The New Pantagruel The New Pantagruel

From the standpoint of postmodernist thinkers like Jean-François Lyotard, western cultures universalize assumptions about what is “human” and “rational,” as if these concepts are not culturally and historically specific, the malleable products of power and ideology. According to Lyotard and others, in the hands of science and the modern state, idealizations of human autonomy and rationality have become parts of an oppressive and imperialistic apparatus. They support a “grand narrative” (or “metanarrative”) about the nature and direction of humanity and history which justifies violence and injustice carried out against marginal groups that do not conform to the beliefs and values that inform western notions of truth, justice or freedom.

Partisan, confessional historiography has gone by the wayside among professional historians, but it retains a strong hold on popular opinion. Conservative Protestants especially are inclined to read or be taught that the Renaissance, and particularly Renaissance humanism, was a spiritually and intellectually compromised movement that led to a modern, secular society which valorizes human self-sufficiency in all areas.

If postmodernism can be generalized, then, as an effort to expose and challenge western modernity’s valuation of the autonomous, rational human individual, the Enlightenment is commonly seen by postmodernists as the period in which the ideal of the autonomous, rational self achieved cultural dominance while the cultural impulse toward that end is typically located centuries earlier, in the Renaissance, often in relation to the humanist movement. This postmodernist intellectual historiography is in large part a reaction to that of modern humanists, or simply modernists, who considered themselves the heirs of the Enlightenment and Renaissance humanism. Unlike contemporary postmodernists, modernists celebrated the historical development of modernity as a liberatory drama that climaxed in the triumph of the individual and nation states constructed on rational principles. As Leo Spitzer put it in Linguistics and Literary History: Essays in Stylistics, “the Humanist believes in the power bestowed on the human mind of investigating the human mind.” However, in the wake of a century of unprecedented warfare, totalitarianism, genocide, weapons of mass destruction, state propaganda, terrorism, and a host of other unprecedented ills, the modernist’s confidence in “culture” and “liberal” or “humanistic” education was profoundly shaken, if not destroyed. Often cited as a foundational postmodernist manifesto, Martin Heidegger’s influential “Letter on Humanism” expressed a profound post-war disillusionment with the humanistic project of European educational systems since the nineteenth century.

Given the trajectory of modern history, it is understandable why Postmodernists radically disagree with the modernist/humanist view of humanity and history to the point of declaring themselves to be anti-humanists and anti-modernists. Nevertheless, Postmodernists still accept most of the modernist historical narrative as valid in itself. That is, they do not question the premise that the Renaissance saw the birth of the autonomous individual. The difference for postmodernists is that the autonomous individual is not a good thing or even a reality. Rather, it is a fallacious ideological construct that serves the oppressive interests of a modernity conceived according to western, Eurocentric values and presuppositions. Postmodernists are inclined to regard self-proclaimed “modern,” “first-world” nations with suspicion as they constitute a global minority of people who nevertheless put themselves at the center of world maps, dominating international affairs with their own interests and native forms of discourse. It is not my intention here to dispute the accuracy of this view but rather the accuracy of the historical narrative that is frequently employed to support it.

In the opinion of many scholars who study medieval and renaissance culture in a variety of disciplines, the historical narrative that modernists and postmodernists both accept should have been discarded many years ago. In Humanism and the Culture of Renaissance Europe, Charles Nauert refers to it as a “historical myth, … the product of the secular, liberal intellectuals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who were searching for the origins of their own beliefs and values.” Similarly, Charles Trinkaus, one of the most influential Renaissance intellectual historians in recent times, argued in “Marsilio Ficino and the Ideal of Human Autonomy” that late twentieth-century scholars who saw the autonomy ideal arising in the Renaissance were subscribing to an interpretation “fueled by Nietzsche … and developed, especially in the 1930s and 1940s, as a counter to the gloomy forebodings of Marx, Weber, and others.”

Max Weber was influenced by Karl Marx’s idea of alienated labor and famously argued in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism that capitalism is a socially impoverishing force that developed from the ascetic, individualistic spirit of Luther and Calvin. Many scholars who dissented from Weber’s jaded view of modernity reacted with a vision of the Renaissance as the origin of a dynamic, liberating, and post-religious, post-medieval humanistic spirit centered on the ideal of human autonomy. This, Trinkaus writes, “is the vision of man commanding his environment with the resources of science, creating his own rules of personal behaviour, free from the restrictions imposed by theologians, and governing his relationships with his fellows in an open, psychically informed, and mutually tolerant discourse.”

