Erasmus
1466–1536 · Netherlands
“In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.”
Peak-work percentile in the canon.
The lineage through Erasmus
Drew From(3)
who shaped Erasmus
- Folly's whole argument leans on Solomon — she cites "the number of fools is infinite" (Vulgate Eccl. 1:15) to claim Scripture itself confesses that folly rules
- Erasmus is reading Ecclesiastes against the grain: the somber book of "vanity of vanities" becomes Folly's favorite scriptural proof
- Read Solomon first and you'll catch the joke — Folly enlists the Bible's own wisdom to argue even its wisest king was a fool
- Erasmus names "the great Stoic Seneca" by name — Praise of Folly is, in part, a comic quarrel with the Letters
- Seneca's program of disciplining the passions is exactly what Folly ridicules: a sage so emotionless he ceases to be human
- Read the Letters first and you'll hear precisely which Stoic ideal Erasmus is laughing at
via The Republic
- Praise of Folly puts Plato in Folly's mouth and lets her run
- She quotes the Republic's philosopher-king maxim only to invert it, and ends by claiming the cave's chained prisoners as her own
- Reading The Republic first means you catch the joke at full volume — Erasmus is mocking the very allegory of illusion and enlightenment that Plato built his ideal state upon
Inspired(2)
who Erasmus shaped
- Rabelais called Erasmus "my spiritual father and mother" and said all he is, he owes to Erasmus and his writings
- Praise of Folly is the satirical engine Rabelais ran on — the laughing, learned voice that mocks pedantry, piety, and self-importance while smuggling in real ideas
- Read it first and you see where the giants got their grin: humanist wit turned loose into the rollicking, ribald comedy of Gargantua and Pantagruel
via Don Quixote
- Erasmus's central joke — that folly sees truer than sense, that the fool is the wise one — is the seed of Cervantes's mad knight
- Cervantes came up inside this tradition: his tutor López de Hoyos was an Erasmian, and the humanist irony of Folly runs straight through Don Quixote
- Folly turns wisdom inside out in an essay; Don Quixote does it across a whole life
Portraits
Erasmus in profile at his desk, pen in hand, writing on a sheet of paper with books and inkstand before him.
Hans Holbein the Younger, 1523
Holbein's 1523 profile portrait in the Louvre (Inv 1345), Erasmus seen from the side absorbed in writing at his desk — the iconic scholar-at-work pose, contemporary to the National Gallery version.
Hans Holbein the Younger, 1523
Holbein's later c.1532 three-quarter portrait in the Met's Lehman Collection, showing an older Erasmus — a frequently cited authentic likeness from the same painter who knew him.
Hans Holbein the Younger, 1532
Erasmus at his writing desk in scholar's cap and gown, mid-sentence, with shelved books behind him.
Quinten Metsys, 1517
Famous Quotes
“The most disadvantageous peace is better than the most just war.”
“It is the chiefest point of happiness that a man is willing to be what he is.”
“What is all this life but a kind of comedy, wherein men walk up and down in one another's disguises and act their respective parts, till the property-man brings them back to the attiring house.”
“I am, as you see, that true and only giver of wealth whom the Greeks call Moria, the Latins Stultitia, and our plain English Folly.”
About Erasmus
Dutch Renaissance humanist, theologian, and the leading intellectual figure of early sixteenth-century Europe. His Praise of Folly is a witty satirical attack on superstition, corruption, and pedantry. He sought to reform the Catholic Church from within through scholarship and reason, influencing both the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation.