Unfortunately, the volume did little to ease his financial woes. In those early years of printing, writers usually received no payment or royalties from publishers, only complimentary copies of the book that they could sell. Erasmus promptly sent off copies of the collection to several friends to peddle; hoping to stir interest, he got one friend to give public lectures on it in Paris. Sales lagged, however, and an acquaintance whom Erasmus had sent to England with a hundred copies disappeared. Even more disappointing was the reception by his fellow humanists. Erasmus’s commentaries were slight and the book was riddled with printer’s errors, and Robert Gaguin, among others, dismissed it as meager and formulaic. Stung, Erasmus immediately began collecting more adages with the intention of producing a new edition.
Thus began an enterprise that would occupy him for the rest of his life. In all, Erasmus would produce ten editions of the Adages, each thicker than the last, with commentaries that in some cases swelled into long essays stuffed with anecdotes, gossip, miscellaneous information, and opinions about religion, politics, and literature. The Adages would appear in sixty printings during Erasmus’s lifetime and another seventy-five in the seventeenth century. The work would be a key means by which Renaissance Europe assimilated knowledge of the ancient world—its agricultural practices, marriage customs, geography, literature, coins, laws, and superstitions, as well as such oddments as the Areopagites of Athens, the frogs of Seriphus, and the bald heads of the Myconians. Its future admirers would include Montaigne. “If anyone had taken me to see Erasmus in old days,” he wrote, “I should have expected nothing to fall from his lips but adages and maxims, even in speaking to his servants and the hostess of the inn.”
As was so often the case in these early years, however, the acclaim would come only later. Desperate to get something else into print, Erasmus resumed work on his guide to letter writing and his manual of style, but he made little headway. And he had a new worry: he learned that the bishop of Cambrai—annoyed at his remaining in Paris without permission—had sent someone to Paris with the task of “ferreting his way through all the secret places” of Erasmus’s life there. On top of it all, the city in the summer of 1500 was hit by the plague. Erasmus fled to Orléans, some sixty miles to the southwest, where he stayed with a friend.
There, he took up the urgent but unappetizing task of finding new patrons. That effort, documented in his letters, shows the humbling lengths to which independent writers had to go before the advent of foundations, fellowships, book advances, and writers’ colonies. His quarry was Lady Anna van Borssele, the wealthy daughter of a prominent Dutch nobleman living in a castle in Tournehem, two hundred miles to the north. Erasmus’s friend Jacob Batt, who was tutoring her son, informed him of her generosity toward scholars, and Erasmus pressed him to approach her on his behalf. Batt said that he should write to her directly. Erasmus testily replied that he did not have the time and again pushed Batt to help. Batt reluctantly agreed, but when a messenger arrived bearing only a few paltry coins, Erasmus exploded. He sent back detailed instructions on how Batt should approach the lady: he should tell her that “I am positively unable to live in miserable surroundings now that I have a literary reputation, such as it is,” and he should explain “how much greater is the glory she can acquire from me, by my literary works, than from the other theologians in her patronage,” since “there is everywhere a huge supply of such uneducated divines as these, while such a one as I am is scarcely found in many generations,” and so on.
This irked Batt even more. After Erasmus returned to Paris, in early 1501, he took Batt’s advice and wrote to Lady Anna directly. “No matter how many thunderbolts Fortune aims at me, I see no reason to abandon literature or lose heart so long as you shine, like an immovable polestar, to guide me on my way,” he trilled. Anna must have seen through him, however, for no more coins were forthcoming. Erasmus would have to grovel elsewhere.
