The Praise of Folly

Summary

The Praise of Folly (Moriae Encomium, 1511) is a mock oration delivered by Folly herself, a goddess who climbs into a pulpit before an imagined crowd and, since no one else will praise her, praises herself. Erasmus borrows the classical form of the paradoxical encomium, the playful speech in honour of something worthless, and fills it with a double irony: Folly says many things that are true, and many that are foolish, and the reader is never told which is which. She introduces herself as the daughter of Plutus, god of wealth, born in the Fortunate Islands, nursed by Drunkenness and Ignorance, and attended by Self-love, Flattery, Oblivion, Laziness, Pleasure, Madness, Wantonness, Intemperance and Dead Sleep. Her first argument is that human life itself depends on her. No one would marry, beget children, endure old age or keep a friend without some measure of illusion; old men are made bearable by a second childhood; friendship survives because friends overlook each other's faults; and the stoic wise man, stripped of every passion, is a marble statue no one could live with. Life is a stage play in which everyone wears a costume, and the man who tears off the masks ruins the comedy. The speech then turns, with steadily sharpening edges, from the follies that make life sweet to the follies that make it corrupt. Folly surveys her devotees: hunters, builders, gamblers, people who trust painted saints to keep them from death, pardon-sellers who measure purgatory by the hour, grammarians, poets, lawyers, philosophers, and above all scholastic theologians who argue whether God could have taken the form of a gourd while neglecting the Gospel. Monks who cannot read, preachers who perform like actors, kings who hunt instead of governing, courtiers, bishops, cardinals and warrior popes all receive their portrait; here the irony thins and the voice is plainly that of the reformer. In the final section the goddess, now quoting Scripture, discovers that the Bible itself praises folly: Ecclesiastes, Paul's 'fools for Christ's sake' and 'the foolishness of God', Christ's choice of the simple. The true Christian, who gives away his goods, forgives injuries and longs for things invisible, looks mad to the world, and the rapture of the saints is a foretaste of a heavenly happiness in which the soul is carried out of itself. Then Folly breaks off, claims she has forgotten everything she said, and dismisses her audience to drink. Erasmus wrote the work in 1509 at the London house of Thomas More and dedicated it to him with a pun on More's name; the library's text is John Wilson's English translation of 1668.

Plot or Argument

• Dedication to Thomas More

  Erasmus explains that he composed the piece while riding from Italy to England, that More's surname suggested the Greek moria, and that jests have a long pedigree from Homer's battle of frogs and mice to Lucian. He anticipates the charge that the book is too light for a theologian and too biting for a Christian, and insists that it names no individuals.

• Folly mounts the pulpit

  Folly observes that her mere appearance has cheered the audience, mocks rhetoricians who pretend their speeches are extempore, refuses to define or divide herself, and names those who hide their allegiance to her the morosophoi, wise fools.

• Lineage, nurses and attendants

  Her father is Plutus rather than Jupiter; her birthplace the Fortunate Islands; her nurses Drunkenness and Ignorance. She introduces her retinue of personified vices, Philautia (Self-love) and Kolakia (Flattery) first among them, as the ministers of her empire.

• The gifts that make life bearable

  Folly claims credit for the begetting of children, the charm of infancy, the second childhood of the old, the pleasures of the gods, the bonds of friendship and marriage, and the self-satisfaction that keeps every craftsman at work. She attacks the Stoic sage as inhuman and argues that the mask is necessary to the comedy of life.

• The pleasant madness

  Distinguishing the madness sent by the Furies, which drives men to war, avarice and crime, from her own gentle delusion, Folly praises the man who laughs at an empty theatre and pities the friends who cured him with hellebore. Most people, she concludes, carry some tang of madness.

• The catalogue of fools

  The satire widens to superstitious devotees of saints, sellers of pardons, merchants, pilgrims, grammarians, poets, rhetoricians, lawyers, natural philosophers and scholastic theologians with their questions about the Incarnation and the Eucharist, then to monks, preachers, princes, courtiers, bishops, cardinals and popes who wage war while claiming Peter's keys.

• Folly in Scripture

  Folly turns exegete, comically misapplying some texts while citing others with real force: Ecclesiastes on vanity, Paul's boast of his own foolishness, the foolishness of the cross, and Christ's preference for children, lilies and sparrows over the wise.

• The holy madness and the abrupt farewell

  Drawing on Plato's account of the lover who lives outside himself, Folly describes the Christian ecstatic whose soul is drawn out of the body toward God, a foretaste of heaven. She then pretends to remember nothing, quotes a drinking proverb, and dismisses her disciples.

Characters

• Folly (Moria / Stultitia), speaker of the oration

  A goddess in cap and bells who praises herself with sophistic wit; sometimes a mouthpiece for Erasmus, sometimes a target of his irony, and in the end an unexpected witness to Christian simplicity.

