Anthony Levi. Renaissance and Reformation: The Intellectual Genesis.

New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. xii + 484 pp. index. $39.95. ISBN: 0-300-09333-0.

A noted contributor to the intellectual history of Renaissance France and to Erasmus studies, Anthony Levi is perhaps best known for his 1964 study of the passions in French ethicists of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. It is his affinity to this theme that appears to have inspired him to construct the Procrustean bed into which he presses medieval, Renaissance, and Reformation thought in the book under review. Renaissance and Reformation, he argues, form a single period, yoked by their repudiation of high medieval scholasticism. For Levi, the scholastic irritants were not Scripture and tradition, glosses on the glosses, logic-chopping, or kitchen Latin. Nor were they jurisdictional theories, which were settled politically in any case. Rather, the key point on which early modern thinkers found scholasticism inadequate was its anthropology and ethics. What they wanted and failed to find in scholasticism was a natural ethics in which human fulfillment, including salvation, was understood as springing from and perfecting our innate moral aspirations and faculties developed in harmony with rational moral norms, in immortal individual souls.

Divided into three unequal parts, Levi's book first devotes two chapters to the failure of scholasticism. The bulk of the book presents eight chapters on the humanists' post-scholastic solutions, followed by four chapters on those of the "schismatics," a.k.a., Protestants, taking the account up to 1535. This odd cut-off point forecloses a meaningful discussion of the later Luther, Calvin, Anglican theology, and Tridentine Catholicism. Within all three sections, Levi's weapons of choice are the strategic omission of pertinent primary and secondary literature, negative profiling, the misconstruction of evidence, and outright factual error in some cases.

According to Levi, late scholastics were unable to reconcile an epistemology based on the need for sense data with the immortality of the individual soul once detached from the body; they were unable to reconcile free will either with the rational choices of human moral agents or with divine grace; they could not reconcile God's justice and benevolence with the notion that He withholds His grace--needed for salvation--from some of the people He creates. They ended with a theology in which the deity's relationship to humankind is arbitrary and in which human efforts to obey His laws and to seek self-improvement are rendered potentially irrelevant, a theology which, nevertheless, counseled that by doing our best we will attract grace. Levi ignores the fact that Albert the Great, Aquinas, and Duns Scotus envision an interactive will and intellect in their consideration of the theme of synderesis and conscience. He omits a major aspect of Aristotle's faculty psychology, which makes the Stagirite compatible with the Platonic anthropology that Levi ascribes to the humanists and reformers. This mode of faculty psychology, and the anthropology and ethics they undergird, are alive and well in more than a few thirteenth-century scholastics.

Levi yokes Scotus to Ockham as the chief perpetrators of the scholastic impasse, under the heading of nominalist theology, although he recognizes the fact that Scotus was a realist. Scotus' voluntarism in the realm of ethics morphs, in Levi's hands, into an extreme application of Ockham's distinction between God's absolute and ordained powers in which God is entirely arbitrary in His governance of the charismatic order, leading to anxiety on the believer's part about whether obeying the moral law makes any difference. On another level, he observes, practitioners of the spiritual life were taught to worry about whether their inner experiences were God-given or were promptings of the devil. Levi concludes that scholasticism could not come up with an intellectually defensible rationale for what it held to be theological orthodoxy. Its theology did not assuage the deepest spiritual needs of Christians.

The section on the Middle Ages contains the majority of errors and misleading statements in this book. There are many errors of fact. For example, Levi's Frederick II (d. 1250) lived in the twelfth century and Dante excluded Augustine from the ranks of the saints in the upper reaches of Paradiso. He credits Valla and Erasmus for exploding the identification of St. Denis, apostle of France, with the Dionysius converted by St. Paul and the pseudo-Areopagite; the credit belongs to Abelard. Nor is Levi's discussion of the Renaissance and Reformation error-free. Africa played no role in making Petrarch's literary reputation. Levi's Pomponazzi is an Averroist on one page (164) and an anti-Averroist on the next. He regards the polity of fifteenthcentury Florence under the Medici as "quasi-democratic" (94). He thinks that Luther went beyond the majority consensus on indulgences in the 95 Theses and that he rejected the divine institution of the sacraments, including those he retained. Most remarkably, perhaps, notwithstanding the flood of social history from Joan Kelly forward showing that patriarchy was the order of the day, and that it increased its limits on female self-determination in early modern Europe (pace Stanley Chojnacki), Levi states that the Renaissance promoted a new and upgraded status for women.

