desire the body itself; rather, seduced, like Narcissus, by corporeal beauty, which is an image of its own beauty, it desires its own beauty.” However, it “never notices the fact that, while it is desiring one thing, it is pursuing another, it never satisfies its desire,” and so finds itself outside of itself, “racked by terrible passions and, stained by the filths of the body” which make it die (VI.17).^[3]

This slavery to mere sensory apprehension of vulgar things can be somewhat overcome by learning, for as the soul exercises its contemplative powers it “perceives that there must be some architect of this huge machine [and] it desires to see and possess Him.” Contemplation of the world of lower things reminds the soul of the world of higher things: “the soul’s intellect is very strongly goaded, by the prodding of its own light, to recover the divine light” it has ignored in favor only of the natural light. Like the fall into the body, this desire to return to God is also motivated by Love. When the soul fell by obsessing only on its own natural light, it lost half of itself - the other half being its divine light attraction to God, its creator. This light, which God infused into men “that it might lead men to bliss, which consists in the possession of Him,” leads us to God by way of the four Cardinal Virtues (Prudence, Courage, Justice, and Temperance). These things in men are but shadows of what they are in God, but they show the soul the way back to God. It is important to understand that the soul can only seek and find God by means of the divine light which God has given it, for the examples of many philosophers show that by restricting oneself to the natural light (and therefore to natural things), one spoils that light. Even the poet Aristophanes, in Plato’s Symposium, recognizes of such men that “even the natural light which was left them they darken with false opinions and extinguish with wicked habits” (IV.5)^[4]

Another important truth is that only those who love God can know God. It is not enough to know of or about God (through the natural light); one must love God (through the divine light). “Those who know God do not yet please Him unless they love Him when they know Him…what restores us to heaven is not knowledge of God but love.”^[5] Loving God begins with the fact that, as Ficino says in Speech VI of his commentary on the Symposium, “in the intellect of man there is an eternal love of seeing the divine beauty, thanks to which we pursue both the study of philosophy and the practice of justice and piety.” But even the seemingly more mundane love found in bodies, the love which produces children, is in an important way eternal: “by it we are continously driven to create some likeness of the celestial Beauty in the image of a procreated offspring” (VI.8).

Here Ficino reveals, I think, a properly Christian critique of the tendency of Platonism to devalue the body and the sensory world in which it resides. He notes that Plato calls these two loves of ours (the intellectual and the bodily) “daemons,” and says that one of them (the intellectual) is a good daemon and the other (the bodily) a bad daemon. “In reality,” says Ficino against Plato, “both are good, since the procreation of offspring is considered to be as necessary and virtuous as the pursuit of truth.” The reason why bodily love is often called evil, in Ficino’s opinion, is merely because we often abuse it, and because of our abuse “it often disturbs us and powerfully diverts the soul from its chief good, which consists in the contemplation of truth, and twists it to baser purposes” (VI.8). Later he says that “procreation with a beautiful object” is “in order to make eternal life available to mortal things.” The goal of procreation is “that what is unable in itself to last forever, may last forever, perpetuated in offspring like itself” (VI.11)

Although the contemplative life (i.e., the life of intellectually seeking the True, the Good, and the Beautiful in their highest forms, which are above and beyond their sensory, bodily copies) is in a real sense superior to the active life (i.e., the life of sight, touch, and bodily action) remains an important part of the soul’s quest for virtue as it awakens to and begins to seek after the true object of its love, Love Himself (God). Indeed, the cognitive part of man loves procreation as well because it has the secondary effect of “caus[ing] the soul to desire truth as its proper food, by whcih, in its own way, it is nourished and grows.” Just as procreation regenerates and preserves mortal things, the love of procreation in the intellect “restores to the mind what had either perished through forgetfulness, or had grown inactive through laziness.” For “Once the soul is mature, the love of procreation inspires it with a burning desire to teach and to write, so that by propagating its knowledge, either in writings or in the minds of students, the knowledge and truth of a teacher may remain among men eternally.” It is in this way that both the body and the soul of man “seems to be able to survive in human affairs forever after death” (VI.11)^[6]

