The Cave and the Light

by Arthur Herman

  Those feelings of inadequacy had haunted him almost from the moment he had become an Augustinian monk five years earlier. Who was he, miserable sinner that he was, to preach the word of God; to hear confessions and administer last rites; or even to touch the body and blood of Christ in saying the Holy Mass? Nothing had seemed to relieve that terrible burden and frightening responsibility.

  Now, as he returned to Wittenberg to prepare lectures on the Bible and theology for his bored and restless students, his harrowing experiences in Rome made certain passages from Scripture leap off the page at him. One in particular left him transfixed, a passage from the letters of Saint Paul (Romans 1:17): “The just shall live by faith.”

  All at once, the powerful simplicity of the message struck home. All the pilgrimages and penances and vows and giving alms to the poor and climbing sacred stairs hadn’t relieved his guilt, because they didn’t count. It was faith, and faith alone, the confident resolute belief that Jesus Christ was his Redeemer, that made the righteous “live” through salvation and that finally lifted the veil of sin from the human soul.

  “The just shall live by faith.” In other words, no relic, no person, no priest, not even the pope himself, could absolve anyone from sin, because such forgiveness was beyond the power of any mortal creature. Only God could do that, and only those who believed in Him with all their hearts would receive that absolution. In fact, there was no other kind of righteousness except through God.5

  If that was true, then why had everyone else, including centuries of theologians, gotten it so wrong? How had the Church, after being founded on that rock of faith, gotten so far off track? Suddenly, Martin Luther thought he knew.

  Sitting on his bookshelf were the works of Aristotle and his scholastic followers: William of Ockham, Duns Scotus, and Luther’s own mentor Gabriel Biel. These were the vaunted intellectual giants of the medieval Church. He himself had taught their ideas for years, along with the works of Aristotle. Indeed, as Martin Luther would write later, “I have read [Aristotle] and studied him with more understanding than did Saint Thomas Aquinas or Duns Scotus.”6 However, by adopting Aristotle’s view of man and nature, the Church’s leading spokesmen had set that institution down the wrong path for centuries.

  “It pains me to the heart,” Luther wrote, “that this damnable arrogant pagan rascal has seduced and fooled so many of the best Christians with his misleading writings,” especially the Physics and Metaphysics and On the Soul. It was time to shove these works aside and start over with Holy Scripture, and Holy Scripture alone. Time to clean house, intellectually and spiritually.

  Gazing at the volumes on his shelf, “I cannot avoid believing,” Luther mused, “that it was Satan himself who introduced the study of Aristotle.”7

  The scholarly output on Martin Luther and the Reformation fills entire libraries. The most recent popular “survey” of the period runs to some eight hundred pages.8 So how does this extraordinary episode in the history of the West fit into the story of the clash between Plato and Aristotle?

  The answer comes from Martin Luther himself. His first breach with the Church did not come with his famous Ninety-five Theses, which he posted on the Wittenberg church door on October 31, 1517. It came almost two months earlier, on September 4, when he published another set of theses, Disputation Against Scholastic Theology, which are less well-known but nearly as explosive.

  They asserted that a Christianity founded on the spiritual power of God’s grace—in effect Christianity in its Platonized form as received from Saint Augustine—and the view of law and nature derived from Aristotle could never be reconciled. “The whole Aristotelian ethic,” Luther wrote, “is grace’s worst enemy.” And so as the tidal wave of Reformation overwhelmed the heart of Europe and changed its religious and cultural contours forever, it also swept Aristotle almost out of sight.

  Plato’s own legacy benefited from this shift in Western civilization’s intellectual balance. But it was not its cause. If any single factor really doomed Aristotle as the Middle Ages had known him, and helped reformers like Martin Luther shove him to the sidelines, it was the invention of printing.

