With Truth and Irony, Terence J. Martin has written a marvelously rich and intelligent set of essays on the wisdom of Desiderius Erasmus. According to Martin, Erasmus presented his readers with a specific form of irony with which he attempted to draw attention to the unbridgeable gap that lies between human aims and human achievement. Attesting to an “ironic experience” inherent to many aspects of life, it would have been Erasmus’s aim throughout his works to draw attention to the fact that some of our most fundamental problems are unsolvable, and thus to communicate a form of wisdom that is unsettling rather than appeasing. Despite that I very much enjoyed reading Martin’s book, I nevertheless doubt whether Erasmus himself was the ironic thinker Terence Martin makes him out to be. Rather, it is my view that Erasmus was a highly programmatic thinker, who most of the time was not in the least ironic.

Martin’s book is in essence a collection of essays on Erasmus’s way of dealing with three weighty issues in philosophy: the question of truth telling, the question of war and peace, and the question of the good life. I have the least problems with the first, even though one might wonder whether the phenomenon of deceit is really indicative of any deep problem in Erasmus. The same may be said with regard to the second issue: the question of war and peace. Here again, I doubt whether Erasmus regarded the issue as a paradoxical one. Martin’s essay weighs “war” against “sanity,” and discusses how it can be that there is a Christian prohibition on warfare when at the same time all human beings, Christians included, obviously cannot do without war, or even have “a longing for war,” as Erasmus himself established. The problem I have with this way of examining the question is that it carries the risk of misrepresenting Erasmus’s own position. Even if Erasmus raised the right questions, this is not to say he was in any doubt about them. In fact, I see no reason to conclude that Erasmus was conscious of a dilemma with regard to warfare. Whether or not war is “natural” or “sane,” is Martin’s, not Erasmus’s, question. Erasmus himself may well have seen war as something “natural,” but he did not in any way consider it sane. War was never sane, according to Erasmus, but simply wrong—and brutally un-Christian.

Erasmus’s understanding of the fact that human practices are very different from human ideals should not, therefore, make us believe he yielded toward an accepting stance about people not living up to their ideals, or that he devised a sophisticated position on the incongruities of man in order to explain the “ironic experience” of failure on this basis. For all his possible irony, Erasmus was primarily a moralist. This moralism is also relevant for the question of happiness and the good life, the subject of the last of Martin’s three essays, which deals extensively with The Praise of Folly, the only book by Erasmus still widely read today. Martin considers the finale of The Praise of Folly the ultimate example of Erasmus’s ironical stance. Erasmus here presents a “foolish” interpretation of the Christian faith in terms of a renouncement of worldly pleasures that is not to be taken entirely seriously, according to Martin, since it is still Folly who speaks to us. At the same time, the passage should nonetheless have an unsettling effect on the reader, since Erasmus would wish us to consider to what extent the ascetic ideal of the Christian good life is incompatible with our everyday acceptance of earthly pleasures. If it is true that Erasmus—as others, such as M. A. Screech, have pointed out—keeps referring in all of his works to the possibility of spiritual rapture and mental ecstasy (and especially so in the last part of the Folly), it is equally true, Martin argues, that he continuously confronted his Christian readership with an Epicurean fascination for the importance of pleasure, never in fact making a definitive choice between the Epicurean appreciation of pleasure and the Christian virtue of the ascetic life.

For Erasmus, however, to promote spiritual rapture never meant to advocate mysticism or asceticism. Rather, it involved putting forward the Platonic idea that morality, whether philosophically or religiously inspired, requires a redirection of mental energy that may bring people to a mental level exceeding the level of their primary reactions. To see this is to admit that it is indeed still Folly who is speaking to us in the last part of the Folly, but at the same time to accept that she is now positively serious. She can be, since according to Erasmus there is no folly involved in seeing both philosophy and religion as genuine kinds of folly. Philosophy and religion both yield morality, but morality is something strange—it is not something that comes naturally. If only rapturous Platonists and Christians appeared to be aware of this, it was also something Erasmus accepted without the slightest bit of irony.