Erasmus and the Tradition of Paradox

Author(s): M. Geraldine
Reviewed work(s):
Source: Studies in Philology, Vol. 61, No. 1 (Jan., 1964), pp. 41-63
Published by: University of North Carolina Press
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ERASMUS AND THE TRADITION OF PARADOX

By

SISTER

M.

GERALDINE, C. S. J.

The paradoxical literature which became popular in England in

the sixteenth century is usually thought to have been inspired by
The Praise of Folly, which Erasmus wrote during his visit to More's
home in 1509. Inspiration the Praise did, no doubt, provide, and
pattern too in some measure, but the unique character of Erasmus's
book needs some re-emphasis, for it differs in quality and, to some
extent, in kind from the later essays which carry forward the
paradox tradition in English literature, and indeed from the very
works which the author lists as having provided classical sanction
for such writing.
In spite of the haste with which Erasmus claims to have written
his " silly little book," he took time to write a foreword and thereby
to accession it. Let no one be astonished, he begs, at the triviality
of his subject: let them but remember those eminent men who
have previously written in such vein; and an imposing list followsimposing but heterogeneous. Homer, he remembers, once sported
with a battle of frogs and mice, Virgil with a gnat and a salad,
Ovid with a nut; Polycrates, Isocrates, Favorinus, and even Seneca
have falsely praised the unworthies of history; Lucian and
Apuleius have eulogized the fly and the ass; certain other reputable
ancients have praised baldness, fever, and even injustice.'
If Erasmus was himself casual in his classifying, it is not
surprising that others, critics of his own time and later, were
equally so. The Praise has been called learned parody, mock eulogy,
an adoxographical essay; 2 and rightly so, for it is all that. But it
1Erasmus,
The Parise of Folly, trans. H. H. Hudson (Princeton, 1941),
p. 2. All subsequent references are to this edition, and the title is shortened
to " the Praise " where there can be no ambiguity.
2 See, for instance, E. N. S. Thompson, The Seventeenth-Century
Essay
(University of Iowa Studies, III, 3), p. 95; Arthur Pease, " Things Without
Honour," Classical Philology, XXI (1926), p. 41; Warner G. Rice, "The
Paradossi of Ortensio Lando " (University of Michigan Publications, VIII,
1932), pp. 59-75; H. H. Hudson's introduction to the Praise, p. xx; Charles
Lenient, La Satire en France (Paris, 1866), pp. 14-16.

41

42

Erasmus and the Tradition of Paradox

is primarily satire, and the parody, eulogy, and paradox are geared
to a serious moral purpose. It is no trifle, surely, to be shouldered
easily into the group which Erasmus himself reviews, nor reduced
to the level of its imitators.
Erasmus's list includes no work so complex as his own. Parody
is not always panegyric, nor mock panegyric always parody; neither
is necessarily satiric. Homer's Battle is parody but not mock praise;
Virgil's gnat tale likewise; of the mock eulogies listed, only Lucian's
tWo are parodies of rhetorical declamations; and of the fifteen
works listed only five are satirical.
The Praise is unique in that it comprises all the qualities of
all the works Erasmus lists. It is surely parody with the mocking
Moria delivering such an oration as never before had followed the
rules of rhetorical declamation. It is also an incisive and serious
moral indictment of European society in all its aspects, an indictment that is sometimes eulogy, sometimes direct censure. It is,
moreover, an oration that attempts, though awkwardly enough, to
point in the end to that heavenly Jerusalem which sixteenthcentury writers knew to be the end of any work of exhortation.
Finally, and especially in comparison with contemporary works, it
is a thoroughly human dramatic monologue, having as its satirical
and allegorical device a woman. She is christened Moria because,
like Europe, she is foolish, or perhaps because, like Thomas More,
she is wise. Nonetheless she is no mere abstraction; she is a woman
with a woman's varying moods, now confidential, now aloof, sometimes amused, often furious, ready to break her ironic vein to coax
and plead, or to pursue some tangential thought; and she grows in
folly or in wisdom as we listen to her diatribes and rhapsodies.
Although it is unlikely that Erasmus, who was not modest about
his achievements, underestimated the worth of his work, it is
surprising to find his Renaissance admirers failing to recognize its
difference from other paradoxes. To some the Praise seems little
more than a merry commendation of folly; others consider it a
Jeremiad attacking immorality and ecclesiastical abuse. Sir John
Harington, for instance, in The Metamorphosis of Ajax, mentions
the Praise as one of many such pieces, serious treatments of light
subjects, of which he cites seven. The Praise heads the list, although
the other six are no more of its kind than is the Metamorphosis
itself: "an encomium on the Pox, a defense of usury, a commendation of Nero," and so forth. John Grange, writing in 1577, does

Sister M. Geraldine

43

recognize.that the Praise hides many profound reflections beneath

a " cloke of mery conceyte," yet he couples Erasmus very easily with
Skelton, whose good place in English letters is surely not in the
Erasmian neighborhood. Not long afterwards Sir Philip Sidney
points out that " Agrippa will be as merry in shewing the vanitie
of Science as Erasmus was in commending of follie "; and although
Sidney's final comment (that both had "another foundation than
the superficiall part would promise ") is sound, the casual juxtaposing of the mercurial Moria and Agrippa's sturdy denunciations
is surprising.A
In all these paradoxes there is, of course, some common denominator by which we recognize them as cognate to one another; but
an examination of the paradoxes and false praises current in sixteenth-century England4 should, I think, justify the contention
that Erasmus's Praise is not only superior to them, but (with one
or two possible exceptions) quite different in scope and purpose.
Its complexity is such that it seems to father two kinds of essay
distinct from each other and germane only through this Erasmian
'John Harington, The Metamorphosis of Ajax (1596), ed. Peter Warlock
and Jack Lindsay (London, 1927), p. 8; John Grange, The Golden Aphrodite
(New York, Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1939), sig. Nil,; Philip
Sidney, An Apologie for Poetrie, ed E. S. Shuckburgh (Cambridge, 1891),
p. 35. It is interesting to note that Thomas Nashe makes no mention of the
Praise in his exhaustive lists of works similar to his "light friskin" of
wit, The Prayse of Red Herring, although he opens the second of these lists
with a sentence reminiscent of Erasmus. Nashe begins: "Homer of rats
and frogs hath heroiqu't it." (Works, ed. R. B. McKerrow, III, 176)
Erasmus's citation of other false praises and paradoxes begins: "Homer,
all those ages ago, made sport with a battle of frogs and mice." (2).
' A survey which did not set itself limits of place and time would be too
unwieldy for a paper of this size. Caspar Dornavius, in an anthology of
some 1,130 large folio pages, Amphitheatri Sapientiae Socraticae Ioco-seriae
Syllabus (Hanover, 1619), has gathered together over a thousand
items. Dornavius has been generous in his inclusions, canvassing from
Homer to the writers of his own day, and including some verses and essays
which surely have in them little of sapientia and nothing at all of the
ioco-seria. Lines to a rose, for instance, or to a violet, are lyrical rather
than paradoxical; Thomas More, or Henry Stephen, on the rustic life are
true praises, not false ones. The items (all in Latin or Greek) are grouped
according to subject matter, and no biographical or bibliographical documentation is supplied. I have chosen my " samplings " for this paper rather
from the Short Title Catalogue (ed. Pollard and Redgrave) than from
Amphitheatrum, but have made use of both.

