In Praise of Folly

Folly, a goddess, delivers her own eulogy, and on the way takes apart theologians, monks, popes and kings.

Latin, the original language
English, a translation held here, and your language

Original title: Moriae encomium
First published: 1511(aged 45)
Original language: Latin

Overview

In September 1514 Maarten van Dorp, a theologian at Louvain, wrote to Erasmus that the faculty there was angry about a book he had published three years earlier, and uneasy about the Greek New Testament he was known to be preparing. The book was a speech in which Folly, a goddess, praises herself. Erasmus had thought of it in 1509 on the long ride from Italy to England and wrote it in Thomas More's house in London; its title, Moriae encomium, Greek for the praise of folly, puns on his host's name. Folly's case is that nobody could bear life without her. Marriages, friendships and whole states hold together because people flatter one another and overlook one another's faults, and a man who saw everything as it really is would not want to go on living. Then the joke changes direction. Folly turns to her most devoted followers: theologians who argue over impossible questions about the sacraments, monks who quarrel over the cut and colour of their habits, popes and princes who make war, and pilgrims who believe holiness can be bought. In its last pages she praises a third kind of folly, the Christian's, who gives everything away and is taken for mad. Erasmus called the book a declamation, a speech arguing one side of a case, and because the speaker is Folly no reader can say exactly where the author stands. In his long reply to Dorp, printed with the book from the Basel edition of 1516 onwards, he wrote that he had meant to make people better, not to wound them. The book, first printed in Paris in 1511, was reprinted again and again in his lifetime and translated into Czech, French and German. Thomas Chaloner's English version appeared in 1548, John Wilson's in 1668. The first papal Index of Prohibited Books, in 1559, banned it along with everything else Erasmus had written. It has never been out of print.

Key concepts

Why does it matter that In Praise of Folly is a declamation?

A declamation is a speech arguing one side of a case as a rhetorical exercise, and here the speaker is Folly herself. That frees Erasmus to say outrageous things, since a fool may praise what the wise condemn, and it stops the reader from treating any sentence as his plain opinion. Every claim has to be weighed: some are jokes, some are serious, and some are both.

Who are the companions Folly brings with her?

They are her attendants, each a weakness with a Greek name: Philautia (self-love), Kolakia (flattery), Lethe (forgetfulness), Misoponia (laziness), Hedone (pleasure), Anoia (madness) and Tryphe (wantonness). Folly introduces them at the start as the helpers through whom she rules human life. Together they sketch her argument: people are happy because they love themselves, flatter each other and forget their troubles.

What are the two kinds of madness in In Praise of Folly?

One is sent by the Furies from hell: the craving for war or gold, shameful love, crime, a guilty conscience. The other comes from Folly and is pleasant, a happy delusion that frees the mind from cares. Folly borrows the distinction from Plato, who counted the raptures of poets, prophets and lovers among life's greatest blessings.

What is Christian folly at the end of the book?

It is the life of the Christian who seems mad to the world: giving away possessions and longing for what cannot be seen. Folly quotes Paul, who said he spoke 'as a fool', and claims such believers as her own. Their highest happiness is a rapture in which the soul is carried out of itself, like Plato's lovers, so that the last folly in the book is also its most serious praise.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

The Folly That Keeps Life Going

Could anyone bear life if they saw it exactly as it is? Folly argues, with a straight face, that every marriage, friendship and pleasure depends on a little blindness, and that she supplies it.

Folly arrives with her companions, Flattery, Forgetfulness, Self-love and Pleasure, and claims every human good as her gift. Without a moment of foolishness no one would marry or have children; without friends winking at each other's faults no friendship would last. Life is a comedy in which everyone wears a costume, and whoever strips the actors spoils the play. The wise man of the Stoics is useless at a feast. Erasmus lets the joke run far enough that a reader has to ask how much of it is true.

folly
happiness
self-deception
flattery
self-love
pleasure
human nature
aging
wisdom

Enter a dialogue

Folly's Most Devoted Followers

What happens when the joke turns on theologians, monks and popes? Halfway through, Folly stops excusing human weakness and starts exposing those who claim to be wiser and holier than others.

