SOURCE: Skrine, Peter. “The Destination of the Ship of Fools: Religious Allegory in Brant's Narrenschiff.” Modern Language Review 64, no. 3 (July 1969): 576-96.

[In the following essay, Skrine analyzes The Ship of Fools as a commentary on the biblical Book of Ecclesiastes.]

In Canto III of the Inferno the souls of the damned gather waiting

                                                            alla riva malvagia
ch'attende ciascun uom che Dio non teme

(l. 107)

to be ferried by Charon across the dark waters of the Acheron

                                                            all'altra riva
nelle tenebre etterne

(l. 86)

and Virgil explains to Dante:

                    quelli che moion nell'ira di Dio
                    tutti convengon qui d'ogni paese:
e pronti sono a trapassar lo rio,
                    ché la divina giustizia li sprona,
                    sí che la tema si volve in disio.
Quinci non passa mai anima bona.

(l. 122)

In the course of his Narrenschiff Brant appears to prove conclusively that virtually all humanity is in some way, be it trivial or serious, guilty of folly: the human head seems made to fit the fool's cap. Thus every type of human being seems destined to be a passenger on the ship of fools; the complement is complete: the voyage may begin. But what is the destination towards which the fools and their ship are speeding? Who is at the helm? Here Brant, so confident and accurate in his diagnosis of the sickness of his fellow humans, leaves his readers in uncertainty.¹

If, as has often been suggested, the term ‘Narrheit’ is the substitute coined and circulated by a superficial age for that more fundamental term ‘sin’, meaningful only to a period that is certain of its values and its intermediate position between Heaven and Hell, it is logical to conclude that the ship of fools is ‘piloted by Charon’ and that Hell, some undefined yet dark and hopeless perdition, is the goal towards which it is heading. In accordance with this interpretation it would be possible to go on to say that whereas Dante meets his sinners in Hell itself and there, by Divine Grace, is given the opportunity of learning how wide is the range of sin, Brant surveys the world from his eminent position in late fifteenth-century Basle and, without the aid of supernatural intervention, reviews the shortcomings of humanity on this side the gate of Hell. In doing so, it is obvious that Brant was performing for his age a task which was akin to Dante's 250 years before. Indeed Jacob Locher, in the Prologue to his Latin version of Brant's poem, the Stultifera Nauis, compares Brant's achievement to that of Dante in the following words:

operę precium fuit, ut denuo vates aliquis eruditus et vafer resurgeret, qui manifestaria stultorum delicta: vitamque spurcissimam taxaret. Hanc scribendi libertatem: preceptor noster iucundissimus, Sebastianus Brant Iurium doctor: poetaque haud ignobilis: ad communem mortalium salutem lingua vernacula celebrauit. Imitatus Dantem Florentinum …²

It would be mistaken, because he was a writer in the vernacular in the late fifteenth century, to fail to appreciate that Brant was a complex personality. The complexity and indeed confusion of his mind may be deduced from the position he occupied in the forefront of his age, which was one generally imbued with a sensation of rushing to the end without any certainty as to what end was in store. Yet at the same time this vivid awareness that humanity is actually in the process of losing the way must undoubtedly have prompted the composition of the Narrenschiff. It is a warning, an admonition, an entreaty even: Brant's voice commands a wide range in his profound concern for the fate of humanity. But can he answer the ultimate question towards which the whole tendency of the poem inevitably leads? Does he himself know towards what end the world is so heedlessly rushing, and can he illuminate this strait and narrow way from which almost all mankind has strayed? Can we even expect Brant to know the answers to these questions? He was living in a period of random uncoordinated intellectual ferment, and his contemporaries in what was then the most advanced and enlightened area in Germany looked up to him with reverence and gratitude as a guide: like the medieval conception of his favourite poet, Virgil, Brant was a torch bearer in the night, unconscious of what the future held in store.³ Thus it is that we find him so often described as playing the ambiguous role of precursor of the Reformation without apparently the least idea of the magnitude of the upheavals to which his Narrenschiff may even have contributed.

On the surface of it, what clearer example is there of this than his failure to sustain the imagery of the ship, indeed his almost incredible inability to exploit so striking an image and to pursue it with any poetic logic? Undoubtedly Brant is muddled on this point. He oscillates between one ship and a whole fleet, he forgets the ship entirely then, in the second half of the poem, remembers it again; he then elaborates the imagery, but only within the confines of individual chapters and regardless of the rest of the poem, and finally calls the book itself a ship with classical justification but little sense, apparently, of the appropriateness of the allusion. Moreover his contemporaries seem not to have understood his intention any more than he did. Yet, despite all this, is Zarncke justified in saying that the only conclusion to be drawn is that Brant's ship imagery is not based on a moral-allegorical idea fundamental to the whole conception of the work but is rather ‘eine dem werke äusserlich umgehängte einkleidung’?⁴

Let us once again refer to Dante and allow him to be our guide. If we accept him as the undisputed master of the large-scale Christian allegory and recall that he was writing at the inception of the Renaissance in Italy, it will not come as a surprise to find that his lucid and wide-ranging intellect can indeed help in elucidating the underlying meaning of a work which seems to be susceptible of so many varying interpretations. In a celebrated letter to Can Grande della Scala, his patron, Dante explained how he intended the allegory of his Paradiso to be read; he began the relevant passage thus:

Ad evidentiam itaque dicendorum sciendum est quod istius operis non est simplex sensus, ymo dici potest polisemos, hoc est plurium sensuum: nam primus sensus est qui habetur per litteram, alius est qui habetur per significata per litteram.⁵

This is obvious enough; however he then goes on: ‘Et primus dicitur litteralis, secundus vero allegoricus sive moralis sive anagogicus’, thus introducing the elaborate technique of four-fold interpretation, which he then proceeds to exemplify with an exegesis of the first two verses of Psalm 113 (Vulgate), ‘In exitu Israel’,⁶ reading them to mean, firstly, the historical Exodus, then the redemption wrought by Christ, then the conversion of the soul from sin to the state of grace, and finally the soul's departure from the servitude of corruption to the liberty of eternal glory. This passage is but an example,⁷ and has of course no direct bearing on the possible allegorical meanings of the Narrenschiff; however Dante has provided a key wherewith we may gain accessus to an otherwise arcane level of poetic significance which is all too easily overlooked by the modern reader, though it is one which remained vivid throughout the Middle Ages, especially, in Germany, to those minds schooled in the writings of Latin antiquity.⁸

Let us now submit Brant's poem to a four-fold interpretation, not identical to that outlined in the letter to Can Grande, but nevertheless analogous. A comprehensive survey of it lends considerable justification for a seemingly arbitrary division of Brant's poetic activity, his purpose in the Narrenschiff, and indeed of his whole range of thought. If this division is made, and if it is remembered that no single passage need be susceptible of all four interpretations simultaneously, it is possible to descry four levels of significance, each relatively independent of the others. In the first place, Brant is a satirist, and the purpose of his work is to enumerate and define the various aspects of folly, the disease from which he, along with many of his late-medieval German contemporaries, sees that society is suffering. Secondly, Brant is a late-medieval moralist whose intention is to castigate the follies of his fellow men and then, by reproof, ridicule, derision, or admonition, to restore the foolish to their senses by appealing to common sense or by sounding a note of solemn warning. Thirdly, he is a humanist, and as such addressing a restricted circle whose philosophical and literary horizon is wider than that of society in general; to them he puts forward, though only on occasion, the ideal of the wise man as it is presented by antiquity. Finally, Brant is a religious and allegorical poet, though he is generally reluctant to appear openly in this role for reasons which will become evident in due course. At this juncture suffice it to say that as such his purpose may well be to present a description of the human situation with reference to Heaven and Hell.

This four-fold division of Brant's poetic purpose may now be illustrated in a different way. It is well known that in the composition of his poem, Brant had frequent recourse to certain clearly-defined sources which easily fall into separate categories. Zarncke was probably the first to realize this:

Es ist, so viel mir bekannt, noch von niemandem darauf aufmerksam gemacht worden, in welcher weise das Narrenschiff entstand, dass es nämlich im wesentlichen eine übersetzung und zusammenkittung von stellen aus verschiedenen alten, biblischen und classischen, schriftstellern ist.