  Of course, historians have told us at least since the eighteenth century that the printing press triggered a revolution in Western civilization, but not always why. The use of movable type to produce printed books transformed intellectual life not because it meant more copies of a book, but because it meant identical copies. As printing pioneers like Germany’s Gutenberg and England’s William Caxton soon realized, every page seven of a printed copy looks exactly like every other copy’s page seven, without variation. This was something not possible even for the most careful and methodical scribe.9

  Even if the printer or editor made a mistake on the first pass, his assistants could quickly correct it with a single shift of a piece of type—just one more reason why proofreaders are vital to the advance of civilization.† The process meant that every reader of a printed book could now read the same words or see the same image as every other reader; and that those words were as close as humanly possible to what the author had actually written. The same applied to dictionaries, maps, calendars, and other reference works and every translation of those works—as readers of Martin Luther’s translation of the New Testament into German in 1522 were to find out.

  It was like new sunlight breaking over the intellectual landscape. “Now all disciplines are restored,” enthused the French writer François Rabelais, “the study of languages revived.… The whole world is full of learned men, of very erudite tutors, of very ample libraries; and it is my opinion that neither in the time of Plato, of Cicero, nor of Papinian, were there such facilities for study as we see now.”10 No wonder Rabelais saw printing as divinely inspired and saw it as the perfect antidote to the kind of highly imperfect education he had received from his scholastic masters at the University of Poitiers.

  The printed book doomed the Aristotle of the medieval schoolmen. It ended his intellectual monopoly first of all because now authors appeared in print almost with the same relative ease as they appear online today. These included not only Plato but intriguing and hitherto remote figures like the poet Lucian; dramatists Terence and Sophocles; historians Plutarch and Tacitus and Josephus; and philosophers such as the Stoic Seneca and the Skeptic Sextus Empiricus.

  In the preprint days, just trying to “read” Plato’s Republic was a monumental undertaking. It might take a scholar to three or four different cities, as it did Ficino and Leonardo Bruni, and to a series of dank monastic libraries, in order to collate various incomplete manuscript versions. Then came the work of trying to decipher the original text buried beneath the omissions or finger faults of ignorant or careless scribes.

  Now in the privacy of your own home, you had the text correct, complete, and whole—pure and uncorrupted, as Renaissance scholars liked to say. The era of having to rely on untrustworthy handwritten manuscripts, or some medieval glossator who spent a lifetime trying to make sense of an often muddled or even counterfeit manuscript of Aristotle, was over. So was the age of the classroom commentator. The age of the érudit, the antiquarian, and the man of letters was about to begin.11

  In the long term, the print revolution turned out to be a boon for Aristotle. His works could be studied by more readers than ever, in cleaned-up versions. Apocryphal works and even outright forgeries (like the fake Aristotelian Theology) were eliminated. But in the short term, it exposed the shortcomings of those who had relied on him as the ultimate authority on everything, especially in universities. Reformation scholars not only had more books, but had their time freed up to ponder, to cross-reference, and to set texts side by side. Thanks to printing, “contradictions became more visible, divergent traditions more difficult to reconcile”—and innovations faster to catch on.12 The authority of Aristotle gave way to the authority of the printed word, including the Word of God.

  The man who discovered the power behind that authority was not Gutenberg or Caxton or even Luther.
It was Erasmus of Rotterdam. Later, some would say Erasmus “laid the egg that Luther hatched.” This is not true. But Erasmus was the first to slay the scholastic giant—and he used the sword of Renaissance Platonism to do it.

  Europe’s most famous scholar was born in 1469, fourteen years after Gutenberg began producing his first printed Vulgate Bible. That book, as it happened, would be at the center of Erasmus’s career as well as Luther’s.

  Erasmus grew up at a school at Steyn run by the Brethren of the Common Life, where his teachers steeped him in all the themes of the devotio moderna and Neoplatonic mystical piety. The focus on the inner emotions of belief, on the “life in Christ” as the highest expression of our spiritual essence and the highest form of wisdom, and on Holy Scripture as the primary authority on a devout life all became the guiding principles of his life and career.

