Thomas More\'s Gentle Tour Guide Raphael Hythloday

¶ … Thomas More's Gentle Tour Guide Raphael Hythloday of Utopia and Erasmus's scathing use of the teacher of rhetoric Folly in the Praise of Folly

Thomas More's Raphael Hythloday in More's Utopia functions as an ideal character for the reader to aspire to. Raphael is a tour guide of a better, albeit fictional place the author has envisioned. In contrast, Erasmus uses Folly as a satirical and one-dimensional teacher of irony and rhetoric to teach the reader about the real, rather than the ideal world. The reader's encounter with Folly is used to show the reader catalogues of individuals, against whose follies the reader may measure his or her own. Thus although both Thomas More and Erasmus make use of fictional characters to illustrate their philosophical works, Thomas More uses Raphael Hythloday to speak to the reader as a kind of unknowing tour guide, a man unwise to the evils of the world, while Folly is all too knowing about the world's evils.

In the case of Erasmus, the narrator Folly takes an ironic tone when talking to the reader, unlike More's far more serious and descriptive tone in his engagement with Raphael. Folly makes fun of himself and of the reader because of his deflated moral sense, which he projects upon the rest of society. Raphael Hythloday also describes what he sees, but with a praiseworthy eye.

This contrast of one man named Folly who sees only evil, with another man named after the angel Raphael who sees only good, can be seen in the way that characters narrate the story, one in the form of the first person as a kind of faux teacher, and the other a guiding character in dialogue with the reader. In Erasmus' The Praise of Folly, the character of Folly narrates the story, attempting to harshly instruct the reader about different kinds of folly in the manner of a discerning, dissecting orator. Folly takes on the narrative persona, rather than Erasmus himself. Folly speaks to the reader in a kind of tongue-in cheek fashion, illustrating different types of Folly that the reader and the character of Folly have observed through life. Folly speaks, he says, as an "orator" to the reader, like a Latin teacher of old. In contrast, Raphael Hythloday speaks as a humble, ordinary man of an extraordinary place, that of Utopia, showing the reader the nature of life in this utopian existence, and how it can be different from their own.

Neither the character of Raphael or Folly, it must be said, functions as a kind of everyman or every person. The character of Folly, for instance, takes a vastly deflationary view of human existence in contrast to the average reader. Folly discusses why he, folly is necessary, for individuals to have children, for instance -- for without foolishness why on earth would anyone chose to procreate? Raphael Hythloday, however, explains to the reader why Utopia is such an ideal place, and by doing so offers a template of moral being and an example of the reader's higher self, rather than the reader's lower self, like Folly.

Both characters, although functionally different, have an allegorical quality to their naming. Raphael is named after an angel, and Hythloday means sweetness all day in Latin. Likewise Folly's name may be taken to represent, well, the Follies the character sees and catalogues in the world around him. The two characters function in different worlds, and thus view the world differently -- but even though both live in created, schematic universes, as created by More and Erasmus, ultimately Folly still is looking around the real world, albeit with an overly dark and critical eye, while More is creating an ideal world that has yet to be built.

More the author may be writing as a critic, but Raphael Hythloday has transcended the office of critic in the universe he inhabits, while Erasmus' Folly is still dwelling in the world of the intended reader. This is another reason why More may have chosen to narrate Utopia, not purely using Raphael's voice, but using his angelic character as kind of a guide. In contrast, Erasmus writes very much as a satirist or critic out of the Latin school of rhetoric, where orators use irony to deflate the follies of the individuals in the world around the reader. "Tell me by Jupiter," Folly says at numerous occasions, as if he is assuming the persona of the Roman speaker, or a teacher of the classics.

Folly takes on the persona of a teaching, ironic satirist, but because Utopia's structure as a book is almost like a travelogue or a tour through a foreign place, More the author must be in dialogue with a gentler, uncritical voice so that the strangeness of this place may come into full flower in the eye of the reader. More may be critiquing his own society, but Raphael has no need to be a critic in the world in which he dwells, and through More's engagement with Raphael's world, the deficiencies of the reader's and More's own world becomes more into being.