In terms of the soul’s intellectual activity, motivated by and oriented to Love, Ficino follows the Augustinian understanding of the divine illumination of man’s mind: “The intellect would be empty and dark unless the light of God were present to it, in which it sees the Reasons of all things. Thus the intellect understands by means of the light of God, and it actually knows only that divine light itself” (VI.13). “The light of the soul is truth,” and even Plato acknowledges that this light is only given to the soul by God. Socrates (Phaedrus 279b-c) asked God only for Wisdom and not for merely earthly things,^[7] and God gives truth to men in the form of the Virtues. There are two classes of these Virtues, moral and intellectual. The moral are Justice, Courage, and Temperance; the intellectual are Wisdom, Knowledge, and Prudence. Although in the Platonic scheme the intellectual Virtues are higher than the moral, at the same time the moral precede the intellectual. This means that by the pursuit of moral Virtue (love of goodness), men are prepared for the intellectual ascent to the true object of love, Love Himself (God). All these Virtues are fundamentally one and come from God: “above the soul of man there must be some single wisdom which is not divided among various concepts, but is a single wisdom, from whose single truth the manifold truth of men derives” (VI.18). The things of the natural life thus point the way to the things of the spiritual life.^[8]

The notion of Platonic love has often been cited as a major reason for homosexual activity in Ancient Greece, because, goes the argument, the principle that “like loves like” combined with the notion that men are superior to women in terms of intellectual ability brought about the idea that contemplative men should love other contemplative men as being “most suitable for receiving the learning which they wish to procreate.”^[9] Interestingly, however, Ficino condemns homosexuality because he says that it results from a disordered transference of intellectual love to the body. But this is not the purpose of the male body’s reproductive organ, and the act of homosexuality is thus useless (VI.14)^[10] Further intriguingly, Ficino connects the logic of homosexuality with the logic of abortion: “We think it was by some error of this kind that that wicked crime arose which Plato in his Laws roundly curses as a form of murder. Certainly a man who snatches away a man about to be born must be considered a murderer no less than one who takes from our midst a man already born. He who destroys a present life may be bolder, but he who begrudges light to the unborn and kills his own unborn sons is more cruel” (ibid.). Thus, both homosexuality and abortion are unnatural and result from a disordered understanding of Love.^[11]

Lastly, the soul is to love God alone. All other loves are but shadows and copies of Love Himself, and if we put this plethora of lower loves before God, we essentially recapitulate the Fall.^[12] God is the light with which we see all other things, and just as the thing that the eyes desire above all else is light itself, so too the thing the soul desires above all else is God Himself. “Thus in this life we shall love God in all things so that in the next we may love all things in God.” Further, “anyone who surrenders himself to God with love in this life will recover himself in God in the next life…as long as we are in this life, none of us is a true man, for we are separated from our own Idea or Form. To it, divine love and piety will lead us.”^[13] The end of the soul’s love for Love Himself is that we might “recover ourselves in Him above all, and in loving God we shall seem to have loved ourselves” (VI.19).

For all this Scripture-compatible exposition of Plato, there is, in my estimation, a serious problem in Ficino’s views. This is that he agrees with Pseudo-Dionysius’ Neoplatonic scheme of the necessary emanation of the superabundant One into lower degrees of being. Ficino approvingly cites P-D: “Divine Love did not permit the King of all things to remain in Himself without issue.” THe problem here is that it leads to the idea that creation was necessary, that God could not have helped but to create finite things. Several centuries earlier, Peter Abelard had followed this trajectory of Greek thought in terms of arguing that since God is Good and it (allegedly) cannot be good not to do something that is good, God cannot help but to do what He actually does do. Other Christian thinkers, notably Thomas Aquinas, took firm stands against the notion of a world which was eternal because it was necessary for God to creat it. On this point Ficino stands with a problematic aspect of Neoplatonism, but that should not detract from the good points he makes as noted above. In the footnotes to this post I have noted various passages of Scripture which accord with the Platonic doctrines Ficino expounds in his commentary on the Symposium, and I think these ought to be enough to demonstrate that at the very least it is not fundamentally idiotic, let alone fundamentally compromising of truth, to see correspondences between the best of Greek thought and the teachings of Scripture. Platonic Love at its best, seen in the opening quote I provided from the Symposium and in Ficino’s expositions of it, seems to be awfully close to what Scripture itself teaches.

I thought this was interesting enough to translate and post here:

I have made an effort in my studies toward nothing other than that I might raise up among us the good books which have been nearly buried; next, that I might excite a world devoted to ludicrous ceremonies more greatly to the study of the truth and evangelical piety; finally, that I might recall [the world] from the scholastic study of theology, [which is] excessively ruined by the inane sophistry of little questions, to the wells of divine Scripture.^[1]

One must keep in mind that the humanists were not exactly fair to the Scholastics, who actually did do much positive good for Christian theology. Duns Scotus in particular, whom Erasmus mercilessly shreds in Praise of Folly, was through the school that bore his name, very influential on the covenant theology of John Calvin. Still, I think this quote from Erasmus is quite good on the whole, and once again illustrates the profound, organic, and catholic connections between the Medieval, the Renaissance, and the Reformation.