While it may have been an understandable reaction to the temper of the times, the modernist alternative was too extreme in its emphasis on the achievements of modernity and the triumph of the individual. This triumphalistic modernist historical narrative tended to be predicated on the eclipse of religion by science and “rational” thought, so Christianity tended to be left out of the picture. It was either overlooked, or diminished in its role, or else characterized as a doddering old belief system superseded by a vibrant new secularism. In his masterwork, In Our Image and Likeness: Humanity and Divinity in Italian and Humanist Thought, Trinkaus pointed out that this account is far too simplistic, and he demonstrated the fundamentally non-secular, Christian nature of Renaissance humanism – a humanism that flatly denies the autonomy ideal prized by modernist scholars. (Earlier, Jacques Maritain made the same point when he distinguished between anthropocentric and theocentric forms of humanism in Humanisme Intégral. One might also consider Eric Voegelin’s view of modernity as the revolt of egophanic, as opposed to theophanic, individuals or Herman Doyeweerd’s similar diagnosis of modernity’s crypto-religious autonomist-individualist “ground-motive.”) Scholars like Trinkaus who are genuinely attentive to history point us toward an understanding of the early modern era – the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance – as a flowering of existing, primarily Catholic and Classical traditions that did increasingly emphasize the human individual and human rationality as somewhat more autonomous than was common previously. But as Trinkaus writes, “the ideal [of individual autonomy] was formulated ordinarily with a deep awareness of the limitations that God, the physical universe, and the human polity placed upon it.”

Unfortunately, Trinkaus’ reappraisal of the Renaissance and Renaissance humanism has not been as widely disseminated as it deserves to be. Many people throughout the past half-century have assumed a reactionary and reductionistic position much like that of modernist and postmodernist scholars. Partisan, confessional historiography has gone by the wayside among professional historians, but it retains a strong hold on popular opinion. Conservative Protestants especially are inclined to read or be taught that the Renaissance, and particularly Renaissance humanism, was a spiritually and intellectually compromised movement that led to a modern, secular society which valorizes human self-sufficiency in all areas. Conservative Catholics often take a similar view but tend to lay blame on the Reformation for the rise of a modernity that lauds the autonomy of the rational individual and is presumptively hostile toward communities of tradition in its valorization of individual rights, reason, and freedom. Like postmodern thinkers, in both of these cases the Renaissance and Reformation era is described as a critical turning point where the culture began to move in earnest toward deluded and dangerous ends. Furthermore, because not a few modernist intellectuals with hostile opinions of Christianity claimed the name and tradition of humanism for themselves, Renaissance humanism is often regarded with suspicion, if not hostility, by many Christians, especially conservative Protestants.

Influenced in large part by the Dutch philosopher Hermann Dooyeweerd’s critique of western culture, Francis Schaeffer frequently used “humanism” as an unqualified polemical term to refer to thinkers and ideas he objected to from the Renaissance to the twentieth century. In his most acclaimed book, How Shall We Then Live?, which was highly influential in Anglo-American Reformed and Evangelical communities, Schaeffer specifically attacked Renaissance humanism and linked it with modern secular humanism. More recently, in popular surveys of postmodern thought and culture aimed at Evangelical Protestant and Reformed readers, Stanley J. Grenz (A Primer on Postmodernism), and Brian Walsh with J. Richard Middleton (The Transforming Vision: Shaping a Christian Worldview and Truth is Stranger Than it Used to Be) have followed Schaeffer and secular postmodernists by reductively asserting that there is an integral relationship between the Renaissance, Renaissance humanism, and the modernist myth of human autonomy. But contrary to the many facile characterizations of Renaissance humanism by modernist intellectuals and their critics, a proper understanding of humanism exposes the poverty of both positions and the false dichotomy between modernist optimism and postmodern skepticism. Many Renaissance humanists believed that original sin had strongly negative epistemological implications. Often their thinking in this regard was formatively shaped by the writings of St. Augustine. Christian humanism of the Augustinian variety actually resembles, and perhaps even anticipates, the deep-seated skepticism that characterizes postmodern thought and what Paul Ricoeur calls “the hermeneutics of suspicion.” The crucial difference is that Augustinian humanism is neither naively optimistic about the human person as the modernists were naively optimistic, nor is it excessively pessimistic as their postmodernist opponents have been.

Etienne Gilson observed in The Christian Philosophy of St. Augustine that “[r]educed to its abstract form, Augustine’s experience may be said to amount to the discovery of humility. Errors of understanding are bound up with the corruption of the heart through pride.” Put even more starkly, Søren Kierkegaard suggested that from the divine perspective, we are always in the wrong. In the same vein, Walsh and Middleton concede in Truth is Stranger that postmodernists are right: “We do tend to construct perspectives, worldviews and metanarratives that erase difference and marginalize whatever does not fit. And therefore, a Christian epistemology will be profoundly suspicious of all totalizing epistemological claims precisely because it recognizes the situated particularity of all finite knowing and the universal brokenness of all human subjects.” This is entirely consistent with a major theme of Renaissance humanism, which asserts the dignity and magnificence of the human creature as well as its fallenness and finitude.