44

Erasmus and the Tradition of Paradox

progeniture. As mock eulogy and parody the Praise inspires some

paradoxical essays delighting in clever urbane dialectic, little more
than jeux d'esprit; as satire it is godmother to seriously didactic
writing. Few of the works that follow in its train are similarly
compounded of both toothless and biting wit.
One of the possible exceptions is Willibald Pirckheimer's The
Prayse of the Gout, close to the Praise in time (the Latin version
was circulating in 1522, though it was not "Englysshed" until
1617), and spirit, possibly because the author was an intimate
friend of Erasmus's.5
Pirckheimer is strongly influenced by Erasmus. Gout's declamation is both parody and eulogy, both absurd and instructive. Its
light tone in the early sections moves, as does that of the Praise,
into a greater seriousness. It is ironic and with moral purpose; it
is delivered by a person, Dame Podagra, as Erasmus's Praise is
delivered by Moria, so that even the guileless little genitive of the
title is, in each case, charged with a double-entente. Podagra
promises in her exordium to show first that " all the blame and
evils which light upon my adversaries are not so much to be ascribed
to me as to their own licentiousness and vices"; secondly that
"these evils, if they be evils, are not so grievous as they are made
out to be"; thirdly that she is the cause of much good and brings
many and great commodities to man.6
Like Moria, Podagra is conscious of her audience, her worthy
friends, her reverend and upright judges; and, although she is not
informed with her elder sister's fullness of personality, she is yet
5 Erasmus himself wrote some facetious
paragraphs on the gout, comparing its distresses with those of the stone, with which he was more
familiar! Dornavius calls them an encomium and includes them with a
dozen others on the gout. Actually they are part of a letter to Pirckheimer
written in March 1525 (P. S. Allen, Erasmi Epistolae, VI, Ep. 1558, pp.
47-48). In one long paragraph Erasmus compares the two ailments, finds
the stone, of course, more insufferable, and notes that, since neither is
contagious, the victim may enjoy the kindly visits of his cronies. The
second paragraph points out another compensation, one which lies in the
realm of the spirit: Plato has defined the highest kind of activity as
philosophy, and the highest kind of philosophy as meditation on death;
sickness is most conducive to such meditation, and therefore . . . and
therefore.

. .

Willibald Pirckheimer, The Prayse of the Gout (Apologia seu Podagrae

Laus), trans. W. Est (London, 1617), sig. A,. Dornavius prints 13 Praises
of Gout.
8

Sister M. Geraldine

45

human enough to forget her ironic form as she warms to her

subject, and to keep coming back to the fiction just when we despair
of her doing so.
After she has announced her purpose and bespoken her joy that
opportunity is given her to " answer and refell [sic] the slaunders
. . . of the franticke vulgar sort, mine enemies," she deals with
the possible objections to her defense, like the good rhetorician she
is. Hatred, she says, proves nothing, for do not children hate their
schoolmasters, however estimable they may be? She is not, moreover, as they allege, the plague of mankind, for if she were, she
would attack all men instead of her chosen few. So far paradox.
Broad humour follows, and a measure of parody. She suggests a
remedy before she goes on with the defense (sig. Cjr):
Take of Plato's breakfast one dramme, of Pythagoras' dinner two ounces,
of Abstemius's supper as much as thou wilt, and quietly take thy rest in
Codrus's cabine, and use upon this daily good active exercise of thy body,
and then a straw for Dame Podagra and her disease!

Having shown she is not so much to blame as people think, she

turns to a further defense of herself: she gives a pedigree, does
she not ?-to the gouty one, since carbuncles and the like proclaim
his aristocratic descent. Moreover, she gives warning of her advent
before she actually visits her victim; and after the great toe has
been afflicted, if the victims still will not "keep a good dyet, but
invite me by their intemperancy, I will pinch them to the quick,
and like Proteus alter my forme." But even if her warnings are
unheeded and the sufferer must take to his bed with " gengrania,"
still there is compensation: illness gives the busy gentleman opportunity for leisurely courtesy and an excuse to be free from civic
affairs. The first of these points is satirical, the other two ingenious
only; but it is clear that moral instruction is already in the air.
The lady claims now to be the cause of much good; she brings man
to realize the folly, by even human standards, of leading a life of
luxury and dissipation; enforced leisure and some discomfort may
lead him to reflection and a change of habit; and thus she brings
these affliges back to the good life.
The Prayse of the Gout is lively and holds the attention of the
reader. The author uses a somewhat Erasmian strategy, producing
a work of imaginative grace and charm, its surface urbane, its
implications satiric but not savagely so. The irony is not merely

