Calvin, The Institutes of the Christian Religion

As much as I've been enjoying my chronological reading, I've noticed that such an undertaking often gives an incomplete view of the discourse of the age. For example, when we read St. Anselm, we were lucky enough to be able to read with his Proslogion the reply of Gaunilo, another monk, followed by Anselm's reply to him. In doing so, we understood that Anselm's achievement was eclipsed to a degree by challenges from contemporary religious figures. As much as one would like to believe--or maybe it's only me--that a chronological reading provides a full picture of intellectual development, it is mostly the vertical history that ends up being covered. The horizontal history--the way in which contemporaneous minds interact and influence one another--is often lost.

So it is with that great theologian, John Calvin, and his magnum opus, Institutes of the Christian Religion. While it is certainly a monumental text, what might be the most interesting aspect--the interaction between Calvin, Luther, Erasmus, and others--is missing. Composed during one of the most intellectually vibrant ages in the history of the world, the Institutes is not an island, and reading it independently of its context can only be a detriment, and will have to be rectified in the future.

Yet much can be gained from its reading, if only because of its place in our current age. American Christianity owes a profound debt to Calvin, and churches across the country look to him as Catholics do to Augustine (or, indeed, as Calvin himself looked to Augustine). At the same time, his Brobdingnagian masterwork, spanning nearly 1500 pages, is absent in many reading lists of Western thought, cast aside in favor of Luther's more bite-sized works.

We won't try to delve into the controversies surrounding the Catholic church at the time, as if I had any insight into them. We know that Luther and Calvin split from the church, that through their close readings of the Bible and early church fathers they testified to how far Christianity had wandered from the strait and narrow. It will still be edifying for us to think about Calvin's work standing alone, as its sheer size obliges us to. And we will see that even my casual, absentminded reading produces great fruit.


Knowing

Thomas Aquinas' Summa began with about a dozen proofs of the existence of God from throughout history. Calvin similarly begins with the question of how men can know God, yet he sets himself apart from Aquinas and the Scholastics in his method. Whereas Aquinas came to know God through proof, with what we may think of as Aristotelian truth, Calvin's knowledge comes not from the brain but from the heart. Yes, though Calvin's reputation is that of the stern forefather of the Puritans, he emphasizes the authority of the heart in matters of faith, and it is this idea that guides the rest of the Institutes. "Each of us," he writes, "must, then, be so stung by the consciousness of his own unhappiness as to attain at least some knowledge of God."

Let us unpack this dense sentence. First of all, Calvin says that it is primarily (that is, in the first place) through unhappiness that we come to know God, for we "cannot seriously aspire to him before we begin to become displeased with ourselves." So unhappiness is not melancholy in a general sense, but rather specifically displeasure with oneself. It is only through this realization--that the way one is is not what one was meant to be--that the knowledge of God comes.

So what is knowledge in this case? To begin with, Calvin says that all men know God in the sense that all men yearn for a godlike figure. He writes that there is "no nation so barbarous, no people so savage, that they have not a deep-seated conviction that there is a God," that "the knowledge of God has been naturally implanted in the minds of men." While I am sure we could scan any textbook of anthropology to refute this claim prima facie, this does not detract from the force of his argument. For he is writing so as to emphasize the legitimacy of religion against critics who, like Marx a couple centuries later, would say that religion is the opiate of the masses, "invented by the subtlety and craft of a few to hold the simple folk in thrall by this device." (That's Calvin, not Marx.) Without even going into how this prefiguring is yet another proof that there is nothing new under the sun, we may note how closely Calvin's argument parallels that of Dostoevsky, who believed that the ability of men to imagine a better world is proof of the existence of such.

How are we then to know? If our hearts are inscribed with the knowledge of God, are we then free to follow our hearts to come to the knowledge of God, as new age philosophy would have us believe? Well, no. Calvin tells us that we are not "to fashion God according to our own whim." He continues: “We ought to observe that we are called to a knowledge of God: not that knowledge which, content with empty speculation, merely flits in the brain, but that which will be sound and fruitful if we duly perceive it, and if it takes root in our heart.” 

Empty is that which flits in the brains, rootless. Intellectual masturbation does not lead to the knowledge of God. This may be a good place to point out how much Calvin hates the Scholastics. Though we briefly touched on the difference between Aquinas and Calvin, it is difficult to overemphasize just how wrong the latter thought the Scholastic method was. Perhaps it is a sign of the times: others, such as Erasmus, had also rejected the Scholastic project in favor of different worldviews.

After quite a bit of build up, Calvin announces how it is we know God: “Consequently, we know the most perfect way of seeking God, and the most suitable order, is not for us to attempt with bold curiosity to penetrate to the investigation of his essence, which we ought more to adore than meticulously to search out, but for us to contemplate him in his works whereby he renders himself near and familiar to us, and in some manner communicates himself. The apostle was referring to this when he said that we need not seek him far away, seeing that he dwells by his very present power in each of us.”

If speculation about God drifts around our brain like a planetary body, in sight but out of reach, true knowledge of God is much more tangible and, to Calvin, is very much within our grasp. He claims that there are more than enough proofs of God that we can see without having to "rack our brains." With a flick of his pen, he casts away Aquinas' proofs of God as a vain intellectual exercise and asks men to ponder the "storehouse of inestimable riches" laying at their feet. 

His rejection of the Scholastic method comes as a result of this belief: that knowing, to Calvin, is not as simple as men make it out to be. Even those as apparently learned as the Scholastics are trapped by the "boundless filthy mire of error" that arises from the difficulty associated with our knowing. "Each man's mind," Calvin says, "is like a labyrinth," his preferred symbol of human frustration and confusion. He offers the following anecdote as illustration: 

“Some praise the reply of Simonides, who, asked by the tyrant Hiero what God was, begged to be given a day to ponder. When on the following day the tyrant asked the same question, he asked for two days more, and after having frequently doubled the number of days, finally answered, ‘The longer I consider this, the more obscure it seems to me.’…Yet hence it appears that if men were taught only by nature, they would hold to nothing certain or solid or clear-cut, but would be so tied to confused principles as to worship an unknown god.” 

Men taught by their minds cannot but fall into the mire of error. Therefore, we must seek truth elsewhere: in the world and, even moreso, in the Bible.


Foreknowledge

Speaking as a Calvinist who could probably do to know more about Calvinism, it seems to me that Calvin's most influential idea is that of election; if it is not the most influential, then it is at very least his most controversial. In the following discussion, I will make no claims (alright, maybe some claims) about what Calvin does or does not believe, because I think this aspect of his theology--election, predestination, and free will--is not only contentious but incredibly subtle. For a better understanding, more than one reading is necessary (especially when that one reading wasn't very careful).

Some things, however, are not so opaque: "There is no such thing as fortune or chance," declares Calvin, sans qualification. Nor, it seems, is there definitive causality, despite what Aristotle might think: "Therefore a godly man will not make the sun either the principal or the necessary cause of these things which existed before the creation of the sun, but merely the instrument that God uses because he so wills; for with no more difficulty he might abandon it, and act through himself." 

