Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 376 - Books That Last Forever - Erasmus.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Books That Last Forever, Erasmus. Over the last 500 years, standards have slipped quite a lot when it comes to celebrities. Famous names of the early 21st century include Piers Morgan, Donald Trump, and the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, whereas in the 16th century, they had Desiderius Erasmus. Nowadays you can get famous just by abusing people on reality television. Back then you had to do something more impressive, like re-editing the Greek text of the New Testament. This achievement and other prodigious feats of scholarship gave Erasmus renown across Western Christendom. He has in fact been called perhaps the first celebrity in European history, famous in part because he was so famous. Humanists saw him as the greatest exponent of their movement and could think of no greater honor than receiving a word of praise from his pen. Doctors invited him to their courts, scholastics fretted over his impact, and when the Reformation began, Protestants and Catholics alike hoped that Erasmus' influential voice would be raised in their defense. But Erasmus was not one for taking sides. Across his life and his works, he sought nuance and subtlety, a master of striking balances. He was a reformer who stayed within the church, a devotee of pagan literature whose worldview was deeply Christian, a proud native of the Low Countries who said that his nation was any place where learning flourished. He was born in Rotterdam in the late 1460s as the illegitimate child of a priest, and in due course became a priest himself. Characteristically, he had mixed feelings about this, and equally characteristically, he expressed them in eloquent writing. One of his earliest texts is a discussion of monastic retreat from the world, which largely treats this life in favorable terms, but warns readers not to embrace it without due consideration. In due course, Erasmus would become a harsh critic of the monastic orders he called mendicant tyrants. He coined an absurdly long word for the battle between them and humanists, the lovers of the muses, tojo torano filo mus o machia. In this case, there was no doubt which side Erasmus was on, but his critique of the hypocrisy of the monastic orders came together with the conviction that a true life of Christian asceticism would be one worth living. In the 1490s, Erasmus tried out another road to religious fulfillment only to find that it led nowhere. He enrolled as a student of theology at the University of Paris, but dropped out. About a decade later, he would get his degree from Turin, albeit by jumping over certain requirements. But by this time, he had already settled on his true calling, a fusion of faith with philological scholarship that he called learned piety, doctor pietas. His first edition was in 1501 of a work on ethics by, who else, Cicero, a figure who elicited another balancing act from Erasmus. He greatly admired this foremost Latin stylist, of course, yet he would later write a work mocking Italian humanists who were so enthralled by Ciceronian style that they abandoned the concerns of the Christian faith. At the time of that edition, he was already traveling around Europe, as he would continue to do for the coming decades. In England, he forged important friendships with the humanists John Colette and Thomas Moore. While there, he became convinced of the need to acquire deep expertise in ancient Greek, the language of the New Testament. Then back in the Low Countries, he came across a text by Lorenzo Valla containing notes on that very text. Here, Erasmus realized, was a project suited to his talent, his faith, and his ambition. He would produce a new edition of the Greek text of the New Testament and offer a new Latin translation, improving on the so-called Vulgate, which had long been the fundamental text of Western Christendom. He made little effort to hide the part about being ambitious. Contrasting himself to school-trained theologians, he said that they merely deliver humdrum sermons. I am writing books that may last forever. By taking the Bible itself as an object of scholarly attention, he was implicitly modeling himself on the Church Father, St. Jerome. Just to make sure no one missed the point, he wrote a biography of Jerome and edited his works. As Lisa Jardine has written in a study of Erasmus's elaborate methods of self-promotion, he aspired to something more like the renown traditionally accorded only to the major ancient authors and teachers of secular and sacred texts, the international acclaim and recognition accorded to a Seneca or a Jerome. We fail to notice the extraordinary presumptuousness of this aspiration on Erasmus's part only, I think, because in the end he was so entirely and consummately successful. Erasmus's labors on the New Testament show us some interesting things about how ancient texts were being studied at this point in history. His edition and translation was first printed in 1516, with new and improved versions then appearing throughout his lifetime. It was based heavily on Greek manuscripts brought from the East. Erasmus assumed that these were more authoritative than the Vulgate, even though this Latin version would ultimately have been based on a very old, long-lost Greek one. Like other humanists of the time, he showed a keen understanding of the way that mistakes can creep into handwritten texts, for instance confusion between words written with similar letters, a classic example being the Greek words hama and alla, meaning at the same time, and but, because in the older maguscule writing these were written AMA and ALLA, big letters, and a capital M looks a lot like two capital Greek Ls. Erasmus also knew to worry about the intrusion of marginal comments into the main text. Particularly notable is his articulation of what is now called the Principle of the Harder Reading, or Lectio difficileor. This means that you might actually prefer a somewhat strange variant reading over