In Praise of Irony

Know thyself, someone said. Oh, right, answered the skeptic.

“Knowing ourselves – what we are like, how we came to be this way, how we might be, and too, how we should be – is extraordinarily difficult because we are such complex and confusing creatures,” writes Terrence Martin in his meditations on Erasmus, Truth and Irony.

Yet we want to know. If “nothing about human existence is simple” and if “opposing claims can both be true enough, while neither is quite true when taken alone, even though the two together make for an unsettled combination” – if these things are true, then “only an especially agile strategy of reflection will suffice.” Given the “thin but crucial lines between honesty and deceit . . .the odd but treacherous fusion of aspiration and failure in the relations between people . . . [and] the curious but inescapably comical and tragic quality of the quest for happiness,” we need “a way of thinking that is “capacious and perceptive, flexible and maneuvering, and thoroughly ironic” (3).

We need both a “view from afar” that enables us to see ourselves from a strange angle, yet also an ability to grasp of the familiar, particular, and local. This double perspective won’t work unless we also have a capacity “to maneuver around from side to side, entertaining divergent perspectives” and playfully turning things inside out and upside down (4).

Enter Erasmus, stage left.

For Martin, Erasmus is a model thinker, perhaps especially for our time. He cultivated a “very specific manner of thinking and writing.” His “is an especially perceptive, circumspect, and agile mind; one that naturally appreciates and savors the nuances and ironies inherent in complex issues; and, thus, one that habitually enters disputed territories with an even-handed and balanced manner” (10).

In Praise of Folly, for instance, Erasmus lays out a typology of forms of folly – happy fools, erotic fools, baby fools and elderly fools. The “space of folly” is indispensable: “What party, what friendship, and indeed, what marriage could thrive, Folly asks., without the dear quirks, the slight illusions, the fortunate oversights, the harmless lapses of memory” (15). Folly is not merely distraction. There are holy fools, fools for Christ, whose folly is full of spiritual seriousness.

Throughout the book, Erasmus leaps back and forth between the wide-angle shot that captures an entire landscape and close-ups, from serious analysis to light whimsy to severe satire.

Erasmus doesn’t fit either philosophical or theological models, but, Martin says, his ironic mode “retains the power to prod and prompt fruitful thinking about our lives” (228), a power that he thinks is a necessary and often missing ingredient of our so-serious discourses.