We've seen a similar line of thinking before, in the Islamic philosophers. Recall the Ash’arite sect, to which belonged al-Ghazali, who claimed that cause and effect did not exist, that the answer to every question of "Why?" is "Because God willed it." For them, saying that one event caused another was tantamount to denying God's role in the process. Calvin doesn't go this far, although he rejects the idea of a passive god: "And truly God claims, and would have us grant him, omnipotence--not the empty, idle, and almost unconscious sort that the Sophists [here meaning the Scholastics] imagine, but a watchful, effective, active sort, engaged in ceaseless activity. Not, indeed, an omnipotence that is only a general principle of confused motion, as if he were to command a river to flow through its once-appointed channels, but one that is directed toward individual and particular motions." God's will is not directionless, the way al-Ghazali may have claimed (it is uncertain to me, but given the severity of his philosophy, it doesn't seem unreasonable). Rather, it is purposeful. We cannot believe in God and be deists; God must be an active God.

We may return briefly to Boethius, who gave what I consider the best explication of the eternal world of God in relation to the human world of men: that God experiences the whole of time as a lighted room, whereas men grope their way along its perimeter in the darkness. In this way, he was able to account for God's foreknowledge while still granting men free will: men are free to grope as they please, since it was all evident to God beforehand. Yet Calvin has no time for those who "babble too ignorantly of bare foreknowledge." True, Boethius' conception is too passive for Calvin. God is not merely "the first agent" since believers who suffer adversity can "comfort themselves with the solace that they suffer nothing except by God's ordinance and command, for they are under his hand." Foreknowledge does not grant God enough power. 


Election

Now that we understand Calvin's stance on foreknowledge, we can consider the question of election, which is for Calvin the true Christian equivalent of foreknowledge. The basic thesis is that certain people are elected by God to be saved. This election is secret: you don't know your status any better than another person does, regardless of your beliefs or behavior. Why are some elect and not others? "If you proceed further to ask why he so willed, you are seeking something greater and higher than God's will, which cannot be found." This may sound unusually Thomistic of Calvin, but it's interesting nonetheless. At bottom is God's will, period. "By thus covering election with a veil of foreknowledge, they [bad Christians] not only obscure it but feign that it has its origin elsewhere."

Besides, there is little use, Calvin might say, in quibbling about election when the great majority of the world is secret to us and known only to God. When Jesus says that men do not live by bread alone, Calvin adds that this is because "it is not plenty itself that nourishes men, but God's secret blessing." He additionally quotes the lovely Psalm 3:5: "I lay down and slept; I awoke again, for the Lord sustained me."

He also answers through Augustine, which is a really enthralling passage that I'm going to quote in full:

"You, a man, except an answer [about God, secrets, etc.] from me; I too am a man. Therefore, let both of us hear one who says, 'O man, who are you?' Ignorance that believes is better than rash knowledge. Seek merits; you will find only punishment. 'O depth!'* Peter denies; the thief believes. 'O depth!' Thou seekest reason? I tremble at the depth. Reason, thou; I will marvel. Dispute, thou; I will believe. I see the depth; I do not reach the bottom. Paul rested, for he found wonder. He calls God's judgments 'unsearchable,' and thou settest out to search them? He speaks of his ways as 'inscrutable,' and thou dost track them down?"

[*Romans 11:33]

To close the matter, he quotes Pseudo-Augustine (that is, Augustine with a devious mustache): "The Lord can therefore also give grace...because he is merciful, and not give to all because he is a just judge. For by giving to some what they do not deserve...he can show his free grace... By not giving to all, he can manifest what all deserve."



Stray Observations

• Law is not one of my major interests, so I glossed over the sections on government and such, but here is a characteristically Calvinist definition of natural law: "Natural law is the apprehension of the conscience which distinguishes between just and unjust, and which deprives men of the excuse of ignorance, while it proves them guilty by their own testimony." Unlike, say, Aquinas, who spoke of natural law as something like a subset of the whole law, Calvin asserts that it is there so that we cannot claim to not understand the concept of inherent law.
• Again about the law: "Was the law to be limited to our powers so as not to be given in vain? Rather, it was put far above us, to show clearly our own weakness!" Again, characteristically Calvin. We should also remember Kafka's parable: "The true path is along a rope, not a rope suspended way up in the air, but rather only just over the ground. It seems more like a tripwire than a tightrope." 
• Okay, okay, maybe I care about law a little bit. Calvin claims that it was Paul's contention that Mosaic law was "the shadow of good things to come," not "the living likeness of the things themselves... Therefore its sole function was to be an introduction to the better hope that is manifested in the gospel." This is the same conclusion that Maimonides came to. 
• Speaking of Mosaic law, here's a wonderful bit about Judaism and its relation to Christianity: "In communicating his Word to them [the Israelites], he joined them to himself, that he might be called and esteemed their God. In the meantime, 'he allowed all other nations to walk' in vanity.... 'But when the fullness of time came' which was appointed for the restoration of all things, he was revealed as the reconciler of God and men; 'the wall' that for so long had confined God's mercy within the boundaries of Israel 'was broken down.' ...Therefore there is now no difference between Jew and Greek.... but 'Christ is in all.'"
• “Herein is man’s ignorance: when he comes to a particular case, he forgets the general principle that he has just laid down… the intellect is very rarely deceived in general definition or in the essence of the thing; but that it is illusory when it goes farther, that is, applies the principle to particular cases.”

Machiavelli, The Prince

I originally read The Prince in college, and I recall that my first reading was entirely consumed with the anticipation that I was about to reach some twisted, horrifying chapter wherein Machiavelli earned the fear that his name connoted. (I was a freshman, give me a break.) That moment never came, and I was disappointed that I had been tricked into reading a Renaissance political treatise rather than an encomium in praise of enhanced interrogation.

Perhaps everyone in his first encounter with Machiavelli is shocked at how pragmatic his philosophy appears. The writer is by no means a saint, yet his advice is rarely controversial by today's political standards and is often downright dull. The stuff about injuring one's own citizens hasn't aged well, but overall, The Prince is less a controversial text and more a prerequisite: would you really want a leader who, as M. warns against, is easily swayed by the advice of others? 

But the politics and statecraft of The Prince are not what I was after in reading it; maybe one day I'll give political theory a fair shot, but that day is not today. Rather, I was led to reread The Prince after one of my professors made the relatively bold claim that M. represented the bridge between the pre-modern and modern world. Before getting to his reasoning, let's consider other thinkers who have earned such a title. Dante has been said to have stood on the cusp of the modern world, but I quite like Eugenio Montale's assessment that he stood at the closing of the medieval world rather than the opening of the Renaissance. Harold Bloom claimed that Shakespeare, by "inventing" what it means to be human, ushered in the modern world, but Shakespeare is too obvious a suspect. Thomas Kuhn, in The Copernican Revolution, makes a good case for Copernicus; of those 3, I would cast my vote for him as well. Descartes, Francis Bacon, Montaigne--all have been posited. Yet it is so alluring, almost sinful to consider Machiavelli for the role.

