"The biggest question is not what title to select, but what we want those titles to say to the community." Jonathan KemperThis foolish journalist thrice submitted the title The Praise of Folly to Kansas City banking dynast Jonathan Kemper's secretary for his consideration as one of the titles to decorate the jumbo parking garage next to the renovated Neoclassical- and Renaissance-style bank building that will serve as the elegant ark for Missouri's high civilization once the downtown Kansas City Public Library is relocated therein. Mr. Kemper is the motivating force for the conversion of the old bank, dubbed 'Jonathan's building', into the new main library.
I recommended to Mr. Kemper that the alfresco method - in widespread use during the heavily walled Romanesque period, and revived during the early Renaissance - be employed to embed the titles on the outside wall of the library's large parking building, thus making the mural a lasting part of the architecture. I also urged Mr. Kemper to review the names of authors sculpted a century ago on the frieze of Kansas City's second library building, a Renaissance-style building at Ninth and Locust, before considering what he wanted to tell the community a century from today with his titles.
Copies of my recommendations together with several critical articles on the new library project were sent along to librarians at the downtown Kansas City Library. A few of them responded with scandalous information about the goings-on at the library and the governing board. Only one librarian asked that his name be removed from the email list for my periodical releases - 'Criticism of the Policies and Practices of Kansas City Missouri Public Librarians' - stating that the subject was of no interest whatsoever to him. Another individual questioned my recommendation, The Praise of Folly, stating that he has never heard of the book, and that the community might get the wrong message and commit itself to folly. In response to which my favorite moron, namely me, once again quoted Lady Folly's view, that nothing would get done without her, and referred the gentleman to my recent library blog entry 'Mystical Real Estate Development.'
The Praise of Folly has in fact been familiar to book lovers for several centuries. Even those few Lutherans left who still hate scholarly works know the title well; or at least they know the author by name, for Luther once said to his friends, "When I pray, 'Blessed be Thy Holy Name', I curse Erasmus and his heretical congeners who revile and profane God." Erasmus, in turn, said that he, Erasmus, had caused humanists to celebrate Christ, but Luther then appeared and threw his "apple of discord" into the world.
Erasmus, for one thing, blamed Luther for the Peasant's Revolt, and Luther was proud of being the cause of the rebels' deaths. "I, Martin Luther," attested Luther, "have slain all the peasants who died during the rebellion, for I goaded authority to the slaughter. Their blood be on my head." Indeed, he had urged the princes to "stab and kill" the peasants whom he had inspired and who had revered him so greatly as a leader: "Those who rally to the side of the princes will become holy martyrs; those who fail, will go to the devil; therefore let all who can, both in public and private, strike down and strangle these miscreants, bearing ever in mind that there is nothing more poisonous, more noisesome, more devilish, than a man who incites the people to insurrection." Furthermore, "The donkey needs a thrashing, and the brute populace must be governed by brute force." Of course Luther stated Christ authorized the killing with, "I come not in peace but with a sword."
Years before Luther penned De servo arbitrio, his notorious response to Erasmus' temperate missive in favor of the pacific pursuit of reform, Luther believed that Germans should go berserk, "I do not think," he wrote to Spalatinus, "that the cause can be carried to a successful issue without tumult, vexation, and insurrection. You cannot make a quill pen out of a sword, nor change war into peace. God's word is war and vexation and destruction, it is poison. Like a bear in the path, like a lioness in the jungle, it attacks the sons of Ephraim." Yet he advised the authorities to kill the peasants, led by Munzer, flying the rainbow banner of God's covenant. When confronted with his contradictions, Luther attributed them to "God's mysteries."
As for pacifism, the world's greatest bigot and hypocrite at the time wrote to Erasmus, "Let be with your complaining and clamor (for peaceful reform); against such a fervor no medicine can prevail. This war is our Lord God's war. He has unchained it, and never will it cease raging until all the enemies of His word has been wiped from the face of the earth. " And Luther said to his friends, "I intend to kill Satan (Erasmus)" just as I slew Munzer, whose blood is on my head."
Erasmus once remarked of the clerical quibbling, prevarication and hypocrisy of his day, "These words 'Evangel', 'God's Truth', 'faith', 'Christ', 'spirit', are perpetually spilling from their mouths, and yet I see many of them so conducting themselves as if they were possessed of the devil." And, in a letter to Zwingli, Erasmus took issue with the errors of Luther's irrational doctrine: Luther denied the merits of free will; he asserted that all good works are mortal sins; he insisted that justification comes from blind faith in God alone.
Of course Erasmus is best known among bookish people for his The Praise of Folly, which was well received by all except the clerics - princes were much amused by being made the butt of jokes by Lady Folly, who gladly served the purpose of a court clown. This foolish cub reporter for Downtown Kansas City was fortunate to stumble over a copy of the book again. Many book lovers have recommended it over the years. For instance, the eminent historian, illustrator, radio commentator, and journalist Hendrik Willem van Loon, best known for The Story of Mankind (made into a movie staring Groucho Marx), admired Erasmus of Rotterdam - Van Loon hailed from Rotterdam.
"I have spent more than a half-century reading books...," wrote van Loon in his prefatory biography of Erasmus, "and now I find myself face to face with the terrible problem of 'What in Heaven's name can I read that I have not already read a dozen times before?' The modern output is like a mighty river. At certain spots it is a veritable Rio de Plata, almost fifty miles wide but so shallow that ever crossing it in a rowboat throws up such quantities of mud that it begins to resemble the mighty Missouri in spring." Hence van Loon returned to the hinterland creeks of his youth to take up the "highly explosive literary dynamite known the last four centuries and a half as The Praise of Folly. So did I.