• Thomas More, dedicatee

  English lawyer and humanist, later Lord Chancellor, at whose house the book was written; addressed in the opening letter as a man who plays Democritus, the laughing philosopher.

• Philautia (Self-love), Folly's attendant

  The companion who makes every man pleased with his own face, talent and nation; Folly treats her as the source of most human contentment.

• Kolakia (Flattery), Folly's attendant

  Self-love's sister, praised by Folly as the glue of friendship, courts and even medicine.

• Plutus, Folly's father

  The god of wealth, presented as the real ruler of gods and men, whose favour turns all affairs sacred and profane upside down.

• The audience, listeners

  A crowd Folly addresses as her disciples; their laughter at others implicates them in the folly she describes.

Lessons

• Who is speaking when Folly speaks?

  Erasmus gives his satire to an unreliable speaker, so the reader must judge each claim rather than accept it. Folly is wrong to praise flattery as the glue of society, yet right when she mocks pardons sold by the hour. Learning to tell the difference is the book's main intellectual discipline, and the same skill is needed for any ironic writing.

  • Pick one claim from Folly's praise of self-love and decide whether Erasmus means it straight, ironically, or both ways.
  • At what point in the catalogue of monks and theologians does Folly stop sounding like Folly and start sounding like a reformer?
  • Why might Erasmus have chosen a fool as his speaker instead of writing a direct treatise on reform?

• Necessary illusions and the comedy of masks

  Folly argues that marriage, friendship and contentment depend on a measure of illusion, and that a man who tears the costumes off the actors ruins the play. The argument is partly persuasive: charity overlooks faults. It is also dangerous, since it can excuse self-deception. Students should weigh where forbearance ends and lying to oneself begins.

  • Is overlooking a friend's faults a kind of folly, a kind of charity, or both?
  • Folly says the wise man 'dropped from heaven' who exposes every pretence would be hated. Is she right, and does that make him wrong?
  • How does the stage-play image change when Folly later describes Christians who seem mad to the world?

• Satire as charity toward the Church

  Erasmus mocks relic-worship, purchased pardons, illiterate monks, hair-splitting theology and warrior popes, yet he wrote as a priest who wanted the Church renewed rather than abandoned. The satire measures each office by the life of Christ: poverty, labour, teaching and the cross. Students can ask whether ridicule is a fitting tool of correction and what makes it just rather than merely cruel.

  • What standard does Folly use when she imagines popes trying to imitate Christ's poverty and labour?
  • Erasmus claims in his dedication that he names no individuals. Does that make the satire fairer?
  • Compare Erasmus's method with a later reformer who left the Roman Church. What did each believe ridicule could accomplish?

• The foolishness of the cross

  In its final pages the book turns Paul's paradox into its climax: the Christian who forgives injuries, gives away goods and longs for invisible things looks insane by worldly standards. Folly's praise of herself becomes, without warning, a praise of holy simplicity. The ending asks whether the whole oration was a trap that leads the laughing reader to judge himself.

  • How does 1 Corinthians 1–4 change the meaning of the word 'folly' in the last section?
  • Is there a difference between the pleasant madness Folly praised earlier and the holy madness of the saints?
  • Why does Folly end by saying she remembers nothing of what she said?

Context

The book belongs to the first generation of northern humanism, when scholars trained in Greek and Latin rhetoric turned their learning on the institutions of late medieval Christendom. Erasmus had just seen the Rome of Julius II, a pope who led armies in person, and he wrote in the years when indulgence preaching, pilgrimage, relic cults and the scholastic method of the universities were under growing criticism from within the Church. The form is classical: Lucian's comic dialogues (which Erasmus and More had translated together in 1505–06) and the ancient tradition of mock encomia praising baldness, flies or fever. The Praise of Folly appeared six years before Luther's theses, and its attacks were later read, often against Erasmus's wishes, as anticipations of the Reformation.

Composition

According to the dedication, Erasmus conceived the work on horseback while returning from Italy to England in 1509 and wrote it quickly at Thomas More's house in Bucklersbury, London. It was printed in Paris in 1511 and revised in many later editions; the Froben edition of 1515 at Basel added a commentary attributed to Gerard Listrius, and Hans Holbein the Younger drew marginal sketches in a copy of that edition. In 1515 Erasmus defended the book in a long letter to the Louvain theologian Maarten van Dorp. The first English version, by Thomas Chaloner, appeared in 1549; the library's text is John Wilson's translation of 1668.

Reception

The book was an immediate success, reprinted dozens of times in Erasmus's lifetime and translated into the major vernaculars. Theologians at Louvain and Paris objected to its treatment of monks and scholastics, and after the Reformation Catholic authorities placed Erasmus's works on the Index of 1559, while Protestants claimed him as a forerunner. Later readers have valued it as a model of sustained irony, a source for Rabelais, Cervantes and Swift, and an example of Christian humanist piety that sought reform without schism.