Theologians spin questions no Apostle could answer; monks quarrel over the width of a cowl and the number of knots in a shoe; the devout worship Saint George or Saint Christopher more fervently than Christ. Then, in its last pages, the speech changes key again. Folly praises the folly of the Christian, who gives everything away and longs for what cannot be seen, and compares it with the raptures Plato granted to lovers. Because a fool is speaking, the reader cannot pin down where mockery ends and conviction begins.

scholasticism
theology
religion
superstition
satire
religious authority
hypocrisy
scriptural interpretation
irony

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held: 333
distinct concepts: 429
by passages held, corpus-wide: #225

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “folly” and “wisdom”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 21 pairings. 81 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
folly	wisdom	30
folly	happiness	20
folly	pleasure	18
folly	human nature	16
folly	satire	13
rhetoric	satire	10
happiness	pleasure	9
human nature	wisdom	8
folly	rhetoric	7
happiness	wisdom	7
rhetoric	scholasticism	7
satire	scholasticism	7
satire	wisdom	7
happiness	satire	6
human nature	satire	6
happiness	human nature	5
human nature	pleasure	3
pleasure	satire	3
rhetoric	wisdom	3
pleasure	wisdom	2
happiness	rhetoric	1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

1500 Adages (Adagia)
The work that first made Erasmus famous and the one he revised for longest, from 1500 until the year he died; Erasmus Against War began as one of its entries.
LA
1503 The Manual of the Christian Knight (Enchiridion militis Christiani)
The earnest twin of In Praise of Folly: when critics attacked the satire, Erasmus answered that it treats the same subject as this manual, only in a playful spirit.
EN
1504 Panegyric for Archduke Philip of Austria (Panegyricus ad Philippum Austriae ducem)
Erasmus's advice to a ruler, delivered as a speech of welcome; The Complaint of Peace and the essay on war later make its case for peace without the obligatory flattery.
LA
1511 In Praise of Folly (Moriae encomium) you are here LAEN
1511 On the Method of Study (De ratione studii)
Part of the same English years' work as De copia, with which it was later printed; Erasmus's later The Education of Children moves the same programme back to infancy.
LA
1515 Erasmus Against War (Dulce bellum inexpertis)
The fullest essay on war in the Adages and the core of Erasmus's writings for peace; The Complaint of Peace restates its case two years later in Peace's own voice.
EN
1516 The Education of a Christian Prince (Institutio principis christiani)
Erasmus's one full treatise on government, in the old genre of advice books for rulers; The Complaint of Peace followed a year later.
LA
1517 The Complaint of Peace (Querela pacis)
A declamation in the voice of Peace, the device of In Praise of Folly turned to a serious purpose, and the most direct of Erasmus's several writings against war.
LAEN
1518 Familiar Colloquies (Colloquia familiaria)
The book that carried Erasmus's views on fasting, pilgrimage and monks to far more readers than his devotional treatises ever reached.
LAEN
1518 In Praise of Marriage (De laude matrimonii)
A schoolroom piece that turned into a controversy: the first of three works on marriage, followed by The Institution of Christian Matrimony in 1526 and On the Christian Widow in 1529.
LA
1520 The Antibarbarians (Antibarbari)
The first statement of the cause Erasmus served all his life, classical learning as the ally of Christian faith, written before any of the books that made his name.
LA
1521 On Disdaining the World (De contemptu mundi)
The counterweight to everything Erasmus later wrote about monks, from The Manual of the Christian Knight to the Familiar Colloquies, and probably the earliest of his surviving prose works.
LA
1524 On Praying to God (Modus orandi Deum)
Pastoral rather than polemical, though written in the same year as On Free Will, his challenge to Luther; the first of the late handbooks on Christian practice that end with An Explanation of the Apostles' Creed.
LA
1525 The Tongue (Lingua)
Erasmus's fullest treatment of a theme that runs through all his writing, speech as the mirror of the soul, written in Basel in the middle of the polemics of the 1520s.
LA
1526 The Institution of Christian Matrimony (Christiani matrimonii institutio)
Commissioned through the English court and dedicated to its queen, it is Erasmus's main statement on the law and practice of marriage, where In Praise of Marriage had been a single persuasive letter.
LA
1528 The Ciceronian (Dialogus cui titulus Ciceronianus)
Satire aimed at fellow humanists rather than at theologians, unusual in Erasmus's later years; it first appeared in one volume with his dialogue on the pronunciation of Latin and Greek.
LA
1529 On the Christian Widow (Vidua christiana)
The last of Erasmus's writings on women's lives, after In Praise of Marriage and The Institution of Christian Matrimony, and like the second of those dedicated to a queen.
LA
1529 The Education of Children (De pueris statim ac liberaliter instituendis)
Dedicated to a prince's heir, like The Education of a Christian Prince, but concerned with every child's first years rather than with government; the most personal of Erasmus's books on schooling.
LAEN
1533 An Explanation of the Apostles' Creed (Explanatio symboli)
Erasmus's catechism, written for lay readers rather than theologians three years before his death.
LA

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