Zarncke notes, almost with surprise, that Brant was quite open in admitting his indebtedness, and concludes:

Auch dies hängt zusammen mit dem (oben entwickelten) gesammtcharacter dieser zeit, die sich kaum das recht und die fähigkeit eines eigenen tüchtigen und gehaltvollen gedankens zutraute.⁹

However, Zarncke exaggerates and over-simplifies; Brant's complexity and uncertainty scarcely lies in his apparently random borrowings; its roots are deeper, as we shall see. Nor is his choice of material so indiscriminate as was once supposed. In the first place, he borrows from the wealth of vernacular idiom and proverb, or rather uses it with extraordinary versatility and for his own particular purpose—an aspect of his writing which has already received considerable attention.¹⁰ Referring to our division above, this type of source material, German, home-spun, humorous, is the metaphorical armoury of the satirist, and serves to make his diagnosis of folly appeal all the more vividly to his average reader. Secondly, he quotes abundantly from the Bible, in particular the Old Testament and the Apocrypha, but in the main only from certain books: Ecclesiastes, Proverbs, the Wisdom of Solomon, and Ecclesiasticus—in other words, the books of wisdom. This type of material is obviously the principal area of reference for Brant the moralist, for these books are the greatest examples he possessed of sustained moral instruction and admonition. Thirdly, though with less frequency, he alludes to the works of various classical authors, almost invariably Roman, amongst whom Juvenal, Horace, and Ovid take pride of place, though the translation of the pseudo-Virgilian “Vir Bonus” in Chapter 112 is the most extended single example. In this case what we have is a selection from the library of Brant the humanist. In so far as the satirical and moral aspects of the poem are relevant to his humanist readers, the presence of Horace and of Juvenal, the Latin satirist, is by no means unexpected; however it is Virgil who is chosen, though mistakenly, to represent the ideal which Brant as a humanist cherished. Only the last role, that of the religious and allegorical poet, is absent, or apparently so, for Brant had in this case no clearly defined area to draw on, and frequent allusion did not suit his more immediate satirical and moral purpose. However, as we shall see, this aspect is not absent from the allusions which the work contains. It is here that the great image of the ship, which dominates the entire poem, will at last come into its own.

About Brant's satirical and moral purpose much has been written, and it does not concern us here. Instead we will turn our attention to the religious and allegorical aspect, with some reference to humanist elements, and endeavour in the light of it to read the underlying allegorical meaning of the poem, which may best be formulated as ‘the destination of the ship of fools’. In doing so, Brant's apparent confusion of thought and uncertainty of aim, as well as his inability to exploit his most striking image to the full, may perhaps receive some explanation.

The problem of the destination of the ship, fundamental to the understanding of the work as a whole, has been most clearly outlined in a recent study by Hans-Joachim Mähl.¹¹ It is interesting to note that here the problem of the ship's destination is given four possible interpretations: the book is said to describe either a journey to a fools' utopia, a deportation of fools so as to facilitate the restoration of traditional moral order, a voyage of self-discovery whereby folly can be recognized and, in the individual, overcome, or lastly as warning of the inevitability of ultimate perdition from which only a handful of wise men will be saved.¹² It is evident that these four interpretations correspond in some way to the four categories defined above; however, the author does not mention any division corresponding to these and, while saying, rightly enough, that the Narrenschiff cannot be reduced to one formula, has in a preceding passage intimated that he is of the opinion that the allegory alluded to in the Introduction is not forthcoming in the poem itself.¹³ He agrees that Zarncke may have been right in supposing that the image of the ship was a later interpolation, though also questions the latter's dismissal of its allegorical purpose, in which connexion he adduces the passage outlined above. Bearing in mind the first three interpretations Mähl gives of the destination of the voyage, let us turn to the last, for it is here that a much closer examination of the allegorical significance of the ship and its journey is of paramount importance.

Brant's inclusion of a translation of the pseudo-Virgilian “Vir Bonus” poem at the end of the Narrenschiff has already been referred to. In the finest and most extended recent study of the Narrenschiff,¹⁴ Barbara Könneker makes her interpretation of the work turn largely on this poem and the ideal of the ‘wis man’ which it enshrines and which, as she observes, is anticipated in certain extremely important passages in the work. In so doing, she lays the emphasis almost entirely on what we have called the humanist aspect of it; the wise man will know how to avoid the disaster which is apparently to overwhelm the fools and their ship: this is the ultimate message of the work.¹⁵ And having said so, she concludes that Brant's ideal was characteristic of his troubled age and was, moreover, foredoomed to failure:

Der von Brant unternommene Versuch, jenes Auseinanderbrechen des Weltganzen noch einmal aufzuhalten … ist letztlich mißlungen, weil das Ideal, das er aufstellt, aus der Negation lebt und sich nicht in fruchtbarer Weise verwirklichen läßt.¹⁶

It is obvious, in the light of this statement, that the two last interpretations of the voyage given by Mähl both refer to this third, or humanist, interpretation, and that they are in fact complementary.

What then is the destination if the work is read as a religious allegory? In order to arrive at some solution of this problem, we should recall the fourth level of significance outlined by Dante, namely the anagogical, and then submit the image of the ship, in which it appears to find its most complete expression, to a more thorough scrutiny. It will then become obvious that the ship image is far from being a mere metaphorical embellishment: its function, when seen in this connexion, is essentially typological. In other words, the image itself is subsidiary to the symbolic and religious significance which it represents.

The comparison of human life to a ship at sea was common amongst the Ancients: it was particularly favoured by the writers of Roman antiquity.¹⁷ But what is of paramount importance to our present purpose is that it was taken over by Christian writers. In their hands the original metaphorical sense was adapted and enlarged so that the image, always a striking one, and one, moreover, also hallowed by Scripture, could play its own figurative part in writing more elevated still than that which in pagan times it had adorned, since its matter was now concerned with Divine Revelation itself, and its theme was truly anagogical. Thus the fervent eloquence of St Augustine could find and elaborate a telling use for it:

Opus est ergo ut in navi simus, hoc est, ut in ligno portemur, ut mare hoc transire valeamus: hoc autem lignum, quo infirmitas nostra portatur, crux est Domini, in qua signamur et ab hujus mundi submersionibus vindicamur.¹⁸

It should be noticed what has happened here: the ‘boat’ and the voyager in it are no longer identical as had been the convention; indeed St Augustine draws a clear distinction between them, whereby the voyager becomes our weak and helpless selves, while the boat is identified with the Cross of Christ. Thus the voyager, who in classical usage had tended to be a figure of heroic stature, is now reduced to almost nothing, whereas the boat, which in pagan metaphor had usually performed a subsidiary metonymic function, is now raised to allegorical pre-eminence. However St Augustine's comparison with the Cross is a relatively sterile one in this sense; the intellect is loath to accept it, and it has always been overshadowed by the allegory which identifies the cross, more convincingly, with the mast of the ship.¹⁹

What then is the ship? The original and indispensable explanation is provided by Tertullian:

Ceterum navicula illa figuram ecclesiae praeferebat quod in mari, id est in saeculo, fluctibus id est persecutionibus et temptationibus inquietetur, domino per patientiam velut dormiente donec orationibus sanctorum in ultimis suscitatus compescat saeculum et tranquilitatem suis reddat.²⁰

The theologian draws his allegorical comparison of the ship to the Church in direct reference to the account of Christ's stilling of the tempest in Matthew VIII, 24-7. It was subsequently taken up by other Christian writers, and every Gospel reference connecting Christ with boats was scrutinized and of course each—Christ's walking on the waters, the miraculous draught of fishes, and Christ's teaching of the multitudes from St Peter's boat—was seen to enhance the profound accuracy of the original allegorical explanation. The passage in Luke V, 3-11, which combines the account of Christ's teaching with the miracle of the draught of fishes, could be seen to be particularly rich in associations since, allegorically interpreted, it clearly prefigures the divinely ordained functions of the Church as teacher and saver of souls. In their relatively few references to boats, the Gospels seemed to have foreshadowed the whole scope of the Church's doctrinal and missionary task and to have emphasized the presence of Christ in His Church; it is therefore no wonder that the symbolic representation of the Church as the Ship of Christ seemed divinely sanctioned and that the image could thenceforth pursue an existence independent of its scriptural sources.²¹ By the fifth century St Augustine, the supreme eulogist of the Civitas Dei, could voice the consensus of opinion in the words: ‘Naviculam quippe istam, fratres, Ecclesiam cogitate; turbulentum mare, hoc saeculum’.²²