My professor at the time supported his claim by saying that Machiavelli was the first to tame fortune. Throughout our reading, be it the Greeks or the medieval Christians, we have seen society after society kowtow to the whims of Fortune. Though the surrender came occasionally after a hard-fought battle, little has been done in general to prepare for misfortune, to fortify the walls against possibility. (The exception would be Asian and Indian philosophy, but we're talking about the West, so shhhh.) By arguing that the taming of fortune was within our power, Machiavelli opened up a new world, a world where man is the "master and proprietor of nature," to quote Descartes. Men no longer live in caves, cowering at lightning in the sky and shadows on the wall; men can use reason to overcome the world's vicissitudes. 

Virtue and Virtu

I usually skim the translator's introductions of books when I am not too concerned with how the translation was done, but I found this one, by Russell Price, interesting since Machiavelli uses words very carefully. 

First, many of his words have close cognates in English--respetto is respect, sospetto is suspicion, etc.--but his abstract nouns carry a particular flavor, specifically that of fear. Price notes that M.'s usage of these words is closer to "fearful respect" and "fearful suspicion," respectively.

But there is more to his language than fear, as surprising as that may be. Take virtu for example. Its direct translation is, of course, virtue, but there is more to Machiavellian virtue than what one might read in Augustine or Plato. Virtue for Machiavelli is "a willingness to follow the [traditional] virtues when possible and an equal willingness to disregard them when necessary." This is not the same as moral relativism, or even amorality. Machiavelli knows virtue and believes in virtue (I think). What he does not believe in is unthinking fealty to virtue. True virtue lies in discernment, and this subtlety is lacking in everything we've read so far.

Such a stance should not be surprising given how often Machiavelli confronts "theory with practice." In the Prince, there is little philosophical waxing, little hemming and hawing about what is and isn't right. What is and isn't right depends on the circumstances, on fortuna. Theoretical ethics, I would argue, is not absent from Machiavelli; rather, theory is so far removed from Machiavelli's point that it is "dismissed with a shrug." Living in the world requires not only a theoretical understanding of right and wrong, but a practical guide to carrying on when wrong appears right and right is conspicuously absent. "How men live," Machiavelli writes," is so different from how they should live."

This, the way men live, is another area where M. doesn't so much challenge long-held ideas as much as write down for the first time how men have behaved. If all men were perfectly virtuous, there would be no need for ethics since it would just be how people are. Rather, M. is recommending a practical, nuanced approach. "Yet one should not be troubled about becoming notorious for those vices without which it is difficult to preserve one's power, because if one considers everything carefully, doing some things that seem virtuous may result in one's ruin, whereas doing other things that seem vicious may strengthen one's position."

One more thing to say about all this. M.'s subtlety is quite incredible. Normally, people discuss M. by saying that he invented the idea of "the ends justifying the means". This may be true, as before him we seem to have spoken exclusively of the ends. But he is not all about the means. Rather, he sees great value in the ends, and his advice is often focused on them: "If generosity is practiced in such a way that you will be considered generous, it will harm you. If it is practiced virtuously, and as it should be, it will not be known about, and you will not avoid acquiring a bad reputation for the opposite vice." M. says that true virtue must be hidden, and therefore those who are truly virtuous will not be known for virtue. He does not see a way out of this, and so he argues "Therefore, since a ruler cannot bring himself to practice this virtue of generosity and be known to do so without harming himself, he would do well not to worry about being called miserly." If you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all. This is very reminiscent of the gospels, wherein Jesus rebukes those who pray in the open, so everyone can see them: "When you pray, you are not to be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on the street corners so that they may be seen by men. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full." (Matt 6:5) The reward for being openly generous is being known for it; the reward for being truly generous is to be thought miserly.


Fortune and Fortuna

What keeps theory from trumping practice? Why is following the Good not enough for people? Because fortune stands in their way. M. knows a thing or two about fortune. He wrote the Prince while imprisoned for treason. As he says in the dedicatory letter, "You will see how much I am unjustly oppressed by great and cruel misfortune."

In the beginning of his discourse on fortune, he writes, "I am not unaware that many have thought, and many still think, that the affairs of the world are so ruled by fortune and by God that the ability of men cannot control them." As we pointed out earlier, this may be the most important observation in the Prince, the distinction between fate and free will, what is predestined and what is in our hands.

It is not necessarily that people in previous generations held that their actions were utterly meaningless; if that were so, I can't imagine that existentialism would have been kept at bay until the 19th century. Rather, there was a certain futility to actions. One must do what one must do, but ultimately all actions are under the power of God. By M.'s time, this had changed slightly, if only because Calvin had declared that we're all predestined and have no free will, i.e., we're all fucked. But at the same time that that great theologian was writing, M. was telling the world (princes, technically) that people have much more power than they realize. From the man himself:

"I compare fortune to one of those dangerous rivers that when they become enraged, flood the plains, destroy trees and buildings, move earth from one place and deposit it in another. Everyone flees before it, everyone gives way to its thrust, without being able to halt it in any way. but this does not mean that, when the river is not in flood, mean are unable to take precautions, by means of dykes and dams, so that when it rises next time, it will either not overflow its banks or, if it does, its force will not be so uncontrolled or damaging." 

When people live from moment to moment, action to action, cowering in fear, all may seem lost; and perhaps there will be great storms that catch us unaware and destroy and maim and kill, but that is not to say that we are powerless in their aftermath. M.'s is not a doctrine of superhuman ability. He does not say that we can predict or take control of nature. He is not so bold. Rather he says that we can plan, we can prepare. In essence, we can use our abilities and our reason to correct our course. Once we have seen a river flood, we can keep it from happening again. Notice also the nature imagery. He does not compare fortune to a homicidal king or a deadly plague, but to nature, calling to mind how often God declares Himself present in the world.

And there is more to fortune than just hindsight. Fortune can destroy, but it can also sweep away, and our success is based not on how strong our armor is or how good of swimmers we are, but on how well we can go with the flow. (I'm so sorry.)

"Moreover, I believe that we are successful when our ways are suited to the times and circumstances, and unsuccessful when they are not. for one sees that, in the things that lead to...glory and riches, men proceed in different ways: one man cautiously, another impetuously... and each of these different ways of acting can be effective... Therefore, if it is necessary for a cautious man to act expeditiously, he does not know how to do it; this leads to failure. But if it were possible to change one's character to suit the times and circumstances, one would always be successful."

This applies too to his most famous doctrine, that it is better to be feared than to be loved: 

“A controversy has arisen about this: whether it is better to be loved than feared, or vice versa. My view is that it is desirable to be both loved and feared; but it is difficult to achieve both and, if one of them has to be lacking, it is much safer to be feared than loved. For this may be said of men generally: they are ungrateful, fickle, feigners and dissemblers, avoiders of danger, eager for gain. [Why, hello there, Hobbes] While you benefit them they are all devoted to you: they would shed their blood for you; they offer their possessions, their lives, and their sons, as I said before, when the need to do so if far off. But when you are hard pressed, they turn away. A ruler who has relied completely on their promises, and as neglected to prepare other defences, will be ruined, because friendships that are acquired with money, and not through greatness and nobility of character, are paid for but not secured, and prove unreliable just when they are needed.”