As a consequence of their theism, the Augustinian humanists had a way to counterbalance their recognition of human corruption and errors of understanding. They held that truth exists as more than a human construct produced by the limited perspectives and desires of individuals locked in their own interpretations of reality. The humanists following Augustine believed that there is something outside the hermeneutic circle – and outside the self – that can get to us. Postmodernism in its most extreme expression is a residual humanism with its intense critical faculties intact but without any openness to truth or reality beyond the realm of the intramundane where we find finite, feeble people whose thoughts, words, and actions are governed by scant, partial knowledge, and by desires that can be all too rational. For Christians, this image is accurate only as part of the whole picture of creation, fall, and redemption – and for that reason it can be the worst sort of lie, deceiving many because it contains seeds of truth. However, Christians have much to learn from the often negative analyses of postmodernists because Christians are frequently inclined to err in the other direction, presuming that they have unequivocally more, better, and easier access to truth, or that they are somehow not as implicated in the delusions, errors, and evils of our communities, nations, and cultures nearly as much as others are.

It does not take much reflection on our finitude to realize that all our knowledge is partial, limited, perspectival, and influenced by the ways in which we perceive and interpret our situatedness in time and space, history and culture. Like contemporary postmodernists, Augustinian humanists understood all this. They made human finitude an integral aspect of their worldview, and this brought them to a number of rather “postmodern” positions that are nonetheless thoroughly Christian as well. For instance, according to Sources of Hermeneutics by Jean Grondin, professor of philosophy at the University of Montreal, humanism historically “acknowledg[es] that as finite beings we never cease to learn.” Indeed, we never stop learning or growing, and neither our knowledge nor our nature is fixed. In postmodern parlance, the rejection of a static, universal human nature is often lauded as “anti-essentialism,” and “essentialism” is invariably traced, not entirely without warrant, to Christian thought. But for humanism, which Grondin links with Augustine, the rejection of a fixed, definitive human nature is embraced as a denial of anthropocentrism and human autonomy. The positive corollary of that denial is a “thankful openness to the enlightening perspectives of others and of those who have preceded us and bequeathed to us the opportunity of their experience.”

In the literary culture of Renaissance humanism, the bequest of other perspectives is given and received through languages and literature with diverse cultural and historical backgrounds. For this reason, the relative nature of human perspectives and interpretations took on great significance for the humanists, just as it has for postmodernists. Kathy Eden, Chair of Literature Humanities at Columbia University, argues that as rhetoricians influenced by Augustine, Renaissance humanists were highly attentive to interpretation and actually developed the basic principles of modern hermeneutics. Similarly, Grondin takes Augustine and the humanists to be two of “the forgotten historical sources of hermeneutical thought” behind contemporary philosophy.

Grondin and Eden attest to the enduring and contemporary relevance of Renaissance humanism, especially in the fields of study concerned with interpretation – particularly the interpretation of literature, history, culture, and human nature itself. Rather than being simply opposed or irrelevant to postmodern thought and hermeneutics, Renaissance humanism has much to teach Christian thinkers and the contemporary academy. In support of this claim and to suggest some constructive points of contact, in the following sections of this essay I will sketch out some of the major concerns, values and motivations of Renaissance humanism with its Augustinian inflections, especially in its understanding of the human individual, language, and interpretation. My touchstone is Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536), the “prince of the humanists.” Erasmus’ Praise of Folly both exemplifies and justifies a radical skepticism akin to that of postmodern thinkers because of its profound awareness of the implications of our proclivity for sin, error, and prideful presumption. Postmodern perspectives, like Erasmus’ Dame Folly, can be seen as useful tools in the effort to expose and contend with the prejudices of the will and idols of the intellect that always hamper us. Yet Erasmus’ Christian skepticism goes well beyond the wholly negative theses of postmodernism. It is not an end in itself but rather a necessary precondition for openness to understanding God, ourselves, others and the world as they are disclosed and made present to us through language.

Renaissance Humanism

RENAISSANCE humanism did not acquire its name until its time had passed, and it was never a concerted movement with its own manifesto. However, humanism in the Renaissance can be understood largely as a reaction to the excesses of medieval scholasticism. Thus it was a movement similar in motivation to the postmodern reaction against Enlightenment rationalism. Inspired by Thomas Aquinas’ prodigious work in the thirteenth century, the scholastics put great stock in the belief that reason applied in the systematic deductive processes of Aristotelian logic is the best way to understand God, scripture, and the natural world. Though admirable and impressive in many respects, scholasticism eventually dominated the church and the schools to the point that it was accepted as a comprehensive approach to knowledge in all subjects. To humanist thinkers of an Augustinian cast, the scholastic intellectual orthodoxy was extraordinarily cold-blooded, naively presumptuous, and blind to its many limitations, which they were eager to expose. So instead of following the scholastics in relying on the sufficiency of systematic logical reasoning, the humanists developed a skeptical stance that was highly conscious of the limited value of abstract reasoning in the face of life and faith as they are actually experienced. The humanists were not unprecedented in this effort, however, since their way was undoubtedly made easier by the emergence of nominalism in the fourteenth century, which Reformation scholar Richard Marius, in Martin Luther: The Christian Between God and Death, called “the deconstruction of its day.” This was because, as Marius writes, “In its various forms, [nominalism] cast doubts on the old certainties of language … . The perceptions of concepts signified by words may communicate something from person to person. But they are not universal, they have no reality beyond their use by mortals, and we understand them according to our own experience. The most certain knowledge we have is by our direct intuition of objects, and at the heart of this intuition is sensory experience.”