He was faring much better in his efforts to learn Greek and read Scripture anew. In March 1501, Erasmus exulted to Antoon van Bergen, an abbot in Saint-Omer, about his “good fortune” in coming upon some Greek books, which he was secretly copying night and day. (Why secretly is not clear; perhaps he had intercepted a bundle intended for someone else.) Despite the “exorbitant fee,” he had decided to hire a Greek tutor for several months. Even with his primitive knowledge of Greek, he had come to see the truth of the claim made by many authors “that Latin scholarship, however elaborate, is maimed and reduced by half without Greek.” While the Latins “have but a few small streams, a few muddy pools, the Greeks possess crystal-clear springs and rivers that run with gold.” This was especially true for sacred texts. He could see what “utter madness” it was to study the mysteries of the faith “unless one is furnished with the equipment of Greek as well,” since the Latin translators of the Bible offered such literal versions of Greek idioms that, without a knowledge of that language, no one could grasp their true meaning.
As an example, he offered a phrase from the Latin version of the Psalms: Et peccatum meum contra me est semper—“And my sin is ever against me.” Many theologians in interpreting this, he wrote, would launch into “a long story about how the flesh wages an endless war with the spirit.” But an examination of the Greek word underlying contra—enopion—showed that the intended sense of the preposition was not “against” but “before,” so that the passage would more accurately read, “And my sin is continually before me.” In other words, the writer of the psalm meant that his guilt displeased him so much that he never lost consciousness of it but had it always “in his view, as if it were physically present.”
This was an important breakthrough for Erasmus. By looking past the Latin to the underlying Greek, he was able to push beyond the convoluted explanations of the subtle doctors to what seemed a more correct reading. That, in turn, pointed toward a more commonsense interpretation of the relationship between guilt and sin than they favored. Such discoveries made Erasmus think that he was on the right track. Through a mastery of Greek grammar, syntax, and vocabulary, he hoped to free the words of the evangelists and the apostles from the dead hand of the sophists; by thus purifying the biblical text, he hoped to revitalize the faith itself.
That undertaking was full of peril, however. For the Latin version of the Bible—known as the Vulgate (from Vulgata editio, or common edition)—was considered inviolable by the Church. For more than a thousand years, it had served as the scriptural foundation of Western Christianity. When, after the fall of Rome, missionaries headed into the barbarian hinterland, it was the Vulgate they carried with them. When Abelard, Aquinas, and Scotus formulated their theorems, they did so in its Latin. Many Church doctrines and sacraments, including original sin, penance, marriage, and the Trinity, were based on specific words and phrases in the Vulgate. Its text was thought to have been produced under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, its every word sanctified by God. The very authority of the Church, and the social order it embodied, rested on this document.
Yet a close inspection of the Vulgate raised obvious questions about its hallowed status. For the text was full of spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and clumsy constructions. Lines were repeated. Homonyms were confused. In some places, words seemed to have been inserted out of nowhere, turning passages into nonsense; in others, key terms were omitted or mangled. At John 5:2, for instance, the Vulgate gave the name of the pool in Jerusalem not as Bethesda (Hebrew for “house of mercy”) but Bethsaida (a town in Galilee meaning “house of fishing”). At Acts 28:1, some versions had Paul shipwrecked not at Melita (Malta) but at Mytilene (on the island of Lesbos), Melitus (in ancient Ionia), or Melitene (a city on the Euphrates River). Such variations were not surprising; prior to the advent of printing in the 1450s, the Vulgate had been transcribed exclusively by hand and so had suffered from the same carelessness and wandering attention that had produced errors in secular manuscripts.
That the Vulgate New Testament was a translation from Greek introduced another level
of distortion. From his studies, Erasmus knew how hard it is to turn ancient Greek into good Latin. One verb tense in Greek, the optative, has no equivalent in Latin. While Greek uses articles (both definite and indefinite), Latin does not, forcing the translator to resort to various expedients, some more fitting than others. Greek similarly uses the final infinitive (expressing a goal or intention), while Latin does not, and the Greek partiality to participles resulted in a concision of expression not always easily reproduced in Latin. Prepositions pose a particular challenge, since the meaning of each changes with the context. The Greek word dia, for instance, could mean “by,” “in,” “through,” “before,” or “because of.” By mastering Greek, Erasmus hoped to identify and clarify these slips and ambiguities.