Seeming and Being

I want to close this post with one of my favorite topics, that of man's nature. Recall in Othello, which we will be getting to soon, that Iago manipulates those around him because they have a solid, unimpeachable view of themselves, and his own nature is so malleable ("I am not what I am"). The former characteristic, which Othello himself possesses, may be termed "heroic absolutism," the disposition that favors sureness and sturdiness rather than changeableness. What does M. have to say about this? "What makes princes appear contemptible... is seeming changeable, pusillanimous and irresolute." 

He agrees. Men seem contemptible when they are irresolute. Hence Othello's heroic absolutism. Hence M.'s advice: "A ruler, then, should never lack advice, but should have it when he wants it, not when others want to give it; rather he should discourage anyone from giving advice uninvited."

But wait. Didn't he just say that men should be open to changes in fortune? Didn't he advise that we adjust ourselves to the winds of circumstance? Indeed, and we should heed that advice. But that advice is about you, yourself, in your soul. Iago was changeable in his soul, but he was hard as a rock on the surface; how else would he earn the nickname "Honest Iago"? It is most important to act a certain way, because that is all men notice, save a select few. "Everyone can see what you appear to be," writes M.," whereas few have direct experience of what you really are... With regard to all human actions, and especially those of rulers... men pay attention to the outcome." This is not just the temporal outcome such as the outcome of a battle; it is also the outcome in the most literal sense, that which comes out of you from the inside. Inside you can be whatever you want, and should; outside, you must be only one way.


Stray Observations

• Wouldn't be a classic text without some good old fashioned sexism: "Because fortune is a woman, and if you want to control her, it is necessary to treat her roughly." Thanks, bro.
• "Therefore, those of our rulers who have lost their principalities, after having ruled them for many years, should not lament their back luck but should blame their own indolence." Cf., Kafka: There are two major sins: impatience and indolence.
• So we've got Hume, Kafka, Shakespeare so far all being prefigured. Anyone else? "But, above all, he must not touch the property of others, because men forget sooner the killing of a father than the loss of their patrimony." Oh, hey Freud, nice to see you here, too. Again: "A change of regime will not bring relatives back to life, but it could well result in one's property being restored." 
• I quite like some of his metaphors: “Since it is not always possible to follow in the footsteps of others, or to equal the ability of those whom you imitate, a shrewd man will always follow the methods of remarkable men, and imitate those who have been outstanding, so that, even if he does not succeed in matching their ability, at least he will get within sniffing distance of it. He should act as skilful archers do, when their target seems too distant: knowing well the power of their bow, they aim at a much higher point, not to hit it with the arrow, but by aiming there to be able to strike their target.”
• And again: “For those who draw maps place themselves on low ground, in order to understand the character of the mountains and other high points, and climb higher in order to understand the character of the plains. Likewise, one needs to be a ruler to understand properly the character of the people, and to be a man of the people to understand properly the character of rulers.”

Erasmus, The Praise of Folly; More, Utopia

Though I feel as if I got a lot out of the medieval philosophers––the Islamic theologians and Maimonides especially––I did complain quite a bit about the dense logic they often employed, lines of reasoning that were mystifying on first (and usually second) read. Indeed, one of the most unique aspects of scholasticism, as far as I’m concerned, is a glorification of Aristotelian logic. How, then, does the Renaissance set itself apart as a separate epoch?

At the same time that Europe experienced a rebirth of classical scholarship, it experienced also the rise of humanism, which was no longer concerned with the monastic approach to arguments that so dominated the previous era. Renaissance humanism instead, as Clarence Miller writes in his introduction to Erasmus, “might be simplistically described as an attempt to regain and restore the rightful roles of grammar and rhetoric.” Simplistic as that may be, it’s an excellent working definition, as we’ve already seen the way Boccaccio and Chaucer brought language and rhetoric to the fore. So too do the figures of today’s post, Desiderius Erasmus and Sir Thomas More.

The two men were friends and often made references to one another in their works, which have much in common. The Praise of Folly and Utopia both make constant reference to the Greeks and Romans. Both are written in Latin. And perhaps most significantly, both join in rhetorical games that stretch the boundaries of logic. In Folly, an encomium (or work of praise) to Folly written by Folly herself, we hear praises and defenses of foolishness so strong that it is difficult to untangle what Erasmus believes from what is tongue-in-cheek. In Utopia, a narration about a perfect society living on an island, our confidence in the so-called perfection of the community is constantly undermined by the narrator, and we are left unsure of what to make of this place called Utopia.

Such is the power of rhetoric, as demonstrated by two of the most famous Renaissance humanists. In today’s post, we’ll consider these two works, which recall and reinforce one another so strongly, and ask what the often paradoxical and disarming rhetoric employed by these two great writers can tell us.

Folly

There is plenty to be discussed in the Praise of Folly as far as arguments go, but even more interesting than its content is its structure. First, Praise is an encomium, that is, a speech written in praise of someone who is generally worthy of such a speech. The most famous example is probably the “Encomium of Helen” by the ancient sophist Gorgias, who gave many reasons for why Helen should be praised, despite having a pivotal role in the start of the Trojan War. So generally, encomia are written by one person in praise of another. Not so with Erasmus’ work, which is written ostensibly by Folly about Folly herself. Who else, it seems to imply, would wish to write a hymn of praise to someone as decidedly unpraiseworthy as Folly?

Folly sets out to prove that she is indeed praiseworthy, and does so in a three-act structure, here described by Clarence Miller:

“(1) Folly provides the illusions necessary to render life in this world tolerable or even pleasant… (2) Folly makes the professional leaders of church and state blind enough to be happy in their vicious irresponsibility… (3) Folly enables the Christian fool to renounce the world in favor of Christian joy in this life and the beatific vision in the next.”

Folly begins in act one (note that these acts are interpolated by scholars and don’t represent hard divisions in the text itself) by describing the ways in which she makes life bearable for the average person. She follows this by extending her duties to leaders of church of state, allowing them to be happy despite the terrible job they do. She concludes by saying that she also helps the Christian fool endure the irresponsibility of the very leaders whom she has made subject to her power.

Immediately we see a problem in this so-called three-act structure. The sections are related to one another, but they also seem to be responsible for one another. All men are foolish in order to live with the absurdities of life; included among all men are leaders of church and state; yet Christians, also included among all men, are miserable without folly exactly because of the leaders of church and state. I wanted to be fancy and say that the middle section acts as something of a chiasma, but on second thought, I don’t think that’s accurate. The entire work, in fact, is rather reminiscent of Homer Simpson’s dictum about alcohol: Folly is the cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems. Or even more accurately, it is like this SMBC. 

Of course, Folly is very convincing if you don’t think too hard about her arguments. She begins by describing the plight of all men: that their wisdom runs counter to their passions:

“Moreover, he [Jupiter] limited reason to the narrow confines of the head, leaving all the rest of the body to passion… How much reason can do against the forces of these two [anger and passionate desire] is sufficiently clear from the everyday life of mankind: she does all she can, which amounts to no more than shouting herself hoarse and preaching moral rules, but the passions tell their ruler to go to the devil and shout her down all the more impudently, until she is so tired that she gives in and knuckles under.”

Who has not experienced such a dilemma: did not Augustine rail against this very problem in his Confessions? The mind is no match for the will, and it is even difficult, truly nearly impossible, to bend one’s will to one’s will; Godel would prove this about half a millennium later.