But let us return to the more specific ecclesiological allegories. In the fourth century St Hilarius in his Commentarius in Matthaeum had taken up the suggestion put forward by the great Tertullian in his treatise on baptism; still referring of course to the specific passage in St Matthew relating the episode of Christ's stilling of the tempest, he had emphasized and indeed elaborated the analogy between the storm-tossed boat on the Sea of Galilee and the Church navigating the hardships and persecutions of the late Roman Empire, and had held out the sure prospect of divine assistance to all those brave enough to forget their hesitations and who, by believing in Christ, would thenceforth be numbered amongst the disciples. The storm around the boat is contrasted with the security inside it: ‘Propositis enim periculorum omnium motibus, Christi navem, id est, Ecclesiam introimus.’²³ Now that the boat is identified with the Church, sailing towards ever-greater influence and authority, the stress is on the safety of the passage and the dangers of the storm, rather than on the insufficient faith and fearfulness of the disciples. It is interesting to observe the shifts of emphasis contained in these allegorizing commentaries on the original biblical episode, and to note the extent to which writers are unwittingly influenced by the contemporary situation of the Church and the varying state of Christian belief. One final but telling instance must suffice. Several centuries later, at a time when the whole situation in Europe and the Church had radically altered, St Paschasius Radbertus (d. 860), Abbot of Corbie in Picardy,²⁴ also undertook an Exposition of the relevant passage in St Matthew. The Church was now no longer a small body of faithful tracing its hazardous course through the hostile sea of pagan and imperial antagonism; with the crowning of Charlemagne the Empire and the Church had become complementary, and the Holy Roman Empire was virtually synonymous with Western Christendom. In providing us with one of the most comprehensive of all the expositions of ship imagery by a theologian, St Paschasius Radbertus underlines the doctrinal authority of the Church as the sole interpreter of the Divine Will on earth:

Ergo Christus tunc ascendit in naviculam, quando ex hoc doceret quod ab initio saeculi potens in sua, dum periclitatur, agit Ecclesia,²⁵

and he makes it clear that the Church, as the sole vehicle of salvation, is itself divinely guided:

Ergo unde ille obdormit, inde navis, videlicet Ecclesia, et qui in ea sunt, regitur, quia exinde fides contra tentationibus amplius ad victoriam eruditur.

Therefore to acknowledge the Christian faith is to be on board the Ship of the Church, and to be on board is to be mysteriously guided towards salvation; the only storm to be feared is that of temptation, for it alone can cause a Christian to forfeit his safe passage. Once the universality of Christianity throughout the Empire is acknowledged, it follows that the passengers on the ship are analogous with Christendom itself.²⁶

We may now realize that it is doubly significant that the original reference to the Church-Ship analogy occurred in a homily on the sacrament and mystery of baptism, for in this cardinal work, Tertullian unequivocally ‘assumes that baptism is the gate of admission to the Church’,²⁷ and that without baptism there can be no salvation. It is at this point that we may return to what is after all our prime concern: the allegorical meaning of the Narrenschiff. Although Brant cannot actually have known the original passage in the De Baptismo,²⁸ the doctrinal orthodoxy of Tertullian's work is such that he may be said to have known it as it were by proxy. Baptism is the gateway to the membership of the Church and it is essential to salvation; to Tertullian's two basic points a third may be added, which was an indisputable fact in the age when Brant was writing: as a matter of course every inhabitant of Christendom was baptized. To the late-medieval mind the faith of which the Church is the sole vehicle was all-embracing; to Brant, every single Christian was entitled to a passage on that ship which is captained by Christ himself.

But if the man who has partaken of the mystery of baptism has in a sense already made harbour in the next world, he is nevertheless still upon a perilous voyage; he may ‘carry upon his soul the seal that gives him a clear passage upon his heavenward journey, yet during that journey his enemies, the evil spirits, still lie in wait for him’.²⁹ The evil spirits, the temptations of the world, the flesh, and the devil, they alone are the storms which can impede the ship. At this point it is relevant to adduce a telling and remarkably comprehensive iconographic illustration: this occurs in Conrad Koch's, alias Conrad Wimpina's Of Sects and Errors, Hallucinations and Schisms (Frankfort-on-Oder, 1528), generally known as the Anacephalaeosis,³⁰ and is a woodcut³¹ depicting in detail the Ship of the Church navigating the shallows of heresy. The ship, labelled FIDES, on whose poop and forecastle stand Emperor and Pope respectively, surrounded by prelates, and with the faithful on board, is heading for an island with a gateway (i.e. Heaven), but is being held back by Diabolus, Caro, and Mundus holding chains attached to its stern. Various reefs are labelled with the names of heresies: in front lie the Scylla of Pelagianism and the Charybdis of Predestination. Behind the ship, a boat founders and its occupants fall overboard: an inscription above (in the top left corner) reads NAVI(s) PHILOSOPHORUM. The significance of the Navis philosophorum will become evident in due course; but the relevance of the other details to the concept of baptism and the Church outlined above is clear enough. Moreover the warning provided in the woodcut of the dangers both of Pelagianism and Predestination may serve to remind us that these relatively ‘easy’ solutions to the problem of man's free will in relation to salvation were both condemned by the Church, whose teaching Brant, always orthodox and deeply versed in such matters, indisputably followed. We must therefore expect to find that man's over-great reliance on his own efforts towards salvation is condemned by Brant, as is his total abdication from all personal participation in a matter which so deeply concerns him, but the outcome of which he erroneously supposes has been decided already. A perusal of the chapters of the Narrenschiff will bear this out; many of Brant's fools are guilty of overweening and ill-advised presumption, while many more have allowed themselves to drift away from moral responsibility either deliberately or as a result of their pursuit of some lesser, foolish aim. Indeed it is hard to discover any type of fool on board the ship who is not tainted, at least, with one or other of these alternatives, for Brant is concerned not with the heresies depicted in the woodcut but with the varying degrees of two basic human tendencies, both of which reveal man's innate defect: his moral misguidedness and spiritual insufficiency.³²

Every man in Brant's Christendom is baptized and a member of the Church, and every man, being human, suffers from a fundamental and inborn defect; every fool on board the Narrenschiff represents one type of human being observed by Brant in late fifteenth-century Germany, and every fool is one because he suffers from an inborn defect. The progress of the members of the Church towards salvation may be impeded, even prevented, by the world, the flesh, and the devil, if these overcome their capacity for spiritual goodness and moral sanity; and man, in so far as he is of the world and the flesh, suffers, in Brant's eyes, from a disease, a moral and intellectual insanity, that is, Narrheit. He brings his folly with him, but his passage will be all the safer and more direct if through self-knowledge and right wisdom he can reduce it to a minimum: Brant writes his book to help his fellow men, it is a medicine as well as a mirror, intended to alleviate as well as to reveal the preeminent stupidity of man's behaviour in this world. But, more important, the seal of baptism counterbalances the universal defect of human folly. All contemporary mankind is placed on board the Narrenschiff, for no-one, not even the author himself, is exempt from the defect that entitles him to a passage on it;³³ but through baptism, every Christian is entitled to the passage towards salvation. The conclusion is obvious: but what of the devil? This problem will be raised later.

Recently a considerable amount has been written on Brant's Narrenschiff and his conception of Narrheit, and in this respect the extensive and penetrating study by Barbara Könneker already mentioned will obviously take pride of place for many years to come, as the authoritative analysis of the subject. It will be evident that the definition of Brantian folly suggested above comes very close to that put forward by her, for instance when she states (p. 86):

Die Narrheit erscheint … als ein verborgen wirkender geistiger Defekt, der nach außen hin, für die meisten gar nicht erkennbar, die vielfältigsten und widersprüchlichsten Erscheinungsformen annehmen kann, aber von katastrophalen Folgen ist, wenn er nicht rechtzeitig crkannt und beseitigt wird.

