In Praise of Folly

What if everything you thought was wise was actually foolish—and what the world mocks as folly is, in fact, the truest kind of wisdom? In In Praise of Folly, Desiderius Erasmus turns this question into a sparkling exploration of human vice, hypocrisy, and self-deception. Writing in the voice of Folly herself, Erasmus gives the world a biting—yet playful—critique of society and the church at the dawn of the Reformation.

In this witty oration, Folly argues that she is the true source of joy, friendship, power, and even faith. Life itself, she claims, would be unbearable without her—because wisdom brings only worries, while folly inspires love, action, and contentment. Through her speech, Erasmus lays bare the pretensions of scholars, theologians, kings, and popes who claim wisdom yet display absurd vanity and vice. Beneath the humor lies a deeply moral purpose: to reveal the corruption of institutions meant to embody truth and goodness, and to invite readers to rediscover the humility and simplicity of authentic Christianity.

Folly as Humanity's Mirror

Erasmus’ choice to make Folly speak for herself was an ingenious device. Folly boasts of her divine lineage—born of Plutus (Wealth) and fed by Drunkenness and Ignorance—and claims she brings happiness to gods and mortals alike. Through her cheerful arrogance, she exposes human hypocrisy. Everyone relies on folly, she asserts: lovers, rulers, scholars, and saints all serve her in their own way, yet none will admit it. By showing everyone’s dependence on her, Erasmus forces readers to confront their own foolishness and pride—and to laugh at it.

The device recalls classical satire, especially Lucian, whose mock orations Erasmus admired. But unlike Lucian, Erasmus aims for reform, not mere ridicule. His Folly holds up a mirror that exposes vice but also urges mercy—she mocks not out of malice, but out of love for humankind’s contradictions. As in the biblical tradition of the foolish prophet or the holy fool, she becomes the paradoxical voice of deeper wisdom.

The Renaissance Humanist Context

When Erasmus wrote In Praise of Folly in 1509, Europe was ripening for reform. The abuses of the Catholic Church—its greed, superstition, and rigid formalism—had alienated both believers and thinkers. But Erasmus was no revolutionary like Luther; he sought to purify, not destroy. As one of the great Christian humanists, he believed that education, reason, and a return to biblical simplicity could renew the faith. Folly’s playful invective thus becomes a tool for moral instruction. By laughing at others’ pretensions, readers might recall Christ’s warning against pride and rediscover the virtues of humility and charity.

This theme anticipates later works of social satire—from Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels to Voltaire’s Candide—in which irony unmasks society’s self-delusions. Yet Erasmus’ tone remains tender: even the foolish are objects of divine mercy. His irony never slides into cynicism.

The Structure: From Merriment to Morality

The work unfolds like a carnival that gradually turns serious. Early sections celebrate Folly’s gifts: how fools enjoy life, how love and friendship thrive through self-deceptions, and how even learning and government owe their vigor to irrational desire. Folly explains that without her, life would stop—it is folly that makes parents care for children, that binds friends, and inspires soldiers or lovers to brave death. But as her speech continues, the humor darkens. She criticizes philosophers who prize abstract knowledge over virtue; theologians who twist scripture for profit; monks who confuse ceremony with holiness; and prelates whose pomp contradicts Christ’s humility. Her praise becomes a scalpel that carves out moral truth.

In the end, Folly praises not the ignorant, but the simple-minded faith of “fools for Christ.” This paradox recasts foolishness as a form of divine wisdom—echoing Paul’s words that “the foolishness of God is wiser than men.” To embrace such holy folly is to renounce false pride and to live by love rather than logic.

Why This Matters Today

Erasmus’ satire still feels fresh because the tensions he exposes are timeless. We still mistake cleverness for wisdom, confuse conformity with faith, and cling to illusions that comfort us. His Folly reminds you that humility, laughter, and honest self-critique are vital to moral and spiritual health. Like a friend who teases you into self-awareness, Folly teaches that joy and imperfection belong together. Her message—delivered through laughter—is that reform begins not in condemnation but in compassion: a message as urgent now as it was in Erasmus’ Europe.

Erasmus opens Folly’s praise with a provocative claim: that life itself depends on her. Without Folly, he insists, there would be no birth, love, or happiness—only sterile reason. In her mock-sermon, Folly describes how every human stage, from infancy to old age, depends on her gifts. What seems like foolishness is what makes life tolerable and sweet.

Folly Gives Life Its Beginning

According to Folly, rational wisdom would halt humanity’s most natural act—reproduction. Lovers do not pair because of reason, but because of desire, illusion, and a little madness. Without passion, the world would empty itself of people. Even the gods and kings of Olympus, she notes mischievously, are ruled by foolish lust. Thus, foolishness, not logic, sustains life itself.

Childhood and the Joy of Ignorance

Children, she argues, are happiest precisely because they are foolish. They know nothing of ambition, politics, or sorrow; they laugh easily and forgive easily. Adults love them because they remind us of our lost innocence. Their very helplessness inspires affection. Folly suggests that children’s ignorance is not a defect but a model for genuine joy. Sophocles once said “to know nothing is the sweetest life”—and Erasmus makes Folly quote this approvingly. Knowledge, by contrast, brings anxiety and loss of wonder.

