The Praise of Folly

Overview

The Praise of Folly is a hundred and thirty pages and Erasmus says he wrote it in about a week, on horseback across the Alps and then at Thomas More’s house in London, while waiting for his books to arrive. The Latin title, Moriae Encomium, is a pun on More’s name, and the dedication makes the joke explicit.

The form is a classical exercise turned into a weapon. Rhetoricians practised the mock encomium, a speech praising something unworthy: baldness, a fly, a quartan fever. Erasmus has the goddess Folly deliver her own, in full academic style, complete with exordium, proofs and peroration.

That device is the whole trick. Everything in the book is said by a self-declared fool praising herself, so nothing can be nailed to the author. When Folly says the popes would be poorer without their wars, Erasmus has not said it. He used this defence for the rest of his life, and it was only partly effective; the book went onto the Index eventually, and the Sorbonne condemned it while he was alive.

There is a shift about two thirds through that catches most readers out. The satire darkens, then stops being satire, and the last twenty pages are a serious argument about Christian folly that would be at home in a sermon.

The argument

Folly introduces herself. She is the daughter of Plutus, the god of wealth, born in the Fortunate Isles, nursed by Drunkenness and Ignorance, attended by Self-Love, Flattery, Forgetfulness, Idleness, Pleasure, Madness and Sensuality. She has come, she says, without preparation, since she never speaks anything but what is on her mind.

Her first case: nothing works without her. Folly claims credit for existence itself, since no man in his right mind would marry, and no woman who understood childbirth would go through it twice. She claims childhood and old age, which are the happiest parts of life and the most foolish. She claims friendship, which requires overlooking faults; marriage, which requires overlooking more; and self-love, without which nobody could bear to do anything in public. Wars are fought by the ignorant, governments run on illusion, and the wise man, if you could find one, would be useless at all of it: unfit for business, hopeless in company, and miserable.

This section is funnier and more unsettling than its summary suggests, because much of it is true. Folly’s argument is that clear sight is intolerable and that societies run on agreed pretences, and Erasmus does not supply a rebuttal.

Her second case: a tour of the professions. Here the speech turns into a survey and the tone hardens. Grammarians, tyrannising over schoolboys and quarrelling over a syllable. Poets and rhetoricians. Lawyers, who pile up citations to make a simple matter impenetrable. Philosophers, who build universes and cannot find their way home. Scientists measuring the heavens. Then the churchmen, who take up most of the space and most of the venom.

Theologians are shown disputing whether God could have taken the form of a gourd, and calculating the exact instant of the Incarnation, so pleased with their distinctions that they mistake them for discoveries. Monks are described as illiterate, filthy, obsessed with the knots in a girdle, and confident of being greeted in heaven by a catalogue of their dietary observances. Bishops, cardinals and finally popes are each given a description of what their office demands, poverty, labour, the cross, and then shown doing the opposite: raising armies, selling offices, and leaving the actual work to deputies.

The turn. Around section 65 the speech changes register. Folly begins quoting scripture, and the quotations are all about foolishness: God choosing the foolish things of the world, Paul playing the fool, the foolishness of the cross being wiser than men. Christians, she says, are fools by every worldly standard. They give away money, forgive injuries, seek out suffering and long to die. They fast and weep while others feast.

The final pages describe the pious soul in something close to ecstasy: absorbed in what it loves, beside itself, unable to give an account of the experience afterwards, and looking to bystanders exactly like a madman. Folly claims this too, and ends by saying she has forgotten what she said, and that her listeners should applaud, drink and live well.

How to read it

Read the preface to More first. It tells you what genre you are in and that the whole thing is meant as a joke with a purpose.

Use an annotated edition. Half the humour depends on recognising a classical tag or a contemporary target, and without notes the middle section is a list of complaints about strangers.

Read the last twenty sections carefully and decide what has happened. The standard question about this book is whether the ending is a pious retreat that makes the satire safe, a genuine climax the satire was building toward all along, or a final and deeper joke. The text supports all three.

Read it against Luther. Erasmus attacked the same abuses six years earlier and far more wittily, and then refused to break with Rome, and spent the 1520s in bitter public argument with Luther about free will. The distance between a satirist and a reformer is the useful thing here.

Hold on to the fact that a fool is speaking. Erasmus is not endorsing Folly’s claim that illusion is necessary, and he is not denying it either. The book is built so that you cannot get a direct answer out of him.

Questions it raises

• Folly argues that life is unliveable without self-deception. Is she refuted anywhere in the book?
• The device of having a fool speak protects the author. Is that a legitimate way to say true things, or an evasion?
• Is the ending sincere? And does it matter whether Erasmus meant it, if the effect is to make everything before it safe?
• Erasmus attacks the church’s abuses and stays in it; Luther attacks the same ones and leaves. Which is the more serious response?
• The satire on scholars comes from one of the greatest scholars in Europe. What is he claiming about his own work?
• If Christian faith looks like madness from outside, what follows for anyone trying to judge it from outside?