It is indeed a ‘geistiger Defekt’, but is it inevitably bound to produce catastrophic results? This, as has been intimated already, may well be questioned. The problem comes back to the various levels of significance in the poem. The satirist in Brant is intent on detecting and ridiculing Folly in the world around him, and from the point of view of the moralist it is a disease endemic in mankind and bound, unless detected and cured, to lead to fatal social and spiritual consequences. To him as a humanist (and the members of contemporary humanist circles in Alsace share the view)³⁴ it is proof of the ordinary man's intellectual misguidedness, and stems from an unawareness of the norm; it is a deviation from the via media proclaimed by Antiquity, and results in foolish man succumbing to the vain temptations of Fortuna and the world.³⁵ A semi-stoical resignation, palliating folly with the consolations of philosophy without any reliance on transcendental values, is the only possible humanist alternative; but it is surely not one sufficient to impel a writer like Brant to compose so comprehensive a work of this kind. The gulf between the Narrenschiff of the humanist Brant and the Odes of his close contemporary Celtis is eloquent enough; the late fifteenth-century humanist is a lonely figure, and his intellectual world is inhabited by the wise men of the past, not the fools of the present. If Brant appears to hold up the ideal of the “Vir Bonus” it is not without sincerity; it was after all the ideal to which he himself aspired. But to interpret the Narrenschiff solely in terms of this ideal is to fail to take into account the fourth level of significance, the religious allegory which underlies the whole work and imbues its central image, the ship, with such unforeseen dimensions. The result is a one-sided and unjust emphasis, in Könneker's words, on ‘die eigentümliche Enge und Gebrochenheit der Brantschen Weltsicht’ (p. 132).

The compass and sheer volume of the Narrenschiff is so immense that it is almost impossible to extract convincingly coherent illustrations of its underlying anagogical meaning. However, certain chapters, which have been generally regarded as problematical, are particularly well suited to this purpose.³⁶ The first of these is Chapter 98, ‘Von uslendigen narren’.

The fools enumerated in this chapter are all in some way exceptions, and Ulrich Gaier has recently shown that the chapter itself is an exception from the formal and rhetorical point of view. Gaier's achievement has been to demonstrate what should have been obvious from our knowledge of other great comprehensive works of the Middle Ages: the conscious artistry of the poet and the complex yet logical structure of the individual chapters and their interrelationship in the poem as a whole.³⁷ There is no longer any need to be perplexed by the apparent discrepancy between Brant's German poem and his humanist Latin works,³⁸ for Brant achieved his latent artistic unity, Gaier claims, through his deliberate and indeed highly sophisticated use of the rules of rhetorical argument and persuasion as they had been demonstrated in his principal classical precedent, Roman satire. Gaier's awareness of this largely forgotten discipline has at last saved us from the puerile assumption that Brant, doctor in utroque, and described by Locher as ‘erudissimus vir, iurisconsultus et poeta argutissimus’,³⁹ wrote a principal work of which it can be said, in Könneker's words: ‘Es liegt dem Narrenschiff weder ein ausgeprägter Kompositionswille noch ein konsequent verfolgter Plan zugrunde’ and ‘Brant greift willkürlich und ohne Plan aus der Fülle der Erscheinungen charakteristische Einzelheiten heraus, stellt sie isoliert nebeneinander, läßt sie für sich selbst sprechen, ohne auf innere Folgerichtigkeit oder auf Steigerung in der Wirkung bedacht zu sein’.⁴⁰

In fact, as Gaier demonstrates, Chapter 98 occupies a significant position, independent from and immediately following a group of thirty chapters (67-97), in which a carefully ordered sequence of the most disparate examples (the Probatio of a formal rhetorical oration) has borne out the basic thesis outlined in the earlier chapters (the Narratio), namely that Folly is universal and that self-knowledge and moderation can alone lead to its antidote, right wisdom. Up to this point every folly has been treated with all the refinements of rhetoric and could, the author implies, be cured if his persuasive eloquence is sufficient to the purpose. But with Chapter 98 Brant comes to a group of fools whom he does not intend to convert and on whom he therefore does not deign to lavish his persuasive arts:

Die sint nit würdig der gesatz
Oder das man sie ler / vnd fatz(41)

(l. 32)

In consequence, this chapter, unlike all others, lacks any rhetorical structure and is simply an enumeration of fools who are hopelessly fixed in their folly and are to be passed by in scorn and silence:

Noch sint sunst vil vnnützer lüt
Die wüst gantz jnn der narren hüt
Vnd sint dar jnn verharret gantz
Gebunden vff des tüfels schwantz
Vnd sint zu bringen nit dar von
Will ich still schwygend für sie gon
Vnd sie lon jnn jr narrheit bliben
Vnd von jr dorheyt wenig schriben

(l. 1)

The satirist thus concedes that they too are possessed by the universal failing of ‘Narrheit’, but he excludes them from the treatment accorded to all the others because their folly is diabolical. They are not impeded in their progress towards salvation by the world and the flesh, that is by shortcomings for which there is some remedy, or, in religious terms, by sins of which they can still repent; they, the heathen, heretics, unbelievers, and those who have relinquished all hope, the sorcerers, prostitutes, and panders, the suicides and killers of children, have all forfeited their passage on Christ's ship and are already in the devil's grasp; they ‘quarum pectora demon agit’⁴² are the ‘cacciati del ciel’, and it is significant that their counterparts are to be found amongst the inhabitants of Dante's City of Dis. Nor do Locher and Geiler von Kaisersberg have any hesitation in saying that they are outside the Christian communion:

Quos ideo externis reputo, quia sunt procul extra Septa Dei et veram catholicamque fidem.

Qui non inepte possunt externi appellari, quod extra terminos Christianitatis sint positi aut extra communem peccandi modum aliorum.⁴³

In other words they are reprobates, and Brant's refusal to concern himself with them implies that they have no place on board the ship of fools either; indeed Locher is quite specific here, describing them as ‘quamvis non digni nobiscum solvere navem’. The satirist only includes them because he is aware that men can sink to such heinous depths of folly and because they provide one of the few clear opportunities for directing the reader's attention to the anagogical dimension of his work.⁴⁴

Chapter 98 is in a sense the culmination of all that has gone before; but it also leads to Chapter 99, ‘Von abgang des glouben’, for the paganism, unbelief, and heresy reprobated by God and scorned by Brant is now seen as the chief threat to the unity of the Church and the Empire. ‘Von abgang des glouben’ is Brant's grandiose survey of the whole political and religious state of contemporary Christendom, and in all respects except the poetic quality of its language it equals the parallel passages in the Divine Comedy. A heartfelt lament on ‘des krysten glouben not, vnd klag’, the result of irresponsibility and indifference within and the growing menace of the infidel without (‘Die porten Europe offen syndt / Zu allen sitten ist der vyndt’) leads to an impassioned call for the regeneration of the Roman Empire and for a new crusade,⁴⁵ coupled with a bitter invective against Germany and its princes: if they were willing to help the Empire, Brant exclaims,

So mag das schiff noch uff recht gan.

(l. 154)

Will his beloved Maximilian succeed? On him Brant pinned all his temporal hopes for the restoration of Christendom, with as much despairing loyalty as Dante on Henry VII, that earlier monarch who was so ardently expected to set straight an Italy described by Dante as

Nave sanza nocchiere in gran tempesta.(46)

Admonishment succeeds admonishment, embracing every rank of society in Europe; the discord among its rulers will cause the ship, already tossing in the storm, to founder. And then, most significant of all:

Wer oren hab / der merck vnd hör
Das schifflin schwancket vff dem mer
Wann Christus yetz nit selber wacht
Es ist bald worden vmb uns nacht

(l. 199)

The desperate cry of the disciples to the sleeping Christ is echoed here. Brant has turned from temporal, political saviours to the eternal Saviour, and his allusion is quite unmistakably to that episode in St Matthew which had been the original source of the image of the Ship of Christ.