46

Erasmus and the Tradition of Paradox

added ornament but integral, born of the double viewpoint: for

gout is a wretched thing to the sufferer's flesh and sinews but a
potential good to the spirit of man if cause and effect can be
percipiently matched.
The Lady Podagra is less satisfying than is Moria. Moria is
not abstract foolishness. We picture her as a woman, as Holbein
did; and she grows in wisdom. The thoroughly human speaker has
more appeal and is more convincing than the abstract. Gout, at
best a type of all the human suffering that is self-induced, at worst
an ailing foot, does not fit easily into a woman's dress; and since
she cannot grow or be converted, she tends to remain an abstraction.
The mincing exordium and the airy rhetorical peroration sandwich
a speech made by something more than disease but less than human.
The essay is a tour de force which introduces a moral sense obliquely
and skilfully, and is entertaining from start to finish; but it lacks
the human warmth of Erasmus's work, because the speaking voice
is not easily particularized, and the human scene it introduces is
remote. Podagra talks about her human victims but we do not
feel that she is part of all she meets, as is Moria. The moral
preoccupation is less satisfying too than that of the Praise. There
are only two classes of people: the good and the bad. The good
have no gout and get short shrift (literally too!) ; the bad get gout
and think about their badness and begin to be good so that they too
live happily ever after without gout-but, of course, without any
gouty leisure for friendly gossip, nor any good alibis for avoiding
the busy round of civic life.
Of all the sixteenth-century praises, this is, nevertheless, closest
to Erasmus's. UJnfitted, by reason of her very limited subject
matter, to go beyond the particular to the universal, still less to
invest the sound moral implications with a spiritual pulse, Lady
Podagra may yet be a weak type of Eve or Pandora, unloosing on
man her box of woes. But the moral emphasis is rather on the
reward and punishment that makes of this life a gouty purgatory
or a healthy heaven. Moria's larger, fairer sights cannot be readily
glimpsed by a woman who calls herself Lady Gout, or even Lady
Nemesis. Folly is Everyman's experience, and may, with scriptural
sanction, become Christian folly; there is no Christian gout.
An important landmark in the progress of the Paradox is a
collection of paradoxical essays written in Italian by Ortensio Lando
in 1534. These Paradossi were well known in England long before

Sister M. Geraldine

47

they were translated in 1593 by Anthony Mundaye as The Defense

of Contraries.
Lando's concern is with wordishly ingenious dialectic. Indeed
his interest in the defense of the less-commonly received opinion
had been evidenced a decade earlier when he published a little
book containing two dialogues, one rejecting and exiling Cicero,
the other defending and reinstating him. The title page of the
Defense makes manifest his purpose:
Paradoxes against common opinion debated in forme of declamation in
place of publicke censure, only to exercise young wittes in difficult matters.
Wherein is no offense of God's honour, the estate of Princes, or private
man's honest actions: but pleasant recreation to beguile the iniquitie of
time.7

The essays are on such subjects as "Povertie is better than

Wealth," "TUgliness is better than Beauty," "Boccaccio is not
worth Reading-especially the Decameron." The author protests
(sig. A1r) that no man is to think that " I or any other would be
so senseless as to hold directly any of these vaine reasons; but what
(for argument's sake) may be said, that set I downe, and no other."
He does not go so far as to say, as Donne will say, that their office
is to make the reader find better reasons "against them," 8 and
indeed such apology would have been to protest too much, for the
author, once he has protested his non-sincerity, seems to take on
a rather convincing tone of earnestness, and in most cases it is the
abuse of the good, not the good itself, which he condemns. In the
defense of proverty, for instance, he notes (sig. B4) that scores of
7Anthony
Mundaye, The Defense of Contraries, trans. out of the French
of Charles Estienne (London, 1593), a translation in turn of the Italian of
Ortensio Lando, Paradossi cioe Sententie Fuori del Comun parere novellamente venute in luce opra mendotta (Lyons, 1543); subsequent editions
appeared in 1543, 1544, 1545, 1550. Estienne's translation was made in
1553, and within the next ten years there were nine editions in Paris.
E. N. S. Thompson notes (pp. 98-99) that some translations omit Lando's
pointed comment that Thomas More's execution was evidence that in one
country at least ignorance was better than knowledge, a more satiric thrust
than are most of Lando's. But apart from this omission, a comparison with
the original Italian does not convince me that the translators drained off
much irony. There was little of it in the original. (I am indebted to Mrs.
A. Amadio for translating Lando's Italian.)
8Evelyn M. Simpson, A Study of the Prose Works of John Donne
(Oxford, 1948), p. 916.

48

Erasmus and the Traditwn of Parad4ox

illustrious men died poor, that many even chose poverty; and he
names examples carefully selected from his well-remembered reading; furthermore, he says (sig. Ca,r), there are "a great number
of molestations and travailles hidden under the vaine splendour of
riches and the abundance of honours hidden in the beautiful bosom
of povertie, honours well known and understood by the poet
Anacreon."
That last sentence is an illustration of the paradoxical method
not only of Lando but of many of the praisers of false good. Here
the specious identification of riches with " vaine splendour " and of
poverty with "abundance of honours " passes easily for the truth,
and while the reader nods his agreement, the author passes on to
cite historical witnesses, and the gullible may not recognize that the
voice of authority (minor authority at that) has supplanted the
voice of reason.
A dubious piety lends respectability to the defense of ignorance.
The learned, says Lando (sig. C1V),fail to excel in civil or domestic
government or in the conduct of war. Students addle their brains
and become stupid or captious or presumptuous as a result of their
reading. Worse than that, knowledge is an invention of the devil,
and examples show that learned men have lived and died miserably.
In glowing contrast, the unlettered are pictured as yearning for
the things of God and sung by angels into Paradise at death.
These arguments are not ironic; there is in them that grain of
half-truth which rather bemuses the listener into accepting the false
proposition uttered than awakens him to its absurdities or to new
recognition of complete truth. The author's introductory promise
of pleasant beguilement is fulfilled, but there are no bonus dividens.
This third essay in the Paradossi, defending ignorance and
repudiating learning, is related to a tradition that has connections
with Erasmus, who is at times capable of betraying his humanist
veneration for knowledge and of lauding the poor ignorant man
as fitter for the kingdom of heaven.9 The Praise itself devotes some
"See, for instance, the Praise, p. 35, and the Epistle Dedicatory to
Enchiridion, and especially a passage from Paraclesis (Omnia Opera, ed.
Leclerc, V. p. 140C), in which Erasmus urges that " to read and understand
the scriptures, one need only bring a pious and open heart imbued above all
things with a pure and simple faith," and goes on to extol the virtues of
the husbandman, ploughman, weaver. (Cited and translated by R. H.
Murray, Erasmus and Luther, p. 21). This contemptu scientiae attitude is