a more predictable one, on the basis that scribes would tend to replace awkward or unusual Greek with a more familiar-looking text of their own invention. A further crucial aspect of this project was Erasmus's own annotations. These were of course intended to explain his choices as editor and translator, but also to give the reader a sense of the nuances and difficulties of the biblical text. In a translation, he explained, you can only express one meaning. In annotations, you can point out several from which the reader can freely choose the one he would want to follow. Here we are not that far from Luther and the idea of a personal encounter with scripture, albeit that the encounter envisioned by Erasmus would be facilitated by deep study of classical languages. Not everyone was pleased. One Dominican blustered, what an imposter Erasmus is. He writes annotations on the New Testament, he addresses responses to some theologians, yet he is ignorant of all theology. As we saw in our earlier survey of northern humanism, the schoolmen were reluctant to accept specialism in ancient Greek and Ciceronian Latin as a substitute for university training, and there were less principled objections too. A Franciscan in Bruges who denounced Erasmus admitted to not having read any of his books, but said he was afraid he may be able to slip into some heresy with all that lofty Latin. Erasmus could give as good as he got, if not better. His experiences at Paris in what he would later call the wrestling schools of the Sorbonne had convinced him that the Scholastics were indulging in disputation over frivolous nonsense. From its title, you might guess that his Against the Barbarians also fits into the now familiar pattern of humanists lamenting the bad thinking and worse Latin of Scholastic literature. In fact though, it seems that the schoolmen were not the primary target of this work, or at least the part of it that Erasmus wrote. It is the beginning of a treatise that was never completed. The part that got written instead answers those who reject all use of classical literature, especially pagan poetry. For Erasmus, this was an anti-religious attitude pretending to be religious. He believed that skillful rhetoric could win more souls for Christ than all the Scholastic distinctions in the world. The Scholastics are, by contrast, very much a target in what may be Erasmus's most famous book, The Praise of Folly. It was written in just one week while Erasmus was staying with Thomas More in London and recovering from kidney stones. In such a circumstance, you or I might rewatch all five seasons of The Wire, or, if that seems too challenging, The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. Erasmus, being made of sterner stuff, produced a delightfully eloquent and ironic book in which Folly speaks on her own behalf. This is a pun on the name of Erasmus's host, since the Latin word for Folly is moria, and he was, as I say, staying with Thomas More. But it also gives Erasmus a chance to make plenty of serious points in a comedic fashion. The work seems to fall into three parts, devoted respectively to, as one scholar has put it, the natural fool, the wicked fool, and the Christian fool. Thus, in the first section, we learn how foolishness results from the domination of reason by the passions. Philosophers may lament this, but Folly says it is absolutely necessary for our survival. After all, even the Stoics, who claim perfect rationality, like gods, must give in to the passions if they are to have children. In the second section, we move on to various sorts of foolish evildoer, including the hypocrites among the monks, whose rivalry shows that they aren't interested in being like Christ, but in being unlike each other, and the schoolmen, who know nothing at all, yet claim to know everything. The Stoics and the Scholastics aren't the only philosophers to come in for rough treatment in this work. Erasmus has Folly mock Plato's idea of philosophers becoming kings. In fact, no state has been so plagued by its rulers as when power has fallen into the hands of some dabbler in philosophy or literary addict. The same passage makes fun of Marcus Aurelius, who was a good emperor, but unpopular precisely because he was a philosopher. Folly even has unkind words for Cicero and Socrates, of all people. We know that Erasmus loved Cicero. As for Socrates, Erasmus was elsewhere so moved by this pagan philosopher's virtue that he prayed, Saint Socrates, pray for us. So it seems obvious that we should read the text as deeply ironic. By having the personification of foolishness condemn these figures, Erasmus is indirectly praising them. Yet one can also detect a skeptical undercurrent running through the praise of Folly, which at one point even endorses the views of the ancient academic skeptics. This may be, to some extent, sincere. In other works, Erasmus is often tentative about the scope of human knowledge, so he is perhaps at least half serious when he says that a foolish person is no less unhappy than an illiterate horse, since foolishness is in keeping with human nature. In this respect, the most difficult part of the text to evaluate is the final section, which still leads to controversy among scholars. In this part, Erasmus has Folly describe a holy fool who withdraws from worldly affairs and even from the body. She compares this otherworldly person's apparent foolishness to the character in Plato's Allegory of the Cave, who, having seen reality in the light of day, returns and is rejected by the prisoners, who still think that the shadow images on the wall of the cave are real. Here it would be natural to suppose that Folly is speaking for Erasmus, speaking in praise of withdrawal from the body. But as already mentioned, Erasmus was at best ambivalent about his own youthful experience with the rigors of asceticism, so one could also take this section to be a parody of an excessive devotion to the spiritual over the physical. Since Erasmus himself said in a letter to his fellow humanist Martin Dorp that the praise of Folly expressed all his