The final chapters of the Narrenschiff are without question the crowning achievement of late fifteenth-century German literature. In them the themes of folly and wisdom, of fear and hope for the outcome, of the transient and the eternal, are blended in complex polyphony, while the mood alternates between humour, sometimes of the broadest kind, and an increasingly urgent seriousness. And, like the plainsong melody in the music of the Ars Nova, which in Brant's time was just reaching Germany, there is, latent beneath the masterly display of learned rhetoric on the one hand, and an unsurpassed verve in the use of vernacular German on the other, that solemn imagery of the Ship of Christ and the profounder dimension which it reveals. Though often still submerged as in the earlier part of the poem, it breaks through more frequently in these final chapters as the loftiness of the poet's purpose becomes more evident. Thus the fear and the entreaty at the climax of Chapter 99 prepares the way for, and receives its fuller explanation from the awesome vision of Chapter 103, ‘Vom Endchrist’, which is itself introduced by a full-page woodcut depicting Antichrist, scourge and purse of gold in hand, gloating over the drowning fools whose ship has capsized, while in the foreground another ship is being drawn safely to the shore by the key held by St Peter.⁴⁷

In fact the heresy and false belief which Chapter 98 had reprobated, and which Chapter 99 had seen largely in political terms as the most dangerous threat to the Empire, is now seen in specifically religious terms as the gravest threat to Christianity and the stability of the Church. Distortion of the tenets of Christianity as taught by the Church and hallowed by tradition is equated with the sabotage of the ship itself, and is foul work inspired by Antichrist: we already know that the fools carrying it out are the devil's own. As a result,

Sant Peters schyfflin ist jm schwangk
Ich sorg gar vast den vndergangk
Die wällen schlagen all sytt dran
Es würt vil sturm vnd plagen han

(l. 63)

In this chapter we find an apparent contradiction in the imagery which it is important to resolve. Ominous clouds have been gathering on the horizon, and the poem, which Brant himself likened to a ship in the Exhortatio to Locher's Latin version and in the Protestation prefaced to later German editions,⁴⁸ has by Chapter 103 left the comic trivialities of innocuous human folly far behind. The dread sound of the last trump can be heard as the ship sails forward through the stormy seas of this chapter. The prime purpose here of Brant the moralist is, as Gaier points out (p. 186), to arouse fear in the reader: fear as to the outcome of a voyage in which he, as a Christian, is participating. The apocalyptic note is further amplified when Brant conjures up the terrifying vision of another great ship on this tempestuous ocean (‘Der endkrist sytzt jm grossen schiff’, I. 72), in which sits Antichrist himself, spreading falsehood and heresy around him. Yet we know from Revelation VIII, 9 that at the sound of the second trumpet ‘the third part of the ships was destroyed’, a reassurance which Brant is careful to avoid, but which the artist of the woodcut to Chapter 103 vividly provides. This quotation can moreover help to resolve the contradiction mentioned above, for it is possible to say that in this chapter we do have three distinct ships: the ship of Antichrist, manned by the fools in Chapter 98, which will ultimately be wrecked, the basic Brantian image of the Ship of Christ as the society of all the baptized, and thirdly ‘Sant Peters schyfflin’, anticipated by the curious ‘bapyren schyff’ in line 8.

At this point attention should be drawn to another biblical allusion which noone appears to have detected. The ‘paper ship’ is a direct reference to Isaiah XVIII, 2, which for its part is situated in a passage of some fourteen verses which turns out to be an unmistakable counterpart of the Brantian context. With apocalyptic solemnity the prophet speaks of that day of grief and desperate sorrow on which a man shall look to his Maker. Men have forgotten the God of their salvation and have not been mindful of the rock of their strength. The multitude make a noise like the roaring of waters; the evening brings trouble, but at morning the foe shall be no more. At this late stage the ‘vessels of papyrus’ being sent out by the Ethiopians will be of no avail; the foe's trumpet shall sound, but God will inflict on him a resounding defeat.

Here in Chapter 103 Brant is not as confused in his imagery as has often been maintained. The basic ship image is, as it were, the substance, while the ‘paper ship’ and St Peter's barque are merely accidents. The first may be taken to mean Holy Scripture, while the second is the Church seen as the supreme religious authority in this world, whose function is to guide humanity and preserve the teachings and articles of the Christian faith intact. The distinction thus made between the eternal Church as the body of all true believers and the Church visible is this world, subdivided in turn into its theological and ecclesiastical aspects, is pre-eminently suited to the immediate and subtle requirements of this chapter, for here it is the stability of the latter that is being particularly threatened by the alarming spread of heresy and false belief. But against the Church as the one way to salvation and the true City of God prefigured in Scripture the gates of Hell shall not prevail. Indeed the early Roman theologian Hippolytus had proclaimed the triumph of the Ship of the Church despite all storms in a work appropriately entitled De Antichristo.⁴⁹ Belief must, then, be preserved in its traditional purity if the Church is not to founder. For belief is like a light, and if we lose sight of it we are indeed lost, our ship will founder, and we will be left in total darkness. The remorseless argument of the chapter thus leads Brant to formulate in imagery of prophetic grandeur a tragic outcome which only an awareness of the intense spiritual optimism of the basic image in his ‘divine satire’ can prevent us from regarding as his ultimate and despairing message.

The chapters that intervene between 103 and 108 provide some relief from this despairing gloom; encouragement of hesitant hope replaces fearful apprehension. Truth, goodness, and wisdom are now in various subtle ways emphasized, Chapter 107 ‘Von lon der wisheit’ being of particular importance⁵⁰ since it makes it clear that the wisdom which Brant has in mind is not the self-sufficient wisdom of the philosophers. Man is constantly intent on achieving his ideal, the ‘greatest good’, on earth; to illuminate the vanity of thus seeking our own salvation, Brant reintroduces that light which had been in such dramatic danger of extinction:

Die wile aber das nit mag syn
Vnd wir jrren jn vinsterm schyn
So hat got geben vns das liecht
Der wiszheyt / dar von man gesicht
Die macht der vinsternisz eyn end
Wann wir sie nemen recht für hend

(l. 57)

Right wisdom is not of this world, for the wisdom of this world is as vain as its folly; thus the various levels of significance and interpretation converge. We might be surprised by the sceptical attitude towards humanist aspirations enunciated here; at a period when humanism was a nascent intellectual force in Germany one of its leading figures might be expected to embrace its ideals with whole-hearted enthusiasm; and such is the interpretation usually given to the concluding chapter ‘Der wis man’. Brant's scepticism is therefore generally seen as a relic of medieval attitudes, reinforcing the estimate of his position as midway between Renaissance and Middle Ages; in his German writings the persistance of medieval themes and attitudes is indeed so immediately evident that it seems a sufficient explanation of his less than whole-hearted humanism. Perhaps it is in this light that his adaptation of the pseudo-Virgilian “Vir Bonus” should be seen, in so far as it is merely one aspect of his complex relationship to Virgil, the epitome of the ideals and attitudes of Antiquity.⁵¹ But if we turn to Locher's Stultifera Nauis and, more particularly, to Brant's own Latin poetry, the question at once becomes more complex. If to the medievalist the Narrenschiff appears, quite rightly, to fit into well-defined traditions,⁵² it is equally true that a classicist will find Brant's Latin poetry very obviously derivative, indeed little more than a series of exercises in Latin verse on certain stock classical themes. Nowhere is this more evident than in the following lines from his Invectiva contra mundi delicias, a long poem dedicated to Geiler von Kaisersberg: nothing shows the eloquence of Brant's latinity to greater effect:

Plurima quae sub sole patent vidi atque revidi
          Et stabile inveni prorsus in orbe nihil
Omnia cognovi vana irrita stulta caduca
          Et labi in terras protinus instar aquae
Nil solidum firmumque nihil durabile parvo est
          Tempore quicquid habes hoc brevis hora rapit
Praestes multa licet pecora aurum iugera natos
          Coniugium et quicquid stulta libido cupit
Plus tamen in cunctis aloe quam melle redundans
          Ingeris et laetis tristia multa tuis.(53)

Neither the thought nor the language here could be described as original, both are soundly based on classical precedents; yet no other topos can so well reconcile the achievement of Antiquity with the outlook of the late Middle Ages as that of vanitas mundi. Therefore Brant may be better described not as caught midway between the two, an imperfect humanist and a derivative late-medieval German poet, but rather as the most impressive example of the synthesis of the two traditions in the German literature of the period; doubly so when we realize that in the Narrenschiff a powerful imagination is at work exploiting the resources of the two traditions it had at its command in a poem whose dimensions transcend what is typical in either.⁵⁴ There can be no doubt that the delights of the world, so grandiosely dismissed in Latin, are one of the principal impediments holding back the ship on its momentous journey. Brant's humanist learning thus came to the assistance of his medieval moralizing tendencies and his admiration for the didactic books of the Bible. All classicism is in a sense derivative, but there is every reason to suppose from a perusal of the Varia Carmina that Brant imitated only what was congenial to his own temper. His humanism, like that of his Alsatian contemporaries, was that of the editor of classical texts, retrospective rather than vitally self-reliant and forward-looking.⁵⁵ His scepticism, so akin to that of many late Roman minds, was therefore not a deficiency in it; on the contrary it was reinforced by the writings of those he most admired. Made subservient to the central religious imagery of the Narrenschiff, it could provide that third, or humanist, dimension. Nowhere does this play a more telling part than in Chapter 108, ‘Das schluraffen schiff’, a chapter so rich in material that, together with its corollary, Chapter 109, ‘Verachtung vngfelles’, it deserves special analysis.