Sister M. Geraldine

49

paragraphs in its impassioned last section to identifying the truly

wise with the fool-the fool for Christ's sake, yes, but one who
does not care to cultivate his mind lest it detract from his piety.
These formative years spent in the schools of those who preached
that it was better to experience than to define compunction had left
their mark on Erasmus. Lando's defense of ignorance goes a step
further, if we take him seriously.
Although there were many translations during this third quarter
of the century, there do not seem to have been many original
paradoxes written in English."0 Two Latin encomiums, however,
were written probably in these years by an English priest living on
the continent: Encomium Debiti and De Laude Ebrietatis.11 The
Praise of Debt, although it is not ironic, shows a nice wit. The
writer begs the reader to do him the favour of reading his little
work; he in turn will please the reader; and already there is a
double debt. But he begs leave to begin "ab ovo," and points out
that every man is in debt to his parents who gave him being, to the
world about him, plants, animals, all things, which made him
what he is. Further, each part of his body is dependent on, and
therefore indebted to, other parts. After a few columns of such
rambling, the essay concludes, as is befitting the essay of a divine,
with a devout recognition of man's debt to God, and an exhortation
to the reader to acknowledge and appreciate this debt. This paradox
is much like that of William Cornwallis who was to praise being in
debt some years later. Neither are very ironic.
The Defense of Drinking is, however, much more ironic, and its
combination of fine raillery and good satire is surely Erasmian.
Whether or not it ever provided reading matter for English
to be found too, a few years later, in Cornelius Agrippa's Of the Vanitie
and Uncertaintie of Artes and Sciences, in de la Noue's Profit of Irmprisonment, and in Thomas Scott's Fowre Paradoxes.
10 Erasmus's Praise was translated several times, the Praise of Quartan
Fever, which Erasmus cites, was translated in 1542, and Lando's Paradossi,
as has been noted above.
"-Robert Turner, Encomium Debiti seu Paradoxon . . ., in Dornavius's
Amphitheatrum, Vol. II, p. 175-176; De Laude Ebrietatis, p. 38-40.
Dornavius credits Turner with being a Jesuit, but D N B denies this, and
conjectures that, because he was once a student of Father Edmund
Campion's, he has been erroneously thought to be of the Society. He was
ordained at Douai in 1575, and died in Bavaria in 1599. I have not been
able to find other dates.

50

Erassmusand the Tradition of Paradox

paradox-fanciers is another matter. The author begins as if he

were a loyal devotee of Bacchus, and for some two or three columns
lauds the delights of unbridled tippling, which he defends against
the censure of the abstemious by showing that it is sanctioned by
long-honoured custom. Gradually this fulsome praise begins to
include words and images that betray the author's intention"Cnausea," "stupidity," "insanity." All this part is ironic, but,
like Erasmus, Turner veers finally to forthright condemnation: his
readers, after all, do not call themselves disciples of Bacchus, or of
any pagan god, nor is the festival providing the present opportunities and temptations to indulgence any pagan one, but one which
precedes " Quadrigesima" or Lent. The remainder of the essay
exhorts the reader to hee.dthe persuasive voice of reason, to recognize the disparity between Christian ideals of self-denial and preLenten surrender to orgiastic indulgence; and the work ends by
cycling back to the initial motif and noting that one who is the prey
to his appetites, who adheres to custom blindly, who yields to the
demands of uncertain goodfellowship is not a free man, and thus is
not beloved by even the pagan gods.
Of the Vanitie and Uncertaintie of Artes and Sciences, by
Cornelius Agrippa (translated in 10T5), is one of the few paradoxes
that have endured the test of time, probably less because of its
ingenuity and literary worth than because its incidental wisdom
expresses its more flexible mood. The prefatory epistle indicates the
author's purpose and plan. With obvious sincerity he protests his
true veneration for reason, learning, sapience and all true arts and
science. He " sharply invayeth against them," he declares, "but to
reprove and detect their evil uses and declare the excellence of his
wit in disproving them, for a shew of learning." 12
One might expect then that the body of the work would be a false
encomium in reverse, or a false phillipic. But the author does not
meet the challenge that might indeed have " declared the excellence
of his wit," but makes a perfectly straightforward denunciation of
such science as is admittedly false, and of the obviously wrong uses
of true science-and this without taxing noticeably his vaunted wit.
The Erasmian satirist would have attacked the proper use of proper
learning (or praised the wrong-headed abuses or quack sciences)
12
H. Cornelius Agrippa, Of the Vanitie and Uncertaintie
Sciences, trans. James Sanford (London, 1575), Sig A,.

of Artes and

Sister M. Geraldine

51

with such telling irony as to shrivel the apathetic; the wily paradoxist might have inflated, with transparent insincerity, some trivial
item on the debit side of learning. In either case, satirically or
facetiously, the challenge would have been met squarely.
The theme of the Vanitie is that the first and only necessary
science for man is that of knowing and contemplating God, and that
this requires no skill in syllogisms and demonstrations and may
indeed be hindered by the vanity induced by such. Agrippa, like
Erasmus, can sometimes pay tribute sincerely to the Brethren!
From arithmetic to alchemy, from grammar to magic, from right
reason to pure quackery, every science, true or trumped up, is
subjected to analysis and made to show that either the science is
valueless or its misuse outweighs its possible worth.
The serious and hortative expositions of the abuses and sometime pretentions of learning might (in matter, not manner) remind
one of the Erasmian indictment of over-intellectualism. In the
essay on " Grammer" (sig. CJ'), for instance, the author deplores
what Erasmus had praised: the concern of divines and monks for
the language rather than meaning of scripture, the schisms springing up from their tortuous explications of " donee " and of " de."
The quackeries Agrippa attacks are such things as "cabalism,"
"courtiers-noble: vulgar," augury, hunting, pandarism, whoring,
madness, witchcraft, pythagorean chance. One wonders wherein the
reader is to find his delight: not surely in this underscoring of the
obvious; perhaps in the immense learning and illustrative anecdote
which the author brings to the support of his position.13
At the end of the second last chapter (a devout essay " On the
Word of God ") there is a digression, lighter and more paradoxical
than the rest: it is " in praise of the Asse," a subject dear to the
sixteenth-century reader.'4 Agrippa's eulogy is a sort of parenthesis
13 E.

N. S. Thompson suggests (95-6) that it was this very informative

quality that constituted the Vanitie's popularity in the sixteenth century;
and that now it is interesting " only for its glimpses into the social life of
that age."
:'4Apuleius's
story of the Golden Ass was cited by Erasmus (Praise, 2)
as if it were a Laus Asini, although it is not that; Nashe mentions
Heinsius's Praise (Works, III, 176), and McKerrow, commenting on
Nashe's reference, refers to two others (IV, 391), one by Jean Passerat
and another by Berni. Dornavius includes no fewer than 39, including
Passerat's and Agrippa's, but neither Heinsius' nor Berni's.