Folly’s arguments in fact remind me very much of a certain episode I experienced. Once, some friends and I were watching American History X. If you are unfamiliar with the movie, Edward Norton stars as an neo-Nazi who returns from prison seeing the error of his ways and seeks to keep his younger brother from going down the same path. There’s a scene early on when Norton, before his stint in prison, confronts his mother’s new lover, a Jewish man, about the atrocities perpetrated by the Jews and how they are the cause of the world’s woes. Yet Norton is not your run-of-the-mill bigot, but a brilliant rhetorician, and he chooses his examples and his words and his tone so carefully that even my friend, watching the film with me, asked, Is it racist if I agree with him? The answer, despite what you may think, is no: Norton, the character, was written so that he would be convincing. Think of Ivan Karamazov, how he could not free himself from his own arguments. Norton is a racist, but he’s also smart, and there’s nothing wrong with falling for his arguments prima facie. But it is upon closer inspection that his arguments, as well as Folly’s, are shown to hold no water.

Take for example the direction she goes after the opening pages. She gives examples (we see how much Erasmus loves the Classical age here) from Circero and Quintillian: Cicero, she says, praises trepidation, Quintillian, fear. Therefore, she says, don’t they “clearly admit that wisdom is a hindrance to doing a job properly?” She continues:

“The fool plunges into the thick of things, staring danger in the face, and in this way (unless I am badly mistaken) he acquires true prudence. Homer seems to have seen this (in spite of his blindness) when he said ‘a fool is wise after the event.’”

Who has not had this same thought? Has not much been made of people like the subway hero in New York, and parodied on 30 Rock? Hell it was even written about in that book All Things Shining by a couple really important philosophers. But it’s said by Folly, so we must see the problem with the argument. Just because apparent vices like fear and trepidation are praised does not mean that wisdom should be discarded, cast aside as a relic of a former time. Rather, wisdom can be found separating true folly from wise folly: a fool is wise after the event, but only to those who saw his wisdom as foolishness. Time does not separate the fool from the wiseman; rather, judgment does.

But let us not spend all our time picking apart Folly’s arguments. It is enough that we know that her words are not to be taken at face value.

Having disposed with normal people, Folly moves on to leaders of church and state. First up, the medieval theologians:

“Certainly, though no one is less willing than they are to recognize my good will toward them, still these men are also obliged to me for benefits of no little importance. They are so blessed by their Selflove as to be fully persuaded that they themselves dwell in the third heaven, looking down from high above on all other mortals as if they were earth-creeping vermin almost worthy of their pity… In all of these there is so much erudition, so much difficulty, that I think the apostles themselves would need to be inspired by a different spirit if they were forced to match wits on such points with this new breed of theologians.”

Truly, this is an argument that could not have been made a few hundred years ago. Folly criticizes the scholastics for turning the teachings of the apostles into a series of increasingly complex word games, so that even the saints themselves would not be holy by the definition of these philosophers.

Yet we should notice something else about this second section: the language is very different. There are fewer rhetorical flourishes, fewer direct references to Folly herself. Rather, this middle section seems as if it could have been written by Erasmus without any reference to a goddess. If any of Folly’s words can be put into Erasmus’ mouth, they would certainly be from this section. This is supported by a comment made by William H Gass in his wonderful afterword: “Erasmus wanted the church to allow the study of pagan authors because he often found them wise and in every way as virtuous as the accepted saints.” Perhaps Erasmus recognized the wisdom of the pagans as well as the folly of many of the saints who, virtuous though they may be, are still foolish.

Finally, Folly quotes the prophets whom she said would find no support from the theologians, quoting them as proof that even God recognizes the importance of her work.

“But [the prophet] Jeremiah professes this belief much more frankly in his tenth chapter: ‘Every man,’ he says, ‘is rendered foolish by his wisdom.’ Wisdom he attributes to God alone, leaving folly as the lot of all men.”

But that’s clearly not what he’s saying. Wisdom is indeed God’s, but that does not mean man receives no share of it: recall that men are made in the image of God, and that a great deal of scholarship in the past centuries was dedicated the showing how wisdom is God’s gift to men. This is true too of the other passages he quotes, such this passage, either from Ecclesiastes or Ecclesiasticus: “A fool changes like the moon, a wise man is immutable like the sun.”

Utopia

The difficulties of Folly lie in its structure and its arguments. More’s Utopia engages with the same rhetorical challenges as Erasmus’ work, but it also derives confusion from its use of language. This problem is brought to light in its very title: Utopia, which in modern parlance is synonymous with “good place” (eu-topos in Greek), can also be translated as “no place” (ou-topos). To skirt middle-school-English analysis, neither is the “correct” translation: the point, rather, is that the Utopian island is both a good place (if we are to believe the narrator Hythloday, which we perhaps shouldn’t, as his name translates to “peddler of nonsense”) and a place that can’t possibly exist, which we will discuss in a moment. The reality of Utopia seems predicated in fact on its hanging in the balance between these two interpretations. The critic Edward Surtz, as quoted in the introduction, writes:

“Is the Utopian view of war, religion, and communism really absurd? Is the Utopian vision really hopeless and unachievable? Utopia therefore is an open-ended work––or better a dialogue with an indeterminate close. More asks the right questions––which can never be answered fully.”

I would change the words just a little: because More asks the right questions, we can never know for certain. For if such a place that fulfilled all of More’s hopes could exist, it already would; since it doesn’t, it cannot.

Why can Utopia not exist? One possible reason: money. Hythloday describes Utopia as having a wealth of gold, but not recognizing that wealth as such. That is, the citizens of Utopia know about the evils of money and therefore do not use it, though it has so much that it could utilize. A lovely idea, is it not? But how would its citizens, who have presumably never left the island, how would they know of the havoc money has wrought on other countries? One might answer, from the books that are brought to the island, works by Plato and Aristotle. Yet they would then know that money is worthwhile elsewhere and would leave the island, taking some of it along with them. It is simply a fanciful dream that such a place could exist. As Jerry Harp writes in the afterword, “You can’t get there from here.” Utopia is a “no place” because it is internally inconsistent; there is no way for such a place to exist.

Moreover, Utopia doesn’t really seem like a great place. Its solutions all seem too elegant and don’t account for the tempestuous nature of human psychology. Take their clothing: “when they go out in public they put on cloaks which cover these rough clothes; throughout the island they are all of the same color…” It seems that Utopians are free from vanity as well as greed. Or take children: “For it is not possible to set a limit for children. This limit is easily maintained by transferring persons from households with too many people to those with too few.” This could never work, for reasons that don’t need to be discussed.

And this is the other point I want to make about the book. Utopia is a simple place. Hythloday, in describing it, uses simple language. Everything is black and white. The sentences are short, the syntax straightforward. In his rhetoric, we may think he has accounted for everything. And, just as Edward Norton may have tricked some of us into becoming neo-Nazis, so Hythloday tricks us with his language.

When criticizing England, on the other hand, Hythloday’s language is anything but simple. In fact, in two places, he uses a sentence that lasts more than one page, straining, as Clarence Miller writes in the introduction, straining the Latin syntax almost to its breaking point. Who but the (post-)modernists would construct such a sentence? What practical need is there for language like that? Yet that is exactly what Hythloday employs, that which is unnecessary, in service of his goal. As much as he admires the Utopians, it seems that even he cannot live up to their unrealistic standard.