Chapter 108 has always been regarded as the culmination of the Narrenschiff and critics have always felt that, more than any other, it contains the key to the interpretation of the entire work.⁵⁶ Thus Könneker states (p. 118): ‘Alle Motive der Dichtung werden hier noch einmal aufgenommen und zu einem geschlossenen Bildkomplex vereinigt’, and claims that the richness of its symbolism and the expressive force of its writing distinguish it from the rest of the poem and assure the latter of a place in the history of literature. Zarncke (pp. lv-lvii), for his part, was tempted to regard it as essentially separate from the rest for the no longer tenable reason that the ‘extraneous’ ship imagery is here very much to the fore. The chapter does undeniably give the impression Zarncke observed, but this is due to the fact that, as Gaier points out (p. 188), its function is that of a peroration. As such, it recapitulates the argument of the poem, but it does so in the form of a miniature epic of remarkable narrative and poetic force, in which new elements are introduced which must be related to what has preceded them before its meaning becomes clear.

An innumerable host of fools from every corner of the world set sail for the preposterous land of Narragonia or the Schlaraffenland. This Geiler von Kaisersberg in his sermons on the Narrenschiff tellingly described as a land flowing with milk and honey;⁵⁷ it is not the earthly paradise from which humanity was once expelled, but rather humanity's distorted idea of an ‘earthly’ paradise where all will be ease and indolence. It is a foolish objective and to contemplate it is to indulge folly yet further; the outcome for the fools will be that they will be engulfed at the gate of Hell instead. In other words the voyage described in this miniature epic is a travesty of the journey of the Ship toward salvation; in it the world, the flesh, and the devil will prevail, and its purpose in the poem is to provide one final culminating warning of the destination awaiting those who persist in their folly having read thus far; it is the last attempt of Brant the moralist and satirist to open his readers' eyes to the allegorical meaning of the work. The fools sail ‘on sorg, vernunfft, wiszheyt, vnd synn’ (l. 22) and are indeed ‘gantz vss dem rechten trib’ (l. 38). They run every danger to which the epic voyager is prone: the Symplegades, Scylla, Charybdis, and the Syrtes⁵⁸—and thus by judicious use of learned allusions Brant prepares the way for the introduction of Ulysses, a parallel yet contrasting figure who will have an important part to play and whose presence is the finest example of his synthesis of the medieval and the classical. These dangers are all ones which the wise Ulysses cunningly avoided although his companions perished, and Brant explains:

Homerus hatt disz erdacht
Do mit man hett vff wiszheyt acht
Vnd sich nit wogt lycht vff das mer.

(l. 69)

Even the wiles of Circe could not prevail against Ulysses; his companions were turned into swine but he sailed on; even when shipwreck overtook him his wisdom came to the rescue. Yet—and this is all-important—Ulysses was killed when he knocked on his own front door, and Brant laconically remarks:

Do künd wiszheyt nit helffen für

(l. 97)

He must surely have been aware of the extraordinary coincidence whereby in all three synoptic gospels the account of Christ's stilling of the tempest is immediately followed by the episode of the Gadarene swine. The principal biblical source for the image of the Ship of the Church is thus closely connected with the most striking New Testament account of madness or folly, the Sea of Galilee and the presence of Christ providing the link between them.⁵⁹ The parallels between these biblical passages and the corresponding episodes in the Odyssey are obvious, especially if we remember that Christ was sometimes called the ‘heavenly Odysseus’. Further, it should be noted that Christ's encounter with the madman culminates in a miracle: the human being is restored to sanity and it is the swine that drown, a fate from which the disciples had just been saved. The ordinary bystanders were however afraid and besought Christ to leave them alone; only the man who had been cured was capable of gratitude. Is there not a parallel between the man who said ‘My name is legion; for we are many’ (Mark V, 9) and the fools who declare ‘On end ist vnser narren zal’ (Chapter 108, 1. 4), and between Christ's exorcizing of the devils and the purpose of Brant's ‘Narrenbeschwörung’ in his religious satire? Many of Brant's readers must have been horrified to realize that the implication of his amusing poem was complete moral regeneration. His many Latin poems addressed to hermits and praising a life of Christian solitude may well be an indirect expression of the loneliness he shared with many prophets and visionaries and of his disillusionment with a world incapable of heeding the wisdom of his message. The fools meanwhile sail on in their folly regardless of the storm and lacking all ability and even inclination to emulate the foresight of the self-reliant Ulysses, with his clever instinct for self-preservation.

The description of the storm which now breaks upon them is vivid enough to merit the praise which this chapter has been given. But it is far more important to note that it marks the re-emergence of the underlying religious allegory, since it is a paraphrase of another biblical prefiguration of the image of the Ship, namely that famous passage from Psalm 106 (Vulgate), the opening verses of which had been in part quoted as an epigraph at the beginning of the poem,⁶⁰ and which Brant undoubtedly regarded as a fitting description of the human condition and also as a promise of ultimate salvation:

They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters; these see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep. For he commandeth, and raiseth the stormy wind, which lifteth up the waves thereof. They mount up to heaven, they go down again to the depths: their soul melteth away because of trouble. They reel to and fro, and stagger like a drunken man, and are at their wits' end.

(vv. 23-7)

This initial quotation goes beyond the paraphrase in Chapter 108, and ends at the appropriate words ‘omnis sapientia eorum devorata est’, a most eloquent description of the state of folly, that lack of true wisdom which it is Brant's purpose to analyse. But he withholds the concluding verses, for they are that true promise of salvation which fools cannot hear until they too cry out in ultimate despair, but which is audible to all those aware of the Christian assurance of salvation through baptism and the Church.⁶¹ The readers of the Narrenschiff, like they that go down to the sea in ships, and like the disciples in the tempest, must recognize themselves in the vanity and helplessness of their folly; if they then cry out to God in their despair, Brant's purpose not only as a satirist and moralist, but also as a religious poet, is complete:

Then they cry unto the Lord in their trouble, and he bringeth them out of their distresses. He maketh the storm a calm, so that the waves thereof are still. Then are they glad because they be quiet; so he bringeth them unto the haven where they would be.

(vv. 28-30)

If, in the version of the myth Brant chose to use, Ulysses is finally killed, this is surely not to prove the ineluctable curse of fate, as Könneker maintains; no, Brant is implying that the pagan Ulysses, held up as an example of wise conduct in life by such pre-eminent authorities as Seneca⁶² and Horace,⁶³ can in a Christian poem provide only a partial contrast to the fools on their senseless voyage. There are wise men in the world, and the humanist Brant admires the ‘sapiens Ithacus’ as an outstanding example. But death meets Ulysses when, ironically, he thought he was safe; the Christian writer cannot escape the fact that death is the gateway to alternatives of the most vital spiritual concern.⁶⁴ The example of Ulysses, who trusted in his own wisdom, is therefore in the last resort less than perfect, although the hero is not condemned with such splendid rigour as is Dante's Ulysses, swallowed up by the ocean within sight of Mount Purgatory.⁶⁵ Something of Dante's desperate pathos is however captured in the woodcut to Chapter 109. The artist's depiction of an individual's audacious but inevitably ill-fated attempt to go it alone, regardless of all perils, eloquently reflects the seriousness and concern underlying these chapters. The face of the fool no longer bears the vacant or crude expression characteristic of him. Transformed now by sudden fear, one might almost speak of its nobility. This is a human being in spiritual distress, and not a mere fool enthralled by his peculiar type of folly. Meanwhile his forlorn little boat, disintegrating beneath him, provides a vivid antithesis to that Ship which cannot founder.

