Our story ends with Erasmus’ monumental edition of the works of Jerome (Basel, 1516). Neither this enterprise nor the edition of the New Testament that he
Produced in the same year would have been conceivable without the teaching and example of Valla. Erasmus (1466-1536) came early to the Elegantiae and swallowed it whole. He took Valla not only as an arbiter of Latinity but also as a guide to the cultural history of the west. ‘‘Who is so small-minded,’’ he asked in a letter of 1490, ‘‘as not to accord generous praise and the warmest possible affection to Valla, who bestowed such intense industry, application, and exertion in combating the follies of the barbarians and rescuing literature [litterae] from extinction?’’ (Ep. 26, ed. Allen, i. 115; Mynors and Thomson 1974: 48). Following Valla’s lead, Erasmus diagnosed a disastrous falling-off in Latin ‘‘letters’’ after the fifth century, adopted ‘‘barbarian’’ as a smear-term for Scholastic theologians and anyone else who failed to meet humanist standards, promoted the church Fathers - with Jerome first - as exemplars of theological discourse, and dedicated himself to the restoration of a lost Christian culture of texts (Camporeale 1972: 283 and passim; 2002: 48; Rummel 1986: 85-8; 1995: 84-6 and passim; Jardine 1993: 66-7; Bejczy 2001: 2-4).
Erasmus’ Valla is the refounder of a commonwealth of letters (res litteraria). If he never calls him Camillus, it is only because his patience with anachronistic analogies was shorter than his hero’s. Erasmus was far less an antique Roman republican than either Valla or Petrarch. The city of Rome, to which he made just one unhappy visit, held no magic for him; he would have been the last man on earth to dream of raising its ancient walls and buildings again. When Erasmus laments the ruin of a once great literary republic, the polity that he has in mind is one in which the revealed truth of the Christian religion had already consummated all that was morally, intellectually, and rhetorically beneficial in classical culture (Bolgar 1954: 336-41). His encyclopedic collection of ancient proverbs, the Adagia, stockpiles classical assets for ready use; his rhetorical manual, De copia, shows how they are to be deployed. These and other ‘‘literary and educational’’ works for which classicists still honor Erasmus are strictly cognate with his editions of Jerome and the New Testament. As the unique medium of the life-giving word of Christ, the Greek New Testament needed to be conveyed to Latin readers - always Erasmus’ main constituency - in the most faithful and expressive terms possible, and these would not necessarily be Jerome’s, since neither Valla nor Erasmus considered much if any of the textus receptus to be attributable to that church Father. Conversely, the authentic literary wuvre of Jerome represented the nearly perfect fusion of classical eloquence and erudition with God-given wisdom - Christianity with the priceless advantage of Ciceronianism. Whereas Valla felt obliged to justify Jerome’s continued classical readings, Erasmus (in the Life of Jerome prefixed to his edition) went out of his way to defend him against humanist critiques of his Latinity (Brady and Olin 1992: 54-61).
The aims of Erasmus’ edition of Jerome have been well explored in recent scholarship (Rice 1985: 116-36; Jardine 1993; Clausi 2000; Pabel 2004). What needs underlining here is its role in establishing an Erasmian literary history. In the preface addressed to Archbishop Warham, Erasmus develops Valla’s sketch of the decline and fall of the Roman state and of the Latin language into a pathetic narrative of the demise of Latin Christian literary culture under late Roman emperors and their successors. The ‘‘character of princes had quite degenerated into a barbaric form of tyranny and bishops had come to love their lay lordships more than the duty of teaching.’’ The task of instruction was abandoned to monks unworthy of the name.
Bonae litterae were neglected, Greek and Hebrew scorned, and Latin ‘‘so much contaminated with an ever-changing barbarism that Latin by now was the last thing it resembled.’’ The art of eloquence was despised; history, geography, and antiquitates were no longer studied. The common stock of letters, res litteraria, ‘‘was reduced to a few sophistic niceties’’ or confined to summaries and excerpts. As a result, the ‘‘old authors [veteres scriptores]’ all but disappeared in a ‘‘holocaust of humane literature’’ and any who showed interest in ‘‘the better kind of learning [litteratura melior]’ were ‘‘expelled from the ranks of the learned’’ (Allen, ii. 214; Brady and Olin 1992: 6, modified).
The ‘‘holocaust’’ (Gk. panolethria) of humane learning is one of early Christian texts. Though Erasmus yields to no one in his qualified regard for classical (i. e., pagan) literature, his sole concern here is with Christian writers, beginning with Clement of Rome. They are the veteres scriptores (translated by Brady and Olin as ‘‘classic authors’’); the church Fathers acquire at Erasmus’ hands a new kind of ‘‘classic’’ status (Pfeiffer 1976: 84 and n. 4; Boeft 1997; Sider 1998). They exhibit classical rhetorical values and so license humanist practice, and they come as close as anyone to combining classical and Christian learning in due proportion (Bejczy 2001: 24-32).
The ultimate sources for this Erasmian understanding of a ‘‘classical Christian’’ culture are Jerome’s letter to the Roman orator Magnus (Jerome, Ep. 70) and the latter part of Book 2 of Augustine's De doctrina christiana, with its residually Varronian disquisition on the liberal and other arts (Bene 1969; Shanzer 2005). Where Erasmus goes beyond his predecessors is in the literary history that corroborates his theory. Jerome's De viris illustribus was another touchstone, already prominent in The Antibarbarians, a humanist manifesto begun while the author was still an Augustinian novice. Erasmus read Jerome's polemical preface as a vindication of the humanist educational program. He then drew the lower temporal limit of ancient Christian wisdom, eloquence, and learning just below the point where Jerome ended - which had been with Jerome. (Only Bede among later writers is regularly spared by Erasmus.) The full import of this restriction is revealed by the architecture of the tomus primus of the 1516 edition of Jerome (Vessey 2005b). Having begun by bewailing the ‘‘holocaust'' of ancient Christian writings, Erasmus closes with Jerome's catalogue, framed by a preface on the same theme. The work is a painful reminder of how few of those ‘‘outstanding monuments [egregia monumenta]’ now remain, unless ‘‘maimed, corrupted and adulterated.'' Such a tragic loss should ‘‘provoke all who favour good authors to read the more eagerly what has survived, since so little has been left us by the ruin of the ages’’ (fo. 138r).
World History
