Participatory Interpretation
Renaissance-era Christian Humanists are largely responsible for ushering in the scholarly interpretation of biblical literature, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t consider the Bible to be a sacred text. For the Christian or Biblical Humanists, proper reading–involving the faithful interpretation of texts–leads to the incremental transformation of the reader. While powerfully championed by Renaissance humanists, these ideas were not entirely new. Already in the late medieval period Henry of Langenstein had written that “the Bible’s peculiar rhetoric, reflected a kind of divine strategy to captivate and penetrate human minds with ‘the fragrance of heavenly mysteries’”(Erasmus on Literature 75). In much the same spirit, Erasmus held that “the best way to do theology was to take the New Testament itself as the supremely expressive, affective, persuasive medium of the personally and socially transformative teaching of Jesus Christ’” (7).
The literary interpretation of the Bible is thus not a rejection of its spiritual potential but rather an insistence upon the textual means by which this potential is realized. Modern scholarly interpreters of the Bible such as Robert Alter and Anthony Grafton might well agree with their Christian Humanist predecessors’ view that both secular texts–bonae literae–and sacred texts–divinae literae–are capable of penetrating the affective understanding of the reader and bringing about transformation.
The Paraclesis appears as preface to Erasmus’s 1516 Greek and Latin edition of the New Testament. Towards the end of this preface Erasmus makes a remarkable claim: “[T]hese writings bring you the living image of His holy mind and the speaking, healing, dying, rising Christ himself, and thus they render Him so fully present that you would see less if you gazed upon Him with your very eyes” (108).[1] According to Erasmus, in participating in Scripture (via assimilative study) one also participates in “the living image of His holy mind and the speaking, healing, dying, rising Christ himself.” In other words, Erasmus envisions biblical interpretation as a prophetic participation in Scripture which is also a transformative imitation of Christ.[2] Part divine grace and part laborious scholarly diligence, Erasmus describes this type of interpretative understanding of and participation in Scripture as the special investiture of one taught by God.