The remainder of Chapter 108, together with Chapter 109, ‘Verachtung vngfelles’, and the last chapter (112), ‘Der wis man’, are Brant's concluding attempt to define his conceptions of the wise man, and much has been made of them for this reason. Taken without reference to the various levels of significance of the poem as a whole, they provide what seems a rather disappointing ideal of painstaking and over-careful moderation in which the humanist and didactic aspects of the poem are emphasized.⁶⁶ But it should be remembered that, just as Chapter 103 and Chapter 108 were designed to arouse the reader's fear, these chapters are intended to formulate a moral norm against which human folly may be measured; the purposes of both groups are complementary, each is an integral part of a total remedial vision. The true ideal is one that the human being can never hope to emulate entirely; without the assistance of Divine Grace not even the ‘wis man’ can aspire to such perfection, as the question implicit in the concluding lines of the poem suggests; once again, what is implied is more significant than what is overtly stated. The pagan hero Ulysses does not represent this ideal; the real hero of Brant's hidden epic of the glorious voyage of the Ship to ultimate salvation is the heavenly Odysseus, Christ, who prevailed against all temptations by binding Himself to the Cross which, in the traditional allegory, is the mast of His Ship, the Church. Brant's poem, read as a religious allegory, is no resigned and sceptical abdication in the face of the universality of human folly;⁶⁷ it is an outstandingly ambitious product of Christian humanism, for ‘only by becoming detached from the world can man recognize and embrace the true humanist values’.⁶⁸

Only now, perhaps, do we finally realize that Brant has been undertaking nothing less than a commentary on that biblical book which, more than any other, was his precedent. Ecclesiastes, as its name implies, was likewise addressed as a warning and admonition to the whole congregation or Church, and, like the Narrenschiff, it moves majestically between the sombre vision of the ultimate equivalence of wisdom and folly in the face of death and the reassuring confidence that, on the Day of Judgement, the upright conduct of the wise man will be vindicated after all. The polarities of Brant's poem are thus foreshadowed in the paradoxes which the Preacher saw when he ‘turned himself to behold wisdom and folly’, just as Brant's method is anticipated when the Preacher, because he ‘was wise, he still taught the people knowledge; yea, he pondered, and sought out, and set in order many proverbs’.⁶⁹ But there is a fundamental difference. In Ecclesiastes all is vanity: the paradoxes are still irreconcilable, the enigmas still veiled, for the unifying factor is absent. Brant, on the other hand, possesses what the Preacher lacked; he can reinterpret this Old Testament type of his own poem in the light of the Christian revelation. His aim in writing the Narrenschiff was to make his humble contribution to the divine purpose of redemption by purging some men of their folly through his satire. The ship of fools is therefore not the counterpart of the infernal ferry piloted by Charon but rather the parallel in Brant's divina satyra of that angelic ship which Dante beheld bearing the souls of the penitent to Purgatory.⁷⁰

Notes

1. This is the verdict, for instance, of Friedrich Zarncke in the Introduction to his great edition of Brant's Narrenschiff (Leipzig, 1854, reprint, 1964), ‘Die ausrüstung eines schiffes’, pp. liii ff.

2. Reproduced by Zarncke in Anhang II, ‘Proben aus den verschiedenen übersetzungen des Narrenschiffs’, p. 212.

3. The words are those of Statius to Virgil in Canto XXII of Purgatorio. See Barbara Reynolds, ‘The Aeneid in Dante's eyes’ (Virgil Society Lectures, No. 73), reprinted in Proceedings of the Virgil Society, 5 (1965-6), p. 4.

4. Zarncke, Einleitung, p. lix.

5. Dante, Epistle XIII, 20.

6. Dante, Epistle XIII, 21.

7. It should be remembered that Dante is by no means the initiator of this type of allegorical interpretation: indeed this same Biblical text had already been submitted to similar interpretation in, for example, the apocryphal Acts of Barnabas. In other words Dante was merely reiterating for his own purpose a time-hallowed method of allegorical interpretation whose origins date back to primitive Christianity and indeed earlier.

8. See Werner Fechter, Lateinische Dichtkunst und deutsches Mittelalter, Philologische Studien und Quellen, 23 (Berlin, 1964), pp. 16 ff.

9. Zarncke, Einleitung, p. xliv.

10. See Zarncke, Commentar, and also Ulrich Gaier, Studien zu Sebastian Brants Narrenschiff (Tübingen, 1966), III: Ergänzungskommentar.

11. Brant, Das Narrenschiff, translated by H. A. Junghans and edited by Hans-Joachim Mähl (Stuttgart, 1964), Nachwort, p. 475.

12. See Edwin H. Zeydel, The Ship of Fools (New York, 1944, reprinted 1962), Introduction, p. 15: ‘The purpose of the trip has been interpreted variously—as a deportation, a trip to a fools’ utopia, a journey to a madhouse or to a Horatian Anticyra.’

13. Mähl, pp. 482, 474.

14. Barbara Könneker, Wesen und Wandlung der Narrenidee im Zeitalter des Humanismus: Brant—Murner—Erasmus (Wiesbaden, 1966).

15. See also Barbara Könneker, ‘“Eyn wis man sich do heym behalt”—Zur Interpretation von Sebastian Brants Narrenschiff’, Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift, New Series 14 (1964), 46-77.

16. Wesen und Wandlung der Narrenidee, p. 128.

17. See Ernst Robert Curtius, Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter (third edition, Berne, 1961), pp. 138 ff.

18. St Augustine, Sermon LXXV (Migne, Patrologia Latina, Vol. 38, 475).

19. See Hugo Rahner, Greek Myths and Christian Mystery (1963), pp. 345 ff.

20. Tertullian, Homily on Baptism, edited by Ernest Evans (1964), Chapter XII, lines 32-7.

21. The Church-Ship analogy also had a considerable influence on the development of medieval church architecture. Thus the nave or ‘Schiff’ of a church is surmounted by a tower representing the mast and symbolizing the Cross. See Ekkart Sauser, ‘Symbolik des katholischen Kirchengebäudes’ in Josef Andreas Jungmann, Symbolik der katholischen Kirche (Volume VI of Symbolik der Religionen, edited by Ferd. Herrmann, Stuttgart, 1960). When Brant surveyed the citizens of his home town assembled in Strasburg Cathedral, possibilities may well have presented themselves to his curious imagination.

22. Sermones supposititii LXXII (Migne, Vol. 39, 1884).

23. Migne, IX, 957B.

24. See Etienne Gilson, La philosophie au moyen âge, second edition (Paris, 1952), p. 198.

25. Migne, Vol. 120, 359D, 360A.

26. It should be made clear that this study has no theological pretensions; it is concerned here solely with certain implications of the Church-Ship metaphor.

27. Tertullian, ed. Evans, Introduction, p. xiv.

28. The De Baptismo was not contained in the earliest editions of Tertullian by Brant's fellow-Alsatian Rhenanus in 1521, 1528, and 1539. It was first printed by Mesnard at Paris in 1545.

29. Rahner, Greek Myths, Chapter III, ‘The Mystery of Baptism’, p. 84.

30. The original title reads: Sectarum / Errorum, Hallutina / tionû, & Schismatum, ab origine ferme / Christianae ecclesiae, ad haec usque nostra / tempora. This vast book, in three parts, is one of the strangest products of the whole period. The main purpose of its author (known also as Conradus Coci, c. 1460-1531) is to show that the errors put forward now are those long since condemned by the Church: ‘nil nunc dictum quod non antehac dictum fuerit’. More particularly, it is a refutation of Lutheran views. See Joseph Negwer, Konrad Wimpina, Ein katholischer Theologe aus der Reformationszeit (Kirchengeschichtliche Abhandlungen 7, Breslau, 1909).

31. The ship woodcut entitled ‘Navis meritoria’ occurs towards the end of the second part (fol. LXXXVII), in a subsidiary work called De fide et operibus sub typo navigii. See Negwer, appendix: ‘Verzeichnis der Schriften Wimpinas in chronologischer Folge.’

32. Yet Könneker can go so far as to maintain (p. 87): ‘Es liegt hier ein Versuch der Selbstheilung vor, bei dem der Mensch Gottes nicht zu bedürfen scheint’! Her extreme Protestant standpoint can at times blind her to Brant's piety, which seeks God through the sacraments of the Church.

33. The preservation of Noah and his family has traditionally been taken to prefigure the salvation of the faithful through baptism by water (see I Peter, III, 20-1), and the Ark itself has often been described as a type of the Church (thus Tertullian in De Baptismo VIII: ‘ecclesia est arcae figura’). Noah's inclusion, by divine command, of specimens of every living thing on board his Ark may perhaps have suggested itself to Brant as a parallel and model for his painstakingly comprehensive inclusion of every conceivable folly: the emphasis is again on salvation. As we shall see, the exception are the ‘uslendigen narren’ of Chapter 98, who therefore correspond to the wicked destroyed by the flood.

34. See Charles Schmidt, Histoire littéraire de l'Alsace, 2 vols (Paris, 1879), 1, 132 ff., 294 ff., and passim.

35. See Rainer Gruenter, ‘Die “Narrheit” in Sebastian Brants Narrenschiff’, Neophilologus, 43 (1959), p. 211.

36. Quotations from the Narrenschiff will be taken from the most recent edition, that of Manfred Lemmer (Tübingen, 1962).