But while the humanists prized experience, they were neither nominalists nor deconstructionists. Erasmus wished to define a middle position between the extremes of scholastic rationalism and nominalist-descended forms of fideism. Thus he positioned himself as an intellectual against intellectualism in the church and the schools that separated faith, the pursuit of knowledge, and the life of the mind from the rest of life, including the passions and sexuality which constitute essential parts of an integral whole. For many humanists, the less seemly, visceral realities of life are not shameful, but they often attest to the essential folly of humanity, our need for humility, and above all, our need to be able to laugh at ourselves.

In exposing human shortcomings, the humanists also reveled in them as the common lot of all people. In fact, the visceral elements of human experience could not be stressed enough for some of the humanists. Dedicated to the idea that nothing human is foreign, humanism was quite capable of finding the profound in the profane. Immensely popular and controversial humanist works of fiction like Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) and Erasmus’ Praise of Folly (ca. 1510) were and remain notorious for their sometimes ribald humor, not to mention their enduring capacity to confound and enrage humorless, too logically-minded readers.

As one might expect, the primary scholarly undertakings of the humanists were not abstract pontifications. As men of letters – philologists and rhetoricians – they strove to recover, interpret, and publish scholarly editions of seminal texts, including scripture, that had been corrupted or unavailable for many centuries. The return to the Jewish, Greek, Roman, and Christian sources of western culture provided a clear alternative to the accretions of scholastic interpretations of classical and biblical texts, and it catered to the growing literary culture of an educated elite that saw little practical knowledge to be gained from scholastic philosophy. This dynamic cultural situation was seen as an evangelical opportunity by many humanists. Erasmus, perhaps more than any other, threw himself into a lifelong mission to change the minds and hearts of Europe. He self-consciously challenged the church and the schools in the manner of Jesus challenging the Jewish rabbinical establishment, and he constantly referred too exclusively logical minds back to the “philosophy of Christ” illustrated in the life and spirit of Jesus and the Apostles. Returning to the founts of faith and culture had to be more than a merely intellectual, bookish affair – it had to put people in experiential contact with the spirit and wisdom of the past, giving old words new life. We can see this in Erasmus’ “Paraclesis,” a preface to his 1516 Greek and Latin edition of the New Testament, where he writes,

Amid the postmodern dissent from Enlightenment thought with its pretensions of autonomous reason, today we may also sense a similar desire for learning that acknowledges and responds to the integral physical, spiritual, intellectual, and emotional whole of the human being. And, like the humanists, we may also see this desire as an opportunity for cultural transformation.

To the humanist, genuine conversation was necessary to cultural transformation, and the languages and literature of western civilization were what constituted that conversation. Erasmus, more than any other humanist, typifies this emphasis on conversation and the efficacy of language. He believed that the Latin Vulgate rendering of logos in John 1 was insufficiently rendered as verbum (literally, “word”) so he used sermo in his new Latin and Greek edition of the New Testament. Marjorie O’Rourke Boyle points out the significance of this choice in her book, Erasmus on Language and Method in Theology. She notes that Sermo is a word that denotes “language,” “discourse,” and “conversation,” while logos translated as sermo emphasizes that Christ, the divine Word, is not like a static, single word to be passively received. It is much more like the dynamic, incarnational power of a whole language to articulate, convey, and even make present an answerable speaker who responds and is responded to.

In the postmodern academy and contemporary literary scholarship, this very humanistic outlook continues to have great currency, and many scholars are probably unaware of how traditional it is. Discourse analysis and dialogic criticism draw heavily on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and other Russian Formalists who often used the Russian word slovo (literally “word,” like verbum) with a much more social, conversational connotation. As Alexandar Mikhailovic notes in “Bakhtin’s Dialogue with Russian Orthodoxy and Critique of Linguistic Universalism,” “speech,” “discourse,” (i.e., sermo, and especially logos) are implied in slovo, which Bakhtin conceived of as an enfleshment or embodiment (voploshchenie) that occurs when people come together in dialogue. Bakhtin and his colleagues, like Erasmus, had no use for, as V. N. Volosinov wrote in Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, “[t]he isolated, finished, monologic utterance, divorced from its verbal and actual context and standing open not to any possible sort of active response but to passive understanding.”

