II
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.
It is, however, in the late Middle Ages and out of
that northern mysticism of the devotio moderna taught
by the Brethren of the Common Life at Deventer that
two of the most important Christian treatments of the
wisdom of the fool appear. Almost simultaneously, near
the middle of the fifteenth century, Thomas à Kempis,
in his influential Imitatio Christi, urged a Christian life
of “holy simplicity” in emulation of Christ the Fool,
and Nicholas of Cusa (or Cusanus), in various writings,
laid the philosophical groundwork for a new concept
of learned ignorance. Cusanus' docta ignorantia, “the
coincidence of knowledge and ignorance,” in rejecting
rational theology and attributing to God a wisdom
unattainable by man, poses serious questions about the
very possibility of human knowledge but finally derives
a kind of wisdom from the antithesis between the
irrational absolute and logical reason. For he argues,
as Socrates had before him and as Montaigne would
after him (though both in quite different contexts from
Cusanus'), that knowledge of our ignorance is itself a
kind of knowledge.
Throughout the Middle Ages, a less theolog-
ical—and, admittedly, often less wise—figure of the
fool capered through the sotties, carnival plays, prov-
erbs, songs, and jestbooks that appeared all over
Europe. Tyl Eulenspiegel, Marcolf, Scogin, Bertoldo,
Robin Goodfellow, and a dozen others, though often
nothing more than scurrilous buffoons and outrageous
pranksters, sometimes give evidence in their jests that
they are also vessels of wisdom. In their roguery, they
are the direct forebears of the confidence men of later
literature—the Elizabethan coney-catcher, Arlecchino,
Lazarillo, Simplicius, Scapin, Melville's deaf-mute,
Felix Krull; but in their wisdom, they display the char-
acteristics of all fools. In particular, the legendary
Marcolf, whose origins are distant and obscure, is one
of the primordial manifestations of the wisdom of folly.
Companion to the very personification of wisdom, King
Solomon, he regularly bests the sage in their encounters
by means of his earthy, natural, literal-minded acuity.
At the same time, there were also literary fools who
were only fools, and the medieval imagination took
satiric delight in cataloguing them in such works as
Wireker's
Speculum stultorum or Lydgate's
The Ordre
of Folys. Their more ominous confrere, the Vice, who
replaced the bauble with a dagger of lath, proffered
temptations to Everyman on the medieval stage.
Sebastian Brandt, gathering them all together at the
end of the Middle Ages, was to confirm once more the
old observation of the preacher of Ecclesiastes that
stultorum numerus infinitus est (I:15). And, indeed, the
passengers on the
Narrenschiff (1494) are fools in the
somberest sense; for, like all men, they are sinners.
By the end of the fifteenth century, a fairly complex
set of ideas and associations had gathered around the
figure of the fool. At worst, he was considered a sinful
instrument of vice, who was blind to the truth and
had no hope of salvation. It has been suggested that
this attitude goes back to Saint Jerome, who translated
the opening of Psalm 53/52 with Dixit insipiens in
corde suo, rendering the Hebrew word “nabal” as
“fool” rather than as “vile or morally deficient person.”
At best, the fool was a simple innocent, devoid of the
pretentions of learning and the corruptions of worldly
wisdom, into whom the spirit of God could most easily
enter. The most universal characteristics of the fool,
however, lay somewhere in between the two opposite
poles represented by the fool of Saint Jerome and the
fool of Saint Paul; for these are his social rather than
his religious characteristics. On the one hand, he could
be found in any rank of society; on the other, he was
the shameless critic of all ranks. He saw through the
hypocrisy of social status and noble sentiments; he
exposed the vanity of beauty and learning. He did not
believe in honor, order, measure, prudence, justice,
chastity, or any of the stoical restraints society imposes
upon itself. If Hercules at the crossroads between virtue
and pleasure had traditionally opted for virtue, the fool
resolutely took the other fork and sought gratification
for the body rather than the spirit, arguing that there
will still be cakes and ale though some are virtuous.
It had long since been recognized, however, that he
was a formidable adversary, not just because he refused
to abide by the accepted rules, but because his jocose
antics, like all play, could easily turn into high serious-
ness and his unbridled tongue was capable of truth as
well as foolishness.
