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.

Top 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.