It was the prospect of such tampering that so unnerved conservative churchmen. By consulting Greek versions of the Scriptures, Erasmus would be in a position to suggest readings at variance with those sanctioned by Rome and consecrated by centuries of use. The Greek text of the New Testament was itself shunned as the heterodox product of a church (the Greek Orthodox) considered schismatic. Greek was seen as the language of troublemaking theologians like Arius and Origen, of licentious writers like Sappho and Epicurus, of Neoplatonists seeking to overthrow the Scholastic master, Aristotle.
Greek, in short, was seen as an agent of subversion. That, however, only enhanced its appeal for Erasmus. Along with his own studies, he began a more general effort to promote the language, touting the merits of its best authors and urging his friends to learn it. Keeping at it for the rest of his life, Erasmus would through this campaign have a profound impact on Western culture, making the study of Greek seem progressive, avant-garde, fashionable.
Nowadays, Erasmus observed in his letter to Antoon van Bergen, “we are perfectly satisfied with the most elementary rudiments of Latin, no doubt because we are convinced that we can get everything out of Scotus, as a sort of horn of plenty.” As for himself, he was determined to pursue his program to learn Greek and read Scripture afresh—“the path to which I am beckoned by St. Jerome and the glorious choir of all those ancient writers.”
The reference to Jerome signaled the other great project Erasmus had embarked on in this period—restoring the reputation of that saint. Along with Augustine, Ambrose, and Gregory the Great, Jerome was one of the four great “Doctors” of the Western Church, whose authority was second only to Scripture itself. Of them, Jerome was the most learned, the best trained in languages, the most elegant stylist. During his lifetime (c. 347 to 420), he produced an astonishing array of biblical commentaries, theological tracts, pamphlets, sermons, polemics, prefaces, manuals, and letters—all featuring his distinctive blend of soaring imagery, thunderous proclamation, and acerbic sarcasm. In addition to his command of Latin, Jerome was one of the few Westerners of his day to know Greek. Even more exceptionally, he knew Hebrew and so was a trilinguist—a master of the three main biblical tongues. (He also knew Aramaic and Syriac.) Drawing on this facility, Jerome was the greatest translator of antiquity. He was, in fact, the principal translator of the Bible into Latin. The Vulgate was generally known as “Jerome’s Bible,” and, despite the many errors that had disfigured it over the centuries, it retained the marks of Jerome’s flair for languages, his vast knowledge of the Bible and the Holy Land, and his immersion in classical literature.
As Erasmus waded into the treacherous waters of biblical commentary and translation, he found in Jerome both a precedent and an inspiration. Just as the eloquent Doctor had used his knowledge of Greek and Hebrew to produce the Bible of the medieval Church, so was Erasmus now studying Greek to recover the true spirit of the text.
Jerome’s reputation as a scholar had faded during the Middle Ages, eclipsed by that of his contemporary Augustine, the preeminent theologian of the medieval Church. To the extent that Jerome was honored, it was not for his scholarship but for his piety. As a young man, he had lived as a hermit in the Syrian Desert, sleeping on the ground and wearing rags in an effort to repent for his earlier high living in Rome. In the fourteenth century, as saint veneration surged, Jerome became the center of an ardent cult. The story was told of how one day he had been approached by a lion who seemed in great pain. Examining the lion’s paws, Jerome found a thorn stuck in one of them and removed it. Thereafter, the grateful lion never left his side. This became a metaphor for Jerome’s success in taming the beast within man. Special healing powers were ascribed to Jerome’s relics, and his image began appearing on canvases and church walls, usually as a gaunt, half-clad penitent expiating his sins in the desert.
In the fifteenth century, though, humanists—seeking sanction for their own sacred studies—began reviving Jerome’s image as a scholar. He was honored as the patron saint of universities, libraries, and translators. In a resplendent 1475 portrait, Antonello da Messina showed Jerome, draped in a cardinal’s red robes, sitting at his desk in rapt contemplation of a large folio volume, his immense and airy study radiating out around him. Standing in the foreground is a peacock, symbolizing paradise; the docile lion has been pushed off into the shadows. The painting is an iconographic representation of the Christian Father as a scholar-saint, joining wisdom and holiness in the pursuit of spiritual enlightenment.