Erasmus and the Tradition of Paradox

in which the author justifies himself for having referred to the
apostles as unlearned, vulgar persons, "void of knowledge, unskilful, and Asses." To justify the word, or possibly "for a shew of
learning," he notes that the name "asse" signifies wisdom, fortitude, and strength. The virtues of the animal are then praised;
and authorities, from profane literature and sacred, are cited to
substantiate the claims. That Christ himself once rode an ass
might, one would think, be the climax, but it is not. We go from
Christ to Abraham, and on to the golden ass of Apuleius which
carried a philosopher in another way. A digression within the
digression tells of other animals who have lent their forms to
disguise men (the Frog Prince is not mentioned), and of women
who have fallen in love with such masquerading knights. The
motif of unlearning reaches a sublimity close to the ridiculous as
we near the end (sig. Bb,r):
We read also of a certain idiot that convinced a most learned and subtil
Heretick, and forced him to turn to the Faith, whom the best and most
learned Bishops at the Council of Nice with a long and difficult disputation
could not convince. Who being afterwards demanded by his friends, how it
came to pass that he yielded to the Fool, who had resisted and withstood
so many and so great Learned Bishops, replied, that he had easily given the
Bishops words for words but that he could not resist this Idiot, who spake
not according to humane wisdom but according to the Spirit.

Piety cannot go much farther.

The last chapter ends with an exhortation to the Asses (" 0 ye
Asses, who are now with your children under the command of
Christ ") to pray to God for wisdom; the author is confident the
Lord will perform some divine osmosis and allow the very wisdom
of Solomon to seep into the mind of these beati. One might think
all this heavy satire were it not for the references, reverent enough,
to Christ and the saints larding it. For Agrippa the life of the
intellect is one thing and the life of the spirit another; and they
conflict, for Agrippa's God regards only the untutored and fallow
mind as capable of humility.
Assuredly much of the erudition of the sixteenth century does
receive incidental mention or reference in this popular work, but
it is such passages as this last, commending with seeming sobriety
the unlettered life as superior to the scholarly, that makes it hard
to understand Sidney's easy pairing of the two. Agrippa cannot
" be as merry as Erasmus " because he does not know the meaning

Sister M. Geraldine

53

of irony-defined in his own century as that which " sayeth the

one thing and meaneth the contrarie." His learned allusions do
show his erudition but they do not show the reader, by analogy, a
new angle of reality, a new delight in the pursuit of wisdom. The
point was, of course, so peripheral to Sidney's line of argument as
to warrant no exercise of discrimination; but the coupling serves to
typify the inability of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth
centuries to distinguish between the complex ironies of such a work
as the Praise and the solid invective or pure facetiousness of others.
Another praise, more directly in imitation of Erasmus's, was
published in England in 1576. Entitled A Mirrour of Madnes, A
Paradoxe Maintayning Madnes to be most Excellent, it claims to be
a " merry jest" and a translation out of the French. Both claims
are suspect, for the name of the French author is nowhere mentioned, and the piece has a burly English quality; it is merry only
inasmuch as its close and sometimes confused dialectic is leavened
by some lusty colloquialism reminiscent of More or Chaucer.
To the trained logician this essay might seem a marvel of strained
and subtle logic; and no doubt it is clever. The author sets out by
asking what man's end is, and boasts that, since there are so many
answers to this question, each of them so difficult and confusing,
his own answer may well be hailed as a panacea. He produces then
the syllogism basic to the first part: Vainglory is, he says, the
incentive to most human activity; Plato identifies vainglory with
madness; then madness is the cause of so many books of philosophy
being written and esteemed. It is these philosophers who have
determined the end of man; and the logic runs on:
So then, propter unumquodque tale est illtud facit magis tale: Whatsoever
thing maketh the thing such, the thing whereby it is made is of necessitie
more such. But by the reason of madnes, that is to say, the matter,
philosophers' books are esteemed and accounted more excellent. Therefore,
of consequence, madnes itself is without comparison.15

Through such amazing turns, we eventually reach Aristotle, who

says a man ought to measure his anger. This is confusing: if goodness is in the mean, then the two extremes are in themselves vileboth anger and patience. Where then, the writer asks (sig. B1r) is
virtue ?
16 The Mirrour of Madnes,
Maintayning Madnes to be most excellent,
trans. James Sanford (London, 1576), Sig. A5r. Microfilm loaned by courtesy
of the Bodleian Library.

54

Erasmus and the Tradition of Paradox

If all anger be na.ught, then all the contrary be naught. So by consequence

vertu is jacke out of office, and vertu banyshed, reason may go shake his
eares. Reason exiled . . . all is stark staring madnes, so is your Master
Zenoes great end come to nothing. Ah, sirra, I am glad I have met you!
Taissez-vous, sayth Zeno, no more of that geare! I am sure there are others
as mad as myself.

The author is sure of it too, and twists Aristotle's reasoning as

to felicity, Plato's on ideas, singulars and universals, and finally
the Epicure's. They are all mad, and "vertu may go sell cheary
stones, and then God give you good night! "
The discussion of the Epicure's philosophy introduces a digression (sig. B5r) wherein the author arraigns the luxuries of the
Papal court with heavy sarcasm and much venom, never losing
sight, however, of the theme of madness. These pages include an
unsavoury story in which the author ridicules (obviously) ignorance
and superstition, but also (less obviously) the doctrine of transubstantiation and the Eucharist; and here the author is most like
Erasmus, though the latter is rarely so uninhibited in his expressions of scorn, or so unguarded in denouncing traditional beliefs.
Ignorance and superstition were nevertheless often enough the
object of Erasmus's more pointed criticism. When we find the
Mirrour's author attacking next the supposed glories of war, we are
sure he has his Praise (or the Adages) before him. But the difference is plain too. Erasmus's persuasion against war is (at least in
the Praise) ironic, but the human, compassionate thinking of
Moria-Erasmus tempers the brittle dialectic. The author of the
Mirrour is a sophisticated logician, who juggles identities and
syllogisms and makes his conclusion a verbal triumph. Erasmus
would have shown us the victim's agony and the victor's jaded
triumph, and would have.given scant attention to word-play.
There is something Erasmian, however, in the MIirrour'sdiscussion of man's end in terms of his obvious nature. All things in
nature, says the author, begin with love and hate. He resolves to
dissect love rather than hate; and after lauding the love of God,
of parents, friends, country, wives and children and self, he speaks
of the love that results in procreation. It is a short step then to the
" amorous arrows of that little waunton boye Cupide " (sig. Cri?).
Politian, Petrarch, and Mantuan corroboratehis claim that all love
is madness, and since it is love that keeps the world peopled, madness is the basis of life. This is Erasmus in reverse. Moria's para-

