The Pantaloon : The Scholar And The Pamphleteer : Brother Wagwit

The Pantaloon
Edited by Brother Wagwit
Earlyish in the 21st Century

The Scholar And The Pamphleteer
Erasmus of Rotterdam was the most respected scholar of his time. He was a philosopher, a writer, tutor and advisor to kings and princes, and a citizen of the world. He was humorous and mild mannered, moderate in his views of life, and fond of food, wine and conversation. He was also a Catholic. As such it was his lifelong mission to make the teachings of the church understandable to the general populace.

He was acutely aware of the corrupt practices that had rotted the Catholic Church for centuries. The top businesses in papal Rome in the 1500’s were wine merchants and houses of prostitution. To both of these, not only did the Catholic Church turn a blind eye, it was as well a proprietor, financier and tax collector. Adding to the duplicity was the highly profitable sale of indulgences to assuage moral guilt and forestall the eternal banishments that were likely to accrue to patrons of wine and loose women. And there was also the matter of the papal nephews –a convenient euphemism for illegitimate sons– all of whom required lucrative employment.

Corruption, nepotism and cronyism were rife in the deep state of papal Rome. Rumblings of discontent were well seeded when Martin Luther –not one to waste a good PR opportunity– nailed his 95 theses to the door of the Wittenberg Castle church, the medieval equivalent of posting a barbed Tweet.

Luther was by most accounts as pompous a prick as any charismatic preacher. He was pious, in the sense that he knew better than thou how a spiritual person should behave, privately and socially. Humility was not in his wheelhouse. He was a dogmatic ideologue, an extremist whose rhetoric fueled war and death for centuries after his time.

Both Erasmus and Luther were addressing the same problem, a corrupted church. For Erasmus, change could best be achieved from within the halls of power. He did not want to tear down the foundations of the Catholic Church, he just wanted to replace them. Luther wanted to burn down the whole edifice. Their methods and motivations differed greatly, but Luther was riding a timely wave, circumstances were more attuned to his extreme views.

Ultimately, Luther prevailed and Erasmus’ reputation as a thinker and a voice for reason fell into decline and ridicule. Erasmus knew that the results of Luther’s charismatic extremism would lead not to a lasting corrective for the church but to a deadly religious schism with a devastating toll. Luther thought this a desirable outcome.

If any of this rings a bell, and it should, it’s because history repeats itself, invariably, continuously. Human nature is human nature, in Rome, Wittenburg, Washington, New York, or Silicon Valley. It’s always the same old story. And it really is an OLD story.

As much as utopians and idealists (who tend to extremes as well) like to put forth their pristine visions of a virtuous future; under the right circumstances, power, greed, and pettiness are by and large the most efficient factors in advancing anyone’s special interest, especially when the power structures of the time, of all time, have been corrupted by those special interests.

The reasonable pen is no match for the pious sword.