Erasmus laughs at the church
In Praise of Folly published
Desiderius Erasmus is the most celebrated scholar in Europe — the prince of humanists, the man whose Greek New Testament will be the engine of the Reformation even though he will refuse to join it. He is also, quietly and persistently, one of the church's most devastating critics.
In 1511 he publishes In Praise of Folly — Moriae Encomium — written in a week while staying at the house of Thomas More in England, dedicated to More in a pun on his name (Moria means folly in Greek). It is a satirical speech delivered by the personification of Folly, praising herself and cataloguing all the ways that human foolishness, self-deception, and vanity operate in every corner of society.
The sharpest sections are on the church. Folly catalogs the pope's worldly ambitions, the bishops' concern with revenue rather than souls, the monks' pride in their rules and their hatred of other monks with slightly different rules, the theologians' endless disputes about questions nobody cares about, the indulgence sellers' confident commerce in divine mercy.
Erasmus does not call for schism. He calls for reform from within — better education, better preaching, better reading of scripture, less superstition, less institutional corruption. He believes the church can be healed by humanist learning and clerical renewal without the violence of theological revolution.
He is wrong about this. But his diagnosis is almost entirely correct.
In Praise of Folly prepares the ground for Luther. The man who laughs at the church clears the space for the man who breaks with it.
“When I have a little money, I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.”
— Erasmus, various letters, c. 1500 AD
“Answer a fool according to his folly, Lest he be wise in his own eyes.”
Erasmus used laughter as a scalpel. Satire has always been one of the most effective tools of prophetic critique — it exposes the gap between what an institution claims to be and what it actually is, and it does so in a way that is harder to prosecute than direct denunciation.
You cannot burn a man for writing a funny book. The church tried to answer Erasmus and found that answering him made it look worse.
The laughter of Erasmus is the sound of the medieval church being shown to itself in a mirror it cannot smash without proving his point.
Satire serves truth when it is aimed at power rather than the powerless, when it exposes pretension rather than mocking suffering, when the laughter is in service of something more serious than entertainment.
What institutions in your world need the satirist's mirror held up to them? And who has the courage and the craft to hold it?