ABSTRACT
Christian laughter gains immeasurably whenever it finds madness to laugh at in human deeds and human errors, in human weaknesses and human vices. It gains immeasurably too when it gladly accepts itself as madness in the eyes of the world. The exacting standards of Erasmus and Rabelais led them to value divine rapture till their life's end. But the majority of mankind, Christians included, must live out their lives firmly within this world. Even sound Christian laymen could not follow those great Christian laughers wherever they ventured. Christian synergism does not encourage human presumption. Men must work with grace, not presume to enjoy gifts of grace with which they have not been favoured. Moral conduct concerns all mankind. Rabelais takes it as a field for Christian laughter. An evangelical symbol and a royalist one too. A royalist-Gallican one therefore. Rabelais is harking back to a faded, ideal world in which the Most Christian King ordered things well in his dominions.