Comparisons

• Utopia

  Written by the friend to whom Folly is dedicated, five years later and in the same humanist circle. Both use a fictional speaker (Folly, Raphael Hythloday) whose views cannot simply be identified with the author's, and both leave readers to sort earnest proposals from jokes.

• On Free Will (De Libero Arbitrio)

  Erasmus's sober 1524 treatise against Luther shows the same distaste for scholastic overconfidence that Folly mocks in the theologians, but in plain argument; reading the two together shows how much his satire relies on persona.

• The Bondage of the Will (De Servo Arbitrio)

  Luther's reply to Erasmus scorned the humanist's caution as scepticism. Set beside Folly, it shows two reformers who shared criticisms of indulgences and monastic abuses but disagreed over grace and over whether reform could stay within the old Church.

• Gargantua and Pantagruel

  Rabelais, who wrote to Erasmus as a spiritual father, carried the humanist comedy of learned fools and corrupt monks into a sprawling narrative of giants, with an even freer mixture of obscenity and earnest piety.

• Don Quixote

  Cervantes's knight embodies Folly's distinction between ruinous and holy madness: his delusion is ridiculous, yet his generosity and fidelity often shame the sane people who mock him.

• King Lear

  Shakespeare's Fool and the mad king echo the Erasmian paradox that wisdom speaks through folly; Lear learns on the heath what Folly preaches from the pulpit, that the wise of the world are often blind.

• Gulliver's Travels

  Swift inherited the ironic persona from Erasmus, but Gulliver, unlike Folly, never reaches a redemptive turn; comparing the two endings shows the difference between satire that hopes and satire that despairs.

Quotes

Medical Lens

Folly offers a Renaissance humanist taxonomy of madness drawn from classical sources rather than from medical writers: a destructive madness sent by the Furies (war-lust, avarice, guilt) and a pleasant delusion she claims as her own, which she treats as a mercy. The Horatian anecdote of the man cured with hellebore, the standard ancient purge for madness, raises a question still discussed in psychiatric ethics, whether a contented delusion should always be treated. Her portrait of physicians as flatterers belongs to a long satirical tradition and is not evidence about any particular practitioner. The account of old age as a second childhood describes forgetfulness and decline without a medical vocabulary. The closing description of mystical rapture borrows the language of madness to describe religious ecstasy; it should be read as theology and rhetoric, not as a clinical account.

• Folly's benefits: old age and second childhood

  Folly claims that the waters of Lethe give the old a forgetful second childhood, listing toothlessness, weakness, broken speech and forgetfulness as shared by the very old and the very young.

  Aging Senescence Dementia Memory
• The arts and sciences

  Physicians are said to be esteemed above all other learned men, and most esteemed when most ignorant; medicine is classed with rhetoric as a branch of flattery.

  Physicians Doctors Quackery Charlatans
• The two kinds of madness

  Folly distinguishes Fury-sent madness from pleasant delusion, retells Horace's tale of the man who applauded an empty theatre and resented his cure by friends and physic, and mentions hellebore as the remedy.

  Madness Psychosis Humoral Medicine
• Folly in Scripture and the Christian life

  Folly notes that the dying and the disordered sometimes speak as if inspired shortly before death, and links the apparent madness of prophets and the sick to the mind loosed from the body.

  Altered States Madness Psychosis
• Conclusion: the ecstasy of the saints

  Description of contemplatives who weep and laugh by turns, speak incoherently, and on returning to themselves cannot say whether they were in the body or out of it.

  Altered States

Creative Prompts

• Fiction

  Write a new paragraph for Folly's catalogue of fools, aimed at a type of person found in your own school or town, keeping her trick of praising what she is really mocking.

• Dialogue

  Stage the conversation between Erasmus and the Louvain theologian Maarten van Dorp in 1515, in which Dorp complains that the book wounds the Church and Erasmus answers that satire can heal.

• Essay

  Is the final section, where Folly praises the holy madness of Christians, the real point of the book or one more ironic turn? Argue from at least three passages.

• Classroom

  Divide the oration into the sections where Folly is wrong, right, or both, and have groups defend their classification of one disputed passage before the class.

Further Reading

• Utopia, Thomas More

  The companion work of the dedicatee.

• Enchiridion militis Christiani (Handbook of the Christian Soldier), Desiderius Erasmus

  The plain statement of the piety that Folly's last pages express ironically.

• Erasmus of Rotterdam, Johan Huizinga

• Erasmus: His Life, Works, and Influence, Cornelis Augustijn

• Moriae Encomium, Hans Holbein the Younger (marginal drawings)

  Holbein's pen sketches in a 1515 copy, widely reproduced in modern editions.