In the second place, he edited a large number of classical texts which had been so often and so badly copied that they no longer made any sense. For this purpose he had been obliged to learn Greek. His many attempts to get hold of a grammar of that forbidden tongue was one of the reasons why so many pious Catholics insisted that at heart he must be as bad as a real heretic. This of course sounds absurd but it was the truth. In the fifteenth century, respectable Christians would never have dreamed of trying to learn this forbidden language. It was a tongue of evil repute like modern Russian. A knowledge of Greek might lead a man into all sorts of difficulties. It might tempt him to compare the original gospels with those translations that had been given to him with the assurance that they were a true reproduction of the original. And that would only be the beginning. Soon he would make a descent into the Ghetto to get hold of a Hebrew grammar. From that point to open rebellion against the authority of the Church was only a step and for a long time the possession of a book with strange and outlandish pothooks was regarded as ipso facto evidence of secret revolutionary tendencies.
Quite often rooms were raided by ecclesiastical authorities in search of this contraband, and Byzantine refugees who were trying to eke out an existence by teaching their native tongue were not infrequently forced to leave the city in which they had found an asylum.
In spite of all these many obstacles, Erasmus had learned Greek and in the asides which he added to his editions of Cyprian and Chrysostom and the other Church fathers, he hid many sly observations upon current events which could never have been printed had they been the subject of a separate pamphlet.
But this impish spirit of annotation manifested itself in an entirely different sort of literature of which he was the inventor. I mean his famous collections of Greek and Latin proverbs which he had brought together in order that the children of his time might learn to write the classics with becoming elegance. These so-called “Adagia” are filled with clever comments which in the eyes of his conservative neighbors were by no means what one had the right to expect of a man who enjoyed the friendship of the Pope.
And finally he was the author of one of those strange little books which are born of the spirit of the moment, which are really a joke conceived for the benefit of a few friends and then assume the dignity of a great literary classic before the poor author quite realizes what he has done. It was called “The Praise of Folly” and we happen to know how it came to be written.
It was in the year 1515 that the world had been startled by a pamphlet written so cleverly that no one could tell whether it was meant as an attack upon the friars or as a defense of the monastic life. No name appeared upon the title page, but those who knew what was what in the world of letters recognized the somewhat unsteady hand of one Ulrich von Hutten. And they guessed right; for that talented young man, poet laureate and town bum extraordinary, had taken no mean share in the production of this gross but useful piece of buffoonery and he was proud of it. When he heard that no one less than Thomas More, the famous champion of the New Learning in England, had spoken well of his work, he wrote to Erasmus and asked him for particulars.
Erasmus was no friend of von Hutten. His orderly mind (reflected in his orderly way of living) did not take kindly to those blowsy Teuton Ritters who spent their mornings and afternoons valiantly wielding pen and rapier for the cause of enlightenment and then retired to the nearest pot-house that they might forget the corruption of the times by drinking endless bumpers of sour beer.
But von Hutten, in his own way, was really a man of genius and Erasmus answered him civilly enough. Yea, as he wrote, he grew eloquent upon the virtues of his London friend and depicted so charming a scene of domestic contentment that the household of Sir Thomas might well serve as a model for all other families until the end of time. It was in this letter that he mentions how More, himself a humorist of no small parts, had given him the original idea for his “Praise of Folly” and very likely it was the good-natured horse-play of the More establishment (a veritable Noah’s ark of sons and daughters-in-law and daughters and sons-in-law and birds and dogs and a private zoo and private theatricals and bands of amateur fiddlers) which had inspired him to write that delightful piece of nonsense with which his name is forever associated.
In some vague way the book reminds me of the Punch and Judy shows which for so many centuries were the only amusement of little Dutch children. Those Punch and Judy shows, with all the gross vulgarity of their dialogue, invariably maintained a tone of lofty moral seriousness. The hollow voiced figure of Death dominated the scene. One by one the other actors were forced to appear before this ragged hero and give an account of themselves. And one by one, to the everlasting delight of the youthful audience, they were knocked on the head with an enormous cudgel and were thrown on an imaginary scrap-heap.
In the “Praise of Folly,” the whole social fabric of the age is carefully taken apart while Folly, as a sort of inspired Coroner, stands by and favors the public at large with her comments. No one is spared. The whole of Medieval Main Street is ransacked for suitable characters. And of course, the go-getters of that day, the peddling friars of salvation with all their sanctimonius sales-talk, their gross ignorance and the futile pomposity of their arguments, came in for a drubbing which was never forgotten and never forgiven.