It is unsurprising to find connections between Bakhtin and Erasmus, since they partook of many of the same spiritual and intellectual sources. Susan Felch, professor of English at Calvin College, and Paul Contino, professor of humanities at Christ College, Valparaiso University, write in the introduction to Bakhtin and Religion: A Feeling for Faith that what Bakhtin called “a feeling for faith … involves both the preparation for personal encounters – the adoption of a proper attitude – and the actual living engagement of persons, human and divine.” Alan Jacobs, professor of English at Wheaton College, demonstrates in “Bakhtin and the Hermeneutics of Love” that Bakhtin elucidated Augustine’s hermeneutics of love, where one is to “pursue active, answerable understanding rather than passive reconstruction” while also renouncing “the tyranny of the magisterial self not by annihilating that self but by practicing a servant’s asceticism.” As Bakhtin saw it, authors and readers are especially humbled and prepared for “answerable” dialogic engagement with others in “carnivalesque” texts such as the humanist Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel. In the carnivalesque, different styles and voices mix and collide in a “joyful relativity” in the manner of medieval carnivals where the wise man and the fool, the king and the beggar, traded places. For Bakhtin, the carnivalesque is radical, often satirical, and inherently subversive. It throws all things into doubt but for liberatory, redemptive ends. Critics have rightly pointed out that one person’s idea of liberation can be repressive to others, and in a world where truth and justice are merely the constructions of power in the quest for domination, this is the final word. But in the Christian humanist’s world, this is not the whole story, as we may see in Erasmus’ carnivalesque satire, The Praise of Folly.

The Praise of Folly

THE PRAISE OF FOLLY (ca. 1509) is a mock encomium owing much to the book of Ecclesiastes, among other sources, and it would become a major source of inspiration for other writers like Rabelais. The book is the occasion for Dame Folly to praise herself at length by showing how her cult is at the center of all human affairs. The satire of the book is extreme, but it has a serious message. Erasmus’s goal is not to promote skepticism for its own sake but to lead readers through a carnivalesque pageant to a better appreciation of the experience of discovering true wisdom and the hard road by which we come to it through our folly. Erasmus would have agreed with what Francesco Petrarca wrote in On His Own Ignorance and That of Many Others (ca. 1368) – knowledge sometimes makes us miserable! But Erasmus has Folly assert that it is only because of her existence that knowledge does not always make us miserable. Folly affirms that humans pursuing knowledge are generally quite presumptuous, incredibly short-sighted, and misery would always be the inevitable fruit of their labor if not for the blinding influence of Folly and her servant Forgetfullness. In this manner, Folly becomes a seriocomic mouthpiece for Erasmus’ criticism of the scholastic church and academy, but these are only two of her targets. The particular folly of which philosophers and theologians partake is widespread and rooted in human nature – nobody escapes it. To presume to eliminate folly from one’s life is shown to be one of the most foolish endeavors there is. What other than folly resides in the pride behind the belief that one can liberate oneself from creaturely limitations and human fallenness? We cannot get outside ourselves to a folly-free zone to perform such an exorcism. Any effort to do so is to follow the folly of utopian thinking that presumes we actually can step outside our nature to become objective, autonomous observers, capable of finding pure principles for right thought and action. Since this is precisely the kind of presumption modernity has romanced in various political ideologies masquerading as critical sciences, Erasmus sounds very postmodern in critiquing it in the early sixteenth century. In fact, the implications of Folly’s argument that we cannot get beyond our condition to an ideal realm of truth leads the reader to wonder if Erasmus, through Folly, is prescribing a skepticism that leaves us no access to truth at all.

Before taking up that question, Erasmus indicates we first must consider how far humanity has fallen into epistemological darkness. Folly maintains a harsh insistence that we exist in an interpreted world, a word-focused world where it is crucial to recognize our “fall” into language and our reliance on a stock of images that necessarily stand between our minds and truth. For secular postmodernism, this recognition supports the idea that we simply raid the stockpiles of images and words that are available to us in order to construct beliefs that give us power over others. The Praise of Folly gives plenty of evidence to show that this is quite often the case. It is plainly a problem that comes with the human condition. Erasmus does not hold that we can escape it, but he does not believe that reality itself is entirely constructed by human discourse, leaving us with only what Jacques Derrida called the endless play of the signifier. Truth is out there, but it can only be pursued legitimately by a middle road between epistemological pride and despair. In humility we must know our limitations and invest ourselves in pursuits that work within those limitations.

Much like John Milton’s depiction of unfallen Eden in Paradise Lost, Folly tells us that people used to conduct themselves in this wiser, humbler way. In the Golden Age, she says, grammar, writing, and all the sciences were superfluous:

Underlying the extreme satire of this passage, we should not overlook that there is indeed some real folly common to “advanced” civilization being exposed here. Folly’s indictment of the drawbacks and costs of human progress forces us to deal with questions that have only grown more acute since the sixteenth century. Amid so many highly developed systems of knowledge that promise so much, why do we have so much cruelty and violence in our societies? Why are there so many people living in loneliness, suffering and despair? We have had many theorists to give us answers: class struggle (Marx), repressed sexual urges (Freud), “slave” moralities that constrain the individual’s will to power (Nietzsche), the triumph of modernity’s totalizing metanarratives (Lyotard). When they have not terminated in complete despair about our ability to know and live in truth, often these “answers” have led to continued “optimistic” and even revolutionary efforts to get around the serious human limitations they would seem to expose. The result has tended to be an even greater increase in individual and social pathology. Our great theorists tend to embody and induce in their disciples what Wallace Stevens in his poem “Esthétique du Mal” called “logical lunacy,” that is to say, the lunacy “of one idea / In a world of ideas.”