The Illusions of Youth and the Comforts of Age

As we mature, Folly explains, her influence continues in subtler ways. In youth, she fills our veins with heat and hope, making love possible and friendship exciting. Without her, young people would be “dull and melancholy.” Later, as age creeps in and bodies weaken, Folly returns as a kind nurse—she makes the old forget their pains, delight in trifles, and behave like children again. To call an old man foolish is, in Folly’s eyes, a compliment: it means he has rediscovered youth. When people reach senility, they literally live in paradise, unaware of death or time. Erasmus wittily rewrites the proverb “once a man, twice a child” as proof that Folly gives humans a second childhood before their end.

Even philosophers, he jests, cannot escape her—because who but a fool would spend life arguing about universals? “Let them,” says Folly, “write endless commentaries, while fools like me live happily without them.”

Through this comic anthropology, Erasmus makes an extraordinary point: folly is woven into the fabric of our being. It is not sin or ignorance alone, but the necessary counterweight to reason. Life without illusion would be unbearable. In lovingly mocking each stage of life, Folly instructs you to forgive your own human frailty and to see laughter as a form of wisdom.

Folly delights in showing how human relationships—especially friendship and love—are sustained by illusion. While philosophers praise reason, real life runs on fantasy. Erasmus uses this cheerful claim to explore the psychology of affection: people can only truly love one another when they overlook faults, invent virtues, and believe pleasant falsehoods.

Flattery and the Bond of Companionship

Folly admits that she has two favorite servants: Flattery and Self-Love. Together, they create friendship. Real friends do not constantly analyze each other’s flaws; they use gentle deceit and selective blindness. Even animals, she observes, enjoy rubbing and scratching one another—so why shouldn’t humans flatter in return? Imagine what would happen if spouses or friends spoke pure truth! The harmony of families and communities, she claims, depends on tact, delusion, and kindness more than on logic or honesty.

(In modern psychological terms, this anticipates Freud’s idea of “necessary illusions” in society. We cooperate by pretending that others are better, kinder, or wiser than they are—and thus we make it true.)

Love as Holy Madness

Romantic love, for Erasmus, is the most charming folly of all. Folly suggests that Cupid’s blindness is a blessing: lovers overlook each other’s defects, fall for beauty that time will soon destroy, and behave irrationally with joy. And yet, she insists, this irrationality is what gives life meaning. The rational person who refuses to love, she mocks, lives like a corpse. As Plato’s Symposium spoke of love as divine madness, so does Erasmus portray it as the truest form of vitality.

The Healing Power of Forgetfulness

Friendship and love require forgetfulness—a gift Folly proudly claims as her own. Forgetting others’ offenses, and your own humiliations, makes social life bearable. It transforms quarrels into laughter. Folly personifies Forgetfulness and Laziness as her attendants, blessings that protect people from overthinking their misery. Erasmus thus offers a gentle antidote to skepticism: ignorance really can be bliss.

What sounds at first like cynical manipulation—flattery, blindness, delusion—becomes, in Folly’s logic, the very glue of human sympathy. Wisdom divides, but folly unites. To live well, you must sometimes choose laughter over precision and compassion over correctness.

After amusing her audience with tales of lovers and fools, Folly turns her sharpest wit on those who most despise her—the scholars, philosophers, and theologians who pride themselves on intellect. These self-styled wise men, she argues, are her most enslaved followers, for their arrogance blinds them to true understanding. No one is more ridiculous than the person who believes himself wise.

Philosophers: The Blind Guides

Erasmus depicts philosophers as men who “measure fleas and clouds” but fail to live well. They quarrel over definitions, invent needless complexities, and waste their years explaining shadows. Socrates, she notes ironically, became wisest because he admitted his ignorance. Compared to him, later scholastics are merely clever fools—tiny intellects puffed up with Latin jargon. As in the comedies of Aristophanes, reason becomes self-consuming—an engine for vanity, not truth.

Theologians: Tyrants in Holy Vestments

No group receives harsher ridicule than theologians. Folly describes them as hair-splitters who “define how the gods think” and defend absurd dogmas with syllogisms. They debate whether Christ could have become a cabbage, how angels move through numbers, or how many hairs were in Saint Peter’s beard. Such endless disputation, Erasmus warns, replaces faith with pedantry. Worse, theologians use their craft to dominate rather than enlighten—an early rebuke to the scholastic arrogance that fueled religious corruption before the Reformation.

Folly mocks their habit of quoting church fathers out of context, twisting scripture, and confusing piety with precision. When they call others fools, she says, “they condemn what they themselves are.” Erasmus himself, a deeply devout humanist, hoped such laughter might recall the true spirit of Christ, who taught simplicity, mercy, and humility—not sterile logic.

Why True Learning Requires Folly

Erasmus concludes that wisdom must always include a grain of folly. Curiosity without kindness, or doctrine without joy, destroys the spirit. To learn is not to accumulate definitions but to reawaken wonder. Folly’s laughter becomes a kind of divine wisdom, freeing knowledge from pride. The scholar who cannot laugh at himself, she implies, will never truly learn.