Stray Observations

• Folly: “I always look exactly like what I am.” Not I always am what I am, but the appearance of such.
• Folly: “Just as nothing is more foolish than misplaced wisdom, so too, nothing is more imprudent than perverse prudence. And surely it is perverse not to adapt yourself to the prevailing circumstances, to refuse ‘to do as the Romans do,’ to ignore the party-goer’s maxim, ‘take a drink or take your leave,’ to insist that the play should not be a play. True prudence, on the other hand, recognizes human limitations and does not strive to leap beyond them; it is willing to run with the herd, to overlook faults tolerantly or to share them in a friendly spirit. But, they say, that is exactly what we mean by folly. I will hardly deny it––as long as they will reciprocate by admitting that this is exactly what it means to perform the play of life.”
• Folly: “Nowadays flattery is thought of as disreputable, but only by people who are more concerned about words than about things themselves… Not to mention that this flattery plays a large part in that eloquence everyone praises, a larger in medicine, and the largest of all in poetry ––in sum, it is the honey and spice of all human intercourse… But to be deceived, they say, is miserable. Quite the contrary––not to be deceived is most miserable of all. For nothing could be further from the truth than the notion that man’s happiness resides in things as they actually are. It depends on opinions.”
• Folly: “Surely you don’t believe that there is any difference between those who sit in Plato’s cave gazing in wonder at the images and likenesses of various things––as long as they desire nothing more and are no less pleased––and the wiseman who left the cave and sees things as they really are?”
• A portion of a sonnet by George Santayana, as quoted by William H Gass in his afterword: “It is not wisdom to be only wise / and on the inward vision close the eyes / but it is wisdom to believe the heart as well.”

Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales

Like the Decameron of his predecessor Boccaccio, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is a set of stories organized around a framing device. Instead of taking shelter from a rampaging plague, Chaucer’s theme is more light-hearted: a group of travelers tell stories on their way to Canterbury and back, and whoever tells the best story wins. Yet unlike Boccaccio’s rigidly structured stories, which deliver on their initial promise of a hundred, all evidence indicates that Chaucer never planned to finish his tales; that he set out to create an unfinished work. Complicating the matter further, Chaucer also died while writing the tales, meaning the work is unfinished not just by design, but by accident.

To speak then of an overall theme to the stories may not be the correct way of approaching Chaucer’s work. Rather, the stories contain what scholars term centers of meaning, concerns so important to such a number of tales that they become fundamental to the meaning of the collection as a whole. Gender is such a theme: Chaucer, to a far greater extent than Boccaccio, is sympathetic to the plight of women and writes stories that showcase not only the intelligence and dignity of women, but also their suffering. This is not the same suffering as in Boccaccio when a woman is stripped naked and left for dead on top of a tower. Rather, Chaucer shows the suffering of everyday women and shows how such suffering should earn the greatest praise in a Christian society. As Christopher Cannon says in the introduction:

“If suffering is taken to be a positive good (if, like Christ, Christians are most virtuous when they can endure great hardship), then the medieval ideal of marriage (in which the wife must endure whatever demands her husband makes on her) makes women especially good in Christian terms. If there is a power imbalance in these religious tales, in other words, it is actually all in favour of women: to precisely the extent that the men in these tales cause women to suffer, they are actually helping them to be better Christians than those men could ever be.”

Rather than justifying women’s oppression, “Chaucer is simply bringing together two fundamental truths for a Christian society and emphasizing their inherent connection.”

Another sphere of meaning is the power of language, as exemplified by the famous nun’s priest’s tale about Chanticleer and Pertelote. To Chaucer, language amounts to action, and we can see this in the way Chanticleer escapes the fox’s mouth by making him talk. The act of convincing is another important theme in Chaucer.

This is going to be a shit post because that’s all I got for Chaucer. I don’t know what else to say about the guy, which is odd considering I really enjoyed the tales in high school. Now, though, they were pretty uninteresting. I'm unsure if this post would have benefited from my having read the tales in the original middle English rather than in translation. I felt that the distance between Chaucer and modern English is a vaster expanse than, say, Shakespeare and modern English, if because of nothing but nonstandard spelling. I’ll mention a few quotes I enjoyed, and simply hope for a better post next time on Erasmus and Thomas More. Sorry.

Stray Observations

“Love is a mightier law, upon my soul, than any made by any mortal rule; For love, all man-made laws are broken by folk of all kinds, all day and every day. A man is bound to love, against all reason.” Oh hey, doesn't this sound like Brothers K?

“We don’t know what we pray for here below, but, like a man drunk as a wheelbarrow, who knows he’s got a home where he can go, but doesn’t know which is the right road thither –– for when you’re drunk, then every road’s a slither, yes, in this world, that’s how it goes with us; all frantically seeking happiness…”

“People aren’t always on their best behaviour as fire is––for fire is always fire.” Great line.

A lament about the rocks that may kill her husband as his ship returns home: “ ‘Eternal Lord! Thou who foreknowest all, and guidest thus the world with sure control, thou makest nothing, so men say, in vain. But lord these rocks, so hostile, black, and grim, which rather seem the work of a foul chaos than any creation of a God so perfect…why has Thou created so irrational a work, which neither south, north, west, nor east benefits either man or bird or beast.”

Boccaccio, The Decameron

“I do not doubt for a moment that you believe what you say to be true. But as far as I can judge, you have not devoted much attention to the study of human nature. For if you had, you surely possess enough intelligence to have discovered certain things that would cause you to think twice before making such confident assertions. When the rest of us spoke so freely… we were merely facing facts.”

Once again, it has been too long. Another busy couple months went by, during which I read a bit of William of Ockham and Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, along with one or two other things, and I didn’t manage to find the time to update. I had planned, was even in my own strange way looking forward to writing a dual post about Ockham and Eco, since the latter’s book is a medieval detective story featuring a Holmesian monk who cut his teeth on Ockham. And Ockham himself had a lot of interesting ideas that I would have liked to have thought more deeply about. Unfortunately, as time went by, I couldn’t bring myself to make sense of the notes I had taken; Ockham’s thought is difficult, and though it pains me to admit I just can’t sit down and read logic for very long. So Ockham and his razor have been shelved for now, until a time when I can revisit him.

Instead, we get the fortuitous opportunity to follow a post about Dante with a post about another Italian writer, Boccaccio, who was deeply influenced by the great poet. In the years since he wrote, he and Dante have gained a complementary relationship. Whereas Dante wrote The Divine Comedy, Boccaccio’s magnum opus, whose official name is the Decameron, has been called the “human comedy.” Although we will return to Dante’s influence, I want to focus now on the “human” aspect of this comparison, because we notice that above all else Boccaccio is concerned with the human.

Granted, in the past we have talked about the human––after all, there isn’t that much else to write about if we are writing about people––but never have we seen humanness take center stage in such a frank way. If Dante writing the greatest epic poem of all time in vernacular allowed his descendents––including Boccaccio––to cast off the shackles of Latin and write for a wider audience, then Boccaccio writing about mankind allowed for everyday human life to become the center of the literary universe in a way that became the status quo.