Stevens’ logical lunatic resembles a man described by Folly who wishes to call the world to a halt, like a play, in order to expose its actors, its true, inner workings – in effect, to set the world straight about reality once and for all. This man’s views are not regarded by Folly as incorrect, nor are they named as the cause of his madness. It is his conduct, his despairing and presumptuously omniscient response to what he sees – a world of lies and deluded people – that she singles out for censure. Folly has no argument with this man’s belief that there is perversity and error masked by the appearances of things that most people are taken in by. She spends most of the book pointing out exactly these kinds of things. “So it goes,” she says. “Deal with the mess in a sensible manner that befits your own role as a foolish person implicated in the world’s folly!” Quite the pragmatist, Folly admonishes readers that it is only “the perverse man who fails to adjust his actions to the present state of things, he disdains the give-and-take of the intellectual marketplace, he won’t even acknowledge the common rule of the barroom, drink up or get out – all of which amounts to demanding that the play [of life] should no longer be a play.”

This barroom that Folly refers to as a carnivalesque image of the intellectual marketplace is not, I think, a scene of people inuring themselves to the harsh realities of existence with alcohol. Instead, it is an image of people coping with life in a commonsense manner – taking what comes and rolling with the punches in a social environment in which one can be responsible for playing one’s given part. The whole, however, is beyond the capacity of any individual to control. The party, as they say, has a life of its own – it is like a game or a play, but it has serious consequences for good or ill. Folly’s talk of plays and barrooms resonates with the familiar humanist topos of people talking about many controversial subjects over food and drink, each of them articulating their convictions, both trivial and insightful, which often offend others as much as they appeal to them. Consensus is rarely going to be the result, but real communication and positive progress can be born in this civil and humane context of camaraderie despite differences. If nothing else, the participants observe the conventions and decorum of the dinner table, and this environment civilizes (by humanizing) what might otherwise be a stark and warlike place of debate in an academic, political, or religious setting. If this humble, good-natured, and humane example were followed more often in universities, the halls of government, and in our churches, it would not be a bad thing!

Erasmus’ humanistic ideal of civil conversation, no matter how difficult or divisive the subject, is not threatened by Folly’s ready admission that we can never, outside of mystical, revelatory experiences, get beyond appearances to the complete truth of things. Making the same point in a recent essay, Stanley Fish writes, “in matters of religion – and I would say in any matter – there is no public space, complete with definitions, standards, norms, criteria, etc., to which one can have recourse in order to separate out the true from the false, the revolutionary from the criminal. And what that means is that there is no common ground, at least no common ground on which a partisan flag has not already been planted…” (Professor Fish however seems to have been driven to revolt against this claim by Intelligent Design, as witnessed by his recent diatribe on that subject in Harper’s.) If this seems unsatisfactory, Folly, like Fish, tells us that is beside the point. Anticipating objections from “the philosophers,” she admits that they will say “It’s utter misery … to be in the clutches of folly, to be bewildered, to blunder, never to know anything for sure.” Her retort, however, is to declare, “On the contrary, I say, that’s what it is to be a man. I don’t see why they should call that condition miserable into which we were born, in which we were bred, in which we have grown up – which is the common fate of every one of us.”

Accepting our nature, we should learn to deal with uncertainty, ambiguity, and error as constant parts of our lives. Yet however deluded we may be, it is not impossible to discern truth or to act wisely and prudently. Indeed, there is no doubt on Folly’s or Erasmus’ part that there is such a thing as truth and a transcendent reality, a foundation for creation in a creator. It is this belief that makes our limitations bearable and our humble pursuit of knowledge worthwhile. It is also the one thing that distinguishes the proto-postmodern aspects of Erasmus’ humanistic skepticism from the radical skepticism and relativism of some of the most controversial contemporary representatives of postmodernism. At its worst, human discourse may always be as Michel Foucault saw it – a field of contestation for hegemony between rivals who have no intrinsic claim to superiority. But in Erasmus’ view – that is, from a standpoint of Christian faith – this is not the final word on human thought and discourse.