Levi's treatment of humanists is almost as problematic as his handling of scholasticism. He rejects interpretations of the Renaissance with which he disagrees without disproving them, and sometimes without mentioning them; he marginalizes or ignores humanists who do not contribute to his chosen story line, and occasionally omits material pertinent to some of the humanists he does include. Levi rejects Paul Oskar Kristeller's view of humanism as an educational reform emphasizing eloquence, whose skills could then be applied to the range of interests that humanists possessed. Ronald Witt's interpretation of humanism as a neo-classicizing stylistic and aesthetic ideal, beginning well before Petrarch with poetry and later extending to prose, is a position Levi does not even deign to mention. This omission cannot be explained by the 2000 publication date of Witt's magnum opus, since Levi includes some titles as recent as 2001, and, in any case, Witt stated his thesis in germ in Albert Rabil's 1988 collection of essays on Renaissance humanism, which Levi does not cite. Instead, what defines humanists, in Levi's view, is their possession of a common ideology. They abandon the doctrines of original sin and predestination, the bondage of the will, the gap Levi posits between intellect and will, and the unicity of the substantial form in human nature, substituting a natural ethics in which instinct and reason join in leading us to perfection and in which the will remains free. This move also involves the systematic substitution of Platonism for Aristotelianism, with Ficino's De amore as its declaration of independence. Petrarch remains the father of humanism despite his lack of express opinions on the above-mentioned rejected doctrines; the best Levi can come up with in defense of this claim is that Petrarch's "insights would have come near to challenging" them (89). Confusingly, Petrarch's fondness for Augustine's Confessions, a prime locus for the doctrine of grace so nefarious in the scholastics, is a plus factor for Petrarch. Absent from Levi's discussion of Petrarch's and other humanists' religious concerns is any reference to the work of Charles Trinkaus. A major beachhead is established with Ficino and his Platonic Academy, whose existence Levi does not question although he cites the work of James Hankins, with the apogee of Italian humanism reached in Pico's Oration on the Dignity of Man. As can be seen, this is an extremely Florence-centric version of the Renaissance. The only non-Florentine deemed to have made a signal contribution to the humanists' anthropological and ethical project is Valla.

The central figure in Levi's northern Renaissance is, unsurprisingly, Erasmus. His achievement, for Levi, was to integrate the spirituality of the devotio moderna with both humanist philological scholarship and Platonism. Erasmus' works thus constitute a great leap forward for the humanist ideology Levi proposes. Levi makes his transition to the Reformation with the Erasmus-Luther debates on free will of 1524-25, in principle, an excellent strategy. But Levi does not reprise the arguments of either contestant very fully, and steers his course around an issue of prime concern to them, Erasmus' wish to keep the church's options open, in an area where support can be found for more than one position, versus Luther's wish to nail down his own position as dogma. Another aspect of Erasmus' theology to which he pays no attention is its stress on the vita activa, the practical ministry to the needs of others. For all his centrality to the thesis of this book, Erasmus is scarcely presented in three-dimensional form. In the end, Levi's Erasmus is the Erasmus of Lisa Jardine, too preoccupied with the creation and advantageous marketing of his self-image, and hence too disingenuous and evasive in representing his real views once the Lutheran Reformation broke out, to be wholly praiseworthy.

This brings us to Levi's truncated consideration of the Reformation. He sees it as a piece with the Renaissance because of its emphasis on inner spiritual experience and inner conversion, plus the natural ethics that makes the Renaissance-Reformation the watershed "from which flowed a new vision of human potential" (12). It must be said point blank, however, that Levi does not show that the magisterial reformers shared the ethics and anthropology that he ascribes to the humanists. If anything, in any objective investigation of their views on human nature, its redemption, and its arrival at glory, what emerges is a continuation of the neo-Augustinianism Levi ascribes to failed late scholastics, with the Doctor of Grace at his most anti-Pelagian. So how does Levi attempt to persuade the readers that Protestant anthropology is indeed the same as that of Ficino and Erasmus? His chosen strategy is to talk about other things instead, presumably in the hope that readers will not notice the reformers unraveling the thesis he advances before their very eyes. The Protestant Reformation does not and cannot yield support for Levi's thesis. Insofar as it produced any generally accepted anthropology and ethics, it is an anthropology and ethics that parts company with the positions of Ficino and Erasmus.

Levi's determination to find the sources of a later doctrine in the Renaissance and Reformation, even when those sources cannot to be found there, distorts his account of both Renaissance and Reformation. His desire to find what he wants to find, because it represents a value he approves of, is manifest. Levi remarks, toward the end of his conclusion, that historians have a duty not to be judgmental. They must resist the temptation to succumb to "ideological alignment as well as ... sadistic amusement at ... history's intellectual detritus" (362). This is indeed a high, and a desirable, standard. But it is one that eludes Levi himself in this book.

MARCIA. L. COLISH

Oberlin College, Emerita