Temporum ruina: that is the keynote of Erasmus' philology and the trope that keeps him shoulder to shoulder with earlier Renaissance restorers of ancient culture.
Now, however, the culture is both specifically Christian in content and clearly demarcated in time. Reading Jerome after Petrarch and Valla, Erasmus made a gap in the history of western Christianity that had never loomed so large before. The theological and ecclesiastical consequences were momentous. Even if Erasmus is rarely taken for an ecclesiastical historian, his schemes undoubtedly influenced the historical consciousness of such Protestant reformers as Melanchthon and Flacius, as well as that of their Roman Catholic opponents, including the great Baronius (Ferguson 1948: 39-46; Backus 2003: 326-91). That a later historian like Tillemont should have confined himself to the ecclesiastical history of les six premiers si'ecles may also be set down partly to Erasmus’ account: it was he who entrenched the division between the Age of the Fathers and what followed. The formidable patristic scholarship of the Benedictines of St. Maur, which Tillemont exploited and Gibbon admired, likewise drew much of its inspiration from Erasmus’ work as an editor of the Fathers.
Erasmus also holds in suspense for a while the nostalgia for ancient Rome. Unlike Petrarch, Valla, or Gibbon, he has no vision of the Capitol. The objects left behind by time’s ruin he sees as monumenta in an exclusively textual sense: monuments of human learning and divinely derived wisdom made available once more through the medium of pure and eloquent Latin ‘‘letters.’’ His work on Jerome and the New Testament is exemplary. Both sets of texts were to be made to speak again with the accents of their authors, in spite of the hazards of transmission; but they could speak only as texts. When Erasmus writes of bringing ‘‘Jerome’’ to life again, he has no thought of summoning a ghost: his ‘‘Jerome’’ is a creation of the written and printed page. And even there, ‘‘Hieronymus’’ is not a living person in the way ‘‘Augustinus’’ could be imagined by a reader of Petrarch. Master of the dialogue, Erasmus never represents himself in conversation with a church Father. Nor, as theorist and practitioner of the familiar letter, has he any time for the impersonations of ‘‘Eusebius,’’ ‘‘Augustine,’’ and ‘‘Cyril’’ that had kept Jerome’s presence alive at Santa Maria Maggiore.
Erasmus’ return ad fontes is largely free of nostalgia for lost worlds and of the ordinary delusions of the ‘‘metaphysics of presence.’’ Jerome belonged to a time and culture long gone and now wholly inaccessible. What contemporaries still had, Erasmus insisted, were the texts - tools for a modern transformation of Christendom. His ideal city was not a reborn Rome or any other fantasy of the ‘‘archaeological’’ imagination, but a Christian community of letters. We glimpse it in his colloquy on ‘‘The Religious Feast’’ (Boyle 1977: 129-41). ‘‘What is a state [civitas],’’ he asks a Benedictine monk, ‘‘but a huge monastery?’’ (Ep. 858, Allen, iii. 376; O’Malley 1988: 97). He explained in the edition of Jerome that the uncorrupted monastic ideal of civilization was now represented solely by Christian writings from the fourth and early fifth centuries. These were products of a short-lived late Roman environment, which Henri-Irenee Marrou would one day call ‘‘the culture of the Theopolis’’ (Marrou 1949: 694-5; Vessey 1998: 388-90). As first surveyor of the (Christian) monuments of that always unreal city, Erasmus has the best claim of any Renaissance or ‘‘early modern’’ man to have anticipated our latter-day science of‘‘Late Antiquity.’’
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
The mid - to late twentieth-century rise of ‘‘Late Antiquity’’ as, in part, a replacement formula for ‘‘the decline and fall of the Roman Empire’’ runs parallel with a critique of‘‘the Renaissance’’ that has led to the rise of ‘‘early modernity’’ as a cross-disciplinary concept. Any approach to these periodizations must still take account of such classics as Ferguson 1948, Panofsky 1960, Weiss 1969, and, in smaller compass, Burke 1969. Renaissance visions of the end of Rome and the later period of ancient culture are finely if cursorily treated in the longer surveys of D’Elia 1967 and Demandt 1984. The present essay owes much to the spirit of recent, conservatively revisionist work on early modern cultivations of a ‘‘classical’’ past, as represented by Grafton 1992, 2001, Barkan 1999, and the 1998 American Historical Review forum on ‘‘The Persistence of the Renaissance’’ (here Findlen 1998 and Gouwens 1998). For the patristic or early Christian literary dimension of the relationship, Jardine 1993 blazes a trail that others have just begun to follow.
World History