usual doctrines, although the method may have differed, we should perhaps turn to other works to clarify his true meaning. For the theme of spirituality, we can do no better than The Handbook of the Christian Soldier. This guide to the moral life wears its classical inspiration on its sleeve. In that title, the Latin for handbook is enchiridion. This can also mean a small dagger kept always on one's person for self-defense, as one should constantly consult the book for inspiration and guidance. It also echoes the title of a collection of teachings by the Stoic philosopher Epictetus. Epictetus is cited explicitly in the text too, when Erasmus refers to his idea that virtue alone is under our control, with all other things external to the true self. His is only one of many ancient names invoked by Erasmus. We get allusions to Socrates, who taught that philosophy is preparation for death, that it is better to be harmed than to do harm, and that virtue is knowledge. There are also learned references to the differing views of the Stoics and Peripatetics on the emotions and the way that the Cynics and Stoics adhered to their rigorous teachings in the face of popular disdain. But Erasmus' handbook is more than a collection of greatest hits from the back catalogue of classical ethics. When he justifies the use of such pagan material, he describes it as a preliminary training in morality. And the more advanced form of righteousness is, of course, Christian. Indeed, Erasmus' intellectual achievement in the handbook is not so much to gather together ideas from ancient philosophy. Most of those ideas are familiar ones, presented in a rather basic fashion, as to show how the ideas fit seamlessly into a distinctively Christian morality. He is particularly positive towards the Platonists, because they encourage us to subordinate the concerns of the body to the concerns of the soul, or spirit. At one point, Erasmus even assimilates Plato's division between the rational and irrational souls to St. Paul's contrast between the earthly and spiritual human. Like other Renaissance thinkers, such as Pico della Mirandola, Erasmus is convinced by the Platonist doctrine that two very different natures are combined in the human. Our souls make us like gods, while our bodies make us like beasts. This is the metaphysical idea that underlies the most significant and most controversial point made by Erasmus' handbook, that the outward practices and rituals of religion are unimportant, compared to the believer's inner conviction. In a letter to his friend John Colette, Erasmus said that he wrote the handbook, solely in order to counteract the error of those who make religion in general consist in rituals and observances of an almost more than Jewish formality, but who are astonishingly indifferent to matters that have to do with true goodness. Erasmus takes it for granted that Judaism is a religion of external practices and rules, rather than interior faith, and accuses his contemporaries of approaching Christianity in this way too. To someone who supposes that the sacrament of baptism suffices to make them Christian, he says, Again, to the person who avoids adultery but has wicked desires, he asks, What good is it to do good on the outside if on the inside one's thoughts are quite the opposite? In short, Erasmus wants to draw his readers' attention to their true selves, their immortal souls, and away from the concerns of the body, even those concerns that are meant to be signs of inner piety. Of course, this suggests that the final ascetic section of the praise of folly was more authentic praise than ironic parody. Erasmus' focus on interiority actually fits better with classical philosophy than with the teachings of the Church, which of course saw inestimable value in such things as the sacrament of baptism. This is one reason why Erasmus was seen as both harbinger and fellow traveler of the Reformation. He de-emphasized the institutional role of the Church in Christian life, emphasizing instead the private, even invisible, interior attitudes of the Christian. This comes out particularly in his attacks on the monastic orders, which he saw as having fallen away from their original purity, corrupted by concern with worldly affairs. No doubt reflecting on his unhappy, youthful experiences with monasticism, he argued that such a lifestyle is just that, only a lifestyle, not to be equated with holiness and not appropriate for everyone. In an introduction added in a later edition of the Handbook, Erasmus defended himself from accusations that he had categorically rejected religious institutions. To the contrary, he was not trying to turn people away from the monastic life, and he accepted a moderate degree of ceremony. But only a page later, he is once again inveighing against monks who live for their own stomachs and not for Christ. The Christian soldier mentioned in the title of the Handbook is someone who steers clear of such hypocrisy. He may not be perfect, but he is striving for perfection, having enlisted in the army of Christ to wage war on sin. This is the battle that Christians ought to be fighting, not the literal battles they pursue against each other and against members of other faiths. It's a pacifist message that once again echoes the praise of folly, where Erasmus likewise laments the evils of warfare. He has his speaker, Folly, say that war is something so monstrous that it befits wild beasts rather than men, and derides churchmen who go into battle in the name of Christian charity. In fact, the pointlessness and wickedness of war is one of Erasmus's favorite themes. It's the main topic of other works of his, including War is Great if You Haven't Tried It, which is how Folly would want us to translate the Latin title, Tulsi Pelum in expertis. That phrase is a saying or adage, one of the many that Erasmus collected and commented upon in another of his most successful publications. He felt so strongly about the topic that in this case he expanded his remarks into a full essay dedicated to the proposition that, if there is any human