Truly, the lives of everyday men and women were not written about until this. (Definitely not women, who play lead roles in many of Boccaccio’s tales.) I learned in a course on Shakespeare that stories were once reserved for adventurers, warriors, explorers: those who had a story to tell, so to speak. Yet by gathering together ten men and women seeking shelter from the bubonic plague, Boccaccio proved that everyone (even women) have things to say that entertain not only themselves, but all people.

I put such an emphasis on women because Boccaccio claimed that the Decameron was written to women and for women, so that they who were unable to voice their concerns and laments could see that those laments and those concerns were universal and thereby lighten their unbearable heaviness. Boccaccio does not deny the lovesickness and hardships of men––he recounts that he had also been “inflamed beyond measure with a most lofty and noble love”––but that women, having to hide their love (which is “far more potent than one which is worn on the sleeve”), having to spend “most of their time cooped up within the narrow confines of their rooms,” having to sit “in apparent idleness…reflecting on various matters,” women have a much more difficult time with their burdens. And so he writes to such women, who due to decorum would never reveal their true desires.

I say “such women” because all women were not created equal to Boccaccio. For all his claims of taking pity on “people in distress,” some of his stories (not all by any means, but a portion) are terribly misogynistic. At this point, we must do our due diligence by acknowledging that we as enlightened, 21^st-century people should not condemn people of the past or bind them by our standards of living. Even still, for all Boccaccio’s talk about writing for women, there are many stories of women being tormented at the hands of men. Aside from “tragedies” wherein the mistreatment of the woman is not directed at women in general, there are stories where a man’s triumph over a woman is glorified in a rather disturbing way. I’ll leave it to those more qualified than me to decide what to make of such stories, but it’s good to keep in mind as we’re reading that Boccaccio carries this worldview. Chaucer, as we’ll see in the next post, is much more sympathetic toward women, in word as well as deed. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

To confess, I did not read all of the hundred stories of the Decameron. There are only so many stories about late medieval life that I can handle, and that number ended up being around fifty or so. In thinking about how to structure this post, I decided to concentrate on a few stories that I found particularly interesting or enlightening, and go over the others only briefly.

Love, Intelligence, Fortune

Dante, as we have said, used the Commedia as a way of summing up all that came before him. In Boccaccio, we occasionally see references to the old stuff: a Greek name here or there, a biblical character recast. But the absolute most striking feature is Boccaccio’s unabashed modernness. His prologue, the very first we read of his writing, immediately mentions three qualities: gratitude, pity, and love; love is the greatest cause of distress; pity is taken on those in distress; gratitude, the result of pity, is, in his words, the virtue most worthy of commendation. Apart from love, these are not the usual virtues we’ve encountered, especially in our recent slew of Christian texts (and Boccaccio’s love is not exactly Christian love either). Sure, gratitude and pity are aspects of greater virtues, but they themselves are not primary.

The three principal themes of the Decameron, according to my translator, are love, intelligence, and fortune; since there is little mention of God (only mention of the depravity of His creation), we must conclude that the love and intelligence are not divine, but human. It is the love between men and women, between kin, between friends, between enemies even that is glorified. Auerbach wrote that “the Decameron develops a distinct, thoroughly practical and secular ethical code rooted in the right to love.” The narrators, the ten hiding from the plague, have been taken to represent the drama of the human soul, which pits “the rational appetite against the lower irascible and concupiscible appetites… the intellectual power of reason [against] the baser human emotions of anger and lust.” That intellectual power runs the gamut between the new ethical code that Auerbach indicates and “strategems adopted by wives and the religious to achieve the gratification of their sexual desires.”

Of the three, only fortune is still distinctly inhuman, but even it is less a god or supernatural being than a force of nature. As intelligent as his characters often are, they still see themselves as subjects of fortune, and do not appear to have the uniquely Machiavellian insight that fortune can be tamed by forethought and intelligence.

Aside from this, Boccaccio’s modernness is manifest throughout the work. Some stories, for example, get their tragic conclusion by way of “blind and unthinking adherence to an outmoded concept of honour.” Rather than having things work out because of virtue, virtue, especially a rigid conception of such, is a hindrance in Boccaccio’s world.

Which, granted, is not hard to imagine. It’s a time when people are running around trying to escape the plague. And as I read (I forget if it’s Boccaccio’s own words or the translator’s introduction), the plague acted in a way as natural selection. For example, women had female attendants who were, among other things, allowed to see them nude for things like dressing. But due to the plague, many of these attendants were dead or else just didn’t want to touch these plague-stricken old broads. So the women who wanted to survive would often ask male attendants to wash them or attend to their sores. As such, Boccaccio (I think) implies that the women who made it out of the plague were distinctly less concerned with decorum than those who died. Not exactly scientific, but an interesting argument nonetheless. Think of it as survival of the sluttiest. (Sorry.)

Tancredi and Ghismonda; Guillaume and His Wife

Of course Boccaccio’s masterwork wouldn’t be a masterwork if there were simply a hundred stories that were only loosely connected by a framing device. Ten people telling ten stories each is relatively uninteresting by itself, and so there should be some sort of internal structure lurking below like a shark beneath the waves.

Indeed, there is such a structure, and if I had read more closely, I likely would have discovered more than just the two examples I have below. But let’s not dwell on my shortcomings and instead focus on the stories that complement each other so well.

One occurs in day four, the first story, wherein Prince Tancredi discovers that his daughter has been sleeping with a man of whom he has not approved, and he takes the reasonable action of killing the young man and sending his daughter the man’s heart in a chalice, at which point the daughter becomes distraught and poisons herself and dies. Before the heart incident, however, Tancredi to his credit lets his daughter know that he is aware of her transgression and asks her to stop. What follows is rather unprecedented: his daughter, the unfortunately-named Ghismonda, delivers a long speech to her father declaring that she has done nothing wrong, that she has acted of her own volition and chosen someone whom she considers worthy of her, and that she, as an individual should be allowed to make such choices. The entire speech is rather abrupt, especially for the time: who would give a woman such a long speech? In fact, Boccaccio says in the first story of day six, “it is more unseemly for a woman to make long speeches than it is for a man.”

Are we to take him at his word here? That would be difficult since Ghismonda’s speech is so perfectly reasoned as to make her father seem like a backwards, oafish moron. In fact, it reminded me quite a bit of Nora’s speech from Ibsen’s A Doll’s House both in its veracity and in its utter incongruence with the rest of the story. I would conclude that it is not unseemly to Boccaccio for a woman to make such a speech; rather, Boccaccio is demonstrating his more enlightened opinion of women, namely that they are capable of deep and original thinking, and that they should be taken seriously; all this taking place more than 600 years ago.

Anyway, in spite of or perhaps due to Ghismonda’s tenacity, her father kills her lover and his brutishness causes her to kill herself. Her father realizes the error of his ways far too late, and mourns her death.

In the ninth story of the same day, Guillaume finds out that his unnamed wife has been sleeping with another man, coincidentally also named Guillaume. He kills this pseudo-Guillaume and feeds his heart to his unnamed wife, who, upon finding out what she has done, throws herself off of a casement sans speech, whereupon the living Guillaume sees the error of his ways and repents.

