The Erasmian Church of Well-Lettered Colloquy

Surfing the broad breaking swell of Renaissance bonae litterae into the tricky straits of the Reformation, Erasmus continued to imagine a single unified Catholic church rendered coherent by a universal Christian Latinity. Enabled by the humanist grammarian’s philologically sophisticated exegetical discipline this imagined church would draw its life-giving waters from Greek and Hebrew sources.  It would be still further fortified by the cultivated and irenic eclecticism of the broader republic of letters with which its enlightened ministry sympathetically corresponded.

Erasmus Agonistes: The Fence-Sitting Grammarian’s Prelude

Erasmus, unlike Luther and Calvin and other Reformers, left no church to carry forward an institutional version of his theology. Erasmus was not one of the Protestant Reformers, but rather a reform-minded Roman Catholic. His positions reflect a reforming ethic prior to that of the Reformation proper, and, as the Reformation took hold, Erasmus became something of a bug bear for the dogmatists of both Protestant and Roman Catholic camps.

Derided as a mere grammarian, Erasmus was accused of exalting the tribe of poet over that of the theologian. This agon pitted both the Scholastic Aristotelian inheritor of an infallible church tradition on the one hand, and the humanistically trained Reformer inventing a new dogma on the other, against the fence-sitting grammarian content to dwell in the moveable realm of human opinion and colloquy. It was, according to Erasmus’s opponents, the poets and schoolmasters and all the scholars of the humanities who were the true beneficiaries of his Christian humanist approach to exegesis or biblical interpretation.

Now, given that Erasmus’s Greek edition and Latin translation of the New Testament was an essential engine of the Reformation, the accusation that his theology served poets and schoolmasters over theologians sounds like polemical hyperbole. What made Erasmus’s New Testament and his exegetical method so threatening, however, was the manner in which they dismantled the stage-craft of divine infallibility essential to the imposition of creedal dogma. Erasmus was blithely wresting exegetical authority from both the Scholastic initiate and the dogmatic elect and to make matters worse, in spite of his unequivocal elitism, he was handing this authority over to the hoi polloi.

Only a very few can be learned, but all can be Christian, all can be devout, and–I shall boldly add–all can be theologians.[1]

All can be theologians, just as all can be devout Christians, but that which further distinguishes between these is learning and for Erasmus the learning that counts is that of the grammarian who recognizes the harvest of bonae litterae, the best things written and spoken within the ancient world, as a dispensation of Christ and the essential support and adornment of the Christian religion.

Erasmus promoted the study of bonae litterae as both propaedeutic to and co-extensive with the study and practice of theology. As a prior dispensation of the eternal and divine reason (Logos), pagan wisdom already participated in Christian truth. Thus, in The Antibarbarians, Erasmus writes:

Everything in the pagan world that was valiantly done, brilliantly said, ingeniously thought, diligently transmitted, had been prepared by Christ for his society. He it was who supplied the intellect, who added the zest for inquiry, and it was through him alone that they found what they sought. Their age produced this harvest of creative work, not so much for them as for us. (60)

The ancient dispensation of pagan wisdom was a crop produced for the reaping of later harvesters. Not only was it perfectly in keeping with the nature of a reasonable God that “the best religion should be adorned and supported by the finest studies” (Antibarbarians 60), but as a gift from Christ the wisdom of pagan antiquity could not be lightly dismissed. Erasmus was not merely seeking to elevate the study of bonae litterae and the cultural station of the classical poets. His arguments in The Antibarbarians effectively made the evaluation and integration of pagan learning a requirement of Christian cultural/historical consciousness.

The Republic of Classical Letters’ Barbarian Outreach Program

In England, as on the continent, Erasmus’s offices as humanist pedagogue and prolific impresario of the new print medium contributed to the dramatic improvement of Greek literacy. Scholarly proficiency in the classical languages was honed in the study and imitation of good classical letters and this, in turn, contributed not only to biblical and patristic studies but to the copious flourishing of the European vernaculars. Thus, Chapman’s Homer, and thus, also, John Florio’s translations of Montaigne’s essays, with the florilegia of neologisms gathered into Florio’s English spilling directly onto the Shakespearean stage.

Zealously propagated at St. Paul’s, the Merchant Taylor’s, and other premier English grammar schools conceived or re-founded according to Humanist principles in the 16^th century, the Erasmian discipline of abundant style, or copia, ushered in the first fruits of early modern English literature. … Cultural and even “auctorial” authority was up for grabs and following hard upon the “autorial” boots of Dante’s Italian tribe, French starlets (among whom Joachim du Bellay, whose Antiquites de Rome was translated by Spenser) had begun parcelling up territory in the auctorial heavens. From Dante and Boccaccio through the poets of the Pleiades, to Florio, Chapman and Philip and Mary Sidney, the Renaissance gave rise to a new breed of vernacular poets: poets who could claim to be stars in their own right and not merely polished satellites straining to out-shine the sunny power and perfection of the classical-world.