Before and Beyond Postmodernism: The Sign as Sacrament

UNLIKE contemporary postmodernists who would undermine all truth claims and human systems of signification – perhaps religious ones in particular, or at least ones they are not in sympathy with – Erasmus insists on a few exceptions. Some signs and truth claims are more than merely human; they have a divine origin. In the “Paraclesis” he writes, “Beyond doubt, only Christ was a teacher descended from heaven, only he (who was eternal wisdom itself) could teach positive certainties.” Christ, however, is acknowledged by Folly as a less than credible figure by normal human standards. Yet she, in Augustinian fashion, directs us to face the fact that words, images, and other superficies both conceal and reveal deeper truths. To illustrate this point, Folly refers to the Silenus statues of Alcibiades as a model for “all human affairs.” These Greek images of the drunken, elderly attendant of Dionysus opened up to reveal a golden figure of Apollo hidden inside.

Andrew Weiner, a former professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, explains the significance of the Sileni for Erasmus this way: “Our world contains mostly inside-out Sileni who wear their ‘deity’ on the outside and have nothing more precious within, while most beholders settle for the surface view, which they find attractive, and cannot fathom what lies hidden within.” As Erasmus explains further in his Adages, the Sileni exemplify St. Paul’s comments about the foolishness of the Greeks and those who claim to have knowledge. To them the image of Christ on the cross is like the outer appearance of a Silenus figure – an absurd loser of a God followed by idiots. The Greeks cannot see the hidden glory beneath the surface. For this reason Erasmus determines that “In this world there are two worlds, at variance with each other in every way: the one gross and material, the other celestial, having its thoughts centered even now, as far as may be, on that which is to come hereafter. In the first of these the chief place goes to him who is least endowed with true possessions, and most weighed down with false ones.”

The struggle between two worlds that Erasmus describes is presented as a struggle between two sign systems in the contested field of human history. Caught in this struggle, our only chance for a productive engagement on the side of truth is to understand the signs by which truth has entered the world and which make reality beyond the intramundane, as Voegelin puts it, “luminous for its truth.” Erasmus’ understanding of Christ as a Silenus figure or ambiguous sign calls us to a critical and fundamentally hermeneutical perspective toward all things. That is, we cannot take any image or truth claim at face value – we need to open them up and see what is on the inside.

Echoing Augustine’s hermeneutics and his distinction between carnal and spiritual reading in De Doctrina Christiana (i.e., that which perceives only the literal verbal surface versus that which perceives the spirit, sermo, or logos), Erasmus writes, “The very Scriptures have their own Sileni. If you remain on the surface, a thing may sometimes appear absurd; if you pierce through to the spiritual meaning, you will adore the divine wisdom.” Such discoveries are like small conversions or little paradigm shifts in one’s inner life. They may never be exhaustive or final, but they are profoundly important, not least because they clear our minds of attachments to accustomed, superficial ways of seeing, thinking, and interpreting.

Erasmus understood that we need a constant supply of epistemological purgatives or mini-conversions that can help us get rid of our attachments to inside-out Sileni. In the Adages he reminds us that because of God’s very nature, he is far from our understanding, but we can draw closer to him as we search for the true Sileni, all the aspects of creation that point to God. God’s creation and the creative arts of human beings are all signs that operate like the sacraments. In the sacraments, Erasmus writes, “You see the water … you hear the spoken words, these are like the faces of the Silenus; you cannot hear or see the power of God, without which all these things would be but mockeries.” Here Erasmus is no doubt recalling Augustine’s discussion of baptism and the Eucharist as signs from God, not men, in De Doctrina 3.13. The sacraments ordained by Christ, along with Christ himself, are the Sileni which can expose, overturn, and refashion the distorted sign and value systems of our world. As the Augustinian scholar and now Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams puts it in “Language, Religion, and Desire in Augustine’s De Doctrina,” “the scope of Christ’s love lies precisely in his own supremely gratuitous acceptance of the limits of history: … the eternal wisdom of God … becomes uniquely and entirely signum, a worldly thing meaning what it is not. To look to the cross, then, and to ‘sign’ ourselves with it, is to accept the same limits, and thus to live in hope.” If we learn the divine grammar of these signs and begin to understand what they signify, then we can approach in humility and hope the only firm hermeneutical grounding available, the only viable alternative to the postmodern abyss of empty signification described by Jean Baudrillard in “The Evil Demon of Images and the Precession of Simulacra” as “the murderous capacity of images.”

“All of Western faith and good faith was engaged in [a] wager on representation: that a sign could refer to the depth of meaning, that a sign could exchange for meaning, and that something could guarantee this exchange – God, of course.”

Baudrillard is a fascinating thinker who connects well with the Augustinian figures I have been discussing, largely because he is attentive to “the successive phases of the image” or the sign as a medium for meaning in western culture and Christianity. Originally, he claims, “All of Western faith and good faith was engaged in [a] wager on representation: that a sign could refer to the depth of meaning, that a sign could exchange for meaning, and that something could guarantee this exchange – God, of course.” In this era people believed that signs and images reflect “a basic reality” and “the image is a good appearance – the representation is of the order of sacrament.” Later, Baudrillard contends that western society began to believe that signs, images, and words can “[mask] and [pervert] a basic reality.” Considerable skepticism was introduced, but belief in a basic reality remained, which implied “a theology of truth.” Augustine and Erasmus can be taken as representative figures of this phase. They know from experience that images can be abused, but this does not render images meaningless for them; rather, it motivates reform and clarification.