What do we make of these parallel stories? There are subtle differences. Tancredi suffers a speech from Ghismonda, who commits suicide despite not having ingested the heart of her lover as Guillaume’s wife did. Both women reach their end because of the lover’s death rather than the abject horror of cannibalism.

But let’s not speculate whether Guillaume’s wife would have killed herself had she only seen and not eaten the heart of Guillaume-Part-Two. Instead, we can notice that Ghismonda speaks her mind, yet comes to no better conclusion than Guillaume’s wife who does not get to plead her case. (Hell, she doesn’t even have a name.) The guy writing the introduction to my edition stresses that for all Boccaccio’s progressive tendency, he still carries a great deal of anti-feminist and misogynistic baggage. Which granted, yes he does. But I would argue that these parallel stories are something of a lamentation. In saying that it is unseemly of women to make long speeches, Boccaccio is lamenting the lack of voice women have; that a brute like Tancredi can act so violently even in the harsh light of reason; that for all their erudition and intelligence, women are subject to the whims of men––or more broadly, fortune––regardless. Or at least that’s what I gather.

Mithridanes and Nathan; Gisippus and Titus

In day ten, there is another pair of complementary stories. In the third story, a generous man named Mithridanes is envious of an even more generous man, Nathan, and decides to kill Nathan so that he can be the most generous man alive. Nathan, being of almost Christlike generosity, says that men have been killing other men all throughout history and is happy to see that Mithridanes is motivated not by hatred, “but in order to be better thought of,” a motivation Nathan considers noble. Nathan then speaks of how commonplace killing is, and that, despite being on the receiving end of Mithridanes’ murderous rage, there is “nothing marvelous or novel” about it. In the end, Mithridanes does not kill Nathan, cannot kill him, and the two end up being friends.

There is something wonderfully subversive about this story, as if Nathan were some amalgam of Christ’s simple compassion, John Galt’s overwritten, objectivist dispassion, and McCarthy’s Judge Holden’s apassion; can you not hear the ringing tones of “War is God” in Nathan’s serene meditation on murder?

In the eighth story of the same day, Gisippus is pledged to marry Sophronia. His friend, Titus, however, has meanwhile fallen so in love with Sophronia that he cannot imagine being with another and is constantly tormented by his thoughts of her. Titus confesses this to Gisippus who, instead of being outraged by his friend's treachery, says “The laws of Love are more powerful than any others; they even supplant divine laws, let alone those of friendship.” He then offers Titus Sophronia’s hand, though not telling her about this arrangement at all. Of course this backfires and the story runs for a while, eventually turning out positively for both men. Sophronia, despite being tricked into sex with and marriage to another man ends up pretty alright as well, all things considered.

The similarity between these two stories is the elevation of vice to divine principle. Nathan opines that murder is a fact of the world, and that he should feel honored that he is being murdered out of a desire to be better rather than something more hateful like power or wealth. Similarly, Gissipus finds that Titus is subject to some universal force the maw of which he cannot escape. As such, he is sympathetic to his friend and offers him exactly what he desires, regardless of the difficulties such an act inevitably present to him. In both stories, there is praise of sin and kowtowing to new world-principles. Boccaccio sees the power of love and wrath in the world; no doubt since he writes so many stories about sex and violence. Yet rather than condemning them categorically as evils, he sees gray areas, times when such transgressions should be praised. This transcends the otherwise acceptable nature of his humanism, or at least the nature that is acceptable to us in our time. Sin is not black and white to Boccaccio. There is some indication of means being justified by ends, or even those means not being all that mean to begin with. (Jokes.)

Joseph and Melissus

Finally, I want to mention my favorite story. The ninth story of the ninth day involves Melissus meeting a man named Joseph while both are on their way to consult with the biblical ruler Solomon about what to do with their respective predicaments; Joseph has a stubborn wife, and Melissus seeks to be loved by his fellow man (no homo). Solomon is terse with both men: he tells Melissus to “love”, and Joseph to “go to Goosebridge.”

At Goosebridge, the two men see a farmer beating the crap out of his stubborn mule, telling the men that sometimes stubbornness answers only to wrath. Inspired, Joseph returns home and violently beats his wife until she becomes submissive to him. Literally, that is what he takes away from the encounter at Goosebridge. This scene occurs in front of Melissus, and it is described in great, often repulsive detail. I say great detail mostly in comparison to Melissus’ part of the story; after watching his companion beat his wife half to death for a full page or two, Melissus simply returns home and tells a wise man what Solomon said, and the wise man tells him that it is true, that one must love others to be loved in return. At which point the story says that Melissus was loved from then on, and concludes. Josephus gets pages for his domestic violence, and Melissus gets literally a paragraph, and a short one at that.

The obvious point to make here is that Solomon gives opposite pieces of advice to the men: though they both desire something from other people, Solomon advises one to love (that is, be generous in some way toward others) and the other to berate (to withhold pity and kindness); the opposing pieces of advice both produce the desired effects. The advice to Joseph to beat his wife takes a little bit of convincing, however: when they arrive at Goosebridge and the muleteer beats his mule, the men are taken aback at the man's savagery. Yet when it produces results, they cannot object. Perhaps Boccaccio is advocating something akin to sparing-the-rod.

What perplexes me more, though, is the brevity with which he treats the advice given to Melissus. Whereas Joseph needs to be convinced firsthand, Melissus needs only short words of encouragement to understand the importance of love. Love, then, may come more naturally in Boccaccio’s mind than hate. Whereas love is our natural tendency and requires only a nudge in the right direction, we must be convinced that wrath and discipline are occasionally necessary. (This goes back to our earlier point that vice can occasionally be elevated to virtue.) Forgetting for the moment that domestic violence is terrible, we should remember the difficulty and roundabout-ness it took for Joseph to be convinced to beat his wife: first, he is not told to be wrathful, but rather to go to a certain place. At that place, he fortuitously encounters this man. It took the power of chance (that Solomon in his wisdom could somehow control), of fortune, to convince Joseph of the right course of action. The words of a stranger, even one as exalted as Solomon, would not have been enough.

Stray Observations

• The Decameron is similar in structure to the Arabian nights: “the spectre of imminent death is held at a manageable distance” by the telling of stories; here it is the spectre of the plague.
• The translator: "[When Boccaccio says] the power of Love is greater than your power or mine [he] seems intent upon showing its validity. Not only that, he implies that any attempt to interfere with the natural progression of instinctive forces is doomed to failure.”
• Of wicked clergy: “They had applied the name of ‘procuration’ to their unconcealed simony, and that of ‘sustentation’ to their gluttony, as if… God were ignorant of the inventions of their wicked minds and would allow Himself to be deceived, as men are, by the mere names of things.” Man, if I had paid more attention to Ockham, he probably would’ve had a lot to say about that.
• “There is a certain proverb, frequently to be heard on the lips of the people, to the effect that a dupe will outwit his deceiver – a saying which would seem impossible to prove but for the fact that it is borne out by actual cases.”
• In story one of day five, a dullard, Cimon, acquires wisdom after he falls in love with Iphigenia. Recall in Gilgamesh when the wild man Enkidu is tamed by sex.