The Anatomy of Melancholy

The commonwealth’s many evils have their seedbed in us. We invite this evil ourselves and deserve every insult and every misery that meanwhile befalls us, since we do not do our utmost to resist it. For what can we expect when so many poor students, men of no known parentage and petty fellows of every rank are admitted to degrees each day, indiscriminately and in a rush? If they have learned one or two definitions and distinctions by heart and spent the customary number of years on dialectic, it does not matter what progress they have made or what sort of men they are: ignoramuses, triflers, idlers, gamblers, drinking companions, worthless men, servants of lust and pleasure—

Penelope’s suitors, and Alcinous’s good-for-nothings—

provided they have spent the required years at the university and passed themselves off as men of the gown, they are presented for degrees, for profit’s sake and through their friends’ intervention. Sometimes, I would add, they are presented with splendid praises of their conduct and learning. And when they are about to leave, they are honoured with testimonials, written most lavishly in their favour by men who undoubtedly sacrifice their own trustworthiness and reputation in doing so.

For doctors and professors, as that author says, care only to advance their own interests through frequent academic ceremonies, hasty rather than properly conducted, and to increase their own wealth at the public’s expense. For the most part, the officers appointed for the year want only to squeeze money from the number of candidates taking degrees. It matters little whether these are mere dabblers in letters or learned men, provided they are plump, sleek, handsome to look at and, to put it in one word, wealthy.

Pretended philosophers are licensed in the arts though they possess no art; men with no wisdom are declared wise, and bring nothing to their degree except the wish to obtain it. Sham theologians—provided they pay—are more than learned enough; they are carried up and climb through every rank of honour.

Hence such vile buffoons, such crowds of ignoramuses, living in the twilight of learning—masks of pastors, market-place charlatans, vagrants, simpletons, blockheads, dullards, asses, nothing but cattle—burst with unwashed feet into theology’s holy precincts. They bring nothing but a shameless face, some commonplace rubbish and a few scraps of schoolroom nonsense unworthy even of a place at the crossroads.

This is that unworthy breed of men, hungry, needy, wandering, enslaved to their bellies, who ought rather to be sent back to the plough, fitter for pigsties than altars, and who shamefully prostitute these divine writings. These are the men who fill the pulpits and creep into noble houses. Lacking other means of livelihood and, through poverty of body and mind, unfit for any other role in the commonwealth, they flee to this sacred anchor, grasping at the priesthood by any means, “not in sincerity”, as Paul says, but “peddling the word of God”.