The Work
Moriae Encomium (In Praise of Folly) was written by Desiderius Erasmus in approximately one week at the house of his friend Thomas More in London in 1509, and first published by Gilles de Gourmont in Paris in 1511. It went through over 40 editions in Erasmus's lifetime - a record that established it as the first European bestseller - and has never been out of print since. The title is a bilingual pun: Moria is Greek for 'Folly,' but it also sounds like 'More-ia,' a salute to Thomas More to whose household Erasmus dedicated it. The work is a paradoxical encomium - a speech in praise of something supposedly unworthy of praise - delivered in the voice of Folly herself, personified as a goddess who claims responsibility for all human happiness and achievement.
The work is typically divided into three parts: the first dealing with secular folly (the pleasures and self-deceptions that make ordinary human life bearable); the second presenting a systematic critique of Renaissance society - kings, merchants, lawyers, scholastic theologians, monks, popes - through the lens of their specific forms of self-delusion; and the third, shortest, and most theologically serious part, reinterpreting Christian faith itself through the paradox of 1 Corinthians 1:18-31, arguing that what the world calls folly - the cross, the saints, the mystical ecstasy - is actually the highest wisdom.
Biblical Engagement
1 Corinthians 1:18 ('For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is the power of God') is the foundational text for the entire work's satirical theology. Erasmus, speaking through Folly, uses Paul's reversal of the wisdom/folly hierarchy to construct a comprehensive critique of worldly pretension: if the cross - the ultimate foolishness by worldly standards - is actually the power of God, then all the forms of worldly wisdom that congratulate themselves on their cleverness are, by that standard, the real folly. The rhetorical structure is brilliant: Erasmus uses Folly to expose worldly folly by showing that the highest form of folly (the cross) is actually wisdom.
1 Corinthians 3:18 ('Let no man deceive himself. If any man among you seemeth to be wise in this world, let him become a fool, that he may be wise') is the Pauline reversal that Erasmus develops throughout the work. His critique of the scholastic theologians - who spend their energies on elaborate logical distinctions about whether divine omnipotence could have become incarnate as a turnip or a cucumber - is an application of this verse: they are the 'wise men of this world' who have become fools in the Pauline sense, not the Erasmian sense.
2 Corinthians 12:2-4 ('I knew a man in Christ above fourteen years ago, whether in the body, I cannot tell; or whether out of the body, I cannot tell: God knoweth; such an one caught up to the third heaven ... and heard unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter') is the Pauline account of mystical ecstasy that Erasmus uses in the work's theological climax. He argues that the Christian mystic's ecstasy - the temporary release from the prison of the body and the self into the direct experience of God - is the highest form of folly and therefore the highest form of wisdom. The saints who are called mad for their self-mortification and their absorption in divine things are, in Erasmian terms, the most perfectly foolish (and therefore the most divinely wise) of all.
Matthew 18:3 ('Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven') is the dominical saying that Erasmus uses to sanction the childlike simplicity of faith against the elaborate sophistication of scholastic theology. Throughout the work, the simplicity of the Gospel - the direct message of Christ's life, death, and resurrection - is contrasted with the baroque complexity of late medieval theology, and the contrast is always to theology's disadvantage. Erasmus's 'philosophy of Christ' (philosophia Christi) - his program for a return to the simple moral and spiritual teaching of the Gospels - is the positive theological program implicit in the work's satire.
Author and Context
Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam (c. 1466-1536) was the dominant intellectual figure of the Northern Renaissance: a classical scholar, biblical humanist, editor of the Greek New Testament, and prolific author whose correspondence spanned Europe and whose influence on educated opinion was unmatched by any contemporary. Born illegitimate - the son of a priest - he was educated by the Brethren of the Common Life (the spiritual movement associated with The Imitation of Christ) and became an Augustinian canon, taking vows that he found constraining for his scholarly vocation. He obtained dispensations that allowed him to live outside the monastery and devoted his life to scholarship.
