An Oration With Two Targets
The Praise of Folly is delivered, with deliberate irony, by Folly herself, who praises her own dominion over human life. Much of what follows is straightforward satire: Folly takes credit for the vanity of theologians who construct elaborate distinctions no one needs, for the credulity of pilgrims who travel great distances to view relics of dubious authenticity, for the self-importance of preachers more interested in displaying their learning than in saying anything true. This is folly in the ordinary sense – foolishness, vice, the absurdity of human pretension – and Erasmus's satire of it is sharp enough that it has remained funny for five centuries.
But partway through her oration, Folly's argument takes an unexpected turn. She begins to describe a different kind of folly – one Christianity itself, she says, “seems to have a certain affinity with.” This is not the same folly as the theologians' vanity. It is the folly Paul describes in 1 Corinthians: the folly of the cross, which the wise of this world regard as foolishness precisely because it does not conform to what the wise of this world consider wisdom.
What the Folly of the Cross Reveals
The shift in Folly's oration is not a contradiction or a loss of nerve. It is the revelation of what the entire oration has been building toward: that “folly,” as a word, can name two completely different things, and that confusing them is one of the most consequential errors a person can make. There is the folly that is genuine foolishness – pretension, credulity, vanity – which Folly has spent most of her oration celebrating in a way designed to make readers recognize it, laugh at it, and be ashamed of it in themselves. And there is the folly that the world calls foolish but that is, in fact, the deepest wisdom – a wisdom that looks like foolishness only because the world's standard for judging wisdom and folly has itself gone wrong.
Erasmus does not explain how the world's standard went wrong. He simply demonstrates, through the structure of his own oration, that it has: an oration that begins by celebrating obvious foolishness ends by celebrating something the same vocabulary calls foolish but that Erasmus, and his readers, are invited to recognize as true wisdom. The categories have been switched without anyone noticing exactly when.
Through the Lens of Genesis 3
Genesis 3 narrates a rupture that begins with an inversion of categories. The serpent's offer is, in essence, that disobedience to God's word is actually wisdom – that the tree God forbade is the path to becoming “like God,” knowing good and evil. Eve and Adam act on this inversion, and the text's verdict is unambiguous: what the serpent called wisdom was folly, and the rupture that follows is the consequence of having mistaken one for the other. From this point forward, the categories of wisdom and folly in the fallen world are not reliable; what the world calls wise and what the world calls foolish cannot simply be trusted to align with what actually is wise and foolish.
Paul's “folly of the cross” in 1 Corinthians names the reversal of this inversion: the wisdom of God, appearing in the world as folly, because the world's categories – categories distorted by the rupture Genesis 3 describes – cannot recognize it as anything else. Genesis 3:15 promises that the serpent's head will be crushed; the cross, in Paul's account, is exactly this crushing, accomplished by means the world's inverted wisdom necessarily misreads. Erasmus's Praise of Folly, written by a humanist scholar steeped in classical rhetoric, performs this same reversal in miniature – an oration that uses the world's own vocabulary of folly to point, by the end, at the one folly the world cannot afford to laugh at.