Suffer Fools Gladly

There is an apostolic injunction to suffer fools gladly. We always lay the stress on the word ‘suffer,’ and interpret the passage as one urging resignation. It might be better, perhaps, to lay the stress upon the word ‘gladly,’ and make our familiarity with fools a delight, and almost a dissipation. Nor is it necessary that our pleasure in fools (or at least in great and godlike fools) should be merely satiric or cruel. The great fool is he in whom we cannot tell which is the conscious and which the unconscious humour; we laugh with him and laugh at him at the same time. An obvious instance is that of ordinary and happy marriage. A man and a woman cannot live together without having against each other a kind of everlasting joke. Each has discovered that the other is not only a fool, but a great fool. This largeness, this grossness and gorgeousness of folly is the thing which we all find about those with whom we are in intimate contact; and it is the one enduring basis of affection, and even of respect.

-G. K. Chesterton, Charles Dickens, H/T Austin Kleon

King Lear and the Apostle Paul

It is in First Corinthians that Paul also writes “God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong, God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are,” and the echoes of those words in King Lear are so striking that it is hard to believe that they were not consciously in Shakespeare’s mind as he wrote it. Not only are the foolish wise in his play and the wise foolish, just as the weak are strong in it and the strong weak, but what seems to be nothing—a word that Lear and Cordelia, Edmund and Gloucester, and the Fool all play upon at some length—turns out to be something of surpassing importance, as it does when in answer to Lear’s “What can you say to draw a third more opulent than your sisters?” Cordelia’s “nothing” contains the whole richness and truth of her love contrasted with her sisters’ deceit. It is almost possible to think of Shakespeare as having written the entire play as a gloss on St. Paul, adding to it such other paradoxes of his own, as that it is the sane who are mad and the mad sane, just as it also the blind who see and the seeing who are blind.

-Frederick Buechner, Speak What We Feel, 137-138.