Eager to hasten the recovery of Jerome the scholar and restore his place in the Christian pantheon, Erasmus set out to edit his letters. About 150 had survived, making them one of the four richest caches from ancient times (along with those of Cicero, Seneca, and Pliny the Younger). Jerome’s letters offered a remarkable look at the state of the Church in its formative years, when it was taking root in the Roman Empire and its core doctrines and rituals were being debated and defined.
This was the patristic era. Coming after the apostolic age, it was dominated by the Fathers (patres in Latin)—sixty-five or so scholars, monks, and theologians, some writing in Latin and others in Greek, who, in the second through the sixth centuries, provided in their tracts, commentaries, and letters the foundation for the Church as it pushed to fill the vacuum left by the collapse of the empire. To Erasmus and other humanists, these men showed how scholarship and devotion could be combined in a program far more enriching than the speculative labors of the Scholastics.
While at Steyn, Erasmus had copied out all of Jerome’s letters by hand—quite a feat, since some are the length of small books. Unfortunately, the letters, like almost all of Jerome’s works, had become corrupted, mutilated, and “filled with mistakes and monstrosities” through “ignorance of classical antiquity and Greek,” as Erasmus wrote. He planned not only to edit the letters but also to elucidate them in a great commentary so that “every reader in his study” would come to recognize the greatness of this Church Father, “the only scholar in the church universal who had a perfect command of all learning both sacred and heathen.”
The editing of Jerome’s letters, and the broader effort to revive his reputation, would absorb Erasmus for years. The project was in many ways critical to his own career. As the revered translator of the Bible into Latin, Jerome could provide cover for Erasmus’s efforts to repair the Vulgate. More generally, his combining of scholarship and piety and his use of classical literature to enhance Christian understanding could serve as a model for Erasmus’s own work in scriptural studies.
As models went, however, Jerome was far from ideal. For all his saintly eminence, he was vain, impulsive, combustible, and vindictive. Given to extreme opinions, he spent much of his life pursuing quarrels and vendettas. The same proficiency in language that made him such a skilled translator also made him a master of insult and invective. In this, he was not atypical of the Church Fathers. The patristic era that Erasmus and other humanists so romanticized was one of the most contentious and volatile in the history of the Church. Like Renaissance thinkers in general, Erasmus, in seeking to recover this figure from the past, would have to refashion him to serve his own needs.
That task was especially delicate in light of Jerome’s work as a Bibl
e translator. The Vulgate bore the imprint of not only his eloquence and erudition but also his temperament and prejudices. Many of the problems that Erasmus was uncovering in this hallowed text could be traced back to the very man he so enthusiastically embraced.
Jerome got his charge to translate the Bible (or at least part of it) from Pope Damasus I, an imperious and charismatic Iberian who devoted his pontificate (366 to 384) to strengthening the claim of the Roman See to supremacy within Christendom. He restored the catacombs, organized the papal archives, commissioned many new churches, and gave his household the trappings of an imperial court. In addition to thus enhancing the Church’s physical presence, Damasus wanted to strengthen its scriptural foundation.
At the time, the Latin Bible used by the Roman Church was in disarray. The New Testament had first been translated from Greek into Latin around the year 200, probably in northern Africa. Other translations followed in Italy, Gaul, and Spain. Each of these regional translations (which together are known as the Vetus Latina, or Old Latin edition) quickly developed its own character. As these versions were carried elsewhere, they became mixed with other readings when new copies were made. With each copy, scribal errors were introduced. Because Christians in the third and early fourth centuries had to operate underground, most copyists were amateurs working in secret, causing slips to multiply. What’s more, the New Testament was then considered a “living text,” with scribes feeling free to improve on it not only grammatically and stylistically but also theologically. Orally transmitted stories, passages from the liturgy, and clauses designed to combat heresy were all incorporated into the biblical text.
Fatal Discord Page 12