After mocking to scorn the dissolute lives of secular princes and their courtiers, Erasmus’ personified Folly in Praise of Folly turns her piercing gaze of sarcasm on the princes of the Church. Popes, cardinals, and bishops have followed the lead of their secular counterparts. They wear the symbolism-rich garb of the Church, yet utterly forget what the symbols mean: “a sad and troublesome life” full of “labor, care, and trouble.” Forgetting that they are “not lordds but dispensers of spiritual things of which they must shortly give an exact account,” these “blind seers” turn the example of the apostles on its head. They feed themselves only, not their flocks, and, raking in the money hand over fist, fail to “instruct, exhort, comfort, reprehend, admonish, compose wars, resist wicked princes, and willingly expend not only their wealth but their very lives for the flock of Christ.”

Folly seems somewhat incredulous that anyone would actually want to be the pope. For popes,

which supply the place of Christ, if they should endeavor to imitate His life, to wit His poverty, labor, doctrine, cross, and contempt of life, or should they consider what the name pope, that is father, or holiness, imports, who would live more disconsolate than themselves? or who would purchase that chair with all his substance? or defend it, so purchased, with swords, poisons, and all force imaginable? so great a profit would the access of wisdom deprive him of - wisdom did I say? nay, the least corn of that salt which Christ speaks of: so much wealth, so much honor, so much riches, so many victories, so many dispensations, so much tribute, so many pardons; such horses, such mules, such guards, and so much pleasure would it lose them. You see how much I have comprehended in a little: instead of which it would bring in watchings, fastings, tears, prayers, sermons, good endeavors, sighs, and a thousand the like troublesome exercises.

The sarcasm here is palpable, and Folly refuses to relent. She complains that these princes of the Church have been execrably reduced to “a staff and a wallet” rather than being the light of the world, as they ought. Further, for men who so often invoke the names of Peter and Paul, the popes are astonishingly unlike either apostle:

if there be anything that requires their pains, they leave that to Peter and Paul that have leisure enough; but if there be anything of honor or pleasure, they take that to themselves.” These supposed wise men seem to believe “that Christ will be well enough pleased if in their mystical and almost mimical pontificality, ceremonies, titles of holiness and the like, and blessing and cursing, they play the parts of bishops. To work miracles is old and antiquated, and not in fashion now; to instruct the people, troublesome; to interpret the Scripture, pedantic; to pray, a sign one has little else to do; to shed tears, silly and womanish; to be poor, base; to be vanquished, dishonorable and little becoming to him that scarce admits even kings to kiss his slipper; and lastly, to die, uncouth; and to be stretched on a cross, infamous.

Obviously following the exhortations of the apostle Paul, the popes make use of the apostolic weapons of “interdictions, hangings, heavy burdens, reproofs, anathemas, executions in effigy, and that terrible thunderbolt of excommunication, with the very sight of which they sink men’s souls beneath the bottom of hell: which yet these most holy fathers in Christ and his vicars hurl with more fierceness against none than against such as, by the instigation of the devil, attempt to lessen or rob them of Peter’s patrimony.” This last is, of course, a reference to the feudal territories claimed by the papacy, and to the warmongering activities of the last several popes of Erasmus’ day, most especially Julius II, infamously known as “the warrior pope.” Folly notes the problem with the papacy’s claims about “Peter’s patrimony”:

When, though those words in the Gospel, “We have left all, and followed Thee,” were his, yet they call his patrimony lands, cities, tribute, imposts, riches; for which, being enflamed with the love of Christ, they contend with fire and sword, and not without loss of much Christian blood, and believe they have then most apostolically defended the Church, the spouse of Christ, when the enemy, as they call them, are valiantly routed. As if the Church had any deadlier enemies than wicked prelates, who not only suffer Christ to run out of request for want of preaching him, but hinder his spreading by their multitudes of laws merely contrived for their own profit, corrupt him by their forced expositions, and murder him by the evil example of their pestilent life.”