  The school’s headmaster also gave him a passion for reading the ancient classics, especially Cicero.13 In the 1480s, the only outlet for a boy with intellectual gifts but no connections (Erasmus was illegitimate) was the Church—even for a boy who was the illegitimate son of a priest. He entered the same order as Martin Luther, the Augustinians. But unlike Luther, Erasmus never felt any need to cleanse away an overwhelming sense of sin. Instead, his one wish always was to surround himself with good books and intelligent companions; to walk in a sunlit garden and discuss Cicero and the ancient poets; in short, to read, write, and dream.

  All these were in short supply in the monastery at Steyn. When Erasmus got his first opportunity to escape and pursue studies abroad, he took it. He went first to the University of Paris, which he found was hardly better than his monastery, and then to England and Oxford, where he met the scholar who would change his life.

  As a university, Oxford had not come very far from the days of Ockham and Roger Bacon; in fact, it had largely regressed. Few students or teachers were interested in Cicero or Erasmus’s other literary heroes. There was, however, a new teacher at Magdalen College named John Colet, who had immersed himself in the humanism coming out of Italy and its Platonist themes. He and Erasmus found an instant harmony. In listening to Colet speak, Erasmus wrote later, he “seemed to be listening to Plato himself.”14

  This is not surprising. Colet was in regular contact with Marsilio Ficino, and he shared the same fascination as the Florentine for the parallels between Platonism and Christianity.15 However, Colet picked up Ficino’s Platonic Theology at the other, Christian end. He paid less attention to how Plato had foreshadowed the message of the Gospels than to how that message could and should be read in a bright Platonist light.

  Reading it was part of the difficulty. Greek and Latin are what is called inflected languages, from the point of view of grammar. The ending of a word, and not (as in English or German) the word’s position in the sentence, determines its meaning, even whether the word is the sentence’s subject or object—or whether it is singular or plural. So changing just a single letter—for example, -am to -ae in Latin, or -eiv to -ouv in Greek—can turn the meaning of a sentence inside out.

  That’s precisely what centuries of ill-trained, inattentive, or just tired and bored monks and scribes had done to virtually every ancient text, including the Bible. As the first humanists in Italy discovered, recovering the original textual meaning required a combination of hard work and grammatical skill, ranging from collating as many copies as possible in order to learn which had the fewest mistakes, and where later copying errors had come from; to a fine-tuned sense of which word or grammatical form an author like Cicero or Plato might have used, in a given time and place—a medieval scribe’s mistakes notwithstanding.

  Over time Ficino, Colet, and their colleagues raised the art of recovering a corrupt text’s lost meaning to a science, which they called philology. Cleaning up and clearing up the written works of antiquity became an Italian, and Florentine, specialty, as philology uncovered new or startling meanings in even the most familiar documents—as trained philologist Lorenzo Valla learned as papal secretary in 1440, when his rigorous examination of the so-called Donation of Constantine revealed it to be a forgery. It was bad news for the papacy but good news for Valla’s integrity as a scholar—and for the growing reputation of philology as the latchkey for unlocking the truth.

  For Colet, philology was only a means to understand one text in particular, the Bible. In his eyes, the New Testament revealed how faith in Christ was the sublime example of the soul’s striving for a higher transcendent truth, and how that faith could lead the soul upward to redemption and union with God. Colet’s sermons revealed to Erasmus for the first time a Neoplatonist message as old as Origen: that the path to salvation lay inward as a form of personal enlightenment rather than (or at least not exclusively) in outward rites and rituals.

  It was also Colet who suggested to Erasmus that he fuse his two interests, the Bible and ancient literature, into one. He urged him to do for ancient Christian literature, including the New Testament, what Ficino had done for Plato: use the techniques of philology to produce a clean, definitive text free from copyists’ errors and scholastic muddles, a “pure Scripture” that would show people what the Bible really said, not what tradition or the allegorists said it meant. By doing so, Colet urged, Erasmus could point others to the true spirit of Christianity and the true path to salvation.