But barbarians, it seems, are never to be trusted. The manifest excellence of the harvest of early modern work exceeded expectation. Although expressly cultivated through classical study and imitation, the vernacular triumphs of the Renaissance have paradoxically contributed to the perceived obsolescence and superfluity of classical studies.

A Revolutionary Discipline: Hamming It Up with the Muses

Like his friend Thomas More, Erasmus was a reform-minded Roman Catholic and, as the Reformation took shape, he remained a vocal opponent of the proliferation of Protestant denominations and, more particularly, of Lutheran dogmatism. An initial stint as secretary to the Bishop of Cambrai, Henry of Bergen, followed by a series of papal dispensations freed Erasmus from his monastic duties at the Augustinian monastery of Emmaus at Stein. An Augustinian canon at large within the greater community, Erasmus escaped both the monk’s habit and the cloistered life that he abhorred and invented himself as diplomatic envoy to the pan-European republic of letters that he and other like-minded Humanists were conjuring.

The flourishing of both European national literatures and Protestant denominations can appear to be entirely distinct and unintended consequences of classicizing Christian Humanist pedagogy. Naturally, different interest groups—on the one hand, poets, on the other hand, theologians—exploit available resources differently. Initial surveys of Erasmus’s works, such as Marjorie O’Rourke Boyle’s exquisitely brilliant Christening Pagan Mysteries: Erasmus in Pursuit of Wisdom, suggest, however, that literary and theological revolution were integral and inseparable aspects of the Erasmian project from the very beginning.

In his The Antibarbarians Erasmus provides a single, brief exchange concerning the relation of poets and theologians. This exchange occurs between the town doctor Jodocus and Batt at the tail end of the latter character’s interpretation of the Pauline message concerning learning and charity:

“Why Batt, whoever would have believed that a poetic fellow like you would have so much theology in him? I swear by the favour of your Muses, you seem to me to have explained Paul’s meaning most accurately, and as far as I can see no theological term escapes you; from what I have heard I should think you would make a beautiful preacher…” 

Batt laughed and said, “…What an impudent fellow you are, to be surprised at theological knowledge in me, a poet… If I were a theologian, that would not mean that I was straying from the domain of the poet. In ancient times poets and theologians were held to be the same people…” (74)

Insistence upon the theological credentials of poets was no empty gesture. That is, the matter did not end with a mere valorization of poetry in the face of its detractors. On the contrary, it was the greatest of all Trojan horses—an insistence upon classical learning as the necessary prerequisite of theology which led (as surely as eloquently) towards the undermining of doctrinal conformity and the overturning of monolithic exegetical authority.

Neither Catholic nor Protestant theologians were comfortable aligning themselves with Erasmus’s theology. That said, the objections levied by Maarten van Dorp against Erasmus’s prises de position in his Moria (Praise of Folly), and his anticipated editions of Jerome and the New Testament, do suggest one identifiable (if somewhat amorphous) group whose interests were consistently advanced by Erasmus: “the whole tribe of school-masters, poets, authors, and all the professed followers of the humanities” (Letters 298-445 156).[2] Significantly, this group’s alignment is disciplinary rather than confessional. Dorp accuses Erasmus not only of bitterly attacking the faculty of theology through his “wretched Folly,” but of composing his edition of Jerome exclusively “for people interested in grammar… the grammarians… the schoolmasters” (Letters 298-445 19; 160).[3] Dorp’s letters are especially suggestive because in pitting Erasmus against the theologians they so clearly and so fully identify his position with that of the poets and scholars of poetry. [4]

Dorp’s identification of Erasmus’s poetic “tribe” might seem, at first, not to warrant special notice. That Erasmus openly identified his exegetical approach as that of a grammarian is well known. The implications of this identification, however, and the cultural resonance it might have had for a Reformation era audience, merit consideration. Dorp asks: “If the theologians are pestilent characters because they have not been initiated into the sacred rites of poesy, what about … the pope himself, the cardinals, the bishops, and the abbots, why do they not lay it down that no one shall be promoted to their order without a recommendation from the Muses?” (Letters 298-445 158). The question is a rhetorical one and its tone of bitter hyperbole assumes the ludicrousness of its proposal. Yet Dorp evidently believes this is the very position which underwrites both Erasmus’s biblical and patristic scholarship and his dismissal of the learning and labours of Scholastic theologians.[5]