As with the highest office, so with the lower ones. The “common herd of priests” is just as bad as the papacy, for they “count it a crime to degenerate from the sanctity of their prelates.” When they are not simply illiterate, they are quick “to pick the least thing out of the writings of the ancients wherewith they may fright the common people.” They continually forget their pastoral duty to the people, stupidly thinking that “they have sufficiently discharged their offices if they but anyhow mumble over a few odd praryers, which, so help me, Hercules! I wonder if any god either hear or understand, since they neither themselves, especially when they thunder them out in that manner.” Like the heathens of old, today’s priests are better read in secular than in sacred things, which enables them to lay all burdensome things on the shoulders of others and shift responsibility from themselves to everyone else. Leaving the study of Christian piety to the common layman, the priests follow the examples of their secular and ecclesiastical superiors, “throw[ing] back the care of the flock on those that take the wool.”

Keep in mind that Praise of Folly was written by Erasmus, in collaboration with Thomas More, both of whom remained all their lives loyal Catholics. This is no bit of heretical nonsense propagated by idiotic malcontents who didn’t believe “real Catholic doctrine.” Of course, the genre of the work is satire, and satire is never to be taken in a strictly woodenly literal sense. Nevertheless, the point of satire is precisely that it has real, identifiable connections with the real world that it is sarcastically describing. It’s no wonder that some have said the Praise of Folly contributed so much to the Reformation. It’s witty highlighting of the profound pastoral failures of the Church in the 16th century connects precisely with a major concern of the Reformers. Of course, Erasmus didn’t make any of it up. Bernard of Clairvaux was chastising the pope for caring more about Roman law than Christian spirituality, Dante reserved special places in hell for corrupt priests and popes, Francis of Assisi and Dominic urged the popes to more moderate lifestyles, and the conciliarists of the 15th century spared no effort of their own to point out the dire need for reform of the Church’s own officers. Sadly, nothing was done about the folly of the self-appointed “wise men” in the hierarchy, and so, as the Preacher had said so long ago of fools who despise wisdom, only the rod was left for their unrepentant backs.

I recently had occasion to read Ray Bradbury’s classic Fahrenheit 451, and the thing simply astonished me with its prescience. Written in 1953, before any of the technological gee-whizzery we all take for granted today, the novel constructed a frighteningly plausible dystopia in which entertainment became the defining mark of the good life, virtual-reality “relationships” the defining mark of love and family, insipid sameness the mark of personal and societal greatness, and education the defining mark of anti-social snobbery aiming to take everyone else’s happiness away.

It is simply amazing to me that over 50 years ago Bradbury foresaw the time of the wall-sized, high-definition TV with fully interactive electronic connections to anonymous people whom one comes to think of as friends, and with whom one lives a literally thoughtless pseudo-life of inane intellectual and emotional fragmentation whose deception consists precisely in its existence in full color, total immersion, surround sound enabled mimicry of the real thing.

The last time I read anything by a Modern author that was so prescient was C.S. Lewis’ Space Trilogy. If you’re at all concerned about education, the good life, and true freedom, and you haven’t read Fahrenheit 451, go get it now and don’t do anything else till you’re done with it. You won’t regret it.

Erasmus’ personified Folly in Praise of Folly is an equal opportunity offender. Having disposed of Philosophers, Scientists, Poets, Rhetoricians, Scholars, Preachers, and Priests, Folly turns to another great class of bloviating asses, the Logicians and Sophists. These are

a generation of men more prattling than an echo and the worst of them able to outchat a hundred of the best picked gossips. And yet their condition would be much better were they only full of words and not so given to scolding that they most obstinately hack and hew one another about a matter of nothing and make such a sputter about terms and words till they have quite lost the sense. And yet they are so happy in the good opinion of themselves that as soon as they are furnished with two or three syllogisms, they dare boldly enter the lists against any man upon any point, as not doubting but to run him down with noise, though the opponent were another Stentor.

Folly says she’s talking about Logicians and Sophists, here, but I can’t help but think that if her speech was aimed at us, she might have instead used the word “Internet Apologists” here.

Still working with Erasmus’ Praise of Folly….

As a scholar-in-training myself, I appreciate Folly’s mockery of the scholar:

For that they know nothing, even this is a sufficient argument, that they don’t agree among themselves and are so incomprehensible touching every particular. These, though they have not the least degree of knowledge, profess yet that they have mastered all; nay, though they neither know themselves, nor perceive a ditch or block that lies in their way, for that perhaps most of them are half blind, or their wits a wool-gathering, yet give out that they have discovered…things so thin and bodiless that I believe even Lynceus himself was not able to perceive them.

