Interpretation of The Praise of Folly

For our story, the Praise of Folly is most fascinating for its trenchant and central satire on war and warmakers, past and present. Within the whole work this forms a structure of relentlessly ironic social criticism, both destructive and constructive. Erasmus was addressing himself to an audience which, if schooled in the quite usual medieval patterns of thought, customarily regarded war (like the plague) as caused by man¡¦s sin and God¡¦s answering justice, yet at the same time (since St. Augustine) as an action approvable as just and Christian. The accretions of chivalrous romance, moreover, had dressed war in a heroic glamour suitable for one of nobility¡¦s most glorious occupations. In startling contrast, Erasmus presented a Christian-humanist image of war and warmakers as beastly, hellish, corruptive of human society, unjust, and unchristian. War is not treated as an incurable form of human folly; it is not in the nature of things inevitable and necessary; it is corrupted m...