  To make this his life’s work, Erasmus needed three things. He needed to learn Greek to read the New Testament—which, with immense difficulty and effort, he ended up having to teach himself. Second, he had to go to Italy, to study and absorb the emerging science of philology. This he did in 1506, stopping first at the University of Turin to receive a degree as doctor of theology, which licensed him to study and write on religious topics.16

  The final thing Erasmus needed was a way to get his message out, to reveal the spiritual riches of the Bible and the Church Fathers to Western Christendom. He found that in the spring in 1507, when he arrived in Venice and walked into the print shop of the most able and profitable publisher in Italy, Aldus Manutius.

  From the start, it was a perfect partnership. For the next decade and a half, we have to imagine Europe’s most distinguished humanist doing almost all his writing in Aldus’s workshop (and later that of Johann Froben in Basel), with the printing press clanking in the background. Erasmus would write out virtually everything from memory. Then he handed his manuscript to the printer, supervised the setting of the type, and finally corrected the pages as they came off the press. “Aldus kept me so busy,” Erasmus remembered later, “I didn’t have time to scratch my ears.”

  After a while, the Hollander got other eminent scholars to step in and do the correcting. Even Aldus Manutius himself took time from his busy publishing schedule to act as Erasmus’s proofreader. “Why?” the astonished scholar asked him. “Because that way I can learn at the same time,” Aldus replied.17

  One by one, Erasmus’s works poured out and were handed over to Venetian merchants, who loaded them aboard ships and pack mules to carry to every city in Europe. Aldus Manutius’s Aldine Press made Erasmus the first writer to earn a living with his pen. This was no mean feat since his books were all written in Latin, which meant they could be read everywhere but only by a small minority.

  The first was his Adages, a digest of quotations from classical Latin authors and Greek authors translated into Latin, an early Bartlett’s Quotations which other scholars could use to perfect an elegant Latin style. The Adages did more than any other single book to introduce the insights of classical antiquity, including Plato, to a wide reading public—and to make Erasmus’s reputation as the best scholar of his day.18

  Then came an edition of Saint Jerome’s letters; the Enchiridion, Erasmus’s own guide to a Christian “purpose-driven life” (and heavily influenced by Pico’s Oration on the Dignity of Man) and finally a translation of the New Testament in 1516. By exposing many of the errors of the old Latin Vulgate, Erasmus established a new appreciation for “pure Scripture” as the final
authority on all things spiritual as well as many secular.

  However, none of these compared with the success of the work that he wrote in 1509 after returning briefly to England, the satire that made him Christendom’s biggest bestselling author: In Praise of Folly.

  The book is an imaginary conversation with the goddess Moria (in Latin, Folly or Stupidity), in which she sings the praises of her devotees, who turn out to be members of the conventional medieval establishment. They include kings and popes and bishops and Erasmus’s fellow monks, but above all, the university followers of Aristotle. Erasmus never goes after Aristotle directly, but for the rest—“realists, nominalists, Thomists, Albertists, Occamists and Scotists”—he accuses them of poisoning the true message of Christianity with “their syllogisms, major and minor, conclusions, corollaries, idiotic hypotheses, and further scholastic rubbish.”

  Desiderius Erasmus (1483–1536): Plato and the printing press turned him into the world’s first bestselling author.

  As Erasmus wrote, “The language of truth is always simple, says Seneca: well then, nothing is simpler or truer than Christ.” However, the Aristotelians’ formal logic and “torturous obscurities” had sullied that simplicity and truth, he asserted. “What, I ask you, has Christ to do with Aristotle, or the mysteries of eternal wisdom with subtle sophistry?”19 The answer, Erasmus affirmed, was to get back to the original source of that faith, the Bible. The whole point of education should be learning the languages and skills needed for unlocking its message, especially a good grounding in Greek and Latin. Only then can the soul’s desire for the highest wisdom finally be set free.