37. Gaier, p. 181: ‘Wenn diese Zuordnungen richtig sind, so erscheint das Narrenschiff als eine große bruchlose Einheit, als Einheit im großen Entwurfe geplant und mit Genauigkeit ausgeführt.’

38. Gaier, p. 70.

39. In the dedicatory epistle prefacing his Stultifera Nauis, reproduced by Zarncke, in Anhang II, p. 211.

40. Könneker, p. 78, and virtually a paraphrase of Schmidt, p. 298.

41. In the sense either of ‘to convert by means of ridicule’ (see Zarncke, Commentary to Chapter 98, p. 440) or of ‘to submit to the process of satirical analysis’ (see Gaier, Ergänzungskommentar, p. 362).

42. Locher, Stultifera Nauis (second edition, 1497, in the John Rylands Library, Manchester), fol. CIX.

43. Quoted by Zarncke, p. 440.

44. The allusion implicit here to the distinction between mortal and venial sins would have been evident to the discerning reader. This is not just a case of ‘schroffe Abgrenzung gegen das Böse’, as Barbara Könneker maintains (p. 83): the hard facts of orthodox theology cannot be so easily overlooked. If the theological implications of Brant's poem are heeded, the positive direction of its religious allegory becomes all the clearer.

45. This was one of Brant's most persistent themes. It is particularly in evidence in his De origine et conversatione bonorum Regum: et laude civitatis Hierosolymae (published in Basle shortly after the Narrenschiff by Johann Bergmann von Olpe, in 1495), in which he traces the history of Jerusalem in order to deduce and illustrate the divine purpose. The theme also forms the subject of several other minor poems, emerging with particular clarity in lines reminiscent of Chapter 99, and addressed to Maximilian:

    Percipe clamores, gemitus lachrymasque tuorum,
              Percipe quod Turcus nos sine fine premit.
    Is canis insequitur nostros direque trucidat
              Christicolas, mortis concitat omne genus.
    Percipe rex clemens, miserae ecclesiaeque ruinam
              Catholicae obmersae naviculae affer opem.
    Fac mundo per te redeant bona saecula pacis …

    (Varia Carmina, reprinted in Zarncke, p. 187). The reference to the Ship of the Church needs no comment.

46. Purgatorio VI, l. 77.

47. See also Die Holzschnitte zu Sebastian Brants Narrenschiff, edited by Manfred Lemmer (Leipzig, 1964), p. 103. There are approximately nine iconographic ship references in the woodcuts to the Narrenschiff, of which those to Chapters 103, 108, and 109 are of particular relevance to this study.

48. For instance in the Exhortatio we read: ‘nobis fabricata carina … theutonico qualem struximus eloquio’ (Zarncke, p. 118).

49. Moreover attention had recently been drawn to the imminence of dire perils for the ‘navicula Sancti Petri’ in the form of heresies, wars, and divisions, as also to the certainty of its ultimate preservation, by the sibylline utterances of the Alsatian hermit and astrologer Johann Lichtenberger. His Pronosticatio in Latino had first appeared in print in 1488, exciting much apprehensive interest during the period when Brant was composing the Narrenschiff. Analogies to Brant's thought at this point are particularly evident in the first two chapters of Lichtenberger's weird but revealing work, with their vivid woodcut illustrating the familiar prediction: ‘Ista navicula heu varijs hinc inde agitata turbinibus fluctibus atque procellis quassabitur’ (quoted from the 1488 edition in the Manchester University Library).

50. The increasing prominence given to good works and indulgences in these chapters, though generally overlooked by scholars, undoubtedly forms part of Brant's purpose. A discussion of this aspect would however lead to theological considerations too complicated for the scope of this article.

51. See Theodore K. Rabb, ‘Sebastian Brant and the First Illustrated Edition of Virgil’, The Princeton University Library Chronicle, 21 (1960), especially p. 188.

52. See Könneker, Chapter 1, ‘Die Entstehung der Narrenthematik um 1500—ihre geistigen und thematischen Wurzeln im späten Mittelalter’.

53. Reproduced from Zarncke, p. 183.

54. Not surprisingly, the image of the Ship of the Church makes isolated appearances throughout medieval German literature, examples occurring as far apart as the Vorau version of Ezzos Gesang and Heinrich von Meissen; its development and the poetic uses to which it was put deserve and require much further investigation.

55. See William Gilbert, ‘Sebastian Brant: Conservative Humanist’, Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, 46 (1955), 145-67.

56. This view has been put forward most recently by Rainer Gruenter in a fascinating paper read at Amsterdam in 1965, and entitled ‘Das Schiff: Ein Beitrag zur historischen Metaphorik’. It has subsequently been published in Tradition und Ursprünglichkeit: Akten des dritten internationalen Germanisten-Kongresses 1965 (Berne, 1966), pp. 86-101.

57. His full description is even more childishly enticing: he calls it ‘terram … ridiculosam et fabulosam, ubi tecta ex laganis sunt confecta, montes incaseati, lapides zuccarei, fontes lacte et fluvii melle fluentes …’ (quoted by Zarncke, p. 457).

58. This is unlikely to be an allusion to Aeneid IV, line 41, as is usually suggested. Perhaps Brant was thinking of the memorable storm encountered off the Syrtes by Cato and his fleet in Lucan's Pharsalia, IX, lines 303-47; but he is surely alluding here primarily to Acts XXVII, 17, where Syrtis is the sandbank avoided by St Paul's ship on the tempestuous voyage to Rome. Thus we find Brant neatly acknowledging the other outstanding New Testament account of a ship in a storm manned by a despairing crew. Its allegorical relationship to the image of the ship and its relevance to Brant's purpose is most obvious in verse 31 when St Paul exclaims: ‘Except these (i.e. the sailors) abide in the ship, ye cannot be saved.’

59. The link had in fact been made some three years before in a highly relevant woodcut. This depicts Christ on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, casting out a devil, while his ship sails confidently by in the background, and St Peter attempts to walk on the water (this episode being taken from Matthew XIV, 28-31). Attributed to Michel Wolgemut, the woodcut is the forty-ninth in a lavishly illustrated collection of meditations on the Passion composed by the Minorite friar Stephen Fridolin, and entitled Schatzbehalter od schrein der waren reichtuemer des hails vnnd ewyger seligkeit; it was published by Anton Koberger of Nuremberg in 1491. See also Richard Bellm's introduction and commentary to the facsimile edition (Wiesbaden, 1962).

60. This passage had already been associated with the Ship of the Church, for instance by the Doctor universalis, Alain of Lille, in his Liber in distinctionibus dictionum theologicalium, which had been published in printed form c. 1477 (Migne, vol. 210, 872A).

61. Yet Barbara Könneker can confidently claim, ‘Die Kirche, für deren Aufrechterhaltung und Wiederherstellung Brant selbst doch eintrat, spielt im Narrenschiff überhaupt keine Rolle’, and maintain that the ‘Richtergott’ is the only genuine embodiment of religious experience in the poem! (pp. 107, 108).

62. Seneca, Epist. Morales, 88.

63. Horace, Epist. 1, 2.

64. Gruenter, ‘Die “Narrheit” in Sebastian Brants Narrenschiff’, emphasizes the importance of death in Brant's thought, but not in this connexion.

65. Ulysses's account of his last voyage occurs in Inferno XXVI, and is the superb invention of Dante's own imagination.

66. The allusions to good works, already mentioned [note 50], should remind us that the further dimension of the poem has been by no means forgotten: we would do well to forget about Luther when trying to appreciate the literary masterpiece of the age which preceded him.

67. Gruenter, in ‘Das Schiff’, speaks of Brant's ‘satirische Umkehrung’ of the traditional image of the navis Ecclesiae (p. 91) and on page 97 describes the ship of fools as a satirical travesty of it; he also shares Könneker's view of Chapter 108 and of the significance of Ulysses in relation to the poem as a whole. Though Gruenter's reading of the Narrenschiff is therefore in almost all respects at variance with the interpretation suggested here, his study has done us the service of concentrating attention on Brantian metaphor and has also provided much complementary material.

68. Rahner, Greek Myths, p. 385.

69. Ecclesiastes, XII, 9.

70. The original idea for this study was suggested by Miss Heather Lowe, a former student of my department, in a paper read at a seminar on Brant's Narrenschiff.