In the Vienna of the Emperor Leopold I, the preacher people crowded to hear was a barefoot Augustinian friar from a Swabian village inn. He could make a congregation laugh out loud at its own vanity and, a sentence later, fall silent before death and judgment. He loved puns the way other preachers loved syllogisms. He told stories about peasants and courtiers, drunkards and dandies, misers and gossips, and he drove each one home with a text of Scripture. His name in religion was Abraham a Sancta Clara, and for a generation he was the most famous preacher in the German-speaking world.
The preacher
He was born Johann Ulrich Megerle in 1644 at Kreenheinstetten, near Messkirch in Swabia, the son of an innkeeper. He was schooled by the Jesuits at Ingolstadt and the Benedictines at Salzburg, and in 1662 he entered the Discalced Augustinians at Mariabrunn near Vienna, taking the name by which he is remembered. Ordained priest in 1666, he soon made a name in the pulpit, and in 1677 the Emperor appointed him court preacher. He served his order as prior and provincial official, but it was the pulpit and the printing-press that made him famous.
He preached through the catastrophes of his city. When plague swept through Vienna for eleven months in 1679, he wrote Merck’s Wienn (“Mark It, Vienna”), a meditation on death addressed to the survivors. When the Turkish army stood before the walls in 1683, he published Auff, auff ihr Christen! (“Up, Up, You Christians!”), a call to arms and to repentance so vivid that, a century later, Schiller borrowed its manner for the Capuchin friar’s sermon in Wallenstein’s Camp. His largest work, the four volumes of Judas der Ertz-Schelm (“Judas the Arch-Rogue”), wrapped a legendary life of the betrayer in hundreds of pages of moral reflection. He died in Vienna in 1709, still preaching, still writing, and still loved by the ordinary people of the city.
The book
Wunderlicher Traum von einem grossen Narren-Nest, “A Wonderful Dream of a Great Nest of Fools,” is one of his last and smallest books. It appeared in 1703 as a Neu-Jahrs-Schanckung, a New Year’s gift: a little volume to be given away at the turn of the year, light enough to be read for pleasure and pointed enough to do some good.
The frame takes a single page. The narrator, a gentleman with the joke name of Gaudentius Hilarion, “Rejoicing Cheerful,” dreams that he is travelling through France. In a garden at Narbonne he sees an enormous nest in an oak and hears a great twittering from it. Curiosity gets the better of him; he fetches a ladder, climbs up, and finds that the nest holds not birds but twelve fools. Then he takes them out one at a time: the simple fool, the lovesick, the covetous, the angry, the drunken, the lazy, the lying, the fearful, the proud, the boorish, the jealous, and last of all, the praiseworthy.
Each fool gets a short chapter, and each chapter is built the same way. Abraham opens with a definition or a text, often turning a word inside out: the true fool, he says at the very start, is not the man with a slow wit but the man who does evil, “He that deviseth to do evils, shall be called a fool.” Then comes the evidence, a rapid parade of cases: a biblical figure, an anecdote from the chronicles, a story he may have heard at a Vienna table. The cases are exaggerated and often very funny, a man who breaks his healed leg again to win a bride, a governor who makes love to the kitchen pots, and they are punctuated by the refrain that runs through the whole book: O Narr!, “O fool!” The laughter is the bait. By the time the reader has finished laughing at the fool, he has usually recognized him.
The tradition of folly
Abraham was writing in an old tradition. Two centuries earlier Sebastian Brant’s Ship of Fools (1494) had loaded a whole vessel with human follies, and Erasmus had let Folly herself deliver a speech in her own praise. Behind both lay the Bible’s wisdom books, where “the fool” is not a man of low intelligence but a man who has turned from God, and St. Paul’s great reversal of the idea: “If any man among you seem to be wise in this world, let him become a fool, that he may be wise.”
That reversal is where the Nest of Fools ends. Its twelfth fool is praised, not mocked. He is the man the world laughs at because he will not live as the world lives: who hands in a purse of a hundred ducats he found rather than keep it, who leads a hard life and chastises his body, who cares nothing for worldly honour. Such a man the world holds for a fool, Abraham says, but this folly is wisdom with God. The book that began with a peasant gaping at ladies’ hats closes by asking the reader which kind of fool he means to be.
This edition
This is, as far as we have been able to discover, the first complete English translation of the Nest of Fools. It is made from the Salzburg printing of 1705, and the note that follows explains how it was done. The aim throughout has been to let an English reader hear what Abraham’s first readers heard: a voice that is quick, sharp, comic, and in deadly earnest about the salvation of souls.