Erasmus dedicates some of his sharpest satire to the corruption of religious orders. Through Folly’s laughter, he reveals how monks, friars, and clergy often mistake ritual for faith, ceremony for holiness, and superstition for love of God. These vivid portraits scandalized churchmen but delighted readers hungry for reform.

Empty Ritual and Vain Holiness

Folly ridicules monks who compete over trivial details: whether their hoods have the right cut, their girdles the right width, or their prayers the right length. They fast, chant, and count beads without understanding their purpose. Their worship has become theater. Worse, many use religion for profit, selling indulgences and blessings. Erasmus, himself a priest, exposes this hypocrisy not to destroy the church but to call it back to purity. His humor, unlike Luther’s later rage, is medicinal laughter.

Popes and Prelates in Splendor

Folly then ascends the hierarchy: popes who live as kings, bishops more concerned with wealth than souls. They fight wars, amass property, and cloak greed in divine rhetoric. She imagines what would happen if Christ returned to judge them—not for ritual, but for charity. “Who would He recognize?” she asks. Erasmus means not to mock faith itself, but its worldly distortion. The humor masks heartfelt grief at what Christianity had become.

Holy Folly: The Paradox of True Faith

Yet Erasmus rescues folly itself as sacred. The holiest Christians, he argues, are those “fools for Christ” who renounce logic, wealth, and power. Their simple faith—childlike and joyful—is truer than the pomp of the learned. In this stunning reversal, Folly becomes wisdom’s highest form. Faith requires surrender of reason: to believe in the unseen, to forgive, to love one’s enemies demands a holy madness that surpasses logic. That, Erasmus suggests, is the gospel truth hiding behind the mask of jest.

Folly’s reach extends beyond monasteries to every corner of social life. Kings, courtiers, and commoners all owe their happiness—and their vices—to her. Erasmus transforms politics into a stage of comic delusion, where self-love masquerades as leadership and glory grows from foolish ambition.

Kings and the Illusion of Greatness

Princes, Folly says, are her favorites. They surround themselves with flatterers who feed their vanity and shield them from truth. They wage wars for praise, imagining themselves heroes while destroying their people. Without folly, they would see their power as the burden it truly is. Rational reflection would make them despair. “A wise king,” she quips, “would throw off his crown.” Thus, folly sustains government itself by keeping rulers intoxicated with illusions of glory.

Courtiers and the Comedy of Flattery

Courtiers practice folly as an art. They wake at noon, plot trivial intrigues, and chase fashion while calling it culture. In vivid sketches echoing Juvenal’s satire, Erasmus mocks their hollow pomp: one boasts jewels, another his Latin; yet all live for reputation, not reality. Still, Folly praises them for keeping society cheerful. Their vanity provides the color of public life, even as it reveals humanity’s endless hunger for admiration.

Folly as the Glue of Civilization

Behind the laughter lies a shocking thesis: folly is civilization’s foundation. Without illusions, institutions collapse. Kings need flattery as much as lovers need self-deception. Justice, patriotism, and ambition—each depends on carefully maintained delusions of righteousness. Erasmus does not urge cynicism but self-awareness. Recognize your own foolishness, he suggests, and you can govern humanely; deny it, and you become a tyrant. It is a lesson every age forgets—and every wise fool must relearn.

The final—and most daring—section of Erasmus’ satire turns laughter into theology. Here Folly, shedding her clown’s mask, becomes a preacher of divine mysteries. She argues that Christianity itself is founded on holy folly: the wisdom of God appears as madness to the world. To believe in an invisible kingdom, to bless those who curse you, to glory in suffering—such things make sense only through the eyes of faith.

Scriptural Roots of Holy Folly

Erasmus joins the Apostle Paul in celebrating “the foolishness of God.” Christ chose fishermen, not philosophers, as apostles. The gospel exalts children over scholars, meekness over might. The crucifixion itself—God dying on a cross—is the supreme paradox of divine folly. Erasmus collects these scriptural paradoxes to show that true religion requires the courage to appear foolish before the world. “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” he reminds us—those humble enough to depend on grace rather than reasoning.

The Soul’s Journey Beyond Reason

In Folly’s vision, the highest spiritual state is an ecstatic unknowing. The saints, lost in contemplation of God, seem mad—laughing, weeping, speaking incoherently. Their rapture mirrors Plato’s “divine madness,” but transfigured into Christian mysticism. To love God is to lose oneself, to forget logic in wonder. Erasmus thus transforms intellectual humility into the core of spirituality.

Laughter as Salvation

Folly ends her oration by blessing her listeners with a paradox: only by admitting your folly can you approach wisdom. Her laughter, once mocking, becomes redemptive. It asks you to laugh at yourself—at your pride, your seriousness, your illusions—not to despair, but to be free. In a sense, Erasmus prefigures what Dostoevsky or Kierkegaard would later teach: faith is not the triumph of reason, but the leap beyond it. Folly’s final benediction—half joke, half prayer—leaves the reader smiling, uneasy, and strangely wiser.