Erasmus' Vision of the Church.

Occasioned by the five-hundredth anniversary of Erasmus's ordination to the priesthood and fittingly informed by the Erasmophilia of the "Catholic" school of Erasmians, this collection merits the attention of those studying Erasmus's ecclesiology. Indirectly treating Erasmus's vision of what the church should be, James Tracy, who is to be admired for engaging thinkers nearly as slippery as Erasmus himself, defends the humanist ideal of scholarship challenged by the postmodernist denial of accessibility to meaning in a text. In spite of Erasmus's dissimilatio, Tracy questions Derrida's notion of self-contradiction as a norm because of the layers of meaning that accrete in multiple editions of Erasmus's texts, especially in the five of annotations to the New Testament. By comparing published and unpublished letters about the papacy, Tracy constructs a genuine perspective to Erasmus's thought on the Catholic church and on the Roman church. He also defends the connection between bonae literae and docta pietas in Erasmus's Philosophia Christi from the charge that these ideas amount to an "intellectual sleight of hand."

For some, the statement in the Enchiridion - monacbatus non est pietas - embodies Erasmus's assault on the institution of monasticism and on the worth of its vows, anti-monasticism being the precondition for the reformation and a common denominator binding reformers like Erasmus, Luther, Calvin, and others. Erika Rummel holds that the intensity of the conflicts then and the bias of readers account for this radical view. She bases her alternative position on analysis of Erasmus's complete statement, its rhetorical operation as a paradox, and the contexts in which he uses the term pietas. She indicates how cynicism gives way to a conciliatory position later in Erasmus's life; moreover, she studies the attacks by Catholic defenders of monasticism, Carvajal and Sichem, and manifests the divide, perhaps unbridgeable, between the theological language of scholastics and that of the humanists.

Hilmar Pabel relates Erasmus's irenicism to his ecclesiology, which sees the members of the church - clerical and lay - united in one body. Erasmus could not reconcile this unity with the development of sects. Pabel shows how Erasmus strove to restore concord at the moment the church was losing its ecumenical authority and how consensus among believers past and present should figure in doctrinal disputes.

In the first study of prefaces to Erasmus's patristic editions, Irena Backus holds that his view of the spirituality of the early church remained unchanged. She demonstrates how meaningful for his day was its toleration and its fluidity in regard to dogma. Backus is the first historian to examine how Erasmus's radical position on the Fathers figures in the controversy between Erasmus and Luther on the Explanatio symboli. She observes that Erasmus, in spite of his radical historiography, does not share the view of church doctrine of the "radical reformers."

Abbe Marc'hadour begins his essay on Holy Orders in the vision and practice of Erasmus, the anticlerical cleric, by maintaining his orthodoxy on the Eucharist, the unchanging core of Catholic spirituality. Relying on Erasmus's lives of Vitrier and Colet, Marc'hadour explains how a prudent kind of doctrine of reserve and not hypocrisy operates in Erasmus's view of the priestly office. He provides a wealth of interesting facts that enable us to see how Erasmus had to be disturbed by priestly behavior and at the same time could engage in some pious practices he had satirized.

Although the valuable bibliography omits Telle's contributions, we are in debt to these scholars who inform us so well about a crucial issue. Readers will profit from the explicit and implicit arguments denying Luther a roost in Erasmus's hatchery.

ROBERT COOGAN University of Maryland, College Park