Lindvall - God mocks: a history of religious satire from the Hebrew Prophets to Stephen Colbert

Terry Lindvall

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York and London

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York and London

www.nyupress.org

2015 by New York University

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lindvall, Terry.

God mocks : a history of religious satire from the Hebrew Prophets to Stephen Colbert / Terry Lindvall.

pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4798-8673-9 (cl : alk. paper)

1. SatireHistory and criticism. 2. Religious satireHistory and criticism. 3. Arts and religion. I. Title.

PN6149.S2L54 2015

809.79382dc23 2015019581

New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability. We strive to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the greatest extent possible in publishing our books.

Manufactured in the United States of America

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To my blessed wife, Karen, who holds up the mirror of folly for me

Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau:

Mock on, mock on: tis all in vain!

You throw the sand against the wind,

And the wind blows it back again.

William Blake

If a good editor functions as a satirist, cutting and slicing an authors vain words, then Jennifer Hammer reigns as the best artist this work could know. Whatever is clear or compelling in this book is due to her incisive skills. I thank Constance Grady as well for keeping me on target, or at least shooting toward the target, for Dorothea Stillman Halliday for managing such an unruly imp, and for the anonymous tmh for turning confusion into coherence. My deepest debt of gratitude goes to Gabrielle Linnell, essentially my coauthor, whose research and editing enhanced everything good in this work. Special thanks must be extended to fellow fools, to those mocking men with whom I meet every week amidst laughter and some wisdom, and to laughing critics Cary Sawyer, Ben Fraser, John Morreall, Craig Wansink, John Lawing, Gil Elvgren, Andrew Quicke, Bill Brown, Dennis Bounds, Robert Darden, Fred Weiss, Ben Haller, Steven Emmanuel, Russ Spittler, James Edwards, Kellie Holzer, Josh Weinstein, Joyce Howell, Jeffrey Timmons, Adam Tobey, Gaby Alexander, the Stroyeck sisters (Morgan and Lauren), Patty Clark, Ariane Avery, Kelly Jackson, Jenny Erdmann, Matt Hatcher, Joe Martin, and Joe and Kathy Merlock-Jackson. To graphic artist Sharon Swift, some squiggly gratitude. Jolly thanks to Jim and Joy Bolander for spurring me on with wine on the dock and to Father Andy Buchanan for sermons that sparked confessions and imagination. To my favorite ladies of Connecticut, Barbara, Babsy, and Dolly, I smile like the Cheshire cat. And to my family who makes me laugh loudly, Karen, Chris, and Caroline, I owe deep and abiding love and joyous thanksgiving. Gratitude finally goes to Virginia Wesleyan College, a place that gave me sanctuary, and its gracious former president Billy (and Fann) Greer, and its academic dean Tim ORourke, and to Frank and Aimee Batten Jr. who made my laughing place possible. Soli Deo gloria.

In 1494, just before the onslaught of the Reformation, Sebastian Brandt, a conservative Roman Catholic scholar living in Basel, looked at the reeking vice and folly of the church of his day and wrote Das Narrenschiff, a Ship of Fools. As the prologue tells us, One vessel would be far too small / To carry all the fools I know. Brandts veritable floating tub of dolts and sinners heads for an unknown destination, a land of Fools, and functions as a harbinger of an imminent schism. Eulogized as divina satira, divine satire, Ship of Fools catapulted Brandt into the ranks of Dante, at least among the Germans.

While not particularly original, Brandt shrewdly painted a hundred vices of his contemporaries in a sparkling mosaic, sketching bad parents, misers, gluttons, ostentatious church-goers, and even those who are noisy in church. In an English prologue, readers are warned that when one ignores the Bybyll (Bible), then Banysshed is doctryne, we wander in derknes Throughe all the worlde: our selfe we wyll not knowe. We know not God, nor virtue, nor even ourselves. A faithful Roman Catholic, Brandt skewered those causing the decay of his beloved church, but he did it with humility, knowing himself to be a shipmate.

Brandts floating community of fools personifies the compelling place of laughter and satire in religious life. If satire is to be defined as the ridiculing of human vanity, folly, and hypocrisy, one finds no better metaphor than a boatload of stupid people obliviously drifting toward the edge of the world. To recognize the church as a similar tub of rogues and village idiots is to recognize a fundamental truth about human nature, within or without the Christian communitynamely, that none are righteous or wise, but all have fallen into the folly of sin.

Brandt dipped into the prophetic Hebrew tradition of religious satire to showcase the discrepancies between what Gods people were supposed to be and how they actually acted. Using a free and easy style, he translated folly into the vernacular. Brandt published the first printed

This book chronicles the evolution of religious satirical discourse from the biblical satire of the Hebrew prophets through the mediated entertainments of modern wits such as Stephen Colbert. It traces the place of such sharp comic discourse in the checkered history of the Christian church, where laughter resides both in the pulpit and in the pews. Mapping the historical cockeyed caravan of eccentric characters and their mocking performances is to find an overarching pattern to the calling of sacred satirist. There are methods to the madness of mockers whose motley garb is often clerical vestments. One finds wild comedy in the carnival festivals of sinners and in the fellowship of saints.

Yet in outlining satiric laughter through history, one also finds remarkable differences. Each age presents its own corruptions, and each age summons forth particular gifts from its religious satirists. The earthy coarse language of Martin Luther and Sir Thomas More during the free-wheeling spirit of the Reformation period contrasts with the enlightened wit of the diminutive Augustan poet Alexander Pope. The religious satirist does not need to be part of the community of faith, as Voltaire and Ambrose Bierce can attest. All they need is an eye and ear for the folly of religious poseurs.

The satirist is a slippery creature. He (usually a he) plays the role of trickster, but with a purpose. When the Apostle Paul listed various gifts of the Spirit to the church at Ephesus, this particular vocation was seemingly absent among the teachers, apostles, evangelists, and even administrators ordained by God for the building up of the church. One category in Pauls list of gifts and offices did admit the satirist, however, in the figure of the prophet. The prophets is an office that tears down in order to build up. Hebrew prophets once assumed the mantle of holy mocking to uproot the brambles in Gods vineyard so that grapes might grow. Within the religious world, the satirist as prophet tries to assume a place among those with more decorous callings. The prophet/satirist points to the second psalm, where the poet notes that God mocks.