Following upon this treatment of the scholastic theologians come the few pages devoted to monks, those “whose trade and observance were surely most miserable and abject, unless I (Folly) did many ways assist them.” They are so ignorant (at least so says Folly), that they can hardly read their own names. Erasmus makes merry over the office they chant, and the begging practised by the friars, and jeers amusingly at their style of dressing, at their mode of cutting their hair, and at their sleeping and working by _rule_. “Yea,” he says, “some of them being of a straightened rule are such sore punishers of their flesh, as outwardly they wear nought but sackcloth and inwardly no better than fine holland.” In a word, he laughs at the general observance of regular life, and in one place only passes a hint that some of their lives are not so saintly as they pretend. As a whole, however, the sarcasm is not so bitter as that addressed to other ecclesiastics, and even to the Pope himself. In view of Sir Thomas More’s subsequent explanation about the spirit of the _Enconium Moriæ_, there can be no doubt that it was intended mainly as a playful, if somewhat ill-judged and severe, lampoon on some patent abuses, and in no sense an attack upon the ecclesiastical system of the Catholic Church.[202]
One other misunderstanding about Erasmus’s position in regard to the revival of letters may be here noticed. The great scholar has been regarded as the incarnation of the spirit of practical paganism, which, unfortunately, was quickly the outcome of the movement in Italy, and which at this time gave so much colour and point to the denunciations of those of the opposite school. No view can be more unjust to Erasmus. Though he longed anxiously for the clergy to awake to a sense of the importance of studies in general, of classical and scriptural studies in particular, there was no one who saw more clearly the danger and absurdity of carrying the classical revivalist spirit to extremes. In fact, in his _Ciceroniana_, he expressly ridicules what he has seen in Rome of the classical spirit run mad. Those afflicted by it, he says, try to think that old Rome has returned. They speak of the “Senate,” the “conscript fathers,” the “plebs,” the “chief auger,” and the “college of soothsayers,” “Pontifices Maximi,” “Vestals,” “triumphs,” &c. Nothing can be more unlike the true Ciceronian spirit. Am I, he asks, as a Christian speaking to Christians about the Christian religion to try and suppose I am living in the age of Cicero, and speak as if I were addressing a meeting of the conscript fathers on the Capitol? Am I to pick my words, choose my figures and illustrations from Cicero’s speeches to the Senate? How can Cicero’s eloquence help me to speak to a mixed audience of virgins, wives, and widows in praise of fasting, penance, prayer, almsgiving, the sanctity of marriage, the contempt of the fleeting pleasures of this world, or of the study of Holy Scripture. No, a Christian orator dressed in Cicero’s clothes is ridiculous.[203]