Sister M. Geraldine

55

graphs on natural folly (14-22) begin by noting that man's dearest

possession, life, comes to him through his parents' folly, continue
with the charm of innocent (foolish) childhood, of unlettered
(foolish) age, of young love and married love dependent as they are
on the (foolish) amenities and courtesies proper to urbane living,
and conclude that "nature, the source and artifice of the human
race, has made provision that this race shall never lack its seasoning
of folly."
The Mirrour is thus largely Erasmian in subject matter; madness is folly and the follies of Erasmus's most vehement denunciation (ignorance, superstition, war) are amply censured. But the
informing pattern is not Erasmus's. The place of love and procreation in each of the pieces illustrates this. In the Praise, man's
natural follies are not given the same treatment as are vices.
Moria opens her vast catalogue of human folly with a deceptively
light attack on such follies as have hardly more of human choice
than have baldness or fever. When she proceeds to the citing of
the follies of self-deception and those proper to certain classes
and professions, the irony is evident; it is bitter as the wilful
follies (vices, really) of pride inhering in dignitaries of State and
Church; and finally Moria, her anger spent, treats of the folly of
the Cross, and this with forthright, hortative " praise." The castigation of man's natural follies had served only as a literary
prelude to the real matter of the oration. The Mirrour-'ssubject
matter might have lent itself to the expansive range that Moria
had made hers, if madness had been personified as folly was. It
was the woman Moria who was so well fitted to change her front,
to use all the dramatic and human devices that appeal to the
intellect and heart of man.
The Mirrour does indeed change tone to some extent, moving
from airy badinage at the beginning to a sterner mood and a more
serious purpose in the parts concerning war and superstition, but
it falls short in its almost total lack of spiritual appeal. There is
no level of religious experience to be caught at here; and only in
the sections on superstition and the Eucharist-sections more
vituperative than inspired-does the name of God appear. Professor
E. N. S. Thompson classes it (101-2) with the " merely humorous "
and comments on its being "quite in the spirit of Erasmus." If
it is the one, surely it is not the other.
Edward Dyer's Prayse of Nothing in the 'eighties is witty but

56

Erasmus and the Tradition of Paradox

not satiric; and so is Cornwallis's essay of the same title some

years later, proclaiming that " nothing is more precious than gold,
nothing stands higher than virtue " and so on. The paradox is a
matter of verbal manipulation.
An English translation of Synesius's In Praise of Baldness
appeared in 1578, the translator Abraham Fleming. It is a fourthcentury work, and is, according to Fleming, " pretty to peruse, and
replenished with recreation." It is clever dialectic written iD
answer to Dionysius's praise of abundant hair, and one is amazed
to find it (under its more imposing title: Laus Calvitii) in Migne's
Greek Patrology! The translator, a Churchman, vouches, however,
for its excellence, averring that it " searcheth out the verie secret
properties of things and findeth out by reason that baldnesse is
excellent, that it is heavenlie, that it is the ende of nature, that it
is the thing by which we attain heavenlie wisdom."
Although there are a few passages of reflective sobriety, it is
largely a piece of mock rhetoric. Synesius is not afraid to admit
the " sour-grapes" attitude to hair:
For my own part, when the terrible thing began, and my hair began to fall
off, I was wounded to the very heart, and when it proceeded further and
one hair went after another, then two at a time, and finally several . . .
then in truth I esteemed myself to suffer more harshly than the Athenians
at the hands of Archidamus. . . . " Where," I said, " is that providence in
which each of us receives his due? What have I done? What crime have
I committed that I should appear more unseemly to the fair sex? "18

But a little reflection soon convinces Synesius that his is the better
part. Hair is the recognizable exterior mark of animals; true, men
too have at times hair, but the best of them have soon parted with
it, as witness Diogenes and Socrates. A fitting symbol of the clogging nature of hair is found in the grain: shorn of its beard and
hairs which hide its nature, it is useful; not before. So too intellectual maturity cannot exist except under a shining cranium
(1179 A-C) ! Synesius saves his piece de resistance for the proper
climactic spot: the divine nature, whole and enduring in itself, is
bodied forth and reflects itself in the spheres. These fragments of
the cosmic soul are spherical; the head of man, the microcosm,
resembles in shape these spheres. How much closer the resemblance
when this human sphere is not encumbered with hair. This dis"I Synesius,
Laus Calvitii in Patrologiae Cursus Completus Ser. Gr., ed.
J. P. Migne (Paris, 1880), LXVI, 1167C (my translation).

Sister M. Geraldine

57

cussion of the "emanation" of the divine in the cosmic and of

the place of man in the scheme is one of the more serious-or at
least more learned-interludes.'7
The Defense of Baldness is interesting only as documenting the
changing taste of the sixteenth century. It has all the sophistication
and detached irony that characterized the Praise of Folly; it
displays much erudition and some oblique wisdom; but it is not a
work of moral persuasion, much less of devotional purpose. Again
we are made to recognize how rarely the Erasmian mixture of
purpose and mood occurs in paradoxical literature.
Daniel Heinsius's Praise of the Louse, or Laus Pediculi published
in 1595 is a work of clever nonsense startlingly like the Laus
Calvitii. In fulsome oratory it declaims that its subject was born
in a more honourable part of the cosmos than either Athens or
Rome:
The native soil of the louse is Man, whose worth and prerogative to blazen
were but a silly and idle enterprise; who as hee only is endued with Reason,
so also his reason hath impallaced itself in his loftiest and most topping
part."'

One can imagine the rest: mockery but without serious purpose.
Nevertheless, one claim must be made for Heinsius: he is able
to use the techniques of satire with ease. This is fine raillery indeed,
satire imanquee,for no man is left standing with his head severed,
and no " prevailing vice or folly " censured. There is lively parody,
exaggeration, incongruity, and an inverted attitude which would
be ironic if there were a more serious intention in the ridicule.
It is quite possible, one might add, to read into this and other
such apparently light defenses-of baldness, for instance, or of
gout-a latent intention of deflating the pretensions of Renaissance man. What a piece of work is man-gouty, bald, flea-ridden
17 A recent commentator on the work of Synesius, Christian
Lacombrade
(Synesios de Cyrbne, He1lne et Chretien, Paris, 1951), speaks of the great
esteem which his work had among his own contemporaries, and in his own
country, and tries to explain the faint praise with which modern readers
have damned him; he suggests that not only does one language carry over
into another awkwardly, so that the reader may lose some tones of the
irony, and some of the " superb inanities," but the matters discussed present
difficulties to the modern mind, pushing as they do the art of sophistication
to the extreme limit.
18 Daniel Heinsius, Laus Pediculi, trans. J. Guitard (London, 1634), sig.
Bar.

