La Teologia e la Grammatica: La Controversia tra Erasmo ed Edward Lee.

At the beginning of Erasmus and His Catholic Critics (1989), Erika Rummel remarks that "the controversies remain among the most neglected pieces in the corpus of his writings" (1:ix). Cecilia Asso's book, appearing close on the heels of Robert Coogan's study of the same controversy (Erasmus, Lee and the Correction of the Vulgate: The Shaking of the Foundations, 1992), marks the new interest the controversies are generating for Erasmus scholars. Both works provide a welcome opportunity to examine the controversy with Lee in depth.

Edward Lee (1482-1544) was a young English scholar, who first met Erasmus in Louvain. In 1517 Erasmus invited him to comment on his Annotations as he began preparing a revision of his New Testament. Erasmus subsequently claimed that Lee set out to issue a detailed, hostile critique of his work, while Lee claimed that he was only trying to be conscientious in honoring Erasmus's request. Whatever Lee's intentions may have been, their exchange soon developed into a major quarrel.

Asso's book sets out to demonstrate that the dispute is far more than a discussion of techniques of philology, for as Asso puts it, "the controversy between Erasmus and Lee . . . is based for the most part on a theoretical discussion of such fundamental problems as the value of tradition, the significance of the institutional church, the organization of the church itself and above all, in close relationship with the other themes, the very foundation of the Christian religion, that is the nature of Christ." Through a study of the controversy, we can see how Erasmus's rereading of the Greek codices and philological critique of the Vulgate had implications that were "the seeds of a religious revolution" (10).

As a preliminary to her discussion of Lee, Asso reviews the earlier controversy with Maarten van Dorp, which gave rise to Erasmus's famous comment that only those who know Greek may call themselves theologians (Ep. 337). This is no mere exhortation to learn Greek; rather, Asso claims that such statements "remove scholastic theology from the number of possible roads to the knowledge of God" (23). She begins by chronicling the events of the dispute, proceeding from there to an examination of the core issues: the shaping of doctrine by tradition and philology, the scriptural basis for the sacraments, and christology. From a careful examination of how each of the two interpreted key passages of Scripture, Asso documents a dispute in which divergent theoretical presuppositions about how to use language led to a complete breakdown in communication, even though the adversaries were speaking the same tongue.

Erasmus and Lee both believed in the sacred origin and status of Scripture. For Lee, that status was embodied in the text of the Vulgate, which had provided the basis for church doctrine and governance for centuries. Erasmus saw the sacred origin as having been polluted by centuries of textual errors, and looked to the Greek manuscripts as a means of retrieving the original sense. Lee saw no reason to prefer Greek codices to the Vulgate, but saw many reasons for protecting the Vulgate against the alterations what were the result of Erasmus's researches - for example, the famous instance of Erasmus's retranslation of the beginning of the Fourth Gospel as "In principio erat sermo," or his elimination of the "comma Johanneum." The title of Asso's third chapter, "Sacramenti e Adiaphora," highlights the fact that what were for Lee the holy mysteries became matters indifferent to the substance of the faith as a result of Erasmus's emendations.

In sum, this book amply demonstrates the significance of the controversies for understanding the theological implications of Erasmus's New Testament scholarship.

Laurel Carrington ST. OLAF COLLEGE