Baudrillard’s third phase marks a critical transition into a much deeper skepticism that might be considered the logical development of modernity into postmodernity. In this stage belief in a basic reality itself was rejected. People began to believe that beneath the images of our own construction there was nothing but a void: “there is no longer any God to recognize his own, nor any last judgement to separate true from false, the real from its artificial resurrection, since everything is already dead and risen in advance.” In his essay on Marsilio Ficino, Trinkaus describes the event that precipitated this radical shift, writing that “in the slow progress of western history human thought gradually replaced the God, whom mankind worshipped and endowed with conceivable qualities, with a conception of man in which now man himself was to be worshipped because he was endowed with godlike qualities.” This is exactly what Baudrillard refers to when he says western man realized he “could murder the divine identity” and install his own image in God’s place. Obviously this act rebels against the most basic tenets of the monotheistic religions. It mistakes man, who is truly a sign of God reflecting his image and likeness, for the thing signified. Instead of enjoying the spiritual freedom of the sign by understanding what it truly refers to and the relationship it implies, according to Augustine in De Doctrina, “taking signs for the things signified by them is a matter of slavish weakness … a matter of error going badly astray.”

Crucially, Baudrillard sees that the image of deified, autonomous man could not be installed in place of God without believing that divinity is artificial, a self-referential signifier that can be constructed any way we wish, given enough power and influence. Thus modernity’s act of rebellious iconoclasm can be repeated ad infinitum, with subsequent ages fashioning their own, rival images of human nature over against those of preceding eras. We have been witnessing this phenomenon over the last hundred years, as various groups of people have begun to see the harm that self-deified western man has done to them, and they have gone far in uncovering the self-deceptions and hidden weaknesses of this image. Postmodern critiques of western culture that target patriarchy, ethnocentrism, imperialism, and colonialism are, in this view, the fruit of modernity’s usurpation of God. However, eating this bitter fruit will not – by itself – lead to a reformed humanity or a better world. A mature postmodernity, as Baudrillard sees it, absorbs, normalizes, and eventually trivializes iconoclastic, revisionary coups. In a fully postmodern world, everything is revolutionary, from political movements to advertising campaigns, so the idea of revolution is relativized and rendered impotent. Without any transcendental ground of meaning, animal rights activists and clothing designers all promote secular religions based on their own ideals – ideals that can have no free-standing foundation in the absence of “a theology of truth.” Finally, one has to admit as Baudrillard does, that “the whole system becomes weightless, it is no longer anything but a gigantic simulacrum–not unreal, but a simulacrum, never again exchanging for what is real, but exchanging in itself, in an uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference.”

This is a disturbing analysis, but Baudrillard accurately describes the world of late liberal, advanced capitalist nation states: full of folly and Silenus-like images with no reference point that allows a distinction between appearance and reality. The Praise of Folly indicates that Baudrillard is quite correct to see that this is where the abandonment of God, a theology of truth, and a sacramental view of representation leaves us. Indeed, the much-derided and poorly understood bogeyman of humanism is itself a Silenus-figure, which, if we open it up, reveals a highly relevant, contemporary alternative to impoverished, groundless, modern and postmodern conceptions of the real and the human.

Erasmian and Augustinian humanistic thought uniquely points to our perennial need to rediscover the firmer ground our culture has extensively discarded but which it continually must recognize and may still return to. Without fleeing from the harshness of postmodernism, we can say that Christian humanism is at one with it in exposing what modernity has buried under the folly and delusion of self-sufficiency, but it is only the Christian humanist who is prepared to go beyond critique to a renaissance of living in light of the truth without losing sight of human limitations.

I believe that any authentically Christian response to the modern-postmodern dichotomy must recover this central trait of Renaissance humanism: the ability to accept and hold together – even to cherish – the two disparate halves of human nature. On the one hand, we are impoverished, deceitful, and self-deceiving. On the other hand, we are noble, capable of reasoning toward truth, capable of sharing the experience of it, and able to improve what we know and how we live. Emphasizing either aspect of human nature at the expense of the other is wrong and will yield distorted results. In reality they are always conjoined, and we live within the tension inherent in both the Gospel and the fallen human condition. Good, wise readings of ourselves, literature, history, and the world will only come forth if we push those tensions out front, cherish them, and live under them in humility, always seeking the truth. There is no systematic, rationalistic method or theory that will help us without an intuitive, experientially- and spiritually-guided openness to questions and conversations where, if any truth is to be had, it must be tasted to be seen.

Selected Bibiliography

Christian Humanism, Past and Present

by Dan Knauss

Renaissance Humanism

The Praise of Folly

Before and Beyond Postmodernism: The Sign as Sacrament

Selected Bibiliography