The scholar is a man who “beat[s] his brains about true knowledge, which first will cost him dear, and next render him the more troublesome and less confident, and lastly, please only a few.” Such ones are, says Folly,

ever tormenting themselves; adding, changing, putting in, blotting out, revising, reprinting, showing it to friends, and nine years in correcting, yet never fully satisfied; at so great a rate do they purchase this vain reward, to wit, praise, and that too of a very few, with so many watchings, so much sweat, so much vexation and loss of sleep, the most precious of all things. Add to this the waste of health, spoil of complexion, weakness of eyes or rather blindness, poverty, envy, abstinence from pleasure, over-hasty old age, untimely death, and the like…

Pursuing endless subtleties of knowledge, the scholars show themselves to be idiots:

And with these and a thousand the like fopperies their heads are so full stuffed and stretched that I believe Jupiter’s brain was not near so big when, being in labor with Pallas, he was beholding to the midwifery of Vulcan’s axe. And therefore you must not wonder if in their public disputes they are so bound about the head, lest otherwise perhaps their brains might leap out. Nay, I have sometimes laughed myself to see them tower in their own opinion when they speak most barbarously; and when they humh and hawh so pitifully that none but one of their own tribe can understand them, they call it heights which the vulgar can’t reach…

Ouch.

Erasmus’ Praise of Folly spares no one from the withering critique of personified Folly. Folly chastises Scholars who waste their lives writing Books full of the most abstruse and exquisitely refined intellectual wranglings just so they can receive the praises of “one or two blear-eyed fellows,” their colleagues. She ridicules the Philosophers, and dares to assault the sacrosanct halls of the Theologians. These asses, who frighten everyone with the thunderbolt of being called a “heretic,” are such that

while being happy in their own opinions, and as if they dwelt in the third heaven, they look with haughtiness on all others as poor creeping things and could almost find in their hearts to pity them; while hedged in with so many magisterial definitions, conclusions, corollaries, propositions explicit and implicit, they abound with so many starting-holes that Vulcan’s net cannot hold them so fast, but they’ll slip through with their distinctions, with which they so easily cut all knots asunder that a hatchet could not have done it better, so plentiful are they in their new-found words and prodigious terms.

Having earlier described the Theologians as those who so vividly describe Hell that they must have spent years living there themselves, Folly attacks the theological schools “in which there is so much doctrine and so much difficulty that I may as well conceive the apostles, had they been to deal with these new kinds of divines, had needed to have prayed in aid of some other spirit.” Paul knew what faith was, but he didn’t define it “doctor-like.” The Apostles consecrated the Eucharist without having the slightest notion about the “terminus a quo” and “terminus ad quem” of transubstantiation, let alone having any understanding of the difference between Christ’s body in heaven and in the Sacrament. They knew the mother of Jesus, but had no inkling of philosophical demonstrations that she was sinless. Peter received the keys of the kingdom, but himself had not the subtlety of knowledge to receive the “key of knowledge” spoken of so grandiosely by the scholastics and canonists.

Indeed, regarding much of the theological knowledge of the Church in the 16th century, Follly brazenly claims that no one can conceive it “unless he has spent at least six and thirty years in the philosophical and supercelestial whims of Aristotle and the Schoolmen.” From Folly’s point of view, “Christians would do much better if instead of those dull troops and companies of soldiers with which they have managed their war with such doubtful success, they would send the bawling Scotists, the most obstinate Occamists, and invincible Albertists to war against the Turks and Saracens; and they would see, I guess, a most pleasant combat and such a victory as was never before.” These quacks vainly imagine that their pleasant trifles of scholastic reasoning (including the sophisticated Realist and Nominalist arguments about the possible modes of the Incarnation) hold up the Church like Atlas holding up the world, and if and when they ever bother to look at Holy Scripture, they treat it like a wax nose so that they can “force everyone to a recantation that differs but a hair’s breadth from the least of their explicit or implicit determinations” which they pronounce like oracles. Indeed, “neither baptism, nor the Gospel, nor Paul, nor Peter, nor St. Jerome, nor St. Augustine, no nor most Aristotelian Thomas himself can make a man a Christian, without these bachelors too be pleased to give him his grace.”

This is all very, very funny and, satire that it is, oh so provocative to reflective thought. Keep in mind that no less a Catholic than Thomas More collaborated with Erasmus in writing this delightful stuff, and it is reported that even Pope Leo X found it very humorous.