The paradoxical idea that the fool may possess wis-
dom, though it was not to achieve its fullest articulation
until the Renaissance, doubtless had its beginnings very
early in the civilizing process. As soon as it was possible
for man to feel nostalgia for a simpler way of life, he
must also have wondered about the superiority of a
simpler kind of wisdom, whether innate or inspired,
over whatever knowledge of the world he had acquired
through his own empirical deducation or from the in-
struction of others. Whenever reason has been able to
question itself and acknowledge that the heart has its
reasons that reason does not know, a kind of wisdom
has been attributed to the fool. Men have often noticed
that the untutored or simpleminded, in their purity of
heart, could penetrate to profounder truths than those
encumbered with learning and convention, in the same
way that we sometimes sense a more resonant verity
in homely sayings or popular proverbs than in rational
exposition. It is, in fact, no accident that the fools of
literature characteristically resort to proverbial ex-
pressions; for proverbs draw their strength, Antaeus-
like, from the humble earth and the simple heart.
Moreover, developing rationality, like developing civ-
ilization, has seemed to bring burdens along with
benefits; and the more advanced the development of
either, the more some men, longing for an earlier,
simpler, more natural state, have experienced the
beguilements of the uncivilized and the irrational. The
concept of the wise fool, in opposing a wisdom that
is natural or god-given to one that is self-acquired, is
the most sophisticated and far-reaching of those primi-
tivistic ideas with which man has questioned his own
potentialities and achievements.
