The Peripatetic Philosopher shares:

 "IN PRAISE OF FOLLY"-THE PALLIATIVE TO GLOOM

Excerpt from

Ten Creative Stages to Confident Thinking

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© June 19, 2017

  It is healthy to have a sense of humor about ourselves and what is needed in troubling times. Folly touches every aspect of our lives. We tend to take ourselves too seriously and matters of urgency not seriously enough.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt said in his inaugural address in 1933 at the height of the Great Depression, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." But Plato counters, "Men are afraid of the light."

It is doubtful many Athenians applauded Plato in his day, or FDR in his. Gloom is a subtle deception that simmers rather than burns but ultimately exhausts courage leaving only capricious hope.  Folly as palliative restores dignity and confidence.

Erasmus (1466-1536) wrote "In Praise of Folly" (1511) in a chaotic period in Western civilization. The Roman Catholic Church was corrupt from the papacy to the clergy, while clinging to its vanities. "Folly" was published just six years before Martin Luther (1483-1546) nailed his 95 theses to the Wittenberg Church door in 1517, which ignited the Protestant Reformation.

Today, 500 years later, man’s excesses and vanities are on a collision course.  Folly provides the modern reader with inescapable evidence of what happens when conventional mores and bureaucratic institutions no longer work, but still hold on desperately to dysfunctional authority.

Neither king nor prince, pope nor priest, aristocrat nor working­man escaped the sweep of the Erasmus “Folly” as it put the masters of society on notice. At the beginning of Folly’s oration, she declares that she is giving a eulogy of herself, and she justifies the impertinence by saying that she knows herself better than anyone else.

The postmodern man has much in common with Folly in the Age of the Reformation. Sixteenth century man was not inter­ested in leaving Plato's cave of darkness for fear the light might blind him. He preferred to wait until things returned to normal or the way they had always been. This was especially true of the Roman Catholic Church. The clergy and laity continued to ignore the handwriting on the wall, waiting for a miracle. Erasmus knew the folly of this and so constructed his oration.

If you can imagine, Catholicism was no longer synonymous with Christianity; nation states were replacing church dominated kingdoms; and capitalism was replacing church con­trolled feudalism. The lowly merchant class was emerging from the docks to change the character of society from a feudalistic system to a performance driven economy.

Erasmus's "Folly" was penned in a time of waning morality and scattering loyalties. Folly represented a many-sided symbol that stood for all that was natural in man however misdirected his attempts to get wrong things right.

Folly revealed the character of man's wisdom and how it could be united with man's action to gain success despite a world domi­nated by folly. Folly was concerned with reason and how it could be presented as simple moral advice. She wondered what secular humanists would make of the supernatural once it was replaced by individual dignity, self-worth and self-satisfaction.

Parody, irony, and satire are used by Folly to show what man does and what he has harvested in the doing. She was obsessed with a passion for Youth with a list of her followers, including Drunkenness, Ignorance, Self-love, Flattery, Forgetfulness, Laziness, Pleasure, Madness, Sensuality, Intemperance, and Sound Sleep, which aided her in gaining complete control of all things in society.

As the source of all that was pleasurable in life, she declared that man being ruled by passion and not reason would never be free.  The two most impor­tant aspects of this passion were anger and lust, which had shrunken man to his present status.

Folly praised herself under the guise of Prudence because she had allowed man to have first-hand experience with the world. She had freed him from shame and fear, which had clouded his mind and inhibited his actions to prevent him from having real experience.

Thanks to Prudence, man had gone along with the crowd, which was folly, at the sacrifice of his individual­ity. Folly had caused all the great achievements of mankind, yet wisdom and learning had not freed man of his anxiety.

Self-love, self-importance, and flattery had been the motivation for everything that man had done. Alas, to lead a life of folly, error, and ignorance showed man to be only too human. Folly was the expression of man's nature. All other forms of life around man were content with their limitations but man was vainly ambitious. Folly concluded that the most ignorant men were the happiest and the most deluded men delighted in telling lies.

Erasmus, who was a priest, chided priests, who Folly saw as relying on magic, charms, relics, prayers, saints and particular rites to create the illusion of happiness. Priests were conjurers of deception, Folly chortled, but man had a need for this deception because emotions belonged to Folly and man could not find hap­piness without them.

The most foolish men, Folly insisted, were those who denied their true nature through religion. Folly proved that religion had more to do with her own nature than with wisdom by showing that children, women, old people and fools took more delight in religion than anyone else. You could tell because they were always nearest the altar.

In the way religion was taught and practiced, man must deny his true nature by disdaining life and preferring death. He must overlook injuries, avoid pleasure, and feast on hunger, vigils, tears, and labors. He must give up and score all physical pleasures, or at the very least take them more lightly than spiritual pleasures.

Folly insisted this was the most foolish way, but also the only sure way to true happiness. Only by forgetting his body and eve­rything physical could man approach this goal. He must give himself up completely to the spiritual aspects of life in order to achieve bliss.

Only a very few men were able to accomplish this task com­pletely, Folly admitted, for in order to approach this detachment one must be very close to madness; a kind of mad­ness similar to the heavenly joys that one would expect after death when the spirit had completely left the body.

Erasmus had sympathy for The Protestant Reformation, but decided to stay in the Church and lead the Counter Reformation. Historians are divided as to whether this was a courageous or cowardly decision.

In this dichotomy, Erasmus is not unlike many of our current opinion makers: a man of reflection rather than action. He wanted to preserve things as they were and to deny intellectually as much as possible things as they were becoming. Unlike Martin Luther, he was unwilling to put his life, reputation and mind on the line. Instead, he retreated into parody. He remained committed to inevitable change but didn't feel obliged to be actively involved.

Luther changed the world. Erasmus put a bite into it with sarcasm, but little else. “Folly” was composed in seven days five hundred years ago (1509), and is still read. It was written while he was recovering from an illness in the home of his English friend, Sir Thomas More (1478-1535), author of "Utopia" (1516). More would be beheaded in 1535 for his refusal to sup­port his friend, King Henry VIII's (1491-1547) Church of England in defi­ance of the Roman Catholic Church and the See of Rome, while Erasmus waited two years after completing "In Praise of Folly" to publish it secretly in France, and then anonymously.

 The fact that there were at least seven editions within months of this first printing provides a measure of its immediate success and popu­larity. Because of this work, Erasmus became one of the most popular men of letters of his time, and consequently, one of the most influential.