58

Erasmus and the Tradition of Paradox

man! Moria would have made the point, and no mistake about it.
The later writers either miss the opportunity or are too sophisticated to point to a serious observation.
Not all the defenses and praises in the last quarter of the century
were facetious, however. De MIornay'sDefense of Death (1577) is
philosophical and pious; de la Noue's Profit of Imprisonment
(1588) and Thomas Scott's Fowre Paradoxes (1602) are sober and
didactic verses.
Odet de la Noue's work is, he says, " a paradox no doubt more
true than creditable, the which myself have also sometimes thought
a fable." 19 True liberty, he argues (sig. A4r), is impaired by the
vanity of the world, and the soul is held, alas, from mounting -to
her good:
This false frail flesh of ours with pleasures' painted lure
Straight makes her stoop again down to the dust impure.

Imprisonment is, no doubt, good for the soul, but de la Noue's

treatment of the subject is direct, neither witty nor ironic, and the
verse uninteresting.
Thomas Scott dedicates his verses to the " Marquesse" of Northampton, assuring her that this work is " the fruit and issue of my
brains, in the begetting of which I wasted much pretious time." 20
He is not eager, he protests, to show his learning, not he, but is
moved by true reflective love. The four paradoxes are on art, law,
justice and service. The one on art owes much to Agrippa or Lando,
or both or even to Erasmus's occasional repudiations of science.
For the most part, the verses are dull and without irony, though
there is some inverted commendation, as in the verses on service
which offer mildly satirical advice to the young social climber
(Sig. Car)
But staie-Oh, rest thee, Muse, and rest thee, Mind;
I have now found the jewel that I sought.

The jewel is the much-disparaged life at court. But the verses

suggest a " Steele Glas " and might have been penned by some late
Gascoigne. Scott can be ironic, but irony is something he does not
value as either a literary or didactic device, for he shares the
19 Odet de la Noue, The Profit
of Imprisonment, trans. J. Sylvester
(London, 1594), sig. A,1r.
20
Thomas Scott, Powre Paradoxes:
of Arte, of Lawe, of Warre, of
Service (London, 1602), sig. Ajr.

Sister M. Geraldine

59

unenlightened view that rhetoric only teaches us to flatter, and

poetry to countenance falsehood. The real paradox is that he should
write at all.
In the work of Thomas Nashe there is much of satire, and some
of it Erasmian. The techniques of false praise and parody are used
in two of his works: "The Prayse of Red Herring" (in Lenten
Stuffe), and an oration and a letter incorporated into Have-withyou to Saffron-Walden, both in praise of Gabriel Harvey.
Lenten Stuffe, a sort of " bread-and-butter letter " to the people
of Yarmouth, who had offered Nashe hospitality when his fiery
denunciations had brought down on him a temporary exile, praises
Yarmouth's most famous commodity, the red herring. The language is deliberately bombastic, in the manner of parody, but this
eulogy is not satiric, though playful and amusing, and is sometimes
far-fetched. There is nothing envenomed in it except in one of the
many digressions, a fairly long one peppering some " infant squibb
of the Inns of Court " who had set this trouble afoot.2' This false
encomium is in the vein of the praises of the louse and baldness and
nothing; and it may, like them, contain a subcutaneous thrust at
the contemporary poets' vaunting of human love and human
bravery. But this is unlikely; this particular Red Herring was
written by a plain-speaking pamphleteer with a strong bent for
abusive language.
Have-with-You, the last of the Harvey-Nashe controversial
pamphlets, is so lacking in organization that even the tireless
McKerrow admits that it defies analysis. But it does incorporate
parts which use satirically the Erasmian weapons of false praise,
parody, and irony, to censure what Nashe certainly considered a
prevailing folly: Gabriel Harvey. The letter pretends to come from
the tutor of young Gabriel and to praise the boy, while really
damaging him rather meanly:
When I record, as I do often, the strange untraffiqu't phrases by him new
vented and unpackt, as of incendarie for fire, an illuminarie for a candle
and lanthorne, and indument for a cloake, an under-foote object for a shooe
or a boote then I am ready to cry (with Erasmus) Sancte Socrates, or
(with Aristotle) Ens entium miserere mei! what an ingenu is here! 0, his
conceit is most delicate and that right well he apprehendeth, having already
proposed high matters for it to worke on. For, stealing into his study by
chance the other day, there I found divers Epistles and Orations purposedly
directed and prepared, as if he had been Secretarie to her Maiestie for the
21

Thomas Nashe, Works, ed. R. B. McKerrow, III, 213-216.

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Erasmus and the Tradition of Paradox

Latine tongue; or against such a place should fall, he would be sure not to
be unprovided.
(III, 65-66)

The irony, energetic as always, is insecure; the mixing of honest

statement with ironical, and the confusion of right judgement of
the unworthy facts alleged with the false praise of them, makes
the satire seem rather "infirm of purpose." Nashe had said of
himself in another place (I, 5) that he was one who " termes poyson
poyson," and his joy in pure invective militates against any
sustained irony.
The oration introduced into the " Life of Gabriel " is parody too,
a ridiculous congeries of all Harvey's most ink-horned terms in new
contexts and juxtapositions, to make them seem more incomprehensible and affected than they are. The oration and " Life " ended,
the real business of the tract begins: censure of Harvey's last two
pamphlets. But it is in these two insets, the letter and the oration,
petulant and inartistic as they are, that Nashe shows himself able
to do (badly) what Erasmus did (well): to use the ridiculing
devices of false praise, mock eulogy, and parody, purposefully. We
may cavil at the object's being an individual anadnot an institution
or group of persons, or a common and prevailing vice, but some of
Dryden's and Pope's satires have stood the test of time in spite of
the too-evident personal engagement.
John Donne's Paradoxes and Problemes, most of them written
about the turn of the century,22 constitute the first group of
paradoxes written by a major writer in England after Erasmus
wrote the Praise in More's home. That Donne was as apt in putting
his wit to satirical work as was Erasmus is attested by the Verse
Satires (1594-99) and Ignatius His Conclave (1611) but, although
some of the Paradoxes may be qualitatively on the same level as
the Praise, their aim and achievement is of quite another kind.
The author himself explains their quality and function in a letter
quoted by Mrs. Simpson (316), saying:
. . .But indeed they were
truth: although they have
enough to overthrow her:
them they do there office:

made rather to deceave tyme then her daughthr

been written in an age when any thing is strong
if they make yo to find better reasons against
for they are but swaggerers: quiet enough if yo

22
See Mrs. E. M. Simpson, A Study of the Prose Works of John Donne
(Oxford, 1949), p. 148. Mrs. Simpson suggests 1599 as probable date for
the nuclear group. The preoccupations in some of these essays are so like
those of the early poems and the satires as to warrant dating them even
earlier perhaps.

