On Reading Erasmus's "Handbook of the Militant Christian" and Dolnick's "The Clockwork Universe"

 

I'll put them in my 2024 Readings post when I'm finished.  But I'm not done reading The Essential Erasmus or The Clockwork Universe yet.  But reading them at the same time has made me think what a loathsome time it was when religion ruled our minds.

We had to create some sorts of explanations for the mystery of existence, and it's not like everything in religion would have been self-evidently stupid.  A lot of morality and ethics is based on the realities of life and of participation in a society.  All pleasures are passing and giving oneself over to them can be self-destructive.  Selfishness and cruelty have to be suppressed or else life will really be "nasty, brutish and short."  But at the end of the day, the religious explanation is a false one.  Science will never explain the mystery.  It's mysteries all the way down.  But science is a more systematic way of trying to explain and understand things than is just making shit up.  Which is what religion is.

I read Desiderius Erasmus's number-one smash-hit "The Praise of Folly" thirty years ago, and it had hovered before me having been mentioned in history books (along with Machiavelli's The Prince) since childhood.  It was one of those books that apparently had a lasting impact on Western Civilization.  Erasmus was described as a brilliant man and a humanist and a moderate.  Someone who railed against the corruption and dogmatism of the Catholic Church while still wanting to prevent a schism within Christianity and all the violence it would inevitably create.  He was the toast of Europe and both Hans Holbein and Albrecht Durer (and other artists) painted his portrait.

It turned out that I liked "Praise of Folly" but there were a couple of moments (one I remember in particular about strong, healthy looking beggars) that struck me as problematic.  Just like nowadays, when assholes see a poor person receiving assistance before they've been reduced to starvation and rags, Erasmus believed that 16th Century poor people were all scammers, living it up on alms at the expense of decent folk.

There's even more of that shit in the first piece of this collection of his works.  "The Handbook of the Militant Christian" was written as a guide to life at the request of the battered wife of some drunken, boorish knight.  I found it to be obnoxious.  Garbage from start to finish.  Along with a few more jabs at poor people, Erasmus writes harshly about enslaved people as if it's self-evident that they're scum.  He comes across as a hypocritical prig.  In the brief biography at the beginning of the book it's mentioned that he was often financially straitened due to his love of fancy clothes and fine food.  He spends the whole essay writing about the disgusting appetites of the poor and about the emptiness of the pleasures of this world but he was clearly unable (for his entire life) to live up to the standards he was constantly scolding others to aspire to.

The whole thing with the stink of religion is how it took the reality that pleasures are fleeting and that they often have consequences, and blew that up into a hatred of the world and a self-denying, self-hating rejection of life itself.  In return for constantly denying oneself any taste of the good things in this one, brief life that we have, and for hating oneself for failing to do so, Erasmus (like so many other religious charlatans) offers the imaginary reward of eternal life with an imaginary God, which he describes with vague, meaningless superlatives.  That so many people lived for so many centuries under this garbage delusion was just so depressing to me.

Edward Dolnicks The Clockwork Universe is about the impact of Gottfried Leibniz and Isaac Newton (with assists from Galileo and Kepler and a few others) in the transformation of European culture from the Medieval to the modern.  And reading it at the same time as Erasmus's puritanical screed only compounded my horror at the stifling, distorting, wasteful impact of religion on human thinking.

Again, ... we felt that we HAD to come up with something.  And since it was invented bullshit, we probably HAD to insist that it not be questioned.  Because, inevitably, the obvious failings and contradictions would blow everything asunder.  It was a stage we had to go through but it's depressing nonetheless.  This idea of this psychotic, angry God (who is simultaneously loving and awesome and just the best and always helping us except when He isn't and then it's our fault for failing) who punishes us with plagues and fire on Earth and who threatens eternal torment for us in Hell should we fail to live up to His impossible standards, ... what sickening vomit.

[God probably thanked Himself that He had Satan conveniently ruling over the Hell that the damned got sent to.  What would He have done without Satan providing that dumping ground?]

The thing about Erasmus is that I wouldn't expect him to have risen above the superstitions that permeated the world he was born into.  He actually did criticize the rote-learning and the dogmatism of many Christian educators and thinkers.  He could see clearly in many ways.  But by his own standards he fell short.  First there was the hypocrisy of his lifelong indulgences in food and clothing.  But for someone who claimed to understand the New Testament, he seemed unable to recognize that Jesus hadn't been a member of any nobility.  Many of the Apostles were fishermen, which would have been the maritime equivalent of the rural peasants Erasmus so clearly despised.  "Christian Charity" is supposed to be given happily, not (as would seem to have been the case with Erasmus) stingily as if all in need are potential grifters.

Obviously people were different back then.  Life was much more violent and crude and therefore so were the humans who lived through it.  But even for his own time,  ... well, for a man of reading, to so clearly have missed the message of what he was yammering about, it's inexcusable for any age.