In Praise of Folly: Illustrated with Many Curious CutsErasmus, Desiderius
General
In Praise of Folly: Illustrated with Many Curious Cuts
Erasmus, Desiderius
Folly -- Early works to 1800
cross, the consecrated bread would have been transubstantiated into
the same body that remained on the tree? whether in Christ's corporal
presence in the sacramental wafer, his humanity be not abstracted from
his Godhead? whether after the resurrection we shall carnally eat and
drink as we do in this life?
There are a thousand other more sublimated and refined niceties of
notions, relations, quantities, formalities, quiddities, haeccities, and
such like abstrusities, as one would think no one could pry into, except
he had not only such cat's eyes as to see best in the dark, but even
such a piercing faculty as to see through an inch-board, and spy out
what really never had any being. Add to these some of their tenets and
opinions, which are so absurd and extravagant, that the wildest fancies
of the Stoicks which they so much disdain and decry as paradoxes, seem
in comparison just and rational; as their maintaining, that it is a less
aggravating fault to kill a hundred men, than for a poor cobbler to set
a stitch on the sabbath-day; or, that it is more justifiable to do
the greatest injury imaginable to others, than to tell the least
lie ourselves. And these subtleties are alchymized to a more refined
sublimate by the abstracting brains of their several schoolmen; the
Realists, the Nominalists, the Thomists, the Albertists, the Occamists,
the Scotists; these are not all, but the rehearsal of a few only, as a
specimen of their divided sects; in each of which there is so much of
deep learning, so much of unfathomable difficulty, that I believe the
apostles themselves would stand in need of a new illuminating spirit, if
they were to engage in any controversy with these new divines. St. Paul,
no question, had a full measure of faith; yet when he lays down faith
to be the substance of things not seen, these men carp at it for an
imperfect definition, and would undertake to teach the apostles better
logic. Thus the same holy author wanted for nothing of the grace
of charity, yet (say they) he describes and defines it but very
inaccurately, when he treats of it in the thirteenth chapter of his
first epistle to the Corinthians. The primitive disciples were very
frequent in administering the holy sacrament, breaking bread from house
to house; yet should they be asked of the _Terminus a quo_ and the
_Terminus ad quern_, the nature of transubstantiation? the manner
how one body can be in several places at the same time? the difference
betwixt the several attributes of Christ in heaven, on the cross, and in
the consecrated bread? what time is required for the transubstantiating
the bread into flesh? how it can be done by a short sentence pronounced
by the priest, which sentence is a species of discreet quantity, that
has no permanent _punctum?_ Were they asked (I say) these, and several
other confused queries, I do not believe they could answer so readily
as our mincing school-men now-a-days take a pride to do. They were well
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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