activity that should be approached with caution, or rather that should be avoided by all possible means, resisted and shunned, that activity is war. In 1516, the same year that saw the publication of his new New Testament, Erasmus came out with two more works that discouraged warfare, The Plea of Peace and The Instruction of the Christian Prince. Both were written for powerful patrons, the former at the behest of Jean de Sauvage, a French chancellor of Burgundy who was trying to make peace between the Netherlands and France, the latter dedicated to the future emperor, Charles V. His approach to the young Charles is in keeping with the tradition of mirrors for princes, and explains that both political success and the happiness of the people depend upon the virtue of the ruler. It's a deeply moralizing work on politics, in sharp contrast to a work written in Italy at about the same time, Machiavelli's The Prince. Erasmus is, for example, now more optimistic about the idea of rulers doing philosophy than he seemed to be in The Praise of Folly. He says that a prince who is not a philosopher is inevitably a tyrant, adding that this just means the ruler should follow what is true and good. Being a philosopher is in practice the same as being a Christian, only the terminology is different. Whereas the tyrant enslaves his people and is concerned only for himself, the good ruler rules over free subjects and looks to their benefit. In this the virtuous prince is like God, who gives humans freedom so that his rule over them may be more glorious. This is all standard fare in works of political advice, of course, but it gives Erasmus a context for something that was more unusual in his times, an outright rejection of warfare for pretty well any reason. War is unwise just in practical terms, since its expense can almost never be offset by the gains of victory. But it is also unnatural, as we can see from the fact that even animals of the more admirable species like dolphins or storks live peacefully with their kind. Erasmus dismisses as useless the medieval concept of a just war, on the rather convincing grounds that in warfare all sides typically think they are then the right. Even war against non-Christians makes little sense to him since violence is no way to convert souls. As he also argues in The Handbook, it would be in the true spirit of the apostles to bring the Turks over to religion by the resources of Christ rather than by force of arms. While he doesn't go so far as to say that war is never necessary, he argues that its costs and calamities should be visited on whoever made the war inevitable. While he was, as we've seen, to some extent a man of contradictions, Erasmus was consistent in striving after peace, which he called the sum and substance of our religion. His goal dominated his response to the outbreak of the Reformation. Given his boldness in revising the text of the New Testament and his emphasis on private spirituality, Erasmus seemed a natural ally of the Lutheran movement. The reformer Martin Luther said that Erasmus and Luther agreed in everything. A humanist named Julius Flug tried to persuade Erasmus to make this agreement explicit by intervening with the Church on behalf of the reformist program. And on the other side, many Catholics blamed him for encouraging that very program, saying, Erasmus laid the egg, Luther hatched it. But remember, he was a celebrity, and you can't overestimate the power of a celebrity endorsement. So the Catholics also tried to win him over to their side, putting so much pressure on him that Erasmus ultimately moved to Basel so that he would not be forced to denounce Luther. As we'll see in a future episode, he did dispute with Luther over free will, in part so he could stay in the good graces of King Henry VIII of England. With pressure being exerted from both directions, Erasmus ultimately refused to join the reformers. For all his complaints about monks, clerics, and bishops, he stated explicitly that he submitted to the authority of the Church, coupling his aforementioned modesty about human knowledge with an acknowledgement of the absolute truth of the Scriptures and Church tradition. With typical nuance, he distinguished between the Roman Church and the true Church of Christ, holding out the prospect of a split between the two. Still, he allowed that as far as he was concerned, these were one and the same Church, for now at least. And he was no apostle of tolerance, especially when the Jews were concerned. While his anti-Semitism did not reach the vicious intensity found in the writings of Luther, we've already seen him being openly disdainful of Judaism. He never expanded his scholarly program to include Hebrew philology, nor did he use his considerable influence to defend Johannes Reuchlin and his study of Jewish literature. But Erasmus did want to see concord within European Christianity. Thus on the one hand, he objected to Cardinal Wolsey at the burning of Luther's books in 1520. On the other hand, he was vigorously opposed to the radical reformers who went beyond the teachings of Luther. In religion as in politics, Erasmus pled for peace and refused to praise the folly of conflict. Among the conflicts of his own day, perhaps none seemed more ridiculous to Erasmus than the one that raged among the scholastics. He refers to it in Praise of Folly, speaking of the torturous obscurities of realists, nominalists, Thomists, Albertists, Ockhamists, and Scodists. These various names should ring at least distant bells for you. Here in the early 16th century, Erasmus refers to intellectual traditions that go back to the 13th and 14th centuries, and with good reason. Medieval schools of thought survived up to the Age of Reformation and beyond, and they helped to shape the thought of figures like Luther and Melanchthon. So before we turn to those great figures of reform, I want to complement our survey of Northern humanism with a survey of Northern scholasticism. You'd be foolish to miss it as we soldier on to the next episode of The History of Philosophy without any guess.