Desiderius Erasmus · Philosophy
Erasmus’s wittiest book lets the goddess <em>Folly</em> mount the rostrum and praise herself - a mock oration that, under cover of a joke, exposes the vanity of scholars, courtiers, and churchmen, and ends by daring to call true Christianity a holy kind of folly.
In 1509, riding back over the Alps toward England, Erasmus amused himself by composing a little declamation, and finished it in a week at the London house of Thomas More. He expected it to be a trifle. Instead The Praise of Folly became the most famous book of the northern Renaissance. Its device is deceptively simple. Erasmus never speaks in his own voice; he hands the podium to the goddess Folly herself, who delivers a formal oration - a mock encomium - praising her own indispensable greatness. Because a fool is boasting, the reader laughs; and because the fool keeps being right, the reader begins to squirm. Folly claims that without her nothing in human life could go on: no marriage, no friendship, no war, no feast, no ambition, and no religion. The satire works from the inside out: Folly is not accused of ruling the world, she cheerfully confesses it, and every rank of society files past as one of her devoted subjects.
Folly’s speech climbs a ladder of daring. She begins with the comic, almost affectionate follies that make ordinary life bearable: young lovers, the self-flattery that lets us endure ourselves, the small vanities of feasts and games. Then the tone sharpens. She parades the learned professions and finds each one absurd: grammarians tyrannizing children, hair-splitting logicians, lawyers, poets, and above all the philosophers who ‘know’ the measurements of the sun and the causes of the universe while unable to cross a ditch. Finally she climbs to the seats of power in the Church - the theologians tangled in useless questions, the monks proud of their filth and their rules, the bishops who hunt and feast, and popes who wage war while claiming the keys of a crucified carpenter. What began as light comedy has become the sharpest religious satire of the age, all of it deniable, because a fool is only praising her own.
The ending is what lifts The Praise of Folly above ordinary satire. Having mocked the false folly of pride, greed, and superstition, Erasmus lets Folly praise a higher folly: the ecstatic self-abandonment of genuine piety. True religion, on this view, is not a matter of ceremonies and calculations but a kind of loving madness that the worldly cannot understand. The book thus carries, in comic disguise, the same message as Erasmus’s serious devotional writing - that Christianity has been buried under human wisdom, rules, and show, and needs to recover the simple, self-forgetful spirit of Christ. The jest and the sermon turn out to be one. Erasmus laughs the reader into a question he could not have asked head-on: how much of what we call wisdom is vanity, and how much of what we dismiss as folly is the only wisdom that matters?
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Erasmus wrote a mock encomium : Folly praises herself, and that ironic device lets him satirize every rank of society with deniability, before turning serious at the end with the ‘folly of the Cross.’ Explain why speaking through Folly was more than a trick - why the fool’s mask was itself the argumen…
Leads to Thomas More.
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