31 pages • 1 hour read
Praise Of Folly
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BetaPages 19-37Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Pages 19-21 Summary: “Whoever Intends to Have Children Must Have Recourse to Folly”
Folly explains that life owes its very beginnings to Folly, as she allows the human race to propagate itself. Marriage is full of troubles and disadvantages, yet people willingly enter into it and thus produce children.
Pages 21-25 Summary: “Folly Seasons Man’s Life with Pleasure”
In addition to being the “seed and source of existence” (21), Folly also provides “whatever advantages there are all throughout life” (21). The foremost advantage is pleasure, a “seasoning” that improves life. Folly argues how she creates pleasure and improves life. First, the happiest age of man is childhood, which is characterized by ignorance; ignorance is the opposite of wisdom and thus allied to folly. When people grow old, they become senile, which constitutes a “second childhood” of happy forgetfulness; in this way, Folly thus restores youth and happiness to the aging. Furthermore, the most learned and wise are frequently unhappy and prematurely aged, while the foolish are fat and healthy.
Pages 25-29 Summary: “The Gods Play the Fool”
Folly cites many other examples from Greek mythology of deities who experienced happiness by being foolish.
Pages 29-31 Summary: “Look Down a Little on the Earth”
Folly spreads happiness and gaiety among human beings as well as gods. Wisdom means being ruled by reason, while folly means being ruled by the passions. There is far more passion than reason in human behavior, which shows the predominance of folly. Nature gave man a wife, “sweeten[ing] his harsh nature by her folly” (30), which means that women are “better off than men in many respects” (31). Women have beauty, with which they exert power even over tyrants, and their folly exists in the fact that they spend a great amount of time enhancing their beauty with makeup, baths, hair-dressing, perfumes, etc., all to please men.
Pages 32-35 Summary: “Folly Makes Society Delightful”
For men who prefer drinking to women, folly lends her hand and becomes the life of every party. Friendship thrives on folly, since everyone flatters friends and turn a blind eye to their faults. Friendship wouldn’t last long without this form of folly, which ensures that everyone is swayed by certain illusions and “finds beauty in what he has” (34). What is true of friendship is doubly true for marriage, “an inseparable union for life” (35), which without folly would not last very long.
Pages 35-37 Summary: “It Is Necessary That Everyone Flatter Himself”
Flattery and self-love, both forms of folly, are necessary for life. Folly ensures that every person is happy and satisfied with the looks, abilities, nationality, etc., with which that person has been born. Folly can thus be credited with the accomplishment of great deeds.
Pages 19-37 Analysis
From Folly’s vantage point, Erasmus is able to assert that things are the opposite of what they appear to be. In other words, for all of Folly’s apparent foolishness, she appears to have sense as well as insight into human frailty. However, Folly’s pose is sometimes ambiguous; on Page 21, for example, she is not sure whether to call her audience’s attitude “wise” or “foolish.” She leads readers to question what is to be taken seriously in the book and what is not. In some ways, Praise of Folly contains many entertaining jokes that use humor to point out serious truths and secret wisdoms about the human condition.
Folly argues that she is an essential facet of life. She is present at every stage of life, from its very beginnings in marriage and procreation, and all the way through the years to old age. The act of falling in love is inherently irrational and foolish, as is the bondage implied by the constraints of marriage and the pain associated with childbearing. Yet without this “foolishness” the human race would not survive. Thus, Folly can legitimately claim that she is necessary to human life, and that foolishness is a more potent force than reason in human affairs.
As a Renaissance humanist, Erasmus placed great value on classical Greco-Roman literature and mythology. His text contains references to ancient authors and myths, many of which would have been familiar to his own close circle of erudite humanists. Erasmus implies that Folly herself is a pagan Greek goddess. These pagan references gradually thin out and yield to Christian themes in the latter part of the book; likewise, the purely secular and humorous tone gives way to a more serious and theological tone.
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