In addressing Dorp’s objections to his Moria, Erasmus confirms, however jestingly, the proposition that so exasperates his interlocutor. Theology is indeed better advanced through the mediating power of the Muses than through the misguided endeavours of contemporary theologians:

So if all this, [the history of Folly’s conception] my dear Dorp, is ill-judged, your culprit owns up, or at least puts up no defence. Within these limits and in an idle moment and to please my friends [I composed Folly, and later allowed its publication, and in doing so] I judged ill, and only once in my whole life. Who can be wise all the time? … What ill-judged things far worse than this I could produce by other men, even by eminent theologians, who think up the most frigid and contentious questions and do battle among themselves over the most worthless trifles as though they fought for hearth and altar! And they act their absurd parts, more farcical than the original Atellanes, without a mask. I was at least more modest, for when I wanted to show how ill-judged I could be, I wore the mask of Folly and… I myself acted my part in disguise. (Letters 298-445 116,117)[6]

The passage is both well-guarded and cutting. On the one hand, Erasmus claims to excel the “eminent theologians” only in “ill-judged things.” He is not presuming to compare his work on Jerome or his translation and annotation of the New Testament to the greatest positive achievements of the theologians. Instead, he is merely referring to the “ill-judged” productions of both parties. On the one hand, Erasmus attributes to the Moria excellent ill-judgment and near-accidental publication (“from an imperfect as well as corrupt copy”). His Folly has been conceived as an amusement, a joke to share with friends, a distraction from physical discomfort, the product of idle moments pending the arrival of his books (Letters 298-445 116). On the other hand, in describing the ill-judged product he ascribes to the “eminent theologians” Erasmus iterates his dismissive appraisal of the Scholastic method as a whole, with its “frigid and contentious questions… over the most worthless trifles.” In other words, Erasmus’s jesting admission of ill-judgement may be read as exalting his Praise of Folly over the “far worse” folly of the most highly respected Scholastic treatises and summas.

          Even as the corpus of his patristic and biblical publications grew to shocking proportions and this work came to furnish the primary materials for an ever wider field of theological inquiry, Erasmus maintained his identification as a grammarian. This alignment with poets and scholars of poetry had seemed both alarming and obvious to the Dutch theologian Maarten van Dorp already in 1514. It seems highly unlikely that this same alignment would have failed to impress itself upon the succeeding generations of aspiring English poets—and specifically those, like Spenser and Milton, inclined towards biblical and patristic study—whose grammar-school formation followed Erasmian principles, whose university educations were imbued with his writings and whose parish churches exhibited copies of the Paraphrases from which their pastors read during church services. As Cecilia Asso writes, “[i]n his argumentation, Dorp links The Praise of Folly with Erasmus’ philological work on the New Testament and thereby puts his finger on the essence of Erasmus’ religious work: he sought to define a new type of theology and a new type of theologian” (171). But what type of theologian did Erasmus’s theology define? Throughout the sixteenth and on into the seventeenth century, English theologians, continental reformers and Catholics alike were constantly engaged in contesting the confessional orthodoxy of Erasmian positions. Few, if any of these, claimed an Erasmian faith. Erasmus’s influence, however, did not depend upon the adoption of any particular confessional position. It was not Erasmian doctrine but Erasmian method that was of revolutionary importance within the Reformation. It was the method of one capable of besting the “eminent theologians” from behind the mask of a narrative fiction—the method of the poet himself acting his part in disguise.[7]

[1]  (“Paraclesis,” tr. Olin Christian Humanism and the Reformation p.100)

[2] The letter is n.347, “Dorp to His Friend Erasmus” (1515).    

[3] The citations are from Letters 304 and 347 respectively.

[4] Of Erasmus’s early years Augustijn writes: “Erasmus and his friends wrote poems and felt themselves to be poets, with a feeling for language and a sensitivity to the music of words” (23).

[5] In “Martin Dorp and Edward Lee,” Cecilia Asso provides a pithy condensation of Dorp’s accusation of Erasmus, in response to both his Praise of Folly and his work on the New Testament: “You have ridiculed the theological profession as a whole, denigrating them and lowering their prestige in the eyes of the people, and now you take on a task which is traditionally theirs. Would that not indicate that you desire to eliminate their raison d’etre?” (171).

[6] In this and the following quotation I am citing Letter n. 337, “Erasmus of Rotterdam to Maarten van Dorp, The Distinguished Theologian” (1515).

[7] In his Letter to Maarten van Dorp, Erasmus cites the example of Plato’s Socratic Dialogues as precedent for his narratorial fiction: “when I wanted to show how ill-judged I could be, I wore the mask of Folly and, like Socrates in Plato, who covers his face before reciting an encomium on love, I myself acted my part in disguise” (Letters 298-445 116-7).