III
It was out of these antecedents that the wisest, most
important, most influential fool of all was created in
the first decade of the sixteenth century. Erasmus'
Moriae encomium, written in 1509 and first published
in 1511, is, for all its joking, the most profoundly serious
and penetrating examination of the wise fool in West-
ern literature. It is no exaggeration to say that all
subsequent fools of note are, in one way or another,
indebted to his figure of Stultitia, who delivers her own
eulogy in The Praise of Folly. Not only does she sum
up all earlier expressions of the paradox, but she also
manages, through her deep sense of humanity and her
polysemous irony, to give new dimensions to the con-
cept. The foolish creation of the most learned man of
his time, she is the literal embodiment of the word
oxymoron, and in her idiotic wisdom she represents the
finest flowering of that fusion of Italian humanistic
thought and northern piety which has been called
Christian Humanism.
Like all fools, Stultitia's basic impulse is satiric, and
her widespread notoriety throughout sixteenth-century
Europe was largely the result of those parts of her
speech in which she irreverently boasts that all the
chief secular, religious, and intellectual estates of the
Renaissance world are under her dominion. No man,
not even her own author, is exempted from her
mordant ridicule as she anatomizes the follies of man-
kind. Yet in the last analysis, it is not her satiric cata-
logue but her ironic self-description which was to have
the more lasting resonance. For in explaining who she
is—in asking, that is, what it means to be a fool—she
demonstrates that folly is not merely universal but
necessary and even desirable to mankind, that to be
a man is nothing other than to play the fool, and
that the highest wisdom is to acknowledge this very
fact.
Portraying herself as the personification of all natural
instincts, she claims to be the life-force in the universe
and argues that it is only she, Folly, who keeps men
from committing suicide. Those impulses of man which
attempt to curb or deny his own nature are objects
of her deepest scorn. Behind this foolish naturalism lies
Erasmus' deep belief, inherited from some of his
humanistic predecessors, in the goodness of nature,
especially human nature—a philosophical position
which enabled Luther later to accuse him of Pelagian-
ism. Stultitia, in reflecting this belief, emerges as the
champion of φύσις (nature) over all forms of νόμος (law,
custom, convention) which attempt to restrict nature.
She is, accordingly, an enemy of the Stoics, as all fools
inherently are. But this fool has philosophical and
theological reasons to buttress her instinctive love of
pleasure. In fact, she is one of the earliest spokesmen
for the post-medieval revival of Epicurus and suggests,
as Erasmus was to argue in detail elsewhere, that “if
we take care to understand the words properly” the
true Christian is an Epicurean (
Colloquia familiaria
[1516], “Epicureus”). Though she speaks in learned
Latin decorated with Greek tags, Stultitia is equally
scornful of the pretensions of learning, whether
pedantic sophistry on the one hand or speculative
metaphysics on the other. In opposition to both sets
of “foolosophers,” as she calls them (μωροσόφοι), she
extolls the humility of ignorance and the simple
knowledge drawn from experience and faith. Beyond
this, she is, as always, acutely conscious of the cares
of mankind and the pains of existence. She laments
with Ecclesiastes that “He that increaseth knowledge
increaseth sorrow” (I:18), and she sadly concedes with
Sophocles that “to know nothing affords the happiest
life” (
Ajax 554).
The fool's traditional penchant for turning things
upside-down is, in Stultitia, reinforced by the profound
Erasmian ability to see both sides of a question. Not
surprisingly, she invokes one of her author's most im-
portant adages, “The Sileni of Alcibiades” (Adagiorum
chiliades III. iii. 1), in which it is argued that the inner
essence of any matter is often the opposite of its outer
appearance, to explain that the apparently foolish may
actually be wise, the apparently wise, foolish. This is,
to be sure, the basis of her irony; but it is also the
burden of her message. For she proceeds to apply this
technique of reversal to all aspects of worldly wisdom,
reexamining those virtues and codes of conduct the
world takes for granted to be wise, and demonstrating
both their limitations and the wisdom of their foolish
opposites. For example, she hails Self-love (Φιλαυτία)
as her closest companion, only to ask if the Christian
can really love his neighbor as himself if he does not,
in fact, love himself. Similarly, she attacks Prudence,
traditional enemy of Folly in medieval psychomachies,
not simply because fools rush in where angels fear to
tread, but in order to show that experience can be
valuable and that judgments are always difficult. She
acknowledges that his illusions and self-delusions are
as important to man as his truths; she accepts the
passions of the heart as well as the reasons of the mind;
and she resolves the ancient antinomy between virtue
and pleasure by arguing that pleasure is a virtue.
These radical reappraisals of common assumptions
are derived throughout from a humane understanding
of man's condition and a belief in the essential goodness
of human nature if it is uncorrupted by man-made
institutions, false learning, and perversions of the will.
Once man has stripped himself of these false claims
to wisdom, he becomes a proper receptacle to receive
the wisdom of Christ, which is the only true wisdom.
In the conclusion of her great speech, Stultitia invokes
the figure of the Fool in Christ, derived from Saint
Paul and Cusanus, and prescribes a pietistic simplicity
of heart as the true way to divine wisdom. What is
more, she effectively argues that, since to be a man
is to be a fool, when the Son of God accepted the role
of human frailty He became the greatest of all fools.