Erasmus's central theological project was the renovation of Christianity through the return to the sources (ad fontes): the Greek New Testament (which he edited and published in 1516, the first printed Greek New Testament - a landmark in the history of biblical scholarship), the patristic authors, and the simple moral teaching of Jesus. He believed that the accumulated accretions of medieval scholasticism, canon law, indulgence-selling, and clerical abuse had obscured the simple evangelical Christianity of the early church, and that a return to the sources would purify and renew the church from within.
In Praise of Folly was written before the Reformation, but it was widely read as a preparation for Luther. Luther himself praised it, and Cardinal Aleander complained that 'Erasmus laid the egg that Luther hatched.' Erasmus's refusal to join the Lutheran movement - he broke with Luther publicly in 1524 over the question of free will - was a deep disappointment to both sides: reformers who had expected him to be their champion, and Catholics who were embarrassed by his relentless satirical exposure of ecclesiastical abuses.
The Satirical Method
The work's satirical method is indirect and therefore difficult to pin down. By speaking through the voice of Folly - a female deity of uncertain reliability - Erasmus maintains deniability: when Folly praises the corruption of popes and monks, Erasmus can claim that it is Folly speaking, not himself. When Folly is interpreted as genuinely foolish rather than sarcastically wise, her encomium of Christian mysticism can be read as a straightforward endorsement of simple piety. The work resists reduction to a single message and continues to generate interpretive debate.
Hans Holbein the Younger's marginal illustrations for the Basel edition of 1515 - many of which depict the specific objects of Erasmus's satire with gleeful precision - are an essential part of the work's cultural reception and have shaped how subsequent ages have visualized it.
Reception History
The work's contemporary reception was one of broad delight among educated humanists and considerable unease among the clergy and theologians it targeted. The Pope initially laughed; the theologians of the Sorbonne eventually condemned it. Luther used it as ammunition against the papacy. Its influence on the development of European satire - on More's Utopia, Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel, Cervantes's Don Quixote - was enormous. Swift's A Tale of a Tub and Gulliver's Travels work in the tradition it established.
Theological Significance
The work's theological significance lies in its recovery of the Pauline paradox of 1 Corinthians 1-3 as a critical principle: if divine wisdom looks like folly to worldly eyes, then the test of any claim to wisdom is whether it can be called foolish by the standards of the world. Applied to the church, this principle is devastating: the elaborate institutional machinery of the late medieval church, which claimed to mediate divine wisdom, looks like worldly wisdom - and therefore, by the Pauline standard, is exposed as the real folly.
Legacy
Erasmus's influence on European intellectual culture has been immense and largely indirect: the biblical humanist program he represented - the recovery of early Christian simplicity through return to the Greek and Hebrew originals - shaped the entire subsequent tradition of biblical scholarship, Protestant and Catholic alike. His Novum Instrumentum (1516) provided both Luther and Tyndale with the Greek text they used for their vernacular translations. The tradition of Christian satire that In Praise of Folly established runs through Swift, Voltaire (who was both attracted and repelled), and Kierkegaard's Attack on Christendom.
Reading Alongside Scripture
Readers should work with 1 Corinthians 1:18-31 (the foolishness of the cross), 1 Corinthians 3:18-23 (becoming a fool to be wise), 2 Corinthians 12:1-10 (Paul's ecstasy and weakness), Matthew 5:3-12 (Beatitudes as a catalogue of apparent foolishness), Matthew 11:25-30 (revealed to babes, hidden from the wise), and Matthew 23 (the woes against religious hypocrisy - the chapter Erasmus's satire most resembles).
Further Reading
- Clarence Miller (ed. and trans.), The Praise of Folly (Yale University Press, 1979) - the standard scholarly edition with essential introduction and notes. - James McConica, Erasmus (Past Masters series, 1991) - the best concise introduction to Erasmus's life and thought. - Johan Huizinga, Erasmus and the Age of Reformation (1924, English 1957) - still the most vivid portrait of Erasmus in his cultural context.