scholastic sects; popes, cardinals, and bishops--all are fiercely ridiculed. Particularly fierce is the
attack on the monastic orders: they are "brainsick fools," who have very little religion in them, yet
are "highly in love with themselves, and fond admirers of their own happiness." They behave as if
all religion consisted in minute punctilio: "The precise number of knots to the tying on of their
sandals; what distinct colours their respective habits, and what stuff made of; how broad and long
their girdles," and so on. "It will be pretty to hear their pleas before the great tribunal: one will
brag how he mortified his carnal appetite by feeding only upon fish: another will urge that he
spent most of his time on earth in the divine exercise of singing psalms:... another, that in
threescore years he never so much as touched a piece of money, except he fingered it though a
thick pair of gloves." But Christ will interrupt: "Woe unto you, scribes and pharisees,... I left you
but one precept, of loving one another, which I do not hear any one plead that he has faithfully
discharged." Yet on earth these men are feared, for they know many secrets from the confessional,
and often blab them when they are drunk.
Popes are not spared. They should imitate their Master by humility and poverty. "Their only
weapons ought to be those of the Spirit; and of these indeed they are mightly liberal, as of their
interdicts, their suspensions, their denunciations, their aggravations, their greater and lesser
excommunications, and their roaring bulls, that fight whomever they are thundered against; and
these most holy fathers never issue them out more frequently than against those, who, at the
instigation of the devil, and not having the fear of God before their eyes, do feloniously and
maliciously attempt to lessen and impair Saint Peter's patrimony."
It might be supposed, from such passages, that Erasmus would have welcomed the Reformation,
but it proved otherwise.
The book ends with the serious suggestion that true religion is a form of Folly. There are,
throughout, two kinds of Folly, one praised ironically, the other seriously; the kind praised
seriously is that which is displayed in Christian simplicity. This praise is of a piece with Erasmus's
dislike of scholastic philosophy and of learned doctors whose Latin was unclassical. But it has
also a deeper aspect. It is the first appearance in literature, so far as I know, of the view set forth in
Rousseau Savoyard Vicar, according to which true religion comes