61

Sister M. Geraldine

resist them. if pchaunce they be pretyly guilt, yt is there best for they are
not hatcht: they are rather alaruisto truth to arme her then enemies: and
they have only this advantadg to scape fro5being caled ill things yt they
are nothings.

A. E. Malloch, explaining and paraphrasing these sentences of

Donne, speaks of the paradoxes as having " a nature which is
revealed in the act of meeting and resisting them," of being
"written to be refuted," and of using a technique which advances
a seemingly conceptual argument, while in reality it is " a
fabricated argument which consists of discrete statements equivocally united." 23
The Paradoxes are like the Praise in being speculative, in provoking thought by their airy persiflage, and occasionally in their
preoccupations. Erasmus would have sanctioned Donne's aim to
make the reader " find better reasons " against the arguments, but
his reasons would have been hortative and in the moral order,
whereas Donne's are speculative and intellectual. Erasmus could
say of the Praise that it was the Enchiridion in fancy dress,24and
the Enchiridion is of sermon matter. Donne could hardly have said
that the Paradoxes carried the burden of his sermons.25 The
Praise, complex in its entirety, uses a simple irony in each of its
parts, saying the one thing, meaning the contrary; the Paradoxes
say the one thing and mean something else, or perhaps nothing at
all, depending on the verbal ingenuity. The inducing of new awareness of truth (and even a dialectic can be true or false) is always
Donne's aim; in sonnet or satire, paradox or sermon, he contrives
that the reader " about and about must go "; and the Paradoxes are
no exception, but the truth they conceal in their ingenuities is
23 A. E. Malloch,
"A Critical Study of Donne's 'Biathanatos'"
(Unpublished thesis, University of Toronto, 1958), p. 25.
24 The Epistles of Erasmus, trans. F. M. Nichols (London, 1901-1918),
epistle 304, p. 317.
2 Donne himself seems to have had the Praise somewhere in his consciousness while writing the Paradoxes. In the Tenth he cites Erasmus as
his authority for appreciating laughter, deliberately assuming an impercipience of Moria's meaning: " I alwaies did, and shall understand that

Adage:

Per risum

multum

possis

cognoscere

stultum,

that

by much

laugh-

ing thou maist know there is a Foole, not, that the laughers are Fooles,
but that among them there is some Poole at whom wisemen laugh: which
moved Erasmus to put this as his first Argument in the mouth of Folly,
that she made Beholders laugh; for fooles are the most laughed at, and
laugh the least themselves of any."

62

Erasmus and the Tradition of Paradox

usually a matter of logic or speculation, sometimes merely of

terminology.
In the first essay, for instance, Donne flouts the idea that
constancy is good, not simply by a false praise of it-that would
be the satirist's way-but by deliberately confusing inconstancy
with variety. Thus the mind is forced to make a distinction between
two concepts, but not about something in the practical or moral
order. (In the last few lines, it is true, the paradox does veer to
something like Erasmian false praise.) Again, Paradox XI contends that the gifts of the body are worthier than those of the mind,
urging that the body is good since it channels to the soul the
wherewithal for the soul's concepts. So far true: then in an
eloquent tour de force the author attempts to show that, although
the body can help the soul to see what it sees, the soul cannot in
return enable the body to see heavenly things or hear the music
of the spheres. And the reader is forced to think out for himself
the attributes of the soul and body.
Although satiric paradox sometimes enlivens these arguments
and keeps them from being merely sharp word-play, it is subordinate to the main purpose of cozening the expectation. (" Are not
your wits pleased," the author had asked in the First Paradox,
"with these jests, which cozen your expectation? ") The satire,
when it occurs, handles with paradoxical wit the old theme of
inconstancy (it is either directly or indirectly the butt of the first,
fourth, seventh, ninth, and twelfth paradoxes), the complaints of
the elderly, the lack of charity of the young, duplicity and deceit,
impatience, and social ambition. There is a more positive side
too to the satire. The theme of hope appears more than once:
good may accrue from evil; good is as rife in the world as ever it
was, and since it tends to diffuse itself, must in the end triumph; a
woman's artifice may be affectionate compliment to her lover's
expectations; discord, unlovely in itself, may engender progress;
ill health often brings forth patience. The hope in these satires is
not openly linked with the life of the spirit as was that of the
Praise, yet a devotional note can occasionally be discovered latent
in the mordant wit.
There is in these brittle Paradoxes something of the capacity
for rich interpretation found in Erasmian satire, and found wanting in mid-century works. On the surface they are brilliant and
sophisticated, tossing the mind into various viewpoints with aston-

Sister M. Geraldine

63

ishing plausibility; morally they combat, like the Praise, attitudes

accruing from mental and spiritual sloth. They are of the stuff
of satire, but they are not satire.
Nor is Biathanatos, Donne's defense of suicide, satire. If it is a
serious defense, as some would have it,26 it is neither paradox nor
satire and of no concern to this discussion. If, as seems more
plausible, it is a pretended defense, it is still not quite satire, blut
rather in the nature of the quasi sincere argument of a debater out
to convince his listeners of what he does not hold himself. Donne
himself refers to Biathanatos as paradox 27 and it is likely that he
meant it to be just that: a presentation of a case supposedly sound
but against which the percipient reader may find " better reasons."
It becomes, as Dr. Malloch suggests, one part in a verbal drama, the
other part not written but waiting in the reader's mind to be
beekoned out by the questionable argument.
It is astonishing that, although the Praise evoked interest and
admiration from the writers and critics of the sixteenth century,
there is little good imitation of its well-intentioned deceits. Its
elements appear in the items reviewed here but not in Erasmian
combinations. Instruction seems to be one thing, humour another.
In the praises of unlearning, poverty, death, imprisonment, the ass,
and so forth, there is a serious indictment of man, and a serious
attempt to teach him; in the praises of the louse, baldness, gout,
good plumbing, nothing, and red herring, there is clever manipulation of word and idea, grotesque incongruity between elaborate
rhetoric and the absurd object of it. But, with the possible
exception of Pirekheimer's Prayse of the Gout, there is no nondramatic English prose in the century following the Praise of Folly
which uses absurd praise, as Erasmus had used it, to arouse concern
for prevailing vice or folly.
St. Michael's College,
University of Toronto
26 Malloch's Critical Study (26) lists five scholarly works whose authors
" insist on ascribing the wrong kind of seriousness " to Biathanatos, among
them two recognized authorities on Donne; but the first paragraphs of the
work surely do lend support to the opinion that Donne wrote the defense at
least partly to convince himself.
27In the title, in the final paragraph of the conclusion, and in the
epigraph.