Fools and Foolishness

By at least the end of the twelfth century (and
probably earlier), the fool had achieved the eminence
of having his own feast day. The famous, sometimes
infamous, Fête des Fous gave the lower clergy, if only
ephemerally, the traditional freedom accorded the fool.
Related to the Roman Saturnalia and embodying the
spirit of carnival misrule, the Feast of Fools found its
Scriptural authority in a verse from the Magnificat:
Deposuit potentes de sede, et exaltavit humiles. Almost
three centuries later, when these blasphemous celebra-
tions had been driven out of the church, they were
taken over and expanded by the secular Sociétés
Joyeuses in the towns and universities. Emulating the
sub-deacons of the cathedrals, students and urban citi-
zens took the opportunity to lord it over their betters
and mock authority, both temporal and religious, with
assumed amnesty. But the original Scriptural sugges-
tion of The World Turned Upside-Down continued to
be closely associated with the fool. For by his very
nature, the fool is iconoclastic, not simply irreverent
but potentially subversive in his inability to compre-
hend the assumptions on which authority is founded.
He is too simpleminded to see the emperor's new
clothes and too unsophisticated to refrain from point-
ing out the nakedness of the truth.

The idea of the wisdom (sapientia) of the fool always
stands in contrast to the knowledge (scientia) of the
learned or the “wisdom” of the worldly (sapientia
mundana). In this respect, the oxymoron, “wise fool,”
is inherently reversible; for whenever it is acknowl-
edged that the fool is wise, it is also suggested, expressly
or tacitly, that the wise are foolish. Perhaps the earliest
recorded expression of this paradox is Heraclitus' ob-
servation that much learning does not teach wisdom
(frag. 40), but the theme was recurrent in ancient
literature from Aeschylus to Horace. The classical
archetype for the figure of the wise fool is Socrates,
whom later theorists constantly invoked. Not only was
his educational method based on exposing the folly of
the supposedly wise, but he himself claimed that his
own wisdom was derived from an awareness of his
ignorance. In the Apology (20d-23b), he recounts how
the oracle at Delphi had once said there was no man
wiser than he. Knowing that he was not wise, however,
he attempted to disprove the oracle by finding a wiser
man among the Athenians; but he found that all those
who professed wisdom were in fact ignorant, while he
alone admitted his ignorance. Hence he concluded that
what the Pythian god had meant was: “The wisest of
you, O men, is he who, like Socrates, knows that as
far as wisdom is concerned he is actually worthless.”

Socrates' account of human ignorance, in attributing
true wisdom only to the divine, anticipates Saint Paul's
claim that God has made foolish the wisdom of this
world (I Corinthians 1:20; 3:19). The Pauline concept
of the Fool in Christ, which is given its fullest exposi-
tion in the Epistles to the Corinthians, affirms the
worthlessness of wordly wisdom in contrast to the
wisdom of the Christian, which to the world appears
folly. Claiming that we are fools for Christ's sake but
are wise in Christ (I Corinthians 4:10), he argues that
“the foolishness of God is wiser than men” (I Corinthi-
ans 1:25), and he says of unbelievers that, “professing
themselves to be wise, they became fools” (Romans
1:22). “Let no man deceive himself,” he exhorts; “if
any man among you seemeth to be wise in this world,
let him become a fool, that he may be wise” (I Corin-
thians 3:18). Christ Himself had exemplified this foolish
wisdom, not only when as a child He answered the
doctors in the temple, but also later when He con-
founded the scribes and pharisees in their wisdom.
Moreover, His teaching was seen to be childlike in its
simplicity, “foolish” in its homespun imagery; and, it
was later argued, although we think of sheep as foolish
creatures, He was the Lamb of God. This theological
paradox of the Wise Fool in Christ, which was to
provide the rationale for so many subsequent treat-
ments of the wisdom of folly, was kept alive all during
the Middle Ages by such writers as Gregory the Great,
Scotus Erigena, Francis of Assisi, Jacopone da Todi,
and Raimond Lull.

Like all fools, Stultitia's basic impulse is satiric, and
her widespread notoriety throughout sixteenth-century
Europe was largely the result of those parts of her
speech in which she irreverently boasts that all the
chief secular, religious, and intellectual estates of the
Renaissance world are under her dominion. No man,
not even her own author, is exempted from her
mordant ridicule as she anatomizes the follies of man-
kind. Yet in the last analysis, it is not her satiric cata-
logue but her ironic self-description which was to have
the more lasting resonance. For in explaining who she
is—in asking, that is, what it means to be a fool—she
demonstrates that folly is not merely universal but
necessary and even desirable to mankind, that to be
a man is nothing other than to play the fool, and
that the highest wisdom is to acknowledge this very
fact.
These radical reappraisals of common assumptions
are derived throughout from a humane understanding
of man's condition and a belief in the essential goodness
of human nature if it is uncorrupted by man-made
institutions, false learning, and perversions of the will.
Once man has stripped himself of these false claims
to wisdom, he becomes a proper receptacle to receive
the wisdom of Christ, which is the only true wisdom.
In the conclusion of her great speech, Stultitia invokes
the figure of the Fool in Christ, derived from Saint
Paul and Cusanus, and prescribes a pietistic simplicity
of heart as the true way to divine wisdom. What is
more, she effectively argues that, since to be a man
is to be a fool, when the Son of God accepted the role
of human frailty He became the greatest of all fools.