Erasmus and the Middle Ages: The Historical Consciousness of a Christian Humanist. (Reviews).

Istvan Bejczy, Erasmus and the Middle Ages: The Historical Consciousness of a Christian Humanist

Brill's Studies in Intellectual History, 106. Leiden: Brill, 2001. xvii + 202 pp. n.p. ISBN: 90-04-12218-4.

Bejczy examines Erasmus' view of the Christian historical past and present and compares it with Erasmus' program of advancing piety by restoring classical literary culture to education and theological scholarship. In three chapters he reviews Erasmus' expressed attitudes about the state of good letters and Christian spiritual life during the patristic age, the age of monasticism (sixth to twelfth centuries), and the four hundred years of Aristotelian scholasticism to his own times. Bejczy argues that to Erasmus none of these is a model for Christendom because each exhibited decay in piety and morals or in intellectual powers, or both. Yet even the last can be honored for handing on the faith to the best of its severely limited ability. What Erasmus fails to see, according to Bejczy, is that by his own reckoning there was no historical correlation between the state of literary culture and the state of the faith, so that his own observations do not justify his conviction that Christian humanism can reverse the perceived decline. The next two chapters focus on the restoration Erasmus tried to effect, examining first his optimism about his own humanistic achievements and how they might propel Christian renewal and then his annotations to the New Testament with revised Vulgate and Greek text (1516, with revisions in 1519, 1522, 1527, and 1535). Bejczy concludes that Erasmus had a progressive view of future (though not of past) history and that the New Testament edition, Erasmus' claims to the contrary, was a deliberate novelty expressing his own stylistic preferences, not a true restoration of the original. The final chapter, pulling together elements of a sub-theme in several earlier ones, describes how Erasmus moderated his hostility to scholasticism after 1520, as the rising reform movements threatened Christian unity. A short conclusion sums up the persisting ambiguities in Erasmus' historical thinking: timeless truths and inevitable change over time, restoration versus renewal, belief, though not borne out by obs ervations of the past, in a necessary link between cultural and spiritual ideals.

There is much to admire in this book. It is based on a thorough knowledge of Erasmus works, especially the polemical and apologetic ones. In raising the question of Erasmus' historical consciousness it resumes an area of investigation not fully addressed since Myron Gilmore (in Humanists and Jurists, Cambridge MA, 1963) and Peter Bietenholz (Biography and History in Erasmus of Rotterdam, Geneva, 1966). The arguments against the simplistic view that Erasmus turned into a pessimist after 1520 (118-28 and chap. 6) are convincing. Yet some things provoke the reader's unease.

For instance, Bejczy's examination of the New Testament annotations and edition is based on Henk de Jonge's conclusion in 1984 that "the final result centred around [Erasmus'] Latin translation" (133, n. 24). Others take a more moderate view (e.g. Erika Rummel, Erasmus' Annotations on the New Testament, Toronto, 1986) or forbear to discuss the question (P. Hovingh, ed. Adnotationes in Novum Testamentum (Pars prima) ASD VI-5, Amsterdam 2000, 4, n. 55). It does seem that the main thrust of Erasmus' work was annotating the Vulgate text, explaining where and why the Vulgate misrepresented, in grammar, content, or style, the Greek texts he saw, as Lorenzo Valla had done before him. Restoration and renovation may not have been to Erasmus the opposites Bejczy would have them be; the Christian theological treatment of moral and spiritual renovation or restoration may have made him see the concepts as more synonymous than antonymous. Bejczy also discounts Erasmus' claims that his version was intended not to supplant t he text recognized by the Church and used in the liturgy but for private reading and study and to foster discussion and reflection. Similarly, Bejczy's view of Erasmus as nearly a believer in historical progress (124-28), based on statements in his letters and books, does not allow for a churchman's or rhetorician's duty to express pious hopes for the future.

The book, while not completely satisfying, is a valuable challenge in at least two ways: it shows the need for continuing close studies, even old-fashioned philological spadework, on the daunting mass of Erasmus' works; and it calls for renewed consideration of his ambivalent relationship with the medieval past.