If the celebrated humanist Erasmus could pen the remarkable In Praise of Folly (1511), dedicating it to Thomas More, perhaps at this late date I can post a plug for the footnote. Think of adoxographia.[1] For a start, without the footnote, the heft of law journals would be sadly diminished. In recent years, the securities lawyer Arnold Jacobs has held the record for the most footnotes in a single legal article, a whopping 4,824.

But suppose Alfred North Whitehead is right and all philosophy is a footnote on Plato. In that case there would be no end to footnotes, even as there is no end of philosophers and their disputations. As a philosopher more ecumenical than disputatious, I am a friend of the footnote. As soon as I have read a paper’s abstract, I find myself scanning its footnotes. They are, if judiciously placed, the indices of where the author’s research has centered. Is the territory familiar or am I to visit new terrain with fresh venues? Are the author’s sources credible? Are controversies acknowledged and dissenters given their due? Even the formalism of the footnotes makes a difference: there’s one style for the social sciences, another for psychologists, and still another for the humanities.

Sometimes footnotes are, so to speak, sternly put into their proper places. I just borrowed Robert Fitzgerald’s new-to-me translation of The Iliad. An eminent Princetonian’s accessible, almost sprightly, introduction assigned all of the heavy lifting to its footnotes, in sharply reduced type. And at other times, as when consulting Wikipedia, the footnotes — strategically interwoven with hyperlinks keyed to hypertexts — are the main attraction. While it won’t do to cite Wikipedia directly, its footnotes are often welcome avenues to properly scholarly material.

But at still other times, a single footnote unfairly becomes itself a cause célèbre. More than one commentator, wondering where Peter is or ought to be, has puzzled over footnote 351 in Chapter 8 of Pope Francis’s Amoris Laetitia. Just when, if ever, can divorced and civilly remarried Catholics receive the sacraments of Reconciliation and the Eucharist? And if they can, why so? The resolution of this controversy, however it comes, will not be managed in a footnote.

In reviewing the fortune and occasional misfortune of the footnote, let me add that authors, a sensitive lot, are sometimes advised to reduce their use of footnotes. Yes, gentle reader, one cheeky journal of opinion has charged me to “trim” my footnotes in an essay that I hope will grace its pages. I will comply, though doing so seems more like jettisoning my anchors than like trimming my sails.

By way of contrast, Scripture itself neither needs nor has footnotes. The word of God is, in that regard, altogether sufficient. But notwithstanding the internal completeness and Divine inerrancy of Scripture, its translators and commentators, with flowing ink and far-ranging reflection, have first given rise to centuries of “gloss” and now to centuries more of footnotes. Medieval scholars used the former, written in the margin notes of a manuscript, to explain and explore particular passages. The footnotes waited, it seems, for the inventiveness of Richard Jugge. He put them to work in printing the Bishops’ Bible of 1568 — authorized by Elizabeth I and then supplanted by the King James Bible.

And now, by way of easy and natural transition, we can return to Erasmus. For it was Erasmus’s New Testament scholarship that paved the way for what is termed the Novum Testamentum Omne, a series of bilingual Latin-Greek New Testaments with substantial scholarly annotations. In 1516 Erasmus dedicated his efforts to Pope Leo X, explaining that

I have revised the whole New Testament (as they call it) against the standard of the Greek original… I have added annotations of my own, in order in the first place to show the reader what changes I have made, and why; second, to disentangle and explain anything that may be complicated, ambiguous, or obscure.

The task was an arduous one, indeed, just the sort that could be lightened by writing something on the side that warned of the folly with which misdirected scholarship could become entangled. Scholar, know thy self! And In Praise of Folly, albeit with nary a footnote, he offers the same advice to all of us.

[1] The Greek term for praise of the mundane in elevated terms.